Going on holiday? Should you stay active on Linkedin, or take a break? Linkedin Safari Session 9/12

Okay, and hello and welcome again. Simon Chapazot in South Africa. Welcome, Simon.

Thank you.

And me, Jim James, here in the UK in wonderful Wiltshire. We're going to talk about LinkedIn, and, uh, Simon is a LinkedIn expert and I'm an aspiring LinkedIn expert, but I'm an author and an entrepreneur, and I'm making so many mistakes with my LinkedIn profile that I've reached out to Simon, who's kindly agreed to help. Simon, Last week you looked and were very polite, but also pretty brutal about the profile. What are we going to do this week? Because I have made quite a lot of changes, but I know that it's still not going to meet your standards. So where would you like to start today?

Exactly. So yeah, right. So last week we spoke about the header section, the header banner, the headshot, and the headline. And we touched on the backstory, your backstory. And so you did some work on the header banner. Gonna look at that in a second. The headshot and the headline. And the backstory is such an important thing because it gives you a backbone for everything that you do content-wise with the posts and with the why, with like the thread that is running through all your posts. So it's very important that the backstory is well-written or that you have clarity, first of all, what your backstory is. And I think one of the things a lot of people struggle with is it's almost like in film. The film is super simplistic. The character has one goal and one obstacle, and at the end of the story, they've achieved this. And real life works differently. We have so many facets to our personality. We've done so many things in our lives. So to come up with this one backstory that we can capture on the LinkedIn profile is really a challenge for a lot of people because they don't really know what to choose. Today, I want to use the time that we have to look at 7 questions or 9 questions in total that help you to define this backstory, to capture the elements. And we're going to do this by looking at your About section, and then we can chat about these 9 questions.

Okay, perfect. So, just checking, so where do you want to start?

Let's start with a quick review of the header section.

Okay.

The headshot, banner image. And the headline, and then we look at the About section.

Okay, so I'm sharing my screen. Can you see that now?

I can. Well, it's coming up.

Let's see. All right, it's coming up now.

Should be loading. Drum roll.

Come on, Riverside. Let's get that.

Expectations are rising.

There we are. Okay.

Okay. So let's look at the header banner. And I see you've done substantial changes. Last week we had a white header banner that also looked already quite cool, just saying The Underdog Entrepreneur. And you've replaced that with the core element in your case, which is the book that is about to be published in a couple of days or weeks. And you've chosen a nice color. Black as a background works nicely with the red. Red on black, well chosen. So it's a beautiful header banner. It's attention-grabbing because it's dark, so it really jumps into your eye. I like that you moved down your headshot. I can now see your full face, and I know that you don't have any hair, but that gives me—

That's okay.

I can trust you because I see I'm chasing you on that one. So it gives me— I can assess you as a person. It gives me more trust when I come to your profile. Instant check of your face. Is this guy trustworthy? So that's the header shot. And then I think one thing that you did brilliantly, and I've not seen this before, you've changed your name. Last time there wasn't the A brackets. You see people who have a second name on the profile. And I think this is almost like a brand that you've created by having the A in brackets between Jim and James. So brilliant. I love it.

Thank you. Thank you for that. And I got to thank Rusty Shelton for that, by the way. Rusty, shout out to Rusty Shelton, who said, you know, Jim James unfortunately is a rock star in America. So I need to have sort of something a little bit different for my name. So I've got Jim A. James here and for my website and for my Twitter as well.

Exactly. I was looking you up and I found some musician. I was like, who's that guy?

Yeah, I know. He has a lot more hair than I do. That's the difference.

Like rock stars do. I don't know why they do it. Anyways, so a little tangent. What I also see is, and that I see a lot of people not do, you now have a logo next to the Unnoticed group. Last week you did not have a logo. Reason why a lot of people don't have this, because you have to have a company profile. And in your lifeline further down, you connect your company with that company page and then this logo pops up. And a lot of people just have the LinkedIn template, which is a gray circle or something, which looks very bland and boring.

Yes.

So that's nice again that you have this logo sitting here. The headline, the 3rd element of the header section, you've changed, you've added something. So last week I think we only had Champion of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur, and now you've added, if you need more recognition, then let's talk. And I think that's already a better start because it gives you an idea when to reach out, and it's sort of a soft call to action. It shows that you are willing to speak with people. And I know, okay, if I'm an entrepreneur and if I feel I'm not— I haven't been noticed enough, I want more recognition, then probably Jim is the person to talk to. So that's definitely a more gripping headline.

Yeah, I tried to make it less of a washing list and more of a, you know, What's the next step? But I know it's still not quite perfect.

Yeah, there are lots of stages. I mean, like, I don't know, Richard Branson or other well-known people, they don't really have to sort of have a call to action because it's more a brand. But I think the league we play in, we have to be clearer with what people can get from us because they don't know.

Yeah, no, that's right. And you kindly helped me as well with the talks about, because that is in the Creator Studio module, which I think I had to turn on. I was looking for it and you kindly shared a link, which we can also put in the show notes. Because if you can't find where to put the hashtags, they are in the Creator Studio for LinkedIn.

Yeah. Cool. Now let's move down to the About section.

Okay.

And so we're gonna look at the section on the background of 9 questions that will help you to transform your About section.

Okay, that's—

And you already did a lot of work here, so.

Okay, this one, I'll open some.

Go to click on See More so we have the same view like—

Where do I do that? Oh, I see here, sorry. Okay.

So, the first thing you'll notice, it's a wall of text. And I see this very often happen also with people writing posts that you see sort of like the brief intro line, innocuous, and you're just like, oh, sounds interesting. You click this thing and then suddenly you're hit by this wall of text.

Yep.

And I know a lot of people are speaking Gestalt, myself, I'm not reading this whole thing because it's just too much. So, first simple fix you can do here is to add more paragraphs, break it up.

Okay.

Ideally American newspaper style where one sentence is one paragraph. And that makes it much, much easier for the eye to read that and sort of isn't a shock that you like, do I have to read the whole thing?

Okay. And I think as when you put this into, for example, Grammarly, which I use, and QuillBot, it actually said that this text would be read by sort of a university graduate, which— And not— not—

don't want this.

Yeah. So although that would probably be my target audience, who's sort of entrepreneurs that have got some education, but it's interesting that we really do have to simplify. And I do have a wall of text. That's a bit of a— coming back to your earlier point about over life, especially as we get to, you know, I'm 56 now, we've done a lot of things, right? And so what you've identified earlier on is that we have to decide what to leave out.

Exactly.

As much as what to leave in.

Okay. Yeah. And what is confusing in terms— and then, and maybe one thing what you said was like, yeah, I mean, the people who are supposed to read that are well-educated, they shouldn't have a problem to read this text. But I always like to think about it is like, imagine you're on the London subway and you're sort of like scrolling through a feed and you see this thing. You don't have the mental capacity to read something that is maybe theoretically your level of language mastery. So you need to really Yes. Adapt to that situation and be as simple as possible. So, it's not about what the reader can handle theoretically, but what reality is. In reality, mostly we are somewhere between coffee, staircase, subway, on the bike, and then it's like, okay, give me the thing in one sentence, make it easy. Don't use more than like the basic vocabulary.

Guilty as charged. Okay, Simon.

Okay, so I don't think we'd want to bore the listeners with reading the whole thing.

No, that's okay.

I think whoever wants to do this can do this.

But for those people that are listening and for those people listening through the podcast and not watching, I've basically got 4 paragraphs and I've kind of used up the 2,500 word allowance. And Simon's point is that it's really much too much. And I've gone through, you know, my early experience, my middle experience, what I've been doing, where I'm going. So it's kind of 56 years in 2,500 words. So Simon's point is I really need to get down to why would that be of interest to someone that I want to work with? to talk with me. Okay. It's not about my life story. It's about how it relates to who I need to serve. Okay, Simon.

What aspect of your life story you need to show for people to resonate with you? And, um, there are 9 very simple questions. Um, and, uh, we're gonna walk through these questions and we can sort of sketch an answer. And I think that will give people an idea of, um, what to look for. And the first 2 Questions.

Shall I close my screen? Stop sharing now then, because that may be a distraction, right?

Exactly. So, the first question is really very simple. It's like, who is your hero and who's your villain? Who do you root for and who are you against?

Yeah. So, I'm for the entrepreneur that is building something that can change lives. And so, I'm for those people. And I'm against the big, like, turgid company that has got scale but not necessarily skill, that's maybe dominating just through being politically savvy or being manipulative of a market. So, you know, I'm, I'm in favor of those people that are creating positive change, not people that are sitting on established practice.

That's beautiful. Okay. And, um, I think that then ties nicely to the next question. And the next question is, what stopped you? What held you back from what you wanted in life when you started or when you started your company? And you shared a story with me that nicely ties back to that.

Yeah, I think that really, like so many people that are entrepreneurs, when I grew up, I didn't come from a family of entrepreneurs, so there wasn't sort of that example. But also in the UK, this in back in the '70s and '80s, a sort of a sense that somehow business and money were not truly good things. And we had Thatcher's Britain, which was sort of loads of money, and somehow that was, um, uh, you know, sort of uncivilized in a funny way. So kind of no real role models that were doing it, and a sort of a general sense that somehow talking about money was somehow, um, you know, not to be done. So sort of personal and social pressures, Simon, I guess.

And, um, you mentioned another thing, which was that you were in corporate and you felt like that's not your place. You were stuck in a corporate world that wasn't—

I tried working, yeah, I tried working for a large multinational and sitting in meetings with 14 people and coming out at after 3 hours, nothing gets done. And I— that wasn't for me. I, I only managed a couple of years of that. I couldn't manage the pace of it.

And, and what held you back, that you sort of like, from moving on from that thing, from that state?

Well, I, I think, uh, at the beginning there was a sort of sense of, well, how do you go from dissatisfaction as you know, an employee to being self-employed. How do you give up the money, give up the car, give up the kudos and everything being done for you to taking all the risks, right? And investing all those things. In the end, I had a physical issue where I just was, I got depressed and couldn't get out of bed. And so, after a week of just finding myself completely unmotivated to go to work, I decided that actually, I had to figure out the other side of that equation because staying where I was was being unhealthy for me.

So, you hit a wall.

Yeah.

Yep. Interesting. Then there was a, you could say, trigger or epiphany that you had. And interestingly, in your case, it was not something that happened at that moment. And I found it interesting because very often we try to sort of have a linear narrative of our lives. But I think often we make experiences or we had experience in the past that at that moment was like, okay, but only in retrospect and sometimes many years back or many years in the future, suddenly it's like this big thing. And I think you had a very interesting story that I would love to hear again.

Well, thank you, Simon. I think, as you say, really, You know, when I was 16, um, uh, I won a place on Operation Rally. Um, and no, sorry, when I was, uh, yeah, 17, I was on— I got a place on Operation Rally, which you had to compete to get on. And I realized that I would never make enough money working selling toys at £3.50 an hour, whatever it was back then. In the time that it would take me, I would never make enough money to get to that trip in Australia. And so I thought, what can I do that would get people to give me some, you know, some support? And I decided to jump out of an airplane.

Hmm.

And by— yeah, that's right, with a parachute. And I got it sponsored because I thought, if I do something other people are afraid of Maybe they'll give me money because I'm overcoming my fear and they can overcome a little bit of their fear with me. And so I managed to raise the money to go on Operation Rally through doing this sponsored event. And then I went to a local outfitters and said, look, if you give me a discount on my clothing and boots and backpack, I will get you into the local newspaper? And they said yes. And I went to the newspaper and they covered the story. And, you know, I was 17 and I still don't really understand, to be honest, how I made all that up. And that must have been quite shocking for them to see this sort of young man coming in with an idea. But somehow that then created the catalyst that actually I could raise this money and that other people needed what I could broker. The store needed publicity and the media needed a story. And I was able to package that for everybody and it was very successful. So yeah, that was my kind of genesis really as a young man. I then went to university and then tried to work for other people. So I did try and ignore the lesson that I'd learned as a 17-year-old. How do you say that? Eventually that came back.

You made an effort, yeah, but it wasn't enough.

Yeah, no, well, physically, I found myself getting unwell. So, yeah, so that was the beginning of it really. It was just that idea somehow that other people would want what I could broker, what I could package together.

Beautiful. Then let's jump forward to another question that needs to be answered. That is one, what inspired you or who's your mentor, like on a high level? And I think in your case, it's an interesting case. Because we identified that there was no real mentor.

And yeah, I think that's— I think we had in those days role models like Freddie Laker, Sir Freddie Laker, who started the first airlines, budget airlines to America. We had, you know, the beginnings of Richard Branson. But in a sort of middle-class Britain, and we didn't have the internet, of course, Simon, you have to remember that then it was whatever newspapers or magazines that you saw. Um, and my family were living in Africa and America and, and, um, at the time. So we didn't know those kind of people. We knew authors and academics and social workers and political campaigners. So there wasn't really a mentor. Um, uh, you know, and I think that's partly why you and I think share the similar sort of background in terms of being creative and coming from a filmmaking background. And I suppose that's, that's one of the issues, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's not having a mentor when you're young. part of why you decide when you're older that you'd like to try and solve that problem for other people. Absolutely.

And I think in your case, it's nice because it gives you a story now, makes your story more rounded because you now want to be that to others. But you didn't have the mentor, the inspiration, the guide on getting noticed. And sort of in my mind, it nicely closes the loop of of what you aim to achieve with the book, with your work, with the knowledge you share, so that more entrepreneurs can get this inspiration and this visibility. Yeah.

And thanks for that, Simon. I think that also what you're highlighting, which I think is very powerful, is that your story doesn't necessarily fit into a, you know, a regular narrative. I mean, everyone's narrative is their own narrative. And I think part of what you're doing with me is to give me a sense of that that's okay, that because I don't have a particularly, uh, regular path in the last 30, 40 years, um, and what you're helping me to really understand is that rather than trying to write something that I think people might want to read, I need to write what I've got and see value in that. I think that's very, very important.

Resonates with the target audience. Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. Excellent. So I'm looking forward to seeing a rewritten About section next week.

Okay.

So we can share that with the listeners. And another thing that I wanted to touch on, I know we are tight on time, but let's quick take a super quick look at your posting timeline. Or what you post.

Okay. And so where do we want to do that?

If you could share your LinkedIn.

Yep. I'll share my screen again.

Recent shares section where you see all the posts that you've done.

Okay.

Here we go.

So for those people on the audio only, we've gone back to my website.

Okay.

And we've gone back to my profile. So I want to click on my name. Do I, Simon? Is that right?

Let's do that. I'm not quite sure I have it. I've all the links saved. If you scroll down and you click on further, further, further, further, go to activity. Activity, yeah. Click on activity. No, at the bottom.

Show all activity.

Yeah. And then you can choose all the posts. Okay.

So now for those people that can't see, we've gone to my place where I see Jim's activity. Okay, Simon, so now you can see my website, I think.

Exactly. So this week I just want to focus on one thing. And if you scroll down, so you posted like 2 hours ago. The post before that was with no likes, nothing. The post before that was 2 hours ago with no likes. The post before that was 3 hours ago with no likes. Hi. The post before that was 17 hours with, sorry to say, no likes. 19 hours. So the thing that I want to point at is not that you have no likes, but that you post a lot.

Yeah.

The challenge that we have here is that you have sort of a certain allocation of possible views per day, and if you post like 3 times in a quick succession, you basically cannibalize your own posts.

Okay.

So, what you have to do is you— and I mean, it's a lot of work putting this together. So, what I would ask you to do to At maximum, do one post per day and do that at a time when most people are probably online or active, which is in the morning. Because what you're aiming for is to get maximum engagement, views, and even a click on the see more link counts as a positive signal for LinkedIn. You want to get as much of these in the first 2 hours. And if you post again after like 90 minutes or like 10 minutes, then you basically start from scratch and you sort of eat into your daily allocation. So, oh, I see.

So that's— so there's an allocation from LinkedIn.

Sort of. Yeah.

I see. So in that sense, the point here I'm hearing from you is it's about value, not about volume, Simon.

Exactly. And, um, so that, that would be the one thing that I want to, uh, ask you from today on or this week, that you reduce the amount of posts that you do to one per day.

Wow.

Okay. And then in the next session, we can also look into the quality because there are also some things in the posts, um, that I would do differently that probably would then help to, uh, to get more engagement and comments and likes on your content.

So Simon, here's a question. We've been putting out all these posts because with the podcast, we go out Tuesdays and Thursdays. And we make a trailer, you know, for that on a Monday and a Wednesday. Plus we have the book. And then we make articles from the podcast.

Hmm.

So we're generating a lot of content, we're repurposing a lot of content. How do you suggest then that we deal with what we post in LinkedIn so that we're not abusing people? And yet on the other hand, kind of meeting some of our objectives in terms of sharing and getting the show noticed.

So the first thing to look at is to As you said, quality. What is the— if I have to make a choice out of 10 things that I could talk about, what is the one thing that probably has the highest value to my audience? And as you said, you have the book, you have the podcast, and you have the takeaways from the podcast. So, I would now think about, and we can do this together over the next week, sort of like put together a content plan or like a structure and try to sort of really focus on individual things. And the strategic challenge here is to pick the one thing that triggers people to explore more things.

Right.

So, with a podcast, for example, with a podcast, I mean, there's so many things that you cover in one episode. And you can either try to cover the whole episode, which is a lot of stuff to talk about and probably overwhelming. Similar with the backstory, you've done so many things in your life, you cannot possibly cover everything. So, what is then this one thing that you have to cover and that possibly will get more people to engage? Because the, I don't know, the 3 seconds they have checking out your profile, they only see one thing that resonates with them and they can make a decision. But if they have 3 seconds for your profile and they see 5 things, then that leaves them only with 0.66 seconds per second. So, it's even harder for them to make a decision. So, we really want to identify this one piece per post per day that will then sort of pull in more people that then can engage with the stuff, if that makes sense.

Okay. So, maybe one strategy is what we need to do is to summarize the learnings from those podcasts into one post and, and still leave some things on the table where we say, you know, okay, here's some things we've learned from our guests this week, or, you know, this today. Maybe there's a carousel, you know, 3 lessons we've learned, 1, 2, and 3. To find out more, go here. Um, and actually, one of the things we're guilty of is we use one of these, you know, platforms, we use Zoho. And that I realize some of these platforms that enable you to kind of schedule and re— you know, multiply posts is actually— they, they're almost doing a disservice because we're sending out more content for the sake of volume rather than curating a small number of quality posts.

Yeah.

Is that something you see a lot of?

Yeah. And I think there's sort of a fundamental misunderstanding with LinkedIn. It is social media. It's not media. So by just publishing, following, using a tool like Zoho, it's very easy. You can put out a lot of stuff, but it's not social. It's just media.

Yeah.

So you're just pushing your stuff into to people's faces. And what LinkedIn loves, and we're going to talk about this in future episodes, is your engagement around posts. So we see a lot of people that don't get traction on LinkedIn. They just sort of push their content out, pieces, pieces, pieces, and they never engage.

Hmm.

And then LinkedIn, yeah, LinkedIn rewards people who engage on content with other people being social. And if you fail to do this and you just push, you get sort of sent to the cellar, to the basement of LinkedIn, and you will not be seen.

Well, that's a great way to leave us, Simon. Yeah, go into the sin bin. But as Oscar Trimboli talks about, you know, we need to have, you know, more listening and less talking. And I've definitely been guilty then through my LinkedIn activities of kind of shouting indiscriminately and not doing any listening. So Simon Chapazeau, once again, a great session. We just do 30 minutes. So thank you for session 2. I've got a little bit of homework to do on my About section. Any final words before we sign off?

I'm looking forward to your new About section and our next call next week. Me too.

Simon, thank you and be well in South Africa. Thank you to everyone for watching and listening.

Bye, Jim.

And we will sign off. And Simon Chapuisot's details will be in the show notes, of course, and also on YouTube. You can watch this where we're sending that. And Simon will guide me on the best place in LinkedIn to post information about this. And we'll be back this time, actually, we'll be back 12 o'clock on Thursday of next week to carry on the sessions. Thank you so much for watching.

Cool. Thank you.