Easiest Way to Grow Your LinkedIn Following as an Entrepreneur (But Should You Do It?) | Ep. 3024

All right guys, we're coming to you virtual today and Neil didn't bring his microphone, so he's going to sound crappy. So it's okay guys, it's temporary. It won't happen. We're not recording live. Usually we have a microphone, but at least Neil has a nice background. So why don't we get started today, Neil? Why don't— here, I'll tell you what, you pick the first one.

The easiest way to grow your LinkedIn following as entrepreneur. But the real question is, should you do it?

Okay. All right. That's a good one. You start it off.

So I don't know if you follow Lars Lofregen on LinkedIn, ex-employee of mine, went out on his own. I've worked with him past being employed. Great guy, really smart marketer. Did a lot of affiliate stuff in between following like the old PG, you know, Patrick Gavin model, setting up those sites like online education, getting tons of traffic.

Oh, the education guy?

TextLinkAds. TextLinkAds.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then he ended up creating some auction. I think TextLinkAds was like an auction-based site to buy links. And then from there he created like online education database and had like onlinecolleges.org or whatever the domain names were, ranked them, did lead gen, and then sold it to— what's the company that owns Bankrate?

I forgot.

Red Ventures. I don't know what it was, but the number was public. I think it was like $600 million or something like that. So good for him. But Lars was doing a similar thing. And then his business partner Corey used to work for Patrick Gavin. But going through, you know, his LinkedIn, I think a lot of people have seen that Ahrefs post if you're in the SEO space where he was complaining about like $7,000 a month for data from LLMs and it went viral on LinkedIn. Tim Soulo ended up commenting on the cost of data and what Ahrefs And you're talking about the Brand Radar thing that Ahrefs is charging for, and it's very expensive. Yeah. So he put a comment on that or a thread on that on LinkedIn, or more so a post, went viral. And one that was done really recently that did extremely well was Google posted on their blog how SEO traffic hasn't gone down. And Lars was like, I just read this, I was catching up. And he's just like, and I'm paraphrasing here and I'm putting words in his mouth, but it's pretty much like Whoever wrote the blog post, let's say their name was Mary, I'm making it up. And he was like, you know, Mary, I don't know where like the F you're getting your data from. Like, you know, I have access to tons of Google Analytics and SEO sites and everyone's going down. Like, what the heck are you talking about? You know, you're smoking some crack. Maybe your employees don't want to tell you the real truth. And like posts like that have done really well. And the reason I bring up Lars as an example, Is he talked about his LinkedIn growth in one of his posts, and he's had some massive growth, and he took 6 months off, and he still had massive growth, and his reach is expanding. But if you look at the type of post I'm talking about, he's just not just speaking the truth, but just being direct and really upfront, and most people probably would never dare to, right? Like, honestly, would you—

Yeah.

create a LinkedIn post calling out Google like that?

Well, I actually have a thought on this, so I'll answer your question, maybe finish your thought, and then I'll kind of tell you where I'm steering this.

Yeah, so when you think about the type of content he's posting that's doing really well, he's taking things that people are thinking, but just saying them, and most people aren't willing to say what they believe is true, what they believe. And even though the majority believe that's true, Yeah. Just most people don't have the guts to say it, including me, by the way. Right? Like, I'm not gonna create a post on social media calling out Google or Facebook or any of the other platforms. Why? Because—

It hurts you a lot more.

Yeah. We generate business from this. Or I'm not gonna post on LinkedIn using a cuss word, um, while he can. And I'm not a saint. I've cussed many times in my life. I'm assuming you have as well. I've at least heard you do.

What do you mean you're assuming? You know.

Yeah, but I would never do that online. Or at least now in my, now being 40 plus, but even in the last quite a few years, I wouldn't put that stuff online. And I'm not saying Lars is wrong. He's saying what people believe, but I wouldn't do it because it can hurt my business. And he's just speaking the truth. As a solo entrepreneur though, which he is, and he probably has a small team or a few contractors that he works with.

Yeah.

It's not going to negatively impact him as much as me dealing with enterprises. And I'm not saying I'm right, or I'm not saying Lars is right. I love his viewpoint and I love reading his content. So I'm liking it. It's just more so, I don't have the guts to say—

It's just not for you.

It's for me to consume. It's not for me to state those kinds of things online.

So I'll tell you what, I was watching— I was— so when I sit on my couch, I watch YouTube. And so I was actually watching— there was a Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. So he had Daniel Priestley, Codie Sanchez, and Alex Hormozi on there at the same time, right? There was 4 of them. And I wanted to understand what they're doing on the content side that might've been unique or different, right? So, I kind of skipped around and then it got to the content side and then Codie mentioned something about her and her husband. So, Codie Sanchez, mutual acquaintance of ours, I'd even say friend. And so, she said that if someone doesn't go out and say things that are controversial or kind of go out on a limb that says something that they really think, she kind of looks at them and be like, that person's too safe, or they're playing it too safe, right? I'm paraphrasing here, but basically, like, she's kind of on guard with that person, right? Because they're not being authentic, right? Now, at the same time, I understand where you're coming from too, because you're trying to protect your business and you can't say all the things that you want to say, right? Because you have so many different constituents, right? Now, here's what I would say. I message— remember Gaetano?

Yeah, he used to work for Yaniv as well.

And you. Yeah. So I texted him. I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to become the Triple H of LinkedIn. So remember in wrestling and WWE in the '90s, Triple H was like a heel. He was a really bad guy, right? Everyone hated him. I hated Triple H. You love Stone Cold, you love The Rock, but you hate Triple H, right? And so I posted something last week that I knew would piss a lot of people off, right? So I don't know if you saw it. It was basically like, you don't deserve to be CEO or CMO unless you have 100,000 followers. I knew It would piss people off. And then someone wrote in there, dumbest comment on the internet. All these people attacking me. And then one guy posted, this guy was an enterprise lead for Carrot, right? And I just didn't give a crap. I just like kept fanning the flames. And then he posted something, I was like, yeah, and that's why you're not CMO. He's like, well, you're not either, blah, blah, blah. So I just tried to piss people off more and more. And I got a lot more reach than I usually would get, right? And then I remember a few months ago, 6 months ago, I said, Harsh reality, everyone's going back to the office, right? So, when you make a statement like it's not most people are going back to the office, it's everyone's going back to the office, you're going to fan the flames. And so, it's no different than what the Clueless people are doing. It's very controversial marketing, right? So, my take on it right now, when I told Guy Tano, I was like, maybe I should become the Triple H of marketing and just try to piss people off and rage bait more and more. I'm not really going to do that, but I kind of enjoyed it when I became the heel or the villain.

So, but it works. Your reach just skyrockets.

Yeah. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. And you know what's interesting is this is a quick thing and this is a quick detour and we can come back to what you're saying. But I actually don't know if you'd agree or disagree with this, but I was talking to our mutual friend Yaniv about it and they do really well, right, as a company. I was like, you know, maybe 5, 10 years ago, you don't necessarily need to understand at least one of the social channels to have a CMO role. I believe now the world that we're going into, if you're going to be a CMO, you have to at least know how to play the game on one of these channels. Yes, you know, you have to know how to manage a P&L. You have to know how to hire people. You have to know how to fire people. You have to know how to do all these things, right? But I do think you actually need to understand one channel really well. For you and me, it started with SEO. But I think now that the game's moving into organic, the reason why I said 100,000 followers isn't because of the followers. I just really mean that you should at least understand one channel, if not multiple. So when I talked to Yaniv on the phone about it, he was like, at least multiple. So my take is at least one. His is multiple. What is yours?

Mine's multiple. I don't think one is— and before you even mentioned you need, I was like, I agree you need one, but it can't just be one. It has to be multiple. Because if you look at Facebook, Facebook grew through the email invite flow, right? Dropbox through social media, tweet and we'll give you more space for free.

It's all free.

But back in the day, companies were able to grow into gigantic organizations through one channel. If you look at today, all these channels are saturated and any good channel quickly becomes saturated. So you have no choice but to take the omnichannel approach. That doesn't mean you need to be great at every single channel because there's too many channels. Not everyone's going to be applicable, but you need to understand a lot of them, most of the major channels. That's one. And you need to understand how marketing platforms in general work. So like, for example, if you're going after AI, just generally speaking, how these AI platforms work or how organic social works, because if a new platform comes around or you want to learn a new pla— another platform that's existing like a Snapchat or Pinterest, a lot of the principles and the frameworks are similar, right?

Yeah.

Like when we create video-based content, it doesn't matter if it's Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, the better the retention, the more views you get. It doesn't matter how many followers, but the fundamental concept and strategy of how to create video that people are intrigued with and want to keep watching It's the same. And if you don't understand not just the basics, but the platforms, and you're not good at, you know, a handful of them, I just don't think you're going to do well in today's world. And I would say the most important thing as a CMO is, you know, most people look at it as like player-coach, you need to be able to get your hands dirty. I do think that is very important. But I would say the most important thing if you want to scale fast is You need a CMO who not only understands strategy, but knows the people to hire, assuming you're trying to grow into a large corporation, that just can execute amazingly on every channel that you want to go after. Like this person, you're just doing Google Ads. This person, only Facebook Ads. This person managing only affiliates. This person organic for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and nothing else, right? This person, AI SEO. This other person, traditional SEO. You, Just email, right? And when you start piecemealing it like that, and you have world-class people who are in charge and don't need to be micromanaged, that's typically when you see the best results.

Yeah. And what I think we're both trying to say, what we're both trying to say here is, is if you're a dynamic marketer, you have taste in these different areas. If you're pretty good at each channel, if you don't have taste and you're an old-school marketer, you haven't learned these new things, how are you going to know the patterns to detect? Because everything in work is really just pattern recognition, especially in hiring. And so, I stand by what I say and maybe I'll Triple H myself more. We'll come back to a post I actually threw up on Threads and there's so many people here calling me an idiot. Only idiots repeat this nonsense. These people are drinking Kool-Aid. These people sound insufferable. It sounds like a delusional crowd. And I responded, I was like, yeah, some company's doing 9 to 10 figures in here, so I suppose these people must all be idiots. So, I think I'm just going to fan the flames more and milk the reach out of it.

But yeah, the one thing I agree with you, and I know when you said 100,000, you're not actually saying they had to have exactly 100,000 followers, but I get the point. You're saying they need to have followers and understand how to grow. The one thing that's important as a CMO, if you have followers and you have an audience, it makes it that much easier to recruit amazing people and your network is probably bigger.

Mm-hmm.

CMOs that don't have that are not going to grow as fast for organization. Like, I'll be very frank here. Both you and I, I know we can execute on marketing, but let's go with a hypothetical that we could not. I guarantee we both have amazing people that we know, whether it's independent contractors or just people that we can hire for Facebook ads, Meta ads, organic on pretty much all major platforms, maybe not the snaps, you know, and Pinterest as well as Actually, we probably both have on both of those, but we definitely have people on the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the YouTubes, all the major channels, email for sure, conversion optimization. And these things are super important because if you and I can't do crap as marketers, just hypothetically here, I'm not saying we can't, at least we have a Rolodex to be like, go run. We know you guys will just perform and produce.

Yeah. And by the way, this goes into why one of, some of you should figure out multiple channels here and build that network because Even though Neil says that 10% of his revenue is driven from brand, that's attributable revenue. But also I'm like, man, all the amazing people he recruited, like huge, massive. So, and then we realized, but by the way, Neil and I both started as marketers, but in order to do the things that we want to do for the long term, I'll tell you what, Neil, like the majority of my time right now is spent on recruiting. So yeah.

I don't spend as much time on recruiting. I never actually really did.

I never met him. You're at a different stage though, too. Yours is marketing strategy. What else?

Right now? Uh, a lot of software and AI, but, uh, yeah, a lot of product. I actually spend most of my time on product, more, more product and engineering than anything else. I'm not actually coding, but if I had to sum it up, it would just be summed up as product. I probably spend like 70% of my time on product right now.

I think what's worth calling out here before we move on to the next topic is you're working, you and I are trying to focus on the highest leverage things. Highest leverage for me right now is, is, um, is recruiting. For you, it actually, I mean, because you have a lot of distribution already in product, You're affecting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people with product, right? And you're going to drive more leads that way. And so you have to constantly be asking yourself when you wake up in the morning, when you look at yourself in the mirror, what is the absolute highest leverage thing? The number one thing I could be working on every single day that will grow the company the most. And that's something that we both try to focus on.

I agree with you. And I do think recruiting is really important. It's just, we have a whole recruiting team that deals with it.

And plus, I don't think you like to deal with it either.

No, but I do interview the people when it gets close to the end, at least for like the main roles. And it actually really depends what you consider a main role. Like we hired a head of Germany years ago and I never interviewed him. Same with the head of Italy or Spain or most of the countries.

Man, that's scary.

At this point, I got a CEO that knows a lot of people in the industry and he's just plucking people that he's already worked with in the past.

Yeah, there's a, he has trust established with these people if he's already worked with them. So it's a lot less risky versus you interviewing someone off the street that you, nobody knows. So.

Dude, our head of LATAM, his name is Javi. So Mike and I, funny enough, interviewed him at your event.

Miami. I remember. Yeah.

Okay. Uh, Javi's worked out really well for us. Yeah. Pitched a lot of companies really well, networked like, dude, he's done partnerships like with, um, other publicly traded like ad agencies. I'm like, oh, how'd we get this client? He's like, oh, I knew someone at Ogilvy. They kicked over the account to us for SEO. And I was like, Ogilvy's owned by a large holding company. They must have an SEO division. And he's like, yeah, they do. But he's just like, because of my relationships, I was able to get them to kick it to us instead of, you know, one of their sister agencies. I was like, all right, we'll take it. I'm not going to complain here. And when I interviewed Javi, not only did he say he could bring revenue, it was a big client. He's just like, You know, he's like, I think I can close you Sony. And this is before we were— before he was hired, and it ended up coming true. It took a few months.

You made that a big deal. I remember that was like, hey, we better get Sony. I remember that.

Yeah. And then he brought it. It took, I think, 2 or 3 months. But what was interesting about Javi, what really made us hire him was, I would probably say 50% the Sony thing, because I was like, dude, if this guy's full of it, I'm going to fire him. I know this sounds bad. But he was the one who says, I'll bring an account. I'm like, what's the certainty? He's like, 100%. I was like, okay. He's like, I have strong relationships in that organization. I know what they're looking for.

Never tell me 100%.

Yeah, because I'll expect it. But the other 50%, which was huge, is Mike G, our CEO, knew Javi not directly, but indirectly, because one of his team members that he worked with in the past that he truly respected and knew was amazing, Work directly with Javi. And that guy's like, Javi's a rock star. You can never go wrong with him. You should bet on him. And, you know, a lot of our hires come from just our executives who we trust and we don't micromanage. And when I say don't micromanage, like, I don't know what a lot of my executives do on a daily basis, but they're good and they just produce results and you just let them go do their thing. When those people that are known to be producers vouch for someone and saying you should go hire them, I don't really care to interview them. Like, at that point, I'm just like, How do you know they're good? Oh, I've worked with them for 6 years in the past and they did all of this stuff. All right. Sounds good. Like those are the people that have worked out almost 100% for us.

Yep. That's good. I think also when you're talking to people too, not, I'm just talking to the crowd. It's, you have to think about what values are important to you and then hire for those. Obviously what's important for especially working with you is, is your, they have to have a bias to action, not to be able to figure things out on their own. Right. And they have to be driven. Ideally, if they're working with you, they know how to run a P&L in some way, shape, or form, or if they know how to impact their numbers, right? So I think those things are all important. Okay.

Well, the leaders we make, we make sure they know how to run a P&L. And some of them we know going into it, they may not be the best, but we have a massive accounting team. So like Javi, for example, he knew how to run a P&L, but he of course could use improvement in that area. But his strong suit or his strong skillset was sales and massive network. So what we'll do is things like a P&L, you can put internal people to help fix that for someone. It's hard to fix the gap of you have strong relationships with clients and you can bring in revenue. Like that is not that fixable or trainable. It's much easier to be like, you don't have great P&L experience or you have some, like Javi actually wasn't bad at P&L, wasn't just, he wasn't the best though. We coached him and he got great. And if he couldn't, we wouldn't care because he's amazing at revenue generation and managing our team. We'll just go have the accounting team help him with it and walk him through it every time.

Yeah, I think relationships, that type of stuff, sales will be one of the last things to fully get replaced by AI. So it's hard.

Hands down.

And that is it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.