AI writing prompt: 7 ideas to power your content workflow

Need AI writing prompt ideas for content production? Get expert tips on how to craft killer prompts, enhance creativity, and speed up your workflow

Move over Web3, crypto, and non-fungible tokens. AI is the new buzzword du jour. 

It’s suddenly everywhere as companies pivot to AI to make decisions that impact their customers and bottom line. 

Experimental, sophisticated content teams are among the biggest beneficiaries of this trend. They’re already deploying AI writing assistants and using well-crafted prompts to create content that converts and generates revenue. 

Curious about how your business can benefit from the latter? 

Guiding AI writing prompt ideas you can use to speed up your workflow and turn them into content marketing gold. 

What are AI writing prompts?

AI writing prompts are suggestions generated by AI algorithms designed to spark creative writing ideas for blog posts, product pages, case studies, advertising copy, or even artwork.

Before that, marketing strategists and writers would spend days or weeks organizing, research, and keywords into detailed content briefs.

With AI-powered tools & models like the GPT — which got viral popularity after OpenAI launched ChatGPT — content teams are less frustrated.

“I mainly use AI tools to help write content briefs, which include an optimized title, secondary keywords, topic outlines, number of images to include, ideal word count range, and minimum number of headings,” says Alli Hill, founder and director of Fleurish Freelance. “This helps to take the guesswork out of what’s going to rank well in search results.”

Developing content briefs, AI writing prompts can generate ideas on a specific theme or topic for your content projects and overall strategy. This results in time and cost savings. 

Plus, you get unique and original perspectives you might not have considered before.

Goodbye writer’s block!

How do AI writing prompts work?

You probably follow a fairly standard process from ideation to research to outlining and drafting. But sometimes, even if you have a topic, you’re unsure of the exact direction you want to take. 

An AI writing assistant uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to your written prompts. Rather than going out to retrieve the information you need, the assistant speeds up the content creation workflow & marketing process based on what you hope to gain.

These tools are trained using various real-life data forms, which they learn from & improve from human-like or natural-sounding text. 

If you’re in the real estate business, you can type a few keywords into an AI writing tool to generate content ideas for: listings descriptions, emails, marketing content, or FAQs. 

Here’s an example of an online listing Iowa realtor JJ Johannes created using an AI writing prompt.

AI writing tools deliver result with perfect grammar, suitable tone, & flowing narrative, you won’t always get exactly what you hope for.

Generative AI models depend on the data combinations used to train their algorithms

meaning they may deliver outputs indistinguishable from human-like text — or they can seem a little uncanny. In some cases, the output may not be appropriate or accurate.

“I’m a freelance writer. I don’t use AI to write any of my content because the technology isn’t good enough yet,” says Ashley Cummings, freelance writer and CMO of Reading With RIK. “But AI is a great tool for research and ideating. I create prompts around topics I’m writing to make better outlines and to capture ideas faster than I could if I were brainstorming on my own or doing a Google search.”

It all depends on the quality of the model and your input. So, be sure to check the output you get then make it more fit for purpose before publishing or using it anywhere.

In Johannes’ case, the tool delivered quick, elaborate responses, which would’ve otherwise taken him at least an hour to write. But he still tweaked and edited the result for conciseness.

That said, there are clear opportunities for businesses using AI prompts. Let’s review some of them below.

How can AI writing prompts benefit your business?

AI writing prompts benefit a wide variety of industries and businesses that need clear written materials such as marketing copy, technical content, and more. 

Specifically, AI writing prompts help you:

Save time:

AI writing prompts automate the rote, repetitive, and predictable tasks that take up much of your content team’s time like outlining or keyword search and more. This not only saves time, but it also enables you to produce more high-quality written material.

Increase productivity:

AI extends and augments your content team’s existing talents, allowing them to scale their capabilities. By taking up the repetitive work, your team is free to focus on more interesting creative, campaign-level work and high-level strategy. 

Create more value:

The time and cost saving benefits you derive from using AI writing prompts allow you to pursue new business opportunities and create more value for your customers.

Repurpose content for multiple platforms:

It’s not enough to create one piece of content these days. You also have to repurpose and remix it for webinars, social media, and other platforms. AI writing can help you reword, summarize, or get multiple variations on your existing content to increase its reach. 

Create consistency across platforms:

If you have multiple channels, AI writing can review your style guide to ensure everything is consistently on-brand across your platforms.  

Target specific audiences:

You can tailor AI writing prompts to target specific user demographics. For instance, if you’re writing a white paper about the challenges of managing capital projects, targeting risk managers in real estate, you can create writing prompts tailored to that audience, personalized or customized for your business.

Improve speed-to-market

: AI writing prompts produce basic drafts and outlines in seconds compared to a human, particularly for informational content like help center articles, SEO content, and product page descriptions you can modify or edit. 

“GPT has decreased our time-to-value outward-facing writing tenfold,” says Bob Rogers, CEO at Oii. “It allows us to create several variations of writing so we can pick a clear & unique piece of content. We then add some flavor and additional details, maybe a personal touch, and the piece is ready to go.”

How do you write a good AI writing prompt?

AI writing prompts are beneficial, what does it take to create a prompt that delivers output you can run with?

Like the ingredients necessary for your favorite festive dish, there’s a clear recipe for creating a good AI prompt. 

In a webinar, dubbed Prompt Crafting for AI Writing Tools, Alaura Weaver, Senior Manager-Content & Community at Writer, AI feeds on three things: 

• Examples: AI learns through examples it finds on the web as it scans for information.
• Context: AI also needs context — the purpose or ‘why’ of what you’re asking — to deliver better output. 
• Parameters: When crafting AI prompts, you need to build guardrails around the output by setting limits on what you want. Otherwise, what you might end up with may be broad or too general to make anything useful out of it.

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From the example, you can clearly see how the three ingredients come together: 

• Example: There’s a specific example of the expected output: “For example, Grace Lau refers to that feeling of being overwhelmed or intimidated when asked to write something from scratch as ‘blank page syndrome’.”
• Context: The ‘why’ or purpose is to spark a conversation in an online community of content marketing leaders.
• Parameters: A link to a blog post the tool should use as a reference is included along with names of people from whom it should source specific quotes (as a starting point). 

With these three ingredients, you can generate prompts that will guide your content direction and creation process. 

Scott Lieberman, founder of Touchdown Money also uses a 3-part formula when creating prompts.

“Make your prompt simple, specific, and structured,” says Lieberman. “Use simple language, explain exactly what you want, and write your prompt in a structured, logical order.”

Here’s an example that applies Lieberman’s 3S formula:

Instead of asking “What is true love?” to create a prompt, you can say: 

“Write a 500-word essay explaining, how does true love compare to infatuation? Start with an introduction that includes a statistic on divorces in the USA. Conclude with a relevant quote from a philosopher about love.”

Here’s the AI-generated result:

Using Alaura’s or Lieberman’s ingredients when building AI writing prompts, the tool acts as your ‘second brain’, helping you:

• Repurpose content from existing blog posts 
• Generate discussion questions to spark conversations in communities and on social media
• Write analogies that make great introductions to blog posts
• Incorporate content into tweets and LinkedIn post copy
• Summarize video recordings or webinar events and build blog posts

Once you have the desired output, you can either refine your prompt further and request again, or — if you’re happy with the result — fine-tune it to prepare content briefs, outlines, or drafts aligned with your brand style guide.

You could also ask the tool to learn how you write headlines based on specific blog posts you feed it with, then ask it to write appropriate headlines.

Armed with these insights, let’s review some AI writing prompt ideas you can try for a fast and more efficient content workflow. 

AI writing prompt ideas to speed up your content process

Whether you’re just starting out with AI prompt crafting or you’ve been using generative AI tools for some time and want to speed up your process, these ideas will unlock a better way to create content that’s consistent and on-brand

Blog post prompt

With an AI writing tool, you can effectively incorporate AI prompts into your blog post content creation process and create content that sounds like your company wrote it — in minutes. 

You can train the tool on your brand guidelines and best-performing blog posts, then craft prompts based on the topic, theme, target audience, and other parameters.

We tested the tool with a more specific prompt. Below is the resulting output:

In this case, I instructed the tool to act like an HR consultant and generate a blog post about a specific topic targeting a specific audience: HR industry leaders. I also asked it to generate a bulleted list of what the readers could expect to learn from the post. 

Email marketing prompt

AI writing prompts can also boost your email marketing campaign conversions from cold emails, email sequences, or newsletters. 

High-performing email marketing messages that drive opens and engagement contain:

• A creative and personalized subject line: What the email recipient sees. It should be appealing and compelling enough for them to open and read your message.
• Clear and concise content: Add a paragraph or two, picture, and call to action that clearly focuses on the reader and encourages them to take a desired action. 

A well-crafted prompt can generate these elements for you. 

To illustrate this point, I created a prompt requesting an AI-written email marketing message (in an upbeat and exciting tone). 

Here’s what I got:

Social media post prompt

Coming up with social media content can be daunting. You need to publish at least one post per platform every day, bi-weekly, or weekly, depending on your schedule and on each channel to keep your audience engaged. 

But it’s not always easy to find time or energy for social media content promotion.

Some AI writing tools let you paste a blog post or link and auto-generate social media posts for your LinkedIn or Twitter profiles and get word out about your latest work. 

Here’s an example prompt based on our recent guide about how to find an app developer for SMBs:

You can request a mix of promotional, company-related, educational, or inspirational content, such as quotes from your company’s CEO, product updates, new stats, and more. 

AI tools are built to adhere to character limits and you get lots of variations to choose from for your posts.

FAQS and help page prompts

AI writing prompts can also help your employees automate content creation for your company’s FAQ and help support pages or sections so you have more time to focus on high value work. 

You can input an example of a help page or FAQ section and copy that you’d like the tool to emulate or reference to get the desired result. 

In the example below, I gave the tool a link to reference when creating an FAQ page for a small dropshipping business:

Notice how the tool generated output that’s generalized based on my non-specific input. And, it uses common language with an active voice and straightforward sentence structure, which makes it easy for the reader to understand.

Product description prompt

In our previous example, we mentioned how Johannes used AI writing prompts to create a real estate listing for an online ad. 

These prompts can help you generate high-quality, SEO-optimized product descriptions that highlight the benefits and features of your products — in seconds — compared to spending weeks or months crafting catchy copy. 

Here’s an example of a product description prompt and the result:

I added a twist to it by asking the tool to create the same copy, but in Latin. The result:

This just illustrates you can also request or write prompts in different languages and still get results based on your specifications.

Visual content prompts

AI writing prompts also save the day when you need new ideas for your promotional video content or infographics and other visuals. 

For instance, I wrote a prompt requesting an infographic copy based on our how to find a web developer in 2023 guide. 

Ad or brand campaign prompts

Creating copy for ads or brand campaigns can be time-consuming. 

But you can write a prompt that captures what you want to see on your ad, including the target audience and keywords, and get well-optimized, high-converting copy you can use in your offline or online marketing campaigns. 

Other ideas you can use AI writing prompts for include:

• Summaries of your brand’s reports or industry news
• Voice scripts for smart or voice-activated devices
• Conversational chatbots for lead generation, sales, and customer support efforts.

Tips for creating AI writing prompts for your business

We spoke to several business owners about how they use AI writing prompts in their content workflows. Here are some helpful tips they shared:

• Make your prompt simple, specific, and structured to get superior results.
• Pick the right AI content creation tool for your needs (language support, customization, existing system integration) and budget.
• Don’t expect you’ll get exactly what you want with just one try – it usually takes a few iterations before the AI understands exactly what kind of content you need.
• Investigate the output a little deeper if it feels wrong or off.
• Invest in a professional copywriter who can help ensure that all content generated by your AI is accurate, consistent and up-to-date with industry trends.
• Monitor the results of your AI writing prompts. This will give you an idea of how effective they are and whether they are meeting your desired objectives.
• Remember that AI has its limitations — no matter how sophisticated the system is — and is still far from thinking like a human.
• Don’t over rely on an AI tool for prompts or content outputs for your creative assets as it could cause potential duplication issues.

How to create killer AI writing prompts: The smarter way

Crafting the perfect AI writing prompt may seem tough. Knowing how to start and what to write is even tougher. 

You need to write prompts that deliver great, useful output — every single time.

But not all businesses are struggling.

Smart companies hire AI prompt writing professionals from digital marketplaces like Fiverr to create the perfect AI-assisted copy for their businesses, and speed up their workflow. These professionals design, craft, and manipulate AI content creation tools to generate copy tailored to the specific task they’re using the model for. 

Plus, they’re trained to create good prompts using AI to achieve better output quality and reduced bias, no matter the depth or complexity of the topic. 

The better the person is at their craft, the more desirable the output you’ll get from the AI tool, and you can:

• Automate your content creation process 
• Reduce time spent on mundane tasks
• Expand your operations
• Increase productivity and efficiency
• Increase profitability

What should I look for in an AI prompt writer?

AI prompt writing is a fairly new skill within the AI services industry. Since AI content creation models are only getting better with time, you’ll need someone to run them and help you get exactly what you need to speed up your workflow.

When looking for an AI prompt writer, consider their:

• Skills: Are they proficient in using AI-based tools to generate strong results? Can they use multiple formulations of a single prompt to get the most accurate answers? Do they have past/current projects that showcase their talent?
• Work portfolio: Do they have past/current projects that showcase their talent?
• AI knowledge: Does the person have an overall grasp of AI writing and/or prompt engineering? How thorough is their research and understanding of the trends around AI prompt writing? 
• Problem-solving skills: Evaluate their problem-solving skills, whether they can troubleshoot any issues that may arise, and think critically and innovatively to improve the generated responses.

Craft the perfect AI writing prompts, everytime

Knowing how to write the perfect AI prompt will help you generate the output you desire.

While there are some great AI tools to help you speed up your workflow, you still need the skill and ability to craft excellent prompts, without which you’ll waste time, effort, and resources. 

With Fiverr, you can find the right AI prompt writer who can engineer AI-powered content creation tools, craft the perfect prompts for your needs, and jumpstart an otherwise slowed down workflow. 

Sign up for Fiverr to begin your search for an AI writer/editor.