Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

It's Time to Make the AI Shift

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 364

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AI. It's not just a buzzword, it's a game-changer. But are you leveraging its full potential in your marketing strategy, or are you still just scratching the surface? Today’s episode is all about making the AI shift—learning how to work faster, smarter, and scale like never before. From optimizing your processes with AI-generated content to automating repetitive tasks and beyond, we’re diving deep into practical steps you can take to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving landscape. So stay tuned to this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

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Speaker 1:

This is not going to be another episode about AI. I want you to join me in making the AI shift. Ai has a lot of promises, but have you really been using AI to take the next leap forward or are you still taking baby steps? Today, I want to talk about this AI shift and why it might be the most important thing that you do Maybe the most important episode of all the episodes. So stay tuned and keep listening to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc email marketing. Podcasting, vlogging, tick tocking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, neil Schaefer here, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. As the teaser, as I like to call it, the intro indicated, today we're going to be talking about AI, and even in the latest news, it's one of these weeks where we have announcements not just from OpenAI on their latest iteration of ChatGPT4 and really becoming a multimedia interactive AI, which is really exciting for a lot of reasons, but Google is also announcing their latest release and really cool integrations that you're going to be able to do throughout all sorts of Google products. We also have further reports of the media that are now pushing back publishers, pushing back on Google that you know. Google is just going to offer generative AI search results and the search engine may not be the place where we get as discovered as we used to. You know there used to be something called the phone book. For those that remember, we're no longer discovered in the phone book or in the classified ads, and we assume that we would get discovered in search engines, and we still can to some degree, but how long is that going to last is something that we're all going to have to consider when we consider our search engine optimization strategies. But today I don't want to be the doomsayer of what is going on. I want to look positively about an aspect of AI that I think we need to be talking more about and, more importantly, doing more about.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to also offer you a personal update. This week, I finally was able to send off my new book to my formatter and hopefully in the next few days actually by the time you hear this episode, I am hoping I am going to have an advanced reading copy available. The advanced reading copy is really available for influencers. That will hopefully contribute a quote that I can put on the front or back cover. It's also, you know, book review sites and what have you. So if, or a journalist, so if that fits one of you and you'd be you want to be one of the very first to access my book. Please make sure you reach out to me. Neal N-E-A-L at nealschafercom. N-e-a-l S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R. I also decided with this book and I'm going to talk a little bit about one of my virtual mentors, joanna Penn, for those that may know of her, but I'm going to talk a little bit about her podcast, but I am following her footsteps and decided that I am going to release the book on a Kickstarter, and those that participate in the Kickstarter will get first dibs on the book before I sell it on my own website before it goes to Amazon. So I will be announcing that Kickstarter very soon as well.

Speaker 1:

I am also going to have a launch team. If you want to be part of this launch team, where I'm going to work together with you through some of my workbook exercises, you're going to get access to that advanced reading copy and we're going to spend some time together, and all I ask is that, when the book comes out, you actually you know purchase a copy of it on Amazon so that you can get a verified Amazon review and actually write a review, in addition to potentially sharing it on your social media. What have you? So, if you want to join me once again, neil and Neil Schaefercom, I'm going to have like a formal Google form application, but in the meantime, if you're interested in any one of those opportunities, please reach out to me. I would love to work together with you, and you'll get access to this a few months before everybody else too. And it's all about time to market, isn't it? And this is going to help you gain, hopefully, a competitive advantage, and we'll get to work with each other in these Zoom calls I plan to have with those ARC team members. All right, so that's my personal update, really exciting as I finally move closer and closer to production and then promotion.

Speaker 1:

But today I want to talk about AI, and I started giving you the personal update about my book because now I have a choice for an audiobook. Now you're asking, neil, what choice do you have? Well, the choice is very clear I can narrate it myself, like I did with podcasts, or I can leverage the time to market advantages of AI and have an AI voice generated audio book. And you might be surprised, but right now in Audible, the latest article said there are more than 40,000. You might be surprised, but right now, in Audible, the latest article said there are more than 40,000. And I think I mentioned this in last week's podcast, but more than 40,000 AI generated audio book titles that are available in the technology 11 labs. For those that are curious, is one company I mean Google has their own technology, and there are other companies that specialize in this that take your voice and, through some samples, we'll be able to generate, you know, a text to voice that sounds a lot like you.

Speaker 1:

My thought is, and I think others share this when you listen to this podcast, I ask you, what speed are you listening to it at? Are you listening to it at 1.0, 1.25, 1.5? I listen to almost every podcast at 1.5. Now, I am a fast talker. My parents may they rest in peace were from New York City, so I have that like fast. I want to get the point across. So maybe this is not a podcast in which you can listen to at 1.5 speed, so maybe you slow down for me.

Speaker 1:

But you know, the faster the speed, the harder it is to tell the difference between AI generated voice and a real voice. I the harder it is to tell the difference between AI-generated voice and a real voice. I kid you not. And the AI-generated voice gives me the ability and I would be transparent about it it gives me the ability with the Kickstarter, to say okay, for everyone who contributes, you're going to get immediate access to the e-book and the audio book because it's AI-generated and I was able to do it really fast and I can always say hey, when the Neil narrated audio book is available, I will replace it at no charge and send you that version as well. But this is one example of using AI to be faster, to be able to offer something I can't offer today At a reasonable enough quality. And now that's the big difference with GPT-4 and all the advancements in AI, the quality is just better and better and more realistic. And this brings me to the point, and I keep on thinking about what Roberto Blake said at Content Entrepreneur Expo, and he said the same thing at PodFest when I saw him.

Speaker 1:

Are you doing things faster, better, cheaper? Now, the better is with AI is sort of the question mark. But definitely faster, cheaper. Are you scaling? And as I did my morning, or I should say my weekly six kilometer walk that I do locally here in Irvine, california, and I was on the trail and it just hit me that you know, think about like 10, 20 years ago before. Well, when the internet was still in its infancy, when email was still in its infancy, we didn't have Slack, we didn't have all these things. How did you work? And then, how did you work today? You work a heck of a lot differently today, more efficiently. You were able to do more in less time today than you did before.

Speaker 1:

Ai is another one of those things that five or 10 years from now. Ai is another one of those things that, five or 10 years from now, I think, work is going to look a lot different. But the question is you know ChatGPT has been around since October of 2022, I believe I went to the Jasper Generative AI Conference February 14, 2023. Hopefully you listened to my episode on that about the 11 big takeaways. It's May 2024.

Speaker 1:

So it's already been a year and a half since ChatGPT came out and I ask you has your work changed? Are you doing anything different? And okay, well, instead of spending, you know, an hour on generating copy for ads, now I'm only spending 15 minutes. That's awesome, right, but I think that there's a lot more that we can be doing, and that's really the challenge I want to give to you is to reimagine your work. Think about the things you're doing and is there a way to use AI to do them faster, better, to help you scale, to be able to do new things that you couldn't do today? And I'm also being inspired.

Speaker 1:

I want to give another shout out to Marc Savant. Marc Savant, I mentioned in my takeaways from PodFest and I'm also being inspired. I want to give another shout out to Mark Savant. Mark Savant, I mentioned in my takeaways from PodFest and he has a great YouTube video. You can search him up. But he was talking about how he had a Google form and he would reach out to people, reach out to executives, saying I'd love to interview you for my X blog. All you need to do is fill out this Google form and I'll take it from there. So he has a Google form input which triggers once there is a new form submitted, a zap on Zapier, which then plugs into a conversation on ChatGPT with instructions, you know, with brand voice and all the other things that need to be talked about. That will then generate a blog post, right, and it will be conversational. It will feature quotes from what that person said in the Google form.

Speaker 1:

Hopefully that gives you an aha moment. It gave me an aha moment and it's like I know about this, but am I using that technology? Am I using AI plus automation? Are there other things in which I could be using it for? And that's you know today, and with this podcast, as well, as well as my work, I for the first time started a paid subscription to chat GPT specifically because, in Zapier those of you that know me know that I love Jasper love that tool, but at the cheapest plan, jasper does not give you API access, which, if you have the $20 plan I believe I'm going to find out really soon with chat GPT you get API access as well as everything else. Getting API access allows you to do a little bit of automation, allows you to get information from one person, feed it through whatever custom prompt you have and send it to another person, or maybe send it to WordPress, send it to ConvertKit I think you get the picture.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot we can do and I believe, when we begin thinking of this way, of different ways in which we can use AI and make those automations our own, we're building assets, we're building infrastructure. We're spending the time now, but the output is going to far outweigh the time we spend now and the efficiency is going to far outweigh that. In other words, it grows upon itself. You can always go back in and fine tune that prompt, fine tune that automation, find other ways of using that content. You know it's not a question of should you have a podcast, blog, youtube channel? You can have all three and AI can become an integral part of that. You still need to be the face right of your brand of your business. But certainly AI can help you do a heck of a lot more if you're not doing those.

Speaker 1:

So, case in point blog posts. I'm currently publishing four posts a week. One of those is republished content, so you know probably 50 to 75% of the content's already done, so it's a lot quicker. And then the other 75% three a week are our new posts. Now I'm I'm invested in doing that, and when I write blog posts, part of it is research and development for myself, so I'm not really leveraging a lot of AI for that. But and you know, I already have like a three month pipeline. Like literally I have blog posts until the mid of August, you know, for a week, that are already set to publish. So that to me I have already made my gains in efficiency without really using AI other than tools like Phrase, f-r-a-s-e, which you've heard me talk about here, but others, if you're not even blogging. I mean to be able to blog once a week to be able to go into a Jasper or ChatGPT.

Speaker 1:

Do some keyword research, think about the topic that you want to talk about, the unique perspective, and then start to create an outline in AI. What are the things that I should cover. This can help you do more with less right cover. This can help you do more with less right. This can help you on doing that, and you know the text-to-voice. You can begin a podcast with blog posts. I'll be totally honest with you. I've had some really well-performing podcast episodes here that were from blog posts. I repurposed a blog post into a podcast episode. You can have a text-to-voice option. Would you like to read this newsletter? Would you like me to read this newsletter? Click here for the audio version or for a blog post.

Speaker 1:

Once again, these came from Content Entrepreneur Expo. Gonna give a shout out to Jordash Johnson, who mentioned these exact same ideas and text-to-video. You know I'm an affiliate of the TikTok ads platform and I'm working on a blog post and a YouTube video on how to get started using TikTok ads For those that are familiar with Facebook ads, but you've never started TikTok ads and I want to help you and I was looking for a UGC creator true story on Fiverr to help me create an ad, because I am not really that active on TikTok and I want to gear the ad towards younger people and therefore I'm going to use UGC like big brands would use, right, and I'm going to use a UGC creator, so I can't wait to get the video. I should get it back in the next day or two. The great thing, like with influencer marketing and working with creators, is you choose your vibe, like all these people on Fiverr have videos of themselves speaking and I can try to see who do I want to best represent me, right, which is a really fascinating and very, very cool benefit of leveraging, you know, user generated content.

Speaker 1:

But there were a number of gigs, as they call them, and what these people were doing was basically text to video, like tell me a URL, tell me a little bit about your product. They were using text to video AI solutions and they were also using text to voice, so they would create a script and they would have a voice that goes with it. Tiktok actually allows you to do it in their platform. You can use other platforms like Google as well, but it was all being AI generated and I looked at some of their samples and it's like man. I've seen these types of ads on Instagram of a product that doesn't necessarily show a face. It shows how a product's being used and it might have a voice, and it has a mixture of, like you know, stock photo and video. Those are all AI generated. What's stopping you from creating those as well? So the AI shift.

Speaker 1:

The AI shift is let's make AI an integral part of what we do so that we work smarter, we work faster, we can scale and guess what? We compete with all the other people that are already doing this, and I think that's the big thing, right? If you're an entrepreneur, it's a no-brainer, because your competitors are already doing this. If you're a professional, it's a no-brainer, because you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to people who understand how to coexist with AI better than you do and that use AI to make them look a heck of a lot smarter.

Speaker 1:

That is my mission and that is the challenge I want to throw out to you today. If you're like Neil, I don't even know where to start. I have a number of blog posts on the subject neilschafercom. Every week, I have an update on AI news Subscribe to neilschafercom slash newsletter. And I have a group coaching mastermind community, where AI almost every week is a topic that we talk about. If you want a little bit more handholding With the Kickstarter, I plan to have one-on-one coaching and some other group coaching programs, so you can wait for that or you can go to neilschafercom slash membership and sign up there.

Speaker 1:

Either way, you know, this podcast is a one-way conversation, but I really want to help you in any way I can. Whether you have a budget or not, there is a resource that I could help you with. But, more importantly right, it's not just about the education. I want to inspire you. I want to inspire you to really take advantage and look at your workflow, look at the way you work compared to a year ago, and if it has not changed, it's time to change it, and I cannot think of a better way to end this episode.

Speaker 1:

We'll be back next week with another interview. As you know, I do bi-weekly solo episodes based on just my vibe at the time, what I want to teach you, what I think is most important to teach you, and the interviews. Yeah, next week is going to be none other than Robert Rose. Robert Rose, together with Joe Polizzi, and you'll hear the story on the interview. Co-founder of the Content Marketing Institute, and he is truly one of the mentors and teachers of content marketing, and we're going to talk all about that. You will not want to miss that, so make sure, if you're not subscribed, that you are, and I can't wait to be back next week to serve you. Until then, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.