Claude's Most Powerful Feature Nobody's Using (Cowork Plugins)

0:00 Hey, it's really awesome. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can create your very own custom Claude plugin to automate a lot of repetitive tasks that you do on a daily weekly basis. For example, with me, I publish on a weekly basis here on YouTube and I've got this custom YouTube pre-publishing plugin that I created which automatically comes up with titles. You can see it comes up with eight candidate titles ranked with RushAnalytics, a description for the YouTube video, keywords and tags, subtitles, and a newsletter email that it comes up with as well. And it's got all these custom instructions as well as particular skills like a description writer, a keyword writer, newsletter writer, subtitle formatting writer, and a title strategist. And it's also connected up with my Notion workspace where I plan and organize all of my YouTube content as you can see, and it automatically pre-populates and comes up with a new page for that particular video that I am about to release, which is learn Claude AI for free. It's come up with all those keywords. It's come up with the overview, the title suggestions including recommendations with the rankings. You can see the titles and what it comes under, a descriptive listicle, the length, a description for the video, even automatic timestamps.

1:18 So, all I need to do is just copy and paste this over onto my YouTube video. The keywords, also a newsletter based on how I would usually write my newsletter to promote and announce my latest video, and then I can copy and paste this over to my email newsletter service, and that is it. This would otherwise take me quite a lot of time and quite repetitive, right? When I could just hand this over to Claude Co-work and then let it do it for me. So, with that said, let me show you exactly how you can create your very own Claude plugin to automate a lot of your day-to-day.

1:50 Okay, let me first preface by saying that plugins is only available on paid plans such as Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. And that's something to note before actually continuing on with this tutorial. If you're going to use any of the extra additions and features and tools, then it's worth upgrading. But, if it means you're going to save hours each week, then it's really worth it. Uh for me, it's just quite uh cumbersome to come up with those titles, going to ChatGPT or Claude, requesting it for suggesting, you know, eight titles and a description, coming up with a newsletter all one by one. That's exactly how I was doing it before using Claude plugins.

2:29 And the thing is, it's not as daunting as it may sound or seem creating a plugin because all you're doing is you're prompting Claude to create a new plugin, and then it asks you a set of questions, such as what do you want to automate? And then you fully describe what you do on a daily basis, describe the pain that you have to go through, and then it will use the right skills that are currently and readily available that's on Claude already. And, of course, you can use those custom instructions, give it feed it your branding and your voice so that it's personalized for you. Now, to elaborate further on what a plugin is, is it gathers multiple skills. So, you could have individual skills doing one particular task, for instance, such as coming up with the copy for your newsletter. So, it's like a newsletter writer. Think of it as individual agents, individual employees working for you for that particular specific task.

3:26 Whereas, with plugins, it combines a set of skills and a set of, let's say, roles, puts it all together so that all you need to do is request it, "Hey, I'm publishing new video. Come up with everything, all the assets." It will understand all of that because you've got that plugin already created. It knows every single thing, as you can see right here, what to produce, the titles, the description, keywords, subtitles, and newsletter. And then it'll call out those individual skills to combine all that. And then pretty much output it in whatever format that you want. In my case, I've got it in Notion and it also saves each individual asset into markdown files. So you can see my skill here and then you've got the skill.md file. And in the individual instructions, right? For the newsletter style, we've got the subtitle format, the title strategy, the length 50 to 60 characters. All of this, of course, can be customized. But I pretty much prompted Claude what my problem was and then it came up with all of this itself.

4:25 It kind of understood how I already work. And because it probably already has these skills built in, it knows what a typical, let's say, title strategy or keyword strategy. In addition, the other things that I did add were some references in terms of how I usually write my email newsletters. So you've got the subject line and here's the main newsletter copy. Here's another one. And it's the formatting, right? It's the layout. It's the words and the way that I usually write my emails. So by feeding it some examples, it knows how to then write future newsletters or copy for you. All right, now let's get into the practical of everything. The first thing you're going to need is the desktop version of Claude because you're going to enable Cohere. You could very well use Cohere if you're more technical, if you understand how to use the terminal or the command. But I like to use Cohere. I know it does eat up on your tokens, but I simply lower to the Sonnet model for everyday work rather than Opus because Opus does consume more and more faster. But it gives you a more user-friendly interface. So rather than using Cohere, simply use Cohere. All right, so once you're there, click on new task and then simply request it to help me create a new plugin and submit.

5:39 That's pretty much all you need to do to start it off. And then it'll come up with this kind of window where it'll ask you a set of questions like what should this plugin do? What problem does it solve? Who will use this plugin? Just me, my team, whole organization? Does it need to connect to any external tools or services? What type of help do you primarily want from this plugin? And anything else. And this is the exact set of steps that I went through. So, you go on and explain your problem, right? You could very well just share your frustrations because the more detailed you are, the more it'll understand what kinds of skills it needs to add into the workflow, into your plugin. Now, when I created this plugin, I wasn't as specific, but then I customized the set of skills anyway, but you could very well just start with something a bit more general, a bit more basic like this is what I wrote. Assist with the task required before hitting publish on my latest video. Tasks such as YouTube titles, description, keywords, subtitles, and writing an email newsletter to announce the new video.

6:42 And I also go on to share what I would like to integrate with this particular task. So, I've got Notion and files only so that it'll save the output text files into markdown files that can be read by pretty much anything. And it also asked what kinds of things should it do. So, create documents or files and a short name for the plugin, give it a custom name. And then it will ask you maybe a couple more questions like this here.

7:08 What's your newsletter style? And then I fed it some of my newsletter articles from the past. And it's also got this thing about transcribing YouTube videos automatically, which I have yet to do. You can see here that I gathered a set of newsletters that I submitted to my subscribers in the past. So, then it made those customizations and then added it into the plugin. And that's the beauty of it really. You don't need to code. You can simply use natural language, write a message, and say, "Hey, I need to customize this plugin and get it to do this instead or write it in this way instead." And if you've chosen to also save it as files, it'll create a new folder, right? And then it'll create individual files that then you can open in your text editor. But if you did integrate it with another tool such as Notion, then you will get an output file that may look something like this. It really depends what you're requesting Claude to do. But in my case, these are kind of pre-publishing things that I usually do by hand. So yeah, go ahead, fill this form in and integrate any of the apps that you wish to integrate because if you are also wanting the plugin to look at other sources, like let's say your Slack messages, ones that your team send on the daily or weekly basis, and you want to reference that so that they can all talk with each other, then you probably want to select that and request it for any other apps that you want it to connect with. And pretty much once it's created the plugin, you can save the plugin. However, it does save it to Co-work anyway. And where you'll find it is under customize, and then you'll see your plugins, right? So I've got my YouTube pre-published, which is pretty much the main thing that I like to automate. Everything else is run like on a schedule or I just do on a manual basis. You can see right here and all the skills that are involved, all the references as I showed at the beginning of this video. And if you do want to edit and customize your plugin, you can very well do that by clicking on edit then to customize with Claude. And really all it's doing is it's entered the text prompt to create the plugin and customize the particular skill. As I said, no coding required, no terminals required. It can all be done under Co-work. Now if you go back to customize, and then you'll see here browse plugins. There are actually a number of plugins that have already been built. And these are some of the most popular roles, right? Popular skills. So if you're looking for a marketing team, you could very well just install the marketing plugin. It's got everything you need, such as draft a blog post with SEO optimization, plan a multi-channel campaign. So, you simply install it, and then it'll do all those tasks for you.

9:48 Some other ones here, we've got a finance team, reconciliation, analyzing, legal, sales, PDF viewer, where you can view, annotate, and sign PDFs. Really useful. Now, speaking of which, how do you actually trigger the plugin that you've just created? Well, if we go back to Cowa, creating new tasks, and this is how I usually do it. I just simply ask it, "Help me publish my latest video. I've added the video script in my downloads folder called script.srt." And this is the pretty much the output, the transcript that I've already converted from my video. And then, when I click on submit, it'll understand and know which plugin to activate for that, rather than having to really reference it to use that plugin. And when it starts off, you can see that it's thinking, running the skill. It already detected which set of skills to use, the YouTube pre-publishing skill. We've got the instructions right here, claw.md. It's read the file that is in my downloads folder, which is a script. And it's pretty much reading everything, and the resources references, like the past users that I sent, and my voice, all of that. And it's just asking a couple more questions to clarify a few things, like does this video have a sponsor? I'll get no sponsor. What are the URLs that I mentioned in the video? You can always just enter it here, or do it later, it doesn't matter. And it also wants to clarify who is this video mainly for.

11:09 You don't have to answer, but the more specific, the better. But, you could very well just skip this entire thing, it'll understand and produce all the assets the best it can. And if I click on skip, you can see exactly what it's doing. Just skip ahead a bit, here's one I prepared earlier. Once it's done, it will generate all the files for you. It will then sync it up with whatever apps that you you connected the plugin with.

11:31 So, I've got Notion and we've got Title Winner that it recommends you use. Here are all the individual files. Here are all of the downloads. If you do want to look at the progress and what it's actually completed, it's generated the title, description, keywords, so on and so forth. And really, that is pretty much all you need to do to create a Claude plugin that's custom to you, custom to your instructions, your voice, your brand. So, the next time you want to run this workflow, simply hit up Claude Work, command it to help you publish your latest video, or create you your those social media posts, or repurpose your existing content. You can very well do that all inside Claude Work. That's all from me for now. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll leave up a couple of relevant videos for you to watch next. See you soon.