Can AI Write My Website?

Can I let AI write my website copy? 

There's a really good chance that you've thought that. Heck, maybe you already tried to let AI write your website copy...but something felt off. It might have ended up being professional enough, but at the same time if felt very "meh". 

Or maybe you're AI-hesitant and worrying that everyone else is using it and you're falling behind. But yet, you're just not sure your comfortable letting AI help you with creative output—especially for something as important as your website.

Either way, this episode is for you.

I'll discuss why so many service provider websites are starting to sound uncannily similar, what AI actually cannot do no matter how good the prompt is, and where it can genuinely help you in the copywriting process. This isn't an anti-AI rant. It's a pro-specificity argument, and I truly believe you can decide whether to invite AI in and determine how much you'll use it.

_____________________________________________
 
YOU CAN STILL JOIN REWRITE YOUR SITE!
Interested in improving your website before the summer kicks off? (Think about how cool it would be sitting by the pool and getting new leads that found you via search and need your offer!)

Learn more about Rewrite Your Site and listen to the recent episodes to see if it's a good fit for you and your business! https://erinollila.com/rewrite-your-site/

_____________________________________________
 
EPISODE 188.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: Coming soon!

______________________________________________

Here's the info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session to get started right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products

Transcript

0:00

Can't ai just write my website? Listen, you might view wondering that question yourself, and even if you're not, I promise other people actually are. In fact, I know many people, they've told me that they've used AI to write or rewrite parts of their website, and some of the people who have been interested in this program, whether the first round in January or this current round that I'm promoting, have asked me if they can use AI because they want to, or. They've asked if I'm going to encourage them to use AI tools because they're feeling AI hesitant or they just don't use AI as part of their business. So I think you can see that the answer to whether or not you can use AI to write your website is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, and that's why I am gonna get into it on this episode of Talk Copy to Me. All right, so to start today, let's just begin by saying that my goal with this episode is not to tell you whether AI is good or bad. It is not to preach about how you should or should not be using AI yourself. You know, in fact, there are things I really love about ai. I do use AI tools in my business, and I think that it is genuinely useful and has been incredibly helpful for certain things, and I will get into what things that I think AI can help you with later in this episode. But that also being said, I am not here to tell you that I love AI either, especially for creative output, , especially for something like your website where you need it to attract audience, to the site. You need the copy to be conversion focused and encourage your audience to, move to the next page or take an action like reaching out for booking services. Or joining your email list or whatever your actual goals for your site are. You see my feelings on ai, they're honestly complicated, but I think that that's not a bad thing in a copywriting coach. Why? Because again, I do see pros and cons., Also because I. Really do think AI usage is dependent on the user. I, I'm not here to tell you what to do. If you would like to use it, go for it. If you don't, you do not have to use it in my program. Uh, but most importantly, the reason why I am not here to, um, lecture you and why my complicated feelings are irrelevant is because my feelings are not actually what matter most. I'm the course creator. I'm not the student. And the students in rewrite your site get to make their own decisions about how they are planning to approach AI in their own business. That is not my call, and I think that is why the program is. Developed to be the way that it is. I am giving you tools to do it on your own. I am not building in supports in the program that you can lean on or use as a crutch, which many AI tools are, if you'd like me to be honest., But I am also showcasing wear and how to use ai, if that is something that you would like to do as a student of rewrite your site. See what I can control is just how I built the program. So there are no pre-trained GPTs. There are no, paste this prompt and skip the work type of handouts or moments built into the program. It is designed so that the thinking has to come from you, and that is intentional. However, what I did do is develop guidance for students who want to bring AI into the process themself thoughtfully and in the right places. Things like reviewing your messaging after you've drafted it. Analyzing the decisions that you made, , to see whether they're landing, whether they're slightly off and need adjusting, editing copy that you have already written in your own voice. Those are places where AI can genuinely add a value to your experience. So I give my students frameworks for how to use it in those situations. But that's context. What I actually want to talk about today is why this even matters, because something is happening on websites in other marketing efforts that I think is really worth paying attention to. Here's the problem, websites are starting to sound the same. I have been analyzing service provider websites for pretty much the entire time. I've owned my own business, which is technically over 10 years. But I have paid very specific attention post pandemic. I mentioned that because, , there were so many new, , people who joined the online business space after leaving careers or experiencing layoffs in 2020. It wasn't so much. The AI was what encouraged me to pay attention to how people were showing up online. It was more just honestly, a change in the workforce. And an a huge entryway to individuals who had never worked, , as a solopreneur or ran a business before. Well, suddenly they came on the scene and they were competition for my clients myself, and I just was very curious how that would change positioning over time. Well, shortly after that, we all know that AI became a more public friendly. Tool than it was in the past. Sure, you might have used Grammarly or some of those other tools that had AI options built into them, but suddenly you could completely take charge of an AI tool, giving it instructions, asking it to work in certain ways that you just didn't have the freedom or flexibility to do before. I don't even know what year it was, 2020 or three, maybe 2022. And that really shifted things. There has been a significant change in small business and solopreneur websites in the past two to three years. Unfortunately where AI could have unlocked a some true creative freedoms where we might have seen things be very different and very unique, which I think would've been a lovely thing. What we're seeing is that websites are looking and sounding the same on a scale that was not there five or plus years ago. You wanna know what I mean? I can give you an exercise, you don't have to do it, but I think it you, whether you stop and pause me now or you do this later, it might be really interesting. I encourage you to open 10 service provider or solopreneur websites right now. Think people like coaches, consultants, designers, photographers, anyone who caters to customers, especially if it's through a service now, stay on their homepage. You don't even need to read the entire website. Their hero section will likely do the job that I'm expecting, that it will. If you read the first line, or maybe let's say the small about section of the homepage, do they all say something like this, I help person achieve. Result so they can. And then enter a vague dream. There might be slightly different words, but the same shape of a message. Now that is a standard copywriting format. It is not a bad one either. I think it helps to sell, an elevator pitch really well. It helps for introductions, making it clear what it is that you do and who you work with. So I am not against the copywriting framework as a whole. What I am against is that this message is shared with maybe slightly different words, but the exact same shape everywhere, and this is not a coincidence. That's not everyone independently arriving at the same great idea or trying to be as clear as possible about who they are, what they do, and who they serve. This is happening because a lot of people are using the same tools with the same prompts and they're skipping. Mostly what's happening here is that they're skipping research and messaging work that would make their individual copy specific to them a clear, clever, maybe even. And that's because AI is trained on patterns. It's very good at recognizing what website copy is supposed to sound like and then just producing more of the same thing, which means if you ask AI to write your homepage . Without giving it something specific and true to your business to work from, it will reach for the most statistically likely words to use. And those statistically likely words are the same ones that everyone else is using. So the result is that you'll get a website that feel. Fine professional. It might be competent even, but it's also potentially interchangeable. You could swap in, a different business's name and the header, and it could belong to anyone in the same space as you. Or it might just feel work like it's working, but yet it's also falling flat. That is the problem I keep seeing, and that's also how I'm hearing, potential clients or students come to me. They say that they have used AI to edit or write sections of their website, and they do somewhat like how it sounds. They feel like the information is there. They also feel like it just falls really flat and that's because AI is not you, and it also doesn't know your voice or the specific way that your clients are describing their problems before they find you the exact words that they used in a discovery call with you. When they are finally explaining, what's keeping them stuck, what's making it hard to move forward, or where they're feeling like they just have no clarity or they're overwhelmed. It also doesn't know what makes you genuinely different from the 11 other people in your field that are doing something similar to you. So it's filling in gaps and I. One thing it's doing well is it's using the most polished and pattern match, statistically reasonable words that it can find. So it's not trying to misbehave or it's not trying to give you the wrong information. It is trying to do its job successfully. But it's just not doing a good enough job because the words that are read back are right, but not well done. AI copy is known to sound confident and clean and structured. It sounds like a good copy. It's just not copy that is specific to you and specificity is what makes copy work. It's what makes someone read your about page and think, oh my goodness, this person actually gets it. Or This person actually has the expertise that I've been looking for. Specificity is what makes your ideal client feel, found not targeted or chased after truly found and supported. And specificity is the one thing that AI cannot manufacture no matter how good the prompt is. Now, again, I've talked negatively about AI for a little while, so I will repeat that. This is not an anti AI position. It is a pro specificity position. The work that we're doing in Rewrite your site is about finding what's. Really true about you, your business, and your clients, and then writing from that place. And that means doing research. It means sitting with data and pulling out insights that actually matter. It means building a messaging foundation that is specific enough to be useful before you write a single word of copy. Rough and specific is always easier to fix than polished and generic. You can tighten rough language, but you can't inject specificity into something that was never built on it. So let's talk about what we do with AI in the program. I do think it's important to talk about what it genuinely can do well, because this is where I think the nuance is getting lost in these types of conversations. You know, AI is, is a legitimately useful tool if you're using it at the right stage of the process. It can help you identify editing areas or a Titan copy that you've already written in your own voice. You write the draft, you bring in ai, let's. Say to help you cut or sharpen or clean it up. AI can also be useful if you're stuck on a specific line and you need options. Not like, " write my homepage for me," but instead something like,"here are five ways that I've tried to phrase this headline. Can you give me additional options to play with?" Or, "can you critique these five ways? And tell me what, a client like, and then describe your client, would most identify with or would, , be most attracted to?" AI is good for brainstorming angles that you might not have considered, especially if you're staring at a section for so long and you have just lost your perspective. It can also help you check for clarity. You can ask it things like, does this actually make sense to someone who doesn't already know me or my work? Having it check a copy that you're not sure if it's actually landing is a good use of your AI time. And once your copy is solid, it's also really good at helping you repurpose the copy you have written for your website across platforms. For example, you could. Pull excerpts and use them as social posts maybe from your about page. You could turn your services page into blurbs of email content, those kinds of things. Now notice the pattern in all of these, you first, AI second, and always with a touch of editing that gives you back the control and also puts you back into the page by using the lens of your own voice and expertise. Tease. So at this point, I think we all understand that I'm suggesting you write first and use AI second. Let that first draft come from you so that it's messy, overwritten, and honestly even not quite right. All of that is fine. That's the goal of any first draft. Get something true. On the page, not something polished. Then you can, , again, use the editing skills you learn in the program and bring in your AI assistant to help you refine it, tighten it, explore options. Your voice is the asset, and AI is the tool. Do not let the tool replace the asset. The people who use AI well in their copy process, I think they come to it with something real and tangible. They also come to it with a good understanding of prompt engineering and those who use their AI tool with more of a blank page or a vague description. And also an expectation that it figures it out for them. It won't perform as well. Your job is to be the asset. Your job is to be the lead of all of this. I wanna address, like what did my students do in the last round? I think they all took a different approach to ai. Interestingly enough though, and used it in different ways, but they all did use it. You know, all of the students used it either to ideate the beginning. With the information that they had from their research, , maybe to write pages for them when they felt really stuck so that they could, pull out key insights,, adjust and ideate from there themself, knowing what to write on their own. They used it for trying to help them identify FAQs. Based on the copy that they already wrote, let's say, for their services page. So there is no one right way to do it. And if anything, I think I have set up a nice structure that shows you the best times in the program and the best ways at those times to, , call in your AI tool and, and ask for a little bit of support. So again, this is nuanced. You might have hoped that I would say a yes. Let's use AI to write your copy or no, let's never touch ai like firm stance here. But I just don't think that when it comes to a done with you like copywriting program. One where you are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on your own and you're leaning on a copywriting coach to help you. I don't think there's a one size fits all approach to using ai, but I do think that there are strategies for using it, and I do think that there are ways to make sure that you use it well. So if this sounds good and you are at the point where you know that you want to write or rewrite a website that sounds like you, one that is built on true research and messaging work where you can use AI as a support in ways that it actually helps you, I invite you to join me in rewrite your site. If you have any questions, you know that you can reach out to me directly on social media through my email, and I'm happy to answer how your usage of AI would fit within the program. And remember, if you are a hundred percent anti ai, that is fine too. I will not force you to even touch or think about an AI tool at any point if it's not right for you. So come to the program as you are, ask me questions if you have them, and we will figure out whether AI is right for you and if you determine that it is right as a support, we'll talk about exactly how you can use it to improve your student experience and also not let it take over. Alright, there is one more episode in this series, so we'll keep talking. Copy.