The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

158. 3 Ways I Actually Use AI (That You Probably Haven’t Tried)

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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If you're only using AI to crank out social media captions or email copy, you're leaving a ton of its power on the table. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on three creative ways to use AI in your business, none of which involve sounding like a robot or churning out cookie-cutter content. These are time-saving strategies that keep your voice and help you stand out in a sea of sameness.

I’ll walk you through how I use AI to turn messy voice memo brain dumps into organized, unique content plans, including the exact process I used to create this very episode! Plus, I’m sharing how my team builds streamlined SOPs using nothing more than a Loom video and an AI-generated checklist, and how I’m using AI to analyze customer feedback and uncover hidden gems that drive my content, product updates, and marketing. Spoiler alert: It’s like hiring a really smart assistant who never sleeps.

And because business and life aren’t separate, I wrap things up with a few fun personal uses too, like diagnosing my sad-looking plants, generating hotel gym workouts, and even planning family travel. Whether you're brand new to AI or already dabbling, this episode will give you a fresh perspective and inspire you to try some truly creative ways to use AI in your business.

02:15 - AI for content organization (do this if you want to stand out!)

05:18 - How to easily create SOPs with AI

07:50 - Using AI to analyze customer feedback

10:11 - Fun ways I’m using AI in my personal life

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode158 

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Check out my Everything Page at https://kristendoyle.co/everything

Kristen:

If you are only using AI to write your emails or your social media captions, or maybe you've been avoiding using AI at all because when you tried, it didn't sound like you, I hate to tell you, but you're doing it wrong. That's okay, though, because today I am going to share with you some ways to use AI that you might not have thought of. Last week in episode 157, we covered AI mistakes that could cost you money and hurt your business. But today I'm going to flip the script a little bit and share some ways I am using AI in my business that maybe you haven't thought of before, including the exact way that I planned out these two AI related episodes. They'll save you time, but they are also ways to use AI that keep your content uniquely yours, when everyone else who just uses AI to write captions or to write blog posts starts to sound like chat GPT. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy, or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no-fluff tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process—things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations, and so much more. Let's get started, y'all. So quick reality check. Most of you are probably already using AI for some of the more obvious stuff. You're writing social media captions, drafting blog posts, maybe you're coming up with emails or subject lines, maybe even playing with it for creating some images, although I am not getting much useful out of that for the business. There are some fun little things that I've done. If you're doing those things, great if it's working for you, keep it up. But let's talk about some stuff you probably have not thought about. The first way that I am regularly using AI right now is to turn all of the thoughts and ideas that are rolling around in my head into organized content. This is actually how I planned this episode and the last one. I was driving home from dropping my kid off, just talking into the voice memos in my phone about everything that I wanted to cover when it came to AI. I thought it was going to be one episode, but it turns out that brain dump was really long, so I split it into two. Then I have an automation setup that takes that voice memo in my phone, transcribes it and sends it over to Claude, which is what I like to use for content planning. Claude organizes all of it and then drops that organized outline right into my Notion database, which is where I plan out all of my content. When I did this, I actually ended up putting so much information into that brain dump that what I realized is I had created about a 40 minute long episode, so I ended up also using Claude to help me split it into the two parts that you're actually hearing in last week's episode, and then this one. So here's why that approach is so much better than if I had just opened up Claude and said, Hey, I want to write a podcast episode about using AI. See, one of the biggest problems that I see with how people are using AI is that they're letting it think for them. And when you let AI think for you, everyone ends up with the same ideas, the same angle, the same approach, the same everything, because you're all getting the same content from the same AI brain. So what I do that's different is I put my thoughts, I use this brain dump approach to keep my unique thoughts, my perspectives, and then I am using the AI tool just to organize my ideas, not to create them. This is how you make sure that you're standing out in your niche, instead of being just one more voice saying all the same things everyone else is saying. Now I just shared how I did it for this podcast episode, but you can do this for blog posts, product ideas, course, content, emails, whatever it is that you want to create. Just dump all your thoughts into a voice memo. Or if you're not a talk it out kind of person like I am, you can type them up, let AI organize it into something logical, instead of, you know, the random order that your thoughts usually come out in. And then you can use that to create your content that sounds like you that has your unique perspective that sets you up to be a leader in your niche, instead of another follower who sounds like all the AI content. We're actually going to be building out this exact automation in The Savvy Seller Collective this month, so if that is something that you're interested in, check it out at kristendoyle.co/collective. Alright, the second thing that we are doing on my team, actually, we're kind of all doing this, is using AI to create our SOPs, our standard operating procedures. If you've ever tried to document a process for a VA or team member, you know how tedious it can get. You sit there trying to remember every single click, every detail, make sure you take the right screenshots, and somehow you probably always forget something important, and your VA tries to follow your instructions, and they get stuck and have to ask you more questions because you assumed they would know how to do something you forgot. So here is what we do now on my team. Whoever is creating the SOP records a loom video, walking through the process. Typically, that's something I do, so walk through the process exactly like I do it. And then you can take the transcript from that video, paste it into your favorite AI tool and ask it to turn this into a step by step SOP with a checklist of steps to follow and tips, include any links that we need. And what AI will do is it will take your kind of rambling explanation and turn it into clean, numbered steps for somebody to follow. If you get that output and you feel like you need to, you can also ask it to simplify the language or flag anything that seems unclear. That way, you almost have a little AI assistant watching your process and writing it up correctly for you. So one tip to keep in mind, if you're going to try this is, when you are recording, keep the SOP in mind. Don't skip steps or assume context that might not be in that transcript. Talk through everything you're doing, even obvious stuff like now I'm clicking save. Those kinds of things that would be seen on screen but won't be visible, so to speak, in the transcript, because that's going to make your final SOP so much better. And then what we do for the final SOP is we have those listed out steps, but we also link to the loom video, so that way, if someone gets stuck or isn't sure they're clicking in the right place, they can pull the video up to find what they need. But they don't have to watch the video every time, because let's be real, sometimes we've done an SOP a few times, we have the general idea, but we're afraid we might miss a step, or we have that one spot that's a little sticky that we always forget about. So that way, you have the listed out SOP, but you also have the video available when it's needed. Alright, the third thing that I am using SOPs for is to figure out what my customers actually want, and I'm doing this in both of my businesses. This one's huge if you are like me, one of those people who gets feedback, forgets to do anything with it. You know how it is, you start getting product reviews or survey responses or emails from customers, and you know there's probably gold in there somewhere. But who has time to really analyze 200 responses looking for the right patterns? Now I will say I do like to read or at least skim the responses, because I'm looking for specific phrases that people say, and I like to look at them myself. But when I have a big chunk of feedback, or maybe it's ratings or reviews on my product listings, and I know I can't go through all of them, you can copy them all, paste them into AI and ask questions like, what are the common things that are coming up here? What do people seem most excited about? What struggles or questions keep coming up over and over? What new products could I create based on this feedback, or what could I add to this existing product to make it better? See, AI will look through all that data in a matter of minutes, and they can spot patterns that you might miss or save you hours of kind of reading through it and trying to find those patterns yourself. It might notice that, you know, 15 people said they wanted additional activities for this, or they needed more information about that part of your lesson, or people keep asking about a certain topic that you haven't covered yet. I have used this for everything from figuring out what topics to cover in my membership to updating products and adding additional features to them, figuring out what's causing confusion that people need addressed, coming up with podcast episode topics. I can use that information across so many parts of my business. So as you are looking at the data, don't just think about that one product or that one offer. Think about how you can use that information across your entire business. It's like having an assistant who can read all your feedback and then send you that summary of what's important, so that you can use that to take some action. So those are three ways that I am using AI in my business, but I wanted to share a handful of kind of just fun, personal things that I'm doing, because why not, right? So first of all, I have gotten a little more into plants. The algorithms are telling me that this has to do with my age and that I've been sorted into the plant house. If any of you have seen those posts, you know what I'm talking about. But one thing that I have been doing as a fairly new plant mom, is sometimes when my plants aren't looking so great, or I'm not really sure if those peppers are ready to pick or not, I will take a picture of the plant and ask chat GPT, what is wrong here? What do I need to do? And you know, I know I have said, I said in the last episode, don't blindly trust AI. But as far as plant advice, it really has not steered me wrong when it says, Oh, your problem is you need more fertilizer. One of my issues, I had these silver specks on a plant, and I couldn't figure out what they were. And it turns out that had to do with the plant getting water and then a ton of hot sunlight. It was a super hot day. We had one of those flash little storms early in the morning, and so the leaves had gotten wet, and then they scalded in the hot sun, and that's what was happening. And so I would have had no idea. I would have thought my plant had a disease, probably. But I was able to figure out what was going on, and now I know kind of how to try to avoid that, at least in terms of when I'm watering, even if I can't avoid it when it rains. Another thing I have done is give AI a picture of gym equipment that's available to me, whether it's in a hotel or it's at home, and ask it for whatever type of workout I need to do. Super awesome, because you don't have to think about, you know, what activities can I do with this? What exercises can I do to hit the muscle groups that I want to with these things I have available to me? It will give you that workout for you. And I know you've probably heard you can take a picture of your fridge or your pantry and ask it what to cook tonight, which is so helpful for when you just really don't know what to do. The last one I'll share that's a personal use for AI is you can tell it about your family, how many kids, what ages, that kind of thing, and ask it for travel recommendations. I have done this in terms of like, where should we go? But I've also done it for when we've already got a trip planned and I'm looking for activities to do while we are in that area, and I've gotten some really cool recommendations for things I might not have found just googling. I actually used AI to help pick the location for my Savvy Seller Collective retreat that I'm hosting this fall. I gave it all of my requirements, and there were a lot. I needed it to be, you know, close to airports, easy to fly in and out. I needed the location to have houses available for rent with lots of bedrooms, so that we all could have a place to sleep. I needed, you know, certain types of activities available around things like that. And it suggested tons of places, including one of the ones I had already kind of been thinking about in the back of my mind, which made me feel really great about my choice. So don't forget about those fun kind of little things that you can do with AI in your personal life to save you time. I know that isn't directly related to your business, but hey, anytime we can save mental bandwidth and time in our personal life, we have that available to use in our business or for other things that are more important. Alright, so your action steps for this episode are just pick one of these ideas to try this week. And if you have not started capturing voice memos when you're on the go and then sending those transcripts to your favorite AI tool to organize and create content from them later on, give that a go. Make sure you're not doing any of those don't do things that I covered in last week's episode, but pick one of these new ones to try out this week. If you have some fun and creative ways that you are using AI in your own business or your personal life, I would love to hear about it. Send me a DM on instagram @kristendoyle.co and share your favorite ways to use AI. Maybe I'll share with my audience or even feature it in a future episode. And if this was helpful, take a second to screenshot this episode and share it in your stories. Your friends who also want to learn how to use AI better will thank you for the heads up, and they will appreciate getting these ideas shared with them as well. I'll talk to you soon.