There’s absolutely no denying that ChatGPT is brilliant and can do a lot of the heavy lifting in your online business. That said, it is NOT the panacea to ALL your content creation ills.
Since ChatGPT is currently free and has over a hundred million users, you can bet your last dollar that many marketers will be cooking up get-rich-quick schemes, hoping to leverage ChatGPT for their nefarious plans.
One example would be offering freelance writing services only to use ChatGPT to hastily create mediocre content that’s repetitive and lacks a ‘voice’. This is just one scheme of many.
Avoiding the common mistakes and pitfalls that most people will gravitate towards when using ChatGPT is one of the best ways to get the most out of this AI tool and benefit from it without sabotaging yourself in the process.
- Mistake #1 – Using the content ‘as-is’
Once again, context is important here. If you’re creating content for your blog posts which you’re hoping to rank with SEO, using AI-generated content might not be the best way to go.
There are tools such as Originality.ai which can detect AI content. Assuming many other lazy marketers will resort to this method of ‘copying and pasting’, it’s inevitable for the major search engines to view content on these sites less favorably in time to come.
When using content that you hope to rank for, you always want to rephrase and rewrite the content so that it’s not 100% ChatGPT-generated.
- Mistake #2 – Your content lacks personality
ChatGPT has no emotions and the content it produces will generally read like a robot. Even if you ask it to write in a conversational tone, it’ll never really sound exactly like a real human. Your reader will just ‘feel’ it.
People come online to be entertained. They want to hear about your experiences, stories, jokes and so on. ChatGPT can’t do that yet. Only you can.
Always take ChatGPT’s content and infuse it with your personality and ‘voice’ so it resonates with your audience.
- Mistake #3 – Not fact checking your content
ChatGPT can get facts wrong. It’s trained based on a data set. Here’s the problem – facts may become outdated over time. What worked in the past may not work now.
If ChatGPT isn’t updated by the time new facts are published, it’ll still be using the old facts in its content. Always fact check the generated content so that you’re not inadvertently including factual errors in your content.
- Mistake #4 – Using prompts poorly
While ChatGPT is great at what it does, it’s still not a human being. Many users create long-winded prompts with a bunch of interwoven requests and they hope ChatGPT can produce a miracle and answer their requests.
In reality, the results given by ChatGPT may be wrong, misleading or it just won’t understand the prompt. You’re better off asking one thing at a time – and letting the tool answer it.
Since ChatGPT works as a ‘conversation’, your next prompt can reference the earlier result you just got. By using new and different prompts repeatedly, you’ll be able to tweak your result and get ChatGPT to give you what you truly want.
- Mistake #5 – Passing off ChatGPT’s work as your own
As mentioned earlier, avoid trying to pass of ChatGPT’s content as your own masterpiece. This is especially true if someone is paying you to do the work. They’re hoping for something unique to stand above the sea of AI-content.
If you give them more AI content, chances are high that you’ll lose them as a client.
- Mistake #6 – Over-reliance on ChatGPT
As useful as ChatGPT is, it’s not a one-stop solution to all your online marketing needs. Recently (February 27, 2023), ChatGPT was down for about 3 hours. (Source)
During that time, thousands of people were left stranded. They couldn’t do their work, and this was true even for those who were paying ChatGPT for the ‘Plus’ plan.
Over-reliance on ChatGPT will mean that if the tool stops working, you’ll be severely ‘handicapped’. It’s best to know how to manually do what you’re asking ChatGPT to do for you all the time.
This may be copywriting, proofreading, researching, and so on. While ChatGPT is reliable, it can go down – and if it does, you’ll still be able to get your work done without being ‘lost’.
- Mistake #7 – Not tapping into the full potential of ChatGPT
On the surface, ChatGPT looks like a content creation tool. Many marketers wrongly believe that that’s all it’s good for. So they dismiss it without realizing just how powerful a tool it can be in their business.
ChatGPT can be used to create legal pages (which replaces plugins) … or it can be used to create chatbot sequences, onboard emails and much more.
It’s NOT just for writing blog posts or ebooks. In fact, how you use ChatGPT is only limited by your imagination.
These 7 mistakes are the most common ones when using this awesome AI tool. Avoid them at all cost.
Use ChatGPT legitimately and creatively, and you’ll be amazed at what it can do. This tool will save you time and money when employed efficiently. Use it wisely.