How To Write Articles On Medium With ChatGPT

What's up, digital writers? My name is Nicholas Cole, and this week in our paid newsletter, Write with AI, I shared how you can leverage your historical library of content on medium and specifically train ChatGPT to write new Medium articles based on other Medium articles you've written in the past. This is something that I've been doing manually for a long time. It's a digital writing strategy. I don't see too many other writers doing this actually. But basically because I've written so many articles on medium, the benefit of building any sort of content library is that the more that you write, the more that you can write because you gather data and you understand what works, and all you really have to do is look for the proven data points and double down on them. This inherently is what all of the most prolific writers, content creators, YouTubers, podcasters, they all do this. And you can kind of watch any prolific creators content get more and more narrow, in a sense, over time. And even if they aren't narrowing in on a topic, they're narrowing in on a certain approach or a certain niche or something that is clearly resonating with readers, viewers, listeners in a certain way. And oftentimes they do this intuitively. And so one of the things we talk about a lot is how to look at your analytics so that you're not doing this intuitively, but you're doing it consciously. And so for years, what I've been doing is, and I was doing this on Medium in 2019, 2020, before a lot of people. I still don't see a lot of writers doing this is I would go through my library of content and anytime something would perform well, I would basically just find a way to rewrite it and do it again. Because I know that, okay, if this worked well once, there's no reason why it can't work again and again and again. And now with this whole AI wave, what really occurred to me is that I was doing this manually. But you can train ChatGPT to do this for you, and this is where you start getting, you know, leverage on leverage. Because what you can DO is train ChatGPT to not only be aware of your whole public library on Medium, but you can feed it specifically articles, and then you can ask it to write about specific topics based on the articles that you trained it on. So if you want that whole process and all of the prompts and everything that I did up to that point, that's what our most recent paid newsletter issue is about in Write with AI, the link is in the description. If you want to check it out. But what I want to show you is actually the last step. The last step is whenever you ask ChatGPT to write something, the technology is still really early. And so there's kind of two problems that happen is one, whatever output it gives you, it's never formatted well. And I think part of that is because the technology just needs to get further along and it needs to get trained better. But the other part of it I think is the plain text nature of this window. And so I find that one of the hardest things to train ChatGPT on is the formatting of writing. And so this is sort of like the last step that, that we need to do. So even if you're successful at getting some sort of good output, there's still going to need to be that human touch, at least for a bit. I assume that in the next five years this is going to get easier and easier for the technology, but you still need to go through and do some manual formatting. So what I want to do is I want to show you how, okay, I use these prompts, I train chatgpt on my Medium library and it created a net new asset. And now I want to show you how I take that and basically copy paste this text into Medium and then I do some quick formatting to take it across the finish line. Okay, so I'm just going to ignore a lot of the content for now. I'll talk about content in another video, but I just want to point out the formatting because this is the part where I think a lot of times people will get to the five yard line with Chat GPT and then they'll kind of look at it and, and it like won't be perfectly formatted and so they'll assume like, oh, this is unusable. And in reality these are actually really easy things to fix. And we talk about these fundamentals in our cohort based course ship 30 for 30 all the time because they're so easy to execute once you understand them. So what I did is I copy pasted, you know, this was the, the title that I gave it to write an article on and this was the Medium article that it wrote for me based on a series of articles that I had written previously to train it on. Okay, so this is the article that it wrote for me and I just bring over the title and I just copy pasted all of this text in here. Okay. So one of the, I mean very first thing you should do immediately is just turn all of these into H1s. Okay. This is like formatting 101 stuff, especially writing on medium. You just want to separate each of these sections into H1S. Good. Rule of thumb is H1 is the new idea. And then if you have a sub idea within this idea, that's H2. Okay. Second, we obviously don't need to say conclusion. We can if we want to. You know, for now, I guess I'll just leave it just to show. Okay, so already, boom. We just made it easier to skim, right? The second thing we talk about this technique all the time in chip 30 is the 1, 31 technique. 13114, 1151. Anytime you open with a big paragraph like this, the reader immediately checks out. It's just the nature of reading online. And if you have two paragraphs like this back to back, they're like, I'm not interested. Like, the fact that they can see the first H1 here is good. They'll probably just skip all of this and go straight to this H1. But we want to make this even more skimmable. So really easy thing you can do is break out. So first, actually, let's just combine these. We go, let's break out the first sentence, and let's break out the last sentence. Okay. Immediately. This opener looks so much better. Just visually, it's. It's more visual. Visually aesthetic, it's easier to skim. I always like opening with some sort of declarative sentence. Then you can go into some sort of description, you know, 1, 3, 1. So this is the 1, 3, 1, right? We have one sentence, and then we have one sentence here. Then we have a second sentence here, and then we have a third sentence here. So this is the three, and then we have one. And then I sort of just treat this separately because this is a transition sentence. We're going. Here's the end of the intro, and we're going into the first main point. Okay. And you can literally just do this all the way down the page. And I'm just going to look, all I'm going to do is just break out the first sentence and the last sentence, and then we'll see where there's room to improve. Okay. So if we break out the first sentence here and then the last sentence here. Okay. So we can see that the. The easy upgrade here would either be creating a smaller sentence here and combining these. Right? Because now we have nice three sentences here. So let's just do that. Identify a gap in the market. Okay. This is category creation 101. Boom. Easy to skim. Then we go into three sentences, and then we go into one. Great. This section immediately looks easier to read. More aesthetically pleasing, right? We do it again here. We break out the first sentence, and then we break out the last sentence. Cool. If we wanted to expand this, we could expand this a bit. But now that's more skimmable, right? We do the same thing here. Break out the first sentence, break out the last sentence. Same thing. If we're going to expand anything, it's going to be this middle section. Same thing here. Break out the first sentence, break out the last sentence. If we're going to expand anything, it's the middle. That's the rule of thumb. You have one single sentence opener, one single sentence closer, you expand to the middle, it's just so much easier to read. And then we do the same thing here. Break out the first sentence, break out the last sentence, right? And then if we want to just keep this conclusion the same, that's fine. We can combine these. We break out the first sentence, and this is. These are long sentences. Bring out the last sentence. Okay, so already this looks so much better. And then if we, you know, we made this promise 5. So anytime we make a numbered promise in the headline, we want to make it easy to deliver on that promise for the reader. So we want to put all of these in here so that they can quickly skim. Right? Conclusion. Okay, and there you go. Those two, three little formatting techniques immediately make it so much more of an article. Right? The problem with ChatGPT's output still is I find whenever I try and train it to write articles, it almost always does it in this style, and it can work. But I mean, I've written thousands of articles on the Internet myself, and so I've really learned what writing techniques and formatting techniques work. And this one three one technique, especially for intros and especially for each section, is just so effective. And so the easiest upgrade you can do, right? Just copy paste this over and then throw it into here and just clean it up, add the headers. You know, if it was to give you multiple big paragraphs inside each one of these, I would take it a second step, you know, and I would go, you know, quick Tesla case study, for example. And then I would break it out and do my H3 there and then do that going down, right? So you always want to think it's either going to be 131 for the whole section, or it's going to be 13 1, H3, another 13 1, and then header 1, 31 H3, right. And then another 1, 3, 1. Like, look at how much easier that looks to skim, right? Versus if you were to remove this. And let's just get rid of this. If you just had this big wall of text that looks a lot longer, that looks a lot harder to skim. I know this sounds ridiculous, but this is how people read on the Internet. So this is the last step of. Whenever you're playing with ChatGPT, you know, the prompts get you pretty far. I think that with, with a lot of smart prompt writing, you can probably get to like 70, 80% of whatever the final output is. And then it doesn't really matter. If you're asking ChatGPT to help you write articles or tweets or Twitter threads or LinkedIn posts or whatever, it's always going to struggle with the formatting. And again, I think part of that is the plain text nature of these windows still. And over time, I imagine that's going to get easier and easier. I'm sure that's going to change inside this user interface. Using ChatGPT, using other AI platforms, like even the AI that notion has brought into its platform, like formatting, soon won't be a problem. But I imagine for the next, you know, two to five years, that's going to be one of the lagging indicator or one of the lagging features because it's a lot easier for the technology to just pull the text itself and the knowledge versus knowledge plus assuming the formatting. Right. So you as the human, you can train ChatGPT to get it to 70, 80, maybe even 90% and then just throw it into whatever thing that you're writing and do some of these quick formatting techniques and you take it across the finish line. So just want to show how this works. Um, this is something that I find myself doing for everything I write, both manually and with ChatGPT, so I wanted to show you how it works. And also if you want to see how I trained ChatGPT to learn from my historical medium articles, how to write Net new medium articles. That's what I wrote a whole breakdown on in our paid newsletter this week, Write with AI. So you'll see the link in the description. All right, more to come.