Just Start
You’re sat there, staring at your keyboard. You’ve been here for 15 minutes. The coffee is going cold, and a sweat is breaking out on your forehead…. your stomach is churning as you try to think what would resonate with your audience. And therein lies the problem.
MOST people try and write to their audience (or their perception of their audience). But very few write about what they’re passionate about, in order to ATTRACT the RIGHT audience.
Newsflash: Most people don’t have a 1st degree connection list that is heavily based on their ideal client. It’s usually a cumulative mix of friends, business colleagues and sales reps waiting to sell you ’30 QUALIFIED leads in 30 days’!
If you carry on trying to write for this audience, you might get more ‘likes’, ‘comments’ and ‘views’, but I can guarantee, it’s the wrong people to view your profile.
And if you’re waiting for perfection in your copy? It’s not going to happen, if you never actually start. Even the most popular ‘influencers’ on LinkedIn had to start somewhere. Have a look at their early posts compared to the current ones, and you’ll see a huge change as they hone their skills to perfection… by DOING, not THINKING ABOUT DOING!
“But nobody wants to know what I’m saying, I’m just a nobody”
We’ve all got that voice to some extent. Hell, I came out of 15 years in retail and had to ghostwrite for 4 LinkedIn accounts as well as my own, to try and reach C-Suite in Enterprise business… you think that was FUN? Nope (I lie, it was a bit, but I’m nuts, and you’re probably not!). But I STARTED.
The hardest step isn’t the first one. It’s the second, third, and fourth, when your ‘views’ are bloody awful (I had some with less than 15 total!). It’s having the courage to keep going back, knowing that sooner or later, the RIGHT people will start to see your content, and will begin to follow you, engage, and help spread you to your ideal client base.
“But how do I know what my ideal clients want to read about?”
This is where you can go one of three routes (and I suggest taking at least two of them).
- Hire a Marketer: Get an in-depth analysis of your ideal client persona and research into the topics they’re likely to care about deeply enough to engage with you.
- Do Your Own Research: Find some folks you’d like to work with and ask them if they would help you.
- Use chatGPT: Ask chatGPT to help you find and refine your ICP, and give you an example of what that person would look like (demographically), what they do, how they talk, and the things they care about.
If I’m going to be honest, option 1 above is often overrated and you can do quite a good job yourself… so I’d always plump for 2 and 3. For more on this, check out the Automating Your Podcast article, which includes tips on leveraging technology efficiently.
If you’re going to message folks about helping with research, please remember that you’re asking them to give up the most precious thing they have – TIME. So don’t make an ask of a complete stranger, if possible. Ask friends and connections, or ask them to refer you to someone who would do it. Respect their time, and keep the session short. And lastly? Remember to go back to them to update them on what you learned and how they’ve helped you. This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship, that you can fan to build a much bigger base of support.
Using chatGPT for Content Ideas
You don’t need to know much about it to use it, but you do need to have created a login, and if I were you, I’d fork out the $20 a month for unlimited access – it’s easily the most versatile tool I have and saves me hours of work each month.
I’ll cover ‘prompt engineering’ (the science of using concise language to get chatGPT’s bot to respond to you in exactly the way you want) in another article in more depth. For now, you just need to plug the code in, amend it to your audience, and hit enter.
“Act as a world class marketing expert. Identify the characteristics, demographics, and firmographics of my ideal client persona. They are a <JOB TITLE> in the <INDUSTRY> sector. They have <X> employees, make <Y> Revenue, and are based in <country>. I’d like to know as much detail as possible about them, and I’d like you to compare them to 3 celebrities’ personalities who they most closely match.”
Now that you’ve got this prompt, you can let your imagination go WILD.
- Ask GPT what their most likely pain points are, what frustrates them the most, what they eat for DINNER even. The best part? The answers are all based on real answers out there, it just saved you having to find them.
- Ask GPT for 20 topics that would be relevant in the current poor economic climate that you could write about.
- Ask it what time of day they’re likely to be on LinkedIn.
- Ask it how long they’d prefer posts to be.
- Ask it to mimic the celebrity’s style that it identified above to write some content.
For example, using chatGPT to brainstorm topics can lead to content that contrasts ideas effectively, similar to the approach in Attracting With Opposites.
I’ll cover the prompts for these in more detail in later newsletters, but for now – just know there are a million and one things you can do with this information. But DO NOT let GPT write your LinkedIn posts solo.
By all means, let it give you inspiration and a starting point – but if you start releasing GPT-written posts, folks will spot it, unfollow, and delete you. You’re toast, baby.
Be Brave
Get your first week’s worth of content using the above, write it, finesse it, but set yourself a date to start posting, and DO IT. No excuses.
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I want to hear your results in the comments! Email me, whatever. But tell me how it went!
