I vividly remember, as a teenager, watching with astonishment as my sister’s boyfriend missed the entrance to our driveway by several feet and slammed her car into my dad’s prize privet hedge.
He got out totally unfazed, walked up to the house, opened the door, and confidently proclaimed, ‘There’s something wrong with the gearbox.’
The fact that at almost 30 years of age, he’d decided to drive a car (and my sister let him) without a licence or ever having had a lesson for the first time, seemed irrelevant to him.
No gearbox issue was ever found and, to the best of my knowledge, Mick never drove a car again.
There are a lot of people as confident there is a problem with AI models like ChatGPT and Claude, as Mick was with the car.
They hop aboard, ask it to perform something akin to witchcraft, and when it fails, assume all the hype is just that—hype.
It isn’t.
AI is all that, and then some.
But just as Mick ought to have mastered the rudimentary basics of braking and turning before getting behind the wheel of a car, you need to know how to write prompts that AI can work with.
Think of AI as a very smart VA.
One who will never take a day off with a hangover, get bored, or demand a pay raise.
With any such assistant, you would take your time to train them or, at the very least, clearly explain your SOPs (standard operating procedures).
You would also provide ongoing support and offer help and feedback.
AI is the same.
Saying, ‘Write me a blog post on how to avoid procrastination and make it good,‘ is about as likely to yield great results as me telling my dogs to stop fucking about when I’m trying to put their collars on to go for a walk.
However, unlike my dogs, who will ignore me and continue to fuck about, AI will give you what it thinks you want.
And it will probably be shit because it’s pulling answers out of its digital arse.
Hopefully, you will know it’s shit and not publish it.
But some many coaches don’t know, and moments later, it’s out in the public domain representing their brand.
That’s not good
So, to help you avoid that, here is a quick guide to writing brilliant prompts using the easy-to-remember acronym CRAFT.
C – context
Give the AI as much background and context as you can.
You wouldn’t hire a Michelin-starred chef, and when asked what you would like cooking respond, food.
Maybe you can share the copy from your About page so it knows more about you.
Or perhaps you have been smart enough to figure out your client avatar and can include that as part of your prompt (more at the end).
R – role
Who or what do you want the AI to be?
If you don’t give it a role, it will take the afternoon off and serve up the kind of generic crap that we all immediately know is AI.
It has almost the entire fucking internet to choose from, so make it work for its living.
This may be as simple as asking it to be yourself, in which case, the context and format elements become even more crucial.
But you may want it to get a lot more creative than that.
I may say I want it to be the brilliant (dead) advertiser and direct response marketer David Ogilvy or )not dead) marketing maven Seth Godin.
Both of those two have a huge body of work from which the AI can draw.
You don’t have to give it a specific person, or people by name. You can be more generic and tell it to assume a role as one of the world’s leading <insert wherever topic you are writing about>.
A – actions
What do you want the AI to do?
Are you writing an email or a sequence of emails for a launch to you newsletter launch?
Maybe you want it to serve up 365 Facebook posts so you can schedule one a day for the next year.
Or perhaps you want to rewrite the copy for your entire website because you just went nuclear on your old niche and need to start again.
F – format
This is similar to context, but it literally means how you want it to write for you.
You may have noticed that I tend to occasionally drop the F-bomb.
That may be needed in longer posts if it’s to sound authentic even when I am asking it to write in the style of another person.
Because style is the operative word, I’m not copying or mimicking them.
Similarly, I make sure my posts are easy to scan by not having paragraphs longer than a sentence or two, so I tell it.
You may have an irrational and slightly concerning love of bullet points or want a blog post with several subheadings, or need a comparison table doing.
Whatever it is, spell it out.
T – target
A chef needs to know if their audience is vegan or has allergies.
A clothes designer needs to know if the attire will be worn for work, or an S&M party
AI needs to know who your ideal client is so that it can provide you with relevant and worthwhile content.
It also needs to know what you want people reading, listening, watching the content to do next.
With copy or sales pages, this is often the call to action (CTA) and it may be clicking a link, buying a product, sending you an email etc.
Knowing this in advance allows it to produce content that has a purpose.
Making all of the above easy
You may be thinking this all sounds like hard work.
It is.
But only to begin with, because you don’t need to keep reinventing the wheel.
I have a lot of the information I mentioned above saved in documents that I can attach.
I have a Word document that explains my writing style and samples of about a dozen emails I have sent that I really like.
It also has a list of words/phrases that I don’t like because they either aren’t things I’d say, or sound too like AI. I update this frequently.
I have another document that contains my client avatar.
And yet another containing all my website copy
I will mix and match depending on the task and I will update them when necessary
And, of course, ChatGPT has its own memory, albeit it is very limited and hit-and-miss.
It still cannot accurately remember from one chat to another, but that is coming if the experts are to be believed.
Writing AI prompts doesn’t end there
As mentioned, this process gives you a starting point for your work with AI.
Besides the occasional very short social media post, doing all of the above will not produce results that don’t need editing or changing.
The first pass is just that, a first pass. Nothing more.
Now the process of tweaking, refining and improving starts.
Other than as an experiment, I’m fairly sure I have never sent out an email or published a blog post that wasn’t 60%+ my writing.
But I’m sure there are times when I could have sent what I had sooner, and it would have been fine.
Over to ChatGPT for its unedited conclusion
AI is not just hype. It’s a game-changing tool that can revolutionize your work—if you know how to use it properly.
Like driving a car, it’s not about whether the tool works; it’s about whether you know how to operate it effectively.
Same goes for AI—it’s a powerful tool, but if you don’t know how to steer it, you’re in for a crash.
The key is writing smart prompts. AI’s like a super-efficient assistant: it’ll never slack, but if you ask it to “write something good,” you’ll get exactly that—something, but probably not good.
Want brilliant AI content? Master the CRAFT of prompt writing. Treat AI like a VA you need to train, not a magic wand.
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