Listen to the Content Creation Made Easy Podcast

The Perils & Power of AI-Generated Content with Cheryl Rerick

content creation made easy

I’m gonna be honest with you – I know AI is here and I know its power is undisputable.

And certainly it can make our life easier.

But I’ve only dipped my toe into using AI tools (especially ChatGPT) because I have concerns about it:

I don’t want it to become a crutch. And I want my content to be MINE. To sound like ME. To be in my VOICE.

Being real is a huge part of who I am and it’s a giant part of my Content Creation Made Easy brand.

But I’ve been wondering…

How much faith to put in AI?
How to use it in a way that feels GOOD to me?

I have a lot to learn about using AI tools like ChatGPT more effectively, so I invited automation engineer and email expert Cheryl Rerick about the ins & outs of using this tech to our benefit…

Without wasting time, getting lost in it, or losing ourselves!

And Cheryl DELIVERED THE GOODS!

She was incredibly generous with her insights & information, not only emphasizing how to use AI in a conversational manner,

How to use it to express our thought leadership….

But Cheryl ALSO warns against putting too much faith in prompted, dump-style responses and course writing through AI tech.

You’ll receive seriously usable tips – like “finish this episode, open ChatGPT, and get some WOWZA results - on how to use AI tools effectively, efficiently, and in integrity.

Cheryl's got a Funnel Content Planning Tool - a simple planning framework that you can use for Every.Single.Funnel. to stay out of overwhelm and overload!

https://cherylrerick.com/funnel-content-planning-tool-signup/

Find her here: https://cherylrerick.com/ and here https://www.instagram.com/cherylrerickmarketing/

SUBSCRIBE TO THE CONTENT MADE EASY PODCAST ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLATFORM

Apple | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart Radio

 


Watch The Full Video! 

 

Full Transcript

Jen Liddy

Hello, hello!

Welcome to today's episode of Content Creation Made Easy. I'm your host, Jen Liddy, and today I'm talking about AI, artificial intelligence, which has been around for a while, but it's really come into the mainstream hard in 2023.

You might have an opinion about using it, you might have an opinion about not using it, you might feel strongly, or you might be on the fence. Today, I have an expert with me to help us unpack this and just wrap our heads around it and understand how we can learn it. I have Cheryl Rerick with me, and she owns Cheryl Rerick Marketing.

Cheryl is an anti-hustle business strategist, which is why I really connected with her because I don't want to work harder. I don't want to do more – I'm totally over it. Her expertise is an automation engineer, she's an email deliverability expert. How many of your emails go to spam or don't get opened? She's a funnel whiz, basically, who brings the magic of automation to people who create courses and to coaches, so basically, you can live your best life.

I love this line to get away from the tyranny of the tiny screen. Can I do that with my 16-year-old? She is the creator of the automate and chill method, which I love that it's trademarked. That's awesome, and you're going to find out that Cheryl is obsessed with designing and automating the customer journey in a flawless way and freeing up your time every single week. We had the most epic back and forth and back and forth to get this podcast recorded, so whoo!

Cheryl Rerick

We sure did.

I'm so happy to finally be here chatting with you, Jen.

Jen Liddy

The funniest part is that when I first tapped you to talk about this on the Content Creation Made Easy podcast, you were like, oh, I'm so excited to talk to you – I'm going to get my head all around it, and then life happened. You just told me before we got on, you're like, and it's all changed since we last talked.

Cheryl Rerick

Changes daily, doesn't it, Jen?

Jen Liddy

I get the sense that automation is your jam, making things work on their own is your jam.

First, before you get started talking about AI, would you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are doing what you do?

Cheryl Rerick

I've always been a bit of a nerd, to be fair.

I grew up, I think it was helpful, and being born in the 80s and growing up through the 90s, the dawn of technology as far as computers and internet goes. I grew up in a family that had a computer store, and I just always liked that type of thing, but I'm also creative.

I've been around marketing and technology my whole life, but as a creative and now in the online course creator and coaches space, I find that I'm really good at bridging that gap because there is a gap. Usually, people are one or the other.

There are a few of us out here that are both, and we need to help the creators. Use your power to it and use technology. When you introduce me to using automation, and you agree to do less – we're just doing the most all the time as online business owners. We live in such a time where we have tools that can help with that and just bridging the gap.

Jen Liddy

I'm going to actually dive in and say, I think there are pluses and minuses.

Obviously, I've seen online, lots of my friends and colleagues have gone, I will say, all in on using AI. I am not that interested in it – my assistants will use it when they need to use it for whatever they're doing on the back end of my marketing machine, but I like to write my own copy, and I love writing, so I don't really love using AI.

That said, it's definitely helped me many times get out of a jam or think of a different way to say something. I have no skin in the game, I'm just really interested to learn your thoughts on it and what my audience can learn from you either in terms of thinking or mindset or actually using this to make their life easier.

Cheryl Rerick

For mindset, mindset is huge – you just nailed it.

I think cultivating a curious mindset is what's necessary in these times because even for people like me who love technology, it's overwhelming, things are moving fast. There are a lot of days where I don't even want to know today what's happening with this. Not another change, I cannot keep up.

I imagine people who are not tech-inclined feel even more so. Just cultivating curiosity and playing around with it is probably my biggest tip when it comes to that, so just try it out. It's happening whether we're ready or whether we want it to.

We might as well just be part of the conversation and be curious and playful with it. I agree, I also enjoy writing and making my own content copy. I don't often use AI for that reason, but I do love it. I'm just preparing for a launch of my own, and I do love it. When I'm stuck, it's really great, it's so much better than a thesaurus. When I'm stuck, and I'm like, this word is flat, this is not driving home the point, and I cannot figure it out.

ChatGPT is my trusty sidekick for those scenarios, and oftentimes, I don't necessarily use the output, but it really gets you past your block and just considering other things. Recently I had put in, give me a word that is more... I'm looking for a word that means critical or important, and I want it to be not so aggressive sounding as critical because I don't want to be gaslighting on my sales page. It's critical, but will you be successful without this? Well, yeah. Is this a better way? Sure. I'm not about to be like, bro, marketing style.

So it gave me something that's not as strong as critical but is a little bit stronger than the word essential. We went through 10 or 12 options, and I'm like, no, those still feel too strong. What else do you have?

I was able to move past that block I was having and also have almost like a thought partner conversation. It was after midnight, and none of my thought partners were available to have a conversation about one word on my sales page.

Jen Liddy

I have those moments, and I'm sure everybody listening does too, when you're just tapped out, you've done the good work, you know you need to create this thing, you know where you're headed, but you're just like, I can't think creatively anymore. This actually just happened to me. I mean, I've written so much copy, I've helped people, and it was so much content. 

I was wondering how you could say something like, so you can, a little bit better, because I wanted people to be able to say, you get this, so you can have this. You get this, so you can, like to really unpack it for them, and so I just asked ChatGPT, I'm like, what's a better way to say? So you came up with 12 really good options, and I have to say I was grateful for it.

Cheryl Rerick

In those moments, it's really good.

Even for those of us who are not about to start using it to write all our words. It's a great editing partner. It's a great conversation partner, thought partner, elaborator, source, transcriber, summarizing data, like putting in your podcast transcripts and, say, pulling out the themes, or things like that that are things that would take us too much time.

They're not our area of expertise, but it's helpful to have a little staff member on the side, a little intern.

Jen Liddy

I'm going to go a little bit to the side here and talk about my 16-year-old who regularly uses AI for literally as much as possible in his life. He has figured out a workaround for everything, not just him, but all of his friends, and so I don't know if you know, but I used to teach high school and college English and Writing.

I say to him all the time, I'm like, if I were teaching today, I would lose my mind because they work so much harder on the workarounds than actually doing the work. He and I have this battle of philosophies about this. I'm going to preface everything I'm about to say by saying I'm 53, I'm Gen X, and I was brought up to believe that you do the work yourself. Believe me, I've been in therapy about this for a long time, and I'm still working on it, but I think that some people feel like, is this cheating?

I'm curious what your thoughts are about that.

Cheryl Rerick

Well, I'm a mom of three kids, and so I've thought that.

As a marketer and an online business owner, a course creator and a marketer, I'm like, hallelujah, this is the great equalizer now because we now have access to things. Like I said, an editor and stuff, I can't afford an editor or data analyzer, but the big companies can.

As a marketer, I think it's so cool, and I'm very curious, but then as a mother, I'm like, oh, my goodness, what have we done? So far, my kids are young – they're 8, 10, and 12, and they're largely uninterested in using it to write because they're excited to get their ideas out. As teenagers, we'll have to see because, as teenagers, I remember when I was a teenager, you want to do the least amount possible, right? You want to go hang out with your friends.

I also think a lot about university and college – I heard someone say, I wish I could credit the person who said it. It was on a podcast talking about AI and talking about...I don't want to butcher their quote, but they were talking about the Industrial Revolution is how we used technology to do the work of our bodies, and this is a new revolution where we use technology to help with the work of our minds.

That really hit me, and I was like, wow, I need to chew on that. I don't really know how I feel about that or what that actually means. It really stood out to me as something really interesting, and that also reminded me I saw a Reel or something on Instagram recently. It was a clip from 1994, and it was a news show, and 1994, for your listeners who are young, is basically when the internet started.

These newscasters were having a conversation, and they had to read out to email the studio, and they're reading the email address out, and there's an @ symbol, and they're like, what is that?

They didn't have a clue.

Jen Liddy

That's the Today Show – I remember because I've seen that and it's so funny. They were like, what's this @ sign? What does any of this mean?

Cheryl Rerick

Someone shouts from the back that it's for the internet, and they're what's the internet, and they're like, it's a room of computers. If you think that wasn't that long ago, I mean, for people our age, that doesn't feel that long ago, 1994, what we didn't know is how different life is today.

There was good and there's bad that came from it, surely, but at the same time, I can't remember a time before I could order my coffee on my phone. I think that we've lived through that cusp before, and we're on the second one now, and I think it's going to be similar. 

They'll be good, they'll be bad, we'll adapt, and life will look different. I'm very curious and a little bit excited, a little bit reserved to see in what ways that changes because I think for us, it's hard to let go of the things we like about the way things are now.

Jen Liddy

Oh, yeah.

It's easy to judge people who are using it, especially when they're 16 years old.

Cheryl Rerick

It's a skill they're going to need in a different way.

Jen Liddy

I wanted to talk about that because you mentioned, before we started chatting, the discrepancy between the positives and the negatives and the good stuff and the bad stuff.

Whether we're resistant to it or we embrace it, and we're just new to it, can you break down some of the positives and negatives?

Cheryl Rerick

There's a whole conversation to be had about the positives and negatives about, like, ethical stuff – I don't know if I'm qualified to dive deep into that. People think it's plagiarism like there are so many conversations happening with really smart people that I'm not educated enough to comment on. I know with ChatGPT, for example, though, it's predictive of text. That's what it is, it's a text predictor based on data, and it knows the words that you're putting in a row, and it predicts what you might want it to come next.

It does create original content, but it is trained on data from somewhere. Human speech and the written word from the internet that it's been trained on. Ethics aside, when it comes to content, because what's important to your listeners, we have so much content to create. Why is some of the output great and some bad? Or some people say, oh, my gosh, ChatGPT brought me the best thing, and other people are like, literally garbage out of that thing.

I think some people, especially when you're new to it, have an overly simplistic view of what it is and how it works, and so we just tap, tap, tap, and then blog post ideas on topics for an audience and see what happens. The output is not very good, obviously, and it's because it has no context, so the key to working with AI is giving it context. 

I find it helpful for myself, I think of it as my newest hire, my newest junior copywriter. Give it a name, and it's fun to talk to a person.

Jen Liddy

What is your name?

Cheryl Rerick

It changes depending on my mood or which chat, you can start a new chat for new topics, but you can give it a job, too.

You can say you are Jane, a marketing coordinator, and you can give it a role, and it'll take the role, which is pretty fine. Thinking of it as a human helps because especially there are a lot of AI tools, and they all use a lot of the same technology underneath the hood through open AI.

Talking specifically about ChatGPT, I know that it's the most accessible because the basic version is free right now, and most people can access it – it's a conversational tool. It's designed to speak like a person, and it works better when it gets input that's conversational as well, and so it feels a little uncomfortable or weird when you're not used to talking to your computer and typing a conversation.

Do think of it as a person, a smart genius-level photographic memory type of intern, but they're Gen Z, and they happen to be young and inexperienced. They don't know you or your company or your content or your audience or your business, or your offers.

They don't know any of that, but they know a ton, they're genius otherwise, so what they lack is your experience and then your context.

You're not going to go to take a genius-level Gen Z intern and hand over your business. You're going to take them under your wing, you're going to work with them and train them, and you're going to use their gifts, but you need to coach them. You need to help them get to giving you the output. They're capable, but you need to work with them to get there, and it's the same thing here.

Jen Liddy

That's super helpful.

The difference between positive output, negative output, or meh output, good output versus useless output, is all in how you treat it and how you approach it, and what you feed it.

Cheryl Rerick

Yes, input will equal your output.

People say that, but what does that really mean? What does that mean in practice? It means to work with it. You don't just ask a question, look at the response and go, oh, well, that sucked. Change your question – they need coaching, editing, prompting, iterating. You work back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Quick sidebar, quick tip, in case somebody out there needs to hear it, is that when you're working in ChatGPT, you know you can start a new chat.

Each time you start a new chat, you want to do that for a new topic because you're training it within the chat with all of your input. If you talk about an Instagram post about email marketing, and now you're asking it for recipes, start a new chat and keep them because it's remembering throughout the chat and it's learning what you want throughout the chat. That's a tip that I think everyone needs to know and understand, and you can go back to old ones and go back to them, but it's important to keep them in their little container silo.

Jen Liddy

Yeah, I love that.

That makes sense because that keeps them all on the side, and you can go back and see them later. This is incredibly helpful, although to you, probably because you work with this and you've been diving in, it's probably second nature to you or like breathing to you, but for somebody, I haven't played much with it.

I've been a little resistant, but honestly, because I really love writing, so to me, it's like, I don't want to learn a new thing, but I'm hearing from you, it's just not that hard.

Cheryl Rerick

Well, it takes practice.

I would say it takes practice because you're assuming that I would use it all the time. I don't because I'm like you, I enjoy writing, and I often forget I even have it. I leave it open on my tab, and I'll completely forget about it because it's not a habit yet. But that reminds me of, like – I'm just aging myself throughout this whole interview. 

When touch screen iPhones came out, touch screen iPhones came out, I didn't use them to their capability just because my brain wasn't ready for it, I didn't understand how it worked, but I gave it to my two-year-old toddler, and they could do anything on it. You know what I mean?

I feel like it's the same as your 16-year-old can run with AI in a way that you and I forget to even use it. We don't even consider a way that you're like, oh, you can use it for that? Well, of course, you can, but we didn't think of it, and so it is a bit of a practice. That's why I say it's really important to have that curiosity mindset because try it.

Jen Liddy

I would love to hear about your launch, your recent launch, how did it serve you there?

Cheryl Rerick

Yeah.

Mostly I'm really obsessed with the program I'm creating and my content, and so I did, like you said, it's fun for me to write about it. I didn't use it for that. but I get a lot of mind blanks and roadblocks when you're writing enough content for a launch, like a long for a sales page, emails, and all the things.

It helped me over a lot of humps, like I said, with that critical versus essential word, like how nitpicky, but stuff like that, it matters to me. I'm able to work back and forth with it that way, as well as editing for active voice from passive voice. Can you change it?

Jen Liddy

That is a really good one.

Cheryl Rerick

I often will write in, or I'll switch tones – I grew up in French Immersion, I'm Canadian, and I learned French grammar before English. I'm a fan of breaking grammar in copywriting and being conversational. Sometimes something's just junky, and you can't sort it yourself, and you're like, just plug it in, and one time I had a bullet point, it was really long. I'm like, can you say this more? Keep the tone, keep the message, make it more concise.

It was able to rearrange the sentence to be more effective, more compelling on the page. So I think just an editor is my favorite use case so far. If someone's not a writer like us and they don't like writing, if you're good at speaking, if you're a verbal processor, jump on Voxer and Vox your own self or wherever you voice record, anybody can voice record on their phone these days, and plug the transcript and say, you can turn this into something, an email.

You need to give it some context – you need to tell what email and who your people are, and what you're trying to say. But get curious about what supports would be helpful for you, especially for the neurodivergent community.

This is a game-changer.

If there are certain things that are harder for you, how can we use this to work around it because there's a lot of opportunity there? It's really exciting, I think, for accessibility.

Jen Liddy

Yes, I think I love that point.

I'm really glad you brought that up – what I was going to say was my dog started barking because the mailman came. I wanted to say that one of the things I see people doing in their writing a lot is their eye focus. I did this, I did this – it's always an eye subject, the rest of the sentence.

If you can put your copy in there, write the way you want to write, and then ask ChatGPT to not only condense it for you and revise it but also change it from the eye's perspective to the second person you, it could improve your copywriting so much.

It will land with your audience more, and then you don't have to waste your brainpower doing that.

Cheryl Rerick

Yeah.

Things like emotion, so I teach a lot of this in my upcoming program, automate and chill, because you have to just get your writing out. Then we can work with it, then we can apply copywriting principles with the help of our new editor ChatGPT.

I wrote something, and I'm like, it comes across aloof. How can I make this feel, insert emotion? And it can help with that because it is trained on humanness, so you can work with it. I said before I think I'm jumping ahead of myself jumping all over the place with my tips, but it's a conversation with ChatGPT, like they said, with context.

You'll get better output if you have a conversation with it, even before you ask it for the ultimate thing that you're looking for. Like a warm-up. Yeah, you're training  it, you're having that brand new green Gen Z, or who doesn't know what the heck you're talking about?

What emotions the copywriters are feeling, they don't know, so ask it, say, what would somebody with this problem feel? The problem you're trying to solve with what you're selling, what would they feel like, and ask it to come up with ideas.

You're not necessarily using that in your copy – you might find something interesting to talk about.

Jen Liddy

Take it to the next step down the path.

Cheryl Rerick

You're just helping it get on your page, and then once it's on your page, it's given you output, and you've had a conversation for a few minutes, now say, okay, now I'm writing an email. Can you bring this in and work with it?

Co-create is a word my friend Harold says, and I love that. It's like co-creating with it, you're not asking it to write for you, but you're getting it to help you along.

Jen Liddy

Speaking of helping things along, how do you feel about people buying prompts to use with ChatGPT, specifically for that reason?

Cheryl Rerick

Yeah.

Let me save your listeners some money, you don't need it, you don't need them, and most definitely not like $3,000 for nine dollars or whatever is on your feed right now. Save your money because they're prompt dumps, they're good for one thing. Opening up your mind to new ways to use it. It's always fascinating to watch how other people do everything, right? 

It makes you think of ways you could do things so it could be valuable. If that's helpful to you, then fill your boots but don't put your business future on these prompt dumps. They're like, write a course in an hour – please don't! Please don't write a course in an hour, we need thought leadership more than ever because we're fully grown adults who have never had this technology, and we're flying blind with it.

If you want to use it for that purpose, it's fine, but for prompting and actually working with AI, you don't need it because it's a conversation. Skilled prompting is a conversation, and there is no magical prompt. There isn't one, but there is a structure, so I'll give you some tips on a structure that will help because the structure can help with prompting.

Even if you don't use the structure that I'm about to tell you, that's okay, just have a conversation and keep the conversation going. Like I said with that example, with my critical versus essential word, the first output it gave me was still a little bit bro marketing, really.

You can tell there's a lot of that on the internet, and it's a lot in their data set for ChatGPT. It pulls a lot of that. I'm like, no, you're not hitting the nail on the head here, I'll just speak conversationally like that. I'm like, this isn't hitting the nail on the head.

Let's try something a little softer or a little not quite so strong, somewhere in between. How about this? What about that? Talk to it, and you'll be surprised by the way it comes out.

Jen Liddy

That would definitely not be intuitive to me, I would never have approached it as a human.

Cheryl Rerick

Well, we never have, we've never had that, but it's trained that way.

ChatGPT specifically, I'm not talking about all the other AI tools because the GPT that runs underneath them all, like Open AI's, GPT 3.5, GPT 4, and all of those that power a lot of them. If you look at Jasper and all of the million other tools that are coming out, they've applied their prompt framework over the top.

You'll have one that's good for blog posts or podcast show notes. It's because they've applied their framework to how to make a good show note. Those tools can be really useful as well in certain cases, but if you're dealing just with ChatGPT, chat to it.

What makes a good prompt if there is no magical prompt and Sam Woods, who I learned AI from, he's amazingly smart with it? If you want to go deep, deep, deep, deep into this stuff, he's your guy, and he said something, he said, prompts are just thoughts made visible in the text.

It's just a thought, and so that little reframe helps, but okay, so if you're going to use it, though, for content for your brand, we need to get better at it. We need a little bit more serious of a prompt. We are going to look at three parts of a good prompt, and the first is you want to give it a task, so every prompt includes a task or a function or a goal, and that's what you're asking it to do for you.

First of all, you need to know what you want. Sometimes we don't know what we want, but if you need to know what you're looking for or what you want out of it and clearly define that. So that would be like, describe, give 10 examples, write, you're telling it specifically what you want.

The second part, and these are not necessarily in order, I don't care, the AI doesn't care what order these come in either, and it can be throughout a conversation thread. It doesn't have to be all in one magical prompt before you hit the enter button. This is the part that most people are missing like we were saying, in why you get crappy output.

It's because you need background information, you need to help it understand the situation so it can generate a relevant response site that's going to be interesting to you. Give it background, give it the situation, key bits of information, describe the problem, describe who the problem is, being felt by who is your people, who you help, what you do, all of that information is going to help. I actually am creating that in my program to make it easier because I think we get stuck with that.

Even I get stuck with that – I go to use AI, and I'm like, oh, I'm not going to bother because I have to give it all this background information to get good stuff. I'm like, I can be bothered, move on to the next thing, shiny object number two. I'm building out my program, I call it the AI copy companion, and it is basically like your brand guide, your tone of voice, your style, things you always say, things you never say, your ideal audience described, the feelings you like to have. I say, what's the feeling when I'm doing anything? I design a sales page, what's the feeling I want? What's writing an email? What's the feeling I want them to have?

You can have all of that juicy goodness that makes you and your brand unique in a document that's handy and saved right on your taskbar so that you can just copy and paste. Every time you start a new chat with ChatGPT that's about your brand or for copy or content, you can just paste it and say, here's the information I want you to consider for this chat about my brand. Paste it all in, and then from there, have a conversation, so that will be really helpful.

I know it's hard to do it in practice to actually sit down and write that document, but then you need to do it one time.

Jen Liddy

Well, it's like anything.

It's like why I don't teach my kid how to fold his own laundry because I have to teach him how to do it. It's like input on the beginning side versus exponential output on the other side once he knows how to do it. That's what we're talking about here, and that's a huge shift for people.

Cheryl Rerick

Well, I'm right in it right now because I'm creating a program that is all about getting people to write a year's worth of emails.

I know that my biggest hurdle is going to be getting them to actually do it. I think it'll sell. I think people want it, but to do it is a whole other thing. Making workflows easier and getting stuff faster, easier without the heavy load is where my brain is, especially this week. But I would say that it's hard for humans.

We don't want to do the hard work, we have human brains, and we're in a human body, and our human brains go, well, difficult. I want to save calories, and I'm not doing that today. Shiny thing over here and so sitting down and writing your brand, not your values so much, that's important, but your tone, your style of voice. Copywriting something that you love, that you wrote, paste it and ask it. What's the tone?

Jen Liddy

That's a great tip.

Cheryl Rerick

What's the voice? Pick out your favorite stuff, or sometimes you'll have things that are different tones – maybe my emails have a different tone than LinkedIn posts or whatever. 

Paste it in there and say, evaluate this for me and tell me what's the tone style, and then keep that and use that next time. You want something to sound similar, or you don't even have to pull out the description. You can just paste an email or a sales page and say, this is the sales page I wrote that I'd like.

I want to write a new one on this topic for this audience, for this so write it similarly. It doesn't always get it right, so work with it and also just back and forth conversation.

Jen Liddy

Absolutely.

Cheryl Rerick

Just like a human, you want to chunk it down.

It gets better output, if you ask it to write a long-form sales page, it won't be very good. If you ask it to write a headline, a lead, a transition, calls to action, you'll get better output.

Jen Liddy

That totally makes sense.

These are all things I hope people listen to over several times to really get into their brains and body, the simple shifts that they can make to use this. I do think that if you're going to use it, the tips are really helpful, but it's got to start with you believing it can help you, believing it's not cheating, believing that it's worth it, and shifting your mindset around how to use it best for you.

Thank you so much, Cheryl.

Cheryl Rerick

Yeah.

I think I forgot number three, which is the queues. I talked about it, but I didn't name it, so give it a task, give it context, and give it queues. The queues would be specific, be detailed, be unique, be uncommon, be vivid, be descriptive. Line up 10 of those words, tell it it's a computer. It won't get offended that you're giving it too much to do, you're going to queue it to give you the output that you want. We were talking about tone and voice, but I didn't give you the actual one, two, three. 

Those are three parts of a prompt, just jot those down. The task, contact, context, and queue – if you get those right and you play with it and, as you say, learn to be curious and accepting of it, like you said, mind, body, body matters, too. We have this fearful response to it, it's very hard to bypass that feeling to get curious and playful.

I would offer that it's not cheating if you're using it to refine your own thoughts.

Jen Liddy

Yes, because eventually, you're serving a group of people with your content, really, you're bringing value to them. The more pointed you can be, the more likely it is to land on their ears.

The goal is to help these people, so sometimes you're at capacity, overloaded, and can't come up with the right word, and this sounds like a really realistic tool that just takes a little bit of tweaking.

Cheryl Rerick

Yeah.

I mean, you can approach this a million ways – you might have a listener that listens to our conversation today and completely disagrees, and that's great.

I think that there are a million ways we can use this, and everyone will find what makes sense to them, but I think just getting in the pool is part of the biggest step.

Just dip a toe.

Jen Liddy

Actually, there are a lot of people online who are saying things that I'm not really interested in. It's not really that I agree or disagree, just that I am not interested in that conversation.

I think I need to know it, and here's why we're having this conversation. I'm not really willing to go into the deep end of the pool at this point, but I am willing to get in the pool and use it.

Cheryl Rerick

I would offer that the deep end isn't for everyone anyway.

That's okay. Some people like to swim laps, but I just like to get a sun tan, and that's fine. That's okay, just as long as it's a drink holder, we're good.

Jen Liddy

Hey, Cheryl, how can people get into your world and find you?

Cheryl Rerick

You can find me at https://cherylrerick.com/

People struggle with my last name – I'm sure it'll be in the show notes. I would love it if you would harass me on Instagram because I don't Instagram, but I want to Instagram, but I don't, so come DM me. I haven't posted there in two years, but I'm going to though this month.

I like DMs and come and hang out anyways, and I'll comment, and we can. Well, I just don't pay attention over there, I'd like to pay attention over there, so come say hey on Instagram.

Jen Liddy

Well, I wanted to say thanks for giving us all of these really realistic tools, plus the shifts and the contacts that you provided. I want to remind everybody depending on when you're listening to this, things could have changed, right?

Remembering that it's a constantly evolving tool and to use it as such.

Cheryl Rerick

Like tomorrow, everything could be different, but that's why I say don't spend all your money on those prompt bundles because using it to work with it in a fundamental way will serve you long-term and across tools, I think.

Jen Liddy

Well, thanks, Cheryl.

Thanks for listening, listener – I appreciate you being here and staying through the whole episode because I know there's a lot of podcasts that you have to listen to, which is why I went to two times a month rather than every week. I love bringing you interesting new approaches, and I'm glad you're here.

Thanks again, and thank you, Cheryl, I appreciate you so much.

3 Steps to Unlock the Content
that magnetizess your audience to you!

Get Your Free Planner