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If you’ve spent any time at all on the web in the year there’s no doubt you’ve heard all about AI content and how writers won’t have a job next week because of AI, AI is the future, AI is going to ruin us all and on and on and on about it….
It’s all nonsense. Yes AI will certainly put low quality writers out of a job but technology has always eaten the jobs of low skill and low value workers.
Here’s three mental models we’ve shared with consulting clients for years that’ll help you write better content to battle our AI content overlords and squeeze much more juice from your content. They’ll make you more money too!
Inverted Pyramid Writing
This is a writing technique taught to journalists. In a nutshell, put the good stuff at the top of the page and don’t waste the reader’s time – you’ll get better engagement, probably better conversion and maybe even better Google rankings due to better engagement as a result
You’ve probably seen this yourself, you google “best airfryers” or a similar search for some other new toy you’re thinking about buying and you get 5 paragraphs about what an airfryer is instead of the page just getting to the point. This is so stupid – if I’m googling for the best airfryer I already know what one is.
It’s like going to the Apple store and asking for a new phone and getting a 10 minute walk through on the history of the telephone. It’s the stupidest way to sell things.
Read more about this at Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
Early close
This is kinda sorta related to the inverted pyramid technique and works REALLY well for services businesses but you can apply it to all types of sites.
Some portion of people hitting a page are ready to buy, book, call or whatever RIGHT NOW. They don’t want to read a bunch of words, they just want to do the next thing they need to do to buy your stuff. They don’t need the story, they just want to know what to do.
Make sure early in your content you tell the visitor what they need to do and what the next step is. This could be as simple as a one line in the first 2 paragraphs of a page: “if you’re ready to book an appointment, call 555-55555 during business hours or click here to book online 24/7”
If I’m looking for the best airfyer, tell me which one is the best and where I should buy it instead of wasting my time.
Avoid the price list problem
This is mostly relevant to ecommerce where category pages have no content and just become a fancy online price list. This adds zero value, doesn’t tell me who you are, why I should buy from you or anything about how to buy your stuff.
This problem exists on content sites too where category pages are just a list of random blog posts without any context at all.
This is the wrong way to do category pages and not only will visitors get no value, Google will not like ranking those pages either.
You want to make sure that your category pages have at least some content are don’t have the price list problem – if ecommerce, tell me who you are and help me buy your products.
If you’re a content site, fatten out the category page, make it a page in itself.
Here’s a couple of arguably extreme examples for you, maybe even overdone but you’ll get the point:
https://www.didgeridoobreath.com/didgeridoos/ – selling didgeridoos
James Clear author of Atomic Habits – category pages are essentially whole posts in themselves https://jamesclear.com/habits