Unlocking the Power of AI in E-commerce: A Deep Dive into Content Creation and Fact-Checking

Ever felt overwhelmed with content creation for your e-commerce business? Imagine if a tool could churn out unique ideas, help you overcome writer's block, and even reword your content for greater clarity - all while saving you precious time. Well, turns out, artificial intelligence could be your knight in shining armor! We kick things off with a fascinating dive into the past, exploring the journey of AI from its early days in the 1950s to its current status as an indispensable tool in our digital lives.

Moving on, we unravel the potential of a specific AI model - GPT chatbots - in content creation. From generating loyal customers to helping you break through that frustrating writer's block, you'd be surprised at what these chatbots can do. But that's not all. One of the most crucial aspects of AI-assisted content is fact-checking for accuracy, and we discuss its importance at length. So, tune in to learn about the wonders of AI, its role in e-commerce, and how it can transform your business. We're ready to answer all your burning questions about AI - just reach out! And before you go, don't forget to rate and subscribe to our podcast.

Mentioned Resources:  

Engaging Content that can be Created with the Help of AI
 Blogs - Unlocking eCommerce Success: Harness the Power of Blogging

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Chapters

• 0:01 The Power of AI in E-Commerce
• 9:27 Chat GPT for Content Creation
• 14:30 Using AI and Fact-Checking in Conversations

Transcript

Carrie: 0:01

AI, or artificial intelligence, is all the rage right now, with the fast growing release of chat, gpt and other AI programs. Many have been around for years, but haven't gotten the hype until recently. Today, we'll discuss how you can use it with your e-commerce or service-based website to save you time, as well as touch on what you should avoid using it for. Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to this week's episode of e-commerce made easy podcast. Today, we're exploring the world of AI, or artificial intelligence, and how you can use it in your business and what to avoid using it for. So first off, we're going to go into a little bit of a fun background about AI and how long it's been around. I think this helps give us perspective on how useful it can or cannot be in certain circumstances. If you can believe it, ai has been around since the 1950s. It was really very primitive at that time and it didn't really understand our natural language, but research in this area did start in the 50s. I found it fascinating that, when digging into the subject, that research started so long ago. Development continued in the 60s and 70s too, but the AI we know today was really started more in the 80s and the 90s. That is when natural language processing was heavily researched and worked on. It was very much rules based and didn't have a lot of intelligence behind it, but it is the foundation of what we know today with the current AI. Natural language processing really took off, though, in the 2000, with great advancements leading to what we know of AI today. The language model in open AI actually started back in 2018, and the first chat GPT was actually released in 2020. A lot of people think that chat GPT, since it's one of the buzzwords right now, is brand new, but it's really been around since 2018, so for five years now. It's just much more well known. So now that we're going into a very brief background on AI.

Carrie: 2:36

How can it help us with our e-commerce store and service based website In general? You should be looking at something like an AI platform such as chat GPT as a tool and as an assistant. It is great for helping you generate content. Now it should not do the writing for you, but you can use it in several ways to help shorten your time to write your blog posts, newsletters, product or service descriptions, social media posts, etc. We talked in episodes seven and nine about how email marketing and blogging can take your business to the next level, which we will link to in the show notes in case you missed those episodes. So how do we use AI to help us with these tasks?

Carrie: 3:18

So some of the common things you can use AI for is for writer's block. So you're getting ready to sit down and write a blog article or an email to your customers and you're just stuck. You can simply just start chatting to an AI program such as chat DPT and start asking it some questions to kind of give you some idea and help you with the flow of your writing, especially if you get stuck. You can say how can I elaborate more on X, or what do you think about the subject Y and what do you know about it, et cetera, and it can give you some information back that you can then use to help you stop your writer's walk and have some great ideas. You can also help you get an outline on a subject so you can ask it Can you give me an outline on runners and what they like to do? For example, say you're a running shoe company. Have you stopped one a few times in our broadcast? I just find it easy to relate to, even though I'm not really a dedicated runner. I have run before when training for triathlons and stuff. But it's just something I can relate to and I think many of us can relate to something like exercising, like running. So you can ask it to give you an outline.

Carrie: 4:25

Or say you have written a paragraph and you just don't like the flow of it and you're just kind of feel like it's a little bit confusing and unclear. You can give that paragraph or those sentences to something like chatGPT and say, hey, can you reword this to make it more understandable and it will give you something back. Now what I have found sometimes is that the first thing it gives me back. Sometimes is great, sometimes it's like not really great. So what you can do is, if it doesn't give you something you'd like, you can tell it to try again, or you could give it some prompts as to what it may have done wrong, that you want it to do better. So maybe it was too technical. You could say, hey, that was too technical. Can you make it more in layman's terms, for example? So you can converse with it like you would converse with a friend to get ideas. Obviously it's not our friend and it's artificially intelligent, but it can help us with rewording of things like that. It also can give us topic ideas and I will go into a few examples here in a little bit in the podcast episode.

Carrie: 5:27

But say you're wanting to come up with some topics for your business. Say you sell pet products. You can ask it what sorts of subjects do pet products pet people want to know about? And so you can get some ideas on it. You can also do some content research. So let's go back to the pet product store. Say you are selling some of some of the rage right now as CBD oil for your dogs help them calm down when you're gone Kind of like the craze used to be lavender oil for your dogs to help them calm down when you're gone. So you can do some content research around that. So it can help you write a good article on what people's questions might have on having CBD for their dog. So you can do a lot of content research, especially in places that you're not quite as much of an expert but you know enough that you could help glean through the information and figure out whether it's correct or not.

Carrie: 6:25

And that's actually one good point here that we need to go over is chat GPT, for example, and many other AIs. Information is limited in the, in what it has in its database and in its systems. So chat GPT, for example I believe it's about from about 2021 is the last update it's got as far as information out there in the world. So if you're asking it about recent events or recent statistics, it's not going to know those like doing your own research is going to find. So you do need to make sure you fact check anything you get from chat GPT, especially if it's in an area where you know the facts could be wrong. So keep that in mind and that's one of the reasons we do not want to copy anything that chat GPT or other AI programs like that give us.

Carrie: 7:12

We need to make sure it's in our own words because, for one, our customers want to hear our own voice. They don't want to hear a robot. I guess you could say although chat GPT can sound very much not like a robot it actually does a pretty good job of sounding like a human but you want to make sure it's in your own words, your brand's words, your brand's themes. We want to make sure that all the information is correct behind what you're using. So, and also, search engines are getting better and better because they're artificially intelligent as well at figuring out whether we are copying something like chat GPT's information into our website. So you want to make sure you don't use anything from chat GPT directly, unless you're just referencing what it is telling you, but you don't want to use it directly in your marketing material because it's it's just not a great idea from an ethics standpoint as well, as people want to hear about you and you want to make sure everything is correct. That's giving you back all right.

Carrie: 8:13

So let's go into some examples of how we can really use chat GPT to help us in our marketing efforts. So when writing blog posts, emails, social media posts, product or service descriptions, etc. We really need to be relatable to our audience. Ai programs such as chat GPT can help us understand our target audience better too, and this can help us refine our own language and, like I said, we need to make sure our language is in our words but this can help us get an idea of what our potential customers are thinking and are not worried about and love.

Carrie: 8:47

So, for example, let's go back to our runner example we used a few times. Say, we're a running company and we are wanting to write some blog articles and some email newsletters that really talk to our consumers. So what can we, what can we do and what can we use chat GPT for here? So one of the things you could do is you can ask chat GPT or any other AI program is similar what are the biggest fears of a runner? Now, I did this before writing this podcast episode and I have some examples of what it gave me and I thought they were very good and a very good starting point for something to write about.

Carrie: 9:27

So, for example, the biggest fears of a runner some of them that it gave me. It gave me a little bit more than this list, but I so I trimmed it down a little bit is injury, their fear of injury, their fear of lack of progress, their fear of motivation and burnout, their fear of comparison, their fear of wildlife or dogs that they're running in nature, their fear of safety in general, say they're running in a very busy city they might fear their safety and they might have fears of having no time to run. So what could we do here to help us with these ideas? Create a blog post. Well, for example, the first thing it told me is people are afraid of injury. So you can ask chat GPT what types of injuries are runners afraid of getting? Of course it's going to give you the standard, like shin swints and tendon issues and things like that. Well then, you can start going down those lines and you, there, you've got a whole set of blog articles that you might want to weave into your content on how to prevent shin swints if you're a runner. So you can really use this to kind of dig into what your consumers are looking for on the internet and what they're really trying, what pain points they're trying to solve.

Carrie: 10:43

So another thing you can ask chat GPT along the same lines is why do people love to run? So maybe you want to talk to those that love to run too. So some of the answers that chat GPT gave me was physical health benefit, mental health benefits, sense of accomplishment, connection with nature, stress relief. I figure if you've ever been a runner, a lot of these can you can relate to, right. So then again you can dig deeper Well, what sort of physical benefits do runners get? And then you can have some answers from chat GPT. You can pick out some of their ideas that you like and that you want to talk about and that you know about, and then you can start writing your blog posts or your newsletter et cetera, around that subject. And then you're really kind of talking more directly to a runner's loves, their pleasures of why they love to run. So it just helps you make it become a bit more of an authority here.

Carrie: 11:41

So now I want you to think about your target audience. What is it that you're targeting? Are you a pet store? Do you have as your target audience pet owners? Do you sell women's clothing? Is your target audience women of a specific age range?

Carrie: 11:59

Use what you know about your customers to ask chat GPT and other programs similar to it, questions about them so you can better understand them. You probably have a really good understanding of them to begin with or you wouldn't be in the businesses you're in but this can help you think of things outside the box that may not be in your perspective, which can really help us connect with our customers much better. So really think about it. I challenge you after listening to this episode, come up with 10 to 20 questions you want to ask chat GPT and see what the answers are to it and how can that help you plan your content for your coming months, for blogging, for email newsletters. Say you don't blog right now regularly. How can you use this to help you blog regularly?

Carrie: 12:47

We talked about this a lot in a previous episode, which will be in our show notes, but it can really help you create a long-term sense of loyalty and brand recognition whenever you are creating high quality articles and, similarly, whenever you're connecting with your customers in a relatable way in your email newsletters and in your social media posts. It's really going to help you in the long run and in the long game to really retain and keep those customers that you have. So really use all the tools you have, including things like AI, to help you. You know short-circuit some of the things, because I know sometimes a lot of our customers just really get writer's block and have a really hard time expressing the things that are in their brain already. So use a tool like this to help pull that information out, and I bet you're going to become a much faster writer. Whenever you're using a tool, just like if you were talking to a fellow person who is in your industry, you guys are going to bounce off ideas and really come up with some spectacular things.

Carrie: 13:53

So that's kind of what we want to use chat GPT for is to bounce ideas off of when we don't have somebody in person to do that too, and it can help us really get those great ideas. So let's recap today's podcast episode. So some things you want to use chat GPT for are things like writer's block, giving an outline, helping you reword things that you're writing in case you don't like how they're worded. They can give you topic ideas and we went into a few detailed examples there and content research, so you can really use those topic ideas and then dig down even farther.

Carrie: 14:30

Word of caution, though as I said earlier, we need to make sure we are a fact checking chat GPT, especially if you feel like your subject matter is a bit on the edge of newer information out there of the past couple years, since things like chat, gpt and other AI programs have a limited knowledge set and you know the information in their systems is up to a certain date typically.

Carrie: 14:53

So we want to make sure that we are checking things like that and I want to hear from you how do you use AI right now? Do you use it at all? What questions do you have on AI that I didn't cover today, because I could totally go even deeper on this subject if you would like, so make sure to email us at podcast at bcsengineering. com, and thank you for joining us this week. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you are listening so you don't miss out on any future episodes, and we'd be forever grateful if you rated us on your favorite podcast app as well, because that helps get us out there into the world more and spread the word so that we can help other e-commerce business owners and service providers such as you help them with their future. So we hope to see you next week.