MBA2684 Q&A Wednesday: My Business is Dying Because of AI. What Do I Do?

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What do you do when a tsunami like AI crashes into your business and wipes out half your income? That's today's question on Q and A Wednesday from Patricia. She's a veteran copywriter whose revenue has dropped by 50% over the past year. She feels stuck and guess what? She's not alone. I've spoken to so many entrepreneurs and many of them have experienced this at some level in their business. AI is here and it's even getting more and more aggressive. Patricia has been doing copywriting for over 15 years and her clients used to come on autopilot, but now they're ghosting her. If AI is killing your business right now, today we're gonna talk about what to do about it.

Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show.

I'm your host Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help.

You start, grow and scale your business.

Real quick. If these episodes help you in any way, hit the Follow button on this podcast app. It helps us to keep bringing you practical business insights three times a week for free. Thanks. Here's the full question from Patricia. Hey Omar, love the show. I've been a copywriter, a freelance copywriter for over 15 years. But this past year my business has taken a nosedive. I'm down 50% in revenue. I'm seeing more and more clients either stop working with me or say they're using AI tools instead. I don't know what to do. This is all I've done my whole career. Any advice would help. Thanks, Patricia. Thank you, Patricia, for asking this question, for being vulnerable, for being open enough to ask this powerful question. Because you're not only going to get some help from me, but you're going to help other people in the process. Through this episode. Let's break this down into three parts. Number one, why this is happening. Number two, what we need to do starting today. And number three, how the shift might actually be the best thing that ever happened to your business. Let's start with number one, the uncomfortable truth, which is AI is replacing certain types of labor. That's just the truth. Especially if that labor is repeatable, is easily templated, or is seen as a commodity or commodity service. That doesn't mean you are replaceable, but it does mean the perception of what you offer might be. Do you see what I'm talking about here? Do you see the difference? Perception is what matters, and perception is what clients base their decisions on. So, for example, if a client thinks I just need some quick sales copy for my landing page so I could sell my online course, they're not thinking strategy, they're not thinking nuance, they're not thinking psychology, they're thinking speed and savings and let's get this thing done with. So what do they do? They open up ChatGPT, they type, you know, write me a high converting landing page for my online course, and then boom, in 60 seconds, they have their copy. Is it great copy? Probably not, but it's fast and it's good enough for someone who doesn't know what actually good looks like. They don't know what, you know, professional looks like. They don't know what they don't know. You're not losing business to AI, you're losing business to perceived good enoughness. And that's something you can fight back against. There's a difference here. You have to see it that people are uneducated about what you actually offer versus what they're getting with AI. So we're going to have to fill in that gap. And I'm going to show you how that leads me to the next part. Let's talk some tactics. Right, because you don't need hope, you need an actual plan to move forward. So step one when it comes to action is reposition what you offer. Right now, people think you write Words. But that's not what great copywriters actually do. Great copywriters actually sell. You are selling conversion rates. You are selling audience psychology. You are selling message marketing fit. You are selling confidence in launching. You are selling sales, making money. Start packaging your services as outcomes, not tasks. Timeout guys. This is so important. We have to really, really make sure everybody's on the same page. You're getting this. Okay, stop selling. I will write you emails because they will think, oh, they're going to write me emails. I can get chatgpt, write me emails. That's not what you're selling. You will sell an outcome. Okay, so for example, try I will craft an email sequence that generates $10,000 in sales from your first or next product launch using data backed persuasion, storytelling and conversion psychology. They're not getting a bunch of copy, they're getting some emails that will result in $10,000 in sales. That's what they're buying.

Really?

The sales. No AI can promise that with real accountability. You can, you could price it that way like if you don't get X amount in sales or you don't get a sale from my copy, then I'll give you my money back, right? AI can't guarantee that. And now when you put that guarantee, they are not looking at emails anymore. They're looking at the result. You're getting them a result. The result is guaranteed and therefore it's a no brainer. Now you might be thinking, well how do I make sure that I can guarantee that result? Well number one, you got to qualify these customers to make sure you can make sure they have a good enough email list, the product is good enough and that you are confident enough. And you got to be good enough. You have your sequences, your emails in this scenario have to be good enough to get people to get to the page and convert. And you don't need to over promise. Like you saw, I dialed it back and said like you, you know, I can guarantee you'll make your first sale or a sale or three sales or whatever it might be. The point here is that you know, if they see that hey, one sale is equal to the price of your service, then it's a no brainer. I will definitely do this if the guarantee holds up.

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Step two in Taking action is Use AI better than your clients. You don't beat AI by ignoring it. It's not going anywhere. It's just becoming more and more prevalent and you beat it with by mastering it. Clients that are using chat GBT for example, are doing it badly. Okay? They don't know how to construct the right prompts. They don't know how to give it the right information, give it the right context, all that kind of stuff. You can become the expert who uses AI as an assistant and not a replacement. Try this positioning for example. AI helps me write faster, but only I know what to say that actually converts. You don't need more content, need the right message so you don't ignore. You say, hey, I use AI, but I have 15 years of experience. I know what converts, so I could tell AI what to write to make sure it does convert. Clients will pay you more when you position yourself as someone who uses AI as a weapon and not a crutch and a way to deliver the work faster than a traditional copywriter. Here's a quick bonus. Start showing AI enhanced workflows in your marketing. What do I mean by that? Well, here's an example. Here's I use AI from rough draft to high converting email in 48 hours. You could do a quick demo video on your website and show that you can say why your AI written landing page isn't converting and you break it down. You fix an AI written landing page by using your expertise and your knowledge and your experience. And don't worry, you're not giving away any trade secrets here because every page is going to be dependent on the product, the service, the audience. It's going to be specific to that page. They can't just use your example on their own business. This builds authority and flips the narrative immediately. Step three in taking action you want to productize a service that solves a bigger pain what do I mean by that? Well, freelancers lose deals to AI all day long because product creators gain leverage. You want to create a product and not a service. So for example, instead of like a one on one copywriting session that you'd get paid hourly for, you want to create a product around that where it's like a copy review hotline, right? Where it's 99 for people to submit an AI written copy and get your personalized feedback in a loom video. So it's a one shot product, they pay 99 bucks and they get something in return. This is just an example. Prices can change. You could do whatever you want. Or like a launch copy accelerator, a two week sprint for course creators trying to sell their course. You write all their launch assets in a bundle where you just basically send or ask them for the link to the product page or the sales page and you go ahead and write everything for them. If you're picking up what I'm saying here, you want to make offers about transformation, not just deliverables. What's the end result? And more importantly, sell what AI can't, right? Which is your insights, your expertise, your ability to tweak based on what information you give them. Without them just kind of bugging out. AI is not very good at nuance. And again, AI won't guarantee anything. So if you could put your reputation behind yourself and say, hey, I'm going to provide this service, I'm going to see it through. I'm going to make sure you get your first sale. That is something AI will never do. All right, here's the real opportunity for Patricia and everybody else who's in the same spot. This AI shift forces you to evolve from being just a service provider to become a strategic entrepreneur. This forces you to stop trading time for money gig work and start seeing yourself as a business that sells products that actually sells. A result, an outcome. Okay, we're not selling again hours anymore. We're. Why am I stressing this so much? Because the truth is a client won't pay $2,000 for a sales page anymore. It just won't happen anymore. But they will pay $2,000 to go from an idea to launch with someone they trust. Someone that's going to help them launch their product. That's a result. People don't want words. They want certainty. They want confidence, they want guidance. This is your moment to evolve from a writer to a conversion strategist. By the way, that's what you always have been, but now you're reframing it so People can perceive you for what you're worth. From freelancer to consultant, from task doer to outcome deliverer, we're getting it. Let me give you some real life examples. A former freelance copywriter I know launched a launch copy concierge program. She now makes about $12,000 a month working with just three clients. No long hours, no begging for gigs. All she does is help people launch their products and services and relaunch them, because people do live launches all the time and she just focuses on the copy that you require for each part of that launch. Another example is somebody started a newsletter called Steal this Swipe Sharing. AI generated copy side by side with her improved versions of the copy. Now in this newsletter, she gets leads through the newsletter weekly and subscribers get to see her skill on display. The those subscribers then get so impressed by how improved her copy is and how appealing it is that they become clients of hers. You're not obsolete, but you're in a new game. So you gotta play with a new playbook. You can't keep playing the same way. You gotta change it up. Patricia and anyone else who's listening and feeling left behind because of AI here's what I want you to remember from today's episode. AI can write, but AI can't care. AI can't support. AI can't get somebody's back. AI can't dig deep into the client's customer psychology and understand what's going on. It can't make people feel seen. It can't help people feel confident about hitting publish. You can, though. Don't shrink, don't panic. Double down on what makes you human. Insight, judgment, nuance, empathy. That's your competitive edge and it's priceless. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The truth is that AI is just another episode that we've seen before. Markets change all the time and the demands of our customers will change. Before there was no Internet, and now there's Internet, right? Before there was no social media, now there's social media. There wasn't Google, there was no SEO. There was none of this, right? And then things change and evolve and the needs and our business needs change and how we reach our customers change and all that kind of stuff. And one of the skills as an entrepreneur that we always have to possess is always be willing to learn. Always be willing to change and to grow. And as long as you have that curiosity and willing to pivot and to learn and to improve and to change your business based on what your audience needs, you're going to be all right. This is just one of many changes that are going to happen. AI is not the last change. There's going to be other changes that we don't perceive right yet. Right. But just understand that this is a journey, this is an adventure, and this is part of of being an entrepreneur. And that's part of the fun, is that it never gets boring because things are always changing. If you found today's episode helpful and.

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