Adam Sand and Gary Miller discuss why roofing companies should blog: it builds trust, answers customer questions, and generates leads. AI speeds up drafting and brainstorming, but Miller warns that AI alone creates noise and errors. The fix: use AI for outlines and first drafts, then add your expertise and fact-check before publishing.
Think blogging is Old school? Think again. For roofers, one good blog post can become your best salesperson. Today, RPB's project manager, Gary Miller, will show you why blogging still wins and builds, and how you can turn one blog into emails, social posts, and more. Gary will walk you through the exact steps, tools and checks he uses so your roofing content actually ranks and converts.
Why Blogging Still Matters if you hear blog, you probably think that's really old school. Why does that still still matter today, especially in roofing? First up, we want to build trust and authority. A good blog is going to show that you know your stuff, you're a real expert, and you're not just another random chuck in a truck. When someone's thinking about hiring a roofing company, they're going to be nervous. It's a big ticket item. Most roofing customers aren't ready to call the first time they land on your site. They're probably just looking for some info. And a great blog is going to answer those questions before they even have to pick up the phone. It's going to prime them for the sales process. You're also going to be fueling your SEO and your inbound leads. Blogs are going to feed search engines if they're written well. More Chances to Show Up When People Google Things so how much does a roof replacement cost? What are the best roofing materials for cold climates when people are looking for that type of thing? The more content you have and the better it is, the more chances you have to show up when they're searching. A good blog post doesn't work for just a week. It can, depending on the topic and how you write it. You can pull in traffic leads, brand recognition for years with just a little bit of updating and refreshing every now and then. So first thing I want to touch on is just how fast AI has changed the landscape for blogging. Over the last couple of years, we have seen an absolute explosion of AI tools. I think ChatGPT was November of 22, so we're now, what, two and a half years later. And the things it does is just crazy. But you don't need a writing background anymore, you don't need a degree in English or anything like that that you might have thought about in the past of like, oh, I can't write because my grammar sucks or my spelling is terrible or whatever. Whatever excuses you used to have, they're gone. Need a prompt, few clicks, you're good to go. The barrier for entry is just destroyed. It's opened up A lot of opportunity, but it's also created a ton of noise. There's a lot of bad content out there right now. It's generic, it's shallow, it's forgettable, but it's about publishing better things. Real value is going to cut through the noise. First off, it's about speed. AI can take what used to be a two, three hour task and cut it down to 30 minutes or less, especially in the early phases. Then there's scale. AI is going to let you do more for faster. You can build clusters of content around a topic much faster and fill in the gaps in your SEO without burning out your team. There's also a lot of support. It doesn't just churn out content, it can help you make your content better. It's almost like a personal assistant that way when you're getting into it, it's there to help you think, to suggest a better angle. So there are some very smart ways to use AI. First off, brainstorming AI is incredible for coming up with ideas you might not have thought of. Then you can outline around those. So I'm writing a blog about give me an outline for whatever length you're looking for. Now you get a solid logical structure built in matter of seconds versus actually having to draft that all yourself. And then you can tweak it. You can like scrap the pieces you don't like. You can add in pieces you think fit better and then straight up drafting AI is really good at giving you a first draft, but you still need to reshape all of this into something worth publishing. There are bad ways to use AI. So the flip side, copy pasting outputs without editing. There's a thing on about a year and a half ago about a lawyer who wrote a brief using entirely AI, did not check it, and reference cases that didn't exist. Don't be that guy. It can be factually wrong. So AI is trained on past data. It can make things up because of that based on newer stuff. So double check anything. It's going to kind of claim for you. But you guys are roofing subject experts. So if you're writing a blog post about roofing, I'd expect to come up with, huh, that doesn't sound quite right. And then it doesn't start off with a real voice. It's not expressive in the same way that you might be if you wrote it yourself. It doesn't lend to excitement in the voice. So to get there, you do need to inject your own voice, your own tone, your own point of view. To anything that AI helps you draft. The bottom line there is AI is going to give you some raw clay and you're going to sculpt that clay into a final blog post. AI is only going to get better. It's made ridiculous strides in the last two and a half years. It' getting better at writing, it's getting better at putting together structure it's getting better at sounding like a human which means the competition is getting tougher. You're only one of hundreds of companies doing this. You can't just expect to post something and have it be good and rank anymore. You need to actually stand out and that's where you need to kind of use your head and your experience to mix with AI's help to get you gold. The idea is that you bring the experience you bring is what's going to make you stand out. Human creativity is going to win. That's what search engines want is that in depth experience that's helpful to to human people.
