Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jessica Malnik's AI Toolkit for Streamlining Marketing Processes
202 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez talks to Jessica Malnik who is the Founder of JM Content Group about her expertise on leveraging AI for administrative tasks, debate on AI's capabilities in writing, and its role as an invaluable co-pilot in the marketing process. They also explore the practicalities of using AI tools like Zapier and ChatGPT, the integration of AI into strategic work, and offer practical advice for those embarking on their AI journey. Listen to this episode if you want to learn more about how to put AI to work for yourself.
Resources Mentioned:
- Zapier: https://zapier.com
- Trello: https://trello.com
- Perplexity AI: https://www.perplexity.ai/
- Jessica Malnik's newsletter: https://newsletter.theremoteworktribe.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 AI as a 24/7 intern in marketing.
06:05 AI vs. human expertise in content creation.
08:32 AI can generate content for niche markets.
11:03 For core niches, use subject matter experts.
16:43 ChatGPT simplifies research process, summarizes top articles.
17:24 AI reads and interprets intent based on keywords.
20:59 AI supports admin tasks, aids research and notifications.
25:53 AI, multistep processes, collaboration, industry, overestimation
27:11 Custom GPT drastically cuts down processing time.
33:08 Consider adopting AI, start experimenting, automate tasks.
36:44 Advancement and growth are essential for success.
38:17 Best to find me on LinkedIn. Also Twitter and newsletter.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Jessica Malnick and AI Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI driven marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez and today I'm talking to Jessica Malnick who has been Automating and doing a bunch of cool things with AI so I wanted to have her on the show We've I found her on LinkedIn a friend recommended
00:00:14
Speaker
having her on to unpack what she's doing with AI that I just can't stop. Like hearing testimonies and case studies of what people are doing. I'm so hungry to learn because I find with AI. It's, I find a lot of a learning AI is really finding about the possibilities of what's even possible and then figuring out how to get there. And maybe it's like that with all learning, but with AI, there's no like guide ball.
00:00:39
Speaker
There's no guide, there's no playbook that's tried and true. So all of us are getting together and kind of like learning from each other. So Jessica, I'm excited to have you on the show. Give me
AI as a 24/7 Intern and its Business Role
00:00:50
Speaker
a quick broad overview for the audience of what are the main categories you would say your AI use and work goes into right now.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. First, thanks for having me on the show. When it comes to how I think about AI, I kind of think of it as almost like, and I feel like it's cliche by now, but like having a 24 seven intern that never sleeps and it's like the best intern you're ever going to have. But the reason I kind of say intern instead of something like assistant is because you do need to prompt it and you do need to kind of do, it was in my experience.
00:01:22
Speaker
the really hard work of figuring out, okay, what are you trying to get done? And then as soon as you know that, have really specific instructions. And that's how I typically get the most results for what I'm doing with AI. But in terms of how I think about AI and how I'm using it, broad categories, I'd say like obviously in marketing, obviously automating some routine admin task within my business would be the main two.
00:01:47
Speaker
Yeah. So you're talking about AI assisting admin tasks. And I know we were just talking about before we pushed record, uh, helping you facilitate writing, but I want to jump into that one first. Cause I
Can AI be Creative in Writing?
00:02:00
Speaker
think we'll have a little bit of a fun debate here and I'm going to get crushed, but I love using AI for writing.
00:02:08
Speaker
But it's also because I'm not a writer and I've never really been a strong writer. I like writing LinkedIn posts. That's where I can, I know how to write for LinkedIn. I know how to write blogs that rank.
00:02:18
Speaker
But it's not because I'm a good writer. I'd say it's because I'm a better teacher and I know how to reverse engineer what people need to learn in order for the article to rank. But it's not certainly because I'm not a great writer or that I'm fun to read. But you told me before jumping on that you don't think chat GPT so good at writing. So unpack that a little bit and tell me about why.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I would say, I feel like whenever anyone talks about AI, like the first use case that everyone jumped to was, oh, let's have AI write stuff for us. And recently my experience, and I've been playing around with this since 2020. So way before DriveTBT was even released with like copy AI and like the very early versions of Jasper. Yep.
00:03:02
Speaker
before it was called that as well. So when I would say about AI, it's objectively bad at writing if you're trying to do anything more than the absolute basics. Can AI write a decent product description if you already have a template and you need 100 more that are basically the same thing? Yeah, AI is good for that. But if you're trying to stand out, build an audience,
00:03:27
Speaker
have a unique point of view or basically not have something
AI's Limitations in Unique Content Creation
00:03:30
Speaker
that's completely commoditized, AI is objectively bad at that because AI is all about pattern matching, right? So when you're trying to do pattern matching, like, yeah, of course, like everything AI is telling you is things that have, somebody else has already said, at least in some case already, not to mention when you have people, not to mention when you have those things and like your only differentiator is a tool that everybody else has access to.
00:03:57
Speaker
That's no differentiation at all. Like the main things that actually took out at least how I'm kind of viewing and I think are pretty timeless writing and audience building skills is developing taste and developing like, and also being able to build an audience. And you can't do that just through a tool that everybody else has.
00:04:15
Speaker
Well, I agree and I disagree. So let me come at it and then let's talk about it. I agree that it's bad at writing, especially if you're trying to teach somebody something and it needs to have a level of
00:04:29
Speaker
It can't be generic, right? If you're gonna rank on Google, like you have to write something original, otherwise Google is gonna be able to tell. It would tell too if you hired a writer to write on it, and they only did 30 minutes worth of research. They're going to end up writing something regurgitated to it. Unless you have enough domain authority for your site, it's not gonna rank. I mean, one of my favorite case studies that I love to hate on is MailChimp wrote like this. They emailed me and asked me if I could link to it for my blog. And I've written a lot of blogs on,
00:04:57
Speaker
how to build a media studio sitting here in a media studio and how to vlog and stuff. And they're like, can you can you link to this from your blog that's also ranking? And I read their blog from MailChimp. And it's obvious it was written by a writer who has never picked up a camera in their life. I'm like, let alone uploaded a vlog to YouTube and the the content was off. It was way off from anything a vlogger would actually need to ask or should be asking or does ask because I was one.
00:05:26
Speaker
So, but I will say the writing was better than what chat GPT would have done had they been given a good prompt because it was written by a writer. I do find that it's pretty good at writing. If you feed it, if you feed it information, that's unique. If you have data, maybe a research report with data and good numbers in it, I might start getting there. Shoot. If you feed it a transcript and ask it to go off of that, then the writing can start getting pretty good. Is it as good as someone who knows how to write well, like remarkably well? No.
00:05:56
Speaker
Is it better than someone who can write okay? If it's given unique data, I'd say probably. Interesting. I would
AI in SEO and Keyword Optimization
00:06:05
Speaker
actually kind of agree with you on more than this than you might even admit to it, which is I do kind of agree. I mean, AI is only as good as the information you feed it.
00:06:16
Speaker
And to your point about kind of the generic freelance writer who has no idea about the topic, yeah, I call that cop, I call that all the time on actually LinkedIn and elsewhere, copycat content. Like that is the same exact thing as what AI does. So if like you're literally just using somebody who has no experience with the product, no subject matter expertise, and they're just trying to Google research their way to an article, then yeah, of course AI is going to be
00:06:45
Speaker
comparable, maybe a little bit below what that person does. However, if you're trying to hire someone who's a subject matter expert, or they're actually taking the time to do interviews with subject matter experts, which is oftentimes a lot of what I do, and what I advocate for as well, like then yeah, you're going to get a probably a much better output than you're going to get from AI or from a generic writer who
00:07:05
Speaker
is spending maybe a couple of hours trying to research their way, particularly if it's on something that's an intermediate or advanced topic. You might be able to get around that if it's like super 101. But even then at that point, like I would say like AI writing is typically like kind of that C level student. Like it's going to be, it's now the new barrier to entry. Then it wasn't the past. So like if you couldn't write
00:07:31
Speaker
at a C level before AI, then AI is going to give you a boost if you know how to use it well. However, if you really want to stand out and kind of do something that's a little bit more unique and kind of resonate more, then I'd kind of argue at that point that that's where we might disagree a little bit where it's like AI is not going to be that level.
00:07:49
Speaker
You know, one of the things I love about the way what I can do with AI that I couldn't do before was add a little bit of humor to my writing. I'm just not a funny guy, but I find that writing newsletter specifically lends itself well to like, just not writing to make people laugh out loud, but just to make them smile a little bit as they're reading and learning. I find AI is pretty good at making it, adding just a little fun and a little humor more than I was. And I've certainly worked with some writers that are
00:08:15
Speaker
that will make you laugh out loud. And they are hilarious. So it's not as good as that. But that's, that's pretty hard. Like it's hard to come up with analogies, especially in the amount of time it takes for it to comes up with it so fast. I'm like, man, it's hard to be at least for me.
00:08:30
Speaker
I could think of one use case though, one use case that I've discovered. It's taken me a while because I've been saying this for a while that it can't, that you need to feed it original ideas in order for it to be useful, but I did find a use case where I'm like, ah, but no, even without feeding it original material, there are the long tail of keywords of things that you can be writing for where I found it to be helpful because nobody else, because it's not, it doesn't, I'm trying, how do I say this?
00:09:00
Speaker
There is not enough traffic coming to some of these long tail keywords to justify hiring someone to write a blog post for.
00:09:07
Speaker
But if you give AI a task to write how to grow an audience on, let's just say Facebook, and then you ask it to write it 100 times for the 100 most popular service industries, how to grow social media as a lawn mowing company, how to grow on Facebook as a fill in the blank, and maybe not a beauty salon, because there's plenty of those, competition and marketing for that.
00:09:36
Speaker
But you just go down the line, like roof repair and all the different service businesses times a hundred and you just go micro and niche. I'm like, it's going to be generic content, but it's going to fit two things together. Mowing lawns and Facebook marketing. Bam. That article is probably going to be better than what you'd probably find out there. And if it isn't, then if you do it a hundred times, half of those articles are probably going to rank at least on the homepage somewhere. That's my hypothesis and I'm currently testing it.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely experimented a lot with programmatic SEO, which is kind of what you described right there. Yeah. I would say for the most part, then like if it's a core vertical, even if it's a super low traffic,
00:10:17
Speaker
Estimate, first of all, in my experience, Ahrefs is usually not as accurate as you think it is when it comes to that sort of thing. And I have multiple examples of keywords. And this is kind of an industry SEO secret of keywords that show up as zero or as like 10 searches a month that end up getting my clients like a thousand. Yeah.
00:10:40
Speaker
The data's really bad, and I agree with you, because I've ranked for things that it's like, oh yeah, that only gets 500. It actually gets 5,000. It's 10 times off. Or it says 5,000. It's 500. I know, because I rank for it, and I can do the math. So they're remarkably bad. But it's not uncommon to think of, hey, are there roofers that are looking for Facebook marketing? Probably. Absolutely. And I would say, in general, if it is a core vertical,
00:11:05
Speaker
or a core niche of your product. And I do a lot of work in software companies. So I give it to empire your current vertical and even if it is low traffic.
00:11:14
Speaker
I would probably still put ideally a subject matter expert writer or a writer who can interview someone who's a subject matter expert on that content. And then for those like lesser known niches and if once you already have, you know, assuming if it's a hundred articles that you're trying to write on this and you already have 10 of them and maybe there's, you know, 10 more that probably could be written by a human, but the rest of those, yeah. At that point, like feed at the content and then have it spewed out and then have somebody edit it.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, so programmatic SEO. I mean, it is programmatic, but it kind of is, it's kind of not. Programmatic SEO is really specific in being able to use an algorithm to be able to create a page that scrapped together enough data to actually call it a page, right? Like Zapier did, or like lots of other sites have done this. It was really hard to do, but now with AI, I'm like, it actually fills in the gaps of what programmatic SEO was missing. And it's not even, I guess it's programmatic, but it still feels a lot different than programmatic SEO did.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like everyone has a different term. A different way of describing programmatic SEO. I kind of view it as anything and I also think a lot of programmatic SEO probably shouldn't even exist. Some of it is just downright spam.
00:12:25
Speaker
However, in other cases, in other cases, like what kind of example we're talking about, it actually makes sense, but it's all about kind of first principle thinking about, okay, where does it actually, like, does this actually make sense? And is the traffic that we might get from it actually going to be useful? Because I do this in my experience, a lot of times people get into, you get like a really technical SEO and be like, I can just create these pages from scratch.
00:12:50
Speaker
or whatever and you wind up ranking for things that are never ever going to be relevant traffic or relevant leads or any sort of relevant conversion for their company.
00:13:01
Speaker
There's all kinds of dangers and pitholes there. I'm waiting for the day that someone just creates a web scraper that goes and reads all the reviews left on Yelp and Google for individual companies and just writes awesome summary pages of them based on real people's data. I'm like, someone's going to do that and it's going to be awesome and terrifying at the same time because sometimes it's going to be so far off and it's going to
00:13:22
Speaker
It's going to down companies, right? Because too many negative reviews and we know Yelp is like prone to negative reviews for some reason and has been painful. I've been on that side of Yelp. It sucks. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how programmers build tools to do all kinds of new programmatic SEO with. Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:44
Speaker
moving on from writing or actually moving on from like using AI to do the writing. Tell me about how you're using AI to do everything else around the writing since you were a fantastic writer. How are you using it to help you accelerate that writing?
AI for Ideation and Overcoming Writer's Block
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I would say in general, the ways that I'm really using AI the most these days has been for
00:14:07
Speaker
what I like to call either sometimes for ideation to kind of get over writer's block. So occasionally, like everyone has writer's block. So it's like, I often will kind of go in there and feed it some tools and be like, here's X, Y, and Z things. Like, you know, about this, I'll feed it some original ideas, help me get something started.
00:14:26
Speaker
I often find that I maybe only use 10% of what AI gives me, but that 10% is usually a jumping off point to make it a lot faster. The other way I like to use it in that sort of sense is I want to see AI's alphabet pattern matching, right? So if I'm not feeding it original ideas, I want to see what's out there because that's generally going to be the most general advice and the things that everyone talks about. So I'm like, okay, I probably need to include some of this if I want to rank on Google, for example.
00:14:51
Speaker
However, I also want to make sure I have some sort of originality nugget, something in there that's going to be different, even if it's only 10% of the article, that can make a huge difference when it comes to not only ranking, but also actually resonating with people and actually getting people to take your desired call to action. The other way I like to use it is the very end of the process, which is for, like,
00:15:14
Speaker
editing and what I call more like role playing, because it's not really like a human editor, it's more like role playing to help me spot out gaps. What is in this article? And oftentimes I will be like, if it's an SEO piece, I'll look at like the 10 articles that are ranking and be like, what are the unanswered questions from all of these articles? Help me figure out, you know, what are the questions you might still have, and I'll get it to kind of us. So make sure that I can include that in my article.
00:15:40
Speaker
And I also will go into my own. I'm going to be like, what are the unanswered questions? What are the gaps? And it helps me kind of make sure that I'm backing up claims, for example, or adding more examples or making sure that I'm explaining what to get out. Tell me how you're doing it specifically. So going back to ideation, what are you prompting it with? Are you saying, hey, write an outline for an article written on this keyword just to tease it out? What are you prompting it with?
00:16:09
Speaker
Good question. I'm not a huge fan of using the same like templated plumps. I kind of find that it's better. It is for my own use cases for like each individual one. Yes, do I have certain things that I tend to reuse over and over again? Absolutely, but I'm usually going back to OK.
00:16:26
Speaker
What is this article about? What's the angle? Because I was thinking, what is my angle and what's my thesis? And I'll prompt it with that and be like, give me 10 ideas, or give me 20 examples just to start spitballing. What I found is that sometimes you ask it to go in a certain direction and write an outline or something, but it goes off into a ditch. But I did find a process with it that was interesting.
00:16:52
Speaker
One of the things I love about chat GPT is it can do research on Bing, which is just amazing. Cause then you don't have to do it. Actually built this custom GPT that you pretty much just give it your keyword and then it goes and searches that keyword on Bing. And I wish it were on Google, but you know, it doesn't have access to Google. It's got access to Bing, which is fine. And then it just goes and reads the top five articles that rank for that keyword on Bing. And then it does a summary of each of them to kind of give you an idea of like what's ranking and what's the angle of those articles.
00:17:22
Speaker
And then it goes, I think I also give it the, it summarizes, it tries to figure out what's the intent based on what it's read so far and what it knows about the keyword. It also takes a shot at thinking, again, it's like one of those, take your time, take a deep breath, think slowly, AI. What do you think the searcher's intent is behind this keyword? After going and doing some initial reading on Bing, its ability to find the intent I find to be remarkably good.
00:17:53
Speaker
which is kind of like the hard part of SEO sometimes is actually triggering, trying to pick out like, why is someone searching for this? What are they looking for? And that part, it's actually pretty good. That's what I use it for right now.
00:18:06
Speaker
Yeah, I use that quite a bit as well. I'd actually use a couple of chat TBT plugins, um, to kind of do a little bit more of that. And then recently I started experimenting a little bit more with perplexity AI, um, and kind of doing a lot of my research there as well as on Google, as well as on chat TBT. It's called perplexity AI. What does it do? It is basically like a way to, a faster way to search the web with AI.
00:18:35
Speaker
Ooh, I'm going to have to check. Is this a free tour? Is this a paid tool? I don't know how. I'm using the free version. Yeah. I'm not paying for it. So it has a free. Yes. I went to perplexity.com. That is not it. Perplexity AI. It's. Oh, interesting. So where knowledge begins. So you're just taking all your Google searches into this thing now? Not all of my Google searches, but I'm definitely using it more and more for that. Yeah. And I'm looking at something that looks like a search page.
00:19:06
Speaker
And then of course I have chat GPT plus which. Yeah, it's where I'm doing the majority of that work. These days chat GPT plus, right?
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, since I have a couple of custom chat TPT plugins and then I find that I like has saved and bookmark different chats that I've done in the past and I'll kind of keep reusing them and kind of creating my own custom, almost custom TPT like thing based off of information that I've already fed it oftentimes over weeks or months.
00:19:39
Speaker
Oh, perplexity AI is cool. How do I not know about this? It's like chat GPT, but it's giving you a ton of images and YouTube videos and a very few, but a few links to search results. But combined, because I asked how to build a home video studio, it's a keyword I know I rank for, so I wanted to see how I influenced it. And there I am, I see my picture. It's very small, but I do see myself in there.
00:20:06
Speaker
Interesting. I'd also say in general, when it comes to chat TPT, going back to another use cases that I use all the time, when it comes to writing is like, if I do an inner, if I'm sometimes doing interviews and there's no proprietary information, I'll take the transcript, I'll feed it into chat TPT and get it to ask me questions and pull out quotes for me just a little bit faster. Yeah.
AI in Editing and Quality Assurance
00:20:30
Speaker
So you say you're using it to do editing, but just to suggest edits, you won't have it rewrite for you.
00:20:36
Speaker
Sometimes I'll have it rewrite. I want to say it's about 50-50, whether I go with the rewrite or I go and change it again, but I'm definitely using it to help me spot gaps and backup claims and stuff like that. Moving on from writing, you said you're using AI to do a lot of admin tasks. What kind of admin tasks are you using it for? And are you automating any of it?
Automating Admin Tasks with AI Tools
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, I would say some of it is like,
00:21:01
Speaker
things that I was even doing a little bit before AI that now AI helps me with a little bit more. Although I still find that when I'm using AI, I usually have to put like my assistant to help with some guardrails to make sure it doesn't go off the rails. So like it's any sort of advent asset is super repetitive. So things that you're doing all of the time, like for example, you know, sending a notification into a Slack channel for like,
00:21:26
Speaker
Hey, remind me of this goal or remind me of this task or, you know, send me a notification when I get a mention on next topic or whatever. That's how I've been using automation predominantly through Zapier for that since well before chat DPT was a thing.
00:21:44
Speaker
And the fact that you can get it to kind of do a bit of research and writing for you, I'm finding new ways to explore that, particularly when it comes to biz dev tasks or social media tasks. It's not writing anything for me, but it is helping me notify and find things.
00:22:03
Speaker
helping me kind of do searches and notify things so that I can then go in and write it myself, but I don't necessarily have to spend as much time as I used to doing that task. Tell me about some of the things you're using Zapier for. Yeah. Some of the ways that I'm using Zapier today is I use Trello as my project management software. That's where all of my internal task and then all of my client work.
00:22:31
Speaker
and pretty much anyone who I collaborate with internally, all of that's in Trello. So anytime I have a deadline, things are, again, this is not really AI related, but it is automation related. And then there's a deadline, it pinks me in Slack, or it pinks me in email, depending on what it's for. I'll use it to create different cards for me based off of a name. So I have an email, get an assignment from a client or whatever, it automatically adds it into Trello for me.
00:22:59
Speaker
Wow. That's pretty cool. So the email, every time you get an email from a certain person, it's like, Oh, turn this email into a task. And then it embeds the email into the thing. Yeah. And that's all done through Zapier. Did you need AI to help you with that though? Cause I feel like that would have been an integration that already worked. Yeah, I didn't need AI for that. That's just more on the automation side. Yeah. Now what I'm kind of starting to do a little bit more of is taking that automation and a step further, where it's like, usually I didn't have to kind of edit it a little bit, but now I can be like, okay, go into chat TBT.
00:23:29
Speaker
and do a little bit of research on this topic and kind of get it started for me. So I kind of get some ideas behind it. Or what I've done in the past, and this is through AI, is whenever I do an interview, once it's done recording on Zoom,
00:23:48
Speaker
it automatically goes into Rev and then using Rev Max, which is their AI subscription service, it will automatically automate it. And then the part I haven't necessarily automated fully yet, but it's on my to-do list, is to send that back into Trello.
00:24:05
Speaker
I'm trying to look for something that it can do and automate that's like multi-step without me having to interfere with it. And I haven't found it yet. I've built a lot of custom GPTs, but I find that I'm like, I could automate this whole process. But I'm like, again, like I said before, sometimes even with multi-step things, it goes off into a ditch frequently. And if you're there walking it through step by step, it's easy to correct, to be like, oh no, not that, do this. And it's like, okay. And then it goes back into the right direction.
00:24:33
Speaker
But I'm like, if you were automated all the way, like, like, even for the show, like I have a custom GPTA, I call my show runner.
00:24:42
Speaker
And I just copy and paste each guest's LinkedIn profile. It's, well, first I'm like, I click the button. It's like, Hey, we doing a solo episode. We, or are you doing a guest? I'm like, guest, you're like, great. Drop their LinkedIn profile before I copy and paste LinkedIn profile gives it context. It then goes and takes their name and title, does some research on bring, does a summary of the person. They're like, Hey, this person's good. X, Y, and Z. Do you have a, do you want to interview them on one of these topics or do you want to.
00:25:07
Speaker
Do you have a topic in mind? Usually, I have a topic in mind. So I put that title. It blends what it knows about the guest and what it knows about the show because that's loaded in the instructions already, and then comes up with four or five unique angles. And then I pick an angle. It then comes up with titles. I pick a title. See, it's a very collaborative process where it's like, now what? Now what? Now what?
00:25:27
Speaker
I'm like, I'd automate the whole thing, but it's ability to actually find because I have to make so many choices in between it that I'm like, it's ability to actually deliver the result and just go all the way through. I just give it a LinkedIn profile and it spits out everything I need is going to be really low. It has to give me options of which I have to choose from because it's not quite smart enough to be able to choose it by itself yet. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And that's kind of one of the reasons why when it comes to any sort of AI things I'm doing,
00:25:57
Speaker
I, similar to you, don't really have a lot of multi-step processes when it comes to AI. Like, AI is helping me with things, but if it's multi-step, either I'm collaborating with it pretty closely, or I'm putting my assistant to collaborate with it even closer as well. Just because it goes, to your point, it just goes off the rails. And then it's also one of the reasons why I think people who don't know much about AI, or people who don't know much about an industry,
00:26:26
Speaker
at least right now, overestimate what it can do. It can do a lot. It is freaking incredible. And if your entire job is what are we doing, something really repetitive and mundane, then yeah, your job probably is at risk already from AI. But however, to your point,
00:26:46
Speaker
A lot of things, AI is really good as a co-pilot or as a collaborator, and it's not necessarily anywhere close to the level where it could go off on its own without creating some issues.
AI as a Co-Pilot: Balancing Human Collaboration
00:26:58
Speaker
Now, will we get to that point in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years? Probably, but at that point, we're also probably looking at general intelligence, which creates a total new can of worms.
00:27:10
Speaker
It's amazing what it can do though. There are like, there are many processes I've cut down from two hours to five minutes like my showrunner used to do or does now for every single guest I have on. I made one that took a one month process and cut it into a 30 minute process.
00:27:28
Speaker
It's, it's, it's long. It's a custom GPT where you really have to babysit it for 20, 20 to 30 minutes. It takes it that long to actually do the work. And oftentimes because it's such heavy work, it'll fail and you have to restart it, which is why it takes 20 to 30 minutes because it's long. We used to, when I worked for a podcast agency, we used to come up with these things called show Bibles, which is a strategic plan for a podcast about who's listening, why they're listening. Why would they care?
00:27:54
Speaker
what are the pains they feel and how does this content map to their pain. What I made a custom GPT do is all based on Bing search and very little input, but it will come up with the whole strategic name and a strategic plan for a podcast. Will it do it as good as a podcast strategist will? No.
00:28:14
Speaker
you now get a podcast strategy that's more strategic thinking about a podcast and what it should be and what it could be and why it matters than I'd say 99% of podcasters ever put into their podcast. You can now accomplish if you just walk it through the baby steps on this chat GPT. I have a client that I'm starting to work with that has this two-week process they go through in their consultation of coming up with
00:28:40
Speaker
Scenarios for their clients, but the scenarios take a long time to think through but i'm like looking at it i'm like This is this is going to turn your two-week process into a one-day process, but it doesn't fully automate it At least not yet or we might get there but It's still going to take eight hours of work. But at least it's not going to be 80 hours of work. It's but it's Still it's a heck of a lot of work done. Are you still finding it's like making you 10 times more productive? Where would you say like the productivity radar for you as with AI?
00:29:11
Speaker
I mean, yes, it's definitely a productivity boost. I think it depends on what I'm using it for, depending on if it's saving me five minutes, or potentially saving me from making a catastrophic mistake, or saving me 12 hours. Similar to you, I think it's a great co-pilot. I don't think
00:29:34
Speaker
it's good enough at least for anything I'm using it for to do something completely from scratch. However, when it comes to feeding it a good idea and having it work through scenarios and different things, yeah, that definitely speeds up how fast I can think through different things and then potentially even think of things that I wouldn't even have even thought of. Yeah, but left unchecked by itself, yeah, it's not gonna do any of that. So like for,
00:30:02
Speaker
Like a competitor. So like if I'm doing like, you know, competitor research or whatnot, I'll be like, Hey, like this, like I have a whole checklist and a whole plan for what I do. But yes, AI is definitely cutting that process from what used to take, you know, two or three days and, or my poor assistant having to like manually do a lot of work. There's still some of that. It's not cut at least my time on it to like a few hours.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah. Would you say that you're able to do twice as much work, three times as much as you were like three years ago before AI was a thing?
00:30:38
Speaker
more work yes two to three times more no because it's also like ai is taking out at least for my own experience some of the menial or some of the administrative or repetitive things but like often the hardest work is the thinking like i'm a copywriter by trade so when it comes to copywriting it's not really about the writing
00:31:00
Speaker
it's about the positioning, it's about being a clear thinker, it's about clear communication. AI is certainly helping me, but a lot of that is still on me to feed it the right information and to think through all the different models and how that's going to relate to a positioning, whether it's positioning a piece of content or doing a website redesign or something like that. AI helps that process, but I don't think you can do 3X the amount of
00:31:29
Speaker
websites just based off of the amount of thinking that it requires. Would you say you'd be able to be 50% more productive because of it? If you weren't doing all the things and just had to go write an article a day, I don't know what your article output would have been a week, but are you able to do like 50% more articles at the same quality you were before?
00:31:53
Speaker
Well, I mean, I do a lot more landing pages and email copy and kind of website copy than I do articles, although I definitely do some articles as well. I would say maybe about like 25% more output.
00:32:07
Speaker
is generous and that's just more because a lot of it is related to kind of thinking through your ideas, thinking through your positioning. And like, yeah, AI helps with that, but it's not like, you know, you still have to do a lot of that hard work and you only have so many hours of like flow state in the day, at least most people do.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. If you're an absolute machine and you can, you know, consistently have a high level output of, you know, for, you know, eight, 10 or 12 hours a day of like strategic work, hats off to you. I don't think that's most people. So like, you know, there's only a certain number of hours a day where you can really do strategy. And typically for most people that kind of falls between four and six hours. Can you work more than that? Absolutely.
00:32:57
Speaker
but like it's not going to be like your highest level strategic work. What
How to Experiment and Adapt with AI Tools
00:33:02
Speaker
have been your best recommendations for getting started with AI? Best recommendation is assuming you're not just, you know, completely trying to just work it out entirely, which there's definitely some people who are doing that and hats off to you. I also hope if you're one of those people listening to this and you're
00:33:23
Speaker
scared of AI and don't want to touch it at all, have some sort of career exit plan in the next 10 years, my recommendation to you.
00:33:32
Speaker
However, for anyone else who's a little bit curious of it but is not really sure how they should be using it, I just started experimenting. A lot of these tools have free versions. So I started experimenting and started thinking through, doing basic stuff. One of the first things I did when I first started today, I was like, create a recipe for me, like a cooking recipe or analyze this YouTube video or something where you start to see what it can do.
00:34:03
Speaker
Start to audit all of the repetitive tasks that you do in a given day or just even in a given week. I can guarantee there's probably at least three tasks that could be automated or you could use AI to speed up your time. Those are also just like once you kind of get your bearings with AI, those are a really good place to start. And then start to experiment a little bit more with it.
00:34:27
Speaker
one of my favorite books of all time that's helped me with my career. It's not a marketing book per se, but I know it's impacted a lot of marketers. It's called the four hour work week, right? It's like a classic written in the mid 2000s about how to become so freaking productive that you can work in under four hours a week and still make a full-time living as a solopreneur or as a remote worker.
00:34:48
Speaker
One of the things that he talks about in there that I love is I, he calls it like, I think it's a three step process to like freedom or something like that. He probably had a smarter way to put it, but it's essentially like look through all the things that you're doing, do an audit of everything you do.
00:35:03
Speaker
And number one, just eliminate everything that you're doing that isn't pushing the needle forward. How much can you get off your plate before we get to the next two steps? Step one, eliminate it. Step two, automate it.
00:35:19
Speaker
Right, which is where you're getting a lot was happier and you're starting to automate all the little tiny tasks Even small things of just copying and pasting something over into another field or another app Can you automate it with something like Zapier to just move it over taking your email move it into Trello? It's just another little thing that just happens automatically now and the last one you talked about was delegate
00:35:38
Speaker
Which is where I find is very interesting for AI right now. Because what AI used to do, or what you used to have to delegate to maybe like an administrative assistant, now AI can do some of those things and do them pretty well. Not always. You can't give AI a list and be like, hey,
00:35:57
Speaker
The example he even gives of the book is like, I want to interview more people on this topic. I have this one as a good example, but I don't need him. I already have his contact info. Go find the contact info of five more people like this person, right? That would be hard for AI to do well. But there's a lot of things that it can do well. So it's starting to blur the lines between automation and delegation I'm finding. You're able to automate more. There's little things that it can do and fill in that you couldn't do programmatically before.
00:36:26
Speaker
I would definitely agree with that. I still think, yeah, someone who has an assistant and stuff like that, I still think there are certain tasks that need to be done by a human if for no reason is AI can't do it yet or it just goes off the rail and it's just not reliable enough. For sure. Or the task is important enough where it's like somebody else needs to be babysitting this task.
00:36:49
Speaker
But to your point, I've also read the four hour week week a couple of times. I feel like one of the biggest sticking points for me, kind of that I indirectly got from the book. And I think it kind of whispers it within the book, which is like, you should be leveling up. And if you're doing the exact same thing 18 months from now that you were doing back then, like you're probably
00:37:11
Speaker
either have a fixed mindset and or, you know, kind of coasting a little bit. And if you kind of want to grow and that's fine, if that's kind of your goal, it's just, you know, make money and then have your passions be outside of that. However, if you're a little bit more ambitious and or wanting to kind of advance your career, like you should never be doing the same thing for 18 months. And I'd argue even argue now if AI is boring the lines a little bit more, if you're still doing the same thing a year from now.
00:37:37
Speaker
you probably start re-evaluating what exactly you're doing and figure out ways of things that you can get, how you can level up, whether that's through automation, through AI, through delegation.
00:37:48
Speaker
Well, Jessica, this has been a fantastic conversation. I know I'm excited about where AI is going and how, how much we can accomplish now, especially as solopreneurs with AI, because I mean, we, we have, I mean, we have us and we might have an administrative assistant and we might even grow the company, but with AI, I feel like there's so much more that can be accomplished. And I
Connecting with Jessica Malnick for AI Insights
00:38:07
Speaker
know you, you talk about that online, where can people go to connect more with you, learn more about what you're doing with AI as well as marketing and writing?
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I feel like the best places you can find me on social media would be on LinkedIn. I'm still kind of on Twitter X, as well as in a little bit more enthrides if for like more personal stuff.
00:38:27
Speaker
You can also subscribe to my newsletter, newsletter.theremoteworktribe.com. It's kind of my other site where I'm kind of talking a little bit about helping founders and marketers lead remote first teams. And I talk a lot about AI through that newsletter. And again, that's newsletter.theremoteworktribe.com. And you can also find me on my website, which is just jessicaemountach.com. Fantastic. Again, thanks so much for joining me. Awesome. Thank you so much.