LinkedIn Growth Hacks: Dominate the Platform in 2024

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 no one has time to read 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 grabbing ideas everywhere books movies YouTube and also getting out and and just walking in my um neighborhood I want to go where where like 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 I am Sam Brown um I am an entrepreneur based in ockland New Zealand prior to LinkedIn I had been building online businesses for 15 years starting with a music agency um 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 or not so much share my story but share the lessons I'd learned from being an Entre R preneur um with up and cominging entrepreneurs and even those who were thinking of taking the leap into it um and so I started writing on LinkedIn in January 2022 after many false starts I tried to get an 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 uh and here we are okay great let's move on here so we have so many people who are very interested in this in how do you grow an audience what did you discover in your journey and creating content in in early 2022 that you have been able to figure out as uh if you do these things you have a higher probability of growing what what have you learned in in that journey man where do I start okay well there's a lot to cover I suppose um okay 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 uh 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 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 do whenever I create a piece of content I'm thinking I need to give my audience a quick win um so a really good example of this is the uh Twitter post screenshot style posts that um 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 so you know 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 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 a handful of things kind of happened that led us there and that's you know that that is something that you can um 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 uh engage with the longest story that would be that would be one one thing uh always think about you know what the audience is you know you want you want to give them that win so if you're if you're listening to this on the podcast C 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 textbase it's very low hanging fruit but for whatever reason it's super engaging and I think my theory and I'd love to get your perspective on this is because it it kind of looks like very real and raw and not over worked and so there's an an immediacy to it um 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 does that 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 knowing 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 they 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 um it's something I think you just started to touch on is is that low it's low cognitive load it doesn't demand the reader do any thinking so the more you can you can remove the need to to think and figure out and it's not about dumbing down your content exactly um it's just about making it the most accessible it can possibly be and this shows up in many different ways but but that's a 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 as so much of a knowledge bomb as yeah I really agree with that you know 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 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 I'm not sure if I believe in it but it must be true manifestation we're getting a little r here like 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 I think it's been dressed up as this magical you know mystical go in a cave and spin around three times thing but it's that uh 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 or all over the freeway that you your brain just filters for it right that all of a sudden you know your your brain If let's say you want to buy a an electric mini hatchback um sorry electric mini you know the the car well 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 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 okay the way you answer that tells me you may or may not buy into this whole uh infinite parallel universes into the quantum entanglement theories are you into that at all because my wife's deep into that it sounds like Rick and Morty which I'm very into so I'll say yes mostly well I'm going to butcher it so those of you that are deep in the woo uh let me know in the comments how I've screwed this part up okay but I was just explain it 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 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 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 uh what has to happen for us to be in Nashville who do we know in Nashville in 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 to First articulate it 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 um I yeah all of the above love it that's a perfect response that's fine okay before we get into wo verse let's go to uh tip number two 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 um 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 um 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 you know a hundred times a year um and really kind of own it um and the the more Niche you go obviously the fewer people it will apply to but the people that it does apply to will really love it and embrace it um so I'm thinking there's a guy um Anthony Pier who has done this with a company called Fletch and they just do landing page optimization for Enterprise SAS 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 um and as a result he's got this thriving audience and a thriving business off the back of it um I have been pretty broad with my content around um you know here's all my stories and lessons from 15 years as a as a serial entrepreneur um 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 um and and what can I discard what can I feel okay about maybe not writing about so much 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 Al together what do you say to those people that's okay I I have that happen a lot with my clients I I help entrepreneurs to grow on LinkedIn and so often somebody who is entrepreneurial will be good at like you know have seven things that they love you know they very they always have very varied interests varied hobbies and skills and I mean the the the easy answer I guess and 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 um 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 so you got let's say you're in five different Lanes right now that's day one um see if you can get it down to three and then see if you can get it down to one it's definitely like a powerful hack for Success um when we think of uh Cody Sanchez with the boring businesses you know when we think of uh Ryan holiday with stoicism James Clea with atomic habits or habits in general um you it it makes your career as a Creator a lot simpler to Simply Be the insert guy insert Niche guy insert Niche girl you know with your audience of designers obviously design is is this huge topic um if you can drill down on the aspect of design that you love whether that is brand design or um ux or just apps you know like it it it just makes everything easier and and from a business point of view too like we we all know of businesses um 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 uh if we've been around those sort of businesses it all is very poor they simply can't be great at all those things y you're you're preaching to the choir here and I 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 yep okay excellent you got to be what my friend Joel pger 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 yep yep I would I would even take it further where you I mean and this this applies to creators specifically rather than just Niche business owners eventually you can become a category of one where people go you know I've got this I've got this uh 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 that's the ultimate goal for creators who are also entrepreneurs okay excellent what might tip number three oh my God okay um you kind of know how this is going to go yeah it's going to get progressively harder as I uh as I use up my tips um yeah okay here's a good one 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 um in any category on LinkedIn there are going to be players who are or creators who are very successful um no matter how Niche your Niche is um 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 um and that is very educational and can save you a lot of time and pain so I guess with every platform there are superstars um that have in the case of LinkedIn not many people have more than like a million followers it's it's sort of unusual that way but anybody that's got 100,000 plus has got a fair knowledge of what they're doing and why they're doing and what works um and then you know if there are 500,000 plus that's that's a big deal on LinkedIn unless they are like a genuine celebrity so your Bill Gates and stuff will have 10 million 20 million followers but you know regular folks that aren't legitimate Global celebrities if they have hundreds of thousands of followers they know what they're doing um so that's a that's a big timesaver and I mean all you can do let's let's say you are uh like a wedding photographer and you you simply go and find this person who's the big wedding photographer on LinkedIn maybe they teach a lot about how to how to make more money as a wedding photographer and um how they've set their website up for success and so they you know 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 changed 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 the subject matter if they talk about how a move across the country or to a new country change 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 of 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 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 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 okay you're saying success leaves Clues pick up the be inde days yeah now you're a creative person because you want to study music and I can just tell by your career path you 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 in air quotes here they look at I'm like I I can't figure this out I don't know it's just it's either good or it's not so they they 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 could apply it to myself aside from the things you just said I'll tell you my L my literal process um so whenever I see a post that I think um I like 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 um put it into an apple note that I have um 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 um and I might make some notes so say it's chriso and he's just done one about um first time you know doing his first YouTube video so I might go 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 um or about what I'm going to do so I kind of I kind of give myself tiny little reminders of what I was thinking at the time and 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 and quick um so I might say um you know Chris did it with a photo of him self and huge response from audience um relatable vulnerable um inspiring and and that might be the whole note and then the link to the post so I can go and see it in detail um 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 you know 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 um all day every day um and and a system for capturing those thoughts so they don't come and go that's been really key for me I think 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 um getting out and and just walking in in my um 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 a like daily digital detoxes where you just let your mind wander so you rolled basically from3 to 04 but I'm gonna go back to3 first all right so you're like okay we can look at these things uh 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 our 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 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 like you said I'm there with you so you're G to quickly copy the link 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 is 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 texts 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 was it written a really Cy way was it just bullet points or was it a flowing story and we need to know that oh here's the 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 so 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 ESS 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 uh 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 is that fair to say absolutely yeah okay wonderful 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 yeah I just thought of one and this is not mine I I this is uh Jasmine Alec um shared this and he is masterful at um he 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 of a mobile phone so you don't have to even scroll you know so there's minimal effort you you know just look at the thing um that is a um good strategy you know if 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 like a just writing there not even a photo um you can make it a text post very attractive through um a low grade of uh I guess it's school grades um to to Define how difficult it is to read um 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 him andway app and it might say okay this is a grade five level um so you know a 10-year-old kid could read this and understand everything you've said and I after doing all this 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 brain stem rather than reading a sentence three times and thinking what is he trying to say here um our job as creators is to do that communicate in a way that the reader or the or the consumer kind of forgets what they're even doing they're just getting the message uh 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 yeah you're you're mentioning our our mutual friend here in Yasmin in that he is very thoughtful and intentional about how he creates posts almost to a level which I'm 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 like 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'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 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 not 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 verose you choose $6 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 I know this is going to rub people the wrong way but we're kind of like sheepo we follow the herd because there's safety in the herd so when you see a post 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 going to waste my time over here I'm going to 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 like uh play uh 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 right and so the crowd knows this is good and very rarely is the crowd wrong more often than not the person's got three engagement it's because it was written in way that no one wants to 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 Chris I've got one more I I know we're going to move on from this oh you got this is 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 a um an idea that you see on Twitter and you see it on LinkedIn more so than on other platforms I I 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 it's going to 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 um I am very guilty of writing the hook when I've already spent three hours on the posts 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 the smart thing to do is give the hook the attention it 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 uh the first two to three lines and I can't remember the car count off the top of my head but it's something like 60 characters those are showing and then you have to click see more in order to read the full post so what ends up happening is or or what an exper Creator will do is they will write a headline for the post that is irresistible to click um 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 um 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 um so there's many different ways to do this um many copywriting techniques so it might be something like everybody thinks this here's the truth dot dot dot and you're like what's the truth I need to know I've got to find out um and again look to the really successful creators they just do this all day long um 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 um I literally think of it as two separate things there's the post and there's the hook and you know you can you can torch great content just by not giving it the attention it deserves okay when you're talking about the hook it refers to the headline and the 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 get you to pay attention and so they have also learned that it doesn't matter how good you're is the media bu 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 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 when you 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 is 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 got that right right okay I wanted to share this idea are you familiar with how Woody Allen uh 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 the how I come up with ideas for mov movies he opens the nightstand drawer and in it are scraps of paper receipts just random torn what 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 it rumag through it and I'm like here and he reads some of the idea like that's pretty interesting oh I'll say that one for lat you can see how his brain is working so they're just interesting Concepts and he will literally get his typewriter out and just start writing based on that so you can do what 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 gonna 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 yep makes sense okay uh there's one other thing that you mentioned where you said here's an example when you say here's what everybody thinks and this is why they're wrong you're using this thing that I refer to as the Known Unknown here's what you know but you didn't know this about that and so these are inherently very catchy because it challenges our belief system and you immediately pull into them into the the rest of your story because you're saying we think the same thing but here's where you're wrong or this won't work will it and then it's like what what what what won't work what are you talking about I want to get in on the conversation and so you have to become a master at drawing attention to what it is that you want them to to read okay I think that was super helpful was there like anything else you want to mention about this or anything else I think we covered a lot nothing Springs to mind yeah okay I have a question for you 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 uh Their audience and be more influential on what they do yeah so I work with them um across uh a handful of calls um 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 um 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 uh section by section so I'll rewrite their Banner um their headline and so forth there's about I want to say seven different parts to their profile and I also uh create branding for them so like a personal brand visual identity um so that they have a particular um look and feel with everything that they're doing on LinkedIn um the only people I don't do that for are designers because I'm I'm not a great designer um so I I I have the ability to do that but not much more more than that as a designer um so we nail we nail the visual of their profile and the copy of their profile to 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 uh then we spend a couple of weeks on content so a lot of the stuff we've talked about so we talk about hooks uh content generation how to create um 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 on 48 hours later um and then we look at things like growth um how to grow on LinkedIn um as opposed to be posting into the abyss and 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 are you doing this work yourself you have a team of digital elves 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 um I'm in the process of building a team for it okay is the price of this service publicly available or is something you can share or you you want to send people to a website yeah sure I'm happy to say um so the price for it at the moment is 4950 okay great so for about five grand you're going to go and roll up your sleeves and really help them architect their LinkedIn identity essentially that's right the idea is to be pretty comprehensive about it um 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 you know I've done 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 um and with with support between as they kind of flex their muscles and and try to stuff out that I've just taught them yes so this is a bit of a done for you service right 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 yeah so week one I focus purely on uh profile and that is done for them 100% everything else is done with them where I teach them um and then they're sharing what they've done with me and I'm giving them feedback before they take it live on LinkedIn okay now with in 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 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 yeah so the way I approach lead generation is very heavy on inbound leads I don't love uh you know sending code DMS hey Chris I saw you were checking out my profile just wanted to see if you you know wanted to talk about it and actually I listened to that post with Richard Mo you did not that post that podcast and it was amazing it was really really good and he was so generous with um with sharing his knowledge um and I kind of toyed with some of that stuff myself which I really hadn't done up until that point um and I don't know I didn't love it no disrespect to Richard who's the master but 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 if we take 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 um here are five tips for doing that um inspiring content which would be personal content you know uh my family just moved and and here's how how much better life is now or I just completed this marathon and here's my training um so kind of not necessarily non- bus content but not educational um personal brand building so that would be 80 or 90% of your content and then 10% of your content is where you sell and the way that I sell there there are um three um 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 online when they came to me they're getting 8 to 10 likes per post 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 I identified these problems um and now here's the results he's posting and getting 50 to 100 likes per post um 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 um so I did this not long ago with a a copywriter um P sunden who was a Swedish copywriter who works with B2B SAS companies and um the great thing with p and and with all of my case study clients is he really took what I taught him and really used it 100% so whenever you work with clients as a consultant or coach you have some clients that pay them 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 and it's an amazing feeling as a as a coach or consultant to have a client like that P was certainly that um so he you know within I don't know 30 days of us working together he 5x his investment with me with one client I know he's had several more clients since then um we built a great friendship too of course I said to him listen i' would love to share your experience of working with me can I send you some questions um obviously I'll promote you to my audience too and he was all for it he's very happy with how it went um 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 It's got the challenge at the beginning um to the adversity to be overcome then the the Triumph and this is how life is now um so that's I do those about one in 10 posts um 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 I might show a line from a testimonial so I'll use parer again he might he might have said something like I five exed 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 straightup sales post and what that might look like for me is I might do one and say um I'm taking on five clients in April um if you're a Founder with an established business and you want to find success on LinkedIn um get into touch here's what we're going to cover and it's almost like a brochure like this is this is or or like a or like a landing page on a website this is what we're going to do um here's what you can expect and then I'd probably finish with some testimonials two or three um which would be very cut down to just show the outcome that we achieve 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 th 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 Etc I want to know what am I going to get for my money um so those are the three case study testimonial sales post wonderful that was super clear okay so you're saying the percentage the ratio is 90% educational inspiring and 10% sales and I think that is an alignment with us we we use like an 8 to1 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 they're really 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 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 in that 10% just to be very direct with your ask I can take on so many clients 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 B basically inbalance yes yep that's exactly it okay um I I have a theory that when you are a much smaller Creator the smart play is to not do so much of the person 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 know as well you know that lady really knows her stuff every time she posts I learn something and then there's kind of a a point and 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 um and the way I think of it is educational content will grow your audience uh personal content will draw the people who already follow you closer to you it will build trust um and then yeah the sales the sales content is where you get paid for all of the effort um I think you would agree with this though Chris the fact of the matter is to be a Creator 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 it's a long long game and it's one worth playing and the benefits of it not able you know 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 it's it's cliche to say but it's really not about the money it's it's like 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 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 okay I do know what it is in November I think of 2022 uh Richard Vander Blom who is like a a a sort of 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 um somehow I don't know 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 Etc so in 2022 he wrote this post where he shared this literally like 150 page you know 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% of that 150 pages and and I put it into a faintly ridiculous Carousel um full of like dinosaurs and all sorts of crap and it just it a link the the LinkedIn algorithm at the time was much more likely to give you a viral post if a lot of people showed up and and liked to 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 um so I think I had about 15,000 followers and overnight I hit 30,000 followers literally overnight wow um 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 they go wow we got a big response on that and they've tried to replicate that post and it just doesn't work it was like a it was like a lightning and a bottle moment um I think the algorithm and the way that I shared like the highlights of this report I don't know I it was it was very lucky so that that one 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 yeah 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 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 let's see I haven't looked at it in a while uh okay so it got 11,446 uh likes or engagements 2370 comments 1,150 reposts and 2.3 million views wow that was a banger and you should see it I'll send you a link to it it's like absolutely ridiculous it's certainly not I I there's actually a typo in it because I kind of had no idea that it and I remember seeing the typo after I published it and going H that's all right you know it was just another day and then boom yeah what didn't you do at that point right yeah 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 gonna ask you this question then I want you to Sam Brown the whole thing what are the three breadcrumbs the clues of what you thought made it tick why did it explode this viral post okay 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 so the secrets yep Secrets is a good word people like Secrets uh the second line says use these tips to build a 10K audience the benefit is biged down y yeah and it's specific right this is if you read this this will happen for you um the text post part of it is pretty short and I I really don't think it has um made any difference um the front cover of the carousel says LinkedIn secrets in in sort of big big um uh type and then much smaller than that of the algorithm so LinkedIn secrets of the algorithm um there are some things that are surprising about it's 24 pages long which is really long for a carousel um as I say I didn't treat it any differently to any other post so I was kind of um it's pretty sort of laidback in tone and maybe that helped it um it's a numbered list people love lists and they love listicles like tip number one do this tip number two um and that is the way that I structured the titles um 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 why did this work you can read it and go I Now understand that thing um I think a key thing about it too is it was so sharable so a lot of the comments are people tagging in other people with like social media agencies or or sess 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 um part of it as well is like how to um 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 you know 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 going to read this thing from start to finish I'll read it from start to finish pull out some really interesting stuff and post it in an accessible way um but as I say I've tried to replicate it lots of other people try to replicate it nobody's done it including me um but happy to like share a link to it for people to check out okay we'll include the link for 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 performing post 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 Tik Tok 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 anything weird cheating techniques it will find an audience if it's good I think there's an egalitarian a de 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 added and fixed and it's not it's ever evolving and changing they throttle things in and out it could be like that was a tell in 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 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 uh you became that person like the the LinkedIn growth guy the coach for Founders so you're teaching people how to grow uh you also looked at other people's success this other gentleman that you mentioned who I don't know Richard Vander Blum he was doing something it took him a lot of energy and effort you're like okay if 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 paral principle to it which is like 80% of the value comes from 20% of what is written no one has time to read 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 into 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 the dinosaurs and the graphics and that is always something that's helpful so when you mix in facts that are really well researched by somebody how how they know this we don't know but you're you're giving people a shortcut so it's not just your opinion of things somebody who's done the research you've paired it down made it digestible and that goes to this whole idea that you know what not everybody is so in love with your 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 off than not and it's a mistake that I often make and 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 it for each person is goingon to be a little bit different yep 100% wonderful okay I've been talking to Sam Brown and he's been able to do something amazing he's grown from Z 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 LinkedIn is a good idea uh so it's Sam Sam Brown with an e um and then um I have a uh I actually just have it linking to a gumroad right now but if they go to uh s.co um I have some like LinkedIn guides and and how to write great hooks that sort of thing planning on replacing that with a a great website in the near future but right now it just goes to gumroad um so yeah all right thanks very much for being a a guest on the show and maybe what we can do is we can end on some rock music maybe we can play that why not would you like that we can include it if you want maybe I mean I did it 14 years ago so it's sort of a strange like Nostalgia for me at this point but if people are interested sure yeah all right thanks for be such a good sport no worries Chris this has been such a pleasure thank you [Music]