The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 229 Adam Houlahan, The Linkedin Playbook Author

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Adam Houlahan, The Linkedin Playbook Author

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com thechrissvossshow.com Hey, we're coming to you with another excellent podcast. We certainly appreciate all of you tuning in and we certainly appreciate when you refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, sons, cats, cousins, all that sort of good stuff. Be sure to tell them to go to youtube.com

force.chrissvoss at the bell notification button. Go to iTunes, Google Play, and now on Spotify. Wow, Spotify. You can listen to the podcast and listen to the great music when you're not listening to the podcast. Well, there you go. Anyway, we have a most excellent guest as always on the Chris Voss Show, Adam Houlihan. He's all the way from Australia. He's an international keynote speaker specializing in social media forhan. He's all the way from Australia. He's an international keynote speaker specializing in social media for business. He's the CEO of a highly successful boutique agency, Web Traffic That Works. He lives in Australia's iconic tourist destination, the Gold Coast, Queensland, and he's considered one of Australia's leading experts in harnessing the power of LinkedIn for business.

Welcome to the show, Adam. How are you doing? Hey, Chris. I'm doing just fine, thanks. Nice, nice. Now, you're also an author, too. You've written several books. I think the LinkedIn playbook I can see on your website, available on Amazon, and social

media secret sauce. You've got another book coming up we'll talk about. Can you give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs? Amazon and social media secret sauce. And you've got another book coming up. We'll talk about, uh, can you give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs? Yeah. The easiest place to go is, excuse me, just straight to my website,

which is adamhoolahan.com. Uh, it's about to go a big, uh, upgrade, but, uh, what you,

what you see there is still, uh, still pretty relevant about me. It's, uh, we're just adding in, uh, a new just adding in a new flavor of it for 2019. Nice. Nice.

Get ready for 2019. Wow. We're almost there, aren't we? Jesus. Where did this year go? Man, I hate this age thing. It seems like the older I get, the faster everything goes, which they tell me, which includes my health. The faster it just goes. I get, the faster everything goes, which they tell me, which includes my health, the faster

it just goes. So you've written these two books. You love LinkedIn, I guess. You still think LinkedIn is a great place to be for social media. Well, it is, but it's not for everyone. So the first thing I always tell people is you know people say you know where should I be focusing my time and I say well you should focus it wherever your clients or potential referral partners and that type of thing are a lot of people say LinkedIn is really only

good for like b2b or you know business to applications, which I don't tend to agree with. Some of the most successful campaigns that we've got running right now are B2C or business-to-consumer type campaigns. I would say, though, that in the majority of cases, it's probably more – it's easier to generate good results in the B2B space. Yeah. You know, someone told me a long time ago, I think it was 2010, and they said basically when it comes to social media, Twitter is the bar, Facebook is your home, and LinkedIn is like your office.

And I thought that was a good analogy. You know, LinkedIn was very business oriented. It was all about, you know, business and connections and not very spammy because you had to actually have connections with people if you want to connect with them on LinkedIn. And, of course, Twitter is what it is, the cesspool or what it's become, a cesspool of noise and trolls. And Facebook, of course, has just become what it is, where your family and friends are there and people who send you webcam hooker invites. Yeah, that's a pretty in-depth and accurate analogy, I would say. It's, you know, 2010 to now,

LinkedIn certainly changed, you know, incredibly. Especially, LinkedIn certainly changed incredibly, especially I would put the line in the sand where it really stepped up into becoming a real powerhouse platform provided you know how to leverage it. It was about the time that, you know, Microsoft dropped $26 billion divided. So clearly at that point they, you know, were going to invest a lot of time and energy into it, and they have. And in most cases, I'd say there have been positive advancements that they've made,

other than, as we were talking about before the show, how crappy their groups are, were, still are, probably always will be. Probably always will be at this point for the for the things they're doing there um it's really sad and a lot of the groups were zombies for a long time but unfortunately they've taken the last vestiges of people holding it together uh great moderators like myself with great groups and they've just uh thrown it right into the shitter and and washed their hands of it i don't really know what they're trying to do or if they're trying to dumb down LinkedIn so that more people use it.

But it seems like the changes they've made to the rules are pretty amazing. But there's still a lot of great things. There's a sales navigator section of it. I still get a lot of great contacts from LinkedIn. I probably have the same problem you do. I'm maxed out at 30,000 people on LinkedIn. And so it's, I have to be really choosy and picky as to who I allow into my connections. And of course I have a lot of followers as well. But to me, I've just found

a rich resource of business and contacts and quality of people, much more so than any other platform on LinkedIn. So I'm a big believer in it as well. Yeah, and you're right. It doesn't matter who you are in the world, whether you're Richard Branson, Chris Voss, or Adam Houlihan, you get 30,000 maximum connections and that's it. It's a hard limit. They don't open it up.

But like you said, you can have a lot of extra followers. But, look, LinkedIn's really not about a numbers game. A lot of other platforms like Twitter and whatever are. But I'm not saying that, you know, having numbers of people is not good. Clearly it is. But its real power is really in the way that you can position yourself as, you know, an expert in whatever field it is that you tend to, you know, want to play in. And that's really done through content strategies more so than, you know, numbers of connections. So this is saying about, you know, really understanding how to leverage the power of it. It's a content platform and, you know, it takes, requires good quality content that's really targeted to a specific niche.

And that's what really gets you the traction. Yeah. And it's so hard for a lot of people to get their head around it. Even a lot of top social media influencers that I know just crap on LinkedIn and they don't they don't really get it they can't understand it because it's a little bit more complex as it should be since this business formatted then you know just like most fall people on Twitter okay yeah it definitely is and it's it's it's often interesting to see, you know, people who, you know, maybe put themselves out there as being very knowledgeable about LinkedIn. And it's clearly obvious, often, by what they're doing that they maybe don't know quite what they suggest they do uh and as an example i'll give you a very simple example is uh uh you know linkedin doesn't stop you doing this but um you know when you share um like a a link to an article

or anything on linkedin they're going to actually suppress it you know it's kind of like the if i could give it a you know something in context it's kind of like the instagram shadow ban so you you probably wear you know if shadow if instagram don't like you anymore for doing dumb stuff they just suppress your content so nobody sees it and and linkedin actually has a version of that as well wow they just bury you i know video when they came out with video I was getting huge views on video that I was posting up to LinkedIn they were very video friendly for a while I haven't seen it quite be as

juiced as it used to be what's been your experience with the video on LinkedIn well it depends on how you upload it so if you if you load a link to your YouTube channel then it's not going to get traction at all if you load a link to your YouTube channel, then it's not going to get traction at all. If you upload as what they call native video,

which means you basically upload it directly to the LinkedIn platform, like the actual MP4 file or move file or whatever you're using, then it definitely will get traction for sure. Yeah, and that definitely makes a difference the i i was just amazed at the huge and this of the views and stuff that i was getting when linkedin came out with video um and uh i actually started posting uh one thing i was doing was posting experts excerpts on the uh video of uh uh like the first five minutes of my podcast. I'm just getting huge views and huge subscriptions to my podcast. It was just pretty amazing. I'm just putting a teaser video for that.

And I'm sure that anybody else who's in business, if you want to put up videos of you and your podcast or you and your business, your product, your service, your brand, it's a great way to take advantage of that and really promote yourself. And the thing I like about LinkedIn, too, is most anybody who's really serious on there has money. There are clients that have money that they can spend. They're usually C-class sort of executive level type people.

You do have a lot of entrepreneurs on there. But they have money. As opposed to Twitter or YouTube. On YouTube, I'm talking to 10 to 15 year olds who aren't going to buy anything most times. And then

on Twitter, I'm just talking to some angry 400 pound man in his basement of his mother's home. And I say that being an almost 400-pound man, so take that for what you will. You know, in Facebook, unless it's my mom or something, she's not going to buy anything from me. So there's that. But yeah, LinkedIn has just been a rich resource for me. So there's that. But yeah, LinkedIn is a rich resource for me. I think I told you the story years ago where I ignored like a lot of social media experts do, experts in quotes,

that they're everywhere but LinkedIn. And I had a LinkedIn expert, someone like yourself who'd written books and talked about stuff, said to me, you know hey I don't understand why you're this social media rock star and everywhere you're big on social media but like you really suck like you have nothing going on on on on LinkedIn and at first I was kind of a little pissed off and then I like, well, everyone hates LinkedIn and blah, blah, blah. And then I was like, you know, maybe she has a point. Maybe there's an opportunity here. And so I said, you know, I'm going to sit down and I'll spend a week just digging through LinkedIn,

understanding it, mastering it, trying to figure out where all these people who tell me how great LinkedIn is, trying to figure out where this is, know what this is about and sure enough I did it now holy crap there's there's really good money and prospects and marketing and farming to do over here and to this day my phones they're in social media they're so three rock stars much of them don't get LinkedIn and they just have no idea. I tell them, I'm like, you have no idea what a beautiful tool this is. Yeah, you're right. But I think where a lot of people go wrong is that they try to treat it as an extension of what they're doing on Twitter or Facebook or, you know, other channels.

Whereas, you know, as you sort of said earlier, it's very much that space where there's people with money. They tend to be active, you know, for certain parts of the day. And they're very open to, you know, quality sort of conversations and very open to, you know, engaging financially if it's the right type of product delivered to them in the right sort of format. So it's, you know, like you said, you know, trying to monetise Twitter or YouTube or, I mean, YouTube, you know, probably the best way to monetise it is a big audience like you have

and then get paid for advertising from YouTube. It's a very, very different strategy than what, you know, positioning yourself with really high-quality solutions to problems is the way we kind of pitch it so that these people, you know, who are looking for solutions to those problems are quite happy to sort of connect and engage with you and find out what you're about. Yeah, and it's very business formatted. I mean, I don't, any other business format I've had, there's just a lot of spam that gets approached to me, a lot of weirdness of people that are like, you know, I get, you know, stuff, uh, Facebook, I get a lot of stuff from people from, uh, you know, the scammers from, uh, Africa, the Nigerians, they love me on

Facebook and friend me. And if by any chance I accidentally friend one of them or one of the fake profiles they made that they later changed who they really are. Um, then i'm stuck with that and going oh wow you know and so uh linkedin is is really i mean if i i would extol to anyone that if you have not gone and mastered linkedin especially if you claim to be a social media guru or you know a rock star and yeah i know social media and pay me lots of money if you have a master LinkedIn, you are missing out on probably one of the most richest platforms when it comes down to it of being able to deal with clients, market products. And the people you're dealing with, I mean, sometimes they're the head execs of Fortune 500 or 1,000 companies.

They're real people with real money and they've got budgets and influence. And that can make all the difference in the world for who you're selling to as opposed to, you know, I don't know, some YouTube 10-year-old to 15-year-old. I've had all these people say to me too, even Instagram marketing. I had somebody complain to me the other day that they bought Instagram marketing from Instagram influencers. And I was like, well, who were they? Well, you know, these girls that get a lot of likes. I'm like, honey, you know what?

No one's watching those girls to buy products from them. If anything, if their clothes are on, they're just watching those girls because they're hot. It's not like a buying consumer area. Most of them have what I call the pants-down audience, and I'm not really sure that they're, you know, there's like people sitting around with money going, I think I'll write a $1,000 check to buy that product because this young girl said I should.

Yeah, it's an interesting part you know phenomenon this new you know influencer marketing sort of uh where you know there's there's a sort of overnight influences the turning up exactly like you say but a lot of the time the um the the level of influence they have is questionable at best. Yeah. But often, like you just said, you know, yes, you don't want to be looking at things just based on the amount of views they get on content or whatever, especially if, like you said, if they're sort of younger, attractive girls,

because, you know, it can often be nothing about what they're the so-called sort of influencer in, more about, you know, guys can often be nothing about what the so-called sort of influencer is in. More about, you know, guys just wanted to check it out. And given there are a lot of girls who do really well. Like the makeup girls, they teach makeup to other young girls and I suppose some boys. But they sell targeted products. But some of the, I think the person was complaining to me. I was like, yeah, your brand has got nothing to do with girls in bikinis on Instagram.

I don't even know why you'd have those people trying to sell on the market. And I'm like, well, we heard that Instagram advertising with influence is really good. And I'm just like, well, not all the time. I mean. Well, yeah, I'd say the point there is, you know, just make sure it's with the right influencers that, you know, really are, you know, influential in a target market that is also your market.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's nothing like it. It doesn't work in that kind of influencer type sort of space. And even, you know, like numbers wise, I mean, there's just over 550 million people on LinkedIn right now. It's still one of the fastest growing platforms. It's like two new people joining two new profiles every second of every day. And LinkedIn's own internal goals are to have about 3 billion people, you know,

on the platform now, you know, I'm not convinced necessarily that they'll, they'll get to those heights, but, and, and maintain sort of quality, but, um, they'll definitely exceed a billion. I think the other thing I like about LinkedIn is there's a real international scale to it. I've liked that a lot about a lot of social media products. But having the international scale of where I can do business with people like you, I think we met off of LinkedIn. You're in Australia. I'm here in America. And, you know, being able to meet people, do business just like it's next door

and know people, work with clients around the world, has been a pretty rich resource for me. I've been pretty amazed about it. And I suppose this is a lot of stuff that you cover in your book. Yeah, pretty much. The LinkedIn playbook, which is the current one that's out right now, it's really more about how to set up a really high-quality profile, how to engage with people the right ways and, you know, generate a reasonable sort of revenue stream from LinkedIn.

The new one, which is coming out, you know, Influencer, which will be out in December, it's like the next level beyond that. It's how you really position yourself as that really, you know, international expert in something. And as you said, one of the real values is this, you know, borderless world we live in now. So, you know, as you said, I can be here in Australia and you're in the U.S. And we've got clients that we work with all over the world in Germany and Canada and the Philippines. It's Bali, a lot in the US as well. So if you can really position yourself as that sort of international expert, then you really only need to be on LinkedIn and with an effective strategy and you can generate a really high level pipeline of leads and revenue any day of the week.

And I think most people, you know, one of the reasons are is most people are on LinkedIn for business. Yeah. I mean, you go on YouTube to, I don't know, eat some lunch, watch some goofy, funny videos, watch people eat cinnamon Tide Pods. You know, it's not really the most business-formatted sort of thing. I mean, I think people try to do business videos and stuff on LinkedIn. They usually have just a low watch rate of business stuff, unless you're doing, I suppose, some sort of high quality content that I haven't seen yet.

But for the most part, it's tough to be successful in those if you have some sort of serious sort of thing and you want to do business. But LinkedIn has just been a gem for me. I've loved LinkedIn. Managing my own group, I built my own group from zero to 135,000 people. So I was pretty proud of myself that way. I've curated the group this whole time moderated it uh giving it lots of love um and up until recently where they took some of my powers away from me um i really enjoyed the format of it um but even then i'm hoping that some more powers

are gonna come back one of the changes they've been doing is changing the platforms of LinkedIn to kind of redesign it. And they've kind of cut away the main part of LinkedIn to redesign it and then come up with this other part that's currently being redesigned so it can just merge with everything. So that's been kind of interesting to see that evolve. Yeah, I hope that they the the way groups work and i openly say it's probably the the the least most valuable sort of um part of linkedin right now

um i know that they're they're sort of putting some effort into it uh to change the group formats but um time will tell whether they're sort of positive and people start engaging more. But, you know, as you're probably finding in your group, you're just getting a lot of, you know, spam for one of a, you know, a term or low quality interaction, probably the way to put it. It's very, very, very difficult to moderate that stuff out at the moment. Yeah, it's definitely been a challenge. For the most part, it was really good because a lot of LinkedIn would filter out a lot of spam. You had your group community that would do a lot of stuff. So where do you spend most of your time when you're in LinkedIn? What's your main focus?

Do you use the sales navigator at all? I think that costs about 70 bucks a month. So where do you spend most of your time when you're in LinkedIn? What's your main focus? Do you use the Sales Navigator at all? I think that costs about $70 a month. I was playing with that recently and exploiting it. Yeah, Sales Navigator is a great tool, and it's one, you know, in our training programs, it's, you know, we teach people how to really use it effectively. You know, you can really get quite granular in the way that you filter down to find the right type of people and, you know, once reach out and connect with them, but then, you know, track how you're engaging with those people. But, you know, that's one side of LinkedIn is connecting and engaging with people, but the other, as we said, is really around content.

So where I spent all my time, it's really around content creation and engaging with the people who engage on that content. Because as you'd see there's you know a video which is basically me standing at the beach which is what every video of me is and um talking about hey do you want you know do you want to work with me i've got i've got a new program and um you know i'm looking for a few people this is the criteria you could go on it right now and you'll see all these people saying yes i'm interested send me more information yes let's do it so uh you know if you if you know how to really kind of leverage it it's all through you know quality content and targeting that content at an ideal market it's not that you

need to get you know half a million views on a video you just need to get you know a thousand views of the right type of people and that can generate you a hundred thousand dollars yeah i mean when you're working with people who have money as opposed to people that don't i mean uh youtube has the same sort of issue where it has you know the target market for youtube is like uh 10 to 15 year olds so unless you're selling gum pop or or i don't know music of course i think does well with Viva but unless you're selling something that's targeting within that market you're you're gonna have you're gonna have our time selling it like basically you mean I want to send Jerry sell geriatric products on you know the words the adult

diapers might not be a good sell there it's all i'm saying exactly yeah my my nine year old uh she loves youtube she's uh you know she's she's on there playing around with uh you know music and she she's crazy about dancing and uh and makeup so as as nine-year-old girls tend to be uh and so you're right it's and i think the audience on YouTube is getting younger and younger. Yeah. In fact, recently when they were down for a day or half a day recently, if you read, my friends who had kids, they're like, our kids are losing their freaking minds. Their whole lives are over because YouTube's down for the day.

And I'm like, holy crap. Is YouTube the third parent babysitter of children these days? But evidently it is. I mean, even I, when I want to eat a meal, I actually sit down and go, oh, let's watch a quick video, and I'll watch some funny video or watch the news or something. And it's gotten to the point where I almost can't seem to sit down and have a meal without watching a video. It's like I'll actually sit down and queue up the video to eat a meal. And you start to wonder, like, how did I eat before this ever happened? You know, it's kind of like us taking phones

into bathrooms. We're like, how did we ever go to the bathroom without phones in the past? Like, was that possible? Was that something that we actually did in our archaic, antique world? Yeah, and it wasn't that long ago. It's, you know, we're not talking like 20 years ago. It was not even 10 years ago. But, you know, the world's certainly evolving and not necessarily always in great ways. And, you know, there's a lot of downsides to social media, let's be honest. But it's, you know, especially with the kids these days, it's, you know, one of the talks I do, you know, I travel extensively around the world.

And one of them is around, you know, keeping kids safe on social media. And, you know, all these little signs you've got to watch out for. I'm sure it must be worse in the US than what it is here, but there's a lot of trouble with kids at school, just they can't focus on their schoolwork. They're just addicted to YouTube and online gaming and whatever and got behavioural problems. It all comes from too much time on social media. So really, but, you know, compare that to LinkedIn.

It's just not, you know, it's just not like that. Kids are not going to play on there. We're not going to play on there. You know, we're not going to sit on LinkedIn while we have dinner watching business videos. So it's just a whole different world and that's the world I like to play in. Yeah, it most definitely is. My apologies, my dogs are having a little too much fun.

I've got Siberian hesties, so they're on it. So, yeah, so you usually work there. You create content on social media. And, of course, making call to action, I suppose, getting people to, hey, come work with me, sign up with me, and everything else. In fact, everyone should pull up your LinkedIn profile. And I think that's how we met. I was actually using Sales Navigator to find some people I wanted to have on the show. And I did some deep diving of people who are authors because usually authors, you know, they're usually pushing a book. And they're good people.

I usually have on the show. They've got great stuff because they want to pitch their book and talk about it. I think that's how I found you was through Sales Navigator. And it's been a really rich resource it's a little more expensive to use and it's kind of weird how they have two different apps for it two different messaging areas um but i'm liking my experience so far yeah and that's that's exactly you know interestingly enough a lot of the features features in Sales Navigator used to be in the free version of LinkedIn. And, of course, you know, when, again, you know, get back to the Microsoft purchase, they moved a lot of the free access into higher level programs such as Sales Navigator.

But, yeah, you're right. It can be a little bit clunky because it actually is a completely separate platform but you can link from there straight back to the standard LinkedIn and you're right it's about 70 odd dollars per month so you're only going to use it if you're really serious

about generating revenue or like for you it's a good way to filter down and find people around the world for your show. It's, you know, so that's worth 70 bucks. Yeah, most definitely. And you know, finding clients, you can really drill down like few things else with it.

And I think that's what's most impressive to me is that I can drill down through it, find the people that I want to talk to. And then from there I can, you know, the people that I want to talk to. And then from there I can, you know, decide hopefully what I want to do and do business with the folks. So it works out really good that way. I've been really impressed with it. So you got a forthcoming book you're talking about doing, I guess. Yeah, it's with the editors right now. So it's from first draft, it's finished, and it should be out in October.

Sorry, in October now, in December. And it's really the sequel, as I said, to the LinkedIn playbook. So it's really the process I use to position myself as an expert for a word on the platform and how exactly I go about generating, let's be honest, hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue through LinkedIn every year. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. That's the way to do it.

And it's really sad to me that a lot of my social media friends really treat it like a stupid stepchild Like you really but on the other hand I go, you know what? Yeah, you probably shouldn't go over there because I just like to have as much the platform all to myself The I can see you've got a lot of videos you got a lot of comments you have all the likes Do you find you have a pretty consistent audience in here where you know you're engaging the same people you're building a nice congruent audience of of a community that are people constantly coming back to you as well yeah exactly and that's the whole point is you know you're not trying to you know linkedin's

not about just spewing out content to the masses looking for the one percenters. It's about engaging with the right type of people. And the more people engage on your content, the more it keeps showing up in their feeds. So it kind of finds its home very, very quickly. And you don't need to be generating hundreds of thousands of views and comments and likes, you know, on content, you can see that one there today that there's a video on there right now. And, you know, I'm obviously not on LinkedIn myself right now, but I guarantee you that there's, you know, probably 10 people or more saying, yes, yes, send me more information about working with you today yeah the so one complaint I always hear from LinkedIn and I get this a lot in my mailbox which

I'm sure you do is this these these in mails that say hey I'm selling this pitch and they send you like four to ten paragraphs of data that no one reads and they asked for a call they're like can we get on the phone call and and have a phone call to talk about stuff and one of the problems with them is they're they're just sent to seemingly it seems like everybody there doesn't seem any qualification like some guy will be i don't know selling uh selling i don't know, SaaS software. And I'm just like, I'm not a SaaS company. Like, why would you market that to me? I don't, like, you're targeting, your qualification process really sucks.

Maybe you should ask if I'm into SaaS marketing before you pitch me and try and get me on a call. Do you find that sort of LinkedIn strategy works, doing a call thing that asks ask people they want to get a call with you or is that is that just way too shotgun sporadic and too much of a straight to be a file yeah well let me let me put it to you this way you know how many times do you think you've got one of those messages this year yeah and how many how many calls have you jumped on and added someone? Probably say zero, maybe one. And for me, exactly the same. I get that on a daily basis.

Interestingly enough, somebody did it to me yesterday where, unbelievably, it's something I am interested in, and I am going to jump on a call with them, but that's one for the whole year. So as opposed to you look at that post that I've just put up where I'm inviting people to say, if you're interested, let's chat. And you can see for yourself the difference just from one post. If you look back at the one before that, it'll be about the launch party for my book. Just saying, would you like to come to this launch party?

And I think so far 170 people have registered to come to that just off that one post. So this is what I mean. The content strategy trumps those dumb messages, those in-mails all day, every day. And like you said, the big mistake people make is, you know, making them so long. And 90% of, sorry, 85% of people are looking at those messages on their cell phones. So you can imagine how long that message is off on cell phones. You're just like, every time I've seen them, I'm just like, who does this? In fact, when I looked at mine, I think that I sent the different people. I try and tone it down, although I do try and put a lot of credibility and references in it.

But, yeah, you look at how the format is for a mobile phone. I mean, when my mom texts me more than a paragraph, I don't read that. And then she's my mom. Now, I am nice nice I love my mom so I just call her and go mom what what's going on but I'm kind of old world that way where I actually like to have a conversation talk to people from the human aspect as opposed to other people sorry if you're gonna use messaging strategy you should exactly that.

Keep it like a text. Keep it super short. You can put links in messages. So, you know, you should be linking them off to a landing page which has some more high-value content. But the message should just be, you know, enough to get people interested to want to go and have a look at the page. And if they're not, they'll move on. That's fine. But, you know, putting five paragraphs of copy on a message is, you know, nobody's going to read it.

One thing I recently started doing, and it's been working really well for me, is you're maxed out, right, with your 30,000 on LinkedIn? Yeah. I keep, I always, you know uh we'll go through and you know like everyone probably in the early days I probably accepted a few people that um you know I don't really serve well or they they don't serve me so you know we'll go through and just remove a few people so we can still add a few you know good good people but generally speaking if i looked at mine right now i think it's uh you know it's 29 970 something like that that's that's how i am

like i've started going back through uh my database getting rid of like 100 people uh especially people that like dead profiles where they don't have a picture that sort of thing uh and then getting rid of those people and then uh i've got like right now i have 2900 i think backed up invites the people i think are following me and so i recently started sending a promotional message through to them saying hey thanks for sending me the connection and all that good stuff. And, you know, let's talk about who you are and more. And by the way, here's my link so you can check them out. What's interesting is I've had two people yell at me about how I was spamming them

because I was replying to their connection. And I'm like, do you understand, you approach me first you open this door and she they're like they're like you're spamming people they haven't given you the the uh the the the the the thing that the uh the okay to do it i'm like no you actually did that when you connected with me when you sent me a connection you made it so that uh you know linkedin will uh give me uh the ability to email you back and i'm actually emailing people back and messaging them because i'm trying to find out which one of those ones i'm gonna let into my uh you know 100 spaces that i just opened And so I've had two dickish things.

Most people have been either ignoring it or they've been fairly nice and usually the nice people who reply to me, I've been letting them back into the system. So, you know, there's that. But, yeah, it's been kind of interesting. Some of the people that you run into that just have no idea what's going on on that platform and probably should buy books like yours and training like yours so they can learn how. The thing that really still surprises me of those 2,900 that you've got outstanding, I guarantee you there's not even 100 of that 2,900 who wrote a message to you, you know, saying why they wanted to connect. They've just hit the connect button and, you know, given no context as to why you should connect.

And, you know, those 100 or potentially even less are the ones who are actually going to get your attention to at least have a look at what they're about because they at least told you something up front. So, you know, if your audience can take one thing away from this chat today is just make sure you, you know, if you're going to send connection requests, just give a short message, one sentence, two sentences max of why you want to connect. You'll get a far better acceptance rate. You get a far better acceptance rate. You get a far better impartial understanding of what the hell that I called that person in the

first place. That's sometimes what I happen to do with my connections or why I'm interested in people is I'll reach out to somebody and be like, hey, we should be friends. And then when they finally approve my thing, I'm like, why did I want to be friends? And you know, sadly, I really have failed.

I think I should have done a better job, and I can see a way that I should have done a better job here. One of the problems I'm having now was I started at the fresh point where it was the latest people who had sent me the friend request. And I'm moving to the back. And so now going through that 3000, I'm in the four month area where people sent me a request four months ago. And I think they're struggling at that point to go, why did we follow this idiot, send him a connection request. And I think what my future strategy is going to be once I go through these 2900 is I'm going to make sure every day and I am doing that now with the fresh ones that come in. I get like five to 10 new ones a day. I make sure and

send those guys a message. So they're really sharp on the moment of why they connected with me, what their reasoning was, and hopefully there's a better chance to do business with me there. The next strategy I've got to work on once i go through these 2900 people that friended me followed me and trying to weed through them and find out who are the really sort of cool networking people i want to get to know and develop relationships with or the people i can develop relationship i mean for the most part it's been the people have written me back and being polite like thank you very much for responding and yeah it's a pleasure to meet you and i'm like okay except then um people have been shitty of course we just kicked and uh you're just like actually i was doing a test to see if i wanted to connect

with you and that's a definite no i think the next thing to do is trying to figure out how to mine my 30 000 followers um and maybe use some suggestions to how I can do that. How I can mine my 30,000 followers, maybe either with direct mail. I mean, I already published content on LinkedIn. I probably need to do a better job with it with video and call to action. But I don't know.

What do you, what do you think about delving into that realm of the database of people? Look, it's, it's definitely something you should do. But like you said, you've got to be really strategic around that. There's no point sending a, you know, a SaaS offer to someone who's got zero interest in that. You've got to filter down.

And, you know, one of the strategies that we use very, very effectively, like you, I'm connected with I think about 1,300 authors around the world. And we have a really sort of high-level strategy that helps authors, one, get their book to become an Amazon bestseller and then to leverage that authority through LinkedIn. And the last time we ran that campaign, of course, we could clearly make sure that we only sent that message to authors.

And it literally just said, hey, Chris, we really knew you were an author. So we said, hey, Chris, want to be an Amazon bestselling author next month? Reply and I'll give you the details. That was the message. That simple. And so, you know, in one week we put 10 people through that program at $4,000 per head, generated $40,000 revenue off, you know, one message. And, you know, as long as you really target the message to be of value

to that person, you can definitely get great results. But it's when people do that blanket stuff that you're talking about that it's just pointless. Yeah, you're just like, why would you want to do this? In fact, I've joked with people. I'm like, maybe you should come up with a better way to market then you wouldn't have to beg on LinkedIn for people to get on a phone call with you. And I'm really big on saving people's time.

Not only mine, it's just something I'm a dick about my time. It's just I don't want to waste some poor guy who's having schlep around on LinkedIn. I don't want to waste his time either on top of my time where, you know, he's got to be like, you know, I just wasted an hour with you. He has to, I don't know, cram some sort of sales out of me or something. I don't know. But yeah, it's been working for me really well. I've actually gotten a couple of clients off of the recent production I'm doing in LinkedIn

where I'm focusing on helping, contacting people who have contacted me and trying to decide if I want to give them my, accept their friend request and their connection. But yeah, it's definitely an interesting experience overall, really, when it comes down to it. And I'm pretty impressed with it. Do you see LinkedIn continuing to be with Microsoft, the real future of this, the most successful business social media platform ever?

Yeah, I don't think, you know, I don't think in this day and age that we're going to see, you know, a real competitor come out of the blocks now and take on Facebook, as an example, or Instagram. And I don't really see that that would happen, you know, for the business space for LinkedIn either. They're too established. They've got too much resources behind them. You know, a company the size of Microsoft can, you know,

can just, you know, outspend a competitor. You can't buy any competitors that come on. Yeah, and then you've got the, you know, the Googles of the world and whatever, you know, billions of dollars a year in revenue. And I saw the other day that Google's shutting down the Google Plus network. So I think, to be honest, I believe social media platforms will actually lessen more so than see new major competitors come into the market.

Yeah. And, you know, like I said, that a lot of social media people don't get LinkedIn, I'm kind of glad because there's a lot of space to really excel there. And I think, and I've seen people really excel on the platform there's a one african-american young lady who was an executive and she just kills it on linkedin she has got tons of likes and tons of comments i forget her name uh but she's like always the top of my my network list yeah and i've been bad for all the years that i really

haven't invested as much as I needed to in LinkedIn. I'm just getting around to it now. But hey, I've been busy. So there's that. Yeah, I think the person you're talking about is Bridget Heiseth. I believe so. That name sounds really familiar. She posts really brilliant content. And that's right. She's just found a niche. She's found a tribe of people that love what she's about, and she can almost post anything, and thousands of people will interact with her. So you can imagine the ability that she has to generate revenue

for whatever she's doing. And look, at the end of the day that uh you know when you just kind of put all the bullshit aside the reality is yes yeah we all we all want to be seen as an influencer we all want to give value to our our marketplace and to our people following us but let's just cut that out the reality is we all just want to generate revenue so um but we want to do it authentically and professionally. And LinkedIn is the place where you can do that. Yeah.

Uh, the, um, uh, in fact, I was just looking at your, uh, LinkedIn profile here.

I guess you had your birthday on October 15th, three days ago. Yeah, it was just a few days ago. Happy birthday. Belated birthday there. Uh, and what's interesting too, is we have 11,297 mutual connections.

So I guess our 30,000, about a third of them follow both of us. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. I actually saw that myself this morning. They're stalking us, Adam. They're stalking us. Yeah, just means they love what we say. I don't know what's going to happen. We might open a wormhole now that we've been on a podcast

together and they're going to be like, oh my god, we follow both of them. What do we do? Overload. So this sounds pretty good. So Adam, look, I could talk to you forever. We're going to have to have you on the show once again. Give me your plugs so we can have people find you on the interwebs. We'll wrap the show and see if we can't have you on again in the future,

especially when you launch this new book. Yeah, I'd love to. So December 15th is the target date, which was 14th for you. Australia, we're slightly ahead, so it's actually Friday morning here. So, yeah, look, as I said, adamhoolahan.com, that's the easiest place to find me. But if you really want to interact with me, LinkedIn's the place. So just message me on there, and I'll definitely get back to you. Sounds good.

It's been wonderful to have you on, Adam, and a pleasure to meet you, and I'm going to look forward to knowing you more. I'll probably find you on facebook too and send you a friend request over there if you're even on there you're on facebook yeah yeah i don't spend a lot of time on there but definitely on there and um once a day so you gotta balance the work life and then twitter's the bar so so uh thanks for adam for being on thanks for my audience for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys be sure to tell your friends and relatives please please refer the show if you can get a chance go on iTunes or Google Play and do review the show we'd certainly appreciate that especially you can say

nice things about it you can help employ the small beetles and hamsters to make the wheels go around and we can invest in things like better mics and better cameras and maybe a facelift for me so I appear better on camera. That might be best for a lot of you who have to look at me during the podcast. We appreciate you guys taking it. Also, we are

now on Spotify. Go to Spotify. You can listen to us there. When you're sequencing between Metallica and Air Supply, you can listen to us there. When you're sequencing between Metallica and Air Supply, you can listen to the Chris Voss show between those tracks. What an amazing technology we've been given. I mean, you can go from Lawrence Welk to Chris Voss show and then right over to probably the anger you're going to get

from listening to the show to Megadeth. Anyway, thanks for tuning in thanks to adam and uh we'll look forward to seeing you guys in the future thank you very much