✨ You’ll learn:

• Practical ways to use AI for automating tasks and saving time
• How to boost your content creation, marketing, and customer insights with AI
• The common misconceptions about AI and why it’s easier than you think to get started
• My favorite AI tools to help you work smarter, not harder!

If you want to grow your business without burning out, this is the episode for you. Hit that download button and let’s unlock the power of AI together!

Free download here

Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Hi, friends. Welcome to her empire build a show. It's Tina Tower here and I am very excited to be talking about AI with you. I have been pretty obsessed with the AI developments in the last few years. The first year after Covid, I went back to south by Southwest. Actually, it was the first year before COVID even happened was when they started talking about it a lot at south by. And I was really, really into it in going, I love anything that can do my job faster and do the parts of my job that I don't love doing. Because I mean, you're probably like me, right? Like most entrepreneurs, we are big picture thinkers.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:00:41]:
We like to have all the ideation. We like to get creative. We like to be there going, oh, let's do this. And then we go and we create the thing. But then after we've done like the initial creation, it's like what? I'm still got to do that, like repeatable tasks. Admin Bleh. No, we don't want to be doing that. And this is where I have found AI to be the biggest game changer inside of my business.

Tina Tower [00:01:07]:
It has made processes faster, it has made it more efficient. It has allowed me to focus on growth and to focus on the human elements of our business and creating cool things. I mean, this year alone we've created so much more for our members than I ever have before. I have two new businesses that are launching. One is a very local business that is launching at the end of this month that I am not the driver of. I am kind of side of that. And the other, this is the first time I am ever saying it out loud. The AI circle, which I have been working on all year, and it is finally being released on Black Friday.

Tina Tower [00:01:51]:
So if you want to get on the waitlist for that, you can go to theaicircle.com dot. We will be releasing the first course there, which is AI for course creators. It is an amazing course, if I do say so myself, but it really does step by step walk you through how to do everything. So it's a full course that has all of my prompt playbook in it, all of my screen shares showing you how to do all of the most common things that we do as course creators. So how to create video, how to automate tasks, how to do like everything. And so you're going to really want to grab that one. I've linked it in the show notes as well. But what I want to share with you today is not just about AI circle, but also how you can use AI in your business to maximize efficiency and growth.

Tina Tower [00:02:40]:
And so, like, imagine just running your business with more ease, more precision, and a fraction of the workload. Like, AI has made so much more possible in so much less time. And so today, we're going to dive into how you can harness its power to take your business to that next level. And the episode will cover, like, the innovative ways to use AI beyond just the basics and help you have ideas to automate and streamline and up level business strategy. So by the end of the episode, you will walk away with some practical ways to incorporate AI into your workflow for efficiency and time saving and increased impact. But if you want to be shown how to do that and get all of the like, I think the best part is the prompt playbook in AI circle, because it is a lot of what I've been playing with, I've been building a lot of bots and different things, but a lot of what we're doing in Aicircle is harnessing the power of chat, GPT, and things that don't require a lot of coding. And a lot of it depends on what you put into it to what you get out. Funny that everything in life, what you put in the determines what you get out, but you can slightly change the prompts and get really wildly different results.

Tina Tower [00:03:54]:
And so I have been testing a lot of different prompts so that we can get the best possible results in the shortest amount of time. And so I'm sharing all of that with you in Aicircle. All right, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to her Empire Builder show. I'm your business strategist and host, Tina Tower, and I am so happy you are here. My goal with this show is to bring you the inspirational and informative conversations with interesting humans, as well as the tools, tips, and resources to help you build your online business. Since starting my first business at 20, I have built and sold four times. And in 2018, while traveling around the world with my family for a year, I tripped and fell into this wonderful world of online courses, and I instantly fell in love.

Tina Tower [00:04:45]:
I'm a million dollar course creator, a world traveler, best selling author, a mummer of two man children, and a lucky wife. There's no playing small here. It's your time to grow to run a highly profitable business that makes you wildly wealthy while you positively impact your clients and the world around you and have the life you've always dreamed of. Let's get it. Okay, so we were at the stage, like, even a year ago, where AI was kind of just a buzzword, you know, people were buzzing about it, but now I think it's an absolutely essential, necessary tool for business owners who want to scale even any business owner. I think in today's fast paced business world, leveraging AI is like, it's like having at least an extra team member. To me, it, you know, I have enough different AI agents built now that it leverages probably about the work of four or five team members. But it's one who works around the clock to automate tasks, to create content, to analyze data.

Tina Tower [00:05:47]:
There are so many different things that we can use it for. And for me, like, the biggest thing is freeing up your time and energy. So it strategically allows you as the business owner to focus on higher level tasks like all of your time should and could be spent on strategy and creativity. Oh, my gosh. Like, I know for me, like, it's a right, creativity is our bread and butter. Like, that is how we earn money with our own ideas and our creativity. When I am spending too much time in the weeds in my business, that's when my creativity dies. You know, like, it's not, it's not when you're sitting at your desk, like hammering things out that you make your best work.

Tina Tower [00:06:31]:
You've got to have space as an entrepreneur to, you know, have your head up in the clouds and have different sceneries and different things so that creativity and energy can flow. And that, to me, is what this has done the most in there. The other thing is it's allowed a lot more personal connection with clients. I don't have to spend a lot of time now on doing a lot of the back end things and a lot of the planning and a lot of the preparation when now I can spend it chatting to clients, answering their human based questions. So to me, it's, you know, like, just imagine having all your content creation, your email responses, your data analysis all handled for you while you focus on doing what you love most. To me, that is the power of AI, and it's only getting better so incredibly rapidly. Also, I think why it's essential for growth is competition and efficiency. So those who are embracing AI are staying ahead in not only the online course space, but in any business.

Tina Tower [00:07:32]:
I really think that, you know, AI, you've probably heard the saying that AI won't take your job, but it will take. What is the saying? I just want to say the same. I'm like, what is the say? AI won't take your job, but your job will be taken by those utilizing AI tools. And that is very, very, very true, because what you can do when you are using AI is your output is so much higher, so you can do so much more with so much more productivity and efficiency that if people aren't using those tools at their disposal, you're just not able to keep up with that. And so previously, I've always been really fast at creating things. You know, I can get to market really, really quickly. I don't overthink, I'm not afraid to fail, so I don't get stuck in procrastination very often. But how much? Using, especially chat GPT and a lot of the prompts that we use, it's just supercharged everything.

Tina Tower [00:08:29]:
So it just gives you this massive competitive edge by allowing you to do more in less time. And if you're not using it, you're likely leaving that growth on the table in there. So you may be like wondering what are the practical ways to do it. In honesty, the most often that I use it is chat GPT prompts. So I've got different prompts for many, many different things in my business. Data analysis, writing all of the copy for our social media, designing all my reels, all of our concepts, writing video scripts, lead magnet creation. Like, there's so many different things that we have all of the prompts for that. And that is what I use it the most for.

Tina Tower [00:09:12]:
But the other things is automating routine tasks like using Manychat and Zapier to automate a lot of customer service, a lot of lead, nurturing, a lot of follow up emails like AI can handle a lot of the repetitive tasks that drain your time and your energy so that you can focus on the more scalable things. We've also started using Gmail's AI plugin so that we can start experimenting with a lot of those replies as well. And we don't get it to send anything. This is the thing, like, you don't get it to send anything. A lot of what the current automation is doing is getting things to like 70% so that you can jump in and put the last 30 on. And it just, it saves so much time. And what I found is not only does it save so much time, but it takes away that like blank screen feeling. You know, when you're looking at a blank screen, you go to create something from scratch and there's just like the cursor blinking, it takes that away and it's like, like your helpful little friend I know.

Tina Tower [00:10:10]:
Like a month ago, I downloaded the new chat GPT app on my phone with the voice and now I can just have conversations back and forth and even that I feel like a little bit of a crazy person. But when I'm thinking of different ideas, like yesterday I was, oh, should I tell you this story? I don't know if it's going to be out yet by the time this episode comes out. I'm going to tell you anyway because I've started telling it, so I'm just going to have to make sure it's out by the time this comes. So I wanted to create like a Heb shop, right? Her empire builder shop. Unfortunately, hebshop.com was taken. And so I was like, how am I going to add the shop on? I use kajabi. And we were going to use, they've got a beta program at the moment to sell digital products. So like, we can sell digital products, obviously, on Kajabi, but you've got to have courses and people create a login and all of that sort of thing, which I wanted to have a shop more based around like a Shopify style shop where people can just go, all right, here's like the 20 different shortcuts that you've gotten.

Tina Tower [00:11:13]:
We'll just go add to cart, add to cart, add to cart with all of the templates. So we're selling a bunch of canva templates. Email, swipe, copy, AI, prompt, playbooks, like all of that sort of thing that can give shortcuts to course creators. And so I was going through it previously. I would brainstorm a whole heap of names and just one at a time, type them into GoDaddy to check whether or not they're available. Or, you know, there's a name checker site that it can check both domains and it can also check all of the social media channels at the same time. So usually that's how I name new things. But this time I was like, godaddy has its own inbuilt AI system there.

Tina Tower [00:11:56]:
So I wrote a whole heap of things into the GoDaddy AI system so that it, and said what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it. And it gave me all of these different available domain names. So you don't have to go through the whole thing. No, taken. Not taken. Anyone who buys domains knows that feeling. It's like, ah, is there anything left? Anyway, I was going through all of that. I shortlisted it to top three.

Tina Tower [00:12:21]:
So we had Heb shortcuts.com, i had course content. What was it called? Coursecreationcentral.com and coursequickies.com. when I say each of those, I wonder which one you think is the best. Anyway, instead of deciding that myself, what I did was I then went to chat GPT and said like with everything that, you know, so this was, I was having the conversation back and forth with it, with the, with the voice one and going like, you know so much about domains, this is what we want to do. Ask me a lot of questions to figure out like what is going to be the best thing that we can create for our shop. On the side of her empire builder, it was asking me different questions. They're like, okay, with everything that you know from that, which of these domain names is going to be the most highly converting, is going to be the most attractive to the market, is going to make the most sales, is going to be really optimized when we place it on a Facebook ad, like all of these different things that I wanted to ask it. And then of course I said, is there anything else that it should be optimized for that I haven't asked you already? It is very helpful.

Tina Tower [00:13:24]:
It's like having a very, very knowledgeable friend. Anyway, it came back and said, hands down, the best domain for what you are trying to achieve is course quickies.com. it's a little bit cheeky, it's a little bit sexy. It tells people what you want, which is just like some quickies. We just want quick results in there. And so that's the one I registered. And that's where our Herampire builder template shop will sit on the side of our, her empire builder site so that we can sell those templates to the wider market. So the strategy for that will be there'll be low cost offers and they'll be sold to like a lot of things through cold leads on Facebook ads.

Tina Tower [00:14:03]:
So there's two things I'm telling you about. On today's episode, the AI circle is launching on Black Friday and we have course quickies of which may not be launched by the time this episode comes out, but it will be very, very soon. I just wanted to demonstrate like the most recent time that I have used it to go back and forth with it. And it is like that previously for me would have been like a day's kind of journey in trying to figure that out. I did the whole process for that in about 30 to 40 minutes and I felt really confident and really, really good about it. So it just like really shortcuts that time. So it's not all just up in my head, but I have someone to bounce those ideas off and ask all of those questions, too, so it really gives that competitive edge. Okay, so I'm still.

Tina Tower [00:14:52]:
I've, like, totally segued off my notes here. Automation for routine tasks. Manychat and zapier. Yep, we got it. Next is content creation and optimization. So we leverage a lot of AI for content creation, so we use chat GPT for that, and a lot of our prom playbooks, we've got our social media down to a fine art with that. Now, it was even six months ago, it was like, you know, it got us about 50% to 60% of the way there, and then I'd put the rest on. Now it's better than me.

Tina Tower [00:15:20]:
Like, I will ask for its real prompts and what to put over b rolls and what to do for captions and all of that. And I'm like, I'll see something and go, did I write that? It sounds like I wrote that. Did I write that? And I just forgot about it. It knows me very, very well. We also use Quillbot so that we can, like, paraphrase the different things out of chat GPT and make it sound less AI in some regards. But, I mean, the advances since it's gone to chat GPT four, we don't need quill bot as much as what we used to. And the other one that we use a lot is canvas magic AI tools. So, you know, that's helping us create a lot of blog posts, a lot of promo videos, a lot of graphics.

Tina Tower [00:16:03]:
We use get. Get captions to do a lot of the videos. One of my favorite things is I find it very hard to remember what to say in a short video. I like podcasts because it's long form. So I can go off on my little tangents, I can go off on my segues. The way that I do podcasts is I have a series of dot points for this episode. I've got about 1015 dot points, and I will just talk through them. But sales videos that are 60 seconds, you got to kind of cap them, right? You can't just ramble on.

Tina Tower [00:16:32]:
So what I do with get captions app is I will record the video, reading the script, and then I use the app to reposition my eyeball direction so it looks like I'm staring down the barrel of the camera. So that way I don't have to remember anything off the top of my head. I don't have to go to the extra setup of setting up the teleprompter and the camera and then putting it under the teleprompter. App and, you know, going through all of that crap to, you know, once you put those hurdles in place, it's like, man, do I really want to do that today, I can do it tomorrow. Kind of thing gets kicked down the road. But now that I can just read it, get it done, it's so quick and it's so good. So we've got that. I'm showing you how to use that also in AI for course creators course, the one that's coming out on Black Friday.

Tina Tower [00:17:16]:
So if you want to know how to use that, that's in there. We also use a lot of AI for customer insights and data analysis. So we use, like, all of our reports from Google Analytics, all of our profit and loss statements from Xero, all of our marketing reports from Metricool, our scheduling software, like all of that, we feed into chat, GPT and get it to analyze it and make data driven decisions. So it will analyze a lot of our customer behavior, it will improve a lot of our marketing strategies. So we just closed her empire builder launch in September 1 of the things that I do at the close of every launch is I send a, why didn't you buy survey? People are really, really insightful on that. We get a lot of really good feedback that I can use in the next round so that I can kind of keep a pulse on where the industry is at the moment and where we're hitting the mark and where we maybe haven't changed as quickly as what we needed to be. And so what I did this time that I haven't been able to do previously is I fed that in and asked it to, you know, analyze all of the data and give me marketing insights for the future. There was a lot more to that prompt than what I just said then, but that's essentially what I did.

Tina Tower [00:18:26]:
And then what it did was it said, okay, like, next time you launch her empire builder, you're going to want to address these pain points. You're going to want to address these objections. You can do that through these reels. Here's 15 reels that you can make. And it gives, like, the set list what to say, how to say it, like all of it there. That will immediately address the concerns of my customers. And so, like, it just takes so much guesswork out of it. And to me, it's knowing exactly what my audience wants based on real time data.

Tina Tower [00:18:56]:
So AI can give that insight without you needing to spend hours, like, crunching the numbers or making determinations. That may not be right. I know sometimes I've looked at data in the past, and I've probably gone down a road that I'm like, I don't know, I think this is why. But it is so much better at data analysis than I have ever been. The other thing it can do is personalization at scale. So previously it's been really hard to do personalization at the massive scale, whereas AI can now segment the audience, send a lot of those personalized emails, give recommendations, give different offers, making clients feel like they're getting vip treatment without having to go through everything one by one. And so that's going to really boost engagement and retention without the manual effort. And that will free you up to be able to have conversations with people.

Tina Tower [00:19:48]:
Like in this last launch, because I used so much AI to help me analyze all the data and do all of that sort of thing while we were launching, I was able to do a lot more discovery calls with people. I was able to be in the chat box a lot more. I was able to be in the Facebook groups a lot more because I had the time to be able to actually connect with people instead of being on the back end the whole time. Okay, so I want to talk about a couple of common misconceptions about AI so that you can get over that hurdle to start really using it well. So one is that I hear people say it's too technical for me. And I will admit, like, we've just spent a little while building some AI agents and bots, and that was pretty technical. I think it will get easier as we go. And this is why I like really harnessing the use of things like chat GPT is because a lot of the tools are really, really user friendly, requiring like little to no coding or tech experience at all to implement.

Tina Tower [00:20:48]:
So to me I'm like, if you can use a smartphone, you can use AI tools. They're designed to make your life easier, not harder, and so find the ones that are going to work for you. The other misconception I hear a lot is that AI will replace the personal touch in my business. Now, what I have found to be true is AI actually enhances personalization by allowing you to spend more time engaging with clients while it handles all the routine tasks. So it's not replacing you, it's freeing you up to do more of what only you can do, and that is building relationships and creating value in your business. That is what. Like, if I had the dream as a business owner, all I would do is build relationships and create. That is it.

Tina Tower [00:21:36]:
But so much of our time as business owners have to be spent doing all of these other things. That takes us away from doing the two core functions that we need to do as the leaders of our company. And so I have seen such a shift in that in the last few months, especially in being able to spend more of my time there. The third is it's expensive. Now, I will say there are different moments because I've been testing so much that I'm like, my software subscriptions, they'd be out of control. But now that I've tested them and know the ones I want to keep and the ones that I don't want to keep and the ones that are going to be worth it, and this is the hard part because it's changing so quickly as well. One will come out that I'm like, okay, this is the best thing for right now. And then another one in a couple of months.

Tina Tower [00:22:25]:
They've developed their AI at a quicker rate than the other company did and so I'm like, I jump ship over to that. So you got to learn something new. And so it's a little trickier than what it used to be with the speed that it's moving. But in terms of expense, I do think that you know, a lot of them, even when they're like 2030, $40 a month, the ROI is so high when used effectively. Like I was having a conversation with someone the other day and they're like, I'm not getting the paid chat GPT because it's $20 a month. I'm like, if you can't spend $20 a month as a business owner and use it in a way that is going to give you so much more time. If that's not worth it to you, I don't know if you have any business being in business. And so to me it's going always when you're investing money, how can you multiply the RoI that that's going to give you back? And many AI tools are free or low cost and when you think about how much time you'll save, they pay for themselves again and again and again and again.

Tina Tower [00:23:26]:
Okay, so things that are my favorites at the moment, chat GPT for sure, especially for writing copy, Jasper for automated marketing, canva for design, project management and productivity. I'm using Mondays AI powered task automation quite a lot. I've only just learnt a lot more about their AI. They were a bit slow to it. I'm a massive devout Monday fan, but they were a bit slow on the AI uptake. But now they're like coming in hot with that which has made me really, really happy. For sales and customer engagement, we use Manychat for a lot of our automated customer engagement. For data and analytics, we use Google Analytics and Hotjar for real time customer insights.

Tina Tower [00:24:09]:
And then we feed that back into chat gpu. So they're the ones that we're using, like really, really regularly that I think are ones, if you haven't got started with, are ones that are really good to just get started and go from there. If you've got a podcast, I recommend cast magic as well. It has changed the game in the way we produce our podcast, too. Okay, so how to implement AI without the overwhelm? I would start with one area of your business. So rather than, you know, try and implement everything, start getting really good at one function. So the first thing, for example, I wanted to get prompts perfect for were lead magnet creation. We create a new lead magnet every month inside our business and it's a process that takes me a day.

Tina Tower [00:24:53]:
So I wanted to be able to go. If I can get that day back and get that down to a couple hours, like, that'd be great. And so that was what I started with. And now it's, it's down to about an hour. Like, it is beautiful, the process to be able to do that. And so I would choose one task to automate. Whether it's email marketing or social media posts or customer service. Customer service would probably be the last thing that I would do, but I would start with those and build from there.

Tina Tower [00:25:19]:
So don't try and overhaul your whole system overnight. Just start with one task that takes a lot of your time and energy that, you know, people have talked about AI use being able to do and let it take over. Then you want to test track and adjust. So really encourage like track your performance, test different tools, make adjustments as you need. So the beauty of AI is that it's constantly learning and improving. So don't be afraid to test new tools and tweak them as you go. Because month to month they are getting better and better and better. The third tip in implementing them without the overwhelm is don't lose the human touch.

Tina Tower [00:25:59]:
So while AI can handle your routine tasks, personal interaction and human connection remain crucial, there is a lot of customer functions that AI can actually automate that I think if you did, it would be detrimental to most people's businesses because we want the human touch, we want that interaction. So I would use AI to do the heavy lifting, but always keep the heart of your business, which is connection and impact at the forefront. Okay, so if you want to use AI effectively, you don't have to be an AI expert to get started. Like as I said, just start with one area and you'll quickly see how much more time, energy and focus you have to build your dream business. And if you want to grab AI for course creators, it is launching on Black Friday so you can join the waitlist at theai circle.com. i'll link it for you in the show notes as well. I hope you are one of the first people to get it. I hope it changes the game for you and I hope it gives you a lot more of that time to nurture your customers, to create, to do that impact that you're so seeking.

Tina Tower [00:27:07]:
Have the most beautiful day. This episode was brought to you by my signature group coaching program, her Empire builder. The best online education for female course creators in the world. Check it out @tinatower.com. along with so many free resources to help you get building your empire and seeing those results that you deserve. If you loved this episode, please don't keep it a secret. Share it with a friend on social media and tag me @tina_tower and give it a review. It really does help us to be able to bring you bigger and better content as we grow.

Tina Tower [00:27:44]:
Have the most beautiful day. I'm Tina Tower and I'm cheering you on all the way.