How ChatGPT Made Me Realize I Was WAY Undercharging as a Writer
If you’re like me, you’re pretty active in a bunch of entrepreneur Facebook groups. And I swear to god, if I have to read another post about how ChatGPT will replace writers, I’ll throw up from rolling my eyes so hard.
You’re sick of it, too… right?
When this new AI software first came out, I talked shit for months. It especially annoyed me when non-SEO experts and social media gurus tried to say you could use ChatGPT for keyword and regular research when it CLEARLY says on its own front page:
ChatGPT can be inaccurate: ChatGPT may provide inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.
There are so many ways to use ChatGPT wrong. And too many self-proclaimed “prompt specialists” are giving advice on something they honestly don’t know anything about (writing).
But after the steam died down and I got off my high horse, I actually started using ChatGPT.
Now, over 6 months in, not only do I use AI every day, but it made me realize I was charging way, WAY too little as an SEO writer (and honestly, I probably still am).
Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Writers
If we are to truly believe that ChatGPT will replace writers and content creators, then we would have to believe that AI is “replacing” jobs every single day.
Except they’re not, really.
I come up with “tech takeover” comparisons on the daily. Do you think that:
Mechanics are going to lose their jobs because of electric cars?
Graphic designers are nonexistent because of Canva?
Realtors are obsolete because of Zillow and Open Door?
Social Media Managers are useless because we have Repurpose.io?
Photographers are out of a career because of the ever-improving iPhone cameras?
I could go ON (and actually, I’d love to read your own ideas about how technology could but didn’t eliminate jobs in the comments below).
Saying ChatGPT will 100% replace writers is not only illogical— but it’s a bit stilly.
Even with its writing help, there is a LOT of writing to be done as a business owner. The act of copy/pasting your written content is tedious enough to want to outsource all the copy ChatGPT gives you.
How ChatGPT Made Me Realize I Was WAY Undercharging as a Writer
You’ve heard it all before. You need the human touch, you still need to manually research and edit, yada yada yada.
And while this is true, there’s no denying that AI gives us an invaluable asset: Time.
I always tell people that my job as a writer is 20% writing and 80% research. As an SEO blog writer, here’s how I used to spend my time writing a single blog:
SEO Research: 15 minutes
Topic Research: 2-4 hours
Writing: 30-60 minutes
Editing: 20 minutes
Uploading/Formatting/Scheduling: 25 minutes
That’s 4.5 hours on a single blog. I charged $200 per 1K blog on average (sometimes less). That meant I was charging less than $45/hour for a single post!
Now, that might seem like a lot, but as a small business owner (who has to pay her own taxes and health insurance), it’s less than $5K a month.
And I have overhead and my own bills to pay!
With ChatGPT, I get those half of those hours back because I use ChatGPT (and Grammarly) to edit, fine tune my writing, and prevent me from getting writer’s block.
So essentially, it’s given me a pay raise from about $44/hour to $133/hour.
I haven’t changed my prices, I just realize I should have been charging WAY more for the amount of time and expertise I was putting in.
Creatives Can’t Work 40 Hours Per Week
As a small business owner, I’ve felt SO guilty about not working 40 hours a week.
Until I realized that employees don’t work that much, either.
When you work an office or blue-collar job, your 40 hours include idle time, meetings, and trips to the bathroom. Sometimes even lunch and drive time.
As a writer, I cannot fathom having my eyes glued to the screen for 8 hours per day doing actual “work.”
A single SEO blog takes me upwards of 4 hours. At $200 a pop and 2 blogs per day (for a standard 8-hour workday), that boils down to me making:
$400/day
$2K per week or
$8K per month.
Sure, it sounds like a lot of money— until you realize I need every single minute of those 8 hours to finish my work. No water cooler breaks, no idle time, no lunch.
And $8K a month (really $5K after expenses and taxes), is not worth losing my sanity and free time.
How I Use ChatGPT As a Writer
There are people saying that SEO is also dead. Why read articles when you can just use ChatGPT, right?
Refer to ChatGPT’s accuracy claim above.
ChatGPT is not Google. In fact, ChatGPT wouldn’t exist without Google. ChatGPT relies on the content that human writers publish online based on their own:
Experiences
Expertise
Opinions
Research
I hate this whole doom and gloom around this subject. As an SEO writer, I’m stoked!
Plus, with Google’s new AI, I think ChatGPT will take a backseat when it comes to search. People will start using Google’s AI or social media to find answers to their problems.
Google’s YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) topics are going to need human writers. These are topics that require human expertise, such as law, medicine, finance, etc.
And Google is going to heavily, heavily reward those who are experts in their industry. And the only way to display that is through unique perspectives— not AI.
Here’s something I posted on my IG stories today to put things into perspective:
I also highly recommend watching the Google I/O Conference to see what’s going to happen with Google in the next year or so!
If you want to know more about Google Bard and the future or writing and searching, join my email list to get 5 days’ worth of need-to-know information.
So anyway, back to what I was saying: how do I use SEO in my writing process? I’ll break it down for you:
SEO Keyword research: Using an actual keyword tool like Ubersuggest— NOT GPT.
Use my *very* specific SEO Blog prompts for ChatGPT: I came up with the outline of the blog myself based on SEO. I wrote myself ChatGPT prompts to follow this outline and to include keywords and FAQs. There are about 10 prompts total for 1 blog.
Run it through Grammarly: For editing, proofreading, and plagiarism check. Fix as needed.
Copy/paste the blog in a Google Doc: Format it so Google and your audience will actually read it (break up paragraphs, create headings, etc).
Find 1-2 sources through manual research: This might take 10 minutes if you are familiar with the topic or if you use my ChatGPT research prompts (but I can easily spend hours on research).
Do a read-through: Change some words, insert my own voice, and add the research or my own perspective.
Run it through Grammarly 1 more time.
Copy/paste the final blog into my website: Add images, fill in the SEO metadata, and hit publish!
The entire thing can take me 2 hours, max, from start to finish. But normally, this would take me 4-8 hours on a single 1K-word piece because I would postpone writing to do more research. Sometimes it could take days if I’m writing for a client whose expertise I’m not familiar with (or is a YMYL topic).
Now I can spend MORE time researching to prove my expertise (or my clients’), making my SEO content more likely to pop at the top of Google’s results page— yes, even when Google’s AI comes into play.
