Episode 444 CopyWriting With Todd Jones AI in Copywriting

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Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Todd Jones about using AI in Copywriting.

ShowHiglights:

• Why use AI in copywriting?
• Which pain points does AI solve?
• Will AI cost jobs in the long run?

Show Notes

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here. I’m here with my good friend Todd Jones with his segment copyrighting with Todd Jones as he puts funny emojis up during the introduction. How are you today, Todd?

You mean I can do this? Oh, wow. Whoa. Hello. Hello. Happy Wednesday. Yeah. Oh yeah, they’ve added they have upped their emoji game in zoom, so yeah.

What time is this record?

So but yeah, anyways I’m doing OK. I’m start. You know, I’m not. I promise I’m not drunk. But, you know, after a few of these calls, you know, you start to get a. Little bit I don’t know. Ohh.

565.

Relax, maybe. But anyway, I’m doing OK. I’m. I’m hanging in there.

So what I thought we talked about that I know we talked about the two dreaded words of marketing AI, so we letters. So we need to kind of revisit it and what I thought we’d do today is not get into how to use AI, but more how you use AI as a tool because I. Personally, believe AI’s. This thing I believe it’s what’s driving computing more than anything else in the last 10 years. What I also think it’s tool, so where would you like to start, Mr. Jones?

Now let’s just be clear you’re talking about using AI as a tool for copywriting.

I am that is correct.

1. Yeah. So yeah, you got you gotta address it somehow, right? You’re a copywriter. And and usually there’s. One of two reactions from copywriter friends is like, yeah, I’m using it, you know, blah, blah, blah. And the other side is I hate it. It’s terrible. Don’t need to do it. And then usually a hybrid. Somewhere in the middle.

But most of.

The best copywriters, I think, have realized that as a tool that can be used. But I think, as with anything, it comes down to how you use the. Tool.

Yes.

Right. And so I I think the last thing you want to do is just say, hey, write a home page. About blah blah blah blah blah. Ah, I I when I work with AI, especially on like copy or something like that, it’s almost a running conversation I have with the chat. Why? Because I’m trying to get it to understand what I want it to do and sometimes it doesn’t come across the first time. I don’t think you should ever have. This is me personally, unless you have a well refined. Prompt and I think prompt is a bad name for it, but yeah, let’s let’s use an example. OK, I’m gonna. I’m gonna. I’m gonna go. To the world of electricity, when you come in this room, first thing I do is. Turn a light. How do I do that? There’s a switch over there. You flip the switch and the lights come on. Most of the time. Hopefully they did today. So we have light. I think most people see technology. Has slipped in a switch and you know as well as I do because we’re concierge in the digital space, right? That sometimes tech is can be pretty simple, right? But most of the time it’s not. Sometimes you have to try multiple times. You have to work at something. Somebody will go to the trouble of building something that has a lot of code, and then they’ll flip the switch, so to speak, to test it. And something won’t work. What do they do then? The word we use is debugging. They’ll start. Garden. They’ll go debug the code, right? Or if if you got connections, you’ll maybe look at the connections you know. So using AI for something like that is very similar. I I will hear people say, well, what you should do is go. You know, give them a scenario, OK? I’m writing an e-mail. And this is my my my customer base and this is what I wanna write about and I wanna write in the tone or I want to like write like been settled. Not gonna work very well. I actually tried that one time. It was like it was exaggerated. Been settled like Ben would never. Say that you’re saying something he might say, and like taking it and turning into a cartoon. Like, just completely blowing up. So I don’t think you should write like somebody personally, because I don’t think when you write content, you should be mimicking someone else. You should be yourself. That’s. Me personally. So when it comes to let’s just use an article. For example, say you gotta write an article, it’s gonna be. The 1000 to 1200 words long what are usually? Do you have an article? You usually have an introduction, right? You might have two or three or four to five points. So you have the points and then you have a conclusion. So there’s five things you have to deal with. Out there, at least five things you have to deal with. Each one of them, you almost. Got the prompt. To do what you wanted to do. I was in a live while ago. And they were talking about using after brainstorming, and they’re like, oh, I don’t use that app for brainstorming because, you know, especially I like what I think better. And when you talked about brainstorming, sometimes I will use the eye but not use. Not always do I use the choices AI gives me. But what a I will do. Because this is how the human brain works will spark in me something that was already there. That wasn’t at the front of my head. It’s just like when you go mow the lawn and you think of something just. Brilliant. Or you take a shower or you do some mundane task. Yeah. Go for a walk. And the most brilliant idea comes your head. It just kind of works its way up. So AI, who starts spinning out all these different generative AI, I should say, start spitting out all these different ideas at you. You may not choose the.

Also.

The ideal, but it may pull something out from the back of your head that was there already, but you weren’t thinking about. And so that’s I like that in a brainstorm. Right. But when you do a copy on a page, you know I have said this before and I’ll say it again, copywriting website copy content and writing an article, whatever it’s like assembling blocks. It’s like it’s like a Lego structure. You’re assembling blocks. Each block has its own part to play, and so you can’t. I don’t think, because essentially. Writing an article. Is essentially. I tried to do like a I tell you what I did do one time. You know I have these frameworks for web copy pages because I have the website copy framework and I said OK, here is my framework alright and I want to do a page. Using this framework and this is the the the the ideal client, you know the the target audience. Here’s the value proposition, blah blah blah. It wasn’t too robust, but it was enough to to give it something. Well, it started writing. But it did not completely fall outline and I realized then that that’s too much to ask for. The generative AI. Now I’m always using free so the the pros may be a lot better, I don’t know, but it’s too much to ask the generative AI to do it one time. My thought is if you’re going to do this. Take it bit by bit. Each one is a prompt. OK, these are the things I need. A unique value proposition. But OK, here’s unique value proposition. Log it. Have an open document. Put it over there. OK. This is my target audience to give some information about target audience and with. They add and maybe come up with some some pain points and stuff like that. Then log that, put it over to. The side if. You keep this in the same. That it remembers it right pesky ChatGPT memory updates. OK, next section. OK. In light of this, I need a headline for this page. OK, the headline don’t like the headline. Ask it, redo it or give you some.

It does.

Options. At that point, Rob, you’ve only done the headlines and that took about 3 or 4 props. You may like what they what it comes up with. You may not, but it may give you an idea that you can use and so it’s it’s always take it bit by bit. So I generally like my own outlines, but once in a while I’ll ask it for help for an outline with the theme and the idea. And sometimes I’ll use the outline or parts of the outline and do my own. That’s if I’m stuck. Usually have my own idea. I don’t always like what it says or how it says it. Hey, actions to use certain words over and over like. Delves. We’re gonna delve into it. What I do understand, I don’t have the pro version of ChatGPT, but I understand. You can tell it, you can even put it in the memory bank not to use certain AI words that AI uses a lot. That helps. That can help if you have pro ChatGPT, you can do a whole lot of stuff. Now you can use it for other marketing tasks. We’re only talking about copywriting.

No.

Yeah, that’s correct.

So you know, obviously Ross Simmons has got a a whole prop. On, you know, product that you bought on gum Rd. that’s if you’re struggling, that would be a great place to start. Any Crestina has done some really good stuff with marketing tasks using the ChatGPT. But the reality is when you do copywriting, you’re not just spitting words out. There’s a whole lot of other stuff involved in copywriting, which takes into account the whole market. And funnel so ChatGPT or Gemini or perplexity or one. I like to play with sometimesisu.com which has like 5 chat engines.

Or or copilot. It’s almost like you.

Copilot. Yeah. God, I tell you what I did do the other day, and this is not really copywriting, per se, but it kind of is. I wanted to make an image of me dressed like The Lone Ranger and not the army hammer one from the movie a few years ago, more like Clayton Moore.

Choose one you and I will.

Back in the 60s, OK, so I went to perplexity because her Black Sea does a good job of sourcing information like they tell. You where it. Comes from whatever. And I said this is what I want. I’m drawing from the Clayton Moore Lone Ranger and I need to create a description to give to an AI, which in this case is art. Flow to create this image and with the help of perplexity we kind of narrowed it down the things that I needed and I went over there and I put it in our flow. What you do is you, I have my image already in there. So you. Make a dynamic picture of Todd Jones and blah blah blah blah and the first one wasn’t got great. I read I kind of redid it and it turned out OK. I I was actually pretty impressed. It was kind of a modern day Lone Ranger with the face of pod. So one of the thing that I struggle with sometimes is to do images because we have images, we have a lot of software AI software that will do images. Is describing the image well enough for the image AI image software to produce the image I want? And so sometimes I will use a generative AI to help me comma. I did that with the algal guts. Do you remember the alcotts? I have the the villain.

I guess.

Have as a group as a group of, you know lizard looking characters called the out of gods and I can’t remember which software I used for that. That one, but and by the way, Microsoft has a really good generated image generating software. I think that’s where you use it from. I think it’s called Microsoft Design or something like that.

Hmm. Yeah, video.

So you know there’s various parts and then of course, you’re struggling to come up with the alt text, you know. Although that really shouldn’t be too hard, but and I don’t know if it can help you unless you have a paid version where you can upload it and let it describe the scene, but there’s a lot of ways you can use it to assist you. I do think that we should probably be better about providing all text for images. Because of accessibility so.

Let’s stop that. Let’s stop there. For sectors, it’s worth sharing. I was reading Lincoln this week, and our our mutual friend, Mr. Andrew Palmer, who is a partner in Adora. And Adrian’s got a new product or a new component to their product that generates all text for images and Andrew was pushing out. I actually hope that goes over really well because. I don’t know how many websites I look at and people say to me. As somebody who audits websites, I have a problem getting traffic and then they’ve got an e-commerce site with 500 images taught and you know how many of those images have all.

No.

Text Nikki guess.

10 percent, 5%. You know none. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Two percent, 1%. And then they look at and then they wonder why it takes forever to fix it, cause to fix 500 images when you use AR, you’re not still takes, it’s still an active job.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s. Yeah, it’s, it’s, yeah. And well, if your if 50% of those images are your products, you definitely want to use all image. Just alt tags for that to describe the product. So yeah, absolutely.

You should be using the null tag on every image.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And Ryan had shared our friend Ryan had shared a video from a colleague of his. A video on LinkedIn and and he was saying he’s riding it, you know, these days we use WordPress, it’ll have a red line saying do you want need to Add all image to your you know all text to your image you know is a field now and and that’s a brilliant thing that that’s been added into the WordPress work. Flow as we try to become try to create more accessibility you know, but that is a.

Accessing that. Well, let’s be fair accessible these good for SEO two. So they go kind of hand in hand. Like, let’s be honest here.

User experience and and and yeah, all that, yeah. Good user experience is good for Google and. Bing, you know, so yeah. That’s what they’re moving towards, for sure. But anyway, there are so many aspects to copywriting. I’ll tell you another way. You can use AI for copywriting that maybe people don’t think about as much. Please go back to my article about 5 things I learned about storytelling. For wrestling I I was explaining to a lady. I was on her show today. I said some of those. It took a while to write that it was like 27. Her words. I didn’t mean for it to be so long, but that’s what. I’m, I said. I took my phone and actually narrated some of those points. So what did I do? I uploaded the audio. Into Microsoft Word or whatever it’s called that office suite. Pull the transcript.

Office Microsoft 365 sits now.

Yep. Yeah. Pull the transcript. Then I dropped it in chat, GPD or whatever, and got it to help me clean it up without losing any to me. You know, formatted a little better. Make sure there’s no, you know, mistakes in there, whatever, and then drops it into the article. It is beautiful for, you know, because sometimes, you know, we have in our brain, but we can’t type fast enough to pull it out. Right. So do an audio version of yourself speaking and ChatGPT or whatever can help clean that up. And really expedite that process, you still need to get the transcript now. A lot of AI will do that. I’ll tell you another thing I did. I had a phone call with somebody a few weeks ago and I had forgotten that I had to say, I think that I had. I even couldn’t even tell you the name of it right now. But I connected it to my Google account. So we we were on Google meet well the darn thing. Took the whole meeting and did a summary and I could like ask him to do like he would tell you. OK, this is what Todd’s supposed to do. This is what this person I mean, it was like and there’s AI included in zoom now. So those are those are basically take those for you.

And may I commend you, yes.

And and so I think these days there’s so much you can do to repurpose content using AI. That’s another way I if somebody’s listening to this and took the. I’m I’m thinking this stuff on the fly, but literally you could take this and turn into an article. Another way. You can use AI is what I just said that I lost my head. Yeah. You know the repurposed content. And I do that a lot. Sometimes I have gotten ChatGPT to help me do a whole Twitter thread. Now, sometimes it misses and gets them wrong.

And sometimes it doesn’t.

You can use that to repurpose content in various ways, so you’ll start seeing it more with video and audio. Well, you already are, but I’m not crazy about the video like like I can upload my face and create a video. I did that once and it was just too creepy, but it didn’t look right, so I know there’s some better ones out there because I’ve seen Ross Simmons.

That’s good.

Experiment with it. I’m not, you know, crazy about that part yet, but certainly there are some things that it can speed up the process that you’re doing and all this is under copyrighting, right? It’s all content, content, marketing, whatever. So yeah, there’s multiple ways to use it to assist you. I am not a fan of just letting it loose to write like an article. Or a whole?

Nor am I. Nor am I.

Web page now if you have a really simple article. Or a simple. Web page that like you don’t have enough information, you know as as much as you would like. Go ahead and let it loose and then put it in a Google document and start working through it and change what you want to change that what you want to change. It’s a great starting point for something like that.

It it. It is no question.

But. It’s a great it’s, it’s. Like having a virtual assistant at your fingertips.

So true. Hey, Todd. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about using AI in tandem. I think what people need to realize just that kind of summarizes it’s a bit of a tool, right. And and it and all these people getting antsy about job loss and everything else. My argument to them is it’s a tool and the reality of it is I don’t think the tool. It’s gonna get cost jobs. What it’s gonna do is redirect people into doing different things and learning how to use that tool. And you know, other people thought AI was a fad. I don’t think AI’s going away. They’re now, they’re now building computers optimized with new processing chips to deal with AI and the power AI.

No, it’s not fat. It’s not. Fat at all.

And the one thing I always say to people is how much memory should they get in the computer. And I’m now at the point of view that maybe you need to put like 32 gigs of RAM or 64 gigs in a Windows PC because of AI. I mean that’s that’s a big factor. It’s a bit of a resource hub. So but it’s a tool. I think your your best bet is to to choose one flavor. I’m I’m in with Bard right now. People are using ChatGPT like choose one and get used to the tool and optimize it and make it work for. Right.

Yeah, I just go in and play with it. You’re like, OK, I’m gonna try to do this and see what happens. And you know, there’s some people out there who have put out some resources already that that can be helpful for a starting point. You say I can. I’m gonna see if I can do this. I mean, people have taken, like, CSV files and have ChatGPT. Like, you know, rearrange it based on certain parameters. I mean, it’s astonishing some stuff you can do. Yeah, so.

Sometimes. So thanks Todd. Somebody wants to find out about your copywriting business. Where’s the best one?

Happyflight.com.

Go see Todd. Look at his website copy framework. It’s great product. We’ll get you started and have a good day, my friend. Be well.