EP 29: Using ChatGPT to Build Your Business Base

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life.

Is Chat GPT the new secret weapon for entrepreneurs? I think it might be. That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about today on Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream podcast and newsletter bringing you the latest in what's happening in the AI world, but also how we can use all of these new developments and tools to grow our businesses and just to grow our own careers. So that's one of the things that we're going to be talking about today with Stephen Schneider. Stephen is a strategy and LinkedIn specialist. Stephen, thank you for joining the show.

Thanks, Jordan. Excited to be here.

All right, Stephen. And also, Stephen wins an award because he's joining us from Seattle. So this is a live show and this is 7:30am Central. So what we're talking 5, 5:30.

Yep.

Hey, Steven. Steven is bringing it today. So if you're joining us on the live, you got to come in with the questions. All right, so let's, let's talk about what's going on in the world of AI news before we get back into using ChatGPT to build your business base. So this is an interesting one, Stephen. So there's been conflicting reports that the US Military, the Air Force, was running an AI drone simulation in which the AI decided to kill its own operator because it determined that its own operator was keeping it from carrying out its mission was which is to destroy the enemy. I both chuckled and feared for my life when I read this. Stephen, what are your thoughts on the AI technology going all the way to the US Air Force?

Pretty similar to yours. I think that we're entering that joked about Terminator stage of AI, where it's like they actually become so smart that they realize that they don't need us. Hopefully they can decide. It reminds me of, like, you know, when we start mixing this sort of technology with, like, the Boston Dynamics robots, it's like, yes, those, those two should be as far away from each other as possible, especially now that we know with this. And then you also bring it back to, like, early stages with Facebook's chat bots and how they created their own language and yeah, it's scary stuff, but I mean, it's also exciting to see that the technology is advanced that far. So it's kind of like damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Yeah, exactly. Which is a great reminder we're going to throw something with Boston Dynamics robots in the newsletter today. We haven't shared a little gif of that yet. If you haven't seen it, it's wild. All right, another piece, which I think we'll get into your background a little bit more, Stephen, but I think your opinion on this weighs heavy. There's new reports detailing how Google's AI search is going to could kind of change publishing as we know it. So just real quick to explain what that means. You know, Google is starting to roll out more of an AI first search experience, so changing the way, you know, the traditional search. So instead of, you know, us googling something and looking at the top 10 results on page one, you know, Google's just going to kind of answer our question for us, you know, taking the best of that information from all the top pages. But what that means is fewer clicks for publishers, publisher companies going, you know, up under and going out of business. But Stephen, what's, what's your take on this? Because we'll get into your background later, but I'm really interested, what's your take?

Yeah, I mean, I think that just like anything, we're going to see SEO and Google and all of these kind of top tier tools that we have available change over time. I mean, it's, it's bound to happen. And I think that as publishers fear that their entire business is going to change like it will. But I think that as part of it, it's really just about figuring out what you need to do to survive. And I think that you have to remember Google makes money based on advertising. And so they're not going to jeopardize anything that affects their revenue model because the upside of getting more advertising is always going to be favorable to them compared to trying to get one extra subscription on Bard, if they're even going to charge for that or what that looks like in the future. But I would say that they're not gonna, they're pretty smart people over there and they're not gonna do anything that kind of makes people want to move away from their platform or stop publishing content.

Yeah. And I think if anything it is, it is just going to be interesting because I think for so long, you know, companies like specifically Google could kind of sit back, you know, and they're saying, hey, we have 93% of all search share in the US we don't need to innovate, we don't need to improve the experience much. But now this will be interesting now that there's, you know, More people are using Chat GPT instead of Google. You know, more people are using Microsoft Bing Chat instead of Google. So it's going to be interesting. So we actually have some, some Chat GPT news as well. So there's been a lot of reports buzzing around the Internet. So if, if you're on any, you know, Twitter, Reddit, so many people saying chat GPT4 is losing its performance. So a recent report kind of featured the response from an OpenAI team member saying that the GPT4 API integration has not changed. So outside platforms tapping into the ChatGPT4 API, but they didn't say anything about ChatGPT4 that you're, you know, when you're actually into the chat, they're just saying it's always evolving. Steven, have you, have, have you kind of seen any changes in performance? What do you think?

Um, I haven't. I think the only, I mean the only change I've seen which I might be out of the loop on, it was the ability to kind of read the Internet or at least like put in a blog article and you know, get a summary of it within a couple seconds. Now it just says like, I'm not able to scan the Internet, all that sort of stuff, which is a bummer because that was probably one of my most used features. But I think going back to the SEO topic, you know, it's, if anybody's ever dabbled in SEO and they know what the feeling is like when Google rolls out an algorithm update, like it's, it's scary world out there with that happens. And so I think that people have to just be susceptible to change when it comes to AI and knowing that, you know, even if they are modifying things, they're doing it with good intentions, they're not trying to, you know, ruin the quality of their products. They might be going through, you know, some sort of experimental phases, tweaking things around, seeing what works, what doesn't work. But I don't think people should view it as such a black and white on and off good versus bad thing. I think they just have to really know that a lot of those changes are going to kind of work themselves out and could potentially come back for sure.

So speaking of ChatGPT, Stephen, give us, give us a little bit kind of on your background and really just how you're using ChatGPT to grow your business right now.

Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in content marketing and large scale like affiliate blogging. You still own a content marketing company with a couple people that specialized in affiliate marketing. We owned a portfolio of about 40 websites and kind of scaled that up, went through all of the fun things that have to offer there. And now since leaving the company last year, kind of focused my efforts more on LinkedIn and see the opportunity and the potential with kind of doubling down on LinkedIn right now. And so I think that over the next like 12, 24, 36 months, my kind of focus has been on building a B2B agency for LinkedIn that can pretty much teach companies how not to write bad content. I think that company pages are one of the kind of few things that have yet to evolve on LinkedIn and nobody really knows how to create good content. And I think that the influencers and the content creators and like, people like you have it figured out, they know how to engage, you know, the community aspects, all that sort of stuff. But I mean, I've found maybe two or three company pages that can do it well, and that just comes down to social media training and kind of telling them, hey, this isn't that old stuffy corporate LinkedIn that you probably created in 2010. This is now a social media platform. Here's how to use it. And so, yeah, kind of with that in mind is kind of where I want to kind of shift my focus and building tools and resources and kind of workshops and all the stuff that can company those people to get to their goals on LinkedIn.

Yeah, so, so speaking of, I'm sure there's plenty of people listening and, you know, if you are listening live and not on the podcast, you know, feel free to drop us a comment. Nayla, thank, thank you for your comment there. Just about, you know, saying they're still book lovers, just like there still will be people who, you know, want to go old school and Google things. Definitely agree with that. But Stephen, talk, talk a little bit about for those people out there that, you know, when they heard you say that about their LinkedIn page and putting out very dry content, you know, what's, what's your hot quick take on what companies should be doing a little bit better specifically with their LinkedIn content?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the biggest thing comes down to engagement and the focus on building community. I think that many social media managers or people who leverage a company page are looking at pushing content out as their main KPI and not looking at their engagement KPIs or any of the things that come around keeping your audience engaged with your content. So what I mean by that is, you know, they're looking at how many posts do we need out per week, what's the best engaging type of content, what are the metrics around how these carousels performed, all that sort of stuff. And they're kind of aiming for impressions and likes and all sorts of stuff. But, you know, when it comes back down to it, if people are replying on your content, just like you and I, you know, if somebody pops in or adds a comment to our post, like, we wouldn't dare just leave them hanging and not reply. And so I think that that level of care around engaging with the people who are going to come back every single day and be your ICP or your target audience, that needs to become a priority for companies. And I think that when the focus is primarily on how do we create more content, how do we increase impressions, all this sort of stuff which is good for advertising, don't get me wrong, you know, in terms of, like, growth and brand awareness. But the end of the day, people buy from those they trust and people that can come back and see that they have that genuine relationship with you. And so I think that shifting more of our focus there will probably, you know, show some pretty quick results. And it's not like it's rocket science to go in there and reply to somebody. It's not that hard. It just takes that time and consistency.

Sure. You know, in, in Talking about how ChatGPT specifically can help in that, in that battle. Right. Against just not putting content out or putting dry content out. You know, if, if a small business owner maybe comes up to you and says, hey, Stephen, maybe I don't have the time to, to do this, or, you know, hey, chatgpt can't, can't speak for, for my company. How do you reply to that? How do you tell them, hey, it's worth giving this a try?

Yeah, I think that most of it really comes down to editing. I think that that's kind of one of the fewer used aspects of AI right now. I don't think it's perfect yet, but that's kind of where I'm using a lot of my stuff. Just because editing is one of those things that the writing, at least personally for me, might come a little bit natural compared to other things. But editing is super taxing for me. I have to go in there and look at word choices. I have to go in and see how are these sentences structured, does it make sense from the flow of their perspective, all that sort of stuff. And so, like, one tool I've been using pretty often is called Unfluffer, and it's a great tool that, you know, pretty much you can pop in any sort of copy and it will allow you to adjust the tone and kind of like the professionalism, how many different outputs you want. And from there you can pretty much, you know, repurpose some sort of content that allows you to now have these, like, really quick expedited sets of copy and paragraphs to kind of regurgitate and experiment with. And so I think that it's a matter of, you know, when people going back to your question ask, you know, how do I kind of leverage this tool appropriately? I think that it's just a matter of kind of seeing, like, where are your pain points, where your bottlenecks in your current content strategy, and then matching an AI tool to that specifically within ChatGPT because the prompts are so powerful on. It's just a matter of, like, you know, how. How do you word your prompts in order to get the results you want? It's kind of like, you know, when an artist looks at a canvas, you know, that canvas can become anything. It's just a matter of, like, how do you use that paint and the brushes and all the tools that you have at your disposal appropriately and in the correct combination is how I look at it.

Yeah, exactly. And just, just as a reminder, so the. The tool that Steven was talking about there on Fluffer, we'll definitely put that in the newsletter. And I know, Nayla, you had another question about, you know, any resources. So. So in our newsletter, we'll recap everything that Steven and I are talking about here, as well as some other great resources. Blair, thank you for your comment about this being a great convo Meijer engagement is something that you should give priority. Absolutely. If you do have any other questions for Stephen, please go ahead and pop them in the chat. I did want to follow up on one thing, Steven, that you mentioned. Kind of a use case that I think people aren't really using with chat. GPT is to improve their writing. I think, you know, people always think of it kind of like a search engine. Right. Like you have to ask a question or ask for something and get something out. But something that people don't do often enough, I think, is to put their copy in. Maybe they wrote it and they're not great at copy and saying, hey, make this more engaging for this audience type, or putting it in and saying, hey, cut this down and make it more succinct for this audience type. Do you have any tips for, you know, businesses or just individuals on specific ways like that they can actually use ChatGPT to get better and more engaging copy.

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies.

In the world do.

Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

Yeah, I think that a lot of it is really going to come down to experimenting with your prompts and kind of finding one that works for you. And so like something I found that works well is to try to ask ChatGPT to assume the role of different kind of expertise, all that sort of stuff. And so I think that, you know, when I go into it, I say assume the role of a LinkedIn Social Media Manager with 10 years experience who is building an agency and working on a client onboarding questionnaire. And so the more specific you get, I think that I just saw Gary V had a video like this where he did a, you know, he, he spoke to someone who translated this in a chat, but it was like this paragraph, almost like a two paragraph prompt. And I think that people are, with the instant need for gratification across all various aspects of life, they're looking for that prompt that can say, you know, make this sound better. Pretty much like what Blair said. But when you look. Sorry Blair, but when you, when it comes down to it, you know, the ChatGPT is only going to be as good as you tell it to be. You know, it's, it's a robot. So more information is always going to be better. More details and kind of like narrowing down on what your input will be is what output you get. So I think going back to the question like how people can do this, you know, start tracking your prompts, start Tweaking little phrases start, you know, doing these little things. And over time, just like anything, it's going to be really refined and kind of come, you know, a lot stronger than it was the first round.

Yeah. You know, Stephen brings up a great point. It is about proper prompting, but also priming chatgpt beforehand. We actually had a whole episode on this. We'll, we'll link it because I don't want to get into it. It's episode 24 if you go to your everydayai.com where we talk about this process. But you know, Stephen, maybe let's, let's quickly talk about some use cases maybe specifically for businesses that maybe they don't think of that they can use CHAT GPT for. You know, I think early on, when it was first released in late November, so it's been out for six months now, people just thought it's like, okay, this is going to help me get from, you know, 0 to 10 or 0 to 5 in content writing. Maybe what's, what's some use cases outside of just content writing that you think maybe businesses should pay attention to?

Yeah, I think that it's going to be actually the opposite. You know, going from 0 to 10 is kind of what everyone hopes for because it does all of the work. And I think that primarily what I've been using it for is going from 0 to 1. And so with the idea of building that agency, you know, a lot of the kind of mundane routine PDFs or SOPs, whatever you want to call them, are very easy to knock out. ChatGPT. So I'm looking at it for new client questionnaires, onboarding materials, frameworks, all the things that allow us to quickly gather resources and have this stockpile or library of assets on hand and kind of develop those frameworks over time is really going to expedite the process. And kind of, obviously they're not going to be perfect and we wouldn't dare use them as they are out of the gate from ChatGPT with clients in the future. But just getting two pages of copy written in 20 seconds is going to save so much time. And it's probably going to be a thousand times better than where I would even look at a blank document. And I think that the other extra benefit there is that I'm not feeling extra guilty if I'm looking at someone's copy and trying to translate it and learn it and all this sort of stuff, because I can kind of let the robot who's a thousand times smarter than me take it Run with it, and then I can add my own personality to it. I can rebrand it and kind of make sure that it fits our goals. But a lot of the heavy lifting is done.

Yeah, I want to pull out something that you said there. I say this too, and I think people aren't giving just whether it's the GPT technology or AI enough credit. There's people that are too proud and they're saying, hey, this isn't smart. ChatGPT or this AI doesn't get great output. If you're listening to this, whether live or on the podcast, Stephen ran a successful content agency dealing with hundreds, I'm sure, of pieces of content, great content written by humans a month. And he just said, these bots are smarter than me. You know, as a former journalist, I agree. I've written probably a million words in my life that have been published, and I know ChatGPT can write better than me. Right. So. So sorry, I just had to call that out because I think it's an important, an important piece. To bring up one other thing that I kind of, I always say, last question, Stephen. We'll see where this goes. There's always people in our lives, right? So if you are like myself and you are obviously encouraging people to use ChatGPT, there's always people that are like, oh, I'm not a writer. Right. What's maybe one kind of practical piece of advice that you can give people who maybe are on the fence and they're like, ah, you know, yeah, I'm not creating content, you know, I'm not, you know, publishing anything on the Internet. What's kind of your, your case to them to say, hey, this can still help you build your business or build your career?

Yeah, I think, I think people who are in that mindset probably just don't have enough information to decide whether it is actually worth it or not. And I think that, like anything, change is scary and change is hard to kind of embrace. And so I think that as all of this technology changes and we start to see how powerful things become, I mean, you know, when we were kind of waiting, you know, pre lobbying the show, we were even talking about how old school seems like, you know, it was two years ago when really it was probably six weeks ago, how fast AI is changing. And I think that people are going to be left in the dust if they don't at least start experimenting with. Experimenting with it and just seeing what it has to offer. And so I think that going back to kind of the idea of, you know, how do we use this properly? It's, it just comes down to practice and seeing what works and what doesn't work. But if it doesn't work the first time, you can't just say, well, this is a piece of trash. You know, it's not going to work for me. And I think that just like anything, it's only going to be as successful as the amount of time that you're willing to commit to master that tool. Because that's what it is. It's a tool. It's not a perfect, you know, script. It doesn't know how to do all the things you probably want to do immediately. But with practice and, you know, care and time, it can create some pretty amazing stuff.

Yeah, I lied. I said last question, but Nayla had it. Nayla had a great one here. So I, you know, speaking of using chat GPT old school vs new school, so she's asking if the I think this is the AIPRM Chrome extension is good or if we should use ChatGPT without it. I'll share my screen here. Steven, what's your thoughts? Using all these Chrome extensions that can expand the capabilities of ChatGPT or just using it out of the box, I'm all for it.

If there's a plugin or an extension that makes something that's good, great, then it's like, why wouldn't I use it? I think that especially with how quickly things are developing and changing, there's always going to be this new plugin, all that sort of stuff. And I think that going back to anything, if we even take a step back and look at Google right out of the box before it had all these crazy Chrome extensions. Look at Grammarly. I think that we start to see these technology change. It's like I wouldn't imagine my life now without Grammarly, but if you're looking at the difference between Google and people not even knowing that that was going to exist and be an extension of their life, I think that we're going to see the same thing with AI and ChatGPT and all these extra Chrome extensions and plugins. They're just going to be this natural extension of our workflow. When we look back on it in five years or 10 years or whatever.

It looks like then yeah, that's a great, great question. And such a good mind shift on how to look at Chat GPT. I love it. Well, we made it to the end. We thank you all for bringing these fantastic questions. As a reminder, please go to your everyday AI dot com. We're going to link some other things that Steven's been referencing so you can find all those. Also, like I said, check out episode 24. I think that's a great compliment to some of the things that Stephen was talking about here. So, Stephen, 5:30am Seattle time. I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Absolutely. Thanks, Jordan. Have a great time. All right.

And just as a reminder, like I said, please go to your everydayai.com if you want to hear more about some of the things that Stephen was talking about, we'll have in our newsletter. So sign up. And if you're watching this live as a reminder, you don't have to wake up at 5:30am Like Stephen did. You can, you know, check us out on the podcast, Spotify, Apple, all that stuff. So we won't see you tomorrow, but we will see you Monday and every other weekday with Everyday AI. Thank you.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.