Eight Blanks, Six Angles, And One Angle That Needs A Ninth Blank

This is a good template. It is worth saying that first, because the rest of this post is going to find a hole in it, and the hole is the kind you only notice after the prompt has already worked twice.

The structure is sound: three roles at the top, eight blanks for you to fill, an instruction to work out the audience’s pain points and objections before writing anything, six content angles arranged as a funnel, and a request for ten ideas with a hook, a core message, a format and a call to action each. It ends with a short Avoid list and a line of small print telling you to review the output and keep claims honest. Most prompt cards do not get that far.

Here is the hole. Of the six angles it asks the model to write, five can be built entirely from the eight things you typed in. One cannot, because the thing it needs was never asked for.

Look at what the eight blanks actually are

Write them out and a pattern appears immediately. These are not eight different kinds of input. They are eight statements of intent.

That is not a criticism of the eight. You genuinely do need all of them, and asking for Brand Voice and Platform as separate fields is more careful than most templates manage. The point is what the set has in common.

Six angles, and the one that needs a ninth blank

Now run the six content angles against those eight inputs and ask, for each, whether the model has what it needs.

Angle three is not a rounding error. In a funnel that runs attention to trust to purchase — which is exactly how the card describes it — trust is the hinge. Problem awareness gets attention. Conversion asks for the sale. The angle in between is the one that earns the right to ask, and it is the one angle that cannot be written from a description of your intentions.

Think about what the model is holding when it reaches that angle. It knows what you sell, who you sell it to, what you say the problem is, what you say the result is, and what you say makes you different. It knows nothing about whether any of that has ever come true for anybody.

So when the prompt says “demonstrate expertise through insights, examples, or genuine results,” a model with no results in front of it has three ways out. It can write about insights instead, which is angle two again. It can write a plausible-sounding example, which is the failure the Avoid list forbids. Or it can hand you a slot and tell you to fill it. Only the third is honest, and nothing in the prompt asks for it.

Which is why the Avoid list carries the most important line on the card

At the bottom of the prompt is a short list of things not to do: aggressive sales language, fake urgency, exaggerated promises, generic advice. And then, in its own sentence: never invent testimonials or results.

Three of those four are matters of taste. The fourth is not. In the United States it is regulated, and the regulation is recent enough that plenty of people writing marketing prompts have not caught up with it.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule took effect on 21 October 2024. It prohibits businesses from writing, creating or selling fake reviews and testimonials, from buying them, from sourcing them from insiders without disclosure, and from spreading them when the business knew or should have known they were fake. Its sections run from § 465.2 to § 465.8, and § 465.2 is specifically about misrepresenting a reviewer’s or testimonialist’s experience. Courts can impose civil penalties for knowing violations. In warning letters sent in December 2025, the FTC put the figure at up to $53,088 per violation.

The second half of that line — never invent results — sits under different rules. The FTC’s Endorsement Guides treat an endorsement about performance as a claim that the product works, which means the advertiser needs substantiation for it, exactly as if the advertiser had made the claim directly. And a specific result in an endorsement is usually read as what other people can expect too. The Guides are blunt about the usual escape hatch: lines like “results not typical” do not cure that reading. If you cannot substantiate that the result is representative, you are expected to disclose what people generally get instead.

So the one-sentence summary of a fairly large body of American advertising law is: the part of your marketing that sounds like proof is the part somebody can make you prove. A prompt that tells the model never to manufacture that part is not being prudish. It is the only line on the card with a dollar figure attached to getting it wrong.

What the ninth blank should contain

The fix is not a better prompt. It is one more field, filled in before you paste anything.

That last row deserves a sentence of its own, because the template’s shape quietly assumes you have been selling for a while. If you have no customer outcomes yet, you still have the fourth row: something you did, written up honestly, with the parts that went wrong left in. It is slower-building trust than a testimonial and it is entirely yours, which also means nobody can ask you to substantiate somebody else’s experience.

What the template gets right

Four things, and they are not small.

It puts the research step before the content step. “First, identify the audience’s biggest pain points, desired outcomes, objections, and reasons they might hesitate to buy” is a separate instruction from “then create a content strategy,” and that ordering is what makes angle four possible at all. Most templates ask for content and hope the understanding arrives with it.

It asks for four components per idea — hook, core message, format, call to action — rather than ten headlines. A headline without a format is not an idea; it is a mood.

It names three roles rather than one. Strategist, copywriter and customer-psychology expert do genuinely different jobs, and stacking them is a defensible use of the pattern. What “act as X” actually buys you is worth reading before you add a fourth.

And it insists every piece be valuable on its own while still forming a path. That is the sentence that separates a content plan from a drip campaign, and it is also the sentence that makes the ninth blank matter — because “valuable on its own” at the trust stage means specific, and specific means evidence. If you are still deciding what you are selling in the first place, the offer comes before the content, not after it.

Four honest caveats

1. The missing ninth blank may be deliberate. A template that asked for evidence up front would be harder to fill in and would get used less. The author may have judged that the Avoid list handles it. My argument is that the Avoid list stops the model inventing evidence but does nothing to get real evidence in front of it, which leaves angle three structurally weaker than the other five.
2. Everything legal here is United States law. The Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule and the Endorsement Guides are FTC instruments. The UK, the EU and Australia all have their own regimes covering fake reviews and unsubstantiated claims, with different thresholds and different penalties. If you sell outside the US, the principle carries and the specifics do not. This is general information, not legal advice.
3. I have not run the prompt. The claim that a model short of evidence will drift from angle three into angle two is a prediction from what the prompt makes available, not a measured result. Run it on a real offer and see what it hands you for Trust Building; that is the test.
4. The penalty figure moves. The $53,088 comes from FTC warning letters in December 2025 and is inflation-adjusted annually, so check the current number before quoting it anywhere that matters. The rule’s effective date, 21 October 2024, does not move.

The one-line version

Fill in the eight blanks, then write a ninth one the template never asks for — the evidence you can actually show — because five of its six content angles run fine without it and the one in the middle, the one that earns the sale, does not.