Using AI in Your Online Marketing

Benefits and Dangers of Using AI in Your Online Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a competitive tool that many of your colleagues will be utilizing in their online business. This technology has created a deep divide among those who are all in on it versus those who abhor it and won’t touch it. Here, I’ll share my thoughts on using AI in your online marketing and business.

Both of these extremes are wrong, and you should strive to fall somewhere in the middle – being open to the use of AI tools, yet cautious about how (and when) you leverage them.

This is the problem with the most vocal people sounding off about AI in the use of online marketing. Some see it as something to fear or something that lacks benefits, while others want to use it as a full replacement of any effort they might have to put into their business.

This all boils down to a lack of knowledge about how AI works, how it fails, what it can do for you, and how it can damage your business. Once you’re educated about it, it can be something you welcome into your business without fear and without risk.

NOTE: The ONLY training I am recommending on this topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence) for marketers, content creators, and others online is from people I know and trust. Denise Wakeman and Andy O’Bryan have created the AI Success Club and I am excited to be learning everything there is to know on this topic, as well as how to utilize it for for business from these two thought leaders.

The Danger of Relying on AI to Curate Facts for You

Right now there are many different AI tools emerging on the Internet. Some are being produced by global mega corporations and others by individual marketers wanting to rake in some quick cash by promising push-button profits.

Regardless of what tool you use, you have to be careful about allowing it to take over your business for you. AI guidelines admit that the tools can get their facts wrong. They also state that the AI tool, when faced with a concept it doesn’t know, can hallucinate (make up) answers.

Niche leaders cannot put their business at risk by leveraging a tool that could mislead their audience. Because it won’t be the tool your readers blame if you publish factually incorrect information – it will be you.

AI has made many blatant errors. In fact, Google lost $100 billion in market shares when their new BARD AI tool made a big gaffe during a live event where they were trying to showcase how great it was.

In another instance, Bing’s AI tool was arguing with a user about the author of an article, and even argued that the person using it was also named Bing because it couldn’t fathom anyone having any other name.

AI has gotten scientific facts wrong. If you’re in any niche and happen to be blogging or selling a product with any sort of advice on health, finances, etc., you could be doling out harmful information that will create backlash for you.

Many of these tools are years behind in the information it’s been fed. They’re working with information from 2021, when it’s already 2023. Others have unlimited access to the Internet to curate their answers, and that sometimes causes them to deliver crazy answers that aren’t from the best (most reliable) sources.

When left unchecked, AI tools have responded in offensive ways, not only being mean and argumentative, but also being discriminatory – which, if you failed to catch before publishing, could decimate your business. Using AI in your online marketing requires taking responsibility.

Competitors Are Hoping You Use AI the Wrong Way

AI has many positive uses. You can input data and information and have it give you some insight about it or help you create better wording. But when you are in a rush to explode the volume of content you’re creating, you might be tempted to rely on AI to do the work for you.

This is exactly what your competitors are hoping you’ll do. Because when you leave everything up to a sterile robot, in no way can you compete with their human, innovative approach.

Consumers often weed out who they follow, listen to, learn from and ultimately buy from according to the personalities involved. You can probably think of several marketing voices right now – and some have repelled you, while others impressed you.

Even when factually correct, it’s not that AI is wrong to use, but it’s simply boring and ineffective in terms of trying to build a list and convert visitors into sales. Without a personal touch, they might as well be reading a school book, not following a cutting edge entrepreneur. Don’t ever forget that using AI in your online marketing requires a watchful eye.

There is no way for an AI-generated piece of content to connect with the reader on a human level. There is a void of emotion that’s so important (especially with online content).

When they feel a connection to you – to your story – they trust you. They get over their hurdles faster when spending money through your links. They’ll also be more apt to engage with you. Using AI in your online marketing requires taking responsibility.

Who wants to leave a comment for a robot? Nobody. Yet Google advises that if you’re publishing AI content, you should disclose that fact to your readers. Imagine how unimpressed they’ll be knowing a tool simply spit out some facts – and if they know anything about AI, they probably won’t trust what it had to say.

Outsourcing Takes on a New Risk for Marketers Due to AI

If you think you’ll just steer clear of AI altogether and instead use the talents of freelance graphics designers, ghostwriters or even private label rights producers, you need to know that you can no longer trust people the way you once did.

The truth is, you’ve always had to be careful about outsourcing. You never knew for sure who would scrape content from other sites unethically, or steal other peoples’ work as their own.

You had to vet people for their ethics before working with them. Some would use content scrapers and spinners, others would use images that were copyrighted and they didn’t have the right to use.

The same holds true for freelancers and content creators with the use of AI tools. Ideally, if they used AI at all, it would be in the same vein as you would use them for idea generation and drilling down topics.

But many are going to try to charge you hundreds or even thousands of dollars to simply own an AI creation outright, without any genuine input from the freelance provider.

In fact, there are tools and courses being sold right now and sometimes being awarded deal of the day for showing people how to create listings for services and then in 30 seconds flat, churn out whatever the buyer was looking for using an AI tool.

Unless they are being upfront about this, it’s an unethical concern that you may want to watch out for. This is especially true if you’re using someone’s services based on their portfolio and profile.

Even if they’re fully capable of writing a full eBook, and you enjoy the talent and quality of their work, it doesn’t mean they won’t take a shortcut and use AI to do their work for them, allowing them to work fewer hours and earn more.

This is often a concern among freelance individuals. They only have so many hours in the day, so they can only earn as much as the market is willing to pay for their creations.

With AI, they’re not restricted by time, but you’ll be putting your business at risk. Imagine if you hired a Fiverr freelancer to develop an eCover for you for your first fiction novel that will be published on Amazon and elsewhere.

But after publishing and branding your book everywhere, you were given a notice (either by the platform or another author) that your cover is something that appears to be stolen from someone else.

If you told the graphic designer that you wanted a cover similar to another author’s style (or gave them several authors) so that they would know what kind of look you were going for, they might input that information into an AI tool and it would piece together pictures from the other authors, making you look like a copycat. Using AI in your online marketing means that you must be involved at every stage.

You want to get reassurance from the freelancer (or PLR provider) that they have not simply asked for an AI to deliver the output of the content you’ll be purchasing. Whether you’re buying a product or a service, it should be created from the mind of the seller, and no more than ideas and brainstorming used in the creation process.

If you’re hiring a graphic designer, ask for proof of licensing for the image or artwork they are using. If Amazon has any problems with your cover, you want that proof to support your right to use the images in your own cover. Using AI in your online marketing requires taking responsibility.

Allowable AI Content Might Be Banned in the Future

Even though AI has technically been around for awhile, it has just recently become the most talked-about technology among online entrepreneurs. One of the first entities to begin banning AI generated content is of course, schools and college institutions.

There are now tools that they can run content through to detect whether or not an AI has created it. This is true even if it passes Copyscape, which is a tool used to detect outright theft of content verbatim.

Of course colleges and educational institutions want students to learn the information they’re being taught and not rely on a machine to churn out essays and a thesis on any given topic.

Search engines have also been trained to detect whether or not content that they are indexing online has been created by a human or by an AI robot. Many of them claim to have a 100% detection rate.

Google has flip-flopped on whether or not they will accept or punish AI web pages. Initially, they stated that AI content was no better than spam, and that it would be treated as such.

However, they began creating their own AI technology called BARD, they had to seem to embrace it to some degree, otherwise that would be hypocritical. They’ve said they won’t punish AI content, but will evaluate the quality of it like anything else.

Unfortunately for many marketers, that means AI will have limited use for them, outside of brainstorming and idea generation. Because Google’s guidelines about helpful content update, the chances of AI-only content being competitive is low.

Therefore, using it as is will defeat the purpose of using these tools for a shortcut to your success. Instead of ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), AI content (which is often sterile and surface-level) will not have the special qualities they look for to rank high.

As for Amazon and other platforms, as they’ve done in the past with other scraped or mass generated content, they will likely put bans on AI-generated content in the future, even though it hasn’t happened yet.

Using AI for Keyword Research as a Marketer

Now that we’ve covered some of the many dangers of using AI in your business the wrong way, let’s look at a few ways you can use it correctly. It can be a great tool for keyword research and to generate ideas from those words and phrases. Remember that using AI in your online marketing requires taking responsibility.

For example, you might have an idea as a niche blogger about what topic you want to write about that day, but you don’t have any specific slants. You can type in the keyword phrase and ask the AI tool to come up with 10 slants for articles.

You can then ask it to tweak those ideas, or to merge a couple of them into one unique slant. For example, if you are in the health niche, you might ask it to give you 10 ideas for the keyword phrase blood pressure.

The ideas it generates from that keyword phrase would be things like:

* Understanding the causes, symptoms, and treatment options for those with high blood pressure
* How stress can affect your blood pressure
* The benefits of exercising to lower your blood pressure
* The dangers of allowing your blood pressure to stay high
* How insomnia can contribute to high blood pressure
* Natural remedies to help you lower your blood pressure
* How to check your blood pressure correctly and consistently

This gives you a variety of topics to discuss. If you wanted to do one article on one of the above topics, you could do that. Or, you could take all of the above slants and turn it into a lead magnet report or info product.

If you needed to gather a list of related keyword phrases, you could simply ask the tool to give you a certain number of additional keyword phrases related to the phrase blood pressure.

It would give you the following answers:

* Hypertension
* High blood pressure
* Low blood pressure
* Blood pressure monitor
* Blood pressure medication
* Blood pressure chart
* Blood pressure diet
* Blood pressure symptoms
* Blood pressure monitor watch
* Blood pressure readings

You could then ask the tool to take each of those related keyword phrases and outline unique points to discuss about each one. So for example, it might tell you the following:

Hypertension

* Definition of hypertension and how it differs from normal blood pressure
* The causes of hypertension, including lifestyle factors and genetic factors
* Treatment options for hypertension, including lifestyle changes and medication

Blood pressure monitor

* The different types of blood pressure monitors available, including manual and digital monitors
* The benefits of monitoring blood pressure at home, including increased accuracy and convenience
* Tips for using a blood pressure monitor effectively and accurately

The examples above were created by an AI tool to showcase the possibilities that an AI tool could provide to you. We specifically asked for three discussion points, but you could ask for 10 or even more, depending on how thoroughly you wanted to expand upon each topic.

Instead of asking the tool to write your content, use it as a way to simply make sure you have covered all of your bases and are discussing everything your readers may want to know about the topic.

Get AI to Punch Up Your Sales Copy for You

Many marketers are discussing the benefits of using AI to write sales copy. This is one form of content creation that many marketers struggle with because it sometimes sounds so spammy.

Even if you believe in your product 100%, you may have a tough time coming up with headlines, bulletpoints, and a strong call to action that convinces your visitor to purchase your product.

You can start with content that you have created that you feel pretty good about in terms of your sales letter. Don’t allow the AI tool to write it from scratch for you. Instead, speed at the information that you have created and allow it to help you take it to the next level.

So a good example might be if you typed into an AI tool these instructions: Improve my headline for a sales letter that says “Learn How to Lower Your Blood Pressure with Natural Remedies” and give me four examples.

The AI tool will deliver the following (better) headlines – and these are taken from a real AI tool:

* “Discover the Power of Nature: Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally with These Effective Remedies”
* “Revitalize Your Health: Discover Natural Remedies to Reduce High Blood Pressure and Enhance Your Wellness”
* “Unleash the Healing Properties of Nature: Say Goodbye to High Blood Pressure with These Simple Natural Remedies”
* “Transform Your Health Naturally: Unlock the Secrets to Lowering Your Blood Pressure with Safe and Effective Remedies”

The AI tool has been fed sales letter wording previously so it knows how to hype it up for you in wording better than “learn how to.” Words like unleash, transform, discover, and revitalize have a stronger impact.

You can then work from that point and mix and match or rewrite it, even learning from the AI tool how to create sales copy better on your own from scratch. You can even ask it to take one of the headlines and tailor it for a specific demographic, such as these instructions: “Tailor the headline for diabetics” and it will respond:

“Say Goodbye to High Blood Pressure the Natural Way: Discover the Best Remedies for Diabetics to Lower Blood Pressure and Boost Health.”

You can ask the AI tool to: “Give me 5 bulletpoints for my sales letter about the learning how to lower your blood pressure.” It would tell you this answer – and pay attention to the fourth one:

* Discover safe, natural remedies for reducing high blood pressure without relying on prescription medication or harsh chemicals
* Learn how to incorporate healthy lifestyle habits into your routine, such as regular exercise and a nutritious diet, to naturally lower blood pressure and improve overall health
* Uncover the hidden causes of high blood pressure, including stress, poor sleep habits, and unhealthy habits, and learn how to address them for long-term health benefits
* Access expert guidance and support from a team of experienced health professionals and fellow health enthusiasts who understand the challenges of managing high blood pressure
* Gain the confidence and knowledge you need to take control of your health and achieve lasting results, with proven techniques and strategies that work for individuals of all ages and backgrounds

The fourth item is something the AI tool “hallucinated.” It made up that benefit, without knowing if your product consisted of expert guidance and support from a team. You have to check to make sure the tool is generating real things your readers will be learning and not just pulling things from thin air.

AI Can Brainstorm for You as an Affiliate Marketer

As an affiliate marketer, AI tools are fantastic for generating ideas and even organizing your information. It can help you pinpoint strategic products to promote as well. Let’s continue using the blood pressure niche as our example.

You can combine the request for slants and get the AI tool to help you with the concept of what you can promote with that slant, for example, if you type into an AI tool this request: “Give me 3 slants for an affiliate blog about blood pressure where my goal is to promote a list of products,” it will deliver the following suggestions:

1. “Revitalize Your Health: The Best Products for Lowering Your Blood Pressure Naturally”: In this blog post, you could promote a list of natural supplements, vitamins, and other products that can help individuals lower their blood pressure without relying on prescription medication. You could highlight the benefits of these products, their ingredients, and how they work to improve health and wellness.
2. “Improve Your Cardiovascular Health: The Top Products for Controlling High Blood Pressure”: In this blog post, you could promote a list of products that are specifically designed to improve cardiovascular health and reduce the risk of high blood pressure. You could highlight the different types of products available, such as blood pressure monitors, heart-healthy supplements, and exercise equipment, and discuss their benefits and how they can be incorporated into a healthy lifestyle.
3. “Manage Your Blood Pressure Like a Pro: The Best Products for Measuring and Controlling Your Blood Pressure”: In this blog post, you could promote a list of products that are designed to help individuals measure and control their blood pressure effectively. You could highlight different types of products such as blood pressure monitors, wearable technology, and other tools that can help individuals stay on top of their blood pressure levels and improve their overall health.

As you can see, not only does it give you a title for your post, but it instructs you on what types of things you can promote and how you can best present that information to your readers.

Instead of using this information to simply instruct the AI tool to do the work for you, you can take the suggestions and create your own, unique content that Google and your readers will appreciate. Using AI in your online marketing provides an added level of creativity.

You can go further in having the AI tool help you come up with more helpful ideas for you. For example, if you wanted to use the first option in the list above for an affiliate product review post on natural remedies, you might ask the AI tool: “What are some reasons why people would want to lower their blood pressure naturally rather than use prescription medicines?”

It would tell you the following, and we’ve cut off the lengthy explanation it gives for each idea:

* Avoiding potential side effects.
* Reducing healthcare costs and the cost of prescriptions.
* Enhancing overall health and wellness.
* Having more control over their treatment.
* Avoiding potential interactions with other medications.

Notice in the first article idea, it mentions ingredients. You can take that one aspect and have the AI tool expand on ideas for you by asking it: “What natural ingredients should people look for in supplements to help lower their blood pressure?”

This is where fact-checking comes in handy. It’s going to tell you Omega-3 fatty acids, Magnesium, CoQ10, Garlic, Hawthorn, and Potassium. Those may very well be accurate, but remember – AI will make things up and get things wrong, so you don’t want to be doling out misinformation.

As an affiliate, you can even ask the AI tool to list 10 different types of cardio equipment to help people lower their blood pressure. It will tell you things like treadmills, stationary bikes, ellipticals, rowing machines, etc.

You can take that list and create a blog post about it. Or, you can take their ideas and drill down – creating a separate blog post reviewing the 10 Best Elliptical Machines to Help Lower Your Blood Pressure.

Ask AI what shoppers need to consider when buying an elliptical machine for the purpose of lowering their blood pressure. It’s going to tell you resistance levels, stride length, comfort features, heart rate monitoring, size and space and more.

You can even give the AI tool after it gives you the list this instruction: “Based on those factors listed above, rank them in order of importance for lowering blood pressure,” and it will! It may not be accurate, but it can be helpful.

Take the ideas, analyze them for accuracy, and create your content from scratch. You’ll be leveraging your AI tool for quick idea generation and brainstorming, but not subjecting your readers to stale, robotic content.

You Can Use AI for Social Media Messages

You can use AI tools to help you generate clusters of keywords that you can turn into hashtags for use on your social media content. You can also get your AI tool to make your message more succinct.

For example, if you have an article of 500 words, you can feed it into the AI tool and ask it to summarize your content in two sentences. This is a great way to quickly and easily share a snippet of text with a link back to your full blog post.

You can even ask it to come up with a call to action that gets people to click on your link. With some tools, you may want to trust it to proofread your content for you. However, not all AI tools are created equally and some will miss errors.

If you are watching your analytic data on social media, and you notice a pattern of certain topics that are performing well for you, you can have the tool drill down and give you additional content ideas.

It can also assist you in developing split testing content ideas such as using two different headlines, two different calls to action, etc. Again, social media is predominantly led by human influencers, so if you allow AI to fully represent you without any personal touch, you will be shunned in favor of those who deliver their content with a unique personality.

Careful Use of AI for Graphics, Video and Audio Production

AI tools are pretty blunt when it comes to tattling on themselves. You can ask it what would go wrong in having it create your multimedia content, and it will tell you precisely where it lacks when compared to human generated content.

One of the biggest problems is that it’s not as original or creative as content that is born from the mind of an individual. It is only going off of information and content that it already has access to.

There are many instances when AI generated multimedia content has caused problems in regards to infringing on copyrighted content. The content it creates can be too similar to works that are already on the market.

There has been a big backlash against the use of AI for creative content. For example, when an AI tool won an art contest, the competing artists were outraged and sought to ban future robotic participants.

Creative people in many different areas worry that the use of AI in artistic and creative endeavors will standardize the content into the same general style and sound or look. Because it can’t create from scratch, it will end up being a hodge podge of leftovers from human minds.

Like many tools and strategies, there is good and bad that can come from its use. This is definitely not something you want to use to scam people or shortcut your way to success.

I’m bestselling Wall Street Journal and USA Today author and marketing strategist Connie Ragen Green, seeking the truth about AI in marketing, and sharing everything I learn with you! Check out the training on this topic by the only people I trust to teach and share the latest research and facts, along with ongoing training, updates, and a community of like-minded marketers, authors, coaches, and more.