160. Unlocking Business Growth with AI: No Coding Required!

0:00AI has quietly become one of the most powerful tools for business owners. But it's not just about automation. It's about making your business more efficient and more profitable. Today's guests have used AI to help their clients achieve incredible results, slashing work days down from hours to minutes to driving millions of dollars in revenue with AI-generated copy and marketing. This is Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Upbook Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Everyone, we have three guests on today's episode in Jason Parker, David Garfinkel and Scott Zetlin, three innovators who have transformed how businesses use AI.

0:36They've helped their clients boost sales, optimize workflows, and create high-performing marketing campaigns, all with the help of AI agents. And the best part is you don't have to be a programmer or tech genius to do this. Jason, David, Scott, thank you all so, so much for being here. I'm excited to have a lot of fun with you guys today. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. To give everyone the context, let's kind of wind back the clock on all your stories. And Scott, we'll start with you, then we'll go to David and we'll go to Jason, just so listeners can also know whose voices are huge. So Scott and everyone, can you guys give us a little bit of background on how you've used AI to grow your business and that for clients?

1:08Kind of give us our background into AI. Absolutely. I'll just give you just a quick background. We do and own a software optimization software that helps people do thousands of tests at a single time to optimize their paid traffic campaigns, et cetera. So we're helping businesses that sometimes are either just getting started out or are extremely already successful, optimized. Really, if I want to keep it simple, we are able to take our workflow, our research workflow that we used to take somebody full-time close to two weeks, we can get it down to three hours for any client. Now, on the flip side, just as a little teaser that we can talk about, we've also been able to take those inputs that we're going to be using for testing.

1:52So it all ties back to copy variations that we're going a test and have seen increases per clients on a single test by as much as 45 to as much as over 300 % increases in actual conversions on a single test. I love it. David, you got to give a little bit of about how you got into AI, and then Jason will go to you as well. But yeah, there's a lot there, and we're definitely going to hit on that. So everyone stay tuned in for that. Let me say something very unpopular. I used to hate AI. I used to think it was terrible. and that was because people were sending me stuff that they did with AI that was really half-assed and I'm you know a copywriter and a copywriting coach and I write books about copywriting and I have a podcast about copywriting and I was looking at this stuff and I said oh this is awful I mentored Jason about 12 years ago and we just lost touch and then crossed paths and I saw what he was doing, I was totally blown away because it was qualitatively different.

2:52It wasn't like incrementally different. It was quantum different. So to answer your question, I mean, that's my background, but to answer your question, how I'm using it. So I do this podcast every week. I know you're a go with the flow guy. I'm more scripted. When I interview someone, I go with the flow. When I do my own, I like a script and it has taken me up to two days to write a half hour script. Last night, I had an idea. I put together 80 % of it in about 20 minutes and I asked it to write in my voice. And it's in my voice. I've also used it. Now, I know a lot of people don't do that, but probably a lot of people post to social media.

3:30I do very specific kind of posts, which are both informative and sell my book, the persuasion story code, all in about 300 words. And Jason helped me put together a bot that got the writing time on that from two to three hours down to about 15 minutes. That's crazy. And then, yeah, Jason, can you kind of give your background there as well? Yeah. So I don't know if there are any marketing or advertising agencies listening, but I came to AI out of absolute necessity because my agency was growing. We were drowning in work. I got to the point where I said I could either hire more copywriters and kind of take a hit because margins are already kind of slim.

4:09I don't know if you know anything about that business, but it really takes a hit. It's almost not even worth hiring somebody else. So I got into it out of absolute necessity and I just ended up going down this rabbit hole because it kept getting better and better. And we're at the point now where we can literally crank out email campaigns in minutes with certain pre-programmed agents and bots and whatnot, at least the first version of that. But it's just, I've gotten more and more dependent upon it. And we've been able to create these agents or bots that write exactly the way I would have written something.

4:42Literally, exactly. Because we program it down to the parts of speech. It knows what kind of verbs I use even, what kind of phrases I use. And so when I create something out with it, it's an extension of myself. This bot becomes an extension of me. That's what makes it different than other AI. And I think all three of us, we all kind of got involved in my mastermind to begin with, but we all kind of branched out together because we realized we were the three obsessed ones and everything was changing. And, you know, processes that took weeks ended up taking days now or, you know, hours down to minutes.

5:14And we've written campaigns like that have done, you know,$420 ,000 in a single day from a webinar in that same campaign ended up making over 900 grand written with AI, all emails, as well as the first version of the webinar script. So like imagine you have 10 different clients, just it's basically like 10 different full time jobs, you know, if you're an agency. So you end up having to use this stuff or hire more people. And there's just no way I could have like handled 10 different clients without it. All right. Let's get very practical here with people that are listening to the show that want to start their companies or at the early stages of their companies.

5:51Let's use the building the campaign example. Like how can AIs be used by these businesses to reduce those workloads and increase efficiency? I can jump in here just because 10 minutes before coming on this show, I wrote 10 really good long form Facebook ads for a client. Now, we don't typically just so it's known right for a client. We're helping them out with the situation. So this is going to their media by a team. So picture this. They have a full media by a team. They have full staff. but their ads in this particular case weren't performing as well as they should be. Literally 10, 15 minutes, 10 variations.

6:31If anybody, for your listeners, the list on the first line or two of those ads where they have to click more is a huge impact on the results they'll get. It just sends a signal to Facebook. 30 variations that I'm turning over of those first ads so they can test. So to your specific question, and I'm sure Jason and David have a lot of other examples, If you have somebody that's new on your podcast or trying to get something going, one of the biggest things is, do we have not only ad copy that converts, but what do they see, even though I talked to you about testing, when they get to the actual page in front of them?

7:05Because you're not going to get anywhere, no matter what level you're at, whether you're expert level and big companies spending a lot of money or you're brand new. And one of the biggest constraints that I see among new businesses is, you know, we're in a direct response medium, the internet, regardless of core. And if you can't write copy that converts, you're not going to get anywhere. So from my standpoint, it's going to help them get ads that are going to have a much, much better chance of converting that they'll be able to test. It's going to constrict that time. And Jason and David both mentioned something.

7:40They talked about sounding like you. The nice part is it can sound like you, but be structured in a way that's already been proven to convert. So that's just my takeaway from something that literally 10, 15 minutes before I was on this podcast. So how do you make it sound like you? Talk to us about the specific model you're using as this ChatGPT. How do you make it sound like you? And how do you train it to build out this copy? To answer this question as well, do you want to start off your business writing generic AI copy? No. I mean, that's what everybody's seeing and they're sick of it. They can spot it a mile away.

8:13You want to start off kind of up here where you're writing in your own voice already and you're starting to build that brand voice. That's the answer to that question. So how do you use AI to write in your brand voice? Now, the way to do that, and it's not by using any particular model because the models change to get better and there's Anthropic and there's OpenAI and all these models, Mixtro, stuff like that. I think right now, I would say Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best. But it's not really the model itself that makes the magic work, although it is the best model. Because not too long ago, I think one of the GPT models, like 4.0, was probably better.

8:46But the way you get it to write in your voice, now, it's hard to explain, and I think you're actually going to give away prompt chunks is what we call. on this call. And that has a lot to do with writing in your voice because prompt chunks allow the AI or teach the AI how to triangulate down to this very minuscule part of copy. Like, you know, your tone, your voice, your style is all down to the parts of speech and certain phrases you use. So that's what the chunks allow you to do. And that's the way you want to talk to it. Because the problem is that if you're using generic AI copy or someone else's AI solution, it's not programmed down to the parts of speech or the phrases or the types of things you would say, you know, like the types of verbs you would use or nouns you would use.

9:28And it's kind of funny because it goes back to like high school English or something like that. All the stuff you thought wouldn't be relevant now is all of a sudden important. So it's kind of funny how that works. It's all of a sudden valuable in this world of AI. Yeah. So I can give an example too. I mean, and everything I'm telling you, I learned from Jason, but you can blame me if I got it wrong. He's a really good teacher, but I'm sometimes an inattentive student. So, you know, when you're writing ads, you want them to be in your own voice. When you're writing a script for your own podcast, you really need it to be in your own voice.

10:01And so one of the things I've done is I have some scripts I wrote without AI, and I will include them in what's called a knowledge base. And I will instruct the AI. I want you to follow my voice, tone, rhythm, sentence lay, word choice in what you're generating. And I say, I am David Garfinkel. I wrote what I just attached in your knowledge base, and I want it to sound like me, right as me. But those five things, that's what I learned from Jason, because Jason got me really attuned to why AI was screwing up so bad almost 99 % of the time. and he systematically almost like with tweezers pulled out the things it was doing wrong and showed me and others because he knows himself you know how to remedy those things so there's a lot of different things you need to do i mean if you look at a professional ghost writer who might make six figures to write someone's book in their own voice there are a lot of different things that they look at.

11:09Well, if you can get an AI to do a large chunk of that, you're going to have some very authentic sounding copy. I'd just like to put an explanation point on this, just one sentence. So as somebody that sees thousands and thousands of variations and ads in real time from companies across the board, I can tell you most of the stuff that is being spit out by AI, whether it's content for your audience that's going to start it, whether it's ads, whether it's a landing page, is spotable by a mile away, by anybody that's ever read. And it's certainly spotable by, that's even a word, by your audience, which is more important.

11:47And it just doesn't convert. So everybody's trying to sell this magic solution that AI is going to solve your problems. And all, at least from my point of view, from what I'm seeing firsthand, it's producing a lot of junk that doesn't convert. And I just want to tie that in because you'd mentioned a lot of your audience is either looking to start at the beginning of starting and that can become very, very frustrating if they don't have what I believe David calls, you know, the magic eye. If you don't know enough to see that it's not working, you're putting out a lot of junk. Uplippers, if you guys are looking to join a community of like-minded entrepreneurs or just looking for that next business idea, go check out the Uplip Academy.

12:31We are taking a ton of actual advice that you can then implement for your businesses. I just attended a workshop where we learned about chat GPT prompts for SEO and social media. And I'm not even kidding you guys, we built out a lead magnet based off of this workshop for Space Star Visuals that we are now using because of this workshop. So there is a ton of valuable advice in here. So everyone, if you are looking for a community of like-minded people, go check out the Uplip Academy. We have a ton of great upcoming workshops and I wanna see you guys there. jump in, say hi, and I will see you guys all at the FWOB Academy.

13:00So let's dive into that a little bit more because I think listeners, at least for me, is like, well, how do I actually generate these prompts? How do I give it instructions to do so? So what's the process of giving AI the right instructions so it can produce quality content for businesses without being overly technical? And listeners, you can download the five prompts that make AI more conversational by clicking the link in the episode description below. But I want to start there. What's the process of giving AI the right instructions to actually create this copy it's an entire process we call novus triangulation i know that sounds great but the way it is is we give ai essentially an overall macro view structurally and its task but we break it down into micro and micro steps so we triangulate it literally so just the chunks for example are more about granular triangulations if that makes sense that's going to dig down to the word level sentence level phrasal level but the way you really get control over the ai and absolute control over it is through the macro combined with the micro instructions.

13:59So that's usually done with rules and examples. And you can see that the prompt chunks themselves are made up of rules and examples. So that's just an example. That'll give you an idea of how to really get control of it from attendance level, which is a lot of the battle. But to get it to write like a nine email sequence that's actually used in a strategic marketing way where, you know, So maybe it's a webinar campaign, for example, and there's introducing what's going on and then building anticipation for it and then saying it's tomorrow and then having a replay sequence and then having little bits of scarcity and urgency and whatnot.

14:33So that takes like macro type structure, you know, feeding it. So your question is asking us exactly like, what do we do all day? You know, like it's the entire triangulation method, but essentially it's just going from macro to micro. So starting out wider and then triangulating with all this data, giving it all these different points so that it knows exactly what you're talking about. If you don't do that, then you're just giving it more space to do what it wants to do. I guess what it wants to do is probably not the best way to say it. But the problem people have is they're giving very vague instructions.

15:04You can think about they're giving blurry instructions to it. But what we're giving is crystal clear clarity, very vivid instructions because we're taking it macro and breaking it down micro, micro, micro. group, if that makes sense. Can I add to that just a little bit that maybe from my point, that may be a little bit of clarity. And I love that. It's exactly what they do, but it's not as complicated as it sounds when you understand and go through the process. So it takes a little bit more work. What most people are doing and what most people are buying and being sold is, you know, prompt sound like Gary Halbert, right in a friendly tone.

15:39And that at least is right. Like when Jason talks and you try that, trust me, you're going to get like that junk that we talked about before. There's just no way of knowing. I'll just add one last thing here from my point of view. If somebody comes without any real copywriting experience, they wonder, well, how do I know where to start the macro? How do I get down to the micro? I'll just let you know in the mastermind, build out a lot of bots. So anybody that's coming in and they're built around all those, let's say, I don't want to use the word perfect, but like well-structured macros and then taught how you get down to those micros.

16:19So it sounds like you. So I just want to throw that out there that from my point of view, somebody could potentially from your audience, if it's appropriate, start and say, listen, I don't know copy. These guys know copy, or I don't want to be a programmer. I need to tell you like to create, I'll just make this be an illustration, not a direct one, to create the Facebook long form ad spot that I created today based upon now having this kind of structure and having it sound like me. We have an hour. But it's an hour now forever in this specific long form format that I know. So your listeners could do the same thing.

16:59I don't want it to sound. It is definitely a process that I haven't seen any place else that nobody else is doing. But it's not out of reach. You don't have to be a prompt engineer to be able to get down there and figure it out. I want to talk a little bit of practical advice for people that are listening and that are just starting out. We were obviously hearing like you can build like Facebook ads on like we've guys have built marketing campaigns. But what are some other easy ways to integrate AI into early business practices? I'll hit that first and then there just really briefly. There really isn't a and I don't want to be too broad because I know it's a specific question.

17:33So I'll just rattle this off real quick. It really isn't a part of your business starting out that doesn't involve you writing something. I mean, it just doesn't. If you, regardless of what kind of business you're in, you're producing blog posts, you're producing content, you're producing, like David said earlier, social media content that you're going to need, whether organic or paid, you're producing ads. You need an ability to be able to do that. And I would argue that you need an ability. You don't have to be an A copywriter. But in today's day in market, with things becoming more and more competitive, and it's becoming more and more competitive every day, you have to be able to write at a certain level.

18:14That's the missing piece. Like if you see no matter what business they're in, and you'll see groups or forums, or occasionally people will come to us, even though they're, and we'll see, you know, the copy, the pages, even if they've been led, even if they've gone through a course, whatever, it's just horrible. And that's the reason their stuff isn't converted, right? Everything requires a conversion, regardless of the business model for the people we're talking about. Whether you're collecting emails, whether you want people to consume your content, whether you want people to like, know, and trust you.

18:46So I think that the number one way this is going to help people listening to your audience is the ability to produce that content at a level that maybe they would struggle with themselves and would take either a tremendous amount of time and or a lot of money to invest it. Yeah. And, you know, when you're starting a business, what do you need? You need a website. So you can write a landing page. You can write a really good one. You can write an About Us page. You can write a Frequently Asked Questions page. A good AI will even come up with the questions and the answers for you. And sometimes if you're, you know, in the 19th hour of your day, it's going to be sharper than you are.

19:25It might think of something that you left out. If you're starting an e-commerce business, you're going to need a sales page. And, you know, the AI can write that for you. Of course, you're going to need to write emails. You're going to need to write sales emails and content emails. AI can do that for you. So, yeah, all of the writing, if you have, you know, authentic agents that can write in your voice, you can get all of that done by AI. And I know people who've taken a year to do their own website. I mean, copywriters are the worst when it comes to writing for themselves because they're always used to writing on super short deadlines for everyone else.

20:06There's nothing left in the tank. So yeah, I think there are a lot of obstacles that you can get over this way. Yeah, I'll add this too as well. When you're first starting out in later on, I was going to say, I love organic strategies. I love organic marketing and content. And first, you're especially relying upon that. And like, I'm more of an advanced player. I've been around for 20 years. I still love organic. But for the people who are listening, I know that this could help them. I know that, you know, authentic agents that write in their voice can help them write two-step Facebook posts. You know, two-step Facebook posts can make a lot of money.

20:39I'm telling you. I don't know if you're talking about there, but basically two-stepping is you're not cold DMing anybody, but you're saying, I have this. You have a post that says, I have this available. And if you're interested, reply and I'll DM. That process works extremely well. but you need quality content to be able to even do that and you need to be able to crank it out fast if you're marketing yourself organic means especially you know with youtube and whatnot and podcasts i mean you always need content for the podcast you need the introductions and whatnot you always need video scripts you know you always need content and then also when you get to this stage of growth where you need to make hires you may not have to know you know if you have your ai dialed in and that's what i like about that you may not have to hire at all at that point you may want to because you might want to go on vacation every once in a while but in my case i didn't want to make a ton of hires for my company when i got to a certain point i'm just smiling because i was thinking about a post that i saw earlier and we're talking about authentic and authentic view if a lot of people try to do what jason just said through chat gpt and all they're doing i don't even know if this is a thing flame with the yopic or spam on the on the thing trolls coming out Well, you know, nice, your AI post.

21:48I mean, all you have to do to any business group is go in and it sticks out like a sore thumb. And I'm just, I'm smiling because somebody tried to do something like that. And most people are becoming very sophisticated to see and they want authenticity. So what I think for me sums up is how do you get the production and the promise of AI with the authenticity? And so that only applies to all of your listeners that may be starting out anew, but it's also a big concern of brands, which have backed away from it because, you know, if we take what's good for brands, they cannot afford to put out inauthentic bad content that doesn't resonate.

22:26I don't want to get too much into computer science here, but you got to think about this question. If you ask the AI to write something and you don't have authentic prompts and you aren't putting in the right information, where is it going to get the information from? That's a big unknown. So It's going to start writing about stuff based on something it found somewhere in some country or in some website. It's not going to write it very well. It's going to write it in this passive, academic, bloated style. People don't generally want to do business with someone who sounds like that. I want to ask a specific example on how someone could use AI.

23:09I want to use the website example you guys talked about. So a common thing, obviously, when you're launching your business is to be like, okay, well, let me go build out a website. How can someone use AI to build out their first website? Talk to me about the content on the page. Talk to me about using SEO, copy, of course. Yeah, talk to us about that. You know, some of the agents that we built are things that will identify the pain points, that will elaborate on those pain points in a way that the market is looking, what I call dimensionalization, right? What does that look like to your pain points?

23:40elaborate on the benefits and value propositions that are most important. So for me, one of the first questions, we talked a lot about writing, right? But what does that look like? So if you're creating even a simple homepage, right? We've seen all of us, I am sure, we've seen some really, really bad homepages or websites. You want to talk naturally, which is something we've been talking about authentically. But ultimately, you need to answer three questions. Why am I here? What can I do here? And why should I do it with you? And if you're not answering those three questions at its basis, and so I look at it, how can it answer your question specifically?

24:20AI agents can answer those three questions. They can go in a little bit deeper. And even if you're not the best writer, let's forget about the writing side of this. You will know what to write about and how to present, which I will tell you from my experience in reviewing thousands of websites is you're going to be that much further off when you start out. Too many people, and I'll just stop at this, write about them. This is what we do. So if you understand it's about the consumer, it's about your prospects, that's the way I would look at its basis. Being able to do that and pinpoint exactly what and who you should be talking to and how you should talk to them.

24:57Yeah, targeting is more important than copy. If you have brilliant copy, but it's written to the wrong market, it doesn't matter. If you have decent copy with a good offer, pinpointing the right market, it's going to convert. Now, I'm sure Scott can tell you that there are a million things you can do with just okay copy to make it convert better. but the point is when you're putting up a website it needs to be about it's not about you it's not about your business it's about your customer their problem or their desire and what you can do for it and if you're not an experienced marketer you're going to spend a long time trying to figure it out and you might get it wrong the first three or four times most of us have earlier on in our own careers.

25:45And so AI can save you a lot of grief and heartache just by getting you on the right track. Yeah, there are various ways to use this. And a lot of the AI solutions out there kind of require you to fill out tons and tons of fields with information. But the way we use AI is also as a brain in itself to do a lot of the thinking for you. So there's different approaches to it. You know, you could have a templated kind of approach or you can have a cross between templated and more organic and where you could actually put your own information into it or you can have it prompt you for information or you can ask it to go out there and make lists and lists of benefits and lists and lists of pain points and potential angles and give you the stuff that you normally have to think about so there's just endless possibilities with it and i just want to say if you use it the correct way you don't have to go and fill out blank after blank after blank you know when you're trying to use AI.