How AI Has Effected The250

When I first started The250, my writing and publishing were 100% manual. Here’s the original workflow for The250:

1. I’d start with a topic (or a few) that I’d been thinking about.
2. If necessary, do some research.
3. Open Grammarly, start writing. Iterate in Grammarly until I had the post complete.
4. Login to admin area of johnmaconline.com.
5. Create new Post.
6. Copy/Paste my work from Grammarly into the Post.
7. Get it formatted correctly.
8. Choose the category (The250 only at the beginning).
9. Write an excerpt.
10. Write the focus keyphrase.
11. Use the point-and-click scheduler to find the right time and schedule the post.

The current workflow:

1. I still start with a topic I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes I ask the AI for a few more ideas on that topic.
2. If research is required, I ask AI to do it (and I check it).
3. I still open Grammarly and write it there until complete. Sometimes, I use AI to help me edit. When I do, I copy/paste my text to/from AI (I don’t like Grammarly’s AI, so I use ChatGPT).
4. I copy/paste the contents of the article into a text editor (I use VS Code) and save it as a markdown file.
5. I call my blog publishing AI agent that I wrote with AI in Python, and it does everything else — automatically finds the next day and schedules it, determines and sets the category, creates and sets the excerpt and keyphrase, and determines and adds tags. All by itself.

The writing part hasn’t really changed, other than AI sometimes helps me with research and editing. But the overall time I spend is identical. The non-writing parts have changed significantly. It originally took me somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes just to do the publishing piece, depending on how many mistakes I made. Plus, I neglected any category except The250 and never used tags. The non-writing parts of my workflow now take me less than 30 seconds, and I have more complete metadata for each post. The original workflow cost $0. The current workflow costs about $0.002 per post. That’s my token in/out cost to use ChatGPT’s API for this workflow. It’s worth my 2/10 cents. I’m much happier now.