Nick Usborne 
My advice to every aspiring copywriter has always been, “Step one is to listen to your audience”.
Put another way, “If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you know what to say?”
When you listen to your prospects and your customers, you get a feel for the emotions they bring to the table.
Identify their fears and desires, and you can speak to those emotions in your copy. Get a sense of the language they use, and you can mirror that language in your own writing.
Which comes first, AI or EI?
Do you start your writing project with AI, and then tweak the outputs to make the copy more emotionally intelligent?
That’s how most people do this. And it’s how I do it myself, some of the time.
Start with a tool like ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting. Use it to do research for a new page, the outline, and a first draft. Once that’s done, you can add layers of more emotionally engaging copy to make the whole thing more appealing and effective.
But… it doesn’t have to be that way.
At the beginning of each year I step back, take stock, see where “I’m at”, and… more importantly… try to figure out where I’m going.
This year, the stakes have never been higher.
According to a survey by Neil Patel of agency NP Digital, over 60% of text content is now being created purely through AI. And 26.8% through a combination of AI and humans.
In other words, AI now plays a significant role in the creation of over 85% of all new content being written for digital media.
It’s always been the case that to deliver value to a client, you need to know just 10% more than they do.
I’ve been teaching this for years.
Copywriters who are just launching their careers often feel nervous about not knowing enough. And then they realize that knowing just 10% more than their prospects is enough.
That 10% can deliver huge value.
The same is true today when it comes to AI.
You don’t need to be a leading expert in AI. But you do need to know 10% more than your prospects and clients.
Companies find it hard to resist the math of using AI to write at least some of their copy and content.
There are huge productivity benefits and costs savings when you compare AI-generated work with the same tasks written by human writers.
And sometimes, when writing informational content, optimized for SEO, and published in bulk, with some light human editing AI can come close to being “good enough”.
But when it’s not just about sharing information, the math changes.
Back in 1995 I published my first website. Those were the early days of the web as a place for business.
That year there were just 16 million people online.
It wasn’t until 1998 that the number of people using the web hit 100 million.
From zero to 100 million in a little over 3 years.
That rapid rate of change was deeply disruptive to traditional, bricks-and-mortar businesses. Companies were struggling to keep up and adapt.
Now let’s fast-forward to November 2022, and the launch of ChatGPT.