Digital Marketing Victories E2S4 Joe Casabona Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories Podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the changemakers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs. And this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins, what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy.

I'm your host, Katherine Watier Ong, the owner of WO Strategies LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise sized science focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let's get into it and celebrate our victories. So today we're joined by Joe Casabona. Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before he realized his true passion, which is sharing his knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course creation to help creators, freelancers, and business owners.

So Joe's got this gift for breaking down concepts that scare people into bite sized, approachable pieces of information they can implement quickly, which I think is something everybody listening to the show will appreciate. Joe's career trajectory includes 20 years of experience building websites, 16 years using WordPress, 11 years of teaching at the college level and seven years of podcasting.

He's the author of four books, including the latest, which is HTML and CSS visual quickstart guide. And when he's not creating courses for LinkedIn learning, you're going to find him spending time with his family, enjoying baseball or talking too much about Star Wars. So this current episode is going to be perfect for you.

If you're curious about the following. How you can automate more of your life to spend more time face to face with your clients or colleagues or your family. And if you run a podcast, how you can improve your podcast workflow to get more time back into your life. And if you've ever read the book Effortless by Greg McKeown, you'll figure out how to implement some of his recommendations after you hear this podcast.

So Joe, welcome to the show.

[00:01:52] Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for having me. I am excited. Also, I have always been saying Greg McKeown’s last name incorrectly. I've always said Greg McEwen.

[00:02:02] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, I don't know if I've pronounced it correctly. So there you go. You've got two pronunciations of it.

[00:02:07] Joe Casabona: Your way’s definitely sounds like the right way.

[00:02:13] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, I'm a fan of your podcast and the content you've been kicking out. So I'm really excited to have you on the show. So why don't you just update our listeners about why it's really awesome to follow what you're doing. What, what about your background? Tell us a little bit more.

[00:02:26] Joe Casabona: Yeah. So you gave a great intro.
You know, I, I have to update the numbers. I think since the last time I wrote this, I've been, all the numbers have ticked up though. I guess ..

[00:02:36] Katherine Watier Ong: I was about to say, I think you're podcasting longer than that. How long have you been podcasting now?

[00:02:38] Joe Casabona: I've been podcasting since 2012, the end of 2012. So I guess we can say 2013, but it's been 10 years now.
Yeah . It's a lot of fun. I think this is my main mission in life these days, because I get this question a lot, like, Hey, Joe, how do you have three kids and also run three podcasts? And so my mission in life is to help busy solopreneurs, maybe parents save like 12 hours a week on their podcast.
Because I know you know, I, I know from personal experience and also. A very negative experience during the pandemic, the importance of being able to take things off of your plate.

[00:03:24] Katherine Watier Ong: People are always like, how do you manage to run a solo consultancy and homeschool and also run a podcast? Yeah.
Processes system, virtual assistants, hopefully some automation this year. Yes.

[00:03:38] Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, it was my wife's a nurse and so she was one of the few. Who didn't stay home during the pandemic and we had one, and then later in the pandemic, two small children. And so that fell on me to take care of them.

Most of the time, she was working longer hours and, and having to go to work and schools were closed. And one day it just really got to me. It was like the stress of raising two small children while not being able to take them anywhere. And then also the stress of me working, I don't know, 60 percent less.

In my own business where I was still like the breadwinner in the family. And I just had a panic attack. It was my first ever panic attack. And I remember my three year old like bringing me a bottle of water and telling me it's okay, it's going to be okay, daddy, you're okay. Yeah. And at that moment I was like, this is so sweet and so unfair.
Like she shouldn't be taking care of me. And I was like, after that, I was like, I've got to fix everything. So I started automating, I hired a VA. I started doing only the things that I had to do, but also at that point, only the things I had capacity to do, and that kept the wheels on the truck.

[00:04:57] Katherine Watier Ong: It's an art, a little bit of a science and an art. So you've talked a little bit about this marketing process automation. So what have you implemented to save yourself some time just for your own sake?

[00:05:07] Joe Casabona: Yeah. So I, I have my. Make. com account up here and I've got formerly Integromat for those who don't know it's like a Zapier competitor. And so I can kind of see like all the processes I automate.

Most of these are gonna be like data entry, right? And so, when someone fills out a form, On my website, it automatically goes into my CRM in Notion. When it comes to my podcast, which is most interesting, it's going to sound the most complicated. We take it step by step. When I book a guest, they fill out a form and then that form kicks off a series of events where they get emails, a Google doc automatically gets generated for show notes, it gets added to Notion and, and then my VA kind of gets a notification like, Hey, new new episode is published. After we record, I take the files, I put them in Dropbox and that kicks off a bunch of automations to email my editor. Hey, this is ready for editing. Email my VA. Hey, gather the show notes. And so after I recorded somebody, I actually don't see the episode again until it's published.

And that is due to. Incremental processes I've built, but also building a team I trust, right? Like, cause if I didn't trust my editor, I'd have to listen to every episode. But we've been working together for a long time and he knows my style. He understands my notes. And so I, I trust with a high level of confidence that what I asked him to do is, is what's done.

So it's, that has been such a game changer for me.

[00:06:56] Katherine Watier Ong: That's pure brilliance. I'm doing some of the stuff on the virtual assistant side, not as much automation as you're doing, but I would love to do more for sure. So how do you help people think through if, if they're crunched for time or maybe in our current instance, maybe they're not feeling so great half the time, and so they're also crunched.

How do you help people think through how they start adding automation to their workflow? And how early in the pandemic, I was crunched because of kids and solo and all the rest. And I don't know, I sort of naturally fell into, is this taking me more than 10 minutes? If so, it becomes a virtual assistant thing, or do I really have to do this?
Okay, I don't. Then it becomes a virtual assistant thing, but I got a VA early on. So for folks that haven't done that, are there any other tips you might have around how they figure out what doesn't need to be them? What could be automated? What could go to somebody else?

[00:07:50] Joe Casabona: Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing that you need to do is understand your processes, right?
And that means creating standard operating procedures or SOPs. This doesn't need to be like some official document. It could just be like a checklist, right? When I publish a new blog post, I write the post in Ulysses. I send it to Grammarly or ChatGPT to, to proofread. I publish that on WordPress. I create a graphic.

I hit publish, I hit schedule, I schedule the tweet to, or the post or whatever on social media, right? It could just be a checklist. And then from there you say, all right, well, in that process, what do I have to do? Well, I have to write the words. That's on me. I'm already using chat, GPT, or Grammarly to proofread.

Maybe if I'm writing something really important, I'm going to have a human. Read it or edit it, but I don't really need to do that. And then do I need to send it to WordPress? No, somebody else can do that. Somebody else can add the categories. Somebody else can create the graphics and somebody else can publish it.

And then somebody else can, or something else can publicize it. So in that six step process or whatever, I wasn't really counting. You only need to do one thing, which is write the words. Somebody else or something else can do everything else. And when you learn that, you think, okay, well, it only takes me like 10 minutes to create the graphic and schedule.

If you write three times a week, that's a half hour. You just saved yourself, right? It's two hours over a month that you magically got back. And so that's, I think that's the first step is figuring out what you do. From there, I have a little bit of a... I don't want to call it a framework. It's really things you can automate and then how to determine what to automate.

And I really should come up with a fun act. Like everybody loves acronyms. Right. But the four types of tasks that you can automate are common, easily repeatable. Right. So this is like creating a social media post. Every time I write a blog post or publish a podcast episode. Right. So those are the ones that most people are going to think about.
Right. Or, you know, when someone fills out a form for a lead, add them to my CRM. Common, easily repeatable, a robot can do that, right? But in lieu of a robot, a person can do that. That's not you. So that's commonly easily repeatable. And then next is an infrequent, high level of effort. This is the other side of the spectrum, right?

This is where you do it so infrequently that you have to remind yourself of how to do it every time. And if you automate that process or give it to somebody else, you're not taking the brain power, the brain cycles to remember, even if you have a checklist to go through those things. So something for me, I don't do a ton of contract client work anymore.

So when I do, it's like, Oh, okay. So I need to send them the contract and then we sign it. And then once they sign it. I have to send them an invoice. And then once the invoice is paid, I have to send them their client folder or whatever. Depending on the invoicing system, QuickBooks is a little bit blah with this.

Maybe it's better on Zapier than it is on Make. FreshBooks always had kind of really good automation. So what you could do is. Let's say you're using DocuSign or Dropbox Sign. When somebody signs this, right, send them an invoice at the same email address. When that, when that invoice is paid, right, this could all be in automation or your assistant can do it.

But in my mind, it's automation. Once the invoice is signed or paid, okay, now create a Dropbox folder. With their name, email it to them, then maybe you can, you personally can add the files. But like, that's an infrequent, high effort task for me that all I'd have to do at that point is send the contract and hopefully I have a contract template.
Right. Ideally. So that's an infrequent, high level of effort. The last two are specific timing required, or you can't forget it. Specific timing required. Someone buys a digital product for you. You want that delivered immediately, right? You don't want somebody to manually send that to you later. That's a very bad experience.

So that's the, that's a really clear example of like you buy an online course, you expect to have access to that online course immediately. And then can't forget the example I always use here is online bill pay, right? In 2021, we had our water shut off because. We had, you know, it was like our, I don't know, fifth water bill, we get it quarterly and our sewer bill is from the same company and usually for the same amount.

So I thought I paid the water bill and the follow up message or follow up letter that they send never got sent to us. And then the third way that they tell you, you got to pay is by putting a sticker on your door that is by their own admission. Can blow away sometimes I'm like this, the fact that, you know, this and don't do anything about it is awful.

[00:13:40] Katherine Watier Ong: They don't text you?

[00:13:41] Joe Casabona: No, exactly. Right. I get a text and a call and an email anytime they got to like shut off our water or flush the pipes. Not for that, right? Anyway, so after that, I set up automatic bill pay, right? So our water, my, my wife called. Got our water turned back on. My wife is not, I'm usually the aggressor with these things and she was furious.

So our water was turned on pretty quickly and then I turned on automatic bill pay so that we'll never forget. Right. Yeah.

[00:14:15] Katherine Watier Ong: So yeah, those, I think there's, those are very helpful. Now when do you decide whether or not it's automation versus a virtual assistant and when do you combine them? Yeah, that's a side note talking about a virtual assistant.

Once. What I've been doing because of limited time is I actually have a virtual assistant who I let him walk through the process of automating one thing. And now I'm handing off automation to him to actually set it up.

[00:14:42] Joe Casabona: Nice. That's, that's perfect.

[00:14:44] Katherine Watier Ong: It's a slow process. Cause I have to review his automation, whatever, but it's frankly faster than me.
I wouldn't have had time to set up any of it. So anyway, I love virtual assistants if you get a good one. So how would you think about when to add in the virtual assistant?

[00:14:59] Joe Casabona: Yeah. So I think right at the top of this salvo here, I will say the harsh truth. You don't need to do everything. In fact, somebody else will probably do it better than you.

If it is outside of your zone of genius, they will do it better than you. My VA, is, is better in my WordPress site now than I am. I'm like, where did I put that template? What is it? How, what category is this? Oh, I forgot to do that. Where she knows, right. She does it multiple times a week for me. So, and the same thing with, I have an assistant now that I'm working with, who's doing cold outreach and sales emails.

I know I'm bad at that. Like the fact that my business relied on that ever, I mean, it's like a miracle that I'm still in business, to be honest with you, so you don't have to do everything. In fact, other people and robots will probably do it better than you. So here's what I here are the four questions to ask yourself to determine if you should move it off of your plate and if a person or a robot needs to do it, number one, I already said this, make a list of everything you do.
Right? I did this in 2020 over a couple of days, right? Or maybe a week. I just, if I did something, I wrote it down. Then ask, do I personally need to do this? The answer to that question is yes, if it is something In your expertise, or it is literally something that is a process that you invented. Those are pretty much the two things you need to do yourself, right?

For my podcast, the only thing I need to do is show up and talk. I still do this, the outline, like the three act story. Somebody else could theoretically do that for me, but it's a nice way to warm up the guest and talk through what we're going to talk through. Right. So that's part of my process. I don't need to do anything else.

Right. And, and I don't really, so do I personally need to do this? Is it in your zone of genius? I guess the other question is like, do you like doing it? But I don't know. I like doing my accounting 'cause I'm weird. I don't do my accounting though. My accountant does my accounting 'cause she does it better than me. Do I per, do I personally need to do this number? The third question here, what's everything that I do, do I personally need to do? Each of these items. Number three is, does a person need to do this? The answer to that question is yes, if it's not a very clear input and a very clear output, right? So does a person need to post on social media when my blog post is published?
No, because there are services that do that. They will watch your blog. They'll get the URL and the title. And they will post very clear input URLs and titles, very clear output posts on social media, and a new blog post title URL, right? If the input and output are super clear, a person probably doesn't need to do it, right?

There's like one more step and that's number four. Can an automation tool do this? So for me, because I use QuickBooks with that nice automation that I talked about where the contract is signed and then the invoice is sent and then the Dropbox folder is sent, that works super well for me. When I was in the thick of doing client work and I used FreshBooks when I rage quit FreshBooks and moved to QuickBooks I, I couldn't do that anymore.

Cause QuickBooks API is not as good as FreshBooks API, but I'm also not doing as much client work anymore, right? If it was a huge pain point for me I'd consider probably not going back to FreshBooks, but using a different, using a tool that worked better for me. Right. So that's number four, can an automation tool actually do this?
And so automation tools can usually do it if the input tool, the input thing has what's called a trigger and the output thing has an action. So when the input thing does something, that's the trigger, the action is what the output thing should do.

[00:19:31] Katherine Watier Ong: And then otherwise it's a virtual assistant.

[00:19:32] Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly. If a person has to do it, right? If an automation tool can't do it, then it's, then it's a virtual assistant. And like there's, varying degrees of virtual assistants, right? My assistant, Anna she's in the Philippines. She has a very clear set of instructions for everything that she needs to do.
I am very, I'm very, actually today, as of today, I'm paying her like a living wage for the Philippines, which is nice because she is super crucial to my business. I'm like, please never leave me. But you know, she is, English is her second language and she has a very specific skill set, right?
Whereas my assistant, Jordan who is doing the sales emails, I'm paying her more, I really am paying her for fewer hours. And she has a lot more autonomy. I tell her, I need this, and then she does it, and then when she needs clarification. Or a specific answer to a question. That's when she messages me.
So varying degrees of assistance there. So that's another thing that you'd want to consider.

[00:20:44] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, I have one VA, which is similar where I don't go anywhere. I mean, you let me run my business and then I, I added in an additional VA. And then that, that second VA has always been doing different things for me as I got smarter about.
What a VA can execute on well and what they can't. The other thing I'd throw in there is that I used to have my VA who writes a lot of my social posts or English is really good, even though she's offshore. I used to have her do a lot of the podcast promotion, and then I played around with Capsho, which I've now moved off of, but Capsho’s, AI generated content.

Was frankly better, it was a better 1st draft and it was cheaper because you pay a monthly fee versus however many hours the VA is spending on it. So sometimes depending, obviously, we know that AI can crank out stuff that's not as accurate as you might want, or maybe boring but there's some interesting things, especially with the GPTs that got launched just this week, where you can train even before the GPTs, you can train AI chat on your voice and your language and then use it to create content.

And I've had some decent success doing that and heard some really great things about people that have created a GPT in their own persona. Feed all the info about their bio, all their, their content to a custom GPT, and then use that GPT to generate content. So just as a side note but either way, maybe you don't need to do it, right?

Maybe it's AI or some combination of AI plus software plus automation. So what do you think? Let me go back a second. So you have clients that you help with automation or you've, you have been doing some of that work. How do you convince them to change their processes? How do you convince them to fall in love with automation?

[00:22:25] Joe Casabona: Yeah, really good question. Right. And it's usually that they need to experience the pain first. Which is tough, right? Cause I'd love to just go to a first time podcaster and be like, Hey, you should do all this stuff. And they'd be like, oh, I don't really need to spend the money to do that.

Right. I think a perfect analogy to this is when I was in web development, I would at the beginning of the sales process say, Hey, I'm going to design this website for you. It's going to be amazing. By the way, I also offer a monthly security and maintenance package. 10 percent discount if you pay for the year upfront.

And I will make sure your website is secure and up to date and backed up. And then I was like, Oh, we don't need that. And then they lose data or they get hacked. And then I charged them double what I would have charged them for the preventative work, not because I'm being vindictive, but because it takes me that much longer, right?

It takes longer to clean up than it does to prevent it. And so then they're like, yeah, we'll, we'll do the package too. Right. So like they experienced that pain. So for me, my ideal customers, they already know, right? They're asking, how can you possibly run three podcasts and have three kids? Or they are a busy executive.

Or the busy agency owner who just knows they should have a podcast or needs to have a podcast and doesn't have time to run it. So when I'm doing something like this, what's that framework? It's like pain, agitate, solve. Is that what it's called?

[00:24:11] Katherine Watier Ong: I think so.

[00:24:12] Joe Casabona: Yeah. So it's like you. You highlight the problem or the pain, you agitate it in your copy and then you offer the solution.

So when I'm doing the agitation part, usually I agitate by saying, have you ever been in a position where you are staying up late the night before to edit an episode to get it out on your published day? Right? Or has a guest ever flaked on you last minute and now you don't have an episode and you need to figure something out?

Those kinds of common scenarios where people are like. Yeah, Oh yeah, I was just up late last night, like freaking out that I wasn't going to finish my episode, right? That's what I, I agitate their pain. And then I say, Hey, what if you didn't have to do that? What if you had a system in place where you had like a month or two worth of episodes in the tank so that you're never under the gun and then usually people will sign up to my mailing list at that point and be like, yeah, show me, or like, I'll give me your templates.

And, and that's kind of where the nurturing starts for me.

[00:25:18] Katherine Watier Ong: So, so talking a little bit about your podcast automation. So what automation tips do you have for folks related to the podcast? You've mentioned guests and you've mentioned some other internal processes, but I particularly haven't discovered the promotion piece.

So what automation do you have around the promotion piece? That's, you know, beyond so I certainly use Buffer and SEMrush’s social media poster, just cause I'm paying for it, for other things to do the push to my whatever five social media handles. But now former Twitter is falling apart. And so now I'm on Mastodon and Bluesky and I'm in a bunch of Slack groups.

Okay. So how do you automate some of that?

[00:26:04] Joe Casabona: Yeah, this is a really tough question that I get a lot. And there's no fully automated process yet. Right. Cause you mentioned the Capsho, I think, right? Earlier. They'll do, they'll do this thing where like, they look at, I think on one of their plans, they'll look at your transcript and then they'll recommend the clips that you can make from the video or the audio.

And those are still kind of off, right? Like, because AI still doesn't really know the most impactful parts. They're just kind of. Like shotgun spraying, I'm going to pick like five or six random spots and hopefully they hit, right. And so you still need a person to do that part where AI and automation can help with creating the transcripts and kind of showing you, right.

I use Castmagic for this. It'll give you like timestamps spots and Castmagic will also give you questions, the episode answers. And I'm like, Oh, that's really neat. Right. So then you're not starting from scratch. You're like, Oh, Hey, at this point, I answered a question about how to make your first automation with Zapier.

So I'm going to open that in Descript or if you use Riverside or whatever open it there, search for like first automation or Zapier with Descript. You can highlight text, export that clip, like just the highlighted text with the video or the audio. And then from there, that's when you can kind of start to do the automation stuff.

So you can maybe put that file in a Dropbox folder and have Makers, Zapier watch the Dropbox folder and create the social post, right? That's something that you can do. You can have Makers, Zapier, watch the Dropbox folder and then automatically upload it to YouTube or send it to Vimeo. And those are the things where it's not taking your time, right?

Before automation, you would have to scrub through the video, maybe watch it or scrub through the audio, right? Watch or listen on 2x. Find that thing, find the right, the place where it ends, where you make your point, export it, upload it, wait for it to like, wait for it to render, then upload it. And now you have an asset you can share.

So the promotion stuff, as far as creating clips for social media, that's kind of where I, what I recommend. On the other side for creating promotional stuff, right? You can use AI to maybe punch up your title and description. Cause here's the thing, I guess this is the thing I didn't say explicitly, but I firmly believe just tweeting or Xetting or whatever we want to call it, just posting on social media, Hey, I have a new episode that doesn't work, right?

That's like, imagine if someone's like swimming and then you say, Hey, I bought this bike for you, right? Ride this bike right now. They're going to be like, I'm swimming. I'm wet. I'm cold. I'm not going to just get on this bike. Right? That's what it's like when you're like, Hey, I know you're scrolling LinkedIn, but I have a new podcast episode.

You should listen to, well, that's like a commitment now. Right? So The, the, the better promotional play, I think is social media to your newsletter. Cause that's easy then promote your podcast. But then you can create enticing assets. Right. So I think I'm, I'm kind of branching on two different thoughts here.
Let's pause on the social media assets. If you have any follow up questions or clarifications, I want to make sure I made my point clearly there.

[00:29:56] Katherine Watier Ong: I know. I think that's clear. And that's sort of what I, so I'm actually thinking as you were talking. So I had the same bummer when it comes to capsho’s social media clips, like still better than the VA, but still not good.

And so I'm personally still going in and pivoting, but the reason I'm pivoting is that AI is sort of just taking the interview and doesn't know the persona of the person listening. So, what I'm going to have to do with my next 1 is actually use chatGPT, tell them the persona and the goals of the podcast, upload the transcript and then see what it comes out in relation to insights, because then I think it might be better at being like.

A marketer would be interested in this piece, right? I'm going to have to test that to see if that might be even faster. Cause at the moment it's still me and you're right. Drives me crazy.

[00:30:44] Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. And that's like the context stuff, right? Like. I have, I'm doing basically like a trial project with somebody who does like video editing and, and so he's full disclosure, doing this for free for me for a few episodes where they're chopping, like they're finding the good parts, chopping it up and then using Publer to publish, right?

So I didn't have to give them access to my social media, direct access to my social media. And Publer is really good. Like. It'll actually publish videos to all of the major platforms, which is, which is really cool. But knowing the context and for who, and who's listening, like you said, is really important there.

And so I think there are better ways to promote your podcast. Whether it's doing like a podcast or promo swap, optimizing your title and description for discovery. Making sure that you have a public page outside of any specific directory for people to go to. And this is where like, you know, like pod page is, is a good service, right.

That'll just connect to your RSS feed and automatically create. A page for you, right? That's a very rudimentary form of automation, right? Where you don't have to go and publish the episode on your website after you just published it on your host. And then you could use things like AI to say things like, here's the description, here's my target audience, can you rewrite this?

Or I want to optimize for these terms, right? That's the kind of stuff where that's kind of like organic growth and, and discovery. And then the third thing, right, is automatically publishing it to YouTube, right? And so there are tools as we record this that do this, but again, as we record this, YouTube is rolling out automatic RSS feed ingestion, so you could just give it your podcast RSS feed and have your show published.

[00:32:57] Katherine Watier Ong: Which would be amazing. When is it coming? It's not live yet, is it?

[00:33:01] Joe Casabona: Funnily enough, I have four YouTube channels. Three of the four of them have it. Ah, the one that doesn't is my main podcast, how I built it. And I'm like, I'm like, Hey why? And they're like, well, it's just, we're just randomly rolling it out.
And I'm like, okay, feels like you're randomly rolling it out to the people who don't really have big podcasts yet. Cause like my one channel has 13 subscribers and no videos. And that has it. So it's not like they're doing it based on like watch count, right?

[00:33:36] Katherine Watier Ong: Right.

[00:33:36] Joe Casabona: Or they're not doing it on the most watch minutes, I should say.

[00:33:39] Katherine Watier Ong: I, it's going to make things a lot easier. Yeah, because that has been a pain point. I have a VA working on the YouTube promotion piece for sure.

[00:33:47] Joe Casabona: Yeah. And I, and I use in my host is Transistor and so they have the automatically publishing to YouTube. RSS. com has that too, full disclosure. I'm an RSS.com evangelist. But you know, they have it and like, they do a really nice job and are more affordable than most hosts. So I think that, once the RSS ingestion rolls out, that's going to be a really crucial piece and help a lot of podcasts with discovery.

[00:34:16] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So what kind of results have you seen in general from implementing either AI or automation with some of your clients?

[00:34:27] Joe Casabona: You have a course out on LinkedIn Learning called Generative AI for Podcasters. And so one of the things I've been doing with recent clients or recent students is, Hey, let's use AI to define an ideal listener avatar, right? Because most people started a podcast and like, I'm just talking to anybody who will listen and I'm like, you, that's terrible, right?

It's bad. Yeah. You're not Joe Rogan. You're not serial. You can't just talk to everybody. So I'm like, we need to define your mission statement. Who do you help? How do you help them? What problem are you solving for them? And how is each episode going to do that? So I say, let's use AI. If you don't have any listeners, you can't ask your listeners what their problems are.

So you need to figure this out based on what you do in your area of expertise. And I think that's probably my favorite way to use AI right now. I know it's not the sexiest way we've talked about some sexier ways, but that's maybe my favorite because the results for me have been staggeringly good.

[00:35:38] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, that sounds great. I think the one big one that I've been telling everybody about, there's actually two. One, I do a lot of training and I discovered that Microsoft, if you upload a document, you can export as PowerPoint. And it gives you visuals for each slide.

[00:35:54] Joe Casabona: What?

[00:35:56] Katherine Watier Ong: It's not perfect, but dang, it's amazing.

[00:35:58] Joe Casabona: Yeah.

[00:35:59] Katherine Watier Ong: The other one I share all the time, well actually there's a handful, but like the other one that I'm particularly tickled about this month, is I have a client who I am writing some copy for and he frankly just wants everything to sound like him, and so he used to edit a lot. And so what I do is I train ChatGPT on the audience and the context and the type of company they are and his voice by uploading some of his own copy.

And then we generate stuff that's in his voice. And once I ship something over that had no edits.

[00:36:28] Joe Casabona: Wow. That's awesome.

[00:36:30] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, it's just awesome. It saves me a lot of time coming back to saving me a lot of time. So then, you know, if we implement both AI, I would say both actually both AI and automation strategically.
It gives you more time to do a variety of things as a marketer. One, maybe become better. Because we all know the space is changing all the time and you need time for learning development. Two, maybe work on your persuasion skills, which is what this whole podcast is about. Like the soft skills. Three, spend more time on that relationship building persuasive part, which we all probably should do.

[00:37:03] Katherine Watier Ong: And you can, when you get out of the weeds, right. And everybody working in digital marketing is drowning everybody, because especially out on the AI stuff, we're all bloody drowning. So anyway, it's prime time to try to offload the stuff that's not critical. So you have time back in your life to do the important parts.
So I'm kind of curious though because obviously listeners of the show do a lot of explaining complicated things to folks that aren't in the weeds like we are. You do that too. So tell me more about your process for explaining technology concepts to potentially non tech people. What do you do?

[00:37:40] Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. That's, that's hard. Right? And I mean, I, I taught, I, for those who don't know, I have a master's in software engineering. I taught, I think we mentioned this at the top of the show, I taught in the classroom for a bunch of years. And so I have. That perspective is like getting real time feedback, right?

Like students looking at me, like I'm insane. Because I said something that was very commonplace to me, but wasn't to them. By the way, I want to revisit something really quick. Cause I just thought of an automation. That would be really interesting when we close out the show with that. So keep listening, ladies and gentlemen, for what could be a very interesting automation.

So explaining the technical stuff to non technical people. The way I do it is I try to start at the beginning, right? And I always know that those who have been listening this whole time know I speak a lot in analogies. Analogies for me are the best vehicle for teaching, right? Because you take something, a concept that everybody knows and you translate that into a new concept and so they can kind of see it, right?

Something like that. Got all of social media very mad at me recently as I said, using AI to write your book is like saying I used a car to run a marathon. And so lots of people got mad at that because they were saying like, you can't use AI at all in the whole book writing process. And that's not what I said.

I was basically saying like, if you tell AI to just write your chapter for you, I would not say I wrote that chapter. I would say I told AI to write that chapter. But it made it very clear how I feel about that. And so that's the first thing I do is I try to think of real world commonplace examples to teach these concepts.

So with automation, you'll notice one of the first examples or one of the early examples I gave was automatic bill pay. Cause what that tells people is you're all, you're probably already automating. Right. If you rent, you probably, you're probably not writing a rent check every month. Right. Especially if you're in one of those, like. Complexes, the big like renting conglomerates here in the United States. They make you connect a bank account. They're going to get their money from you. But the same thing happens when you buy a house, probably, right? You get a loan through the bank, you open a bank account with the bank, and they automatically take your mortgage out of that bank account every month.

So that's something that, oh yeah, okay. So it's just like telling a computer to do something instead of me doing it. Great. Now let's look at some building blocks. Let's take it slow. My super complex automation that I built over the course of years. We're not starting there. Let's start with how do you book guests right now?

How will I email them a few times that work for me? And then they pick one. Here's a link to Calendly or Savvy Cal or whatever. That's it. Pick the hours that work best for you. 

Connect your calendar. You don't have to do that dance anymore. Oh, well, it's like 1 p. m. Eastern daylight time. But by the time we schedule, it'll be daylight savings time.
And so now we're going to miss our meeting because we've, we wrote down the wrong time. Don't need to worry about that anymore. Right? So now you've automated the scheduling process, the time changes and everything that's building blocks. Number one, building blocks. Number two, when someone books a guest as a guest on your podcast, What do you, what do you do with that information?

Oh, well, I usually add it to a spreadsheet. Okay, you don't have to do that anymore. What do you do? You add their name, maybe you add their email address, and the day you're recording, Calendly grabs all that. So now we'll set up a very simple two step automation, where when someone fills out your Calendly link, we send that information to Google Sheets.

And from there, that's when people are like, Oh, this is not as scary as I thought it would be. It's when we get to the big complex stuff where we're connecting Notion databases and, or Airtable bases and this and that, let's do automations based on text parsing. That's when it gets scary. But the early steps, the baby steps, those are things that people can conceptualize.

[00:42:16] Katherine Watier Ong: I'm kind of floored that people are still emailing back and forth to set up a meeting. I'm still stuck on that one. That was the first thing I did.

[00:42:22] Joe Casabona: If it like physically hurts me. I'm like, there are some people who are like, that's disingenuous. And I'm like, Okay, you propose a time and then we'll see if we actually meet cause you're in Arizona and it's November.

Who knows what time it is in Arizona in November.

[00:42:38] Katherine Watier Ong: It's so painful.

[00:42:40] Joe Casabona: Yeah. For those, for those who don't know Arizona, like there's most of Arizona doesn't adhere to the time changes. They just change time zones. I don't know if people know this.

[00:42:52] Katherine Watier Ong: Super confusing.

[00:42:53] Joe Casabona: They're just like, Oh, well, instead of changing our clocks, we're just going to move from mountain to Pacific, except for one section of Arizona that changes time.

So like Arizona has its own time zone in these date pickers.

[00:43:07] Katherine Watier Ong: So you mentioned, so you mentioned one part of your course. Tell me a little bit more. What else could people get when they take your course? You mentioned the upfront persona piece, but I'm curious about what else you've got tinkering around.

[00:43:19] Joe Casabona: Oh yeah. The LinkedIn learning stuff ideation and, and research are, are two of my favorite things, right? Cause like I have a lot of stuff in my head. I know about podcasting, what I might not know, right. What, what many of us as experts. Might forget what it's like to be a first time learner, right?

And so this is where you can leverage AI to say, Hey, I'm starting a podcast about how to, how to start a podcast. That's really rude. How to ride a bike. What are some of the things I should talk about for someone who's never ridden a bike before? Now, like you might think, all right, wear a helmet, handbrakes.

Get stable. You have to pick up speed to ride a bike. Like you can't just go super slow. You're going to fall over, but maybe there are things that you forget. Oh, what if the resistance is really, Oh, I never thought of that. You just kind of click the resistance thing, but if nobody, if someone's never ridden a bike, they're not going to know what that thing is.

Right. So that's where AI can really help you in the ideation part. And so during my course, I took the concept of the American revolution from the British point of view. And I said, what are some things that I could talk about from the British point of view, and they'll talk about France joining the war, right?

What the British people thought long term about the war with America and, and King George's decreasing popularity. And then it talked about how you know crucial women. On the British side of the war. And I was like, Oh, that's really interesting. Give me a list of 10 British and French women who impacted the American revolution, and then it gives you a list, right?

And this is like history, so it's not even recent stuff. So it's got a lot of stuff to work off of there. And that was really fun and interesting to me as a history buff.

[00:45:27] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. I've also used ChatGPT, that is, I think sometimes I wander between that Barton Bing chat, but I'm pretty sure it's ChatGPT.
So to just formulate interview questions, I've also crowdsourced with real people. Sometimes I'll put into a Slack group, I'm interviewing so and so what questions do you have about soft skills in this person? But also AI is great with brainstorming that kind of stuff, coming up with questions you wouldn't have thought about.

[00:45:51] Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Right. And this could be, I mean, it's very likely like questions that maybe other people thought of, but that could be a jump off point for you. Right. For Andrew Warner, right. Of Mixergy, he wrote the book, Stop Asking Questions. Tell me a little bit about Andrew Warner, maybe tell me stories that people might not know about him.

Oh, well, he actually started his first business with his brother in their dorm room. They were, I forget what they were doing exactly, but I'm like, oh, I didn't know that story, right? So now I could take that and be like, what was it like working with your brother, right? Maybe that's a question that a lot of people don't think of, but I have three younger brothers and at least one of us Would kill each other if we went into business together.

Right. So like, that's a really interesting dynamic to me. So yeah, I, I love that. Like the ideation part, the brainstorming part, super crucial. And then later on in the process, one of, I'm not a designer. By any stretch of the imagination. And so I was using Midjourney to create podcast artwork.
Midjourney blew my mind. And now, you know, as we record this, ChatGPT got a bunch of new updates. My friend used ChatGPT to create an image and it actually had words that he used. And like actual legible words in AI images is like a relatively new thing.

[00:47:22] Katherine Watier Ong: That's hard. Yeah. Most of the time it comes out garbled.

[00:47:24] Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah. It's just like, it looks like some letters and like, it's like a fever dream. Yeah. And so like, usually what I would do is like take the, I would just like say no words. I would put the words on later in Canva, and so, or Photoshop. I've, I've moved to Photoshop back to Photoshop, but that's a, that's a really good one because even if you're going to maybe hire a graphic designer to do this or someone on Fiverr or whatever having some base work, right, so that you don't have to use words to another human being.

Who might not speak the same language as you, or who will definitely interpret what you said differently, saying, make something that looks like this. That, that could be huge. 
Right. Or just use it. Yeah.

[00:48:18] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, and there's two other free ones. So I've been using Microsoft designer a lot, which is totally free and it's decent.

You don't have to know a lot of really elaborate image prompting to get something out that looks sort of okay. And then more interesting. And I was more excited about the output actually is Google. You can on desktop, you can actually, if you've, if you're in the labs and you've got generative experience turned on, you can actually prompt Google directly to generate an image for you.

And those are closer to mid journey images. It was pretty hard. I just tried it yesterday.

[00:48:52] Joe Casabona: That's awesome. One of the reasons that I moved back to Photoshop is because, well, I feel like. I feel like a lot of tech companies are starting to lose their way, right? They're trying to be everything. And I feel like Canva is there.

They're like, we do presentations and shareable documents. And I'm like, I really just liked it. Cause you were like an easier version of Photoshop. But now you're way more expensive. And then your AI tools are very, their AI tools are very bad.

[00:49:21] Katherine Watier Ong: That's too bad. Cause I've seen some people use an API to hook you know, content they're generating.
Into Canva to generate the images out to a scheduler kind of workflow process. If the images that kind of creates are not great, then it won't matter.

[00:49:38] Joe Casabona: Yeah. I think like banner bear is a tool that's probably better suited for that. Like you give a template and then it has a web hook and you send the information from like air table or notion and it creates the image.

Like it's, it's really neat for that stuff. But yeah, so anyway, that was a tangent, but like, I'm back on Photoshop in part because Adobe's like Firefly image generation AI. Really like, yeah, very realistic looking people, which shocked me.

[00:50:12] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, that's good.

[00:50:13] Joe Casabona: Yeah, so it's, I, I liked that a lot. And so, you know, I was able to get Photoshop, which is something I've used.
I used it for a long time before switching to Canva. And I could, you know, kind of consolidate costs and tools from Canva and Midjourney to just. Adobe, which is nice.

[00:50:32] Katherine Watier Ong: No. Well, you're going to have to play around with Google then. Cause I thought it was closer to mid journey and stuff. I played with right in search for everybody.

Isn't that amazing that, well, I guess not for everybody. They haven't rolled out generative experience. We'll find out in December, maybe in December, it'll be like everybody. And everybody's search experience will be radically different. So we haven't actually talked too much about soft skills, except I did give a plug for automating your life.

So you have the time to do the soft skills because relationship management takes time. But what soft skills do you think, since you're a podcast expert, basically what soft skills do you think podcast hosts need to develop and nurture?

[00:51:11] Joe Casabona: I think the biggest one is. I have all like I'll admit here that like, I have like a fuzzy definition of soft skills in my head.
And so like, I'm going to say conversationalist generically, which feels obvious, but I think the subtext of that is curiosity, right? I feel like there are a lot of people who get on a podcast and they have the same questions that they ask everybody and that's just. That's a recipe for failure, if not early, then, then down the line, right?

And I used to do the same thing. Oh, this is great. I just ask everybody the same five questions and then I move on with my day, but that's not really compelling content. So people tell me I'm a good interviewer and they're like, what's your secret? And I'm like, I'm legitimately just curious. Like I really.

I think I listened to what the person's saying, I think of these scenarios and then I asked them about these scenarios and so maybe active listening is the soft skill, right? And then the, the other one I would say, which again, I don't know if this is a soft skill so you can, you can correct me on this, but I think storytelling.

So, and however we want to translate that into. Soft skill storytelling or, or weaving a narrative is, is something really important for podcasters because gone are the days where you can just kind of hop on a call, have an informal conversation and release it. Right. You and I, we looked through this document.

We thought about the overall theme as it applies to your audience. For me, I have a Google document where I literally write act one, act two and act three. And I work with my guests to be like, I think act one, we're going to introduce your concept here. Act two, I'm going to ask you a purposefully inflammatory question.

That'll be the conflict. And then act three will be the thrilling resolution where people are like, okay, you've convinced us through act two. Now, how do we apply what you, what you're talking about? And so that narrative, that journey makes for compelling content because now you're not just You know, Joe Rogan in it, right?

Which is like, it's a long conversation with probably not. I mean, maybe somebody would listen to a three hour conversation with Joe Rogan and The Rock because everyone loves The Rock, but no one's going to listen to a three hour conversation between a random person and me, right? Yeah. Yeah. People want to learn something.

[00:53:51] Katherine Watier Ong: So, for people listening, if you're interested in developing your soft skills, I would encourage you to check out the episode with Dana Theus. She gave me quite a few tips in relation to improving your listening skills. I know I plug her every time, but I also think that's the episode that's got a ton of good stuff in it.

But related to storytelling, I actually don't have any guests that've been able to give us. Sort of tactical next steps for that. So if somebody likes storytelling, what's storytelling and how do I actually inject that into my verbal narrative or my PowerPoint or how does somebody get started there?

[00:54:26] Joe Casabona: Yeah, this is a great question. Something I've thought a lot about. I actually presented it to my friend, Nick Benson's class. About digital storytelling.

[00:54:35] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, perfect.

[00:54:35] Joe Casabona: And one of the students asked me, they said, okay, but like, when you're doing like true crime or a fictional podcast, like the story is obvious, but like you do a business podcast, like what are the stories there?

And I say, all right, this is advice that my friend, Mike Pacquiao, and he's a public speaking coach that he gives, and this, I think is really helpful, get a long sheet of paper, horizontal, write a line on it. This is your timeline of your life. Right? Significant or memorable moments from your life and think about the stories around that.

Right? So I more or less opened the show with a story about how I had a panic attack. That was an inciting incident that led me to change, right? Which follows the classic Joseph Campbell The Hero's Journey, right? I was in a spot. Something happened to me. I realized I needed to change and I made that change.

That's what you want to do when you think about stories. And if you think, well, my life is boring, like from the outside, I had a panic attack and my daughter had to help me like that. I'm in the kitchen. That's very boring to most people. Right. I think Taylor Swift got us, we got to talk about Taylor Swift, right?

I think she's really good at this, right? Her 10 minute version of All Too Well is like one of my favorite songs. Not because it's about heartache and breakup, right? I like punk emo songs for that, but because of the story that she tells and the analogy, like it was a, I don't know, from what the internet sleuth says, it was like a four month relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal. 

But like she talks about you kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath. Like that is so amazing. Like you're painting such an amazing picture there, or I'm a crumpled up piece of paper lying here. Like you, you really feel that. And so when you're thinking about storytelling. Paint some word pictures for people, but more importantly, think about the transformation. 

So if you know, maybe you learned how to fix the hinges on your door because one day it slammed you in the face and gave you a bruise and you're like, Oh man. So now the inciting incident is like your door just beat you up. And the transformation is you learned how to do some home repair because of that. And now you don't have to call a handyman every time something breaks in your house, right? So you're saving money. Maybe that's the moral of the story. It doesn't have to be super interesting to you, but it does need to illustrate a transformation.

[00:57:29] Katherine Watier Ong: That's a great tip, a transformation. I was thinking about digital marketing case studies. I was also thinking about the episode from last month on the show with Gus, where he talked about how to write a compelling board entry in the digital marketing space and how important storytelling is there as well as the transformation, the conflict and the transformation that you helped engineer. Kind of essential. So those are great tips and we'll make sure we get that Joseph Campbell book from you to put in the show notes.

[00:57:56] Joe Casabona: Yeah, here's one more really important thing, right? You are not the hero. Remember this. You are the guide. So in Joseph Campbell parlance, there's the hero who's the main character of the story.
And then there's the guide who aids in the transformation. When you're telling your stories, you think about how you are the guide and your listener. Or your audience is the hero because you want them to feel like you can do this for them as well. Luke Skywalker was like a whiny little kid in the first Star Wars.
You know, who was awesome though? Obi Wan Kenobi. That guy really taught Luke a thing or two, and that's who you want to be for your listeners.

[00:58:55] Katherine Watier Ong: Yes Star Wars reference I was wondering when it was gonna come up. 

[00:59:00] Joe Casabona: I don't wanna make it contrived but I definitely wanna know you know.

[00:59:03] Katherine Watier Ong: That's awesome.So before I forget you had another automation you wanted to share.

[00:59:08] Joe Casabona: Yes so when we were talking about the convergence of AI and automation I brought up a little mix scenario here and I noticed that fireflies.ai has a trigger in Make and likely in Zapier.

So what you can do right is have fireflies AI or probably some other ones maybe you can do this directly to chat GPT send some audio to this service have it transcribe that audio then send that transcript to let's say ChatGPT, say summarize this for me, or make a blog post for me, or make 10 social posts for me, and then you can send let's say the blog post to WordPress and the social posts to Publer or Buffer or whatever and then email me and let me know you did that cause then I'm gonna go in and make sure it's not total garbage before I hit publish and so now you've published a podcast episode and had these assets at least first drafts created without you ever doing without you ever touching another button.

I think that's really cool. It feels like something I'm gonna do for my members feels like something I should do for my members.

[01:00:30] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah or create a GBT maybe.

[01:00:35] Joe Casabona: Yeah absolutely. Yeah this is like something I need to do. I was gonna sign up for ChatGPT Plus but there they turned it off due to high demand. I don't know if you saw this.

[01:00:45] Katherine Watier Ong: Yes I saw that. So this has been amazing. I've learned a ton. I think there's great info for our listeners. I'm always trying to make sure people get more time to do this persuasive stuff which requires its own set of time. 

So but before I let you go I'm kind of curious if you had a recent AHA moment or a win or a moment of persuasion that you wanna share that you're proud of.

[01:01:14] Joe Casabona: A recent AHA moment or moment of persuasion. Okay so I was talking to my friend Alistair McDermott, this is very recent, as a matter of fact it was like yesterday as we record this.

Because he saw my post about the Car Marathon AI book and from what I understand he used AI heavily to write his latest book. So he's like why don't I get you on the podcast and we have a debate and there was one point where he was like okay let's say I dictated into Otter AI or whatever he's using now for an hour and then I tell ChatGPT to clean it up and then I use it to iterate and iterate did I write that.

And I was like well you put in a lot of work and so my AHA moment was that I took a hard line of like don't use AI to write words for you. 
I don't think that's your writing but what it really is is you putting in the work to make sure it is your viewpoint and your, does it have your personal experience and it's really important to keep that current right because like I could tell Chat GPT to read all of my blog posts. I've been blogging for 20 years and now write like me.

First of all, the way I wrote in 2003 is drastically different from the way I write in 2023. But also the stuff that I wrote about in 2000, I've had 3 years and 2 more children worth of experience since then so ChatGPT can get me part of the way there but my perspective is very different and so I think that's the really important thing to think about as you leverage AI to help you when you're stuck and you're creating content.

[01:03:13] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah I think that's good, I think that's a good insight. So how can people learn more about you?

[01:03:19] Joe Casabona: Well I have a very special landing page, if you go to podcastliftoff.com/DMV

You can find links to whatever socials I'm on that day could change anytime. There will also be a link to my automations database which is usually only for my members but I'm making it freely available since we talked a ton about automations here.

So again, that's that is podcastLiftoff.com/DMV 

[01:03:50] Katherine Watier Ong: Amazing. This has been such a great episode. 

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[01:03:56] Joe Casabona: My pleasure, thanks so much for having me.

I love talking about this stuff.

[01:04:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Thanks so much for listening to find out more about the podcast and what we're up to go to digitalmarketingvictories.com. And if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Rate us, comment, and share the podcast. Please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics, and guests. Email us at admin@wostrategies.com or DM us on Twitter at @dmvictories. 

Thanks for listening.