Ways to Use AI to Save Time in Your Side Hustle

Does this sound familiar? You’re sitting in front of your computer looking at a blank screen. You know you want to write an article for your website, but you just don’t know where to start. You’ve got a great topic, but the ideas just aren’t flowing today.

I know how you feel, we’ve all been there and I want to tell you where you can get help. The answer is to ask ChatGPT, the free artificial intelligence tool. Just to say there are others available, such as Google Gemini, but my go-to is ChatGPT.

You can waste a lot of time being stuck. Stuck not knowing what to write, stuck coming up with a title for your webinar, stuck revising and revising your freebie and never feeling that it’s right. The good news is that AI can help with all of these. You don’t need to be stuck. You just need to ask ChatGPT.

Now I’m not recommending that you just ask it to write all of your content for you. To be honest, people are going to be able to tell, because the answers it gives tend to be a bit generic. There’s no personal touch and that’s what people enjoy about your content - what you bring to it. How you’re different from all the other people doing what you do. So you don’t want to lose that. But ChatGPT can get you started. It’s great at idea creation and can give you bullet points for you to expand upon.

Sometimes when I know I’ve got a great idea for a blog post, but am strugggling to start I’ll ask ChatGPT. It’s like uncorking the bottle. Once it’s got me started the ideas start flowing out of me and I can’t work out why I didn’t think of all those points in the first place.

As well as help with writing ChatGPT can find specific quotes or information for you. Sometimes I know I’ve read something in a book, usually one that’s sitting on my bookshelf, but flicking through it I can’t find what I’m looking for. So I’ll ask ChatGPT e.g. what does Laura Vanderkam say in her books about planning free time or in which book does she talk about giving yourself a bed time? You could Google these questions, but my experience is that ChatGPT is better and quicker at finding the answer.

When it comes to social media you can ask AI to write captions for your posts or suggest hooks that are going to catch your audience’s eye. If you have a piece of text that you’ve written, such as a blog post, it will pull out ideas for social media posts from it. Just past the text into ChatGPT and ask it to act as a golden nugget miner and come up with say 30 ideas for Facebook posts. The ideas were already yours as they’re in the text you wrote, but it draws them out and will list them for you. It will also suggest scripts if you want to go live on social media, based on that writing or just the topic you give it. Again you can add to the script or delete ideas that you don’t like. It will just get you started. 

The most amazing thing that I’ve discovered recently is that it can read pdf documents. So if you’ve got a freebie, a lead magnet, that you’ve created you can upload it to ChatGPT and ask it to analyse it for you and make suggestions about how to improve it. It’s magic (well probably not, but it felt like it). If you keep making changes and making changes to your freebie and wasting time fiddling with it, upload it to ChatGPT and see what it thinks. I’m not saying you have to do everything it tells you, but just see what it has to say.

When you talk to people about AI they seem to love it or hate it. ‘Real writers’ may look down their nose at you if you say you use ChatGPT, but like any tool, it’s how you use it. So what are your thoughts? A great tool that is going to save you hours or the thin end of the wedge that’s going to lead to you offering boring and mundane content? It can be tempting to fall into the trap of the latter, but just be mindful. Like scrolling social media - there’s lots of great thoughtful and informative posts, but also a lot of dross. Be selective. Don’t discount it before you’ve even tried it. Have a go and see how much time it can save you in your side hustle. It may just be your new virtual assistant and the good news is, it won’t cost you a penny!