Which tool to choose
A general-purpose AI assistant in its latest version is enough, and if writing the answers is a burden use voice dictation: you talk and it transcribes. The point isn't the tool but the flipping of the task: instead of sitting in front of the blank page searching for words, you answer questions, which is infinitely easier. The page is born from your answers, not from an effort of inspiration.
How to do it
- Open the AI and say what you have to update, without pretending to already know what to write.
- Ask it to interview you: five or six questions to extract the content.
- Answer freely, even with disconnected sentences: your raw notes are the raw material.
- Give it the answers and ask for the first draft, which you'll then fix up.
The operational syntax:
I have to update the [which] page of my site but I'm stuck and don't know where to start. Don't write anything yet. First ask me five questions, one at a time, to understand what I need to say: what's changed, who the page is speaking to, what I want the reader to think or do. When I've answered them all, write a first draft using my words, not yours.
Check: if after the questions your mind is still blank, it means the questions were too abstract. Ask: "Make them more concrete, as if you were a curious friend who knows nothing about my work and wants to understand."
A concrete example
Anna has to update the services page of her graphic design studio but has been staring at the screen for twenty minutes. She stops trying to write and asks the AI to interview her. The questions arrive: "What have clients been asking for most lately? What have you stopped doing? What do you do today that you didn't offer before?". Anna answers by voice while she walks, recording. The answers become a draft that she then polishes. Twenty minutes of block solved by five questions, because talking about your own work is easy, writing about it from scratch isn't.
When it does NOT work (and how to fix it)
If you don't know what to answer to the questions either
Maybe the question is too big. Ask the AI to break it up: instead of "what's your added value?" (paralyzing), "tell me about the last happy client and why they were happy". From the concrete answer you work back to the added value, never the other way around.
If the draft comes out flat and generic
You gave it answers that were too short. The more you go on in your answers, the more the draft has substance. Answer the way you'd talk to a friend at the bar, with examples and details, not in monosyllables. The richness of the draft mirrors the richness of the answers.
If you keep putting it off because "it's not the right moment"
The block is sometimes procrastinating, not the blank page. Give yourself a small pact: answer just one question, now, in three minutes. A single question often sets off the rest, and the page you'd been putting off for weeks starts there. The trick is lowering the bar of the first step until it's ridiculous not to take it.
A tip from someone who really uses it
Keep your raw answers, not just the clean draft. When the AI interviews you, what you say off the cuff often contains the liveliest sentence in the whole page, the one a copywriter would pay to hear you say. The polished draft risks smoothing it away. Reread your original answers and recover the most "you" expression: that's usually where the real voice is, before the AI levels it out.
Frequently asked questions
What if I have absolutely nothing new to say?
Then the question isn't what to write but whether that page is needed. Ask the AI: "Given my work, what would interest one of my clients today that I'm not already saying?". Often the new thing is there, you just take it for granted because you live it every day.
How long should it take me to update a page?
Less than you think, once the block is broken. The interview lasts five minutes, the AI makes the draft, the polishing takes half an hour. The real time you lose is the time you spend putting it off: the question-based method serves precisely to cut that.
Doesn't having the AI write make the page fake and soulless?
If you have it write on empty, yes. If you use it to interview you and then it writes with your answers, the page is more yours than before: it's born from real things you said, just put in order. You put the soul in the answers; the AI does the boring work of turning them into paragraphs. The fakeness arises when you skip your part, not when you use the tool.