Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Mike Rhodes, author of the best selling book "Ultimate Guide to Google Ads".
Mike Rhodes has a profound appreciation for the world of business. He has successfully built and sold four businesses, imparting knowledge to tens of thousands of individuals and delivering speeches on hundreds of stages.
Additionally, he co-authored the world's best-selling book on Google Ads. Currently, Mike Rhodes is obsessed with AI agents and their potential to transform both business and careers.
Mike's Website: https://mikerhodesideas.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Mike Rhodes, author of the best selling book "Ultimate Guide to Google Ads".
Mike Rhodes has a profound appreciation for the world of business. He has successfully built and sold four businesses, imparting knowledge to tens of thousands of individuals and delivering speeches on hundreds of stages.
Additionally, he co-authored the world's best-selling book on Google Ads. Currently, Mike Rhodes is obsessed with AI agents and their potential to transform both business and careers.
Mike's Website: https://mikerhodesideas.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
People think there's this magical prompt that they're gonna come up with to throw in their chat GPT that's gonna give them the perfect answer. Basically, ask chat GPT. Ask me all the questions that you need in order to be able to write an amazing sales page. But that saved me days and one LinkedIn post and we sold out.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name's John Ainsworth and today's guest is Mike Rhodes. Mike has been a fixture of the Google ads community for almost 20 years. He's trained over 100,000 people through his courses and his co-author of the ultimate guide to Google ads with Perry Marsh, or, who we had on the podcast a few weeks ago. He built one of Australia's largest independent Google ad agencies, which he recently sold, and has created many tools that people use every day, his latest being the Pmax script.
Speaker 2:Today we're gonna be talking about using AI how that's gonna lead to a ton of mediocre content and what you can do about that, and then how else you can use AI in your business. Now, before we dive into our interview, yozip is our funnel strategy lead and, while he's been working on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects, he's developed and tested most of the systems that we use here at Days to River Marketing to 5x our clients revenue. What we did is we took all of the coaching calls that Yozip's ever done with our clients, transcribed them and uploaded them to a tool that is built on top of chat GPT. So what we've basically got is a chat GPT specifically for funnels using the data driven marketing method. We call it internally Yozip AI.
Speaker 2:You can go to datadrivenmarketingai to access it, and you can access that for free. It's absolutely fantastic. It's gonna help you figure out what kind of funnels to run, how to write your emails, how to plan everything else. So go use that today. Datadrivenmarketingai. Mike. Welcome to the show man. Thanks, tom, good to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.
Speaker 2:So you've said that you think AI is gonna create a flood of new, mostly mediocre content. Why do you think that's the case?
Speaker 1:A couple of reasons. One is that a large language model is just predicting the next word, right? We all know that by now we've all played with chat GPT. It's read basically the entire internet and the wisdom of the crowd. Wonderful book is alive and well here. So it is going to regurgitate the average of all that it's read, unless you really push it to the edges, unless you prompted in such a way to specifically ask for the edgy stuff, the unusual stuff, the stuff that nobody else would think of. Most of the time it kind of goes for pretty mediocre.
Speaker 1:Now a lot of people using it will increase their skills in something because it will be mediocre to fairly good compared to the average human in so many different places. But it won't be for a while at least. Most of the time. All these caveats, sorry, but most of the time it won't be as good as a real expert in a particular field. That amazing copywriter that you've heard about and maybe used and one day I can afford them like they will probably do better than this thing that is just read everybody else trying to remember. It's like a clever grad student. It gets a bit drunk sometimes it's very clever, but it kind of can get things a little bit wonky and obviously we all know it can make stuff up, yeah, but this is the worst it will ever get right, so it only gets better from here.
Speaker 2:So where do you see this mediocre content coming up? Is this like gonna be a lot of SEO content or like what kind of places are you seeing this happening?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean there was an announcement two days ago. I don't want to date the podcast, but there was a big open AI dev day a couple of days ago and it's gonna be like the app store all over again. I was chatting to a guy this morning who made a really interesting distinction about this. By the way, like remember, the Apple app store was very, very curated in the early days. There were very few apps and they were really good, whereas Android was just. I've had it, everything's there. I think it'll be well. It'll be interesting. They haven't actually given many details around that. With plugins, it was a bit like the Android app store. There were just tons of stuff on chat GPT. It wasn't a good experience. You could only see it at a time. There were loads and loads and loads and they weren't particularly useful. I don't think they'll make that mistake again. I think they'll err on the side of curated, really really good, effectively plugins, these custom GPTs terrible branding, they've got to do something about the name, but there'll be content there.
Speaker 1:You mentioned your AI. That could be this sort of custom GPT, because most people can't figure out what you guys figured out of how to embed all the vectors and load all of that information that you did so that people can now ask questions of your content. Most people haven't been able to figure out how to do that. That's taken a developer to this point. It now gets much easier. So that's one place. But yeah, you mentioned SEO. There will be. I mean, it's already starting.
Speaker 1:People are creating bots to create bots. It's all getting very meta To sit there and churn out blog posts that have never seen a human. I mean, I think we should probably keep a human in the loop for a lot of this stuff for a while yet to check, to cajole, to nudge the machine back on track. There's an awful lot of stuff just being churned out. Bots that are because we can tie these bots together so we can have one bot whose job it is to go research, to go find out, sit there and watch all the forums and find out questions and go, oh, here's a good idea for a blog post, Pass it up to the ideas bot who says, yeah, that's a good idea, that's not a good idea. Yeah, that's a good one, write an article about that. And then that hands it off to the outline bot and comes up with an outline it goes back and forwards with the ideas boss and says is this good enough? Yeah, no, yep, okay, great, now write the article. Now hand it off to the image bot to write, to decide what the image should be, to go with that blog post, to create the image, to insert the image. And two days ago they announced actions. So all of this can then be posted to the WordPress site, published off you go.
Speaker 1:And yeah, there's a lot of talk about will this content be watermarked? Will the AI detectors be able to tell that this content is created by AI? I don't think they'll ever be the case, maybe for images and video, but there's probably workarounds for that anyway. But most content, almost all content, I would say a year from now, is going to be some partnership between human and AI. So at what point do you say is it created by AI? If chat DPPT is giving you the first draft and you change 17 words, is that now still AI or does that no longer count? So I don't think any kind of watermarking helps there. But it's just, the volume will increase. I don't see the quality increasing much, hence a ton of mediocre content.
Speaker 2:So we're using AI in a bunch of different places in the business, right, so we do when we do in copywriting. The first draft is now we feed in a lot of information to Yosie Paye and that spits back out the first draft of the emails, the sales pages, etc. And then we go back through and improve it so it gets as fast as that bad first draft so that you can then make an amazing second, third, fourth draft. So we're doing that with email, we're doing that with sales pages, but we've also started doing it with our YouTube channel as well. So we'll put in ideas of I want to write something about this. Give me some ideas of sorry, I want to make a video about this topic. Give me 10 different ideas for titles, give me three different ideas for hooks and then kind of work from there in terms of refining them. So that's all proven useful and then you make it into something good afterwards.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of our angle on it. What do you see in terms of, like, how can people go about doing something about this, either making their content not mediocre or doubling? You know, like, what's the solution here? What can people do?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:So I'll give you a slightly different take on that of how I used it. I don't know, it must be about eight, nine months ago, beginning of the year. I wanted to. I had created this script you mentioned it in the intro Performance Max. It's a particular type of Google Ads campaign. It's quite opaque. It's one of Google's AIs black box things and I found a little bit of data that was able to be pulled by the script. I'm not a programmer, but I figured out a way to write the absolute minimum amount of code, create the script.
Speaker 1:We're in a bit bonkers on LinkedIn so I thought, right, clearly this is a hot topic and I've always loved teaching. I'm a teacher at heart. That's always been my MO to kind of run four hills into the future and not just report back but kind of, hey, here's what's happening, here's how you can grow your business. And teaching the 80, 20 of that, how to make it practical and useful. That's what I've always loved to do. So I thought I'll do a course around this and instead of the typical prompt engineering you know people think there's this magical prompts that they're going to come up with to throw into chat, gpt. It's going to give them the perfect answer. It's like some hocus pocus spell. I instead like to be the one that gets prompted, so I basically asked chat GPT ask me all the questions that you need in order to be able to write an amazing sales page to sell this workshop I'm thinking about, and it wondered. If we went back and forth for a little bit, it came up with 14 questions. It's a great. Ask them to be one at a time, because I don't want to keep scrolling all the way back up to the top, and once I've answered one question, ask me the next question on your list. Fantastic. Get through all those to about half an hour. Now. Is there anything else that you need to ask me in order to write the sales page for this? No, right, bang, so off it goes. Amazing. Now please write me the LinkedIn post and, exactly like you did, the YouTube script. Give me a 15 second, a 30 second and one and a half minute script. Give me the shot list for the video. Give me three Facebook ads. And again, yes, most of these weren't. I wouldn't recommend anybody. Take exactly what's there and copy paste without changing word. Like you say, it's a blank page solver. It's a first draft creator, but that saved me days of coming up with the sales page for the workshop and one LinkedIn post and we sold out, so I guess it worked.
Speaker 1:I'll give you an example of the mediocre stuff. I then asked it to because it had all this information now to create the course curriculum for this eight week workshop. And it was awful. It was just having a bit of a stab and it was sort of like you know, you've explained to a mate in the pub this thing that you do that you know lots about and he doesn't know anything about it and then he's writing the sales. But it was terrible. It had no idea what should be in that course curriculum, so I had to throw all of that out and just do that myself.
Speaker 2:I think you did the same stuff there in terms of the getting it to ask you all the right questions in order to be able to write a good curriculum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we didn't go into a lot of detail of what was in the course, like for the sales. Later we were focusing more on the outcome, I guess the usual sort of framework. It's probably read every unbounce blog that's ever been right. So it asked me about guarantees and it asked me about testimonials and those sites of, I guess, selling questions, which is probably for sales page, I guess more important than the course content. As a teacher, for me the course content is way more important and I tend to over index on that stuff and just I'm not very good at selling so I just assume that you know. Of course it's good content, it'll sell itself and don't write a very salesy letter.
Speaker 1:Perry actually always told me off for not being like hype enough not selling myself. Humble always get told off by Americans for that, especially Perry. Hi Perry. So maybe mediocre is a strong word.
Speaker 1:I just I think there's gonna be all this sort of SEO crappy content. I mean I'm old enough to remember back when Ed Dale and Frank Kern were doing the underachiever method and people were farming Websites and you know, coming up with a, using market samurai to choose a whole bunch of keywords and then building a website around that quick right, 20 blog posts Putting it through those spinners just got awful content back when it used to just be about the number of links rather than the quality of where you're getting your back links from, and I suspect that most of this content will be pretty crappy and probably won't get index. I'm not an SEO guy, don't really. Seo is a black voodoo art to me, so I suspect it won't really do much. But I do think there'll be a lot of people. I know there are a lot of people churning out thousands of these bot created articles by the day and the pretty mediocre and they're not going to be great. But then A lot of the people that thought, oh, I know how to get blog posts for it and I'll go to the Philippines and pay five bucks an hour. They're pretty mediocre to. So I just, you know, I see the pyramid growing, but growing the bottom of the pyramid growing more and more of that Mediocre content, probably maybe a little bit more of the good content, but not to the same degree unless people really use it well.
Speaker 1:That is, I think, the opportunity to use these tools really well, to do the stuff that you've done by the sounds of it with your AI to to use the proprietary data that you have your own stuff and make useful tools from that. I mean the announcement open AI the other day. We're going to see a rush of people building these GPT's. Hopefully it's not like the Android Play Store and it's just tons and tons of questionable use cases. But it might be. I suspect it won't be. I think Sam Altman's too smart for that.
Speaker 2:You know the AI is going to create a whole load of absolute rubbish stuff and you've got to figure out some way of standing out from that. You can that it might be that Google figures out how to spot the rubbish content in it. Probably they will at some point In order to create good content. Certainly like sales pages we've talked through. Like there's a certain number of prompts you need to get it to ask you, like the way the system that we have is Will feed in, will have done the customer avatar survey About, like the specific words that are our audience using. Will upload the customer avatar to chat to you and then tell it. Can you recap that back to me so I know you understood it? Then do the same thing with the cost language document and then tell it we're creating a sales page.
Speaker 2:These are the 15 elements that need to be on the sales page. Here's an example of a sales page we did before the converts really well, now you write a version of oh, sorry. And then here's the course that we're selling and here's what's good about it and here's what the reasons why people should do it and what outcomes people can get from it those kind of bits of information and then now go create a version of the sales page and then again now rewrite it in this tone of voice and then kind of a few iterations of that and that gets you to something Brilliant. So that's kind of sales pages right now. That's not. That's enough for people to get the idea of the concept, probably not enough for someone To do it that well themselves. But if you've got all of those elements, if you're already doing customer avatar. Customer language document.
Speaker 1:The course is you can do this. I will throw back at you a phrase that a mentor of mine said to me many, many years ago. Obvious to you, amazing to others. You probably assume that most people writing the half decent sales pages go through a process like that. I would say you're in the top nevermind 5%, probably one or 2% with that process and that most sales pages, compared to something done like that, is going to be relatively mediocre. So it's all like chat GPT elevates you way ahead of the pack.
Speaker 1:The rest of the pack kind of comes up a little bit rising tide, lifts all boats, but still becomes the new mediocre. It's probably a little bit better than we had before, but it's not much higher. But for those that really lean into this, the delta then becomes so much greater and you become so much further away using a system like that, and not only is it probably Better or a slightly more junior member of your team is able to create the stuff that maybe only you could do before, but also just the speed of that, being able to do more of that, whether you're doing that for clients and that means you can service more clients with better quality. I mean, it's just the perfect storm. Right, you can do it better and faster and cheaper. We're only supposed to be able to pick two of those.
Speaker 2:What's some of the stuff you're doing now in terms of teaching marketers?
Speaker 1:I'm. I'm a big, big believer in. Well, what I've been trying to do is teaching people to think like a coder. But I've also realized that most people don't want to think, most people want the magic easy button. Just press the magic easy button and, like, make it work. Hence selling the script and almost giving the training away for free. Because I think there is this period, especially in the short to medium term, where that skill and I was chatting to a mate at lunchtime today about this and we've both been coding. He's a brilliant coder.
Speaker 1:I am really not a very good coder at all, but we both learned to code when we were teenagers and so that sort of thinking of a problem there's some sort of input, there's some sort of process, there's some sort of output, and breaking down that problem into smaller and smaller pieces and then attacking those, solving them, whether it's through code or whatever, but that just is, I get, obvious to us, amazing to others maybe, I don't know. It's such a useful skill and I think in the future we won't need to. I'm teaching my kids to code, but I don't think we will need to learn Python. I think there's a window where it's very, very useful right now because a lot of these tools are stitched together with code, but the programming language of the future is English the ability to describe exactly what you want and, I guess, the curiosity to actually do that because, again, a lot of people are lazy and you can probably, two years from now, create your entire own Netflix series just for you if you wanted. But most people can't be asked doing that. That's too much work. I'll just turn on the TV and watch someone else's thanks. I'd rather pay for that. So I'm teaching not how to code, but sort of the level above that, sort of how to think about what is possible, how to think like a coder, how to communicate with chatGPT.
Speaker 1:I've been using chatGPT more recently because that didn't exist when I did my first script, I guess October-ish of last year. What allowed me to do that was just finding this sort of magic unlock where I did the absolute minimum amount of coding required and lots of heavy lifting inside of spreadsheet, because I've been a spreadsheet nerd for a very long time. Now. With GPT-4, and particularly code interpreter, I've been using it a couple of different ways to both be my junior coding assistant but also my coding mentor and asking it questions how should I be thinking about this? Is there a better way to do this? How could this be more efficient? And then giving my junior coding developer essentially little tasks of go write this, go write this, and then packaging that up together to create more scripts, better scripts that I can then give to the community and I think there's a real thirst, for whenever I talk about chatGPT, a lot of people are like how I don't know where to start. And again, often they just want that magic prompt, just tell me what to ask, and they're like no, please don't expect that. There isn't some magic spell that's going to unlock everything else. Just start playing with it, start talking to it, start asking for stuff. I think that the people that figure out how to use it in that way again, how to describe what you really want the outcome to be will do very, very well.
Speaker 1:Dan Sullivan, strategic coachcom, amazing, amazing guy, has this thing called an impact filter and what? One of the main things that makes that work is this thing at the top called success criteria, and he uses this example which is just popped into my head. Maybe it's useful. I don't know of. He had a, I think, a summer cottage that they bought and they went there once with the interior designer or whoever it was, and he had this list. Here's my success criteria Right Off you go, and they came back nine months later they didn't talk in between apparently, most people are complete control freaks about that sort of thing came out nine months later, walked in, Perfect Everything, exactly the way they wanted it done. Now, yes, he's got some coin and he can afford to do that. It's probably an amazing interior designer I don't know, but he has this ability to think through.
Speaker 1:What is it that will make this work? How will I know when this is done the way I want? Most people don't do that. Most people start an experiment in Google ads with oh I will just try this, I don't think about how will I know if this experiment is a success or not? What's that criteria? So just being able to do that. And then there's just some basic skills that I think every marketer should know. I mean, you guys are into data in a big way. So, again, probably obvious to you, amazing to others, but just just basics around.
Speaker 1:What is an API? What is Jason? Jason confuse. The bugger had made like two years ago.
Speaker 1:I just squiggly brackets and colons everywhere and I don't understand it. But you sit down. It's like pivot tables. You sit down for 15 minutes. Somebody explained it to you. What was I ever scared of? This is really easy Now that I understand that. It unlocks all this other stuff. And so just being able to understand a few of these key elements APIs, json, just basic, basic code you don't need to know how to write it, but it kinda helps if you can read it a little bit. But just thinking in those terms, I think, is a huge, huge, huge benefit for the majority of marketers. Because I think in the future, you either have to be very, very data-driven or tremendously creative, and by tremendously I mean much, much more so than somebody with Canva and Adobe and a chat GPT. You've got to be a master at one of those two extremes. Probably, or ideally, both the artists that can use code will do amazingly well, I think, because most people won't know how to do that.
Speaker 2:If someone wants to go and learn more from this, if you wanna go and check out your training, what's the site they should go to?
Speaker 1:If you go to wwwmicrodeideascom. So my spelling of my surname is R-H-O-D-E-S, like the Greek island wwwmicrodeideascom.
Speaker 2:So, when it goes to wwwmicrodeideascom, what can they expect? What kind of person should be using that? What kind of outcome can they get from it?
Speaker 1:At the moment, it's probably geared pretty heavily towards the market that I've been serving for 20 years, which is the Google Ads market. So Google Ads Scripts how to write scripts, how to implement them in your account and I'm sort of starting to head towards much more onto the AI side. But I'm starting with what I know and I'm actually considering a course.
Speaker 1:We should talk about this of going to teach them much more of the AI side. That Dev Day blew my mind two days ago. I'm still racing about it and what's gonna happen there. And is it just a short-term gold rush that's gonna create a ton of these GPTs that are all gonna be crap, but I do think there is the opportunity to create real value for an audience there and I don't wanna be just another AI guy on YouTube, but most again, obvious to us, amazing to others.
Speaker 1:I see so many people that just haven't even started playing with these tools yet and I just think, if you don't get on this wave, whether as a marketer, as a business owner, you've got to be thinking what is my AI strategy in business? How am I gonna be using these tools to be 40% better? I just started using Copilot. Again, I'm not a coder, I'm not a developer, but I just started using Copilot last week. It's incredible. I can write a comment of code I want to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it just goes boom 12 lines of code done. That would have taken half an hour in the past going backwards and forwards with Stack Overflow. For someone that isn't a very good coder and I'm sure the good developers are using it, I believe, to become sort of 50% better, whether that's faster writing, better code.
Speaker 1:All of these tools, you've got to figure out what the tool is for your industry, for your profession. If you, as a marketer, are sticking your head in the sand and still saying blah, blah, blah, a computer will never be better than me. And there are still lots of those people around. I met them at the last conference I was at. I think you're staffed. So, yeah, I want to create something that helps people come along on that journey and not be a beginner's course. But also, just, I'm not an expert in it, I'm learning as I go.
Speaker 1:I don't know much about APIs yet I know you know holistically what they are, but I think just teaching what's possible, like what is this stuff able to do Most businesses need?
Speaker 2:that At the moment, that's mostly focused around Google Ads, but you're going to start expanding out into kind of other areas over time as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's Google Ads scripts, it's Google spreadsheets, some of the sort of very advanced spreadsheet stuff, and then it'll head more and more towards I've still got all my old courses on there as well, so lots of Google Ads stuff and Google Analytics and Lucas Studio and that sort of stuff. But, yes, more and more it's going to be heading more towards AI and automation. That's the stuff that I'm really interested in, fascinated by at the moment and that I believe is the future, not just for marketers, but for the vast majority of businesses. Certainly. You know white collar work.
Speaker 2:So hopefully this has given you some food for thought about how you might start to be using AI in your business. We've talked about sales pages and how you can use them there, and emails. We've talked about our data driven marketingai tool that you can use to get started with some of your strategy. If you're interested in the Google Ads side of things, obviously go check out microadsideascom and start learning there, and it's probably worth going back and checking it out later. If you're not in Google Ads, because it sounds like it's going to be expanding and moving into other areas as well. If you found this interview useful and you want to get more episodes like this, where we're going to interview top experts in the industry, then please subscribe. Wherever you listened, thanks so much for listening, as always, and Mike, thanks so much for coming on today. Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:My pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.