This is Lesson #01 of the ANTIghostwriter course — a free, complete system for creating authentic content with AI assistance.
New here? Start from the full course overview.
What You’ll Learn
In this lesson, you’ll discover the complete toolkit needed for AI-powered content creation. We’ll cover the essential AI tools (for writing, research, and images), knowledge base options for organizing your content, social media platforms for distribution, and optional tools for automation. By the end, you’ll have a clear shopping list for building your content creation system.
Time to complete: ~30 minutes to set up all tools
AI Tools
The first component is a complete toolkit for work. We’ll start with artificial intelligence, which means we need AI tools. Here we’ll need three basic tools, with the third being optional:
- For writing directly – This is the chatbot or model that will be responsible for creating texts. We cannot do without this because our key function here is content creation.
- For research – This tool handles scientific research that will search for scientific facts, statistics, and quotes that enrich articles and posts. It essentially automates the work needed to write normal, authentic, and deep content. I wouldn’t skip this either, but if you prefer doing research yourself, you can also use your own efforts for research. I’ve just automated this with artificial intelligence, and within this product, I also suggest using such a tool.
- For image generation (optional) – Image generation will be needed when we write articles, for example, to publish them on your website or somewhere else that requires visual accompaniment. If we supplement articles with images, they will better attract attention because pictures always catch the eye. When images complement the article well, they make an excellent addition.
So we need three AI tools, with image generation being optional. Again, these can be free tools. You can decide for yourself – in my budget recommendations, I’ll give specific suggestions later about which tools I use and which ones I consider the best for each of these purposes.
Knowledge Base
The next component is a knowledge base and a place for writing. You need some tool that will allow you to store all notes, all records, and all materials that will be created, because there will be a huge amount of them. Managing this data array will be extremely difficult if there is no suitable tool.
The simplest option is to use files and folders of the operating system. There are text editors and the standard hierarchical tree structure in the operating system that can be used to structure your information. But there are also special tools that make this more convenient in a one-window mode. Examples of such tools are Notion, Kortex, Obsidian, Hemingway, and other tools that are mainly aimed at storing text content and allowing it to be structured accordingly, also using hierarchy and tree structure.
All these tools offer free use, and if you need paid versions, you can use them. Obsidian has a completely free version that you can use. Personally, I use Kortex because, first of all, it’s made very neatly, and I really like its style and design – it’s pleasant to work with. It’s a tool that I’ve been looking for for a long time, and it has many things that I miss in Notion. But Notion itself has also become a market standard that you can use.
Social Networks
The next component is social networks directly – where you will post your content. Here you can choose one channel or several channels. This depends on your positioning, how you plan to build and develop your personal brand, and what tools for promoting your personal brand you possess.
For myself, for example, I use several distribution channels, so it was important for me to register on all the key social networks: X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook. This creates omnipresence. I’ll explain later how you can be present everywhere at the same time.
In general, you’ll need to register on social networks. That’s not the subject of this course, but at the very minimum, I assume that you’ll be registered on social networks in order to post something there. Without this, there’s simply nowhere to post. I’ll also mention Medium here.
Your own website is an option that may or may not be used – that’s up to you. I prefer to have my own website because for me, it’s a place that belongs only to me, and I have full control over it.
Newsletter systems allow you to send email newsletters, such as Substack, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, and other tools. There are actually many of them – I’ve just listed the most popular ones in the creator community. These are the tools that you can use.
Posting Automation
Next come the optional components. This is a posting scheduler that allows you to automate posts across all social networks. If you only have one social network chosen, then there’s no point in this, and you can save on this, at least initially. But in any case, it’s convenient to use because, let’s say, you have a phase when you actively create content. Then you can schedule it for a week, two weeks, or as far in advance as you want, and then calmly deal with other matters related to promoting your brand, business, creating products, and so on. This helps free up time. Otherwise, without a scheduler, posting gets spread out over time, which causes context switching between tasks and, consequently, higher labor costs.
Video Editor
The next optional component is a video editor. Personally, I am present on TikTok and YouTube, where I make shorts, and I record reels for Instagram and Facebook. Accordingly, I need a video editor to do that. There are now free video editors that can edit video using AI. Personally, I haven’t yet found a tool that produces results I like. All of them, especially the free versions, work rather clumsily. There are useful features like automatic recognition of text and generating subtitles that appear synchronously with your speech. But when you learn tools more deeply, for example Adobe Premiere Pro, it turns out there’s also such a function. It can also automatically create much higher quality subtitles, recognize text, and so on. In general, all this exists, and if you want to delve into how to edit your video, then you’ll need a video editor. My top pick here is Premiere Pro, but there are other tools.
Graphic Editor
Next is a graphic editor – a tool that you’ll need for editing photos and images, if you need them. Here there are also different options. Adobe Photoshop is a paid version, and there’s Photopea – a free tool that is a clone of Photoshop on the web. You can edit photos from your browser. For editing vector images – graphics that are created from scratch, not from photographs – this is Figma, which also allows you to work fully in the free version.
Complete Toolkit
So this is the complete toolkit that we’ll need. Let’s go through it once more:
- AI tools
- For writing
- For research
- For image generation
- Knowledge base + writing tool (2 in 1)
- Socials
- Autoposting tool
- Video editor
- Graphic editor