TL;DR: Generic answers come from generic prompts. Give every prompt a role, clear constraints and [placeholders], and ChatGPT stops guessing. Three templates below do this for sales pages, positioning and weekly planning.
Why your answers feel generic
If you ask ChatGPT to “write a sales page for my product,” it has to guess who you are, who you’re selling to and what good looks like. So it gives you the average of everything. That’s the generic answer you keep getting. You will usually spot it by the vague openers (“In today’s fast-paced world”) and benefits that could apply to any product on the planet.
A Reddit user in r/ChatGPTPromptGenius shared a simple fix that works. Every prompt gets three things:
- A role. Tell it who to be, like a direct-response copywriter or an operations consultant. The more specific the role, the more specific the voice. “Copywriter” is fine, but “copywriter who writes for busy freelancers” is better.
- Constraints. Word count, format, number of items, tone. If you don’t set a limit, the model picks one for you, and it usually picks long.
- [Placeholders]. Slots you fill with your real details before you hit send. Keep the square brackets in your saved template so you can see at a glance what still needs filling in.
The role sets the point of view. The constraints stop the rambling. The placeholders force you to bring real context, which is where most of the quality comes from. A good habit is to save all three prompts in a notes app so you only swap the brackets each time instead of rewriting from scratch.
The three prompts
1. Sales page
You are an experienced direct-response copywriter. Write a sales page for [product] aimed at [target customer], who struggles with [main problem]. Include a headline, 3 benefit bullets, a ‘who it’s for’ section, 3 FAQs and a call to action. Under 400 words, plain language.
The structure is spelled out, so you get a usable draft instead of a wall of hype. The “plain language” line keeps the buzzwords away. For the [main problem] slot, use the words your customers actually say. “I keep losing track of invoices” will beat “inefficient financial workflows” every time.
2. Positioning
Act as a brand strategist. My business is [business], I sell [offer] to [audience], and my competitors are [competitors]. Give me 3 positioning statements that set me apart, and explain why each would appeal.
Naming your competitors is the key move here. Without them, the model has nothing to differentiate against. Asking for the “why” also shows you the reasoning, so you can judge each option instead of just picking the one that sounds nicest. If two statements feel close, ask for a version that leans harder on the difference and compare them side by side.
3. Weekly plan
You are an operations consultant for a one-person business. Tasks: [list]. Hours available: [hours]. Sort them into must/should/can wait, estimate the time for each, and give me a day-by-day schedule.
The “hours available” placeholder matters. It gives the model a hard limit to plan around. Be honest with that number. If you only have four real working hours a day, say 20 for the week, not 40.
One upgrade worth stealing
A commenter, u/CuriousRelayLab, pointed out a good stress test for the weekly plan. Give it 22 hours of tasks and only 12 hours available. A lazy answer will just cram everything in. Their fix is to tell the model to total its estimates before scheduling, and if the tasks don’t fit, to show what to drop or defer. That one extra line turns a nice-looking schedule into an honest one. It also works outside planning. Any time a prompt has a limit, whether budget, time or word count, ask the model to check the numbers against that limit before it answers.
Use cases
- 🛠️ Freelancers and solo founders: draft a landing page in minutes, then edit it with your own voice. Treat the output as a first draft and rewrite the opening line yourself.
- 🎯 Anyone stuck on “what makes us different”: run the positioning prompt, then pick the statement that sounds most like you. Read it out loud, and if you wouldn’t say it to a customer, change it.
- 📅 Busy Monday mornings: dump your task list into the weekly plan prompt and get a realistic week. Re-run it on Wednesday with the leftover tasks to adjust when things slip.
Prompt of the Day
Here is the weekly plan prompt with the community upgrade built in:
You are an operations consultant for a one-person business. Tasks: [list]. Hours available: [hours]. First, estimate the time for each task and total it. Sort the tasks into must/should/can wait. If the total is more than my available hours, tell me what to drop or defer before you schedule anything. Then give me a day-by-day schedule that fits.
Your turn
Pick one of these three, fill in the brackets with your real details and run it today. If the result is still too generic, add a constraint and run it again. A good second constraint is a banned-words list or an example of a sentence you like. Then do what the original poster asked: tell us what you would add to make these prompts better.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I know if my weekly plan prompt can handle a real week?
Give it more work than you have time for, like 22 hours of tasks with only 12 hours available. A good prompt should notice the overload instead of squeezing everything into a neat calendar. If it builds a tidy schedule anyway, that schedule won’t survive your actual week.
Q: What should the prompt do when the tasks don’t fit?
Ask it to total the estimated hours before it builds any schedule. If the total is over your available time, it should show what to drop or defer and ask you one priority question. Adding a buffer for interruptions also keeps the plan workable when real life shows up.
Q: Why do a role, constraints and placeholders make such a difference?
Without a role, the model answers like an average voice on the internet. Constraints such as a word limit, plain language or a set number of bullets give it a clear finish line it can check its own work against. Placeholders in square brackets make the prompt reusable, so you swap in your details each week instead of rewriting the whole thing.
3 business prompts that stopped ChatGPT giving me generic answers
by u/Certain_Bar6354 in ChatGPTPromptGenius