70: My Favorite AI Tools for Course Creators (And Exactly How I Use Them)

Thanks for listening to Your Online Business Mentor. If you've built a course and it isn't selling consistently, or you're tired of launching without lasting momentum, I want you to know this: your course isn't the problem, it's your delivery model. I put together a free resource called the Course Evolution Guide, which shows you how to evolve what you've already built into a cohort-driven experience that increases engagement, results, and repeatable revenue. It's not about starting over, it's about refining what you you have so it finally works for you. Download it for free at launchwithlydia.com/evolution. Welcome back to Your Online Business Mentor. I'm so excited you're here, especially if you've ever found yourself going down a rabbit hole of AI tools, watching videos, reading about all the things these tools can supposedly do, and then walking away feeling more overwhelmed than when you started. I hear this all the time from course creators and coaches because there's just so many AI tools out there right now. And every single one of them has a list of amazing features that sound incredible, but knowing a tool exists and actually knowing how to apply it to your specific business, those are two very different things. So today I'm keeping it simple. I want to share 3 AI tools that I'm actively using in my business right now. These are the ones that are making the biggest impact on my efficiency and content as a course creator and online business mentor. Not a list of 10 things, not a roundup of everything that exists, just 3 tools and what they actually do. I want to share exactly how I use them so that you can picture what this might look like in your business. By the time this episode is over, you're going to have a very clear picture of where to start. So let's get into it. If you're new here, I'm Lydia Martin and I help course creators and coaches build cohort experiences that sell and transform. And AI is a huge part of how I run my business and what I teach inside my programs. The good news is that you don't have to be tech savvy to use these tools. As a course creator and coach myself, I love figuring out how these tools work for my business and helping others do the same. Because when you can get it right, AI genuinely saves you time and makes your content better and more organized. But you need context for how to apply it. And that's exactly what I'm here for. If you want the full picture of how I use AI to build and run cohort-style programs, be sure to join my free workshop Beyond Courses. The link is below this video. But right now, let's go ahead and jump into the tools. The first tool I want to talk about is Claude. Now there is a backstory. Like many of you, I've started off using ChatGPT. I used it for years and I had it set up well. I had it trained. I was using it every single day for my emails, my launch copy, my YouTube scripts, my podcast content, everything. But over time, I kept hitting the same wall. The outputs, which seemed really good at first, started to feel generic. No matter how much I tweaked my prompts or how detailed my instructions got, the writing just fell flat. A little bit corporate, kind of like it could have come from any online business coach, but not specifically from me. And that matters because the whole point of using AI in your business is to work faster, but not to water down your brand or your message. So I kept hearing how lots of people had made the switch to Claude, and the difference was noticeable immediately. When I give Claude a task, it asks me clarifying questions before it starts writing. So if I go to write an email to my list, Claude might ask, what's the goal of this email? Are you trying to nurture your audience, point them to a sales page, or invite them to a free workshop? It works more like a human assistant who actually wants to get it right before diving in. So you click on the option that fits your goal and the output is so much more aligned with what you actually need. So that one feature alone changed the quality of my outputs significantly. Now, like ChatGPT, Claude also has projects, and this is where you train Claude on your business, your audience, your voice, your offers, your frameworks. But unlike other tools I've used, Claude actually maintains that memory consistently. It references earlier conversations inside the project, and it stays oriented to who I am without me having to retrain it. I've only been using Claude for a couple of months and it already feels like it knows me better than the other tools I've been using for years. And this is a super practical thing, but it's genuinely been a game changer for me. And that's the open in Google Docs button. When Claude finishes a piece of content, because I've connected my Google Drive, I can click on one button and it opens directly in Google Drive, already formatted with colors, structure, headers. No more copying and pasting for me, and no more reformatting. For someone who's consistently creating guides and lesson docs, emails, launch copy, that button saves me real time every single week. Now, I do want to mention something that goes hand in hand with Claude, and that is the Claude for Chrome extension. This is one of the newest favorite tools that I've been using, and if you didn't know about it, be sure to install it on your Chrome browser. This extension lets you use Claude directly on any webpage without switching tabs or copying anything. And I want to give you a real example of how this one extension helped me so much in my business. This is how powerful this tool is. We recently rebranded from Banish Business Clutter to Launch with Lydia, and we feel so aligned with this brand. But one of the tasks on our list was finding every single old link on my website that still referenced the old brand name. This is the kind of thing that would've taken my team weeks to do manually, going through every page, every post, every resource one by one. But thanks to the Claude for Chrome extension, Claude went through my entire site analyzing every piece of content, every blog post right there on my browser with my permission, and it flagged every instance of an old link. It even found typos and errors I didn't know were there, and it would've taken me weeks to find it, if at all. Now you can also use it to get copy suggestions for your own pages, analyze content that you're reading, or get instant feedback without ever leaving the page you're on. It removes all that friction of switching back and forth between tools and having to copy and paste everything. This alone definitely makes it worth adding to your browser. Claude has become my go-to for content creation, for emails, podcasts, YouTube. Course lesson copy, and more. If words need to come out of it, I'm probably using Claude to help me get there. Now, I haven't fully left ChatGPT. I still use it for one specific thing, which is custom GPTs. The ability to build custom GPTs and share them with my students and clients is definitely still something I love. It's helping my students build faster, and it's not something I've learned how to do inside Claude yet. So for right now, I'm keeping both tools. But overall, Claude wins every time. Now, if you're like me and thinking, how in the world am I going to get all of my info from ChatGPT into Claude? I have good news. I've included a link to a full tutorial video in the notes below. And in that video, I show you how to get up and running with Claude in no time. All right. So tool number 2 that I want to share today is something that has just stopped me in my tracks literally from the first moment I used it. And I think it's going to do the same for you. Now, before I tell you what it is, I want to explain that it's not a tool that's similar to ChatGPT or Claude. It's called NotebookLM, and it's not a writing assistant in the same way that you use it to brainstorm or write emails from scratch. It does something very different and very specific. So I still use Claude to help me with the content, organize all of my ideas and my thoughts, but I use NotebookLM to take that content that I've now created and turn it into something stunning. We're talking slide decks, infographics, audio overviews, visual summaries, assessments, and the quality is something you have to see to believe. My biggest wow moment with this tool was when I used it to design the slides for my last live workshop. This is something that would've taken me hours, maybe even days to do in Canva, but I uploaded my content, gave it some direction on my colors, what to focus on, and NotebookLM generated a full professional slide deck that was ready to go with very little prompting. The way it works is simple. You go to notebooklm.google.com, create a notebook, and upload your sources. These sources can be transcripts, course lesson documents, PDFs, frameworks, offer descriptions, anything you've already created. And then you tell it what you want to make. In the studio, you can select slide deck, infographic, audio overview, even a mind map. And you give it your brand colors and some context, hit generate, and about 5 to 10 minutes, you have a beautifully designed resource. In one of my notebooks, I uploaded 9 recent podcast episode transcripts and asked it to create a slide deck. It pulled out my exact frameworks, my stories, and my concepts. Things I reference all the time that I didn't even specifically point to, and it created something that genuinely looked like it was made by a professional designer. Once you have the output, you can download it as a PDF, drop it into Canva, and use some of their amazing tools to make everything editable. Then you adjust colors, fonts, or any details to match your brand, and poof, just like that, what used to take me days now takes me a couple of hours. It's a Google tool, so you can get started for free. But if you have a Google Workspace or a Google One account or an up-leveled account, you will get some additional features and you won't be as limited with the number of outputs it can create for you. So the higher levels of NotebookLM do have expanded features and higher limits. And thanks to my Google Workspace account, that's what I get access to. So I've been able to create a lot of content without hitting those limits. Here's why that tool is so powerful, especially for course creators and coaches. Everything it creates is based on the sources you give it, not something AI is suggesting, which means you can have it create something that's specific to your content. I love that it takes what you've already built, what you've already taught, and what you already know, and it makes it look incredible. Think about every time you've taught something in a training session or recorded a lesson and thought, I wish I had a beautiful visual to go with this. And that's exactly what Notebook LM is for. It's the tool that takes your brilliant ideas and makes them look as good as they are. I do have a Notebook LM intro video linked in the notes below, so be sure to check that out. One of my favorite uses for this tool are the worksheets I've been able to create at the end of each level of my cohort program. This visual is a great review and a visual reminder to my students of the concepts that I taught. I also love the video and audio overviews. If you've been struggling with how to promote your own offer, wait until you get to hear two people discussing your content is what I describe as a mock podcast interview. You'll be so amazed at what they share, you'll want to buy your own offer. All right, so let's go ahead and move to the third AI tool I can't live without. And this one's especially important if you're creating any kind of video or audio content, which if you're running courses or a podcast, that's definitely you. I think editing is one of the biggest barriers that stops course creators and coaches from creating more content or from even starting. But Descript is a video and audio editor that works completely differently than probably anything you've already tried. Instead of editing a timeline like you would in a traditional editing software, you edit a transcript. You literally read through the transcript of your recording and delete the parts you don't want word by word. Delete the word, it removes it from the video or audio. It's that straightforward. But the AI features are what make Descript a must-have for me. With one click, Descript can remove all of the filler words from my recording. The ahs and the ums and the you knows are all gone. It also removes word gaps, those awkward little pauses between sentences that make recordings kind of sound choppy. And it removes retakes, those moments when you stumbled over a word and had to start again. Just by repeating that sentence, Descript finds all the retakes and in one click keeps the fixed sentence. All of that cleanup has saved me so much time. And it used to be manual, but now it happens in seconds. I use Descript for all my podcast episodes, recording my course videos because it handles the cleanup. And then all I do is a quick review, make any final edits, and it's done. For course creators, the ability to quickly clean up your training recordings means you can publish content faster and it sounds more polished without a lot of extra effort on your part. So if you've ever avoided starting a podcast or recording course content because the editing felt too overwhelming or too time-consuming, Descript genuinely removes that barrier. It has made creating audio and video content feel so much more accessible in a way I think all of us need right now. So for all that it does, this tool is an amazing price, and you can get started by going to my partner link, which is lydiamartin.info/podcast. Descript. They have awesome getting started tutorials, which brings up something I think is really important. I just walked you through 3 tools, and even in the time it took me to explain them, I'm guessing at least one of you thought, okay, but where do we even start with this or that? I've tried something like that before, or I couldn't figure it out. And that sounds amazing, but I don't know how to apply it to what I specifically do. That feeling is actually not a you problem. It's an information without context problem. AI tools are moving so fast right now, and it's genuinely so hard to keep up. And the gap isn't usually knowing that a tool exists. The gap is knowing how to actually use it in your specific business, how to prompt it, how to train it, how to make it work for your content, your programs, your audience. That context is what makes the difference between someone who tries the tool once and gives up, and someone who integrates it into their workflow and wonders how they ever worked without it. And this is exactly why being inside a community or working with a coach who can walk you through these tools in real time is such a game changer. When you can watch someone actually use the tool on their real business content and then ask questions in the moment, that's where the learning actually sticks. This is something I'm incredibly passionate about inside my Ignite membership, inside my cohort Impact Accelerator program, because I think it's so important to not just talk about AI in theory. We have to show up, we have to use the tools together, and we have to share what's working. I love how we're able to help each other figure out how to apply all of this to our actual businesses. So if you're feeling like you're on the outside of the AI conversation and you want to be on the inside of it, Those are the places to be. Now, some of the programs where I help people in this area are linked below. So just to recap, 3 tools that I know have been making a huge difference in my business right now are Claude for writing content that actually sounds like me with the Chrome extension Claude for Chrome, which allows me to work right inside my browser. NotebookLM for turning my existing content into stunning visual resources. And Descript for editing my video and audio content without time or overwhelm. Now, none of these tools require you to be a tech person. None of them require a massive learning curve, but what they do require is having someone show you how to use them in your actual business. But now you have a starting point. So I have a couple of YouTube videos linked in the show notes for both Claude and NotebookLM, where I go even deeper with screen recordings of my actual setup. If you're a visual learner and you actually want to see how these work, these videos are a great next step. If this episode was helpful, I would love it if you'd share it with another course creator or coach in your world who is trying to figure out the AI piece of their business. And if you haven't subscribed to the show yet, now is a great time. I've got so much more coming that I know you're gonna love. Thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you in the next episode.