5 ways I'm leveraging AI for business growth

Summary

if you’re not using AI right now to augment what you do in business, you’re already falling behind. I hate giving that vibe but it’s true. here are the five ways I’m actually using it. some low impact, some high.

1. context. AI is early. it’s a skill. people who get good at it now will be way ahead in a year. we have it integrated across all the companies I run, multiple team members trained, accounts in different places. I’m at maybe a kindergarten level. I want to graduate up a few grades fast.

2. social media posts. mostly the organic community side, not my personal account. some posts need to come straight from me and some are generic enough to draft with AI. I think of it like paying someone to cut my grass. saturday is for family, not three hours behind a mower. low impact, time back.

3. podcast prep, medium impact. on Garage Gym Athlete I cover scientific studies. I now talk through them with ChatGPT. ask why. ask for follow up studies. ask for supporting evidence. it’s the same research process I was doing solo, just twice as fast. I still verify everything because I don’t trust the output blindly yet.

4. SEO, high impact. we’re leveraging the crap out of AI for optimizing blog posts, meta titles, tags, structure. production rate is way up. that’s one of the poles in the water for 2023 and AI made it move.

5. drafting simple emails. I don’t use it for newsletters, I want those in my own voice. I do use it for responses to customers, partners, vendors, when I just need a clean draft and don’t want to spend the mental energy. it gets me 80% of the email in seconds.

6. complex brainstorming and content creation, the experimental one. I’ll give ChatGPT three paragraphs of context about who I am, what the business is, what I’m trying to do, and then ask for four marketing emails with a specific call to action. the more detail you give it the better the output. the more follow up questions you ask the sharper it gets. this is where the real leverage lives.

7. tools right now, ChatGPT, Jasper, Ubersuggest from Neil Patel for SEO. there are dozens more. start anywhere. give AI some low impact work first, build the muscle, then move it up the value chain. try harder.

Transcript

if you’re not using ai yet, you’re behind

A higher impact, and the third one would be SEO. So we’re leveraging the crap out of AI right now to publish and optimize our websites for search engine optimization. The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself.

This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses, and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Let’s get right into it. If you are not using AI right now, artificial intelligence to augment what you’re doing In business, especially online business, really any business, you are already falling behind.

And I hate kind of giving that mentality or even giving you that feeling if you’re not. But I just hope everyone understands where we’re at in history. This is not a cool tool that you may or may not use and it doesn’t really matter. It’s just so early right now, it hasn’t made its way into what you’re doing yet if you’re not using it, but it absolutely will.

And for anybody who’s adopting it right now and getting good at it, because to be honest, it is kind of a skill, you are going to progress forward and see a lot of progress. I know it’s already amplified the work that I’m doing and the work we’re doing as a team. It’s made us faster at some things.

It’s had to use a little less creativity bandwidth. And I think that there are some cons to that too. Like if AI is doing all your critical thinking, what’s going to happen to your brain if you’re not exercising that part of just thinking in general and being able to come up with things? But I’m going to tell you the five simple ways I’m using it right now.

And some of these are impactful, some of them are not. When I say impactful, it’s like some of them I’m using for low-end tasks I just don’t want to use mental energy for. That way I can use my mental energy for more critical thinking and creativity and things like that. And then there are some actual high-impact tasks.

So I’ll start with the first one. The first one we’re using it for, and I say we because I’m not the only one who’s using it. We’ve signed up for different accounts in different places. We have team members using it and getting better at it. And to be honest, they might even use it more than I do at this point, but I kind of trained them up and told them what we needed, and we’re all using AI somewhere in all the online businesses that I run right now.

social media posts

The first one is social media posts. And this is not specific to like my personal account, because to be honest, I don’t publish a whole lot there anyway. But we do a lot of back-end organic community building type stuff, and sometimes those posts do not require a lot of critical thinking to come up with a post.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of if you’re trying to do 30 or 40 posts inside of a Facebook group over the course of the month, some of those need to really come from your brain and be personal, and some of them can be more generalized. So we’re definitely using social media, leveraging social media to help us ask better questions, help us do research, and help us actually draft the post itself.

So that’s the first one. Again, this is more taking in a little bit more low-impact, and when I say low-impact, I either look at it as something that can save my time so I don’t have to do it, and it’s kind of like whether or not you cut your grass or you pay someone to cut your grass. This is how you can look at some of these AI tasks.

I pay to have my grass cut because ultimately the only time I’m going to have to do it realistically is on a Saturday or a Sunday, and between all we’re doing as a family and that really being our core family time, I’ll pay for it every time just because I want to spend that time with my family and with the size yard I have, it would take me several hours on a Saturday.

It wouldn’t be like a quick little thing. So anyway, that’s how I think about these things. It’s like I could do it, but it doesn’t take my skill. It’s not specific to me to be able to do yard work. I can farm it out. It will cost me money. If I ever felt like I couldn’t afford it anymore, I could easily cut that off or take the task back over, and it’s the same with AI.

Creating a couple social media posts I don’t think is going to hinder me in the long run and it saves me time to be able to go do something else or it saves my team time. Another one is podcast prep. This one’s pretty interesting. I’ve started using it a lot more. I haven’t used it for any podcast prep for this podcast, but I have another podcast called the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast where we actually cover scientific studies.

podcast prep and seo

So I will go in and have an actual conversation using ChatGPT about the study, and I can ask questions why. I can ask for follow-up studies supporting evidence. I can go back and forth with this person, which to be honest is not much different than what I was doing previously. I would pull up the study.

I’d read through it. I’d see what I understood, what I didn’t understand, see if I could go Google other studies that would help me understand it better or have supporting evidence to kind of what my points are going to be. It’s really just doing the same type of research just twice as fast because now I can just ask and then I can, if ChatGPT gave me four more studies to go look at, I can go look at them briefly because there’s still like a verification element to me using AI right now.

I don’t fully trust it that the information is 100% accurate, so I verify a lot of what is given, but it’s helped with podcast prep. So if you have any kind of podcast prep that you’re doing, I mean it can even give you ideas on what to do an episode on given your topic and niche and all these other things.

So pretty crazy if you’re using ChatGPT. Another one is more high impact. I would say podcast prep is like middle of the road. Higher impact. And the third one would be SEO. So we’re leveraging the crap out of AI right now to publish and optimize our websites for search engine optimization. There are just so many great tools out there that you can use.

I did a full video on this to people who are part of the newsletter for Better Human Business. I sent out a video on like how to actually use AI to write a SEO optimized blog post. If you’re not on the newsletter, you can go to Jerred.com, so J-E-R-R-E-D.com and just sign up for the newsletter there on that page and you can get cool information like that.

So yeah, using it for SEO, optimizing blog posts, getting what the meta title should be, tags, all these kind of things and again, speeding up the process so much, so much faster, being able to create the content, optimize the content and really tackle search engines as if you listen to my 2023 overall strategy, that’s one of the poles in the water that we have for growing the business.

drafting simple emails

Another one is drafting emails. These I don’t use it for drafting like large emails that I’m sending to like my community like I won’t have AI write a newsletter that I’m sending to people. I don’t like it for those kind of emails because I’d rather, to be honest, right now at least, write those myself where I don’t lose the personal touch or I don’t want to write less to be honest.

I think writing is really good and that creativity is really good. But I’ve had responses to people, whether this could be response to a customer or someone who’s looking to partner or whatever, I draft an email, I ask ChatGPT specifically to draft an email and I give it all the parameters and then it will spit out like a good response and that’s normally like enough for me to be like, okay, cool, thank you, that’s what I needed and use some variation of that.

So drafting simple emails and responses to people if I don’t feel like using my brain or if I needed to draft like a letter for me or a request or something like that, those things make it very easy to do. Now the fifth one is I’m experimenting and I would say this is going to go in the more higher impact stuff, is the like complex brainstorming and content creation.

So I’ve been trying, and this, like I said, this is more experimental, I’ve been trying to use really complex prompts with ChatGPT, so I’ll be like, I’ll give the very specifics of who I am, what my business is, what I’m looking to do, you know, all of these things, giving it as much data as I possibly can and then having a request at the end of that, be like, okay, given that, those three paragraphs of information I just wrote, write me three or four emails, you know, with a call to action to do blank, you know, and so, and it’s actually getting pretty good at being able to do those and so this would be more for like marketing emails, not necessarily like a newsletter, but like marketing follow-up emails, those kind of things that are involved in, you know, just the lead generation and

nurture process.

Those emails aren’t perfect yet, but they’re getting a lot better and I have found, like I said, this is a skill, using AI as a skill, the more information you give it and the more questions, follow-up questions you ask and, you know, corrections you ask it to make, the better and better it gets and the better and better the information it spits out is getting, so definitely another area I’m using it in more experimental.

complex brainstorming and content

So that is five, I’m using it for social media, podcast prep, SEO, drafting like mundane emails and then complex brainstorming and content creation and again, I would start adding this into your workflow somewhere, let it offload, I would start where I was talking about with the cutting the grass example, let it offload some tasks for you that are not very important and that to be honest, you shouldn’t be doing anyway, so maybe something you would normally give to a team member, something simple that you can just try and give to AI and see what it does, see how it generates, then you can teach your team how to use it and now we’re just leveraging, we’re buying more time back, even if we’re buying our team members time back because as an entrepreneur, you get tasks saturated and then to buy your time back, you

hire someone, right?

And then once that person, they get tasks saturated, you have to hire another person and if we can buy time back, our time back by doing some AI, by hiring other people but then we can buy the time back of the people we’ve hired by having them leverage AI, do things faster, now you’re getting more output per individual, per human on your team and this is where things can really compound and we’re just getting started, we’re only a couple of weeks into like actually being like, hey, we use AI as a company, here’s how it is used and kind of documenting the process behind that but I mean, I think a year from now, it will be very robust how integrated AI is into our business and so I really wanna urge everyone listening, again, like go get accustomed to it, there’s so many different

great ones out there, Uber suggests for SEO, blog post writing, that one’s by Neil Patel, that one’s kind of in beta, they do blog post writing, Jasper is pretty amazing, I’ve been using Jasper for a long time, even before like AI got all crazy and they’ve been getting better and better, they can create almost any type of content and then ChatGPT is the one everyone knows about that’s really good, it’s free, it’s down a lot, you can now be like a page subscriber for like 20 bucks a month, those would be like the top three I have right now and then there are other ones that can create images and like all this crazy stuff and it’s just gonna get, like I said, it’s just gonna go out of control, Google has their new one called BARD, I think, B-A-R-D, I think, so yeah, just

go check them out, check any one of the ones I just mentioned out, start playing around with it, try working in your workflow, give it some easy tasks and then if you can get more complex and more creative, there are definitely, there’s a lot more that you can do, I still think I’m at like kindergarten with using AI but I would like to graduate up a couple levels and get better at it and I’ll update you in that process as I do get better at AI and leverage it to grow business.

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