Why I'm so enthusiastic about AI
--> and why I think you should be too
I was a skeptic about using AI for writing and marketing for the longest time. But then two things happened.
Firstly, the tech got better. It’s what tech does.
The writing was no longer clunky. The research was much better.
But more importantly, I found it started saving me so much time it was having a real impact.
And in parallel, I began to realise just how important that time element was.
Of course, I’ve always known intellectually that most businesspeople struggle to fit marketing into their busy schedule. I’ve spent tons of time coaching and created oodles of training on being more efficient with your marketing, on planning and scheduling better, on using the 80:20 rule to focus on what really counts etc.
But I don’t think I properly appreciated just how hard it is until I faced the issue myself big-time.
Last year Kathy and I decided we wanted to cut down our working hours to spend more time travelling and just doing things outside of work.
I realised this would mean I would have quite a bit less time for marketing. But I hadn’t realised that less time didn’t just mean a proportional decrease in the amount of marketing I could do - it was an exponential decrease.
Not only do you have less time for marketing, but there are things you just can’t do at all because you don’t have the time to learn how to do them.
And if you’re not doing things regularly you end up forgetting how to do them. Even simple things like updating your website take an age because you’ve forgotten where that clever little button is or you can’t remember that little trick you need to do to get the formatting right.
It really hammered home to me just how challenging it is for busy people with clients to serve and businesses to run to get much marketing done at all.
And unfortunately, a lot of marketing is much more time-consuming than it used to be.
Ad platforms and algorithms are much more complex than they used to be, with a much steeper learning curve. SEO is stacked against the small guy with the content needed to rank well seeming to need a small army of writers to create.
And social media seems to have gone from a fun place you could connect and chat to a place dominated by pseudo thought leaders churning out swathes of content every waking hour.
I was beginning to get a “hang on, this is much harder than I thought…maybe I can’t cut down my hours” feeling.
Until I started using AI more seriously.
We started with writing articles for Kathy’s site on the advice of a friend. The idea was to add in-depth articles alongside our video content and to become more of a destination site for search traffic.
Two things became apparent very quickly:
My friend was right. Traffic started spiking after a few weeks. In three months we’ve nearly 10x’d the search traffic.
Using AI with some smart prompts massively shrank the amount of time the writing took. Big, high quality, in-depth articles that would have taken weeks (or that more likely I just wouldn’t have done at all) just took a few hours.
I applied and adapted the techniques for emails. For coming up with ideas. For reviewing content.
Same results. Huge time savings and output that was often as good as I could have done myself.
All of a sudden it was like having a small marketing team working for me. And it didn’t matter that I’ve always been rubbish at managing teams :)
Everything is repeatable and systemisable too. I’ve outsourced the article writing to our youngest son who is very smart and hard working, but by no means a veteran marketer. Yet his articles are as good as mine and need almost no editing from me.
It feels like aided by AI, suddenly the small guy is back in business.
And more importantly, our goal of taking a lot more time off is back in business too.
- Ian
PS - we hit our 20 or so slots for the AI Writing workshop yesterday - but half a dozen people have emailed and been kind enough to tell me they won’t be attending live, just watching the recordings. So we have room for a handful more before I close the doors. Click here to register (it’s £27 for 90 minutes covering using AI to understand your clients, generate topics and write brilliant emails and articles).