By Jason Sibley

How to use 12 ChatGPT prompts that save time in a small business

Most people open ChatGPT, type something vague like "write me a marketing email", get something bland back, and quietly decide the whole thing is overrated. The prompt was the problem. A prompt that names your business, your customer, the format you want and the tone you actually use will get you something you can edit in two minutes rather than rewrite from scratch.

This guide gives you 12 prompts you can paste straight in, plus the small amount of context you need to add so the output sounds like your company and not like a press release from 2019.

Who this is for

• Owners and directors of UK and Irish SMBs who are drowning in small writing jobs - replies, posts, adverts, notes.
• Marketing and sales people in teams of 1 to 20, where nobody has a copywriter.
• Anyone who has tried ChatGPT once, got mediocre results, and hasn't gone back.

You do not need any technical skill. If you can write an email, you can write these prompts.

What it does (in plain English)

ChatGPT is a writing and thinking assistant. It is very good at first drafts, restructuring messy text, and producing five versions of something when you only have the energy for one. It is not a source of truth - it can state things confidently that are wrong, out of date, or invented.

So the working model is simple: ChatGPT drafts, you decide. It saves the twenty minutes of staring at a blank page. It does not save you the two minutes of reading what it wrote and checking anything factual.

The prompts below all follow the same shape, which is worth learning because you can then write your own:

1. Role and context - who you are, what you sell, who to.
2. The job - exactly what you want produced.
3. Format - length, structure, number of options.
4. Tone rules - what to avoid as much as what to include.

You can use ChatGPT