Show Notes
In this solo episode, host Carrie Rollwagen shares practical tips for prompting AI tools — like ChatGPT — to get better, more tailored results, especially for small business owners and content creators. Carrie emphasizes the importance of specificity when creating prompts — clearly stating the desired tone, format and length can dramatically improve the outcome. She also recommends treating AI like a helpful, but inexperienced intern — capable of producing strong drafts, but still needing direction and oversight. By taking the time to clarify expectations, business owners can save time while maintaining authenticity in their communications.
Carrie shares her personal workflow, which includes asking AI to produce an outline before writing long-form content and ending each prompt with, “What else do you need to know from me?” This approach ensures the AI gathers enough context to generate accurate, high-quality content. While she acknowledges AI’s value, she encourages a healthy level of skepticism and the need for human editing and review. It’s a thoughtful, practical guide to using AI as a tool — one that enhances productivity without compromising personal voice or professionalism.
Mentioned in this episode:
Carrie’s talk on writing with AI
Episode Transcript
Carrie
Welcome to the localist, a podcast for local makers and independent entrepreneurs. I’m your host, author of The localist book and former small business owner, Carrie Rollwagen.
Carrie
So today I wanted to share some tips for prompting AI to get better results. So if you listened before, you probably know that I have maybe not mixed feelings about AI, but I’m not like a I’m not a Luddite, but I’m also not let’s use AI for every single thing. I think AI is a really great tool, but I do think it needs some kind of, like some human thought and oversight, if that makes sense, like to kind of look at the results and make sure the results are what you want.
Carrie
But it is also true that the more you’re the better you’re prompting AI, and especially when it comes to write, writing or really, the prompts are kind of for anything, but the better you prompt, the better the results will be. And that this can be a really helpful tool for a lot of business owners to get more out of your time, especially when it comes to writing.
Carrie
There are so many places that we need to use writing, and I think it’s a really accessible way to use AI, like obviously, you can use AI for images and things as well, but I think that that can get a little more dicey as far as whether or not you want to use that on social media, or is going to perform or is it going to look weird, or whatever. But I do think that using AI to do some writing, or at least to give you an assist with writing is a pretty easy way to get started and seeing to see if this is a good tool for you.
Carrie
So as AI evolves, we kind of, like, the way we prompt it, and things evolve too. There’s some things I’ve shared here before, and also I’ve done a talk on AI and writing for infomedia. So there’s a on their YouTube, there’s a whole talk about using AI for writing, and even though that was several months ago, most of the principles still hold true. There’s nothing in that talk that is incorrect now, but there are also some, some more ways of of writing prompts to get better results that have kind of come up since that talk. So I kind of wanted to do, like an overview of how to write better prompts to get better results.
Carrie
So first of all, just make sure you’re as specific as possible. So some of that is just saying, things like tell AI the length that you’re looking for. If you want 50 words, if you want 200 words, if you want two pages, you don’t have to know that exactly, because you can kind of guess. And then if it’s still too long, just make it shorter. But telling AI the format that you want it, how long you want it, whether or not it’s going to have you want it to have bullet points, you should tell it if you want it to use emojis or not, because it likes to throw in emojis instead of bullet points. But if you tell it not to do that, it won’t. But being really specific about the length is helpful.
Carrie
It can also be helpful to be specific about the tone. So do you want it to be casual? Do you want it to be professional? Do you want it to be a blend of casual and professional? It can do all of those things, but it really helps to be as specific as you can.
Carrie
Another tip that really helps in AI is to tell ChatGPT, or whatever AI tool you’re using who you want it to be. So if you’re wanting to write marketing materials, start off by saying you’re a marketing expert, and then write ever whatever you want to say. Or you can say, if you’re writing, you know, a sales proposal, say you’re a sales expert. Or you can even say you’re a sales and marketing expert. It seems to me that it seems strange to have to tell AI who you want it to be I’m like, if I’m asking for marketing advice, advice, of course, I want you to be an expert, but this actually does really help to kind of set the tone and to get better results from AI.
Carrie
Another thing I really like to do is it, especially if I’m writing something long, like if I’m writing a drip email campaign or something that’s maybe five pages, or a business proposal or something like that. Before I tell AI to write, I will say, give me an outline of what you plan to write, because, say, a drip email campaign that can be dozens of emails, and it is much easier for me instead of reading through all the dozens of emails and saying, This is where you got it wrong. I love just being able to look at an outline and saying, okay, an email two and point three, change it from this to this, and kind of to go through that outline, it saves a lot of time. And then you can kind of have it go to the races on writing, and you’ll get better results out of that writing.
Carrie
Another thing I really love to do is when you’re done with a writing or when you’re done writing the prompt before you hit enter to say, what else do you need to know from me to to answer this question? And that is extremely helpful, because AI does it does a good job of, like, just pulling a lot of information from everywhere, like, really, in whatever language model has fed it. So especially something with marketing or business or things like that, it does have a lot of kind of knowledge based baked in.
Carrie
So first I will write of really long prompts. Like, my prompts are, like, paragraphs and paragraphs, I just stream of consciousness everything. I’m thinking that I want to go in here, and then I’ll say, what else you need to know from me? And especially in marketing and business areas, it has a lot of really good questions that it’s pulling from other pieces and blogs people have done on this that have kind of fed it, if that makes sense. So it’ll, it’ll often ask things like, you know, what is the audience that you want for this? Do you want a call to action? Do you like just normal questions for business and marketing, but things that I don’t always think to put into a prompt? It can really help it to hone in. And not only like even if you had given it enough information at the beginning, this can really help to make sure not only that it’s getting all the information, but also that it’s like taking the right tone, that it’s coming at it from the right angle. And so I do think that that is something that I have in almost all my prompts now, almost all the time before I hit Enter, I say, before you start writing, let me know what else you need to know from me, and that can be really helpful.
Carrie
So I do think that AI can be really useful for what we’re doing at in business. I also think we should kind of treat it like treat it with a little bit of caution. So especially with writing, I kind of think of AI as sort of like an intern where they have a lot of knowledge. They have knowledge, maybe even that I don’t have, because they’re learning something new, and they’re bringing that to the table, and that can be really good. But I’m also going to expect that an intern isn’t always going to know how to be the most professional, but they may need me to, like, go over what they’re saying and to kind of put my own spin on it, maybe fact check it a little bit more. I just have a little bit more skepticism with, say, an intern, than when some with someone who I’ve worked with for five years, who or who’s been in the in the business world longer, and I think that’s really healthy skepticism to have with AI as well.
Carrie
So absolutely, use it as a tool. Use it to create, um, some of your drafts or emails or whatever it is. I think you can get better, more targeted results by some of these prompting tips, like be very specific. Tell it how many words to give. Let it know what tone. Tell it who, who it needs to be, and ask it what else it needs to know. So this can really help. But also, it is always good to give a critical eye to that as well.
Carrie
The localist podcast is written and produced by me, Carrie Rollwagen. We record here at infomedia studios. So we would love to have you in the studio if you’re interested in doing your own podcast, if you need photo or video for your business, or even if you just need reels or YouTube shorts, or you want some videos to put on your LinkedIn, we would love to help. So find us at infomedia.com and fill out that contact form. We will just have a conversation and see if there’s anything that we can do to help. Our show runner is Taylor Davis. Our outreach manager is Jen Tucker, and our promotions manager is Alana Harmond. You can find show notes and links to anything we talked about today at carrierollwagen.com and you can find me on pretty much all social media @crollwagen. So until next time, here’s to thinking global by acting local and putting small shops before big box.