Get ready to be blown away, folks! We've got a dynamo of a guest today—meet Jonathan Green, the wizard who turned artificial intelligence into a goldmine for online businesses!
Author of the chart-topping book "ChatGPT Profits," Jonathan is here to spill the beans on how he turned a career hiccup into a groundbreaking journey. Picture this: It's 2010, and out of the blue, he's handed a pink slip from a job he loved. Ouch, right? But instead of throwing a pity party, Jonathan had an epiphany: the 9-to-5 grind could be a financial house of cards!
That 'aha' moment catapulted him into the mesmerizing world of AI. Determined to take the reins of his financial future, he delved deep into crafting passive income streams powered by artificial intelligence.
Gone are the days when AI was a shiny new toy for tech nerds. Today, it's the linchpin that's redefining how we think about online businesses and the job market. If you're not AI-savvy yet, you might just be missing the boat!
And it's not just Jonathan raving about AI; Paula joins the conversation to share her life-changing experience. Ever swamped with work? Paula reveals how AI cut her workload in half—like a hot knife through butter! Jonathan chips in with killer insights on how ChatGPT can automate the mundane—from whipping up captivating social media posts to drafting pitch-perfect marketing emails.
But wait, there's more! AI isn't a one-size-fits-all robot. It's a virtuoso that can tune into your unique writing style and deliver content that speaks directly to YOUR audience. The secret sauce? Asking the right questions can unlock the AI's potential better than mere commands.
For those hungry to unlock the full power of AI, Jonathan has something special—his hands-on course, "AI Freedom." This isn't about replacing humans; it's about amplifying our talents. Imagine the kind of wizardry you can pull off when AI is your sidekick, fine-tuning your craft and supercharging your strengths!
Learn more about Jonathan, his course, and his contact info on his website: https://servenomaster.com/
Find Paula Christine at PaulaChristine.com or via emal at paula@paulachristine.com.
Paula Christine: Welcome to Beyond the Paycheck. I'm Paula Christine. Today we're joined by Jonathan Green, who is an expert on using artificial intelligence tools to accelerate online business. He's the bestselling author of ChatGPT Profits. Jonathan, I'd like to welcome you to the show.
Jonathan Green: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here and get a chance to hang out.
Paula: Do I call you Jonathan or Jon?
Jonathan: Jonathan's fine.
Paula: How did you become interested in using AI as a source of passive income?
Jonathan: Sure. I've been working online full-time since I was fired from my dream job in 2010 and I realized that when you have a boss, they can not only take away your job, they can take away your ability to pay your rent or pay for your kids to go to the doctor, pay for your kids to go to a good school. I never want someone to have that power from me again. Over the last 13 years, I've started to notice that certain trends aren't just optional, they're necessary. I saw over the last about year that AI was not a toy anymore.
For a long time, there've been AI tools that I've used that you can never put for prime time. You can never show an article written for your blog by AI because it was just not good enough. Everything changed at the start of 2023 when things suddenly were good enough to be actually useful. I realized that it's not really optional. Within two or three years, people that don't know how to use AI aren't going to be able to get jobs anymore because if you hire one person who's twice as fast for the same price, that person's always going to win. It's like an accountant who doesn't use calculators, who doesn't use spreadsheets. They're never going to find any work because it's just too slow to do it by hand.
Paula: Right. I've been using AI a lot more for my business too. It's probably cut my workload down to about a third. It's amazing.
Jonathan: It's awesome.
Paula: How do you use that for passive income?
Jonathan: Sure. One of the easiest ways to do it is for anything that you need to do repetitive, so anything that you have to do every single week or everything that you have to do in large batches. For example, I use it to write out thousands of Pinterest pins for me at a single time. I could do it myself manually, but it would take all day to get half as many done. Then I can use that with automation to turn all those into pins and post all of those. I can post 100 pins in a couple of minutes, which used to take 50 hours or an entire week's worth of work, or I have to hire a VA to do.
Other things that I can do that are passive is write a blog post with an affiliate link to a product. I can create a course with a- like have the entire outline and have the structure and have the slides written by artificial intelligence, by ChatGPT. I can use it to plan out my social media campaign. I can use it to brainstorm.
One of the things, its's really fast is it never misspells. It never makes grammatical mistakes. You can have it edit anything you're working on and it never is going to make a mistake. Every time I write an email, I can just send it through ChatGPT and say, hey, just rewrite this, but just fix any errors, like radical errors and it'll give me a better version, so I stop getting those emails from people that say, "Jonathan, you're an author. Why did you misspell a word?"
Paula: I misspell words all the time. I use it a lot for ideas because you can put in say, how do I say this, or how can I do this, and it just spits out this wonderful thing that you can just really copy and maybe tweak it a little bit based on your personality. It's just incredible how fast it gives you exactly what you need.
Jonathan: What you've actually dialed into there is the number one way to use ChatGPT better, which is asking questions. Most people give it commands, but when ChatGPT really shines is you say, "I want to know who's my perfect customer. What information do you need from me to create that answer?" Then it'll ask you questions so it has the information it needs so it always gives you a good answer.
That's how you avoid the old garbage in, garbage out mistake of computers from the last 100 years. Suddenly you never get that answer because you start with the question. I love that you're asking a question at the beginning. Most people don't do that, so you're already in the top 10% of users.
Paula: I had a friend that taught me how to use it. She actually just did an online course that she taught how to use AI and I'm like, "Teach me," and she did. Within a matter of minutes, it was just so easy to use the tool. I took something and it's just like, I want to know how to put a one sheet together on basics of investing, and it just gave me everything I needed. When it didn't, then I just rephrased my question or asked for more and then it just developed and I said, "Hey, put it into a Word document," and I had everything I needed. It was really cool.
Jonathan: That's really great. We're in that phase right now where a lot of people have tried it once or twice and they treat it like Google. They'll ask it a question you could just do a search engine for, and that's not really where it shines. Where it really shines is exactly what you're doing is kind of know what you want and you build it together.
Paula: If I'm just an average- I don't want to say the word average, that's kind of demeaning but if I'm just a listener and I want to know how I can generate some passive income, and I know you talked a little bit about Pinterest and stuff like that, what advice would you give someone who said, "Hey, I'd like to generate additional income. How can I use AI to do that?"
Jonathan: Sure. The way AI really works is it combines your personal expertise with its general expertise. For example, your complete and total expertise about being a lawyer because you went to law school with its ability to turn that into a course, or turn that into blog posts, or use its expertise at designing a one sheet so you get on podcast shows. You're taking its general knowledge of turning your knowledge into skills. That's where it really shines. For each person, it's going to be something completely different.
The best place to use it is areas where you're weak. If I'm a really good writer, I'm not going to use it to write, but I'll use it to edit because that's not what I'm good at. If you're a great editor, then you might use it to plan out your story. For every person, it's going to be a different use, but anything that's a repetitive task, whether it's social media or emailing people, for example, you can use it to email every single person a custom email that you want to appear on their podcast. If you're running a podcast, how you can get a ton of guests by writing them a custom email that actually ChatGPT wrote for you that's so much faster because otherwise it takes 10 or 20 minutes to write each email. Now it just takes a minute.
Anything like that is where it really shines. Just doing something over and over again or doing something that you want to customize for each person that's receiving it. You can really use it again for strategizing, planning a marketing campaign. What it's really great for is you can say, "Hey, I want to start making passive income. Here's the things I'm good at. Here's the things I like to do. Here's how much money I want to make. Here's my current situation." It will help you develop a custom plan. The more data you feed it, the better results you get.
Paula: Oh, I'm tempted to do that right now. I have a couple online courses and I need to find out a better way to market those. I'm going to ask that question when we get off this call.
Jonathan: It can help you write the sales page. It can help you figure out where your audience is. A lot of people don't realize that different people use every social network. People that are 16 are using it different than people that are my age and people that are older. That's an even basic question. You go, "Where's my audience?" You can start spending time on the right social network or the right type of marketing. You can rewrite your sales page. You can rewrite the emails to bring people in. When people join your mailing list, you go, "Hey, you're on my mailing list. Let me tell you about my new course." That's a really big part of it.
I know for me, I'm really good at writing sales pages for other people. Sometimes writing it for myself, it's hard to be as self-reflective and ChatGPT can help with that.
Paula: One thing it can't do, though, is put in the personal touch, right?
Jonathan: Yes, it can.
Paula: How do you use it for that?
Jonathan: There's several ways to do it. The first is you want to find out if ChatGPT knows who you are. I'm like the eighth most famous Jonathan Green. I was teaching a lesson with my students and I said, "Write this in the style of Jonathan Green." I thought it was going to choose the one who wrote, The Fault in Our Stars. He writes all the teenage movies, where one teenager's dying and then they fall in love. I thought it was going to write in that style. I started writing, that sounds like me and I said, "Which Jonathan Green are you using?" It turns out it's read all of my books, so it was writing in my style.
For some authors, it's already in there. If you're not already in there and you'd be surprised how many people are in there. It's really surprising. You can just say, "ChatGPT, I'm going to feed you things that I've written. You just let me know when you have enough to write in my style." You can feed it usually about eight blog posts or eight pieces of content or so. Then it'll be able to write in your style so you can actually feed it that way.
Paula: Does it save that information somehow? I have an account and I paid the extra $20 a month or something so I could use some of the tools that you should really be familiar with. Does it just save that information?
Jonathan: It won't save that between conversations. That basic way, you just have to redo that every time you start a new project with it, a new conversation. The more advanced way, which is where we get into really advanced prompt engineering is where you say, "ChatGPT, I want to write a prompt that sets you to write in this exact style. Please give me that prompt." ChatGPT can do way, way beyond what most people know. You can actually create an entire ocean personality type, which is a five-point personality metric. Each one of it has 10 different sub-numbers. You can create a really specific personality. You can write a scale tree.
Paula: I don't know what any of that is. [laughs]
Jonathan: All that means is you can tell it-- Your personality's not the same as mine. The way we'll describe a personality is using a personality type test that's a common test. It's like the Myers-Brigg, but it's more complicated. I don't know how to do it either but then you say, "ChatGPT, give it to me," and it'll actually give you a personality type and it will give you a skill chain that describes your writing style. Then you can reuse that as a prompt. You just tell it to write the prompt fo rou. That's the best way to say it.
Paula: What, do you just copy and save the prompt?
Jonathan: Yes.
Paula: Like a Word document and just reuse it all the time.
Jonathan: Exactly. I have a bunch of prompts.
Paula: Because it doesn't save your previous chats, right?
Jonathan: No, no it doesn't. You want to save all of your prompts in a collection because you can develop your personal structures. I have 13 prompts that I do in a row whenever I'm writing a blog post and I have to do those in a row. I copy and paste them and I just change one word. That's part of my process.
In the same way, I have each of my different personalities. I have when I want it to be a social media expert, when I want to be a Twitter expert, when I want it to be an editing expert, I'll feed that starting prompt and then I'll go into the rest of my process so that it's preset.
Paula: Do you have a business or something that you teach people how to do this or have classes?
Jonathan: Yes. I have a course called AI Freedom where I teach people all the different ways to use both ChatGPT and Midjourney so that you can create anything from creating your own logos, to creating your own social media graphics, to designing coloring books, or designing any type of printables. I go through the different ways to use the things combined. That's really the main thing I do besides write books on ChatGPT.
Paula: Okay, somebody wants to get information on that. How do they find that?
Jonathan: Everything about me, if you google Serve No Master, every result is me and you can go to servenomaster.com/ai for artificial intelligence and all of my AI stuff is on one page.
Paula: That is really cool. How long ago did you start this? I want to ask one question before you answer that. What was your dream job before you got let go?
Jonathan: I was in education. At 29, I was the head of a $1.5 million department at a top 20 university in America. I realized that it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It's like careful what you wish for. I didn't realize how much slow-roll they were. They would give me a job that was supposed to take six months and it'd be done in 30 minutes. I'm like I don't know what to do for the next six months. I don't know how to make a 30-minute task take six months. It wasn't the right fit for me, but I thought it was what I wanted.
Paula: Then how did you come across doing this?
Jonathan: Sure. I lost my job and I said I never want someone to be able to do this to me again so I started doing stuff online. I bought a course. I started selling local search engine optimization services because I noticed a lot of businesses and a lot of big businesses too had no online presence, or all the links about their business to go to a different business. That's where I started off helping people, helping people do video marketing and all of that stuff, and then from there I went from services into creating courses over the next two years.
Paula: You're ahead of the game. I know so many people are just now starting to get into it and I think that if they can't figure it out within the first couple of times that they try it, I don't think they're going to go back. You really have to play around with the tool, and take some classes, and really understand how to use it. It literally saves me, I have to say a third of my work a week easily.
Jonathan: It's like with any new tool or new technology, the first question is is this real? Is it a fad? Is it going to be something that people are talking about now but not in a year?" You go, "Oh, I'll just wait for this one to pass by," which I understand. This one is not one of those. There are going to be challenges. I have had bad results. I've gotten into fights with ChatGPT, probably 50 fights because when I load it with my personality like when I was editing my last book, I was talking to myself and it kept rewriting stuff in my style.
I was like, "I already wrote this. You don't have to rewrite it." You're going to have frustrating moments. That's part of it, but it's the ability to get past that and keep tweaking and realize that each new conversation, it's not going to remember it's mad at you like an assistant or someone who works with you. You have the ability to test stuff.
The biggest fear people have is looking stupid. They go, "I don't want ChatGPT to think I'm stupid." That's the fear I had. I was afraid of putting in the wrong prompt. Once you realize that it erases every single conversation as soon as it ends, you can delete a conversation that's gone forever, it doesn't store it on its servers, there's no risk. There's no downside. It's just in our heads that fear of an AI thinking we're dumb. Once you escape that and you go, "I'll just keep trying stuff," then the sky is the limit.
Paula: When it came to that, I am dumb and if I'm going to that to help me, I don't like to use the word dumb, but I don't mind being dumb. You know what I mean? It's there to help you and it's actually making me smarter. At least I appear smarter.
Jonathan: No, you seem smart to me.
Jon Gay: You used the word dumb, but you're hitting on a much larger picture that I think Jonathan's alluding to here, which is if you don't know how something works, it's very easy to get down on yourself about it but if you spend the time with it and Jonathan's talking about giving it different prompts, telling it how to do different things, it's just you're not dumb. You're just inexperienced with it. That's all and the more experience you get man, the sky's the limit with this thing.
Paula: I think most people don't even understand probably what the term prompt means. Jonathan, what does the word prompt mean?
Jonathan: Sure. Prompt is when you give a command to ChatGPT, whether it's asking a question or telling it to do something, or pre-prompting where you're warming it up saying I'm about to do something, but I want to give you more information first. All prompt means is when I'm talking to ChatGPT.
Paula: Okay, give me an example. Let's say we wanted to find out about--
Jon: Upcoming NFL season.
Jonathan: That's a great one. There's two ways to approach it. The first thing is that ChatGPT's cutoff is in September 2021. Let's pretend that's not there. Let's pretend that it has access to current data, which sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't have internet access to data. There's two approaches.
The first thing is you can say, hey, you're an NFL- I would say probably whatever they call a spread house in Las Vegas, the one who makes all the rules for all the gambling, because they always win.
Jon: Call it a casino or a sports book.
Jonathan: Yes, a sports book or whoever the person is who does that. I don't know the right word. I'd probably ask it that first. I'd say, "What's the name of the person who sets the odds?" Then I would say, "You're an oddsmaker with 30 years of experience in NFL as your expertise, and for the rest of this conversation you're going to be that expert." That's the first way to do it. That's the softer way to do it. That's where you're creating a character for it to be.
The stronger way to do it is a mimic, is if you know a specific person. What I normally do is say, "Hey, who are the 10 best NFL oddsmakers?" I don't care who the "best" is. I just care who ChatGPT has the largest database on. Whenever I create a character, what I'm doing is just limiting out all the unuseful data because if you just ask for gambling data or for NFL data, most people are wrong. Most people's websites aren't good. Most information on the internet's wrong. You want to just narrow it down to something good so we can narrow it down to a booking expert, which is wide, and even more narrow is a specific person. You'll say, "Hey, what would this person do in this situation?" then it'll start to give you more specific data.
The other way to do it is you can also create a specific coach or a specific commentator who you know is consistently right or who has you like their information. You can have it be as specific as a specific person, or as wide as a specific type of expert and then it will just give you much, much better data. You'll notice the data gets 10 or 20 times better just with one single prompt.
Jon: Jonathan, before we let you go and ask you for your contact info, if you could give somebody who's never played with ChatGPT one piece of advice, what would it be?
Jonathan: Always start with a question. If you start off by saying, "I want to do this, what information do you need from me?" you're going to get amazing results every single time. I use that technique every single day for sure, and probably about half the time I'm using ChatGPT because I'm doing a new task so I want to develop a process. I always ask it same thing. I go, "I want a prompt that does this. What prompt do I need?" I always have it give me guidance. If you switch from commands, which is how we think of like from Star Trek, how to talk to AI and switch to asking questions and see it as a conversation. They call it, right, ChatGPT, you chat with it, but we still don't think of it that way. As soon as you switch conversation and say, "I don't know how to do this--"
I've been doing a lot of work developing new social media strategies because my next book is ChatGPT for Social Media, and so I was trying to design the perfect prompt to write a hundred Pinterest pins with one prompt. I was constantly tweaking and saying, "Hey, what went wrong here? What goes on there?
How can I make this a better prompt?" By being conversational, I can get to the answer much faster than just guessing because guessing, I'm very unlikely to hit the bullseye but if I just keep asking, "How can I make this better? What went wrong here?" then I get closer and closer to the perfect prompt for each different task.
Paula: I'll have to let you know that the questions that I came up for today's interview, I asked ChatGPT for questions to ask you.
Jonathan: That's great.
Paula: Because I had no idea because I don't know enough.
Jon: As we start to wrap up here, Jonathan, I really want to come back to what you just said, which is almost like if you think about a typical employee-boss relationship, the best relationships are collaborative where the boss asks the employee questions as well as the employee saying to the boss, "What do you need me to do?" The worst bosses are the ones say do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, but the ones that are collaborative and have a conversation and ask questions tend to get better results and that's exactly what you're describing here.
Paula: Kind of though, isn't it? Isn't it more of I don't know, I look at it as giving direction to your assistant.
Jonathan: Well, it can be either way. There's two different ways to communicate. It can be something as simple as giving it a command and saying, I want to do this, but the collaborative idea is correct because there's certain things I'm not very good at that ChatGPT's better at. ChatGPT knows all of the different image size for every social media platform. Those are changing every year. What banner size or this and that, it's always a different dimension. It's so annoying to me, but ChatGPT just knows that. ChatGPT is always going to spell things right.
It's certain tasks it's always going to be better than me because I always misspell where it's just like everyone else. It's totally normal. It's part of the process, but there are certain things it's an expert at. Again, it's a collaborative process. The more you see it as collaborative, the better results you'll get because if you say, for example, there's just two versions.
"I'm interviewing Jonathan. What are five great questions?" or, "I'm going to have a podcast interview with a guest and I want to ask the five best questions possible. What information do you need from me to help design the best questions?" That's more conversational, more cooperative, collaborative, and you're going to get a better result because it will- it always, even for things I'm an expert at, I will ask it a question like, "How do I get more book reviews?" and it'll be 12 things, and 11 of them I've done before and the 12th one I go, "Oh, yes, I used to do that. Why don't I do that for this one? I forgot about it."
Sometimes it's just we already know things, we don't always remember every step, but it always remembers every step. It can be just the collaborative venture ensures you don't forget something or give it a bad piece of information. I still do that. If I just give it a command, sometimes I go, "What just happened here? This is really bad. I have to start a new conversation with a question to get to a better result."
Paula: Fascinating. Where do you think the future of this is going to be for, say, people who are copywriters and social media people, when we can basically be doing it ourselves?
Jonathan: What it does is it makes you better. I have some friends who are the most expensive copywriters in the world. They are seven, eight figures to write a sales letter. They're crazy expensive. They work with the huge financial companies. Those always are the most expensive ones. One of my friends wrote the control for one of the largest ones in the world. I could never afford him. It's so far outside of what I would pay for a sales letter.
I could never write a sales letter as good as him even with ChatGPT even if I tell ChatGPT to write it his style because there's that creative spark that makes him an expert. What it does is it makes an expert better and it makes everyone else a good generalist. It can take someone who's never written a sales letter forward, help them write an okay sales letter, but it's never going to help them to write a letter as good as an expert.
Whatever you're excellent at, whatever your area of expertise is, I will never be able to capture that even with ChatGPT on my side because you have an expertise that even combined with ChatGPT or any other AI tool, I can't match.
What it really does is it makes everyone better. For example, every single person who's writing blog posts for a penny a word from around the world, now they can write better blog posts so their content gets better, kind of as the great equalizer. I really see it as helping people to do anything and help experts to do what they do better. I will never be able to write a sales letter as good as the top sales letters in the world, even using ChatGPT as a tool.
That's the holy grail. People are still trying to figure out copywriting with it but a Copywriter Plus aid is always better than a regular person with it.
Paula: Okay. Give me your website, again.
Jonathan: servenomaster.com.
Paula: Servenomaster. I like that. Did you hear that Jon, I serve no master.
Jon: [laughs]
Paula: Got that.
Jon: This will be a bad time to order you to give your website as a plug to wrap it up.
Paula: It would be a bad time.
Jon: [laughs]
Paula: If you'd like to reach out to me, you can reach me at paula@paulachristine.com or you can email me at paula@paulachristine.com. Jonathan, fantastic information. I am so excited to get on and play with ChatGPT more. You've just taught me a lot in just in a few minutes and we're going to check out your course.
Jonathan: Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much. I hope you see things that you like.
[00:20:42] [END OF AUDIO]