5 Creative Ways to Utilize ChatGPT to Write Content for Your Website
ChatGPT was all the hype when it first came out exactly one year ago today on November 30th, 2022. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found ChatGPT to be useful sometimes, but not always. After utilizing it a few times, ChatGPT’s writing started to seem a little generic, repetitive, and just not as authentic as something that I would actually write myself. So I put it away and stopped using it for a while— except for times when I had writer’s block and desperately needed ChatGPT’s help to generate quick ideas and get my creative momentum flowing again.
Months later, after chatting about ChatGPT with some friends and colleagues, I discovered a few techniques that have made this technology way more supportive to my needs. What I’ve come to realize is that ChatGPT is incredibly powerful and accurate most of the time— you just need to tell it the right commands so that it can customize its response to your particular needs.
Lately, I’ve been utilizing ChatGPT A LOT– especially in situations where my clients don’t have content written for their website yet. One of my clients even sent me voice-to-text messages for their website’s About page, and ChatGPT cleaned it right up and made it sound super professional and cohesive, which saved me and my client hours of stress and time. Of course, I always review and revise ChatGPT’s writing thoroughly before adding it to a client’s website. But starting with ChatGPT (instead of writing everything from scratch) has been a huge game-changer for my workflow because it has helped me generate ideas and write good-quality content super fast.
So, I wanted to write this blog post for those of you who may have given ChatGPT a chance but weren’t super thrilled by your results at first. By sharing these 5 powerful techniques that I’ve discovered along my ChatGPT and AI journey this past year, I hope you’ll find this information helpful and consider giving this technology second chance.
Tip #1 — Write to ChatGPT as if it were a friend, coworker, or team member of yours.
This tip literally changed the game for me. If you start treating ChatGPT like a friend or a personal assistant that you’re talking to and collaborating with, I guarantee it will produce better results for you. Why? Because it’s a back-and-forth conversation, instead of AI technology spitting out generic results.
Here’s an example and some screenshots of an experiment that I did to prove this:
Instead of typing into ChatGPT something like, “Write a paragraph for the call to action on the home page of my website.” I recommend saying something like, “Hi Chat GPT! It's me again :) I would love your help writing a paragraph for the call to action on the home page of my website.”
Check out these completely different results below! In the first example, ChatGPT provided a generic response for the call to action paragraph. It’s a good starting point, but it’s not specific to any particular website or topic. In the second example where I spoke to ChatGPT like a human, it replied with a series of questions to help customize its response and make it more accurate for me.
Furthermore, here’s what happened when I wrote back to ChatGPT with more information about my business and my main call to action. Although I may not want to keep 100% of the writing that it came up with, it’s much more friendly, welcoming, and specific to my industry and brand. The emojis and hashtags that it came up with are a nice touch too. ✨
I know it may seem a little weird to talk to your computer like a human, but trust me, once you start doing it, it will feel more natural— and even sometimes fun. I’ve found ChatGPT to be pretty clever, witty, and even a little sassy at times too, depending on how I write my messages to it. Just make sure to say, “Thank you,” and give it any feedback or corrections along the way, so that it knows it’s doing a good job.
Tip #2 — Ask ChatGPT to ask you questions to help narrow down the results.
Tip #2 goes along with something I mentioned briefly in tip #1, which is having ChatGPT ask you questions. Think of it this way: If you hired a personal assistant to help write content for your website, you’d probably give them a pretty detailed prompt to make sure that they knew exactly what topic to write about, and what details to include. The same concept applies to ChatGPT. Before you ask it to write anything for you, I recommend typing in something like, “Hi ChatGPT, I need your help writing a (type of content) all about (topic). Can you please ask me 10 questions to help you write your response as accurately as possible?”
10 questions that ChatGPT might ask in order to help narrow down the results could be:
What is the main purpose or goal of the content you're working on?
Who is your target audience? Can you describe their characteristics and interests?
What key message or information do you want your audience to take away from your content?
Are there any specific sources or references you would like to be incorporated into your content?
What tone or writing style do you envision for your content? Formal, informal, conversational, technical, etc.?
Do you have any specific keywords or phrases that you would like to be included for SEO purposes?
Are there any guidelines or specifications you need to follow regarding the length of the content?
Do you have a preferred structure for your content, such as an introduction, main points, and conclusion?
Are there any potential challenges or objections your audience might have, and how would you like these addressed in the content?
Is there a specific deadline for the completion of this content?
While responding to ChatGPT’s questions may require extra time and effort up-front, it’s totally worth it in the long run because you won’t need to spend as much time reviewing and editing the content that it generates.
Tip #3 — Include example text that ChatGPT can utilize to write its content in a similar style to yours.
If you’ve started applying tips #1 and #2 to your ChatGPT workflow, but you’re still not super impressed by the results, try copying and pasting some example text that shows your writing style so that ChatGPT can write its response in a similar way. A few ideas for types of content that you can copy and paste into ChatGPT are:
Paragraphs from your website
Social media posts
Email marketing campaigns
Emails you’ve written to clients
Transcripts from your YouTube videos
If you don’t particularly like your writing style and want ChatGPT to emulate a different style, you can copy and paste another piece of writing into ChatGPT and ask it to write your content in a similar style. Alternatively, you can tell ChatGPT to write your content in a different tone, such as in a more formal, friendly, or playful way.
Tip #4 — Ask ChatGPT to write a list of content topics and ideas for you.
If you’re a fan of content batching and like to plan your marketing content weeks in advance, ChatGPT will be your best friend and personal sidekick for this! Simply ask it to write as many topic ideas as you want for social media posts, blog posts, YouTube videos, marketing emails, etc, etc.
Just remember, the more details you give it, the more thorough the results will be. Then, when you’re ready to write the actual content for each of those items, you can utilize ChatGPT if needed too.
Tip #5 — Have ChatGPT write SEO-optimized blog posts, titles, and descriptions for your website.
Now that we’ve covered the 4 tips above, the final tip that I’d like to include here (that you might not know about) is that ChatGPT can help you write SEO-optimized blog posts, titles, and descriptions for your website. If you have certain search keywords for your business, such as “Women’s Business Coach” or “Mindset Coaching for Six-Figure Entrepreneurs,” you can tell ChatGPT to write (or re-write) your blog post content, titles, and descriptions so that they’re more SEO-optimized for those keywords.
To do that, ChatGPT might reorder your your blog post’s wording so that it is in alignment with good SEO principles. It also might structure your writing in a way that calls attention to your particular search keywords more. Just be careful not to over-rely on ChatGPT for all of your blog posts and content writing. Ultimately, Google likes to rank original content higher in the search results, so if most of your writing is generated by ChatGPT, it’s probably not going to perform super well.
SEO in relation to ChatGPT is a super deep and nuanced topic. If there are any particular aspects of this blog post that you want to explore deeper, I recommend doing a quick search on Google or YouTube, as there are a lot of free resources out there to help.
So, as the world celebrates the 1-year anniversary of ChatGPT, it's pretty remarkable to reflect on how this tool has seamlessly integrated into my workflow and felt more like a human than technology most of the time. I’m curious to know how you’ve personally adapted ChatGPT into your workflow! If you have any creative and interesting ways that you’ve utilized ChatGPT this past year, feel free to comment below so that we can all learn and grow together!
As always, I’m here if you ever want to chat more!
Alyssa Parr
Squarespace Expert & CEO of Luminescent Dreams
👩💻 Hire me to build or edit your website: VIP Days | Custom Web Design
alyssa@luminescentdreams.com
