ChatGPT, the language model developed by OpenAI, is a powerful tool that can speed up your writing process and help you create content quickly and easily.

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for a few months now and starting to learn better ways of using it in my daily workflow.

If you aren’t sure what ChatGPT is and want some ideas for how to use it in your interior design business then check out this blog post first :)

But I still hear ‘complaints’ from people that the information that ChatGPT spits out is very surface level or not that helpful but I find that you need to be clever about how you use it and the prompts you give it.

If you give it boring prompts, you’ll get boring responses.

But if you are clever about what you ask it, you’ll get much better answers.

Here are 7 tricks to help you create better content using ChatGPT.

1: Update and improve old content

One way I’ve been using ChatGPT is to update and improve old content in my back catalogue. I find this has been really helpful given that I’ve been writing on my blog for many years now and have a backlog of older posts that could do with a refresh.

The way I’ve been doing this is to go through some of my old blog posts and rework them to make them more engaging, relevant and up to date.

To do this I plug in ideas from the post that I might want to expand on or just copy in the entire blog post and see what else ChatGPT suggests I add in. It normally comes up with new ideas I haven’t thought of that I can then use to expand or update the post.

This is is a great way to create a brand new piece of content in a fraction of the time it would take to write it from scratch.

Another way I’ve been using it is to improve old blog post titles.

Titles are normally the first thing that readers see and some of my older blog post titles were pretty average! So I’ve asked ChatGPT to write different ideas to help give me other ways to phrase things.

I don’t often then use any of these titles exactly as written (as some of them are pretty cringe!) but I do find I can mix and match some of the ideas to improve a title I’ve come up with myself.

2: Improve your storytelling

One of my goals for 2023 is to get better at storytelling and to weave more of this into what I’m doing and creating.

Storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool for connecting with people and making your content more engaging. The human brain is wired to respond to stories so using stories to illustrate points can make them more memorable and impactful.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to find stories about people that can help illustrate different ideas in the content I’ve been creating.

For example, I was writing a blog post about impostor syndrome and wanted to illustrate the point with a real life story. So I asked ChatGPT to find stories about people who have experienced impostor syndrome and used their experiences to illustrate the points I was trying to make.

You can see how that turned out in THIS BLOG POST if you’re interested.

Here is the conversation I was having with ChatGPT as I was writing this post:

3: Improve your writing

I’ve also been using ChatGPT to improve my writing.

I don’t tend to use the suggestions it gives me word for word, but I do find it gives me new ideas and inspiration for how to write in a clearer, more concise and more engaging way.

Here are a few ways I’ve been using it:

asking it to summarise what I’ve written - e.g. if I have a long piece of content I ask it to summarise it into a few concise sentences. This can help me see whether my writing is clear and it can pull out the key ideas
asking it for alternate phrasing if I’m struggling to find the right words
asking it to improve passages I’ve written but to still write them in the same ‘voice’ as what I’ve written (which I tend to find is a good trick to get it write more like I do rather than like a robot!)
asking it to help me write in different styles - e.g. can you write this in a more persuasive style, or can you rewrite this in a more imaginative way. Again, often it spits out something that is a little odd or doesn’t sound like me, but I’ll then use the new ideas and adapt them myself.

4: Alternative perspectives or ideas

Another way to find better ideas about a topic is to ask ChatGPT for alternative perspectives or for things people may not have thought of.

This way you can find out what alternate views might be about a topic, which can make you think about it in a different way and therefore make the information more interesting and engaging for your reader.

Here are some examples of the types of questions I have been using to generate more interesting angles on topics:

What are the fears, frustrations, goals and aspirations of NICHE?
What’s an alternate view about this?
What are some typical assumptions that could be challenged here?
Give me the thing nobody thinks about here?
What are the pros and cons about this topic?
What might I not think of here?
What’s something lots of people think but might not be the case?
What are some uncommon answers to this question?

5: For content repurposing

Content repurposing is the process of taking existing content and reusing it in different ways to reach new audiences or to give a fresh spin to an old topic.

If you want lots of ideas for how to do this then make sure to read this blog post next

Here are some of the ways I’ve been using ChatGPT to help with content repurposing:

come up with new, updated versions of popular blog posts I’ve written
summarise blog topics so I can create Instagram carousels
create new blog posts titles
write Instagram captions based on information I feed it
create new product descriptions for my online courses shop
create video scripts from blog posts I’ve written
update my email templates for FAQs I get asked in email
brainstorm new topic ideas or blog post series ideas that I can add to my content calendar
write better intros and hooks for content I’ve already created
quickly turn blog posts into Twitter threads
turning content into Facebook or Instagram ads
using it to expand on ideas I’ve already written to create new lead magnets

6: Summarising chats

Often I can spend quite some time chatting with ChatGPT about a specific topic so we then have this huge conversation with heaps of different ideas and information in it.

So I often then ask ChatGPT to summarise what we have been talking about in the chat so I have a bit of a summary of that.

I do try to give it clear parameters when I do this, as I have found this gets better results.

Here’s an example:

7: Writing in someone else’s voice

I have also used it to brainstorm ideas in the voice of another creator.

Sometimes this can be helpful to get out of a creative rut and generate ideas in a style or tone that is different from my own or when I’m looking to add a fresh spin on my content.

Here’s an example:

Remember ChatGPT is a tool to use for brainstorming ideas, not really for writing full content for you. The ideas it provides should be a starting point and you should always put your own spin on them.

It will be really obvious to someone reading a post if it’s been written entirely by ChatGPT, so use some of the ideas I’ve shared here to improve what ChatGPT gives you, but always put things in your own words and expand your writing with your own ideas and stories.

Thanks for reading and catch you in my next post :)

Clare x

Dr Clare Le Roy

PS: If you enjoyed this then don’t forget to follow me @thelittledesigncorner for my daily tips on growing a profitable design or architecture business.

Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects

DO YOU WANT TO….

Improve your professionalism?
Find more clients?
Bring in more revenue?
Create better systems and processes?

Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.

These courses and templates leave you with work done - not just a long list of things you need to do next. We have a really strong focus on taking action and getting things created that improve your business.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MY COURSES FOR DESIGNERS

7 Tricks for Better Content Creation using ChatGPT