Bonus: LinkedIn Masterclass Session One

I've got here Simon Chapazot in South Africa and me, Jim James, here in England. And we're gonna embark on something. Love you to come with us. We've got a 12-week program because the problem we're trying to solve is that I've got a new book out called The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, and I want to try and use LinkedIn to, you know, show everybody the book. There are 50 entrepreneurs we featured in the book. All on the subject of getting noticed. But what I don't know how to do is to use LinkedIn to do that. So I've asked Simon, who is an expert, he runs a company called Storylux in South Africa, to help me to do LinkedIn properly. Simon, welcome.

Thank you, and what a lovely introduction, Jim. Good to be here, and I'm very excited about what we're going to do over the next 12 weeks. Yeah, let's get started.

Good. And just so for anyone that's interested, uh, we basically have got, um, 30-minute sessions the same time each week, hopefully without technical troubles that we had this morning, uh, 12 o'clock on a Thursday. We are going to track the progress, and Simon's going to share with us what we need to do each week to improve our LinkedIn engagement, the, uh, the impressions, the number of connections we've got, and how we start to get people across from LinkedIn. into a newsletter and into learning more about the books. That's the basic concept behind this. We thought, why don't we build in public? Why don't we do this, uh, on LinkedIn as we do it? Because other people want to know how to use LinkedIn to drive connections and the result of some kind, in this case, getting traction for the book. Simon, where do we start?

Exactly. Sounds wonderful, and I'm very excited to be doing this with you, and, um, for a number of reasons. First of all, I mean, You're a lovely guy. We've had many, many nice chats. We share the bond with EO, which I think is always a cool thing.

Yeah.

And I think you have a great podcast. You have a book. Your 3rd book is coming out. So, what I'm excited about here is you have a lot of great assets on your hands. And what I want to do over the next couple of weeks with you is to really leverage them because I think you have a lot of potential, um, with the books, with the podcast. Um, I see a lot of low-hanging fruits and, uh, I want to embark on a journey with you and pick these fruits and, uh, and, uh, make nice apple juice and applesauce and whatnot. So perfect. Let's get started.

Perfect. Thanks for the kind words. Mutual, of course. So, um, yeah, terrific. So where do we start, Simon? You're the expert on LinkedIn.

Exactly.

And you let us know where you want to start.

Exactly. Let's start by taking a look at all the assets that you have, and then I want to define what we are aiming for over the next weeks.

And yeah, let's just start with a look at your profile and the stats that we have or that you have, and then Yeah, so, so what Simon did was Simon gave me some homework, and hopefully you can see this is my LinkedIn. Uh, I've been on LinkedIn now for over, over 10 years. The first, um, number of years I was in China, actually. Of course, LinkedIn's blocked in China, so I didn't have a lot of content for many years. It's really been the last 3 years since I came back to the UK that we've been building this out. Simon, uh, this is my snapshot, if you like, on week 1 of where we're at.

And yeah, a bit of comment here for our listeners. So what we see is the number of connections. Those are people that are connected with Jim. Then we have the number of followers that we don't see here, though we do, which is a slightly different thing because connections are people who have connected with you, and followers is more like a one-sided thing. So we see that content producers that post regularly or podcast hosts, they can have a lot of followers, but they can have very few connections. And to give you an example, in my case, I have, I think, 2,800 connections, but I have 5,300 followers. So some of them are connections, but not all.

Right.

Okay. So yeah, we see the connections here and followers. We see that you are in 96 groups. That is a lot. And you have been part of a lot of events. So let's move on to the next slide.

Okay. And I think what Simon is going to be doing is a little bit of an audit on my profile. And you can find this by just clicking your own picture, by the way, and it'll show your profile. And over the next 12 weeks, Simon will be sharing with us some of the hidden depths within LinkedIn where you can find and optimize your profile. And just to say, I don't pay for LinkedIn. I just have a normal account. I don't have Navigator or Premium. So everything you're seeing is for free. And that's what we decided we would do is just show, uh, people that are not spending extra money, right, Simon, on LinkedIn. how to optimize what you've got to start with.

And on that note, with a free account and Sales Navigator, LinkedIn is offering amazing value for free. You can have amazing reach. That's one of the nice things with LinkedIn. And I know some of the content creators that have a huge following don't even pay for LinkedIn. So it's insane what you can do with LinkedIn for free.

Yep.

So what we see here is the LinkedIn content performance, as it said, says, over the past 7 days. And so we've created— we've prepared 3 slides for the past 7 days, I think the past 28, and 90 days. And what we see here is the number of impressions that you had on all of your posts on a given day. And the interesting thing is to keep in mind how many connections or followers you have because that has an impact on your impressions. It's not directly correlated. You can have a lot of impressions with very few connections. But in theory, you see that the more connections you have, the more impressions you have. And maybe you can jump to the next slide. So yeah, get into your picture.

And I think also perhaps notable here too is, is the inconsistency, right? That, you know, it was on a downward trend, then it had a lot of impressions in, in, you know, February 4th, 5th, and then down again. And that's one of the things I want to deal with and have this sort of long-term downward trend, which doesn't seem to make sense either. So next slide.

So that's, uh, basically the past 4 weeks. And again, we see the same spike here, uh, beginning of February. And we see that beginning of January had also a lot of impressions. Let's move to the next one for the past 90 days.

Okay.

Or was it 360? 90, yeah. So that is interesting because now we begin to see a bigger picture, which is that you basically have a very consistent number of impressions over many, many days. Interesting to see is then always that you have these outlier posts. We can see one here. Well, you had, uh, how many impressions? I'm sure.

Yeah, nearly, nearly, nearly 50,000. Yeah, back in November, 50,000 for something, right? Yeah. And this is really what we're going to be talking about, isn't it, Simon?

That's nice.

So this is good. And so plainly I can do it with something. I just don't know what kind of posts I need to be doing and We can see this kind of fairly low, lumpy, um, and also, you know, although 243 seems like a lot of impressions, 243,000 impressions seems like a lot, it's down 13.5% in the last 90 days. So even the stock market's doing better, uh, than that at the minute. Okay.

Well, what I can say, you definitely should have more impressions with the number of connections you have, but we're going to work on that. So we're going to Keep that as a snapshot, and then we will keep coming back to these stats over the next weeks. Now, what we see here, for our listeners, as an explanation, is the number of followers. And what LinkedIn does, it gives you the number of followers that you have and that you have added over the past, in this case, 7 days. So we can see that you have added—

2.

I have to squint my eyes, so small.

We've made about another 130, uh, followers because you can see it, for some reason it's done an exclamation mark. We've got 5,000 total followers in the last, uh, 7 days, it says here. Uh, so we've gone up nearly 4%. Let's make that—

edit 5,300 So every individual dot on that line, so you added about like 15, 25, up to what, 75 on one day, and 2 days you added 75 each.

Yeah, so that's pretty respectable, right? So we've been putting something out for a couple of days over a week where we're adding 75 people a day, right?

So And that correlates with the, with the, with the spike that we saw with the one post. So you can see there's a correlation between a good post and people following you. Um, so that's why we want to have good content, because that's what makes people want to follow you.

Yep, exactly. Okay, so again, it's the inconsistency, isn't it? You can see here. Um, so see similar pictures Yeah. So it's, it's that we're doing the right thing sometimes. I just don't know with my virtual assistant team in the Philippines, Simon, what is the right thing at what time. So next slide.

Yeah. And the interesting thing is we basically see the same thing like with your posts, one, one huge spike in, what was it, November or something.

Yeah, that's right.

And you added like 500 people in one day, which is phenomenal. So that post apparently has done a lot of good to your profile. And we see again also this mini hump in the beginning, like a couple of days back. So you see correlation between good posts and followers. Okay, cool.

And then this is my job title.

That is by job title, and that is something very important because I think there's a lot of vanity out there with people trying to get a lot of followers and sort of grow their audience, which is a good thing, but it's always very relative. So the other day I had a conversation with a friend who is a specialist for insurance, for the insurance industry outsourcing market, And he's specializing on Ukraine. Now you can imagine how many people there are that are potentially interested in outsourcing for the insurance industry in Ukraine. So would it be realistic for him to expect to grow an audience of 10,000, 20,000 people and have hundreds of likes on his posts? Probably not. And so one thing that we need to keep an eye on is to be clear who we want us to follow, um, who's our target market, and then use that as a benchmark to, to say, okay, we're going in that right direction. So what we don't want to do is to turn you into some LinkedIn poster who talks about LinkedIn, and then you have sort of like through-the-roof followers, but they're all copywriters because that is not your target market. Um, yeah, you want— who, who do you want to have in your audience? Who, who is— Your target market. Tell me.

So I think that now what's good about this, Simon, is that, you know, I'm getting to founders. And really, with the Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast and the Unnoticed Entrepreneur book that's coming out on the 24th of February, founders, CEO, co-founders, MDs, you know, that's who I want to get to. Um, so we're going to focus in on the content and the groups Uh, for example, I've got 96 groups. Some of them go back to when I was in automotive and when I was in food and when I was in China and when I was in Singapore. So part of what I need to do over the next 12 weeks is to refine my, uh, audience and the groups I'm in, and with your help to define the content. So shall I shut the, um, the, the screen share now then, Simon? Okay. And then part of what we're gonna do is each week we're gonna be monitoring this.

You want to? Okay, sorry.

That's okay. By the way, we're only going to be about 20 minutes on these shows, just so that people can follow on maybe while they're having a cup of tea or something at lunchtime. So here we go. Oh, my profile, actually, if I share the screen, um, it shows, um, you and I. Is it going to go to infinity? There we are. It actually shows you and I talking. How cool is that, right?

What? Ah, that's cool.

Yeah. So Simon and I, as you can guess, we are experimenting. We're learning how to use LinkedIn Live, uh, as we speak. So, um, Simon, what do we— what would you like me to show?

Um, your profile. So I'll give you a quick rundown, um, of your profile, feedback on the profile.

Yep.

And that we're going to use to work on your profile. So first thing to look at is always the top section. And I have to say, you already have a good profile. You have a great headshot. You have a great header banner, which we don't see at the moment, but it's really done nicely because you have the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And it nicely blends in with the white. So anybody who comes to your profile will see your face, which is good because it builds trust. It's a very professional photo and they instantly see the brand, which is The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. So that is great. We don't have to do anything here. Your headline, aspiring entrepreneur, podcast host, adventurous spirit. is interesting. It sounds like you are a guy that I want to talk to because he has something to share. What it doesn't do is—

That's very kind of you.

What it doesn't do, sorry to say, is it tells me what do I get from you. So why should I follow you? What's in it for me? And that would be the first thing to think about until next week. What is it the thing— what is the thing that you want people to know what they can get from you so that they get intrigued? Because how it works is if you post something or somebody comes to your profile, that is the first thing they see and that's where they check you out. And this is interesting, but it doesn't give me a reason why I should follow you. No, that's right. Unless I'm into podcasting hardcore, then maybe.

Okay, that's really good feedback. So, so many of us write what we are in our profile, but not, if you like, why that matters to somebody else. It's kind of a 101 mistake, isn't it?

Exactly. And it's very tempting because LinkedIn was set up as a CV tool. So everybody writes, so many people write their role. I'm a sales rep or CEO or whatnot. Yes, you are, but It doesn't really say what I can get from you.

Okay, so what should I write there, Simon? So what sort of things should I be writing?

So what, what do you want to give to people? What do you want them to, to get from you?

I want to share with entrepreneurs and business owners how to get noticed. I'm sharing information, creating connections for them, introducing tools, hosting, uh, live events like this. So really providing information and guidance and inspiration for entrepreneurs on how to get noticed.

So it's everything around marketing, PR. It's, I'm thinking—

I put you on the spot there. Well, this is exactly the sort of thing that you've identified the problem and then over the next week, we'll work together on getting that right. Okay, so just mindful of the time. What else do we need to show today?

Yeah, let's scroll further down. The other thing that is interesting, and now we see the inside view of your profile. So yeah, again, you had 6,600 post impressions. This is the past week, I think. And that definitely is a number that we have to get up, and I'm pretty confident we will get that up. Let's go down to the featured section because that is the other thing that people will see when they come to your profile. The featured section is a great thing on LinkedIn, and a lot of people don't really understand what you can do with it.

Mm-hmm.

And I see sort of a similar thing with you. So the rookie mistake is that people highlight the best performing post, which is nice if you had a viral post. But what the featured section allows you to do, and you've already taken advantage of that, is it allows you to link to an external page. And you want to use that super valuable real estate that you have to drive people to do something that you want them to do. The thing that I see here which is not as good as could be, you offer 4 things. And whenever you offer people a choice, the danger is that they don't do anything because they don't know what to do. So it's always better to only have one thing.

Okay.

And I would think in your case, since you want to promote the book over the next week and the weeks, It's gonna— it should be something about the book. It probably could be a landing page leading to the book to learn more about the book. And that could then tie back to the headline at the top that you released this new book where entrepreneurs can learn about how to get noticed. And then you would have a landing page that takes them to a page where they sort of get the gist of what they get from this book, which is how do I get noticed. Okay.

Okay, great. So would I remove those other, uh, posts and just have the one? Is that the idea?

Exactly, exactly.

Okay, all right. So we can do that and make a link to the, to the place where people can get the book. Okay. And then what else do we need to show?

Then, then, then a quick thing here with the activity. Um, that is a— I always see it sort of like as a social proof thing, because if I come to somebody's profile and I see a lot of activity, people liking, commenting on the posts, it gives me confidence in that person, that that person is well-connected, has something to say. And that is something that is a problem here because we don't really see that you get a lot of likes and comments, which is weird because you have a lot of followers, relatively speaking. 10,000 followers is a good number. Most people are sort of in the low 4 digits. So that is a great number, but it's not correlating to the number of posts and their comments here. And getting that up gives you a lot of social clout here because people see, okay, this guy has something to say and people are listening.

Okay, so we need to look at why the posts that we're sending out, which are, you know, twice a week we're sending out, um, posts with the links to the podcast shows and then also the articles that we've been writing as a transcript, um, so they're very much sort of almost information rather than engagement-led. I'm not asking questions or doing polls, so maybe that's why. Okay, let's look at—

we have to look back to that in a second. Let's finish this off with the About section, which is the other important piece that you have in your profile. If you click See More, we can see the whole, um, and then on the, on the About section We want to see the whole text that you have about you. Go down, go down.

Show all activity. Oh, sorry, see more. There we go. Okay.

Exactly. See more. So what you've done here is also like, I would say, the old LinkedIn. You've basically given a CV, what you've done in your life in a very sort of bullet point way, locations, dates, and roles you had. That is all good, but it's not really— doesn't really give me a sense of who you are. And what we are going to do over the next week is we're going to rework this bit because that is what they like to call in CVs the motivational background or something. Right.

Okay.

What we want to do here is to create a backstory that gives your profile visitors an idea of who Jim James really is. I mean, it starts with like, if we go up, it says you were in Singapore in 1995 and China in 2008. I mean, the first thing I'm asking myself is like, what the hell did he do in Singapore and China? And sort of what kind of a person has he become because of that experience? So that is the first question that I get.

Okay, so it's an essay on the fugitive of some kind, right?

Exactly. So again, it's sort of, I get an idea of that you must be interesting because you've seen and done a lot, but I don't really sort of get a detail on sort of like, okay, Very interesting.

Yeah.

And that's something that we're going to work over the next week.

Okay.

And if you go back to your— yeah, the rest we can spend hours, but those are the main elements. We're going to spare the audience the rest. Let's go back to—

That's right. It's a washing list, isn't it?

Yeah. Let's go back to the content. And I see we have 5 minutes left. So let's do a very quick review of the content, and I think we can explain in very few words what the challenge is here.

Okay, what do you want me to click on next?

The content, the activity.

Exactly.

If you go to the activity and at the bottom you have see more, show all activity.

Yep. Okay, there we go.

And then you can click posts.

Oh, I think we can— I think we should celebrate that we're doing this, right?

Yeah, we're doing this.

Okay, 55 impressions. Fantastic. As we're learning, and this is exactly the kind of work that Simon does for his clients, uh, we thought it'd be fun to share this.

Okay, click on post.

What do you want me to show?

So what we see here now, and it's very funny to see us live here, um, what, what we see here now is the whole list of posts that you've published, like since you started publishing. And let's just take the first one. And if you can, the second one, not the livestream, the first content post.

Yeah. Okay.

That one, scroll up here and click see more.

Yep.

And I've looked at the others, so it's not like this is an outlier. So I see a pattern. And the pattern that I see with your posts and that I think is a challenge, to take a positive word, is that you sell a product, which is the podcast, but you don't tell me why I should care. So Again, it's very small for me. I need glasses.

Um, okay, I don't know that I can zoom that, uh, anymore.

So, so it says in this article of The Entrepreneur, Ashley Klein talked about how entrepreneurs can build an event.

There you go.

How's that? When they own the attendees instead of the visitor. So you give sort of a very high-level summary of the post. But I don't know who Ashley is, and I assume she's not super famous. So it's not like only me that doesn't know her. So this post would be okay if she's like, if she would be Whitney Houston, then I mean, you don't have to tell me anything. But it's like, I don't know who she is.

Okay.

I don't really know what she— I know what she's talking about or what to expect, but it's, you can't sell with her because she's not a big name.

Right.

And instead of sort of leading with, this is a podcast or this is my book and this is the guest that I had and it was super interesting, the baseline that we have to work on over the next weeks is to lead with interesting content. And so the the direction that I want to take with you is to get away from this is a podcast to these are three things that I learned, and I da da da da. So you break it down, you give a nice post on that, and then at the bottom there's a link, and it says, "Hey, if you like this, this came from a podcast that I had with XYZ," and feel free to check it out and hear more on this topic from XYZ. And that is probably gonna work better here because you will grab the audience if you talk about pains and gains that they can get, that they can relate to, rather than leading with a person that nobody knows and a podcast that probably is not that known at the moment.

Okay, Simon, that's, you know, you're being very polite and diplomatic, um, but the brutality of what you said, uh, and the naked honesty is great. So what you and I are going to do over the next week is revisit how I do this. And I work with a team in the Philippines, a virtual assistant team in the Philippines, which is really powerful because it releases me from a lot of the the work. But plainly, the danger of having a VA team is you also outsource the content generation, and it sort of— the automation has to some degree caused, um, really sort of a failure in the quality. Uh, not as a disrespect to the team, but my lack of creative leadership there. So an understanding of how we do it. So, Simon, thank you. A lot for us to do this next week, and then you and I are going to come back next week, same time, same place. Um, so next Thursday, 12 o'clock, LinkedIn Live. We'll figure out how to get it on time next time. Um, my fault with some camera stuff. And we're gonna revisit those pages and start to see improvements. Is that right?

Exactly. Great.

And so we're gonna do perfect. So, um, we didn't do a lot of promotion about this because we thought we would just see how we get on. And if we can do this— for me, it's my first time doing a LinkedIn Live. I think, Simon, for you too?

Yes, indeed.

Yeah, so LinkedIn Live using Riverside. Um, we're going to do this for the next 12 weeks. We'll also put links to the video and also to the pages, um, so that you can follow this. So we're going to build in public, um, so you can follow along and, and work on your own profile at the same time, um, if you want to. And obviously reach out to Simon as well, who is the expert. So with that, Simon, any last comments? Do you want to just say goodbye from South Africa?

Um, yeah, I'm excited about the next weeks. It's going to be great fun. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much for you, Simon, for your input. And thank you to those of you that are listening and watching. Do leave comments in the messages below if you've got any questions for Simon and I. Drop them in and we'll come to those as well. And the idea is to build this out together and not be unnoticed entrepreneurs anymore. Thanks for watching.

Thank you.