Brian Burke - Personal Branding and LinkedIn Success

I had somebody say recently, it's nice to be good for something. And I thought, Shannon, oh, I like that. Yeah. You know, I thought what a great thing to remember when you're managing people. Right. When you're managing people or working with a vendor or a customer or something. If you can inspire the thought in them that they are good for something, they are valuable for something. I mean, of course it's true about all of us, but. But when you can communicate that to someone, it makes a big difference. And it will. Right. If they're, especially if they're doing work for you, it will inspire them to do their best job. But even for your customers, it's just a good thing to do. Plus you might get something out of it.

Yeah, I agree with you. And I just randomly, coincidentally here, I just read an article about a great way to. The intro to a comment like that is a couple different ways. One would be, hey, I'm not sure if you're aware of this and then saying something that, what they're good at or I don't know if anyone has ever told you this because it makes that statement you're about to make so much more impactful. And it's kind of a form of persuasion, if you will. But it adds important that, that prefix to any of those comments.

So much power in the. I don't know if anyone has ever told you this before.

I don't know if anybody told you this, but you know, you're at boom. And so I really have grabbed onto that and started making those kind of comments before or, you know, before I mentioned something to somebody. I think it's a great idea.

That is, it really sets it up. I don't know why I'm sitting here a little bit lost for words because I know that that works. It works on me, it works on other people. But I don't know why, like the comment, the compliment is the same either way. But there's something, I think it's.

Yeah, it's a form of persuasion.

Yeah.

Someone may have told you this before, but our minds, the way they work, you're like, oh, no one's ever said that.

No one's ever said that. So. Right. Maybe that's what it is.

It adds importance.

It does add.

So think about that. Yeah. And speaking of important things, you know, if, if you've ever thought about what, what you're going to do or your own sense of self worth, if you will, and your own personal brand maybe beyond your small businesses that you are, are, you know, starting Running. This is going to be a great show for you today. We've got a great guest in Brian Burke, who's really focused on personal branding, especially up on LinkedIn, and has helped his businesses grow and helped a lot of other people. I'm really excited to talk to Brian again.

Absolutely. Yeah. Brian is, he is the master at building and maintaining his personal brand and it really helps his business. But it's not, I mean, he does it. He certainly knows that it's good for his business. That's not why he does it. He does it because he, he, he loves it.

And yes, he does.

He can tell and you can tell and you, we all, we all, look, we all love talking about ourselves. It is, it is a thing, right? We love it when people listen to us. Maybe that's a better way to say that, because we love it when we are heard. And Brian has found his way of being heard. And I think you can extract from that some ways for you to be heard. And he's got some really good tips, in fact, some very actionable small businessing tips right there in the episode, too.

So there is, and it comes back to your original comment, Dave, about we all want to be good at something or known for being good at something.

We want to be known for being good at something.

Yeah. And that's, you know, I can just feel it when you're talking to Brian about this experiment, if you will, that he's been doing the past year or two of building up this brand, his personal brand. It's great.

It's great. Yeah, it's great. What else is great and can help you build your personal brand is textexpander@textexpander.com podcast, our sponsor for this episode. Textexpander allows you to really craft the responses that you're going to send to people. And it might be a little snippet that just has your address in it. Right. Or maybe even just your email address, your phone number. But it can also be long, long bits of text, you know, many paragraphs worth where you're sending a customer service response to someone that has a question. Or maybe a sales inquiry comes in and you're like, right, I want to be able to send them everything they're asking for. But you don't want to have to craft it every single time. You don't want to have to dig into your sent folder to find the last time you wrote it and then modify it. No, you put it all in textexpander so that you look good, you look responsive. You look efficient and you look accurate and it's really hard to get those three things right all the time. Textexpander makes it possible and you can sync your snippets amongst all your devices and all the devices of your team. And because you're a listener to the Small Business show, you get 20% off your first year by going to textexpander.com podcast go check it out. You're going to love it. It's something Shannon and I. E. Use. We couldn't live without it. I know you're going to feel the same way. Just go check it out. Maybe you won't, but I think you will. Textexpander.com podcast Our thanks to Textexpander for sponsoring this episode. And with that, my friend, I think it's time to listen to Brian. Unless you've got something else.

Let's do it. Let's go small business together.

Let's go small business together. He is Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton and this is episode 302 of the Small Business Show.

Kind of just commenting back on some of the things we've already discussed, like being authentic, first and foremost. If you're not authentic, that's going to be a terrible detriment to your personal brand. And the second thing I would say is not posting diverse content would be a mistake. Make sure you are mixing it up. You know, if you're stuck on one form of content, it's not going to work long term. And LinkedIn is constantly changing their algorithm. You know, someone that I really respect on there for his videos, his name is Jonathan Palmer, he posts incredible LinkedIn video tips. And he just showed how his engagement went down about 90% about a week and a half or two ago. And it's just due to LinkedIn algorithm, you just have to change it sometimes. So being mindful of that. And the next thing would be, the mistake would be being inconsistent. If you're only posting once or twice a week, you almost don't have a chance to grow at any, you know, high rate. I would say you need to post one to two times a day. And some of the experts are saying it needs to be even more than that to be kind of constantly in the feed when people are seeing it, you know, even upwards of five or six times a day. So you can take a day off every now and then, but I wouldn't recommend taking more than one to two days off.

You know, as small business owners, all of us were just really focused obviously on creating healthy and profitable businesses. As part of the path to living a charmed life that we talk about here all the time on the Small Business Show. But what about building your personal brand all on, on your own, expanding off your business success, creating a network based on who you are. And, and I'm excited. Today on the show, we're going to be joined by one of our favorite guests to discuss the art of personal branding. So Brian Burke is the founder and chief Mac man@sellyourmac.com founder of renewedmacs.com he's also a board member and technology chair for the Adopt a Class Foundation. He's. And he's, you know, he's pretty much the most active person you're going to find on LinkedIn. You know, he's, he's got.

So true.

Yeah, just Pete hit over 14,000 followers and he's the guy in the bright blue suit with the huge smile on his face. And today we're going to talk about Brian's take on the power of building your personal brand. Brian, thank you for joining us again today.

Oh, thank you, gentlemen. If you saw my face right now, I have a huge smile. I'm so excited to talk to you guys.

Believe it or not, I can imagine that.

Yes, I can.

Because literally every picture of you has that huge smile, which is awesome. It's part of your personal brand, which is great.

It is.

Got to bring the positivity to everything.

I love it. Yeah. So before we jump into the personal branding, how about just giving us a quick update on sell your Mac and your relatively new business. Renewed Macs, what's going on with your businesses? Since we had you on the show back in 2018, a lot has changed.

We are 100% virtual now. We've closed our retail store due to Covid. No shocker. And we can't even keep up with the demand. Demand has been soaring for everything Apple, and supply is extremely constrained because everyone's either handing them down or businesses aren't upgrading as fast as they normally would and stuff like that. So seeing a huge supply crunch in the industry and to kind of combat that, we're continually trying to pay more to our customers to try to get them to trade in and upgrade their products and keep finding them some good new homes and helping everyone out.

Yeah, that's great. I imagine. It's just, it's a constant challenge. I mean, I was in the Mac business for years in the Apple space and I pretty much spent most of my time, you know, buying, purchasing, and trying to just find more product all the Time so I could.

That is the name of the game.

And Apple has been killing it this year with their products and excitement. Like their third event in the fall already they've done three events now in the fall and they're the best events Apple's ever done. And it's because of COVID because they've had to pre record them. Right. They're not just doing them live.

I like it better. I could see an integration of that in the future of like having some of the cool video stuff integrated right in.

I hope you're right. Yeah, I mean I like getting together with. I mean I would, I would be prefer to be doing this interview in person too but you know, I missed that part of it. But you know, the, the rest of it like Apple's been killing it. So it doesn't surprise me that you're having trouble with supply computer people use computers longer than they used to.

Oh, dramatically.

Phones too, I think everything at least another year.

Yeah, right, right. It's. Yeah, yeah.

I seem so good. Yeah, that's what I mean. The requirements to upgrade, the development cycle is nothing like it was, you know, five years ago even, especially 10 years ago where it was so many dramatic changes happening that you always had to upgrade to the next best thing. So it's a different world. Okay, so let's just start at the most fundamental thing. Why? What's your take on it? Why is building a personal brand?

First of all, it's fun. This is a something you do differently than your day to day work and I think has potential to span multiple businesses. So the kind of reason that I think it's important is, you know, I can help me out with sellermac.com and renewmax.com, but what about my next 5, 10 ventures? If I have this amazing network of people that support me, I'll be able to kind of quickly launch a new business and get some traction or get feedback on initial business ideas. You know, really the possibilities are endless. If you have a, you know, a group of supporters that's, you know, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 out there.

Yeah, that, that's. I, I couldn't agree more. So when you started doing it, were you. I mean, is it true that you mainly focusing on just getting your businesses to grow and then it just, you know, kind of exponentially took off from there?

That's a pretty good synopsis. I'm more focused right now on trying to grow sellyourmac.com and so when I'm posting, I'm trying to get My audience to be interested in not just me, but upgrading their products and of course doing that in a non salesy fun way. And I think from there we kind of opened it up. So it's like I wasn't initially thinking that I was going to be maybe launching new businesses with this huge network, but it's kind of evolved quickly and it may be grown faster than I would have ever imagined. So I'm pretty excited to see where it takes me next.

Yeah, sure. So now I mostly interact and see your network on LinkedIn. Are you doing similar things on other networks? Like, you know, Facebook and other things as well?

Not really. I used to post way more on Facebook, just a lot more family stuff. And you know, I still posting some business stuff on there. But the business stuff doesn't resonate as well with the Facebook audience. They're not expecting that. They like the little kid pictures that I share. And also it's so saturated with content. I think that's the biggest issue is there's 600 million people on LinkedIn but there's billions of people on Facebook.

I think you nailed it. Because I hear this a lot from people that say, oh, Facebook doesn't work for business. And I find that to be wholly untrue. But I agree that it is much harder for Facebook to. Much harder to get your stuff shown on Facebook.

Yeah, yeah. To get noticed.

It's a different angle. I think.

I think you're right.

Yeah. So I haven't put much effort into the Facebook or Instagram lately. It's really just all on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn. Okay, so let's.

Now everyone says TikTok. They keep telling me I need to start TikToking.

Yeah, I can imagine. In that blue suit. We're going to talk about the suit in a minute. So sticking with LinkedIn then how? And I asked why. I think I know the why. But how have you amassed such a huge following, you know, over 14,000 people on the network? It just seems like so much work because I have exponentially less than that. And yeah, I mean, it's a lot to manage. Can you share a story or two about the benefits of all that hard work somewhere where it's really paid off and a connection that you've met or something like that?

Sure. And just speaking to the hard work portion of it, it's a lot about persistence and being consistent. I think at first when I was posting good content, it just wasn't getting as many likes. And over time, posting two, three times a day, the algorithm really Starts to pick up on that. And you have to be extremely active in terms of connecting with other people and commenting and liking on their posts to get them to come back to yours and continue to kind of grow the views and engagement there. So it's not. So it's just that that effort is not just the posting. So I really just want to be clear about that. If you only posted, you'd probably get almost no results.

Yeah, I, I mean it's the commenting and the, the, in the, I mean, the engagement, what we call engagement. Right. Commenting, liking, interacting with people. That makes sense 100%.

I noticed you doing it even on your own posts. Right. Where you posted last night.

Experts tell me I should be commenting like my own stuff.

Yeah, because I noticed you, you posted and then I was looking at it because then I like, hey, we're looking forward to having you on. But then you kept comment commenting and I was like, wow, there's already like, I don't know, 20 or some comments and you. But then I could see it the, I could just see the engagement as I was looking at it later in the evening, I was like, wow, man, he's getting a lot more people comments. You're interacting back and forth.

So this was, this is almost midnight.

Yeah. So it's really, I, I, is, is it, am I right in that that engagement is just critical for the LinkedIn algorithm just to see. And it's probably equally as important to making your own comments on your post. Right?

It is. And you, you have this like 30 to 60 minute window to kind of really kick it off. And after that, if it hasn't got much traction, it's not going to do that.

Well, so once. Okay.

Because I was, don't post and run away.

Yeah, right. Again, this is like, this is not unique to LinkedIn. This is Facebook. Very much true. You have to engage. And I would say you have that same 30 to 60 minute window. If it hasn't picked up steam, it's very uncommon that it will down the road. Like something could happen and that causes.

It to have a big influencer to come on and start engaging with it or something.

Right, that's right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I mean, I think also some people under the misconception that just because you post it, everyone in your network or in your group or in your followers is going to see it and that's just not the case.

Yeah, good luck.

Yeah, yeah, good luck.

Good luck.

And so this is not an, if you build it, they will come.

The, the network wants to See this? Oh, well, this is a popular post. People are talking about it. We want to show it to more people. And then it cut kind of get going.

Um, yeah, it's also the variety. You. I used to only do photo posts, and then I kind of learned through others that having the different type of content, you know, adding the videos and adding text only and text only is something that just didn't really resonate with me. But I'm kind of forcing myself to do more of it because the algorithm likes it and I guess people like the content too.

Interesting. So, okay, so I'm going to come back.

So, stories.

Yeah, stories. I love it. So talk about, you know, something. Yeah. Something that impacted you, where you're like, wow, this is really working. I need to continue building this network.

On LinkedIn, so I'll preface with saying it is a slow start. I've been focusing on this really hard for about a year and only recently starting to win some real deals through my LinkedIn network. So just in the last week, I have two new business customers that have come through a LinkedIn post. And the first one actually saw my post and started engaging with me through message. And it's funny because the post he said he saw was me wearing a black suit or black tux with my blue shoes getting ready for my brother's wedding. And something about the blue shoes on the black tux literally jumped out enough to make him want to reach out and do a deal.

That's great.

So that was kind of crazy. And then this next one was someone I just connected with in the last week, and it took a little while to figure out how he initially saw me because we were not connected on LinkedIn at first. We were second connections. And I met him at a Macworld event eight years ago, and I didn't remember him initially. And he said he's been seeing my content from other people, liking my posts that were his connections, and it just jogged his memory enough to reach out.

Wow, that's cool. And when did the idea for the blue suit come along?

The blue suit started about two years ago, and it came from a guy that wears an orange suit.

I see that guy.

The orange suit guy. People think we're the dumb and dumber combo when we're together at these events, because he's local in Cincinnati.

Oh, okay.

So he. He did it at a, A, E and O breakfast event, and I asked him about it. And later that day, he sent me a link to the blue suit. And these blue suits are so inexpensive. They're 99 delivered. So I had no reason to say no.

That's great.

So I ordered my first blue suit. This was a couple weeks before this huge IT event out in Miami, Florida called the ITAD Summit. So the first day at the event, I had so many people coming up and engaging with me that I've never met in my life. And the only reason was because of the blue suit. They would see it and they would walk right towards me and it was an instant conversation starter. Broke the ice. It was perfect. Then the blue suit was born.

Yeah, I love it. It does, it makes you stand out and it, you know, becomes part of your brand.

Yeah.

Kind of trademark and oh, find that guy in the blue suit.

That's the, I mean, by the end of the two day event, people were already like, hey, yeah, the blue suit guy, if you talk to him, like they, they knew it. And if I, if I wear it enough and you know, I post enough videos with it, people start to remember.

Yeah, that's great. Okay.

So I am wearing blue if anyone is wondering.

Perfect.

Just don't tell us what's blue. And we're all good. It's all fine.

So. And I know you do a lot like you do the, the, you know, the adopt a class. I love those posts. You're helping out, you know, kids, technology, your hands. And I love that. So I want to talk about that for a few minutes. And obviously, you know, there's the obvious benefit of helping others, but, and I don't want to sound cynical, but it also, you know, giving back and helping your community, that's an important part of building your personal brand as well, right?

I would say yes. I mean, that stuff really resonates with people.

Yeah.

So I mean, I'm doing it to help out the community and help serve students, but I'm also trying to share it. And part of that is to the motivation, inspiration to encourage others to do it too. It's not necessarily they're going to trade their Mac into me. I mean, if they just did something to help someone else out because they saw that, that would make me incredibly happy as well.

Yeah, that's great. I love it. I love it. And obviously you're getting, you know, we all get something back from giving. Right. It's a, it's just a great thing to help. And especially in technology where you can make.

I usually smile and cry.

That's awesome. So let's talk about business for a minute. I would, I think that, you know, working, I know it's hard work and building Your personal brand. But isn't it also. Or would you think that it's a. It's a great way to kind of get yourself beyond the kind of daily grind? You know, all businesses kind of can be monotonous sometimes. Does it help you kind of recharge you to get back into the swing of things at your regular job, if you will?

It's tough to completely separate it because I'm thinking so much about my business when I'm doing my personal branding stuff, but I would definitely say it is a battery recharging activity for me. You know, I'm connecting with people that also have, you know, very high energy and very positive stuff to say. And I'd say LinkedIn in general is just such a positive network. I've had so few times where there's been any negative comments on my posts and there's, you know, there's no political crap or anything else like that. So it's refreshing in general to be on that platform.

Yeah, I think that I've seen a lot of people kind of migrating, you know, towards that LinkedIn because of that, because it's just so business focused. And you do see everyone's helpful, right? They're all trying to lift each other up, right?

Exactly.

Everything is Facebook's like, how can you.

Knock someone down faster? I don't really engage with content on Facebook anymore. I would only post and just leave because I don't want to read the rest of the stuff.

Yeah, me too. Yeah, I used to enjoy it and I don't even. I just can't anymore. And especially as I got businesses on Facebook that were doing things, I was like, look at all this data. I don't want to share all this data anymore. You know, I'm. And, but, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting.

I'm sure, I'm sure you've seen the new Netflix special about it.

Of course.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then don't think that LinkedIn's not doing the same thing.

No, I know.

In fact, we just talked about how they are. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm always amazed at how quickly and how often you're engaging with these commenters and people. And it just seems like that to me is the difference. It's, you know, okay, I'm doing posting, I'm doing whatever. But I come back to that comment you made earlier. Yeah, it's that interaction, engagement, commenting on your own post. Because I just wouldn't think of it until, like, sometimes I'LL comment in there if someone asks a question, of course. But I look at your post, I'm like, Brian's the first five comments right here, you know, but you're spurring, you.

Got, you got to kick it off.

You're asking questions, you're like, what, what's your favorite thing? What's it? And I, and I love that. I find that yours is a mix of comments about things, but maybe even more frequently it's questions to inspire other people to engage. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I'm trying to inspire engagement, see what the network really thinks about stuff. I mean, some of it's for my own knowledge or business knowledge. And people tend to answer the questions if you put them in the main body of the post, not as much in the comments. So I would say I do try to jump on as fast as possible without interrupting too much of my daily work. I mean, the iPhone has nice notifications that pop up, so it's easy to jump on them quickly. Yeah, I'm on there for a few hours a day.

Yeah, I know, I could tell.

So, so, so it is that, that. But that, like, we could almost ignore that in passing. But you're, you're actively doing this hours per day. I think that's the important thing.

Yeah.

For people to take away here is that this is not just posting hours per day. It is engaging.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So a lot of these LinkedIn guides or coaches are saying, like, here's how to spend only 10 minutes a day and that I think you can get like a comment or two and make a post, but you're not going to really get the engagement or action to grow your network.

Right. Yeah. And speaking of growing your network, did you start out by going out and just following and connecting and trying to connect with more people to then get them to come back to you, or was there a different system that you used?

I did connect to a lot of people. It was more a spray approach to start. It wasn't like hyper targeted at my industry necessarily. And then I think you find a few supporters that really help you grow. You know, if you can become friends with someone that has a much larger network, there's kind of one person in particular that really stood out. His name is Corey Warfield and he had, let's say, a hundred thousand some followers when I first met him a year ago. And now he's got, you know, quarter million or more on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn.

Oh my God.

And he would, you know, comment on my stuff right when I posted it. I, you know, I would send it to him and, you know, after his comment, I might get another few comments and, you know, 10 likes the next, like, few minutes. And it was just, he was just bringing his network to my post, basically. So that was really awesome. And I had another strategy where I would tag a lot of people and I've realized now this is kind of annoying for them.

Yes, right, right.

But that was my idea of how to get people to see my stuff. I'm like, well, If I tag 100 people, I mean, people are going to come look, right?

Yeah.

See?

Well, why, why are you tagging me?

Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, some of these people private message you and say, hey, can you not tag me anymore? So finding the right balance there for something relevant to say, I'm giving someone props, you know, I, I had my post today when I made 14,000 connections. I, the, the idea of the post was to help people make more meaningful connections. So I was tagging people and calling out what kind of work they did or why to follow them.

So tagging. But as long as you're. It's Be mindful. Yeah, be mind. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. Or even ask. That's, that's something I've learned. If you get someone with a huge following and you want to engage with them more, shoot them a private message and ask if it's okay to tag them. If they say yes, then you're all in.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So, okay, speaking that you mentioned, just a couple little mistakes, but I want to have you, you really been focused on this for about a year or two years on LinkedIn, building that network out.

I would say two years in total, the last year. Just being more mentally conscious of my time around it of like, oh, I'm gonna spend this hour in the morning, spend an hour at night, you know, kind of stuff like that. And really just being hyper, consistent with the posts.

That's great.

You are. I, I think it's important for people to understand. I mean, you are very active on LinkedIn, you're very outgoing on LinkedIn. But it all. But that's exactly it. This is a genuine reflection of you. Right. You're not exactly. I mean, yeah, yes, you are aggressively friendly. Right, right.

But I like that term.

You aren't that way in person too. And so you can back it up. You, it is a natural thing for you. If something, it's authentic and if somebody's all authentic, if somebody says to you, whoa, dude, like, you know, please don't tag me anymore. You'll. You, you'll take that in stride. You'll say, okay, hey, no problem, you.

Know, and yeah, I don't mind the feedback. I mean, give it to me.

Well, that's it. But even like for me, like, and this hasn't been a problem, but let's say it were. I know who you are. And I mean I. And by that I know that you are that outgoing person. So it's like, oh, well, of course. He's like being aggressive and taking people. It's what, it's. I can't help. If we were at a cocktail party, you'd be running around introducing everybody to everybody else anyway.

You're just that. Exactly.

And, and so I think it's important for people to, to realize. Yes. Spend that hour or two a day managing your own social media and engaging and be authentic in an authentic way for you. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't exactly.

You don't. You got to find what works for you. It's going to be the won't work.

Long term if you're not.

Don't go buy a book.

You might be able to pull it off for a few months and for a certain business. But purpose or something like that. But not.

Don't go buy a blue suit. Just figure out what's going to work for you.

I got to cancel my order.

Or if you do buy a blue.

Suit, tag me because that would be fun.

Yeah. But something that's related to you. I mean. Yes. If you're not familiar with your brand. Yes. Sell your Mac.com. that color blue is permeated throughout their business.

That's their color.

That light baby blue, I guess. And so it makes a lot of sense. So tell us, you know, you know that we, we love mistakes on the show. You were featured in our. Our Mistakes.

I loved it.

Yeah, that's, you know, gangbusters up on Amazon. Everybody likes to hear about other people's mistakes.

I will, I'll plug you guys for that. Your Amazon bestseller list.

Awesome. That's awesome. So think, can you think of a mistake or two that someone who's, you know, trying to go out and build their personal brand and replicate some of the success that you've had, you know, a mistake that you, you might have made or something else that you know would be good for them to avoid?

I think it kind of just commenting back on some of the things we've already discussed, like being authentic. First and foremost. If you're not authentic. That's going to be a terrible detriment to your personal brand. And the second thing I would say is not posting diverse content would be a mistake. Make sure you are mixing it up. You know, if you're stuck on one form of content, it's not going to work long term. And LinkedIn is constantly changing their algorithm. You know, someone that I really respect on there for his videos, his name is Jonathan Palmer, he posts incredible LinkedIn video tips. And he just showed how his engagement went down about 90% about a week and a half or two ago. And it's just due to LinkedIn algorithm, you just have to change it sometimes.

Ah.

So being mindful of that. And the next thing would be, the mistake would be being inconsistent. If you're only posting once or twice a week, you almost don't have a chance to grow at any, you know, high rate. I would say you need to post one to two times a day. And some of the experts are saying it needs to be even more than that to be kind of constantly in the feed when people are seeing it, you know, even upwards of five or six times a day. So you can take a day off every now and then, but I wouldn't recommend taking more than one to two days off at a time.

Are there automated, you know, programs for LinkedIn like Hootsuite and stuff that you can schedule posts and things or you just have to actively go do it?

So you can use Hootsuite and Hootsuite's one of the only kind of authorized LinkedIn platforms, but at the same time, there's some deficiencies. You can't or tag people organically using that. And then if you are, you're not going to be following up on your content and, you know, adding some more information and comments in there. And I think that's the biggest mistake. If you're not engaging, you're just not going to have any growth.

Yeah. To make it work, you have to be right there.

Yeah. And your network won't love you. Like, I mean, people are sending me so many direct messages, tell me how much they love my content and encourage me to keep up my positivity and stuff like that. But if I didn't comment back on their comments, then they would never reach out to me again. They were like, all right, this guy is just, you know, out in cyberspace somewhere.

Yeah. And I also like, on your Met, your messaging, when they send you private message, you have an autoresponder that just says, hey, you know, my. I'm getting so many messages. Here's, here's a little tidbit of information about, you know, what I'm doing and sell your Mac and stuff and I will follow up with you, but it takes, it may take me a little more time. That's great.

You know, exactly. New feature, the away message. I love it.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I'm telling people to come engage. You know, there's so many just like spammy sales pitches. Like, if you have something to say, come say it in the post. If not, no worries.

Yeah, I use a text expander, you know, auto thing. I'm just like, hey, I'm happy, happy to connect, but I don't, I'm not interested in any of your services at this time, you know, because it's just con. And I, I.

You don't want to learn more about Bitcoin?

Yeah. Or, or, yeah. How I'm going to make you so much more money and send you all these leads. It's like, no, I, I don't want that now. Maybe in the future, you know, it doesn't work. I don't know. The, you know the first thing you say to a new connection is not buy this from me. Right.

I know.

It just does not work.

I'm trying to coach people on that. They're sending these crazy messages. I'm just like, guys, this doesn't work. I'm not even going to read it.

Nobody does it. Yeah. And they still do it over and over. And it's this very similar kind of pitch that you get, especially with lead gen. And it's like a spam email. It is it really kind of. It really is.

It's cheap to. I mean, I'm not, I'm not defending this.

I'm just free.

Explaining it.

Yeah.

Effectively, it's free to send. So if. Even if your response rate is one out of 10,000, well, okay, great. Like, awesome. I got one. Like, that's all that matters.

They made one sale with their 10,000 connections.

But if that's, if that's your metric, then okay.

Right.

I mean it again, please don't do this, folks. But I don't, don't wonder why it's happening. That's why it's happening. Just move on. Yeah, exactly.

Sure. Send a short one.

Something. Yeah, yeah. It's just, you know, how I could.

How much will you guys read? I mean, you got. You have two sentences and I'm done.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I think it's some of them. I've seen where it's like, hey, here's some value I can add. I saw. Or they make a comment where they can. They've obviously read my profile first. That's a, that's a start.

That's huge.

Right? Or I heard you on the small business show. Or I read your, your book. Those kind of connections, like, okay, now.

You'Re going to read it.

That gets me a little further along.

Right.

Because I know. Oh, okay. They are putting a little time into this. It's not just this automated boom, boom, boom. So you know, know your, your audience, I guess. Right.

So, yes, know your audience. Tell them something about what they do as opposed to saying, where are you located? Or what do you do?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what's next for you on the personal branding front? Are you going to continue to grow this, you know, the Mac man Persona, focusing on LinkedIn or is there, are you working on anything new?

I guess maybe Tick Tock now that they tied it in with Shopify. My renewed Max.com store is built on Shopify, so I can do selling directly on the Tick Tock post.

Oh, I see.

And I know I know nothing about Tick Tock right now.

I think it involves dancing. You might.

You got those shoes, so you're good to go with the dance moves, man.

Yeah, I got bad knees, but I can still, still dance. I'll give it a shot.

You could get some, some exposure up there for that. Okay.

But also really pushing on LinkedIn, though. I see myself, you know, two, three years from now having a hundred thousand connections and using that to really launch new businesses and also help a lot of people out. If I can share advice or any Apple tips and stuff like that, they're help people out. That would make me incredibly happy.

I think it's great. And I love that you're always talking about helping others, giving back, adding value. It's authentic and it really helps build your base of support of people that in turn, when the time may come, would like to help you.

Exactly. Thank you.

That's great. Okay, so we've got kind of a new question we're asking our guests because we're really focused in 2020 all about action. And we really want to train people that the term small business is not a noun, it's really a verb. Because action is so important to be successful.

Oh, yes.

Is there, is there one action item that you could leave our listeners with that they could do today to help them start building their personal brand?

That's a great question.

Take action.

Yeah. What?

Yeah, no, don't. Don't just think about growing it. I mean, start writing down content. So for me personally, I'm prepping content ahead of time and sure, there's, there's organic content, you know, today I posted a quick video about the new Apple Mac launch and stuff like that. But plan these posts in advance. If you can make a week worth of content, you're much more apt to actually get it posted at a consistent basis. I think that's what you're going to need to kind of get started and take that action quickly.

That's great. So like a content calendar, if you will, where they're okay this week I've got this going on and yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's really.

And mine I don't like actually add on a calendar. I use my Apple Notes app and I have, you know, I might have 20 or 30 kind of future posts, but prepped right now across a range of different ideas. So find your authentic voice, think about your core values and start posting about that because that'll, that'll help show your passion. If you're super passionate about it, then people are going to resonate with that and they're going to engage with you.

Very cool. Brian, thank you again for coming on the show. I love your energy. It helps energize me.

Oh, thanks.

What's the best way for our.

You could only see me.

That's right. Walking around, hands in the air. I know the best way for our listeners to connect with you is on LinkedIn. We're going to put a link obviously in the show notes. Where can they go? Learn more about Sell your Mac and.

Renewed Macs right on the website. Sell your Mac.com. go there. It's very apparent what we do. We help people trade on our Apple products, get cash form, make it super fast and easy. And if you're on there, you can click on the top right, there's a little button that says buy renewed and you'll be able to take a renewed Apple device right from there.

That's awesome. Thank you again, sir. And we will see you in the comments on LinkedIn, that's for sure.

Oh, I love it. Can't wait to connect with 100 more people from your network.

There it is.

I will do it.

Yeah, Very good. Take care.

Cheers, gentlemen.

Man, There was a LinkedIn masterclass that we just.

He's a good guy. Yeah. And Ed, well, yeah, what I, what I love about it too is he's helping. He doesn't want anything in return. There's all kinds of people out There trying to sell, hey, is this what you should do? But he's just like, hey, I'll help you come in, link to me or, you know, mention me and I'll mention you and help out back and forth. And he's a real authentic guy.

I mean, yes, it is like I said it, it is authentically who he is. And I meant what I said. He would, if you were at a cocktail party, he would be introducing everybody. It's just who, who he is.

Aggressively friendly.

Aggressively friendly.

I love that.

But he does benefit from that. I don't mean to say that he does it only for that benefit. He does it because it wouldn't work.

If he did that just for that. Right.

But there is a huge benefit to helping people and he does it by being aggressively friendly, which is great. My advice to everyone who's listening is don't try. If you're not already like Brian, don't try to be like Brian. Find your way to help people and then go do that. And that's, that's gonna, that's what's gonna work for you. Yeah.

And it takes a while. I mean, it, it takes, I think a long time to figure out what your message is and what being authentic about your, your life and your business is. And, and you know, it's just, it's just different. I mean, we were even talking about at the end of the show with Brian a little bit about, hey, what about this one of them. It's like, yeah, that's, it is a great idea. We don't do this little other thing. But, you know, you don't have to do it all. You just got to find what works for you and what resonates and what helps your own, you know, your own brand and your business. And also you're giving back at the same time helping other people, which is just, you know, huge.

Totally. I am going to throw this out here though. I am actively looking for, for someone to be a podcast producer for me and lots of things, including small business show, but really to work for us at Backbeat Media and do some stuff. It could be a probably halftime job or a full time job and I'm fine going either way. If that's you, find us. Feedbackusinessshow.co. i'm very eager to talk with you and there's. I have money to pay you, so. Yeah, it's good.

Always a good thing.

It is always a good thing. Yeah, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for listening. Please go and leave us a review at your podcast directory of choice. It really helps us out. Gets more people here, keeps us. Keeps the guests coming on so we can keep it interesting for you.

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