Ryan Law

i soft-launched my course last week. 154 people are currently working through it 😱

it's $99. it contains everything i know about thought leadership content:

~ ideation frameworks
~ writing techniques
~ distribution tactics
~ examples and teardowns

ryanlaw.podia.com/how-to-write-t…

slop cannons vs thinkmaxxers: or, how to write with AI.

blanket statements are fun and polarising and perform well on social media but they shouldn't be taken seriously. "don't write with AI" is bad advice. "write everything with AI" is equally bad advice. both will hamstring you in different ways.

generative AI is an intensely powerful tool in every marketer's toolkit and like any tool it requires a measure of skill to know when it's appropriate to use it and when it's not.

at one extreme is the thinkmaxxer, someone labouring to pour maximal human intelligence and creativity into every utilitarian piece of prose. the thinkmaxxer operates under a perpetual category error, confusing the inherently pragmatic job of marketing a business and helping increase sales with an artistic act of self-expression. they forget that their words are not innately valuable; it is the outcome those words achieve that matters, regardless of their method of manufacture.

many - i would argue most - types of marketing content benefit greatly from being done faster and more efficiently. there is a proven format, and little to be gained in deviating from it. the content needs to exist in some finished form to be useful, and the more that exist, the better. there are vastly diminishing returns from additional time spent tweaking and refining beyond the basic template. thinkmaxxing in these situations is sheer self-indulgence masquerading as moral virtue. you misunderstand the job to be done. you waste everyone's time.

at the other end of the spectrum is the slop cannon, someone who has reduced all the shining facets of writing to a single homogenous AI paste, satisfied with the first passable simulacrum the LLM spits out in response to their prompt. for them, writing is solely mechanical, an irritation to be automated away in service of creating more content widgets.

but writing has vast utility beyond simply making widgets; it is a manifestation of thought, a timeless scaffold for arranging and improving thoughts. there are many marketing opportunities that don't come neatly bundled with a defined template to follow, and experimentation and messy play are necessary to discovering what works. sometimes, good outcomes are so rare and unpredictable that only herculean efforts to polish and improve writing are necessary to have any outcome at all.

the difficulty lies in working out where a given item sits on this spectrum; it is not always easy. you will make mistakes in categorisation, as i have. you will need to constantly evaluate AI's capabilities and revisit your previous taxonomy. you will need to sacrifice things you love and learn skills you never expected to need.

but this is our job now.

this is how you will explain and couch your value to everyone you encounter. whether you feel good about it or not (i still haven't decided), AI has irreparably changed the content marketing game. you need to create your own mental-model of its utility and value, assign the many tactics at your disposal somewhere along the AI/not AI spectrum, and be able to explain that model to your peers, your customers, your bosses.

so don't worry if you don't have some pithy stance on AI, or you don't fall neatly into an extreme viewpoint. the great irony is that both thinkmaxxers and slop cannons have abdicated responsibility over AI use and taken the easy, seductive path out. as long as you are engaging with AI in some capacity, making reasoned judgements about its utility, you are doing all you need to do to successful "write with AI" - whatever the hell that means

both people and Google are looking for signs of effort when making a website—and spending tokens is a form of effort, if they result in better data, better images, or a unique UX

this week on the @ahrefs podcast i walked @timsoulo through one of my vibe-coded side projects, including all of the decisions and data sources that turn a commodity website into something worth ranking

full episode: youtu.be/QmNqZRfDLGQ

gone are the days of compounding search traffic, ordinal search rankings, forecasting based on predictable click-through and conversion rates.

today, your content pages are grist for the AI mill, their contents scraped from the page, blended together with competing pages, and shown to the user—if you're lucky—in a context and format controlled entirely by a third party.

forgotten is the handshake agreement that good content will be rewarded by website visitors. instead, most people who interact with your content will do so through an intermediary like Google's AI Overviews or a ChatGPT response.

but most pages are still created with the assumption that people will visit them directly. how does content change if we abandon that idea?

my new article on the Ahrefs blog explores the idea of "headless" content marketing: ahrefs.com/blog/headless-…

if 🚨 "automating content creation" 🚨 sounds spammy or black hat... you might want to read this.

my awesome colleague @siquanong just shared how he uses content automation to automagically update articles, keep their data accurate and fresh, prevent hours of tedious work... and make content that is objectively better for the reader.

even if you never use AI to generate search content, there is a serious case for enlisting it to help update your existing content. SQ explains precisely how to he does it on the Ahrefs blog:

ahrefs.com/blog/automated…