ChatGPT Tutorial for Beginners (2026 Update)

Welcome to Chat GPT 101. Mastering this conversational AI. We're going to dive into how you can use Chat GPT for your business. But as you learn more about it, I bet you'll start using it in your personal life, too. So what is ChatGPT? Chat GPT is a LLM and large language model, and it is developed by a company called OpenAI. And just last month they hit 800 million users per week. I don't know if I can even fathom what that looks like, but that is an insane amount of users. And it's one of the. Well, it's the most used tool outside of Facebook, so it has conversational capabilities, so it can engage in conversations. And it could also respond to a variety of different tasks. And it has a wide range of applications like creating images. It can create custom GPTs which act like custom assistants. And so we're going to dive in and go through some of these things today. But first I want to show you that there are a couple account levels. So there's a free account and then a paid subscription, which is $20 a month if you can swing it. I highly suggest getting the paid subscription because it allows you to use custom GPTs, which are just a total game changer, especially for small business owners. So I want to actually go in there and we're going to talk about how you can customize your ChatGPT settings like Tone language, content filtering and personality. So if you haven't seen ChatGPT before, welcome. This is ChatGPT and it's chatgpt.com. i have the teams account, which is similar to the paid account, except for I have the ability to share things with people on the JAMAI team. So if you just go down and you just click on your little icon and hit settings, this is where you can customize not only the look and feel of this app, but also how it works and interacts with you. I like to work on this light background. It's just better on my eyes. I made all of the accent colors orange because, well, I love orange and I have it set to. Well, it auto detects that I'm English using English. And then if you use the app, you can choose what sort of voice talks back to you. So this is mine. Hi, glad to meet you. I think we're going to do great work together. Where should we start? I do love an accent. So that's about. That's what that's about. Notifications. I have text and email, so I do have the app on my phone. And when I use tasks, which I'll show you in just a moment, I like to have them pushed to both my text and my email. Let's see here. Personalization. This is where you can customize how ChatGPT responds to you. And you can put in information about you so it knows what you're doing and that really helps shape how it has conversations with you. So you can see here I have mine empty and that's on purpose because I use mine for a variety of different reasons and I kind of like to keep it guessing. It's also something that I've been working with for so long that it's memory knows way more about me than anything I could fill in here. But if you're using it and you have one job that you're using it for, I do suggest coming in here and customizing your instructions. So in here you can kind of say how you like it to respond to you. You can set it like Gen Z. Encouraging, straight shooting, witty, chatty. I always say don't use hyphens because we all know well, and if you don't know AI, text is full of hyphens and that's a big way that people can tell that you're using AI in your writing. So ChatGPT can integrate with other tools in your business, so you can integrate it into your Canva, your GitHub, Gmail, most Google products, HubSpot, and then look at all these other connectors that you can work with. So, so again, if you're using Asana for project management, you could just go straight into your chat and have it update a project in Asana for you. Schedules are something I'm always shocked that people are not using. So you can have Chat GPT do something for you every single day at a certain time. So I have it running my excuse me, I have it running my workouts and then I also have it running my content pillar ideas. So basically once a week it'll send me my pillar idea for my content, which is based on an entire thing that we do in Club Jam, which is creating your tone and voice in your content marketing plan. But it knows that every week it'll go look into my community pillars and content pillars and give me ideas to write about that week. So I really look forward to getting those on Monday. And then you could also have it review your Google Calendar and summarize your day every single day. I had to pause this because I was out of town, but I'm going to resume it. So every day at 6am it goes to my Google Calendar and then it shoots me a detailed summary of my day, who I'm meeting with, what we're meeting about. It'll look for any sort of prep suggestions that I might need and then it just goes from there. So that's a setting that people don't often use, but it's very, very powerful. So data and controls. I have this set to off because I'm on the teams program and it makes me. But you can have it improve the model for everyone, which just means that the conversations that you're having can go and train the technology behind the LLM. But if you're somebody that's very nervous about your security and you don't want anything shared, you can just come in here and toggle this off remote browser data. This will let the agent mode browser reuse cookies between sessions. So if you're using agent mode, you should toggle this on. And then if you want to share links of your chats, this is where you manage them. So say you have this great chat about some sort of strategy for your business and then you want to share that chat because you learned so much so you want to share it with your partner. You could share that link. Well, say that partner decides to leave and go to a different company and they're not working with you anymore. You could go into manage and unshare that link, delete it. So that's what you do. That your archive chats go in here. And then this is where you could clean up your chats as well. Security. We should always have a multi factor login, so make sure you have that. And then if you have a G, if you create GPTs in the GPT store, you need a builder profile and I'll show you what those are as well. So those are kind of the main settings. And let's see here, make sure I don't miss anything I wanted to talk about. Okay, so let me show you where all of these things live. So if you just open up the sidebar, you can see down here you have all your chats. So if you are like me, don't really clean them up that much because you're never done with that conversation. You can leave them here. And, and then if you want to find something like if you can't find your chat but you remember what you were talking about, you can just search a term from one of your conversations and it shows the couple chats here. So I'll know, oh, I can jump into this one and keep Chatting. So if you leave your conversation, it doesn't die. It's just over here in the left hand side chats and you can continue to have that chat when you come back. I wanted to talk about projects. So projects are a great thing if you are somebody that has multiple clients that you use ChatGPT for. So I have a couple clients that do things that are way different than AI training. So I have a couple that do like women's coaching. I have a health insurance client, I have a couple others. So I don't necessarily want to go into my chatgpt and I just thought you couldn't see that the whole way. I don't want to go into my chatgpt and have a whole conversation, you know, about insurance. And then all of a sudden my chatgpt starts thinking that that's something I do and will bring it into my conversation. So you want to keep things super separate. So you create a. Sorry. You create a project, it's going to say portfolio and then you could train it so you add files that relate to that project and you could also give it a knowledge base. So that is something that's super important. If you have multiple clients. You used to have people have like three or four different accounts just because they didn't want their chatgpt to get confused. But you don't need to do that. People just use these folders. Okay. The next thing are GPTs. So I'm going to click on Explore and if you have the free account, you can use GPTs, but you have to have the paid account to build GPTs. So that's where I think it's super important. If you want to create AI assistance for your business in ChatGPT, pay that $20 a month. It's totally worth it. So GPTs, you might be asking, what the heck are those? Those are basically copies of ChatGPT that are then trained and programmed to do one specific thing really well. So I'll show you an example of my business development AI agent person. So her name's Morgan and we're just going to hit Start chat. So say I just did a prospecting phone call and somebody wants to work with me first for consulting. I can just upload our chat and say create a proposal. Let's see. This is not a lot of information, but the difference between using this and just typing into chat GPT is that Morgan is trained on my proposal process, how I like to write them, my flow. I always start with an executive summary. They know Morgan knows exactly what we do. For our one on one training. And so it's giving exactly what I would offer and giving some pricing about and next steps. So you might be wondering, well, how does she know all that? So I'm going to hit edit GPT and show you the back end. So AI agents always have hands and a brain. The brain is what you program it with so that it knows and the hands is where you tell it what to do. So instructions are where you tell the hands what to do. So I say you are Morgan, you are club jams, relationship focused sales specialist who understands blah blah, blah, goes on and on. So you can see this. It knows about my voice, it knows what to do, what not to do. And then here's the brain, right? So in the knowledge, I was able to upload my ideal customer profile, my phone call script proposal templates, our SEO recommendations. That has like our voice and tone in it. So it has all of these things in there. And so now when I go and ask her a question, she's very, very educated on just that subject and is a super helpful assistant rather than just an LLM to create content with me. Okay, so that's what GPTs are and then a couple other things. So Atlas is the new chat GPT browser. So right now my browser is Chrome, but if you go ahead and download this, it creates its own browser and then basically you have an agentic AI where ChatGPT is kind of like your assistant as you browse websites. That's like a whole different training in itself. But I want you to know what it is. Codex is for web developers. Not even going to click on it. Library shows all the images that you've created. So if you've created a bunch of cool stuff and in different chats and you want to come back to it, you can find it in the library. I don't do a whole lot of image generation with with ChatGPT, but it's definitely cool to do. I'm going to talk a little bit. Here's the custom GPTs, but I want to talk a little bit about prompting. So when you're prompting, obviously when you're prompting in a custom GPT, you don't have to think about your prompting that much. But when you're prompting just In a basic ChatGPT chat, make sure you're following these best practices. So use clear and concise language, provide relevant context, incorporate feedback so that first response you get. If it's not exactly what you want, tell it why and keep iterating on the same chat rather than Starting new Encourage elaboration, experiment with prompts. So one thing that I'm going to tell you right now, a quick tip is the tip of act as. So for instance, if I go into ChatGPT and I say my son has a rash and it looks like this, what should I do? It's a good personal example. It might ask a few questions and then get back to me. But I also could say act as a pediatrician with 40 years experience and tell me what you think this is. And then I would describe whatever's going on. So that's one trick is act as, act as a marketing director. Act as a experienced business development professional, act as a magician, whatever you think you want to use and then encourage elaboration. So another thing I really like to do is write out my prompt. So act as a marketing director with 20 years experience in digital marketing for veterinary clinics. Create an AdWords campaign for North Carolina and I'll say like give me campaign structure with a budget of $500 a month. And then I would say before you get started, do you have any questions? And that's an amazing thing to do because ChatGPT will then ask you a bunch of stuff to really dial in your prompt and what you actually want before spitting out content. So that's another really good tip. I want to talk about the different modes. So let me go back to ChatGPT, just a regular chat. And you can see here there's multiple types. So there's chat GPT5 is what we're in right now. This is November 2025. So it kind of just tells you what these mean. And then you could go to legacy models which is their 4. 0. So if you're wanting instant answers right away, I would go to instant. This is just kind of like your good old chat GPT Thinking takes a lot longer. So if you're, if you want it to actually really think through the memory of the conversations you've had and really look through all of its training and take more time. Do Thinking Pro is really cool because it's research grade assistance with academic resources and it'll actually cite its sources as well. So those are really cool different ways to use ChatGPT5 but then in here there's other ones. So there's company knowledge where it's actually diving into your company knowledge and then deep research. It's again going into different sources and the research is looking into more like academic post publications and then agent mode. This is where you give it a task and then it's going to go out to the web and find information that you didn't really ask it to go look for specifically. So the Manus IM, that's an agentic AI and ChatGPT has it too. I just, to be honest, I still prefer Manus for any sort of research. And then there's web mode. I like to use this if I'm looking for real time information because one thing you should know is that these models so chat GPT5, chat GPT4, they're trained on the Internet at a specific time. And so while it's able to get real time information, sometimes if you go into Chat GPT Pro with without web search and you would ask something like what's the score of the Nuggets game? Or what's the price of this stock? It may not be completely up to date. So if you need really up to date information, hit web search. All right, so those are the different modes. And yeah, just some tips is really get in there and practice with the prompting. Make sure that you spent some time trying out ChatGPT. If you're a beginner, I would suggest using the same prompt in every single mode because I think that really helps you understand the difference. So it would be like make it something useful, create a blog post for your company about XYZ and then do it in all of these different modes and see what happens. So I think the best way that you could use Chat GPT is just by practice. Just do it. Get your feet wet. And if you've been using it for a long time, make sure you're exploring those custom GPTs and creating your own as well. So I hope you learned something here and we'll see you in the next module.