I’m no marketing expert. But if there’s one thing I’ve heard repeated by people who are experts, it’s this: content is king. Create valuable content regularly and consistently on your website, and good things follow.
Years ago I read a book, I can’t even remember the title now, about a guy who ran a pool company. He had a website like everyone else: a few products, a few services, nothing that made him stand out in his industry. Then he did something simple. He started a section on his site where he just answered the everyday questions people asked him, the ones nobody else in the market was bothering to answer. Someone asked a question; he wrote down the answer and published it. Over and over.
Before long, his website became the go-to source for everything related to swimming pools and hot tubs. Google indexed all of it because people were searching for those exact terms, and his site turned into the authority everyone landed on when they were looking to buy. Pure, useful content did that.
The Problem: It Takes Time You Don’t Have
Here’s the catch. Creating content like that is time consuming.
It takes a little skill to even get set up learning a content management system like WordPress, publishing articles, formatting them so they look right. Then there’s the time to actually write: organizing your thoughts, making sure the content is genuinely valuable, working in the right keywords, and on and on. The list never seems to end.
For someone who doesn’t write naturally or doesn’t enjoy writing, it’s daunting. And it’s just as overwhelming for people who love to write but have no web design experience. Either way, the barrier is real, and for a small business owner already wearing every hat in the building, it’s usually the thing that never gets done.
This post is entirely about how I got past that.
A while back I wrote about creating presentations and slides quickly, consistently, and at high quality. This is almost a continuation of that; I’m using a lot of the same approach to solve a different problem.
The Workflow
The whole thing rests on one shift: stop typing, start talking.
Most people speak around 200 words per minute. Typing? The average person manages 30 to 60. So, when you can talk into something that transcribes what you say and then organizes it into a coherent, well-paced document, the leverage is enormous. Here’s exactly how I do it.
- Pick an AI engine you like that lets you talk to it. My preference is Claude. I use Claude Chat for the transcription piece.
- Just talk. I ramble on about my topic. I change direction three times. I back up and add something I forgot earlier. When I’m done, it’s all one big run-on stream of thought, and that’s fine.
- Let the AI organize it. I paste that mess into Claude and ask it to turn it into a blog post. It usually does a great job structuring it into something clean and readable.
- Make a few small edits and publish. A couple of tiny tweaks and it goes up on the blog.
- Repurpose the same content everywhere. I take that finished post, hand it back to the AI, and say: make me a LinkedIn post. Then a Facebook post. Then whatever other platform I’m putting it on. Same idea, reshaped for each audience.
- Add an image. A quick note here, AI-generated images are getting downgraded on social media now, so you’re better off snapping a real photo of something loosely related to your topic. But if you’re short on time and out of ideas, an AI image (I’ll use ChatGPT for this) is better than nothing.
- Schedule it. We use WordPress to schedule posts and publish them out to the platforms we want, automatically, on a set cadence.
In a single sitting of about an hour or two, you can realistically produce five to ten blog posts and five to ten social posts, then schedule the whole batch and walk away.
We also run a weekly newsletter. We take one of our blog posts and send it out once a week. It’s one more easy way to stay in touch without it being overwhelming. None of it is salesy. It’s value-driven, useful stuff for the people reading it.
“But What Do I Even Write About?”
This is the question that stops most people cold. The answer is the same trick the pool guy used: think about the questions people ask you every day. What do customers want to know? What do you find yourself explaining over and over? Answer those questions out loud, to your AI, freeform.
And it’s fine to pause. Stop mid-sentence, go pull a real statistic, grab an actual quote you want to use, and read it in. The AI will work it in cleanly and make it legible.
You don’t have to be an expert at making content to make good content. AI changed the game. Anyone with something worth sharing can now get it out into the world.
The Quote That Finally Made Sense
There’s an Edgar Allan Poe passage that stumped me for years. It’s from his short poem “To ——”:
Not long ago, the writer of these lines,
In the mad pride of intellectuality,
Maintained “the power of words”, denied that ever
A thought arose within the human brain
Beyond the utterance of the human tongue.
In other words: if you can think it, you can put it into words others can read and understand.
I never believed that. I always felt there were thoughts I could dream up but never quite pin down or that I could only convey by talking for a solid hour.
AI changes that for everyone. You talk for an hour, and it converts the whole sprawling thing into a single coherent thought, written down in a shorter, sharper form with far more punch. If you’re like me, naturally wordy, always talking because you want your ideas to be understood, AI finally makes that possible. You just talk a lot, and it does the summarizing.
That’s all I’ve got.
If you’d like me to show you exactly how I do this in a short video, say so in the comments below and I’ll get it done. Thanks for reading.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
