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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.
I typically try to hog top-billing in this newsletter for myself, but because it’s Superpath’s 6th birthday, I am selflessly relinquishing this prime real estate to our old friend Jimmy Daly.
Jimmy wrote this excellent blog post on the commodification of content marketing into neatly packaged skill files and prompt templates—and the complicated feelings he’s feeling about those files.
I’m going to be a friendly zero-click marketer and just dump his intro right here:
I got interested in photography shortly after college. I saved up to buy a camera and started to read up on composition, techniques and editing. This was before Instagram and in those days, photographers shared their work on blogs. One of the first things I noticed was that my pictures didn’t look like anything like the photographers I was following on Blogspot.
In addition to being more interesting and better composed than my own, most professional photos also have a look. The photographers edit their pictures in a way that captures a vibe and their own personal style. Most do this in Lightroom, which was and still is the most popular tool for photographers to manage, edit and export photos.
One very cool feature in Lightroom is called Presets. Instead of manually sliding contrast and brightness manually on every edit, you can save your most used settings in a Preset. And you can export and sell those Presets to other photographers. This was (and to a degree, still is) a massive deal in the photography world and an important way for photographers to monetize their work as well. They sell their photos but they also sell the way they make their photos.
This feels a lot like what’s happening in marketing right now. Tons of people are turning processes and skills and knowledge into little portable objects that can be saved, exported, reused and shared. Like much of what’s happening in marketing right now, this trend is sort of good, sort of bad and very interesting.
Go read it here, and I’ll give you my quick reaction below:
My take: Jimmy nailed the tension here. Content marketers should be building their personal tool belt of AI skills/projects right now to scale their impact within their company or for their clients—and making those artifacts visible somehow.
Everyone’s writing with AI now (writers and non-writers), so there’s a big opportunity for us content marketers to become the AI-systems people that make that writing great.
e.g., I recently led an internal AI enablement session at Dock, where I coached our GTM team on how to use Claude more effectively. I also shared some skills and projects with the team to help them stick to our messaging, competitive differentiation, etc. Over time, the more AI systems I build for our team, the more indispensable I become to the organization. (And as Jimmy points out, it makes me a great human teammate, too.)
I do, however, think there’s danger in being overly generous with those skills and projects publicly. I’m happy to demo the AI tools I’ve built. in our monthly Superpath AI Show & Tells for 400 people, or in 1-on-1s, but I’m not going to post the source code for our entire marketing strategy freely on LinkedIn (even if you comment PROMPT).
There’s something inherently different to me about the old world of posting a free blog brief template—where there’s still 95% of the work to do—vs. a skill that can do 50% of the work with the right inputs.
A very smart content marketer gave me the advice about a year ago that it’s worth keeping the details of the systems you build close to the chest—and I’m pretty sure that person is going around selling their AI workflows/setups to big companies for a bunch of money right now.
I don’t say this to sound pessimistic or selfish. I say it because the AI/systems work we do has real, tangible value. That value we create is what makes us employable. We didn’t give our writing services away for free before, so why would we give away our whole AI toolbox?
Cheers,
- Eric
🏆 Superpath June Challenge
Did you know we host monthly accountability challenges in the Superpath Slack community? They’re a great way to build healthy habits with a bit of peer encouragement.
(Plus, everyone who participates is entered into a draw for a super-cozy Superpath hoodie.)
This month’s challenge is the art of cold outreach.
Whether you're growing your network, booking new clients, or solving a problem that requires talking to the right person, reaching out to strangers is hard but necessary. As summer opens up everyone's schedules, there's no better time to finally hit send.
We asked members:
How many people do you plan to message this month? (quantity)
How many real conversations do you want to have? (quality)
If you want to participate, join Superpath Pro for free for 30 days.
📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events
Superpath Social (Jun 4): Join us for breakout discussions with your content peers on hot content topics.
Change My Mind (Jun 17): As a group, we’ll debate your hottest content takes. These have been really fun.
Slack AMA (Jun 18): Melissa Rosenthal, co-founder of Outlever, and previously the VP Creative at BuzzFeed, CCO of ClickUp, CMO of Insight Timer, and CRO of Cheddar, will answer your questions about building an editorial or newsroom-driven content strategy.
AI Show & Tell (Jun 25): Our monthly show and tell, where three people show off what they’ve been building with AI. All the past recordings are available to Pro members.
To get the invitations to our virtual events, join Superpath Pro. You get 30 days free, so you can attend all these events!
🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Content Marketing Isn’t Just for Robots, with Ryan Sargent
This episode is part of The Art of Content series hosted by Rachel Bicha, where Rachel brings on guests to chat about big-picture content marketing theory. Each conversation is centered on a recent piece that person wrote for The Art of Content blog.
In this episode, Rachel is joined by Ryan Sargent to talk about his recent post, Content Marketing Isn't Just for Robots.
Ryan's argument: AI writers are now good enough to do most SEO and AEO work, so content marketers should stop trying to out-write the machine and start doing the work only humans can do.
He has an analogy for it that he came up with at Costco: Some marketers are reacting by piling caviar on $50 hot dogs nobody wants to buy. Others are eating a thousand mediocre ones and getting their cardiologist rich. Ryan thinks the move is to let the machine make the hot dogs and spend the freed-up time on a Michelin-star dessert.
They got into juicy topics like:
Content is bifurcating into two lanes: robot-facing content (SEO/AEO) and human-facing content designed to influence buying decisions
Content marketing ≠ SEO
AEO/SEO is the first touch, not the last, in the buying journey
The key skill to build right now: tying your work closer to business impact
I always love hearing Ryan talk about content. Give it a listen!
💬 Great Slack Threads This Week
Here were some of my favorite questions asked of Kaleigh Moore in our Slack AMA next week (blog coming soon with a summary, but isn’t this a spicy way to create intrigue?):
An obstacle in the past with trying to support internal creators at my company is executive concern about investing a lot into building the personal brands of people who may not be at the company for the long haul. Like there was some fear that, 'hey we are going to spend a bunch of resources investing and supporting these people who may leave in a year or two (and maybe they leave for a competitor!)'. Have you encountered that pushback and if so, what's your response to it?
How would you describe the demand and client vibe for AEO services right now? Are people kinda scrambling for it? What's the client education level like compared to traditional SEO services?
With each LLM having different rules, how do you optimize for them all? Do you start focusing on one and then expand? And if so, how do you choose which is best to start with? I feel like it's difficult enough to know if LLMs are sending traffic/lead/deals, let alone which one specifically.
📙 The Reading List
Here are some articles that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:
We are worth more than our .md files. Right? Right? | Jimmy Daly, Superpath
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech | The Ringer
Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console | Google Search Central Blog
🆓 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 wanted to publicly note how much value I've gotten from Superpath. Social Hour is such a good time spent that I'm mad my work calendar is starting to prevent me from attending future ones. AI Show and Tell + Change My Mind have been intellectually stimulating. And the caliber of conversations across the various channels in this Slack is the hardest to describe, but I frequently feel enlightened, inspired, and smarter from them."
— Ronnie Higgins, Senior Content Production Manager, Freshpaint