Prompt template design

Most businesses know they could be getting more from AI, they just don't know where to start. So I like to share one common example.

Yesterday, I was on a discovery call with a business that is interested in hiring me to help them with their SEO and AI optimization. Naturally, they wanted to know what I would be doing to help them get more traffic from search and AI results.

And I explained that about half of the work we'd be doing would be content creation. They immediately jumped in and said, we actually don't need help with content creation.

We have a team of writers. And I said, oh, that's great.

Are these writers experts in your industry? And they said, yes, we've trained these writers to understand everything that's important to know about our industry.

We can't use AI to write the content because it constantly gets things wrong about our industry. Now, first let me say I think there still is a place for prolific expert writers.

If you have extensive firsthand experience or are truly a prolific writer, then AI cannot replace you...

et started. So here are the basics.

You need to set up some kind of project. They're called custom GPTs in ChatGPT, they're called gems in Gemini, or in my favourite, Claude, they're just called projects.

Projects have two parts to them: the instructions and the knowledge. The knowledge, you're going to place everything that is important for this project to be able to reference.

You wanna document with all the basic information about your company. You wanna document about all your products and services.

You wanna document about your ideal customer profile. And then in the instructions, you want to give very clear instructions about how to do the task, and you also want to explain all the documents it has in its knowledge and, most importantly, specific instructions on when to use each document.

Think of setting up your project like the onboarding process of a new hire. You're not yet training it on specific tasks, you're just giving it the basic information it's going to need to start learning those tasks.

For each specific task, you're gonna need a prompt template...

ind the role. This is gonna be something like you are an expert content writer for this brand.

Next, to find the goal. This is gonna be something like your goal is to produce an optimized blog post for a given search term.

Then you're gonna define the input. This might be the target keyword or the topic, along with any information you want it to reference while it's writing this piece of content.

Next, you'll define the process. These should be very specific step by step instructions you want to take as it performs this test.

Next are the guidelines. These are any rules you want it to follow as it goes through the process.

Again, be very specific. Next are examples.

You want to give it both positive and negative examples of what success looks like. You don't need to create the negative examples right away.

As you get bad outputs from the prompt, you can include those as negatives. Next, to find the format that you wanted to output the task in.

And then finally, you're going to repeat the most important instructions...

, and then you paste the prompt into that project and run it this way. In addition to the prompt, it has access to everything that you've put into that project.

And the project also needs to be maintained. Anytime there's new information about your company, add it to the project, update the instructions.

And you might be thinking, this sounds like a ton of work. And if you're creating a single blog post, sure.

But if you want to create 100 blog posts or 1,000, it's an incredibly efficient use of your time.