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In this week's episode, Justin Simon and Ross Simmonds tackle AI marketing dilemma head-on. They dive into the power of AI in content creation and distribution, laser-focusing on the tools and specific prompts that can multiply your efforts without sacrificing quality.

Ross also lifts the curtain on the vital human element that guides the AI process, ensuring that the content doesn't just exist – it excites, it engages, it executes. It’s about striking that sweet spot between AI efficiency and human ingenuity. So, if you're spinning your wheels trying to figure out how to use AI in your marketing, this episode is for you.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How AI can boost content creation efficiency
• Why human oversight is vital in AI-generated content
• Ways to refine AI content prompts
• The impact of AI on marketing careers
• Strategies for repurposing content effectively

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Hey, everybody. Before we get started, I want to thank my friends at Hatch for

producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcast editing and

strategy for one flat rate by visiting Hatch

FM. All right, let's get in the show.

Welcome to distribution first, the show where we flip content marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week, I

share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you

create.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of distribution. First, could not

be more excited to have Ross Simmons back on the show. Anytime I get to

chat with Ross, even pre call, I'm like, man, I'm just, I'm loving

this. I'm feeling inspired and happy. So, Ross, man, thanks

for coming back. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited to chat. As you

said, the feeling is 100% mutual. I love chatting with you, love what you've done

for the community, and continue to do with the, with the industry at large on

the distribution front. So I'm excited to chat today. It's going to be fun. Amazing.

Yeah. And I'm sure we will touch on some of the distribution stuff as well

at some point. Anybody watching this is seeing a little book back there

behind Ross that he's been talking about a little bit

on social if you're following him. So we'll get there at some point. But I

would. Ross has also, if you've been paying attention, really been

shifting more into AI, how marketers can use

AI and not be afraid of AI, but use it

wisely. Yeah. I've noticed in the, in my

world, I'm kind of, I was a little bit leery at first.

Cause, like, man, is this another. Honestly, it was like, is this another clubhouse? Is

this another, like, you know, a fad or is it? But then it just became

too obvious for, like, this is not going away. Right. But

I'm curious to hear from your standpoint, like, I was in the same spot.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, when I first got a glimpse at some

of these tools and stuff, I was very anti it. And I like to say,

like, like, I thought, oh, this tool will never be as good as me.

This tool will never be great. I'm not even going to give it a chance.

And then I realized that AI for marketers is

kind of like onions for kids when we're young.

It's not that great because it's like, we don't want it. We don't dig it.

We're not feeling it. But as you get older, you realize, like, onions are key.

Like, if you throw onions into a dish, it can elevate it

significantly. And I think AI works the same way. If you throw

AI into the mix and you are not necessarily an expert, if you're

not bought into the idea, you'll probably get mediocre results and then you'll

walk away. If you don't understand prompt engineering and you get a response back

that's mediocre, you'll walk away and you'll say that you had a bad taste

in your mouth. But when you commit to trying it and trying it in different

ways with different prompts, with different strategies and techniques, you start

to realize that this technology is going to fundamentally

change humanity for a very long time.

And yes, there's no question you can wait on the

sidelines and allow it to kind of evolve and change and work through all of

the bugs. But I believe right now what

AI is doing to our industry in the

world is very similar to what social media did to our

world probably 1520 years ago. And I think a lot of

people are resistant the same way that people were resistant

about social. And to me, this is one of the

most exciting times to be in the digital marketing world

because the change is happening quickly. There's no question that it can

accelerate and improve our capabilities, our capacity, and I don't see

why any marketer would ignore it today. Yeah,

and I think sometimes you just need to have your eyes up. Like, the more

I've seen for how people are using it or some of the tools that are

being brought out and, like, the amount of speed at which I can

get things done now compared to when I used to be able to get things

done. I mean, the other day we were talking about the membership

before I'm building up this membership, and I was like, oh, I need to, like,

do an onboarding sequence. I need to do an onboarding

video. Well, I had all this base work

that I had created and thought of. I was then able to go into chat,

GBT, prop my way into a full on

onboarding email series and video

script in an hour, hour and a half. You know,

where, I mean, that's, that's weeks worth of work. And just

two or three years ago. Yeah. Like, the efficiency gains are, in

my opinion, one of the most underrated elements of AI. Like, yes, there's

a lot of validity to the idea that AI is going to have a hard

time replacing human creativity and being able to take lived

experiences and combine that with an opportunity and come up with something that

connects with culture. Those are true, real

concerns. But here's something that people don't recognize. A lot of the things

that we do on a day to day basis are very reputable tasks. They're tasks

that other people have done in the past. They're tasks that other people have written

about in the past. And they're tasks that AI can actually replicate quite well, especially

if you give it a task to do it. Take, for example, the task that

we all have as owners. When we're trying to brief someone on how to do

a project, we need to delegate a task. Let's say it's video editing.

Typically, we have our best practices around how we would like our

videos to sound, how we would like our videos to kind of tell a story.

We want a certain type of hook, all of those things. You can literally take

a voice note using your phone today, explain and

vomit all of your ideas into that voice note, upload it to

chat GPT, and then tell chat GPT to use the audio to understand

your concepts, your ideas, and write an SOP that you can use to

brief a new video editor on this project. And then in

the matter of seconds, you literally have taken two minutes to

record, 2 seconds to upload. You hit enter, you now have

an SOP. You can copy and paste that into a Google Doc. Maybe you read

it or you don't. You pass that off to this video editor and you ask

them if they have any questions, and that allows you to then fine tune and

improve based off of their responses. That task and that

energy would have traditionally taken probably four to 5

hours of time for someone to create. Now it can be done in

the matter of minutes, and you can do it at scale. So you

can no longer just, you don't limit yourself to that video thing. You can start

to do it for Twitter. How do we manage our Twitter account? How do we

manage responses? You can get all of this directly out of the chat

TPT and order these tools and inform, ultimately

your team on your best practices. And that's where I find the most

significant advantages come from, is by accelerating and improving

your ability to have standardization across your, with content that is

rooted exclusively in your own IP and your knowledge, which you have shared directly with

the AI. Yeah, and it makes me think too. Like you said, it might take

four to 5 hours to do that task. And I'm thinking in my brain, as

somebody who doesn't always love perfect

process and like that type of tax would actually take me four or five days,

because I'd be like, start and stop, start

and stop. Right. And, and so I think that's where those type of

things can be. Especially for like, if you know where your weak spots are.

Yeah. Where you can kind of fill gaps internally. I mean, that's where,

I mean, it's, it's small things. It's everything from

AI can create meta descriptions way smarter than you can. You know what

I mean? Like those type of things where it's like you're saving hours

and hours of time. Yeah, 100%. And there's plugins now

that can go directly into Google sheets where you can have like a GPT

prompt where you can literally just say, okay, these are the titles of all

of our blog posts. Hey, chat GPT. Using best practices around X, Y

and Z, I want you to write that meta description. You drag that cell and

it's going to write those meta descriptions for every single element within that

spreadsheet. Similarly, you can take looms that

you record. If you record looms or videos for your team, you can take the

transcripts and upload to chat GPT and ask chat GPT to

turn those transcripts into a blog post or turn them into an

internal document that breaks down how we do certain things. I've

gotten so many resources and assets built

directly from that process that it is ridiculous

and it saves me a ton of time. So the team no longer has to

rely on me to now have a conversation again. They have a central

system with pretty much my entire brain uploaded and downloaded for them to

consume and to use when they're trying to be informed on how to do a

certain task. Dang, love that. Yeah, and like

you said, that scales, because now you have it, you need to do that task

again. It's there, you've got it. And again, you might need to adjust it a

little bit, but. Right, and that's where the magic happens. Right? Like, I

think one of the issues that I have with the state of the industry today

is that a lot of people are making the mistake of assuming that AI replaces

everyone and that they no longer need humans. That's not

reality. Sure, some tasks are no longer needed, but I

do believe that humans still play a pivotal role, especially in

marketing and communication, when we are thinking about distributing

content or creating content. Does AI play a role? Yes,

but I don't believe that AI can manage the full spectrum of

the content that is being created, the stories that are being told,

or even determine whether or not an ad or a visual that it's created through

mid journey is actually worth being amplified and promoted. I think there's still

some human element that needs to be applied to it. So the way that we

view AI a foundation, is that AI is more of an augmentation tool

tool rather than a replacement tool. So when we're thinking about using

AI to create a long form blog post or an ebook, we're not thinking about

HTPT. Write us this ebook and then we walk away. We're ensuring

that the same way that we would brief a writer as a human, we're

giving as much details as possible around what we want

this piece to cover. Then chat GPT will give us a very

bad or mediocre draft, a draft that somebody could have probably

written if they were fresh out of school. No shade, but like that's what you

would get. We then take that and then we revise it, we update it, we

improve it. We have a checklist of what we call the content elevation list, and

then we elevate that piece to meet our standard. And then once it's meet our

standard, then we are confident that we can share this with an editor who does

a final review, and then it goes to the client. We do that same thinking

and approach to content distribution efforts, to content creation efforts,

you name it. That is where I think the biggest gap exists today.

A lot of people are thinking, I'm going to connect chat to the back end

of my CMS and let the words run. And then they get surprised

when Google erases them from the Internet. No, that's what you

get. You tried to game the system by publishing mediocre content,

and now you get below mediocre results. You need to add the

humans on top of the AI driven content to

reach content excellence. And then you actually have things that are worth

promoting and distributing. I've used this example a couple of times, I'm

sure on the show and definitely in conversations with other marketers. But I, and I

heard Daniel Priestley say this from Scoreapp and

oversubscribed and all that. And he said, because score app, he built

his tool with AI built into it, and he was describing it and he

said, you gotta like, yes, you can build a landing page. But

he said, it's just the cake. A bakery isn't going to go out

and sell just a plain cake without icing. It's on

the humans to go add the icing, to add the decoration, to

add the stuff on top. That's going to actually make that thing desirable

and want to be able to actually enjoy, consume and all that

stuff, right? 100%, yeah. I think

it's the analogy I like to also give is like, Iron

Man, Tony Stark exists, and I know some listeners have no idea where

I'm going with this. Might not follow any Marvel movies, but I'm a comic book

geek, so bear with me for a second. But Tony Stark as a human has

tons of flaws and is filled with lots of issues. If you

poke him, he's going to feel pain. But when you put on the Iron man

suit, he has superpowers. And I think AI is the same way. Me

as Rossimans, the human, I am a human. Cool. But when

you give me AI tools, I can do things in a

time span that would have not been humanly possible

before. I am able to execute and implement

tasks that I couldn't do before simply because I have this tool.

So I think when I talk to brands and I talk to people about, like,

how should they view AI, view it as an accelerant and as an

augmentation, and realize you're still very important. You have to guide it, you

have to direct it, and you need to understand the value of a good prompt

to be able to make it all work. So I guess for

anybody listening, and I'll throw a link to it in the description as well. Ross

has a full course that's super reasonably priced and you can go get

it. It's got a whole, a whole ton of prompts. I got it at the

beginning of the year. And so if you're. Because I think for me, one of

the biggest roadblocks for folks is like, what the heck do I

ask? What am I asking for? What are those type of, like, you, you were

talking about the SOp thing. I never would have thought about doing the Sop thing.

So, ross, tell me, what are some of the main things I need to be

thinking about as far as, like, general, I'm a content marketer, or I'm

running a small business trying to do content marketing. What are those type of things

I need to be thinking about prompting? Yeah, so the AI marketing console

is the course that I launched, and it's because, again, I'm a geek and I

love video games, and I think, like, this needs to be thought

of like a system. The technology changes so quickly

that we need to have system thinking across the board with all AI,

whether we're talking about audio AI, video AI, or written

text AI, and it's all covered within the AI marketing console. We have to have

systems in place for how we will use these tools. So when we're thinking

about prompts for written text, there are a few simple things that you need to

remember and keep in mind. First, you always want to be very, very

clear to the AI with what you want. A lot of people make

the mistake of saying, chat GPT, can you write me a blog post? That's not

enough. You need to be very specific. What is the goal of the blog post?

What are you trying to get it to do? And then if you can give

it an exemplar and an example of exactly how you want it

to sound so it can kind of go into the back of its brain to

say, all right, I have a framework that I'm going to apply to it. It

makes it better. So what can you do in that case? You can say, hey,

chat GPT, please. I always like to use my please and thank yous just in

case the AI comes to life someday and doesn't try to get me.

I like to do that. And then you're going to say something like, I want

you to use the inbound marketing model to identify

ten different types of blog posts that I should create, and then it's going to

give them to you. So now chat GPT has understood that inbound marketing model

and it's making recommendations based off of top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom of

funnel. Great. That could be good. What would be ten times

better is if you gave it context around the types of

content that you wanted to give you back. And the way that you do that

is you give it a Persona. So I would oftentimes tell chat

DPT not just, hey, can you write this for me? I would say

you are a digital marketer named Ross Simmons name

Seth Godin or whoever that is, like your goat in the

industry, and then ask them to create a recommendation like they would.

Then they're again going to understand what's their style, what's their approach, and

then they're going to craft it in that format. Now, at this point, you will

probably have better results than the vast majority of the people who use

chat GPT. And the system that you put in place after

that is essentially, let's do some chain prompting to now take these

titles and turn them into full fledged blog posts. So I want

chatgpt to now write me briefs. And from those briefs, you ask

Chatgbt to turn those briefs into full on blog posts. And then you

communicate that back over to editors. They review, they edit, and they bring it to

life. Now, this is where it starts to get really, really

interesting, because now within chatgpt they have a section called

Dolly, which allows you to have images. And you can ask

Chatgpt to create the social media graphics that should

go with that blog post. And it will read it, it will understand the

context, and then it will give you an image that it thinks is relevant to

that piece. You can then talk to it just like you would a designer with

recos and insights around your brand so it meets your brand quality guidelines.

All of that stuff to modify it and tweak it to hit your best

practices. There's also a GPT plugin. I

believe plugins are getting replaced in chat GPT. So it might be just called GPT

in the future, called whimsical, where you're able to even say to chat

GPT, I want you to create a flowchart. Let's say, for example, I wrote a

blog post about the 20 things that you need to know about

content distribution in 2024. And in that blog post, I had a

section that talked about the workflow of distro. I could say, hey,

chat DBT, I want you to create a workflow visual using

a diagram and a chart that showcases how someone

can go from an asset to 20 different assets. And

chat DPT will actually design that for me. Now,

let's just say that that graphic wasn't exactly what you wanted.

You can now download that graphic, upload it back to Dolly and

say, design this in a way that hits this type of state,

this type of style, and it will do that for you. That whole

process took me a long time to articulate with

words, but as an actual executor, it probably took

about an hour of time. Within that hour, you were able to

create ten blog posts, titles, probably get five

briefs, five final drafts, and imagery for all of that

content. This is why I believe this technology

is absolutely going to fundamentally change the way we do our work.

Yeah, I love that. So it's funny,

I haven't experimented too much with the image stuff yet, knowing that it's in chat

GP. I'm going to have to do that now. But one of the things in

Ross's course is he has a bunch of sort of image prompts.

Like there's really like, in my mind anyway, there's like sort of

the AI for content, traditional, like

written type content, maybe even some video stuff, which is super wild, which I know

you're experimenting with that next, and then you've got, and

then you've got images, which is a whole other world, but some of the just

the prompts alone for images are really, really cool and interesting to

just go through and try different styles. You know, I was playing with one, it

was like retro fujifilm something. Or I'm like, oh, this is sweet. I would,

you know, I would have never, would have never thought to try that.

So yeah, it's super cool. But the thing that I think is really

interesting is for your company too. You can start to tailor

those things with your own custom templates where if you get an

outline for a bottom funnel blog, for instance, you can

rinse and repeat that as the basis for the brief that AI creates

for you. Exactly. Yeah. It just allows for so

much more scale and efficiencies. And one of the other

efficiencies that I found with AI is you can take a blog post that

you've written and we talk about this awesome often. So I know you're going to

love this, but you can take a blog post that you've written and you can

ask chat GPT to write a script that would live on TikTok or that would

live on YouTube with that same concept. And then you can do

two things. One, you can go the old fashioned approach where you set up your

camera and you read that script and you say it into a camera and now

you have a video. Or you can take that script that you just got chat

DPT to create and you're going to upload it to a tool called

did or eleven labs or hey gen, which are AI

tools that create essentially deepfakes of yourself. And you're going to

have AI Ross or AI Justin go on

and look just like you would standing in front of a camera, read

that script, and then you're going to upload it to TikTok, you're going to upload

it to Instagram, you're going to upload it to YouTube and you're going to

essentially articulate that script without the words actually coming out of

your real mouth and instead it coming out through a synthetic version

of you and you throw some hashtags on it and you get some comments.

Why do I know this works? I experimented with one of these. I took

a script from a blog post that I wrote. I downloaded the entire

script, I uploaded it to eleven labs, and I got our video editor

to place video on top of it and I uploaded that to YouTube. It's called

what is on site SEO. And I encourage folks to check out that video on

my YouTube channel. It sounds just like me. And people sent it to

me saying, ross, I love how deep you went into this video. It's

not me. I never actually said those words, but it is me. But it's not

me. And that is the wild part of this entire space is like,

you don't know who is and isn't really an

AI. It's going to be wild. It is going to be wild. It's going to

be absolutely. I've even started playing with some of that stuff with, like, inside of

descript and inside, like, there's all, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff. And for

me, I was like, it's not perfect, but for

30 seconds of audio that I had to give

you, it's freakily shocking. It's more, honestly, it's

like pacing more than the, than the audio. Like, the audio

sounds great. It's just you're not quite on how I would pace, so.

But it'll get there. It's oh, 100%. It's all wild because, like, I

was, I was working with a brand and I had to send them a 30

minutes video. And in the video, I think I said, here are four ways

instead of saying five ways. And in descript I could actually

edit my words. So instead of saying four, I could

change it to five. And then it replicated my voice and changed it to five

and I sent it back to them and they were like, we don't know how

you did that, but thank you. And I was like, exactly

wild. It is a wild time to be alive. But that saved me

literally a lot of money because I would have been, I would have

had to go, I recorded it in a nice studio, I booked a studio

and I said the wrong thing. I would had to go back to the studio.

I would add, to set up camera, I would have had to record, I would

add, find out what shirt I was wearing, make sure that I looked the same,

everything was looking good. But instead I just changed the words and

AI picked up my voice, threw it in, made my mouth look like it matched

and what a time to be alive. Amazing.

Amazing. For the traditional sort of marketer thinking about doing

this, one of the things I think, and you brought it up with the video

script is the ability to take the one thing you've

made and maybe not straight, repurpose it like

you maybe traditionally would think of repurposing, but repurpose that

into multiple other things. Right. Like I was able to, like I

mentioned earlier, like, take an email outline

that came from like, basically an outline of how I'm going to onboard and then

I could come up with a full on email sequence and then from there, I

could say, take everything you know about this email sequence and write it out in

a perfect how to step by step video. Yeah. And so it's

like, those are the types. And instantly, you know, and again, is it perfect?

No. Does it maybe need a little bit of massaging? Yes, but I can do

that in minutes instead of hours. 100%. I think it's,

we're going to live in a time very soon where

the responsibilities of an individual marketer goes up and a lot of

people are afraid of that. But because of our capabilities now, thanks

to AI, you should be able to get more done. You should be able to

execute more frequently tasks and do more. And I think that's

going to wreak a lot of havoc on a lot of folks because the

expectations for marketers is going to rise due

to the fact that we should have AI in our back pocket. And that's

why I launched the AI marketing console is because I am

ridiculously confident that this technology

is going to wreak havoc on the careers of people who do not embrace

it. And I think it's important for

repurposing for paid media, for creation

all of the things AI should be a part of your mix and that part

of your tools that you're using today. I mean, I can say, just speaking from

me, running my own business, I got on a call a couple weeks

ago with somebody and it's like, dude, you're just a machine. Like, you're

stuck. I've just, well, how are you? You're in my feed and then you're in

my inbox, and then you're like, why are you doing it all? And it's like,

really? It's me, but it's me using AI as my,

my assistant. Like that. When I first heard somebody say that,

and you're, you're speaking the same language there. Like, that completely

opened up my brain to, like, not be afraid of it and be like, oh,

no, no, no, you're my intern now. You're, you're my marketing

manager now. You're, you know, 100%. I am with you

100%. I don't even just view AI as my assistant. I view it as my

mentor. I use it as my partner in crime,

my colleague. It's not just someone that I'm giving tasks

to, it's someone who I will use as like a,

someone to just, like, bounce ideas off of. So I'll ask Chatjpt,

like, I don't know if you're familiar with. I think it's called the trillion dollar

coach Bill Campbell. He coached like all of the top execs at

Google and brands like that. I will tell Chat TPT to

think like him and personify him and be him. And

then I'll say, this is what I'm trying to work through. What advice do you

have for me? And then it is good advice,

or I'm trying to make a decision on whether or not I should take on

a project and I need to bounce the idea off of chat GPT

on like the pros and cons and tell it to go and do some total,

addressable market research. So hey, chat GPT, I have these two ideas.

Please do a deep dive on what you believe might be the opportunity

worth chasing. Thinking about the total number of,

amount of impact, how much time it's going to take, the investment

that I will have to make, both from a time and cost perspective. And the

responses are always enlightening and eye opening.

So for me, I don't think you should view it just

as the intern. Also, don't be afraid to ask it for advice and get

guidance on things. And of course, sometimes the advice will be bad and it will

be wrong, but that's okay because at least it will start to open

little doors of sequences where you can poke in and navigate and say,

I never would have went down this path. Nope, not for me. Shut it. And

then on to the next one. So I use it as not just an assistant,

but also as a mentor. And I think that there is a ton of value

in using it for that and for brainstorming and things like that too. That's

amazing. Brainstorming is huge. The mentor thing, I've, I've maybe done it

not maybe as strongly as you have there. That's really cool to think about.

Like, I've used it as like an, like a really strong editor

at times where, you know, for, hey, you are X, Y and Z, like

edit this thing. What, what's missing? What would make this stronger? What, you know, and

that way it's not like. And then from there you can take that and either

you can implement those changes yourself, you can do more prompting if you want

the AI ad to do that, but it's a good way to use it

for. Yeah, getting advice. Getting. I've

uploaded like literal sales calls to chat GPT and been

like, look, I just had this sales call with a company would love to get

your feedback on what I could have done better. Oh, that's so good. And then

it will tell me, like, I've had times where it says the best amount of

time to actually talk on a call is, on average, about three minutes for the

person who's pitching. You went long. And I'll be like, cool, I need to slow

down on that. Or it'll say, like, they brought up this major concern, but you

didn't really address it. And then I'm like, right, I should have listened a little

bit closer to that. You can get some ridiculous value out of

that. Just, again, playing the mentor role. Hmm. That's

amazing. I've done sales calls, but not from that perspective. That's super

cool. Yeah. I mean, even with the sales call thing, too, it's

like, just as a reminder, okay, what are the.

If I've done this, like, even if the sales call didn't work

out, right, it's going back and saying what were the

biggest problems that they were having? And then it's like, oh,

cool, now I can create some. Give me. You know, and that now you're starting

that chain over again, and then you can frame it up to say, like, off

that sales call if you're talking to Jane. Jane is the

avatar for all the content in this thread. And so everything that

I'm going to be creating is for Jane. Exactly. Even though we didn't make

the sale. Right, exactly. And what you can say is like, hey,

chat GPT, recognizing we didn't close that sale, but I want to nurture that

relationship with Jane three months from now, what are some pieces of content that I

could create that I can send to her that will demonstrate why we would have

been the right partner for? Then you get that answer, then you go and create

it. Or you ask chat GPT to create it, and then you can nurture that

relationship down the road with those same exact assets. It's

interesting, I saw a quote from Sam Altman a few weeks ago,

and it was like he believes that

95% of the roles and the work that marketing

agencies do is going to be completely replaced by AI.

And that, to me, was like, okay, hmm,

this is the goat of AI right now, talking about

how 95% of the tasks that marketers do could be

wiped out. And in some cases, I

think he's right. A lot of the repeatable tasks that marketers do

on a regular basis will be replaced by AI, because we're still in

early days of this technology. But the

creativity, the connection to culture, the human touch, the things that

make you unique, and the things that allow you to get closer to your customers

on a human personal level will never be replicable by

AI. And because of that, I think there will always be

room for great marketers, great storytellers, great creators and great

creatives. But if you are mediocre and you are average,

now is the time to invest

ridiculously in elevating your skill sets. Because the

talent that is going to be required to win in this new

age is going to be beyond mediocre. And

that would be my big message to anyone who wants to get into

marketing, who wants to continue to have a long career in

marketing. Things are going to change. And I encourage you to really

double down on some of those even soft skills that a lot of

people have put to the wayside for the last little bit

around management. Empathy, communication,

internal relationships, sales, all of those things are going

to matter more than ever before. Yeah. The days of

scooting by at a place because you're a cog in the

machine and they need XYZ thing

every week. And so I'm irreplaceable because they need that.

That's, that's going to be long gone because what it's going to be,

and you know, think about it, too, from somebody who's managed teams

or if you're not great at what you're

doing or bringing something else to the table.

Right. That's a lot of my time,

you know, this running teams, is it. Your time is always spent on the person

that's not doing the good work versus this. And now there's a very

easy alternative that even if you try out, well, we're going

to try out AI and see if we can replace these systems in these. Even

if you can't nail it 1000% right, you're probably going to get

pretty close. And I think that's where teams and companies are

going out. Especially we had the continued and tech mass

layoffs. I think it's going to be curious. Eventually money

will come back. Everything's cyclical, but what our teams going

to look like when the money comes back. Right. And I think that's the biggest

thing that a lot of people don't realize is there's two forces going on

right now that are not necessarily in the favor

of people who are mediocre. One, globalization

is happening. Brands can now employ and hire people

from all over the globe. We have all gone through the work from home

experience. Thus people are more and more comfortable with outsourcing

and partnering with people on a global scale. Due to that, the

competition for jobs is at an all time high.

In addition to that, we throw in the mix. AI. Great.

Now, not only are we competing on a global

scale, but we're also competing with the smartest technology

since Siri. Right? Like, okay, how do

you compete with that? You need creativity. You need to

be good at communicating internally, you need to be good at

being able to pick up on new trends, understand culture, understand

storytelling, understand community. The whole idea of a t

shaped marketer just got a lot more interesting, where not only do

you need to be deep in one thing, but you also need to know

a lot of the soft skills to be the balancing act to all of

those skills that you've gained. It's a wild time, and I

really do believe that more than ever before, people need to invest in

themselves and try to find companies. If you are early on in

your career, find companies to work for that are going to invest in your

education and invest in your development and skills by not only giving

you room to learn, but also giving you projects that allow you to

learn. Yeah, it's. And to me, the other aspect of it, which

is, honestly, I'm super bullish on, it's why I'm doing a lot

of things I'm doing is learning together. Right?

Yeah. Being in community with people who are trying to do the same thing.

So then you don't have to sit in a silo and try

to figure out if this tactic is the right thing or if

this is what I should be leaning on. What, what are other companies vps

telling them that they're focused on? The more you can get those answers

and have those questions sort of figured out and really

understand, I think, from the macro perspective, why are

we doing what we're doing here? You know, when I was running a team, that

was the biggest thing. It was like, do you know why we're doing what we're

doing here? I don't need to know, like, you know, the how, like, you know,

your individual tactic. I think the hows are what's going to be

outsourced. Right. But it's like you as a human, you still have to know

the why. Why am I telling the story I'm telling? Why am I

telling this story and not that one? Why am I talking to this audience and

not that one? And then that's what's going to inform all of these

other things, 100%. Like communities built my career, my entire

career was built on the back of communities. So hearing that you're launching one getting

got me really excited because I think we need more communities, especially

focusing on things like distribution, but like, communities gave

me not only the access to the right people to build relationships, to

unlock, again, new opportunities. But also the idea

of publishing my thoughts in front of a community and allowing that

community to be essentially my crowdsourced space

to give me feedback and thumbs up or thumbs down or

debate and argue and fine tune my thinking. There's a lot of

value in communities, and especially early in your career,

if you are not already where you want to be, find a

community where you can really make it your own and add as much

value as possible. Because when you add value to these communities, you get value

back. And that value that you get back will literally last

the rest of your career. So I don't know where I'm going with that,

but long response to probably not even a question.

Communities are good, are great. Definitely encourage people to join communities.

It's a great place to be. Yeah, it's that shared experience. It's that.

Again, I think, like, you can learn so much by yourself, and I'm a

huge, I'm a huge advocate. Like, I've, I've said this.

Anytime anybody asked me about, like, career growth or what do you, it's like,

work harder on yourself than you do at your job and you will, you will

succeed. Like, I truly believe that if you are improving

your skills, your mindset, how you're thinking about things, how you're

trying to, if you're focusing on growing like most people are

not, you know, that's the other thing too, right? Like, most people are not focused

on growth at all. They're just like, focused on surviving. So if you, if

you turn that dial just a little bit and want to focus on

growing yourself, you'd be complete game changer. Yeah, I 100% agree.

I can remember my first job. I came in relatively fresh

out of school, and my mission was to kind of

be able to compete with the peers who I knew were making six

figures. And I was coming in very junior and I wasn't making that. And I

was like, all right, I need to be able to do everything they did. So

I blocked off time in my calendar, even after hours, where I would go

in and read all of their work. I would go on websites like Slideshare. Back

in the day, it was a great place for reading briefs and studying

documents. And I would study how to write a creative brief, how

to manage a project. What does it mean to be a project manager? I

wanted to understand the entire system in the entire.

And I viewed myself as a, essentially a computer, and I need to download as

much info as possible. And I grinded and I put in that work. So

eventually I could get on stage. I can have these conversations with

my colleagues and my peers at the time and be able to say, like, look,

don't look at me as just some young 22 year old who doesn't know

anything. I need you to understand that I have put in the time to

understand these channels, this network, social media, this is now

my thing and I'm going to own it. So my advice to folks who are

early in their career would be to be known internally as

the person who understands things like AI better than anyone else.

If you can be positioned internally as the person who is

obsessed, that knows how to use all of the tools, who

understands what perplexity is, who understands what chattypt is, who

understands mid journey and can support the team in those efforts, I

can say with confidence, if you still do your job and you deliver

value and you are seen as the expert in that world,

you will not be on the list when layoffs come, you will not be on

the list, not even close, because the leadership team is going to view you

as somebody who has a key role in the future at being able

to grow that. And with that, it's a soft skill

that is showing your willingness to adapt,

learn, be agile, not be stuck in your

ways, not be boots in the sand. I'm not moving. This is how

I've always done things, you know, which all of those things add up to say,

like, all right, the world is changing, Ross is with. Us,

you know, yeah, 100%. Like, be great, try to be

great at your job and don't get caught up in the

noise and the chaos of, oh, you just do the bare minimum and get

by. No, like you're talking about your livelihood, folks. Like, life is

hopefully long for you. And in life you're going to do a lot of

things. If some of it is self employment, amazing, go do that. Be a

run your own show. I'm a huge fan of side hustles, of

entrepreneurship, all of those things. I'm a big believer in it. But I also recognize

that some people want to have a full time career and that's their goal and

their ambitions, great, do that too. But recognize that

if you want to thrive in your career, you are very likely

going to need to differentiate, especially with the rise of

AI and the technologies that are coming down the pipe across our industry.

Yeah, it's becoming more and more. As somebody who worked in

house for over a decade and then is now building his own thing, I

can speak from first hand experience that I

had to learn my craft. But then I had to learn about

marketing in general. It wasn't just websites, it wasn't just copy. I had to learn

about how does the ads that they're running tie in with the thing I'm

doing here? How does this work with that? Right, like you're expanding and learning. And

then it was, how does, oh, how does this tie into the business? How does

this tie in what sales is trying to like and now run my own business?

I'm just doing everything. So it's like, you know, crash,

crash, crash course and everything. So.

All that stuff. How can I expense this coffee? That's the question.

Real quick, before we wrap, I'm curious because this is actually something that one of

my clients brought up with me, and I wasn't sure I had a great answer.

So I was curious to ask you, how do we think about

plagiarism in a world of AI? Knowing

we can do a lot of things, how can, and with

the core updates that Google's doing and all that type of stuff, how can we

as marketers feel confident that, like, I'm tapping into every bit of

potential that AI is giving me, but I'm not crossing some sort of

mysterious line? Yeah, it's a great question. So

there's two trains of thought that I apply to plagiarism with

AI. The first one is, you always want to do plagiarism checks

at the end of producing an asset. So there are a ton of plagiarism

checkers that will actually analyze what you've created across the Internet

and determine whether or not things were plagiarized and whether or not they need to

be rewritten, redeveloped, and rewrote. That's the first piece.

Always embrace plagiarism checkers to make sure that you are not taking someone

else's ip and turning it into something. Now, the little Internet voices

might be saying, yeah, but Ross, it was trained on other people's content, so it's

plagiarism. Anyway, I hear you. This is my thought on that. The

same way that I learned content marketing by reading

blog posts from some of the great content marketers, AI

has learned content marketing by reading content from some of

the greatest marketers. If I want to learn how to be

great at sewing, I'm going to read a ton of books

on sewing, and that's going to form my thoughts and my perspective

on sewing. If I decide that I am great at sewing and then I write

a book on sewing, I'm very likely not going to go out

into the wilderness. And think back to ten years ago when I was

informed by a famous sewer who wrote a blog post or an article on

that and then use that as a quote and source them as the ip of

that original idea. It's not going to happen, right? All of the

greats learn from other greats. You don't see LeBron James

saying, oh, that shot was created by Michael Jordan. You don't see Michael Jordan talking

about how every shot that he did was inspired by Doctor J and Doctor

J doing the same thing for Will Chamberlain and then will Chamberlain with Bill Russell,

blah, blah, blah. It doesn't work that way. And the same thing exists with AI.

AI has learned from humans the same way that we as humans

would have learned from other humans. The only reason why me and you can even

have this conversation is because over the course of our life, people

have taught us English and we can speak English. But every time I talk

to you, I might be plagiarizing things that my dad would have said. My dad

always said, long story, a little bit longer. That is like my go

to line, but I'm not saying source. My

father, Hank Simmons, I'm not doing that right. So I think a lot of people

get caught up in this idea, not realizing that all ideas that we

have as humans are taken from humans in the past, that we've

interacted with and that we've connected with. Unless you're in a research lab and you're

coming up with new things in math, but that's a whole different ballgame. So for

me, long story, little bit longer, I think the

plagiarism side, run your checks. But also, when it comes

down to it, folks realize that the ideas that AI has

captured and is grabbing are very similar to the same ones that you

would, except instead of it being flesh and chemicals

inside of our brain, it's pixels and data inside of a computer.

Yeah, it's like the. I gave him credit because earlier Daniel

Priestley talking about AI. But at some point, I will not. At some point, I'm

just gonna, you know what I mean? Like, it's gonna be so baked into the

conversations that I'm having. I'm just like, yeah, AI's like cake. And it's like that,

you know, like, I think about all the books, all the books that I read,

and it's like, oh, that's a really interesting idea. That's a, that's a way to,

to build a business, or that's a way to frame this up. I mean, I

was watching a YouTube video the other day, and, you know, some guy's pitching his

framework, and I'm like, boy, that's a lot like so and so's framework that.

That I saw over here. Right? So it's like, I think the more

comfortable and confident you can be, unless it's like a named

process thing that you, you know. You know, I was talking with

somebody earlier, everyone. The flywheel. Like, the flywheel's been around. Like,

Disney had the flywheel, then so and so had the flywheel HubSpot. At this flywheel,

everyone's flywheel, flywheel, flywheel. It's not a new concept. Yep. Right. But coming

back more, you know, I see it all the time now. It's like, you got

to build, you know, build this flywheel, do these things. So, yeah, it's. It's

the classic nothing is new under the sun.

Quoted by someone else. Someone else said that? Absolutely, man.

So before we wrap, I do want to touch on the book, because we

didn't talk too much about it, but I'm super pumped for it. Why don't you

talk to a little bit about the book? I don't know when you're officially releasing

or doing anything, but let me know about this, man. I appreciate it. So, April

9, the book is officially going to hit the stores, the shelves, etcetera, etcetera. It's

called create once, distribute forever, which is the mantra and idea that I've

kind of fine tuned and spent a lot of time and energy thinking about over

the last few years, especially when I think back to, like, my early days in

marketing, where I was creating a lot of content, but I actually wasn't getting any

results. And then I realized that the reason why I wasn't getting any results is

because, yes, the content was good, but my audience was small, and I needed to

get that content into a larger audience to increase my

sample size, to ultimately drive more results. And in this book,

I wouldn't say it's exclusively around content distribution, but it's

also around creative distribution, business

distribution, startup distribution, organizational distribution.

Whether you're running a store on Etsy, you're running a blog, you're running a

YouTube channel, whatever it might be, distribution is very likely

the one thing that's holding a lot of people back from their dreams. And my

goal with this book is to unblock so

many great creators, so many great minds, so many great companies from

being in their own way as it relates to distribution and giving them not

only the playbooks, but also the confidence and the systems that they can use. To

understand how important it is to distribute their stories and amplify

their message to maximize their likelihood of actually becoming

successful. Love it, man. That's how I got into the distribution game myself,

is just the understanding of, like, the things you

create. That's step one.

Exactly, exactly. That's 100% it. Like, we oftentimes

fall into the mistake of thinking just because we created

something, we can pop the bubbly and celebrate when in reality, that's when the

job starts. The job starts after you have created this thing and you need to

get the word out about the thing that you've developed. And for a lot of

people, the reason why they don't amplify is because of fear. And

on the other side of that fear is the outcomes that most of us actually

want one. Yeah. And it's interesting, too, the more, I mean, I'm sure you know

this from working with all the companies you work with. The volume

play of just, we're going to create as much content as humanly

possible with no utter strategy. We're just going to, you know, spray and pray and

make this thing work that is long gone.

And, I mean, it's really eye opening. Some of the companies I've been

working with recently, like, for core products, we're

talking about a couple pages driving the vast majority of the

content around there. And so it's like, okay, let's do a better

job of amplifying those bad boys if they're the ones that are driving

it. Exactly. If you're seeing the results off of a few

assets, then pour the gasoline on the fire. Right? Like, don't just

say onto the next one, let's create something new. Let's see

and look at what's working and try to milk that for all it's

worth. And the best brands do this every single day.

And when you can crack that code as an organization, it just

unlocks ridiculous potential and opportunity. And like you said, too, I think the

underrated thing, when I talk about it as well, that usually

when I say it, it kind of lights up for people, is around. You're

amplifying your business, you're amplifying your message, you're amplifying your story.

Like, you're not just distributing a piece of content. Hopefully. Hopefully you're

distributing your point of view. You're distributing all of those things that

you wish people would understand. You're not forcing them

to take all this time out of their day to understand that, oh,

you've got this blog post, like, no, you're just presenting it

to them in unique ways and native ways wherever they're at. So where

eventually, over time, oh, Ross talks about x, y,

and Z. Oh, Justin talks about x, y, and z. Cool, I'm in.

That's it, 100%. And everyone's like, oh, but I don't want to say the same

thing over and over again. And it's like, folks, how long has nike

said, just do it? A very, very

long time, and you're afraid to share blog posts twice in one

week. Really think about that. Like, it makes no sense. It makes

absolutely no sense. So I encourage people to get out of your own way

and just try it. And that's when the light bulbs start to come off, when

they share something in week one, and then they share the same thing in week

two, and they see that the amount of impact was the exact same.

Ah, cool. Nobody's commenting saying, why'd you share this

again? Everybody's just doing what we wanted them to do

twice. Ching, ching. And what it does is it, when it,

when I started implementing this system, what it does is it completely

unlocks the amount of content that you realize you even need to be, need to

be making to be successful. You can create a big old engine

and be successful and do that, but you can also

be super lean, be super strategic, amplify

distribution. And I said it in an episode a couple

weeks ago, but I don't have to do a podcast every week to get a

content engine that goes for the year. You know what I mean? Like, I don't

have to. It's fun. I love having the conversations, but it's sometimes even for me,

I'm like, boy, I'm creating so much good stuff. I'm

struggling to keep up with the amount of, you know, stuff that I can create.

I try my best to build those systems in place, but it's just once

you learn the process of repurposing and distributing that content, it just opens

up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's what I hope people can

get out of the book. It's exactly that. It's breaking down how you can get

more out of the things that you create that are already valuable, that already educate,

engage, entertain, or empower people, and then give you the ability to say,

okay, how can we get the most out of this thing and get this story

out here? And my hope is that the book will deliver the playbook and much

more for people. Love it. I'm pumped to read it. I'm super excited. And

Ross, man, thanks for coming on the show again. It was a blessed talking to

you. Thanks for having me. This was fun. I always appreciate again, like I said

last time, I appreciate what you do for the industry overall and thank you for

beating the horn around distribution. The world needs it. The industry needs it

as well. Thank you so much for having me. Awesome chat soon man. Cheers.

Alright, I hope you enjoyed this episode of distribution first

and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so,

so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in this

episode way or another into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that

are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and

transform the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe

to the show and sign up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co.

So you don't miss a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next

episode as well. And until then, take care and I'll see you next

time.