Make your writing into mixtapes, for real people

Will says: “Be more mixtape, specifically when you're writing content.

To explain that, I need to take you back in time to the mid-90s. I'm a big music fan, I have been for most of my life, and my formative years with music were in the ‘90s. Back then, there were two main ways to share music: listening to the radio and making mixtapes and sharing those mixtapes with your friends.

Now, creating mixtapes was hard work. It was a faff because you had to figure out exactly what tracks were going to be in what order. You had to sit in front of your stereo, picking out your records or your CDs and pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’ on your tape deck. However, that meant that every mixtape that anybody made was special because people put so much thought and effort into it.

Skip forward to today, and we've got the big streaming services: Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc. Don't get me wrong, these things are absolutely brilliant. I love the fact that I can think, ‘I want to listen to X song at Y time,’ and it's just there, like that. It's fantastic. However, one of the things I'm not so keen on is their algorithmically-generated playlists, which monitor what you listen to, monitor what other people who listen to similar stuff listen to, and build you a playlist based on that.

Theoretically, that sounds like a great idea, because you can stick on a playlist and know that you’re going to get something you like, and sometimes it is great. The danger is, if you only ever listen to those playlists, you never hear anything new. You get sucked into a cycle of sameness and mediocrity because you're going down the middle of the road. Everything's filtered into this one thing that Spotify knows that you like.

Now, you're probably wondering what all this has got to do with SEO. The thing is, the content that we consume (on the internet specifically, but also in general) has gone the same way. The speed and volume at which stuff is produced is insane. With the advent of AI, this has massively expanded even further.

The danger with AI tools is that everybody uses the same tools, and everybody uses similar prompts. Therefore, all the writing that's produced becomes more and more bland and generic. Everything becomes that middle ground.

I'll caveat this by saying that I do use AI tools. I'm not anti-AI. I use them in the writing process, but not for actually writing content. There are a few reasons for this. The biggest one is that AI is not a human being. It has no experience of the world. It has no experience of your products. It has no experience of your competitors.

It's never stood at the front of a gig with its fist in the air screaming the lyrics with 100 other people, it's never danced in a field in the middle of Milton Keynes because it's lost all its mates, or listened to the same song on repeat, sat on the floor crying because it reminds it of the person it's just broken up with. It hasn’t had any of these experiences. Anything it spits out is just an amalgamation of things that other people have written about vaguely similar things.

There are times when that's fine, but it's never going to stand out. It's never going to be unique, and that's what you want for your brand. That's how you get people to click through to your website, read your stuff, and actually do what you want them to do.

For the same reason, AI content is often just wrong. We all laugh about the time when Gemini told people to put glue on pizza, but that's indicative of a deeper problem. AI has never eaten pizza. It's never stuck anything with glue. It's never smelled glue and thought, ‘That's horrific, I don’t want to put that in my mouth.’ It can't possibly know what's right and wrong. It has no concept of reality because it has no experience.

That's literally one of the four big things that Google talks about in EEAT: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. AI can't really do any of those because it's not lived in the real world.

Another problem with AI is that it's really bad at waffling. AI content will often churn out paragraph after paragraph. When you scan over it, nominally, grammatically, it makes sense, but when you try and break it down and see what point it’s trying to make in each paragraph, you can't, because it's not actually saying anything. There is no point.

Again, that is the opposite of what Google wants. It's the opposite of concise, helpful content, which is what readers want as well. Google wants you to write content that's good for users. Ironically, it's even quite bad for what Google wants for its own AI Mode, because that wants simple, concise, clear information that it can pull and amalgamate into its own AI answers.”

How do you make your content more mixtape and less playlist?

“The biggest thing you can do when you're writing is write for another human being. That sounds really obvious, but a lot of the time we don’t; we write for a SaaS company or we write for a persona – like a 45-year-old man who lives in Slough and likes cats. The problem with that is that it’s not a human being; you’re writing for an idea.

If I were making a mixtape, I would generally be making it for a specific person. That person might be me. It might be a girl that I'm trying to impress. It might be somebody in a band that I'm going on a road trip with.

When I'm writing a piece of content, I haven't met the person that I'm going to write it for, so I invent them in my head. I spend a bit of time thinking of a person. I give them a name, I imagine what they're like, and I write as if I'm having a conversation with a real person.

If you imagine you're having a conversation with someone in the pub, it's a great way to cut out all the jargony waffle you just wouldn't say in real life, and that helps you make something that people identify with. It makes them energised and excited because it's real, it's like somebody's actually talking to them. It takes away the genericness of writing for a generic persona.

One of the things we forget when we're writing is that the person reading it on the other end is another human being, whether it’s in B2B or whatever. It’s not a company, it’s an actual person sitting at their desk or on the toilet. Getting some personality in there makes it a lot more real and makes it easier to identify with.

There are a few other things that help to make this mixtape-style content. The next one is to make sure it flows well. Make sure it flows from song to song. You might start with a real banger of a tune that really grabs people and hooks them in. You start with a hook, a song that somebody likes or a band covering a song they like, and it’s something that you know is going to grab them.

You do the same with your content. You write about them. You talk about the problem that they've got. You don't start by talking about you. Then, as you go through, you bring in more of your stuff, and you start talking about that a little bit more, in the context of the person that you're writing for.

Another thing to remember with mixtapes is that you had to rewind them to the start if you wanted to start from the beginning. A lot of the time, people wouldn't do that, so you would be starting from the middle. People aren't necessarily going to read your content in a linear way. They might read the headline, they might read the intro, and then they might skip through to see the bits that they think are most relevant to them.

You need to make sure that the whole thing makes sense, even if people are reading sections and paragraphs in isolation, because there is a good chance that people are going to skip through. You don’t want any of those songs that only work well in the context of the album, because that’s not how people are consuming it.

Then, it’s really important that you end with an absolute banger. People often trip up here and end their content with a generic ‘Get in touch if you want to find out more.’ That’s the most generic and boring thing, and it makes it forgettable. When you’re finishing, do something epic. It’s the song that finishes the mixtape, and it’s 10 minutes long, and it has an epic guitar solo.

Make them feel something at the end of your content so that, when they’re finished reading, it really sticks in their mind. It could make them laugh or make them cry; it doesn’t matter, but it should make them want to do the thing that you’re selling.

My epic ending is to say that AI has its uses, but it’s not that good at writing. You’re really good at writing. You’re full of empathy, experience, and knowledge that AI just can’t compete with. It doesn't matter if you're not perfect – it doesn't matter if it's not the greatest, most top-quality writing – because imperfect is actually quite good.

That's what stands out now, because it's real. It stands out from the increasingly similar AI content that we're seeing everywhere on the internet.”

What is the difference between a mixtape and a human-curated playlist on Spotify?

“There are a couple of key things. The first thing is the physicality of it. When you make a mixtape, you're not just sitting in front of your computer clicking. You've got to go to your CD collection or your record collection and flick through to find the tracks you want.

That translates to the research for your content, because it's like your research phase. It's not all just there for you. You're not just going for the easiest solution. You're digging a bit deeper, and you're really making the effort.

Spotify makes it very easy to find songs. If you want to put on a song by Hot Water Music, you type in ‘Hot Water Music’, and it'll give you a list of the top five songs by that artist. When you're making a mixtape, back in the '90s, you would have six CDs to choose from, with 60 songs to pick from. You don't know which are the most famous, you don't know which are the most popular. You're choosing the one that's most important to you, that really grabs you – and it might not be the same one that everybody else is listening to.”

What metrics do you look at to show that content with significant human input performs better than AI content?

“We always try to look way beyond the top-level metrics. Ranking is a great start, but if nobody's clicking through, rankings don't mean anything. Click-through is another important step on the journey, but if people aren't reading the content and they aren't converting, then it's still practically worthless, depending on the content itself.

Obviously, it's different if it's an informational piece compared to a product page or a landing page, but we tend to track the conversions. If people are actually doing what we want them to do, and the page is making money for the client, then that's a successful page. If it's not doing that, then we need to look a bit deeper.

Perhaps it's an informational piece that’s not converting directly, but it's bringing a lot of traffic in, and that traffic is moving further into the website or that traffic is coming back. That has value as well.”

Will, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Write to people. Write like you're writing to your gran, your mum, your uncle, or your mate down the pub.

Don't think about writing to a SaaS company. Think about writing to Jim, who works at a SaaS company.”

Will Slater is a Creative Content Specialist at 43 Clicks North. Find out more over at 43ClicksNorth.co.uk.