Influential Introvert: Communication Coaching for Professionals with Performance Anxiety - LinkedIn for Podcasters

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

*** Podcast Launch Academy is open for enrollment for a limited time *** If you’ve been wanting to start a podcast for awhile and are sick of struggling to figure it out on your own…   I invite you to join Podcast Launch Academy.    This online course will help you confidently launch your first podcast without the tech headache, overwhelm, or ‘where do I even start’ worries.   But it’s not just an online course. Podcast Launch Academy is an experience.    Because if you join this first class — which will close its doors at 11:59 p.m. EST on November 26, you’ll also get 2 months of free group coaching and mentorship from me.    Every week for seven weeks, you’ll get a new online session with video tutorials and action items that build upon each other. You’ll do your online work, and then later in the week, as a group, we’ll meet in our virtual classroom for coaching, Q&A, and workshops. And if you can’t make a live session, you can catch the recording.    By the end of Podcast Launch Academy, you’ll have  Nailed down your podcast idea and strategy Crafted a brand that gets you and your podcast publicity Outlined a year’s worth of binge-worthy content for your show — plus get a special podcast productivity accelerator tool to manage your podcast production  You’ll have recorded and edited your episodes — yes, you’re going to learn how to edit audio. I’m going to make it really easy for you! You’ll have planned a rock-solid engagement and growth strategy for your podcast, and  You’ll have launched a show that lights you up and brings joy to others.   If you are looking for easy-to-understand guidance to walk you through every step of creating, launching, and growing a professional quality podcast from scratch, then Podcast Launch Academy is for you.    This course begins November 29, but enrollment closes at 11:59 p.m. on November 26.    Head here for details >>>  sarahmikutel.com/course    And also, please enjoy this episode on how we can use LinkedIn to engage our audience and grow our show. :)   My guest is  Josh Steimle, founder of Influencer Inc, author of the 7 Systems of Influence, and creator of the 60 days to LinkedIn Mastery Course.   Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Hello, my friend. I am so excited to announce that the doors to podcast launch academy are open. If you are looking for easy to understand guidance to walk you through every step of creating launching and growing a professional quality podcast from scratch, then this online course is for you. But it's not just an online course. Podcast Launch Academy is an experience because if you join this first class, which will close its doors at 1159 p.m. Eastern Time on November 26, you'll, you'll You will also get two months of free group coaching and mentorship from me. So every week for seven weeks, you will get a new online session with video tutorials and action items that will build upon each other. You'll do your online work. And then later in the week as a group, we'll meet in our virtual classroom for coaching Q&A and workshops. And if you can't make a live session, you can just catch the recording.

By the end of Podcast Launch Academy, you will have nailed down your podcast idea and strategy, crafted a brand that gets you and your podcast publicity. City outlined a year's worth of binge-worthy content for your show and plus get a special podcast productivity accelerator tool to manage your workflow. You will also have recorded and edited your episodes. That's right. You are going to learn how to edit audio. I'm going to make it really easy for you. You will have planned a rock-solid engagement and growth strategy for your podcast. And you will have launched a show that lights you up and brings joy to others. So if you've been wanting to start a podcast for a while and you are just sick of struggling trying to figure it out

on your own and you don't want to be in the same spot next year, then I invite you to join Podcast Launch Academy where you will learn how to launch your first podcast without the tech headache overwhelmed or where do I even start worries. This course begins November 29th, but enrollment closes, as I said, at 1159 p.m. Eastern Time November 26th. Visit sarahmicatel.com slash course for all the details, and this link will be in your show notes. Have you been wanting to start a podcast for a while now, but something's holding you back? Maybe it's fear of putting yourself out there or confusion about the technology. I'm Sarah Mikital and on podcasting step by step, I'll break down how to podcast with a little

loving motivation to give you the skills and the confidence you need to finally launch that show of your dreams. Let's get started. On the social media for podcasters episode of podcasting step by step, Andrea Jones and I talked to you through a great plan to get you started with your social media strategy. Today and in future episodes, I really want to dive deeper into the most popular social media platforms and how we can use them to connect with our ideal listener and accelerate our podcast growth. Today is all about LinkedIn for podcasters and my guest is Josh Steinley.

He is founder of Influencer Inc. an author of the seven systems of influence, as well as more than 300 articles for Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, and other publications. He also created the 60 Days to LinkedIn Mastery course, which is excellent, and he's an all-around nice guy. So this episode is packed with concrete tips to grow your influence on LinkedIn in a genuine way that actually sounds pretty fun. So I hope you enjoy this show. Now into my conversation with Josh. Welcome, Josh. Thank you so much for joining me. today. Thank you so much for having me on, Sarah. So you are the founder and the CEO of Influencer, Inc. Who are you serving over there? What are you guys doing? We work primarily with entrepreneurs and

executives and we help them with their personal brands, especially on LinkedIn. Okay. I think that you can offer some great advice to podcasters, especially podcasters who are doing as a part of, you know, a marketing service for their business. And you're also helping others develop their thought leadership on LinkedIn. So I would love to just combine all of this today. And you came up with a framework called the Seven Systems of Influence that I think could really help us out. Could you just give me a snapshot of what this is and then we can do a little deeper dive

on the different levels? Sure. And the story here is I started working in personal branding years ago. And over the years, I started to notice trends and things that were always present with people who are highly influential. And that's where this framework, the seven systems of influence came from. I just noticed that everybody who's influential does these things repeatedly. So the first system is vision. That's knowing what you want to do, having some sort of objective or goal or something you want to accomplish, figuring that out.

Number two is Genius Zone. So that's about you, what makes you special, your experience, your background. Number three is audience. So that's who you're talking to and really your ideal audience, because we can all talk to a lot of people, but there's an ideal audience out there for every person, for every business. Number four is content. So that's the actual content you're creating to reach your audience so that they take action. And that leads to your vision becoming reality. Number five is action plan.

So that's the actual plan. that you put in place. So, for example, if you're writing a book, you might say I'm going to write two pages every day. That's my action plan. And that would be a pretty simple plan. In order to get content done, we have to have some sort of plan. So that's system number five. And I call the first five the core systems. Without those systems in place, you don't generate any influence at all. The next two systems are still important, but they're not part of the core systems. And the next two, Number six is collaboration. So that's asking who can I work with or how can I work with other organizations or individuals

to expand my influence way beyond what it would be if I'm just working by myself. And then number seven is love. And when I talk about love as the seventh system, I mean passion, excitement for what you're doing, for your topic, for what you're covering. But it's also empathy for your audience or the people you're serving and it's goodwill. meaning you want to help people that you're providing content for, your ideal audience, you really care about that audience. If you don't have that care, that goodwill in place, people see through it and your influence

falls flat and it's short-lived. So you as part of your job, you're helping other people develop their thought leadership. What are you best known for? And how did you become an influencer in this area? It was completely accidental in my case. I started a marketing agency called MWI in 1999, and I ran this agency for about 13 years. And in 2013, the agency wasn't doing too well. It had really kind of struggled all along, but it always did well enough to keep it in business

and keep things interesting. But in 2013, I got the opportunity to write for Forbes magazine. And when I started writing for Forbes, I felt like I had found my calling. I loved writing and writing for this. large publication, this big platform, brought a lot of attention to me. And then it also brought a lot of attention to MWI. And that helped my agency grow in a phenomenal way. I can track over $5 million in revenue back to the articles I wrote for Forbes magazine. So it was really a huge boost for my agency. And I didn't know what personal branding was back then. I had never heard the

term. But as I wrote for Forbes, then that led to opportunities to write for other publications, which led to speaking opportunities, which led to a book deal. And soon people were reaching out to me and saying, how did you build up this personal brand? And I was saying, I don't even know what you're talking about. What do you mean? I just write stuff and people ask me to speak. So I say stuff and somebody asked me to write a book. So I wrote it. And it wasn't a conscious effort to put something together. It wasn't really part of a plan. But once this all happened, I realized I'm on to something here. This is really helping my business. And then other people started to see that it was helping the business. And they started coming and saying, hey, can you coach me? Can you teach me how you did what

you did? And I realized, I need to write something down. I need to put a book out or I need to blog about this or I need to launch some courses or something. And so I started looking in how to do that. And that's where the second business influencer Inc. came from was an effort to put out services and tools and information to help people build their personal brands. I've read that you've said, you know, you will become known for what you focus on, but if you don't focus, you won't become known. And I know, I think when you started writing for Forbes, you were kind of just writing about everything. So when did you realize that you needed to focus? Yeah. When I started writing for Forbes, the editor told me, hey, just write about whatever you write about on your blog, but now it's going to be

on Forbes. I don't know how close of a look he had taken at my blog, but my blog was about all sorts of stuff, just whatever I was interested in that day I would write about. So one day it was about entrepreneurship, another day it was about marketing, another day it was about whatever. And so that's what I did with Forbes when I first got on is I just wrote about whatever was interesting to me that day. And after a few months of that, I realized, I'm spending a lot of time writing and I'm having fun and I'm getting good feedback. People do like my articles, but what am I doing this for? I'm not getting any business from it. I'm not getting anything really out of it other than the experience. And I started to look around at what other writers

at Forbes were doing. And I noticed all these people write about one thing and one thing only. Whatever their focus is, that's what they stick to. And there was another Forbes editor who had written an article and he said, here's how to be successful as a contributor. And this was his article. And he said, go out and slay the same dragon every day. And he said, this is what the best writers do. They choose a dragon and they stick to slaying that dragon every single day. And I thought, maybe I need to focus a little bit. And I also thought, you know, I run a marketing agency. Maybe I should be writing about marketing. Maybe I'd get some results if I wrote about marketing. So that was a shift in thinking for me. I started to write articles about marketing, and I wrote primarily how-to articles.

I told people how to do what we were doing at my agency. And I found that this was the magic topic, because when I put out those how-to articles, people would find the articles when they wanted to do those things I was writing about, use those marketing tactics. They'd read the article. They would say, hey, this is in Forbes. This is great content. But you know what?

We don't really have time to do this ourselves. let's look into this guy who wrote this article. Maybe he can help us out. And then they would find out that I had an agency and they'd say, oh, great, let's just go hire his agency and just have him do it. And so the credibility of Forbes combined with that how-to content led to all the leads that we were getting. It's not like I was writing articles and saying at the end, hey, I run an agency,

you should hire us, come give me a call. It was they just liked the content and then they would figure out from there who I was. and that's how they would call the agency. Yeah, I think the same can be applied exactly for podcasters. The successful podcasts are the ones that niche down get specific, and the ones that make money are the ones that focus on what is related to their business. And it's not all about sell, sell, sell, it's adding value like you did with those Forbes articles. Yeah, you can go broad if you're famous or you're, I mean, Oprah goes broad.

So she can do anything and everything. or Tim Ferriss or some of these really large podcasters, but they already have an audience, they already have a platform, and even they have a focus, but their focus might be, I mean, Tim Ferriss might be kind of entrepreneurship

and people who are doing exciting things in the startup world or something, and you can go really broad with that and cover all sorts of businesses and industries and things like that, but he still has a topic or a theme that he sticks to. But what I found in my experience is just, People listen to podcasts because they want to get a job done.

There's some information that they need. And so they'll go searching for a podcast to satisfy that need. Well, if you're out there talking about everything, then they're going to look at you and say, here's this person who is just all over the place. And here's this other person who focuses on nothing but the topic I'm interested in. Which one are you going to listen to? You're going to go with the person who seems like the expert, who seems really focused, because you're assuming you're going to get more relevant, helpful content from that person.

The vision part is, why do you have a podcast in the first place? Or what is the goal that is leading to launching a podcast? Is it because you have a business and you want to use the podcast to grow that business? Is it because you want to go work in radio and you think that the podcast is a stepping stone to that? And so there's some bigger dream or goal behind why you're launching that podcast. And that's what the vision is all about. The podcast is not the end in and of itself. It's a means to that end.

And that's what the vision system is, is figuring out what that end is going to be. And then the podcast is actually further down. That's really system for content, figuring out how do I produce the right content that is going to help me make that vision reality. The vision is finding your why and your goal. Yeah.

So if you want to adopt the Simon's Neck, thing of finding your why. It's that finding your why. It's your purpose. It's your mission. It's your calling. It's your objective. It's the goal. And it can be things that are smaller. It could be something big big. Maybe it's, I want to eradicate world poverty. That's my big dream. That would be a very big dream. Or it might be, I want to make it through the day and not kill my kids because they're annoying me. That could be your dream. And then you figure out, okay, well, what's my genius zone? Who's my audience. Okay, it's my kids. What's my content? What am I going to say to my kids today

to get them to calm down and do what I want them to do? I mean, you can go very granular with these systems of influence or it can be huge, big dreams and you're using it to accomplish those. Let's talk about the second part then, the genius zone. How do we find

our zone of genius? The trick is to step back and look at your expert zones. We all have a lot of expert zones. And this is what is challenging in this day and age is because we look at things that we know about and we say, well, I'm good at this and I'm good at this and I'm good at this. And this is where we often run into the problem of spreading ourselves too thin and saying, well, I'll just talk about all these things on my

podcast. And the real key is to take those expert zones, all the different things that you're good at. When I say expert zone, I don't mean you're the best at that thing. I mean, make a list of everything that you are halfway good at. Everything that anybody has ever asked you for advice on and also all the different characteristics or the things that make you you. For example, I speak English. So I would write down English on my list of expert zones. Now, anybody else who speaks English is like, you're not an expert on English.

Well, I'm not, but compared to somebody who doesn't speak English, I am an expert. And it's all relative. So I would write down on my list, English. I'm an expert on California because I grew up in California. I'm an expert on the United States because I grew up in the United States. I could say I'm an expert on Boston, even though I've only lived here for nine months, but hey, compared to somebody who's never lived here, I know a bit about Boston. And I also know about marketing from running a marketing agency and I grew up as a skateboarder, so I know a lot about that. These are all expert zones. So you make a huge list of all these

expert zones. And then you start looking at these and you start combining them and saying, what if I take this plus this plus this? Does that give me a unique edge or unique niche that I can focus on? So for example, I've run a marketing agency for 20 years. By itself, that doesn't make me special because there are, I don't know, 100,000 other people out there who have run marketing agencies for 20 years. It's not that big of a deal by itself. And I grew up skateboarding. So I know a lot about skateboarding. I used to run a skate shop. I was in the industry, but there are a lot of people who know that and know it a lot better than I do. So by itself, that doesn't make me unique either. But if I take those two expert zones and I combine them and I say,

who in the world knows more about skateboarding and marketing than I do? Now I'm down to a group of maybe 10 people. So I could say, I'm going to make that my genius zone and I'm going to go to Adidas or Nike, and I'm going to help them sell a ton of shoes to skateboarders because I know skateboarding and I know marketing. So that's how you get to a genius zone, is combining those expert zones. Okay. So we're doing sort of like a Venn diagram of areas of expertise and then picking the ones that interest us most, I guess. Right. So obviously I haven't chosen to do the skateboarding plus marketing thing. I've chosen to focus on LinkedIn and thought leadership and personal branding or to focus on influence and executives. So I'm overlapping different expert zones to form

these different genius zones that I focus on. And it depends on who my audience is too. So in my family, my genius zone is not personal branding and executives and influence. My genius zone for my family is, well, I'm the dad. And so I have to be a genius that being a dad. That's my genius zone. is instructing my kids, helping them learn, inspiring them, giving them access to opportunities, to educate themselves. So it's a different genius zone depending on the circumstances, depending on that vision that you have for that part of your life. Right. So your seven systems, this can be applied to all aspects of life, not just business. Right. So that sounds bad, right? The seven systems are for anybody in everything, in every situation. But, well, that is the

in this case. Yeah. Yeah. So you are a LinkedIn influencer expert. That's your genius zone. I would love to talk a little bit more about, I guess, our audiences and finding them in general, also finding them on LinkedIn. So in the past, LinkedIn had only wanted us to connect with people who we knew in real life. But this has changed. So who should we be connecting with? Yeah, it's funny because LinkedIn used to really push this that, hey, only connect with people you know and you have a relationship with. And now it's totally the opposite. They're pushing you in every which way to grow your networks and connect with all sorts of people. And that's good, I think, in one way, as long as people control it a little bit because you shouldn't connect with everybody or anybody.

And I used to do this. When I started out on LinkedIn, if somebody sent me a connection request and I would say, screen them out if I thought it was a bot or spam. But if they were a live human being and they just really wanted to connect with me, I would accept that request. And it didn't matter where they were or who they were or what they did. I just figured, hey, they're a human being. They want to connect with me. Great. And now I don't do that anymore because I've defined my vision. I know a little bit better what I'm trying to do on LinkedIn. And so I primarily connect with people that I feel like I can serve them. they can serve me and that ends up with a win-win relationship where we're both benefited.

So the first step, if you're just starting out on LinkedIn, let's say you have 200 connections and you're trying to grow that network, the first step would be to take your email database and upload that to LinkedIn and connect with all those people. Those are the people you do know and most of us will have a thousand contacts, maybe a few thousand contacts in Gmail or in some email database somewhere. and you can upload those and send an invitation to every single one of those immediately. And most of those people are going to accept that connection request because they know you. So that's the first step that you take.

Once you do that, that increases the number of second connections you have or people you're connected to that you're just one step removed from on LinkedIn. So then you start going through those second connections and start saying, all right, who are the people out there who I could help, they could help me, we could partner, Maybe we're in the same industry. Maybe we have similar interests. And you start connecting with those looser connections, still building up your network. And then the final group that you end up connecting to is really your ideal audience.

The people that you are selling to or that you really want to focus on with your content, those are actually the last people that you focus on because you really want to get those people to connect with you. And the more connections you have before you start connecting with them, the easier it is to get them to accept your connection request. Is that because it makes us seem more legit if we've got connections? Yeah. If you have fewer than 500 connections, it will show that on LinkedIn. And people are less likely to accept connection requests from people who have fewer than

500 connections. And if people know what to look for, they can see exactly how many connections you have. And so if they see 800 connections versus 8,000, they're much more likely to connect or accept your connection request if you have a very. 8,000 connections because they feel like you're a real person, you have this network, and there's some credibility that comes with having a larger network. You're just more trustworthy. If you only have 800 connections, they might feel like, yeah, this guy could have set up his

account a month ago and he's just been connecting with all sorts of people. I don't even know if this is a real person or a spammer in Nigeria or Russia or something like that. So there's more credibility that comes with having a larger network, especially when you're reaching out to people you don't know. And so when we do reach out, we can like send a request to connect and then write them a little message. What should we be saying in this message? Well, first, what you should not be saying is buy my product.

If you send a sales pitch in that connection request, it's almost certain that it's going to get rejected. You also should not send a connection request and then as soon as they accept it, then send them a sales pitch. That's also bad form. And some people will block you. They might even report you to LinkedIn if you do that. So really what you want to put in that request is something that's customized and individualized to each person that you're connecting with. That doesn't mean you have to spend 10 minutes on every single person's profile you want to connect to and find some tidbit of information and include that. But to say at least some basic things like, for example, we're working with a client right now who makes wood tables and he wants to reach out to interior designers.

And so we're helping him, and we helped him craft a message that he sends out to interior designers saying, hey, I'm a furniture designer based in Boston. I see that you're in New England, and I'm not going to send you a sales pitch. We just throw it out there. I'm not going to send you a sales pitch, but I would love to connect with you because I'm trying to build my network of interior designers. And we get really great response rates from that connection message. And we'll customize it.

So when we're reaching out to people in Boston, we say, hey, I see that you're in Boston. I'm in Boston. I'm a furniture designer. We make wood tables, no sales pitch. I'd love to connect. And that's it. Simple. If it's New England, we say, hey, you're in New England.

I'm based in Boston. And we'd love to connect. We make wood tables. But I'm not going to send you a sales pitch. I'm just trying to build my network here. We're very open about what our client is trying to do when he's trying to build this network or just get in touch with interior designers. But we make it just real like a normal human being connecting.

And again, we get great response rates from that. And anybody else can too. And how are you finding these ideal connections? Is it keywords? Is it hashtags? Yeah, we use sales navigator. So a lot of people ask, should I pay for LinkedIn? Should I upgrade?

And the answer is if you don't know why you're upgrading, don't upgrade. But if you're running into hurdles, for example, when you upgrade from the basic free version of LinkedIn. One of the benefits is LinkedIn expands the network of people that you can search for. So if you go on the free version of LinkedIn and you do a search, there's only a certain portion of the network out there that you can even see, that you even are allowed to see exists. If you sign up for sales navigator, you instantly get access to more people on LinkedIn, which means more people that are part of your ideal audience. So that's one of the benefits if you use it. So what we do for our clients is we'll go on sales navigator, but we sit down with the client first and we figure out who their ideal audience is.

And then we go on sales navigator and we start constructing a search query that brings back results that are that ideal audience. So in this case of this one client, he really wants to connect with interior designers, specifically in the New England area, because that's closer to where he is and it's just easier to develop a relationship. So we go on there and we say, okay, we're searching. for interior designers. We're searching for interior designers located in New England. And we will find other job titles that match interior designer because maybe it's not just people who say interior designer and their job title. There are other job titles related to that. So we figured out all the different job titles. We might in some cases screen out certain size companies. Maybe a client comes to us and says, hey, I only want to work with companies that are 5,000 employees and above.

So we'll restrict the search that way. So there are all these different criteria and sales navigator that you can use. And then it will throw you back all these search results. And you refine that process until you start looking through the results and saying, yes, these are all people I would love to be connected with. This is my ideal audience. And that's how we build that audience. And then we start connecting to those people.

And how do we attract people to us? I'm thinking specifically of like LinkedIn bios. What are some mistakes that you're seeing people making and how could we fix them so that the right people are finding us? So there are two primary ways to attract connections or attract people to you on LinkedIn. The first one is to show up in search results. LinkedIn is a huge search engine, just like Google. And I mean, not just like Google, but you can search in the search.

the search bar on LinkedIn, and people use that search bar a lot to find content, to find people, to find companies. And if your profile is not optimized, then you won't show up in the search results. They'll go find somebody else to hire or to work with, to partner with. So if you optimize your profile and you have the right keywords in there, if you have a complete profile, then that's going to increase the amount that you show up in those search results. Also, things like, having your profile just look decent when people come to it. If you have no photo or if you have a not very good photo on your profile, then people will come to the profile. They look at that photo and they think, if there's no photo, they'll just be like, okay, I don't even know if this is a real person and they'll just

go to the next search result. Or if the photo doesn't look very good or not very professional, then they'll say, I don't know. It really affects people's opinion. They judge the book by the cover. When I say professional photo, I don't mean you have to go out and spend a $1,000 on a super nice headshot. I'm just saying some basic things like it should be close enough. It should be well lit. You should be smiling, looking at the camera, just some basic tips. And so once you optimize your profile, you have a decent photo, you have a decent banner,

you have the right job title, you have a good bio that explains who you are and what you do and who you do it for. Once you have the basics in place, you're great on the optimization. You're going to show up in the search results. The other side of attracting people is the content that you put out. So a lot of people are on LinkedIn, but they're not active on LinkedIn. They're not posting. They're not commenting.

They're not engaging with the community there. And they're missing out on a huge opportunity because if you get active on LinkedIn and you learn how to post the right content, the right way, and it's not complicated, it's pretty simple, then you'll get a lot of engagement. You'll get discussions going. and you'll establish yourself as an expert. So if you're always posting on LinkedIn about a certain thing, then people will come to know you as the marketing gal or the computer guy

or whatever it is that you're posting about. And you'll start to attract a tribe or a crowd or a following on LinkedIn of people who want to read what you're posting. And they'll start sharing that content with other people. And whenever they engage with your content, it shows up on their feeds. So their followers see your content, even if they're not connected to you. And then people start reaching out to you and saying, hey, I saw your post and I want to talk to you about XYZ, what you're doing. Yeah.

So content is your fourth system. And I would love to dive a little bit deeper into that. You just mentioned that when your connections like comment, then their connections are going to see your content. Right. So that's another reason why you should build your network. Exactly. So if you're connected to 300 people and you post on LinkedIn, LinkedIn will show your post to a percentage of those 300 people. If you have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, it's going to also show that post to a percentage of those 30,000, but that's going to be a lot more people. So the larger your audience on LinkedIn, the more people are going to see your content. The more people who see your content, the more people will engage with your content. And when they engage, their network, see your content. So the larger your network, the better, all other things being equal. I mean, that assumes that you're building a good network with high quality people in it.

Now, I know what LinkedIn favors changes all the time, but I would love to talk about what's working right now. So are articles dead? They are, but I always hesitate to say this because by this time somebody listens to this podcast in two months, everything could have changed. So, but the history of articles is that articles used to be so good on LinkedIn about three, four years ago. You could post content in articles and it would get tens of thousands of views, maybe hundreds of thousands of views, and you would get so much engagement on LinkedIn. It was great. I mean, I was writing for Forbes and I stopped writing for Forbes and I started writing articles on LinkedIn where anybody can post because I was getting better results on LinkedIn than I was getting with my writing

on Forbes. That's how good it was. And then one day to the next, LinkedIn just yanked, the rug out from under us. And they just stopped showing the articles. So you would write an article and just nobody would see it because LinkedIn was kind of hiding it. And why they did that, I don't know exactly, but they did it. And overnight, articles were no longer a thing that you could really use to generate attention on LinkedIn. And all the attention went to posts in the feed, the short posts.

So I started writing the posts and I started getting attention on those. And that was really great for a while. And then, of course, it's like Gary Vaynerchuk says, marketers ruin everything. Marketers figured this out about the posts and they game to the system. But they figured out the system. And it got to the point where LinkedIn felt like they needed to make changes to how that system worked. And so what they did is they switched it so that people who are getting lots of attention on their posts didn't get as much.

much attention anymore, and people who weren't getting as much attention were getting more. So they kind of evened out the posts and how they were showing these posts. And for people who are doing really well on LinkedIn, getting lots of attention, it was bad for them. But for the vast majority of people who weren't getting any attention on their posts, it was great for them because it helped them to get more attention. So what advice do you have to help us craft posts that get high engagement? So one, if there were only one thing I could say about writing posts that, and this as kind of a quick tip, trick, tactic to get more engagement, it would be to start your post with a question.

And the reason why is because the lifeblood of getting attention on posts is to start a discussion. It's to get comments. You can write the most amazing post on LinkedIn and you could get a ton of likes of. on it, but if nobody's commenting, it's going to disappear and it will barely get any attention. And you can write the worst post, and if it gets lots of comments, tons of people are going to see it. It's all about getting those comments. And if you want people to comment, ask a question and not just a rhetorical question, but really ask a question that shows that you want people to respond to that post. Otherwise, people think, oh, he's just saying something and maybe it's something

that sounds good and is interesting. But when you start it with a question and then they see underneath that people are commenting on that, then they say, oh, yeah, I have an answer to that question, too. And there's a lot of people responding. I want to respond too. I want to get in on this discussion. And once you're able to create that, then that's how posts go viral. That's how they get a lot of attention. That's how they spread. Yeah. So the comments are what LinkedIn's looking at, not likes, not shared. They're looking for people commenting and engaging in that way. Yeah. And so also, when people comment, respond to those comments, that's a golden opportunity. especially if they ask questions in the comments.

So I'll create a post. I'll start it with a question. I usually end it with the same question as well, just to remind people that I want them to respond. And as soon as people start commenting, I jump in there. And if they're asking a question, I answer their question.

If they're not asking a question, but I can ask them a question about what they've said in their comment, then I'll ask a question because then I know they're going to respond and we can maybe get a back and forth going. And as soon as you get that back and forth going, and you have 10 comments going back and forth with a couple of people, all of a sudden you're up to 30, 40, 50 comments.

And LinkedIn sees that and they say, hey, this is hot content. We should show this to more people on LinkedIn. And then they start promoting your content for free in the feed. And that's where you get serious attention. Yeah. And so as you said before, all of your systems are building upon each other.

So you've got content, but you need to know who your audience is and what they want to hear about to write this content. And before that, you need to know what you want to be focusing on. Right, because you could be posting great, interesting stuff and people are commenting on it. But if it's not related to what you're doing, to your big vision, your big dream, then what good is it doing you? Sticking with content, just a little sort of like nitty-gritty thing, I guess. But how should we be using hashtags on LinkedIn?

So hashtags are something that I wish worked better. But they just, it's not like you can put in a hashtag on a post and you're going to get a bunch of attention because you used a hashtag. Sometimes that can work if it's a trending hashtag and a lot of people are discussing something. So if there's something in the news that's going on, then maybe you can kind of jump onto a hashtag and get some attention that way. But generally speaking, if you put in a hashtag, really the benefits are not so much in that you get a bunch of people who are following the hashtag. and so they see your post, whereas they wouldn't have seen it without the hashtag. Usually the more useful way to use hashtags is to string content together. So, for example, if I did a series of LinkedIn posts, and so I used the hashtag LinkedIn tips

because I wanted people who liked one of my tips to be able to find all the other tips really easily using that hashtag. So then if they clicked on that hashtag, it would bring up a whole list of all the tips that I had posted. And so I'll use hashtags strategically that way. that helps me to get a little bit of extra attention on my posts, but it's not the difference between going viral or not going viral or anything like that. It's more of a, it's a way to help people out who are interested in my content and to make things easy for them.

Do you have any examples of people who are really doing LinkedIn right? Yeah. For example, Alan Gannett is one of the people who I love to follow. He makes short interview videos of all sorts of people. It's marketers, it's entrepreneurs, it's celebrities. He goes to all sorts of events and he finds these famous people or just interesting people. And he'll ask him one question and they'll answer that question and that's it. They're just these short videos. He uses a cheap phone to do them. But he asks really good insightful questions. He asks good follow-up questions and he gets interesting answers and he does a lot of these videos and they're just really interesting. And he's not selling anything in these videos. He has a company, but it's more, he's just talking about what he's

interested in, but that has helped him to build a following. I think he just passed 75,000 followers or something. And so he's got a lot of followers on LinkedIn. He's getting a lot of attention. And he's really helping out a lot of people with interesting, unique content. So I love that because he's putting in the time, he's putting in the effort to craft content that's really good. Now, Gary Vaynerchuk, he produces great content on LinkedIn as well, but a lot of his success comes from the fact that he took his audiences from Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram and everywhere else, and he drove them over to LinkedIn. And so you could call that cheating in a way. I mean, it's not cheating, but it's, he didn't build his audience on LinkedIn from scratch. He took a preexisting audience and moved it over or copied it over to LinkedIn. And, but his content is still good. even if he were starting from scratch on LinkedIn,

he would have great content and he would have a great big audience in no time. I just don't want anybody to go look at Gary Vaynerchuk and be like, oh, he's got 800,000 followers. It's not just because of the content he's produced on LinkedIn. It's what he's been doing for the past 10 years and all sorts of other places too. Alan, he's making videos. LinkedIn, you can now post a native video. How is Alan using this video?

Is he putting it in posts? Where is he sharing this content? Right. He's putting it in posts and it's native video. I'm glad you brought that up because if you post a video from YouTube, a link from YouTube in a post on LinkedIn, that will get ignored by LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't like links because links take people off of LinkedIn and they want people to stay on LinkedIn. So if you're posting video, what you need to do is have that actual video file and you upload that to LinkedIn and that's native video. And LinkedIn loves native video right now. Yeah, I heard LinkedIn that hates links so much that even if you link to your own articles on LinkedIn, they don't like doing that. Is that true? Yeah, even that, it's almost comical how bad links perform on LinkedIn. I mean, you can post the exact same content two times. And if you have no link, it will get literally 100 or 1,000 times the attention. But if you have the exact same content

with a link in there, it'll just get nothing. Nobody will see it. I mean, you can, can tell that they are actively hiding content that has links in it. Now, this might all change in two months. Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it's been working for the past few years at least. Yeah. And so I guess a way to share who you are in addition. So in a post, you like start with the question that you know your audience would be curious about. You speak a little bit about that and then pose the question again. But somewhere in there, I guess we could mention like, oh, on such and such podcast like this week. I talked about this. Like, what do you think about X, Y, Z? Like, we can fit it in that way without, like, linking out externally to our shows. Exactly. I mean, obviously,

that makes it people have to go do a little bit of work to find your content. So they're going to have to be really interested. And it would be nice if we could just put in a link there and make it easy for them. But you put in the link, nobody sees it. So there's no point in putting in the link. But if you just talk about it and say, hey, I was, I just wrote this article the other day in Forbes, I just released an episode of my podcast the other day. If people are really interested in your content, then they'll do the work and they'll figure it out and they'll find it. Yeah.

And I guess, I mean, we should have this information in our bios anyway, a link to our show, maybe even a page for our podcast. Right. And you can put links in your bio. They used to not actually link. It would just be the text and people would have to copy it and paste it like a caveman. But now you can put links in the text. and the last time I checked, it won't link it if somebody comes to that profile from their computer,

but if they go to it from their phone, it will be linked on their phone. And so it is worth putting links in your actual profile bio. Okay. So, Josh, what is your LinkedIn strategy? How much time are you spending on the platform? And I'm curious about how much we have to put into this, I guess. So there are all sorts of different levels here. And you could start with five minutes a day.

You can start with five minutes a week and you're going to get results. And now if you put in five minutes a week, obviously you're not getting the results of somebody who puts in five hours a week. But if you put in five minutes a week, you will get results. They will be positive and they will be noticeable. So even a tiny amount of activity is worth doing. The thing is that most people say, I'm going to do five minutes a week and then they do five minutes once and then they don't touch. for six months. But if you do five minutes a week consistently, schedule it in, put it on your calendar and say, hey, I'm going to go on LinkedIn once a week and I'm going to find one post

that is interesting to me and I'm going to leave a comment on that post. You can easily do that in five minutes. And if you do that once every week, you would see noticeable results. You would get contacted by people. You'd see an uptick in profile views. You might actually get a lead or something from something as simple as that. So you will notice that. Now, if you do five minutes a day, so much the better. If you do 10 minutes a day, so much the better. For me, because for the past two years, I've really been heavily focused on LinkedIn.

I've been writing a book. I've been doing research. So I've really been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn. And when I say a lot of time on LinkedIn, I'm saying three or four hours a day. That's a lot. Right. I mean, most people, they can't do that. I was doing that because that was my job essentially to be on LinkedIn.

So I saw what you can do with three or four hours a day. And yeah, you can do a lot on LinkedIn with three or four hours a day. But I didn't do that every single day. And sometimes I couldn't do that for a few weeks because of something else that I was focused on. And so I had the opportunity to experiment and say, okay, let's go to one extreme three or four hours a day. Let's go to the other extreme where I'm doing five minutes a week. And I'll tell you, if you can do. I would say if you could do 15 minutes, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you would get an outsized

amount of results from just that investment, 45 minutes a week, spread over three days. You would get a lot of results from that. And as you start to increase beyond that and spend more time, it's kind of that diminishing returns where, yes, you're going to get more results, but you have to put in more and more time to get results. And at some point, you start posting a lot and you just don't get that many results. I mean, you can post five times in a day. You're not going to get five times the result. But if you post once on Tuesday, once on Wednesday, once on Thursday, you're already probably getting 80% of the results that you could get on LinkedIn, even if you spent a lot more time.

Okay. That's great to know. So post Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then also comment on other people. And if that fosters discussion, then get. involved in that. Yeah. And one of the things I like to do is I've got the LinkedIn app on my phone like probably everybody else does. When you're bored and you have five minutes, you're waiting for a train or whatever, when you've got those five minutes, get in the habit. I mean, just try this for a month. For one month, whenever you have two or three minutes, pull out the phone, get on LinkedIn, do one thing and then put the phone away or just fill up that five minutes that you have with activity and just added into those corners where you're not really doing anything productive anyway.

And you might be surprised at the results you get from just taking those little chunks of time here and there. And now moving on to my favorite parts of your seven systems, collaboration and love. So back in the day when social media first became a thing, I was really into it, very innocent and just seeing the good and loving the connection. And I just have gotten burnt out over the last few years, especially in 2016, with everyone fighting and, you know, foreign countries invading various governments. I'm like, no, I cannot do this anymore. And so I am interested in the idea of social media for marketing purposes, but I'm more interested in, I guess, from an idea of building friendships and, you know, networking in a positive way and collaborating with people I'm really interested in. And so I think if I

get into that mindset of having it be about love and collaboration, it will help me bring me back to social media. So can we talk about collaboration? Yeah. And isn't that one of the great things about LinkedIn is that you don't have the politics, you don't have all the divisive stuff, the culture wars and all this. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's wonderful. It's just to me, LinkedIn is kind of a relaxing place to go relative to Twitter or Facebook. I mean, especially Twitter. Twitter's like it's just nonstop people screaming at each other and insulting each other. I can't bear it.

So I go on LinkedIn, I'm like, oh, this is kind of nice, you know? We're just doing work here. It's all professional. Everybody's nice. Everybody's supportive. Every once in a while you get somebody who's kind of a jerk or something, but it's nothing compared to Twitter. Yeah.

Yeah. So in terms of collaboration, one of the, What I love to do is form, friend, I just like to find friends on LinkedIn. That's the best form of collaboration I found is you develop real relationships on LinkedIn. And you can start by just finding people who have interesting content and start interacting with their content. And not in a manipulative way like, hey, I'm going to comment on this person's content every day and then they'll know who I am. And then I can reach out. And then we can develop a relationship.

And then like more just, hey, this person's got really interesting content. I have something I can contribute here. I'm going to do that and just start doing that and just see what happens, see what relationships develop. I've developed some great friendships and relationships with people I've never met in person, but we have similar interests and we like the same type of content. And what happens is that naturally, they start sharing your content or commenting on it and you're commenting on their content and you get into discussions and you're just helping each other

and supporting each other. And it's not a spoken thing where you agree, hey, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours type of thing. It's more just friends help each other, right? And friends are interested in each other. And people who have similar interests tend to discuss things and talk about things. So when you're active on LinkedIn and you form those relationships and you get that core group of people, you'll find that they'll always engage with your content. Almost whatever you post, they're going to leave a content because they'll see,

oh, Sarah, my buddy over here, she just post. posted something, I like Sarah, and so I'm going to go comment on her post because I know her and I like her and she has interesting content. And so you'll start getting these comments from your friends and of course, comments are the lifeblood of attention. So that helps you to get this critical mass, which then pushes your content out to a lot of other people. And you could do that in a manipulative, planned out fashion, or you could just have fun with it and just say, you know what, I like people. I like making friends. And if I get a business benefit out of it, so much the better. But really, I just like interacting with people and being human. Yeah, that's the easiest and, like, most fun choice, I think. Let's just be human beings trying to be good human beings.

Yeah, why not? Okay. The System 7, love. What are we talking about here? You know, this was hard to come up with because it's hard to put the word love into a business context and not feel just a little bit awkward about it. And so I struggled with System 7. I knew there was something that was missing. I knew there was something and I thought maybe it's mindset, maybe it's attitude or something. And finally I came down to I was like, it's love. Like that's really what it is because if you think about there have been some very highly influential people throughout a history. who didn't have love.

I mean, think Hitler or other totalitarian government leaders. Like, those people were influential, but they didn't love their audience. They weren't driven by love. They were driven by a thirst for power or wealth or whatever it is. And they were influential for a short time, but their influence fades and it's not long lived, and it's certainly not positive influence, the kind that we're interested in. So if you want to have enduring influence that lasts a long time and changes the world or changes the world for one person, then you've got to have that love component in there. And what really drove at home for me was I was talking to my business partner at MWI, Corey Blake.

And we're talking about parenting. We both have young children. And we're talking about our children and our parents and the way that we're raising our children. And he said, and we were talking about our imperfections and how we felt like. you know, we're, we don't know what we're doing, just like every other parent out there. You don't know what you're doing until you become a grandparent. Then you realize, like, all the mistakes you made and how you could have done it better, and then you end up just spoiling your grandkids for some reason.

So, but we were talking about this. And he said, you know what? If you know as a child that your parent loves you, it kind of makes up for everything else that they do wrong. And I thought about that a lot over the years since he brought that up. And I thought, that's really true, right? I mean, as a parent or anybody else, you can really mess up. You can be a jerk.

You can produce bad content. You can get your audience wrong, like all these things. But if people know that you're coming from the right place, that you have that love in your heart, you have goodwill, you can empathize with people, you're passionate about what you're putting out there, people will forgive all the other mistakes that you make with your content and stuff, as long as they know that you're coming. coming from the right place. And you see this a lot with politicians. I mean, people say, I mean, it doesn't matter which side you're talking about. But whenever we look at the other side

of politics and we think, oh, those people are crazy. How can they possibly vote for that leader? And you go and you talk to those people and you say, how can you possibly vote for this guy or this woman or this person who believes this? I mean, that's crazy. They'll say, well, I just feel like they want to help people. That's what they'll often say. I feel like they want to help. people. So we might think that person's crazy, but they feel like that leader wants to help them. And that's the key that keeps them on board is that they think they care. That's love. That's system number seven. So if you've got that love system down and you can empathize, you understand people, you can talk to them from where they are and relate to them, and you have that goodwill you really

want to serve them. It shows through people see that and you can make a lot of other mistakes and still win in the end. Well, thank you so much, Josh, for talking to me about influence and how we can be better, more influential thought leaders. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on before we wrap up? This is great. Thank you so much for having me on. I just, I love talking about this stuff. And if anybody wants to ask questions, they can reach out to me. And I'd be happy to respond and chat and talk and find me on LinkedIn, find my email address. I'm all over Google. I'd love to chat with you about these things.

And I have to mention your LinkedIn mastery course. I just wrapped that up yesterday, actually. And it was fantastic. So where can people find out more about that? Oh, yeah. If you do a search for 60 days to LinkedIn Mastery, then that will bring up my email course. You get an email every day sent to you with a, short, quick, easy tip. And by the end of 60 days, you'll be a LinkedIn master. Thank you again,

Josh. Cool. Thanks so much. This was a great chat. You're a great host. You ask great questions. And I can tell you've done this before. Indeed, I have. In fact, I've been interviewing people throughout my career at all the places I've worked, including Apple, Barclays, the New York City Council, the McGraw-Hill companies. I also have a background in journalism. And so I've been interviewing people for years now. Oh, and on podcasts, of course. So this is a skill that I've developed pretty well over time because I've had so much experience doing it. Do you want to improve your interview skills? If you join Podcast Launch Academy this week, I'm adding an extra bonus podcast interview mastery, which will help you build your confidence behind the mic and have you sounding like you've been

interviewing people for years. To learn more about podcast launch academy, head on over to sarahmicatel.com. slash course. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahigatel.com slash blank no more.