Future-Proof Your Content Strategy in the Age of AI

- With the trend we're seeing right now
is people are using chat GPT after a month or so,
lose this novelty and then it slows down.
So how do you actually get it integrated
in people's daily lives?
Just like how Alexa is in our daily lives
or Siri is in our daily lives,
you'll start seeing AI more integrated.
- Thanks for being here,
ladies and gentlemen, Neil is one of the largest,
biggest entrepreneur and marketers in the world.
In fact, entrepreneur magazine
said he's number one marketer in the world.
You know what, you created your first website at what?
15, 16 years old and has been going a strong ever since.
Now you own four multimillion dollar businesses.
Colleges are using your material.
I know one of your big passions
is helping small businesses, right?
Helping small businesses get to where they want to go.
And you say there's a formula
to getting results in marketing, right?
Can you explain what that formula is,
that basic formula as you understand it?
- Sure, so when I say there's a formula to marketing,
the first thing is, is you need to go after a big TAM.
TAM stands for total addressable market.
If you go after,
it's almost the same amount of work
to market a small niche business as it is
to market in a really large business.
So might as well go after a large business
because it's hard to gobble up a hundred percent
of a large but niche.
While it's much easier to gobble up a fraction
of a percent of a hundred billion dollar market.
So go after a large market.
The second one is after you got a large market,
is you need to figure out what you can give
to disrupt the industry.
So for example, if you're going after health insurance,
you can give away payroll software for free
to then generate more sales for health insurance.
'Cause people who pay for payroll software,
they typically also provide their employees health
insurance, right?
So instead of charging 'em
for what they're used to paying for,
you then end up saying,
"Hey, we'll give you this thing that doesn't cost
"us much here for free and we're going to make a lot of money
"charging you for this much bigger thing,
"which is health insurance."
And then the next part is, is you just got to go omnichannel.
So from the
TikTok to Instagram to Facebooks to Google,
there's not one channel that does well.
They all are end up getting crowded and are competitive.
So you got to leverage all of 'em.
And other than that, you know,
you just got to execute on it and give it time.
But those are the main three elements.
Of course there's a lot of other things
involved in marketing to make each of those things work.
I oversimplified it,
but those are some of the three key things
that people mess up on.
They don't pick a big enough tam,
they don't figure out how to disrupt a market
and they think that they can grow a business
to being really amazing with just one channel.
You can start off with one channel,
but eventually you got to expand into all of them.
- So today we're going to be talking about ai.
That's the thrust of what we're talking about clearly.
And I watched one of your podcasts recently
and you said we're in the first inning
of the AI game, right?
Have we been been in that first inning for a while
'cause it seems like the algorithms for Facebook
and those have been around a while.
Have we been there for a while
and you see us going to the, say the second inning,
so to speak soon?
- Yeah, we're in the first inning.
What you'll see is things will actually speed up
and progress faster and faster.
So the amount of time you'll be in inning one
will be much longer than the amount of time
you're in inning two and then in inning three and so forth,
so on in which it'll,
each inning will get shorter and shorter
'cause technology improves and things get faster.
It's just like space exploration.
You know, it used to be where NASA
was doing everything and it would take us,
it took a long time for us to make a lot of progress
when it comes to space.
But then all of a sudden private companies
are sending things into space,
then all of a sudden rockets are reusable
and then all of a sudden you have things like
starlink that's up and running
and you can be in the middle of nowhere
and you can get fast internet versus the old school
slow satellite internet.
All I'm getting at is things progress
at a really fast pace due to technology,
with AI we're still in inning one,
there's a lot of issues with AI
and you're going to see a lot of 'em worked on.
Most of 'em will not be fixed this year or even next year.
It's going to be a long race,
but they'll get drastically better over the next few years.
- And what do you think inning two might look like?
Is it going to be similar to this only, you know,
chat GPT is going to be better
or is there going to be voice commands?
Any idea what that might look like?
- So inning two, in my opinion,
will be integration into more of our lives.
So right now everyone looks at chat GPT,
oh I can just ask 'em a prompt
and it ends up pushing out something.
The trend we're seeing right now
is people are using chat GPT after a month or so
loses novelty and then it slows down.
So how do you actually get it integrated
in people's daily lives?
Just like how Alexa is in our daily lives
or Siri is in our daily lives,
you'll start seeing AI more integrated
but not from an aspect of just Alexa, Siri.
Yes, that's already there.
I'm talking more of an aspect of
I'm working on an assembly line and AI
is doing X, Y, and Z for me to speed up the process
and make sure no one gets hurt
and everything is done perfectly
or I'm in marketing, we have all this analytical data,
AI on a daily basis spits out a report
and tells us what to do to get the most
out of our marketing by analyzing everything
that's happened in the last 24 hours.
- Okay, so a lot of people are talking about AI
being similar to the.com era.
Would you make the same comparison?
Where do you think the biggest opportunities are right now?
- I would, there's a lot of junk.
There's going to be a ton of failures.
And the biggest opportunity is, in my opinion,
streamlining a lot of processes
and operations within organizations.
The boring stuff.
If you actually look at the McKinsey report that came out,
most of the money that's being spent on AI
is not things like content creation.
It's in systems and processes.
- All right, and so a lot of us are like
looking at AI and we're not sure where to start.
Do you have suggestions for small business owners?
Like where would you start implementing ai?
- Yeah, so as a small business, honestly,
I wouldn't worry about implementing AI
much at all right now.
Instead, I would just use the tools
to help you get some of your work done.
So people look at AI as like,
"Hey, let me see if I can integrate in my marketing
"and just do it for me."
AI is not there yet.
It's not the, we're not at a point
in time where you can just rely on AI
to do everything that you need perfectly.
It's just like when search engines first came out,
a lot of the results were crap.
Google showcased barred with the error
and or misinformation, not in a bad way,
but it was just inaccurate.
And the market cap dropped by billions of dollars.
Chat GPT is inaccurate in so many ways.
You should see how many times we use chat GPT
and it's plagiarizing content
just to be super transparent, it's nowhere near perfect.
But where as a business owner,
you could be using ai right now in your marketing is
if you take an omnichannel approach,
which we talk about in a formula
to do really well in marketing, you had to create content,
AI can help you spearhead that content creation.
Coming up with the concepts and ideas,
titles stream and blog posts or content for social media
and even creating it.
Then you need to go out there and modify the content
and make sure it represents you
and it's accurate and it's what you want.
Content by AI isn't good enough to just post.
Yes, the Ryan Reynolds example was pretty good,
but that is not the majority of the cases with ai.
- And it may not even been
the whole example of what he did,
he probably got a a printout
and he probably modified it to work for him, right?
And then use that, which is, I think
what all of us are doing is we get
a blog post or an email or whatever we create
on chat GPT, we modify it and then we use it.
And that's the way it probably should be used right now
from what I'm hearing you say.
- Yes, it was very scripted.
Right, there was no way the Ryan Reynolds like,
he's like, let me just pull it up right now
and see what happens. - Yeah.
- You know, his team worked on that.
It was a recording the quality of the production
even though it looks like it was natural,
it wasn't shot with a phone or anything like that.
- Yeah, right, okay, good.
So what are some of the big mistakes
that you see entrepreneurs making
or marketers making when it comes
to implementing ai and how can we avoid those mistakes?
- The biggest mistake is they think AI is perfect
and then they just use it and they just expect the results
are going to be great, that's the first one.
The second mistake that we see is,
is are going out there at least in marketing
and they're just like,
let me go create tons of content
on everything within my industry
so I can catch up with my competition.
You can do a search for anything on the internet.
A great example of this is,
I did a search the other day of
how to dunk a basketball if you're short?
All right, so if I did an example
of how did dunk a basketball
if you're short, and I'm just sharing my screen here,
you can end up seeing it here.
I'm going to end up closing some of my windows
so you can see what I'm seeing.
This has 13 million results, okay?
If you look at how many people search for it
in the United States, roughly 20.
So there's already tons of content on any given phrase.
Chances are people are already clicking on page one,
maybe page two and that's it.
The point I'm getting is having AI create content
on any given topic isn't just going to get you more traffic.
Google and social sites already know how to drown out
the crap.
They've been doing this for ages.
There's no difference,
just because content's created by AI or human,
they already know how to drown it out unless it's amazing.
So what you need to focus on is, a,
make sure the content is amazing.
You know, showcase your experience, your expertise,
your authority, your trust.
Google likes calling it EEAT.
And the second is spend more time promoting
the content than creating it.
Because all you're going to end up doing
is just using AI to create a ton of content
that no one's going to read.
And it's actually going to hurt your site
and get you less traffic or less social engagement
and less followers 'cause people are like,
"Eh, this is junk, mediocre content."
- Yeah and it sounds like getting,
once you get the output from say, chat GPT,
it's super important to make it sound like you
would you say that's true as well?
- You need to make it sound like you,
but the example I gave just to double down on this,
I gave a really random example
that most people aren't going to type
and that had 13 plus million results.
Now imagine if it was on something generic,
you're going to have in many cases, hundreds of millions,
if not billions of results.
Oh, AI will allow me to keep, not really,
you got to compete with 13 or 16
or a hundred million other results.
It's not that simple.
- Yeah, yeah, that's crazy, yep.
So, so super important,
make sure that you don't just take Chat GPT
and post it somewhere.
You want to make sure you take the results
and modify it to be your content.
Make it the best it can be.
And make it sound like you before you send it out.
- Exactly.
- Got it, okay.
So I know a lot of people are worried about jobs, right?
We've seen Facebook and Google do layoffs.
Is that true?
Are people actually losing their jobs already
from AI and the explosion of AI right now?
- People aren't losing their jobs to ai,
they're losing their jobs to bad economy
and companies not hitting their quarterly earnings.
Facebook just laid off more people today.
I think they did an announcement that they're laying off
10,000 more people or something like that, or 5,000.
Either way it was a large number.
AI, if you think about it right now,
what we are seeing is there's a demand for marketers,
engineers, product people,
the list goes on and on who understand AI
can help get those things implemented
within our organization.
- So there's actually more opportunity
for people with AI than less than people losing their jobs?
- Right now, right now fast forward is,
I think it's going to change - Yeah.
- but right now that's the case.
- Yeah, and so let's talk about that change.
Where do you see that change occurring?
Is it within the entrepreneur industry?
Is it within businesses...
- All industries.
I literally see it in all industries
the moment that AI can do a better job
than the average human, the reason I say average human,
'cause there's human error.
And if the AI can do that job with less errors
and more efficiently, you're going to start seeing
it replace jobs, but it's nowhere near there.
And it's not going to be there in the next year
or even two years, or maybe, probably not even three years.
It's going to take a while.
Maybe within three years you slowly start
seeing ai affecting jobs.
But I really don't see it happening anytime soon.
- Okay, so a lot of hype,
a lot of worry that maybe it shouldn't be there.
And when you look at this,
who do you think is most vulnerable?
Who do you see as the most vulnerable
at losing their jobs or losing their business?
- Anything that's manual labor.
- Anything in manual labor, okay.
- Flipping a burger, right?
You can use machines for that, that already exists,
but like, that's like an extreme example.
Or like having 'em do very basic simple things
like number crunchers or people who are analyzing data.
You can have AI just replace a lot of those kind of things.
- Okay, copywriters, are copywriters at risk
and other content creators, social media managers?
- No, any, so , AI will,
the way I see AI affecting social and marketing
and content is it'll help streamline your job
and allow you to produce more output
for the hours you're given.
So instead of replacing job,
they may not have to hire as many people
and they can get more output from the same people.
Ex AI helps you with a ton of content ideas
or helps you write some of the content
you can go in and modify and it saves you half the time
so you can increase your output.
- You know Neil, when I work with a lot of coaches,
they're very concerned that AI is going to come in
and start taking their business form.
People won't need coaches because...
- A lot of us going to end replacing jobs
that people don't want to do.
And the burger example is a great one.
There's already machines that flip burgers,
but imagine AI integrated into the burger
and be like, "Oh, let me flip it.
"Oh, the temperature's not right.
"It needs to be cooked a little bit more.
"Oh, if we add these seasonings,
"people are going to love it even more. "
Like, think about getting a little bit
more sophisticated that way,
or you're walking into your home
and it makes it easier to cook or do things or,
"Hey, here's all the recipes based on what you have
"in the fridge, we analyze this
"and here's what you can make for dinner
"in less than five minutes," right?
Think of it as something that'll make life easier
versus it replacing.
You could say, oh,
that's going to replace a lot of chefs at home.
Well, how many people are actually chefs,
private chefs for, you know, the average American?
Not that many.
- Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.
So you don't think coaches
really have anything to worry about
within the next, at least two or three years?
AI is not really that close
to being able to coach you say online?
- Well, the better way to think about it is,
is the AI is only good as its input.
Search engines have been trying to fight misinformation
and false information for well over 10 years.
Google still has that issue.
Bing still has that issue and the list goes on and on.
So if the input is still not a hundred percent accurate,
how do you expect the output
to be a hundred percent accurate?
For that reason,
you can't expect the AI to be amazing.
Think of AI as like
a better version of a article spinner.
Hey, how can someone generate more sales?
Let's say you're a sales coach.
Well, it's going to scour the web,
figure everything out that it's analyzing
and then just give you data based on what it finds.
In essence, it's spinning up old information,
regurgitating it.
So as a coach, as long as you can stay ahead of the curve
and constantly are researching
and coming up with new trends and ideas
and strategies that other people aren't leveraging for,
you can have a leg up on ai,
at least in the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years.
- I've heard people say that the only people
that are going to be are the,
some of the people that are going to be affected negatively
by AI are the people that don't embrace it
and start integrating it because
all their competitors will be.
Now would you say that's a true statement
and what does that.
- It is. - Yeah.
- Embrace it, leverage it.
That's where the opportunity is.
- So let's talk about leveraging it.
So we kind of got a good foundation
of understanding AI a little bit.
What are some of the maybe the key points
or key principles of how we can
leverage AI at this point?
- All right, so I'll go with the three things.
I think you mentioned three ways
that we can embrace it and use it.
So one, have AI come up with content ideas for you.
The biggest thing is people have issues
coming up with a lot of ideas for
their business, their marketing.
They don't have a consistent content calendar.
This is going to help you guys a lot.
Number two is analyzing analytics data.
You're going to see more AI solutions come out.
If you look at most people, they're using Google Analytics,
but how many people actually log in
and take actionable insights based on that data?
Very few.
So you can end up using AI for that.
Number three,
the thing that I love the most is when you're starting off,
you may not have a lot of time to test your learning pages,
your collateral.
You may are like, oh,
things aren't working with conversions,
or my images on my Facebook ads aren't doing well.
You can start using Dolly or chat GPT
or a lot of these solutions
just come uptons of variations,
which allow you to test, to figure out, all right,
let me see what will work versus what won't work.
- I know a lot of people are looking
at video AI for video creating, you know,
the avatars that come up
and you can type in your information
and it'll basically spin out this video
and there other people are using it for audio,
other people are using it for picture generation.
Do you think AI is there yet to create content
that is helpful in marketing?
Or is it something that's not quite
where it needs to be yet?
- I think it can help.
I don't think it's that great for video.
I think it's drastically worse for video
than it is for text.
And I'm not a fan of it at its in its current form.
- Do you think it it's more harmful than good to use,
a bad... - Yes.
- Avatar generated video, than...
- It's really harmful.
You want to know why?
Because the way the social platforms and the algorithms work
is if you keep putting out crap,
it's going to hurt your reach for your future content.
So you're better off only putting out good stuff
than crap or mediocre stuff.
And a lot of the AI video created content and audio content
is just not there.
- Got it, so how does it hurt
your searchability and your ranking and stuff?
How does that happen?
- Well, the way it works with social platforms
at least is if you put out content
and people don't want to engage with it,
it tells us social platforms,
even if you have a million followers,
people don't care for what you're posting.
They don't want to engage.
So then you start doing it another 2, 3, 4 times.
They're like, no one likes engaging with
this person Neil Patella or whoever it is, or Bob.
So when you keep putting out crap content,
what do they do?
They show it to less and less of your followers.
And then when you start putting out good content, too late,
people don't want to engage with your stuff.
So we're not really going to show 'em much of your stuff.
And then it takes a long time to recover.
So it actually hurts you to put out crap content
with search and SEOs the same thing.
You put out crap content,
you already soften the example I showed.
You're competing with millions of people.
They'll be like, oh, they're just creating
tons of me too content.
Nothing new, nothing unique here.
No one wants a link to 'em.
We shouldn't rank 'em.
They just have a lot of bad content.
Great example of this was about.com.
They had tons of content,
they actually got more traffic when they split up
their content into unique sites, spoke sun niches,
and then they deleted a lot of the junk,
I forgot what percentage of the content they deleted,
but it was more than 20, 30%.
They deleted a large chunk of their content
and they got more traffic.
Because the more portion of your content is good,
the better the platforms, whether search or social,
you know, favor you the more traffic, the more likes,
the higher rankings you're going to get
versus if you just put a lot of mediocre stuff out.
- Okay, so let's say, you know, I'm,
you're doing a private consultation with me and I'm saying,
Neil, I don't know where to start with ai.
Where would you say the first thing
I would go to dig into my business
is start implementing right away?
- If you don't know where to start with ai,
the first thing that you should do
is go analyze your competition.
You can use a lot of the tools out there from
Uber suggest to SimilarWeb to Semrush
rush to Social Blade
to see what your competition is doing that you're not doing.
And then use AI to help you with your ideation for content
and creating the content.
Again, you can't publish it in that form.
You're going to have to modify it heavily
to be where it needs to be and be amazing.
But the biggest thing that we see a lot of small businesses
lack is they just don't create the content
that's needed to really compete with the larger companies.
- Got it, got it.
And you had said something that kind of,
if you think that I probably should be asking this question,
like, is there a danger and how can we protect ourselves?
A danger of plagiarism, danger of, you know,
having information that chat GPT fits out,
that somebody else's,
we had no idea and then we post it
and that sounds like a real thing.
And how do we protect ourselves from that?
- You can run it through tools like Copyscape.
It'll tell you if it's plagiarized or not.
There's a lot of plagiarism tools
out there that you can just use.
- Okay, so would you recommend taking
every thing that you get from it chat, GPT,
take it through, what was the name of the website again?
- Copyscape. - Copyscape.
So go to copyscape.com,
run it through there before you post it on your site
and then you can protect yourself
against potential plagiarism or copyrights, et cetera.
- Yep.
- Okay, awesome.
So I start with research.
What would be the maybe the next couple steps
that we might take as far as implementing it
as a small business?
- So the issue isn't implementing it.
Once you got the research and you create the content
you're pushing out there,
the issue isn't AI and how it can really
help you streamline it.
The big mistake that companies and marketers are making
is they're not spending enough time promoting it.
And that's not a AI thing.
That's more of a time thing and you just got to do it.
So for example,
who's tweeting out content that's similar to yours on
you know, Twitter, hit 'em up, build a relationship,
ask 'em to tweet out your content
and tweet out theirs in exchange.
Look to see who's engaging with your competition
on social media.
Go follow them on their profiles, comment on their profiles,
engage with them, build relationships.
So then that way your profiles start doing better.
Start going live on social media.
Instagram is lacking live content.
They've actually seen a decline.
The last stat that I saw maybe has changed this year,
but the last that I saw in 2022,
they were starting to see a decline in live content.
So consider creating live content and making sure
that it's really valuable and you can get ideas
from any of these AI tools on some things
that you should talk about.
The other thing you want to do is look to see
who's linking to your competition.
Any of the link tools out there,
like Ubersuggests or Ahrefs or Semrush,
you can do a lot of it for free.
And Uber says, we'll show you who's linking
to your competition,
build relationships with those people.
Ask 'em to link to your content.
All this stuff is a lot of manual work.
Is it what you ideally want to do?
No, but someone needs to do it
and this is what right now AI can't do.
And that's where you should be spending the majority
of your time in marketing if you really want to see results.
Spend 20% of the time creating the content,
80% promoting it.
And you may be like, that's not enough time creating content
AI can help you create more content,
but you don't need to create a lot of content.
Just make sure the content you do
create is amazing and you spend the majority
of the time promoting it.
- So good, so good.
Okay, great.
That's some really solid tools there
that we can use right away.
I have seen tools out there that help you hire on SEO.
For example I've seen a tool out there
that will take a blog post and rewrite it
and so it ranks higher.
Are those tools valuable?
Are they where they need to be?
Is there anything we need - No.
- to know about those?
- One of the biggest ways to get higher rankings
on Google is not to rewrite content, is to update it.
If you look at any search that you performed,
there's a good chance of Wikipedia ranks on page one.
Why?
There's already a lot of results.
Most of 'em are old, but Wikipedia keeps up to date.
So if you take your hit pieces,
the ones that really matter to your business,
continually update them,
not update 'em with a sentence or a photo,
but update 'em to continually provide value,
whatever that may be.
Maybe a few paragraphs, maybe one sentence,
'cause there doesn't need to be anything really updated,
but if you keep it up to date
for however much it needs to be up to date,
you'll find that your rankings and your traffic
are going to continually be better.
- And let's say you're using a repurposing strategy, right?
And you're taking your old videos
and it's like they're totally relevant now,
how can you make them up to date
and keep that process going forward?
- Videos, you can't,
you would just go and create new videos.
- Got it, but blog posts, you can, and
what you just said is just update the content,
update the date. - Yes.
For audio and video you were just create
new versions once it's out of date.
- Got it, got it.
Okay well we're just about out of time.
I'd like to have you talk a little bit about,
you have four multimillion dollar companies.
Can you tell us a little bit about those companies
so we know how we can engage with them
and how we can use them and how they're valuable
for small business owners like ourselves?
- Sure, my main business is NP Digital.
It's ad agency, we help companies of all sizes grow.
We're a global, I think we're in nine or 10 regions now.
I forgot how many by the end year we should be in 20.
And we also have software tools like AnswerThePublic
and Ubersuggests, and some of 'em are integrating ai
to make your guys' lives easier when it comes to marketing.
- Awesome, awesome.
Well, Neil, any last words from our audience here today
around AI before you go?
- Don't we word about it, embrace it,
and don't assume it's going to be perfect.
Make sure you take the time to modify it
or else you're not going to get the results you want.
- All right,
so all out nuclear war's not going to happen
from from the Terminator yet.
We've got time and - That's right.
- Like I said, we're in the first,
any idea when we're going to get to the,
like the ninth inning of this thing?
It could be five, 10 years from now or longer or...
- When Elon Musk creates human looking robots
that have AI integrated is probably the ninth inning.
- [Bob] Yep and that's coming.
- That's coming.
- All right, well thank you so much.
Appreciate your time today.
Thanks for taking your time to be with us
small business owners
and helping us understand the landscape of AI today.
- Sounds good, take care.