This edition is brought to you by our friends at uSERP.
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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.
I’m writing to you on vacation from warm and sunny, but surprisingly windy, Los Cabos, Mexico. The high winds mean I’m getting all the benefits of high UV on my pasty-white skin without the pesky downsides—like being able to comfortably enjoy the pool.
Anyway, when life gives you limóns, eat tacos. It’s been a lovely time either way. At least I’m not these poor folks whose “tropical” cruise was rerouted from Bermuda to Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. (Go watch the videos, it’s hilarious.)
This transitions absolutely seamlessly to today’s thought:
I’ve fallen in love with the blank page again—all thanks to AI.
There’s always been a quantity demand for any content job I’ve had. Whether that’s writing X SEO blog posts per week, sending a weekly email to customers, or keeping a social calendar. For better or worse, I’ve managed to keep up with the treadmill.
But that’s made it hard to stay in love with the act of writing. I got into content marketing because I loved small-b blogging and putting clever words on a page, but over time, writing became more of a rote, transactional process.
On the rare occasion when a more creative task landed on my plate, I didn't have the brain space left to actually do it justice.
Now—I’ve long argued that the more you can learn to automate the rote parts of the job, the more time you free up for the creative aspects, but I could never quite make that apply to the writing itself.
Three years into the ChatGPT era, I can confidently say I enjoy writing again.
With the rote, quantity writing work largely off my plate, I find myself with actual mind space to write when the medium calls for it. I look forward to opening a blank draft of this newsletter every week, instead of it feeling like yet another thing on my plate.
(Plus, I never use AI for this newsletter, so it feels like a breath of fresh air to write from a stream of consciousness. It’s a treat to start from a blank page.)
TL;DR: AI doing the boring writing is letting me enjoy the fun writing.
I share this because I’ve mostly heard stories of the opposite being true—AI taking the joy out of writing. Maybe that margarita-half-full perspective can help you see the benefits of AI in another light.
Does anyone else feel this way? Just me? Reply to let me know!
Cheers,
- Eric
📧 Recommendations with beehiiv – beehiiv has a recommendations feature that lets you suggest other newsletters to your subscribers. This week, we're using it to spotlight some of the beehiiv newsletters written by Superpath Pro members. - Alex
Want to try beehiiv? Use SUPERPATH30 for 30% off
📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events
To get the invitations to our virtual events, join Superpath Pro.
AI Show & Tell (Apr 23): Three marketers will show off cool stuff they’re building with AI. Past event recordings are also in the Superpath Courses archive.
Slack AMA (Apr 30): Katie Parrott, Staff Writer & AI Editorial Lead at Every, will answer your questions about their AI-led editorial strategy.
Superpath Social (May 14): Meet a bunch of other content marketers in our 1-hour virtual mixer.
Change My Mind (May 20): Our monthly open discussion where we debate someone’s hot take.
And don't miss our open-to-everyone, in-person events:
🎙 New on Content, Briefly: 3 Things AI Has Changed about Content Marketing That Aren’t Going Back
In this recent blog post, Jimmy argued that three things AI has changed about content marketing aren't going back:
Writing is less commercially viable than it used to be.
The marketing skill set now includes things marketers were never asked to do before.
Your reputation has quietly become your most important career asset.
For this week’s podcast episode, Chloe, Jimmy, and I got together to react to these statements.
We all come to this conversation with different career vantage points at the moment—I’m a one-person marketing team, Jimmy works at a huge company now (Miro), and Chloe is once again unbothered by all this AI talk—so, unsurprisingly, we have quite different perspectives on what’s really changed.
We chat about:
Whether writing is actually a less commercially viable skill, or whether "writing" just means something different now
How the marketing skill set has shifted—and what that means if you're more creative than technical
How to prove you're good at your job when the work is harder to show
Why your network and reputation matters more now than it did five years ago
💬 Great Slack Threads This Week
Here are some questions members asked in Superpath Pro this week:
Throughout my career, I’ve worked at the intersection of production and strategy. But I’ve never owned strategy from start to finish. When clients expect me to offer strategy, I rarely feel confident enough to calmly say: we need to do this and this, and here's why. So, my question: what was the moment or experience that made you confident in your strategy judgment?
Has anyone experimented with on-site AEO stuff like markdown files or pages specifically designed to be crawled by agents?
How would you go about setting up blog infrastructure for a brand-new company that barely has a website yet? They’re planning to expand the website in the near-ish term, but likely want to launch the blog first
How do you handle when shady competitors are blatantly incorrect on their comparison pages and lie about your offer vs theirs?
📙 The Reading List
Here are some thought-provoking articles shared in the Superpath Slack community this week:
How ClickUp's Blog Lost 97.6% of Its Traffic in 15 Months | Kamila Olexa
I'm rethinking blogging | Marie Haynes
🆓 Get a free 30-day trial of Superpath Pro
Superpath Pro is our paid community membership. On your free trial, you'll get access to:
A private Slack community with 400+ in-house and freelance content marketers
Monthly 1:1 peer networking calls
Monthly group events with breakout sessions
Monthly AI Show & Tell workshops
Graduate-level content courses
Niche channels and events for freelancers, content leaders, and more
"I was about to cancel my Pro subscription as part of my annual January subscription culling. But after catching up on all the recent posts, I was like ‘uhhhh yeah I'd better stay here. These people are smarter than me.’ Grateful for all the knowledge-sharing. Take my money!"
— Nik Wright, Sr. Content Marketing Manager