Leveraging AI

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

• Isar Meitis • Season 1 • Episode 187

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 What if you could create LinkedIn content that looks like it was designed by a pro—and you didn’t even open Canva yourself?

In this live, behind-the-scenes session, MJ Jaindl will walk you through his exact process for building LinkedIn posts and carousel covers that actually get noticed. You’ll see real-time use of tools like ChatGPT, EasyGen, and Ideogram to turn raw ideas into polished, high-performing posts.

MJ isn’t selling a LinkedIn course. He’s the Chief Revenue Officer at Miva, a leading B2B eCommerce platform. His carousels have been shared across the AI community for a reason—he’s a master at blending visuals, storytelling, and automation. And now he’s showing you how it’s actually done.

Whether you're a business leader trying to grow your presence or exploring AI to streamline your content ops, this session will leave you inspired and equipped.

Extra: Download the The Ultimate Content & Algorithm Playbook by Richard Van der Blom here. 

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Isar Meitis:

Hello and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This Isar Metis, your host, and today's topic is something I'm personally very. Passionate about, and our guest is as well, but we'll get to that in a second. Every company today, and to be fair, every business leader and business person out there today needs to create content. Creating valuable content that stands out will enable you, your company, your brand, to establish yourself as leaders in your field, which by direct relation will drive more business. I can tell you that because I have this podcast, most people that approach me for me, not as an option. They wanna hire me for my services because I've already established to them through my content that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to AI business transformation. And Producing high quality content is important, but standing out today is not easy because everybody wants to produce content. And with AI, it became very easy to produce content, and most of it is just, eh, vanilla, and it's just hard to stand out. And hence when I see true content masterpieces that really capture the attention and just look different and that drive a lot of engagement. I'm personally very curious and hence I'm gonna follow up with the person. And so this is exactly what we're going to do today. Our guest today, MJ jal is. Maybe the creator that creates the coolest content on LinkedIn today. I don't know if he's number one, but he is very high up there, and his carousels and visual aspects of his content just look spectacular. They're always on brand. They're always very different, and they always just attract me to read what he's saying and hence I said, Hey mj, can you come and share your magic with us and show what you're doing now? MJ is just a pretty face or a pretty post. He's background. He's actually, a C-Suite leader. For multiple years. He was running large and medium sized companies and leading them. So he brings a lot of really invaluable information into his post. So it's an amazing combination of knowing how to use AI and knowing how to combine your. Personal information, experience and pour it into something that A, stands out from a visual perspective, B provides a lot of value to his readers and hence driving a lot of engagement that in the long run provides and drives more business. So if you want to learn how to create amazing content that stands out and drives engagement and drives business, don't miss a second of this episode. I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun. Now, I will tell you something from my personal experience. MJ shares online some of the things that he's going to share today, such as how to create, amazing covers for your car sales or your post. And we literally. Joyce and I, my assistant and I followed his process to the t last week. We created two, posts on LinkedIn. Each and every one of them gained over 18,000 views. That's way above my daily average. And so I can tell you from very personal experience that what we're going to share with you today works. So with that, I must say again, I'm personally really excited to welcome MJ to the show. Mj, welcome to leveraging ai.

MJ Jaindl:

Thank you so much, Asara. this is one of the best intros ever. I appreciate it. I appreciate you. Thank you for having me on. And I'm really excited to chat today and talk a little bit about design, LinkedIn growing audience and, why visuals are so important today. maybe what we could do is just start by talking about how LinkedIn has changed a little bit. And so

Isar Meitis:

before we dive in, gimme a second. First of all, there's a live audience, right? Yeah. So we're doing this live on LinkedIn and we're doing this live on Zoom, and we have multiple people joining us. So I wanna thank everybody that join us. There's a lot of people who join us every single week, kinda like our groupies that are there, but there's a lot of people who join for people like you, right? Because the topic is relevant to them specifically. And so if you are joining us live, thank you so much. Wherever you're in the world, share right now in the chat, both on LinkedIn as well as on Zoom. Where are you at? Where are you joining from? what are you trying to get from this conversation? So we can relate to that when we, go through this interview. And, in addition, if you're not with us, why aren't you with us? So if you're just listening to the podcast or watching this on YouTube afterwards, and both are awesome, like I love my audience. but you can join us live every Thursday, noon Eastern time. we have amazing people like mj. And the last thing that I will say before we dive into this topic, there is just less than two weeks to go to the next session of the AI Business Transformation Course. It's the best probably AI practical course on the planet today. I have a lot of people join our course after taking courses at MIT and Stanford and Harvard, and Oxford, and places like this. And all of them say that from a practical business perspective, my course is significantly better than that. Because that's what I focus on. Like it's literally hands-on how to apply AI in a business environment. I've been teaching these courses for two years. Hundreds of maybe thousands of business people have been through this training and literally transformed their businesses and their careers with that course. We only teach this course like I teach it all the time, but it's mostly private to organizations and different groups and companies, and we only open public courses once a quarter. So this one happens on May 12th. The previous one was January and February, and the next one will probably be in August. So if you don't wanna wait through August in order to completely transform your company, this is a great opportunity to join us. There's a link in the show notes. You can just click on that. I'll also post it here in the chat if you're here with us live. that's it. with that I'm gonna give the microphone back to MJ and let's dive into, the magic of creating posts that engage people and actually drive value.

MJ Jaindl:

For sure. And, I'll start by saying it seems like the, LinkedIn feed has changed. So why is this important? Why is what we're talking about today important is that LinkedIn, the feed is more visual than ever and creating great visuals is actually a growth strategy today. a little bit about my background on LinkedIn, I was invisible 18 months ago. I literally had a thousand followers or 1500 followers. I think I. that were just built up through my career. I didn't really take it seriously. I didn't log in that much. so my whole LinkedIn journey started about 18 months ago. And when I first started, I took a course. So I took a course and the course was about content creation and it was mainly about copy. And the copy's really important, but it was nail the hook, nail the rehook nail, the rest of the post. Talking about having content pillars focusing on your niche. And I learned a lot from that. I thought it was really important. I. And I really focused on my text hooks and making sure that they were tight. But what I realized over time is that the visual is actually the thing that's so important and the main reason behind that because like 72% of people are reading LinkedIn in their feed. So if you think about scrolling through your feed and you see the visuals that are coming through, those are what stand out and catch your eye. And we're gonna talk about this a little bit as we go through designs today, but those are what stand out and catch your eye. and today those text hooks that used to be so important on LinkedIn like two years ago or 18 months ago, are not so important today. They're still important. You should write a good hook, but the visual is actually the real hook. So if you can understand that it pays to develop your skills to build something that looks nice and beautiful and that could also catch your eye. And those are kind of like the concepts that we're Gonna talk about it today.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah. I love what you're saying and I agree with you a hundred percent, right? I still think that first sentence plays a big role, but if you think about your personal way, you scroll through things, you scroll, scroll, scroll, and you gotta stop to read that first line. And usually what stops you is the graphics, right? Yes. So if there's a graphics that is unique, that stands out, that. It says exactly what it needs to say in the way it needs to say it. And I think that's the biggest difference with the stuff that you're doing. Like it's very, pun intended. It's very bold. And so it's very obvious what this is going to be about by reading three to four words that are huge on the screen. So if it relates to your target audience, which it should, then they're gonna stop. And then they're gonna read that first line, and then if you nail that first line, they're gonna click on see more and actually see the rest of your post. And then if you provided them value, they may actually follow you and engage with you and so on. but that first visual step is critical.

MJ Jaindl:

Yeah. I totally agree. Do you wanna jump in? Maybe jump in and take a look? Yeah.

Isar Meitis:

let's go to the, you know, what, practical, why not? I think that's why people are here.

MJ Jaindl:

why not? I'm in Canva now. So this is where the magic happens. I think it's truly like one of the number one skills that you need to learn if you are creating on LinkedIn. and so what you're seeing here now is a lot of the designs that I've created, some of you, if you do follow me, you've seen these in the feed. So you see all of these, these images and start to get a feel for what I create.

Isar Meitis:

But what I really wanted to, for those of you, by the way, for those of you who are just listening, first of all, there's a YouTube channel, so you can go and watch this if you can, but if you're walking your dog or driving or something, you obviously cannot, What we are looking at is kinda like a feed of images that all look like the cover of National Geographic from the quality of the way they look, but they all follow the same brand guidelines with like really large, bold text with like light greenish hue to everything, whether it's the actual images or the background or the text or some combination of the above. So lots of black and light green, so they're all very much to brand and they all look amazing and professional, and we're gonna learn exactly how to create it for yourself.

MJ Jaindl:

I appreciate that. I appreciate the, the kind words there. And in order to get here, I actually was talking to a friend about it. I tried a trillion different color combinations, so I literally went in and, and tried. I. All these different combos. Lemme see if I gonna find it. Yeah, this is like an example of it. So you see these like brand kit six, brand kit seven brand kit eight brand kit 15. I literally went through when I was deciding this color and I was like, okay, let's see what all of these look like together. So you can kind of see what could have been. Down here. Yeah. But I eventually landed on the screen, which I really like. And the reason why I picked it is because I wanted to design on black, so a black background, which I think stands out really well in the feed. But I also wanted to be able to do light. I've kind of shifted. I used to do a lot of, back black backgrounds and then I've shifted a little bit toward light backgrounds. But I wanted to be able to do both, and I wanted to be able to flop back and forth, because, I like the variety and I didn't want. My feed or my content that I was putting out to look too stale. some colors just don't work with it when it's like, you can't do the light background and then have something that's not too overwhelming. Like when you do a, like a really kind of bright neon, yellow. I love that color. Sometimes it could be overwhelming in the feed. it stands out. It's, especially if it's

Isar Meitis:

like a full page and that's the background of the thing. It's too much. I agree. Right,

MJ Jaindl:

exactly. so that's kind of what I was trying to play around with and make something that, was very high contrast on a light background, but could also be used on a black background. And I wanted to keep things simple, and I've told this story before, but when I first started out, my designs were really colorful. you can kind of see one of them, here as an example, they had a lot of colors on them. This was the gen one. And what was challenging with this design is that there were so many colors on it. Like this was literally the entire palette here that it was hard to work with because you would create something and you would try to get the palette just right and you ended up playing around with colors. It's too time consuming. And I think the key to designing for LinkedIn content is to be able to do things super fast. So that's why I wanted to just pick two colors and and kind of move forward with that. before I get into actually creating something, I wanted to just explain a concept, and I've talked about this in a post, but I think it'll be really helpful for everybody to just understand this general concept when designing carousel covers, because this is super important. There's a couple elements that are going on. This is actually a carousel cover. so it's a page one, and for those that aren't used to creating carousels yet, it's basically just a PDF document. So it's called the document post. In LinkedIn, you upload a PDF, but the kind of slang term for it as a carousel, and it comes up in LinkedIn as a carousel. Now, the reason to create a carousel, there's a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is they will give you the biggest reach. one of the reasons behind that is because, LinkedIn is looking at dwell time. And so dwell time is how long is someone actually looking at your post? How much time are they spending on your post? When you have a carousel, you have added length to your post. So you could have many slides on your carousel. There's ways to optimize the number of slides that you have, but it's longer than a text post. So if someone is trying to understand what you're saying, they're going to spend more time swiping through, they may go back up and click on your post, and all of those things are gonna increase. the dwell time. When there's good dwell time on the post, the LinkedIn algorithm is saying to itself, this is a post that is relevant. And people like reading. They wanna promote content that gets read because LinkedIn wants to keep people on the platform. So the more that you can increase the dwell time, the better shot that you have, that your post is going to do well, carousels a really good vehicle for that. So this is why it's important to be able to create them. If you have them in your repertoire, if carousels a tool in your toolbox, it gives you the opportunity to increase your reach faster, which on LinkedIn, everybody wants to grow. I think everybody wants to put out quality content and create a quality audience, but they give you this opportunity to grow. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is they give you the opportunity to educate. And I think educational content is the content from my experience, and by now I've posted over 400 times from my experience, educational content is the content that does really well, and it also helps you build your authority. So if you go deep on a particular subject, then your readers will start to understand that you have authority in that particular subject, and they are more likely to follow, for one, if they're just reading your content for the first time. but it starts to build trust with the reader. those are kind of the two main reasons why carousels are important. And when you start thinking about designing them, there are a few elements here. And then after this I'll go into how I actually create them. And I think for most folks who see my carousels, they'll be shocked at how easy it is I, it talked about my background a little bit. I'm a CRO, I run sales and marketing. I love marketing, but I'm not a designer. I feel like I am now, but I never had a design background. I never had a design job. so 18 months ago I was just learning design Canva. I literally just signed up for it 18 months ago and I've kind of learned this all along the way. So the things that I'm gonna show today, if you have no design chops, no design skills, that's okay. I didn't either. You can still come a really long way. And I think Conva is an amazing tool because, it has a really small learning curve. Yeah. Think a sec.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah. one, there was literally a question in the chat. I said, okay, what's, I literally looked at Canva today. What, kinda like a coincidence and what is the time to learn Canva? So he kind of answered that, right. Canva made it the whole point behind Canva as they took the concepts from like Adobe and said, let's bring this to the masses and make it cheap and easy to use. And so that's number one. It's the learning curve. and you'll see today just the stuff that MJ is gonna show is you'll know it like in the next 25 minutes, you will know how to design these kind of things. There's obviously a million other things you can design on Canva. but that will give you a good intro. The other thing that I wanted to say, I know some of you're saying, well, this is an AI show. What are we talking about Canva here? There's a lot of AI that goes into this from the hooks to the actual imagery and so on. So it's gonna be a great combination of design and marketing concepts together with how to apply AI tools for that.

MJ Jaindl:

So we'll learn how to design part of that. We use ai, so I'll show how to create great, beautiful AI images very quickly. Then after that, I'm gonna show everybody how to take the carousel that you've created and then create a really great post to using ai. Awesome. So AI can digest that carousel with the mean work. And then you transfer that to a post that'll actually take literally no time, but you'll kind of see the AI piece of that, of the content creation. So we'll talk about all of that stuff. before we get there real quickly, there's a couple elements that I think are super important about carousel covers. the first element is something that I call the trigger word. So you'll notice something that's different about my carousels than a lot of others is that they are not wordy on the cover. It is typically one word when you observe LinkedIn feed as you're going on your phone and you just scroll quickly through. The thing that you're going to notice is this. If you're scrolling fast through a feed, you're gonna notice this word first. It's gonna be the first thing your eye catches, it's gonna say hooks. If you are studying hooks and you're studying LinkedIn growth, you know, hooks are important. That's the first thing that's gonna catch your eye. And your brain is gonna immediately say, that is relevant to me. And that would be a scroll stopper. The second thing that you'll see is like the image, so you just kind of see like a beautiful image. But this is why this is so big. I don't use small text. And then what I want the reader to do is to start to scroll once they're interested. And so you have a title here, but I like to keep this title under six to eight words. Because you don't really want a long title. You actually want the reader to swipe once they've decided that they're interested. And then on a carousel, you have this little on mobile, and mobile is important. You should be designing for mobile first. You have this little, slide on the right hand side. I call this the nudge slide, but it's basically just the preview of the next slide that's coming up in the carousel. This shouldn't be ignored. Actually, and one of the points that I like to make is, if you notice how this is designed here, you can actually see that there's an infographic here. It's a mobile infographic. It has some points on it, and your brain can say to itself, that looks like it's something that's easy to digest. If this was a slide that was all text and you could just see it's paragraphs and paragraphs of text here, you could be reading through that and saying, I don't want to get into this right now. Like, I gotta jump into my meeting in two minutes. my kids screaming in the background. Whatever it is, when you're looking at your feed, it might just look too overwhelming. So you want something to feel inviting on this slide and that will help you scroll over and, so that's another element that you need to consider.

Isar Meitis:

so I wanna pause it just for one second for listeners who are not watching this, because there's a few really key important things here, and I'll try to describe what we're looking at. the slide is more or less, and think about like a. Portrait style. So think about a PDF page, right? This is practically what it is. the first half, almost or 40% is text, but out of that text is one word that takes most of the space. So 70% of the top 40% is one word that says hooks on most of the page, like the entire width and 30% of the actual word above it. There's a smaller text that says, still pretty big, that says how to design carousel. So this puts a sentence together that says how to design carousel hooks, but the hooks is gigantic. And underneath that, and that's kinda like the topic that, MJ was trying to convey. When you open these carousels on mobile, it gives you a sneak peek into the next slide, basically. So you see 20% or 25% of slide number two. So if the left portion of your second slide. Is going to be visible here. If it is something attractive and people are thinking it's gonna be interesting, there's a higher chance they're gonna scroll to that. And I'm sure the same is true for other slides. So you always see the sneak peek of the next slide. And if you make sure that the left side of your slides is attractive, people will keep on scrolling, which means you're gonna get rewarded by the algorithm, as MJ said in the beginning. So a lot of great things as far as best practices in this one slide.

MJ Jaindl:

yeah, that, that was great. To sum it up, here's an example of a nudge slide. This slide is designed for the visual that to be on the left. So in a typical carousel, and for the folks that are just listening in, it has the image left aligned. So the image is on the left hand side. It looks interesting and it looks not overwhelming, and it looks inviting. So just something that folks should consider when they're creating a carousel. So let's go through the steps to create one real quick. this will be fun and I'm curious if anybody in the audience has a topic that they would want to create and I'll create it live. If they don't, we'll pick something ourselves and we'll generate it with live.

Isar Meitis:

Let's see. so we have people from the us, from Europe, from India, and so let's see who comes up with a great idea to try this with. And whoever's gonna come up with the first one, that's the one we're going to pick.

MJ Jaindl:

Yeah, we'll see. we'll see where this goes. Bangalore, India a

Isar Meitis:

little late. So Aditi, you have an opportunity to show that you're still awake. I'm just kidding. Tariffs.

MJ Jaindl:

Tariffs is a little, that's a little hard. that's not super interesting. But we could, here, all right, let's see if we can do tariffs. If we get a better one that comes in. we'll try, let's see if we could do tariffs here. This is gonna be actually really difficult, but, maybe we can get something that looks pretty cool. All right. So tariffs.

Isar Meitis:

somebody said AI robots. Otherwise AI robots. New business launch. I think AI robots would be cool because it's very visual.

MJ Jaindl:

All right. AI, robots. And then, you know, if we have time, we'll come back to tariffs. thank you Phil, for the idea. So the winning idea is tariffs. Let, so let's create a post about tariffs.

Isar Meitis:

Oh, tars. How I Tars or AI robots. Which one are we going with?

MJ Jaindl:

All right, let's do AI robots. That'll be a little bit easier. I think it would be easier.

Isar Meitis:

Okay, cool.

MJ Jaindl:

Here's how we started off, and this is kind of where the AI starts. So what everybody's looking at here is ideogram. This is how I create my images. You could see I just did a post on chat to VII's shopping. So I've generated a ton of images because I wanted a big shopping bag on the post. it's literally a post that I posted yesterday. You could see it right here. So kind of see like my past workflow on there. but what we're gonna do in here is, the way that I start this is I have a color palette that's in Ideogram, I have to access it by clicking on one of these images. So I have my color palette here. These are my green colors. I start the post by clicking that, what that allows me to do is set the style. So now I have my color palette immediately in ideogram, which makes it easier to create this image. So we're gonna create, an image our robot. The thing I love about Ideogram is you don't need to have complex, prompt engineering skills. You could actually put in something very simple and it'll generate something decent and beautiful. And I'm gonna say Generate a mint green image of a head of an AI robot. So we're gonna give that a try. I like to use this paid version of Ideogram only because it lets me create many images quickly. the great thing about AI is that it takes your prompt and it creates something very quickly. The challenging thing about AI is you really can't control it perfectly. you can get a general feel and a general direction, but as you can see, within a few seconds, I was able to create a number of, AI robots. I kind of like this one down here. So the first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and download it. And while you're

Isar Meitis:

downloading it, I'll say two things about AI image generation. There's multiple tools out there, right, between more professional tools like, mid Journey or even, Korea or stuff like that, all the way to just creating images in Chae or Gemini and the. Biggest difference between these tools, and I'll talk about Ideogram as well because you mentioned that Ideogram was probably the only tool that could create text consistently and well 90% of the time. now Chachi, PITI and Gemini, more or less nailed that as well. The biggest disadvantage of using Chachi piti right now, which their latest tool is incredible, like it's amazing at creating images and texts and everything. Its biggest disadvantage is time. So rendering a single image takes it. I dunno, 35 seconds to a minute, sometimes more. And here in Ideogram we just created 12 of them in six seconds. And so if you want to create multiple versions of what you want to create, so you have options to pick from, then Idio Graham is a better option. The other thing that Ideogram did very well is it knows how to capture that, these particular colors. But you can do that in Chachi PT as well. You can literally upload a color palette and then use it again and again. And as of a few days ago, in custom GPTs, in Chachi pt, so these automations that you can build, they're now using the new image generation tool versus. Dali. So you can actually have your color palette in a custom GPT plus some basic instructions on what you're creating this for. This is gonna be the cover, I'm gonna use it this and that way. So give it a lot of guidance so when it creates that one image in a minute, it will actually gonna be a good image. So there's obviously trade offs and there's goods and bad on both sides, but, pick the tool that works for you and your process and keep on running with that. Keep on trying different tools because they change all the time.

MJ Jaindl:

Absolutely. Yeah. Agreed. it could be challenging to keep up with it all, but it's also very helpful to kind of stay on top of all the different things that are happening. So you could pick what's right for you. yeah, I gram I like,'cause it just generates the image fast. You don't need a complex prompt. and they look pretty great. And again, it's all about speed. LinkedIn posting consistently is a big growth driver. And so you don't really, for most folks, especially if you're busy and you're working, you know, professional, LinkedIn is your full-time job. you need to be able to create things quick. Igram helps you. so once I've created that, I just drag that image in over here. and before we do that. I just took, the trigger word and the title from a different slide and pasted it in here. And one thing that I'll like to call out is that the reason this font stands out so well, it's nuanced, but it's just a tall font. It's actually really long words. So not all fonts look like this. They're not all tall like this, but this is what you want to focus on. You wanna have a tall font on your cover for that trigger word. This is something that's really important. and again, I ask anybody who's watching, like, go through your feed and just flick through it, you'll see that this trigger word is the thing that kind of sticks out in your brain. So you're really trying to do that. You know, we were talking about AI robots. I don't know specifically if robots is gonna be, you know, maybe there's an audience for robots, but let's assume that there is, right? there's an audience for like ai, robots and bots or whatever. I would be tempted to say AI robots, but I probably wouldn't. I would say I would just keep it as robots and keep AI in the top. When I talk about LinkedIn, which is like a viral topic on LinkedIn, everybody wants to learn about LinkedIn. On LinkedIn. I am always tempted to have LinkedIn in my, trigger word, but I always refrain from it and I usually relegate it to the title because I wanna keep that trigger word clean. I don't want many words in there and I don't wanna shrink it. so let's just kind of make this up and say All about AI robots. Now we have our title, very simple. We have our trigger word, a large trigger word. And, and what I like to do now is it is pretty easy. I can just drag in the image. So I dragged in the image from ideogram. And I wanna show everybody something really quickly that's very important, which is I'm going to settings in Conva, and I'm clicking on show margins. Show margins is so important for your designs. Our eyeballs do not like if something were to look like this, for example, like covering the slide, all the way from the left to the right and not respecting that margin. It is sometimes tempting to do this because you wanna fit more on the page or you wanna go like this. It kind of hangs out of the margin. It's very thin over here. I urge anyone who's thinking about design and designing better, do not do that. use the margins as gospel and try your best to not go outside of them. Maybe you can with the image, but, our brain really likes when everything looks neat and structured. So that's what gives it a professional look. When people say, oh, it looks really professional. I don't get it. I don't understand why it looks that way. It's because the designer that designed it was respecting the margins and spacing between all of the images and stuff. So throw on that, show margins. You'll kind of be able to see where the text is and you won't have to go outside of it. Once I've added the image here, you can see it as a background, you know, doesn't look too interesting. But Canva has this feature, it's one of the best features in Conva. It's bgma remover that remove a background. You could do this in Ideogram as well, but it's a little bit easier to do it over on the Conva side. So once you click this, I

Isar Meitis:

also find really the Canva background remover to be the best there is right now. Like you can do it. It is very good than many other tools. It's fantastic in removing. Yeah.

MJ Jaindl:

I agree. so now that I gave everybody a rule, you have to break the rule. And the rule is when you put an image on the page, I like to go outside of the margins because I like to make the image big and bold, so it just looks a little bit better. I don't always do this. Sometimes you could keep it here and it's nice and clean, but I feel that, when it's larger, it looks better. And so what I'll try to do is come here and add the image and put it into position. So that's literally just drag and drop. Very easy. And then when you wanna position it, you can come up here, click position, and you can just click to front. What that's gonna do is bring the image forward so it's in front of the text. I wanna make sure that the text is actually readable, so it'll shrink it down so it's not covering like key parts of the word. but that also gives you another reason for folks to stop, which is coming on here. And, and seeing this image here in front of the text, it makes it a little bit more prominent. So the last thing that I typically do is add some sort of, background element to give it text or texture or depth. you could do this a couple different ways. The easiest is to come up here to design and, click on elements, and then come in and just say, grainy. You could say grainy circle, or you could say grainy texture. And all of these different textures come up. If you're using the ProE version, you have more options. So that's always better. But you can throw one of these textures on the page and you could position it in the back. This gives the whole design a little bit more depth so you can see there, instead of looking just like black background, you have a little bit more depth to it and you can turn the transparency down. So it's not overwhelming. You don't really want this element of the slide to be overwhelming. You just want it to be there to look a little bit more, leveled up, a little bit more sophisticated. And then finally I'll add like one more grainy element. So I'll come in here and say, grainy circle or shape. You also get all these different options in convo. You could kind of use whatever you want. Most of these have the ability for you to kind of change the color on it. So I can come in here and change this to my color palette and I could kind of add it behind one of my images and move it to the back. So now that you've done this, and the last thing to do is just some minor positioning of all of the elements here to make sure that everything is like, you know, in the right place. but once you've done that, you kind of have beautiful cover image that you've created. And as you could see, I took a little bit longer to explain these things, but it doesn't take long. You could actually create a cover like this in just a few minutes. It's pretty simple.

Isar Meitis:

Again, for those of you who are just listening, we're looking now at a cover image that again, looks like National Geographic right, or like a professional magazine. It just looks amazing and it was created. If we now review the steps very carefully, the first thing was picking the right keyword. That is really big. The second was writing a few words above it to make it into a sentence in our case, all about ai. And then it says Robots in a big, font, creating an relevant image that will be cool and interesting and thumb stopper on. Any image generator, bringing it in, removing the background, and then applying two different levels of just grainy backgrounds. One on the entire image just to break the black. And the other is something that is more centered behind the image itself. something in like a shape of a circle or an oval or something like that usually works well. And then just playing with the elements. And the last thing that really makes it stand out is really the top of the image to cover the bottom of the big word of the text. And that again, gives it that professional also that depth, that 3D look almost, that makes it very interesting. If you're creating an image, one of the things that we tried, if you're creating an image that kind of has depth to begin with, it makes it even more interesting if you add some text on the bottom that is in front of the thing. And that really gives it a lot of depth because then the bottom of the image kind of looks behind the text while the top of the image looks on top of the text, and it gives it that 3D look. So one of the things we had, on our post had a swimming cat. well it was half cat, half fish, and it was a catfish and kinda like the same thing. and because the front of it was in front of the text in the back behind the text, it looks like it's an actual 3D image when it's actually not. And again, it's all creating the perception of something interesting and unique that will stop you from scrolling.

MJ Jaindl:

A hundred percent. So now that we've created this, Let's see what it looks like to create an actual post. And okay, let's do it. I'm gonna use another one of my examples that's actually built out here and use this as example. So I'll go through and I'll design the cover and then I will create the rest of the carousel. And you know, we could talk about this for days on all the different design elements, but for now we'll just say I like step by step. So in my carousels, it's typically about how to do something. This is how to create carousel hooks. The Hulk is that whole package that we talked about earlier and how to create them and why it's important. So when I walk through this, it's a how to, and it's describing the difference between something that's good and something that's bad. Right? And I like to keep it to one topic. So there's one problem. The problem is how do you actually create a carousel hook that hooks somebody's attention? and that's for anybody who's trying to grow their audience on LinkedIn. So the audience of one is anyone that's trying to grow their audience on LinkedIn. The problem is creating carousel hooks. And the carousel is the explainer of that. I think that's what works best on LinkedIn for an educational carousel is typically a how to. So I'm just gonna go ahead and, and download this. And when you download it, you're gonna download it as a PDF. So this will just take a second here. I conva downloads this, and while it's doing that, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run over and open up chat CPT and what I like to do, so most of my writing actually happens in Conva. Now this is not everybody's process, but this is mine. What I like to do is do most of the post in Conva. So it's already done from my perspective, the entire post is the how to create a carousel hook. and I've designed it through the slides in Conva. So when I add it to chat GBT, what I do to write the actual posts is just say, summarize this post concisely in a step-by-step fashion. So I would just use that as a prompt. And what I'll do here is it'll take my carousel that I create in Conva and it's gonna produce a summary for me. Usually these are pretty good. They're getting better. You can now see it summarizing, like slide by slide as it goes down. So it's giving me a pretty good summary here. I already don't like something about it. So if I were to put this directly into LinkedIn, I would say. Make each one of these bullets more concise, no longer than 60 characters, what that's gonna do is it's gonna make sure that there's no, orphan words. What an orphan word is on your mobile device when a sentence kind of wraps to the next word, and you only have one word on the next sentence. What that does visually is it's, more difficult for your brain to read than if it was just no wrap. And so I know that I could create something like a little bit more concise without a wrap by giving chat GBT instructions to just make things more concise, and then I'll give it an actual character count. So that's just a tip to make sure that your posts are concise. but another thing that I like to do is sometimes I'll just take the entire post into this tool that I really like called Easy Gen. And Easy Gen is another AI tool. It's a post creation tool, and it's specifically built for LinkedIn. And so if, you know LinkedIn and LinkedIn posting. You know that certain things really work on LinkedIn. So short, punchy sentences, no orphan words like I just talked about. a really good hook, a really good rehook. A body of the post that's typically a listicle. So like your body, if you're describing something or you're describing a how-to, it's good to say like subject, bullet, subject, bullet. That's very helpful. it helps somebody skim through it and read through it quickly, which is important on LinkedIn because people don't spend too much time on it reading your post. So what easy gen does well is it could take any type of post and make it into a format that's great for LinkedIn. You know, you can see it right here. This post I really like already. sometimes I don't like, you know, every output isn't perfect, but this one is pretty good. You know, it already wrote your hook size, your first impression. I agree with that. Your design makes a difference. It's all about stopping the scroll. Okay. I mean, pretty decent. I would probably change it to like add some, you know, maybe add a number in there or something like that. But it's already off to a really good start. And then you can see kind of how it summarized my whole post. So right now in easy gen you've taken the carousel, you've kind of transcribed the whole thing, which chat, CBT does amazing job of that with PDFs. And then you could throw an easy gen if you want to add an extra layer of refinement on it, which I would recommend. And now typically what I'll do as part of this process is I'll generate a couple of these, like you can see kind of how fast it goes with easy gen. It's just a different version of it. So it's got a new hook, it's got a new rehook, it's got a different ending, and you can kind of just do this over and over again until you have one that you really like. You know, this one's hook is just, carousels can boost your engagement. if you do another one, I'll come up with another hook at the top. I used to struggle with creating engaging content. Okay. also true. so what I'll do is I'll actually generate 10 of these. I'll generate 10. I'll find one that I really like, and then I'll use that as the draft of my post, the basis of my post. I don't copy and paste anything directly out of ai, but what I'll do is I will cut elements of this, or I'll take the whole post and use it as a draft. The main work for the post was done in the carousel. That's where all of like the expertise and the creation process happens. And then the post becomes something that's drafted with ai. and then I'll just throw this into LinkedIn I'll start to tweak it to add my personal experience, my personal insights and personal stories that I have with this. So it doesn't feel so much like an AI post. And I think this is the thing that's really important. I'll just say these tools are here, they're helpful, but don't just take, you know, the outputs from an AI and throw it into LinkedIn. It's going to feel a little bit too robotic. And, I think the comment that you made at the very beginning, Sarah, is like people. Are engaging with you for you, and they're, you know, they're coming on as prospects and you know, potential customers because of you, because of who you are. And that's really important. So you have to add that you part to your post to make them more authentic and more personal. Once you do that, you have a great showstopping carousel cover. You have a good carousel, you have a post that's structured. Well hook rehook, you know, punchy body power ending CTA at the bottom with a little help from easy gen and ai. And then you've taken it and personalized it. Now you have a post that could go viral on LinkedIn, like that whole package is the package of how you can create a post that'll go viral on LinkedIn and help you grow your audience and gain reach. that's pretty much the process.

Isar Meitis:

Fantastic. really incredible. I want to add a few things and then there's a few questions from the audience, but I'll start with adding, one thing on how I like approaching this. so I was not aware of Easy Gen, but the way I would approach it is I would build a custom GP PT. So for those of you who don't know what custom gpt are, there's these little automations that you can build on your own on chat GPT. They show up on the top left and you can create as many of those as you want. So this is a perfect example where a custom GPT will work well, or even more than one, and I'll give an example of what I mean more than one. So one of them can be take literally these several prompts that MJ used already, build them into the custom GPT. So all you have to do is drop the post in and it will do the magic of. Reading your carousel, it will already have the structure. So you can define that in your definition. I want a hook or run a rehook. I want it to be punchy. I want to have a CTA on the bottom. I want these sentences to be less than 60 characters You can have all of that in the instructions and then you don't have to say anything. You just drag your PDF in and you click go and you will do all of that stuff. The other thing that you can do, either in the same custom GPT or in a secondary one, that then when you will call at the end of that one is you can add your own personal stuff. So you can have a bunch of your own personal stories on your personal experience and the topics that you talk about and bring them in. And this will, on its own add you, your style, your character, your personal experience, and so on into the first draft. So that saves you more work afterwards. And as MJ said, in addition to this is a good process to generate good posts, you want it to. Be not your full-time job because you have a full-time job, right? so you need to be able to do this quickly. So doing this in a custom GPT will help. The last thing that I will say, when I said more than one GPT, we have a custom GPT that we created that is a hook generator. So we actually write our post without the initial first line. And what we did is we looked for posts that were very successful on LinkedIn and literally stole the hooks. Now, right now there's over 750 different hooks in there, and what it does, it kind of reads through all the hooks, all seven 50, and it looks at your post and says, oh, what would be a good fit? And it gives us three options, and you can run it again and get three more options. And it takes from a structure, and then it shows you how to apply that structure to your particular post. And so you can do either a single GPT or several GPTs to do this process very quickly, where literally all you have to do is drag the PDF, click go on the first one. Copy and paste. Put it on the second one and you're done. two additional little tricks that I think will help people a lot. One is once you use a custom, GPT is basically a regular conversation, right? You're in a conversation just started from A GPT. That is a structured process. you can add symbol and call another custom GPT. So if you started the first one to just create the draft and your second one creates the hooks, you don't have to copy and paste. You can just at, and then find the hook one on the list and call that. And it's gonna give you the three hooks in the same conversation. And the last thing that I would say. Is I actually do all my editing in collaboration with ai and I do it in Canvas, in chat, GPT. So Canvas allows you to open this editing thing on the right where you can actually edit what the AI wrote on your own right there. And then, so I don't need to copy this into a Word editor or Google Docs or something to do the editing. I do the editing right there and then all I have to do is copy and paste it into, LinkedIn. So a few additional, tricks there that I think people can benefit from a bunch of questions. one that I really like. Is there a sweet spot of the number of slides or images in a carousel that's from Dr. Katie on LinkedIn.

MJ Jaindl:

Awesome. I think there is, and it was recently updated and typically the data that I'm using for this one is data from, Richard Vander Blum's report. his awesome report. I love it. he just recently released a new one and, I don't want to get it wrong, but, so I won't say exactly'cause I think he just updated it, but I think it's, based on data, it's somewhere in the neighborhood between eight and 12, you know. Okay. I think that's the sweet spot. or could be six and 12, but yeah, it's too short. And I think it's just not enough meat to generate that dwell time that we talked about. And then too long, what's gonna end up happening is LinkedIn's also gonna say, are people getting to the end? is the content worthwhile and people are getting to the end? And if they're not, then I think that's another issue that you face. So the sweet spot ends up being this kind of, I think six to 12 range. But look at Richard's report, you know, go download that and, that'll tell you exactly what it is.

Isar Meitis:

Awesome. The next, by the way, what I've done, and I've done this for several of my clients as well, I actually take the report and attach it to my custom GPT, so all the knowledge of best practices are there in a huge, that's the move. Those of you don't know the report, it's like a 60 page PDF with like best practices for AI he does based on actual research and what works and doesn't work in so much like millions of posts.

MJ Jaindl:

Yeah. Yeah.

Isar Meitis:

So it's, I literally attach that as the knowledge base to the custom GPT and then it knows how to write for LinkedIn way better than I can explain it. I then add my 2 cents and we kind of, use it this way. Another question was how many of these tools are paid versus free? So you used, three different tools. You used Ideogram, you used Canva, and you used, Chachi PT. I know all of them has a free and a paid version. I will let you kind of explain what your approach to this.

MJ Jaindl:

Yeah, so everyone has a paid and a free version. I would say if you're thinking about, design, you should start on the free version of Conva. Start on the free version. It's pretty good. there's some limitations. You can't have a brand kit, which speeds up the creation process a lot. That's where all of your colors and fonts and everything are there. so you can't have a brand kit. And then a lot of the different elements, like the grainy textures that we were looking at today are, the pro versions of them are better. you know, there's some advantages to having the pro version of Canva and I'd recommend that, bt you could probably get away with the regular version ideogram. You could get away with a regular version. The good thing about the paid version of Ideogram is that it lets you generate more faster. It's like you get priority in the queue. And so for me, speed's important. I have the paid version because I wanna create like. 30 or 40 iterations of an image to get the best one. And I wanna do that in like two minutes. I don't wanna do that in like 20 minutes. so that's worth it for me. I think it's like 200 bucks a year or something like that. and then Easy gen is a paid product, but, I love it, so I use it.

Isar Meitis:

Awesome. Yeah, so a few things about that. Great answers by the way. I think for most of these tools, most AI tools has a free version. yeah. Whether it's a generation or text or chats or whatever. and go experiment and then you'll know the difference. And some of these tools you just run of credits and that's it. You can't use them anymore. some of these tools like Canva or Chachi pt, there is a free version. You're just limited with some of the things you can do, and then you can decide for yourself. If it's worth paying the money from my very personal experience, every time I find a tool that actually helps me in a real relevant process, in this particular case that we're talking about, of generating content that in my case, drives actual revenue to my company, I. It's worth every cent, right? If I have to pay$200 a year 10 times for 10 different tools, that's$2,000. That's a lot less than one client is worth to me. So if it brings me one client in a year, it was a good investment. And from my perspective, exactly, no brainer. That being said, if you manage a team and you have a team of 10 people, or if you're the CEO and you have. 2000 employees, that adds up very fast. And so that's where you need to start doing more calculations on who gets which licenses and what access to what paid tools at what level, and you need a person to manage that. and there's actually tools to do that as well. But, I think on a personal level, and MJ you know, is a CRO, he actually has a role in a big company where he probably needs to look at what his team is using and not using. but even there, I think if a person can prove to you, actually prove that a AI tool is providing them actual value, that saves them time, their time is worth way more than 20 bucks a month. And so if that saves them an hour a month, I will get them the paid tool. but they have to actually show me that they're using it consistently and for something that's valuable, which is relatively easy to do with each and every one of these tools. I agree. Mj, this was. Incredible. Like really well thought after lots of details, lots of very strategic conceptual things. But also we went down to the tactics and show people exactly how to do all the different steps. So literally, I wanna see a million, you know, really well converting posts on LinkedIn tomorrow from all the people who are listening. but no, seriously, go try this out. This actually works. I did it myself and I got amazing results. I wanna thank you. But before that, if people wanna follow you, work with, you, know, more about what you do, check out your content, what are the best ways to do that?

MJ Jaindl:

Yeah, best way is LinkedIn. I am pretty much focused on that platform. So just, you know, go to LinkedIn, you'll find me there, MJ del. You'll see my stuff. And, yeah, if you wanna chat, send me a dm.

Isar Meitis:

Awesome. Thanks everybody for joining us live. Great questions, great participation. We'll do the tariffs one next time. I promise

MJ Jaindl:

I was thinking about it. I'm like, man, I think we could probably get like a good like, old school, like image of a document or something like that and call it tariffs, but we'll do it next time.

Isar Meitis:

Like an old judge or something, you know, something like, oh, that would be really good. I was thinking about something. That'd be really good. Anyways, yeah, great stuff. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for joining us live. We'll be here again on Thursday. Those of you who want to join us for the Friday AI Hangouts, we do that every Friday at 1:00 PM Eastern. It's a great group of people and we just share AI solutions and questions and help each other out, which is fantastic. There's a lot of people saying thank you on the different chats. So again, thank you from everybody who are with us live. that's it. See you next time. Have a great day. Thank you for having me. Bye-bye.

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