Ilise Benun on how to use AI to find clients

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: Hey Lynne, I’ve got a question for you. How much are you using ChatGPT these days? I don’t think we’ve even had this conversation. Have we? 

Lynne: No, I don’t know that we have really. I don’t use it a lot. I use the bits and pieces. I use it a little bit for ideation occasionally for things like headlines and stuff like that. But most of my uses of AI are in other areas. I use a lot for meeting summaries, transcriptions and a few bits and pieces just to make things. It helps with the show notes for these episodes and a few bits and pieces, but I know you are doing a bit more with it than me because you’ve built your own custom GPT, right? 

Rachel: After we had Steven Lewis on, I did his course and I built what is a train as GPT that really knows the Rachel’s List business, which has been absolutely phenomenal for marketing and asking questions and all of that sort of stuff. So, I’m using it, not to write, but more for marketing and advice type thing, which is really interesting once it’s trained for that.

I’m really excited to dive back into AI today with a bit more training, a bit of a different topic, and we’re talking about how to use it to find clients. 

Lynne: It’s an interesting way to use it, isn’t it? We’ve got Ilise Benun to take us through it, and some of our listeners may know of Ilise anyway, because she appeared at Austin Church’s, Growth Without Burnout Summit. So, shall I introduce her? 

Rachel: Sounds good. 

Lynne: Okay. Ilise Benun is a business coach for creative professionals and the founder of marketingmentor.com – the go-to online resource for creative professionals who want better projects with bigger budgets. That sounds great. She’s also a national speaker and author of seven books, including the Creative Professionals Guide to Money, as well as three online courses tailored to the needs of creative professionals. She’s hosted the Marketing Mentor podcast since 2008. 

Welcome, Elise! 

Ilise Benun: Well, thank you. It’s great to be here. 

Rachel: Ilise, you have talked a lot about how to find clients with AI over the past couple of years, and I know you have specific strategies for doing this, which we are going to dive into. But tell us how you figured out how you could do this and turned it into a process that other people can follow.

Ilise: Well, I would say I am not an early adopter for technology in general, but when I saw AI at the end of 2022, it just really seemed obvious to me that I should pay attention. I don’t know why, but it did, so I did. And also, because I’m always thinking about how to help my people get more clients, and that was just the obvious question in my mind when I saw it, not how to write a better email. So, I just am always looking for new ways to help people remove obstacles and make it easier for them to build a business they can depend on, essentially. So, it was kind of a no-brainer from my point of view, even though most people say that’s a really interesting way of using it. Like to me that was the most obvious way.

Lynne: It’s interesting. Do you think that using AI changes how you might approach finding clients, though? How do you get over the worry of doing the very human work of finding clients and building relationships? 

Ilise: Well, first of all, I mean relationships are everything when it comes to marketing, so you still have to do that, there’s no question. But there are so many mostly self-imposed obstacles that I see prevent creatives from getting to that point. And so, it sounds like things such as, I can’t decide on a niche, or how do I know if it’s the right niche? Or how do I choose the right prospects, or how do I even know what they need or how do I get in front of them, or how do I stand out? The list goes on and on, and those are the things essentially that AI can help with. But you still, once you answer all those questions, you still have to build the relationships. 

Lynne: Makes sense.

Rachel: Yes. So, you are sort of taking that part of the process, that’s more of the human process, writing the LOI’s and having all the correspondence and that sort of thing.

Ilise: Yes. There’s a lot to building relationships. It includes writing, whether you’re a writer or not, but it’s also just the idea of following up and staying in touch and showing that you care and that you remember things. Those are all marketing tools. I like to say that curiosity is a marketing tool, and generosity is a marketing tool. And so, all of those things you still have to bring to the table, even if AI can help you answer some of the questions that you use to get in your own way. 

Lynne: Interesting, isn’t it? Because AI, there’s a lot of legwork in that, and I think you’re pointing out that there’s a bit of obstacles – fear maybe inertia. 

Ilise: A lot of fear, a lot of insecurity, a lot of imposter syndrome, a lot of not knowing if the thing you’ve chosen is the right thing, because most writers work alone, and so you don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of or to get feedback from. And not that AI is the answer or the solution to those problems, but I think it’s a step in the right direction at least to help us get unstuck. 

Rachel: Well, let’s chat about the actual prompt you might use with ChatGPT. So as an example, say a freelance journalist who’s listening to this podcast is starting to do a lot more copywriting in the health space and wants to use AI to find clients. Can you walk us through an example of a prompt this freelancer could use and how you might turn that into client outreach?

Ilise: Well, first of all, it’s not a prompt. It is a conversation with the AI. That’s one of the things I think it’s important for people to understand from the get-go. It’s not Google. You don’t just ask a question and get an answer. You have to treat it like an entity, someone that you’re having a conversation with. And so, what I have developed through my process is a series of prompts, and I’m happy to walk you through that series of prompts. 

Rachel: Let’s go through the series. 

Ilise: All right. So, it basically starts with – actually there’s three parts to what I consider to be a helpful and useful prompt process.

The first part is you give the AI a role. I guess we could call this a framework, although I find that there is just an overabundance of frameworks when it comes to AI these days. I was actually at a conference last week on AI and there were just like frameworks embedded within frameworks, and I could not see how people were keeping track of it all, but that aside, this is a framework of sorts that has three pieces to it. One is you give the AI information about you and what you’re trying to do. You give the AI a role about who it is. And sometimes if you build your own GPT, like Rachel, you said you have, then sometimes that information will already be in it. But if it’s not, then you tell it who you are and who it is. And then you give it an ask, you ask it a question, and I would say one question at a time. Maybe two questions at a time, but not too many. So, it’s just those three simple pieces of information. 

When you are trying to find new clients the first thing, I want to do is tell it as much as I can about who I am if I am the writer, and basically, you could just give it your elevator pitch, which is how you answer the question, what do you do? Hopefully you tell it for whom as well. But I like to call it a robust elevator pitch. What you give it to start with, and it’s basically the answer to, I think, seven questions. They’re simple questions that you ask it to then summarise into a paragraph or two from you. So, the questions are, what services do you offer? What are your goals and dreams for your business? Who do you want to help? That’s how I think about who you want to work with, who your clients are, because sometimes people can’t figure out what niche they want to work in. You’ve suggested healthcare and that definitely could be a good option. But I think about it as who do you want to help in which areas is your experience or expertise? What do you care about and what’s your favourite thing about yourself? What do you pride yourself on? Because the more input you give the AI, the better the output is going to be. So, you could do this with a simple, I teach creative professionals how to get better clients with bigger budgets, or I could answer all those questions and then ask it to give me the paragraph. 

And so basically you answer all those questions and then you ask it to summarise all of your answers into one to two succinct paragraphs written in the first person. And then I like to add, keep the tone humble and avoid anything that sounds like bragging because often people are very resistant to anything that sounds like bragging. because their mothers told them not to brag. And anyway, self-promotion is not about bragging, but you want it to give you something that won’t sound like bragging. So that’s the first piece of the prompt. Shall I keep going? Do you want to comment?

Lynne: Take us through. It’s fascinating.

Rachel: This is interesting Okay. So, this is the bit about you, and then the next bit is about the role that you want the AI to take the role. 

Ilise: Exactly. 

Rachel: Okay. 

Ilise: And so, the next prompt is assume the role of an expert marketer with an MBA. You could tell it to be whoever you want. You could say that specialises in the healthcare field, for example, right? Or have public health or anything. But assume the role of an expert marketer with an MBA and you say, below is my robust elevator pitch, please identify five potential target markets I am best suited to serve. And then you copy and paste the thing that it just gave you essentially – the paragraph about you. And so, then it will give you five ideas for target markets. And the reason I like to ask this question, even if you have an idea about who you want to help and who you want to work with, the beautiful thing about AI is that it basically will give you ideas you would not have thought of, and I think that’s super important. 

I like to ask it for five ideas, but basically then once it gives you five and then it’ll tell you why it likes those five ideas, then you choose one. And the next prompt is I’m very interested in working with this one, and then based on what you know about me, because it just gave you a lot of information and you gave it a lot of information about you. Is this a viable market for me? Tell me why or why not. And if you’re new to this market you also add, and how could I approach this market if I have no experience yet? Because again, that’s one of the obstacles people put in their way is, well, I’m interested in this market, but I don’t have this, or I don’t have that, or I don’t have that. But the AI will give you strategies for approaching it, even if you know you have to start somewhere. Everyone starts somewhere. 

Lynne: So interesting. And also, it’s sort of like having an expert sitting next to you, when you’d have a good colleague or sort of things Rachel and I do to each other, support each other with questions and its sort of maybe because they’re different and less personal, they can be more objective about you and your strengths and weaknesses. 

Ilise: Absolutely. And actually, as part of the program that I run, The Simplest Marketing Plan, I have included my own custom GPT call her Artificial Elise. She’s my bot, basically. And she has been loaded with all the books I’ve ever written and the courses I’ve ever taught, and all of my 35 plus years of content. And so, when my members and clients use her to answer these questions and go through this process, then she’d answer based on what she knows about The Simplest Marketing Plan. So that’s just another way of making it more customised and less general than just the normal GPT or AI platform. 

Lynne: So interesting.

Rachel: Okay, so, let’s move on with the process. So, we got to, you chose one and you asked them, how would I enter this market? Especially if I don’t have any experience. I probably missed something else as well. 

Ilise: No, no. And then it gave, you, me, a whole, the AI is that it’s very verbose. Have you noticed that? 

Rachel: Yes.

Ilise: It gives you way too much. And then you look at that and you say, it’s too much. I can’t do all that. How do I decide what to do? That’s one of the problems because I like to say also, you know, AI can give you all the information you need, but you still have to do the marketing. You still have to, I mean, to this point, we don’t have an agent yet who’s going to do it for us. Although I do think that’s coming, but for the moment, we have to build the relationships, we have to do the marketing. So, you’ve got all this information, okay? Then you’re ready to ask for information about what these people need. So, I’m going to say I’d like to approach and then you fill in the blank of the market that you chose. 

Lynne: So, say healthcare. 

Ilise: I would be much more specific about healthcare, which area of healthcare. You could do it generally also. Again, the more specific you are, the better. But I’d like to approach healthcare as potential clients. Tell me what you know about what these prospects need and what their pain points are because you’re going to need that information to approach them and to talk to them about what they need. Because I also like to say that marketing and self-promotion is not about you. It’s about them. And that’s another one of these obstacles people imagine that their own self-promotion is actually about them, but it’s not. That’s the secret, is that it’s, you don’t really hardly ever have to talk about yourself only in the context of how you can help them cure their pain or solve their problems.

Lynne: Yes. It’s such an important distinction, isn’t it? 

Ilise: Right? Yes. And it’s a mindset shift that is very kind of antithetical to the way we self-centred human beings are wired. So, it really takes a long time, I find, to turn your head around to think about it this way but asking for pain points and thinking in terms of pain points and creating content that speaks to the pain points, these are all ways to kind of get your mind around it. So basically, the next step is to ask for their pain points and what they need and then it’s going to give them to you, and then you’re ready to ask for a list of people. But I actually also like to ask for a list of places or events where I can meet these people real time.

Rachel: That’s a good one. 

Lynne: Now that’s the human element, that relationship.

 Rachel: That networking. Lynne is very into that face-to-face networking. 

Ilise: Absolutely. Networking. No, it’s one of the three tools in the simplest marketing plan, because it is the most. Actually, right now it’s the most effective tool that people have because you can’t forget someone once you’ve met them. But it’s really easy to forget them if you just exchange the messages with them. 

Lynne: Absolutely. 

Rachel: Okay, so would you put that in, so you find the pain points you find, perhaps gaps in their content or what they need, and then you would slip in the next prompt, which is where would I potentially meet clients in this niche? Okay. And you’d put in Sydney, Australia or something like that?

Ilise: Exactly. You put the location. Yes. And then you can ask for a list of attendees at past events because that could be a good prospect list. Or you could just ask directly for a list of members of a particular association or links to directories, member directories of associations or links to LinkedIn groups that bring these people together. Or a list of titles of the people that you might be able to look for or a list of actual people. All of those are windows in or angles into finding the right people that you need to talk to. 

Lynne: So, very interesting. 

Rachel: I’m wondering at what point, knowing that ChatGPT hallucinates, at what point are you saying, please make these real people? I want actual people, please don’t make up contacts. Are you putting that in somewhere specific? 

Ilise: Yes. When I ask for the list, I will generally ask for real people, but I have to say that it hallucinates a lot less these days than it used to. 

Lynne: And you sort of check that as you start to reach out anyway, don’t you? 

Ilise: Exactly. You just click on the links, and you find out if they’re real. And sometimes it won’t give you the right LinkedIn link, but if you take the name and look the person up on LinkedIn, they’re there. So, it’s not even hallucinating. It’s just a mistake.

Lynne: Or maybe it’s out of date or something. Not everyone updates all their stuff all the time.  

Rachel: I would be tempted to say at this point, please put all these people into a table for me with little boxes so that I can take notes on who I’ve reached out to and what the outcome has been. Or a Google sheet or something. I know it can do that now. 

Ilise: It can do a lot. 

Lynne: So, is there anything else we should know when you’re putting in this prompt? Because it sounds like it’s a real, you’re building a relationship here almost with your GPT and building a conversation. 

Ilise: I think that’s true. One of the things that people have been complaining about or noticing lately is just the sycophancy of the chat bot, meaning that it’s always very positive and it always tells you what you want to hear. And so, I think sometimes if you add to your prompt, please be a critic, tell me what’s not working, or what wouldn’t work, or what’s missing, or what could be better in whatever the output is, I think that can help. And then the other thing, as I said before, is to ask one question at a time. And sometimes one way to do that is to ask the AI to interview you and ask you one question at a time. 

Lynne: Oh, okay. But you’re right about the sycophancy. It’s interesting. I’ve heard a few people saying, treat me like a competitor or be tough in your answers and things like that.  

Rachel: Ilise, I’m interested to hear what you would do after this process. You have your list, are you still using AI at this point, or are you going then to do the rest yourself? What do you do? What’s the process? 

Ilise: Well, once you’ve got your people, then you apply the framework that I’ve developed over the years, which is The Simplest Marketing Plan. And basically, that is three tools that I’ve basically distilled it into three tools. Because part of the problem, perhaps you’ve noticed this, is that there are way too many ways you could be marketing yourself and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the different options and very randomly and haphazardly try this and try that and try this and try that, and nothing seems to work. And then you kind of throw up your hands and say, marketing doesn’t work. But I maintain that marketing works when you do it, but you have to do it in a very methodical and consistent and thoughtful way.

And so, I’ve tried to distil it into these three tools. The three tools are networking, which we’ve talked about. In-person networking whenever possible, but it could be online if your people are not, anywhere near you. But networking is essentially building relationships. And it could be with prospects and clients, but it could also be with referral sources and could colleagues and peers and all different people who are in a position to pass your name along. So networking is the first tool. High quality content marketing is the second tool, and as writers, it should not be hard, although sometimes it is to create your own content. And that could be written content, it could be video content, it could be a podcast like this, it could be a combination thereof. There’s so many different ways to create content. Again, another obstacle – choosing what kind of content to create, but high-quality content that I say speaks to the needs of your market. It’s not about you and what you know. It’s about what you know they need, because that’s what will grab them.

Lynne: Interesting. 

Ilise: The third tool is another thing you referred to, which is outreach LOI’s, or reaching out to actual people you’ve decided you are enthusiastic about and want to help. Not waiting for them to find you, essentially. And so, the combination of outreach, content marketing, which could be a newsletter. That’s actually one of the best ways to do content marketing. because then you stay top of mind and networking, and you follow up with your newsletter. All these things together when you do them on a particular market, so let’s say this new market, that’s what works and AI. It can help with some of these things. As a writer, I don’t think you should be using AI for writing, personally, because everything you write is an example of your writing. But there’s a big debate about that, obviously, but that’s not my area. 

But you can use it for outreach messages, but I really think, again, everything you write is an example of your writing. So, your outreach messages are very much included in that and your personality and your enthusiasm, and you have to come through your marketing now more than ever. I think it’s so, so important. So, your original question was what do you do now? How do you incorporate AI? It depends where your obstacles are basically.

Lynne: I’d love to know about the results you’ve seen when you help clients with this strategy. You’ve got your course and everything. Can you share some interesting stories? 

Ilise: Yes. It could be as simple as, actually I had a client today who is looking for a new market. She’s in the non-profit world, and I don’t know about how things are where you are, but here in the States, the non-profit world does not have a lot of money at the moment. She is looking for a more corporate world to reach out into and to basically start over with. We were talking about that today – she has an idea for a market. She knows one person in that market, and so I suggested to her that she cloned that person, basically. That means take that person’s LinkedIn profile or a PDF version of it and ask AI for more people like her, just like her. Right? It could be as simple as that. I have story after story about people who are doing networking at the moment. And maybe they found these events by asking AI where they should go, but they go to these events and timing is everything when it comes to marketing. So, if you’re in the right place at the right time and stay in touch with these people over time, then that’s when you get the work. The same client actually has been doing a lot of networking, and came across someone who then got her newsletter and now she’s got a bunch of projects from them. So, it’s that kind of thing. 

Lynne: So interesting.

Rachel: I could see that would be one of the best use cases for AI is to clone an existing client and say, give me five other options of people that are similar. That’s such a good tip. I wouldn’t have thought of doing that, but that’s really useful. And then you just reach out to those people and say, hey, I’ve done work in this niche and how can I help you? My question before was going to be more about marketing. It’s kind of a weird question because I was just looking at something on LinkedIn about this, and it was a conversation about, freelancers who might find marketing difficult because they want to put out marketing that speaks to their clients and they end up worrying about what other freelancers will think. So, you get into this state of analysis paralysis and how complex do you get with those messages. I’m just wondering, could AI help in terms of how you would market to these new clients that you might be, getting a list of?

Ilise: I’m a little confused by your question, Rachel, because are you saying they are not sure what to say because of their peers seeing it?  

Rachel: Yes. So, they might think their peers are seeing it and going, wow, that’s super basic, I already know that. Do you know what I mean? So, they’re worried. 

Ilise: My answer is who cares?  I mean, truthfully, that’s actually one of my strategies is who cares? You have to have that mindset. We’re not brain surgeons here. We’re not doing anything that is life or death, and you cannot be worried about what your peers think because your job is to get clients and make money. So, I don’t care. 

Lynne: I think that comes with age Rach, I don’t care, maybe. I stopped caring a while ago about what other people think. But I know you care more than I do. 

Rachel: Well, not so much that I think it’s difficult as well. If you run two different kinds of businesses, one that speaks to freelancers and one that speaks to clients.

Ilise: Well, that’s a different issue, definitely Rachel. Right? I mean, if that’s the case, I personally think you should be prioritising different platforms for those people, it’s very difficult to do both things on LinkedIn, for example, you will confuse your people. 

Rachel: That’s pretty much what I’ve done. I sort of focus more on Rachel’s List on LinkedIn and I do more of sharing my own stuff on other platforms. But it is tricky because I feel like I’m missing that opportunity for my own business. So, it’s an interesting one. We did want to ask you, because you mentioned earlier about the AI agents. Talk to us about what that might look like and how it might change this process if you would be using AI to find clients.

Ilise: Well. I’m only going to guess because I have no idea, but I think that, the idea behind agents. Is that they do a series of actions autonomously so that we don’t have to, and we ideally, but maybe eventually not so much are the human in the loop guiding and making the final decisions. So, I’ve heard about systems that are somehow in process where you basically ask the agent to not only find you those ten or fifty new prospects, but then to reach out to them and to warm them up basically and get you a meeting with them. 

Rachel: God, that terrifies me. 

Ilise: I know, me too! And I can’t imagine the clients are going to like it either.

Lynne: I’m sure clients can tell, I’m sure that it’s not really you. 

Ilise: No, it would have to be transparent that this is your agent, and your agent would be talking to their agent anyway, so it’s not like there’s a person there. So, I don’t know what this is going to do to our relationships, our everything approach. But we’ll see. 

Lynne: We’ll see.

Rachel: How has having Artificial Ilise impacted your business? Or has it just given people a way to ask you questions via the bot? Not via the bot? Because you’re not answering them, the bot is. 

Ilise: 24/7? That’s one of the things that people love about it is that because I’m not available all the time, they can ask the question. But it’s funny because one person summed up what I think a lot of people feel, which is they love having my bot, but somehow, they still want to know what I think. 

Lynne: Yes. 

Ilise: I actually am not as verbose as my bot. My bot just says way too much. And then they’ll bring to me the output of my bot and they’ll say, what do you think of this? And I said, focus on this point right here. Ignore the rest. Right. So, I can simplify it for them. 

Rachel: It’s really interesting because I’m seeing that happen with a lot of coaches. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kirsty Fanton, in Australia, but she’s got a bot as part of her comms camp membership. And also, Ed Gandia, who I’m sure you, you’ll know of, have heard of has got Ed on Tap now in his program. So, it’s a thing.

Ilise: It’s a thing. It’s definitely a thing and it’s, I think next year going to be expected actually. 

Lynne: It’s interesting, isn’t it? You’ve been talking about using AI to find clients for a while, but the thing about AI is, we’ve talked about this, it’s changing so fast. Can you see this strategy as being less effective as we go on, as more people do your courses work out or get the idea or more bots out there. Do you think it’ll be less effective? 

Ilise: I really have no idea, but I actually see it getting more effective. The more, the better we get at using it, the more effective I think it will be. That’s my prediction. 

Lynne: Okay. Interesting. 

Rachel: Interesting. 

Ilise: I have not, I’m not basing it on anything except what I see happening. Which is people who use it are doing better. 

Lynne: Maybe it’s just that old human gut reaction. That’s your gut feel.

Rachel: Ilise, a lot of the stuff I read, you talk a lot about how we really need to get into this experimentation mindset instead of just accepting what it gives us and that sort of thing. What are you experimenting right now with AI that is kind of blowing your mind or proving interesting. 

Ilise: I’m just experimenting with different ways of prompting. And different ways of getting better output. I think more than anything, I’m just interested in seeing how the market is using it and what that’s doing to and for my clients. And so, I may have mentioned that I was at an AI marketing conference last week and my main goal was to talk to marketers and ask, are you still using writers? Or is AI doing your copywriting? And it was very interesting because I guess I could have expected this. It was really across the board. I spoke to a few people who said, oh no, we’re not using writers anymore. We’re just doing everything with AI and other people who swore up and down they were only using AI for research and polishing, but they would not get rid of the writer they know already. Right. It’s not like writers in general. We have a writer who knows our business. And is really good and I’m not going to use AI instead of this writer. And I personally feel that way too. 

Lynne: It’s all back to relationships, isn’t it? 

Ilise: It is all back to relationships. Yes. 

Rachel: Also, it makes me wonder if there are companies out there who have, who are doing that big 360 and going back to their writer after. Did you hear any stories along those lines? 

Ilise: Not yet. Not yet, but I do think that people are. It depends on what they’re using their writing for as well. Right. Because there’s some writing that doesn’t need to be really good. It could be mediocre. It could be the same. Right. That’s the problem. I think one of the speakers at this event, Alex Kantrowitz, he calls it the AI sameness problem. And so, if we want our copy to not be the same as everyone else, then we have to either use a real writer or be able to get better output from the AI or some combination thereof. So I really think it depends on how the copy and the words and the writing is being used. Whether it is fine to use AI versus when you really need a real person and a real brain. 

Rachel:  I would love to ask you, are you coming up against, people in your program being asked to simply switch to polishing or editing AI words instead of writing them from scratch? And I’m just wondering if that is the case, how are they starting to price that work?

Ilise: I do know that people are being asked to do something with, here’s what the AI wrote. Can you do something with it, whether it’s editing or making it better. But I don’t know anyone who has said yes to that yet, truthfully. So, I don’t know how they’re pricing it. I personally think it should be priced higher than something that you write from scratch because it’s probably not as easy as writing something from scratch. But yes, I do see that happening. 

Lynne: I’m getting a lot of briefs from clients that I’m pretty sure are AI generated. And I find that there’s a sameness to the brief, but sometimes, to be honest, some briefs, particularly in large corporates, they had templates anyway, and they always gave you almost the same brief and it was about you adding a nice twist or an extra layer of humanness. 

Rachel: I’m getting briefs that include the article in AI. So they’re briefing me to write an article, and then they’re including the AI version. A draft. 

Ilise: And what are you doing? How are you responding, Rachel?

Rachel: I just ignore the AI draft and write the article that they’ve briefed me on. 

Ilise: Interesting. 

Rachel: But it’s always like I’m briefed by someone who might be a bit less experienced in the company, and it’ll be along the lines of, here’s something that might help you get started or something. 

Ilise: Right, right, right. 

Rachel: I don’t actually need that, but I don’t want to be rude. So, I just ignore it. 

Ilise: I think that’s smart. That’s interesting. 

Rachel: Well, Ilise, we could talk to you all day, but we have only a couple more questions for you. And one is, is one that we ask all our guests, it’s about the software or apps they’d be lost without. And we know that ChatGPT is a big one for you but is there any other favourite. That you’ve got or that you think are good for freelancers to you help them build a successful business? 

Ilise: The simple answer is no, not really. I’m not big on technology. I find it mostly complicates things instead of simplifying things. My favourite app is something called WeCroak actually, which has nothing to do with business. It’s a daily reminder and a quote from someone basically reminding you, you’re going to die, so please relax and put everything in perspective. 

Lynne: Fantastic. 

Ilise: And I really love that. 

Rachel: Okay. We have to check that one out.

Ilise: Let me tell you which one I saw today. Let’s see if I can find it. Here we quote from interesting Steve Jobs, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” 

Lynne: Fair enough. 

Ilise: That’s really important. 

Rachel: Wow, WeCroak and ChatGPT. 

Lynne: Thank you so much for such a great chat, Ilise, tell us where our audience can find you and find your courses. 

Ilise: Yes, absolutely. Everything is @marketing-mentor.com. 

Lynne: Fantastic. I’ll put that in the show notes too, just to make it clear and make it easier. 

Ilise: Awesome. 

Rachel: Thanks Elise my head’s buzzing with all of that information. I can’t wait to actually try that prompt conversation that you gave us, so really appreciate that. Know how it 

Ilise: Let me know how it goes when you do. 

Rachel: Absolutely. Well, that brings us to the end of the show, but thanks to everybody out there who’s listening, and I did have someone say to me on LinkedIn, I really need to give you a review. And she’s been listening to us for six years and I said, yes, you do. No pressure. So please let this be your prompt, your nudge to give us a rating or a review on the platform where you find your podcast. And we will pop everything in the show notes about Ilise and how you can track her down as well.

Ilise: That’d be great.

Lynne: So, thank you. We’ll be back again next week. Bye. 

Rachel: Thanks everybody. See you next week. Bye. 

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Credits:

Find Ilise’s AI Kit at: https://go.marketing-mentor.com/free-ai-kit 

Connect with her

https://www.marketing-mentor.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilisebenun

Or her podcast, The Marketing Mentor: https://pod.link/279328611 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

Thanks (as always) to our sponsors Rounded (www.rounded.com.au), an easy invoicing and accounting solution that helps freelancers run their businesses with confidence. Looking to take advantage of the discount for Rachel’s List Gold Members? Email us at: hello@rachelslist.com.au for the details.

Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co