3 Ways I’m Using AI in My Business Right Now (writing articles isn’t one of them)

You can’t read, watch or scroll anything these days without running into something about AI. There’s hype, there’s drama, there’s foreshadowing, there’s political intrigue… I readily admit I don’t know how all of this is going to turn out. But in the meantime, the two main free AI tools, ChatGPT and Google Bard are helping me be more productive, which at the moment is very much appreciated.

I will say that I don’t use AI to draft these articles and if you’re aiming for thought-leadership in an area, I don’t recommend that you do either. While there are some paid tools that do better with imitating your “voice”, in my experience, most of the content they generate is pretty fluffy. It’s like an 8th grade book report that spits out the average opinion of the internet. It can generate a lot of words very quickly, but not a lot of original ideas. YMMV.

How I Use AI to Speed Up My Workflow

1. Help me decide which subjects would be interesting to my audience and have the best potential for SEO

Luckily, it’s easy for me to generate ideas for articles. So in December I came up with a list of 100 ideas for posts for 2024. I wanted the topics to be interesting and helpful, but since I use my articles as part of my marketing strategy, I also wanted them to help drive traffic to my website. So I copied and pasted the list and asked the AI agent to please (I know I don’t have to say please, but it feels wrong not to) prioritize them based on interest to my audience and potential for SEO. It returned about 20 of the titles and gave the reasons why it selected each one. I took those and prioritized them for the first half of the year. You’re reading one right now.

2. Help me “atomize” my articles for other media

Whether you’re solo, have a VA or have a small team, if creating content is part of your business it’s important to leverage each item as much as possible. If you’re not familiar with the concept of “atomizing” content, there’s a pretty good description here. In this case, I want to speed up my ability to drive traffic to each post by using various media channels. So for each article I write, I ask AI to help me break it down into smaller pieces. My requests are based on my marketing strategy, but you can easily adapt this for yours.

Here’s the standard list I use for each article:

• Give me a quote from the article I can use on social media
• Give me an idea for a static post for instagram. Please include image recommendations and copy for the text below the post.
• Write scripts for 2 10–15 second instagram reels. Please include copy for the text below the post.
• Write a script for a 2–4 minute YouTube Video

3. Help Me Get Unstuck

One of the hardest things about being a solopreneur is not having anyone there to ideastorm with when you get stuck. Sometimes it can be really useful to have someone (or something) generate a whole bunch of ideas and then you can mix and match until you find what you’re looking for.

For instance, I’ll type in a description of what my article is about and then ask it to generate 10 headlines and subheads. I rarely use one of the suggestions in its entirety, because they are usually pretty cheesy. But usually, I can mix and match to create something better than I would have written on my own. It can also help me make choices that are better for SEO.

In another example, I recently got stuck on a metaphor for how to explain the importance of making sure that your offer solves an important problem for a specific audience before you start promoting it. I thought “roof and house” or “caboose and engine”….. AI came up with 20 more ideas in seconds. I haven’t settled on one yet, but don’t be surprised if you see it in an upcoming post.

Pro Tips For AI Productivity Boosts

• The bots are really good at helping speed up how fast you can take in information. Think book or article summaries, lists or survey responses. If you have the transcript, they can be used to summarize a podcast and apparently there are paid tools that can summarize the audio version. Google’s Bard is able to summarize YouTube videos.
• The bots are not as good at coming up with original ideas so don’t rely on them for novel insights. You still need to do that work on your own.
• Try putting your prompt in both ChatGPT and Bard — I’m astonished at the differences between the results
• Don’t forget that both platforms are known to make things up. Fact check them as necessary.

How I can help…

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