EP325 - Rob Marsh on Leveraging AI to Grow Your Freelance Business

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 business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With well over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries. Hey, Rob, welcome. Great to have you.

Thanks, Ed. This is a pleasure to be able to hang out with you.

I feel the same way. I feel the same way. And this is certainly not a boring topic we're going to be talking about today. It's something I've been addressing in my show recently and something we're going to continue to talk about. I know you've really taking a deep dive into this. You've embraced it, you've explored it, you've. You found the good, the bad and the ugly. And, and I'm excited to dive in. And we're going to get in the weeds with some of this stuff because I think we're at a phase right now where people really want practical, tactical advice. Agreed. Which will evolve, but that's fair. But before we get into that, I want for listeners to really understand a little bit about you, like what you do today, what your focus is, and then your just kind of Overall take of AI as. As of right now, July 2023, when we're recording this.

Yeah, well, I don't know how far you want me to go back, but, I mean, I started copywriting before there were cell phones, before email was really a thing. You know, the Internet was just coming, you know, together. And so I've seen a lot of changes over the past literally three decades. And, you know, I've worked in house, I've worked in agencies, I've freelanced. So, you know, I've, I've seen the copywriting world from all kinds of perspectives as well. And I think this change with AI is, you know, along with the Internet, is probably the most significant change for not just the world of copy or content writing or even marketing, but for business across the board. You know, the last 20 or so years, businesses have been digitizing, moving from selling in person to selling online. And that's, you know, taken a while to do. AI is going to have a similar impact, but I think it's going to happen much faster. I mean, we've already seen, you know, just the talk and the number of tools that have ramped up literally hundreds of New tools every week for the past three or four months. At some point that has to slow down. There will be consolidation among the tools and, you know, some good tools will last and some good tools won't be discovered, you know, for all of the reasons that the things happen. But it's an exciting time to be a copywriter and I know a lot of people are panicked about it. I'm excited about it. I actually think that good copywriters who learn how to harness the power of AI, of tools, even, even the ability just to talk about them and using them with their clients are going to succeed. You know, that's the, the microcosm of marketing. Now, who knows what AI does to the world? You know, there. That's a bigger question than maybe you and to be able to solve in a short discussion.

Well, I, I'm happy to hear you say that because I think the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle, right? It's not going to be, forget it, we're done. It's going to take over our, all our jobs, right? But at the same time, I'm seeing a lot of people being resistant out there in conversations and in social media to the point of being belligerent. And I think the answer, again, lies somewhere in the middle. What makes you, what factors make you the most optimistic about this?

For me, as I've played around with the tools, there's this opportunity to use AI to increase not just our production, the amount of work that we can get done, but to improve the kind of thinking and strategizing that we do. And I think, you know, last, last winter, as, you know, ChatGPT sort of sprang everything, you know, on us. And it's like, hey, here's this new thing. And everybody got excited about it. And I think the initial reaction was, oh my gosh, this thing is good enough to replace copywriters. You know, it writes emails pretty well. You know, initially it was like it wrote them okay, and you could go in and change them up. People have learned how to change the inputs, the prompts, and you can actually get some very good, well written email out of it. So I think that initial excitement was like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, this could replace, you know, what we do. But as I've played with it, I think it's less about being replaced as a person and more about how do we change our skill sets so that we are using this tool, this more powerful tool to help us do the things that we do for our clients. So, you know, you think about, you Know when, when the automatic hammer was invented, right. Instead of having pound a hammer, you know, seven or eight times to drive one nail, you can, you know, one punch and it hits the nail. And now carpentry or construction is that much faster. That's what AI, most AI tools are for us. It helps us do some of this stuff faster. And then even as I've played with it more, it's less about producing writing faster, but it, because it helps us strategize and think and be creative, doesn't actually, for at least for me, it doesn't shorten the time that I'm writing because a lot of that work now goes into the strategy and the thinking. But it, if I'm using it as a back and forth tool, it sharpens the strategy, it sharpens the thinking, sharpens the copy. And you know, as it comes back, it's almost like having a junior writer that's sitting with you, you know, and, or a junior thinker. And it can ask you questions, it can push back. Basically, whatever you tell it to do, it will do. And so that's the thing that's got me the most excited. It's almost like a vitamin for your brain in some ways.

Oh, vitamin for your brain. I like that and I like the, I like the analogy you gave us there. One that I've been using lately. Because none of these are perfect, right? Because this is something, it's completely different, but we need, it's new. We need mental models. So I'm a drummer. Um, I mean, I don't play actively because drums is the one instrument that's, you know, forget it. If you live in a neighborhood somewhere, you got neighbors. But one of the things that happened back in the 1980s is, you know, you know, you and I were talking about our age. You remember those days, right?

That's right.

Electric drum kits came out.

Exactly.

And what's happened since then? It was a phase, Right. Suddenly everyone converted to a fully electric kit. What, what happened is it was too much. And then the, you know, the, the, the, the pendulum started swinging the other way and now it's somewhere in the middle. What you see is a lot of drummers these days incorporate electronic drums and machines, drum machines with their acoustic kit. And what you will never see, Rob, I've never seen this. I've been to a bunch of concerts. I've never seen the whole band leave the stage, leave the drummer there to do his or her drum solo. And then the drummer also walk off and let the machine do the solo. Yeah, right. We clap and go crazy. For a human out there doing his or her thing, nobody is ever going to clap and go crazy for the whole band leaving and then now the machine's doing its thing.

No, I, I, that's a great analogy because even like you said today, drummers are using, you know, standard drum kits. They're using, you know, the, the electronic drum kits and the combination. They'll, they'll use the electronic kit to do the stuff that they're not so good at. So an electronic kit, for instance, is really good at keeping a standard beat right. And, and staying right on that beat, which is, I mean, I, I don't, I'm not a very good drummer. I've played the drums a few times and I, that's, to me, you know, as you learn, it's like the hardest thing is to keep that consistent beat, not speed up, not slow down. And, and so you can use the kit for what it's good for and you can use the electronic setup for what it's good for. And together they make it make you a better musician.

Absolutely. You can bring in sounds that you wouldn't be able to bring in otherwise. And you know, Neil Pert from Rush used to have back in the 70s and 80s, you know, all these bells and timpani and kettle drums and all this crazy stuff that was just impractical to take with you on tour. So now you can have it. All those elements you can have in a kit. So, but again, it was never for a brief period, at least in his example, the whole kit was electric and because of the fad. Right. So I think that's kind of where we're going now. It's like people are taking it to extremes.

For sure.

Will settle.

Yeah, you're right. In fact, some of that pendulum swing is already happening. So there are a lot of enterprise level big companies, because of the legal risks with AI generated copy and content that are saying we're not okay with this yet. And so you are not allowed to use generative AI for images, for words and that, you know, obviously this is going to moderate, but you know, there's that when there's this legal risk, we don't actually own the words coming from a generative AI yet. And all of that law is going to take a decade to figure out. But you know, companies are basically saying, okay, wait, hold on. You know, we're all excited about this thing. Yes, it may help us save time, it may help us do things better, but we need to make sure that the ducks are lined up. We're seeing that happening in enterprise level companies because obviously the legal risk for them can be very expensive. That'll trickle down into smaller companies as well. And of course, there are going to be companies that are okay with that risk and are going to want to play around and push. But, you know, we've been doing, we've been in this a, the generative AI world practically for maybe eight months, nine months. It's been around for longer than that. But that, you know, the excitement is there and all of this stuff's got to be worked out. So there's. Yeah, there's a lot of working out left to do.

Well, let's, let's move into some uses that you're really excited about right now. Maybe we can touch on three or four of them. You know, there's, we, we all know already about the. Okay, there's the research element, which, you know, it's okay. There are some drawbacks depending on the, the AI you're using. There's the. This is too long. Can you condense it down to 400 words? But let's talk about some stuff outside of that, you know, that you're starting to get really excited about that we can leverage as writers and copywriters.

Yeah. So prospecting is really hard as a copywriter. And, you know, you've talked, you've talked about this with, with your podcast for years. It's a bit of a numbers game to do it. Right. And obviously you don't want to be sending out junk to, you know, to make those numbers. You don't, you don't send out 100 pitch that you're just typing together, you know, as quick as you can. You've got to put some thought into it. Right. So one of the things that, that we've taught, you know, people in our groups is a process for setting up what we would call an MVP pitch. And I'll quickly sort of walk through that. You know, we, I can come back and we can teach this entire thing if it's, if it's helpful at some point. But when I am researching prospects that I want to pitch, I will find out a few things about them. Obviously, you find their contact information, their, you know, some, something like that. And then I will go to their content, to their website, to their emails, whatever, and I'll try to identify something that I might be able to help them with. Obviously, I'm looking for a problem to solve. Right. And as I'm gathering this information, I put it into a spreadsheet so I Have, you know, my contact. I have, you know, something, something that's positive, like what I call connection content. So it's, you know, you and I are in the same LinkedIn group or it might be deeper than that. You know, I've been following you for a while. I love this thing that you do. I'm sure you see this and people pitching you for your podcast, like, hey, you know, episode, whatever, was fantastic. And I learned this thing from you, something to connect with. And then I also start recording problems that I think I can help them with. Sometimes it's obvious, you know, the, the copy is bad on the website or they're not sending out a welcome sequence to the email, whatever, I, I identify that and I put that into my tracking sheet and I can do that for, you know, while I'm doing my, my looking for clients to pitch, I might collect 20, 30, 50 of those. In fact, if I've got it, if I'm doing it right, it's the kind of thing that I can have a VA or somebody else help me with because I say, this is the kind of company I'm looking for. This is the kind of problem that I can solve. Find some specifics, you know, on the site and let's put it into this tracking sheet. Ultimately, I get a tracking sheet that's got 50 or 60 lines in it of people that I might be able to pitch again, something that I can connect them with, some kind of a problem statement. And then of course, you know, the rest of my pitch would be about how I can help them solve this problem. Now, using Chat GPT and a plugin with Chat GBT that goes to Google Sheets, I can basically say, here's the template for my pitch. I want you to pull that first initial, you know, connection content. I want you to slip it into the place on my pitch that I, that it belongs. I want you to pull the problem and put that into the pitch where it belongs. I want you to fill in this other data that I've provided about me, the problem I can solve, you know, what, whatever the offer is that I'm making that quick, easy. Yes. And I can basically say to ChatGPT, do it for everything in the lines of that Google sheet and in less than two minutes, it will piece together how, you know, 40, 50, 100 pitches that are built to my template that are, are really good. Literally would have taken me days to do that myself. And Chat GPT can do it in minutes. Now, Chat GPT didn't go find the content right, Like I had to do that or somebody had to do that. But actually piecing together the pitch, you know, that final step, it literally can save days of time. That's just one way that, that these kinds of tools can help with the time. Now I've got 50 pitches that I can send out in a week or in a day. However, you know, I want to send them out to balance that. Done. And if I don't like what Chat GBT has written exactly, you know, how they filled out my, I can basically just say, hey, take another look at it and write it a little bit more friendly or yeah, you do that pushback. Right. And you know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not using Chat GPT to write, you know, the work that I'm doing for that particular client. I'm just using it to speed up this process for, you know, filling out my templates, getting it out there. And you know, if, if I can send out 100 pitches at A, and let's say the hit rate is 2%, which is low, you know, maybe it should probably be more like five to ten. But you know, let's say I booked two clients for every hundred I send out. Two clients could be enough to get me through the first half of this month. Right. And if I can do that twice a month, I've, I've literally filled my, my client roster. So that's just one thing that I'm really excited about. The speed and the help that, that at least Chat GPT with plugins can help me do.

Tell me about the plugin for, for Google Sheets that you're using for that.

Yeah, so it, I, I believe it's just called GPT for Sheets. Okay, I'll have to pull up my AI, but I, there are so many plugins now. If you go through, you know, the plugin store you have, if you have to have a paid membership to OpenAI which gives you ChatGPT4, there's a plug in store. They don't cost anything, but you can search through and so you can search for sheets I've used. I'm pretty sure the one I've used is called Sheets for GPT. There are one or two others that I've seen that I haven't tried, maybe better. Obviously you don't need to use a plugin to do this. You could use a tool like Zapier or make to connect sheets, you know, with OpenAI on the back end using the API. There's a workaround there if you don't want to actually use the plugins, but that's, you know, two different ways to do that same. I mean, amazing time saving process.

That's pretty amazing. That is pretty amazing that it could actually cobble this together and get you, you know, even if it got you 90% there with all of them. I mean, I don't know about you, but give me something that's mostly cooked, you know, I can refine it, take it to the finish line.

Exactly.

Very easily.

And when I was testing it, what I was amazed with is Chat GPT has a little bit of a mind of its own. I'm personifying something that doesn't really have human personality, but it doesn't always write exactly the template that I feed it. It does massage it based on the content that I've fed it into the sheets. And so sometimes what I would get back is I'm like, actually I like that better than the way I was saying. And some of what I get back is, again, it's better than what I was thinking as it's assembling it together. But you're right that back and forth, you need to massage that last 10% or where I can just say wrong word. I would put this word in instead. Again, you're still saving days worth of effort.

I love it. I love it. All right, so that's a great one. What would be another one that you're really excited about right now?

Yeah, so another one if anybody listening is like, me, I hate creating content for, for social media pain in the butt to do. I'm not a designer. And so, you know, putting it into, you know, cool designs, whatever, is again, another. It's just, it's something that I would hire a VA to do if I even get around to doing that. Right. So I know there are definitely copywriters out there who are great at this stuff, but you could take a topic, and this is something, again, that I've played around with. You can take a topic and something that you would talk about normally. So, you know, you might take one of your frameworks, Ed, and just say, hey, you know, again, we're talking to a tool like ChatGPT, or you might use Bard or Claude or, you know, one of the other generative AI tools. You basically say, I'd love to have 25 captions, ideas that I can share on Twitter or on Instagram or on LinkedIn on this topic. And again, you're not just saying it's not a one line prompt. Right. You're giving it your framework, you're telling it A little bit about what you think, and then it will churn the audience, you know.

The audience.

Yeah, exactly. You talk about your audience, talk about the voice you want to write in, if that's important to you. And. And you can tell it, you know, 10, you can tell it 100, whatever. And these tools will give you these captions, and then I can go through and like, yeah, I like that one. I don't like that one. That's. This sounds exactly like I would do. But once I have the content that I'm happy with, I can actually take that to a Canva. And again, using. Using a tool like Zapier or Make, I can make this happen automatic, automatically take that into Canva and into a template in Canva, literally in seconds, can generate a graphic, you know, that has that phrase on it. So it's not just a caption that's going in the comments on. On something in, say, Instagram, but it's actually creating a nice piece of artwork. And again, in seconds, I can have 25, 30, 50 posts ready to go. And then again, I can connect that to Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever I want that to show up using Zapier make, and I can actually make the posting automatic. So with. With, you know, maybe 30 minutes of work up front saying, hey, this is what I want to talk about. These are some of the ideas that I'm thinking about. You know, give me some of this stuff, and then two or three minutes later, have all of these posts ready to go created. It's just, again, it's. It smooths out these processes that I hate, and it does that work for me, and it lets me do the thinking part, which I'm pretty good at, which is that this is the stuff I want to talk about. These are my frame, this is the audience that I'm talking about. This is the strategy. And then I just let the tool actually do the stuff that I don't want to do myself.

Have you tried? Because I've been doing a lot of thinking about this that you just talked about. Have you tried to see what it could do? If you're sitting on a gold mine of content that could be repurposed in many different ways, that. That is my biggest pain right now is I don't need it. Hey, give me some ideas I got. I'm sitting on years of stuff that's evergreen.

Yep.

It's like, can you sort through this gold mine in mine for golden nuggets? Mine the golden nuggets out.

So this is the Next big thing that Kira and I are going to be doing, you know, at the copywriter club is there are tools like wisdom AI, wisdom AI.com, which is, it's basically a, a coach in the box kind of a tool where you can take all of your podcast transcripts, or you can take course transcripts, or you can take, you know, anything that you've written. So newsletters, emails, whatever, you can upload that into a tool like Wisdom AI. And Wisdom is not the only one that's out there. There are five or six of them that I've heard of and basically it creates a coach type chatbot that then is, let's call it the Ed, the Ed Bot, where it's like I can now ask the Ed Bot about anything that has happened on the podcast in the past and just say, hey, you know, I'm thinking about profitability of my copy. You know, what's it, what should I be doing as far as my copywriting business? Profitability. What is some good profit margin? And it will pull up all of those great conversations you've had in the past that talk about this stuff. In fact, it can even link into some of the documents that you might have supporting it. So, you know, if there is a spreadsheet that helps you figure out, you know, what should my profit margin be in order to pay for all this other stuff in my business, it can make that available too and, and basically do some of that work. Now it's not talking to you Ed, but it is talking to all of the back catalog of Ed's thinking. And these are the kinds of tools I think we're going to see a lot of coaches start creating these. So you, you'll have the Amy Porterfield bot or you know, the, the thing of whatever, whoever the coach is that, you know, you're, you're familiar Marie Forleo or Tony Robbins or whatever and inst, you know, thousands of dollars for a one on one time with them, you may be able to pay $30 and just have all access to, you know, to their wisdom. Obviously, copywriters are tremendous content creators. So we have a lot of the stuff that we've created, you know, for our list for our own businesses, whatever that we could put into something like that as well. So yeah, there's, that's just yet another way and I think that's one of the next big things that Kira and I are going to be doing, you know, in our business as well.

Well, I think there's a huge opportunity, even if even beyond Your own content. You know, if you write a blog or have a podcast or have a newsletter, which is helping clients figure this stuff out.

Exactly.

You know.

Yeah, exactly. Imagine taking that tool to a client and say, hey, look, you've got this course. Let me help you create an entire new product that can generate revenue for you. Like, now you're. And this is the game changer with AI now you're not showing up as a writer, which is, in my opinion, it's always kind of been a mistake. You need to show up as a problem solver and as a partner for your clients. And if you're doing that, you're basically saying, hey, I can help you create new revenue in your business. You are so much more valuable, much, much more valuable than a content writer who can easily be replaced by a generative AI tool that's, you know, is doing that. Thing is, you're showing up as the expert.

I love that. I actually wanted to ask you more about that a little bit later, but let's, let's address it now because this is, this is a great time to do it. I think that I've been saying this for a long time. The days of order taking as a writer are coming to an end, you know, definitely. And, you know, it's like the order take, like, okay, what do you need written? You know, what do you need done? Those days are numbered. We need to be proactive. We need to show up differently. We need to be the trusted advisor. A lot of writers freak out when I say this because they say, well, but I'm just a writer. And my whole point is you're more than a writer, but you need to believe it. You need to believe that. I. I can't make you believe that. So. But when I, I think when people hear examples, they start seeing, you know what, I kind of do that already, or I have done that, or I am doing that. So you just gave us a great one. Right. You can come in for a client who's got great content that's not being fully leveraged and show them how they could either, you know, leverage it better or create additional revenue streams from that. Can you give us a couple of other examples of how writers and copywriters can start repositioning themselves to provide different kind of value with AI?

Yeah. And you and I are on the same wavelength here. Kira and I have taught this in a lot of our programs. The number one thing we teach is you are not just that order taker, that writer who just shows up. You know, if somebody asks You, I need a website. Can you help me write a website? Your first answer should not be, yes, I can help you write a website. Your first thing should be asking questions about, well, what, what do we need the website for? Like, what is the problem we're trying to solve? Right? Because copywriters are problem solvers and sometimes the problem is solvable with copy, but sometimes it's not. You know, and, and a lot of copywriters, I'm sure you've seen this happen where a client will come to you and say, hey, this, you know, this launch failed, this sales page failed. You take a look at the, the copy and the copy is actually pretty good. And you're thinking, you know, what would I change to make the copy better? But then you look at some of the other things that they're doing in their business and that's actually the reason why, you know, they're not talking to the right audience, for instance. And so you can advise them on that. Or the offer itself is a terrible offer. Copy is great, but it's just not going to connect. Right? So you can now change up the offer. So, so let's take that offer idea and let's say that, you know, you're thinking about offers. So you've probably paid attention to what Alex Hormozi talks about in his book about 100 million dollar offers. Or maybe you've seen some of the teachings that Todd Brown has around creating irresistible sin offers that he calls. And we could take some of those ideas and again feed them into a tool like Chat gbt. There are other tools that would do it as well. Say, you know, these are the things that a good offer includes. You know, maybe they're, we put in some things about bonuses, we put in some things about making it irresistible and we can then feed in the offer that we have. Maybe it's our own offer, maybe it's a client's offer and say, you know, how do I take this and get to where we want to go using some of these other frameworks. Now we can do that with our brains. You know, we understand the frameworks and we can kind of suss it out and, and it will take several hours, but we can get there using a chat, A tool like Chat GPT to do not all of the work, but you know, to do some of that work can get us there a lot faster. In fact, you can even set it up to, you know, say, here's all this stuff that Alex Hormozy teaches or Todd Brown teaches or here are my ideas around an offer. Use that to ask me questions about this offer so that I can improve it. And then you get this back and forth. It's like, have you thought about, you know, focusing on the value you create? Like, what is the value? You know, and having ChatGPT almost act as an offer coach to you as you think through this stuff can be again, another game changer. Right? So now the, the thing to make this work is that what you said earlier is if you're showing up and say, well, I'm just a writer, I don't know that stuff. Now's the time when writers who are serious about staying writers need to get smart about marketing strategy. And designers who want to be designers need to get smart about marketing strategy. Because if the AI tools can do the basic stuff, that means that we need to up level our skill set in order to be able to do that top level. I know how to guide the tools to get the output that we need. And if you get really good at that, the tools, then they're just tools, they're not a threat.

I think it's brilliant and I'm going to play devil's advocate and push back a little bit on that. What happens when you finally muster the courage to show up that way and start thinking that way and repositioning that way, and you're talking to a potential client and they say, we need this. And you do exactly what you just said, well, what are you trying to accomplish? And you start going down that path and they don't want to hear it because they feel like they've gotten everything figured out. What do you do when your vision was, I would be working with clients who actually want my advice and want to be questioned and want to be a thought partner. But now everyone I talk to, it's like, no, we already spec that out. We've already figured that out. Here's what we need you to do. How much?

Yeah, so that's a great question. And this is the same challenge that we have, you know, as copywriters. Like, well, I have this research process and clients push back, say, ah, we've already done our own research, right? Or we don't need the research, we know who our customers is. It's really the same problem. And you have a decision. You can say, okay, I'm willing to work within those constraints that the client has, or actually, no, I need to work with a higher level client, somebody who understands the value that I bring. And in that case, you need to find better clients. Now, oftentimes those Decisions are driven by economic realities. You know, if you're desperate for a client, you know, we'll say yes sometimes to those less than perfect, you know, ideal circumstances. But hopefully, if we're in that situation, we're able to start to leverage some of this and say, okay. And I've heard you talk about this concept of laddering up, right, where you take. You take a client that's not perfect, it's not in your niche, it's not what you're paying for, not how much you want to be paid, but you use that in order to find the next client that's closer to what you want. And I would do the same thing. If, if you're stuck and unable to, you know, push those, those boundaries the client sets, then if you have to take the job, but use it to ladder up to the client, that does allow you to do that. Or you can say, nope, sorry, that's my process. And I'm, you know, I believe in it. And, and talk about, like, why the process is important, the value that you bring to the table, and following your process or doing it your way. Clients own their businesses. They get to decide, you know, and it is their business at the end of the day, and they are ultimately responsible, which is why clients will change our copy, clients will change our strategies. But if you're showing up as the very best strategist that you can be, and you are helping a client, adding value as much as you can, then you're doing what you should be doing.

Amen.

Yeah.

I think you do have a decision to make, and you're right. I mean, you have to be practical. There are times when you have to do what you have to do. But at the end of the day, you still have to start moving in a certain direction. If you don't start moving, you're going to be taken, you're going to be dragged in a different direction by, by the market. So. Well said. Let's. Along these lines, let's talk a little bit about. And I want to come back. I, you know, with. I know you had several other ideas. Maybe we can touch on another one on how you could leverage AI. But, you know, there's all kinds of talk in there. This has been the most anticipated recession that I've ever been through. It's like, it's coming. It's coming some. Okay, where is it? Oh, next year.

Yeah, it's next year, exactly.

But. But all that's doing is creating a lot of anxiety. It's creating a lot of inaction in the way of, you know, people not investing like they should in their marketing. We're starting to see some of that clear up. I think, you know, people can only. And businesses can only hold off for so long, but there's still a threat of a potential recession here. So what can we do to better prepare as writers, copywriters, and strategists to not only do well, but come out of whatever that is and when it is stronger than we were going into it?

Yeah, this is actually a foundational question because the economy is always going to be out there, right? Sometimes it's going to be good, sometimes it's going to be bad. But we all have the same economy. And I've talked to copywriters in the last two weeks who have literally in the last four months, gone from zero in income to more than 10k a month. And then other copywriters who've gone the exact opposite, you know, had all of their clients disappear. And you have to say, okay, what's the difference here? Now, it's not always the copywriter's fault. You know, client decides to stop spending or whatever. Those are realities that we have to learn how to deal with. But, and this is. This isn't even really AI related. This is business related. And that is, it doesn't matter what the economy is. We are 100 responsible, 100 responsible for whatever we do to sell ourselves, to grow our business, to find clients. And so if for some reason our business is suddenly not doing as well, it's not because we've become bad at what we've done, but it's because we need to change something in order to react to whatever it is. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's clients that are worried about AI. Maybe it's something else. Maybe I've just gotten lazy in my pitching, and so I don't have that pipeline, you know, that I used to have. But the fact that there are copywriters who are succeeding really, really well at the same time that they're copywriters that are struggling, I've got to say, it's not the economy. It's our ability to adjust and to make changes. You know, maybe we need to switch up our offer a little bit so that clients have an easier. Yes, for a while. Maybe we need to change the niche because the particular niche has, you know, for economic reasons, whatever has changed. And people aren't investing in that niche, but they are suddenly investing in another. So SaaS and tech for the last 612 months have been a little rough. There have been a layoffs in this space. And a lot of those companies aren't trying to invest in marketing the way that they, they were before you. If you've been working in those industries, you might have to temporarily switch and find some additional clients in order to, you know, wait out that reality. But, and this is true of all of us, we have to. We can't blame the economy. We can't blame AI even if it is the economy and AI that causes the problem, because how we respond is on us. And we just need to figure out, okay, how do I. What am I going to do differently? How do I adjust here? That's actually, I think the business skill that freelancers need more than anything, you know, more than even writing well or the ability to pitch. It's that ability to adjust when things aren't going quite the way you expect.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It is what it is, right? We. We just need to learn how to. I think the, one of the dangers of the past three years has been that, you know, it made a lot of us lazy because the business was just coming in, coming in and coming in, and we didn't have to do anything, lift a finger to get the business, and things are shifting. So now we have to get better. Let's come back to, you know, the ideas where you were giving us a little bit earlier on things you could do, and specifically because you mentioned offers, you know, especially with outbound marketing outreach. What, what could be some things to think about in terms of how we pitch, what call to action or offer we talk about as opposed to, hey, I can do all these things for you. Let me know if you need help.

Yeah, well, I can do everything is one of the big mistakes that we all make. You know, when we start pitching, almost all of us make this and that. And anytime you say, I can do anything, you're basically forcing the client to figure out how to work with you. Right. And so, you know, as I was talking about that process for creating a pitch, and I know I kind of went through it really fast and sort of touched on it, but spending some time to figure out what is the problem that whoever you were talking to has matters because. And you can adjust, you know, what you offer to them based, you know, on the problem, but you need to find something that they need help with. And if, if you find a thing that is a problem for them or a challenge or even it's, you know, it's like, let's say you're an email copywriter and you discover that, you know, the emails that you're writing, they're great emails but nobody's ever sending them out because your clients don't actually like getting into their ESP or you know, whatever you know, the engine is for sending them out. Why don't you start a service? You don't even have to do this. You could hire a VA to do this. But it's like, hey, not only will I write the emails, but I'm going to drop them into your emailer, I will schedule them to go out for it. You like anything you can take off of your clients plate to make life easy for them is something. And I mean they have to be willing to pay, they have to know the value of that. And that's part of that conversation. But that's how you make those shifts and how you can change up your offer. So, you know, if you're a website copywriter and you're having a hard time selling websites, okay, what is the smallest ask that you can make or what is the, the easiest to say yes ass that you can make when you, you know, are talking to them one on one or you're making a pitch or whatever? Maybe it's, can I share a couple of ideas that might improve the conversions on your website? Maybe it's, I have this, this offer, it's a website audit for X number of dollars and I guarantee that you'll give ideas for improving your website or I'll, you know, help rewrite four or five lines, whatever that offer is. And it may be different for every client. It might be something you can package and, and make to all of your clients, but you, you need to connect it to the thing that the person you're talking to needs help with. And, and that goes back to again, problem solving, not copywriting.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's really, I guess tying thinking back about what your school's core skills are and where you've helped clients in the past and then okay, what, what could I package there? I. One of the things that I love to do is, is package offers where clients can get quick wins. You know, where I know It's a problem 80% of the time. And the way I'm going to show them how to shift, especially with email marketing, is if you make these little changes not very onerous. You know, the upside is tremendous. I love finding opportunities like that because it's like a magic trick, right? It's like suddenly so, so think about, I guess to the audience is what have you done in the past that, that generated, you know, those kinds of aha moments. And it doesn't have to be something tangible. So for you, for those of you who are content writers, it doesn't have to be, well, it generated this number of leads, but how did it make your contacts job a lot easier? How were you able to take a limited budget and repurpose content for them in a way that, you know, got them a lot of great stuff from just one piece? I don't know. There's so many possibilities there, but you have to do something thinking every, every.

Business has hidden money. You know, it's just, it's out there. You know, it might be an abandoned cart sequence. You know, people have checked out your client's course or, you know, something else and they leave. Well, what if you could get 10% of them to come back and, you know, let's say it's a $3,000 course and 100 people see it and leave. You get 10% of them to come back and purchase. That's a $30,000 add to your client. Now what's that abandoned cart sequence worth now that those numbers may be, you know, high for the average, you know, so what if you only get 3,000 additional dollars, but. But it's repeating every month for, you know, for the next year or two because they're able to use this over and over again. That's a more than $50,000 add on to their business, and you've almost created that out of nothing. It was there. They don't have time to go find it or to deal with it. But you as a copywriter, slash problem solver, can see those needs and show up and do that. And again, don't know how to write an abandoned card sequence. Ask ChatGPT or Bard how to do it and, you know, it will give you some of that feedback. So there are tools that can make it even easier for you.

Absolutely. And in the content creation area, it could be, hey, helping a client figure out, all right, the content that people have prospects have opted in for over the past six months. You know, let's do, let's find out how much they were followed up with or if at all. And then let's take those and create a, you know, maybe a new, very simple email campaign to follow up with those people. Because they downloaded this white paper and these case studies or whatever it could have been. I mean, there's all kinds of possibilities, right? I think content repurposing is one of the biggest opportunities for, for content people. That's Just nobody's bringing it up. We're so programmed to just create new stuff.

But, yeah, yeah, I mean, you mentioned, you know, you've got all of this. You've got, what, 400 some odd episodes of something.

But then I got a bunch of other stuff, 80% of which is everything.

Right.

Yeah.

So. So being able to take that and, and reuse it in new ways. There are a couple of tools, actually, that we've started using for our podcast. One is called Swell AI. There's a similar tool called, I think it's Descript. And basically what it does is you put in the transcript and it will kick out all you. You tell it what to kick out, but it'll kick out content for social media, for email, for, you know, direct messages, whatever, all related to the stuff that you talked about in that transcript. And it kind of goes through. It obviously does things like transcripts and time scoring and all of that. But those tools, Magic, which is a very. Yeah, Cast Magic is another one. Yeah. I mean, I mean, again, there are literally 200 new tools coming online every week.

It's insane. It's insane.

There's but.

But there's more of these than what.

We can test best.

You can, you can use these tools and I love the idea. I'm glad you mentioned, hey, you know, you could hire a VA who's savvy about this stuff, but trainable, I mean, you don't need the top VA when it comes to this because this stuff is. Is trainable. These are trainable processes. Do it yourself. First, find someone who can help you on the admin side create standardized operating procedures, and you could help clients, I mean, in measurable ways, using tools that. I mean, that's the whole point of our conversation today, that to make it much more productive. So as we wrap up, I do want to, since you mentioned, hey, 200 of these apps coming out like every single week. It's insane. One of my bigger question is, I'm so overwhelmed by all the possibilities, and I subscribe to a few newsletters about AI. It's funny, you know, a couple of months ago, some of these newsletters were publishing cheat sheets of, you know, hey, here's a cheat sheet. And it's gotten so crazy that now it's like the best cheat sheets. So now, now we're getting really meta. So it. Now it's download this best cheat sheets cheat sheet. And what. Where is this going? The best cheat sheet of the best cheat sheet Cheat sheets. I mean, like, is this going to sound like a Dr. Seuss novel. How do you keep up with it and how do you filter out the stuff that's just not really going to be relevant and helpful today?

Yeah, so, and this will probably a little different for everyone, but I subscribe to a bunch of AI newsletters as well. In fact, I've seen the same thing happening and at first I was like, oh yeah, I'm reading them all. And then I, you know, kind of stopped reading a few of them because they just weren't as deep as maybe some of the others. So it's really about experimenting. So find somebody to follow, you know, a couple of names that I, I would follow outside of, you know, what we're doing, you know, with our AI podcast or whatever. Sam woods, great guy, super smart thinker around AI and copywriting. Rob Lennon is a content guy who's been experimenting with a lot of AI. In fact, he's created an AI, sort of like a, I don't want to call her a bot, but an artificial intelligent personality that he has a podcast with where he's talking to the AI and it's responding back and it's kind of cool. But find a few people just to follow and watch. And then the other thing is I would just play around with some of the tools. So, you know, if you're a content creator and it's, I mean now it's. The problem is like finding the right tools, right? Start with chat GPT Bard if you can get access to Claude, you know, these are kind of like the big ones. Pie, I think is another one that's available on iPhone and just play with them, right? Ask them questions, test them out. We, you actually shared a challenge that we did with people a few weeks ago where it, we basically just took five days and said, hey, here's you know what to drop in. Like have it. Tell it a little bit about yourself and have it recommend some movies to me, right? Not work related at all, but just getting comfortable with how the tool works. And then, and you know, we said, okay, create, you know, if I'm, if I'm at a conference and I need an introduction written for me, here's a little bit about me. Write an introduction that somebody could use to introduce me to speak on stage. Right. Like again, probably not work related to something that we're doing right now, but you're, you're sort of feeling out what the tools can do. And as you find tools that you like, especially if they have a paid option and it's helping you and doing well, buy the Paid option. Because again, there's going to be this great sort out where the tools that can't make money are going to fall by the wayside. And it is worth investing in one or two, three, maybe four ish tools that you like that you use for helping you do things better so that they'll stick around and then of course share them, but then be open to, you know, changes new things coming online. It's like, hey, this new version of Swell AI, or decrypt or, or Cast Magic or what, like it does that, but it also does these other things. Try it out, sign up for the free use, you know, the trial period, whatever. Is it better if it's better, switch if it's not better, stick with what you're doing, you know, so it's just a matter of exploring, playing and finding a couple voices that are kind of doing the same thing that you can listen to.

I and I would underscore that last part because there's a limit to. Well, experimentation is super important, but if you can get ideas on how to use these tools better. Just listening to you today, I got a bunch of new ideas. It's like, wow, I could have kept playing on my own, but if I don't have inputs, you know, on how I can have a conversation and have chat GPT, for instance, challenge me, you know, and show me where the holes are, I'm not going to be able to use it to its fullest potential.

So, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, you've been doing a bunch of podcast interviews about AI. It's a good place to start. Listen to what people are saying about it, try out some of the suggestions they make, you know, but it's easy to get overwhelmed. So you do not need to listen to everybody. You do not need to feel like you need to try every tool. One new tool a week maybe, or, you know, one or two newsletters. And if they're not giving you what you need, find a different one. Right. Don't feel like you need to know it all because nobody knows what they all. We're just at the beginning of this thing and some knowledge is. Is enough to make you almost an expert compared to our clients. Certainly.

Amen. So, Rob, where can I. Two things. Where can I send people to learn more about what you're doing? I know you're talking a lot about the stuff. You got a new podcast on AI for writers and copywriters. So tell us about that first.

Yeah, so Kira and I have put together a podcast all about this stuff. We've interviewed several people who are creating a copywriters who are using them, even other experts outside of copywriting and the ways that they're using AI. It's called AI for Creative Entrepreneurs. You can find it at AI for Creative Entrepreneurs.com or on YouTube. So that's, you know, that's that, you know, the informational side, we've created a short course about it as well. And there's information there if people, you know, want to check that out too. But as far as AI stuff goes, that's. That's where we focus most of our efforts about AI.

Perfect. And for those who want to learn more about what you guys are doing just in general and your excellent newsletter, where can we send them?

Yeah, go to the copywriterclub.com obviously, we have our podcast as well. You can sign up there. We have a free Facebook group. All of the things. Right. We talk about a lot of the same things that you talk about, Ed. I think there's, in fact, I know there's a bunch of people who listen to our podcast who love what you do and, you know, so hopefully there's something in common that people can find there.

Awesome. All right, well, Rob, thanks for sharing some time with us today, man. This is. I learned a lot and my head hurts a little bit, but I appreciate you.

It's scary. Yeah, it's scary, but it's exciting. And if we figure it out and learn it now, you know, a year from now, there's going to be so many AI expert copywriters in the world, and that's just going to be a great thing.

What an exciting time. Thanks. Appreciate you being here.

Yep.

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, Burn More in Less Time. The Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com or you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.