Hi ,

There's a saying you may have hear before: "your network is your net worth."

This adage was popularized by Author, Porter Gale in her 2013 book by the same name.

12 years ago this saying existed mainly in sales circles, and while it was influenced by the internet, it was generally thought about as an offline strategy...

Today, the most efficient way to grow your network is on LinkedIn.

I turned over my LinkedIn to ChatGPT for 30 days, and here's what happened:

Highlights:

1,071 followers gained
14 qualified leads generated
3 media inquiries

How I did it (and how you can too)

In total, the cost to deploy this strategy was less than $100, plus a bit of my time.

What you will need to automate your LinkedIn growth:

LinkedIn (obviously) - but more importantly, to get started, you'll need some data from your LinkedIn Account.
Taplio ($40/mo) - this is a critical piece not only for scheduling, which makes this take so much less time to roll out, but more so for the analytics. More on this in a bit.
Virtual Assistant ($10/hr x 4 hrs/mo = $40/mo) - this is optional, but for me it was a necessity. My VA had an extremely simple process to follow, requiring only 1 hour of his time each week to complete.
Training Data - This is what you will feed into your custom GPT to make it effective in terms of reach and engagement.

Step 1 - Train your initial Custom GPT (this is the most time intensive step to get started)

This step sounds more complicated than it really is, it's actually pretty simple when you get into it.

This is also not a hard and fast set of requirements, feel free to adjust to best fit what you're comfortable with / feel is important.

It is worth calling out that I over-indexed on format as well as science-backed (psychological-focused) copywriting.

Train the GPT on your personal tone and voice using your LinkedIn post history:
1. Go into your LinkedIn account, and download your previous 12 months of post content into a CSV.
2. Click on "Analytics" in the left menu (you may need to be an admin of a LinkedIn Page to access this).
3. Select "Content"
4. Click the "Export" button in the upper-right corner.
5. Choose the desired timeframe (e.g., last 12 months).
6. Click "Export" again to download the data.
Train the GPT on the best formats for engagement:
1. Hook + Re-Hook: I used a Monster one compiled by an Assassins Only member (available to members) butI found a smaller set of 400 available from DemandCurve, that you can grab here.
2. "Viral" (high engagement) content format examples; shoot for at least 100. You can scrape these from any of the best creators (like Matt Gray, here's an example). AO Members can access a 30 day archive of examples is available in a Google Doc for input directly into your GPT.
3. Specific narrative examples to demonstrate how to a)generate curiosity, b) start a story, and c) provoke an audience. For AO Members, here is the full training set.
Set the rules for content outputs (feel free to copy and paste this prompt)
1. Leveraging all of the patterns across all of the examples and guides that have been uploaded, you will be creating posts to be shared on my personal linkedin account (reference: ENTER LINKEDIN URL).
  
  Add these rules to memory:
  - Remove all emoji's and em-dashes. Never use them.
  - Match the tone of my voice from pervious posts. Use the same style of writing that I use.
  - Format all posts to match the "viral post" format guidelines, employing a hook and re-hook format for each post.
  - Vary post length and depth, but always include sources and trending facts and quips to keep readers engaged and the content hyper-relevant to my audience.
  - Generate 12 new posts at a time, when asked for a new batch of content.
  - Create post content in a copy and paste ready format that can be pasted directly into LInkedIn without the need for any additional editing.
Provide some topically-specific content to seed the post content:
1. This part is simple, here all you're doing is to find 3articles you like covering a specific topic that you want to create content on.
2. The articles don't have to be written by you, and can be on any accessible website or even a powerpoint or PDF, ChatGPT is able to parse all of those file types without issue.
Request a new batch of content

Step 2 - Set your posting cadence and schedule your first week of posts.

This is where Taplio comes in handy.

You can set your posting cadence once in Settings and then whoever is doing your scheduling, just has to click the same button and posts will get added into your set time slots.

For this experiment I posted 2x per day, Monday-Sunday(except Fridays) at 11:30am and 4:00pm Eastern.

Step 3 - Use actual performance data to refine your content strategy each week.

Here's where a VA comes in handy.

Every Sunday, after the week's posts have gone live, my VA logged into my Taplio account to review the post performance:

Taplio gives you the ability to export your posts and the specific performance data for each from your selected time period including views, engagement, likes and replies:

Export this data at the end of each week, and then upload it into your Custom GPT with the following prompt:

Here is the post-level performance data from the previous week's posts. Save this data to memory. Analyze the content and format associated with the highest engagement posts, and utilize correlations and patterns to inform the future design of new post content and formats.

Step 4 - Engage with your posts as they get engagement.

LinkedIn heavily rewards comments, not just when your posts get them but when you reply (and in turn drive more replies from users engaging on your posts).

One thing I did NOT do was useChatGPT to write my replies, I did them all myself. Some times I was a couple days late because I would get more replies than I could keep up with, butI still made time to go in and leave a thoughtful reply to as many comments as I could.

Taplio does have a feature to do this natively in the tool, where they do have a single-click solution to "generate a reply" using AI.

The reply tool is absolutely worth using as it aggregates all of the comments across various posts onto one screen for you to go down, but I (personally) wouldn't recommend using AI to write your comments... it's too valuable of an opportunity to bring your own perspective to a conversation and demonstrate your expertise (or just your opinion).

I hope you found this valuable 😀

Make it a week you're proud of,

Nick

P.s. - If you're at all curious about what I'm cooking up in Assassins Only, hit reply and let's chat. It's where I'm sharing all of my AI playbooks, training data (as I build it), and behind the scenes looks at everything that's working (and not working) for agencies right now. Plus, it's an amazing networking opportunity.