#372: The AI Opportunity — Reinventing Your Writing Business for 10X Impact

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for freelance writers and copywriters and solo marketers who want to earn more and less time and doing work they love for better clients, with over 1.3 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries. So the writing industry is experiencing one of the biggest shakeups we've seen in decades. And one of the biggest fears among writers is that AI is going to replace them. And it's a valid concern, right? I mean, there's a lot going on out there. There's a lot of uncertainty. I don't think AI is really the biggest factor, at least right now, but it certainly feels like it could be. It feels that way. Or we could be led to believe, or we might tell ourselves a story that it is the biggest factor. But what if we're asking the wrong questions entirely? What if AI isn't really a threat, but really the biggest opportunity we've seen in a long, long time? Look, I get it. Change is scary. Nobody likes change. I mean, you might think I do, but I really don't. I really like things the way they are. I've shared the story before, but when ChatGPT came out late 2022, my first thought was, oh, no, I don't need this right now. I was in my early 50s at the time. I just thought, I don't want to learn something new. Now everyone's asking me about this. I don't know anything about it. I just didn't have the energy to dive into something like that. So, yeah, I resist change myself, and I especially resisted, and we all resisted when that change seems to directly threaten our livelihood. I've been there, I've been there myself, wondering if the skills that I've worked so hard to develop are about to become obsolete. But when I. And I respect other perspectives, in fact, I want to hear all voices. I want to hear all the different fears and opinions and thoughts about what's happening and the changes. It's stimulating conversation, and I certainly don't want to be in an echo chamber. I should also admit that there are some aspects of AI that do concern me, you know, because as much as this pattern has repeated over the years in terms of new technologies that are very disruptive but end up creating all kinds of new opportunities, one difference here is that in the past, there has been a period of rebuilding. There's been enough time during that disruptive phase where the technology creates that disruption, but there's also enough time to create the new opportunities. And this stuff is happening so fast that I do wonder, you know, can we overcome that disruption? Is there going to be enough time for those opportunities to emerge? I feel that there will be, based on what I'm seeing. But look, nobody really knows. I'm following all kinds of experts. You'd think these people would know. These people are immersed in all the new developments day in and day out. And it's interesting to see all the different opinions. There's a lot of optimism, but there's also pessimism. So I do have some concerns. I'm not all just Pollyanna here thinking that everything's going to be amazing and nothing will go wrong. But today, I don't really want to get into that. My hope is that this conversation will challenge your thinking a bit. Today's episode, that is. And I want to do that with a few powerful questions. I'm going to give you the questions and we're going to dive into them more. But I want to set the stage here. First, what if AI allows you to deliver services at a scale that wasn't financially possible before? And I'm not just talking about writing faster here. I'm talking about completely new service models that were never feasible when you were the bottleneck as a solo business owner? Okay, so that's first question. First, food for thought. Second, how could you reinvent client relationships if execution was no longer your bottleneck? The reality is that when implementation is streamlined, your advisory role. If you take an advisory role or more of an advisory role, that role can expand in ways you might not have even considered. And finally, what if your industry expertise combined with AI creates a whole new set of capabilities and a competitive advantage that no AI or only or human only solution can match? This is about building a moat through a unique human and AI partnership. Because here's the thing. AI does way more than just automate existing work. It also unlocks potential. It unlocks capabilities that you may have overlooked or ignored for years. And I think that's very exciting. These aren't just theoretical questions. I want you to ponder them. It's really good food for thought. But they're not theory. They're the foundation for what could be a complete reinvention of your business model and value proposition. And today, we're going to explore three transformations that can revolutionize your writing business. First, becoming a strategic conductor. Instead of an order taker number two, or the second one, using AI as your intellectual sparring partner number three, multiplying your creative output by 10x. So let's dive right in and let's start with that first one. From order taker to becoming more of a strategic conductor. My view here is that the writing market is splitting into two, and it's happening faster than many of us even expected. So on one side you have what we could call commodity content creation, the kind of writing that follows predictable formulas, predictable structures. This is increasingly being automated or augmented by AI. And I would argue that this is a segment that's being commoditized to death. This is nothing new. These are markets that were doing this before, but they were doing it with human labor, right? So they were doing it with writers who were willing to write for, let's say, five or ten cents a word. Eventually that led to the rise of the content mill, and then that led to a lot of offshoring of this work where writers could write for even less than that, like a penny, one cent a word, for example. This has been happening for a long time, and that's kind of the lowest hanging fruit for these markets to start adopting AI. This is also the segment that Google is going after and penalizing. And as much as marketers hate what Google is doing there and how they keep changing their guidance on what represents quality content, I think most of us have seen the sheer garbage that so many of these businesses are pumping out every day. So in a way, I'm glad that Google is moving in that direction. I think they're taking down other markets and other legitimate marketers and content creators with them. That's a topic for another day. But it's clear that there was no thought or care put into their AI usage. And by them, I'm talking about these companies that are just cranking out garbage. Their only goal is to just pump out a ton of content at a very fast pace, regardless of what it looks like. Now, on the other side is high value strategic direction. Now, of course, this is a spectrum, right? They're not just two sides. But I want to kind of draw some contrast here. The high value strategic direction, the thinking work that determines what should be created, why it matters, and how it fits into a larger strategic picture. This work is becoming increasingly valuable precisely because AI can't do it effectively, at least not on its own. Okay, AI can do a lot of brainstorming, it can help ideate, but again, it can't do these things in a vacuum. You need A human. This split that I just described, I think gives us an incredible opportunity for those of us writers, copywriters, solo marketers who are willing to evolve in a role. So instead of just being the person who executes the writing, you can become the conductor, if you will, who orchestrates the entire content strategy or parts of it. You could be the one who understands the business objectives, the audience needs and the strategic content, and then directs both human and AI resources to create the optimal content mix. Now, before you freak out and tune out, I just want to say that this is only one model and one idea. I'm going to share others with you, but I'm just trying to anchor the concept for now. And I should also say that this is not going to work for every client. So don't shut it down because you're thinking, oh yeah, my clients, that they're not going to want to do that. They already got that stuff figured out. They have people who do that. Okay, just keep an open mind for now. We're going to address that a little bit later. The idea is just for me to start planting some seeds to give you some food for thought. Okay. I want to start by sharing my own recent experience with this evolution that I'm describing here. And I haven't written for clients since 2016. I've talked about this before, I haven't really gotten into the details, but just a quick history. I started as a freelance copywriter in 2003. Three years later, almost three years later, I went full time as a freelancer. I've been self employed since the summer of 2006 and I started 2008, 2009, 2010, I started creating training resources and useful resources for other freelancers. And in 2012, that evolved into coaching. I started formally coaching in 2012. I still had my own writing clients, but I started phasing those out. And by 2016 I had just one client left. They got acquired by another company and then that was really the end of it. And I realized that what I wanted to do was just focus on my coaching work and my coaching business. And that's what I've done since then. I really haven't written for clients since 2016. But last fall, this is fall of 2024, I came across an opportunity to help a home services business in my area with some of their marketing strategy. And that was a long story of how that came about. But let's just say that it was a very serendipitous event. That just makes me happy just thinking about it. How this all kind of came together because I had put an intention out there to the universe, and it just came back to me. And it was so loud and clear that, I mean, I'm getting chills just thinking about it. But what started out as an email campaign strategy for this client quickly expanded into positioning, messaging, and copywriting. And then that morphed into a complete website overhaul for them. And then help with all kinds of other marketing assets and workflows. Not a ton of volume, but, you know, definitely quite a few things. They're all small. As I began leveraging AI in my workload, in my workflows for this client, I. I experienced a profound shift in what was possible. Within just a few weeks, I could see the huge potential unfolding, and I realized that I suddenly had a powerful tool that could help scale my creativity and productivity by a factor of 5, 7. 10x. And that wasn't just a minor improvement. It was transformative. I began asking myself a whole new set of questions. It really got me thinking. So, for example, I was asking, okay, so what's now possible that wasn't possible for me before? What can I now provide clients that I couldn't or thought I couldn't before? And how can I amplify my experience and Wisdom to deliver 5 to 10x the value to this particular client? The revelation wasn't just about scaling my productivity, although that was huge just a few years ago, I couldn't have taken on this client experiment alongside my coaching business. I just couldn't. My coaching business really took all of my time and attention. But now I can easily handle all the work this client needs and more. In fact, this client quickly brought me into their sister business, which is another home services company that also needed help. And now this sister company is a franchise. So we were limited as to what we could create on our own because they do have a marketing department. But it turns out that my client has quite a bit of leeway in terms of what they create. They got to get things approved, but they do have a lot of leeway in terms of their marketing assets that they they can create. And here's the cool thing. As they kept asking me for more help and I saw other gaps in what they were doing from a marketing standpoint, some of the gaps that they had and some of the things they were overlooking, I saw that I could leverage AI in more creative ways. Using these AI models, I gain access to frameworks and ideas and tools and knowledge and systems that I didn't previously have at my fingertips. So in Other words, I'll give you an example. I didn't have fully fleshed out branding guides, for example, and I mean, I knew what some of the elements were, but I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't have a full view of the entire branding landscape. But with AI's help, suddenly I had access to all kinds of ideas for frameworks. And of course, it takes someone who knows what they're doing to see what's good and what's not great, what's really bad. So you gotta sift through everything. But I was at a point where I knew enough to know or to recognize when something that the models were giving me was good and what I could do away with. And because I had the judgment, I had the discernment again to know what was good and what wasn't so good. So that's a key factor, right? You could put a total newbie in front of these models and if they don't know what they're doing, they're going to deliver trash. Complete garbage, right? So you have to be at a point in your career, in your business, where you have capabilities that now an AI model can help amplify. And this is a key point because I don't want to give anyone the impression that, you know, you essentially can cheat your way through this new phase of technology that we're seeing roll out right now, but with good experience, in my case, the experience that I had, you know, again, being in business, being in marketing for all these years, I could coax these systems to help me create powerful messaging platforms, brand frameworks, different campaigns, different concepts, newsletter content ideas, and creative strategies that were beyond what I could have developed on my own. Sure, I had the capability to do it on my own, but doing it 100% solo as myself would have taken me months to learn, maybe even years to learn. That's assuming that I even came across these new ideas and new concepts and new training on my own. So I think you can start seeing that you can take someone who knows enough, who's good and has good judgment and discernment and good taste, and put it in front of a tool that can really amplify that. And I started seeing that AI was giving me an unfair advantage. I could operate at a higher level while delivering more comprehensive solutions that I could have managed alone and do a higher volume of that work. Now, these kinds of shifts require a fundamental mindset change for writers. You could probably start seeing that already, because instead of asking, how do I protect my current services we need to start asking ourselves, okay, what do my clients really need that I can't provide? Or maybe I can provide them, but because they don't know what I know about marketing or copywriting or content marketing, because they're not a specialist like I am, they don't know how to prompt or how to leverage these tools in a way that's going to give them the real value they're looking for. So, really, and I've been harping on this for a while, change the quality of the questions you ask yourself and change the quality of the outcomes you get. Okay? If you ponder those questions, if you really give them some thought and journal on these and use them as a gateway into new ideas and brainstorming. So here are some practical questions to help identify your unique strategic value. Because I don't want to just tell you, ask yourself better questions. Let me give you something to get you started. Number one, what industry or subject matter expertise do you have that gives you unique insight? What do your best clients continually ask for your opinion on, beyond the writing itself? Here's another one. Where do your clients typically struggle to see the big picture or to make connections? And what patterns have you observed across multiple clients that give you perspective that they don't have? So this, what I like to call a strategic conductor role, opens up real revenue opportunities for you. You can offer content strategy workshops, you can develop brand messaging frameworks, you could create content ecosystems rather than just individual pieces or assets, and you could command significantly higher fees for your specialized expertise. Now, it may not be in terms of the per item fees, but your overall revenue can grow dramatically without you having to put in the proportional amount of hours. So, in other words, you have asymmetric advantage here because of the leverage these tools can give you. But the key is to position yourself as the strategic brain rather than just the executing set of hands. When you do this effectively, AI becomes your ally rather than your replacement. Okay, so let's talk about this next idea of AI as your intellectual sparring partner. And it's related to this last one of being a conductor. This is something that's completely changed my creative process, which is using AI as an intellectual partner or sparring partner. Most people are still using AI tools in pretty basic ways. So essentially is writing assistance. They type in a prompt, get a response, they make some edits, and that's it, they're done. But that's so limiting. There is a much more powerful approach for using AI in your collaborative thinking. Imagine, for example, having a panel of virtual experts on tap, at your disposal, ready to debate ideas, ready to challenge your assumptions, ready to help you refine your thinking. That's what's now possible when you move beyond basic prompts to true intellectual collaboration with AI. One technique I found incredibly valuable is setting up Socratic dialogues with AI. So instead of just asking for an answer, I'll ask an AI to take a specific perspective or a specific role and then engage in back and forth conversation with me about a topic. So for example, with that home services business I mentioned, I used AI to generate multiple stakeholder perspectives on their messaging strategy that I helped them create. I had one AI perspective take the position of a skeptical homeowner, I had another one represent a price sensitive customer, I had another one take the role of a competitor, and so on. And then I facilitated a virtual debate, if you will, between these perspectives, challenging the messaging from different angles. And what that process revealed was set of weaknesses in the original approach that neither I nor the client really had identified. Or maybe we could have gone with it and never known any better. It would have sounded good to us. But you know, we're so close to it and you've been here, right? You get so close to the material, you get so close to the client that like them, you can't see the weaknesses, you can't see the gaps. So the price sensitive perspective, for example, pointed out that our value proposition didn't clearly articulate why their higher pricing was justified. Then I remember when we were using, I was using the competitor perspective, it highlighted areas where differentiation wasn't as strong as I thought. And then the skeptical homeowner perspective revealed that some of our claims didn't have the specificity that you need to be convincing. So it was really cool to see this. The debate led to a much stronger messaging framework than I could have developed on my own. And it took a fraction of the time than it would have taken to gather real customer feedback. You can also apply the same approach to developing your own content. So before publishing a, let's say a controversial position or a bold claim, you could stress test it by having AI argue against your points. You could look for holes in your reasoning, you could have it help you identify angles you hadn't considered and strengthen your position in response to the critique. And you could work with it, or at that point you will probably know, okay, cool. So I now know what I need to do to bolster my argument. I recently used this approach when developing a new coaching offer, for example. So I had AI generate responses from different perspectives, like a Budget conscious freelancer, for example, or an experienced consultant. And even skeptics who question the value of coaching altogether. And their critiques really helped me. They helped me refine my positioning. They helped me address potential objections before I even spoke to a prospective client. So it was really, really useful. In fact, it made me wonder, man, I thought this copy was good to go. I thought it was really, really strong. And then I saw the shortcomings, I saw the gaps, and I thought, I don't think I would have ever realized this. And people would have maybe had these objections and they probably would have never told me, hey, here's why I didn't hire you. You didn't address this right, or you really didn't make me feel like you were the right fit based on this, that and the other. So sometimes you do get that honest feedback, but most of the time you don't. Now, for my home services client, the result of this internal approach that I took with AI was much more nuanced and compelling in terms of getting or being able to produce a stronger set of marketing assets. And the client was really impressed by how thoroughly we thought through some of the potential pushback. So again, things that I'm not really sure if I would have been able to come up with on my own or how long it would have taken me to even do it, even if I did recognize the shortcomings or the gaps. I think you can see why this matters. The ability to rapidly iterate on ideas gives you a massive competitive advantage in developing truly original perspective. So instead of, again, instead of publishing your first or second draft because you really believe it's the best version you can produce, you can publish your 10th draft after it's been challenged, refine and strengthen through that intellectual debate. And you can do that in the time it may have taken you to produce two or three drafts before. So, I mean, there's just no comparison. It's just mind blowing. And here's the counterintuitive truth about this approach that I just described. I found that using AI for debate actually strengthens your uniquely human thinking capacity. This was an unexpected benefit because I found that by exposing myself to diverse perspectives and challenging my own ideas, I've been able to develop more nuanced understanding and more original insights. So this is not something that I'm hearing a lot of people talk about. In fact, I don't think I've heard of anyone say this, but I really believe it's making me a stronger thinker. It's forcing me to see things that I wouldn't have seen before. And sometimes they're hard to swallow. I mean, there's some things that I think, okay, AI, you're being a little too picky here. But you know what? I need to understand that in many cases, these are very valid points. And of course, again, you're the one with judgment and discernment. So, you know, you're the one who ultimately decides what you're going to accept and what you're going to reject. But many times the stuff that comes back is powerful. It's right on target. So this is how you can stay valuable in an AI world. Not by trying to outproduce the machines, but by developing the kinds of nuance, contextual, strategic thinking that machines can help refine, but they can't generate on their own. All right, leads us to the third idea, what I sometimes call the 10x Rider. So really, it's about multiplying your creative output. What if you could produce 10 times more content or reach 10 times more people, or generate 10 times more ideas, but without working 10 times more hours? That's a massive asymmetrical advantage. I mean, that's been the tagline of my coaching and training business for years. Earning more and less time doing work you love for better clients. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you are very familiar with that, right? And I've always meant that. To me, that is the holy grail of freelancing. Well, that's the math of leverage that makes this whole thing possible. AI makes that kind of leverage not only possible, but it takes it to a scale that I would have never imagined we would have access to. But it requires thinking differently about your creative process. So first, I think we need to identify your current production bottlenecks, or you need to do this and you need to ask yourself questions like, what are the bottlenecks in my business, if I'm honest with myself, what is it? What are the most common ones? Is it idea generation? So do you struggle to come up with fresh topics, fresh angles, or is it drafting? Does the blank page intimidate you? Does it make the first draft painfully slow for you? Is it more on the editing side? Is it editing and refinement? Do you spend hours tweaking and polishing your work, or is it distribution and repurposing? Do you create great content, but then you're not great at maximizing its reach and all the possibilities and squeezing as much value out of that content as you could? Well, it doesn't really matter what the bottleneck is, the cool thing is AI can help with all of those, but you have to build workflows that create multiplication rather than replacement. Here's a specific example. Now, I haven't done this yet, but it's something I'm going to be proposing to my home services clients soon. We could easily create a comprehensive and very relevant and practical guide about home maintenance for their customers and prospects. Now, in the past, this would have been a standalone project where you create the guide, you promote it, blow it up, right? You can try to extract as much out of it as you could, which takes time, but with AI assistance, we can transform that single piece of content into an entire ecosystem. And we can do it very, very easily. So we could extract the key points from each section and create a series of social media posts. For example, we could develop a short email sequence that delivered the guide's insights over a six week period that would position the business as the trusted expert. We could turn the major sections into standalone blog posts and each of them could go into much more deeply into a specific aspect of home maintenance. Or we could create scripts for short video tutorials based on the guides framework. We could even generate a home maintenance checklist tool that helps homeowners evaluate where they stand on protecting their investment. The ideas, I mean, you can see they're endless. There's so many things we could do now that we don't have as many constraints. And we could do all of that from a single piece of content. Better yet, we could do it in about a third of the time that it would have taken previously. And I'm being conservative here. Most importantly, I think that the business would now have months of content from what would have normally been a one off project for me, an asset they paid a decent amount of money for. And they're only getting one type of value out of it. So that's the power of content multiplication. Instead of creating each piece from scratch, you are extending, you're adapting and you're transforming core ideas into multiple formats for different channels and contexts. The compound effect of this approach is really, really powerful. Increase output leads to more visibility and that visibility builds authority, and that authority creates more client opportunities. It's a virtual cycle that accelerates your growth, that accelerates the client's potential. Now you might say, well, yeah, but what about quality? Doesn't more output mean lower quality? Well, not necessarily. Now first of all, the idea here is not to have AI write all this stuff. I hope you're starting to see that you need to look at this from different angles. It's a multifaceted solution Here. The idea is to incorporate AI into some parts of the workflow for doing everything I just described. And you know what? I really feel strongly about this. We need to stop having this binary argument about AI. The use cases go way beyond getting AI to write the draft for you or to just do it yourself. That is just the argument that we keep having, especially in LinkedIn. Oh, it's, you know, having AI write for you, you know, you're selling out. That's not the right way to do things. That's pathetic. That binary argument is not serving anyone. I'd argue that creating a draft is one of the least valuable uses of these tools. There are dozens and dozens of other better opportunities. And the point here is that when used correctly, AI can help you increase both quality and quantity by handling more the routine aspects of content creation and by presenting opportunities to improve your copy's impact. It just frees you up to focus on the areas where unique expertise and perspective adds the most value. So think of it this way. If you spend less time struggling with reformatting content for different channels, you can spend more time on screen strategic thinking, you can spend more time on creative ideation or adding your unique insights. And those are the things that truly differentiate your work. That multiplication approach isn't just about replacing yourself with AI. It's really broader than that. It's bigger. It's about extending your reach and extending your impact beyond what was previously possible. All right, so so far we've talked about transforming your role using AI as a thinking partner. We've talked about multiplying your output. But there's another critical aspect to thriving in the AI era, and that's building a competitive moat around your business. Now, again, most writers are applying AI incorrectly. That's my opinion. I see it all the time. They're using it as a replacement tool rather than a complimentary technology. And they're asking, how can AI write this for me? Instead of how can AI and I, the two of us jointly as a team, create something together that neither of us could create alone? Now, this common mistake creates an opportunity for those of us who understand how to build a true AI enabled competitive advantage. And there are three elements that can create an unbeatable competitive moat in the AI area. So the first is domain expertise that AI can't replicate. And by this, I'm talking about the deep knowledge of an industry, your deep understanding of an audience or subject matter that comes from years of experience in countless real world Interactions. AI can access information, has a ton of training data, but it doesn't have lived experience. It doesn't have contextual understanding, especially nuanced information and understanding and insights about a company, a narrow market segment, how a particular business works and why it works that way, and so on. It's really the nuance here that matters, and that's what you have. Second, there's a relationship capital that AI simply cannot build. So the trust, the rapport, the understanding you develop with clients over time, that's something AI simply can't create. People do business with people they know like and trust, and that human connection will remain irreplaceable. Third, there's the strategic thinking that AI can't provide. I mean, the ability here to see the big picture, to connect seemingly unrelated dots and make smart judgment calls based on incomplete information. These are distinctly human capabilities that AI can enhance but not replace. Now, it's gotten really good at this. Okay, so if you've seen these capabilities, you might be thinking, ed, you're wrong. No, I'm with you. It's really, really good at this. But this is the key. You still need a human to tie it all together and to make decisions. Because humans bring four critical things that AI doesn't have. And I've already mentioned these a few times, but let me just go ahead and highlight them. Judgment, discernment, understanding, and taste. So when you combine these uniquely human elements with powerful AI tools, you create services that clients can't easily replace or replicate elsewhere. One powerful way to solidify this advantage is by creating proprietary workflows. So custom AI systems for specific clients or specific industries. For example, I'm not going to get too deep into this, but I want to get you thinking in terms of what the possibilities could be. So, for example, with my home services client, I created a custom AI system that houses their brand, voice or messaging guidelines, historical content. This system becomes more valuable over time as I train it on their specific data marketing materials that we're creating and we optimize it for their particular needs. For me, it's like having a marketing department in a box. A marketing department that basically helps maintain consistently across their content, even when neither of us is directly involved in creating every single piece. And guess what? That marketing department in a box only cost me $20 a month. A little more because I subscribed to a few tools. But between Claude, the paid version of Claude, $20 a month and the paid version of Chat GPT, $20 a month, $40 a month, okay, for a whole marketing department in a box. This approach of creating something custom, so proprietary workflows, proprietary tools, creates what I would call golden handcuffs. By that I mean something that makes you irreplaceable because you've built systems that are uniquely tailored to each client's needs. Again, lots of possibilities here. I mean, you could even help clients develop, create these, support them. There's a lot of money to be made and there will be over the next few years working with clients to build this. And the longer you work with a client, the more valuable these systems become and the harder it becomes for them to work with anyone else. Because I still say that even if you help clients build this for their internal teams to use, there's still a support component there that's really, really valuable that you can continue to provide. The beauty of the approach that I just described is that there are many, again, many possibilities here, but it aligns everyone's interest. So your client gets better results, they get more consistent output and they get a system that improves over time. You get long term clients, you get higher fees, and you get work. You get to do work that leverages your highest value skills rather than your time. This is the kind of competitive advantage that's sustainable even as AI tools become more widespread and more powerful, because they will. Here's a powerful thought today, these tools are the dumbest they will ever be. Let that sink in for a minute. Okay, so as we wrap this up, let's get practical here. How do you start transforming your writing business to thrive in this AI era? Well, I got a simple 30 day action plan that you could deploy to begin this evolution. First, I would urge you to conduct a self audit. So where are you currently on the commodity versus strategic value spectrum? Are you primarily executing tasks that could be easily outsourced to an AI? Or are you providing insights and direction that requires a good amount of human judgment? Be honest with yourself. If most of your work involves following templates, very detailed briefs repeating familiar patterns, you're more vulnerable to AI disruption than if you're doing work that requires original thinking, contextual understanding, and strategic judgment. One example of this is large companies. So if you're working only with say, Fortune 500 companies that have big marketing departments that already have every project kind of specked out, they have everything dialed in, they have everything systemized and checklisted for you, they have detailed briefs created, and all they want is someone to write the piece, it's only a matter of time before they take that work in house and do it with a combination of Internal staff and machines. I'm telling you, the writings on the wall, that order taking model is going to be dead soon. Okay, so that's the first. Conduct a self audit. Be honest with yourself. Next, I'm going to invite you to run three specific AI experimentation projects. Project number one is what I might call the idea validation experiment. So take something you're working on right now, let's say a client project, a piece of content, a new service offering, and use AI to debate and refine it. Create multiple AI Personas to challenge your thinking from different angles and user feedback to strengthen your original idea. Project number two, I would call the content multiplication experiment. So take one substantial piece of content that you've already created and use AI to help you transform it into at least five different formats or different channels or context. And don't just republish the same content. That defeats the purpose. You want to adapt it thoughtfully for each channel and for each audience. Project number three, we're going to call the Custom System Experiment. Create a simple AI system tailored to a specific client or use case. This could be as a basic set of prompts or a prompt template that incorporates the client's brand, voice and messaging guidelines. Or it could be a sophisticated custom GPT using their existing content, their brand guide, style guide, and a few other assets as training data. Now, of course, quick disclaimer, don't upload these things to an AI model without your client's permission. Right? So this is their proprietary information. You want to make sure that you ask first and make sure to have a clear AI policy in your client agreements that explain how and where you use AI and where and how you don't use it. Okay, Very, very important. I think this is going to become much more commonplace. I think we're going to start feeling a lot more comfortable just flat out letting clients know how we use these tools. And you should practice communicating this clearly to clients and prospects. Now, if you're not ready for that, that's fine. You can still run all three of these experiments using either your own content or content from a company that's not your client but has content assets freely available on their website. So you could just kind of create, you know, your own case study. You could download those assets, those PDFs, and pretend that this is your client. You know, just pick a company in your industry, or it doesn't even need to be in your industry, but something you would understand. And you could just create a whole set of assets and systems that you can play around with. Okay, so don't let the fact that you're afraid to ask your client for permission, don't let that be a deterrent. You can create your own thing. As you run these experiments, I want you to pay close attention to market signals. So which new capabilities or which new service offerings resonate most with you? And if you put them out there, which ones resonate most with your clients? Where do they see the most value? Let their response guide your next steps. And then I want you to start working on communication strategies for discussing your evolved services with clients. And this is key. You need to help clients understand how your role is changing and why that's beneficial to them. Here's what doesn't work. Saying that I'm using AI now, that immediately raises concerns about value and about pricing. Don't put yourself in that situation. Instead, focus on the outcomes when you approach clients. So say something like, I've developed a new approach that allows me to deliver more comprehensive solutions while maintaining the quality and strategic alignment you expect. Right. That's kind of the framing you need to use. Demonstrate your new capabilities rather than just talk about them. Show clients examples of how your enhanced approach delivers better results, how it saves time. Saves them time. And how it solves problems they didn't even know they had. So, for example, instead of telling clients you're using AI to help with research, show them an insightful competitive analysis that would have taken weeks to produce manually. Let the results speak for themselves and explain that this took some thoughtful work and experimentation. These aren't just plug and play systems. The client needs to understand that you still have to know how to work with these tools and to get the output you really need. But the key here is to position these changes as an evolution that benefits them, not as a technological shortcut that benefits you. Remember, clients want to know what's in it for them. You have to present the value from their perspective. Okay, so we covered a lot of ground here, from transforming your role to building AI enabled competitive advantages. And I would say that the mindset shift I want you to take away from this episode is this AI isn't something to fear. It's a powerful tool that can help you express your uniquely human insights at a scale and at a speed that was never possible before. And the writers, because of that, the writers who will thrive in this new era aren't those fighting against the rise of AI. It's going to be those who harness it to amplify their humanity, their distinctly human contributions, if you will. It's going to be those who get creative with this, those who apply solid critical thinking to their challenges. It's going to be those who see those challenges as opportunities to try new ideas and to think differently. I urge you to keep asking yourself, what does this enable me to do that was impossible before. That question shifts your focus from threat to opportunity. It shifts it from scarcity to abundance. And if you're a bit overwhelmed right now, here's one specific step I'd encourage you to take today. Choose one of the experiment projects I mentioned a few minutes ago and commit to completing it in the next week. Don't overthink it. Just start exploring what's possible when you combine your expertise with these new tools. I truly believe that the future belongs to those who adapt first, who see the possibilities instead of the threats, and who use these tools to unlock their full potential rather than trying to maintain the status quo. You have a choice right now. You can resist the wave of change and eventually get swept away by it, or you can ride it to new heights that you never thought possible. I know which option I'm choosing. So one last thing. If today's conversation sparks something in you, if you've been curious about AI and how it can actually help you enhance your creativity instead of stifle it, then I want you to consider joining me in my upcoming AI Advantage Bootcamp for writers and solo marketers. This is a four week hands on program for both AI beginners and intermediate users. Okay, so even if you've just barely dabbled, that's fine. We'll meet you where you are. And then for those of you who have been using it, I'm going to show you even more creative ways, powerful ways and systems and methods to use these tools. And this bootcamp is designed to help you make AI your most powerful creative and productivity partner. And I mean actually make it work for you, not just dabble with prompts or follow generic advice. We're going to roll up our sleeves together. We're going to apply everything we cover, building a complete writing project as we go. And by the end, you won't just understand how to use AI better, you're actually going to have real, tangible results to show for it. You can learn more about the Bootcamp@smarterfreelancing.com g as in gamma aibootcamp altogether, all lowercase, so smarterfreelancing.com g as in gamma aibootcamp I'll also put that link in the show notes, but I would say this, you'll need to hurry because last time I offered this, it sold out way before the registration deadline, and that deadline's already coming up soon, so you can find all the details again at that Link spots are limited. We're going to kick off in a couple of weeks, so check it out now if it feels like the right next step for you. Thanks for listening and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Carpe Diem. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book earn more and less time the proven mindset, strategies and actions to prosper as a freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com where you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.