Ep.54 ChatGPT Diaries: How I'm Using AI to Boost My Productivity

Are you a content creator who's hesitant to use ChatGPT?  As a creative, you might think tools like this just aren't for you...but you're wrong.

Ignore the fear mongers for a minute - this is NOT going to replace you as a creative - your genius, voice and personality are still required.  This is simply an assistant that can help get you focused on more of your want to's instead of your have to's. 

On this episode we get into the technical and ethical ways to use ChatGPT in your business.  I'll show you how I've been using it to knock off tasks on my to-do list, and how you can too. 

After listening to this episode you're ready to learn more about ChatGPT and how to use it in your business, Jamie invites you to an interactive workshop on May 23rd. You'll get to see live examples of how to prep and prompt ChatGPT for better results and get your burning questions answered. To sign up, head to JamieRiene.com/gpt.

Click here for full show notes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

I know there's a lot of talk around ChatGPT and other AI tools that are out there. And as a creative, you may be thinking that those things don't actually apply to you. When you're building your business around your words and your ideas, using these programs can feel counterintuitive and also kind of like you're cheating. On today's show, I want to walk you through some of the ways I've been using ChatGPT to knock some things off my to-do list that have been hanging around for way too long. I think you'll appreciate the reframe and guidelines I've established for myself to keep me in integrity. And I think you're going to be excited to learn how you can start using this powerful tool in your own business journey. Hello there and welcome to the Perfection Not Required podcast. I am your host, Jamie Renee. On this show, we talk about building a sustainable business from the inside out. And today we're going to be focused on the sustainable part of that, because nothing increases the chances of sustainability like having help creating your vision. Y'all know I'm a total nerd for all things automation and tech to drive results, so let's get into it. As a creator, especially in the early years, a lot of what goes into growing your business is simply getting found. You're creating content, maybe in the form of a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel. And while your ideas and genius are poured into those things, that's just a fraction of what you'll have to create to promote that content and get it in front of new eyeballs. Let's talk about when and how to use ChatGPT in your business and how to wrap your brain around this new technology. Okay, so here's the first reframe I want to offer you. If you're writing for the robots, let the robots write it. Meaning, if nine times out of ten you know that people aren't actually reading the words, but you have to have them there to appease search engines and algorithms, then that is a prime task to delegate to AI. Here's some examples of that. And I want you to validate what I'm saying by examining your own behavior and asking yourself, do I read these things or am I just clicking through once I get there? So for example, for YouTube, I've used it to write channel descriptions and episode descriptions. For Pinterest, I've used it to do board descriptions, pen descriptions. Honestly, when was the last time you were on Pinterest and you were actually reading the pen description before you saved it or clicked on through it? So for Etsy, the same goes with product descriptions, return policies, all of that good stuff. Anything that's like a technical writing. And for your website, same thing goes, like terms and conditions, contracts, SEO page descriptions, all of that stuff you are writing for the robots. You're writing to get found in search. You're writing with an eye on SEO or search engine optimization. When you're new, this is how people find you. The writing for these things, it's most likely not your zone of genius. It's not anything that requires your personality. These are just things that have to be completed, but not necessarily by you. You put in your parameters and whatever it spits out is fine. Done is better than perfect. These boring tasks will no longer have to occupy your mental space, just do it and move on. You're writing those things for the robots, let the robots ride it. Next, let's move into a hybrid of that. The task where there's more involvement from you, but you can use Chat GPT to really get things going. The way I frame this is anything you would or could pay a virtual assistant to do, this is a good task for Chat GPT as well. It won't be turnkey. It won't be something that you can just copy and paste, and nor would you want to, because these are things that really do require more of you in order to make an impact. You're gonna want to put your spin on it, but you can get like 80% there with these things. So that would be creating outlines, whether that be for your podcast, your blog, or your video from your ideas. So sometimes you have ideas floating around in your head and you know what you want to say, but maybe it's not in some well-thought out, organized draft or whatever. You can put your ideas down in Chat GPT, say what you want to talk about, and ask it to generate an outline for you. Again, it's not gonna be perfect, but it's a good starting point to take that and go from there. Also, if you're drafting like technical emails for show-up sequences or how to download a specific thing, again, you're gonna want to inject your personality and have your vibe kind of show up and be part of these sequence emails as well. But it's something that you can get most of the way done. It's not reminding somebody that your webinar starts in an hour or it starts in 24 hours, and another one it starts in 12 hours. Like those things do not have to be just chalk full of your personality. The goal is to get in front of people and to remind them to show up. So let that draft come straight from Chat GPT, put your details in it, and go from there. So you can also use this hybrid model to generate like multiple title ideas. What if you take that same outline that you just created based on your ideas for your podcast, your blog, your video, all of those things. And then you have ChatGPT generate a series of ideas for your titles. You can say what the goal of the title is, you can talk about how you want it to sound, you can ask for multiple examples. All of these things will help you get you closer. And it may not be the end product, but it will like spark ideas. So it's easier for us to know what we like when we know what we don't like, even if it's just seeing those examples where you're saying, oh, I don't like that at all, but I like this piece from this one and this piece from this one and this piece from this one. You can use that. You can ask Chat GPT to say, okay, I like number three, five, and six, but I don't like this. Generate 10 more ideas. Like those are the things that will keep you moving instead of just kind of sitting and thinking about things for way too long. One of the other ways I love to use this as a hybrid and something that I have been doing a lot of is repurposing my content that I already have. And this doesn't have to be like, I know we're talking about business here, but I also want to talk about one of the things that I've wanted to do that has been on my to-do list is updating my LinkedIn profile. And I know that sounds super lame and super boring, but I had just this uninspiring LinkedIn profile that was not doing me any good and not actually up to date and was really dated. And I wanted to have this done so that I can also have a business page for my podcast that is linked to my uh LinkedIn profile. Anyway, so what I was able to do is take my resume that I have already written that's fairly up to date. I took the job description from my current job since that was the last time I've updated my resume, was to get this job. But taken each of those sections and broken it down within Chat GPT that says, hey, use this, include these skills, use this time frame, write me a summary, summarize this job description, summarize this in a way that is blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so you get the idea that you can take pieces of your writing and really tweak it for the platform that you're putting it on. Another example is actually using using it to rework podcast descriptions. So I have my outline for the podcast, I have transcripts for the podcast, I have all of these things to where I can pop those into Chat GPT. Probably not the transcript. I've tried that and it is very overwhelming. But you can put in like your outline that you have and say generate a podcast description. The thing is, is again, like people aren't necessarily reading all of the descriptions before they actually listen to the podcast. Your zone of genius, the thing that you're promoting, your content creation is the podcast itself. The podcast description is there for people for search. It is there for people who are honestly, I feel like with podcast descriptions, it's more of just a placeholder because people that's not how they find podcasts necessarily, is through the description unless your podcast is on YouTube. So there's certain nuances, but what can you take that you've already written and just rework it for a different platform? One of the things that I have been doing, tying it back into Pinterest, is there is a connection with Excel. So I have used automation to get an RSS feed, which is my podcast feed, download it into a worksheet within Excel, connected it to Chat GPT through an API integration, and said, here's the title, here's the descriptions of everything that I've done in the past, 50-something episodes, rewrite a pen description with this many characters, blah, blah, blah, focused on search, and gave it the parameters to put in so that I now have five different pen descriptions that I'm using for to promote my podcast and put it on Pinterest. So those things that people are searching for in Pinterest are there for in the description I've already written, and it's just reworked for Pinterest. I know people aren't actually reading Pinterest descriptions, like pen descriptions. It's not human nature, but that is something that you can do. And then some other ways that I've been able to use Chat GPT is to write like simple code for my website. There's things within Squarespace that are more universal. And so you have to do these code injections to remove things like a header or a footer or pop-ups from specific pages like sales pages or like signup pages, those sorts of things. So if you don't know how to write code, you can just ask Chat GPT to write a simple line of code that you can then put in your website to do those things for you. So that's an example of how you can use it. I have used it to critique my own writing. For example, I actually ran my first ad in a podcast newsletter to promote my automations guide that I have mentioned here before. So I've never written like a 75-word sales copy ad technical blah, blah, blah. But what I did was I put all of the features of the automation guide, all of the benefits of the automation guide into ChatGPT and said, write me a 75-word description sales copy to promote people to download this guide. And what it got gave back compared to what I actually put in as what I thought was a pretty good example was eye-opening. Like I just wasn't an expert in writing persuasive copy, like for sales or anything like that. So if there's a style that you have, then you're trying to have another goal that is outside of your norm. Use that as a way to see how ChatGPT reworks your ideas. I realized that one of the things that I've heard over and over, but I wasn't actually implementing whenever I was trying to write this sales copy, was talking about the benefits versus the features. Like I was saying, oh, well, you can connect, connect Google to Callanly and you can use this app called Zapier and all of the things that people don't care about. They don't care about how they're getting there. They want to know what the end result is. And so just having like putting that stuff in and getting that reminder, it's oh yeah, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. So critiquing your own writing, that is a perfect example of how to use Chat GPT. You can also use it to critique your own titles or putting in other like things of copy, even copy that ChatGPT has written, you can put it back into the software and say, critique this. What is missing? What can I do better? How can I be more clear with this, or how can this be more clear? So critiquing is very good. And then you can also use it to generate ideas for digital products. Depending on what space you're in, you are probably an online business owner or something like that if you're listening to this podcast. And one of the ways to add kind of that recurring income that I like to talk about is through digital products. And this has helped me kind of come up with ideas around digital products that I can incorporate for my audience, like ideas that I've had but that weren't like fully fleshed out or that I needed some additional help on. For example, like branding guides or something like that. You can check in Canva or you can actually say ChatGPT based on the free fonts that are in Canva. What are five font pairings that denote a whimsical brand, something like that? So that you can start to build out ideas for digital products, that you can have these offerings for people that you can kind of run through ideas and refine them, get better, all of those good things. Another example, another way that you can use this is for research. If there's something that you don't know how to do or that you want to learn more about, you can ask Chat GPT. Now there are some caveats. The free version of Chat GPT, it is not updated for anything past like 2021. And then also it tells you like right on the program that it may or may not be accurate. But what it can do is kind of get the ball rolling and get things directionally accurate. So if you needed to just say, hey, I don't understand what this concept means, put it in Chat GPT and you can see the answers there. And then I know that other people have used Chat GPT to just generate ideas for blog posts, for podcast episodes, that sort of thing. Personally, uh generating ideas is not my problem. I'm overflowing with ideas, kind of refining and acting on those ideas is kind of where I need help. But if that is something that you struggle with, or if you just have a blank page that you're trying to avoid, you can use Chat GPT in a way to like bounce ideas off of someone, quote unquote someone, just to get some feedback and in a way that is not going to like interrupt your flow or you have to wait for a certain time period to talk to your coach or something like that. It's not going to replace those people in your life, but it will give you more like immediate access to things that if you just have something that you need to bounce an idea off of. And I know that sounds weird, but I just encourage you to try it. So I hope that gives you some things to think about with this new technology. And like everything, there's nuance. I know not everybody's like eager to jump on the bandwagon and learn new tech, but it's something that has very quickly become invaluable in my business. And I wanted to share with you how I've adopted this. This is not going to replace content creators. I know that that's some of the big hubbaloo, and that's one of the big worries within the community is oh my gosh, like people are just going to be using this to write all their social media posts, and their people are going to be writing blog posts with it. And maybe that's true. But this is why your personality, your voice, your genius is needed more than ever. Because there are those people that will take advantage of this in a negative way, but that does not mean that you still can't benefit from the technology in a responsible and ethical way. This can be the boost you need in your business to knock out some of those have-to's so you can get to your want-to's. You can get to your zone of genius because you're not bogged down in just all of the checking the boxes of the things that don't actually require your genius, but still have to be done. So it's a tool, it's assistance, it is not replacement for your human experience. If you want to learn more about ChatGPT and how you can use it in your business, I'd like to invite you to an interactive workshop I'm hosting on May 23rd. I'll be going through some live examples of how to prep and prompt ChatGPT to get better results. If you've ever tried to use it and you're thinking, like, what the hell? This is worthless. This is not something that I would ever use. There is nuance, like I said, and there are a way to use tools that you can get better results. So I want to show you that and I will walk through these examples that I've talked about today, and I'll also be taking questions about anything you've got on your mind. So you can go to the link in the description or go to jamirene.com forward slash GPT to sign up. That is J-A-M-I-E-R-I-E-N-E.com forward slash G P T to sign up. Okay, thank you so much for listening this week. I can't wait to hear your feedback and what kind of ideas or questions this episode has sparked for you. Until next time.