B2B Live Lounge LinkedIn Interviews Joe Apfelbaum by Sarah Clay

Has literally just this second arrived, um, and I can see him in the, in the green room. I'm going to keep him waiting there now. I can see my wonderful guest. We got a little mixed up, I think, with the time, but hey, this is live and this is what we love about live. So I'm gonna bring my wonderful guest onto the stage right now. Ladies and gentlemen, a big warm welcome to the wonderful Joe Apfelbaum.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you for having me here, Sarah. I'm so excited that we made it and that we're here.

We did make it. We did make it. I was all ready. I was all ready to do a show alone. You know, I'd got it all worked out.

Wait, isn't it 10 o'clock? Like it's 10 o'clock now.

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm on time.

You're right on time.

Okay, okay. I'm so excited that we're live here. I'm gonna go ahead and reshare it. Guys, if you're watching this live, press the repost button on LinkedIn. Is this live on LinkedIn right now?

It's live on YouTube. It's not going live on YouTube for some odd reason. We've got a glitch there, but it's going live on Facebook. Um, hey, so have you got it going on live on yours as well?

Um, I didn't know how to attach— I mean, I use restream.io, um, and that I, I'm logged into that and I can easily do it, but it didn't give me the option to attach it to my LinkedIn. I didn't know how to, how to attach it.

Anyway, it's probably—

But I'll, I'll repost it. I'll repost yours so this way the comments are in one place. When people— when multiple people stream it, um, the comments kind of get segmented into different places. So I'm gonna hit repost and just repost without thoughts, because if I do repost without thoughts, it keeps all the comments and likes in one place. I don't know if you knew that. When you do repost with thoughts, it kind of just segments it out as a separate post and you lose the comments and likes. But if you just do plain repost, um, I love that. I love that component. And I'm going to go ahead and also reply to everybody's comments on the post as well as, uh, as a best practice. I love doing that.

I know, it's brilliant. So, and actually, this is a tip that anybody can, uh, can take, can't they? So when, when you have a live and people comment on your, on your live, after the live, then go and reply to the comments that people put into the live chat, into the live thing, because it helps the algorithm.

And I love doing it while I'm on live because that also helps the algorithm. And because I'm using my AI tool, Evie AI, to help me do it, I just click buttons and every single comment without using any automation— this is all manual, but I'm just clicking buttons and it's almost like Grammarly helping me, you know, type things up the way Grammarly does it. Um, but this helps me write comments for every single comment. So if you can go there and you look at your live right now, there's comments being generated and replying to every comment that's on there.

Wow, that's amazing. So that— so I'm— we're definitely going to be talking about that. So it's quite interesting because a couple of things I love about LinkedIn, one of them is the pronunciation tool, voice record, whatever you want to call it. And I really like your message. that you've put on yours. Um, and I'm not going to say it here because people need to go listen to it, right? Um, and then I'm looking at, um, the fact that you have set up this company called Evy AI, and I'm thinking, if only there was a pronunciation tool to tell me how to pronounce that. But you—

Evy AI. Yeah, Evy AI. I, I should, I should update my pronunciation that it says Um, that says, you know, that has call to action for that, cuz I haven't updated it in a while. So I should update that pronunciation. It's a 10-second pronunciation, so I should pronounce my name and the name of my company. And so this way people know how to pronounce it. Good, good. Even by the— even AI has a hard time figuring out. It sometimes says Evy AI, Evy AI. Like it— I have this voice agent. When somebody cancels Evy AI, we send the voice agent to have a conversation with them. and ask them questions. Say, hey, thank you so much for using Evvy AI and for being a customer. We noticed that you canceled and we'd love to talk to you for 5 minutes about why you canceled. Do you mind speaking to me for 5 minutes? I'm an AI agent. And the per— you can have a regular natural conversation with the AI. And when it says Evvy AI, it's having trouble. But, um, but it's just epic what you can build.

Yeah, it's brilliant. It is amazing. Um, did you deliberately Choose a name for your AI platform that AI would struggle pronouncing.

I didn't deliberately do that at all. I actually didn't even know that. I didn't even know that we have a company called Evergreen. Ever— I was, I was running, I was running in the park one day and I was thinking of a name for a core, for a, uh, I wanted to create a business that teaches people education about business. I wanted to create a separate company. I have a marketing agency for 15 years called Ajax Union. We've serviced over 1,100 clients. We were on the Inc. 500, one of the fastest private growing companies in the US. And what I, what I realized is like, people need to learn skills. And as a marketing agency, we might not be able to service every single person, but we can educate every person. And so we were doing a lot of free education and I realized that people that pay, pay attention, and a lot of people wanna pay for education to kind of get educated. And so we decided to start creating courses and, uh, classes and frameworks and checklists and cheat sheets and all types of stuff. related to goal setting first and then related to LinkedIn and related to AI and related to a bunch of different things. Um, and so we called the company Evergreen cuz I was running and I saw trees and I wanted the knowledge to be evergreen knowledge, but evergreen.com wasn't available. And I said, why not add a Y in Evergreen? So it's evyrgreen.com. And so Evergreen, you make it short, it's Evy, E-V-Y. And Evy was also my first employee and I wanna hire AI employees like Evy AI. And so evyai.com was naturally the name that just popped up. So it's called Evy AI, evyai.com. And that's, um, that's kind of like how the name was kind of born. It was a combination of my first employee, the name of the company, which educates people, um, Evergreen with a Y. So I, I always, I also, when I spell Evergreen, I always say it's E-V-Y-R-G-R-E-E-N. You know, like I always have to say it cuz otherwise how are people gonna know how to spell Evergreen?

Yeah, absolutely. So you're teaching people things all the time. Brilliant. I love it. I love this. So I always ask— actually, one of the questions I always ask my guests is, can you remember where we first met and how we first connected?

LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn. Yeah, we, we met, we met on LinkedIn. So I was reaching out to people. I don't know if you remember this, but I, for the past 6 years, I've had a conference, an online conference called the LinkedIn Influencer Summit.

Yeah.

And we've had our first guest was Shay Rowbottom when she had 60,000 followers. She only had— now she has over 600,000 followers on LinkedIn. But what me and my co-host, our goal was to interview the top LinkedIn influencers to figure out what are you doing to get traction? What are you doing to get engagement? What are you doing to get clients? What are your strategies? And we only wanted people who are actively teaching LinkedIn and had some type of a course that they can sell. So, because it would be a win-win, you know, they bring people on and then they can educate them after and sell them something or a book or course or something. And so we, we took Richard Vanderbloem and we took all the, all the top people of LinkedIn. And every year we would take 6 to 8 influencers, bring them up in front of 1,000 people. And we did it for the past 6 years successfully. This will be the 7th year in January that we're gonna be doing it. And so I have been collecting LinkedIn trainers and LinkedIn influencers over the years, and you were one of those people that I kind of reached out to to try to collect. I'm sorry to say it that way, but you know, you do have 18,000 followers and you are a prominent person on LinkedIn. So yeah, um, you know, that's, that's, that's kind of like why I reached out initially.

Yeah, no, it's great, it's great. And I love it, I love it when people reach out randomly like that, um, and they've done their homework and they've realized this is the person I want in my network. And, and that's how it should be, which is, which is fantastic. So yeah.

And your birthday is June— your birthday is June 1st. So you're a Gemini.

I am a Gemini indeed. Yes. Obviously, there's no year of birth on there. So we don't talk about that.

Well, we can determine that I used AI to determine people's ages. So I built a— I built 30— I built 30 Chrome extensions. /web apps over the past 60 days using AI. So AI now can build apps. And so I build Chrome extensions and apps. And one of the things that I wanted to know on LinkedIn is when people's, when people were born, like people's ages. And so I built an a, uh, a, a tool that sends all the information from your LinkedIn profile to Perplexity, to AI. And then what it does is it'll kind of determine if you're a male or a female, because LinkedIn doesn't give gender based on your name and You know, your picture and stuff like that. And then what it would do is it will also determine when you were born based on when you graduated school and when you started working.

Hmm. I'd be interested to see what it says about me and how old I am.

Okay. I'm gonna— do you want me to publish? You want me to tell everyone what it says? Oh my God.

Okay.

We'll get into it. I'm gonna send it right now to the AI. I just pushed a button and let's see how long it takes.

Because maybe I didn't go a traditional route, you see. So we'll see. But hey, I'm intrigued now.

Yeah, no, I just pulled it up. It said that you are female. I don't know if I'm right or wrong on that. And it said you're— it said you're 35 years old.

Did it? Oh yeah, I love it. Pieces, you see, it's right. It's right.

Spot on. You're exactly 35.

Yeah, I happen to have a daughter who's 25.

She has an accelerated age. Yeah. Wow.

Oh, they produce them young around here. Yeah, I love that. So as I say, I didn't necessarily have a, uh, you know, a normal pathway, uh, in life. Anyway, that aside, we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you, Joe. So one of the things we're definitely going to talk about your AI thing, but what I love about you is yes, you're very much into AI and you've created this Evvy platform to help people be more efficient and quicker on LinkedIn. But when reading all of the stuff about it, it's not about being spammy or being a bot. It's still having a personality. And that's what I love about you. And you're very much about community, and you do, you hold LinkedIn Locals and all of those things. So what I see that you've done is you've managed to combine the AI into our proper world, if you like, and our proper communication. So it becomes a part of who we are. And I, I think that's really clever. And my question, I suppose, is not— I know I sent you some questions earlier, but I've kind of slightly rethought them. So this is A bit on the hoof. When you were thinking, when you were running through the park and thinking about this AI that you wanted to create, what were your, what were your parameters, if you like? And what were the things it had to be or didn't have to be, or you didn't want it to be?

Well, number one is I don't want people to spam. That's the number one thing is that I, I really, really dislike spamming and I really dislike unpersonalized communication. Like when you're just kind of blasting, you know, spraying and praying, I call it. I don't like that. What I like, and I also don't like the idea of going viral because a lot of people died from COVID I don't like viruses. I'm not into going viral. I would rather have a few dozen people engage with my content than have millions of people engage with my content. Because if millions of people engage with my content, that means there's no way for me to really build a relationship with anyone specific.

Mm-hmm.

And I can't because there's so many people just coming in and coming in and coming in and coming in. And I don't even know who's who and I don't know what's going on. And it's like a, big stressful mess. And so going viral is something that's also unpredictable. It's not strategic. Like, there are a lot of people that have their 15 minutes of fame and they go viral and then they burn out. And then they're like, they're always trying to go for like, trying to win big and trying to make it and trying to like, if it's all or nothing type of thing. And I'm very big into consistency, into strategy. I always say, I don't want to go viral. I want the right 1,000 people to see me 1,000 times a year. That's what I want. And anybody can have 1,000 connections. The average CEO has 930 connections on LinkedIn. So if you wanna be above average, just get 1,000 connections. And the way that you get 1,000 connections is you send out 1,000, uh, connection notes and you can send out 100 a week in just 2 months. Within 90 days, you're gonna have 1,000 connections if you do it correctly.

Right.

So my thought process with Evvy AI, first of all, I didn't even think of Evvy AI. It wasn't even my idea. I was running in the beach in Mexico last January. So not this January, the January before, right after ChatGPT came out, November of 2022. I went to Mexico January 5th, 2023. While I'm running in Mexico, I'm chatting with ChatGPT because I'm obsessed with it. As soon as it came out, I was like, oh my God, I'm obsessed with this thing. This is my like new friend, you know, like forget about dating. This is my new girlfriend, right? And I'm, I'm just going to be talking to it all the time. And so I'm talking to it and I'm running and I'm like, I can't, I have, I have, I have this business. Called Evergreen. I've trained over 1,000 companies on how to leverage LinkedIn, on how to use AI, like on how to do all types of stuff. And now what I want to do is I want to come up with ways to monetize this using AI. What can you do? And so it said, write a book and do this and do that. And it said, create an AI that helps people save time on LinkedIn and still be authentic. And I was like, hang on a second, saves time on LinkedIn. and still be authentic? I really like that. I really like that. Can you save time while still being authentic, while still being your voice? How do I do that? And so the first thing that I said I'm gonna do is I'm gonna help people write posts on LinkedIn that's in their voice, cuz that's easy.

Mm-hmm.

Most people are not posting on LinkedIn. And when you post, you need a hook. You need main points. You need a call to action and you need 3 hashtags. Don't go over the top with 1,000 hashtags, but 3 basic hashtags. And the reason I say 3 hashtags is when you share your post, your URL, your SEO-friendly URL that LinkedIn creates, if you'll notice, it's linkedin.com/post/ and it'll have your 3 hashtags there. If you put 4 hashtags, it's not going to include 4. It'll only include 3 there. So that specifically, strategically for SEO, even just for the post to be filled out correctly, for the URL to be right, you want to have 3 hashtags. And so I said, let me create an AI that does this. And so I went off and I started looking for developers. And initially we tried to partner with somebody that were developers and they ended up just doing a terrible job and we ended up failing and failing and failing and failing. And finally we found this person overseas that we paid and he built a LinkedIn posting, a LinkedIn post creator slash comment creator Chrome extension. So it was built right into LinkedIn. Again, I wanted to comply with LinkedIn's terms and conditions as well. I don't, I—

Yeah.

LinkedIn allows you to write posts with AI. They actually have an AI post writer. There's just AI post writers, terrible. That you just write it and it gives you like a sentence and you're like, well, what am I gonna do with this? This is not, this is not a post. I need a hook. I need main points. I need a call to action. I need hashtags and I need it to sound like me. I want it to sound like me. I want it to sound like Joe Apfelbaum. I want it to understand my journey. I want it to understand who I am. I want it to understand what words to use, what words not to use. What are my taboos? What is my style of speaking? I, I want it to like not just one be one blurb of text like LinkedIn creates, but I want it to have like lines. I want it to look in a way that's readable for people who are ADD. A lot of people are ADD on LinkedIn, and so I wanted it to look good. And now you push a button and the AI writes posts for you and you can post every single day and you get unlimited content with Evvy AI. So that was the idea. The idea is a content creator that will help you write posts and comments. And eventually we said, okay, so help me reply to messages like DMs. Help me be able to create connection notes. Help me be able to write recommendations. Help me be able to optimize my profile. And now we do all those things.

That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. And I love that the idea for your AI came from AI itself.

Why not? Who would have known? Like, I would have never even thought of that if I wasn't running on the beach and then just talking to ChatGPT, literally talking to ChatGPT, having a conversation with it. And when I sat down after and I saw that idea, I was like, yeah, I think that's the one.

Yeah, amazing. So well done. I love that. That's great.

And then Yeah, and Warren Buffett says it's not about having a good idea, it's about having a terrible idea with great execution. So you don't have to have the best idea, you just have to execute. Uber wasn't the first car-sharing app, Google wasn't the first search engine, and Facebook wasn't the first social media site. LinkedIn wasn't the— you know, like, there's so many.

Yeah.

So if you think about— if you take a moment and just think about, there's a lot of room for people to create And to be able to have, you know, we're not the first post writer, we're not the first one, and we're not gonna be the last one. There's a million different ones out there. But if you want one that will save you time, that has an easy user interface to use, that's free to try with no credit card required, because there are many others that you could try but you have to put in your credit card and they just charge you $60, $70 a month. We're less than 50 cents a day to get unlimited content, unlimited comments. We wanted to make it super, super affordable and accessible to people. And we have clients in Pakistan, clients in India and Saudi Arabia, in the UK. We have a large client base in the UK. We have clients in 36 different countries around the world, including Portugal, including, uh, Mexico, including Argentina. Like we have clients everywhere. And the crazy thing is when I started my business, it was just in Brooklyn. I had a LinkedIn Local in Brooklyn. I was just in Brooklyn. Now I have a global company with employees all over the world.

Yeah, yeah, start small and then it grows. Okay, so maybe what I'll do, Joe, is after this we'll have a chat in the green room and maybe I'll have a little try of, uh, of Evie AI and see if anybody notices the difference.

100%. I had a post that I posted a couple months ago with Evie AI and it got 4 million impressions. I just posted it, 4 million impressions, 13,000 likes. You can go through my posts and find it. I've posted 10,000 times since I, since I started posting back in 2010, whenever I, you know, whenever LinkedIn allowed posting, 2015, 2016, 20-whatever, they, they slowly were like launching the ability to post. But since I started my account, I recently exported all my shares. You know, you can export all your history from LinkedIn. If you go to settings and, and data, you can export all your stuff. I put it into a spreadsheet, a CSV file into a spreadsheet. I noticed I posted 10,000 times in the past 10 years.

Wow, I need to do that and see how many times I've posted. It's probably not— it won't be that many, but that's a lot. Wow, that's a heck of a lot. So AI, amazing. So everybody listening on the replay, on the podcast, as this will be, um, when I get my act together to actually do it, um, check out Joe Apfelbaum and his Evie AI. Now, Joe, I know that I did send you some questions, but we kind of covered most of what I've, I've put in the questions. And I'm— I want to move into a completely different area now. It's about being authentic on LinkedIn, which is something that we, we talk about with AI. I want to talk about fake profiles with you.

Hmm. Fake profiles.

Fake profiles. How do you see many fake profiles on LinkedIn?

There's a lot fewer fake profiles on LinkedIn than fake profiles on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook. There's a lot more spam going on on those platforms. Now, I can spot a fake profile very quickly on LinkedIn because LinkedIn requires your network to do things on your profile that will allow you to show credibility. And it's very hard to fake recommendations. It's very hard to fake endorsements. It's very hard to fake adding a verification badge with government ID. It's very hard to fake certain things. So when I look at someone's profile, and I see a gold icon, that means they're paying for LinkedIn. Right away, I give them a whole nother level of credibility. You know, I look at your name, Sarah Clay, next to it I see a gold icon with LinkedIn. Even, even like when you leave a comment anywhere that has that gold icon, I'm like, wow, okay, she's paying for LinkedIn, she's a real person. That's, that's number one. Number 2, I go to your profile. I see right away, I go straight to the recommendations. If I want to know if you're real or not real, I go to the recommendations. I see you received 125 recommendations, and the latest one was less than 30 days ago in August. Wow, look at you, you're a rock star. I've never seen— I've never seen anybody with over 100 recommendations until I found somebody that had over 100, and I got really jealous, and I said, you know what, I got to work hard and I got to get over 100. So I got over 100, and then I found somebody else. I found somebody else that had over 200, and I was like Over 200? How dare you! I gotta get over 200. Then I got over 200, and then I found somebody that had 300. Then I was like, oh my God, I gotta get over 300. And I started working really hard and I got over 300. And then I found somebody that had 1,000, and at that point I just gave up. But I'm up to— my last recommendation I got was yesterday.

I need to— well, you see, I haven't, um, I haven't asked one for ages. I need to get— I need to get going on that. So Yeah, I sense a competitive nature here, Joe.

Am I wrong? Yeah, it's one of my— so there is something called the 34 StrengthsFinder. There's a Gallup, uh, has something called the StrengthsFinder where you could identify your strengths. So you take an assessment and there are 35 human strengths. There's a book called StrengthsFinder 2.0. And if you read the book, it explains all the different strengths that human beings have. And they determined there are 34 strengths that people have and different strengths are for different peoples. And every strength has a weakness associated to it. So understanding your strengths are important. One of my strengths is competition. One of my strengths is strategy. Another strength is ideation. Another— so I have, I have lots of different strengths. And if you understand your strengths, you can also understand your weaknesses. So when I'm coaching people, one of the things I tell them to do is, hey, go take the StrengthsFinder and tell me what your top 5 strengths are so I could understand your weaknesses.

And actually, that's a really, you know, circling— circling, is that right?

Circulating.

back to the whole AI thing, because— and I had a conversation with somebody this morning who's an amazing businessman but really bad at marketing. So obviously the two of us can work together. Um, hopefully that's the plan, but we're not good at everything. So this is where we sometimes need something like AI to help us. Okay. So I work with clients all the time, you know, lawyers, engineers, um, accountants, architects, really clever, clever people. Can they post on LinkedIn? They struggle. They really, really struggle with what to write. So having some kind of a tool to help them, that's perfect.

That's key. That's key. I mean, look, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional social network. There's a billion people on LinkedIn. They're growing rapidly. They're gonna have 3 billion people on LinkedIn soon. And it's gonna be people leaving TikTok, people leaving Twitter, people leaving Snapchat. These are the young generation that's taking over their family businesses. There's 10 million business owners that are giving over their businesses globally to their kids. And that's really what's happening every single year. And so these people are coming into the workforce, they're joining LinkedIn, and they have the capacity to do business with you if you show up. But if you're like, you're in BNI, it's very clear that you're, you know, education coordinator, you know, relevant person in a networking group. Most BNI members, there's 300,000 globally. Most BNI members are not posting on LinkedIn. That's a huge missed opportunity. You need to be top of mind with your network if you're networking, if you're building relationships, and, and, and posting on LinkedIn is a key way to stay top of mind. You know what I love about LinkedIn better than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and all the other platforms?

Everything, but go on. What's, what's the thing?

Well, well, the number one thing that I like is that I'm in control of how many followers I have. Why? Because every time I send somebody a connection request, they become a follower on LinkedIn. Whereas if I follow somebody on Instagram, they're not necessarily gonna follow me back. It's really hard to get followers on Instagram, TikTok, and, and those places. People say, oh, it's easy to get followers. Not if you're not willing to get undressed. But on LinkedIn, all you gotta do is connect with somebody, build a relationship with them. You just send a connection request. As soon as they accept that connection request, you now have a new follower and you can have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, which means you can have 30,000 followers. That's a huge missed opportunity when people are not sending that 100 connection requests a week or 20 a day. Send out 20 connection requests a day. Be strategic, build relationships, use AI if you have to, to write your connection notes so that it has context, so that it has credibility, and so that it has customization. You wanna mention people's names, and if you do it correctly, you'll be more successful.

Gina, you are absolutely right. And what— that's what I love about LinkedIn. It's about the communication that you have with the people that you're connected to. You don't get that on, on any other platform in the same way. Um, and I have completely lost my train of thought what I was going to say then. That's really annoying. Um, connecting with people— I can't remember what it was going to be because my mind just disappeared off somewhere else.

Um, I want to know if the photos behind you are real or not.

Are they AI? I'll tell you about this in a sec. No, I have remembered. So I tried to connect, I tried to But quite often I try to connect with Richard Branson. Why not? So Richard Branson, you can't connect with him because you've got to put his email address in. So he doesn't want you to connect with him unless you have his email address because he only wants his inner sanctum to connect with him. That's fine. I came across somebody's profile about an hour before we hooked up together, and somebody who had 326 followers, okay, very, very small on LinkedIn. Trying to grow their following, and I couldn't connect with her because she had her settings set in such a way that I needed to put in her email address. Now, obviously, she didn't realize that was the case, or I hope she didn't realize that was the case, because LinkedIn is about being open, isn't it? And it's about talking, and it's about letting people in.

But sometimes people get spammed, and so that's why they put out that setting, because they get spammed. So what I would suggest is use a tool like Apollo.io to get you their email address and And then you send them a connection request with their email.

Do it that way. Exactly, exactly. The pictures behind— no, it's not real. It's fabric.

Ah, it's fabric. Oh my God, that's epic. I want to know what's behind the fabric.

Oh, it's just a white wall. There's really nothing very exciting. I had this made when I did— it's for when I do exhibitions. It's my exhibition stand.

Wow. What type of exhibition? I didn't know you were an exhibitionist. What type of exhibitions do you do?

Hey, hey. Um, that's for a business show, mainly.

Oh, it's a business exhibition. I was getting excited.

B2B show at the Excel down the road. You know, that's about as exciting as it gets.

Not as exciting as where my mind was going. Okay, very cool.

It can stay there. Um, because of course I am an E35. Um, so I had this made and designed with these little pictures on it.

Oh, it's so nice. It's so nice. Was it expensive?

Yes.

Okay, she's like, yes, as a matter of fact it was. Because I have 2.

Because when you have a stand at an exhibition, uh, you have to do 2 sides.

So it's basically a booth, right? So this is for your booth?

Yeah, exactly, for my booth.

Okay.

And it's 2 metal frames and then the fabric goes over the top.

Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

To be honest, for what it is, it wasn't expensive really, and it was printed by a very nice, um, guy that I met kind of on LinkedIn called Mark Orr, who's a printer.

And does it go down? Do you like— does it go down? Is it a retractable banner stand?

So you have to take the fabric off and then the whole thing just all collapses in.

Okay, okay, okay. But it's not one of those things that rolls down to the bottom into the—

That would have been cool, but yeah, you can only get those in paper, I think, and not in fabric.

And I wanted fabric, like actual fabric.

Actual fabric. Yes.

Very high quality. High quality, 100% polyester.

Absolutely. Yeah, indeed. So sort of touching on the— and I know we're coming up to time— on the profiles thing, the reason I asked that was because I was looking at your company page, evie.ai, and you've got some really interesting employees, and I would love to meet Barbie Apfelbaum.

Barbie Apfelbaum is a persona. Um, I have a company page for Barbie. You know, Barbie, Barbie is, um, I wanted to, I wanted to show people how you can have different personalities on LinkedIn. So I have Barbie Apfelbaum, I have Basil the Samoyed, which is a dog. And so you're allowed to create as many company pages as you want on LinkedIn. I don't know if you know that you can create as many company pages as you want. And so I create company pages and then Evie AI can leave a comment as a company page.

Mm-hmm.

And then you can create a persona inside Evie AI as that company page. So if you wanna, let's say for example, give yourself 10 likes on your post, let's say you wanted to do that. You can't give yourself 10 likes with your profile, but you can give yourself 10 likes from 10 different company pages.

Yeah. Yeah.

I love hacking, so I don't know if you know me, but I love reverse engineering. I love hacking. I like finding ways to do things. So you can have a conversation in your post with your 10 different company pages talking about different things with different personas. So sometimes I'll go in and talk like Barbie and then like Basil and then like Mojo and then like me and Ajax Union and Evergreen and Evie AI and all the different companies having conversations under my page. And all of a sudden I have a page that has like, you know, 10 likes from 10 company pages and a bunch of comments going back and forth between all the different company pages and my profile. And then you go there and you look at the post and you're like, damn, this guy gets engagement. Because just from looking at the post, you don't see what, what the engagement is. You just see a bunch of likes and a bunch of comments on a post.

You've got your own personal pod.

My own personal party.

Well, or your LinkedIn pod. It's brilliant. I love it. And it reminds me of my first ever job when I was striking out into this world of social media. I was employed by Mattel to be the community manager of Barbie. But not only Barbie, I was also the community manager of Bob the Builder. I don't know if you know Bob the Builder.

Heard of it.

Thomas the Tank Engine and Fireman Sam. And I literally used to do exactly what you have Just said, and I used to have conversations on all the different pages with all these different characters in their individual voices. It was a hoot. It was such fun. Anyway, we are digressing. We are coming to the end, and I, um, want to say thank you, of course, um, for coming. But I have one more question for the people who are listening. who are a varied audience, of course, can you give 3 takeaway actionable tips for them?

Okay, so here are the 3 tips for you to, to be more successful with LinkedIn using artificial intelligence, or even just using LinkedIn in general. Number one is you need exposure. How do you get exposure? The number one way to get exposure is to post. My recommendation is posting once a day. So action item, post once a day. You don't have to post anything crazy. You can post common myths. You can post a question in your industry. You can post a story, something that happened, something that you plan on doing, something that you're interested in, an interesting video that you saw, a TED Talk, whatever. You can post a motivational quote, but post something because you want your network to know that you're alive and that you're there and that you're active. So post. You want exposure? Post. Number 2 is you need credibility. The fastest way to get credibility with somebody on LinkedIn is to leave a comment on their post. So if you have 1,000 connections on LinkedIn and 10 of them are posting every single day, Make sure that you know who those 10 are and that you post a comment on their posts. If you have 20 or 30 that are posting every month or every week, make sure that you have a list with Evy AI. You can save those people inside Evy AI. You just hit save profile. It saves their profile to a list, and then you can see their posts when they post. You click see post, you see, you just leave a comment and boom. You leaving comments on a regular basis will increase your credibility, not just to the author of the post, but also to their audience. So I leave comments regularly. Make sure to leave a comment that's more than 7 words. That's why I use AI. It helps me generate comments that are more than 7 words very quickly and that are in my voice. And you can train the AI to use specific templates and specific language so that when you give it examples, it'll use those. I call it a comment bank. So I'll make a list of 4 different comments that I would leave on Sarah Clay's post. And then I tell AI, use one of these 4 comments. And then when I comment, it'll use one of those 4 sporadically, and it'll also inject relevance to the post with my comment. And so it'll use my language with the word boom at the end or whatever I want to say, and then it'll incorporate her post into my comment and it'll use it that way. So it's called a comment bank. And then the third thing I would say is if you're not messaging people every day, you're not going to book meetings. Conversions come from conversations. So my recommendation is message at least 10 people every single day. So post once a day, leave 5 comments a day, and send 10 messages a day. Now, what type of messages can you send? You can send happy birthday messages. You can send happy anniversary messages. You can say, thank you for being my connection on LinkedIn, or thanks for connecting on LinkedIn, or great post, or whatever it is that you want to send. I tell— take people through a journey called greeting, feeding, and meeting. You first greet them, then you feed them, and then you offer to meet them if they're interested in meeting you. And so if you take them through that journey and don't be a spammer, and then you build rapport properly, And then you build a relationship and nurture them, and then you book a meeting, you're much more likely to get those meetings and those conversations will lead to conversions. If you do that correctly, you'll have exposure, you'll have credibility, and you'll have more meetings, which means you'll grow your business and you'll expand your relationships with your network. Wow.

Boom. Have you got that? Did you get that, folks? Post once a day, anything you like. And actually what you said is interesting. You don't have to post original content every single time. You can repost something from somewhere else.

Or even from your own stuff. If you posted 100 times in the past 3 years, go find one of your posts from 3 years ago, from 2 years ago, from a year ago, from 3 months ago, and then just republish it. You can use AI to spin it if you want. Evie AI will take your post and rewrite it in different ways, but with a different tone, with a different language, with a different call to action, with a different hashtag, with a different whatever. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I always say you just need 5 topics to talk about. Once I have something called the 555 framework, Sarah, the 555 framework means come up with 5 topics for your personal brand. Just 5 topics. For me, it's marketing, networking, AI automation, personal development, whatever. Pick your 5 topics. Once you have your 5 topics, your 5 categories, then pick 5 topics for each category. Now you have 25 total. You have your 5 main categories and you have your 5, 5, 5 times 5 is 25. And then pick 5 mediums that you'll talk about each topic. So maybe an image, maybe a video, maybe an article, maybe a poll, maybe a document, 5 different ways to talk about each individual topic. Now you have 125 topics. I wrote that in my LinkedIn newsletter. I wrote a detailed questionnaire that will help you come up with your 125 topics. And once you have your 125, you never have to write again. You know what you need to write for the rest of the year and you're good to go. And so I call it the 555 framework. And if you take a look at my, I, I just launched my second newsletter. I don't know if you know this, Sarah, most LinkedIn trainers don't know this. You can have 5 LinkedIn newsletters for each profile now. It's a new thing with LinkedIn. You can have 5 newsletters. I just launched my second newsletter. I'm gonna be having 5, but I just saw, launched my second LinkedIn newsletter, which is gonna be a weekly newsletter about AI automation, which I launch every Friday. I launched it yesterday, 24 hours ago I launched it. I have 2,400 followers, subscribers to my newsletter right now from that. And I didn't promote it at all. I posted a post about it and then LinkedIn automatically sends the newsletter to people that you're connected to. Crazy.

Which is amazing. It's incredible. Every single one of your connections will have got a notification/email if they're getting their notifications. Notifications on email that you've published a newsletter. That's amazing, isn't it? That's gold.

Yeah, no, it's gold. And, and every single time I publish a newsletter, all those 2,400 people will get notification via email, via the feed, through the post, and also on SEO, because articles— Pulse ranks on Google SEO. Posts don't show up in SEO, but articles do for the most part. And so when I write an article that's 2,000 words long and I include lots of keywords, it's going to rank on Google really highly.

Yeah, it is amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. Joe Apfelbaum, I have loved this conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest on the B2B Live Lounge. I will let you know when it comes out as a podcast, um, as I say, when I get my act together to do it. Um, but yeah, this has been amazing, amazing. Now, one last little question for you: where do we find you, Joe? Where's the best place?

Well, I bought a domain name, joelinkedin.com, to make it really easy for people to find me. J-O-E-linkedin.com. It forwards to my LinkedIn URL, so it complies with LinkedIn. I'm not sending it to another website. I'm sending LinkedIn to LinkedIn. But if you want to find my AI, you can try it for free. Just go to evyai.com. That's evyai.com. Check it out, register for free, use it, enjoy it, and let your friends know about it. And if you If you like using it, premium is very, very affordable. So I recommend upgrading to premium as soon as possible and get the deal that we're running right now where you get 50% off the year.

Look at that sales. Brilliant. Love it, Joe. Right. I'm going to play us out with some music now. You may dance if you wish. I will. Um, but thanks guys. Thanks for listening. And next week we have the doctor in the house. I'll say no more. See ya.