Claude Skills: Build Your Own AI Experts (Full Breakdown)

Okay, Claude has just released one of the best features of the year. You can now give your Claude AI assistant a bunch of incredible skills. Any world-class skill you can imagine — you can give it to Claude — and it can choose that skill whenever you need it to do that task.

Do not miss this episode. This is how you’re going to 100x the quality of your output with Claude AI today. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing Against the Grain.

All right, let’s get into giving Claude some incredible new skills so we can be an expert at anything we want. This is an incredible launch. Very, very excited. I think this is one of the coolest launches of the year.

Let’s get into the actual announcement here, just to show you the little video they’ve done to describe what a Claude skill is. So, here we go.

Introducing agent skills. How cool is this? We can actually give Claude a bunch of different skills. Let’s quickly watch the video — it’s about one minute — but it really describes how this works and why it’s so valuable. Then we’re going to create a couple of skills for my Claude agent so you can see how it works, and you can start to give these amazing skills to Claude so you can use it in your everyday work.

So basically, you need to go into your capabilities, and then you turn on file creation and skills. You’ll have this new thing in capabilities called “skills,” and you can upload skills.

You can see what it’s doing now, right? They’ve asked it to do something like create a branded deck, and they’ve given Claude the skill on how to create a branded deck specifically for their company. And now it goes and checks against all of the skills it has. It’s able to look at the skills and find the right one based upon the request.

You don’t have to tell it which one to use. It can figure that out itself. It says here, “I’m going to check for the brand guideline skill.”

Pretty nice deck, actually. Claude does really good presentations now. So if you’re not using it to do some visuals, it’s getting really good at them.

Now they want to turn that into a bunch of posters. And look — it’s gone and said, “Hey, I’m going to use the poster design skill,” because they’ve uploaded a skill to teach it how to create posters in a style that they like.

How cool is that?

Now, you’re probably sitting there and thinking, “Wow, what is a skills MD file and how do I create one?” What’s pretty cool is Claude can do that for you as well. Here’s a little video — and we’re going to actually create a skill to show you how this works — but you can just go and ask Claude now to create skills, and it knows what you mean.

So there you go. We’re going to run through this process. I won’t do any more of that, but it can create the skill for you.

What you’re going to have to get really good at is understanding how to teach Claude a new skill through prompting. But we’re going to do a couple of really easy examples to follow.

Again, I think this is really cool because you can arm Claude with any number of skills now, and it can do that work at an expert level for you — as long as you know how to create the right skills files and teach Claude how to be an expert in that task.

So let me switch into my Claude.

All right. What I asked it to do is create a skill. Again, this is a very basic prompt. When you look at this prompt, to start to get really great at this, you’re going to need much better prompts. But just to start, we’re going to ask it to create a hook that creates FOMO among readers.

So anytime I put in a post, and I ask it to create a hook for that post, it will create a hook based upon this skill.

It goes through, and it starts to look at proven frameworks from elite writers and starts to craft a skill. And look at this — I have a new skill already to use with my Claude. How pretty. How exciting is that?

So I’m going to download this. What you need to do is: you create your skill, you ask it to make sure it’s in this format, then you download it, and then you have to zip it up. Make sure the skill is called skill.md.

You zip that up, and then you upload it. I’ll show you what it should look like. When you upload it, you have to upload it as a zip file that contains that name. So you have to rename it to make sure it’s skill.md. You have a zip file, and it has to be in that format.

And then we should now have our new hook format ready to use.

So let’s go use it.

We’re going to give it a post. We’re going to do a post about how LLMs can predict purchase intent of your consumers within 90% accuracy, which is pretty amazing. Can you create an incredible hook for the post?

Oh, here we go. “Consulted skill framework before crafting compelling hook. I’ll create an incredible hook for your post. Let me first check the hook creator skill.”

Now we have a hook skill. And anytime I want to get a hook, I can use it to get one based upon that new skill.

Hook one: “AI just passed a test that will make most market research obsolete. A study from PYMC Labs.”

What a great hook. And look — it gives me the exact formula, the hook, and specificity, and why it works.

Hook option two: “What if you could test every campaign on a digital twin of your customer before spending a dollar on ads? PYMC Labs just proved it works with 90% accuracy. The marketers using this are already rewriting the playbook while you read this.”

Very, very cool.

So now you can have any number of skills.

Let’s create one more. We just dropped our 10 new Claude skills prompts that will completely transform your marketing — everything from content creation, AI engine optimization, to building interactive dashboards. These skill-building prompts will change the game for your business. Get it right now. Click the link in the description.

Now, let’s get back to the show.

Let’s create a new skill. We’re going to create a mini problem solver. So anytime I have a problem, it’s going to use this skill.

Create a new skill that will help me solve many problems. Many problems are things that come up during the day, and I need some help to think through those problems using the following instructions. So we’re going to give it a much more comprehensive prompt to see if it works.

All right. I’ve done the same thing. I’ve downloaded it. I’ve uploaded it. And now we can actually go use it.

So let’s use our new skill.

Help me solve this problem: I want to post a tutorial I did on Substack to my LinkedIn audience. But external links reduce engagement when added to LinkedIn posts. Help me solve this problem using our mini problem-solving skill.

Okay, so it did use it — using the mini problem crystallizer skill. Sometimes you actually have to coax it to use it, I’ve found. So maybe if it’s not named really well… “problem” is pretty generic when I ask it to solve a problem.

And so here we go. It’s going to run through the same methodology in that skill. It’s going to go through the root cause, what matters most, and smart options. Reformat your tutorial as a LinkedIn article or a carousel post. Drop the link in the first comment. Create a teaser and weekly newsletter post.

So — whatever. Pretty good. Pretty good. Again, these are just for mini problems. You can create one of these for longer problems.

But the main thing is you can see here it’s now using my skills. So I have a hook skill. I’ve created a mini problem skill. That’s how you get skills in Claude.

What a great feature.

A little tricky sometimes to get the skill downloaded. Make sure it’s in that format. Make sure it’s in the zip file. And then you can upload it through capabilities.

Go try out your new skills.