Sarah Raanan Content and Coaching

Every time you put something good into the world, a dog barks.

Some keyboard warrior with a strong opinion decides that commenting on your post is their moment to shine. Or maybe there's a comment that misses the point entirely. Or it opens with "not being funny, but..." "not being rude, but..." (they are about to be rude, we know that) The person who has never built a 'thing', explaining how you are building yours wrong.

The temptation is always the same: stop what you're doing, turn round, explain yourself by writing the perfect reply that will FINALLY make them get it and see the error of their ways.

But every metaphorical stone you stop to throw is a step you don't take toward the thing you want. It's a distraction, pullng you off course, pulling at your limited supply of energy.

So keep walking, keep building your thing. Let the dogs stay where they are, barking at the fence. You are not walking that way, you're on a whole other path.

Share this to your stories if you think this is a reminder your people need today.

I stopped typing my captions and started saying them out loud. And I realised that, as a kid, I saw my dad doing this all the time.

He's a solicitor. Back in the '80s, I'd go to visit his office now and then and find him mid-sentence talking into his dictaphone.

I always thought it was such a clever idea, and it is. It was just what people did back then, and I'm really happy to see it back in modern-day form.

Typing wakes up your inner editor.

You write a line, delete it, rewrite it, second-guess it, get stuck, then get bored.

But when you speak, that editor switches off. Your genuine vocabulary comes out, in your rhythm and style. Which is exactly the version your audience likes you for. And how your future audience will connect with you.

And it's quicker. You speak around 150 words a minute and type around 40. A five minute ramble is a caption, a story script, a newsletter intro and most of a blog post.

Will you feel silly talking to yourself at first? Yes. Does it pass? Quicker than you'd expect. Nothing gets played back to you, and a decent tool (I use Wispr Flow) tidies your stumbles as you go.

If you ramble, give your brain a formula. Hook, story, takeaway, CTA, in that order. I close my eyes while I dictate. It shuts out the distractions.

Try it before you have time to overthink it!

🛼 Give it a go
🙏🏻 Thank me later.
👉🏻 Follow for more Claude tips and strategies.

I used to spend aaaaages in Canva. I would lose hours of my day fiddling with font sizing and margins, trying to condense what I need to say into ten slides and make it all look on brand. It was the part of content creation I liked least, and it took the longest.🥱

Then I started asking Claude to build my carousels.

I give it the topic for the title slide, the key points I want on each slide, and my brand elements to use.

It already knows my brand colours, fonts, and my preferred font sizing. It gives me back the whole carousel as individual PNG files I can check slide by slide, and a PDF with the full overview. Slides, layout, text hierarchy, consistent styling. Ready to download and post.

The first time it worked I sat there for a minute because the thing I'd been avoiding all morning was finished. I did not know what to do with myself. It's actually insane.

I still tweak things. I'll change a word on a slide, adjust a colour, swap the order of two points. But the version Claude gives me is usually 95% there. The last 5% takes a few minutes.

If you're a solo business owner who dreads the graphics part of posting, try this, please!
Open Claude Cowork, describe what you want your carousel to say, tell it your brand info (fonts and colours) and ask it to build the slides. Want to add other elements? Just ask if it's possible; the answer will be yes.

You might not open Canva again either after this.

🛼 Give it a go
🙏🏻 Thank me later.
👉🏻 Follow for more Claude tips and strategies.

Being known for one thing is the best marketing you'll ever do.

Your reputation offline was built on it. Someone asked for a recommendation, your name came up, and it came up for something specific.

Online works the same way. Fewer topics, gone deeper. Fewer offers, built properly. Fewer platforms, handled consistently. Fewer yeses, chosen carefully.

Then the compounding starts.

Decisions speed up because most options disqualify themselves. Content gets easier to write because you know what it's for. Your audience learns exactly what to bring you. And the right clients arrive half-sold, because everything they've seen from you points the same way.

Choose the one thing you want to be known for, and let everything you publish point at it.

I connected my Gmail to Claude last month. Now it pulls action items from my inbox every morning and presents them to me before I've even opened Gmail.

Cowork is Claude's desktop-only app.

It can connect to your Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Google Drive, spreadsheets and Zoom, to name just a few.

You chat with Claude like you would with your personal assistant and it works inside your tools and apps. One window, all your work. No more bouncing between 6 tabs and losing your train of thought every time you switch.

The Gmail setup is simple.

You click one button and sign into Google. Done.

From there you can ask Claude to sort your inbox, label threads, search by sender or date, summarise long conversations, flag what needs your attention, and draft routine replies.

You can also set it up as a recurring task, so Claude runs through your inbox every morning before you even open it.

Claude handles the sorting, searching, labelling, and routine replies. For the emails that need your voice, you still write those yourself. 100%

I walked through the full setup in this carousel.

Swipe through for the step-by-step.

💾 Save this, thank me later and follow for more Claude tips and strategies.

The boring stuff is usually the profitable stuff.

Edison said opportunity is missed because it looks like work. And he was right, because the things that move a business forward tend to look spectacularly unglamorous.

Following up with people who enquired six weeks ago. Updating your website copy so it sounds like the person you are now, not the version from 2021. Writing the email to your list when you haven't emailed them in four months and it feels a bit awkward (because it is a bit awkward).

These are the tasks you skip when you're "busy." They sit at the bottom of your to-do list getting rewritten week after week, and somehow the week always ends before you reach them.

Meanwhile, you sign up for another course, join another group programme, download another freebie, because those feel like progress. They feel productive.

The unsexy work is where your next client is sitting. The follow-up, the bio update, the post you've been putting off because you can't get the first line right.

You already know what that thing is for you.

Go do it.

You can post every day and still end up nowhere.

Posting without a strategy feels productive. You're doing the thing. Ticking the box. Publishing on schedule. (Full marks for effort, truly.)

And six months later you look back and realise the content didn't take you anywhere specific, because you never decided where "anywhere specific" was.

That's usually a direction problem. You've been consistent, you've been creating, and you still can't trace a line from your content to your clients.

So the question worth sitting with: do you know where your content is taking people, or are you just hoping they figure it out?

If you want more gentle pep talks (and some not so gentle), follow along. I talk about this stuff constantly. Like, until you'll be rolling your eyes at me. But also you know I'm right.

One of my favourite Claude features is one most people haven't tried yet.

Claude connects to Google Calendar through Cowork. Ask "what's on my plate today?" and you get your schedule without switching windows. Say "schedule a call with Lisa next Tuesday at 2pm" and the event shows up on your calendar. Ask when you're free this week and Claude pulls up the open slots.

Rescheduling, updating details, adding links, changing times. One sentence each.

To connect: Settings > Connectors > Google Calendar.

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I spent way too long telling myself that I was busy with work, and avoiding looking at my bank account.

There's a world of difference between a functioning, profitable business and a hobby, no matter how 'busy' you tell yourself you are.

My advice to you? Audit what you did last week.

Separate the things that moved the needle from the things that just kept you occupied.

What percentage of activities you did, honestly got you closer to making more money?

The ratio will probably make you uncomfortable. Good (with love 🫶)

🎢 If Claude's capabilities were already blowing your mind, you’d better strap in ‘cos Claude 'Dispatch' is here, and it can run tasks for you on your computer while you're off somewhere else, doing more important things.

Yep, that’s right. Claude has a feature called 'Dispatch.' Here's why I want to tell everyone about it.

Most people use Claude the same way. You ask something, it answers, you refine, and then you take the output somewhere else. You're still doing the moving, the pasting, the organising (aka boring stuffs).

'Dispatch' takes that ‘doing’ off your plate.

You send requests from your phone or browser. They run on your Mac or PC in the background. You can walk away and come back to finished work.

The part I'm geeking out about the most is that you can queue up multiple tasks at once, and they can all run at the same time.

So you could have it summarise yesterday's Slack messages with your team. You could ask it to check your calendar for things you need to do today. Have it turn Monday's transcript from your Zoom meeting into important action items as a PDF. And ask it to update a client's content calendar on their spreadsheet.

All of those can be happening in parallel while you go do something less boring instead.

You pick what goes in. It only touches what you tell it to.

🛼 Give it a go.
🙏🏻 Thank me later.
👉🏻 Follow for more Claude tips and strategies.