LinkedIn Safari: Session 10 of 12

We're live, Simon. Okay, and, uh, hello from me, Jim James. Today I'm actually in Singapore, hence the rather floral Asian shirt. And Simon, tell us where you are today.

I'm still in Cape Town. I haven't changed. Same place, same time, same spot. Okay, I was wondering, where is Jim? He looks different.

Where in the world am I? So I'm in Singapore, um, and Simon and I are now on session 10 of our LinkedIn Live. So thank you for joining us today. Hopefully you can hear us and see us today. And as you see, it's a global effort, as indeed LinkedIn is really a global platform with over 800 million people on, including, you know, you and Simon and I. So what we're gonna talk about today really is the performance of your account and the need for a content plan, right, Simon? That's really what we're gonna talk about because—

Mm-hmm.

My, if you like, engagement and performance on LinkedIn has gone down in the last couple of weeks. One, because I went on holiday and then came back to the UK and then went straight here to Singapore, and that's impacted my numbers. So we're gonna look at the need for a content plan, and Sam's gonna share with you some tools that he uses for creating a content plan. And then we're gonna share a little bit of good news about my book, but we'll keep that to the end. So stay tuned. As always, it's only 30 minutes, And we'd love you to stick with us all the way through. So Simon, over to you. Let's look at some of the numbers, shall we? See how we've been going with my profile.

Okay, so I'm going to share the numbers from your profile. I've opened a view for the past 4 weeks, and you can clearly see some trends. It's coming up.

So I'm just going to share a screen.

Drum roll. Where's the drum roll?

Oh, sorry. Yes, I need to do drum roll. Right. Right, Simon, you're—

There we are. Okay.

Okay.

Okay, cool. So this is the view for the past 4 weeks. And you launched your book on what date was that?

Oh, 24th of February. Gosh.

24th of February. Yeah. So because there was a flurry of activity around that, and you can see there's still sort of good reach in the first 2 weeks of the past 4 weeks with the highlight here.

Zoom in a little bit, Simon, on your screen.

Can you do that? I can do that. Let's see.

There you go. So we can see a bit better. Great.

Yeah. So yeah, and you can see there on like March 28th, we had good reach. I think I remember it was not your post with your sister, but I think the first slideshow or the second slideshow. The second slideshow.

Yes.

And that trailed off. And then we can see you went to Crete. Here you came back. Yeah, I was on holiday. Exactly. That's like the nice April Friday. Yeah, you went Wednesday to Wednesday.

Wednesday to Thursday. That's right. I just did that one post from the balcony to say I'm on holiday.

Which is doing really nicely, by the way. I see you're still getting likes on that one.

Wow.

Because it's personal. Nothing beats a personal impression. And I think this is the next slideshow that you posted, but you haven't been very active. And I would say that is the main reason why we see this slump, this downward trend.

Yes.

From 4 weeks ago when you changed a couple of things, one being not posting 3 times a day, not posting in groups, and switching to a daily rhythm or every other day. And so in terms of time you invested, you have stabilized or you spent less time and you roughly get still the same amount of reach.

That's great, Simon. Yeah. So I think we were winning with the content types and the quality and the consistency, but plainly we all need to travel sometimes for work or for pleasure. So Simon, let's talk about content plans. Because that is, I think, the unspoken part of what makes those content creators that you've mentioned before, like Justin Welch, successful, and the rest of us sort of sporadic.

Yeah, absolutely. So planning content is like super fundamental. It's super important. And it's not only about getting a preview and sort of having an overview of what's happening, but it's also a tool to save time. And it is easy to do plans, but it's hard to follow through. So let's look at what we've done. So I will show a few tools to do that or how I do this.

Yes.

And also, Yeah, a very neat tool. So content calendar, very important thing. As I said, one thing is you should get an overview of the article so you plan a week ahead or month ahead. I'd rather do it a week. So what I like to do is to sit down on a Saturday and write the post, the 5 posts or 7 posts for the week in advance. or pick old posts, rewrite them, recycle them. And it's not about only getting an overview and not being an on-the-spot creator, but having a plan. But the second biggest advantage is that when we write on the spot, we spend half of the time trying to figure out what is the post about, what is the topic. Yeah. Once the topic is clear, and I speak from experience, but I think a lot of people who've been in the same situation can agree on that. Once it's clear what you want to write about, it's very quick and easy, and it sort of doesn't take very long because it's sort of the clarity in your head easily translates to what you have online or on paper. So having a plan, sitting down on the weekend, spending an hour to pre-plan the content and to, to batch it is a huge, huge time saver. And, um, ideally what we want to do is to get into this habit of having the content ready in advance for the week so that once we hit the week, we can focus on engaging with people, because that is the other half that sort of is often cut short if I'm on the spot creator. So that is the huge thing that I cannot reiterate enough, that planning the content in advance saves a lot of time.

Yeah.

I have 2 or 3 examples I want to show you how— what that could look like. One is a currently very messy example that is my content preview. And you can do it in several ways. What I do here is I have a column for rough ideas. I see a post that I like that I want to copy or iterate on. I copy the link and I put it here. And I collect the original post with a link here so I can go back later and see that original post. Sometimes I capture some notes what I want this post to be, but it's really sort of just a a way to capture ideas. And if it's a bit more refined, then I have a couple of lines or maybe sort of a draft of what the post could look like, often with a link to the post that I was inspired by or another source. So you can see this is basically sort of a scribble of what the post could look like. So it's a bit more advanced.

Yep.

And Then I have a library of existing posts, as you can see here. And what I do here is that these posts, they have a date. So I can see that this post called Not Vanity Metrics but Conversions Count, that one I published on March 31st. And I can scroll down now and at the bottom of the column, you will see I have the oldest posts here, November the 16th, 15th.

Perhaps you could zoom in a little bit as well for those of us. It's quite hard to see from that.

Let's see.

Show us one unique card. There you go.

Yeah, okay. So exactly. So this is an old post published on December the 5th. I have a link to the original post so I can go back and I can rewrite it if I think it's good. Sometimes I like a post and after a couple of weeks I think it's not that good and I don't really want to reuse it. And then I just throw it here to the, to, to the side and it's sort of discarded.

Right.

And this column is the column where I have the posts for this week. And you can assign a date. And that is the interesting thing with Trello and with many other tools that you also get a calendar view. And I'll show you that in a second. You can see what the week ahead or the month ahead looked like. And you also see the individual posts allocated to the day you want to publish them. So here you see on the 12th, I said saying thank you is powerful. tool. That's a post. It has been published, so it's crossed out because I checked it off on the card. And tomorrow I'm gonna publish the Gotcha, 1 Year Later post, which is not crossed out because it hasn't yet been published. Okay.

And this is, just to be clear, Simon, this is a manual process at the moment in Trello, isn't it?

Exactly. So that is a bit of a pain point, and you hit on something that we're going to talk about in a second. Before that, here's a more sophisticated tool. Not the tool, but this first version of this Trello board is very simple because it's only me and it's only LinkedIn. And what I'm gonna show you here is a client of ours and they have 4 people and they repost content from LinkedIn on Instagram and Facebook. So suddenly you have 10x the complexity of what you have to manage.

Yes.

And they've captured this also in a weekly view, and they have managed the process here by the company has done the post, the author is still working on it, so they have to check it off. So we see who is where, what has happened, and this is the publication post. But you hit on something which is the pain with both systems, because even if the post is ready here, you then have to manually transfer the text and the image, if you have one, to LinkedIn to publish it. And that is sort of complicated. If you have somebody who writes the post, that person captures the content here. So in our case, Thomas has written his post, he's captured this, Darren has given feedback, so we know the post is good to go. But now Megan has to come and she has to copy this.

Right.

and paste it into LinkedIn so it can be published. And that is—

Right. It's still a very manual process, isn't it? So that's what we really want to use tools like Zoho, for example. Can you write it into Zoho and it auto-publishes the same as things like Buffer? But anyway, Simon, so over to you.

Yeah. So you can do—

So you've got a content calendar.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and this is the crème de la crème tool. It's called Taplio. There are other tools that I want to zoom in.

Can you zoom in again on that, Simon?

See how— yeah, better?

Yep. Yeah, because otherwise you just can't see.

Yeah, sure. So this is Taplio. That's sort of like— it's sort of 3 things in one. It allows you to schedule posts, it allows you to write, and it also has AI writing helps. It allows you to build lists, to send connection— to send messages. So it's a very comprehensive tool. But the nice thing here is we can schedule posts like we can in Trello and Monday. So you see the week in advance. Today, April 13th. Tomorrow, 14th. You can have 1, 2, 3 posts per week. So it's up to you what you choose. And you see old posts that you've published, but you also have drafts. And that is a nice thing. So you don't have to write the post on Trello and then copy paste the content to LinkedIn. You have it here and you can write it in Taplio. You see the running length of the lines, so you know whether it's gonna break over into the next row. Oh, nice. Which is a big help if you want to understand.

From a formatting point of view.

A formatting point of view, because we always try to hit the see more button.

Yes.

With the first lines. I'm trying to show you what that looks like. Yeah, here you can see this. So this is now set to mobile view. And you can see that on a mobile, this line would break over with the 600%. We would want to avoid that because we want to have one line, free line, one line. So you can see the See More button would appear here. If we have the desktop mode, it breaks off differently. That's now slightly hidden by the menu bar on the left, but you get the point. Yeah, here, that line 1, free line, line 2. So it's a slightly different view, but again, you can see whether you hit the See More button. But you can see that the 3rd sentence that I wrote here That one is too long because it's being cut off by the See More button. So I know I have to rewrite this thing. So it gives me a visual preview of the post, how it would look for the user. And it allows me to schedule it. So it's being published automatically. I don't have to copy paste, a very convenient solution. Looks like I can't hear you.

There we go. Okay, that's so that's called Tapelo, and we can put a link to that in the in the show notes. Of course, as always, we will do that.

Okay, and there are many there are many more tools. It's not Taplio. I mean, there's Hootsuite, and it's like oh yeah Buffer Buffer Zoho yeah.

So a lot of these automation tools, and most of them are Relatively low cost as well, aren't they?

So, and yeah, nice trick. If you are on Facebook, you can set up a media management tool on Facebook that is for free, and it also allows you to publish on LinkedIn.

So there you go. That's a nice little one. Okay, perfect.

Okay, then let's look at the presentation because we have spoken about the tools, we've looked at the numbers. And coming back to the presentation, as I said, getting an overview is one thing, but batch writing planning in advance is a huge time saver when it comes to content creation. And I want to do one thing. On one of the earlier episodes, we spoke about the 5 tests. A post should always meet one of these 5 criteria to make sure it's really interesting to the reader and we don't just publish something because we think it's interesting or we don't think at all. So any of these 5 questions is a good measure to see whether that is something that is worth posting. Does it teach the reader something new? Does it motivate the reader? Does it entertain the reader? Does it make the reader think, my reader think? And does it show that I, the author, understand my reader? So if I can say to at least one of these 5 questions, yes, that's great, and I'm good to publish. Today I have added a second criteria, and I want to put you on the spot here a little, and I want to work with you through this second criteria, which are the content pillars. And I think, yeah, I think we're all the same. It's easy to get swept away by some excitement about something that is happening that I want to share with my network. But very often we have to remember, we are on LinkedIn, we are a limited personality in the sense that we have a few things that people should know us for. And there are a lot of things people should not know us for because, not because we're going to hide it, but because it's confusing if we talk about 50 different things. We want to talk about 3 things. And surely a lot of things that I would love to post about. I don't know why Brexit comes to mind here, but it's something I was very emotional about. And I could have posted a lot about that, but it's not something— it's not a hide it, but it's something that's just not relevant to my audience. So having defined content pillars helps us to also stress test whether a post idea meets our criteria. And if yes, then it's a good thing to post that. And I wanted to do— I tried to do— I didn't really— I wanted to do it with you on the call, and I wanted to work through what that would look like in your case. And maybe just sort of like, let's brainstorm and talk about what Jim James's content pillars are.

Okay, let's do that. We've got about 10 minutes left. So we'll move sharply. I won't dwell too long. So Simon, where do you want me to start?

Well, I mean, looking from the outside, one thing is definitely PR. It's what you talk about. So it's your books. You show cheap or free ways to get PR for your business, for yourself. So that's sort of like a topic cloud that I see. Absolutely.

So, they're getting, I think really the, you know, I call it getting noticed because, you know, public relations now is more than media relations. Hmm. And what I'm really interested in is all the things that entrepreneurs can do that are low cost or no cost to get them noticed, right? Everything from using a QRC, for example, which costs nothing to print out, to Google reviews, which cost nothing to to establish on your website, to sending a press release and getting that covered, you know, in a local magazine, um, to having, um, your staff wear a uniform so that when people come into the shop or the building, uh, there's a logo, you know, all those things that, uh, are absolutely in my content pillar number 1.

Hmm.

And then, and the second then is about entrepreneurship, Simon. Because the, the people that I'm really working to serve are people that have got a business that they're trying to grow, um, as opposed to working with large corporations. In my PR firm, East West Public Relations, I've worked with lots of multinationals, companies like Philips and AT&T and BlackBerry, right? Big companies. And that's wonderful, but they, they tend to be, you know, you know, decision by organization and take a lot of time. And they then really have budgets. So I'm really interested in the entrepreneur who's going from like, you know, from maybe a couple of hundred thousand to half a million, you know, and it's on a journey to scaling the business. And the third element that I have in my content pillar is the use of technology. Because I believe that technology democratizes the marketing process and that the new tech that we, you know, you and I are leveraging now— you know, you're in South Africa, I'm in Singapore— you know, I've got a small broadcast quality microphone from Rode, for example, enables us to give broadcast quality audio for $150. Technology is enabling people to compete with big companies because it gives them the speed and the flexibility, um, and to personalize at scale and at speed, which is— which enables a smaller enterprise to grow their business without having to just spend more money on more ads, for example. So it's about getting noticed at low cost to no cost helping the entrepreneur that's growing a 6-figure business and using technology to help content creation, amplification, evaluation, because that really democratizes the process and it gives entrepreneurs a fair fight with big companies. So those are really my 3 that I love to, uh, have, and it's this intersection of business communication and technology That is, I think, really exciting for me and what I try and focus on.

Nice. Okay. So then we have identified 3 content pillars. And as always, it is a starting point. I would now look at the old pieces that you've done. And sort of see how that aligns. Probably also look at the pieces that have done particularly well and see whether we can use that to sharpen that even more and to make it as concrete as possible.

Yep.

And it could also be thinking about Jim James— Justin Welch, Um, it could also be a thing like, I always want to motivate my reader, sort of like there's a certain tonality, or I always want to show a transformation. So whenever I post, it's basically the story of how something has been transformed, which could be met with these criteria, because if you show how a technology tool has help to transform a company, a process, um, by democratizing or using a tool that has allowed for democratization. Um, that could be another, another, um, filter.

Yeah. And I, and I think, Simon, you, you've raised a really good point here about the need for self-discipline in content creation. Because it's— because there is no editorial control on LinkedIn, it's very easy to write what kind of comes up, right? And the danger of that is that, as you've pointed out really cleverly over the last 10 weeks, is that then that your profile online is without focus and structure, and therefore people don't know what to approach you for.

Right.

So you end up with people not knowing what to buy from you because actually you haven't really explained what it is that you do carefully. And so this idea that we would have your 5 criteria, you know, 1 or 2 or 3, as many as we can in there, and then this content pillar with these key messages, then really it's much more in alignment with what we do with traditional media relations. Because when you reach out to traditional media, you know, the editor needs to see some, like, impact on the industry or the market. You know, they need to think that that's in line with what the company already does.

Exactly.

To be consistent to the reader. So we really have to be our own editor. Sorry, when I said Simon, Siri started and I don't know how to stop.

Uh, Siri, what does she want?

Sorry about that. Uh, she said, I don't know how to find that, she said. Um, so anyway, sorry, apologies for that. Um, but so what is really, really useful in what you're saying is that we have to then become our own editors.

Yeah.

Um, because the platform doesn't have it, and we have to have the self-discipline to put on what we, what we want to write about. So that's really, really—

Self-discipline, I think, is big thing with being your own editor. It's the thing that's really different. Yeah. I'm just thinking, so over the Easter weekend, I spent time looking through hundreds of posts that I saved from people that went viral. Stuff like—

Wow, you have an exciting home life, Simon. When your child is born, you can say goodbye to those kind of weekends. You'll have Easter egg hunts and stuff like that. But anyway, that's another matter. Get them, get all those read for now as quick as you can.

Let's get it all done. And yeah, let me see. Yeah. Um, so yeah, and, um, to your point, so what I could see that sort of the big profiles, people who have, um, a huge following and have high engagement, those are the profiles that are very clear with what they talk about. And, um, It's to a point where it's repetitive, but you have no doubt about what this person is interested.

Yeah.

And what you can get from that person and their content. And then you see these, and I'm thinking about sort of a couple of profiles that I saw, it's sort of like a bit all over the place and sort of a bit of this and a bit of that. And you don't really know what they are talking about and it's tiring. And then you can see that these profiles never get to like this influencer level level with 50, 100, 200,000 people.

You know, and I think that's, you know, speaking of what you and I started off with, I'm in Singapore and one of the things that we said I need to be consistent about is about the book. Now, I want to share with you, I'm in Singapore and actually I'm going to share with you my screen because this is a copy of the book, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, published by Wiley. And I'm just going to share with you my screen because I met a good friend for lunch today, um, called Boon Chong. He's a young man here, as you can see. And Boon Chong and I met, and he said, guess what, I've got your book, can you sign it? And I, you know, I was like, that's wonderful, I'm so glad that you've got the book. And it turned out that it was in Takashimaya, the Kinokuniya, which is the largest bookshop here in Singapore. And so I went along after lunch, and sure enough, there is the book on the shelf. And the good news is they've already sold 60% of the stock.

That's amazing. Yeah.

So there are a couple of things there about that, um, and I'll stop the share. But anyway, so this whole work we're doing together, Simon, is about using LinkedIn to build a profile to help me share with more people about the book, because that's the, the formulation of the, of the interviews from the podcast into a format that people could consume, and that are now published by Wiley. Um, so that now, while I'm in Singapore, I've been able to, you know, share that the book is available and being sold in, in stores. I can now share that as part of my circular story beyond my wildest imagination, uh, that it would actually be in the Kinokuniya. Because when I used to live in Singapore, this bookstore was open. It's a Japanese one. Um, and that I would now have a book in Kinokuniya is, you know, beyond a dream, right? That's absolutely stunning.

Yeah.

Um, but also in the context of what we're doing now, I can then put into my LinkedIn story a little bit about the fact that I, you know, lived here from '95 to 2006, started a public relations company before going to China in 2006. So a little bit of backstory, which you've encouraged me to do, but also bring it really back to the purpose of our LinkedIn Safari, which is how to help an entrepreneur market a, you know, a book and position themselves as an author, um, and someone that can move from being paid to do what they do and being paid to, you know, for what they know. So that's kind of like an amazing transition, Simon. So thank you.

That's so cool. I mean, must be exciting to come back to the city where you lived for many, many years, probably to the bookstore where you've spent many hours browsing and buying other people's books, and then finally to find your own book on the shelf. among many of the other books that you probably bought a while back.

Yeah, unbelievably, in amongst big authors, right? So feeling very, very blessed. Simon, we've been very blessed to have you guide us on this journey, and it's our 30 minutes and we keep it to that every Thursday. Any final thoughts before we say goodbye from South Africa and from Singapore, from Cape Town? Down there, Simon.

Looking forward to your post on your book that you found at the bookshop.

Yeah, the only thing is it wouldn't have been in my content plan because I couldn't have imagined coming to Singapore to find it.

Okay, then, then here's the addition for the content plan. Don't stick to it if you find something that definitely is better. And in this case, um, you have to go with the flow because you are excited now and you have to write that post now because you have the energy. And people can trace you with your journey to Singapore. And so it's definitely a piece that you have to publish ASAP as long as you are in that moment. Don't schedule for next month.

Yeah, I got to be doing it tomorrow. Simon, thank you for joining me. And thank you to those of you that have been watching today. But as always, we will put this content onto our YouTube account, the Unnoticed Entrepreneur YouTube. And we will make a transcript as well and put that in there. And I also put it on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast, the full list. And now this will be episode number 10, and again has the transcript in the show notes. So thank you for joining us on the session of the LinkedIn Safari. Simon, you want to say goodbye?

Goodbye, and, um, thanks for having me.

Mate, it's always my pleasure. Thank you for teaching me, and hope you've learned some things too. And until we meet again, which will be next Thursday, 12 o'clock GMT, we will encourage you just to keep on communicating. Thanks for watching. Bye for now. Bye.