How-To Create an E-book Using ChatGPT

ChatGPT can take care of the bulk of the work of creating the main content of an eBook that can be used as a lead magnet, tripwire offer, or simply as a free resource for our users. This document will walk through an example step-by-step process for creating a high quality content asset for campaigns.

Preparation

Before we dive into using ChatGPT to create our eBook, we need to decide on a topic. Maybe you already have one in mind, but if you don’t, below is a great resources that can help. The key to your eBook being successful is that it covers a topic that our users are actually interested in, and would want to read.

Answerthepublic.com

This site is great for getting ideas for a content piece. It is an up-to-date repository of recent searches that were phrased as a question to the search engines. It organizes the data into categories based on the type of question, and shows you search volume so you can easily find a question that your target audience is asking, and center your content piece around answering that question.

For our example, we will use http://Answerthepublic.com and search for “nurse careers” to return a list of questions based around that key phrase. We won’t walk through pouring over the results, but after only a few minutes of reviewing the returned data we can see that there is high search volume for the question “What is the best career path for a Nurse?”.

So, we have the topic we want to create our content around, let’s head over to ChatGPT and start the process of creating our asset.

The Perfect Title

While we have the question we want to answer with our content piece, the title of our eBook is not going to just be the question. So, we will use ChatGPT to create ideas for the title of our eBook. We may end up using one of the suggestions directly as provided, but we might also take the suggestions and use them to spark a better idea that we come up with for ourselves.

We are going to ask ChatGPT to take on the persona of an expert marketer for this part of our process, generate a list of possible titles, and manually review the output. We will input the following prompt into ChatGPT:

After entering that prompt, ChatGPT returned the follow list:

These are all quality choices, but #2, #5, and #7 look more promising than the rest, as they use the seed keywords we entered into Answerthepublic.com as well as the key phrase “Nursing Career Path(s)” from the question we are looking to answer. Any of those would be great titles. For the purpose of this guide, we will choose #7 - “The Top Nursing Career Paths: Choosing the Right Direction for You”

Generating an Outline

As much as we may want to just have ChatGPT move directly into writing the content, doing so just based on a title will generate pretty poor results. It is better to now ask ChatGPT to create an outline of the content that would be in this guide. This will allow us to take the outline, get feedback from internal SME and ensure all the correct points are being touched on before we get too far in the process.

For the title, we asked ChatGPT to act as an expert digital marketer. That is because we wanted it to generate a title that was engaging and would ideally create some interest from our target audience. Now that we are moving on to the actual content, we are going to ask ChatGPT to act as a career coach with extensive Nursing experience, to try and get the best content we can. Here is the prompt we will use:

With that prompt, ChatGPT returned the following outline:

Now we can take this outline and get an internal SME to review, and we can make any adjustments to our outline that are needed. This step of generating an outline instead of asking ChatGPT to just start creating content is crucial. ChatGPT would not be as thorough with its content creation if we skipped this step. It also allows us to make sure ChatGPT will cover all the points we want it to once we have it start generating content.

Writing The Content

Our internal SME has said the outline looks like it is good to go! Now we can finally get to actually producing the content of our guide. ChatGPT can only generate so much content at one time, so for this part of our process, we will break the outline down and have it generate smaller pieces of the whole. It is advisable to enter all your prompts moving forward into a single chat instance with ChatGPT. This will allow ChatGPT to remember what it has already generated and reference it as needed as we create the content.

We will not show the process of going through the entire outline, but give a couple of examples of prompts. The process is then simply repeated for each section of the outline. As ChatGPT generates each section of content, copy it and paste into a word document - this will be our first draft of the guide.

Our initial prompt is written as follows:

ChatGPT will generate the content as you described. Note that we included specific instructions about the length of the content. This is important to ensure ChatGPT outputs exactly what you are looking for. You can change the length requirements as needed as you continue to build out the content from your outline.

From here you would keep repeating the above prompt with each section of the outline until ChatGPT has generated the entire content piece. Once finished, it is critical that you again have a SME review the content and provide feedback. After that, the text should be reviewed and edited by our content marketing team. Once all of that is done, its time to send the piece to the creative team to turn into a PDF asset for use in your campaigns!