Optimizing Your Online Business: Unveiling AI’s Pros and Cons

AI is a technology that many of your competitors will be using in their own online businesses.  If you want to stay ahead of them you're going to have to understand AI's pros and cons. This way, you can make informed decisions when you leverage AI.

Unfortunately, there is a huge divide between those who love it and those who hate it and don’t want to use it at all.

Both sides are wrong. You should aim to be somewhere in between – open to using AI tools but careful about how and when you use them.

That’s the issue with some of the most vocal opponents of AI in online marketing. Some view it as something to be feared or something that doesn’t offer any value, while others view it as a complete replacement for any effort they’ve put into their businesses.

All of this comes down to a fundamental lack of understanding of how AI works, where it doesn’t work, what it can help you with, and where it can hurt your business. Once you’re well-informed, AI can be welcomed into your business with open arms and without fear.

AI Fumbles: Risks in Fact-Finding

At the moment, there are a variety of AI tools available on the internet. Some are developed by global mega-corporations, while others are created by individual marketers looking to make quick money by offering push-button solutions.

No matter which tool you choose, you must be careful not to let it control your business. AI guidelines acknowledge that these tools can misinterpret facts. They also note that AI tools, when confronted with a concept they don’t understand, can hallucinate (make up) answers.

A niche leader cannot jeopardize their business by using a tool that can mislead their audience. That’s because if your readers blame you for publishing factually inaccurate information, it’ll be you.

AI has made several glaring mistakes. In fact, Google lost $100 billion in market share when their new BARD AI tool went horribly wrong at a live event where they tried to show how good it was.

In another case, Bing’s AI tool got into an argument with a user over an article’s author, and even claimed that the user’s name was also Bing because it “couldn’t imagine anyone with any other name”.

AI has also misinterpreted scientific facts. If you blog or sell a product with health, finance, or any other kind of advice, you could be giving out damaging information that could lead to a backlash.

Many AI tools are working with information that’s years behind. Some are working with data from 2021, and it's now 2023/24, while others have limitless access to the internet, which sometimes leads them to give crazy answers that are not from the most reliable sources.

When left to their own devices, AI tools respond in offensive ways. Not only are they mean, argumentative, and discriminatory, but if you don’t catch them before publishing, they can ruin your business.

Competitor's Challenge: AI Concerns

AI has many benefits. You can feed it data and it will give you insights or help you write better content. But if you're in a hurry to increase the amount of content you're producing, you may be tempted to use AI to do all the work for you.

And that's exactly what your competition is hoping for. Because if you leave it all up to a soulless robot, you can't compete with the human, creative approach they have.

Customers tend to pick and choose who they engage with, who they listen to, who they learn from, and who they buy from based on those personalities. You've probably heard of a few marketing voices in your life – some have annoyed you, some have impressed you.  (I'm hoping I impress you, haha).

Even when it's factually true, it's just boring and ineffective when it comes to building a list and converting visitors into sales.  Without that personal touch, they They might as well be reading a school book if you're not going to add that personal touch.

There’s no way for AI-generated content to have a human-like connection with the reader. There’s no human to connect to, haha. It’s that lack of emotion that matters so much (especially when it comes to online content).

Readers trust you when they feel connected to you, to your story. They get over their obstacles faster when they spend money on your links. And they’re more likely to interact with you. 

But who wants to comment on something written by a robot? No one. Google recommends that if you are publishing AI content you should tell your readers. Imagine how unconvinced they’d be if a tool just spouts some facts. If they know anything at all about AI they probably wouldn’t believe what it said.

Outsourcing Risks: AI Ambiguity

If you’re thinking you’re going to avoid AI altogether and rely on the skills of freelancers, ghostwriters and even private label right producers, it’s important to remember that you can’t trust people like you used to.

In the past, you had to be very careful about outsourcing because you weren’t sure who would unthinkingly scrape your site’s content or steal other people’s work.

You had to vet them for their ethics. Some used content scrapers or spinners, while others used copyrighted images that they had no right to use at all.

Now, the same applies to freelancers or content creators using AI tools. If they were using them at all, they would be using them in the same way you would be using them to generate ideas and drill down topics.

However, many will try to charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for the privilege of owning an AI creation directly, with no real input from the freelancer.

If they're not being honest about it, it's an ethical issue that you should be aware of. Especially if you're using someone's services based on a portfolio and a profile.

Even if they're able to write a full eBook and you like their talent and quality, it doesn't mean they won't use AI to take shortcuts and work less hours and make more money.

This is a common concern among freelancers. They have only so much time in the day and can only make as much money as the market will pay for their work.

With AI, they're not limited by time but you're putting your business in danger. For example, let's say you hire a freelancer on Fiverr to create your eCover for your new fiction novel that's going to be sold on Amazon and other platforms...

...but, after you’ve published and branded your book all over the place, you receive a notification (either from the platform or from another author) saying that your cover looks like it’s stolen from another person’s work.

For example, if you tell the graphic designer you want a similar style to another author (or you give them several authors so they know what look you want), they might enter that information into the AI tool and the AI will put together pictures from all the other authors so you look like a copycat.

What you want is reassurance that the freelancer had not simply asked an AI to produce the output of your content. Whether it’s a product or service, it’s supposed to be thought out from the seller’s point of view, with just AI ideas and brainstorming when creating your ecover.

If you hire a graphic designer, you want proof that they have a license for the artwork they’re using. In the event that Amazon has any issues with your book cover, you’d like that proof to prove that you have the right to use your own images in your cover.

AI's Approval Risks: Content Constraints

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time, it has only recently become one of the most discussed technologies amongst online entrepreneurs. And schools and college institutions were one of the first to ban AI-generated content.

Now, there are tools that can be run through content to determine whether or not it was created by an AI. This is even if the content goes through Copyscape, which is a tool used to identify outright theft of verbatim content.

Colleges and educational institutions, of course, want their students to learn what they are being taught. They don’t want their students relying on a computer to write essays and/or write a thesis on a topic they haven’t studied.

Google and other search engines have been trained to determine if content that they index online is created by humans or by AI robots. Many search engines claim to have 100% detection rates.

Google has repeatedly reversed itself on whether or not it will accept or penalize AI web pages. At first, Google said that AI content is no better than spam and will be treated accordingly.

But then Google started developing its own AI technology, BARD, so it had to appear to accept some degree of AI, or else it would be a case of “hypocrisy.” Google has said that it won’t penalize AI content, but that it will assess the quality of it just like any other content.

For many marketers, this means that AI will have little use for them, except for brainstorming and generating ideas. Because Google’s guidelines about helpful content update, AI-only content is unlikely to be very competitive.

Using it in its current form will defeat the point of using these tools as a means to your advantage. Instead of ranking high on SERPs, AI content (which often is dull and superficial) won’t have the unique qualities that SERPs look for to rank highly.

As far as Amazon and other platforms are concerned, they will continue to consider bans on AI-generated content in the future, as they have in the past with scraped or mass-generated content.

Cautious Content: Crafting with AI

Artificial intelligence tools are pretty self-serving. Ask it what would happen if it created your multimedia content and it’ll tell you exactly where it falls short compared to human-generated content.

One of the main drawbacks is that it’s not as creative or original as content that comes from an individual’s mind. It’s just based on information and content they already have access to.

In many cases, AI-generated multimedia content has led to copyright infringement issues because the content it creates is too similar to what’s already out there.

There’s been a lot of pushback against using AI for creativity. For instance, when one AI tool won a competition, competing artists were very angry and called for the banning of future robotic participants from the competition.

Artists and creatives from all walks of life are concerned that using AI in creative endeavors will normalize the content to the same generic style, sound, or look. AI cannot create from the ground up, so it’ll just be a bunch of recycled stuff from human minds.

Keyword Mastery: AI for Marketers

Now that we’ve gone over some of the many ways in which AI can be used in the wrong way in your business, let’s take a look at some of the ways in which you can use it in the right way. I love using it for keyword research and to generating long-tail keywords and phrases.

For example, as a niche blogger, you may have an idea of what topic you’d like to write about on a given day. However, you don’t have a specific keyword or phrase in mind. Instead, you can use the AI tool to generate 10 ideas for articles by typing in the keyword phrase.

These ideas can then be tweaked or merged into one unique idea. For example, if you’re in the health niche and you’re looking for 10 ideas on the keyword phrase, “blood pressure".

This provides you with a wide range of topics to cover. For example, if you want to write a single article on any of the topics mentioned above, you can do that. Alternatively, you can take all of these topics and turn them into lead magnet reports or information products.

If you need to collect a list of relevant keyword phrases, you can ask the tool to generate a set number of additional keywords related to the phrase “blood pressure.”

You could then request the tool to compile each of these related keyword phrases into separate bullet points to analyze each one. For instance, it could report:

Hypertension

     • What is Hypertension? How does it differ from normal blood pressure?
     • Factors that contribute to Hypertension, such as lifestyle changes and genetics.
     • Treatments for Hypertension: lifestyle changes and medications.

Blood pressure monitor

     • Types of blood pressure monitor - Manual vs. digital.
     • Benefits of home blood pressure monitoring.
     • Tips for effective and accurate blood pressure monitoring.

The examples above are from an AI tool, but they’re just a taste of what an AI tool can do for you. I asked for three topics, but you can ask for 10, or even more if you want to expand on each one.

Don’t ask the tool to create your content for you. Use it as a checkbox to make sure you’ve covered everything your readers need to know about your topic.

Sales Boost: AI in Ad Copy

Many marketers are talking about the advantages of using AI for sales copy writing. This is one type of content that many marketers have trouble with because it can sound so generic, even spammy.

Even if you are 100% confident in your product, it can be hard to come up with the right headlines, the right number of bullet points, and the right call to action that will convince your visitor to buy your product.

You can begin with content that you feel comfortable with as far as your sales letter is concerned. Don’t let the AI tool write it for you from the ground up. Instead, enter the information you have created and let it help you make it even better.

For example, let’s say you entered into an AI tool the following instructions: “I’d like to improve my headline for my sales letter that says “Learn how to lower your blood pressure with natural remedies” and gave me four examples.

The AI tool will give you the following (improved) headlines – these are taken from an actual AI tool:

     • "Discover the Power of Nature: Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally with These Effective Remedies"
     • "Revitalize Your Health: Discover Natural Remedies to Reduce High Blood Pressure and Enhance Your Wellness"
     • "Unleash the Healing Properties of Nature: Say Goodbye to High Blood Pressure with These Simple Natural Remedies"
     • "Transform Your Health Naturally: Unlock the Secrets to Lowering Your Blood Pressure with Safe and Effective Remedies"

The AI tool has already been programmed with sales letter text, so it can hype it for you in a better way than "learn how to". The words "unleash," "transform," "discover," and "revitalize" have more impact.

From there, you can mix and match, or rewrite it yourself. You can even learn how to create better sales copy yourself from scratch.

You can then go further and give it instructions to take one of the headlines, and tailor it for a specific demographic, such as for "diabetics” and it will respond:

"Say Goodbye to High Blood Pressure the Natural Way: Discover the Best Remedies for Diabetics to Lower Blood Pressure and Boost Health"

Or how about asking the tool to give you 5 bullet points for your sales letter about "learning how to reduce your blood pressure." The AI tool will provide you with this answer: (take note of the 4th point...)

     • Discover safe, natural ways to lower your blood pressure without the need for prescription drugs or harsh chemicals.
     • Discover how to add healthy lifestyle habits such as exercise and a healthy diet to naturally lower your blood pressure and enhance your overall health.
     • Identify the underlying causes of elevated blood pressure, such as stress, sleep deprivation, and poor lifestyle choices, and how to manage them for long term health benefits.
     • Ask for expert advice and support from an experienced team of health professionals and health enthusiasts who know what it takes to manage high blood pressure!
     • Gain the power and confidence to take charge of your health with proven strategies and techniques that work for everyone, regardless of age or background.

Affiliate Assistance: AI Idea Generation

AI tools are great for generating ideas as an affiliate marketer and can even help you organize your information. They can also help you identify strategic products to promote. For example, let’s keep looking at the blood pressure niche.

By combining the request for ideas with the AI tool, you can get the idea of what you want to promote with that idea. For instance, if you type the following into an AI tool: “I need 3 ideas for a blood pressure related affiliate blog where I’m going to focus on promoting a list of products” it will deliver the following points:

Not only does it tell you what title to use for your post, it also tells you what types of content you should promote and how you should present that content to your audience.

You shouldn't rely the AI tool to do the work for you. Instead, you can use the suggestions to create your own, original content that Google will love and your readers will love.

Even better, you can ask the AI tool to come up with more useful ideas for you. For example, if you’re looking for a natural remedies affiliate product review post, you might want to ask the AI tool what are some reasons people would want to naturally lower their blood pressure instead of using prescription medicines?

It would say the following, (I've removed it's lengthy descriptions... haha):
     • Avoiding adverse reactions.
     • Reduce healthcare costs and prescription costs.
     • Improve overall health and wellness.
     • Have more control over treatment.
     • Avoid interactions with other medications.

The first article idea mentioned above (#1) mentions ingredients. You could take this one aspect and ask the AI tool to expand on ideas by asking: "What natural ingredients do people need to find in supplements to lower blood pressure?"

You can also ask the AI tool as an affiliate to create a list of 10 types of cardio equipment that can help lower blood pressure. It can tell you about treadmills and stationary bikes and ellipticals and rowing machines, etc.

You can take the list and write a blog about it, or you can drill down and write a separate blog post about the 10 best elliptical machines to help lower your blood pressure.

Ask the AI tool what shoppers need to think about when looking for an elliptical machine to lower their blood pressure, and it will tell you things like resistance levels, stride length, comfort features, heart rate monitoring, and even the size and space needed.

After the AI tool gives you the list, you can give it this instruction: "Based on the factors listed above, order them in order of priority for lowering blood pressure." It may not be 100% accurate, but hey, it's a start!

You'll be using your AI tool to generate ideas quickly and brainstorm, but you won't be spamming your readers with stale, robotic content.

Social Media Impact: AI Messaging

You can also use AI tools to create clusters of keywords that can be converted into hashtags for your social media posts. You can also use your AI tool to reduce the length of your message so appropriate for each particular platform.

For instance, let’s say you have a 500-word article and feed it into an AI tool. You can ask it to summarise your content into two sentences, which is a quick and easy way to share a snippet with a link to your entire blog post.

You can also ask it to generate a call-to-action that will get people to click your link. Some of these tools may even be able to proofread for you. But not every AI tool is created equal, and some of them will miss mistakes.

If you're following your analytic data on social media, and you see a pattern of topics that are performing well for you, you can ask AI to drill down on those topics to give you even more content ideas.

The tool can also help you come up with ideas for split testing your content. For example, you could use two different headlines and two different calls-to-actions to find the most effective one.

Remember that social media is mostly run by humans, so you’ll be shunned if you don’t deliver your content with a personal touch.  Don't let AI fully represent you!

Concluding AI Considerations

Like many tools and strategies, there is good and bad that can come from AI use. It's not a magic solution to scam people or shortcut your way to success.

While AI offers incredible benefits, it's crucial to approach it with caution, especially in critical areas like fact curation. The potential risks, such as finding inaccurate information and facing backlash, underscore the need for businesses to exercise care when integrating AI into their online strategies.

However, it's not all cautionary tales. AI can be a huge advantage when used strategically. 

Leveraging it for tasks like keyword research, sales copy refinement, and social media messaging can significantly boost efficiency. The key lies in finding that balance, where AI complements your creativity rather than replacing it entirely.

Striking this balance requires a thoughtful and informed approach. It's about embracing the positives while steering clear of the negatives, ensuring that AI serves as a powerful tool of innovation rather than a shortcut fraught with risks.