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- #94 Must-Use Tools & Much Better Prompts
Welcome back!
Our third edition of the month is our AI-forward edition, and we have some questions:
What AI tools do you use?
Which ones would you want to learn about in the near future?
Do you find these editions helpful?
I use AI literally every single day (ChatGPT has replaced Google for me), but I’d love to hear from you about how it currently impacts your life and what you want to see moving forward.
So hit us up at [email protected] where you can let us know your thoughts on AI (or anything else, really) or take advantage of a special offer I’m putting out there over the next few weeks (see “Before You Go” for more details).
Let’s get After It 🤝
AI Didn’t Prompt These Highlights 🤖
BOOSTING YOUR PRODUCTIVITY 🕺
Hustle Hub: 4 Must-Use AI Tools, A $500 Million Company, & Recruiters’ Advice
FATTENING THE WALLET 💰️
Expert Advice that Makes Cents, courtesy of Mark Cuban.
ELEVATING YOUR BRAND 📈
Prompt Better by Working With AI
The Best Conversationalists are Always Informed
Hustle Hub 📈
YOUR SUCCESS:
Get More Efficient - She’s tested many AI tools over the past two years for work; here are the 4 she swears by.
THEIR SUCCESS:
Get Inspired - Lin Qiao studied trends, accurately predicted what was coming, and now her AI company is worth half a BILLION!
YOUR SUCCESS:
Get Employed - When looking for your next job, recruiters say you should use AI to help with the application.
Working With AI 🦾
Need to Prompt Better? Use Promptly
Loyal readers of OTF know we have a few core values that essentially drive all the content we produce. One of those is an emphasis on the importance of effective communication, whether verbal or written, whether with humans or bots.
Speaking about bots specifically, we frequently try to drive home the point that good prompting is paramount. But we’re not tech experts, so you don’t have to take our word for it. Instead, here’s someone immersed in the field:
“The results you get from these tools are only as good as the prompts you enter.”
To that end, various prompt improvers have been developed to help you. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have ones that only work on their platforms. But Promptly, from Decrypt, works to analyze prompts that can be used across all platforms.
It’s easy to figure out, but let’s go through it anyway:
Step 1: Click here. (We recommend bookmarking it so it’s always easy to find.)
Step 2: Write “improve this prompt,” followed by the prompt you want to fine-tune.
Step 3: Receive both a revised prompt and the reasoning behind it (so that you learn a little bit, too).
Here’s a Sample Prompt I submitted:
And here’s the bot’s Revised Prompt:
"You are a media consultant specializing in content strategy and audience engagement. I want to create a new AI-focused newsletter aimed at amateurs to make it accessible to the widest possible audience.
1. Topics to Cover: Suggest 5-7 recurring topics that would appeal to a general audience unfamiliar with AI but interested in learning about it. For each topic, include a brief description of why it’s relevant and engaging.
2. Research Sources: Provide a list of trustworthy and beginner-friendly sources, including websites, books, and other resources, that I can use for researching content.
3. Success Strategies Beyond Content: Suggest key design principles and newsletter formats for better readability and accessibility; Recommend tools or platforms for creating and managing the newsletter; Share marketing strategies to attract and retain subscribers; Offer tips to establish credibility and build a loyal audience.
4. Engagement and Growth: Suggest creative ways to encourage audience interaction (e.g., polls, Q&A sections) and community-building activities.
5. Unique Angle: Provide ideas on how to differentiate my newsletter from other AI newsletters in the market.
Organize your response into clearly labeled sections, and feel free to offer creative or unconventional ideas that could make this newsletter successful."
And here’s the bot’s Reasoning (explanation of why it made the revisions it did):
O.T.F.
O.F.T - One Final Thought
You don’t need to be a tech genius to use these incredible tools. Most of them are made to help beginners like us develop competency. Let’s take advantage!
Anthropic claims their prompt improver helps results improve by 30% on their platform. If Promptly can improve YOUR results by that much, there’s no reason not to use it. Save time. Save energy. Yield better results that you can then apply to your work, side hustle, or everyday life.
Always Informed 🦾
Don’t Let the Bot Get to You
Chatbots and other forms of generative AI are great when you need information or want to complete tasks in a more efficient manner, but remember: they are tools.
They pull what they produce from the internet, and while the internet is a magical place with an overabundance of great information, it’s simultaneously a cesspool of trolls and all other sorts of negativity. Sometimes, information from the cesspool makes its way into the bots’ responses. So:
If one tells you to eat rocks to get your daily allotment of essential minerals, don’t listen.
If one sends you a dark and twisted message like this one (I do question what prompted this kind of response!)…don’t let it get to you.
And if for whatever reason you seek companionship from bots like the ones on Character.ai, please remember that it’s not real. (If you have kids who use AI, please monitor what they’re doing.)
Once again: they are tools. And just like handling a hammer or a saw carelessly can harm yourself or others, so too can misusing a bot.
Chat responsibly.
Expert Advice 🤝 Making Cents
Using AI to Create Opportunity.
“If I was a 16 year old kid, and I needed to start a side-hustle to make some money, I’d be all in on learning how to prompt and how to use AI.”
This quote goes hard because it’s true. Here are the highlights from the CNBC interview:
Cuban would focus his learning on how to prompt LLMs (large language models).
He’d practice teaching others how to prompt by practicing on his friends, instructing them on how to use it to help them write papers.
Once he mastered this instruction, he’d focus on “small-to-medium sized businesses” and charge them a fee for his expertise.
O.T.F.
O.F.T - One Final Thought
Anyone can say they want to make money using AI, but it’s those who execute that will actually do it. No matter what age you are, unless you’re allergic to technology, you need to get familiar with AI and its capabilities.
This is exactly why we have this AI-focused edition, and why we try to include doses of it in every edition. It’s critical to stay in the know and learn how to use these tools to your advantage.
The ball’s in your court. Get in on the ground floor (while you still can).
Before You Go
I’ve owned and operated this newsletter for almost two years now, and it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience. I owe that to you, and I want to return the favor.
Over the next three weeks, I want to offer three of my readers the opportunity to have a free 45-minute chat with me regarding side-hustles worth pursuing, balancing content creation with a full-time job, finding more direction in your career, and much more.
If you’re interested, here is a link that will direct you to available times I have through the first week of December. If the link does not work for you, feel free to email me at [email protected].
Next week we’ll be back with our final November edition, featuring Major Moves, Search Bar, and more content to keep you productive and informed.
See you then!
