187 | How Top Creators Use AI to Create Scroll-Stopping LinkedIn Content with MJ Jaindl

21:48So I have my color palette here. These are my green colors. I start the post by clicking that. what that allows me to do is set the style. So now I have my color palette immediately in Ideogram, which makes it easier to create this image. So we're going to create an image of our robot. The thing I love about Ideogram is you don't need to have complex prompt engineering skills. You could actually put in something very simple and it'll generate something decent and beautiful. And I'm going to say, generate a mint green image of a head of an AI robot. So we're going to give that a try. I like to use this paid version of Ideogram only because it lets me create many images quickly.

22:31The great thing about AI is that it takes your prompt and it creates something very quickly. The challenging thing about AI is you really can't control it perfectly. You can get a general feel and a general direction. But as you can see, within a few seconds, I was able to create a number of AI robots. I kind of like this one down here. So the first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and download it. and while you're downloading it i'll say two things about ai image generation there's multiple tools out there right between more professional tools like mid-journey or even kreya or stuff like that all the way to just creating images in chachapiti or gemini and the biggest difference between these tools and i'll talk about ideogram as well because you mentioned that ideogram was probably the only tool that could create text consistently and well 90 of the time now chachapiti and Gemini more or less nailed that as well.

23:22The biggest disadvantage of using ChatGPT right now, which their latest tool is incredible, like it's amazing at creating images and text and everything, its biggest disadvantage is time. So rendering a single image takes it, I don't know, 35 seconds to a minute, sometimes more. And here in Ideogram, we just created 12 of them in six seconds. And so if you want to create multiple versions of what you want to create, so you have options to pick from, then ideogram is a better option the other thing that ideogram did very well is it knows how to capture that these particular colors but you can do that in chat gpt as well you can literally upload a color palette and then use it again and again and as of a few days ago in custom gpts in chat gpt so these automations that you can build they're now using the new image generation tool versus dali so you can actually have your color palette in a custom gpt plus some basic instructions on what you're creating this for.

24:18This is going to be the cover. I'm going to use this and that way. So give it a lot of guidance. So when it creates that one image in a minute, it will actually going to be a good image. So there's obviously trade-offs and there's goods and bads on both sides, but pick the tool that works for you and your process and keep on running with that. Keep on trying different tools because they change all the time. Absolutely. Yeah, agreed. It can be challenging to keep up with it all, but it's also very helpful to kind of stay on top of all the different things that are happening. So you can pick what's right for you.

24:44Yeah, I do agree with my light because it just generates the image fast. You don't need a complex prompt and they look pretty great. And again, it's all about speed. LinkedIn posting consistently is a big growth driver. And so you don't really, for most folks, especially if you're busy and you're a working professional, LinkedIn is in your full-time job. You need to be able to create things quick. Ideagram helps you. So once I've created that, I just drag that image in over here. And before we do that, I just took the trigger word and the title from a different slide and pasted it in here. And one thing that I like to call out is that the reason this font stands out so well, it's nuanced, but it's just a tall font.

25:21It's actually really long words. So not all fonts look like this. They're not all tall like this. But this is what you want to focus on. You want to have a tall font on your cover for that trigger word. This is something that's really important. And again, I ask anybody who's watching, like, go through your feed and just flick through it. You'll see that this trigger word is the thing that kind of sticks out in your brain. So you're really trying to do that. You know, we were talking about AI robots. I don't know specifically if robots is going to be, you know, maybe there's an audience for robots, but let's assume that there is, right?

25:51There's an audience for like AI robots and bots or whatever. I would be tempted to say AI robots, but I probably wouldn't. I would say I would just keep it as robots and keep AI in the top. When I talk about LinkedIn, which is like a viral topic on LinkedIn, everybody wants to learn about LinkedIn on LinkedIn. I'm always tempted to have LinkedIn in my trigger word, but I always refrain from it. And I usually relegate it to the title because I want to keep that trigger word clean. I don't want many words in there and I don't want to shrink it. So let's just kind of make this up and say all about AI robots.

26:26Now we have our title, very simple. We have our trigger word, a large trigger word. and what I like to do now is it is pretty easy. I can just drag in the image. So I dragged in the image from ideogram and I want to show everybody something really quickly that's very important, which is I'm going to settings in Comba and I'm clicking on show margins. Show margins is so important for your designs. Our eyeballs do not like if something were to look like this, for example, like covering the slide all the way from the left to the right and not respecting that margin. It is sometimes tempting to do this because you want to fit more on the page or you want to go like this.

27:02It kind of hangs out of the margin. It's very thin over here. I urge anyone who's thinking about design and design better, do not do that. Use the margins as gospel and try your best to not go outside of them. Maybe you can with the image, but our brain really likes when everything looks neat and structured. So that's what gives it a professional look. When people say, oh, it looks very professional. I don't get it. I don't understand why it looks that way. it's because the designer that designed it was respecting the margins and spacing between all the images and stuff. So throw on that show margins, you'll kind of be able to see where the text is, and you won't have to go outside of it.

27:36Once I've added the image here, you can see it as a background, you know, doesn't look too interesting. But Canva has this feature, it's one of the best features in Canva, it's BG Remover that remove a background, you can do this in ideogram as well, but it's a little bit easier to do it over on the Canva side. So once you click this, I also find literally the Canva background remover to be the best there is right now. Like you can do it. It's very good. Other tools. It's fantastic. Yeah, I agree. So now that I gave everybody a rule, you have to break the rule. And the rule is when you put an image on the page, I like to go outside of the margins because I like to make the image big and bold.

28:10So it just looks a little bit better. I don't always do this. Sometimes you keep it here and it's nice and clean, but I feel that when it's larger, it looks better. And so So what I'll try to do is come here and add the image and put it into position. So that's literally just drag and drop very easy. And then when you want to position it, you can come up here, click position, and you can just click to front. What that's going to do is bring the image forward. So it's in front of the text. I want to make sure the text is actually readable. So it'll shrink it down. So it's not covering like key parts of the word, but that also gives you another reason for folks to stop, which is coming on here and seeing this image here in front of the text, it makes it a little bit more prominent.

28:50So the last thing that I typically do is add some sort of background element to give it text or texture or depth. You could do this a couple different ways. The easiest is to come up here to design and click on elements and then come in and just say grainy. You could say grainy circle, or you could say grainy texture and all of these different textures come up. If you're using the pro version, you have more options. That's always better, but you can throw one of these textures on the page and you could position it in the back. This gives the whole design a little bit more depth. So you can see there, instead of looking just like black background, you have a little bit more depth to it and you can turn the transparency down.

29:29So it's not overwhelming. You don't really want this element of the slide to be overwhelming. You just want it to be there to look a little bit more leveled up a little bit more sophisticated. And then finally I'll add like one more grainy element. So I'll come in here and say granny circle or shape. You also get all these different options in combo. You could kind of use whatever you want. Most of these have the ability for you to kind of change the color on it. So I can come in here and change this to my color palette. And I could kind of add it behind one of my images and move it to the back.

29:59So now that you've done this, the last thing to do is just a minor positioning of all of the elements here to make sure that everything is like, you know, in the right place. But once you've done that, you kind to have a beautiful cover image that you've created. And as you can see, it took a little bit longer to explain these things, but it doesn't take long. You could actually create a cover like this in just a few minutes. It's pretty simple. Again, for those of you just listening, we're looking now at a cover image that again, looks like National Geographic, right? Or like a professional magazine.

30:27It just looks amazing. And it was created, if we now review the steps very carefully, the first thing was picking the right keyword that is really big. The second was writing a few words above it to make it into a sentence, in our case, all about AI. And then it says robots in a big font, creating a relevant image that will be cool and interesting and thumb stopper on any image generator, bringing it in, removing the background, and then applying two different levels of just grainy backgrounds, one on the entire image just to break the black. And the other is something that is more centered behind the image itself.

30:59Something in like a shape of a circle or an oval or something like that usually works well. And then just playing with the elements. And the last thing that really makes it stand out is really the top of the image to cover the bottom of the big word of the text. And that, again, gives it that professional, also that depth, that 3D look almost that makes it very interesting. If you're creating an image, one of the things that we tried, if you're creating an image that kind of has depth to begin with, it makes it even more interesting if you add some text on the bottom that is in front of the thing.

31:27And that really gives it a lot of depth because then the bottom of the image kind of looks behind the text while the top of the image looks on top of the text. and it gives it that 3D look. So one of the things we had on our post had a swimming cat. Well, it was half cat, half fish, and it was a catfish and kind of like the same thing. And because the front of it was in front of the text and the back behind the text, it looks like it's an actual 3D image when it's actually not. And again, it's all creating the perception of something interesting and unique that will stop you from scrolling. 100%.

31:59So now that we've created this, let's see what it looks like to create an actual post And I'm going to use another one of my examples that's actually built out here and use this as an example. So I'll go through and I'll design the cover and then I will create the rest of the carousel. And, you know, we could talk about this for days on all the different design elements, but for now we'll just say I like step-by-step. So in my carousels, it's typically about how to do something. This is how to create carousel hooks. The hook is that whole package that we talked about earlier and how to create them and why it's important.

32:31So when I walk through this, it's a how-to, and it's describing the difference between something that's good and something that's bad, right? And I like to keep it to one topic. So there's one problem. The problem is, how do you actually create a carousel hook that hooks somebody's attention? And that's for anybody who's trying to grow their audience on LinkedIn. So the audience of one is anyone that's trying to grow their audience on LinkedIn. The problem is creating carousel hooks, and the carousel is the explainer of that. I think that's what works best on LinkedIn for an educational carousel is typically a how-to.

33:03So I'm just going to go ahead and download this. And when you download it, you're going to download it as a PDF. So this will just take a second here, why Conva downloads this. And while it's doing that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run over and open up ChatGPT. And what I like to do, so most of my writing actually happens in Conva. Now, this is not everybody's process, but this is mine. what I like to do is do most of the post in Conva. So it's already done from my perspective. The entire post is the how to create a carousel hook and I've designed it through the slides in Conva. So when I add it to ChatGPT, what I do to write the actual post is just say, summarize this post concisely in a step-by-step fashion.

33:47So I would just use that as a prompt. And what I'll do here is it'll take my carousel that I create in Conva and it's going to produce a summary for me. Usually these are pretty good. They're getting better. You can now see it summarizing like slide by slide as it goes down. So it's giving me a pretty good summary here. I already don't like something about it. So if I were to put this directly into LinkedIn, I would say make each one of these bullets more concise, no longer than 60 characters. What that's going to do is it's going to make sure that there's no orphan words. What an orphan word is on your mobile device when a sentence kind of wraps to the next word and you only have one word on the next sentence, what that does visually is it's more difficult for your brain to read than if it was just no wrap.

34:35And so I know that I could create something like a little bit more concise without a wrap by giving ChatGPT instructions to just make things more concise and then I'll give it an actual character count. So that's just a tip to make sure that your posts are concise. But another thing that I like to do is sometimes I'll just take the entire post into this tool that I really like called EasyGen and easy gen is another ai tool it's a post creation tool and it's specifically built for linkedin and so if you know linkedin and linkedin posting you know that certain things really work on linkedin so short punchy sentences no orphan words like i just talked about a really good hook a really good re-hook a body of the post that's typically a listicle so like your body if you're describing something or you're describing a how-to it's good to say like subject bullet subject bullet.

35:21That's very helpful. It helps somebody skim through it and read through it quickly, which is important on LinkedIn because people don't spend too much time on it reading your post. So what EasyGen does well is it can take any type of post and make it into a format that's great for LinkedIn. You know, you can see it right here. This post I really like already. Sometimes I don't like, you know, every output isn't perfect, but this one is pretty good. You know, it already wrote your hook size, your first impression. I agree with that. your design makes a difference. It's all about stopping the scroll.

35:50Okay. I mean, pretty decent. I would probably change it to like add some, you know, maybe add a number in there or something like that, but it's already off to a really good start. And then you can see kind of how it summarized my whole post. So right now in EasyGen, you've taken the carousel, you've kind of transcribed the whole thing, which actually BT does an amazing job of that with PDFs. And then you could throw it in EasyGen if you want to add an extra layer of refinement on it, which I would recommend. And now typically what I will do as part of this process is I'll generate a couple of these.

36:17Like you can see kind of how fast it goes with EasyGen. It's just a different version of it. So it's got a new hook. It's got a new re-hook. It's got a different ending. And you can kind of just do this over and over again until you have one that you really like. You know, this one's hook is just carousels can boost your engagement. If you do another one, I'll come up with another hook at the top. I used to struggle with creating engaging content. Okay. Also true. So what I'll do is I'll actually generate 10 of these. I'll generate 10. I'll find one that I really like. And then I'll use that as the draft of my post, the basis of my post.

36:45I don't copy and paste anything directly out of AI. But what I'll do is I will cut elements of this, or I'll take the whole post and use that as a draft. The main work for the post was done in the carousel. That's where all of like the expertise and the creation process happens. And then the post becomes something that's drafted with AI. And then I'll just throw this into LinkedIn. I'll start to tweak it to add my personal experience, my personal insights and personal stories that I have with this. So it doesn't feel so much like an AI post. And I think this is the thing that's really important.

37:12I'll just say these tools are here. They're helpful, but don't just take, you know, the outputs from an AI and throw it into LinkedIn. It's going to feel a little bit too robotic. And I think the comment that you made at the very beginning is like, people are engaging with you for you. And they're, you know, they're coming on as prospects and, you know, potential customers because of you, because of who you are. And that's really important. So you have to add that you part to your post to make them more authentic and more personal. Once you do that, you have a great show stop and carousel cover, you have a good carousel, you have a post that's structured well, hook, re-hook, punchy body, power ending CTA at the bottom with a little help from EasyGen and AI, and then you've taken it and personalized it.

37:55Now you have a post that can go viral on LinkedIn. That whole package is the package of how you can create a post that will go viral on LinkedIn and help you grow your audience and gain reach. That's pretty much the process. Fantastic. Really incredible. I want to add a few things and then there's a few questions from the audience, but I'll start with adding one thing on how I like approaching this. So I was not aware of EasyGen, but the way I would approach it is I would build a custom GPT. So for those of you who don't know what custom GPTs are, there's these little automations that you can build on your own on ChatGPT.

38:23They show up on the top left and you can create as many of those as you want. So this is a perfect example of where a custom GPT will work well, or even more than one. And I'll give an example of what I mean more than one. So one of them can be take literally these several prompts that MJ used, already build them into the custom GPT. So all you have to do is drop the post in and it will do the magic of reading your carousel. It will already have the structure so you can define that in your definition. I want a hook. I want a rehook. I want it to be punchy. I want to have a CTA on the bottom. I want the sentences to be less than 60 characters.

38:55You can have all of that in the instructions and then you don't have to say anything. You just drag your PDF in and you click go and it will do all of that stuff. The other thing that you can do either in the same custom GPT or in a secondary one that then when you will call at the end of that one is you can add your own personal stuff. So you can have a bunch of your own personal stories and your personal experience and the topics that you talk about and bring them in. And this will on its own, add you, your style, your character, your personal experience, and so on into the first draft. So that saves you more work afterwards.

39:29And as MJ said, in addition to this is a good process to generate good posts, you want it to be not your full-time job because you have a full-time job. So you need to be able to do this quickly. So doing this in a custom GPT will help. The last thing that I will say when I said more than one GPT, we have a custom GPT that we created that is a hook generator. So we actually write our posts without the initial first line. And what we did is we looked for posts that were very successful on LinkedIn and literally stole the hooks. Now, right now there's over 750 different hooks in there. And what it does, it kind of reads through all the hooks, all 750, and it looks at your post and says, oh, what would be a good fit?

40:06And he gives us three options and you can run it again and get three more options. And he takes from a structure and then it shows you how to apply that structure to your particular post. And so you can do either a single GPT or several GPTs to do this process very quickly where literally all you have to do is drag the PDF, click go on the first one, copy and paste, put it on the second one, and you're done. Two additional little tricks that I think will help people a lot. One is once you use a custom GPT, it's basically a regular conversation, right? You're in a conversation just started from a GPT that is a structured process.

40:37You can add symbol and call another custom GPT. So if you started the first one to just create the draft and your second one creates the hooks, you don't have to copy and paste. You can just add and then find the hook one on the list and call that. And it's going to give you the three hooks in the same conversation. And the last thing that I would say is I actually do all my editing in collaboration with AI and I do it in Canvas in chat GPT. So Canvas allows you to open this editing thing on the right where you can actually edit what the AI wrote on your own right there and then. So I don't need to copy this into a Word editor or Google Docs or something to do the editing.

41:12I do the editing right there and then all I have to do is copy and paste it into LinkedIn. So a few additional tricks there that I think people can benefit from. A bunch of questions, one that I really like. Is there a sweet spot of the number of slides or images in a carousel? That's from Dr. Katie on LinkedIn. Awesome. I think there is, and it was recently updated. And typically the data that I'm using for this one is data from Richard Vanderblum's report. It's an awesome report. I love it. He just recently released a new one and I don't want to get it wrong, but so I won't say exactly because I think he just updated it, but I think it's based on data.

41:49It's somewhere in the neighborhood between eight and 12. You know, I think that's the sweet spot or it could be six and 12, but yeah, it's too short. And I think it's just not enough meat to generate that dwell time that we talked about. And then too long, what's going to end up happening is LinkedIn is also going to say, are people getting to the end? Is the content worthwhile and people are getting to the end? And if they're not, then I think that's another issue that you face. So this sweet spot ends up being this kind of, I think six to 12 range, but look at Richard's report, you know, go download that.

42:15And that'll tell you exactly what it is. Awesome. The next, by the way, what I've done, and I've done this for several of my clients as well. I actually take the report and attach it to my custom GPT. So all the knowledge of best practices are there in a huge - That's the move. Those of you who don't know the report, it's like a 60 page PDF with like best practices for AI. He does based on actual research and what works and doesn't work. Like millions of posts. Yeah. So it's, I literally attach that as the knowledge base to the custom GPT and then it knows how to write for LinkedIn way better than I can explain it.

42:47I then add my two cents and we kind of use it this way. Another question was, how many of these tools are paid versus free? So you used three different tools. You used Ideogram, you used Canva, and you used ChatGPT. I know all of them has a free and a paid version. I will let you kind of explain what's your approach to this. Yeah, so everyone has a paid and a free version. I would say if you're thinking about design, you should start on the free version of Canva. Start on the free version is pretty good. There are some limitations. You can't have a brand kit, which speeds up the creation process a lot.

43:19That's where all of your colors and fonts and everything are there. So you can't have a brand kit. And then a lot of the different elements, like the grainy textures that we were looking at today, are the pro versions of them are better. You know, there's some advantages to having the pro version of Canva, and I'd recommend that. You'd see, you could probably get away with the regular version. Ideogram, you could get away with the regular version. The good thing about the paid version of Ideogram is that it lets you generate more faster. It's like you get priority in the queue. And so for me, speed's important.

43:46I have the paid version because I want to create like 30 or 40 iterations of an image to get the best one. and I want to do that in like two minutes. I don't want to do that in like 20 minutes. So that's worth it for me. I think it's like 200 bucks a year or something like that. And then EasyGen is a paid product, but I love it. So I use it. Awesome. Yeah. So a few things about that. Great answers, by the way. I think for most of these tools, most AI tools has a free version. Yeah. It's a generation or text or chats or whatever and go experiment. And then you'll know the difference. And some of these tools, you just run off credits and that's it.

44:17You can't use them anymore. Some of these tools like Canva or ChatGPT, there is a free version. You're just limited with some of the things you can do. And then you can decide for yourself if it's worth paying the money. From my very personal experience, every time I find a tool that actually helps me in a real relevant process, in this particular case that we're talking about of generating content that in my case drives actual revenue to my company, it's worth every cent, right? If I have to pay$200 a year, 10 times for 10 different tools, that's$2 ,000. That's a lot less than one client is worth to me.

44:48So if it brings me one client in a year, it was a good investment. And from my perspective, it's a no-brainer. That being said, if you manage a team and you have a team of 10 people, or if you're the CEO and you have 2000 employees, that adds up very fast. And so that's where you need to start doing more calculations on who gets which licenses and what access to what paid tools at what level. And you need a person to manage that. And there's actually tools to do that as well. But I think on a personal level, and MJ, you know, he's a CRO. He actually has a role in a big company where he probably needs to look at what his team is using and not using.

45:23But even there, I think if a person can prove to you, actually prove that a AI tool is providing them actual value that saves them time, their time is worth way more than 20 bucks a month. And so if that saves them an hour a month, I will get them the paid tool. But they have to actually show me that they're using it consistently and for something that's valuable, which is relatively easy to do with each and every one of these tools. I agree. MJ, this was incredible, like really well thought after, lots of details, lots of very strategic conceptual things, but also we went down to the tactics and show people exactly how to do all the different steps.

45:58So literally I want to see a million, you know, really well converting posts on LinkedIn tomorrow from all the people who are listening. But now seriously, go try this out. This actually works. I did it myself and I got amazing results. I want to thank you. But before that, if people want to follow you, work with you, know more about what you do, check out your content, what are the best ways to do that? Yeah. Best way is LinkedIn. I'm pretty much focused on that platform. So just, you know, go to LinkedIn, you'll find me there. MJ Jandle, you'll see my stuff. And yeah, if you want to chat, send me a DM.

46:30Awesome. Thanks everybody for joining us live. Great questions, great participation. We'll do the tariffs one next time. I promise. I was thinking about it. I'm like, man, I think we could probably get like a good, like old school, like image of a document or something like that. and call it together. But we'll do it next time. Or like an old judge or something, you know, something like old school. Oh, that would be really good. I was thinking about something like this. Anyways, great stuff. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for joining us live. We'll be here again on Thursday. Those of you who want to join us for the Friday AI Hangouts, we do that every Friday at 1 p.m.

47:01Eastern. It's a great group of people and we just share AI solutions and questions and help each other out, which is fantastic. There's a lot of people saying thank you on the different chats. So again, thank you from everybody who are with us live. That's it. See you next time. Have a great day. Thank you for having me.