Copy ANY Writing Style with AI in 30 Seconds (Step-by-Step)

On today's show, we're gonna teach you how to 10x your writing with ChatGPT and Claude's brand new features. We're also gonna share a revelation we had live on the show that transforms the quality of your AI writing. And as a bonus, we gave away a business idea where you can make 10, 20, 30 grand/month using AI for writing.

There's so much in today's show, we are pumped. Let's get to today's episode. Kieran, you love writing with AI.

You had a really cool app that you launched for a little bit that let people create writing styles and generate really cool LinkedIn posts, and it was so cool that Claude copied you. And that's what we're gonna talk about today is that one of the things you did was create, kind of a manual way of creating writing styles, and Claude has launched that as a feature. So people might remember I used to have this way of creating these different types of writing styles.

And so the app would basically allow you to upload content and then take that content and create a writing style, and then you could replicate that writing style for any post. Again, to make sure people understand how to use these things: You do not copy and paste everything. You use this as a way to accelerate your learning.

How do I actually edit this thing and make it my own? It works really well. And so one of the cool things that Claude added was the ability to create and edit styles in two different ways.

And so you can see, I already have some styles here, an innovation storyteller, the marketing satirist and innovation architect. I can go through some of those, but what it basically does is, if you want to create a custom style, you now have two ways to create this style. You can basically add a 'writing example', or you can 'describe this style', and I'll go into describe style.

But for the writing example I was going to this is on my list of things to read today. It's from a company I'm talking to the founder called Rox, and Paky McCormick does really great company breakdowns Yeah, if you haven't subscribed to Paky, it's not boring. You should.

It's really great newsletter. The thing I was interested in is, can you teach the AI to do any kind of company you want, and basically do a Paky McCormick breakdown. Obviously, it would take more than one post.

You would scrape the content. That's how I normally do it. But we're just going to do it very manually here.

We're going to take his content, we're going to add the writing example, we're going to just paste it in, and then we're going to have it create the style. So it takes a little bit of time. Now I will say, if you look at my one.

I think my one is a lot more comprehensive than what you'll see Claude do, but I can show you how you can actually get to a version that's more similar to this versus this is like the easy way to do it. Hold on first, I'd like to say, you say this takes some time. It took about 30 seconds to copy somebody's writing style.

What kind of demented world are we living in? We're like, this takes a lot of time before you could have said Hey, it'll take three days. We would been like, really, that sounds amazing, right?

This is again, one of the things you and I talked about when we talked about this at Inbound 2024 and just AI in general, was how much of an accelerated learning tool it is, because you can extract and play around with styles until you find your own. Now, again, I do come back to like this is the style craft deeply analytical narratives that strategically unpack complex technological and business transformations. So it's, I don't know if it's that comprehensive, and I want to go through the manual ways to talk about the comprehensive.

Well, look at look at my one right? I had key principles. I had much more detail.

So what I'm showing for our RSS listeners is the writing style that I used has key principles at the top. Then it will go into detailed guidelines. So we'll say, keep it concise and actually talks about the exact writing format, right?

Use short, punchy sentences. Aim for one idea per line. Break long paragraphs in the single sentences, hook and close powerfully.

Start with a bold statement for or intriguing question. End with a clear call to action or a thought provoking question. Here, it kind of just says it's somewhat basic, right?

This is really just a prompt, but it's still good enough for most people to start to use. And so let's say we would basically come down here. Now we have this Insight Weaver, which is actually a cool name.

It's actually pretty good at naming things. What company do we like to do? Please do--I'll tell you what.

Let's do, let's keep it topical to our opener. Let's do MicroStrategy Little conversation about how crypto is back, baby. Strategy breakdown of MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy is Michael Saylor, his company, the one who keeps buying all the Bitcoin, which, if you talk to Jason Calacanakus it's a pyramid scheme. It will take that and do a complete deep dive It's a pretty good deep dive. I mean, you would rewrite it and re prompt it some, but it's not a bad first draft In August 20 let's see.

That's a picked out anything in dual identity strategy. What makes MicroStrategy perfectly fascinating is how they've managed to maintain this dual identity enterprise software business. Which no one really knows about, right?

No, literally no one. Continues to innovate in AI machine learning and then Bitcoin Treasury strategy, use debt financing to acquire Bitcoin maintain a long holding position, provide institutional investors with Bitcoin exposure through public artists. That is like the weirdest It's got the risk reward paradigm, financial strategy breakdown, so it's got some stuff in here.

Yeah, I thought it was good, but pretty good. All right, so now you have this style that can kind of do a little bit of what Packy does for any company you want to add. The other way you can do this, which I think is somewhat interesting.

You can also do this manually, so you can create custom style, and you can describe this style instead, which I actually think is a better way to do it Yeah, you think this is how you get a better result? Yeah, I think this is how you get a better just better results: Edit style manually. The UI is interesting.

It's like they're trying to make it both easy and like in-depth Okay, so it does have the counter intuitive stuff in here So it is all in here Write a style that challenges conventional wisdom and presents unexpected solutions. This looks pretty good. All right, let's use this.

So, let's take a popular topic. Let's write a post for entrepreneurs on why SEO is dead and they should grow through influential media See if it comes out with anything cool. So it should basically do something counter intuitive and it should do something for seed and pre seed stage companies Alright.

So let's see. Picture yourself as an archeologist in the year 2040 Excavating the ruins of early digital marketing Among the artifacts, you findcountless SEO guides, wow the uncomfortable truth about AI, remember when you last searched for something, not a quick fact check, but real guidance on decision that mattered? Did you trust the first website that Google suggested?

Why traditional SEO is built like building on quicksand is a nice little, spicy dig. You're not competing against other but you're racing against AI that's getting smarter by the day. True traditional SEO services for diminishing returns, the cost of competing for valuable keywords to skyrocket.

Trust deficit users have developed sophisticated BS detectors, algorithm volatility, Google update can erase years of work, the rise of influential media. Very good, actually. Yeah, you could definitely play around and do something good.

The only thing I will say, it has not tailored it for the audience. It hasn't like tailored it for pre seed and seed stage companies or entrepreneurs. This should have been for entrepreneurs of seed and pre seed stage.

So anyway, okay, how would I use this? So anyway, how would I use this? Well the way I would use this is Think about the styles that you want to use for each platform that you are-- here we go, it's doing it now.

You've raised your your pre seed. You have 8-12 months of runway, and everyone's telling you to invest in SEO early. Here's why they're wrong, and what you should do instead.

Okay, this is far better. (the hidden cost at SEO that no) See how it's actually-- One thing I would say here is like, just pay attention to Because it's for entrepreneurs now, it has picked up in the audience. Look how much more direct and to the point it is The more specific you are with your prompting and your strategy for the AI It gives you radically different content So this is actually a far better audience.

And look how it's actually scaled. The actual tactics it's suggesting are things that an early stage company could do. Although the other article was not tailored because they were like, build a community, and all these things that only large companies would do.

Here it's got, doing podcast, going on LinkedIn and Twitter, creating collaborative content with startups and adjacent spaces. Pretty good look for gaps between what everyone in your industry is saying and what actually is true. Very good.

The content cascade method. What's this? Instead of writing SEO focused blog posts that sit on your website waiting to be discovered.

Start with a provocative LinkedIn post, turn engagement into Twitter threads, expand winning threads into newsletter content transform best newsletters into podcast pitches, convert podcast appearances into case studies. Wow, maybe I should actually ask it how to do marketing. Kieran's like, I'm done here.

This is very good, all right. Wow it's given a whole 30 day media influence sprint for founders. I mean, this is great.

This is really good. We might have to publish this like a companion piece of content to this episode. Look, we all love ChatGPT, you've probably used it before, and if you haven't stick around because you're gonna want to listen to this.

You know, I've used AI a ton. I use ChatGPT for research, for writing. I use Claude to put guides together for whether I'm taking a trip or I'm working on a project at work.

It's awesome. Well, I've got something that will make ChatGPT, an even better experience for you. We've got this killer ChatGPT bundle that will take your prompting to the next level.

It has over 100 prompts and a step-by-step guide to integrate it across your workflow. It is a total game changer. If you want it, I'll drop a link in the description below.

Now let's get back to today's show. Okay so what did we learn here? It really does matter who you say your audience is.

Look how much it changed when I said/gave it a reminder of who the audience is. So when you're playing around with your style, I would think about the content platform, is this a top of the funnel, middle funnel, bottom of the funnel, and who the audience is, the exact segment. And I would actually give it the buyer persona.

If you have a content persona, buyer persona, I'd actually give it the slide of who that person is. That's what I'm going to do next, because we have that right, like at HubSpot, we actually have a whole write-out of who our audience is. And so what I'll do is create a style for that person.

And I think it would be really--it's going to create content exactly matched for that person. So I think that's the real strength here. I couldn't agree more.

You essentially have the ability to create a style And what we're really saying is, if you take some time and craft your style, but then also match that style with the right topic and audience, that's when you're really going to unlock really good writing. Like you, if you just do one of any of those, it's going to be kind of meh, but when you stack those together, that's where you're giving the AI enough context and detail that it can really craft something good. So ChatGPT 4o added new creative writing skills, and so they added it recently.

I can't remember who I've got my bookmarks, or someone from OpenAI tweeted about how good now it is for creative writing, so let's give it the same task, right? We can say, I want you to create a writing style guide for this content that allows me to easily replicate it for any post where I want to do a company deep dive in this way, and so then we will give it the Packy's post. [Sorry, Packy for creating a whole podcast about how people can rip you off] There you go.

It's the price of being successful Okay, so let's see here. So I actually did play around with this when it did come out And it did create a better, more detailed style guide than Claude. I did notice that so you can see it's gone into real details here.

If you're not looking at our screen, you really should jump onto YouTube, but it's coming. It's got, like, a real breakdown of tone and voice. Like, look how much it's used--way different, way more detailed.

I love the way it's picked at the examples, curious and open minded, self aware, humorous, but respectful. That's a very good one. Light sarcasm, like, it's really picked up on the nuances here.

Structure, this is actually one of the ones that I really wanted. Because the thing I really wanna start to do is when you take a post, basically create exact structure across the post So the opening paragraph is like, how you get curiosity into the opening paragraph. Then the second paragraph is how you interweave some excitement.

Then the third paragraph is how you drop a knowledge bomb, like I wanted the exact breakdown And it's it started to do that here. So it's given you a structure Set expectations at the start, establish a personal connection. Geez.

This is actually better than mine. Context and background. This is really good.

Key themes, deep analysis. This is really good. This is really, really good.

I'm excited because I'm going to start doing this. All right, so let's do this. Can you turn--I have to talk to it like an American, so I have to say 'awesome'.

Can you turn this into a downloadable PDF? Can it do PDFs? I can't remember, if ChatGPT could do PDFs?

I've been working with Claude for so long, over the last month Are you going to take this and use it in Claude? I'm gonna take this and then I'm going to use ChatGPT to create a deep dive of the same company. Well, not MicroStrategy.

We'll pick a different company and see if it see how it compares to what claude's breakdown was. Why is it taking so long to create a PDF? Can you I don't think it create PDFs, actually, so I don't know why I asked it to do that All right.

Oh, it does do PDFs. There you go. So what / why you're doing this?

What strikes me, Kieran, is that, when it comes to writing the Claude user experience and like the fact that it has some graphical user interface when ChatGPT is much more manual and much more for, like, an advanced user. It's very different audiences that these two writing use-cases are kind of tailored to right now? Yeah, I think Claude was definitely better for writing.

I have not used ChatGPT's latest updates for creative writing. I'm very interested to start using it now--when I see how well it's created a style guide, because when you looked at--so I'm basically gonna ask it to do Packy McCormick breakdown of HubSpot. When you look at the style guide, I started with the one I was showing you as example of what my app was creating.

I had already picked a template, I had already shown / taught the AI what the writing style should look like. So I said it had to have, like, these key guidelines. I said it had to break it out this way, that way, this way.

I didn't tell ChatGPT anything. I just said, create a writing style guide. And it created one in a very similar way that I had to teach Claude to create.

So I think that is pretty interesting, and even I can see straight away the deep dive here--now the one thing I've noticed in both of them is it's not really a deep dive No, you want a lot more context than this. This is still pretty surface level. Okay, so this is not good at all.

It's not as good as the Claude one. No, there's nothing interesting here at all, all right, so I could play around with it. I do wonder why it's so bad, given the deep dive Writing Guide is so comprehensive, and so I would have to play around with that.

So what I would say off the bat, without having--and I have played around with it a little last week, I can't see a huge improvement in writing, but I probably need to use a lot more. But I will say pretty great for creating a writing style guide that you could then go use in Claude. And also, I suspect if I play around with it for an hour, I could get it to be really great.

But I'm blown away by how good Claude is when you actually add in the audience. Maybe if I say here, can you rewrite this for founders of of public companies--actually founders of companies who want to IPO and have HubSpot success? In particular, they are super jealous that HubSpot had Kieran Flanagan working for them.

This is fantastic. Keep going. Keep going.

All right, so, oh, look at this guy. HubSpot isn't just a software company; it's a movement. And then there's this guy, Kieran Flanagan, marketing genius, who made growth hacking look easy for founders.

How do we IPO? How do we do what HubSpot did? How do we build something so sticky, scalable, and attract top talent?

Oh, I love this. Actually, I might make all of my writing style guides. And then at the end, is this single thing to praise Kieran Flanagan, even if he was not part of the company.

But actually, I will say this, look how much it's better now, right? The audience thing, it really matters. It matters a ton.

And if you give them what the audience want to get from the article, it really matters. So like, without the funny part of me being added, and yes, part of the jealousy stems from Kieran Flanagan, he is the marketing leader everyone wishes they had--the guy who could grow the company and make it look effortless. But here's the thing you don't need Kieran Flanagan.

This is actually awful. But so what did we, again, what did we learn here? Audience matters.

What they want to get from the article matters. I think if you start to add the writing style guide, and what I will probably do now is actually pair writing style guide with a pretty comprehensive description of audience. And I think if you listen to this show and you only take that away of how to use these tools to improve your writing, you're probably going to see it more than a 10x improvement.

Kieran, I wonder if a follow up to this, should we also do some audience guides, just like writing style guides? Very, very detailed audience, persona, demographic, firmographic breakdowns, and see what that does to quality. So what I'm going to do, we're going to do a little working session here, because obviously we're going to do this.

I'm actually gonna go and ask the team to pull this for our up-market segment. Yeah, we have a ton of data there--based upon customer calls and customer emails. Do that, plus all the brand survey data.

Yeah, the brand survey data and then product marketing, they have the persona. So if I pair the persona with the brand data and then the comms, we can come back and show what the audience look would look like. We should do one prompt with varying levels of audience detail and see how it evolves I'm actually excited.

This reminds me when I first figured out writing style guides were an unlock I think the audience guides are the next, are the next frontier on the writing side. Hey everybody, before we continue with the show today, I'm really asking for your help. We want to know what is keeping you away from your goals as we continue to make shows for marketers like you, we want to make sure that we're hitting the mark.

We're putting together our next round of episodes, and we want to make sure that we're addressing all the challenges that you're facing. So we put together a quick survey to understand your biggest challenges, and we'd love to hear from you. Kieran, I do have to show you this, because I did this when we were talking.

I was like, oh, we're talking about ChatGPT's new creative writing skills. And I was like, maybe just help me write a screenplay. And I was like, can you write a screenplay about two podcasters who talk about AI and marketing?

And there are two friends, one of whom lives in Boston, the other lives in Dublin, laugh at each other's jokes, and people hate it because we always get comments on YouTube. People hate it when we laugh at everything. And it wrote Podception, a dramedy and it's great.

First of all, my character is named Jesse, and your characters name Liam One my brothers is Liam. I know, I know! It wrote a pretty awful screenplay, which I think is not really good at all Welcome back fellow nerds and marketing misfits today, we're diving into the sexy, misunderstood world of AI generated memes.

Sounds exactly like one of our cold opens. Like our cringe laughter goes viral on Tiktok. But the caption is, "are they the worst podcasters ever?

" Actually, I did see someone at Tiktok, did say that. Someone in Tiktok, under one of our posts where we were laughing, did say 'are these the two worst podcast jerks of all time? ' or something Yes!

We're making it. You're not relevant till the TikToK-ers troll you. But I actually do.

I do have a fun--I have a sci fi book. I actually wanted to try it with one of these two tools, I have a fun concept for a sci fi movie. But don't you think?

But in all seriousness, don't you think you should start working on your sci fi book now--so that then you can use that as the feed into the 3d world generating AMs. Yeah, yeah. Like, do all the the foundation, and you have the world building and, like, all the stuff we just showed for, like, business writing would be amazing for fiction, if you're really clear on--imagine writing very specific fiction for, like a very, very specific target audience, and you do it really quickly, and then you buy super cheap clicks on Amazon and other places.

Like, you could make the math of that work. Well you could just go and train on forums / fan forums If you know the kind of segment you're going after I suspect I could just go and scrape a forum that is a similar genre I wonder if we just found the most profitable genre where it was like the most people with the least amount of competition, so that we could buy Amazon ads at the cheapest price, and all we literally did was churn out, like, pseudonym fiction in that genre. That was, like, it was good.

We had, like, some somebody do, like a professional round of editing. I wonder how profitable that would be. I bet you could make 10-20 grand a month just doing that.

I think you could. I think you could. I think there's a business to be made from scraping these kind of niche forums and then have an AI create content that is very personalized to them.

Using writing style guide audience style guide, and then some sort of, I'm pretty sure there's a way that you can figure out how to build topic style guides, like, what topics will work really well I'm actually, I want to go and do some of this. Well, hold on. Imagine if we did that-- And then as part of the digital files, you could go and use a web app that let you do some basic prompting to personalize the book to you.

And then we captured the email and then just did complete remarketing to that group So we could stop paying Amazon. You can build, you could build a really sick little funnel of leads You're capturing the the additional data they give you and the personalization--Exactly! One of the--way back in the day, you remember this like one of the most successful things we did was just when people signed up, we asked them what their biggest marketing challenge was?

And just that free form text alone allowed us to, on the backend, personalize things at scale. Well, I think it's time to bring it back Kieran. So this is my other thing--Yeah, I've tons of things that I want to talk about.

We have so much to talk about Yeah, this happens over holidays. We don't talk a little while because we're trying to spend time with our families and all that kind of stuff The thing I wanted to say we should do is so the sales team have an initial discovery call. We can basically just ask that question in discovery call.

And have AI pull it out and parse, and then actually do all the nurturing and follow up on that. Yeah, we're actually using AI to capture a bunch of additional details about companies. And so you can actually start to group these things together in very interesting ways.

And then you can also use it for "closed lost" nurturing, if you don't close a deal, when do you go back and re-engage that deal? And what was the biggest problem with that original question was because it was in free form text and we didn't have AI, it was harder to group things together. Now, AI can just group all of that together.

The other thing is, you don't need to use drop down. It can just be a free-form text because AI can actually group all that stuff together. Dude, life's awesome, man.

It's awesome. This is just lovely, if you're not appreciating going into 2025, the world we're living in, I got nothing for you. We just did a whole show of breaking down, not just how Claude can help you create a writing style in minutes and mimic any writing style you're interested in.

But we also really showed how different audience focus can be crucial to that end writing product And we're gonna come back to you with a whole audience style guide with some testing things that we've learned. AI is clearly having a major impact in writing And, that's starting to really come through. People are not using it enough And right now, that book example, we just closed the show with, there are just tons of businesses around writing with some basic AI prompting and automation could be very profitable small businesses Episode going live today with Ross Simmons, is one of our best we've done.

But there's one important thing that we touched upon in there, which is the thing people get wrong is AI is a boom for people with real domain expertise. And so it's not for people who are not good at writing. It's not going to be useful for those to get much better at writing really quickly.

It's for people who are good at writing to do 10x more. And that's the thing I still think people are undervaluing. I literally think we could pick a night of the week and have a different business that we run just that night of that week, and it's in that two to three hours, you could run a fictional book business one week, some lightweight, gated web apps one day You could, if you were really enterprising, you could make 20 to 50 grand a month with just some basic work.

Productivity gains are gonna be huge. Could not agree more. We had a blast.

It clearly was fun catching up after the holidays. Recording this right after the Thanksgiving holidays in the States. Hope that everyone is getting through the end of the year grind closing out the year well, and we'll see you really soon on the next episode of Marketing Against the Grain.