Building your Personal Brand through LinkedIn - 2022

1. Course Introduction: Thanks for visiting. My core is building a professional brand on LinkedIn. For those who've never met me. I'm Teddy, I'm on LinkedIn and Sales Navigator strategies. I've been teaching linked as a business tool since 2009. My job is to experiment with LinkedIn so I can teach you the best practices and processes of using LinkedIn as a business tool. So what are you going to learn in this course? You will learn why engagement is critical to get value on LinkedIn, I'm going to share with you lots of best practices of engaging include lots of tips and tactics for sharing content. I'm talking about why your LinkedIn profile is critical and why the comment is far more powerful than the light button to talk about. Why your target audience doesn't care about you yet and how you can fix that. I'm introducing LinkedIn pages. I'm going to introduce you to creator mode, LinkedIn Live LinkedIn audio, LinkedIn events and LinkedIn newsletters. This course was created specifically for all types of business professionals, whether you're in a sales role and account executive role, whether you're a college graduate, someone in job search or career transition, whether you're a business owner or an entrepreneur, or just anyone who wants to be found based on your content. You all you need to take this course, computer and Internet connection and LinkedIn account. The benefits of this class ultimately will be to build the right brand and move the right people into the right conversations, whether that's for your business or your career. This class project was created specifically for you to experiment with what I share with you, finding content that's relevant to you and then shared it on LinkedIn, discover ongoing conversations on LinkedIn and then participate in them. Create very simple piece of content and share on LinkedIn and then tag me in this activity so I can be a part of your journey as you experiment with using LinkedIn to build your professional brand. So go ahead and get started as no better time than now. Get comfortable. Get yourself a note pad, turn up all those other distractions, and get started learning how to build your professional brand on LinkedIn. Go ahead. I'll look forward to seeing you in the course. 2. What is LinkedIn?: So first of all, let's make sure we're all clear what LinkedIn is so that we're all on the same page. So there's no misconception. It may be a social media site. But first and foremost, it is the number one professional networking site in the world. Number one, nothing compares to a for professional networking. There's 150 million people on LinkedIn today and we still get about two new members every second, which is a rapid growth for this platform and interests enough. Yes, there are ****** Council, they did. Yes, there are cows that we wish would go away. But a lot of them, more and more of the accounts that show up on LinkedIn or serious business professionals. It's about 58 million companies represented on LinkedIn as well. And that grows fairly steady, nowhere near the same rate as the number of LinkedIn members. This is a really interesting statistic that really became pretty accurate around the time of the pandemic. And as we transition out of the pandemic of 2021, 25 per cent of all LinkedIn members show up at least every other week. Now that sounds like a low number, but think about this. 25% of your network shown up every other week for an event with you, that'd be a pretty decent number. If 25% of your network, the people who are relevant to your target audience, your ideal client, their fluids. They shouldn't be every other week, that would be pretty cool. Well, they do on LinkedIn. Linkedin is an important platform for building our presence, our professional presence, also overbuilding. Another connection to our target audience are influencers, are network and to build our brand, which is what we're going to talk about in this course. 3. Why is Social Engagement so Important: So why is social engagement so important to on LinkedIn? Talk about this. Go back to the earlier slide where I'm talking about what lay dead is. That's one reason why it's important. 25% of your network shows up on a regular basis. It's a networking site and social networking works best with engagement. I get this all the time. I got a profile, I've got a company page, I post something every now and then. Well, that is not engagement, that is just presence and content. Engagement is far more than that, which we'll talk about in this course. Your brand stands out head and shoulders above everybody else based on the words that you use in your content, in the comments that you make on other content, and in the replies that you make on other comments, your words are what make up your brand. And LinkedIn gives you lots of opportunities to use your words in post comments and replies. Sharing and engaging on LinkedIn is one of the ways that you can amplify your brand. Amplify your brand. But the views of your LinkedIn profile, the views of your company page, and add amplify you show it up in LinkedIn search. The more you engage, the more you impact all these other areas of LinkedIn. I believe in the philosophy of giving it actually I call it with no expectations. And the more you give through content and engagement, the more you build trust, respect, and like. Show up. Create conversations, get into conversations relevant to your target audience, relevant to their influencers, which will drive more and more people to build trust and respect of you and even like you. So they want to know more about you and be willing to have a business conversation with you. An analogy. I get this all the time. People go to a networking event, they go grab a great knee high. They go grab a biscuit. They stand the corner and they do nothing and they wonder why networking doesn't work for them. And what they failed to do was to show up and get into a conversation because that's where the magic is by getting into conversations at networking events. Well, this analogy in lies exactly what the use of LinkedIn show up going into conversations. Otherwise, it's a complete waste of time. You can start conversations with original content. That's a powerful way to start a conversation with your own words, your own ideas, your own perspective, your own videos, your own means, et cetera, et cetera. But what is left The only way to do it, you can find content that's highly relevant to your what you do, highly relevant to your target audience. This can be really good content for you to start a conversation as well. Find content that you want to share from people you trust, from companies you trust. And you don't have to put it all in your bank to create this content. But yet, never forget that it is the engagement that creates the greatest value. You can have the best content you can cure rate the best content ever. But it is absolutely the engagement, the conversations that you either start or you become a part of that creates the greatest value. Go back to this analogy that is share with you. Just show up with great content. You show up being willing to be a part of the conversation. 4. Professional Branding Philosophies: So I want to share with you some professional branding philosophies that you can use on LinkedIn and Facebook, and Twitter and Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. That can help you create the best possible brand or reputation that you need for your business or your career. First of all, never do say or engage in any way that you don't want to be seen, heard, or perceived of and light. That is what I call it, my safety net. Never do it. That right there, that icon it, eat it, that safety net. That right there is saved my butt more often than I can admit want to admit to because I'll type something and at every time I type something, I'll read it out loud and I'll go, no, that should never do that. Never do say or engage in ways you don't want to be seen her to proceed. Those made me hit the backspace key of the leaky far too many times, but I'm glad that I have never used social media to argue if anyone ever, It's just not worth it. Don't get on LinkedIn and argue if somebody, if you disagree with what they had to say and you don't have a viable response to what they say in a professional way than walk away from that content, it just not worth it. Do not argue ever. You see more of what you touch on social media including LinkedIn. The more you touch it, the more you search for it and engage or even more than that, the more you dwell on it, if you bring a piece of content up in your news feed and you stop and you look at it. That's called dwelt your conditioning the algorithm to give you more of that content. So think about it. You see more of what you touch. Touch the stuff you want to say. Focus on engaging on content that is highly relevant to both your target audience and your business. That's what you wanna do. You wanna make sure you're investing time to build your brand around content that's important to your target audience and content that's relevant to your business. And every time someone touches your content, whether it's opposed the video, it's an article or a newsletter, or a third party content. Or maybe it's even your company content or your Showcase Page, kinda whatever they touched, it belongs to you that you put out there. You must always go back and reply to them in a meaningful way. Every single time. As called, creating and moving the conversation forward. I'm not a fan of scrolling through the News Feed, hoping and praying that content or find content that's highly relevant to me. I will scroll through my news feed a little bit just so I can say hi to my people. But what I'd rather do is go use the people search for Thomas, show you how to do this. Use the Sumi post search and look for content that's highly relevant to you and your business and your target audience. That is the content you want to invest the most amount of Tywin. And when you do comment and you do reply, even when you make post, if you're going to refer to someone, use their name, maybe even mention their name and a post. But you use their name and your comments and in your post. Because the more you say someone's name and the more they like it, people want to see their names written in specific and really good fonts. So do that when you can. And I never sent, uh, what you share on LinkedIn should not be about your companies, should not be about your products. 90% must be relevant. Must be relevant to your target audience, but it can't be about your products, your services, your widget, or your company. By the way, if you do that right, that 10% can be. Now. Furthermore, if you'd like to create and share content, that's great. But what you wanna do is engage more often than you share. I like the four number, engaged four times more often than you share. Because this is you looking for conversations to get into that, always trying to start the conversation. If you've ever shared content on LinkedIn, you know, it is hard to start a conversation. So don't rely on that. Go find conversations to be a part of and above my head and says it all starts the conversation. And furthermore, the most, the most rich, worthwhile, beneficial conversations are not on LinkedIn. You may start a conversation on LinkedIn. You may engage a little bit on LinkedIn, but at some point you want to say, let's take this conversation on LinkedIn. Would you be open to a phone call? Would you be open to a Zoom call? Would you be open to meeting in person? You will start to conversational LinkedIn. But as soon as it's appropriate, you move it off of LinkedIn. 5. LinkedIn Profile Branding: Your LinkedIn profile is where it all starts. You've got to build LinkedIn profile that is speaking clearly to your target audience, telling them what you do, you need to use the keywords and phrases that resonate with them. Use words and stories that they can think that they can see themselves in. You also need to make sure that you do not put content on your LinkedIn profile. They can take your target audience down an irrelevant rabbit hole. You don't want them going off into your past related to something that is not relevant to what you do today. Minimize venting yourself. It's not what a profile is four. Instead, what you want to do is tell your target audience what you do, what you can do, what you have done, what you enjoy doing. Well, they'll vet you through the conversations. You don't need to make vetting statements. You start with a headline that's highly focused, your target audience keyword rich, telling them what you do for them. Then you use all the other areas LinkedIn profile to continue to tell the story, continues showing the relevance. Continue showing them what you enjoy doing it can do, we have done what you do today that's relevant to them. And I will remind you throughout all that, all of my courses to be very careful with grammar and spell check. You do not want to LinkedIn profile. If you're a public relations professional, you do not want your profile to say your pubic relations professional. If you're a project manager, you do not want your LinkedIn profile and say You're a project Mancur. Check your spelling and check your grammar. Don't let the content on your LinkedIn profile goes stale. Revise it periodically and make sure it's still aligns with who you are, what you do today makes sure has gotten news stories where you can add new stories, new skills, new recommendations, new publications, et cetera, et cetera, so that your profile never goes stale. Your LinkedIn profile is the first and most important piece of content on your LinkedIn account that shows your target audience, who you are and what you do and shows them your brand. 6. Networking to Build your Brand: Now, the other big part of your professional brand is your network. Who are you connecting with? Your target audience should be your most important LinkedIn connection. Now that may change in times S, okay? But today you need to be looking for connecting with your target audience. So they also see that their peers are connected to you. You want to connect with their influencers so that your target audience sees that you are connected to their influencers. And your influencers can then introduce you to the target audience. Your influencers can be a vital source of what I call organic referrals, live referrals, introductions. And as they get to trust, respect you, they become advocates for your business and they will just buy a conversation, raise you up to a higher level with their words and let the person they're talking to know that you are really good at what you do just through a conversation. They may not be intentionally tried to praise you. They'll just do it. You want to celebrate your followers as well as your connections. Followers are important. These are the people who say, I like yourself and you don't even know them. These are people who say, hey, I introduced you to this company and you've never met this person. But yet they follow you like your style there, like your philosophy lately, like your content. And they tell other people about, you know, what, a network on LinkedIn with your target audience and their influencers. Now, don't misunderstand me. Linkedin is not the only place to network where you can either move this, this networking activity to other places including in real life, where you can ever remember is called networking for mutual benefit. That about networking for sale and networking for a job. It's networking for mutual benefit. So look for ways to help your network and they'll look for ways to help, you know, selling. Know, I asked him for a job. You network to engage in network to create some level of trust, respect to light. And that'll happen through the engagement. And you never stopped connected on LinkedIn. Big fan of everyday look for a new connection every day. Consider accepting a new connection of someone who's relevant to you in some meaningful way. And every day you should be looking for ways to move the right people that you're connected to into conversations that may lead to business conversations. Network purposely on LinkedIn. And you'll discover your LinkedIn network is much more important. 7. Branding through your LinkedIn Posts: Now, furthermore, you can continue building your brand through the post that you make on LinkedIn. Give is the word I use. Your audience, content that they are seeking, the content that answers their questions, the content that creates value for them. It's not easy to do. You've got to learn how to use social listening skills. But the more you give content that is beneficial, useful, transparent, honest, some interests to your target audience. The more they're going to want it, the more they will trust respect to like you. And as I said earlier, 90% of the posts, 90% of the content cannot be about your company. Ten per cent can be, but the majority of the content you share must be content that again, fulfills that need, that requests that interests that. The answer is a question for your target audience. Content diversity is important as well. Don't just use images, don't just use videos, don't just use poles instead and mix it all up. Give them any image, give them a video, give them a late to third party content. Give them a link to your blog posts, gave them just simple text statements, maybe a native video statement, etc, etc. Give them a kudos posts, mix up your content because you never know who on your LinkedIn, in your LinkedIn network wants different types of contents and I can assure you they all want something a little bit different. When you post anything, when you share anything on LinkedIn, you've always got to tell your target audience what is about called editorial statement. You've got to be very clear about telling your target audience what this piece of information about why it's important or relevant to them. And again, when you're posted on LinkedIn, you can create your own content if you want to, but you can also cure rate content that you buy from other sources. But I make sure these sources are not gated. Make sure you're not sharing content from some website that you have a subscription to and others may not. That really is troublesome. Make sure the content you're sharing as a harpist and accessible to anybody. And from your personal LinkedIn account. No more than once a day, posts something no more than once a day. This is only talking about a CPU, so we're not talking about comments or of lies and throw company pages. The same rule applies. Post something no more than once a day. Company posts, I'd really go down to something maybe at twice a month, twice a week, or maybe even only once a week. But as long as you're consistent, whether it's your personal profile, post, your company posts. When you're consistent about your frequency of posting, you'll get far value for more value because people are going to be expecting it. Pay attention to what post, get the most meaningful engagement. Because those could be, not necessarily always, but they could be the types of content are the styles of posting that you need to repeat. Because more people have discovered it and the enlightened find it useful. Your LinkedIn post, or a powerful place for you to build your brand. Not the only place, but it's one of the very powerful places for you to build your brand. 8. Building your Brand through Engagement: Now beyond posting, here's the next big piece, engagement. Using LinkedIn engagement, engage on content and gauge. Engage basically means the light button, the Comment button, and the Share button, and maybe the send button, that's the engagement piece. But you want to engage with content is highly relevant to your brand and your target audience. Now, it doesn't mean you can't engage on other stuff for the right reasons. But when you're engaging your first and foremost say to yourself, am I engaging content that can grow my brand and never hijack opposed or try to change the topic. They're talking about. Leadership in a non-profit space. Don't change your conversation in something different that would be rude. Again. Never argued a comment. You can disagree, but you need to learn how to disagree politely and sincerely and show your research will and information you've acquired that has shown that you have a different maybe better opinion of L zone and don't write dissertations long-winded. Um, it's simple, sweet, short to the point. That's what people are looking for. They don't want to read the 2000s character comments. Yet. I'll always use a minimum of ten words in a meaningful comment. Don't just say happy birthday. Don't just say thanks for this article. Don't say kudos or Congratulations. Say something way more meaningful might mean you need to do a little research to figure out what to say. There's more meaningful, but always look for a way to say something meaningful in a comment or reply. And furthermore, I said this earlier. If someone comments on your posts, comments on your content replies to your comment, you must always respond back to them in some meaningful way. Never leave a comment or reply. Go and responded to. And don't use comments, replies to sell your content. You can use a comment or reply to encourage someone to have a conversation with your invite them their conversation with you. If that door was open, but don't use it to try to sell. Again, pay attention who comments, replies, and your content. And consider where relevant and appropriate. Pulling that person to another conversation and maybe ultimately pulling them into a conversation off of LinkedIn. Use people's names when you're commonly use people's names when your reply, you don't need to tag. They have all the time if it's their content. But the very least, you should use their names in your messaging when you're writing a comment or reply. Again, as I said earlier, you want to look for ways to engage four times more often than posting. 9. Branding through LinkedIn Messaging: So branding through LinkedIn messaging, you can do that. You can use LinkedIn messages to speak directly to your target audience, speak directly your influencers. And you can use these messages to invite them to a conversation deeper, maybe a little bit more on Lake Dam and ultimately off of LinkedIn. Look at the words you're using, the phrase that you're using. Make sure you use a polite and friendly words in your messaging. Because they will people want to engage with people who are polite and friendly. So be purposeful about that. Use messages to share content that you failed with the send button or copy the URL and put it in the message. Send content directly to your target audience, directly to your influencers that you know for a fact they are interested in, you know, for a fact, but it will benefit for reading. Give it to them directly through a message. And again, don't try to sell. Messaging is not for Sally. Messaging is for ultimately move in someone into a conversation off of LinkedIn, maybe via Zoom, maybe in-person. So you can have that conversation and inquire as to whether or not they're willing to have a conversation about your products and services. I use InMail is a little different than most people do. For me most of the time I use in males to invite somebody that I found on LinkedIn to a conversation with someone else who may need their help. Just recently I did this were a lady was whatever conversation with the credit union in North Carolina. Now, I didn't know the specific person responsible for the area that she wanted to talk about, but they are on LinkedIn and I sent them an InMail said Would you be willing to have a conversation with this person who asked me to introduce you to them. And the response back was yes. You'll find that the more you use in males to help others, the more your brand grows because you're showing that you care about others. If you're a premium subscriber, whether it's LinkedIn business or Sales Navigator recruiter. And you get x number of emails a month. Try to use them all up. Try to use them very purposely. They are a powerful tool when you learn how to craft the messaging in the mail so that it resonates the person you're messaging. On your mobile app. You had the ability to send messages, LinkedIn messages with an audio recording or a video recording. You might want to experiment with that, experiment with the position of your phone if you're doing a video so that you don't get the CIA later. You don't get just the floor, but they can see you talking to them and play with recording the audio. What's the best way to do that? So you get to clear crisp audio so that you get good at this. And when you get good and efficient at using these tools, you'll use them more often with much better success. 10. Branding through LinkedIn Pages: If you are an admin of a LinkedIn page or just a user LinkedIn pages. You may find this to be very useful. If you're an admin of a company paid, you want to find a frequency that you can sustain for you to be able to post content to your company page. You also want to make sure that the content you're sharing is again, not about you. It's first and foremost about something that's important to your target audience, maybe relevant to you. Use the LinkedIn company page and build it out completely so that all the areas where a company page are populated appropriately with the maximum amount of information. Otherwise, it's a missed opportunity for you to be found through your company page. Develop a frequency of inviting your LinkedIn connections or others in the company. Have them invite their LinkedIn connections to follow your company page where relevant, appropriate. Don't see any advice out and open break. Pay attention to what content on your page is getting the most views, getting the most engagement. Because maybe you need to create more of that type of content, that style and content, that messaging or that topic. And if someone does touch your content, you need to figure out what's the best way for you to respond to them. Maybe respond publicly on the content with a reply as a company page or as an individual responsible that company page. Additionally, the response, maybe a phone call or an e-mail, doesn't always need to stop at LinkedIn. And again, just as this with personal profile, content diversity is important. Images, videos, articles, simple post, memes, etc, center, give a diversity of content on LinkedIn pages. Maybe it's a LinkedIn live. Maybe it's the LinkedIn. I don't know, but you've gotta come up with a plan for you to be able to create the kind of content you have the ability to create. And maybe that does include LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn audio or newsletter. And here's the other part of that 90% can't be about you. You do not want to talk about your business or your products only all the time when your LinkedIn profile do not talk about something that's important to them. And then pitch there with the product, talking about something that's important to them. And then later on you can reference in a post that other 10% of the time. You can reference your company page, your profile, your personal, your business company page, and your products. But very purposely no more than 10% of the time. One of my tactics that I use on a regular basis is I never asked anybody to share my company page content. I never asked anybody to share my own content on my personal profile. Instead, what I asked them to do is take a look at it and comment. I do not want my content from my personal profile or my company page shared. I don't want that. I want people to engage on that piece of content. So that piece of content grows. 11. Branding through LinkedIn Groups: This one's hard for me because I really am not a big advocate of LinkedIn groups at this point. I really do minimize, if not completely eliminate, posting content into LinkedIn groups. Instead, I go into the groups that I focus on the content that is there. And I focus on the group members to see if there's any members I can pull into a conversation or does content that's in that group that is worthy of me hitting a comment button and reply to somebody through their post. I want to gauge on content and the group again and where irrelevant. Pull the members into conversation, maybe by mentioning them in my comment made, by mentioning them in my reply. Maybe as I spoke earlier, go look for these LinkedIn members of the member lists and engage with them. They're acknowledged new members of the group, even though I hate to say this, going and going away, making them more and more difficult to acknowledge the new members unless you're managing the group. Use the messaging feature of LinkedIn groups, paul group members into a conversation. I'll show you how to do that later on in this course. But that's much more beneficial is to pay attention to the member list and find the people that are member list that you want to engage with and just engage with them, again, some meaningful, relevant way. And you may open the door for them to have a conversation with you outside of the group and or outside LinkedIn. As I said in different ways already, when you share content anywhere on LinkedIn, including LinkedIn groups, make sure it's not about you, not about your business, but yet all I doubt that person and all of that, that person's interests, ideas, or perspectives that you've discovered in the group. Again, pay attention and LinkedIn groups to see who commented, who replied, who shared it. Because if they did that here, maybe they'll do it somewhere else. So pay attention to who touches your stuff in LinkedIn groups. 12. Branding through LinkedIn Providing Services Pages: Branding through you're providing services pages. This is a tag or as a sectional A-bomb, your LinkedIn profile. If you are in a service industry, then you have providing services pages. And you can create a providing the service page for your target audience to tells them a little bit more about your services. And like a sub page to your LinkedIn profile. But again, it's only available to LinkedIn members who were in the service category is very useful for LinkedIn members who can find you. They may do a search based on services. May find you're providing services page, and then you'll look at that and then you discover just a little bit more about you. You can have ten service categories. This should be all pretty relevant each other. Unfortunately, the service categories are not ad hoc, which means you can't create your own does not offer service category from dust bunny collectors. There may be a service category for environmental management. There's not a service category for LinkedIn training and coaching. I've got to use upwards of ten service categories regarding branding and training and other areas. Sort of aligned with what I do. Kind of wish I could have ad hoc. But then again, the problem with ad hoc is you never know what people are searching for. So this force them to search a specific area. They're more likely to find us. You have 500 characters of text in the description box of your services page. 500 characters attacks is a lot of texts done right, written properly and using keywords that resonate with your target audience. You can also have client recommendations or testimonials. Actually they're called reviews on a category under the services page. So you have five excuse me, you can have upwards of 20 client reviews and your service page. Now what I haven't discovered is that when I hit that 20:00 A.M. I going to get 20 more or not. And I've gotta do a test to find that out because I'm not sure, but 20 reviews on your service page is pretty powerful. So use them, get them. And also when you ask people, do review, ask them to use keywords that are relevant to what you do because those reviews are indexed as well. You can have eight pieces of rich media on your service pages. So you might have a YouTube video. If I have a PDF, you might have a document. You can have, maybe it's an image that you had, but you can have rich media, more color, and more emphasis to who you are, what you're all about when your products services page. So if you are in a service category, look and see if you have the ability to add providing services to your LinkedIn profile macros, secondary tasks don't leave with this. Get your LinkedIn profile built out first, may get keyword rich, make it full of information. It tells your target audience who you are and then come back later and build you're providing services page and then use all of these different areas to make it really powerful, really rich in ideas and perspectives that can elevate your brand to your target audience. 13. Branding using LinkedIn Creator Mode: Now there's a whole nother tool set or a collection of tools on LinkedIn. It's all wrapped up in a program on LinkedIn call a dumb creator mode. And this is LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn audio events and newsletters. Let's talk a little bit about those. So first of all, in order for you to use successfully use LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn audio or LinkedIn newsletters. You've got to want to create content. You've gotta be interested in doing live video or live audio and blogging. Those are the, those are the really the cool important attributes you have to have in order to get value from it. Because if you don't like doing audio or video or writing blog posts that don't go down that journey. You don't have to don't do something you're not interested in doing. And if you are interested in doing it, then you need to have a plan. You didn't know what are you going to talk about? What are you going to do live video on? What are you going to write about? And once again, if you learn how to do social listening, you can listen to what your network or your target audience and influencers are talking about. And then may inspire you to come up with an idea about what to do live or audio or newsletters on. It's gotta be diversity of topics. It can't just be about one very specific day. All of my writing has all my YouTube videos and my core answers are about two things are about LinkedIn and everything about LinkedIn, not just LinkedIn profiles, but everything about LinkedIn. My courses are not just about LinkedIn engagement. This course is about LinkedIn engagement. But my diversity of contents about LinkedIn surge and LinkedIn algorithm is LinkedIn profiles and networks and groups and company pages on and on and on and on and on. So it's about a specific area, but it's really diverse conversations about that specific area. By the way, it can't be about you. It can't be about your business. I wrote the word mostly, but it can't be about you and it can't be about your business. Maybe you show up in the conversations. Maybe your business shows up the conversations are in the topics but not about you. And if you go to do audio, if you're going to do live, don't make it about just your cells. Don't make you, you shouldn't be the hero of the conversation. You should be the facilitator, you should be the MC, you should be the person who brings the subject matter experts to the conversation, length Myelin and live. As of this month, which is September 2022, I've done 130 LinkedIn live. Every Wednesday I do a LinkedIn Live. And every week I bring somebody new to the conversation. And that is what makes my LinkedIn live successful. Makes my YouTube videos of my podcasts are the same things successful because not just me, I'm not the only person on the stage. Say anything about audio and even newsletters. Your newsletters can be stories that you learn from other's ideas, you've learned from others, et cetera, et cetera. Don't try to do that. Put all the weight on your shoulders because they won't necessarily work. And you need to produce in a frequency that you can sustain. If you say you didn't do it every week, hundred and 30 weeks, you got to do it every week. Whatever that amount, whatever whatever amount of energy you need to put into it, you better make sure you show up every week. Maybe you only want to do it twice a month. Maybe you only want to do it once a month, but never miss doing what you say. You're going to do a live, an audio or a newsletter because that's people get used to it. They're going to expect it. If I miss a Wednesday, I can promise you 100 people are going to message me and go, Where the heck are you? And that's important. I'm fortunate to have that. And I'm done. I'm not going to miss that opportunity. Give them what they're expecting. If you're writing blog posts or other site, you get your own website, your writing blog posts, don't repurpose them in your LinkedIn articles, which becomes, which are by the way, the essence of your newsletters. Don't do that. You get that content for your blog on your website, leave it out there. You may repurpose it. You may write it differently. You may write it from a different perspective. If you want to write about today about dust bunnies and your website, you might talk about dust bunny collectors or dust bunnies styles in your LinkedIn newsletter, but don't, don't, don't copy and paste. That's ludicrous. Google hates it and Google will get mad at you and your LinkedIn content is highly indexed by Google. So don't let that become a problem. Also, your website may become down rated as well. They see you doing that. Produce live shows, produce content. Produced stories that answer questions, create intrigue, create value, entertain or motivate your target audience. Lots of people, lots of companies, lots of marketing department is live by a content calendar. I think that for humans, for individuals, and for companies, that when you live to create content that your target audience seeks that they want, that answers our questions creates value for them and you know, they want it because at least one person asked about it. You're then producing content that people want. And that is far richer, far more powerful, far more brand positive than living by a content calendar. So produce content they want. And test, experiment. Change it up. You do something a little bit different. Change up your entry for your lives, your entry for your audios, change up the words you use the start you newsletters change it in words you use to promote your, your newsletters. Change up your methodology of sharing content in your newsletters. Use different. Maybe, maybe have a guest writer on your newsletter, etcetera, etcetera. You've always got to test and see what value you get out doing it a little bit differently in marketing as well as in science, we call it AB testing. Try it this way and see what happens measured for awhile. Do a four or five times that way, see what happens, then change it up, doing four or five times this way and see what happens. And you might discover that different styles of writing in different styles of doing line, different styles of doing audio. You may find something like, Oh my God, this is what they want. Then you keep doing that. You pivot and adjust that a little bit. Test and test again. Linkedin Live Video, LinkedIn audio and LinkedIn newsletters are great tools for you to get your brand out there through video, audio, and blog posts through a newsletter. But again, I caution you on this. Do not start using these tools unless you're committed to doing it and you enjoy doing it. Because it can become very tedious. If you do not enjoy doing it at one moment, it becomes tedious, is the moment it starts degrading in value. 14. Preparing to build your Brand on LinkedIn: That's allowed to share with you through a slide deck. The next thing I wanna do is I want to take you into LinkedIn. We will log in to LinkedIn through my account. And we're going to look at all the things that I just talked about. Branding through your profile, your services page, branding through your LinkedIn posts and content engagement messaging using LinkedIn groups using LinkedIn in bytes and LinkedIn pages. What is creator mode and what is LinkedIn live audio events and order LinkedIn articles, newsletters. I'm going to go into LinkedIn, and this is what we're going to talk about in the next section of this course. Before we do, here's what I recommend you do. Stop and sit down and write down some things that you need know you need to pay attention to. Maybe go look at your LinkedIn profile and determine is it written right? Go look and see if you have the providing services sector. And I look and see if you have the option for creator mode or not. Maybe look and see and write down for yourself who is your target audience? So you're absolutely clear about who your target audience is. Maybe who are your influencers. So you're clear about who are the people who can introduce you to your target audience. And then maybe also write start building the list of the keywords and phrases that resonate with them. Because as we move through this next section of building a brand or a lake, then as I show it to you on LinkedIn, you're going to need to be thinking about these things. So get yourself prepared before we start doing it. 15. Branding through your LinkedIn Profile: The first thing you need to do to start building your brand or LinkedIn, is to build an appropriately focused LinkedIn profile. Now, before we move into the segment, narrower segment, I said one of the things you may want to do is stop and start building three list. List. Number one is who is your target audience? Who is the human in the role, in the company type, in the industry, maybe in the region who is important to you, your target audience. Secondly, I suggest that you start building a list of influencers who are the people who can introduce you to your target audience. And then the third lists that I recommend that you work on is your keywords or the words and phrases that resonate the most with your target audience. Knowing these three pieces of information and building this list upfront and categorizing and prioritizing them were really does help you in your branding on LinkedIn. Because now you know who you're talking to and you know the words to use when you talk with them. So let's talk a little bit about your LinkedIn profile in the context of building your brand on LinkedIn. I'm not going to go all the way into how to build a LinkedIn profile. I'm just going to hit on the top pieces. I have a course out there how to build a professional LinkedIn profile that you might want to take. This gonna go way deeper than what I'm about to go into on this part here. First of all, I think every LinkedIn profile needs some kind of a banner image. It doesn't need to be if logo and one and doesn't need to be corporate branded. It just needs to be something that shows your target audience that you care enough to put an image on there. Secondly, you need a picture of yourself, your profile picture. And if you're really into doing content and you have a mobile device and you're like, Do you use your mobile device? Maybe you want to create a video of profile video as well. Again, you can only create that on the mobile device. Then you get to connect it to your LinkedIn profile. Then I also suggest that your name field be your name. Nothing more. I've seen some profiles have all kinds of content. You know, the alphabet soup and cute phrases and statements that are in the name field, and that's not what you put in your name field. I think that's disrespectful to your name, to clutter it up with all that other stuff. Additionally, from the mobile device, you can create an audio file here that pronounces your name appropriately so that others can hear your pronunciation of your name. And bottom, It's a ten second field. So not only can you put in your name in there, but you can also add maybe five or 6 s of additional content. That's Brandy that may speak to who you are and what you do for your target audience, but lead with your name there, don't leave him to anything else. Now this is a big one. This is your headline. This is 220 characters where you're again, you get to use those words and phrases that resonate with your target audience. Keywords. Use those in this 220 character field to tell your target audience what you do. Nobody is interested in your HR assign title and you don't need to reiterate where you work, which most headlines say HR define title at company. That is a total waste of space here. But instead, think about telling your target audience what you do for them in this field, again, using the words that resonate with them. Now I'm not going to get too deep into this right here. I'm talking about this a little bit later on, and this is what's called a creator mode. A creator mode gives you the ability also to show your number of followers. And it also by default, it puts the Follow button here for people who are not connected to you and puts the instead of the Connect button. But I wanted to follow button is here, the Connect button is here and vice versa. I've talked a little bit about the providing services section later on we'll come back to that. Show recruiters you open to work, maybe, maybe not. Again, you want to be very purposeful about using that field here. Also, if you're hiring, then you can put that here as well. And by the way, any company on LinkedIn can have one free job posting, anything more than that you had to pay for. And so maybe you want to share that there and maybe you want it, maybe you want to share. Recruiters are looking for a job. But if you're going to use these fields and move very purposeful about using them completely, so you get the greatest value from them. We'll talk about providing services later one. I'm not going to dig in analytics. You want to understand your analytics as a part of that, measuring what's going on, on my profile views coming up on my search appearance is going up or they diminishing. Maybe that means something I might post and pressures diminishing maybe that means something. It means it's time for you to make an adjustment to your activities only den resources or six different resources listed here, creator mode, my account, which is a duplicate of that personal demographic information. I don't use that salary is lights, I don't use that. Here's my activity, which by the way, you can get to that just as easily from your profile as well. And then my items, these are the things that you've saved to come back and look at them later. The most important thing from a branding perspective is creator mode. This is where you turn on the features that you have access to. If in fact you're using. In fact, you want to be a creator. You want to create content, do lives, et cetera, et cetera. We'll talk about that later on as well. I missed a piece on near the top card here. Not always your headline important, but also your contact information. Have you customize your LinkedIn profile URL, which I think is important to do. Furthermore, if you're using lots of social media platforms, maybe you want to customize them so they all use the same handle. Tl Burris is the handle I use everywhere. You want to brand yourself your website by putting your company website there. And if you're going to have three websites listed here, you want to make sure that they are all highly relevant to what you want people to know about you. I've seen people who have their primary business website here and then they add their side hustle here. But yet they're not doing anything else regarding their side hustle on LinkedIn. So that's really kinda distracting unless you are in fact using LinkedIn help you build your side hustle. I highly recommend a business phone number here. I highly recommend a business email address here. If you're not use, really not using twitter, don't put it on your LinkedIn profile. Again, you never want to send your target audience down a rabbit hole. That's irrelevant. I recommend, but your birthday creates an opportunity for conversations. And when I use WeChat and not everybody does, so don't worry about that, but build this out appropriately and make yourself accessible and you're more likely to be successful in life. Now here's the big, first, big section. You're featured section. You only want to put content. This is a rich media content. It can be links to content on LinkedIn. Here's the plus button. Can be a adipose that you've made only did at your newsletter. If you're using newsletters at an article, you're writing articles linked to third party content and then add media is PDFs or videos or images. You want to think about using the featured section and put content in here that again, is highly relevant to your brand and to your target audience. And furthermore, if you put content in here and you got a lot of content, you want to make sure that the first three, which is typically all they see, you want to make sure these are highly relevant to your target audience and a benefit to them. Don't put old content in here that is distracting from your real brand and distracting for your target audience. Activity. This is a really big part of your branding. You don't change anything here. This really shows your target audience, your activity. And so for big pieces of data here, you should look at this on a regular basis and ask yourself this question. Is this content developing my brands, supporting my brand, growing my brand? Or is this content distracting? If it's distracting, you got to ask yourself, why do you put it out there to begin with? And secondly, you may want to go get rid of it. Alright, another big area on your LinkedIn profile, your About section. This is huge. You want to put in these first three or four lives content that speaks clearly to your target audience, telling them who you are and what you do for them. And if you get my attention here, if I'm your target audience, then I may click on see more. And then you have 2,600 characters that you can populate in your about section, again, continuously with each paragraph, each short small paragraph telling your target audience you what you do for them, using the words that resonate with them. The next big area where you get to develop your brand and showcase your brand, your target audience is the experience section. And again, as I spoke to earlier in the headline, nobody cares about your HR assign title, use your keywords and tell your target audience what you do for them in this title, title field here. Then in this description box, which you only see one or two lines by default, you want to make sure you get their attention in these, this first one or two lines. So then maybe they'll click See More and read the other 2000 characters that are in this description box. Again. Using different words, saying it differently but similar to the about section. Tell your target audience what you do for them using words that resonate with them. Furthermore, you can add rich media to your experience section. So again, if you add rich media, makes sure that content is highly relevant and useful to your target audience. Otherwise, don't put it out there. And if you look at your previous positions, what you wanna do here from a branding perspective is never talk about the other company and don't even talk about what you did for the other company unless what you did is highly relevant to what you do today. And, or you're able to show growth. This role to who you are, what you do today in your primary role with your current company, your education field as could be very beneficial to you if you have higher ed put that in their licenses and certifications can be very beneficial if your license and certifications are relevant to what you do today and or shows professional growth. Voluntariness could be another brand Developing. Volunteer work you do is relevant to who you are, what you're all about, or truly given his supporting your community, your skill words are another area where you build your brands or your LinkedIn profile. So makes sure the skill words that are at the top, the top three are the most important and relevant to your target audience. So again, that you're not distracting them. And by the way, if you add skills from a previous life that are not relevant to what you do today. You need to remove those. Again, you don't put any content on your profile that distracts your target audience from who you are today. Recommendations, this is called social proof. You should regularly be looking for that social proof, asking for it from the people you do work with, the people you served and cared for. Make sure that your recommendations again, speak about what you do today, relevant to what you want your target audience to know about you. If you have a recommendation in here, this totally irrelevant or totally distracting, then you can go in here and edit that and you can hide those recommendations so they don't distract your target audience. Publications. If you've got YouTube videos, podcasts, interviews bent on TV, but at the newspaper ben and magazines, but somebody interviewed you in on a website, etc, etc, etc. Then show those publications as well again, as long as they are relevant to who you are, what you do for your target audience. Take the old stuff out of their courses and other way to show your growth in your role. Maybe courses that help you become who you are today, it would be good courses to show projects if you've done work with others relevant to what you want people to know about you projects is a good tool to use. And then languages of your multi lingual put that on there by Pig. Latin is only for a joke, for a test I was doing. If you're a member of organizations that are relevant to your target audience, relevant to what you do. Show those. And the last section is you should always look at your interests section. See what pops up. You know, do I want people to know? I find Dave, follow Dave carpet and Amy Cuddy. Excuse me. Amy Cuddy don't want people to know I follow these, uh, 1,200 companies that I'm a member of these hundred groups or that I follow these different schools. And if they're relevant to what you do, relevant to your target audience, the answer may be yes. If they are irrelevant to what you do and irrelevant to your target audience, then maybe you need to get rid of them. So there's a lot you can do with your LinkedIn profile to build your brand and present your brand to your target audience. You should work on making this happen. Again. Go find my other course on how to build professional LinkedIn profile. It will help you to build a highly branded LinkedIn profile. 16. Branding using your LinkedIn Providing Services page: So let's talk about the providing services section of your LinkedIn profile. Now originally, this section was only available to people who in their LinkedIn profile, they had chosen a, an industry that was a service-based industry. I think it's being rolled out a little further now for even more and more people. I most of the profiles I've looked at had the provided services feature, but not everybody has used that. So let's talk about it for a minute. I'm gonna just click on see all details. Now, there's a couple of different areas. First of all, here's why edited as a management. But then the big section here is the about section. You have 500 characters you can use to populate and tell the viewers of your services page what you do, how you create value that, who you serve, and you want to use keywords. The more keywords you use in this section, the more you're speaking clearly to your target audience. I just noticed one thing is I don't have the phrase LinkedIn training in here. I need to change that. I'm playing on editing this later on because I want to use the key phrase, not just the keywords linked data and training, but the key phrase, LinkedIn training in my content. You also get to pick the location you're in that's going to, by default, align with your LinkedIn profile location. And then you can determine, do I work remote or in-person. I'll show this to you in a moment. Now here's the services provided. You see you get ten services categories, unfortunately is not ad hoc, so you've got to choose the categories or the system has idle available for you to choose. This is really cool as the media section, you can have eight different pieces of rich media. It can be and hit the plus key. I'll show you an image, a video or link to content, or link to documents, or our link to other videos, et cetera, et cetera. Anything you put on here needs to be content that better and continues to support who you are and what you say you do here. Don't, don't put a piece of content that distracts the viewer so that they are misled and don't think about you in the context of the service you provide. Reviews. You can have. I know for a fact that I can ask for 20 and get 20 reviews. I think I get more, but I'm trying to get to 20. And once I get to 20, I'll see if I can get more. But these are reviews where people get to break down your rent, your rating in his satisfaction, communications, knowledge and timeliness. And not only can they do that ranking, but they can also write some character. It might be 500 characters. You can write a fair amount of space within the write about who you are and what you do. And then when you get that review, you can also share that review or LinkedIn if you want to. If you've got a really stellar reviews like, oh my golly, this person knows me, they feel me, they hear me and I did all right, by their share that they all linked in. This is called social proof and there's nothing more powerful from a branding perspective than when other people talk well of you. So those are the reviews you get. And then again, you need up to 20. Now you'll see requests. So this is a part of people requesting services, so you can accept requests. I got somebody here wants help with business planning, strategy and stuff, and I get involved in that a little bit and I got to make a decision if I want to accept this request and submit a proposal back to Timothy or say No thanks, I'll do that later on one another. Really good benefit can be a good benefit of your services pages that you can get service requests. Here's client project. Now this is going to be anything that you have done or you're in conversation of newer, they'll show up here. I don't have any that I've completed because again, I won't get a whole lot of them that are really relevant to me. But this is pretty cool. You can see the ones that you've submitted it in conversation. I believe you can show the ones that are completed as well. And then here's the review status. This is where you go ask for reviews. You can see that I've asked for these reviews and I'm waiting for someone to come in. If if I'm tired of waiting, I can withdrawal that or if I really think that Jim can do and I can send him a message, say, Hey dude, do me a favor, right. This review for me. And if you review, then you can ask for more. Because what you can always you can ask for up to 20 at this point. Let me go back to my service page and I'm gonna hit Edit. Here's where you asked for though. Excuse me. Here's where you put the ten services. Here's rewrite the 500 characters of your About section for your service page. Here's where you say I work in Greensboro area and or remotely. You can turn out you could turn off visibility so others can't see your ratings and reviews from others. You can also allow the two members that you've not connected to the message you for free. This is where this aligns with the open profile. If you have an open profile, which means other people can send you an InMail even though they can't, they don't pay for it. That can be, it can be a channel for getting a conversation. Because my profile is 100% public. Everyone can see my services page. And if I want to get rid of it right here and unpublished it, we go back to request reviews. Reviews. This is interesting. Typically up top here is where you can invite. Let me actually get rid of a few. Let me find a few and get rid of and I will show it to you again. Withdrawal, withdrawal. Find one more. Withdrawal. Withdrawal. Now if I hit refresh Look here. Because I have two credits available nail, I can invite others to review and all you're gonna do there is, you know, say, what do I want them to all? What do I want to invite them to review before I can do social media marketing and do next. And now I can just look, search, scroll and find the right in this case to people that I want to ask them to review my page. And then when you click onto people, and once you pick them, the number of people that you have left to invite for, to write a review for you. Then just hit the button and they will get I'm pretty sure it's a notification to do a review of my services page. Again, you want to use the services page to tell your target audience what you do. You want to choose the right services category. You want to tell your story. You want to use rich media. You want to ask for this social proof reviews so you can build that up. And then this becomes a really nice page, the additional to your LinkedIn profile that when people look at it, then go, Wow, this is what he does. And your target audience will see what you do, the different categories, rich media and most importantly, the social proof. And this could open up the door for a conversation. 17. Social Listening on LinkedIn: Another area of professional branding that's important, especially if you're going to get into content creation, is to do social listening. Now if you had Sales Navigator, you had the ability of Sales Navigator to save leads and save accounts so that you can, in Sales Navigator, you can look at what they're talking about, look at what they're posting, and you can listen to them through social media. Now without Sales Navigator, you have to do is a couple of things. Number one is you have to go look and see what conversations are going on. Now, if you're all about, Let's do program management and health care. All I did was searched for program management health care. And now I'm gonna go look for post. Now I can see who is talking about program management and health care. And I can see who are these people. And if this is a topic that's highly relevant to what I do, I want to see what the discussions are. Unfortunately, this is a little bit dated because I must have chosen a category that's not highly discussed. Well, that's a month old. Interesting. I don't know what the order is here. Six months old, two months old, but just the same. You want to look and see what people are talking about. This social listening. Whose Dan, Kevin, Why did he share this? Who is Nicole and why did she share this? You want to this is called social listening. You want to read what they share, look at their content and understand what the topics are. Because when you do social listening, you now know what kinds of conversations are going along. The a, you should start those conversations. Or B, you should look to get into the conversation with people around what the topics are. Again, if these are important, whenever you search for, are important to you and your target audience, you should be paying attention to what people are saying. Furthermore, you may decide that, wow, this guy Brandon posts a lot of stuff around program management and health care. Maybe I want to follow him. So if you follow him and even more important than to follow, I can go to his profile. I can say I want to follow him, but then I have this bill this bill will send me a notification every time Brandon post something new. So again, if he shares content that's highly relevant than a, you want to follow him and B, you may want to very well hit the bell and get notified of what he's sharing with social listening is important. You may also want to say, Okay, program management, health care Osaka, look at pose. So let's go look at companies. Maybe there's companies that I need to pay attention to that are all about program management, health care. Well, who's this company here? Do I need to pay attention to them? And maybe you go look at Planet Health Care. Right-click open in a new tab. Look at their company page and go, okay, There are 7,000 people following 111 employees. This is what they're all about. They're posting content pretty regularly. They are relevant to me. They are relevant to my target audience. I want to follow the company. And so I following the company and also creates an, a social listening philosophy and may bring their content into your news feed. So look for ways to find the topics, the people, and the companies who are talking about the things that are important to your target audience and relevant to you. And follow all of that. Maybe what you wanna do is you want to look for health care leadership. And you got, and then here I'm looking at the hashtag for health care leadership. Well, 8,000 people think this conversation is worthwhile. Skip the ad eight 6 h ago, April posted salted about health care, whereas healthcare leadership, healthcare leadership, maybe I want to follow our April, maybe I want to follow this hashtag again to create scenarios of social listening where you can find, again, the conversations, the people, and the companies that are relevant to you, relevant to your target audience. So that you can participate in the conversations that they create. Or B, create your own conversations relevant to what they're talking about. Socialists and is rich. And if you're born a brand yourself, you need to be listening more. 18. Curate or Create Content for LinkedIn: Let's talk a little bit more about content on LinkedIn that you can either cure rate or create for yourself and share on LinkedIn. So curating content, That's the first piece. So there's lots of ways to cure rate content. I am a big fan of using Google Alerts. If you've never used Google Alerts, you may want to check this out because you can create a Google Alert to pay attention to the conversations that are going on. Then you could take these conversations that you find here and you can decide while this might be a really useful conversation for my LinkedIn network. So then you go look at that right-click open in a new tab. And you read this piece of content and you decide, is this something I want to share my network? By the way, anytime you get a link from somewhere and they want you to login or register is called gated content. I would be very paul says about sharing any gated content because it may be more difficult for your LinkedIn connections to get to that content. So be very cautious about that. When I go look at as other piece of content or Yahoo Finance, right-click open in a new tab. And these are all examples. This content is not relevant to my network, but this was written, you know, ten days ago, 15 days ago. It's a two-minute read. You go. Alright, This might be, might be very useful to my network. Then what you're gonna do is share that. Now my recommendation when you go to Share is grab the link up here, grab this link right here, copy it, and then you'd go back to LinkedIn. You can, you know, I always hit enter a couple times if paste that link in there, let it load the previews so you can see it as kind of sloppy look in preview. That's what I expect from Yahoo. I can't fix that, but then use that same philosophy. I said earlier. Tell the viewer why you are sharing this. What's the benefit of reading it? What's the value you got from it? Tell me why you're sharing this. And if you tell me something that's meaningful or irrelevant, then I'm more likely to go click on it and read it. And you may want to expand that a little bit more expanded the reason you're sharing here. Whatever that reason is. And then again, just like with any other post on LinkedIn, come down here and put your hashtags. And these need to be hashtags that are relevant to this conversation. Might be hashtag, EV, might be hashtag, electric vehicle. The vehicles, it might be automation, and whatever others are relevant here. So again, you have relevant hashtags that associated this account file, this format, always tell me why you can expand upon the reason you're sharing it with maybe a sentence or two or three or whatever you think is appropriate, and then put the leg and always end it with hashtags. Now, this is just a style that I use that you may want to consider because I know for a fact when I tell them why I'm giving it to them, they're more likely to read it. You'll notice that I also wrote in here, the article came from automation works. And then I also wrote here the articles written by either bird heal, I went and researched that and that's who wrote the Oracle. I expand my reason for sharing it. There's the URL, there's the hashtags. This is just my style that I use. And the reason I use this style as I know that when I first tell them what it's all about, they're more likely to be interested in when I tell them where I got it, they're more interested. If I tag the author, it creates an opportunity for even the altered or common engaged on this content. And then my target audience, my network is more likely to consume this content and be appreciative of the fact that I gave it to them. But curated content from other websites is a great piece of a style of content to share. Don't make it everything you do. But it is a piece of the equation of content that you can share on LinkedIn amount away. You can also go find content. If I go to automation work cell, let me go. Well, use them. I'll go to they're all LinkedIn company page. There's our company page here. The C, they have any content. They do a month ago they shared a piece of content. I can go look at their post and read what they wrote, read with this shared and if it makes sense and is useful this another way to cure a content is go find it on LinkedIn company page and then I can either share it directly if I want to. And if I share it directly, I always use Share and I always tell the viewer why I'm sharing this piece of content. Sometimes all I'll include hashtags as well. Actually altered all include hashtags as well. It's a great way to share curated content by not just find it on the web, the fondant on LinkedIn. Now earlier I told you to do social listening and find content from a social listing perspective. And when you can do the same thing here, you can cure rate content through your social listening. And if you think this article that Dan Rohde is really useful or beneficial to your target audience. Just hit the share button. I'm a tail bit more about this later on, just hit that share button and share it. Always share with your thoughts. And when you do tell the viewer why you're sharing it, There's lots of different ways to get content cure rate content for you share on LinkedIn. Always remember, the content needs to be relevant to who you are and what you do and relevant to your target audience. Now maybe you want to create content. Maybe you want to use some video tool or use your cell phone and capture yourself in a video or record a Zoom call and share the zoom call with with people. Maybe you want to create memes. I'm a big advocate for using Canva. I have a much bigger tool. I use pixel mater. But you maybe you want to create images that you want to share, whatever works best for you to create content, then that becomes a really powerful way of building your brand because it's your words, it's your story, it's your experiences that you sharing, rather than just simply other people's experiences that you are relating to. Both of those are powerful, but your own content can be way more powerful. But be careful this don't make everything you share. Be about you and your company. Tried to make what you share and even what you create to be about others that are relevant to you. Maybe it's your clients, maybe it's your prospects, maybe it's people you met a way. Maybe it's your networking connections where you're sharing their stories that you wrote, talking about what they share with you, what you learn from them, what you discovered through your engagement with them. Lots of ways to create content, lots of ways to cure a content. Use all the different ways that you can come up with. Because again, content, what's the statement we've been using for decades? Content is king. Context is important, especially when that content is relevant to your target audience. 19. Posting Contetnt on LinkedIn: So let's talk about creating a post on LinkedIn and the power that it has for you as you build your brand on LinkedIn. So create a post is really pretty easy from the LinkedIn homepage. No matter how you get here, click the eye and click home. Right here it is. Started post. Yeah, you'd click on photo, video job or write an article, but almost always click right there. Now, when you go to create a pose as a couple pieces of a post, that makes sense to understand. First of all, if you're a manager of a LinkedIn page, you can click right here and you can decide, do I want to post this teddy or one of my pages managed some pages for some people had my own pages as well. I can make a decision. Do I again, do I post Here's my page or do I post as Teddy? And you can do either one. It will work exactly the same from the homepage. So I'm going to do it as Teddy, I'm going hit back. I also get the ability to say, okay, who do I want to see this content if I posted as Teddy, I can say I want everyone on LinkedIn and often linked to see it. That's what's called 100% public the globe means is global. Now I can also say, Okay, I wanted to go in A1, appear on or off or LinkedIn and Twitter. I don't generally do that. I'm not a big advocate of posting content in multiple places at the same time, mainly because they're different conversation. Additionally, I could say I only want to have my connections see it. Now that may be beneficial in some very, very unique situations. Example, you could do a post and say this is just for my connections. And you could say, I'm making an offer, I'm providing this idea, this knowledge is information and I only want it for you. Again, I think it was a very unique situation. I don t think it's something that we want to do regularly. Then the last option you have in who can see your post is I can choose a group. So I'm in 100 groups. I can choose any one of these groups. I only want to post it in this group. So I can make that selection there. And it works exactly the same way as posted in the group. But again, I'm doing it from the homepage. So I'll make this selection right here. Got to go back. By the way, if you change this, then the next time you post is going to revert to what you changed it to. So if you haven't connections only, it'll keep doing connections only until you come back in here, change it to anyone and then hit Save. Now, one more big thing I can do right here is I'd also say who can comment on another comment options. I have three options. Anyone? Only my connections or no one. Now, I understand where I would do a post that says no one can comment. And for two reasons. One primary reason, if no-one comments than opposable die, because you have to have engagement to get opposed to grow and be seen by more and more people. Remember those words. You have to have engagement, so post doesn't die the moment the engagement dies off, so does the post and it will never be seen in the news feed ever again. I don't know why I would use connections only. Again, maybe in the context of some special situation. I always go with anyone. I want anyone to see my content and I don't want anyone or everyone to be able to engage in my content. So those are your options there. Now, couple of things to think about when you're writing a post. If you're just writing a post, then you want to write Seldin again, relevant to who you are, what you do, and relevant to your target audience. That is first and foremost, what you need to be thinking about when you're writing content. And again, if you're doing social listening, then you may have some idea what the conversations are. Not always another piece of social listening I didn't refer to. I use Cora and read it and YouTube to pay attention to what the conversations are in regards to who I am and what I do and my target audience. So you don't need only social listen and link LinkedIn. You can do social listening and other spaces and other platforms and other media. So again, you, when you go, right, so I love with LinkedIn says, What do you want to talk about? So you want to first lead with a statement that tells your target audience what you're about, ready to share. What is this piece of information? What is this knowledge? Where does this idea, what is this perspective? What is this question that you're going to share here? Because if you don't tell them what you're about ready to share and why it's important, then they're not as likely to read it, consume it, watch it, listen to it. So always think about telling your target audience what you're given first. Then give them what you intend to give them, whatever that is. Maybe you want to give them a photo, maybe you want to give them a video. Name is going to native video. We're going to drop an MP4 in here. Maybe you want to give them a document. This might be a PDF or a Word document or Excel document or a PowerPoint, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe you want to post that you're hiring, which will take you through the process of doing. I'll fill basically a LinkedIn hiring form. Maybe you wanna do a celebratory or when I refer to as a kudos posts, which has other options available to it. Maybe you want to do a LinkedIn pole, which you can ask a question. You can make a statement as the pole is all about, and then you get 44 options in your poll. You run your poll for a week or three days. Then under the three dots here you have other ones. You can find an expert, you can offer help or create an event. So these are the different types of posts you can do. Each one from this point forward is slightly different functionality to it. But all of this is worth considering. If only thing you ever do day after day after day is post a bunch of words. Your LinkedIn network is going to get tired of that. They want diversity in content. They want to see pictures and videos and documents and they want they want lanes. You can do www.ncbiwiseman.com just to show you what happens when you put a URL in there. If it's done right, it will resolve to a nice image. You want to give them the lots of different types of content that different members of your LinkedIn network will consume differently. My point is, there are people in your network who love videos. There are people in your network who loved to read. There are people in your network. I love memes or images, et cetera, et cetera. So when you give diverse types of content, you appeal to a larger group of LinkedIn members. Versus if you're only doing one piece of content over and over and over again, you're going to lose the attention of those who don't necessarily like to consume that type of content. Anyway, back to what I was saying here, you always tell the viewer when it is. Just write one sentence there. Then you give them what they want. You give them that information, that piece of content. You may write a little bit more about that. What it is. If sale of it or bad, maybe say what you value you got from it. Say, you know, that you tested it, try to experiment with whatever you can speak about that piece of content. And you might speak about it a little bit more in another sentence, or two or three, if it's only a text, maybe it goes over a paragraph or two. Then an idea after you tell the viewer what you gonna give them, you'd give them a content, right? A little bit more about it, then maybe a closing statement. These are just general ideas, but you want to think about giving somebody something and when you give them something to use, don't hand it, walk away. So maybe the closing statement could be you ask a question. Have you experienced this? What would you do in this situation? Have you ever seen this happened, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe it's an idea or your opinion about that piece of content. But I want to be very careful given out bold, brash opinions who that might dissuade people to want to engage in your content. Maybe it's just an expanded thought about what you just gave them, what you read, what you saw, what you heard in it, which encouraged you to share it with them. These are just general ideas that you may want to consider when you're creating a postal LinkedIn. One more thing to always use hashtags. I don't have any hashtags for this, so I'm just going to make stuff up. But you want to always have tags. And you want to hash upwards of no more than six hashtags and at least three hashtags. This is actually a LinkedIn recommendations minimum of three and generally no more than six and don't do hashtag stuffing. I see LinkedIn post on a regular basis. Not as, not as regular because they get downgraded. They have 15, 20 hashtags like people do on Instagram. And that doesn't work on LinkedIn. So don't do that. Suggest some ideas about creating a post television or what you're giving them. Give it to them, and then have some closing statement or some closing thought or idea, and then always end with hashtags. Now by the way, adding a video's pretty easy. You click on Add a video and then you go find a video that you want to give them. I've got some I can go grab where's my MP4s? I don't have them here, but so there's an mp4, but it won't let you grab to Bigtable. And this is to gauge. The other thing too, is that when you do images, notice it says select images. So I can come over here and I can select nine images. Where's my images? Let me find some. So I can select nine images, 12. Oh, fine. Is no. 3456789. Again, I messed up and didn't click right, but you can add up to nine images to a LinkedIn post suggestion I would have for you. And that is that when you add images, when I recommend you do is all the images should be the same size that it presents way better than images that are horizontal, vertical, thin, narrow, wide, whatever all it should be about the same size. I also recommend that when you're sharing an image on a LinkedIn post, that they should be at least 1,000, 1,000. That fills up the post area the best. And the other thing is if you're going to share a gallery of images, they will display in a gallery of non images. They will display in the post in order of the date they were created, date slash time. They're created couple of things to share with you. When you do a post. When I do a post, I can tag people are mentioned people and I can mention companies. So there's my intro statement about a LinkedIn marketing webinar. Then what I can say is I can thank the company for the webinar, and then I can thank the individual who delivered the webinar. So I might go, you know, Thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring the event. And thank you to add Randy wooden. Because Randy, I are friends. I can get rid of this classification there and I can even get rid of his last name that you can't do that on company names. You have to use the entire company name. But for LinkedIn members, you can backspace out and just have their first name if you want to. Thank you to Randy for the hospitality. Now, I'm really going to create real value. I might want to tell the viewer. Might want to tell them one piece of information because they don't really care. The teddy bears went to LinkedIn marketing webinar. But they may care about one thing that I discovered that they may be able to benefit from as well, so that I can share that. And then whatever that, whatever that information is in one sentence, two sentences, two paragraphs, maybe a video or an image or whatever. And then I can end it again in my hashtags. And then I would just post that. But again, I tagged the company HubSpot, and I tagged the LinkedIn member Randy. And by the way, I don't need to be following a company to tag them, and I don't need to be connected to a LinkedIn member to tag them. I don't know Reid Hoffman, other than when I listened to when I listen to his podcasts. But look, I just tagged Reid Hoffman in my post, doesn't make any difference. Unless they have turned off tagging slash mentioning in their settings. You can tag any LinkedIn member. Now there are lots of other ways you can do a post on LinkedIn. I don't want to hold you up and show you all these different things. What I want to really encourage you to do is stop this course now, go to your LinkedIn account and practice, experiment, play with it and see what happens for you. Because until you go experiment with creating your own posts, you're not going to understand how powerful it can be useful. And until you practice it enough, you're not going to realize how easy it is to do. 20. Social Engagement on LinkedIn: So talked about content creation, content curation, and sharing content through starting up post on LinkedIn. But let's talk about something that as a little bit more powerful than just sharing content. Because if all you do is share content, what you're trying to do is be the one responsible for starting the conversation. And you don't have to be the only one who starts conversations. What you can participate in is other people's conversations. Now again, I mentioned earlier, let's go, let's go look for health care leadership. I'm going to put, just hit Enter. Now look for conversations about health care leadership. Hit Post. And this is one way to participate in conversations. Go to social engagement. That is, go find conversations that are going on that are relevant to you and relevant to your target audience, whatever those conversations are. Find those conversations and then get into the conversation. Now talking about doing that in a minute, something else that you can do. Let's say you find a conversation with St. find. It said how Logics is a really good source of those conversations. That again, I'd mentioned this earlier. You might want to follow that company and turns out I am following that company so that hopefully some of their content shows up in your news feed better than that. Jennifer is one of my connections. If I go look at Jennifer and I see that Jennifer is pretty active, was sharing content. That she's not in this case. Then what I might wanna do is I want to turn on the bell which would get me notified under my notifications anytime Jennifer shares content. So again, whatever you can do to find the conversations going on, then you can look for ways to get into those conversations. Let's go back to the homepage. Let's say that if you're following the right people and you're engaging the right content, if you're looking for the right content, then that's going to influence the LinkedIn application to put more of those conversations in your news feed. So then what you can do is if you discover a conversation is going on in your news feed, then consume the content, which means watch the video, read the article, read the posts, whatever it is, look at the image. And then once you've consume that content, now you are prepared to actually participate in the conversation. This is where you participate. So let's talk about these different options down here. First of all, if you manage a LinkedIn page, you have the ability to change and comment, react, and repost as either yourself or your company page so you can make a decision and change. And I can come down here and say, I want to engage as Burr as verse and salting. And now you look at it, you'll see there's the Burris consult your logo to tell him commented as various consulting. So I could if I wanted to wear relevant and appropriate, I can engage as my company on a piece of content and LinkedIn. Now, go back and engage as Teddy. Now I'm calming or engaging as Teddy. So note you've had the ability to do that. Do not engage completely as your company page. Because really engagement happens at the human to human level. There's another row of every now and then bring in your brand in where relevant and appropriate. But first and foremost, you want to engage as yourself. Now, let's talk about the other buttons here, like comment, share, and sin. There's nothing wrong with the Like button. If your only goal is in this case the let David No, I saw his content. That's my goal. That hit the like button. But if I want to get my brand out there, if I want to people to discover who I am through my conversation with David's content. Then the most important thing I do is comment. That is the most powerful way to get your brand seen by others. Because not only will the third is it, What's the numbers here? Not only will the 32 people who liked it, but also the five people who commented. And David will see that I engage with that content. And if I engaged in a meaningful way, then I get a better opportunity for them to see who I am and what I'm all about. Now, what's a meaningful way mean? A minimum of ten words. What additionally defines a meaningful way? My engagement on this content must be all about this content and the ongoing conversation. The worst thing I could do would be to hijack this post and start talking about something else. That's not what David wanted. He started a conversation about have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it. So you'll want to engage in that context. I don't want to steal that and start talking about something else. Again, that is rude. And again that won't, that also will not help you build your brand. That I actually put a blemish against your brand because people will look at you as that guy. So the words you use here needs to be about this conversation. And again, a meaningful comment is at least ten words. I see this. Often people will see a kudos post about an anniversary or a new job, or a promotion or something. And they'll say congratulations. They'll say, yeah, congratulations to you. What they should've said. It's something more meaningful. So the more appropriate, maybe they should say something along the lines of, I've watched your career growth if this is fact and I am so excited for where you're going, that is a meaningful conversation. Far better than a virtual slap on the back with kudos dude, it's just not a good way to build your brand. Now the share button, Let's talk about this for a minute because there's a couple of different perspectives about the share button I want to share with you. Number one, when you hit share yet two options, you can instantly brain david's post to others feeds. Or you can share your thoughts and attached david's post to your thoughts. Now, why would you do one of the yellow? If your only goal is to quickly help david get his post seen by others that hit the repost button. Still through all that. But it doesn't help you. If you want to engage on this content and you wanna be a part of the conversation. You can share David's post, but add your thoughts. Why are you sharing this? What did you get from it? What did you learn from it? Why do you think this could be beneficial to others? Those are the kinds of things you need to think about. And you need to say that in this, what I refer to as the editorial part of your post. And maybe again, you can tag people. Maybe you don't have to tag David. He'll know that you shared this. You'll get a notification that you shared it. But you may also maybe you want to tag somebody else. Maybe you want to tag somebody that you think really needs to hear this, or someone who you had a conversation with in this context. So you can mention people again, use the at symbol at Randy and click on his name and backspace out because I know him personally. Ready. This is what we talked about last week. So I can tag him but always tagging after you tell me why you're sharing this. Tell me why you're sharing it. Then you can mention Randy are mentioned somebody else. And then you might also add to the story why this resonates with you. And then end it with hashtags. Maybe your hashtags are, you know, peak, which I know is a hashtag for David. Maybe the hashtag is set El Salvador Dali as ANOVA DLR, da, Salvador Dali. Maybe its growth and maybe it's brand, whatever. But you want to use hashtags. Tell me why you're sharing it. Pull somebody in the conversation where relevant, appropriate. Talk a little bit more about why you shared this, what you got from it, and how it impacted you. And then end with your hashtags that I think it's important to share. If you, if this is what I will never do, I will never ask somebody Oh, my company page to share my content. I won't do that. The reason why I won't do that is because I want people to engage on my content. I want this one piece of content to grow, to flourish, to get out there more and more. And when I hit Share, what happens is it creates a competing piece of content. Here's the original piece and when they share it, Here's the new piece. Well, that creates, especially when you don't do repost, if you share what thoughts that creates a competing piece of content. And both of these pieces of content, one being a connection to the other, trying to get into newsfeed and there's not enough space in the news feed for all this content. So let's just take this one piece of content and let's get as many eyeballs as we can own it. And the way we do that is using the like and or the comment button, not the Share button. Now while I'm here, let's go ahead and tell him how does other button does other button is a Send button. The send button lets me send a message to somebody or to others. And to put the link to this piece of content in that message. Now, just as when you're sharing content on the LinkedIn newsfeed, you need to always tell the people who you're sending this content to. Why are you sharing it with them? What did you get from it? What's the value got from it? How did it help you? Why do I think that this piece of content would be of interest to you? You must always tell the person you're handing the content too. Why I am headed to you, no matter how your hand it to them in this case through a message about away. I can send this to Randy and I can send it to Rebecca. And I can send it to Megan. Said to anybody I'm connected to. And then when I do that, by the way, I clicked down here, I can now name this. So I might be able to name this content is name it about Google are. Then tell them why I'm sharing. Maybe you ask them a question, engaged with them privately through messaging. Similar to the way you would engage publicly, but you could use different words privately. Social engagement happens on the post no matter where that post is an Inuit and the news feed, you did a search and you found it. Maybe it's in groups, maybe it's accompany pages wherever it is, but it all is based around use an individual or your company page liking, commenting, maybe sharing are sending the content to others. And by the way, as far as social engagement, let me show you something else that's really important. If I go look at my content and I look at my post, anytime someone engages on your content, you must always respond back to them. Every single time someone touches your content, you need to engage back with them. Now I've got to engage back with Carolyn. She just did this 45 min go. But I need to respond back to her. You'd never let someone engage on your content without you responding back to them. The reason you do that is a, it's the right thing to do. Be it can help your content get more views. When an algorithm sees there's a conversation or conversations going on and see, you can create you can open a door because maybe there's a conversation between Carolyn and I that I haven't discovered yet. And maybe what she says here could open the door for me to reach out to her and ask her for another conversation, which is important, which is ultimately the goal of engaging on LinkedIn, is to develop trust, respect, and like, and to move the right people into the right conversations. Furthermore, again, as I was saying, I don't want people sharing my content. I don't want them sharing my company pij page content, but I do want them to comment on it and helped me get into conversations with the right people. Again, social engagement. So now as I referred to it as the secret sauce of using LinkedIn, because this is the essence. This is the starting point of conversations. When you engage or other people's content. You engage with people on your content. What I would recommend you do at this point is stopped this course, go to your LinkedIn account, do a search for some content that's relevant to you. Read it, look at it, see if it's worthy of engaging on in some meaningful way. Maybe go look at your target audience, searched for their content. Maybe go search for your target audience companies and maybe engage on their content. And then most importantly, go see if anybody commented on any of your content and if they did engage back with them. And then once you practice that a little bit, come on back to the course. 21. Branding through LinkedIn Messaging: So here's my message. I want you to think this way when you're using LinkedIn messaging. Messaging, first of all, is not about selling messaging. Old LinkedIn is not about asking for a job. Linkedin messaging, which is by the way, if a thread is more like chat than it is in male or ERA, or you've seen me email. But you'll want to think about LinkedIn messaging as a way to reach out to your LinkedIn connections. Or if you're using an InMail though people you're not yet connected to. And what you wanna do with LinkedIn messaging is just create enough understanding about who you are in a very simple way. And then use that messaging too. And maybe it takes a couple of steps to encourage that LinkedIn member to participate in a conversation with you. I often say this, use LinkedIn messaging only to invite your LinkedIn connections to a conversation off of LinkedIn. That's my goal. To get my conversation off of LinkedIn. I wanna do it through telephone or let me put it in the right order. I want to do it through Zoom or the telephone or meet in person. That's what I'm after with my LinkedIn messaging. Now, don't misunderstand me. I use LinkedIn messaging for a lot of other reasons. Example, during the Florida hurricanes and September 2020, 1.20, 22, excuse me. I said a bunch of LinkedIn messages out to a whole bunch of people in Florida and wish them all the best. That was my only purpose was just to say hello and I'm thinking of you, nothing more, no sales pitch, nothing. And when they responded back with gratitude or appreciation or engage with me about what I said with them. I did not move them over to you. Oh, hey, by the way, can I get you in a conversation about sales? That's just plain rude. Use LinkedIn messaging to engage with people at a very simple ways. Maybe congratulate them privately for what's going on. Maybe ask them a question privately about their business or about their role, or maybe do some research, say, Hey, I'm looking for someone that can help me with something. You may know, somebody who can help me. When you get enough, build enough trust, respect, and like with your LinkedIn connections, you can start asking them for help. And by the way, the only way you're gonna build trust, respect and like is to help them first. And so there's lots of ways of doing that. Lots of ways to engage through LinkedIn messaging, to build trust, respect and like, and show people you care about them and to ask for help when it's when you have permission to ask for help. But the only thing you wanna do from a business perspective through LinkedIn messaging is when you think you had permission to do so, ask them or invite them to another conversation, ask them if they would be willing to talk with you. And it via Zoom telephone or meet in person. And then when you meet them off of LinkedIn, now you can have a slightly different conversation. Again, you're going to start with that bonding and rapport and you're going to ask questions and again, each step of the way, validating, you have permission to go the next step and have a deeper conversation or not. But you do not do these types of real deep conversations through LinkedIn messaging. Again, think about the words that you're using and thinking about your method and your process of using LinkedIn messaging. Are you trying to sell or you're trying to pressure someone into a conversation? Or are you using it to build some level of trust, respect, and light where you can get permission to invite the right people to the next appropriate conversation. 22. Branding while Connecting on LinkedIn: There's another engagement you can have with LinkedIn members that when done properly, can build your brand and a very meaningful way. And that is the LinkedIn. In bytes, I get a regular frequency of invites to connect on LinkedIn, and nowhere near is frequently, but far more deliberately. I send in bytes out to people whom I want to connect with. But I'm a very deliberate process for doing that. If you really want to understand that process more and look for my course on building LinkedIn network and you'll discover what my process is. But part of the process of connecting and really growing meaningful relationships on LinkedIn, they can help you create business or career solutions, is to be as transparent as I can, to be as honest and sincere as I can. Start the connection with two humans connecting to humans having conversations. I never send a LinkedIn invite out. Here's my center invites. I never send an invite out without including a personal note, that it's a personal note, not a scripted tested AB, measured in byte message is a personal message. I look at the person LinkedIn profile, I looked at the companies they worked for. I looked at what they do, look at their content. And furthermore, typically I will send an invite out to someone who doesn't know me. So they'll generally know who I am or when they get the message. Quickly determine who I am in my relevance to them. And that's what it's all about. It's not about sending out invites and hope and pray that they accept it so you can quickly move them into the sales process that that'll fail long term. For me, I'm very deliberate about the messaging I use on my invites. And again, where relevant and appropriate and where I can I look for introductions or I looked to bump into their content, engage with their content before I send the invite. My purpose of this style, this philosophy of sending LinkedIn in bytes, is so that the right people will accept my invitation. Again, it's not all. This is not a fast and furious race to build a huge LinkedIn network and move them into my pipeline and put them in my Mailchimp contact or Hermite constant contact newsletter that, that is pathetic. Borrowing. Never do that just because you connect with someone on LinkedIn, does not give you permission to add them to your email drip campaign. This is all about building relationships, all about building trust, respect. And like. If you connect with someone or LinkedIn and you immediately add them to your drip campaign. You are not building troughs respect to light your jamming, your business, trying to jam your business down their throat, really long-term does not succeed. So again, think about the messaging you're using. Thinking about the process that you're using. When you are sending invites to people who are irrelevant to you. And if think about the messaging that you get, you know, what kind of invite messaging do you get? Is that the kind of messaging you want that says, I've got this widget to sell and development platform. I've got this program I want to introduce you to. I've, you know, and then you get the standard, you less than real messaging. Think about what messaging you get when you get LinkedIn in bytes and what upsets you, disappoint you or turns you off and makes sure you're never using those kinds of words. I won't sell phrase that my mother told me when I was a kid, treat people in a manner that you want to be treated. And that doesn't change others who don't do it right? But it sure will change the results that you get with your LinkedIn networking activity. So connecting on LinkedIn is an important thing. Growing your LinkedIn network is an important set of activities. Think about your branding with your invite messaging and also furthermore, think about the branding with your next step. Once you accept that in byte or once they accept that and what's your next step? Think about again, one of the words that you'd like to hear. Maybe there's a step that you should take before you try to move them into that business conversation. Sandler sales mental training and taught me not to jam sales conversations into the pipeline to quickly do is called bonding and rapport. So I meet you, I connect with you. Let me do a little bonding sincerely transparently not pretending, and then see if it makes sense to move to that next conversation. Asked for permission to move to that next conversation. That may give you permission to move to the conversation about business. And so again, not only look at the messaging that you use with your invite, but look at that next step, messaging. And by the way, here's another really quick tip. Again, you can get a lot of this from my other course. Often the people I connect with who are highly relevant to me. After I connect with them, I do not send them a LinkedIn message. I really want to develop some level of trust, respect, and delight with them. So I will look for an opportunity to call them. If not, if I can't do that, look for an opportunity to email them before I just simply use a LinkedIn message. And my LinkedIn message will never simply say, hey, thanks for that connection. I didn't message is going to try to pull them into a real human-to-human conversation. Before, again, before I try to move to that sales conversation, it's really important when you're building your brand to do it right in the very first steps, not just all the steps afterwards. 23. Engaging in LinkedIn Groups: There's another area of LinkedIn that I talked about and that is LinkedIn groups. And I'm a little bit hesitant to spend a lot of time in LinkedIn groups. And let me explain why. Most people don't mean this group has 193 members and the only people sharing content on a regular basis is a buddy of mine and myself. Every now and then we're the only ones who show up in this group sharing content. Now, we share content in this group, but none of the members are engaged in on any of the content. You go look at some other groups here. There's one all leadership development. This is a pretty big groups, 66,000 members. Now, a few people who share content in here. This is an hour old, has got three touches on it. This one here has an arrow and we find something a little bit older. This is a month old and a month old. As for comments and 18 touches, again, most people do not spend time engaging in LinkedIn groups. A lot of people want to push content in there myself as well. I'm pushing what I'm hoping is relevant content into those groups. But nobody really engages on from a group perspective. I don't think you're going to find a significant amount of value sharing content in LinkedIn groups. Now, you may want to, if Sandra is someone who is your target audience or an influence or someone you want to meet, you may look at her content and make a decision as to whether or not you want to engage on it or not. Furthermore, in LinkedIn groups, as long as you're a member, you can look at all of the members, hit Show All. And you can do some research on who these members are. Right-click open in a new tab and look at them. If they are someone who is relevant to you, someone whom you may want to connect with and or get into a conversation with them, whether regardless of whether or not you are first-level connected or not in a LinkedIn group from this page, you can send them a message and strike up a conversation with them. But in the context of building trust, respect and light, that message better not be all about you. It should be all about Timothy and maybe Timothy, he's company or about Esther and their company she works for and maybe what you discovered about Angelica, et cetera, et cetera, make the conversation all about the other person. That's a Dale Carnegie principle. I add to that until they give you permission to make it about yourself. And if they don't give you permission, move on. But LinkedIn groups, especially if these 66,000 people are highly relevant to leadership development and thus relevant to you. It could be a good place to find people to get into conversations with through this page. But again, not going to spend a lot of time sharing content in these groups and hoping that that builds my brand. Because again, most of these people never come visit this LinkedIn group. I wish that was different. Maybe one day LinkedIn will do something that would make, will make groups more engaging. But until then, I'm just not going to recommend that you spend a lot of time sharing or engage in content in LinkedIn groups. 24. Branding through LinkedIn pages: Linkedin company pages and showcase pages slash school pages have some benefits as well that may be worthy of exploring. Let's go look at more of my company pages and we'll talk about it and see if I can share with you some ideas that may be beneficial to you. Here's one of my company pages and has 600, almost 700 borrowers. And it's not the most important area of my LinkedIn profile. As a solopreneur, typically I get way more value, way more engagement and conversations out of my personal profile that I do my company page. But I do get some value from the company paid, that's 700 followers, by the way, in case you didn't know and go to analytics and then go to followers. And look right here, I can see how often am I getting new followers. And then better than that, I can see where they are. I can search for the demographics based on function, company, industry locations, seniority. But even better than that, I can come down here and here's the followers. Here's all the newest followers in this month's September 8th show all. And you can see in September I got 15, 20 new followers to my company page. Now, from a branding perspective, it would be worthwhile to understand why, why is many roof following my company page, what does she see value from it? What a Giles are Gale's see in value my company page to follow it. Why is Ashley or Kelly Woodruff? And Kelly Woodruff is a friend of mine and he just recently he started following my company page. Why why didn't Nancy follow my company page? So this is really useful from a branding perspective to reach out to ruddy and say hello to him. Maybe if he's highly relevant to you. So pay attention if you are a super admin or an admin of your company page, pay attention to your followers. Don't ignore them. So great opportunity to strike up a conversation, slash build your brand. Additionally, what I recommend you do from the context of building your brand through a company page, is make sure that the content you are sharing through your company page is highly relevant and useful to your target audience. Now, the same concept applies in sharing content in a LinkedIn group on your personal profile. Same concept, a concept or philosophy applies here. Tell you if you are what you're sharing and why it's beneficial. Give them the information, the length, that URL, the video, the image, et cetera, document, etc, etc. Give them the content you want to give them, and then maybe engage with them a little bit more, share a little bit more insights about that piece of content. Maybe something else that you learned about that piece of content. Maybe a question. Then always end with three to six hashtags. Exactly the same philosophy I shared with you. All other post creational LinkedIn I would recommend you use here, including you can mention any LinkedIn member. Let me see if I can do Reid Hoffman again. I can mention anybody on LinkedIn in my post who allows me to mention them. Again, mentioned any company at IBM. I can mention any company as well. So again, where relevant and appropriate, even on company page post, I'll pull up the right people for the right reasons into your content and your conversations. Pull the right companies in your conversation and follow the same philosophy of already talked about. Again, another idea to think about too, is share content in your company page on a regular basis. Don't share a piece now and share a little piece of content six months from now. And don't share a piece of content this our next hour, the next hour, one, post a day at most. And if you don't want to sustain that frequency, do a piece of content of week one piece of content and meaningful, relevant, useful piece of content every week. And as you're generating and growing your followers, you're giving them content that they may be interested in. You're not gonna get a lot of engagement unless you reach out to create that engagement. But you may very well get more eyeballs on it than you think you are. 46 impressions, 30 unique impressions. So look at your analytics and understand what's going on. How often are people seeing it? 52 impressions, three-three unique impressions. You never know who's going to see this now you're not necessarily going to see who individually posted on. But that's okay. Because I'm fine with this only being seen by 33 unique people. Because every single post I do will get seen by more and more and more people. And that's all I'm after. Not after viral, I'm after consistently sharing content that can build my brand. And along the way it's gonna happen. I'll tell you, I get this on a regular basis. Someone will say to me, Hey Teddy, I saw that free course post you did on your company page. Thanks for sharing that. Well, I'm great with that. They didn't engage, they didn't comment. I'm okay with that. I know they saw it. So share content on a regular basis, is that fulfills the same ideas that I've already shared with you about personal profile, post and doing only can frequency that you can sustain. And it'll entire time, it will start creating value for you. By the way, if you're managing your LinkedIn company page, make sure a, you have complete control over it. Make sure if you don't have control over it looked to get that resolved. And also make sure that you built it outright so that when people look at your LinkedIn company page, hey, they've got a logo, they got a banner or they've got a good headline. There are the about section is filled out. I think you'd have, can't remember, it's 2000 characters in here and make sure this is all filled out. Keyword rich. Make sure you have your website, your phone number, etc, etc. So that your, your company page speaks as well to your target audience as your LinkedIn profile does. One other important aspect about your company page. Pay attention to the activity. Pay attention to when people touch your content. Pay attention to when people share your content. Because you do not want to let a piece of content that someone engaged on be ignored. Now I've already done my research on who OK, OK, OK IO network is. And I reached out to them outside of this post. But anytime someone touches your company paid posts, just like your personal profile post, you can't let it be ignored. You have to come back and engage with them. By the way, look at this engagement. I can engage with my company or as myself. So never let engagement on your company page post, go ignored. Again. Company pages can be useful if you build them out correctly. If you share content that your target audience seeks or once or would be interested in, follow the 9010 rule that I've talked about already. 90% of the content is not about you, not about your business, not about your products, but content that's highly relevant and useful to your target audience. And they will be accepting of that onetime out of ten, the posts will be about your business. 25. Introduction to Using LinkedIn Creator Mode: Okay, The last big tool set that you have on LinkedIn that can be beneficial is what's called creator mode. If I look at my profile right now, you'll see that I have this section here called talks about this is a feature of creator mode. You'll also see that I have my follower number there next to my typical five-year-old plus connectors. These are not my number connections. This is my number of followers. I don't have anywhere near that many connections. But you'll also see that down here under resources, I've created a mode turned on. So let's talk about this for a minute. In creator mode, you can have up to five topics. These are the hashtags that you saw right here that I have added to my LinkedIn profile. You can, these are ad hoc, so you can type in anything you want here. Then you will also see that because I have creator mode turned on, I have LinkedIn Live available to me and to my company pages. I have audio events available to me, and I also have newsletters available to me and my company pages. So let's talk a little bit about how you may use this. I'm not going to take a deep dive into this because really creator mode is really only for people who want to do content creation. People who want to write articles, people who want to create a newsletter, people who want to do LinkedIn Live or do on LinkedIn audio events. But it's worth understanding because if you do like to create content that I would recommend you turn creator mode on and then you start showing that you are a creator. By the way, when you turn creator mode on, you have, for those that you're not connected with, you won't have a Connect button here. You will have the follow button. Connect button will be under More, where again, if you're not in creator mode, the Follow button will be going find somebody who has that, give me 1 s. Here's a good example of a LinkedIn profile that has a creator mode turned on. Again, there's what he's talking about there he's got five hashtags he talks about, I can see is number of followers. Interestingly, he's second level of being connected to Matthew butts, but I don't see His plus 500 connections. So I don't know how many people who's connecting with. But because he's a creator, you can see that these two features here, and because he's got creator mode on, you get the Follow button by default versus the Connect button, which is hidden under more, It's the Connect button was here, the Follow button would be right here. So let's go back and talk about creator mode a little bit more if we go back to my profile. So let's talk a little bit about how to use creator mode. Number one, let's talk about articles and newsletters. The way you start an article and a newsletter, if you have creative mode enabled and you have access to newsletters as you write an article. When you go to write an article and you choose right now for your personal or for your company page. And you go down here and hit Next. Now here's where you write articles. Articles with or without newsletters can be useful because when you write an article, it is 100 per cent visible, not only on LinkedIn, but I can take the article and share it anywhere off of LinkedIn. So I could do a tweet with a article Lanka going to put a Facebook post, Facebook Business post it anywhere. I want to share it, put it on my website, and make that article accessible with or without being logged in LinkedIn. Now newsletters, really cool thing about newsletters, and I haven't started to create one yet. I'm not ready to do that because I want to be serious about doing it. I want to commit to a frequency of writing new articles for my newsletters. I'm not ready to commit to that. But when you create a newsletter, the first time you create a newsletter, it's going to send your newest article out to all of your followers. Now, think about that. The very first one is going to go out to your followers. You better make sure that that first article in your newly created newsletter speaks to your target audience and a real meaningful way give them great value so that you can generate, which is the purpose of this first blast, generate as many subscribers as you can create? Because the purpose of the newsletter is every time you write a new article for your newsletter, it will go out. From the second article forward. It will only be sent via email to all of your subscribers. Let me repeat this. Your first article and your newsletter will go out to all of your followers via e-mail. Subsequent to that, each new article that you write for that newsletter will only be sent out via e-mail to your subscribers. So make sure that first newsletter is really focused on the needs of your target audience, Not everybody on LinkedIn, your target audience. Because you really only want your target audience and your influencers. Those are the most important people to subscribe to your newsletter. Now once you start writing more articles for your newsletters, then your newsletter will be shared through LinkedIn. You can, you can reshare it through LinkedIn. You can reshare it outside of LinkedIn. Everybody knew who sees that article slash newsletter, who are not subscribers, they will have the opportunity to subscribe. So you get your biggest wave with your first article slash newsletter. And then you can keep sharing it forward and other places and you can generate additional subscribers over time. Now, again, reiterate, write your articles relevant to your target audience. Use the same philosophy I said before. Actually for an article, I would say 100 per cent of the time it can't be about your business. For an article, it needs to be knowledge, ideas, perspectives, motivation, inspiration, all kinds of content that your target audience and their influencers can get value from. Because once they see that you're giving them value, then they're going to click on your Profile, want to know more about you. Maybe they'll want to have a conversation with you. So articles and newsletters are really useful as long as they are really useful to your target audience. Let's talk about LinkedIn Live. Linkedin Live. Does it happen in LinkedIn? Linkedin Live happens with third party apps. I use a tool called restrain. And I'm not, but I use restrain as a tool that takes my Zoom webinars. My Zoom webinars are connected to restrain. And then they threw restrain their broadcast out to different destinations. One destination is as a LinkedIn live, another destination, I use this as a Facebook page live. This is how LinkedIn lives were. They? They do not. Again, they don't happen in LinkedIn. You can create an event to promote the live, but you've got to use a third party tool. They go stream yard is one restraint as one. Vimeo has an interface for LinkedIn lives are others out there as well. I went with restrained because restrain back when I started was the only tool that I could find that would take a live Zoom webinar and broadcast it into LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. And I didn't want to change my live webinar format to accommodate a different broadcast tools. Stream yard wouldn't do that. But I have a Live LinkedIn event. Linkedin live event I've been doing I meant to show one-thirty. This is September 2022. Um, it show 130. I get a really good number of people who show up live on Zoom. I get a decent number of people who show up live watching it on LinkedIn, as well as on Facebook. And I also publish my Zoom webinar into a podcast, audio podcasts, and I publish it to YouTube. And my point of doing that is it gets me more reach for my conversations. Furthermore, all of my LinkedIn Live Events are not about me, they're not about my business. I'm a decision to make them about a whole nother conversation that are relevant to a whole other conversation that my business is relevant to, but it's not about my business. And furthermore, I'm not the sponsor. I had to have a sponsor for my event, but I burst. Consulting is not the sponsor. I let other people be the hero of that event. I happen to be one of the co-host. That makes it happen. But I'm not the hero. And that's a think about your LinkedIn lives. Your LinkedIn live event is going to be all about you? Or again, are they going to be all about topics and conversations and discussions and panel discussions that are relevant to your target audience, relevant to your customers, your clients, or prospects, et cetera, et cetera. If you want a LinkedIn Live program to have legs, to keep growing, keep getting an audience, keep creating value for people. You better put together a plan of what those conversations are gonna be about. Who are your special guest, go into b so that you can have a sustainable LinkedIn Live program. Otherwise, this is what's going to happen with almost. 90% of the LinkedIn live events out there is that they don't, they don't last. They have a flash in the pan and then they go away. And if you want to create a brand through video, through live events and you want your brand to really grow. Put some thought into what it's all about and make sure you're giving to your target audience. So let's talk about LinkedIn audio events. Linkedin audio events are a little bit different. With audio events. They start right in LinkedIn when you go to create an event which basically is used for promoting your event, you can choose the type online or in person. And then when you choose online, you can choose a LinkedIn Live or LinkedIn audio event. And again, this is predominantly for promoting your event. But when you create a LinkedIn audio event and you fill it all out of all the information, you get 5,000 characters for your description. That's a lot of promotional content. But when you create the event for LinkedIn audio event, then the way you start a LinkedIn audio event is right before five or 10 min before the audio event is going to start, you click on the event and because you are the host or the organizer, it will set you up with the live event. It'll run and we close this down. It'll run right down here, right down here, and you're on your LinkedIn, you got to do some of the web browser. I have not tested it from an audio excuse me, from a mobile app yet. But you do your lie. You live audio right here. And the people who discover your audio event, either through the event promotion or through your sharing it in other places are sharing it again on LinkedIn exam, etc. The people who discovered it when they click join, it also will show up right here on the desktop. I haven't experimented with it myself on mobile, but I plan on doing this soon. Again, the philosophy that I want you to think about here, you're going to do an audio event. Make them a little bit shorter. Audio events probably work best if they're less than an hour, 30 min, especially if you're going to do them on a regular basis. But when you do an audio event, if you've ever experienced clubhouse, LinkedIn audio events work similar to clubhouse. You can invite people from the audience to be on stage. And these people on stage can talk. The people in the audience can only listen. And you can move people off the stage and move new people onto the stage. And you can create conversations on the stage for your audience slash listeners to listen to. It's a really interesting tool. I've seen it used a few times very well. I'm being totally transparent. I have not used it a lot myself. One of the reasons why I want to experiment with a more is because every Monday I do a meeting with my co-host and we share some ideas, some tips, some stories, then we introduce our speaker, our special guests for our Wendy show is if my Wednesday show, it's a promotional video that we do. And I get a little bit eyeballs. I don't quite get as many as I'd like. So what we're thinking about doing is switching to a LinkedIn audio event and use that to promote our Wednesday show through the LinkedIn audio. We'll see, maybe we'll do it, maybe it won't. But the point I'm sharing with you here as we're planning, We absolutely are planning. We're not just going to jump in and start doing LinkedIn audios and hope and pray. Because as much as I hope and pray, it is not a business tactic. So turning on creator mode on your LinkedIn profile could be beneficial if you have the desire and the time and wherewithal to start creating content, writing LinkedIn articles that get published through a newsletter. Do a LinkedIn live video outside of LinkedIn and using some broadcast tool to push it into LinkedIn and or doing LinkedIn audio events that can share content, ideas, stories, motivation, inspiration, examples, et cetera, et cetera. That your target audience would be interested in consuming in one way or another. Absolutely plan. Because the planning will make the use of this tool on LinkedIn much more rewarding for you. 26. Measuring Brand Growth: Now you've got to measure how your brain is developing. You gotta use the LinkedIn KPIs that are available to you and look at them on a regular basis, maybe monthly. So you know what is going on with your brand or your Profile View is going up. If they're not, maybe you're not doing all that you could do on your LinkedIn profile and in your engagement to get more people to look at your LinkedIn profile. Or you showed up in more LinkedIn search. Again, maybe you're not engaging, maybe you're not sharing enough. Maybe you don't have the right keywords in your LinkedIn profile for you to show up in search. Are you getting more organic and relevant connection requests or you're getting connection requests from the wrong people. And are you sending out invites to the right people? So thus, the big measure there is, is your LinkedIn network growing with the right people? Are you pulling more of the right LinkedIn members into conversations off of LinkedIn? If you're not pulling your LinkedIn, the right LinkedIn connections into the right conversations on LinkedIn, that you've reached a wall. You're never go any further. You never get any more value out of that LinkedIn connection. For the most part. You can break through out of LinkedIn into, in real life conversations, whether that's Phone, Zoom or Teams, or meet in person. Are those people are you able to move some of those connections, those conversations into business conversations. When you go past that wall of LinkedIn and you break through a dead, typically, unless it really makes sense and are clear that this is the right conversation, the next conversation is not business. It may be, even if it is business, it will start with human to human, just released for a few minutes. That's called bonding and rapport. And then you move into a business conversation. Are you moving enough of the right people in the business conversations? And of your connections that you moved to conversations, that you moved to business conversations, or enough of them moving into the realm of customer or client. Or if you're looking for a job, have you moved somewhat into being come your employer? If not, you may not be building your brand, right? You may not be building your network, right? And you may not be doing the activity that you need to make this happen. Notice the last thing I referred to as likes, comments and shares, because that is the least important metric, not saying it's irrelevant, but it is the least important metric. 27. Course Closing Remarks: I've shared a whole lot in this course. From understanding who your target audience is, what's the message and the words that resonate with them. Lots of ideas about curating content, creating content, sharing content, doing social listening and social engaging. Talked about lots of different areas of LinkedIn where you can do these activities. I assure you that I didn't touch on every thing that you could be doing because there's just way too much content. I really wanted to focus on the stuff that is the most meaningful and beneficial for you to do this with. Start practicing. You've got to practice, you've got to experiment. You've got to try things and, and scrape your knee up and get up and shake it off and delete that post or delete that comment and try again because until you go forth and practice, you're never going to truly understand the power and the efficiency of doing it so that you can do more and more and more. I really want you to experiment so that you can get the greatest value from what I've shared with you. So go ahead and finish this course up. If it has a review questions and vital questions, you might wait and take those later after you go practice and experiment. And then come back and do the final question to the review questions and then ask yourself, what did you miss and maybe go back and listen to some of those other segments and watch how I did it again. And experiment even more. Because I'm serious. Until you go experiment, you're never gonna get it. And if you don't go experiment, I'm just going to share with you right now. You just wasted a whole lot of time and whatever money you invested in this course. Because it's the practice of what we shared with you. Here, is the practice of what you discovered here that will get you the greatest results and allow you to be consistently creating even more results. I appreciate you showing up. I appreciate you taking this course. Please use the messaging system and let me know what you think of the course. Let me know if there's something that I didn't understand clearly, I will be happy to respond to any messages in the course and give you any insights that I didn't clearly give you. There are resources that I might include the course and maybe some links to some YouTube videos or some other articles that I find that you may be able to get benefit from. So please get those resources and use them as well. And I wish you lots and lots of success as you build your professional brand on LinkedIn.