(upbeat music) - You're listening to Let's Talk Jobs, where we give you practical insights into jobs and careers. I'm Tim Chen, and today, we're talking about how to be a social content marketer. Now, it goes without saying, knowing who your audience is, knowing what they're looking for, and then authoring content that they'll actually read is really, really difficult.

And there's a reason why we aren't all influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers that read our content. I'm certainly not one of them, and it's not due to lack of effort. So today, we're going to talk to someone who has achieved this. We'll be joined by Paul Patron, a senior content marketing manager at LinkedIn, and he runs LinkedIn Sales Solutions' owned channel strategy, where he's the blog editor and owner of social content and the recently launched newsletter.

Altogether, this reaches over 400,000 people monthly. In this video, he's going to give us practical insights into topics like the importance of immediate payoff for the reader, examples of blogs that did and did not perform well, and then he'll talk about his own career journey and how he discovered a passion for writing.

All right, let's get started. Joining us today to talk about content marketing is Paul Patron. How you doing, Paul? - I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Tim. - Dude, I'm so glad you're here today. You know, I've worked with you. I've really admired how you do content marketing.

So can you tell us a little bit about your role today and how long you've been doing it? - Sure. So right now, I currently lead our blog and social efforts for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, which is roughly a $1.2 billion business, primarily selling Sales Navigator. And I've bounced around a few different roles at LinkedIn, primarily content marketing, although I've done some product marketing too.

And I've been at LinkedIn for eight years. So a little bit about my job now. Basically, my job is to build an audience of sales professionals. And I do that through our blog and social channels. We wanna connect with sales professionals. We wanna keep them engaged. We wanna build this community of existing customers and people who are prospective customers as well, and keep them coming back and wanting to learn more about sales best practices, how to sell more effectively.

And then we also pepper in, of course, some best practices around Sales Navigator and how to get the most out of our product as well. - Got it. So when you're saying you're building this community, so this is primarily through engagement on your blogs. Is that true? - Blog and-- - And social.

- LinkedIn, yes. - LinkedIn, okay. - LinkedIn, I would say, is almost the focus because we have more sales pros use LinkedIn more than any other type of professional. So there's this huge community there. And we're looking to tap into that community and build awareness with them of Sales Navigator and just kind of who we are and what we stand for.

- Can you tell me a little bit about, obviously the community in LinkedIn can be very diverse, right? There's all these different people and different personas. And so how do you go about defining your target audience? And then how do you then, whether it's through, you know, journey mapping or understanding their top tasks or what use cases that they care about, like how do you then pair the individual to topics that you think is highly relevant to them?

- Yeah, I think the key to good content marketing is empathy for the person you're writing to, to your point. So really our audience is our core, is the core of the business as well. So for us, that's 25 to 45 year old sales professionals. I would say high tech and finance is the focus, but we really serve a wide range.

But when I think about who I'm writing for, I think about somebody who's either an SDR or an AE, who's hungry to advance in their career, is hungry to get better at selling because unlike other professions, there's an immediate payoff. The better you get at sales, the more money you make.

So I really think about that as I'm designing content, like what would they care about? And then of course I talk to sales professionals all the time. I hear research from our product marketing team on what our sales professionals care about. And honestly, part of it is trial and error.

Like part of it is like, I produce a lot of blogs and a lot of social posts and you see, hey, this topic resonates, this topic doesn't resonate. And I've written for a lot of audiences in my time and it's always the same process. Try to speak to the people who actually do that job, try to get whatever market research you can.

And then a lot of it's quite frankly, trial and error. - Cool, so you said two things in there that really kind of piqued my interest. One is around kind of gathering and soliciting feedback to validate what your customers are looking for. And I definitely want to focus on that.

And then you talked about how you're measuring engagement as a way of seeing efficacy of your content or making sure they're engaging. So I got a question for you. So, it seems like when you're describing to me, whether it's your partners in product marketing or the sales rep themselves, maybe there's a general alignment to maybe their agreement on what the customer is looking for.

Now, a lot of companies may not have that luxury. You could be in a very complex B2B company where your product marketing has a very specific point of view that may differ from another organization. Have you encountered that in your current role or previous jobs? And how do you kind of marry the two together and really kind of come up with the agreed kind of source of truth to identify what they're looking for?

- Yes, I mean, I've worked in organizations that had no product marketing. So the whole funnel. And then I think the ultimate source of truth is what's performing on the channel. That's the source of truth. - Okay. - I mean, granted, it needs to be related to the business, of course.

But like, if you're seeing, let's just use, I'll just continue the example. So let's see, we're seeing a lot of, with sales professionals specifically, we see a lot do really successful around like sort of the emotional side of sales. Like how do you bounce back from a tough call or how do you bounce back from missing quota?

How do you deal with rejection? Now, is that a direct tie to our product? Somewhat, but not 100% as like prospecting would be. Now, we talk about sales prospecting, we wanna connect with the sales pro. If we don't build a community, like our efforts are meaningless 'cause then we're like talking to nobody.

So you need to look at the engagement numbers really closely and see what is actually resonating with the audience and use that as your source of truth versus even the research you get back from PMM or whoever. - Yeah, and how are you measuring like success? Are you looking at clicks?

Like are you looking at balanced rates? Are you looking at heat maps? Like what kind of tools you use and what numbers, what KPIs matter to you? - Yeah, so there's a few and I've used a bunch in my times in content marketing. I think in social, you have a lot more metrics you can use.

You can see how many people engage the post. You can see the sentiment around that post. You can see if those posts, if people click down through, if they go on to convert, although I would not recommend, and we can talk about this later, I would not recommend conversions as a key metric for content marketing for a lot of reasons.

- Okay. - But we can talk about that in a second. In blog, it's a little more limited 'cause you don't have as much visibility into your audience, but it's, you're really relying on views. I think time on pages are underrated stat. Like are people, are they, is it clickbait or are there people actually like syncing in and reading the content?

And then if you have some sort of blog newsletter or subscribing is really critical because that shows that like they're getting so much value that they want more of it. - Yeah. - So I think in some ways for blog, I would say views is generally your true North, but subscribers can actually be an even better metric.

- Yeah, you said something earlier that I really want to revisit again 'cause it's so important. You know, you're talking about like, you know, whether that's empathetic writing or kind of putting the user or customer truly first, that's actually really hard 'cause it's easy for a company who's passionate about their product to want to talk about their product first.

And you're going completely different way, right? You're trying to talk about something that's relatable that seems like it's taking a topic that's relevant and talking about maybe a editorial piece or a story or narrative to kind of build that kind of a story. And then you lead them into maybe why your product matters, right?

Can you share some examples of maybe like an example of a topic that worked really well in terms of getting engagement versus one that really fell flat? You know, like maybe it was a pure product push or something that just no one cared about. - I can think of, so first off, pure product pushes almost always fall flat unless there's, I would say actually in my current role, when we have updates about Sales Navigator and we can talk about immediate payoff, then it actually does perform well because they're just so hungry to learn how to use the tool better.

But to answer your question, I'll give you a very specific example. So I think the key is in writing good content is you need to identify pain. You need to figure out like what's something that like somebody's struggling with right now that they want to click on and figure out how to solve it.

So, and if the more immediate that pain is, the more clicks and the more successful and the more engaged it's going to be. So I give you a very specific example. Back when we were working together, Tim, I worked with somebody else on the team, Carrie, on this campaign and it was my first big effort on like a big editorial campaign.

I was really excited about it and it was called The Future of Skills, the skills that would be popular in five years. And we interviewed all of these great people. We interviewed Reid Hoffman. We interviewed our head of sales at LinkedIn at the time. I think we interviewed 40 people all with really impressive credentials.

And we're like, what are the skills that are going to be popular in five years? And it was good. I actually revisited it. We did this in 2017. I revisited it in 2022 and it was amazingly accurate. Like one of them was like the sales guy was like, virtual meetings is going to be even more critical than ever.

Now, of course he didn't know pandemic was going to happen. But so anyway, it was strong writing. It was, the points were good. Everything was good. And the campaign couldn't have done worse. It was embarrassing. It was my first big one. And I was like, why? Like, it sounds so good.

And it's like, 'cause there's not an immediate payoff. Yes, like if I were to ask you what's going to make you successful in five years and granted I know you can build towards that and everything but there's not that immediate pain that, and we had like, it was all, this was to give a little more context.

This was back when I worked for LinkedIn Learning which taught all these courses and all these skills. So the thought was, well, this will inspire people to want to take these courses because they want to get prepared for five years from now. But the reality is people don't think like that.

They want to put out the fire that's burning inside them right now. - Yeah. - So we altered. And then what we did was, so they kind of gave me one more chance to like, all right, we'll do one more of these sort of campaigns. I felt the pressure.

So we did something around the skills companies need most where we identified the skills right now that companies were most hiring for based on this really cool LinkedIn data. And that killed. That was probably the most successful campaign I ever did. And then we did it again next year and it was even bigger.

And it, again, it addressed that immediate pain and it was a direct tie to the product. It was, hey, these are the skills companies are hiring for. This is how to learn the skill on LinkedIn Learning. So it's okay to have a complete straight line to the product but you better match it real closely to something that's a pain in somebody's life right now.

Not something that's potentially a pain or philosophically a pain. - No, that's a really good point. I'm thinking about even the blogs that my teams have written in the past and you're totally right. They're like, there's two types of blogs that seem to perform really well. One is timely and relevant to key events happening in market right now, right?

So in my world, the previous was around like, like privacy and security and like online, like identification and protection, right? And not being DDoS attacked. So like having people aware of like, hey, this attack just happened. Like, here's what you need to know about it. Like, that was really practical.

But the one you're saying is even better, which is like, you need to remember that users are trying to get their jobs done at the end of the day, right? And so they're trying to solve for something specifically. And if you talk broad stretches, like brushes, like marketing speak usually turns people off, right?

It's like, connect with me as a human, use my language, help me figure out how you're gonna make my job better and tell me how to do it. 'Cause then that actually establishes you as a subject matter expert, right? Or thought leader. And again, that kind of probably leads to more repeat readership in your content or maybe update and subscribes, et cetera.

So, Paul, you have like actually really interesting history to me for your career journey. 'Cause, you know, when I'm thinking about the skills required to be a successful content marketer. Now like, you're double downing in blog and social content for viewers. You know, there's other types of content marketing as well.

There's eBooks, creating webinars, infographics. There's a lot of ways or packages you can put your content in and I'll create more content around that to help you guys understand how to do that. But in your world, can you help us understand what skills, both hard and soft, you believe are really critical for this role?

And then I would love to kind of even rewind the clock a little bit, kind of talk about your career journey. 'Cause you started somewhere totally different than where you are now, but all the skills you kind of gained along the way, they're all somehow thematically relevant, right? And it kind of led you to where we are today.

So can you, yeah, start us with the skills and you believe are required and then talk about your journey. - Sure, absolutely. So first off I'll say, although I've done mostly blog and social in my career, I've done eBooks, I've done live shows, I've done webinars, I've done it all.

And I actually think I've done videos and I think the skills needed to create good content across all those mediums are very similar. So I think the really critical skills is, the hard skills is, and it doesn't matter what type of content you're doing, you need to be able to, I would say the number one skill you need, believe it or not, is the ability to take a bunch of information, distill it down and figure out what's gonna be interesting to the audience.

So like, that's what we had to do and I'll get to it in a second in my career as a reporter, but that's what we had to do was take a lot of information, okay, this is a lot of stuff here, a lot of angles we could go here, what's actually gonna matter to our audience?

And I think the best way to do that is, I think of this thing my journalism professor told me one time is, he said, imagine you're on a boat and the boat is casting offshore and there's somebody on shore and you have just one sentence you can shout to that person on shore before the boat is out of earshot.

And like, what is that one sentence gonna be? So before you create anything, whether it's an ebook or a video or a blog or a social post, you need to be like crystal clear on what that one message is because if you don't have that, you're gonna have a very unstructured post.

So that's the most important. It's actually kind of, I would describe it almost as like an analytical skill to be able to boil it down. The other skills you need, I would say, is obviously the ability to write and again, that applies to all types of content. And I really think the only way to become a good writer is to just write a lot.

You do need the building on the analytical skill. You need the ability to understand data and figure out trends from that data and apply it to your writing. So you're reaching bigger and bigger audiences, ideally. Those are the main ones. And then on the soft skill, which I think are probably equally important, not more important.

One of the big soft skills you really need to learn, which I struggled with earlier in my career and then it got beat out of me basically, was the ability to take really strong feedback. Even in, I've been doing writing for 15 years and I ghost write for people all the time and everybody has different opinions and everybody has, most people have really strong feedback.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that every single thing, every piece of feedback you get is right. But you need to be able to accept the feedback. Some of it does, is right. And some of it you need to learn from other, you just need to chalk it up as, hey, it's their perspective.

But either way, you need to be able to accept a lot of feedback and not take it personally. So that's critical. You need to be able to build partnerships, which is so important. And another thing that I wasn't like, I was kind of like a little bit of a lone wolf, probably still somewhat are, but like you really need to bring people along and be able to build partnerships.

Otherwise you're gonna be seen as just a writer and you don't want that in your career. You wanna be able to build these larger initiatives and be part of something larger. You need to have some sort of like strategic view of what the business is, which again was something I had to learn over time.

And I would say, I mean, there's many more, but I would say those are the main ones. If I had to distill it down to one hard and one soft, soft skill, most important ability to take feedback, not take it personally and incorporate, not lose your confidence either, which is also hard, and then be able to put it back in.

And the hard skill again, just be able to take a lot of information and distill out, I kind of called the bones of it, but what's the main thing that you really wanna get across? - Yeah, and I really liked that. You know, the kind of hard skill you mentioned just now around being able to take a lot of complex information and distill it into the one point that people care about.

I would say that applies broadly as an effective communicator in business, right? How many times have we been asked to put a presentation together for a manager or whatever? And being in the weeds, there's so much we wanna talk about 'cause we're passionate about it and we should have a strong point of view, but that audience only has time to remember one or two things they're gonna say.

And so being able to practice restraint and kind of bubbling up just the first, you know, one or two things that matter to them is really important. And as a matter of fact, Paul, I don't know if you remember, when we started at LinkedIn together at the same time, in that time in my career, you know, I was very much an individual contributor, really passionate about my work.

I had a lot of work to do in the way of presenting my thoughts. You know, my mind ran a mile a minute and my presentations looked like that. You know, I would create a slide that would be way too verbose. And I kind of leveraged too many funny pictures as well, but that's just my personality.

But like, I think over time, being just admitting to myself that, "Hey, look, this is a thing I need to work on." The thing that I appreciate with even you is accountability, right? 'Cause people are gonna wonder, I am a talkative type, but a lot of things you say, "How do I bring it down?" Letting a few friends or close people who you trust give you feedback is important.

I remember a lot of times in the beginning, I would distill my presentations down. I would do like a dry run through you or I'd do a dry run through my manager at the time and say, "Hey, look, does this make sense?" Or even before I presented something, I'd be like, "Hey, by the way, before we get started, I'm trying to work on bringing a better presenter.

So look out for these three things. And just let me know after the fact, you know, and I'll deal with that." And then I would go on. So I think the same thing applies for you and your content writing, right? Again, I'm sending feedback and kind of like iron sharpening iron.

And I think the ability to take constructive feedback, like that's so valuable. Cool, so you kind of teased it. So you're a reporter before. So I'm kind of curious. So there's a lot of people who are wondering, like, "Hey, look, I want to make a career shift into let's say content marketing." And of course, content marketing is a very broad category, right?

And they may have some skills that they'd be more tangible, but they may be maybe intimidated 'cause you've mentioned analytical mindset and they may not see themselves as the analytical person. What I don't want them to take away is, "Okay, I'm gonna just rule myself out and self-select out this job function or category." So can you tell us about your evolutionary career?

'Cause I think that's important for people 'cause they might be following a similar journey even though the starting point looks different. - Yes, absolutely. So I had a kind of a unique journey to LinkedIn. So I'll start, I won't tell the whole story, but I'll start when I was, I kind of graduated college pretty listless and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life.

I kind of had a kind of a generic degree. I graduated from the University of Connecticut and I was actually working for my father at his construction company and I really didn't like it. It wasn't a good fit and I was unhappy. And I got this, it's gonna sound crazy, but I had this dream effectively that said, "Hey, become a writer." And I started, I made that my focus.

I was gonna become a writer. And I went back and got some schooling at UConn, advanced education around journalism. Got enough to get into the world of journalism and started writing for some local newspapers and then a website called Patch that was like a local, I ran a local website, news website.

And through those roles, I wrote a lot. My role, so I paid my first reporting job. I got, I think $75 a story. And then actually I got laid off from that job. And then I had to get another job that only paid $50 a story. So to make ends meet, I had to write 10 stories a week.

And that was at only 500 bucks. I think I did some tutoring too. So I was barely getting by, but I was writing a tremendous amount. And then at Patch, it was even more crazy. I would do like upwards of five posts a day. So I was writing a tremendous amount.

And so I was getting, whether I liked it or not, I was becoming a really good writer. And I did that for the reporting thing for like seven years. And then Patch actually went under as a company and we all got laid off. And I started working for this really small startup in Mystic, Connecticut that sold a hiring solution.

And the boss... So at first I had like a somewhat complicated, but it was basically like a customer success role. I was to analyze some customer success records and make recommendations. But anyway, he's like, "Paul, you're a writer. "You should lead our marketing efforts "and write on LinkedIn for us." And at the time, I mean, I really didn't know anything about, I didn't know content marketing was, and I knew very little about LinkedIn.

And I was like, "Okay." And I started writing on LinkedIn about like hirings, just things that were interesting to me about hiring, like how Warren Buffett hires, how "Star Wars" is actually a movie about bad recruiting 'cause Darth Vader couldn't bring one. (Paul laughs) - That's amazing. - And all of a sudden, and I should add that my boss at this job in Mystic, Connecticut was very quick to fire.

And he fired people all the time. So there's a lot of pressure on me. And I'm like, he's like, "Keep writing." And I'm like, "Really?" I was so nervous. And I just kept writing. And then some of these posts started going viral. And all of a sudden, we sat at all, and at the bottom, every post had nothing to do with our hiring product.

And that was generally about hiring. And I put a little thing at the bottom that says, "We have the world's smartest hiring tool, VoiceGlance. "If you're interested, call this number." And we started getting all these phone calls. And I was, "Where are these phone calls coming from?" Like, "Well, it's from your LinkedIn post." And I'm looking at the LinkedIn posts.

And I remember that one of my first ones got like 10,000 views. And like, five people called us and wanted to learn more about the product and potentially become customers. And I was like, "Wow." And then I started writing more. And then it was like 20,000. And then it was like 50,000 views.

And then it was like 100,000 views. And then, remember, one was like a million views. And these articles were just so popular. And it was crazy. And then LinkedIn actually assigned an editor to me to be like, "Hey, Paul is this great writer. "He's writing for us for free, effectively.

"Let's give him story ideas and he'll write for it." And we were getting so much business from people just reading my articles and then, "Oh, what's Voice Glance?" And then calling or check out the website and filling out a form. And we were getting like, it was almost so much business.

There was like seven of us in the office. We couldn't even handle all the leads coming. (laughs) And it was crazy. - What a good problem to have. - Yeah, exactly. So then I was like, really, I look back on it now and I'm like, all those years of like, really barely getting by.

And I think my max salary at the patch was maybe $42,000 a year. But I was writing a lot. And then that writing kind of formed these skills in me that like allowed me to be successful on LinkedIn. And then ultimately LinkedIn, I was so popular that somebody at LinkedIn was like, "Why don't we just hire this guy?

"He's writing for us. "We like his stuff." And they hired me and the rest is history. I've been here for eight years and I don't wanna leave. But so I definitely wasn't intentional about it. I just love to write and I think I built up my skills enough where, and then I had the opportunity to be able to build this platform that ultimately led me to getting hired at LinkedIn.

- Yeah, that's an awesome story. So that Darth Vader analogy is hilarious. I totally resonate with that. Yeah, I think there's one thing you introduced there, which is kind of an interesting idea, which is like earlier we talked about knowing the right audience and write something that matters to them that's actual now that solves a pain point they're trying to solve for right now that impacts their job.

There's also a piece of it, which is like whether it's luck or it's even writing by volume, right? And I think people need to realize like five posts a day is a lot of content to be writing and to kind of get, whether it's building up your experience, you're kind of honing the craft or just finding the right audience and seeing what sticks.

There is a part of this, which is the grind. Like you just got to put it out, you know? And I'm assuming your career, there's some topics you've written that you're really passionate about it. Some of them were maybe not throw away or filler, but again, there's gotta be a volume game as a part of this, right?

'Cause then you got to touch a hit and strike the gold. Then you obviously focus on what works. But I think until you get there, you kind of had to be okay with being, maybe kind of springing yourself a little broad, right? - Yeah, I mean, I've become such, so when I first started writing, I'll be honest, like I was not a good writer.

Like I remember my first few articles for the newspaper. I remember one time I had a really harsh editor and he was like, "This is unprincipled, this is." And then another time I wrote like a, in newspaper language, I call it a lead, the opening sentence. And then I remember it was my first week at this newspaper.

I was all excited 'cause I finally got hired. I was a freelancer and then I got hired full time. And my first week there, my editor at the time was like, "We need to get better leads. "We've had some bad leads recently. "And I think this is the perfect example." And she read out my lead in front of the whole newsroom.

About how terrible this lead was. So I was like, okay. So the point is like, to your point, Tim, like I had skills, I had innate skills. I was good at what I said before of like being able to boil things down and figuring out what was interesting. And I kind of had, I think I have this unique skill to figure out like what people are gonna be interested in.

But I wasn't like a strong technical writer by any stretch. I didn't have, my grammar skills were awful. I didn't know how to, I didn't have a great grasp of the English language. And it was difficult for me. I like had the idea, but I couldn't get it out.

And only like through years and years of just doing it, did I actually build those skills. So point being, there's gonna be like, when you start writing, like it's gonna, you're not gonna be great. Like it's just reality. Nobody's like immediately great at anything. - Yeah. - Even if you're passionate about it.

But like, if you do it over time and you're getting, the other thing is like, I got, I always got feedback. Whether it was just really harsh editors or viewership. Like I always got feedback. So like, I always kept learning. And by the end, I, you know, today, and I still like challenge myself every day.

Like in no ways do I feel like I've figured it out. Every single day I'm like, I can get better. We could get more views. Like I still put that pressure on myself and I'm still pushing to get better. So like, maybe not as extreme. I probably too hard on myself at times, but like, it's good to like, to like, you have to accept the fact that you're going to need to grow into it.

- Yeah. And that's really actually comforting for someone like me to know, right? 'Cause one of the kind of maybe factors I would consider it's sort of skillset that I think I would require to even qualify this is like strong writing skills. And like, if I'm not a writer by trade, I shouldn't even bother to be my tone to this.

I may have a strong opinion on Oxford comma, but that's as far as I go, right? So I was like, I think that's good. I think you're right. You just kind of got play with it and kind of get yourself some experience under the belt. And that'll help you understand whether you even have a passion to do this or not, but you don't know if you have the passion, if you don't try.

I got one last question for you, Paul. I didn't prep you for this one. So I don't know if you have a point of view on this one, but you know, like there's a lot of AI tools out there right now, right? And whether it's chat GPT or whatnot, and I'm glad there's already intelligence around how people can sniff out AI written content.

Some of that is just pulled from plagiarized content as well. Do you, how do you use, or do you use like AI tools to augment your writing and maybe even refining headlines that are engaging? - Yeah, it's a great question. So first I'll say that you can't see these things as like, oh, I'm against it or anything like that.

Like you have to accept that, quite frankly, the challenge. That AI, I mean, you think about all the writers in the world and there's always gonna be new challenges and you need to figure out how to make it work for you or figure out ways that you can provide value and not be like, oh, nobody should use chat GPT to write or anything like that.

So I always try to do that, is like never see anything as a threat and instead more see it as like, this is just a push for me to get better. Now, as far as like, how do I actually use it? I don't use chat GPT. I actually did a post where I interviewed chat GPT.

- Oh, fascinating. - I will say a little bit, like there are tools that I use though. Like I use this tool called a headline analyzer, which I love. It's helped me really use better, write better headlines. You can Google it. I use SEO tools to like create outlines for me that helped me rank for SEO.

And we obviously use a lot of analytics to figure out what's resonating and what's not. I mean, there's, I like adding tools. Like if they're used correctly, they can be stronger. So I probably actually could do a better job of that 'cause I'm not like always on the, searching for new tools that kind of come to me.

But so NetNet, like don't see tools as a threat or it's taking your job or anything like that. Instead, like the reality is if it's gonna take your job, like you're not adding enough value in your job. You need to like figure out like how you can use the tool to become even more valuable.

And I could probably do a better job of that, but that's something I try to do often. - Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I think, yeah, there's definitely fear of AI, especially as it pertains to AI embedded into product and workflows that some people might feel intimidated.

I totally agree that you can totally leverage it to augment your work. So in a way that I used, like ChatGPT, for example, my previous job was in the area of research, right? It's like ChatGPT, it's just more efficient than using a broad Google search, right? 'Cause hey, look, I'm looking for topics that utilize these specific keywords 'cause SEO is a part of the game as well, right?

Like you have to have a strong point of view on what keywords you're trying to grow as a business. And that can help you at least brainstorm or at least get the process started. There'll be times where I even like wrote a headline that had zero SEO value. They were like, "Help me rewrite this using these keywords." And it'll spell some options.

You never use it right out of the box 'cause it's gotta be validated 'cause they don't know your business. But again, it was good to kind of use it as an ideation tool or I would like write like a 900 word article, let's say, where my team would. I'm not gonna take credit for that.

My writer would. And then they would say, "Help me rewrite this "utilizing these five keywords for SEO." And they'll spit something out. And then again, to your point, there's tools to evaluate the efficacy of that. But again, that's an example of just embracing it, right? And just using it as a supplementary tool.

Well, Paul, I just wanna thank you for this time. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you had a really strong points of view on how to be a good content marketer or even how to do the job. And so I wanna thank you for your time, man. - Yeah, it was awesome.

Anytime. - Yeah. Do you wanna share maybe your, how can people find your posts on LinkedIn? - Sure. So you should feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Paul Patron, who works at LinkedIn. And you can follow the LinkedIn sales blog, the number one blog on the internet for sales professionals.

- Awesome. And I'll put that link in the comments below. So yeah, feel free to check out Paul's content. It is a really good sample of a writing style. And so definitely take a look. There's a really good content there. Thanks again, Paul. I appreciate your time. - Cool, thanks too.

- Have a good one. - You too. you