Anatomy of an effective prompt
A POM AI prompt has four possible parts. Most good prompts use two or three of them, in two or three sentences.
The four parts
1. The subject. What the output is about. Always required.
2. The reader. Who it is for, described by their situation rather than their demographics.
3. The must-haves. Points the output has to cover.
4. The exclusions. What to leave out.
That is the whole structure. Everything else — tone, length, format, language, your business — is either a form control or already configured.
A worked example
Weak:
Write about our accounting services.
Better:
Article about outsourced accounting for small manufacturers. Reader currently does their own books and is deciding whether to hand it over. Cover what it costs, what they have to hand over, and what stays their responsibility. No section on the history of accounting.
The second is four sentences and specifies subject, reader, must-haves and an exclusion. It is not longer for the sake of it; every clause removes a decision the tool would otherwise make arbitrarily.
Describing the reader
The single highest-value addition to most prompts. Describe where the reader is in their thinking:
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| For small businesses | Has outgrown a spreadsheet and is looking for the first real system |
| For developers | Knows WordPress well but has never built a multisite network |
| For customers | Has already decided to buy and is comparing two suppliers |
| For everyone | Has heard the term and does not know whether it applies to them |
Two prompts identical except for this line produce genuinely different articles.
Must-haves
Name them explicitly, as a short list:
Must cover: what it costs, how long it takes, and what typically goes wrong.
In the multi-stage generators this shapes the structure, which is where it matters most — the outline decides the article. See Prepare a long-form outline.
Exclusions
Underused, and often the fastest quality improvement. Generated content has predictable habits, and one clause removes each:
- No history or background section — removes the generic opener.
- Do not compare against named competitors — removes a legal problem.
- Do not invent company history, size or founding date — essential for About pages.
- No urgency or scarcity language — removes fake pressure.
- Do not explain what X is; the reader knows — removes wasted words.
What not to put in
Your business, tone and audience profile. Already sent from the business description. Restating it wastes input and can conflict with it.
The language. Taken from the site locale.
Length, style, ratio, quality. These are form controls, and the control wins.
Adjective stacks. "Engaging, compelling, professional, high-quality, SEO-optimised" adds nothing after the first word.
Keyword density instructions. They produce copy that reads like it was written to a density target.
Long company background. If it matters, it belongs in the business description once, not in every prompt.
Different tools, different emphasis
| Tool | The prompt mostly determines |
|---|---|
| Long-form post builder | The outline, and through it the whole article |
| Site-wide copy generator | What applies across all pages |
| Paragraph assistant | One specific change to one passage |
| Image tools | The picture itself |
For the paragraph assistant, the mode you select changes what the same words mean — in continue mode a prompt says "add this", in replace mode it says "instead, write this". See Write and revise a paragraph in the visual editor.
The test of a good prompt
Read it and ask: could a competent freelancer produce roughly the right thing from this, given they already know the business?
If yes, it is long enough. If you are still adding clauses after that point, you are writing a brief for yourself rather than an instruction for the tool.