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00:00:01
Inside My Journey From Consultant to AI Podcast Agency
189 Plays9 months ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez dives into a solo session to update you on his journey in mastering AI, offering a sneak peek into the AI-driven systems he is currently building. From transitioning into an AI agency to automating podcast production, Dan walks through the extensive steps of using custom GPTs and various AI tools to streamline and elevate marketing tasks. He discusses his approach to automating guest follow-ups, leveraging Zencastr for podcast hosting, and using AI-generated newsletters. Tune in to learn how you can replicate these processes and take your content marketing automation to the next level.
Resources Mentioned:
HighLevel: https://www.gohighlevel.com
• Podcastpage.io: https://www.podcastpage.io
• LucidChart: https://www.lucidchart.com
• Zencastr: https://zencastr.com
• MidJourney: https://www.midjourney.com
• Adobe Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
• AI Driven Marketer Course: https://aidrivenmarketer.com/course
Timestamps:
00:00 Teaching AI marketing for self-sufficient growth.
03:16 AI's evolving role as consultant and coach.
07:44 Utilizing AI for podcasting yields abundant content.
09:53 App automates guest communication, show preparation & checklists.
14:37 Save time by automating social media updates.
17:43 AI leverages workflow, triggers automation for newsletters.
19:26 Custom data sequencing for optimal guest engagement.
23:26 Automating content creation, coaching for original ideas.
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Transcript
Introduction and 2024 AI Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
but I'll come back to the AI driven marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez, my friends, Kami Danchez, and it's been a journey in 2024 to master AI. And I wanted to take just a break to do a solo episode and give you an update on where I'm at with the show, where I'm at in the journey and kind of what I'm looking into
Evolution to an AI Agency
00:00:19
Speaker
next. Kind of give you a peek behind the scenes of this bigger thing that I'm building now um as I transitioned from just a solo consultant and podcaster to essentially ah what people are calling an AI agency. Like it's kind of inevitable that I was either going to build a SaaS app, which I actually am working on that, um or launch an AI agency out of this thing because as I've learned to leverage AI more and more, I'm finding that people are asking for help building these things more and more. So I wanted to give you a sneak peek of what I'm building and how i'm people how i'm I'm helping myself and others leverage AI to automate a ton of their content marketing.
00:00:54
Speaker
Um, but even for those who are really hungry, like show you exactly what I'm doing so you can rip it off. Like learn from me. You can steal from me and just do it all for yourself using the same tools. Like i' I'm hoping to like make it approachable enough that someone who's eager and hungry to learn and master the same things can go and just do it themselves and save all the money and not have to hire people like me to help them do it. But you know, sometimes people want to go faster, not have to go through the seven months of interviews and.
Leveraging AI in Content Marketing
00:01:22
Speaker
watching the YouTube videos and all that stuff and in order to learn how to do it the hard way, even though there's a lot of value in that. um If you want to go faster or help ah have help building these things, you know that's what I'm starting to become available for as more and more people reach out for help with AI marketing automation and learning how to really leverage it to get do more with much less.
00:01:44
Speaker
That's the goal of AI, is to be able to do ah ton add a ton more value to your your prospects, your customers, in order to drive more revenue for way less marketing dollars. right that's That's the dream. um And I think every every marketer needs to figure out how to do it because we're all stretched so thin that learning how to do a little bit of AI marketing goes a long freaking way. So in the rest of this, like I kind of want to review where I've been, what I'm working on now, where where I'm going. um If you're listening to the audio of this, I'm gonna be showing some visuals alongside. I'm just gonna be going from tab to tab in my browser to kind of give you a sneak peek. It's like really behind the scenes. This is not a keynote or presentation. I'm just gonna dive into the nitty gritty and into the dirty stuff here.
00:02:29
Speaker
But if you're just listening to the audio, then just know I'll be doing my best to describe what I'm looking at as I'm going through it. But if you're on Apple Podcasts, pull open that video. If you're on YouTube, youtube you're already watching this. And if you're ah if you if you don't know where and you're already listening to it, go to aidrivernmarketer.com and find this episode. And there's a video there too. So let's dive in.
AI Progression and Market Position
00:02:50
Speaker
The first thing I want to look at is this stair-step kind of graphic that I made a long time ago. It's got five different steps from personal AI as a personal assistant, AI as process automator, AI as coach and consultant coach, AI as forecaster, AI as value creator. These are the things that I see coming over the next five years. so um And I feel feel like we're still very much on level one. Most people are at level one. I am now, and a few others that I've interviewed are kind of pushing into the process automat may so automation section.
00:03:16
Speaker
AI is still really, it's it's not it's okay as a consultant coach, but over the next couple of years that tech will be developed enough to where it's a really good consultant coach. um It'll be way better at forecasting because we'll be able to feed it more data. And coming up with original value is is kind of a more vague and ambiguous one that I have and that i know is out there. um But that's another episode to explain what that even is. So coming back down here, I want to talk about how I'm using AI, not to just use custom GPTs to perform one-off actions or even a step of actions, but how to set it and forget it. Kind of like with, I'm going to make a quick plug, my AI Fundamentals course. If you haven't taken this course, take a moment just to go to aidrivermarketer.com slash course and you can taste what I'm talking about here.
00:03:59
Speaker
like put your name, your email, and a few pieces of information about this stuff. And every custom or our every lesson will be customized for who you are and who you sell to. um You'll learn a lot about the fundamentals of AI and how to use it in this first level that I'm talking about here in the stair steps, this AI's personal assistant. But you also start to see how I'm the leveraging AI to create hyper-personalized content. And this is where the magic of AI really starts to get unlocked and a few people are tapping into yet. So get ahead of the curve, start figuring out how to use AI to automate all your processes.
Automating Podcast Production
00:04:35
Speaker
Now, the one I wanna show you kind of behind the scenes here is a topic that I've talked about multiple times and I've had a bunch of different components of this, but I'm now starting to tie everything together to automate a big part of my marketing process, which is around podcasting. This very podcast is a, pain to produce because there's probably like 100, 200, 300 little baby steps that have to be taken with every single episode. Um, I've created a little chart here that kind of demonstrates the big chunks, but of course there's like a hundred baby steps in between all these little chunks and it's like overwhelming just to even look at. Um, if you're listening, I'm looking at this big infographic of this like thing I built on Lucid chart where it starts off with guest books interview and then goes,
00:05:15
Speaker
step by step, all the way from pre-production to production, post-production, and then distribution. And at first glance, you're like, whoa, that's a lot of freaking steps. um And it is. um But these are even just the big steps in order to go from guest booking interview to your podcast being published on like dozens and dozens of places, from apple from podcast apps to YouTube to websites to social media to newsletter and all the different stuff. So if you want to, like just pause the video and you can go through it. um But I kind of want to walk through it step by step and kind of give you ah just a sneak peek of what it looks like. you know Starting with guestbooks and interview, it's like this this is an AI. This is a software tool I use called High Level. I just embed into my website, ah which is an awesome um website builder. they have a There's a great website builder called Podcast.
00:06:03
Speaker
ah page.io that automates the creation of websites for podcasts. I love it. That's what I use for a lot of my websites now. um But I embedded a a high-level, like, you know, kind of Calendly type form, a book scheduling form. This isn't even AI. It's just normal marketing tech, you know, it's just normal tech to automate stuff. And it has a custom form that gathers all the information that I'm going to need from the guests later on, like name, email, title, LinkedIn profile, URL, company, company website, and more importantly, like what podcast they, not more importantly, but like what podcast they, where they listen to podcasts at. Cause I follow up and customize the sequence just for them based on where they listen. And of course what I can do to help them, but I'll kind of make the episode worth their while. Just a basic form built into the, the calendar app.
00:06:51
Speaker
um And it's important because with every automation, you need to have trigger points. Like what's the place that starts this? What are you already doing where like every time this happens, you have tasks that need to happen after that. That's where the magic can happen.
Efficiency in Marketing with AI
00:07:05
Speaker
And so as I'm walking through my own podcast production process, be thinking about the process you use. If you're doing product marketing, like what's the step that comes before you even start the new project? Is somebody else kicking it off to you? How do they kick it off to you? What things do you need from them? There's probably a form someone needs to fill out somewhere in order to kick off the process with you. That form could also be used to move all the tasks down the line with AI, or sometimes with you, but sometimes a mix of you and AI in order to automate way more of your own process. um And this is possible with almost any marketing job. It can be with done with ad creative, it can be done with
00:07:41
Speaker
email marketing, text message marketing, SEO. like There's so many different systems out there that you can just kick off with a form fill and then have AI take over 90% of the work. This is what I'm doing with with podcasting now um because I find with podcasting, it's easier to take one episode and push it into so many different formats because a transcript is so robust with information that AI is so good at repurposing it. and coming up with clips and video clips, it's like it's just a goldmine of content for every single episode. So I can't really emphasize enough how powerful a podcast is, but now with marketing automation and AI, it's like, ah, like it used to take a team of five at Sweetfish in order to do all this work, and $5,000 a month in order to do it. Now I'm starting to figure out how to bring it down substantially so you can get all this work done for like way less, because you've automated all of it. um Of course, there are still some manual processes that I'll
00:08:33
Speaker
talk about as we as we go through the the process here um that you'd still want an agency to help you with or just a well-documented internal process in order to have your team step into those places where a human needs to work with AI to get it done, but so much of it can be done with automat automation and AI now. So, going back into my own process, a guest fills out a form which kicks off the guest prep and reminder email sequence. Pretty typical for getting people to an interview. The part that I've injected in between is this My Showrunner app or custom GPT I made. Now, I've done a whole episode on this, so you can go back and check that out. I'll link to it in the show notes. But is essentially, I'll kind of give you a little preview here.
00:09:12
Speaker
It is a GPT where you just paste in the guest LinkedIn profile and it does a quick work of summarizing them. You tell it what you want to talk to them about and it comes up with angles for you. You just pick one. It comes up with titles for you based on that angle and what it knows about your show premise and the the guest. It comes up with some awesome titles. You pick a title and then it actually comes up with the whole outline based on ah the template that it's already fed into the My Show Runner. So this is one that I actually already used for an interview I did with Audra here. around
00:09:43
Speaker
around podcast automation, was been learning from other people and how they do it in order to better improve my own process. And it came up with the intro, the questions, the outro, even wrote the guest email. Now I've actually built this into a part of my ah high level app where it just automatically emails the guest. Let me go back to... the process. So the iShowrunner takes care of a lot of the actual thinking that needs to go into it. So you can get what used to take 60 minutes of work just researching the guest, building the questions and the show outline and gets it done in about five minutes. It saves so much time. and Now, I have a point where you could just fill out a form after this and it takes care of emailing the guest for you, as well as then building what I call, or what the industry calls a run sheet, a really robust checklist to do before the show with the guest, before the show with the guest.
00:10:36
Speaker
as you record you know the run sheet that we already saw the intro questions and outro but also post show checklist and then what to do after the guest signs off imagine getting a run sheet that has all those different checklists in your email 30 minutes before every single episode oh like i wish i would have had this as a host for all the 400 episodes that i've done to this date but now i'm going to because i've built it in my own system and helping other people do the same um And again, it doesn't even need AI, like this comes up with the questions for you, but then it's just marketing automation to put all those things together because you know what needs to be on the checklist. You're just scrambling to put it together every single time. um Why not just automatically have it emailed to you before you need it with the questions already injected into it, right? Easy peasy. Zencaster is the major tool that just had an awesome update ah this this late spring, coming into summer now.
00:11:23
Speaker
um That automates a lot of the production and a bunch of the post-production which I'm very excited about you can see here I host it's where I host my podcast um But it's also where I do the recordings like you can come and join it in here and do a whole Session start the recording you can see here. Here's Audra's last episode i I recorded and it records it kind of like Riverside But you know, it's now Riverside is a one app that does recording and zencaster does it all from recording? ah production and hosting so that's why I stick with Riverside because our zencaster because it just automates the whole process but you can go from here let me show you to actually
00:12:05
Speaker
editing the whole episode and coming up with all the different formats you would need and going into editing the episode even with text like a descript like it's all here and it's web-based because it saves so much time in order
00:12:28
Speaker
from you having to like download, up get it into your editing software, render, and then re-upload, takes forever. The fact that you can have it all here in Zencaster now is just like, ah, it's like a thing of beauty, because they just that download and upload speeds, even with gigabit fiber like internet speeds like I have, still takes forever for every single episode. So having it all in one in Zencaster makes a huge difference. So Zencaster is a big part of my process. It also like hosts it. um It also generates the AI clips. And I've talked about this before on multiple episodes, but it does more than... Oh, let me go back to Edit. It does more than just come up with the episode. I can add this portrait mode, ah go to Content and Clips, and actually just say, yes. like Create me some portrait or vertical.
00:13:20
Speaker
clips. And now when I go to apply and edit out these renders, it's going to have all the captions and the titles done where I can actually go and review the clips later and then post them individually one one at a time or schedule them or put them in the queue to just post as they drip out. So huge part of the whole process. um for not only production but part of distribution right because then once it hits that ah RSS feed it gets published uh to all the the podcast apps apple podcast spotify it goes to youtube you used to have to go through zapier but now zencaster publishes natively to youtube through the api it's fantastic
00:13:54
Speaker
And then the RSS you can use to drive to WordPress sites or a podcast site. You noticed I have the AI driven marketer where as soon as it gets published to the host, it just pulls the episode with the art and the video so you can watch it here. Like I don't build this page. This page just gets generated automatically. Shoot, if you go to my other website to Danches, oh, not the slash Cal, but to my normal site, my blog is updated automatically with, oh, it looks like I have a duplicate here. um It's updated automatically with the audio. I can't get the video to go for some reason, but at least the audio and the show notes updates my WordPress site, so I don't have to update it in two places. It automatically updates both websites for me, which is huge. I mean, every time you don't have to update another thing, time saved and more value added across your websites, across just social platforms.
00:14:44
Speaker
Again, it creates those AI clips, and then with one click, you can like edit, archive, or just auto-post to six different ah social platforms. like it may Of course, the TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts, but you know all the other platforms are becoming very very short form video focused as well, so it also posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. ah which is great, so you can, with one episode, you're hitting all the different social platforms with clips of the podcast. Now, the part that I'm really excited about is all the other stuff, because Zencaster has been automating a lot of this for me since ah December, and even better now, since you can edit it in Zencaster.
00:15:20
Speaker
um But the part that I'm excited about is I built a automation sequence that uses just good marketing automation and AI to come up with all the other stuff that needs to happen, which is mainly following up with the guests, which even I'm bad at. like i've I've been a guest on probably 30 plus episodes. I could probably count out one hand the amount of times the the ah podcast I was a guest on has emailed me when the episodes gone live. which I'd love, I promote them all the time. I'd love to get those published on my own LinkedIn feed where I have 25,000 followers and they don't email me just to tell me the episode's gone live. It's sad, but I've done the same thing because even just getting it to the finish line of like scheduling it to publish, you're like, oh my gosh, you're already onto the next podcast episode.
00:16:02
Speaker
ah So, following up with the guest is huge because it's a great way to grow an audience for a podcast and get more distribution for all your social content. So, I was like, come on. So, what I've done is I've built an automated sequence that not only thinks the guest and emails you the show notes to put into Zencaster, but also follows up with them once it goes live because chances are, once you've actually have edited or finished recording the episode, you know when this is going to go live. You're going to be publishing it or scheduling it soon. So you just enter that same date here and then just standard of marketing automation waits for that date. And then the cool part is it takes, if I could find it here, there we go. This is the form I and my clients now fill out afterwards ah with the guest email and their phone number.
00:16:45
Speaker
um episode title, which is usually already pre-populated because my showrunner already figured that out, right? But also the main thing is this episode transcript, maybe an episode thumbnail. um Sometimes ah i I do this ahead of time or sometimes this is done afterwards. And then an option to send a newsletter out afterwards and of course a publication date or whenever it's going out. With this information, we can automate the rest of the guest follow-up process. So let's take a look at that. I use, see here, we have a marketing automation. If you're not used to looking at marketing automation, this is a pretty typical like drag and drop automation builder where you can have a trigger, again, here's my form submitted, um and then starts doing the typical things. Wait 60 minutes, send a text to the guests, thanking them about the episode, right? And it inserts the when when they can expect for it to go live. a Great way to follow up with guests on a text message basis rather than an email basis because they're more likely to get it, see it, and then engage with you and maybe even share the episode afterwards.
Automated Newsletters and Audience Engagement
00:17:43
Speaker
So and then it waits right and while it waits it actually if in this case if I selected this Send it to a newsletter because not every episode needs to be sent to a newsletter, but so a lot of mine I'd like to It actually goes through the work of using AI in the workflow this is the part that hardly anybody thinks about hardly ah anybody leverages AI for and This is very different than working with chat GPT, but those same prompting skills work here. I actually use it to ping OpenAI with this prompt as the as this sequence is triggered. And the prompt looks like, you are an expert copywriter who specializes in making fun and engaging content for insert value proposition to the podcast, right?
00:18:25
Speaker
um your current position and I just insert a bunch of dynamic fields from the guest that the guest has given me or from just the the whole account has these custom values that you can fill in so that if you need to change it, all the marketing automation you have a linked to that that podcast name or the value proposition of your show is injected and updated on the go. um It goes through this long prompt to essentially make the body of the newsletter. um mean it It references the podcast transcript, which is what we uploaded on the forum. It references the an example of what the the newsletter should look like. It references a style guide of how to write like myself since I'm the one sending the newsletter.
00:19:03
Speaker
right um And these are all the processes I would have done naturally. It it even writes a little an intro for it so that I can put the intro in the top of the newsletter and then the graphic and then the body of the newsletter. And I'll probably come up with more stuff to stick in the newsletter from different parts of the episode to make it a full-fledged newsletter. But I'm keeping it simple to start because, you know, you've got to start somewhere and then build on it later, otherwise you're taking too much time to build the perfect thing that you never launch, right? So it goes through and does some work of moving data around from the feedback it gets from open AI to custom values so I can send it as a newsletter a little later on down in the sequence. And then it waits for a bit before actually texting the guest based on where they listen to podcasts. So if they listen to Apple podcasts and they get a text that sends them a link to the Apple podcast, right?
00:19:50
Speaker
Because if they're pulling this open on their phone, then it's going to take them right to their Apple Podcasts app, or right to the Spotify app, or right to the YouTube app, if that's where they listen to podcasts. Or ah if it if they said Other on the form, then it sends them to the website where the most recent episode is pulled up, and just for them. And then it waits four hours before sending them all the assets ah later on. And that's kind of the guest sequence, right? Because you want to text the guest when the episode goes live, and be like, hey, your episode's live. Check it out here, right? when If they actually get it on a text message, they're likely to open it, they're likely to click the link to open it up where they subscribe, probably listen to the episode, maybe even give it a rating or subscribe themselves, right? That could be a new subscriber for you, but you want them to get excited about it, and they're gonna be more so excited about it if they can go and interact with it where they subscribe.
00:20:35
Speaker
So later it sends a promotional assets of all the different like tweets and different things they can use. And then it sends out the newsletter. The newsletter to me is the most exciting part because again, I'm i'm horrible at sending out my own newsletter. I probably haven't emailed my newsletter out to my list of 700 of you for three months. It's just because it's so many steps, I'm finally automating it so that it sends out a really cool-looking one. And you can see it automated here, where it comes up with the intro paragraph in one prompt, injects it here, injects the that image for the episode in between, and then the body right here. And this is where I'm currently at, where I feel like it's it's good enough content that it does a great job of summarizing, giving somebody the key points of the guest, writing it as me, but without saying, hey, I'm Dan Sanchez here, because that's redundant. The email came from Dan Sanchez.
00:21:21
Speaker
um i need to add some links to be like hey listen to the full episode and then to like apple youtube spotify or the website um down below so that they can actually listen to the episode it even links to the episode automatically i think yeah okay i went to the website it really needs to go to the episode but you know uh progress before perfection right um um i'm just excited about this because now with every single one Podcasts that I produce I'm gonna be able to get a newsletter out of it and actually update the email list Which means more people will listen to the show and round and round this whole thing goes So that's what I've been working on.
Future Plans and AI Adoption
00:21:58
Speaker
I'm moving essentially from a marketing consultant and podcaster and like AI junkie
00:22:06
Speaker
to actually starting, I guess what you could call an AI agency, an AI podcast agency, is kind of like the next step that I'm taking. With everything that I've learned, I can now produce a podcast for way less, because there are still a few pieces that you could outsource, because AI can't do it all, like actually going through those clips, selecting them, actually making the few edits that need to be made to a show, as much as Zencaster has automated the process, there's still some editing that needs to happen here. um And then making sure it's all posted at the right place at the right time. Also coming up with that one graphic is something that you can't quite automate graphic design. It's so close. I'm so close to being able to automate that too, but not yet. ah That one piece that we saw here, like this piece, that someone still has to, even with a using AI, like I created this image in mid-journey and then I brought it into Photoshop and even used the AI tool in Photoshop to make it, it's still not quite to the point where you can fully automate a graphic like this.
00:23:03
Speaker
It's getting closer, though, and it's faster with AI, but still not fully automatable, like coming up with this newsletter is. um And of course, this is this is the worst that it's going to be. It's only going to get better from here. And that's the most exciting part as a the AI, the chat gpt gets better or clod gets better or whatever as the automation can tap into more different apps uh all of this is going to get easier it's going to get better but the ones who are on the forefront of this are going to be able to accelerate past the ones who
00:23:34
Speaker
are still doing all of this manually because you're going to be able to come up with more and better content faster because you could spend way less time doing all the little baby steps of getting this content out there and way more time thinking about how to come up with original ideas that are actually worth spreading in the first place. The problem is we're all stuck in the hamster wheel of this instead of spending almost all of our time thinking about just this one recording and how to make it the best possible thing ever. coming up with better ideas, spending more time thinking, doing more time learning so that we have better ideas to share, more time experimenting, so we have something worth sharing. That's why I'm heading in this AI like agency direction, because I think a lot of it is automating it for people, but also spending more time coaching people on how to come up with original
00:24:17
Speaker
points of view that are worth sharing that can transform other people's ah ah transform the industries they're working in. So that's kind of where I'm at. Hopefully you've enjoyed this behind the scenes. It's kind of hodgepodgey as I'm going from tab to tab on my desktop here. but Hopefully, it was insightful to do a few of you to get into my head as far as what I'm working on, how I'm thinking about it, and how I'm approaching it for myself as my like as a solopreneur and marketing consultant. so Stay tuned for the next episode where I'm going to be diving in with more guests in how they use it so I could even use my learnings from then to better improve this process. and I'll be giving some updates on this podcast agency thing that I'm working on real soon.