June 8, 2024 • 35 mins
What are your thoughts on AI in the church?
Our guest, Julia McCoy of Content Hacker and Content at Scale, shares her story of being anti-AI and how that quickly changed to her becoming an AI expert.
--
You can find more on Content At Scale by visiting https://contentatscale.ai/
You can find more about Julia's consulting at https://ContentHacker.com
FOLLOW us for more resources on how to grow your church!
--
Tithely provides the tools you need to engage with your church online, stay connected, increase generosity, and simplify the lives of your staff.
With tools like text and email messaging, custom church apps and websites, church management software, digital giving, and so much more… it’s no wonder over 37,000 churches in 50 countries trust Tithely to help run their church.
Learn more at https://tithely.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hey guys, frank here with another episode of Modern
Church Leader, excited to talkAI.
Today I'm here with my new bud,julia McCoy.
Julia, how's it going?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hey Frank, I'm excited to be here.
It's going good.
I'm in Arizona.
It's pretty hot.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
It's hot already.
We're in May, and what's theweather?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh, it's like high 80s going into the 90s.
That's not too bad.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
You're going to get into, like the 115s.
I think, that's true.
So we're going to talk a lotabout content and AI and search
as it relates to kind of tryingto connect it to churches and
kind of our audience of pastors.
But you've been at it for along time.
You're, you know, one of theexperts out there in content
(00:54):
marketing.
It looks like you're abestselling author.
You've written a bunch of booksand writing is your passion.
So why don't you tell us youknow?
And then there's the new stuffthat you're kind of getting into
.
So we'll get into that as well.
So why don't you tell us youknow?
And then there's the new stuffthat you're kind of getting into
.
So we'll get into that as well.
But why don't you give us yourstory, like, how did you get
into writing and content and howdid you get to where you're at
today?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to share.
Well, all of this started whenI was 19.
I was in college and I wasactually going for a nursing
degree, and halfway throughgetting that degree, I thought,
oh my gosh, first of all, Iwould be terrible at this, like
I knew.
I knew I really hated that.
And so my second thought waswell, what do I love to do and
(01:35):
how can I actually do thatinstead?
And so I knew the answer waswriting.
I loved writing ever since Icould pick up a pen and write.
And so that morning, when I hadthat idea, I was 19 years old
and I Googled how to make moneywriting.
And back then, odesk was, orUpwork was.
Odesk and Elance.
It was two different platforms.
It was very, very different.
This was 2011.
(01:56):
And freelance gigs there wasn'ta lot of competition, so I spun
up a freelance profile.
Three months later, I had moreincome than I knew what to do
with as a 19 year old, and so Iwas like, well, let me just
start a business.
And I guess starting businessesruns in my blood, because it
did not fail like I thought itwould.
I just kept at it and learnedas I went and kind of.
(02:21):
You know the saying is likebuild your wings on the way down
.
I really did that.
I didn't know what I was doingthe majority of the time, so I
learned as I went and then, 10years later, it was a slow and
steady trajectory for me.
I was able to have a sevenfigure exit, sell that business
and we had grown it to 100people.
We had the first e-commerceplatform for human writing
(02:42):
services got copied off by abunch of competitors with that
idea, but yeah, it was reallyamazing to see that all the way
through.
And then you know, 10 yearslater, have this exit.
That I was told would be nearlyimpossible for a humanly run
business.
But you know I sold it when Isaw what was on the horizon,
which was AI, and along the way,like I built my personal brand,
(03:04):
I knew that that was going tobe a lifeline, if not like a way
to grow what I knew and theauthority that I had in the
space, and absolutely it waslike there's no better avenue to
build authority than publishingbooks.
So I'm really glad I did that.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Right, right, how many?
Speaker 1 (03:23):
you've written eight books publishing books, so I'm
really glad I did that Rightright how many you've written a
books.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Nine actually, as of.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
April, less than 20 days ago, when I came out.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I mean that's amazing .
What was the latest book?
It's called joy of failure.
Nice, yes, and I co wrote itwith very.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It was not my idea.
It was my co author, chrisEvans, and it was his story.
So I long story short.
He reached out about a year agoand he's just like I think we
should talk, and when I talkedto him I was, I just felt this
call to go write the message hehad.
And you know I'm a crazy writer.
I can write a book in like aweek if I wanted to.
(04:02):
It.
Just it comes very naturally.
So I was like Chris, we've gotto get your story out.
He's like, well, I don't knowhow to write anything or I don't
know how to put together a book, and I'm like, well, I could do
it for you.
So I just naturally progressedto co -authoring this amazing
book that actually went to thetop 5,000 in all Kindle books in
the Amazon Kindle store theweek it came out.
(04:24):
I've never had a book do that,although I've had every book's
been a number one, but that onejust it was the right time.
You know, there's a lot ofpeople that aren't winning right
now, and so being a successfulentrepreneur, publishing a book
about losing and failing wasactually, I felt, like what the
audience needed this year themost.
So that book has just helped somany people.
(04:44):
We're so thankful to see thatChris and I did a book signing
here in Scottsdale a couple ofweeks ago.
That was really fun.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Can you again, like we'retalking to the pastor, the
church leader, maybe the peoplethat are responsible for
marketing at a church, ortechnology at a church like,
what is content marketing?
Can you describe it in your ownwords so that?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
our audience can understand it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's one of the bestforms of marketing, because what
you're doing is you'republishing content in order to
attract your audience.
You're not putting together anad campaign, you're not
screaming in their face, you'renot trying to go viral or all
the other marketing methods youcould do.
It's like what we're doing herepodcasting.
(05:29):
You're literally putting outcontent that attracts, grows and
retains an audience, and thatis just.
It's so steadfast and evergreen, especially because of, like,
what's happened with consumertrust.
So, since the pandemic trustactually left, there was a study
(05:52):
done across 33,000 consumers,90 countries, and they found
that consumer trust left threemajor segments, and those major
segments were the media,government and nonprofit, and
they actually went to the smallbusiness owner.
So whenever we create content, Ithink like even churches can
think of it like this puttingout content and doing content
marketing is a way to engageyour target audience that's
(06:14):
almost better than any othermethod.
So that's why I've done it for10 years and it paid off
tremendously.
And you know, we did it forclients.
That's what we sold, so we gotto see a lot of success for them
too.
But it's all about attractingan audience, not, you know,
getting in their phase trying toput together an ad or and ads
are not bad.
I'm not saying that, but it'smore okay.
(06:34):
I'm putting out this amazingpiece of content that I think
you want.
I'm targeting it for a keywordyou're already searching for
that's SEO and for that's SEO,and I'm going to give you an
amazing place to land if that'syour website and so you create
this almost like a rabbit holethat they don't want to leave
because it's so amazing.
And when you have that, I meanit's magic to see what happens
(06:54):
with conversion, sales, theretention of your audience that
finds you.
So it's just, it's amazing,amazing marketing avenue.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Right, right.
And for churches.
So a church has a website, sothey're publishing content on
their website, on their blog.
It could be their sermons, thattheir pastor's preaching every
Sunday, that they're turninginto podcasts.
It could be taking the podcastand transcribing it, turning it
into a blog post, like that kindof stuff, but putting it on
your website, trying to get itto rank in Google.
(07:24):
Yes, you just mentioned, youjust moved and you were looking
for a church.
And how did you find them?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, yeah, we Googled.
We're like, well, we did twothings.
We went to a Facebook group.
I put a post out in theScottsdale Living Facebook group
and I had so many comments Iwas overwhelmed.
So then I just went to Googleand we Google, searched
non-denominational Christianchurches near me and then just
looked at which ones said thebest message like that felt the
(07:54):
most transparent, authentic inthe actual copy of the website.
So in the end, yeah, we madeour decision where to go based
on that church's website content.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
It's interesting to see that.
So you basically searched forlike church near me or
non-denominational church nearme.
How does a church let's takethat example and apply content
marketing to it how would achurch get their website to show
up on Google towards the topfor a search term like that?
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, well, for that that's more of a local presence,
versus like inspirational Bibleverses, like somebody searching
for that.
That's probably not tied to alocation and you could get to
the top of Google for that onejust with blog posts, which is
something interesting, because Ithink that is another way to
bring in people to a localchurch.
(08:45):
But that aside, let's sayyou're looking, you're trying to
be found for that specifickeyword near me.
That's all going to come downto your Google listing.
So do you have a Google listing?
Is your church like the correctaddress?
Is all that set up under aGoogle listing?
That's number one, and thenyour website comes in.
Secondly, maybe even moreimportant, but you need both
(09:08):
things for it to work.
That website should have clearbranding, clear messaging.
It should speak to that personin that location.
It should convey what you'reactively doing in the community,
like events, all of that.
So you need a good, clearwebsite and then you really need
to make sure that your Google,my business profiles all set up
(09:28):
correctly.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
All set up up correctly.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
But those two things get you set up pretty well.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that.
So you built a business thathad you know up to a hundred
like freelance writers orcontract writers that you were
writing content for.
You know hundreds and hundredsor thousands of other businesses
is what it sounds like.
So you had people doing the jobof writing and, like describe
(09:54):
that business to us a little bit, just so that kind of again our
audience understands like thewriting of content, content
marketing and how businesseswere using it, or churches that
you guys were serving were usingit to kind of grow their
business or their onlinepresence.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So I think a good way to thinkabout this is of the marketing
you own.
Think of it like assets andwhat is an asset?
Something that you actually own.
So the only thing you own onthe internet is your domain name
and your website like even ifyou had an Instagram profile,
for example, twitter or it's nowX Facebook page like none of
(10:33):
those things you actually ownbecause that's on another
platform's real estate.
So if you think about the assetfirst approach, that is where
content comes in, because theonly way to build the asset the
website is through consistentcontent, because that builds
topical authority, which buildsgrowth and traffic.
So it's kind of simple, butit's also, you know, simple is
(10:56):
not easy.
It takes a lot of consistency.
So what we did for clients wasnormally they had their website
set up, so that was first, andthis is kind of the same
approach I'm still using to thisday at Consonant Scale, which
is now the new AI company.
But whenever I sold content, itwas people would come in,
whether it was we definitelyserve churches a brand, a
(11:20):
product based website, like allkinds of websites you could ever
think of, and it was neat tosee so many different use cases
where content worked across somany industries.
But they would come to us.
They had their website and theprimary thing they bought that
we did really well was the blog.
Because SEO blog posts likethat is still the top, one of
the top clicked links in search.
(11:42):
Because it's information driven.
People know, like when theyclick on a blog let's say, how
to set up my mic from AudioTechnica or 30 inspirational
Bible verses to keep a tired momgoing, Like that could be
something, a church post Then Iknow if I click on those things
I'm not going to be sold to.
That's informational,value-driven content and so
(12:03):
that's why it works so well.
And it's interesting because wesold all different types of
content in my agency but thenumber one seller for 10 years
straight was always the blogbecause it built traffic.
And you know we did ad copy, wedid landing pages, we did all
these other things.
But when it comes to buildingthat asset that you own, your
website that's always going tocome down to how many blog posts
(12:24):
you have, what's your topicalauthority and your domain
authority, and those things arebuilt from consistent publishing
of blog content.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
But yeah, that's what we sold and did for years.
Yeah, yeah, I love it, and sothat was the lead into like,
that was humans.
But now we have AI, yes, sowe'll jump into AI and look AI
in churches AI in general, Imean.
And look AI in churches.
Ai in general, I mean.
It's been around.
I'm certainly no professionalat it, but I know ChatGPT hit
(12:56):
and that's when it blew up from.
The world knew AI was here andthere was a real interface that
you could do things in.
And anybody on the planet cantry it now.
Anybody on the planet can tryit now.
Right, so, like AI becamereally tangible for the like
general population of the worldwhen ChatGPT released.
Right, yeah, or the latest youknow ChatGPT, whatever it was,
(13:17):
3.5 or whatever, whenever theyhad the UI in front of it, you
could start using it.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And it's just I mean, that was sometime last year and
it's just, AI is moving so fast.
That was sometime last year andAI is moving so fast.
And every week, every month,every quarter, there's these
crazy improvements in what'sgoing on, and content is one of
those places where AI is justthis supernatural.
You think about it right away.
(13:43):
You're like, oh yeah, AI canwrite content for me or it can
help me in my writing process.
Yeah, AI can write content forme or it can help me in my
writing process.
We talk a lot about it withpastors doing sermon prep, using
AI to prepare your sermon forthe weekend and asking questions
and using it as kind of ateammate to work on your sermon
with you.
But you guys are out and you'vecreated you and your co-founder
(14:05):
or partner have created contentat scaleai, a tech company
that's using AI for content.
So I'd love to tell us aboutthe company and kind of who
you're serving and what theproduct's all about.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yes, yeah, yeah, it's a good story.
When I sold my agency, that waslate 2021.
And so fall 2022, chatgpt comesout, picks up 100 million users
in two months.
When I sold the agency a yearprior, I knew GPT was getting
better and better.
The iterations were just goingto get better.
(14:40):
But I was very skeptical becauseI was used to article spinners
and just garbage.
So I was like, oh OK, ai isgoing to take writing jobs.
Sure, that's what I thought.
And when ChatGPT came out, Istill was not impressed.
I was actually speaking ondigital marketer stage
digitalmarketercom.
I did training.
(15:00):
I was a subject matter expertin content, so they invited me
to speak and I was like, well,I'm not going to be pro AI and
that's.
They're like that's fine, it'syour expertise, it's like don't
use the AI, it's garbage.
So I was telling people thatDecember of 2022, a month after
ChatGPT came out and in Januaryof 2023, I completely changed my
(15:21):
perspective on it when I founda tool stack that actually saved
me seven hours out of aneight-hour writing process and
it took me around eight hours tocompile my writers and I to
compile a good 3,000-word, meatySEO blog that would rank at the
top of Google, had all theresearch done.
So that took a lot of time.
(15:41):
So to replace that many hours,I was like, okay, this is the
one.
And I was just researching AItool after AI tool because I
knew okay, this is the one.
And I was just researching AItool after AI tool because I
knew okay, we're probably goingto see one real soon here that
could do all these steps.
So constant scale was the onlyone that replicated the human
(16:01):
workflow that my writers and Ihad perfected over years, and
that workflow was you go and youresearch what's ranking at top
of Google.
You kind of break all that down, you look for the best and the
worst, you take the bestelements, you put that into the
blog post, you write and thenyou add in new content so it's
100% original and then you needformatting, you need headers,
you need meta title, metadescription, so a lot of things
(16:22):
go into that blog post.
So this whole thing wasentirely automated.
I could feed content, scale,keyword and in less than seven
minutes I had a blog post thatwas like 80 to 90% ready to
publish.
And it was 100% original.
And now, like this March, ayear later, it's gotten so good
where it's identifying all thesources that it's pulling from
(16:45):
and it's linking that into itscontent, and the sources are
higher quality than they've everbeen.
Like it's pulling from actualstudies done on a topic.
It's avoiding 404s, like it'sknowing what to do when it comes
to finding those sources andputting together this really
high quality piece of content.
So just to see all thatautomated without any human work
(17:08):
is unbelievable.
It's a total game changer.
I didn't think I would see it,and so when I saw it in front of
me last year as kind of it wasstill a beta January of 2023, I
was like, well, I better jointhis before it wipes out all the
jobs that I used to hire for.
So that was my natural thought.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
So I literally emailed the founder that weekend
and I was like, hey, here's amarketing plan, here's what I
would do to improve your website.
Do you want to hire me?
So that's how that went.
And he's like, well, hop on acall.
And then I was hired.
So I've never worked for anyonein 10 years.
It was the first time I'd evertaken on the employee hat,
(17:50):
because I, you know, successfulentrepreneur for that long of a
time.
So I kind of swallowed my pridea little and became an employee
.
So I started out as VP ofmarketing and then three months
later went to president.
I pitched him on the role ofpresident, like, just make me
the president.
He did that too, and so hisrole he's kind of the product
(18:15):
genius slash founder.
So he's the one that inventedwhat the product tool stack is,
the technology that goes into it, that's what he lives in is the
science of that incredibleproduct tool stack he lives in
is the science of thatincredible product tool stack.
So it's really cool to come inand be a partner where my job is
marketing an amazing, excellentproduct that actually works in
(18:36):
the AI space, because there's somany AI tools out there that
are marketed very quickly andthey're really just no better
than an API skin that islayering a single layer to chat
GPT, which you can now get GPT4.0.
You can get that for free nowwith their spring update this
week in May.
So it's really crazy.
(18:57):
A lot of AI tools are beingwiped out, but thankfully I
chose the one that isn't.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Right, right, yeah, it's the other one that seems to
be doing.
I mean, I'm sure there's a lotactually, but I know Jasper's
done really well.
Yes, it's different, I thinkit's slightly, you know,
different, but what I mean,that's a cool story.
Again, I'm trying to connectdots to the church.
How would a church leverage atool like Continent Scale?
(19:23):
Yeah, like, yeah, like, if achurch marketers listen to the
podcast, or you know a volunteerthat helps their small local
church with, like their websiteand their kind of online
presence, like well, how would achurch use it Like real,
practically, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, 100%.
I'd say look at your goalsFirst of all.
If your goals are to grow yourwebsite traffic, this is an
amazing tool.
You won't need to hire a writer.
It basically removes that barof entry which has really
stopped a lot of churches,especially from publishing
content because, oh, I got to gofind out writer, I got to
expand the staff, maybe I needto train this writer.
(19:59):
Well, we don't even have enoughstaff to do the stuff we need
to do, so that's been a hugeroadblock.
So all you have to do is type ina keyword idea that you have.
It could be the location ofwhere you are, where you serve.
It could be a traffic piece youwant to get found for, like
(20:19):
inspirational verses or somekind of, um, a bunch of biblical
references.
You know, there's just we could.
There's so much potential, somuch potential in the space.
Um, if you just take the Bibleand all the keywords we could
get from the topics in thatamazing book, there's just so
many keywords, um, so I'm.
That's why I'm really excitedabout this, cause I think it's a
(20:41):
kind of an untapped opportunityBecause of that hurdle oh, I
have to hire the writer, I haveto know SEO, and so that stopped
so many churches.
So now, with constant scale,what you would have to do is
literally turn it on, type in aseed keyword and let it do all
the rest.
It'll go find the ideal keyword.
It'll tell you like here's alist of 70 different keywords
(21:02):
and straight from those keywordsyou can have it write the
actual content.
Just click a button, writecontent and then you get a blog
post.
That's like 70 to 80% there.
Sometimes it's 95% there.
It just depends on the topic.
But now with deep research thisMarch, it's very, very accurate
.
So it would even do things likequote Bible verses correctly
(21:24):
from the source.
And you could like kind of trustthat which a lot of AI tools
there's bogus.
You know.
There's no like source of truth.
That's not built into thesetools.
So this one has that researchbacked piece in it.
That kind of makes it go okay,where's this coming from?
Let's find the sources, put itin the content.
So you see all that.
So that's what you would do andthe cost is dramatically lower
(21:49):
than hiring a writer.
You know, it's just like it.
I've seen use cases where itwas four times lower.
I've seen use cases where itwas 25 times lower.
So it's just, and it removesthat entirely, because you could
literally have a volunteer,just start running keywords and
posting content.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, most churches are, you
know, 100, 200 members and youknow there's a couple.
You know maybe there's afull-time couple or maybe
there's a couple staff people,but they generally don't have
marketing teams or even anybodythat you know.
Maybe they have a volunteer,maybe they have somebody on
(22:26):
staff, maybe it's the you knowyouth pastor, or you know
somebody in the youth ministrythat's younger and techie and
that you know.
So it's just, oftentimes it'snot the focus.
Because you know churches areabout taking care of their
community and providing pastoralcare to their members and being
a place for connection andbuilding faith and whatnot.
(22:47):
So when it comes to marketing,I mean, sometimes just having a
website period is like all thata church can kind of muster up.
But you know, publishingcontent consistently is not
something they're really staffedup to do, right?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
So a tool like this where they can.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
maybe a volunteer or, you know, the youth pastor or
somebody on the team that'swhoever's responsible for the
website can now just say oh, I'mgoing to publish some you know,
faith-based content, like oncea week or twice a week, and it's
only going to take me I don'tknow an hour versus two or three
days of putting togethercontent.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yes, exactly that's how I would think about think
about it.
Yeah, it's a huge opportunity.
It takes what was like a oneman marketing team.
You know it can 20 X thatbecause of what you can get with
content at continent scale.
Can 20x that because of whatyou can get with content at
continent scale.
Our own website we're a casestudy of this.
You know.
We're publishing 80 to 90pieces of content per month.
(23:48):
We're ranking for per monthover yes, per month, and we're
getting over 500 000 searchesyeah, I mean that's crazy crazy.
and we're doing that with oneperson running the machine that
used to take 20 humans at aminimum, sometimes more.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
That's like three blog posts a day.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, that's what we're doing.
It's almost fully automated.
I don't even look at it anymore.
It's just such a hands-offprocess.
I have a person who'spublishing the content and
that's it.
We're just letting the ai doall the heavy lifting yeah, I
mean incredible.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
What on the topic of ai, like, what are your?
You were anti, now you're forit.
We're really talking aboutspecific like writing, use case,
um, what?
What are the thoughts do youhave around ai and just where
we're headed?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
yeah, I.
I think it's really interesting.
I've spent a lot of time here.
I actually talk about it quitea bit on my YouTube channel,
julie McCoy.
I have this whole theme thereabout the rabbit hole from Lewis
Carroll's Adventures inWonderland one of my favorite
series and it's like you know,the AI rabbit hole can go really
, really deep.
So how deep do you want to go?
So on that channel, we goreally deep, right.
(25:01):
But you know, are you familiarwith this concept called the
singularity?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah.
Okay, okay, cool, I mean I'm noexpert, so don't like quiz me
right now.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Well, I'm no expert either, I'm still learning, but
I have Ray Kurzweil's book theSingularity is Near and of
course, he's launching one injune.
The singularity is nearer, sohe thinks it's nearer?
Yeah, but basically it's thispoint from which we'll have no
return, where we have a singularevent of ai changing humanity
(25:36):
as we know it, and so we'reheaded there, and what's crazy
is how fast we're actuallyheaded there.
We had a point in history wherethings were greatly changed
because of events, but we'venever actually had a point in
history that's changing thisrapidly.
That's the difference.
So the rapid progression iswhat's crazy.
(25:56):
And we're looking at a potentialtime and place we could be at
one day, called AGI, which isvery subjective.
I think the name for it iswrong.
It's artificial generalintelligence.
What does that actually mean?
The idea there is AI that canthink and function like a human,
autonomously, without uscontrolling it.
(26:18):
It gets to a point where it canbe iterative on itself and do
better work than iteratingitself.
So what's interesting is how Ithink, if we look at this less
like from the Skynet, hollywoodmirror or lens, I should say and
more from like OK, where'stechnology actually going?
(26:38):
Where will we end up, so wecould be looking at automation
of human labor almost entirely,and that's not necessarily a bad
thing.
Like the way, I've been readinga lot of books and researching
this wide event just to reallyunderstand it, and so there's
several books that I've reallyenjoyed that are very realistic
(26:59):
in their approach to thisTechnology-based, science-based,
actual fact-based.
Those books, some of myfavorites, are by Dr Kai-Fu Lee.
He's a Chinese scientist.
He's the former China presidentof Google in China.
What's interesting is Googleactually holds two-thirds of the
market share of the GDP in AI,so the AI growth that will
(27:24):
contribute to the actual dollar.
China owns two thirds of thatgrowth.
But what's interesting is whenyou look at this, especially
from the scientific perspectives.
I think that we're going to seea new economy form, and that new
economy could actually givepeople more meaning if the right
(27:46):
world leaders come into this,because the biggest problem
throughout history has alwaysbeen human greed and that
driving world orders andgovernments, and so that's what
we're going to have to be verycareful of.
We might have to go live in adifferent country just so we can
have morals and values again,like right.
I don't know where this willhead.
I think it's really interestingto see where the governments
(28:08):
will align on this.
But you know, if you look atthe reality of where we're
living today like the fiatdollars crashing, gallup's study
of a billion people at work andthey found that 86 of those
people are unhappy at work tothe point of detrimental
depression, anxiety and somepeople suicidal so when you look
(28:29):
at that, I think we have abroken world.
Will AI make it more broken, orwill it actually give us an
opportunity to free us up fromthe things that were mundane,
that brought us down, and allowus to actually step into more
meaning?
and if you look back at time,which you know, there's a book
called super abundance.
It does a great job of this.
(28:50):
Another book, abundance, bypeter dm.
And as you look back at time,there's been cyclical world
governments that point to erasof abundance where people
actually had no need to work forincome and so what they did was
, like people became musicians,harvest great warriors, and so
(29:10):
we've actually had examples inhistory we can refer to where
taking work and changing theeconomy was not necessarily a
bad thing.
So I mean, I mean I've beenstudying this a lot and I still
have more to study, so it's arabbit hole.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
I mean, yeah, it is a rabbit hole and it's such early
days and the whole thing.
And you know the tools likewriting content.
I mean it's so harmless and anawesome advancement, right to
help people get more done, bemore productive, be more
efficient.
But then there's stuff likeyou're like where is AI going to
(29:46):
go?
And you know, are the robotscoming?
For us?
It's a whole.
It's a whole nother level oflike AI and the future, which is
kind of crazy.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
So much in my conversations.
You know, it's like it'ssomething that I can't just
ignore anymore.
I used to be like, well, haha,you know, I just live in writing
content right, yeah I avoidthat topic.
But the reason I put together mychannel, julep and coy, where I
do talk about all these things,very of the craziest bits of
those two the reason I put thattogether I started reading and
(30:19):
researching myself.
I didn't really find a lot ofvoices out there that spoke on
this from both realist andoptimist perspective.
A really good book is theRational Optimist by Matt Ridley
.
It's like you can look atthings one way or you can look
at them another way.
It really is like how we lookat it.
So that's the whole reason Istarted talking about this.
(30:40):
I didn't find a voice I likedlistening to about this topic.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
And then you found did you find one now, though,
like, and all the books you'veread, what would you recommend?
Again, I'm thinking, like youknow, our audience is church
leaders.
So if you're a church leaderand you're trying to learn more
about AI and kind of where we'reheaded, what's, what's your
kind of top recommendation toread?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, I would say it's not necessarily a book on
AI, but it's a book on thegrowth of technology.
Abundance by Peter Diamandiswould be where I would start.
It'll shift your perspective on.
It'll take you completely outof, I think, what Hollywood has
done for a while, which is makeus fear and have that embedded
(31:25):
concern.
There's so many images thatwe've been presented with, so
that's a really refreshing readabout how we're actually living
in a world right now wherethere's so many images that
we've been presented with.
So that's a really refreshingread about how we're actually
living in a world right nowwhere there's more than we could
ever want or need at ourfingertips.
It's just have we actuallycultivated that yet?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Have we been stewards of it yet.
So that book's a great reminderof that.
And then another really goodone would be AI Superpowers by
Kai Fugli.
That's a great book.
It talks about the growth ofall this, where it's headed, and
then it's also very realist.
Like well, we're not going tohave Skynet, because what we're
looking at right now is theresult of 20 years of
(32:04):
breakthroughs.
It's not necessarily somethingthat's breaking or something
that creating a breakthroughevery single year.
It's not.
That's not what's going on here.
So that book is also a verygood yeah, those are good ones.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Okay, let's, let's wrap, because we could sit here
and talk about this forever.
But you are coming to uh, ourconference in october, modern
church leader and you're goingto be teaching a session.
What are you going to betalking about?
Give us, give us the uh, thehighlight.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
So I feel like everything we just teased here
is a really good lead-in to whatI'll be teaching at the
conference, which is how to 25Xyour content without hiring a
big marketing staff, withoutadding on all these paid writers
or strategists or SDOs, and howto actually just use AI to get
the job done.
(32:52):
So I'll take you through it.
The opportunity that stillexists.
You know we might hear a lotthat SDO is dead.
I'll share why that's not truehow to get found for specific
searches, pull in a bunch ofgood examples relevant to church
leaders and, yeah, hopefullyleave them with some really good
eye openers like whoa.
This is possible.
(33:12):
I can do this in this age of AI.
And then the actual path on howto take advantage of it all.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And specifically, you know, to help their community
and hopefully attract morepeople into their church.
And, you know, learning aboutJesus and kind of growing in
their faith and connecting withother believers, like using
content to do that is somethingevery church should be, you know
, wanting to learn more about.
So I'm looking forward to thesession.
It's going to be fun.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Yeah, same here.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'm looking forward to meetingall of you too.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, in person, we got all this digital.
Final thing where should folksgo to learn more about you and
to learn more about Content atScale?
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, so Content at Scale.
You can go to contentatscaleaito see what we do.
There's a $15 seven-day trialthat gets you into the actual
software.
You can see it right around the.
You know I can't recommend itenough.
It's what I use for my blog,both at Cost of Hacker and to
grow the Cost of Scale websiteAnother tool I would use and
(34:22):
then to find my work, what I'mdoing, you can find it at Cost
of Scale.
So I'm driving a lot ofmarketing growth there.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Also Julie McC mccoy, amazon you can find my books
and, of course, love it.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Julia, it's been a pleasure having you on.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Thanks for coming today thanks for having me frank
.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
This is so much fun we'll, uh, we'll, see you in
october and, uh, hopefully abunch of you guys listening to
the podcast will join us too.
So, uh, modern church leader inoctober uh, you can go to the
website modern church leadercomto find out more and definitely
check out julia at content atscaleai, and we'll catch you
guys next week on anotherepisode of Modern Church Leader.
(35:00):
See ya.
Hey guys, frank here with another episode of Modern
Church Leader, excited to talkAI.
Today I'm here with my new bud,julia McCoy.
Julia, how's it going?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Hey Frank, I'm excited to be here.
It's going good.
I'm in Arizona.
It's pretty hot.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
It's hot already.
We're in May, and what's theweather?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh, it's like high 80s going into the 90s.
That's not too bad.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
You're going to get into, like the 115s.
I think, that's true.
So we're going to talk a lotabout content and AI and search
as it relates to kind of tryingto connect it to churches and
kind of our audience of pastors.
But you've been at it for along time.
You're, you know, one of theexperts out there in content
(00:54):
marketing.
It looks like you're abestselling author.
You've written a bunch of booksand writing is your passion.
So why don't you tell us youknow?
And then there's the new stuffthat you're kind of getting into
.
So we'll get into that as well.
So why don't you tell us youknow?
And then there's the new stuffthat you're kind of getting into
.
So we'll get into that as well.
But why don't you give us yourstory, like, how did you get
into writing and content and howdid you get to where you're at
today?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to share.
Well, all of this started whenI was 19.
I was in college and I wasactually going for a nursing
degree, and halfway throughgetting that degree, I thought,
oh my gosh, first of all, Iwould be terrible at this, like
I knew.
I knew I really hated that.
And so my second thought waswell, what do I love to do and
(01:35):
how can I actually do thatinstead?
And so I knew the answer waswriting.
I loved writing ever since Icould pick up a pen and write.
And so that morning, when I hadthat idea, I was 19 years old
and I Googled how to make moneywriting.
And back then, odesk was, orUpwork was.
Odesk and Elance.
It was two different platforms.
It was very, very different.
This was 2011.
(01:56):
And freelance gigs there wasn'ta lot of competition, so I spun
up a freelance profile.
Three months later, I had moreincome than I knew what to do
with as a 19 year old, and so Iwas like, well, let me just
start a business.
And I guess starting businessesruns in my blood, because it
did not fail like I thought itwould.
I just kept at it and learnedas I went and kind of.
(02:21):
You know the saying is likebuild your wings on the way down
.
I really did that.
I didn't know what I was doingthe majority of the time, so I
learned as I went and then, 10years later, it was a slow and
steady trajectory for me.
I was able to have a sevenfigure exit, sell that business
and we had grown it to 100people.
We had the first e-commerceplatform for human writing
(02:42):
services got copied off by abunch of competitors with that
idea, but yeah, it was reallyamazing to see that all the way
through.
And then you know, 10 yearslater, have this exit.
That I was told would be nearlyimpossible for a humanly run
business.
But you know I sold it when Isaw what was on the horizon,
which was AI, and along the way,like I built my personal brand,
(03:04):
I knew that that was going tobe a lifeline, if not like a way
to grow what I knew and theauthority that I had in the
space, and absolutely it waslike there's no better avenue to
build authority than publishingbooks.
So I'm really glad I did that.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Right, right, how many?
Speaker 1 (03:23):
you've written eight books publishing books, so I'm
really glad I did that Rightright how many you've written a
books.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Nine actually, as of.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
April, less than 20 days ago, when I came out.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I mean that's amazing .
What was the latest book?
It's called joy of failure.
Nice, yes, and I co wrote itwith very.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It was not my idea.
It was my co author, chrisEvans, and it was his story.
So I long story short.
He reached out about a year agoand he's just like I think we
should talk, and when I talkedto him I was, I just felt this
call to go write the message hehad.
And you know I'm a crazy writer.
I can write a book in like aweek if I wanted to.
(04:02):
It.
Just it comes very naturally.
So I was like Chris, we've gotto get your story out.
He's like, well, I don't knowhow to write anything or I don't
know how to put together a book, and I'm like, well, I could do
it for you.
So I just naturally progressedto co -authoring this amazing
book that actually went to thetop 5,000 in all Kindle books in
the Amazon Kindle store theweek it came out.
(04:24):
I've never had a book do that,although I've had every book's
been a number one, but that onejust it was the right time.
You know, there's a lot ofpeople that aren't winning right
now, and so being a successfulentrepreneur, publishing a book
about losing and failing wasactually, I felt, like what the
audience needed this year themost.
So that book has just helped somany people.
(04:44):
We're so thankful to see thatChris and I did a book signing
here in Scottsdale a couple ofweeks ago.
That was really fun.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, that's awesome.
Can you again, like we'retalking to the pastor, the
church leader, maybe the peoplethat are responsible for
marketing at a church, ortechnology at a church like,
what is content marketing?
Can you describe it in your ownwords so that?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
our audience can understand it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's one of the bestforms of marketing, because what
you're doing is you'republishing content in order to
attract your audience.
You're not putting together anad campaign, you're not
screaming in their face, you'renot trying to go viral or all
the other marketing methods youcould do.
It's like what we're doing herepodcasting.
(05:29):
You're literally putting outcontent that attracts, grows and
retains an audience, and thatis just.
It's so steadfast and evergreen, especially because of, like,
what's happened with consumertrust.
So, since the pandemic trustactually left, there was a study
(05:52):
done across 33,000 consumers,90 countries, and they found
that consumer trust left threemajor segments, and those major
segments were the media,government and nonprofit, and
they actually went to the smallbusiness owner.
So whenever we create content, Ithink like even churches can
think of it like this puttingout content and doing content
marketing is a way to engageyour target audience that's
(06:14):
almost better than any othermethod.
So that's why I've done it for10 years and it paid off
tremendously.
And you know, we did it forclients.
That's what we sold, so we gotto see a lot of success for them
too.
But it's all about attractingan audience, not, you know,
getting in their phase trying toput together an ad or and ads
are not bad.
I'm not saying that, but it'smore okay.
(06:34):
I'm putting out this amazingpiece of content that I think
you want.
I'm targeting it for a keywordyou're already searching for
that's SEO and for that's SEO,and I'm going to give you an
amazing place to land if that'syour website and so you create
this almost like a rabbit holethat they don't want to leave
because it's so amazing.
And when you have that, I meanit's magic to see what happens
(06:54):
with conversion, sales, theretention of your audience that
finds you.
So it's just, it's amazing,amazing marketing avenue.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Right, right.
And for churches.
So a church has a website, sothey're publishing content on
their website, on their blog.
It could be their sermons, thattheir pastor's preaching every
Sunday, that they're turninginto podcasts.
It could be taking the podcastand transcribing it, turning it
into a blog post, like that kindof stuff, but putting it on
your website, trying to get itto rank in Google.
(07:24):
Yes, you just mentioned, youjust moved and you were looking
for a church.
And how did you find them?
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, yeah, we Googled.
We're like, well, we did twothings.
We went to a Facebook group.
I put a post out in theScottsdale Living Facebook group
and I had so many comments Iwas overwhelmed.
So then I just went to Googleand we Google, searched
non-denominational Christianchurches near me and then just
looked at which ones said thebest message like that felt the
(07:54):
most transparent, authentic inthe actual copy of the website.
So in the end, yeah, we madeour decision where to go based
on that church's website content.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
It's interesting to see that.
So you basically searched forlike church near me or
non-denominational church nearme.
How does a church let's takethat example and apply content
marketing to it how would achurch get their website to show
up on Google towards the topfor a search term like that?
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, well, for that that's more of a local presence,
versus like inspirational Bibleverses, like somebody searching
for that.
That's probably not tied to alocation and you could get to
the top of Google for that onejust with blog posts, which is
something interesting, because Ithink that is another way to
bring in people to a localchurch.
(08:45):
But that aside, let's sayyou're looking, you're trying to
be found for that specifickeyword near me.
That's all going to come downto your Google listing.
So do you have a Google listing?
Is your church like the correctaddress?
Is all that set up under aGoogle listing?
That's number one, and thenyour website comes in.
Secondly, maybe even moreimportant, but you need both
(09:08):
things for it to work.
That website should have clearbranding, clear messaging.
It should speak to that personin that location.
It should convey what you'reactively doing in the community,
like events, all of that.
So you need a good, clearwebsite and then you really need
to make sure that your Google,my business profiles all set up
(09:28):
correctly.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
All set up up correctly.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
But those two things get you set up pretty well.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that.
So you built a business thathad you know up to a hundred
like freelance writers orcontract writers that you were
writing content for.
You know hundreds and hundredsor thousands of other businesses
is what it sounds like.
So you had people doing the jobof writing and, like describe
(09:54):
that business to us a little bit, just so that kind of again our
audience understands like thewriting of content, content
marketing and how businesseswere using it, or churches that
you guys were serving were usingit to kind of grow their
business or their onlinepresence.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So I think a good way to thinkabout this is of the marketing
you own.
Think of it like assets andwhat is an asset?
Something that you actually own.
So the only thing you own onthe internet is your domain name
and your website like even ifyou had an Instagram profile,
for example, twitter or it's nowX Facebook page like none of
(10:33):
those things you actually ownbecause that's on another
platform's real estate.
So if you think about the assetfirst approach, that is where
content comes in, because theonly way to build the asset the
website is through consistentcontent, because that builds
topical authority, which buildsgrowth and traffic.
So it's kind of simple, butit's also, you know, simple is
(10:56):
not easy.
It takes a lot of consistency.
So what we did for clients wasnormally they had their website
set up, so that was first, andthis is kind of the same
approach I'm still using to thisday at Consonant Scale, which
is now the new AI company.
But whenever I sold content, itwas people would come in,
whether it was we definitelyserve churches a brand, a
(11:20):
product based website, like allkinds of websites you could ever
think of, and it was neat tosee so many different use cases
where content worked across somany industries.
But they would come to us.
They had their website and theprimary thing they bought that
we did really well was the blog.
Because SEO blog posts likethat is still the top, one of
the top clicked links in search.
(11:42):
Because it's information driven.
People know, like when theyclick on a blog let's say, how
to set up my mic from AudioTechnica or 30 inspirational
Bible verses to keep a tired momgoing, Like that could be
something, a church post Then Iknow if I click on those things
I'm not going to be sold to.
That's informational,value-driven content and so
(12:03):
that's why it works so well.
And it's interesting because wesold all different types of
content in my agency but thenumber one seller for 10 years
straight was always the blogbecause it built traffic.
And you know we did ad copy, wedid landing pages, we did all
these other things.
But when it comes to buildingthat asset that you own, your
website that's always going tocome down to how many blog posts
(12:24):
you have, what's your topicalauthority and your domain
authority, and those things arebuilt from consistent publishing
of blog content.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
But yeah, that's what we sold and did for years.
Yeah, yeah, I love it, and sothat was the lead into like,
that was humans.
But now we have AI, yes, sowe'll jump into AI and look AI
in churches AI in general, Imean.
And look AI in churches.
Ai in general, I mean.
It's been around.
I'm certainly no professionalat it, but I know ChatGPT hit
(12:56):
and that's when it blew up from.
The world knew AI was here andthere was a real interface that
you could do things in.
And anybody on the planet cantry it now.
Anybody on the planet can tryit now.
Right, so, like AI becamereally tangible for the like
general population of the worldwhen ChatGPT released.
Right, yeah, or the latest youknow ChatGPT, whatever it was,
(13:17):
3.5 or whatever, whenever theyhad the UI in front of it, you
could start using it.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And it's just I mean, that was sometime last year and
it's just, AI is moving so fast.
That was sometime last year andAI is moving so fast.
And every week, every month,every quarter, there's these
crazy improvements in what'sgoing on, and content is one of
those places where AI is justthis supernatural.
You think about it right away.
(13:43):
You're like, oh yeah, AI canwrite content for me or it can
help me in my writing process.
Yeah, AI can write content forme or it can help me in my
writing process.
We talk a lot about it withpastors doing sermon prep, using
AI to prepare your sermon forthe weekend and asking questions
and using it as kind of ateammate to work on your sermon
with you.
But you guys are out and you'vecreated you and your co-founder
(14:05):
or partner have created contentat scaleai, a tech company
that's using AI for content.
So I'd love to tell us aboutthe company and kind of who
you're serving and what theproduct's all about.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yes, yeah, yeah, it's a good story.
When I sold my agency, that waslate 2021.
And so fall 2022, chatgpt comesout, picks up 100 million users
in two months.
When I sold the agency a yearprior, I knew GPT was getting
better and better.
The iterations were just goingto get better.
(14:40):
But I was very skeptical becauseI was used to article spinners
and just garbage.
So I was like, oh OK, ai isgoing to take writing jobs.
Sure, that's what I thought.
And when ChatGPT came out, Istill was not impressed.
I was actually speaking ondigital marketer stage
digitalmarketercom.
I did training.
(15:00):
I was a subject matter expertin content, so they invited me
to speak and I was like, well,I'm not going to be pro AI and
that's.
They're like that's fine, it'syour expertise, it's like don't
use the AI, it's garbage.
So I was telling people thatDecember of 2022, a month after
ChatGPT came out and in Januaryof 2023, I completely changed my
(15:21):
perspective on it when I founda tool stack that actually saved
me seven hours out of aneight-hour writing process and
it took me around eight hours tocompile my writers and I to
compile a good 3,000-word, meatySEO blog that would rank at the
top of Google, had all theresearch done.
So that took a lot of time.
(15:41):
So to replace that many hours,I was like, okay, this is the
one.
And I was just researching AItool after AI tool because I
knew okay, this is the one.
And I was just researching AItool after AI tool because I
knew okay, we're probably goingto see one real soon here that
could do all these steps.
So constant scale was the onlyone that replicated the human
(16:01):
workflow that my writers and Ihad perfected over years, and
that workflow was you go and youresearch what's ranking at top
of Google.
You kind of break all that down, you look for the best and the
worst, you take the bestelements, you put that into the
blog post, you write and thenyou add in new content so it's
100% original and then you needformatting, you need headers,
you need meta title, metadescription, so a lot of things
(16:22):
go into that blog post.
So this whole thing wasentirely automated.
I could feed content, scale,keyword and in less than seven
minutes I had a blog post thatwas like 80 to 90% ready to
publish.
And it was 100% original.
And now, like this March, ayear later, it's gotten so good
where it's identifying all thesources that it's pulling from
(16:45):
and it's linking that into itscontent, and the sources are
higher quality than they've everbeen.
Like it's pulling from actualstudies done on a topic.
It's avoiding 404s, like it'sknowing what to do when it comes
to finding those sources andputting together this really
high quality piece of content.
So just to see all thatautomated without any human work
(17:08):
is unbelievable.
It's a total game changer.
I didn't think I would see it,and so when I saw it in front of
me last year as kind of it wasstill a beta January of 2023, I
was like, well, I better jointhis before it wipes out all the
jobs that I used to hire for.
So that was my natural thought.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
So I literally emailed the founder that weekend
and I was like, hey, here's amarketing plan, here's what I
would do to improve your website.
Do you want to hire me?
So that's how that went.
And he's like, well, hop on acall.
And then I was hired.
So I've never worked for anyonein 10 years.
It was the first time I'd evertaken on the employee hat,
(17:50):
because I, you know, successfulentrepreneur for that long of a
time.
So I kind of swallowed my pridea little and became an employee
.
So I started out as VP ofmarketing and then three months
later went to president.
I pitched him on the role ofpresident, like, just make me
the president.
He did that too, and so hisrole he's kind of the product
(18:15):
genius slash founder.
So he's the one that inventedwhat the product tool stack is,
the technology that goes into it, that's what he lives in is the
science of that incredibleproduct tool stack he lives in
is the science of thatincredible product tool stack.
So it's really cool to come inand be a partner where my job is
marketing an amazing, excellentproduct that actually works in
(18:36):
the AI space, because there's somany AI tools out there that
are marketed very quickly andthey're really just no better
than an API skin that islayering a single layer to chat
GPT, which you can now get GPT4.0.
You can get that for free nowwith their spring update this
week in May.
So it's really crazy.
(18:57):
A lot of AI tools are beingwiped out, but thankfully I
chose the one that isn't.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Right, right, yeah, it's the other one that seems to
be doing.
I mean, I'm sure there's a lotactually, but I know Jasper's
done really well.
Yes, it's different, I thinkit's slightly, you know,
different, but what I mean,that's a cool story.
Again, I'm trying to connectdots to the church.
How would a church leverage atool like Continent Scale?
(19:23):
Yeah, like, yeah, like, if achurch marketers listen to the
podcast, or you know a volunteerthat helps their small local
church with, like their websiteand their kind of online
presence, like well, how would achurch use it Like real,
practically, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, 100%.
I'd say look at your goalsFirst of all.
If your goals are to grow yourwebsite traffic, this is an
amazing tool.
You won't need to hire a writer.
It basically removes that barof entry which has really
stopped a lot of churches,especially from publishing
content because, oh, I got to gofind out writer, I got to
expand the staff, maybe I needto train this writer.
(19:59):
Well, we don't even have enoughstaff to do the stuff we need
to do, so that's been a hugeroadblock.
So all you have to do is type ina keyword idea that you have.
It could be the location ofwhere you are, where you serve.
It could be a traffic piece youwant to get found for, like
(20:19):
inspirational verses or somekind of, um, a bunch of biblical
references.
You know, there's just we could.
There's so much potential, somuch potential in the space.
Um, if you just take the Bibleand all the keywords we could
get from the topics in thatamazing book, there's just so
many keywords, um, so I'm.
That's why I'm really excitedabout this, cause I think it's a
(20:41):
kind of an untapped opportunityBecause of that hurdle oh, I
have to hire the writer, I haveto know SEO, and so that stopped
so many churches.
So now, with constant scale,what you would have to do is
literally turn it on, type in aseed keyword and let it do all
the rest.
It'll go find the ideal keyword.
It'll tell you like here's alist of 70 different keywords
(21:02):
and straight from those keywordsyou can have it write the
actual content.
Just click a button, writecontent and then you get a blog
post.
That's like 70 to 80% there.
Sometimes it's 95% there.
It just depends on the topic.
But now with deep research thisMarch, it's very, very accurate
.
So it would even do things likequote Bible verses correctly
(21:24):
from the source.
And you could like kind of trustthat which a lot of AI tools
there's bogus.
You know.
There's no like source of truth.
That's not built into thesetools.
So this one has that researchbacked piece in it.
That kind of makes it go okay,where's this coming from?
Let's find the sources, put itin the content.
So you see all that.
So that's what you would do andthe cost is dramatically lower
(21:49):
than hiring a writer.
You know, it's just like it.
I've seen use cases where itwas four times lower.
I've seen use cases where itwas 25 times lower.
So it's just, and it removesthat entirely, because you could
literally have a volunteer,just start running keywords and
posting content.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, most churches are, you
know, 100, 200 members and youknow there's a couple.
You know maybe there's afull-time couple or maybe
there's a couple staff people,but they generally don't have
marketing teams or even anybodythat you know.
Maybe they have a volunteer,maybe they have somebody on
(22:26):
staff, maybe it's the you knowyouth pastor, or you know
somebody in the youth ministrythat's younger and techie and
that you know.
So it's just, oftentimes it'snot the focus.
Because you know churches areabout taking care of their
community and providing pastoralcare to their members and being
a place for connection andbuilding faith and whatnot.
(22:47):
So when it comes to marketing,I mean, sometimes just having a
website period is like all thata church can kind of muster up.
But you know, publishingcontent consistently is not
something they're really staffedup to do, right?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
So a tool like this where they can.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
maybe a volunteer or, you know, the youth pastor or
somebody on the team that'swhoever's responsible for the
website can now just say oh, I'mgoing to publish some you know,
faith-based content, like oncea week or twice a week, and it's
only going to take me I don'tknow an hour versus two or three
days of putting togethercontent.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yes, exactly that's how I would think about think
about it.
Yeah, it's a huge opportunity.
It takes what was like a oneman marketing team.
You know it can 20 X thatbecause of what you can get with
content at continent scale.
Can 20x that because of whatyou can get with content at
continent scale.
Our own website we're a casestudy of this.
You know.
We're publishing 80 to 90pieces of content per month.
(23:48):
We're ranking for per monthover yes, per month, and we're
getting over 500 000 searchesyeah, I mean that's crazy crazy.
and we're doing that with oneperson running the machine that
used to take 20 humans at aminimum, sometimes more.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
That's like three blog posts a day.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, that's what we're doing.
It's almost fully automated.
I don't even look at it anymore.
It's just such a hands-offprocess.
I have a person who'spublishing the content and
that's it.
We're just letting the ai doall the heavy lifting yeah, I
mean incredible.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
What on the topic of ai, like, what are your?
You were anti, now you're forit.
We're really talking aboutspecific like writing, use case,
um, what?
What are the thoughts do youhave around ai and just where
we're headed?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
yeah, I.
I think it's really interesting.
I've spent a lot of time here.
I actually talk about it quitea bit on my YouTube channel,
julie McCoy.
I have this whole theme thereabout the rabbit hole from Lewis
Carroll's Adventures inWonderland one of my favorite
series and it's like you know,the AI rabbit hole can go really
, really deep.
So how deep do you want to go?
So on that channel, we goreally deep, right.
(25:01):
But you know, are you familiarwith this concept called the
singularity?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah.
Okay, okay, cool, I mean I'm noexpert, so don't like quiz me
right now.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Well, I'm no expert either, I'm still learning, but
I have Ray Kurzweil's book theSingularity is Near and of
course, he's launching one injune.
The singularity is nearer, sohe thinks it's nearer?
Yeah, but basically it's thispoint from which we'll have no
return, where we have a singularevent of ai changing humanity
(25:36):
as we know it, and so we'reheaded there, and what's crazy
is how fast we're actuallyheaded there.
We had a point in history wherethings were greatly changed
because of events, but we'venever actually had a point in
history that's changing thisrapidly.
That's the difference.
So the rapid progression iswhat's crazy.
(25:56):
And we're looking at a potentialtime and place we could be at
one day, called AGI, which isvery subjective.
I think the name for it iswrong.
It's artificial generalintelligence.
What does that actually mean?
The idea there is AI that canthink and function like a human,
autonomously, without uscontrolling it.
(26:18):
It gets to a point where it canbe iterative on itself and do
better work than iteratingitself.
So what's interesting is how Ithink, if we look at this less
like from the Skynet, hollywoodmirror or lens, I should say and
more from like OK, where'stechnology actually going?
(26:38):
Where will we end up, so wecould be looking at automation
of human labor almost entirely,and that's not necessarily a bad
thing.
Like the way, I've been readinga lot of books and researching
this wide event just to reallyunderstand it, and so there's
several books that I've reallyenjoyed that are very realistic
(26:59):
in their approach to thisTechnology-based, science-based,
actual fact-based.
Those books, some of myfavorites, are by Dr Kai-Fu Lee.
He's a Chinese scientist.
He's the former China presidentof Google in China.
What's interesting is Googleactually holds two-thirds of the
market share of the GDP in AI,so the AI growth that will
(27:24):
contribute to the actual dollar.
China owns two thirds of thatgrowth.
But what's interesting is whenyou look at this, especially
from the scientific perspectives.
I think that we're going to seea new economy form, and that new
economy could actually givepeople more meaning if the right
(27:46):
world leaders come into this,because the biggest problem
throughout history has alwaysbeen human greed and that
driving world orders andgovernments, and so that's what
we're going to have to be verycareful of.
We might have to go live in adifferent country just so we can
have morals and values again,like right.
I don't know where this willhead.
I think it's really interestingto see where the governments
(28:08):
will align on this.
But you know, if you look atthe reality of where we're
living today like the fiatdollars crashing, gallup's study
of a billion people at work andthey found that 86 of those
people are unhappy at work tothe point of detrimental
depression, anxiety and somepeople suicidal so when you look
(28:29):
at that, I think we have abroken world.
Will AI make it more broken, orwill it actually give us an
opportunity to free us up fromthe things that were mundane,
that brought us down, and allowus to actually step into more
meaning?
and if you look back at time,which you know, there's a book
called super abundance.
It does a great job of this.
(28:50):
Another book, abundance, bypeter dm.
And as you look back at time,there's been cyclical world
governments that point to erasof abundance where people
actually had no need to work forincome and so what they did was
, like people became musicians,harvest great warriors, and so
(29:10):
we've actually had examples inhistory we can refer to where
taking work and changing theeconomy was not necessarily a
bad thing.
So I mean, I mean I've beenstudying this a lot and I still
have more to study, so it's arabbit hole.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
I mean, yeah, it is a rabbit hole and it's such early
days and the whole thing.
And you know the tools likewriting content.
I mean it's so harmless and anawesome advancement, right to
help people get more done, bemore productive, be more
efficient.
But then there's stuff likeyou're like where is AI going to
(29:46):
go?
And you know, are the robotscoming?
For us?
It's a whole.
It's a whole nother level oflike AI and the future, which is
kind of crazy.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
So much in my conversations.
You know, it's like it'ssomething that I can't just
ignore anymore.
I used to be like, well, haha,you know, I just live in writing
content right, yeah I avoidthat topic.
But the reason I put together mychannel, julep and coy, where I
do talk about all these things,very of the craziest bits of
those two the reason I put thattogether I started reading and
(30:19):
researching myself.
I didn't really find a lot ofvoices out there that spoke on
this from both realist andoptimist perspective.
A really good book is theRational Optimist by Matt Ridley
.
It's like you can look atthings one way or you can look
at them another way.
It really is like how we lookat it.
So that's the whole reason Istarted talking about this.
(30:40):
I didn't find a voice I likedlistening to about this topic.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
And then you found did you find one now, though,
like, and all the books you'veread, what would you recommend?
Again, I'm thinking, like youknow, our audience is church
leaders.
So if you're a church leaderand you're trying to learn more
about AI and kind of where we'reheaded, what's, what's your
kind of top recommendation toread?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, I would say it's not necessarily a book on
AI, but it's a book on thegrowth of technology.
Abundance by Peter Diamandiswould be where I would start.
It'll shift your perspective on.
It'll take you completely outof, I think, what Hollywood has
done for a while, which is makeus fear and have that embedded
(31:25):
concern.
There's so many images thatwe've been presented with, so
that's a really refreshing readabout how we're actually living
in a world right now wherethere's so many images that
we've been presented with.
So that's a really refreshingread about how we're actually
living in a world right nowwhere there's more than we could
ever want or need at ourfingertips.
It's just have we actuallycultivated that yet?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Have we been stewards of it yet.
So that book's a great reminderof that.
And then another really goodone would be AI Superpowers by
Kai Fugli.
That's a great book.
It talks about the growth ofall this, where it's headed, and
then it's also very realist.
Like well, we're not going tohave Skynet, because what we're
looking at right now is theresult of 20 years of
(32:04):
breakthroughs.
It's not necessarily somethingthat's breaking or something
that creating a breakthroughevery single year.
It's not.
That's not what's going on here.
So that book is also a verygood yeah, those are good ones.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Okay, let's, let's wrap, because we could sit here
and talk about this forever.
But you are coming to uh, ourconference in october, modern
church leader and you're goingto be teaching a session.
What are you going to betalking about?
Give us, give us the uh, thehighlight.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
So I feel like everything we just teased here
is a really good lead-in to whatI'll be teaching at the
conference, which is how to 25Xyour content without hiring a
big marketing staff, withoutadding on all these paid writers
or strategists or SDOs, and howto actually just use AI to get
the job done.
(32:52):
So I'll take you through it.
The opportunity that stillexists.
You know we might hear a lotthat SDO is dead.
I'll share why that's not truehow to get found for specific
searches, pull in a bunch ofgood examples relevant to church
leaders and, yeah, hopefullyleave them with some really good
eye openers like whoa.
This is possible.
(33:12):
I can do this in this age of AI.
And then the actual path on howto take advantage of it all.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
And specifically, you know, to help their community
and hopefully attract morepeople into their church.
And, you know, learning aboutJesus and kind of growing in
their faith and connecting withother believers, like using
content to do that is somethingevery church should be, you know
, wanting to learn more about.
So I'm looking forward to thesession.
It's going to be fun.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Yeah, same here.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'm looking forward to meetingall of you too.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, in person, we got all this digital.
Final thing where should folksgo to learn more about you and
to learn more about Content atScale?
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, so Content at Scale.
You can go to contentatscaleaito see what we do.
There's a $15 seven-day trialthat gets you into the actual
software.
You can see it right around the.
You know I can't recommend itenough.
It's what I use for my blog,both at Cost of Hacker and to
grow the Cost of Scale websiteAnother tool I would use and
(34:22):
then to find my work, what I'mdoing, you can find it at Cost
of Scale.
So I'm driving a lot ofmarketing growth there.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Also Julie McC mccoy, amazon you can find my books
and, of course, love it.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Julia, it's been a pleasure having you on.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Thanks for coming today thanks for having me frank
.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
This is so much fun we'll, uh, we'll, see you in
october and, uh, hopefully abunch of you guys listening to
the podcast will join us too.
So, uh, modern church leader inoctober uh, you can go to the
website modern church leadercomto find out more and definitely
check out julia at content atscaleai, and we'll catch you
guys next week on anotherepisode of Modern Church Leader.
(35:00):
See ya.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.