04 | Supercharge Your LinkedIn Game: Boost Authority and Grow Your Business with AI Automation. With Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of Ajax Union

0:00In this episode, the amazing Joe Applebaum is going to share what AI tools and what process he uses and his clients use to build more relationship and deeper relationships on LinkedIn as a lever for business growth. But if you missed the previous episode, jump to that one first. It's an incredible, incredible episode with Carl Yeh, and he's sharing how to take AI tools and bring them from testing by specific individuals into a company-wide process based on real-life experience in his company. And now to the fascinating conversation with Joe Applebaum. Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency and drive business growth.

0:46This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I have an incredibly exciting guest for you today. His name is Joe Affelbaum, and he is a global expert on LinkedIn and AI automation tools. And he's going to teach us today in a very short amount of time, what's the process you need to follow in order to grow your LinkedIn relationship building and authority building, enhance your business without being salesy while leveraging amazing automation tools to do it in the most efficient way. So Joe, welcome to Leveraging AI. Thank you so much for having me on this program. Really excited to be here. So when you want to leverage AI and you want to leverage LinkedIn, you first have to make sure that you have a strategy because the right strategy will save you a decade.

1:29Most people are using energy without strategy, and that is a waste of time. So what is a good strategy for using LinkedIn, there are really three steps to being successful at LinkedIn. There's Brandon, Buildin, and Boomin. In each one of those three steps, I walk people through how they can make sure that in Brandon, they have an actual strategy. That means they have a plan for their business, for their marketing, for LinkedIn. They have the right target market. That means that they're focusing on the right people, making sure that they're targeting the right clients, the right potential clients, the right centers of influence, the people that are in the position to refer business to them because LinkedIn is a social networking platform, a professional social networking platform with 900 million people.

2:09So you have to know who the right people are that you're going to target. So after you have your plan, then you pick your people and then you pick your promise. So the third step in Brandon is making sure you have a solid promise, which means have the right messaging for your ideal clients. If you don't know who your ideal client is, how are you supposed to know what messaging to give them? And if you don't know what your plan is how are you supposed to pick who your ideal client is? So there is a sequence to making sure that you're successful on LinkedIn and using a tool like, for example, ChatGPT, it can help you figure out your plan.

2:42It can help you identify your target market and your center of influence, and it can help you create the messaging specifically for that target market that will get them to want to connect with you, to want to build relationships with you, and to want to do business with you. Once you have your foundation in place... So let me pause you for one second. this is probably really weird to people because most people don't understand how to use ChatGPT for this. So can you give us a quick example on what could be the prompt to do market research and what could be the prompt to identify the people on LinkedIn that you should target?

3:17So for example, if you're in ChatGPT, you can just say, who should I target? It's not going to help you. What you want to do, you want to first feed it information around who you are, what you do, what your offer is, what exactly you're doing. And then you can tell it something like, act like a marketing strategist and tell me who is the best industry? What is the best industry? Who is the right target market in order for me to be able to be successful using LinkedIn? And it'll start giving you ideas. And then you can ask it, which one is the most lucrative? Which one has the most people? Which one are most likely on LinkedIn?

3:49And then the more conversation you have with it, the more you could figure out exactly who you need to be targeting And then at one point you can say, act as an expert marketing strategist and develop an ICP, which stands for an ideal client profile, include geography, include title, and include all the filters that I can use on LinkedIn to be able to find this target market. And then once it does that, it'll literally tell you all the different search criteria that you need to put into LinkedIn and give you specific examples to help you be able to find the target market. And then you tell it, what should I say to this person?

4:24What messaging should I include? And then you could be very specific. You can say, act as a social media community manager and create a connection note that is under 50 words and make it relevant to these specific target market. And you could be very specific with the prompt and it'll help you be able to actually create messaging that will resonate with your target market and help you get to your plan. Awesome. So that's the branding. What's the building step? So now once you have the branding in place, now you gotta build. You gotta have assets. What are assets? you got to know what your stories are.

4:55Most people are sharing information on LinkedIn. And instead of just sharing information, which you can go to Google to get information, you got to tell stories. Stories sell. Features tell and stories sell. Once you have your stories in place and you have solid content that will resonate with your target market with the right messaging, then you need to get your presence in order, which means having the right profile. Inside our course, we have 20 different bullet points of things that you can do in your profile to improve your profile. I gave you an example earlier called the headline and creating the right headline, using tools like copy.ai.

5:26It'll actually analyze your LinkedIn profile for you and suggest certain elements for it. But what I like doing with people is making sure that they have the elements set up correctly on their profile because people will not trust you. If they go to your profile, you're missing an image. Things don't look correctly. No one even knows what you do for a living. So having a solid profile might even be more important than having a solid website. When people search for your first and last name, LinkedIn usually comes up. And so you want to make sure that people will find you both on Google and on LinkedIn.

5:57And then finally, the third step inside creating your assets, which is in Buildin, is making sure you have the right automation tools. What are the five technologies that you're going to use to automate processes on LinkedIn so you're not wasting time doing the same stuff over and over and over? There are tools for templates. There are tools to send out emails to your connections. There are tools to create content calendars. There are tools to create content. Making sure you understand what tools you need to use and having a good stack for LinkedIn is really important. So now we did the foundation, which is your strategy, Brandon.

6:26Then we did your assets, which is building, making sure you have the right stories, the right presence and the right automation. And finally, the last step is to make sure you're taking the right actions. We call this booming. There are three results you want from LinkedIn. You want exposure, you want credibility. And ultimately, if you're in business development, you want new meetings, you want new clients. I believe that conversions come from conversations. And the more conversations you have that are relevant, the more likely you are that you're gonna get ideal clients. If you go to a networking event, you don't just wanna sit there and steer at people.

6:58So why are you on LinkedIn steering at people and just lurking? Instead, get into the conversation. So how do you get exposure? How do you build credibility? How do you book meetings? Having the right strategy and having the right knowledge to be able to do this correctly is gonna be key. So specifically with getting exposure, it's about posting. There are six different types of posts that you can post on LinkedIn. And doing it in line with the strategy is very, very key. There's also ways to engage and get engagement and getting recommendations and getting endorsements to build credibility. And then finally, there's a three-step process for booking meetings on LinkedIn.

7:31We call it greeting, feeding, and then meeting. A lot of people go straight for the meeting. That is selling and selling on LinkedIn is smelling. So you want to be able to make sure that you have the right tools, the right assets, the right information to help you succeed. And if you do it correctly, you're much more likely to be successful using LinkedIn. Here's a quick prompt that you can use to be able to create content with a tool like ChatGPT or with CanvaWrite or with Notion. You can say, act as an expert LinkedIn content writer and create a LinkedIn post that is less than 2 ,000 characters.

8:03Consider the LinkedIn user who is the author of the post that is writing the content. Use a professional tone and address the audience reading the post on LinkedIn. Use at least eight sentences using short paragraphs separated by breaks and are social media friendly and easy to read. Start with a hook, add main points and a call to action. at the end, encourage people that are LinkedIn connections to like the post and leave relevant comments on the post. Include three popular hashtags and use markdown in your output. Consider the following information as well. And you can add whatever information you want there as well.

8:31So that's called prompt engineering. And if you learn how to use this correctly, you're much likely to succeed using AI together with LinkedIn. Boom, head blown. Joe, this was incredible, really amazing. We recorded a much longer episode. It will come out live probably a few weeks after this short one comes out. Thank you so much. This was absolutely incredible. Boom. Wow, right? What level of energy and knowledge from Joe. You should wait until we release the full episode with all the details on how to do all the things you talked about. It's absolutely mind-blowing. People may think that AI will take away the personal relationships.

9:09I think it will enhance it in an amazing way. And Joe's processes just show how to do that. But do not go anywhere because our next guest is absolutely mind-blowing. His name is Yuval Mahlin. He is the chief strategy officer and the chief product officer of DID. It's a company and a product that uses AI in order to create avatars that you can paste text into them. And they will speak in a human way, whatever it is you want to add to them. And it's an incredible tool to create marketing content, training content, and customer service stuff literally in seconds instead of weeks and months of video filming and editing.

9:46So don't go anywhere.