Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

AI is About Innovating Your Approach, Not Prompt Engineering

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 382

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A lot is being said about how to best use AI in your marketing, but there is one thing that needs to be said:

ChatGPT is all about democratizing the use of AI. While understanding how to "prompt" an AI chatbot is important, what is more important is imagining the many different ways in which you can use this technology to help you work faster and/or smarter. And then implementing those ideas into reality.

That is what this episode is all about: It's all about innovating your approach to AI.

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Speaker 1:

What if I told you that you don't need to be a prompt engineer to best leverage AI? What if I told you that 10 years from now, AI is going to be considered as mainstream as the internet is considered today? What if I told you that leveraging AI is a lot easier than you might have thought? Well, that's going to be my advice for you on today's episode of the your Digital Marketing.

Speaker 2:

Coach podcast. Good thing you've got Neil. 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 Schafer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schafer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 382 of this podcast. Today I do not have any industry news to share with you, but I wanted to give you some thoughts on a conversation that I had with a marketing partner. This is a company in the email marketing industry. I won't name names, but it's advice related to SEO and recent Google search changes in their algorithm, and there have been a lot of changes in their algorithm, as we know, and if your website was hit by one of these changes, I think that this information that my partner went through will really give you some confidence that not all is lost. So I think what happened with the most recent Google search updates and I'm talking about the ones that happened in Q4 to Q2, q4 last year to Q2 of this year was it was mixed up with the whole generative AI search feature that began to be implemented and the competition with ChatGPT. And you know, google also announced they were doing some anti-spam and anti-AI and I won't say anti-AI, but related to the anti-spam. But there were a lot of things going on and I think that if you were hit, it was really hard to understand exactly why you were hit, that, if you were hit, it was really hard to understand exactly why you were hit, and I think that there were a lot of individual bloggers that were hit, way more than businesses. But the person that I'm speaking about today actually represents a business that has been in the industry for more than a decade, if not two decades a very, very established company that got hit like the rest of us did, including myself, and when I was talking to them a few days ago, he mentioned what he did, and he also mentioned that in August of this year, google did another revision to their update, and I know there was someone in my Digital Threads launch team and she is a individual blogger like myself and her rankings pretty much came back, and she was thankful for that. I don't really think she intentionally did anything different, but Google realized, hey, they might've made a mistake. Now, that is not the case for me yet, so I'm still sort of on the outside looking in, but what I heard last week was basically, this website got hit and what they ended up doing was doing something that I am in the act of doing myself, which is going into Google search console looking for those posts that got hit, which is very, very easy to find, and basically saying you know what? Maybe these sites, these posts, are out of date. Maybe there's new information, maybe there's a different, more user-friendly way of saying things, maybe there's a different, more user-friendly way of saying things, maybe there's a different way we would say the same thing in 2024.

Speaker 1:

And I think that we all invest a lot of time building up our library of content and I am the same. But think of it this way my library of content. Right now and I'm just looking at my WordPress dashboard I have published exactly 750 blog posts. I am currently publishing four blog posts. I am currently publishing four blog posts a week. That's about, let's say, 200 blog posts. So I'm continuing to build up that library of content until there's nothing more to build. But of those 200, I am only revising 50 of those posts, meaning that on average, it's going to take me 15 years to revise all of my posts.

Speaker 1:

Well, what happens is that Google has manual readers that will manually go on your website at random, choose a few blog posts and you are going to get ranked in part based on what they see. And if they happen to find an article that was 10 years old. What are they going to think If they happen to find an article that was five years old but a lot has changed? Like all these influencer marketing articles, I wrote back in 2020, before TikTok became a big thing they're going to think that you're outdated and you have to remember. You have competition as well, and when the competition is blogging, they're blogging on what is here and now, today, on the most recent things. They're not going to blog an outdated article. So that is the blessing of a library of content, and the curse of the library of content is that it requires maintenance. I know I've seen some surveys where major companies are now republishing you know, not a quarter, but even half of their content is republished content. Because of this need to constantly be revising, and I am starting I can foresee in Q4 of this year that we are now entering that I will also be on some weeks doing 50% republished content to revise and refresh.

Speaker 1:

So, getting back to what my friend did, he basically went in and for the top 100 posts I think his website had about 600 posts he was saying he decided that he was going to revise them, refresh them. Right, did a few different things and I'll have to actually have him on the podcast to explain his process in full Basically found some good writers out there on freelance sites like Upwork and that had an eye for SEO and writing, and had them, you know, revise, refresh the language, any outdated information, paying close attention to the introduction and adding a little bit more personality and personal experience to that content. And he has already seen. Basically he did this several months ago and with this latest update, not only is the web traffic for this business back to where it was before all these updates started, it is actually higher. And he showed me his Google Search Console as proof, in terms of the impressions and clicks and it was really impressive and it was really inspiring and it is setting me on a journey to want to do the same thing.

Speaker 1:

So, you know, I know that we have AI, there's a lot of stuff going on, but this is an algorithmic change like any other and it should be dealt with like any other. And my advice to you is it should be dealt with like any other. And my advice to you is if your website traffic went down, there are others who website traffic went up. Find your competitors, old and new, who gained traffic and analyze the top search engine rankings for your niche, see what they are doing, what you may not be doing, and then go into your own Google search console, look for those posts that took the biggest hit, see if you are not doing any of those things that your competitors are doing on their posts, on your own posts right, look for those hints and clues and then revise, keep that library of content up to date. And that is the one thing I wanted to tell you in lieu of the industry news this week. A little bit of advice, just based on some recent interactions I've had and, like I said, this is something I plan to do as well and document and hope to share with you how it went for me. But you know, once again, these algorithm updates are random. We never know when they're going to hit. You just need to best be prepared that when they do hit, that you have all you know. You're doing all the things that you need to be doing for your content to have a friendly relationship with the algorithms, as I write about in Digital Threads, which I believe the day that this podcast episode publishes, digital Threads is also officially out, what started as a Kickstarter only campaign, and if you got it on my Kickstarter, you got the book you know well before anyone else had access to it, but it is now available for the public.

Speaker 1:

The ebook is available anywhere books are sold. The paperback now is available anywhere books are sold, and I am working on getting the hardcover, the audio book and the companion workbook out as well, and all those things should be out by the end of this month. So, regardless of what format you prefer to read books in, it will be ready for you and waiting for you, and I can't wait to hear your feedback. I think this book is really going to help a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs and obviously, all of my podcast listeners, who faithfully subscribe and download and listen to these episodes, or at least listen to the episodes that are relevant to you. So, as part of the official release of Digital Threads, I am doing a webinar on AI for those that pre-ordered the book in advance, and if that was you, I thank you. I did my best to promote the fact that I was doing it. I didn't really launch it in advance because I really didn't put the book up on Amazon until just a few days ago, so sorry if you missed the chance to take part in that webinar, and it's the first time that I am doing a dedicated session on AI and ChachiBT and how I use it and how I recommend you use it, and I thought it would be great to sort of share a summary of that for those that couldn't take part. Related to that teaser that I just talked about.

Speaker 1:

Now, I have been reading a lot of blog posts. There's even some books out now on AI and marketing, and I like to take a very different approach to what you see out there. So you have to remember that. You know whether it's Facebook ads or whether it's Google search or whether it's Grammarly, we are already living in the age of AI. Ai is already doing a lot, or you know, we're actually leveraging AI without our knowing it right, and more of the tools that we use in marketing are adding more and more AI features right the ability to hey, even like LinkedIn, meta, which now boasts 500 million users of its AI like let us create an image for you, let us create some text for you. So that is not the hard part. There's plenty of opportunity to use it, but I feel the best way for you to use AI is for you to have a direct relationship with the large language models themselves. Only when you do that will you really understand how generative AI works.

Speaker 1:

And it does not have to be intimidating the whole idea behind ChatGPT. And you could use Google Gemini. You can use Cloud. Those are the three big players in the market right now. Basically, all the other AI tools out there are tapping into the APIs of these tools anyway, right, so you might as well just use them directly, because you're going to get the best result. And, if you're curious, linkedin yes, you can pay for the privilege to get access to their AI and maybe they're creating an AI in the background using our posts as part of their large language model. But they are not open AI, although they are owned by Microsoft, who has invested in open AI. But at the end of the day, if they have, you're still getting access to the exact same chat GPT that you can directly access, and that's the main point here. So you should have an account, you should have a paid account so that any information provided does not does not become part of the large language model and you begin to have a little bit of privacy over what you can post there.

Speaker 1:

And you know, I'm still surprised when, in the various, you know whether it's the digital first mastermind or my LinkedIn maximizing LinkedIn for business growth our team or the digital threads our team. I know that AI literacy is still all over the map because it is still so new, so I sometimes find myself explaining these prompts and people are sort of blown away like wow, I never thought about that. And I think the use of AI right now and when I talk about AI I'm talking about generative AI and I'm specifically talking about chat, gpt but the use of AI right now is really similar to when the internet first appeared and that first time when you found something on yahoocom, if you can remember, and then the first time you use Google and then you can naturally insert text and find information, and some of us are better than others at internet research of being able to understand how search engines work and make them work for you. And that is really the greatest analogy that I can find for AI as well, because a lot of the prompts that I have found that others think it's a great prompt just come from a natural curiosity and a wanting to innovate my thoughts and my work and with that in mind, there really is no limit, there is no boundary to what you can do with AI. Will you use what you can use it for is another question. Will it be good content that it creates is another question. But the use case scenarios are really only limited by our creativity, which is why I sometimes read, like I said, this material that defines, which is why I sometimes read, like I said, this material that defines, like this is a prompt you should use Because, for instance, I would never let ChatGPT create a strategy for me.

Speaker 1:

Right, it is my business, my brand, I know best. Yet now I know that, if I already have a written strategy, I can ask it for advice on what I might be missing out on or, compared to the competition, what are the strengths and weaknesses of this? Right, I am finding that chat GPT works best when it already has something to work with and you're looking for ways to expand, improve, find shortcomings. So, with that in mind, any written piece of work or any analysis and I'm only talking about text you can be uploading Excel spreadsheets. What have you uploading PowerPoints?

Speaker 1:

I've not gone that far with my use of AI, in all honesty, but this is the first thing you should be looking at is whatever I am working on, how can I leverage AI to improve it? And you don't have to be a prompt engineer. How can I leverage AI to improve it? And you know you don't have to be a prompt engineer. All you need to do is to be able to articulate what you want ChatGPT or any other AI to do for you. It really is that simple. Now, obviously, there are ways to improve upon that, but at the beginning, you ask what you wanted to do and then, based on its response, you ask to revise it, or you ask for other ideas, or you say no. You know, I wanted a maximum of 150 characters and you need to count spaces and punctuation as characters, so please revise. There are going to come areas where you're going to need to do constant revisions to get what you want, but that's really the whole idea when you have a need, right. So you know, just to give you some ideas, when I was looking to replace stock photos on my website with AI generated images, and knowing that I already had a plugin that would generate AI images for me if I gave it a prompt, but not knowing what prompt to use, I basically uploaded the stock photo to Chachi PD and said hey, you know, please give me a prompt that I can give an AI image generator to be able to create a similar image to this. And then, boom, I was able to use that prompt and create the AI images that you see on my site recently.

Speaker 1:

If you go to my blog and you look at the header image at the very top, you'll see that more and more of them are AI generated. You may not even notice the difference, in all honesty, and it could be other things. Like you know, here's a blog post getting back to that point about SEO that I talked about, and I've been using this as well, but here's a blog post. It's fallen out of rankings. Here are URLs for top ranking blog posts that I'm competing with. What do they have that I'm missing in my blog post? Give me some ideas how to best revise this blog post or another way that I've been using it.

Speaker 1:

I'm doing these Facebook ad campaigns. I'm doing one both for maximizing LinkedIn, for business growth, which is going to be at 99 cents only for a limited time I will be raising the price very shortly as well as for the launch of digital threads, and we know that best practices in Facebook or really any ads is doing A-B testing and images are one of the most important things you need to be doing A-B testing on. So I'd say, hey, you're a Facebook ads expert. I'm releasing this new book, or it's on sale limited time only. I want to create five different images based on your expertise and knowing that I want to be able to A-B test different types of images to attract different types of people. What are the five different types of images that I should create? And it gave me five distinctly different types of images that I could use for Facebook ads, which then I sent over to my VAs. That helped me with my graphics to create those ads for me, and they're doing pretty well right now.

Speaker 1:

So when you have a need is when you use AI and you use it as if you were just talking to your intern, your VA, your expert, who knows anything and everything right. But you will always find things that AI can't do well, like when you ask it to generate images. It sometimes won't use logos because of copyright issues, it sometimes can't change the incorrect text that it already has in the image, it can only delete it, and other things. So you begin to see that you know what. Maybe I need to use a tool that is more geared specifically towards AI image generation, for instance and you may find other times, like I go in looking for AI tools to experiment with, and I've written a lot of blog posts on various AI tools, and there was one that was brought up recently that I really wanted to get a handle on and understand how it works, specifically for using AI for Facebook ads creation.

Speaker 1:

It is called ads creativeai, by the way, and so I went to YouTube and I saw two different demo videos and I realized that it really wasn't using AI to create the images. You still had to upload a background image, right, and then it probably had some templates that it was giving you random displays of text and color based on that background image, and then, obviously, it used the AI to sort of spin the text. But this is something that I use in ChatGPT anyway. So you begin to see the limitations of such a tool and I realized that you know what I don't think if I have to upload my own background photo, it sort of defeats the purpose of using an AI tool for Facebook ads, so that's why I haven't used that specific tool yet.

Speaker 1:

But once you begin to use ChatGPT more frequently for different things and you begin to create a series of conversations in the sidebar for every little thing you use it for, you begin to see AI in a new way. You begin to see new use case scenarios and you begin to see that maybe you don't want to use that third-party AI tool for this, or maybe you know what LinkedIn meta. No thanks, I don't need to use you for the AI. I already have a fine-tuned system with ChatGPT. And really the secret, as I mentioned before, if you already have something to work with by uploading that, that is the secret. And guess what? Guess again, if you are working with something new, you can upload samples from other people to use as inspiration. If it's public information, right? Hey, this is something that my competitor did, or? You know? These are the top five ranked blog posts, you know? Please analyze them and give me a formula that I can begin to work with and then create a first rough draft around that formula.

Speaker 1:

These are all things you could be doing today with the technology that's out there, and I think once you get it, it really is mind blowing. It's yeah, I have no words for it, but you have to have a need for it. You're not using AI for AI's sake. It's like the people when Google Plus just came out, they went in and you know they followed in the circle did all the stuff at Google Plus. For what right? You need to have a business objective, and the business objective is just helping you with the mundane tasks that you're doing on a regular basis. But get experienced in this. Become AI literate, because the more you give it, the more revisions you make, the better the results get. And one more piece of advice and this I'm going to get I'm going to give a shout out to Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, who also has one of the most downloaded podcasts on using AI for marketing and ran into him at VidSum.

Speaker 1:

And he's like Neil, you really got to be using custom GPTs, because the conversation approach in ChatGPT I have like 20 or 30 conversations going on for 20 or 30 different tasks is that ChatGPT just forgets over time and the quality goes down. So I was inspired, you know, before I do this webinar this next week and before I recorded this podcast, to actually create my own custom GPT. And guess what? It is really really, really simple to do, right. You're basically giving it instructions to do and you can optimize those instructions on the left-hand side, and then on the right-hand side is where you converse with that GPT that you just created.

Speaker 1:

So I also want to encourage you, if you're listening, do not be afraid to create your own custom GPT and I know that there are GPTs out there third-party GPTs that you can use but I have always found the best results based on my own work and my own language, not on someone else's. So I don't think you necessarily have to use a custom GPT to be successful with your AI or to even be successful with custom GPTs. I urge you to try one on your own. So I hope that this episode I know it's really short and sweet I really wanted to inspire you to think outside of the box, to be an innovator with your own work and find new ways to use AI, and if you found just one new way to use it today than you did yesterday, I've done my job and this is really part of digital threads.

Speaker 1:

I do have a dedicated chapter at the end of the book on AI and marketing, but remember it is only one chapter out of 20. And it's only after you understand how to do the other things. So AI is not going to make everything better for you, but it can help you do things better and faster. But, at the end of the day, you're in control. It's your strategy, it's your thoughts, it's your implementation. And another reminder, as I like to say be as much AI on the inside as you can, but be as human as much as possible on the outside, and that's really really the key thing that you don't want to forget when using this. You never really want to use responses, as is that AI gives you. But, once again, this is all part of a journey of becoming AI literate and I hope, like I said, you are on your way to becoming AI literate. Maybe you're already doing all the things that I'm talking about, which is awesome, right, but I have a feeling that a majority of professionals are still not there, especially outside of marketing. I think we, as marketers, understand that AI is critical for our success in the future and as entrepreneurs, but there's still a lot that are on the outside looking in.

Speaker 1:

Well, I hope you'll join me on the inside looking out after listening to this episode. So thank you for listening to the end. If you haven't subscribed to this podcast, I would appreciate you hitting that subscribe button. Writing a review, if you'd like as well could always use more reviews. But next week, or I should say the next episode, I'm going to be having the amazing Dennis Yu on, and Dennis is one of these. You know, one of the smartest people you will find out there in social media marketing, and we're going to talk about the Google ability of yourself and this sort of relates to AI and the way that algorithms work and really, how can you and your business be seen more and more in search engines going forward. It's going to be a great talk. We also talk about Facebook ads, which Dennis is really famous for, but you'll definitely want to make sure that you stay tuned for that one, and until we meet again, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, 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 in to 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.