Episode 6: Useful Content Marketing Tools

Want ideas on how marketing professionals are actually using AI in their daily life? Listen in to digital marketing expert, Will Francis and SEO consultant, Danny Richman chat about what's new in how AI is affecting marketing.

In this episode, Danny tells us about two simple but super-useful tools he built a few months back, in Google Sheets but powered by GPT-4. One is a Content Suggestions sheet to help you find new titles for content based on what's worked for you before. The other is an Alt tag generator for your site. 

You can also watch our earlier webinar with Will, Danny and Clark Boyd where they dig into what ChatGPT really means for marketers.

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Video Transcript

Will Francis  00:00

So you were on a webinar with us a month or so ago, you shared some Google sheets with scripts there were ChatGPT powered, basically, and they were great. Since then you've created a couple of new ones that sound really useful as well. I definitely want to get my hands on them. Tell me more about them.

Danny Richman  00:20

So I was doing a lot of these a little while ago. And I had to take a bit of a break, because I just had client projects that I had to work on. And so that took me away from these, but I'm back. So I've got a couple of new freebies that I can make available.

Danny Richman  00:36

The first one is, I did give it a name, I think it was called something like Content Opportunities. So essentially, this is a Google sheet that you download, you can get the link off my website. And you just make a copy onto your own Google Drive and make a copy of the sheet. And in the sheet, you've got Column A where you just put in a load of URLs of pages on your website, articles on your website that have performed well for you in the past. So if you're doing content marketing, and you've got a whole load of content in your blog, or whatever it is, just put in the URLs of those pages. In the second column, you put in how much traffic those pages have received.

Will Francis  01:28

So you just paste in that from your top content report in Google Analytics, basically,

Danny Richman  01:31

Google Analytics or Looker studio or something like that, wherever you've got this data. So URLs in a column, then how much traffic you've got. And then it's also good to add a third column with some kind of metric that tells the sheet or tells the code rather, how well that content performs. So something other than just traffic. So it might be, I like to use a metric called Page value, which is a Google Analytics metric that tells you the degree to which a particular page has contributed towards a conversion. But you could also put in straight conversions, you can put in newsletter, signups, you could put it all kinds of, clicks on the page, engagement time, and you know, anything that you would consider to be a successful measure of that piece of content. So you put that into the sheet, you select an option on the menu, it then sends all of that data over to GPT. And it performs an analysis of the content that's worked well for you, and creates a report that tells you which content has performed best, taking into account all of these different metrics. And why it's likely to have performed well. And it kind of breaks that down into different content groups. So it just creates like a report. There's then another option on the menu where you then send that analysis that it's generated back to GPT. And it creates a list of new content articles, titles and content topics, or things it believes you should be writing about - new ideas, not things that you've already done - based on the content that's worked well for you in the past.

Danny Richman  02:02

Great. Sounds really useful. I definitely going to be getting my hands on that. So does it create a new sheet and fill that in with this report you're talking about?

Danny Richman  03:27

A new sheet in the same workbook, yeah. So there's only two things you need to use this, which is one a copy of the sheet, which you can download from my website. And the only other thing you need is an API key from open AI. Which if you just register an account with open API and they even give you I think, $18 worth of free credits when you first sign up if you've never used it before.

Will Francis  03:53

Okay, great. That sounds amazing. What's the other one that you built?

Danny Richman  03:57

Well, the other one is a bit of a fix. Actually, this was a really popular one when I released it a few months back. But then one of the API's that I was using for it just stopped working. And so I then had to rebuild it. And I've just finally found the time to do that. So this is another Google Sheet. Again, you download the Google Sheet, the only thing you need to supply is a list of image URLs. That's literally it. You just kind of copy and paste in could be 1000s of them, image URLs, and then you press an option on the menu and it then generates alt tags for you automatically. So it grabs the actual image, it looks at what's in the image: so the objects and the background and the different features in the image. And also analyzes the colors that are found. And say for example, a short-sleeved men's shirt with blue stripes? And is that peachy? Keen? Yeah, it would just basically do a description of that shirt. And I also added a little option, where if there are certain words, you want to be included in that alt tag, you can put them in the box. So if you've got like a brand name, for example, you know, so if you want to have like John Lewis, or Versace or something like that, you know,

Will Francis  05:31

That's really cool. Right, okay, so this the GPT sprinkle of magic there is it's turning key words into a sentence like a descriptive sentence, which a good old tag should be. But what technology's reading what's in the image?

Danny Richman  05:48

There's three API's in use on that sheet. Okay. One of them is called in Marga, or a Marja, I'm not quite sure how you pronounce it. And that's the one that extracts the color information. So it will actually identify all of the foreground and background colors in an image that takes the color out of that. Then there is another API, which is called I believe, Regim. And that works out what's actually in the image. So it's taking all of the objects, so man, glasses, microphone, electric guitars, all the kind of the various components of the image. And then, but both of those API's, all they do is generate a list of keywords. And for an alt tag, you don't really want just a list of keywords, you want that in some kind of properly structured sentence. And that's where GPT comes into play, is we then send all of that list of keywords over to GPT. And then it comes back with a nicely structured alt tag: "image of a man wearing glasses with a stripy shirt with a microphone", you know, all that kind of thing. So yeah, if you've got a website with a lot of image content on there, and you need alt text on there, and you don't fancy the idea of having to do that manually. That is a huge time saver.

Will Francis  07:14

I'm going to use that actually, for a WordPress website I work on. Now, I will be able to work this out. But you may have already worked it out - what's the most efficient way to get those alt tags back onto the website on the right images?

Danny Richman  07:32

That is an excellent question. I mean, obviously, you could do it manually, just, you know, just kind of copying and pasting. But I think

Will Francis  07:43

I'm sure there's a database, because in the WordPress database...

Danny Richman  07:48

Well, there is. And, you know, I probably the way that I would do it is again, I mean, I hate to sound like I'm promoting different companies here. But you know, Zapier would be a really good way of automating that process, because you could link the Google sheet up to the URL of the image. And in Zapier, I know that you can access the WordPress API. And that should be a really easy way of doing it.

Will Francis  08:13

I'm gonna have a play with that. I'll let you know, I'll report back.

Danny Richman  08:16

You know, the thing is all this stuff like that, you know, like that, alt tag generator, it's only going to be a matter of time before that's built into any decent CMS. Why would it not be you know, they'll there'll be a WordPress plugin, and I'd be amazed if there isn't already a WordPress plug in that does this for you automatically. I mean, I haven't even looked.

Will Francis  08:38

Yeah, well, who knows - might have given someone an idea for their next WordPress plugin. Just get ChatGPT to write the code. Okay, cool.

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