Transcription
Claude has really stepped it up these past few weeks, and if you use YouTube to grow your business, it can do way more to help you than you even know. I use Claude every single day to help me make the videos that run my whole business because its newest models and latest features just put it way ahead of any other AI on the market right now. So, these are the seven Claude use cases that are going to help you create the kinds of videos that will grow your channel and get your viewers to see you as the expert you are, which grows your business, too. Let's get into it.
Before I make any video, there's one thing I have to get right first. I need to know exactly who I'm talking to. For a couple years into doing YouTube, I would just sit down and plan a video and just guess at what my audience actually wanted. I'd write my hooks and my titles in my own words instead of the words that they would really use. Big mistake.
And then, once the AI came around, I would just tell Claude or ChatGPT all about my viewer just to get, you know, one good title back, then close the chat, and then the next day it was like that conversation never happened. So, I'd have to say it all over again, and it might remember a little piece of my audience, but never the whole picture. The thing is, it needs to know all kinds of stuff about them so that it can hand me the right topics they'll care about in the words that they use, you know, in everything from my hooks to my script.
So, this first use case is about doing the research one time and then permanently training the system on exactly who they are. So, it just always knows and uses it every single time. Okay, I'm turning on research mode, and I'm running a prompt that just sends Claude, you know, out across the whole web, places like forums, Reddit, comment sections, anywhere where my audience would be hanging out. It's going to go hunting for the exact problems they have, the words they use to describe them, and what they've already tried that didn't work. And if you want this prompt and every other prompt from the whole video, you can download my complete Claude content creation playbook from the link in the description.
Then, you're just going to add a few details about your own business and expertise. That's really all it needs and then I'm going to let it run. And it does look like it has a few clarifying questions for me, which I'm going to answer as best as I can so that it can do the best possible job for me. And now it's off and running. So I'm just going to let it do its thing.
Okay, so look at what it came back with after about 8 minutes of working. So I'm reading through all of this right now and it's all really good. This is exactly the kind of stuff that Claude can really hold on to about my audience and you know, pull into every other use case in this video. But I want to push this one step further and connect Claude to a tool that has even more on real YouTube viewers. This is the new VidIQ connector. So and if you don't know what VidIQ is, it plugs straight into your YouTube account so that it can read all the data from your own videos. But it gets even better because it also has tons of data on just about every other channel on YouTube including your competition.
So to use it, you just set up a VidIQ account and I actually worked out a special month for a dollar promo with them for you guys. So just click the link in the description to get it all set up. And if you use that link, you are helping my channel too. So thanks for that. Once it's connected to your Claude account, you can start asking it all kinds of things. But for this use case, you want it to mine audience details right out of the comment section. So if you already have a channel that gets lots of comments, great. Start there. And if you don't, no problem. You can literally have it go through the most recent comments on the biggest channels in your niche or you can even just tell it which channels you want it to focus on. Like if there's a channel that's out there that you know you'd love to have their audience, point it to that channel first.
So I'm just going to tell it what to look for. The questions that are coming up over and over again because those are basically a list of my next video ideas. What they love, what they can't stand, and the exact phrases that they type out themselves into comments. And look at this, it's pulling real comments and then grouping them by what people actually struggle with. If I combine this with what Claude found in its own research pass, this becomes my channel's North Star. Right, every title, every thumbnail, hook, and script should serve this one viewer. When all of those things use the actual words that your audience uses, you come across like the one person who finally gets them. Your competition isn't doing this, but you can, and that's going to be a huge advantage even if you have a brand new channel.
Now, here's how I lock it in so I never lose it. So, once it's done, I tell it to combine everything from both research passes into one detailed avatar, and then turn that into a skill that it's going to draw on every single time it helps me with my channel. A skill is just something that Claude holds onto and then uses automatically whenever it needs to from then on. So, every time I sit down to work on my channel, anything looking for a topics or titles or thumbnails, hooks, writing full scripts, it already knows my audience cold. So, I never have to explain them to Claude again. It's building that skill right now. Then, I'm just going to click on save skill, and that's it. It's locked into its permanent memory, and it's going to help us with everything else in the rest of this video.
So, now Claude knows who I'm making videos for. But, that still leaves the question that I get stuck on the most, what video do I actually make next? For the longest time, I would just pick a topic based on nothing more than a feeling. Or, I would open VidIQ and stare at all the search numbers and the competition scores and just kind of freeze up not knowing what to do with that. And if you get it wrong, you end up making a video that feels important, but no one's really searching for it. Or, one with huge search numbers that you've got no real shot at ranking for.
Here's how I do it now. VidIQ already has all the data and Claude can think its way through that data for me. I just ask for a batch of ideas and because I already predefined my audience, it weighs every idea against them, not just whatever happens to get views in general.
So, you just ask it to use the VidIQ connection and you know, pull as many topic ideas as you want. I'll just put 10. And then tell it to ask you any follow-up questions it needs to fully understand your niche or it might just give you suggestions that really don't make sense for you to cover. So, if you've already got videos that did well for you, it's going to study what worked and find more in that vein. If you're just starting and you don't really have any proven winners yet, that's fine, too. It's just going to look at what's clearly working for your competitors. I'm going to tell it to balance out search volume, in other words, how many people are looking for a topic against how competitive it is, plus what's just doing really well on YouTube right now.
Now, this does work best with the latest model on a high reasoning mode. Right now, Opus 4.8 is the highest and it's always on high by default, but for a heavy thinking task like this, it's as important as this one is, you might want to bump it up to extra. Max is probably overkill, um but you can try it. Just know that's going to eat through your usage a lot faster. I just tell it I want the search terms and the overall topics it thinks are going to do well on my channel right now, plus the full title that would make someone actually want to click. And okay, these are really good. I mean, and and you can treat this like a once in a while thing where you just get a whole content calendar created for you for months at a time or just do it every time you plan a single video and then just pick the one you like best. I think I'm going to go with this one. You only need 200 views on YouTube to land your next client. That's a take I haven't really seen anyone else make like that and I can absolutely back it up. I may just change the number though.
All right, the topic's picked out. The next job is actually making it good. And the way most of us were taught to make YouTube videos is the exact thing that's holding them back now. You know, conventional YouTube advice used to say, "Find a video that's super hot and just basically remake it with your own little spin on top of it." And that worked for a really long time. Not anymore. YouTube is looking for something it calls information gain now. That just means it wants to push videos that have something genuinely new to say. And a remake, by definition, just says what everyone else already said. The one thing you've got that no other video has is what's in your own head. Your stories, your opinions, the systems that you figured out the hard way. And the best way to get all of that out of your head and into a script is an interview.
So, the first step here is just to write out a brain dump. So, open a fresh chat and just get everything in there that you think you want in the video. You know, all your tips, your steps, your mistakes, your opinions, stories, advice, whatever comes to mind. You don't need to organize it. Just get it all there on the page. Then I drop in this prompt. And again, all of these prompts are in the link in the description, so you can go ahead and get those. I'm not going to read through the whole thing here. Then I'm just going to type in what the video is about. And when I go to answer the first question, I'm just going to turn on voice mode. So, uh that helps me just talk it all out and I'm way more unfiltered and real when I do it like that as opposed to writing it out. And it just makes for a much richer video in the end. It gets all your wording and all that good stuff. Now it's just going to interview me about my real tips, my systems, what I actually believe about this stuff. This is the step that makes you pretty much impossible to copy, you know? Anyone can lift the the structure of your video, but that actual stuff that came out of your mouth, you know, your stories, the way you think about it, they can't touch that stuff.
Whoa, I'm just reading back what it kind of pulled out of me there and it's super detailed. And more than that, it's actually interesting. So, this is the perfect base for later when we sit down to write the actual script.
Then, make sure your video says things that no other video out there is saying. That's information gain, and it's a really big reason that YouTube decides to push your video to more people. Now, there's another way to add even more of it, and this one works even when your advice isn't exactly new, because a lot of your best stuff, let's be honest, is things that plenty of other people teach too. And when it sounds like the same advice that everyone else is giving, it's really hard to stand out. But, the experts who win just gave their advice a name, right? Alex Hormozi has his value equation, Donald Miller has StoryBrand, and Dave Ramsey has what he calls the debt snowball. None of those things actually say anything truly new and innovative, but the name is the part that nobody else has. I call these signature concepts, and the name makes the idea feel solid, like they came up with the whole thing. But, coming up with a signature concept on your own can be kind of tough. Lucky for us, Claude is really good at exactly this kind of thing.
So, I take the brief that I got from my interview, and then I hand it back to Claude, and I ask it to dig through and find any advice or frameworks that are hiding in there that we could turn into a good signature concept. So, a clever name, an acronym, an equation, some kind of a a little named diagram, right? I'm going to ask it for a few options, and I'm actually going to put this one on extra mode because I want it thinking extra hard here. Whoa, okay, this is really good. I especially like the floor equation one. Um, it even calculated out how I would show it on screen. Then, there's the trust cliff, the human number. These are good, too, but I think I'm just going to go with the floor equation. It just feels like something that I could actually own in this video. I could grab more, but you really don't want to go overboard with these. You don't need a name on every single point. I try to go for just one good signature concept per video where it actually fits. Then, I just reuse my best ones across a bunch of videos so that people start to, you know, come to know them as mine. And actually, the name signature concept is in itself one of my own signature concepts. I talk about it all the time. It's exactly the kind of thing that YouTube reads as unique and it helps push your video out to more and more people.
So, at this point, I've got my topic, my interview, and a framework to build around. Now, it's time to actually write the thing. But, the second I ask Claude just to write me a script from scratch, it sounds like I just asked AI to write me a script. That's because AI isn't a good writer on its own. You have to train it to write the way you want, and that's where Claude projects come in. And a project is just a version of Claude that's trained on one job and nothing else. This right here is my actual project that I use to write my own scripts, and it runs on what I call the bookend rule. So, you do the first 10%, which is the brief, and then Claude does the middle 80, the first draft, then you come back for the last 10%, which is the polish. That keeps your hands on the two ends that actually matter most, and lets it carry the heavy part in the middle.
And setting one of these up is actually really simple. You just make a new project and name it something like YouTube scriptwriting assistant. Then, you write out its instructions. So, so I'm going to tell mine to take my rough notes and turn them into a solid first draft, give me three solid hook options, and follow the structure I give it, and write in my voice. And above all else, to always write for my defined audience. It's the one we built way back at the start of the video. Then, you can decide if you want it to start with an outline or just go straight to a full script. I personally like to start with an outline, but just do whatever works for your process. And these instructions get better the more you add to them over time. So, every time it does something that I don't really like, I come back in here and I tweak those instructions. I add to them. And honestly, mine's never really finished. I'm always adding a new phrase to stop using or some habit that I want it to stop doing. It's a work in progress and it probably always will be.
So, next I'm going to load in all of my training files. Now, it should already have your audience profile as a skill, but honestly, I would just reload it back in here, too. Couldn't hurt. And I'm going to add in a writing sample that sounds like me. So, that could be a transcript from one of my own videos or even it could be a transcript of another YouTuber whose voice that I would kind of resonate with and want to speak through. And one more thing, I'm going to add in a hook bank, which is just a document that's full of really good hooks that I've seen actually perform well. So, that when it's writing those hooks, you know, the beginnings of the videos, it's writing something based on what works instead of just guessing.
And that's all there is to creating the project. Now, it's ready for us to actually use it. So, I'm just going to paste in my creative brief and let it run. So, it might have a few follow-up questions and if it does, I just answer them as best I can. All right, there it goes and I've got three great hooks to choose from and all the sections laid out for my whole script. So, I'm just going to work through it and make any changes I want to see and then it's going to write out the first full draft. And reading this back because it's already trained on, you know, my voice and my own hooks, it already sounds pretty much like me. So, from here, I'm just going to give it that last 10% polish to get it all the way there.
Time for the fun part, the visuals. Because a script read straight to camera with nothing else going on can get old pretty fast. It's just you talking the whole way through with nothing to break it up and nothing that shows the idea instead of saying it. And most new YouTubers skip this part because, you know, good animations and b-roll used to be really expensive. But now I can do it myself in a few minutes with another new feature, Claude design. This can build all kinds of stuff, whole websites, landing pages, slide decks, but for what we're doing today, I'm going to have it make little b-roll animations that I can cut to throughout the video just to, you know, break things up and show the idea instead of just telling it.
Now, the first thing I'm doing is building my design system. So, that just means the visual style that Claude is going to use for anything it designs for me. If I were to skip this step, it's still going to make something that looks nice, but it usually ends up looking like Claude's own branding, a lot of those beiges and orange. That's kind of its default. So, I'm just going to be grabbing screenshots of my own new website style. You can pull yours from just about anywhere, you know, it can be your website if you want to stay consistent or just any visual inspiration that you find online. So, I'm going to load those in and it's going to pull the whole system together in about 5 minutes. And yeah, I think that looks pretty good.
Now, to use it, I'm going to pick the animation option and tell it to come up with animated text treatments and simple b-roll to bring my script to life. Then I drag in the script. So, I could mark the exact spots I want animations in, but I think I'm just going to drop in the whole thing and let it pick. It's got a few follow-up questions for me, so I'm just going to quickly answer those as best I can, and let's let it work. And look at these. This looks amazing. It's on brand, it looks professional, and it took about 5 minutes of my time. Not bad at all.
All right. So, now I've got a video planned out that should pull in some good views, but watching a video and then buying from me are two very different things. YouTube is a pretty rough place to try to sell anything directly. It's the perfect top-of-funnel piece where people first find me, but emails are where I want them because I know that's where I can actually sell to them. That's where I can, you know, keep sending helpful stuff and then drop in the occasional sales email to turn a viewer into a buyer. And to bridge that gap, you know, the way I move people from YouTube onto my list is with a lead magnet, you know, something like a PDF cheat sheet or a guide that they'll hand over their email to get. And I made a ton of these over the years. Some of them took several days to make, but it's never been as easy as it is right now because the newest models reason well enough to take a whole script and turn it into a download. And Claude design can one-shot the whole thing with nothing more than that script.
So, I'm going to choose document, pasting in the script that I just finished, and I'm going to tell it to create and design the perfect companion guide to go with this video script. I'm asking it to keep the actionable parts, the steps, the prompts, if applicable, the checklist that someone can actually follow to get a better result. What we don't want is just a word-for-word rehash of the whole video. You want it to be actionable and succinct. So, the idea here is I'm going to promote this lead magnet in the video, link to it in the description, and then people are going to hand over their email to get it.
Once again, it's got a few follow-up questions for me. I'm going to answer those, then let it do its thing. Check it out. This looks fantastic, and it also did a really good job of knowing what to include in something like this and what to leave out. And I actually made a guide like this a few weeks ago for a video I made, and it got me over 2,000 people onto my email list, and it's still pulling in about 100 new people every single day.
And just as a reminder and a little meta twist, go ahead and download my Claude content creation playbook in the link below. It's got every single use case in here broken into really nice actionable steps, so you can put all the newest features to work for your business today. And there is actually one more use case that brings all of this together. It's my exact workflow for using Claude to make an expertly crafted video from zero in under 2 hours. I'm talking starting with no idea at all all the way through a recorded video with pro-level graphics like this. And I cover that whole workflow start to finish in this video right here. So, click here to see exactly how Claude can finally make YouTube possible for you, even if you've got no time for it. So, click here. I can't wait to show you what this is. It's going to blow your mind.