How to Use ChatGPT for Engaging Blog Content
There’s a quote by the late American author, Dan Poynter, “If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.”
While this quote is true to a large extent, thousands of bloggers will readily admit that facing a blank screen can be intimidating. So they procrastinate often. This mental stress is exacerbated when faced with a tight content schedule to meet.
Most blogs are beasts that feed off fresh content. To stay relevant in the eyes of your readers, your blog will need new content on a regular basis.
This will retain readers and help with your search engine optimization (SEO) too. Google loves blogs that are constantly updated and relevant.
While the experienced (and profitable) bloggers may use a team of writers to create a steady stream of content, the newbie or even intermediate marketer may struggle to come up with new topics, angles, and content ideas.
Even with a consistent writing habit, the process can seem arduous and monotonous… until now…
Is ChatGPT Really That Good?
Ever since ChatGPT was released, thousands of people have discovered that not only can this game-changing tool generate text that reads (and sounds) like it was written by a human – but it can also be used for a variety of purposes ranging from research to outlining to even idea generation.
The inexperienced user will rely on ChatGPT to just generate blocks of text which they’ll then lazily copy and paste on their blogs.
The astute user, however, will understand that ChatGPT is like the Swiss knife of content creation and it can be used for so much more.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced user or not – this article will open your eyes to what is possible with ChatGPT. Your blogging and content creation process will NEVER be the same again.
Read on…
Using ChatGPT to Generate topics for your blog and/or a content calendar
Coming up with new topics to write about can be mind-numbing if you only rely on brainstorming. Instead of cracking your head for hours, just fire up ChatGPT and ask it to do the heavy lifting for you.
Let’s try it out. We’ll assume that we’re in the numerology niche and need topics for an entire month.
Whether you write 5 blog posts all at once and schedule them to go out daily or you choose to write 1 blog post every single day is up to you. But having a content calendar will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed because it’s all laid out in an easy-to-follow manner.
Ideally, you’ll want to batch your tasks and write several posts at once and schedule them. This will prevent decision fatigue and you’ll be able to write as much as you can when you’re in a state of flow.
Now let’s ask ChatGPT to create a content calendar for us…
It’s important to break your prompt down into smaller requests so that ChatGPT doesn’t get ‘confused’. If your prompt contains too many details, it’ll be difficult for the software to process it effectively, as formidable as it may be.
So go slow. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
This is the calendar generated by ChatGPT…
Now that you have a content calendar, you have a topic for every day of the month. Phew! What a weight off your shoulders. It’s time to write.
Or is it?
Of course not. There’s so much more we can get ChatGPT to do!
Always remember, the more work ChatGPT does, the less work you’ll do.
Using ChatGPT to generate titles for Blog articles
Now that we have topics, we can generate titles for our topics. In the example below, we asked for 4 article titles. From there, it’s just a matter of choosing the best one.
You could ask for any number of titles you want. We chose 4 for brevity. By asking for several titles, you could manually mix and match them to create a Frankentitle that you truly like.
It’s easier to create a title when you already have ideas to work with – and ChatGPT gives you exactly what you need.
Let’s choose this title: Unlock Your Destiny: Discover Your Life Path Number
Creating Blog Article Outlines With ChatGPT
So we have a title. Now it’s time to create an outline.
We can get ChatGPT to outline articles based on the topics generated in the content calendar. In the past, we’d have to do our own research and outline the articles individually.
This process could take hours depending on the quantity of content we were writing. With ChatGPT, this process can be reduced to minutes!
From the example above, you’ll notice that we asked for sub-headings and 2 facts for each subheading. There’s a reason for this.
When writing for the web, having sub-headings will help to break up your text and make it easier to read. This will encourage people to keep reading and your visitor retention will increase.
People tend to get overwhelmed when faced with large blocks of text. It just seems like too much effort to wade through all those words just to find out what they want.
By having sub-headings with 2 facts for each sub-heading, your content will be informative, factual, digestible, and a breeze to read. This is why listicles are so popular online.
Let’s see what ChatGPT comes up with…
Beautiful! We now have an entire outline that we can flesh out. This outline will act as a framework and roadmap when you’re writing.
Which brings us to a very important point!
You should do most of the writing!
There’s often a lot of debate over this issue.
Should we let ChatGPT write the entire article for us… or should we merely use it to facilitate parts of the content creation process?
Ideally, you should do most of the writing yourself. While ChatGPT can be used for idea generation and many other tasks, it’s a text generator and NOT A WRITER!
This is a very important distinction that you absolutely must understand. The text generated by ChatGPT will often sound robotic and dull. People come online for information, but they also want to be entertained.
They want to hear your stories, opinions, etc. They want content that’s humorous, witty, opinionated, and oozing with human emotion.
This is known as a writing ‘voice’ and ChatGPT doesn’t have one.
Even if you asked it to write in a conversational tone, it will not have your personality. If you truly wish to build a loyal audience and make an impact on your niche, your content MUST have a voice.
A voice that’s daring, unique and maybe even polarizing. Only you can do that.
So use ChatGPT for the ‘technical’ parts of the content creation process – but do as much of the writing as you can on your own. Or hire a competent writer to write… once you have ChatGPT do all the other work for you.
Now let’s get back to leveraging ChatGPT…
Using ChatGPT to Write Blog Introductions and Conclusions
The hardest part of getting started is the introduction. Use ChatGPT to generate an introduction for you. From here, you can rewrite the intro in your own words. At least now you’ve got the ball rolling… and from there, you’ll gain momentum.
We’ll follow the earlier example and ask ChatGPT to generate an intro for our article, “Unlock Your Destiny: Discover Your Life Path Number”.
It created one block of text. While good, let’s make it more readable and break it down to a few smaller (easier to read) paragraphs.
That’s a good intro which sets the stage for the rest of the article.
Another common problem that many bloggers face is writing a conclusion which neatly sums up the article. This is important because you don’t want to end abruptly, but at the same time, you don’t want to ramble on too long.
So we’ll ask ChatGPT to write a conclusion…
Good job! Now just rewrite it a little, make it personable and you’re good to go.
Writing Tutorials With ChatGPT
ChatGPT can be used to write step-by-step tutorials to simplify complex processes.
Following the example above, let’s assume we want to teach the reader to calculate their life path number… whatever it may be.
Rather than pulling out our scientific calculators and reliving nightmares of high school algebra, let’s ask ChatGPT to do it for us…
There you go… a cool tutorial that you can use on your blog, done in less than a minute. There’s no denying that ChatGPT is a time saver.
Finding Niche Trends with ChatGPT
While ChatGPT is only as accurate as its last update, it can still highlight trends in your niche and give you content ideas.
Based on this data, you may wish to write articles on technology and how it relates to numerology… or how numerology impacts one’s career and so on. All these topics are relevant to your niche and worth writing about.
Linking Closely Related Niches and Sub-Niches
Sometimes writing only about topics on one niche can constrain your content creation.
However, if you can write about other niches which are closely related to your niche, not only will you be able to get more content ideas, but there will be more opportunities to target long tail keywords…
And drive more traffic to your site.
For example, if you’re in the bodybuilding niche… some related niches may be:
- The keto diet
- Fitness gear
- Gym memberships
- Male enhancement
- Natural remedies
By linking different niches to your own and showing the reader the relevance, your blog will never run short of content.
In this example, we’ll assume that we’re in the numerology niche and have no idea what other niches are relevant to us. So we’ll turn to ChatGPT, the Jedi of content creation, and ask it to give us some ideas…
ChatGPT gave us 3 related niches:
- Astrology
- Tarot Reading
- Feng Shui
We only asked for 3 niches… but of course, you can always ask for more.
Now that we have related niches, let’s ask ChatGPT to give us article ideas for one of these niches and link the topic to our niche, which is numerology.
There you go. Related topics in related niches just waiting for you to delve into them.
Using ChatGPT to Create Polls
People love taking part in polls online. Sites like Buzzfeed often have polls to increase reader engagement and retention.
You can use ChatGPT to easily give you ideas for polls on your site. Let’s try this with an extremely popular niche like the keto diet.
See that?
These are excellent questions that often polarize the keto niche. By getting people to vote in the poll, you’ll make them feel like a part of your blog… and your content will resonate with them. Furthermore, many will return to check on the poll results.
So you’ll have constant traffic to your blog and be viewed upon favorably by Google. You may need a WordPress poll plugin to conduct a poll (if you’re using WordPress). One reliable plugin you can use is WP Forms: https://wpforms.com/
Generating FAQs With ChatGPT
Besides polls, you can ask ChatGPT to list out the frequently asked questions by people in your niche.
Once you have a list of questions, you can ask ChatGPT to generate answers for these questions. Then it’s just a matter of grouping the tightly related questions and answers and post them on your blog accordingly.
If you wish, you can use AnswerThePublic.com to generate a list of questions for you. After that, you can use ChatGPT to answer these questions.
You’ll be amazed to discover that if you optimize these types of ‘FAQ’ posts, they’ll often rank in Google, provided you have all the SEO factors nailed down.
For example, if we did a search on Google for ‘how to use chatgpt’… you’d see this in the results…
All these are FAQs… and they point to different sites. It all depends on how well-optimized the page is.
See that? 2 different questions pointing to 2 different sites.
Using ChatGPT to Understand Your Niche Audience
The best way to resonate with your audience will be to understand their needs and problems. You need to speak the same lingo as them and your content must address the problems that they have.
There are several ways to research your niche audience. One easy way is to ask ChatGPT to create a generalized avatar of your typical reader…
ChatGPT has given us a long wordy description, but you can always ask it to summarize the entire thing into point format for easier reference.
Whenever you’re about to write a blog post, you’ll know who you are writing for and be able to tailor your tone and topic to suit your audience.
Get Affiliate Product Suggestions and Ideas From ChatGPT
One of the best ways to monetize your blog will be to sell or promote products/services. These can either be your own products or other people’s products (affiliate marketing).
Use ChatGPT to give you a few suggestions that you can ponder over…
In the prompt above, we only mentioned being an affiliate. This is to keep things simple. If you’re a vendor, you can create similar products to what you’d promote as an affiliate.
Armed with the suggestions given by ChatGPT, now you can either find products to promote… or create your own products and sell them to your audience. Or do both. The sky is the limit here.
Let’s wrap things up!
By now, you’ll be keenly aware of how versatile ChatGPT is and how it can be used to not only save time but also serve to improve the quality of your content.
Besides the suggestions above, you can also use this tool to…
- Answer readers’ questions/comments which are left on your posts
- Create reviews for products you’re selling or promoting
- Proofreading your content before you post it
- Translate your content into different languages
- Create quizzes
- Curate expert opinions on topics related to your niche (and you offer your take on these issues)
You’re only limited by your imagination. Treat ChatGPT as a tool to ASSIST you in your content creation. It’s a means to an end and not an end in itself.
ChatGPT generates different but similar content.
That basically means, your competitors who are using it to create content (on a similar topic) and using the content exactly as it is will often face a situation where they all have similar content rewritten in different words.
The content will all sound the same even if the words used are different. This is the downside of relying solely on ChatGPT to do your writing for you.
While the masses will use it to mindlessly generate ‘copy and paste’ text, if you wield it wisely and use it to shortcut the content creation process – but do your own writing with your own voice and flavor blended into it, you’ll stand above the noise in your niche and be the authority in it.
Always remember the quote by Coco Chanel, “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”