Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPLive: Ask Hala Anything! | Uncut Version | Marketing

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

Hala hopped on Linkedin Live for an impromptu session where listeners and fans asked her about podcasting, linkedin growth strategies, growing your network and her life. Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

Hey everyone, it's Hala. I'm here doing an impromptu LinkedIn live because I had an interview and it got canceled last minute. So I figured I'd go live and if anybody has questions about LinkedIn or podcasting, I'm happy to answer them. So if you have any questions, just type them in the chat. anyway, I was going to interview Jason Pfeiffer today. He is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and was all prepped for the interview and then my internet crapped out. So I figured I would, you know, just come on here and answer any questions that you guys have for me. So I see there's lots of folks joining now. So we have Dana, Adam, Alexander, David, Tim, Iran. So many people all the way from Istanbul.

That's awesome. Thank you guys so much. So I'm going to just stay on here for the next half hour. Let me know whatever questions you guys have about LinkedIn or about podcasting. Any questions that you guys have, and I'm happy to answer them. So go ahead, type them in the comments. It's about a one to two minute delay on my side. So get to typing any of your questions.

I consider myself to be a LinkedIn. I feel like I know a lot more than the average person in terms of how to grow a following on here. I grew my following to 50,000 almost followers in a little less than, like, maybe in about a year I did that. So I really know how to grow a social media following on any platform. I did it on LinkedIn. I did it on Twitter previously to that. So it's something I'm really good at. So happy to answer any questions that you have.

And then also, I know how to launch a podcast. So if you're thinking about starting a podcast, ask me anything that you want. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. All right. So how do you intend to work towards a sustainable future with your podcasts? One way that I'm doing that is that I just got a sponsorship with a water company called Waakia, and they have a sustainable mission. What they do is they get water from this volcano in Hawaii,

and they actually give back to the community and they use like 100% recyclable plastic for any of their water bottles. So that's one way that I'm building a sustainable feature with my podcast. Other than that, I don't really have any plans in terms of being sustainable. Podcasting doesn't really do anything bad

to the environment in general. It's all online. I don't have to even travel anywhere to do my podcast. So I think I'm pretty sustainable with that. What do I think about video podcasting? I think video podcasting is extremely important. I started making all of my podcast video now, partially because I like to record the long form content,

put the full episode on YouTube, and then I chop up the rest for microcontent on LinkedIn and Instagram. I find that it works really well. I also find that with video podcasting, you get to kind of get a better connection with your guest. I find that everybody that I've done a video pod with, I actually have a better relationship with after the show. and part of my goals or wants in terms of podcasting is to make relationships with the people that I interviews.

So I actually really like doing video interviews because you get more of a connection. And props to Jordan Paris because he does video interviews, but he doesn't ever post the video, but he's the one that inspired me in terms of making better relationships with posting video. You end up just having a better conversation because you can see each other's facial expressions. And the guest tends to not just like ramble on and on because they can see when I'm ready to ask my Next question. How do you, best connection you made to explode your podcast? The best connection that I made to explode my podcast was having Robert Green on the show.

He is like one of the biggest authors in the world, but he has like a cult following. His episode went viral on every single platform. I think on SoundCloud, I had like 26,000 downloads. On YouTube, it got really good downloads. on Apple it got really good downloads. Everybody really loved that episode. And so he's just got this great following. So that was amazing.

He has never answered my emails or Instagram messages or anything since then. So I don't think he remembers me, unfortunately. But I really appreciated having him on the show. In terms of an actual relationship where, you know, we maintained a relationship. There are so many people. David Meltzer has always been a really great influence on me since he came on the show. J.T. McCormick is always reaching out to me and checking up on me. Richard Moore, Lila Smith.

These are my good friends now that I talk to like every day. So made lots of great relationships on the podcast. And that's one of the best things about being on a podcast. How do you grow products on LinkedIn? The key is really to provide value around your product or your expertise. So it's not actually to go ahead and sell anything. You don't want to ask anything from your community for about a year or even two years. The main goal is to get your community to trust you and to look at you like an expert.

So you want to provide content that your customers would find valuable. It doesn't necessarily need to be directly related to your product. It's just related to your industry. And any content that your audience, your potential customers would find value. That's how you grow a product on LinkedIn. It's more about becoming an expert and building a community that trusts you and building an engaged network. How about equipment needed to start a video podcast like cameras, lighting, act? So I would say that when you're first starting out, I would recommend there's lots of different mics that you can use.

I'm using a blue Yeti right now. So I'm actually going to upgrade my mic because I've kind of graduated from a Blue Yetty now. I'm a top 10 how to podcasts on Apple. I really should get a new mic. But so this Blue Yeti, it's about $150 and it will really be a great mic for like one to two years as you're building your podcast. You don't need to invest anymore in that. And then in terms of a camera, I just use a little video cam. It's a C290 Logitech.

I think that's what it's called C2922 or something like that. And it's a Logitech webcam. It's like 80 bucks and it works really well. And then in terms of lighting, I like to use a desk ring light. I think that works really well. I'll turn it on and off so you see the difference. So this is the ring light with the ring light on and this is with it off. So it just makes you look a lot brighter when you have the ring light on and it like makes your face look like really smooth.

So I would definitely recommend getting a ring light and you can get one for like 40 bucks or less on Amazon. Okay. Content is king. What other questions you got? What other questions do you guys have for me? Okay, what got you into podcasting? So I actually started my career in radio. I used to work at Hot 97. I was Angie Martinez's assistant slash intern for about three years. And I loved being in radio. While I was working at Hot 97, I had multiple online radio shows. Back then, this was about 10 years. ago. I was really young when I worked at Hot 97. I was still like in the beginning of my college years. And I had all these online radio shows. They didn't have podcasting back then. So you used to go to a studio and there would be like you could like record episodes and I would do it with some of the

younger DJs at the station. And I would be like a host and there would be a DJ and then like some other personalities. And we used to interview celebrities and things like that. And basically it would like stream on a website and you would tell everybody on social media, check us up. at 1 p.m., blah, blah, blah, we're going live, and then the episode would go on YouTube afterwards. So there was no such thing as podcasts back then, but it really helped to get me really interested in something like a podcast. So I learned how to do radio production and audio editing. And at that time, I was really focused on music. So I used to interview celebrities and things like that. So, and it was a much more casual conversation. But that's how I got into

podcasting because essentially I took a break from the entertainment world. I went into corporate and then I got bored in my corporate job and I felt like I wanted to go back to broadcasting and young and profiting podcast was a way to mix my business passions with my broadcasting passions and I put it all together and I had a different format focused more on business and education and edutainment as I like to call it and not about music or fashion or anything like that which I previously used to talk about. But that's why I started the podcast. It was always like a passion

and it was just kind of the natural progression of my career. What is the best way to use LinkedIn to channel branded content? I don't really understand that question. Can you elaborate a little bit? What type of prep and planning does it take to have a podcast? Do you set a goal and host weekly, monthly? Yeah. So I am very organized and very strategic.

So yes, there is a lot of planning that's involved. I have Hisham on my team who's responsible for targeting guests. And we do bookings and waves. So essentially what we do is we have a list of 40 people we're going to reach out to and we try to book for the next three months. And that's the goal. So for example, right now I'm booked until I think July. And so we're like scrambling because we want to get the next.

three months after that booked because I don't ever like to feel like I'm, you know, don't even know what my next interview is going to be. I like to know my next 15 interviews. So I record one interview a week and we have a list of guests that we target. And so the way that we reach out to them is we try to find out their email. There's actually extensions that you can use to scrape people's email off of LinkedIn. So that's a strategy that we do a lot. We also use contact forms via websites. We also track down. who our guest assistants are. And then another way that we reach out to guests is because I'm starting to have a really

good presence on LinkedIn, I actually just DM people and, you know, they see my profile and how much engagement that I have and, you know, they accept. So that's a lot of the ways that we get our guests. In terms of the planning of a podcast, we do so much research at Young and Profiting Podcast. I have a Shiv, who is one of my producers on the show. And then I have Peter, who's a researcher, and he also. helps us with our LinkedIn lives. And so usually what happens is about two days before the interview, my team submits the research. And I also do a ton of research. So I read my guest book, if they have a

book, I listen to their audio book, if it's in that form. I also listen to a lot of the different interviews that they have out there. I probably listen to maybe 10 interviews that my guest has had in the past before I actually start to even think about my questions. And, you know, I really pride myself on the research that I do on the show, and I constantly get guests telling me, oh, my God, you know everything about me. And I really do. And most of the time when they're talking, I know exactly what they're going to say because I've heard them say something along those lines in the past.

And I want to actually get that out for my listeners. I basically look at all the different content that they have out there and think about what I want my podcast to be and what I know their expertise is. And I try to pull that out of them. And then, of course, I think of questions that nobody has ever asked them because I do listen to their most popular content out there and then I know what nobody has actually asked them before or I'll dig deeper on a topic they might have talked about on another show and I want to learn something, you know, more detailed.

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coming onto my podcast. I do allow people to pitch themselves to Hasham. You can do that at Hasham at younginprofiting.com. But I will say that probably we only accept one out of 20 people who do pitch to us. And that's because I really am strategic about the people that I have on the show. I think one of the reasons why my show has become so popular so fast is because I can pick those experts on my show. And from the start, I had Dory Clark and Dr. Jack Schaefer, who were bestselling authors. Those were my first two guests. And because I have a high caliber guest on my show, like more celebrities and, and, you know, bestselling authors and CEOs, they feel comfortable to come on my show because, you know, Robert Green's been on my show and

Mark Manson's been on my show and, you know, the CEO of Scribe and things like that. So I definitely try to keep my guests at a certain level and that's actually strategic and so I'm so happy to introduce people to other podcasts that they can go on that are a better fit but for me I'm very strategic and I also really want my guests to be valuable to my listeners and so they really need to have a story they really need to have a specific topic I never just like bring somebody on to talk about their company or to talk about their life like that's not what I do I don't even talk about myself on the podcast so I hope nobody gets offended because the podcast is not even about me. It's really about providing educational, really super valuable content to my listeners.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. I really appreciate all these compliments. How to best use LinkedIn to advertise your products without actually asking people to buy the product. Again, this is all about quality content. And I think the missing piece here, that nobody has asked is how you actually grow your following to a network that cares about what you're talking about. That's step number one. It's actually not the content. Step number one is building a community that actually would engage in the type of content

that you would post. So how do you do that? How do you build a community that cares about the type of content that you post so that you have an engaged community? Because we've all seen those people who have 600,000 followers and two likes on their posts. obviously they paid for their followers or they had a big PR push four years ago and they never did anything with it. Those are the two reasons why you see people with a lot of following who actually have no engagement on their content. So in terms of building an engaged community, what you want to do

is you want to look at your competition. Is there somebody out there who you'd want to emulate? Is there somebody out there where you feel that they talk about very similar topics that you do and they're doing well on LinkedIn or whatever social media platform that you're trying to build, right? So for me, that was Gary Vee. Gary V has a podcast that's pretty similar to mine, and I feel that my listeners would enjoy his podcast and vice versa. And so I targeted Gary Vee on LinkedIn in terms of getting his following. So what I did as I looked at all of his posts, who is liking and actually commenting on their posts.

And what I did is I sent an invite to those people who are, liking or commenting. Hey, what's up? My name is Hala. I saw that you like Gary V's content. If you like his content, I think you'll like mine too. And I also mentioned that I have a podcast. So like his content and podcasts, I think you'll like mine too, hoping to connect, right? So nine out of 10 people accepted that friend request. Then my next message would be, hey, what's up? It's a Hala. I have a podcast. It's a top 10 self-improvement podcast on Apple. Our subject matter is enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of side hustle. My latest episode is blah, blah, blah.

You know, if you want to listen, check out the link. Let me know what you thought. And then after that, I would have real conversations with people. So after, you know, I bring them in and I invite them to connect, great. They're part of my network. I tell them about my podcast. Great. They know everything that I'm about.

The third step then is to be a real human and to actually care about the people who care about you. So the people who did actually take the time to respond to me, I then have a real conversation with them. They tell me they love the show. I have say thank you, you know, ask them about their life, understand what they do, and I actually care and nurture those relationships. A lot of people, they're like, how do you respond to every single message on LinkedIn?

You know what? I prioritize that time to actually connect with my following because it's important to me. So that's one way that you can grow your network. And the beauty of that is that because you're only following people who like and comment on your posts, you're going to have an engaged following. You're basically building your network with people who actually engage. engage on LinkedIn. A lot of the times people go on LinkedIn and they're only doing that to get a job. They get a job that they never log on again. You don't want those connections. So you don't want to just

blindly accept anybody who asks you to connect. You want to check, has this person recently liked or commented on anything? Because if they don't, you'll never going to get visibility on your post. LinkedIn is all about engagement. If you don't get engagement on your post within the first like hour that you post, nobody is going to see your content and it's just going to be a waste of time. So the first step in trying to build anything on LinkedIn is to get that engaged following. Yes, no problem. What other questions do you guys have? Let me know.

Let's see. Would you consider managing or a consult social media page for a business to build a targeted following? Right now, I'm not considering any opportunities like that. I work full time at Disney streaming services. And then I also have my podcast, which is a big undertaking. And so I don't really have time for anything else. Right now I'm doing this over my lunch at like half hours. So I don't have time to do anything else.

I am starting a small podcast marketing agency. And once I actually roll that out officially, I will let everybody know. But specifically on podcast marketing. What is the legacy that I want to leave behind? I just want to help people. Honestly, I'm not one of those people that like I have this concrete goal and I'm going to do X, Y, Z to get it. I'm the type of person that I just put my best effort every single day.

I put my best effort into this podcast and it's done well. I put my best effort into my career and I've done well. And so I just try to put great energy. I always want to put myself in a learning environment. I really care about being, you know, always learning, always getting better, always expanding my skills. I guess if I had one dream, I wish my podcast, and I don't know if it's going to be under the Young and Profiting brand.

I imagine that in five years or less I'll have the Halitaha show, similar to what Jordan Harbinger did, where he was on the Art of Charm, and then he had the Jordan Harbinger show, and now he's out of the box in terms of how big his podcast is. And so, like, if I could be on that level of Joe Rogan, Jordan Harbinger, Louis Hughes, I forgot how to say his name, sorry, but like these huge. podcasters, Tim Ferriss, they're all men, right? And I wish that I could be like the female version of them. Like, that's really my goal is like if I could be the female version of Tim Ferriss. And then I also want to write a book one day. I think I have a lot to say about rejection and

failure and overcoming those things and just talking about my journey and everything that I've learned with all these incredibly smart people that I've interviewed. So if I could write a book, that's one big goal. And then, you know, be an exception. podcaster that is like everybody knows and you know a self-improvement podcaster on the level of of jordan harbinger um tim bellew um like those kind of folks and be the female version of them i would be really like feel like i've accomplished a lot in my life so um hopefully that happens um i'm in the final stages of launching a podcast your tips along the way helped a lot great yeah let me know if you have any questions in in terms of a podcast favorite disney character that would be

Jasmine. I am Arabic and Jasmine was the only princess that I could ever relate to. So it's definitely Princess Jasmine. Thank you. What is the one mistake you made when starting out that you think actually helped you reach to where you are today? One mistake. So I don't know if you're talking about my career or podcasting. I have a mistake. So when I first started my podcast, the first three episodes actually were very, very hard to put on. I had a very complex format. What I would do is I would interview two to four experts and then I would chop up all the audio and I would piece it all together and I would narrate in between. And while they were actually phenomenal episodes, they were a lot of work. And so I couldn't scale. So everybody thinks that my podcast is two years old. But really,

it's like a year and a half old because the first six months I only put out three episodes because I had this extremely complicated format and I didn't have a team at the time. So I would say that once I started with weekly episodes, I quickly realized like, you know what, I'm not going to scale. I'm never going to be popular. I cannot keep an audience engaged if I'm putting out one podcast per month and I'm working my tail to the bone to try to put out these episodes and they're taking so long. So I actually decided that, you know, I was going to just do a regular kind of interview format and I I just made sure that I did really good research and I could still bring out the information that I wanted. It just took more upfront prep instead of me doing so much post-production.

And then I was able to do one episode per week. And then, you know, the download started like really skyrocketing at that point. And that was, you know, how I ended up getting a big following. So I think that if I stayed at that, you know, crazy format, first of all, I would have killed myself because it was so hard to maintain without a team. and second of all, I would have never grown in an audience. So I think that was an early mistake. The other thing is when I started, and I don't know if this is a mistake or this is good, you could take it both ways.

I wish that I had prepared like five episodes in the clutch and that I had content before I actually released. So like I would just like, I was kind of like, I don't know how to explain it. Like I was putting out, I would record an episode then three days later put it out. Like I never had anything in the backlog in terms of episodes. And that's really stressful because it. if you get sick or if, you know, you get really busy and you can't record that week or something, you have a technical difficulty, then you don't have an episode the next week. So I ended up, you know, doing like doubling interviews for a while so that I did have a backlog. And now I'm back to

this like, you know, getting episodes out by the skin in my teeth because my dad got sick and my whole family got coronavirus and I had to cancel like four episodes in a row. And now because I used to have like four episodes in the backlog, now that's really catching up to me. And I'm back at like one episode per week, you know, where I'm just kind of putting out episodes as they come, which is cool because you can talk about current events, but it's not cool because you feel so stressed out that you don't have an episode this week and, you know, you need to record one and then you need to produce it right away and edit it right away, and that can get a little stressful. So I would say if you are thinking about starting a podcast, you definitely want to have

a bunch of episodes in the backlog so that you give yourself that buffer in case emergencies do come up. I would love to be on your podcast, Asia. I do about one podcast interview per week on somebody else's show. So you can email me at Hala at young and profiting.com. And I'd love to have you on the show. My dad actually passed away. So thanks for asking. I'm holding in there.

So thank you for asking. My dad passed away. He was sick prior to getting coronavirus. So it was a really slippery slope. And, you know, we did everything that we could. And he was such a fighter, but he didn't make it. And, you know, my dad is, I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for my dad. And that's why I feel like I can be so positive about him because he's just instilled so much good, hard work ethic in me.

And he was so positive to me and he was such a good dad. And I feel like if I was sad about it, I would be disrespecting him because he was such a great dad and he lived such a great life. And I'm so blessed because he was my father. And literally I will, every day, every second of the day, I'm just so thankful that I had this, spectacular man as my father and I could never be sad about that so thank you for asking no it's okay thank you for asking um okay so I have I have to hop off I'll take one more question if you guys want to um ask me one last question if not I'm going to hop off who is my biggest inspiration that would be Jordan Harbinger is a huge inspiration to me in terms of a podcaster um he

is so great. He's so talented. He also really cares about research, and he just puts on a phenomenal show, the Jordan Harbinger show. I had him on my podcast, so if I could pick one podcaster to emulate, it would be him. Yeah. Okay. Awesome, guys. Well, I'll do these more often. I think that it seemed like everybody was really engaged. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll catch you. I'll go live next week, so I'll catch you then.