4 Agent Skills I Use for Marketing

We're builders. We think in systems, processes, repeatable workflows. And now

that we can delegate to agents, whether that's on cloud code or openclaw, whatever you're using, we can apply that same systems mindset to marketing our business without needing to become worldclass marketers ourselves. You

know, marketing is one of those things that as builders, we know we should be doing more of it, but it pulls us away from the work we actually want to be doing. The thing is, most marketing work

doing. The thing is, most marketing work follows a pattern. pattern. And once you see these patterns, you can turn these processes into skills and hand them to agents. Today, I'll show you four of the

agents. Today, I'll show you four of the skills that I built to run the marketing side of my business, and I'll walk through how I structured each one and how I delegate them to my agents using

OpenClaw and Claude. And honestly, this approach applies way beyond marketing.

Every role in your organization should be looking for these repeatable processes that can be turned into skills. If we haven't met yet, I'm Brian

skills. If we haven't met yet, I'm Brian Castle and I help builders and teams stay ahead of the curve when it comes to building with AI. And I also send a free weekly newsletter called the builder

briefing. That's a free 5-minute read to

briefing. That's a free 5-minute read to keep you sharp on what's actually working. And today I'll show you the

working. And today I'll show you the agent skill that I use to help me write and send that newsletter. Anyway, you

can get yours by going to buildermethods.com.

buildermethods.com.

And if you're just getting into OpenClaw, I just launched a new course and starter kit inside of Builder Methods Pro where I walk through how I built my team of agents and it comes with a ready to build spec so that you

can build your own custom dashboard for your agents.

Now, as I walk through each of my customuilt skills, I think what's most important is for you to see how I think about the strategy and the process behind these because that's really what matters when it comes to skills and

processes in your business. You can

literally just describe what you want to do and what your business goals are.

Explain those to Claude or Chatubt or Gemini and have it help you build out a customuilt skill that fits your specific needs for your processes. So, I'm going to walk through mine. Here's the first

one. I call this my radar scan process.

one. I call this my radar scan process.

And so, at basically every morning in Telegram, so I have these, you know, these four different agents. These are

all operating on OpenClaw on my Mac Mini on my desk. Uh, one of my agents is I named this agent Veil. And this is like my marketing agent. And so, Veil is

responsible for running the radar scan, which the agent does every morning. And

I received this one today. It runs

actually at 4:00 in the morning. So,

it's here when I wake up. And I I don't wake up at 4:00 a.m. by the way. Uh but

it's there waiting for when I wake up.

And so, here is today's radar scan. And

there's a link. And this is actually pointing to a markdown file that lives on my file system and also in Dropbox.

And I'm opening it up in a customuilt app that I created called Brainown. And

that is my markdown reader, Markdown writer. And it really makes it easy for

writer. And it really makes it easy for my agents and I to be able to pass these markdown files around to each other. But

this is actually a markdown file that my agent wrote up and it basically summarizes a bunch of mostly tweets that are happening in my industry that came through sometime in the past 24 hours.

These are people and companies and like industry news and influencers and thinkers that I really like to follow and I like to keep tabs on. And so my agent my agent kind of collects those

and analyzes a lot of like incoming feeds and then decides which ones the agent thinks based on my training are most relevant for me and my business and

could potentially become material that I might use or comment on or you know react to in various content. I actually

haven't walked through today's report just yet but I will later today. So how

is this actually happening? Let's let's

see how I set it up. So, it starts with a skill. In my custom collection of

a skill. In my custom collection of skills, I call this one content radar scan. And inside that folder, I've got

scan. And inside that folder, I've got the main skill file. That's this. And

then I've got a couple of references.

So, the skill file itself, I've got some configuration stuff. I'll talk a bit

configuration stuff. I'll talk a bit more about this other tool called Spark Drop. That's another customuilt tool

Drop. That's another customuilt tool that I that I'm using. I'm actually in the middle of building this right now, and I might share this on the channel sometime later. Anyway, there's a lot

sometime later. Anyway, there's a lot more to it than this, but this is where my agents can pull my training for my interests from. Now, you don't have to

interests from. Now, you don't have to have a customuilt tool for that. What I

did for a while before I started building this Spark Drop app is I had this like training material in markdown files, you know, stored inside the skill itself. So, I would have a file on like

itself. So, I would have a file on like my voice and the tone. I would have a file on the topics and interests that I wanted to focus on and that sort of thing. And I trained that from Claude

thing. And I trained that from Claude from helping me write lots of stuff over over a couple of years now. So that's

where the training data comes from. And

then I give my agent this process starting with the radar sources. First

fetch the training data from Sparkdrop or you can read it from markdown files if you have those and then scan all of the radar sources for new activity since the last run. And the last run happened

yesterday. So we're we're scanning for

yesterday. So we're we're scanning for the last 24 hours. So the radar sources, that's another important file in here.

So this skill is referencing this file right here called radar sources. This is

something that I'm still in the process of building out. It's a collection of XML RSS feeds. And I grouped them into different feeds. One is tracking the

different feeds. One is tracking the anthropic team's tweets. So there's a lot of people on the cloud team who are tweeting all the time about about new releases, new features. Same thing with

the Open AI team, the team at Cursor, and then another general list of like influencers and people who I think are doing really interesting work in building with AI that I like to keep tabs on. I'm naturally scrolling Twitter

tabs on. I'm naturally scrolling Twitter every day just watching this stuff, but it's really nice to have an agent who is always watching and capturing this stuff. So, I'm using an app that anyone

stuff. So, I'm using an app that anyone can use uh called RSS.app.

And let's take a look at that. So, this

is a pretty cool tool. It works really well. I think they have a free plan, but

well. I think they have a free plan, but I think I'm paying for it. Um, so if I go into my feeds in my account, these are the feeds of like X or Twitter. I

still call it Twitter, you know, X feeds. So, for example, this is the one

feeds. So, for example, this is the one that tracks anthropic teams tweets and it's sort of just this is a feed of of those tweets, but what the agent is

actually going to read is this XML feed and that looks like this. So this is a much more it's not digestible for us, but it's a lot more digestible for the agent. And so that's actually what I am

agent. And so that's actually what I am referencing here. I'm telling the agent

referencing here. I'm telling the agent to go to that XML feed and read that for each of these and to sort of like analyze and scan through. And as you can see, there's a there's a lot here that that came through in the last, you know,

24 hours or so. So the agent is actually going to use its own judgment and the training that I give it to decide what's most relevant for me to include in my daily report. And then the way that that

daily report. And then the way that that is actually built in this RSS feed is it's actually tracking a Twitter search.

So if I look at that, I go into Twitter or you know X and this is an actual search and then I'm giving that a search

URL to the uh RSS.app and that generates this XML feed which is then read by the agent. Okay, so that's that piece. It's

agent. Okay, so that's that piece. It's

all just like moving parts one step at a time, one big process, right? So after

the agent reads those radar sources, filter for relevance, some instruction on how to choose what is interesting to me, discard items that are, you know, have these characteristics that I'm not

interested in, how to write the brief entry and what to write for each one, and then uh output it to this file on my actual file system, which is synced using Dropbox. A little format for how

using Dropbox. A little format for how to name the file. Here's how I want the file to be created in this type of format with a bunch of examples built into there. And then finally,

into there. And then finally, instructions to notify me via Telegram.

So the agents are connected to my Telegram and I have that here. I like to organize my Telegram into these are my human friends and these are my agent friends. So then I get this message and

friends. So then I get this message and I also instructed it, you know, don't give me the whole report in the Telegram message. I just want sort of an overview

message. I just want sort of an overview and then I can click into this and open it up on my Brainown app. And that's how I uh handle all of my messages like my

other agent sends me daily report and these link to my to-do list and yesterday's summary and I can see like the NYX score and the Met score. So

that's kind of cool. So this radar scan really helps me keep tabs on what's happening in the in the industry. It can

help me come up with new ideas for content or I can use it in my content development pipeline with my agents to draw on ideas and help me draft new stuff for YouTube or for Twitter or for

my newsletter.

All right, this next skill is one that I use to create all of the branded visuals throughout my business and my brand. So,

I did another whole deep dive video on how I created this skill for creating a brand visuals, but I'll show you how I've been using it here again. So, if

you look at my website for builder methods, you'll see these uh kind of interesting illustrations throughout the site. You know, there's all sorts of

site. You know, there's all sorts of different ones in here, but they all follow a very consistent style look and feel. They always have a selection of

feel. They always have a selection of specific colors and you know very specific notes on how I want the literally like the lines and the illustrations and the shadows to be

built out so that on any page any time I can create so no matter which page I'm working on or if I'm creating like a new workshop or a new session or an image

that I want to share on social media all of that can follow consistent look and feel from you know I created this months ago to the one that I'll create tomorrow. All these images feel

tomorrow. All these images feel connected. I think that's a really

connected. I think that's a really important part of branding and marketing in general. So, how does this actually

in general. So, how does this actually work? So, here is a skill and and this

work? So, here is a skill and and this is actually inside of a special project that I call BM, you know, builder methods brand illustrations. And so,

there's one skill in here and then inside that I've got these mini projects for every individual illustration that I create. So, for example, yesterday I was

create. So, for example, yesterday I was preparing some new like live sessions for members of Builder Methods Pro. And

so I wanted to create an illustration that is used on that. And so for example I that is on our sessions list here. And

and you can see that that image is being used in these thumbnails. So this one went through a few iterations you know and and ultimately I was happy with this

one. And you can see that the agent also

one. And you can see that the agent also created some concepts like suggesting like a few different descriptive concepts of of what it might be. And

then I uh I sort of green lit one of these concepts and then had it uh go ahead and generate the image. So it's

generating the illustration using the Google image genen API. So I'm using claude and claude code to prompt and to suggest the concept for the illustration

and then I'm using the Google Gemini API to actually generate the image because claw doesn't have an image generation model built in. So let's try it out, shall we? Now, this is one that I

shall we? Now, this is one that I actually use like manually. It It's not happening automatically in the background. Although, I might start to

background. Although, I might start to incorporate it into more of a content pipeline at some point, but basically whenever I need an illustration, I'll just fire up this I just fire up this project and then I have it work on it.

First, I start by running Claude and then I'll do right brand illustrator.

And then I'm going to give it a little bit of a description of of what I want to do here. So, I'll use voice dictation. create an illustration for a

dictation. create an illustration for a blog article that's about marketing skills for agents. I want to share a a set of tools that my agents can use to help me with marketing. All right, so

that's the overview of the description and then the skill instructs my agent to go through this creative like interviewing process with me to first develop the concept for what we want to

do. So, first it's asking me, do I have

do. So, first it's asking me, do I have like a visual context like a screenshot of where this image is going to be placed? I'll just say no for now. That's

placed? I'll just say no for now. That's

fine. And then I have a a set of brand colors that I always wanted to use. And

I've built these into the skill. And you

can see in the references. So I've got like colors and idea mapping and and like a visual world for like the types of objects that might be found in my brand. I went deeper into all this stuff

brand. I went deeper into all this stuff in my other video on how I created this skill, but I just want to show you how it's all wired up here. So yeah, let's go with the let's go with coral. All

right. So, what size of of illustration and and configuration? Let's go with a scene. And I'll use the typical

scene. And I'll use the typical dimensions for that. All right. So,

before it gets to work on the actual illustration, Claude is going to use my training and my references and the information that I've provided to generate three potential concepts and

it's going to describe those in detail.

And that's really important before we get into creating an image. I want a very descriptive concept that we can use as the prompt that we will then send over to Google. All right. So, it gives

me an option, option A, option B, option C. Yeah, I kind of like this option A,

C. Yeah, I kind of like this option A, the agents toolbox. So, let's go with that. And it's using the uh ask user

that. And it's using the uh ask user questions system to make it easy to to sort of collaborate with the agent on this. I'm going to just select that.

this. I'm going to just select that.

Okay. So, now what it's going to do is inside of my projects folder, you can see it has already created this new folder. It dated it today. And it's also

folder. It dated it today. And it's also creating a little project.md file which is documenting everything that we've discussed so far. So, it has the the prompt that it's going to be sending to

Google. It has the options that it

Google. It has the options that it presented. It has the one that I

presented. It has the one that I selected. And now it's actually going to

selected. And now it's actually going to send the request to the Google image gen API to start generating the first take at this illustration. Okay, so V1, the first take at this illustration is done.

Let's take a look. And yeah, there is a uh marketing toolbox with a bunch of marketing things inside. So, you know, from here, I would typically go through a couple more iterations to maybe dial it in and and give it some feedback and

and then select a winner, like an an actual user usable one. But this is actually a pretty good first stab at it.

And as you can see, it already has the built-in style and level of detail that I like to have in all of my illustrations. It already feels pretty

illustrations. It already feels pretty consistent. And so, that's how I

consistent. And so, that's how I generate visuals for all of the public facing marketing stuff that I do.

Now, this next skill is made possible by today's sponsor, Weigh-In Video. So, if

you're a builder who's also producing video content, whether that's tutorials, demos, or just building in public, you know, the bottleneck isn't recording.

It's everything that comes after turning your long- form videos into short clips for YouTube shorts or LinkedIn or Tik Tok. That's a whole job in itself.

Tok. That's a whole job in itself.

Weigh-in video handles that. You can

give it a long form video recording or a YouTube link and its AI identifies the most engaging moments and then cuts them into share ready clips. It can even reframe them into vertical format and

add animated captions and all these little tasks that stuff really adds up.

So automating that is huge. Now as a builder what makes weigh-in video interesting to me is their API. So all

of those capabilities, the clipping, transcription summarization searching for moments, that's all available through a simple REST API with a pay as you go pricing model, which means I can

plug it into my agent workflows just like any other tool. And they've also published an agent skill on clawhub that handles the full workflow from uploading a video to submitting a clipping job,

pulling for results, and then delivering the finished clips. So if you're using OpenClaw, you can immediately plug it in with your agent. Or you can just download the skill zip and then use it with Claude or any other agent. You

know, that's where I could see this fitting into my setup. You know, I publish these long form videos on YouTube and then my agent can pick it up and run it through weigh-in videos API and generate a batch of short clips and

then have them ready for me to review and push out to my other platforms. And so for someone who likes to build in public, that kind of automated repurposing pipeline, that's exactly what I want. So you can try Weighin

Video for free by going to weigh-in.ai.

Or if you want to build it into your agent workflows, their API is pay as you go. So you can just grab your API key

go. So you can just grab your API key and go or use their skill and plug it right in with your agent.

All right, so the last skill that I want to talk about or the last set of skills that I want to talk about is the one that helps me write and send my weekly newsletter. You may have heard me talk

newsletter. You may have heard me talk about this on the channel. It's

available at buildermethods.com. I call

my newsletter the builder briefing and folks join that here. But here's what an issue of my builder briefing newsletter actually looks like. It's a pretty simple textbased email and you know it's

got a simple subject line. I number each issue. I've got the date. You know this

issue. I've got the date. You know this is the one that I sent last week. It

always starts with a sort of like a mini article on you know something that I've been thinking about and a mental model or an observation that I want to share with my fellow builders. And then below that, you know, I've got a couple of

other sections where I'll talk about my recent YouTube video and another section where I talk about what I'm currently building. And sometimes I add in a few

building. And sometimes I add in a few additional sections into this. So, very

minimal formatting, some, you know, I've got my sign off, some lines, and and some uh some styling built into it. But

it used to be that I would create this manually in ConvertKit or it's called kit.com now. and you know, a lot of like

kit.com now. and you know, a lot of like tedious formatting and clicking of buttons and making sure that it gets scheduled and making sure that it looks right and and all that kind of stuff.

And then of course writing the content.

So, and you know, thanks to these skills that I use with Claude, I don't actually have to do any of the setup work inside of my email marketing tool whatsoever.

So, now every week when I'm creating my builder briefing newsletter, I come into Claude and I have a project called BM newsletter for builder methods newsletter. Here is a folder with some

newsletter. Here is a folder with some of the more recent ones. And then in this project, I have a Claude skills folder. And it has two skills actually

folder. And it has two skills actually that I'll show you. First, I'm going to look at the newsletter writer skill. And

this is the skill that actually helps me craft my message and the content that's going to go into each one of these sections. So, let me show you how this

sections. So, let me show you how this usually plays out. So, I'm going to open up Claude. And the first thing that I'll

up Claude. And the first thing that I'll do is I'll pull up that newsletter writer skill by using the slash command.

Now, normally I get my message out using a long voice message. I I usually go out and and take a walk for 20 minutes and talk through the idea or observation or insight that I want to share in this

week's newsletter. Just a a brain dump

week's newsletter. Just a a brain dump of what I want to talk about today. For

this demo, I'm just going to do a much more abbreviated version of that. So,

I'll use voice dictation here. The main

message for this newsletter should be about how I go about creating skills for my agents to carry out my marketing processes. So again, normally I would go

processes. So again, normally I would go into much more detail in terms of like sharing what I want to say, but that's not actually how it ends up getting presented or or written out. The agent

is going to do that. But it we're going to go through a process here starting with the main message, but then we're going to go section by section and Claude using my newsletter writer skill is going to get all of the essential

information out of me in order to be able to assemble my newsletter. So,

first it's it's actually going back and checking recent examples so that it that helps with like training its voice and style. And so, now it actually gave me a

style. And so, now it actually gave me a draft for what that main message section could be. You know, this is what will go

could be. You know, this is what will go in this top section of the newsletter.

So, you know, again, normally I would read this through and I typically go through a round of maybe three to five revisions. I would give some creative

revisions. I would give some creative feedback and really start to dial in the message and get a much better draft. And

then even later after we send it into kit, before I send it out, I'll do a little bit of hand editing as well. For

the sake of this demo, to keep it moving, I'm just going to go ahead and approve this. Good to go. Okay. So now

approve this. Good to go. Okay. So now

the agent is going to move on to the subject line and the preheader. And so

this is the next step that I have instructed it to do. So it actually suggested a couple of pretty good subject lines and some preheaders. And

actually, I'm going to go with something a little bit different for the subject line. subject marketing skills preheader

line. subject marketing skills preheader one I'll use its first suggestion there okay so now we're moving on into the next section which is the YouTube section and that's typically like this and and sometimes I don't have a recent

video that I want to share so it's asking me like are we going to include a YouTube video for this week or not and by the way let's just take a look at the skill itself so you can see how how this is happening the skill is instructing

the agent to read through my recent finished newsletter examples I like to look at the recent ones because my style might change from week to week and then a little bit more info about like patterns on how to speak like me and and

my voice. And then we get into the

my voice. And then we get into the workflow, you know, the drafting of the main message, which we just saw. Then we

get the subject line and preheader uh worked out. And then we get into this

worked out. And then we get into this YouTube video section. So, I'm literally instructing the agent on how to go step by step to get uh what we need for each section. And I'll say uh yes, let's

section. And I'll say uh yes, let's let's use this most recent video. And

I'm just going to grab that URL so that it can set up the link for me. So that's

the URL and I'm going to use the same description that I put at the top of the video and I'm going to drop that in here. And then the agent is going to

here. And then the agent is going to write new version of that to go in the on YouTube section. Okay. So as you can see here, it actually formatted it the way that it will ultimately look in my

email newsletter. So that's that's

email newsletter. So that's that's looking good. Yes, we're going to

looking good. Yes, we're going to promote a podcast episode this week. So,

I co-host a podcast called The Panel, and we did release an episode last week, and that one was called, "Can AI be our CRM?" So, uh, I do want to mention that

CRM?" So, uh, I do want to mention that in next week's newsletter. Now, we

didn't have much of a description on that one, but I'm just going to paste it in. Okay, so that's looking good. And

in. Okay, so that's looking good. And

then, are we going to have a behind the build section this week? Yes, we're

going to have a behind the build section this week. And I'm going to talk more

this week. And I'm going to talk more about how I'm coming along with my Spark Drop app for managing my content development pipeline in collaboration

with my agents. And again, in a normal situation, I would be going back and forth and provide a lot more input on each one of these, but I just want to go through the process for the sake of this

demo. That's good. So, this is a much

demo. That's good. So, this is a much easier back and forth than for me to go, you know, into into Kit and like and click all the buttons and format each thing and and make sure that it looks

just right. I just like to be able to,

just right. I just like to be able to, you know, give my input and approve and know that it's going to get assembled the way that I always want it. So, so

far using that newsletter writing skill, it created this full markdown version of this newsletter. So, this is a good

this newsletter. So, this is a good start. And so now we have the content

start. And so now we have the content worked out and we have the headlines and the and we have the subject line, the preheader. We've got the headlines, the

preheader. We've got the headlines, the links are all worked out. So the most important part like creating the content that was done using the newsletter writer skill. But next comes actually

writer skill. But next comes actually assembling it into an HTML email and sending it out.

And so for that I have one more skill.

This is sort of a bonus skill that I'm going to show you here. And that one is called newsletter builder. So, we just saw the newsletter writer skill. Now,

we're going to run the newsletter builder. And I'm going to stay within

builder. And I'm going to stay within the same conversation with Claude Code here. And I'm going to run /newsletter.

here. And I'm going to run /newsletter.

All right. So, I'm going to run my newsletter builder skill now. And this

one is going to take the written content and it's going to assemble the HTML email. And then it's going to send it up

email. And then it's going to send it up to kit using the kit API. All right. So,

it's going to first confirm some of the essential details like the issue number, the subject line, the header, the main message, the send time. So, we're going to say we're going to want to send it tomorrow, April 2nd. And then sometimes

I include a call to action at the top.

This time, I won't be doing that. And

I'll just say that's all good. And yeah,

that's a good order. It's confirming.

Now, the way that I have this newsletter builder set up is that inside templates, I have shell. And this is like the outer HTML shell of my email newsletter. But

then there's just this content tag which is the bulk of the content of the email.

And then I have these individual HTML templates that represent each individual section. And these are pretty simple,

section. And these are pretty simple, but sometimes they have a little bit of styling and formatting built into them.

And sometimes they have like um some dynamic tags that I use in in Kit when it gets into kit. So, it's going to use the outer shell and then it's going to insert each individual section that

we've already written into these individual templates and ultimately build a final HTML email. So, let's see how it's doing on that. Okay, so it has

generated the actual HTML email for this entire message. Again, it uses that

entire message. Again, it uses that outer shell with some CSS built into the top. That's how you would normally do an

top. That's how you would normally do an HTML email. And then it assembles the

HTML email. And then it assembles the rest of the actual content in nice clean HTML according to exactly how I want my design template to be. I don't have to

do this every single time. You know, the skill and the agent just puts these pieces together because it's all mapped out in the process. And already it has actually pushed it up to kit. And just

to show you real quick, I have this scripts folder where we are, you know, running this Python script which interacts with the Kit V4 API. And that

is what enables us to push it up into my Kit account. And so now if I go into my

Kit account. And so now if I go into my Kit account, there it is. Marketing

skills. So, you know, here is that next builder briefing. It's got the subject

builder briefing. It's got the subject line, the preview text, all of the content. It's all in place exactly where

content. It's all in place exactly where I always want it. All the details are dialed in. I've got my call to action at

dialed in. I've got my call to action at the bottom for those who are not pro members yet. And I can, you know,

members yet. And I can, you know, preview it and see how it looks. And if

I keep going through the process, I can see that it's actually scheduled for the time that I want it to to send out. So

there you go. Those are four of the agent skills, actually five, that I built around repeatable processes that I was already doing by hand. From my

agents radar scan to keep tabs on what's happening in my industry to designing brand visuals to repurposing videos to writing and sending my weekly newsletter. Now, here's the takeaway

newsletter. Now, here's the takeaway that goes beyond marketing. The real

skill, the human skill here is observation. Paying attention to the

observation. Paying attention to the work that you repeat every week. Those

patterns that you follow without thinking about it. Once you see them, you can document them and then structure them into a skill that you can delegate to an agent. And this applies to every

role, not just marketing, not just development. Wherever there's a

development. Wherever there's a recurring process, there's a skill waiting to be built. Now, if you're wondering how I actually set up my agents to run these skills using OpenClaw, the multi- aent team, my

customuilt dashboard, the whole system, I go deep on all of that in my video on building a multi- aent team on OpenClaw.

So, first subscribe to the channel so you don't miss my next video on building with agents and then I'll see you over there next. Let's keep building.

there next. Let's keep building.