and welcome to day three of the cloudways Prepon 2024 hopefully yall have had a great time the last two days want to give a special thanks to all of our speakers and panelists and all the cloudways team so far and of course our amazing audience uh maybe let’s give give ourselves and and our speakers a great Round of Applause thank you Solem Sol for being here um so great to have you guys here the last few days how many of you here were were with us uh over the last two days Laden’s back yep loving the chat maybe we can just kind of light that up let’s uh welcome everyone say hi we’ve got an amazing day ahead we’ll talk about some of the things we’ve got on the docket for today yesterday was absolutely fantastic revenue and growth um those are two of my personal favorite topics um today we’re going to be focused on AI and Innovation so we’ve got some amazing activities for you uh planned today we’ve got some awesome speakers we’ve got some additional games hey what’s up Christopher hey what’s up Lindsay Sebastian been here for most the talks love that let’s keep those uh emojis and memes flying today let’s keep the internet interaction going um we’re going to be doing some fun uh AI Innovation challenges and quizzes and activities today of course in between our amazing Keynotes and we have a special guest for us after we announce the contest winners this afternoon uh the team has been so amazing to get give us a little bit of a a Cod ways Prepon Afterparty uh we have a comedian joining us by the name of Tara Brown She performs clean and family friendly comedy across the country she’s been on um some of the stages with the the the best comedians of our time um she’s been recognized by um some of the major news organizations out there Charlotte 5 um uh Newsweek New York Post Charlotte Observer Lancaster News all that good stuff so we’re we’re gonna have an amazing day we’re gonna end with some fun after we announce the contest winners at the end of the day with a little standup bit from uh Miss Tara Brown so I’m personally looking forward to that it’s going to be a good time to to be able to kick back relax really enjoy um all this amazing content that we’ve had here at the Prepon uh one other thing before we go into our first Speaker Mr Andy craden who’s going to be giving a fantastic presentation on AI he’s been one of my favorite speakers recently on AI I’ve had to be able to host him on our our podcast the digital agency show but before we get into Andy’s presentation uh I just want to give a quick call out if you haven’t yet chatted gone by the booth Booth uh the booth feature within the platform make sure you do that today we’ve got double the points and double the prizes for folks checking out those booths today so we’ve got some additional gift cards hosting credits all that good stuff and you’ll get additional points for the overall leaderboard contest if you hit up those booths today so make sure you guys do that um you’re going to get double the points double leaderboards on today so explore those booths while we’re hanging out here over the rest of the day three of Prepon all right um I think I’ve covered all of our announcements to the day I’m excited to be hanging out with you all in chat throughout the day we’ve got some fantastic guest speakers coming up but we’re going to get started here today with our first speaker with Mr Andy craden here in just one moment three of the cloudways preath on so good to see so many agency owners e-commerce businesses smbs engaging with us over these past couple of days really excited to be introducing our next speaker hanging out with us we’re gon to be continuing our theme on AI and Innovation we are really excited to be welcoming Andy craden to our stage Andy is a co-founder and CMO of orbit media an award-winning 50 person agency based in Chicago he’s helped over a thousand businesses with his digital marketing advice he’s written over 600 articles on content strategy SEO ga4 and AI if you guys were here with us on our web growth Summit Andy gave a gamechanging presentation on uh the changing landscape in SEO with the invention uh in of AI so we’re really excited to be welcoming Andy back to our program here Andy good to have you here on cloudways preath thanks for having me Brent I’ve really been looking forward to this I’m a fan of this event and uh excited about this topic we’re going to do AI for B2B social media which is super interesting lots of angles and we’re basically going to just rip through a bunch of uh specific use cases and AI methods for getting better results and social with AI very cool I I love when you you share your stuff man it’s like real Hands-On actionable tips and hacks and techniques so I’m like I’m ready with my pad of paper and notes I’m going to be taking some notes and implementing stuff uh for my own business so really looking forward to it Andy you’ve got the stage man great let’s hope not to disappoint you Bren if you like it it’s good because you’re a pro at this and you know what you’re talking about okay I’m G to click this uh share button share screen share entire screens and and this is recorded of course so I’m going to go kind of quickly but there’s a lot uh but you’re getting all this content anyway right and you can go back and watch it in slow motion or you know copy and paste the prompts whatever you need I Comment Spam want to start with this because AI puts us in kind of dangerous territory with social media because it it uh it reduces the cost to do certain things like generate content including things like comments and I am not fuzzing out the names these are actual comments and you can see these are people who just bought a tool that is automatically jumping into streams and leaving the same comment again and again look at that comment spam this is AI generated comment spam I don’t even know if this needs to be AI honestly could just a you know everyday algorithm can do stuff like this not good not happy not healthy not good for the internet this is antisocial media it’s the opposite I mean this is clearly spam if I could say that there’s one thing that should not be done by a robot it’s the comment because that’s supposed to be your point of view that’s your chance to have a conversation right Outsource tasks but don’t Outsource your voice please and I’ve seen it it’s getting a little bit more sophisticated are people using tools put it that kind of generated a bit more including this like copy and paste thing it’s clearly just filling in the blank uh I’m seeing this like one after the other and they’re just like kind of all the same in a stream and it’s not good okay so let’s not do that I’m going to go through methods that are much more ethical sustainable effective uh and you’re going to notice that it’s not mostly about generating words uh I’m going to use it for analysis I’m going to use it for ideas I’m going to use it for uh to make me a better marketer uh from two perspectives one to get results for the brand two to get results for yourself this’s going to be we’re going to uh the last third of this is going to be mostly about personal branding which I think we should all pay some attention to here hopefully uh so first how AI can Content Formats discover topics this one is kind of um this will take a second this is the biggest one and I but I’m starting with it because I believe strongly in this there’s good research on what what formats for Content Drive results this article from from years ago published by Steve rayon co-founder of buz suumo changed my content strategy forever here’s what Steve discovered after analyzing a million articles he’s like a statistician uh he said if you want to create content that creates a high level of both shares and links we’ll call those key performance indicators for social in search then you should concentrate on one of two things opinion forming authoritative content or well researched and evidenced content I’m going to paraphrase Steve here for a moment strong opinion and original research now I’m going to say a strong opinion is what gets the best Traction in Social I’m going to say original research is what gets the best Traction in search nothing attracts links like original research pieces it’ll always be part of my content mix but strong opinion that triggers response and responses trigger social algorithms here’s an example I wrote an article about what you remove from your website I make some I make a case here press releases don’t belong on websites they’re not digital content best practices at all for immediate release what does that mean am I not supposed to read this yet that little you know crappy blurb about the about the about section at the bottom this is nothing to do with digital content this is a press release turn it into a story you can do a better job uh PDFs why do people put PDFs on websites maybe as an alternate version but everything should also be HTML in other words I’m making I’m taking a stand on some little things pretty simple little mundane things and one of them I said don’t put dates on blog posts you can put the date in the text but don’t use the don’t use the blog template for the date okay I make a video for this 13 things you should remove from your website immediately this video goes on YouTube 775 mostly negative comments people are very worked up about this but that’s what thought leadership is that’s what strong opinion is I’m going to use Seth godden’s definition of thought leadership it always creates attention it’s about making assertions you have to be willing to be wrong you can be certain that some people will disagree think about that for a minute if you can’t disagree with it it isn’t thought leadership that’s the point draw a line in the sand plant a little flag that’s what the best content marketers the best social media marketers are doing because that’s when people believe that’s when they that’s when people can really connect okay so this goes on YouTube and people start called me Sleazy and untrustworthy I’m most secure in myself this isn’t bothering too much Matt cat cool uh this guy’s got all caps hates what my recommendation this person said I told people to make low information useless blogs uh do not remove the date in all caps said DG dg0 z0000 Z my beautiful Health won’t even watch it she said that the comments told her to that it’s the advice is terrible it goes on and on so uh this person says I don’t know what I’m talking about I should let a real experienced uxer talking I’ve been part of the planning process for more than 1,000 Web projects in my career 24 years I have I made an out of hundreds of analytics accounts I do have some experience here SP sting uh anyway it goes on and on some people give me good feedback some people give me irrelevant feedback this person thinks I dye my hair I don’t dye my hair for what it’s worth just for the record I don’t know why you’re going there key2 okay but what but my point is this YouTube thinks that it’s worth watching and they showed it to 300,000 people that’s like 100x that’s more than 100x my typical YouTube video I’m happy to get 2,000 views that’s good for me 300,000 why did that happen because the engagement the topic triggered the engagement the engagement triggered the algorithm so my first advice here and the best thing that you can do in social media is to understand how to take a little stand on something without necessarily going into controversy and that differ enes from AI because chat GPT can’t throw a punch but it can help Provocative Topics you find provocative topics so I’m here to share with you now my topic research mundane but provocative topic research prompt I’m going to do it for this company I don’t know this company it’s a space port okay we’re going to be a Spaceport for a minute we’re looking for topics to connect with our audience commercial satellite operators ready what are some relatively mundane almost trivial space industry topics that professionals have very strong opinions about these answers are fantastic Imperial versus metric units oh that’s going to start a big conversation how do they name spacecraft and celestial bodies that will defin people have people will take a stand like they’re going to come out for and against something they’ve got a point of view like as Pluto a planet rocket design philosophies reusable versus Expendable these are going to trigger my audience to have bigger conversations just use that provocative but mundane topic prompt and you’ll find out in your category what people really care about this one’s for a company that targets office manager you know what everybody cares about the temperature in their office the thermostat they’re going to get in fights over this that’s a provocative Topic open floor plans are they really that good so you can just imagine what this does to your marketing right what this could do in social media again we’re not taking we’re not we’re not talking about geopolitics and social justice and gun control I’m trying to just trigger a little interaction here I’m trying to give people something to talk about I’m also not trying to be correct in a way uh that comment I said where you shouldn’t put press releases on your blog I know a woman who totally disagrees with that so I got her to provide to me a contributor quote I put it right next to that piece of advice what Andy why would you want other people to dissent disagree with you in your article because I’m trying to start a conversation it’s like moving the comments from under the blog into the blog right I’m just trying to have a conversation I’m trying to give my reader something to talk about here’s some more prompts what do people in your what are people in your industry afraid to answer fantastic insights what false things do people in your industry think are true fantastic insights what are the most common assertions that are least likely to be supported by evidence might find some research related topics what are important things that are not covered humans can’t do this that’s an AI only method what are important topics that are unlikely to be covered by the big blogs the only way you could do that is by reading every blog in the world right impossible what counternarrative opinions are least likely to be discussed by thought leaders that word is powerful this is how this is you can you know an experienced content strategist can write good prompts right that maybe a junior person can’t the junior person isn’t thinking about counter narratives right but the the pro- social media marketer might so write the prompt and give it to your Junior marketers here’s an example what common assertions are least likely to be supported by evidence what counter narratives right it comes back with these things these are you know these are topics I could potentially cover and in I learned this from Brook Ellis in the social penetration Theory this is a well researched thing it’s like an academic topic that is how people connect that is what’s memorable that is what creates an emotional bond between two individuals it’s not cliches it’s not facts it’s opinions and core feelings that’s what you’re going for in social media that’s what matters that’s what that’s what at least some of the time okay an even better way to do this is to First give AI your persona which we’ve talked about uh and then talk to Persona Prompt it about topics you can learn the fears and hopes and secrets of this audience here’s what a Persona prompt looks like you can deconstruct these and use them for yourselves better yet upload your your battle tested ideal client profiles build me Persona of a job title commercial satellite operator at an industry Global Telecom company size billion in Revenue responsibilities and challenges planning launch missions needs and requirements they’re considering a launch services provider they need to deploy communication satellites okay AI give me four things I want to know the hope and dreams I want to know the fears and concerns I want to know their emotional triggers and I want to know their decision criteria for selecting a company like mine right how they buy this is the what this is the the core of a Persona and it’s made from a simple prompt breathtakingly useful people once you have a synthetic member of your target audience that’s amazing I don’t know if there’s a better use for AI than this oh write me a blog post in 10 seconds that’s the worst use of AI if you can write a if you use a to write a blog post for you in 10 seconds guess what your target audience can also write that same prompt and get the article that you know that’s the last thing you should write opinion perspective point of view beliefs that AI cannot write AI has no opinions it can’t do it every day most of the things you say could never be said by AI I’m GNA speak some sentences AI can’t write Brent I’m digressing here a tiny bit marketers overspend on technology uh pop-ups are bad for your for for trust you know uh rice is better than pasta uh red licorice is not licorice whatever like these are a million things that we all say every day right that are AI could never say it doesn’t have a point of view it has no background it has no story right it has no beliefs go ask AI what it really cares what does AI care about NADA what do you care about and I care about a lot right we can have a we can connect that’s what social’s about so what social interaction onlineer off is really about okay I digressed I’m back on track it gives us a persona it’s probably wrong fix it of course don’t trust AI it’s it’s going to be incorrect you got to tell it what you know tell it to improve the Persona based on what you know to be correct now try these prompts what widely accept accepted best practices my does my Persona secretly reject what common advice does this Persona think is harmful what seemingly unrelated topics does this Persona have think has crucial lessons for their industry right what could the movie Titanic teach us about you know marketing automation you get the idea what commonly held fear or concern does this Persona think is overblown or misguided this is catnip in social media this is it this is decoding the psychology of a larger audience for triggering engagement which triggers algorithms I think it makes sense right you’re getting this unpopular view did they hold about a trending topic I got these from Lisa Adams great person to follow on the topic of AI uh Lisa and I I when I meet someone who really knows stuff I want to learn I ask them if they wouldn’t mind doing a call with me every month or so right I I G and I are constantly trading ideas uh this is the the best way to learn AI I found okay moving on moving on we’re at only at number two uh it speeds up here I promise AI can generate images for you Images uh these images are useful for social because they’re visually impactful but they’re not very specific uh I’m going to use do everything that I do is in chatu PT because people have it I’m not advocating for chatu PT or co-pilot or Claude use whatever you like I’m just showing you in these I I don’t care what you whatever you have access to and and enjoy using so here’s DOI uh Hey AI make me a a faces of a small diverse group of satellite operators in the control room during lunch wow that is impressive that is that is crisp and Vivid that is colorful and beautiful that’s a beautiful image that didn’t exist 10 seconds ago uh but can we pump it up so this is where it so my takeaway here is not that you can use it for images but that you can keep pushing it to create more interesting images now they’re excited it was Su a successful launch look how happy those people are they’re thrilled that the rocket launch was so successful Tears in their eyes that that’s that’s a compelling picture legally you can’t copyright this in the United States because it had no substantial human involvement uh so this is a and I’m not a lawyer but there’s interesting aspects of images for uh AI generated images um they’re celebrating the most successful rocket launch of all time they got out the champagne the Rockets the Rockets launching in the control room itself there’s other Rockets launching what is going on here the happiest rocket launch party of all time filled with ecstatic satell operators the rocket launch was totally awesome I mean Super Rad see I’m just throwing in words to try push it in a different corner like you get the idea like this is this this what prompting is right it’s about the the cues the little verbal cues you’re giving it totally awesome Super Rad who it went in kind of a cartoon Direction you can see what that did look at how excited these people are um I lost my diversity though uh can we get that back in more diverse I guess diversity means vaguely ethnic party hats the rocket is launching inside the control room people are being blown backwards there’s a safety risk here it’s making up new Flags anyway you get the idea iterate on those AI generation on those image generation prompts um and don’t expect to get anything don’t you can’t control it right don’t try to fine-tune it just uh uh keep it broad these are what I consider to be long shot prompts moving on method three we’ve got 10 of these right let’s let keep going find a to produce sound bites okay if you took the transcript of this entire uh session and wanted to promote it somehow uh you’d want to find the the juiciest little most compelling unexpected thing and use that in the social post right I’m generating a ton of language right now what which of these things I’m saying are the most surprising counterintuitive compelling memorable very hard to do you’d have to watch it and pay close attention the whole time instead get the transcript and give it to AI what’s the most provocative thing in this sound bite I had a conversation with Paul rer founder of the marketing AI Institute and Chris car founder of ferot here we are fun conversation it went up on YouTube scroll down I’m promoting this on social somehow grab the show transcript copy and paste the show transcript into a text file upload the text file I can repurpose that very easily right suggest articles based on that interesting AI search engines rise of generative AI navigating privacy totally based on the article right not not based on blue sky but the article now I want to promote on social which statements in this video are people most likely to be surprised by that’s what’s going to work in Social I need that sound bite that quote right that counternarrative that surprising quote which sound bite makes the best video clip hey if I want to cut 10 seconds of this out and use that in social media as a short form video to promote the pece or get broader engagement that’s exactly how to find it AI is amazing at this right it doesn’t get tired it will sit there and read every word in the transcript and find and compare it to the rest of the internet and highlight for you which the things are more surprising and it’s actually telling me on which lines right if you leave the trans the time code in on YouTube it will uh it will reference that and then you can make that these are surprising statements right um and some of them are pretty good uh and some of them are garbage and that’s fine if 80% of what gives you is trash no big deal the 20% might be gold you only spent three you know four minutes on this exercise anyway we’re not super invested don’t dismiss AI because something it gave you wasn’t good nothing in this life produces something 100% perfect and don’t dismiss Ai and and don’t don’t um don’t get too excited about Ai and think that everything that it gives you is great right this we need to calibrate our perspective with this technology we need to have a relationship with it on some level that is uh that isn’t either you know I drink all the Kool-Aid everything should be done with AI now or I don’t trust that accuracy bias labor market impact copyright law I hate this we’re just looking for Value here people you’re just trying to get some utility I’m having it uh give me a perspective I’ve done things in AI that were worthless I spent 45 minutes trying to teach it to recommend internal links for articles and it still doesn’t work I’ll get it right but many of these methods aren’t that time save I’m I’m not looking to save time actually I’m trying to get be I’m looking for performance I have no interest in efficiency really I’m trying to get 10 100x results sounds strange not strange uh the goal isn’t to isn’t to do isn’t to be 10 minutes faster the goal is to drive a marketing outcome and the top 1% in any category in any channel in any Topic in any format get 100x results do whatever you can to get greater performance don’t look to find deficiencies look to find deficiencies and then fix that thing I digress again Brent I’m I’m back on track AI is g to uh analyze some social media data for me here right this is also kind of a uh not a shortcut at all but you’ll get good insights from this I’m un LinkedIn it’s almost my only Social Network anymore analytics and tools on my profile I click I land I got to choose a long date range and I’m going to export this now when you export a file you’re going to look at at that file and you’re going to see either structured data or you’re going to see unstructured data unfortunately AI uh LinkedIn is a lot of unstructured data that is not that helpful this is this needs a ton of work and I want I want this to show topics I want this to include the post I wanted to do analysis on my LinkedIn engagement and this is just links and dates and not not very good so I’m going to uh spend a couple Analytics hours literally I spent let’s see it was before breakfast my kids were asleep I sat there copying and pasting all the posts tagging and assigning to categories until I’ve got this and this is perfect this is exquisite this is structured and ready for analysis I’ve got the topic for each the text for each post I’ve got the topics and categories I’ve got the format is that a newsletter is that a video I’ve got the all the social metrics Impressions engagements comments and reposts very useful upload this to Ai and it’s going to give me insights uh you’re an expert social media marketing data analyst you can find insights with data uh which topic gets the most growth engagement for impression it comes back and does some nice analysis for me it’s looking pretty good deeper I need more draw heatmap Matrix showing the normalized averages of Impressions engagements and and comments for each topic that chart uh was surprising to me this is a normalized color-coded heatmap matrix showing the relative performance of every topic I talk about in social media topics on the left engagement on the uh in the metrics on the bottom look at what this found when I talk about web design and ux uh I get a lot of Engagement but those people never follow when I talk about analytics I get very low engagement but those people are the ones that that’s where I’m getting my growth that’s where I’m getting followers fascinating right uh a lot of social media strategists have known this for years uh it’s it’s it’s a it’s counterintuitive but the things that you do in social media that get lots of visible engagement may not be driving the actual business outcomes you were hoping for they may just be like big conversations right like that um you know provocative topics it’s but the things that get very low engagement look like quiet they look quiet you hear crickets like what happened no one’s engaging that one actually might be the one that is uh where people see it not much to talk about but they say I want more of that I want this guy in my streams I’m going to follow this person so uh that’s true in in other channels as well right um don’t get too hooked on these visible metrics social media platforms have gamified engagement and they’re trying to get you to pay attention to these certain metrics by making them really really big at the top that’s it’s called the availability her estic marketers get really enamored by these Topline metrics that’s not the that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing here people be a bottomline marketer okay okay I’m not going to digress anymore before I run out of time okay other interesting ideas what three-word trigrams appear in top performing posts not Junior marketers may not think about three-word trigrams uh a black belt social media Chessmaster level genius might think a lot about trigrams uh but actually in this case I didn’t get that much insights from this I know why that one’s there it’s because I was talking about that explain though inter diagrams interesting look diagrams visuals there’s a so uh sometimes you get more insight sometimes you don’t let’s try some other prompts how does word count correlate with performance numbers emojis how do Emojis correlate with performance not best practices on someone else’s blog for your blog your audience your content your social metrics I exported this from my profile right perform a semantic distance analysis to find subtopics that are not in my data set but would work well semantic distance analysis another combination of words for a prompt that maybe a junior marketer wouldn’t think of but quite compelling right you can find the the distance between like there’s a hole in your content because it’s measuring the distance between uh you know the the the the relevance of these related topics use uh using topics tone and voice create a LinkedIn post that would drive high engagement let’s see you make a draft AI I would like to check it out I’ll probably rewrite it all but let’s see what you got summarize the content strategy oh wow if you gave it that many if you copied and paste it in 40 different LinkedIn posts don’t leave that conversation with AI until you ask it to summarize and give you a style guide or give you a Content strategy based on what you gave it my buddy Tony uh I wrote about this I think I made a video about this we could share it um and then my buddy Tony did this and uh I and then wrote to me this email and I’ll read it to you I tried Andy’s method of using AI or ask him for this quote that’s why I put my name I asked I tried method for using AI to analyze my LinkedIn post and adjusted my content based on what I learned then I did it again six months later Impressions went up 13x I think Tony was doing some other good things in LinkedIn at the time I saw him do this but his engagement it just exploded and uh he he attributes it to this approach using the data to see what worked and then uh tuning up the content strategy based on performance right these topics lead to this outcome I want that outcome I’m going to use those topics right uh so he says crazy what some data driven insights can help you accomplish thanks Tony love the feedback uh I’m doing this myself and uh results have been quite good um the trick is to get your data structured it’s hard okay number five let a I make a style guide this one’s short because we just did it basically once you gave it all the text to just one more prompt create a prompt that can work as a style guide and can be given to Chad PT so AI can effectively write future posts in the same voice tone and style that what it gives back there’s your style guide thanks AI copy paste save as PDF upload to your shared prompt library and now anybody on your team can Shared Prompt Library go grab that anytime right if they’re working on some content strategy thing or social media or SEO they can jump into that document this is my shared prompt Library just a Google drive folder bunch of documents inside inside each document there’s tons of of prompts that I’ve hammered on for months right they’re I know that they work there’s a different folder for prompts that are kind of in beta I’m not very confident in them there’s some that don’t work at all like that one I mentioned that’s an that’s an alpha prompt right now uh but anyway once they get promoted to this level anyone can use them anytime and I want welcome my team to contribute and collaborate here this is a great place to upload that that PDF Persona that PDF Style guy you know maybe a data export things that you want to be able to give the AI easily uh very very useful that’s scaling up that’s AI on teams um without a fancy tool number six moving right along number six let AI discover uh what to promote with this one okay here’s my thesis for you you have articles that have 10x engagement far down the funnel people who read that one are so inspired and you built so much trust with them that they will actually give you an email address that takes a lot of trust right people get way too much email if they given you their email address after reading that one they’re very likely to to want more of that that’s the post that gets the best results for you but guess what there are no metrics in G4 showing the conversion rate from visitor to subscriber per blog post where do you get that the visitors who subscribed here’s an article it’s got a signup called to action it’s a sticky footer you can get to the email the sign up thank you page from any URL from any article right now which of these articles is driving the most people to that to drives the greatest percentage of people to that page okay what is the calculation to find the conversion rate from visitor to subscriber per article this is it you have to take the Key Event Rate number of visits to the thank you page when that article was the page referer and divide that number by the total number of visits to the article that’s the conversion rate of that article from visitor to subscriber make sense how many times did that article send visitors to the thank you page divided by how many times that article was seen that’s a conversion rate from visitor to subscriber and I’m not going to do the math in analytics but if analytics did have it it’d be called the key event rate analytic this is a calculated metric jf4 doesn’t make it for you uh a data Studio or looker Studio Pro could do it for you I’m terrible at that uh Excel could do it for you yeah but I’m bad at that too so I’m G to use AI uh here’s the here’s where you get the data I’m on the pages report choose the long date range add a filter so that you’re only looking at blog posts ideally every article on your website is in a common folder called blog or whatever resources uh there’s a lot of reasons to do this easy analysis is one of the good ones uh if someone at some if some programmer decided one day that all of your blog post should be at the root instead of in a folder uh they made a mistake that’s not good uh for this kind of approach you got to do some fancy programming to try to get those out of there um uh some people this like an SEO Superstition that things closer to the root have greater you know share and more of the domain authority of the overall never seen it doesn’t matter don’t worry so yes I’m going to filter just to see blog posts now I’m just looking at blog posts there they all are click apply and then export that I’ve got half the data traffic to blog posts this is also not uh not P not great structured data uh when you export anything from ga4 you need to delete the first nine rows they are simply comments and anything else like you see the thank you page in there the blog main page get that stuff out of there you also don’t need any of that data all I want is sessions you saw my calculation right I just need traffic to these blog posts looks good half the battle that’s what I needed now I need uh traffic to the thank you page when these were the page refer a different report calculated metric I’m in another I’m back in here so now I’m getting the page path uh same date it’s got to be the exact same date range right and I’m going to add a secondary Dimension you have to click the blue plus and then search for and find page refer and choose that as the secondary Dimension right now the filters for this add filter I only want to see the newsletter thank you page so page path exactly matches the newsletter sign up thank you page see that’s the First Column also known as the primary Dimension only has the blog thank you page the email sign up thank you page and then there’s another condition it’s a two-part filter the second condition I only want to see when the page refers are blog posts right the page referr contains blog that’s it I hope this makes sense that’s actually pretty simple right show me every time this article send a visitor to the thank you page apply export again remove the top nine rows and any other noise uh and also you don’t need those other columns you don’t even need the First Column right you don’t need the thank you page column this is all you’re looking for Al also there’s a bunch of ultra low volume stuff right like s like zeros or something like ones that’s not good for analysis it’s you good false positives oh there was one reader one visit to that blog post and that reader subscribed so that blog post has a 100% conversion rate not useful so remove all the things with ultra low data I also uh now I can uh give this to AI first I actually change the headers so that they match the other report um upload both files and here’s what it sounds like I’m giving you two G4 reports one shows traffic to blog post the other shows conversion rates for from those same blog posts or conversion not rate the conversions from the blog post merge those as you would using like a vlookup provide link to download anytime you ask AI to edit a spreadsheet provide link to download because it might remove every row and there’s only one row left and it doesn’t look right like you have to always double check it again don’t trust AI okay looks good that’s just what I wanted I could actually do the conversion right here um but AI already has the data so it’s easier to do a prompt than to do a calculation uh but that’s it right sessions and conversions conversions divided by sessions equals the conversion rate create a bar chart showing the conversion rates for the top 20 blog posts that chart is very very valuable to the content marketer because these are the articles that regardless of the traffic Source grew your list and don’t be surprised when there’s a small number of them that have like 10x results if I took this out to the top 30 there’s the 30th would be very very low some of these things might have 100x results the average now you know what to put in Social streams now you know what to keep in heavy social rotation now you know what to put on your homepage now you know what to put on your email signature now you know what to send it again as a newsletter now you know what to do now you know what to search optimize this put on your traffic driving gloves you just found the best mouse traps now give them better cheese I’m mixing my metaphors gloves and cheese but you get the idea very few marketers know the conversion rate from visitor to subscriber per blog post ask the hardest core most serious you know marketer you know if they can tell you this one most cannot but isn’t it valuable don’t you want to know that you can promote any the social media marketers spent years building an audience they can promote anything which are they promote now you know right these are the things so this is not technically a social media marketing strategy it’s a it’s a uh a data analysis for conversion optimization strategy once you know these things you know what to go do I love that one do that do it you repeat it every few months right because it will change okay moving on I’m G to let AI review my social ads um we have never bought an ad I’m not that kind of marketer uh not actually that strange if you do content marketing long enough and hard enough but this is an 8 million do agency with 55 employees never bought an ad zero ads never gated content uh never used a popup window uh there’s lots of examples of businesses like mine you can grow a business without having without um uh using those you know those methods uh but because I don’t know anything about ads I’ve got a skills Gap that’s where AI helps if you’re good at what Ads you do AI will make you a little bit better if you’re not good AI will make you a lot better it’s a skills leveler that’s what AI is doing here for us right okay so I’m gonna make an ad which I’ve never made i’ never made an ad let’s try it uh here’s an ad it’s promoting a webinar free webinar B2B lead generation tips now here’s a lazy prompt suggest five ways this ad could be better I don’t believe in lazy prompts uh I believe in detailed prompts and multi-step methods uh but uh uh so what it gives me back in this casee I’m not very surprised it’s terrible it said it suggested changing the headline to unlock your sales potential of course it didn’t know what to do it doesn’t know my audience I’m not targeting salespeople I’m targeting marketers so it’s off that’s okay uh so what are we going to do next uh we’re going to ignore most of this and give it a better prompt um so my prompt this time includes my Persona see I’m uploading the the draft the creative the ad the Persona and I’m going to give it a much more detailed prompt so there’s three things happening here the asset the Persona and the prompt and the prompt is like a mini set of best practices I don’t know ads but I can do some research and I can find um the best practices you’re a paid social strategist skilled at crafting ads that drive clicks and conversions the best ads have a certain approach to messaging a certain approach to the headlines a certain approach to the visuals a certain approach to the CTA they trigger urgency and exclusivity yeah I spent 15 20 minutes researching best practices paid social ads partly I want to learn partly I want the best results I can get right I’m not again I’m not trying to save time I’m not giving you any shortcuts uh the risk of me not doing this well is I waste tons of money right you’re buying you’re buying traffic using an ad that would have low engagement so uh I will always spend a little more time uh you and by the way one way that you can research best practice is by talking to the AI as well um so here’s the here’s the actual prompt rate the extent to which the ad does or does not align with best practices recommend changes that’s a common approach that I use rate the extent to which it does or does not blank that’s me asking it for perspective and keeping it broad it comes back uh my original copy said struggling to to drive B2B leads its suggestion uh the the audience you told me your audience it’s in your persona cares about conversion rates why don’t you talk about conversion rates that’s a great tip I like that advice actionable insights to boost your lead conversion rates that actually is smart it’s more specific and as we probably know by now right specificity correlates with conversion Drive leads or boost lead conversion rates demonstrate Roi demonstrate Roi my my Persona uh I I discovered through Persona research that my audience as individuals want to specifically show their performance to their teams so demonstrating Roi is actually very smart thing to put as a CTA uh B2B Le Gen tips it says proven strategies to boost B2B conversions that’s better that’s just clearly better that’s empirically better okay let’s fix it I’m making a new ad here’s a second ad create a colorcoded heat Mac scoring each uh heatmat Matrix scoring them against best practices and alignment with psychology of the Persona okay it likes the second ad better caution I’m asking AI to check its own recommendations of course it likes what it recommended these I did what it told me to do and it said I did what it told it to do right so anyway to get the idea but that um creating me heat map matrixes right if you’re going to a meeting AI is great at not just doing the analysis but creating some kind of visual asset for you to go have a conversation with your boss or your man manager your executive or your client moving right along 15 minutes Personal Branding Brent we’re going to end on time um your LinkedIn profile uh I’m going to go move now into the personal branding side AI can create head shots uh quick tip about head shots that’s a bad head shot because you’re panned out too far dude you got to show your face it’s called Facebook because you people want to see your face if your head shot is like panned out that far that’s less engaging right there’s only 5% of this image is this face whoa whoa okay back up that’s too much face all so proper framing we want to do that and also don’t try to put your lifestyle and interest into your profile picture that belongs in the background I used to do a whole thing about social profile best practices uh you know if you’re like this guy’s like in a witness protection program what’s up with the the sh the the the silhouette okay sea. is one of many of these tools it costs something I can’t remember how much maybe 50 bucks upload tons of images you have to give it a lot of pictures so I I think it wants like 50 highres images to do it but then it comes back with some pretty good likenesses of yourself none of these are photos there was no camera involved it just gave it lots of training data it’s also a lesson about AI you always have to give it more than you would have expected lots of training data comes back with lots of pictures this is like analysis paralysis what do they call it marketers know this the Paradox of choice give someone too many options they get stuck but scroll down like whoa these all kind of look a lot like me the lighting is a bit perfect they they’re actually sort of obviously AI I think we can all understand AI now Chang my eye color to Blue I don’t have blue eyes um I didn’t know what to choose in the end I just chose this guy down here the orange one why did I choose the one with the orange background to me they’re all kind of the same I chose the one with the orange background because that is a complimentary color it’s the opposite on the color wheel orange is a warm color LinkedIn is a cool colored social network right all the uh the interface elements are are blue you probably know this by now orange red and yellow are warm colors purple green and blue are cool colors so in the context of a cool color a warm color will pop so I’m standing out right look that’s Kate win Kate Winkler stands out because she threw on a a colored jacket that’s a best practice if you want data for it you can upload these photos to photo fer and then people will rate them and review them and uh you know after you tell it is this a dating profile picture is this a business picture of course I’m doing business here um and it says uh I I paid to get up 40 votes and uh it scored quite well it was uh very high for competence and also um not bad for influence likable was oh no this one was more likable anyway I’m not using my AI generated picture anymore you can choose your own adventure nine getting there nine uh let AI draft a new headline in the new about Headlines section update your LinkedIn bio okay uh you’re going to copy and paste the whole thing which is tricky because you have to expand LinkedIn is filled with these sort of accordians expandable content areas you have to expand them and copy the paste copy and paste the text out um the following is LinkedIn profile of an about section for this person suggest five alternate headlines I put in the character limit that probably doesn’t work language models are terrible at counting image models are terrible at spelling right we live in an era right now this is 2024 where these models are very separate the future of AI will be combined models these will all get sort of closer together uh you won’t be you know these will all merge together a bit better someday anyway suggest five alternate headlines write a new draft of an about section structure it with clear narrative showcasing achievements quantifiable results include a call to action there again my little best practices these are not short simple lazy prompts I’m going to uh tell it more specifically what I need then I give it this giant uh copy and paste in all the text um here are the headlines I think these are pretty good here’s the draft about section uh I like that too uh I think that this did a good job uh again I don’t love AI for writing but as a draft as a point of view as an editor as a starting point uh you it’s it’s interesting and it might be useful but again never trust AI app you’re the strategist you’re the expert you know your audience hasn’t had 500 conversations with your target audience but you have uh I hasn’t had your life experience and doesn’t know all the things about your background but you do so uh filter all these through your own point of view please and then um uh edit Profile Audit that one more let AI audit your entire profile based on the point of view of your target audience what if you gave AI the the Persona and your LinkedIn profile what if you’re a Frontline rep what if you’re doing influencer marketing and you’re out in the world or you’re uh you’re a customer service person you know who who people look you up or you’re an executive or you’re a a Founder looking for funding or whatever your LinkedIn profile is a web page uh have you optimized it as a web page have you have you audited it from the perspective of that most valuable uh visitor to that web page uh who is considering working with you uh collaborating with you uh maybe you’re a job Seeker you know build a build a Persona of the hiring manager and ask it right give it give it the job if I were looking for a job I would take the job description of my ideal job and the Persona of my hiring manager and the detailed full every word of my LinkedIn profile and I’d start talking to AI about where are their gaps is that timec consuming yes but I’m not trying to find efficiencies I’m trying to find deficiencies and make my LinkedIn profile better because when this person lands on it I want them to see the Promise and hope of me in that role so they don’t have to IM use their imagination that I’m in there you could even have it LinkedIn you could have it do a SWAT analysis AI here’s my LinkedIn profile here’s the job description do an analysis of the strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats of me in that role it’ll do it for you and then you’re ready for the interview right this is um LinkedIn is a the Cornerstone of your personal brand I can’t overstate the importance so here I’m going to my final method I’m giving it my LinkedIn profile I’m giving it my Persona uh and I’m uh I’m telling it you’re a networking and personal branding expert skilled in evaluating LinkedIn Pages for their ability to build trust and credibility all my prompts start the same way you have Ro X you have skills why okay just context uh I’m giving you a Persona and I’m of you a LinkedIn profile list five ways in which the Persona could be more compelling to the Persona list five of the least important elements and persuasive elements on this page right similar to the rate the extent to which it does or does not meet right it does meet or it doesn’t meet whatever the case LinkedIn profile Persona of my target audience detailed prompt what it comes back with my persona’s named Alex you can see it here um it it knows my audience my my buyer is looking for evidence they want to reduce the perceived risk of working with me I totally agree AI I should add more case studies right show data my audience wants to know that we’re not a one-size fits-all WordPress template theme websites it’s customized personalized for them and for their brand and for their target audience highlight more projects and solutions that are specifically tailored to their unique challenges my audience is not secure in their content strategy they were attracted to us because they see we’re doing this at a certain level uh my LinkedIn profile doesn’t really talk about that describe your approach to content that leads to these high conversion rates focus on areas that they’re struggling with like messaging and personalization wow I think those are all great great tips even if it didn’t write them for me I can go back and revise too much detail can overshadow critical achievements AI I totally disagree with you I don’t think that’s true true at all I think that for a LinkedIn profile or any web page my job is to make the most detailed version of that thing possible I want to be exhaustively thorough and that’s my philosophy about digital so uh I disagree with that point so I’m not going to listen to it how about this one prioritize your endorsements so the most relevant ones B2B web development B2B marketing data driven strategies are at the top great idea I am embarrassed that uh I just made this slide ahead I haven’t updated my my endorsements yet but that should totally be changed right you get the idea now if you want to go ahead uh the next prompt almost rights itself but if you wanted it to give you a hand rewrite sentences for the about section of this profile see how I’m asking for specific sentences um and to better Target the Persona show both the original and the recommended Rewritten sentences that’s this is not I’m working with it I’m going back and forth It’s a Long convers ation and I’m having this it’s like an editor it’s like a perspective it’s kind of interesting sometimes I like it sometimes I don’t sometimes but I I don’t want it to rewrite the whole thing again that’s a add value add your your add add your strategic insights don’t just have it do one big monolithic thing and control C control V that is gonna taste like water it’s not differentiated it has amazing summarization tool it read the internet I joke AI might as well stand for average information we don’t want the average information we’re trying to be different here right so I’m actually looking closely at it it’s its recommendations uh I lead our award-winning team in delivering customized datadriven digital solutions that drive measurable results for B2B tech companies okay first of all we don’t just work with B2B Tech secondly I hate the word Solutions I think that’s a really the only people who use the word Solutions are salespeople that’s not a good word for marketing I’ve done hundreds of hours of keyword research as an SEO and I’ve never seen the word Solutions appear in keyword research so some of that is awesome some of it is not but I use my skills and expertise and my years and decades in digital to uh take what it gave me and go make it better you get the idea it goes on uh Brett we’re going to share these I’m going to stop hopefully we’re all still on I’m gonna stop sharing now and come back for quick conversation and just say thank you Prepon and cloudways for letting me be part of this Andy dude virtual high5 Round of Applause I feel like I’m always uh like drinking from the fire hose on your on your talks ban they’re they’re value packed there’s so much there in terms of specific strategies prompting um ways for our amazing audience to leverage AI to more effectively promote their business their agency their client business is um that was an absolutely amazing uh talk so thank you for that um I my pleasure I think it’s fun these were these were like use cases I had and I kind of finally put them together um and I hope what came through is that that the ethos about it right like the um uh like invest more time in it I think you get better results was I hopefully the main point that came through yeah and I mean I think just even now that I’ve gotten a chance to get to know some of your material and just your perspective on how to approach AI um I think it’s really amazing advice for people to go in and learn how to do detailed multi-step prompts how to seed AI with your avatar with your own profile with your own content and then be able to pull insights out of that that then informs your content bringing in that you know specific perspective beliefs points of view really being able to make your content stand out with AI versus what I think a lot of entrylevel people to ai go oh I’m just going of AI write my content right which is you know you kind of go over and over if you’re using it for that so are your users they’re not even to your website if they read if they feel like it’s it’s written by AI which I think is such a brilliant Point yeah there’s a famous quote uh or I don’t know if it’s famous it should be Jay bear once said the problem is not that uh AI can do what marketers do the problem is that marketers keep doing what can be done by an AI if an AI can make that thing for you in 10 seconds that thing should not be made anymore because your audience can have it made for themselves in 10 seconds you know so uh the first thing we did is the one I maybe love most consider using AI to get uh to help you research provocative topics it’ll give you tons you don’t care about or don’t agree with but the ones the one or two where you can take a little stand um you know uh Victory favors the Bold uh if if it triggers one of those ideas and you can go into that and make that kind of part of your little platform for your brand uh that is really what people remember and I know there’s no metric or data point or ga4 report for you know are you remembered but that’s actually what we’re trying to do here is to be top- of- mind in our category only one or two companies can be top- of- mind in every category and uh if there’s one outcome that you’d want more than any other it’s that even though there’s no shortcut or data for it um that would be the ultimate outcome I and I love that I imagine that that some folks watching this session might have I mean obviously they’ve gotten some very specific tactics that they can implement but I know at least for myself I’m like man I need to get more into this I need to learn more about the type of stuff that Andy’s doing you mentioned your uh kind of growth hack of finding somebody like you know uh Lisa Adams and saying hey let’s talk about AI on a monthly basis for business owners e-commerce businesses agencies that are kind of of just dipping their toe into AI they’re just starting to leverage it for their business any suggestions any other suggestions that you’d provide them in terms of starting points besides just you know opening up and starting using you know chat GPT or another Tool uh a lot of people have said this if you can document all of your most important Sops your standard operating procedures and then go through them breaking down the tasks and asking if there’s an AI use case for that thing uh a lot of what I’m doing in Ai and some of the some my friends are doing is just doing it to help them uh do more comprehensively things they were already doing so rather than think how can I use AI you know look at what you’re doing all the time and say could I help with that could it help with that could it help with that topic research you know oh data analysis oh like these are things like keyword research and you know onpage SEO and uh these are just things that I’ve been doing for forever so I don’t ever start by asking like you know what can a what can I do with AI uh I’m trying to uh Drive outcomes through methods I’ve always used and and sometimes not always but sometimes discovering ways that AI can help very cool Andy I’m sure we’re gonna have you come on board on future uh growth Summits and Prepon for those that can’t wait that long till your next keynot with us um how can folks find out more about you or check out some of your content uh orbit media.com um I write an article there one every once every two weeks uh if you want to connect uh you can find me on LinkedIn that’s my best social network and then also a bunch I I counted the other day I’ve done 60 videos on YouTube so there’s um at least maybe once or twice a month I’ll put something there so if you go to YouTube and to search for orbit media Studios you should be able to find me there too awesome well Andy thanks again for being with us today uh and that concludes our keynote from Mr Andy Cadena we’re g to um stay tuned tuned with us here at the cloudways preath 2024 today we’re going to have more content focused on AI and Innovation so stick with us and we’ll be right back here with cloudway Prepon 2024 thanks Brent thanks cloudways