How I Used AI to Become a One-Man Digital Powerhouse
Before AI, I was just a writer who knew how to game keywords. But after adopting the technology for my business, I’ve become a digital powerhouse, doing the work that once required a full team. As an early adopter who subscribed to ChatGPT Plus the moment it launched in February 2023, AI has completely transformed my workflow as a digital entrepreneur. And it’s only getting better.
This post outlines all the ways I’m using AI to turn myself into a one-man digital powerhouse. And how you can, too.
Writing Blog Content & Website Copy
Writing blog content & website copy is the lowest-hanging fruit use case for AI, but it is undeniably powerful. However, it’s not as simple as simply telling ChatGPT to “write me a blog post about XYZ.” That will just get you generic fluff content. The trick to using AI to write blog articles is to provide the model with as much context and details as possible.
The AI can take care of the actual forming of paragraphs and sentences, but you still need to guide it towards the results you want to see. This can be a list of facts that need to be included in the article, the angle that you want it to take, or even the writing style that you want it to use. The more you give it, the better the result will be.
I could create an entire blog post about using AI to write content, but I want to keep it moving for some additional use cases here. Plus, there are tons of people who have already tackled this topic, though most of them are also trying to sell you their AI writing product (which you don’t need).
How AI Transformed My Writing Workflow
I’m using AI to write content in a ton of different ways, both on Extra Chill, Sarai Chinwag, and all my other niche sites that I haven’t shared publicly. This has been an absolute came changer for me as a writer and business owner, but has also come with it’s own challenges (see: The Death of Blogging).
Custom GPT: Sarai Chinwag
When I created Sarai Chinwag, I also created a Custom GPT that is packed with all of the details about formatting and writing style that I like to use for blog articles. This allows me to simply feed the AI a headline, and a few facts and an angle and let it produce the article.
Since AI is known to hallucinate, I prefer topics that are subjective, so I don’t have to bother proofreading and can simply produce content at scale. By using this tool I’ve produced almost 1,500 blog articles on Sarai’s website without having to type a single word.
Curious how you can scale content with AI? Contact me to learn how.
Proofreading & Editing
I also use ChatGPT as my personal proofreader and editor for articles I write on Extra Chill. While working on an in-depth piece, such as an interview, I will feed my drafts into ChatGPT and ask it to point out typos, errors, anything that doesn’t make sense, or where I’ve been too verbose.
This helps improve my writing, and makes it more engaging for readers in the modern world, who value concise and straight to the point articles. I don’t always agree with the suggestions, but most of the time it helps me take my writing to the next level.
Social Media Captions
This one solves one of my biggest personal pain points as a digital business owner. I post on Extra Chill’s Instagram several times per week, often featuring articles that I just finished writing, or articles from freelancers, and the process of writing captions is absolutely painful.
Nowadays, I simply take the text of the article, and ask ChatGPT to write me a caption that includes context from the article, isn’t overly enthusiastic, and fits my brand style. Then I fiddle with the output, regenerating as needed, until I get something that works for me. You could also create a custom GPT for this purpose, but I haven’t done that yet.
Article Titles
Another huge pain point is coming up with titles for an article. The process is the same here for coming up with captions or proofreading. I will paste the raw text of a draft into ChatGPT and ask it to suggest some titles that align with the message and voice of the story. It usually gives me 10 options, several of which are good and usable.
Overall, using AI to write content helps take some of the heavy lifting off you as a content creator, allowing you to be much more productive and effective at what you do. And for me, running a one-man operation that hardly turns a profit, that is a huge benefit.
Creating Images with AI
Midjourney, the AI image creation tool, completely blew my mind the first time I used it. Being a total Deadhead, the first thing I did, naturally, was spend an entire day generating images of Jerry Garcia. I put them all into one blog post on Extra Chill, and the post took off on Google Discover, making me over $1000 in ad revenue in one day. That alone paid my subscription for the next few years, and I was hooked.
Of course, Google Discover no longer works for me, but I’m still using Midjourney on a daily basis to generate lots of AI images, now mostly for Pinterest, and driving lots of traffic to my websites.
This strategy has grown Sarai Chinwag’s account from nothing to over 20,000 outbound clicks per month. Now, I’m scaling it across multiple domains.
Using AI to Write Code
Before AI, I was an extremely amateur developer. I always had ideas for how to enhance my sites, but I often spent a lot of time trying to figure things out, only to produce subpar results. When I first discovered that ChatGPT could write code, I learned so much, and I’m now in a place where I can build anything that I can dream up with the help of AI.
The challenge is that as your builds become larger and more complex, it is difficult to keep the model on track, so it will often break things in the process of making changes. So, you do still have to know what you’re doing, and keep giving context about the project, but regardless, it will spit out code that does exactly what you ask it to do, and it keeps improving.
How I’m Using AI for Coding
When I started, it was just simple website WordPress enhancements, but now, as I’ve grasped the concepts behind the code, I am able to do much more complex things.
Custom WordPress Themes & Plugins
Custom WordPress themes and plugins are my bread and butter for using AI to code. I’ve mastered WordPress and know exactly how it works, its limitations and capabilities, and I can do some really cool stuff. Someone told me that my flagship site, Extra Chill, “looks like I paid someone 10k to build it for me.”
In reality, the whole thing is DIY.
I started with simple rap & band name generator plugins, and moved on to social media API integrations, cross domain session tokens for unified logins, and content syndication across multiple platforms. I’ve created custom post types, custom taxonomies, and javascript animations that elevate my site to the top tier.
Custom Web Scraping
When building out Extra Chill’s events calendar, some of the data I wanted from smaller venues was not available on any event platforms. In the past, I would have been manually entering the event information from these venues into my website, or hiring a freelancer to do it for me.
Now, I have scripts that check the website periodically and import their event listings into my calendar automatically. This allowed me to create one of the most comprehensive event calendars in all of Charleston. The best part is that it’s completely a set-it-and-forget-it thing.
Social Media Automation
For my niche sites, I wanted to expand my reach, but in order to post on multiple platforms would require a ton of manual effort, which is impossible for a one-man team running several websites simultaneously.
So, I built a custom plugin that uses APIs from various social media platforms to post content automatically to these platforms, using captions & hashtags that are auto-generated by the ChatGPT API. This was a serious validation of my capabilities.
Want to automate your social media like a pro? Let’s talk.
Custom Gutenberg Block Development
Gutenberg block development is a lot more complicated than regular WordPress development, but I was also able to do this with the help of AI.
The first Gutenberg Block I created was a custom Image Voting Block that allowed people to vote on the best costumes at Boogieman Halloween Festival in Charleston. It wasn’t easy, but it worked seamlessly during a real-time application, and allowed me to collect over 400 email addresses in one day, not once but twice.
Then, I created a custom block to display poetry on this website. This block has pagination so users can read the poems one at a time without having to scroll through an entire webpage. For this one, I used the modern React framework to create the block according to the guidelines at WordPress.org. It took me a bit to figure it out, but I once I understood the purpose, it started to flow.
Cold Outreach Email Automation
My latest and greatest AI automation tool was built to solve yet another real-world pain point for my business, which is cold email outreach for my digital services. I built this website to help facilitate my freelance business, but the process of finding clients was a massive pain.
So, I decided to use the skills I’m advertising to create a solution for myself, that will eventually be available for others. This is a WordPress plugin that uses the Google Maps API to gather potential leads, with custom fields for email address entry and notes for personalization.
Then, it generates a personalized email using the ChatGPT API, and sends it to the potential client. After sending the initial email, it follows up with those clients periodically, taking the manual effort out of cold outreach and allowing me to focus on building and content creation.
Conclusion
This post is comprehensive, but it still doesn’t cover all of the ways I’m using AI to enhance my business. However, the main takeaway is that I did all of this myself, using AI to augment my creativity and supercharge my creative powers.
Without AI, none of this would have been possible. You, too, can harness the power of AI to build something epic for yourself, and become a digital superhuman.
Ready to build an AI-powered workflow? Contact me to get started.