AI is everywhere these days, along with the temptation to simplify your life by paying for premium AI tools. Do you really need to open your wallet and hire a robot? Let’s talk about it!

Episode Highlights:

• Will It Help You Reach Your Goals?
• Is it ACTUALLY Saving You Time?
• Would a Practical Workflow Do the Same Thing?

Resources Mentioned:

https://stephanieroyer.podia.com/bring-your-own-traffic

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Mentioned in this episode:

My 37 Favorite Places to Find Blog Ideas

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Stephanie 0:00

Let's face it, AI is everywhere these days, along with the temptation to simplify your life by paying for premium AI tools. But do you really need to open your wallet and hire a robot? Let's talk about it.

Stephanie 0:16

Hey there teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:27

Welcome to our second episode in the Let's pay less series. On the last Saturday of each month, we're going to talk about popular budget busters, and decide if they're really worth the hype. My goal for this series is not to give you a recommendation one way or the other, because you know your business best. Instead, we're going to weigh the pros and cons so that you can make an intentional decision about where your marketing dollars go.

Stephanie 0:53

As we've been talking about the content creation workflow for the past month, I imagine that you've probably thought a few times of that's a lot of steps. That's a lot of things. I wonder if there's a way to make this easier. And if you had those thoughts, that's totally understandable, because there really are a lot of steps in a content creation workflow. That's why AI can definitely seem like an appealing option. I mean, people are sharing online about how much content they're able to create for their businesses at the click of a button. But as you probably discovered, the best AI tools come with a pretty hefty price tag.

Stephanie 1:32

But if we stopped to think about it, AI has increased the pace of online content creation to what feels like a lightning speed. It might have you wondering if you need to pay for these tools. In order to keep up with everyone. You're worried that if you don't join the ranks of premium AI users, your website just won't be able to compete. But it's important to ask yourself specific questions about your business before you open your wallet. So I have three questions for you to consider today.

Stephanie 2:04

First, ask yourself is a premium AI tool going to help me reach my goals in my business? And I'm talking about the big meaningful goals in your business? Because, yes, AI can be helpful for short term, smaller goals, just as an example. I mean, if you have the goal of gathering blog post topic ideas, not necessarily keywords, but just topics, I have a little hack in my free blog post guide, I'll put a link in the show notes, where you use AI to help you create this really cohesive list for a content pillar on your blog. So yes, AI can be helpful, I am not saying that it's not. However, I want you to think about the overarching goal for your business. And if AI can really help you with that, if you're listening to this podcast, you clearly have a big goal to increase traffic and sales through blogging. So is the final product of a blog post created by AI? Is that the best representation of your brand? And is it the best way to feature your products in your post? In recent posts, we talked about the importance of avoiding clunkiness in your blog, and of serving our readers before selling like those are essential elements of blogging, is artificial intelligence truly able to handle that nuance. I'm just gonna leave it there. Because I'm sure you realize, as a writer, I have big feelings about this. But there are going to be some goals in your business, that would be fine to outsource to AI. I talked about one. But let's think of another example. Let's say that Instagram isn't a huge part of your income for your business, but you still want to maintain a presence of some kind. So you might use AI to help you generate some images and captions more quickly, just to get them out of the way and scheduled. If this was the case, you might consider just using the AI add ons of tools you're already using, instead of paying for a premium AI tool, the quality might not be the best. But it might not be that important if it's not a primary goal for your business. Now, I'm going to pause there, because it's possible that what I just said made you cringe a little bit. But you might be thinking, wow, Stephanie, I want all of my marketing efforts to reflect my business in the best light possible. I was hoping that when I said that, that it would strike a nerve because I wanted to point out that many people are settling for AI, because it saves them time. And it helps them to be in more places at once. They don't necessarily care that it's glaringly obvious that they're using an AI to write their social media captions, because at least they're there. They're creating content.

Stephanie 4:55

But I guess my next question is, does it really matter? saved time? That's the second question I would like you to consider because many people say that AI is saving them hours and hours of time in their workflow. Now, I'm all about saving time. So I'll admit, I've experimented with chat GPT a few times. Granted, I didn't pay for the premium version. But I just wanted to get an idea of what I was missing, because everybody said they're saving so much time. But I had the opposite experience. By the time I crafted a prompt, I read through the less than impressive response, crafted a second prompt to ask for them to try again. And then I eventually edited the closest match to what I was looking for, I realized I could have just written it myself three times over. Now, going back to my previous point about your goals for your business, words matter a lot to me and my business. And I want the content that I put out there the written content, to the quality for the people who take the time to read it, it kind of reminds me of the effort we put in to teach our kids how to do chores, you know, that when they first start trying to do tasks themselves, it can be pretty painful to watch. And a lot of times, it's not quite done to the standard, we would hope. Sometimes we even have to, like, redo it after they're not around, so we don't hurt their feelings. But ultimately, the effort we put into that and the time we spend, it completely matches up to the goals that we have for our kids. We want them to be independent humans who can take care of their own stuff. And so obviously, it's worth it to put the time into that process. And so when it comes to the back and forth that we have with the AI tools to prompt them, and teach them how to sound like us and use our brand voice and all the things. If it matches up to the goals you have for your business, then the time spent is worth it. But if it doesn't match up to the goals you have for your business, then leave it from what I've gathered in the mastermind groups that I'm a part of the only tools that professional bloggers trust to create content for their websites are paid AI tools, and they're not very cheap. But they all still talk about the importance of crafting informative prompts, just to get that really quality output. So they're crafting half of a blog post in order to prompt the AI. Plus, the content needs to be heavily edited in order to create content that's worthy of ranking on Google. So at the end of the day, I'm just truly left wondering if AI is really saving people the time they think it is.

Stephanie 7:35

The final question I wanted to pose in this discussion is whether a practical workflow could help you see the results you're looking for, instead of turning to AI, because at the end of the day, most people use AI tools to help them do more in less time. But isn't that what an effective workflow can do for your business?

Stephanie 7:57

And that question is at the heart of the course that I created, bring your own traffic, because I was tired of seeing people shell out big bucks for courses that would help them with each step of the content creation process, they were having these different pain points in blogging. And so they would buy these expensive courses to learn a few tidbits to help them with that pain point, when really all they needed was just to put the essentials together into a realistic workflow. And that's what bring your own traffic helps people with is it takes the essentials of blogging and SEO and Pinterest. And it puts it together into one manageable workflow that people can do on their own without having to pay for expensive AI tools or to hire out because I show them exactly where in the workflow, they should try to be taking care of certain tasks. So Oh, you're working on this with your SEO, you might want to make note of that for Pinterest. And so I just had never seen a course like that, especially one that was designed specifically for TPT sellers. So that's where the course came from. And my hope is that when people have this manageable workflow, they're going to be less likely to keep turning to the next shiny object that's going to help them save so much time. Right now, it's AI but who knows what it's going to be down the road. But that's also why I wanted you to take a look at your content creation workflow as soon as possible after I launched this podcast, because your systems are truly the most important thing to put into place so that you can win with organic marketing. Because once you are consistently creating quality content for your audience, everything else will fall into place.

Stephanie 9:41

So let's go back to the initial question. Do I need to pay for AI in order to keep up? Only you can answer that question, but I hope that this discussion gave you some food for thought. You can decide if outsourcing to AI is truly going to help you meet your goals or save time in the long run. But I would love to know if you are using AI in a way that is really saving you a lot of time and headache in your business. Because like I said earlier, I love to save time, especially using free tools. So reach out to me on Instagram if you have just this wonderful way of using AI in your business and you wouldn't mind sharing with me. My handle is Stephanie Royer Solutions, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.