The Art of Blog Post Writing with ChatGPT: Best Practices and Pitfalls to Avoid

My Facebook and Twitter feeds are swamped with paid ads promising to unlock secrets that will instantly make me 100x richer, 50 kg lighter, and capable of composing articles for a company blog in just 20 minutes using ChatGPT. However, is this genuinely the case or simply a sophisticated bluff? I decided to refresh my experience and write honestly about how to create a blog post with ChatGPT. Let me tell you upfront, I spent a considerable amount of time in pursuit of the truth so you don't have to.

So, what is ChatGPT?

For those who may not know, ChatGPT is an AI assistant conversational bot. Its main function is to answer your questions, be your thought partner, and complete tasks that require thinking. It is built on top of OpenAI's large language model, GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 (in its premium version). Thus, it carries the capability to create textual material based on the entire knowledge base of humanity that it has learned from. Theoretically, ChatGPT should be the ideal partner for writing blog posts. But how does it perform? That's what we're investigating.

How not to use ChatGPT for writing blog posts?

I must admit, I'm not a prolific blogger. I've written a few articles over time, but mostly in English. In many cases, I've used AI, but more in an assisting, translating-to-English capacity. However, in the development of some individual articles, AI has played a significantly larger role.

To refresh my experience, I revisited ChatGPT and asked it to write an article on what makes a web article "good". I started with pretty simple prompts as is generally recommended. My first attempt was with a very simple prompt:

"Write me a detailed essay on the topic: How to write good blog posts. Use correct Estonian. Follow best practices in writing the essay and focus on readability and comprehensibility.”

Let's just say the article that resulted from this prompt was not particularly good. It was short, full of headlines, and thus gave the impression of being a quick PowerPoint outline. The problem for me was that each paragraph, though relevant, was covered too briefly.

I didn't give up yet and tried again, asking it to pay special attention to the length of the text. I also thought that perhaps for ChatGPT, a blog post as a genre is something very short and made up of bullet points. What if I asked it to write an essay?

The new prompt was as follows:

“Write me a detailed essay on the topic: How to write good blog posts? Use correct Estonian. Follow best practices in writing the essay and focus on readability and comprehensibility. Before starting, make a plan and divide the essay into specific paragraphs. Plan the essay so that it is at least 1500 words long. Once you have planned the paragraphs, calculate the length of the paragraph in words so that the paragraphs are more or less the same length.”

The start was promising, but the result was still quite similar, i.e., there were many headlines but little concrete useful content. After that, I was losing hope and wanted to classify ChatGPT under the category: "Nice, but not suitable for writing".

I shut down the computer and instead went to Midjourney to create some new AI art pieces for my Instagram account.

New plan: Don't write a blog post with ChatGPT!

While creating pictures with Midjourney, a sudden new hypothesis arose: OpenAI has probably tuned ChatGPT to give shorter answers at a time. The reason seems logical - generating a long response is costly for OpenAI. In addition, the training material for GPT-4 probably instructs that blog posts and essays should contain lots of headlines. The result, however, is a chopped-up text where the content of a paragraph doesn't really help to expand a specific topic.

I decided to use a new strategy: don't expect to get a post as one answer to one prompt, but rather combine the article from a series of questions and answers over several prompts. In addition, I removed references from my prompt that the result should be an essay or blog post.

In the prompt, I focused on setting a task for artificial intelligence to help me deeply understand the topic, because that was the purpose of the planned article. The new prompt sounded like this:

"Become a content marketing expert and give me deep and detailed advice on how to write a good web article. Begin by giving me an overview of each topic you plan to cover, and then when I say 'continue', delve into each topic. Let's start!”

As a result of this prompt, ChatGPT first put together a plan of what topics to cover and then waited for my further commands.

The result of this strategy is that ChatGPT doesn't try to cram all of its blog post content into one response, and each response can be more substantial and detailed.

This strategy bore fruit. However, upon completion of the first paragraph, I had to remind it that I did not want to see responses in bullet points. I added an additional prompt:

"I find it hard to read when there are so many subheadings. Could you please write without them and in a continuous text?" As a result, the readability of the paragraphs began to improve, although it still tended to prefer bullet points.

The final part of the strategy is not to let ChatGPT forget what it has already talked about and what it still needs to talk about.

For this, I used the following command after each paragraph was completed:

"Summarize what has been discussed so far, repeat the upcoming topics that are still ahead, and then move on." This allows ChatGPT to keep a longer context in memory and continue from the right place.

Using all these tricks, I finally got ChatGPT's conversation flowing and each paragraph of the post was filled with content in more or less sufficient volume.

Of course, all this meant that in the end, I had to copy the corresponding paragraphs one by one into a text editor to get the whole picture, but this effort was quite small in the end.

Are there "magical" web text writing prompts?

Unfortunately, I have to admit that there are no magical prompts that give an ideal result in one breath. So anyone who claims to teach you one prompt and writes your blog post for you in 20 minutes is likely to be a liar.

Once upon a time, this might have been the case, because until recently, ChatGPT had far fewer restrictions. But as the number of users increased, so did the costs of running ChatGPT, and OpenAI has clearly decided to set cost limits.

At the moment, it seems that the main limitation (even in the paid version) is the length of one answer. If the length of the answer is limited and the given task is complex, then ChatGPT optimizes the answer in a way to bring the result home as briefly and therefore superficially as possible. Based on my experiments, longer answers can be around 500-700 words. Rarely does a longer answer come.

Are custom instructions helpful?

One new feature of ChatGPT is custom instructions, which aim to slightly tune the tone and style of the answers given and slightly unify the AI persona across answers. I tried custom instructions especially with the first prompts, hoping that they would help create a longer and more interesting text.

The result is certainly a bit noticeable, but it doesn't help overcome the problem of response length. Here’s an example of what kind of instructions I used in Estonian language.

If ChatGPT is not enough, what to do?

As you saw, to get the best results from ChatGPT, you need to try different approaches and strategies. If one prompt does not give the desired result, it is worth trying another prompt or dividing the task into several parts to get more substantial answers.

Despite this, you may conclude that ChatGPT is not quite the tool that makes your life 100 times better. I mean specifically in terms of writing.

In that case, I would suggest two tools that I have also tested and that focus specifically on writing tasks.

Writesonic

Writesonic is an effective writing tool for those who have to churn out dozens of articles that no one but Google Bot reads. In the marketing landscape, this is known as SEO (search engine optimization).

Writesonic has several different wizards that allow you to produce ready-made texts super quickly. So it's not a problem to write, for example, 10 different articles a day on what to keep in mind in content marketing.

You can try Writesonic yourself here.

Copy.ai

Copy.ai is also an AI-based writing tool, but it is significantly different from Writesonic. Copy.ai focuses more on dialogue or chat with the writer and if interesting thoughts come from the chat, they can be copied to the Copy.ai text editor for editing.

So probably everything I talked about above about writing with ChatGPT also applies to copy.ai.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said that ChatGPT is a powerful tool for writing text, but its use requires a thoughtful strategy and trying different methods. A single prompt may not give the ideal result, but a combination of different prompts, instructions, and approaches can help create substantial and detailed texts.

It's also worth remembering that ChatGPT responses are limited in length, so you need to find clever ways to make the text as substantial and readable version as possible. If ChatGPT does not provide enough help, you might consider alternative text-writing methods. In general, it is important to find the most suitable approach for you and use ChatGPT as a tool, not as a complete replacement for human-created content.

Since I already have a ChatGPT subscription, I probably won't need an additional tool and will try to get by with ChatGPT in the future.

P.S. This article was not created with the help of ChatGPT.

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