Many solo business owners have waited, followed the AI buzz from the sidelines. And now, three years later, after ChatGBT was released, they're starting to think about joining in or at least giving it a serious look. Yet with so many options and little training, they often try tools like ChatGBT only to be disappointed. In this episode, we're going to break down common mistakes and I'm going to show you how to get the best results using ChatGBT. You're going to walk away inspired and ready to build better prompts and even perhaps your first AI assistant and start using ChatGPT for meaningful, high-leverage work, not just for a quick social media post. Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to the Amplify Your Authority podcast. I am your host, Marissa Shadrick, AI marketing strategist and certified copywriter. And I'm excited to bring you this little mini training. I'm gonna give you a lot of information about how ChatGBT works and why it's important to use it as a solo business owner and best practices too. But let's begin with why you even need AI. Many people have hesitated to jump in and start using ChatGBT. And I get it, it could be a little scary, it's unfamiliar, but three years later it's still here, and many companies have already implemented forms of AI. We've seen it across the board. It's not going away, it's going to continue to be part of our lives. So, what does this mean for the solo business owner? Well, I'm a solo business owner, so I understand what we have to go through. And sometimes I like to term it as the hustle dilemma. We have so many things that we do. We wear many, many hats. Now, if we were in a corporate setting, you would see various roles like people that would handle the sales and product development. You would see a copywriter, you would see a content strategist, you would see a customer service rep, social media manager, admin, project managers, and guess what? The solo business owner does it all. We wear all those hats. And sometimes we don't realize all the different roles that we handle, but we feel the pressure, we feel the stress of it. So you're stretched across so many roles. It's no surprise that your prompts to AI are rushed and shallow because we're so busy. We're just trying to check things off the list. So it's not anyone's fault and no one is being lazy or careless. People are just overloaded with tasks. That's why AI matters, not to do more, but to help you improve what you're already doing with more effectiveness, do it better, and make it stronger. Imagine creating AI assistants that take maybe just one of those roles off your plate. Maybe that would be the copy chief. Now, in a corporate setting, the copy chief would oversee all copy-related content to maintain brand voice consistency across everything. That means website, emails, campaigns, all of it. They wouldn't necessarily write the copy, but they would make sure there's continuity across all of the copy that's generated. Wouldn't it be great to have that type of AI assistant that would help you with that continuity when you're posting things online? So here's the first mindset shift that we have to have before we start looking at how we implement AI. We have to stop seeing ourselves as an admin and start seeing ourselves as a strategist. So many business owners focus their time on the role of social media manager. They're posting everywhere on multiple platforms, chasing engagement, likes, shares, reactions. But where is all that leading? What does engagement really mean? It's not conversion. So let's quickly review this so we can begin to see where our energy and focus should be when we're creating content and then work backwards and see how AI can help us. So we have four buckets, so to speak. We have reach, we have impressions, we have engagement, and we have conversion. Many people post online because they want to grow their email list. That's great. So let's start with reach. Reach is the number of unique people who see your digital content. This can be from a social media post, paid ads, or video content. This metric shows the number of unique users who have seen your brand and helps you understand the size of your audience. Now you have impressions. This is the foundational metric that represents how many times your content appears in a user's feed or on their screens. Impressions are important and they're essential for building initial awareness, but they only measure visibility, not any kind of action or intent. Now we get to engagement. This is where things get kind of interesting because with engagement, once content is seen, engagement measures how users interact with your content, such as the likes and the comments and the shares and the clicks. All of those are meaningful interactions, and higher engagement signals effective messaging and audience relevance. Then from engagement, we have conversion. Some of those people are going to be interested enough to be able to buy a product or sign up for your email list or register and listen to a webinar. So you can see that there are a lot of steps and a lot of volume to be able to go from reach to impression to engagement to conversion. So we had to be very strategic on the content we create and figure out where our audience is at on the awareness scale. Are they very aware of the need? If not, then we need to create content that educates them, these services or products that we have. So we can't just post and check it off the list and play the role of a social media manager. We have to be very strategic and start with the products that we have, what we're trying to sell, and work backwards to figure out what type of content would resonate with them to either educate them or maybe they're ready to download a freebie from you. But you can see why it's so important. We can't afford the energy or the time to just post without a strategy behind every post. Even if you're able to convert 10% of organic reach, of that 10%, statistically, 3% are ready to buy and 7% are interested, but not quite ready yet. And so this is why we say we nurture our email list, because there's going to be a percentage that is just not ready to buy, but they've already raised their hand and they said they're very interested in what you talk about and what you share and what you train on. So AI can play a huge role in content creation, helping you create long-form content, short form content, courses, trainings, workshops, all of this, AI can help you with this. But there's got to be a strategy. We have to move away from being the social media manager and be a strategist and figure out why I am posting these things and then let AI help you with that strategy and help you with that content creation. So when you get ready to use AI, you need to understand how it works so you can feed it the information it needs. Now, the best example I can give, and I've mentioned this before, my favorite book when I was a kid was Amelia Bedelia. It was a book that I resonated with because this was a little character, a storybook character, who misunderstood everything because she was so literal. You would say something like, draw the drapes, and she would take a sketchpad and a pen or pencil and draw the drapes. She was so literal, and I loved that book because I was the same way. Well, guess what? AI does the same thing too. It takes your prompt at face value unless you give it further explanation. It's very, very literal. It's not a mind reader, so it won't necessarily ask you for more information. Sometimes it does, but it doesn't always. And if it doesn't have a lot of the information it needs to give the output you requested, it will begin to hallucinate or it will pull something from the internet and give it to you. And it's not always aligned. It doesn't have opinions. So it will search the internet and find opinions that are not yours unless you give it your opinions, your perspective, your point of view, your worldview. And I'm going to show you here in just a second how to do all this and piece all this together. But this means that your voice, your point of view, your perspectives are essential to include when you want AI to produce something for you. AI will fill in the blanks if you leave out important details. So I like to look at it this way. When I am working with AI, I like to not only give it the task, but I want to also give it information of what preceded it. Like what is the vision? What is the goal of the company or the business? And then this task, how does that play into that vision? And then I also like to share what is our ultimate goal, or at least the plan for after this task is completed. How does this task play into the big picture? So why is this important? When you feed AI information about you and your business and your brand and your mission statement and your vision, it becomes very unique to you, not to somebody else's business. And AI is very good at pattern recognition. Let me give you some examples. If I was to say Humpty Dumpty sat on a, you would know the next word is wall. If I said Mary had a little, you would know the next word is lamb. Or if I was to say don't leave blank without it, you would know that the word is home. That is pattern recognition. So when you give it the information, it recognizes the patterns of what you provided. And then the answers or the responses are going to be much better. So how do you pull all this together? You need to have some documents that have information about your business. And I prefer to do each one separately. So you need like a business profile. An example of a business profile would have your unique value proposition. It would also include maybe your positioning in the market. It would include some competitor research. It would include your core offerings and your solution, maybe some social proof and testimonials, your credentials, a brief maybe vision and goals, and maybe even a personal story of how you started the business. You can also include maybe your preferred social channels. That would all be about your business. And then you can also have a separate one that would be your client profile. And this would all be about your ideal avatar. So what are their struggles? What are their pain points? Have you done some surveys? Include as much of the knowledge that you have about your audience. Another document that's really helpful is to have a document on your product. Detail your product. What is your product? Is it a coaching program? Is it a digital course? Is it a membership? What is it? And give details about the product itself. So when you have the business profile, you have the client profile, you have a product profile, another document that could be really helpful is your voice, tone, and style. One of the things I teach inside my private membership is to grab transcripts of podcasts or articles and feed this into AI and tell it to create a writing style that will include voice, tone, and style. It will take those transcripts and give you a beautiful document with voice, tone, and style. So now you have your business profile, you have your client profile, you also have your product description or product summary, and then you also have your voice tone and style. These are great documents that you can reuse. Once you do it, it's done, unless you change the product or unless you have a separate segment and you have a different audience that you serve as well. But for most coaches and service providers, this would stay the same. And so these documents, so these documents become PDF files that will end up being the knowledge for AI. So it can pull knowledge from you rather than the internet. Now there's one final document that I found to be very, very helpful because again, AI, it will fill in the gaps. And I discovered this as I've been finishing my book. I am in the process of writing a book. I finished the first draft. I started editing, and I realized that everything was starting to sound the same. It it lost my voice. It would strip my voice and it would clean it up too much. And so I thought, well, this is a problem because I want to kind of speed dial this process. It's all my stories, it's my insights, it's all me. I just want AI to help me edit and clean it up faster. So what I realized was it didn't have my human DNA. It doesn't understand humanity, it doesn't understand feelings, it doesn't have opinions. And so I created a new document that's called the Heart Profile. And this goes really, really deep on just your worldview, your values. It goes really deep on what makes you tick. Like why do you do certain things the way you do it? What's the story behind it? What's the philosophy? What is the the core belief behind it? And those things are things we don't normally talk about. But when we can extract it and create this heart profile, it's a game changer because now it's understanding what it means to be human, which it didn't have that before, and it'll never find that on the internet. So this heart profile is a great document. Once you have these documents, you can reuse them for prompts, you can create custom GPTs. And I would be really strategic on the type of custom GPT you want to create. Do you need a CFO or custom GPT? Do you need a ghostwriting or custom GPT? Do you need a social media manager custom GPT? Which kind of custom GPT do you need? Of all the roles that we discussed earlier, which one would be most effective for you? Maybe you need a copy chief, or maybe you need a director of content that creates all long form content. So what is it that you need as far as a first role? And that could literally be a domino effect. It could be the thing that takes a big weight off of you and helps you create content that normally takes you a long time every week to produce. And it helps you condense the time and do it better and give you margin for real human-to-human connection. I know it sounds like a lot to create these files, but you have to realize that you do it only once and you can reuse it. And the clarity you gain, because when I've worked with individuals, they don't know how to articulate what it is that they do. And let alone articulate their product and go into great detail. When we go into great detail with these files, it gives us like an unfair advantage as far as the clarity that we receive. We benefit from it. And then we have the documents to be able to use AI more effectively. And these documents, by the way, if ChatGPT is not your choice and you'd rather use Claude or Gemini, you can use it in other AI tools as well. I want to be able to help you get the heart of your business, your brand, into your AI output. So I have a free resource that you can access that is a questionnaire to extract what makes you human. All you have to do is go to marissachrick.com forward slash heart. So this is very easy to do in Google Drive. You can open up a document, go to the tab that says tools, click the voice typing mode, and then click the microphone and begin to record your answers. The questionnaire is pretty hefty, but remember, this is something you're going to reuse over and over again, and it's going to make the AI output sound more human, sound more like you. When it has a choice as far as pulling something from the internet or pulling something from your document, guess what? It's going to pull from your document. So this is a really helpful document. So I hope you take advantage of this free download and you grab it so that you can begin to use AI effectively from the get-go. If you're just getting started, these are important documents to have. But of all of these, I think the heart profile is one that's really going to make a difference. So let me leave you with this. If you've been watching the AI conversation from the sidelines, this is your moment to step in with clarity and with confidence. You have something unique to say. And at the end of the day, it's you that's going to cause people to click or buy because there's a lot of choices out there, there's a lot of competition, there's nothing new under the sun. At the end of the day, people are looking for the people they want to work with, not necessarily the outcome. Yeah, people want outcome and they want transformation, but they're not going to buy something from someone they don't trust. So you are the one that's going to make the difference as far as whether or not they choose to buy from you. So your brand, your voice is so important. And AI can help you say it more often, more clearly, and with greater impact. It's not about doing more, it's about doing the right things better. So give yourself permission to start small, maybe test one new prompt, or build your first assistant. You're not just adapting, you're leading your business into a new, more focused chapter. So if you enjoyed this podcast, I would love it if you would leave a rating and review. I would really appreciate it, and I'm happy to give you a shout out on the next episode. Until next time, take care.