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1 Year of AI-Driven Marketer: What I Learned, What’s Next, and Why It Matters
259 Plays10 days ago
In this milestone episode of AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez reflects on a year of hosting the podcast and reaching 1,000 subscribers. Dan shares his journey of discovering the potential of AI in marketing, the challenges of finding a niche, and his unique "30-30-30 Plan" for mastering a new topic. He also discusses his recent pivot to joining Social Media Examiner as a Senior AI Marketing Strategist, what this means for the future of the podcast, and the exciting developments in store for 2025.
Mentioned Resources:
- AI Explored Podcast Episode with Danchez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luyVQyj6ohM
Episode Timestamps:
- 00:00 - 02:00: Welcome and celebrating 1 year of the podcast.
- 02:01 - 06:00: Reflections on the growth of AI-Driven Marketer and finding a niche.
- 06:01 - 14:30: Introduction to the 30-30-30 Plan and how it helps marketers establish expertise.
- 14:31 - 20:00: Why video podcasting is the most effective content channel.
- 20:01 - 28:00: Learning in the light: The benefits of public transparency in expertise-building.
- 28:01 - 35:30: Dan’s transition to Social Media Examiner and his new role.
- 35:31 - 42:00: Future plans for the AI-Driven Marketer and what’s next in 2025.
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Transcript
Podcast Milestone and AI Vision
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI Driver Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez and today I have a personal update for you because it's been a full calendar year since I launched this show and there are now a thousand of you that are listening to the show and it just, it blows my mind because I've started many podcasts but in the past and you know, I get like a trickle of followers, a dozen, two dozen, you're like,
00:00:21
Speaker
But now there's a thousand people following the show, learning about AI with me together as we try to figure out how to make the most of the the hype that is AI turn into something that's actually helpful to advance our goals in marketing, hopefully bridging the gap between like all the crazy expectations like boards and CEOs and the C-suite put on marketers and taking away our resources.
00:00:43
Speaker
and trying to bridge the gap hopefully with AI to make it easier to actually reach achieve those goals. So that's been kind of the goal of this. A year ago, it was clear to me that AI was going to take over it was what I call the writing on the wall moment. it was like It had an epiphany and I was like, this is going to impact everything.
00:01:01
Speaker
more than social, more than the internet. It's going to be a fundamental part of the way we live in the future and it's certainly going to transform marketing.
Journey and Challenges in Marketing
00:01:10
Speaker
So I'm going to start a podcast about that because I clearly don't know what I don't know and I know go need to go learn stuff.
00:01:16
Speaker
So in this episode, I want to talk about a little bit of that journey I've taken over the last year, the process I've used on this podcast, that you might be able to take it to different subjects, start your own podcast, and and grow and and build an audience yourself. But I also want to talk about the next steps, so because now that we're at the birthday for AI-driven marketer, I want to talk about where the show is now and where it's going in the future, where I'm personally going to be going. So let's talk about the process.
00:01:44
Speaker
Before this show, I'd spent a lot of time talking about multiple subjects on LinkedIn. Since 2020, I've been active on LinkedIn, posting at least once a week, sometimes once a day, in some seasons, three times a day when I was had some hyper growth back in 2020. And there's been multiple topics that I've dabbled on, even tried to make a name in, but couldn't quite, I don't know, it's sometimes it's really hard to break through if a subject is stagnant or if or if there's just a factor that people don't like about a subject. For example,
00:02:12
Speaker
Thought leadership was a topic that was new to me in 2020 and I went all in on learning everything that I could about it. Found out quickly that people thought that term was really cringy even though it's still super relevant because thought leadership at the end of the day is just leading the thinking of others usually around a specific use case and that can be really helpful and beneficial and highly profitable sometimes for businesses.
00:02:35
Speaker
to lead the thinking around markets, thinking around a specific topic, right? Like we all know this to be true, even though people call them to themselves thought leaders, and I'm not saying I am one, but it was a topic that I really liked the idea of, because it tied so many things that I liked, it tied marketing together, tied learning, and finding unique and novel and original ideas that are useful to a particular group of people. I love that process.
00:02:59
Speaker
And so I tried to get into that and then I tried to get into audience growth. I tried to even spend some time just being known just about podcasting where I was probably the most successful because I was the director of audience growth for Sweetfish Media who is a B2B podcasting agency and I helped launch lots lots of shows for them. And I was very prolific about it on LinkedIn to the point where the people thought I was the CEO. and it's I'm not. It's James Carberry, fantastic guy.
00:03:26
Speaker
So I've tried all these different avenues and always wanted to find that niche. And I think most marketers wrestle with this, especially if you're like me, you're a generalist, you're good at lots of different things. And not just kind of like, I love, I've done some awesome things with SEO, I've done some awesome things with paid media, I've done i've built websites, I've designed campaigns, I've done social, I've done the whole gamut, I've automated email marketing to the nth degree and gotten amazing results from it. But I'm like, what? I talk about all these things, but and I'm known to be a marketer, but what?
00:03:56
Speaker
there's I hit a ceiling, personally, as with my own personal brand and my own influence, because like put people really couldn't peg down what Dan Cez was about. And it bugged me. And so I took multiple swings. I failed many times. And I just wanna, if you're one of those marketers out there that are trying to do the same thing, just know that it's it's really difficult to find the thing. And it's okay to pivot and keep trying over and over again.
00:04:21
Speaker
this thing with AI marketing, the AI-driven marketer, was my pivot last year. Last year, i was I was going hard after audience growth, find that it was too generic. People didn't want to pay for consulting products around it. I'd done multiple great pitches, people
AI Marketing and Career Shift
00:04:36
Speaker
loved it, and were just like, eh. And I was like, huh, there's there's got to be something else here. And back then, nobody wanted to pay for AI either, but I just had a feeling that it was early and that if I could start doing something about it, learning about it, documenting it, that it might become something. And I'm not saying here I'm crushing it as an AI consultant or anything like that. I've certainly been paid to do AI projects. was a mix of AI and podcasting and automation and all kinds of interesting things I've been working on for the last year and a half. But something's changed my the trajectory of my career because of this podcast. It's given me a a space where people kind of know like, oh, dan Dan's the AI marketing guy.
00:05:15
Speaker
as trite as that is to be like the guy or the gal for the thing, Gosh, it works. We all know it. Positioning is a thing. Positioning is a factor that you have to consider when launching a personal brand, when trying to stand out as a marketer. And I finally found the thing that once I dug in and applied some principles that I'd learned from trying to do other things, finally, I'd say took off and is now working. And I'm just continuing to double down on this thing of AI marketing.
00:05:46
Speaker
So I want to share some of the processes I've learned in trying to do some of these other things that I applied now to AI marketing with AI-driven marketer that have been remarkably successful. And this comes out of my, some just some of my content marketing background with Sweetfish, but also just my deep dive into thought leadership and what that really means. So for starters, what I get the most out of for Sweetfish, if you've been following me for a while on LinkedIn, you know, like my background is deep so like steeped in Sweetfish, like Sweetfish was my thing for years because I was the host of B2B Growth because I posted a lot about podcasting and that's what Sweetfish did, is that I am a huge proponent of podcasts, now video podcasts. If you're not doing a video podcast today, you are missing out. I don't care what market you're in, video podcasts are by far the most powerful form of content. I can't speak highly enough about this particular medium.
00:06:37
Speaker
It's the easiest way to make content. It's easier to step in front of a camera and just shoot or to have experts, even your own internal subject matter experts, because and ask them questions because it's easier to ask them questions and have them answer with really insightful things than it is for them to write blog posts or contribute content from just a blank page.
00:06:56
Speaker
There's something about a Q and&A format or just hitting record on a camera like I am right now that is freeing. It's easier than writing out something formally in a blog unless you're an incredible writer. I know writers always say like, oh, it's just easier for me to write. Good for you. That's that's not everybody. And it can be remixed to so many different channels and gotten out there incredibly quickly. And with video podcasts, the ability to do well on YouTube is really the thing that i i is growing this channel more than anything now, is that it's picking up on YouTube and people are finding it and talking about it.
00:07:29
Speaker
So I can't recommend that one, like marketing channel enough pod video podcast. So like podcasting, but in a way that's really good for YouTube as well. And then you can of course, run it through a clip making tool and make all the social clips out of it that you want. Right. And I've done a lot of that. So video podcasts, it is the thing. a quick plug for sweet fish because man, sweet fish still crushes it on this thing. But if you're a company and you want to out, outsource the video podcast and you not figure it out internally, you want to get accelerated in that quickly. Go call sweet fish, go to sweet fish, media.com.
00:08:03
Speaker
after plug. I'm not paid. They haven't asked me. They don't even know I'm making that recommendation, but they are the best when it comes to video podcasts right now as far as an agency goes. so are crushing it. They know how to do it. They're great. So go check out sweetfishingmedia.com if you want to get into that channel. If you're doing it for a company. Other things that I've learned is this process that I kind of developed for myself called the 30 30 30 plan.
00:08:26
Speaker
And I've talked about this on podcasts. I've talked about it a lot on LinkedIn, but it is working incredibly well. And I've had to modify it for this topic of AI because it doesn't quite work here. This is how this is the how the plan works. It is 30 books, 30 interviews, and 30 blog posts. If you do those three things in the course of a year, you will become a bit of an authority on that topic.
00:08:51
Speaker
even if you're starting from near scratch or if you just have like a professional basis for it and you've kind of dabbled a little bit. 30 books, it seems really hard, but it's actually not hard to read all the books on a very niche topic. If there's more than 30 books and the topic's too big and you need to niche it down further. did this multiple times with many subjects. I did it on thought leadership. I've done it with account-based marketing and I've done it with audience growth where I've read all the books on written on
Strategies for Authority and Learning
00:09:18
Speaker
ah ah one topic.
00:09:20
Speaker
<unk> It's helpful because then you learn everything that's currently said. It gives you confidence in knowing like all the things that are currently out there, but it also gives you a sense of what's missing. What questions do you still have that no one's quite answered yet? this I came up with this process because I wanted to learn, I had the question, like how does one become a thought leader What practical steps can you take? And i after reading all the books on the topic, I didn't really find like a clear steps you can take from like just being a professional to actually becoming known in an industry for a topic. And the 30-30-30 plan is what I came up with in order to bridge that gap.
00:09:58
Speaker
Because if you go through the process of reading all the books, you now know and have a good basis, a foundation of where to start. you also know who's who because you've read a lot of authors. You know who people are talking about, and who who who has the best ideas on the market. Then lead you to doing 30 episodes interviewing some of those authors and other subject matter experts, authorities, leaders, gatekeepers of the industry of that topic.
00:10:22
Speaker
Not only does it help you learn incredibly more, all the stuff they didn't put in the book, you can actually poke at the ideas and ask them questions that you had from the books, but you can actually start exploring new ideas with them, testing out things. You're also building relationships that are critical for building momentum in the industry and becoming known because if you're known by the people who have the authority already, the chances that you can start to grow in your authority goes up because of the relational factor. There's also this at Sweetfish, we used to call this the Oprah Effect. If you interview a bunch of famous people, like while you might not be famous yourself, you will start to become famous because a little bit of that fame or a little bit of their authority starts to rub off on you. Kind of like Oprah Winfrey, like what has she done? She's interviewed a lot of really cool people over a long period of time. So now she's very well known herself, right? So we called it the Oprah Winfrey Effect because that's generally what happens. Some of that authority starts to rub off on you one a little bit at a time. So if you do a lot of them, this happens.
00:11:19
Speaker
And the not only that, but it also gives you content to talk about. See, this is why video podcasts are so good because it gives you so many different things of learning, building authority, relationships, but it also is just good content. Like you can actually take all these learning sessions and you'd be surprised how many people say yes to being on a podcast, by the way. It's one of the most remarkable things. Like people won't give you five minutes over coffee to talk about anything.
00:11:42
Speaker
But if you ask them to be on a 60-minute long episode just to have to talk about their expertise and how they're crushing it and all that kind of stuff, they usually say yes. It's amazing. I say yes, too, because there's other reasons why you should. I won't get into that. but So 30 books, 30 podcasts to with industry experts to learn more about the craft and to just dialogue and discuss, because discussion in itself is a great learning tool, right? It's the Socratic method they call it in higher ed.
00:12:10
Speaker
Uh, and then 30 blog posts, 30 blog posts is important because there's something about teaching the thing that reinforces the learning in yourself to really master a topic, but it also, again, what the, what the interview is. And once you start publishing content and.
00:12:27
Speaker
answering the most base the most commonly asked questions, which is what writing for SEO really is it's at it's answering the most common questions on the internet, you really start to gain a sense of mastery over a subject and start to become known for it as you as you build a podcast following as you start to get found in search for the basic questions people are looking for and you're answering them with pretty good answers If you've read all the books and done all the interviews, it's pretty easy to write those blog posts because you have a lot of the answers now in your head just from the sheer volume of information you've read and podcasts you've had.
00:12:59
Speaker
So in this topic of AI marketing, there weren't a lot of books, which, side note, I know reading 30 books sounds intimidating, it's not. If you're all reading it on a very narrow topic, you'd be surprised how fast it is to read like like the first three books takes a while, but the fourth, fifth, sixth, and and and it becomes increasingly faster for each book because most of the book is the same information that you've already read.
00:13:24
Speaker
So each new book you take on the very same topic only has less and less information that you've seen before. So reading 15 books feels more like reading six books, and six books starts to feel manageable, right? So that's why I don't feel overwhelmed with 30 books. It's actually reading 30 books probably feels more like reading 10 books, which anybody can achieve in the course of a whole year, right?
00:13:45
Speaker
on AI marketing, there weren't any books. There's probably like three or four books, and I read those. And as new books got published throughout this year, I've certainly read them, but they're, you know, this is a brand new topic. There's, I've i've watched all the documentaries I could find. I watched everything about AI they could find, but most of the AI stuff from like the 2000s, the 90s, and before is old. Luckily, I'd already done a lot of Reading on like the history of technology and computing and I read a lot of biographies about tech founders from the 70s 80s 90s and 2000s so I'm pretty like well educated in the area in general of tech without being like a computer scientist myself.
00:14:24
Speaker
but there wasn't a lot of blogs, so I had to do my best to lean heavily more heavily on the podcast and interviewing experts and rolling up my sleeves and experimenting aggressively to learn everything I could. I also subscribed to a ton of all the other few podcasts out that were out there and the few YouTubers that were but publishing a lot of stuff on YouTube. I watched all their stuff, so I spent hours on YouTube, hours on podcasts, listening and reading and watching everything this year.
00:14:49
Speaker
Most of it, highly irrelevant, but it was something. The podcast was the best way to go because in any industry that's growing like AI, there's a lot of people out there who are dabbling and figuring things out and it's easy to find them and interview them and talk to them about how they're crushing it with AI and the use cases and things they've learned and how they're introducing it into their company and how they think about it as a leader, as a practitioner, a manager, and all that different kind of stuff to run the gamut.
00:15:15
Speaker
And that's why this podcast has been so important to me and I think podcasting can be to you too. But that's, and then the blog post, I'm only just starting to now blog more aggressively about AI. But instead of blogging so much, I've just been trying to figure out use cases. And then once I find something incredibly useful, I've been documenting it, showcasing it here on the podcast as a tutorial or a showcase of like what you can do with AI rather than the blogging, because I feel like that was more important. Everybody's asking like, okay, this is cool. It seems really powerful. What do I do with it?
00:15:48
Speaker
And that's part of building an authority. And it's honestly, I love to come into a topic where people are asking, like, how do we use this? Because somebody gets to be the person to forge the path through the jungle. Some people might see a jungle and be like, oh, well, we can't get through here. Nobody's figured out how to use it yet. But I look at it as an opportunity. Like, huh someone gets to cut the path. Someone gets to define how this weaves through this place. And that's what I love to do. It's one of my favorite things to find a new topic and forge a new path through it.
00:16:17
Speaker
you could do the same. Even
Community and Collaboration in AI Marketing
00:16:18
Speaker
on AI marketing, let's do it together. We can have you on as a guest and you could start your own show and we could collaborate. and like If you're that person, let me know. Because again, this this thing is done better together rather than alone solo. More about that in a second. yeah So that's the 30-30-30 plan. The other part that I think is incredibly helpful that I've talked i've talked about before is this concept I call learning in the light.
00:16:40
Speaker
you've heard of build in public so this is kind of like my my riff on build in public but instead of building something you're actually just learning out loud you're learning in the light you're documenting what you're doing from the beginning you're not pretending to be an expert and i wouldn't even say i'm an expert now i'm still on this process of learning and mastering ai and you just say it like hey i want to learn about this thing here's what i'm doing I read this book. Here's what I learned. I interviewed this person. Here's what I learned. Hey, I just experimented and tried this thing. Here's what I learned. And just doing that over and over again. Because what I found over and over again is that if you learn in the light, people won't wonder if you know. they'll They'll know because they've seen you on your journey of mastering a topic.
00:17:23
Speaker
And this is incredibly helpful. So you never need to position yourself as a thought leader. You never need to position yourself as an expert. You just need to get up in front of people and actually start documenting what you're doing to learn a topic, what you're doing to solve the problems, who you're talking to to learn from. And if you document that on social a couple times a week as you're doing it,
00:17:42
Speaker
People will start to figure it out that you know your stuff, right? People have started reaching out to me for help with AI. And usually their questions are you know pretty beginner or intermediate. I've already covered those. I've already documented it. I've already figured those out. I'm now dealing with harder things. So I answered their questions.
00:17:57
Speaker
And people can start coming behind me because I forged a path through the jungle. And that's the process of thought leadership. It's not something, it's such a cringy term out there, but at the same time, it's it's we need more people doing this stuff, rolling up their sleeves, doing the work, reading the books, talking to the experts in order to solve the problems we all have. we all have There's a lot of problems left to solve in the world.
00:18:19
Speaker
and there's we need more people to forge through and become a thought leader in different spaces. Like right now I'm covering AI marketing, but eventually podcasts will come behind me and find even nitcher topics, more niche topics, B2B AI marketing, B2C AI marketing, AI marketing for retail. You know, like there's gonna be all these different things and questions related to all these different niches that nobody else has figured out yet. Right now all the big shows out there are just AI.
00:18:44
Speaker
And I came down and niched down just to AI marketing. People will come down and answer more specific questions below this show. And we need them. We need you in order to do that. Thought leader is a cringy term. It's a term you never really need to apply to yourself.
New Role and Future Plans
00:18:58
Speaker
But the process of becoming one is worthwhile.
00:19:01
Speaker
and i think is needed because somebody has to roll up their sleeves learn the thing rustle with the problems talk to the experts and actually experiment until they find plausible and really reliable solutions to share with other people and they just repeat that over and over again until uh you've solved all the problems in your niche or to the degree that you can right and that's kind of the process i've used for the show and it's a process that i'll continue using for the show but like i teased in the beginning of this episode this journey has taken a different turn. I've been a solo marketer for about a year and a half now, and i've had I've consulted, I've done some AI stuff, I did a lot of marketing automation and podcasting. I've kind of been the three things that I've been feeding feed in the family with over the last year and a half, and it's been great. I've worked with some incredible clients, had some great work with them, but now I've actually just accepted a full-time position for a different company.
00:19:54
Speaker
And I'm excited to tell you about it because it's going to impact the show and my direction with AI marketings. I'm going to be the senior AI marketing strategist for a company called Social Media Examiner led by Michael Stelzner.
00:20:11
Speaker
When I started the show, it was one of maybe a dozen shows, and yet half those shows weren't even active, and the few that were active were small players like myself. I knew eventually this topic was going to get big. like That's the writing on the wall moment I had. I knew it was going to be really big. Eventually it was going to attract some bigger players in the field, and sure enough,
00:20:31
Speaker
I wasn't super surprised because I've seen Michael do this before but he started a show called AI Explored in the spring of 2024 and it quickly eclipsed my show because he has an audience over with social media and attracted a large audience to it and because he's also really good at what he does. like he's He's done way more podcast episodes than I have and has way more better chops at this game than I do.
00:20:54
Speaker
So I was honored actually to be a guest on his podcast, probably the best summary of things I've learned and all the best tips and tricks I've listened to. I'll link to in this episode. But the best stuff I've learned about AI this year is best summarized in the show I gave on his podcast back in October. So I'll drop a link to AI Explored where you can listen to that episode.
00:21:15
Speaker
But that episode with him led to you know led to lunch and led to some other conversations. And eventually he asked me to come join his team and to help build this AI marketing thing into a bigger bigger thing. And I'm excited to join him because I think we can do better together. I think we can both move farther, faster down the field, collaborating together. Not that we were ever competing together. It was going to be a ah great relationship either way.
00:21:40
Speaker
But I'm excited to do it. And this show will actually continue. I will continue posting to the show at least once a week, if not twice a week, probably just at that cadence though, because a lot of my time now full time is going to be focused on building AI assets for social media examiner slow at first, but it's going to start winding up. I'm going to be working for his community, AI Society. So if you ever want to dialogue with me more and get into the the weeds of AI, if you're that kind of person where you're like an AI nerd already and you're like, man, I need to get AI I heart AI t-shirt, you know Come join me at the AI success society. It's a paid premium community. So just be prepared it's good and I'm gonna be developing Resources and assets just for that society that you can only find them there I I will have announcements on this show about what I'll be building there to kind of preview it But right now it's still early too early to talk. I only started two days ago at this role. And I'll be helping him ah ah and work on and of course promoting a social media marketing world where it's about social media, but I swear they have a huge AI marketing track that has the best lineup of AI practitioners that I've seen yet. And it's honestly the best AI conference, even though it's a social media marketing conference with this huge AI track they have in it. It's kind of like the de facto AI marketing conference that I've seen out there.
00:22:59
Speaker
if you're getting into AI marketing, you want to meet other people like me, like yourself, and you want to like, just collaborate and learn from some of the best in the field, social media marketing world 2025 in March, go Google it. I'll be there weekend. I'd love to meet anybody who's listening to the show. So I'm excited for 2025. I'm going to continue mastering AI, but now I'm not doing it solo. I'm going to be doing it alongside the incredible team at Social Media Examiner, and I'll be continuing with you on this show, as well as with the channels as a full-time AI marketer overall.