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Saying LinkedIn is an AI circle jerk is the same thing as saying like, Instagram is all onlyfans. Booty girl. People's timelines expose a lot about them. I've pre interviewed some people before doing this episode and a lot of the people that I've interviewed have totally different takes. Faces are proven to perform way better on social media on every platform. Like if I post a picture of my book versus I post a picture of my book with my face smiling next to it, the face is going to perform better. This is just human psychology. I have a sample copy of my book here. If you guys are on video, you can see it. So exciting. Welcome to Built In Public. I am your host, Courtney Johnson. I've been a full time content creator and a personal brand strategist for seven years. And I really built my career sharing the process, not just the outcomes of personal brand. Built In Public is about what it actually looks like to build a brand, a business, and to build real leverage in the creator economy. We're talking strategy systems, audience growth, monetization, and that uncomfortable middle ground between. I have an idea. And this is actually working. I'll be sharing what I'm testing, what, what's working, what's not, and I'm going to be bringing on people who are building their careers and companies out loud too. If you want honest conversations, practical insight and zero bs, you are in the right place. Let's build in public. Hey, y'. All. Welcome back to Built In Public. So we have a new name. Yay. No longer Slay the Gatekeeper. We are Built In Public. And it was a really interesting story how this happened. I was talking with my team, with my manager, and we were talking about really the direction that, that I want my content to go in and the direction that's gonna give you guys the most value. So when I looked at the data, I looked at the posts that perform really well, I looked at all the feedback that you guys have given me and it was very clear that personal brand, specifically mindset and strategy for personal brand is what you guys really like, what you guys really want. And doing some market research, we just figured that there was no show or podcast that was specifically talking about personal brands, specifically interviewing people to learn about their personal brand and their personal brand journeys. And it was really this white space and also a space that I'm obsessed with. So that's why we transitioned from Slay the Gatekeeper to Built In Public. I also wanted people to really understand what the title was, right, Like Slay the Gatekeeper is a little bit more general. We're talking about lots of topics built in public. That's a pretty common phrase, right? We're building in public, we're creating in public and really encapsulates personal brand. Don't worry, Slay the Gatekeeper isn't going away forever. I feel like that's going to become the name of another offering group community, maybe the future book. I love the name Slay the Gatekeeper. I've had that, like, in my brain for years and years and years. And, you know, it's interesting because my content strategy that I inform others about is I tell people, post a wide variety of content types, talk about everything you're obsessed with, talk about everything you're interested in. Your audience is going to tell you, your audience is going to show you by their feedback, by metrics, by the numbers, and it's going to be pretty obvious what topics your audience resonates with and the biggest value that you can bring the world. So you might start off your content creation journey talking about your dog and talking about healthy recipes and talking about your favorite coffee shops and talking about your relationship and talking about your work and talking about yoga, like talking about all these different things. And then as you grow and grow and grow, you're gonna see the outliers and you're gonna see interesting. Every time I talk about relationships, that performs really well and my audience really likes it, then maybe you're not gonna talk so much about your dog. You're gonna talk about relationships and your work and your favorite coffee shops and this and that. And then you go back, you look at your outliers and you realize, huh, relationship is still an outlier. Relations performing really, really well. And not just relationships. This idea around building friendships in adulthood. Okay, so you keep posting about your dog, you post about relationships, you post about building friendship, you post about your favorite coffee shops, and then again, you look at the outliers and making friends as an adult is. And maintaining those relationships is your outliers again. So again, as you refine and refine and refine, it doesn't mean you can never talk about your dog or never talk about your favorite coffee shops. But if you see over and, and over and over that your audience is really responding to you talking about adult friendship relationships, that might be your secret sauce, that might be the niche, and maybe that gets picked up into a podcast or a book deal, or you create a content series or you create some sort of event around it, but that's how I coach others. The reason Why I do that is because I find that, like, when people go into content creation with one niche that they already pre choose, it can be very limiting. If you went into that being like, I'm only talking about recipes, but that's not actually your secret sauce, and that's not actually why people follow you, you might be frustrated for a long, long, long time. So when I started posting content, I was posting about real estate, I was posting about corporate marketing, I was posting about advertising, I was posting about yoga, I was posting about working out, I was posting about recipes, I was posting about dating, I was single at the time, I was posting about so many different. I started. And every single time over the course of a couple of years, it always came back to personal brand, specifically mindset around personal brand. And I want to be clear, this is not something I would have ever, ever, ever started with. Because first of all, I thought that was obvious. And that's probably the same for you. Your secret sauce, your zone of genius. You probably think that thing is obvious, so obvious that you would never choose it as your main content pillar as or as your niche because you think everybody knows my book. By the way, I have a sample copy of my book here. If you guys are on video, you can see it. Ah, so exciting. But my book is about career cheat codes. And I would have never gotten this book deal had I not gone through the exercise of posting about lots of different things because I thought these career cheat codes were obvious. But my friends were texting me, asking me for career advice. I was posting, posting, posting my career advice. Posts perform really well. And that ended up being a content pillar, a niche, right? And what I really encourage you to do is to not limit yourself. When you're starting off. Don't limit yourself. Post about everything you're obsessed with, everything you're interested in, and you're going to see by the outliers that it's naturally going to reveal your niche and your zone of genius. It's almost like a dirty window. And the more you post and the more you look at your analytics, the clearer the window gets and the simpler it gets. So you also, you might see people and say, wow, their content is so clear and so simple. It takes a lot of repetition, a lot of trial and error, a lot of testing and clarity to make something very simple. If you are established as a content creator, still looking for your niche, now is the time to refine, right? Like, I would recommend posting, I don't know, 300, 500, 1,000, 2,000 times before you really narrow it. So Built in Public is mainly about personal brands. We're going to take this from a personal brand perspective in the same way that my book is all about career, but it really approaches career in a personal brand perspective. It talks about creating your personal brand internally in your organization, creating your personal brand externally, creating relationships through your personal brand, and using your personal brand as leverage for relationships. So the through line here is personal brand, right? And that's because through so much repetition I found that this is really the sweet sauce, the zone of genius. So we're still gonna be talking about money and mindset and career and some crazy shit like we always do. It's just gonna be reflected through the lens of personal brand. We're also bringing on some crazy ass guests coming up. I actually made a goal in 2026 called butt clenching guests that I'm not gonna have someone on the podcast unless they're a butt clenching guest. Like they make me really. And my hands are sweating going into the interview. Those are the types of people I am going to be talking to. And these are some people with incredible stories, incredible perspectives on personal brand. I've pre interviewed some people before doing doing this episode and a lot of the people that I've interviewed have totally different takes on personal brand than I do. I'm sharing my perspective and they're like, actually Courtney, you're wrong. I think of this totally different. And I think that's so fucking cool. Like we have so many different perspect perspectives on personal brand. Not just what I'm telling you guys. We have so many different backgrounds and so many different strategies. My strategy of post a lot of shit, see what works and focus in on that is completely opposite as some of the strategies we're going to be talking about, which is just so cool because there's no right answer. There is no one strategy that works for every single person in the world. So you guys are going to get so much more depth to your own strategies and I'm super pumped about that. So I asked you guys to submit some questions last week and I want to answer some of those questions right now. So let's just get into these personal brand questions. Okay? Julia asks, how do I start conversations with ideal clients? So I've been thinking about this method a lot lately. I've used this method in my own content. You can use it and steal this in your own content, but the best way to really relate to your audience, to get your audience to convert and to start conversations with your audience is to use their Messaging. So I think the easiest way to do this is just to go put 10 free calls on your calendar. These are 1520 minute calls with your target audience. So let's say I want to, I'm a career coach and I want to get in front of job seekers. I might post on Instagram or LinkedIn and say, hey guys, I am giving away 10 free sessions. With me, totally free, no obligation, 10 mini coaching sessions or whatever. Then I'm going to go on these sessions, I'm going to talk to these career job seekers and I'm going to ask them their problems. Hey, what are you struggling with? How can I help you? Where are you in your career right now? Right. I'm going to ask all the questions and I'm really going to try to understand their language throughout this time. You want to be transcribing these mini interviews, okay. So you can use the annoying note takers or you can just use Zoom recording and Zoom transcription. What's going to be interesting, all 10 of these free consultations or free coaching sessions, you're probably going to see similar themes throughout everybody. For example, if I am talking to job seekers, I might see the theme of the job seeker saying they're overwhelmed, they're overwhelmed, they're overwhelmed. Or they feel behind, they feel behind. Or they're confused about AI and they don't know how to, how to implement that. So I'm going to put these transcripts into ChatGPT or whatever your favorite AI is and I'm going to ask chat to give me the common themes and common messaging. And what's going to happen is you are going to see very clear common messaging. So for example, again, these job seekers might constantly say they're overwhelmed, they might say they're confused or they might say that they're behind. So you can take that and you can put that into your own messaging. You can say, you can make a post that says, so you're feeling behind as a job seeker. So you're feeling overwhelmed as a job seeker. Here's how to beat the overwhelm. So again, you're using their exact language. I actually do this in level up on LinkedIn. I have like a little section that says, why did you register for level up on LinkedIn? And I actually take some of that language and use it in my marketing. So maybe People register for LevelUp on LinkedIn because they want to finally get that opportunity. And I keep seeing that over and over and over. So I might take that language, put it into my marketing and create some Posts that say, so you want to finally get that opportunity? Here's how. So what's gonna happen is when your target audience sees these posts, they're gonna be like, holy fuck, how did you get in my brain? They're gonna feel very seen and they're gonna wan you. Another really good way to start conversations with ideal clients is to ask them what their goal is. So you're going to go on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, you're going to message people in your target audience and you're going to say, hey, what's your goal right now? What's your goal for 2026? What's your goal for this month? What's your goal for Q2? What are you working on? Just ask them their goal. Right? You can even ask them, what's your goal and how can I help? Okay, so one of three things is going to happen after you ask somebody their goal. Number one, they're going to tell you that their goal is exactly what you offer. Oh, Courtney. My goal is to build a personal brand. My goal is to get consistent with content. Oh, your goal is to get consistent with content. Amazing. Would it be helpful to meet with you on Zoom every single day and I can help you with content? Right? Join content club. So they walk right into a problem that you solve. And by the way, when it comes to sales, I don't want you guys to think about this as I'm being slimy or I'm being annoying or whatever. Sales is solving someone's problem. If somebody's in my DM saying, courtney, I want to get consistent in content creation, I know that content creation is going to help me accomplish my goals. I just can't get consistent. Encouraging them to join content club is solving their problem. Right. I'm like, actually, you have this problem. You've struggled with it for a long time. I can solve that for you. So again, you've messaged the person, you've asked them their goals. They might say, it's my goal to improve my website. And you're like, amazing. I actually build websites. It's my goal to improve my mindset. Amazing. I'm a mindset coach. It's my goal to clean up my finances. That's great. Because I'm a bookkeeper. I can help you do that. So they might walk right into exactly what you're offering. The second option is they might say something that's irrelevant, but you kind of know about. Right? They might say, my goal is to improve my taxes. Okay. I don't offer tax services. But I could give you a referral to my tax person, or I could give you a book recommendation, or I could give you a YouTube channel that's really helped me. So again, number one, they tell you, oh, my goal is exactly what you do. Number two, they say, my goal is this other thing. And in that case, you're going to give them a recommendation, you're going to give them a referral. My goal is to get a really great virtual assistant. Oh, awesome. My virtual assistant has some extra hours. Here's their name. So again, number one, they say, my goal is exactly what you do. In that case, you pitch them. Option two, my goal is this other thing. You send them a referral, a book, a YouTube channel, something that's helped you. Or they might say, number three, my goal is this other completely random thing that I know nothing about. Right? They might say, my goal is shipping logistics optimization. In that case, I have nothing to offer them. I don't offer that myself. I don't know anybody that offers that. I personally don't deal with any shipping logistics coordination. So I might just offer them a word of encouragement. That's amazing. I think you're going to do great at it. Like you got this, right? So again, to summarize, we're asking the person a question, number one, and then they're going to answer one of three things. They're going to say, number one, it's the thing that you do. I need help in my personal brand. Amazing. Come join content club. Number two, it's going to be something that's irrelevant but you kind of know a little bit about. I need help optimizing my taxes. And I might say that's awesome. Here's this book that really helped me. It might help you, too. Or option three, they might say something completely random. My goal is to optimize my shipping logistics. And in that case, I'm just gonna give them a word of encouragement. That is a really, really great way to start to build the foundation and plant the seeds of relationships. Also, you can just reach out to people. You can just reach out and say, hi. One of my favorite things is sending video messages and voice messages on LinkedIn. Most people have never received a video or voice message on LinkedIn, so it's super, super helpful. And the open rates are really high. But, you know, you can just reach out and say hi. It can be that simple. Next question. LinkedIn feels like it's become an AI circle jerk. Any suggestions on cutting through that barrier? I feel like saying LinkedIn is an AI circle jerk is the same thing as saying, like, Instagram is all onlyfans, booty girl hoes. Like, okay, maybe you're following the wrong people and that's like exposing you. You know, like, people's timelines expose a lot about them anyways. Totally. I get it that LinkedIn might feel like an AI circle jerk, but there's a reason why these AI bros are talking about AI on LinkedIn. Because it's working for them. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't work for them. Now, if you don't want to follow the LinkedIn AI bros, you can just click the little three dots above any LinkedIn post and say, not interested. And then go follow people that really inspire you. Also, if you're annoyed at your industry on LinkedIn, what an amazing opportunity for you to step in and be different. So a lot of people, again, make fun of these AI bros on LinkedIn. If you don't like the AI bros and you don't like how they're speaking or talking or writing, do something different. Like, if it's not good, what an amazing opportunity for you to step in and do something different. So my encouragement, if you feel like LinkedIn is this AI circle jerk. Number one, change who you follow. Just follow people that are more inspiring to you. Number two, do it a different way. Like, if you don't like how something is done on LinkedIn, on the Internet or in the world, you can change it. You can create something new and do your own thing. So I hope that helps. Okay, next question. I love this question. I get this a lot. I'm post grad with zero experience or direction. So how do I start? If you're a postgrad and you have zero experience, what you're gonna do is you're gonna learn in public. So yes, maybe you just graduated in, I don't know, you just graduated in marketing and you have no marketing experience. That's okay. Go read a marketing book and post about what you learned in that marketing book on social media. Go to a conference and post about what you learned. Go watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast and post about what you learned. If you are new to an industry, you don't have to come up with all these ideas on your own and have this amazing, mind blowing whatever. You can just share what you're learning. And that is the simplest way to get started. Our next question is, how do I create visibility when my NDA has not expired? Ooh, this is so good. So you're working with clients but they're under NDAs and they're still active. So you can't really post about the clients that you're working with. You can't really post about the projects. So let's say you're a lawyer and you cannot post about your clients. Something that you can do is you can talk about public information. So maybe you're a lawyer and you can't talk about your clients, but what you can talk about is that tech company that's kind of in legal trouble right now and you can give your own thoughts or opinions on it. You could also share resources. You can share resources where you're learning things about law. You could also share common asked questions. You could share your own story of your journey through law school, starting a business, starting your own practice, etc. Talking about your work is actually a very small part of your content creation in general. Again, we want to talk about things outside of our work too, because that's how people hire us. People hire us because we also love sports, or we're also a runner, or we also have this thing in common. So if you're under NDAs, you can't talk about your clients. That's okay. Talking about clients is such a small percentage of content creation anyways that it shouldn't really be a big deal. Curate resources, curate other legal cases that are going on, talk about public things that are relevant to you, and be the expert commentator on these public things. Okay, next question. I don't get much engagement, but I see people post really boring shit and people will comment and like on that, but not mine. So I got a lot of questions about I have low engagement, what do I do? And I actually went back and looked at a lot of Yalls profiles on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on whatever, to see why you have low engagement. And it's usually the same patterns over and over and over. The first pattern I see is that there's no personal photos or videos. If you are only posting stock photos or AI photos or AI videos, or just graphics with words only, that's not going to perform as well as bringing in your own life. So you don't have to show your face all the time if you don't want to. Although faces are proven to perform way better on social media on every platform. Like if I post a picture of my book versus I post a picture of my book with my face smiling next to it, the face is going to perform better. This is just human psychology. We are drawn to other people's faces. So you want to make sure. You have faces in your photo if you can. If you're uncomfortable with your own face, talk about other people. For example, I did a post recently where I was talking about Oprah's personal brand. I can make that post with Oprah's face. It doesn't have to be my face. So if you're talking about a certain industry, you don't necessarily have to put your face. Can you talk about somebody else, make it about them and put their face. That's gonna perform a lot better. So make sure you have faces in your photos and then personal photos, personal stuff. So it doesn't have to be something ultra personal. It could be the next time you go to a coffee shop, you're just taking a photo of the coffee and your breakfast pastry or whatever. It could just be a picture of your desk set up. It could be a picture of a sunset or a view that you really like. But when you bring in those personal elements, the platforms will tag them as personal. Right where we don't want the platform to be tagging us as like AI. It's okay if you use AI. I use AI every single day. We just don't want the platforms to tag us as like AI slop, because then your posts are going to the very bottom of the algorithms. Okay, so you're going to include a personal photo, some sort of personal visual element. Second thing is formatting. I see a lot of people, their content doesn't get a lot of engagement because the formatting is bad. Anytime we have like a wall of text or a chunk of text, it just doesn't perform well. I know people make fun of this, especially on LinkedIn. Like, people will call it bro a tree because there's line breaks between every sentence. But there's actually a reason why people do this. It's because it is so much easier to read and it performs a lot better. I kind of think of this as like an email. If I'm writing an email, I'm not going to shove all of my thoughts into Debt's paragraph. I'm going to write a sentence, have a line break, write a bullet point of four things, and then I'm going to write another sentence, and then I'm going to write number one and number two, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Like, it's a lot easier to read. So you want to make sure that your content is formatted well, and this is true for all platforms. And then you also want to make sure you're bringing in a personal element to whatever information you're giving so if you just post on Instagram or LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever, here are four ways to improve your website. It's not going to perform as well of if you bring in a personal story. So you might say, I've built over a thousand websites and I keep seeing this one problem, right? That's like bringing in your own personal experience of I've built over a thousand websites. Or you could bring in a personal example. I was talking to a client last week and this client had this question that was really interesting. They were struggling with this problem, right? Like you're bringing in this kind of personal story of why that thing is important. I was talking to to somebody on Instagram the other day who runs a PR firm and she was just posting three reasons why PR is important. Two PR tips for this month. Three things to think about when you hire a PR firm. Like it was like very basic, what would perform better? Instead of three reasons PR is important. She might post, Taylor Swift is having this scandal, which really shows us the concept of blah, blah, blah. And this really illuminates these two reasons why PR is important. Like she's bringing in something culturally relevant that's happening, that's going to make that post perform a lot better because it's adding context and depth to these two reasons why PR is important. Another example is, I don't know, this one public relations mistake everybody makes. Great, that's fine. But if you want more engagement, bring in a story. Again, it could be a personal story. It could be something that's happening in the cultural zeitgeist. It could be I made this mistake when I was early in my PR career and it costs my clients time and money and something like that. Just adding a little bit of context is really, really helpful and going to elevate that. This is a really good question. I get this all the time. Is there any difference on content performance when you're scheduling versus posting live? Okay, this is a great question. And this is a question that's really been a mystery for a long time in the content world, right? If I pre schedule something E on a scheduling tool or natively in an app, does it hurt the algorithm? To this question I would ask you, are you consistent in content creation and what helps you be consistent? By the way, there's not a correct answer to it. We don't really know if pre scheduling hurts the reach. There hasn't been a platform that has come out and said definitively yes, pre scheduling hurts the reach or no, it does not. My recommendation to think about this is like, what's going to make you the most consistent? Let's say that it does hurt the reach by 10%. But now that you're not scheduling because you're like, oh, it hurts the reach by 10% now I can't schedule it, I have to do it live. But now since you're doing it live, it doesn't work in your workflow. You're missing days, you're inconsistent, right? Like that's not worth it. It's better to pre schedule out everything if that's what works for you. Some people do better showing up live, some people do better pre scheduling. But if you want to pre schedule and that's what works for your workflow, it doesn't matter if it slightly reduces the reach. Keep scheduling it. Like, do whatever is going to make you the most consistent. People also ask me this in terms of like, well, will I get more likes and comments if I add audio to it, if I add a location to it, if I add this or that to it. And most of the time the people that are asking me these questions are not posting consistently. And these are what I call procrastination questions. You are asking these questions in order to try to get all of the possible information that you can so you can make the most informed decision possible, so you can find the perfect formula. But the truth is you will never have the perfect formula. The perfect formula does not exist. There is not this one right answer of this type of music, plus this format plus this amount of copy, plus these hashtags, plus tag these people plus this link like plus this time of day. Oh my God, time of day is a big one too. People are like, what's the best time of day to post? What's the best day of the week to post? And it just does not matter unless you're actually posting. So to this person, I would say do the thing that's going to make you the most consistent. Once you're consistent, then optimize. Because optimizing your content does not matter if you're not consistent. It does not matter if you've done the right day of the week, the right time of day, the perfect scheduling or non scheduling, whatever, that doesn't matter if you're posting two times, getting overwhelmed and then stopping for three months. So get consistent. Do whatever it takes to get consistent, then optimize. And once you are consistent, you can run these experiments on yourself. You can run the experiment of scheduled versus non scheduled, of face in the post versus not a face in the post Real verse carousel of LinkedIn slides versus LinkedIn photos. Right. You can start to run the experiments, but they truly, truly are different for everyone. They're different for every audience. So get consistent, then run the experiment. All right, we'll be back next week for our first official, official episode of Built In Public with a guest. I'm so excited. If you guys have any questions you want me to answer in future Q and A episodes, just go to the comment section. Leave me a comment. I look at all of the Spotify comments, so we'd love to answer your question as well. I do have an ask for you guys before we go. If this podcast has benefited you and in any way, if you have gotten a tip that you've really loved and you implemented it, if it's given you some sort of inspiration, if it's given you some sort of motivation or clarity, my ask is that you leave a five star review. I would appreciate it so much. It helps spread the message, it really helps the show grow, and it helps more people get access to this information. My deepest desire is un gatekeeping shit. I want to un gatekeep information. So anybody that desires to build a personal brand, to build a business, to create this success in their life and to live their dream, I want them to have all of the information. And I don't hold shit back on the show. Okay, we are not holding shit back. So in order to get this message to more people, in order to get these resources and tips to more people, your reviews go a long way. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.