Episode 275.

Late Night Internet Marketing.

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, we'll talk about eliminating the friction in your side hustle using automation and AI. This is the way you need to think about getting more stuff done in less time so you can make your side hustle dreams come true. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Hey, hey, hey. I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, and today we're going to talk about something really exciting. This is something near and dear to me. It's the way I think about things, both in my day job and my side hustle, but I think it's really going to help you get more done and get those dreams accomplished how you can think about the work that you need to do in order to be successful and get your side hustle to the level of success that you've been dreaming about for so long by eliminating friction in your side hustle. We're going to do that by using automation and AI. We'll talk about the way I think about the problem, and not only that, but the tools that help keep me consistent as I work through the constant elimination of friction and the improved efficiency of my business. It involves mindset shifting around AI and how you do things in your business and use of cool tools that are coming available to us now as side hustlers and solo entrepreneurs. It's super exciting, and if you're ready, we'll get right after it, okay, so here's the first thing I want to talk to you about, and that is that friction is the silent killer of momentum. Let me say that again, friction is the silent killer of momentum because, without you even realizing it, it keeps you from getting up the head of steam that you need, as a solo entrepreneur, to go from win to win, to win, from strength to strength, from strength. A lot of times we confuse this as laziness, but it's not really laziness. We see it sometimes as procrastination, but I would argue that the procrastination that you're feeling a lot of times, that comes from resistance, the energy that it takes to get things going. You know, in physics there are two kinds of friction. There's the kind of friction that you have when things are moving, like when something's sliding along a surface. It generates heat. And there's the kind of friction that it takes for something to start moving in the first place. We call that static friction, that friction of getting moving in the first place. That's always bigger than the kinetic friction. Once you get moving, it's always easier to stay moving.

And so these hidden sources of friction that we have in our business, the things that keep us from getting started, we need to get rid of those and we need to use some of these magical new tools that we have in order to eliminate this, and I would say this is really a system problem. This is a problem for your whole business. But when we think about it, we want to think about it in terms of the things that we actually need to do and are most important in our business, because eliminating friction will allow us to get consistent results. We'll be able to build momentum with less effort, and friction is one of those things that causes burnout. If you're having to overcome friction and things that are, in your way, obstacles to getting even the simplest task done, that just sucks away your sustainable energy that you need for long-term growth and that results in burnout. So we want to avoid that as much as possible. And when the hard things become automatic, we start going from strength to strength, to win, to win, and inevitably we make progress. So how do we think about this? We know we want to eliminate friction. We want to make things easier. I think that's a way to say this. So we need to identify the most important things that must get done in our business and spot the points of friction, and we're going to go through a really detailed example from my business to help you understand this. But think about the things that you know you must get done in your business, that you either have a hard time getting started or a hard time doing over and over again. Where are you consistently getting slowed down? Where do you feel resistance? And we need to find solutions for those problems that allow us to automate things and make things easier to do. So I think it's one thing, probably, to talk about these things in abstraction right, there's focus that we need to have and they're the most important things in our business.

But let's talk about my business and an example of something that I think you'll be able to relate to, and that's this very podcast. After all, you are a listener and this is an important part of my business. It is the organic content creation engine for my business. This is really the main organic content that I create and I repurpose this content. So if I don't get my podcast out, my organic content creation engine suffers greatly and leads and customers and clients and coaching clients and, course, customers. Many of them come from that organic content engine. So it's very important for my business. But I think you probably have something similar, something you need to be doing in your business to make it run well, and so, if you know me and you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time.

I've been on the air, off and on, since 2009. It's been 15 years that I've been creating this podcast, but I don't have 15 years worth of episodes, and that's because I've been inconsistent. And boy, what would my business be like if I had never missed a week of podcast creation in that 15 years. That would have been amazing. That's water under the bridge. You know, it's one of those planting a tree things. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is right now, and that's true for you too.

So when I think about this podcast, I know that I need to get more consistent with creating it. And the question is, why am I not so consistent? And the answer, I think, has been friction. So I've eliminated many friction points in my podcast around the scheduling of it, including the content, calendar, ideation and content generation and outlining and run sheets and recording and production and show notes and distribution Many, many points of friction. Many steps involved in the production of this podcast have been eliminated or reduced, and that's helping me be more consistent with the content.

So let's go down through those one by one and what I want you to do is not think so much about my podcast. You may not even have a podcast. What I want you to think about is the kinds of things that are analogous in your business that you can eliminate as well. So the first thing is scheduling. So my big problem was finding the time to record this podcast. I've talked on and on about how I use motion as my personal scheduling and project management app. Now I moved from ClickUp most recently and I'm using motion, and motion has this amazing capability to actually block time on my calendar to record this podcast. It sounds simple and silly, but the truth is that motion is persistent and consistent and it continues to remind me hey, you haven't recorded this week's episode yet and I recommend that you do it tonight at nine o'clock. I mean, this is a really helpful thing and it integrates with my calendars and if you want to try it, you can get a free trial at markmasoncom slash motion.

The second thing I do is this idea of ideation what am I going to talk about on the podcast? And you know, this is not just a problem of coming up with random ideas. This is also um, as president George Bush used to say strategery right, I can't just pick any random topic. I really want to consider where I'm taking the brand, what product launches are coming out for me, what my listeners are telling me, and all these things. A conversation with chat GPT give it all of this information and we can have a discussion about how to set the future list of podcast episode ideas and we can brainstorm and I can tell it the things I like and why, and the things that I don't like and why, and it can get smarter and smarter, and smarter about suggesting what the next few episodes would be. And that used to be a huge point of friction what in the world am I going to talk about on the podcast? Now, that's no issue at all.

I use chat GPT as a partner to brainstorm and then, of course, once I decide what the next episode is going to be about, I need an outline for that episode. As most of you know, I work from outlines. I shoot off the cuff, but I like to be organized. Otherwise you would get totally bored and restless, and so I use some custom chat GPT prompts to help me structure an outline in the way I would do it without chat GPT, and it's remarkable in the way that it's able to generate exactly what I would generate, plus add some things in that I might not have thought about. I've got a specific format that I use. Those of you that listen to the show a lot know what it is and then I'm able to take that outline and edit it and use it exactly the way that I want to use it, in just a few minutes instead of half an hour, and that's an amazing reduction in friction. And as a bonus, I've started feeding that outline into gammaapp to create slides and I'm working on a fully automated flow that incorporates the video of those slides and of me talking and of B-roll and of captioning and other interesting visual elements, jump cuts and all that. I'm working on that automation flow in my editing. But to create those slides that give me additional collateral visual collateral that I can use in post-production, I'm using Gamma Dot app for that and that's an amazing tool just for creating additional assets around your content.

Then, of course, there was just the idea of actually sitting down and recording, because I've got to set up the studio right. I've got to turn on all the lights and I've got video lights for my face and I've got lights in the room and I've got lights in the background that are blue. If you've seen me on video, I've got this kind of bookcase in the background and that's all lit up and things need to be turned on. I've got to get software up and running, I've got to get the cameras pointed in the right direction and all that. I've been able to automate all that using my Stream Deck where I can just push two buttons to turn everything on. It turns on the software on my PC. I push another button, it turns on all the lights and I'm ready to record inside of two seconds. Literally I'm ready to go, and that's been a huge reduction in friction, because if you've got to turn everything on.

By the way, this is something also I think you'll hear Leslie Samuel talk about. He and I both use this amazing software called Ecamm to capture a video. I edit video into script and I capture it in Ecamm. He has a similar kind of setup in his house. His studio is much more sophisticated in advance and he gets even more advantage out of that. You should check out some of Leslie's videos on the I am Leslie Samuel channel. He's kind of an amazing dude and a good friend of mine.

And then, of course, I want to be able to do jump cuts between my face and the slides and I need to get all that recorded in sync. As I mentioned, ecamm does that for me and it is all handled automatically. I literally just hit the big button that says record once it's all set up and I admit, some of this stuff takes some time to set up, but once it's all set up, I just hit of this stuff takes some time to set up, but once it's all set up, I just hit the record button, pull the mic over to my face, like I have it now, and I'm ready to go. I could even do switching live during my recording, and Leslie does do that. I don't do that. I wait and do it in post because I don't want to be distracted by hitting those buttons, but the stream deck can handle that as well. If you want just a one-shot thing with no post-production, ecamm Live is the way to go, man, and you can check that out over at markmasoncom. Forward slash, ecamm, e-c-a-m-m.

And then in post-production I'm using Descript and that feeds directly into Buzzsprout for the audio. So Descript is becoming the most famous editing tool for podcasters. It's got a lot of amazing features. It's a text-based editor. It uses AI to transcribe the episode and then you can edit the text. It uses AI increasingly to identify clips and to do different kinds of editing, and this year we're looking for even more AI editing functionality inside of Descript. That is truly an amazing thing, because editing is a huge point of friction in content creation. Editing is literally what keeps people from having YouTube channels. Descript is making that all go away removing filler words and doing all kinds of things like that.

And Descript, along with other tools like Buzzsprout and, of course, chatgpt, can create AI show notes and titles and tags and all the things that you used to have to do in post-production. It wasn't enough just to record the damn episode excuse my French, but you had to do all this kind of silly, monotonous work to decide on show tags and write descriptions and all these things for SEO and blah, blah blah, and it just wasn't nearly as much fun as recording the episode, and so for me personally, those represented huge points of friction that are now completely gone. In fact, buzzsprout has this amazing capability called co-host AI, which is or AI co-host I can't quite remember. It's amazing. If you're looking at podcasting. This totally eliminates, at least on the audio side, all of these points of friction around getting your recorded episode out into the world. Check them out at markmasoncom forward slash buzzsprout.

So once I've got an audio and a video, I get into this issue where now it's time to do distribution. I've got a video recorded and really most of my distribution comes from the video product and I need to distribute it. I've got a full makecom workflow that sees the new YouTube video, the full length podcast, and then it can take that, transcribe it, create YouTube description and title and tags and then, using that information, it can create show notes for my blog, some links that I apply in other places, and create links back to other podcast episodes and do all the things that you would do if you were normally writing really, really good show notes. And at that time, once I've got great show notes and a link to those show notes and a YouTube video embedded in those show notes and the podcast player app embedded in those show notes, all done by makecom, then I can start and push links to that blog post with the show notes out to social media and all of that is completely automatic and can be completely automated and makecom, and that's just another point of friction that God. It was time to start working on the next episode, but I was still working on these production things from the last episode. That's just really terrible a point of friction that I wanted to get rid of, and with ChatGPT and Makecom and other tools that are available there, I'm able to do that automatically.

Of course, I mentioned the repurposing of video content into Reels and Shorts. I use Opus Clips, which is really cool for that. You can also do that into script and then once I create a clip and I push it out to YouTube, usually first I use repurposeio to send it into TikTok and Instagram and Pinterest and all these places where I repurpose this content. And the point of it is just so people can discover the show. If I say a clever thing and it causes someone to check out the show, well that's a win and that's very inexpensive to do. But I'm not really going to spend time creating TikToks. I mean, I need to automate this. That's a huge point of friction and basically, when you remove that friction, it's just free promotion and it's not magic. It's not like these TikToks are going viral. But again, this podcasting game and for my particular application, is a game of attrition that you win by being consistent over weeks and months and years, and so you need to keep that content coming so that people can discover you. So those are some examples from my podcast. And you're saying to keep that content coming so that people can discover you. So those are some examples from my podcast. And you're saying, well, yeah, mark, but that's just an example. That's content creation. Everybody knows there are all these really good content creation tools.

Well, we did this with drop shipping too. When we worked on a drop shipping store and this was three summers ago ago, when I did this with my son, we did about $50,000 worth of low ticket items over that summer. That's a lot of work. That creates a lot of point of friction. We listed a thousand items on Facebook marketplace. Maybe really in the end it was closer to 2000 and all of those things are points of friction.

The finding the items is a point of friction. We wrote a script to do that. The listing of the items was a point of friction. We found automation to do that. In that case, there was no chat GPT back then, four years ago. That was useful to us, so we hired a virtual assistant to sort of run these things. When orders came in, we wrote automation to notify us so that we could manage the order. There was other software that we used to eliminate the point of friction of getting the customer's information from the order system into the drop shipping system so that they could get their package For ship tracking we automated the tracking of shipping by automatically taking the ship tracking number and putting it into our ship tracking software so the customer could self-serve and look up their package, because customer service is another huge point of friction friction in that business on your most important things.

And if you break that process down into steps and simply ask what can AI or automation or the combination of AI and automation do to help me completely or almost completely automate this, I think you'll find there are amazing opportunities for you to streamline your business and get more done. So here's your call to action streamline your business and get more done. So here's your call to action Identify your most important parts of your business that either you need to do more efficiently or, like me on the podcast where you're getting stuck, and then do some research and ask what tools can help. And here's a pro tip Explain your situation to chat GPT and put it into deep research mode and tell it to find recommendations for how you might optimize this process through the use of automation and artificial intelligence, using existing tools that it can find on the internet, and it will come back with an amazing list of recommendations that you could consider. Then figure out which AI solutions fit for you and start at the beginning of your process, or the most painful part, and just start implementing them one at a time. You don't need to do this all in one day. Just do the first one and when that's running well and you're happy with it, do the second one and so forth, and before you know it, the most important thing in your business will be running almost automatically. So I want you to make progress, and I want you to do that, as we say here on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, one night at a time. Do it by eliminating friction. That's going to point you towards sustainable success, because you'll be building lasting systems for your business. It's going to improve your time freedom, you'll be able to do more with less hours, and it's just going to make the whole thing much more enjoyable.

Hey, thanks for listening today. My name is Mark Mason and I am super happy, excited and privileged to be talking to you today. I'm really excited about our episode next week. So next week we are going to respond to a listener question from a listener named Sarah and she's got a business. I'm not going to tell you the exact business, but she asked me a business question. She's just getting started about what strategy she should take, so we're going to talk about that again. I'm not going to tell you Sarah's exact business because I don't want to give away her great idea, but I do want to tell you and Sarah how I think about these things and maybe that'll help you. It's going to be an interesting case study and that's what we'll be doing next week right here on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Ciao, You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit LNIMpodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, Download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.