Published Wednesday, 4 November 2026 | By Noleen Thompson, Managing Director and Founder, LadyBugz Marketing
The LadyBugz Academy coaches you to write your own LinkedIn posts and profile better. Here is what your first month looks like, and why our coaches will never write it for you.
Key Insights
- You write, the coach helps you make it better. The AI coaches in the LadyBugz Academy never write your posts for you. Your first two coaches are the Personal Brand Copywriter and the Content Performance Coach: write a post, see why it scored what it did, then rework it in your own words.
- Your R95 scan comes before the coaching. The AI visibility scan costs R95 once off and takes a few minutes. It checks whether three AI chat tools, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, find your LinkedIn profile, name you in your field and describe you correctly.
- There are two plans. The Academy plan costs R299 a month and the Growth plan R899 a month, with a yearly option on each. Your R95 counts towards your first month if you join within 30 days.
- Copied answers do not sound like you. In my experience, a borrowed About section (the summary paragraph near the top of your LinkedIn profile) reads like many others, so people and AI tools have little to tell you apart by.
- Working it out yourself sticks. Research going back to Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf in 1978 found that people remember what they produce themselves better than what they only read.
- Found is not the same as named. An AI tool can find your LinkedIn profile when given your name. It can still leave you out when a stranger asks who the people to know are in your field.
What does the LadyBugz Academy do for you?
The LadyBugz Academy, which you will find at ladybugz.academy, coaches you to write your own LinkedIn posts and profile better, so you get better at showing up as a leader in your field. Lots of people now let an AI tool write their posts. I understand the appeal. Our coaches score your work and hand it straight back to you.
The first two coaches you will meet are the Personal Brand Copywriter and the Content Performance Coach. You write a post and give it to the coach. It scores the post, shows you exactly why each mark was given and asks you what is missing. Then you rework it yourself. That is one coaching round, and you get 100 of them a month on either plan.
The other four coaches are the LinkedIn Profile Optimiser, the Story-Selling Profile Builder, Comment Catalyst and Audience Compass. They follow the same rule. Together, the six cover your profile, your posts and your comments.
Why posts first? Posts are where people watch you think, week after week. On LinkedIn, that is how you win business.
Why does it start with an R95 scan?
The AI visibility scan is the first step because it shows you where you stand with AI tools before you write a word, and it tells you what to work on first. It costs R95 once off and takes a few minutes. You give us your LinkedIn profile and a line on what you do. Then we ask three AI chat tools, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, two questions and check three things.
- Can they find you? We ask each one for your LinkedIn profile and check the answer against your actual link, so a namesake in another city does not count.
- Do they name you? We ask who the people to know are in your field and your area, without mentioning you, the way a stranger would ask.
- Do they get you right? When they do mention you, we check whether what they say is correct.
What comes back is one overall score, a scorecard area by area, and your next steps, with the most important one first. It is saved in your Academy login, so you can reopen it.
If you work for a company, in sales or anywhere outside marketing, the score is about you only. Your employer’s website and company page are not part of it.
All of this falls under AEO, short for Answer Engine Optimisation. It is the work of making sure AI tools can find you and put your name forward. New to the term? Start with what AEO is and why people now look you up with AI. To try a rough version by hand first, checking what AI says about you takes about twenty minutes.
What do you get when you join a plan?
Joining a LadyBugz Academy plan gives you all six coaches, the lessons and a regular re-check of your score.
Academy: R299 a month, or R3,289 if you pay for the year, which covers 12 months for the cost of 11
- Your AI visibility score, shown as My AI Score, checked once a month on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
- The six AI coaches, with 100 coaching rounds a month
- The lessons, and up to five content ideas a month, each a topic to post about with a short brief to write from
- 150 credits a month. Credits are spent each time the Academy asks an AI tool something for you, such as a tracking check. Each answer uses one or two, and you see the cost before you spend. Coaching rounds past your 100 use credits too
- Email support, and one LinkedIn Profile Assessment per account, a review of your profile with a personal action plan
Growth: R899 a month, or R9,889 if you pay for the year
- Everything in the Academy plan
- Your score checked every week in the country you mainly work in
- A second country tracked next to your main one, which helps if you work across borders
- Up to 12 content ideas a month, and 460 credits
- A live group coaching hour every month with me and Mpho Mogorosi. Send your questions in beforehand and we work through them, along with what has changed. Miss it and you can watch the recording
If you join within 30 days of your scan, your R95 comes off your first month. You can compare the two plans side by side on the Academy home page. A plan gives you a sharper picture of where you stand and a lot more coaching. What it cannot do is lift the score itself.
If you would rather work one to one with a person, we offer that too, through our LinkedIn coaching services.
What does your first month look like?
Your first month in the Academy is mostly writing, which may surprise you in an AI product.
- Week one. You open your scan and start on the top item. Say it points at your About section. That gap opens the lesson or the coach for it, and you write a version. Write your first post that week too, and take it to the Personal Brand Copywriter or the Content Performance Coach. Both drafts will probably be a bit stiff. Everyone’s first one is.
- Your first coaching round. The coach scores your draft and asks you questions. What do people actually come to you for? Who was the last person you helped, and with what? Then it hands the draft back. You go again, and the second version tends to be better, because you had to answer those questions yourself.
- Your first re-check. Your score is checked again after a week on Growth, or about a month in on the Academy plan, and any movement shows on your dashboard, the page you land on when you sign in.
Please do not expect fireworks at that first re-check. The score usually moves slowly. AI tools give different answers on different days even when you have changed nothing, and your score can shift without you lifting a finger, up or down. Watch the direction over a few months, not one reading.
Why won’t the coach just write it for me?
The coaches do not write for you because a borrowed answer does not sound like you, and sounding like you is the point. The story behind that rule is in why we built the Academy. This is the bit after it: what happens once you paste in a borrowed paragraph.
In my experience, people and AI tools piece together who you are in a similar way. They match what you say in one place against what you say in another. Your headline, your About section, your posts, the comments you leave, the way you talk on a call. When those line up, a clear picture forms. A copied About section breaks the line. It reads like every other About section written from the same request typed into an AI tool, so there is nothing in it that belongs to you and nothing to separate you from the next person.
Then somebody meets you. They have read “strategic, results-driven storyteller” on your profile, and over coffee they ask a simple follow-up. Tell me about a story you told that worked. If those words were never yours, that is the moment it falls apart.
My view, after being on LinkedIn since 2009 and now watching the AI tools, is that they reward a recognisable personal voice that stays consistent over time. Being able to say clearly, in your own words, what you do and who you do it for carries over to whatever the platforms change next. And it gets easier. The third time you write a headline, you need the coach less.
There is even a name now for posts a machine wrote: AI slop. LinkedIn has started letting people flag them, and I wrote about what that means in what LinkedIn’s new AI slop button means for your content strategy.
Why does working it out yourself make it stick?
Working out an answer yourself makes it stick. The effort is part of how memory works. The psychologists Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf described the generation effect in 1978, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: people remembered words they had produced themselves better than words they had simply read. Their studies used word lists, not LinkedIn profiles, so I will not stretch it. The effect has held up across decades of studies, though, and a 2007 review of 86 of them by Bertsch and colleagues in Memory and Cognition confirmed it.
Robert Bjork named the other half in 1994: “desirable difficulties”. Making learning a little harder, say by having to work the answer out instead of being handed it, feels slower at the time. It also makes the learning last.
That is our coaching in two research findings. The round where you rewrite your headline for the third time feels slow. It is also the round you remember next time you write one, on your own, without us.
What is the difference between being found and being named by AI?
Being found means an AI tool can locate you when it is handed your name. Being named means it thinks of you when nobody has mentioned you at all, and that second one is what a stranger sees. The gap between the two is where a lot of the real work sits.
I have not seen a template close that gap. What helps is the AI tools seeing, in your own words and in lots of places, what you are the person for. Only you can tell them that, which is why the coaches keep handing your writing back to you.
Being found comes first, and it starts with your profile. Our guide to LinkedIn SEO (search engine optimisation, making your profile easy for search tools to find) covers the parts of it that LinkedIn, Google and AI tools all read.
If you are wondering whether any of this is worth R95, do the scan first and decide afterwards. Read the next steps slowly. If they make sense, join and write your first post with the coaches. If they don’t, ask us. Either way you will know where you stand with AI, which is more than you knew this morning.
Get your AI visibility scan, R95
Rather talk it through first? Email hello@ladybugz.academy
Noleen Thompson, Managing Director and Founder, LadyBugz Marketing
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