S5E26 – How to use AI to create more lead-generating content With Gen Furukawa

• (00:34) – Show intro and background history
• (03:20) – Deeper into his career journey
• (05:30) – Understanding his business model
• (07:37) – Deeper into his AI strategies
• (13:51) – Understanding his AI marketing tactics
• (21:01) – How he use AI to optimize e-mail
• (23:21) – Commercial break (TYKR mobile app)
• (27:41) – How AI can help business tactics
• (30:49) – Guest hot tips
• (35:45) – How AI can make our work more efficient
• (40:55) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Show Intro

Introducing Payback Time, the podcast for entrepreneurs looking to build and scale their startups, gain access to actionable tips, proven strategies, and valuable data that can help you avoid mistakes, skyrocket sales, and optimize profits. Your business breakthrough may just be an episode away.

 

[00:00:17.360] – Guest Intro

If you want to learn how to create more content that generates leads, this episode is for you. My next guest breaks down strategies on how to create highly marketable blog posts, lead magnets, and email templates using ChatGPT. Please welcome Gen Furukawa.

 

[00:00:34.580] – Sean

Gen, welcome to the show.

 

[00:00:36.150] – Gen

Hey, Sean. Thanks for having me.

 

[00:00:38.110] – Sean

All right, before we dive in, if you could tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know.

 

[00:00:43.620] – Gen

Sure. I grew up in New York City. I grew up playing a lot of tennis, and I was actually a ball boy at the US Open in 1998 after getting rejected. So this is around the time Seinfeld was big and Kramer had his episode of being a ball boy. And I got rejected as a ball boy, which stump me because I thought it was pretty good, but as a ball boy for several years after. And it was a paid job, and I got to go to the US Open every day for two weeks that year, both years. It was fantastic.

 

[00:01:13.030] – Sean

What a cool opportunity That’s awesome. I’m not a big tennis player, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. The exposure you get to top-level players, that’s pretty cool.

 

[00:01:23.570] – Gen

Totally.

 

[00:01:24.580] – Sean

Awesome. Well, that’s a first for this episode. Nobody’s been a ball boy in tennis. All right, let’s dive into your career background. If you could take a few minutes here and just tell us about your history.

 

[00:01:36.990] – Gen

Yeah, sure. I’m founder of supermarketers. Ai. It’s a B2B demand gen company. But I got into this because I sold a B2B SaaS company last year. So it was a quiz builder called Prehook. It helped Shopify merchants ask a few questions, capture an email, SMS or email, and then recommend a product. And so this is something that I co-founded with two people that I worked with when I was at Jungle Scout. And Jungle Scout is an Amazon product research tool, the leader in the space. I was head of marketing there. And so I’ve been in the e-commerce space for seven years. And then we bootstrapped Prehook, and that was by design, something that we wanted to do in order to maintain autonomy, to have our own autonomy and hear the guidelines that we want or the milestones that we want to hit on the timeline that we want to hit them. And so that was something that we did. The downside is a little more tight with resources. And after we sold it, I realized that I wasn’t necessarily taking advantage of everything that I could have with AI, with automation. Granted, ChatGPT had not quite launched at that point, but this world of automation, I knew about it, but I didn’t leverage it.

 

[00:02:53.390] – Gen

So that’s how I got into really focusing on how AI and automation can scale scale what you can do, the resources, the efficiency, the speed with which a marketer… I’m a marketer, so that’s why it matters to marketers, but with your designer, with your writer, developer, whatever, how AI can empower you to do so much more at such a fraction of the cost.

 

[00:03:19.760] – Sean

Right on. We’re going to get into AI tips and tactics, how to help marketers. But I just have to ask this question high level here. You sold the SaaS business. A lot of people that do that go and create another SaaS, you decided to go create an agency. Why did you choose that path?

 

[00:03:36.890] – Gen

Well, I still want to build out a SaaS. The reason why it was because I think it’s good to establish some cash flow or something. Building a SaaS does have some lead time and dev time. And so my thought is, let’s understand where there are opportunities. And things are changing so fast. I mean, even a year ago, people were doing really well with GPT wrappers. It’d be built on OpenAI with a different user interface, so you couldn’t necessarily tell. But I didn’t necessarily know exactly what that would be. So now I do want to get into it again. And going to figure out what that is. This time around, though, I do think that there are no code tool builders, something like a bubble and something like a make. Com where you’re able to build the front-end. And operates, it looks like a SaaS. The user experience is exactly the same as a standalone software as a service. But on the back-end, the requirements and the build-out are far less because you’re leveraging these no code tools like Bubble and Make.

 

[00:04:43.810] – Sean

Right on. I got to break the fourth wall already, talk to the audience. So what Gen is talking about here is, and I see this more and more with SaaS founders, is you create a service business first, like an agency, with a wider spectrum, but you start talking to customers, serving customers, making some money, and you figure out the problems along the way. You have an idea at a high level, but serving them with the service is a great way to make money before you go create a SaaS that nobody wants. So I see the play. You’re going to provide the service first, figure out what the needs are, figure out what the pain is, and then create your SaaS. It’s a great way to make money and find product market fit along the way.

 

[00:05:28.760] – Gen

Yeah, that is a A goal for sure.

 

[00:05:30.750] – Sean

Okay, smart. All right, let’s dive into, I see the phrasing in your marketing material here, AI-powered demand gen. What does that mean?

 

[00:05:41.020] – Gen

Yeah, so basically, like I was saying, there’s so much more that you can do with AI, even if it’s just to get past a blank screen. Here, let’s start with something. We know the keyword that we’re going to target. Let’s create an outline, let’s create the content, and then let’s have a human review it. And so demand gen is really just… It could be anything related to creating demand. So brand awareness, inbound, lead gen. Lead gen is a subset of demand gen. And I’m focused specifically on inbound. So that is where you are actually creating the content to establish the thought leadership, to build the brand awareness without relying on performance marketing, like paid ads or affiliate or partnership. So I am focusing on creating the content. So that includes blog posts, email, organic social, video, lead magnets. And really one of the key metrics there is capturing an email. So whether you are a PLG, so a product-led growth or sales-led motion. Ultimately, you want to start building a relationship so you can educate them, indoctrinate them on the problem that you’re solving, the product, and how it solves that particular problem. And so that will generally start with an email and then maybe move on to a demo call or a trial.

 

[00:07:06.340] – Sean

Got it. So essentially high level here to rephrase back to you is use AI to create content. So it’s essentially using AI to be more efficient in content generation with the end goal to collect more email addresses.

 

[00:07:22.870] – Gen

Yeah. I mean, emails is one proxy, maybe one leading indicator. Ultimately, it is to to increase revenue. And so that moves to trials, to demo calls, to signups.

 

[00:07:36.490] – Sean

Sure. So people probably want to go here next. I can always feel my audience tapping me on the shoulder like, Sean, you got to ask this question. So This is probably where they want to go, which is, how are you using AI? We’re going to get tactical here. How do you use it to get more efficient at, let’s say, writing emails or creating blog posts or I know email sequences to nurture your audience is really big. Give us some examples here of how are you using AI.

 

[00:08:05.930] – Gen

Yeah, sure. To start, it always helps to… I’ll walk you through the process of how I work with clients. Initially, it starts with research. So that’s competitive analysis. That’s understanding the positioning, the brand voice, the product itself, and how it stands out. And so from that, that basically distills down into an idea for myself, and then also how that translates into the content itself. What type of content would be most helpful? And so generally, I’d like to break that down into three to five buckets, clusters, topic clusters, and then from there, more specific keywords and long-term long-tail keywords. And so I can actually share. Later, I’ll send you some prompts where you can actually have ChatGPT help with this process. And then I also like to take a data-driven approach. So this is when you’re doing keyword research, what are those search terms that have a certain amount of search volume. Every month, how many people are searching for them? And then also, if you’re looking at a keyword tool, say Hrefs or Samrush, any other tool, there might be some notion of keyword difficulty, how competitive it is to rank for that particular keyword.

 

[00:09:20.830] – Gen

And so ideally, you’re going to find keywords that have some search volume and not a lot of keyword difficulty. And so that’s like getting the lay of the land. And then from there, actually using AI to run through the process of creating the content, I found it actually most helpful to start by creating an outline. So you would simply find your keyword. So say, for example, it’s like, if we say use a Tykr example, how to increase your investment strategy or your investment strategy. You would take that keyword, drop that into Google, then you can find the top results for that particular keyword. Take those URLs, drop them into ChatGPT, and then you’d say, Help me understand why these pages are ranking for this keyword. And you can be specific. You can say, what’s the H1, the title? The H2s, the H3s, the LSI keywords, Latent Semantic Index keywords. What’s the theme? And so you can do this for, say, three to five of the top results. And then so now you have an understanding of the competitive landscape. And then you’re going to actually combine that into your own outline. And you want to incorporate your own brand voice, maybe your own product.

 

[00:10:39.030] – Gen

So it is more unique to you and not just regurgitating what the top search engine results page what the top results are, because that doesn’t do you any favors or Google is not going to reward you for regurgitating what top results are. You need to add your own unique flavor to it. You do that in the outline. And then when you’re actually creating the outline, or once you have the outline created, then you actually create the post. I like to do it section by section. It turns out to be a more detailed and robust post if you’re doing it section by section, as opposed to, now take this outline and write a whole post immediately.

 

[00:11:16.340] – Sean

Right. And just to drill into that, I know some people have done homework, and using AI to write an entire article, there can be a negative effect because search engines, and I’m going to hear your feedback on that, but it’s like, search engines like Google be like, you’re using AI to write the whole thing. You want to blend of your own voice in your own language, but you can also have AI write sections of it. So do you agree with that?

 

[00:11:43.130] – Gen

Yeah. Well, I mean, Yes, I like to, as a human, review the whole thing and add my own voice to it. But there are also ways that you can help the AI output to be better. So there’s a few-shot prompt, this notion of few-shot prompts, where you’re uploading examples of this is what the ideal output is, because ultimately, the AI output would pattern match to the inputs that you’re giving it, including examples. Then you can also use don’t use these words or don’t use fluffy jargon in a fast-paced world, or all those AI phrases that you know the second you see it, unleashish, unlock, whatever. So there’s that. And then, yeah, you can use different phrases. People say, if you say use perplexity or perspicacity, that’s changing the tonality or the length of sentences. You can alternate sentences. For me, when I’m having help with drafting or revising social content, for example, on LinkedIn, I will specify one line per paragraph, one sentence per paragraph because generally, and especially these days, people don’t necessarily read, but you want to make things easily scannable. And if you have not so much dense blocks of text, but easier to read, shorter, that helps.

 

[00:13:15.330] – Gen

All these little prompts that might mimic your own style would ultimately lead to a better AI output. And then furthermore, you can actually just reverse engineer your own content. Sean, if you have a post that you spend a lot time on, and it generates a lot of traffic for you, you can ask the AI to reverse engineer. What’s the formatting? What’s the style? How would you describe this writing? And then use that as the input for how you’d want the AI to write for you.

 

[00:13:51.190] – Sean

Right on. So you really gave a nice overview here of how to write a blog post, like an SEO-rich blog post. And you could I tell people, if you’re writing blogs, and I’d love to hear your comments on this, is try to think of the top 10, top 15, top 20 most frequently asked questions your customers ask, and create blog post articles against that. So when they’re searching Google, they should theoretically find those articles, depending on, of course, how much traffic you have and how well your SEO is. But would you recommend the same strategy?

 

[00:14:24.360] – Gen

Yeah. I think that’s a great way to start, too, is basically question-based keywords. So you can use You can use Semrush or Ahrefs to filter specifically for questions, or you can use tools. Detailed. Com has a Chrome extension. Basically, for a particular keyword, it will export the people also ask. Ask. So in your Google search result, you’d see other search queries that people who ask, How would I improve my investment strategy? There would be similar queries that Google will show you on that page. Detail. Com just makes it easy to export that. So answer socerties, detail. Com, keywordtool. Io, another way that you can just find the search queries. You have to pay if you want to see the volume. But all these are other ways that you can identify related questions to those main keywords that you’re trying to target.

 

[00:15:17.410] – Sean

Right on. Okay. So a lot of good tips here with blogs. What are their marketing tools? You mentioned email, you mentioned lead magnets. You want to talk about that a little bit, too?

 

[00:15:28.620] – Gen

Yeah, sure. And In what regard? The content generation?

 

[00:15:33.500] – Sean

Yeah. How would you use AI to streamline your approach of creating? Let’s get into because email is something we do a lot of, and I think I’ve talked to a few other people about email. But do you use AI to help you optimize a lead magnet?

 

[00:15:47.190] – Gen

I do, yeah. I do for actually help with creating it. For example, one use case, one example is, let’s find a list of conversion rate optimization optimization tips. And so that’s where I’ve seen lead magnets that do well. And with that, I wanted to add a little more to it. And so you can actually get a list of your optimization tips, but you can go further. You can do whatever you want. So say if it’s for a B2C finance investing tool, you can create basically an output as a table. So in doing that, I would say, All right, let’s create the investment strategies and of a smart investor. And so you’d say, What’s the strategy? What’s the tactics? What’s the category? Give me a detailed description and give me the first steps to do this or the best resources. I’m just making this up. But you can get the output in a table, and then you could paste that table into, say, a notion or air table. And that in itself becomes incredibly valuable, and especially when you can layer on these things or you can enrich each particular cell or row with more detail sales.

 

[00:17:00.510] – Gen

And then maybe you’re using a Tykr tie in in some ways. These are ways that you can use AI to curate knowledge and also just add value. Once you understand what your ideal customer profile is, what their questions are, what their problems are, and why did they exchange their email to opt in to your lead magnet?

 

[00:17:19.940] – Sean

Right. And just to back up a second, again, I’ll talk to the audience here. Audience, you probably know what a lead magnet is, but I’ll just keep it really simple. I’ll give you an example of what we do at Tykr. So when you join, we use a tool called Convert Box. And what it does is you can set… You put a little snippet of code on your site, and if somebody lands on your site, you can set the duration. For example, after 15 seconds or 30 seconds, or in our case, 40 In five seconds of browsing our site, a popup shows up. And it’s 10 tips for beginners, and add your email to download a PDF right now. Not five minutes from now, not 20 hours from now. It’s like, you get it right now. So So that’s the lead magnet because we want to track those leads into our system. And when they get into our system, then we give them a drip sequence providing them as more educational content. But that tool has proven to work really well. So in the case of AI, I’m just thinking out loud here, we could probably brainstorm again some ideas, like behind the scenes we could, or offline, I should say, of how do we optimize a more attractive title for the lead magnet?

 

[00:18:28.880] – Sean

And then maybe maybe formatting the content of the PDF, which is really just a Google Doc we exported to PDF as simple as that. Anyway, that’s Lead Magnet. And your strategy here to help optimize that to maybe make it more attractive, more clickable. Just a thought.

 

[00:18:48.410] – Gen

Yeah. And then that’s where AI can be really good is you might have, say you’re running ad campaigns and you’re targeting one for beginners, then you might have one for advanced, then you might have a real estate investment thing. So you can really niche down. And it’s not going to be a bait and switch because the actual content would be specific for the niche that you specify.

 

[00:19:09.840] – Sean

Right. Okay, this is great for lead magnet. Any other tips here with optimizing a lead magnet before we jump over to email?

 

[00:19:20.990] – Gen

Tips for optimizing a lead magnet? Yeah. I mean, these days, I think the bar has raised for what what a lead magnet is, and I think people expect more value. So if it’s some fluffy piece, it’s not going to be as actionable or helpful. So the way that I like to try and do things is to make it as actionable as possible. And I think you’re a great example of you have a free trial or freemium, right? And then that’s probably as good as you can get free access to the tool itself so they can extract their value. Short of that, maybe it is some checklist or template or something that’s more immediately useful. So that’s how I try to think of what these offers would be, is something that would be actionable and tight as closely as possible to the actual offer of the product.

 

[00:20:15.620] – Sean

I like where you’re going there because you’re right, a lot of people don’t want the fluff pieces. This podcast is a great example. They want tactical strategies they can use today. And with a lead magnet, how I would optimize it using AI is trying to find out what are the things, in my case, my audience, retail investors, what do they want to learn most? What are tactical strategies they can use today? And I would probably use back and forth prompt engineering with ChatGPT to drill into those and then create some document. And I like to use simple numbers. Don’t be like, Here’s 27 tips. It’s like, Keep it like 5, 7, 10. Keep it relatively short and just get to the point. But they better be tactical. All right, let’s transition to email. Email marketing is still so hot. I had one of my buddies go to a conference about email marketing, and an executive from Target was there talking about still a massive amount of revenue, I forgot the number, but it was in the billions, is generated just from email marketing alone. So some people say, Well, email marketing is dead. It’s like, No, it’s far from dead.

 

[00:21:28.070] – Sean

So how do you use AI to optimize as email?

 

[00:21:31.200] – Gen

Yeah. For email, I generally do it… I do it most often for myself. I actually use a custom GPT where I have… So custom GPT is in ChatGPT. You can basically create your own bot where you’re adding custom instructions. So this is what your background is. This is the format of the newsletter. This is the topic. This is the points that we want to have. And for me, for example, I have a more specific structure Sure, for Supermarketers. It’s an acronym for strategy, use case, prompt, exercise, and resource. Each of those, every email would be broken out into that format. And so what I like to do is I just basically will either drop in some text of the type of email that I’m trying to cover, or I’ll actually just open up the Custom GPT in ChatGPT and then talk into the app. So I want to write an email about out this strategy. I want it to cover these points, and then I’ll get a draft from the Custom GPT. And then, for example, there’s also some nuances of it where the email will start with a quote. So I like to have a quote at the top of whatever, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, a Supermarketer, and then break into the intro, and then the outro will be like, Stay Supermarketers, all those small things.

 

[00:23:00.080] – Gen

But I added that to the custom instructions, so the output does include those. And so it’s just a nice way to shortcut the time. You understand what you want to include, but it makes it easier in terms of the formatting the structure, and maybe coming up with ideas to flesh out those initial seeds of the idea.

 

[00:23:20.950] – Sean

Right on. Okay. Let’s take a quick commercial break. All right, the Tykr mobile app for both iOS and Android is now live. It includes all the same It reaches as the web app, including stocks, ETFs, crypto, a watchlist, watchlist alerts, so something changes, you automatically get notified, a portfolio tracker, and a confidence booster powered by OpenAI. Plus, it includes learning modules inspired by Duolingo, in this case investing, learning modules to help you get up to speed as fast as possible. If you’re interested, you can go to Tykr. Com. You’ll see the Apple and Google logos right up top, or you can go to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store and download the app for All right, back to the show. And then as far as the format, email, what I’ve learned is, let’s say you’re doing a campaign and you’re promoting something, is each email, let’s say it was over two weeks, five emails, just throwing out random numbers here. Every email, in my case, and I learned this from a few other marketers, is every email should be a little shorter. So your first email is a little longer, more context, and then you want to get shorter as you go.

 

[00:24:29.130] – Sean

So that last email, right to the point, this deal ends in 24 hours. Grab it now, bam, that’s it. So do you do the same thing with your email marketing sequences?

 

[00:24:40.230] – Gen

No, not necessarily. But I actually don’t do a lot of discrete campaigns like that. So if I do one with a client, it might be more of the onboarding flow. So it’s not leading towards an an event. So I don’t do that. But I certainly think that what you’re saying makes sense. And then also switching between a highly designed, more visual email, and then maybe a text-based, simple email. It always keeping one call to action, making it simple, making it very clear for the reader to know what it is that they should be doing.

 

[00:25:21.810] – Sean

Got it. And to talk about what we do at our levels, we have a few different types of sequences. The The main one is onboarding or nurturing, which is all content value add education, which is probably what a lot of what you’re doing. For example, we do 20 plus tips over 20 days. Every day, you get a new tip, whether it’s like, When do you buy? When do you sell? How to use this feature and Tykr, stuff like that. And so we really focus on, again, value add. We’re not selling anything. And we could use ChatGPT to help formulate or change the contents a little bit. We could also use, like you mentioned, a good idea here, use a quote from somebody like, in our case, we could use Warren Buffet. Use a quote there and incorporate this quote into this article in some way, shape, or form. And ChatGPT could output content that we could copy and paste and maybe rework a little bit if needed. But that’s a good approach to create a nurturing campaign is what you’re talking about, right?

 

[00:26:26.600] – Gen

Yeah, absolutely. And for you also, It could be a term, a financial term, and that’s something that you can have AI do. That actually reminds me another good use case of AI that people are… I think maybe the window is limited here, but programmatic SEO. So programmatic SEO is basically creating content that follows a certain template and format. So Yelp is a good example where they have a category and a city. So best blank in blank. So best coffee shop in Chicago, best physical trainer in Milwaukee. And so all these things, and you can get very granular there. But once you have the template, once you understand what you’re trying to accomplish, that’s a great use case for how AI can do this to help you scale. The caveat there is that you don’t just want to, again, regurgitate content because that wouldn’t be as good. You’re not adding a unique perspective, but AI is good there. So maybe you have some unique data points. Maybe you have from Tykr a lot of proprietary data or benchmarks that you could use, but that’s something that’s helpful.

 

[00:27:40.430] – Sean

Right. What I was thinking of, too, you touched on this a little bit is whatever your service is, your product or service, it’s important to break it down in simple terms. So finance is known to make things super over complicated. Let’s use $20 words. It just drives me nuts. But anyway, Anyway, you could go to ChatGPT and plug in, take this phrase or this term and give me one to two sentences in simple terms. You could do that with ChatGPT and I’ll spit out something that’s written in a way where a third grader could understand it.

 

[00:28:17.550] – Gen

Yeah.

 

[00:28:18.110] – Sean

Kind of tactic you use there. I think that strategy there works really well for both the blog posts and the emails that are being sent out to your customers. Keep things simple. Yeah. Have you You ever used the tool? It’s hemmingwayapp. Com?

 

[00:28:33.740] – Gen

I know of it. I actually I’ve used Grammarly.

 

[00:28:37.640] – Sean

Okay.

 

[00:28:38.460] – Gen

But yeah.

 

[00:28:38.520] – Sean

What this Hemmingway app does is you can put in sentences and content and it’ll say what grade is it understandable? And you want to ideally get as low of a grade like third grade. For example, investing for beginners, I’m just plugging in as we speak. I’m going to see that comes back. Actually, that comes back as grade 10, which is a little high. You want to be Grade 3 or lower. It’s very hard to get that low. But essentially what it does is it teaches you to put in or use content that a third grader can understand. And that is proven from some marketers Have you used that tool, proven to increase conversions and make your site more approachable? Because there are some people that still want to keep the complex language, and it’s like, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

 

[00:29:26.010] – Gen

No. Yeah, totally. Don’t make me think.

 

[00:29:29.060] – Sean

Yes, right. Just get to the point. I’m trying to solve pain. How are you doing that? Get right to the end result here. So any other tips there on email? How are you using AI to help out your email creation?

 

[00:29:46.640] – Gen

Yeah. So I do get ChatGPT help for the subject and preview text. So I’ll paste in the email, then paste in generally for For my own email, I like to make it to focus on how to and have some promise of what someone would learn if they read it. And I like to start with an emoji to stand out in the inbox, though that doesn’t work as well anymore. But yeah, so I’ll just get, I want to focus on the how to. Here’s the email. Give me 10 variations of a subject line and preview text for the email. And then you can add different You can add examples. You can add the types of things that you want. You can add copywriting frameworks, for example, problem agitation solution, attention interest, desire, action. So setting different frameworks is also helpful, whether you’re doing copy or email subject lines.

 

[00:30:49.670] – Sean

Awesome. All right. What I want to do next is do a rollup. I’ve got a bunch of key takeaways for the audience here. Just summarize, and then I’m going to ask you one more question. We’ll get into the rapid fire round right after that. So here we go. I took a bunch of notes here. There’s really three categories. There’s tactics for blogs, tactics for lead magnets, and tactics for emails. So the blogs, I’m going to summarize. We’ve got come up with questions. Number one is come up with questions You can use tools like semrush or keywordool. Io. Did I get that right? Keyword tool. Io? Okay. You have come up with your top questions, and you can also look in those platforms to see what other questions are being asked. But I do that a lot with My customers, as I do surveys, every so often I ask, What are your top questions? I put them into Excel or the Google Sheets, and that way I can keep a list of what is the highest count next to each question, and I use that as a starting point. All right. Number two, competitive analysis. Use ChatGPT for competitive analysis.

 

[00:31:50.050] – Sean

You can come up with three to five clusters. Find search terms with high volume. I like to use Google Trends, which is for you. You can compare different trends in each other, which one to search most. Create long tail words. And then you can use ChatGPT to summarize the title tags, H1s, and descriptions of your competitors, is what I wrote down before. I thought that was a smart tactic I haven’t used. Number three within blogs, which is use AI to create the content. Write the outline first. Then number four, use ChatGPT to write your blog post section by section. I really love that idea. Don’t do the whole thing. Go section by section, add your human touch to it. And also tell ChatGPT to get rid of the cliché marketing phrases such as unlock or unleash. Get rid of that noise. And then this is good, too, is I forgot how it was phrased, but speed of readability, if that’s the thing, is don’t have big blocks. Do maybe one or two, maybe three sentences per paragraph so people can get through the content faster, fast reading, essentially. All right, moving on to… That was number four.

 

[00:33:05.530] – Sean

Moving on to number five, which is use AI to review blog posts that you already have written. That’s the low-hanging fruit. And then number six is programmatic SEO, such as, and I like your example of best of in blank. I wrote down the example, best pizza restaurant in Chicago as a framework. Best marketing firm on SEO in Milwaukee. People get the idea. All right, so that was blog’s lead magnet. I got three tips here. Find a list of conversion optimization tips. You could find articles. You can use ChatGPT to shorten your search there. You can use AI to find out what people want most, and then use AI for different niches, like niching down. In my case, I could go to niches, not just investing, but investing for beginners, investing for advanced as investors investing for real estate, so on and so forth. All right, then getting to email, this was great. For creating content, use ChatGPT. You can plug in a quote from a famous person in your industry and create content around that. You can then tell ChatGPT to define complex words and phrases in simple terms. I like that for finance. And then also this was really good is use ChatGPT to come up with a few subject line and preview text options.

 

[00:34:28.810] – Sean

That way you’re not using your own brain power. It’s like you let ChatGPT shorten the work time, you could say, and give you a list to choose from. So there you go. Massive roll up there. A lot of great tips. Before we jump to the rapid fire run, what is one more key takeaway you can give her on?

 

[00:34:45.330] – Gen

A key takeaway is, I think, the combination of AI. So make. Com and OpenAI, creating assistance in OpenAI. So you go to platform. Openai. Com, create an assistant. And So that’s where you can really customize these large language models, which are going to be very generic. You create an assistant where you’re uploading your own specific proprietary information. It could be your brand voice, it could be your good articles, it could be your product marketing stuff. But once you’re able to create a robust assistant, and so Tykr could have assistance for product marketing, email, copy, blog post, whatever it is, consider it basically an employee, and then use make. Com, which is an automation tool similar to Zappier, but make is more robust. And then you’re just creating different automation. So that, I think, is a huge unlock to saving time, saving money, doing more with less.

 

[00:35:45.760] – Sean

Right on. And just to hammer on something here, there’s a lot of people out there that become fearful of AI, like it’s going to take jobs away. And my response to that is, if you’re smart, you’re going to find out how to use AI to make your job more efficient. It’s not really going replace jobs. It’s like the jobs change a little bit like the industrial revolution. Now we’re using AI to work more efficient, become more specific, become more accurate. And how you use it really can separate you from other marketers out there. And it sounds like you’re doing exactly that.

 

[00:36:19.470] – Gen

I’m trying. But yeah, I do agree. They say you’re not going to lose a job to AI. You’ll lose it to a person who uses AI. Yes. Yeah. You can just do so much more. And I think you can in some ways do it better. And it’s an instant way to level up your skills where you can do design stuff. I’m using it for AI music for the podcast. There are just so many different use cases. Once you distill down what you’re actually doing, and then maybe more so on a recurring basis, what are those tasks that you’re doing? I’m pretty sure that you can find a way to use AI and automation to help you do faster.

 

[00:37:00.850] – Sean

Right on. All right, let’s jump into the rapid fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Gen really is. If you can, try to answer each question in about 15 seconds or less. You ready?

 

[00:37:12.660] – Gen

Yes.

 

[00:37:13.400] – Sean

All right. What is your favorite podcast?

 

[00:37:15.600] – Gen

My First Million and the Startup Ideas podcast with Greg Eisenberg and Marketing Against the Green.

 

[00:37:24.710] – Sean

Yes, very familiar with all three. Nice choices. All right. What is the recent book you read and would recommend?

 

[00:37:30.840] – Gen

2034 is a novel set in the future of 2034, but basically the start of World War III. It was fascinating. It was scary, it was gripping, it was enlightening, and a reminder of we’re teetering on the precipice of some dangerous times, potentially.

 

[00:37:53.920] – Sean

Right. Okay, I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds in the book, but is it AI Skynet? We’re talking Terminator? No.

 

[00:38:03.130] – Gen

Like Skynet?

 

[00:38:03.430] – Sean

No. Okay.

 

[00:38:04.360] – Gen

It’s very geopolitical nuclear weapons type stuff.

 

[00:38:08.730] – Sean

Got it. Okay.

 

[00:38:10.180] – Gen

All right. But it’s realistic. It’s not like a sci-fi.

 

[00:38:13.530] – Sean

Sci-fi. Like AI is going to be the trigger for World War III. No. Okay. Yeah, just checking. All right, moving on to the movie question. What is your favorite movie?

 

[00:38:22.690] – Gen

I’m a big basketball fan. I recently saw the Yannis movie, Yannis Antetokounmpo on Amazon. There are a couple. The one on Amazon, a documentary was fantastic. I mean, that guy’s story is so inspiring, where he grew up as an immigrant in Greece from Nigeria, a family of four sons. And to get by, they basically sold trinkets around the poorest sites of Athens. And it was really the family bond that held them together all the way through to him becoming some scrawny drafted player that nobody knew of in Milwaukee. So maybe you’re a fan. To MBA champion, MVP. Just an amazing story. So I really like that one.

 

[00:39:05.090] – Sean

I’m all in on that. It’s like a good sports documentary.

 

[00:39:08.890] – Gen

Well, it’s not, but it’s more than that. That’s more- Right.

 

[00:39:12.080] – Sean

Yeah. All right. What is the worst advice you ever received?

 

[00:39:16.550] – Gen

Well, probably to sign a four-year contract for a sales job soon after college, and then believing that that was an enforceable contract. That was a It was a little bit of a regrettable decision, but I did it.

 

[00:39:33.590] – Sean

You went to learn.

 

[00:39:34.740] – Gen

Yeah, exactly.

 

[00:39:36.140] – Sean

I get right to the end here. You didn’t stay four years, I assume?

 

[00:39:40.220] – Gen

Well, I did, but it was all part of the plan I had to go to business school. Okay. I have a few regrets, but that was a long time, more than I should have.

 

[00:39:50.020] – Sean

Okay, all right. Flip the equation. What’s the best advice you ever received?

 

[00:39:56.240] – Gen

To spend time with family, kids, that But I have a three-year-old and an eight-year-old, and just the time goes by so quickly. I’m already seeing that. And so work can wait. It’ll be there, but really enjoy the time while they’re young, while they want to hang out. And so I try to prioritize that as much as possible.

 

[00:40:13.900] – Sean

Right, right. Good advice. All right, last question here is the time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

 

[00:40:23.840] – Gen

I would say probably early 20s. It doesn’t matter and no one cares. I felt like, Oh, I needed to do this, this, and this. So it ties into that four-year job and the business school and the jobs and following a path. And really, I could have done other things and not been so I’m restricted by what I thought I should do, but more like what I actually want to do, which I’m doing now. So I’m very happy I am here now.

 

[00:40:53.820] – Sean

You’ve arrived. There you go. Yes.

 

[00:40:56.160] – Gen

All right.

 

[00:40:58.430] – Sean

And where can the audience reach you?

 

[00:41:00.500] – Gen

Yeah. So I’m LinkedIn. This is a great place, Gen Furukawa. You’re not going to see many Gen Furukawa’s, I don’t think. And then, yeah, feel free to email Gen, G-E-N@supermarketers. Ai. Happy to share or elaborate on anything I touched on today.

 

[00:41:17.960] – Sean

Awesome. Well, Gen, thank you so much for your time. This is great. Yeah.

 

[00:41:21.750] – Gen

Thanks so much, Sean.

 

[00:41:22.850] – Sean

We’ll see you. Yeah. Bye. Hey, I’d like to say thanks for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review? The more reviews we get, the higher this podcast will rank. All right, stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you.