https://www.listennotes.com/e/0fec6a0b116f4da391f11ab102d6afd1

Welcome to another week of Unfuck youk Startup weekly workshop. He's a LinkedIn strategist that top-tier leaders turn to when they want to build influence, drive engagement, and generate leads.

You can't be great at LinkedIn just making up stories sit in your house.

People assume that everyone is going to read every word.

The classic maxim for social media has always been like, do cool shit and document it. And like, that very much applies to LinkedIn.

We have a special guest today, Alec Paul. This can be called unfuck my LinkedIn.

Definitely.

Alec Paul, my man. Welcome to the show.

Well, thanks for having me. Hey, Max. I saw Max say hi in the chat. Yeah, that was a nice compliment from Sam. Rick Rubin. I never thought about that way, but that's about as highly complimentary as you can get.

Yeah, he. He's. I love Rick Rubin and that pretty accurately describes you. Yeah.

I don't agree with the innocence, but I sit behind.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's like, I don't, yeah, it's like, it's like, what does Alec do? He doesn't write for me, but it's.

Like- that's very true. And very good to make clear as well. I would never want to take credit for any of that.

Yeah, but it's like, it helps with idea generation, helps nail the hooks, helps sort of like look at what hasn't been working, you know, does the sort of like calendar, you know, content calendar. So yeah, and is worth every penny. You know, if I was looking to go from good to great, and Alec was a move to do that. So today we're going to jump into exactly what you need to be doing to crush LinkedIn coming from the person who is running more big LinkedIn programs than anybody, this man right here.

And not only that, I want to add that Diana Ross, our CRO here at Retention, just started posting with the help of Alex. She's now on our weekly calls. And if anyone wants to head over to Diana Ross's account, I think this is a great testament to this idea that great content trumps everything. Because she's literally started posting, she has 20,000 followers, which isn't huge, it's one-fifth of Adam's audience, and she's been getting like a thousand, you know, likes, like hundreds of comments. It's, and so I said, Diana Ross, how can you go wrong with that name? I cannot disagree with that, Mark. And Mark Mack, how can you go wrong with that name? I mean, that's a great name too. okay, so first thing we're gonna do before we get into the discussion with Alec, we are gonna hop into our pitch slap. As all of you know, this is how we start the show. Somebody is going to come up. In this case, it's gonna be John Zembba from sales table. We do not call people up randomly anymore. If you would like to pitch your product next week, email producer@rb2b.com I dropped it into a chat. I will take a look at all your companies and pick the one that probably fits the best for the audience here.

And by the way, I love reminding the audience, we are speaking to you. You have the opportunity to pitch your product to 531 people live.

Next week.

Yeah, next week. If you want to do that, email us and you might get picked.

So Sales Table, it can be a complete sales enablement and LMS solution. And you could quickly launch AI-powered training, role plays, coaching, But it's also fully customizable. So you're, you could pick and choose, pay for only the tools that you need. Over 120 customers, they're cutting deal cycles by 15% and boosting closed one rates by 20%. And so your chances to win those deals and prevent them from slipping, they improve when your reps can be sharp in their messaging and relaying that value to your prospects. So a couple of weeks ago, I got an email saying that a new training had been assigned to me in sales table, and I'm going to share with you here, if I could give you a little taste of, of what we do. Sorry, I'm trying to figure out. There we go. Sorry about that. Here we go. So I gotta sign this training here. Could everybody see this?

Yes.

Okay, so I got this training. I got an email notification, got this training a couple weeks ago from my boss, CEO, co-founder of sales table. His name's Suresh. He said, you didn't have to say anything, just click the couple buttons. So I know I got this training. So I go and I use the built in video tool, submit my elevator pitch for 60 seconds here, and then I'm graded instantly by the AI sales coach here to know exactly how I did. As you can see, that first attempt, not so great. But what's great for me as the sales rep, I know immediately here when I click details, why I got this rating, how I can improve, and then apply that to the next. So I got to redo that. as well. Didn't do that good on that first one, but applying the saves, the AI sales coach feedback, almost four stars across the board. I mean, who wouldn't want the second rep to make the cold calls for them over the first rep?

Sweet.

That's awesome. We got a question in here. Is this like Gong?

It's different from Gong. It's not going to evaluate live calls. The key is being prepared. before going on those live calls. So you're making the most out of those opportunities. So you're getting those that practice in before executing it on the live cold calls and the live meetings.

Let's get to the discussion here. So, Alec, I don't want to break any NDAs, but you have helped some major names like Adam, like Diana, Sam Jacobs, I think we can call out, achieve incredible results on LinkedIn. In your experience, what is the single biggest mistake people are making when they're crafting their posts? And I guess tangentially, what's the one thing they should focus on when it comes to grabbing someone's attention and stopping the scroll?

So the one thing I'll think they focus on it. I mean, you're probably not writing to a specific enough audience with a specific enough pain. I mean, you're trying to appeal to everyone or you're writing to your writing too soft. like if you don't have a distinct enough perspective, yes, we can talk about the importance of hooks and credibility and story building and intrigue. And I think Max Radman's on this call. He did a good write up on this. And we can talk about that. But like unless you can write to a specific audience with specific pain, you're never going to crack the LinkedIn. kind of beast. That's definitely, and then as far as like the biggest mistake is like it's still, I think it's, everyone talks about the hook. So yeah, right to the specific person, but also I'd say most of the, like I just can't, they're not getting me to stop reading. They're not giving me anything to stop scrolling, you know, to, like I said, from some story or intrigue based or credibility based, like we said, the hooks are the most important thing that more than everything. If you can't get me to stop reading, the rest of it is worthless. And you're going to hear that a million times, but it bears repeating because you you look at Adam, you look at Sam, you look at Diana. It's like, oh, inordinate amount of time is spent on that. Like before we even go into the post, right? Like if there's no hook, it's not even worth writing. I think some of the times we've done it, like Adam, we can write a post and then find the hook, right? Like, hey, we can, we have a good enough idea, we're gonna write it and like somewhere in there, we're gonna find it. And like, yeah, you can do that. But I think early on, it's write that hook first, right?

Yeah.

The trailer for your posts. You don't want to spend two hours or 45 minutes writing a post and you just can never come up with the concept or the idea to get people to stop scrolling. So if you cannot do that, like, that's where you got to start. Yeah. There's this weird assumption in, and I.

Think it's just this, like, inherent assumption. I see it with all types of copywriting, whether it's LinkedIn posts, website copy, emails, where people assume that everyone is going to read every word and, like, the, the substance sometimes will be at the very end, like, almost like the hook is at the end. And it's just a thing to keep in mind that, like, most people are not going to read any of this. And, and, you know, 50 of people are gonna read your, you know, your first 10 words. So I, when I, can I, can.

I jump in with this? Can I jump in first? So, so, like, The majority, Alec and I meet for an hour a week to talk through ideas. The majority of that time is spent working through hooks for ideas that I've had in the position that I've found. So I try to sit down and write three or four LinkedIn posts at once. The position I've tried to get myself into is I basically, in a Notion doc, I was doing a spreadsheet. I write ideas down that are happening all week. And then we have this bank of pre-written hooks and the topics of the post that I want to have like, when I sit down to write three or four posts, I want to have like 10 options where the hook is fully flushed out and we mostly know what the post is. 'Cause then if I don't feel inspired by something, I just move on to the next and I'll get at least three or four posts. Point being, I want to reiterate this. Alex said it, but like, It is not worth spending your time writing a post if it does not have a great hook. A great post with a bad hook is a post that you shouldn't have written. A post that is okay with the best hook in the world is actually a great post.

It's not just the hook. The hook is the idea. You know what I mean? It is also the beautiful combination of words, like using emotion and stats and whatever you guys have all seen, but it is communicating that idea. or teasing that idea enough in two or three or four sentences. So yes, it's a combination of words that can get people excited, but it's more the idea, more than just the words.

Yeah, and a metaphor for a hook is like back in the day when people had physical newspapers that they would read and people were writing those articles, they'd spend 50% of the time on the, title of the article and 50% of the time writing the article. Think about that. 50% of the time on the fucking title.

Right?

So we're not doing that, but we're spending a lot of time fully fleshing out the hook before I start writing anything. And probably right now what we should do as a service to the audience is talk about what we think a great hook is. I don't know if that's in the run of show or not.

Yeah, let's do it. Let's get into that. So we can do that one of two ways. There's people Just ripping posts into the comment section here. So as an example, Jason said, this was my last hook. If I can copy this.

So let me just go on my quick what is a great hook rant. So I think, and this is, a lot of this is coming from Alec and I always give Alec credit when I talk about this. So Alec says LinkedIn is a professional platform, so you need to maximize credibility. He also says you need to treat it as though No one has ever heard of you when you write this hook, right? Nothing is a continuation of anything else and there's always fresh audiences is going for. So the combination of what you say and what your description is has to maximize your credibility, which then combined with the provocative nature of your hook gets people to hit see more. Let me give you an example. Diana Ross, my co-founder, when she says, I have been the one sales rep on two bootstrapped journeys from zero to 10 million ARR, It doesn't matter if you were a sales rep, the weight of her words after seeing that are so enormous that you're gonna click and see whatever she has to say about sales.

Right?

So like maximize credibility is point number one. Anytime, you know, there's this idea of like being in the prolific zone. So like this mainstream, nonsense is just noise. And then too far out on either side's crazy, but in between there is this polarizing stuff. So it's like these points of view that are authentic to you but are contrarian and have a very strong opposing side to them. So I love to say everybody should bootstrap. Obviously, that's not universally true, but it's true enough to me that I can say everybody should bootstrap. Bootstrappers love it. VC community comes in, says, I'm an idiot. I'm like, you know, ignoring these, like, you know, obvious areas. And that's a great social media post, right? Because like, it starts discussion. Also use as many numbers as possible. Like, if you can use a number for a date, a time, a number of employees, a revenue number, money, everyone wants to hear about money, anything related to it, profits, like whatever. And then if you're sitting there thinking like, well, I'm not Adam, I didn't bootstrap 25 million ARR, what can I say for credibility? One of my favorite strategies even is me, and you can use this, is to be a broker of information, right? So like I spoke to 10 early stage startups about their cold email strategies in 2025. Here's four things that aren't working and one that is.

Right.

Everybody's gonna hit see more on that post. And like, I didn't need to bootstrap 25 million AR to say that. Like everybody just wants to know about cold email so badly. Anyway, that's, I think that's most of what I think about hooks when I'm trying to write them.

There's always the cliffhanger or the expectation setting. It's like you can load it up with a bunch of social proof and storytelling and whatever up front. But there needs to be some tease for them to keep reading. I mean, you can look at someone like Adam, who's usually doing like three lines right before that see more. And that last line is getting you to click see more. It primes it with the first two and the third one gets you to click see more. You can do that with some kind of cliffhanger. If I was a startup founder, here's how I would grow to zero to five million, whatever. That gets you to click to read more. And then the other way to do it is, I think I saw someone post about I think it was, I'm going to reference Max again. It was like, there was a good one he had recently about like, CEO friend of mine just shut down his startup after 12 years. He had raised over $30 million. Even the co-founder's families put in $2 million. He tried to hire me, like saying soon we'd be worth a billion dollars. Like there's no cliffhanger statement there, but that very idea of like, what the hell happens next? that is the cliffhanger. So there's different ways of doing it, but like you have to get those people to click read more. That's all we're designing those first three or four sentences to do.

I wanna, well, I wanna talk about shit posting at some point, but I think on this contrarian point, I think I just wanna bring up an example that Adam had earlier in the year. And I had made a similar post sort of ripping it off, but In December, we had shut down all of our demand gen channels just to focus on brand marketing. You guys are in a brand marketing event right now. But Adam's post was something like, we just caught all of our marketing channels saving a hundred thousand dollars a month. And then it was like, here's why the next month was our best month ever. And we grew by 15%. And that's just so like contrarian and sort of like juxtaposed. It's like, well, how the hell did they, if they caught all their marketing channels, how did they grow? Like I have to know. and it's like you're compelled to click see more even, you know, and just sort of stop that in your tracks. And I think that is just a perfect example of that.

I mean, part of that, too, as the thing is, like, we can get into this a little bit later, but it's like, you have to do. Like, you're, you have to do cool. Like, it's very hard. Like, you have to build things, you have to talk to interesting customers, you have to consume interesting information that other people don't have access to. You should go get into a lot of conversations without that. kind of without all of that information, there's nothing to build off of. You can't be greater LinkedIn just making up stories sit in your house. Like the classic Maxim for social media has always been like, do cool and document it. And like that very much applies to LinkedIn. Not everyone is going to have the same level of success as Adam has had, but like you can still apply that principle. And I think that's very important. Like he was talking about, P was talking about that one example of shutting off all the the, the ad spend or whatever. That's because Adam, we did a cool experiment and then we talked about what we did in that experiment. Like, I think that should be your guiding ethos is you are a journalist, right? You are a business building journalist. You're not Mr. Beast. Like, you're not staring at the blank page. You're building cool and you're talking about how you do it. It doesn't necessarily mean work in public, and you need to talk about your churn numbers and give away all your revenue numbers, but, like, You still need to go out there and do based customer problem. Not that doesn't work. But like, and then tell us what's going on because everyone on LinkedIn is there to make, I mean, for lack of a better term, is there to make more money. They're there to go to their business. They're going to network. They're going to learn. They want to know that you have credibility and that you're someone that they can, they should be listening to. So that's the easiest way to communicate that.

And I want to just, I say this, as frequently as people will listen to me say it. From the day that I started posting on LinkedIn till the day I would consider it started working in a real way, it was a year.

Yeah.

During that year, and I worked with Alec for three months of that year, I was very conflicted because I didn't understand why I was writing what I was writing, and it really bothered me. At this point in my journey, I work on product and marketing and now content. It's like in product and marketing, I might be wrong about what I do, but I at least understand why I want to do it. In the LinkedIn thing, it just felt like I was just hurling darts at a dartboard with my eyes closed until it clicked. And then now I feel like every word, I understand why I'm writing it. And most of the time, we had one that missed today. Most of the time, it's like, you know when it's a banger before you.

Yeah. You know?

Yeah.

Even at this stage, we still miss, you know?

Yeah.

Today was a surprise.

It was like this post about John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who said that VC ruins businesses. It was aligned with me. It was this famous guy and it just didn't get any love at all.

Very strange.

You can usually tell pretty quickly, right? Within the first hour or so.

Sometimes they change it up. It used to be the first 60 minutes you could track. If it wasn't tracking one a minute for the first 15 or two or three, then it wasn't gonna hit. And then, You know, the change stuff. I think it's a good point of like, the algorithm, you can't live and die by the algorithm, but it is a phenomenal feedback mechanism. I always talk about this like the audience is not wrong. Like, sure, sometimes LinkedIn has an error or there's an outage or whatever, but if you put out a piece of content and it didn't work, it's your job to figure out why it didn't work. Like you have to have a theory on what happened and why in order to get it better and to continue to test and iterate, right? So like, LinkedIn is the best feedback mechanism on the planet for your message, for your content, for everything, for your bigger picture narrative. So I think that that is very important to lean into that, not just complain about like, oh, this didn't work because the algorithm, blah, blah, blah. It's like, if it didn't work, it's got audience, audience don't like it.

You did something wrong and like, we have to figure out what that was. I am curious, would you re, will.

You guys try to repost the, the John Mackey one? Yeah, I totally would. Yeah, yeah.

I totally would try to do it again in like, like a month or.

A couple weeks or whatever.

What'S the main thing you look to change? I don't know.

Definitely the hook. I mean, it's all. If it didn't work, it's the hook. Or it's like you try without the video, and then, you know, it's gonna be the hook. So you guys can try. See us try to do that again in a month, for sure. And I think you should look at it. We're kind of getting off topic, but, like, the reason we can do that is because content is intellectual property, right? Guys, like, you're not posting once and then never using that again. You should think of all this content as Like episodes of friends, like they don't air an episode of friends once. Like you re exploit that intellectual property over and over and over again to gain attention. So the idea that you're creating this content library, you're not on a never ending tread, tread, treadmill, like it compounds. And Adam now has hundreds, thousands of posts that we can pull from and remix and reuse and redo. Like that's what you're building, right?

It's like a library of intellectual property. That's the best way to think about it. And it's, it's like, Andy Muborin says it a little bit differently. He's like, you don't post on LinkedIn to get get engagement and likes and followers. You post on LinkedIn to get a library of greatest hits and those get you engagement likes and followers.

Absolutely. And then if you want to go the full machine, you turn those into ads, right? You turn it into whatever. So that's a good way of looking at it.

I want to grab a couple questions from the audience and then we'll get into the unfuck my LinkedIn section. Someone asked, is it a good idea to post daily? So post frequency, especially for somebody starting out, let's think of it in that lens.

I think you want reps, right? You need to have bats, right? Because you don't know what you're doing yet. So it's good to try different things. At the same time, trying to meet an artificial content calendar because you think that's what you need to do. And then you rush out the post and you don't spend as much time of it. You'll get greater. Adam posted three times a week. like you'll get greater growth off of quality than you will quantity. Like again, it's a hard balance, but because your growth comes at the upper 2%, right? So it's like if you can put a post that does one post once a month that does a thousand likes, it's going to give you way more than one post every single day that does 20.

Right?

So that's kind of how you want to balance it. You want the reps, but it is a quality over quantity game, at least now. It wasn't always like that.

I like to think of it like a, like an artist, like a musician. You know, if they put out a hundred songs and only one percent of them were good, you're probably never going to listen to an album or a new song when it comes out. But if they put out, you know, five songs a year or whatever, every few years, and, like, three of those were just Killers, you're gonna listen to virtually everything they put out and. whether that's, this is email or we're talking about music or LinkedIn posts, like the worst thing you could do is develop the reputation for being white noise for your audience, no matter what medium you're in.

Yeah, you start to get ignored.

Definitely. One other question in here. Ryan Barnett asked, does this is call to action related? Does the content posted on LinkedIn need to stay on LinkedIn? He says, I hit read more on nearly Autumn. All of Adam's posts, excuse me, I've bought RB2B, but I don't recall if there were call to actions on the post itself. Are there links to podcasts, webinars, contents.

Or is that too much friction? No, it's fine. You can do it. I would just be very sparing, you know, do it sparingly, sparingly. Like, what was the name? What's the name? Gary Van, you know, it's like the jab jab. What's the phrase? Jab jab. Like jab jab right hook. Yeah, yeah. It's like give, give, give, take. Like early on, you just want to give. You don't want to be taking anything from them. Right. So it's like, you're not gonna be sending people like, Hey, this is all cool. Go by my shit. This is all cool. Go by my shit. Like that doesn't really build the right, that doesn't build affinity with the audience. That doesn't mean at some point you can't sell, but early on especially, I would be much more focused on giving and looking at, it's a six to 12 month investment and testing occasional calls to action. And then using Adam as an example, we've definitely gone through periods like at our B2B launch, we pushed it super hard for like six months. We pushed it really hard. We're pushing it less hard now. For a while, we'll push the webinar or we'll push the community. So I think you want to use it sparingly or strategically, I think is the best way to talk, you know, think about it.

And there's so many good questions I'm trying to answer. I'm trying to answer some of them. Yeah, so another thing I wanted to say was like, the thing that I think about, it's like you've got to just like try to make the best stuff you can. and over time, people reading several posts of yours, they will click the visit my website.

Absolutely.

Like, like all of the traffic to RB2B is from LinkedIn, and that is what it's from. It's from people, like, reading through my posts, being like, oh, like, I kind of like what this guy has to say. What the does he do? You know? So if you don't have visit my website as your call to action underneath the description of what you do, you're doing yourself a huge disservice. I would get off this call the second you get off this call, go do that if you plan to post on LinkedIn, because that is an unbelievable source of traffic for you for when you unlock this content.

Yeah.

Another point on that is like Adam made our, not everyone's gonna be able to do this, but it's just something to note that I think is important depending on who you sell to. It was like Adam made the company a character in his content, right? RB2B was a full, just like Adam was a character, RB2B was its own character, right? It had ups and downs, it had a launch, it had setbacks, we different learn. And that gave us a very organic way of promoting RB2B without actually promoting RB2B. We just talked about it.

So, by the way, right now, I hate RB2B. In reality, like we just hit 5 million, I fucking hate it.

And I'm sure we'll be talking about that very soon.

Yeah.

If you can make your company a character in your content in a way that doesn't feel like you're saying, Hey, go read our blog post, but it's very organic. That's another kind of like hack for how you can talk about your company and get drive traffic offsite without having to constantly say, Hey, go visit my website.

And like all good characters in any story, like you don't want to just see it succeeding. So like just sharing the successes or even when it's failing, pretending lights like it's succeeding. is not going to do you any good. You want the character to go through, I mean, hardship. I mean, you don't, if it's a business, you don't want it to go through that, but, like, it's going to. That's, that's the reality. That's why we're all here on a.

On a podcast called unfuck my startup. Right. So can I, can I say one more thing? I think when you get really Advanced with LinkedIn, like, I think when you start writing, there's, like, templates you can follow, which I was doing, and it's like listicles with the tldr or something, and that, like, just helps people. It's like getting them to click see more and then stay on the page is basically it. And then as you get better and better, storytelling is your ultimate superpower because that's what everybody wants. And that's what really emotionally moves people. And that's what really sticks them on the page better than anything else. So I've just tried to get better at that. Like, if you look at what my monthly updates have turned into now, It used to be like fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. If you look at some of my quote unquote competitors that build in public, it's like boring, dry blog posts. But I've gotten to the point where I hardly talk about anything. I talk about the emotional journey of how frustrated I am that we're stuck again, which I think is more relatable than, oh, yeah, we hired three SDRs and let go of one.

So.

So, yeah, that's a little additional nugget that just came to mind.

I I pulled up five posts that people have been dropping in throughout the show. Thank you, everybody. So we'll get to cover a few here before we get to that. So we have sort of soft launched, I mean, I guess now hard launched, a community called rb2b insiders. we do a ton of stuff in there. We have live events where it's like, you know, interactive. We do AMAs with, with high profile people. We have courses, we do all sorts of feedback in there. But one thing that's in there that the community members love is our LinkedIn section of our community. And, and what's in that section is a, a LinkedIn Secrets course, which is really all of Adam's learnings, a lot of which came from Alec. over this journey of growing his LinkedIn audience. And I see there's just a ton of questions rolling through here. Of course, we can't get to everything, but I hope this course will really help answer a lot of questions and accelerate everybody's sort of journey here. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to drop in the link. I made the course public. I'll probably turn it off tomorrow after the workday, but it is going to be public, this LinkedIn Secrets course. right in the link that I just dropped in here, insiders.rbd.com Everything else will still be private. There's an onboarding course in there. If you're curious what's in the community, you can check that out. It's like three minutes long. But hop in there, check out that LinkedIn Secrets course. We do a ton of like engagement and stuff and help each other blow up, you know, blow up everyone's posts. It's really great. But wanted to do a plug there. So check out the LinkedIn Secrets course. We spent a lot of time and energy on it. It's really well produced. It's amazing content. if you can only get to one module, module three, I is my personal favorite. And someone said, it looks like the course is still locked. I will unlock it for you.

Well, you have to- and by the way, the idea with the community is we're giving an incredible amount of educational value, but the reason people are the happiest is because, let's be honest, it's a very lonely deal being a founder. So it's like, The idea is give a 5x value on just content and education alone, but what you're really there for is to just go through this with somebody who's experiencing the same thing, which I did not have until very recently when I did this.

So let's try, I see everyone saying there's an access issue. It says open on my end. I'm going to figure that out during the next discussion component. Before we do that, let's hop through some posts. Let's do this unfuck my LinkedIn section. We've been sort of talking about it all week. I'm very excited for this. I'm going to share my screen and we are going to go through some posts that I've selected from the group. So Alec, I think the best way to do this, why don't you give us your thoughts on these posts? These were mostly for, I don't think anyone dropped in a post saying, hey, this absolutely crushed. Tell me exactly why I crushed. These are all you know, people that wish they're posted better. So we'll kind of rifle through five of them so we don't have to go too, too deep, but just the high level.

It's like, who's we for me? It's like, who's this before? Like, inbound machine can kind of apply to anyone.

Right.

And there's also, like, the repetition of inbound. It was probably you're like, you're wasting real estate there, but it's like, I don't know exactly who this is for, I think is the immediate thing. I'm scrolling pretty quickly. So the TAM for this is basically anyone that has, that is looking for an inbound calls, which is, I think this is too broad, right? So I think I would get more specific. I'd say who's we in like your inbound machine and was there any constraints to it? I just need to like load more up in that kind of initial real estate to get someone to stop and like, what's the constraints, I think is a good way of looking at it. So you can call it the persona, call out the constraints, and then leave me with some kind of reason I should click see more. I think if you go down, there's like a video, is that right?

Mm-. So this is like a demo video.

Sales post, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Which in general, those don't perform as well, do they, Alec?

No, they don't. It's like you can use it sparingly. let's call it introducing, but we're here. Sorry. It's just too sales. I think probably just too salesy. Like, the way I would have done it is write, like, a big post about how you built your inbound machine, and then if you did it using your product at the end, I would then tease that product and, like, offer, you know, proof for one of them to see it or whatever, but I would bury it like a lot of the. Let's see like a very compelling video. Like a demo is gonna be harder because even just like the word demo, people feel like they're being sold to. And what you wanna do is provide only value and then bury the fact that it's a sales thing. Like I think the best version of this post, you don't know that you're selling a demo until you get to the last two or three lines, right? So that's how I would kind of like that expertise.ai, I would bury that at the end as well. What I would like to see is like how you built this inbound machine. to book these 60 calls a week for the certain persona. And then all of that narrative arc leads to the demo, right? And then you bury it at the bottom so people don't stop scrolling before they get there.

And I think a good question to ask is like, when you look back at your posts, think to yourself, is my product or the benefits of my product the story or is it a character in my story? Cause there's a huge difference between those two. And this one I would say it's definitely the story. Let's hop to another one. We have Kate O'Neill over here.

What's the image? Okay, explicit. Everyone knows how my communication was objectively reviewed on my, is it a product? Is it a gent? Is it a product post?

I don't know.

Could those holes in every job? again, I'd get, it's like who's it for again? I think it's the big question. Excellent communication skills are probably just a little bit broad, but in the experience skills of the person reviewing your performance. Sorry, I gotta read it really quick.

Yeah, I feel like there's not, not like a strong story arc here, like something that's, that's Like almost summarizing it in that first sentence.

I would lead with something like where poor communication led to a very negative outcome to raise the stakes of how important communication is and then get into the rest of it. I think that is where we start. The image is going to make that really difficult. because it's a lot of text on top of a lot of other texts. So I maybe would have killed the image and used that text in the post and probably shortened it down a little bit. Like use that that way. I've seen anything where you're using like a lot of text in an image with a lot of text on top of it just gets it feels like a lot of friction for people to like, I have to consume all this. So that's kind of my initial thoughts.

Well, let's hop to one more and we'll get back to discussion here. So off the bat we have a, yeah, well, you jump into it, Alec, you're the expert.

I mean, crash G chat GPT is great, you know, a great angle for sure, but, you know, the very, very big blocky paragraph is like impossible to get through, especially on mobile. The fact that you just have that link, that's like a, the link preview. Like I'm okay with links, but when you use the link previews, LinkedIn seems to punish that even more. I have no idea why, but like you can have a link in there, but don't do that little link preview image. And then even just from right here, it's going to be hard to read. So you got to give me some white space to brief with this thing so I can like, otherwise it just feels like this really daunting task that I'm going to have to read this entire paragraph to get the value of it. Like you've got to break it out. but I love the crash. I crashed chat. GPT should be a killer hook.

Yeah.

And this, I think this also brings up this idea of, like, everything really has to work together in Harmony, right? If you have a great first sentence, but it's not, the spacing isn't great, it's still not going to take off.

If you have it, I would redo it.

Yeah.

Like, you could do this post again last week. I crashed chat GPT.

Well, cool, folks. Thank you for participating in the, the unfuck my LinkedIn. The first ever. I will have to do this again. Let's go back to sort of a, there was something you had mentioned, Alec, and we, we had posted it in the promo for this show. It was kind of this gimmick you were talking about that gets this insane engagement. So there are comments, maybe yeah. So could you please kind of go into exactly what that is and, and, you know, why is this basically not all there seems to be these Trends that happen in posts. This is not unique to LinkedIn. This happens on every social media platform. And while they won't be long-term strategies, they can be great for, you know, latching onto early engagement.

So, yeah, it works. You should jump on it. Like I said, I mean, you may not like it. There's a lot of, you got to do what's right for your brand, I think what Pete is talking about is we've all seen like these long posts that promise big outcomes or assets. And then at the end of it, they're going to be like, comment, whatever deck below and I'll send you the deck. We've done it. I've had clients that do it.

It works incredibly well. It's a huge- I just dropped an.

Example in from our boy Nathan Laka. Nathan Laka loves it. It's a huge pain in the ass to have to deal with the output. And a lot of people are never.

Going to send you that asset, to be fair.

It's really just an engagement hack.

Daniel, works amazing, feels terrible.

That's exactly right. That is exactly right. I think you have to balance what you, it works to drive leads. The reason you're seeing a crop up, because there's been like two or three or four, like AI tools and coaching programs that have gotten popular on LinkedIn and they kind of teach how to do this. And that's why you're seeing a rash of this stuff all around. And then it's kind of gotten populated throughout the rest of the ecosystem. I can tell you though, I've been doing this stuff for like three or four years. Like it worked four years ago. So will it continue to work? I don't know. It really is a question for your brand if you want to be associated with it, but I can tell you it works if you do it right. You can drive a ton of leads if you can figure out how to get back to all them and drive a bunch of inbound opt-ins to whatever it is you're doing. The way it works is usually people are looking to accomplish some kind of result. You're going to give them half or tease it in that post and then you're going to give them the full thing and they have to comment X below. It juices your comment numbers. It'll drive an insane amount of views for you. Your followers will go up. It tends to extend outside because of how wide it goes. It tends to extend pretty far outside your ICP. Like you're going to get a lot of people commenting that will never buy whatever it is you're selling, right? And you're going to get a lot of new followers that again are never going to buy what you're selling. But again, it does work. Work in the sense that it will juice your views, it'll drive followers for you, and it'll give you wider distribution for that post. I can tell you, I would say maybe 30% of the time do people actually follow through with it, which is very annoying and is given a very bad reputation. Mainly because LinkedIn punishes outbound and there's no physical way to send 4,000 messages on LinkedIn without scraping them all and doing it via email or even if you have them all connect with you, it's like you will get rate limited. So, you got to deal with the aftermath of it, but it works.

Someone said, lock, I never sent the slides yet.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, you almost don't want it to take off too much because then, like you said, there's just no way to go through them all. So beyond kind of, we've talked about a ton of tactical stuff. What is sort of the biggest mindset shift you encourage kind of your clients to make when approaching LinkedIn? So maybe in this example, we think about Adam when you first started working with him and whereas LinkedIn was kind of pre-Alec and, you know, those three months and then, you know, really the past two years.

Mindset shift. I mean, if you're going, I think it's different depending where you are. Adam had been doing it a long time. It had a lot of evidence of, like, what did or didn't work. I think from a mindset shift perspective, you really got to treat it like jogging, like, It kind of sucks at first, right? Like you don't want a job, you know it's really good for you, you know over the long term it'll make you healthy, make your business healthy. But even once you get going, it still kind of sucks and you don't want to do it, right? But like that is the biggest mind shift shift for me. It's like it is a 12 to 18 to 24 month commitment over time. You need to figure out ways to make yourself stay in a Stay consistent. LinkedIn is all about compounding and consistency. If you post for six months, 12 months and grow a big audience, and we've seen this a couple times and then stop for six months, it is very, you're not starting where you left off. Like you're taking a couple big steps back, right? So it is a consistency. You've set yourself up a consistent schedule for you to be, and I'm gonna keep saying it, consistent over the next, that's why I kind of don't recommend doing seven days a week cuz you'll get it burned out, right? So I think that consistency is the most important. I mean, the advanced level stuff would be like you have to find your big picture narrative of who you stand against, whether that be like little micro narratives like Adam with Six Sense or Predictable Revenue Playbook or Inbound Lead Outbound or VCs Boosts Bootstrapper or the work in public. Like all of those things are different narratives that we've told over time. that have developed their own language and storylines and and a lot some of that stuff is found organically, so based on what the audience respond to, but some of it's kind of plotted out. So sometimes it helps to look a bit more like a again, this is a little more advanced, but more like a TV show. I do.

I'm hammering questions over here, by the way. Yeah, I just answered like 12 in a row.

Daniel Klein has a great one in here. Adam, are you doing it on are you posting to everyone? or just hosting panelists.

Can you make sure you're- no, no, no. I'm sorry. There were 14 questions in the Q&A.

Oh, Q&A.

Yeah, yeah. I just knocked them all out. Thank you. So I was a little zoned out for a second, but I answered all of them.

Hey, you're good. Giving the people what they need. Someone had a great question, which I think talks about the really goes down on this mind to that shift sort of thing. Especially, you know, a lot of the folks in here, Alec, are not you know, not big names on LinkedIn yet. So Daniel Klein says, Adam, did you deal with any imposter syndrome when posting? Like, especially when starting to post? Sometimes it's like, do I have to say? I feel that. And I feel like a lot of the people in here are like, well, I'm not Adam. I don't have this 25 million, you know, ARR company that I bootstrapped and all these crazy stories.

Well, So, yeah, what I would say to that is I say that I made my first social post in the fall of 2022, but I ran a successful Facebook ad campaign in 2020, which is not this, but it's kind of like that. And the only reason I was able to do that is because several years prior, I got this idea in my head through a business coach, one of these info product type business coaches. who was advertising on Facebook over video to grow his coaching business, that it would work for this non-product market fit SaaS that I had. You should see the videos. They're terrible. I was so bad at it that I actually, I was down in Argentina is when I met Helen. I actually hired this influencer guy in Argentina to teach me how to be better on camera. and do this stuff.

So.

Long story short, at that point when I was hurling this, I look at it now, it's like, what was I even talking about? Why would I have ever thought that somebody would have wanted to see a Facebook ad about this? It just seems crazy now. But it didn't seem like that at the time. I didn't know what else to do. At that point, I definitely felt, like, you know, this imposter syndrome, right? Because, like, the business coach is telling you, get out there and do it. He's giving you some stupid, like, four-part strategy, and then, like, you do it, and it just obviously doesn't work because, like, that's their whole game. And, yeah, it's. It's humiliating, but, like, anything in life, you know, everyone who's really, really good has this really long backstory getting there.

Right.

And mine is no different. So yeah.

Yeah, it's all the long game. I want to, so I quickly want to ask, it looks like I see a ton of people flooding into the community. You do have to sign up for like a free account so you can access it. Can someone just confirm that that is working? So insiders.rbd.com, I saw like 50 people, yes it works. All right, beautiful. So everyone once again, insiders.rb2b.com. yeah, it says locked, but the, the LinkedIn Secrets course will be open. You'll see a little graduation hat there, Nisha.

So somebody asked for my newsletter again. I didn't want to put it in there while Pete was promoing the insiders. I just dropped the, the link in again.

So that'll give you our, our 10 step unfuck my startup checklist that we believe are the 10 things you need to have figured out you can articulate your idea to anybody.

And by the way, Alec, I think you get the retention award. We have like, you know, the amount of people who have dropped versus the peak is much lower than a normal, normally we get a pretty sharp drop off at halfway. I think it's the beard, man. I think people are so captivated by the beard, they're like, it's always the beard.

It's always the beard. We can talk about this stuff forever, honestly. There's so much LinkedIn stuff. and it's such a confusing topic for people.

Just for says, yes. That's why I'm still here.

Yeah.

I think people, everyone canceled their meetings at the half hour Mark. I think that's why a lot of people drop in. Alec, you just, you trumped whatever they had. Whatever they had. So let's say Legends retain. Oh, man, let's put that on a shirt. We'll do some giveaways on that.

That makes me feel small because my software products don't retain.

Let's do a couple of questions in here before we go. Does scheduling posts impact distribution? Terry Wilson, that's a good- I can.

Do it in platform. I would avoid all third party tools. One of the biggest, we should have talked about that earlier, but LinkedIn has.

A lot of automation.

Very strict terms of service. You're building a founder brand or your audience. like as a point of leverage for your business, you're going to invest a lot of time and that means money into it over the long term. Don't risk it by doing cheap, easy hacks. Like there's a lot of automation on LinkedIn, there's a lot of post scraping, there's a lot of automated whatever enrichment and stuff like that. Like it is, you're playing with fire a little bit, right? You saw what happened to Apollo, you saw what happened to Seamless, you know, they're big players. but LinkedIn is aware of every little thing you're doing for the most part on LinkedIn. So going back to his question, if you're going to use scheduling, do it with their native tool. I don't use any kind of third party tools. So they have a native scheduling tool. Just to reiterate that everybody shouldn't impact the distribution. Like it'd be very, I know there's a lot of myths around that of like posting live that we do post live a lot because I still buy into some of those old myths, but we've scheduled enough now that it feels like it doesn't. And obviously it'd be very dumb of them to punish their own internal tools. I think it just like you're, when you post live, you're actually on the platform, you're liking and you're engaging. That kind of primes it a little bit. I think that's what people see versus, like, you schedule it and then you don't come back to the platform for three hours and you wonder why it happened.

It's because, you know, it's because you weren't engaging. You weren't, you weren't engaging with your comments or other people, so. and Kate O'Neill had, like, a good, I just want to, like, if, if, if there's a, a body of questions related to my engagement has gone down, her specifically was like, I got this top voice and affiliate went down. It's like, I feel like what you would say to this is there's really only one thing you can do, no matter what the reason your engagement goes down. It's just go back to the fundamentals, try to make a better hook, try to make a better content. It's like, whether it's an algo change or a tap badge voice or, like, you get Shadow banned or, like, whatever you think happens. You have to get- the only thing you can do. Yeah, it's just- There are a couple levers.

Adam's 100% right. I think the best look at LinkedIn is like, LinkedIn is an angry God. There is nothing you can do about whatever decision they've made. You may face their wrath, but you live in their world. We've chose to build on this platform. We follow their rules, right? So if something happens and it's happened to us, for a month, everything felt like shit and nothing was working. It eventually does come back, right? So I think there's growth levers you can pull. Like, yes, work on your content, work on your hooks, go engage with a ton more people, right? Like that stuff really does work. That's not just, like, a myth, right? Like go comments on more people's stuff. Make sure you send connection requests, have DM conversations. Like a fun little trick is like, if you start DMing with people and they respond positively, LinkedIn will show your content to those people.

Right?

So like there's all these different levers of the comments, the connections, outbound comments, inbound comments, profile views, messages, and I would utilize all of those, you know, as a busy executive, you only have so much time in the day, so we can't pull all these growth levers all the time, but know that they do exist and there is a way to get through it. I saw the thing about the blue badge, Kate. I've heard that before. I don't have a good answer. It seems insane to me, but you're not the first person I've heard that from.

I never got one. There was a way to get it at one point that I was fed the instructions for it and I just was like, I'm not doing that.

Yeah, apparently it's good. Apparently they punished me and, you know, who knows?

Well, next week, folks, we're talking about LinkedIn again. We have Tom Hunt, who has had post blow up bigger than anything I've ever seen. I'm looking at one right now, 309,000 likes, 9,700 comments, 70,000. I mean, I'm not making up these numbers. Let me share my screen. screen quickly. We're gonna have Tom Hunt on next week. So if you would like to figure out how the heck you can get numbers like this, we want to, too. And we're all going to dive into it together next week with Tom.

And surely there must be some Shenanigans involved.

Yeah. Shenanigans or like. Like there's LinkedIn bait. You talk about remote work or bad bosses or. you know, giving time to pregnant employees. Like there's just certain topics that LinkedIn just loves, right? Like, so you combine that.

I think he's got some pretty clever Tom Foolery going to that I can't wait to uncover.

I'm going to tune into that one because yeah, very big.

Alec, join and grill them in the comments.

I'll just come in and just like leave a bunch of trolling.

Well, guys, thank you all for joining.

Thanks, everybody.

If you want to get higher response rates, you got to get in the inbox first. Guess what? I always tell people this. If my Awelita, you know, messages me or emails me, I'm gonna open that email. I don't give a shit what the subject line is.

Right?

Most people that you talk to about cold email today will say cold email sucks, it doesn't work. And I go, Really? The subject line is the most important part of the email? No, it's not.

It's actually getting the email in the inbox. The second most important part of the email.