SUMMARY KEYWORDS
AI in website development, digital marketing, user experience, SEO, ChatGPT, keyword research, content creation, marketing plan, backlinks, CRM systems, customer journey, emotional experience, storytelling, automation, business growth.
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Sarah Johnson
Damon Pistulka 00:07
All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am so excited for our guest today, because we have none other than Sarah Johnson, co founder of JamboJon, website development. Today we are going to be talking about leveraging AI in your website and digital marketing. Sarah, thanks so much for being here today. Thank you
Sarah Johnson 00:36
so much. I’m so excited to talk about this, and I’m so excited for the listeners to come on board. This is such a new field that this is really a great opportunity to experiment and to pick each other’s brains and to just to play. It’s like a big new sandbox that we get to play in.
Damon Pistulka 00:54
It literally is like a big sandbox. That’s a great way to describe it, because every, every day, it seems like you come up with a new way that AI has helped, or you heard about or read about, that it’s, it’s, it’s helping, and especially in what you do in website development and digital marketing. So let’s, let’s, first of all, let’s back up a little ways and let people know more about your background and what you guys have been doing at Jamba John for for a little bit of time now, I’d be
Sarah Johnson 01:23
happy to so I’m a native of Utah. We live in the Rocky Mountains, and I grew up right near the University of Utah. My grandfather was a computer scientist there, and my mom was a nursing student there, and so really, really deep roots here in the Salt Lake Valley. I graduated with a degree in communication, and so back when I graduated from college, back in the early 2000s communication really was about buying billboards, buying TV spots, getting promo spots on the radio, and doing a lot of PR, um, I remember my my boss, who was my mentor. Um, she we were getting a new website built for red Butte garden, which is where I interned at, and the only way to build a website was with HTML. And I was like, I’m not interested in learning how to do HTML, which is ironic that now you know Jamba John is a website agency, yeah. And fast forward 25 years, my husband and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. Nice, um, he is my business partner, and my husband and we have been building websites with at John Bo John for now 15 years, we’ve helped over 450 companies across the country. And you could say a lot has changed. You could say a lot has changed. So a little bit of background. I graduated with my degree in communications, went into sales for about eight years, learned that I actually really enjoy sales. It’s a really important part of the economy. And my husband is was a marketing professional who self taught programmer. He knows about five different programming languages. Wow, joined forces in 2006 I’m a copywriter and and was good at sales. He was a programmer and designer, which, if you know anything about the programming design world, that’s unusual. Yes, those ads and we started Jabo John. So here we are now. We have a team of about 12 developers and designers, copywriters, all local, located in the United States. And we’re helping companies grow. We’re helping advance entrepreneurs, and we’re helping growing businesses with their digital marketing.
Damon Pistulka 03:31
Nice, nice. So you’ve been building websites for a while. What are some of the changes you’ve seen over the years that really shook up. You know, what’s expected, or what we see in websites over the years? What are some big pivot points that you’ve seen? Ah,
Sarah Johnson 03:48
oh my gosh. Well, the first websites we built in the late 90s literally was like a Word document on the internet. Yeah, there was, there was not a lot of design prowess or user experience at all. It was, it was just literally so simple. And I think what you could say is, is, I think that the internet has has gone to school kind of like a child would have gone from, yeah, old to kindergarten to high school, and now we’re in graduate level, because with digital marketing, we’re looking at color psychology, we’re looking at brand psychology, we’re looking at user experiences and user interface. We’re looking at APIs and connections and plugging point A to point B so our data set can swim down this funnel and our customers have a seamless experience. And so really, I think the biggest change that I’ve seen with marketing as a whole is that marketers tend, because it’s such a low cost of of involvement, that marketers think that they can do everything, and they’re like, oh, I can do that. I can do that. I can pick that up. I can do that. And really, what we’re seeing is that marketing to succeed at marketing, you have to work with specialists and. That might mean that you have a specialist that’s really good at Pay Per Click ads, and that’s their area of genius, but you hire your pay per click genius to write your copy that’s actually going to sell the product to an emotional user, human. Yeah, right. So I think that’s the biggest thing that there’s that this industry specifically, is moving so fast that the the best practices, even two years ago, we’re everything like, it’s just you have to pivot and get better and pivot and get better. You can get data and get pivot and get better. You just have to keep moving forward. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 05:35
yeah. And that you said a few things in this and I was writing notes down here. You know, the user experience, the users have gotten so much their their level of expectations have gone up significantly. Yeah, yeah. You know, like it better work just as good on mobile as it does on a desktop and and probably, if it doesn’t work on a mobile, you’re hurt more than if it doesn’t work on desktop anymore. And then, then what something, I think, really in B to B, that’s, that’s a huge thing that people, if they don’t work with that they don’t understand it is that data flow, because used to be with the in the old world, that your website was kind of sitting out there on its own and not really connected to everything. And now it’s, it’s expected to be connected. It’s expected that I can, if I am an E commerce, I can order. It flows right all the way through my systems. Nobody touches anything. It just happens. If I’m, you know, quote request that goes to the right place internally. And it’s not just somebody gets an email and they have to manually do any of this that that whole, like you said, the API data flow to make sure that that user has a more seamless experience, is just matured so much well,
Sarah Johnson 06:51
and it’s intensified too. So I don’t know if you like a little bit of data, but I have a little bit of data.
Damon Pistulka 06:56
Yes, that’d be awesome. Okay, so
Sarah Johnson 06:58
in 1998 I went to a conference hosted by our local radio station B 98.7 and they wanted to sell redview garden and advertising package. And their their data in 1998 said that customers have to see your brand seven times before they buy. And so their solutions like, for X amount of dollars, we can provide all seven contacts. And I really like the analogy they provided, because they’re like, You know what, awareness in the community, which is the first step in any marketing funnel, people have to see you as kind of like getting enough energy for a hot air balloon to be lifted up onto the air, a lot of momentum to keep that awareness up. So it’s easier to keep a hot air balloon up than it is to get one off the ground right? What’s your guess? Now we’re fast forward to 2025. I’ll give you a clue. The numbers higher than seven. What’s your guess? What’s the data say? Now, what do you think the number is?
Damon Pistulka 07:57
A dozen.
Sarah Johnson 07:59
Good guess. It’s higher than that. Oh,
Damon Pistulka 08:04
I don’t know, 21 Oh, my goodness, it went up three times.
Sarah Johnson 08:08
It went up three times. So it’s interesting, because I think that, you know, seven times you have, you had billboards, TV, you had radio, you had print, which is expensive media, yes. So the word of like that that those funnels were expensive, which made it so not a lot of people can play at that level. Not a lot of brands could play at that level. Now our cost of entry is a lot less, because you can start advertising for under 100 bucks. Mm, hmm, right, with social media, with all sorts of things. I’m not saying you should stop at 100 but now our communication system have to match the need for for the 21 times. And I think we’re doing that with technology, with APIs, with connections from different data sets, so that the experience seems it seems flawless to the customer. It should feel flawless to the customer, but there’s a lot of programming and a lot of manpower and woman power that goes behind making those transitions,
Damon Pistulka 09:06
yeah, yeah. So give an example of that for somebody that’s just a person that doesn’t know the technology behind it, explain what we’re talking about. Yeah. So
Sarah Johnson 09:19
there are CRM systems. CRM stands for customer relationship management, and the the software does all the heavy lifting where you’re, instead of having a Rolodex is, you know, or like, the phone book where you’re, you have in that paper format that all the data is, is in a digital format. So what’s happening, what we’re seeing in the marketplace with AI and with software development is that there is a widget, there is a software for everything. You know, it’s like we have our cellphones and anything that you want to have happen, there’s a plugin for that, or there’s an app. It’s so funny. We’re doing math with our kids. My husband and I have four kids and and he was talking about math, and he’s like, you know, our math teacher said, Well, you’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket. You gotta figure out how to do this math on your own. And it turns out, in fact, we do have all the calculators in our pocket, right? And so what would have happened manually, of like, you’re writing yourself a note? Oh, I gotta call Damon. It’s been a while since I’ve talked to Damon. I gotta put it in my calendar and write it out contact Damon in October. There are software systems that take the mental load of what we would do to build a personal relationship with something and automate it so it feels like a human to human connection with text messages, with emails, with fun postcards, is actually a software system. They are built from A to Z that we’re pre configuring with the help of software. What you want the customer experience to look like and feel like,
Damon Pistulka 10:53
yeah, yeah, and it’s incredible now, what we what you know just from a decade ago, and how our expectations on normal e commerce transactions, a lot of people buy from Amazon works. We’re expected to be able to, hey, we, we know, down to the, you know, three hour window when it’s going to get delivered. It get delivered pretty fast, you know, I’ve got a, oh, all crazy, you know, selection right at my fingertips in about two thumb moves, you got everything you just wanted to get,
Sarah Johnson 11:29
which is incredible because word that’s from a perspective of a user like you’re thinking about that in terms of a user that you think about from an operations standpoint, Amazon, like the inventory they have to manage, and the the numbers that they have to manage, and the drivers and the operations to have that kind of expedited service around the globe. Yeah, that’s pretty incredible.
Damon Pistulka 11:50
It really is. And especially, I had the luxury of going to one of their fulfillment centers a few years ago, and we didn’t even go inside. We were just with a delivery company and and touring, you know, giving us the experience of what their drivers go through. It is absolutely amazing how efficient that is run when you see hundreds of cars and vans and everything else rolling into a fulfillment center, loading up, all knowing exactly where they have to go. Everybody’s got the on their phone or on their device, whatever it is, then they’re out delivering that all day long. And that was somebody that could have ordered, you know, a few hours ago, right? And they coordinate that effort. It’s it’s huge.
Sarah Johnson 12:37
It’s amazing. And I think for the listeners, this can feel really overwhelming. Don’t you think Damon, like, Yes, as a business owner, I think it’s like we we want to have the ease of that system being built, and that it feels so overwhelming. So I actually like to think about this experience, um, from an emotional standpoint, from the user standpoint. So are you okay if I pivot for just a second? Yes, yes. Yes. So there’s two things I want to share. Number one is, we’re big Disney fans at our house. We go, we like to go to Disney World. And if you’ve ever been to Disneyland or Disney World, you get your tickets and you go underneath the train. You go walk underneath the train, and then you are in Main Street. Yep, right. As soon as you walk out of the door, you smell popcorn. Have you ever noticed that there is no popcorn right there? It just smells like popcorn, right? So I imagine, like the big poofer of the you know, the Febreze breeze at the beginning of Disney World. Now I like this example because I think everyone can relate to it. That’s an intentional customer journey. That’s an experience nolger. That’s like a Oh my gosh, like this celebration, right? The same people who designed fireworks right before the park closes, you get the entire population, 20,000 people who are scattered amongst this huge park to the exit before the park closes. I think the celebration leaves the customers with a feeling of nostalgia. Yes, peers are designing people to get out of the park. Thank you for coming Good night. Yeah. So I think it’s really important that we’re designing an emotional experience that’s eliciting, that’s eliciting those feelings that you want your customer to have. So the technology is the tool that allows us to let go of the mental load and our team’s mental load, and makes it automated. But the point is not the automation. The point is the experience. Yeah, okay, so the second thing I wanted to share is we at Jambo John, we’re very story centric, and we study tons of stories telling strategies. That’s the framework. And the reason why is because people make decisions to buy based on emotion, and then they figure out the why, then they figure out the how. So then they’ll figure out the what that it’s an emotional experience, and we can do that through storytelling. So Joseph Campbell’s the father of the hero’s journey. He’s he’s the one that created this framework, and he talks about this journey is like, you go from the normal world and go to you are invited, because of some kind of opposition, into the extraordinary world. Okay, so whatever your product is, whoever’s listening, I want you to think about your product, and what is the moment for your customer when they go from their normal, everyday, ongoing experience, their normal world, and they’re invited to go into an extraordinary world. Now it might be like, for example, if if you’re a medical provider, that there’s some kind of medical catastrophe. If you’re an attorney, there might have been a divorce. If you are a business coach, there might be a desire at some point to exit your way, right? There’s some kind of catalyst. But as we’re talking about user experience, and we’re talking about designing a system for the customer. If you’re looking at storytelling, you’re inviting your customers into a magical world. My favorite example of this is cocoa. Have you seen Coco? Disney’s cocoa? Yes. Okay, so you know when, and it’s not at the it’s not an initial transition, but there’s a bridge of those orange flower petals read literally, a bridge from the living world to the land of the dead, right? Mm, hmm. Beautiful scene work. So as as a business owner, I want you to think about, what are the smells? What are the tastes? What are the visuals? What are what do you hear, what do you taste, what do you feel, and what’s the experience? So like, I want you to design like your customers walking into the theme park, your customers walking into this magical world. What are they feeling? What are they thinking, what are they experiencing? And then use the software to automate it so it’s easy,
Damon Pistulka 17:01
yeah, that’s a great point, because you really have to think about the experience. Mm, hmm, because it’s so huge, it’s so huge. And as you said, people make buying decisions. They’re emotional, and then they try to substantiate their decision based on that emotion. Exactly,
Sarah Johnson 17:22
yep. And we’re not here to market because of fear. We’re here to market because we can help people. Mm, hmm, right. And so people are looking they’re up late at night, they’re stressing out to their spouse, they’re talking to their business partners with a problem. And if you come along and say, Oh, I’ve had a problem, and I solve the problem, and this is how I feel, then what’s going to happen is that their brain is going to say, Tell me more. Nothing else matters besides solving that particular problem, and then they’re going to find out exactly what you have to offer. Mm, hmm,
Damon Pistulka 17:56
yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome because that experience is so, so key, and, like you said, designing the experience and then creating it digitally so people can feel it. Yes,
Sarah Johnson 18:11
and what I would recommend, if you have a listener who’s new to this is I would start with one one experience, map out one experience. So I like to look at, what is my offer that’s going to make me money? What am I looking to sell in q2 or q3 then I’m going to backtrack and say, What kind of free offer, what kind of free gift can I provide that’s going to be a hook for that experience? What kind of communication can I lead up to buying that experience. Now we’ve talked about the magic 21 right? Most people that I tell that to get scared and feel overwhelmed. I was talking to a service provider recently, and we had a one to one, and he told me he changed his business. He grew his business from $5,000 a month in revenue to $2 million a month in revenue, and his contact strategy includes 96 touch points. So if you’re in his database, you’ll get 96 touch points a year. Yeah, isn’t that cool? And so talking to somebody like that, he made my brain get bigger, right? So I would encourage you, if you haven’t yet started, start somewhere. And so what I like to do is just pick five ways you’re contacting people, and rinse and repeat. So it might be a newsletter, it might be your in person, networking, it might be Facebook ads, it might be social media posts, it might be a postcard. There’s a bazillion ways you can Yeah, but just pick five, and then you’re going to rinse and repeat. If five feels like too much, start with three. So you’re going to build out one campaign for one offer, and then after you’ve presented the offer, continue that conversation. So this is where it’s important to get soft. Or that’s sophisticated enough that if somebody’s on a path and you’re like, hey, schedule an appointment, and you have six emails that say, Hey, I really want you to schedule this appointment, well if after the second appointment, after the second email, they schedule an appointment, you don’t want to keep inviting them to schedule an appointment, because then they’ll be confused. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 20:19
yeah. You hear me, yeah, yeah. It has to stop. It has to know that they’ve scheduled an appointment and at least stop or change into something else, yeah, yeah. And there’s
Sarah Johnson 20:31
different levels of tools, good, better, best that you can purchase and you can utilize, but that’s just something in terms of, like, user experience is helpful,
Damon Pistulka 20:40
yeah? And it really is amazing now, with simple, simple tools, how well you can improve that communication path. And I think that’s one of the things that we really see, is that you know, in just using websites now, you expect to get almost an instant confirmation if you’ve ordered something, or you’re you’re on a website, right? Even in the chat, the website chats now people are they expect that thing should come up. That thing should work fast to the point that even me is at my age. If I’m going, like on some of my sites, for, say, my phone or something, I want to use chat because I know that’s a faster option for me to get the service I need. And people are these, these expectations are really changing in how we get things done. Yeah,
Sarah Johnson 21:29
absolutely. And I would recommend, like to have a schedule where you’re coming back to test your own system. Yes, gautically, like, what is it like in incognito mode for the user, and periodically just test it to make sure that it’s working right. Because people who don’t know you or aren’t familiar with you probably don’t love you enough to be like, Hey, I didn’t, I didn’t get a confirmation. They’re just going to go away and you won’t know about them. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 21:58
that’s that’s a great point, because, you know, a software update, some other change can can lead to something that stops, something that could be really vital to your business, yes,
Sarah Johnson 22:09
so a couple things that we’re seeing a lot of that I want to encourage any of the the listeners today, back up your site, take five minutes and make a backup of your site that’s off of your website. There’s a tool called updraft that we really like. There’s a lot of different tools, but just just do it, like, just, you know, like, you get your teeth cleaned, you get these things done, period. You get your oil changed. Make sure you have a backup of your site, because if something happens, and you always know, and you can schedule them to happen. The other thing that I would recommend is a CDN network that we like to use CloudFlare, but there’s a lot of malicious attacks that happen on on websites with bots. I like to think of them like those little coconut guys on Moana that they look really cute until you get close, and then they get really mean, and they take your ship down, but getting us something like a CDN will help the traffic route through a security defense before it goes to your website, and can help prevent some of these malicious attacks that we’re seeing on the internet today.
Damon Pistulka 23:14
Yeah, yeah, that is that is amazing, and just the the level that you have to go to to keep things secure now. Mm,
Sarah Johnson 23:23
hmm, yeah. And the bigger your company is, and the bigger your website is, and the more traffic you get, you’re more attractive to those bots and more malicious intent. And so putting in a little bit of framework in advance can help make sure that you have like websites cost 1000s of dollars to create, but you think about the time that you’re spending every week, updating your site, adding new content is so valuable and don’t catch it fast enough, if there’s a problem, what happens is, typically, your hosting company will save seven backups for seven days, and then the last one falls off. So if you have a problem and don’t catch you, don’t notice that there’s a problem fast enough you could lose your website and a lot. Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen to you,
Damon Pistulka 24:07
right? Yes, yes, that’s That’s great advice. That’s great advice. So today we’re talking about leveraging AI in your website and digital marketing. Yeah, talk a little bit about AI, because it hit us by storm. Here. We’re into it. What I don’t know, a year and a half, two years now, whatever the timeline is. So how, how have you seen AI helping you as a website development, slash marketing? And, yeah, let’s start there. I
Sarah Johnson 24:40
love that. So I think that one thing we have to acknowledge is AI is not going away. If we don’t like it, that’s okay. You don’t have to use AI but, but it’s not going away. I think there’s been several major inventions in the last 100 years that have fundamentally changed how communities were. Work. And I think AI is one of those things. We’ve walked through a gateway, and we’re never going back. And I think if you, if you think about early adopters and late adopters as a business owner, I’d encourage you to adopt at some point in in some fashion, because, for example, like in the early 1900s 1800s there were like window tappers that were paid to wake people up, right? We don’t hire window tappers anymore because we have alarm clocks on our phones, right? And so for for one, is like having the mindset to be brave about embracing something new. Number one. Number two, I think that there’s a lot of ways to use AI, and there’s so many cool tools right now, and AI should be used to help leverage what you know Damon and I were actually talking about this before we got on, is that the the people in their own fields, who use AI are going to get a better output than somebody who doesn’t know that field. So for example, my husband, Johnny, is our lead programmer, and he programs something in one day with the help of AI that should have taken him eight. Wow. He’s a coder. So he’s he’s writing code that he typically writes by hand, and it sped up his process that much. Now, I do not program. I’m not a coder. I couldn’t have asked chat GPT or known what to do with the code if it had given me the same output. So the better the input, the better the output, but it’s also the driver. It’s also the person that’s driving that will determine the quality of the output on chat, GPT,
Damon Pistulka 26:52
understanding what to ask to get the right response, yes,
Sarah Johnson 26:54
yes. And the other thought that I have is that I think that that AI can be leveraged for planning, and AI can be used for output, and those are two different things, but I would highly encourage all of the listeners to use, jump into using chat GPT with planning, for sure, for sure, for sure, for sure. If you’re using chat G, P, T for output, it you have to have a human input. So for example, I have got some really good, great prompts that I’d love to share with the team on how to use AI to create a marketing plan and how to use AI to make a blog post. I would never take a blog post out of the box from chatgpt without editing it on chatgpt and then taking it out of chatgpt and actually editing it, yes, as a human, right? So that’s what I would recommend, is like, how can we use it to organize and leverage our data, and then how can we use the human in us to make chat GPT even better? Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 27:55
yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So as as we’re talking about that how, how do you see it changing marketing overall, the way marketing is delivered, there’s just so many things that it seems to be touching
Sarah Johnson 28:13
so many things. So I think the biggest thing you’ll notice on search engine results is you’ll see an AI answer first, yep. And so now, as a business provider, as as somebody who owns a website, and I want website traffic, that the way that we’re optimizing is transforming, because we’re optimizing to answer questions, and we’re optimizing to be a reference on an AI engine, rather than just a search result listed. And so I would encourage you to think about how people are asking questions about your business and having a lot of generative answers, generative answers on your website that answer the questions. I think that’s a good way. That’s a good way to to capitalize on the new way that the search results show up.
Damon Pistulka 29:04
Now, when you say that is that as simple as listing a lot of FAQs about your products or services or what are we talking that would be a yes and
Sarah Johnson 29:14
okay. So to understand how to leverage content in an AI result, you have to understand how Google algorithms work to show showcase. So you need three things on a website to get good search engine results. You have to have a great experience. So Google Analytics is installed on your website, and it shows how many people come, how long do they stay, where do they go? So you need to have a website that’s interactive. You need to have a website that has interesting information. That’s number one. Number two, you need good new content consistently. Google does not want you to have a website and let it sit there for 24 months and do nothing. Google wants to see you at. New blog posts and new landing pages and new references and new videos. Okay, so that’s number two. Number three is you need referring backlinks.
Damon Pistulka 30:11
Okay, okay, so
Sarah Johnson 30:12
for those who might not be familiar with the language, a backlink is another website pointing to your website. It’s an introduction. I like to tell the analogy. Are you familiar with Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice? Yes. Okay, so Pride and Prejudice was written about the Regency period regent. The Regent was King George. That’s why it’s called the Regency period. And at that time, if Damon and I were in the same room together and we hadn’t met, I couldn’t go talk to you, Damon, unless somebody that I knew we had a mutual friend introduce us. Said, Damon, I want to introduce you to my friend, Sarah Johnson. You couldn’t actually even talk to them without an introduction. But you think about like if a lord introduced you, or even the king introduced you, that would give you a higher social clout than, let’s say, like the farm hand, while he was parking your horse was like, oh, I want to introduce you guys. Does that make sense? Like, there’s different social clout that could give you more credit. Mm, hmm, Google. Think of Google like the regent. He’s King George, and he wants to introduce you to the the people of the land, if you get a good recommendation from other people, he already knows. How do we do that? Backlinks? So Google has what’s called a domain authority where it’s like a credit score, it tells you how much clout you have. And so if you have a backlink or an introduction from a Domain Authority website of 90, for example, one out of 190 is really high compared to a backlink of somebody that’s like 15, you’re going to have more clout, more credibility with that score. So that’s that’s the basic SEO 101, in terms of, how do you get rankings on Google? Then we add AI to the mix. So what I would recommend is, as we’re as we’re noticing those three things, good user experience, consistent new content and backlinks. That consistent new content we’re talking about needs to be answering questions.
Damon Pistulka 32:25
Yeah, yeah. Because if you think about what is happening now, it’s not just putting up an article about information. The searches are now questions, and when you can directly have you asked this question on Google? And it finds that exact question with a really healthy answer on a good website. That’s where they’re going to go. That’s how you can get up and search like that. And
Sarah Johnson 32:53
you’ll see the changes from the first chat GPT that we’re seeing in the first AI that we’re seeing compared to now. And it’s going to get better and better and better is that the data is having more references specifically to specific articles and specific websites. Yeah, another thing that you and I were just talking about is custom gpts. So custom GPT is when you install your own data set into it, into this GPT. And so every time you create something for AI with AI, it’s using your data set, copy your information be consistent with your brand. But I also think that that with custom gbts being built, and with more data sets being built, we’re going to see more accurate information on search results, and then the links will help us. The Reference link will help get you credit that will help drive traffic to your website too. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 33:53
yeah. And it really, I mean, it’s amazing how ei or AI, ei AI can help us, though, in in really refining what we’re seeing and so many different things that help us answer those questions better. And like you said, it’s not something you can just let run without guard rails, but you can certainly use it to to as draft tools, as idea generators. And there’s so many different ways, you know, especially when you look at a website and you know, just the text that has to go on a website, yeah, yeah, there’s a huge amount of that. Or even ideas for what images should go on a page or something if you’re doing that, or, yeah, so many things. So as you said, you have you save eight or one day instead of eight for the programming. That’s pretty amazing. What are some of the other things that you’re seeing AI start to do in the in the website development, website world, that is pretty interesting. Yeah. And. So
Sarah Johnson 35:00
one of the things that we like to use the chat GPT, and with AI, is to use the chat GPT for content creation, to create a marketing calendar. And so for years and years and years, we’d create a yearly content calendar where you have a theme for the month, and then we list our events every quarter we have a promotion that we want to offer, and then we’re going to create blog content. Well, I have a chat GPT it. We can do it in 20 minutes. You can do it from start to start to finish in 20 minutes. And have a year’s worth of content organized and planned. Wow. And so again, the input you put in, it is going to make the output better. Yeah. But are you interested? Do you want to walk through this?
Damon Pistulka 35:46
Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s take a look. That’d be cool. Alright, so
Sarah Johnson 35:50
what I’m going to do is I’m going to run I’m going to pop these prompts in the chat. Can everyone see the chat?
Damon Pistulka 36:00
Let’s see that is the private chat, but I will put it into the chat, the comments, yeah, yeah. You can go on the other one, but I will, I will put it in the other one, just the normal comments. Here, you
Sarah Johnson 36:12
do that. I’m not sure how to do that. I’ll let you do that. I got it. Okay. So the first thing is, we want to introduce, we want to introduce what your business is. And this is, this is information that is going to be generic. So Google or the chat will be pulling data from the generic internet, right? But we want to give the chat GPT a little bit information. So I run a business with a physical or digital presence located and and then you can add your city. And I sell, why? So for me, I would say I run, I a digital presence. I run a website development agency and digital presence in Draper, Utah, and I sell websites. Okay, so that we’re not asking anything yet. We’re just telling, we’re just telling chat GPT reference point. Okay, the second prompt, and this is the most valuable prompt I’ve discovered, is ask chat GPT to ask you questions before you tell it what to do. Have you done that yet? So then you’re going to say, please ask me 20 questions about my business that will help me build a well rounded marketing campaign. Now you could say, ask me 20 questions about my business that will help me to fix my HR. Ask me 20 questions about my business that will help me with my operations. You can take this. This is honestly Damon, and I, I don’t have any original ideas. I did not come up with this, but I think this, this is what is the difference between an okay solution and a really, really, really good solution. Ask chat GPT to ask you questions. Okay, the next thing that we’re going to do, after the results are shown, yeah, I want you to say to chat. GBT, I want you to answer these questions to the best of your ability. And Cool, cool new thing, there’s deep research. Damon, tell them about what you said about deep research.
Damon Pistulka 38:20
Oh, yeah, the I was testing deep research. And, I mean, if you want something that will go off and do like, hours of research in minutes, is is asking a chat GPT to do deep research on a subject like, you know, what are the latest things in whatever? And tell me who’s doing it. And I want to know specific companies. I want to know websites, and I want to know what they’re talking about that you know where we’re going next. And it goes away for 10 minutes, sometimes or more, and comes back with with very succinct information that can help you learn a lot more about that and and really help you make better decisions.
Speaker 1 39:06
Isn’t it amazing? Yes, I was thinking about
Damon Pistulka 39:09
it for market research, right? I wasn’t using it for market research in the fact, but you know how many times, even in what, what we’re doing, if it’s, if it’s, uh, somebody wants to know about, oh, well, what’s your market like? You know, most business owners don’t know what their market demographics are very well, right in best they got a good idea. But this would be something that you could really describe it a lot and succinctly, because it would go out and actually find the data in deep, deep search to find the data, yeah, and bring it back to you.
Sarah Johnson 39:40
Yes, it’s so cool because, like we talked about, the better the input, the better the output. The output is getting better based on how much information you want. Yeah, right. So on chat, G, P, T, specifically, there’s a free version, and I think that this deep search is available with. The first paid tier
Damon Pistulka 40:01
first page. Here it is, yes, right?
Sarah Johnson 40:03
Which is so cool. I’m going to go ahead and put these the rest of our prompts in here. Very good. It just says, Now, develop a marketing plan based on the information I provided above. Yeah, in a minute, do a screen share, and I’ll show you guys my output for my keyword research that I did, it took me three minutes to do some really cool keyword research that we’re saying now make me a marketing plan. Now what I like to do is I like to give a little bit of information into what I want. So when I’m doing a marketing plan, I want a monthly theme, and then I’m showing here four blog posts, articles, very cool. You could go into like, Hey, give me 10 ideas for offers for my web development business. Or give me 10 idea for offers I have a restaurant that sells cinnamon rolls. Tell me is so you can be really specific and dive into the data. The other really fun thing you can do, and I don’t know if you’ve done this yet Damon, is you can you can tell chat GPT to write with a fun voice. So you can say, like, write as if I’m a cowboy from Arkansas in the 1960s you can say, write it as a poem. Do it as a Shakespearean iambic pentameter poetry? Yes, oh, you can. But I like to. I like my students when I’m when I’m teaching classes, to play with it, because it just opens your eyes. It’s so shocking that a prompt can make things fun, or can make them unique or different, yes, yes.
Damon Pistulka 41:37
And I think what I what when I talk to people about it, and when I explore how people are using it, or where it provides a ton of benefit, is really when you’ve got the blank page syndrome, and it could be that I’m I’m starting to write, i i I’ve got to create something, and it doesn’t matter If it’s a spreadsheet or a document or a presentation. I mean, I’ve used it to go, Okay, here’s the kind of presentation I want to this kind of audience. I want to do it in 10 I got 30 minutes to do it. And I want, you know, 20 minutes in the presentation. I want 10 minutes for good conversation after it. Tell me what I should have on the slides, the titles and, you know, and just keep working into the details, down even into the talking points for each slide. And then on top of it, you go, okay for the discussion. After, what are some great questions I should ask the group to really get the interactions that we want? Yes. So because, you know, we we often are very good or very technically understand what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, all that kind of stuff. But when it is to really teach someone else is where our experience prevents us from their we really looking in their perspective as much as we could by using using a tool like this. Yes,
Sarah Johnson 43:00
and I love what you’re saying, Damon, and I think that, I think it’s like obvious, but I think that we might be missing it. Is that because chat, GPT and AI is like this shiny new toy, we forget that we are the magic? Yes, right?
Damon Pistulka 43:18
You’re exactly right, because it doesn’t work unless we prompt it Yes, and it doesn’t work unless we tell it what to do,
Sarah Johnson 43:26
right exactly. And you have been in this industry, I don’t know how many years? How many couple years, few
Damon Pistulka 43:37
decades. Yeah, whether
Sarah Johnson 43:39
as a listener, you’ve been like you’re a brand new business owner, or if you’ve been in this business for 30 years, you are the magic. Your experience and your knowledge and your application of the experience is the magic. And so while this is the shiny new tool, and it’s making things like zip, zip, zip, in a super, super fast don’t forget that it’s the human connection that matters is human relationship that matters. And so then what can happen is you spent less time getting a really good presentation prepared, so you can be totally present with your audience, and you can only engage in solving their problem because you’re there. Chat. GPT is not going to close the sale. No. He is not going to nail the presentation, but it’s going to make you preparing it so much faster, 100%
Damon Pistulka 44:27
and it just gives you that different perspective, different ideas, that help to really release more that you have in you. Yes,
Sarah Johnson 44:35
and then I can also prompt things like you said is like, Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. I was going to work on that and help me organize my data, right? So today I I’m gonna do a screen share, if that’s okay. Yeah, go ahead. I’ll go ahead and just do I can, like, kind of slide through these, um. I’m not sure this will be the right one. Okay, I’m going to stop doing the screen share because that’s not the quite the right one. But what I did today is because I wanted to see, how can I use AI to help with keyword research. Now, keywords are, what are people actually searching in the search result? So it’s like, Hey, where’s the dominoes near me? That’s a keyword. Yeah. And you’ll notice, if you’re if you’re talking to your phone, it’s a longer tail keyword, and it’s usually a question, versus if you’re on a desktop, it’s like, pizza near me, right? Um. But how you optimize your landing page for keywords will determine, in part, how many people come to your website. Yes, so a short tail keyword, and I, Damon, I would love to hear from you, like, what your short tail keyword? A short tail keyword, for me, would be websites. But that doesn’t tell intent. That doesn’t say, are people looking for a website developer? Are they looking to build a website? Are they looking to find a website? Are they looking to teach about websites? Right? So long tail keyword would be website developer in Draper Utah. Mm, hmm. And then I’m, I is delivering intent. Okay, so your turn, Damon, what’s a good example for you of a short tail keyword? Well,
Damon Pistulka 46:19
if someone was just selling my sell my business. I mean, that’s a super generic keyword phrase, yeah, yeah. And then if you look at a longer tail, word is, what do I need to do to sell my manufacturing business in North Dakota?
Sarah Johnson 46:35
Oh, yeah, yeah. So if you are building out a strategy for people to come to your website. You’re going to have a lot of content matching industries with locations, right? You’re going to say, manufacturing in Dakota, manufacturing in Utah, manufacturing in Seattle. I love so if you’re as as you’re listening to the listeners who are listening today, I want you to think about your business as short tail and a long tail keyword. Now what I did today is I said, if I were using chat, G, P, T for keyword research, what 20 questions would you ask me about my Utah based website development business?
Damon Pistulka 47:16
Very cool. Do
Sarah Johnson 47:17
you guys? You guys hear the hook, right? You guys hear that repeat is like before you dive into asking for output, ask chat GPT to ask you questions. And some of the questions I got like were, what specific web development services do you offer, and who is your ideal client, and what makes jumbo John different? And then what I said is based on best practices for custom WordPress websites, how would you answer those questions? My business is, there’s a lot of website developers, and there’s some magic that makes jumbo different, that I’m really proud that there’s enough information on the internet that it can answer some of these questions without input. Okay? And then I said, Okay, based on the answers you just provided, give me 20 long tail keywords and 10 short tail keywords for my industry. And in three and a half minutes, I had 20 long tail keywords. For example, custom WordPress websites designed for service businesses Utah, WordPress developer for small business, high converting website design agency in Salt Lake City. The list goes on and on.
Damon Pistulka 48:28
Yeah, and those are good ones.
Sarah Johnson 48:30
Those are good ones. And now I can say, Okay, I’m going to grab custom WordPress website design for service businesses, and I’ll tell chat GPT, make me a 700 word article with this title, with this keyword, and it will give me my first draft that I can use, and then I can make it magic. Cool,
Damon Pistulka 48:51
yeah, I I use it to figure out what live stream titles are going to be.
Sarah Johnson 48:58
And does it work?
Damon Pistulka 49:01
Well, I I bet in 24 to 48 hours, when you search for this title on Google, it’ll be on the first page.
Sarah Johnson 49:10
You guys like one other thing too, Damon, is I know you, you and I have talked before. You’ve been doing this for a long time, so you’re, you’re matching the rules that we talked about. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 49:20
they’re expanding the rules, good
Sarah Johnson 49:22
user experience, consistent new content and backlinks. Because guess what’s going to happen this podcast and all the other podcasts are giving your customers a new experience. It’s giving you new content, and I bet everyone who comes on this podcast backlinks to your website. Hey, look, I’m on the podcast. And then automatically, it’s, it’s, it’s ranking. It’s not automatically, because it’s a lot of work, but look at that. You’re playing by the rules well,
Damon Pistulka 49:49
and it’s, and it’s about, you know, when you’re when you’re talking about really making Google happy and wanting to show your content. It’s not just on your website. It’s, you know, this goes to five different places to. Day turns into a blog post. It turns into a podcast. All those things help to help to show and build the richness in the content that you’re doing, you know, so as a small business, you really need to understand some of this stuff, at least at a beginner level, because then you can find the right people to help you to do this because, you know, we really have two different ways that we can sell online. One of them is we can pay a lot for ads. That works totally a good strategy for some people. Or if you really need a lot of people to come to you, that’s another one. You know, in the businesses that I’m typically helping with our services. They are not the kind of companies that need 100,000 people to visit them every month. Oh, they’re the kind of companies that you know, if they had 10 new customers a year, it’s a big deal, and this a whole different kind of game for them, because they want to build more deeper relationships with a smaller group of people. That’s not that ad based kind of thing that they do. So it’s very interesting to me how you can use AI to really, you know, tailor what you need and give you more ideas, just like you’re saying today. It’s just, it’s just such a powerful, powerful piece of and going
Sarah Johnson 51:20
back to our original conversation, is, if you only need 10 customers a year, you are a relationship driven. And you think about the bandwidth it would take to juggle the amount of contacts for a large group of people, to whittle them down to the 10. If you’re doing it on your own, it people fall through the cracks and you dismiss people. But if you can set up a system where a system is doing the managing and the system is making it easy, then again, you can be totally present in whatever meeting you’re at in front of, and you can be totally present in your podcast that you’re delivering, and you can be totally present on the phone, because the mental load of all of that data is taken care of in a system.
Damon Pistulka 52:04
This is such a good way to to explain it too, because it is when your system is helping you schedule appointments, when it’s helping you send pertinent reminders for people, remind yourself, get request information so that you can be be better prepared and more present in those meetings, so you don’t have to remember to do it. It just these, the the amount of things that and how AI can help augment all that and really help you think of what you didn’t think of to do. It’s just amazing. You
Sarah Johnson 52:40
could do, a prompt that says, Help me think of the things I didn’t think of. Yes, things do I need to think of that I didn’t think of. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 52:50
I’ve done that. What? What did Gates said? What did I miss here? Something like that, just short and it, it comes back with great stuff.
Sarah Johnson 52:57
So Damon, what are your favorite tools that you use to help you automate your business.
Damon Pistulka 53:03
Oh, it’s just normal CRM stuff and and chat GPT to figure out how to do it, I mean. And then, of course, anymore, I really don’t think, like you said, I don’t think any business can really run without the specialist to do what you need to do, because it’s just there’s too many different things to learn, right? We have to, we have to know our business, and then we have to have the specialists that are going to do what they do, even in our business, right? I don’t care if you’re a painter or you’re a manufacturer or you’re a surgeon, right? You know, yeah, all of them have to have their specialists that do what they do in their business. And when we look at the systems behind it, it it really is as simple as find something that works in your industry, or for you, for your size of business, and then make sure you got somebody that knows how to build it out technically. Because these things are it’s not like you have to go to any special system. It’s just you have to have the right people to help you use it. Right,
Sarah Johnson 53:57
right, right? Yeah, absolutely. And you can do cool thing. You can do pros and cons or comparison too, with chat GPT, yep, say, I want to do, I want to automate my podcast transcription, yeah, five options, and do pros and cons with costs and deliverables, and then chat, you can do the work, right? Um, one, one other thing that I wanted to share is at John Bucha John, we do websites, one of our core values is time. Time is a gift, and time is the only thing we can’t get back. And I think that as an entrepreneur that’s going into advanced entrepreneurship and then into a growing business, is really valuing our time. Yes, be really scary to give away a responsibility or to delegate or task because it takes money, set a time or money. But you can’t scale a business if, if the entrepreneur, the the founder, is doing all the things.
Damon Pistulka 54:54
Yep, right. No, you just can’t. You just can’t. I mean, go read the book. Buy back your time. Read 10x is greater than 2x I mean these things, there is no way you can scale your business fast enough if you don’t find good, trusted partners to help you do what they do awesome, because you have your own unique ability that you can hone and get better and better and better, just like an athlete, right? They have, they have goalies on soccer teams. They have, you know, quarterbacks on football teams. They have centers in a basketball team. They got pitchers and catchers in baseball or soccer or softball, I mean, and you know, there’s a reason why there are specialists and the team together, with all the pieces. Wins championships. The individuals do well in what they do, but they can’t win a championship without them being together, and that’s really how I like to look at even if you have a single person business, as soon as you can you need to start figuring out who are the experts that I need to bring around me that really can help me to augment where I’m not where I not the best, and I shouldn’t be spending my time, because I really need to keep getting better and better at what I what I am good at, and what people pay me to do. Yeah.
Sarah Johnson 56:15
And the cool thing about this conversation is, for the solopreneurs chat, GPT can be your first hire for 20 bucks a month. Yep, yep. You’re never going to be able to hire somebody for 20 bucks a month,
Damon Pistulka 56:27
not, not now, yeah, it’s a good investment, but that can be a
Sarah Johnson 56:30
good bridge into business planning and strategy and production, right? So that individual can really focus on what they’re good at,
Damon Pistulka 56:38
yeah, yeah. And it just so much more as you have a business and setting up process and procedures, because when you look at things, it really there’s the AI is so good at helping you organize.
Sarah Johnson 56:51
So, yeah, oh my gosh. It’s so fun. It’s tough,
Damon Pistulka 56:55
man. It’s so much fun talking to you, Sarah, I just thank you. Thank you for coming and being on today and talking about leveraging AI and in your website and digital marketing. Because I you know, in for folks that got in here late, go back to the beginning, because Sarah dropped a ton of great information and reach out to them at Jamba John, you know, they do a great job there with websites and WordPress websites and getting your digital presence established, and really, like you said at the beginning, creating that experience for those web visitors so they they know what you really are about. Thank
Sarah Johnson 57:37
you so much. Thank you so much for letting me be part of your tribe today and sharing and chatting, it’s just a fascinating topic that’s new to everybody, and so it’s really fun to experiment and learn from each other. So thank you so much
Damon Pistulka 57:50
awesome. Well, thanks everyone for being here today. Thanks for the comments today. We had Fatima in here late. We had some other people in there. I can see there’s a lot of people watching. We enjoy those people that are watching and love the people that take the time to comment. Thank you so much. And like I said before, if you got in this late, go back to the beginning, because Sarah dropped a lot of golden nuggets about using AI in different ways. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of prompts she dropped in here, a lot of things she talked about that can really help you get started or improve your use of AI. So Sarah, thanks so much for being here. Hang out with me just a moment. We’re going to drop off the live stream and finish up you.
