1 Year of AI-Driven Marketer: What I Learned, What's Next, and Why It Matters

Start with a question you cannot answer alone

A year into the AI-Driven Marketer, I am less interested in pretending I have AI figured out than I am in continuing to learn in public. The show began with a simple realization: AI would change marketing more deeply than another channel trend. I knew enough to see the writing on thewall, but not enough to predict where the useful work would be. Starting the podcast gave me a way to investigate the change with other people.

That matters because I had already tried several identities. I wrote about thought leadership, audience growth, podcasting, SEO, paid media, websites, social, and automation. I am a generalist, and trying to force every interest into one neat niche made it harder to build momentum. The podcast gave those interests a shared center: how marketers can use AI to do better work.

Publish consistently before you optimize

The process was not complicated. I had been active on LinkedIn since 2020, testing topics and learning what resonated. The show let me go deeper than a post and build a body of work over time. After a year, there were a thousand listeners learning with me. That audience did not come from one perfect launch. It came from continuing to show up and letting the focus sharpen through practice.

That is the useful lesson for anyone starting a show. You do not need complete certainty before recording. You need a question worth pursuing, a repeatable publishing rhythm, and enough curiosity to keep investigating when the first version is rough. The audience helps you discover the shape of the work.

Let the next opportunity grow from the work

The show also created relationships I could not have planned. A conversation led to lunch, then more conversations, and eventually an invitation to help build AI marketing resources with the Social Media Examiner team. I was excited because collaboration could move the work farther and faster. The podcast did not end when that role began. I planned to keep publishing while building AI assets and resources for the AI Business Society.

That is a better model for a content project than treating it as a separate performance. The work can become a portfolio, a learning system, a network, and a way for the right people to understand how you think. A podcast is valuable even before it becomes a large media business because it creates evidence of your thinking.

My next year is about continuing to master AI, but with more collaboration and a clearer direction. If you are considering your own show, begin with what you are trying to understand. Share the experiments, explain what changed your mind, and keep the cadence sustainable. You do not have to know exactly where it leads. You do have to keep making the next useful episode.

welcome back to the AI dri marketer I'm Dan Sanchez and today I have a personal update for you because it's been a full calendar year since I launched the show and there are now a thousand of you that are listening to the show and it just it blows my mind because I've started many podcast but in the past and you know I get like a trickle of followers a dozen two dozen you're like H but now there's a thousand people following the show learning about AI uh with me together as we try to figure out how to make the most of the hype that is AI turned into something that's actually helpful to advance our goals in marketing hopefully Bridging the Gap between like all the crazy expectations like boards and CEOs and the Sea Suite put on marketers and taking away our resources and trying to bridge the gap hopefully with AI to make it easier to actually re achieve those goals so that's been kind of the goal of this uh a year ago I I was clear to me that AI was going to take over it was what I call the writing on thewall moment it was like it had an epiphany and I was like this is going to impact everything more than social more than the Internet it's going to be a fundamental part of the way we live in the future and it's certainly going to transform marketing so I'm going to start a podcast about that because I clearly don't know what I don't know and I know need to go learn stuff so in this episode I want to talk about a little bit of that Journey I've taken over the last year the process I've used on this podcast uh that you might be able to take it to different subjects start your own podcast uh and and grow and and build an audience yourself but I also want to talk about the next steps because now that we're at the birthday for Aid driven marketer I want to talk about where the show is now and where it's going in the future where I'm personally going to be going so let's talk about the process before the show I'd spent a lot of time talking about multiple subjects on LinkedIn since 2020 I've been active on LinkedIn posting at least once a week sometimes once a day in some Seasons three times a day when I was had some hyper growth back in 2020 and there's been multiple topics that I've dabbled on even tried to make a name in but couldn't quite I don't know that it's sometimes it's really hard to break through if a subject is stagnant or if or if there's just a factor that people don't like about a subject for example thought leadership was a topic that was new to me in 2020 and I went all in on learning everything that I could about it um found out quickly that people thought that term was really cringy even though it's still super relevant because thought leadership at the end of the day is just leading the thinking of others um are usually around a specific use case and that can be really helpful and beneficial and uh highly profitable sometimes for businesses to lead the thinking around uh a Market's uh thinking around a specific topic right like we all know this to be true even though people call themselves thought leaders and I'm not saying I am one but it was a topic that I really liked the idea of because it tied so many things that I liked it tied marketing together tied learning and finding unique novel and original ideas that are useful to a particular group of people people uh I love that process and so I tried to get into that and then I tried to get into audience growth I tried to even spend some time just being known just about podcasting where I was probably the most successful because I was the director of audience growth for sweet fish media who is a B2B podcasting agency and I helped launch lot lots of shows for them uh and I was very prolific about it on LinkedIn to the point where the people thought I was the CEO and it's I'm not it's James Carberry fantastic guy um so I've tried all these different Avenues and always wanted to find that Niche and I think most marketers wrestle with this especially if you're like me you're a generalist you're good at lots of different things and not just kind of like I love I've done some awesome things with SEO I've done some awesome things with paid media I've done I've built websites I've designed campaigns I've done social I've done the whole gamut I've automated email marketing to the nth degree and gotten amazing results from it but I'm like what I talk about all these things but and I'm known to be a marketer but what it there's I hit a ceiling personally is with my own personal brand and my own influence because I couldn't people really couldn't Peg down what danz was about um and it bugged me and so I took multiple swings I failed many times and I I just wanted if you're if you're one of those marketers out there that are trying to do the same thing just know that it's it's really difficult to find the thing and it's okay to Pivot and keep trying over and over again uh this thing with AI marketing the AI driven marketer was my Pivot last last year last year I was I was going hard after audience growth find that it was too generic people didn't want to pay for Consulting products around it uh I'd done multiple great pitches people loved it and were just like H and I was like huh there's there's got to be something else here and back then nobody wanted to pay for AI either but I just had a feeling that it was early and that if I could start doing something about it learning about it documenting it that it might become something and I'm not saying here I'm crushing it as an AI consultant or anything like that I've certainly been paid to do AI projects um it was a mix of AI and podcasting and Automation and all kinds of interesting things uh that I've been working on for the last year and a half but something's changed my the trajectory of my career because of this podcast it's given me a a space where people kind of know like oh Dan's Dan's the AI marketing guy um and as as trite as that is to be like the guy or the gal for the thing gosh it works we all know it positioning is a thing positioning is is a a factor that you have to consider when launching a personal brand when trying to stand out as a marketer and I finally found the thing that once I dug in and applied some principles that I'd learned from trying to do other things finally uh I'd say took off and is now working and I'm continuing to double down on this thing of AI marketing so I want to share some of the processes I've learned in trying to do some of these other things that I applied now to AI marketing with AI driven marketer that have been remarkably successful uccessful um and this comes out of my some just some of my content marketing background with sweet fish but also just my deep dive into thought leadership and what that really means uh so for starters what I got the most out of for sweet fish if you have been following me for a while on LinkedIn you know like my background is deep like steeped in sweet fish like sweet fish was my thing for years because I was the host of B2B growth um and because I posted a lot about podcasting and that's what sweet fish did is that I am a huge proponent of podcast Now video podcast if you're not doing a video podcast today you are missing out I don't care what Market you're in video podcasts are by far the most powerful form of content I can't speak highly enough about this particular medium uh it's the easiest way to make content it's easier to step in front of a camera and just shoot or to have experts even your own internal subject matter experts because and ask them questions because it's easier to ask them questions and have them answer with really insightful things than it is for them to write blog post or contribute content from just a blank page uh there's something about a Q&A format or just hitting record on a camera like I am right now that is freeing it's easier than writing out something formally in a blog unless you're an incredible writer I know writers always say like oh it's just easier for me to write good for you that's that's not everybody um and it can be remixed in so many different channels and gotten out there incredibly quickly uh and with video podcasts the ability to do well on YouTube is really the thing that I I is growing this channel more than anything now is is it's picking up on YouTube and people are finding it and talking about it so I can't recommend that one like marketing channel enough pod video podcast so like podcasting but in a way that's really good for YouTube as well and then you can of course run it through uh a clip making tool and make all the social Clips out of it that you want right and I've done a lot of that so video podcast it is the thing um and quick plug for sweet fish because man sweet fish still crushes it on this thing but if you're a company and you want to out Outsource the video podcast and can not figure it out internally you want to get accelerated in that quickly go call Sweet fish go to sweetfish media.com have to plug I'm not paid they haven't asked me they don't even know I'm making that recommendation but they are the best when it comes to video podcast right now as far as an agency goes uh they are crushing it they know how to do it they are great so go check out sweetfish media.com if you want to get into that channel if you're doing it for a company other things that I've learned is this process that I kind of developed for myself called the 303030 plan and I've talked about this on podcast I've talked about it a lot on LinkedIn but it is working incredibly well and I've had to modify it for this topic of AI because it doesn't quite work here this is how this is the how the plan works uh it is 30 books 30 interviews and 30 blog posts if you do those three things in the course of a year you will become a bit of an authority on that topic even if you're starting from near scratch or if you just have like a professional basis for it and you've kind of dabbled a little bit 30 books it seems really hard but it's actually not hard to read all the books on a very Niche topic if there's more than 30 books and the Topic's too big um and you need to Niche it down further um I did this multiple times with many subjects I did it on thought leadership I've done it with uh account-based marketing and I've done it with audience growth where I've read all the books on written on a one topic um it's helpful because then you learn everything that's current ly said it gives you confidence in knowing like all the things that are currently out there but it also gives you a sense of what's missing what questions do you still have that no one's quite answered yet this I came up with this process because I wanted to learn I had the question I'm like how does one become a thought leader what practical steps can you take and I after reading all the books on the topic I didn't really find like a clear steps you can take from like just being a professional to actually becoming known in an industry for topic and the 303030 plan is what I came up with in order to bridge that Gap um because if you go through the process of reading all the books you now know and have a good basis a foundation of where to start um but you also know who's who because you've read a lot of authors you know who people are talking about who who who has the best ideas on the market then lead you to doing 30 episodes interviewing some of those authors and other subject matter experts authorities leaders Gatekeepers of the industry of that topic um not only does it help you learn incredibly more all the stuff they didn't put in the book you can actually poke at the ideas and ask them questions that you had from the books but you can actually start exploring new ideas with them testing out things you're also building relationships uh that are critical for building momentum in an industry and becoming known because if you're known by the people who have the authority already the chances that you can start to grow in your Authority goes up because of the relational Factor there's also this sweet fish we used to call this the Oprah effect if you interview a bunch of famous people like while you might not be famous yourself you will start to become famous because a little bit of that fame or a little bit of their Authority starts to rub off on you um kind of like Oprah Winfrey like what has she done she's interviewed a lot of really cool people over a long period of time so now she's very well known herself right so we called it the oah Winfrey effect because that's generally what happens some of that Authority starts to rub off on you one a little bit at a time so if you do a lot of them this happens and the not only that but it also gives you content to talk about see this is why video podcasts are so good because it gives you so many different things of learning building authority relationships but it also is just good content like you can actually take all these learning sessions and you'd be surprised how many people say yes to being on a podcast by the way it's one of the most remarkable things like people won't give you five minutes over coffee to talk about anything but if you ask them to be on a 60- minute long episode just to have to talk about their expertise and how they're crushing it and all that kind of stuff they usually say yes it's amazing I I say yes too because there's other reasons why you should I won't get into that but uh so 30 books 30 podcasts to with industry experts to learn more about the craft and to just dialogue and discuss because discussion in itself is a great learning tool right it's the Socratic method they call it in highered uh and then 30 blog posts 30 blog posts is important because there's something about teaching the thing that reinforces the learning in yourself to really master a topic but also again with the with the interviews and once you start publishing content and answering the most Bas the most commonly asked questions which is what writing for SEO really is it's it's answering the most common questions on the internet uh you really start to gain a sense of Mastery over a subject and start to become known for it as you uh as you build a podcast following as you start to get found in search for the basic questions people are looking for and you're answering them with pretty good answers if you've read all the books and done all the interview it's pretty easy to write those blog posts because you have a lot of the answers now in your head just from the sheer volume of information you've read and podcasts you've had so in this topic of AI marketing there weren't a lot of books which side note I know reading 30 books sounds intimidating it's not if you're all reading it on a very narrow topic you'd be surprised how fast it is to read like like the first three books takes a while but the fourth fifth sixth and it becomes increasingly faster for each book book because most of the book is the same information that you've already read so each new book you take on the very same topic only has less and less information that you've seen before so reading 15 books feels more like reading six books and six books starts to feel manageable right so that's why I don't feel overwhelmed with 30 books it's actually reading 30 books probably feels more like reading 10 books which anybody can achieve in the course of a whole year right um on II marketing there weren't any books there is probably like three or four books and I read those and as new books got published throughout this year I've certainly read them but they're you know this is a brand new topic there's i' I watched all the documentaries I could find I watched everything about AI I could find but most the AI stuff from like the 2000s the 90s and before is old luckily I'd already done a lot of reading on like the history of technology and Computing and I read a lot of biographies about tech Founders from the 70s ' 80s 90s and 2000s uh so I'm pretty like well educated in the area in general Ro of tech uh without being like a computer scientist myself um but there wasn't a lot of blogs so I had to do my best to lean he more heavily on the podcast and interviewing experts and rolling up my sleeves and experimenting aggressively to learn everything I could I also subscrib to a ton of all the other pod few podcasts that that were out there and the few YouTubers that were P publishing a lot of stuff on YouTube I watched all their stuff so I spent hours on YouTube hours on podcasts listening and reading and watching everything this year most of it highly irrelevant but you know it was something uh the podcast was the best way to go because in any industry that's growing like AI there's a lot of people out there who are dabbling and figuring things out and is easy to find them and interview them and talk to them about how they're crushing it with AI and the use cases and things they've learned and how they're introducing it into their company and how they think about it as a leader as a practitioner um as a manager and all that different kind of stuff to run the gamut and that's why this podcast has been so important to me and I think podcasting can be to you too but that's and then uh for the blog post I'm only just starting to now blog more aggressively about AI um but instead of blogging so much I've just been trying to figure out use cases and then once I find something incredibly useful I've been documenting it showcasing it here on the podcast as a tutorial or Showcase of like what you can do with AI rather than the blogging because I felt like that was more important everybody's asking like okay this is cool it seems really powerful what do I do with it and that's part of building an authority and it's honestly I love to come into a topic where people are asking like how do we use this because somebody gets to be the person to forge the path through the jungle some people might see a jungle and be like oh well we can't get through here nobody's figured out how to use it yet but I look at it as an opportunity like huh someone gets to cut the path someone gets to Define how this weaves through this place and that's what I love to do it's one of my favorite things to find a new topic and Forge A New Path through it you could do the same even on AI marketing let's do it together we can have you on as a guest and you can start your own show we could collaborate like if you're that person let me know um because again this this thing is done better together rather than alone solo more about that in a second so that's the 303030 plan the other part that I think is incredibly helpful that I've talked I've talked about before is this concept I call learning in the light you've heard of buildin public so this is kind of like my my Riff on uh building public but instead of building something you're actually just learning out loud you're learning in the light you're documenting what you're doing from the beginning you're not pretending to be an expert and I wouldn't even say I'm an expert now I'm still on this process of learning and mastering Ai and you just say it like hey I want to learn about this thing here's what I'm doing I read this book here's what I learned I interviewed this person here's what I learned hey I just experimented and tried this thing here's what I learned and just doing that over and over again um because what I found over and over again is that if you learn in the light people won't wonder if you know they'll they'll know because they've seen you on your journey of mastering a topic and this is incredibly helpful so you never need to position yourself as a thought leader you never need to position yourself as an expert you just need to get up in front of people and actually start documenting what you're doing to learn a topic what you're doing to solve the problems who you're talking to to learn from and if you document that on social a couple times a week as you're doing it people will start to figure it out that you know your stuff right uh people have started reaching out to me for help with AI and usually their questions are you know pretty beginner or intermediate I've already covered those I've already documented it I've already figured those out I'm now dealing with harder things um so I answer their questions and people can start coming behind me because I forged a path through the jungle and that's the process of thought leadership it's not something it's such a cringey term out there but at the same time it's it's we need more people doing this stuff rolling up their sleeves doing the work reading the books talking to the experts in order to solve the problems we all have we all there's a lot of problems left to solve in the world and there's we need more people to forge through and become a thought leader in different spaces like right now I'm covering AI marketing but eventually podcast will come behind me and find even nicher topics more Niche topics B2B AI marketing B Toc AI marketing AI marketing for retail you know like there's going to be all these different things and questions related to all these different niches that nobody else has figured out yet right now all the big shows out there are just Ai and I came down and niched down just to marketing people will come down and answer more specific questions below this show and we need them we need you in order to do that thought leader is a cringey term it's a term you never really need to apply to yourself uh but the process of becoming one is worthwhile and I think is needed because somebody has to roll up their sleeves learn the thing russle with the problems talk to The Experts and actually experiment until they find plausible and really reliable solutions to share with other people and they just repeat that over and over again until uh you've solved all the problems in your Niche or to the degree that you can right and that's kind of the process I've used for the show and it's a process that I'll continue using for the show but like I teased in the beginning of this episode this journey has taken a different turn uh I've been a solo marketer for about a year and a half now and I've had I've consulted I've done some AI stuff I did a lot of marketing Automation and podcasting of kind of been the three things that I've been uh feeding feeding the family with over the last year and a half and it's been great I've worked with some incredible clients have some done some great work with them but now I've actually just accepted a full-time position uh for a different company and I'm excited to tell you about it because it's going to impact the show and my uh Direction with AI marketings I'm going to be the senior AI marketing strategist for a company called social media examiner led by Michael St there when I started the show it was one of maybe a dozen shows and half those shows weren't even active and the few that were active were small players like myself um I knew eventually this topic was going to get big like that's the writing on the wall moment I had I knew it was going to be really big eventually it was going to attract some bigger players in the field and sure enough I I wasn't super surprised because I've seen Michael do this before but he started a show called AI explored in the spring of 2024 and it quickly eclips my show because he has an audience over with social media and attract a large audience to it and because he's also really good at what he does like he's he's done way more podcast episodes than I have and has way more better chops at this game than I do uh so I was honored actually to be a guest on his podcast probably the best summary of things I've learned and all the best tips and tricks I've listened to I'll link to in this episode uh but the best stuff I've learned about AI this year is best summarized in the show I gave on his podcast back in October so I'll drop a link to AI explored where you can listen to that episode but that episode with him led to you know led to lunch and led to some other conversations and eventually he asked me to come join his team and to help build this AI marketing thing into a bigger bigger thing and I'm excited to join him because I think we can do better together I think we can both move farther faster down the field collaborating together not that we were ever competing together it was going to be a a great relationship either way um but I'm excited to do it and this show will actually continue I will continue posting to the show at least once a week if not twice a week um probably just at that Cadence though because a lot of my time now full-time is going to be focused on building uh AI assets for social media examiner slow at first but it's going to start winding up I'm going to be working for his community AI Society so if you ever want to dialogue with me more and get into the the the weeds of AI if you're that kind of person where you're like an AI nerd already and you're like man I need to get an AI heart IH heart AI t-shirt you know uh come join me at the AI Society it's a paid premium community so just be prepared uh but it's good I'm going to be developing resources and assets just for that society that you can only find them there um I I will have announcements on this show about what I'll be building there to kind of preview it but right now it's still early too early to talk I only started two days ago at this role and I'll be helping him work on and of course promoting a social media marketing world where it's about social media but I swear they have a huge huge AI marketing track that's has the best lineup of AI practitioners that I've seen yet and is honestly the best AI conference even though it's a social media marketing conference with the huge AI track they have in it it's kind of like the deao AI marketing conference that I've seen out there um so if you're getting into AI marketing you want to meet other people like me like yourself and want to like just collaborate and learn from some of the best in the field social media marketing World 2025 in March go Google it um I'll be there we can I'd love to meet anybody who's listening to the show so I'm excited for 2025 I'm GNA continue mastering AI but now I'm not doing it solo I'm going to be doing it alongside the incredible team at social media examiner and I'll be continuing with you on this show as well as with the channels uh as a full-time AI marketer over