A growing number of writers are incorporating AI tools into their workflow.
Those who’ve kept an open mind and experimented with different approaches and ways to increase their productivity and scale their creativity have seen remarkable improvements in both the quality and quantity of their work, allowing them to stay ahead in an ever-evolving industry.
The current models are powerful out of the box. But what if there was a way to take things a step further and create personalized AI tools tailored to your unique needs?
In this episode, I sit down with Erynn LaFlamme, founder and CEO of Ethic Agency, a marketing agency based in Metro Atlanta. Erynn and I discuss how writers can harness the power of custom GPTs to handle nuanced parts of their client workflow.
Erynn has become an expert in using AI for content creation, and she walks us through the process of building Custom GPTs and shares real-world examples of how her team is leveraging this technology to produce better work.
We dive deep into:
- The difference between Custom GPTs and using standard ChatGPT
- Key steps involved in creating GPTs for specific clients
- Challenges and ethical considerations in AI-powered workflows
- How to refine and improve Custom GPTs over time
- Deciding when to use a Custom GPT versus a general AI tool
We also explore what this means for the future of freelance writers and content professionals—will AI replace us, or will it become an essential tool in our toolkit?
Whether you’re curious about integrating AI into your business or looking for ways to refine your processes, this episode offers some very practical ideas, insights and tips.
The notes that follow are a very basic, unedited summary of the show. There’s a lot more detail in the audio version. You can listen to the show using the audio player below. Or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Key Topics and Bullets:
- Key to addressing audience problems and showcasing solutions.
- Interest in AI tools to enhance strategies.
- Comparison to early social media adoption.
- AI enhances workflow, preserving human creativity.
- Significant efficiency gains in tasks like ideation.
- Tailored custom GPTs save time and ensure consistency.
- Use of provided guidelines for accurate outputs
- Steps to create custom GPTs using ChatGPT.
- Preference for Claude AI over ChatGPT for adherence to guidelines.
- Avoid feeding proprietary data into AI tools.
- Ensuring originality and verifying AI-generated data.
- Adapting to and leading new technology strategies.
- Essential for maintaining quality in AI-driven processes.
- Using custom GPTs for engaging email marketing content.
- High ROI with ChatGPT subscription, handling 75% of writing tasks.
Timestamp Overview:
00:00 Erynn– I am a growth marketing consultant. I started an agency here in the metro Atlanta area that focuses on digital marketing. So I cover a wide range of full service, marketing aspects, right, everything from branding and messaging all the way to, you know, executing websites and, you know, managing social media. So a lot of different areas. How I got there, you know, my career is very much backed by copywriting. Started as a just digital marketing strategist, you know, doing everything from the ground up, in terms of messaging, writing copy, rebranding companies, you know, writing landing pages
05:46 Ed– What what exactly is a custom GPT? How is it different from just going in there and starting a new chat with the model?
Erynn– Totally. So a custom GPT from a copywriter perspective is really helpful when you have multiple clients who will have their own unique set of problems, brand voice, brand tones. I know when I first started using chat gpt to help me with copy, I got really sick and tired of having to constantly educate it on who my client is, what we do. I would be feeding it landing pages and previous blogs. I would have to do that for every new prompt unless I wanted to, like, have this ever going conversation, which wasn’t always relevant. So ChatGPT, with a gen…with a regular search is kind of like a general purpose search engine. It’s really good if you just have a quick question or something like that. But if you were trying to really tailor a response or a prompt to your clients, and not have to educate it every single time on what they do and how to match your voice and tone and things like that, that’s where custom GPT has come in.
09:48 Ed– So you’ve got a client, ecommerce. Walk us through where you go because I know, at least the way it’s designed right now, it takes you straight to the, I believe, the configure page.
But there is another tab, which is create Which I find confusing. So maybe walk us through how you do it.
Erynn– So when you’re actually, like, inside of chat gpt, you have, like, this left hand panel that has all your previous chats, and you can start a new chat. Well, on that, on the left hand side, there’s a little button that’s a black button that says explore GPTs. When you click that, in the you get to a new screen, and it says in the top right corner, create GPT, and you literally just click that. From there, it opens up this, like, new chat. It kinda looks like ChatGPT, but what you’re it’s it starts prompting or asking you questions. Right? Like, tell me how you’re gonna use me. Give me a name.
10:21 Erynn– You can even upload a picture. So I like to, like, upload my client logos so that way in the future, it shows up on that left hand panel with, like, all your existing chats. It’ll literally have your client whatever you named it. Right? So x GPT or, ecommerce GPT, whatever it is you named it. And I like to have the client logos for my, you know, visual purposes. So what you can feed it in this chat I mean, I feed it everything and anything that’s gonna be relevant. So brand guidelines. Right? The more you have, the better.
13:34 Erynn– I mean, it takes a lot of lift off. Right? I always say, like, ChatGPT will, especially as a writer, will get you 75% of the way. It’s not gonna get you all the way, and we’ll talk about that, but it’ll get you pretty far. So, so back to, like, our list of what you wanna feed it, brand guidelines, product and service details. If you have ICP over overview, so ideal customer profiles. Right? You can feed it the demographics, the personas, avatars, anything you have. Tell it who you’re talking to and, say this is who we’re talking to in all of our copy.
17:30 Erynn– So you can edit your GPTs at any point. Right? So I currently have a client who’s doing, like, a complete rebrand, and they’re totally shifting their messaging. And they’re changing their audience. Literally, everything is changing. We still want to apply our core functionalities through this rebrand. Right? But we’re trying to weave in new messaging. So I will go into ChatGPT. And so you, I’m trying to remember exactly where it’s located. It’s at the top when you start a new chat, and you can, like, highlight it and say edit gpt. And so it’s gonna keep you on that kind of conversational page. And you can start feeding it the new information that you have. Right? So here’s our new messaging. I literally treat it like it’s an employee. So using ChatGPT is a lot of shifting your brain from maybe, like, an execution standpoint to almost like a management role. Right? So if you were talking to an employee and telling them the change is happening in a company, how would you explain that? And I will literally write it to it and be like, this is what’s going on.
22:17 Ed– Here’s how I sometimes use these tools, or maybe this is what I will not use it for or whatever.
Erynn– Exactly. Just have those safeguards in place. Right? But as you know, as you start exploring, just be really careful not to feed it that kind of information because, ChatGPT, everything anyone feeds it is now a free game for you know, it just starts spitting answers to other people. Right? I mean, you don’t wanna put in a new company concept, and then it starts spitting that out in results for competitors or anyone else using the tool. Right? So you have to be really careful about what you feed it in that sense. So that’s, you know, from the NDA or data privacy side of things. Now in terms of I mean, just accuracy, plagiarism, things like that we need to worry about is copywriters. Right? I mean, you wanna be really careful.
25:38 Ed– The plagiarism is kind of a different story there. I don’t think that’s really been resolved yet because a lot of the plagiarism checkers will give you false positives or false negatives. I mean, it’s kind of all over the place.
Erynn– Yeah. So there’s a couple tools that I will use. As an agency owner, I do work with a lot of copywriters. Right? So I will work out. And I can’t tell you how many times someone has sent me a blog, and I know it’s completely ChatGPT. I mean, they didn’t even try to personalize it, humanize it, you know. And Chargebee Tea does still sound like a robot if you’re not training it not to.
29:07 Ed– Well, I think this is a good point for me to just make something really clear, and I know you and I are aligned here. But, I’ve talked about this in other episodes where we’ve talked about AI, but I can’t say this enough. The real power of these tools is in their ability to help you with a lot of the grunt work and to scale your creativity and improve your productivity. These tools should not be looked at as binary options. This is not a I’ll either use it to write this article draft and turn that in or, no, you should never use it to write an article draft. I can’t say this enough times. If you’re looking at AI in this binary with this binary perspective, you’re gonna be left behind. There are so many. First of all, I agree.
30:02 Ed– There are so many opportunities to integrate these tools in your workflow within your workflow. If there’s 15 steps to a workflow for writing an article for client a, it could probably help you dramatically in 6 of those steps. So I want everyone to think a little bit more in a more nuanced way about these tools and how you can incorporate them rather than in a very binary yes or no way. So, I know we’re very much aligned there. Right? It’s like if it can take me to a certain level, if the ideation process can go from 2 hours to 20 minutes, right, if I can use it to maybe generate an outline or help me with the outline, if I can use it for this part and that part, maybe test my logic in the piece and see if maybe there’s a better way to build my argument in terms of the the logic flow. Any of those applications, if I can use it for some of those, we’re talking about compressing something that would have taken 10 hours compressing it down to 5 or 6. Right? And that is huge. But you need to be a smart, critical thinker here.
35:55 Erynn– Well, it saves so much time onboarding. Right? I’m like, hey. If you’re gonna leverage this tool if you’re gonna do it. I take a position of educating my copywriters on how to use chat gpt because I’m telling you, it’s happened so many times where you’re obviously using it, but you’re not doing it right. If you’re gonna use it, I’m gonna help you learn how to do it right.
So I will share the GPTs with them, the custom ones, so they can start leveraging them. And, you know, I just try to educate them.
37:34 Erynn– You know, I tried Claude out, like, right as is the first time I started trying out ChatGPT. And I wasn’t impressed with it, so I haven’t played too much with it since then. I’m a big UI, UX person. If I don’t even like the way it looks, I can’t use it. You know? But I’ve tinkered with it since. It’s come around. One thing I will say, from a free perspective, right, if you’re not paying for Claude, I know that it doesn’t have the project’s function. That’s the pro plan if you pay for it.
41:03 Ed– Do I you’ve already had some people say, well, wait a minute. I could just use this. Why would I need you? Nobody really has a crystal ball, but, you know, what’s your best guess in terms of how this will evolve?
Erynn– So I think that this is gonna be a slow process, you know, too. I don’t think anyone needs to panic and say, oh, this is gonna take over my job or, you know I don’t think anyone’s job is in jeopardy at all. With that being said, I do think at some point, this is gonna fundamentally change the way we do things just like everything else has. Right? Any other technology. I expect AI to get much more integrated with our broader tech stack. So, you know, right now, you know, for blog posts, I’m using Semrush for my SEO research. I write my blog, and then I have to manually add backlinks. I have to change the headline based on keywords. Right? So I think at some point, we’ll see ChatGPT starting to integrate with these tools, right, so that everything that it’s creating for you is going to be implementing your broader strategy.
45:06 Ed– I think there’s so many opportunities to, like you said, move up the value ladder and actually become more of an adviser. You know? Do more and more of that work when the execution as more of the execution gets kind of outsourced to these tools, we’re gonna need somebody to oversee that and, again, be kind of the creative brain behind it all, the critical thinker. And I think there’s all kinds of opportunities to help clients integrate this, right, into their own workflow because somebody still needs to guide them, and they’re not gonna have that expertise in house.
Erynn– And, Ed, I think that one critical area where ChatGPT just, like, doesn’t meet the mark right now is integrating into your broader tech stack. Right? I mean, it’s starting to get integrations and stuff. But, I mean, wait for the day when you say, hey, ChatGPT. Can you design me this flier based on this copy or whatever? Right? I mean, the designs and stuff, it’s just not there. Or from an SEO perspective, I use SEMrush. It’s like once it integrates with my SEMrush and knows my keyword research and what backlinks I need, like and it starts writing blogs, pulling all that in. Like, again, you still have to be a strategic leader and be able to integrate those technologies and lead that strategy.
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