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My first LinkedIn talk, part 2: The content

By Amy Hoy —
My first LinkedIn talk, part 2: The content

Last time I wrote about the framework for my first LinkedIn talk:

  1. Proper introduction of me & who I am/why I'm giving this talk, what Noko is
  2. Business advice HEAVILY BLENDED WITH where did Noko come from, what Noko is, where it’s going, WHY, etc.
  3. Open for collaboration, want to talk to you and connect with more agency owners and others, here’s my email address / calendly, let’s chat (about whatever)

But that's not an actual outline… it doesn't tell me what I'm going to actually say.

I was having a hard time deciding what exactly to talk about, so I did what any expert in mental aikido does: brain dump.

Oh, you can't find a pattern? You can't come up with a coherent narrative? THEN DON'T. Yeah, bitch! Spill it all! Make a mess!

Normally I'd do this on paper (because I love crossing shit out and drawing lots of lines between different points) but first I'd have to go find paper and frankly my ankle hurts and somebody moved my clipboard and I'm not in the mood.

So instead, I popped into Miro, started a mind map, and shook my brain to see what fell out.

It started off messy like this:

a mindmap titled Profitable Clients, with sections for "Investing," "more money, less work," "strategies to bill for un-billable time," and "expansion revenue"

Then the more I dumped into it, the more I could really see the true shape the information wanted to be in.

So I reorg'd it:

Mindmap titled Profit. Sections are: Save, charge, track, grow, double dip.

And actually this is a doubly cleaned up version—a lot of the nodes above had a third layer but it was getting way too big to put on, e.g., one slide, so I broke 'em out into separate pages:

storyboard layout with 6 pages in one grid

I like doing it this way because it's great to work in this storyboard-type format; that's how I outline talks on paper, too. I love a bird's eye view. Again, this is something that gives you the big picture, the shape of the content, and in the case of a presentation, story beats. (Not that there are story beats yet! These aren't slides!)  

I'm going to further refine the structure here into something pithy like "3 Levers and 4 Tools for X" and come up with some catchy rules/slogans. And obviously I've got to work in the About Me and About Noko stuff, and screenshots, yadda yadda.

And now that I'm looking at it, "Track" doesn't fit in here… it's more of a HOW that enables all those other things. (An important HOW, seeing as the thing I'm selling is a time trackign tool.)

That's why it's so good to do it this way, to dump it all out and then sort through it and make meaning.

This was the hard part, and it's done! Ish!

Enough to be smooth (ish!) sailing from here on out.

I'll report in again once I'm closer to done.