48:8 How we use ChatGPT in our web agency

Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host Lee, and on today's show, we're gonna be talking about ways you can use ChatGPT in your web agency. We're gonna be doing something a little bit different today because I am not only recording to you solo, in person, in the confines of my wonderful little office, but I'm also doing this on video.

You can check out the full video over on YouTube, so be sure to check out the show notes so you can watch along at me goofing around in my office. So I'm now gonna stop looking at the camera cuz that's totally putting me off. I've got my notes in front of me and I wanna share with you a whole range of different ways that you can use ChatGPT in your web agency.

These are all ways that we have used the platform to our benefit. So the first one is code. We're web agencies. We are building websites, and for us, the biggest thing we love to create are code snippets, especially in WordPress. We can essentially ask ChatGPT to generate anything for us. Being a custom post type, uh, custom meta fields, WordPress loops, you name it, we can pretty much ask ChatGPT to do it off the bat and it can do it really, really quickly for us. 

Now, the code it generates isn't always great, and I would always say with anything that you do on ChatGPT, just ensure that you are using it with good, solid, grounded knowledge yourself. Don't just assume that ChatGPT is amazing and you can just copy and paste everything into your website and it's gonna work like a dream.

The other thing is it's not gonna work like a dream very often. Than there will be bugs, so be sure to check that out. Now on bugs, there is another feature of ChatGPT that you can also check out, and that is code de-buggin. Yes. If you have a problem with your theme, perhaps you think there is a particular area in your theme or your plugin that you're developing, you can copy and paste that code and ask ChatGPT if it can work out. Hmm. Are there any issues in here? Am I missing any semicolons, as we all know, is usually the problem and ChatGPT is usually pretty good at suggesting a few areas that might be the problem. If you ever get, say, console errors as well with say JavaScript, you can also paste in your JavaScript and the console error, and it will give you some good ideas on how to fix it. So be short to check that one out too. 

The next area is content, and we use ChatGPT to generate content ideas. We'll put in our target audience. We'll say, Hey, I run a podcast for web agency owners. They might be stressed out with the amount of work they've got on. They may want. More time at home. They may wanna book a holiday. Maybe they want to grow their business and turn over millions of pounds. This is my target audience. Here are some example podcasts I've done in the past. What sort of podcast episodes do you think I could do in the future? And ChatGPT will pour out loads of great ideas. You can see do the same with blog posts, et cetera. It's wonderful. 

Also, you can use ChatGPT for the creation. So if you have an idea and you've outlined that idea, you can get some inspiration from ChatGPT to help you maybe formulate the opening paragraph in order to hook into whatever the problem or the aspiration that your reader or your listener has.

ChatGPT is really great at creating potentially viral copy. So be sure to use it for stuff like that. Of course, though, it should always be in your own voice and it should always be based on your knowledge. Now there are a couple of, blogs that you can check out over on Trailblazer.FM. They are members only, but it's free to be a member. So trailblazer.fm, tap in ChatGPT into the search. And there are two blogs. Yeah. One is on how to blog and the other one is going over what I talked about earlier on code creation.

Anyway, continuing on content. The other area is summarization. If you have a big, long load of text, maybe it's an article that you are reading, maybe it's a document that you've received, then you can copy and paste that into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize it for you, which is phenomenal because that has saved me countless hours reading super complicated documents when all I really want is, the point, gimme the point, gimme the breakdown, gimme the key takeaways so that I can respond to that or do something with it. 

And finally in the content section would be proofreading and content improvement. If I've written a whole load of content, I will want ChatGPT to take a look and tell me if I've screwed up in my grammar, my punctuation on all of that good stuff. But equally, I might ask it ways I can improve the content. ChatGPT very often will suggest things like making things clearer, more concise. It might suggest that I add an illustration of some sort. It might even say I need to change the tone of voice slightly, maybe to a more active tone of voice. And if I ask it for examples, it'll even give me examples and potentially even rewrite sections for me if I really want it to. So content improvement is a big one. 

Okay. Let's move on into email, and of course you can use ChatGPT to create emails. I would say that most emails ChatGPT has ever created for me have been terribly boring and formal and usually start with, "I hope this finds you well". So I don't personally recommend you do that all of the time, but if this is just something quick you need to send out and that you can edit with your own tone of voice, then hmm, maybe go for it.

I tend to use it though for replying to longer emails. I do that by pasting in the massive email that some of our clients will send us and say, "Hey, summarize, uh, the key points out of this. Will you please and also help me formulate a response". And it'll give me all of the bullets of the summaries. It'll also give me a rough response that I can use, especially if the client's asking me a whole load questions. Um, ChatGPT can highlight to me the questions that I need to answer. So it's ridiculously useful for making sure that I give my clients a, a decent answer, but also just improve, my own productivity that improve my own what? What's the right words? Uh, just to, basically, I just wanna speed up the process of reading ridiculously long emails that I get off clients.

I, I guess I could also reply to clients and say, in future, is there any way you could say that? A little shorter, but that might come across a little bit rude. 

Speaking of rude, there is also sanity checking. I often use, ChatGPT, just a sanity check and email that I'm sending. I'll copy and paste the email that I've received and I'll copy and paste my reply, instant chat, g p t. And I'll just ask, does this sound like a sensible reply? Do you believe I've covered everything that, uh, I should do? Uh, do I sound rude potentially? And, uh, just gimme a little bit of feedback and I find ChatGPT is, uh, very impartial and will will give me honest advice.

Next, you may or may not know that I am learning Dutch at the moment. I've been learning Dutch for something like 200 days, and I can say a few things now, potentially even order a beer. Please don't test me because I freeze on the spot when anyone asks me. But whilst I am learning, I will very often ask.

ChatGPT to help me say certain things in Dutch. Equally, you can also do this with content on the web, or perhaps if you are working with, uh, team members who do not have English as their first language, and in fact we do this with Priya, for example, sometimes she may convert some things I am saying to her in Skype, into Tamil so that she can read that in her native tongue and then she can decide how she wants to respond. So it's a, a great kind of edge case use for ChatGPT. 

Let's move on to social media. I dunno why I made that sound exciting, but, uh, here's a cool one we do. We paste in the transcript of our episodes, so once I finish chatting away to the camera and to the microphone for this podcast, we will paste that in, to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, will you pull out like seven quotes from this transcript that, um, are informative and educational and have value, and they kind of act as sound bites. Uh, and then with those, could you also give us a small call to action, maybe throwing some emojis, uh, to, you know, attract people's attention and also suggest some hashtags for those".

And it will then squirt out, seven, eight, however many, we ask social posts for us, which we can then edit and then I can pass over to Priya and the team to, uh, to schedule. Also though, we can ask for image ideas as well, and of course, yes, I know you can generate images with AI, I don't think they're ready yet. You can even tell when they're even in mid journey, which is amazing. Is it Mid Journey? Yeah, mid journey, um, even they're amazing, but I, I still don't think they're quite right and, uh, I often like to just find as a human a picture that I think would work. But you can ask for suggestions from ChatGPT to say, "Hey, what sort of image might work in this case" when you're looking through, say, Unsplash or some of your stock images, image portfolios... excellent.

The beauty of doing this on video at the same time means that I'm kind of, you know, not able to just cut myself off all the time and make myself sound much more professional on the podcast. So, hey. 

Anyway, last but not least, customer research. Do you have an ideal customer? Do you have an industry? Do you have a niche? Well, if no, then ChatGPT can help you to develop all of those for a start off. But equally, it can help you deep dive into those specifically. For example, we have a Event Engine and we look after exhibition and conference organizers. We can feed all of that information into ChatGPT and then ask ChatGPT to give us some specific problems that our ideal client might be struggling with.

And it's incredible the amount of information that ChatGPT can give you on your potential client as long as you can feed it with good information. That's just one example, but you can totally deep dive and you can niche within the niche, within the niche. Essentially. This is just saving you time from looking at competitor websites. Going around the internet, going into social media forums and everything else like that, trying to work out what's going on and just see if ChatGPT can just generate you some good ideas on what your clients might be struggling with, what their dreams and aspirations, um, are, what their most expensive problem might be.

I've got a mate of mine who serves the technical sector and, uh, he delivers websites for them, which is great. But using ChatGPT, we were both able to niche within the niche and we realized that for those clients, yeah, sure they can have a sales website to sell their technical services, and that was all very exciting, but. (And this was manufacturing by the way). But, what they really struggle with is to display their documentation for, complex machinery, et cetera, online. They just have to maybe upload a big fat PDF and it's not great. So by using ChatGPT, we're able to work out that potentially, um, a service could be offered, to those manufacturing companies that would help them create some form of searchable database with interactive data to help their customers consume the how-to guides and the tech specs and all of the other stuff that they need to be able to give their customers. So that's a massive value add instead of just slinging over lots of paper or PDFs and, uh, you know, having frustrated clients trying to go through all of this information, a great interactive, searchable database would be an incredibly high value product that my mate could position in that industry. So that all came from just using ChatGPT to, just shoot the breeze and say, "Hey, what ideas have you got"? 

All right. Well, that's pretty much it. That's literally everything on my list.

We've got code content, email, translation, social media, customer research. There are so many other ways of using ChatGPT. Again, I would just say that whenever you use it, sanity check absolutely everything. Only use it based on the knowledge that you already have, or go and find verifiable sources to help back up anything that ChatGPT has shared with you, and in fact, you can ask ChatGPT in many times, uh, many occasions to cite its own sources and it will actually give you some ideas as to where it's got some of its information, uh, from as well. So either know your subject when you are using ChatGPT or do some good solid research.

Folks, how are you using ChatGPT? Please click on the link in the show notes and come and join me in the comments. If you are on YouTube, let me know in the comments below. If you're watching on YouTube, like subscribe, hit that bell notification icon if you are listening to the podcast, then, well subscribe on your podcast player if you're not already.

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Well, why don't we see you in the next episode?