Paul Clifford — AI and Machine Learning To Create More Traffic

Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolf. I am here with my co host, Joseph Fear.

Hello.

And today we have a really, really cool conversation about automation and technology and artificial intelligence.

Yeah. And how you can actually harness this yourself. No, we're actually using this. And there's some cool stuff that technology mainly, you know, Google, Amazon. There's a lot of cool things now you can like piggyback. And basically in this episode, we're talking to Paul Clifford of designer, and this is a good buddy of ours here in San Diego up in Encinitas. You'll hear it referenced often in citizens kind of mispronounce it. But yeah, so when we're talking about that, that's just a little North San Diego. But he's a. He's a good buddy. He's a software ninja. Comes from, you know, Silicon Valley era, like, or not era, but that area. But if you want his backstory, all that stuff. We actually did a previous episode with him last year and it's amazing. But he digs into his backstory and a lot of that software stuff back then. So if you are interested, definitely check that out.

That's a benefit to you because in this episode, we jump straight into the meat.

That's right, we did. We just went deep into like, okay, what's working right now? What is he actually providing to allow you to take advantage of this? Because you're legitimately taking advantage of machine learning and all that kind of cool stuff.

Yeah.

Yep. So we're going to talk about a lot about how to drive traffic and grow leads in your business using content, recycling and using specific tools that use artificial intelligence and machine learning and all that kind of stuff to help you recycle your content and make it a much more automated process. So, so really, really fascinating subject and we just go all over the place with ideas for how to get your stuff in front of more people using this technology. So for sure.

And make sure to also, you know, if you're driving or away from the computer, make a note, mental note or something that come back to the computer, check out the show notes. There's going to be some references in there for you to check out. To explore further. Slash, you could check out that previous episode and some other cool things like cheat sheets and whatnot that are kind of like a little Cliff Notes of this, like, the big takeaways. So you'll probably enjoy that. Almost guaranteed.

Yes. So go to evergreenprofits.com and find the Paul Clifford episode and check that out. And is there anything else we need to say before we jump over to Paul?

I think that's it.

I added new, like, buttons on our podcast. So if you haven't yet, go. Like, every episode we've ever done and.

What we're really trying to push, if you haven't already. I know we have actually talked to a lot of, uh, the listeners, probably you, that are listening to me right now. We've chatted on the phone. Um, please help us. I know a lot of you guys love the podcast. We just don't really hear about it unless we actually, like, hop on the phone, go hit the subscribe button on itunes. That would help us out so much. We're just trying to get this thing out to a lot more people, and I know it's kind of one of those things a lot of people don't think about, so we included. I'm guilty of that. For a lot of podcasts, we even.

Made an easy link. Go to hustleandflowchart.com that'll redirect you right to itunes.

Please, please just hit subscribe. All right.

All right, let's jump over to Paul.

Thank you. Hey, Paul. How you doing? All right.

That was very enthusiastic. He just had a big.

Very enthusiastic. He's going against my Britishness.

Well, let's see this big smile. We're looking at you on camera. We rarely do the video with podcasts, but maybe it's a thing now. Who knows?

Yeah, I think it's a great thing. You know, it makes it a bit more personal. You know, we're real people, not just a voice. Right?

Yeah. I mean, well, the voices could have changed. We were debating about doing British accents the entire time. Do an American accent, Joe.

I want to hear your best British accent.

I don't even want to. I'm going to. I'm going to let it sneak in sometime during the conversation. I won't let you know when you're.

Going to say, I can. I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, would you like a cup of tea?

Cheerio.

Cheerio.

We'll get into that.

I've got the wrong.

Here's the loo. In reality, do you like tea more than coffee? No. Okay, good. Yeah. Does do more. I mean, it's.

But generally, you know. Generally, yeah, it's more. We're more tea drinkers.

Yeah.

So do you. Do you stop in the middle of the day at some point because you need a tea break?

Yeah, it's more like, you know, like in California, if you need to de stress, you smoke a joint or something. Whereas in the uk, we just make a cup of tea.

But what do you do if you're from the UK and live in California? Do both.

I didn't just put some THC in the tea. And you're good.

Coffee. Coffee and marijuana, I guess.

I. I think it's a thing.

Yeah.

Hey, maybe that is the next thing. Right.

Well, I mean, here's what. It's totally tangent. I mean, you're an Encinitas, so you know, you appreciate it.

But I know our local coffee shop's called the Better Buzz. You know, it's going to be called the Better Spliff Moving forward.

And the best meat in Southern California is called Cardiff Crack. Right.

That's true. Well, I was thinking, I mean, you could totally do a butter, you know, bulletproof coffee, but with THC butter. Think about it, Think about it.

True that.

You could do that.

Yeah. I've never tried, but I've been tempted and got Paul instead of it.

Yeah.

Let's get on to Dave Asprey.

Right, Right. I'm sure he's tried it.

It's funny. One of my favorite. We were actually reading some of the reviews on the podcast before we hit record, and one of my favorite reviews says, thanks for not doing any podcast episodes about Keto.

That's true.

Which secretly, we did have one tangent, but I'll get Paul Lindbergh.

He's good. Anyway, let's talk about what we're going to talk about.

Right?

Yeah, let's do it.

What are we talking about, Matt?

All right, so we're actually about to do a webinar with you on this concept of content recycling using your new designer AI tool. So I wanted to kind of just dive into. Dive right in. And if you don't know who Paul is, this is actually our second time interviewing Paul. So if you don't know Paul, definitely check out the first episode. We go into his backstory and kind of how he got into software development and all that sort of thing in that first episode. We'll link to it in the show notes. This one, we just want to dive straight in. So can you talk about what is content recycling? Because I know the sort of training we're about to do with you, which should already be live by the time this. This is out, is A lot about content recycling. So can you kind of touch on that topic and explain what it means?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So, you know, as you know, we were, you and I have been in the content marketing game for quite a while. And, you know, over the last five years, you know, we've witnessed pretty much any company online, you know, turning everything into content marketing. Right. So, you know, what they're all focusing on is the top five things. It's blogging, it's videos, it's creating ebooks, it's things like podcasting.

And everything is all around creating content that engages people. So imagine that all of a sudden you've got the whole world online, that is the whole world suddenly thinking, right, we got to produce all this great content. So they're producing it. And so what is, of course, we're seeing saturation now. And because there's such a big motivation for people to just push out more and more and more content, that the effectiveness of content is diminishing. Okay. And so you see things like Google and search engines placing more emphasis now on like 4,000 word posts, you know, rather than, you know, two years ago it was 1,000 or 2,000 words, you know, so like, the bars are just going up all the time.

Yeah, like five years ago it was 500 word posts is what you were shooting for. So I remember when we first started blogging back in 2007, that was our goal, was all of our blog posts need to be a minimum of 500 words.

Oh, man, that's right. Yeah, yeah, we thought that was interesting.

So here's the thing, right? So the problem is it's hard, right? It's hard producing all this. And if you're not doing yourself, it's expensive, right. Because you need to hire people to do it and all that of thing. So.

You know, there is this whole technique called content repurposing, which isn't brand new, by the way. Okay. I didn't invent it, you know, and I put a little spin on it, calling it content recycling. But essentially the premise is that, you know, you've. You've already got all this great content in one form or another in your business, you know, and especially if you're a larger company, you know, you've got tons of white papers, research articles, a lot of content is already done. Yeah. And so instead of coming up and starting to create brand new blog posts every time and struggling with that, let's find the stuff that you've already got and reproduce it, transform it, recycle it into a new form of content. And so that's where this whole notion is going.

And by that we're not just talking about, you know, your white papers were talking about, you know, let's take a blog post and turn that into an ebook, you know, which you do a lot. In fact, you do a lot of. You turn a lot of your blog posts into PDFs, so you can put them on SlideShare and you track that and you've got data to support that. You actually get traffic from that, you know, and, you know, why not take some. A collection of your best articles and turn them into a Kindle ebook? Okay, another great example. And of course, Amazon is a search engine in itself nowadays, right? And so there are people actively searching for solutions on Amazon and you can see the way that's going. So pushing your content onto Amazon is another good traffic form. And of course, you don't have to charge for an ebook. You can put it up there for free. And you can.

Yeah, I was going to say there's a whole free option there. That. And just, just to back up really quick, like, a few years ago I was partnered with Misha and we had a bunch of publishing books. We, if we had your tool designer at that time, that would have made our lives way easier. Like we were literally having to custom code like dot mobi files and epubs and stuff like that. All the stuff that Amazon or Apple wants, you know. Yeah, yeah, but it's like it's a platform, both of them, even ibooks too, because I know you can publish to their. It's amazing traffic or at least branding exposure.

Yeah, totally. You know, so, you know, so it comes down to. It comes down to an old thing called modalities. You know, I don't know if you remember, but you know, people consume content in different ways. Okay. You know, some people will just watch videos, you know, and if you're not putting a video in front of them, they're switched off. You know, some people don't like videos. Some people are in a corporate environment or they can't have the speaker on or whatever, and they much rather read, you know, they much rather read a blog post, you know, like your podcast. As amazing as it is, a lot of people won't necessarily watch it, you know, because they're more interested in reading, scanning, looking for the text, finding, drilling out and pulling out those nuggets. And so you know what to boost an easy boost to your reach and to your audience and to your engagement is to ensure that you're Coming. Covering all those angles. Okay. So you know, you're covering your video and your reader, your readers and your listeners all in the same piece of content. Okay. So, you know, so you pull out your best content and whatever form that is. So we talked about blog posts into PDFs, whatever. Let's talk about videos and audios, for example. You know, turn that into a blog post. Turn that into an ebook. Okay. You know, look at, you know, Tim Ferriss, his big book. Remember Tools of Titans, I think it was called. Right. You know, it's like this.

Yeah, Here goes, Matt. Here we go.

Yeah, right.

It's on video.

I'm showing it on video if you're listening in.

I always call that any of Tim's books. Like the last three I'm looking at, they're all like weapons. So like, if you ever need to defend yourself in a dark alley in Encinitas, then you can just whack someone over the head. Tim's book, it's all good. Blunt trauma.

You don't need to take it to Encinitas.

You can do it anywhere. Chicago, fine.

But you know, look at Tools of Titans, right? Where did the content come from? That book?

Podcast.

All his podcasts.

All his podcasts, Right.

Funny you say that. We're actually going to do that for our own podcast, but just for traffic. But we will be using Designer for that.

Yeah, we've been actually talking. I like your little subtle pitches in there, but.

We'Ve been talking. Yeah, we've actually been talking about putting, putting out a book called like Traffic Secrets Revealed, which might already be taken, whatever, Volume one. And he's like taking all of the traffic tips from our podcast and just making a giant like encyclopedia of traffic strategies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly what you're saying.

You know, and in fact, you've got a lot from your newsletter as well. Already done. So you can turn that into.

If we put all those newsletters into a book, which we actually have it in Google Docs, it's like a 450 page book. So it's probably a good like Tools of Titan size book.

Totally. And then thick paper, you know, hardback.

Oh, by the way, that's eight and a half by 11, 450 pages. That's, you know, so.

Oh, I thought he was just hardback. Thick paper for the weapon usage.

Oh yeah, you need that to turn it into a weapon.

Got it. Okay, carrying on, carrying on, carrying on.

We're start selling our book to survivalists now too, after you read this. It's also a Weapon.

It's a good selling point.

Let's take a step back and recap. So we're talking about recycling content.

From one form to another. You've got all this great content, and how can you get it out to more audience without having to spend hours and hours and hours and doing it? This is the direction we're taking with Designer. And as you know, we launched designer back in 2016 as a tool for creating ebooks from your blog posts and evolved that. And it's been doing incredibly well since then.

And you can import a PDF and you can turn a PDF into a flipbook. You can turn your blog posts into a flipbook. You can turn.

What's a flipbook?

It's like basically A into B really, really easily, with a nice design slapped on it. In between using our templates and things like that.

Can you quickly explain what a flipbook is?

Yeah. A flipbook is where. So the problem with PDFs and books, they're difficult to share because they're big and chunky. Right. There's several megabytes. Whereas what you really want to do is just send a link to someone. And so what you can do now is create a flipbook, which is a link that you can share. And when someone loads it up on their phone or on their browser, whatever, you dynamically turn the pages. The pages turn like this.

I like it.

Okay, so it's not like a normal PDF where you just kind of endlessly scroll down through the thing. It actually kind of reads more like a Kindle book or something.

Yeah, yeah. And it does it within the browser context. So it means that you don't have this huge hundred megabyte file on your phone. Yeah. You're just looking at the page and able to read it. You know when you go into Amazon and there's that section in the book that says, take a look inside.

Yep.

Yeah, that's a flipbook.

Got it. So you can make them interact, because I have seen them before. You can make them interactive. You can probably embed some cool stuff in there if you want to get fancy.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, it's a great way of getting heavy PDFs out to especially mobile users who have trouble with PDFs. Um, so. So, yeah, so you can do that. And then what we've recently released, and this is what we're, like, really proud of right now and focusing all our attention on, is this AI technology that will take your audio or your video file and transcribe it literally within minutes. Okay. You know the, the advances now in AI enable us to. To do this, like, it takes a tenth of the time. Okay. And the accuracy is like almost 97% now, you know, assuming you're speaking English and things like that. But it's really, really good at picking up nuances in words and all that. And, you know, when you read through it, it's incredible.

Now, what if you're Scottish?

Yeah, Scottish versions. Well, we could do that, but it'd have to be really, really cheap.

Scots are known for. You know, I was just wondering, like.

Does the AI, does it recognize, like, really heavy accents?

Yeah, Paul, we're not trying to try a grudge here between.

We're not trying to start a war between.

You know, I'm half Scottish, right?

Oh, perfect. You're fine then. Cool.

You know how copper wire was invented?

Not a clue.

Yeah. It's two Scotsmen fighting over a one penny pie.

This is good. This is good.

I'm going to make sure Steven Renton listens to this episode.

Oh, he will make him. No, but going back to this AI.

A couple years ago, I think it was the first time it started to really get on the scene for transcriptions. There's been rev around for a long time. There's all these different options, but we were never really happy with the AI type of transcriptions. And I know a lot of folks would have to get or would get frustrated because of the editing process after, and they're like, damn it, it didn't catch this person's name or capitalize whatever. But after using designer. And this is not a joke, but your transcription. The very first time, I think I took one of James Schramko's podcasts. I don't know why, not my own, but I threw his in there. I think maybe it's the Australian accent. And it was perfect.

Oh, there you go. Works for Australians then.

It does. Yeah. There you go, James. He listens. So, yeah, it was. And I think he actually uses your tool too, so, you know, it just kind of works that way. But it was amazing because even weird, like, there were some funky names, you know, from people that were mentioned in there, and it nailed it. And I even double checked the spelling. I was like, I don't know how the hell that worked, but cool. It just saved us a ton of time.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's. It's cool. It's quite amazing, you know, when it comes through and of course. But you know, there's going to be errors, though, you know, so it's. It's not it's not 100% perfect. And to solve that, when the transcription comes back a few minutes later, we present it in an editor. And then what we're doing right now is focusing on making the correction process really slick and easy. So things like if it detects a brand, let's say Facebook comes up in conversation. The Facebook, the name. Normally you capitalize the fish right, so it won't know to do that, but you can click on it and say, right, capitalize all words like this and it will go through. And wherever it finds Facebook, it'll automatically capitalize it. You know, things like that.

And you can do all that with one click, by the way, and some other really cool stuff. So if you're doing a video, and this is what I think is going to be the best is that, you know, when you're scanning, you can, you can put in a YouTube video, for example, and it comes back the transcription, and as you're reading through, you can just click or do Control I. And it will just take a screen grab of that video and put it straight in the text.

Yeah.

Wherever you are.

That's so smart. It's so smart. So if like you're a YouTuber or you really focus on video marketing now, every video you have now becomes also a PDF or a written blog post with the screenshots. So like even tutorial videos where you're like, I'm sharing my screen and showing you where to click and stuff still relevant.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the application now is not just for podcasts, it's for course creators. You know, step by step videos, they want to turn those into a book or PDF or something like that. People doing training for software or something else, you know, I mean, when I'm doing my training, I don't write a script first, you know, generally I'll just do the screencast. Yeah. And talk through it. This is what I'm doing. This is why I'm doing click this, click, click. Right. A lot of people haven't got time to watch a video. They just want to read it. So, you know, we just take that video, run it through Designer, and out comes, you know, a blog post at the other end. We put that on our training blog.

Yeah.

I mean, it's so quick.

Yeah. We do so many tutorials for different affiliate products. ThriveCart being one of them, Designer being another. And Designer. Yeah, I know both of them. But, but the whole thing is like, we have so many videos that with like, that's just the best way we, we create videos. Or content. It's the quickest way. You know, podcasts are another one. But if we could take that and now fill out those blog posts with another option to follow along. Don't want to watch the video. All right, well, here you go. Screenshots, step by steps. I'm sure it's great for SEO as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the SEO is an important one actually, because we just talked a minute ago about long form content and search engines. Google especially putting emphasis on that. And when you're doing a podcast, it's a slow road to grow your audience in the early days. Right. And when you look at the podcast forums, you see so many situations of people really struggling because they're putting all this work publishing the podcast, but they're not getting the traction, you know, and as we all know, the traction does come, but it comes much later.

So you still have to market your podcast. Right. You still have to do the marketing for the podcast itself, even though the podcast is a marketing tool.

Sure.

And a really easy way of doing that is to provide transcripts or show notes as we call them.

Because transcripts, especially if make them interesting, you know, highlight block quotes and things like that and maybe put some images in and things. If you do that, all of a sudden you've got a 2000 plus Word article.

Going straight on your blog. So you're going to get the Google love for that.

We just started because of Designer giving us the option to do this not only fast, but for a lot cheaper than we would have gone to Rev or some other service out there. That's exactly what we're doing now. We've done it for a handful of where the transcripts on there and it's I think well over 4, 000 words or probably 4,000.

I know these podcasts are like 12, 000 words.

That's right. Yeah.

They're beefy as hell.

Yeah.

The only downside is obviously, you know, WordPress limitations, but whatever. There's ways around that and I think they're upgrading.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, that is the big problem is when you put a 12,000 word post into WordPress, WordPress, all of a sudden it gets real slow.

Right, but.

Right.

So I'm actually curious about the sort of the development of Designer. And I don't know if this is something you really want to go into or not, but I'm kind of curious, you know, what.

What was the process like to add this kind of functionality? Because to me, adding some sort of like artificial intelligent element just seems like crazy. Elon Musk type stuff.

We're looking at the British and Scottish Elon. I mean, look at him. There you go. That's how we do this.

It's a long conversation, but basically.

There'S a lot of AI facilitators already. So Google and Amazon can provide a lot of infrastructure and a lot of the really complex AI kind of stuff. And they expose APIs to you so you can tap into the massive brain power, you know, the powers Alexa and, you know, and Google was it Google Assistant and all that sort of stuff.

And you kind of overlay that with some organic words, you know, so things that you do know, you know, work well.

Right.

And then when you put that combo together, that's where you start to come up with really accurate machine translate machine transcriptions.

So, so you and your team, there's actually people in the background adding new words into the platform and making sure it's learning all the time.

So it's not so much people like typing as such, but we're using bits of content, we're using articles and things.

Like that to learn.

We don't actually have a team of 500 people in South Asian countries.

This is a new word. Let's add it to the database.

We have to turn this around in two minutes.

Go fast. Faster. Yeah. Well, that's the thing that's always blown my mind with some of these transcription services. I'm like, how do they do that? And a, they're fast, but I'm like, I know they gotta be using machine learning and then just having a team to basically edit it up. Well, the thing is, as best they can, we've used.

We partner with people who are doing this.

Okay.

I didn't know that they're not all working for us directly.

Got it. Yeah. Because we've used some of the automated tools in the past. There's some other existing ones. Trent is one that we've played with in the past. And we were never happy with the transcriptions. They always came back to us and we went, you know, what is this? This is junk. Right. So we've always ended up going with rev to the, like human actually standing there or sitting, typing, but somehow designer. I mean, the Results are just like 10x better than what we used to get from Trent. So, you know, I would have imagined a lot of the technology out there is kind of the same technology, but if you compare side by side, I almost guarantee if we got notes from Trent and got notes from Designer, the designer ones would beat it.

That'd be a Good video. We should do that.

Yeah, There you go, Trent.

Challenge. Actually, that actually sounds really fun.

Coming your way.

So the idea then is we try and make the editor.

Easy to use and to do those little subtle nuances. Take screen captures of videos. Oh, another thing we do is when you come across a website mentioned, you know, so let's say you're coming across evergreenprofits.com or digitalmarketer.com or whatever, as you come across that domain, you can click on it and it will go out to that website, literally take a photo, take a screen grab of that website and then pull it back into the content.

Oh, man, I didn't know that.

So, you know what's great about that is again, it's just another thing that livens up the transcript, you know, because in the old days, when you get something back from Rev, it's just a lot of words and it's, you know, it's a lot of work. And so you just want things to break it up to make it more interesting to read.

So I'm going to mention Patti. So Patty, I know you're listening to this right now. She's on our team. She actually, for everybody listening, she's the one that writes all the show notes, transcriptions, does Designer. So start using some of these ninja tricks that Paul's saying. This is right up our alley because that is the toughest and time consuming thing is going out there, grabbing specific pages or like you said, screen grabs from the video, just prettying up that big block of text that typically a transcription looks like.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Basically you get the transcript back and everything like that. And then you got a couple of choices. So you can just click download and just grab that content and do what you want with it. Okay. But where it gets more interesting is then what you can do is choose a template, a style, so maybe you develop one for your brand or something like that. It's all built into Designer and then that will then turn it into something that looks like a lot more professional. And it's at that stage then you can add more images in.

Put a good cover on it to make it an ebook.

And stylize it a little bit to then publish that as one of the ebook formats we talked about earlier. Or the new thing we've just put in is embedded into your blog post directly. You can literally export as HTML, we call it, and you can copy and paste the little piece of code it gives you, put it on your blog post.

And you're done. You know what I mean? All the formatting is retained and everything else. And it will inherit the style of your blog. So it still fits in really nicely. And it's SEO friendly. So it's not like what we call an iframe embed where Google can't see it. All the text gets put on your blog, so that way Google's going to pick up on it and it just makes the whole process really easy.

Yeah, the exact thing that we use to put the transcriptions on our blog is the HTML export. Because I think I did it kind of the wrong way before. I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to export to a doc and then I'm going to copy it. Like, no, that was horrendous. Please don't do that. Anyone listening? But the HTML export was like night and day. And then when I figured that out and I told Patty about it, I was like, holy smokes. This is the way to do it right here.

Yeah, the WordPress editor is funky. For whatever reason, when you import from like a Word or a Google Doc or something, it screws everything up. So the HTML import is kind of a lifesaver. Yeah. So I have a question about. So speaking of traffic, we were talking about SEO. So Designer can obviously be used for SEO if you have a podcast or video because then it transcribes it and you try to rank for whatever you're talking about. Are there other ways that you can use Designer and some of this recycled content for traffic outside of SEO?

Outside. So, well, the. So we talked about, you know, PDFs onto PDF sharing sites and things like that. You also use that as your lead magnet, you know, to use as a. An ebook for people to download and subscribe. Yes. That's going to help you grow your list. We talked about the SEO benefits. You can obviously, you know, take, you know, take that and push it onto Amazon, you know, as Kindle.

Let me think the other traffic benefits. Just trying to think what you guys do. You definitely do the SlideShare piece, don't you?

Issue. There's like four or five sites you can upload PDFs to.

Yeah, Speaker Deck is another one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, good point.

We have a whole designer blog post that we'll link in the show notes for sure that like. Yeah, it lines out all these different.

Strategies, like something like 30 Ways that We use Designer.

Nice.

It's quite a bit, but yeah, no, the traffic. Have you seen good success with the Amazon, like the free books?

Can you do free books on Amazon?

Yeah, yeah.

Kindles you can do Free Kindles, right?

Well, yeah, I always thought the free Kindle thing was like, only if you had a Kindle unlimited subscription or something.

It could be, but yeah, that's what it was. Curious because I'm like, I would be down to try that.

Yeah. Well, you know, you can do free Kindle books unless that's changed. Literally. I mean, I haven't been on there for a little while, but, you know, a lot of people were doing that.

Yeah.

All right. Or even if you charge a dollar, you know, it's something, you know. But the point is it will come up in, in Amazon search rankings and, you know, if you get your title right, which is, as, you know, key to a lot of this, you know, ensure you got a keyword optimized, you know, headline and things like that. And in fact, one of the methods that I teach for people writing headlines is to do some Amazon research. Yeah, because let's say you're in into keto, and I know that's your favorite topic. You know, if you do a search for, you know, keto, then look at the top bestsellers that are selling and look at their titles, right? And you'll find that they pretty much all follow a very similar formula, to be honest. You know, it's always like it's a number. It's.

Keyword modifiers that are based around quick, easy, cheap, fast, you know, all those kind of things. So, you know, it's going to be seven easy to make keto recipes that will make you look young and beautiful, just like Joe, you know.

Thank you.

There you go. That's your bestseller.

It is already. You didn't know about it, but. Yeah, no, that's. I think this is something we got to test because we have not done that.

Not Amazon.

No, we haven't played around with the book stuff. We did a lot, like years ago, and it was very effective. But exactly like you said now with Amazon, and if it's, you know, with a program like this, it's actually easy to make them look great, too. Yeah, that was always the issue is making them actually look appealing.

So just to kind of close the loop on the whole, like, traffic thing, there's obvious benefits for SEO. If you're posting videos or audios, get the transcription. That's going to help. With SEO, you can like export a PDF, put it on SlideShare issue speaker deck. I even think, like, Google Drive has like an open area where you can upload PDFs that people can explore. You've got using it as a lead magnet to get people on your list, which will essentially drive traffic back to your list. What else?

There's a whole bunch of other.

Posting it on Kindle or Ibooks or any other book platform out there and putting links inside of the books. So to drive traffic back to your website, put the.

If you're doing YouTube, a lot of, there's a lot of YouTube marketers, right. Just trying to rank that content. You can put that transcript in the description of the YouTube, you know, smart.

Or give the YouTubers, obviously they're on YouTube, but you can give them a link, maybe a special link for that video to download the transcript or maybe the step by step in written form.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of cool ways. And that's the thing. It's like if you could just jive with. I feel like the best thing is start with the content creation type that you're comfortable with, something you flow with and then from there figure out what to do with it.

Yeah. So, okay, I want to touch on, I want to touch on some lead magnets real quick too. What, what are some good, like best practices for creating lead magnets? I'll start with the obvious one. The obvious one is if you, you can actually take a blog post, convert it to a PDF and then get people to opt in for the PDF version of the blog post. That one's always surprised me because like we'll, we'll put it in a little slide in, in the bottom right corner of the site and we'll get like a 5, 5% of the people that view the page to opt in for a PDF version of the same thing they just read. Yeah, I think it just comes back to people thinking, well, if I get the PDF then maybe I'll actually remember to read this later.

But yeah, everyone's a collectomaniac, you know.

That'S really, really good. I don't want to lose it. I know. I'll just save it. It's on my desk and I know I'll come back to it later.

Yeah. Are there any other like real cool lead magnet ideas that you can use designer for getting people to opt into your list?

Well, so for, for designer per se, you know, because design is all about creating the lead magnet from that content, you know, so.

You know, that's the whole content upgrade or that, which is what we just talked about, you know, that that is the core thing. You know, lead magnets in general, you know, they have to be very specifically tied to the post that someone's reading. Okay, so let's Just step out of the box. Let's say you're not using Designer. You know, you can create a tool or a spreadsheet or a list of, you know, techniques or, you know, anything that's just gonna take, or help that person just take the next step. Yeah, right. You know, you talk. I mean, James Tramko, you mentioned him earlier on his podcast. You know, he publishes the full transcript and, you know, download the PDF in return for, you know, submitting your email.

Exactly.

Perfect content upgrade. You've been doing it for years.

Yeah, I'm so curious. I'm curious about how well the transcripts get opt in, especially since they're already embedded.

Well, we know that the podcast is his number one traffic source. I mean, he's very open about that. So it's. Something's doing, you know, doing well for him. And we're taking it. We're kind of taking it. Well, we're definitely taking his lead with your lead on the software side of stuff. But creating like cheat sheets with every podcast is, you know, Patty, we mentioned earlier, she takes notes, extensive notes throughout each podcast and she will not only create the show notes from that, but will take a, you know, create really in depth cheat sheets that people can.

That's a good point.

I'm glad you mentioned that because we're just rolling that out actually, probably in the next week.

So as you're going through, you can create a note against every paragraph. So as you're listening to it or reading to it and you want to summarize or make a key point or benefit, you can just type it in as a note.

It gets stored and timestamped.

And then when it goes into the final editor, the formatter, it'll be at the top.

What you could do is you can then say, right, that's my cheat sheet. And just delete the transcript. And then you've got all your notes. There's your cheat sheet. Done.

Oh, man.

Right, that's cool.

That's pretty smart. Yeah.

There you go, Patty.

I like that a lot. To the list, Patty, from here on out would be.

Call me if you need any more help.

You gotta open line.

From here on out, Patty's referred to as Blue Shark. Don't forget.

Yeah, Purple Shark.

Yeah. Oh, purple Shark.

Sorry, Purple Hair. Come on.

That's her doing.

That's her own nickname. She nicknamed herself.

You don't want to show Matt's name?

No, we're not going to talk about my nickname on air. Actually, we can. My nickname that I named myself is Mr. Nice Guy.

Yeah, Mr. Nice.

That's not the nickname my team gave me. That's the nickname I gave myself. I won't go into what my team named me because it's not nice for children.

No, no one's know that. You shouldn't know that.

In fact. In fact, you don't know that. That's just what the team are telling you they want you to hear.

Right.

You don't know the real name. Right.

That's probably true.

We have a totally different Slack channel without Matt in it that we're typically talking in. But that's.

We're all right. So this will be a fun question because I, you know, I mentioned, I wrote that blog post that we will share later. It's got like, I don't know, 25, 30 different ways we use Designer. You could, you could mention some of the same ones that are already mentioned on it. But I'm curious, what are some of the more creative ways you've seen people use Designer and like the feature set? Because you obviously have a pretty big like database of people using it. I'm just curious, what are some of the outside of the box ways you've seen it being used?

Well.

So people are using it just to create books, you know, they're using it to create ebooks, they're using it to create flipbooks. A lot of corporates who've got a ton of PDFs lying around, you know, and they want to get it out to more mobile audience. And so they're creating a flipbook which is just a link, you know, and putting that on there.

And you know, where people get the most benefit really is in the speed. You know, if you're going to set out and write a novel from scratch. Yeah. Then design is probably not your best tool to start with. You know, you're better off with Word or whatever your favorite editor is, you know, and get the words out in something really simple. And then when you want to make that look amazing and then you import it into Designer and Designer can take your Word document, by the way, just import it and do all the magic from there.

But those are the key things, right? Flipbooks, ebooks, Kindles, Ibooks.

And you can embed that onto your WordPress site or your wix Squarespace. Any of those.

Now are there any. Are there any. Have you. Are there any use cases where somebody had Designer and you're just like, wow, I actually never imagined it being used in that way. Like just some real. Because I've got one that I'll share.

I'M sure you've got something.

I do, I do.

What is it that you do?

No, I do. I will share one or two, but I was just kind of curious if you had any that were just like, yeah, this blew me away when I saw somebody use it this way. You know, I've shared all the different ways I've used it with you, but one of the ways that I thought was really cool was we have a 10 day email sequence so somebody can opt into one of our sequences and it's this 10 day sequence that kind of shows them through setting up all these various tools that they need in their business and that goes out through our autoresponder we use. But this is relevant to any autoresponder. And basically what we did was we all of our emails have an HTML version of them saved inside of Drip's database. And so what I did was I actually imported all of the HTML versions of the emails into a PDF downloadable ebook. And so when somebody gets on our list on day one, we say, okay, over the next 10 days you're going to learn this. But if you want to learn it all today, you know, seven bucks today I'll send you the PDF with the entire email sequence and you get, you have like a little real low hanging fruit lead magnet or what do they call it?

Tripwire.

Right. Like a tripwire style thing that you sell for five or seven bucks. Right. When somebody gets on your list.

Yeah, of course. That's genius.

It is. I mean that's just an easy product right there. So for folks looking know what to sell. Well, there you go. Sell your email sequence right there.

Yep.

You're basically. Yeah, they're buying time back. They're like, we want it now, buy it.

Cool. Yeah, no, it makes total sense.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll link to the blog post that we're talking about because I did list off like 25 and I'm drawing a blank on most of them.

Yeah, there's a lot of them there. But the post I think will do a lot of justice.

Yeah, yeah.

What's in the future? I know you mentioned the notes for designer. Like where do you see this thing headed? Is AI getting better or some other cool stuff?

Well, we do have a plan, so we've got a couple of things. So in the short term we want to make it easier for people to take lots of blog posts and turn it into a book or lots of transcripts and turn it into a book. We got this feature called Draft and that's live now, but basically what you can do then is you can focus on importing all your content. You end up with lots of drafts. Check all your wording, your editing and everything in draft mode because it's just a raw text editor. And then, you know, take those 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and convert it into the ebook, you know what I mean? So then you can create your tools or titans really, really quickly and easily. The next thing we're working on is rather than just YouTube, maybe Facebook lives. Okay, so a lot of people doing Facebook Lives, getting that content into an ebook or transcript or something like that, you know, that's next on our radar. And then more long term is actually going to be going the other way. Right. Let's take your blog post and turn that into a Video Never Talks.

I like it.

So, you know, that's the next step. Really?

Yeah. No, I think it's amazing because so many people are just like, oh, video, you know, but come on, it's a great medium. Like you just said, Facebook lives, they've been around for a while, but they're finally catching on with a lot of folks. You still get a ton of exposure. I know a lot of our SEO over the years has been hinging on things like videos. Like on Vimeo has worked really well for us. In addition to the PDFs, just goes back to recycling your content creatively.

Now, I know Designer also has a feature in it where you can go to, is it Facebook groups or Facebook pages? You can go inside Facebook and essentially pull out comments and discussions and turn those into PDFs.

Yeah, yeah. You know, so for group. So for pages and groups. So for. Well, they kind of work the same.

Right.

But the benefits are slightly different. So let's take a group. If you run a group, one of the biggest problems with that is you got so much content going in, you know, so many new threads, new posts and everything. And, you know, over a month, there's a ton of really cool gems that come out of that, you know, some that really, really get really active and loads of comments and likes and all that sort of stuff.

And the problem that a group administrator has is obviously keeping people engaged in the group and people get disheartened because they know the solutions in the group somewhere and they've missed it. You know, it's just gone. And the search in Facebook group never seems to deliver, does it? Right.

Horrible.

It's just horrible. So, you know, for a group of admin, what you can is through Designer, you can say, right, here's my group show. Me the most active top 10 posts this month. Yeah. And so it'll import the post with the most likes, the most comments, for example, and then turn that into an ebook and then you can deliver that as your monthly summary of what's happened this month.

Can you do, can you go to other people's groups and do this or do you have to own the group?

You have to, you have to be an admin or.

An admin. Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, that's good. No, this is. I could see the weekly depending or monthly on the engagement being amazing to just follow up with, with that targeted list of people.

Yeah, I mean that's also, it's also be a solid lead magnet if you were selling access to a group.

Sure.

Right. If you're selling access to a group, you can always have people opt in and, and say, hey, do you want to see the top 10 threads from our group from last month to get a feel for what the community's like? They opt in to get that. Once they opt in now, you follow up with them relentlessly and sell them on your group.

Yeah, yeah, I love it.

That's the thing with Designer is like, I don't even. Luckily this episode we're able to throw a bunch of ideas out, but it almost. I guess the point here is not to overwhelm the listeners, but to just say like, all right, just pick like a couple of these things.

There's a lot of cool shit you.

Could do with start simple, you know?

Yeah.

You know, we've got, we've got a really active group too. You know, we've got, you know, so got like 7,700 people, like really active and we have a dedicated staff member who just runs the group. And so what he's doing daily is creating little videos for people. So when someone comes up with, hey, how would you do this? You know, he just, he says, I'll show you, and he just posts in the video, you know, and he's great, he's great for that. And you know, because of that, then the engagement's really good. People coming up with all ideas and things like that. And the other thing we do, so we've got quite a good support team now and we're probably the only software company at this sort of price level that does one on one training. Yeah. So if you, if you get stuck with anything, you can just request it in the support chat and you set up a zoom call and you get like one on one training, one on one walkthrough through Designer.

That's I mean, I know. I think Patty took you up on something like that, and it panned out perfect. I mean, that. That is very unique, and most softwares just kind of leave you there to dry and, you know, wish the best with our knowledge base, but it's probably not that great.

So. No, you're doing it right.

We're obviously conscious of the fact that it's very powerful tool, and as you just said, there's potential for overwhelm. Right, right. And so that's kind of why we want to just go over the top at the beginning, make sure you get you on board, get you using it. And once people have been through that, then, you know, they stay for life.

I love it.

It's great.

Well, we should probably start wrapping this thing up. So.

How do people go find, like, what's the best place for people to.

Evergreenprofits.com designer AI.

Okay. Right there.

I'll link to it in the show notes.

I don't know the link.

Yeah, and designer spelled D, E, S, I, G, N, R, R. So instead of that last E, there's a. There's two R's there. So designer with an RR at the end and then put dash, AI. And this is the new version of designer that's coming out. It's out.

It is out.

Yeah, it's out.

Right on, man. Well, what? What?

And so the transcript for this. Right. Will be on there.

Absolutely.

Heck, yeah. Well, so we'll cheat.

She know what that means, though? That means you got to make some interesting visuals, Patty.

Well, we've got. This is one of the few podcasts that we're actually taking a video. So all the visuals will just be you in front of your brick wall.

Exactly. It's not enough, is it?

Crazy things.

There it is. That's the podcast image right there. Still. Still frame. What's he looking for?

Yeah, now he's making creative stills. Oh, this is.

That's good.

Oh, man.

Freeze frame. Perfect.

You can see him. He's holding stuff up into the camera so that we have different screenshots to.

Pull for this gold spiky bar. I don't know what he does. That's probably another weapon that he uses. Hard streets of incinerators. Oh, hold on.

Say no to crap jobs. I love it. And a horseshoe.

So we're finding that Paul has a lot of knickknacks in his office and.

Love it.

I love it. All right, so wrapping it up. I know we asked you this last time. What are some cool books? Anything new? That's on your radar or something. That just is fascinating.

I. Tell us. On my radar only. You reminded me in your last podcast about Profit First.

Yes, he's coming on the show soon. Yeah.

And gtd, because literally I've been thinking about my productivity and finances last week and your emails came through and it was like almost serendipity, you know, I was thinking, oh, yes, you know, and.

Mike McCallowicz, the profit first guy, is going to be on the show too. He's scheduled the interview with us in two weeks.

Yeah, yeah, he's, he's a, he's a cool dude and. Yeah, and gtd, you know, getting things done. David Allen. That podcast just dropped yesterday. Two days ago yesterday.

Yeah.

At the time of this recording. But yeah, and we'll do a round two with him too. But it's. So if you have any questions, Paul selfishly pipe them over. Really? Anyone listening? That would actually be.

Honestly, anybody listening to this show. If you have questions for any of our upcoming guests, let us know in our Facebook group.

And for Paul as well, obviously.

And for Paul. Paul's also in the Facebook group.

Yes, he is. Awesome. Paul.

Other than the Designer link that we sent him to, is there anywhere else you'd want them to check out? Do you have like a main website for your entire brand and business or anything like that?

Well, let's, let's, you know, with most people going to that link, I mean, everyone knows it's designer IO. But.

You know, they can get everything with the link in the show notes and you know, we'll probably have like a demo video, you know, on that link. Right. So they'll get a full overview and things like that. But remember, you know, anyone who comes in, you know, you get the Facebook group, you get dedicated one on one support, you know, so you won't get stuck. All right, so, you know, we're focused on, you know, long term here, so we're excited to have, you know, just more and more customers coming in.

Yeah, you guys. Yeah, and it's both of us. You get both two of us. And even Patty will probably a lot.

Of these random ideas that I mentioned of things that I've built or done with Designer. I've actually made videos of most of those. So. So if somebody does grab Designer through our link and you want those videos, let us know and we'll share them with you. Because I did make a video on that email trick and the some videos on using Facebook groups and making PDFs from those and things like that. We have videos on all of that. So somebody grabs Designer after listening to this podcast, shoot me a message on Facebook or wherever and we'll hook you up.

Awesome.

Right on.

Cool.

All right, Paul. Thank you, my man.

Thanks for having me on, guys. It's always a pleasure.

Oh, well, cheerio. Cheerio.

Oh, there was Joe's only British accent there.

I said cheerio earlier.

Cheerio. Oh, I've got to go use the loo. Okay.

Bye. Bye. All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. So go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up hustle and flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this. This cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.