Finally stop overthinking what to say and when. This free guide helps you write clear, consistent emails that sound like you — and build trust without burnout.
A podcast where you join me (Colie) as I chat about what it takes to grow a sustainable + profitable business.
CRM Guru, Family Filmmaker, and Host of the Business-First Creatives podcast. I help creative service providers grow and streamline their businesses using Dubsado, Honeybook, and Airtable.
If you’ve ever opened ChatGPT, typed “write my blog post,” and cringed at the results—you’re not alone. This episode dives into what it really takes to build an AI tool that doesn’t sound like a robot.
Join me as I welcome back my friend Annemie Tonken from This Can’t Be That Hard to talk about her deep dive into AI tools—yes, the same woman who once called blogging “too time-consuming” is now building AI-powered systems to help photographers blog better and faster. We go behind the scenes of her new blogging tool, how it’s changing the game inside her Consistency Club, and why “just being good at ChatGPT” isn’t enough.
Colie: Hello, hello, and welcome back to Business First Creatives. Y’all anime’s back and I feel like I, you know, I should have looked it up, but it’s been at least a year since you’ve been on here. Oh, you were on here for an anniversary episode, so it hasn’t been that long, but it’s been that long since you’ve been on here as the only guest, because Sabrina joined you for that one.
So welcome back to the podcast.
Annemie: Thank you ma’am. I am so excited to be back. It’s nice that we get to chat in the in the interim, but I feel like I’m excited to share our conversations ’cause they always inspire me.
Colie: And I will say if you listen to this podcast and you don’t listen to this, can’t be that hard. I was actually on Anime’s podcast a few months ago talking about my kind of foray into ai, if you will. I. I find it completely hilarious and ironic that she is here today to talk about how she has taken like a complete like dive into AI tools and she is also beginning to put them into some of her offers that we are gonna talk about today.
But I don’t feel like you were really using AI when I came on your podcast a couple months ago.
Annemie: No, I’m, I’m not lying when I say that. My conversations with you are inspirational. You have inspired some pretty major, uh, twists and turns in my. Career path, I guess when, uh, like as it pertains to education and, usually it’s because you are paying attention to what’s happening and what’s cool.
And I can barely keep up. And then I talk to you and I’m like, Ooh, maybe I should look into that. Which might be annoying and I, I recognize that. But, AI certainly was on my radar. When we talked, but you really inspired me to dig in because I had ideas about how I felt like it could help the courses that I teach and the, you know, the things that I did.
But I felt pretty intimidated by the whole thing. And yeah, as part of my inspiration for really diving in was talking to you and being like, okay. It’s put your big kid pants on time and let’s wade into these new waters. I think it’s intimidating when you’re brand new to something, when it seems really techie, when it seems whatever.
But, whether it’s something like this or changing an outlet in the wall or something, you know, I’m always like, look, if somebody else can do it, it can’t be that hard.
Colie: It can’t be that hard. I mean, isn’t that the whole name of your business? But also I just realized I was also responsible for you jumping into Airtable,
Annemie: Air table.
Colie: and then eventually you took Airtable and just redesigned half of the things that you gave people in simple sales. So what that means to me, that we should have more conversations more
Annemie: know,
Colie: I can inspire you constantly.
Annemie: Well, and I hope it cuts both ways. I hope I have ever done for you even half of what you’ve done for me.
Colie: So. You have, I mean, I feel like I’ve said this before, but guys, we are gonna stop going back and forth. We are gonna hop into AI because before we hit record, she was like, okay, where are we gonna take this conversation? So sometimes I have thoughts in my head that clearly I don’t actually express to my guest, and that’s okay.
She’s willing to just roll with the punches, but. Before we really get into how she is using AI inside of one of what has become her main offer, I would say, or at least it is taking a bigger piece of the pie now than it ever has before. But before we get into that, I wanna talk about a hot take that I’ve seen in a few threads now that I’m semi-active on social media.
Again, I don’t know that I really wanna put myself out there like that, but. Some of the things that I’ve been seeing around AI offers because there are AI offers everywhere, and I actually just wrote an email to my email list the other day that was like, I opened up my email and I think I have five different new offers where people are pitching, you know, AI assistance as part of their program.
So I do think that this is a trend that is not going anywhere. And while you and I are now, you know, diving into it with our offers, I do think that we’re gonna see more of these things as they go. One thing that I’ve had and that people have said on threads and other places is, oh, but I’m really good at chat GPT, and so I’m sure that I can just get the same result.
And so we’re gonna start this conversation there. Ami, did you just like open chat GPT and say, Hey, you know, I wanna build this, help me do this. Is that how you started?
Annemie: It’s probably how I started. Yeah. But I actually, I wrote, speaking of emails being written, I wrote an email yesterday talking about this new. Product, which we’ll get into in a little bit. But, the very first time that I logged into chat, GPT as I was sitting there thinking, what am I gonna use this for?
You know, I had, this was a couple years ago, and people were talking about like, oh, you know, you can use it to help you meal plan and you can use it to whatever. I can’t, I can’t remember what some of the early, examples were that were kind of floating around. But, but the first thing that I thought of when I opened it up was. Sweet. I can finally get back into blogging. Right? Blogging is so, it’s so high value when it comes to marketing, but it is time consuming. And to do it well is, back when I was blogging regularly, it would easily take me a solid day of work to sit down, like think of what I wanted to write, outline it, get it to, the point where I felt like I was not. Filling it with fluff and just trying to like up my word count and make it SEO friendly, whatever, and make it so that it was, it looked good, it sounded good, and it was actually valuable to people as well as my SEO kind of bottom line,
Right. So it was a huge lift and I ended up giving it up after a while.
’cause I was like, well, I’m not actively trying to get a whole bunch of new clients, so I’m gonna let this go because it takes so much time. So. Chat, PT comes along and I’m, that’s the very first use case that I was
like, sweet, I’m gonna have it. Help me write a blog post. And I remember, I remember, I’m sure I gave it some sort of topic or whatever, like, I am a family photographer and I want to write a blog post on X, Y, Z. And the garbage that came out of that was so profoundly bad that I was just like, well. Nevermind. I guess we’re not gonna use this for this. So yeah, I mean, I would say that I am also, quote unquote good at chat GPT in terms of I now know, to ask really specific questions to how my, I’ve learned how to engineer prompts better so that the output that I get is better.
I’ve certainly learned how to train it on my voice and all that sort of stuff, but. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. And as I progressed, I realized that in order to get consistently good output from an AI tool, there is so much work that goes in to the front end. And that’s if it’s just for you. If you are then trying to create a tool that services a lot of people. You have to think through to like the far corners of, you know, how could this go wrong? How could this go wrong? Testing, all that stuff. It’s very tedious and so I see this proliferation of tools out there and I have a very healthy dose of skepticism about the quality of those tools.
I mean, we’ve all played around with custom gpt and stuff that are
Colie: Garbage.
Annemie: garbage. Yeah, for lack of a better word.
Colie: So I feel like one thing that I wanna mention, and you kind of said this, but you know, I like to like put together frameworks if you will, or like a step by step. So I feel like first there’s the figuring out what you want to do with the tool. So in your case it was to write a blog, and then you’re kind of figuring out, well what are the, I.
Important things that you need to make sure are taken care of in the output. And for you, I hear you saying that you know, it needed to be in your own voice. It needed to be something that was actually going to be rankable for your SEO. And then also that it didn’t sound like a lot of fluff that was actually giving the person on the other end, the person that was reading it something meaningful after they had consumed the information.
But in order to get those three things, not only are you engineering a really good prompt, because that’s of course where we’re all starting, and then you’re doing, you know. Hours and hours of testing, seeing what it’s giving you, refining your instructions. I mean, the amount of time that I spend refining instructions, I wish that on one of these tools I had just like started a timer because I’m sure that it would’ve been like at least a solid week of eight hour days to see how many times I went back and forth.
But I think what a lot of people don’t understand. Is the third part, and that’s the part that you and I really focus on and that people leave out of the conversation when it comes to these custom gpt, and that’s your knowledge files. Like we’re not just telling it what to do and letting chat GPT take care of it.
When it comes to systems and like creating workflows, since that’s what I discussed on your podcast last time, I have a lot of knowledge of how these things should go, what the output should be, intimate knowledge of HoneyBook and Dubsado, which are the two tools that I use, and I take all of that. In addition to like feeding it examples of like the hundreds at this point of clients and students that I’ve helped refine their workflows, and I’m kind of packaging it all up in these knowledge files and that’s what actually runs my AI tool.
Now when it comes to blogging, I. You’ve got a different set of knowledge tools and you actually took it to a whole different level than I’m doing, and I mean, I was really impressed, not only when you showed me the tool on a different call, but when I talked to one of the people that you know, helped you ideate and go through it and all that, like I was just so impressed by everything that you did.
But I think that at the end of the day. If you’re using AI tools and they are really built with intention and they’re really using like all of the strategy and information that you have in your brain, it is a very different thing than just logging into chat GPT and saying, Hey, I’m a family photographer.
I wanna write a blog post about this last session. Here’s my thoughts. Please write me a blog post.
Annemie: Right. And that’s, I think intention is the word that needs to be underlined in red ink. The like temptation with chat GPT and AI tools in general is to look at that and be like, great, I don’t have to do the work. The truth of the matter is, in some ways I am grateful that I have been in business as long as I have, that I have as much content that I created from scratch as I do, because I totally get that temptation.
Like, I don’t, I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to think through my own answers to X, Y, z if someone else, can do the work for me. It is, it’s a, the lessons that we learn over time as we. Are in business, are, we have opinions, we have knowledge, we have experience that we need to share. It’s way too easy to be like, here are some photos that I wanna share in a blog post. Here’s the general topic, take it away, chat. And then you end up with gar. I mean, that, that is how you get, you know, garbage in, garbage out. And the way that we put this blog tool together. And you mentioned you had talked to Kinzie and I had worked with, so I knew enough to know that I didn’t know enough to build this tool to the level that I wanted to do that.
And so I reached out to Kinzie Soderberg, and said, you know, teach me your ways. Help me, help me build this thing. And what we were able to do together was I, I’m just. Pleased as punch with it. I feel like it is one of those, and one of the things that I really like about her is the, is her focus on human
centered, human, led ai where you really are taking the reins and saying, this is what we are building.
And so the tool that we’ve built requires that the photographers who are using it first. Sort of dialogue with the tool to say, this is, these are my thoughts, these are my feelings, these are my experiences, these are my recommendations, whatever the, whatever the case may be, depending on the, the topic. And then it’s really just the formatting, the writing, the SEO tools, all that sort of stuff. And the thing is that, is the, that is the time consuming part. So I feel like what we’ve done is, uh, is sort of walk that line and that that’s the hardest part right now. Maybe it’ll get better in the future to where it really does do the work for you, but for now, I don’t feel like that’s where it is.
Colie: And I mean, I feel like I’m now calling one of my newest offers, AI powered, which is what I would call what you’re doing as well. But I just find it so fascinating that you started with simple sales. You kind of went into revenue on repeat to help people, you know, fill their calendar or kind of space out their money as they go.
And then you did like the marketing, um, glow up. I mean, you’ve, you’ve kind of been like leading people here to where now you really do have a suite of offers that helps a photographer basically run. The entire backend of their business. Now you are missing systems and that’s why we’re besties ’cause you can’t ever do that to
Annemie: I’m not interested in
Colie: see, not even a little, but I do feel that other than the systems to run the booking, you have really created like this offer suite that has all of it.
So now let’s talk about Consistency Club. ’cause I feel like you and Dana have both been on this podcast. And while we’ve mentioned Consistency Club, I don’t ever know that I’ve like given you a spotlight and been like. Tell me about Consistency Club. So this is your opportunity, AMI. Tell me about Consistency Club.
Annemie: Well, I will give credit where credit is due. Dana was the first person who really suggested, consistency club. She didn’t give it that name. I gave it the name. I will take credit for that. But she, so Dana, if you, if you’re listening and you don’t know, um, me or her, so Dana is my marketing director at this.
Can’t be that hard. She has never been a professional photographer, but she has now worked with me for, I guess we’re over four years now. And so she knows this business, this industry, like the back of her hand. But she comes from a marketing background and she is great at what she does. And so she was always, she, I first hired her to do my social media and it grew from there.
She was doing like 10 hours a week. Now she’s basically full-time. And at one point a couple of years ago, she and I were having a conversation, and it was one of those like planning conversations for the following year. She was like, I really, you know, I just, I look at photographers and what they are saying that they want and need and you know, they’re always talking about how they wish that they could hire me. ’cause she is the one in our social media, like, chatting with people most of the time. And, um, and she was saying, I, you know, they, they say they wish they could hire me and it would be so prohibitively expensive for a photographer to hire a marketing. Director or marketing strategist, it’s one thing to hire somebody who’s gonna go in and like post to Pinterest and Instagram for you, but it’s a totally different thing for somebody to learn your business and your views and all that and have the ability to like. Pick out the photos and write the captions in a way that really mimics you. So she’s talking about this and she was like, maybe what we can do is put our brains together, you with your photography knowledge and me with my marketing knowledge and, and create marketing materials that are sort of templated that come out every month.
So January of 23, we launched the Consistency Club, which basically is just like, there are parts of your marketing. That are, it’s not, I don’t wanna say you just have to check a box, but you kind of just have to show up, right? You have to show up on social, you have to show up in email and um, and it’s like. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel completely. I would extend that to blogging, but unfortunately for all this time, blogging is not the sort of thing that you can create a template for, right? You can’t say, here’s a template. Now hundreds of photographers go write more or less the same blog post and drop it this month because Google would have a panic attack. So we left blogging outta the mix. More on that later, but anyway, so for two and a half years we have been providing email templates and social media templates. Plus we have like a little private marketing podcast that we drop each month. And it’s really simple. It’s a low cost monthly subscription and you just get a lot of the heavy lifting for your, your marketing content done for you. Does that do a good job explaining what
Colie: does. And so I wanna ask you, because I know that you’re just now doing ai, was there any AI that was introduced in those two portions? So email and social media. Has there been any kind of AI prompting that you’ve given them? Or have you seen your members. Start saying that they were taking the materials that you were giving them and using AI to get across the finish line.
Annemie: Yeah. Uh, well, I haven’t gotten a lot of people saying that. I have had some people say, oh, I turned your email from this month, your email template into a blog post.
Or I, you know, I, I then took my email, fed it into chat GPT and bulked up my social media. So I took your social media prompts, but I also created my own in chat,
GPT, which is great.
I mean, like, that’s absolutely a. An important and smart way to repurpose your content. And I think that when you’re feeding chat GPT something that is really solid to begin with, obviously you’re gonna start to get better results.
Colie: Yes. I mean, that’s the biggest part that I talk about because I don’t really, I have no desire to be a marketing person, but I do have my content hub for Airtable. And the one thing that I talk about over and over again is that whatever your long form piece of content is, I. As long as that is you, and it’s really your ideas and your voice.
There is no limit to what you can like rinse and repeat from that one piece of content. And so now we’re kind of getting into the blogging because for a lot of people that’s a blog for me. It’s not a blog, it’s my podcast episode. I. In the last, I would say year and a half, when I get an idea, I don’t think, oh, that would make a great blog post, I think.
Okay, let me go sit on my computer, record a podcast episode, and then I will repurpose it. And in full transparency, I don’t write my own blog post anymore. It’s either AI written or care on my blog. My blog writer writes it. I mean, I have not written an actual blog post except for like a handful in the last year and a half I would say.
But you are now coming into this. Hey. We are gonna start working on blogging as an upgrade to consistency club, and that is going to give your members like one solid piece of long form content that they are going to be able to repurpose more than perhaps they were able to do with just a single email or even two emails in the past.
Annemie: Yeah, for sure. So, the concept here is basically that for most photographers, blogging is the best. Long form content, right?
Like a photographer could certainly have a podcast. I am a photographer and I have a podcast, but I’m not, it, it’s not a visual medium,
right? It’s an auditory medium. And like we as photographers are really trying to drive, eyeballs to our website. And a blog post lives on your website, and you can pepper it with. Beautiful photos that are al tagged and, and then, but you’ve, you’re also telling Google like, Hey, I am an active photographer. I’ve got experience in these fields. I live in this place. Like I’m legit send people my way when they’re searching for photographers.
It is one of those where it’s like, it’s not new, it’s not bright and shiny, but it is absolutely a workhorse in terms of marketing. Forever. It has been a very difficult thing to do well without spending gobs and gobs of time like we were talking about earlier. And and a lot of photographers who have blogs have been told like, you should be blogging.
And so what do they do? They do the easy thing or the easiest thing, which is to take a bunch of their photos, string ’em together. Maybe they’re, maybe they’re alt text. You know, they’re creating alt text for those images and they’re writing like a one paragraph intro at the beginning, but they then are just letting the images do the work for them. That’s fine. When it comes to someone browsing your website and wanting to kind of deep dive. A particular session that you did or like a location that you are featuring in your blog. It doesn’t really do much for you when it comes to SEO. So it’s, you’re doing the, you’re doing some of the work, and I get why you would cut that corner, but most photographers either don’t feel like they can write or they don’t want to spend a ton of time writing.
And it is, I mean, it’s, it’s. Content creation content is a time consuming thing if you wanna do it well. So this opportunity to marry what I know about. SEO and the structure of a high quality blog and all that sort of stuff with the knowledge that I know is in the heads of these photographers.
Like we all have these stories that we can share to illustrate a point. And we have opinions that are born of experience that we have. We have recommendations that we can share with people that are valuable. These are answers to questions that people are legitimately searching for. Getting that put all together in a way that’s actually gonna get found on Google.
And that’s going to be interesting to the person who lands on that blog, post and you know, is going to actually pull them in. That’s the part that’s hard and that’s what we set out to fix with this tool.
Colie: Because the writing is the last part. I mean, if you sit down and you’re trying to write and you haven’t done all of the things that come before, like are the key words that you’re trying to rank this blog post, does it even have any volume? Is anybody searching for this? And then you know, you have the stories.
And yes, we have a lot of stories. And yes, I tell my people all the time. You know, make a voice note, get the story out. I’ve told so many photographers after a session, when you get in your car, turn on your voice note and just talk about what you liked about the session. Anything interesting that happened, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I mean, this is usually advice that I’m giving people when they’re asking someone else to write their blog posts, but it’s also very useful for yourself. But so again. You’ve got all of the SEO parts, you’ve got the storytelling, and then you’ve got the actual writing. But I think that when people are considering an AI tool, they’re really thinking of, oh, but it’s gonna do the writing for me.
And yes, it will. But the first two parts that we talked about are what give your output like power. It’s what actually makes it like a useful tool inside of your marketing ecosystem, if you will.
Annemie: And here’s the. the. downside to the proliferation and accessibility of AI now, and that is that the bar is going up at an exponential pace, right? Like everybody has access to chat, GPT. So if you are just looking to create volume on a blog, you’re. You may as well not be blogging at all. I
think that Google’s algorithms are getting better by the minute at identifying AI generated content. And it’s not that they’re not taking that, I mean, obviously if there’s something on your website that’s being refreshed or being added or whatever, then there’s activity on there and that’s, that is a good thing. It’s not zero value,
but it’s pretty low val value compared to once upon a time when if you were writing. A thousand word or 2000 word blog post every week, even if it wasn’t great. Just that amount of work was being recognized.
Now we are looking at, like, anybody can type a garbage prompt into Chachi PT and get garbage output and then get that going. So it really does come down to quality something that is passing muster if you put it into an AI checker. And that. Again, really, really gives value. And this is the thing that I will come back to. Either this is the hill that I will die on everything when it comes to marketing. Everything when it comes to, You can cut corners in a bunch of different places, but ultimately. You need to put everything that you do through the lens of like, am I creating value here?
Am I doing something that I’m proud of? Because if you’re not, it might help you in the very short term, but in the long term it’s, it’s like a ball and chain, you know? I mean,
it kind of drags you down.
Colie: No, and I mean we, I feel like we recognize this a lot with social media because back in the day, the thing was, hey, post to Instagram five, six times a day. Right? And slowly, I think that we are all starting to understand that quality is much better than volume. I don’t see a lot of people posting to their feed 5, 6, 7 times a day anymore unless you’re like a content media manager.
Annemie: Right,
Colie: But I don’t see photographers doing it, but. I think that we’re now kind of honing in on an era where we are going to really think about the quality of what we’re putting out there, instead of just doing it to check off a box or trying to overwhelm the algorithm, whether that’s a social media algorithm or you’re trying to like trick Google, SEO, um, into thinking that you are a, that you’re a knowledge expert just because of the amount of content that you are pumping out.
So I wanna kind of like. I wanna get really specific now, because the tool that you have created for Consistency Club, that’s going to be like an upgrade you do have where you know they have to give it some information. Then you guys are gonna be putting monthly blog posts that they can choose from. But then I wanna talk about what happens after your tool gives them the blog post.
Because this is the part that I keep harping on, and I think it’s so amazing that you are still keeping it in, you know, in the back of your mind or in the front of your mind, I guess, when they get the blog post. So let’s say I’m a member of Consistency Club. I’ve chosen my blog post. I’ve given it a story.
It’s gone through the iteration of your tool, and now it has sent me my blog post. Can I take that blog post and directly put it on my blog?
Annemie: You might be able to.
Colie: Okay.
Annemie: So I’m just gonna back up and give you a little more context. So the, when someone first. Access is this tool. The first thing that they do is fill out a very long, detailed questionnaire. And this is a one-time deal. You don’t have to do it more than once, but it, we do, like, according to our beta testers, it’s taking about 60 to 90 minutes to do well, where you’re answering questions about your brand voice and you’re uploading, writing samples, and you’re talking about your ideal customers and where you’re based and all these different things, right? So you fill that out, then you get to the point where you get to choose like, oh, this is the blog topic that I’m gonna write about this month. And what we’re doing is we are actually, we have enlisted AI’s help with this. AI is going each month and scraping the web for trending topics in each niche.
And I think we’ve identified 13 different niches. So each niche gets four options each month. You’ll see all the options. So if you see an option in a different niche that you’re like, oh, this pertains to my business and I could do this, you can use it. But, like, if you’re a newborn photographer, the first ones you’d wanna check out are probably the newborn photography specific topics. So then you choose a topic. You can also choose to like, choose your own adventure on the topics you can put in your own topic. But then you answer three questions about that topic. That typically come down to share a story that you have about this, share your recommendations about this. So it’s establishing this as your individual unique blog post. Then, the system takes it in, compiles all of that, puts it with your brand profile and creates a blog post that meets certain specific
parameters that we have. Put together in terms of length. It gives you SEO specific stuff at the end. And it is written with like your H one, H two, H three tags and all that sort of stuff. So you get that, and as I said, according to our beta testers, there, some of the content is coming out at a level where they’re like, I think I changed one sentence, and then I just put it in my blog. But, chances are you’re going to want to do some additional work after the fact, whether it is editing for length, if you might, you know, there might be a section that you wanna bulk up a little bit. You might wanna edit for content a little bit. Like you have a thought, like, oh, there’s another story that I’d like to add in here. You might wanna change the wording, obviously chat. GPT doesn’t always get it a hundred percent spot on, even if it’s well-trained. And then, and then the last thing is that even if you don’t need any content changes, you’re probably going to want to add photos to this blog and you’re going to, it gives you some, recommended photos based on the content. You’re gonna have specific photos, you can, what we’ve done is we’ve created a custom GPT that everybody gets access to after the fact that is sort of the finalization, like finalization. Did I just make that up? Where you finalize your blog so you can edit for content, but you can also screenshot the images that you want to include and it’ll give you alt text for those
images.
Colie: I mean, it’s brilliant and the reason that I say this is because I feel like now we’re getting closer and closer to where. If you’ve done a really good job of, you know, doing your brand voice and you worked with Kenzie and this is what she talks about all the time, and you know, like you said, that questionnaire takes 60 to 90 minutes to like nail your brand voice.
But even if you’ve done a really good job, I. Nailing that brand voice when it comes out. Maybe out of, you know, I’ll go back and talk about like a regular custom GPT. I am a big fan of making sure that you have allotted the time to go back and forth with it. ’cause I think in the beginning what we were getting was such trash, nobody, oh no, there’s no saving this.
Like, I should have just taken the time and written it myself. And it would’ve been, you know, much better than what came out. But like now. I have a couple custom gpt that I’ve made for myself, and when it spits it out, it does give me those moments of, oh, I mean, I really should have said this instead of this.
And so then I go back and forth with it. And to me, the value of getting a tool from someone like you or me or someone else who’s put in the same amount of effort to create these tools is that we’re giving them a really, I would say, first draft, but maybe yours is like, you know, just shy of a final draft, but we’re giving it to them and.
Our intention is not just copy and paste it and don’t consider what we’ve given you. I think it’s that, you know, you need to read it over. You need to make sure that it feels good for you, but like 10 minutes, 10 minutes of adjustments versus the whole day that you said it was taking you to write a blog post before.
Annemie: and the thing is, we are not professional bloggers.
Like this is the, that you want the content to be good. You want it to be reflective of your brand. You want it to be something that you stand behind and that you know what it says and you know, all that sort of thing. At the same time, you don’t, that’s not your job.
Your job in this particular case is to get eyeballs on your website so that people hire you to take photos for
them. So, you know, for instance, podcasting. When I first started podcasting Blow these many five years ago, I remember write, first of all, writing complete scripts for. My early, you know, podcast episodes and then reading them, and trying to make, you know, it’s like I would hem and haw over every line and is it perfect and whatever.
And of course it wasn’t perfect, but it took me a lot more time. It’s still not perfect, but nowadays it’s like, okay, here are the thoughts that I want to share. I’m going to share them in my actual authentic voice, and I’m not gonna worry too much if I. Stumble a little bit, or if I ramble a little bit, because the truth is, I, if I’m giving valuable content, people will hopefully forgive me for that.
And if they
don’t, that is what it is. But my job isn’t, I’m not a professional podcaster. I am an educator and I have good information. So that’s what I’m trying to convey. And I would say the same thing, like hopefully what we’re doing is creating a tool that makes it as quick as possible for you to. Check this box so that you can, again, continue to grow your audience and bring people into your ecosphere so that they see your photos and they’re like, I wanna hire you.
Colie: Yeah. I’m gonna say one more thing. I recently joined someone’s program, I don’t know if you know this, it’s called Launch Your Own Way so that I can start like doing the full selling, marketing, all this stuff. But one thing that I’ve learned recently, I. Is that I really need to work on my positioning and my messaging.
And the reason that I’m saying this is ’cause it’s so relevant to what we’re talking about right now. I recently shared my workflow FastPass, which is actually the new iteration of the offer that I came on your podcast to talk about before. So now it’s not you’re gonna do. You know, the creation of the workflows with the AI tool’s that I’m doing it for you so that I have reviewed it and you have it in your hands, and you know that it was reviewed by me and that it’s absolutely going to work.
But the one thing that Kelsey keeps saying over and over again is, yeah, but you need to make sure that you’re hammering two things. That it’s fast and that it’s custom. And I feel like for you, it’s the exact same thing. Like we’re, we’re talking about all these pieces and you know how we’re gonna make your life easier.
But at the end of the day, it comes down to two things. We are helping you do it so much faster than any human could possibly do it, and it is customized for you so that when you get the output. You aren’t spending, you know, a day refining, it’s like five, 10 minutes and then it’s whatever time it takes you to upload it to your blog.
You know, actually set the whatever you have to do behind the scenes, and then you hit publish like an entire day down to maybe one hour. And then you can actually put more content out there, which is going to help Google see you as an expert and it’s going to bring more eyeballs to your website.
Annemie: Right. And am I custom writing this for you? No. If I were, it would cost a lot more than, you know. Like it does, uh, for sure. And I, that that’s the beauty of leveraging these tools. And I, and I wanna kind of come back ’cause I think that there are people who struggle with, especially as artists who struggle with the like. Are we replacing ourselves? You know, there are copywriters out there for whom, writing is their income and their livelihood. And you know, here we are, we’re using these bots to, to replace them. And my feeling is they are professional writers. I want them to focus on the things that are, I think in general, obviously there’s a messy middle that we’re just entering now and a lot of people will find themselves out of a job in the way that they define their job in the past and all that sort of thing. It is the direction that things are moving and as small business owners, I think that as long as we are focused on not. Staying in our lane in that. Again, I am a photographer, I am not a blogger. And so using AI to help me blog is moving my business forward and it’s allowing me to do more of what I want and sort of need to be doing out in the world. For a professional copywriter. Yeah, they’re probably going to see some loss of income for things like. I just want you to write my, my blogs, but at the same time, maybe that frees them up to write a novel or, do something that is a little bit less commercial transaction, driven and is actually adding value and meaning into the world. Mm-hmm.
Colie: So, I mean, I know a lot of copywriters and some of them are starting to embrace, ai, I finally had Courtney Fanning on my podcast after hearing her on yours years ago. And. I don’t know that I told you this, but when we stopped recording, I literally told her, okay, I am gonna take your four buyer profiles and go build a custom GPT.
I’m gonna send it to you later today. I mean, and I didn’t have very much knowledge. I just had the results from my quiz, some things that she had given me, and I did it and I sent it to her and she was like, okay, like I think that I want to explore this further because like this is amazing. Like it was giving suggestions and all this, but.
Does that replace her? I think not because would I have known what the four brought buyer profiles were without her? Absolutely not. Like I needed Courtney to have like the framework and the knowledge and things like that. So I mean, I don’t think that it’s going to replace humans. In fact, every time I do an AI episode, I end it with, and don’t you guys worry, my human teammates are completely safe because I am not doing the work that it takes to put these things into the world after my ai.
Assistants have created it. I am not scheduling my podcast episodes. I am not putting my blogs on my blog. I mean, there’s a lot of other things that my human teammates are doing, and if I can get this content written in a different way, it doesn’t mean that I don’t need them. It means that I can ask them to do different things that will help me get a better ROI of my business because what I’m getting from my AI assistance for that particular like purpose.
Can be crossed off or the time that it takes can be shortened. So yeah, I mean AI is here to stay and we are getting better and better at using it as a tool, but I definitely don’t think that it’s going to like come for everybody’s jobs, even if you’re a copywriter, because I don’t know that I wanna sales page written by chat, GPT, no matter how many frameworks I put in there that I don’t still have reviewed by someone with more copywriting knowledge than me.
Annemie: Yeah, absolutely. My hope is that it does free us up to do the things that we are sort of best at and that really, are additive in the world and not just sort of recycling what’s out there, which is what AI does really well.
Colie: Yeah, but if you give it more of you, it doesn’t seem like it’s just giving you everybody else’s garbage. It’s giving you stuff that’s unique to
Annemie: Yeah. Yeah.
so this is dropping before our official launch,
right? Of the tool.
Colie: when you are listening to this, this is the week before her tool drops.
Annemie: Okay. So on August 6th, we are actually like. Inviting everybody to come and watch this happen, kind of in live, in real time, and ask questions and play with the tool and see what it can do. That’s happening August 6th. Everybody’s invited. It’s free. So you can go to this. Can’t be that hard. Dot com slash summit. To grab a seat there. If you have missed that, if you’re listening to this after August 6th, then just go to this can’t be the hard.com/club because it is inside the Consistency Club is where this tool lives.
Colie: Okay. And I had a, I had a, a solo episode planned for you guys, but we covered it all today, so I’m gonna think of something else
Annemie: Ugh,
Colie: to air after
Annemie: it. I’m sorry.
Colie: I mean, I do like having these conversations with other people because when I talk about like, Hey, I do a much better job than chat GPT, it does sound, you know, it sounds, it sounds different when it’s just me saying it.
Annemie: It just because it sounds different doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Colie: That’s true.
Annemie: Yeah.
Colie: All right guys. I hope that in this episode that you have gotten like a really good behind the scenes of what it looks like when people like Anami and I are building AI tools in our business that help you do the things that we are experts in faster and with, you know, a better first draft, if you will.
And so, once again, I really do want all of you to go and check out Anime’s Consistency Club. It is, this can’t be that hard.com/club.
That’s it for this episode. See you next time.

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Meet the Guest
Annemie Tonken is a family photographer + business strategist + podcast host based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She created This Can’t Be That Hard to help photographers get their businesses organized into a well-oiled machine. Her goal? Helping you put the BUSINESS side of your business on the back burner so you can (re)focus your energy on what you love… and why you started this business in the first place.
Find It Quickly
00:56 – Diving into AI Tools
04:34 – The Challenges and Potential of AI in Blogging
14:04 – Introducing Consistency Club
22:41 – Voice Notes for Storytelling
23:08 -The Role of AI in Content Creation
23:35 – Quality Over Quantity in Blogging
26:17 – Introducing Consistency Club’s New Tool
27:04 – Customizing and Finalizing Your Blog Post
35:36 – The Future of AI and Human Collaboration
Resources Mentioned
How Automated Processes Can Help Strengthen Client Relationships with Annemie Tonken
Expanding into Education with Annemie Tonken
The 4 Buyer Types and How to Sell to Each One with Courtney Fanning
Building Your Content Strategy with the Marketing Jar with Dayna Schaaf
Connect with Annemie
Annemie’s Podcast
Annemie’s Website
Annemie’s Instagram

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