In the last lesson, we broke down the six essential elements of a great prompt.
And now it's time to put this to work.
In this lesson, you're going to use all six of these elements and see how they show up in real prompts.
So we'll compare weak versus strong examples.
And we'll dive into smart prompting techniques.
And then lastly end with a hands on exercise so you can start crafting your prompts that actually deliver
in your personal and professional projects.
So let's start this with a quick comparison.
We're going to have the same goal, but with two different prompts.
This first one is the simplistic version.
Now, this may be what you type out when you're first using AI, or you're simply in a rush.
And it could be give me a marketing campaign idea.
Now this is pretty vague and obviously lacks direction, and overall it just doesn't tell the AI who
it's supposed to be.
If it's meant to be a specific product or what even matters most.
So there's no structure, there's no audience, there's no tone, none of that's mentioned, and there's
no overall guidance.
So in this case, the AI is just going to start guessing and the output is going to end up pretty generic
as you can see.
So overall it's giving us ideas that can work for multiple brands or scenarios like a run, a challenge
scenario, or a user generated content scenario.
Now, these aren't wrong.
They're just not necessarily the most effective for our specific situation.
So now let's upgrade that prompt using the structure that we worked on.
I want you to act as a marketing specialist for a new fitness app made for busy moms.
The goal is to boost signups and downloads in the first 30 days.
Suggest three creative campaigns under $500.
Format it as a numbered list with 1 to 2 sentence descriptions.
Use warm and a supportive tone that speaks to overwhelmed moms in this scenario, and I want you to
model the tone after this example, which is no time, no problem.
Quick workouts and real results.
You've got this.
Now, as you can see, this version checks every single box we've defined.
The role included context, clear instructions, formatting boundaries like a tone and a budget, and
an example at the very end to help communicate the overall tone that we're looking for.
And looking at the output.
Now we're getting campaign ideas that are actually designed for our specific use case.
For example, the Mom to mom referral challenge or the five minute Wins video series.
Now, they definitely sound a lot more interesting and relatable to our example brand in this scenario,
as you can see.
And that's exactly what a well-structured prompt does.
It doesn't just give you the content, you give it the proper context that then delivers the content
that you're looking for.
And so now that you've seen how prompts are built, let's take this one layer deeper.
And this is where we're going to start developing your actual prompting skills.
And these are going to be the essential techniques that every beginner should really know to actually
become confident and proficient with AI.
So let's start with clarity versus wordiness.
Now, being specific doesn't mean long or a lot of words.
Instead, you can say something like, give me a specific idea or list three punchy blog titles about
AI in healthcare.
Next is instruction type.
You can go with something open ended, like tell me a creative idea for a short film, or be direct
and specific with something like write a five step checklist for launching a product.
Then there's tone and audience control.
So here you don't want to be afraid to guide the overall voice.
You can say something like, use a friendly tone, write like a Google Product manager, or make this
sound like a LinkedIn post.
Now these simple little tweaks can massively improve the output, and then you're going to start getting
responses that feel a lot more tailored to what you're looking for.
And with that said, now that we have a good overview of the basics of prompting, now we're going to
actually put this into action.
So we're going to take a moment.
If you haven't already, head over to ChatGPT, log in and create a free account.
And we're going to do this learning exercise.
So you can click over to OpenAI, which is available in the resources tab of this lesson.
And like I said, create a free account so you can pause the video, sign in, and then jump back here
when you're ready.
Or you can simply sit back, watch everything and apply what you learned at the end of this lesson.
Let's start this exercise with a couple great different prompting templates that I created.
Now you can actually copy and paste these directly into ChatGPT.
The first one is designed to help you choose your learning path inside this course.
So whether you're more of an entrepreneur or a creative or a business focused learner, you're going
to take this prompt and answer a few personal questions about your goals in life, your learning style,
and your overall preferences.
ChatGPT is then going to recommend which one of these learning paths best fits for you.
The second option that you can choose from is a little bit more inspiring.
It's going to help you to visualize what your ideal day would look like if you were living as your dream
self.
You'll use this prompt to describe your goals, your lifestyle, and the kind of people that you want
to be surrounded by.
ChatGPT is then going to turn that prompt into an actual narrative.
That's pretty cool and pretty motivating to see.
Both of these prompts, as you can see, are going to include context, role, and clear instructions.
And while neither of them really focus too heavily on tone or formatting, that's not a problem.
Those are the things you can always add in or tweak later once you have a strong base.
Now let's walk through one of these prompts together so you can actually see how to make it your own.
Let's go with the skill path selector.
You're going to notice that the template already includes placeholders for you to fill in your answers.
That means you don't need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
You can simply just copy and paste and take a moment to really reflect and type in your responses for
each of these four questions about your goals, how you like to work your current role, and how you
learn best.
So here's an example of how this might look filled in.
My primary goal with AI is to automate repetitive design tasks so I can focus more on the creative side
of my projects.
Next, I prefer to work in the following way, which would be independently with flexible systems that
I can adjust as I go.
My current profession or ambition is that I'm a freelance graphic designer looking to build a small
creative agency, and the best description of my approach to learning is I'm self-taught.
I like learning by doing with real world examples that I can apply right away.
And so once you filled out your prompt, you can run it through ChatGPT and see what comes back.
Now, if you want to take things a step further, you can refine the tone or the formatting to get even
more specific results.
For example, you can add keep the tone encouraging or conversational, like advice from a mentor,
or present the recommendations in something like a short bullet point format so it's easy to understand.
Now, the goal of all this is to show you that this is how you take a base prompt that's more simple,
and you can start shaping it into something that's a lot more personalized and powerful.
So lastly, you can use this checklist as your cheat sheet, and you can simply test out two versions
of a prompt, the simple one and the refined one.
Using this framework.
Using this checklist and compare the results, you can see what changed and what improved.
And this type of reflection is really where you're going to start developing your prompting skills and
getting things to the next level.
And that's the anatomy of a good prompt.
It's a simple idea, but a big shift in the output.
From here, we're going to move into more advanced and creative use cases.
But now that you've got the structure and the techniques, ideally you're never going to look the same
at a blank prompting box again.
I'll see you in the next lesson.