In this LMScast episode, Nick Usborne delves into the deep effects of emotional intelligence and AI on successful communication, with a focus on course building and copywriting.

Nick Usborne is a seasoned copywriter, author, and consultant with a career spanning back to 1979. His website is nickusbrone.com. He fell in love with copywriting and finally started working for big businesses. After making the switch to an internet company in 1997, Nick started advising startups and was in high demand as a conference speaker.

Nick highlights self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management as the four key categories that comprise emotional intelligence. He emphasizes how important emotional intelligence is in creating trust, which is a necessary condition for both profitable sales and enduring client relationships.

Additionally, he talks about the differences between manipulative strategies and ethical, emotionally intelligent copywriting, arguing in favor of an authentic, listener-focused strategy.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s a repeat guest on the show. He’s my friend and colleague, Nick Usborne. You can find him over at nickusborne. com. Nick is the creator of his later latest course, which is future proof copywriting course. Combining artificial intelligence with the power of emotional intelligence.

Nick is an awesome writer, copywriter, course creator, teacher. Nick has done copywriting for big brands like Apple. The New York Times, the United States Navy. He shared the stage at marketing conferences with folks like Seth Godin. I’m lucky to consider Nick a friend. Welcome back on the show, Nick.

Nick Usborne: Thank you. Thank you for the generous introduction. You make me sound good.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. So Nick is a prolific curiosity person. And when he goes deep on things like AI and writing, I pay attention. Let’s start by unpacking. We’ve all heard a lot about artificial intelligence, which we’re going to talk about and how to use that in our writing, but before we go there.

Let’s unpack what emotional intelligence is.

Nick Usborne: Emotional intelligence. So I think a lot of us when we were kids took, it took a standard intelligence test. This is the kind of cognitive intelligence test. And it’s horrible because as a young age, you’re told whether you’re smart or dumb or whatever.

And the thing about the cognitive intelligence is it doesn’t really change in during life, but for a long time, there’s been this sense that. Is this really the only measure of someone’s potential success or achievements in life is what their cognitive intelligence is? And an author called Daniel, Dan Goldman in the 90s.

In 1995, he wrote the book Emotional Intelligence. And he argued that, you know what? It’s not so much about the cognitive intelligence. If you look at the most successful people in. In business and entrepreneurs and, within the families, it’s not about the cognitive intelligence. It’s about the emotional intelligence.

And he, if you don’t mind me rambling, all right, to set it up, he basically broke this down into four domains, the self awareness of your own emotional state. So you may have a look, Chris, you and I could get into a discussion and one of us gets heated. And you say to me, I’ll nick it. You sound angry and I said, No, I don’t.

Or he said, You’re angry. No, I’m not. Nick, you’re upset. No, I’m not. And maybe I am upset, but I don’t recognize it. We think we automatically understand that we’re self aware about our emotional state. Very often we’re not. Nick, you’re really stressed. No, I’m not. Actually I am. So, self awareness is part of this process.

And then self management, which is how do you actually then manage the emotions you feel? So if I go into my, my kids are too old now, but there was a time where I had some teenage sons and I’d go into their bedroom and they’d be sitting there smoking a cigarette in bed or worse, and the place would be a dump.

And I’d be, and I know that my first reaction is to be frustrated and angry. Ah, come on. But I also know, so self management is for me to recognize that emotion that I’m going to feel because I because there it is. I’ve been there. We’ve been there before, but I could have now self manage and say, okay, take a breath.

We know that it never turns out well if you just get angry with the teenager because the teenager always wins when it comes to getting angry. So now I’ve got to manage my emotions. So that is something, hey, this is a big part of like emotional maturity is how well Some people say, Oh I feel this way.

Therefore, I’m going to shout and scream at you. Okay, but there’s maybe there’s more emotionally intelligent ways to go about it, which is sometimes to manage those emotions to get to a better outcome. The third was he talks about social awareness, and this is a really interesting and difficult one, I think, and that is with other people.

If I’m talking to a group of three people, how aware am I, how tuned in am I into their emotions? What, how empathetic am I being? So empathy is a big part of social awareness is like and, I’m honestly, I’m not terribly good at this as like reading. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll have a conversation and then like an hour later or a day later, or three days later, I think, Oh my goodness, that person, the one on the right that I didn’t know, there was almost like an expression or a micro expression that I can see now, but I didn’t see at the time.

And what I was saying. upset insulted that person and I didn’t get it. I was not aware of other people’s emotions around me. So it’s, super hard. That part of emotional intelligence is to be not just empathetic, which I think we’d like to think that we’re empathetic, that because it’s a nice thing to be, but actually to be aware of the emotions of people around us.

So Daniel Goleman wrote about this from A lot of it about it from a personal point of view and other people, other experts have picked it up since then, and he has to and applying this to business of like emotional intelligence within managers and leaders and teams like, how self aware is your boss?

How well does she manage her emotions when things go south a bit? How, aware is she of People’s someone’s had a terrible day and goes in to see the boss. Does the boss even notice? Does she aware that person’s having a really hard day or does she just. And it’s the same with writing.

We can be a big part of copywriting, which is my core skill. I’ve been a copywriter for over 40 years is before I put pen to paper, old school pen to paper before I put pen to paper, I’ve got to pause and think, who am I writing to? Who is my audience? And also what is their emotional state? How am I going to make them feel good?

All right, I want to take a layer of amygdala and make them feel good. And if I can get them to feel good, then I’m 80 90 percent of the way to making it a sale. The other thing about emotional intelligence is it builds trust. And trust is a kind of precursor to making a sale. And for us, like Chris said, I am a course creator myself, so I’m a copywriter.

But I’m also a course creator, and I know that when I am writing promotions to sell my courses, I have to find a way to get my reader to trust me. They’re going to put money down. They don’t see, they don’t get to take the course. They may get a sample or something. Over to, and maybe I’m not going to do it in one shot, maybe I can get him to sign up for my newsletter and step by step, I will build trust.

And if I want to build trust, it means that I have to be emotionally intelligent. I cannot just keep bombarding them with 10, 20 percent off, 10 percent off, 5 percent off rush, I can’t do the same old all the time. I’m not saying that doesn’t work. It does. We, I think we all know that, but longer term, if I want to build a relationship with, a buyer and maybe have them buy a second course or a third course, is I got to build trust.

And that’s where emotional intelligence is, a superpower. And then no, you go ahead. Otherwise I’ll just talk forever

Chris Badgett: about it. A side question related to this sometimes for somebody who’s not a marketer or a copywriter those, things have a bad rap. How would you differentiate Healthy emotional intelligence in your communication and your writing specifically compared to what some people fear of manipulation or being a pushy salesperson where you’re, trying to make them feel good, but it’s not necessarily authentic or whatever.

So how, do you, what’s the difference there that makes great ethical, emotionally intelligent copywriting versus manipulation?

Nick Usborne: I think it actually comes from the writer. It’s a mindset thing. I know how to, like I said, I’ve been doing this forever so, I know how to do the manipulation thing the rush hurry, the fear fear of missing out, the fear of losing your money, the fear of, and yeah, I can I, can do that, but it, but I know it’s manipulative, and I know that I can make some dollars that way, but I don’t think it’s a good way to build a longer term relationship, yet.

Because it’s in any realm in life to build a relationship based on emotional manipulation is probably not a winning strategy, whether it’s at home or at work. And I know some companies follow that route. But again if I’m a bigger company and I follow that route. Okay. It’s, the company’s reputation on the line, but for those of us who are selling courses, programs, training more one on one hi, I’m Nick.

I’m Chris. This is me. The stakes are a little different. I can’t really afford to be seen to be manipulative because my brand has got to be trustworthy. Because this is me. If you go to my website, look, this is me. You’ll see me on my website. My brand is me. And yes, I can do the manipulative, emotional stuff.

I know how to do it and how to pull those triggers. But what does that say about me as a brand? Because when you get to the website, next time you’re thinking of buying one of my courses, it’s it’s either, Oh, that’s Nick. Hey he really seems like the real deal. He seems like a good, generous guy.

Or I look, it’s Nick, the manipulative copywriter. And, I don’t want to beat the second one. I want to be the first one. That’s how a business endures in the long term, even with even for a small scale businesses.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about places where somebody could use emotionally intelligent copywriting as a course creator.

I think the obvious thing is the sales page, but where can we and we can accelerate with AI and get new more blended in with that. But before we go to AI, where can we use this emotional, emotionally intelligent copywriting as a course creator, coach or training provider besides our sales pages?

Nick Usborne: I for me, my personal experience with this is probably 90 percent of that work has been done with my newsletter.

All right, so I’ll build a relationship with people are stutter. And hey, if you go to my website, you’ll find you’re invited to sign up for my newsletter, you get a free report, all the good stuff. And then I will start. Sending you emails once or twice a week. And that is my opportunity to show myself as I truly am because email and newsletters are like that.

If I’m doing social media, if I’m doing a landing page, it’s web marketing stuff. If you give me permission to talk to you in your inbox is a private is you own your inbox, right? It’s the one thing in this domain. Like, Zuckerberg owns everything you do on Facebook. Google owns everything you do when you’re browsing.

Everyone else owns everything, but you own your inbox. It’s your place. And if you don’t like what I say, you can unsubscribe or you can mark me as spam. So it’s a place where one, I have to be careful not to get thrown out, but it also is a place where I have the best opportunity to speak to you, write to you, like pretty much one on one because friends and family will write to you in, email.

It’s not just a business application. It’s a personal space as well. So if I respect that space, if I respect the fact that this is your personal space, and I that is where I have the opportunity, however well or poorly I might do it, but I have the opportunity now to build a relationship. So one of my favorite writers is Anne Handley.

of marketing profs. And if you get her newsletter, she does this fantastic job of building a relationship with her reader. In fact, just, you just read the first, you just read one newsletter from out Handley and you feel like she really is your friend, which is impossible because it’s the first newsletter, but the way she writes.

It just feels that way that she cares about you, that she sees you, that she’s writing to you. So that has always been for me, the killer app is either through email or newsletters come into the inbox as well through newsletter is there is where I can speak. I can speak honestly and I can try to demonstrate a high level of emotional intelligence and also simple, things like every now and again I’ll say, Hey, I want to hear what you get.

I want to hear what you think. I’ve just done a super quick survey. Just let me know what you think. So I’m listening. All right. So, listening is key to empathy. It’s key to emotional intelligence. It’s something a lot of us don’t do as well as we should. We love talking much. Listen to me. I can’t stop.

We love talking. But we’re not most of us are not so good at listening. So I’ll just do Something like I’ll throw in a quick two question survey one because I’m really interested in the answers. But secondly, it lets my readers know that, hey, it’s not just Nick broadcasting. He actually wants to hear.

He wants feedback from us. So that’s cool.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Your course is future proof, copywriting, combining artificial intelligence with the power of emotional intelligence. That’s over at nickusborne. com. There’s a coupon code Lifter15 if you want 15 percent off. Tell us about the course and start bringing AI into the conversation.

So you’ve always been a very talented, emotionally intelligent copywriter yourself. AI came on the scene really strongly a year ago of this recording or so. What have you discovered when combining your emotionally intelligent brain with the large language models of artificial intelligence?

Nick Usborne: So many things but you’re right.

Like whenever dangle a new technology in front of me and it’s irresistible, like I’m just like down the rabbit hole and I see everyone in the comments that James Burchill is there and he knows, cause we’ve fallen down one or two mutual rabbit holes over the years. So when it came out, Hey, I’ve been using with, James Burchill, we were using official intelligence in chatbots like many years ago.

It’s been around for a while. I’ve been into it for quite a while. And then along comes GPT, chat GPT at the end of November of last year. And, I’d been using some other tools, like literally the week before that tool comes out and it like completely blows my mind because literally it felt like 10 years of development had been.

Passed over the course of a weekend. It honestly felt like that to me. It was extraordinary, that leap. And, we know that to be true. ’cause in fact, everything that’s happened since last November, it is almost defined by that moment and, chat. GBT and g BT four are, still almost the benchmark.

These are the LLMs to beat right now. As always, I jumped in because I was fascinated and amazed. And I discovered some ways as a copywriter that I could, really use it to my advantage. I could use it, I used it for brainstorming. And, I used it for research. I used it for outlining presentations.

And I used it for ideas. People really struggle with the idea that these A. I. S. might, in some sense, be creative, but I have found them to be creative and that I can throw two things in and it’s a mash up and they’ll spit something out that I hadn’t thought of or anticipated. I think, huh. They took these two things and they created suggested something new that to me is, an act of creation.

So I found that absolutely fascinating because I never anticipated that from a tool like this. So as a copywriter, say I could brainstorm stuff, I could research stuff, I could outline stuff. I could do some first drafts of stuff I could do early on and I was doing these, I experimented with something.

I went to and I have one or two books up on Amazon. And I went naturally on this, I didn’t do my stuff. It was a product. I went to a product on Amazon. It was like a food blender and I copied like 50 reviews, consumer reviews, and I pasted them into GPT for, and I said, Hey, based on the, these reviews, give me a sentiment analysis of this product.

And it’s like one, two, three, boom. And it’s like insane. You know how hard it is to take 50 or 100 pieces of written reviews and try and hold those in your mind and say, okay, hang on, what are the positives? What are the negatives, what are the proportions? What are the main points? And it just like 30 seconds later, I have it.

There are companies I could go to, to do sentiment analysis, but it would cost me thousands of dollars and weeks or months. Then I said, okay, give me identify the words and phrases that predominated on the positive side of the sentiment. And it did, and then I said, okay, based on the sentiment analysis. Based on the kind of emotionally triggering vocabulary we’ve identified, write me a sales page for this product.

It did. And I’m sitting there thinking this is like insane. Particularly the sentiment analysis part of it. So, as a copywriter, I’m beginning to look at this and I’m looking at it and looking at it and I’m seeing all the potential. Meanwhile, I’m watching the market like of copywriters. So copywriters, content writers, SEO writers, all that kind of digital writing, my digital writing colleagues out there, there’s one block.

They’re saying, Oh, no, I’m not even looking at AI. I think it’s just a passing fad. It’s all hype. It’ll never come to anything. And that’s actually, I find it in a sense, discouraging. That’s a larger block than I might have anticipated because I’ve done surveys on this design group. And then there’s the group that a little bit worried that this might eat their lunch one day.

So my, whole Positioning on this is like lean into this. You cannot ignore this. This is way too powerful to ignore. If you ignore this, you will, you’ll be done. Because in fact, I I’ve asked, and again you have to, revise, you have to prompt and then reprompt and sometimes revise that prompt.

But if you work hard enough at it, you can get a good You can get if you’re writing a 5, 500 word blog post with a bit of work you can get a really good piece of writing and I’ve hired other writers as well as being a writer myself. And I can probably, I can get output from GPT four.

That is pretty close to as good as what I get from most human writers, as long as I take care with the prompting. There’s a potential problem there. And low level writers that have been pumping out stuff very fast at volume without really caring about the quality. They’re already being replaced by these tools.

And in a sense, yeah, because what you’re doing is low quality and these tools are already better than you. So yeah it’s, a, it is a potential threat to all of us in the creative space, the commercial creative space. So to my mind, the way to deal with that one is to lean into it so that you maximize your use of it.

It makes you more productive. It makes you smarter. But the second bit getting into the emotional intelligence is okay. If I want to beat this thing, if I want to stand, not beat it so much, but if I want to separate myself from just another AI writer, because there’s already a gazillion of those, how do I do that while I add in the emotional intelligence, because if you ask chat, GPT say, Hey, chat, GPT, what are your limitations when it comes to selling or writing stuff for humans?

And it’ll say. We don’t really, I don’t really do empathy. I don’t have firsthand experience of emotions. I don’t get. Cultural nuances or regional nuances. There’s all kinds of subtleties and it’s all within the emotional scale. There are these subtleties that I don’t get because I doesn’t get it. It can read.

It can read a story or a poem or a screenplay about emotion, but it can’t. It’s never didn’t have a story. It can’t tell you the story of when it was a teenager in the pub and it saw this girl across the room for the very first time. It can’t have that experience. So that’s why I blend.

artificial intelligence with emotional intelligence, because one, it makes the copy better, because emotion always makes copy better. But also now I’m adding something in that AI cannot add it, because it doesn’t have that sophisticated, doesn’t have that first hand experience. It’s never tasted ice cream, it’s never fallen in love, it’s never stubbed his toe.

So, I’ll bring into my copy more sensory things Smell or taste or hearing being on the beach and feeling the sound between your toes and smelling the salt and hearing the wind and all this stuff that I can’t do, but I can so yeah, and then another thing. And again, just interrupt me because I just go on forever.

Is if too many people just use AI. There is this sameness trap, there’s this kind of paradox, is that if you just use AI for your output guess what? There’s a gazillion other copywriters doing the same, and you’re going to start sounding very, similar to everyone else. So as a company, why would I hire you if you sound the same as everyone else?

And also there are some companies that I think have jumped on the bandwagon a little bit quickly and using they’re firing some of the human writers and perhaps leaning too heavily into AI with the result that their brands are beginning to sound a little bit like everyone else’s they’re competing brands.

So you’ve got to be really careful this differentiation, because AI tends to, this is this kind of paradox with AI is that it’s amazing and it’s creative and it’s incredibly productive, but there’s, you get the sameness trap. And so again, as a copywriter with emotional intelligence, I come in and say, Hey, I can disrupt that.

I can make you sound unique. I can make you sound, we can use all the benefits of AI, but by weaving in emotional intelligence, I would not only make your copy better, but I’ll make you stand out from the crowd.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about prompts, like what are some good prompts or ways to think about prompts instead of Hey, I’m a course creator about, let’s say, Bitcoin investing, write me a sales page or create a course outline based on this topic, like these really simple prompts, but like you said, you’re going to end up in a sea of sameness.

So how can we prompt better? You

Nick Usborne: have to learn it. I’m, forever a student. I’m taking a course right now, which is making my brain hurt. And it’s about prompt engineering, but it’s beyond the front interface. It’s in the developer interface with, GPT 4 where prompting prompt, engineering is really a very structured process.

But for, everyday use, if you’re working within a GPT 4. One of the remarkable things is you can do very well with a very simple conversation. It’s a chat. It’s chat. All right. It’s chat GPT. It is conversational. It is optimized for conversation back and forth. So that’s what I do is, I might say, okay, and you should start off like here’s a simple piece of of prompt engineering advice for you.

Start off by saying. Asking the A. I. To take on a particular persona like act as the founder of a course creation company that serves this market so that the A. I. Knows what is it’s the background. Give it some context. So act as or write as if you were. Something like that. So give it, tell it who it is before you ask it to write something.

Act as an expert in online copywriting with many years experience. And your audience is Tell ’em who your audience is, then you get in. So this, is like some of the structure of more formal prompt engineering. You say who you who, I want the AI to be, who the audience is gonna be.

And now comes the prompt here’s, the goal I wanna achieve here’s the prompt I’m gonna put in there to get me part of the way. So, you can formalize it in that way. And just those two things of act as such and such, and here’s the context. Here’s the audience. So it’s almost like giving it a bit more of a briefing background, and then you ask the question.

What I’ve done in the past is I’ve got the best results where I will do this by steps. It’s a bit of a prompt chain. So I will say you from XR, I have this separate chat on my left hand column, all to do with this course that I teach. GPT 4 is familiar with this thread of conversation. I’ll say, Hey, based on everything about my course write me an email.

Promote promoting the course and let’s make it a three part email that we’re going to do it for five days, and it’ll write me the emails and I’ll look at it. And because of the background conversation above, it’s usually pretty good. And I’ll say, you know what, make that a little bit more. It sounds a little formal, make it a little bit more conversational.

And it’ll rewrite it in a slightly changed tone. Sometimes it goes too far. So I have to pull it by saying not quite that conversation somewhere in between, and then it does it again. All right. So then I’ll say, okay, but it’s like you’re leading with some, it understands things like benefits, difference between features and benefits.

So I’ll say, yeah, but you’re opening with a feature there. Let’s open with a benefit. Maybe we can weave a story, a bit of a story. Let’s put an example in their story. And so it’ll do that. And maybe I won’t love it. So I’ll tweak that prompt a bit. So what I’m doing is I very rarely just go in with one ask and then print out the outcome or copy and paste it.

I’m usually Conversation, right? It’s a conversational experience. I’m usually going back to forwards until I hit something just right. Do I then cut and copy and paste that into my email delivery service? Usually not let’s say it comes in with a story like a little example of just to humanize this thing.

I said, Hey, that’s cool. And I said, Hey, you know what? That reminds me of something that happened to me. So I’ll actually take the email that is written, but I’ll actually then take out their example story and I’ll put in a real one from me. Because somehow that changes stuff. All right. And like having done that, I think, yeah, but you know what, being me, I wouldn’t actually the first sentence with those five words, I’d probably say something.

So what I’m doing is I’m getting AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting on my copywriting, and it’s also encouraging me to do much better because sometimes I’ll sit down, like I’ve, I did it this morning. I’ve had a busy day. I had to write out an email. I wrote it out. I’ve got it scheduled to go, but I’ll probably pull it back out.

I want to tweak it a bit more because. It’s okay. If I’d done that with AI, I probably just have been more focused on those, steps, the process and AI very often will bring in a point of view or an idea or a thought that I hadn’t thought of, and I wouldn’t have thought of. So, it really can be a creative partner in this.

So I go I start off with the A. I. And then, like I say, with the example of my own story rather than this made up example. Now what I’m doing is I’m weaving in the emotional intelligence. All right. And I’m doing that final edit. To make sure that this fear this is a kind of emotional proximity between me and the reader.

But let’s say you can also get there if you do with this kind of prompt engineering thing is you start off with act as and then tell them a bit of background about the audience. If you just give them a little bit of extra background information, they can usually do a little better in the first and second draft.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned in your revision to the prompt of making it more conversational and you actually have another course called conversational copywriting. Can you give us a high level on what that is when we’re writing copy? What makes copy conversational?

Nick Usborne: The conversational copyright, it was almost like in anticipation of this moment, because in fact, emotionally intelligent copy.

is generally conversational copy. So in fact, I’ve got, where are we? A wonderful book here by Judith Glaser, Conversational Intelligence. So we’ve got cognitive intelligence, we’ve got emotional intelligence, we’ve got conversational intelligence. And that really was what my, that course was about. So again, if we go back into Relationships and conversations in companies.

Sometimes a manager or a boss or a team leader is not as empathetic as they could be. They don’t have that. They’re not working with a high degree of emotional intelligence. Conversational intelligence is very, closely related. So if I’m one of those not very highly emotionally intelligent managers and I’m in conversation with the subordinate, I’m probably not managing that conversation terribly well.

I’m probably lacking in empathy. I’m probably talking more than I’m listening when I should actually be listening more than I’m talking. So my course on conversational copywriting in a sense was anticipating the need to add emotional intel. I didn’t talk explicitly about emotional intelligence, but in a sense, that’s what it is about.

It’s certainly about conversational intelligence, which is to have like she, Judith worked as a consultant to companies going in and retraining people, like from the boss down of how to have more intelligent conversations. And it really was about empathy. It was about listening. Yeah, I should do a double package of both the courses together, because in, in a sense, the conversational copywriting course is almost like how to write.

In emotionally intelligent way. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: And how is that similar to being in conversation with the AI? What, overlaps between writing conversational copy versus engaging in this conversational interface? Like, you mentioned, you wrote the email series, but that probably included like 10 back and forth before you had something to edit off the AI.

Yeah. How do we. Become more emotionally and conversationally intelligent when, working with the AI specifically in the prompts,

Nick Usborne: you can, you, you can ask it, you can say, Hey, we’re writing to, let’s say some kind of medical thing. And you, can say to GPT 4, Hey we’re writing to people who generally have a family member who is, unwell.

So let’s be empathetic. Let’s be sensitive in how we write. And this is say, one of the things that completely blows my mind is, that chat GPT will get it. Now. It doesn’t get it in terms of consciousness Oh, my goodness, I feel for you, but it understands what I’m saying. And as a result, when he writes the copy, it will be more empathetic.

It will not. And it may be. This is the kind of thing it’s the I can’t do emotion. It simply reads about human experience of emotion, which means it’s sometimes quite clumsy. In how it handles it. So if I say I’m writing in some medical device or medical thing, and it’s for people who are very unwell.

So let’s be sensitive about that. It may overdo it when it comes back. All right, so I might find myself editing it back a bit so that it’s not too over the top in terms of Oh, poor you. So it’s you can go to a certain degree. Like I say, sentiment analysis. It does really well. I did that.

I did a survey A couple of weeks ago, and there were the responses, 120 people. answered an open ended question at the end. So I had this like thousands of words and again, impossible. So again, I just downloaded it, threw it into duty for us and hey, give me a sentiment analysis on this, which it did.

It does, it comprehends what sentiment means, what emotion means. But when it tries to write emotionally, you just always, you have to edit because sometimes it’ll, it doesn’t quite get it because it hasn’t been there. It hasn’t felt anything itself.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about your course future proof copywriting.

Like how did you structure it? What’s inside the program?

Nick Usborne: It’s basically in, in, three sections. The first section is on how to lean into artificial intelligence, how to maximize your use of AI as a content writer, copywriter, social media writer, SEO writer. So don’t be shy. You’ve got to, if you want to come out of this ahead, step one is to lean into the technology and keep up with it.

Hey, you and me both. I think today or the last few days have been playing around with Delhi three within GPT four. So now, in a very simple conversational way, I can generate high quality images within GPT four, which a week ago, we couldn’t really do unless we were on a kind of super duper list.

But so, leading up to technology like Keep, in touch with it, watch it, because this is moving so quickly. It’s, like insane, which makes it very exciting, but it does mean that you’ve got to actually make a bit of an effort to stay ahead, not be ahead as a kind of, but Hey I, do.

I listened to a podcast on AI probably most days, just in an attempt to see where everything is going. So step one, so the court, the first third of the course is teaching you. to become a more productive writer through application of AI. Step two of the course is the same for EI, for emotional intelligence.

So it’s, deep dive learning into what does it mean to be emotionally intelligent? What does it mean to be emotionally intelligent writer? How do we apply emotionally the domains of emotional intelligence, there’s four domains. How do we apply that to writing social media or writing content or writing a sales page or an email or a newsletter?

And how do you know? What is the I then stage three in the final stage before the kind of concluding lessons is how to combine the two? How do we combine a I and E I together? Eso step this first section a I second section E I in the third section is how we put those together. How we get the most of a I But also blend in EI so that the copywriting is better.

And also said that we can separate ourselves from the crowd, whether we are a, whether we’re building a course, whether we are, and I’ve helped, I’ve got a, I’ve got some more courses up my sleeve and two of them have been very much co creations with chat with GPT for I’ve come up with the kernel of an idea for a course and I’ll say, what do you think, how would you structure this?

And I chat about it and they come back and I say, yeah, but section four, that’s, you’re not getting it. I want to do something more so I’ve spent like, when it comes to brainstorming, whether it’s the structure of a sales page or the structure of the course itself, like the structure of a course itself, I’ve spent hours over the course of days, sometimes weeks of going back and forth.

using it as a, Hey, it’s a brainstorming buddy. It’s the smartest, it’s the most knowledgeable buddy you will ever, have. It knows everything about everything. It’s insane. And it’s super smart. So yeah, I use it across the board. I’m probably rambling now and went past the point of your question.

Chris Badgett: No, that’s it. That’s it. Go check out the course, future proof copywriting. That’s it. Nick us born. com Lifter 15 will save you 15%, but we’re not done. I have some more questions for you, Nick. Some of the people out there watching are WordPress professionals or they have an agency, they work with clients, particularly in the LMS niche.

So they have course creators and coaches and clients. How might a. If you’re an agency versus a course creator leveraged, what are some ways that agency could leverage this? One thing that jumps out at me is instead of giving somebody a website with a bunch of Latin text on there to actually use the AI to help you write starter content for a client.

But what else?

Nick Usborne: That’s happening already. And it’s I’ve used it. Aside the tool called Canva for a long time just, simple templates for Facebook posts and Twitter and tweets or X’s or whatever they’re called, but some of the stuff they’re doing with AI in terms of manipulation of those images it used to be stuff you had to be on the beta list of Photoshop to get that kind of functionality.

Now you can get it within, Canva. It’s, nuts, but also when you start typing in Canva, you have an option, you just click a button. And Canva will write a first draft for you. I’m, sure this is happening in, Oh, so some of the email provide the, I’m trying to think which one I think it was in get response.

I was working in it the other day and it said, Oh, Hey, would you like us to write a first draft? And I was like, no, but interesting. So, tools that are integrated other services, all other services, we’ve seen like search engines that are integrating it. Everyone has to integrate it now.

Canva and within WordPress. And I know other platforms what was I working in again? Shopify, offered to write me a product description with its AI. So if, I’m an agency. It’s a challenging time because the number crunch will say, awesome. We can fire, half of our illustrators and our media people and our copywriters, and we can get AI to do all the heavy lifting.

And, I get that. Maybe if you have two or three extra copywriters or extra designers, I can see the argument for that. I think there is a danger. I’ve read, I’ve, on discussion lists, I’ve heard back from the inside of agencies. Actually, I know an agency owner in the city where I live, and we talked about it, and he said that is a knee jerk.

They stopped hiring certain types of people and just used AI. But what he’s finding is that it’s, really easy to use AI superficially. It’s really hard to use it well. And you actually need to hire some of those people back to help you use it. There was a story I heard, which is in a sense, heartbreaking the other day, there’s this illustrator.

He’s been illustrating for big magazine covers for decades. Super, well respected. And he’s seeing his work just dry up, dry out, dry up. He got a call the other day from one of his former clients, like a big, national magazine said, okay, can you do a cover for us? And he said, Oh, wow, cool.

Excellent. Of course. I thought I’d never hear from you guys again. What makes you tend to me today? And the answer from that company, this is the heartbreaking bit was that, oh, our AI engineer is overwhelmed right now. In other words, the robots are busy. The robots are busy. We’re going to have to go second best and go to a human illustrator who served us well for decades, which is it’s really sad in one sense.

But, part of this is that. I think step one that a lot of companies did is they, used AI probably more than they should have done. And I think the step, a lot of agencies and groups have yet to take is to understand that you’ve really got to train people to use AI. Like I said I’m, doing this deep dive into a very kind of high level training myself because I want to stay ahead of the pack.

It’s my nature. I like new stuff. But I’m hearing from like firsthand and secondhand within agencies where that they’ve. They’re trying to automate too much. It’s like such an exciting prospect of, Oh my goodness. We can hire 20 percent of us, fire 20 percent of the staff and do this automatically.

And you can, but it won’t happen very well. You’ve got to hold on to some of those people and retrain those people. So you can be much more productive, but it’s not, however good these tools are, there, there is a one button press version. But that’s not the best version. The best version is where you have a human being who is really highly trained in this, and then they can really make this stuff dance.

Chris Badgett: One more thing I wanted to get into with you, with emotional intelligence, and you actually just did it very naturally right there, where it was, is I want to talk about story and how to use it, and you just did it in your answer right there, you’re like, that reminds me of a story of a graphic artist, how can we better use story on our sales pages and our lesson videos?

How do we think about that?

Nick Usborne: It’s weird because I have, as I have another course on Lyfter called selling with stories. So it’s like everything I’ve been doing for years has been in anticipation of this moment. So stories are uniquely human. All right. GPT 4 doesn’t have a first hand memory of their their first kiss or their first beer or the first time they lied to their parents and went to a party when they said they were somewhere else.

Like they don’t have these memories. So we have these stories and a lot of our culture, a lot of our shared beliefs tie up in the stories that we share. And a lot of stories will cross It doesn’t matter whether you’re from India or whether you’re from Alaska, there are some stories like being a teenager, falling in love, first kiss, the broken heart that, that are common.

So, stories that are an incredibly powerful way to connect with people emotionally stories, almost always emotional for good or bad, you sit down at Thanksgiving with your family and maybe your family isn’t always the best. Maybe, you’re not the best. Maybe it’s not the most.

Emotionally intelligence group or a mostly emotionally intelligent group around the table. But boy, do you have some stories that you can share and you do share stories. So, it goes right to the heart of what it means to be human and what community feels like, what family feels like is the shared stories that we have.

So that’s why the example I gave a little while ago where, chat GPT gave me a GPT for gave me a generic story. example. And I took that out and I replaced it with a real story because it just there’s something about that just rings true. And people again, if people have been reading me for a while, it’s that sounds like Nick.

I can see Nick in that situation. That’s that feels real. So yes, stories. And also within stories, make it experiential, make it sensory. It’s like walking on the beach and hearing the cry of the gulls above your head. AI doesn’t know that we know that it’s, part of it’s, part of a story we, we, can share.

And it also helps us to avoid that sameness trap because if we’re all using the same tool and we’re all doing the top 20, if we’ve looked up the top 50 prompts on Google, all right, we’re using all using the same top 50 prompts. We’re all using GPT 4 and then we get this sameness trap. Everything starts sounding the same.

And that’s not gonna have a good outcome for anyone not, for the writers, not for the companies, not for the course creators or whatever. So use the tool, then weave in emotional intelligence. And yes, stories is part of that, conversational writing is, and conversational is, writing, copywriting is, going back to your question there.

It’s just everyday writing. It’s as if you’re talking to someone across the kitchen table. You can be enthusiastic, but you don’t have to be a salesperson. Just, conversational everyday language and writing. If

Chris Badgett: artificial intelligence can speed us up, accelerate our writing contribute new ideas, particularly at the brainstorming phase, do we end up as digital writers spending about the same amount of time?

Are we actually more productive? We spending the same amount of time, but it’s higher quality output? Are we actually more productive? With our time

Nick Usborne: I think we can be a lot more productive. So, I have I have a few kind of passion hobby websites. I’m a bit of a coffee geek.

I’m a mushroom geek. And so last night, actually, I was just brainstorming with GPT 4 and I said, Hey, give me some, actually, I fed in some survey results into GPT 4. I said, based on this survey results, what are people most interested in hearing about? And it spat me out 10 topics. And I wrote back and said, you know what?

I’ve covered all of those. I’ve already covered those in the website. Give me some non obvious in between topics, which it did. When I said non obvious, it understood it perfectly. And it came back with some non obvious. And, one of them was about bioluminescent mushrooms. I said, cool. I said, write me a 600 word blog post on, on bioluminescent mushrooms, which it did.

And I went in and I tweaked it and I changed it. And I changed it. I just I did a, probably a 15 minute. editing time on it. And then I got an image for it and I’ll put it out. So I can probably produce five or 10 pieces of content now in the time that used to take me one. And that’s by, and also a better topic.

I wouldn’t, I hadn’t thought of bioluminescence and this is always happening. I’ll use it for, it could be a professional side. It could be a client side. It could be coffee or mushrooms, whatever, in whatever’s interesting me that day. And I’ll often ask, give me the non obvious. Give get, taken a symmetrical approach to that.

Tell me something that I wouldn’t think of. And it does. And that’s the gold for me. So it makes me more productive. It actually makes me better as well. But I would say probably in terms of productivity as a writer, I’ve got to be somewhere between five times and 10 times more productive than I was.

And that’s even putting in the extra work.

Chris Badgett: So go check out future proof, copywriting at Nick Osborne. com. Use a coupon code Lifter 15. And Nick, I want to thank you for coming back on the show. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. That was a, bunch of tactical gold in there too, about how to better work with AI, any final words for the people before we sign off today,

Nick Usborne: just lean into it.

Don’t be like, so I was, I did a survey on this and I was discouraged because there was like 35 percent of writers, copywriters that I surveyed said, Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a hype. It’ll just disappear. And I thought that’s a very high percentage. Don’t be this is like the, candle makers looking at Edison and saying there’s light bulbs that’ll come to nothing.

This, is a huge transformative disruptive change here. So my one piece of advice is lean into it just as far and fast as you can.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Nick. We really appreciate

Nick Usborne: it. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for inviting me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast.

Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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