Podcast

Peter Jacobs

Welcome to Lay of the Brand, where we talk with the experts on tech marketing, creative, and PR to learn what’s new, what’s working, and what’s next. I’m Peter Jacobs with Merritt Group. AI has made it easier than ever to generate content, and a lot of brands are publishing more and more, faster. And that’s a problem when you’re trying to produce thought leadership.

When AI puts out generic surface level content, it doesn’t build credibility and it doesn’t sound like an actual person. And it absolutely doesn’t deliver fresh ideas. So it’s not really thought leadership. It’s just more words.

So what can marketers do? Well, that’s why we’re talking with Raj Khera, CEO of Make Media, to talk about why thought leadership, especially AI-generated content, misses the mark way too often, and what trust and discoverability look like now, and especially how you can show up with ideas that actually break through. Raj, I’m so excited to talk to you about this.

Raj Khera 

Peter, pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Peter Jacobs 

Thought leadership is supposed to build authority, but a lot of it just doesn’t. Why do so many of these posts feel like generic marketing?

Raj Khera 

It’s like the Staples easy button because what we want to do is, there’s a whole slew of people who want to be able to produce content. They know they should be doing it because it works. And I’ve built several companies, I’ve sold them to public companies. And the way we grew them was through thought leadership. One of my companies, Mailer Mailer, it was an email marketing software company. We were getting about 13 to 1500 trial signups, not just visitors, trial signups every single month because of our thought leadership. There’s a few other things we did in marketing, but when you start producing really valuable content, it becomes a magnet for your business. So many people want to do it, but who’s got the time? A lot of people don’t enjoy writing and executives are busy. So what do they do? A lot of them are just turning to AI and they have ChatGPT or other tools create the content for them. And as a result, we get caught in this sea of sameness. The way you phrase things is exactly the way the AI tools phrase things, the thoughts that it carries with it is based on the training data. And you might be able to give it some guidance and maybe shape it a little bit. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t sound like you. It’s not expressing your real thoughts. Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to get around this and still leverage AI, but really be you authentically.

Peter Jacobs 

Thought leadership is supposed to be about influence, not just volume. And yet it seems like the goal is let me just get a lot of content out there. And that takes precedence over what you’re talking about, which is “say something useful.”

Raj Khera 

Yeah, right.

That’s exactly right. And that’s where you see a lot of people creating nonsense posts. If you look at the average blog from a company, you can just look at the quality of the blog, the depth. It doesn’t have a lot of depth there. The other thing is it’s short. It’s not structured. And so first, they’re missing the mark with SEO. And by the way, GEO has SEO as its roots. So you still have to get SEO right.

And then when you look at the rest of the content, you can tell that the executive team who ordered the content to be built just had a checkbox item. we need a blog, check, got a blog, done. And they don’t realize that that’s actually hurting their brand, not amplifying it.

Peter Jacobs 

The starting place should be, here’s why I want to publish something, not, I want to publish something, shouldn’t it?

Raj Khera

It should, and I think the best way to start is think about conversations that you’re having every single week. And that’s what I recommend as a way to amplify what you’re trying to say, what you need to be saying. So it really starts from a very well-developed plan. And agencies can certainly help with developing that plan. I think it’s one of the most important uses of human thought. And so what we’re trying to do at Make Media is we’re trying to help people use AI to help amplify that plan as well. I’m probably using the word amplify too many times, but that’s really what we’re doing

And so I think creating this document or the strategy that’s centered around your ICP, your ideal client profile. And then within that, if your ICP is a B2B company, you’ve got different personas. So you want to be talking to each different persona. Every persona goes through their own buyer journey, awareness, consideration, evaluation before they make a purchase. Then actually there’s a buyer, there’s a buyer journey after the purchase as well to retain them and upsell them. So the buyer journey is a very long thing and it’s unique to every persona. I’ll give you an example. If you sell cybersecurity services, you need to talk to the CTO very differently than you need to talk to a CFO. They’re going to be caring about ROI, the CTO is going to be caring about security, SOC 2 compliance. And so if your content tries to mash everything into one topic, you’re going to completely miss the mark because when you talk to everyone, you talk to no one.

And so designing a plan around all of those components takes a lot of time, takes a lot of thinking, definitely not a checkbox item.

Peter Jacobs 

Well, you’d think AI could solve for this. Why can’t AI make content that the search engines and the AI aspects of search find valuable?

Raj Khera 

You know, one of the things that I would liken this to is, say you stepped into an airplane cockpit and it had an autopilot button. You still can’t take off and land. You still need to know how to fly the plane. So the driver of the sports car, the pilot of the plane still needs to know what they’re doing. So AI is a tool set that can really help you get to where you want to be, but it’s not the…

like just the easy button. You don’t just click it and it does everything for you. There’s a lot of hype around this. There’s a lot of hype around vibe coding. And ⁓ you’ll find that there’s a lot of stuff that it lacks. I’ll give you an example of the vibe coding aspect of it. You know how if you had AI write content, we talked about it, it sounds the same? Vibe coding is the same way. If you create a, if you try to create a tool set, it’s all going to look the same. No new designs. It’s all going to have the same type of coding sets because it’s built on what it knows. And there are senior developers that will look at it say, my gosh, they’re completely missing all these gaps in the data architecture.

And so as a result, there’s this illusion that AI has completely taken over and we’re going to lose all these jobs. And it’s actually the ones who know what they’re doing are going to be in such demand because we need that human component.

Peter Jacobs 

Yeah, you mentioned to me before we started the show that you had found a way to see if your materials, because you’ve written so much over the years, ⁓ were part of AI training. And it was. So you would think then that you’d be able to sound like you if you asked AI to write something that sounds like me. And I have colleagues that use their own databases.

to help recreate or make new materials like proposals and reports, that sort of thing. So does that help?

Raj Khera 

Yeah. Well, there is some degree of being able to use actual data sets that you still have and use that to train the models on what you want immediately.

There’s another layer of this and that is the data sets that the AI was trained on ⁓ where it just that’s how it comes out of the box. So when ChatGPT came out, there was this ⁓ way you could figure out what data sets it used. And I found out

It was called like the big data set. I forgot the exact name of it. But I found out that thousands of my articles that I had written over the many years I’ve been in business ⁓ were part of that data set. So they just took my data and used it for training purposes. What they did with it, I don’t know. And granted, that’s a very microscopic portion of the data that they had. But if I searched for specific things in ChatGPT at the time, I looked at the results, I looked at the article that I had on the web, and it was almost identical, almost identical. And so that’s one of the big challenges that we face is, where’s all that data coming from? So when you start writing something using AI, it may not sound like you if you’ve got the data in the data set, but there’s this way to do it and it’s called MCP. And what you do is you actually put some of the examples that you have as sources that the AI should use as it starts to help you build out some of the content. And so to your point about the proposals,

Yes, if you have a whole bunch of sample proposals and you want to create more like that, AI will be able to emulate it because it knows that’s the set that you want to use. This is what you want it to look like, sound like, feel like. And then you can enter additional data and then it’ll give you something repeatable. This is very different than creating thought leadership content though. So there are use cases where it makes sense to use AI a little bit more fluidly and then other cases where you absolutely have to start with human thought.

Peter Jacobs 

There has to be something new. There has to be something useful. There has to be something that your audience hasn’t heard before so that there’s a new way of thinking about it. And you have to have the credibility and the authority to actually make that statement.

So, what happens when AI is involved in producing it? And I’m thinking of Google’s E-E-A-T standard.

Raj Khera 

Yeah, I heard that come right through when you were saying it. so experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So E-E-A-T stands for. And that really is still the gold

And a lot of people will say that that’s all you need to do. Like if you’re only focused on Google search results. But when you think about it, when you read, it’s like 150 page document, they really think through, are you qualified to be talking about what you’re saying? And that’s what these newer algorithms are starting to do.

I’ll give you another example. So about a year ago, LinkedIn changed their algorithm. People have been seeing it for about six to eight months now, but they actually changed it a little bit before that. It’s called uh 360 Brew. It took me a while to hunt this down. I found the actual paper that the engineering lab wrote that described how they think through the new applications. And to kind of summarize it for an executive, what it does is it looks at your background, your profile. So the profile part of your LinkedIn page, set up is extremely important because that gives a framework of this is who I am, this is my background, this is what I do, this is what I talk about. So then when you start posting about something completely different, there’s a mismatch. And so the algorithm says, well, this person really isn’t qualified to be talking about that topic. It may also go out to other places and find ⁓ things about you too, I don’t know. But when you start to align the things that you’re posting about, with what’s in your LinkedIn profile and the title, that starts to amplify it, it starts to really expand your reach.

And so that’s one way to start looking at it. A lot of algorithms are headed in that direction. Are you qualified to be talking about what you’re talking about?

Peter Jacobs 

Right. Which makes sense. It’s more difficult if you haven’t written a lot in the past, if you haven’t been that visible. Everybody wants to be a thought leader and everybody wants to contribute to the industry conversation and to connect with their audiences with something that that audience is going to find useful. So

Raj Khera 

Yeah.

Peter Jacobs 

Are we saying that credibility and experience can’t be automated?

Raj Khera 

I think we are. Let me shine a different light on this for a second. So pretend for a moment that we’re not working for the companies that we’re currently at. Maybe in 10 years we’re going to be somewhere else. If you’re not out there sharing how you think, not just like company posts, look what we did, look at this new feature we built, all those kind of things, that’s all fine and good. But if you’re not actually sharing how you think when you want to change jobs or if…

An example I use all the time is if you are over 50 and you lose your job It is going to be very hard. Age discrimination is real. We can say it’s not it is very real. And So you’re gonna have a hard time finding a job. Your resume will not save you. But your network might save you and if people know how you think and they’ve watched you think for years That shapes how you’re be able to land on your feet in the next part the next chapter of your life

And so I think we really need to look at the sharing of content, not just as this is what I’m going to do for my company right this minute. This is really something very personal and deep that you should think about in terms of your professional goals.

Peter Jacobs 

I’ve had a lot of discussions with people about personal brand and this absolutely is essential to it. If you’re not participating and I tell people start out by commenting on something that you saw but don’t just say yes I agree explain what you agree with and why you agree with it and then add a little bit more. That’s a good way to ease yourself in.

Raj Khera 

Yeah. And so I fully agree with that. The easiest way to get in is just to comment thoughtfully. A thoughtful comment is not, I agree, or great post. That’s not thoughtful. Comment on what you think of what someone said and comment respectfully and thoughtfully. I actually have talked to people who said, well, I’m afraid of people trolling me. I don’t want to get trolled. So I have a three step process that I use with trolls. So the first step is I block them. The second step is I go on with my life. And the third step is there’s actually no three steps. It’s just one step. And so that’s how I deal with it. And I remember one time I was posting some comment. I think it was posting something and someone saw the backdrop. So I’ve

Ansel Adams pictures in my backdrop and I’ve loved Ansel Adams since I was in high school. And so instead of commenting on the actual post,

He started complaining about the posters I have in the back. And I was like, what kind of comment was that? And I just ignored it. He did it again. And so at that point, I was like, life’s too short. Why deal with these people? I’m not going to engage. I just blocked him. That was it. Guy used to be someone in a community that I knew 20, 30 years ago. And I just blocked him. That’s how you deal with

Peter Jacobs 

Yeah, and that’s part of your personal brand also. It’s deciding who you want to engage with, how you want to engage, and then having a position and sticking with it, but also being open-minded enough to adapt as you learn new information.

Raj Khera 

Yeah. What I recommend for someone who wants to be more active, but doesn’t know exactly where to start. Certainly the comments, just going through your feed and maybe just posting a comment on people who you already know in your community, that’s a very safe, easy way. They’re not going to jump down your throat for whatever you’re saying. Now, the other part of this is everybody has conversations every week, customer conversations, vendor conversations, teammates.

It could be with your family. It could be professional development courses you’ve attended. Maybe you went to an event. There’s so much that happens in every week that we can talk about and just share. And so there’s one thing that many get confused by and that is, well, what’s the metric that I’m being successful? And they think that it’s the number of likes you get on your post. Well, it’s actually very easy to get a lot of likes. All you gotta do is when you’re at event, take a picture with someone, tag them in it. Everybody loves looking at pictures of people at events. They’ll always click like. You will get…

a lot of likes, more than your average post. What’s gonna make the phone ring? What’s gonna get somebody to say, I need to speak to this person, start a conversation? That’s when you start to get into deeper thought leadership posts. And it’s not just about the stuff that’s happening in your world right now, like new features or we’re launching a product or something. People really wanna see how you’re thinking through a problem. So I’ll give you an example of some of the content that’s worked well for me.

I started sharing how I’m building this new company, MakeMedia. And I didn’t just talk about, here’s the tool set we’re building, here’s the problem we’re solving, which is a pretty neat problem we’re solving. But I started talking about all the problems I was having building the company. And I made it into a weekly series I call Startup Diary. The number of comments, Peter, that I get on that, not online, in person.

I will go to networking events and I will get three or four people constantly picking up the conversation where my LinkedIn post left off. And it’s amazing. Those are the things that start conversations. That’s actually how we went from what I thought was going to be 30 beta users to 275 very quickly is because people saw how we were solving the problem, how we were thinking. And that really makes a big difference in your content. And we all have these things happening every single week. Just talk about it.

Peter Jacobs 

You just basically described what makes human thought leadership different from machine thought leadership. It’s the lived experience. And then you shared it like a person, like you would with somebody you’re face to face with, but you did it online. And that’s something that I haven’t seen AI be able to replicate yet, because it doesn’t have lived experience. It’s reacting. to other people’s lived experiences. So let’s start with the idea that you’re a CEO, you’re another C-suite leader, you’re an IT leader, you’re a sales leader, and you wanna start creating thought leadership content. What should you be thinking about?

Raj Khera 

Okay, so this is actually what MakeMedia is designed to do is to make this process very fast, very fast. And so I was thinking back, the reason, so I didn’t just like come up with this idea and built the product, which is the way a lot of people build products. I actually was looking back to what is the biggest problem that I had in building all my prior companies? And it was creating the content. I know it works, because we were getting lots of business by creating really useful content. And I would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year creating this content. And I would have teams, I’d have teams of writers, I’d have marketers. And what was happening was the executive team or the engineers actually had the expertise. So our writing team always had to interview the experts. And I noticed one thing: The way that you extract expertise isn’t just sitting down and looking at that blank page, which can make you freeze. It’s actually answering questions.

So when you ask someone to write something, you may be waiting six months, you may never get anything back. But if you are walking down the hallway and say, hey, let me ask you a quick question. And you just ask a question, they can answer, boom, just like that. Everybody can do this. And so that’s actually the unlock is when you’re looking to create deep thought leadership, start with questions. And so that’s actually the essence of what MakeMedia does is it looks at your background, looks at the audience you’re trying to reach, the personas that you want to reach, thinks about the questions they would have along their buyer journey and then creates prompts that address an executive’s ability to make all the dots connect in that deep experience they have so they can express in very succinct terms what’s going on. And we actually ask questions so that the only way to answer them is by telling stories. And that makes the post so engaging because they’re stories and they’re stories of lived experiences. And that’s very engaging. People love those. That starts conversations too.

Peter Jacobs

Right, my experience is the same as I interview executives, as I interview the business development leads, the technical leads. I’m not just asking for give me facts about what your thing does. Tell me stories about how it changed something for a customer, for a group of people, for society. Give me something tangible that people can connect to on a human level.

Raj Khera 

Yeah, so I’ll give you a few questions that your audience can use very quickly and get great content in minutes, really. Tell me about the last time. So ask one of your customers this question. Tell me about the last time you logged into our software, what were you looking to do? And then they’ll answer probably about your tool and then say, well, tell me what you’re looking to do that week. What were some of the other priorities you had? And so then you start to get a sense of your tool in the context of their daily lives, their weekly lives.

And that gives you so much more insight. then you can very quickly just talk about that. You know, anonymize the person, don’t say like the company name or anything like that. Don’t divulge confidential stuff. But you can talk about an example. And we used to do this so effectively at my other companies. I’m actually doing this quite effectively right now. I had one accountant use our tool and within the first post, which took him maybe 20 minutes to create, because there’s a little setup process for us to understand who you are. It generated a post, he put it on his LinkedIn.

And he got four times more than his highest ever performing post in the last 10 years. And it was because the post was so genuine and filled with examples from his past rooted in what he does and why he does it. It was so genuine, there’s no way AI could have made it. But what we did was we asked him very specific questions, learned about his background. And then we put that into a well formatted post that had an engaging hook that created a little bit of tension and curiosity and then information and then a closing that encouraged people to engage. And it sounded like him because we captured his voice. And that’s really how you start to do this. You don’t need an AI tool, by the way, to do any of this. You can take out your phone. And I just do this all the time. Just think about that question. Tell me about the last time you were looking to log in or something. And just answer it on your phone. Just look at it. And then I recommend just doing one take because what usually happens is you record something and say, I should have said this, should have said that, and your second, third, fourth, 20th takes are always the worst. The first one, almost always the best. And so just do it and just click post. And the fact that it won’t be polished will get you more traffic and more engagement than anything you could do that’s super polished.

Peter Jacobs 

Well, yeah, we both play music. We know what that first take is like versus the, let’s try it again, let’s try it again. And then you lose that spark. And that’s the thing that makes it human is that first burst of energy. There’s not just, I have knowledge and I have experience. There’s passion and excitement and the desire to get somebody else to feel as excited about it as you are.

Raj Khera 

Yeah, yeah. so there’s, I mean, every line of business can do this. If you’re targeting other professionals, every line of business can do this. And when you think about a coach, for example, a professional coach, they go through scenarios all the time. Like, how do you help ⁓ a brand new CEO ⁓ transition into their role when they’ve got to get rid of half of their executive leadership team? And what’s the first thing they should be doing? And an executive coach who’s seasoned

can actually answer this question and walk through how you would think about that situation. And when you post something like that in your raw, ⁓ in a raw video or maybe as a post, ⁓ the other executives who are out there, they will look at it. And the one phenomenon that everyone needs to know is that CEOs rarely engage with posts. And so there’s this illusion that, my post isn’t performing.

Executives read posts. They don’t always engage because they just sometimes don’t want to be seen as engaging on other posts. So instead what they can do is they can post themselves their own content. But when you start sharing how you think people see it.

Peter Jacobs 

And there’s also the influencer aspect of that. Even if the CEO isn’t engaging, someone in their orbit is going to see it as well, may engage, may go back to the CEO and say, hey, you know, this person told this story and it sounds a lot like our story.

Raj Khera

Peter, you touched on dark social and I love it because that is how stuff is happening. I mean I see it happening all the time. People talk about, hey, I read this on, they post in their Slack channel for their company. I just read this really interesting article. mean, there’s this group I’m part of in the DC area called Mindshare. I’m with like 1,300 CEOs, past

And someone was sharing an article to a group of 1,300 CEOs about some aspect of AI and there’s a discussion going on right now and it’s a very thoughtful discussion. And so does that author know that we’re talking about his article? No, we’re not. We’re not. 1,300 CEOs. So like that’s the kind of power like deep thought leadership content creates. So every executive sees trends in their industry and they can probably comment on those trends. And so do it.

That’s your thought leadership. And then every now and then I get some that I don’t have any time to do this, I need to hire an assistant to do this. Well, let me tell you, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other very large companies, Figma, are paying $200,000 to $700,000 a year for one person to follow the executive around, the CEO around and create content for the one person. And so…

If you’re not doing it, these AI companies are doing exactly that you need to really, I mean, use that as a model, right? 

Peter Jacobs 

Wow. Seriously. And can you think about, what is the result that they’re looking for from that? What did they think is the outcome of somebody producing content in that way?

Raj Khera

Yeah, they’re making more than most CMOs actually.

You know, it’s the human aspect of it. It’s showing what they’re doing as a company. It’s talking about ⁓ the influence that they’re trying to have on the world, the impact that they’re having on the world. Now, the type of content that you post as an executive will be different if you are, under $10 million in sales versus a company that’s over $10 million. So let’s say you’re a CEO of a company that’s below $10 million, maybe even below $5 million.

You want to actually start posting more educational information about how you solve certain problems, the benefits that some of your customers are seeing, things like that. A little bit more, I don’t want to go all the way and say instructional, but it will be a little bit more into the weeds. If you are running a company that’s over 10 million, definitely over 50 million, you need to be talking about trends that you’re seeing and the investments that you’re making as a company and why. And it’s a very different thought that goes into those kinds of topics than it does the more rudimentary, ⁓ you know, hey, here, look at what we’re doing. Here’s how you enhance your cybersecurity. Whereas this is, here’s where we’re seeing AI go with cybersecurity. And so it’s different type of topic based on the company size.

Peter Jacobs 

Yeah, for some people who haven’t really done much on the thought leadership side of things, getting over that initial hump is probably quite a barrier. Are people saying to themselves, why does somebody want to know what I think? Why does somebody want to hear from me?

Raj Khera

It’s more than that, Peter, it’s imposter syndrome. And I have talked to people running $200 million a year companies still feeling imposter syndrome. And you would think this person should not be feeling imposter syndrome at all, but it’s there. one of my best friends is an executive leadership coach and he coaches people who are running billion dollar companies. And he said, you would be shocked at how many have imposter syndrome, even at that level. And so, yeah, would anybody care what I think? Why should I be talking about this? You really need to be, you actually know way more than you know. And it’s funny, it’s at all levels. So, you know, my kids are in their early 20s and surprisingly, they know a lot about social media, right? Go figure. And they know stuff that people my age don’t know because they’re seeing the trends and we can actually learn a lot from them. Yet they’re like, but what?

This is just so obvious. is what all of us do. Everybody does this kind of stuff. Dad, know, and like, I’m like, you don’t realize how many people who are my age need to know what you know. And so just start talking about it. So any age you are, you can really be sharing stuff. And that’s actually the beauty of sharing your knowledge. We all have it. There is one thing you want to balance.

There’s one guy I remember seeing on LinkedIn and he looked like he was about two years out of college and he posted

His job title was LinkedIn algorithm expert. And you look at it you’re like, I’m sorry, you’ve instantly discredited yourself by saying that two years out of college, you’re a LinkedIn algorithm expert. mean, so, you know, don’t kind of go over the top. Start showing why are you a LinkedIn? Show me some stuff that proves to me that you really are. And then maybe we’ll have a conversation. But you know, that’s the one thing that you’ll see on social media.

A lot is people just claiming expertise that they don’t have.

Peter Jacobs 

I think that may be because of the democracy of social media where anybody can be anything because we all have the same ability to reach, even if we don’t actually have the reach yet.

Raj Khera

That’s right. the big line that a lot of these people use is the blank blank is dead. SEO is dead. Email marketing is dead. You know, everything is dead. for crying out loud, please. You know?

Peter Jacobs 

But remember content is king. We can’t forget that.

Raj Khera

That’s right. And you know, there’s a thing that this new 360 brew algorithm is doing on LinkedIn is it’s trying to ⁓ not promote generic content that is just so pervasive that only if you are a brand new fresh graduate out of college, you don’t know. And so that level of basic content is really getting deprecated. It’s looking for something that’s really talking about what’s going on in the industry. What kind of trends are you seeing? What are the use cases you’re seeing for vibe coding? I just posted about about how you build an interactive dynamic pricing table using Gemini in thinking mode to do vibe coding. And I explained the process that went behind it and in an hour built this really cool tool. And so, which used to require an engineering team to actually create. Now that’s kind of interesting because it shows how to do something, it shows how you think through it. And it was not, Gemini, make a pricing table for me.

It’s not like that. It took an hour to go through the thinking of what should this pricing table include based on the audience I’m trying to reach? What are ways that they need to get the information that will help influence a decision, make it faster? And so you have to have that discussion first. And the only way to do that is if you have some sort of critical thinking skills, which takes schooling to learn, and then you apply that. That’s the best way to use it. Yeah.

Peter Jacobs 

Well, you have an advantage having a technical background, so you are already thinking in those terms, but business leaders without that technical background also have that skill set. They solve problems. That’s their job.

Raj Khera

You know, and I tell you where I learned. So I do have graduate degrees in engineering. I did my thesis was on AI applied to semiconductors many, many years ago. But I will tell you, my high school English teacher is probably the one who taught me the most critical thinking. I had two great teachers, 11th grade, 12th grade. And they taught me how to think through an analysis of is what really developed a lot of my skills.

So even if you don’t have the pedigree from a Ivy League college or something, you probably have critical thinking skills, which maybe you kind of buried. I mean, they teach this in high school. So I don’t think it’s a big leap for us to start applying it. ⁓ You can reinvent the impression that you have of your own abilities and ⁓ start to look back and think about, well, how did I get an A on that paper? What did I do differently? And just… It was critical thinking because that’s what they test for and apply that to AI. It’s the same thing.

Peter Jacobs 

What is one thing executives should stop doing immediately when it comes to creating thought leadership? And then I want to ask you, what’s the one thing they should start doing?

Raj Khera 

Well, I think they should stop being afraid of posting on LinkedIn and stop being afraid of actually extrapolating their posts into deeper thought leadership articles. Now, I think that it’s not a question of quantity, it is a question of quality, but there is a quantity component to it. If you’re publishing once every three to four months, that’s not gonna do much for you. I mean, you’ll have stuff that’s out there, but it’s not gonna move the needle in the way that you want.

The way you create that depth, that EEAT that we talked about, are you an authority to be talking about something? Is you keep posting about it. And so that doesn’t mean you have to do it every day, but I would strongly recommend be active on LinkedIn minimum once a week. Twice a week is really ideal. Three times a week’s best, four times a week’s even better. Okay. So that means that you really do have to start having something to say and just think back to the last conversation you had, whoever that was with in your career.

And what did you learn? What did they learn? Just talk about it. And that’s it. There’s so many people that want to be a fly on the wall in that conversation, and they can learn from

So we all have something to say. And you can record it on a video and just post that and just see the reaction. So that’s the best way to get started with it. But I think in terms of the fear, you got to stop that. You got to get past that fear. It’s like jumping into the deep end for the first time. It’s not that bad.

Peter Jacobs 

It’s like so much in life. The first thing is, get out of your own way.

Raj Khera 

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And then to your other question, which is what should you start doing? So one is start to get more start to create more content, and deep, rich thought leadership content, everybody, like I said, everybody has. And the way you unlock it is through

The other part of this is when you’re posting content, not on LinkedIn, but on your website or other places, make sure it is structured properly for basic SEO. And so what that includes is the main theme that you want to talk about. ⁓ We’ll call them key phrases for right now, but that should be inside your title, inside heading tags, inside the body with a certain degree of frequency. You should have images also that help enhance the visual appeal because when people are reading,

They don’t want to read a big, huge block of text like they’re reading some kind of research paper. They want to be able to see something that’s a little bit more engaging, section headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, tables, images, all that makes for visual appeal. Google takes a look at that. Now, to expand this into AI, SEO, GEO, there’s a couple of things that it’s really pursuing. And that is tight information that match someone’s intended search.

So the way people who are brand new to AI do searches is exactly the way they use Google. And it’s one liner. But that only lasts for like a short period of time until they realize, hey, I can actually ask it deeper stuff. Like I run an accounting company that’s got 25 employees. We’re located in the Washington DC area. We’re about to expand by adding four more new accountants next year. And I need to make sure that I’ve got the CRM system that’s going to be able to manage my accountants and the tools that we have paragraph long prompt, what are the best tools for me?

And so now, if you have content about a CRM for accountants and for small accounting companies and you explain use case, that content actually it’s much higher likelihood of getting found for that specific prompt. So now you think about this, you’re like, wait a minute Raj, does that mean I need to create content for every single use case, every single persona? Yes, you do.

And that’s the thing, that’s the content explosion. And this is such an advantage because when people realize, my gosh, there’s a mountain of content that I should be creating, they freeze, they stop, they don’t do it. It creates a massive opportunity for people who are like, all right, let’s go, let’s do it. Because they will get found.

Peter Jacobs 

I have been talking with Raj Khera, who’s the CEO of MakeMedia and has launched and sold more companies than I can think of. Raj, this has been such a great conversation. It’s everything I hoped it would be.

Raj Khera

Thank you.

Peter Jacobs 

And thank you for joining us. Lay of the Brand is brought to you by Merritt Group, an integrated strategic communications firm that blends the best of PR, marketing, and creative to help our clients tell their stories and build business. Got a topic suggestion or want to share feedback? Subscribe to Lay of the Brand on your preferred podcast platform and leave us a review. And please spread the word and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in as well. To learn more about Merritt Group and the show, check out layofthebrand.com.