TOP 3 Productivity Hacks: Leveraging AI for Smarter Workflows
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Claire: Hello, and welcome back to the Small Town Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, Claire Bouvier. Today, you're with me and we're going into the world of all the things that are happening in artificial intelligence and looking specifically at different workflows. So if you are interested in doing your work 10 times faster, So you can focus on the things you're super passionate about.
Claire: You're really good at, this is a great episode for you and everything I'll be doing will be on the screen. As you can see, I've started [00:01:00] here just to give you behind the scenes. I tried doing the paid version of Loom where it will spit out all my transcripts and notes after the fact using the Loom AI.
Claire: So I'm going to work backwards. I posted this. Previous week really cool workflow that I did on LinkedIn. And a lot of people were chatting about it and I was talking offline with a few people. And it's one of those things just to say what I do and how these workflows help me do my work faster and more with more accuracy, allowing for a greater impact, there's only so many contents you can put on a written part on LinkedIn.
Claire: And also. It's only good for the people that understand the language. Just for fun, I got my husband to read it and he made it down into maybe three sentences and he's like, this is another language for me. I have no idea what this is about. [00:02:00] So we're going to pull it back and I'm going to look at just a couple of different workflows and specifically we'll just start with one workflow today.
Claire: that I think will be really cool for anyone that wants to limit the manual hours that they're putting into something. So I threw out to my audience three problems that I was solving and over the course of the last month. The first one is re looking at a lot Of building websites, that's, you know, the foundation of a house for people to come to see what you're all about.
Claire: There's something really happening in website design world that we are entering, if not already, that the personalization of a website will be changed based on the user, how they see it. So, It's becoming more robust. A lot of people said, you know, our, [00:03:00] our website's going to be gone. It's kind of like asking, will people not want photographs anymore?
Claire: In my opinion, I think they'll always be there, but there'll be at a different level and how we generate them will be differently. So my first problem on the screen here was creating a professional website from scratch is expensive and time consuming. And so I thought it was really cool that I was introduced a shout out to Karen.
Claire: Introducing me, another friend online here, to the world of Raloom. I believe that's how you pronounce it. So, when you build a website. One thing you need to have is have all the information that's out there, but because our attention spans are small, and there's so many beautiful websites generated by huge companies and organizations, and a lot of time is spent into putting the money into the user experience, the user interface, how we navigate it, how we fix it.
Claire: Find something. There's nothing worse than when you want to go buy something you can't find the buy button or you want to [00:04:00] contact them or have a support chat, whatever it is. It's very frustrating when you don't have those options. And so. The first problem is like, okay, making the websites hard enough, but then what we call the site mapping.
Claire: So essentially where everything's going to go. So a site map, where's the menu? What is the navigation bar going to say? Is the contact me? All these things. This is what developers have done and UX designers still to this day map out, but. Not everyone has these resources. And then the second part is the wireframing.
Claire: So essentially is like a window into the next screen. It's like a book. If you laid it all out, which chapter goes where in the website. So people can go to this one, how they get. To that navigation and it's the movement, how it moves and flows. And so more than ever, this user experience and the user interface is crucial.
Claire: Something I have less [00:05:00] experience in, but understand the importance and how it needs to happen has been really cool using for loom. So what does this look like? I'm going to jump in to. And itRelumeoom. io. This is essentially an interface that is the first beginnings of creating a sitemap. So let's just try an untitled project that I was just putting together.
Claire: This is really cool. It says primary sitemap. So let's say I would like to create a website for my photography.
Claire: Portfolio. focusing on portraits and landscapes. I would like it to be [00:06:00] accessible and simple and easy to follow. I will be providing online workshops that people can watch and pay as you go. Design this please. I always say please, it's important. 5 to 10 pages. I don't want it more than 5 pages. We're gonna keep it really simple just to get a sense. I've said what exactly I want high level for it. Press generate sitemap.
Claire: This is mind blowing to me. I can say, okay, there's empty pages. I want it to generate just having some sort of copy there that I can play with. But if we look here,
Claire: there'll be the features list, benefit section, testimonial section, call to action, contact section, newsletter section, footer. And then. You have your [00:07:00] portfolio and it drops down into all the things that it's suggesting for your portfolio, for your workshops, instead of trying to figure out all this, you know that this is generating the very basics of getting the framework, the site mapping done of the website and I gave it so little information, right?
Claire: So you can see this is the site map. Now, if you toggle over here, There is a wireframe that this completely blew me away because to do this manually back in the day. next level. This is like wild. So I'm just going to make it a little smaller and you can see that you now can go in and fill in. It's already given some suggestions for inspiration, photography, resources, portraits, how it's going to look.
Claire: Now the neat thing is you can go in and you can change the images. This is where you can start [00:08:00] adding things, replacing things and putting them in. Based on what you want. Also, you can add sections. So if you want to add any footers, for example, you can hero images, your navigation benefits, anything else onto pages, you can just plop them in.
Claire: Now, this is a great starting point at this point, so maybe you'll just use it for a site map to get started, or maybe you'll use it to wireframe, because what's powerful about wireframe, is that now If you're someone that works in Figma or Webflow, which I have been working on Webflow.
Claire: Most of the designers I know are in Figma, so it all depends. Now, it's really cool because you may not have any interest in doing this, but this is what has been really powerful. When I go on to places like Upwork to hire developers or designers, I will look and say, looking for someone that can go in and.
Claire: and edit my [00:09:00] existing sitemap or my wireframe. So you can get them to this point and say, okay, this is as much as I can do, or I'm interested in doing. I want now designer to populate it, get it in. Maybe you need a copyright or something like that. So this is where it's really cool. You can export it to TXT or A-C-E-S-V file For this purpose, I'm gonna show you, if you export it to Webflow, there's tons of online tutorials.
Claire: And again, I am not going to go deep into this. I'm just showing how robust this can be. You can get, as you see, I have a plugin that will connect to my re my, the Loom to Webflow, and it will populate into Webflow. To give you an example. Once we go into Webflow, where it's going to be downloading and a project I'm currently working on, you can actually go in and make the site live and start working off of.
Claire: And so it's [00:10:00] really, really neat, where you get to start putting, Everything in as we go. So I just want to introduce you first to the idea of when you're starting your website, even if you are working on something else, this is a great, just this alone, having a site map, just to get you the general idea and the starting point.
Claire: And then building wireframing was really helpful for me. And depending how far you want to go, if you want to outsource the rest or hire some or do it yourself. There's tons of tutorials on the Relume and Webflow YouTube channels. So that's the first one that I thought, well, it has saved 20, 30 hours of site mapping and essentially doing wireframing.
Claire: The next problem that I want to look at and that I was sharing this one was very crazy because I had no idea. And again, all these are very high level. So if you're excited and you want to [00:11:00] learn more, please reach out. I'm so excited to you know, give any feedback or write any questions on the channel here.
Claire: So the first one was, well, I don't have a sales team and most sole proprietors or people that are small teams, they don't have a dedicated sales team. And so when they have a new product or a service and they really want people to know about it, that's They don't have someone sitting on the calls or writing emails or strategically doing lead generation all day long.
Claire: And when you're working for yourself, you need both happening to be working on the client work. And you also need to have new client work or new work or new products in the queue to be selling. So something, especially for those in the service based industry, This essentially changed everything for me because what I did was I created one message, with the help of perplexity and a couple of things. So I'm going to show you that my workflow and my goal was to target people that have [00:12:00] decisions to be made in their company at a minimum of 10 employees or more in one day.
Claire: Marketing and artificial intelligence. So I was able to segment that audience and say, these are the people I would like to research. So the first was I went into perplexity and if you haven't used it, it is amazing because you get to play on the pro without paying for it. You know, have a certain amount to use.
Claire: And also I find when I search something, if I write in chat, GBT or write on Gemini, I don't get the exact sources that I want. It takes you to everything. So I'm going to show you here So when I started to reach 2, 500 people over the course of a weekend, I started with saying, who is the ideal person to speak to regarding bringing in training for [00:13:00] artificial intelligence into company training? So I offer company training for artificial intelligence. So as you can see, when it asks a question, it's using the pro search. There's all the sources here that you can click onto anything from as simple and conversational as Reddit to Forbes magazine, where there's a little more legitimacy. but you also get.
Claire: a summary. So what I did in this situation, I wrote down the chief learning officer, the HR director of HR if they have a chief technology officer, innovation officer, all of these different people. And what I did then is, so the second part of this, you can see, I started to create an outreach went deep into writing out, understanding who they are, so I won't go through all of this, but happy to go deeper and saying, you know, asking, what do we know about this person?
Claire: What [00:14:00] are some of the things that motivates them? Well, a lot of these companies that is reaching in Canada, a huge incentive is there is a training grant. And so there was all of these things and people are busy. And so when you're writing someone, they have a split second, there has to be value for them opening that.
Claire: So the value I was saying was like, Hey, if you never hire me or work with me, there is a grant that you can leverage a 15, 000 plus just for your business. If you want any sort of training that. Is granted through the program. And so it's really important that when you grab their attention and so what I've done and LinkedIn conversational ads, you can do this right in here, but I used a third party called Phantom Buster.
Claire: There's lots of different ones that you can use this one. I found the user experience to be very straightforward, very easy. And so you, 30 minutes. Remaining in use of time. So you buy time that it sends [00:15:00] out. So I was getting every eight minutes. There was a message sending out all weekend long. I had you know, over the course of the week, 2, 500 messages were sent out.
Claire: So let me see what I'll pull up is a message that I sent out to someone in that I will blur out the name. And this was the message that I reached out. So as you can see here, I wrote out this message and I'll put it down on the notes. Okay. Thanks. Thanks. So you can look at it, but I was able to using the dashboard using phantom buster.
Claire: I could, and there's a step by step video again, I'm not going to repeat all the step by step because they obviously do it way better and it's right there how to set it up, but just showing you overall what the purpose is, how I did it and what was the end result. So. I tried to just right off the bat when I wrote them saying a quick question.[00:16:00]
Claire: First of all, a qualifier question. Are you interested in AI and how it could reach more customers, make more money, or save you at least two hours a day that I guarantee when I show people how you can save two hours a day. So. The first one, if you're in Canada, for example, there's a specific training program that is a minimum of 10, 000, a grant for, I put AI training, it's other training when they go to, it's up to them.
Claire: Then I have a link to know a lot more. about the training program. So you can see I set up a landing page that goes into all the modules and what I'm teaching and how it's going to look and understanding the rec putting, you know, having, having all this set up. But this is really cool because you can do all this in your site mapping on your website.
Claire: The actual Relume that I was showing you. And so, I show all the information that people might be [00:17:00] interested in. And then, when I'm sending out that message, I'm saying, Okay, well here's more information about it. Understanding that I like to work with very small groups.
Claire: So here is limited. Creating that sense of urgency. I always use a prompt Alex Hormozy calls it the Grand Slam offer. I type that into ChatGPT and I say format this as the Grand Slam offer template. And that's what you can see when I've written this. I'll go in right here and I'll open up ChatGPT. And you can see, I'll go right into, into my chat dbt and I'll just say, could you give me the grand slam offer by Alex Hermosi?
Claire: And he has a great book and free resources. If you want to learn more, it will be in the show notes. But check [00:18:00] this out. So the grand slam offer, it walks you through. How do you offer something that people cannot say no to? So you create the irresistible offer, all of this. So this is what I've done and everyone can do this.
Claire: And it's just kind of going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, toggle from here, toggle from there. So what I would do copied this whole thing, my whole landing page of information, and then I say I go into ChatGPT.
Claire: So great. Thank you. Can you take my landing page information and create a short LinkedIn message that I will be. Sending out to HR executives that are busy and I want to create this.
Claire: Please [00:19:00] write this landing page copy into a Grand Slam offer by Alex Harmozy and please write it in a friendly, professional voice. So let's start with that. And here's the copy. I drop it in. this is great because this is a starting point where, as you will see, there's always an intro, what you'll gain, the advantage, exclusive offer. It has everything in here. Now I've taken it and as you see, I go back. I make it me. So I put in my emojis. I will, I added the thing after the fact being like, here's a grant because what is the exclusive limited offer or what is the, big driver of why people will apply, which has worked out very well.[00:20:00]
Claire: And then showing, you know, in the framework, the proven success, staying ahead. A bonus workshop. So giving that extra for those people that want to just know about it, that they don't want to commit, but here's a bonus workshop. And then a lot of people, maybe they want the one on one I put right into here, a calendar.
Claire: So please take this framework, take what I've done, try it yourself. And so what's really cool is that when I went out and I automated it and I went into My LinkedIn into my platforms and I set up one of these things is called Phantom busters is essentially, it allowed me to put all my leads in and you can see you know, whether it's online, my marketing professionals, HR, all this stuff, which I don't want to have all this information because that's not fair.
Claire: But what you get then is I take this message and I [00:21:00] make it my own, add it to be under my brand. And I was able to send out 2, 500 of those automatically. And you know, what's really, really cool is that that turned into a ton of awesome paid work, great relationships. And I now have another AI mentor. What they think is.
Claire: Really, really cool. And so that was essentially a very high level of the workflow, how I went about it. Whereas if I did that two, three years ago, five years ago, it would have taken so much time to reach all those people targeted the right. You can also just do it in sales nav. You couldn't do conversational ads, which is becoming very popular.
Claire: And you might ask like why on LinkedIn, it has the highest conversion rate. It's been amazing.
Claire: [00:22:00] Problem three, I was getting so frustrated asking people financial questions, and when you have a financial planner, they're either, you know, lean on the conservative side or someone that's really interested in web three and the blockchain movement and Bitcoin and understanding Ethereum and having investments in those portfolios, I never could find the one.
Claire: stop shop for having a financial planner that could be really objective, but also have the intel and have the knowledge with the brain of working in, you know, the crypto worlds and also the traditional worlds and understanding how to leverage things. So what I did was really simple. I just spent almost an hour writing out my entire financial situation from the emotions that I experience. And how money makes me feel and how I like to, what are my goals financially? So, but before I did that, I asked [00:23:00] ChatGPT what are all the questions I can ask my financial planner and what are things I need to be addressing?
Claire: This is my situation. This is where I am in my life. and it was really cool because then it came up with all these questions and then I took those questions and flipped it back in and. Answered them and say, can you act like, and then I named three of my top favorite female mompreneurs, financial advisors, gurus in the wealth space that I really look up to.
Claire: And there's lots of books in it and everything from them. So I was able to speak to these girls get totally. Objective feedback, no emotions involved in saying, here's my situation. No, people are like, I don't put in my credit card numbers. I'm not putting all these details. I'm just putting in numbers and for me, I'm fine with that. It's just me putting in numbers, my situation. And as you can see, I have my own GPT. So I kind of have that going on for one for finances. And [00:24:00] so it was really interesting because it really reaffirmed some things that I knew, and that made me think of different ways to plan for my finances, my investments and paying off any debt.
Claire: It's really powerful to use these things as feedback, but to really come down to the end of it, why I'm so passionate about this movement of generative AI and looking at how we can work differently, faster, be more productive, is really at the end of the day, so that we get To the point where we get to spend the times on the more of the high impact items.
Claire: So instead of sitting there and updating Excel spreadsheet for two hours on something, it can be done in 30 seconds behind the scenes. And we get to the answers and we can start actually solving real big world problems. And yes, there's lots of fears around a lot of other things but I'll let those people be the ones that.
Claire: Are worrying about it, but for now, or not even for now, I'm not being naive, but I really believe that we need [00:25:00] you and me and leaders in the space. Saying, you know, using this to solve problems, to allow us to be critical thinkers, let our creativity, we're able to focus on strategic design and making real changes in this world.
Claire: So these are just three things. I'm so curious, which one would you use? depending if you're with the business lens. Are you looking to build, for example, a website and get smarter and better at creating the user experience for a website? Or do you need you know, a financial planner that you can't be talking to every day because that's not realistic?
Claire: Or is it essentially Reaching a whole bunch of people, because I do believe we have a lot of us as solopreneurs. We don't have the capacity to be reaching thousands of people a day because we're working in our work. We don't always have the time to be dedicated to having a sales team. So here was a very high level of three of three.
Claire: The workflows that I've been playing with [00:26:00] this week, there will be always new ones. Happy to share. If there's any workflow that you're like, Oh my gosh, could you solve this problem? I have to do this every day and I can't stand it. Well, I love solving the workflow situations and to streamline those things because Work can be so much fun and especially when you're working on stuff that you want to be tackling the stuff that you're really good at and you have now a 24 7 assistant to help you out.
Claire: So please in the messages or the comments, share a workflow, share something you want to learn about. And I will be so excited for the next pod to respond to it if you want or to do another workflow. Thank you for being with me. We have a very exciting fall, a very special guest, and a big sponsorship and a partnership announcement coming.
Claire: And so I've been really excited and waiting for that to drop come end of August into September of 2024. [00:27:00] So stay tuned. I'm not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere and would love to hear topics that you would like to learn more about. Thanks for being here. Have a great week and we'll see you in the next episode.
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