Supercharge Your Copywriting Skills with ChatGPT

Use these tips to level up your copywriting skills

Maaz Naeem
ILLUMINATION
7 min readApr 2, 2023

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Photo by ilgmyzin on Unsplash

With the release of ChatGPT, many people got worried about the different fields of work it was about to take over. One of these fields was copywriting.

It provided such lengthy and well-written articles using just a single prompt that left people in shock at how is such a thing even possible. All you had to do is tell it to write you an article of 500/1000 words and it would do that in a matter of seconds.

With time, people finally realized that the output that ChatGPT was giving wasn’t ideal and that it sounded way too robotic.

This is where Prompt Engineering stepped in. Prompt Engineering is the name of writing or formatting your prompt in such a way that makes the software, in this case, ChatGPT, give you the output just the way you want.

You have to specify, in your prompt, each little detail that you want in your output and ChatGPT will do the magic for you.

As a writer myself, I started to experiment with different prompts that I would give to ChatGPT and rate its output, and I have shared observations in this post.

Understanding Your Audience

Here comes the first part, when you want ChatGPT to write you something, you must specify to whom the output is going to be directed.

For example, if you’re writing a copy in which your main readers are going to be younger people, you must specify in your prompt something like “make it suitable for younger people” or something like it.

Similarly, if you are writing something that is going to be read by foreigners or those people whose first language isn’t English, you must specify it so that it uses simpler English words that are easier to understand.

Consider this example,

Importance of mentioning your audience in ChatGPT

Notice how in the first prompt, I didn’t specify anything, I just told it to define global warming, and it did just that.

However, the vocabulary used in the first output may not be everyone’s piece of cake.

In the second prompt, however, when I specifically told it to define global warming in simpler words, it gave me an output that even a little kid can easily understand.

To keep your audience engaged, it is also very important to mention their pain points.

For example, if you are writing a guide or some kind of problem-solving post, it is important that you first mention what the problem is and how can it be solved through your guide.

ChatGPT can help you in this matter as well if you ask it something like

Mention the pain points of my audience?

after telling it to write you a copy on a specific topic. Consider the following example:

Notice how it started the article by mentioning the possible problems the readers may be suffering from. This keeps the readers engaged and makes them feel like they are directly being engaged through your article/post.

Crafting Headlines and Hooks

ChatGPT allows you to generate impressive headlines that you can use throughout your copy. You can further improve these headlines to make them sound more catchy and attention-grabbing.

For instance, a common rule about having an SEO title is to include some sort of power word and a number in it.

Well with ChatGPT, you can do that using a single prompt. Simply put:

Generate a catchy title for my blog post about [YOUR TITLE]

or

[YOUR TITLE], include a power word in this title and make it sound more captivating.

Some examples of awesome titles generated by ChatGPT:

You can also use ChatGPT to give you outlines for your blog post. You can simply ask it:

Generate outlines for my blog post about [YOUR TITLE]

and it’ll do the job for you. Check this example:

After generating your outlines, you can further tell it to explain each one or provide you with the content of each headline so that you can get a better idea about what you’re going to be writing about.

These are just some of the ways that you can use ChatGPT to generate for you impressive headlines that you can use throughout your copy.

Writing Persuasive Copy

To increase conversions, or to make your audience take some sort of action, you gotta write a copy that is persuasive enough for your audience to act on.

ChatGPT allows you to write content and make it sound persuasive which has the ability to make the reader take some sort of action.

For example, let's talk about the meditation blog post that I have given the screenshot of above. Suppose you are writing a blog post on meditation, now to make your readers agree with the benefits of meditation and to make them start meditating, you have to address the objections that they might have about meditation.

You can ask ChatGPT:

What objections might my audience have?

In the above case, it might be meditation is too difficult, or too boring, and then you can address these objections to help better convince your audience.

Another tip is mentioning the benefits of taking the action. This might increase the knowledge of the readers and they might find out something that they didn’t know about (whatever your topic is).

ChatGPT can also list the benefits if you simply ask it:

What benefits will my audience receive by taking action?

It can also help you to create a sense of urgency in your copy so you can really convince your readers to take the action. You can say:

How can I create a sense of urgency in my copy?

Writing in this manner will boost the chances of the readers to take some sort of action once they are done reading your article.

Improving Readability

A good copy is one that is easy to read and understand. If you use ChatGPT to write content for you then you might know that the output it produces may be impressive, but sounds kinda robotic and not human.

Well, you can improve on this aspect if you ask ChatGPT:

Make it sound more casual

Check this example:

Notice how it changed so much, from sounding like some copy/paste text from Wikipedia, it sounds much more like some human wrote it.

Of course, it might not be perfect, but it does improve on the previous a lot. Just a little bit of changes and your paragraph will be ready much quicker than if you were to write one all by yourself.

ChatGPT is also a master at giving very detailed and explained output about a certain topic and no one likes big chunks of paragraphs. People look for small texts that have the answer to what they are looking for.

Ask ChatGPT:

How can I make it concise?

and it’ll tell what the important points that you must mention in your copy and which ones can you skip talking about.

Adding Personality and Voice

Adding personality to your content is a great way to improve your overall copy. It is a popular method used by almost every copywriter that uses ChatGPT for their work.

To do this, you have to assign a role to ChatGPT to talk as if it is someone. You can tell it that

You are a social media expert

or something like

You are an experienced website developer

and then proceed with your prompt.

What this will do is it will allow ChatGPT to use the language and terms of that field so that the readers who then read that copy will be familiar with them and it will make your copy sound more authentic.

The second thing you can ask ChatGPT is to talk in a specific tone or voice. This can be a humorous tone or a serious one. You can tell it act as a marketer to promote your brand/product and it will use convincing techniques in the copy that’ll help in increasing your conversions.

Another interesting thing it can do for you is that it can give you output in the voice of specific people. You can ask it

Write in the voice of [FAMOUS CELEBRITY]

and it will use the slang or words of that person. This isn’t recommended for copywriting but I just wanted to include this here as it is another one of many interesting things that ChatGPT can do.

Adding a specific personality in your ChatGPT prompt helps to make your content sound more like it was written by a human and the Make it sound more casual prompt will improve it even more.

Final Thoughts

ChatGPT is an awesome tool with many applications and copywriting is just one of them. It has drastically improved the rate at which people used to write/publish blog posts and is increasing in use day by day.

This doesn’t mean that it will take over jobs. When tractors were invented, farmers didn’t lose their job but were replaced by the ones that adopted tractors. Similarly, in this case, AI will not completely replace jobs but the people who adopt it and get better at it certainly will rise.

Copying and pasting the content provided by ChatGPT directly is never recommended as it may include plagiarism and may have other defects, so it is always best to check it and make necessary adjustments before publishing it anywhere on the internet.

Any questions pop up in your mind? Feel free to drop them in the comments! I’m happy to help out.

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