Transcript of this video:

[00:00:00] In this video, I’m gonna show you how to create your own custom content generator using GPT-3 and Google Spreadsheets and docs, a k a, the Google Workspace.

Today, we’re going to build a blog post, but the concepts I’m going to show you can be used for any type of structured content if you’re an impatient Patrick, there’s a shortcut in the link below that cuts straight to how you get this done.

Before getting started, there’s a few things that you’re going to need. First of all, a Google Workspace account with the permission to run App Scripts.

Some corporate users may need to ask permission for that.

You’ll need a spreadsheet that’s connected to open AI’s GPT-3. If you don’t know how to set that up, you can watch the previous video I did. It takes about five minutes.
I’d also suggest you have a target audience and some keywords for that target audience in mind if you need help doing that research, I did a video on that as well. So check that keyword research tutorial out, make your list and come right [00:01:00] back.

Lastly, you’ll need a willingness to copy paste code, the old copy pasta. Nothing in this video is particularly complicated, but if you’re scared of semicolons, you may not want to proceed. Speaking of semicolons, I’m gonna take a brief pause and ask you to like and subscribe.I spent hours putting this video together and it will literally take you one, two seconds.

Before we build our custom content creator, I just want to touch on a few things that AI is good at.

Number one, taking specific prompts. And in this video I’ll show you how to be specific to get a decent result, but there’s really no wrong way to do it, so don’t be scared to experiment.

Second, AI is good at sparking creativity. The text you get back won’t always be perfect, but it may get your creative juices flowing so you can get towards the Holy Grail, which is a first draft.

Personally, I find it much easier to edit and react text then come up with it, [00:02:00] especially if the topic isn’t something that I’m passionate about.

Using GPT-3 promotes you to editor, allowing you to mold and shape the content as opposed to having to come up with it from scratch.

That said, it’s not good at everything.

First of all, it can only go so far when considering your target audience. So that’s on you to know who are you talking to and how do they want to be talked to. It’s also pretty bad at times at speaking like a real person.

Depending on how you’ve set the algorithm, it will often use a lot of flowery language. I a hundred percent agree with what Scott McKelvey says on his site, which is the problem with most adjectives and adverbs is that they’re vague and hollow.
So, make sure your AI copy has a little soul. By being a good editor.

AI is also bad at providing its sources. In fact, in many cases, it’s a full-blown liar
So be careful and prepared to check the stats and information your generator is [00:03:00] going to create.

But why use AI to generate your blog post?

The blog post tends to fit into content strategy of any size, and frequently you need a lot of them. If you’ve done your homework, they tend to follow a clear structure, which makes AI a perfect candidate to give you a first draft.
And maybe it’s just me, but personally I find writing them a little bit unenjoyable. So this gives me a head start in getting towards the finish.

With all of that context in the back of your mind, let’s create our generator!

Open your Google sheet connected to open AI. As you can see here, I have the code inserted. Double check that the AI function is working by entering the formula equals ai, and then typing a prompt “who was the second prime minister of Canada?”. It connected to open AI and provided an answer. So we’re good to go ahead [00:04:00] and get started.

Over in my app script window, I’m going to make a few minor tweaks to the settings. Now, as I said before, if you don’t have this already set up, you can check out the previous video I did.

It takes about five minutes.

At the top of the code where it says max tokens. I’m going to change this value to 900 as some of the blog post pieces we’re going to generate. We’ll need more text, and if you don’t supply enough tokens, it’s going to cut off the response
I’m also going to change the temperature in the AI function.

This value decides how creative the algorithm will be. The closer to zero it is, the more clinical and functional, the more you move towards one, the more creative the algorithm is going to be. It’s currently set at 0.4, but I’m going to up it to 0.5. You could try 0.6 or seven.

Just be aware of the adjective overload and how it might make you [00:05:00] look.
With those changes made. I’m gonna hit save and return to my spreadsheet.
The first thing I’m gonna do is outline the structure of my blog post. As I mentioned, we’re gonna center the content around a keyword. We’re going to use that keyword to generate a title. From the title. They would be an introduction paragraph followed by the body, to make it interesting, we’ll also have the algorithm pull up some related keywords and write a meta description as a bonus. We’ll also have it do a tweet to promote our blog post. now I’ll take a second to make it look a little bit more visually clear.

Now that I’ve laid out the structure of my post, I can go to my keyword research and pick the keyword. I want to build my content around. If you don’t have keywords, there’s a video I did previously showing how to use a tool called Keywords Everywhere to quickly generate a list like this.

For my blog post. I’m going to target one of these [00:06:00] lower volume keywords. “Eighties heavy metal songs” has 390. That seems doable, so let’s take it over and start building our post.

With my keyword pasted into the sheet in the column next to the title, we’ll submit our first prompt.

Click into the cell and call the function by saying equals ai open quote now from my tests, the algorithm responds well when you give it a role. So in this case, I’m going to say acting as an engaging content writer. Create one unique blog post title that includes the keyword. Now here we’re going to want to reference the cell. So we’ll put a space, the quote, an ampersand, then select the cell we want. You’ll see it’s selected F1 on your sheet. It may be B1.

Then we put an additional ampersand. So basically this is a reference that joins the sheet data into the [00:07:00] question being asked. Acting as an engaging content writer. Create one unique blog post title that includes the keyword, eighties heavy metal songs. In the text period, close quote, bracket, enter.

“Rock out to the best eighties heavy metal songs. A playlist for every metal head.”
Now you could have this generate three blog posts or 10 or any number up to your max number of tokens..

Now here you can see it created a title for a classic listicle format if you want to limit the number of items it suggests as a title, what you can do is add more to your prompt. If creating a top list, do not use more than five.

Now you can see it’s adjusted it to be top five eighties heavy metal songs to Rock out too The next section of our post will be the introduction. I like to segment my content generators to do specific tasks in each cell. [00:08:00] Since I want an introduction that’s catchy, having it broken out on its own gives me more flexibility in how I tell the algorithm to generate the text. similar to the title, I’m gonna call the AI function
and give it a roll. as a viral blog, post writer. Create an introductory paragraph.
For an article entitled similar to Above, we’re going to use an ampersand and instead of referencing our keyword cell, we’re going to reference the title that is generated. Add another ampersand and a period. As a viral blog post writer, create an introductory paragraph for an article entitled “Top five eighties Heavy Metal Songs for Rock out Too”. Hit Enter.

Now the output is overflowing the cell, so to make it easier to use, I’m just gonna set the text to wrap around and remove the bold so it’s easier to read.

I’m also going to align all my titles to the top of the cell, so they’ll look nice and clean.
With our introduction drafted, [00:09:00] we can now move on to the body.

Similarly, we’re going to give it another role, we’ll open the AI function and say, “as an engaging blog writer, you are creating a blog about…” and then we will reference our keyword, close it at a comma, then provide it our introduction for context. So I will say extend the text colon and then once again, I will reference my introduction the same way I’ve done my other references and put a period on it to close it and let it do its work.

Now the prompts I’m using here are just examples. You can tweak them as much as you want depending on the posts you’re trying to create. You may also need more sections.

This is just an example.

Your creativity is what is gonna make this work and be great. Also, don’t forget to like and subscribe so I can put kibbles in my [00:10:00] cat’s dish.

So generating the body of the post can take a while, but as you can see here, it’s done a good job to give me a reasonable first draft.

I’ve got my title, “Top five eighties Heavy Metal Songs to Rock Out” to an Intro paragraph and five recommended songs based on what came out in the eighties.
If your blog post is for SEO, you may want some related keywords. So again, you’ll just make a new prompt and say, “Suggest three related keyword phrases that customers who search for…”, in this case, eighties heavy metal songs, “may also search for”.

I’ll hit enter and it gives me three pretty likely related keywords.

Because this is an SEO focused blog post, I will also use it to generate a meta description. So new prompt: “As an SEO writer. Create a meta description that uses the keyword…” and we will add a reference to our [00:11:00] keyword, ampersand, and then finish our sentence, “as the primary keyword. Try to include one or two of these related keywords:”. And then I will reference my new related keywords.
Put a period and say, end with a call to action.

Give that a second to run…

And it says, “Discover the best eighties heavy metal songs. That’s my keyword and hard rock songs for the most iconic metal bands with a decade eighties metal music.”
So you can see it’s using the other keywords. This isn’t perfect, it actually might be a little much, but it shows you how you can generate really interesting starting points.

I’ll close this out with a tweet, say AI give it a roll. Writing like a social media manager, create a tweet to promote an article called, and then we will reference our article title. [00:12:00] Put a quote reopen it. Put a period , and say, don’t use too many hashtags, because sometimes it goes a little crazy. And now you can see rock out to the best of the eighties. Check out our article with a link.

Woo! Not bad.

So this is pretty cool and generally readable.

But the text is still locked up in this document because when I look at the cells, all I see is the prompts up here that generated this text. So the next thing we’re going to do is add a menu function to allow us to export this text to a Word doc.
To make it easy, I’ve put all the code you need up on my GitHub page.

So what you can do is just copy, go to your app script window and down at the bottom, paste it in. There are a few things that you need to edit to make it work. First of all, right here, we need a destination id. Now, what this is, is the unique value [00:13:00] of where we want to create our documents.

To get a destination, ID just go to your Google Drive, create a new folder,
I’ll call mine blogs. Once your new folder is created, just click into it and you’ll see at the top here, you have a unique ID for that folder. So you want to cut that, go back to your app script window and paste it between the quotes so that the script knows where to create the new file. We’re gonna go ahead and hit save, then back in our document, we will reload the whole thing.

When the page reloads, it’ll generate the content again. You’ll also have this new tab at the top here called Workflow Tools. Where you can go ahead and just click save to document.

It will ask you for the authorization to your drive as it is creating a new document with all of this text. So you just hit continue, choose your account. It will tell you that Google hasn’t verified this app, so you have to get all hacker space, click Advanced [00:14:00] and connect and give it permission.

Now I’ve been working in columns E and F so that you can see it on my screen, but in order for the script to work, it needs to be in columns A and B, so make sure you’ve structured your AI content generator to use A and B as the primary columns for generating content.

Once your content is generated, you can just hit save to document. It’ll say running script. And once it says finished back in your blog folder, you can reload and see it’s been named according to your keyword. You can click into it. and all of the text has been put into a nice table that you can then share with a copywriter or start doing the editing yourself.

Now that it’s set up. It’s insanely powerful we can use this framework to generate as many drafts as we need.

Let’s say I also want to do one on the best nineties heavy metal songs. All I have to do is paste [00:15:00] the keyword in and wait for the content to generate. All the references we made in our sheet work together to start generating another blog post around this keyword.

Similarly, I can just click save to document and once the script is run, it shows up in my folder again to be shared with an editor or be edited myself. If you’re working on a team, you can use the built-in shared in functions the same way you do in every doc. Just add the people to the document.

You can also add comments so the team can see what you think of the content generated. Best of all, you have access to Google’s version history, so you can keep track of how a document has evolved over time and revert if you need to.
And there it is, the template, the secret sauce. But one thing you need to be mindful of, Is not everyone loves AI generated content. In fact Open AI has released a classifier to help people know if content has been generated via an [00:16:00] algorithm. So that makes you even more important. You are the value. This is just a tool to help you get moving in a valuable direction.

So as you’re creating your own content writers, keep in mind what your customers want is value and knowledge. So make sure that you add value. I hope you found this video helpful and interesting. There is no wrong way to build your content generator. So experiment. Have fun, and if you have any questions, put them in the comments below.

Don’t forget to check out my other videos. I’ll be sharing more tips on seo, content marketing, team building and digital business.

So please like and subscribe and have a great day.