Part 3 - Expansive writing

We’re continuing our week of long-form content prompts.

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

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.

Editing Assistant

One additional technique we can use here is to remix our short form content and then expand it into long form posts.

It's much easier to remix a short form post because of its length. Then we can run it through the same prompt as above in order to create a fresh piece of long form content.

I've take the above X post and use the following prompt

Create 5 variations. Variations can be content, structure or both.

which generates a number of alternatives for me to work with. Here’s one example

It’s the same basic content and structure as the previous tweet but with different tools.

You can either post these newly generated short forms first to see how they do or simply go ahead and use the long form conversion prompt.

In this case the prompt would go ahead and create another long form article for me - this time featuring different tools.

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