Why build your own Claude skill instead of copying someone else's prompt?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another week of e-commerce marketing chats with myself Charles and Jimmy Jimmy what’s going on mate? What’s happening?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, it was good. think it’s just been a week of putting out, I guess, fires in the e-commerce space, both client side and personal side. So, yeah, no groundbreaking, I guess, accomplishments just in the weeds. But yeah, sometimes you get like that. Actually, I had ⁓ an interesting conversation with an e-commerce student this morning. said, you know, I’m the type of person, you know, I need a job where… ⁓ You know, I can always be doing something. And I feel like with my e-commerce store, I’ve just been sitting on my hands a lot. And I’m like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Um, I think if you’re sitting on your hands at your e-commerce store, I mean, there’s just so much you could do. I don’t even know where to start. Like you could be writing blogs. You could be improving your conversion rate. could, there’s like a million things you could be improving. if you’re you’re sitting on your hands thinking the job’s done and you’re not making the revenue that you want. There’s something, there’s always something to do. Um, I find it, I didn’t know what to say to that. I was like, what you’re just, you, you’re saying you’re done. I have like, everything’s perfect. Everything’s done. It was, uh, I think I, um, I think I had a look at his website. I’m like, Oh, you can fix this. You can change that. And when the space of like five minutes, giving him like a list of 10 things that he could do. So I think if you’re off the opinion that ⁓ e-commerce isn’t busy enough for me, there’s like, you’re not, you’re not trying, you’re not trying hard enough. yeah, it was an interesting conversation this morning, but I, I, cause I always tell my clients like jumping into e-commerce is basically signing yourself up for a to-do list that never ends. ⁓ it’s how I feel every week. You’ve, you’ve always got something to do. ⁓

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Actually, Charles, I’m keen to, I haven’t actually even spoken to you about this yet, but I think last week I was talking about how I connected, ⁓ I guess my bulk actions for product title changes and description changes. And, ⁓ after that call, I just, I went off camera and showed you how I did it. So I’m curious to know, have you done it and have you tested it yet?

Charles Travers: No, I think I looked at it. It looks like I need to check that with you, Jimmy, actually, because I was told by my client he’s given me access, but it doesn’t look like I have the full developer access. But yeah, I desperately want to get that done because I’ve actually kind of systemized

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, okay. ⁓ mate, you sent me a celebratory message and everything. You celebrate too early, did you?

Charles Travers: I know it was premature. I was there celebrating after I got off the call. Finally I don’t have to upload metadata one by one. But yeah, obviously spoke too soon. The good news is I’ve built ⁓ a Claude skills now where I’ve systemized a lot of the optimization of SEO titles and descriptions, ⁓ along with keyword research. So I give Claude Cowork access to SEO Rush and it actually does, based on the directions that I’ve given it, it does a pretty good job of deciphering what keyword each page should focus on from a search intent perspective. making sure that if you’re targeting the right keyword that actually matches.

Jimmy Dalgleish: you

Charles Travers: you know, the user’s interest, whether it’s a collection page or a product ⁓ page. So, yeah, actually, I was just working on a relatively new client site over the last month and like, on a large skew website, we’ve pretty much done a lot of the metadata or at least the initial metadata optimization. Like it’s not, you know, and I am reviewing it as it. as it’s done. So every kind of section of the navigation and group of collections, I’m reviewing that process. But what it does mean is that I’m able to get it on a lot faster. And obviously, if I can finally get this app running where I can automate the upload of these new meta titles and descriptions, then that will speed up the process even faster, which then means it gives me more time to focus on actually Analyzing the data like what what’s moved the needles? What minor tweaks do we need to make and I think that’s the great thing is it could spend more time now on actually reviewing the strategy and developing the strategy versus Having just to execute some of these quite mundane tasks to be quite frank anyone that’s working with owns a large e-commerce store with a lot of product skews or is on the agency side will know that if you’re working in an SEO and you have to optimize all like thousands of pages it’s a real pain in the back side at times just because it’s yeah it’s quite monotonous so yeah we’re getting there we’re getting there Jimmy hopefully next week I’ll be able to tell you that I’ve got this all working and and sorted

Jimmy Dalgleish: you Yeah, that’s good. On the, ⁓ actually I’m interested just on the, cause Claude, Claude Cowork is probably the one, ⁓ element of Claude that I haven’t really experimented with probably enough for, ⁓ even at all. don’t think I’ve, Claude Cowork is probably the one that I haven’t tested. I’ve probably been, probably heavily used Claude Code, but I haven’t really experimented with Claude Cowork just from, ⁓ like from the use that you’ve got from it, I guess. If an ecomos spistesona was to use clawed co-work, what type of things would they use it for and what have you found it beneficial for?

Charles Travers: Yeah, mean, Claude, Claude, Claude, co-work was actually created by Claude code. So it was a team of people at Anthropic that built Claude co-work in, I think it was in like 10 days, they use Claude code to build Claude co-work. And the reason they did that is because they found that, you know, people were using Claude code to do non-technical, non-code type tasks.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Ha ha.

Charles Travers: So they were asking it to do things. So they realized they needed to develop like more of a kind of non-technical, you know, software or program or entity that delivered on these things. really, you know, I think the functionality is similar to Claude code, but it’s done in a different way. So you’re not, you don’t have to play around with the terminal. It’s very more.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Ha ha ha.

Charles Travers: non-techie friendly and you’re effectively… Asking it to do various tasks, anything from like, you know, go off and fill in this spreadsheet. mean, like I said, I’m using it to help with, with writing SEO titles and meta descriptions. However, what I would say is I’ve trained so you can set up Claude skills. So you building out these workflows, these SOPs, and then you can just say to Claude, co-work, look, load up this skill, run it through this process. So it’s effectively an AI agent, but it’s not, it has some guardrails. It’s not like, ⁓ from my understanding, it’s not like open claw where you’re just giving it access to everything. You do need to, it’s a bit more hands-on, so it will ask you for permissions a lot, like often at many steps of the process. I think you can turn that functionality off. And I use it with the Mac Mini that I have. Mainly because I can just let that run, do a task, and then on my main computer I can be doing another task at the same time. Because obviously if you’re Claude’s co-work while you’re doing your own device, or sorry, one device, it… it’s going to slow down your computer. Plus Claude’s ⁓ co-work, you can give access to your browser. So you can actually see it moving around. If you open up your browser and you log on to certain, you know, softwares or whatever, it will then be able to use those softwares. The only thing, it is a bit hand holding. Like what I found is you can’t just say, okay, go off and use SEMrush. It’s like, ⁓ no, you need to log in first in order to give it access. So you have to have everything set up on the browser to then use the tools. ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: So if you ask it to do it again, ⁓ bullet, remember it kind of the next time around, is it like training an employee basically? ⁓ or is it started? Is it guiding them fresh every time you do something?

Charles Travers: Yeah, exactly. It depends if you’re opening up in a new chat. It also depends if you’ve got Claude skills built in so you’ve got the process down then it will ⁓ It’s gonna remember that one thing I also found useful is they have like schedule tasks so you can basically ⁓ Create these scheduled tasks with workflows for it to complete every week So like for example, what I do is for my clients. I’ll do like a weekly competitor

Jimmy Dalgleish: Okay.

Charles Travers: intelligence analysis so it’ll like it’ll run through all of my competitors for my clients and it’ll give me a report on like what are the latest blogs that they’ve released like what the latest backlinks that they’ve got so you can kind of see ⁓ you know what some of your competitors are up to which is quite cool ⁓ what else do do with it i mean i’ve i’ve got it to help with monthly reports blog ideas is another one every Monday, I’ll have a Claude schedule task set up, which will basically create a new set of blog ideas for one of my clients. So yeah, it’s a useful tool for sure. And you can also now, I think they have a feature called dispatch where you can effectively just ask it to do a task from your mobile phone. So say for example, you had, a Mac Mini, you could just, if the Mac Mini was on, that’s the only, thing is you have to make sure that your device is on for the task to be running. So bear that in mind if you’ve only got one device. That’s why I think there’s value in having that Mac Mini, basically. So you could have it running all the time and get that set up. So yeah, there’s many use cases for it it’s, they’re constantly adding new features.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, okay. Yeah, it makes sense. think that Claude skills has been an interesting thing because anyone that’s logged onto LinkedIn in the last month has seen, you know, comment flawed to get the latest Claude skill for whatever. So for those who haven’t used like Claude skills, the skill is basically, ⁓ it’s almost like a chat training, ⁓ or a document that someone else’s So it’s, it’s, basically trained it in a certain aspect of how to do something. Now, for example, like I’ve tested some of these Claude skills and honestly, if you’re going to grab a Claude skill off LinkedIn and just launch it straight into your account, you’re probably not going to have a great time. So, and, I’ll give you an example. So I was testing this negative keyword skill for Google ads. it’s supposed to, you know, find all the things that aren’t relevant to your business and negative keyword them for you in bog. Cause negative keywords is one of the longer processes to go through in Google ads. When you’re trying to, guess, increase the quality of your traffic. So I ran this negative keyword list and took out a lot of negative keywords and like, okay, great. But then, So they’re like, Oh, this competitive term isn’t relevant to your business. But then what I did is I ended up running an analysis on all the terms that it took out. And specifically the competitor terms and those competitive terms that brought in a significant amount of revenue at around a 15 and a half return on ad spend. if you’re Basically blindly just installing these skills. So for someone that didn’t know what they were looking at or didn’t know how to read the data and they’re just like, ⁓ cool. I’m going to use this for my negative keywords. They basically would have taken out probably about 70,000 worth, $70,000 worth of conversion data from one month, on. Competitive terms. If they just ran this and just applied it just because the AI is like, ⁓ this term is irrelevant. ⁓ it may not be relevant, but to your business, it’d be like an Apple iPhone isn’t relevant to Samsung, but you may still be able to convert a lot of those customers that are looking for iPhones just purely based off the price. so yeah, there is nuances to it. And I still think that I still think you, I like to build my own skills because I like things done a particular way. And with my own expertise in the skill, um, most of the skills that I’ve seen, maybe you found like one good skill, most of them are trash and they don’t, they’re like the absolute level one version of whatever skill they’re trying to set out. And then just pumped it on LinkedIn for engagement. And it’s like a dangerous rabbit hole for people to fall into to just start going onto LinkedIn and start getting these skills without fully understanding. what it’s actually doing and I guess the strategy and the logic behind it. So, ⁓ I’m not sure how many of those skills you’ve tested from those LinkedIn comment and get whatever Charles, but, or what your experience has been like, but yeah, mine hasn’t been great.

Charles Travers: No, none to be fair. I’ve built all my own custom skills and I think I would unlike you, Jimmy, I’d advise probably people do the same because you have far more knowledge about your own business and you probably already have a process on how you do things that has got you some level of success in whatever it is that you’re trying to do. So yeah, I would build out your own skills and if you want, if you’re unsure how to… to set up these Claude skills, it’s pretty simple. you just open up a new chat in Claude and just say, Claude, I wanna create a new skill on X, Y and Z. This is my process. Can you create me this skill? And you can literally just, it will create the skill for you and then you click one button and it installs it to your Claude account. So yeah, there’s no real barrier to entry. creating these skills and there’s no real technical knowledge that you really need. If you’re unsure, just open up a chat and ask how do you create a Claude skill? It will tell you exactly how to do it and it will give you probably a far better framework than what you would have created yourself, certainly in terms of the actual format of how you write the skill. But in terms of the knowledge that should come from yourself. So yeah, it’s really just a customized set of instructions.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, 100%. I agree.

Charles Travers: ⁓ yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I agree. even, ⁓ even, even last week when we having a chat, said, you know, don’t get married to kind of one AI platform. And even this week, so we’ve always said, you know, at the moment, Claude is probably the best, but even this week, a lot of the AI rankings are changing now and chat cheap, ET 5.5 or whatever is ranking higher than Claude in, some instances now. So There is a world, I’ve been saying this to everyone because they’re like, what AI platform are you using? I’m just saying whatever’s the best at the time for the skill or process that I want to do. Because I don’t just use Claude, like for the image stuff, I was using Gemini, like nano banana. Now I’m using ChatGPT because the new version of it is better again. So I think that… I think a lot more people are jumping onto a chat.jpt codex now too, as a replacement from Claude code. The codex actually have, I saw a cool feature on codex actually this week. It’s got a, so a lot of people use like a whisper, which is like a, an app you can use to voice command anything on your computer. If you, so for example, if you’re on Google and you just hold control, it would speak directly into the Google search thing, and you don’t have to type anything. Now, Claude Code has got a shortcut that you can, sorry, not Claude, Codex has a shortcut that you can enable on it that would, when you’ve got the computer app that will work across your whole computer, and you’ll never have to type anything again, you can just hold the shortcut talk and then Um, and it’ll put the text in there. It’s very similar to what the, uh, the whisper app does. And a lot of people use whisper when they’re coding or doing anything. they don’t have to type anything. They can literally just talk to these platforms. So I think Codex is making some inroads with a few features that it’s got too. think, uh, Claude probably has the best environment for a lot of different softwares, but yeah, in terms of, in terms of. I get asked what, you know, what AI are you using? ⁓ all of them. So, yeah, it depends. So, yeah, don’t get stuck on one. think a few people get stuck on one. ⁓ and then before you know it, the others have, like, for example, the, people that have been stuck on chat, GBT and haven’t migrated over to Claude in the last like four months, fallen way behind in terms of what they can do. ⁓ That’s not to say that chat GBT won’t come back and offer like a similar, similar level of service, but yeah, it’s, ⁓ you just, you got to try to use the one that’s best for the use case that you want to use it for. So I don’t think there’s a best AI at the moment. think there’s the best AI for particular use cases for what you want to use it for. And it’s constantly changing.

Charles Travers: Yeah, and I would say also, yeah, yeah. I think the most important thing is you’re using the AI that’s actually going to make a difference to your business. And, you know, I think many people have been guilty of just, you know, tinkering with these tools and not actually, it’s not having any impact on their business. They need to be using it to do tasks that are actually going to move the needle and make a difference to whether that’s, you know, saving you time. helping you to make more money because you’ve made some changes on your site that have increased your traffic, your conversions. I think that’s the most important thing because these AI tools are great, but if it’s not actually having an impact on the growth of your business, then what’s the point?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, exactly right. ⁓ but yeah, on the, I think, ⁓ I think on the e-commerce side too, I don’t know what it’s like globally, Australia has just been hit by another interest rate rise and there’s always

Charles Travers: So.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I always get the questions. I’m not sure if you do too Charles, but yeah, Jimmy earlier clients like down in this economy. I try not to look at it like that. So the people that, ⁓ the people that are having like poor results and just straight away default to the economy, like they’re so far behind the people that are Okay. The economy struggling a little bit, but there’s still so many things that I can do on my website to improve what we’re doing now. I want to focus on those. I I think that’s the mindset, mindset difference between the two. Some people go doom and gloom, the economy’s down, my sales are down. ⁓ and you know, that’s the, the economy is the reason for everything. Whereas the people that can get some good results are like, okay. sediment might be down at the moment, the economy’s potentially slightly down too, but I’ve still got so much room to improve the conversion rate on my website. I’ve been needing to update all my meta titles and descriptions. I’ll get that done. Basically put yourself in the best position to take control of the things that are within your control to make your business better. find those people that work like that, just especially on the client side. ⁓ just end up growing so much more bigger businesses than the people that are like, the economy’s down, sales are down. We just have to ride this out. Like it’s the worst way to look at it. Cause you basically hand over control of your business to what you’re perceiving is happening in the economy at the moment.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, absolutely. You took the words out my mouth when you said, you know, focus on what you can control. you can’t control the economy, but you can control your actions. And there’s like you said, there’s so many things you can do to improve not only your website, but your marketing to market your website. yeah, 100%. And I think it’s those that kind of get into that negative mindset. It’s that you know it’s that self prophecy isn’t it if you’re thinking bad things then inevitably things get even worse so yeah I totally agree with what you’re saying Jimmy

Jimmy Dalgleish: What are some strategies that I’m just thinking of some strategies that I’ve used recently, especially on the blog posts. So one of the, one of the better strategies that I like, I’ve gate-kept, I guess, competitors is I do a lot of blog posts on celebrities in particular niches or thought leaders or people that are already generating a lot of traffic for their actual name or who they are.

Charles Travers: ⁓

Jimmy Dalgleish: Um, let’s just say, say you’re, um, say you’re in the, I don’t know, the gardening niche, you might do an article on like SB mowing, you know, the guy that does all the before and after videos on, uh, Facebook of garden transformations. Um, I don’t know about you, but I just get stuck sitting there watching some guy most, someone’s strangers lawn. So I can see what it looked like before he started versus after.

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Like he’s got, he’s got millions of followers. So if you had a gardening business, you might write, ⁓ how I’ve, how I’ve gone out and done like five gardens, SP mowing style this week and like write about why he’s your inspiration or whatever. And the top tip, the top five transformations that you’ve seen of his and post them in your blog post. then because You don’t want to just write about them with no relevance to you. You’ve gone like, I’ve tried to go out and replicate this. This is the five gardens that I’ve done and then show the before and after of your work and say, you know, I’ve done this completely for free. I wanted to give back to the community. If you’re interested in gardens like this in our services and contact me here. like I’ve kind of done that, but across like different e-commerce niches, I’ve tried to. ⁓ for example, if, ⁓ if you’re in the supplement niche of trying to find a thought leader who really, ⁓ I found a couple of good ones on like diary of CEO that talk about supplements or things to improve their life. And as soon as those podcasts release, like I write an article about them and we get a decent amount of traffic from people searching for the person that they’ve just interviewed and, that kind of thing. ⁓ yeah, it’s a really good. Uh, if the economy is slightly down for you at the moment, I think if you tried that and did some really high quality blog posts, uh, for different niches, um, yeah, you can potentially, uh, give yourself an evergreen asset that is going to pay off for you for a long period of time. And I’ve seen some, I’ve seen some really good results kind of doing that too.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s good. There’s some, yeah, like I said, there’s so many things you can do. was just, one thing I wanted to mention, actually, I had a call with one of my clients this week and they were working with a conversion kind of ROO, sorry, CRO expert to kind of see if they can improve their conversions. And they did a test where they found that if you’re adding in a little box in the top right hand corner of of your product grid. on each product, on a collection, if you change, if you’re running a sale and you have a little ⁓ box and you change it to kind of a dark orange, to show like say 5 % off, 10 % off, they saw an uptick in sales from that. So there’s like little conversion things you can do. They found that, I’ve just got here as well, like adding review stars on mobile. So sometimes, the kind of the review settings on Shopify, if you’re using an app, they’re not always moved across to mobile view. So they kind of hard coded their reviews back in on mobile. And they found that that also had an uptake on certain product pages as well. So yeah, just a few things that I found quite useful based on a real client of mine at the moment that’s trying to work on.

Jimmy Dalgleish: sick

Charles Travers: not only driving more traffic, but improving their conversion rate. One other thing actually, Jimmy, while I was working this week, again, this is not something that’s gonna transform your business, but I think it’s super important, especially if you’ve got a large e-commerce store and you’ve got a lot of collections and product pages, is one thing that I do with my clients is I have a spreadsheet where I’m mapping out various optimization work, but I have one tab on there, which is called change lock, which is basically all the changes I make on every single page on their website, as in the URL, what I’ve changed, why I’ve changed it, the date when I changed it. And like there’ll be a status, which is like monitoring, did it improve? And by doing that, it means that I can always revert back because When you’re optimizing thousands of pages, often you’re going to forget. So you need to be able to go back. And also I find as well, and I think it’s probably valuable if you’ve got a decent sized team and you’re working across various departments is to actually share those changes or that spreadsheet with the team. Because the amount of times that I’ve been on a call with a client and They’ve told me that someone has changed this page and that’s then impacted the rankings or the traffic or the conversions. And I think having that sink where you’ve got a change log, a master sheet where you’ve noted all of those changes down where your team can see what’s going on at any point, I think is going to save you a lot of headaches. it’s, you know, it’s something that’s more.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah

Charles Travers: probably damage control that is going to make a significant difference overnight. But I think it’s super important, something that I wanted to mention because I was working on, you know, as I was making a note of the changes I’ve made today for one of my clients and noting that down. Yeah, it did make me realize that.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Sounds like, sounds like you’re at your next app to build out in cloud code. So you don’t have to use the Excel spreadsheet anymore. You can just have the app monitor what you’re doing in the browser and write and make notes of all the changes that you’re making as you go.

Charles Travers: Yeah! funny enough I had that exact thought earlier Jimmy so yeah definitely shows are on the same wavelength that’s the next evolution is moving on Google Sheets to a fully functional app which you know potentially could share with clients and various different stakeholders so yeah that’s something that I think super

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. I think it’s good for your monthly reporting too. Like if clients want to know what’s happening, then you’ve got a whole log of everything that’s happened that month. So you know, you don’t have to just, you don’t have to just guess or try to remember. ⁓ If you’ve got a like Google’s good because it’s got its own change log within Google. So if I change anything within Google ads, the change logs there already. ⁓ But Yeah, I guess for other things like in the merchant center and things like that, there’s no change log there. So, um, that stuff stopped being recorded. yeah, like, uh, it’s almost like a documentation of everything that you’ve done, uh, for your clients almost. I think that would be handy for a lot of people.

Charles Travers: Yeah, sure. Good stuff. I think we’re coming up already to the half an hour mark.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, we’ve just hit the yeah. In the half an hour again, it was quick, but yeah, I think, well, hopefully we can, this week we can get Charles on the app and the Shopify to automate some of the descriptions and titles and he can give us the feedback on how that went next week. And yeah, if you guys have any questions or you want any guidance from us, just feel free to reach us out in the Facebook group at Shopify marketing secrets. Or you could find ⁓ all out the rest of our podcasts on e-commerce marketing chats on all the ⁓ popular podcasting platforms. And until then, we’ll catch you guys next week.