My 5 step process for writing content

Image Credit: Alexander Zas

For this blog post I thought I would take a step back from Japan and marketing and get a little more personal. I wanted to instead talk about the process I’ve been using to write the content that I post. Like with many things its always changing and developing as I continue to write. But most of my writing has been following this similar flow and I think it may prove useful to those looking to start writing content or looking for tips and tricks to incorporate into their strategy for writing content. So let’s dive into my five step process for writing content.

1. AI Brainstorming

The first step in my writing process involves the use of AI. To be specific I utilize ChatGPT as a tool in my arsenal of creating content. That isn’t to say that I just ask ChatGPT to write my content. No instead I utilize it for idea generation. I give it a prompt so that based on the topic I want to write about, it presents to me a list of potential blog titles and a couple sentence summary of the article. I can’t express how much this helps a person like me with a lot of information in my head but often struggle to bring it out without some sort of trigger like having a topic to write about. It usually generates some great ideas for topics, but if necessary I may ask it to give me some new ideas. Once I find the ones I like I move to the next step.

2. Outline

For the next step of my writing process we will again be utilizing ChatGPT. In the previous step we narrowed our topic choice to one, or in my case half of them. I’m naturally curious and the idea of learning a new topic and then being able to write about it make its hard to choose.

Which is fine, because we are now going to grab all the topics that we picked and prompt it to give me an outline for each of the topics. This helps with a variety of different things.

First, is that it helps me narrow down on a topic that seems more interesting to me. Giving an outline about what you going to write about, can contribute to my excitement about writing something. It also triggers more idea generation for me as I start looking for ideas and connections in my head.

Secondly, and most importantly, it gives me an idea of the overall structure of how I am going to write the blog post. Having an overall structure for what your are going to write about is so essential I think for anybody. For me who can have all this information floating in my head, it provides me a way to organize my mind, and channel that information into an organize and meaningful way. This I feel is probably true for anyone who is writing.

Finally, another little tip that has helped me, when I struggling to put together ideas especially for topics I’m not as familiar with but want to write about, is to ask it to expand on the outline. This will give you an expanded outline with more details and some good examples for those ideas. The can be super useful in guiding you for the next step.

3. Research

So now that we have an outline, and we have some examples for our blog post, we can now begin researching. Particularly with the examples that ChatGPT generates it can provide us some interesting case studies to look for, or at least begin to guide a direction for what to look up.

Here is where depending on the person, you can utilize a couple of different tools. Since, we have been using ChatGPT, you could realistically use that to provide you the research you needed. However, I can’t necessarily make that recommendation as I haven’t done it to much if at all.

Instead with my new found information I got to everyones favorite search engine, Google. I’ll usually ask it for whatever information I am looking for. This process is a little more intensive, since you may have to read a variety of articles. You also may have to change the query to better find the information you are looking for. That being said it is an extremely rewarding process.

First, you are learning and collecting a lot of information. This information can be useful not only for the article you are writing but for any future things you may write about. Often times you can make new connections with the current article you are writing. However, those connections you make can be used for new connections in future articles as well. Eventually you are creating essentially a mental database that makes future writing a lot easier as you start to connect all the dots.

Secondly, when looking for marketing materials, who are the people that generally write about marketing? Thats right, marketing companies. These are obviously professionals who do this for a living, and have valuable insights into the field and industry your exploring. For example I wrote about social media used for word-of-mouth marketing. I found a very thorough article for social media usage and trends in Japan, which they write every year. Now I have found a source I can depend on and go to when I need that information.

But there is another thing that can be overlooked in this process. In my case I want to live in Japan, and work there in the future. Naturally, I want to work in a marketing position for a company there if possible. Well, it just so happens that the company that wrote that article is a Japanese based digital marketing agency. Now I have a potential place to look to apply too. Even better if you are able to connect with them, collaborate on some future blog posts.

4. Write

Now that we have an outline and lots of research under our belt, we can now start writing. Now I am someone who hops back and forth between the outline and the research just to see how I can connect the two together.

I also often will come up with ideas as I am writing. This can obviously lengthen the time of writing but I think it delivers better content and quality. So, I encourage exploring the ideas that pop up as you write.

In this process I will also make edits in terms of the structure of the article. The outline doesn’t mean that you have to write it exactly the way it was presented. If you come up with a better way to structure it or even feel like some parts of the outline are redundant, just toss them. The outline is a guide, and if it hinders your writing it is no longer a useful tool. Use it as medium to channel the creativity.

Similarly, you may write out a bunch of stuff into one massive paragraph. In these cases I will look for places to create spacing, and separate into its one little section similar to what I have done in this paper. Its more engaging and comes of easier to read if snipped into chunks like this. Imagine if I just left it as a long essay. You would feel overwhelmed and think “Never mind.” Like with everything think about how the person feels if they had to read this all.

Another thing I will once I finish is of course proofread. Especially for a messy person like me, I will often just write and write and when I go and look back I see a massive amount of misspellings and grammar mistakes. This ensures we have a clean, legible, and nice to read article.

5. Pictures and Links

Next I will look for relevant pictures to add to the blog post. I feel like doing this last allows me you to tie the articles content with the picture to create an experience that accents or brings out the content. For example for a topic related to challenges you may want to put a picture of someone who is upset. There are a couple different places you can get pictures.

First, is using creative commons pictures on Google, or going to websites that give you free pictures that aren’t copyrighted. I would recommend the latter as the options on Google are limited and you won’t find anything good. Websites like Unsplash provide professional level photography pictures for free. While websites like Freepik offer more of the stock image style images.

Another option is to subscribe to these websites to get more access to these types of pictures. Some platforms also provide these features if you subscribe to them like Canva. Being a Canva subscriber I also leverage this feature, to find a variety of images as well.

A great option that I myself have used but haven’t fully explored is AI image generators. These provide a great way to essentially paint a picture by writing out a prompt and the AI will generate it for you. I really enjoy this tool, as it essentially allows me to develop an image based on the values and ideas I want to generate, allowing me to create images that are full of rich meaning. You can even copy and paste your article and ask it to generate something based on it, something I have found useful for idea generating as well.

That being said, I haven’t explored many outside of ChatGPT AI generator. If you are subscribed it is another way to leverage ChatGPT. However, I find it can be quite difficult and finicky, when trying to create edits for the image. I may tell it to edit this specific part of the image but it will just generate a whole new image. My goal is to try to find some new AI image tools to create more rich imagery that aligns with what I want to portray.

The last thing we have to do is post the article on our websites. Now during this process I will look for opportunities to do some internal linking. That is trying to connect relevant portions of the article to other parts of my website or blog posts. This is done by attaching a hyperlink to that phrase or word. During this process I also may add some sentences into the post itself to facilitate that process.

I hope you have found this useful. I think there is something for everyone in this blog post. If you like this kind of content follow me on social media and sign up for my newsletter to get the latest updates.