How to write a great prompt for an LLM

You’ve tried ChatGPT or Claude a few times. Maybe asked it to write a social media caption or tidy up a paragraph for your website. But 'master it'? Not quite. Here’s the good news: You’re closer than you think. With a few simple techniques, you can go from dabbling to expert. Breezy is built on top of several LLM models, so prompting Breezy is very similar to prompting a tool like ChatGPT.

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In this blog we will go over the basics for the casual user. For a technical deep dive view from the experts you can also check out OpenAIs guide to writing great prompts

Zero-shot vs few-shot

This is just about giving examples, a zero-shot is when you ask ChatGPT to do something without giving an example such as “Write a product description for a scented candle”. Few-shot is when you show ChatGPT a few examples so it knows exactly what style you like i.e “Here are 2 product descriptions I love. Now write one for my new lavender candle.”

If you love a particular tone or format, copy-paste it as an example. AI learns from context quickly, so showing it the style you want gets better results.

Using chain prompts

Think of it like a recipe. Step-by-step. Instead of writing the following prompt:

“Write me a blog post about booking tips.”

You break down your prompt into steps to explain the topic and  a perspective or angle you want explored. Include  3 potential titles and request the LLM to build a simple outline. This gives you way more control. The output is usually clearer, more accurate, and closer to what you need. You can tweak and refine the output until it is what you are after.

Understanding multimodality

Sounds fancy. It’s not. It just means ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others can learn from more than what you write.  You can also:

• Show it an advert or product photo you want it to use
• Upload your brochure or a customer survey and ask it to use that in the response
• Provide competitor info or industry trends to reference

Next time you’re stuck, upload the thing you’re working on (an image, a doc, whatever) and say “Here’s what I’ve got, what would you improve?". All the major LLMs are continuing to expand multimodal capabilities. These features are becoming increasingly useful for small businesses who juggle multiple formats of content.

Key take aways

You don’t need to become an AI expert. You just need a few tricks up your sleeve.

• Give good examples
• Break big asks into steps

• Refine and retry until you land on the right prompt

Mastering ChatGPT isn’t about being technical. It’s about being clear, curious, and in control. As a business owner, that’s already your superpower. If you want to see how these techniques apply directly to customer bookings, check out our blog on if is it safe to let AI manage your bookings.

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