Long form content using AI

Sitting and staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor is the worst.

I should know - I have to do it daily!

Writing when we are prompted however is much simpler. It's more structured and the process is broken down into individual steps.

Think about when you did exams - there were easy to answer short questions and then the dreaded "essay" questions. Pages and pages of blank space for you to fill in from scratch. Terrifying!

We're going to convert writing long from a scary essay question into more manageable short form questions.

Here's the prompt:

Act as a writing coach. 

I am writing a long form content piece on [subject]
	

	The sections are:
	-hook
	-intro paragraph
	-main body
	-outro

For the hook make 5 suggestions
Link the intro paragraph to the hook
For the body suggest 3-5 main points, based on the hook and intro

For each section sequentially walk me through the writing process steps by i) providing suggestions, ii) having me write notes iii) confirming the text

Show each section one at a time. Do not show me all the sections. Wait for my input before moving on to the next section. 

Prompt Output:

This prompt will step by step walk you through the process of drafting the long form article.

For each step it'll generate some suggestions. You'll guide ChatGPT about which you like and will then be asked for your notes on how to alter and personalise the writing.

Once you are happy ChatGPT will move onto the next section, using info from earlier sections for consistency.

All you need to do is provide notes - don't worry too much about drafting whole paragraphs.

Continue through the process until ChatGPT outputs your complete long form article.

Because you've "co-authored" the piece it will be far less generic than if you had simply said "write a long form content piece on [subject]"

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Pulling it together

That’s the first of a handful of techniques I’m going to be showing you covered. I recommend over the course of this guide testing what works best for you, combining and refining to suit your needs.

A reminder of what we’re covering this week :

Part 1: Co-writing using ChatGPT

Part 2: Format/Framework Matrix

Part 3: Expansive writing

Part 4: Niche-jacking

Part 5: Personal GPT writing agentSee you tomorrow Prompt Entrepreneur!

Until then, keep PROMPTING!

Kyle

This next method gives more control to ChatGPT and automates the process more.

Let’s get started:

Format/Framework Matrix

We're going to use a content matrix to provide lots of different post types.

Our matrix will consist of formats and frameworks that we combine.

We're going to combine these with writing guidelines to ensure a certain standard of output.

Giving lots of specific instructions like this helps ChatGPT to create a non-generic output. Here’s the prompt:

Act as a long-form blog writer

Prepare an article on the topic of [topic, keyword]

The article format should be [format]

The target audience is [audience details]

Use the [framework name] framework

Follow these guidelines for the end piece:
Produce a minimum of [#] words
Logical narrative structure
Visually scannable formatting
Compelling intro hook
Comprehensive FAQ
Recapped takeaways
Short, focused paragraphs
Relevant visual augmentation suggestions

To make the prompt work make sure to fill in the variables.

For format here's a list to get started:

• Ultimate Guide

• Listicle

• Case Study

• Thought leadership

• Opinion/Editorial

• Origin Story

• Roundup/Compilation

For frameworks here's a list:

• PAS: Problem, amplify, solution.

• AIDA: Attention, interest, desire, action.

• PASTOR: Problem, amplify, story testimony, offer resolution.

• Before-After

• Attention-Interest-Reinforcement-Call-to-Action (AIRCA).

• Features-Advantages-Benefits

• Analyze-Strategize-Plan-Execute

• PACED - Present the problem, analyze causes, consider solutions, evaluate each option, drive readers to action.

• Compare & Contrast

Plug in the name of the framework only - ChatGPT knows all of these (and more) and will act accordingly.

Combining all these variables will ensure that ChatGPT’s output isn’t too generic.

Prompt Output:

Using topic “marketing psychology”, audience “entrepreneurs”, the listicle format and the AIDA framework here’s the intro and start of an article that ChatGPT generated.

Experiment with different combinations of format and framework to see which produce the best results for your particular content niche.

Once you've honed in on that you can re-use the prompt over and over with different topics selected. In fact you can begin to bulk automate creation.

As with any AI generated long form please go through and rewrite!

Consider the output your first draft rather than immediately publishing.

Premium Prompt - Editing Assistant

Pulling it together

A reminder of what we’re covering this week :

Part 1: Co-writing using ChatGPT

Part 2: Format/Framework Matrix

Part 3: Expansive writing

Part 4: Niche-jacking

Part 5: Personal GPT writing agentSee you tomorrow Prompt Entrepreneur!

Until then, keep PROMPTING!

Kyle

In this issue we’ll look at expansive writing - taking something short and expanding upon it.

Let’s get started:

Expansive writing

Our next long form content method is to convert our short form content into long form content.

If we start from existing human generated short form content and build it out into longer form then it'll be less generic and obviously AI generated.

The steps here are quite basic.

First we find a piece of our short form content that performed well. There's no point making a longer form content piece from an unpopular short form post.

It will just be longer but still unpopular!

Instead we can use short posts to test ideas and receptiveness. Think of these posts like a pilot for longer form full posts.

I personally use X/Twitter to post short form content. If you use another platform that's no problem. Just find your top posts and we ca apply the same process.

Here's an example of a short post that did quite well and is a perfect choice for expanding:

From here we're going to use ChatGPT to expand the content. I'm using Dickie Bush's framework here in the prompt. There's more detail about the exact framework here.

Here's the prompt:

Act as a long form content writer. 

Review the short form content piece I have provided and expand it into a long form content piece.

Use the same structure as the short form piece as the core sections. 

For each section expand the main point by:

- giving more context

- highlighting mistakes to avoid

- giving a clear path forward, step by step

- providing a personal example

- providing a noteworthy third party example

This will expand the piece out and give you the outline for a longer form piece. Here’s just the first of the 8 parts generated:

It will leave in the "formatting" elements initially so you can more easily edit.

If you are happy just use the prompt "remove the expansion scaffolding ie. "context", "mistakes to avoid" and format as a blog article" to strip out the prompt formatting.

This will leave you with a long form content piece.

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Pulling it together

We’ve started to build your long form content creation arsenal and you’ve got a number of tools you can already deploy to create high quality long form. We’ll next move onto more advanced methods of i) jacking into existing content from different niches and ii) building our own GPT.

A reminder of what we’re covering this week :

Part 1: Co-writing using ChatGPT

Part 2: Format/Framework Matrix

Part 3: Expansive writing

Part 4: Niche-jacking

Part 5: Personal GPT writing agent

See you tomorrow Prompt Entrepreneur!

Until then, keep PROMPTING!

Kyle

This next technique involves using other people's content as input to generate your own unique long form posts.

Because we're starting with the content of other people we need to be extra careful not to be lazy. I've reiterated this over the week - use AI to get your first draft in place and then manually adapt. This is particularly the case here.

The first step here is to keep a collection of content that you are inspired by.

I personally do this on X using bookmark folders. You can also keep a document with links in it. Whatever works for you.

Whenever you see a stellar piece of content just save the link. Then each week go through your saved content and choose pieces to repurpose.

It's best to find inspiration in entirely different niches. For example I write in the AI niche but take inspiration from entrepreneurship, copywriting, money, business and personal development niches.

You can take content from diverse niches like this and repurpose them into your own particular niche.

For example Naval Ravikant wrote a (now famous) long form Twitter thread on "How to Get Rich (without getting lucky). Here's the original:

Click through to see the whole thing - it’s expansive!

That's a great piece of work - what if we could adapt it into our niche?

Let's use a prompt:

Act as a content repurposer. 

Rewrite the below long form content piece into the [niche] niche

Change the metaphors, examples, stories, language to better suit the new niche. 

Keep the basic structure and flow but alter the content to it makes sense for the new niche. 

Here's an output for “building influence” rather than “getting rich”.

I recommend reading Naval's initial piece so you can tell how well ChatGPT has done:

I'd then go through this and edit for clarity, flow and to make sure it makes sense for your particular niche.

You can adapt from any niche using this method which allows you to get really creative. The real restriction is your input - what great content you can find. I'd recommend widening out your content consumption and finding inspirational pieces from all over the web.

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Pulling it together

That’s a lot of different content creation tools covered this week.

Tomorrow we look at building our own GPT using ChatGPT’s brand new functionality.

A reminder of what we’re covering this week :

Part 1: Co-writing using ChatGPT

Part 2: Format/Framework Matrix

Part 3: Expansive writing

Part 4: Niche-jacking

Part 5: Personal GPT writing agent

See you tomorrow Prompt Entrepreneur!

Until then, keep PROMPTING!

Kyle

BUT if you put in the work you'll have a super valuable asset.

We're going to be using ChatGPT's new GPT Builder.

Let’s get started:

Personal GPT writing agent

ChatGPT allows us to create our own GPTs - our own little AI models that perform specific tasks for us.

I'll keep this high level to show you the potential, get you excited and give you an overview of how to set this up.

You will need a paid ChatGPT account for this.

First, navigate to GPT Builder and describe what sort of GPT you want to build.

In this case we'll tell it something like "a writing tool that uses my past writing to prepare new long form posts"

We are then going to give our GPT all our written work. We’re going to upload past writing and use it to “train” our GPT.

How you do this depends on where your content is hosted.

The simplest yet most time consuming is always going to be copy pasting all your posts, blog articles, newsletters etc. into a Word or Google Document. Get everything in one place and then upload that document into your GPT.

Ideally though we can download copies of our work automatically.

For example:

• if your newsletter is in beehiiv you can download a backup of all your content from Settings.

• If you write on X a lot you can request an export of all posts from Settings, Privacy.

• If you have a Wordpress blog you can go to Tools, Export, Posts.

I could go on! How you get your posts really depends on where they are. Generally though there will be some sort of export tool function built into your publishing tool.

Once you have a copy of your writing we’re going to upload it.

Head to configure and look for the Knowledge section to upload your past posts. You can upload multiple files.

For this example I’ll just upload my beehiiv newsletter data. For best results upload your blog articles, long form tweets and more.

This will allow your GPT to be "trained" on your style, tone of voice, vocabulary usage etc. all based on past writing. Obviously the more you have written in the past the better!

Once we’ve set up the basics and uploaded our data we will give your GPT the instructions it needs to build your writing tool.

Here’s the interface you’ll be working with:

On the left you will tell ChatGPT what sort of tool you want to build.

On the right is a preview of your tool.

First we need to give some basic instructions on the left hand side to configure the tool. This is very simple - we don’t need to code. We just need to tell ChatGPT what we want the tool to be like.

This is an extension of all the prompt engineering work we’ve been doing before.

To start simply answer the questions ChatGPT asks you. For example:

Here ChatGPT has asked me what it should do when it needs information - should it just wing it and make stuff up or ask me?

Because the veracity of information is important to me in this case I’ll say to ask for clarifications.

ChatGPT will continue to ask more questions like this to get the basic parameters of my tool in place.

Once that’s done we need to start using your GPT by testing on the right hand side. The right hand side is a Preview of how the tool will act - it’s here we test the tool and find areas for improvement.

For example if I asked for a blog article now ChatGPT produces it in American English. That’s the default.

I personally write in British English though so on the left hand side (Create) I would tell ChatGPT to only use British English. That request will be saved into my model and from now on the tool will only use British English.

Optimising (or “tuning”) the model is a process of using the preview, finding areas where it can improve, adding the improvement suggestions in the left hand Create panel, testing the model more, finding more improvements etc. etc.

We do this until the outputs of the Preview model produce what we expect (long form articles) to the quality we require.

With your own GPT you can extremely rapidly produce long form content on hundreds of topics, all trained to your past writing and with your saved requirements and improvements.

Don’t expect the final outputs to be 100% perfect. Again, as with all AI writing, I’d recommend still using the output as your first draft and rewriting yourself.

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Pulling it together

We’ve covered a whole slew of different long form content generation techniques this week. Hopefully at least one or two will be useful in your workflow.

Don’t feel that you need to incorporate them all - instead think of this as a menu of options for you to try and choose from.

As long as you’ve come away with one technique that makes long form content easier then I’m happy!

A reminder of what we covered this week :

Part 1: Co-writing using ChatGPT

Part 2: Format/Framework Matrix

Part 3: Expansive writing

Part 4: Niche-jacking

Part 5: Personal GPT writing agent

See you tomorrow Prompt Entrepreneur!

Until then, keep PROMPTING!

Kyle