Episode Transcript
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Hello, welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today we are talking all about LinkedIn audience growth and actually getting customers from that audience with Sam Brown. Sam has over 100,000 followers on LinkedIn and is the authority. You know, when I asked on social media, who should I talk to? Who's the absolute expert in content generation and audience building on LinkedIn? Everyone said Sam. And so this episode is packed with information. We only talk for about 40, 45 minutes, which is just as long as I could do an episode. And Sam dropped enormous knowledge bombs and gave us a real succinct 30 day growth plan for our LinkedIn audience growth, which, if I ask anyone in the b two B space right now, hey, what's the channel that I should go to for growing my business?
Everyone says LinkedIn. So I think regardless of your industry or the type of business you run, there is an angle for you to grow your business on LinkedIn. And in this episode, Sam delivers the goods with showing us exactly the steps we should take to do that. I hope you enjoy this episode with Sam Brown.
We touched on this before we started recording, but I think it's worth touching on at the very beginning, is fucking everyone is talking about LinkedIn in the B two B SaaS circles, agencies and services, everyone saying, whenever it's like, hey, how do I get more leads? The answer is always LinkedIn.
You are one of the authorities that I would go to for an answer on this. Is, why is that? And as we're recording here on June 3, is that still going to be the case six months from now?
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Okay, why is that? Well, there's two things that spring to mind for me. One of them is it's where the money is right.
We're hearing so much about virality on TikTok, and of course, Instagram is like, many years into being, like, a mature market for social media, but your 30 plus 40 plus 50 plus people and deep pocketed people are not spending their days scrolling TikToks.
LinkedIn is kind of social media for grownups, so that's a huge part of it. And then the other thing is that the algorithm is relatively generous, especially compared with, say, meta. TikTok's a different thing where that's better, but in a different way. But I would say in terms of, if we compared all social media platforms, LinkedIn is pretty good in terms of how much reach, how much engagement you get when you post organically.
I anticipate that in six months or twelve months, we will see more pay to play. We're seeing the beginning of it already with a lot more ads coming through.
But I'm hopeful that LinkedIn will realize and look at the past examples where pay to play has been introduced and basically spelled the beginning of the decline. I think of Facebook in particular, way back when I built a business page up, as we all did on Facebook ten years ago, we got it to 20,000 followers and it was great. We would get a decent, I don't know, five to 10% of those people seeing every post. And then one day they flicked the you got to pay now switch and it became instantly terrible.
And now, in terms of organic, it's completely useless and has been for many years. So, so far, so good with LinkedIn. I'm hopeful that we've still got a few good years in it yet.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it is, from my perspective. I agree. I think it's still, like, on the way up. I agree. It's got some time left. Like, I would give it at least a year, which to me means it's worth investing in. Right? Get a year out of a channel, that's fantastic, and you learn something that could then be applicable to the next channel, whether that's YouTube or Snapchat or God knows, whatever it's going to be. I think we have enough time to learn, get some actual value in customers and take those learnings and go apply them to whatever the next thing is after that.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I mean, mastery of any social media really does translate across things like the hook on LinkedIn, meaning the first two to three lines of the post that is very much a parallel to the YouTube thumbnail, for example, you realize the value of get people in the door and that's going to work. And obviously that's good stuff for your own websites and so forth as well. In many ways, getting really good at social media is becoming a skilled copywriter, conversion optimizer, and on and on. It's like twelve things around. Writing, conversion, human psychology, design.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Love it, love it. Okay, cool. So I think a cool way to really like jump into the weeds of what we want to talk about today is I said the phrase like a therapy session so I can share a little bit about how I'm approaching LinkedIn, because I think I'm, you know, whatever, 50 or 60% of the way there and then I'd love to get some feedback from you. And the goal of kind all of this is for it to be generally applicable enough to our audience, who are mostly like software founders trying to grow a business.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Sounds good. Let's do it.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Cool. Yeah. So just generally. So my business where castos were a podcast hosting platform, software as a service, I post on LinkedIn. Well, I think this is a good first thing.
I know I should have one thing I post about, right? So I have like a thing that you want to be known for and like an ICP that you post for, is that right? Or can I say, I want to post for this and I want to post for this and I want to post for this. And those are kind of spread across different Persona types.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Every single client I have wrestles with this. You know, I only do coaching with entrepreneurs and I wrestle with this.
We are by nature creators, creative, and we have varied interests. Right? So we're not like 20 years into our career as an insurance adjuster or something. We're like, this is how I make money.
And with that comes optionality, which is really fun in life, but in social media, it creates confusion. So I'll try and give you the most succinct answer to this possible.
The first thing is yes. Ideally you want to say, so if it was, let's take you, you want to say, I am the b two b podcast guy. So I tell my clients, you want to be the insert thing guy or insert thing girl.
You really want to. At least, even if you have more than one thing you write about, you really want to have a primary niche and ICP. And essentially the thing that you want to get paid on from LinkedIn, that's the insert niche guy or girl thing for you. It's a no brainer that you would say, okay, I'm going to talk about the benefits of podcasting, how to get started with podcasting, where podcasting is going heavy emphasis on education and essentially answering the questions of your ICP. And you could list them out, whether you go on quora or you go on Reddit to actually identify those questions, you'll know them, as will your listeners and your clients. But if you want some reminders and you basically create a library of those answers that address each of those questions, and you can essentially just cycle through those answers. So let's say you did 50 q and a posts, you get through all 50, and then you start again at number one. And that is literally what I do. So I don't want to go too much off on a tangent about that, but you don't have to constantly show up with a brand new idea about, say, b two B podcasting for the rest of time. You just need to kind of get some content, like three months worth, and then you can put that on auto repeat. Sorry, there's a second part to that as well. You definitely can also say, you know, I'm a. I run a b two b podcast agency, and I am also really interested in psychological triggers and personal development.
That's okay. I do that. You know, I've been very reluctant to go, I'm the LinkedIn growth guy because actually I'm nearly 20 years into my career as an entrepreneur, bootstrap entrepreneur.
I've built a handful of sites. I've built a few to six figures, one to seven figures. I'm working on my first SaaS, so there's a lot there I almost kind of lead with. I'm an entrepreneur, and I can teach you how to succeed on LinkedIn, but then I constantly touch on those other things I'm doing because that's personal brand, right? If I'm just a LinkedIn guy and I'm just the source of LinkedIn information, that's not a personal brand. That's just like a textbook.
I want people to be showing up and going, I really like how Sam writes, and it's always different stories and interesting insights and unique stories. So that's personal brand, it's education, and then what's going on in your life. So I hope that isn't too contradictory. You definitely do want to pick a primary niche.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: No, that's fantastic. So I have really two things that I want to write about. One is podcasting, and within podcasting, that's a big old topic. I could write for years on podcasting, but also I do a bit of coaching and advising to startup founders. And I like talking about myself as a founder and an entrepreneur and a coach. To help them grow their business and be more successful.
I'm glad to have the grace to be able to talk about both because they're both really important to me. And I think for everyone listening, they've probably been in the hamster wheel at times where they're like, I can't write another fucking post about what microphone you should use. I just literally can't. I'll go crazy. And so to give us the grace of saying, cool, you can go off on this tangent for a few days, but you got to come back home eventually. Yeah, I think that's really great.
Um, the other thing is this idea of, like, 50 days or 90 days worth of content. And this is super counterintuitive to me, where, like, most of our marketing at castos has been, like, content marketing and SEO, where, like, you can't ever write about the same thing twice on a blog. Um, but this is a little more analogous to, like, a YouTube strategy where we did our YouTube series around the end of the year, where the guys there are saying, like, about half of your content should be, how to start a podcast in 2024. Best podcast gear for 2024. You know, they're recycling all of this content, and you're saying the same kind of thing of, like, because social media is a little more transient, your audience is not going to see your post for 90 days or for more than 90 days. So just starting over relatively, at that point is. Is reasonable. It's a. That's a pretty big mindset shift for a lot of people.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: I think it is. Yeah.
It's never really. Well, you know, I guess we. We touch on it, but I don't think it's highlighted as much as it should be that when you're starting out on social media, there's a real sense of, like, wow, what am I signing up for? Like, am I. Am I gonna just have to create? Am I gonna have to just constantly come up with new ideas? And obviously that's gonna get harder and harder as I use up all the existing ideas.
As you say with YouTube guys, if you follow a fitness YouTube guy, they might do something about, here's how to do better pushups.
I'm sure that they would do something with a slightly varied title every few months on that same topic. It's not like they do one video on that one time back in 2018, and then they think, okay, well, push ups are off the menu from this point forward.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Done it. Yeah.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: And even. Even social media. Social media or LinkedIn specifically, more so than that. You really. I mean, I've done posts where I probably leave it about eight weeks between and before I start the cycle again. So I literally probably have around about 50 at this point that I cycle.
And you know, I just posted one just before the podcast actually, that I probably spent, I would say 8 hours creating this post way back when, let's say a year ago. And what happens is every two or three months when I repost it, I will read back over it with fresh eyes. I'm three months better at LinkedIn. I might change the COVID I might change the hook, might change the title, et cetera. Change a few words here and there, shorten it, maybe lengthen it. So you are constantly refining what you're already doing, similar to a blog post where you might realize, okay, this needs to be longer and I need more h two s or whatever, but at the end of the day, the hard work has been done and you're just kind of tweaking around the edges. And yeah, in terms of, look, even if your audience has seen the post multiple times, they're not going to begrudge you doing what you're doing. It's been long enough that it's no problem. I have people in the comments say, oh, I really love this one. This is a classic.
They're fine with the fact it's come up again and again. I think if you were doing it on a every two weeks or something, you're going to get called out, but there's a lot of room to move and it makes the whole thing so sustainable as well. But now I would say 90% of my stuff is reposts, 10% is new stuff that I introduce into the mix, basically. See how it goes. If it goes well, it gets added to the sort of greatest hits. If not, that's okay.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. So I'm sitting here thinking I have some content that performed well, that is evergreen, because this is not like, oh, I'm announcing a new role or something like that.
So if folks are starting today, we can go back to our LinkedIn analytics history and say, okay, this one did well. I like this one. I can imagine posting this one later.
And if you've been active on LinkedIn at all, you got a dozen or 25 posts probably already that in a couple months you could post again. Is that how we might think about starting like this?
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So early on, obviously you're not going to have 50 greatest hits.
I call it the forever 50. That's the goal is to get 50. My friend said, yeah, but I just want to have a forever 14 right now. And I think if you've got ten, if you've got ten, that you can post regularly.
Even that is going to make it so much easier to get up and running. So another question I get asked a lot is how often do I need to post on LinkedIn? And there's a lot of pressure to post daily or every weekday. And I just think that's crazy that you're not going to create something meaningful that you feel good about if you're having to show up and create something every single day. So I would say aim for one to two a week early on.
You do want to kind of build the muscle of getting comfortable with hitting post and putting it out to the world. But the idea of getting to five plus a week, leave that for a year plus into the journey where you've really built the muscle. Um, it's kind of like, you know, if we use running as an analogy, you don't go out and run the marathon on day one. If you do, you're going to hurt yourself. You know, you just want to do the jog around the block. You tick the box like, I've started running. You do that as many times a week as you can. Maybe next week you go a little further. It's exactly like that.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. Okay, cool. So, um, I think we. We kind of know what we're talking about. I'll assume that everyone listening to this knows who their ICP is. So. So that's cool.
I want to talk about connecting the dots between you. Post something, and then how do we get to customers buying stuff from our business?
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So the way it works for me, and it has worked very well for a long time, is I create nine pieces of high quality information content with no ask, no, by the way, you know, you need to, if you want more about this, get in touch. So I'm giving it away, and I'm really giving it away in a pretty comprehensive way. I'm not, like, holding back the paid secrets.
And the reason is, you know, I think it's Hormozi's quote. People don't pay for information, they pay for execution.
So you can feel very comfortable giving away the farm with your content. You're basically giving away nugget by Nugget of stuff that's taking you 510, 20 years to learn. Because, of course, there's all this nuance to what you're doing that you're not going to communicate in a LinkedIn post. And people b two b buyers are not looking to build the skill that you have to the level that you have it. They're looking to solve a problem. So what you're really doing is with those, with those nine out of ten posts is saying, look how experienced and skilled I am at this thing that you want and need. You're just broadcasting that over and over again in the form of generous content. And then on post number ten, there's two ways I do it. The one that works really well is a case study. So you do it before and after. So let's say it's an SEO agency. It's actually a niche that works incredibly well. You say, you know, I was working with Jane beforehand. Her site's getting 1500 visitors a month and she's going broke. And now look at this graph. You can see that she's now got 10,000 visitors a month and she just bought a new Tesla. And here's Jane in her own words saying what the experience has been like of working with ABC SEO. That works incredibly well because you get a story, you get a human at the center of it, and your reader thinks themselves, well, I am in that before state and it sucks. And I need to solve this. And you don't even really need to say, hey, get in touch with me. I mean, you do, you do finish with the call to action. Like, you know, what I mean is you don't have to be pushy about it. You can just keep putting these case studies out there and that's when you get your inbox filling up. The mistake I see people making is constantly doing that. Constantly basically asking for clients and treating LinkedIn like nothing but lead Gen. You kind of have to be in it somewhat for the long haul and be quite generous with your content in order to do that 10th one and say, okay, it's time to buy. So the case study works really well. The other one you can do is essentially a twist on that, a series of testimonials. It might be one page each in a carousel.
And you start and finish that by saying, hey, I'm taking on clients for July. I've got three spaces. If you're insert three criteria for what they would need to meet in order to be a good fit. Dm me this word, the key with it is make it really low friction. So don't say you need to go to abcseo.com, workwithme, blah, blah. They're not going to do it. Make it that. All they have to do is click your name and send you like a one word DM and start a conversation.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Got it. Got it.
It resonates a lot that we want to give away the information and get paid for the execution. And that's 100% how it is with our professional services. We do podcast editing for companies, and, like, they're. All of the information they need is out there, right. It's entirely for free. They get on LinkedIn, they get on YouTube, but. But they want a problem solved, like you said. And I think that's important for us to keep in mind is, like, we get the audience with the information, and then we. We get paid for solving a problem that they have. Um, that's cool. I like how you frame that.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Yeah. This. I always see people say, oh, you know, if the information's on the Internet already, how could you possibly, you know, sell it? It's like, dude, literally everything in human history is on the Internet for free. That's like, unless you're like, neo in the Matrix soaking up this information, you can't use everything that exists. We really are paying for somebody who's gone, you know, my career is going to be podcasts. I'm going to learn about microphones. I'm going to learn about how to acoustically treat a room. I'm going to learn about how loud the background music should be and what genre it should be to create the right vibe and on and on and on and on. It's like a thousand things that you've learned, and then you've leveled up and leveled up with them. And, you know, there's this thing that shows up again and again that I see, especially when people start creating on social is the curse of knowledge, where you fear that you don't really have any particularly deep knowledge of anything. I had this, my girlfriend had to talk me into it. I was like, oh, what do I have to share? I've been kind of just building my online businesses all these years, but I'm not like, I don't have a PhD or I haven't got an MBA or anything. And she sort of told me off and said, there's no way you could have done all the stuff you've done without building a series of skills.
And it's not something I worry about now, but it comes up again and again that people are like, well, I don't know if I'm really good enough at this thing for people to benefit from me sharing it on social. And almost certainly, yes, you absolutely are good enough.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: And how do you get over that? How do you get over that? Imposter syndrome.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: How do you get over that?
Slowly but surely, I guess. I think you build your.
There are so many strange and unexpected benefits to building a personal brand on social media, and one of them, I think, is you get a confidence. At least I did. That I really lacked. I kind of. I did have a lot of imposter syndrome. And it's not as if you think you're so fantastic because you've built a big audience, but you realize, as people keep showing up in the comments and saying, hey, I really liked how you wrote about this. This is so helpful. Something that probably you take completely for granted. And, you know, that starts to stack up after a while where this positive evidence of your knowledge and skills and experience becomes undeniable. It starts to outweigh, you know, the inner criticism, saying, you're crap. You don't really know anything. Why are you thinking this is going to work out? It won't. It just. That voice gets quieter and quieter, and eventually you realize we're all in the same boat in that regard. I think that's part of it, that the difference is the people who push through it versus those who let that inner critic drag them down.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: So I think this is where the expression, like, fake it till you make it really, really comes in, is you just got to kind of believe, even if it's a bit brash and maybe not well founded, fake it till you make it, and then you'll get that social proof, if you will, of people engaging and liking your stuff, and that that reinforces the belief that should be underneath anyhow.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I think fake it till you make it in terms of your confidence but not your knowledge. Don't. Don't pretend to know things you don't know.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Yeah. But for sure, you know, you do have to kind of go into it with maybe a false sense of confidence that you're not entirely feeling and just kind of realize, you know, if your listeners take nothing else from this, realize that everybody finds it really scary early on, you know, breaking that seal. I'm having the same thing right now. I want to get started on YouTube and, you know, I've bought all this gear. I've got so much gear, and I'm like, you know, watching videos about lighting setups, and I haven't made a single video. Right. I need to just break the seal, get the video done, put it on YouTube and suffer the consequences, and then it's done. And then I can do number two and then I can do number three and that you know, that's the same thing with LinkedIn. Once you get past that small handful of early posts, it does change.
You know, when I look back at my early stuff, so I'm about two and a half years in now. My early stuff is like weirdly like an exaggerated version of myself where I kind of showed up the way I thought you have to on social, you know, like more confident than I, than I am and kind of a louder voice in the room than I. Than I want. And what happens over time is you really just become more and more yourself as your confidence builds. And so you stop worrying about people hearing your voice and you kind of just relax into who you actually are. Like I mentioned, the strange benefits of social. One of them is kind of you build a lot of knowledge of how the world sees you because of the feedback from people, you know. Oh, thank you for saying that.
Making that specific comment that really speaks to experience, I had you start to see, okay, people really like it when I talk about these things in this way. And when I do that, it doesn't work so well. And I really feel like it has changed my self perception for the better a lot.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I can totally imagine. We're going to have an entire episode around kind of the psychology of social media and selling, and I think that'll be really enlightening to exactly what you're talking about. It's like why people engage with people, why they buy from certain people and not from others, how we can kind of use this in a healthy and like appropriate way to grow our business. So like that. Yeah, there's a ton there. Definitely stay tuned, listeners that that's coming and that's going to be a banger for sure.
I want to touch on commenting versus posting. So I was chatting with somebody, it's been a few months now, and they said, craig, at your level, which is shit, I have 3000 followers, maybe, or something, you should be spending 80% of your time commenting and 20% posting.
Does that line up with your thinking? How does that change over time?
What's that balance?
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Yeah, look, there definitely is a lot of benefit to commenting, particularly on larger accounts in your niche. So if we use the SEO person, we kind of continue that example.
It's easy enough to Google who the top SEO influencers are on LinkedIn. And typically once you find one or two, you'll find others of them are commenting on those people's stuff.
You know, let's say if you're checking out what Brian Dean is doing and what, oh, man, I'm trying to think of some good SEO guys off the top of my head, and I can't, you know, you'll see that the same name sharpen again and again. The strange thing with LinkedIn, too, is that it's a relatively small number of people who are really active. Like, it's probably, it's got to be under 2%. I know there's like, I think there's a billion people on there now. I believe that's right.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: And yet you see the same people posting, but also the same names in the comments over and over. It's like people who are taking LinkedIn seriously. It's a tiny percentage.
Anyway, I wouldn't agree that 80% comments, 20% content. I would say for sure you need to do the comments in order to get on the radar of other people.
And the good thing with commenting, I mean, to give you a percentage, I don't know, 50 50 maybe, something like that.
Without the content, there's nothing for people to engage with when they go and check out your profile. But what does happen from commenting is the beginning. Well, there's two things you get comfortable with being seen on LinkedIn and kind of sharing your thoughts with your name and your photo attached to it. And eventually you're not worried about how the world's going to react to you commenting on a stranger's content, for example, which is perfectly fine. The etiquette of LinkedIn is you don't have to know the person in order to leave a comment on their stuff.
And that can be, you know, so that's good to build that muscle of just being comfortable being out there. But also, if you repeatedly show up and comment on someone who's maybe not at 100,000 followers, but maybe they're at 10,000 in your case, so they're a few steps ahead of you, they will notice that. And that can be the beginning of a relationship. That can be, you know, you may, you will typically find that that person will reciprocate when you post content in their niche.
That's a great way to break the ice. You might comment on this stuff for a week or two, and then you might send them a DM and say, I'm really enjoying your stuff. I loved your last post about X. And then it becomes kind of inevitable. Or it makes sense to connect with each other and formally or informally start supporting each other's content, have them on.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Your podcast like this.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Yep. There you go. Perfect.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. I love it. I love it. I mean, I have to say, I have I have made quite a few friends, people on this podcast, people that I've, I've, I've helped, they've helped me. I've bought their stuff. They've bought our stuff. It's been, you know, LinkedIn has been a really solid, like, relationship and networking building experience for me more, more than anything else, which is, which has been like a huge upside.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Yeah. The lack of anonymity is so key, right. That, you know, I have been a big Redditor for the last ten years. I love Reddit, but it's all anonymous, so it can be incredibly brutal and ruthless. If you something that you post on LinkedIn where people are like, hey, great post. People on Reddit are like, well, I won't say, but they don't say that. They're, like, pretty honest about what they like and don't like. So, you know, for sure, you know, LinkedIn are pretty good at policing, um, that everybody is a real person, and that almost kind of keeps people on their best behavior somewhat. It's, you know, it's like going to a conference where everybody's got their name tag on. It's just a conference that never ends on whatever topics you're interested in. So. Yeah. And as a result, yeah, people are, you know, relationships can form, and also people get to know what you're all about because they'll not even just feel from your post, but they will see your comments as well and start to form a picture in their mind of who you are. And obviously, if they like what you're all about, they'll gravitate towards you more and more and eventually kind of take the plunge of starting some sort of relationship.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Love it, love it. Okay, cool. So kind of going back to my therapy session analogy, like, what I would love to do. So we've talked about what we're going to post. We have a really good framework, I think, for like, that, that forever 50, right? Like, come up with a 50 posts that gives you a basis for your content.
We're going to post a couple times a week.
We're going to comment about 50% of the time. And I guess that is, I wanted to have, like a 30 day game plan for myself and for everyone listening to, like, hey, if you want to get serious about growing your audience on LinkedIn, this is what we do. I guess we just kind of summarize that, right? It's like, identify your ICP post a few times a week. Let's say, engage with people for 30 minutes every day, build your kind of target list of folks you want to follow.
What am I missing?
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so one thing is we should probably talk about profiles. So if I was working with a client for 30 days, which actually is what I do, I do a 30 day program with clients. The first thing we do is optimize their profile.
If we do the shorthand version of what a profile actually is, it's your banner, which is an image at the top, very much like a website banner. So we go banner, profile pic, your headline, which is a sentence or two that shows up every time you post and every time you comment, and then your featured section and your about section. So I'll go from top to bottom. So with your banner, I think of it like, well, yeah, the best analogy is probably the website, your hero image on your website. So point being, your banner should not tell the entire story. It should sum up the story of you. So an easy framework to work with is I help and who you help. So the niche of people you help to and the outcome you achieve for them. So again, I'll use our SEO guy or girl. I help bootstrap B. Two B brands generate 30% to 50% more traffic per month. Okay. So we know exactly who you help and we know the outcome that you are promising, and you can give yourself some breathing room in there. But the more that you sort of say this actual tangible outcome is what I do for people, the more compelling that is for them to get in touch. So my own is something like, I help entrepreneurs to grow their audience and income on LinkedIn. Those are the things that they're most interested in and those are the things I focus on with my coaching.
In reality, I also help them with, like, how do we come up with great content ideas? How do we format that content so it works really well? How do we create branding that stands out and on and on. You know, it's like 50 different things, but it would be a mistake to jam all that into the banner. So you really just want that big statement and then you might have some social proof. So I have a few logos of brands that I've worked with as well, but that's basically it, your profile pic. You really want to make sure you've got a. It can be, it can be an iPhone photo for sure, but, you know, nicely lit, smiling, facing the camera and a bright color behind you, ideally. And the reason for that is when people see you commenting on a big creator on their phone, if you've got, you know, bright orange or bright purple behind your name and, sorry, behind your face, and everybody else has got like a gray background in their office or whatever, your photo is going to pop and stand out and just grab the eye in a way that everybody else is, isn't. So that's an easy one. I just do that in canva background, remove and then drop a color in. Your headline is the, I won't do every single one, but the headline is the other really important one. Headline shows up every time you post. You get about, I think it's about 50 characters. So that first part of your headline is really important.
And then you can explain more later in the headline. For when people go to your profile, they'll be able to see the whole thing. But a really important thing to keep in mind is every time you comment, people will see that headline as well. So let's say if you comment on somebody with 100,000 followers who's in your niche or adjacent to your niche, if it starts with something like, I make podcast as millionaires, that might be the first few words of your headline. Well, that's going to grab my attention. You obviously don't want to claim something you can't do, but if you can, if you can find that most desirable outcome that your ideal client wants, that's what I always tell my clients to start with. So for a long time, I put in my own, it was like 100,000 followers. I felt a bit weird about it, honestly, because it was so braggy, but it's certainly, and I took it away eventually because I didn't feel great about it. But it was something that I had achieved and it was also something that gave me uniqueness in LinkedIn. Not that many people have done that. So I chose to lead with that and create curiosity to make people say, well, why the hell has he got 100,000 followers? What's he doing that I'm not doing? That will then get them to my profile where I can give them the full kind of selling experience.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to, I want to touch on the, like, the coaching and the way that you work with clients real quick because I think you just dropped like a enormous amount of value and probably a lot of that went over our head. So can you just give a quick view on, like, if folks are like, holy shit, like, how can I get more of what Sam's putting out here and work with you?
[00:37:21] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Okay. So for, you know, any entrepreneurs who are interested in working with me, I start with a 30 minutes call that's free and it's not a sale. It's not like a Trojan horse of like, oh, it's actually just me selling you on working with me. What I do is we do the call, I give you value, like we're doing now, because I feel like that's the best marketing. If I basically show you in that 30 minutes, well, here's the things we're going to be focusing on. If we work together, even if you walk away not spending anything with me, I want you to genuinely have like five changes you can immediately make that will improve your LinkedIn experience. But of course, you know, what tends to happen is people go, well, that was really useful. Now I'll pay him. So starts with that free call. And then I have two ways I work with people. So you can do 1 hour with me where we do a little bit of prep before the call, I'll ask you a series of questions to make sure we maximize that hour. I charge 500 for that hour and we record it. And I'll give you an I call it an action plan call. So you'll get a series of actions to take. And then the sort of full program is 30 days of working together. I optimize your profile, I create branding for you. So I'll actually create designs for your banner, your carousels, your featured section. So you're sort of good to go on LinkedIn. We do that in the first week and I rewrite all of your profile to optimize it. Then we spend a couple of weeks on content. That's kind of the thing that takes a lot more work to really understand. So I teach you on some coaching calls and we also do some work together calls where we're basically making posts together in real time and talking about what we're doing and why. And then in the fourth week we focus on lead gen. So how to create case studies that sell how to connect with people in the DM's when they show interest. Yeah. So we do four weeks. That's basically 30 days of working together. I only work with five people a month because it's pretty intense for me and just to be like very available to them, to take them from zero to everything kind of making sense to them.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: That's awesome, man. That's awesome. I see your stuff. I think that's how we got connected and so can attest to the quality for sure. So for folks who are really serious about growing their LinkedIn, definitely check out Sam. We'll have a link in the description below to get in touch with them. Sam, I want to wrap with you have more insight to LinkedIn than most all of us. What is something that you're looking at in the future? And you're like, ooh, I want to keep my eye on that because that is exciting or scary or worrisome.
What's something you're looking at? And you're like, shit, that's going to be a thing soon.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: Video. I think that's. There'd be the big one.
The people who are.
The thing about video is the moat to getting started. Is that the right word? You know, the barrier to entry, to getting started is so much higher than, you know, typing out a post.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: And so the pew in your camera gear.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Right, right. Yeah, yeah, man. I've been talking about being a youtuber for a year and I'm still not a youtuber.
Yeah, yeah. So I think video on LinkedIn, they being LinkedIn, are rolling out like some sort of reels type tools at the moment. I haven't seen it down in little old New Zealand. We're usually the last to get these things, but, you know, I think that they can see the writing is on the wall, that consuming video content is what the market at large wants. And regardless, I think because of that high barrier to entry, not that many people will go to that level and put in the required energy and work to create great videos. So if you're one of the, say, 0.1% who does, you're going to stand out.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: I agree. I agree. Speaking of the series, we have a LinkedIn video expert coming on as well and just going to dive super deep into workflows and best practices and everything there, so. Yeah, I. I agree on both fronts, man. It's like, it's definitely going to be a thing. I've heard of this reels thing. We. I have not seen it here in the states, uh, either. But I mean, it's. There's that moat or that barrier for reason is it's fucking hard, right? Like, turning this on right now, it's fucking 80 degrees in my house and I'm sweating. I look like I just ran a marathon, probably. Um, like, it's just. It's so hard compared to, like, typing some words out and hitting enter. Um, so, yeah, it should be rewarded, I think, is the point.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think too. I mean, it's like, there's so much.
Maybe I'm putting this pressure on myself to a large extent, but even just, you know, opening up loom and shooting a video, talking to your webcam with half decent light is more than most people are going to do. Like, it doesn't have to look like an Eli Abdall video on day one or mister beast video.
Just as with, you know, my own stuff, I didn't. I didn't start creating carousels until I was like, ten months in. And then, you know, like, I got better and better at them through repetition. And eventually you're doing stuff at a pretty high level without really thinking about it. But that certainly was not my day one.
[00:42:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Totally. Awesome. Sam, I guess the best place for folks to connect with you, to learn more about what you do and everything is just on LinkedIn. Is that the best place to connect?
[00:42:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it would be. So, yeah, it's Sam Brown with an e.
I'm working on Sambrown co right now. Maybe that'll be live by the time this goes live. At any rate, if you go to that URL, I've got some LinkedIn products and stuff there just to get you started. There's guides for LinkedIn and guides for creating hooks and that sort of thing.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: Okay. Awesome. Sam, this is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Craig. It's been fun.
