Automating Newsletter creation with AI
How to create a Pickaxe to come up with new story ideas for your newsletter
Newsletters are more popular than ever before. The timeless technology remains one of the best ways to engage a specific audience, and sites like Medium and Substack make distribution a cinch.
But creating content remains a challenge for many of us. Even gifted writers struggle to find something new to write about, and the weekly or monthly commitment to produce a newsletter can seem like a lot of work.
Today, we’ll explain how to build a Pickaxe designed to generate newsletter ideas for any organization. We’ll build on this initial Pickaxe throughout the week to create a Pickaxe Studio focused on AI-assisted newsletter creation.
Unlike past projects at IntelliBotique, where I focused on demonstrating new prototypes, this time we’ll walk through how to actually build a Pickaxe. For those new to Pickaxe, it’s a no-code generative AI platform that runs on the same technology that drives ChatGPT and the GPT store. All of this week’s Pickaxes are published under a Creative Commons license and are cloneable from within Pickaxe so that anyone can make them their own.
While this week’s project is focused on creating newsletters, it wouldn’t be difficult to adapt the prompt to help generate ideas for social media content, come up with monthly themes for your classroom, or even to organize an idea for a self-help book.
Tomorrow, we’ll demonstrate how with just a few changes in the prompt we can expand on its capabilities immensely.
Introducing Content Seedling
Content Seedling is a simple Pickaxe form that produces a dozen themes that relate to your organization along with five distinct story ideas for each theme in order to help create a year’s worth of newsletter content with just a few simple questions.
From the user’s side, Pickaxe forms look a lot like other forms you may have filled out before, but the responses provided go directly into GPT-4 to automatically generate an answer instead of responses being stored in a database or spreadsheet.
From the creator’s side, Pickaxe forms resemble a prompt that contains one or more variables. Those variables are filled in using information from the responses to the form. In many ways, the prompt for a Pickaxe form looks and functions a lot like Madlibs.
In this case, the first paragraph of our Content Seedling prompt is focused on ingesting the information that we will need for the task. When the forms are filled out, the system will fill them into the blanks to flesh out the instructions.
The prompt next instructs GPT-4 to use that information to “create 12 distinct themes,” and explains that it will be instructed to create “reports” for each theme while still using the information collected above.
Our third paragraph explains that we will provide a list of what’s needed in the report and that we want GPT-4 to format its output using markdown. Markdown is a way to format documents online that is used on a lot of web sites, including Wikipedia. It is similar to HTML but is considered a little easier to learn.
By specifying that the theme will be the title of each report helps ensure a format that looks professional and is intuitive to read.
I decided that it would be fun to include a relevant quote for each newsletter. In order to ensure that ChatGPT provides real quotes from real humans, I told it “do not hallucinate and verify that the quote is real and properly attributed.” While I don’t know if this solution is 100 percent effective, it seems to be working as intended the vast majority of the time.
Asking it for more than five ideas for each month seemed to result in Content Seedling being unable to finish the job in a single report. Any fewer than five ideas and I was concerned that there might not be enough material to work with after you eliminate any suggestions that won’t work.
Newsletters are often used to drive engagement, and the best way to accomplish that goal is to include a “call to action” at the end of each issue. I figured it would be nice to have ChatGPT create a unique call for each month’s newsletter based on the theme.
In the example above, I filled out the form as if I were going to plan out a newsletter for Pickaxe. Now let’s see what it produces:
Sample Results from Content Seedling
January: "The Dawn of AI in Creativity"
Quote:
"AI will be the ultimate version of Google. Google will understand not just what you're looking for, but who you are and what you need." - Larry Page, Co-Founder, Google.
Story Ideas:
Exploring the ways AI is reshaping artistic and creative pursuits.
Understanding how AI can inspire fresh creative ideas and concepts.
Highlighting successful case studies where AI and human creativity merged.
Debunking myths around AI in the creative industry.
Insight on how to kick-start 2022 with AI-integrated creative work.
Call to Action:
Start your New Year with a twist! Unleash your creativity with AI. Subscribe now to explore the potentials of AI in reshaping your creative pursuits.
February: "AI Love: Personalization with AI"
Quote:
"The future of personalization is AI. It’s pure math." - Ayush Jain, Co-Founder, Mindbowser.
Story Ideas:
The role of AI in shaping personalized customer experiences.
How to leverage AI for personalized marketing campaigns.
Showcasing businesses that effectively use AI for personalization.
Promising AI tools for personalization in various industries.
The impact of personalized AI on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Call to Action:
Fall in love with AI this February! Personalize your business strategies with AI to show your customers how much you care. Stay tuned with our newsletter to learn more!
March: "AI Women: Empowering Women Entrepreneurs with AI"
Quote:
"We’re in a diversity crisis: Black and Latinx people are severely underrepresented in the tech industry." - Reshma Saujani, Founder, Girls Who Code.
Story Ideas:
Empowering women entrepreneurs with AI: Opportunities and Challenges.
Inspirational stories of women entrepreneurs who have successfully adopted AI.
AI tools every female entrepreneur should know.
The role of AI in promoting gender equality in the entrepreneurial world.
Workshops and seminars on AI for female entrepreneurs.
Call to Action:
Join our tribe of bold and ambitious women entrepreneurs embracing AI. Subscribe to our newsletter today for an enlightening journey!
Tomorrow, we’ll show how to adapt Content Seedling to work for a weekly newsletter as well as introduce Story Sprout — our tool to take these story ideas and provide a plan to help you craft them. It also provides specific Google query search terms to find relevant content to share that’s both on brand and on theme from around the web.