How To Use ChatGPT To Write Your First Blog Post In 5 Easy Steps
There's something amazing happening right under your nose. And you have a choice whether to use ChatGPT or get left behind. AI has been in the blogging world for several years. When ChatGPT became available for people to use, some took immediate advantage of the opportunity to work with it, while others sat back and watched.
At this moment, you might be asking yourself, "Should I be part of this?" Well, that's totally up to you... as with so many questions, the answer is “It Depends.”
As an online coach, you are familiar with technology. Using tech is part of your job. And when you think about it, your clients have a level of comfort using technology and online platforms. After all, it's in these digital spaces that your audience searches for answers to their questions. So when you write an article or share a recipe online you are meeting them in a place where they are seeking out guidance and looking for information that is valuable to them. Which will lead them to discover your services.
Use ChatGPT with a gentle reminder
The important thing is, if you decide to give it a go, make sure you've got the know-how, and we’re not really talking about prompts. Recent advancements, such as GPT-4 and Google giving a thumbs-up to AI-created content, make AI tools more enticing, but YOU have to know what YOU are talking about.
So, a word to the wise, keep AI from taking over for you completely. At Balanced Healthstyles, we are head over heels excited about everything AI. And we're adding fantastic information to the Collaboration Hub for contributing authors who write articles and recipes for our website. The Collaboration Hub is your resource to start getting more visible in the marketplace by writing articles, recipes, and courses, and now AI is part of the landscape.
The essential role of blogging in growing your business
If you offer any digital service or product, blogging is a must.
Let me paint you a picture - you’re running a business and want to connect with your audience.
How do you do that?
Blogging.
It’s an easy way to connect with your potential customers, letting them discover who you are, what you do, how you know what you know, and share your experience. It allows them to get to know your business and what you offer and even draws them closer to you with ways to connect with you on a deeper level.
Transforming Content Creation using ChatGPT
But let’s be honest, coming up with a constant stream of catchy, well-written articles and social media posts can sometimes feel like trying to catch a new unicorn every day. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play.
AI's role in content creation today is like a gardener in a bountiful garden. AI, like ChatGPT, helps you grow your content, turning it from seedling ideas into fully finished posts. Thanks to language models, AI now understands natural language input and assembles text that feels almost human.
Your new ally in writing your first blog post
Say goodbye to staring at an empty screen and hello to ChatGPT for writing, editing, and improving posts.
So why is ChatGPT becoming the new best friend for bloggers?
For starters, there's writer's block - we've all been there, right? But with ChatGPT, it's like having a coworker who always has a fresh idea or a new direction when you're feeling stuck.
And once you have the idea, using AI is like a genie granting you extra hours in your day. Whether you're starting a blog post from scratch or refining an existing one, ChatGPT helps you race through it.
Finally, it helps you get your blog posts more attention, making them easy to read and SEO-friendly, which means more eyeballs and engagement.
The Role of ChatGPT in Health and Wellness Blogging
We aren't necessarily writers. We’re personal trainers, nutrition, health, and wellness coaches. No wonder you find yourself staring at a blank screen. Take a deep breath, dear friend, because ChatGPT might be your best blogging companion.
Imagine a virtual assistant who knows just what to say and when to say it. ChatGPT is a language model by OpenAI, a shiny tool that can transform a brief thought into a piece of art (a.k.a. your next blog post). It's like having a brainstorming buddy who never tires.
Leveraging ChatGPT for your personal training, nutrition, health, and wellness business
Picture how ChatGPT might come in handy for your health and wellness business. Let's say you're a personal trainer, and you've just finished an exhilarating session with a client. Your brain is buzzing with the idea for a blog post about functional workouts at home, but you need help figuring out where to start. Enter ChatGPT.
Give your AI friend the spark of an idea and watch as it weaves together a comprehensive outline complete with engaging introductions and compelling headlines. "10 Fun and Effective Functional Workouts You Can Do At Home". Doesn't that sound like a blog post you'd read?
And how about wellness coaches? How often have you wanted to spread awareness about mindfulness but couldn't get past writer's block? ChatGPT could help you develop engaging blog posts like "The Beauty of Living in the Present: A Beginner's Guide to Mindfulness."
ChatGPT is an assistant, not a replacement
Don't get me wrong; ChatGPT isn't here to replace you. It's here to assist you. After all, nothing can replace the personal touch, the unique voice, the creative flair, and the hands-on experience you bring to your content.
But imagine the time you could save, the new ideas you could explore, and the quality of your content you could enhance! All with a tool that's willing to work day or night.
Before you start your blog post, identify who you are writing content for - Your target market
There is a golden thread that weaves its way through all of your content writing, giving it a unique essence and a distinct personality. ChatGPT can help find your golden thread.
The first step before writing your first blog post using ChatGPT is to identify who you are writing for - your target market. You'll want to harness AI's power by giving it the information it needs to deeply understand who your target audience of potential customers is. Data, or as coaches we like to say, context, matters. And using ChatGPT is no different. Once you feed it all the information about who your customers are (their likes, dislikes, and specific needs, wants, and desires), it can help you write to that audience.
ChatGPT is a sophisticated language model that can help you analyze and summarize large amounts of text data. It can even analyze customer reviews or social media posts. And that’s a big plus for helping you get to know your audience.
By knowing who your target audience is and leveraging AI tools, you can unearth valuable insights about your customers’ preferences and sentiments. With that wealth of knowledge at your fingertips, you can craft your first blog post using ChatGPT.
How to use ChatGPT to write your first blog post - A step-by-step guide
Ready to dive into a workspace where artificial intelligence meets creativity and productivity? By working through the following steps, you’ll be ready to try ChatGPT to write your first blog post.
Remember, ChatGPT is a co-worker, not a quick fix or magic pill. You’ll be working together to shape your ideas and turn your voice into captivating content.
Step 1: Plan your blog post
Spend time interacting with ChatGPT, seeding it with background information about your topic and audience. Think of ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner, helping you comb through your thoughts. This is where the conversation with your AI co-worker begins.
Some things to think about when planning your article. What are you trying to provide? What is it that your target audience wants to know about?
Look at the services you offer. What would your audience benefit from knowing more about?
Here is an example:
Target Market: Women who are close to retirement age, who want to reclaim their health so that they can enjoy traveling more and enjoying their extended family and friends. Their biggest concern is that they haven’t been purposely active for years, and they’re concerned that getting active and improving their eating habits is going to cramp the way they are accustomed to living.
What topics will ChatGPT suggest for this type of potential customer?
The conversations you have with ChatGPT are not once and done. They are continuations of the story. You’ll find that revising and giving it more context as you go will improve the responses you get.
Sometimes the first output from ChatGPT won’t reveal anything useful, so keep the conversation going.
Once you have found your sweet spot with ChatGPT and it is offering you results that better fit your business, move on to creating your headline and outline.
Step 2: Craft an Outline and an Engaging Headline with ChatGPT
Creating an outline and an engaging headline is a collaborative process with ChatGPT. While ChatGPT helps you draft an outline and a headline, make sure they echo your voice. The output should feel personal and relatable, as well as reflect your unique perspective.
Here is a prompt you can use to get headline ideas.
Starter Prompt to GPT:
I want you to act as a blog post title writer. I will give you a title idea and keywords separated by commas, and you will reply with blog post titles. The titles should include a hook and a high potential to go viral on social media platforms as well as be picked up by local news media. Here are my title and keywords [insert title ideas and keywords by using a comma in between]
Second Prompt for GPT:
Develop a comprehensive outline indentation and markdown for a long-form article on the topic [insert your blog title], featuring at least 20 engaging headings and subheadings that are detailed, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, and cover the entire topic. End with a summary and relevant FAQs. Do not write the article.
Note: You may be wondering what the word “markdown outline” means, in this case it is used so that the outline given by ChatPGT is visually appealing and easy to work with. In fact, asking ChatPGT to give you a markdown outline is giving you a great rough draft for how your article will be published on Balanced Healthstyles website, with titles and subheadings.
Use ChatGPT’s outline to help you start writing your article.
Step 3: Write Your Post with ChatGPT
You may be wondering - How can I teach ChatGPT to write in my voice, to use my writing style and tone?
If this is your first blog post, look to other content you have written. Input many examples of your writing into ChatGPT. Once you have given it content you have written in the past, ask it to analyze and summarize your writing style and tone. This will help you inform ChatGPT of your voice each time you start a conversation.
With your voice infused into ChatGPT, it's time to write your post. Remember, prompting is a skill, but it's also as easy as having a conversation. Work in tandem with ChatGPT, developing a narrative that is coherent, compelling, and stays true to your style and tone.
Tailoring ChatGPT to Reflect Your Unique Writing Style
As an example, after inputting information from Healthline into ChatGPT, this is how it summed up the website's writing style.
The writing style and tone:
Writing Style:
- Informative
- Straightforward
- Use simple, clear language to communicate complex topics to abroad audience
- Providing essential information without overwhelming the reader
- Organize content in a logical manner with headers and sub-headers to guide the reader through the topics
- Subject matter is broken down into easily digestible sections
- Use bullet points for easy reading and understanding
Tone:
- Friendly
- Reassuring
- Approachable
- Assures the reader that it's possible
- Non-judgmental
- Empathetic
- Encouraging
- Highlight benefits
- Provides practical action, aiming to empower the reader
Once you know your own writing style and tone, use the outline ChatGPT helped you create and ask CharGPT to help you fill in each section using your voice. Remember, you are working as a team. You write your thoughts and have AI help you when you get stumped.
Step 4: Use images to enhance your post
An engaging article is a balance of words and visuals. ChatGPT helps you find the words, and it can also suggest images that add depth to your narrative.
Most of the contributing authors on Balanced Healthstyles use Canva to create images for their content. A way to have ChatGPT help you with image suggestions would be to input your entire blog and ask it to suggest images and image placements based on your article. Ask it to give you detailed information regarding the images it suggests you use.
For a Canva Image Prompt try this:
Creating a prompt for Canva's AI Image Generator involves a combination of key elements, including the subject matter, the scene description, and the style of the image. Here's how to create each of the prompts:
Define the Subject Matter:
This could be anything you want to depict in your image. It could be a person, an animal, an object, a location, a theme, or an abstract concept. In these prompts, choose subjects like a forest landscape, a city skyline, an ocean view, and a group of friends at a barbecue, among others.
Describe the Scene:
This is where you provide details to bring the subject matter to life. You might describe the environment, the time of day, the weather, the colors, the mood, the actions, and the interactions. For instance, in the prompt below, the serenity, the brook, and the forest are all parts of the scene description.
Canva Prompt:
A serene forest landscape with a small brook running through it
[No filter]
Choose the Style:
Specify the artistic style in which you want the image to be generated. Canva's AI Image Generator allows you to choose from different styles like Photography which can be photo, vibrant, minimalist, neon, and filmic. Digital art can be playful, retrowave, 3D, psychedelic, concept art, 3D model, gradient, dreamy, retro anime, or anime. And Fine Art, which can be color pencil, watercolor, stained glass, or ink print.
[Style Filter: Filmic]
[Style Filter: Color Pencil]
ChatGPT prompt to help write a Canva AI Text to Image prompt
Here is how we used ChatGPT to create the image at the top of this article.
ChatGPT Prompt:
Hi ChatGPT, HealthstyleCoaches.com is writing an article about you, to help health coaches get started for themselves to get the great results we've had working with you.
Health coaching is often marketed, purchased, and delivered in an exclusively online environment.
I'd like you to help me write a midjourney prompt for a featured image for this article.
Please ask me as many questions as you need to get enough information to suggest a good prompt for me to try.
The Canva AI Text to Image prompt is crafted from the results. (You will have to shorten a Midjourney oriented prompt due to Canva’s character limit in the prompt field.)
Canva Prompt:
a health coach sitting at their computer in a vibrant and cheery home office or kitchen. engaged in a lively conversation with ChatGPT, represented by a stylized chat interface on the computer screen. sense of hopefulness and ease, side view woman wearing athletic clothes
Take care when having AI generate images of people, it’s not that great at fingers and faces yet 😱🤣🤣🤣
Step 5: Edit Your Blog Post with ChatGPT
The first draft of your blog is a stepping stone. Once your draft is written, start editing it with ChatGPT by your side.
If the output from ChatGPT doesn’t seem to be working for you, think about the phrase, “Garbage in, Garbage out.” In other words, the input you give to ChatGPT during the draft writing and editing process will shape the output.
When editing, refine your content, verify facts (especially citations), ensure coherence, and maintain a suitable length. With ChatGPT's assistance, you can polish your content, making it both reader-friendly and SEO-optimized.
Once you have finished editing your article and know what primary keyword and related keywords you want to use in the article, input all that back into ChatGPT - the entire draft article and keywords - and ask it to rewrite it using the keywords. Ask ChatGPT if it has any rewrite suggestions. Once the rewrite is complete, see if the changes look good. If you like any suggestions, use them; if you don't, that’s fine too.
By following these steps, you'll craft a blog post that's uniquely you. Writing with AI is about maintaining authenticity. Keep this article close by as a guide to using ChatGPT as your co-worker. It's your time to tell your story.
ChatGPT's Strengths and Limitations
AI technologies like ChatGPT are revolutionizing the way we approach content creation. It has unique advantages that offer the potential to enhance your creative process. However, understanding its limitations is equally important to achieving the best results.
ChatGPT is a powerful brainstorming partner that can help you comb through your thoughts and turn abstract ideas into tangible content. With time and interaction, it becomes a valuable co-worker, aiding in crafting compelling narratives your readers will enjoy. However, remember that ChatGPT is not a magic wand but a tool to focus your creativity.
Precise prompts for quality outputs
As with any tool, how you use it determines the results. Using clear and specific prompts will yield more relevant results than generic ones. For more insights on how to use prompts effectively, check out these strategies straight from Open AI themselves.
Just as one week of exercise won't get you fit, a few generic prompts won't yield high-quality content, so you have to spend some time, put in the reps, before you can say that it does or doesn’t work for you.
Creating more beautiful questions with ChatGPT
Moreover, ChatGPT helps improve your questioning skills. The way to find “your voice” is to ask better and more insightful questions, challenging you to really define your needs more clearly. Think of it as a collaborative conversation rather than a one-sided interaction. You can really explain what you're going for.
A gift with a caveat
One of the key strengths of ChatGPT lies in its generative technology. It can create diverse and creative content based on the information and context you provide. But, this is also where the importance of revising and personalizing AI-generated content comes into play.
Despite its strengths, ChatGPT isn't without limitations. It doesn't inherently understand truth or accuracy - it merely tries to make the next two words make sense. This results in a "truthy" sounding output. Consequently, always verify confidently stated "facts" and citations, or better yet, provide your own. It's not about what ChatGPT creates straight out of the box, but what you shape out of it.
Every piece of information you input informs the output across the system and into the future, and as such, must be chosen carefully.
Avoid feeding it proprietary or confidential information, keeping in mind that it can potentially generate this information into someone else's output. However, this feature can be advantageous if you aim to influence the conversation with something new, such as shifting the dialogue around health and fitness toward more holistic values.
A balanced approach: The true value of ChatGPT
In essence, the value of ChatGPT as a content creation tool is rooted in a balance of its strengths and understanding its limitations. It is not about expecting a fully formed piece of content springing from the AI like Athena from Zeus's head, but rather about using it as a powerful tool that, combined with your input and revision, leads to compelling and authentic content.
Remember, when using ChatGPT, the principle of "Garbage In, Garbage Out" applies. Quality input leads to quality output.
FAQ
Yes, any form of written content that reflects your style and tone can be input to ChatGPT to help it understand and emulate your writing style.
You can input your initial draft to ChatGPT, along with instructions for the kind of edits you want, such as ensuring coherence, improving section heading, ensuring an active voice is used, limiting jargon, checking for clear instructions, and smooth transition as well as keyword placement for SEO optimization
While ChatGPT can provide high-quality, coherent text, it's important to remember that it doesn't inherently understand truth or accuracy. Always verify the facts and citations in the content it generates.
It's best to avoid using ChatGPT for confidential or proprietary information, as it has the potential to generate this information into someone else's output.
By feeding ChatGPT with examples of your own writing and editing its output, you can ensure that the content it generates aligns with your unique voice and style.
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