248 | Beyond ChatGPT: Use Claude Projects For High Impact Content. Steal Michael Steltzner’s Proven Blueprint

23:56And by the way, I always like to tell everybody this when I'm interviewing people on my podcast, the best use of AI is to actually make you a better version of yourself. And I think you believe this to be true, right? So like if you have extreme domain expertise, like I do, I just, I love split testing everything. So try creating multiple projects, put AI up against you following the Mike method and see which one wins. You'll be surprised. So I'm with you a hundred percent. Yeah. I just think exactly like you said, you are an expert on this topic and not necessarily everybody is, but if everybody follows what I said, they're going to be golden.

24:32Yeah. My next question really goes to the files and I see you have a lot of them. Yeah. Now that you've developed multiple of those, Do you have a feel of how many and what kind of files you need to have for this to be as efficient? And can you overdo it? Did you get to the point like, okay, I've uploaded 50 files and now it's not working very well? Well, let me explain what I have here. Okay. Excuse me and why I have them because it's very important. The reason I have what looks like 10 or 15 files here is because I have taken the sales page for social media marketing world and I've made PDFs of every page.

25:08So each of our ticketing types has a page. Our agenda has a page. Our speakers have a page. Our hotel, I mean, commonly asked questions. So if you have a sales page that is one page sales page, you don't need all these pages. So every one of these pages serves a different purpose. I've also got the pages for AI business world in here. but the key file that I have here is something called SM is my testimonial CSV file. This is the magic sauce, like the second magic sauce. If you happen to have a product where you have lots of customer testimonials, which I have over a thousand of them because we've been doing social media marketing world since 2013, 13, 14, 13, something like that.

25:47We've been doing it for a while. Yeah. Since 2013, you can export a CSV file. Like we have these in a sheet. Okay. And And in the sheet, we've got like name and then testimonial. And we even had a column that said topics, but we didn't need the topics because AI is really smart. So all I did was export the quote, the name and the first name and the last name of the testimonial person. This is where it gets really fricking cool. AI is so smart that it will be able to look through all of those testimonials and find the best portions of the best testimonials to integrate directly into the emails, which is 100 % magic sauce.

26:23because you know when you get testimonials typically they're rambling they might be two paragraphs long and there might be just like one section that really matters well ai knows how to pull that right section if you will and knows how to integrate it in the right place inside your messages which is absolute gold because the concept there is social proof and there's nothing better to sell than social proof the other thing that i've trained my ai model to do is also to recommend an image to place inside the email. We have thousands and thousands of images that I'm not uploading into the database, but instead I'm asking the model to recommend what kind of image would make the most amount of sense.

27:01Like it'll say people smiling, taking notes, people talking to a speaker in the hallway, that kind of stuff. And then I just go through and I manually pick the one that I think is best for the email, which I think is kind of cool. Yeah, that's the only reason I have lots of PDFs here. Question about the PDFs. You said most of them are basically PDF versions of web pages. Did you try just giving the instructions, the links to the relevant web pages instead of uploading all these files? You can't do that with files, but the reason I can't do it is because my website, Claude, cannot. I use Superbot Protector, which is Cloudflare, and for whatever reason, Claude can't get past it.

27:39Does that make sense? It does not allow the AI to crawl your website, so you have to convert it to pages. That's right. Exactly. Got it. Makes sense. But it does mean that every once in a while, I've got to remember to update the files. And that's something I, you know, like every year I've got new speakers, right? So I have to update a new PDF. And new testimonials and all. And now you'll have testimonials about AI. So yeah, all these things have to... And there's probably better ways to do this, but this is just the way that I do it because this is the way I know how to do it. Yeah. No, I will add one more thing that I do on a slightly different note, but it's still connected to the topic of projects.

28:13I have a project that writes all my proposals. So just as an example of what I have in there is I have a template of a proposal. Like what are the different components I include in the proposal? So it knows how to pull from that. And just like Mike said, it doesn't pull everything. It just pulls what's relevant to this particular client based on the transcript of a call I have with them. So it's just, it is really good at pulling information from the different files and combining it into the output that you want to combine it. And as Mike said earlier, another big one is good examples. Like if you have great performing emails, newsletter, reports, proposals, whatever it is that you've done in the past that you're using this for, you can upload one or two examples and say, these perform really, really well.

28:58Use these as hints to what is good. And then you can do that as well, as far as the files that you upload. Now, this is really important because Claude is very prompt compliant. it might keep modeling those examples over and over again. And at a certain point, you have to tell it, stop modeling it so closely, get creative. Like I have this, there's two types of marketers and it, Claude just loves to use that a million times. And I finally had to say ease up on it. You know, there's a better way they can say it without like saying it so directly. Yeah. So if you want, I can show you how I now use this project to accomplish.

29:31Yeah. I think that will be extremely valuable. So I have my director of marketing who also has a cloud project and his project is an ideation project where he sends me themes that I can use to write emails. And basically what he includes is the core audience. So for example, this particular one I'm showing is people that subscribe to our newsletter. The focus, which in this case was invest in yourself and grow your business for next year. The theme and then emotional triggers. and emotional triggers are just things that, you know, go from overwhelming control and gain clarity. Key message, and it will declare some key messages.

30:10And then usually this is a, this could be a small or a big section, but in the key message, you can include important sales that are ending. Like we have a$700 off kind of thing. So what I'll do is I will start my prompt with create multiple email variations based on the below theme. This is the important part. Ask it to create multiple variations. If you do not do that, it will not do that, okay? And what it will do is it'll reiterate what it's going to do, and then it will start processing and thinking, and you can set it up if you want to, to notify you when it's done. But typically what it will do is it will start going through its database, it will start reading the customer testimonials, and then what it will do is it will actually output a bunch of different variations.

30:51And I'm not going to go through all these variations, but I'm showing eight different variations. Sometimes it does six times sometimes it does eight now what i'll do depending on how much time i have is i'll read all these variations and i'll get a sense as to which one i like best then i'll ask it which is best and this is where it gets really interesting it's going to say variation three is the one that i think is the best and it's going to tell you exactly why because it's you know it's going to make the case for you as to why it's best okay and then i noticed this quote in here was from this guy, Anthony Ambrez.

31:23So I asked it to show me the entire quote, because I just wanted to see the context of the entire quote. And sure enough, it pulled up the quote right out of the database. And then I said, all right, let's come up with some alternative subject lines and avoid the word investment, because I knew the word investment was going to send it to a promo tab. So it came up with a whole bunch of different investments. And look at this, it says its best recommendations are this. So you can see how this is a really consultative advisor, if you will, Any thoughts, any feedback on any of this so far? I got three other examples we can talk about.

31:54Yeah, I love this. I think the two things that you said that are very critical. One is asking for multiple options. And I always do that. What happens to me in many cases is I mix and match between them. I like the first part of the first one and the second part of the second one. Well, you can tell to combine them together. And it's exactly what I'm doing. And then I add my own to send. So I would like you to do this and that and add this. And then it creates a new version. And it's like you're saying, in addition to being a consultant, it's a great brainstorming partner. It helps me come up with juicier ideas.

32:23And together with AI, we get to the final conclusion of this. My question to you is, how do you eventually decide it's the final version? It's just what feels right to you. It is... Yeah. Because I'm a crafts person, I kind of know good when I see it. But I also think that most people just take the first iteration out of AI and they say it's way better than I could ever do. I think by asking for multiple variations, what you want to do is you want to ask yourself, which one connects to me emotionally? Am I getting the feels? Is there something about that that makes me want to keep reading? Does it come off as kind of spammy and not me?

33:06Or does it come off as like, oh yeah, this is actually something I feel like I could say. You know what I mean? And if it does, that's a good sign that you're off to the right races. But the subject line you might not like and that's where you can ask it to come up with variations of subject lines you might not like the quote that it came up with so you can go and look at all the other quotes that pulled for all the other emails but just be careful because sometimes it assembles the whole message around the quote which is really kind of cool you'll also notice that it recommends an image of people networking at the conference so that's important and you can train it eventually to how to how to format the name and how to format your signature and all that kind of stuff but yeah I mean it's it's gotten to the point now Isar where I can literally in 15 to 30 minutes go from this prompt to the final output and in the past I probably could have written a message in the same amount of time but it wouldn't have been at this quality I would forget to include a testimonial or I wouldn't have the patience to go find the right testimonial or I wouldn't I would forget to include an image or I wouldn't even know what kind of theme thematical direction I should go into.

34:11So I find that this is not necessarily saving me time, but it is radically increasing the quality of my output, which is what we want when we're trying to create those ways of messaging. I'll say one more thing and then let's jump into another example. You talked about the fact it's really in this particular case, a two-step process. The first is a different project that generates the theme and the audience and the definition and the goal and so on. And then this part of the process. And there's two important aspects about this. Aspect number one is this this is what you want to do. You don't want to combine unrelated automations into one process because it just confuses the AI and it dilutes the quality.

34:46So you want to do two, three steps, do them separately, and then copy and paste the output from one to the other. And the second thing that I will say, if you really want to do this, you can then go to a third-party tool like make.com or NA10 or whatever to string these steps together, assuming there's no human input in the process. Meaning if it's literally just copying and pasting from one to the other, you can use a third-party tool to move the data from one to the other. And you just look at the final version or look at all the different components at the end of the process versus having to copy and paste.

35:16But definitely the important part is break this down into several different steps. Each one is focused on providing a specific kind of value. Yeah, exactly right. So here's another example. This one was for a different audience. This was for people that had previously attended. And this was all about triggering nostalgia and belonging and memories of the good things that have happened, but also dealing with some of the challenges that my audience faces because they often work alone and they're not around people that understand them. So in this particular case, we can see that it came up with a ton of variations, just like the other one.

35:52And it went through its whole process. And then I asked it, just like I did before, which one is the best. And it came up with one of the variations that it thought was the best. And of course, you can see this type one, type two thing I was talking to you about before it does it a lot, because unfortunately, it's what it's got. Then I did what you suggested is I said, can you combine number two with number one? Because I actually really like number one. It was like, you already know what it feels like. You know, that feeling walking into it, blah, blah, blah. It just felt a little bit more like nostalgic than number two.

36:23and what it ended up doing was it ended up making this hybrid version of it which is what you were talking about and it took the best of both of them and effectively combined it together and then just like before I said can you come up with better subject lines and in this particular case it just said here's my number one recommendation and here's my number two and here's my number three so again this project is exactly the same thing it's just a different audience. And this is really important because a lot of marketers will just take the same message and they'll slightly modify the message to the different audiences.

36:59I'm a proponent that if you have the power of AI behind you, why not come up with a completely different message for each of the audiences that is 100 % customized to them? That's going to yield in something really, really powerful. Now, there's two more applications I'm going to be talking about. One of them is actually using a writer project to do a non-writing related task, which is to create a script for a podcast ad. And the other one is actually to use it to do something completely out of the box. Now, do you want me to go to that right away or do you have any questions at this point? Oh, let's go.

37:32I think it's exciting. So this is fun. So this model understands my conference like no other model. So here's what I said. I said, you are now also an expert at creating spoken word ads. This is important. I gave it a new role. Okay. Then I went on. Still within the same project. Again, I want to emphasize this for people. You're not creating a new project. You're using the fact that this project knows so much about the conference and what you do in it. It would be a nightmare for me to create a new project considering how complex this project is. So this is the secret sauce. You can take any project that is designed to do a very specific task and you can have it do a tangential task for you as long as you give it a new role.

38:11Okay. So I gave it a new role. You're an expert. at creating spoken word ads, create a 30-second pre-roll podcast ad based on this content. So this is important. What I did was I took an email that my director of marketing said, use this as inspiration. That was created by Claude in the first place and create a podcast ad out of it. So you're seeing I'm just repurposing something here. And it said, okay, here it is. And it basically just created a very simple ad. It knew I was going to be speaking it. So it made almost every paragraph one line. So it was easy for me to speak. And it even without me asking suggested when I can talk a little bit faster and when I can talk a little bit slower.

38:52Isn't that cool? I didn't ask it to do that. And it came up with some alternative openings, you know, for me. And then I said, Oh, I forgot to add in this information. So it went ahead and it created a new version of the, of the ad. And this time it put it in a, this time it put it in a, in a, um, uh, what do you call this thing? Artifact, right. And it included this important piece of data that I had forgotten, which is that we have a sale ending. But it wrote it in a way that works for me when I verbally speak it. And then I also, there was a quote in here, and I asked it to source the quote.

39:23And I worked back and forth with it. And then I ended up having to create a mid-roll ad next. And then finally, you know, I just kept working with this until I got what I wanted. And then, you know, it ended up creating a final ad with it. I had to end up putting a different quote in front of it. I had to put the name of the person before I actually said the quote instead of after I put the quote, because when you're speaking a quote, it's kind of like weird if you just start quote unquote acting like you're someone different. So, but anyways, this allowed me to very rapidly take an email and output a really nice looking final podcast episode ad that I recorded.

39:59And it told me how long it would take. It told me when I should focus certain kinds of things. It's pretty cool. Any feedback on that or any thoughts on that? Yeah. First of all, I think it's brilliant. I think the key take here for people is that you can quote unquote repurpose your existing project. The project knows a lot about a topic. That's the whole point of it. And then if you ask it to do something else, it will leverage all the knowledge that it has, the instructions, the reference material, the memory, all the stuff that we talked about. It's going to use that to do the new task and the new role that you gave it, which is magical because it has, again, Mike said, it has two years of experience of working with Mike as a brainstorming partner, as a consultant, as a copywriter, all of that combined into one project.

40:43And now you can use the project to do other things. Again, generalize this to anything that you're doing, whether you're writing reports, whether you're writing sales emails, whether you are creating training materials for companies, like whatever it is that you're doing, that is quote unquote, your content, you can use a project that knows a lot about that particular topic to do anything because it knows a lot about the topic and how you like to do it, which is another big part of this. So I think this is a brilliant example. Okay. This last one is really creative and out of the box. This time I asked it, I said, you're an expert at helping put together podcast episodes that are designed to create high quality content yet also promote social media marketing world.

41:19I will provide context as to who is speaking on what topics, and we'll ask you to assist me to analyze the best guests for certain themes. Do you understand? Okay, it was very simple. I said, yep, I'm adding a new role, podcast episode strategy. And just so you understand what I was trying to do here was I decided that I'm going to have four roundtable podcast episodes. They're going to be regular episodes of my social media marketing podcast, but I'm going to bring on guests to other people around certain kinds of themes. So what I did was I pasted in the most up-to-date list of all the speakers across, there's like 50 of them.

41:52Okay. And I said, study this list and I will ask questions. And it said, okay, here's what I see. You've got all these people in all these different categories. And I said, okay, if I did an episode called what's working with Instagram marketing right now, select two other guests to join Michael Stelzner that will create an interesting show. And here's what it did. It went and it looked at all, cause it already has, you know, it already knows who all these speakers are. It must've from its LLM kind of understood some of this stuff. and it said, here's the two guests that I would recommend. And here's why this works.

42:24It's diverse perspectives, blah, blah, blah, different teaching styles, different gender balances. And then it said, would you like me to suggest different angles for themes of the podcast? And I said, sure. And it went ahead and it came up with like a, I mean, look at this. It came up, it's pretty freaking crazy. It came up with a headline and opening hook segments, all sorts of stuff, because I just asked it to take on this new role. And this is where it gets really interesting. I also went on to ask it to, all right, let's come up with one on what's working with content marketing right now.

42:55And it picked two people, Andy Crestedina and Brian Piper, who are big names in the content marketing world. And then I said, okay, how about what's working with short form video? Said Pat Flynn and Ed and Hazan. Pat Flynn's got this massive Pokemon channel. And then I said, okay, what's working? And by the way, it also said why it didn't choose other people that are speaking on the same topic, which is really intriguing. And then I said, okay, Facebook ads, I just went through a bazillion of these things. Okay. And then I said, Hey, you have Ed and Hazan twice. Can we swap them out with someone else?

43:26So it came up with somebody else. And then as we keep going through here, this is where it gets really interesting. I eventually got to the point where I said, okay, here's the ones that I like the most. If I could only choose four, which would you choose? Okay. And then it came up with its top priority of them. So for example, number one, oh, you know what? Actually, I have to back this up a little bit. I did ask it, somewhere in here, I asked it, what's something I'm not covering? And it said, well, here's some topics you probably should consider. So in the end, you can see I'm using this as a consultant.

44:03And basically, this was a really out of the box. Oh, here we go. What are other topical themes I should consider that might be just as powerful as the first one. So it had said the one that it thought was the best was about the threat of marketing. And it came up with what it called maximum urgency themes, like the AI replacement reality, which marketing jobs will disappear first. Here's some guests. So this was a very powerful, and this is the essence of what I wanna share. This is a completely out of the box way of using a project that I'd already created. But I'm telling you right now, it was brilliant.

44:34And this was so good that I actually ended up using this to not just pick the topics, but eventually to create the questions that were going to be the questions I was going to ask during the interview. Crazy, huh? Absolutely incredible. Really, really incredible. And I want to add one last thing to what you said is connecting full circle to what you said in the beginning. You have a full-time, 24-7, an incredible consultant, brainstorm partner, and copywriter for 20 bucks a month, which is what you said in the beginning. Who understands my product better than I do even. Yeah. And again, to connect this back to business, right?

45:16At the end of the day, yes, Mike is investing a lot of effort of his time to work with the AI, to train it, to work with it, to interact with it, to put his soul and knowledge and experience into this. But if you, because of these more nuanced emails, newsletter, podcast episodes, guests, examples, questions that he's asking can increase the amount of people who come to the conference by 10%. That is a lot of money. So the business benefits from it just by having this free consultants and by this just better finesse. And I think what you said is very, very interesting because most people go to, how is this going to save me time?

45:56And you said, it doesn't necessarily save me time. It just makes it better and better drives more business and more business means more money. And this is why we're doing this. And so I think this is a, first of all, incredible episode. I really appreciate you sharing all your secret sauce. Can I say something else just to act up on what you said? Let's not discount the leverage that this brings because it enables you to be creative. in a way. Maybe you're tired because you've got a lot going on and it would be a lot of work for me to do what I just showed you with analyzing all these different people, trying to make the best selections, discounting my biases about who's a friend and who's not a friend and all that kind of stuff.

46:41This is objective. This understands who these people are, even though I haven't given it a lot of information because it's in its large language model. It's looking at it through the lens of the ideal customer, which is what I often forget about. And it just gives me incredible leverage to now say, huh, I've got this project that's really, really good at this thing. What if I just gave it a slightly different assignment and could I use it for this thing over here? And I'm telling you that that is a massive unlock because a lot of people don't allow themselves to get creative and expand their horizons on things because they just don't have the mental energy to do it.

47:19AI will never get tired. It might freeze up on you. It might tell you you got to wait until one o 'clock in the afternoon before you can reuse it because you're using it too much. But I feel like that's a massive unlock for a lot of us is the ability to actually go further. And it also, another big unlock for me is I used to only be able to do this work in the morning when I'm most creative. Now I find even when I'm exhausted, I can do this work with Claude because it re-energizes me. I don't know. I think there's something really powerful here that is more about creative output and less about necessarily just the time savings.

47:53So I just wanted to double down on that. Again, exceptional, really, really great. I really, really appreciate you sharing. If people want to find you, work with you, learn about what you do, join the conference, follow the podcast, what are the best ways to do that? Yeah. Well, first of all, we've got a$100 off coupon off the already discounted price that's going to expire on January 1st, 2026, socialmediaexaminer.com slash leveraging AI. Okay. That's going to be easy for people to remember. Yeah. Leveraging AI, that word leverage is there again, and it'll show up. I will drop a link to that in the show notes.

48:27So you guys can be lazy and just click on the link. Yeah. And you know, all across all the different ticketing types, if you virtual, physical, or whatever, I am most active on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X. So you can follow me on any of those channels. And then if you just want to listen to another podcast, AI Explored is the one that Isar was mentioning earlier in the show. Other than that, thank you so much for having me. No, this was absolutely awesome. Again, it's been a real pleasure. You went above and beyond in really sharing the details of your real day-to-day work. Most people give you frameworks and don't show though, this is really my secret sauce and you did.

49:01So I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for being on the show. My pleasure.

49:10Thank you.