Text Prompts, Image Prompts & Workflow Prompts
Chapter 1 treated "a prompt" as one thing. It isn't. Three genuinely different products live under that label, each with a different buyer, a different way of proving quality before the sale, and a different realistic price. Picking which one to focus on shapes almost everything in the rest of this course.
The Three Categories
🖼️ Image-Generation Prompts
Highest marketplace volumePrompts for tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, or Leonardo AI — a precisely tuned description plus style keywords, aspect ratio, weights, and negative prompts that reliably produce a specific visual look. This category dominates marketplace listings for a simple reason: a buyer can see exactly what they're getting from a preview image before paying. The product markets itself.
💬 Text / Chat Prompts
Harder to prove, real demandA single, well-engineered prompt for a specific text task — a cold-email generator, a product description generator, a study-notes summariser — built for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. There's no single "picture" to sell here, so quality has to be demonstrated with worked before/after examples instead of a preview image. That extra friction is exactly why this category has less competition than image prompts, even though genuine demand for it is strong.
🔄 Workflow / Chained Prompts
Highest price ceilingA multi-step sequence of prompts designed to be run in order — a five-step content-repurposing workflow, a customer-support ticket triage sequence — often packaged as a custom GPT, a Claude Project, or a Notion AI template rather than raw text. This solves a whole process, not one output, which is why it commands the highest per-sale price of the three — but it also needs the most sophisticated packaging: step-by-step instructions, not just a single prompt to paste in.
How They Actually Compare
| Category | Ease of Proving Quality | Typical Price | Competition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Image-generation | Very easy (preview image) | $1.99–$4.99 | High |
| Text / chat | Moderate (worked example) | $3–$9.99 | Medium |
| Workflow / chained | Harder (full walkthrough needed) | $9–$40+ | Lower |
None of this means you have to pick only one category forever — many sellers eventually build a catalog spanning two or three. But starting with a single, deliberately chosen category (Chapter 4 covers how to pick one) keeps the early workflow manageable.