Intro to Content Creation with ChatGPT's AI-powered Chatbot
Maybe you’ve heard about ChatGPT (good things or bad things, but probably a mix), maybe you’ve played around with it, or maybe you’re already incorporating it into your day-to-day content creation processes.
No matter where you are on the journey, it is important to cover some best practices for small business owners when it comes to using ChatGPT.
Listen to the podcast episode of this blog post here.
What is ChatGPT?
If you’re new or haven’t had a chance to read beyond some occasionally clickbait-y headlines, let’s dig into what ChatGPT is and how it works (in a very basic way).
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is an AI-powered chatbot that can generate content from conversations. That’s about it.
And it is a huge oversimplification because it has been trained on hundreds of billions of words, and it is still learning.
At an extremely basic level, it works by using natural language processing to "guess" the next word. Natural language processing helps machines understand how humans speak. What makes ChatGPT really interesting is not only the quantity of data it was trained on, but also how "human-like" the interaction is. Siri and Alexa are both examples of tools you may have used that rely on natural language processing.
Three important things to keep in mind before we go further:
This isn’t a search engine. As you become more familiar with ChatGPT and how to use it for content creation, you may be tempted to treat it as a search engine. Don’t do that. Why?
It can be wrong or even make up facts, figures, or information to fill in the gaps. Always fact check anything it gives you.
Content from ChatGPT shouldn’t be copy/pasted directly - it may have errors, poor wording, or may not pass a plagiarism checker. Plan to use ChatGPT as a place to start and build from there. Once you are done, run your content through both an AI checker and a plagiarism detector.
For example, I think ChatGPT is great for giving me ideas about what I could do with leftover apples and spark my imagination, but I may not trust a recipe it gives me without fact checking it before baking.
But since this is about content creation and not apples, let’s talk about ways you can use ChatGPT for content creation in your business.
One of the biggest challenges small businesses have is a lack of time. The other thing many small businesses struggle with is either not knowing what to say around promoting or talking about their business or not knowing how to say it.
ChatGPT can help with both of those struggles which can streamline your content creation process, help you better connect with your audience, and free you to work on other tasks.
Am I overselling ChatGPT? Maybe? It depends on your business, your goals, and how comfortable you are exploring this tool. But I’ve been using ChatGPT with my AIM membership group since December 2022 (shortly after it became available), and they are finding it incredibly helpful in a variety of ways.
Let’s dig into some of the ways you can use ChatGPT!
Streamline Content Creation
What do I mean by content?
Emails you send to your list
Social media
Videos you create (ChatGPT can write your scripts, so I’m including it here)
Blogging
Common (and uncommon) emails you send to clients
Sales pages
About pages
Email subject lines
Course outlines
Worksheets
Freebies/Opt-ins for your email list
There are more, but let’s just focus on these since they are the most common things a small business owner would create.
ChatGPT can help in both creating the ideas for the topics as well as actually writing the content (in seconds).
If you struggle when it comes to thinking of content to send to your email list - how much easier would your email creation process be if you already had a list of ideas and some copy already written?
If you struggle when it comes to writing social media posts - how much easier would managing your social media be if you had a list of ideas and examples already written that you could modify as needed?
If you’ve always wanted to create a course or a video, but got stuck on how to outline it and what to include - what if that wasn’t a barrier anymore?
Do you still need to understand your audience, write the content, and do all of the work of promoting it? Absolutely. However, using ChatGPT for content creation is a huge time saver.
Improve Consistency
A lack of time often leads to a lack of consistency. You only have so much time and so many ways your focus can be split. Content takes time to plan, outline, write, and schedule.
Unfortunately, the time it takes to do those things often eats into the time you have to work on other parts of your business, which means being consistent on social media, blogging, and sending emails to your list can easily fall into the “I would, but I don’t have time” pile of things you need to do.
But if content creation feels easier and less stressful, you’ll be more likely to do it which means you’ll be more consistent.
This doesn’t mean you have to create mountains to blogs and social media posts, but it does mean you’ll have the option to create content that is interesting to you and helps you connect with your audience.
Improve Customer Experience
You can use ChatGPT to help you create FAQs for your business, write customer service email templates, email welcome series, and even abandoned cart emails if you have an e-commerce store.
These extra touches of customer care and service mean you are providing a better customer experience.
Can all of this be done without using ChatGPT? Absolutely.
But if you’re not already doing these things, the roadblock may be a lack of time or a lack of clarity around what to say/include in those types of communication.
ChatGPT can make it simpler, faster, and easier for you to take better care of your people.
At this point, you might be ready to hand over all of your content creation to ChatGPT and unburden yourself forever of ever having to write another word.
Yeah…not so fast.
This is a tool Like spell check. Or a Roomba. Or GPS apps.
It's cool and may make your life much easier, but there are some things to keep in mind.
Remember that ChatGPT is “guessing” the next best word based on patterns and data it has been fed. It won’t have the creativity or uniqueness of text written by you and it can’t understand your audience the way you understand it.
ChatGPT (or any AI) is great for first drafts and generating ideas, but it isn’t human.
Adding your voice to any writing it creates is a must. Not only to avoid potential plagiarism/AI detection, but also because the thing that makes your business unique is you, your experience, and your perspective.
If that is missing from your content, you’ll end up sounding like everyone else - and that’s not how you connect with your audience.
A common complaint I’m seeing is that ChatGPT isn’t necessarily creating great content. Which makes sense because it is a tool that is following patterns. You may not love the word choice or phrasing it creates and that’s ok. Use it as a base to start from and build on those foundations.
Do you have to use ChatGPT? No.
But AI tools have been around for years and the popularity of ChatGPT means they are going to be more prominent and added to more tools.
Canva has “Magic Write” within its “Docs” section, Notion has an AI assist, and I think we’re going to see a boom of AI tools (both good and bad).
You don’t have to use this AI tool or any AI tool, but don’t discount it because it's new.
If you’d like to dig into how to use ChatGPT, I have a mini course that walks you through how to create prompts, how to use it to learn more about your audience, and save time so you can work on other areas of your business.
