The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] JM: So these tools are filling in, I think, those gaps for the solopreneur or the kitchen table entrepreneur. It is an interesting
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[00:01:57] JM: yeah, sure. You know, there’s a whole group of tools that I think is interesting to talk about. Um, and that is the. What you might call automation engines, you know, and this is as compared or, uh, differentiated from chat.
[00:02:10] GBT, which is what I would refer to as an answer engine. So in the, in the answer engine category with along with chat, GBT, obviously we mentioned perplexity. Um, another one that you could have used. Sorry, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll talk about answer engines for a moment before I set it up for automation engines, but, but answer engines, you know, um, Another one that you could have used to try to get your summation of the 80 20 book by Perry Marshall was called Talk to Books.
[00:02:35] It’s a Google tool, and they basically scanned tons and tons and tons of books, and you can ask it questions, and it will spit out the answers from those, you know, from a summation of those books. So that tool might have been a better use case for you after, uh, you know, hearing what you’re trying to accomplish.
[00:02:52] But anyway, those are all answer engines. Now, automation engines is like a whole new level. Automation engines are designed to stitch all of these things together. So think of the, the agent or the actor or the person who says, I’m going to take something out of, uh, talk to books and I’m going to stitch it together with headline, uh, studio, and then I’m going to put it together with autopod.
[00:03:19] fm. And I’m going to weave it together with some other of these tools and. Boom, bam, bang. Here’s, you know, a 19 part marketing campaign. That’s what automation engines are doing. The ones that I include in the book, um, auto GPT is one. Uh, and I’ll, I’ll save the other two for, for the readers of the book, but these are tools designed to really create the linkages that don’t just give you information, they actually take action for you, uh, they can do bookings.
[00:03:54] They can do, uh, you know, blogging, publishing, they can do, uh, reservations, they can do just a whole host of, uh, actions. And that category of AI tool, I believe, is going to grow and grow and grow until you literally just have to say to an AI tool, Hey, let’s do this and it will do 15 complicated steps involved in making whatever this was a reality.
[00:04:20] And, uh, and that’s, that’s pretty amazing.
[00:04:25] MV: I suppose what I’m familiar with, uh, is things like, uh, Zapier, uh, is that a more sophisticated version of Zapier or is it sort of a halfway house between that and a true kind of assistant where you say, make this happen, like Captain Picard, make it so, and it just happens. I mean, how, how close are we to that?
[00:04:42] JM: Zapier was one of the original instance of this where the humans involved had to do the API, you know, connecting. And so and Zapier kind of had pre, you know, pre created, uh, you know, scripts. There’s also like if this than that scripts that have been around for a long time. Uh, and and those types of tools have been in existence.
[00:05:02] What this is doing is making them. Um, behave or act or produce a result based on just your, your command, not on you technically doing the work. So the activity is not done by you anymore as the automation tools step in. You know,
[00:05:21] MV: so if, for example, I wanted to set something up for the podcast, or, you know, there could be for somebody creating a product detail pages for Shopify, for example, which is more relevant to, you know, the, the traffic stacking workshop and so forth.
[00:05:34] Um, would I simply just say make. You know, create a web site with, you know, the following characteristics and then it would put all the different tools together, or do I have to connect the manually using API permissions? I mean, how manual is it? How is office? Well,
[00:05:49] JM: the, the, the burgeoning space that we’re in right now, that’s just starting is these tools as pro these are basically projects that are open source and out there for you to play with, and everyone is using these.
[00:06:04] Uh, you know, these tools to construct the APIs and the linkages to make magic happen. And so you have to have a little bit of coding or, you know, kind of, um, you know, the shallow end of the swimming pool in terms of ability to rig things up to use these. Automation engines right now, but the thing about it is by the time people hear this podcast, even if it’s by the time we even put this thing out, uh, there might be more tools in that space where people have already pre cooked things together for you so that you can, for example, do what you said, which would be, for example, take the content from the following response.
[00:06:42] From perplexity and build me a site on site kick. ai, which is a website building landing page tool that it is in the book that we talked about. Um, and so, yeah, those. Those pieces are coming together, which is really mind blowing, because this is the work for the last 15, 20 years. All of us have learned to do how to write copy in word and then cut it into, you know, an HTML based website or what’s CSS and, you know, all these things that we’ve learned over time, these automation tools are learning in hours or days or weeks.
[00:07:18] And they will do this stuff for us in short order, which is, you know, that’s the amazing part of the automation engine tools. I guess
[00:07:28] MV: that, um, even if you remove the, the sort of sci fi, what’s the dystopian idea that you get a robot that, that makes robots or, you know, an AI that produces better AI and you have this 24 hour window when it goes into super intelligence, takes the world over.
[00:07:40] There is still, I guess, the Cameron explosion is happening because. Or that’s what it looks like because things, things are building on top of things, on top of things, and the rate of the iteration of the bottom layer is pretty fast. So the iteration of the top layer of new apps and what have you is just incredibly ridiculously fast.
[00:07:56] I mean, every time I look on Facebook now, somebody’s created a new AI tool for Marketers, which is kind of mental. I guess learning to differentiate between useful and not so useful things is going to be, you know, one of the things I mean. There’s quite a few even in terms of I’m just looking at the the contents table here and even if you’re talking just general Generic categories not specific tools.
[00:08:17] There’s a lot to take on board I mean content creation tools have been talked about a lot. Everyone’s obsessed about Um graphic arts creation for some reason that doesn’t excite me so much I guess because i’m not so visually oriented Which are the other sort of generic types of tools do you think have the most?
[00:08:32] Potential to be sort of game changers. You’ve already talked about those automation things, which I can see becoming really big once they become more user friendly. Well, what are the other big ones that are game changers? Do you think?
[00:08:43] JM: Well, I think the question that’s always been in the back of entrepreneurs mind is they’re trying to grow a business is what am I good at and what do I hate?
[00:08:53] You know, what do I love doing and what I hate doing? And you have to, you know, this is like a chicken and egg problem. It’s like, if I’m going to scale my business. I have to, first of all, love some part of, you know, like, I have to have a role for myself. It’s not misery. You know, I [00:09:10] have to have a role that’s enjoyable.
[00:09:11] So then you figure that out. And that’s different for all of us. Like, you know, um, we all kind of approach it differently, but then the, the question is, well, what is the stuff I hate to do and who’s going to do that? And if you neglect that stuff, you literally can go to jail for tax avoidance or whatever, you know, like there’s some stuff that’s like a legal requirement.
[00:09:29] And, um, and so. Yeah. So these tools are filling in, I think, those gaps for the solopreneur or the kitchen table entrepreneur. It is an interesting, you know, kind of thought process for me is like, okay, what are the things I really dislike and can an AI tool do it for me so I can just do what I like?
[00:09:48] Here’s an example. There is an AI tool called Synthesia. io, and you, if you like to type and create words, which I do, you can just go to that site and type a sentence or a phrase or whatever, and then someone on video will read it for you, and it is beautifully done instantly. It’s not, it’s not somebody on Fiverr who’s like, hi, I do videos for people.
[00:10:15] Give me 50 and I’ll have it done in four days. It’s literally the robot doing the, you know, the image of the person and their mouth’s moving. You can’t even tell it’s, I mean, it’s real close to, you know, to real life. So, and it’s a real person. They just have it kind of automated in terms of how they do their mouth moving or whatever, but the outcome from Synthesia.
[00:10:38] io. Is video work that if I said, I hate videos, I’m never doing a video. And yet I really need one. You could literally just type your script in. Have the AI tool, make the video and put that on your landing page and you could even say, Hey, I’m, I’m the AI tool, Becky from the so and so team, I want to tell you all about our project and invite you to participate, you know, like that’s amazing to me, that is just downright awesome.
[00:11:09] I mean,
[00:11:10] MV: I was about to jokingly say, yeah, this Jason bot’s very realistic. It seems exactly the same as the real Jason, but the frightening thing comes up, the frightening thing at one point is, um. You know, where does that line come? I guess that brings in a whole more sort of not so much even ethical, although there is an ethical consideration, but more Um, there are so many things that hinge on, like, is it your work?
[00:11:29] Is it Jason G. Miles’s work as you are on, on Kindle books and other things on Amazon? Or, you know, is this an authentic person? And, um, and then I guess the other question is, does that even matter? I guess it feels like it matters. I mean, what’s your view of this? And you you’ve written a book where you’ve written many books yourself with you and, uh, Cassie, your creative, you know, writing partner slash editor.
[00:11:51] Um, so I guess. You didn’t necessarily sort of write, uh, you might’ve said in the acknowledgments, thank you so much, Cassie, but it’s not on the cover. Now you’ve written it in conjunction with an AI tool. I mean, how much do you think that bothers you? How much do you think that’s
[00:12:02] JM: important? Here’s what I wrote in the introduction to this book.
[00:12:06] Um, uh, blah, blah, blah. A few, a few introductory paragraphs. And I said, um, writing this book in roughly nine days was possible because I used a team of three, me, an experienced writer with 30 years. Of, uh, writing experience. My first job was writing job descriptions in human resources for larger organization.
[00:12:24] Number two, Cassie Smithco, my super talented writing assistant who helped with what can only be described as a tangled web of small but vital writing related activities. Um, they’re nuanced and hard to explain, but ultimately generate books at a much faster pace and with higher quality than I could have done alone.
[00:12:42] Three Perplex. An AI tool I ran across while attempting to write this book. Instantly impressed, I put it through a rigorous writing test, which it passed instantly, and I hired it on the spot, for free. It does a brilliant job of simplifying complexity. Together, we are a superhuman writing machine. And then I described that whole bit about how perplexity is better than chat GPT for writing.
[00:13:10] And then I write a little blurb at the end, um, that says basically how this book was created. The content of this book is best understood as being created in the following manner. Envisioned and directed by Jason Miles, refined and improved. By Cassie Smith co and tool descriptions and category summaries were written by perplexity.
[00:13:30] So I’m, I’m giving it credit as a third party, uh, you know, uh, in, in the writing process, um, as much as I do my real writing assistant Cassie, I think that’s the, in fairness, the right way to approach this kind of thing. Obviously if you’re in seventh grade and you use JAP GPT to do your homework and you say, Hi, Mrs.
[00:13:54] Smith. I didn’t understand any of this, so I asked ChatGPT what it thought and it said, and then you give 400 words that are ChatGPTs, and then you said, Mrs. Smith, I hope it was okay, because it really helped me understand, and da da da da da. I think Mrs. Smith might take that as an okay paper, even though 80% of it was ChatGPT, because…
[00:14:16] You framed it as such, you gave context, you gave, you give the context in which it’s an appropriate use of the tool to do otherwise is to be deceptive in my view. But if you just say what you’re doing, I think most people are like, Oh, well, that’s really cool. And go on about their, you know, involvement in the work, reading, or whatever they do, you know.
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[00:15:31] MV: I think particularly for marketers, if you’re writing a how to book or a sort of prelude and exploratory book, then it’s particularly valid, I think, what you say, because it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re honest, um, it doesn’t really matter to them if the… Where the information came from, how it got constructed as long as it’s useful.
[00:15:48] I mean, it’s a little bit different from if I were teaching, I’d say, you know, I’d like to think that the first thing Cassie does is, you know, or whatever little, little, whoever we’re calling them, um, does their own homework just to learn to do it the hard way, because it’s good for your brain development.
[00:16:01] But yeah, there’s no real reason in the real world to do things the hard way. Um, either some puritanical impulse, unless of course, your audience really cares about that. In which case you might do that.
[00:16:11] JM: I think teachers are in. Uh, a whole new phase of learning how to teach. And, you know, we had a big conversation the other night over dinner about this at my house, which was what would you do if you were a teacher?
[00:16:25] And we all had our different angles of how we would or wouldn’t, you know, one person at the table said, I would absolutely, uh, refuse to allow. Any AI tool to be used and my take on it was, well, that’s just, you know, what would you do then? You’d have, well, you’d have an AI tool that would document that it was original writing.
[00:16:43] Well, if you ask perplexity to write something for you and you put it through Grammarly’s, uh, you know, a plagiarism checker, it will pass that test. So then you’re back to square one, which is how do you know it was originally written? So I don’t think a teacher can exclude the use of these tools. I think they have to level up their own talent and skill.
[00:17:03] And say, how do I weave in these tools to the educational process and, um, have participants understand how to use them to gain mastery of skills or information that they otherwise wouldn’t know and include it in the process. Just like you would say, I’m going to let you use a calculator. Exactly. I
[00:17:23] MV: was thinking the exact same thing.
[00:17:25] Glad you came up with that. Yeah. Cause you can have a math test, which is for people at the earlier stages where it’s arithmetic, maybe even mental arithmetic, which I know in Scotland, they teach as a separate subject, which seems very wise to me. But on the other hand, by the time you’re doing advanced maths, famously, I know a few maths graduates and they’re famously terrible at arithmetic.
[00:17:41] Ironically, it’s a tradition somehow. So yeah, they’re probably better off with a calculator. So, so coming back. It’s a marketing to sort of wrap this up then. Cause we’re obviously, I know I’m not a teacher and you’re not. Well, I mean, I’ve done bits in the past, but what would you say, um, is the best way to even navigate this stuff?
[00:17:55] I mean, obviously getting your book. It’s a fantastic starting point, um, to, you know, give you an overview, but then you’ve got, you know, 67 tools. How do we begin to choose which ones to use and, um, navigate this whole world, especially given that the number of tools on the same subjects you’ve talked about a year’s time is probably going to be 6, 700 right now.
[00:18:15] How do we navigate that landscape?
[00:18:17] JM: I appreciate you asking that question. Actually, tease [00:18:20] up a little, uh, just a little paragraph in the introduction to this book that I wrote that I think is sort of the perfect answer, um, and it says what we expect you to do next. Our hope is that you take the knowledge in this book and do the following.
[00:18:34] Number one, be open to learning. Number two, take time to experiment and test new tools. Challenge your existing assumptions about the way things have to work and explore changing. Number three, edit your business process and systems to utilize the new tools and their incredible functionality. As the famous Elihu Goldrate wisely said, it comes down to three questions.
[00:18:59] What to change, what to change to, and how to make the change. And then lastly, build and scale your ability to serve more people. And serve them even better than you have before. So, you know, I think that’s sort of the takeaway is just like, it’s just like when the app store came out. If you want another kind of analogy, 2008, you know, parallel, um, and the app store came out and there was like, you know, 50, 000 apps made or whatever.
[00:19:28] And the question was, how do you use these in your business? And I think a lot of business owners haven’t answered that question. They haven’t really gotten the app sorted out, but hopefully AI tools will be even better because the thing you don’t want to do is be a Luddite, you know, kind of bury your head in the sand and then watch your competitors start cooking with.
[00:19:48] Because they’ve got four or five AA tools figured out that are plugged into their business that are making them super superhuman compared to you. And, uh, you know, that’s the long and the short of it is we’re, we’re in the real world of competitive marketing and whoever can engineer these tools to deliver to customers, a more beautiful experience, a better quality of service, et cetera, et cetera, the people who do that win, and we want to be those people.
[00:20:16] I
[00:20:16] MV: mean, I guess it’s, it’s not a particularly, um, pleasant analogy, but I think it’s sadly that there is people talk about arms races as if, um, that’s, uh, I don’t know. It is, it is reality of human technological development. I mean, the internet came on the back of DARPA net, which was part of the Cold War, which kind of came on the back of the Americans creating the nuclear weapon.
[00:20:35] And you can go back as far as you want in human history. But I guess one of the things that’s interesting. To think as a metaphor from the Ukraine, Russia war is the use of equipment and tactics as a, an a sort of combination to, you know, the, the, in some situations seems to be more successful than others.
[00:20:52] And to come back to ai, if you think of AI as, you know, very advanced technology, like the right type of missiles, that that can do very precise targeting as opposed to old school missiles that you just fire and it kind of blows up very nearly the target. And it still comes down to the ability of the general to have good strategy that makes sense and the, the ground level to have tactics and to have will and, you know, human characteristics like courage.
[00:21:14] And it strikes me that actually the, um, the same thing applies in AI, that the promise of AI is not going to resolve foolish decisions, which are the hardest, you know, it can accelerate them. I suspect it can make them more obvious in some cases or more quickly damaging. Um, but it’s not totally not a substitute for thinking properly.
[00:21:33] Maybe that’s still our job more than ever. It’s not doing stuff. It’s thinking it’s right.
[00:21:38] JM: Yes. And this has been true for a long time. Our recent Jack Trout wrote the book marketing warfare and then, you know, the, their whole, their line of books, uh, guerrilla marketing, uh, Jay Conrad Levinson was famous for that.
[00:21:50] That was 20, 30 years ago. You know, I mean, marketing as warfare is not a new metaphor. We’ve talked about that for a long time. Um, and. So this does just create a new layer of, uh, tools that are in the toolbox for marketers to use and you can use them for great effect to serve well and be an amazing business and amazing company and do well for your clients.
[00:22:16] And that’s what I’m trying to model, for example, by writing this book with perplexity, I’m trying to, you know, kind of eat my own dog food. And actually, you know, do what I’m describing here and do it as a demo. Um, I did this about a month or so ago where I had chat GPT, write an email for me that was very, very nicely put together and people commented after they received it and at the bottom of the email and the footer, I said, PS, I was too busy today, so I asked chat GPT to write this mess email for me.
[00:22:45] And then everybody’s like, Oh, that’s why it was so amazing. And, you know, so. Demonstration of effect, I think, is important. We eat our own dog food as we do this. And, and, um, as an educator and author and somebody likes to teach people and coach, uh, I think it was important for me to step into the space.
[00:23:03] And start to answer basic questions, uh, related to what is available to us and how can it be used to. You know, good effect, um, and so anyway, that was the premise of the whole book and and what reason I did it the way I did. Um, and so I hope people do get it. You can get it at traffic, traffic stacking dot com.
[00:23:21] That’s a challenge we’re running. We’re going to continuously run that challenge now going forward for Shopify site owners. So if you’ve heard this, uh, into the far future, then check that website and we’ll still make it available there or, uh, look for AI marketing power tools, uh, by Jason miles. Maybe I’ll have it on Amazon by the time people hear this.
[00:23:40] MV: Fantastic. Well, I have to say that I’m very excited about the challenge of, of navigating this new world. Cause I think so much is changing so fast and when things change fast, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity if we know how to capitalize on it. And I think this is just incredible time for business opportunity.
[00:23:56] Um, But yeah, also good to have, um, some mindful responses to it. Not just, oh, this is exciting or this is terrible. We seem to be broadly speaking, any article you read on chat GPT seems to have fallen down one of those rabbit holes. And I feel like, yeah, very simplistic, really. Come on guys. There’s more. I literally
[00:24:12] JM: heard in the last.
[00:24:14] Week several, I saw several articles that were like chat GPT has made 43, 000 millionaires so far and you could be next. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that’s such slimy marketing. And then on the opposite spectrum, I literally saw someone do a post about how it is the antichrist. And she was not joking around.
[00:24:37] Like, this is, like, satanic, what’s happening. So I was like, wow, this is eliciting such a dramatic range of responses. You’ve got the people who literally are scared of this thing, like, at a supernatural spiritual level. Then you’ve got the charlatans out there trying to make a buck off of it. And then you’ve got people in the middle who are just trying to figure out what in the world is happening right now.
[00:25:00] Yeah,
[00:25:02] MV: I have to say that, you know, um, this is probably a terrible thing to say, but from London, that all of what you just said just feels like a very American response. America is full of people with very strong religious convictions. Good, bad or indifferent, but certainly very strong and not afraid to share it on the internet.
[00:25:18] And then, you know, amazing technologists. It particularly in Silicon Valley, classically, would think that technology is going to save the universe or, you know, we’re going to take everyone to Mars and that’s the best solution to the world’s problems. And of course, I think the middle ground is actually a rarer thing these days.
[00:25:32] And I like your book is trying to navigate this and help us navigate that. I think that’s a really helpful contribution to the debate. So I’m certainly it. The traffic stacking challenge. We ought to just tell people a little bit more. We’ve sort of glossed over that completely, but tell us a little bit more for those who are listening when it is available about the traffic second challenge, just briefly.
[00:25:51] JM: Sure. It’s a three day event and it’s designed to help Shopify site owners, um, learn how, uh, systems and process frameworks to double their traffic in 90 days. That’s the big challenge. Can you double your traffic in 90 days and we’ll present, uh, tools and, you know, Uh, the details and systems for how to make that a reality.
[00:26:11] This really draws on the work that I started in 2011 with my marketing on Pinterest, uh, blog, and then the marketing on Pinterest book. And then my Instagram power book and then my YouTube marketing power book and my email marketing power book and then ultimately I did nine mountains of traffic book and all of the traffic strategies that I’ve worked on for the last more than 10 years, um, is really brought to the party to really help Shopify site owners figure out how to be responsible for the traffic that comes to their site, how to manage it, how to manage its growth.
[00:26:49] And you know me, I’m not the hype type guy. This is more like trade craft training. I mean, this is more like, you know, the plumbers and electricians and, you know, the, that type of people show up for training. And you too, if you want to throw traffic on your website can show up for the training. I’m not saying it’ll be boring.
[00:27:09] I’m saying it’ll be very pragmatic. Uh, and it won’t be hypey and it won’t be, you know, kind of stupid black hat, gimmicky stuff. It’ll be very, very nuts and bolts training about how to use sources of internet traffic to double your, your site traffic. And, um, and it had a monitor that evaluate the whole nine yards.
[00:27:28] So that’s really the [00:27:30] emphasis of the whole thing. And, um, we’re really excited about it. I had the phrase. Traffic stacking. I look back and I bought the domain. I had the kind of the idea for this. 8 years ago, and I really never did much of anything with it. And so traffic stacking dot com is. Is the URL where we have the challenge built on and go there.
[00:27:54] It’s a free challenge. Um. Michael, you ask your wife, like, or said to your wife, why would this be free? There’s so much new and good content there. And the answer is very simple. I work with Shopify site owners and they are my people and I sell them services and consulting. I work with them, uh, for improving their websites, building Shopify sites, uh, and coaching them on how to grow and scale.
[00:28:19] And some of them will even be sharing, uh, during the event. Um, but I’m looking for more, uh, of them to work with. And so this is really built. Taylor made to help Shopify site owners, um, do what is generally the biggest Top of mind thing, which is scale their traffic and we’re passionate about it.
[00:28:39] MV: Good, good to bring it back to, um, brass tacks, as they say here, you know, the basics of it.
[00:28:43] And, uh, presumably you will be integrating your thinking on the latest AI tools. Cause we’ve been talking about, you know, creating systems and processes and speeding things up and making them more and more, you know, scalable.
[00:28:54] JM: Exactly. Right. And I also should just say, I’m also going to just talk about our own experience.
[00:29:00] Uh, we do have a Shopify site that is a top 1% traffic site. fair. com. And, um, and that’s documented. I, I have a letter from somebody who offered to buy our site and they cited that as one of the facts that they’d give us more money than a normal Shopify site because it’s a top of a Shopify 1% trafficked site.
[00:29:20] Um, and so I do, you know, I’ve, I’ve spent a decade. Uh, applying all of these lessons to our own business. And so it’s not theoretical, hypothetical. It’s not just me regurgitating stuff or even saying what my students who got Instagram power five years ago have done. It’s literally what we’ve done. And, and, uh, we’ll talk about how we do it.
[00:29:41] And. And walk people through the basics of, uh, getting after this idea of doubling their site traffic, which I think is a really aspirational goal and really powerful motivator. Yeah,
[00:29:53] MV: absolutely. Can’t can’t get away from the basics. Internet 101, get some traffic number two, convert it and go and count your money.
[00:30:02] I mean, How not to get away from those trade skills. Absolutely. Well, look, it’s been a great conversation, particularly the new thing is air marketing, power tools, ebook, but it’s great to put that in the center of a really practical, really, you know, changing your actual finances kind of situation where you.
[00:30:20] Yeah, doubling traffic. So that sounds really, really good. I’ve certainly got to say, I don’t even own the Shopify site, but even I was looking through that and going, I really want to go on this. It sounds really powerful because obviously I do own websites. So, uh, it’s, it’s really attractive stuff. And I want to get hold of that, those, those books as well.
[00:30:35] So, uh, Jason been fantastic chat. Um, we ought to wrap up there, but, um, I went to the traffic stacking workshop kicking off. That’s the only thing we should just
[00:30:42] JM: check. Tuesday, May 2nd. So if you’re hearing this after the date, uh, 2023, then just go to trafficstacking. com and see when the next challenge is and get registered
[00:30:51] MV: there.
[00:30:52] Cool. Thanks, man. Thanks, buddy.
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