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Put aside your feelings for AI. It ain't going anywhere. For the voice actor who chooses to embrace this, there is an opportunity. The technology's not going to go away just because we're mad about it. I'm using it as an assistant. That whole entire interaction happened inside of ChatGPT. So let me give you just a couple of the different things that I am using AI for. Yesterday, I'm scrolling through Instagram and this video pops up in my feed and it's a guy in a Cadillac with a cow in the backseat going through the drive through at KFC and he places his order for his chicken sandwich and his fries or whatever. And then when he pulls up to the drive thru window, everybody at the KFC is freaking out because this guy's got a cow in the backseat of his Cadillac. Totally random. Guess what? My Instagram feed was today when I logged in, I got all kinds of crazy cow videos popping up in my Instagram feed. Now, the algorithm gives you more of what you want. So can you do me a favor? If you're enjoying the everyday veopreneur podcast, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, drop a comment, let the algorithm know that you enjoy the show so that it will give you more of the show in your feed. AI is a tool. I wanted to start with that right up front, right off the top. That way for those who are not interested in AI offended by the very mention of AI, you know, angered at the thought of somebody even using AI, you know, this episode is not for you, and that's okay. But I think that there are ways that as veopreneurs, we can incorporate AI into our workflows to help us do some of the things that we're already doing in a more efficient way and potentially to help us do things that we weren't previously doing because we didn't know how or we weren't sure where to start. And those are just a couple of the things that I am doing with AI. So what I want to do in this episode of the podcast is share just a couple of different ways that I have been using AI assistance agents to make me a little bit more productive with my business. Now, right off the top, I have primarily been a user of ChatGPT for, I don't know, almost three years, I guess. I've been using ChatGPT, although definitely much more probably in the last two years, and I've been pretty happy with what I get from ChatGPT. I will definitely say that over time the outputs have gotten progressively Better. That being said, I've recently started investigating Claude a little bit. I am highly intrigued by this idea of Claude coworkers, and I've been doing a lot of research on it, watching a bunch of videos, listen to a couple of podcasts on it, got myself on a couple of newsletters. And so I'm thinking about possibly making the transition from ChatGPT to Claude in order to be able to take advantage of Cowork. But there are a lot of different LLMs that are available to you, obviously ChatGPT being one of them, Claude being another one. Those are probably two of the most popular. But then there's Google Gemini, and then there's Perplexity. So there are different options that are available for you to choose from. But. But for the purposes of this one, we're going to primarily be talking about what I've been doing with ChatGPT and what I may potentially start doing with Claude. So let me give you just a couple of the different things that I am using AI for. So the first one I want to start with is something that if I did not have AI to do this for me, I would not be doing it, period. And that is analyzing my website traffic. I have Google Analytics on my website. I have had Google Analytics on my website for, I don't know, two decades maybe. And in the span of those two decades, I can probably count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of times that I had previously gone through my Google Analytics because I wasn't really sure what to do with it. Yes, I can see whether or not people are coming to the website. I can get a sense for how they're getting there, whatever. But by and large, I really wasn't sure what to do with it until recently. One of the things that I have been doing with ChatGPT is I have been going into Google Analytics and I've been downloading my raw data. So I will download raw data maybe once a month, and I will put that raw data into ChatGPT and then I will just tell it to tell me what I need to know, analyze this raw data, help me understand where are things working, where are things not working, what might be able to be improved, what can we be doing better? What do I need to understand? And it will give me a complete summary of my website traffic for the month, and it will help me understand the keywords that people are using. It will help me understand the traffic sources that they're coming from. It helps me understand how long they're staying, you know, where they came when they left, et cetera. And can you get some of that just by going through Google Analytics? Sure. But for me, it's much more helpful when I get that summary from ChatGPT because I don't always understand everything that I'm seeing on Google Analytics. And so if I did not have this AI tool, this is one of the things that I would never be fully taking advantage of. So if you've never tried it, that's the first thing that I would suggest is downloading your raw search data from Google Analytics and pasting that data into ChatGPT and asking it to help you see what you need to understand, because it is going to show you what's working and it is also going to tell you what is not working. Are you looking to register a new domain to set up your voiceover website on, or are you looking for a reliable place where you can host your voiceover website? Itrustupperlevelhosting.com it's where I get my domains, it's where I get my hosting, because it works. Check it out for yourself and get signed up at upper level hosting dot com. Now back to our show. The second thing that I'm doing is I am getting it to analyze my Google Search Console. So separate tool, very similar to Google Analytics, but the search console really breaks down how you are ranking in search, where are people coming from, what keywords are they using, and all of that sort of stuff. And so when I started adding new pages to my website, because I was creating pages for my docu shorts and started doing some updates on some of my genre pages and whatnot, one of the things that I've been doing just like with Google Analytics is downloading the raw data from Google Search Console, dropping that into ChatGPT and again asking it to tell me what do I need to know, what do I need to understand. And that one in particular has been really great because I have no concept of SEO geo beyond the basic understanding of, you know, what is search engine optimization. And yeah, search engine optimization is important, but it's something that I don't have an expertise in. It's something that I don't currently have the budget to hire someone to do. And so it was either don't do it at all or, you know, do it with the minimal skill set that I have, or can I use AI tools to help me to understand this a little bit better. And so by putting that raw search data from Google search console into ChatGPT and asking for that summary, I'm able to get a much clearer picture of how people are finding me. So then I can decide, okay, are people finding me for the things that I want to be found for or are they finding me for something else? When they are finding me for certain things, am I able to. Does my website deliver on that promise? You know, they did a particular search and did my website deliver what they were looking for on that search? Are there areas where I can improve? Do I need to make changes to the copy on my website? Do I need to update some of those pages? Do I need to try using different combinations of keywords? Do I need to re strategize what I'm doing right now to actually make my website work in the way that I want it to work? And so these are two things that are tasks that I know there's value in them. Understanding your analytics and understanding the Google Search console. I do not have the expertise for it. I do not have the ability to outsource that at this point or hire a professional to do it. Hiring somebody for SEO and things like that, I mean, it can get really expensive in a hurry. So either it wasn't going to happen at all, or I can try to use one of these tools to help make it happen. And so that's what I've been doing. And I will tell you, it's been really interesting. It's not that there won't be any work involved either, to be clear. So I had built a whole bunch of pages on my website, let those pages sit on the site for a couple of months, and then continued to monitor the data in my Google Search console. And ultimately what I decided was this wasn't working the way that I wanted it to. And so again, going back with ChatGPT and saying, okay, here's the strategy that I'm trying to get to happen, here's what's actually happening. So how do we course correct. And so then ChatGPT is able to say, you need to change this, this, this, and this. And so then, yeah, I got to go back and I got to update a bunch of pages on my website. But at least I know what I'm doing now. If I didn't have access to that information, I wouldn't have known, I wouldn't have made any changes. I wouldn't have done anything to make any of it any better. And so this is an area where I'm able to do more. I'm able to build in a whole new skill set and a whole new set of efficiencies that otherwise wouldn't happen because I just simply couldn't afford to hire professional services to do it. So if you've never tried that before, those are two things that I think you might find rather interesting. Downloading your raw data from Google Analytics and downloading your raw data from Google Search Console and having whatever LLM you choose, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, whoever you're working with, and having it summarize what you need to understand from that and what is working, what isn't working, and where are there areas where we could be doing things a little bit better. And I think those two go hand in hand with SEO and geo. And I've talked a little bit about this on the podcast before. SEO being search engine optimization, GEO being generative engine optimization, which is basically. I don't know if we fully settled on the term yet, but it's basically AI SEO. So Search engine optimization, that's what you're doing to get yourself found in Google. Generative Engine optimization is what you are getting or what you are doing to get yourself found within the LLMs. So when somebody goes into ChatGPT and types a search, does your website or does your name or does your services come back in those search results? And one of the things that we know statistics show very clearly is that people are searching in LLMs more and more and more and more. And I recently shared a story about this in a class that I taught where I have a. My wife has a Dyson vacuum. And that Dyson vacuum broke a couple of months ago. It broke just outside of the warranty window, of course, as it always does. So I'm thinking, okay, well, the vacuum's already broken, so what difference does it make at this time? So I take it out to the shop, tear the vacuum cleaner completely apart, clean it all up, pulled a bunch of crap out of it, thought, okay, here we go, Vacuum's ready to go again. Put it all back together, didn't have any spare parts left over. Amazingly, brought the vacuum back inside and it worked for about three minutes, and then it quit working again. Take it back out to the shop, tear it all apart, make sure that I put everything back together right. Everything was back together right. So, okay, away we go. Put it back together again, bring it inside, try it again, runs for about two minutes and dies. I go into ChatGPT and I say, this is the model of Dyson vacuum cleaner that I have, and I give it the model number and I say, here's what it's doing. What do you think the problem is. And it comes back with an answer that says, actually, I think it's this. And this issue is a known issue with this particular model of Dyson vacuum cleaner. And here's how to fix it, and here's the part that you need to fix it, and here's where you can go to get that part. And there was actually a vacuum cleaner shop in a town about an hour away from me. And so I called them up and I said, hey, this is what I'm. What is going on. This is the part that I need. Yep, no problem. We'll get that part for you. That whole entire interaction happened inside of ChatGPT did not happen with Google. The point of that story was to demonstrate how important it is now for us as voice actors to be thinking about the AI SEO side of this, the generative engine side of this. What are we doing or what can we be doing to get ourselves found in search when somebody is typing in a search, asking a question in one of those LLMs, Gemini, Claude, Chatgpt, whatever. This is a subject that I really don't know a ton about, but I've been learning a lot about it. And the way that I have been learning about it is through ChatGPT and using ChatGPT as a teacher to help me understand how generative engine optimization works and to help me come up with a strategy for how I can get my website ranking. And in these LLMs, when you go into Google and you do a search for voiceover terms, there are a handful of websites that will come up number one or on page one, we'll say, and some of those websites are from some of the most respected voice actors in the industry. And part of what they have going for them is longevity. They have been building their websites for a very long time. They have been putting new content on their websites for a very long period of time. And as they have built up that. That mountain of content, it has given them greater authority, which is part of the reason why they continuously rank on the first page in the search results. What you need to understand about generative engine optimization is this is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this. Nobody has a head start on you yet, really, because this is something that is still very new. And so for the voice actors who choose to embrace this, put aside your feelings for AI, it ain't going anywhere. For the voice actor who chooses to embrace this, there is an opportunity. And that is where for me, ChatGPT has come in. As I continue to build new content from my website. I'm running all of that new content through ChatGPT and getting it to help me to build it in a way, hopefully that will rank in LLMs. So I'm now killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. I'm working on websites and or web pages on my site that will have SEO and that will have geo. Hopefully I can get found in Google. Hopefully I can get found in LLMs. Now, I already know that the Google side is starting to work. I can tell that the Google site is starting to work by when I download my search console data and when I download my Google Analytics data and I feed that into ChatGPT, and we can see that my traffic is starting to climb steadily. I'm being ranked for more things, I'm being ranked for more keywords, I'm being found for more keywords, and I'm being found for keywords that I ultimately want to be found for. So I know that the SEO side of things is working. The geo side is a little bit harder to measure at this point because there's not really a tool that will tell you, but there are indicators that you can see that suggest that, yeah, you're probably starting to be found in some of these LLMs. And I'm starting to see an uptick in some of those indicators, again based on the analysis of analytics, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. So those are a couple of areas that I think that any voice actor doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, you could use an AI tool to help you do these things relatively easily. And it will create most of the outputs that you need. You just have to be able to ask it the right prompts. And even asking it the right prompts is not rocket science because you know what you're trying to accomplish. The biggest thing is figuring out what are the keywords that you want to get found for. What do you. What do you want to know? And. And the keywords need to be, in my opinion, more than just, you know, American male voice actor or Canadian female voice actor or whatever. Like, you've got to get down into the nitty gritty and you've got to pick some really specific keywords that you can optimize for. But thinking about keywords that your potential buyers are going to be using. So those are. Those are a couple of the things that I think right off the bat, any voice actor can be using it for. Another thing that I have been using AI for a lot lately is with my writing, but not how you think every email that I send out, I am still writing, and that includes every marketing email that I am sending, and that includes every email that I send. On the veopreneur side, I am writing all of those emails because I still want those emails to have my voice, to have my personality, to have my character. I think if you've been emailing with clients or voiceover prospects for a really long time and they've got a sense of how you speak and what your emails look like, and then all of a sudden, one day, emails start landing in their inbox that look entirely different, it's not going to take them very long to figure out, oh, wow, they're using AI now. And you've immediately burned the relationship and lost all of the credibility on the personalization side because they can recognize that you're using this tool. So I never have AI write the emails for me, but what I will have it do is proofread my emails. Did I miss any spelling errors or any grammatical errors that need to be addressed? And I will have it give me some suggestions for how I might be able to improve. Sometimes I have a tendency to be a little wordy in my emails. And I know that being concise is really key when you are sending out emails, particularly to people that you're trying to build a relationship with. And so using some of these AI tools to help me to write better emails has been one of the things that I have been using a lot. But again, I'm using it as an assistant. I am not making it do the work for me. I'm not making it do the heavy lifting on the writing side. I think that is so key. Now. Are there voice actors who are doing it? Sure. Are there voice actors who teach it? Yes. Do I think that it works as well and efficiently? No. I really. I haven't seen any evidence of that yet. I still think that we need to have that, that human touch and that our emails need to have a little bit of our character and our personality in them. But that doesn't mean that it can help you avoid spelling mistakes. Because I'll tell you what, maybe this is just a pet peeve for me, but I can't stand it when I get emails that are laced with spelling mistakes. I understand every once in a while you're going to slip up, that's fine. But when they're laced with them like that makes me crazy. And now there's even less of an excuse. So I'm a Google workspace user. I don't need to put my emails into ChatGPT anymore, because within Google Workspace now in Gmail, I have Gemini that is going to make corrections and suggestions for me. And I also use Apple Mail. And so Apple Intelligence can make corrections and suggestions for me, and I can have it to proofread my emails right from within Apple Mail. And so it's making it even easier for us to use some of these tools, which means we have even fewer excuses for sending out emails that are riddled with mistakes and, you know, things that make us look bad. And so that is definitely one of the things that I think that you can be using it for, to expand on that, I think one step further. The other thing that I can think that you can use it for on the writing side is as a brainstorming partner. And I would say that that's not just on the email side. I would say that that is also on the social media side as well. And so that's my final tip for you, is to use it as a brainstorming buddy. There is a lot of science that is starting to come out, a lot of data studies that are starting to come out that show that when we give all the heavy lifting to AI, it's actually causing us to use our brains less, which, I mean, when you think about it, that actually makes sense. And by using our brains less, I mean it's a use it or lose it scenario. And I've listened to several different podcasts and read a couple of different studies that talk about this. I don't want to fall into that scenario. But on the flip side, people who are using it as a teacher, as a coach, as a guide, as a. As a mentor, whatever you want to call it, I don't know what the word is, but you're using it as an extension. So I'm not getting it to do the heavy lifting, but I'm getting it to help me to do things that I maybe otherwise wouldn't have done. I'm using it to teach me. I'm using it to help me see things from a different perspective. I'm using it to help me come up with new ways, using it as a brainstorm buddy. When I can sit down and say, okay, I want to create a social media strategy around this topic, give it, whatever the topic is, can you help me brainstorm 15 different ways that I could approach that subject in social media posts, and it can come back and it can give me a bunch of different ideas. Now I can take those ideas and I can create that content, write that content in my voice, using my words, with my personality. So I'm not just letting it do all the work for me or letting it do the heavy lifting for me, but it's expanding what is possible for me because I'm using it as a tool to help me see things from a different perspective or to help me come at it from an angle that I maybe previously hadn't thought of or hadn't considered coming from. And so when it comes to writing marketing emails, I can use it as a brainstorming buddy to help me figure out, okay, I want to create a follow up sequence and I can give it a very specific use case scenario and then I can ask it to help me come up with some ideas for what might I include in some of those follow up emails. And then I can take the ideas that it gives me and then I can go and I can write my emails. These are the ways that I think that we need to be thinking about and using and incorporating AI into our voiceover businesses. Where you're using it as an employee but you're not making it the boss, I think is probably the best way to put it, but also where you're using it to help you do things that you couldn't have previously done because either A you didn't have the time or B, you didn't, you didn't have the expertise, or C, you didn't have the financial means. And so I don't see AI the way I'm using it as taking anything away from anyone because I couldn't hire someone to do SEO optimization for me in the past. I couldn't hire someone to do generative engine optimization for me in the past. I certainly don't have it in my budget to have to hire someone to analyze my Google Analytics or analyze my search console. So it's not taking away anything from anyone because I wasn't hiring anybody to do it in the first place. But what it's doing is it's adding to my business in a positive and productive way because it's helping me to do things that I couldn't previously do before or when I'm using it as a writing assistant or a brainstorming buddy, for example, it's helping me build inefficiencies, it's helping me take projects that may have taken me several hours and I can reduce that time by half. Maybe because I'm not spending near as much time trying to think through an idea or research out an idea, I'm able to get to implementation much quicker and so when I'm working with voice actors in a coaching perspective, there are certain things that come up over and over and over again, which I understand all of those things, finances obviously is always one of them. We've all got limited budgets and particularly when you're starting out and you're newer in your career, there are so many different things that you can spend money on. You've got to spend money on your coaching and your demos and you got to build out your studio and maybe you got to get a casting site profile and like there's just, there's no shortage of places where you can spend money, which means there are restrictions, which means maybe you can't hire somebody to do some of the website stuff that you would like to do or want to be able to do. So AI can be a really great tool there. Finances often one of the reasons why things don't get done time is the other one. We've all got a lot going on. I get it. I've got a family, I've got a wife, I've got four kids. There's a lot going on in this house on a day to day basis and trying to keep up with everything and make time for everyone and fit everything in while simultaneously running a voiceover business that I'm continuously trying to grow and running the vopreneur side of things which I'm always trying to find new ways to, to give back to the community and offer and add value to the community. Anything that can help me to build in efficiencies into my schedule, I am all for that. I am all for buying back my time in that way. So for the 20 or 30 bucks a month that it costs you for one of these AI tools, I think you're going to, if you use it the right way, I think you're going to reap a very significant return on investment from that money. Particularly even if you just implemented a couple of the things that I talked to you about today. So let's recap very quickly. One, have IT analyze your raw Google Analytics data and help you come up with a report and a summary of where your traffic is coming from, what's working, what isn't, where you might be able to make improvements. Two, have it analyzed your Google search console raw data and that's going to help you to figure out what keywords are working for you right now. What are the things that people are typing in to find your website? Or are there things at this point or maybe there's not. And again then how do I Improve this. What can I do to get found for these keywords? What language do I need to include? How do I need to tweak or update my website? So using it as a tool to help you take that a step further, getting it to work with you as an assistant on the SEO and GEO side of things so that you are ranking for keywords so that you are getting found. When somebody's going into ChatGPT or and they're, they're going into Claude and they're saying I have an employee training program that I need to build for the HR department in my company and I am looking for a female voice actor, a US based female voice actor who can narrate this training program for me. If you have US based female voice actor or if you have HR or employee training, if you know, if you have any of those keywords that are mentioned on your website within a page about your elearning, there's a high probability that ChatGPT is going to draw information from your website and that that's going to be one of the sources that it's going to cite when it's answering that person's question. Which by the way, to be clear, that is happening now. Once upon a time ChatGPT would spit out answers and it wouldn't tell you where the answers came from. Now it is much more likely to spit out answers and tell you where the answers came from or you can even ask it to give you the sources. And so then that's how when somebody does that search, your name comes up in the search, your website comes up in the search because it's citing you as a source. So using AI as a tool for SEO and GEO I think is another one that a lot of voice actors can lean into very easily. Using it as a writing assistant, don't make it do the writing for you, but use it as an assistant to help you write better, to help you write more concise, to help you avoid spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, to help you brainstorm out ideas for some of the emails that you're going to send. Use it in that way as an assistant, but still make sure that everything you are writing is in your words, your voice, your character, your personality. And then using it as a brainstorm buddy, using it as a brainstorm buddy to help you come up with content. I mean, the number one reason why people don't do social media according to everything that I have gathered from my coaching, is I don't know what to post. That's it. I don't know what to post. I hear that every single day in coaching sessions. Okay, well now you've got AI tools that you can use to help you come up with ideas for what to post. And you would be surprised once you get that. Those first few ideas, it doesn't take long for you to build it from there. So these are all different things that I think that you can be using regardless of how you feel about AI, regardless of how you feel about LLMs. Again, the technology is not going to go away just because we're mad about it. And so my whole thing is if I can embrace this and use it in a way that helps me to run my business better, that helps me to run my business more efficiently, that helps me to present myself more professionally, then I'm going to take advantage of this tool in every way that I can for the benefit of my business, which is ultimately for the benefit of my family. So I would love to know how you are using AI in your voiceover business. Drop a comment, let me know. I.
