YouTube video

Best AI Tools To Make Social Media Content For Your Membership Website

Unlock the potential of AI to create captivating social media content and drive traffic to your membership website. Find the perfect tools now.

Are you struggling to create engaging social media content for your membership website? This informative show explores the top AI tools and services designed to simplify your content creation efforts. Learn how to leverage these powerful resources to produce eye-catching posts and effective promotional campaigns that attract new members. Join us on this journey to boost your online presence.

Hosts of The Show Jonathan Denwood & Nicole Ouellette.

This Week Show’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Convesio: Convesio

Omnisend: Omnisend

Jonathan Selections

1) Grammarly

https://www.grammarly.com

Prices Free | Pro $30 paid monthly

2) Pictochart

https://piktochart.com/

Prices Free | Pro $29 | Business $49 per month

3) WordHero

Home

Prices Creator $49 | Infinity $99 per month

Right Blogger

https://rightblogger.com/

Prices Free | Unlimited $29.99 per month

4) Photoroom

https://www.photoroom.com

Prices Free | Pro $12.99 | $12.99

5) Claude

https://claude.ai/

Prices $20 per month

6) Fotor

https://www.fotor.com

Prices Free | Pro $3.33 | Pro + $7.49 per month

7) Recraft

https://www.recraft.ai

Prices Free | Basic $10 | Advanced $27 | Pro $48 per month

8) – Lumen5

https://lumen5.com

Prices Basic $29 | Starter $79 | Professional $199 per month

Opus.pro

https://www.opus.pro/

Prices Starter $15 | Pro $29 per month

Nicole Selections

1) ChatGPT

https://chatgpt.com

2) Prices Start at around $20

https://www.socialpilot.co/

3) Canva

https://www.canva.com

Prices Free | Canva Pro 120 per year

4) Descript.com

https://www.descript.com

Prices Hobbyist $19 | Creator $35 | Business $50 per month

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:48.340] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine This is episode 105. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about all the best AI tools and services that can help you with your social media content to promote your membership and community website in 2025. It’s an important subject. I’ve also got some great news. I’ve got Nicole back. She has agreed to be my co-host on a trial period, but hopefully we can persuade her to stay on. Hopefully, she won’t get too fed up with my crazy antics. But other co-hosts have stayed with me for a number of years, so I’ve got a reasonable track record. So Nicole, do you want to introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, sure. And also tell the audience quickly some of the things you can do for them.

[00:01:50.470] – Nicole Ouellette

Oh, yeah, sure. So thanks for having me, first of all. I think this will be really fun. I haven’t had a podcast in a while. So my name is Nicole Willet. I own a marketing company called Breaking Even communications, and we mainly work with small businesses and nonprofits on their marketing strategy and implementations. That could be social media, that could be blogging, that could be email newsletters or texting services, or any number of other solutions. We really tailor it to fit the client. And I also own two co-working spaces, and I have a trending video service called Trend Descend, where I track trends across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, find a trend that’s going to work for small businesses and send it out via text message. Although this is all about to change because the TikTok ban just went through. So now I have to re-figure out how this is going to work. But yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. And I’m excited to be here and talking about membership communities. I have a physical membership community in my co-working space, but also I’ve run and managed a variety of them over the years.

[00:02:56.570] – Nicole Ouellette

So thanks for having me, Jonathan. I’m really excited about this.

[00:02:58.950] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it should be great fun. Nicole’s got a ton of experience in social media, running Facebook and other social media, paid advertising campaigns. Plus, she’s got a great deal of knowledge in the WordPress space, so I thought she would bring a great resource to you, and we have a bit of fun as well. But before we go into all the AI tools that we’ve got listed, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out we got a free resource on the WP-Tonic website, and that’s a created list of all the best WordPress plugins and services, plus some great special offers from the sponsors. You can get all these goodies to help you build your membership website on WordPress, and I think you should. You We can get all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Nicole, you’re not typing. You’re supposed to go there as I was speaking.

[00:04:12.940] – Nicole Ouellette

I memorized it.

[00:04:15.200] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I’m glad to hear that.

[00:04:18.080] – Nicole Ouellette

It’s a memorable URL. I’ve got a good brain. I’ve got it in my head.

[00:04:21.510] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, that’s the right answer. That was the answer I was looking for, Nicole. Let’s go straight into it. Nicole, we’ve got two lists. What’s number one on your list?

[00:04:35.810] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, obviously, I’ve been using ChatGPT since it came out, but as these other tools have come out, like Claude and Gemini, I’ve also tried those. But honestly, ChatGPT just works really well for me, and I use the free version of the service. Actually, ChatGPT is what helped me name my trending service because I was looking for a short name for it, but I was looking for available. Coms, and it helped me… I was asking for a short… I forget exactly what the prompt I put in was, but it suggested trend to send, and it was available for the. Com, and it was available across social media. So yeah, ChatGPT, the free version, has not It scared me. Well, it’s steered me wrong a few times, but it’s great for also writing responses to awkward emails and things. What about you? What’s number one on your list?

[00:05:25.440] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. I was really proud of that last comment you came. I’m not going to. Grammarly. Obviously, I have a bit of dyslexia. Grammarly is a great tool. I tend to rely on it a bit. It can totally rewrite some of my emails, but if I can bother to reedit them afterwards, it’s okay. It’s not a bad price. It’s $30 per month if you go month to month, but you can get it for a little bit over $100 if you pay the annual plan, and I just pay it. It comes with some other tools, a good check for plagiarism tool that works reasonably well. But the main And the second thing I have it is the spell checker and the grammar checker. For your social media, you don’t want… It’s not the end of the world, but you don’t want consistent grammar and spelling mistakes all over your social media, do you?

 

[00:06:30.920] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, and I had the free version of Grammarly for a while, and it gives you a certain amount free every day, and then you run out. So what I found was I was using them sparingly. I’d be like, oh, I’m going to save the grammar suggestion for later on. And I realized that was totally stupid. So I finally paid for it. And now it gives me unlimited suggestions, which I appreciate. I think it’s totally worth paying for. And I used to be a copy editor. So I’m pretty good about not having typos, but it does catch stuff that it makes it phrases it less awkwardly. So I can appreciate that.

 

[00:07:03.950] – Jonathan Denwood

So what’s your next what’s your next one?

 

[00:07:07.180] – Nicole Ouellette

My next one? Well, I honestly like, so I sent Jonathan ahead of this. We were planning this episode and I sent him this whole long paragraph about basically AI and how it’s training off of artists’ work, and I feel gross about that. But what I mainly use it for is when I’m editing images in Canva, which is what I use when I’m interfacing with clients, because we can make public view links that they can just look at and stuff like that. But it has a magic erase feature. So if you take a picture of a building, and then there’s this ugly telephone pole in front of it, you can erase it in there. And another thing I’ve used it to do is, sometimes you take this really great image, but it needs to be square. But the way that the image was taken, it’s not quite wide enough to be a square. I took this great picture of this woman. It was at a lobster restaurant, a lobster shack on the Coast of Maine. And so she standing in front of a fence holding this lobster. It was a great picture. The problem was the fence didn’t extend far enough to be a square picture.

 

[00:08:08.490] – Nicole Ouellette

So I use the magic, I think it’s magic wand, I think is what they call it, but it generates and fills a space for you. So it copied the fence background and extended it into the square version. So I use Canva’s image AI tools a fair bit to take images that I’ve taken or clients have taken and just make them a little better.

 

[00:08:28.520] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. I got I’ve got Canva. I use it almost every day. It’s a great value proposition. It’s about 120 a year. If you pay for the pro, the free is not too limiting, but I pay for the pro, and it’s like grand I just pay it. I have got some minor criticisms of it. I think in UX organization, the interface is messy. If you’re utilizing feature regularly, you normally have to go on YouTube and watch a trading video to work out. There’s some elements to the interface being that it’s a reasonably mature app service. I think the UX design is… Also, when it comes to the AI, they are adding more AI features and tools and services, but some of them, I think, are a bit janky, to be quite truthful. Yeah, for sure. But the pure power and the value proposition that you get from it, it’s unquestionable, and it’s a no brainer to buy a Canva annual subscription, and it will really help with your social media. Am I being a bit cruel to Canva?

 

[00:09:57.450] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, I think, honestly, as somebody who taught myself Photoshop and felt like I never… I feel like I know 5 % of what Photoshop can do, even after using it for almost 20 years. And it also is really like, you open it up right on your computer and then you go make a coffee and make your lunch and then come back and it might have finished opening up. I will say the Canva interface on mobile, I just wouldn’t use it because of the way the menus have to be, it’s very chaotic as a mobile app. I would just use it on a desktop, personally. But yeah, I mean, I’m sure there’s all these great image editing tools, and I think part of it is finding something that works well for you, and whether that’s based on your computer or web-based, and whether you have to collaborate with other people might factor into the decision, too, of what you pick.

 

[00:10:48.800] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. On to one of my pics, and that’s a picchou chart. I don’t know where to get that.

 

[00:11:00.360] – Nicole Ouellette

Wait, how do you spell? I think you should spell it for people who are listening and- You do think so, P-I-C-T-O-C-H-A-R-T.

 

[00:11:09.220] – Jonathan Denwood

I want to point out all the links and products will be listed on the WP Tonic website in the episode show notes. So don’t worry, it will be all there. And normally this episode goes live on Tuesday, and normally I have all the show notes available at the time. It’s on iTunes and Spotify, or whatever podcast player that you are utilizing. I’ve tried quite a few of these products that basically what they help with folks is to produce infographics, and good infographics can really spice up a blog post, and I spew out a tremendous amount of content content every week. I wouldn’t say this is perfect, but none of the tools that I’ve tried have been perfect. But they offer a free account and you can look out about 2-3 infographics on the free account per month. And then the paid account is $29 for the Pro version and the business version is 49. So it’s not mega money. And you put a prompt in, and it does a reasonable job. You can edit it. I’m not saying that you can just put a prompt in and it will spew out a perfect infographic that you can just…

 

[00:12:43.760] – Jonathan Denwood

But I’ve used it a bit, and it reduces the work by 50 to 70 %. And obviously, that’s what I mean is you going into Canva and finding a template, and it will reduce the work that even what Canva reduces for you. So I would say, have a look at it. It’s got a really good free level, which allows you to try it out and see if it could help you. What do you reckon, Nicole?

 

[00:13:22.680] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, I’m wondering because I actually didn’t have a chance to test it out yet.

 

[00:13:26.540] – Jonathan Denwood

What? You mean when I sent my links to you, you didn’t instantaneously spend at least three hours of your life wasting your time, Nika.

 

[00:13:37.030] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, let’s just say between the meta and the TikTok stuff this week, I’ve been a little bit busy keeping up with where everything is going to fall in terms of how my marketing company is going to deal with all that. But I’m wondering for this infographic generator, it sounds like you can type in a prompt, can you give it a spreadsheet of data or something like that and have it work with it? Or do you mostly have to narratively tell it the things that you’d like it to work on?

 

[00:14:05.030] – Jonathan Denwood

Sorry, I went blank there.

 

[00:14:07.550] – Nicole Ouellette

Oh, yeah. No. So for an infographic, right? Because it’s using a lot of data to… What I’m wondering is if it works with spreadsheets, too, or is it you type in the narrative of what you’re looking for for the infographic?

 

[00:14:20.310] – Jonathan Denwood

You can do both. The more info you give it, the more less editing. That’s awesome. Some of these platforms, doesn’t matter how much extra information actually confuses them. There’s a sweet point. It seems reasonably sophisticated. You do have to edit them. I haven’t had one that it spewed out, and I thought I didn’t have to go in and improve it. You can swap out… The editor is pretty good. You can swap out images with other ones that come from your own sources. I think it’s pretty good. Let’s go on to one of your choices, because you jumped on my list, you had number two, AI and my social media scheduling apps. So I was going to ask you, when it comes to scheduling, are there any apps that you’re utilizing on a regular basis to do all your scheduling or social media?

 

[00:15:19.100] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, I have tried all the tools over the years, right? I’ve been doing this for a long time. And the one that I’m testing out right now is called Social Pilot. And what’s interesting about it is it has I mean, no matter what tool you pick, they’re going to have an AI built into it. But part of what it does is it allows you to… Like all social media schedulers, you put in a piece of content, let’s say I put in a short video, and I could customize the short video for Instagram versus YouTube, in terms of I could change the caption, I could change the thumbnail and all that. But it has this area for the YouTube one where it’s like, generate a YouTube title. And I was like, oh, well, That’s interesting because I’m long winded. So and it has.

 

[00:16:06.730] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, you’re not long winded, not compared to me.

 

[00:16:11.980] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, it’s, like I said, It’s generated these really interesting titles that I would have never thought of before. So I would say if you have a tool that you like, they’re probably coming out with an AI or they’re probably already have an AI built in that they’re improving. And I would test that out because if you’re already comfortable social media scheduling in a certain tool, they might have ways of rewriting the description or finding you hashtags or writing a compelling title for one platform versus another, that thing. So I think we’re going to see some interesting use cases, not just for these general AI tools that you open up and say, I’m going to produce an infographic or I’m going to come up with an outline or some ideas for a podcast or something. But it’s going to be built into the tools that we’re already using. So we We might as well see if they work well for us. Like I said, the YouTube title generator, I was like, Oh, I would have never come up with this stuff.

 

[00:17:09.970] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s a great name for the service, actually. There you go. On to my next one, which is I’ve got the main one, and then I’ve got a secondary recommendation as well. Word Hero. What does Word Hero do? Basically, I got it on at Zoom I invested a fair bit of money in a number of AI tools. Some of them were real dogs. I think if you get it on a special offer, I think Word Hero is probably, and depending on your case, it could be worthwhile. I wouldn’t recommend it at its normal retail price. But what does it do? Basically, if If you’re using prompts, putting prompts in all day, that gets a bit tiring. This produces a very large library of pre-diverpt prompts that being optimized, and it generates. It’s used in one of the big language libraries out there, so it generates as well. But it just saves you a ton of time. What it writes isn’t the best, but isn’t terrible either, compared to some of the other tools that you use. But it’s a big time saver for me because having to reput in a prompt. There’s a bit of overlap with some of the other tools that I use, but I still use it a fair, almost every day.

 

[00:18:51.580] – Jonathan Denwood

But like I say, is it worth the normal price? Probably isn’t, because the normal price, if you’re paying month to month, is 49 or Infinity, which is $99 a month, and I definitely don’t think it’s worth $99 a month. Now, another one that one of my other co-hosts for my other podcast He put it on my radar, and it was one of the guests on my other podcast who has developed it, and it’s called Write Blogger, blogger, blogger, blogger, blogger. Now, it does something very similar to Word Hero, provide a library of predesign prompts in a visual interface, but it also does blogging as well. I They’ve got more powerful blogging AI tools that I’ve invested in. But what the great thing is, they got a pretty good free program with Write Blogger, and then they our unlimited plan for just 29.99. And Kirk, my other co-host, he says he hits it heavily, almost every… And he writes a fair few blogs, and they never asked any additional money from him. It looks reasonably unlimited because, folks, when a company says unlimited, it normally means until they get fed up with the amount usage you’re doing, and then it isn’t unlimited.

 

[00:20:29.820] – Jonathan Denwood

But so that’s a good choice because the price is more realistic, 29.99. They’re two things that provide this library of pre-design prompts in a visual interface. What do you reckon, Nico?

 

[00:20:47.180] – Nicole Ouellette

No, I think that’s… It’s funny when you were saying, Oh, I bought something off AppSumo. I feel like that reminded me of something I bought off AppSumo, which is… I don’t know if I would consider it AI, but… And I also wouldn’t pay full price for it. But it’s called Relay That. And what it does is you make one graphic, and then you can have it dynamically create other graphics that are resized. So I had a client who is running some display ads on Google, And if you’ve never run a display ad in Google AdWords, there’s 20 different sizes. There’s skyscrapers and there’s whatever. And so I was able to generate the creative… Once they had a look that they wanted, I was able to run it through a tool and basically make 20 versions of it in 20 different aspect ratios. Did I have to move the logo on some of them? And did I have to rework it a little bit? Yes. But it would have, I mean, it saved me hours of making 20 different image sizes that were going to be display ads. So, yeah, I also wouldn’t pay for… I can’t remember how much I paid for it, but it was a one time fee.

 

[00:21:54.780] – Nicole Ouellette

And I just have, I think it gives you, it gave me five workspaces so I and upload my logos and my brand colors and my fonts and all that for five different clients. And I can use that to generate the images. If you’re making a lot of images and have to do them in a bunch of different aspect ratios, you just don’t want to hit copy, resize, and Canva 20 times. It’s nice.

 

[00:22:18.640] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I’ve got some tools to help you in that as well that we’re going to be talking about. On to your next one, which was Descript. What’s that?

 

[00:22:27.410] – Nicole Ouellette

Descript. Com. Okay, this is like your co-host who uses the blogging one. I use this one pretty, not quite every day, but pretty close. It’s a video editor, but it’s text-based. So you put your video in and it transcribes your video. And Let’s say I wanted to cut a section of this podcast. What I do is I just find it in the transcript, highlight the words, hit delete, and it’s gone from the video. So it’s really great at editing long form content. You can also search for things like filler So apparently when I talk by myself, I say, right a lot.

 

[00:23:06.320] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, right. Sure, right, Nico.

 

[00:23:10.460] – Nicole Ouellette

So I can have it find all instances of the word right and have it just delete them all from the entire transcript. In some cases, it’ll find over a hundred of them, which horrifies me. But yeah, the other thing that it does, though, is it has this AI, I think it’s called an Overlord or something. They call it something funny. But what you can do is you could take a long form video like this, and you can say, Cut this into clips, and you can say the clips that you wanted to do. So pick clips where the man is laughing with the woman, or pick clips that seem controversial. You could give it a little bit of editorial guidance on what clips that it picks and how many that you want it to generate. So if you wanted to cut up, if you have a podcast or some long form video that you want to cut into short segments, that could be a nice tool for you. But what I do recommend doing if you’re a control freak like me is, let’s say that you wanted 60 second clips to actually work with. I say, have it give you two-minute clips.

 

[00:24:11.770] – Nicole Ouellette

And that way, if it cuts it in an awkward spot or if you want to massage it a little bit, it’s giving you some room in either direction to do that by giving you more content. Because once it cuts it off, it doesn’t let you say, oh, can I add this other sentence in? No, it already cut it off. So I really like the script a lot for my YouTube video editing.

 

[00:24:32.620] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ve used it a little bit. My other co-host, he was one of his choices. When we had a session where we were talking about AI tools that can help you as a freelancer or small agency owner. So which price level? Because you’ve got hobbyists at $19. These are month-to-month prices.

 

[00:24:52.690] – Nicole Ouellette

Yeah, that’s the one I use.

 

[00:24:53.820] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, you just got the hobbyists. All their plans aren’t ridiculous. They’ve got hobbyists at 19, creator 35, business at 50. So it’s not ridiculously priced.

 

[00:25:09.120] – Nicole Ouellette

There is a free version of it, I think, or at least I should have double checked. There used to be that it gives you two hours of transcription a month for free. But the AI tools are part of their paid plans.

 

[00:25:18.840] – Jonathan Denwood

I think they’ve buried that somewhere, but it might be still there. I didn’t see it.

 

[00:25:23.100] – Nicole Ouellette

Oh, that’s too bad. Yeah. Okay. It was fun while it lasted. But the AI tools would be a paid part of their service anyway. And yeah, it’s like bucks a month, which is doable.

 

[00:25:31.880] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ve got one. Photo Room. This works really well with Canva, because Canva has got some really great editing, photo-editing, graphic It’s a lot of editing tools, but it’s also got some limitations compared to where Photoshop, like what Nico said, I regularly only use 20% of it. It’s such a beast, and it’s such a mess of the interface. But there are some limitations with Canvas. So PhotoRoom, it’s got some really powerful tools in it. It It’s background remover is actually… Canvas one is pretty impressive, but actually photos room, background remover, and selecting different items in the photo removing them is pretty impressive. One of the other tools, and it’s got a number of them that really works well, is that if a client gives you a low-resolution photo and that’s all they’ve got, and they want it to be used as the hero image on the website, this will take it, analyze it, utilize it in AI, and then grow the image by magic. It’s not perfect, but Perfect. But are you going to use it as a background or it’s just going to be used for the web? It ain’t going to be utilized for print.

 

[00:27:12.610] – Jonathan Denwood

It does a pretty amazing job actually. It’s got me out because we can’t find the originals.

 

[00:27:21.990] – Nicole Ouellette

Yeah, or the boss sent us this photo, and it’s like this. Yeah, and it’s the boss’s photo, so you’re not going to say, Oh, that’s not No.

 

[00:27:31.310] – Jonathan Denwood

They got a free level where you can try it out. Then they got the pro level, which is around 12.99 a month, so it ain’t going to bankrupt you. It saved me a ton of time. It does some of the other things about producing social media. Obviously, Canva does that, different sizes for different resolute layouts on different social media platforms, which are the pain of my life, the pain of my life. It does a good job helping there. It’s got a number of tools in there. What do you think of PhotoRoom, Nico?

 

[00:28:13.190] – Nicole Ouellette

I think that sounds great because I literally have the problem sometimes where I have this photo that I have to use, but it’s not great. So I’m going to use it just for that purpose alone. I think that’s great.

 

[00:28:23.590] – Jonathan Denwood

Have a look at it. I think it’s time for us to go for our break. We’ve had a good A huge of AI tools. If you didn’t get some value from this first half, God help you, because I think we’ve slapped down on… We have slapped down our value on the table, folks. Nicole’s been doing a great job. I’ve been doing my normal bad job. Oh, come on. There we go. Where’s the violins? We will be back for the second half where we got some more AI tools. We will be back in For you in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. They’re coming back. Nicole’s managed to control me. How am I doing that? Can you use it? I’m just teasing. But before we go into the second half, I want to point out we’ve got a great free resource for you, those that are looking to build your membership or community website in That’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group. It’s a total free resource. It’s got a load of WordPress, plus people like you trying to build a membership website or community site. It’s a great resource. I try and post something every one or two days on it.

 

[00:29:50.630] – Jonathan Denwood

If you’ve got any questions about the show or you need any quick advice, it’s a great resource. Go over there and join us on this. In the Membership Machine Show Facebook group. On to the next one, because you’ve run out, haven’t you? You’re a naughty girl. You only provided four, didn’t you?

 

[00:30:09.450] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, yeah. I mean, I will say something that I think that is underappreciated about AI, whatever general AI tool that you use, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, is you can have the AI ask you questions, which I think a lot of people don’t understand about that. So I had a prospective client, and he was scattered with what he wanted.

 

[00:30:34.620] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, that never happened.

 

[00:30:36.090] – Nicole Ouellette

I know, right? So I asked him for an RFP, and I suggested that he use a tool like ChatGPT or similar to say, okay, you’re a business consultant. You’re helping me write an RFP for a new marketing plan for my small business. I want you to ask me questions about my business. And what I got back a day later was honestly, he had marketing goals of what he wanted and why he wanted it. He had target audience information. He had all kinds of stuff that was so useful. And I was like, oh, I should have more people do this when they don’t quite know what they want. Rather than having me sit there having to try to sell them something, which I’m not really trying to do, but I’m sure they feel like I’m trying to do.

 

[00:31:27.820] – Jonathan Denwood

No, I think that’s very insightful, actually. What we’re going to do is I’ve got a number of other tools. We’re going to blow through them, and then maybe we’ve got a bit of time at the end of the show, I’m going to ask Nicole for some insights about what can be an effective strategy for using social media. You keep touching your mic, Nicole. Is it being a bit naughty?

 

[00:31:56.070] – Nicole Ouellette

No, my cat has come in the room.

 

[00:32:00.500] – Jonathan Denwood

And he is- I’ll get the cat on the… If we have animals on the show, the right… Okay, I was trying to keep him out. The right little tip for your videos, Nicole, just have your cat as your co-host, and your rated, because if I wanted to make money, I just do cat videos because I give up on all this.

 

[00:32:23.050] – Nicole Ouellette

Yeah, I don’t blame you. But he was on my desk for the last about 10 minutes, and then he decided to go across the room and start knocking stuff off of a shelf. So rather than you hearing an occasional bang, I’ve just been hitting mute. Yeah, he’s being naughty. I’m not getting up to trouble this particular time.

 

[00:32:43.430] – Jonathan Denwood

Because I have made some co-hosts go to sleep, actually, but there we go. On to the next one, Claude. Now, Claude is one of these large language plans, models. One of the professional-level tools I use is Koala, which is my AI writer, Koala Bear, and koala. There’s a number, there’s SEO writer, there’s a couple of others, but I use koala. It’s not one of the cheaper ones. It gives me a choice of which language models that I can choose from. I found Claude, when it comes to long-form writing, Claude, when I put it into my AI detection tools and then use a humorizer. Yes, I’m pretty hard core, folks. Claude, Nicole definitely seems to provide the best long-form written content at the present moment. It’s $20 a month. Even though I’m using professionals, I And it comes with a reasonably good free account, and I do cough up my $20 because I find it really useful. It does all the things that Nicole just said about her new client It really answers your questions and gives you planning layouts. It’s pretty useful. So Claude, have you played around with Claude at all?

 

[00:34:44.360] – Nicole Ouellette

I played with Claude, I played with Gemini. I think that there’s a tool for everyone. You know what I mean? And like I said, what I appreciate is that these tools can act as a nice in between, in particular, if you’re working with a client or something. Rather than you, you’re both can talk to the tool together. It is like a little intermediary between some people sometimes. But yeah, no, I like Claude. He’s a nice guy.

 

[00:35:18.690] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. On to the next one, photo, photo, photo. I don’t know how to pronounce it. It’s the best browser-based photo editor in my opinion. If you need something that’s more powerful than Canva. Photoroom has some really great tools, like I said, like the image expansion standard. But if you’re looking for something that’s in between Canva and Photoshop, basically, I found it to be, for what it provides in a cloud-based, browser-based interface, it is, in my opinion, a great tool, photo editor for those in between. You might not need it, but on the other hand, it’s about $3 per month or $7 or $750 per month for the Pro plan, the Pro Plus plan. I think the Pro plan is most people would want Especially if you got one of the other tools like Canva or you’ve got PhotoRoom. That’s what I got to say about it. Go and have a look at it, but it’s a ton of power in the web browser for editing images and that. Any thoughts, Niko?

 

[00:36:55.130] – Nicole Ouellette

After you work with some of these tools, some of these either free tools or whatever, web-based stuff, you start and as you’ve, we’re talking about, you run into things like, oh, I wish it did this. I wish it did that. So sometimes I think it is important to reevaluate what tools you’re using and see if you can find something better. And something that I’ve been trying to figure out is, okay, how do I make this efficiently, but also have, I would like some more professional color grading and things like that. How in Photoshop you can get one of those 15 % gray squares. And when you start doing your photography, you can have the person hold it up. And then in Photoshop, you can basically sample the color, set it to that, and then it fixes the color. It’s some strong image There’s some real limitations with Canva, but I’m not knocking Canva for- Well, right.

 

[00:37:53.120] – Jonathan Denwood

Because for what you get, for what you’re paying, you’re getting a bargain, even now with Canva. There’s no question, it’s a bargain. But if you’re doing a lot, and if you’re doing… That’s one of the things I want to discuss with you at the end of the show, is you’re going to be producing a lot of stuff, and If you’re doing it on your own, plus you’re trying to run your membership website and build the courses and that, you got to find methodologies and tools that enable you to produce social media content, and it’s a lot of it is visual video in a way that reduces the amount of time you’re spending on it, because you won’t have any time to sleep otherwise or have any personal life or anything. On to the next one. I struggle with these names, Reecraft. What Reecraft does is it produces really I hate the term, but I’m going to use it, images that pop. Don’t you love that when you got a client that says it doesn’t pop? You just want to go get a gun and shoot yourself. But that’s what it does. It really produces very visually pleasing, stunning images, where you just put in a prompt, and it does a pretty good job.

 

[00:39:25.510] – Jonathan Denwood

I know Twitter X has a product, if you’re paid the pro, which I do, but that does a similar thing. I can’t remember its name. They’ve got a free program, and I generally use the free, and it’s a bit like photo, I generally use the free. But if I got some need, I just go month to month and I cough up the $3. But it does a pretty good job of producing really quite stunning imaging that works really well in social media in my opinion. They’ve got the free program. The next one, Basic, it’s $10, and then they got Advanced, $27, and then they got a Pro, $49. I think Basic or Advanced, if you’re wanting to produce a lot of imaging that can use the Turbogaine, pop. Have a look at this because I found it. It saved me a ton of time in I don’t really spending an hour or something because I have got a background in graphic design. I did my MA in graphic design. Yes, Nika, I did I did it at the London School in Print and Design.

 

[00:40:48.470] – Nicole Ouellette

It’s a whole trade school in London.

 

[00:40:54.280] – Jonathan Denwood

It got exalbed by the University at Münster. But yeah, so it does a really good job in producing more stunning images that really is appealing to the eye.

 

[00:41:11.760] – Nicole Ouellette

Is that what you use to make the thumbnails for the podcast?

 

[00:41:14.500] – Jonathan Denwood

No, I didn’t. There’s nothing appealing. I thought that it’s not bad, though, is it?

 

[00:41:20.680] – Nicole Ouellette

No, that’s why I was wondering if you used it to do the podcast. No, that was just Canva. Okay, nice.

 

[00:41:27.570] – Jonathan Denwood

On to the next But have a look at it because trying to produce images that really… Because most of these social media platforms, I think you would agree, Nico, are disruptive platforms. Basically, you got the feed and you want them to stop and look at the image and then what you’re talking about in the social media post. Well, that’s what ReCraft helps you with. On to the next one. Oh, God, how to pronounce this? Lumen. Lumen 5?

 

[00:42:02.530] – Nicole Ouellette

Oh, Lumen 5, yeah.

 

[00:42:03.930] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. Use this a bit, but more in testing mode.

 

[00:42:10.750] – Nicole Ouellette

Me too, actually. I’ve used this before.

 

[00:42:12.960] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. It’s coming on. You put in a prompt and it just makes a video.

 

[00:42:20.550] – Nicole Ouellette

Well, what I like about it, because I have so much long form content, like on my blog, is I can put in a blog URL or a PDF, and it I’ll pull stuff from it and I can create a short video. It’s a text-based video, but it’s a short video based on the content from that and really brand it and everything. That’s what I’ve used it for, which I’ve appreciated. Obviously, the branding and all that is limited on the free plan. I haven’t actually paid any money to use it yet, but it has some interesting features with it for sure.

 

[00:42:52.790] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s got some editing tools now in there, and it starts at 29. And, Unless you’re doing podcasts or you’re happy to be in front of the camera like narcissists like me- I like being in front of the camera. I was thinking about being a lady, I wasn’t going to say that. But if you’re happy to be in front of the camera and you want to produce video, it’s a bit difficult. This tool could help you produce videos that are interesting based on the text you input in it. So you can use it in your social media campaigns. So that’s why… Another one I added before the show is Opus Pro. That really helps you if you’ve got video content, long form video content, you put it in and you want to chop it up into shorts. It’s a bit like the last tool on your list, which was Descript.

 

[00:44:01.910] – Nicole Ouellette

The Descript one, yeah.

 

[00:44:05.070] – Jonathan Denwood

But it’s designed to take long form video like this podcast and then cut it up into small clips with text, and it does a really good job. And then you can push it out through your social media streams. But obviously, you got to have long-form video content for it to cut up. That’s I’ve combined it with Lumify because there’s people that want to mix up, have a bit of video, but they’ve got no long-form video. So Lumify can help with that. But if you’ve got some video and you want to carry it up and use it for shorts, Opus Pro is a pretty good product, and it starts at around $15 a month.

 

[00:44:57.560] – Nicole Ouellette

Nice. And I will say, if you’re a little bit I’m hesitant to get on camera, understandable, we’re not all camera ready all the time. I mean, you’re listening to a podcast right now, the human voice is really lovely. So if you wanted to do images with your voice, that’s one thing. But just as another little And that’s what this script can do, is you can make a deep fake of your own voice, if you have about one to two hours of footage of yourself talking. So if I wanted to, I could type up a script, and I could make my fake Nicole voice say it. And this can come in handy. I did a video about this woman once, and I mispronounced her name for the entire video, but I didn’t want to obviously go and re-record it, like spend three hours re-recording it. So I recorded me saying her name correctly, and then I put I put it, I did a find and replace and fix the pronunciation of her name, and my mouth moved similarly, so it wasn’t too off-putting.

 

[00:45:58.010] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, well, your listeners I love this show, regular listeners, and my other podcast, they’re well aware. They just got used to my total inability to pronounce anybody’s name, especially the guests, mate. It’s become a mean in the WordPress community, actually, my inability. It’s become a joke, really, but does it really matter? I’m going to go on to some other tools. Now, if you’re looking to help in blogging and that, I mentioned Koala. I think Koala is really great. There are other tools that can help you with blog writing content. Koala is not the cheapest tool. It’s got an essential plan at $9, got a starter at $25. If you’re going to use it for more than one or two articles a month, you’re probably going to be looking at the professional or the boost. The professional is $49, the boost is $99. What Koala has got a really nice interface, and you can choose which large language model you’re going to be utilizing. I tend to choose broad, and it can produce photos. They were a little bit janky, but they They’ve improved the quality. They give you standard or premier photo quality. It’s based on a token, all these professional writing tools are based on a token system.

 

[00:47:44.150] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ve been using it for over a year, and they periodically offer some great special deals where you buy a large group of tokens, And I trust them and I bought in, and so I got quite a large discount. Now, if you can’t afford those prices for your writing, there’s a couple of others I’ve utilized I think could be worthwhile looking at. Some people say that they’re better than koala, but I think all these tools are in to exchange in how they’re seen as effective writing tools. Another one is called SEO writer. It’s interfaced as polished as koala. Another one is a Agility Writer. That’s another one. They are cheaper. I haven’t got the prices in front of me, but in general. Agility Writer, you don’t have to use it this way, and I’ll strongly advise you not to use it this way. You can put in a… I don’t use these tools in this way. I research the topic, I give that It’s not a detailed outline document. It produces content, I edit it, and then I have a third person come in and edit it again. They all check for I do a lot of prior research.

 

[00:49:33.700] – Jonathan Denwood

I give it an outline, where something like agility writer, you can actually import Excel spreadsheet into it with, let’s say, 100 titles, and it would just churn out 100 articles. And there are people that… That’s their morphology. They also have been really hammered by Google. So I don’t use these tools that way, and I would advise you not to.

 

[00:50:07.730] – Nicole Ouellette

I mean, as someone who gets paid to write, you. As someone who gets paid to write stuff, I just find it you, personally.

 

[00:50:16.260] – Jonathan Denwood

But we’re in this age, so we got to talk about it, Nico. Absolutely. Another tool that we use to do the transcripts of the podcast is Happy Scribe. There’s a number of these tools there. This was another AppZuma purchase that’s worked out for me. I bought enough tokens. The transcription it does is okay. It’s not in no way perfect. It depends how much time I will edit it. They do offer the automation transcription, and then they offer a person that will look over it in-house, but that’s $2 per minute, I think. I just bought the automatic platform. It covers most of my usage, but there are some months where I have to give them some more money to top up. But you get 50% discount if you bought one of their apps, Zoom, or one of their special offer plans, and I think they’ve been reasonably fair for me. If you are doing a fair bit of podcasting and you want a transcript, I think Happy Scribe is a good platform to look at. How are we doing for time? We’re getting around… So I think for the last 10 minutes, let’s have a general discussion.

 

[00:51:57.430] – Jonathan Denwood

I think one of the things when it comes to social Nicole, that people don’t realize is the amount of… If you really want to get something out of a platform, is the amount of volume that you got to produce. It’s a lot more than I think most people realize. Secondly, I think I’ve a hiring you and your team to help with that is utilize these tools that we’ve talked about to produce, help you produce the volume. But the real thing you’re trying to do is to trigger engagement, is to trigger conversation, and where your time should really be spent on is responding to people’s comments or in your social media. But it’s the whole volume side. I think people just don’t… I think just posting once a week or posting a couple of times a day, I just don’t think it’s going to move things much. What’s your whole… Because you’ve got a lot more knowledge in this area than I do, so what’s your whole thing about what I’ve just said?

 

[00:53:18.080] – Nicole Ouellette

Part of our work is that social media platforms expect video from us as content creators, and they push videos out in the algorithm more. So I have to have at least two or three videos a week for each client, like short videos. I’m talking 60 seconds and under. But even short videos obviously take time to to film and edit and upload and all that. So I would say, I don’t know, in terms of an amount of content, like I said, for our clients, we’re producing between two and three videos a week and probably two and four static posts a to mix in there, too. And we’re responding, we’re logging in once a day and responding to comments and messages. Obviously, we’re dealing with relatively small businesses, right? So that’s a good amount of volume. Obviously, if it’s a bigger company, we we do that more often if they have a larger community. We manage something for a pretty big influencer for a little bit. And so we were logging in three times a day for her. So I would say, obviously, batching is what makes it efficient. So I’ll have a day I actually have two days a week where I schedule no meetings, and that’s when I can produce content without being interrupted.

 

[00:54:36.510] – Nicole Ouellette

And I can usually get through, if I have the videos filmed or organized, I can get through 12 to 20 short videos in that one workday. And yeah, I mean, it’s just one of my coworkers, she’s like, it’s just taking so long. And we just look at each other, we’re Content takes time. It just takes time. I don’t know. Obviously, we can use the AI tools. I have one client who who says, I recorded a bunch of videos with her. She said, 24 times in a 60 second video. It’s noticeable. But she’s very comfortable on video and she says it very quickly. So opening up a tool like Descript, searching for and hitting delete, she’s not paying. So I’m able now, instead of spending an hour finding all the ums and deleting them, I’m able to spend my time making her more high quality content, doing more video and other time intensive work, spending more time on strategy, and that thing. So yeah, I would say that batch editing the content and using these tools as they make sense. And understanding that there’s a learning curve. If you try to go edit a bunch of video, if you’d say, I like Nicole’s idea, and I’m going to set aside a day and edit video.

 

[00:55:56.920] – Nicole Ouellette

If you don’t get 10 videos done, that’s okay. I’ve been doing this 20 years. Give yourself time to come up with your own process, whatever that is. But yeah, there’s going to be a bit of a learning curve with learning this new technology. But at the same time, if you don’t learn it and everyone else is using it, you’re going to be left behind a bit. Anyway, I would say that you have to have some video in with your content, and some of these tools we talked about do video work or at least help you make videos.

 

[00:56:27.790] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, my position on And this is if you’re trying to build your own tribe folks around your membership website in your community, you’ve got to have a scheduling tool and you’ve got block off periods of time during the week to produce content. Content, and in disperse that with responding and maybe one post per day where you’re doing it on that day so you can react to news in your niche area But you got to block off some time, like a couple of hours where you can block off to produce the content and then put it in the scheduler. Because it’s just the volume. If you don’t, you’re not going to move the needle unless in building your tribe for your membership to build conversations unless… I would say you really got to triple the amount of content that you think you’re going to produce. But if you’re not using these AI tools and scheduling time and using a scheduling app to help you schedule it out and utilizing the same content on different platforms through the scheduler, you’re going to go bonkers. You’re going to have no time because you’re probably in full-time employment, trying to build this as a side hustle, hopefully turn it, maybe, if you wish to, to turn it into a full-time gig, or you’re in a position where you’re just working part-time and you want to build this up.

 

[00:58:17.440] – Jonathan Denwood

You’ve got to produce content for your course. You’ve got to be there to engage with your students. You might be in coaching as well. If you don’t do Do what we’ve talked about in this episode, either you’re going to produce very little content or you’re just going to burn out. You’re going to explode, basically. You’re just going to spend all your time making social media content.

[00:58:45.580] – Nicole Ouellette

Right. And that’s why I came up with this trend to send things, because I was like, I see these short trends. They’re 15-second videos and under, and I see them trending across these platforms. My goal is I make a video along with the people, And it takes me about 15 minutes to record, edit, and post that video. And it’s a trending audio. I also have a way to attach the audio to the Trend Descend site. And it basically allows you to make fun content, but in a really time-conscious way. So that’s why I started this service, too, because I was like, okay, I want people to have something that’s topical and interesting but also doesn’t take a long time to film. So yeah, there’s definitely different ways to do it, but there’s no getting around that. It takes time, unfortunately.

[00:59:31.820] – Jonathan Denwood

So, Nico, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you? Maybe book a chat with you and see if you could help them with their social media strategy and outreach. What are the best ways for people to get a hold of you, Nico?

[00:59:46.820] – Nicole Ouellette

Yeah. So you can visit our agency website, BreakingEvenCommunications.com, or if you want to check out the trend service I was talking about, trendtosend.com. There are contact forms on both those websites, and those go right to me.

[01:00:00.410] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. As I said, if you’ve got any questions, put them in the comments because this will be on YouTube, or you can join the Membership Machine Show Facebook group with any questions, and that is a great resource, folks. We will be back next week with either an interview, we’re going to be interviewing somebody, or we’ll be touching on a topic that will help you be successful with your membership on the Community Focus website in 2025. We’ll see, folks. Bye.

[01:00:32.020] – Nicole Ouellette

Bye. All.

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