ChatGPT Copywriting: How to Use ChatGPT for Writing Articles [Guide & Prompts]

ChatGPT has many capabilities that help with the content and copywriting process. These can be as simple as generating ideas for content, or as complex as writing an entire article for you. The results you get depend on the prompts that you give the AI. It takes a little bit of practice and engineering to learn the right commands, but once you do, the possibilities are endless.

If you understand how to prompt ChatGPT correctly, you can get a blog post with a relevant topic that utilizes top keywords and has excellent spelling and grammar. Plus, it will require far less time and effort than writing the article without its assistance. So, ultimately, it has the potential to save you time and energy, again, provided you know how to use it.

The power of ChatGPT comes with significant limitations to be aware of. For example, the AI may generate inaccurate information from time to time. Or, that information could be plagiarized from existing online sources. Therefore, it’s important to read back over the work it produces and check it for accuracy and originality.

However, the product can be a powerful idea and copy generator. It has the potential to take complex ideas and make them more simple. It can also perform some tasks, such as writing, at an extremely fast speed compared to a human. This is the promise of AI, that it will make life and work easier for humans. It’s also now available in the app form, making it more accessible to busy creatives than ever.

ChatGPT is far from the only AI writing tool on the market. Two very popular alternatives are Jasper and Copy.ai.

Unlike ChatGPT, Jasper and Copy.ai are built specifically with writers and copywriters in mind. Because of this, many professional marketing teams at large companies have adopted Jasper and Copy.ai instead of ChatGPT to assist with content and copywriting.

However, ChatGPT is arguably more advanced and cutting-edge than these specialty tools. The best way to determine the differences, though, is to dive in and try them for yourself!

To sign up for ChatGPT, visit Openai.com and follow the prompts to sign up.

Go to Openai.com

From there, log in if you have an account. If not, you can easily sign up by clicking the relevant button.

Simply enter your email address and choose a password, or use one of the single sign-on (SSO) options below. These include Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

It will then ask for more information about you, including your name, birthday (to verify your age), and phone number. Once you’ve completed this process, you’ll be able to use that account to sign in to ChatGPT and see your sessions.

Above is the screen you’ll see during your first session of ChatGPT.

In the top left, you’ll see a New chat button.  This begins a new “session.” The AI remembers what you’ve said previously in each session. So, a new session is a clean slate. Some users have several sessions, each for different tasks they want to use ChatGPT for.

The center of the screen, gives you some guidelines to get started. These include some sample prompts and a list of the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT. Below that, Send a message begins your session. You type into that field to prompt ChatGPT.

There are multiple versions of ChatGPT in use today by OpenAI. The free-to-use version of ChatGPT currently uses ChatGPT-3.5, but the superior ChatGPT-4 was released in March 2023. It is accessible through a premium membership called ChatGPT+, currently holding new users on a waitlist at the time of this writing. Although ChatGPT-4 is more advanced, ChatGPT-3.5 is far from basic. It can still be used quite extensively for article writing. Plus, those who are familiar with ChatGPT-3.5 will be more experienced when ChatGPT-4 becomes more widely available.

Below, we cover the most popular ways on how to use ChatGPT for your copywriting needs. Use the navigation below to jump to the corresponding section:

• Keyword research

• Analyzing niches

• Generating title ideas

• Generating outlines

• Generating lists of key points for topics

• Generating blog posts

• Help with spelling/grammar checks

• Rewriting content

• Translating content

• Receiving feedback and suggestions

• Generating interview questions and answers

• Generating posts for social media

If you want to write an article that captivates the attention of your target audience and entices them to read, then your journey begins with keyword research. Keyword research means discovering the right words to put into the text of your article or copy so that it ranks more highly in search engines. This is a process known as search engine optimization (SEO).

ChatGPT can be used to generate keyword ideas like so:

Simply ask it which keywords should be included. You can tell it how many options you want as well as your target audience for a more specific answer:

One important caveat here is the fact that ChatGPT-3.5 doesn’t have as much information after September 2021. So, if the top performing articles were written after that date, it may not know which keywords they use.

Once you have your list of keywords, it’s time to determine what you want to say and who you want to talk to. That’s the art of analyzing your niche. For example, there are a plethora of articles about the Aurora Borealis, but they serve different niches. Some are written from a scientific point of view, while others are written for tourists. ChatGPT can help a content marketer find the right audience to talk to through niche analysis, also known as audience segmentation.

In this prompt, ChatGPT identified potential audience segments for an article about the Northern Lights. If the content marketer chose to write to adventure travelers, the second niche, then ChatGPT can be used to analyze them further:

When you have your keyword ideas and your niche selected, what’s next is creating a captivating title for your audience. A good title can be the difference maker, determining whether your target reader will click on the article in a search engine or social media feed. Thankfully, ChatGPT can also be used to generate title ideas. Tell it the kind of article you’re writing and to whom, and it will give you specific ideas:

You can also ask it to be more specific in the titles in generates, depending on the kind of article you’re writing. If you want to write a list-based article, for example, then include that information:

At this point, we have keywords, a niche, and a title for our article. At this point, ChatGPT can be used a number of ways, depending on your content needs. This includes coming up with outlines, templates, key points, or even generating a first draft of the article in its entirety.

If you want an outline for your article, ask ChatGPT to generate an outline, and be specific about what to include. Here are a couple of examples:

This was an outline for the list-based idea, “Top 10 Arctic Destinations for Adventure Travelers to Witness the Northern Lights”. You can also include all the previous information in a single prompt, and generate a similar response:

Similar to the previous use of ChatGPT, you can use the AI writer as a reference point for things that should be included in your article:

You can also use it to get more specific on topics you don’t understand, to help you articulate them to your audience. For example, the Northern Lights is a complicated scientific phenomenon that might be difficult to understand at first, much less write about in an article. So, you can ask ChatGPT to help explain it.

Plus, you can also target specific reading levels to make it line up with your audience. However, always make sure to fact-check the responses!

Besides generating an outline or key points for the article, you can also use ChatGPT to generate a first draft of the entire blog post. This can save you a great deal of time in the drafting process, but it does have its drawbacks. For example, you have to check the response for accuracy and plagiarism. In addition, the copy the AI generates could be repetitive. Lastly, it could be detected as AI by AI detection software. So, make sure that you have considered the legal and ethical ramifications for the work you’re asking ChatGPT to perform. Because of all this, many content marketers use ChatGPT for pieces of their article, or they extensively edit and rewrite the content it generates.

The above prompt relied on the information that was previously in that ChatGPT session. However, you can generate articles from scratch if you include the correct information.

Whether you used ChatGPT to generate the article, or you wrote it yourself, you can even use it for spelling and grammar checks. This could also include functions like changing the spelling of certain words from U.S. English to British English, or making sure that the copy aligns with style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.

Above is an example of ChatGPT’s ability to analyze and fix spelling and grammar. Below is an example of the Aurora Borealis article, but with the language style changed:

In addition to generating new content, ChatGPT can be used to take existing content and rewrite it. One could have many reasons to rewrite existing content: perhaps they want to convert a blog post into a list-based article, or target a new audience. Regardless, ChatGPT can take what the writer has and rewrite it according to their specifications.

For example, say that you want to target scientists instead of adventure travelers with your article about the Northern Lights. You could prompt the AI writer like so:

You could also take your article and give it a different voice or tone. This will help you make sure your content reaches your target audience.

Take note: many of these prompts build upon previous prompts. This shows that ChatGPT not only generates new content, but it keeps track of the content already in the conversation. This makes it a powerful tool for rewriting, as you can get multiple iterations and passes at the same content.

If your audience speaks multiple languages, you can use ChatGPT to create content targeting them in their language. If you already have an article in your conversation, then you can ask ChatGPT to generate a new version in a new language:

Note: it’s always wise to run your article by someone who is fluent in the target language, just in case anything was lost in ChatGPT’s translation.

In addition to translating between languages, you can also translate between reading levels. This can be helpful for anyone writing content for children and students, or those who want to make their content accessible to those who are learning English:

In addition to complete rewrites, ChatGPT can be used for feedback and suggestions on your topic. You can think of it as a beta reader. It can give you suggestions not only for the content you’ve already produced, but additional articles stemming off of existing articles. This can help you dive further into a niche, or explore a new (but related) topic.

In the above prompt, ChatGPT was given the article about pilot careers. It gave feedback to help make the main arguments in the blog article more convincing to the reader. In the below prompt, ChatGPT gives suggestions on additional content related to the Northern Lights article.

Some articles are not list-based or argument-driven, but instead consist of interviews. However, one of the most difficult parts of interviewing someone is coming up with compelling questions to ask them. Or, someone may write a question-and-answer format article, such as frequently asked questions (FAQ). ChatGPT can be used both to generate questions for interviewees and answers to FAQs.

Observe the prompt below for interview questions:

When you tell ChatGPT to generate open-ended questions, it will create questions that cannot be answered by a simple “yes” or “no,” and therefore can lead your interviewee into more substantial responses. Likewise, you can use ChatGPT to generate answers to questions:

Once you have your blog or article written, it’s time to get the word out! ChatGPT can also help you share your post and get it in front of as many people as possible through social media. If you prompt it correctly, it can even help you create a campaign of social media posts about your article, or social media ad copy for it.

In the above prompt, ChatGPT helped identify social media sites to share the article about pilot careers on. In the below prompt, ChatGPT took the article about the Northern lights and gave two Facebook ad ideas for it. These can be excellent springboards into creating an ad campaign.