Let’s talk about how you can get better outcomes with AI.

Recently, we talked about how you can use ChatGPT and other AI tools to streamline your work. In this episode of Art of Online Business, I’m sharing some of my best prompting tips to get what you want from AI. So basically, I’m sharing how to ask ChatGPT to get what you’re looking for.

I’ve said it before, but AI can have a huge impact on your business and give you so much time back if you use it correctly, and it all starts with how you prompt it.

The results you get will be dependent on how you ask and how much detail you give it. These tips will help you determine what details you need to include for the best results.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to teach ChatGPT your writing style 
• Why more details will improve your results 
• How to ask ChatGPT to help you solve a problem
• Ways to use it to help with your business and how to ask for it
• The pitfalls to avoid when prompting ChatGPT

Links & Resources:

• The Art of Online Business website
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!

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Time-Saving Content Creation: How to Use ChatGPT and AI Tools for Faster Production

Ask Rick: As the CEO, Do I Have to Make ALL the Decisions?

A Bestseller in the Making: Secrets to Publishing Your First Book | w/Jamie Sears

And what's up, my friends? Welcome to. 

Today's episode. Today's episode number 695. And I can't believe when I just say that out loud. It's I mean, we're close to 700 episodes here in a couple of weeks, which just blows my mind. Over 10 million downloads to date. I think we're I think we're near 10.5 million downloads of the show, which is just blows my mind. And if I don't tell you enough, thank you for, you know, when you subscribe to the show and you come in and listen each and every week and then hit me up with questions or updates on what you're doing with the information that you learn here on the show.

It means the world. And it's exactly why I do the podcast here. So thank you. On today's episode of of the show on Wednesday, we talked about using Chatgpt and other tools for content creation, like how to streamline and speed up that whole process to create content. Today I specifically want to dive into prompting tips for Chatgpt prompts, if you haven't heard that term yet, is just is simply what you type into the input field in Chatgpt to try to get a result. Whether that is, I don't know, an email or a blog post or outline or a title or whatever it is, that's a prompt. And so I want to share with you how to navigate your way to getting better outcomes, better results from what you're typing in and hoping to get out of Chatgpt. 

And so as we dive into it here, depending on the kind of output that you are looking for. From Chatgpt. I will often try and teach it my writing style and tone as the first thing that I do. And I did talk about this a bit on Wednesday's episode. There's a really easy way to do this. If you have a podcast, if you have videos, whether they're YouTube videos or social media videos or what have you, if you've got a blog post, if you've got an email or to write, transcribe a podcast episode, transcribe a video, whatever it is that you've done, take the blog post or an email and you don't have to do all of these.

Let's take one of these and copy and paste it into chatgpt. Then after that, the prompt that you're going to put into Chatgpt is you're going to ask it to analyze the above text for writing style and tone of voice. And then you hit enter and it's going to analyze it in a matter of seconds and it's going to give you an output and it's pretty cool. It'll give you a paragraph usually of the tone of voice and the writing style and and so on. And if you're pretty happy with what it tells you, what you then can say is, okay, now write all of the results in this style and tone from here on out. 

So now you're telling it to take this tone and style of speaking that it is just analyzed and is giving you the result of now you're telling it. Okay, use that in everything we're doing here going forward within this chat, then you can get into the prompt. So basically we've kind of primed Chatgpt in the way that it's going to write for you. Now if you're just asking for a podcast title or an email subject line, you don't really need to do that, right?

You can give it a tone of voice like friendly or conversational, but if you're going to ask it to write you an email or a blog post or an email sequence or a social media post or whatever it might be. I would kind of sort of tune it, if you will, to get your tone of voice and your style down. Then it will write everything that you're asking it to do in that tone of voice and style. Once you've done that, then I recommend telling it what role you want it to play. So you can say you are a and then fill in the blank. Or I want you to act as a fill in the blank, right? So you can say, I want you to I want you to play a or I want you to be a content marketer. I want you to act as a marketing genius. I want you to act as a human resources expert. 

You are a CMO, you're an expert, Facebook ads manager, you're a conversion copywriter. You're a best selling author, you're a project manager. You are blah, blah, blah. Like you just fill in the blank, whatever it is that you want it to do, tell it what you want it to act like. So now, not only is it going to give you results in your writing style, but now you are telling it how from which context, right? You want to give it the intent. For the results that you're hoping to get out of it. And so if you just if you just give it, you know, write me this, it will do it for you. But you're going to get a better outcome when you start this out by telling Chatgpt who you want it to be or how you act as a.

Okay, So once you've done that, then you say at that point I like to give Chatgpt as much background information as possible about my target audience. Okay. And so the more information that you have here and the detail that you have here, the better. Tell Chatgpt specifically who your target audience is, what their pain points are, what their struggles are, what their values that are most important to them. What's the outcome that they are after, right? What are their goals? What are their aspirations? The more detailed that you can be here, the better result that you're going to get from whatever it is that you're asking Chatgpt to do.

I think I mentioned this in the last episode. A buddy of mine put in a thousand word description of the program that they were, you know, to give context, which we'll talk more about here in a second. And the target audience like that's a huge amount of text, right? But it was so detailed that the response that it gave, like the output that came from the prompt was so spot on that it was the result of being so detailed in the target audience and also giving chatgpt context for what you're asking for. Again, more about that in just a second. So for me, just this is just kind of like a working target audience Paste in. So I say paste in because I've written this and I keep it in notion, and I also have created a shortcut for it. And so I use a tool called What is this tool called? Alfred? It's Alfred, it's on my Mac.

And so it's got what they call snippets. It's basically text expander. And so I just hit colon P on my keyboard and it auto populates this whole what I'm about to read to you. So again, so you don't have to rewrite the whole thing every time. Now, this is going to be really hard for, for all of you who do not fully understand your target audience. 

And so this is something that this is another example where you've just got to understand your target audience and what their pain points and challenges are, because a tool like Chatgpt, when you're asking it to do the things that we're about to that we're talking about here today are it's not going to give you the results that you want when you can't even explain your target audience and their pain points and challenges and, you know, aspirations and so forth. So I'm always talking about the fundamentals. This is another 

example where you've got to know this information about it's your business, right? And so what I like to write in for my target audience. And so I'm telling Chatgpt right? So I would say you are a whatever conversion copywriter your audience is online course creators, online business owners with memberships and online coaches. These online business owners have been in business for at least two years. They're generating over $100,000 in revenue per year, and most have small teams.

They tend to struggle with things like working too much hiring, managing a team, clarity on what to focus on, to grow their business marketing strategies and how to create consistent and predictable revenue. They have strong values that are important to their business and those that they tend to learn from. So that's sort of like my working target audience. Could I go into a lot more detail? Absolutely I could. 

So that's one example of the detail of a target audience. Now, I asked Chatgpt to come up with the type of detail. All that would be helpful within a target audience for when you're doing a prompt. Like basically I'm asking Chatgpt how can I best use you in terms of or use it right, in terms of target audience Right. So my prompt was when it comes to describing my target audience to give Chatgpt context for a marketing prompt, I'm about to input What are best practices for the level of audience detail that will offer me the best results from my prompt? I basically just made that up because I'm, you know, like that's one of the beauties of Chatgpt is you can ask it to help you figure out a problem when you don't know how to prompt it to do something, ask, ask it to help you. Ask it to tell you what the prompt would be.

And that's kind of what I did here in a sense of I wanted to see what Chatgpt told me in terms of what's what level of detail should I include in my target audience to get or to add as context when I have an input prompt for a, you know, for a marketing exercise or something like that? Right. And so it listed me seven different things and then it just wrote me, Here's an example. 

It said Target audience Female entrepreneurs aged 25 to 45 living in urban areas within the US with a college education and annual income of 50 to $100,000. So basic demographic information. Then it gets more into sort of like the psychographic, right? Their ambitious value work life balance and are interested in personal growth and productivity. They mainly use Instagram and Facebook for networking and inspiration.

Their pain points include time management and finding effective tools to grow their business. They aspire to scale their ventures while maintaining personal well-being. Preferred communication tone is empowering, friendly and informative. So that's the example that Chatgpt gave me. You can see here that it follows the type of format that I just mentioned. And so what it will do with this information is now you're giving it context, further context for what you're about to ask it, right? We haven't even asked it for anything yet. We've just sort of primed chatgpt at this point with, you know, tone of voice and writing style, telling it who you want it to be again, you know, a content marketer, a human resources expert, whatever. And then then you're giving it context as to the target audience. Okay. So now that you've given that information, depending on what you want it, what you're going to ask it for, you can either go right into the ask or you want to put additional context into like your program or your course. 

Because if you're going to ask it to write an email sequence consisting of five emails to promote, you know, my new program called blah, blah, blah, you've got to give context to chatgpt of what the program is, what it's about, who it's for. Et cetera. Right. Now, again, if you're just doing. If you just trying to ideate and come up with ideas for podcast titles or email subject lines or video titles or what have you, you really don't need to go through all of this, you know, with a target audience and such. You know, it could help, but you could literally go right into one that I use is I'll say you're the number one podcaster in the world. I would give an audience and then I would ask it like, please come up with 15 different episode title variations that would make people want to listen based on. And then I would give it, you know, what the episode is about right now. You could also do that with you could paste a transcript into chatgpt, depending on the length, and you could say come up with 15 title variations based on the transcript.

That's all you, that's all you have to do. But the example I wanted to I'm taking through here is we're going more in depth because this is really how you can do some really cool things with with the tool. Like you can write an entire email marketing sequence.

So for example, all right, we've gone through all the, you know, the the priming, if you will. Now we can say, here's an example. Write in the email marketing sequence consisting of five emails to promote, promote my new program, blah, blah, blah. And you've already given it context about the program. Another example, you can tell it what to do. Draft an email to promote a limited time discount for my coaching program. Again, you you would want to give in context about the program already you could tell it to create a task list. I want you to create a task list for my team to prepare for an upcoming webinar. And then again, you could give it some additional context there. I'll be doing the webinar on Zoom and people are going to be registering for it on a registration page. Et Cetera. And then it will literally and then you can tell it how you want the results to look. Meaning if you want it in a in a list, like a numbered list, it will give you the result in a numbered list. If you want it in bullet points, tell it like you want it. Tell it that you want it in bullet points.

If you want to create results in a table format that you could literally take and copy and paste, for example, into Google sheets or what have you, tell it that you want it, that it will produce those results in that format, right? You could have it generate a creative social media calendar for the next month. 

Again, give it some context as to what you want to be focusing on for the month. Again, audience context. Et cetera and have it give you the results in a table. It will do that. You can use Chatgpt in terms of writing ing, customer support emails back to people who have written. You could say, respond to a customer who's asking for a refund for my program that is beyond the 14 day refund policy. You know, that's a common one, right? Like people say, how do I respond to that? Ask Chatgpt to come up with. You could say come up with, generate three options for emails. You could ask it to suggest five engaging questions to spark conversation in my membership. Like if you want. If your goal is to increase engagement.

As she asked Chatgpt for ideas, again, you'd want to add context as to the membership and the type of students that you have in the in the membership if you have FAQs, right? So you could say write a concise answer for a frequently asked question about my online course pricing structure. And that's these last couple are examples, right from chatgpt. And then of course, again, sound like a broken record here, but when you're asking for. Results in. If you're trying to get a result or an outcome with this type of input, you've got to give it more context, the better about your audience, about your the course pricing in that last example or what have you. 

Right. The next one and want to give credit to Debbie Sassari, where I found this one online and I really liked it. And so this is an example that they wrote, I want you to act as a social media manager. Okay. So there it is, like you're telling it how you want it to act. You'll be responsible for developing and executing campaigns across all relevant platforms. Engage with the audience by responding to questions and comments, monitor conversations through community management tools, use analytics to measure success, create engaging content, and update regularly.

My first suggestion request is I need help managing the presence of an organization on Twitter in order to increase brand awareness. Now that is pretty high level, right? Meaning like it's asking for a lot of amazing things. So you'd put that in there and see what it comes up with. I'll almost guarantee you you're going to be very surprised at what it comes up with. Here's another example, and I got this one from Neat prompts.com, which gives you prompt examples for different types of things. So let's just say you wanted to write a YouTube video script. And so right here it's the prompt example was generate a seven minute video script for a YouTube video about our newest and you fill in the blank, you know, product or program and you would want to put the description of said product or program and the target audience, right? So you basically just fill in the blank now and then you could see what it does right? At that point. 

What I would do with this is I would go a little bit more in depth on this. I would say, you know, you are the number one YouTuber in the world with hundreds of millions of subscribers. Please write. I'm always I'm always very cordial with Chatgpt. I'm always saying please and thank you. I would say, please write a seven minute video script for a YouTube video about, you know, fill in the blank, right? And then you would give it the audience. So that's how to kind of how I would alter that one a little bit.

Now, if you're writing emails, if you're asking it to write emails, and again, a lot of people don't realize this, but yeah, of course you can have Chatgpt write you an email, but you can also write it, have it, write you a whole email sequence, like a five email sequence like I talked about before. And so if you're doing something like that, you can even tell it to how you like the emails to feel, maybe what kind of format that you'd like to see, the emails in. 

Like you want to include bullet points in emails or emojis or paragraphs that are no longer than three sentences or something like that, whatever it is that you like to do. Chatgpt can even consider gender neutral language if you tell it to. So again, these are just more examples of the more input that you can give it, the the better the outcome is that you are hoping for. So if another example is if you want these emails to to go to people who have just joined your email list and they know nothing about you or your program, they're basically cold traffic. Tell Chatgpt that and it will write the emails with that in mind.

All right. So now that you've gone through all that, you've put your prompt in, tell it what you want it to do. You sit back and you watch the results get produced right before your eyes in a matter of seconds. And if you like the results that you see, amazing. Awesome. If there are changes that you like to see made to any or all of the emails. In this hypothetical example, I'm sharing. Okay, cool. Tell chatgpt what those changes are that you want to see made. Let's just say that you you have it. Write a five email sequence and you like emails one through four, but you really didn't like email Number five. You could say this is how I would respond.

Great, Thanks. Please. And then you could say, you know, edit or please rewrite or please add in or please go more in depth or what have you on email number five. And it will go right. It will look at email number five that it wrote and only deal with that one because you've just told it to. Right. And if you also want to get even more specific with it, if you want your emails to be no longer than let's just say, I don't know, 400 words, tell it that it will write emails for you that are no longer than 400 words.

If you want 750 word emails, tell it that you can do all these things and it will. The output that it will give you will be a result of what you're asking it to do. Now, once you get your outcome to, you're like, I really like this. I'm going to use this. Remember, as I mentioned last episode, you're not just copying and pasting it into whatever your email, CRM or in your on your blog, on your website or whatever. Right. Take it as Okay, cool. This is really good. Now, I might shift a few things around. I'm going to add my own personality and some stories to it, and then I'm going to use it right. This this should not be a cool dig it. Copy paste. Boom. Done. This is to really get you started. 

Maybe to get you to like 80% or 75%. And then you're doing the rest with your own personality, with your own personal touch and stories. Et cetera. Okay. Now, with that, the last thing I want to share is I asked Chatgpt what are some common pitfalls to avoid when crafting prompts? I asked itself. I asked it to tell me what are some common pitfalls when giving it prompts. And so here are the. It gave me five different pitfalls. Number one, vague or ambiguous prompts. It says Chatgpt may not provide useful responses if the prompts are unclear or lack context. Be specific about what you want and provide any necessary context or background information.

We talked a lot about that here today. Number two was overloading the prompt avoid including too much information or too many requests in a single prompt break down complex tasks into smaller, manageable parts and submit separate prompts for each part. Now, you could try. You might you might not know that something is too complex that you've put in there. Right? Well, you'll know when you get the when the output comes out, when you get the outcome that's typed in front of you, you'll you'll see it like, do you like it or not? And so if you're not liking it, if it's way off base, this is something that you might want to try, like breaking it down and breaking it into smaller, more manageable parts and then separating and doing those prompts separately for each one of those things. 

The third common pitfall in the in the prompts is neglecting to set the format. So meaning if you have a specific format in mind for the response, make sure to mention it. In the prompt. For example, if you want a list or a step by step guide or you want a table or this output is going to be a blog post or this is a LinkedIn post, whatever, like tell it that because it's going to help give you the output in the kind of format that you're looking for. The fourth common pitfall in prompting is using negative phrasing, and it says Chatgpt can sometimes focus on the negative aspect of a question rather than providing a helpful response. So instead of asking what not to do, ask for suggestions on what to do. I thought that was really interesting.

And then the last common pitfall that Chatgpt gave about too prompting itself, it says assuming prior knowledge and it says Chatgpt doesn't know the specifics of your business past conversations or personal preferences unless you provide the information in the prompt, ensure you include any relevant details to get a more accurate response. Now, this is exactly what we're talking about here today. Now, remember, when you're with within a chat, you've opened up a chat, you know, on the left hand column there, all the information that you are putting in and it's it's giving you within the chat. 

It's learning from itself within that chat. So you don't have to keep, you know, putting the target audience in or you don't have to keep putting in the transcript, for example, to learn your writing style. You can just do that once and then everything from there on out. Chatgpt is taking those things into account and learning from itself as it goes, right? And the final thing that Chatgpt said is, is expecting perfect results is another common pitfall.

Chatgpt is an is an AI language model, and it may not always generate perfect answers or content. Be prepared to refine and iterate on the outputs to get the best results. Okay, so remember that this technology is changing on a daily. It's changing so incredibly fast. So as I mentioned at the top of the episode here, and I'll just recap here in just one second for you, what we talked about today. Continue to educate yourself, continue to educate yourself on the terminology, on, you know, the major tools. There's tons and tons of new tools that are coming out every single day. It is hard to keep up with, continue to educate yourself, continue to keep testing different prompts and different ways to prompt in a tool like Chatgpt or or a tool like Claude, which is a quote unquote competing tool similar to Chatgpt continue different ways of testing, different prompts and how you prompt it and then refining the prompts to help you get to the results that are most helpful for you. 

It's just going to be you getting in there and playing around with it because again, the results that you can get are just amazing from when you were putting the right kinds of prompts in to get a specific outcome. Okay. And so let me just recap here real quick. I know I've just I've just taken you through a lot of different stuff. So if you if you want it to write anything, any kind of written content outside 

of like an email subject line or a video title or, you know, something like that, I would teach it your tone of voice. You want it to give you the outcomes in your tone of voice. So, you know, paste in a blog post, paste in an email, transcribe a podcast episode or a video and ask it to analyze it for your tone of voice and style. And then if you feel pretty comfortable with those results, then you can say, All right, great. Please answer. Please make sure all outcomes, all proceeding outcomes are in that writing style and tone of voice. Okay? Then you can start to get into the prompt itself, tell it what role you want it to play, tell it how you want it to act, tell it who you want it to act as.

And then from there, this is where you're giving it as much background and context as possible. Go into a very detailed description of your target audience. If you want something done about a program or a course that you have or a client or whatever it is. You're going to have to tell GPT about that program, about that course, about that membership, specifically about said client or or what have you. So you're going to need to do that. And then you can go into. All right, please, please generate an email marketing sequence consisting of five emails to promote my new program or create a task list for an upcoming webinar. You know, stuff like that.

That's where you get into telling it what you want it to do. And again, be specific with the the, the kind of output that you want it to or the format, I should say, for the output in a table, in a list and an outline and bullet points. No more than 500 words, whatever it is. Just be specific with that. And the more specific that you are, the better the results that you're going to get. You can tell it how you want it, like emails to feel or social media captions to feel. You can tell chatgpt to consider gender neutral language and it will do that in the outputs that it's giving you. Okay. And then once you've done that, it kicks out the gives you the outcome. 

You get to see like, all right, I really like that, or let's make some changes to it, and then you can start to reprompt and make changes to it. Now, again, you don't have to reenter in your target audience and the context of the program, if that's what it's about, you just give it specific instructions to make changes and tell it what kind of changes that you want to a specific piece or what have you. Right. And then and then lastly, remember, we're not just copying and pasting. This is kind of getting you like 75, 80% there and then you're adding your own personality and story to it before using it. Right?

Then we went through all the pitfalls and so forth. So I hope this was helpful for you. I love talking about this stuff. Every time I use Chatgpt and these other tools, I am just blown away at the possibilities of what this can do for our business and helping us streamline so many things that we do. And I think it's really exciting. So any questions? Feel free to shoot me a DM over on Instagram at Rick Mulready. Thank you as always for listening. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast here. Also, I've got a pretty big announcement, big, big announcement coming your way in two episodes, so next Friday. So make sure to stay tuned. Thank you, my friend, as always, for tuning in today. Appreciate you. Until next time, be well. Chat with you soon.