AI-Powered Success: Why Your LinkedIn Strategy Needs a 2024 Upgrade with Joe Apfelbaum

Dustin: [00:00:00] All right. Welcome back to the seven figure leap. I have another amazing guest for you today. Uh, I met Joe and a networking group that we're in called JVMM. That's Joint Venture Mastermind. And so I gotta be honest. I had a call with him. He's one of, I don't know, a dozen people I was meeting with from the group.
And you know how these things go. You exchange pleasantries and you think, yeah, maybe there's some way he can help me. Maybe there's some way I can help him. And It was like one of the most jam packed value laden calls. And he opened a call with like, give me very tangible, practical things I could do on LinkedIn to improve my profile and improve my presence.
And I was immediately smitten with Joe and said, I could have you on my podcast because LinkedIn and networking and AI, and some of the things that he's involved with. Our key things for scaling our businesses here in 2024. So, uh, Joe Apfelbaum, uh, is my guest today. Joe, I'd love to let you introduce yourself a little bit, talk a little bit about what you're up to, and then we'll kind of dive back into your past and come right back up into the future and, and unpack all the goodness you have to share with us.
Joe: Oh, thank you so much for [00:01:00] having me. I'm really excited about being on the seven figure leap. My name is Joe Appelbaum, CEO of Ajax Union and now Evi AI. I started off being more of a web designer, like designing HTML websites for people. And I used to design about a hundred websites per year. And one of the things that people told me is, uh, if you build it, they will come, right?
But nobody's coming. What do we do, Joe? So I had to figure out how to do search engine optimization, which is basically getting websites to rank on Google. That's what was hot about 15 years ago. And I became really, really proficient at it. It used to be much easier than it is right now. But, you know, like, Getting people to rank on Google for back then was really, really easy and I found that I had a passion for reverse engineering things, like figuring out how things work.
And now with artificial intelligence, I'm figuring out how to create Chrome extensions and build applications without knowing much code or without knowing development. And so I went on a journey from building websites to
becoming a marketer, to becoming a business guy. I grew Inc. [00:02:00] 500 to be, uh, I grew Ajax unit to be on the Inc.
500 as one of the fastest growing companies in America. We serviced over 1100 clients and on my path, I found that the best clients come from referrals. And so I started networking and building relationships and I did it all wrong at the beginning and then eventually what I found was that LinkedIn was one of the most productive platforms for networking, building relationships and getting high, high value clients. So a lot of people don't even know the value of LinkedIn. I speak to people and they're like, Oh my God, I didn't know that every connection on LinkedIn becomes a follower. I didn't know that you can add 30, 000 connections on LinkedIn, which means you can have 30, 000 followers with their first name, last name, email address, cell phone number, where they went to work, where they went to school, everything about them on Instagram is just big Betty 25. But on LinkedIn, you see everything about somebody. It's just crazy. Like I don't. And so it's basically gold for someone who's a coach, a consultant, a sales professional, someone who's selling high ticket items. [00:03:00] If you have a high value product or service, even if it's B2C, LinkedIn is a great platform for you to network, build relationships and close deals.
So I started really getting into it, and then I realized Microsoft paid $26.2 billion to buy LinkedIn. LinkedIn was failing financially, and LinkedIn went and bailed it. They paid four times more than what the stock was worth at the time to buy it and take it in for themselves. So $26.2 billion to buy LinkedIn, and I was like,
oh my God, if they paid that much money for LinkedIn, they're gonna monetize the crap out of it.
And then I saw what they started doing. I went all in 2016, 2017, 2018. I warned my entire network saying, Hey, LinkedIn is changing the way they're doing things. They're not no longer gonna give you email address on the export. You gotta get all your contacts off LinkedIn. And I taught people how to do that.
And now in 2024, they include LinkedIn URLs in the exports, which you can use together with AI to do some pretty incredible things. I'll talk about that later. But what I just want to tell people is like, who am I? I'm a nerd. a nerd when it comes to networking. I'm a nerd when it comes to marketing.
I'm a nerd when it comes [00:04:00] to prospecting. I love reverse engineering. I love making a difference for people. I love showing people how I built multiple seven figure businesses.
Dustin: Absolutely. And that's, of course, when I started to unpack this with Joe and I'm like, Oh, I thought you were just like the LinkedIn dude. Um, and then as I got to understand some of the businesses he's built and he's Done this in numerous models. And he's very intentional about some of the models that he's focused on today.
I thought, man, this is going to be amazing value to unpack for our listeners who are building their own seven figure businesses in many different models. And yeah, so I got to chuckle. I was like, I wanted to interject with a crude comment to say like big Betty 25 is like my favorite Instagram follow, but, um, I'll, I'll, I'll leave that one there.
So let's go back just a little bit and talk about. You know, some of the things that you did with Ajax union and you know that you can, you can unpack what that is, you know, just for a couple of minutes. So people have context to like where you came from. So when we get to what you're doing now, they can kind of see that like most of the context and the contrast, right?
Like you've built [00:05:00] different businesses now than what you built getting up to this point in your entrepreneurial journey. So what is Ajax union? I know you're still running it. You still own it. Why is maybe that model, not your focus as much moving forward?
Joe: Well, when I started doing websites for people, I was just doing it for fun. That's the truth. You know, like, I was just like, Oh my God, I love to like hack and like, you know, copy and paste HTML and wow, the website works. It's rendered. Look at that. That's so amazing. And I would just like get a, I would get like a high off, like making a website work.
I was like, I can do this. Like I have no education, like I have nothing. I don't know anything about computers. And all of a sudden, boom, I can make a website work. Like, I don't have an engineering degree. I'm not this big genius. I just like. Just hack things, you know, like hack things together, like scotch tape a website together and suddenly it works.
And people were willing to pay me a thousand bucks to Scotch tape a website together, and I would do that a hundred times a year, but it was a project thing. That means every single year I had to work my ass off to try to close clients to do projects for them. The difference [00:06:00] between that six figure business
and then Ajax Union, a multiple seven figure business that had a 12000% growth over three years.
Is the concept of reoccurring revenue, which is something I did not have in my first business, which was called Apple's creations. Which by the way, I just relaunched the apples creations website with a new framework on how anyone can build a no code app by themselves. It was just, I came up with the idea like literally two days ago, wrote up the diagram in my row and then I put it up on the website and I was just like full circle.
I'm now teaching people how to build their own app with AI. Their own web app, their own web application with AI, without a developer, without any knowledge of coding. So I'm like, wow, I'm coming full circle, but going back, you know, I built Ajax union and I, I, this bug hit me. It's like, oh my God, if I close a client to pay me a thousand bucks a month, instead of a thousand bucks period. Now I can scale because if I get a hundred customers, it's a hundred thousand dollars a month. [00:07:00] That's 1. 2 million dollars in revenue. What if I got a thousand customers and eventually I got 1100 clients, but what, like, I would go, I would, that's insane. Yeah. Even if I had a churn, a 20, 30 percent churn, I would still do amazing.
And that's essentially what happened. I had 75 full time employees in three locations. And then the only way I was able to afford to do that is because I would get clients to prepay me in advance. So when you hire me to do your marketing, I don't first do the marketing and then you pay me. This is not a restaurant where I first serve you the food you eat.
And then if you like it, you pay me. That's not how it works. This is a fast food place. You come, you pay, then we make your food. Then we manufacture your food, then we hand it to you. That's how it works with, with, with Ajax Union.
You, people would pay. That means I was cash flow positive from day one. That means the more customers I would get, the more cash I would have, the more employees I could hire, the more I can grow the business.
And so that's the model that really changed my life. And now I employ the same model [00:08:00] in, in my course business, where I teach people how to use LinkedIn and I teach people how to use AI. Then also, which is called Evergreen, E-V-Y-R-G-R-E-E n.com. That's evergreen. And then in the new business that we opened up early this year called Evie ai, we have 13,000 people using it in 35 countries around the world.
And somebody just said, Joe, you can get 46 times, uh, multiple on this business. This is a reoccurring revenue business that doesn't have a high cogs. The problem with Ajax Union is that although I'm profitable from day one, and
although it's reoccurring revenue, the scalability is low, because the more clients I get, the more employees I need to hire.
The calculation I made when I started Ajax Union is that for every 10 clients, I would have to hire an employee on those low level. You know, when I say a thousand bucks a month is pretty low level, but for a, let's say a $45,000 a month client, I may have to hire a team of 10 people or a team of five people at least.
And so now all of a sudden I'm like hiring people, they have to be high [00:09:00] end. The client leaves, it leaves me a gaping hole. I still have to pay the employees. That's a problem. My cost of goods aren't very good. Like it's not very profitable to have an agency, you know, like if some staffing agencies make 10%, some staffing agencies make 20%, some that are very profitable make 30%, but your fixed costs, you got to have, you know, a thousand employees in order for it to make any money for you.
And so you take a step back and you ask yourself, Joe, do you want to be hurting employees or do you want to be hoarding employees? Either way, it's not good. Hurting or hoarding. It's not good. So what are you going to do? The answer is higher artificial intelligence. And that's what I'm doing now. When you have somebody write your post with my current software, Evi AI, E V Y AI.
com. When you have somebody write it. AI is writing it. That's my employee. When you pick up the phone and you brainstorm with my AI agent on the phone, like a regular human, you're talking to an AI agent and that agent sounds like a [00:10:00] human. It laughs like a human. It talks, it makes suggestions like a human.
It does everything, but it's available 24 seven. It never goes to sleep. It never complains. It never goes to the government talking smack about you. It never has random fornications with other employees. It doesn't do any of that. It literally just works, does its job and is, is predictable every single time.
And if it does a terrible job, it's because I didn't train it right.
Dustin: I love it. Yeah. I think, I think many people listening, uh, we'll have various paths, but I think we kind of hit many of these same models, right? So I do have an engineering degree. And so for many years, I worked in engineering firms and I got to the point where I was building teams and it was like, Hey, great.
We got, you know, 250, 000 contract for some traffic engineering job. Uh, and I know I have to hire, you know, someone else or I have to hire two more people. And so you're constantly chasing your tail with this cost of goods sold, which in that case is labor, which is among the highest cost of goods sold that you can
have.
Uh, my escape from engineering was into project based marketing work where it's [00:11:00] like, Oh, you want to give me 3, 500 bucks to build your website? Sweet, you know, uh, and then when that project started and when it's over, well, guess what? And I have no clients. I have to go get the next one. So then, yeah, then I got into recurring revenue.
Like, Hey, and what if I had 10 clients that were paying me 3000 a month? And you know, then that became a very viable business model, but still hits a limit pretty quickly because it's either you and your own time or it's. People time that you're paying for. And then you have all of these imbalances that you already mentioned, right?
Like whether it's a problem, employee, a contract dries up, um, yeah, any, any, any number of things that can go wrong. So I love that you, then you went from project based to recurring revenue to now a focus on scalable recurring revenue. That's not human based for the most part, obviously there's some humans involved.
And so. I think that gives us a great through line into how you've built multiple seven figure businesses, not without pain. Obviously, you had a lot of learning curves along there and, and a lot of false starts as you're building things. Um, so, [00:12:00] so the agency still exists. You still own that. Now you've got evergreen as a project or as a product, as a business, you've got Evie AI, which is the latest and sounds like it's really the quickest growing of the different, um, endeavors that you've taken so far.
And it's very, obviously, AI based it's right in the title, but it is based on LinkedIn. So I think to come back to where you opened, let's, let's unpack this onion, a little bit of LinkedIn. So, uh, I think you have some very unique perspectives on it. Obviously you've added this layer of AI as an assistant to LinkedIn, but at your core and the way that you were introduced to me, you're a LinkedIn trainer.
So let's just assume people are like they've dabbled in LinkedIn. Like many people, they have the resume, they probably have some kind of profile there, but maybe they're not in the content game of LinkedIn, like you and I both are at
this point, tell us why LinkedIn, what's the opportunity for us as entrepreneurs, in particular, as like creators and marketers?
Joe: So what is the opportunity with LinkedIn? By the way, does your cell phone end with eight eights?
Dustin: It does.[00:13:00]
Joe: do I know that? How do I know that? How do I know that? And the answer is LinkedIn gives you so much information. So, so LinkedIn tells you everything about somebody that you need to know in order for you to be able to get a cell phone, to get a, to get their last five places where they live, the, the, the amount of money that they owe on their mortgage, who they're married to and their kids names, five X father, five X founder.
Like there's a lot of things that you can learn about somebody on LinkedIn. You can't learn about it on Twitter, Snapchat, only fans. You can't learn about it anywhere else. The thing I want to let you know is that LinkedIn is a professional social network. Some people are unprofessional, but it's a professional social network, which means it's a place where people, their mindset, the context is business, is networking, is relationships, it's growth, it's personal development.
And so people want to connect with each other. If you connect with me on Instagram, sure. You know, you could slide in my DM. I'll be like, all right, what does this person want? Is it a sugar baby? Is it a sugar father? Is it a grandmother? Like what's going on over here? What do you want? [00:14:00] But on LinkedIn, you want to network, you want to build relationships, you want to make referrals.
And so LinkedIn is extremely powerful because of the context that you're in. They say that every follower on LinkedIn is worth three times or four times of that on Facebook. Because on Facebook, the people aren't necessarily there to buy. They're not there to connect and to build relationships. They're there to look at pictures of pizza or pictures of feet.
On LinkedIn, you're there to connect and build relationships. And so when you're connecting on LinkedIn, the value is much, much higher. Also, the people that are on LinkedIn are decision makers, their founders, their CEOs, their executives, their authors, speakers, podcasters. Those are the people that are on LinkedIn, senior executives at major corporations.
Those are the people that are spending time on LinkedIn. Most social media sites are banned from big corporations, but LinkedIn needs to be available because sales reps are using it all the time. And so it's like available for people to use during work, during work hours, when people are thinking about business, they could use it.
What I love most about LinkedIn is not that they have a billion users because they do, they have a billion users. It's not that they have [00:15:00] 60 million people that log in for 17 minutes a day, every single day, a lot of active users,
not like Instagram has 400 million, but you know, people on LinkedIn are paying attention.
People are reading things on LinkedIn. There's more text based things, not just images where people are swiping. People are paying attention on LinkedIn. As a matter of fact, 38 percent of people are not just paying attention, but they're also paying for LinkedIn. What does that mean that they're paying for LinkedIn?
There's LinkedIn premium. I know that you have LinkedIn premium because you have a little gold icon on your profile. So if I was going to be a trainer. Teaching people how to do anything in Spanish. What I would do is teach LinkedIn. That's where the money is. In LinkedIn. I'm building a tool for LinkedIn because LinkedIn is where the money is and I want people that are paying for LinkedIn, sometimes 50 a month.
Sometimes 100 a month, sometimes 150 a month, they use LinkedIn. And so if you're paying, people that pay, pay attention. I'll say this again, people that pay, pay [00:16:00] attention. And on LinkedIn, people are paying attention because they're paying, they're investing time, effort, energy, and money. You could have
30, 000 followers because you could have 30, 000 connections.
And let me tell you something, Gary Vaynerchuk, all in on LinkedIn, Tony Robbins, all in on LinkedIn, like the people that I'm following, that I'm looking at what they're doing on LinkedIn is just mind blowing the amount of followers, whether it's Bill Gates, whether it's Reid Hoffman, I mean, go follow the top 100 influencers on LinkedIn, the people that are making it in the world, they're on LinkedIn, they're active on LinkedIn.
And I'm the one engaging on their posts. So LinkedIn is a powerful platform. You can see everything everybody's doing on there. You can see their first name, last name, company name, where they work, where they work before, what their cell phone number is, what their email address is. You just have to learn how to use it.
Now, everything Microsoft does is complicated.
Dustin: Yes, that's an
Joe: used windows. Are you a windows or a Mac?
Dustin: uh, Mac, but I've, I've, uh, in my engineering career, I had to use windows
Joe: Windows. I use windows. I'm a windows guy. I'm an Android guy. And the [00:17:00] reason I'm a windows and Android guy, cause I want to do things 15 different ways. If I was a Mac, there's only one way to do one thing on our Mac. On a Mac, you just wait for the little red ball to spin, the little colorful ball to
spin.
And if Microsoft, if Mac says wait, you freaking wait. Even if you have to wait a month, you wait. On Apple and, and, and Windows, I can delete DLL files from today till tomorrow, go into the registry, make it 16, 15 different ways, do whatever I want instantly. I can't do that with a Mac because it's not an open thing.
You also can't get hacked the same way you can get hacked because you can do things 15 different ways. But I'm a hacker, I like to hack, and so I have these like auto key tools that automatically visit websites and do all these types of weird scripts that automatically click on things for me on my computer because I'm that type of hacker.
I like to hack. Again, I'm not a coder. I'm a hacker. I'm not going to sit there writing code. That's what Claude does for me. That's what ChatGPT does for me, writes all the code for everything, even Excel codes it writes for me. So, to answer your question, is I'm obsessed with LinkedIn? Is it because that's where the money is?
Dustin: yeah, I think that's the best way to put it. And I can speak from personal experience. Certainly [00:18:00] no, no power user as Joe is. Um, but it's been a huge component of my business. I got, I'd say pretty active on LinkedIn about 18 months ago. So. Um, it really fits hand in glove with the podcast guesting strategies that we teach.
So, uh, some of the things we do in the back end of a podcast, yes, the appearance happened on LinkedIn. And so many times I'll have an experience where we kick off a group call and I'll say, Hey, how'd you guys, you remember
how we first interacted and there'll be this sort of smorgasbord, um, of initial answers, but then eventually pretty much everyone's like, I heard you on a podcast and LinkedIn and I got a new email and you know, and it's like an attribution is a little fuzzy, but LinkedIn plays a key role in that sort of conversion process.
And that no like and trust, uh, affinity that we're always trying to build as marketers. And even as we sit here, Joe, like I, I'm doing a, an impromptu coaching session tomorrow. As the Apple guy, I got a new iPad and an Apple pencil. And I'm like, you know what, what the hell I'm going to like, just have people on live and I'm going to ask him, what do you want to know?
And [00:19:00] we're going to do a diagrammic sort of coaching session tomorrow on marketing. I'm really excited about that. Uh, and I sent it to my email list and I had a good response. So this morning I put a very simple text based LinkedIn post and said, Hey, I'm doing this thing tomorrow. I put no thought into it, no images.
And I've had, I have DMS right now. I have probably at least 10 new people who I don't know who have been following me for like. What an amazing opportunity. Please add me to the calendar invite, but will one of them become a client? Not sure, but probably. And so that's the power. And I have like 85, 8, 800 followers at this point.
And Joe's got pushing 50, 000. So what's awesome though, is even when I had 800 followers, I still had amazing DMs, a lot of great connection calls. And I definitely got clients from the first month I was on LinkedIn. Um, just by serving first, not being a douchebag about it. Um, trying to be, you know, just being human and respecting people.
Cause that's,
Joe: It's so
Dustin: maybe you can talk a little bit about the dark side. Cause I think some people have been exposed to LinkedIn. They got pitch slapped in their DMs, uh, immediately and got turned off by [00:20:00] the whole thing.
Joe: so much. They hate it so much. Especially you. You, you know, uh, you're, um, you're a Cancer, right? You were born in July. Am I right?
Dustin: Correct.
Joe: So, you know, like LinkedIn gives me information about people that you can't get anywhere else. Like, how do you know somebody's astrology sign from LinkedIn? You just do like, these are the things
Dustin: that's only on my only fans. So this is actually really Joe: exactly I'm just saying, like, you know, I know exactly who you are.
I mean, we were born in the same year. We're both water signs. So we have that in common. So when you're building a relationship with somebody and you're getting to know them, You can see when they graduated school, you can see this information that when you run it through AI, I have an AI that sits on top of LinkedIn and tells me how old everybody is and their gender.
Like I know your gender. I can tell your gender. Even if you change it, I can still tell it. Um, but LinkedIn tells me everything and it's just so powerful what you can know from these tools if you use them correctly and you start learning how to use them and that's why I'm so passionate and you know, I used to, I used to have an ego thing about, Oh, I'm a CEO.
I can't call myself a LinkedIn trainer. I'm a CEO, [00:21:00] but then that was just ego. You know, like if I really want to help people, I got to put on that cap of like. Call me. I'm your LinkedIn trainer. Let me help you. You know, like stop having an ego about it and stop worrying about it. You know, I'm turning 45, you know, like you just turned 45, but I'm turning 45.
It's, it's a thing. It's, it's, you know, like we're, we're on the, we're on the other edge of 40, you know, like we're, we're on the other side. Like our ego, it's time for to say goodbye to that ego, you know,
Dustin: We're gonna be saying goodbye to the world soon enough. I might as well say goodbye to the ego, right?
Joe: crazy.
Dustin: No, that's great. I, and I think that, um, yeah, I mean, obviously you're demonstrating live and you did this whenever we had our first call where it's like, Hey, you should do this to your profile and I noticed this about your history and, and like you're, you're demonstrating live the power of being, um,
Joe: LinkedIn, LinkedIn
Dustin: and
Joe: you, and LinkedIn, if you attach other big data, it says, Oh, this person lived in the same house for 20 years. That's what it says. Like it like tells you, wow, like this information about you [00:22:00] can learn something about people that you would not be able to learn if you didn't have AI together with it.
So, but even just looking at the basic raw data from LinkedIn, you can see so much about somebody
Dustin: And so follow up question to that. And as we, you know, get maybe five minutes from now, I kind of start to close things out and let you just have the mic and teach us a LinkedIn growth strategies. I think, uh, you've demonstrated there's lots of data on individuals on LinkedIn. There's lots of people on LinkedIn, people on there have money and they're there for business purposes.
So it's a great environment for growing your business. What is. So I guess the, so what question, Hey, you know, I'm like cancer, you know, I'm 45, you know, how long I, maybe I lived in my house and I have where I went to school, so what, so how does, if I'm sitting here listening, I'm like, that's really cool. Uh, Joe, I want to like grow my coaching business.
So how do I use that sort of information to give me an advantage?
Joe: very simple. If I'm on the phone with you, I can talk to you about the fact that you're a father of three that enjoys spending time with his family. [00:23:00] I can ask you, like, what inspired you to start your journey with, with, with podcast guesting? I can, I know that you generate over two million in revenue from podcasts alone.
I know that your, your main service is podcast guesting strategy. I know that you are mission, you're looking for mission driven experts and entrepreneurs. I know that your business helps mission driven experts build seven podcast guesting. If I'm going to talk to you and I use your language and what you do based on what I know, If, if, if I know that, if I know that Matthew Pollard is one of our mutual connections, or Darren Morgo or 407 other people, and I know 8,706 connections, if I have that information, the fact that I know that we connected on June 10th, 2024 on LinkedIn.
The fact that I can create an intro in one second with AI using Evie AI that says, meet Dustin Reichman. He's a founder of seven figure leap is LinkedIn is boom,
boom, boom. Dustin helps mission driven experts add six figures to their bottom line by mastering the art of [00:24:00] podcast guesting and helps entrepreneurs achieve marketing success with strategic storytelling.
His email is X, his cell is X. I recommend Dustin. Think about that for a second. That relationship that we now have. The fact that I know that you live in Glen Carbon, Illinois, the fact that I know about you, I can send you messaging that would make you say, hang on a second. This is not just a spammer.
He's only sending this to me. He's not sending it to 500 people. He's only sending this to me. You can craft messages to hundreds of people at the same time, if not thousands of people that are each extremely personalized. I believe that that is the next level of marketing next year, when AGI is going to come out or the year after when, you know, people are, People are spam is going to be obsolete.
You can't spam people anymore. Spam is not going to work anymore. People are just going to look at things that are relevant to them because the AI is just going to feed them things that are relevant. So if I send you something. That I, that AI will see as like, dude, this guy [00:25:00] knows everything about you.
And he's talking to you as you, it's going to let it pass through. Versus if you're just saying, Hey, decision maker, I see you have a mutual connection. Would you like to know that's never going to fly. Because you're being lazy because you're not using all the tools you have available right now. So that's what I tell people.
Right now you have tools available to personalize and customize messages to people so you build real, authentic relationships. Both in cold calling, texting, emailing, LinkedIning, or even in person. You know, sometimes I'll go to a coffee shop and I'll meet someone who's extremely attractive financially and I'll say, hello, how are you?
Can you scan this QR code on my phone? And they'll be like, sure, I can scan it. Once they scan it, I see who they are, because I can see who looked at my LinkedIn profile. And now I know everything about them. If I'm sitting on a plane in first class next to somebody else, sure, yeah, I could fly private, but I'd rather fly first class and hang out with the millionaires in first class.
And just chill and have a conversation. I'm like, by the way, I just found this QR code on LinkedIn. I wonder [00:26:00] what happens if you scan it and then scan it. And I know everything about them without even asking them their
name. Cause it's the last thing you want to do is say, Hey, what do you do? You know, you look like you got money.
Look at that rock on you. You know, you don't want to do that. You just say, scan this QR code and boom. Now I see where they are crazy.
Dustin: And the way that that's working behind the scenes is basically when someone views your profile, LinkedIn says, Hey, Dustin views your profile. And then using the tools that. You've created and you have access to in a snap now, because I opened this, I basically gave you permission to look at my profile by looking at your profile first, then that gives you access into the data that you have access to.
Am I getting that right?
Joe: Yeah, correct. You know, everything's already publicly on your profile, whether you give me access or not. And whether you're on, and somebody might listen to me and be like, Oh, I don't want this information to be available. The information is already available. Leverage it. Stop worrying about whether your information's out there.
It's all out there. You were born. You're paying taxes, you have a social security number, you have a credit card, your information's out there. You want to change your name, you want to, you want to be like Michael Jackson, change your face, [00:27:00] you can do all that. You can do that. You can go to Mexico, you can get a new face, you can get a new name, you can get a new body, you can even get a new gender.
But what I want to let you know right now is that on LinkedIn, you can leverage the information to close new business.
Dustin: Very good. Yeah, that's really I mean, that's why we're here is marketing and and I but I want to kind of put a disclaimer on that too. And there's a reason I invited Joe here. I wouldn't invite him here if I felt like he was, um, manipulative with this information. If it was like, uh, he's selling data and it's it's like some kind of scheme.
He Uses this in a positive altruistic way. Right? Like, so like, of course I know he's a marketer. I know he has a marketing agency. I know he has this FBI tool. Um, we're in a JVMN, which is a networking group. Like we're trying to do business, right? So this is not some big secret. And I'll say all that's true.
And when we met, I'm like, He's a cool guy. He's really genuine. He's not trying to hide the fact that how he uses these tools. And so I think the key here is to [00:28:00] use this power, uh, and what this information comes power in a positive way. Like you're still leading with value. You're still being a giver.
You're still not trying to manipulate people and like hold them hostage to do business with you. Because I think some people get here. Oh, he knows all this stuff about me. Like that's creepy. I would never do business with someone like that, but that's not how you're using the information.
Joe: I'm not, I'm not using information to try to convince you to do anything. What I'm doing is I'm building a relationship. The more I know about you, the easier it is for me to build a relationship with you. I'm not trying to get information so that I can manipulate you or change your mind. If you want to do business with me, you're going to do business with me because you know me, like me and trust me, not because I convinced you based on some Some random thing that I, that I, that I figured out how to do it to try to convince you to do something.
That's not my goal here. My goal is to build a real relationship, and I know that with most people, I'm not gonna be able to build a real relationship anyway. It's just not gonna work. So, with the people that actually resonate with me, that I can build a real relationship with, that's gonna be the key.
That's where the key is. The key, it lies in actually getting to know somebody, Building a real [00:29:00] relationship with them, learning about their business. And the more I learn about you, the more I can refer to you. My goal is to refer business to you. I don't even care if you do business with me more. I want to refer business to you.
I want to learn about you. I want to know where you live, what you do, who you are. You know, people really want to know who you are. That's what people want to know. They want to really go deep and figure out who you are. And if I have an introduction for you, now I have it saved in my CRM. I know how to make an introduction for you.
I know exactly who you are. I know exactly what you do. I know exactly how I can add value to you. As a matter of fact, AI even picked up your Calendly link, which, you know, your calendar link is slash call. You have a slash talk or slash call. It's just right in my CRM. Everything is in my CRM already, all automatic.
So think about saving so much time, not manipulating people.
Dustin: Yes. And I'll say also, you know, I'm a huge, obviously huge proponent of podcast guesting. And so LinkedIn has got a lot of its, its value. And then with podcast guesting, I think you get a different flavor for someone, right? It is [00:30:00] this longer form conversational. And so I listened to one interview that Joe did as I prepared for this interview and just to kind of give that human human connection, I I'm obviously giving him the spotlight I could have led with.
Hey, Joe, I know, obviously you have five kids, uh, they mean a lot to you. Um, you're divorced. And so you only have your own limited time with them. And one of the things I admire about Joe is that whether he's on this podcast, whether he's on a stage, if one of his kids calls, he's answering the phone and I've seen this demonstrated in an interview, right?
That tells you something about Joe and his, his values and his character. He's also written five books, right? And so that tells you a lot about Joe and the depth of his knowledge. And so I think that these are not. Um, I think, I think I'm, what I'm trying to get at is these are very, um, complimentary, uh, tools, right?
Like podcast guesting is long form storytelling. You get to know more about someone's maybe emotional history and their values. Whereas LinkedIn, if you want to know any fact figure history, um, data point about them as a person and where they live and their life experience, like it's all [00:31:00] available at the click of a button on LinkedIn with the right tool.
So what I do want to, before we get into your kind of teaching time here, Joe, as to close out. I'd love for you to just take a minute, explain what Evie is, because I think a lot of people might be listening and be like, well, I can click on Joe's profile and I can see maybe his email address. I can see he lives in Brooklyn, but like, how in the world does he know my birthday and my cell phone number?
Like, so tell us a little more about what every I does now interacts with LinkedIn to open more insights.
Joe: Well, Evi AI is a AI assistant. What it does is it helps you be able to create comments on LinkedIn, under people's posts, it creates posts, it helps you save profiles. It also allows you to tap into artificial intelligence to be able to reply to messages, create custom connection notes. Evi AI has access to big data.
And so when you install Evi AI as a Chrome extension, or you use the web app, those are two separate ways to be able to access Evi AI. You're now able to tap
into Perplexity, to ChatGPT, [00:32:00] to Gemini, to Claude, and you can do research on people using these tools. The main benefit of Evie AI is not to do research on people, but it's to create content, create comments, to create messages, and to help you stay top of mind.
You know what I love about Evie AI? With a click of a button, I can save you into a list, a JVMM list, for example. And then if I want to see all your recent posts, I click on a button, all your recent posts load, And then I could just click buttons to leave comments in my voice. I can train personas, I can use templates.
I can optimize my profile and I have a whole learning center on how to leverage LinkedIn. And so there's a lot that you can do with Evie AI. And that's why we have 13, 000 people using it in 35 countries around the world because of the value that we're adding. You
Dustin: it. And, uh, obviously your call to action at the end is probably going to be to go check it out. But, um, as, as people are listening right now and they're, they're interested in that, is there a. Um, what's the obligation? Is there a free trial? Is there a year long contractor?
Joe: use it for free. If you like it, upgrade, you could pay monthly. [00:33:00] If you pay annually, you get a deep discount and you know, it's very, it's less than 50 cents a day for the annual plan. So it's very, very affordable. And, you know,
like what I tell people is. Use the AI first. Don't even give me your credit card, sign up, try it out, use it.
You like it, pay for it. You go to the people that pay, pay attention. I recommend high paying for it. We're going to have two different options for paying. We're going to have the premium option and the pro option. The premium option just gives you the content tools. The pro option is going to give you a lot more like spying on people and whatever.
But you know, at the end of the day, right now, our goal is to make sure that people are posting, engaging, and messaging on LinkedIn every day. That's the key.
Dustin: Love it. Awesome. Well, continuing that theme, Joe, uh, I'd like to give you the mic here. Five, 10 minutes, however long you want to, you want to take. And, you know, knowing who our audience is, scaling, uh, entrepreneurs, often solopreneurs who are passionate about what they do, they've got a story, they've got a mission, mind what they do.
They'd love to get seven figures and build this, this lifestyle business that lets them have a big [00:34:00] impact in the world. And they're familiar with LinkedIn, but like, give us your, your, your five or 10 minute dissertation here on. How to like grow on how to use LinkedIn to grow your business. I know that's a very open ended question that you could probably talk for weeks about, but I'd love to get the highlights.
We can have some practical takeaways for people.
Joe: Yeah, so just in a very practical way, if you want to grow your business, you need to start with a great foundation called the plan, the people, and the promise. The plan is making sure that you have a business plan, a marketing
plan, and a LinkedIn plan. Then you want to make sure you're targeting the right people.
What does that mean? Making sure that you have your ideal clients you're connected to on LinkedIn and your COIs, your centers of influence. LinkedIn. com Once you have your plan and your people, then you got to have the right promise, the right messaging. What does that include? Understanding the goals and the dreams, the fears and the All the things that your customers really care about having a unique value proposition and making sure that you're doing that properly.
In our course, we teach people this framework that step by step allows them to create the plan, the people and the promise so that they have a good [00:35:00] branding strategy. Once you have a good brand, which is a foundation, then you need to start building, you need to get your stories in order. You got to make sure because stories tell, stories sell, features tell and stories sell.
So you got to make sure you have your stories in order, making sure you know who you are and you know what's going to resonate with your audience. Then you got to make sure you have a top notch profile. There's a 20 point inspection that we do on your profile that allows us to be able to make sure that you have the right photo, the right background banner, the right headline, the right about section, the right experience section, and so much more.
Once you have your right profile, that's polished. Then you need some automation tools. You need tools that will help you with AI, with scheduling posts, with making sure that you're using all the right things on LinkedIn in a way that doesn't conflict with the terms and conditions of LinkedIn, LinkedIn.
But it helps you be able to use templates, helps you be able to just save a tremendous amount of time, because time is money, and who the heck has time to sit there writing things manually when you can push buttons and have the AI be able to help you, um, whether it's save lists, whether it's strategically create summaries about people and send it to your CRM or whatever.
So you need the right automation [00:36:00] tools. And then the final part, once you have your branding and your building in order, then you get to booming. Booming is where you take action. There are three results you want from LinkedIn. You want exposure, you want credibility, and you want more meetings. Meetings equal conversations and conversations equal conversions.
So I always tell people is if you get the right exposure by posting, and I want you to post every day, most people don't post at all, but post once a day. Post something of value. Every post should include a hook, main points, call to action and hashtags. By the way, Evi AI does this for you. It gives you the idea.
You press a button and it writes the hook, the main points, the call to action and the hashtags for you all in line with LinkedIn's algorithm. So once you have your post, my last post that I posted got, if you go look at my last post, you'll see I got 13, 000 likes on it. This is not, I'm not kidding. I'm not joking.
I got 13, 000 likes. Anyway, regardless of that, you got to get exposure. The next thing you want to do is you want to get credibility. Credibility means leaving comments. I recommend leaving five to 10 comments every day. If you don't have time to do it yourself, [00:37:00] do it anyway. Use AI to help you do it.
Because if you leave a comment, the author will recognize you and will appreciate you very, very much. And that's what you want to do. You want to get in front of the authors on LinkedIn that are writing posts. Most people are not writing posts. There's a billion people on LinkedIn, less than a million people are posting.
And so you get a lot of exposure by just showing up and leaving a post. You want the post to be valuable, but you want the comment to be even more valuable because you have the ability to comment on as many people as you want. The question is, are you leaving comments? And most people are lurkers. Don't be a lurker, be a twerker.
Start leaving comments, show off your common flex, and you'll get more engagement and you get more credibility. On average, our clients see an 1800
percent increase in profile views when they start leaving comments. The last thing,
Dustin: think that that's I think that's something that someone could take away and just use today, right? Like, maybe you're on linked in and you find yourself lurking. So, like, hey, I'm on my phone. I'm whatever. I'm like, look, I spend the morning. I look through my post and maybe I like them [00:38:00] or whatever.
If you just take, like, read one less post and on the three posts that you read before that, leave a thoughtful comment, that's the needle mover, right?
Because then that author gets to see you. Everyone that comments gets to see you. You're gonna get notified when other people comment, which is going to show you kind of a like mindedness of people that you can interact with. And
when you, one thing you'll notice is when you leave a comment, the first part of your, what we call, I guess, the tagline, the headline, the thing right underneath your name that you set, like mine says, profitable podcast guesting.
When I leave a comment, people see my name and they see profitable podcast guesting. So in a snap, subconsciously and consciously, they can be like, Oh, this Dustin guy. Is the guy for profitable podcast guesting and my headline set up on purpose like that. Um, so Joe, there was a ton there. We, people can go back and listen to that.
Um, I think one thing that'd be super helpful for the last 60 seconds here. If, when you think of profiles, you said there's a 20 point checklist. I think profile is like the one thing you can fix once. And for the [00:39:00] most part. You get compounding returns because you have to keep updating it all the time.
Like you do new posts. What are like five things, three things that like almost everyone screws up that they could go make a massive improvement in their profile today if they just go pay attention to that.
Joe: yeah, if you want to be able to improve your profile significantly, the most important thing that you're going to look at is your headline. That would be number one, Evi AI will write your headline for you. You want to make sure that you have key elements in your headline, like your keyword, your title, your company name, who you help and how you help them.
Your about section is also very important because that ranks really well in Google and also in the LinkedIn search. You can have 2, 600 characters in your about section. There's a specific format that I recommend. Evi AI will write
your about section for you for free. You just go there, you know, put in your information.
Boom, it'll write you an about section in two seconds. Most people have a terrible about section or they're missing their about section, which is a huge, huge no, no featured posts. Make sure that you put at least three posts that are LinkedIn posts that have dozens of engagements of likes and comments as your featured posts.
Big mistake is [00:40:00] just linking people to your website. Nobody cares about your stupid website. People want to stay on LinkedIn. And you make sure that you keep them on LinkedIn, but keep them on your most popular posts that hopefully are related to your business, related to testimonials, related to depending on the where in the funnel you need, there's top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel.
Make sure you get at least three recommendations on LinkedIn. Most people have zero recommendations. You need to have at least three recommendations and make sure that they're recent within the past year or two. And then finally, the fifth thing that I would tell you to do is make sure that you have a call to action on your profile.
I can't tell you how many people don't have any links or any contact information. That people can easily find. Yeah, sure. I can click around and find your information, but make it easy. You want me to buy something from you? Make it freaking easy. Easy peasy. That's the name of the game. Make it schmeasy.
Dustin: Make it, make it smeezy. There's the, there's the quote to take away. And one thing I'll say, if you're a little intimidated, like recommendations, I don't know who to ask. Something I did that really bolstered my recommendations is I just went out in a, you know, clients that people are in a group coaching that I'm [00:41:00] leading.
I just made an effort one day. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna go on all 12 of these people's profiles. And as long as it's justified, I'm gonna leave them a really nice recommendation. I wrote it manually. Of course, you can use AVI and it will help shortcut that dramatically. But whenever I left them a recommendation, guess what?
They get notified. They have to approve it. And there's a major. Feeling of reciprocate reciprocation. Right? So now all of a sudden they're all leaving me
recommendations. So I just made that a habit. Like every group I have, I go leave them recommendations. Almost always. They all leave me recommendations and now I've got like, not only does it look really good on LinkedIn and give me a lot of credibility, but now I have great testimonials that I can screenshot.
Uh, put into other marketing materials and people know they're legit cause they're public and they're on my LinkedIn profile. Like they're not, there's obviously I didn't make them up cause someone else had to write them. So
that's, that's a great pro tip as well. So, uh, Joe, we've packed this thing full of, uh, LinkedIn value.
And I hopefully open people's eyes up into how to use AI the right way in the context of relationship building. And that it's very much an enhancement, not a replacement for [00:42:00] human to human contact and relationships. So I want to leave it with you, Joe. Tell us where to go. People are like jacked up. They want to know about Evi AI.
They want to know about LinkedIn training. They want to know about your marketing agency, wherever you want to send us. What's the clear call to action that Joe wants to leave us today?
Joe: If you want to be more successful on LinkedIn, check out this website. Evi AI. com E V Y a I. com register for free. You can register from your mobile phone too. If you really want to use all the features of it, get the Chrome extension and use it on Google Chrome. But you can use, you can use it right now on your mobile phone with a mobile website to create posts.
Uh, to write up your profile or whatever it is that you want to do. My recommendation is going to evyai. com registering for a free account. If you like it, upgrade people that pay, pay attention. We're having some special deals on the annual stuff. But what I want to say is use that tool. Feel free to let me know what you think about it.
You can find me on LinkedIn at joelinkedin. com. I'd love to connect with you. My email address and cell phone number is right [00:43:00] there. So send me a WhatsApp. Let me know that you heard me on the seven figure elite podcast. And let me know what you love most about my episode.
Dustin: There you go. Spoken like a true podcast guesting pro. So, uh, Joe, this is awesome, man. Thanks for. Packing it through full of value. I don't know how anyone could listen to this and not be excited to go leverage LinkedIn in a
bigger way, or even jump on there for the first time and go to Evie, I dot Evie, AI.
com. Make it easy. Uh, you can go sign up for free, get your headline written, get your about section written and all the things that we all procrastinate on because we're like, Oh gosh, at some point I got, I know I really should be doing this. Just use the tool. Joe's already created it. You've got free access and of course, upgrade.
When it makes sense for you to upgrade as well. So Joe, uh, super grateful for your brother. Thank you for being here and sharing so much.
Joe: Thank you for having me. I appreciate you and I'll see you on LinkedIn. Boom.