Chances are good you’ve been hearing a lot about AI tools lately. You might be wondering which tools you can or should be taking advantage of in your membership business. It’s true that a number of these super-intelligent programs have recently exploded onto the market, so what better time than now to go exploring? Here are 5 use cases and examples of artificial intelligence resources that membership website owners can use to automate tasks, create content, communicate with members and research membership business ideas.
Communication
AI Tool Example: Chat Bots
Chat bots can be used in many different ways by membership managers. They can work hand in hand with email marketing programs to let you make even more efficient decisions about list segmentation. Chat bots can be very helpful to first-time visitors to your website by offering an array of knowledge base information, or directing them to an FAQ section on your website. They can answer common queries, guide new members through the platform, and provide access to a live support representative (you or someone you designate).
If you don’t have the bandwidth to be available for live chatting, you can also have the bot default to an email capture of name and email address. The visitor at least gets to “leave a message”, and you have a lead that you didn’t have to even be on your website to get. Some examples of chat bots are chatbot.com, drift.com, liveperson.com, intercom.com. Chatbot embed code can be easily added to your SubHub site to offer support at any stage of your client's customer journey, from first-time visitor to loyal member.
Content Creation
AI Tool Example: ChatGPT
If you haven’t heard (which is unlikely at this point!), ChatGPT is am extremely versatile AI tool that can generate copy, write poetry, headlines, and answer just about any question you may have on any topic. For membership website managers, an intriguing application is the ability to write computer programs. Now don’t worry, you don’t have to know anything about code to use it. Let’s say you’re a nutritionist, and you want to offer your members a tool that would allow them to generate meal plans in less than a second, based on your ingredient recommendations. As an experiment, I entered the following command into Chat GPT:
Write a script that allows a user to input a number of calories, then build 3 meals including ingredients from these food groups: dairy, eggs, meat, grains, vegetables, and fruit, each meal containing the number of calories input.
It’s a fairly vague instruction and not all that practical. Each meal is to contain an ingredient from each of the food groups mentioned. The beauty is you can replace those groups with something else, add your own elements of each group, ask it to include recipes for individual suggestions, and anything else you could think of.
From the time I entered the query to the time I tested the script on a webpage was about 5 minutes. This is a simple example, but the main point is that you can easily have ChatGPT whip up a quick quiz or generator like this one to either intrigue your first-time visitors, or act as a premium content for your current membership. See the meal generator in action here: https://youngvoafip.subhub.net/pages/meal-generator
If you don’t already have a ChatGPT account, you can go to chat.openai.com and set up a free account.
Keyword Research
AI Tool Example: Answer the Public & Ubersuggest.com
These are products created by NP Digital, a huge digital marketing company headed up by Neil Patel.
You can get a free version of Ubersuggest.com for your own website. Ubersuggest is a perfect tool to start with if you are just at the beginning of your membership business journey, and trying to discover if your idea is even viable.
You can plug in any number of keywords related to your general topic, and you’ll be returned a list of monthly volumes for that keyword. In other words, you can answer the question, “Is anyone searching for this?” You might find that thousands of searches per month are recorded in search engines for your topic. On the other hand you might find out there are zero searches for your niche topic. It’s a great place to start to week out niche ideas that have little appeal, and to seriously consider those with higher volumes.
Of course, there is more to picking out a niche topic and building an entire membership business around it than a few keywords. But it is a good place to start. Let’s say you wanted to create a coaching website for swimming instructors. Is that a viable niche? Ubersuggest (and similar tools like Semrush.com) can give you search volumes per month for the keyword “swimming instructor coaching”.
Ubersuggest’s companion software "Answer the Public" offers a similar service. But in addition to search volumes for a keyword or topic, it returns actual questions that searchers ask (and that you will often find in the “People also ask” section in Google searches.) Answering these questions are a great starting point for blog post topics, courses and lesson topics, Q & A sessions, and newsletter topics.
Image Creation
AI Tool Example: Starryai.com
As a membership business manager, you are responsible to paying members to keep your material interesting and original. What better way to demonstrate originality than to have your text material accompanied by AI-created images? How many times have you seen the same image-bank photo showing up on different websites, blogs, and course material? You won’t have that problem if you use one of the many image-generating AI tools available. I tried Starry.io (suggested by ChatGPT), and found mixed results for the moment, but I’m sure the technology will improve with time.
Collaboration
AI Tool Example: GPT-4
Who knows how far the AI world will go…right now new tools are springing up all the time offering more and more advanced capabilities. One is GPT-4, the next generation of ChatGPT. It’s available with a paid subscription to ChatGPT, but apparently Bing Chat allows free access if you’re willing to use Microsoft Edge as your browser.
What are the advantages over regular ChatGPT? It purports to be able to “generate, edit, and iterate with users on creative and technical writing tasks, such as composing songs, writing screenplays, or learning a user’s writing style”. For the moment, it’s free via Bing Chat. You’ll need to be logged into a Microsoft account to take full advantage of the features.
Here is an example of its capabilities from the Openai.com website:
Like any tool, no matter how advanced or intuitive, it's up to you how or if it can be of service to you as a membership manager. You may not have a use for a program that explains the plot of Cinderella in a sentence that uses words beginning with consecutive letters of the alphabet...but can you think of other games, challenges or resources that one of these tools could help you create? Whether it's creating a meal plan, original art for an event invitation, or improving the effectiveness of your membership content, it's worth considering how AI might make your life easier, and managing your membership business more fun.
Get started on your membership site today with a free 14-day trial of the SubHub platform.
