E164: Benjamin Gorman

Richard Hill [00:00:04]:

Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One, and welcome to episode 164. In this episode, I speak with Benjamin Gorman, content writer, copy editor, and consultant, SEO copywriter and messaging specialist with a seasoned background in research and creative writing. Crack an episode, this one. I met Ben out at an SEO conference several months ago, and I just knew when I met him, I had to get him on the podcast. We cover cover all things AI and content, embracing AI the right way, you know, and some very, very to tips on how to use AI in your content strategy. What's the biggest issues Ben sees right now in using chat GPT? Ben's proven tips for implementing AI as part of your content strategy and your specific strategy. And Ben steps us through Successful content strategies over the last 6 months that were well and the very, very surprising, results from some of those strategies.

Richard Hill [00:00:55]:

And of course, so much more in this episode. If you enjoy this episode, please hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this episode so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now Let's head over to this fantastic episode. Well, welcome to the podcast, Ben. How are

Benjamin Gorman [00:01:11]:

you doing? Oh, I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

Richard Hill [00:01:14]:

No problem at all. Well, the last time well, the semi last time I saw Bam was on a rooftop terrace in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, which is not how I normally start many many other podcasts, So but that's how we met. And, we, then spoke a few times over a at a conference, and I talk about conferences a lot on the podcast, in the benefits of going to them and and and put yourself out there and meet a lot of brilliant people. Well, Betty is one of those people that I met at a conference, you know, 7, 8 months ago. So I think it'd be great, Ben, for you to, introduce yourself and tell our listeners how you got to the world of content copy and the ecommerce.

Benjamin Gorman [00:01:48]:

Sure. I would love to. Yeah. I, I studied marketing at university, which now is quite a few years ago. And I initially like many people in digital marketing, I moved abroad and became an English teacher. And after a few years, I wanted to pivot and do something different, so I started writing content. I've always been into, writing stories, telling stories,

Richard Hill [00:02:13]:

and

Benjamin Gorman [00:02:13]:

I also wanted to travel and start my own business, so this was an amazing opportunity to do all of those things. And now I've been writing content for over 10 years. I write for a number of large companies, such as, Norton, the web security company. I do a lot of crowdfunding content, and I consult for a number of businesses helping them with their messaging strategy. So that's quite a quite a deep, experience and, sort of, shout out to

Richard Hill [00:02:45]:

a lot of good lot of nice firms there. So, you know, why why did you really Decide to go with content writing as a career out of all the sort of different marketing, functions out there.

Benjamin Gorman [00:02:55]:

Well, I think, you know, I sort of had a passion for writing, and with my background as well in teaching, and I you know, teaching a foreign language or English as a foreign language, and I also learned a foreign language. Communication, And learning the the intricacies of communication was something that was also very interesting to me. And I think that works, really well when you pivot into into content marketing. Also, I'm very much a numbers person or sorry. I'm very much a words person and not a numbers person. And so the numbers and analytics side and SEO side didn't really appeal to me, whereas the narrative side was, something that I connected with a lot more. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:03:44]:

I do sort of do see that divide when I think about our agency. You know, we've got, you know, I think, you know, that there the the word side. He's not my side. We're the we're the opposites. Yeah. I'm I'm the numbers guy, 100%. Somebody says to me, can you write me a x, y, zed? You know, I'll be like, Mike, can you write me a you know, that's bikes at the next office. You know? Everyone should have a mic or everyone should have a Ben, I guess.

Benjamin Gorman [00:04:07]:

That's why that's why we work well together. Right? Like, I I only work with, with Numbers people because that's they hate somebody like

Richard Hill [00:04:14]:

me. Yeah. Yeah. No. That that's, you know, stick to your it's one of those, isn't it? I think you're gonna stick to your lane, but at the same to the same respect. You have a good understanding of what good you know, whether that's, you know, you have somebody that's a trusted adviser or a team that are that other side of the business. You know, quite often when we talk about marketing a business, it is quite often numbers and content. You know, that's very that's a very crude, Analogy, but ultimately, use content when we think about ecommerce stores, and there's understanding what is and isn't working.

Richard Hill [00:04:44]:

And that's usually down to looking into whether that's GA 4 or looking at different dashboards to, sort of interpret what is happening. But I think I want I wanna get straight into it, AI. You know? Oh, yeah. Worried already of your clients sort of worried around AI, or is it more a case of embracing it and and running with it? Well, I think it's definitely a

Benjamin Gorman [00:05:04]:

case of embracing it and running with it because, I mean, no matter how you look at it, AI is going to be a part of digital marketing. It's gonna be a part of Content creation, for forever, for the rest of the history of this business. Yep. So yeah. I mean, you really only can embrace it. At the same time, yes, like, there are some people should be very worried. People who are not trying to really improve their craft or people who are not trying to embrace it should be worried. Everyone else, I think, is okay.

Benjamin Gorman [00:05:37]:

Of course, there's uncertainty. Like, we don't know where AI is gonna go. We don't know what it's gonna be like in 3 months. We don't know what it's gonna be capable of, and I think, You know people are dealing with a lot of burnout because there's something new every day. Yes. Am I worried? I'm not particularly worried, at this point, because I personally am embracing it,

Richard Hill [00:05:58]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:06:00]:

And I think, hopefully, my quality of my content will Continue to be better than that of AI's content. I personally think AI content will always be kind of the low bar, because especially when we have free tools or tools for $20 a month like, Jajib everyone's gonna be able to create this level of content, right, for, yeah, almost no money. So as soon as that AI gets evolves, everyone's content is going to evolve up to this point. So we're always gonna need, hopefully, people like me, to take that level a little bit higher. Yeah. Because the people who achieve that little bit higher level than what AI can do are gonna see all

Richard Hill [00:06:43]:

of the benefits, all the inversions, and, all the money. Here, we talk about this, it's it's not our our sort of terminology. It's, from the PPC business, but, unleveling the playing field. AI is sort of leveled, if you like, or leveling the playing field, You know? And and as is as has AI in in PPC, you know, a lot of automation in PPC for many, many years now. So to then how do you unlevel the playing field? So everyone at the moment is everyone's using GPT. They're running an ecom store. They're all selling, you know, barbecues or whatever it is, 10 barbecue stores all using GPT. So to then unlevel that playing field is obviously how or it's how you then use to the tech stack, whether that's GBT or whatever you're gonna use and what subscriptions you're using and APIs you're pulling from, what prompts you're using and so forth.

Richard Hill [00:07:32]:

You know, everyone's using them, say. You know? So it's then using them and then using them again. You know, really the detail around how you use the tool and then adding in, you know, that layer of expertise like you and, you know, your business where, you know, you're you're layering another 5, 10, 20, 30% of, You know? And that's where I think, you know, then I think, you know, sort of copywriting and content teams are gonna come into their own again. Whereas, I think there's been there's this period at the moment where maybe a smidge of uncertainty around different, you know, like you know, I came back from the conference where I met you, for example, and I was talking a lot about, you know, GPT from the various talks and people that I'd met. And A few of my content team were like, so what what how where does that leave us? I said, well, it's brilliant. It's brilliant for us. You know, we're gonna be able to produce more. You know, we're gonna be but we're gonna be at some of the stuff around the researching and the, you know, the let's say the, the content and the content, the outlines and the briefs and things like that where we spend a lot of time on, we can really speed that up, but we're still gonna have a manual part to it.

Richard Hill [00:08:39]:

But we're really gonna be able to speed that up. So our output per hour a day or whatever is gonna go go up. You know, we're gonna have some of our roles may change to more of an editing role as opposed to a writing role, but we're still gonna need writers and and editors. But it's like that change, isn't it? We're in that transition sort of piece at the moment in the next Exactly. Just wanted to introduce you very quickly to our sponsors, Prisync. Now Prisync is a competitive price tracking and monitoring software that can dynamically change a product's prices on all sales channels. They work with brands such as Samsung, Sony, Suzuki to increase their online revenue. Now if you run Google Shopping, which I know a lot of you absolutely do, this software is absolutely key to accelerating profits.

Richard Hill [00:09:20]:

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Richard Hill [00:10:16]:

I think it's easy to convince yourself and to be convinced that,

Benjamin Gorman [00:10:20]:

that GPT is Actually intelligent, and it's not. Right? GPT essentially is like a kind of a Glorified autofill. It's a predictive tool, so it doesn't really have, any intelligence behind it. The intelligence has to come from the prompter. And I think that people kind of, assume that ChatGPT is going to be able to do things without receiving, detailed instructions. So Yeah. That's really the biggest issue when people get very frustrated because it can't do what they want it to do, but those people don't know how to Instruct it to do what they want it to do. Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:11:06]:

Yeah. And what I say, you know, as a content writer, people are trying to replace their, content writers with ChatGPT without knowing how to write content. And I say, well, if you don't know content best practices, how are you going to Prompt ChatGPT to give you good content when they say, oh, I can go get prompts from the Internet. Okay? Well, the Internet doesn't Know who your audience is. The Internet doesn't know who your target market is. Right? Yeah. You're gonna need somebody who knows those things in order to prompt correctly. So, that's one of the biggest issues that that I see is just a lack of understanding of, of the the tool itself And how to, input information via prompting Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:11:48]:

And get out what you want. It's like

Richard Hill [00:11:51]:

the garbage in, garbage out scenario, isn't it, really, with the Really is. Really is. Like, what what you yeah. You get what you give type thing. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. There's no Those sort of detail in there. It's just, I guess, in its most basic form.

Richard Hill [00:12:04]:

You know, write me a blog post on 5 write me a 500 word blog post on barbecues. You know, that's the worst prompt in the world.

Benjamin Gorman [00:12:12]:

It's cool. Yeah. You know, I liken it to, like, you You know, imagine there's, like, a actual you bought an actual robot with, like, arms and legs. Right? And your robot can do any task, But it needs to be instructed, you know, like and you want your robot to build a house. Okay. Who are you gonna hire to give that robot instructions? Well, you would wanna hire a contractor probably. Right? Because that contractor understands how to build a house and understands how to instruct your robot, but people instead are are hiring a robot expert. But a robot expert doesn't know how to build a house, so it's similar with with, you know, writing content with ChatGPT.

Benjamin Gorman [00:12:47]:

Well, You need somebody working with you who understands good content

Richard Hill [00:12:52]:

to get the most out of this tool. Yep. Yeah. I think that's, that's you know, you gotta sort of hold on that on that bit for a moment, guys, because that's the reality. You can't just go and spend the $20 a month and back to get something that is polished and, you know, and put it on your website and expect to get, you know, good, Whether that's rankings or that's, you know, a a sort of following or whether that's, you know, to become an expert in the niche, you know, you've gotta polish it and have somebody there They're still spending that time on it and working on it. You know, we have a team here, you know, that of you know, just 2 guys I know have done sort of 30, nearly 30 years as PRs, as editors, as and so forth. And nothing goes out of this business that isn't checked, double checked, and then triple checked sort of thing. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:13:40]:

Yeah. So Yeah. If you if you were to sorta list maybe 3 things then. So, you know, our listeners, the thing. Right. Okay. Let's, let's experiment deeper on news chat GPT as an example. Obviously, there's other tech, but we'll focus on that.

Richard Hill [00:13:57]:

What are sort of maybe 3 tips around implementing, content via chat GPT, for which to break down sort of 3 things to rather just a standard prom that you'll put in what are 2 or 3 thing well, 3 things that will help the output to be a lot stronger.

Benjamin Gorman [00:14:13]:

Yeah. Well, I'll start by saying, like, as we said before, you know, using GPT to outline, and to do a little bit of research is great. Like, that can really, really speed you up because you can build a bunch of outlines. Yeah. But what I also see is people kind of generating tons of outlines and not really editing them. You you can get a really great initial Outline from Chat GPT, and then go in, refine the sections, add a couple more sections. And then you have a quick outline, takes you much Less time than it would, but it's still tailored to your readers and to your market. So that's a good way to start.

Benjamin Gorman [00:14:48]:

Once you have your outline, second tip, I would say, Don't bulk generate, and even don't generate entire articles at a time. Generate section by section. So The shorter, or the less content you generate at a time, the more control you're gonna be able to have over that output. You're gonna be able to give detailed instructions for each subheading and each, and the content below, so that you're going to get more of what you want and after the less editing at the end. So does it take a little bit more time to generate the article? Yes. But if you're doing it right, you need to edit it anyway, so this is gonna save you time in the end. Yeah. And, finally, as the last tip, I would say to, reuse your prompts.

Benjamin Gorman [00:15:36]:

If you're creating content, for 1 website, you're probably gonna want to achieve some uniformity in your content, uniformity of tone, Uniformity of style or uniformity also of a look and readability. So you're gonna be able to reuse your prompts pretty easily. You need to put your content best practices into your prompts, things such as, you know, word count, tone. You can say for example, in the introduction, I like to say, you know, ask a rhetorical question. You can tell it, oh, you know, use a joke in the lead in. In the body, you can say, give a personal experience, something like that, you know, use metaphor. So you can build these things into your prompts and then just reuse them, kind of plug and place the topics or the products, and then Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:16:28]:

Because you have to edit your output anyway, this can help you to to generate more quickly, Still get those good content practices in there. Yeah. And, also, it makes the process, teachable. You can delegate it because your writers and editors don't need to create their own prompts, every time.

Richard Hill [00:16:48]:

I think there's a lot of great things there, but I think that sort of Couple of things you said there around adding that tone, adding, like, maybe a rhetorical question, and it's giving him that human element to it. Sounds like it has been written more lightly by somebody that knows more about the the industry, the topic, for example. But that humanizing piece, I I think quite often they're just the tones are off. You know, when you look at a you look at a site and then you then that's, you know, maybe established and, you know, you can see that they're this sort of brand, you know, whether that's, you know, a serious outdoor camping brand, for example, for the serious adventurer, you know, and then you go to their blog and there's for maybe more of a comical feel. This is just an example, more of a comical feel. I think, well, that doesn't really match the tone and the brand that they're trying to, attract or they are. You know, when you go to the videos of the guy that runs the business on socials, you think, well, that's not really So quite often, that's where they've missed a trick around the tone. So adding that tone, adding and and they've obviously not checked to it because it's not it's not sounding like that, and it sounded like some robot potentially.

Richard Hill [00:17:52]:

So that tone piece, I think, is, you know, does quite often get get missed. You got anything else to add on the tone to things.

Benjamin Gorman [00:17:58]:

You know, I just say tone is trust. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if what I see is, you know, people's websites, they have, You know, especially people who are working with multiple writers, their articles have a different tone, and that's not that's not a good thing. Also, if you're if as you said, if you have a serious kind of business and your tone is kind of humorous, that's not gonna appeal to your audience that that well. Right? Or if you're selling medical devices and you're using, like, humor in your content, like, okay. Humor is great usually, but not always. Right? Nope.

Benjamin Gorman [00:18:32]:

And so, yeah, finding the right tone to match your target, that is what elicits trust from them. Yeah. Yeah. And with ChatGPT, you know, you can you can get it to Achieve a certain tone, as close to the tone that you want as possible, which is great. But you still need to go in and and tweak it to to

Richard Hill [00:18:55]:

give it that humanness and to that connection to your to your audience. Yeah. All sorts bouncing through my head there. I think, you You know, the guys that are listed in, you know, they think, right. Okay. We're gonna embrace AI, you know, and they're they're gonna start playing with, let's say, various prompts, make it simple. Various prompts are adding in some other things you've said. But I know, you know, specifically, you've trained different teams, you know, and you've just launched a course not so long ago, you know, on sort of training teams and and, and and on AI and editing.

Richard Hill [00:19:25]:

You know, maybe tell us a little bit about that, to the course and also any sort of tips on our listeners training their teams. Yeah. Sure. So, the course is called the AI copy editing crash course.

Benjamin Gorman [00:19:41]:

You can read all about it at aicopycrashcourse.com. And, essentially, it's a step by step process, to learn AI copy editing. So I take you through from a blank document to a completed article in Yeah. A certain number of steps, and then And I give a full over the shoulder demonstration of, what it looks like to write an article and edit an article with ChatGpt. So that's the course in a nutshell. In terms of training teams, the course helps with that because as I said before, The prompts are reusable. The steps are reusable. It's a very teachable process.

Benjamin Gorman [00:20:21]:

And the predictability of the AI makes it great for, delegation, and for teaching a team. If you're Going to use AI on your team, what I would recommend doing is, creating that process, create Process, how do you generate an out outline? Okay? And then make a document for that. Teach that. Yeah. Next. Teach them. Yeah. This Article style, these are the prompts that you use.

Benjamin Gorman [00:20:51]:

1, 2, 3, 4. And then you can even have you know, Depending on your process, you can have somebody like a VA do that, you know, because if your prompts are are more static, Then you don't really need somebody who's a professional to do that. Then you send that raw output to an editor, and that editor, who is a professional, is gonna be able to fix that. So you can there are a number of ways that you can do it, but I think AI does give a lot of opportunities for, for, Building processes, repeatable processes, streamlining, your processes. Well, this is how we sort of met really because because, Ben was doing

Richard Hill [00:21:33]:

a talk at an SEO conference, in Vietnam, and, I was in the audience. And that's how this is how we met. And, really, Ben. So it caught my eye, I feel like, when he talked about, SOPs and writing, you know, training and writing SOPs and the different as we're talking about different Styles of blog or different styles of content having an SOP, standard operating procedure, for that. And that's something, as a business, we're very big on here at the agencies, but it's something we talk about quite a lot on other podcasts that we've done over the years. Having you know, when you think about your ecom store, You know, there's there's ways to do things when you've got new people coming in. It's a lot easier to to show people and train people a certain way if you've got that documented, You know? And if you're creating a lot of content, if you've got those SOPs documented, and as Ben said there, you know, you you're building out an SOP or you're you're Modeling some of Ben's SOPs from his course, where you're then able to then teach somebody very quickly the way that we do it. You know? To SAPs.

Richard Hill [00:22:30]:

You know? Something that I think if you're listening, you know, and you're on your journey with your ecom store and you're looking to do that, you know, you're you're doing $1,000,000, but you wanna get to 10,000,000, you're not gonna get to 10,000,000 without standard operating procedures in certain areas of the business in you know, that's where, you know, in terms of our business to sort of plateaus that we've hit over the years, if you like, you know, you know, where we'll where we've hit the 7 figures, etcetera. You know, there's the difference between, you know, 1 man band or a 5 man band. But when you've got 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 employees, you can't expect them just to sort of figure stuff out. Gotta be documented how you want it. Hazard you're just leaving yourself open for a lot of error. So yeah. SOPs. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:23:08]:

That's how we met.

Benjamin Gorman [00:23:10]:

Yeah. Yeah. And it's so important. And the more the more you grow, the more you need it, because it becomes harder as you grow, as you get more employees, especially more content creators. Because content is creative, it's hard to, control that process and to make it uniform to streamline it. As you grow and you get more writers, you get more editors, it becomes Harder to herd the creativity into a uniform channel.

Richard Hill [00:23:36]:

It's something that everyone needs to think about if they want to pass those plateaus, if they wanna break through those bottlenecks. Yeah. Yeah. No. I completely get it. So For those that say just wanna get better at writing that are listening, you know, that's that's me. You bet. That's me.

Richard Hill [00:23:51]:

Although, I'll probably stick to my numbers to be fair, but, You know, I'll get somebody a lot smarter than me on the on the writing side. But for those that have a genuine interest in But there may be you know, they just want some guidance on how to become a better writer and a better content writer for their business or for in their role. What advice would you give to them, you know, some steps so they could take to just improve their writing, you know, when it comes to their ecom store? Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:24:18]:

I mean, Of course, practice makes perfect, but at the core of of copywriting or content writing is communicating. So I always say stop writing. Stop writing this content that seems like everything else on the Internet. Stop imitating. You know? Start communicating because you're not trying to create something just like, you know, Wirecutter. You know? You're not trying to create something just like the other ecom store who's making a lot of money because your target might be different from them. So you need to every time you're writing, know that there's Somebody on the other side of that screen who's reading. Right? And that you're not actually writing about stats and figures And, specs and things like that.

Benjamin Gorman [00:25:05]:

You're actually talking to somebody, and you're you're making an argument. You're convincing them of something.

Richard Hill [00:25:10]:

Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:25:12]:

And some people find it very difficult to write because they don't know their target. So good Good content writing starts with impeccable market research and target research. Same thing, you know, when you meet somebody for the 1st time, you have difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate with them to talk to them because you don't really know them. Right? You don't know what their interests are. It's hard to kind of strike up a conversation. When you know somebody really well, The conversation flows really easily. You have lots of stuff to talk about, and you can also, you know, maybe convince them to help you move because you know their motivations and things like that.

Benjamin Gorman [00:25:44]:

So it's the same thing when you know your target that the the content flows much more easily because you understand them. You understand their motivations, Their fears, their needs, and so when you're thinking about writing about, say, a product, you know exactly what they would use this product for. You know Problems that this product would solve. And so I would say, you know, that's where you start when you wanna become a better writer as you start with Research, understanding your target, and focusing on that communicative aspect. Other things on such yeah. Like Tone, like, readability, these are things that you can tweak over time.

Richard Hill [00:26:20]:

Yeah. When you think about just having a genuine one on 1 conversation with an individual And there's a you know, there's quite, you know, deep sort of you're listening and you're, you know, just sort of half listening and not really answering. You have a you have a good conversation with somebody, you know about it, don't you? Oh, that was really this guy was really I really like this guy. I really I met this guy, and he was really good at this. And, you know, we had a real good connection. But then when you transpose that to writing, you know, it's a similar thing. Like, it's I think it's what you're saying is, you know, you're you're you've got a sort of picture and you've done the research on this individual that, you know, you don't you understand them. You're listening, and you've researched you've you've researched that individual, you know, and that, to, Persona, I guess, is what we're talking about.

Richard Hill [00:27:04]:

You know, certainly that, you know, if we're going back to, a previous episode I did earlier today, we were talking about, an industry I over at well, the company knows very well, which is sort of really hardcore outdoor adventures. Now when they're buying their equipment, they're not looking for, You know, a cheap coat a cheap rain jacket. They wanna know the insides out of that rain jacket, the detail. You know, is it good for summer? Is it good for winter as well? Is it how long is it gonna last? Is it to 2 2 2 layer, 3 layer, 4 layer. You know, what pockets? What you know, like but so when you explain it, they actually do want the detail. They want the real to. Well, if you just say this is a black coat, it's extra large, it's in black. It's like, well, no no hardcore adventure is gonna buy that jacket, that coat, You know, without the detail, the detail, the deed you know, the real technical element of that description or a deep understanding of, well, this is great for certain types of mountaineering as opposed to just going camping with the kids.

Richard Hill [00:27:57]:

That's a whole different sort of, understanding. Yeah. So spending that time to understand the those people. Yeah. Exactly. You know? And and that's that's a

Benjamin Gorman [00:28:06]:

a type of target market that really wants that information. Whereas if that if that rain jacket is being sold by, you know, A shop on the high street or, you know, H and M or something, or even a luxury brand, then what it's it's gonna be much more about, the style, much more about the prestige than whether the jacket is gonna help you survive, you know, oh, a 7 day hike. Yeah. And and so you could use that strategy saying, oh, it's really high quality. It's got lots of pockets. You know? It's it's gonna keep you dry, and that that target Who's wearing it to their office every day and wants to look Yeah. Really nice, they're gonna say, I don't I don't want this one. I'm gonna buy this other one that says I'm gonna you know, it's gonna make me look look successful.

Richard Hill [00:28:52]:

And when you think about that as well, it's like That's where the value comes from in terms of a good copywriter and a good writer because you are able to then yeah. You're selling ultimately or trying you're helping to sell. It depends where you are in the our journey. But ultimately, our listeners are trying to sell at some point, really, a a physical item via their store. It was just a very basic overview Or it's extremely detailed, extremely honed to that tone and that persona of your buyer. You're gonna sell more stuff. You know? Yeah. Quite that simple.

Benjamin Gorman [00:29:23]:

And a yeah. A good copywriter can take that that good research and turn it into something that's Yeah. Really, really converts. And, you know, to bring it full circle, that Comes back to ChatGPT. Right? Like, communicating that information to your copywriter is how they do a good job. Right? If you don't communicate The right information to your copywriter, then they can't do a good job, and and the same way that you're kind of prompting the the AI. If you're giving the AI Good information, not target research. Don't give target research to the AI, but, good information about exactly what you want it to do, then you're gonna get, as well, much better output.

Benjamin Gorman [00:30:01]:

Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:30:02]:

So I think it would be good if you could step through maybe a project that you worked on, around content, you know, what you did. You know? I know sometimes it can be difficult to say company names and things like that because of, you know, various NDAs and whatnot. But Yeah. Then when we think about, you know, a a store maybe at a company that you worked on in the last maybe 6 months or so, the sort of, sort of strategy and implementation and result you you got from a from a content strategy been implemented. Yeah. Actually, I can give you an example. I worked for,

Benjamin Gorman [00:30:33]:

I did a crowdfunding campaign, a while back for a rain jacket, actually, like, That's interestingly enough. And so crowdfunding is very interesting in the especially in the world of, you know, of of sales and ecom and direct marketing because You you design the campaign, you create the content, and then you see kind of immediately, you can see the sales coming in. Yeah. You can see The effectiveness of the copy because the copy is that that page that crowdfunding page is the gateway. Right? You can drive traffic there, but that's That's the thing that converts right there. And so you can you can see the effectiveness. You can tweak things. You can watch it go up or down, and And it's only 30 or 60 days, so it's it's interesting.

Benjamin Gorman [00:31:22]:

But we designed a page for this, You know, year round rain jacket, and we built it around our for our target, the target that the persona that we'd built. And it's kind of hard because you don't have a lot of opportunity to do target research or really specific target research Before you launch the product, you can put your feelers out and, start to generate hype, But, really, it's crunch time just on launch day. So we built a a persona. We and we we built a a page Based around, what we thought would be the the best influencing Content which involves on Kickstarter and on crowdfunding is always a combination of the benefits of the product and also novelty. Right? Because people want people feel like, you know, they're a kid on Christmas. When they go on to Kickstarter, they're getting something new. They're getting something special. Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:32:22]:

And, yeah, these are the sorts of things that you kind of like, okay. What's special about this target, or this Kickstarter audience? You know? So We built the page. I also work on the scripts I work on consulting for, the flow of the page, how the images look, You know, how everything feels, readability, things like that. And we launched and we made over $3,000,000 on this product. It was one of the highest, funded best funded projects of the year on a You

Richard Hill [00:32:54]:

you are you on a percent do you get a percentage of stat of sales?

Benjamin Gorman [00:32:57]:

Unfortunately, no. Unfortunately, I don't. Yeah. Oh, Ben,

Richard Hill [00:32:59]:

you missed a trick.

Benjamin Gorman [00:33:00]:

I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't I wouldn't be here right now if I got a percentage

Richard Hill [00:33:04]:

Where what's happening? Where's Ben going? I'd be, yeah, I'd be on the

Benjamin Gorman [00:33:07]:

on the beach right now. But yeah. No. But, yeah, this was a company that Worked for for a while and, unfortunately, no percentage, but, yeah, but it was a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun to have Yeah. To do that type of content, to learn about that, Really, really helps you especially in ecom writing. I do I write for Shopify stores and things like that now. And Yeah.

Benjamin Gorman [00:33:25]:

In terms of understanding the way that that, people react to to new products and, how to communicate with them. It's fun. It's

Richard Hill [00:33:34]:

You know, that's because that's quite a tough, you know, Kickstarter. I don't I don't think you've actually ever bought anything from there, but I've spent hours look oh, look at this new thing, and you just get lost in it's like Facebook Marketplace. You you go there for 5 minutes, and then 3 hours later, you're you're still on there looking at some random gadget for your desk that you didn't ever thought of. But, yeah, there's some there's such cool stuff on there, isn't there? Uh-huh. But, obviously, it's a tough it's a tough gig. You know? Not not every Kickstarter campaign, obviously, nowhere near. You know, is is anywhere near that successful or even hits there? Because they set a target down there, and you have to hit the target to get funded or something. Is that is that Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:34:07]:

Yeah. Yeah. It's not I'm not that familiar with it, but I know a few sort of clients and friends have done various Kickstars over the years. And a a good friend of mine, an old friend of mine, ran a, a few on there for a, nutrition sort of brand. I know he raised, you know, several. It wasn't that in the old level, but it was in I think you raised that half a 1000000 over a couple, which was quite u a UK, which was good. But, Again, I know he's a very good copywriter and a very he's a very creative mind, very smart guy. Obviously, you've got to stand out on that platform like any.

Richard Hill [00:34:39]:

Yeah. You're an ecom store. And let's be realistic. You can launch an ecom store in a morning that's gonna look half decent. You know? That's the reality of the tech that's out there. You know, it's gonna look pretty good. Yeah. But, obviously, content and SEO, for example, they they go hand in hand.

Richard Hill [00:34:56]:

You can't Really do SEO. I mean, that's a bit controversial, but on an ecom store, you know, yeah, there's a lot of technical stuff stuff you can do. There's a lot of stuff at the front end, but then ultimately, you've got thousands of thousands of SKUs, usually 10,000, 50,000, or even 500. That's a lot of copy that you can make better than anybody else's. You know, a lot of time, a lot of re a lot of time can be spent on that copy, you know, after us between in the 1 store that's got, you know, really good, great on tone, you know, on message copy as opposed to the other 95% of people that have just copied it from the, you know, the manufacturer to a catalog or the the CSV import file. You know, the difference is it's night and day in terms of the way it's gonna read to the user, which is firstly the most important thing, but then that transcends into the SEO benefit. When Google's having to decide who to rank And you've got 9 sites that are identical, or you've got the site that spend the time on the copy that's usually where. Do Do you have, like, a formula in terms of, So let's say, you know, you've got make the maths easy.

Richard Hill [00:36:00]:

You've got a 1,000 SKUs on the website, a 1,000 products. Uh-huh. Obviously, to sit and write a 1,000 product descriptions. That's that's a task. That's that's some that's some brain ache right there. Of course, That May Be Done. Have you got, like, a do you do you usually start with the top 2% in terms of, like, turnover? Or how do you how do you sort of, Start with sort of big catalogs of products.

Benjamin Gorman [00:36:22]:

Yeah. I mean, you you wanna go with your If if you're converting already, you wanna take the pages that are converting the best, right, obviously, and then you wanna hone that content, because, really, it's It's it's a numbers game. Right? So, you know, as you're saying, no good content versus, you know, kind of below effort content. You know, if your SEO is really good that, You know, you're gonna convert a certain percentage just because of visibility, but if you have good content, then you can convert much, much more. Could be the difference between 5 figures and 7 figures. But if you're already converting, then you know, you know, Which of your products already have, have the highest demand? And then put your effort into those that have the highest demand so that you can convert better. But, Really, I mean, you should be working your way through your catalog to try to optimize all of your product descriptions. You know, you want.

Benjamin Gorman [00:37:16]:

Because as soon as you start doing it, as soon as you hire a copywriter, like, all of a sudden, you know, you do your top 10 in, let's say, 2 weeks, your top 10 and your And then you're, you know, 11 to 20 are are now gonna be really different. They're gonna have a different tone. Right? They're gonna have a different readability, different feel. So, you you certainly want to to develop a good relationship with a good copywriter, Aim for a long term relationship because that copywriter is gonna be the voice of your website. And then start with your highest converting products And then move down the list. If you're not converting, if you're you have a new website, you know, then really Market research, product research, target research, that's gonna identify, and even, you know, keyword research is gonna identify those those products that you should prioritize.

Richard Hill [00:38:07]:

Yeah. Yeah. No. Love it. So last couple of questions, Ben. So with sort of crystal ball time, really, you know, we sat here in 12 months' time. You know, what should our listeners be thinking about, and what do you believe the focus should be in the on the in the next 12 months? To ecommerce store owner, marketeer that is looking to, you know, get a real head start this next 12 months. What should they be focusing on?

Benjamin Gorman [00:38:34]:

Well, I would say, of course, you know, in light of this recent Google update, you know, what the best thing you can do for your content is to be Genuine and be genuinely helpful. Right? So what does that mean in terms of AI? It means that You need to combine the efficiency and speed of AI with, Good content practices, human edits, and that real experience that connects with your target. Right? I think that the people that are gonna succeed you know, there's a lot of people who are just like, oh, I'm waiting for GPT 5, and GPT 5 will probably come soon. But GPT 5 It's essentially gonna be the same tool as GPT 4 and GPT 3.5. Again, it's gonna rely on the quality of the input to produce quality output. And so I think people now who are like, hey. You know, I want to invest in good content. I want to learn how to create content with AI and also, you know, hire someone or learn myself.

Benjamin Gorman [00:39:38]:

Best copywriting practices, Develop a copy editing AI copy editing strategy, develop these SOPs, so that I can speed up my production and And increase my quality. And I wanna also stress, you know, that AI does not have a concept of experience, and it does not have a concept of your target markets experience, which is and that's what Google wants. We know. E e a t, expertise, experience. That's That's the same thing, really. Right? Yeah. And I believe, you know, expertise is your expertise, the writer's expertise, but experience is connecting with the reader's experience. Right? That's communication.

Benjamin Gorman [00:40:18]:

Chat GPT cannot do that. So Yeah. I think, you know, using leveraging Chat GPT for the speed, AI for the speed for, you know, planning for research, for outlining. And then, you know, before it's too late, building these processes into your business, where you're combining that the human element with the efficiency of AI. That's gonna be how, you know, you kinda get to the next level. Because then the next GPTs that release, you don't have to refine those processes. It's just gonna

Richard Hill [00:40:48]:

get better. You just say, oh, now we're using a better model. Yeah. You're getting better outlines. You're getting better outputs. Yeah. Well, thank you for that, Ben. I'm allowed to finish every episode with a book recommendation.

Richard Hill [00:40:58]:

Do you have a book to recommend to our listeners and viewers?

Benjamin Gorman [00:41:00]:

Yes. I do. You know, I'd personally, I don't I don't read a lot of, like, content marketing books, but, one book that I really liked that kind of I think about a lot even when I'm working is, called The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I don't know if you've heard of it. No. No. It's an award winner. It's about the Vietnam War, but it's kind of like a a semi fictional book, because the author was drafted, into into the war, and it kind of questions the line between, like, Truth and and fiction, fact and fiction.

Benjamin Gorman [00:41:39]:

And it it asks the question, like, what's more important, the words on the page or the response that those words evoke from the reader. And I think that that's a really interesting thing to think about in terms of fiction, but also in terms of marketing, and content marketing. Mhmm. It's also, like, Just a really, a really, hard hitting book, emotional, you know, and, I would highly recommend it.

Richard Hill [00:42:14]:

That does sound great. We'll get that added, to the show notes, and we'll get that ordered for, for ourselves as well. But thank you, Ben, for coming on. Thank you for that. To those that wanna find out no worries at all. Those that wanna find out more about you, more about the course, what's the best way

Benjamin Gorman [00:42:27]:

to do that? Alright. Yeah. You can you can find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to shoot me a message. I'm you know, I do consultations, and maybe at some point in the future, I'll be open to, take on copywriting clients. If you're interesting, interested in my course, it's, the website is aicopycrashcourse.com. And I've also got a promotion running, to celebrate, Chiang Mai SEO Conference, which we will both be attending in couple of weeks. So if you go to aicopy crash course.com, and purchase the course, use the code c m s e o, for 20% off.

Benjamin Gorman [00:43:12]:

The course is you know, it's not a massive course. It's if you listen to it on 1.5 times, you can Watch it over your lunch break, and start implementing the processes immediately, so there's a lot

Richard Hill [00:43:25]:

of, actionable stuff in there. And it's CMSEO for the 20% discount there. Mhmm. Yeah. Well, I will see you in a couple of weeks. Definitely. So if you're if you're listening to this episode and it's Just gone live. I will be probably sharing a beer with Ben in Chiang Mai talking for his coffee.

Richard Hill [00:43:41]:

So thank you. You're gonna be sharing it, Ben? Yep. Thank you again. Yep. I'll see

Benjamin Gorman [00:43:46]:

you soon. Okay. Yep. Thank

Richard Hill [00:43:53]:

If you enjoyed this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast. You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Have a fantastic day, and I'll see you on the next one.