Sean Ridley, SEO expert: using ChatGPT & Midjourney for the #hustleGPT challenge

Welcome to the Prompt Engineering Podcast, where we teach you the art of writing effective prompts for AI systems like Chat, G P T, mid Journey Dolly, and More. Each week we explore prompting techniques, interviews with experts and newbies, and tips on selling your prompts. Here's your host, Greg Schwartz.

Welcome to the Prompt Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Schwartz. So we have a guest with us today. Go ahead and introduce yourself.

Hi everyone. My name is Sean Ridley. I'm the founder of M S P SEO Synergy. I am a SEO expert at heart, and recently I've gotten more involved into AI marketing and trying to learn how those intersections work, not only with automations, but also with content, and ideally with trying to run better business.

Awesome. So here at the Prompt Engineering Podcast, what we're about is helping you learn how to do better prompt engineering, how to sell it, if that's relevant to you, or to use it in your day job. And that's what we're gonna be doing today. So first off, how did you start? learning about prompt engineering?

I learned about prompt engineering through Twitter. Just following the news with chat G p T, just trying to understand how it's been evolving over these last few weeks. And then, I I've met you through the Discord for Hustle, G P T, so I followed that challenge.

I was actually one of the first official 50 businesses that had started from it. And my goal was to, instead of try to start a new side hustle, but instead take my freelancing from my S C O skills and try to turn them into a full-time agency. So a lot of my prompts, I've been focused. Trying to build the business plan, trying to develop the website copy, and then also, just trying to figure out, Hey, how should I speak about this business on Twitter?

How should I even, talk to people in general because shy person. So you know it's been a great experience trying to just get that energy and confidence from a.

I totally relate to that for me. Marketing copy and really just like copy in general that is not for an interface is really challenging. So I know exactly what you mean in terms of asking the robot to give me some advice and really help me figure out the right way to talk and write about all of this.

So that makes sense. So I'm curious, you listed a few you're doing for this. Are you also doing any other prompts, 

yeah, for fun I'm always trying out new things with mid journey. Just being able to just see how people are able to put in prompts that generate such realistic results, as well as people that are able to put in just abstract ideas and concepts. Just gimme something whimsical, gimme something dreamy, gimme something that I've never seen before.

And then being able to imagine such things from that. As a side I'm always fascinated from that and playing with it. As a, as part of my day job, as I mentioned before, I'm using it for almost everything now. Just being able to, like I said earlier, put together the copy for the website, the meta descriptions for it, being able to have posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

It's been honestly, it's been ridiculous, the things that I've been able to do. I had no idea that it'd be this powerful with ChatGPT-4.

That's awesome. I'm feeling similar. So it sounds for work. You're doing mostly text generation prompts. And then for fun it's more of the image prompting. Is that right?

Yes. And then even for our website, I was able to use Mid Journey recently just to get some ideas for different layouts for the website itself. And so I was able just to type in, 

design a professional marketing agency website style is modern and clean, simple white background with purple accents, version five. 

And so mostly for that prompt it was able to give me, a header of the website. It doesn't necessarily, gimme anything you know, underneath or what the different sections should look like or what the contact forms should look like or anything else. But it, is able to provide you a big, vibrant header and understand that's important.

It understands that you need to have a button for a call to action. It understands that you'll probably have a navigation bar at the top of your website, and so all of that's able to be put together, but not necessarily all the rest of the, meat and potatoes of it yet.

That totally makes sense.

Once you're able to get an idea, you're able to put the rest of it together. That at least allows you some branding and then, ideally you can add whatever personalized touch you need for it. 

The original prompt that I had was a website for an SEO agency, cartoon style white background, purple highlights, version 4.

So again, nothing too complicated and it's able to, immediately give me four different versions of it. And I do have those on Twitter. 

Interesting. Okay. That's good to hear because I actually I'm building a tool, which I'll probably cover at some point, but, I was trying to use Mid Journey to get some, themes and mockups and stuff and was really not succeeding. So I'd be curious tell us a little more about what were the prompts you were using for that?

Do you remember the specific language?

For the website, honestly I, I tried to keep it very simple. I watched a YouTube video from, I think an agency, I think it's Pay Digital. They made a smaller Discord group for Mid Journey because if just have, if you're on the regular mid journey discord, it's overwhelming. There's something people.

Posting prompts, constantly getting results constantly. So they made their own separate smaller discord and it's mostly focused on web design, it's focused on, different logos and things of that nature. Just general, just images and designs, more than anything else. And so I was able to see how other people were putting together website prompts, and then I was just mostly able to copy.

That's awesome. Yeah. We will put a link to that in the description. So that you, the listener can actually go watch it and frankly, I will probably be going to watch it cuz I'm still looking for some ideas for my website design.

Definitely and that Discord specifically has a ton of them. It's just people who are professionals that are just trying out new things. And I think that's probably what's been most interesting about this entire process is nobody is an expert. Nobody knows what to do yet. We're all just learning from each other.

I think. One of the other mid journey prompts with Viral was somebody who did. The father with the daughter, they're reading a book. I've been trying to replicate that as best as I can recently, just trying to put in, different inputs, different, descriptors so that I can just see what comes out of it.

And I think just the learning through the socialization through the community has been probably the most over, informative, overwhelming, and probably the most powerful thing that's come out of all of.

Yes, informative and overwhelming is exactly how I would describe all of this, so that totally resonates with me.

Yes. I feel like every day I'm learning different ways to put things together, different ways that, people are using the technology. You're talking about different extensions and things and so I'm just excited to almost sit in the sidelines and just see some of the things that pop out over the next few weeks.

Definitely. So with that process of trying to, get mid journey to give you some of these things you're looking for, can you tell us a little bit about how you've been iterating on the prompt. What you've been doing of oh, that didn't work. Let me try going this way or however you're doing it.

Yeah, I with Mid Journey it gives you about four different options for anything that you have. And so from that I was able to pick a one specific version of the mockup that it gave me. I was able to tell it I don't want it to be as cartoony.

Let's get, maybe have something that's more high resolution. That's something that's maybe more professional. And so I was able to just try. I honestly, I made a complete 180 from my original prompt, but I wanted to be able to see, okay, how fast can I come up with completely different designs that are still based within the same ideas of the first one?

And it was amazing what I was able to.

That's awesome. 

Instead of a cartoonish version, I would like something more professional. I like the color designs, but I would like for it to be something that's more realistic and something that would work for a more corporate image or a more corporate tone, and it's able to provide that very similar to, how it works with chat, G P T.

You're able to iterate based off of your design. You can say imagine prompt, and then you can say the things that you had before and then just change them a bit. That's what I've been able to do the best for myself.

Awesome. Okay. 

Being able to be a little bit more specific, a little bit more detailed, and the things that I'm looking for, just the overall design, color tone, branding, all of those things.

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. In terms of the text generation, what kind of ways have you been iterating on the props? Have you been using like role playing or purpose, context constraint? 

I as I mentioned before, I started a lot of this because of the hustle G P T challenge, and so I think that would probably, fall under a role playing. Framework for putting together the prompts. You have the, the AI position as the entrepreneur. Its goal is to try to make as much money as possible.

Drew a human liaison who is, acting within the physical world. And again, I mentioned that I'd already given it a knee. SHI had already said that I had certain background and experience, and so I asked it to develop a business plan or an outline for a business based off of those.

Gotcha. So role playing is a big one. 

Yes. Yes. And then, I recently saw another video where, they kept it pretty simple. They were able to say, who, what, where, when, why, . And so from that, I try not to overthink the.

Way that I'm addressing the prompt. I'm always trying to think about the output, and I want something that's going to be natural for me. I want something that's gonna come off that's going to be human sounding, at least to some degree. So persuasive still, marketing involved, and so from that I'm not necessarily thinking about what the, framework for the prompts are, but rather what results I'm trying to get outta.

Nice. Are there any prompts that you can think of that you've just gotten stuck on? You've iterated and it just didn't go where you wanted, 

honestly, a lot of different prompts I've tried out and just didn't get the results that I wanted. As I mentioned before, I've, tried it for different blog posts and I've found, unfortunately that, because it's not connected to the internet because it's only gonna give you, generalized information, it's not gonna necessarily gonna gimme the things that I think are going to convert into a full-time business.

And so I've had to go. Added them to myself, add in my own research, double check whatever research that it does try to give me, because I have tried, I need a more professional tone. I need a more academic or corporate tone. I need more research with these, within this article. And it still doesn't necessarily gimme the things that I need.

It may gimme a statistic that may be relevant, but not necessarily from the right source that I'm looking for. Or it may, just as I mentioned before, just give me a generalized tip that you can, find almost anywhere. And and you. It. Trying to get things that are more unique, more, brand personalized.

I don't necessarily get that, and so I have to be able to add that in myself, and I think that's even slowly, as a problem going away because I know that people are using machine learning with their prompts so that they can teach it, Hey, this is what our brand tone is, this is how that, how we expect to respond to certain questions.

This is how, we want to tweet out certain things so they're able to. Standard operating procedures that they're teaching their ai, and then going from there it's ridiculous how it all works.

Yeah, definitely. 

Have you sold any prompts?

No, you're actually the first person that told me about that. I, you told me about Prompt Base and so I, was able to go there. I did, fill out an accountant, but honestly, there's just an overwhelming amount of prompts already. It's hard to figure out, how can I best fit in?

I think the. Most interesting prompt that I may put together is one for notion dashboards, because I was able to get my, my g my hustle, G P T, AI, to, this is the dashboard that I need, here are the certain pages that we need, and it gave me the details, how to put it together, which pages should interact in different ways j And so from that I haven't necessarily started selling prompts, but I'm definitely getting some ideas for.

That's awesome. You and the listeners are both welcome to go download the analysis that I did. I basically ran through all of the prompts on prompt base for G P T prompts, for text output prompts, and then analyze them in terms of the category. Analyze that in terms of what categories like sell and what don't, and which ones are overrun with scripts sorry prompts and which ones are not.

So it gives you a breakdown of here areas that have a lot of potential in high revenue versus here areas that there's maybe less potential.

And I think that a, again, the evolution of that, being able to understand market analysis just in, in a single click is gonna save people so much time. It's gonna make people, so much more excited. And energized to be able to jump into certain activities because they can see, Hey, there are opportunities for me here.

It's not as overwhelming as I first thought it could be. There are certain prompts that I could sell and make money from, so why not?

Yeah, absolutely. So are there any problems. That you wish you could solve with generative ai, whether that's Mid journey or chat, G P T or something else entirely, but you haven't been able to figure out how to solve it.

Just personally, I can't think of any problems that, you know, or any major projects that I'm working on. I'm caught up in what I have going on right now, but, I'm always interested in questions of access to information technology, or, I even funding. And I think that with chat G p T especially, as it's starting to connect to the internet, it's going to be able to do things for people that they couldn't even imagine before.

They're going to be able to. Understand that they can get whole backgrounds in business and MBAs. They're going to be able to have access to lawyers to be able to have consultations for, whatever could be happening them when they're real in their real lives. And so I'm just excited to be able to not only see where this is going, but also to help promote it and collaborate with other people because there's so many different people from different backgrounds that are just able to.

Hey, let me type in a prompt. Let me try to see what's going on and let me try to build something that, I'm trying to network as with as many of them as possible.

Absolutely. That's a nice point to plug the podcast. If you are working on anything in this space, I would love to hear from you. Email me@greggregschwartz.net cuz I haven't even bothered setting up a website for this yet. But yeah, send me an email or, contact me on Discord. 

Going back to tools for iterating on prompts, have you used any of the prompt building prompts as repetitive as that sounds? Chat g p t. Ask me what the prompt should do. Ask me what the context is. Ask me anything else you need to know, and then give me a prompt. Have you used anything like that?

Yes. I originally, when I was trying to put together my logo for the business, Hey, let me tap in the chat. G p t give me a prompt for Dolly and That was a complete fail. Honestly, I probably should have mentioned that earlier when you were talking about just complete roadblocks. My wife is an artist and so she has Canva, and I found that way faster than trying to use the ai the promt that it gave me was something like professional logo for business, for marketing company we need some sort of image that shows unity and synergy and it was just a complete fail. I don't even know what it gave me. And then, with Dolly, it gives you just. Almost, just just squiggly lines almost for words.

It's, just all mu like, just muddled. And so from that it was it was a mess. It was nothing that I could actually put together. I'm honestly also very impressed by anybody who would just take those and then move them into something like Photoshop and then get a relevant idea from it, because that didn't work for. But outside of that, no. I haven't tried to create any other side prompts. I've seen that new companies are sprouting up that are, using your original AI to create certain, personas underneath your business. And so you can use them for different roles such as, your marketing person obviously, your accountant, your sales team.

And then you can work through all of that. And you have an initial boss, AI that's giving prompts to all of the other ones. And then somehow, I guess it'd be some automation, some sort of integration. You have all of them working with each other, giving you back ideas. You could have those ideas bounced off of each other and prompted back to each other.

It's just, A lot going on. But no, I haven't necessarily tried it, but I've definitely seen a lot of, ways that people are putting it together. And again, I'm excited for, how that's gonna happen as well.

Very nice. Yeah, that sounds like a very interesting concept. A multi AI office, almost 

Yeah, yeah. I just signed up for it. I think it's called Role Play ai.

Cool. We will put a link to that in the podcast description. 

Last question is is there any recent news that has you particularly excited?

Yeah, I I've thought about this as as you gave me all the questions and everything earlier. I think probably the biggest news that has me excited is. Once chat, G p T and other forms of AI are able to integrate with the internet and connect with it I've already seen that people are getting the api, early access to it.

They're able to use certain apps like Instacart so that, let's say you're in a situation or a disability or something like that and you can literally. Hey, I need food. I need you to know, go out and get that. Have those supplies for me. If you're in emergency situation, that's just an amazing thing that could happen for you.

Also, with Zapier, you're able to make it so that you're. You're creating automations and integrations within your business. And so as I mentioned before I use notion for a lot of things and so I'm would be able to, at least in that world, have it so that the AI is, pulling down customer information and leads, putting it into my notion.

It could then create cold emails from those and then send it out. I could tell it, Hey, this is our marketing information and what's happened, here's the result of those emails. And honestly, I, it wouldn't even need me. It could just pull that information itself from different sources and then go, Hey, this isn't necessarily working.

Let me, iterate on it. Let me create different versions of it, and it could have its own metrics versus success. And then you. Make its own money. I think once you turn it on, it can just do all of these things for us. I feel almost I'm in my AI's way, I didn't necessarily, get too sleep last night, and so I kinda started off slow.

I had different things going on with my wife, and so I was like, Hey, I'm sorry, a, I'm busy here. It wouldn't need me for any of those. And it, and I think that's probably what makes me most excited is that it could take whatever small human idea and scale it beyond whatever that person could imagine.

And and there's people you know on Twitter at, Definitely wanna shout out somebody. People like Lauren Marie. She definitely has been posting a lot of, really majestic and beautiful prompts on Mid Journey. That, have definitely inspired me because I had no idea that, as I mentioned before, you can just put in something, generalized and abstract.

You don't have to be as scientific and technical about it. You can just have a thought that's Hey, this would be cool. I just wanna see that. And you can just see where the act goes with. And most of the time it's amazing.

To hear more about what you're working on, where should people go?

Yeah, so you can check me out at my website, msp seo synergy.com. You can also find me on Twitter at MSP SEO synergy, and then also at LinkedIn under my name Sean Ridley. I'm honestly excited to try to collaborate with anyone else in the community. I'm always, trying to learn more about prompt writing.

Thanks to you Greg. I'm definitely gonna try to sell some prompts here in the near future, and so anybody who wants to reach out to me or try to do any more interviews or any guest spots like this, I'd love to do it. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Thanks for coming to the Prompt Engineering podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn how to be a better prompt engineer, how to sell your prompts if that's something you're into, or just use them in your day job. See you soon.