In plain terms: Telling ChatGPT or Claude to "write like me" almost never works because tone isn't the thing that makes your content sound like you, your opinions and specific details are. Build a short voice document full of your actual stances, phrases, and pet peeves instead of a persona prompt, and the output changes overnight. I tested this on my own LinkedIn content for six weeks and the difference in engagement was not subtle.
Next step on this topic: What ChatGPT Prompts Help You Write Better Business Content.
The prompt everyone tries first, and why it flops
Here's what almost every small business owner does the first time they try to get AI to sound like them. They open ChatGP, or Claude, or whatever they've picked, type "write this email newsletter in my voice, I'm warm, direct, and a bit cheeky" and hit enter.
What comes back reads like a LinkedIn influencer wrote it in 2019. Lots of short punchy sentences. An emoji or two. The word "journey" somewhere it doesn't belong. It's not wrong exactly, it's just not you, it's a slightly better version of everyone.
I did this, or tried to, back in early 2025 when I was rebuilding my content process after five rough years where I'd stepped back from the influencer side of things. I fed ChatGPT forty of my old blog posts, all in one long paste, and asked it to learn my style and then write a new post about email marketing. It came back competent. Grammatically clean. Structurally sound. And it read like a press release from a marketing agency in Croydon. Not me.
Voice isn't vocabulary, it's opinion
Here's the bit nobody tells you when they sell you a "clone your writing style" course or tool. AI can copy your sentence rhythm, your favourite words, even your habit of starting sentences with "and". What it can't copy from forty blog posts is the reason you hold the opinions you hold, because most of your writing doesn't state the reason, it assumes the reader already knows you.
My blog posts don't say "I believe small businesses should own their audience instead of renting it from social platforms because I watched my own following get throttled overnight when Instagram changed its algorithm in 2018 and my reach dropped by 80% in a week." They just say "own your list" and move on, because I'd already told that story elsewhere, out loud, on stage, in a podcast. The AI never got that context, so it writes the generic version of the advice, because that's all the training data gave it.
This is the uncomfortable bit most people writing about AI content skip over: a huge amount of small business content sounded generic before AI ever touched it. If your blog posts are already safe, hedge-everything, no-strong-opinion pieces, AI won't make that worse, it'll just make it faster and cheaper to produce, which is arguably a bigger problem than the AI itself. You can't blame the tool for exposing a gap that was already there.
What changes the output: a voice document, not a persona prompt
Stop trying to describe your tone. Instead, build a short document (I keep mine to about two pages) that gives the model raw material it can't get from a style sample. Here's the exact structure I use now, and give to clients when I help them set up their own content process through working with an AI consultant on this rather than winging it with a single prompt:
- Ten opinions you hold that some people in your industry disagree with. Not neutral facts, actual stances. Mine include "most lead magnets are landfill" and "email still beats social for revenue, no contest."
- Five phrases or words you say out loud, in your own accent and rhythm. I say "let's be honest" a lot. I say "here's the thing nobody tells you" too often, so I've had to consciously vary it.
- Three specific stories with numbers attached. Not "I've helped many businesses grow", but "I ran a webinar in 2023 that converted 4.2% of attendees into paying clients, against an industry average closer to 2%."
- Your pet peeves. What language, structure, or advice makes you roll your eyes when you see other people in your space post it? This is often the fastest way into a real voice, because complaint is more specific than praise.
- What you refuse to write about, and why. I won't write fear-based marketing copy. That refusal is part of my voice as much as anything I do write.
Paste that document in before every piece of content, not a two-line tone instruction. Then ask for a first draft and expect to rewrite 30 to 40% of it by hand, because the point isn't zero editing, it's a draft that's already 60% you instead of 10% you.
The six-week test I ran on my own LinkedIn
I wanted a number, not a feeling, so I ran a proper test. Six weeks, twelve LinkedIn posts, half written the old "write like me" way, half using the voice document approach above, alternated so it wasn't seasonal or lucky timing.
The "write like me" posts averaged 47 comments and a 1.8% engagement rate against my follower count. The voice document posts averaged 112 comments and a 3.4% engagement rate. Same topics roughly, same posting times, same me hitting publish. The only variable was what I fed the model before asking it to draft.
The bigger tell was qualitative. People replied to the voice document posts with things like "this is exactly what I needed to hear" or disagreed with me outright in the comments, which never happened with the generic drafts. Nobody argues with a press release.
Where AI earns its keep in this process
I'm not anti-AI in content, that would be a strange position for someone consulting on this for a living. AI is brilliant at the bits that used to eat my whole afternoon: pulling together research, restructuring a messy voice note into paragraphs, drafting five headline options so I can pick the least worst one, and turning a long blog post into a shorter email version for the newsletter. Think of the split as research and scaffolding done by AI, opinion and specifics done by you.
This matters even more for email, because inbox competition is brutal and generic subject lines get ignored. If you're building your newsletter process around a platform like Mailchimp, it's worth looking at how established brands structure their sends, not just the subject line tricks, and there's a good breakdown of that in this Mailchimp marketing strategy piece that's useful alongside your own voice document.
The same logic applies to visual brand consistency, which is its own version of this problem. A logo file and a colour palette don't make a brand any more than a tone-of-voice prompt makes a writer sound like you, the system behind it does, which is why the way Figma built a brand around genuine product opinions rather than generic design language is a decent model to study even outside the design world.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
The bit people get wrong on Instagram specifically
Instagram is where this problem shows up fastest because captions are short and the temptation to let AI write the whole thing is huge. I see small business accounts posting captions that are technically fine and completely forgettable, three sentences of AI-smooth encouragement with no actual person behind them. Compare that to how a brand builds a following on strong, specific point of view rather than pretty captions, which is exactly what's covered in this Instagram marketing strategy breakdown, it's a decent second read after you've built your own voice document.
Content strategy people have been saying versions of "be specific, not generic" for years before AI existed. Joe Pulizzi built an entire content marketing career on the idea that most brand content fails because it's boring, not because it's poorly produced, which is worth revisiting now that the production cost of boring content has dropped to almost nothing. I've written before about the business lessons in Joe Pulizzi's approach, and the AI era has made his core point sharper, not weaker: production quality is no longer the differentiator, specificity is.
A quick way to test your own voice document
Before you roll this out across your whole content calendar, run a small test the way I did. Pick one platform, write six pieces of content, three the old way with a tone prompt, three with a proper voice document. Track comments, replies, or reply rate on email, whichever metric matches the channel. Two weeks is enough to see a pattern, you don't need six.
If you want to go further, this is the same logic behind interactive tools that convert better than static content, because specificity beats generic advice every time you give the reader something concrete to engage with rather than something they've read forty times before, and that's covered well in this piece on using interactive calculators to convert visitors, a different channel but the same underlying principle: give people something specific, not a vibe.
What to do this week
Don't try to overhaul your whole content process in one sitting, that's how these things get abandoned by Thursday. Do this instead:
- Write your voice document today, thirty minutes, don't overthink it, first draft only.
- Use it on your next three pieces of content, whatever platform you post on most.
- Keep the old prompt version of one piece as a comparison so you can see the difference rather than just feeling like there is one.
- Update the document every month, your opinions sharpen as your business changes, and a document from January won't sound like you by June.
The tool was never the problem. A blank tone instruction was.
Free resource: The 30-Day Content Calendar Template.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI ever really sound exactly like me?
Not exactly, no, and that's fine, the goal isn't a perfect clone, it's a first draft close enough that your edit takes ten minutes instead of an hour. Aim for 60 to 70% there from the AI, with your specific stories and opinions filling the rest.
How long should a voice document be?
Two pages is plenty. Ten opinions, five phrases you use, three stories with real numbers attached, and a short list of things you refuse to write about. Longer than that and you'll stop updating it.
Is it worth paying someone to build this for me?
If you're short on time or too close to your own writing to see the patterns, yes, this is exactly the kind of setup work an outside eye does well, and it's a common part of what comes up when small businesses look at what an AI consultant costs versus what they save in editing time each month.
Does this work for email newsletters as well as social posts?
Yes, and arguably it matters more there, because a generic email gets deleted in half a second while a generic social post at least gets scrolled past. The same voice document approach applies, just feed it in before drafting subject lines as well as body copy.
Related reading: How to Train an AI to Sound Like You (Not Like Every Other AI) and How I Use AI to Draft Client Proposals (And Why I Still Rewrite Every Word).
I go much deeper on this in the AI marketing guide.
