Linkedin Safari: Session 6 of 12

Right.

Do that. Yes, absolutely. Any kind of success.

Yeah.

Because it's, I think it's a good illustration for what success really means. Success doesn't start with, hey, I sold something. Success starts with, hey, people have something to talk about with me because they understand who I am. And that then leads to a relationship that leads to a sale.

Hello and welcome back to what is now session 6 of the LinkedIn Safari sessions with me, Jim James, here in the UK and Simon Chapazot in Cape Town, South Africa. Simon, do you want to say hello?

Hello, hello, Jim.

Simon, it's wonderful. We're moving forward. It's hard to believe we've managed 6 live sessions, but we're moving forward. What have you got in store for me today?

Well, today I think some great thing is that you've done your first slideshow. And so we're going to look at your slideshow and I'll show a couple of examples of other slideshows. We will look at your post and analyze how you structured the post. So you can then take that for the next slideshow, which you're hopefully going to do.

Okay, great. We're going to talk about then the post because on the last show, we talked about which formats are most, if you like, uh, highest performing. And you said the slideshow is the highest performing of all. So that's why we've had the challenge. You set me the challenge. We're even going to show people how to create a slideshow, right? I'll, I'll let people see my Canva and show how I made the slideshow after you gave me the template. So do you want me to just share a little bit of good news first, Simon, before we dive into how to make a deck?

Good news. So whatever, whatever you have in good news, give it to us.

Yeah, the world needs good news. So good news. First of all, my, you know, I say followers sounds a little bit egotistical, but the number of people that are connected and, and, you know, following what I am sharing has increased now to 11,071. So that's fantastic. So that's grown from just under 11,000 before we started this process. I am spending measurably less time on LinkedIn, but my engagement levels are higher. And today I had a call with a couple of business development people from a new company called OmniCourse, which is an audio app for courses. They were in actually Turkey and they'd found me through LinkedIn and they'd read my line, you know, about jumping out of a plane at 17 and loving how profit and publicity can go hand in hand.

Wow.

And that's thanks to you getting me to work on my story, Simon. Whereas before it was kind of like my CV. So, um, and that's leading to an opportunity.

It's a great example of how something that you could consider like irrelevant, trivial almost, um, gives somebody else a sort of like a hook where it can connect with you and form a relationship. And yes, I mean, in the long run, if we want to sell something, But, uh, before that comes a relationship that has to be built and that relationship you can build with personal experiences that make you unique and memorable in a way that people connect with you and think, hey, that, that is an interesting guy. Let's talk some more. So great, great story.

Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for that. So really opens up an opportunity. Um, and just a direct result of changing the About Me profile and And I think we did that in session 3, didn't we? So if anyone wants to go back and look at that, that's on YouTube. And also we're writing this up into articles. So Simon, what have you got in store for us this week?

Yeah, today I wanted to dissect your slideshow and look a bit at the structure. I wanted to show a couple of examples of other slideshows and hopefully give you some pointers and ideas, um, for your next slideshow, because I think you have, with the book that you wrote, um, The Anonymous Entrepreneur, you have a lot of great content on your hands. And the question is really, how can you best convey that in a way that people, um, can easily consume that and connect, connect with you? And I'm gonna show you a slideshow that, that I think you're gonna like, um, because it almost gives you the feeling of a book.

Yeah.

And what it's a stretch. So, yeah, first let's get started. Let's start by putting together a little slide. And what I've put together is sort of a guideline that I have for the, for what we, what we should think about when we write a pull request, sort of like a test. And it's a very simple test. Okay.

Okay. Are you gonna share your screen? Yeah, I will.

You should see my screen here.

Yes.

So, sorry. So it's 5 very simple questions that I ask myself every time when I write a post. Um, and, um, It's, yeah, it's really not wrong. So, but does my post teach me some, teach my reader something? Does my post motivate my reader? Does my post entertain my reader? Um, does it make them think, or do I give them the feeling that they understand me? And, um, if you take these 5 questions, um, I think it's a good true north compass, a guideline to measure whether a post is really good. And, um, I had to, uh, admit to myself with some posts that I sort of wrote down in a hurry because I didn't really know what to write about. It doesn't hit any of them. And then usually you get low engagement because it's like people are like, yeah, so what? Um, I don't care.

Yeah. Those are great questions and you've got enough of them to give some diversity, which is part of the challenge if you're sitting there. And also not so many as to not know where to start. And you can even put one of those into like storylab.ai or Peppertype or ChatGPT or any one of these writing aids, right? To give you a prompt. Simon, you still there? Hello, Simon. Simon's in Cape Town, South Africa, so sometimes we lose him, and I think that may be the case. Right now. So Simon is talking about The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Are you back, Simon? He's back. He's live. Simon, hello. Can you hear us? Earth calling Simon. The joys of international videos. And what we're going to be doing is we're recording this using riverside.fm. And uploading each of these to the YouTube channel, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, so you can watch all of these afterwards anyway. And I'll also put out as a bonus episode on my podcast, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, which you can find on all players. Simon, are you back with us now? Hello, Simon, are you there? Okay. Now, so if I can't get Simon back, I'm gonna show you what he's given me as homework this week to try and help as an author to share the contents of my book without sounding like I'm selling something. So I'm looking at the LinkedIn Live and I can see Simon's, uh, frozen there. So Simon, are you, are you there?

Hello, Simon.

Now, while we don't have Simon, then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna share my screen.

Okay?

Um, and I've got here under my window the Canva slides, and I use Canva to create The presentation. Simon gave me a template, which is great. And what I did was did a sort of a red, gray, black sequence, taking the content from one of the chapters with Oscar Tromboli, who's a listening expert in, actually in Australia. She was like, we're doing everything with people from all over the world, which is fantastic. And you can see here, basically what I did was create the slide, each slide with a small amount of text telling a story. And this is really Simon's genius has been to try and, you know, help me to work out not selling, but informing, but entertaining, educating. This is really a key point of what Simon's been teaching me. And you can see here what I did was I was able to create this Canva. And truth be told, I was actually waiting for my daughter to finish her ballet lesson, and I used the iPad app on Canva to create this while I was waiting for her sitting in the car. And what I did then was I was able to export this as a PDF file. And Canva has access to lots and lots of great photographs. So you can get stock photographs and then you can remove the background in Canva. This also will work in Visme too. So when you export that, then of course you can import that as a PDF into LinkedIn. Simon, you back with us?

I'm back.

Good. I was winging it a little bit there when I lost you, but I know that somebody's having some issues with power there. Thank you.

So, um, South African power outage.

So luckily we had a little bit of a chat before Simon and I talk. We always talk on a Monday what we're gonna cover, and then on, on Thursday we go through it. So Simon, I've just shared how I made the deck. Do you wanna share your screen and, and see the performance of it, or is your internet, you know, not gonna cover, not gonna handle that?

Let's see. Um, so you shared, um, Canva and how you do decks in Canva and just to show alternatives.

Yeah, that's right. Very simple.

Just to show alternatives. I thought I'd show my deck.

Yes, of course. Well, that was the plan. And then I think the point of showing you Canva is that without being a designer, tools like Canva and Visme give you the power to create content. It's really not that difficult. If you create a format, size is standard on LinkedIn, and you choose some colors that you want and some fonts that you want and the sizes and a style, then Canva really helps you to make this as quickly as anything.

Hmm.

Simon, over to you, the template you gave us.

Exactly. So this is just another example of a template you could use. Free tool. Canva, I think, is, I don't know, £10 a month or £20. Um, and, uh, Google Slides is a free tool, um, which basically does the same. What you don't get with Google Slides are, uh, images. So I had to buy them separately, but it's essentially, it's the same tool. You have like individual slides and then you can watch this. text and, um, you can, yeah, pin the images like you've done, like crop the backgrounds. Yeah. So it's, it's a very simple tool. Um, if you know how to use Word, you know how to use, uh, Slideshow and it's free.

And, and Simon, this is the template you kindly shared with me at the beginning. Do you want to then look now at the post on my LinkedIn, as we said, so you can see how it then looks? So I had to write a little bit of introduction text. And basically what we're doing, Simon and I, is finding a way for people that have got something to promote, in this case, you know, the book by Wiley, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, and how to make it so we're not selling people a book, we're giving them an insight into what they might get from the book. So that's really the purpose. So Simon, why don't you go, you want to screen share and show then how it looks on my profile?

And on the note of the book, you said a good thing.

Yes.

I mean, in the end we want to sell the book. But I believe that the best way to sell something is to basically give it away for free. Because it's, I mean, even if you share all the content you, that you have in the book, it will never be the same like having the book, but it will help people to understand what they can get from the book. And so some people might think, hey, I can't share what I've written in the book because I want people to buy the book. So why share this in the book? And I think the, the best, the better way to approach this, and sort of where we are getting there now, is to share as much as possible from the book because that is, um, giving value on LinkedIn. If you look at like the average feed, and you might remember the session we had a couple of weeks back where I asked you to, um, give comments on the posts and You struggle with some of them, and that is very often because these posts only promote something where you can't really have an opinion or you don't care. So what is there to say? But the minute you start sharing things that are of interest or valuable, and coming back to the 5 things that I said earlier today, whether teach me and entertain me and make me think and show that you understand me. These are things that, um, are interesting or engaging for people. So, yeah, you started doing this with your posts here. Um, I love your opening line with the Simon Sinek. Um, that, I mean, that's so ironic. I would've never thought that Simon Sinek is a bad listener after he's been talking to us for, uh, what, close to 50 years. But, um, actually I can, I can see that. Yeah.

No. And that's why I led with that because you'd also said to me, Simon, in one of the episodes, I think in 4, that, you know, if you're posting about people that are obscure, no one really knows. Right. And so what I decided this time to do was to try and link it to someone who has a profile. And I listened to Simon Sinek.

Hmm.

He's a bit of an optimism podcast. And he said that. And so I, I thought from what you'd said, I would try and build bridges or links to people that have got a profile. So people go, oh, if Simon says that, it's in a different category to sort of, uh, uh, someone that, that people are not familiar with. So that, that's why I did that. I learned that from you.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Very smart.

Absolutely.

Because you build, you, we like to identify with things that we recognize and Things that are familiar, and Simon said it definitely is. Oscar from Bode probably less than Simon said.

So exactly.

Then another great thing you led with a number. I'm not sure that we would see this number because it's in the fourth row with a with a slideshow. You only see the first three rows, but still, it's always good to sort of cram facts. Numbers and hard things into the opening of a post because that pulls us in. One thing that I see a lot of people do, which is, um, not as good as sort of like have a lengthy introduction like you would have on a blog post or if you write a letter, um, that does not work on LinkedIn. So you really have to very, be very fast with what you say, but so people know what, what, what they can expect from this post. And you've done this. Um, you've picked what I think was the strongest fact from the chapter with Oscar Trimboli. Um, and yeah, it is a pretty number that 74.9% of people believe they're above average because that doesn't make sense because otherwise they can't be above average. So great. And, um, yeah, you took 4 main lessons, um, from the chapter, the 4 listening types. That is quite nice. Um, and you kept the post rather short. So just the text is something that I can easily read in probably just in 60 seconds. Um, which is enough to have a touchpoint with you, to give a taste of what to expect from this post, from you, and potentially from future posts. And then you just cut it and share it. You have the slideshow.

Yeah. And Simon, I owe that to you because I used to write sort of semi-essays really. And, and you know, the less is more. You do more thinking and less writing is one of the takeaways. So for anybody that's involved in writing for here and other platforms, you know, more thinking, less writing is a mantra that I'm taking away from this.

What is this beautiful saying? Sorry for the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one.

Um, along those lines. Yes, that's right. Yeah. There's, there's all sorts of stuff about that. You know, great books are, are what's left out, not what's put in. Right.

Mm-hmm.

So as you, as you said, with your 5 questions, which of course we'll share again, um, and we'll be on the YouTube video version of this. You know, that you, you do anything entertaining or informing or inspiring, you know, or somehow sharing, it's key. So tell us what you think of then the PowerPoint that I made in Canva. I showed that while you were having a power outage.

Yeah, let's, let's go through it slide by slide so the listeners and the viewers can also see, uh, what you've done here. Um, so you've done 12 slides, which is a good number. Um, there's no hard and fast rules. for the number of slides you should have. Um, in the end, as long as it's interesting and entertaining for the reader, it's, it's a good number. And, um, so, but 12 is—

And also one, one small thing is, Sam, is I used the alt text to do the 3 killer questions to become a better listener.

Yeah.

So that was another little thing, another little—

Well done.

Piece of metadata that I hadn't used before, but now, well, just discovering, and you're gonna share with us later about How to make sure you share so everyone can view it, not just your connections. We'll share that later.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you, if you come to the post for the first time and you hover over it with the, with the mouse, then you see the killer questions pop up. So it's a nice additional piece of information that we can give to pull people into the post. Um, and I think you've done a good job here with, uh, yeah, mentioning the killer questions. Okay. So, um, let's. Let's start the slideshow analysis. Again, here you've done a good job by picking a number with 74% of the people think we are above average listeners, which is great. What I would've done differently here is to sort of show how ridiculous the number is, because if I just read it, sort of like you've done it on the next slide. So, um, You've chosen a great picture. So, um, I don't have, don't have the answer now how, how to put that on one slide. Um, but, uh, um, that—

Well, I could have switched them actually. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

So I needed to create a better visual counterpoint to the text. Yeah.

Hmm. Hmm. And that, that's also a good point. Um, so the, the visuals here are, they're nice, but it's not really sort of working with the headline. It's sort of, it's. We, we see what we read, and there's one rule in, uh, film script editing, um, that what you see should always be something that you don't hear the actor say. And by that you create tension because it doesn't really gel what, what they say. I mean, it's like, uh, I don't know, somebody coming into the door and saying, hey, great to see you here, but not smiling. Oh, sorry, just for a moment. Then we can read that there's a subtext between that person not being honest and sincere and having some other motives coming into the room. Okay.

Because if not, I will share my screen.

But, um, I will share my screen. You get the point that if we see what is written, it's not as exciting as if there's—

Okay. I think we've, it looks like we've lost Simon just for a moment. So, uh, I think that isn't ideal.

You've done a good job here, um, by pointing out, um, take over here.

Okay, Simon, I think we've lost you there, Simon. So what I'm gonna do in the interest of time is I'm gonna share my screen. Oh, I can't do that while he's still here, Simon. Okay, I will share my screen and I will just show you Here is the post that we did. And so we'll wait for Simon to be able to rejoin us. But here, what I did was I took some pictures, stock pictures, and I think Simon's made a really good point there about the need to find pictures that are accountable. In a way, maybe that's the hardest part of this from a creative point of view and why it's not just about finding pictures and text, it's about making them look that work together. Here I have about most people know mathematics, wines, and cheese. And I have to say, I thank Simon for giving me the prompt on how to do all of this because it's not something I was familiar with. But you can see another thing that I did was I made a point of having just a little text, not too much text on every page. And this is the central problem. No one's taught us how to listen. And here's Oscar. Now Oscar's picture, and I took this from Canva, removed the background, So that I could get, you know, the person and the place together. And then this is the, the, the solution that we're getting as a result of learning from Oscar. Okay. And Oscar's got the 3 essential questions that he says you need to know in order to hold a brilliant conversation, to be a brilliant listener. And the first one then, I just make the reader wait just a moment, just to pause. And then the first one is, tell me more. So you're showing interest. The second question is, and what else? Go deeper in the conversation. And the third is the silence. Let the truth come out. And then what I've done is shared how, if anyone was interested, they could find the podcast, which is on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast, or they could read the book. And obviously, you know, and here's the book. So what we're really trying to do is to help people to know what's inside the book. This is one of 50 articles with people like Oscar without selling the book. And this is the key, as Simon was saying earlier on, what we're trying to do is to inform or inspire or to educate people. And then to leave a place where they can come and find us. Ah, Simon, you're back. Wonderful. Have we— he's back, right? So Simon, I've gone through the deck and we've got about 6 minutes left, and I'm sorry that in South Africa, I know you're having some problems there with power. Next time I have to get you a bicycle and you could sort of cycle for the power at the same time. So I'll stop sharing, shall I? Or did you want to make any more comments on the deck?

Um, yeah, I think, uh, let's, let's, let's move on to the last section, which is, um, yes, the other samples that I wanted to share.

Um, more, okay.

Um, samples for interesting slideshows, because some people really have taken that to an art form. And, um, yeah. We talk in minutes.

And I think what, you know, what we're doing while Simon's teeing that up is, you know, we're just showing how using Canva and Simon's framework, a novice like me can transform my LinkedIn contribution from really being sort of content dumping to content creation proper. And it's taking less time, but more thinking, but the rewards are much greater. So that, so really taking some effort and thinking about the audience. Rather than the sort of the function is really a key learning from this. So Simon, I'm just playing for time there. So yeah, over to you.

And you used the great word content dumping, which I think sums up what a lot of people do on LinkedIn, thinking if you announce your latest workshop, your promotion, your whatnot, uh, people care about that. And, um, I couldn't have named it better. It is content dumping. 'Cause it's not really paying attention and is not considering what, what is interesting to the reader. And, um, what is interesting to the reader again is like if you teach something, if you motivate people, if you entertain them, if you make them think, if you show them that you understand. So it's always about the reader. And, um, I think we are just at the beginning of a wonderful journey understanding how we can do this with, um, our audience. And I wanted to finish off by showing, um, one of my favorite, um, slideshows. This is a guy, um, called, uh, Kiljoa Valles from Mexico. And, uh, oh, okay. He's taken at a new art form. He summarizes, um, books. He asked people for their input and, um, As you can see, the whole look and feel. Now you see the first page. The whole look and feel of this thing is almost like a book. And what happens very often, and that is another thing that LinkedIn rewards you or holds sort of for you, is if people, A, look at the whole slideshow. So every click that you do on a slide is counted as an impression. So you get Great impression numbers. Um, if people go through the whole thing, that's a big plus for LinkedIn. And the other thing is, um, if people save a slideshow, because you can save these slideshows. So you see some, uh, LinkedIn authors really taking this to an art form. And Joe Zare is one of these. Um, this example, it's, yeah, a, it's a 5 Dead Copywriters that he's chosen. best classics of copywriting. And well, you can see with sort of like his name at the bottom, it almost feels like a book cover. And, um, yes. What you then get as you go through this book is nothing short of like really interesting and valuable. It's easy to read. It's, it's, um, very text-based. So you can do images, you can do text. Um, if you do text, It really has to be, um, good, well-written, on point, entertaining. Um, so that you over time build trust with the audience that they know whatever you do, whatever you deliver in these, uh, slideshows is of value and they, they want to see this. And, um, again, you can see, so again, great visual, almost like a book cover. Clear font, clear layout. And since I know that he does all of his slideshows like that, and all of his slideshows are highly insightful and interesting, I definitely want to save them all and I blindly check them out. And that is sort of a thing that you develop over time. So if I look at my original slideshows, I don't want to see them anymore because they're horrible. But over time you get a sense of like how to put the font and the colors and images and not images. And most importantly, um, how to write what you have to show in the slideshow to make it interesting to the reader and hit these 5 qualities that we spoke about earlier.

Simon, that's wonderful. I love that. And I think for those people that are watching, you know, who like me are not necessarily writers or creators, I think that What we're really trying to do with the LinkedIn Safari is to just show progression, right? And we're making incremental changes over time. If there's a takeaway from today, it's that we really need to reduce, we'll think about reducing the volume and not doing content dumping, but think about Simon's 5 questions. I don't know whether, Simon, you can put them back on the screen again, can you? Because I think if we approach LinkedIn as we would with Twitter or Instagram or any of the other channels, With what's in it for the audience rather than that I need to post something today. That for me is a critical mindset change on the journey to creating content that people actually want to engage with. Well, Simon's back in the dark, Simon.

But I'm here.

So he's here, which is great. And we're nearly, we're finished. It's half past. So Simon, just read those last 5 quickly and then we'll sign off.

Yeah. Again, so if your post, um, hits any of these 5, if it teaches people, if it motivates people, if it entertains them, if it makes them think, or if you show that you understand your reader, um, then it is a good post and, uh, you should be confident to, to publish that post.

Thank you for joining Simon and I. In this episode 6 of the LinkedIn Safari. Simon, do you want to say goodbye from South Africa, from Cape Town?

It was great being here with you. Always fun and looking forward to next week's slideshow that you will then show.

Yeah, we're working on this. So on the YouTube channel, we'll put a link. Um, but we've now got all 6 of these, uh, online. You can watch the back catalog. And, you know, Simon and I, our details are obviously on LinkedIn. So reach out to us with any questions or any questions that you've got you'd like us to answer or any particular problems you're solving. And in the meantime, until we meet you same time, same place, that's 12 o'clock GMT here on LinkedIn Live. Thank you so much for joining us. And as I always say, keep on communicating.

Thank you, James. All right.

We say goodbye. We used to sing before, but I think probably people No one liked that, so we'll just say goodbye. Thank you so much for watching.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.