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- [00:00]
A
Hey friends. Today I'm bringing you a fun one from the archives of my friend Coley James. Podcast Business First Creatives. If you've been tuning in this month, you know that for the month of December, I'm re airing some of my favorite conversations that I had on other people's podcasts in 2025, and I knew that this one was going to make the cut. We all have that business friend who, you know, gets your wheels turning. And for me, Kolie James is one of those people. In this episode, Kohli and I are talking about one of 2025's hottest topics, AI. The AI conversation is honestly unavoidable in the world right now, and I've shared before that I think as artists and business owners, ignoring this new development that is touching just about everything in our world is a big mistake. So in this conversation, Kohli and I have an open, honest dialogue about how AI is affecting our businesses, what it's actually good for, and how photographers can use it to make content creation faster without losing their voice. I also shared a little sneak peek of the AI powered blogging tool that we added inside the Consistency Club this summer, which has turned out to be such an enormous game changer for our members. So if blogging in particular is on your 2025 to do list, make sure that you listen all the way to the end, sharing a link for you to try it out at a special podcast listener price at the end of this episode and in the show notes as well. Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Annemie Tonkin and I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it and I can show you how.
- [02:03]
B
Y' all anomy's back and I feel like, you know, I should have looked it up, but it's been at least a year since you've been on here. Oh, you were on here for an anniversary episode, so it hasn't been that long. But it's been that long since you've been on here as the only guest because Sabrina joined you for that one. So welcome back to the podcast.
- [02:22]
A
Thank you, ma'. Am. I am so excited to be back. It's nice that we get to chat in the in the interim, but I feel like I'm excited to share our conversations because they always inspire me and.
- [02:33]
B
I will say, if you listen to this podcast and you don't listen to this, can't be that hard. I was actually on Anomy's podcast a few months ago talking about my kind of foray into AI, if you will. And I find it completely hilarious and ironic that she is here today to talk about how she has taken, like, a complete, like, dive into AI tools, and she is also beginning to put them into some of her offers that we are going to talk about today. But I don't feel like you were really using AI when I came on your podcast a couple months ago.
- [03:07]
A
No, I'm. I'm not lying when I say that my conversations with you are inspirational. You have inspired some pretty major twists and turns in my career path, I guess when, like, as it pertains to education, and usually it's because you are paying attention to what's happening and what's cool, and I can barely keep up. And then I talk to you and I'm like, oh, maybe I should look into that. Which might be annoying. And I recognize that, but AI certainly was on my radar when we talked. But you really inspired me to dig in because I had ideas about how I felt like it could help the courses that I teach and the, you know, the things that I did. But I felt pretty intimidated by the whole thing. And, yeah, as part of my inspiration for really diving in was talking to you and being like, okay, let's put your big kid pants on time and let's wade into these new waters. I think it's intimidating when you're brand new to something, when it seems really techy, when it seems whatever. But whether it's something like this or changing an outlet in the wall or something, you know, I'm always like, look, if somebody else can do it, it can't be that hard.
- [04:20]
B
It can't be that hard. Isn't that the whole name of your business? But also, I just. I was also responsible for you jumping into airtable.
- [04:27]
A
Airtable. Yeah.
- [04:28]
B
And then eventually you took airtable and just redesigned half of the things that you gave people in simple sales. So what that means to me is that we should have more conversations more often so that I can inspire you constantly.
- [04:39]
A
Well, and I hope it cuts both ways. I hope I have ever done for you even half of what you've done for me.
- [04:45]
B
So you have. I mean, I feel like I've said this before, but, guys, we are going to stop going back and forth. We are going to hop into AI because before we hit record, she was like, okay, where are we going to take this conversation? So sometimes I have thoughts in my head that clearly I don't actually express to my guest. And that's okay. She's willing to just roll with the punches. But before we really get into how she is using AI inside of one of what has become her main offer, I would say, or at least it is taking a bigger piece of the pie now than it ever has before. But before we get into that, I want to talk about a hot take that I've seen in a few threads. Now that I'm semi active on social media again, I don't know that I really want to put myself out there like that, but some of the things that I've been seeing around AI offers, because there are AI offers everywhere.
- [05:36]
A
Sure.
- [05:36]
B
And I actually just wrote an email to my email list the other day that was like, I opened up my email and I think I have five different new offers where people are pitching, you know, AI assistants as part of their program. So I do think that this is a trend that is not going anywhere. And while you and I are now, you know, diving into it with our offers, I do think that we're going to see more of these things as they go. But one thing that I've had and that people have said on threads and other places is, oh, but I'm really good at ChatGPT and so I'm sure that I can just get the same result. And so we're going to start this conversation there. Anime. Did you just like open ChatGPT and say, hey, you know, I want to build this, help me do this. Is that how you started?
- [06:23]
A
It's probably how I started, yeah. But I actually, I wrote. Speaking of emails being written, I wrote an email yesterday talking about this new product, which we'll get into in a little bit. But the very first time that I logged into ChatGPT, as I was sitting there thinking, what am I going to use this for? You know, I had. This was a couple years ago and people were talking about like, oh, you know, you can use it to help you meal plan and you can use it to whatever. I can't, I can't remember what some of the early examples were that were kind of floating around, but. But the first thing that I thought of when I opened it up was sweet. I can finally get back into blogging. Right? Blogging is so. It's so high value when it comes to marketing, but it is time consuming. And to do it well is back when I was blogging regularly, it would easily Take me a solid day of work to sit down, like, think of what I wanted to write, outline it, get it to the point where I felt like I was not filling it with fluff and just trying to like, up my word count and make it SEO friendly, whatever, and make it so that it was, it looked good, it sounded good, and it was actually valuable to people as well as my SEO kind of bottom line. Right. So it's a huge lift. And I ended up giving it up after a while because I was like, well, I'm not actively trying to get a whole bunch of new clients, so I'm going to let this go because it takes so much time. So ChatGPT comes along and I'm, that's the very first use case that I was like, sweet, I'm going to have it help me write a blog post. And I remember, I remember. I'm sure I gave it some sort of topic or whatever. Like, I am a family photographer and I want to write a blog post on xyz. And, and the garbage that came out of that was so profoundly bad that I was just like, well, never mind, I guess we're not going to use this for this. So, yeah, I mean, I would say that I am also quote unquote, good at chatgpt in terms of. I now know to ask really specific questions to how my. I've learned how to engineer prompts better so that the output that I get is better. I've certainly learned how to train it on my voice and all that sort of stuff. But the more you know, the more you know, you don't know. And as I progressed, I realized that in order to get consistently good output from an AI tool, there is so much work that goes in to the front end. And that's if it's just for you, if you are then trying to create a tool that services a lot of people, you have to think through to like the far corners of, you know, how could this go wrong? How could this go wrong? Testing all that stuff. It's very tedious. And so I see this proliferation of tools out there and I have a very healthy dose of skepticism about the quality of those tools. I mean, we've all played around with custom GPTs and stuff that are kind of garbage. Garbage?
- [09:27]
B
Yeah, for lack of a better word. So I feel like one thing that I want to mention, and you kind of said this, but, you know, I like to like, put together frameworks, if you will, or like a step by step. So I feel like first there's the Figuring out what you want to do with the tool. So in your case, it was to write a blog, and then you're kind of figuring out, well, what are the important things that you need to make sure are taken care of in the output? And for you, I hear you saying that, you know, it needed to be in your own voice, it needed to be something that was actually going to be rankable for your SEO. And then also that it didn't sound like a lot of fluff that was actually giving the person on the other end, the person that was reading it, something meaningful after they had consumed the information. But in order to get those three things, not only are you engineering a really good prompt, because that's of course, where we're all starting. And then you're doing, you know, hours and hours of testing, seeing what it's giving you, refining your instructions. I mean, the amount of time that I spend refining instructions, I wish that on one of these tools I had just like started a timer, because I'm sure that it would have been like at least a solid week of eight hour days to see how many times I went back and forth. But I think what a lot of people don't understand is the third part, and that's the part that you and I really focus on and that people leave out of the conversation when it comes to these custom GPTs. And that's your knowledge files. Like we're not just telling it what to do and letting ChatGPT take care of it, right? Like when it comes to systems and like creating workflows, since that's what I discussed on your podcast last time, I have a lot of knowledge of how these things should go, what the output should be, intimate knowledge of Honeybook and Dubsado, which are the two tools that I use. And I take all of that, in addition to like feeding it examples of like the hundreds at this point of clients and students that I've helped refine their workflows, and I'm kind of packaging it all up in these knowledge files. And that's what actually runs my AI tool. Now, when it comes to blogging, you've got a different set of knowledge tools and you actually took it to a whole different level than I'm doing. And I mean, I was really impressed, not only when you showed me the tool on a different call, but when I talked to one of the people that, you know, helped you ideate and go through it and all that. Like, I was just so impressed by everything that you did. But I think that at the End of the day, if you're using AI tools and they are really built with intention and they're really using like all of the strategy and information that you have in your brain, it is a very different thing than just logging into ChatGPT and saying, hey, I'm a family photographer, I want to write a blog post about this last session. Here's my thoughts. Please write me a blog post.
- [12:21]
A
Right? And that's, I think intention is the word that needs to be underlined in red ink. The like temptation with ChatGPT and AI tools in general is to look at that and be like, great, I don't have to do the work. And the truth of the matter is in some ways I'm grateful that I have been in business as long as I have, that I have as much content that I created from scratch as I do because I totally get that temptation. Like, I don't, I don't want to think about this. I don't want to think through my own answers to X, Y, Z. If someone else can do the work for me, it is, it's a, the lessons that we learn over time as we are in business are, we have opinions, we have knowledge, we have experience that we need to share. It's way too easy to be like, here are some photos that I want to share in a blog post. Here's the general topic. Take it away, chat. And then you end up with garbage. I mean that, that is how you get, you know, garbage in, garbage out. And the way that we put this blog tool together and you mentioned you had talked to Kinsey and I had worked with. So I knew enough to know that I didn't know enough to build this tool to the level that I wanted to do that. And so I reached out to Kinsey Soderbergh and said, you know, teach me your ways, help me, help me build this thing. And what we were able to do together was I, I'm just pleased as punch with it. I feel like it is one of those. And one of the things that I really like about her is the, is her focus on human centered, human led AI where you really are taking the reins and saying, this is what we are building. And so the tool that we've built requires that the photographers who are using it first sort of dialogue with the tool to say, this is, these are my thoughts, these are my feelings, these are my experiences, these are my recommendations, whatever the, whatever the case may be, depending on the, the topic. And then it's really just the formatting, the writing, the SEO tools, all that sort of stuff. And the thing is, that is the, that is the time consuming part. So I feel like what we've done is sort of walk that line, and that's the hardest part right now. Maybe it'll get better in the future to where it really does do the work for you, but for now, I don't feel like that's where it is.
- [14:51]
B
Yeah, and I mean, I feel like I'm now calling one of my newest offers AI Powered, which is what I would call what you're doing as well. But I just find it so fascinating that you started with simple sales. You kind of went into revenue on repeat to help people, you know, fill their calendar or kind of space out their money as they go. And then you did like the marketing glow up. I mean, you've, you've kind of been like leading people here to where now you really do have a suite of offers that helps a photographer basically run like the entire back end of their business. Now you are missing systems, and that's why we're besties, because you can't ever do that to me. I'm not interested in taking over, not even a little. But I do feel that other than the systems to run the booking, you have really created, like, this offer suite that has all of it. So now let's talk about Consistency Club, because I feel like you and Dana have both been on this podcast and while we've mentioned Consistency Club, I don't ever know that I've like, given you a spotlight and been like, tell me about Consistency Club. So this is your opportunity on me. Tell me about Consistency.
- [15:56]
A
Right. Well, I will give credit where credit is due. Dana was the first person who really suggested Consistency Club. She didn't give it that name. I gave it the name. I will take credit for that. But she. So Dana, if you, if you're listening and you don't know me, me or her. So Dana is my marketing director at this can't be that hard. She has never been a professional photographer, but she has now worked with me for, I guess we're over four years now. And so she knows this business, this industry like the back of her hand, but she comes from a marketing background and she is great at what she does. And so she was always. She. I first hired her to do my social media and it grew from there. She was doing like 10 hours a week. Now she's basically full time. And at one point a couple of years ago, she and I were having a conversation and it was one of those, like, planning conversations for the following year. And she was like, I really, you know, I just, I look at photographers and what they are saying that they want and need and you know, they're always talking about how they wish that they could hire me because she is the one in our social media, like chatting with people most of the time. And, and she was saying, you know, they, they say they wish they could hire me. And it would be so prohibitively expensive for a photographer to hire a marketing director or marketing strategist. It's one thing to hire somebody who's going to go in and like post to Pinterest and Instagram for you, but it's a totally different thing for somebody to learn your business and your views and all that and have the ability to like pick out the photos and write the captions in a way that really mimics you. So she's talking about this and she was like, maybe what we can do is put our brains together, you with your photography knowledge and me with my marketing knowledge and, and create marketing materials that are sort of templated that come out every month. So January of 23 we launched the Consistency Club, which basically is just like there are parts of your marketing that are, it's not, I don't want to say you just have to check a box, but you kind of just have to show up, right? You have to show up on social, you have to show up in email and, and it's like, you don't need to reinvent the wheel completely. I would extend that to blogging, but unfortunately for all this time, blogging is not the sort of thing that you can create a template for, right? You can't say, here's a template. Now hundreds of photographers go write more or less the same blog post and drop it this month because Google would have a panic attack. So we left blogging out of the mix. More on that later. But anyway, so for two and a half years we have been providing email templates and social media templates. Plus we have like a little private marketing podcast that we drop each month. And it's really simple. It's a low cost monthly subscription and you just get a lot of the heavy lifting for your, your marketing content done for you. Does that do a good job explaining?
- [18:52]
B
It does. So I want to ask you, because I know that you're just now doing AI. Was there any AI that was introduced in those two portions? So email and social media, has there been any kind of AI prompting that you've given them? Or have you seen your members start saying that they were taking the materials that you were giving them and using AI to get across the finish line.
- [19:18]
A
Yeah, well, I haven't gotten a lot of people saying that. I have had some people say, oh, I turned your email from this month, your email template into a blog post. Or I, you know, I, I then took my email, fed it into chatgpt and bulked up my social media. So I took your social media prompts, but I also created my own in chat GPT, which is great. I mean, like, that's absolutely a, an important and smart way to repurpose your content. And I think that when you're feeding ChatGPT something that is really solid to begin with, obviously you're going to start to get better results.
- [19:54]
B
Yes. I mean, that's the biggest part that I talk about because I don't really, I have no desire to be a marketing person, but I do have my content hub for Airtable. And the one thing that I talk about over and over again is that whatever your long form piece of content is, as long as that is you and it's really your ideas and your voice, there is no limit to what you can like rinse and repeat from that one piece of content.
- [20:19]
A
Yep.
- [20:19]
B
And so now we're kind of getting into the blogging because for a lot of people that's a blog. For me, it's not a blog, it's my podcast episode.
- [20:25]
A
Right.
- [20:25]
B
I in the last, I would say year and a half when I get an idea, I don't think, oh, that would make a great blog post. I think, okay, let me go sit on my computer, record a podcast episode and then I will repurpose it. And in full transparency. I don't write my own blog posts anymore. It's either AI written or cara my blog post, my blog writer writes it. I mean, I have not written an actual blog post except for like a handful in the last year and a half, I would say. But you are now coming into this, hey, we are going to start working on blogging as an upgrade to Consistency Club. And that is going to give your members like one solid piece of long form content that they are going to be able to repurpose more than perhaps they were able to do with just a single email or even two emails in the past.
- [21:14]
A
Yeah, for sure. So the concept here is basically that for most photographers, blogging is the best long form content. Right. Like a photographer could certainly have a podcast. I am a photographer and I have a podcast, but I'm not, it's not a visual medium. Right. It's an auditory medium and like we as photographers are really trying to drive eyeballs to our website. And a blog post lives on your website and you can pepper it with beautiful photos that are alt tagged and, and then. But you, you're also telling Google like, hey, I am an active photographer. I've got experience in these fields. I live in this place. Like I'm legit send people my way when they're searching for photographers. It is one of those where it's like, it's not new, it's not bright and shiny, but it is absolutely a workhorse in terms of marketing forever. It has been a very difficult thing to do well without spending gobs and gobs of time like we were talking about earlier. And, and a lot of photographers who have blogs have been told like you should be blogging. And so what do they do? They do the easy thing or the easiest thing which is to take a bunch of their photos, string them together. Maybe they're, maybe they're all text. You know, they're creating alt text for those images and they're writing like a one paragraph intro at the beginning and, but they then are just letting the images do the work for them. That's fine. When it comes to someone browsing your website and wanting to kind of deep dive a particular session that you did or like a location that you are featuring in your blog, it doesn't really do much for you when it comes to SEO. So it's, you're doing the, you're doing some of the work and I get why you would cut that corner. But most photographers either don't feel like they can write or they don't want to spend a ton of time writing. And it is, I mean it's content creation is a time consuming thing if you want to do it well. So this opportunity to marry what I know about SEO and the structure of a high quality blog and all that sort of stuff with the knowledge that I know is in the heads of these photographers. Like we all have these stories that we can share to illustrate a point and we have opinions that are born of experience that we have. We have recommendations that we can share with people that are valuable. These are answers to questions that people are legitimately searching for. But getting that put all together in a way that's actually going to get found on Google and that's going to be interesting to the person who lands on that blog post and you know, is going to actually pull them in. That's the part that's hard and that's what we set out to fix with this tool.
- [24:03]
B
Yeah, because the writing is the last part.
- [24:06]
A
Yeah.
- [24:06]
B
I mean, if you sit down and you're trying to write and you haven't done all of the things that come before, like are the keywords that you're trying to rank? This blog post, does it even have any volume? Is anybody searching for this? And then, you know, you have the stories. And yes, we have a lot of stories. And yes, I tell my people all the time, you know, make a voice note, get the story out. I've told so many photographers, after a session, when you get in your car, turn on your voice note and just talk about what you liked about the session, anything interesting that happened, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I mean, this is usually advice that I'm giving people when they're asking someone else to write their blog posts, but it's also very useful for yourself. But so again, you've got all of the SEO parts, you've got the storytelling and then you've got the actual writing. But I think that when people are considering an AI tool, they're really thinking of, oh, but it's going to do the writing for me. And yes it will. But the first two parts that we talked about are what give your output like power. It's what actually makes it like a useful tool inside of your marketing ecosystem, if you will.
- [25:12]
A
And here's the, the downside to the proliferation and accessibility of AI now, and that is that the bar is going up at an exponential pace. Right? Like everybody has access to ChatGPT. So if you are just looking to create volume on a blog, you're, you may as well not be blogging at all. I think that Google's algorithms are getting better by the minute at identifying AI generated content. And it's not that they're not taking that. I mean, obviously, obviously if there's something on your website that's being refreshed or being added or whatever, then there's activity on there and that's, that is a good thing. It's not zero value, but it's pretty low value compared to once upon a time when if you were writing a thousand word or two thousand word blog post every week, even if it wasn't great, just that amount of work was being recognized. Now we are looking at like anybody can type a garbage prompt into ChatGPT and get garbage output and then get that going. So it really does come down to quality. Something that is passing muster if you put it into an AI checker. And that again, really, really Gives value. And this is the thing that I will come back to. Either it's the hill that I will die on. Everything when it comes to marketing, everything, when it comes to. You can cut corners in a bunch of different places, but ultimately you need to put everything that you do through the lens of like, am I creating value here? Am I doing something that I'm proud of? Because if you're not, it might help you in the very short term, but in the long term, it's. It's like a ball and chain, you know, I mean, it kind of drags you down.
- [27:04]
B
No, and I mean, we. I feel like we recognize this a lot with social media because back in the day, the thing was, hey, post to Instagram five, six times a day. Right. And slowly, I think that we are all starting to understand that quality is much better than volume. I don't see a lot of people posting to their feed five, six, seven times a day anymore. Unless you're like a content media manager.
- [27:24]
A
Right, Right.
- [27:25]
B
But I don't see photographers doing it. But I think that we're now kind of honing in on an era where we are going to really think about the quality of what we're putting out there, instead of just doing it to check off a box or trying to overwhelm the algorithm, whether that's a social media algorithm, or you're trying to, like, trick Google SEO right, into thinking that you are a. That you're a knowledge expert just because of the amount of content that you are pumping out.
- [27:53]
A
Right.
- [27:53]
B
So I want to kind of like, I want to get really specific now because the tool that you have created for Consistency Club, that's going to be like an upgrade you do have where, you know, they have to give it some information. And then you guys are going to be putting monthly blog posts that they can choose from. But then I want to talk about what happens after your tool gives them the blog post. Because this is the part that I keep harping on. And I think it's so amazing that you are still keeping it in, you know, in the back of your mind or in the front of your mind, I guess, when they get the blog post. So let's say I'm a member of Consistency Club. I've chosen my blog post. I've given it a story. It's gone through the iteration of your tool, and. And now it has sent me my blog post. Can I take that blog post and directly put it on my blog?
- [28:40]
A
You might be able to. So I'm just going to back up and give you a little more context. So when someone first accesses this tool, the first thing that they do is fill out a very long, detailed questionnaire. And this is a one time deal. You don't have to do it more than once, but we do. Like, according to our beta testers, it's taking about 60 to 90 minutes to do well, where you're answering questions about your brand voice and you're uploading writing samples and you're talking about your ideal customers and where you're based and all these different things, right? So you fill that out, then you get to the point where you get to choose like, oh, this is the blog topic that I'm going to write about this month. And what we're doing is we are actually, we have enlisted AI's help with this. AI is going each month and scraping the web for trending topics in each niche. And I think we've identified 13 different, different niches. So each niche gets four options each month. You'll see all the options. So if you see an option in a different niche that you're like, oh, this pertains to my business and I could do this, you can use it. But like, if you're a newborn photographer, the first ones you'd want to check out are probably the newborn photography specific topics. So then you choose a topic. You can also choose to like, choose your own adventure on the topics, you can put in your own topic, but then you answer three questions about that topic that typically come down to share a story that you have about this, share your recommendations about this. So it's establishing this as your individual unique blog post. Then the system takes it in, compiles all of that, puts it with your brand profile, and creates a blog post that meets certain specific parameters that we have put together in terms of length. It gives you SEO specific stuff at the end and it is written with like your H1, H2, H3 tags and all that sort of stuff. So you get that. And as I said, according to our beta testers there some of the content is coming out at a level where they're like, I think I changed one sentence and then I just put it in my blog. But chances are you're going to want to do some additional work after the fact. Whether it is editing for length. If you might, you know, there might be a section that you want to bulk up a little bit. You might want to edit for content a little bit. Like you have a thought like, oh, there's another story that I'd like to add in Here you might want to change the wording. Obviously, ChatGPT doesn't always get it 100% spot on, even if it's well trained. And then, and then the last thing is that even if you don't need any content changes, you're probably going to want to add photos to this blog. And you're going to. It gives you some recommended photos based on the content, but you're going to have specific photos. You can. What we've done is we've created a custom GPT that everybody gets access to after the fact. That is sort of the finalization, like finalization. Did I just make that up? Where you finalize your blog so you can edit for content, but you can also screenshot the images that you want to include and it'll give you alt text for those images.
- [31:57]
B
I mean, it's brilliant. And the reason that I say this is because I feel like now we're getting closer and closer to where if you've done a really good job of, you know, doing your brand voice and you worked with Kinsey and this is what she talks about all the time. And, you know, like you said, that questionnaire takes 60 to 90 minutes to like nail your brand voice. But even if you've done a really good job of nailing that brand voice, when it comes out, maybe out of, you know, I'll go back and talk about like a regular custom GPT. I am a big fan of making sure that you have allotted the time to go back and forth with it because I think in the beginning what we were getting was such trash. Nobody saw. Oh no, there's no saving this. Like, I should have just taken the time and written it myself. Would have been, you know, much better than what came out. But like, now I have a couple custom GPTs that I've made for myself and when it spits it out, it does give me those moments of, oh, I mean, I really should have said this instead of this. And so then I go back and forth with it. And to me, the value of getting a tool from someone like you or me or someone else who's put in the same amount of effort to create these tools is that we're giving them a really, I would say first draft, but maybe yours is like, you know, just shy of a final draft. But we're giving it to them and our intention is not just copy and paste it and don't consider what we've given you. I think it's that, you know, you need to read it over, you need to make sure, that it feels good for you, but, like, 10 minutes, 10 minutes of adjustments versus the whole day that you said it was taking you to write a blog post before.
- [33:32]
A
And the thing is, we are not professional bloggers. Like, this is that you want the content to be good. You want it to be reflective of your brand. You want it to be something that you stand behind and that you know what it says and you know, all that sort of thing, but at the same time, you don't. That's not your job. Your job in this particular case, is to get eyeballs on your website so that people hire you to take photos for them. So, you know, for instance, podcasting. When I first started podcasting lo these many five years ago, I remember, right, first of all, writing complete scripts for my early, you know, podcast episodes and then reading them and trying to make, you know, it's like I would hem and haw over every line and is it perfect? And whatever. And of course, it wasn't perfect, but it took me a lot more time. It's still not perfect. But nowadays it's like, okay, here are the thoughts that I want to share. I'm going to share them in my actual, authentic voice, and I'm not going to worry too much if I stumble a little bit or if I ramble a little bit, because the truth is, I. If I'm giving valuable content, people will hopefully forgive me for that. And if they don't, that is what it is. But my job isn't. I'm not a professional podcaster. I am an educator, and I have good information. So that's what I'm trying to convey. And I would say the same thing. Like, hopefully, what we're doing is creating a tool that makes it as quick as possible for you to check this box so that you can again, continue to grow your audience and bring people into your ecosphere so that they see your photos and they're like, I want to hire you.
- [35:17]
B
Yeah, I'm going to say one more thing. I recently joined someone's program. I don't know if you know this. It's called launch your own way. So that I can start, like, doing the full selling, marketing, all this stuff. But one thing that I've learned recently is that I really need to work on my positioning and my messaging. And the reason that I'm saying this is because it's so relevant to what we're talking about right now. I recently shared my workflow Fast pass, which is actually the new iteration of the offer that I came on your podcast to talk about before. So now it's not you're going to do the creation of the workflows with the AI tool. It's that I'm doing it for you so that I have reviewed it and you have it in your hands, and you know that it was reviewed by me and that it's absolutely going to work. But the one thing that Kelsey keeps saying over and over again is, yeah, but you need to make sure that you're hammering two things, that it's fast and that it's custom. And I feel like for you, it's the exact same thing. Like, we're, we're talking about all these pieces and, you know, how we're going to make your life easier. But at the end of the day, it comes down to two things. We are helping you do it so much faster than any human could possibly do it. And it is customized for you so that when you get the output, you aren't spending, you know, a day refining. It's like five, 10 minutes. And then it's whatever time it takes you to upload it to your blog. You know, actually set the. Whatever you have to do behind the scenes. And then you hit publish, like an entire day down to maybe one hour. And then you can actually put more content out there, which is going to help Google see you as an expert and it's going to bring more eyeballs to your website.
- [36:55]
A
Right. And am I custom writing this for you?
- [36:58]
B
No.
- [36:59]
A
If I were, it would cost a lot more than, you know, like it does for sure. And I. That's the beauty of leveraging these tools. And I, and I want to kind of come back because I think that there are people who struggle with, especially as artists who struggle with the like. Are we replacing ourselves? You know, there are copywriters out there for whom writing is their income and their livelihood. And, you know, here we are, we're using these bots to. To replace them. And my feeling is they are professional writers. I want them to focus on the things that are, I think, in general, obviously there's a messy middle that we're just entering now. And a lot of people will find themselves out of a job in the way that they define their job in the past and all that sort of thing. It is the direction that things are moving. And as small business owners, I think that as long as we are focused on not staying in our lane in that again, I am a photographer, I am not a blogger. And so using AI to help me blog is moving my business forward. And it's Allowing me to do more of what I want and sort of need to be doing out in the world for a professional copywriter. Yeah, they're probably going to see some loss of income for things like, oh, I just want you to write my. My blogs. But at the same time, maybe that frees them up to write a novel or do something that is a little bit less commercial transaction driven and is actually adding value and meaning into the world.
- [38:42]
B
So, I mean, I know a lot of copywriters, and some of them are starting to embrace AI. I finally had Courtney Fanning on my podcast after hearing her on yours years ago.
- [38:50]
A
Yeah.
- [38:50]
B
And I don't know that I told you this, but when we stopped recording, I literally told her, okay, I am going to take your four buyer profiles and go build a custom GPT. I'm going to send it to you later today. I mean, and I didn't have very much knowledge. I just had the results for my quiz, some things that she had given me, and I did it and I sent it to her. And she was like, okay, like, I think that I want to explore this further because, like, this is amazing. Like, it was giving suggestions and all this. But does that replace her? I think not. Because would I have known what the four buyer profiles were without her? Absolutely not. Like, I needed Courtney to have, like, the framework and the knowledge and things like that. So, I mean, I don't think that it's going to replace humans. In fact, every time I do an AI episode, I end it with. And don't you guys worry, my human teammates are completely safe because I am not doing the work that it takes to put these things into the world after my AI, you know, assistants have created it. I am not scheduling my podcast episodes. I am not putting my blogs on my blog. I mean, there's a lot of other things that my human teammates are doing, and if I can get this content written in a different way, it doesn't mean that I don't need them. It means that I can ask them to do different things that will help me get a better ROI of my business. Because what I'm getting from my AI assistants for that particular, like, purpose can be crossed off or the time that it takes can be shortened. So, yeah, I mean, AI is here to stay, and we are getting better and better at using it as a tool, but I definitely don't think that it's going to, like, come for everybody's jobs, even if you're a copywriter, because I don't know that I want a sales page written by ChatGPT. No matter how many frameworks I put in there that I don't still have reviewed by someone with more copywriting knowledge than me.
- [40:40]
A
Yeah, absolutely. My hope is that it does free us up to do the things that we are sort of best at and that really are additive in the world and not just sort of recycling what's out there, which is what AI does really well.
- [40:56]
B
Yeah. But if you give it more of you, it doesn't seem like it's just giving you everybody else's garbage. It's giving you stuff that's unique to you.
- [41:03]
A
Yeah.
- [41:03]
B
Yeah.
- [41:04]
A
So this is dropping before our official launch, right?
- [41:07]
B
Yes.
- [41:07]
A
Of the tool.
- [41:08]
B
When you are listening to this. This is the week before her tool drops.
- [41:12]
A
Okay. So on August 6, we are actually, like, inviting everybody to come and watch this happen kind of in live in real time and ask questions and play with the tool and see what it can do. That's happening August 6th. Everybody's invited. It's free. So you can go to this can't bethard.com summit to grab a seat there if you have missed that. If you're listening to this after August 6th, then just go to this can't betheart.com club, because it is inside. The Consistency Club is where this tool lives.
- [41:47]
B
Okay. And I had a. I had a solo episode planned for you guys, but we covered it all today, so I'm gonna think of something else to air out.
- [41:55]
A
Ruined it. I'm sorry.
- [41:56]
B
It's okay. I mean, I do like having these conversations with other people because when I talk about, like, hey, I do a much better job than chat GPT it does sound, you know, it sounds. It sounds different when it's just me saying it.
- [42:09]
A
Just because it sounds different doesn't mean it's not true.
- [42:12]
B
That's true.
- [42:13]
A
Yeah.
- [42:13]
B
All right, guys, I hope that in this episode that you have gotten, like, a really good behind the scenes of what it looks like when people like Anami and I are building AI tools in our business that help you do the things that we are experts in faster and with a better first draft, if you will. And so, once again, I really do want all of you to go and check out Anami's Consistency club. It is thiscan'tbethard.comclub. that's it for this episode. See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Business First Creatives podcast. For more information on this podcast, including show notes and links to the video podcast, please visit coleyjames.com podcast. Are you loving the podcast Sharing is caring. Until next time.
- [43:09]
A
All right, can you see why I love basically any chance that I have to sit down with Coley? She's just one of those people who keeps me thinking bigger and trying new things. If this conversation got you curious about using AI more strategically in your own business, I would love for you to come join us in the Consistency Club. That is where this new blog tool lives, along with our monthly email and social templates to make your marketing easier and more consistent. You can learn more@thiscantbethard.com Club and if you use the link in our show notes, you will get your first month with the Blog Builder for just $9. Thanks for listening in. I'll see you next week. That's it for this week's episode of this Can't Be that Hard. I'll be back same time, same place next week. If you like the show, be sure to check out thiscan'tbethard.com to explore all the resources we have for photographers. And of course it would mean the world to me if you would leave a review of the show on itunes or Spotify. As always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.