Episode 396: Different Ways to Leverage AI Writing Tools Like ChatGPT for Your Food Blog with Marley Braunlich

EBT396 – Marley Braunlich

Intro: Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom, whether that’s financial, personal, or professional.

I’m Megan Porta, and I’ve been a food blogger for over 12 years. I understand how isolating food blogging can be at times. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

There has been a ton of chatter in our space about ChatGPT and AI tools in general lately. So I think this episode will really give you some peace of mind about ChatGPT overall. It’ll also give you some ideas about how to use it for good in your business. So tune in. This is Marley Braunlich. She is a blogger at Baked Abundance and she’s also an SEO expert, and she has extensive knowledge in AI tools, so I think you’ll get a lot out of this. This is episode number 396, sponsored by RankIQ.

Sponsor: Hey, there we are putting together an AMA episode. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything, coming Up here on the Eat Blog Talk podcast, and we would love your help with this project. Submit questions that you would like for me to answer in episode number 400 that will be published on April 10th. Ask me anything about myself, productivity, planning, food blogging, any of those topics that I talk a lot about. I will do my very best to get an answer for you. Send me an email [email protected] with AMA as the subject line and ask away. 

Megan Porta: Marley Braunlich has been a food blogger for a little over one year now. She started working full-time for an SEO agency one month later. During this time, she grew her Instagram audience to 13,000 followers and started working with brands to earn a side income while the blog matured and she continued to pour into the blog. Marley has learned how to successfully land brand deals and form long-term partnerships. She also grew an understanding of SEO and applied these learnings. She is now leveraging AI to grow her business and streamline writing so that she can save time and create more content. 

Marley, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. How are you doing today? 

Marley Braunlich: I’m doing well. Thank you for having me, Megan. How are you? 

Megan Porta: I’m good too. Thanks for asking. Such a pleasure to have you here, and I can’t wait to talk about AI. I think this is a very hot topic for a lot of us right now, so it’ll be good to dive into it and hear your thoughts on it. I know you have rounded out a lot of thoughts about it. So first though, we would love to hear what fun fact you have to share with us.

Marley Braunlich: Awesome. Thank you. My fun fact is that I was actually a really picky eater growing up, but since then I’ve learned how to cook and try new recipes from a lot of different food blogs, which has helped me learn to love new foods. So there’s lots of things I eat now that I would never have voluntarily had before. Like beans, artichokes, and lots of other things. But I really enjoyed trying new things. 

Megan Porta: So it’s full circle. Food blogs got you liking new foods and now you’re a food blogger. 

Marley Braunlich: Exactly. I know. It’s so fun. I’ve been missing out on so many good foods. 

Megan Porta: Ah, it is. My mom was really good about just showing me a lot of different foods, like you mentioned artichokes. We used to have movie nights snacks, and she would actually include foods like artichokes on the snack tray. So I grew up eating those kinds of weird foods that people don’t really know much about. So I feel like I’m the exception. My boys are like, oh my gosh, I’ll never touch that green, whatever that is. But I love that. Okay, so you are here to talk about AI and how to leverage these AI tools that are coming out with higher frequency, it seems, as a food blogger. So let’s first of all talk about your background, because I know you have a background in SEO. So tell us about that. 

Marley Braunlich: Awesome. So I actually started working in SEO in 2021. I changed jobs and now I work for an SEO agency. So this actually was really helpful for blogging as well, because I had just started a food blog in 2021 and I had no idea what I was doing. So really learning about SEO and keyword research early on was a really big help with food blogging as well. In my job I mainly help clients with their on-page SEO and strategy to grow their traffic and a little bit of technical SEO as well. But it’s just been a really fun experience in such an interesting industry, and I’ve really enjoyed just being in the SEO world. 

Megan Porta: I can see how that would give you a massive advantage just coming into food blogging or just blogging in general space because a lot of us learn on the fly and don’t even know what SEO is, getting into food blogging, and then we have to learn it. So that’s really cool that you came to the food blogging space with that background. Yeah. Okay. So AI tools are getting more and more popular and getting really smart, so I would just love to get your overall general opinion of these tools. 

Marley Braunlich: Awesome. Yeah, so mainly today I wanna talk about chat GPT, but overall AI is a really popular topic right now, and it can help businesses and bloggers create more unique content that can rank on Google. So that’s mainly our focus for today. I’ll provide a little bit of an overview of AI and different AI tools. But yeah, I think AI’s really awesome. I’ve used it personally, so I’ll get into some of the ways that I’ve liked to use AI tools for food blogging. Of course, you need to take some things with a grain of salt. We’ll get into some things to avoid and things look out for when using AI. But overall, I think it’s really interesting and can be really helpful. 

Megan Porta: Would you mind covering the helpful content update? I know that’s been a recent thing, right? Wasn’t it last fall that came out? So can you just give us an overview of that? 

Marley Braunlich: Yeah, definitely. So the helpful content update, I believe, went out around August in 2022. Really that was Google’s update to focus on people first content. So you really wanna avoid creating content for search engines first. So this would be like keyword stuffing and over optimizing your content. People’s first content is really gonna fulfill a need and help a user answer a question and just offer a lot of value to the end user. So you want to make sure that your website visitors feel satisfied when leaving your site. 

Megan Porta: Do you think that considering this in the helpful content update that AI content is detected by Google? 

Marley Braunlich: That’s a big question. A lot of people are wondering if Google can detect AI content. Is it penalized or will it rank? So there’s lots of different thoughts on this, but my opinion is that yes, it definitely can rank. It’s a little bit difficult to tell which sites are using AI since most are not gonna come out and say that on their website. But I definitely know some large sites and tech savvy sites are using it and seeing success with it. It’s also important to remember that the helpful content update is not aimed at all AI content. I can include a resource from Google that describes exactly what they consider to be spammy AI content. So that’s just one really important thing to remember in that any low quality page is gonna provide little value to the end user. So as long as you’re not creating low value pages, whether they’re programmatic or human generated, that’s what we wanna focus on. 

Megan Porta: Is this a shameful thing? If you do use AI tools, is it something that people just aren’t talking about? Like pushing under the rug? 

Marley Braunlich: I wouldn’t say that it’s shameful. I think that when you’re using AI tools, you need to be a little bit careful with how you’re using them. As long as you have a human review of the content before publishing, I think that’s important. So then that way you’re making sure the content is accurate. It aligns with your audience. It adds value. So I think that’s where the problem comes in when people are not reviewing before publishing.

Megan Porta: Do you think that Google even cares? Like you mentioned that you, yes, you can get things to rank if it’s quality, but is Google going to police this? Is it even a concern, do you think?

Marley Braunlich: I wouldn’t be too worried about it, especially because since ChatGPT and AI tools are so popular right now, everyone’s gonna be using them and AI content is everywhere already. So for Google to actually go through and find all of that and try to police it. I don’t see that happening. So I wouldn’t worry about it. As long as you’re using it in the right way, I don’t think there’s really any concern. 

Megan Porta: Okay. Let’s talk about ChatGPT, because I know this AI tool is massively smart and people are blown away by the results that it produces. So for anyone who doesn’t know what it is, can you go through that? 

Marley Braunlich: So ChatGPT uses GPT three, which is a language processing AI model developed by Open AI and Chat GPT was launched in November 2022. So that’s a little bit of the background, and you can basically just give the chat bot a prompt and it will return a result for you. The quality and accuracy of that result is gonna depend on your specific request. 

Megan Porta: I was blown away by the fact that you can also type in I want whatever, fill in the blank, write with this tone and you can give it really specific details about what you want. It does it. It’s crazy. 

Marley Braunlich: That’s one of my favorite use cases of using ChatGPT, especially as a food blogger. I definitely struggle with a brand voice and asking it to rewrite old content with a witty tone or a humorous voice just adds so much personality into the content. So that can be a really fun way to use it.

Megan Porta: Yeah, and it’s free right now. Do you know if it’s going to become a paid service or tool?

Marley Braunlich: I’m not sure. I imagine it will at least continue to have some free capabilities. So if you are already using it and you’re worried about that, I think there definitely will continue to be a free version. But I think there’s other options as well if you can, I don’t know, connect their API or something. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. What ways do you think food bloggers should be using ChatGPT right now? 

Marley Braunlich: So I have about 10 different uses for food bloggers that can help you create content faster and easier. So I’ll just run through a couple of these and outline which ones are my personal favorite. So the first way is for FAQ answers. So for questions like, how to freeze a layer cake or what can I substitute for butter in cupcakes, something like that. Typically these answers are fairly short, so I think this would be a really great way to use ChatGPT. 

Megan Porta: Okay, so FAQs, Q and A, that’s a huge one. What are some other uses?

Marley Braunlich: So another one would be for informational or non-recipe posts, like how to cut an onion or how to store produce so it lasts longer. I know you’ve mentioned you are focusing on creating more non-recipe posts lately. Since these are more informational and you don’t need to have a lot of personal instruction for how to make a certain recipe that you have maybe special techniques for, this could be a really great way to use something like ChatGPT.

Megan Porta: When you produce results for something like that, how extensively do you recommend combing through it? Because I know some of the information that comes up is just not accurate, so you need to really pay attention to that. But do you rewrite everything or do you just change a few words or how do you do that? 

Marley Braunlich: It definitely depends on your query. So if you’re just typing in how to cut an onion, the result you’re gonna get is probably gonna be pretty short. So sometimes there’s some tricks you can do to get longer content. You can ask for a specific word count, maybe specifying that you need an article or a blog post on something. So that can definitely impact the length of the content that you’ll get back from an AI tool. But I would definitely go through and read it, probably word for word is best. You definitely wanna make sure all of the information coming back is accurate and sometimes it can provide incorrect information. That is something you want to check.

Megan Porta: It definitely does. I’ve been experimenting with it a little bit lately and I put something in the other day about how to make chicken or some sort of meat more moist and something that popped up, it was just totally wrong. I’m like, what? So you do have to read it because you don’t want to deliver that accidentally to your reader. That would be bad. What other uses do you have for ChatGPT? 

Marley Braunlich: So this is another one of my favorites that I was actually really surprised at how well it was coming out, but for writing recipe card instructions. I don’t know why, but I really dread writing these. I feel like it’s just because since I know how to make it, it seems so simple and straightforward in my head, and to have to type out, grab a mixing bowl, add these three things, whisk. That’s just so boring for me. So actually having ChatGPT write recipe card instructions, it’s been pretty accurate so far in all of my tests. You just insert all of your ingredients and ask it to write instructions for that recipe. Even things like the bake temperature, that’s the one that I recommend. 

Megan Porta: That’s weird. 

Marley Braunlich: I know it was pretty crazy, but definitely go through those as well and make sure that the temperature and just the method is correct.

Megan Porta: I haven’t thought of doing that, but I’m going to test that now. Just maybe even taking a few of my existing recipes to see what it comes up with, if it’s similar. I’m curious. 

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Marley Braunlich: Another good idea would be if you are stuck with any recipe ideas for recipe development and you’ve maybe exhausted some keyword research. I actually saw someone on TikTok ask ChatGPT to give them a unique cookie recipe, and then they made and followed that recipe and they wanted to see if it would actually turn out good or not. So that’s a fun one that you could experiment with. 

Megan Porta: Did it work, the one you’re talking about? 

Marley Braunlich: I think they liked them. I don’t know if it would work every time, but it does seem like a fun way to get even some recipe ideas if you wanted to go that route. Another good one would be foods that pair well together or sides to serve with a certain dish. If you’re trying to create a lot of supporting content around maybe a dinner post and you need a lot of sides, you could come up with maybe a long list of options. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that’s a good idea too. Do you know where this information is pulled from? 

Marley Braunlich: They use a couple different places, mainly GPT three which is their own language processing model, but I think it also pulls from a couple other places.

Megan Porta: Okay, so not existing blogs? 

Marley Braunlich: No. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Okay. What are some other uses for us? 

Marley Braunlich: A couple other ones that we already mentioned, my favorite one, which was using the voice and tones. You can ask it to rewrite old copy with a new brand voice and add some more personality in there. You also can just rewrite old content in general to give it a little bit of a refresh. Then, let’s see. Oh, I like this one too. For social media captions actually, if you’re stuck on like an Instagram caption, you could easily ask it to give you some fun puns or different ideas for maybe a key lime pie post or something that you’re posting to Instagram. 

Megan Porta: Oh, I like that. Okay. I might try that too. Just another thought, do you see this helping copywriters or hurting copywriters, this tool? 

Marley Braunlich: I don’t see it hurting them because there’s a lot of limitations and just the quality of the content and the length and just understanding someone’s entire business model. A human copywriter and freelancer is gonna have such a better handle over that than something like ChatGPT.

Megan Porta: Yeah. 

Marley Braunlich: The last two I believe would be for meta descriptions, small blurbs or any other short descriptions, just so then that way you don’t have to really worry about reviewing lots of content back from the AI tool. You can just quickly see if a couple sentences are accurate and you could use those. Then maybe for a paragraph or two within your recipe blog post. So if you want to answer any generic questions about baking best practices or grilling or just general food tips, that could be another good instance. 

Megan Porta: Okay. These are all great ideas. Is there anything more? What about emails, email copy?

Marley Braunlich: Oh yeah, I did have that one too. FOr your email newsletter, that would be great. Whether you want to have a blurb about why someone should make your banana bread or just any type of email copy that’s maybe like filler. I feel like if you’re writing personal content, you’ll write that yourself. Then if you need a little bit of filler content, that could maybe save you some time. 

Megan Porta: Okay, so these are all great. I think that this gives us plenty of ideas to start with and just experiment with it, right Marley? Don’t you think just go in and see? Maybe put in a topic for an email coming up and just see what it comes up with and then go from there. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t use it. If you can tweak it, great. Don’t you think? 

Marley Braunlich: Definitely. Yeah. It’s almost like a game, like you put in different queries and see what you get and then tweak it a little bit and then see what you get. So it can be pretty fun to play around with. 

Megan Porta: If in case anybody doesn’t know, it’s chat.openai.com it looks like.

Marley Braunlich: Yes. 

Megan Porta: Okay, perfect. Then what things should we avoid when we’re using these generators? 

Marley Braunlich: There’s definitely a couple things you’ll want to avoid if you’re using any AI content generator. The very first one is not using a plagiarism checker before using the content. So far, each time I’ve tried this, it does come back saying that the content is a hundred percent unique. So I haven’t encountered an instance where it does say that it’s plagiarized, but you always want to be safe rather than sorry.

Megan Porta: Which plagiarism checker do you use or are there a few of them? 

Marley Braunlich: There’s a bunch of free ones on Google. I just Google it and use whatever comes up. I haven’t been using a very specific one, but there’s plenty that are free.

Megan Porta: Okay. What else should we be avoiding? 

Marley Braunlich: You want to make sure that you’re editing the content and looking for any misspellings or grammar issues. One just other free tool that I really recommend for any food bloggers who aren’t using this already would be the Google Chrome plugin. This I use all the time while I’m working on my computer and it just automatically underlines things that you can quickly just with one click update if it’s a quick grammar fix. So I would definitely get that, and that can help you when editing your AI content. 

Megan Porta: I don’t think I have that. I’ll check that out. Okay. Anything else that we should be avoiding? 

Marley Braunlich: Not fact checking. Of course, as you mentioned, sometimes AI tools can pull old, outdated, or incorrect facts, so you wanna ensure your content is accurate, so always fact check.

Megan Porta: Okay. You can do that just by reading through, like you said earlier, just word for word, making sure you’re not just copying and pasting paragraphs without looking through them. Okay, what else? 

Marley Braunlich: Then the last one would be not adding a personal touch to the content. You always wanna make sure that the content adds value and answers common questions and speaks to your audience. So if you’re mainly using AI to write a post, always go back in and add unique sentences or your own personality and advice into the copy. So then that way it just kind of differs from generic AI answers. 

Megan Porta: Okay, that’ll make sense. I think that’s all pretty intuitive and stuff that I hope people are doing anyway, but good to just go through that again. So thank you for that. Now, what do you think about the future? Where’s this gonna go? What are your thoughts? 

Marley Braunlich: So of course it’s really popular right now. I don’t see it going away. I definitely see it continuing to improve and grow. However, it’s really important to note that it’s never gonna replace human content writers and freelancers. There’s always gonna be so much value that copywriters can add that AI tools just will not be able to provide. It also still has quite a ways to go, like lots of improvements to be made in terms of the factual content and understanding your query. But I think overall it’s a helpful tool to have in your toolbox.

Megan Porta: Do you foresee any time in the future, and I know this would just be opinion because none of us have any idea what’s going to happen, but do you foresee it replacing some of our blog content?

Marley Braunlich: I don’t think so. Recently Google has announced their own version of ChatGPT, which is called Bard, and it’s interesting because it looks like some of those results are gonna be directly in the search results toward the top. So I can give you the link to that announcement from Google as well. Just in their screenshots, it looked like they were trying to answer a featured snippet at the very top. So that’s interesting if you’re already ranking for a featured snippet, if Google’s version is gonna be the very, very first result. 

Megan Porta: I think too, this will be an evolution, because Bard isn’t coming out for a while. 

Marley Braunlich: I don’t believe so. I have to look again. 

Megan Porta: I feel like they had to scurry to get things going because of ChatGPT. But once it comes out, I think we just have to kinda roll with the punches and that first version might not be what it eventually evolves into. So just be patient with it. Like when featured snippets came out, I remember food bloggers being thrown off because at first there were no links, correct? So we were like, wait, what? Then that changed. Am I saying all of this right, Marley? 

Marley Braunlich: I believe so. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So yeah, just to not freak out when Bard does come out. If it’s not exactly what we think it should look like, it may evolve and to just take it as it comes. 

Marley Braunlich: Exactly. Overall with any AI tool, I think it’s important just to remember that you don’t want to solely rely on AI tools. One interesting point from Google is, that kind of relates back to why a human editor and writer is gonna be so important, is that one point that they have for spammy AI content is text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing. So they’re exactly spelling that out. It’s not all AI content, it’s spammy AI content. So especially whenever a human has not reviewed any of it. So that’s just a good takeaway point from all of this. 

Megan Porta: The human touch will be noted, I think, and Google is so smart and our users are so smart too. So I think that if we just copy and paste whatever’s generated for us that will be detected. So that’s the moral of the story here. But there are good uses for it and there are ways that it can help to streamline our businesses. You went through 10 awesome ways to do that. So where do you think someone should get started? If they have not opened this at all and they’re literally doing it right now as we talk, what do you think would be like a good first step into using AI content?

Marley Braunlich: I would say just start with a very simple query, just so you can understand the results you’re gonna get from that. So just asking it a very simple question, like how to do something and then just tweak that a little bit and say like, You know how to do something and get the answer with this kind of brand voice and tone. Then just start playing around with your query to see how that result changes. Because you can ask it the same thing 10 different ways. You’re gonna get 10 different types of responses. So that’s how I would start using it, just to get a feel for it. Then maybe start going into some of those reasons I listed earlier, like updating old copies or maybe the recipe card instructions.

Megan Porta: The one I’m gonna try after we chat is updating old copies. Maybe just taking a really old post and changing the tone and adding more helpful information to the post and just see what happens. So I’m excited about that. 

Marley Braunlich: Yeah, that’s a really great one, especially because Google also does consider a little bit of a freshness score. So going back and updating old content, especially if it could have changed in the last couple of years, can really help. So keeping things fresh and relevant. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that’s great. Anything else we’re forgetting that you feel like food bloggers should definitely know about ChatGPT or other AI tools?

Marley Braunlich: One thing which I’d say is like a pretty big downfall of AI tools, specifically ChatGPT, since it is in such high demand right now, there are times where I’ve tried to use it, that it’s not available. So sometimes you’re unable to access the tool for hours due to high demand and it’s at capacity. So that’s something to remember. If you really need it and you are in a time crunch, you might not always have access to it. 

Megan Porta: So work at 2:00 AM or something so you don’t have to worry about it. 

Marley Braunlich: Yeah. Maybe some off time. I feel like that Monday morning it’s usually down because too many people are already using it.

Megan Porta: Oh, interesting. Do you know what the limit is? Is there a personal capacity or something? 

Marley Braunlich: Oh my gosh. I’m sure it’s huge but I have no idea. 

Megan Porta: Interesting. Okay. Anything else we should touch on before we go Marley?

Marley Braunlich: I think we covered everything. 

Megan Porta: Okay, awesome. Thank you for this. I know that a lot of food bloggers lately have been asking me like, oh my gosh, is this something I should worry about? Should we be freaking out? It’s just good to cover all of this so that we are informed. Again, just rolling with the punches because nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen, but I just wanna say it’s gonna be okay. We are super smart bunch of people, we figure everything out that comes our way and not to see this as a threat necessarily, but a way to improve our businesses, and make our work more streamlined. That’s my thoughts. 

Marley Braunlich: 100%. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Thank you Marley, so much for your time today. We appreciate you. Do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to leave us with today?

Marley Braunlich: I do, and it’s related to my fun fact. Then also just how you mentioned, we have to roll with the punches. So my words of inspiration are, start with willingness, be willing to learn, adapt, and grow. Times are always changing and being flexible and open-minded will help your business both survive and thrive.

Megan Porta: Aw, you just spoke my language. I love it so much. Awesome. We’ll put together show notes for you, Marley, and if you wanna go peek at those, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/bakedabundance. Tell everyone where they can find you.

Marley Braunlich: So you can find me on Instagram over at Baked Abundance. I’m also recently on TikTok and I’m actually Food with Marley over there. But I’d love to connect with so many of you guys, other bloggers and content creators, and I’m happy to answer any questions or offer advice where I can, whether it’s related to AI, SEO, or anything else. If you’re interested in learning more about AI tools or SEO tips, definitely sign up for my email list. I’ll share a link with Megan in the show notes or you could DM me on Instagram. I’m gonna put together a little AI series and then you’ll be able to see examples from ChatGPT and further resources, pros and cons, and actual examples of results I’ve gotten as well. 

Megan Porta: I will definitely be signing up for that. That sounds amazing. Thank you for offering that and for joining us today, Marley, and thank you so much for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories. I will see you next time.