Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Hala Taha: Hala AKA The Podcast Princess Drops Wisdom at the Grow Your Podcast Summit
Episode Date: August 5, 2022Do you want to grow your podcast and dominate your social network? Listen to the top podcast host of Young and Profiting Podcast, CEO of YAP Media, and major LinkedIn Influencer, Hala Taha’s guest a...ppearance in the yearly Capsho + Grow Your Podcast Summit. The Grow Your Podcast Summit is a three-day event hosted by Deirdre Tshien, Founder of Capsho. At the 2022 Grow Your Podcast Summit, Deirdre interviewed 33 industry experts on ways to grow, monetize and scale podcasts. In this episode, Hala shares her career journey from radio to corporate to entrepreneurism. She chats about how she grew the Young and Profiting podcast, and she gives actionable advice about how to promote your podcast using social networks, advertising, and more. Topics Include: - Hala’s career journey and podcast growth - Dealing with rejection - How Hala grew her podcast - Content on different platforms - Advertising on podcast players - Hala’s LinkedIn strategy - Hala’s content strategy - And other topics… Sponsored By: Indeed - Claim your $75 credit now at Indeed.com/yap (Terms and conditions apply) Shopify - Go to shopify.com/profiting, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features The Jordan Harbinger Show - Check out jordanharbinger.com/start for some episode recommendations Resources Mentioned: YAP Media: https://yapmedia.io/ Hala’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Hala’s Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Hala’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/yapwithhala Clubhouse: https://www.clubhouse.com/@halataha Website: https://www.youngandprofiting.com/ Text Hala: https://youngandprofiting.co/TextHala or text “YAP” to 28046 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast.
A place where you can listen, learn, and profit.
Welcome to the show.
I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and
interview some of the brightest minds in the world.
My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday
life, no matter your age, profession or industry.
There's no fluff on this podcast and that's on purpose.
I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions.
If you're new to the show, we've
chatted with the likes of XFBI agents,
real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs,
and bestselling authors.
Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity,
had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship,
and more.
If you're smart and like to continually
improve yourself, hit the subscribe button, because you'll love it here at Young & Profiting
Podcast. Today on YAP, we're sharing my interview from the Grow Your Podcast Summit, which
took place in early July, and included 33 industry experts who spoke on how to grow, monetize,
and scale your podcast. I was interviewed by Diedri Tishin, the founder of CAP Show, which is an AI-powered software
that helps you write copy and promote your podcast.
My topic for this session was advertising for your podcast, the How-To for LinkedIn
and podcast player ads.
We chat about my come-up story and how I use LinkedIn as well as other creative strategies
to grow the Young and Profiting podcast from 3, 3000 downloads a month to 500,000 downloads a month.
I give tons of actionable advice for content and publishing strategies and I share tips that
you can start using today to grow both your social following and promote your podcasts.
Folks, they don't call me the podcast princess for no good reason.
I know my stuff and I let you in on all my secrets in this episode.
So all you podcasters and wannabe podcasters, be sure to crank up that volume and get your
notebooks out because I drop tons of knowledge bombs in this conversation.
And before we get started, I did want to ask that if you find any value from this episode,
if you're an up and coming podcaster and you learn something new,
the best way to repay me and thank me for giving away
my secrets for free is to drop us a five star review
on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform.
So go ahead, take a couple minutes
after the interview, drop us a five star review
on your favorite podcast platform.
And if you guys have other social media and podcasting advice,
you can always join my text community,
just text YAPYAP to 28046.
And you'll be in the community,
you can ask me anything.
And I check those messages every single night.
All right, so without further ado,
here's my appearance on the Grow Your Podcast Summit.
Hello everyone, this is a Grow My Podcast Summit
and I have Hala Tahar with you now.
Get this, Hala is the host of Younger Profiting Podcast
and this podcast is a top 50 podcasts
with over four million downloads.
Oh my gosh, and she's also the CEO of YAP Media.
It's a side hustle that was turned into a seven-figure business.
Wow, that's amazing.
Welcome to the Summit Huller. Thank you, Dejory. I'm so happy to be here. Yes, I'm so
proud because I know that your growth trajectory is just such an inspiration for all about
audience on this summit. So let's start there with your podcast and your journey,
getting it to this point. Yeah, so I started my career at Hot 97.
It was a radio station.
I started my career when I was just in college.
I interned at the radio station for three years,
learned everything about production.
I first honed my on-air chops,
recording commercials.
After the station, I became a blogger.
I had a number one hip-hop and entertainment blog site called the Sorority of Hip-hop and I I became a blogger. I had a number one hip hop and entertainment blog site called
the Sfority of Hip Hop and I led 50 female bloggers.
We had online radio shows on the side.
It was a precursor of podcasts.
That didn't really pan out.
I almost got to show an MTV twice, pretty devastated.
We got rejected a bunch of times.
And then I thought, you know, I'm gonna hang my hat up.
Forget about the entertainment industry.
I'm obviously not gonna make it, you know,
I didn't get my dream job at Haunted A7.
I then didn't get the show on MTV
after this like big website that I had.
And I like just thought I'd never get back on a mic.
But four years after being in corporate marketing,
I got the itch again.
And I started a young and profiting podcast.
And at that point, I had a lot of skills
under my belt to do it right this time.
A podcast were, you know, more mainstream. They were a thing. I knew enough to get one out the door and do it really well.
And here we are four years later. Number one podcast across all apps.
I've interviewed people like Deepak Chopra, Matthew McConaughey, have a team of 60 running a podcast network and a social media and podcast agency and
making, you know, seven figures a year.
So it's been amazing to say.
Yeah. So basically not landing those those MTV roles really did you a favor?
Yeah. In the end, you know, rejection is redirection.
That famous saying. It's so true.
I'm so thankful for all the news that I got.
I was rejected over and over and over again.
It wasn't until I started my own thing
that things really took off.
And this isn't quite what I wanted to ask you on this summer,
but I'm just so intrigued.
Like how did you pick yourself back up?
Because I think this is entrepreneurship, right?
Like you do get rejected over and over and over again.
So what did you do?
How did you, yeah, as I said,
pick yourself back up and just keep going?
Whenever something bad happens to me and I don't get something that I feel like I truly
deserved and I'm devastated, I tend to channel my energy into learning something new.
That's what I always do.
So when I actually got fired from hot 97 after working for there for free for three years
and I got fired for like a really stupid reason.
It was really unfair.
I was devastated, but I was just devastated for a couple of days
by, you know, I got fired on a Thursday.
By Sunday, I was figuring out how to create websites
and learn how to code websites and create, like, you know,
custom WordPress sites.
And I launched my blog, like the next week,
and it took off right away.
So just channeling my energy into something new.
When I got rejected from MTV, I went
and got my MBA. That set me up for a really nice corporate career. And that's the key.
To focus on something else, to stay busy, to be productive, and to realize that your failures
are a good sign. Because, you know, the more opportunities you get, the more opportunities you
have to fail. And so when you fail, that actually means that you got an opportunity that many people
would have been too scared to even get that opportunity to begin with.
Yes, wow, I love that.
Okay, now you have a huge audience, four million downloads, you've interviewed some really,
really cool people, as you mentioned.
But I'm sure that it wasn't, it didn't start out like that.
So can you take us all the way back to that point?
And can you talk us through some of the strategies that you actually credit for the growth of your
podcast from the point you started to now? Yeah. Okay. So when I first started, I decided that I
was going to promote my podcast on LinkedIn. And I specifically decided to focus on one channel
and not spread myself then by going on Instagram and Twitter and all these other sites.
I decided that the people who would like to listen to Young Improving podcasts are going
to be young professionals in corporate or young entrepreneurs.
Those people are mostly on LinkedIn.
And I did some testing.
When I first put out content, people on Instagram liked my clothes and my makeup and that kind
of thing.
And people on LinkedIn cared about my brain and what I had to say.
And so I really focused on LinkedIn for that point.
So I was consistent every single day.
I posted every single day, and I made it part of my routine.
So I used to have to commute from Brooklyn into the city to my job at Disney Streaming Services.
And I would write my post every morning on the train,
and I would do my engagement every day on the way back from work.
And that was my routine every single day and I made it a point to be like, your one job on the
train is to get out your post, right? And that is important, the consistency. So that's something
that I did want to kind of put a light on. And I also just leveraged the DM. So one of the first
things that I did was I just DMed every single follower that I had.
So I started with like 2000 followers today.
I'm one of the most popular influencers on LinkedIn.
I have 160,000 followers, very engaged community.
And so I just message everyone, hey, like what's up?
It's Hala.
Like, you know, we met each other ex-YZ a go.
Now I have a podcast.
Here's the link.
I'd love for you to listen.
And because I had all this experience, my first episode was great. And it took me months to put out my first three episodes. They were
masterpieces. People still love them. And most people are embarrassed of their first
episode, but mine got people hooked and people were really excited. And I got very good reception
from my episodes. And so I would just copy and paste copy and paste DMs. By episode two,
I got a message from who's now my business partner, Timothy Tan, my first
volunteer for the show.
And he basically was like, are you copying and pasting these messages?
Because you could be automating this.
And I was like, what are you talking about?
And so he taught me all about LinkedIn automation.
And he became my business partner.
And you know, now he owns 10% of, yeah, media.
And he taught me how to do automation. Then I started to do it at scale. So what I did was target Gary Vee's
followers. And I thought that Gary Vee had a very lookalike audience, meaning that
anybody who would like his stuff, his podcast, he talks about marketing, they're going to
like my stuff too. So I messaged people who liked and commented on his post through automation.
And I said, Hey, what's up? My name is Hala. I noticed you engage on Gary V's content. If you like his stuff, you're going to love my two. Let's connect.
Then nine out of 10 people would connect. I acquired like 10,000 of his fans. Then I was always a top
comment on his stuff with a hundred likes and got even more visibility because he I was always
like that girl on Gary V's post. And then I did it with Tony Robbins and Lewis House and like the
the next one after the next one. And all the sudden it with Tony Robbins and Lewis Howes and like the next one after the next
one.
And all of a sudden I started going viral and I didn't need to really do that anymore.
And I've used those same strategies to grow other people on LinkedIn as well now that I
have a social media agency.
So that's some of the ways that I grew, you know, as a LinkedIn influencer.
And then I actually leveraged that influence to get featured in podcast apps.
And that's how I blew up my podcast.
Wow.
Okay.
That was, it was ingenious.
Okay.
Okay.
So, stepping back.
So, for someone who maybe isn't as familiar with LinkedIn, like, in terms of content,
is there a difference between the content that you would put on Instagram, Facebook,
other places, and LinkedIn?
And what is the difference between that content?
And why is it so important to be as consistent as you were? Yeah, so content definitely varies on platform, so like the size of
your images, what type of content, videos, pictures, text only, what actually works on that platform.
And so whatever platform that you're using, you want to study the platform, you want to learn
all of its features, right? You want to really explore the different things and understand what
the app is actually pushing because a lot of these apps, they're pushing certain features.
So on LinkedIn, for a while, they were pushing polls, but they're no longer doing that.
And so we don't post polls anymore because they're not working. Now on LinkedIn, like
big portrait photos work. So I called them poster size. It's I think three, like by five is like the dimension.
And if you look on my page, you'll see that like most of our
pictures are always in this portrait size because the bigger
the real estate, the better it's gonna perform on LinkedIn.
An aesthetic picture performs better than a video,
performs better than a slider.
Just a short catchy caption and a static graphic
works the best on LinkedIn.
Now we've seen our most popular posts this year
at yet media got 100,000 likes and 8 million views on LinkedIn.
And that was actually a text post.
And so we are testing text posts now
because we're like, why did this get 100,000 likes
and 8 million views?
And so sometimes things change and you need to try to see,
like, well, is this a trend?
Is this just a fluke?
Should we lean into this?
And that's how you got to go about it.
Wow.
OK.
All right.
So you started on LinkedIn, and then you
mentioned that you did blow up on podcast players.
And there was another human strategy
that you used to grow your show on podcast players.
Can you talk us through what it is and how you discovered
actually advertising on podcast players?
Yeah, it's a really cute story.
So I started growing my influence on LinkedIn two years ago,
let's say I had like 60,000 followers.
And that was a big deal at that time.
Like the biggest influencers had 60,000,000 followers.
Like 100,000 followers was like so much on LinkedIn, right?
And so I was getting some notoriety at a little cloud
and I started doing some research.
I was thinking, you know, how can I leverage my following
and cross promote with other podcasts, anything?
And I'm talking about anything.
So I cross promoted with Good Pods,
which is like a podcast rating. I worked
with pod bean, my hosting provider, and tried to get like cross promo with them. I worked
with Audrey and they wrote a blog and just all the anything podcast related. I'd shoot
them an email, hey, what's up on the biggest podcaster on LinkedIn now. I wasn't called
the podcast princess yet. I was about to say that, but that wasn't my name yet.
So I was like, I'm one of the biggest podcasters on LinkedIn now.
And I'd love to promote you on LinkedIn in exchange for you writing a blog,
in exchange for you featuring me and your app, featuring me on your website.
And so I did that constantly.
And I would just always be looking for new podcast brands that I could reach out to
and become this podcast influencer within this niche. And it worked. People always said yes because I really did have
something unique. There wasn't a lot of podcasters on LinkedIn. And so I had that community.
It was engaged. And so I actually looked up cast box at one point. And I saw that they
were looking for Twitter influencers. And that was they had a whole website about how they're
looking for Twitter influencers. And so I emailed them had a whole website about how they're looking for Twitter influencers.
And so I emailed them and I was like,
hey, what's up, I'm Hala, I'm not a Twitter influencer,
but I'm on LinkedIn and I'd love to collaborate.
So they said yes.
And they sort of promoting me
to their international community every month.
And I would do like a review solicit
and they were really happy with my results.
And so they literally sponsored me for like five or six months. And my podcast just took off like I and they loved it too because the listeners
stayed and retained on their app. So they thought it was like a fruitful collaboration.
And the lady's name is Valentina at Casbach's now. She's one of my closest friends. And
she like I always I told her the other day. I was like, you like made me a podcast superstar
because you believed in me and featured me in your app.
Then I started doing the same thing with player FM, with pod bean, with podcast repub
like all these different apps started to feature me, stitch your featured me.
And my podcast just took off.
I had really stagnant growth for a long time.
I was way bigger than I seemed.
In fact, I always feel like I am way bigger than I seem.
I'm always punching above my weight.
And I went from getting 3,000 downloads a month
to 10,000 downloads an episode to 500,000 downloads a month.
And now it's crazy.
I can't, sometimes I, I, I still growing really fast.
So it's just been an amazing red.
That's amazing.
And do you think in, because how long ago would that have been, do you think
approximately?
So the cast box thing was started two years ago. And now I have 235,000 subscribers on
cast box.
Wow. So just blew up. And do you think that same strategy could work for others if they
were like listening to you and like, I'm going to do what she did. Do you think that it
could work again?
So the lesson that you want to take from this is to think outside the box.
I had no idea what I was doing.
I was just like, I know, I want visibility and I have something to leverage.
So the lesson is, grow something that you can leverage, whatever that is.
Grow a social platform, a YouTube channel, whatever it is, a community, a text community,
an email list, anything that you can leverage,
take that and trade that with other people who can also share your message to their audience.
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That's the lesson because it's not that you can necessarily do this anymore. Now I do media
buying as a profession and I actually took all these relationships from the people who sponsored
me and I sell these opportunities to my clients because they're actually very expensive to do
or not very expensive, but they cost money.
So it's like a typical run will cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000.
And you usually have to do it every month if you're going to do it, right?
And so usually it's networks like Wundery and I Heart
who are buying these opportunities for their original content podcasts.
So for the average podcaster, it's out of their league.
It was out of my league when I was a podcaster.
It's only because I was innovative and found this little loophole before everybody else
did, right?
And it's because I knocked on so many doors before I found that opportunity.
I was stagnant for a long time, but I kept trying and trying and trying until I found
something that worked.
I love that.
That is such a great lesson.
And so it's so applicable for everyone watching this.
So thank you so much for sharing.
If people want to learn more about what is that you do and about
yet media, how can they do that?
Yeah, so the best place to go is
yetmedia.io.
And we've got all our services there.
I also launched a new podcast network.
So if you get over 10,000 downloads a week,
come talk to me.
We have a new podcast network that is absolutely crushing already.
Amazing. Wow. Okay. So what I wanted her to share with us in this video was really just go through and deep dive in her strategy.
Like what did she do? Almost step by step to use LinkedIn to grow her podcast. So how are over to you?
Please share with us everything you can. Yeah, sure. So, why don't we split it up in a couple different things? First,
let's talk about frequency. So, LinkedIn is the type of platform where you want to post at
least five times a week, if not every single day. And I would say post in the morning. So,
anywhere between nine and 12, that way people can engage on your content all day. So that's frequency.
You post every single day, be consistent.
Once you start, just make sure that you post every single day, even if it does bad, if
it does bad, just delete it.
That's it, right?
It's not a big deal.
Nobody's going to notice.
Okay.
So that's first things, first consistency.
Now let's talk about captions.
So LinkedIn likes broitree style.
So broitree style means that it's this line-by-line content.
You guys, if you follow me on LinkedIn,
just search for my name.
It's halataha.
You'll see that all my posts
are this line-by-line content.
People do not like chunky paragraphs.
People do not like to read
when they're scrolling on mobile,
reading chunky paragraphs is just really hard.
And your sentences will look like paragraphs.
So just think about just doing a couple lines.
You also want to start with a hook, so something that really entices them, and you also want
to end with a call to action, and you want to make sure that your posts have meaning,
right, and they provide value.
So stay away from promotional content for a long time.
You don't want to sell to your audience too quickly.
You want to be of service.
So make sure that you're educational, inspirational,
motivational.
Those are the types of things that you want to post
if you want to get traction on LinkedIn
and any other platform.
Now, the best and highest engagement on LinkedIn,
like Blyk's, comments, shares,
the most valuable engagement is a share, right?
So the more that your posts get shared, the more likely engagement is a share, right? So the more that you're post gets shared,
the more likely it's gonna go viral.
So you wanna optimize everything for shareability.
So whenever you're posting something,
you wanna think, would somebody share this,
would I share this?
So if there's a picture of you on it,
and you're dressed inappropriately, no one's gonna share it.
If there's a picture of you and you're smiling,
and you look professional, and people are gonna share it, right? And people love faces.
So big smiles, big eyes, white teeth, that's really important. The bigger the face,
the better a perform, okay? So I know I was pitting out a lot. I just know there's a lot of
things. The other thing is content types. So the bigger the asset, the bigger the piece of real estate,
whether that's video or graphic,
the better it's gonna perform.
You wanna stop the scroll.
Also, the brighter the better.
So be different standout, especially on a platform
like LinkedIn people are sharing external links
and it's really boring a lot of the times.
So the more that you stand out,
the brighter the colors, the more even controversial,
the better.
Again, faces, if you have a video, put a thumbnail that has a
face on it, it will perform a lot better.
If you have a picture, make the face as big as possible.
One face, I think, is better than many faces.
And that's really key.
So if you notice a lot of my posts and a lot of my clients, it's
just portrait photos.
And that does the best on LinkedIn with something that's
educational, motivational, inspirational in the caption
The other kind of hacks that you want to think about is don't post external links
Especially in the caption so most platforms they don't want you to go to another website
They want you to stay on platforms
So if you point to an external website, they're gonna deprioritize your post
So you can put the link in the comments or you can retarget anybody who liked or commented
in the DMs with your link.
That will be a lot better clicks happen in the DMs
that don't happen on the actual content.
I love that.
Wow.
So in terms of, you mentioned hook in the caption,
do you put any text on the images or videos that you post
as do you put any text hooks, I guess.
Yeah, so the thumbnail definitely should have a very few
amount of words, but something that's going to hook them in,
maybe a question, maybe something that sparks curiosity,
right?
And then captions are great, especially if you
want to be accessible.
Captions are always a good thing.
So definitely important.
I would say what's more important is your caption,
making it short, sweet, catchy and meaningful,
and making sure that your asset has content that's just, you know,
interesting and people actually want to watch.
Now, what I will say is videos on LinkedIn in general don't perform that well,
but something that people don't realize is that their impressions are counted differently. So on LinkedIn, a video view is when somebody watches your video for three seconds,
whereas the view on a graphic is somebody just scrolls by. And so it's a lot harder to get video views.
So you can basically like times it by four or so to know how many people actually saw your post.
And it's hard because people think like videos don't work
at all on LinkedIn, but really it's just counted
a little bit differently.
And you have to realize that it will always seem
like videos perform way worse.
Yeah, wow.
Okay.
And so you talked about the frequency of posting every day.
What was your content strategy?
I see in in terms of, you know, we talked a lot
about content pillars and did you have a content strategy
when you were posting personal LinkedIn around that?
I mean, it's changed so many times, you know?
But like, I think I would have, you know,
maybe three posts a week were more like motivational,
inspirational, personal stories.
Like if something happened to me at work or on the train,
I would kind of like share more personal things
that would connect me with my audience.
And so they'd felt like they knew me as a person.
And then two days a week, I would promote my new episode.
And so putting out micro content.
And here's the tips since everybody's a podcaster.
If anybody's liking or commenting
on your podcast episode, they're raising their hand
and they're saying, hey, like I would be interested
to check out the full episode, that's your opportunity
to then damn them and be like, hey, I notice you likes my microclip. If you want to catch the full episode, that's your opportunity to then damn them and be like, hey, I noticed you liked my microclip.
If you want to catch the full episode, here's the link.
And that's how I got a lot of subscribers.
So I'd re-target people who liked and commented on my micro content videos,
which were about like three minutes long.
And then we'd encourage them to listen to the full episode.
Love that so much, so much gold there.
Okay, cool.
So that was frequency.
What's the next part? Well, we went over frequency
We went over content
captions we went over
Asset types because I mentioned graphics are performing well again polls are not working well on LinkedIn
So stay away from them sliders aren't really working well on LinkedIn
It's really those big static posts text only posts have a little bit of momentum right now, and videos.
So those are the three things that you should pay attention to.
The more shareable, the better again,
the more shares, the more likely you're gonna go viral.
Even a ton of comments,
because people can kind of fudge comments now,
LinkedIn doesn't really care that much about comments.
So you could get hundreds and thousands of comments
and knuckle viral is all about the shares, okay?
The next thing I'm gonna talk about is publishing strategies.
So people don't realize that publishing is just as important
as the actual content.
And what I mean by publishing strategies is the way that you engage
and get other people to engage on your content.
So one of the first things that I did when I first started
getting influenced on LinkedIn is I decided to team up with my competition.
I was like, who is an upcoming podcaster that's coming from my neck right now?
It was like Mark Metrie at the time, Quentin Alums, like Jordan Perris, all these guys that
were bubbling up and also podcasting or doing similar things.
I said, let's join a WhatsApp group.
Let's have a monthly mastermind call.
Let's change exchange strategies since
for both doing LinkedIn and podcasts.
And let's support each other's links.
And so I got all these podcasters in a WhatsApp group.
And I just had some simple rules.
I was like, listen, if you post something today
and you post a link, you got to share on everyone else's link.
And I looked it up and LinkedIn's turns with service.
And it's not against their TOS. It's not against terms of service, but engagement
pods. So I encourage everyone to start your own engagement pod because you want people
to like and comment within the first 30 minutes of your post. So I got all these other
influencers to do that. Their audience was very similar to mine. Their audience started
to see my stuff. It made me even bigger, made me even go more viral. So start your own
engagement pod, make sure people are liking and commenting within the first 30 minutes of you putting up
a post. If you have a team, have the team liking comment, if you have a family that will support
you, have your family liking comment, it really does help. And it helps kind of boost your
visibility in the feed. So publishing strategies are important. The other thing is like the timing,
pay attention to your timing, and then also responding
to your comments.
There's a trick though.
You don't want to respond to every comment.
There's some psychological things going on in the comments.
If you respond to every single comment, people are going to find it and be like, they're
going to think, oh, she is like on it right now, and I'm like too embarrassed to comment
because she's like actually reading her comments right now.
That's one reason why you don't want to respond
to all the comments.
The next reason why is because people are gonna be like,
oh my gosh, I think the conversation is over
because everything's responded to.
And they don't, so you wanna leave
the last five, 10 comments unanswered at all times
because then people will keep commenting.
We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think hashtags don't work that well in LinkedIn. You want to keep it to like three.
You also don't want to overdo it with very popular hashtags because actually more people
will see your post, but less people will engage.
Your engagement rate will go down and you actually won't get boosted in the feed.
So you want to kind of own a hashtag.
So for example, I use the same three hashtags.
Two of them are branded.
One of them is one that I'm owning and that's podcast.
So I basically own the podcast hashtag on LinkedIn.
I do it for every single post.
And then I have YAP, which is my brand and younger profiting,
which is my podcast.
So a couple branded hashtags,
maybe one that you try to own and you always use
is another tactic.
So awesome.
Okay, and then talk us through your whole DM strategy,
because this was another way that you really blew up.
And you shared one way with us, which
is as people are commenting, liking, hey, DM them,
and go like, so that you did that,
do you want to listen to the podcast episode?
What, how else did you use DMing on LinkedIn?
There's so many different ways to use a lot of the different features.
I'll just talk about some of the things that people aren't realizing.
The other thing I'll say is that automation is against terms of service.
I did it when I was first coming out,
but I would not recommend that anybody do automation.
Now you've got to do everything manually.
You can get a VA or something like that,
but you have to be careful because you can't log in
from a different country or a different city.
It's pretty technical.
So what I would say is if you wanna get into this,
you've gotta really know what you're doing
and don't just do it without really studying
about it and understanding that you have to be logged in
from like the same city,
you have to stay under certain amount of actions
so you don't get flack.
And so automation is against terms service.
I do not recommend it.
It's something I did early in my career before I even knew
that it was against LinkedIn terms of service.
Okay, so just calling that out.
Now, in terms of like just general things
that you should be aware of,
number one is that LinkedIn is full of dead connections.
So one of the things that you wanna do
is you wanna optimize for active connections. And what that means things that you want to do is you want to optimize for active
connections. And what that means is people who have logged on to LinkedIn for the past six
months and people who actively engage, meaning they like, share, and they comment on posts.
Those are the people that you want to invite to your network because the last thing that
you want is somebody who doesn't engage because in your engage, Marie, is always going to
be down. So I run a social media agency for celebrity
as an influencer, some things like that.
And we always get different types of clients.
Sometimes people have no following,
which is the easiest thing to grow
and get a really active channel that goes viral
because you don't have any dead connections.
Some people have like 30,000 connections.
They used LinkedIn from 10 years ago.
They added people left and right. And those people aren't on the platform anymore.
You need to go in there.
You can get access to something like sales navigator, which is a software from LinkedIn.
You can see who's been an active for six months or more.
You can see who's in India, who's in countries that you don't care for, and you don't sell
too.
You can start to unfollow people who don't belong in your network.
That's going to be really key if you want to go viral because you need a high engagement rate.
So that's a key tactic that some people don't realize is that you actually need to unfollow people
so that you can get a better head start, especially if you already have a lot of connections.
If you don't have a lot of connections right now, it's a non-issue. You can just focus on active
connections. Now, where do you find the active connections? It's not just looking at follower lists. It's
looking at who liked and commented on recent posts of people
who speak about the topics that you speak about. And so think
about your niche, come up with a list of lookalike profiles. So
for me, it's like Lewis House, Jay Shetty, Jordan Harbinger,
Gary Vee, right? Those are the people that I targeted. Who is
liking and commenting on those posts? Sound those people and
invite, Hey, what's up? I noticed you're engaging on this Sonsos post.
That's my favorite podcast. I'd love to connect or oh, I noticed that you're engaging with Sonsos
posts. He actually just came on my podcast. I'd love to connect. Like then send a DM after they
accept and say, hey, thank you so much for liking my stuff. If you want to listen to my show,
here's the link. I'd love to like, you know, provide value
on your feed. Can't wait for, you know, to learn more about you and have genuine conversations
with people. I really got to know my followers and then they became my super fans. Some of them
worked for me volunteers and it everything just took off from there. So definitely pay attention
to your community. Wow, I love that. Okay. Now I know that you you've obviously used other organic means to grow your podcast. Can you share some of those with us?
Yeah, I think there's lots of different ways and a lot of them don't cost any money. So one of my favorite tactics is to guest on other shows.
So for a period of time, I went on anybody's show who asked actually this month, I'm going on anybody's show who asks for while I had
some criteria, you know, yet I've over 5,000 followers on one platform or you know, but now I'm just
supporting anybody who sports me, Jaldi style, and guessing on shows is a great way to get new listeners
because 50% of people who listen to podcasts, sorry, 50% of people in America do not listen to podcasts.
So when you're posting on social media,
you gotta remember that you're posting to 50% of people
who don't listen to podcasts
and most people don't listen to podcasts frequently.
But the people who do listen to podcasts
listen to six or seven at a time.
And so that means that if you guess on someone's show,
they might be interested to go find you
and subscribe and listen to your show.
And so, guessing on other shows is a great tactic
and it's a free tactic.
You just gotta find a swap.
Now, in terms of how you actually find those podcasts,
so basically what you wanna do is
you can go to something like listen notes
and you can look up your podcasts and see, and this is not entirely
accurate, because I know that they're not that accurate with me, but it's, I think it's
accurate enough. Yes. If you go here, you'll see what kind of podcast ranking that you have.
And then you can go look up other podcasts and see if they rank similar. If they rank similar,
you can use this as a leverage point and say,
hey, like we have the same global rank on list of notes. Why don't we have a podcast
swap? Or you can simply tell them, hey, I get a thousand downloads in episode. How many
how many downloads do you get for episode? If you're surround the same, you know, range,
we have a similar audience. Let's have a podcast swap, right? Now, the other thing that
you can do is a commercial impression swap. So basically what that
means, and I did this with Jordan Harbinger. So Jordan Harbinger's show is like five to eight times
my size at any given moment, right? So it shows much bigger than mine. So when he became my mentor,
we had an impression swap where I did eight commercials for his every one to promote my podcast, and we did an impression commercial swap. So that's a very creative way to get a commercial on a really big podcast.
So if you get 10,000 downloads, an episode and somebody gets 50,000 downloads, you're going to do five commercials for their every one and you'll do an even impression swap.
So that's a key thing. A lot of big podcasters do that. A lot of people don't really know about it, and it's something that up and coming podcasters can kind of replicate.
Wow, okay, this has been so, so cool. Thank you so much, Har. This is just invaluable
information that you're sharing with our audience. So if people want to know more about what
is that you're doing about yet media, and maybe even like what level do they need to be at to even have a conversation with you.
Can you share with us all those details?
Yeah, first of all, I think the never one way to thank me would be to listen to
Younger Profiting Podcast. I just put out an episode with Wim Hof today. It's an amazing
conversation. I'd love for you guys to go listen to my episode with Wim Hof,
then drop me a review on Apple Podcasts since I'm still actually growing my Apple Podcasts and trying to,
so please drop me a review on Apple Podcasts.
If you found value from this session,
that would be the number one way to thank me.
And to subscribe to the show,
listen to Younger Profiting Podcasts.
I interview the brightest minds in the world.
We unpack their wisdom for actionable advice.
And then my company, Yap Media.
So it's for CEOs, influencers,
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