TL;DR

In this episode, you’ll discover 5 ways that AI tools can help you streamline your solopreneur business

Visit https://macpreneur.com/ai to grab your own copy of the Top 10 AI tools Cheat Sheet that will help you boost your solo business in this fast pacing world.

Summary:

In this episode, I discuss five ways that AI tools can revolutionize productivity. These include brainstorming content topics, assisting with copywriting tasks, generating custom images, transcribing audio and video, and repurposing content. I emphasize the importance of providing clear and accurate information to AI tools in order to achieve meaningful results.

For brainstorming content topics, I suggest using AI chatbots to generate questions and perspectives from an ideal customer avatar. In terms of copywriting tasks, AI chatbots can be prompted to create copy following specific frameworks or to critique and suggest improvements to existing copy.

AI tools can also generate custom images based on descriptions provided by the user. For transcribing audio and video, AI tools like Descript make the process faster and easier by transcribing and allowing for easy editing.

Lastly, AI tools can assist in repurposing content by generating multiple pieces of content in different formats, such as creating blog posts from podcast transcripts or extracting short clips from videos based on virality scores. I emphasize the need for human oversight in reviewing and aligning AI-generated content with the brand.

Takeaways:

1. AI tools can help generate content ideas by using AI chatbots to ask questions and perspectives from an ideal customer avatar.
2. AI chatbots can assist with copywriting tasks by creating copy following specific frameworks or critiquing and suggesting improvements to existing copy.
3. AI tools can generate custom images based on descriptions provided by the user, saving time and effort in finding the right image.
4. Transcribing audio and video is made easier and faster with AI tools like Descript, allowing for easy editing and searching.
5. AI tools can help repurpose content by generating multiple pieces of content in different formats, such as blog posts from podcast transcripts or short clips from videos based on virality scores.
6. Human oversight is necessary to review and align AI-generated content with the brand.
7. Clear and accurate information must be provided to AI tools in order to achieve meaningful results.
8. AI tools can significantly boost productivity by automating and streamlining various tasks.

Full transcript

Teaser

Hello, hello!

Ever wondered how the power of artificial intelligence can supercharge your solopreneur business?

Today, we’re diving deep into 5 ways that AI can make you more efficient and boost your productivity.

I’ll unpack all of this after the intro.

Welcome

If this is the first episode you’re listening to, welcome to the Macpreneur tribe.

If you’re a longtime Macpreneur listener, thank you for tuning back in.

As a fellow solopreneur, I appreciate that you dedicate approximately 15 minutes each week to spend with me.

In the last episode, I kicked off Season 3, which is entirely dedicated to exploring the world of Artificial Intelligence.

For this occasion, I’ve compiled a list of 10 AI tools that every Macpreneur needs to know about to be more efficient and gain a competitive edge.

If you have not done it yet, you can grab your own copy by visiting macpreneur.com/ai.

Each tool comes with a brief overview and a direct link so that you can seamlessly integrate them into your workflow.

So visit macpreneur.com/ai and you’ll instantly discover cutting edge tools that few other solopreneurs even know existed.

Intro

If you’ve never used AI tools before, you might be wondering about their potential uses.

If you’ve already started using them, it’s highly likely you’ve only scratched the surface of what this revolutionary technology can do to boost your daily tasks.

The good news is that you’re in the right place, my Macpreneur friend. In this episode, I will reveal five ways that AI can revolutionize your productivity.

Here they are:

1. Brainstorming content topics.
2. Assisting with copywriting tasks.
3. Generating custom images.
4. Transcribing audio and video.
5. Repurposing long-form content.

Important reminder

Before we delve into these use cases, it’s crucial to understand that AI tools are not intelligent and lack reasoning capabilities.

To summarize episode 68 in a single sentence, I would state that AI tools are simply sophisticated computer programs that predict an output based on the input we provide.

Consequently, it’s our responsibility as humans to supply them with the correct information if we desire meaningful results from these AI tools.

For example, if we aim to utilize AI tools for marketing-related tasks, we need to be unequivocally clear about our ideal customer avatar and their major pain points.

We also need to clearly express who we are, what we stand for, and how we significantly improve the lives of our clients.

With this understanding, let’s explore how AI tools can assist us in brainstorming content topics.

Brainstorming content topics

Building a strong personal brand requires the regular publication of original content.

However, creating a reservoir of topics is not always straightforward, particularly in the beginning when our audience is relatively small and we lack substantial feedback.

One method to swiftly generate content ideas is to ask an AI chatbot like Google Bard or ChatGPT for a list of 50 potential questions that our ideal customer avatar might have. These could pertain to general or specific situations.

This approach is akin to what the website AnswerThePublic provides, except that it allows for a much richer context.

Additionally, for each question, we can request the chatbot to propose 3 to 5 different perspectives from which we could form an answer.

An alternative way to brainstorm content ideas is to ask AI chatbots for a list of 5 to 10 problems that our ideal customer avatar may not even realize exist in a specific situation.

For instance, I performed this exercise while considering a migration from a 27 inch Intel-based iMac to a 24 inch Apple Silicon iMac. ChatGPT suggested some topics that I had completely overlooked, mainly because I am a power user and sometimes forget that what seems obvious to me may not be the same for my ideal client.

As I explained in episode 68, I also present the same prompt to multiple AI chatbots. This way, I can not only compare the responses of each tool, which serves as a form of AI research for me, but also have a larger pool of options to choose from.

Now let’s delve into how AI can assist us with copywriting tasks.

Copywriting tasks

Whether it’s for a landing page or an email promoting a new product or service, having good copy is critical to convincing our clients and our leads to take action.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I struggle with writing good copy.

I often attribute this to my engineering background. Even though I’m improving, it’s still not a particularly enjoyable experience for me.

This is yet another example of the usefulness of these large language models.

When you are able to prompt them correctly, they can produce astonishing results, much faster and at a fraction of the cost of a professional.

The most effective prompt that I have found starts like this:

You now act as a copywriting expert specializing in crafting highly converting fill in the blank. It could be a highly converting landing page, Facebook ad, or marketing email.

You choose the area in which you want help.

After that sentence, you need to describe the product or the service that you’re trying to promote.

You provide its name, the problem it’s designed to solve, the benefits, and so on.

The last part of the prompt depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

I’ve tried using this technique to create copy, asking the AI chatbot to follow a specific framework.

For instance, there’s a marketing framework called AIDA: A for attention, I for interest, D for desire, and A for action.

The last sentence of the prompt might be something like, “Go ahead and create copy for the landing page following the AIDA framework.”

The second thing I’m doing is asking the large language model to critique and suggest improvements to existing copy.

I did this with the landing page where you can find the 10 AI tools cheat sheet. In that case, the last part of the prompt described the current elements of the landing page.

I informed the LLM of the heading text, the subheading text, and the text for the first call to action button, among other things.

After providing that prompt, the AI chatbot gave me an analysis of each item, indicating if it was good or not good enough, and then suggested improvements. In some cases, the AI chatbot advised me to add some benefits to my copy.

Now, let’s move on to the next use case: generating custom images.

Generating custom images

Whether it’s to illustrate a blog post or a presentation, having relevant images can significantly elevate your content. However, finding the right image that perfectly aligns with your vision can be time-consuming. I’ve personally spent countless hours on sites like Pexels and Pixabay in search of the ideal image. This is where generative image AI tools come into play.

You simply describe what you want, and within a few seconds, you can get multiple alternative images. For instance, if you watched the video version of episode 68, you would have noticed the intermittent use of images. There was a neural network diagram, a pensive humanoid robot, a server room, and a dog and cat sitting in a park. All these images were generated by AI.

In some instances, I used Bing Image Creator, which is completely free and only requires a Microsoft account. For others, I experimented with the new DALL-E integration within ChatGPT 4. In both scenarios, four square images are generated at once, but there’s a significant difference.

With Bing Image Creator, you are solely responsible for the prompt. Therefore, the quality of the image depends on the quality of your prompt. If you don’t know how to prompt the tool effectively, you might not get the desired result.

On the other hand, with ChatGPT4, you only need to describe what you want, and it will create the best image prompt possible, specifically tailored for DALL-E. DALL-E is another image generation AI tool offered by OpenAI. What’s even better with ChatGPT 4 is that you can see the prompt it created, enabling you to learn how to create better image generation prompts over time.

Another example of image generation using AI is found within Canva. It’s a web service that also has a local Mac application, capable of helping you create flyers, infographics, YouTube thumbnails, Facebook covers, and so much more. The AI feature within Canva is called Magic Media. You describe what you want, select the style, and in this case, even choose the aspect ratio, and then Canva handles the rest.

The free plan offers a lifetime limit of 50 images, while the paid plan allows the creation of up to 500 images every month. Lastly, let’s discuss use case number four: transcription.

Transcribing audio and video

If you have a podcast or create videos, whether short or long form, you will most likely want them transcribed for show notes, captions, or both.

As explained in episode 68, transcribing podcasts and videos used to be costly and time-consuming, especially when done by a human.

However, this is no longer the case thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

The preferred tool for podcasters and YouTubers is Descript.

It’s a crucial part of my podcast production process.

Once an episode is transcribed, editing it becomes as easy as child’s play.

Instead of spending hours scrolling through a waveform trying to recognize hums, with Descript, you edit a podcast like a Word document.

You can even search for words and delete text to remove portions of the video.

In the past, I would clap my hands to signal a retake, which would create a spike in the waveform. Now, I simply say “redo” while recording, then search for the word “redo” in the transcript. This allows me to identify and delete the sentences that were recorded just prior.

Now, let’s move on to our final use case: repurposing content.

Repurposing content

Creating weekly content is beneficial, but it’s not sufficient.

Ideally, we should also generate daily short-form content, whether it’s text, images, or video.

However, how can we accomplish this on a budget, especially given our already limited time?

And as you may have guessed, we can now utilize AI.

Whether you begin with a video or text, there are AI tools available that can assist you in quickly generating multiple pieces of content in other formats.

It’s crucial to remember that any output generated still requires human oversight. At the very least, it needs to be reviewed to ensure it’s acceptable and aligns with our brand.

Let’s consider a few examples.

Take, for instance, the podcast transcript generated by Descript.

I export it as a markdown file, which quickly becomes the blog post published on my website.

Utilizing ChatGPT, I can create a summary and key takeaways which will then form part of the show notes.

Using the video version of the podcast, I employ another AI tool to analyze the video and extract short clips based on a virality score.

This score ranges between 0 and 100, with the tool providing a number and explaining why this particular clip has viral potential.

Using this tool alone saves me about an hour in my podcast production process, which is highly beneficial.

Once I’ve downloaded all the clips, I simply drag and drop them onto another AI tool that generates the subtitles and transcript in batch mode. This means I just drag and drop, and it will process all the videos independently, creating the text file and subtitle files in the same folder as the videos.

After this process is complete, for each transcript, I ask ChatGPT to generate some social media text complete with emojis and everything.

So if you’re curious about which AI tool I’m using at this stage of the process, just head on to macpreneur.com/AI and download the cheat sheet. You will find them there.

Recap

To recap, AI tools can assist us solopreneurs in streamlining our businesses, thus saving both time and money.

I have discussed five practical use cases: brainstorming content topics, managing copywriting tasks, generating custom images, transcribing audio and video, and repurposing content.

There are many more applications of AI. For instance, you could use them to spell-check text.

You could also rectify missing punctuation, highlight important words by automatically bolding them, and rewrite text to follow a specific tone.

Quickly generating voiceovers using text-to-speech capabilities, either by cloning your own voice or using a synthetic one, is also possible.

There are AI tools that enable you to create videos with synthetic avatars.

The next step, in the not-so-distant future, will be the democratization of autonomous AI agents.

These AI agents are capable of crawling the web on our behalf for research purposes. For instance, they can find the best flight given specific dates and our preferred times of landing and takeoff.

Afterward, these tools will report back, and we will be able to instruct these AI agents to book the flights of our choosing on our behalf.

Now, imagine being able to do that with restaurants or to research your competition.

I’m barely scratching the surface of how semi-autonomous AI agents will assist us solopreneurs in saving valuable time and money.

We are still in the early stages of this technology, and I promise to dedicate a specific episode to it when I have practical experience with this new technology.

If you’ve never used any AI tool before, I hope this episode has inspired you to start experimenting with them.

Choose one use case and try it in your own business.

If you’ve already begun, I’m eager to hear about the specific use cases that have helped you so far.

You can DM me on Instagram, my handle is @macpreneurfm.

Next

In the next episode, I’ll dive deeper on how we can leverage ChatGPT and doing it in a very efficient manner, directly from our Mac.

So, that’s it for today, if you haven’t done it yet, visit macpreneur.com/ai to grab your own copy of the Top 10 AI Tools Cheat Sheet.

This PDF will give you the edge that you need to boost your solo business in this fast pacing world.

Once again, it’s macpreneur.com/ai.

And until next time, I’m Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.