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NotebookLM test result

This started as one of those wake up at 4am, toss and turn for an hour, get up at 5am mornings.

The previous day I'd seen a post on LinkedIn from my friend Louise explaining she was making her renowned influencing skills course available via remote access for the first time. I've been delivering remote workshops like that since before the pandemic lockdowns.

The thing on my mind was whether or not I could make those workshops available as self-paced courses. So, in the morning gloom I decided to see what Perplexity could do with a slide deck from a workshop I'd designed and delivered: building a productive network.

I started by asking it to create a script for me. Approximately 3 minutes per slide. The result was amazing. To give you some idea how good it was:

“Let’s move from the theory of referrals into the practice of nurturing a network over time.

Most people treat networking as a one-off event: conferences, breakfasts, LinkedIn sprints. You meet, you connect, you feel good for a week… and then nothing happens.​

What I’m interested in is a quieter, more deliberate approach: a relationship system that compounds over quarters and years.

There are four moves here.

First, you kick off with impact. When you meet someone you genuinely want in your network, don’t just send the generic ‘great to meet you’ note. Do something that makes you memorable and useful early – share an insight, connect them with someone, or send a small, thoughtful follow-up.

Second, you schedule touch points. Don’t leave it to chance...

Then I thought about whether I could get AI to do a voice over for the slides - in my voice. I found ElevenLabs voice cloning, which I am going to try.

Meanwhile, in the midst of doing this I spoke to my friend Dean in Australia. He reminded me about Google's NotebookLM ai app.

I'd used this before, just after it as launched. So I decided to try it again and feed in workshop material I'd previously published in three newsletters.

This is where it got interesting.

Within 30 minutes (yes 30 minutes) NotebookLM transformed the three newsletters workshop into:

• A fully narrated podcast episode
• An explainer video
• A fresh slide deck
• An infographic

I'm not suggesting for a moment the content is perfect. Some of it is out of date now and I have a more advanced technique for outreach. But it's still pretty good and more importantly 80% is useful

Here it is for you to judge for yourself:

The_Outreach_Playbook
The_Outreach_Playbook.pdf
10 MB
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Exactly how did I do this?

This is the process I used and timings:

  1. Selected the text from the workshop content and images. Cut and paste these into NotebookLM. (2 minutes)
  2. Select NotebookLM Studio>Audio and created the podcast style audio. I used the two hosts, deep dive format. (3 minutes)
  3. Select NotebookLM Studio>Slide Deck; Studio>Infographic and Studio>Video because at this point I realised it's possible to run multiple request simultaneously. (10 minutes)
  4. Downloaded all the files from NotebookLM. (2 minutes)
  5. Posted the Audio onto my Soundcloud account and the Video to my Vimeo account. (10 minutes)
  6. Pasted the links to the recordings on Soundcloud and Vimeo here, along with uploading the slides and infographic. (3 minutes)
  7. Finished.

This would not have been possible if I hadn't already generated the newsletter content. But in terms of value add and accessibility for people it made it easy to add value.

What material do you have that's worth putting through the same process?