All right. Welcome to episode 1, I don't know, 80 something. And I mentioned that because I never really expected to be at uh episode 180. When we started this podcast, Meredith and I, if you've heard our first podcast, we kind of started it on a whim. We didn't really, we didn't have any expectations. And for a while, we were just wondering if we were going to make it to 10 episodes. And so now that was 180-something episodes ago. So looking back, I realized one day I had just asked Meredith, hey, do you want to do a podcast? She said, yeah, sure. I didn't ask her, hey, do you want to do 180-something podcast episodes? And so it occurred to me that uh maybe I should give her a little break. So moving forward, Meredith is going to be with us occasionally, sometimes not, sometimes yes. It may very well depend on her schedule, since I don't pay her for this. In fact, I don't even pay myself for this. But anyway, that is the plan. Just wanted to give you a heads up. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about formatting content specifically for AI. Yes, this is something I have talked about in the past. It's something that has been changing over the past few months. The things that I have said in the past are still valid. Nothing that I have said is no longer true, but there are some new considerations have been added. And really, this is, I think, the first time that when writing content for a website, if you want it to appear in people for people who are doing searches in AI, you really need to start to think about how a machine is going to read through your content. That's never really been the case before. In SEO, there is a misconception that yes, you are writing content to please Google, but really what you should have been doing, and what Google has said you should do many, many times, is write content to be helpful and pleasing to people. And Google's job is to find a way to determine what content is doing that. That's what Google is looking for. Google is not looking for you to write some secret code in your uh blog that they're gonna see and be like, oh, they know the secret code, let's put their website on top. That doesn't happen. Now, however, this there has been an adjustment. And more than ever before, like I said, you're gonna want to format your content in a way that is going to be appealing to a machine, but then also be appealing to a person if and when people do arrive on that page. Now, this is something I talk about in the mentoring program. How to make that content appealing to both readers, actual people, and to machines. Today, here, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about step two. How do you make your content more appealing to users once they get there? I have already, like I said, talked about how we want to format the comment to appeal to machines. Like I said, there is some new information there, but not really enough for a whole new episode. However, I do want to talk about that second aspect. And today, more importantly, how to maintain your brand voice, how to make it sound like you. Because you may, and I'm sure you have gone to AI, maybe ChatGPG or Cloud or the others, and asked it to help you write something, or perhaps write something for you. And you may have noticed that right uh right uh by default, it's gonna sound a bit cheesy. Uh, no matter what model you're using, it's not really it's not gonna sound like you anyway. And I'm gonna just sort of skim the surface of that. This is something I cover in more detail inside the mentoring program, but I'm gonna give you, I think, some good takeaways today. So the first thing, if you're having AI help you create your content, and that's something I do recommend. I recommend that you use AI to help you create content. Again, not create your content for you. Okay, there is a major difference there. And if you don't really understand what that difference is or if that's confusing in any way, just think about it in terms of iterations. When you are using AI to help create content for you, there's gonna be iterations. There's gonna be some back and forth between you and whatever AI tool model you are using. You are never going to want to, even if you have a really great prompt, ask AI to create something for you and then go use that right on your site. You have to embed your own voice and your own opinions, and you've got to tweak it. So iterations is very important. That's what makes the process. Well, that's the difference between, like I said, having AI create content for you and having AI help you create content. So you have to start the process with a prompt that's as specific as you can be. You've I'm sure you've heard me say this before, but it's very true. If you bad information in is going to equal bad information out. The more details you can give it, the better. Also, you're gonna want to provide examples. These are called shots. The people who developed AI as they were creating and testing and using it themselves, they found that it was it provided a whole lot better uh results when they when they provided examples. So and they started calling examples shot. Either a they would create a prompt and it would either be a zero shot, that would be something, a prompt with no examples given, or a one shot, a prompt that includes a single example, or a few shot. And a few shot refers to uh a prompt that has two examples or more. And I think of this shot uh uh kind of literally in terms of sports, like if you don't take a shot, you're not gonna score, or you can't make a basket, or whatever sport you're playing, if you never take a shot, you're just not gonna win. So that's how I think of it. Now, in this case, when we're asking ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever to help us create content, what does that mean? What is an example? So this could be an example of your own writing. Using your own writing as an example is something you'd probably want to do if you're helping or if you're writing uh emails, if you're using AI to help you write emails to clients or business partners or whatever, an example that you would want to give there would be a sample of your own writing. So what you want to do is just give it examples of, hey, this is the writing style that I use. This is what I sound like. And what I would recommend is going through your sent uh box probably in your Gmail or email provider, and just pick out a handful or a dozen emails that you think uh you know have a little bit of length. They're not like one or two sentences long, uh, but you think they are well written in that they kind of show your voice a little bit. That's that's what you want to sound like. Usually, if you're like me, there are some emails in there somewhere to some important clients that you spent some time on and you wanted them to sound just right. So use things like that. Okay, that's a good starting point. You might also include emails where you like the sense of humor, or you might have different styles that you use and you want to include all of those in the instruments that you give to AI. That's all great. That's super if you can do that. So that's something you might want to do if you're using AI to write emails. But what about a website copy? Uh now, here an example again could be your own writing style. We might also look at competitors, and we might find other websites where we like their style. Now, I wouldn't recommend doing this with a local competitor. In other words, somebody who you actually really compete with. Personally, I wouldn't feel great about stealing their style or using their style, so to speak. But certainly like look for look at photographers in other places in the country or photographers who you don't actually compete with. And again, we're just looking at the style here. We're not looking to take their actual content and say the things that they're saying. We just want to use their website as or their page as an example of the tone that we like and so that we can show that to AI and say, hey, I like the way this person does XYZ. So now, how would you take these examples and how do you actually give them to AI? Because this matters. What you don't want to do is just copy that text and put it into a chat inside whatever AI tool you're using and say, do this stuff. What is a much better solution is in whatever AI tool you're using, there's going to be an option called projects. Or in Gemini, I believe they're called gems. I think in everything else they're called actual projects. So you can upload project instructions inside each project. And I know in Cloud, you can actually provide what they call knowledge documents. So that's what I do. I take examples of my rules that I have created for Claude and examples that I want Claude to use, and I uploaded them into Cloud as a knowledge document. Now the great thing about that is moving forward, if I want to modify those examples or I want to add more rules or something, then right within a chat, I can say to Claude, please update the knowledge file, make it do this instead. And it will do that for me. I don't have to worry about then going back in and revising those instructions. This is one of the fantastic things about AI, really, and especially Claude does this really well, is you can just ask it to update its own instructions. You can even ask it to create its own initial instructions by having a chat. In fact, I recommend doing that. If you want to create some of these files, sit down and within a chat, tell Claude or your AI what you what it is that you want to do, and then ask it to help you do that. This to me is, I mean, this is the first time in my lifetime that any technology is able to do something like that. Okay, so now you have some examples. You can also create some rules here, like, hey, please don't use m-dashes or anything else, whatever it is you like or dislike in terms of like grammar, you you can specify, hey, please don't do this or please do that. And then now is when you want to do those iterations I talked about. So now some there's good AI will give you something that you have asked for and you've given it examples. It's gonna give you something you're gonna want to revise and then give back to AI and so on and so on. Okay, so now assuming you have followed the format that is good for AI, and I've talked about that in other episodes. Now what you will have is also a page that sounds like you and you haven't had to slave over it. This should, if nothing else, kind of give you an idea of how you should be creating content with AI, with the help of AI, and also hopefully help you develop a few new AI skills, which are going to be, I would say, necessary moving forward in the professional world. Okay, I hope this helps.