Leveraging LinkedIn and AI with Darrell Stern & Joe Apfelbaum

Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of LinkedIn Live. This is Joe Apfelbaum and I have a special guest today. One of our clients, Darryl Stern, is here to talk marketing with us. Darryl, how's it going?

It's good. I mean, ending the year with a bang and of course using all the EBAI tools. I mean, now every new consulting client that I get, the first thing I do with them, set up EBAI. It's like integrated now into everything that we do. It's just phenomenal.

That's fantastic. I'm really great. So tell me some of your things that you're doing on LinkedIn. What are, what is like your, the, the number one thing that you think people need to be doing in order to be successful on LinkedIn?

Sure. Well, the hottest thing in the world right now is 1-minute reels. In other words, 1-minute vertical videos. If you're on your phone app now, you'll see that this little video button down the bottom of your LinkedIn phone app, and all of a sudden you're in TikTok land. Only difference is it's, it's Business tips. It's business advice. So going into 2025, all the platforms, including LinkedIn, are going to be pushing this as the platform of choice. So what are we doing in these? Well, we've got to hit them with something really strong, a really great headline, a really great lesson, a really great business tip, especially on LinkedIn. And I've recently been putting out these reels, and one of them got like half a million impressions. You know, so we're seeing we're seeing great results with this. You know, moving the TikTok format. over to LinkedIn. But the same thing always applies, which is hit them up with a good headline and a good hook and get right to the point. Yeah, I love when people start videos and go, hi, I'm Joe. Today I'm going to tell you a story about— those 5 seconds and they flipped it, right? They're gone already. So you got to hit them up with something really fast. But that's what I've been fascinated the most is, you know, these new vertical video formats that have come out and then now on LinkedIn.

That's one of the reasons why I do LinkedIn Live so much.

Sure.

The reason I'm on LinkedIn Live constantly is because I have my video editor go ahead and take the LinkedIn Lives that I've been doing, and they're also streaming to YouTube, by the way. Um, and then he takes them and turns them into these 1-minute videos. And now I have, from a year's worth of content, I have hundreds of these little 1-minute clips that are really solid 1-minute Clips that we're going to be sharing in 2025 throughout, throughout all the different platforms. And we're going to be sharing those. But the way that I was able to create them to begin with was because of LinkedIn Live. And you know, when it comes to those vertical things, they don't only work on LinkedIn, they work on Facebook, they work on Instagram Reels.

YouTube Shorts.

On YouTube, they work on TikTok, they work on WhatsApp I don't know if you're familiar with WhatsApp Status, but a lot of people are using WhatsApp globally. It has billions of users right now. And so using these tools is really essential. It looks like ST said, ST commented on the post just now. I'm looking at the comments that are coming in live now.

Yeah.

ST, one of my connections said Reels are so important. Yes, that's awesome.

Yeah, most definitely. It depends on what you're doing. If you're taking a podcast and making it smaller parts, fine, because we know it's a podcast and we know it's a small part something bigger. But if you're literally doing this for your marketing where you want to get people to learn something from you and then click this link on top and go contact you, then it should be a condensed format of just a 1-minute story that's self-contained. Like we teach 4-minute stories, not horizontally, but vertically that have a beginning, middle, and end. And of course, with the hook and the call to action and all those other kinds of things. But yeah, it's going to be a massive switchover this next year into going viral vertically, you know, especially on these platforms like LinkedIn.

What do you think of company pages? What has been your experience with those?

Well, I'm into personal branding, so I haven't done— I mean, I usually coach people, look, it's your personal network that we're really working on. I haven't seen too much about that, but then you were talking in one of your lives about how the company pages do a lot, right? You could do better things with events. Um, the company pages and all kinds of other things. So I'm kind of 50/50 about it, but you expressed to me all kinds of things. Go ahead.

There are 3 different things that you can do on LinkedIn. There's networking, marketing, and prospecting.

Yes.

Prospecting is what you do with Sales Navigator when you're sending out InMails and you're reaching out to people and you're trying to qualify them and try to close deals. On your personal brand on LinkedIn, you're mostly networking, which means you're relationship building and you're Wishing people happy birthday and happy anniversary and happy holidays and you're getting to know them and you're having networking calls and you're referring business and you're getting referrals. That's networking. That's what you use your profile for. And then marketing is your company page because you could be advertising and strategic advertising on LinkedIn works really well with the right budget. And so advertising, you cannot advertise a profile on LinkedIn. You can only advertise a company page on LinkedIn.

Mm-hmm.

And so company pages do really well when it comes to advertising, because it's the only way that advertising works, and that is marketing. And so if you want, and also company pages rank really well on Google, believe it or not, whereas profiles don't really rank on Google. The aspect of a profile that would rank on Google would be the articles attached to a profile. Now, most people never write articles on their profile, but if you go to the LinkedIn feed, Mm-hmm. You can actually, instead of creating a post, you can write an article. An article includes a topic with a banner, and you can include 40,000 words in an article with images and videos embedded and so on. And those tend to do really well with organic SEO. We've gotten thousands of views on articles that didn't even show up on the feed, but they showed up on Google.

So, To rebuttal that a little bit, you know, when I first started my business, I called it Jersey Visions as a website design company, right? In 2002, when I put on the website, you know, we do all this work like we and there's just me. But then as the Instagram took over and this thing called personal branding took over, all of a sudden I said, oh, wait a minute, if I had worked the past 15 years on Darryl Stern being the expert on my personal influence, I'd probably be a lot further along. And your LinkedIn profile, when they Google your name, is one of the things that'll come up on page 1. They can go right to you. And heck, if you've got 40,000, 50,000 followers as you do, sir, it adds authority, right, to what you're doing, or maybe a decision-making process of, hey, should I upgrade this software or not? So it's all of it. That's the one thing, like everybody says it's this or it's that, but I said if you can do it in balance and do all of it, then you'll be in better shape than just putting all your eggs in one basket. For instance, they just took LinkedIn Audios away. Why? I don't know. For a little while they had LinkedIn Fleets going, you know, with the stories above, you know, the little circle stories like on Facebook. They suddenly took that away. So don't put all your eggs into under one shell because you never know when they're gonna flip it over again and go, nope, can't do that anymore, go over here.

So the reason they pulled LinkedIn Audio stories away, LinkedIn Audio events away, is simply because there weren't enough usage. Same thing with stories, not enough people were using it. So they just have to, they have to, in order to maintain one feature in a product, it's very expensive. It's time-consuming. Um, and it can cause a lot of problems. And so they test out a feature, they add it. It was like Clubhouse for LinkedIn. They tried it out and they're like, listen, you know, LinkedIn Live is working really well. A lot of people are using LinkedIn Live. It uses the same system as LinkedIn Live. Um, what I loved about audio events Mm-hmm. that LinkedIn Live doesn't have is that you're able to see who attends the audio event. Whereas with LinkedIn Live, I don't know who's watching us right now.

Exactly. Unless they comment. Yeah.

In the comment, leave a comment. Let us know that you're watching us live. Just write the word live or let us know where in the world you're dialing in from so that we see you, whether you're watching the live or the replay, just write what city you're dialing in from. You know, the key is to build a relationship and to really get to know people. And when it comes to your personal brand, people don't build relationships with companies. They build relationships with personal brands. So you're absolutely right. If someone has a limited budget and they can't afford to spend a few thousand dollars a month on advertising, then leveraging their personal brand is going to be key for them to be able to grow their business.

Oh, 100%. And I mean, you're talking to the guy that took a local auto mechanic from $50,000 a month to $600,000 a month by filming videos of him fixing the cars, transcribing them, and doing a lot of SEO work on the transcriptions of it. So what I see is, and you would agree with me, and especially with what EB AI adds on to LinkedIn, is people are doing 80% of what you really need to do to succeed. Everybody's got a podcast now. Well, great, but are you transcribing the podcast and doing, you know, SEO on the transcriptions? Yes, you've got a LinkedIn, but are you actually interacting with other people, or are you just networking and having someone post but not going out there and commenting and being part of it? So I always give the analogy of, you know, I run into a networking meeting with you, Joe, you invite me to something and I go, oh, Joe, sorry, I can't stay here. Here's some business cards of mine, pass them out to everybody, and I gotta go. Well, I'm the asshole of the networking meeting because I didn't come and talk to anybody. So when you're just posting and you're not going out there and commenting and commenting in an intelligent way, the way EvAI lets you do so simply, you're not interacting with anybody else. It's like saying, look at me, but I don't support anybody else. And I think that's what's brilliant about what really EVA put in the forefront of it is participate on the platform. If you're not participating on the platform, there's no reason for anybody to pay attention to you. And you can work all day and night on posting and posting and posting and posting, and you're still not going to get anywhere because you're not showing anybody else love. It's reciprocal.

Yes, 100%. I totally agree with you. Making sure that you're leaving adequate amount of comments. LinkedIn has something called the LinkedIn Weekly Tracker. Have you ever seen your own weekly LinkedIn Weekly Trackers? If you go to your own profile and you scroll down to the section called Analytics, and then you click on Show All Analytics, you'll be able to see a weekly tracker to determine how many comments you leave in any given week, and it resets Monday morning. So today it reset this morning at 1:00 AM. It resets in the morning and it shows you how many comments you left on LinkedIn. Mine right now says I posted 3 times today. This is my third post. This, this post right now that's live is my third post.

Mm-hmm.

And it tells me how many comments I left. Today I left 96 comments.

There you go.

Most people don't even leave one comment per week. I left 96 comments in the first day of the week. My goal is to leave 1,000 comments a month. So think about that in terms of what your goal is for how many comments you want. Every time I leave a comment, I'm getting exposure under someone's post.

Yeah. Well, it's also— so it's also the follow-up after that. So my friend Eric Swanson, who's a big public speaker, he shared a video of a lady from a nonprofit, her TED Talk. And what she does is she takes photographs, portraits of people that are terminally ill. She takes family portraits of them so they can save the memory. Well, he's sharing her video. I commented because my mom had cancer and passed away about that. She saw my comment. You understand? He's sharing someone else's comment. I'm going to And then she then commented, so I followed up with her and I got a client. So without knowing the person, being connected with the person, nothing, right? I'm commenting on somebody else's share of something that I'm impressed with. So it's all in that follow-up after that. So I don't want the audience to get confused that you just turn this thing on, you put out 96 comments a day, and your phone's gonna ring. There's still more to it in terms of you gotta really then follow up, go into the Messenger, and I do it right away. If someone comments, I'm right away in that Messenger saying, hey, so thank you so much for commenting on that, or did you have any other questions about that, whatever it is, so I can get them off the internet. Now I'm 53, I need to get them off the internet, you know, and onto a Zoom call so I can continue the conversation and of course book the client and all that. So all these are tools that are kind of like the middleman, the, the middle part that you're skipping over. You're posting and expecting clients when there's 3 steps in between, which is participating, commenting, following up on the comments. You can use even AI, even EBAI too. They comment, they reply, then you can use EBAI to reply to that comment. Like, you can keep going with it, and the deeper you go, the more likely that person is then to connect, understanding that this person commenting in the first place is on somebody else's stuff and you don't even know them yet. You know what I mean? You can go from total stranger to conversation In a few comments and replies, which is absolutely incredible, especially if the topic is around some area that you serve in. It's just the same thing as you got a phone call, you met somebody at a networking meeting, you finally remember to call them 6 months later and they had already hired someone else. It's the same thing as real life. You just got to put it into this format and use these amazing tools, especially the one you developed, which is the best in the business. You know, to do the same thing we would do in real life. But somehow people think the internet is different. Well, how do I make the algorithm work on this? Or how many times a day should I post? And that's not what it is. It's about who— it's about, do you know how to have a real conversation with someone and lead it into something that then they would become your client?

100%. And most people are not having conversations. I always say that conversations lead to conversions. Conversations lead to conversions. So if you're not Having conversations with people, then the likelihood of you getting conversions and building relationships is going to be much lower than if you're actually having real conversations with people. So cutting out the noise and thinking that, oh, you know, if I post on LinkedIn, I'm going to get a bunch of clients. That's not really the game. The game is not just posting on LinkedIn.

Right.

And if you think if you're just going to have a bunch of conversations, you're going to close deals, it's not also just not the game. Like you said, the fortune's in the follow-up. The key is not just to show up and throw up, but also actually to follow up. And if you follow up correctly and you're tracking your follow-up and in a meaningful way, building those relationships, you're going to be much more likely to close deals.

Yeah. And here's something else. Like I always talk, you know, real estate agents, if you look at their posts, they're all, this is my open house, here's the house to do and all that. And I said, well, what else do you like? So I talked to a real estate agent recently who said, well, they like hunting. So we'll go type in hunting into LinkedIn and connect with all the groups and the people that like hunting. You know the famous Gary Vee story where he— this one top CEO was talking about this particular football player that he liked, so he put the football player on his fantasy football, started talking about the football player. That's it. Just talking about the football player and ended up with a $3.5 million deal. So social means creating alliances. And we create alliances all around us, be it at church, be it at the pickleball— that's the latest thing, right? The pickleball court, or whatever it is, the book club, whatever, you know, real-life communities that you enjoy being on. Take that and put it into this too. It's not just, I'm going to connect the ideal client, I'm going to comment on their post, and that's all I'm going to do. You've got to expand it because it deepens your character, and people will more— they'll be easier to work with if they like the same things you like. Right? So now we get into, well, why aren't we commenting? Like, I typed in Star Wars. I love Star Wars. Guess what? There's people from Lucasfilm. There's people that do the costuming, the makeup, the special effects for Star Wars, and they're on LinkedIn, and I can put them in my network and talk to them, and it's just cool. Just, it's just because. So when you get out of the modality of just this directness, you know what I'm saying, where you're really being social and networking with different people and different things that you like and commenting and supporting all different kinds of people, It's not just showing up to that ideal client all day to get these leads and close. It's about truly being social and creating alliances because somebody knows somebody, 6 degrees with Kevin Bacon, who needs your services. And it's much more fun to have it happen that way than it is to just be trying to push and push and bombard people with, can I improve your SEO? As they do all the people overseas that bombard Yeah.

Yeah. And people are just kind of spraying and praying. They're hoping for the best. They're hoping that they're going to get lucky. And most of the time they don't get lucky. They get banned because when you send somebody information that's not relevant to them, that's literally sending spam.

Yeah.

And spam is against LinkedIn's terms and conditions. So sending messages to people that are not relevant to them is against LinkedIn terms. And it's also a little rude. Just to send people random things when you can be more thoughtful and you you could actually send people something that's meaningful to them and you don't take the time to be more thoughtful. That's what pisses people off that you're just trying to get away with the basics.

Well, this is the problem with now. You know, some people are saying they'll do the whole thing with AI, all of it, right from connecting to have the conversation in Messenger to da da da and. You know, you're sending messages like, I see the process systems algorithms of your engineering, some clause, you know, just cut and pasting sentences like Mad Libs. You can tell it's artificial. And this is something that I love about what you've done with EVAI is it really looks like a human being wrote it. Although there are linguistic patterns that sometimes really, you know, repeat themselves, it still really looks authentic and it reads authentically. And you've done a fine job with that. But other people are making this so templated with the automation that right away I'm going to tell, and people are going to figure out quickly, you know, that they're talking, you know, to a robot. So if you feel that you don't have the time to do all this, then this is what your sales team does. You can have other people logged into your LinkedIn. You have to be careful about it. You can't go nuts having 16 people on it, but you've got to understand that behind every account is a human being, and you're talking to a real person. And you're not broadcasting. That's the other thing. When I teach people how to make videos, I'm talking to the person that needs my help, and I'm acting and I'm pausing and I'm listening to that other person that I'm talking to, to create the illusion when they get the message that they feel like I'm talking directly to them in a one-on-one conversation. It is not broadcasting, right? Social media is not broadcasting to a group of people like public speaking. So that's when we get into things like vernacular. That's another whole, that's another whole live, you know, to talk about that. Some of the other tools that I love, let's talk about other tools that I love in EVAI in the upgraded version, and you should all be upgraded. Yes, everybody watching is upgrading. Yes, is you have a part called the Learning Hub with all these other different links in it. And one that I love is here's all the new posts that came out in the past 24 hours in your network. And if you really want to nurture your connections, you should make certain people a priority and see who's the most active on LinkedIn, because if they're posting every day, you want to keep that algorithm going with the comments. The second one that I love the most, which is genius, is all the posts that have no comments at all. In other words, they posted and no one commented. One, this is awesome for me because I teach people how to make better posts to get comments. Second, though, is you'll be the only one commenting. And if you really think about how much attention you could grab from 100 people that have zero comments, zero, and you're the only one that actually showed them that you cared about what they're doing, that's a great attention grabber, you know, for a conversation. Also, anyone else scanning their profile and looking at their post is only going to see you as the only person that's, you know, commenting on it. So there's a lot of tools hidden within So if you guys are using it and you're just hopping in there and commenting all day and you're not going back to the app to click on Learning Hub and look at all the other links that he set up in there— Joe, you're standing right next to me— that you have set up in there, it's just brilliant. And if you get creative with it, you can do such amazing things to cut through the fluff and get to those real meaningful conversations. And that's what marketing is.

Yeah, cutting through the fluff. Uh, creating meaningful conversations, building relationships, getting to know people, and like you said, finding ways to really stand out in a meaningful way. I truly believe that every time that someone leaves a comment on LinkedIn, they're creating an opportunity to connect and they're creating an opportunity for new business. I have been leaving comments on specific people's posts because I I save profiles to lists. That's something that I do with Evy AI. And so I have a list of people that are part of my networking group, a specific networking group called the Executives Association. So I'm the one that's every week, once a week, I have it on my calendar, pops up on my calendar.

Yeah.

And I make sure that I go through the list and I, and often I do this on LinkedIn Live. I'll go through the list and I'll open up each person's profile and identify if they recently posted. and then drop a comment. And somebody walked over to me at a networking event recently in Manhattan, I think it was like a week and a half ago, and he said, Joe, I noticed that you're the only one commenting on my posts, and for that reason, I want to do business with you. I want you guys to do our marketing. That's $100,000 potential for our marketing agency.

Yeah.

Simply because I have a list and I have a routine to go through that list and leave comments on those people's posts, and I'm the only one doing it for most of the people.

100%. 100%. And especially if it's a higher-end deal. I mean, you're talking about a $50,000, you know, consultation or something even above that into the hundreds of thousands to millions. These are extended conversations. It's not like you're gonna book the person, have a conversation on a Zoom, and they're gonna write you a check for $1 million. They usually have boards of directors and other decision makers involved. So it's especially important in those types of situations when you're selling a large product or consultation to be on their feeds and to be constantly, you know, encouraging them with comments and sharing their wisdom and all these other different kind of things because it keeps that relationship warm. It keeps it close. And by keeping that person close, also a lot of times we get a maybe, you know, or a no or not right now. And we think, oh, we're devastated by that. No, no, there's no nos. There's a, there's a it's not good for me right now for whatever limiting beliefs Talk that someone's doing, keep those people on your list and keep commenting and keep sharing their knowledge and keep going. And you never know, a year and a half later, I've had people pop up and go, okay, I'm ready. I'm like, who is that? Oh my God, that's George Smith from 2 years ago. You know what I mean? They pop back up.

Yeah, no, I was on a webinar today teaching people about Sales Navigator. And the reason I just thought of this is because what you just said.

Yeah.

I saw a message pop up on Sales Navigator as I was in Sales Navigator and it said, I'd like to learn more. And I looked at when I sent that person that message and I sent it to them in November.

Oh yeah.

So I sent somebody a Sales Navigator InMail in November telling them about my services, and then they pop up 6 weeks later saying, I'm interested. Most people, they think they failed because they sent a message and they didn't get a response within 5 minutes. Well, for this woman, it took her 6 weeks for her to even respond to my InMail. So Tammy just asked a question in the chat. She said, how does it— how much, how much does it matter to you, Sales Navigator?

Mm-hmm. You go first and then I'll go.

For me, Sales Navigator is just another way for me to prospect and to build relationships with people that are prospective customers. And the AI works within Sales Navigator and it alerts me when my leads that I saved into Sales Navigator when they're posting on LinkedIn.

Mm-hmm.

So if a lead posts on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator will alert me that my lead that is saved into Sales Navigator posted on LinkedIn, and then I can use Evy AI within Sales Navigator to leave a comment. The other thing I like about Sales Navigator is the advanced search. So I can see all the people that posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days that are in a particular industry, that are in a particular group, that are following my company page, that have viewed my profile, There's a lot of filters that you can't get anywhere else. If I want to see people that recently left one company and joined another company, I could specifically say, show me all the people that left Google and joined Microsoft. Show me all the people that left Facebook and joined Apple. And I can see those people and I can create really, really custom messages for those people. I can see people that have been in a position for more than X amount of years. So if I'm targeting sales managers that have been in the same company for 16+ years, And maybe they're looking to retire or they're looking for their next thing because they're in the company for more than 10 years. You see that there are types of people that are loyal. You want to find people that don't have a specific title. You can use Boolean search within Sales Navigator. There's a lot that you can do if you learn how to leverage Sales Navigator. And part of Evvy AI Pro, which is the upgraded version of Evvy AI that we just launched a week and a half ago, We're now offering the Sales Nav Bootcamp, which is a $3,000 value included in Sales Nav into Avi.ai Pro. We're including the Sales Nav Bootcamp, which is 6 hours of training on how to leverage, um, how to leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator. But it does cost more money to pay for Sales Navigator and not everybody wants to spend that money. And so if you, I would say if you're already paying for Premium, which is a couple hundred dollars a year, you pay a couple hundred dollars more and you get Sales Navigator. Which is a nice boost, but don't pay for it unless you're going to use it.

Yeah, so Facebook was in the hole the first— at the first couple years it was out because it's free and everybody's uploading pictures to it. Well, the cloud is very heavy and very expensive. It's called servers that we store everything at. So that freeware where then they tried to add the pages later and then tried to add the— it was kind of sloppy, you know, the way they, they executed. So LinkedIn was smarter and said, well, we're going to be a sales database for people that want leads and to find potential customers. So we're gonna give you some of the filters for free, but the more advanced filters, we're gonna indicate you're going to have to pay for. So it's things like, I want company headcount. I wanna see that they have at least 50 employees so they could obviously afford my $50,000 program. And things that are deeper, I wanna talk to the president of the company, but not the owner of the company. I want the owner of the company to be someone else. And the more specific things you can do with it is just fascinating. Joe just mentioned some of them, but there's all kinds of more specific things in the search that you can do to siphon out, out of the now 900 million people on LinkedIn, who you specifically want to network with and who you specifically want to collect as leads and nurture them and comment on them and get them to, of course, have a conversation with you. So it's just a matter of A, what you're selling, and B, what level you're at. I mean, it's not worth it if you're just starting out. I say build your network first, Then later on, when you want to get more specific, go into Sales Navigator and then you can get, you know, even more specific about it.

I agree. And you know what, like at the end of the day, AGI is going to take over and do everything for us. Like artificial intelligence, general intelligence is going to come in and it's literally going to do everything for us. But the one thing that it's not really going to do is build those relationships and connect with people emotionally because AI is not gonna have emotions. And so if you learn how to be a mensch and connect with people and get to know them, that is something that AI is probably not gonna be able to replace anytime soon. So Darryl, can you tell us a little bit about your history? Like how did you start doing what you're doing? How did, what was the making? What was, what's your hero's journey?

Sure, well it was, I threw away theater and acting and standup comedy Uh, in my late 20s to go and be corporate. So I was the voice of Scooter Computer on Schoolhouse Rock. I auditioned for The Goonies. I met Steven Spielberg. I worked with Howard Ashman and Jodi Benson. If you don't know that combination, that's who was The Little Mermaid and who wrote The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast. Um, all kinds of different theater and stand-up comedy that I did all through that, you know, whole period. Then I got this little floppy disk in 1997 that said HTML, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna adult now. You know, and sit in front of a desk all day, remove myself from being on stage and interacting with people that way and just make websites. So I started a website design business in 2002. Fast forward, people are starting to make a video and business people are trying to make videos and they are not actors. And it's really funny, even when with the live broadcasting, like in 2016 with Facebook and the lives, everybody all of a sudden goes and starts doing it without studying broadcasting, or everybody starts making videos without taking an acting class, a playwriting class, a screenwriting class, or comedy improv class. And everybody's trying to be theater now and on film without knowing how to do it. So that's where I gradually started to consult with people on that, not realizing what I was doing at first. And that blossomed into my fastest-moving, emotionally-driven video content marketing agency on the planet. So how that works is I do an exercise called stormstorming. I go backwards through your life. You tell me your whole life story because I'm trying to find all this Things that led up to what you're doing now. Then we'll write out your platform, your online course, and the landing pages. And then I'll visit with you and I'll shoot 200 videos of your stories in 2 days. So my philosophy is all the stories are already in you that will go viral. You already know all of your stories. I've just got to extract them. So as other marketing people come along and say, okay, this will be your marketing, it'll look like this, we'll make it a mermaid, uh, with some colors there, that's your marketing. And you go, okay, I guess. I mean, that it's supposed to be blue with lightning. Okay, I guess. But I say your marketing is in you. So that has evolved in this new age of Reels and the way that people are doing with LinkedIn is I have an AI prompt for ChatGPT that'll take the transcriptions of your videos and make them in this new— bless you— viral format, double-spaced with the emojis and the bullet points. And you've seen this format that everybody's doing. So now we can just go even faster But the key is teaching you how to act, how to be yourself on camera and pause and listen to that person that isn't there yet. So I'll give you one more example if you're a sci-fi fan. There's a movie called Interstellar. Matthew McConaughey goes out into outer space, you know, for a minute, and his daughter goes from 8 years old to 28 years old in a minute. So the daughter sends his dad a video message and she's crying. Now, how this works, I don't know, but it gets to him in outer space light years before or after. But when he gets the message, and now his daughter's 28 and she's crying, he starts to cry. So we've broken the space-time continuum. If you can be present with someone that you really care about and learn the acting skills to get them emotionally involved in this conversation that you're having, when they receive it, they're going to feel like you are present with them. And that's the illusion that we can really create, especially with these vertical reels now. where I can be so close to you and intimate. So I don't shoot videos, hey, come on down to my store, look at all the stuff we've got. Like, I don't do that. I mean, I have you close to the camera and intimate and never moving your eyes off the camera lens. And that's what creates the theater in marketing, creates the illusion of this connection. Comments and all these things we're doing are creating connection. And if you don't make your video content like you're actually connecting to someone and caring about them and wanting to help them, And you're just rattling off facts and figures that— and you know this in sales, some people say, well, that's interesting, I need to think about it. If you're getting a lot of that, it's because you didn't make anybody feel anything. So I just boost you up to this emotional state where you're actually— the passion behind what you do shows. And like in the case of an auto mechanic, I just had him fixing the cars and teach you how he's fixing the cars, transcribe the videos, put them on YouTube, interlinked everything together. And it worked. I mean, one of his videos made him $7 million because we did a little research on it too. So that's what I'm focusing on because again, it's, it's all the legs together. You could get EVAI and comment, comment, comment, comment, comment, but still they're going to go to your profile and see who the heck you are. And if you don't have any videos or anything on there, you're done. And the opposite is true. If you do all my videos the way I do it and you don't comment, you, you're like one leg's missing from the tripod. But when you get it all right and in balance, as Joe has given this tool that takes one or two of those legs and makes it so efficient to do, I have the third essential leg, which is how are you talking to these people and how are you moving them to say yes? Because you can sell someone in 90 seconds if you do a really good inbound video. And Gary Vee talks about that, punch, punch, punch, jab. Anyway, nobody's doing that either. So I could go on, but there you are.

No, that's amazing. Punch, punch, punch, jab. I think it's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Am I right?

Yeah, I have it sitting there. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

Yeah, yeah. My point is, so great point and sharing your story and teaching people about your background. How do you see similarities between stand-up comedy and marketing?

Well, comic timing is everything, and the most important word in any dramatic literature is the word Pause. In the script, I write pause, and it's in those microseconds of pausing where the emotion takes place. Take my wife, please. It's a W feels, C feels joke, right? The pause and then the punchline after that makes this a joke happen. And if you can make someone laugh in a sales presentation, if you can get them to relax and get them laughing, you're done. You've done 90% of the work towards forming you know, the next client relationship that you're going to have. If you can make them feel relaxed and be a little silly, a little tongue-in-cheek about it, ask them some funny questions about their life, and just— and it softens the mood and it makes it so that you're so much more approachable. But comic timing and dramatic timing are the same in theory, uh, and when you put those into practice, you'll be so much more likable. And what do we talk about? The know, like, and trust factor. So what are they liking about you? Are they liking your beard, Joe? Is that what they call you? They say, but Joe, that beard is amazing. No, they like you because they see your character. They see the type of person that you are, and you are so serving. You do these amazing posting parties. You spend so much time helping your clients. I mean, it's software. You could sell the software and be done, but instead you've got this active forum and trainings all the time and helping people and da da da. And that's what makes us now feel like we're in the EVAI fam. And that's your brand. Your brand is the reputation and the family feeling that we're all in this together and we're all working together and we're all learning from each other. And that which— that's what you've done beautifully, although I can still help you with your acting.

Thank you very much. No, you're 100%— you're 100% right about the pause. A lot of people don't even take the time to pause because They get so nervous that they're gonna ruin something if they pause. But the reality is that's what makes the beauty of music is the silence between the notes. Otherwise, it would just be noise.

Correct. Another one is don't introduce yourself. I already know I'm on your feed. Don't tell me I'm about to tell you a story about a frog. In those 5 seconds, you lost them. They scroll past it. Right? You go, here's how I saved a dog from a tree in a fire and almost lost my leg. It was crazy that day. And you just, you know, that's it. Like, shocker of a headline.

A great hook.

Yeah, right hook. I mean, you know, Maria Malik, who is the Pakistani American who has this one post that says, you know, I was 17 years old when I was forced into an arranged marriage. And she goes from that to at the end talking about how she now helps introverts to speak up and teaches introverts public speaking because if she hadn't spoken up, she'd still be in Pakistan miserable. I mean, it's a real story and you get caught into so much drama and then her victory at the end, which then at the same time is why she does her business. Here's another one. So they talk about your purpose, find your purpose. I found mine yesterday, Joe. It's in my bottom drawer here in my file cabinet. I found my purpose. Yeah, it was back behind my socks. That doesn't make any sense to me. What makes sense to me is show your expertise, demonstrate who you are by telling stories from your life, by telling stories of the people that you love and care about, by demonstrating great things that you can know, teach, and demonstrate. The world will then decide how to use you. They will ask you, hey, could you help me with it? Hey, do you also know this? Hey, I saw that, I was so inspired. Can I just talk to you because I just like that story about You know, how your mom, you know, had cancer and how you survived that, or whatever it is. Marketing is just starting conversation. The marketing stops when the conversation starts. Then you're going into the next process, which is the sales process. So don't go out there trying to sell. You're trying to market. You're trying to start meaningful conversations with people that would just be your friend and would care about the same things. That's about it.

Yeah. And if you do it correctly, you're going to get a lot of business and be very successful.

Yep.

Thank you very much for being on here. Any final words of wisdom before we wrap up?

Well, sure. I mean, I, I work with people that actually audition to work with me and they have to be real experts in their field. So I have the thing open over here. I'll drop the link to there. I'm going to connect with everybody of your connections that are mine, and you can connect me with yours and all that. We'll follow up with everybody. And if anybody wants to take this LinkedIn to the next level, Me and the guy sitting next to me are the combination that'll do it. Because if you can do these viral videos right at the same time as using all the tools that Joe has, you're gonna rock it to the next level and have those conversations with those people who need you. And it's your fault that you're not reaching them because all the tools are here to do it.

Awesome.

So stop the limiting beliefs and go for it.

Thank you very much for being here, Darryl. Thank everybody for watching. We'll see you on the next one. Don't forget to hit that repost button. Awesome. Bye, everyone.