I Told a LinkedIn Coach My Startup Strategy. He Fixed It in 4 Minutes | Jasmin Alić, Founder@Link Up

And for the first time in history, this is so scary to say, the human brain has slowed down. Try writing without AI. Try writing without it. We wanted AI to think like us because writing is thinking, right? Writing, it literally means like exporting something out of your brain. It's like trying to go to the gym and having someone else lift the weights for you. It's like it doesn't work that way. It's almost like we could be losing ourselves in a sense where it might be the other way around, where the businesses have outgrown the founder to the point where our brains can't keep up with the growth. Dude, we have proof that the brain has slowed down. Don't let it slow down further. The expert still needs the expert. Virality can be good, but virality most of the time is just bad because it attracts a lot of eyeballs and it attracts a lot of the wrong eyeballs. So you really want to target networks, not individuals. That's where you're going to find more individuals.

Everything you teach comes back to one thing: be human. Be you.

Continue caring despite how much we continue to evolve in this AI world. Just continue caring, guys. It's the one thing that can't take away from us. So let's not let them.

Here's how I imagine as a technical founder what I'm going to do for doing LinkedIn go-to-market. And maybe you can criticize how I'm thinking about it. So day one, I leverage a little bit things I learned from your community as well. So let me optimize my profile. I'm starting a new company. I have a new product. At least it has to be on my LinkedIn, right? And maybe change a banner or something. And week 1, I will batch write 30 posts in one setting and schedule them over the next 60 days. So I have like 2 or every other day I have a post out. Maybe some of the posts I can run— if it performs well, I can run LinkedIn ads to boost it. Meanwhile, I want to hire a virtual assistant to help me comment on 20, 30 posts a day. That's your recommendation. And What else can I do? In 6, 3 months, 6 months, I can check back on the measurement, maybe my growth impressions, follower counts. What do you think of my strategy?

Okay, all of that is good. All of that is necessary. Before all of that, I would advise you look at the funnel, like where are you going to be sending people? Because when you say optimize the profile, what really matters with optimization of the LinkedIn profile is where are you sending people? Because if they land on the profile, they now have to land somewhere next. Now, where is that next spot? For a lot of tech founders, the next spot is the homepage of the product. And in my experience, that is a very wrong, incorrect place to send people to. Why? Because there's too many buttons. The navigation is stacked with other menus and other pages. You want to send them to exactly the page where they can give you the money easily, or where they can do exactly the thing. Whether it's, you know, if you're building a waitlist, send them to the freaking waitlist page, man. You don't send them to the homepage for them to find the waitlist page, you know. Send them to the waitlist page. If you— even if you gotta repurpose the homepage, like copy-paste it and then just delete some parts that are not necessary, send them there. So that's crucial. But if you're past the waitlist stage, past the pre-launch stage, if you're already launched, if you're already in the market, send them to the page where it's like the easiest and the fastest for them to give you money. As simple as that. I'm going to keep it blunt here. The way I like to approach it with all of my clients is we create custom pages. So all of the homepage stuff that you have, all of the service pages that exist, that's great for SEO, that's great for everywhere else. You have your visibility and wherever your traffic comes from. The way we like to do it is we like to take the best page and we like to create a and we're literally going to label it LinkedIn landing page in the URL, you know. So we're going to create a very specific LinkedIn landing page that only exists in your LinkedIn profile link, in your featured link, and in the blue link at the top of your profile. Nowhere else is that page indexed because we want to make sure that the traffic that comes from LinkedIn— just a little segue here because I have to mention this— there's a bit of a difference between the traffic you get from all the other places and the traffic you get from LinkedIn, because chances are people will already be familiar with a lot of the stuff you've talked about in your posts, in your comments, and in your conversations with people. So you don't necessarily need to reeducate them on the page itself. So that's why it matters that we create a very specific page for just the LinkedIn traffic. And it's gonna be much shorter compared to all the other pages that you have publicly. And the pricing links are gonna come up much sooner on the page itself. It's not gonna be buried at the bottom. So that's typically how we structure it for clients. And it works really well because again, basically the gist of the communication happens before they ever land on the page. The page is just the conversion point where they just, you know, hey, it's here. Where do I go? What's the price? Click. Done.

Well, that's very interesting. Basically every post is my landing page and I just— my call to action in that little blue link in my profile under my name and people go there and it's very easy to convert.

Exactly. But you have to think about it that way. Like the way you've said it just now is literally the correct way to do it.

I've seen so many founders struggle with this copywriting 101, not just on their landing page. When I ask them, how do you explain what you're building to, let's say, an elementary schooler, they also struggle. And you know what I most commonly seen on from tech founder posts? It's comment on news and we have a new feature, here's what it is, and very lengthy technical details, very hard to understand. Those are most common ones.

I'll give you a shortcut. Can I give you a shortcut? For anyone who's kind of struggling to communicate the value of their product, whether it's a certain feature, whether it's the entire product, whether it's the entire business, the easiest shortcut for this is don't think about the starting point, 'cause everything you've just now listed is the starting point. The feature is the starting point, but what's the outcome? What's the ultimate result? What are you fixing for me? Start there. Start at the end. In psychology, this is something that is so useful. Because you're immediately helping them paint the picture of what needs fixing in their life, in their workflow, in their daily operations, right? Versus, hey, I build something, but now their mind has to fill the gaps. Their mind is thinking, okay, how does this really help me? And now they're visualizing what their process looks like, how they would be using it in their little, you know, individualized use case so that they could come to the conclusion, oh, here's the outcome, here's how it could help me. But when you start at the outcome for them, they can immediately relate to that. So the best way to think about these outcomes is 3 ways: help people save stress, time, and money. Whichever one of the 3 you choose, it's going to be a banger because those 3, I feel like, are the biggest worries for people about losing and wasting. So if you can stop the waste, you know, stress, time, and money, it's, you know, that's, that's all you got to do. No matter how you're communicating, about certain features, the entire product, the entire business, whatever you've done for someone. Start there. Start at the end and think, ask yourself, now that I've written this one sentence, have I helped communicate the fact that I've helped them save either stress or time or money? If the answer is no, just rewrite it. Those three, they're, they're the strongest emotional pulls. They're like triggers to the brain, right?

Does that saver language have to come up on the top? Because not everybody—

anywhere, literally anywhere. I always tell people, like, that's where you start, and the immediate the next thing you mention is the starting point. Like, for example, if you're going to tell me, hey, we built this new feature— what kind of feature? It's a privacy screen Samsung just launched there. Okay. And my immediate thought is like, okay, what's the point? Like, how is it different from a regular privacy, you know, glass that I can just stick onto this? But they're telling you, you know, you can customize every bit of privacy on your screen. I'm like, okay, sure, but that's still not enough. Like, what's the end game? And they're like, you can choose when to be private versus all the time. And I'm Huh, now that's something. Because it's like, if you've ever used the privacy screen on your phone, you know it dims your screen. You have to keep it all the way up 24/7. And it's like, even you get annoyed if your phone is on the table, right? Like, even you have to like look at it like this to actually see what's going on. But it's like, if I can pick and choose when to be private, it's like, huh, right? Pick and choose when you can be private versus all the time. Like, there's no limits on privacy, I guess. You can, you can even Say it that way, but this is how you can immediately pull someone in where they feel like, oh my God, I felt that. I wanted that many times versus, hey, we got a new privacy screen. And you're like, okay, what for? You see, it's like when you start with the feature, you're looking for the outcome. Like you're trying to fill the gap. Like, why is it useful? But when you tell me why it's useful first, and then the very next thing you say, it's because of our new privacy screen. It's like, oh damn, this is good. It's like all the gaps are filled immediately.

It's almost feel like pay attention to your users' daily struggle and what do they really hate and put that first, right? Yeah.

Stress, time, and money. Stress, time, and money. I'm telling you, it's like certain things, especially if you're a product founder, certain things take a lot of clicks, many clicks, a lot of time for the user. And if you can just shorten that journey where it's fewer clicks, bam, done. Or if it's like try to sign out of an Adobe product, try to cancel your subscription, you're going to see the pain. You know, it takes—

I tried, I tried.

Yeah, exactly. It takes 20 minutes. It's almost like you're held hostage. But if you can fix that and you can tell them, hey, it's as easy as 2 clicks, cancel your subscription in 15 seconds. Thank you. Thank you.

A lot of us still struggle. We keep posting, we're not seeing anything. Have you helped any founder or someone who cracked the LinkedIn go-to-market channel? What did they do differently? And you know how I feel about learning how to swim and learning how to bike? For the longest time, I have no clue. It's trial and error, and I really don't know what I'm doing. Honestly, it feels like the same thing. When you get close, you do feel something, right? What does it feel like when you crack the LinkedIn game?

It really does. It really does. Cracking the LinkedIn game feels very rewarding, but it really boils down to two things. It boils down to speaking to as many people as possible in the most clearest of ways. And number two, speaking to as many people as possible in the clearest of ways. It's the same thing that I repeated. It boils down to going broader, a little broader in your content. I'm not talking about, hey, go to, you know, talk about the most vague things and the most vague topics, but we've tested this out across thousands of posts. We've tested this out across thousands of people's accounts. I have a framework when it comes to writing. It's called BND— broad, niche, deep. Basically, your first instinct as a tech founder is to directly speak to your target audience. And don't get me wrong, traditional marketing does teach us this, right? Speak to your target audience because that's when you're going to have the biggest conversions because they feel seen. Problem is, that's okay on a website when people are already there. That's okay in an email because you're talking to them directly. They're already subscribed to a newsletter, for example. That's okay at a conference because chances are the people are already interested in what you have to do. That's why they are at a conference. But if you have no visibility on LinkedIn and you're trying to talk to this niche audience, you're basically keeping yourself small. You can't grow an audience by always keeping it small. You just can't. It's impossible or it's painfully slow. So the way we do it is we remove in the preview of the post, which is 3 lines by the way, doesn't matter what it is, 3 lines. And then LinkedIn is going to give you the See More button that you have to click and then the rest of the post shows up. So in the first 3 lines, we remove any and all niche language. That's how we do it. Basically, we're targeting broadly. We go broad with the beginning of the post. In this one bakery, and I'm always going there every day and I'm thinking, okay, this is the best bread I've ever had. No, bruh, go to all the other blocks, go to all the other cities, go to all the other states and countries. That's when you can actually find even more bakeries just like that one. Similarly to our case on LinkedIn, if we're targeting broadly, that's where we're finding all the other tech founders, because otherwise we can't find them by always hanging out in the same circle. We just can't. It can't expand. There's just no possibility. By targeting broadly at the very beginning, we get more people to read our content, right? Think of it as a funnel. It's literally like a funnel. We go broad at the very beginning, at the start. This is where most people are clicking see more and they're reading the post. But then As we're going down the post, this is where we're now using our actual niche language and niche use cases and niche case studies and words and whatever you want, because this is where we wanna build interest of the broader audience, right? And this based on their interactions now serves my post to their network. And this is the point I was trying to make when it comes to building following on LinkedIn and building visibility, it's not these individuals who you're engaging with or who engage with your posts. It's not about them ever. It's about their networks. That's who you're targeting.

That's my—

interacting with my post for the very first time. I want all of her network to see me as well, because chances are there are other people, peers, competitors, people very similar to Angelina and her network as well. I want all of them to now see me and they will. Best believe they will. Because why? When they're now scrolling through the feed, they will get a notification in the home feed, Angelina Yang commented on this, and they're seeing you directly versus I'm only ever talking to this one person and I'm never actually going broader, meaning I'm never targeting newer people who are connected to my target audience. That's the problem. So you really want to target networks, not individuals. That's where you're going to find more individuals.

I run Phantom Buster to connect with people so my follower accounts look bigger. What's your reaction? Connect, connect, connect every day so that, you know, I have bigger follower account.

No, I would say no to both of those genuinely, just because I have a particular philosophy when it comes to connections versus followers. Those two are different for a reason. They're two different metrics. They're two different numbers. It's like, Angelina, I know you, right? We have worked together, right? We have engaged many times. At this point, you're someone who I'm connected with and who I'm looking forward to seeing, meaning you're a connection of mine. But if you're just someone I see randomly in the feed here and there, or whose content I'm enjoying without all of the stuff I just listed, without the connection, you're not a connection. You're just someone I know of in the social media realm. You're now a first-degree connection. The algorithm prioritizes first-degree connections, meaning the people who you're closest with, they're going to place the content first to them. And if the people closest to you aren't engaging with your content, why the hell would we push it to second and third degrees? That's just, just simple math. It's like if the people closest to you don't care about what you have to share, why would we push it to more people who aren't even in your circle? So I guess what I'm saying is be careful who you connect with. It's like, do you know them? Do you want to work with them? Are you actually connected? And the other part is, are they engaging with the content? Are they active on LinkedIn? Because otherwise what ends up happening is you're going to be building a dead network. And a lot of people have this problem. Long term, they're going to build a following. And we have this correlation. It's like the more your account grows, the lower your engagement gets over time. And people might be thinking, wait, that doesn't make any sense. No, based on what I just explained to you, it makes perfect sense, because you're building a dead or deader network over time. So your engagement takes a nosedive over time, because the more people you connect with, the more negative this algorithm score is, because more people will be seeing the content but fewer people will be engaging with the content. And the algorithm is not an idiot. They're going to be seeing that trend. They're going to be like, okay, yeah, the quality is off. We're not going to be pushing this to more people now. And you're going to end up ending up with fewer impressions, fewer likes, fewer comments, but more connections, a higher follower count. Pick your poison. Yeah, a lot of people are going backwards. They are deleting connections, and they're deleting thousands. They're spending days deleting inactive connections. And I'm like, you do realize you could have avoided this? You know, you could have just avoided this entire issue and spending days deleting, deleting, deleting old inactive connections just by not accepting them in the first place. Long answer, but yeah, it's a necessary one.