Sam Browne: Look to the really successful creators. They just do this all day long. Every single post will start with a very considered hook. Nobody who's really successful on LinkedIn just kind of starts writing the content and hits publish. I literally think of it as two separate things. There's the post and there's the hook.

And you can torch great content just by not giving it the attention it deserves.

Chris Do:

Sam I want to go where there's smoke and there's a lot of smoke around Linkedin right now And you've had an incredible journey of trying lots of different businesses. We'll get into that. But I see on your LinkedIn profile, you were able to grow 50,000 followers in one year. That's an enviable result. That's something that everybody that I know who was on LinkedIn would love to have. So tell us a little bit about who you are in case people don't know you a little bit of your backstory, and then I'll follow up with that exact question.

Sam Browne: I am Sam Browne. I am an entrepreneur based in Auckland, New Zealand. Prior to LinkedIn, I had been building online businesses for 15 years, starting with a music agency, and then I did a wedding marketplace, a venue marketplace, some other bits and pieces, but I'd always had this desire to share my story. Well, not so much share my story, but share the lessons I'd learned from being an entrepreneur with up and coming entrepreneurs, and even those who were thinking of taking the leap into it. And so I started writing on LinkedIn in January 2022. After many false starts, I tried to get a entrepreneur podcast going and a blog and stuff, and probably did like three episodes and four blog posts that never saw the light of day. And then it just stuck with LinkedIn. And I, I started posting and I kept posting and here we are.

Chris Do: There are a lot of people who post and keep posting, but they don't have nearly the kind of results that you have. And I want to tease our audience a little bit. So if you are interested in growing on a platform like LinkedIn, but I'm sure that the principles that you're going to share with us are broadly applicable to most platforms.

But I just want to identify something here because I'm looking at your timeline. Thanks for putting that together for me. You've done a lot of things. You're what we would consider a serial entrepreneur. You tried many different things and ultimately you landed this place where you found a couple businesses that work for you.

But then you find this other success on LinkedIn and I think that's really cool. And just for people who don't know, like you have a background in music and you're part of a band and you've written a number one charting song in the, is it the New Zealand market?

Sam Browne: In the New Zealand rock market. So it's a small market within a small market. You know, I wasn't, uh, I wasn't touring with the Rolling Stones, but I had some success. Yeah.

Chris Do: Yes. And are you the lead singer or what role do you play in the band?

Sam Browne: Yep. I was the singer, the guitar player, and I wrote all the songs.

Chris Do: Wonderful. I did listen to that really well produced video. So kudos to you. And before we get into the LinkedIn part, you also mentioned about going back and working on your website, Findaband and producing like really high quality videos. And you're seeing like the success, I think you attribute to those videos, right?

Sam Browne: Yeah, that's right. That was a total game changer where I kind of, it's so obvious now, right? That we all know that video is the answer. And I had a very visual product to sell. So, um, so Findaband is a live music agency, we book live bands for events. And, you know, we have like a hundred bands through New Zealand that we work with about 20 DJs. And up until I made videos with the bands, that sort of coincided with the rise of the smartphone.

But the way we used to do it was people would have a pretty rough audio recording from like playing in a bar or something and some crappy photos that maybe somebody's mom took at a gig or whatever. It was terrible. And eventually I guess I thought, I think somebody else had made some videos and I noticed they were getting all of the gigs.

I thought, okay, we should start making videos for the artists at our expense. Because if it works, we'll easily cover the cost of this. And that's exactly what happened. So I really just doubled and tripled down on that in the 10 years from that point. And the revenue just skyrocketed as a result.

Chris Do: So are you saying that crappy quality photos and videos for a rock band don't exactly inspire someone to book the band?

Sam Browne: Correct.

Chris Do: Is that what you're saying?

Sam Browne: Who would have thought? Who would have thought? But that's, uh, that's what happened. And I mean, When I started Findaband, you know, that was my first online business and it was a different time to now. It wasn't like now where you had your Squarespace, Wix, Webflow. There was WordPress, but everything was hard and things weren't like now where you can go on YouTube and get really high quality education in any topic.

So I was really flying blind combined with a lack of experience. I'd only been working for other people for a handful of years. So I really learned everything from absolute zero. And as a result, you know, the first version of the website is truly terrible. I sometimes show it on Linkedin just for people to go. That's what day one looks like. So we're on about iteration four now and soon to be five and you know the revenue has sort of reflected my journey as an entrepreneur learning how to make things better

Chris Do: I think you you shared with me in the document that business for live music. It's never been better. It's like post pandemic. Things are going great, right?

Sam Browne: Yeah, we had two incredibly bad years as you can imagine. It's quite hard to book a live band and lockdown But then surprisingly, yeah, we had a a sort of overnight recovery after two years of like wondering if people would ever be able to book bands again. Uh, it was like right back where we had started from.

Chris Do: Okay. And that's, I guess it's surprisingly or unsurprising that the years in the, during the pandemic were brutal to you guys in the live event space. But I thought that New Zealand had this really great lockdown on an island and you're pretty self contained and the, the rate of COVID spreading was very, very low. So even then you weren't able to go out and perform. Was that a problem?

Sam Browne: Yeah, you're right. New Zealand did have a very good experience of COVID relative to most other places. We had the benefit of isolation as an island nation, and then also the benefit of kind of seeing what was happening a month before it happened to us.

We had a prime minister at the time who was willing to make hard choices and, you know, locked down before it was strictly necessary. And as a result, we had far fewer infections, far fewer fatalities. But the criticism she got, which personally I think was unfounded, was that she was almost overzealous about it, that she was so aggressively locking down cities and sometimes the whole country that it was economically damaging. So that was the trade off really. More of us lived, but we didn't make any money.

Chris Do: Last question about COVID. Was it a good decision in your, in hindsight? What do you think?

Sam Browne: Yeah, I think it was, I think, honestly, she was damned either way. And it was, it's like, I think any politician was under tremendous pressure to make the right move over and over again, literally life and death decisions. And obviously different leaders around the world went from very cavalier, which would usually be disastrous to New Zealand was probably the opposite extreme of being very aggressive with trying to contain it. And I think she made the best decision by far with the information she had. Yeah.

Chris Do: We have so many people who are very interested in this. And how do you grow an audience? What did you discover in your journey in creating content in early 2022 that you have been able to figure out is if you do these things, you have a higher probability of growing. What have you learned in that journey?

Sam Browne: The first thing that springs to mind for me is social media, including LinkedIn is entertainment for people who are on that social media. So we understand that when we think of an Instagram or a YouTube that you go there to, in many cases, you go there to kind of be entertained. You might have 10 minutes while you're, you know, waiting for the bus or something. This is if you're a consumer of the content, it's different for a creator.

But, and I think people think of LinkedIn differently, like it's business. So it's this whole other thing, but increasingly, I think that's not the case. I think that obviously it is about business, but the big winners on LinkedIn, no matter what they're doing, whether they're educating or sharing personal content or whatever the case, they are providing something that is actually fun to interact with.

So whenever I create a piece of content, I'm thinking I need to give my audience a quick win. So a really good example of this is the Twitter post screenshot style posts that have become quite popular where I think of it as having two levels. So an example of this might be, I just did one actually, where I said something like, if you believe you can, you can, and if you believe you can't, you can't, we get to decide our outcomes with mindset.

And that's it. That's all that the image says. So I wrote that text on the image and it's got my name and my photo, like a Twitter screenshot and nothing else. So it's, there's not a lot of noise graphically there. And then behind that, if you like, there's like a much longer post about my story of how my band was able to travel to Nashville, record an album with this world renowned producer.

And it all kind of started with me writing the word Nashville on a whiteboard. And honestly, I'm like very cynical about these sorts of things, but that's the truth of what happened. We decided we were going to go to Nashville and then weeks and months later, we found ourselves there and a handful of things kind of happened that led us there.

And that is something that you can engineer. So the point is there's like a very short version of the post where you get, you don't get the deep story. You just get this thing that as a casual observer, scrolling LinkedIn, you go, oh yeah, I agree with that. And you maybe don't even read the post, but you've amplified the post so that more people have the opportunity to engage with the longer story. That would be one thing. Always think about, you know, what the audience You want to give them that win.

Chris Do: If you're listening to this on the podcast and you're not looking at it, you're like, what is he talking about? In its lowest form, you literally go on Twitter and you make your thing full screen and you screen capture that with your phone and then you crop it.

And you use that as a way to lead people in. So it's text based, it's very low hanging fruit. But for whatever reason, it's super engaging. And I think that's what we my theory, and I'd love to get your perspective on this, is because it kind of looks like very real and raw and not overworked, and so there's an immediacy to it, a lack of refinement or overthinking, but you get the headline or the juicy, like, here's the knowledge bomb or the gem, and if you want, you can read the rest of the post.

Now, a lot of you are probably thinking, well, if they don't read the post, like, why is that effective? Well, there's this thing called dwell time, apparently, where when somebody slows down on the feed and looks at your thing, the computer, the algorithm is noticing this. And so even though they don't twirl down and read more, you're good to go there, as long as they stay there for a little bit and they can read that.

And if they're running to a meeting, they have 30 seconds, that's a great way to deliver value really quickly, very efficiently. What's your take as to why that thing works? Because I've noticed it as well, and I've used it myself.

Sam Browne: It's something I think you just started to touch on is it's low cognitive load. It doesn't demand the reader do any thinking. So the more you can remove the need to think and figure out, and it's not about dumbing down your content exactly. It's just about making it the most accessible it can possibly be. And this shows up in many different ways, but that's a very black and white example of it where you read like one sentence or one phrase and in many cases, it might not even be so much of a knowledge bomb as yeah, I really agree with that like, so they hit like, and the reason why that's valuable is for the creator is although that person didn't read the whole thing, they are amplifying the content to a much wider audience.

So if you get, say, 500 likes, you're going to get a percentage of your audience who wouldn't have seen it, will see it as a result of LinkedIn saying, well, 500 people like this thing. It must be good. We're going to show more of the audience this post.

Chris Do: Well, and before we move on to maybe tip number two, and I'll be cataloging these as we go, he mentioned something about like, uh, I'm not sure if I believe in it, but it must be true. Manifestation. We're getting a little woo here. We're going to meander, guys, just hang in there with me. So the way you said it is kind of like how I feel about it, which is like, I don't think this is true, but let me just do it. And it's a weird thing. When things work out, you're like, did I manifest this into becoming a reality? What's your take on that?

Sam Browne: Yeah, I think it's being dressed up as this magical, you know, mystical, go in a cave and spin around three times thing. But it's that, what's it called, reticular activation system. It's exactly like when you want to buy a new car. And all of a sudden you see that car all over the motorway, all over the freeway that you, your brain just filters for it, right?

That all of a sudden your brain, if let's say you want to buy an electric mini hatchback, but as soon as you start thinking about that, you're seeing these minis every, that one's parked there. And there's one at your local coffee shop. They were always there, but now you're filtering for it. I think that's what it is.

And I think that's what happened to me with that example is you start filtering opportunities. You discard everything that does not move you towards that opportunity and you sort of embrace everything that moves you towards it.

Chris Do: The way you answer that tells me you may or may not buy into this whole infinite parallel universes into the quantum entanglement theories. Are you into that at all? Because my wife's deep into that.

Sam Browne: It sounds like Rick and Morty, which I'm very into. So I'll say yes, mostly.

Chris Do: I'm going to butcher it, so those of you that are deep in the woo, let me know in the comments how I've screwed this part up, okay, but I was just explaining that there are an infinite number of versions of us living, right, and how we shape our mind allows us to move from this earth to a different earth, and so if you're sitting there thinking about Nashville, you've activated that connection, that bridge from you, from this plane of existence to a different plane, and then you're able to make that happen.

Now, unlike in your example with the Mini Cooper, which is like, okay, I think I need to buy a Mini Cooper, so then you reduce the scope of interest, your focus is like, okay, now I see Mini Coopers everywhere. But unlike that, with the Nashville example, it's not like, now I only see Nashville, you can't see Nashville.

But what I think you're doing, in a less scientific explanation, is you're saying to yourself, wouldn't it be cool if this happened? And then you allow your subconscious to help you now. So it's not magical in my opinion. You're like, okay, what has to happen for us to be in Nashville? Who do we know in Nashville?

And days, weeks later, an answer may appear to you out of the blue. When you're not even working on it because you've activated your subconscious. So part of us with, uh, us achieving our goals is the first articulated, just put it out into the wild. I want this. And then hold it such that your archival brain can start to deconstruct it for you. Or maybe you believe in the multiple parallel planes that we live on. Who knows?

Sam Browne: Yeah. All of the above. Love it.

Chris Do: That's a perfect response. That's fine. Okay. Before we get into Wooverse, let's go to tip number two.

Sam Browne: A really useful thing to do, which I have to say too, I've done a really bad job of this myself, but it's a good thing to do is to decide to be the insert thing guy or the insert thing girl. So for example, if you are the landing page girl, and what you do is you write about landing pages and how to optimize landing pages and how to get more conversions and why that's worth doing and how much money you'll save. You want to find a niche where you can feel good about writing about it a hundred times a year and really kind of own it. And the more niche you go, obviously the fewer people that will apply to, but the people that does apply to will really love it and embrace it. So I'm thinking there's a guy, Anthony Pieri, who has done this with a company called Fletch and they just do landing page optimization for enterprises and he has done so well with that.

He just stays right in his lane, just stays focused on that niche and he's great. I mean, that's the other thing. He really knows his stuff and as a result, he's got this thriving audience and a thriving business off the back of it. I have been pretty broad with my content around. Here's all my stories and lessons from 15 years as a serial entrepreneur and as time has gone on, I've, I've thought more and more about, okay, what do I want to be the guy of? And what can I discard? What can I feel okay about maybe not writing about so much?

Chris Do: What you say makes a lot of sense but it's so difficult for people to decide what lane they want to be in. They're like, kind of in my mind, figuratively zipping across seven lanes on the freeway. It's like, now I own all these lanes. And it's like, it's kind of hard to do that. So what you're talking about is picking a lane, developing your niche expertise and then creating content around that. How can you help people who are just still stuck in that? Well, I want to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that and all these things all together. What do you say to those people?

Sam Browne: That's okay. I have that happen a lot with my clients. I help entrepreneurs to grow on LinkedIn and so often somebody who was entrepreneurial will be good at like, you know, we have seven things that they love, always have very varied interests, varied hobbies and skills.

And I mean, the easy answer, I guess, and the way that it has been for me is, okay, well, just try them all and kind of see what sticks, see what gets a good response, see what you enjoy. And just kind of try and keep it in the back of your mind that ultimately you are trying to decide on the lane you're going to pick. Let's say you're in five different lanes right now. That's day one, see if you can get it down to three and then see if you can get it down to one and it's definitely like a powerful hack for success when we think of Cody Sanchez with the boring businesses, you know, when we think of Ryan Holiday with stoicism, James Clear with atomic habits or habits in general, it makes your career as a creator a lot simpler to simply be the insert niche guy, insert niche girl, you know, with your audience of designers, obviously designers, it's this huge topic. If you can drill down on the aspect of design that you love, whether that is brand design or UX or just apps, you know, like it just makes everything easier.

And from a business point of view too, like we all know of businesses like, uh, agencies where they say, Oh, we do AdWords and we do SEO and we can do brand and we can do your website. And we all know the quality of the work if we've been around those sort of businesses, it all is very poor. They simply can't be great at all those things.

Chris Do: Yeah, you're preaching to the choir here, and I tell people, I'm 52 years old now, when I'm 89, people are still going to ask me the question, should I niche or should I be a generalist? And it'll be done to the end of time. You're approaching this in a much more kind and gentler way than I would. My response to people who ask that question is like, hey, if it works for you, just keep doing it. But if it's not working for you, you might want to try something different. And you have to decide when that day is, and if not, just keep doing what you're doing.

Sam Browne: Yep.

Chris Do: Okay, excellent. What my friend Joel Pilger would say, you go from being "a" to "the". So it's that transition from being a designer to the designer. So the more niched or nuanced you can make that, the easier it is for you to claim expertise, and you have actually less competition.

Sam Browne: Yeah. I would even take it further where you, I mean, this, this applies to creators specifically rather than just niche business owners. Eventually you can become a category of one where people go, I've got this design project and I've been following Chris for five years and I only want to work with Chris and that's it. I'm not like comparing Chris's prices or what his proposal looks like and making my decision. Basically, if I can afford it, if I can possibly find the money, I'm going to work with Chris and I think that's the ultimate goal for creators who are also entrepreneurs.

Chris Do: What might tip number three be?

Sam Browne: You want to look at what the people who are already having success are doing. And you want to do that. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel in any category on LinkedIn. There are going to be players who are, or creators who are very successful, no matter how niche your niche is. You can find those people. And you can look through all of their content and you can see how it performed. You can see how many likes they got, how many comments they got. And you know, they'll have some smash hit posts that will have done very well. And then they'll have others that haven't done very well at all and everything in between. And that is very educational and can save you a lot of time and pain.

So I guess with every platform, there are superstars that have in the case of LinkedIn, not many people have more than like a million followers. It's sort of unusual that way, but anybody that's got a hundred thousand plus has got a fair knowledge of what they're doing and why they're doing it and what works.

And then, you know, if there are 500,000 plus, that's a big deal on LinkedIn, unless they are like a genuine celebrity. So your Bill Gates's and stuff will have 10 million, 20 million followers, but regular folks that aren't legitimate global celebrities, if they have hundreds of thousands of followers, they know what they're doing. That's a big time saver. And I mean, all you can do, let's say you are a wedding photographer and you simply go and find this person who's the big wedding photographer on LinkedIn. Maybe they teach a lot about how to make more money as a wedding photographer and how they've set their website up for success.

And so they're sharing these different educational posts and then they might do something about, you know, me and my family moved to Hawaii three years ago and this is how our lives change. So that's personal content where they're building their brand and building trust with the audience as opposed to educating. So if you keep showing up and you keep looking at the content that somebody like that is doing, and you do your version of it, so you obviously don't just literally word for word copy what they've done, but you can certainly copy the subject matter. If they talk about how a move across the country or to a new country changed their lives, and that's content that does well, perhaps you could do something like that. If that somewhat aligns with your own experience, if they talk about transitioning from working a job to starting a business, and that does really well, you could do a post just like that.

And so it wouldn't just be the topic. So if we take that last one off, I had a job and I hated it and I finally took the leap into entrepreneurship and it was great. That's kind of like your top level post, but then what about the formatting of the post? Like, is it long and detailed or is it lots of short sentences? Is it a text post or is it a carousel or is it a video? All of these are lessons and you can kind of see the high score at the bottom. Like did they get 5,000 likes or did they get 70 likes?

Chris Do: You're saying success leaves clues, pick up the pieces. Now you're a creative person because you went to study music and I can just tell by your career path, you find problems and you find solutions. Sometimes it works in your favor and sometimes it doesn't. And it seems like for people like you and me, this is pretty obvious. You look at stuff and you can break it down. When I talk to people who are not traditionally creative, and air quotes here, they look at them like, I can't figure this out.

I don't know, it's just, it's either good or it's not. So they look at the high score, they can't figure out the moves in between. And I think it's because if you're a self identified creative person, whether you're trained traditionally or not, you're an abstract thinker. You're a divergent thinker. You can connect dots where people can't see.

It's like the magic that logical people just can't put together. So, what are some things, do you have any hacks on like looking at a post and saying, here's what I'm looking for, here's how I'm pulling out like what can be repeatable and how I can apply it to myself, aside from the things you just said?

Sam Browne: I'll tell you my literal process. So whenever I see a post that I think I liked that, like it was interesting to me, it's done really well. And it's something that I could probably do my own version of. I will copy a link to the post and put it into an Apple note that I have. Whether I'm on my phone or my desktop, I use the same singular note.

It's like LinkedIn ideas or something like that. And I just drop them in kind of chronologically and I might make some notes. So say it's Chris Do and he's just done one about first time, you know, doing his first YouTube video. So I'm like, Oh, I wonder if I could do a version of that about my first LinkedIn post.

And I might make a few notes about what you did as well, or about what I'm going to do. So I kind of give myself a tiny little reminders of what I was thinking at the time. The reason that they're minimal is I don't want to make it a big, hard job for myself where I'm writing detail. It has to be kind of fun and quick.

So I might say Chris did it with a photo of himself and huge response from audience, relatable, vulnerable, inspiring, and that might be the whole note and then the link to the post so I can go and see it in detail. I mean, that's almost kind of tip number four as well is make content creation easy for yourself by having a system where whether you're out for a walk or you're at the gym or you're having coffee with a friend or you're watching TV at night, you can quickly jot down ideas as they come.

So we talk about shower thoughts. You want to introduce kind of a system where you're having shower thoughts all day every day and a system for capturing those thoughts so they don't come and go that's been really key for me I think when I've been most successful and most productive is when I am very active with grabbing ideas everywhere, books, movies, YouTube, and also probably most importantly for me getting out and just walking in my neighborhood without a phone. Actually, ironically, I don't take a phone, but then I get home and I put them all into my phone. So I don't forget them. I think it's really important to have like daily digital detoxes where you just let your mind wander.

Chris Do: All right. So you're like, okay, we can look at these things. We have a system in place and when something tickles us, whatever way that you want, try to just grab a few things that you can observe so that you can save them for later.

And then you go to point four, but let's go back to point three. Here's a hack that I'm going to share with everybody because it turns out people are not that analytical. They're not observers of the world, if you will. Artists tend to be very good observers of the world. They're noticing human interaction, a color of paint, a texture on a piece of fabric or something like that.

They can see things that we normal folk don't pay a lot of attention to. But here's what you can do. Okay, let's create that link that you said, I'm there with you. So you're going to quickly copy the link to the post that you like. And you need to do this because you won't be able to find it later.

You're like, who was that person? Happens all the time, right? Save that link wherever you want to save it. The next thing you can do is you can literally copy all of the text and jump into GPT. You can say, analyze this high performing post on LinkedIn for structure, style, tone of voice, challenges they had to overcome, the payoff and any insights to help me deconstruct this so I can create an outline from this to create content for myself.

See what it says. So even if you're not that good at pulling things apart, you can use GPT if you learn how to ask it questions. Because I assume some part of you or me is doing this thing. Like, what was the hook? How did I feel? What was the style? Like you said, was it written in a really choppy way? Was it just bullet points? Or was it a flowing story? And we need to know that. Oh, here's to where the crux of the story is. And here's how they overcame that conflict. So I know I need to add a conflict in the middle of the story. And I need to share a lesson, because that seems to be the template. You can also take the image and have GPT analyze that too, because now I can read images.

Say, analyze this image for style, tone, theme, all those kinds of things as well. And that should give you a pretty good blueprint. When you go to apply this yourself, if you have success, fantastic, you nailed it. If you didn't, what I would suggest is don't give up. Try it again, because sometimes your application of the formula isn't great.

It's just like a recipe, sometimes you screw up the recipe. It doesn't mean the recipe is bad, it just means your application of it was. Point number four that you said, basically make it easy. We want to remove friction in the creation process. The more friction that you add, the harder it's going to be. I love that you said this. Essentially, you walk without your phone because when you're with your phone, what happens is you interrupt your own observation. So there's a rule in writing. Don't edit while you write. So I think while you're collecting ideas, don't catalog while you're collecting.

Sam Browne: Absolutely. Yeah.

Chris Do: And the digital detox, that's part of your process. Okay, so Let's do one more point. Do you have a fifth in you?

Sam Browne: Yeah, I just thought of one and this is not mine. Jasmin Alić shared this and he gets pretty insane engagement with every single post on LinkedIn. So his idea was if you can have a post that fits on a single screen of a mobile phone so you don't have to even scroll, you know, so there's minimal effort. Just look at the thing. That is a good strategy. It's not obviously going to work for a deep dive educational post, but I love the idea of that, particularly for a text post. And when I say text post, I mean, no image, just writing. It's not even a photo. You can make it a text post, very attractive through a low grade of, uh, I guess it's school grades to define how difficult it is to read.

So you can use tools like Hemingway App to find out what grade you would have to be to actually understand what you're saying. You can literally copy and paste your post into Hemingway App. And it might say, okay, this is a grade five level. So a 10 year old kid could read this and understand everything you've said.

And after writing on LinkedIn for, for all this time, I do this naturally, but when I do put my stuff into something like that, it always says, yeah, this is like a grade three, you know, and really the lower you can get it, the better, and it doesn't mean that the content is dumbed down or overly simplistic.

It means that the creator has worked hard to communicate in such a way that the reader, it just sort of feeds directly into their brainstem rather than reading a sentence three times and thinking, what is he trying to say here? Our job as creators is to do that, to communicate in a way that the reader or the consumer kind of forgets what they're even doing.

They're just getting the message directly into their mind. So yeah, I really love that idea. I haven't done a lot of it yet, but I think it's a really good idea.

The Futur: It's time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

Chris Do: Want to make the most of the opportunities coming your way this year? I'd like to invite you to join me inside The Futur Pro Membership. Your ace in the hole for 2024. With expert guidance and a supportive community, The Futur Pro Membership was created as your ultimate business lifeline. And we have years of testimonials from members to prove it. Check it out at thefutur.com/pro

The Futur: and we're back. Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do: You're mentioning our mutual friend here in Jasmin in that he is very thoughtful and intentional about how he creates posts almost to a level which like I care if I don't care that much, but if you care and you want to grow, you might try to adopt some of these concepts.

And there's a general theme here. Make it easy. Keep it simple. Don't make me think too hard. And I think there's an Einstein quote that goes something like this. I'm sure I'm going to butcher it. It's like something to the effect of, if you can't explain it simply, you probably don't understand it well enough.

And so a lot of people think that they impress others by choosing very complicated language and sentence structure that they show, like, I have a master's degree in English literature. Can you see? And we can see. And the problem is that you have to keep in mind that everyone speaks English natively, and even the native speakers don't want to think that much to try to unpack what it is that you're doing.

So in your efforts to impress people with your language skills, you become very verbose, you choose six dollar words, and what you do is you alienate everyone. So what we want to do is to have a lot of people respond to it, so that the right kinds of people that we want to see the post have an opportunity to see it.

Plus there's this other thing, and I know this is going to rub people the wrong way, We're kind of like sheeple. We follow the herd, because there's safety in the herd. So when you see a post that has 10,000 likes or reactions versus one that has three, the one that has three could be superior to the 10,000. We're like, I'm not gonna waste my time over here. I'm gonna go where they're going. And I believe in this. There's such a thing as crowd intelligence, that the crowd knows, and people who bet professionally on sports, they know that the line moves as the crowd moves, and they want to create a 50/50 shot.

Like, if you pick this or that, it's a very tough decision. And so the crowd knows this is good, and very rarely is the crowd wrong. More often than not, the person who's got three engagements, it's because it was written in a way that no one wants to read any more of it. So, everybody do your best. And you mentioned Hemingway app as a way to grade yourself to see what grade level you're speaking at. And then you over time will learn. Keep it really simple. Keep it conversational. And if you can imagine a person in front of you who is, who is a fifth grader, pretend like you're talking to them. If they're interested, there's a good chance everyone on LinkedIn is going to be able to understand and process what you're saying. Excellent.

Sam Browne: Chris, I've got one more. I know we were going to move on from this.

Chris Do: Oh, you got a bonus six? Shoot.

Sam Browne: I feel like this is probably the most important one of all. That's why I feel like we've got to include it. The most important thing you can do as a LinkedIn creator by far is nail the hook. And so I guess the hook is an idea that you see on Twitter and you see it on LinkedIn more so than on other platforms. You know, there's different versions of this, like the YouTube thumbnail would be the obvious one. This is the equivalent of the YouTube thumbnail where if you write the best post in the world, it's amazing. It's going to change the world.

But the hook is not very good, nobody's going to read it. And unfortunately, the opposite is true. If you nail the hook and it's completely amazing and the content is just okay, the post will probably still do pretty well. I am very guilty of writing the hook when I've already spent three hours on the post and I'm a little bit bored and I'm, you know, ready to go and do something else.

And that's a mistake. The smart thing to do is give the hook. The attention that deserves spend 10 or 15 minutes workshopping it and making it good. So I'll explain exactly what it is for those that are just getting started on LinkedIn. So when you do any kind of LinkedIn post, you get the first 2 to 3 lines and I can't remember the carrot count off the top of my head, but it's something like 60 characters.

Those are shown and then you have to click see more in order to read the full post. So what an experienced creator will do is they will write a headline for the post that is irresistible to click. So the way I think of it is we have to create irresistible curiosity. We have to make it impossible for the reader to keep scrolling past and ignore your post in favor of somebody else's.

Because until we get them into the content, we haven't won them their business as a reader. So there's many different ways to do this, many copywriting techniques. So it might be something like everybody thinks this, here's the truth dot, dot, dot. And you're like, well, what's the truth I need to know I've got to find out.

And again, look to the really successful creators. They just do this all day long. Every single post will start with a very considered hook. Nobody who's really successful on LinkedIn just kind of starts writing the content and hits publish. I literally think of it as two separate things. There's the post and there's the hook. And you can torch great content just by not giving it the attention it deserves.

Chris Do: When you're talking about the hook, it refers to the headline. And these are all principles that people who have worked in advertising and marketing have mastered over decades now, you know, the age of Mad Men, they understand how to write and say things that are profound, that gets you to pay attention.

And so they have also learned that it doesn't matter how good your ad is, the media buy, if you lose people at the headline, they don't read the subhead, If you lose them at the subhead, they don't read the first sentence and it goes on and on. So there are many books on copywriting. So if you want to write better hooks or headlines, just look into what copywriters have figured out already.

And there's many, many resources that. Okay, here's something that's interesting that you said. And when you say like, you used to spend a ton of time writing the content and not enough time thinking about the headline. And now kind of on reflection, it's like, don't even bother writing the content if you can't come up with the headline because no one's going to read it. Anyways, I wanted to share this idea. Are you familiar with how Woody Allen comes up with ideas for movies? There's this beautiful documentary on him putting aside some of the other allegations that put, he's a brilliant American director, extremely prolific. What he does literally, as the documentary filmmakers do, is they follow him into his home and he goes, here's how I come up with ideas for movies.

He opens the nightstand drawer, And in it are scraps of paper, receipts, just random torn wood napkins, anything. And whenever he has an idea, he just jots down an interesting hook or prompt. And he goes, when I finish, making a movie, I go into the drawer, I open it up, and I rummage through it, and I'm like, here.

And he reads some of the ideas, like, oh, that's pretty interesting. Oh, I'll save that one for later. You can see how his brain is working. So they're just interesting concepts. And then he will literally get his typewriter out and just start writing based on that. So you can do what you're talking about here, Sam, which is just create a bunch of interesting hooks or headlines and just put them away.

And when you're feeling stuck or uninspired, pull one out. It's like, what did I? Oh, yeah, yeah. Let me write something about that. You're more likely to be successful if the hook is good and the content's okay, as opposed to the hook is okay and the content is good. Spend your energy where it's necessary.

It's kind of like when we do public speaking, the first 15 minutes or the first five minutes, You kind of have to nail it. Otherwise the audience, you're going to have the audience turn on you. And you should spend a disproportionate amount of time working the first five minutes of your talk, as opposed to the body.

Sam Browne: Makes sense.

Chris Do: So you're a LinkedIn coach for founders. That's what it says on your bio. So when you're working with founders, What are you doing with them for them so that they can grow their audience and be more influential in what they do?

Sam Browne: Yeah, so I work with them across a handful of calls. The first thing that I do is I rewrite their profile. So actually, the very first thing I do is I get them to fill in a survey where they tell me all about themselves and their business. But then they also tell me about their hobbies. They tell me about their lives outside of work their superpowers both in their career and in their personal lives. So I basically try and get a really good idea of who this person is by asking lots of questions that get them to think in different ways then I take that survey and I rewrite their profile section by section so I'll rewrite their banner their headline And so forth is about, I want to say seven different parts to their profile.

And I also create branding for them. So like a personal brand, visual identity, so that they have a particular look and feel with everything that they're doing on LinkedIn. The only people I don't do that for a designer is cause I'm, I'm not a great designer, so I have the ability to do that, but not much more than that as a designer.

So we nailed, we nailed the visual of their profile and the copy of their profile. So basically drive their ideal clients to work with them. That's the first week. We kind of talk through that on the call and I explain what I've done. Then we spend a couple of weeks on content. So a lot of the stuff we've talked about.

So we talk about hooks, content generation, how to create evergreen content that they can post month after month. For years, as opposed to writing something that you can only use once and then it's gone 48 hours later. And then we look at things like growth, how to grow on LinkedIn, as opposed to be posting into the abyss and nobody's looking at what you're doing.

And then the final thing, and the big one for a lot of people is lead generation. How do we create content that takes the casual reader and turns them into a buyer?

Chris Do: Are you doing this work yourself or do you have a team of digital elves to help you?

Sam Browne: It's just me at the moment, actually. And so with that in mind, I only work with a small handful of people a month. I'm in the process of building a team for it.

Chris Do: Is the price of this service publicly available or is it something you can share or you want to send people to a website or something?

Yeah, sure. I'm happy to say. So the price for it at the moment is $4,950.

$4,950. Is that U. S. dollars?

Sam Browne: Yeah.

Chris Do: So for about five grand, you're going to go and roll up your sleeves and really help them architect their LinkedIn identity, essentially, right?

Sam Browne: That's right. The idea is to be pretty comprehensive about it. So initially I was doing it for a 90 minute call. And I found that there was just so much to cover that we'd get to the end of the 90 minutes and I would have done this massive kind of brain dump on them. And I just think it was too much. So now it's even longer and we cover even, even more, but we break it up into weekly sessions and with support between as they kind of flex their muscles and try this stuff out that I've just taught them.

Chris Do: So this is a bit of a done for you service, right? You, they fill out the survey, you analyze it, you start to, to write and design some of it. And you said that you'll do this for founders, but if you're a designer, like you know what to do, you're just going to give them some pointers. Is that the idea?

Sam Browne: Yeah. So week one, I focused purely on profile and that is done for them a hundred percent. Everything else is done with them, where I teach them and then they're sharing what they've done with me. And I'm giving them feedback before they take it live on LinkedIn.

Chris Do: Now, within the time that's remaining here, I think I have a few more minutes with you, which is lead generation. Let's talk about this because there are a lot of people who are like, yeah, so what? These are all vanity metrics. People are looking at your post, they're engaging, but what is that doing for your revenues? We would kind of be irresponsible just to talk about how you get more engagement. What are you doing to help people generate more leads with their content?

Sam Browne: So, the way I approach lead generation is, Very heavy on inbound leads. I don't love, you know, sending code DMs. Hey Chris, I saw you were checking out my profile. I just wanted to see if you wanted to talk about it. And actually I listened to that post with Richard Moore. You did not that post that podcast. It was amazing. It was really, really good. And he was so generous with sharing his knowledge. And I kind of toyed with some of that stuff myself, which I really hadn't done up until that point.

And I don't know, I didn't love it. No disrespect to Richard, who's the master. I like creating content that gets people to contact me and ask me, can we work together? So, you know, to answer your question, my approach is this, if we divide our content into 10 posts at a time, I would think eight or nine of those posts should be either educational content, how to do this, here are five tips for doing that. Inspiring content, which would be personal content, my family just moved in and here's how, how much better life is now, or I just completed this marathon and here's my training. So kind of not necessarily non business content, but not educational, personal brand building. So that would be 80 or 90 percent of your content.

And then 10 percent of your content is where you sell. And the way that I sell there, there are three particular types that I really like. And the one that I like the most of all is case studies. So let's say I share the before and after story of a founder who has a, let's say they're running a design agency and they're struggling to get traction on LinkedIn.

When they came to me, they're getting eight to 10 likes per post. And They're spending hours every week creating content that nobody's seeing. So this is the before. This is like where you, the reader are at now too. And you're thinking that's me and it sucks. And then I say, you know, we work together for a month and I identified these problems and now here's the results.

He's posting and getting 50 to a hundred likes per post. He's seeing real results and getting amazing people commenting on his stuff. And most importantly, he's already made back his investment three times over. So I did this not long ago with a copywriter, Pella Sundin, who was a Swedish copywriter who works with B2B SaaS companies and the great thing with Pella and with all of my case study clients is he really took what I taught him and really used it a hundred percent.

So whenever you work with clients as a consultant or coach, you have some clients that pay the money and they show up and they do the call and then they never do anything with the information. And then you have others at the opposite end of the spectrum who really get the most out of it. They immediately put it into action. They ask great questions and they just master it. And it's an amazing feeling as a coach or consultant to have a client like that. Pella was certainly that. So he, within, I don't know, 30 days of us working together, he 5x'd his investment with me with one client. I know he's had several more clients since then.

We built a great friendship too. Of course, I said to him, listen, I'd love to share your experience of working with me. Can I send you some questions? Obviously, I'll promote you to my audience too. And he was all for it. He's very happy with how it went. And that case study, the great thing with case studies is it doesn't feel like you're getting a sales pitch shoved in your face as the audience.

So you kind of recognize like, okay, this is somebody promoting their business, but it's a good story as well. You know, it's, it's got the challenge at the beginning, the adversity to be overcome then the triumph. And this is how life is now. So that's, I do those about one in 10 posts and that is my single favorite way to sell.

The other two are a testimonial post. This is kind of like a mini case study where I might show. A line from a testimonial. So I'll use Pella again. He might've said something like I 5x'ed my investment within 30 days. So I might have that in like, italic text on an image, and then I might just share his story in a concise fashion in the text post.

So in many ways, it's just a mini case study. And then the third one is a straight up sales post. And what that might look like for me is I might do one and say. I'm taking on five clients in April. If you're a founder with an established business and you want to find success on LinkedIn, get in touch.

Here's what we're going to cover. And it's almost like a brochure. Like this is all like a landing page on a website. This is what we're going to do. Here's what you can expect. And then I'd probably finish with some testimonials, two or three, which would be very cut down to just show the outcome that we achieved together.

So if I have a testimonial where they go, Sam's great, I had such a lot of fun and the time flew by, and by the way, I got a thousand followers within a week of working together. I'll probably just show I got a thousand followers within a week of us working together because the reader is thinking what's in it for me? I don't care that Sam's a nice guy, et cetera. I want to know what am I going to get for my money? So those are the three. Case study, testimonial, sales post.

Chris Do: So you're saying the percentage, the ratio is 90 percent educational inspiring and 10 percent sales. And I think that is in alignment with us. We use like an eight to one rule, because otherwise what happens is you start to wear people down and you're like, This guy or this gal is just pitching to me all the time.

This is just a sales funnel for them. And I don't want to be funneled to use the words of Daniel Priestley. And you see the educational stuff could be the stuff that is your authority. So you're teaching people. Some percentage of that should be inspirational stuff, more your personal story, things that are going on with your life to give a more complete picture of who you are versus just the things that you do.

This is fantastic. And then, Sometimes it's okay in that 10 percent just to be very direct with your ask. I can take on so many clients in the next number of months. If you're this kind of person who needs these kinds of results, here's what I do. Contact me or comment or something and I'll, I'll be in touch with you. That's your system, right? It's all basically inbound?

Sam Browne: Yep, that's exactly it. I have a theory that when you are a much smaller creator, the smart play is to not do so much of the personal content because you haven't kind of got people's interest yet. And instead I would really double down on educational content only and just get known as, well, you know, that lady really knows her stuff.

Every time she posts, I learned something. And then there's kind of a point then, I mean, It's different for everybody, but let's say it's like 20,000 followers where now people are actually interested to learn about you, the person. And the way I think of it is educational content will grow your audience.

Personal content will draw the people who already follow you closer to you. It will build trust. And then yeah, the sales content is where you get paid for all of the effort. I think you would agree with this though, Chris, the fact of the matter is to be a create a long term you actually have to just love creating and helping and interacting with people.

I don't think it's sustainable to kind of get into this game with a view of like, how can I make a lot of money on LinkedIn? It's a long, long game and it's one worth playing and the benefits of it. I'm not, it's difficult to anticipate and kind of hard to overstate how fantastic it is if you stick it out long term, but on day one, I was just happy to be there writing and sharing even now, I still love sitting down, writing a post, crafting into something I'm really proud of, putting it out to people and having people say, I really enjoyed this. This was really interesting, or this was surprising, or I'm inspired. It's cliche to say, but it's really not about the money. It's like, that is a really nice byproduct of it, but you won't do what it takes if that's what you're there for.

Chris Do: Okay, before we wrap up, I want to ask you this question. What is the highest performing post that you've ever created on LinkedIn? If you know what that is, I'd love for you to tell us what it is, some of the metrics, the scoreboard, if you will, and then break it down for us.

Sam Browne: Okay, I do know what it is. In November, I think, of 2022, Richard Vanderblom, who is like a, LinkedIn algorithm expert. He does training and stuff, but he's really made his name by writing these annual reports where he goes super deep into LinkedIn somehow.

I don't know his process, but he does these annual algorithm reports. This is what LinkedIn likes. This is what LinkedIn doesn't like. This is what's working for people, et cetera. So in 2022, he wrote this post where he shared this literally like 150 page textbook of everything about LinkedIn and I read it and then pulled out all of the stuff that I thought was interesting for creators of which there was like 5 percent of 150 pages and I put it into a faintly ridiculous carousel full of like dinosaurs and all sorts of crap. And the LinkedIn algorithm at the time was much more likely to give you a viral post. If a lot of people showed up and liked a post within the first hour, the potential for virality was much higher than it is now. It's much harder to go viral on LinkedIn. And it just went absolutely ballistic. So I think I had about, 15,000 followers and overnight I hit 30,000 followers literally overnight and I wish I could replicate that success.

I tried to do it again a year later. It didn't work at all. And what's really funny too is I see people have realized, you know, they look through my content and they go, wow, he got a big response on that. And they've tried to replicate that post. And it just doesn't work. It was like a lightning in a bottle moment.

I think the algorithm and the way that I shared like the highlights of this report, I don't know, it was very lucky. And as I say, I've tried to do it and I'm pretty good at this LinkedIn stuff. I can't replicate that result. I mean, if we knew how to go viral, all we would do is viral posts all the time.

Chris Do: Well, I wanted to ask you some, a little bit more about the metric. So in one post, you, you grew by 15,000 followers in a matter of days. And what was the engagement numbers like in the comments and all that stuff? I'm just curious if you know that.

Sam Browne: I remember it was over 2 million views, 10,000 plus likes. I have this list I keep of all of my posts and their results. And this one's just so outlandishly higher than everything else I've ever done. So it should be easy enough to find. There it is. So, learn the secrets of the LinkedIn algorithm, is what it was called. Okay, so it got 11,446 likes or engagements, 2,370 comments, 1,150 reposts, and 2.3 million views.

Chris Do: Wow, that was a banger, as the kids say.

Sam Browne: It was a banger, and you should see it. I'll send you a link to it. It's like absolutely ridiculous. There's actually a typo in it because I kind of had no idea that it would, and I remember seeing the typo after I published it and going, no, that's all right. You know, it was just another day. And then boom.

Chris Do: Yeah. What do you do at that point? Right? It's already published. You can only change the text part of it. You can't change the carousel after the fact for a lot of different reasons. But okay, very cool. So I'm going to ask you this question then. I want you to Sam Browne the whole thing. Okay. What are the three breadcrumbs, the clues of what you thought made it tick? Why did it explode?

Sam Browne: First thing would be the hook. So the very first line says, learn the secrets of the LinkedIn algorithm. And then the second line says, Yep. Secrets is a good word. People like secrets. The second line says, use these tips to build a 10K audience.

Chris Do: The benefit is baked in.

Sam Browne: Yep. And it's specific, right? This is, if you read this, this will happen for you. The text post part of it is pretty short and I, I really don't think it has made any difference. The front cover of the carousel says LinkedIn secrets instead of big type and then much smaller than that of the algorithm.

So LinkedIn secrets of the algorithm. There are some things that are surprising about it. It's 24 pages long, which is really long for a carousel. Honestly, there's quite a few things about it that are not like perfect. Oh, there's a little bit of humor in there as well. As I say, I didn't treat it any differently to any other posts.

So I was kind of, it's pretty sort of laid back in tone and maybe that helped it. It's a numbered list. People love lists and they love listicles, like tip number one, do this tip number two. And that is the way that I structured the titles. The text is large enough to easily read on a mobile phone. And each of the tips is short.

So you can read it in two seconds and you don't have to figure it out. Why did this work? You can read it and go, I now understand that thing. I think a key thing about it too, is it was so shareable. So a lot of the comments are people tagging in other people with like social media agencies or, or SaaS companies or whatever, like, you know, Hey, Steve, you should check this out there.

A lot of the comments say that, and then Steve would go, hey, Mary, you should check this out with your team. So that helped it a lot. Part of it as well as like how to avoid loss. So there's things like the worst types of posts, which at the time, like a video post did quite a bit worse in terms of how much love the LinkedIn algorithm gave it versus a text post. So that's, that's useful. We don't want to waste our time doing something that's not going to work. It's certainly not, in my opinion, a perfect post. I think it was the algorithm at the time, what people were interested in. People were aware of this report, but it was this massive undertaking to read it, and I kind of knew like, nobody's gonna read this thing from start to finish.

I'll read it from start to finish, pull out some really interesting stuff, post it in an accessible way, but as I say, I've tried to replicate it. Lots of other people have tried to replicate it. Nobody's done it, including me, but happy to, like, share a link to it for people to check out.

Chris Do: Okay, we'll include the link in the show notes, so if you want to check this post out and kind of do your own sleuthing and try to reverse engineer the formula. It's a very high profile project. performing posts, taking into consideration also at the time you had 15,000 followers. So people can't sit back like, well, he had a big following, of course it's going to go viral because people like to dismiss things like that. I think of all the social platforms that you have a potential of going viral outside of TikTok.

LinkedIn is a pretty good place for you to invest your time, because if it's a good piece of content, organically, you don't do any weird cheating techniques, it will find an audience if it's good. I think there's an egalitarian, a democratic thing that good content should win. And that's what it was.

I think you're right. People think that the algorithm is a static thing that's fine edited and fixed, and it's not. It's ever evolving and changing. They throttle things in and out. It could be like, that was the tell end of carousels, where they were juicing all carousels, because I noticed carousels don't even perform as well as they used to.

There's a lot of things. Now more people are aware that they need to make content. So eventually this space is going to be very noisy and very difficult to stand out. But the going is still good. Y'all just jump in there and get started. Now, from my perspective, you did a couple of things. That is, consistent with your six tips, right?

You became that person, like the, the LinkedIn growth guy, the coach for founders. So you're teaching people how to grow. You also looked at other people's success. This other gentleman that you mentioned, who I don't know, Richard Vanderblom, he was doing something and it took him a lot of energy and effort. You're like, okay, that's working. What's he doing that's well, that's going well. And you did something more beautiful, which is I think you applied the Pareto principle to it, which is like 80 percent of the value comes from 20 percent of what is written. No one has time to read a 150 page report. Let me donate my time, I'm speaking for you here, Sam, and find the very best things relative to the audience in which I want to serve today, what are they looking for? And you made it simpler and easier to consume, which is one of your rules here, which is make it easy. And just trying to keep it really simple, by breaking it to carousels, you make it fun. They can swipe quickly through it and they can scan the content.

I think you added some kind of outrageousness to it with the dinosaurs and the graphics, and that is always something that's helpful. When you mix in facts, that are really well researched by somebody, how they know this, we don't know, but you're giving people a shortcut. So it's not just your opinion of things, somebody who's done the research, you've pared it down, made it digestible, and that goes to this whole idea that, you know what, everybody is so in love with their content that they're going to work that hard to understand it.

Your job is to make it easy to consume, make it snackable, and Let people go about their lives, not to consume up all their time, because those are the posts that are going to win more often than not. And it's a mistake that I often make in trying to like over educate people. They want a little bit of education, they want a lot of fun. So try to figure out that formula, that balance, and for each person it's going to be a little bit different.

Sam Browne: Yep, 100%.

Chris Do: Wonderful. I've been talking to Sam Browne, and he's been able to do something amazing. He's grown from zero to 50,000 followers in one year. And this is not ancient history. He's been able to do this in the last year, which is pretty mind blowing, everybody. He's a LinkedIn coach for founders. So if you want to grow your audience and generate inbound leads, Sam is his name. Sam, where can people find out more about you?

Sam Browne: LinkedIn is a good idea. Sam Browne with an E. And then I have a, I actually just have it linking to a Gumroad right now, but if they go to sambrowne.co, I have some like LinkedIn guides and how to write great hooks, that sort of thing, planning on replacing that with a great website in the near future. But right now it just goes to Gumroad. So yeah.

Chris Do: Thanks very much for being a guest on the show.

Sam Browne: Chris, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you. I'm Sam Browne and you're listening to The Futur.

The Futur: Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get new insightful episodes from us every week, The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced and edited by Rich Cardona Media. Thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple podcasts.

It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it. Visit thefutur.com and you'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and the creative business. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.

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