Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
In the last couple of months, I have run an 8-day sale, launched a brand new membership, and built an interactive freebie that has brought in over 500 new subscribers to my list. It has also brought in over $15K extra income in a stretch where getting dressed some days was a stretch. And none of that happened because I am super techie, because I’m really not. So in this episode, I’m sharing with you the 4 ways I use Claude that made all of it possible Without having to be a tech expert. Welcome to the Soulful Sales Show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. So at the time of recording this, I just ran a live workshop earlier this week, and I was blown away by the response to this workshop. It’s one of the most popular free things I have put out there in a long time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:57]:
I had around 800 people signed up for it, and it’s on a limited time replay. So I thought that I would share some of what I shared there in this episode as well. One of the things that someone said in the chat when we were live was that for the first time they felt something resembling excitement rather than resistance around AI. And that was just like music to my ears. This is exactly why I’m talking about AI in the way that I am. I know that so many of us have resistance, and it is absolutely justified But there are so many ways that AI can support us, especially as lower capacity humans, in a way that aligns with our values as well. So I am going to share the roadmap with you in this episode. And if you were there live on the workshop, then you can get your reminders of what matters most in this condensed, tighter version on the podcast.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:57]:
And if you weren’t there, listen along to this episode, and if you want to get the full replay with the screen shares and demos that I did, this episode is coming out on the last day of access to that replay. So just if you are listening to this on the day that the episode comes out, go and grab the replay at ruthpoundwhite.com/freeclass, and I’ll put the link in the show notes as well. So what I really want to make clear before I get to the actual roadmap is that there is obviously so much advice about AI out there at at the moment, but a lot of this AI advice is not built for people like us. Well, you know if you’ve been around for a while that I have been doing this online business thing for a while. I started out as a copywriter. I, I’ve always been a massive introvert. I’ve always had, well, especially in the early days of my business, a lot of self-doubt around showing up. Throw neurodivergence, chronic fatigue, unpredictable capacity into the mix, it means that I’m always having to find ways of working that don’t depend on pushing all the time or always being on.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:01]:
And I know that I have a lot of people here in my audience who have a lot of ideas and a lot of things that they want to do in their business. I call us all quietly ambitious, but sometimes those ideas outnumber the hours and the energy that we actually have available to put this stuff into action. And then let’s not forget that AI itself can be super, super overwhelming. A lot of the AI advice out there is about learning all the features, keeping up to date with all the updates, understanding how all of the things work behind the scenes. And by the way, you do not have to understand how AI works behind the scenes. You just need to understand how to get it to work for you. And I think this is the really important thing. When you get stuck in trying to keep up with AI, it really is a losing game because none of us is able to keep up with it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:48]:
It is moving at such a speed. All of these podcast episodes that I’ve been recording throughout this year, some of them are probably out of date already. It really is wild. So it’s really not about trying to keep up with it. It’s not about learning how everything works. It’s about learning to use it for us. It’s about creating resources, assets in our business that will keep working for us over time, even when AI is moving on so quickly. And I also want to make it clear that this is not all about being more productive with AI.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:20]:
So yes, some of the examples I’m going to share are about how I have been more productive with AI, but I do think AI is feeding some of that toxic productivity culture around always doing more, more, more. And a lot of us are finding ourselves using AI in a way that should be saving us time and energy, but is actually taking more time and taking more energy and adding more to our to-do lists. So if that is you, then just know that I am not coming at it from that place. And I really want us to use it to save our capacity, save our time, and give us more freedom to work on other things or creativity to work on the human parts of our business, if that’s what we want to do as well. And I really do believe that we can do all of this with AI as a shortcut. In full alignment with our values without losing the heart from our work. You never have to put content out there that doesn’t sound like you. You don’t even need to use AI for your written content if that is really important for you not to.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:16]:
I am very picky about the way I use AI. I do a lot of editing with what AI gives me, and I don’t take AI’s recommendations and, you know, plans for my offers and stuff as gospel. Because I’m the one who knows my business best. And that’s a really important undercurrent of everything I’m about to share. Okay, so let’s talk about where I got stuck and where a lot of the people in my world often get stuck as well. So I think that a lot of us know that we have to do some training to make AI sound like us. And I’ve talked a lot about that in past podcast episodes. That bit felt obvious to me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:56]:
And I did it, and I did it better, and I did it well. And then I kind of stopped there for a bit. I was using AI as a kind of content productivity tool, but not really going beyond that. Like I said, I don’t really want to use it for all of my writing anyway, so I was using it for ideas or drafts or outlines and then kind of leaving it there. But what I hadn’t realized was how much that AI could do for me that had nothing to do with posting more content. So I’m going to share 4 stages of the Claude marketing roadmap, and yes, most of this stuff applies if you use another AI tool as well. 3 of those 4 things are things that past me would have believed were out of reach for me, either because they were too complicated, too techie, or just not for someone like me, because I am not a tech expert. And I actually feel like that is the reason why people are resonating with the way that I’m talking about AI, because I’m bringing my business expertise, I’m bringing my voice and strategy, and also the heart and the values, and training AI to work with all of that from that place.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:06]:
Like I said, it’s not about learning AI and becoming an AI expert, it’s about training AI to be an expert in your business so you can hand more over to it. And actually, when I went live for this workshop that I just did, I asked everyone how AI was helping them in marketing right now, a lot of people are stuck at that stage of either not really doing much, not happy with the output, or feeling overwhelmed, or just doing the odd bit of writing. There is so much more that you can do with it, which is what I’m going to share with you in this episode. And before I get to those 4 stages of the Claude and AI marketing roadmap, let me just share what this has made possible for me. So I had a previous episode about this 8-day sale that I ran. I think it was in April, and I did it all in a period of very low capacity, recovering from running a marathon. They were very, very low-cost offers, but it brought in £5K. Brand new offers, new sales pages, new checkout pages.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:08]:
It was a lot of work to put together, but actually it didn’t feel like a lot of work because I trained the whole system. It was not just about the content, but like all of those pages and everything, and even the project plan is what made made that possible. I also was able to start a new membership from scratch. I’ve been in a period of real creativity, and you know when you get an idea and you just want to act on it without planning it in advance for months and months? This is where I feel like I’ve been with the way that I have set up Claude to work for me. I was able to start a new membership from scratch. It made over $10K in its first month. I’ve been able to put out loads of different new freebies. One interactive freebie that I made as a Claude artifact which is basically an interactive kind of page that you can make with Claude, that got over 500 new subscribers and is still growing.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:57]:
So in total, I can attribute over £15K extra income in Q2 alone, even in periods of low energy, thanks to the systems that I set up with Claude. And I want to be really honest with you here, it’s not that I have changed and suddenly have more energy and capacity. I often, like, very, very regularly feel that I am personally the biggest bottleneck in my business, and it is a really tough feeling sometimes. And I know that a lot of you listening can relate. So I know that technically I could have done all of this stuff without the Claude setup, but would I have done all of this stuff? Would it have just been an idea that sat on my to-do list for a year or more? Probably. I probably wouldn’t have done it. It probably would still be on my to-do list right now. So it’s not about outsourcing things I am capable of coming up with these ideas.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:50]:
I’m capable of acting on these ideas, but what I’m not capable of is acting on them in a certain time period, acting on them quickly, doing all these things at once. But now I have the systems and support from Claude. It has made such a huge difference. Okay, so let me get on to the four rungs of the Claude marketing roadmap. The first rung is the really, really important foundation. It’s the bit that a lot of us know we need to do, whether we do it. Enough or at all is another matter, but you want to get Claude or whatever AI you’re using to sound like you. The thing that I think we don’t go far enough is getting it to sell like us.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:32]:
AI is very easily going to give you content that sounds good enough, whether you train it or not. If you train it on your voice, your words, your past content that you have written, then it’s going to sound somewhat like you. You’re going to find that you need to do some tweaking and editing and retraining over time, but it’s going to be generally good. However, when you scratch the surface of the sales content that AI creates, it’s often kind of bland and vague and not doing a great job of selling the offer. So sounding like you and selling like you are 2 kind of parts, 2 stages of this foundation piece, and I did talk more about that, um, in my previous episode, so I will link to that in the show notes. Now, I know that a lot of us have noticed that more and more people are starting to sound the same in the kind of AI era. The content that AI produces can water down our voices, our heart, which is why we need to train it in the first place. And yeah, it does take some time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:31]:
It doesn’t necessarily give us the same dopamine hit that creating output like emails and pages and actually doing things for us. Can give, but it’s really, really important and it is a living thing. So as much as I want to say it’s one and done thing, in some ways it is, but there is part of it that involves you feeding back to AI where it gets it wrong and retraining it as you go. So it’s really, really important, even if you think, you know, you’ve done it, like, it’s really important to do it properly. So that is rung 1. Rung 2 on the roadmap is the output. So once you have the proper training, that really, really solid foundation, it can start making the things for you. And this is where it gets really exciting really quickly.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:20]:
So I’m talking things like sales pages, free opt-in pages, emails, creating things like that for you. And again, you can go as far as you want in, in terms of how much of the words it writes, but this isn’t just about words, this is about design, this is about coding the pages as well. So When I just did this workshop this week, the registration page for the workshop was created with Claude. It’s what allowed me to have the idea and literally put it out there the next day. So I have been quite last minute with putting it out there, but clearly it’s in demand because I had around 800 signups for it. So I’m really, really glad that Claude enabled me to act on my idea so quickly. Um, my Aligned AI Lab sales page, that’s ruthpoundwhite.com/lab, that was created with Claude. Even the HTML on my ThriveCart checkout pages.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:10]:
So if you use a software or a website host that lets you insert HTML, then you can do a lot of that with Claude or other AI. I also find that when I’m taking part in a bundle or a summit, I kind of have a format for the way that I promote them in my emails. They’re always personalized. I never just use the swipe copy as is, but I usually share, you know, why I’m part of it and some of the other people who are part of it that I would recommend. Claude takes care of those emails literally in like 10 minutes for me these days. It is amazing. And I will say also that design was never my strong point, and Claude is making design my thing. It’s just been so surprising and exciting.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:51]:
And underlying all the shiny objects and of this output is really just thinking about what am I able to do now that I wasn’t able to do before? What freebies am I able to test? That I didn’t have the bandwidth for before? What offers am I able to launch that would have taken me weeks to put together before? Like, the amount of freebies I’ve been testing and offers I’ve been testing as a result of this setup— I mean, I told you before, it has definitely made me money and massively grown my audience. So that’s rung 2, the output. Rung 3 of the roadmap are the assets. So beyond the pages and emails We get into offers themselves. So creating actual freebies. If you have a freebie that you made years ago, maybe a PDF. I gave an example of a PDF that my assistant had made that looks nice, but took hours and is not actually interactive. Now it’s really, really easy for me to program Claude to make interactive versions of those workbooks that people can actually take action on, fill in on a webpage and combine different visual elements.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:55]:
It’s also got a visualization audio on the same page and they can act on it. And get an outcome from that freebie immediately. It’s not just a passive PDF anymore. I also think that incorporating these AI elements into our paid offers is going to be more and more important as we go forward. I think it’s already very important actually, because information is very cheap and easy to come by in any kind of AI chatbot. So the question is, what is making your offers usable as well as buyable? What is going to help someone actually do the thing rather than just learn the thing? So the assets, the offers, all that stuff, and I am adding so many more helpful resources that help people take action in my courses and memberships and all of that as well. And then finally, rung 4, the final stage of the roadmap, we are at the systems. So this is when Claude or AI can hold what is in your head and take action on the things you need it to take action on.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:56]:
So when I ran this workshop live, I asked everyone in the room what they were holding that they would love To hand over, people said to-do lists, project plans, email sequences, project plans, basically my whole work life, courses, planning things out. That planning part came up a lot, and actually simplest way to do that: brain dump, voice mode. Say everything you need to do. You don’t need to say it in the right order. Say everything that’s in your brain. Say everything that’s overwhelming you, and Claude AI will turn that into a plan. Now that’s the basic version. You can get it to walk you through it one step at a time, by the way, which is very, very helpful for neurodivergent brains that can get overwhelmed by the bigger picture but get that dopamine hit of taking one step at a time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:43]:
But yeah, that is the first stage of this. But it has honestly planned out entire launches for me and helped me action them. It has planned out my email and promotion calendar. That was one of the things I demoed in the live session the other day. It’s taking action on creating creating courses for me using co-work, um, implementation. I have a bunch of connections in Claude. I’m getting into the details of it now, but the, the long and short of it is there’s a lot going on that you are holding in your head as a business owner. There’s the delivery to your clients, there’s the marketing, there’s the strategizing, and everything else in between.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:17:27]:
Getting that out of your brain and handing it to Claude, handing it to AI is really, really going to make a huge, huge difference to your capacity for the creative stuff, the ideas, and also life stuff. So really, really important stage of this roadmap. And I asked everyone at the end of the workshop to let me know which of those 4 stages— so let me just summarize them. The first stage was the foundation in the training. The second stage was the output, the things like the emails, the pages, The third step were the assets, the offers, the freebies, and the fourth step was the systems. And it was really split across the board as to which part of this roadmap would change things the most for people. Now, the most important thing is you cannot get to the higher stages without working on those foundations first. So if you haven’t got to a point where you are happy with how much Claude or AI knows about your brand, your business, and, and you personally as well, then you need to do that properly.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:30]:
Or if it’s not selling for you to a level that you’re happy with, you need to train it to sell for you. Really, really important to do that properly before you do everything else, because every rung after that depends on those foundations. And this is where my Aligned AI Lab comes in. It will share with you how to climb those rungs one month at a time, building things with you. This is not just about learning stuff. In fact, it’s not about learning AI. It’s not about keeping up with AI. It’s about what I said earlier in this episode, knowing what it is that you need to hand over to AI that’s going to make a difference in your life and business and knowing how to hand that over.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:11]:
And you can read more about what it includes at ruthpoundwhite.com/lab. So we already have a bunch of systems already in there specifically on building pages. You can learn how to do it from scratch yourself, or you can use my page picker tool with starter templates to make it very, very easy. We also covered interactive tools, aka artifacts. Again, you can learn to do it from scratch, but I have a 48-tool library that you can use to pick and choose the interactive elements you want in a tool, copy the prompt it gives you over to Claude, and then customize it to your brand. Again, making it very, very easy even if you’ve never done this stuff before. But what I really, I’m really excited about is that we are about to do a 3-day live build-along called Your Claude business brain. So we are doing all of the foundations properly from the 4th of August.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:20:09]:
You can join in live and get it done alongside other people there and then, but I do get it, like, time zones, schedules don’t work for everyone. So of course there are replays, and what I’m going to do is keep the exercises very short and doable so that it’s not overwhelming to think, oh my God, I’ve got to watch like an hour’s thing for a replay. The exercises are going to be very short. The rest of it it is going to be us doing it together. So day 1 is about getting AI to sound like you. This, this is the basic step that absolutely everyone needs to do, and most of us know we should do. So training it on our content and our voice and all of that. Day 2 is training it on our business and our brand and our offers and all of that stuff.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:20:50]:
And day 3 is creating something real with it, because like I said, I’m not getting you to do this for the point of learning. I want you to do this for the point of running your business with less time and energy. So by the end of next week, at the time of release of this episode, Claude, or whatever AI tool you prefer— because yes, this will work in other AI tools, it’s just I use Claude, so I’m demoing on Claude and talking about Claude— will have written your next email or a sales page or an opt-in page, and nobody will be able to tell because you have trained it so well. So rung 1 and part of rung 2 done with you live, rather than sitting on the list of things you’ll get to, or you having done it but not quite fully. So you’re having to edit everything that AI comes up with anyway. And I should have said, we are on a very tight deadline for joining the Aligned AI Lab because the price is going up at the end of today. So if you join by the end of today, you’re going to keep the current price for as long as you stay a member. And I should also mention there is a free trial so you can look around, have a nosy at the way we do things there.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:21:52]:
And then you’re locked into the lowest price if you choose to stay. So you can find out more about that at ruthpoundwhite.com/lab. It is full of incredible workflows, and I am doing my very best to make it absolutely applicable to the kinds of businesses we run. This is not a generic AI membership with a bunch of tools and a bunch of prompts and a bunch of AI info that’s suitable for all businesses everywhere, or is just about learning AI. This is a membership that is designed for heart-led online offer creators to do the things that we personally actually need it to do so that we don’t waste time with all the rest of it. Okay, so make sure you join by the end of today for the lowest price. It’s still going to be an absolute bargain if you are listening to this after the price has gone up. It will still be an absolute bargain, so please do join us as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:22:40]:
And if you are stuck on any of these stages, if you are only using AI to write for you and you know that it could do so much more but you’re not sure how, there’s nothing wrong. You’re not behind. You just haven’t trained it yet. You need to put the workflows into place, and you are going to be so blown away once you do. So I would love to work with you on that in the lab. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community at ruthpoundwhite.com/community, or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/membership.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:23:24]:
And keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.