Introduction

So my name is Maria. I am a engineer turned consultant turned educator right now. And I help women build their own personal brand using low cost or free AI tools that are available for everyone everywhere.

Origins of the Idea

The idea is this. The idea came from my mom that was taking a course. She wanted to go on social media.

And then a few of her friends as well came to me, and they're like, can you build me a website? And so it turns out there's many, many women like that that are realizing that the world is changing with AI, and they want to start their own business, right?

Empowering Women Through a Four-Stage Process

So I take their passion, their idea, And then I walk them through a four stage process, right?

First, we do marketing research. So we find the audience that they're looking for.

Then we go through social media, how to create content. Everyone probably is using Canva already or photo or all kinds of tools like that.

And then we build the website or e-commerce store, depending on what they're selling, if it's services or products.

And finally, I teach them how to read the data and the numbers like a CEO so that they can be adaptive to the market.

Challenges in Building Online Presence

So what part do you think is the hardest one? Like the one that stops pretty much everyone?

Well, social media has some barriers, typically psychological barriers.

No, actually it's the website part. Because no matter what they tell you, Shopify, Wix, and WordPress, I guarantee you it's not plug and play. There's so many micro decisions that you need to take along the process.

And I have worked in Chicago for a web agency that did the websites for Dior, Playboy, and big clients like that. And I know for a fact that there are big teams working on these websites.

And if you want to do it by yourself, it's never as easy as you think. Well, until now.

Cost and Accessibility of Website Development

So the cost of an actual website?

Oh, they end up going to agencies, so they get charged for development, designers, logos, photographers, copywriters, whatever you can think of. It turns out to be about, well, about 2,000 euro.

And so I teach them how to do it with the Shopify subscription, which is the minimum that we can get.

Showcasing Success

And I'm gonna show you an actual website of one of my clients that was made in seven hours. So this was really not possible before. Even with all the Wix and Shopify and whatever kind of platforms that you use, having a homepage like this in seven hours was impossible.

So I'm just showcasing it, and then I'm going to show you how you can do it yourself. And I'm going to try to do it in 15 minutes, so it's probably not going to be perfect, but as long as you get the gist of it, I think it's enough.

How do you like it? Do you like it? It's pretty nice, right?

All right.

Building A Website Using Shopify

So now I'm going to use Shopify for this. This is a completely test account, so it's completely empty.

The one thing I've done before the demo was to upload my logo just because I didn't want to waste any time.

Quick Steps to Setup

If you want to do a website real quick, you're going to download an app that's called Gem Pages Builder. It's magical.

So if you don't know how to do it, go to Apps and Sales and then Shopify App Store. It's like a marketplace. You download it. It takes 30 seconds to do. So I'm going to go there.

To be honest, I myself am terrible in design. I'm good in the technical part. I can do the coding. But I cannot do the design myself.

So what I usually do is I steal ideas. Does anyone steal good ideas? Yeah? All right.

So I steal good ideas, and I just make them mine, tweak them a little bit. It works. So that's exactly what we're going to do.

Leveraging Inspiration From Successful Brands

So one site that I really like that's Marie Forleo, that's a website that really converts. I know for a fact she's a super famous author. She has a very strong personal brand.

So I'm going to go back to Shopify pages. And I'm going to click on Create New Page. That's under Gem Pages, right?

So you can choose from templates, but we're going to do it from scratch. And so I'm going to click right here under Start with Generating from a URL.

I'm going to get the URL. And then I'm going to generate. So right now, it's analyzing the web page in real time.

And you're going to see what's going to happen. So there's some do's and don'ts on the right side. So if there's a lot of overlapping, it's going to have a hard time doing it. But if it's a clean page, there's no overlapping, it's probably going to be pretty much perfect.

And so as I'm doing this, I'm going to show you real quick. Whenever it comes to pages, you can generate whatever photos with AI and then just swap the face so it's you. And it works really, really well.

And this image actually is also generated by AI. You can do that with videos as well. I didn't know that, um, like a week ago.

And so I'm going to show you how, well, that, that tool, by the way, is completely free. You can just go, what is the website? We do it or something like that.

So you can do videos with face swap and photo face swap. So you can get free videos over the internet and just swap the faces. That's not necessary, but just in case you don't have it, right?

You can record yourself as well. That's OK. So that's the original video.

And that is the video with the face swap. One second. There you go. And I think it's close to perfect.

You can see some, you know. Some problems here and there, but we're going to fix them now. All right, so let's go back to Gem Pages.

Editing and Customizing the Website

There you go. So it's already scanned the page. And now you can choose the sections that you want to leave out or you want to keep working with, right?

So I'm going to just choose a few because we don't have all the time in the world. So we're going to do one, two, three, and four, for example. So I'm going to click on Generate.

With this tool, with Gem Pages, you can have one posted page, one published page for free. And then if you want to get more pages, then it's $29 per month, I think. So you can see I already have the overall structure of the website.

So what I'm left with is I just need to change the text and the pictures. And that's pretty much how I do most of the websites. So we can do it real quick right now.

This section, I'm going to remove the image. OK, and I'm going to put the video. So the video needs to have a hosting URL.

So to do that, you have to go under Shopify content files and then upload the video here. I've already done it, so it's going to give you a copy link here that you can plug in here. All right.

I did that almost 20 times today and it worked perfectly. I think the Wi-Fi is a little slow. But it's okay.

We'll do it. Don't worry about it. Could also be the internet speed. I think that's the problem, but I'm just going to do it from scratch.

All right, I'm going to do web hosting. There we go. And there's the video.

Then just to cover a little bit the defects, because there's a little bit of defect if you see around the nose, I'm just going to add some overlay just as it is in the design. Save. We can remove this because we're going to, I'm just going to follow the website that we had.

Oop, not this. All right. Can make it a bit bigger. You can play a lot with this, right?

It's probably not going to be perfect in 15 minutes, but at least. It's going to be close to perfect.

Now we need to change here. One second to find the color that I like. Love creates your Online brand. Style.

I love the color. I'm just improvising, right? So you just change whatever is yours.

You put your text, of course, right here. You can see there are some broken things, but at least it's leaving us the structure together.

So that was a form. We can plug a form. So this tool, it really has everything, right?

We can remove whatever we don't like. There's name, email. I'm going to do my brand color.

You want to reinforce your brand colors everywhere. Oh, not here. I wanted to do background. There we go.

You want to reinforce your brand colors everywhere where... You can, that's just from my experience building websites and you can do this and so on and so forth.

So we don't have the time to do everything, but I want to show you something else. Like if I come here, I'll remove part of this. Okay. And I'm just going to remove all right here.

Obviously, this section is broken, right? Like it's not working. Plus, that's some something like from a podcast. So all right, cool.

Using AI for Advanced Customization

Good enough. Now I'm going to go to chat GP team.

And I'm going to use the 401 model. And so I'm going to tell it, hey, can you create for me an HTML, CSS, JavaScript snippet that I can put on my website?

I have five podcast episodes that I want to list there. Just use my brand colors, FF1F85, and make it stylish and look good. And it needs to appeal to women from 25 to 55 years old that want to start their own brand.

I hope it works. No, it's going to work. I mean, I hope it works with the Wi-Fi here.

Oh, yeah. OK, cool. All right, let's wait a second.

It's a little slow, as you can see. Usually, it's much faster.

Oh, OK, let's use this. It's going to be better. That's the canvas, by the way.

Sorry for the language. She's going to write the code for us. And by the way, because it knows me, it knows the brand colors and everything, right?

So sometimes I don't even have to say. It knows my business, so...

The 401 model is the best for coding. I don't know if you guys are using it, but it's supposed to be the best, best.

Even if you get the GitHub copilot, it also uses the 4.1 model. So it gives you the CSS, JavaScript if needed. It knows the font and everything.

I'm really impressed you can speak to it. You didn't know? I'm dictating. With my accent, it doesn't work too well.

Fine-Tuning AI-Generated Outputs

All right. So I don't know if you know, but you can actually even see it in here. And so I don't really like it, but you can ask it to change everything, right?

But also, what you can do is you can just copy it. You can go back to the JamPages website. And then right here, we can drop a custom HTML, custom code section, edit code.

Final Steps

All right, save. Save. There it is. And that's pretty much it.