How freelancers can save time with ChatGPT

As a freelancer, your most valuable resource is time. With the gig economy and your workload always changing, you must find new ways to stay productive. That’s where ChatGPT comes in.

ChatGPT can help freelancers save hours every week by automating tasks, such as generating new content ideas and topics, writing code for apps and plugins, and even putting together personalized client proposals. The following guide will investigate how freelancers and professionals can use ChatGPT (and ChatGPT-adjacent tools) to be more productive and time-efficient.

What Is ChatGPT?

Knowing how a technology works is important before you dedicate considerable time and effort to learning how to use it. Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer is a sophisticated chatbot and automated writing prompt processor developed by OpenAI.

What makes it different from the chatbots of old is its ability to apply machine learning (be trained over time) and its implementation of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While ChatGPT is free, it isn’t open source.

Additionally, ChatGPT can have some accessibility issues. That’s largely because ChatGPT lives on OpenAI’s servers, and like any other servers, they have capacity limits. Also, high volumes of traffic can slow ChatGPT down. So, while it may be accessible, it may not be technically usable.

This unreliability may put you off, but fortunately, several ChatGPT derivatives and alternatives exist. Some are paid, some are free, and some are open source. But how can you leverage these tools as a freelancer, and how can they benefit you?

5 Ways GPT Software Can Improve Your Life as a Freelancer

Many ChatGPT users believe it will replace traditional search engines like Google because it can produce straightforward, concise results. You don’t have to sift through long lists of links, trying to figure out which source is the most reliable. ChatGPT can do it for you, making research far easier and less time-consuming.

But that’s not the only benefit for freelancers and general users; here are five other ways freelancers can leverage GPT solutions.

Search Engine Optimization

Freelance bloggers and writers can improve their content’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through ChatGPT.

A word of warning, though; it isn’t a good idea to instruct ChatGPT to write entire blog posts for you. Google’s guidelines on AI-generated content are still a bit unclear and subject to change.

However, you can use carefully written prompts to improve your SEO through ChatGPT. For instance, you can ask ChatGPT if it thinks your post’s title is optimal for SEO or for feedback regarding the SEO of your content and ways to improve it.

You can also use ChatGPT to summarize your blogs and generate meta-descriptions when you feel stuck. When it comes to creating news-related content or posts on current events, however, other AI writing tools besides ChatGPT may be better suited since ChatGPT currently has a knowledge cutoff of September 2021.

Generating Code

If you’re a freelance blogger or site owner with very little coding skills, you can benefit from using ChatGPT too. You can instruct it to write WordPress plugins or shortcodes for you.

You can also use it to make changes to the design of non-WordPress websites, including UI components or entire landing pages.

While ChatGPT may be sufficient for writing simple HTML and CSS code for web design, Galileo AI is specifically built for this purpose. It can translate simple text prompts into high-quality GUI designs.

Copywriting and Generating Content for Ads

ChatGPT and other prompt-based artificial intelligence tools can assist you in writing copy for site-specific ads. They can also help you identify the latest trends and which types of ads generate the most positive responses. ChatGTP is a great tool for people struggling with writer’s block and can be invaluable in filling in the blanks.

Writing Client Proposals and Motivation Letters

While you may be good at some aspects of your job - whether it be coding, writing long-form content, etc. -- you may not be good at selling yourself.

You can use ChatGPT to write client proposals based on criteria such as your price, your specialization, and how you can solve problems specific to potential clients.

ChatGPT-like tools can also be used to write motivational and cover letters, making job and client acquisition a lot easier and more effective.

Job and Client Acquisition

You may find yourself scouring the internet for job offerings. Often, the results of your efforts may end fruitless, not because of a terrible job market but because your search criteria may be slightly off. ChatGPT can help you improve your searches by supplying you with alternative job titles, allowing you to broaden your searches.

Alternatively, you can use ChatGPT to help you research similar services in budding industries. For instance, your digital marketing and web design skills may lend themselves well to customer experience engineering (CX).

If you find yourself stuck in your business and need additional funds or an alternative business idea, you could try generating passive income by using generative AI. ChatGPT can help you write apps, find the best investment options, and write materials for online courses, all of which are viable ways for generating passive income on the side.

However, if you’re dead set on finding a freelance position, ChatGPT can also help you compile a list of potential clients and companies. You can then ask the tool to write client proposals that are unique to each target.

ChatGPT can also prepare you for interviews or meetings with clients. You can prompt it to generate a list of potential interview questions to help you prepare or write pertinent questions you can ask during your interviews and meetings.

Conclusion

As with most things, ChatGPT’s effectiveness hinges on how well you can use it, i.e., the quality of your prompts. If you want to get the best results from generative AI, you should treat your requests or queries like conversations.

It’s also a good idea to experiment with the questions you ask. For instance, you can try asking a single question in varying ways. Qualify your prompts by telling ChatGPT why you want the information and what you’ll be using it for. 

As a final tip, you should always read over your AI-generated text to ensure it reads well. As previously mentioned, you should not completely rely on these tools; they should be used to enhance your skills, not replace them. 

Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan, and DouYin (now TikTok).