Preliminary Prompt Process
If you’ve been trying to make the most of using artificial intelligence (AI) tools for your content development as a niche marketer, and coming up short – it could be how you’re preparing for the prompt process.
Or rather, the way you’re not preparing. Before you log onto your favorite AI tool, there are some preliminary things you can do that will make the process go faster, smoother, and ultimately easier for you.
AI isn’t a mind reader. When you ask it to create content, it doesn’t know your niche, purpose, target audience, style – or any other details that might separate you from the vast number of competitors using it to create content.
All it knows is that it has access to databases that train it and that training might not align with your request. Specifics matter when prompting, and unless you want to be tied to AI for hours after the output is delivered, struggling to clean up whatever it’s produced, you’ll want to learn some preliminary steps that ensure a seamless process.
Have a Niche and Audience Profile Ready
If you are working with AI tools regularly to create content for your niche audience, you need to have a profile ready that explains your niche and one or more segments of your target audience each time you begin to work on a new project.
You can’t just tell AI that you are in the weight loss niche and you want an article for your blog. That is too broad and generic for it to do a good job. Instead, you want to have taken the steps to write out a comprehensive profile that includes the topics you cover under the main umbrella of your niche content, and details about the demographic audience(s) that you serve.
For your niche profile, you might want to define the broad topic you cover, and any other relevant sub-topics. In the weight loss niche, you might want to specify that you focus on low-carb options, which can also include another subtopic of keto.
It’s helpful if you have information in your niche profile about what you do and do not believe in sharing with your audience. You may have certain opinions about what should be taught.
For example, some people in the keto niche teach people how to follow a “dirty keto” diet. Others are strictly against this concept and prefer to teach people a healthier method.
Unless you specify where you stand on certain issues and what topics you do and do not want to be covered, AI will have free reign over what it puts into your content. If you know that there are certain trends or content that your audience prefers learning about, you can always add that to your profile.
You might want to have a few things ready to train AI with whenever you start a new project. The first would be an overall customer persona that gives AI a basic understanding of who you are targeting in terms of gender, age, location, income level, and so on. You should have done most of this already during your market research.
But you can also specify segmented personas if you are dealing with a certain subset of your target audience. This might be women over 50, or men who have diabetes. Whenever you want your content to be more specific, you need to share these individual profiles with AI before it starts writing.
Keep these profiles and niche information in a file that you can call upon any time, and be sure to update and tweak them whenever you realize there’s something else that could be included that might help AI yo create your content to be more effective for your readers.
Tell AI What Your Objectives Are
Another thing that helps AI is when you have done your preliminary work to determine what goal you have for the content it is creating for you. AI cannot assume anything, and specifying what you hope to have happen with the content can make a difference in what it delivers.
For example, content that is meant to merely entertain and engage readers could be written very differently from content that is meant to convert into a click-through and sale.
Have some sentences ready to add to your prompt whenever you have a specific goal in mind for your content. For example you might tell AI that you want a persuasive blog post that not only explains the benefit of focusing on organic traffic over paid traffic but also includes a strong call to action advising them to purchase your course teaching them how to achieve this goal.
Another goal you might have for AI’s content is to get more people to sign up as a subscriber to your list. That way, AI can emphasize the free gift and the benefits they will receive in downloading it and absorbing the content rather than simply teaching your readers the information in full so they don’t feel motivated to sign up.
You might want to specify that AI needs to steer the content in a way that encourages people to click through to learn more. That way, it can deliver enough valuable information to showcase the worth of your insight, but then make an intriguing statement that they can’t resist in clicking through.
Even if your goal is just to heighten your trust and authority within the niche, AI can churn out content that is full of knowledge and expertise so that you gain the trust of the reader and make them appreciate your guidance.
Sometimes, the goal is just to get more engagement, you can often do that by entertaining and informing an audience. But AI won’t know that this is your goal unless you tell it to craft the content in a way that is thought-provoking or humorous and helps the content go viral.
Prepare Examples for Content Tone and Style
Another thing you want to have ready in your preliminary stage before you begin prompting AI is to gather examples of content with the correct tone and style to use as training material that will help AI mimic your voice.
Even if you don’t feel as if you are a good writer, you can still give AI a sample of your writing so that it can share your voice and personality, even if it cleans it up and makes it more professional.
You also want to have training examples for different platforms that you are publishing on. While you want consistency across different platforms with your branding, sometimes the voice is slightly different on a platform like TikTok than it is on a platform like Facebook, merely due to the audience it is targeting.
You might want to have an example of content that is very formal versus more casual content that you would use on social media. Or, something that is more personalized for an email autoresponder versus your blog content.
If you have preferences for your content, such as content that is very detailed and descriptive or content that is void of any fluff and gets to the point, you can have examples to show AI how to adhere to those instructions.
The examples and training material that you provide to AI can be your own or those of your competitors. It can also be scientific research or market studies and educational information that helps AI understand more about your intended output.
The goal is not to have your AI tool copy someone else, but to learn more about what the target audience in that niche appreciates and responds best to so that your own content can deliver on those as well.
Have these training materials stored so that you can pull them up and feed them into your AI tool before you begin a new project. Don’t forget to not only include what you do want it to write, but also what you don’t want it to do.
You can also point out what you do (or don’t) like about the examples you provide. Don’t just upload a file. Explain what you appreciate or dislike so that AI understands why you’ve chosen that piece.
Gather Any Reliable Data or Information AI Needs to Know
Sometimes, part of your preliminary prompting process will be gathering certain information that you think AI needs to know before crafting your content. Typically, this is not generic or generalized information, but more detailed data.
Unless you want AI to make up statistics (and it will !), you might want to gather some on your own and identify what you want to be included in the piece if you have sourced something that you know is reliable.
You also might have data from your own accounts that you want AI to consider whenever it is creating content. This can be data that you gather from your own website statistics, social media account profiles, and email autoresponder systems.
If you are selling products on a third-party platform, these can also provide you with valuable information. Provide it to AI whenever it is helping you brainstorm, strategize, or create content for your audience.
This might include performance metrics, statistics about growth or decline in sales, popular topics and pages, and more. You can even have customer feedback from a survey ready to upload before you start prompting AI.
If you have any specific links to resources that you want AI to use in educating itself before it begins the writing process, you can include those if your AI tool is capable of going and consuming it.
Otherwise, you might have to copy and paste the information into a file or have a digital account ready to upload so that it can accurately refer to the reference you are providing it with.
You also want to have your own opinions or slants ready to articulate to AI so that it doesn’t just take a neutral tone or fail to take a stand about a certain topic. We already talked about the example with dirty keto, but it might be any small or large issue that you want AI to use when crafting your content.
Keep Your Most Effective Prompts for AI Content Creation
If you are new to working with AI, you’ll want to spend some time playing around with various tools to see which one works best for you and how the prompt process works. As you use this technology more, you will want to have a swipe file or stockpile of prompts that are most effective in getting what you want out of this tool.
This should include both your initial prompts and any revision prompts that you feel work best in redirecting AI to correct content and polish it up to what you want. What you’ll probably find is that vague prompts do not work well for creating content for your business.
You’ll want to have prompts set aside for the creation of a blog post, product review, and for different types of social media content or emails. If you have the desire to optimize the content, you’ll want to have part of a prompt written that instructs AI to optimize the content for a certain keyword phrase or search intent.
You can also have revisionary prompts that address things like tone or style or even getting it to expand on information that lacks any type of depth or detail, when you know your readers are going to be looking for more.
When you develop a stockpile of prompts that work best for you, categorize them so that you can easily find them in a file and use them quickly and easily. You also might want to track the performance of certain prompts so that you can weed out any that are not delivering the right content and use more of those that are creating content that converts.
Identify Competitors You Want AI to Beat
Every successful business checks out the competition to see how they can perform better than them. You can have a list of industry leaders that you mention to AI whenever you want it to address any content gaps, analyze effective content formats, or see how they are engaging their audience that your content may be lacking.
You can have a list of competitors that are ranking high for the same keywords you want to rank for, so that AI can analyze what they are doing and help you achieve that goal. If you are using an AI tool that can go out and learn more on its own about that competitor, you can provide links, but if you are using a tool that cannot do that, you may have to upload some of their best-performing content so AI can spot patterns in the topics, style, and optimization.
If your goal is to outrank a competitor, you’ll need to have an exact copy of a high-ranking piece of their content. AI can analyze it to see where they are lacking in their optimization and give you the edge needed to dominate over them in the search engine results pages.
AI can serve as a formidable ally when you are publishing content in your niche. When used correctly, you will participate in the process by not only giving it preliminary information that you have ready, but also overseeing the output and editing it to perfection in the end.
If you want to learn more about how to edit the content that AI produces, I have a F.R.E.E ebook that steps you thorough reviewing and changing AI content.
