107 | Cracking the LinkedIn Code: Colin Gallagher on AI, Content, and Connection Mastery

0:00Hello, and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And I've got a very interesting topic for you today and a really unique guest. And I'll let you start by imagining something. Imagine yourself in a large conference or in a big networking event. Now, most people coming into networking events and conferences will walk the floor, shake some hands, try to get into a few conversations, and then we'd leave with a few new business cards or LinkedIn contacts and maybe a lead or two.

0:34But some people have developed a system, a way to approach something that seems not systemized, but they will have a proper process that they can replicate every single time. And they will walk away from that conference with hundreds of new leads. Many of them are warm leads that will do business with them. And really the difference is, did you figure out the process to do that? Now, LinkedIn is the world's largest networking event. It has tens of millions of people or hundreds of millions of people from any language in any industry. It runs 365 days, 24 seven. The difference between people who make it on LinkedIn and people who do not make it on LinkedIn are people who have developed a process and people who have not developed a process on how to connect with relevant people on LinkedIn.

1:24That's it. There is no magic. There is no secret sauce. It's literally, there is a secret sauce, but it's a secret sauce everybody can learn. And that's exactly what we're going to do today. So I guess today, Colin Gallagher, also known as the AI marketing guy on LinkedIn, is an AI LinkedIn content guru with tens of thousands of followers to prove that he knows what he's doing. The interesting thing is in Colin's background, he's an engineer by trade, which we'll see in a minute in the way he develops processes. And he was an operation manager again. So he approaches this concept of how do I address LinkedIn in a very systemized way that works consistently over time at scale.

2:09Now, I find this extremely attracting because I'm active on LinkedIn all the time. And I always want to learn how to create better content in a consistent way using AI, and that's exactly what Colin has developed. So I'm really excited to welcome him to the show. Colin, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast.

2:51You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

3:09Hey, sir. How's it going? Thanks very much for having me on. Very excited to have a chat to you today. Same here. You and I met on LinkedIn, changing ideas and sharing AI content. And what you do is very well thought after. And so I'm really glad to have you. Yeah. It's funny because I do networking professionally, but I've never actually been to an in real life networking event because I'm a bit of an introvert. I don't like going places to talk to people. Yeah. LinkedIn has just been great for me. Obviously, LinkedIn Ghostwriters we went through, done a lot of work with CEOs and founders, and I've also had a consultant program to help people basically do what I did and get all those same benefits.

3:49So yeah, I'm a massive proponent of the platform, social media in general, really. But it is about having a system because it can get super time consuming as we can get into maybe in a minute. Yeah, I think really the, again, when you think about it, first of all, there's a really small amount of people that actually generate content on LinkedIn. I think the number is like 2 % of anybody on the platform. So if you're creating content, you're already doing something good. But the reality is, even from the people who are creating content, it's not the 80-20 rule. It's the same kind of number. It's probably 98 % of the people who create content get some benefit and 2 % get a huge benefit.

4:30And again, the difference is purely knowing what content to create and how to create it. and to find a way that will not consume a day and a half a week creating that content because we have day jobs and we don't have a day and a half a week to create content. That's the thing, yeah. I think there has been more people. I'd say that number is still probably around 2 % because the amount of users are on the platform. But there's creating content and then there's creating content with a purpose in the sense of there's a lot of people who, like kind of what I want to show is the system that we're going to go through here.

5:02It's not just about using AI and getting something that AI can say and then just putting that on LinkedIn because that's literally no value at all and that's not going to get you any anywhere because that's not the point they're missing the point of the whole thing I think the people who I see winning the most on LinkedIn is the ones getting all the leads is they're actually demonstrating that they know what they're talking about by explaining in depth like at an expert level how to do things or what they are doing on a day-to-day basis and just if i think a lot of people may have watched this and been like i can just use ai to create content this is going to be great and then i want to think ever i want people to think but not about the ai is do it for me it's like the assistant that makes it way faster and allows you to get the ideas out of your head efficiently so that you can really say what you want just faster and more because it's very much about social media is very much about not just doing one post and then be like that now i'm going to be a millionaire now it's being there every day so that people see you and you are top of mind for when they need whatever you're talking about basically an ai is just an accelerant to you being able to do that to everybody to be able to do that easier okay i think that's a great intro let's dive right in so let's dive into what you want to share what's the process what's the outcome of the process whatever you want to start with yeah sure so the what it is basically a system that allows i share this with people in my program the clients but it's basically how what i want to do is enable them to just not have to worry about their the structure of the post the hooks and all that type of stuff because they're not professional writers they are professional salespeople marketers blah blah whatever that whatever the operations people whatever that is so what the system that we're going to go through is like a framework that they can just put in and then allow them to basically I'm going to use the word mind vomit whatever they're thinking about the topic that they want not have to worry about the structure and get out the pulse pretty quickly so I'll just share my screen and I'll explain what I'm talking about I'm sure the people on that are a lot of people on here that are listening to this that tried to create content from prompts before the issue with it is you have to come up with the rules every time they have to figure out what how they wanted to write tell us you should write in this tone blah blah so on and so forth what the thing that I'm going to show is that the system that I would suggest following is you want to do that once so you want to pre-package your writing style into effectively a pdf so that you can just deploy that pdf every single time and then add on the extra context that's going to be specifically about what's in the post so i'll explain what i mean in a second but i'll go on to my linkedin profile and if anyone sees sorry i'll just delete these if anyone sees any post that i've done recently like including say this post i wrote this in about using voice typing and it took me about maybe 60 seconds because i just had the framework voice type the answer in put it into ai and it gave me the post out so this post did not so great for me in general but it actually helped me sign a couple clients because it was very consumer driven another way to do it as well is for people who there's kind of i've noticed this kind of two people two types of people who like creating content one prefers writing they prefer text-based and they're able to get their ideas out that way the other are those who are actually just good on video but they struggle with text so another way to do it is to actually just record a video, pull the transcript into the system, and then use that as the context to create the post from.

8:47So this is an example, a post that I've done that did okay. And again, just to put things in perspective, for those of you not watching, but rather listening, when you're saying a post that did okay, it's a post that is, I don't know, probably 300 words long. So it's a pretty decent post with step-by-step process with a video embedded into it that got dozens of comments and engagements. So when you're saying did okay, that's way above the average of, again, most people who create content on LinkedIn. Yeah, so maybe I'm a bit of a perfectionist. The post did pretty well, but it has all the framework of this post that we're looking at on screen at the moment.

9:28It's like how to get two to three clients every quarter as a fractional consultant. So obviously fractional consultants are going to be interested in that, and then they're going to watch a video of me talking away for 15 minutes about how they can actually do that so for this post i actually didn't type any of these words i just recorded the video first put it into my system and then it spat out the post and i was able to it spat out a post that was personalized to what i said and i think that's the important part it's not like ai pulling chat gpt information from the internet it's i said it i'm using the ai to organize it and say it in a way that makes sense and will do well on LinkedIn.

10:05Okay, awesome. I want to pause and comment on two things. One, some people are saying, I don't even know how to write and I'm really scared being on video. The thing here is not being on video. Like you don't even have to share the video. You can share an image or a video of something else that explains it. The thing is, you can just mumble your thoughts, like literally like brainstorm with yourself as you're recording it, just to share the idea and use that as the first ugly draft that the AI will take your thoughts and crystallize them into a very well-structured post that people would actually like to read.

10:46And that's what Colin is referring to. Even if you're saying, I don't want to be on video, you don't have to, but you have to record yourself as you're talking about the subject you want to write about if you're not a good writer and the AI will do the writing for you and I think that's a great segue to dive into how that's actually done yeah exactly so I'll go through that I'll go through that here so when I my writing framework that I use is called the AI VAV so that's the structure that I generally follow on LinkedIn so just a quick explainer on that so A is for attention so it's that's basically the hook so how I'm gonna hook the reader get them interested in reading the second line and so on to the rest of it i is interest so that's going to pique their interest so that's going to be doubling down on the hook so giving following up on the hook and proving that the rest of the post is enticing enough to get them to keep reading then v is value so value is something useful that they can get like for example the post that we just talked about there was about how fractional consultants can get customers on LinkedIn.

11:49The value for them is the how the eight step how to guide on actually how they can do that, which is in the text. And that's the next section after that is the A. So we have action. So this is what I want them to do. So it's go in this case, it'll be go and watch a video. And then V is visual. So visual is going to be the video in this case, or it could be an image that expands on the text, or it could be a personal image of myself or whatever that is. So I codified all that into a PDF so that I don't have to think about writing rules every time. And for people who aren't watching, I highly recommend using Claude as the AI for copywriting, specifically on LinkedIn and actually all other channels.

12:30It just has a lot better output than any of the current GPT models that have been released at the time of recording, which is 4.0, was the most recent one. Claude has much better output. but it requires less editing to actually get it to a point where it's usable. And also Claude can handle much bigger inputs without hallucinating. So the PDF that I'm about to add here has 131 lines of text. So it's quite a lot of information to take in. And for a vision, just hallucinate so much that it doesn't get the output right. Whereas Claude can handle a lot more than I've put in, actually. And I agree.

13:11I think when it comes to writing text that sounds human, with that a lot of effort, Claude just wins as of right now. By the way, my number two is Gemini and ChatUpt is just my number three. Again, as of June 13th at 9.23 a.m. Because I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. But as of right now, I agree with you 100%. Claude, as far as writing good content and also as a great summarizer of long content, is still my number one choice. Yeah, very good. Yeah, I haven't tried Gen.I, but it's well ahead of that. So what I want to do now is we'll write a post, and I'm going to write it for you, actually, sir.

13:54Awesome. Let's do it. I'm going to make up a content strategy for you on LinkedIn that you want to teach people how to grow their podcast, because you've done a good job. But we're going to create content around that. So now that I have that put in, All I need to do is write, use the framework. And you can have keywords to do that. I just don't. Use the framework in the PDF to write 200 to 220 word LinkedIn post about the following. And then I'm just going to skip two lines. And I'll usually just put in these three ats to separate it. I actually don't know if this makes any difference, but it's just a habit for formatting reasons.

14:37and what I do then is I turn on voice typing. So I'm using a MacBook Air and if I double tap control, voice typing turns on. The reason I do that is because it's much easier for me and most people to communicate by speaking because they're able to just, that's what they're used to talking about. So I can just turn on voice typing and just start speaking basically. So you get ideas out much easier this way. So usually what I would do as a prep for this if I was creating a week's worth of content, I would have lined up maybe 15 ideas that I want to talk about. And then I'm going to just pick one of them and then start talking away.

15:17No structure, whatever it might be, just get it out there. So I'm going to say, I'm going to turn on voice typing by just double tapping control. And then I'm going to start talking. I'm going to have to delete this bit. But here's how to grow your podcast to 10 ,000 listeners per day.

15:38One, record daily. It's important to record daily because we want to get people in the habit of coming back for their daily fix of valuable information every day and become part of the routine. Two, get high value guests that have had successful appearances on other podcasts. by leveraging their previous background, you'll start to pull in new listeners from other podcasts quickly. I'm just going to stop that now because it will stop. Yeah, I'm just going to say. Yeah, and I think for, as an example, that's good enough, right? Obviously, I will say two things. Like when I record solo episodes, which is the same thing, I just be talking about a topic, I will prepare some bullet points.

16:25Right now we're doing a demo and Colin is literally winging it. But I'm sure when you do this, you have a few bullet points as general things you want to say. And then you just talk about these bullet points for just trying to make the bullet points as you're talking. But what you'll see that even with this, that Colin was just thinking as he was doing, as soon as he hits enter, which is just what he did, we're going to get a very detailed post. And I'll let you walk us through what it's generating. Yeah. So again, I didn't know anything about that topic, so I'm not going to be adding a huge amount of value there.

16:58but what it did what this does then it's going to take this and structure what i said and it'll structure it as per the ai vav so you can see it here for people watching but let's read for the people who are just listening the actual thing that it's saying yeah sure the output came with how to grow your podcast to 10 000 daily listeners in record time i use this exact formula most new podcasters struggle for months to get any real traction but here's a simple three-part system to explode your listenership fast one daily record get listeners hooked on coming back for a daily dose of valuable content consistency breeds habit and loyalty two book high value guests leverage the audience of successful folks who've been on other popular podcasts in your niche their fans will follow them to your show three prepare bullet point outlines have a clear concise talking points having clear concise talking points keeps your episodes focused and engaging no rambling or fluff when you deliver valuable content on a reliable schedule and bring on guests with existing followings you pull in floods of new listeners rapidly i use this we can pause Because here, I mean, see, very obvious that this is a structured post with a good hook and a good flow.

18:17That was not in the thing that you just recorded. I was, no, I was stumbling and I couldn't think of what to say, but I just got it out. So the magic is that PDF, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's having a framework that you can rely on. Obviously, I've written a lot of posts, but everyone has their own style and they have their own style that they want to follow to. the difference between this and maybe the other ai content systems that you might have seen in the past it doesn't follow a template it follows a framework so i i don't want to give it a template because if i give it a template then i need a new template for every post that i do but if i have a framework as in first you need to do this so inside that document it's basically so let's dive into the document let's share yeah show what the magician is doing behind the curtain so let me just get that so av7 as you can see i've i've versioned it a few times but whenever i'm doing anything like this is basically the system instructions so you know you are li king claude i just made up something you'll help me create linkedin posts using the following information so section one is the writing framework section two is example posts because it needs to know it needs to have good examples on what to put in.

19:35Section three is post context, which is referring back to what we just did. The post context is what I said. So that was the voice type piece. And then four, you will output the new LinkedIn post. And then I'll just go into detail about the writing framework. So here it's the attention section. So what I've done is give it a set of rules. So all posts are between this and that. Don't use emojis. in eighth grade English. Here's an example. And then I gave an example post to follow. And then I went and showed, here's section A in that example. Here's section I, B, A, B. So I want to pause you just for one second.

20:13One of the things that people miss, and it's actually easier than people think, is the example part. These tools become significantly better when you give them examples. By the way, good and bad examples. You can use both, but at least give it good examples. What is the outcome supposed to look like? Now, the cool thing is, we're talking about LinkedIn. Even if you've posted zero content and you have no good examples to show, you're following other people in your niche that have shared good content. And you're saying, okay, I want to write or I want to create posts like this and this, because I see other people in my niche posting amazing content that is structured in these ways.

20:50So you can literally take these as your examples. And all that Colin is doing here, in addition to sharing the example, he is breaking down, explaining the example to the AI. It's basically, okay, here's the sentence that is the hook. It's marked with an asterisk. Here's the sentence that is the value. It's marked by three hashtags. Here's a sentence and you can then break it down to the AI to say, okay, this is the framework I want to use. Here are other people's successful examples of that. It It doesn't even have to be yours in order to still give it the exact framework and the exact understanding of the outcome that you're looking for.

21:33Yeah, exactly. So just the better, the more examples, the better. In this document, this is the attention section here, but I've just put in 40 other examples of hooks. So it knows exactly what that first line is generally wanting to be like. And again, these hooks, we're talking about many hooks that are written here as examples. and I don't know if you came up with all of them, but a lot of them could be from other people that you just see that are writing great hooks. Yeah, a lot of them would have been following original templates, but for someone who'd be looking to build out their own examples at the start, let's say, you can't just write the post yourself manually first.

22:13You know what I mean? So if I was looking to do this and I didn't want to use someone else's and I had my own style that I wanted to be, I would actually just forget about the AI for the first bit and then i'd reverse i'd write five posts or ten posts and be like these are good i like these and then i'd reverse engineer those into your framework because sometimes when you take someone else's you don't it doesn't always flow too well when you put it through an ai because it'll end up not understanding it as you intended it to so if i was saying for someone who wanted to do this, I would say, just forget AI at the start, write five posts, and then build your framework around those five posts, because they're going to follow a rough framework.

22:58Yeah, but I think you have so much experience and understanding and analysis that you can think in a framework. And I think most people, especially people getting started, cannot. But I want to scroll back and break this down a detail further, the document. So you started really with your first segment first of all my first question are all the segments the same meaning does every one of those segments of the document share the concept of that segment in the framework and then examples yes yeah so you started by explaining to it what's the ai vav framework literally breaking this down then you go to each and every one of the letters so you start with attention interest value etc yeah exactly yeah so here i'll go to i'll go to attention so as an example i said i i need to speak to it as if it's like a five-year-old so i need to get them to understand so the a and a i v stands for attention is the first line in the attention thing attention serves as the hook it's the show stopper that makes someone pause and take notes and so on and i'll give it i'll just explain in more detail and then I'll say let's look at this one as an example and then I give an example and explain why it's a good example and then I'll say here are 30 other examples or I think I've said here are more so the way that I've gone about it is I'll say I'll introduce the section I'll give one primary example and then I'll break that one down in detail and then I'll say here are other examples so there will be perfect so so that's the framework explanation detail broken down example, and then a lot of other just simple examples.

24:36And again, the examples here are just hooks. 99 % of LinkedIn posts suck in parentheses, follow this framework so yours won't. How I get three to four qualified leads every day on LinkedIn without paid ads, and so on and so forth. There's 40 of them here that are just examples. But before that, there was an example that explains why a hook is a hook and why it works. And so this is how you broken down every single segment of the stocking yes and then what typically happens then is the hooks in the new posts that i'm written will follow an outline of one of these it'll pick one it'll pick the highest probability one that sounds the best and it'll put it out uh so for example it might change the topic of please stop with the whatever it is you are negative consequence or whatever so it'll the way that this is set up is it'll analyze all these hooks and then it'll find the best fit and then it'll change the wording to suit the topic yeah yeah awesome so yeah so again going back more examples is better on every one of these aspects so basically this is a giant mega prompt that is very well structured and follows a lot of best practices both in means of the structure of it as well as in means of explaining exactly what you mean as well as in means of providing a lot of examples.

25:52This is just the AIVV part, but then you had three other sections, right? So what are the other sections? Are there in this document or one of them you said is what you wrote or said within the prompt, but what are the other segments in the document other than explaining the framework itself? So first one is the framework section was a framework then two is just backed up by more examples of more examples as opposed to more examples of full posts as opposed to the examples of each section if that makes sense so section two is i just put 15 old posts that i've done and they are examples to follow the third section then is just the context so that's the specific context that i want to talk about in this post which is what we put together in Claude.

26:41So that's the how to grow your podcast by 10 ,000 listeners. That's the context in this case. And then the final section four is just the output. So that's the instruction. So then if you think about it, there's 23 pages of prompt here. I just need to do this once, save it as a PDF, and just upload it every time. So it cuts down me needing to think about structuring the prompt and copying and pasting and bringing that in every time. And I can just get straight into what's the most important part, which is getting the idea out of my head through voice typing, which is I found the lowest barrier to the entryway to do that.

27:18Or you can record the video and pull the transcript and do it that way as well. So it kind of depends on whichever way you want to go about it. No, this is amazing. I want to highlight two important things about the whole process. And one is, I talk about this a lot on the show, having a prompt library is important. And especially on the things that are the critical path of whatever your business is, right? So in Colin's case, his critical path is content on LinkedIn, because he's teaching people how to do that. But in your business, it might be marketing, it might be sales, it might be customer service, it might be customer success, it might be finance, it might be all of the above.

27:58but having a prompt that is solid, that works consistently every single time to do the thing you're trying to do is critical because if once you figure it out and you may invest, and some people saying, Oh my God, he wrote 23 pages, like writing the prompt, sorry, writing the post will take me five minutes. Writing a 23 page prompt will take me five hours to figure it out. But once you figured it out once those five hours, you can generate daily good posts or again, any other thing in your company that you need in seconds. And so when you look at the ROI over a quarter or over a year, it's an extremely good ROI.

28:42And I think a lot of people are just afraid of, oh my God, you want me to now figure out how to write a 23 page prompt and collect all these examples and do all that stuff? That's crazy. I It's true if you just compare that work to writing one post. But if you compare that to writing 365 posts in a year, that's a whole different ballgame. Or again, the same concept applies to anything else you want to try to do in your business. The other thing that I will say, that's going back to what you said in the beginning, it's a great iterative process, right? So this is version seven. So version one was smaller and with less examples.

29:20And then you had version two and version three and version four. So you iterate as you learn and you keep on improving your go-to prompt in the prompt library. Funnily enough, version four was probably the longest. And since the AI models have improved, I actually was able to reduce the amount of text in it. I think that got better. So, yeah, because I think it was hallucinating its way to getting the right answer before somehow. up whereas then it started listening to the rules better and I could be more concise with the later version so six and seven were considerably shorter than the ones that came previously which was interesting on my end when I was putting them together as well I think yeah as you touched on with content it's not about you could just write one post and that's fine the majority of people like by hand and you can post it but the majority of people that I've you know worked with they really struggle to get the ideas out of their head to get started and a person who started my program a while ago she said it took her three and a half hours to write the first post and that was just because she kept getting stunted by the various different parts and she had to think about what am I going to talk about and then what am I what hook am I going to use and then what value am I going to do and then what video am I going to do and then it just became overwhelming you You know, so it's not about being able to write one post.

30:44Even if you were only writing one post and it took two hours, that'd be okay. But two hours every day is too much. You know what I mean? And you really win with content and just content. The whole thing is about building trust and showing up and proving that you're going to show day after day. In order to do that, you need to try and minimize the amount of friction to stop you showing up. Sorry. So you need to be there. and things like this, if you want to use AI to help you, 23 pages might sound like a lot, but once you do it once, then you have it forever or at least you can iterate it and improve on it.

31:19One thing that I'm working on here that I still haven't fully cracked is using additional tools like make.com or IntegraMata as it used to be to set up chain prompts in the backend so that it'll write multiple posts and it will take information through a form and do all my posting and everything on the back end. I'm working on some pretty exciting stuff with that. I haven't fully figured it out yet, but I think as the AI models continuously improve, which they will, that will become easier. And then someone who's probably reading this and thinking, oh, but then all the content's just going to be AI.

31:55That might be true, but it'll still be very much about you demonstrating that you know what you're talking about and your unique experience. That isn't going to go away. I will say something about what you said. Yes, there's going to be more and more AI generated content, but there's going to be vanilla generated content that nobody would care about. And there's going to be high value, useful AI generated content that will be like this, right? Because it comes from actual experts with actual domain expertise, with connection to the audience, with understanding of what actually is important to the people.

32:27And that will resonate with people. And so I think this, at least in the foreseeable future until AGI arrives, and then maybe it knows how to do all of that better than any of us, including all the steps that you and I are now trying to do on our side, not on the AI side. At least until then, I think this is a very valuable method. I will add two cents on some things that I've said in the beginning. if you don't know how to get started and what to even do, again, just you can do this by analyzing other people's content. You can literally start by looking at what other people in your niche are doing successfully.