The short answer: Our strategists spend hours creating your briefs and our writers use an AI tool to help with research and outlining the blog. The writers “hand write” large sections of your pieces, edit, SEO optimize, and may completely rewrite a piece depending on the technicality.
Questions We’ll Answer
- What does our writing process look like?
- Why should I hire you to do my marketing when I can just use ChatGPT?
- Are you worth the cost when I could hire someone off of a freelance site to do it?
- Are you selling me AI-generated content?
Hi, my name is Abby! I’m a content writer at Lemonade Stand and if you’re a client of ours, there’s a good chance I’ve written one of your blogs and know a whole lot about your business. If you’re thinking about becoming a client, I probably will write one (or one hundred) of your blogs and get to know your business!
I’m from California, have a bachelor’s degree in editing and publishing, have been in digital marketing for five years, and love working with small businesses like yours. (In the picture, I’m the one on the left, Jenna in the middle is a Lemonade Stand account manager, and Adrie on the right is our Director of Content Marketing.)
I’ve worked at Lemonade Stand for three years now and have used an AI tool called Jasper since my first day, so really we’ve been writing with AI since before it was cool. But as ChatGPT and other AI tools have exploded over the last year or so, our clients have brought up some concerns:
- Why should I hire you to do my marketing when I can just use ChatGPT?
- Are you worth the cost when I could hire someone off of Fiverr or Upwork to do it?
- Are you selling me purely AI-generated content?
All of these have been on my mind too because
- I want my clients’ businesses to grow and for their content to bring in leads
- I want people to love and respect my writing
- I want to keep my job!
So, here is how writers at Lemonade Stand use AI in our writing process. I hope it answers your questions and helps you feel confident in your decision to work with our team.
Human Written, AI-Supported Content
We can look at the wave of human vs AI writing and the pushback that’s come with it like the creation of the printing press. People were outraged that this new technology would put scribes and monks “out of business,” some even going as far as destroying printing presses and threatening merchants.
Instead, it created a new industry and countless new jobs that changed education forever (a big statement, I know, but I’m trying to cover hundreds of years of history in one sentence).
So, even though it may seem like AI is taking over and limiting human-written content, it can actually be seen as a valuable tool for making content even more accessible.
Your Content From Idea to Published Piece
The content process starts with briefs that one of our strategists spend three to eight hours preparing. They will have researched:
- keywords (search volume, difficulty, etc)
- your domain history (backlink profile, organic traffic, organic traffic value)
- competitor traffic and top pages
- customer concerns and goals
- industry trends
They will then create a three-month strategy with extremely detailed briefs for one to four blogs. They’ll include the keyword these blogs should rank for based on their research, questions your ideal customers are asking, how we can answer questions your competitors have missed, and strategic links back to your website I should use throughout the blogs.
If you have a specific tone or style you want us to follow (dad jokes, uber professional, local ma and pop shop), we’ll channel whatever you’d like us to. Oxford comma, specific spellings, avoiding certain topics—you tell us what we need to know and we’ll store all of that information away for future reference.
I’ll do about 30-45 minutes of research on the blog topic, find some good external links to support my writing, and then jump right in! Mind you—I’ve already spent a couple hours getting to know your company by scouring your website, social media, the discovery call notes, and any other information I can find about you. The FBI could hire me at this point.
Since I like to give Jasper, our AI tool, a good starting point, I’ll write the intro by hand with a story, statistic, or some kind of hook to get the reader interested. I’ll then give Jasper the information the strategist has provided through their research and see what Jasper can generate.
It might give me a couple hundred words of content that I’ll then go through with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it’s
- accurate
- includes helpful examples and imagery
- answers readers’ questions
- fits the brief, and
- SEO-optimized
The concluding paragraph or call-to-action is another section of the blog that feels more personal. I like to write that with little or no AI assistance and make it very specific to the client.
The more technical the topic, the more research I will do to make sure I’m answering your readers’ questions. If Jasper didn’t give me the information I was looking for, I’ll scrap it and try again. If it falls short again, I’ll adjust the prompt or just start writing based on my research.
Just like any AI tool, the better the prompt, the better the outcome. That’s why our strategists spend so much time getting the best information they can for the writers and providing detailed briefs for us. Our strategists are really what set us apart from so many agencies out there when it comes to human vs AI writing.
And as you can see in this picture, I have some extra help from pets during my workday too!
What About Website Content?
Website content is a whole other story! I rarely use AI to write web content because it’s so specific. I might use it to help me create button ideas or work through writer’s block because that happens to the best of us.
But we know website copy is highly personal to you and is read by potential customers every day, which means we invest more time into perfecting it. We want to give you the best chance possible at moving customers through the sales funnel and leading to conversions as they land on the main service pages, so we work closely with your team to create conversion-ready web copy.
Why Should I Hire You If ChatGPT Can Write My Content?
A valid question! Here are some of the ways ChatGPT and relying solely on AI-written content can come back to bite you.
- Google penalizes low-quality content
- Our content comes with hours of expert strategy
- AI can’t SEO optimize like we can
- Our team saves you hours of time by researching, writing, editing, and publishing
- Human writers add empathy, storytelling, and accuracy
- ChatGPT can only write it—you have to take care of everything else
Blogs and service pages help prospects along the sales funnel. I want to answer as many of your prospects’ questions as I can so that Google labels your content as helpful and gets it in front of more eyes. Over time, I want it to help your website rank higher, bring in more leads, and build your business’s authority.
(THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS BLOG)
Doing this takes more than AI-generated content. It takes a short and long-term strategy, SEO research, time to keep up with industry trends (and let’s face it—time is in short supply for most small business owners), and consistency.
AI can technically create all of those things for you but you have to know what to prompt it, wonder if it’s accurate and applicable for your business, and then have the time, tools, and discipline to execute the marketing strategy.
Why Do We Use AI Tools?
You might be wondering why we even use Jasper in the first place. Why not just write everything from scratch instead of worrying about human vs AI writing? The other day, I wrote a blog about the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, the cybersecurity practices the Department of Defense uses that experts spend decades studying, then worked on a piece about construction defects, another topic that our law clients have spent years researching.
To top the day off, I started a blog about IT systems in K-12 schools, an industry I would’ve never thought about in a million years. I love learning about these things and doing my own research about them but a strength of Jasper’s is that it can source the research very quickly and then I can cross reference to make sure it’s accurate.
I want your pieces to be well-written, accurate, SEO-optimized, and delivered to you on time. Google favors sites that post consistently and frequently. With AI assistance, our team can deliver content to you like clockwork so that your site has the best chance to grow organically.
We start strategizing your pieces a quarter beforehand, and then seamlessly execute your content month after month. We are never late so that you have the best shot at growing your audience!
Without AI, there aren’t many marketing agencies that could handwrite blogs without charging an exorbitant amount or outsourcing to a third-party company that is (you guessed it) maybe using only AI to generate your content. That leads me to what might be your next concern.
Can’t I Hire Someone Off of Fiverr, Upwork, or Another Freelance Site?
I won’t say there aren’t reliable people on freelance sites. I’ve used and hired people on Upwork for nondigital marketing services so I know what the process is like. All I will highlight are the strengths of our team:
- Clear communication with a dedicated account manager
- US-based, native English speakers
- Expert strategists who spend hours creating your quarterly content strategy
- An SEO-first mindset, not just AI-generated content
- A holistic view of your online presence and content marketing goals
You could hire my Golden Retriever, Birdie, but I guarantee her editing won’t be as good as mine. The video backs me up.
An AI Detector Said Your Content Was 100% AI Written
I saw a Linkedin post about an AI detector that said the Bible was written 100% by AI so I decided to test it out myself with the most “advanced and reliable AI content detector” and sure enough, it looks like ChatGPT came up with Genesis 1:1 and Bohemian Rhapsody and the Gettysburg Address!
Of course, I’m sure these pieces are being flagged because of the way language learning models (LLMs) work—they’re noticing that these same pieces are all over the internet and assuming they’ve been plagiarized from an original source.
So, I wanted to take it a bit further and use content I knew I’d written and published, not something that would’ve been widely spread and used by others. I took a blog I wrote by hand, word for word, and the AI detector told me it was 32% written by AI. Some of the content it flagged were direct quotes from coworkers that I had included in the piece, so content that’s completely untouched by the internet.
Researchers have also come to a conclusion that AI detectors are not currently accurate and need more development before they can be reliable. So we just ask that you’re not too quick to plug our content into an AI detector as proof that we use only AI to write your pieces.
We do use AI to help us write our pieces—research, pushing past writer’s block, maybe coming up with a witty website button. But all of our pieces go through two rounds of edits (by real humans) before we send them to you—once by our writers and then by our strategists. And if they don’t meet your standards, we’re happy to do two rounds of revisions to make the piece something you love.
So, What Does This Mean for You?
If you’re a current client, I hope this helped you understand the behind-the-scenes a bit more, especially the strength of the strategists. ChatGPT can’t match their long-term vision for your business and the chess pieces they’re putting into place to help grow your business.
On the writing side, if you would like something about your pieces to change, please communicate that to us! We are happy to refine your tone or enhance your storytelling. The more information we can get from you, the more expertise we can put into a piece.
If you’re thinking about partnering with Lemonade Stand, I hope this provides transparency into our process. We’re trying to help as many small businesses as we can while staying personal and true to our core values of being “honest, transparent, and insanely fast.”
