We’ve talked about how AI could impact the freelance writing industry, how AI can lead to plagiarism problems, and even the best way freelance writers can make money with AI. Now it’s time to explore the many different AI uses cases that could impact your freelance writing business.
We’ll look at how you can use AI tools for ideation, outlining, writing, editing, marketing, and much more.
This is a long one, so to help you navigate to AI use cases you’re most likely to try, you can click the links below to be taken to their summaries.
And that’s what we’re covering today: summaries. There will be follow-up posts with step-by-step instructions and examples for some of the key use cases here. If there are specific ones you’d like to learn more about, please leave a comment to let me know.
AI Use Cases for Freelance Writers
Here are 80 AI use cases for freelance writers.
- Blog Post Ideas
- Article Ideas for Client Pitches
- Long-form Content Ideas
- Specialization / Niche Ideas
- Title Options
- Series Ideas
- Branding / Slogan / Tagline Ideas
- Target Prospect Ideas
- Content Supplement Ideas
- Initial Content Outlines
- Expanded Outlines
- Content Plan Holes (& Filling Them Before Writing)
- Subheading Ideas
- Fleshing Out Key Points
- Reverse Outlining
- Long-form Content Outlines / Table of Contents
- Finding Sources & Statistics
- Research Summarization & Organization
- Data Analysis from Research Materials
- Data Visualization (Charts & Graphs)
- AI Content Generation (in a Legal & Ethical Way)
- Better Interview Questions
- Simplifying Style Guidelines
- Brand Consistency in Content
- “Filler Copy” Creation
- Alternative Intros and Conclusions
- CTA Suggestions
- Drafting Pitches & Proposals
- Learning New Project Types
- Basic Content Clean-Up
- Language Adaptation
- Content Audit Follow-Ups
- Factchecking
- Writing Style Insights
- Cutting Excess Content
- Social Media Posts
- Long-form Content Excerpts
- Slides & Presentations
- Video Scripts
- Video Shorts
- Course Content
- Podcasts
- Posts-to-Books (or E-books)
- Text-to-Audio (& Speech-to-Text)
- Keyword Research
- On-page Optimization
- Internal Linking Improvements
- Image Creation / Editing
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Strategy
- Marketing Strategy
- Query Customization
- Prioritizing Your Pitch List
- Improving Website Copy
- Testimonial Request Emails
- Client Feedback Survey Design
- Client Feedback Analysis
- Promotional Copy (White Papers, Press Releases, Case Studies, etc.)
- Analyze Competitive Data
- Analyze Website Analytics
- Analyze SEO Data
- Email Marketing Assistance
- Creating Interactive Elements
- Professional Bio Improvements
- Write Books & E-books
- Create Online Courses
- Content Upgrade Add-ons
- Consulting & Other Service Expansions
- Niche Sites as Income Streams
- Scheduling Help & Analysis
- Professional Development & Study Plans
- Analyze Industry Trends
- Conducting Content Audits
- Email Response Automation
- Contract Customizations
- Goal-setting & Long-term Planning
- Task Prioritization & Routine Planning
- Meeting & Interview Prep
- Motivation Help
- Day-to-Day Work Tool Integration
Remember, you can click on any of the links in the list above to go right to the AI use cases you’re most interested in. You’ll find brief summaries here, and we’ll have some follow-up posts showing some of these use cases in action with their corresponding prompts.
AI Use Cases for Ideation
One of the most basic things AI tools can help you with as a freelance writer is ideation. So consider swapping old school idea generators for something like ChatGPT the next time you feel stuck and aren’t sure what to work on next.
Here are some AI use cases for coming up with better project ideas, titles, and more.
Blog Post Ideas
Not sure what to write about on your professional blog? Ask your favorite AI writing tool for blog post ideas that would appeal to your target clients.
Article Ideas for Client Pitches
Similar to blog post ideas, you can use generative AI tools to help you come up with article ideas you can pitch to prospects.
Long-form Content Ideas
Whether for a client project or your own promotional pieces, AI tools can also help you come up with long-form content ideas.
For example, you might want to produce a white paper, case studies, or even a book to help position you as a subject matter expert in your specialty area.
Specialization / Niche Ideas
Don’t have a specialty yet? That’s OK. AI can help you with that too.
Provide some information on your educational and professional background as well as your interests, and see what specialties it suggests. If you like some, but they aren’t quite right, ask for more specific specialty ideas around those niches, industries, project types, or client types.
Title Options
Are you struggling to come up with the perfect title for a piece you wrote? Is your working title just not working for you anymore? Use AI to come up with multiple title options you can either pull from or tweak to meet your needs.
Series Ideas
AI can also help you brainstorm article series ideas. Use it much in the same way you would when generating article or blog post ideas, asking for multiple articles around a single topic.
Similarly, you can have AI tools help you brainstorm topical authority maps for SEO (essentially a series of interlinked content around a main topic area).
Branding / Slogan / Tagline Ideas
As a freelancer, you have multiple branding options. For example, a personal brand is the image and reputation you build around your name. But you can also opt for a more traditional business brand name.
If you’re struggling to come up with a unique brand, or a slogan or tagline for a brand name you’ve already chosen, ask your favorite AI tool for some ideas. Just remember to run a trademark search on any ideas you consider to make sure you don’t infringe on anyone else’s trademarks.
Target Prospect Ideas / Pitch Lists
If you use an AI tool with internet access, like ChatGPT-4 via plugins, let it help you identify new markets.
Ask it to identify paying markets in a specific niche. You can set parameters regarding pay or other requirements you have, but know that the more specific you get for this kind of prompt, the more varied your results will be.
Note: With ChatGPT-4 specifically, it likes to link you to blog posts with market lists. If you want the most recent and accurate information, ask it to only provide links to a publication’s official writers’ guidelines.
Content Supplement Ideas
Do you want to offer add-ons or supplements for your key content? Premium upgrades? Email list incentives?
Ask AI to help you come up with ideas for templates, worksheets, and more based on the content you plan to promote them through.
AI Use Cases for Outlining
AI tools are great for coming up with ideas and titles, especially when you’re feeling stuck. But they’re also helpful when it comes to outlining writing projects and mapping out content plans.
Here are some outline-related AI use cases that might help speed up projects of any size.
Initial Content Outlines
I begin most writing with a skeleton outline. This is pretty much headings and filler text to map out structure. It allows me to start writing from something other than a blank page.
You can use AI in a similar way, especially if you struggle to get started. Use an AI writing tool to provide a rough outline based on a topic or title. You can always add to this later, and you don’t have to include all suggested settings. Ask it to leave placeholders for paragraphs, lists, transitions, and images so you have a basic structure to work from.
Expanded Outlines
Maybe you already have a skeleton outline. In that case, you can use AI tools to help you flesh them out.
For example, if you already have your main headings, ask AI to suggest subheadings for each section. You could also input your existing outline and ask your AI tool to create a bullet point list of key points you should cover under each heading or sub-heading.
Content Plan Holes (& Filling Them Before Writing)
Even if you think you have a comprehensive outline, AI tools can help you make sure you aren’t missing anything before you send those outlines off for client approval.
For example, you can input your outline and ask the AI to suggest additional headings or sections for content not already covered.
Subheading Ideas
Don’t settle for your (or your AI tool’s) initial outline subheadings. You can go beyond this and have AI generate multiple alternatives.
Consider this if you want all of your subheadings to fit a particular style, cover a variety of keyword phrases for SEO, or when you just aren’t feeling your initial ideas even if you still like the content breakdown.
Fleshing Out Key Points
I mentioned previously you could have AI provide a list of key points to cover for each section of your outline. But you can use it to go even further than this.
For example, instead of that bulleted list, you could have it write a one-paragraph summary related to each point (which you’ll use as a reference point, not publish it directly). Or ask it to provide a relevant quote or statistic you can include when writing that section.
Only do the latter if you’re using an internet-connected AI tool, and always fact-check quotes and statistics along with the sources you should ask it to provide.
Reverse Outlining
One of my favorite AI use cases so far has been reverse outlining. This is when you enter a completed document or manuscript and ask AI to provide a summarized outline of the content.
This is helpful in making sure you covered the key points you wanted to make. But I love this for updating and merging older content where I need to identify similarities between two pieces to combine them in a more natural way.
Long-form Content Outlines / Table of Contents
AI can also help you outline longer-form content, from white papers to a proposed table of contents for a new book.
These can get much more detailed than the end result TOC, covering chapters, sections within each chapter, any subheadings / sub-sections, asides, quotes, interviews, etc.
For this, I suggest a prompt sequence / prompt chain approach. This is where you start with a simple prompt such as “Outline chapter ideas for a book about [topic].” Then, when you’re happy with the top-level results, start fleshing them out chapter-by-chapter.
AI Use Cases for Research
You’ve likely heard AI writing tools are either great for research or they’re useless for research. The truth falls somewhere in between.
People advocating for using non-connected AI tools for research (such as by asking it questions and trusting its answers) are off-base. They don’t account for limitations in training materials by date, the lack of transparency around training data and its own credibility, and the chances of these tools hallucinating false facts and making up nonexistent sources.
On the other hand, connected AI can be an outstanding research tool… if you know how to use it. Here are some AI uses cases for conducting and analyzing research for your writing.
Finding Sources & Statistics
If you have access to a web-connected AI tool, you can use it to help you gather initial sources for a piece you’re working on.
For example, if you use ChatGPT-4 with the Scholarly plugin (which is currently returning better and more recent results than similar plugins I’ve tried), it can help you identify peer-reviewed studies and papers around the topic you’re writing about.
Research Summarization & Organization
If you have several long, complicated pieces of research you need to analyze, let AI help. For example, if you upload or link to a research paper (if your AI tool allows this), you can have the paper summarized for you.
This could speed up the process of narrowing down which sources you want to cite in your work as well as help you determine if there are any conflicts among sources that require deeper analysis.
Data Analysis from Research Materials
Are you struggling to analyze or interpret some of the data you’ve come across in your research? Consider pasting, or uploading it depending on your tool, and asking AI to summarize key findings represented by that data. You can also use AI to help you simplify that data for a lay audience.
Data Visualization (Charts & Graphs)
You can also let AI create tables, charts, and graphs based on data you provide. Whether or not you use them in your writing, this can help you visualize key points or concepts you want to cover.
AI Use Cases for Writing
When you hear people talking about AI writing or AI content, they often mean content completely generated by AI tools with minimal human input.
We’ve established already how this is risky, unethical, and potentially even illegal. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use AI for writing. When you learn how to do so responsibly, AI writing tools can boost productivity, inspire new creative ideas of your own, and keep you competitive.
Here are some of the ways you can use AI for writing, or helping you write, content related to your freelance writing business.
AI Content Generation (in a Legal & Ethical Way)
We’ll go over an example of this in a later post, but you can use AI to help write your content without crossing legal or ethical lines. As always, the quality and validity of your output is directly related to the quality of your input.
For example, a prompt of “Write me an article about [subject]” is bad – high likelihood of hallucinations, plagiarism, and / or copyright infringement. But an alternative is to take your own research, sources, and expertise and feed that into your AI tool to get a draft that's more your own. Include the following as a start:
- Project brief
- Initial outline
- Points to make in each outline section
- Headings and subheadings
- Statistics you’ve vetted (with source citations)
- Quotes from interviews you’ve conducted
- Links that need to be included
- Client style guidelines
- Examples of past articles you’ve written for the client (for voice consistency)
The more of the base material you provide, the lower the risk of anything being plagiarized from a third-party, and the more it will sound like you.
Better Interview Questions
Need to come up with some creative interview questions? Ask your AI tool for ideas.
Better yet, if you have an internet-connected tool, feed the AI links to recent interviews with your subject. Have it analyze things like over-lapping questions so you can then come up with new takes rather than running a repetitive interview.
Simplifying Style Guidelines
Were you asked to follow specific style guidelines you aren’t familiar with? Given custom style guidelines that apply only to one client? Ask your AI tool to simplify them into a list format or provide the most important considerations. You can always have a tool check your article against those style guidelines more thoroughly afterwards.
Brand Consistency in Content
Similar to how it can help you stick to style guidelines, AI can also help you maintain brand consistency from one client’s projects to the next. Input examples or ask your tool to identify key brand or voice elements from existing published work to help you keep new pieces on the same page.
“Filler Copy” Creation
Maybe you need to see more than a rough outline to get past the blank page rut on a new project. Or maybe you’re building a new professional website or blog.
Consider using AI to generate filler copy that’s relevant to the article or page rather than using “lorem ipsum” as a placeholder.
You’ll still replace it, but sometimes seeing functional text might help get past mental hurdles to getting started.
Alternative Intros & Conclusions
Maybe you’ve finished a draft, but you’re just not “feeling” your intro or conclusion. Let AI have a crack at it. Give it the gist of your article or copy, feed in your existing intro or conclusion. Then ask it to create some alternatives.
Again, the idea isn’t use the alternatives as-is, but rather to see if it sparks any new ideas or angles you wouldn’t have otherwise considered in the revision process.
Call-to-Action Suggestions
Tired of the same basic calls-to-action, like a call for comments or shares at the end of blog posts? Ask AI for some more creative approaches. Or feed it key actions for the site or business and let it decide what kind of CTA might be a good fit for that particular piece.
Drafting Pitches & Proposals
When you’re working on something reasonably templated, like a pitch or proposal, consider letting AI handle your first draft.
Create a sort of brief where you input key things (the publication you’re pitching, editor’s name, article idea, your relevant background, etc.), then let AI format it into a pitch style before you clean things up and further customize it.
Again, it’s just about getting past the blank page and giving you something to work from. You’re entering this information one way or another, so treating certain elements as almost data entry might be easier for some writers than starting from nothing.
Learning New Project Types
AI can do more than generate content outright. It can also help you learn how to tackle new types of freelance writing projects.
For example, if you’ve never written a case study before, ask your AI tool to explain what they are, how they’re used, and common formatting options.
You can also upload or link to (depending on your tool) examples you like. Let’s say you have a handful of relevant press releases that worked well. Link to them, then have AI help you sort out similarities in how they were written so you can see what made them work.
AI Editing Use Cases
If you use any of the popular online editing or grammar-checker tools (or even spell-check for that matter), you already use AI in your editing process.
You can stick with those more traditional AI editing tools, but you can also use generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude 2 to help with your revisions. Here are some examples of how you can do that.
Basic Content Clean-Up
Use AI as a basic grammar checker. Paste in your draft (watch those token limits) and ask for feedback or suggestions on anything from word choice to sentence length.
Language Adaptation
One of the biggest potential strengths of the current wave of AI writing tools is their ability to help writers adapt their language to different markets.
For example, let’s say you’re a US-based writer, but a client’s readers are in the UK. You might run a draft through AI to make sure you don’t miss anything when tailoring your work to a different audience than you usually write for.
Even better, these could be incredible tools for ESL writers (or any freelance writer working in markets outside their native language). I’m not talking about full translations here, but rather taking writing that might not pass as native use of the target language, then letting AI help writers improve their end product before delivery.
Content Audit Follow-Ups
An AI use case I’ve quickly become a fan of is the content audit follow-up. For me this usually means either having AI suggest an updated outline for an old piece that might be too short or outdated.
Or I use it to combine posts by letting AI review existing article structure, topics, covered, etc. then develop a merge plan with a new outline that covers everything from the older posts in a way that flows naturally.
Factchecking
Did you come across stats or claims that just don’t sound right? Unsure of a source? If you have an AI tool with internet access, you can use it to speed up your factchecking.
Ask your AI if it can find sources to verify the claims or data, then link you to the primary sources when possible (rather than citing someone who cited someone else who misinterpreted data from yet another party).
Writing Style Insights
Not sure what makes your writing, well, you? Input some of your favorite writing samples and ask your AI tool to break it down to distinct elements those pieces have in common. Style? Word choice? Simplicity? Brevity? What does your best work share in common? Find out, and you’ll know what to focus on when revising later projects.
Cutting Excess Content
Cutting content can suck. I get it. No matter how much we cut, we can usually afford to cut more. I cut a few thousand words from this post, and it’s still longer than I’d like.
If I was smart (which I’ve decided not to be today), I’d run this draft through an AI tool before publishing. And I’d let it make more ruthless cuts than I might otherwise be able or willing to.
Remember though, you don’t have to accept every suggested cut. The idea with this one is more to help with those “should I, or shouldn’t I?” moments when you aren’t sure if something is worthy of the axe.
AI Use Cases for Content Repurposing
Perhaps one of the best uses of generative AI right now is content repurposing. And this is great news for those of us with thousands of pieces of content we own the rights to.
On the freelance side, if you haven’t signed away your copyright (which I highly suggest you never do—sell first rights or exclusive digital rights or something along those lines instead), you can repurpose older pieces into new ones. Tailor the base topic to a different target reader base for example. Or combine key points from older content in your specialty area into a book.
Even beyond that, you can repurpose your content for promotional purposes too, such as letting AI generate social media updates to promote a blog post.
Here are some ways AI can help you repurpose content and get more out of your current and prior work.
Social Media Posts
Whether you need some one-liners for your favorite microblogging service or longer posts for a platform like LinkedIn, AI can generate ideas or social media content for you from your existing articles or copy.
Long-form Content Excerpts
Let’s say you have a book to promote (for yourself or a client). If you use a high-input AI tool like Claude 2, you can input anything from a chapter to a full manuscript (with the client’s permission) and let AI help you identify good excerpts you can distribute, modify as guest posts, or turn into other promotional content.
Slides & Presentations
Turn old articles into presentations. Let AI help you generate text for the slides based on your original material, then import into your favorite slide-creation tool.
Video Scripts
Want to create a YouTube series tied to your blog? Use AI tools to draft video scripts based on your posts.
Video Shorts
AI can also help you develop a collection of video shorts based on existing content. When coupled with a bulk-edit tool (like Canva’s), you can all but automate a new shorts account (on YouTube, TikTok, or elsewhere). In a later post over at Kiss My Biz, I’ll even show you how step-by-step.
Course Content
If you use an AI tool that lets you upload a .csv or similar file, you can export your content and let it analyze what you already have. Then let it suggest course topics and specific content you have that can either integrate with the course or be used as course content itself.
Podcasts
Similar to videos, you can use AI to generate podcast scripts from existing articles (ideal for solo shows) or topic ideas to help you identify target guests.
Posts-to-Books (or E-books)
Want to write a book, but you don’t know where to start? How about your blog archives? Let AI help you repurpose what you already have to write your first (or next) book. It doesn’t mean you have to use the blog content as-is. But a lot of the hard work might already be done. And AI can help you sort through it, organize it, and put it all together.
Text-to-Audio (& Speech-to-Text)
While there are tools to help you AI-ify your own voice, they’re not quite where I want to see them yet. But they’re getting better all the time. And one use case I’m excited about is the possibility of turning old posts into audio versions in your own voice, but without the time commitment of manually recording all of them. This could be good for accessibility in the future, making blog content available to more people, and without that common artificial AI-assistant sound.
The opposite is also a possibility--using AI tools to turn audio content like podcasts into written transcripts. While there are already niche AI transcription tools out there, the rapid advancement in AI technologies makes this something to keep an eye on. I fully expect we'll see better transcriptions in coming months-to-years, and with a wider variety of tool options.
AI Use Cases for Marketing / PR / SEO
AI doesn’t just help you create or improve your writing. It can also help you market your services, promote your blog content to build your reach, and help you stand out in competitive markets.
There are many ways AI can be used in marketing, PR, SEO, and related areas. Here are some examples to get you started.
Keyword Research
While AI tools aren’t going to give you accurate keyword search volumes (nothing really does), they can still be used for keyword research for your site or SEO-focused client pieces.
For example, you can ask your AI tool to generate a list of common questions a reader might have about a particular topic, then use these as longtail keyword targets.
If you have an internet-connected tool, have it analyze competitors’ high-ranking pieces to see what keyword phrases they’re targeting (both their main keyword focus and related keywords that might also drive traffic to the page).
On-page Optimization
Have AI improve your on-page optimization by suggesting new subheadings, additional content sections, and more based on your target keywords. Or use an SEO-specific AI tool to do deeper analysis of your page’s content to further optimize it for search.
Internal Linking Improvements
You can use AI tools to suggest internal linking placements so you don’t end up with orphan pages. SEO AI tools might be a better bet for this use case because some will crawl your site and be able to suggest pages to link to. But even a base AI writing tool can help spread internal links across a new article in a natural way if you give it the target links to include.
Image Creation / Editing
While this series hasn’t (and won’t) touch on generative art much, you should know there are AI tools that help with image generation or editing. Even AI content tools that allow you to upload images can help with minor tasks, such as changing the image file type for you without special software. There are also tools like Canva’s AI photo editor that can be used remove parts of photos and generate new “fill” for blank spaces.
I’ve found this handy for some blog header images where only part of a photo is needed, and you want the rest to be a solid color. I haven’t used the generative fill aspect, but the removals are clean and quick.
Social Media Strategy
Let AI gather basic info from you (social platforms you want to use, time available, etc.) and put together a simple social media strategy that helps you keep updates consistent. Better yet, couple this with AI-based social media content repurposing.
Content Strategy
AI can also help you map out a more general content strategy. It can provide content ideas, or you can tell it what types of content you want to create, how much time you have available, and let it help you create a strategy and schedule.
Marketing Strategy
Similarly, AI can help you organize your thoughts around a particular marketing strategy. I’m not talking about a full marketing plan here, but how you’ll implement individual strategies (such as via email marketing, direct queries, blogging to attract clients, etc.).
Query Customization
Do most of your queries start from a similar structure? Consider saving it as a template, having a “query brief” outline you can fill out for each pitch, then letting AI generate your query letters.
As always, I don’t suggest distributing or publishing AI content on its own. In this case, nearly everything should come from your own input. Then you can deal with final tweaks and customizations once you have that base.
Prioritizing Your Pitch List
Do you have a target pitch list of “dream” publications? Let AI put it into a table for you and prioritize it to maximize what you get out of your pitching strategy.
For example, you could assign each prospect a rating based on their importance to you. You might input their reported pay if you have the data. Add whatever matters to you. Then tell your AI tool to re-organize and prioritize that list based on those factors and how much each matters to you. (We’ll use this as a later example to walk you through it.)
Improving Website Copy
Not all freelance writers are copywriters. And that’s OK. If you have copy on your professional website, but it’s not delivering clients, ask AI for tips on improving it.
Will it be as good as working with a professional copywriter? No. But it could be enough to deliver more, or better, results than you’re currently seeing.
Testimonial Request Emails
Does anyone else feel weird about asking for testimonials? I always have, and I rarely do. I know it’s silly. But I also know testimonials haven’t mattered much in my case because I have referrals working for me instead. Newer freelancers might see a bigger benefit.
So if you’re not a fan of sending testimonial request emails, consider setting up a template that you can plug into your favorite AI tool, and let it generate those requests for you. It’s no different than starting with a similar email or template manually. You’re just streamlining the process and automating it as much as possible.
Client Feedback Survey Design
You can also have AI create a simple survey to gather client feedback after completing a project. Just set it up with your favorite survey or form tool (from a WordPress plugin on your site to something like Google Forms).
Client Feedback Analysis
AI can also help you take that client survey data and analyze it. Upload your results in .csv format (with a tool that allows it) and have it pull out common praise, repeat suggestions, and other insights that can help you improve your freelance writing business.
Promotional Copy
If you don’t love writing promotional copy or marketing collateral to promote your business, let AI help, at least with the formatting. What can it help you create? Case studies, white papers, brochures, press releases, and much more.
Analyze Competitive Data
If you do competitive research, data can become overwhelming, especially when you work as a solopreneur. I could easily spend half of every month pouring over competitive reports to keep an eye on what’s being covered, by whom, how it’s performing, etc.
No thank you.
By uploading this data to an AI tool, you can have it pull key insights for you, simplifying what you need to look into deeper.
Note: Do not upload or paste anyone’s identifiable information into an AI tool without consent. Some tools keep this data and / or use it in their training models. You wouldn’t want someone doing that with your data without your consent, so have the same respect for others. Create an updated version of any spreadsheets that replaces names / brands / etc. with markers you’ll understand but an AI tool will not. This includes full URLs that would include a brand / site name. Keep only the slug with a domain stand-in for example. A quick "find-and-replace" can save you headaches here.
Analyze Website Analytics
You can use AI tools to analyze exported website analytics data as well. If you’re not technically-minded, this lets you ask questions in a natural way to help you better understand what all those metrics mean.
Analyze SEO Data
Use AI similarly to analyze exported SEO data for your own website. Again, this can be a big time-saver when you’re the only one working on this. Distill things down to key problems and opportunities so you know where to spend most of your SEO time.
Email Marketing Assistance
AI tools can help you turn articles into promotional emails for that content. But they can also provide you with email subject line ideas, help analyze similarities in campaigns that saw the highest unsubscribe rates, and more to help in your email marketing.
Creating Interactive Elements
Do you want to create interactive elements for your content? Maybe a simple calculator? AI can not only design the input structure, but some tools can even code these interactive elements for you.
As an example, I used the free ChatGPT-3.5 to create this simple calculator in less than one minute.
Yes, the calculation is simple enough to do manually, but this is just to illustrate that these tools can indeed code interactive elements for your content. In this case, you would enter your total project fee, then the number of hours you spent on it. It calculates your actual hourly rate based on your time tracking.
Enter the total project fee and the number of hours worked to calculate the hourly rate:
You can certainly go back and clean up the formatting or create a more complex calculator with a more detailed prompt. This was based on a single-sentence prompt followed by “Can you help with that?”
Yes. Yes, it can.
Professional Bio Improvements
Do you struggle to write about yourself, especially when you need to hype yourself up and show prospects why they should hire you?
First, I hope you get more comfortable with self-promotion, because it’s a necessary evil of being in business. Second though, why not let your favorite AI tool help? Your virtual hype-man can take key reputational factors, experience, etc. and organize them into a stronger professional bio.
AI Use Cases for Creating Additional Income Streams
Something that routinely breaks my heart is watching freelance writers give up because they hit a slump. And after a certain point, there’s really no excuse to still be facing the feast-famine freelance cycle. You’ve either built necessary demand, or you haven’t.
While AI won’t make you the go-to freelance writer in any particular area, what it can do is help you create additional income streams that keep the money flowing in even if you need to take a break or suddenly struggle to land enough clients.
This is one of my top 5 (top 3 even?) tips if you’re new to freelancing: build additional income streams. They can be writing-related. I’d argue they should be because you’ll build a collection of content you can monetize well into the future.
AI can help you do that. Here’s how.
Writing Books & E-books
You can use AI in any of the ways we’ve previously looked at in this post to help you write books and e-books (or any type of long-form content). Use it for idea generation. Use AI for outlining. Or use it to help you repurpose other content you own into that manuscript.
Creating Online Courses
Similarly, use AI to help generate ideas, outline, and content for online courses you can sell.
Content Upgrade Add-Ons
Looking for smaller-scale income streams? Use AI to help you come up with ideas for (and create) content add-ons. For example, you might sell a template pack related to a particular article that helps readers take action based on a tutorial or advice you gave.
Consulting & Other Service Expansions
Use AI to help you figure out ancillary services you might be able to offer new or existing clients. For example, if you write social media content, ask your AI tool for ideas related to social media strategy and management. You can even use it to put together service package ideas.
Niche Sites as Income Streams
I already showed you how basic AI content tools can code simple calculators. Did you know they can also code HTML websites from scratch?
I’ve long been a fan of what I call “quiet sites” as an additional income stream. These are small sites that don’t require regular updates. I don’t put my name on them. And they’re designed to bring in anywhere from a couple hundred dollars per month to $1000 per month before I flip them. This is almost entirely passive in nature, and they typically take me around three days to set up.
Now, I can code a site from scratch myself. I’ve done web development work for close to 20 years, it being one of the most important “side skills” I made it a point to pick up in my career. But I don’t always want to. So I’d default to things like WordPress. But any CMS will require more admin time than I want to put into these.
The three-day turnaround would include coding a basic HTML site myself. With AI though? I just enter a detailed prompt about what I want, how it should look and be structured, give it my color scheme and font choices, and BAM! Done. Just like that. A functional website in minutes.
Holy cow. Game-changer.
Now, don’t get me wrong. These aren’t gorgeous, over-designed, over-engineered sites. But they’re simple. They’re fast. They’re easily-optimized for search. And now they’re on my server and ready for me to make my final tweaks after literally minutes.
It takes me longer to type up what I want into a prompt than it does for ChatGPT or Claude 2 (which did a better job by the way) to code the site and for me to get it up and running.
So if you’re thinking about setting up a very simple niche site for an income stream, or even a simple HTML/CSS professional site, AI can absolutely help you do that, and fast. (Only recommended if you understand HTML and CSS basics and know how to host it and set things up.)
AI Use Cases for Administrative Help & Productivity Improvements
If you’ve been around All Freelance Writing for a while, you know I’m borderline obsessed with productivity improvements. (Which is very different than “hustle culture” – please stop confusing the two.)
This is where my real excitement for AI comes in.
While testing tools like ChatGPT, I quickly realized it could help me automate so much of what I do behind the scenes. So, so much.
The things I despise having to spend time on.
The things that bore me to no end.
Things that I’ve sometimes even hired others to help with only to find out I despise managing others even more, and it often took longer than just doing it myself.
AI can do a lot of those things. And I can’t wait to share some of those implementations over at Kiss My Biz in the near future (like how I’m aiming to use AI to help manage the job board and market directory here to give you more, and more-updated, resources moving forward).
For now, let’s look at some of the administrative and productivity help AI can offer specific to freelance writers. Follow the other blog if you’re interested in blog and publishing-oriented use cases.
Scheduling Help & Analysis
Too many deadlines coming up around the same time? Not enough time to market your services, so you’re worried about a future dry spell? Let AI help you optimize your schedule or analyze where your time is currently going.
A little old fashioned time tracking comes in handy here. Track your working hours for a month or so. Then enter that data into an AI tool. Ask it to help you identify trends and suggest schedule changes to make the most of your most productive hours.
Professional Development & Study Plans
Another AI use case I love is the creation of study plans. I believe strongly in pursuing life-long learning. That doesn’t mean you have to pursue advanced degrees or enroll in courses of any kind. It just means staying curious and always working to learn something new.
ChatGPT and related tools are great at coming up with study plans for this. For example, you might have it create a study plan to help you learn a new language or instrument. But it can also be used for professional development.
Earlier we talked about me learning how to code websites early in my career, and how it’s paid off over time. Consider learning HTML and CSS yourself. Learn some PHP if you work in WordPress regularly. If you write online content for clients, you should have a good grasp of SEO fundamentals (which frequently change, so that’s not a one-off skill to learn).
Tell your AI tool about your background, what you want to learn or improve, how much time you can dedicate, then let it come up with a study plan. Even better, if you have a web-connected AI tool, ask it to recommend specific books, recent articles, or recent videos. You can put together a study plan full of free or premium resources depending on your needs.
Analyze Industry Trends
Again, you’ll want a web-connected AI tool for this one as others can have outdated training data.
Use AI to get recent studies and trend data related to your specialized industry or niche, or the freelance community in general (though it’s rare to find truly high-quality data in this area). ID-ing trends early could give you article ideas to pitch to clients to help them stay ahead of the curve too.
Conducting Content Audits
AI can also help you speed up content audits. This goes back to the ability to upload data such as in a .csv file. You could also do this on a much smaller scale directly in a tool like Claude 2 by manually inputting key data and letting AI create a table and share suggestions (such as related to content length, age, whether or not it has appropriate meta data, etc.).
Email Response Automation
Do you get tired of responding to the same kinds of emails all the time? It’s repetitive. And we all have better things to do.
But if you don’t respond (or immediately filter the sender), you’re almost certain to get follow-up emails that waste even more time.
Let AI help you automate these responses. You can do this with predictive text / responses in applications like Gmail. Or you can use AI writing tools to come up with template responses for emails you want to respond to but that don’t necessarily require a custom response.
Contract Customizations
Do you have a standard freelance writing contract you use with clients? I highly recommend having a lawyer draft one for you based on your usual rights transfers, project types, and risks unique to your specialty.
If you do have a contract template, you can couple it with a project brief form you send to clients. Have their relevant inputs merged into your contract template automatically using an AI tool with little more than a copy-paste required on your part. Just another way to save what amounts to unnecessary data entry.
Goal-setting & Long-term Planning
I’m also a huge fan of goal-setting and planning. Yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily… you get the idea.
AI can help speed this up too. Not only can it suggest targets when you aren’t sure what you should strive for next, but it can also help you reach those goals long-term.
For example, you could set yearly goals, then let your AI tool break it down into monthly checkpoints. Or you can use your yearly or quarterly goals to let AI map out what your monthly or weekly targets should be to get there.
Falling behind? Rather than feel frustrated, let AI re-work your plans to get you back on track towards your biggest goals.
Task Prioritization & Routine Planning
AI can be great for managing long-term plans, but it’s also helpful for routine planning and prioritizing tasks. This is another case where time tracking can come in handy, letting AI figure out what you’re working on when, then tweak your task priorities to make sure time is spent on the most important things first.
Meeting & Interview Prep
If you’re the type of freelancer who gets nervous before meetings or conducting interviews, AI chat bots can help. Think of them as practice partners, letting you ask questions in a natural way while the AI role-plays as your interview subject or client you’ll meet with.
Motivation Help
This might sound silly, but AI can be a great motivational tool. Just not “feeling it” today? Ask the AI to give you 10 motivational quotes about whatever it is you’re supposed to work on.
They won’t always be good quotes, mind you. They might not even be real ones. But this is a rare case where AI hallucinations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They might stumble into what you need to hear that day. Or they might just make you laugh and make it that much easier to climb out of your funk and get back to it.
Day-to-Day Document Integration
This is another AI use case we’ll talk about more in-depth in a future post (this time at All Freelance Writing’s sister site for more experienced freelance writers: Freelance Writing Pros).
Basically, you can integrate AI tools like OpenAI’s GPT models into your document and spreadsheet software. That means you can run AI prompts directly from that software using things like the GPT for Sheets and Docs extension (which does require API access and its related costs).
Why does this matter?
With things like Google Docs, you can save your results as a document directly. Or you can use it within an existing document without having to upload or paste anything into a web interface.
And when you integrate AI into Google Sheets, you can use it similarly. I’m using it for SEO, but it would also speed up the creation and management of editorial calendars and much more.
Again, this use case is a little more complex, so we’ll go over it in greater detail in a future post that walks you through the process.
If there are specific use cases you’d like to learn more about, or get tool and prompt suggestions for, leave a comment and I’ll consider it for a follow-up post.
Also, follow All Freelance Writing on LinkedIn or follow my personal LinkedIn profile for more shorter-form content, including AI tool insights and simpler prompt examples and tool comparisons.