Tips for Using AI to Create Content for Your SMB Website and Social Media, Part 1

This is the first of a two-part article on inventive ways to get an AI writing assistant to lighten your writing load.

Making your voice heard on the internet is arguably the most essential part of business development these days. You have to get out there and tell your story for the payback in more leads, with more sales as a result. The more pieces of content for social media you create – like a script for a video about your service, a short post, or a longer article – the better, because every time you publish something, more people can get to know your brand. Adding fresh, well-researched, and engrossing articles regularly to your website positively impacts your ranking in search engines, so it’s one of the factors in moving your website up in search results..

As a small business owner, you’re probably thinking, Ugh! Who has time for all that?! And you probably also have a limit on marketing expenses, so hiring a copywriter is not necessarily the best option.

Well, modern problems require modern solutions, so why not try an AI content generator? Tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Copy.ai, and others can be great writing assistants. Try a few of them to see which you like best. Yes, I know, that takes time too, but it will be paid back in spades, as an AI writing assistant can generate in minutes what previously took hours, days, or even weeks to research and compose. It can give you endless amounts of content in all possible genres, on any topic you may think of.

In this two-part article, we’ll look at some clever tips I’ve come across for putting this technology to good use. To begin with, let’s play around with it a bit to get a sense of what it can and cannot do.

Have Some Fun with It

This point is crucial to remember: These content generators are not creative at all. They can only draw from what’s already out there on the internet. But it’s pretty amazing what they can derive from what they find.

Try different genres and receive corresponding results. ChatGPT can even write poems, and is actually quite good at it. I told it to “write a 4-line verse to advertise DocuSend,” and here’s the result:

This is a lighthearted example, but it demonstrates what AI can do. Now, just for fun, let’s imagine we want a rap song. I typed: “write a rap song about DocuSend,” and here’s what I got:

Now let’s say we are promoting our services to a more specific target audience. We add one more condition, and it changes the approach completely: “write a gangster rap song about DocuSend.” 

Or how about something really silly: “create a short post about car engines in medieval style.”

The Hilarious Hazards of Letting Machines Write Your Content

“In the modern fast-paced world of X, the Y is paramount/crucial.” At our blog editorial team, we keep receiving guest-post inquiries starting with the same type of opening sentence.

One social media post after another offers us to “revolutionize” something, “dive deeper into the magic world of X,” even if X is just a car washing service, or “look no further than” X that “could be a game-changer,” even if it’s just a new recipe for an ordinary dish. The basic language style set by default is characterized by a limited set of phrases that are used over and over again, and the same sentence structures are also repeated. This basic style and tone of voice will be applied if no other instructions are given. If you use short, undetailed prompts and don’t stipulate a style, the context, and who your audience will be, this kind of language will be used, which is easily recognizable as AI-generated.

Your personal overused phrases may vary depending on the type of your business, even though most of them are general for all. Here’s a sample of the results I get for DocuSend:

When it comes to social media ads, this saying goodbye and saying hello thing used to drive me crazy the most. One of the solutions is to create your own list of overused phrases, paste them to the chat and instruct the writing assistant not to use these. It has the ability to memorize everything you previously asked for within one session.

When you first use it, the results do look great. But the more texts we generate, the more we see that we’re getting the same old tiresome wording. Not only do we ourselves get tired of it, but the savvy ones among our readers can recognize this “robot speak” after a short time. AI is using machine learning to rapidly evolve, though, so we can hope that the problem of repetitiveness will cease to be an issue over time.

Sometimes the text that’s generated is too generic or too formal. Or it could be too informal, in the case that you’re a developer promoting your app and seeking to look professional, and the chatbot comes up with “dive into the magic realm” of it or that it’s “iconic,” which may be flattering but will make your potential users suspicious. Sometimes it tends to exaggerate or overpromise and uses too many exclamation points (our editor says to never use more than one in a short blurb, because it will make you look desperate and salesy instead of professional). Another issue can be that the generated result doesn’t cover the topic fully, especially if yours is an unusual or specialized field.

When ChatGPT became widely available, some people were worried it would replace humans in their creative jobs, but many became skeptical about such a probability after trying it. The opinions depend on whether the results people get meet their standards. Many seem to think that chatbots are not very smart; they write about everything and nothing particularly helpful at the same time. But after developing skill at crafting prompts, users understand it all can be fixed with the right techniques.

Reveal Your Inner Wordsmith

Don’t just type a prompt like “create a post on topic X, 400 words.” To open AI’s full potential, it’s important how we write prompts, as it uses language modeling to analyze an immense amount of text and come up with its suggestions. What you get as an answer depends on how you phrase the question. This knowledge plus your brain and critical thinking is the best combination to craft the needed wording that will help to attract more traffic to your website so you can earn more.

Let’s imagine we need a piece of content telling people why having a big credit limit doesn’t mean they’re rich. We type a prompt like this: “create an article on this topic: How to resist the illusion of being rich in high credit limits.”

Just look at this intro. It’s a small and style-less generic text. Further tips are given formally, in the form of a list.

Now let’s compare it to what happens when we have ChatGPT help us draw our readers in. This is one of the options of how our prompt might look:

And here’s the resulting text:

Both are AI-generated, but the second creates emotional bonds with the reader and is more difficult to tell apart from human-written text. If you don’t want to call your readers folks, you can quickly edit it. But with the first result, someone will not become a popular financial adviser.

This is why we are adding nuances to our prompt that responses can be based on. In a good prompt there are many more details, and these are like fuel to the engine. The more you feed it with details, the better results you get and the less editing it requires. I’ll go into this in greater detail in Part 2 of this article. Click here to read on!