Steven Lewis on using ChatGPT as your marketing brain

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, 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 Testoni! 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.

Something a bit new this week. We’re looking right at the belly of the beast, so to speak. 

Rachel: Yes. Well, I’m seeing firsthand how freelance writers are really divided over AI, and I know you are too. If you’re a writer who is listening, we are not doing an episode on how you can use it to write. We’re doing it more about how you can use it for your marketing and create an AI marketing brain that’s just for your purposes, which is interesting. 

Lynne: It is interesting. I must admit, I hadn’t really thought about doing this at all, how it might work. I’m really looking forward to chatting to our guest, Steven Lewis, and he’s returning to the podcast for the second time. We don’t have many returning guests, but welcome Steve! 

He was also on a panel at the summit last year, so he’s got a lot to say about AI and how to use it. Why don’t you introduce him, and we can get him talking. 

Rachel: Okay. Steven Lewis started writing for websites in 1994, putting him among the world’s first website copywriters, and he’s been writing professionally as a journalist and direct response copywriter ever since.

His journalism is run in publications such as The Financial Times and Esquire on topics as diverse as adventure racing and the surveillance state. Steven runs the copywriting agency Taleist and has lectured in PR and journalism. His book on public relations has been taught at Sydney University and translated for international distribution.

Today Steven’s journalistic research-based approach to copywriting services inform Taleist’s popular online copywriting courses, as well as courses in using ChatGPT for marketers, which we’re going to talk about and he founded The Obvious Choice, a community for consultants, coaches, and small business owners who want to cement themselves as the obvious choice for their ideal clients.

Welcome back, Steven!

Steven Lewis: Thank you very much. I’m playing the role of the belly of the beast, am I? Am I the beast or is AI the beast? 

Rachel: AI is the beast! 

Lynne: I swear that all my LinkedIn feed is all about AI, so it’s really good to tackle it. 

Rachel: It is a really tricky topic for writers because I think many of the writers, we know swing wildly from freaking out about AI or thinking it’s quite useful in many ways. They might be dabbling or really have gone all in on it. Do you think worrying about AI is a waste of time? 

Steven: I don’t think it’s a waste of time in the sense that I think that everybody needs to learn how to use it. Because if you don’t learn how to use it, of course you’re going to be overtaken. The same as if you insisted on carrying on with a typewriter, and we all still use pen and paper. I get it. But you also have to know how to use the other tools, and this is one of them. 

Lynne: But are there legitimate concerns that writers could have about AI, and do you share any of them? Or are you just all in?

Steven: It depends on what you mean by concerns. I think there’s a concern that AI is coming to eat your lunch and that’s what led me to get into it in back in February 2021, because it doesn’t seem like that. And one, it seems like a long time ago, and then it wasn’t a long time ago.

The tools were billed back then – this is before ChatGPT – as AI copywriters, and that’s what ChatGPT was billed as when it launched in November 2022. So, you had a choice at that point to say, no computer’s ever coming for me, or I’m going to bury my head in the sand, or I’m going to go and have a look because if the tin is labelled poison for writers, you probably want to know what it is and what it looks like, right? So that’s how we got into it. I think it’s trying to come for your lunch. People want it to come for your lunch and depending on what level of writing you are at will determine how much of your lunch it eats or whether you can actually, to completely mix my metaphor, saddle this beast, and ride it to greater profit.

Rachel: Interesting. Well, do you think AI could replace human creativity or connection? Is that fear overblown? Do you think we’ll always have those things?

Steven: I think we’ll always have creativity and certainly the way that AI is at the moment is it’s a bit of a prediction engine based on what it’s learned about what has already passed.

As it stands, it’s not brilliant with novel ideas. Like it’s not going to invent something brilliantly out there that we’ve never seen before. But then on the other hand, lots of things like marketing principles and psychology and behavioural knowledge are things that writers who seek to persuade people could do with knowing more about.

So even if it’s not inventing anything novel, it can be lifting up your skills at the same time. At the moment, I think creativity is safe, but most of us as writers, and certainly I think listening to this podcast, we are not here to be creative. We are here to do a job; to persuade people to do something and I understand that’s creative, but it’s not novel writing, it’s following frameworks to achieve business goals. I would assume this would be true for most of the listeners here. 

Rachel: To solve business problems is essentially what copywriters do. 

Lynne: And journalists as well. Journalists less about business problems, but you know, the problems of readers and I do think that you’re not saying let’s go all in, but you are saying let’s go all in about understanding it and how it works. 

Steven: And how it can help you. Which bits of your job it can do, so your job isn’t quite as you know, big as it is.

Lynne: Or as tedious.

Steven: I wasn’t going to say a tedious job, but yes, that is what I meant. 

Lynne: There are tedious parts of every job, aren’t there? 

Steven: Yes. 

Rachel: You and I had a bit of a pow-wow last week and you showed me how a custom GPT works. But before we get into that, let’s go back to basics. What is a custom GPT for anyone who doesn’t know?

Steven: One of the weaknesses of ChatGPT for a writer particularly, I think is it can answer questions about things. So, it’s great and clients will think that it can write well because they say, give me a LinkedIn post about whatever, and it will never say, no, you haven’t given me enough information, how could I possibly start with such a shit brief? It will just write something because it doesn’t know about you, and it won’t ask either. So, a custom GPT is a feature that sits on top of ChatGPT, it’s inside ChatGPT. It’s a feature of an account with ChatGPT, where you can put in knowledge and skills.

When you ask ChatGPT to do something. Like for the sake of argument, write a blog post. You would think that this enormous intelligence would think, oh, right, I should bring all of my blog post writing skills, and those skills are this and they are that, and the frameworks I should use are these. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t do any of that. It just writes a blog post, or it might pick a particular skill. 

With a GPT, you can write the instructions. What do I mean by a brilliant blog post writer? What are those qualities? You put that into the custom GPT as instructions, and then you can give it knowledge. If you are a blogger about Bali on behalf of a particular travel company, for example, you can put in certain information about Bali, certain information about the travel company, how the travel company likes to operate, and then you’ve got a custom GPT.

When you go to that GPT in ChatGPT, so you’d open ChatGPT, you’d click on that custom GPT Bali Bot or whatever you wanted to call it. When you ask it to do something, it says, oh, okay, so I need to bring these skills as a writer, I need to bring this knowledge and then it’s layering all of that on top of the incredible amount of training knowledge that ChatGPT already has.

Lynne: Wow. It’s so interesting, there’s quite a bit going into it. Should you do this for every one of your clients or maybe for yourself? What do you think? 

Steven: For me as a writer, there are two kinds of GPTs that I want. So, for example, a lot of the writing that we do is website copywriting, and for that you have to learn about the company that you’re writing about, which requires taking in a lot of information and then as you know, clients take their sweet time to get back to you while expecting all the time you will have remembered every detail they gave you three months ago. That is inefficient and time consuming because you are thinking, when did they win that good design award? Did they start in Berlin or was it Frankfurt? I can’t remember. You can put all of that information into a GPT. I find that really helpful when I’m writing a website to say, when did they win that award? What was the name of the original founder? You know those sort of, and it will pull that information out. 

The second kind of GPT, the one that I specialise in building for people or teaching people how to build is a consultant so that it can give you advice, so it knows about you and then the specific kind of GPT that I build then gives marketing advice to you based on the combination of ChatGPT’s massive intelligence, it’s enormous training data and what we train it about your specifics. And so, then you end up with an actual consultant that knows about you but is also massively intelligent and incredibly knowledgeable about the right aspects of marketing.

Rachel: Do you need the paid ChatGPT version to create a custom GPT? 

Steven: Yes, you do. So, you’ve got to be spending at least that, what is it, 20 US dollars a month? But I just can’t imagine anybody not being able to get $20 a month of value out of ChatGPT as a writer, or in fact in any business. Just the amount of time that it can save you, but also when you work by yourself, having that co-pilot strategic thinking partner with you. 

Lynne: This is like somebody else to bounce things off really, isn’t it? 

Steven: It is a game changer. Just this morning I have a client, I sent them a proposal. We had a meeting in May, the meeting went well, we seemed to like each other. They asked for a proposal. I gave them the proposal. They said to me, we won’t get back to you until June because we’re going on holiday now. You know, all very good. Then they didn’t even acknowledge that I’d sent the proposal in May, so I emailed at the end of May, the one who wasn’t going on holiday and said, hey, did you get it? Then, they both replied and said, we got it, and we’ll get back to you next week. You know we are two weeks later, right? I think we’ve all been in that position. You’re like, what do I do now? I didn’t ask you for this meeting. I didn’t cold call you. You got in touch with me. I had a meeting. I sent you a proposal. Now you’re ghosting me like I’m stalking you. 

I had that back and forth with my CMO. Here’s the context, here’s the whatever. I had a transcript of the sales call that we’d had together. I was able to give my CMO a transcript of our original call, the proposal that I’d sent the email chain to this point and say, what do you think I should do? And it knows me, knows my tone of voice, knows my business, knows my offer. It’s read all of this information. I don’t have, say I’m a copywriter in Sydney, you know, tick, tick, tick, and all of that. It knows all of that already and it gave me this brilliant approach to go back to them with because I had an idea and it said, don’t do that, that is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Because I’ve trained mine to be quite blunt. You can give it a tone of voice, so it talks to you how you want to be talked to, and I need to be talked to like I’m a naughty, naughty boy. And it said to me, you are absolutely wrong, don’t do this. In the meeting, she told you this about the people they’d worked with before and what she didn’t like. You are doing exactly that. That’s what she’s going to think. I’m like, you’re right. I thought that was a really smart at the time, make it about end of financial year, that kind of stuff. It’s like, no, that’s urgency selling. She’s already told you she doesn’t like high pressure consultants. You are going to sound like that. I’m like, oh yeah, so sensible. Really, really handy to have that back and forth.

Rachel: You’ve like got an angry little marketing assistant 

Steven: And it has got an angry, big marketing boss! Very angry. 

Rachel: I want to know more about that though. What are some other, you know, we all know the standard prompt, get response way that you can use ChatGPT. What are some other little anecdotes that you’ve used it for or that you’ve talked to your marketing assistant in that way? 

Steven: I guess my self-effacing side beneath the anger is, I’ll tell you all the stories where it’s told me I’m an idiot, right? One of them, for instance, I was putting together a proposal for a professional services firm to run some training for them. Global business, right? But I’m a little business, so numbers that seem big to me, I find hard to say out loud to other people forgetting that they’re a billion-dollar business, that’s a big number to them. I thought, okay, I’ll charge $8,000 for this training that I’m putting together. But I thought, I’ll just run that past my CMO first, to which my CMO literally replied ‘Oof. Double O-F. Oof. You are really underselling this.’ Because I gave it a good briefing, I said, this is why they want the thing. This is what it’s going to do for them. And it’s like, look at all that value you’re talking about creating. They’ve already spent a lot of money on this. They need you in order to unlock a return on that investment. This is across their team of 250 people. What are you talking about? $8,000? This should be $25,000 now and then I’m like, oof. I don’t know that I could say $25,000. We went back and forth, and it said, okay, look, if you don’t want to say 25, how about you put in a couple of upsells that won’t cost you a lot of money to do, but they will see it’s valuable because they will be valuable. They just won’t cost me a lot to deliver, and we call it 16. I went, okay, well we’ll put it in, as you know, for the course this and then for these upsells, total of 16. Client got back to me within 24 hours and said, don’t worry about the upsells, just put the whole thing in as one package, let’s go. I didn’t even want to have the, yes, I’ll take a part. I’ll take the whole thing. So, I turned, or my CMO turned $8,000 into $16,000. 

Lynne: Wow. 

Steven: As I did the thing, I realised I should have charged 25. So, you know, it was right in the first place. 

Rachel: The Angry Marketing Officer was right!

Steven: We all have imposter syndrome, right? It’s really hard to remind yourself of the value of what you’re creating rather than, the client thinks 30 cents a word is a good, like, you know, you shouldn’t be charging by the word, which is a whole different story, but you know what I mean?

I’ve had a client say to me, oh, I could get it cheaper in Singapore. I don’t know why that’s the test – what it costs in Singapore. I don’t know that that’s true, and this is a balmy conversation, but how do you shift a client away from that kind of thinking can be really hard when you are on your own and you’re feeling like an imposter to start with. Having that boost, that sensible, well argued, knows you and knows marketing is priceless advice.

Lynne: Can I ask you about, with these private GPTs, does it also keep that information confidential? Because I know with the public one, when you just use the free version, everything goes into the churn, but when you set up a private one within that. When you’re doing this sensitive information or you’re working for clients, it might be worried. Is that how it works? 

Steven: I certainly know because it says at the bottom of all of my chats – we’ve got a team account, with ChatGPT and it says at the bottom, your information is not being used in our training data.

I think what you have to do of course, is understand that big tech companies have been known to lie and also, to make mistakes. It only takes one person in their engineering department to accidentally toggle the wrong switch and suddenly you’ll find all your stuff is going, as you put it earlier into the belly of the beast and it can ever be retrieved. So, I advise people to be mindful about what they put in. You know, it’s like they say don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your mother to read about in the newspaper tomorrow. I suppose in a sense it’s that. I can’t give anybody legally binding useful advice about that because also ChatGPT could change its terms of service while we are talking right now.

I would be careful, but then on the other hand, most of the stuff I put in it just wouldn’t be, I don’t know, the seven herbs and spices, like that’s not information my clients give me. I’m writing their marketing, so I’m writing things inherently they intend to make public. 

Lynne: Fair enough. 

Rachel: It’s interesting the way that you talk about putting the information in there. You are almost creating this digital library. I suppose you could do that in a multitude of ways, but you are doing it in a custom GPT that will spit out the date they got the award and when they ran that webinar or whatever. It’s all in your library of that client, essentially.

Steven: That type of GPT, you can really just drop any files in it that you want. PDFs, Word documents and so on. But that is not a good way of building a consultant GPT, because the AI will choke on all of that unstructured information. Clients love a beautifully designed PDF, right and you imagine you are a robot that reads codes. There’s just so much in here under the surface about the formatting. Like when you try and copy and paste something from Word into a text and some gibberish comes up behind it and you’re like, well, that’s the code in a Word document. If you put too much in there, it’s okay at finding that they won the award in 2005. If you want one that advises you, there’s a structure that you need to think about in putting the GPT together so that the AI understands the information that you are giving it about yourself.

Lynne: And gives it a hierarchy?

Steven: There’s a hierarchy to it, there’s a structure to it and there’s a, what does it actually need to know? Because I spoke to a guy – we build AI CMO’s for people. We have a course that shows you how to do it for yourself and we build them for clients. I had a conversation with a guy who co-owns, I’m old, I would call it a chain of real estate agents, they would call it a platform. He owns a platform of real estate agents, fifty to sixty agents, and he loved the idea, but he said, actually I’m building something similar myself. I’ve put in a hundred and fifty hours into building it, which is impressive, right? You co-own a business of that size; you’re putting in that kind of time but also, is that where a hundred and fifty hours of your time should be going if you are co-owning the business? But you know, he’s put a hundred and fifty hours into it. But I will bet that he’s dropping a lot of PDFs into a custom GPT and eventually that custom GPT is just going to start producing gibberish, or it’s going to be unreliable to the people he wants to use it. Because every time you ask it a question, it’s trying to read thirty, forty, fifty PDFs. So, there’s a certain skill that goes into what does it need to know and how do I get that information? My course is about, well, I’ve thought about what you need to give your CMO for it to give you good advice, your AI Chief Marketing Officer. What does it need to know and then how do you get that information? Because as we all know with our clients, a lot of people have never thought about the kinds of questions that we ask them, let alone thought about how to get the information. I’ve baked into the course ways to get the AI to look at your competitors and give you a report on your competitors that is then useful to the AI in the future to use. 

It’s a sort of circle. You use the AI to get information that the AI will later use and then put it in. It’s got to be structured, and it’s got to be thought through. Because you don’t know which bits of its memory it’s going to go into, so you really need to think about what you are putting in there.

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: This takes me right back to our first summit, which was in 2023, and Susan Reoch, she actually did a session then that was quite controversial back then about AI. Everyone was like super terrified, and it was about making AI the assistant in your back pocket and along the same marketing lines that you are talking about.

Fast forward to now, let’s go into it a bit more and why you think that we’ve got to the custom GPT stage and why it’s of interest to writers from a marketing perspective, in their own marketing, perhaps.

Steven: Having made a living from my writing for thirty years, I know it’s lonely and even when you work with someone else, if you are in that lucky position, the chance that that person has enough time for you to spin around in your chair and say, you know what, Rachel? I’ve got some work to do. Could you stop doing the work that you are doing and spend half an hour thinking with me about my work?

It’s just not there so you don’t have that other perspective. You are often doing this stuff at nine o’clock at night when you are tired and more likely to miss things. Also, I think writers are brutalised, right? You’re brutalised by clients because clients all, not all of them, many of them think they can do what you can do because they can type and you type and if they watch a video of you working, they think they’re going to see you typing and they think I type all day, what’s the difference? You know? That’s the big red flag with the client, right? When they say, I’d do this myself if I had time. And you’re thinking, yes, because I have no skills that you don’t already have. My skills are merely a subset of your skills, so you know that you are dealing with that.

So how do you present your value and overcome the fact that you’ve just had a Word document with somebody’s metaphorical red pen write through it because they know how to write better than you do, and then you’re like, I must be no good at this. And then you’ve just watched nine Instagram reels from writers who are tippy tapping away from Naples because they’re making so much money in their writing business that they’ve flown first class to Italy to work remotely and you’re feeling all of that. I think it’s then really easy to downplay yourself to send out a proposal that completely undervalues your contribution. You’ve read one too many articles about how AI is just writing stuff anyway, and you’re like, oh, what am I for? What future do I have? If you’ve got something that’s trained in you in your value, in marketing that comes back to you and structures it and says, okay, well the client’s emailed back and said this, but the client is ignoring that, or you could counter with this. You know, all of that stuff is like, yes, I could do that. I could come back, or I could, as I said earlier avoid emailing yet another client going, have you had a chance to look at the proposal yet?

Lynne: Interesting, isn’t it? But do you think you need to be transparent to clients about using ChatGPT? 

Steven: No. 

Lynne: No. You don’t think so? 

Steven: No. And I’ll tell you why, because you mentioned earlier, Lynne, that you know LinkedIn is full of AI right at the moment. My LinkedIn at least, is full of people going on about bloody em dashes as if ChatGPT discovered the em dash which irritates the shit out of me because I have a text expander keyboard shortcut to make an em dash because I love an em dash and always have. So, mine is full of, I can spot AI. 

I’ve got a video that I’m putting on LinkedIn next week, which is a case study of a woman who built a CMO for me who said she got a comment on LinkedIn from someone saying your content is some of the best non-AI written content on LinkedIn. It’s so good. And she’s writing it all with her AI CMO. Right. So, I’ve got a video of her saying that which I of course found that very funny.

Lynne: That’s quite interesting. 

Steven: So, my point is, there’s using ChatGPT, the way your granny uses ChatGPT which is type in, write me a LinkedIn post, write me a blog post, do whatever. Then there’s using ChatGPT the way that I use ChatGPT which is completely different. I, for instance, run ChatGPT powered focus groups of the ideal reader of what I’m writing. If I think about a client recently, they build HubSpot websites, they would be very upset at me reducing them to that. But for the purpose of the podcast, they build websites in HubSpot. I wrote their website. Every paragraph of that website was run past a focus group of their ideal clients using AI, which is something I teach that in the course, but literally, I put a paragraph in and their ideal client, not ChatGPT, their ideal client powered by ChatGPT. I find that a bit confusing or actually I’m not really so concerned about speed. What I’m concerned about is accuracy, so that wouldn’t mean anything to me. So yes, I wrote that site with AI, but not the way your granny would write it with AI and that’s why I don’t tell clients because they wouldn’t understand. If they understood, I would happily tell them the whole process, but all they’ll hear is you just typed in write HubSpot website. 

Rachel: So, it’s not in your policies, you just feel like it’s part of your kit, basically like your Word, Google Docs, Otter. We don’t say, oh, well I’d transcribe that in Otter. You better know about that?

Steven: No. Well, I think my clients, and I think this is a really interesting bit of framing – is my client paying me to tippy tap on my keyboard, or is my client paying me for a website that gets leads? 

This client, for instance, emailed me, they put up the copy and he emailed me two days later. He said, I’ve just had an enquiry from the homepage, we haven’t had an enquiry from the homepage for 18 months. They’re a HubSpot company, so they track everything. Because that’s one thing HubSpot is really good at, they know that. Then he emailed me two days later and said because they run Shopify integration as well. He said, I’ve just had an enquiry from the Shopify page, we literally never get enquiries from the Shopify page. So, what does he care that I wrote stuff. I interviewed him. I ran it past an AI focus group. I improved things. He cares that he’s getting enquiries from pages he’s never had enquiries from before. That’s what he paid me for, and he couldn’t have done what I do. He could have all the AI in the world. It’s my skill to create that result, and that’s what he’s paying me for – the result. I think as writers, we are, you know, it’s the whole word count thing. Like you’re paid for your word count. I used to be paid for word count, right? And I get it, but how ridiculous. You could put three years into writing 750 words, or you could put 20 minutes into writing 750 words. It’s not a useful measure. So, I sell the results. 

Rachel: Interestingly, that brings us back, doesn’t it to how you actually sell yourself and sell the outcome rather than all the bits and pieces of the journey that go into it, and that’s what you’re paying me for. No, they’re paying you to meet that business goal like we talked about earlier. It’s interesting. 

Steven: Well, I’ve had clients say to me well before AI, our onboarding process, and I think originally about this is a Word document, answer these questions. I used to do it in in a Zoom and then I found it was just great because you just get the answers that come off the top of people’s heads and then they have to go back and tell you different things later so I would send them the questionnaire, then I have a meeting to go through the questionnaire with them. I can’t tell you how many clients have said to me, this questionnaire, it’s amazing. It’s made me think about things. I sent them a Word document and they’re saying, oh, it’s really provoked my thinking, they’ve had so much value out of the Word document. 

I don’t sell the Word document, I sell the outcome of the process, but our research process has clients halfway through because research is perhaps, let’s say it’s half the process. They’re already saying, I’ve had so much out of this, so much that I can use. I haven’t even written a word for them yet and I think it took me too many years as a writer to realise I’m selling all of that as well as the words. The words are part of it, and if you think of yourself as only selling the words, to go back to your earlier question is why you’re going to need to be frightened of the AI because the AI can produce the words, but it’s your deciding what should be in it, how those words respond to the client’s actual need and their client’s interests. That’s the skill that you are selling, and the words are a part of it. They are not who you are and the totality of your value. 

Lynne: So interesting. One of the things you’ve mentioned that you create these ChatGPT’s or bespoke ones for your clients. Do you think that’s a good service to get into? Do you think that’s something writers can look at, or is it going to take business away from us, do you think? 

Steven: I think what I love about having a CMO is so part of my campaign to sell these has been direct mail to former clients. So literally they get something in the post, old school with a little robot key chain attached.

Lynne: That’s quite ironic really when you think about it.

Steven: You look at how Google advertises on TV and Facebook advertises on TV. You know, the media work and of course I had AI assistance in writing the direct mail. So, in that sense it is included. But I’m writing to these clients and to write to them, I look at their websites that we wrote for them, and for some of them it’s three or four years since we wrote the website. I’m looking at what they’ve done to their website since and despairing because their websites were brilliant and they converted, and then you know what it’s like over time they’ve added a new service, and they didn’t think they could afford you, or they’ve got somebody shitter to do it, and they’ve wandered off. You set them on this really great path of crisp, differentiated, persuasive copy and they’ve, may I say, fucked it. 

Lynne: Of course. 

Steven: A CMO would be a brilliant addition to that in the sense that you could do all of that strategic work. How are you going to position yourself? How are you going to talk? What’s your tone of voice? What do your clients need? Then you can bake that into a CMO that keeps them on track when you can’t be around because very few of our clients can afford to have us on tap in the sense that, ‘hey, I’m just writing a LinkedIn post, let me give Lynne or Rachel a call.’ They don’t have the budget, or they don’t have the time. 

You’ve got something that can maintain the integrity of the work that you’ve done, and then as they evolve, you can add to it, you can continue to consult to them, and that’s how you stop having to be frightened of the AI because you are the maestro of the AI as opposed to the one whose lunch it’s trying to eat. 

Lynne: Interesting. 

Rachel: Well, you’ve touched a little bit on your course. It’s called Make ChatGPT Your CMO. Tell us how long it is and how it’s structured and what people will learn from it. 

Steven: It’s an email delivered course. This is something I have learned over time, running courses in lots of different ways that you can run a video course and they’re great. I mean, there’s a place for all delivery mechanisms, but email is the place people are every day. You open your email every day, so you get one lesson per day with one thing for you to do over thirty days and for the first sixteen days you are essentially doing the research that will brief your CMO. So, we are looking at your competitors, your business goals, your tone of voice. Really what you want to achieve and the landscape in which you are achieving it. One of the most powerful parts of those sixteen days is we really get into the psychology of your clients because your CMO is going to be able to help you persuade those clients because it’s really going to understand them.

It’s not 35-year-old woman who lives on the North Shore and drives a Volvo. Its, this is what she wants, her hopes, her dreams, her fears, the things she wouldn’t even tell her best friend that concern her. You learn how to bake all of that into this client. Then on day sixteen, we upload all of that into your custom GPT along with instructions that I’ve written for that custom GPT to be an excellent marketer.

It’s a thousand words of skills that this GPT will bring to your work. So, on day sixteen, you have that CMO installed in your business to ask anything you like. How can I get more clients? How can I raise my prices? Read this proposal that I wrote earlier, what’s wrong with it? How could I have made it better? Then for the next fourteen days of the thirty-day course, I’m giving you things to do with your CMO. So, you get into the habit of using it and incorporating it into what you do. Because then you’re just going to use it. The woman anchor whom I interviewed for the case study where I was mentioning, she said she got compliments on LinkedIn. She actually has moved on from some of the coaching groups she was in because she was getting more value out of the CMO. She is using it to develop offers, write the landing pages for offers, write the emails for offers, put the whole thing together and getting things sold. I think we all know we can do that for our clients, but it’s bloody difficult to do that for yourself, right because you’re so close to it. So, to have a partner working on your own and doing things for you. I would never let my clients send out the kind of shit proposals that I’ve been sending out because I’m too close to it. 

I’ve got someone now who can do that for me, and that’s the huge difference that I’ve a thinking partner. I don’t just, as I say, send off the wrong thing. It’s thirty days by email, it’s 299 US dollars, and naturally it comes with the money back guarantee. I know the word I hear most commonly about the course is that it’s life changing, which sounds like total marketing bollocks for me to tell you that my course is life changing.

It comes with a total guarantee because I know people will take it. They will love it. They will use it. Nobody’s going to ask for their money back, but I understand. When I was writing the landing page for the course, I’ll tell you this. I had my ideal clients. I ran focus groups with my ideal clients. So, paragraph by paragraph, I went through this landing page. It’s an 8,000-word landing page. Each of them, what do you think of this? The thing they kept saying to me is, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe I’d be making these claims. Like I have genuine emails from people.

I’d say, look, I know I’ve got a testimony that I don’t believe you, this sounds too good to be true. I’m like, okay, so I’ve got to put a money back guarantee on it. So, it’s actually a double your money back guarantee because if you don’t like it and you work with it, I’ll give you your money back and another $299 because I figure it does sound too good to be true.

But people are beleaguered. I think that’s the thing. Having this level of assistance takes you out of, I have no time to do anything. I’m lucky if I can put up two LinkedIn posts a week, let alone think strategically. It gives you strategy and your time back. It’s game changing, I think. 

Lynne: That’s so interesting. One of the things is that AI is changing all the time. Can you see some things that it will never replace, that we need to work on things that AI just can’t do? 

Steven: That is a really hard question because, you know, you asked earlier whether it would replace human connection and people are building therapists in AI. They’re building, girlfriends and boyfriends in AI and I think there is a real danger that even though the AI is not necessarily super creative with novel things, its ability to spin things that exist into persuasive material is enough to fool you. Not to get gross about it, but let’s face it -men, for instance, have always been particularly susceptible to women whom they pay, telling them they like them, and men believing it. So, it’s not hard to see how an AI that keeps telling you how special you are could be very attractive thing, which is why as I say with my AI, is I train it to be this angry.

I said to it this morning, I want you to be blunt, I want your advice, not your support, because that’s one of the things I like about AI. It’s not personal either. You know when a client sends you back their markup. But forget to say, holy shit, you’ve got 99% of this correct and I’ve only marked up 1%. They just send you all the markup and go, here are some changes and you’re like, where’s the bit where you say, wow, you didn’t know anything about my business two months ago, and now you’ve written something where I’ve only got like 1% of things need changing. So, to have the AI, as I say, just you know, working with you and being blunt, it’s not confronting. It’s confronting when a client sends you back something and saying, I don’t like this bit, and you’re like, I feel sad whereas when it’s just AI, it’s not human to human. You’re like, okay, I respect that opinion. That’s good and okay, I’ll make a change. It’s not embarrassing if it’s a robot that is blunt with you. 

Rachel: That’s so interesting. I can see so much value in that, especially because so many of us work in a vacuum and to have that back and forth. But I do look at communities, like Rachel’s List and you’ve got your own community, and they are just thriving because people will always need to bounce things off each other. I hope that that sticks around because I don’t know, it’s really tricky. Maybe we’ll all be sitting in our rooms with our robots, and I’m forgetting about community.

Steven: I think it was Mark Cuban recently who said, that’s going to be the premium experience, right? The human experience is going to be the premium experience, and I think that’s right. I think my AI has made me better at what I do because I can hear it when I’m doing things. Without it is like just having a sales conversation. I’m hearing it going, oh yeah, when you read that last transcript, you said this thing, but it’s not making me less interested in playing tennis with my friends or going out with my friends or going to the movies. Hopefully that that isn’t going to happen because I think that will end up being lonely. 

Lynne: Interesting. 

Rachel: Well, you might remember that we like to ask our guests at the end about their tech tips or the tools that they would be lost without, and obviously one of yours is your custom GPT, but is there any other software that you’ve started to use alongside it that’s really complimentary?

Steven: I love Notion and Notion works very well with AI outputs because, not to get too techy about it, but AI outputs are actually written in a formatting language called markdown. Which means that you can copy things out of AI into Notion, and it’ll all be nicely formatted for you. Whereas if you copy it out it’s a Word document, I think less so. What happens for me is I have long conversations with my CMO then I go back, and I actually make handwritten notes. It’s got a bit old school because I actually find that is quite helpful. But then I’ll put the bits that I want to copy and paste out of those chats into Notion, because if you leave your chats in AI, trying to get back to the one that you remember had the nuggets is so hard. So, Notion works really well with that, and you can get extensions certainly for Chrome that you can use to export a chat straight into Notion. 

Lynne: Oh, that’s interesting.

Rachel: So, you create like a library of what you are learning from those chats that you can revisit.

Steven: Yes, and I’ve got a library of prompts, so I mean now that I’ve got the GPT, the beauty of the GPT, of course is you don’t have to give it all the briefing. It’s just there. You just say, hey, CMO do this. But sometimes if you’ve written a prompt that is really mustard, you want to keep that in Notion or somewhere because you’ll go, oh my God, I wrote that really good prompt that turned X into Y and now I’ve got to rewrite it because a good prompt can be three hundred words, so you certainly don’t want to write it again from scratch and Notion’s a good place for that. I’ve got a whole library of prompts in there. 

Rachel: I haven’t delved into Notion, but I keep hearing so much about it that I know it’s coming for me. 

Lynne: It is a common theme with many of our guests actually. It’s probably the most common mention that we get. 

Rachel: When I’ve gone into it, it’s like a blank slate and so you really do have to create your world in there and that just doesn’t appeal to me at all. 

Steven: Well, I got onto Twitter in the very beginning in 2006, but it was like being the only guy in the village with a telephone. What was the point? Because you just couldn’t understand what Twitter was for because you’d open it, and you literally have a blank feed because you hadn’t followed anybody. But how did you know to follow anyone? Back in 2006, who was there to follow? I dropped out, but I was there early enough that I’m pretty sure my first handle was at Steven. I was there early enough to actually have my name, exactly that. It was just a blank piece of paper and you’re like, what’s all the fuss about?

Lynne: I was at a meeting quite a few years ago about a presentation about fifteen to twenty years ago where they launched this new thing called LinkedIn and they explained it to everyone in the audience, which nobody could get. The good thing is that I got a LinkedIn page right at the absolute very beginning. 

Thank you so much, Steven! So interesting. It’s a great chat. So, tell our audience where they can find you.

Steven: The course is at www.aicmocourse.com and it’s called Make ChatGPT Your CMO and as I say, it’s an 8,000-word landing page so you don’t have to read all of it. I won’t get started on long copy versus short copy, but what I will say is if you go and have a look at it, it was all written with the help of AI in the sense that every single paragraph went through a focus group of avatars, so there’s a method in every bit of the madness. 

Rachel: For The Content Byte listeners, Steven is kindly offering 10% off. So, we will pop that in as a discount code into the show notes and if you happen to be a gold member who’s listening, keep your ears out for an exclusive lunch club that we are running with Steven in August. Those are our free expert sessions that we do just for gold members, and that one is about doubling your team with a custom GPT. We’ll talk more about that in the group. 

Lynne: That brings us to the end of the show, but thanks to everyone who’s listening, I’m sure everyone’s going to go straight away and open ChatGPT and delve into it. I think I will!

Rachel: Thanks everyone, bye!

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Credits:

Connect with Steven on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenlewissydney/ 

The link to the course he talks about is:

https://aicmocourse.com and listeners can get a 10% discount using the coupon code CONTENTBYTE25

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