- Not Another AI Newsletter
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- Not Another AI Newsletter
🙋🏻‍♀️ FWIW
FWIW: How I got into AI + why I’m writing this newsletter
It was June 2022 and, reader, I was in a serious funk.
I’d recently lost my Dad and Grandma, El*n M*sk was slowly hijacking what was supposed to be my dream job at Twitter, and my wife and I had just come off our third unsuccessful round of IUI (we tried the natural way, but my sperm count is shockingly low).
Like I said — serious funk. The grayest of days.
To distract myself from the grayness, I did what any self-respecting millennial workaholic would do: I started a blog.
I’d been testing AI tools for a while and was a huge fan of the Animalz’ team’s writings on how they could help content marketers do their jobs better. I whole-heartedly agreed that AI content was the future of content marketing and that it could actually be here to help, not harm, content writers.
So, I decided to start Punchup AI, a site dedicated to helping marketers learn how to ~punch up~ their marketing with AI content.
After a week or so of working on Punchup, I noticed something: I felt…better. I felt excited. I was having so much fun learning about this stuff and my brain was buzzing with possibilities.
In what felt like the longest stretch of gray days, I could finally see a little color again. I paid attention to this feeling and kept going.
I tested tool after tool after tool for Punchup, but one tool continued to stand out: a little robot head named Jasper. One day, I got curious and looked at Jasper’s Careers page. “Search Engine Marketing Specialist''. I told myself to keep my head down at Twitter and work on Punchup for fun. After all, who would choose to leave a brand like Twitter for a brand new startup in a brand new industry?
I looked at that job listing every day for two weeks. Every time, I told myself it wouldn’t be smart to apply. Then, one day, I decided I was tired of being “smart”. I wanted to follow the thing that was making my days colorful again.
I’ve been at Jasper for about seven months now, and I am so glad I made the stupid decision to leave a well-established brand and take a chance on AI.
Since I started at Jasper last September, AI has…exploded. The launch of ChatGPT in December took AI mainstream in a way none of us were expecting.
All of a sudden, something that was only being talked about in small circles on Twitter was everywhere. So-called ChatGPT and AI experts were coming out of the woodworks, claiming all sorts of things about AI and the future of marketing.
That brings me to this, why I wanted to create this newsletter.
I wanted to create this newsletter for the same reason I wanted to create Punchup AI nearly a year ago: I believe AI content is the future of marketing. I believe that AI content is here to help, not harm, content writers. And I believe this with my whole heart.
I wanted to create this newsletter to cut through all the noise of threadbois and alleged AI experts, and bring you truth and perspective from the people actually working in this space.
I wanted to create this newsletter to help you feel empowered to step into this moment that will change your career forever. Because, dear writer/marketer/creator, this moment does belong to you.
This moment in AI, it belongs to you. Not to the people who want to crank out a bunch of junk content, or the people who claim to be experts about a tool they learned about yesterday. To you. The person who’s gonna learn how to wield this tool in a way that’s actually powerful and helpful and good.
To the I-just-wanna-make-cool-shit people, this moment belongs to you.
To the people who want to spend more time on storytelling and less time on “Top 10 whatever” listicles, this moment belongs to you.
To the content strategists, piecing together endless puzzles made of words and H2s and CTAs, this moment belongs to you.
From my perspective, in my experience, AI tools aren’t here to help hinder your work or your creativity. They’re here for you, to help free you from The Bullshit that is grunt work. To help free you from the stuff you have to do, so you can do the stuff you want to do.
My hope is that I can shed a little light on how the people building AI products think about AI, how they actually want you to use AI, and how they hope AI can free you from The Bullshit, from the grayness of your days, in the same way that it freed me from mine.
Next month’s topic: How I believe AI will change SEO and content marketing
Here’s a preview of that chat 👇
🤖 How I’m actually using AI this month
1. Recovering backlinks from an old domain
This month, Jasper has been helping me recover backlinks that point to our old Jarvis.ai domain.
How’s it helping me do this? Writing and scaling my outreach emails.
I exported my list of backlinks from ahrefs, prioritized them by DR of >30, and I can quickly write outreach emails to the site owners/content managers using the Jasper Chrome extension inside of Gmail. 🎉
2. Programmatic content
In January, I started a new project to create SEO-focused landing pages at scale using Jasper Chat and automation tools like Airtable and Zapier.
Programmatic pages are the perfect use case for AI and automation because they’re typically very formulaic and don’t heavily rely on editorial content (no writer I’ve ever met longs to write copy for programmatic SEO).
Here’s an example of a programmatic project I worked on at Outdoorsy where we scraped public data and created a page with information for pretty much every type of park you can think of.
Even just a few years ago, a project like this was SO much bigger and relied heavily on help from dev & engineering to build page templates, scrape data to use on the pages, and port the CSV files into your CMS.
Now, with AI and no-code automation tools, I can pretty much do this myself in a weekend as long as I have a page template ready to go. And with Jasper, I can even add in a little more editorial-style content to beef up the pages if I want.
The process looks a little something like this:
In your CMS, create a page template with a format that each page you create will follow.
Create an Airtable spreadsheet with columns that map to each section of your CMS page template. Then, go nuts and have Jasper Chat create the copy for each of those columns.
Once your Airtable sheet is ready. Create a Zapier zap to send all new Airtable rows to your CMS. Each row in your sheet will create a new page draft 🤯
Go through the drafts and edit the content for quality and accuracy.
Publish! 🎉
This is probably one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on, and it’s an example of how AI can give content marketers and SEOs super powers.
Add the new Jasper API to Airtable to automate the page copy even more and, forget about it, content automation is now part of my SEO strategy forever.
PS. I plan to write a lot more about Jasper’s content automation project in a future newsletter where I’ll dive deeper into our process, the results we’ve seen so far, and how we plan to keep using it. Stay tuned!
Non-Jasper tool I’m loving:
I recently came across a tool from the team at Fillout called Graphmaker.ai. GraphMaker can take a CSV or spreadsheet of your data and make it interactive 🤯
To test it out, I dropped in a traffic audit spreadsheet and asked it to create a pie chart showing the distribution of blog traffic by year created. And it did it!
What a time, folks, what a time.
Disclaimer: GraphMaker encrypts all your data and they don’t store it. Still, I wouldn’t drop in any super sensitive company data, ya know, just in case.
🤝 I get b(AI) with a little help from my friends
For this addition of I get b(AI) — (Editor’s note: I may be reaching with that pun, but I like it, so it’s staying) — I decided to interview my Jasper colleague and platonic soulmate, Samyutha Reddy.
Samyutha is our Head of Enterprise Marketing and one of the most influential women in this space.
She has an incredible way of making all the complex, jargon-y information around AI and LLMs fun, conversational, and easy to understand, so definitely chat with her if you ever get the chance!
Tell us who you are and what do you do in the AI industry
My name is Samyutha Reddy! I lead Jasper’s Enterprise Marketing Team — we work to ensure businesses can use generative AI to create content and unlock creativity.
So that's my day job. I moonlight as an AI newbie who stumbled into this industry about a year ago (AI years = dog years?) who's trying to stay on top of the demands of my career and personal life while enjoying a front row seat in one of the most exciting period of technology I've been privileged enough to be apart of.
What’s your favorite way to use AI at work?
My favorite way to use AI at work are functions like:
"summarize"
"re-format"
"take existing copy and optimize for X, Y, Z, channel"
"create a slide deck"
All those tasks are traditionally outsourced to whomever is lowest on the totem pole, but can now be done within minutes, allowing me full creative control over outputs and time back in my day to focus on what I’m naturally best at.
As I've gotten further in my career, I've learned that success is less about being good at everything, and more about spending most of my time within my natural skillsets or areas I have a true interest in.
For me, I identify those skillsets through taking an audit of things I can do significantly better than most people, while using less energy than most people. Then it's just a matter of getting ruthless in honing those skills and ensuring that the bulk of my time is spent within them.
To me, energizing work is gathering a group of cross-functional teammates, putting together a strategy to achieve an objective, and project-managing it to completion. It hits my core skills around people management, storytelling, facilitating group discussions, and organizing disparate messages into a cohesive narrative.
Honing in on what work is energizing to me and delegating to AI what's draining to me, means I feel more fulfilled at work. It means I learn more everyday, I'm a better manager to my team, and most importantly, I'm not faced with Sunday Scaries every week.
I'm sure a large chunk of that has to do with having an incredible manager and teammates, but this one exercise has made me significantly happier and more productive in the last year.
I do this audit anytime I feel overwhelming feelings come on, and it shows me how to delegate and get myself out of the weeds and back into my sweet spot.
It would be tough for me to manage a best-in-class B2B marketing team while also performing as an IC in those areas that don’t fit my skillset — I need that generative AI partner on my team.
What’s your least favorite myth about AI? Why do you think it’s a myth?
My least favorite myth is the existence of “generative AI experts” or the claim that generative AI is “too saturated” and you’ve missed the train on it, be it from an employment, investment, or general interest perspective.
I remember hearing the same messages around Web3 and feeling so intimidated and discouraged from attempting to learn more.
It’s the same rhetoric that keeps revolutionary new technology with the possibility of massive wealth creation sequestered within a small group of people in-the-know…people who all too often look the same, as well.
Generative AI’s journey to becoming mainstream these past few months has brought so much awareness and discussion. I hope that while we reap the benefits of becoming a household name, our industry can stay accountable to how nascent we are in our journey and how much we’d benefit from keeping the gate wide open to new perspectives and possibilities.
Like most things, words matter, and for anyone reading this, you’ve definitely not missed the train.
What’s your favorite AI tool (besides Jasper)?
As I get older, I reach for more opportunities and experiences that make me feel like a child again. Tools like Runway ML do just that — seeing a video come to life from text make my eyes light up and my head brim with possibilities. It’s empowering to feel like I can flex my creativity without the technical chops reserved for “true creatives”.
It is even more empowering to be a marketer and to feel like I could one day create an award winning commercial without a multi million dollar budget. I could work within the resource constraints of this startup world I love so much but experiment with the avant-garde style marketing tactics that made me want to be a marketer in the first place.
A good example is this recent Jacquemus campaign that stole headlines. I don’t know the details behind the tools used to create it but these videos were all digitally rendered.
None of these activations were actually produced. These types of idea simply couldn’t exist with current economic conditions without technology to power them. I am so excited to be part of it.
See you next month,
Krista đź‘‹