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Here is the first human-written blog about blogging with GPT-4. Enjoy!

I'm a firm believer in the idea that you need to make things work before you can make them work well.

This belief holds true across industries, but is especially pertinent to industries that allow for product iteration (think software development, digital art, writing, etc). When the cost of updating the initial product is close to nothing, you should hit the big "Publish" button early and often; early so you can start seeing traffic and often so the experience for new users is always improving. Internet traffic is the lifeblood of online businesses and without it, your venture could die before it sees its first sale.

In this article we'll be talking about writing blog posts with GPT-4 so you can publish early. A blog will instantly add credibility to any web business you're operating, whether that's a drop-shipping site, a digital marketplace, an online community, or something more obscure. Let's dive in 🏊

I want to emphasize up front that while ChatGPT articles are good, a human touch can make them great

The Recipe

By the end of this post we will create a general, long-form prompt that will reliably give us something worth reading. A recipe for literary success, if you will.

Ingredient 1: The Topic

When it comes to establishing a topic for your post, the more specific you can be the better. In the absence of deliberate direction, ChatGPT gravitates towards high-level generalities. To prove this, I prompted it with increasingly specific requests.

"Write me a blog post about how AI will threaten human writers."
"Write me a blog post about how AI will threaten the role of human writers in the blogosphere."
"Write me a blog post about how AI will threaten the role of human writers in the blogosphere. Focus on how bloggers will need to become more authentic and engaging to retain readers."
"Write me a blog post about how AI will threaten the role of human writers in the blogosphere. Focus on how bloggers will need to become more authentic and engaging to retain readers. There should be a common theme throughout the post that highlights the irony of this post being written by AI."

At the most general level, the bot created paragraphs outlining issues from a 30,000 foot perspective. In each iteration, it zoomed in a bit, but by the third prompt, the answer stopped changing that much. That's fine! This is just the seed.

Ingredient 2: The Constraints

On average, a high quality blog post is between 1700 and 2500 words. Anything below 500 is dud. GPT-4 has a token limit of 8192 which is consumed by both the input and the response. On paper, this should be more than enough to generate a full 2000 word blog post but it doesn't always work that way. To be safe, let's go with a 1000 word article.

"Write me a 1000-word blog about..."

If the chat gets cut off, a simple "continue" will get the ball rolling again.

Ingredient 3: The Tone

I see tone as the spice that pulls the meal together and it's incredible how a single word in the original prompt can steer the post in drastically different directions.

Formal: This tone is often used in academic or professional writing, where the language is more structured and objective.
Informal: This tone is more casual and conversational, and may include slang or colloquial expressions.
Humorous: This tone is used to entertain or amuse the reader, often through the use of sarcasm, irony, or wit.
Serious: This tone is used to convey a sense of importance or urgency, often in news or editorial writing.
Persuasive: This tone is used to convince the reader to take a certain action or agree with a certain viewpoint.
Sarcastic: This tone is used to express irony or mockery, often through the use of exaggerated or opposite meanings.
Optimistic: This tone is used to convey a positive and hopeful message, often in motivational or inspirational writing.
Pessimistic: This tone is used to convey a negative or cynical message, often in critical or satirical writing.
Objective: This tone is used to present information in an unbiased and neutral manner.
Subjective: This tone is used to present information from a personal or emotional perspective, often in memoir or personal essay writing.

Ingredient 4: GPT-4

This should go without saying given the title of this post but GPT-4 is significantly better than GPT-3.5 at creating engaging content in the form of a blog. If GPT-3.5 is a highschooler, GPT-4 is a midlevel college student.

Optional Ingredient: The Outline

Without an outline, GPT-4 will make one up. In some cases this is fine and I'm tempted to say you can skip this step. Nonetheless, if there's a message you want to communicate to your audience, adding an outline will give you more control over the blog's overall story.

Start small and build from there. Usually I break a blog down into 5 sections including an introduction and conclusion. GPT-4 doesn't need to be told to include the intro and conclusion since its familiar with the basic structure of a blog post so you can omit those in the prompt.

GPT-4 also understands markdown so present it the outline using (#) headings, (##) subheadings, and (-) bullet points like this:

You can also inform GPT-4 that the headings can be improved and that it should/should not include sections for each subheading. This gives you the freedom of not having to come up with the exact text

Optional Ingredient: Image Placeholders

You can make your job even easier (and admittedly more fun) by asking GPT-4 to include image placeholders in the generated output. During the final editing round you can simply scroll through the output and copy the placeholder text into an image generator like Microsoft's Image Creator or Midjourney.

Becoming the Editor

After GPT-4 has printed the initial draft, I encourage you to give it a pass and see where it went astray. If a paragraph sounds lackluster, copy and paste it back into the chat window with one of the prefixed prompts:

"Add a real world example to this paragraph"
"Rewrite this for a {describe your audience} audience"
"Expand on this paragraph with more details/a bulleted list/a metaphor"

GPT-4 is a tool with little to no restrictions or rules on how it can be used so edit to your hearts content. Ask it to introduce jokes, insert quotes, take tangents. And try writing a paragraph yourself now and then 😅

Example

I used the following prompt to generate an entire post in the AI section of the AI Co-Founded blog.

"Write me a 1000-word blog post about how AI will threaten the role of human writers in the blogosphere. Focus on how bloggers will need to become more authentic and engaging to retain readers. There should be a common joke throughout the post that highlights the irony of this post being written by AI. Use a 5 part outline and leave placeholders for images. Use a nervous tone."

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