AI for Copywriting, Content Creation, and All the Other Marketing Tasks

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. SUMMARY KEYWORDS ai, artificial intelligence, marketing magic, marketing magic app, marketing magic dashboards, marketing, content, small business owner, sales page, blog post, momentum SPEAKERS Erin Ollila, Menekse Stewart Erin Ollila 00:04 Hey friends. Welcome to the top coffee Timmy podcast. Here we empower small business owners to step into the spotlight with their marketing and messaging. I’m your host, Erin Ollila. Let’s get started and talk coffee. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. Today I am excited to introduce Monascus Stewart to you who is the creative founder of the marketing magic app, which I’m super excited to talk to you about today. And while you may know her behind this marketing genius that she has created, what you may not know about her is that she actually lives in a vicarage, which when she told me that as her Fun fact, I didn’t know what it was. So tell us all about this. Where do you live? And what is this interesting place that I’ve never heard of before. Menekse Stewart 01:01 So I live in London, and but I live in a village which is a Church of England church house, because my husband is a priest. And I always jokingly refer to him as the hot priest because people meet him like I’ve had friends meet him and then be like, Go, one of my friends went bright red, and she went, he is way too attractive to be a priest. So I now jokingly, like refer to him as the high priests but we have to live in a vicarage because of his job. And it’s not a word that is commonly used outside of the UK very much anything. So a lot of fun facts fu Erin Ollila 01:37 Yeah, I think it locally to me, we’d call it a rectory is what I’m assuming it would that be about the same thing. Menekse Stewart 01:43 I’ve actually or like a Manse as well as used quite a lot. But yeah, the Church of England calls that of acreage, because Andrew gets called vicar as his job well, so he gets called like vicar or priest. So Erin Ollila 01:56 that’s awesome. So we’re here today to talk about AI and how it relates to all of the copy and content that we create for our marketing assets. You are kind of sandwiched in between two different AI episodes. So I actually really love to kind of get your perspective to start with the first episode we kind of talked like about the fact like, is AI good or is AI bad. And I if you’ve listened, you know that there’s no good or bad as it relates to AI. But because you have invested so much of your time, energy and business into creating an AI related product. I’d really love your perspective on what you think about for the average small business owner? Like, is there anything you’re excited about when it comes to using AI? Is there anything that makes you nervous? Or that you’d like to correct some misconceptions conceptions around? Menekse Stewart 02:48 Yes, I think the question around like, is it good or bad? It’s such an interesting one, just as we look at across the industry, and like I was talking about this in a summit talk recently, which is that AI in itself isn’t intrinsically good or bad, but in the hands of people like the media executives at Netflix, and, you know, the studios that are trying to replace background actors with an AI generated version of them that they own in perpetuity, like that is bad. So AI in the hands of people who use it to exploit humans, and to continue to have an agenda for their own personal gain over and above the people that are employed by them, etc. has the potential to be incredibly harmful. And I am personally a very slow adopter of technology. Even though I am a tech entrepreneur at this point, like I’ve started and worked in enough projects that I do fall into that category. I haven’t ecommerce marketplace and different things like that. And I’ve had that for like seven years now. And I was very, very reticent to say that I thought that AI could be a positive thing. And Google so my background is SEO, I started doing SEO in like 2005. And I’ve been doing copywriting on the internet for like 18 years. And in 2018 when Google did it sort of machine learning algorithm update and was talking a lot more about it publicly 2017 2018. Around that time. I had started to kind of look into it a little bit more, obviously, because it’s part of understanding how the search algorithm works, and then researched it more and more sort of over the last couple of years. And then obviously since it’s been a lot more newsworthy, it’s been really interesting to be able to have more sort of mainstream conversations with people about it and how it applies to different things. And I think the interesting thing to me has been that we have barely scratched the surface of like what’s possible with AI when we come to streamline our businesses, like the obvious thing is it’s a generative technology. The obvious thing is to generate content with it. That’s like the a bare minimum. And anything that we do that is content based is actually just, you know, an A to B, it’s not, it’s not very complex, it isn’t really solving the problems that it’s able to solve. And so we are going to see more and more tools that solving much more complex problems for us, like, you know, in boxes and all that jazz. And that’s quite an interesting and exciting thing to look at. Because for the small business owner, the biggest thing that holds many of us back is capacity and the fact that we have so many different things going on. And we have to learn so many things before we feel like we can do things. And the sense of momentum, when we get excited about an idea is lost very quickly. So I think, for me, in terms of developing marketing magic, I had already been teaching marketing for a lot of years and working on different projects, I had templated a lot of things because of the methodologies that I used with clients and as part of courses and so on. And it was really that I wanted to just get comfortable with the implications of using AI. Before I like Bill, the AI tool. And one of the things that I’ve started to talk a lot more about this year, because I do think this is really at the core of it is just understanding data privacy, and how we can take ownership of our data privacy. And also understand the difference between fun and functional. So if we are doing things in our business that are functional, that are taking up a lot of our time, a lot of our energy, a lot of maybe, like confidence, because this is the other thing, right? Our marketing or running our businesses, it doesn’t just take time, it doesn’t just take money, it also takes skills, our energy levels, our confidence. And there’s a lot of subjective resource that we pour into our businesses that we can’t necessarily measure. But we default to time and money because they’re measurable. And so we do a lot of these functional things where we’re like, we’ve got this idea. But in order to get this idea out into the world, there are these steps that I need to go through in order to get out there. And I don’t feel comfortable to invest any resource in it right now. Because I don’t know if it’s gonna make me any money. And if I invest in it, now, it could be a loss. And then because small business owners don’t have a lot of research and development capital in their businesses, if you do something and it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t break, even like that can be a make or break thing, it can add a lot of extra stress. It’s just not a great, great space to be in. And we see a lot of that in the course space where people are like, you know, pre sell things as a model, because that risk factor of investing a lot of resources that is precious to you, as a small business owner, is a really risky factor. And I’ve worked with creatives. And a lot I’ve worked a lot with, I love working with creatives, it’s like my favorite piece is working with people who are you know, illustrators, designers, and artists, and just people who love their craft. And I don’t enjoy working with creatives when there is time pressure or financial pressure, because you don’t have space to really enjoy the creative process. So this is a really long winded question and answer to your question. But the thing that excites me the most is that we can get the functional stuff done quickly. And then find out if it’s going to work or not. If it does work, we then have the finances and the energy and the space to work with people who are creative, who can help us elevate what we’re doing, without the pressure of having to do it to, you know, make sure that we’re like making enough money to pay our bills kind of thing. So it helps us break out of the hustle loop a little bit. And then also, there’s a lot of things that are on our task lists where if you’re marketing, specifically, you get onto a hamster wheel of free content creation all the time. And this is if you’re like a high ticket provider, you provide services that people pay 1000s of dollars for, you spend a lot of time creating free content so that people remember that you exist when it comes to them having a budget. And if you aren’t, and you’re selling products, like you still are on the site, okay, I need to take some marketing pictures and figure out how I’m going to talk about this in a way that isn’t achy, and all of these, like potholes and opportunities for us to fall into overthinking to lose momentum to get stuck in a bit of inertia. And when it comes to the marketing content that we’re putting out there, we are really working for free in the majority of our marketing, and we’re following these, like strategies because the algorithm changed and someone said we should do this. But there’s not like we’re not experts in every single thing in our business. And we shouldn’t need to be in order to be able to make money from the skills and the gifts and the passions that were the reason we started our businesses in the first place. So the potential for AI really, is to when you engage with it in a way that you feel really comfortable with your days. to an all of those applications is that you can, the 80% of the work that you’re doing that you wish could be done faster or by somebody else, but you can’t afford to outsource it. Yeah, or you don’t 100% know how to start and the blank page is really overwhelming. It helps like break through that barrier and just get your ideas out into the world more quickly. And so the question that I had asked myself at the start of this year was, what would it look like to go from idea to implementation in 10 minutes. And that was like, the problem that I had set for myself, because I know how to do all of the marketing things. And I’ve done them at a really high level for a lot of people that it’s made a lot of money for. But when it came to my own business, I was still getting stuck in overwhelm, and feeling really, just like, I didn’t know where to start with it. Because it felt too big. So I was like, Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow, when I don’t feel quite so overwhelmed. So yeah, that’s a bit of a long answer. But the reason that I’m excited for it ultimately, is because a lot of us are spending time, feeling like we should know more or telling ourselves that we should be, you know, If only we knew more than this, or if only we were more like that person. And we spend a lot of time in comparison and just not feeling great about ourselves. And AI gives us the opportunity to automate some of that stuff and spend more time in creative flow. And just remembering the joy of why we do what we do. Erin Ollila 11:18 So yeah, yeah, everything that you said, I could just dive in so deep here, one thing I love that you mentioned, the the idea that as small business owners, like we don’t have to know everything. And that is I think, the trap that so many of us fall in and I’ve done it myself, it’s beating yourself up about the fact that you don’t know how to do this quicker, or that quick or use this tool that you know would help you. And oftentimes what happens is it paralyzes people from moving forward. And the one of the keywords that you use in your marketing that really stands out to me is the word momentum. And I think that when we look at the word momentum, and we compare it to artificial intelligence, that’s my biggest excitement level, because I feel like for the most part, my recommendation is almost always like, you cannot take in whole and use what artificial intelligence gives to you, you still need to put your own personal touch on it. Yet, if you use artificial intelligence, it gives you so much momentum to be able to produce and produce quickly, and in a way that sounds like you and feels like you and doesn’t paralyze you from doing all of the things. You know, if you create, let’s just say if you create a course, as an example, a lot of people think well, I’m going to sit down, I’m going to like draw up what I’d like to have the modules look like and I’ll record a couple of videos and sell it. And that is the farthest thing from all of the steps that you need to take, you need to have a payment processor, you need to have checkout copy, you need to have transcripts of these videos, you need to have copy that goes in within the modules, you need to have a website and web design and graphics and images and copy for all of the sections on a sales page. Emails like Philly, it’s like, the list can doesn’t have to but the list can go on and on and on. And when people hear that, it’s just like, Well, I’m not going to do that course right now, because I don’t have the bandwidth. But it doesn’t have to be like that. And again, we’re just using a course as an example. But when we think of using artificial intelligence to help us with our marketing, and we think of the idea, like if it can just give me enough momentum to take the first step, then I can take the next step. And the step after that. Do you think that there’s anything else that we’re kind of missing that small business owners really need to think about before they start using artificial intelligence when it comes to like getting momentum or getting started? Menekse Stewart 13:48 Yeah, so I think that the key thing that I always encourage people to understand is the way that the data that you’re submitting to artificial intelligence is used before you start using it. So when you use a tool, like chat, GPT, the reason it is free at the point of access is because they will use the content that you submit in the conversations that you have to improve the future language model and to make sure that their product continues to improve in the future. And so they Goldmine whenever, you know, a million users started, you know, signed up for it within the first like it set a record. But basically, whenever people just started on mass adopting track GPT as part of their workday, that enabled open AI to release that GPT four language model much more quickly because of the volume of content that has gone in there. So when you use GPT chat GPT so GPT is the language model. Chat. GPT is one way of interacting with that language model. When you use chat GPT to interact with the GPT language model. Your data by default is used to inform the future training of that language model. If you go through the API, via platform dot open ai.com There’s a little bit more Have a barrier there because the language sounds more techie. But if you just create an account or platform to open ai.com, when you access GPT, the language model through that, that method, your data is automatically excluded by default. So the automatically using it versus automatically excluding a piece is really important, especially if you are somebody who writes for a living, or if you are doing anything that involves like content, or frameworks or methodologies or anything that is because you have come up with an interesting way to describe what you’re talking about. And as an example, I will not use AI tools for transcription for my own teaching, and audio, if I am not 100% confident that that data is not going to be used by the company, or by the end AI model to improve future outputs. Because I don’t, it would annoy me, if in five years time, you know, people started to use this analogies and things that I had put into AI. So just understanding before you start, like what you want to use it for. And what I use as a filter. Question is, if somebody made a million dollars from this and five years time, would I be annoyed about it? If I would be annoyed, then I don’t use chatter GPT, I use the platform dot open ai.com Because that will like automatically exclude my data. So the data privacy piece is really big. And obviously, if the next episode is covering the sort of legal side of AI, that’s going to be a really interesting one to think through when it comes to intellectual property and all of that kind of thing. And also that the internet is changing. And that is really uncomfortable for a lot of us because we just as a, you know, humans just don’t like change. But things like SEO are going to be hugely impacted by AI because it changes how people engage with functional content. So when you are, we’ve seen this with Google for years, where they will give people a zero click result. So they’ll pull the copy from your website and put it into their search engine, you don’t benefit from the traffic because Google has used it as a snippet. And we’re gonna see more and more of that where it’s harder to get traffic because actually, Google is so concerned with it, you know, keeping people engaged and making sure that they aren’t impatient, if you can go to church up and ask the same question and get a response in seconds. So the nature of the internet is going to change. But AI has been around for decades, and it isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon, like the financial institutions of the world have been using it since their late 80s. You know, logistics used in logistics, and in so many different industries. It’s just that it’s only now coming into the sort of wider populations consciousness, and we can access it at our level without having to be a software engineer. And we’re moving away from the era of content and into an era of context. And when you think about how businesses have grown over the last two decades, it has been through putting out as much content as possible, positioning themselves as experts, making sure that people know that they’re the best and have like, you know, they’re the one, they’re number one on google there. They’ve got the most credibility, and they’re really, you know, well known all of that kind of thing. But it’s that that alone triggers a lot of impostor syndrome for people because of the nature of just how we build businesses is that you must be an expert before you start something. But people are overwhelmed by content. And the reason that people adopted chat GPT so quickly, is like tells us how we’ve won people I was content, they did not want to have to sift through 16 million different website results from Google, they want to ask a question, get it answered and get back to what they’re doing. So as we think about the future of business on the internet, the content piece is actually going to make marketing feel a lot easier and a lot more joyful for people because your role as a business owner, is understanding the context that your customers need you to show up and you’ll be showing up and like, you know, Aaron and I both have worked in the you know, internet and content spaces for long enough that if we have a client come to us and ask us a question, we can see from a much bigger, like a higher view, like what’s going on and give very contextually relevant advice, and you can get some contextually relevant advice from chat GPT. But you have to know what to ask it in order to get the advice out. And so this just this sense of being able to get excited about the real life application of what you love, is where businesses kind of moving towards, in my opinion, and your ability to create content Next for your customers and your audience is going to be the thing that keeps people around. Erin Ollila 20:06 Yeah, a lot of what I hear from people who are worried about using AI is that it’s like, well, a few things. One, it’s like they don’t know how there’s too much to learn. Are they using it right. But there’s so much of what you said, like one, one of the first things I was taking notes is like, everyone will say, like, well, I don’t know how to do this, this is a new thing. But they don’t realize that so many of the tools that they’ve used have aI elements built in, whether it’s something like banking, for example, like you check your credit card statement, and it gives you a projection of what you could save if you try to pay down debt in a certain way. That’s not like someone sitting on the opposite end of you like a computer while you’re checking your credit card statement and doing like a contextual check of everything. That’s them using their own tools that have been built into their software unable to create these tools that we can use. So you’ve already been using AI everyone for a long time, whether it just might not have have been so front and center in your lives. And then as it relates to the whole content and context, I think that’s a really important key, just like you mentioned, you know, my clients will come to me and they’ll say, like, I’m experiencing this problem, or like, this is what I’d like to do. And I don’t know how to get from here to there. Because we have the experience, we can then offer a customized strategy for people to take forward. Well, with AI, you can get a strategy yet you need to know the steps to get there. And that’s where a lot of people will get started and fall off. Which is actually I think, a really great introduction now to project your product. Excuse me, because one thing that I loved about it when I first used it, was that it or I didn’t have to ask any questions, right? Like I was an early adopter to chat GBT open AI playground and I was I would be like, Hey, I have a question about this random thing, because I was curious, and it was fun to play. But it gets a little exhausting and overwhelming, if you don’t know how to get the question, if you don’t know what question to use to get the answer that you want. So tell me a little bit more about marketing magic and why you decided to create it, and how it helps like the average small business owner, specifically that part of like, they don’t have to ask the questions. They don’t need to know everything in order to use the app. Menekse Stewart 22:29 Yeah, so I have I mentioned my marketplace already. And I’ve worked with different team members over the years. And I didn’t realize until like three, three and a half years or so ago that I have ADHD. So I had been like working with team members. And wondering why people’s brains were melting when I briefed them on projects. It was basically because my brain was like walking four times more quickly. And I’m like giving them Erin Ollila 22:56 every detail. Yeah. And people were just Menekse Stewart 22:59 like, Okay, this is like too much information too precise. And one, like, you know, 30 minute call. So, um, yeah, so that like helped. But I have a lot of like, high volume. So for instance, if we’ve got 300 sellers on our marketplace that’s 300 different, like meet the maker, blog posts, and like newsletters, and all of these different placements, where it’s like telling people’s stories, and so on. And I have really grown it with help of two part time team members. So we just a, you know, small team. And I was like, there has to be an easy way to like get transcripts from the I’ve got 130 hour long or longer summits, transcripts from the last three years. And I was like, I briefed someone to turn them into blog posts. And then I briefed them again, and again, and again. And we still have no like blog posts from these transcripts. And I was like this is really, there has to be like an easy way of doing this. Like it is fundamentally just the same thing. But across each of these different posts. So I started out by thinking, if I just like take what I want to happen and the framework of what I want to happen, and map it out, then I can get AI to do 70% of the work. And then that will save a lot of this like back and forth. Because the other thing is because I have ADHD as soon as I’ve lost momentum with something, it becomes so much harder to like pick that back up. And it was just feeling really energetically draining. So I started the initial like Google Sheet to basically Fast forward some of these tasks that had been like hanging over the team for about 18 months and that we just didn’t have the capacity for or that people didn’t feel comfortable to do. And then I was like, I wonder what would happen if I like automated a custom A journey map because I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours a year for like, you know, 15 plus years, creating customer journey maps and keyword research and doing like keyword research strategy, all that stuff. And so then I started testing out the sort of different applications of strategic assets that you would want to maybe use once to, like generate once to understand and then to, like, create a content strategy that you didn’t need to every single week think what do I need to talk about? What should I be writing a blog post on, and to just, like pre brief, something that if a team member was feeling like uncertain where they could go and just feel relatively confident that it would send them in the right direction? And so that’s how it got started. And then I was talking about it in a mastermind group that I’m in and like, three people were like, Give me it immediately. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, it just kind of grew from there. But I’ve got a like, I just like solving problems. So for me, I’m like, Oh, I wonder if I could solve this problem, and then solve it. And then I’m like, oh, what’s the next problem I can solve, and I do get quite a lot of dopamine from it. So that’s kind of how it has ended up escalating to being something that’s like really comprehensive now. But I started it with transcripts and funnels, just for overthinking sales pages, and feeling like, I just want to get this product out here. But I know that if I sit down and build a sales page, I’ve got 12 hours of sales page creation ahead of me, and that is stopping me from launching a lot of things. So things like, you know, creating sales pages, and getting draft, copy, post purchase emails, right? When somebody buys something from you, and then you send them an email that is fundamentally functional, but you want it to be related to what they’ve bought, obviously. But just little things like that, that would get me sort of a bit stuck in thinking, Oh, if I sit and do this, it’s gonna take me hours and hours. And so now we’ve got, you know, social media content plans, capturing generators, blog, the blog, the blog post generator, you can put a title and outline in but when you take a tool, like the funnel magic tool, for instance, and upload your product, you can create a bespoke blog strategy for that product that will help you get more organic visibility for it across the five main stages of a customer journey. So there’s things like that that have just been built into it, because of the sort of experience that I’ve got in marketing are widely. But that took a huge amount of the legwork out of it. And like you said earlier, like I totally agree with that we should never accept 100% from Ai, if we expect if we want to get 100% from AI, and then it managers to give us 100%, we should be very concerned about the amount of data it has about us. Like we should have a minimum sort of expectation of sort of 70%, I would say and that you will have to go in and add stories. Because if AI can generate things that sound like you and that use your stories and your anecdotes and your experiences and the unique ways that you think you don’t necessarily want that to be something that it has the capacity and ability to do. So it’s a good thing that you have to edit the content that you create. But the problem with the track GPT side of things is the amount of context that you’re having to type in every single time. And then if you don’t provide that you do have to edit, I would say like it’s 30 or 40% of the way there and you have to spend a lot longer, kind of editing it and so on. So, yeah, that’s kind of how it came to be. And now it’s just grown beyond anything I would possibly have thought was gonna happen in January. Erin Ollila 28:45 You and me both. So just to rewind a little and give a quick overview if you’re listening and you have never even heard of the Met the marketing magic app. So it is basically a tool where you can import information about your brand your business, you can use their tone analyzers to kind of develop like a voice for your business because I know that’s something people struggle with. And one of one of the most popular episodes of the podcast is an earlier one where we talked about like, well what is a brand voice because it’s that’s like a pet peeve I have of how like, Miss calculated Miss misinformed people can be because it’s just described differently or everywhere. So at its basic, you can import information about your business and your brand to kind of learn more about your ideal customers, your tone, your brand, your positioning words that you may use bios that you may have, and then moving forward from that there are tools built into the system to create all of those things that my next show was just saying such as website pages, content, ideas, content outlines, follow up email after someone purchases frequently asked questions all All the things are basically like the social media plans, swipes to give your affiliates, different type of promo ideas that you can share with your affiliates. So if we think of marketing magic as a tool that you use that is AI based, what it’s basically doing is it’s giving you outlines, as well as complete output. So when she mentioned, well, it’s about 70% of the way done it is, it’s actually going to look 100% of the way done. So you input information. Let’s say you’re using the sales page generator tool, and it gives you all of the things that you need to put on a sales page, what are the problems? What are the outcomes? What are the desires, what are the features and the benefits of this thing that you’re selling? So could you copy and paste exactly what the tool gives you and put it on a web page or sales page, of course you could. But if you want it to sound like your business, if you want to maybe like change some of the grammar or change some of the things that it shares, that’s the key to making it your own. And I think that’s kind of what we were, the point we’re making is take the output, and adjust it so that it truly is your own, because it will give you that’s the beauty of marketing magic, it will give you complete output to use. You’re just going to love it extra more if you edit it a little bit to make it your businesses. Menekse Stewart 31:25 And it’s things like you might have anecdotes or stories from your own life and experience that kind of inform why you created something or why you do something a certain way. Those are the things that I mean for us to add in. Like you can use the 100% completions, but they’re not going to necessarily reflect who you are as a business owner because of those extra personality tweaks that you add in. And the thing that I tend to like doing is adding like sound bites to things that marketing magic is the official like strapline is AI powered business growth because it helps you it is like having a marketing tool in your pocket. But it also has a lot of product management theories sort of built into it to make it really easy to get your product ideas. And that’s like anything that you would sell from initial idea all the way to completely done. So that would be your core information, like your product summary, the features and benefits and who it’s for your buyer persona, then your sales assets. So that could be a product description for a physical product or a sales page, your checkout copy, if you ever want to add it as a bump to another product, you can add a bit of bump copy and generate that, and then your marketing assets to get traffic to their sales pages. So your blog posts and your social captions, your Facebook adverts their SEO title and description. And the idea is that if you can’t afford to outsource to a copywriter at the moment, that is not getting done either way. So this at least helps you to get all of those pieces in place. And then once you’ve got a bit of space and time and you’re like this is making me money, you can go back and you can hone it. And you can think like one of the fun things for marketing magic has been working with my friend Vicki, and we’ve come up with some different, you know, catchy straplines for it that AI cannot come up with. I’ve tried multiple ways. But things like grow your business, not your to do list, unsubscribe from overwhelm, make time for the things that you want to do the things that are really getting to the root of a, somebody’s experience and being able to just crystallize something down in a way that also uses like the rhythm and tone of language as well. And so that’s the space that has been nice to have. Because we’ve been able to like automate sort of 70% of the process for the functional stuff, and then just enjoy that creative space for how exactly we want to message something. And Vicki actually messaged me today with a whole load of email ideas for things like Goldilocks and the Three sales pages, and some like funny fairytale based emails for marketing magic of the next few weeks, and things like that, which I wouldn’t have had time for if I’d had to do everything from scratch. So yeah, that’s also just a bit of context for the fun space you get. Erin Ollila 34:23 And I was gonna say this is exactly what you meant earlier, like, when you’re listening in, she started talking about the difference between fun and functional like this is it you use a tool you don’t actually even have to put in a question. You fill in the blanks sharing a bit of information about your business. And it provides you whether it’s idea generating or whether it’s content producing, it provides you all of these things so you can take it and then do that fun part like the Goldilocks and the would you say three sales emails is that we said three sales pages, I think sales pages right? But like that’s where you get to play. So if all of the hard work has been done for you, then you can play with it more. And I think a blog post is probably the easiest way to like conceptualize this in your brain. If you’re listening. And you’re like, I think I get what you mean, you know, when you write a blog post, let’s say, especially if it’s a simple how to blog post where you’re explaining, like, how to make a coffee? How do you start that off, you have to capture attention. And I think that’s what people understand where story works really well. You know, it could be like a trope like using imagine staring at your coffee pot and not knowing how to use it. But then you want to kind of share more, you want to share a story, either a personal story, or something that is still in that imagined scope, where you’re getting the person who’s reading to kind of check off and be like, Yes, I can imagine this. Yes, I do. Stare at those coffee grounds sometimes and think, How can I make this better? Right, you want to get them involved. So if you think of a blog post, this is kind of the way that we’re saying, it can give you the outline, it can give you the structure, it being AI here can give you the outline the structure, and potentially even all of the words that you could use, we’ll take that output and adjust it so that it becomes that fun part, you can read it yourself and say, Well, how can I make this better? How could I add like, you know, upon here, for example, if you love puns, or maybe you decide you want to have like, you know, put your teacher hat on and, and do something a little bit more serious or give a homework assignment in your blog post. But it gives you that opportunity. Like you’re mentioning, we’re spending so much time creating, and I know you said we create for free, but if anything, I think we create, like at a cost to ourselves, right? Because like time does, if you’re billing for a service, for example, your time is money that you could be making working with clients. And I know for a fact all of my clients have spent hours doing their marketing and creating their copy. And the vast majority of the time that they’re spending is time that’s with ideating. And getting started and creating outlines, because it’s the blank page syndrome of just not knowing what to say or how to get started. So I that’s where the beauty of this tool lies is like that work has been done for you. I do a lot of copy coaching in my business where clients will come to me either to get that outline started, or to do editing on the work that they’ve created. And just recently, I had a client who we were meeting for the first time. And she was I think, I think needing more permission than anything because she was like I you know, she’s just struggling with what do I do? How do I get started. So I said go by this tool, play with it like actually have fun, you don’t have to just accept the first thing, play with it and see how you can get it to have an output that’s like you then touch it. And then let’s meet and figure out how to like, really adjust this. So for example, a website page, there’s a lot you can do with an about page, they don’t have to be as boring as everyone makes them. And they don’t have to be as ridiculously personal as other people make them. Right. So there are so many ways that you can have fun with it. But if you’re not taking action, because you’re not sure what to do not sure what to say, that’s holding you back. So I think, you know, it’s the momentum thing again to like get the momentum so you can create in your business, and not lose all of this time where you could be making sales or networking or doing visibility opportunities that will have a much higher return on investment than just content creation over and over and over again. Menekse Stewart 38:36 Yeah, 100%. I think that if you look at your traffic metrics, so you know, if you use Google Analytics or something else, and you go to your traffic breakdown and see how many of your how much website traffic and how many of your sales are actually coming from Instagram, for instance. And then how much time you spend thinking about it, stressing about it creating content for it, the return on investment is very rarely bad unless you’ve got a really highly engaged audience. But I’ve worked with people with like millions of Instagram followers and I every day across the board, we’ll see that like the conversion rate for sales from something like Instagram is maybe half a percent. It’s great for keeping your audience warm, but it’s not going to help you move the needle on the revenue side of things. So anytime you’re thinking, is this worth my time, like you’re spending time on something? Is this worth my time, you can look at your website sales and have a little look at some of these channels and give yourself permission to not use them if you don’t like them. Because if they’re not bringing revenue, if they’re not paying you for the marketing labor that you’re doing at the moment, then something has to change. Otherwise your business is never going to be able to scale beyond the sort of hamster wheel hustle that you’ve got going on at the minute. So I think that the ability to step back and say Actually, I’m happy for my Instagram captions to be aI generated for the next three months and see if it has a negative impact on my business. It’s an interesting experiment to just look at what are the things that are draining our energy? And is there a way that we can make them easy for ourselves, and just do it as a container of 60 or 90 days, and then see how we feel and whether things have changed for the better or worse. But some of those things can really help us to get comfortable with using new technologies, and to also really get back to doing more of what we love. Erin Ollila 40:33 Yeah, that’s so it’s so important that you say that, because, you know, sometimes I meet with my clients, and we’ll talk about like, what it is they’re doing, how they’re spending their time marketing, or what are they creating with their marketing. And a lot of what they say is that they like don’t enjoy what they’re doing. So it’s like, well, why are you wasting your time doing this, but to say the same thing about social in regard to content, such as blog content, case studies, things like that. One of the things I see people miss the most are calls to action, like they they constantly forget the call to action, yet they spend an immense amount of time creating really good content, but they never ask anyone to do anything of it. So that’s a reminder to actually make sure any content you’re creating, you are putting it back on that like sales marketing intermediary level of saying like, Okay, do you like this? Well, I can work with you this way. Or you can purchase this product, which, you know, again, we’re talking about using marketing magic as a tool like these things are built in. And if we’re looking at order bumps, things, like you’d mentioned earlier, creating trip wires, like those are the things that get often overlooked. And people worry about why they are content creation, part of their marketing is not drawing money back into their business, it’s because they’re not selling alongside of their marketing. Menekse Stewart 41:50 And as business owners, and I’m saying this, like, because it’s my I’ve done it myself, isn’t like, Oh, you’re all doing this, and you shouldn’t, it is absolutely, like, I do this all the time. And I know that other people do too. And we like can be so excited about the things that we’re doing, and just like sharing stuff online and things and then just kind of subconsciously expect customers to just want to work with us, right? So it’s like, oh, I just, you know, I’m putting stuff out there, people should just know that they can work with me, if you push it, just know that they can come to our site and buy my stuff. Because look how good I am. Like, I’m not even but just, it’s not even from a place of like objective ego, but more just like, well, I’m putting stuff out there. So obviously, it’s connected to something that I’m doing. And it can just be like a bit of an assumption that we’re putting stuff out there. And we’re trying really hard to make sure that it’s helpful and valuable and stuff. And that people should just connect the dots automatically, because we’re showing up like that. But the the internet is just so busy and so noisy, that if we’re not being very direct about what we want people to do, it’s so easily missed. And I am a sucker for it. I’ve spent like years, you know, putting content out because I’m having fun with it and enjoying it enjoying the conversations and things. But the call to action bet is the thing that people feel like scared off, because it’s like, oh, I’m asking people to work with me, it feels vulnerable to ask for people to buy my stuff, or, you know, there’s loads of reasons that we have for not doing it. But that piece of just kind of expecting people to know, like, Wouldn’t it be great if people could just approach me like in the lecture, how can I give you my money, and I’d be like, Oh, this makes me feel really uncomfortable. So I’m just gonna leave you on read, because I don’t know how to answer. But like, you know, these things always come up for us. And I think that you can kind of laugh about it. But also, you know, if we weren’t a bit bold with those things, we probably would all have a lot less stress when it comes to our sales, Erin Ollila 43:43 completely 100%. And if you’d like to know how to give them an extra year money, one way would be to purchase her marketing magic tool. I will put all links to how to do that in the show notes and within the podcast description itself. But one reason I’m so excited to squeeze this interview in in the middle of July is that you actually have a pricing change coming up to your tool. It is currently a lifetime deal. So if you purchase before the end of the month before the end of July of 2023. If you’re listening to this next July, no this does not work for you. 2023, July 31, you will get marketing magic as a lifetime deal, which maybe that’s why I’m so excited about it because I don’t like paying for tools over and over again. I just kinda want to buy it and then have it but after that it will be an annual license. So if you’re listening in August, you’re honestly getting an incredible deal for an annual license. I would have also purchased this at an annual license. But if you’re listening right now, you definitely want to head over to the link check out the tool, see the demo because if you buy it by the end of this month, you will be able to get the app for a lifetime deal and You know, we talked earlier about how you like to problem solve, which is why you’ve kind of just been adding and adding and she’s not joking, like, there has been so much added to the marketing magic app. I’m just kind of peeked in here quickly. And I’m looking at the little all tools, search function. And there’s so much like its buyer personas, content pillars, customer research, et Cie descriptions, ideal customer problems, post purchase, email, subject line generators, upsell sales pages, like, she doesn’t stop. So it is a great time to get in and get the app. And it is, I am an affiliate, obviously, for your app. But I will say I use it myself, it helps me definitely be iterative and generate outlines and ideas of starting points for my work. So I am I stand fully behind it. And I think it just been great to use. So yes, that’s how you can give him an extra your money and it is money well spent. Before we end this episode, though, one thing I always ask of my guest is, based on what we’ve said in our conversation, if there is one thing that you would share with our guest as a teeny, tiny homework assignment, what would it be, Menekse Stewart 46:14 I would sit for 30 seconds and think about three things that you hate doing in your business, and then figure out if you can get AI to help with some of them. So that could be that you go to chat GPT and say, I don’t like doing I’m a I’m an artist, or I’m a copywriter or I am whatever your job is, I don’t like doing these three things. Tell me how to automate them or tell me how to fix it and start the conversation with that. But if you figure out a problem, that you have something that’s draining your energy, something that you don’t like doing, and then start from that point, it gives you an incentive to keep being curious and to keep seeing what options there might be to make your life a bit easier to give you a bit more space to do other things. And if any of those three things are marketing things, then like Aaron said, check out the demo for how you can kind of get some pre built support there without having to know how to ask charge GPT for help, and that will help keep your data privacy intact as well. But yeah, start with three things that you don’t like doing and then just be curious about how AI might be able to help make your life easier with them. Erin Ollila 47:25 We’re going to end the podcast here, my friends. Thank you so much for showing up today. Again, the links to how you can purchase marketing magic and learn more about mineka. It will be in the description in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Top copy to me. If you enjoyed spending your time with me today. I would be so honored if you could subscribe to the show and leave a review. Want to continue the conversation. Head on over to Instagram and follow me Erin Ollila. Until next time friends