Sam Browne: Secrets of NZ’s biggest LinkedIn influencer (110,000+ followers)

I was on LinkedIn looking at the three most well known and followed people in New Zealand. Number one, Prime Minister. Number two, a guy I'd never heard of, a guy called Sam Brown. So I got curious. Why is this Sam Brown guy so popular in New Zealand? Well, I looked at it. He has built tens and tens of thousands of followers, is deeply engaged on that platform and understands what we need to do to build our online reputation, to build that connection with people that we might do business with or want to influence on LinkedIn. So I sat down with him in person up in Auckland and got very tactical. How do we do LinkedIn? Well, how do we build it and how do we use it to monetize our businesses and our pipelines? So sit back and enjoy this masterclass. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz Sam, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm excited to have you here because LinkedIn is something that I've been very interested in. I know many of my listeners will either be on it and very active or on it and very inactive. There'll be some who. Why bother? I'm already on Instagram and others.

Yeah.

And so I think there's a real place for LinkedIn and I think there's a lot of untapped potential, but there's so much in terms of options for us that often we just don't engage as individuals. So you went from 0 to 100,000 followers on LinkedIn in two years? Y. Wow.

Yeah.

Like, mind blowing. Yeah. How did you do that? Like, what did you. Well, why did you do that? It's probably more important. What was your. Your goal there?

My goal was. Not that. It was. I had been through, you know, two really tough years with COVID as we all did. And my business was and is a music agency, so I was booking live bands and DJs for events. It was going very well for years and years and years. We were about at year 12 and I can even remember saying to my girlfriend, oh, it's sort of, it's. It's sort of too easy. Like, the challenge is gone. We've done it, you know, and then overnight all the business went away. Um, and so that after a lot of, you know, kind of sitting on the couch wondering what the hell I was going to do, I tried a few different things and.

Got through those years kicking and screaming. And then, you know, at the end of that, I guess I was almost in a New mindset and feeling like a new chapter at the start of 2022, and started writing about my experiences as an entrepreneur up until that point on LinkedIn. And I'd had this really strong desire to do that for a long time. I'd thought about. I tried to start a podcast, I tried to start a blog. It was always around, you know, entrepreneurship is this doorway to a better life. And I'd done it kind of informally with a lot of friends and even friends of friends. People would book a coffee with me and go, you know, I'm starting this photography business or I've got this real estate video company and, you know, it's. Things aren't quite working. Another friend wanted to start a drum tuition school. So this kept happening, you know, and I was never putting it out there to, to people like, hey, hit me up if you want to do this. But something was.

Something kept creating that, those interactions, and I really loved them. You know, every time I would do it, people would meet the person who I'd met with, would message me afterwards or email me or whatever and say, hey, I'm just buzzing. I'm really inspired and excited from what we talked about. Can't wait to put it all into action. And it was almost. It was almost just like, okay, that feels really good. I want to do more of that. And. And I suppose the idea of doing on LinkedIn was like doing it at scale. All of a sudden, you can reach a lot more people with these ideas. I think it was. It was that combined with a love of writing, something I've always done all my life, and sort of how I figure out things in my brain for myself, even, you know, journaling and putting things down on paper. So I think, I think there was sort of a few contributing factors like that a natural inclination to write and to help to inspire people. And I got some positive feedback early on. Obviously, early on, I didn't have a hundred thousand followers. I had something like a thousand from having been on LinkedIn like we all have been for 10 years.

And I just sort of got, you know, nice comments and thought, okay, I'll do it again and do it again. And, you know, day after day I was posting. I had a lot of stories to share, and I would sort of learn from the reaction of people when I write about this. They like it more than when I write about that. And really one thing led to another. So it wasn't. It wasn't like on day one, I thought, okay, I'm going to go for it 100,000 followers or bust. You know, I probably started thinking that way about six months in. It had become a big part of my life. I was spending a lot of time on there. I had a lot of people letting me know how much they were enjoying it and how inspired they were. And it just becomes this kind of virtuous cycle, I think, where that. That just kept building and building and building. And so I hit 50,000 followers after a year and thought, okay, well, if I can do that, I can get to 100 in another year. And that's what I did.

Incredible. Yeah. I love the organic nature of it. Yeah. And it's interesting because something came across my desk and it was like, top three most followed LinkedIn people in New Zealand.

Yeah.

And it was a prime minister, Christopher Luxon, yourself, and Simran Kaur. And I was like, sam Brown, who is he? Need to know. I'm like this. I know.

Yeah.

I want to sit down with that guy.

Yeah.

Why do I want to do that? Well, I just see LinkedIn as an incredible platform that is misunderstood and it's undervalued in a lot of ways. So when you were writing at the start, because ChatGPT is doing a lot of writing for a lot of people right now, and it's generally rubbish.

Yeah.

In my honest opinion. Do I use CHAT GPT? Yes. Is it helpful for research? Yes. Is it like a writing assistant? Absolutely. But I don't think it writes great content. So when you were writing 2022.

Yep.

What were you writing about? What was the kind of structure of that?

Yeah, well, first off, we didn't have ChatGPT yet. There was no, you know, I mean, obviously AI existed, but it wasn't as commonplace as it was. That really kicked off. I might get the date wrong, but I feel like it kicked off either late 22 or early 23, something like that. And that was quite. It was a transformation. You know, one day there was no AI, the next, everybody's using AI is what it felt like. But what I wrote about. Okay, so I. I had built a handful of online businesses. Find a band. My music agency, Auckland Weddings, which was. Is a wedding marketplace, we actually did Auckland Weddings, Wellington Weddings, Queenstown Weddings, etc as a sort of a big SEO play to kind of dominate Google for those cities. And I did that one with a business partner, and I also did New Zealand venues with the same business partner. So I had this sort of events ecosystem. And then Find a Band was the one that I owned outright and was kind of where I made my money. Everything Else was almost a means to an end for that. So I had a lot of stories from that, you know, a lot, A lot of things I had kind of learned the hard way about SEO, copywriting, design, user experience, sales, marketing, from the point of view of a bootstrap founder. So, yeah, there was never any shortage of ideas. It was almost the opposite. It still is. There's like, I am always.

Open to ideas, seeking them out and then adding them to my little, you know, note in my phone. There's probably 500 things there that I'll never get to. So, yeah, I think, I think finding the ideas is, is so much. It's like attitudinal rather than reality. The reality is we all have hundreds or thousands of stories we could tell and yeah, you just have to kind of be open to them. It's almost. When I get out of my own way with it, I get the best ideas. Like I. I mentioned before the call, took my dog for a walk up Mount Eden. Every time I do that, I never take my phone or headphones or anything. I get home and I have like eight things that I need to quickly write down.

So. Good. So, yeah, you're inspired when you're in nature and your mind wandering.

Exactly, yeah. Shower thoughts. Right. But you sort of take it to the nth degree.

That's amazing. He had a shower thought this morning, come up with a book title. I was like, oh, that's it.

I think I've got it right.

It's funny. It's how the mind works in different scenarios. Ye, interesting. There's somebody listening right now that's going, yeah, he did 100,000. He can do that, but I can't. Do you think that it's possible for anyone that's willing and committed to open up and be vulnerable, share stories, share tactics, tools, experiences. Anyone could grow to that.

It's harder now, for sure. It was easier then. The algorithm has tightened up since I started.

My girlfriend, who is a social media specialist for Enterprise Brands, said to me in 22, hey, this is the golden era. Like, you need to make the most of this. You need to be getting people onto an email list. It won't always be this easy. And I sort of went, oh, it's fine, it's great. And she was absolutely right. She's always right. So, yeah, it's still possible. I've seen people do it in 2024. It's. It's about.

Yeah, a lot of factors. The things you mentioned are the types of things to be, to be thinking about the thing about vulnerability is an interesting one. When I speak to clients about that, often they'll say something to the effect of, you know, I'm not sure what I should share. I don't know if this is too personal. And my advice around that would be, if it feels uncomfortable in any way, don't share it. You know, you. You get much more aware of how far you want to go, how much you want to share. So, for example, I would share how, you know, business failures that I've had, I might. I might share a story around that. And I'm sort of comfortable enough now on a. On that stage, if you will, to. To share that without any fear. It's like, I don't have any emotional.

Reaction to that whatsoever now. I'm kind of immune to it, but I doubt I'd be comfortable writing that on day one.

Yeah, makes sense. And in terms of writing, I mean, I read a lot, books, magazines, social media, but a lot of the time I'm like, no, no. And I flick through and I don't engage. But sometimes there's something that catches me, and I haven't went deep enough into the psychology of why. And I guess social media experts will call that the hook. How do you get someone's attention? How do you hook them in? So in terms of what you've seen work, in terms of getting people to actually stop, read, engage, is there a certain way that you start when you're writing in terms of hooking people?

Yeah. Okay, so this is like a big topic. We Love this on LinkedIn. So we talk about hooks, and hooks means different things, but, um, the. The kind of quintessential hook of LinkedIn is the two lines of text that you see before you click, see more, and you sort of open up the entire post. And the way I approach it now after trying a lot of things and seeing what works, and, you know, I've created a digital product specifically around hooks. So this is something I spent a lot of time thinking about. I think about human psychology triggers. So I will use things like, it's always about desire and curiosity. So I'll use things like greed, fear of loss, scarcity, curiosity. So an example I might do, the first line might be curiosity. I might say something like this really surprised me. Okay, that's intriguing.

And.

And then I might say in brackets, and it's earned me $10,000 every month for the last six months. So that would be greed. So I'm saying to you, if you read this, you too can have this outcome that'd be a pretty classic one. And then you've got to balance that up with. You don't want it to be clickbaity. You don't want people to feel like you sort of did a bait and switch. So you also have to be thinking about, if somebody read this and then they clicked, are they going to feel that they got what they paid for with their attention? Um, so, yeah, that's. That's how I approach it. And I give them a lot of weight. I spend time on each one. I might spend on a. On a detailed post, let's say four hours writing it, editing it, and then turning it into a carousel, et cetera. And then I would probably spend an additional 15 minutes just on those two lines. And that's with experience. I'm. I'm pretty good at them now, so I've noticed a huge difference. Sometimes I'll, you know, I post the same post every, say, six months. I'll reuse it and I might experiment with the hook from one posting to the next. And it's incredible what a difference a good hook can make versus a mediocre one. It could be. You could be getting double the engagement, triple the engagement, just because the hook was better.

Wow.

Yeah.

I love that you talk about people's attention in terms of get what they paid for. Clearly they're not paying any money, but actually they're paying with one of the most precious things, which time and attention. Right. So that's really. I love the way you see that. And you talk about, say, carousels. So you've got the text, you're writing descriptions. You're right, you're sorry, you're writing the actual. The body got your hook and then the body. When you talk about carousels, are you putting text on those? Are they visual carousels? Like.

Yeah, they're text. Yeah, they're a carousel. If you, if you haven't seen them, it's. Think of it like a simple kind of a book. So you'll have a. You'll have a cover that may or may not have an image. You will have your title in, you know, big, bold letters. You might have a subtitle. And that's another kind of hook. If you nail that title page in the title image, that is going to get more attention than if you phone it in or you kind of miss the mark. And then the sort of bulk of the carousel is going to be pages of text. Like a book. Yeah. So it's a. It's a, I guess you could say like a mini E book. Something like that.

And it's. There wouldn't be a lot of text, I imagine, on each of those slides of the carousel, it would be quite the quote ask. Almost correct.

Yeah. You want to keep it at least. My approach is no more than four or five lines per page. And, you know, anywhere between kind of three to five lines is ideal. And the reason for that is you are constantly trying to make it as consumable as possible for the reader. You want them to forget their reading because it's so simple. So we're constantly seeking with social media, low cognitive load, make it easy, serve it up on a silver platter for them if they feel like it's too hard. Basket. There's a wall of text. They've got a squint or, you know, zoom in or whatever. You've lost the battle.

Interesting. And when you're writing the post itself, is it quite lengthy at times?

Yes.

Okay, so don't shortchange that. Or do you think there's a balance between sometimes you're doing short form, long form?

Yeah, I've done a lot of long form stuff. I haven't done a huge amount of very short posts. They can all work. It depends on the person. I think the kind of overarching advice would be keep it brief. It's social media, it's not a textbook. You know, the way I would approach like a social post versus an email newsletter is different. I would go into more depth on the newsletter. The social post should be, as I was saying, sort of simpler, simple to consume, no effort required. Somebody reading your email newsletter where you maybe do a deep dive on a topic, they have, you know, agreed to the contract of I like what you're doing enough that I'm going to give you my email address and maybe read the emails that you send. So it doesn't make sense for those people to just read like a social post in their email. That's where you can go into, into greater depth.

So on the other hand, I've done lots of posts where I will walk step by step through process. As long as you provide a lot of visual accompaniment for it, that can work. Okay. You lose people when you just have page after page after page of dense text. Even if the topic and the, the, the content is interesting, people just will not put the effort in.

Hmm, I like that. And in terms of like imagery, so photos of yourself or your team or videos of you, let's say you're a salesperson and you're. Or you're an auctioneer. For me, I'M often speaking from stage. Is that stuff appropriate for LinkedIn? Is there a way to package it where people will engage with it? Or is that a bit kind of peacocking?

No, video is big. Video has been really prioritized by LinkedIn over the last six months. When I started, so nearly three years ago now, it was.

People were not really sure how to, how to, how to take on video on LinkedIn and there were sort of arguments. Is it worth it at all? It's not something I've done yet because of the, the sort of technical requirements of doing it, but I have seen it work really well for people. And the good thing about it is, of course you get, you know, the whole human. You get to see the body language, you get to hear the accent, the, the.

All of those little subtle nuances of human communication that you don't get from text alone. So it's, it's maybe not that helpful me to say this, but, you know, different things work for different people on there. You could go all in and do nothing but video and succeed. You could do no video, which is what I've done, and succeed. You could write long posts, you could write short posts. It depends on the person, it depends on the approach. Like, I don't use a lot of photos of myself. You'll see people who've come from Instagram where they're really good at that and comfortable with it and they have a large library of images of themselves that can work really well for them. The better looking you are, the better that works.

I'm screwed. I better get the images.

Yeah, it tends to be this at a 25 year old, you know, social media manager and she'll have a lot of followers as a result of doing that. So, you know, it's, it's different strokes for different folks.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And is it about pick your one thing instead of diluting your, you know, your focus and saying, hey, I'm going to do videos and I'm going to do images and I'm going to do carousels. Do you think it's worthwhile going, no, I'm the person that does that.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about it too much. You can change tech anytime and you know, people, frankly, people don't care, you know, that, that you're as good as your last post in many ways. Um, so you could do text for a year while you kind of get up to speed on LinkedIn and then think, okay, I've just, you know, I've hired a Video guy. And now I'm going to do videos and. Or maybe I'm gonna do videos and text. That's fine. Um, maybe your audience would say, hey, it's really cool you're doing videos now, but you don't have to sort of commit to a format and say, this is it. And similarly, with your niche, as in the topic that you write about, ideally you want to drill down on a particular one and be known for a particular thing, but you will always see people pivoting as they sort of dial that in over time. So an example could be somebody could start out talking about marketing and then maybe talk and then. And then think, okay, actually now I'm going to talk about copywriting. So a subdivision of marketing. And then finally they might say, I'm going to be the person who writes about copywriting for email newsletters. And when you get that specific, all of a sudden people who are looking for that exact thing go, okay, that's my guy or my girl for that thing. I've read her last nine posts and they're so good. And she shares so much about copywriting for email marketing. And I need email marketing. So I'm going to book that call.

Makes sense. I want to zoom out for a bit because I've zoomed right in. I've got really. In the detail. I'm loving it, but zooming out for a second. So my personal LinkedIn. I'll see if my team can maybe just show that on the. For those that are watching on the video content right now, for the audio guys, you can head across to YouTube and check it out. But so let's say on my profile.

I'm James Lachlan, an individual, essentially, say a personal brand approach. I've also got a leadership company where I go and deliver high performance leadership to corporates and small businesses. A keynote speaker, which kind of ties into that. But then another separate entity is the podcast. So I've decided I don't want to have a podcast LinkedIn page and I don't want to have a James Lachlan leadership page. I just want to have the one. Am I silly?

No, that's the way. That's the way to go. So I frequently get asked by clients, how do I grow my personal brand, my own page, and my company at the same time? Or should I focus on my company page? Because, you know, it's, we want to make money here, we want to do business. The answer is always focus on the personal page. It's fine to have a company page that you could potentially send people to where maybe you've got case studies and stuff. Although really for various reasons, you're better off just sending them straight to your website. LinkedIn are sort of hell bent on keeping you on the platform and not sending people to other places that aren't LinkedIn. So yeah, you want to just focus on the personal brand. What people will follow on LinkedIn is people. So they'll, you know, may, maybe you share a series of posts about being a speaker and your journey with that and then you might share something about, you know, this happened with my kids this morning and it reminded me of this. So you should maybe you have a mix of what you know and are expert at and your, your life outside of work. And over time, as these posts sort of add up in aggregate, people go like, I really like James. I've learned a lot about public speaking from him and, and high level leadership. But I thought it was really cool how he, he shared that thing that happened this morning with his kids. And you know, they grow to know you so they, so you build the parasocial relationship, meaning one way relationship where they feel connected to you. They feel that they know you because you've shared so much of yourself professionally and personally on the platform. And then when it comes time to invest in that particular thing, they think, well, I'm going to do it with James. I like James. You know, I've been following him and he just seems like a good guy. It's basically impossible to do that exact thing with a company page. And one of the big reasons is people are just not interested on LinkedIn in following company pages. There are exceptions. HubSpot has, I want to say, you know, 4 million followers or something for their company page. But that is the rare exception. You won't see any creators really trying to simultaneously build a personal page and a company page. They just go all in on their own page.

Such a relief for me to hear, to be honest, that's a lot less work ahead for me.

Right.

So I'll keep zoom out. I'm dying to zoom in again, but stay zoomed out. So I run a podcast. I get legends like you on the show. I then have, you know, thought leadership around high performance and mindset. Obviously work with corporates. I'm a dad, I'm a partner. Like there's all different parts of my life. So what I'm hearing is you're saying, James, you can share it all on there, provided the context is that it adds value to my ideal potential customer or follower. So how Do I do that successfully? So, for example, video. I'm imagining me putting a YouTube link on LinkedIn. Bad idea. It's taking people off. But let's say this. Somebody's watching this right now on LinkedIn as a raw file that's been uploaded, embedded. Is there a way for me to start getting the podcast more engaged with my followership? Is there. Is there any advice you would give me on that front?

Yeah. I've been featured on a few podcasts, and I've tried to figure out how best to kind of, you know, I try and pay back the person who's hosted me by doing a post about it. And what doesn't work is for me to say, oh, hey, I was on James's podcast. Here's the link, and here's a picture of us talking or something. What probably would work best and what I'm planning on doing going forward is to.

Get a transcript of the podcast through an AI tool, pick out the, you know, let's say four to eight nuggets of things that we discuss that I think my audience is going to find really useful and essentially kind of, you know, advertise how great this podcast is going to be. It's worth the hour or what have you of your time because we cover these eight things. So you could almost give value in the post of. Here's a summary of what we talked about, and it would act both as, you know, valuable content, hopefully, and an advertisement for the podcast itself. In all honesty, it's fairly hard to drive people from LinkedIn to listening to a podcast. It's not. When I do it, it's not particularly high performance because it kind of requires a bit of, you know, a bit of a lift. It's like, okay, that sounds pretty good. I've got to click this link and now I've got to listen to this thing for an hour. Unless they were planning on doing that exact thing. When I spoke with Chris Doe, that worked really well because he was. He's huge, you know, 5 million followers or something. That one was cool. And that one went well, I think, because my audience were like, hey, good for you, Sam. That's cool that you, you know, you were able to get to that you were able to work with somebody at that level. Typically, yeah, they do. Okay. I guess if I were in your position, I would take that one step further and try and turn the podcast into a really good LinkedIn post that works in and of itself. That isn't just taking people to the podcast, but it's like here's everything I learned from this podcast. And, you know, maybe here's a, here's a download with, with how you can put these things into practice. And by the way, there's a link in my, in the comments or on my profile to the podcast, if you want to check it out.

I like that. So don't put the link to the podcast, whether it's YouTube or Apple or Spotify, in the post. Put it in my actual profile. Because you can put one URL in there.

You can put one URL under your headline. Okay, this is going to get a bit.

We're getting back in there. Do you want to get.

Okay, so you can pay for a thing called LinkedIn Premium. It's like a thousand US a year. And you get a few things. You get LinkedIn learning, which is actually really good. They acquired Lynda.com so there's like, I don't know, thousands of amazing courses. You could learn Figma or Mid Journey or what have you. But you also get this custom link that you only get by paying the money. And what that means is every time you post, you can have a. You are a link under your headline. So mine says, visit my website. They give you about seven to choose from. It's like, visit my website, subscribe to my newsletter, book an appointment. And what I do is I use that link. I change what, where that link goes, depending on the post. So say it was a podcast that I really wanted to drive people to, and I didn't want to tank my engagement by putting a link in the post because you can do that, but LinkedIn hates it and it kills your engagement by, I don't know, some percentage, say half. I don't know what the number is, but it's certainly, it's very noticeable that the post will do much worse. So instead if you're saying, hey, listen, I've. I've done this podcast, here are the things we covered. And if you just scroll up to the top of the post, you can click visit my website, it'll take you straight to the podcast. That way you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too. So you, you won't suffer any algorithm punishment. But you do have that external link.

It's awesome. And you talk about the download because often I'm speaking with people that have amazing tactics that a listener could implement in their business or their life. So the download aspect, that would be the same thing. Get them to go up to a link rather than put another link in there. So just get them to go up to visit my website. And that will take them through to.

Yeah, so you get that link under your headline, which is at the close to the top of your profile. You get it that the link shows every time you post. And then separate to that, you have your featured section. And that is just on your profile. And that is kind of where it's almost like LinkedIn. Like, okay, we know you want to have some external links. Just put them in there, that's fine. So that would be where you might put, you know, if you want to book a call with me, click this and take you straight there. Or if you had like a digital product, if you want to buy my course or download my book, you might put that there. And I generally advise clients put one or two things there. You can put, I don't know, maybe unlimited. You can put a lot of things there, but the more of them you put, the more you kind of water it down. Having one or two looks really good and you get a big chunk of real estate as well.

Makes sense. Let's talk about real estate for a second. So we're looking at the LinkedIn landing page or homepage, your profile page. And we'll make sure again, the team puts this on, on for people to see. So you've got a little thumbnail photo, you've got a backdrop photo, you've got a little bit of description of what you do, who you know, who you serve. Got an opportunity for a URL in there. There's probably a few other things, but high level, that's kind of what I think of. So structure of that. How important are these different elements? Yeah, what do we do? How do we set up a really clean and magnetic LinkedIn profile? So someone goes, yep, follow.

Yeah, okay, I'll take you top to bottom on. On how I would do it. So the first thing is the mindset I have when I do this is this is like a landing page for a business. So the very first thing you've got at the top is your banner. And that is only an image, so you can't click it and go anywhere else. But you do get a big space for this image. So you can do whatever you want on that image. And what I tell clients to do is make it clear who you work with and the outcome that you achieve for them. So mine says something like, I help founders build a profitable, profitable personal brand on LinkedIn and nothing else.

And that's on like a one black blank color background. So I'm way off on that so far. So I've got me on a stage speaking.

Yep.

In the distance.

Yeah.

And then. Yeah, I bet it is.

Everybody's like, look, I speak on stages. Yeah.

And I was like, I was actually a brand strategist and said, you should do that. I was okay, so got that. And then along the bottom of that image is companies I've worked with New Zealand Army. That's a good thing.

So you want that social proof. So I have that too. So I usually like to have. If you have social proof for sure, include it and just make it really clear. So, so what, what happens a lot is people over complicate it in terms of like, here are the eight things I can do. You know, I'm consultant and B2B this and DA, da. And. And if you're everything, you're nothing. You know, you want people to quickly be able to say just from the banner. Okay, I get it. And really the idea with the banner is I get it. And I'm ready to continue down the page. So, you know, I think of it as if we, if we think of it like a movie, this is the movie poster. You just get an image and you might get a small line of text. You don't get the trailer. You definitely don't get the full movie. Next thing is your profile picture. You want to have a well lit smiling headshot. You don't want half your body or your whole body on stage. Sometimes people do because most of the time when it's viewed it will be very, very small. So what I advise is well lit headshot with a bright color behind you.

So I've got like a bright orange in the background and it's just like headshot only and it's professional photograph up close. Nothing fancy, but just like professional.

That's it. So that one's pretty easy. It's pretty kind of black or white. What you should do there, I get.

A little tick on that one.

You get a tick on that.

And then thinking, suggesting that backdrop photo I should be considering, get me off the stage. Put a blank color that compliments.

It doesn't have to literally be blank. You know, people use gradients or, or graphics and stuff. Mine is just a single color. But yeah, there's lots of variations. But certainly what I wouldn't tend to do is have a photo of yourself. And if you are going to have a photo of yourself, make it relatively close up. Like maybe, you know, from the waist up or something like that. Yeah, you're kind of asking too much of the reader or the prospect. If it's like you in the distance.

Okay, yeah. And in that text. So for example, I go into companies where I'm helping deliver high performance training and sometimes that's to their sales brokers, sometimes that's to back of house and admin. But helping them become high performing at their role, whatever that might be. There's then senior leadership consulting where I'm working with executive leadership teams. Then of course there's keynoting. So essentially what would I put up there? I do. Do you literally write in that banner I help and then insert the type of person achieve insert the outcome or is that a little too kind of, I don't know. In my industry is a little bit off piste.

Right. You don't have to literally do that, although you can, you know, you could say, yeah, there's lots of different ways you could approach that exact statement. The point is that somebody reading it gets it. And what you don't want is for people to go, well, is he a keynote speaker or a coach or a consultant or a sales coach or you know, if they're asking or if it feels like you do four things and each one is given equal weight. It dilutes the, the power of it. And that's really common, you know, and, and something that people struggle with, that I struggled with is, you know, they're multi dimensional beings, they're not just one thing. But ideally on LinkedIn you do want to say, here's the thing that I most want you to know about me. So if I use myself, I have this music agency that I operate outside of LinkedIn. I don't really talk about it at all on my profile because there's no value to the prospect of, you know, of combining that with. Oh, and I also am a LinkedIn consultant as far as they're concerned. I am a LinkedIn creator 247 and that's all I sort of need for them to know. The way around it, if you like, is I sometimes will share stories about that business in my content, but the profile is not the place to do it. The profile should be really black and white. Here is this one thing that is the top of the pile for me.

Beautiful. So I've got a profile photo, I've got the backdrop, banner photo. Now we get into, we've got some space to write in terms of like the description.

Right. The headline.

The headline, yeah. What needs to happen there?

Yeah. Okay. So it's important to note that this is the most important copy for your profile and really for you on LinkedIn. And why is that? That's because every time you comment and every time you post, people will see a portion of that headline. So they'll see about, depending on whether they're viewing it on desktop or mobile, they'll see the first six to eight words. And I suggest playing it safe and really focus on the first six. So those first six words need to be so curiosity inducing in the reader that they think I really need to check out what this guy's about. That sounds really interesting. So mine says something like building a million dollar founder brand. And I do that because I want my audience to think that sounds intriguing. I wonder what that's all about.

What I haven't done and shouldn't do is something like, I am a LinkedIn expert who works at Da Da Da. So because what will happen is you get it cut off before you even get to the good stuff. So the first part is that curiosity think about, I just need to get the right people to come have a look at my profile. So start with curiosity, then elaborate. So if you do get them to your profile and they read the rest of your headline, now you can go into more detail. So that would be where I would explain in more detail who exactly do I work with and what exactly do I do for them. That might be, you know, it doesn't matter, but it might be 12 words, something like that. And then the third thing I do is I reiterate social proof there. So I might say I've worked with, you know, X, Y and Z or featured in X, Y and Z. And so yeah, that's, that's pretty much my formula. I go curiosity, elaborate, social proof for headlines.

Incredible. This is so helpful. So I'm going to get zoom in again, again and again.

Yeah, no worries.

So featured in versus clients I've worked with. So let's say some clients that I've worked with are New Zealand, New Zealand Army, Canterbury Rugby, and then some other corporates, so forth. I'll put that in.

Yep.

But then I featured in Forbes CEO Weekly and I haven't put that in.

Yeah.

So where should that be? The banner that should that be in the, in the headline? Like should I be mentioning that I've been featured in these?

Yeah, the, the, the, either of those, you know, clients I've worked with or featured in is fine. You could conceivably do both. I guess there's a point where it starts to become meaningless if there's too many names there. The thing about the clients I've worked with is it says to the prospect, if they are kind of like that. So let's say, you know, you've got the Air New Zealand, the army, and let's say somebody from Deloitte sees it, they're gonna, or Google, you know, they're gonna think, okay, this guy's working at the top level. He's a comfortable choice for us. There's social proof there that he has already worked with these big brands. It's a safe bet that we should at least talk to him. And that's kind of what you're shooting for. So, you know, when you're putting in, here's who I've already worked with, you are broadcasting. If you are a bit like this, you should probably talk to me.

I like that. And I guess from my end I do talk a little bit about what I do. Maybe one thing that again, my brand strategist said, look, it's important. It's a unique differentiator. It's like, James, you're a world champion. You're a seven time world champion. You should mention that in your description. And I've for years steered away from it and I don't want to talk about it. People don't need to know about it. It's not who I am, it's just something I did many years ago. Now you need to put it on there. Is it a good thing to have it on there? Is it silly?

It's an interesting one, isn't it? What, are you a world champion in drumming? Are you?

Yeah.

Oh, that's so cool.

When you mentioned music at the start, I was like, oh, we've got more of a conversation here.

Great. Yeah. I mean, the good thing about that is, as they've said, it's, it's a differentiator. So I have a client right now who is a very accomplished entrepreneur and sort of works around mental health and she's also a circus performer outside of work. And we included that because it is such a nice little twist. So it's good in terms of personal brand, it's maybe not.

You know, gonna, gonna lead to a direct roi, but it's gonna make you stand out in somebody's mind. I would include it for sure. Seven time world champion is something. Yes, I would put that in.

Yeah.

You could choose not to, but I think it's a nice thing just to kind of flesh out the person in your prospect's mind.

And the first six words shouldn't be about what I've done, it shouldn't be about I run a podcast. It should be about What I do for the most ideal customer, even more.

Dialed in than that. It should just be about getting people to come and check out your profile.

Okay, so it's that curiosity piece. It's that like the thumbnail on a YouTube.

Correct.

God, I need to click that.

Yes.

Okay, so I need to work on that majorly.

Maybe.

Any, Definitely. Any advice on that in terms of a theme that I should consider in terms of what I do? Like, any, any suggestions? Yours is amazing.

Like, I. Thank you. I spend a lot of time on this with clients. It's, it's sometimes the thing that take not literally just that, but thinking of the copy for their profile is hard. You know, I have to really. I get them to fill in a detailed survey and then I take their answers and often kind of have a good old think, you know, and think what exactly? You know, how do I, how do I sum up this person in six words? It's easier for me to do it for them than for them to do it. They can never, they can never pick, you know, but I would have to give it a bit more time, honestly, do a decent job of it. But yeah, the, the, the, the goal is how do I pick out something that will be really interesting and compelling to someone who would potentially work with James?

I love it. And I guess not all of my clients have got a different, I guess a suite of services. And some of them might start at, say, with a book, 25 bucks, right up to working one to $100,000. So certain clients are not going to be on LinkedIn potentially. And others will.

Yeah.

So let's talk about then, how we engage with the ideal client. My understanding is I want to get my, my potential future clients off social media and onto my email list. And something I've been working slowly at. Finally, my email list is larger than my LinkedIn followership. We're pulling them in from multiple places.

Yep.

So how do we do that and get them off and into our email list effectively, and then how do we monetize? Because at the end of the day, people want to use LinkedIn, spend time on it, so that there's an ROI, not a cost to it.

Right.

So how do we get them off onto our own email list and then how do we monetize?

Okay, so, yes, I like that. That is what you want to do. The thing about getting them onto Your email list versus selling directly on LinkedIn is if you can get them on that list, you can then sell to them repeatedly direct in the inbox. You're not going to be subject to the whims of the algorithm, which I have seen change a lot for the worse for creators. You know, you have them forever, assuming you, you write good emails for them that they like.

And so the easiest way to do that is lead magnets. And the most effective way, so a lead magnet, is when you put together a typically free offer that is so irresistible to your reader, to your ideal audience, that they think, okay, I know I'm gonna have to put my email address in and I know I'm gonna get sent some marketing emails, but I really, really want that thing. And so I've created lots of them for people wanting to grow on LinkedIn and seen what works and what doesn't for me. And it sort of highlights the rules for everybody. So I'll give you some examples. So if I do a lead magnet, here's how to create a really, really good banner. You know, here's my exact process and I've got 12 examples of well created banners and I've got a Canva template that you just fill in the blanks. Okay, that's okay. That's probably a 5 out of 10 lead magnet. It's relatively desirable to people, but it's not a, an absolute killer. It's, it's just okay. At the opposite end of the spectrum might be something like, here is a step by step guide to making $10,000 every month on LinkedIn. Okay, that's, that is something that everybody who isn't already making that wants to know, bar none. If they're sort of dabbling in content creation, that is the thing they want.

So the key with lead magnets is kind of figure out, what is that for you?

What do they we really want?

What do they really want? Yeah, and, and they won't always even tell you that, you know, they, they, for example, with personal brand, people might say, you know, I want to grow my brand, I want to grow my authority. And then when we drill right down to it, like, why, what do you really want? Okay, I want a big audience and I want to make, you know, $30,000 a month on LinkedIn. Okay, now I know what you want. That's the goal. So it's about, it's about finding what those true desires are and then creating lead magnets to that effect. And people wrestle with this in that they feel, well, doesn't that mean I'm giving away the golden goose if I tell them my secrets? But you know, Alex Hormozy talks about people don't pay for information all the Information is on the Internet. They pay for execution. They want you to either make it incredibly easy for them to do it or even do it for them. So I have found, and speaking to other creators, I know they found the same. The more I just give away all my secrets, all my little hacks, the more that I am signing high ticket clients who say, hey, I just read that exact breakdown. You did. Can you do that for me?

I can see that Hormozy's amazing, you know, $100 million offer. Great book. I'll put a link in the show notes as well. But for, for us, it's definitely, we've seen that like the more we give, yeah. The naturally, the more interest, intrigue and then naturally our ideal customers reach out.

Right.

And so I guess about doing that organically, authentically. The one thing I haven't nailed and really dabbled in is low ticket. So, you know, I've got lots of mini courses that I could shoot, record and put out there. What's the best way to kind of, I guess if I was to do 10k months on LinkedIn, because I don't look at LinkedIn as a platform where I'm just making recurring monthly revenue, but I should, like, why not? Like, I'm spending time on there and I've got all the educational kind of tools and videos ready to rock. What's my starting point? How might I get started on that journey?

If you have.

Testimonials from people who have previously taken one of your mini courses, and if you don't, it'll be useful to get some. What you can do, and I advise not doing this too often, you don't want to fatigue your audience by constantly hitting them over the head with offers. And, you know, buy my thing, whether it's working with you at the top end or buying my $25 book at the other, I suggest somewhere between 10 and 20% and definitely no more than 20% of the time you want to be selling. You know, some months I won't sell at all. Others I'll do a few offers. And so let's say it's a, it's a course. Let's say it's a course on high performance for C suite. And what I would do is I would say something like, you know, three years ago I built this course. Since then, you know, 230 people have gone through it. Here's what some of them had to say. And you've got these testimonials that are really highlighting how did the person's life change for the better as a result. So say this person gave you this long testimonial. James is a great speaker. It was so much fun and the time passed so quickly. That's all great, but the person on social media doesn't care that they had a nice time doing the course. They want to know, if I spend the 200 bucks on your course, how's my life going to be better? So you want to pick out those sort of gold nuggets within the testimonials, usually a sentence or two sentences. And then you know the person and where they're from, if they're, if they're a credible person, you know, ideally you say it's their name and their CEO at this company. Okay, great. So this is a course for CEOs. It's 200 bucks and the value is, you know, easily 5,000, $10,000. And you just sort of repeatedly hit on that. You might do, you know, six to eight testimonial, something like that. And then if you wanted to really push it, you might say, you might say something like, for the next 48 hours, I'm going to, I'm going to offer the course 50% off. All you need to do is comment this word in the comments and I'll send you the link. And again, it needs to be something pretty desirable. It has to be something they actually really want. It won't just sort of work because you want to sell stuff. But yeah, that, that has proven really effective for me.

I just think I've tried this in a different way. Had three books, three books to give away. One of them is a signed copy of Drive by Daniel Pink. So he sold like 4 million copies of this. And the other couple was Ali Abdaal productivity book and maybe Think and Grow Rich and said, hey, comment below, comment book below if you'd like to be in for a chance to win this. And my God, like the engagement was ridiculous because people really wanted it. Low cost of entry. And then of course I can send them a link to enter that, which is, hey, join my mailing list. And you know, that's interesting.

I've never done that. Then that went well for you, huh?

Very well.

Yeah. The trade off with something like that is who wants, who is willing to do that? Probably not your $100,000 client. Right. They, they either own the books or they're happy to buy them. They're not. They're not. So, you know, there's a bit of a, call it a danger that's probably overstating it of Accidentally building an audience of people that are not, you know, serious prospects. That's been something I've learned the hard way to some extent. A large portion of my audience are people who are just looking to grow on LinkedIn and not willing to pay a single dollar to do it. You know that they're just in the comments, they're downloading all my free stuff. But when it comes to like, hey, do you want to buy that $50 thing, hundred dollar thing, or work one on one with me? No, can't afford. So you'll often see people on LinkedIn who've been on there a few years saying, look, don't worry so much about a huge audience. Worry about building the right audience, you know, get it, get, be making content that or focus on content that the people you really, really want to work with are going to find interesting and useful. That's how you get your inbox filling up with ideal fit clients who have the money to work with you.

Makes sense. I often think about, I mean it's interesting. You can watch political leaders do this now they're on TikTok. So you get a 50 something year old political leader on TikTok saying drip and no cap, right? Riz? I'm like, that's interesting. That's not their ideal. It's not a voter that they're speaking to. Yeah, but in like two to three years, some of those 15, 16 year old people will be voting yes. Do you think there's some regards a personal brand should be considering like a long tail in terms of I can be talking to or say for example the book giveaways. Do you think it's important for me to be going, the person that maybe gets the book now could be the $100,000 client in five years maybe.

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a stretch, honestly. I mean maybe, maybe they'll stick around and they're like, hey, yeah, I remember that guy did that book giveaway when I was just a nipper and now I'm a serious business person. I mean I'll be focusing on who you want to be talking to right now.

Yeah, all in on that.

I mean the example you gave to me, that is kind of the antithesis of a personal brand.

Yeah.

There needs to be a large dollop of authenticity who you actually are rather than, you know, talking about things that you, that you in a way that you would never talk outside of social media. I'd say that can do as much harm as good.

Yeah. When you see a politician do like no, Cap. You're like, come on, did you never speak like that?

Right? You know that they've got some millennial advisor in their ear going, okay, you need to say, no, Cap. This is what it means. It's like, oh, man, cringey. It's cringy for sure. You know, people are not stupid. They can tell if it's the real person or if it's, you know, I'm doing this for their engagement.

Can I share with you one of my biggest weaknesses? So I did the CliftonStrengths personality assessment, and my number one strength was harmony or harmonious. I don't know what they call it, but harmony. So it says, I seek harmony. I want to keep positive relations. And it's very true. But also it's massive weakness. They call it strength, but it's a massive weakness. Why I often sit on the fence, I often don't speak my mind. Worried about repercussions, worried about how it might hurt someone, worried about maybe someone going below. I'm going to unfollow him or I'm not going to do business with him. But then I look at someone ultimately the number one personal brand on the planet right now, Donald Trump. Whether you love him or loathe him, he's just everywhere. Everyone talks about him, everyone knows him, everyone can see his face. They know what he stands for. Joe Rogan. In my podcasting world, I'm not a fan of Joe Rogan, not because he's got 500 million more listeners than me, but.

More so because I don't like some of the things that he believes in. He's. He's pretty polarizing. I see this as a big weakness for me in that I don't really have any polarizing views that I express. Do you think on LinkedIn that it would be helpful for me to be a little more, hey, I'm on the right hand side of the fence or the left hand side of the fence today. This is what I believe in. This leader that said this things I talk about leadership and high performance. The fact they did this would highlight X, Y and Z. Here's my thoughts on it. Here's how you might consider it in your own leadership. Is that dangerous or is that wise?

I wouldn't say it's dangerous. I think it's a choice.

I've read a lot of people saying something to the effect of, you know, you need to pick a lane, you need to be known for. I'm this and not that. I haven't gone out of my way to be polarizing. And, you know, for example, I, I thought about doing a sort of a satirical post in the lead up to the election. You know, I'm like most people, I guess, in New Zealand. I'm very much anti Trump. I think he's terrible. And it's amazing to me what happened. And I, I didn't post about it because I thought, you know, I, I guess I was thinking, do I need to be. Do I need to insert myself in this conversation? Is it my place? You know, I think social media creators can be in danger of.

Taking themselves too seriously and maybe taking their. That, you know, you have a lot of people supporting you who like your stuff and are fans of yours, and you kind of start to believe your own hype. And I thought, I don't need to be part of that conversation. But on the other hand, you know, there are things. For example, people using AI comments on LinkedIn is really common and it's pretty terrible. It's like it's AI people commenting on AI content and we're losing.

I'm seeing that this week for the first time ever. I'm getting. They're almost like either female VA's or secretaries, right? Saying, please DM me. And I've seen like so many over the last week, and I'm like, what? As a comment? Like, that's such a weird thing. It's. There's no context. It has to be AI doing that. So why would someone do that on my content? What would they get out of that? Am I. If I go and engage with that person, is that potentially phishing and scams?

No, it's. I mean, maybe, but it's, it's the, the primary reason people are using AI comments. And sometimes it is literally a combination of Vas doing their comments. So it's almost like a human AI. And sometimes it's VAs doing AI comments on behalf of the creator. The reason they do it is for growth. So if they're, if they're, you know, putting out 5,000 comments a day. We were talking earlier about the headline and how, you know, that interesting part at the beginning of the headline gets you over to the profile. If you do, if you have thousands of comments going out a day, a percentage of those people are going to go and check out your profile. Then they might see You've already got 280,000 followers and think, oh, you must be legit. And I've seen people grow huge audiences with just junk content just through kind of abusing that, that power. The thing with doing it is. You don't, in my opinion, really grow a. And this is actually to your point about polarizing opinions, this is a polarizing opinion I have. If you are growing a huge audience on LinkedIn, kind of using cheat codes like that, ultimately it doesn't really serve you because when you get in a situation like we are now, you don't really have anything to say. You've just grown this huge audience who, you know, probably themselves looking to grow their audiences, but they're not seeking out high quality content. So yes, you might have a big social media audience and you might even be able to turn that into cash, but you're not going to get invited to speak at things, you're not going to get invited on podcasts, you're not going to get these interesting opportunities that you will get if you do it the real, the hard way.

Do it the right way. Yeah, as the stoics say, right way right now.

Right.

It's, it's interesting. So, comments. Someone, you put up a post and someone comments on your post. Let's say you get four comments and you posted it seven minutes ago. Should you be getting in there, liking, hiring, celebrating, commenting back right away? Is it a bit boosting, right, in terms of algorithm or is it like the old idea of milking it? So do one love or like respond and 24 hours later do the next comment, then spread it out. Is there any strategy around algorithm or is it now just be normal and respond to them all right away?

And I usually respond to them as they come in and I usually kind of pay them back for however much effort they've put in. So if somebody says, great post, Sam, you might, maybe you said that. I might say, cheers, James. You know, I've paid it back if you, if you comment. Great post, Sam. This reminds me of back in, you know, World Championship drumming attempt number seven, when my stick broke and right on midnight. And you write this great post and it's genuinely, you know, contributing to the, to the overall experience or even if you're just trying to contribute, even if it's a bit off on a tangent, a person like that is so valuable to you as an audience member. So, you know, I call these people content amplifiers where they're showing up and they are reading your stuff, having a think about it and then writing their thoughts. That's how much they appreciate what you're doing. So that person, I will, as much as time allows, I will repay them with that sort of equally in depth response within reason. You know, if they've put three paragraphs. I might reply with a full paragraph of hey, James, that's great. I'm so interesting, amazing that you, you made it seven times to the world championship because I know that, that that person is, it's going to.

It'S going to really count for them that this, this big creator that they follow took the time, people say that to me all the time. I really appreciate, appreciate that you took the time to do that because a lot of big creators don't, you know that they're kind of the, the audience are a means to an end for them. Often they themselves are quite divorced from the whole process. They've got a team. They may have contributed to that, but somebody might have written it. Somebody else did the imagery, somebody else scheduled it and then a VA is replying to the comments and I don't know, I feel like you can tell to a certain.