Joshua B. Lee - The Dopamine Dealer of LinkedIn

On our side, we become dopamine dealers, right? And so if you're our ideal client, let's say, Matt, you did a post. I'm going to reach out, man, and I'm going to like your post and I'm like, comment on it and realize on LinkedIn the average engagement ratio is around 1%. Our clients get much higher than that because we're conditioning them. And you guys have seen it. On my post, we reach out, say, hey, Matt, man, I saw your recent post, man. I just want to take two seconds out and say, thank you for adding great content. Really resonate with me. Love to be able to connect with you, don't you? Doesn't that sound more human? Doesn't that make someone go, yeah, I want connect with this person. I want to, you know, have a long. So that's how we're drawing in our audience, right? You can connect with anyone if you engage on their posts and they're actually seeing that you thank them for doing a good post, they feel good about it and they're going to connect with you.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Yo, yo, yo, what's happening, my people? All right, today we have a brand new friend of ours and I feel like he's going to good friend for a while. His name is Joshua B. Lee and he actually runs a company, a new venture called Standout Authority. But he is not new to the game at all. This guy goes way back. So just a little brief on what we're chatting about. This thing is going to be all about LinkedIn, how to get engagement stoked on actually getting the right people to listen to you. And you can actually get real engagement on LinkedIn, not the spammy bot stuff that you see all the time. So this is actually getting Matt and I back into Link and you'll hear why. We had some AHA's and you'll, I'm sure, get a lot more AHAs as well, in addition to just LinkedIn overall, even if LinkedIn isn't your jam, don't click away because what Joshua talks about is this human algorithm and the way that he connects in a unique way. He has a whole thought process and procedures behind how he does this, where he could basically connect with anyone on LinkedIn and he has a strategy to essentially get into their world and figure out some kind of way they can collaborate or work together as a client, some kind of relationship it's basically the backbone of business and life. Be a cool human. He goes deep into it, so definitely not doing it justice there. But little quick bio on Joshua. He's been in the game for a long time. So in 2003 he actually was working with a little known company by the name of MySpace. Hello, that was one of his clients. And also Google. He was managing over $100 million in advertising spend and actually controlling 35 trillion with a T online impression. So basically he knows what to do with traffic. He's seen a lot of it and even more now. So he's doing this for some of the biggest legends in the marketing space like Dan Sullivan, Joe Polish, John Maxwell, tons of companies, Oracle, adt. I mean, like basically everyone needs to be better humans, at least we should especially. And his whole thing is he doesn't believe it's B2B or B2C. It's H2H. Human to human. I like that. So check out his training and everything he's doing at standout. That is standout. Authority.com and of course, we're taking the notes on this episode for you. You can get those@flowchartgroup.com that's flowchartgroup.com it's gonna get you in for free. If you're within two weeks of this episode going live, you can get the notes for free. If you're late, well, you're just going to get some other notes. But that's cool. You could get some cool notes on some episode. So go to flowchartgroup.com, throw your email in there. That's all we ask for and we'll send them to you. And lastly, we have Ahrefs. So they are our amazing sponsor of this episode and it's basically the best tool ever for SEO and just getting more traffic organically. And you don't need to be a traffic nerd to actually benefit from Ahrefs. That's what's cool. That's why I like it. Shh. Matt's the nerd, not me. His words. Basically, you can get in there and use it for all sorts of reasons. You can optimize your website and basically audit your website, see what you're lacking, maybe what you should be doing that you just didn't know about. You can analyze your competitors. They have a tool for that. You could study what your customers are actually searching for. So figure out what keywords are searching for so you can create content around there and optimize stuff so you could show up right there when no one else is. You can also learn from your industry's top performing content. So you can actually swipe ideas of what's working already and apply it to your own stuff. And then, of course, check what your ranks are looking like, how you're ranking your content, how your traffic's maybe not ranking well, and how to optimize that. Tons of cool stuff you could do with Ahrefs. So go check it out. There's really no excuse not to at least try it. Even if you're a little, like, on the fence or whatever. Go give it a shot. It's seven days. They have a trial there for seven days for seven dollars. Only seven bucks for seven days. Try out the whole thing. So go to ahrefs. It's a hrefs.com a h r e f s.com ahrefs all right, that is all. Let's go head over and do our chit chat with Mr. Joshua B. Lee. All right. For like the fifth try, I think we're live, dude. Josh, it's great to have you.

Hey, man, I'm happy to be here. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. And not like you guys have been doing it for over 10.

And for everyone listening. Yeah, we've probably spent the last. Yeah, definitely 10 minutes trying to make this recording start. Every tech gremlin has come out to haunt us, but that's okay because it's not going to stop us. That's for dang sure.

The Josh I'm pushing forward.

Yeah. I just wish we were in Austin with some fiber Internet like you, but carrying on. Thanks for joining us, man. I know we were chatting about how we all met or you guys met, I think, prior playing Pokemon. Right?

Yeah, yeah, we go way back through Pokemon.

Pokemon Go.

Yeah.

No, his breakfast stands. I gotta give him a shout out there.

Do we get a cider free bacon by mentioning his name?

Ooh, bacon for life, I think.

You know, I don't think I've ever actually had bacon with Brad.

Bacon with bread.

I always tell him, I said, look, you know, if you're not getting like, bacon sponsors and like, everyone on your show gets a, you know, a package of bacon in the mail. You're doing something wrong. Even though I love them to death.

Yeah. Oh, man, oh, man.

He should send people bacon first and then they eat together on the show.

I'm just thinking of sponsorship opportunities with all the nice bacon farms out in the world. Oh, man. Try new bacon every day. All right, Brad, just an idea for you. Let's End up here.

This is our first riff.

Yeah, but you, I mean, you're like. I feel like you cover a topic or you embody a topic that we say often on this podcast, which is the human element on the other side of a screen. We've said it many times on this show where a lot of folks just forget the person on the other end. I think now more than ever in this weird world we're in, you probably have even deeper insights than anything we've ever talked about. So I think it's gonna be exciting to hear how you create a brand connection and all this engagement, mainly through what, LinkedIn now as well. That's it.

That's the vehicle, right? I mean, it's as I, as I tell everyone, we kind of just remind people how to be human online again. Because most of us, especially marketers, have forgotten in this world of automation, we just use the vehicle of LinkedIn to be able to do it. So a lot of the. The mentality that we have around what we do, you can use on any platform. Right. I mean, when we kind of go into it later, I'm going to show you, like, the stuff that I do. It's just what my mom taught me, how to treat other human beings. I'm just doing it online. Mind blown, right?

It's true, man. I mean, that's, That's. It's the weird. Yeah, weird. Something mental happens where it's just the switch, like, oh, human. Even a video with us chatting together, it kind of humanizes us. But still, I feel like with the Zoom calls that we're all on and group calls, you still kind of forget that. Especially Zoom calls. And we're all picking our noses and stuff like that. Or you catch that one person going to the bathroom. Just kidding. Have not caught that yet. But yeah, give us the backstory, dude, because I know you've gone through some interesting businesses, relationship stuff, personal development, too. And what brought you here?

No worries. Well, man, we can go all the way back, right? My mom says that I was an entrepreneur as a child. I used to love summer school, sold candy out of my locker. I mean, those things did happen. But, I mean, I would say that I really picked up my career in 2002 is when I first started my real, like, Internet marketing company. I was kind of blessed and cursed, right? This was the. Back then, it's like print money and, you know, people didn't know. And I was actually blessed and cursed because I got one of my first clients was a company that most people have forgotten. About these days, MySpace. So I got an exclusive contract to monetize all their traffic. We did arbitrage back then. Buy low, sell high. So we would buy their traffic, sell it to Overture, which would became Yahoo, which I think is Verizon now. But back then, I mean, it was crazy. Like we would pay a tenth of a penny and then turn around and drive that traffic to a word like mesothelioma for $100 a click. And I mean we made the margin, I mean, you know, insanity. But As a young 20 year old, we. It's good and bad, right? You can make a whole bunch of money when you're doing a couple million dollars a month and you don't know. I mean, you make a lot of mistakes. So I mean, you know, I was, as I say, blessed and cursed. Right. So I was able to be able to grow. I made a lot of my stakes early, but I actually at least two held onto some of my money. Cause I had a lot of my friends back then, they're like, oh yeah, just bought my Lamborghini. And then six months later, like, so I don't own that anymore because you know, people just do the wrong thing, you know, and they were, they were kind of going through them. Through that time frame, I built multiple different companies. I mean, I probably monetized every acronym from CPC to CPA to CPL to whatever, ppc, you know, whatever we want to name the different ones that were back then. And you know, throughout my career, I've controlled over 35 trillion online impressions on my own servers and monetized personally over $100 million in ad spend. And my companies have done over $300 million in ad spend.

And the biggest thing, it's all about traffic with you.

What's that?

I said it's all about traffic with you.

Well, that's the whole thing, right. The biggest thing I learned was there's a huge difference between traffic and actually true engagement.

Yeah.

And I mean, dude, there were certain, certain things that I went through. And I mean by growing those companies and I was helping a lot going through. And you know, at a certain point, I mean, I look back, I mean, I was down in Orange county when I first started my company. I moved back to Texas to have K.

Born and raised Texas boy. So you know.

My wife at the time, and because I'm divorced now from her, that I was like, well, if you get pregnant in California, we're gonna have to fly back home and just have my boy in Texas. This is what it is. We're insane. So, you know. But, I mean, I remember being here and people like, oh, Josh, you run 10 different. At the time, I was running about 10 different companies.

But I was about 35 pounds heavier than I am now. Never been really overweight in my life. My relationship were becoming monetary, and I had no vision about where I was going. I just knew where I was at. Everything was work or play. And at a certain point, when I had my son and he's 11 now, I remember I wanted to work out of the house. I didn't want to be one of those dads that was away. And I always wanted my office doors open because if I couldn't say it in front of my son, I probably shouldn't say it, no matter what age he is. And I certain point with everything because I was concentrating on the money and how to be able to grow, because that's what we're all taught. My door shut in my office. I would sit there and stare at the wall for eight hours a day. And honestly, and this is right before I was doing interviews like Jamie Masters and people like that. Jamie's a good friend of mine. I mean, I remember doing podcasts and trying to turn on for those different things. And my office became not only a sanctuary, but a coffin.

I was feeling, yeah, been there before. Yeah, I think.

Yeah, man. It was just like, I've got to reset. And I was really blessed. I had a friend of mine, Jesse Elder. You guys probably know Jesse, he's been around and he's like, he gave me permission and gave me permission to give to my ex as well. Like, look, to live our lives, because we weren't happy. We had grown to a point, and we. And I wanted to start changing things because I met Janik with Mavericks and everything like that. And I said, whoa, there's other people making money and actually doing good on this world.

That's who I am and that's who I want to be. And I remember my ex going, why can't you just do what you do well, make money. I knew at that point, our gap had grown too large between us. She's like, why do you have to help people? There's got to be a better way. We've got kids. There's got to be different things. So that's where I had a full reset on my life. And I shut down all my companies because my lawyers had told me it'd take up to three years to be able to go through a divorce. I said, no, I value time over money. I can Always make more money, can't make more time. Gave her everything at 36 and I'm 42 now. Moved back in with my parents with a little under $1,000 to my name and reset my life and started thinking about where I wanted to go and that's really where standard authority was born. What I'm doing today.

Wow, dude, that's a heck of a story. Thanks for sharing that too. I mean that's. I don't even know where to navigate that stuff. I mean you've learned so much, it seems like and obviously hasn't even been that long ago, but you've like, what's the biggest thing you've taken from that journey so far? Obviously you're still going through kind of a new journey now, but what's your.

I'm married again to celebrate a two year anniversary. So, you know, it's. And it was just one of those pieces where. Well, the one thing I can tell you, the biggest thing I can tell everyone because I mean, I know we have a lot of people that see guys like y' all like me. We have a lot of friends that are always online. The one thing I learned was always be you 100% of the time online and offline. Because we've all met them, some of them are friends and they have their some online personality. And then there's, you know, average guy over here and you're like, wait a minute, you're just too. And it's exhausting.

It's too much work. Yeah, you're right. That's what I always said. Like, why are you trying so hard?

Yeah, yeah, it's hard to be congruent. Who was I to that person again?

Oh yes.

So it's like, you know, that was one of the biggest things that I learned was that was me. Because I mean we can't create and add value to others if we don't have the power within ourselves first to be able to do that. I think that's where most people miss out on. And I know we're trying to get to LinkedIn and stuff like that, but I mean like so important because mindset with everything, like we're going to get into strategies and going through and what we do on LinkedIn and show some people some awesome stuff. But if we don't talk to the audience first, I'm sure you guys believe the same thing. We don't know the mindset that you have to be in first to be able to really. Especially now with COVID Right. I mean, whatever we thought the next 40 years was going to be like we just had a full reset. And now, more than ever in history, we have the ability to create the next 40 years, to be the leaders, to be the creators of that more than ever. And so I think it all starts with mindset. And those are the things that I really learned going through the whole process is be true to yourself and be true to the people that you're talking to as well. Yeah, yeah.

Couldn't agree more. In fact, we actually did a survey to our audience fairly recently, maybe what, six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, something like that. And we asked, what do you want to hear more of? And what do you want to hear less of? Among a lot of other questions. But those were two of the main questions we were trying to get insights out of. And it was 50, 50 split down the. Down the board of. Half the people said they wanted to hear more on mindset. Half the people said they wanted to hear less about mindset. And ever since we heard that, Joe and I have started working in more mindset into every single episode, because we're like the ones that say, you want to hear less mindset. You're the ones who probably need it more than the others.

It's. What would you say to those group of people? Because it sounds like that was like, you back, you know, what, 10 years ago.

I guess we'll say 100%, man. I would say to those people that you really have to kind of sit back, right, and really look at where your life was, because I didn't see it happening.

Right.

We have these small shifts throughout our lives, and I didn't see the changes that were going on in my perspective. I was making money, and I was still giving and paying for people to do things and whatever. And I was like, I was helping. I was being a good guy, dude. I was only doing that for my own benefit in the long run. I love hindsight, being. And I hate to say the word now, 2020.

But, you know, you look at it, you go, man, I thought I was doing on others, but I was really just making myself feel good and be like, oh, look at me. I can pay for shit. You know, what an accomplishment, right? Yeah. Wait a minute. I didn't do anything. And that's why I looked back, and I was like, I've got to be better. And that was the whole piece, right? I mean, I was able to then take that shift of mindset and then put it into an industry like the marketing world that I saw going the wrong way. I mean, I also realized, too, when you look at mindset, so many entrepreneurs feel like they're alone and they're in this world or they're carrying this huge, heavy weight on them, and they've got to be able to do it. But you guys live in San Diego, I'm in Austin, and we have two major hubs of amazing friends that we can all do this together. And still sometimes we still don't reach out to them.

It's. Dude, almost always. Yeah, we forget. And even we forget, you know, and, yeah, it's not. If it wasn't for the two of us helping each other, to support each other, we would sometimes forget who's out of the four walls in our office, you know?

Yeah. So, I mean, those are those mindsets, man. I mean, you've got to be able to, you know, connect with your people, connect to your friends and realize that you're not alone in this. And I mean, that's just. That's mindset, right? Understanding. It's not just you. I can't. I tried to change this world on my own. I almost killed myself. I mean, I contemplated that, believe me. It was like, okay, you know, maybe it'd be better for my family because I'm not happy, they're not happy. You know, maybe that they. All I want is money. They're out there that can get that. And I know now the only way I can change this world for my kids, for your kids, for everyone's, is for us to work together and like, come on. Come on shows like this and just share 100% freely.

And go, hey, ask me anything. Let's just go in and. I told you guys before I started, like, look, I'm gonna. I'll share about everything, you know, because I've just known. It's so much easier. I can smile. I don't carry any weight on me anymore.

Yeah, man. It's like a little. The audience knows this, but we do these therapy sessions at least once a month, just Matt and I, and that's our opportunity to just put it all out there and before it. Yeah, it scared us shitless to put the craziest things we've gone through, deaths and struggles, whatever it might be, but it's like the most freeing. And afterwards, we just give ourselves a high five and we're like. Like, hell, yeah. And then they become the best episodes, like the most favorited episodes from the audience.

That's it, man. I mean, we have a group of guys here. I mean, we were getting together and it was like, it was basically called call each other on your bullshit. And they'd be like, all right, look, we're going to give you the hard truths of what we're seeing. And I mean it sucked to hear some of your best friends say that, but you felt better because they're like, you're right, I was bullshit myself. So, you know, thank you, I appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah. Because we're the best bullshit artists of our. It's cover up artists, especially entrepreneurs, man. Like, it's like this crazy vicious cycle that we always have to be better. We're always striving for improvement. So we ignore a lot of the, like the foundational things that make us happy. At least that's what I've gone through.

And yeah, man, that's like, right? I mean that's like why I do what I do with standard authority now is I told you guys before, I mean like some of the stuff that we talk about and we're going to get into, dude, it's. It's not rocket science. It's truly just being human online. We're humanizing the experience and don't take it as euthanizing. We're humanizing.

The experience of being online and just treating people with the respect they deserve. I mean it's amazing when you just appreciate someone for something that they've never been appreciated for and what that can actually how and it can change someone's life. And I mean that's the just an act of act appreciation in all of marketing. Right? The reason why you have so many listeners, the reason why I have followers like Matt, you followed me, you know, on LinkedIn first and reached out to Brad to be able to connect with me was because of that. Right. And we forget to acknowledge those people like everyone now. Thank you so much for even listening to us this far.

That's right.

Thank you Mindset. Because I know half of you didn't want to hear it.

We have the proof it's true. So thanks for hanging around with us still folks. Yeah. Because it's one of those things. It's what that was it. Travis Sago Chocolate covered broccoli. We probably titled this episode something around LinkedIn, but we got Mindset first. I don't know what we're titling this yet, but you nailed it on the head.

You can use my tagline that I use all the time. There is no B2B or B2C. There's only H to H. You know, human. I mean when you look about it, only marketers like you and I years ago created B2B and B2C just to diversify ad spend to get more money. Every business is run by another human being. We've just forgotten that, you know, like we don't go in and I was just looking at an email like Steelhouse, hey, I want to talk to you about. No, you're talking to people that actually make the decision. At Steelhouse, the brand doesn't make the decisions. So we have to not speak at brands, but connect and engage with the people that actually work at those companies. And I mean, that's the biggest thing, right? I mean this is the whole piece of being human online and developing these strategies to be able to take that mindset and shift it a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

It's not like when you create a Facebook ad, there's like a company of people standing around viewing that ad together. It's one person seeing that ad and maybe forwarding it to somebody else. And it's always a human viewing it, not like a committee of humans viewing what you're putting out.

But guys, I mean.

I work with a lot of, you know, high end guys that have high end products and services and. But at the same point, like if I put an ad in front of you, you know, if it's an ad, if there's a funnel, you know, if you're in a funnel, if you're in automation, you know, if you're an automation. I've seen the trends doing this as long as I have. When we used to do arbitrage, no one knew what it was and then they figured it out. Then we did other things and they figured out and these, it's like money goes up and down. You had businesses. Why do we have to keep on doing this? Right. I mean, like, yes, I get it, there are reasons to have particular funnels and stuff like that. But if we just treat the other person not as an opportunity but as a, as another human being and have a true conversation, what you're going to start doing is you're going to be able to build advocates first and allow that byproduct become clients. And I mean, that's what we're doing every single day. That's how we get, you know. You know, Matt, you were asked like, like, I just don't get it. How are you getting the engagement on LinkedIn for treating people like human beings? And we're conditioning them to be appreciated. Yeah.

So let's. What are some like cardinal sins that people are committing in your perspective that are like easy fixes? If you just give Them the aha. And kind of show them the light a little bit.

Well, using automation on LinkedIn. If you get caught using any automated tool, LinkedIn will potentially bang you.

You.

I have seen some very high level people get banned because like, oh, well, I'm just going to go around. They say that, but they won't do it. Oh, yes they will. Because in the long run, if you pitch or spam 1,000 people and get the one sale. Yes, you got the one sale. And that's where people are like, yeah, you got the one sale. You still pissed off 999 people. Remember that? And I mean, this is the better way to be able to do it. You know, the same thing like, oh, hey Matt, you know, hey Joe, I see you guys are wearing black shirts. Me too. Let's connect.

This is the biggest thing. And then two seconds later, what I love is the, oh, you reconnect and you're like, hey, great. And then they just pitch you. Yeah, don't cold pitch anyone. I hate cold emails and cold calling. I hate to get that. So don't do it to somebody else. I mean, these are the things that on LinkedIn that people are always doing same thing. One of the other ones was swig with posting. People always talk at people like, that's not a way. Yes, we did that for many years. The last 10 years we've probably been, we've had every guru out there, like, you know, speak at your audience. No, speak with your audience. Write conversationally. You know, if you have a problem writing conversation, you got this amazing tool right here or there and talk to text, talk out what you're about to write your post on and then adjust it from there. I mean, there's certain things that you can actually be able to do to be able to make these things. And then the last thing I think when you're doing posting on LinkedIn is everyone goes, I'm going to show everyone how smart I am. I'm going to write really high level. Then you speak over your audience. I love. Have you guys ever used hemingwayapp.com Yep, that's right. Yeah, easy enough. Always put your stuff in there. You know, there's a reason why the show Are youe Smarter than a Fifth Grader did so well for so long with Jeff Fart. Because the average person reads at a fifth grade level. I don't care how smart we think we are, you want to be able to go through and do these things. So these are, I mean, we could sit here all day, I could talk about all the different cardinal sins on LinkedIn, but I mean, that's the whole thing, like add value. Don't just talk about yourself. You don't want to be that person in the room going, oh, dude, there's that guy Josh Lee again. You never shuts up about LinkedIn. God is exhausting. Well, Joshua, meet that person.

Joshua Beeley is cool, but you know, Josh.

Yeah, man. I mean, you, you nailed it. And the fact everything you just said obviously extends to all other platforms too. Like, we get pitched, you know, on the podcast all the time. I saw one this morning. It was like normal looking email. And then you saw this blurb that we wrote that was in their email in italics. Like, we're like, wait, wow. Like you were that blatantly just scraping our content and then firing out this probably along with a thousand other podcasts.

Oh, yeah, it goes through. I mean, you talk about scraping, right? That's the other. I love when I connect with someone on LinkedIn and now they're going to spam me there, but then they're going to scrape my email and then send me an email. I got one earlier today. Hey, Josh, we just connected on LinkedIn and I'm like, you're pitching me in two different places, are you? You already upset me once and I deleted you as soon as you cold pitch me. But you're going to email me too. Like, I was at an event. Have you guys heard of Brian Kurt's Titans Mastermind?

Oh, yeah, we've had him on here too.

Yeah. So I was speaking with that Brian's event and one of the people there, like, well, some of the process that you're going through just seems slow. Like, why couldn't I just scrape? You could physically see me. Like, I was trying not to just be like.

And I'm like, you can do whatever you want. I don't believe in people doing that. I hate when someone does that to me. And I, I think we have to be better, to expect better.

So if you want to, I always tell everyone, like, if you're coming to me just to monetize your offer, I'm not your guy. You know, there's a thousand people behind me that you can hire that are going to do just that. They're going to take your money. But if you want to educate, inspire, and drawing your audience without ever selling them, I can help you out because those are the ways that we do it. I mean, that's where we have to go. We are the influencers. Like I said, we're creating this next 40 years, now more than ever before. And that's why it's so important to be able to have these. I mean, it's like.

I got on a riff there.

No, it was a good riff. I liked it. I'm curious when it comes to like the growth of your LinkedIn following, you know, for the longest time I always had what I call a Pokemon approach to LinkedIn, where I literally just tried to collect them all. Anybody who requested, sure. I'd see people that looked interesting request even if I didn't really know them that well. Over time I've stopped doing that. But I'm curious, what's your philosophy on like, on growing the account? How do you find new people to follow? How do you approve people? How does that work for you?

Yeah, no worries, man. So Matt, look, same thing if someone's cold pitching right out of the gate, like, hey, and my name is Joshua B. On LinkedIn. So I know it's like, hey, Joshua B. I personally looked at your profile. Have you thought about using LinkedIn for leads? No, you didn't. You totally just scraped my name. So like you can make your name all capitalized, do something, right, to be able to distinguish those automations. Because like, look, if they're not going to take the time out to be able to really reach out to me, why do I want to? LinkedIn's not a numbers game. You have your average incomes, your average education, all that is so much higher on this platform. So you need to play at a higher level. And this is one of those biggest things, right? Because like your average income, I think like last time I looked like Twitter's like 58,000.

Facebook's like $64,000 a year. Do you have any guesses on what LinkedIn is right now?

I would say it's closer to the six figure mark.

80, I was going to say 110 or something like that.

You're close 118 last time I looked about a month ago. And that's, I mean it's averages. So there are lower, but that means there's a lot higher. Right. So you're playing with people that have a better understanding. They're people like us that are on this platform that we're connecting to. So you can't use the same kind of tricks that, and that's what they are, tricks to be able to either get around algorithms or to be able to, you know, get that. Not. I don't want to ever sell anyone. If I got to sell them, I've got to keep selling Them every single month.

True. Because you kind of condition them to expect the sale, I guess. And you're not. That's not the type of people you're talking to on LinkedIn primarily.

No. So, I mean, these are those things, Right. So you don't want to be able to collect. I'd rather have. It's like an email list, Right. I'd rather have a couple thousand people on my email lists that are highly engaged than have an email list of 200,000 people that don't ever respond. You know, it's just more noise. There's so much noise out there. It's not content is king anymore or connections are king. It's quality is king. Right. We've. We've had a shift because everyone's online, especially with COVID now. So we have to be able to cut through that noise. And if someone cold pitches me, Matt, man, dude, delete. Insubordinate. I don't care who it is. You know, if they go on and I probably got 200 open connections on LinkedIn right now, like, I had someone the other day, they go, oh, well, I heard you get the blue check mark. If you get 220,000 to get to your 30,000 connections, I go, who told you? I go, One LinkedIn doesn't give that blue check amount unless your name is like a household name. We're talking about Gary V, you know, Tony Robbins, you know, Arianna Huffington. You've got to be a household name. And. And whoever told you that didn't have any clue what's going on. They're just collecting connections that just clog up everything. Yeah.

Do you have any advice for somebody who maybe has been doing LinkedIn wrong for a while, but maybe needs to sort of revamp it and, you know, because obviously you only have one LinkedIn account. I'm not going to go like, create a new Matt Wolf account and start from scratch. That's probably against the terms of service, you know. So, like, what would it. I think I've got, like, like, I don't know, I have no clue how many connections I have, but I have a lot of connections where just whenever somebody asks to be a connection, I'm like, oh, you like business? I like business, sure. Let's connect. Right. Like, that's the kind of reach out that you get. But over time, now I just kind of have a feed that I don't care to pay attention to. I'm not really that interested in most of what pops onto my feed. I have a feeling most people aren't paying attention to me, like, is there any advice to sort of reinvigorate it?

Yeah, no worries. So, I mean, some of the best things to be able to do is to be able to draw on that ideal audience, right? You want to be able to condition your audience. And this is kind of what we do with our clients, you know, and it's being able to go in and really draw in the right people that actually align with your. Like, again, first and foremost, if people are just pitching you, delete them. Right? They send you spam messages. Delete it. It's that easy. Do it immediately. Don't just guess about it. Don't just disregard the message, right? You're. You're still. We're going to say this a lot. You're conditioning them that it's okay just to spam everyone else, and it gets annoying. So you need to be able to delete these people. Hell, I'll even call them out. Like, my wife got mad at me for a while when people would. These LinkedIn experts that went through a class. And I know some of the people that run these classes, and then six months ago, they were, you know, a Pizza Hut delivery guy, and now they're a LinkedIn expert. And they were like, hey, you know, like, like. And I just kind of like, are you kidding me? And, you know, I do this whole text back, and my wife's like, that, what does that do? I'm like, well, I'm teaching. I'm trying to help. Like, if they're going to go out there and say they're a LinkedIn expert, and I hate that word expert, but, you know, no one's an expert. Right. I always want to be growing. Like, I'm, you know, I'm a LinkedIn connoisseur.

Yeah, you're just very interested in LinkedIn and further.

Exactly. You know, but, you know, these are those pieces. And then two. Let's just go into it, man. I mean, what we're doing for our clients, I'm going to share it. And this will show you how we condition and be able to build and we work with guys like, you know, I've been blessed to be able to have clients like Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish and John Maxwell and some amazing people that I read their books on how to be able to start my own companies years ago, and now I get to help them, like, really connect and engage and educate their audience.

That's so cool.

And it's, it's been an. It's been an honor to be able to kind of do that. I mean, and now with everything too. I mean, it's cool. Like, Covid actually put me into the corporate space, which I never really, you know, we all know it's very difficult to make that jump unless you came from that world. And I mean, I've been doing our training now for, like, companies like adt, Gartner, Oracle and companies like that, teaching them. So what we're doing, we start off, man, first and foremost, I don't think there was enough appreciation in this world prior to Covid for the little things in life. I think there's a hell of a lot more now, right? I mean, like, I appreciate my kids, teachers. I appreciate being able to go outside and go to dinner, not wear a mask and, you know, all these things. So we start with that, right? If someone looks at your profile, if someone engages on your content, we reach out and go, hey, Joe, I saw you looked at my profile, man. I just want to take two seconds out and say thank you. You know, too often, I appreciate this. I. I'd love to be able to connect with you and find out why you. Why you look me up, right? We're appreciating them for something that never been appreciated for, right? Our cycle of being online is to, like, comment, share, post, like, comment, share, post. We've got to create these stop gaps. I mean, if we've all watched the social dilemma, right? I mean, like, most of us that are in it, we're like, yeah, we've seen that, knew that was happening. A lot of times you're like, whoa, mind blown. The social media's been doing this to us.

I'm like, yes, yes, it has.

But we've got to be. We know the conditioning. So, like, we create those stopgaps by appreciating someone likes a post. Like, when's the last time someone reached out and said, hey, Matt, man, you like my Facebook post? I just want to send you a personal message, say, thank you. Dude, that's awesome. Yeah.

I can think of one person that's ever done that actually. And it was actually, you mentioned him. Travis Seiko.

It was Sego. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I mean, that's. But you're totally right. Yeah, it's like.

Or people don't do it.

You hearted my post. What made you love it so much? I'd love to hear some feedback.

Exactly. So that's what we'll do. Like, hey, thanks for listening. Like my post. Love to find out why you. Why you engaged, right? Or what, what you like best about it so and especially if they're not first degree connections and their second or third like re, that's a message you send out to connect with them. Hey, love to be able to connect with you and find out what push you to check out my posts, whatever it might be. I mean it's starting a conversation. It's not leading to. We all get the whole like Matt, what you were saying, like we connect with people because, well, business of business in common and then we never talk to that person again. So we're trying to be able to go down this whole path of, you know, starting with that appreciation. And when you condition people to like when they do something that's positive and they get positive reinforcement back, they will continue to do that. They're like, and especially when you're, you know, you're whatever, you know, in this world, like people follow you and you have. They're the reason why I get to be on shows like this, you know, appreciate them. And they're like, man, I I want to get another appreciation for Matt and Joe. They did this. Thank you. Yeah, that's awesome. So we kind of go about and do that. And on the same post, if I asked you guys, why does everyone in this world, I don't care who you are, first and foremost, most visually post online, what would you say they want?

Attention. I don't know.

Yeah, attention could be for me, I would say it's some internal thing. They're probably working through themselves and they're maybe somehow displaying it or showing off that they're doing this thing.

It's better you guys did it better. Like something like, oh, to get clients or to do this. It really is first and foremost to get that dopamine we all get when someone engages in our content. We all get it. I don't care who you are. We love it when we get a like or a comment. It's like, yeah, I'm validated for sure. On our side, we become dopamine dealers, right? And so if you're our ideal client, let's say Matt, you did a post. I'm gonna reach out, man, and I'm gonna like your post and I'm a comment on it. And realize on LinkedIn only one, the average engagement ratio is around 1%.

Wow.

So like our clients get much higher than that because we're conditioning them. And you guys have seen it on my posts. But I mean we reach out, say, you know, hey Matt, I already liked your post. I commented on there reach out. And if I'm One of the three people or five people or 10 people, whatever it might be that did that. And I reach out and go, hey, Matt, man, I saw your recent post, man. I just want to take two seconds out and say thank you for adding great content. Really resonate with me. Love to be able to connect with you. Doesn't that sound more human?

Absolutely.

Doesn't that make someone go, yeah, I want to connect with this person. I want to have a long. So that's how we're drawing in our audience. You can connect with anyone. I don't care if it's the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. If you engage on their posts and if they're actually seeing that and you thank them for doing a good post, they feel good about it and they're going to connect with you. So that's how we start off first, always appreciation. And that's what, you know, like I said, my mom taught me that they appreciate the little things in life.

Yeah, no, I like that a lot. And I know you're not doing it to sort of game any sort of algorithms or anything like that, but I would imagine just from an algorithmic perspective, the people that you interact with like that are probably going to see more of your post in general as well.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, this is the human algorithm, right? I'm not trying. I don't have to be able to adjust that. I mean, we've had the same algorithm within us for, you know, our lifetime. So I kind of went through, right. All that traffic I used to work on in the day, I looked at that and then I also kind of looked at. I said, you know, what's the difference? And I'm an only child, you know, growing up. So, like, I didn't have, you know, baked in relationships with a brother or sister or something like that. So I had to really learn how to engage and connect with friends that actually became my brothers and sisters in that sense. Right. That I truly cared about and cared about me. So I look for those different pieces right when I connected. I mean, that's probably why in the. Originally, I was a really good salespeople. Like, oh, you could sell anyone anything. Because I would look for mannerisms and look how they actually moved and how they talk and I mimic these things and, you know, I don't want to be that person. But I do understand that that human nature.

Has a certain course. And as humans, we all appreciate being appreciated.

That's never going to change no matter how confident you are and however you're in a post you're still going to like the gratitude, man.

Yeah, that's it. So we start off with that and this is where the fun part, right? This is where most people go, they connect and they go, they, they throw up on you and they spam you with their pitch, hey, I'd love to jump on a 15 minute phone call about you or whatever it might be.

We don't do that, right? Next thing my mom always taught me how to be able to do is, you know, if you meet, when you meet someone, pay them a compliment, right? Like, oh, great shirts. Love the evergreen shirt. Totally awesome band, you know, or dude, that's an awesome bookcase behind, you know, whatever it might be, right? So it's the same thing on LinkedIn. We go in and we're giving an endorsement, which is like a compliment. So we endorse someone on LinkedIn. So we have appreciate we've they've engaged on our content or we've engaged on theirs. We reach out to connect with them and give them appreciation. Now we're giving them a compliment by giving them an endorsement. LinkedIn makes it super easy to be able to come back in and go, hey, Joe, thanks for the, thanks for endorsing me for marketing or podcasting, whatever it is. Now, I hate unsolicited advice, right? Like people do it all the time, you know, like, oh, you should do this. And I'm like, I didn't ask and.

I should do that really off of.

What criteria appreciate it. So I never want to give it as well. So that allows someone to be able to. They're starting the conversation with me, right? I had already said I had cold call and cold email. So when they send back and message back, they're the first one to really send that message, which is, hey, thanks for endorsing me, Joe. Happy to do it. Hey, quick question for you. This is where I can ask a qualifying question. I can learn more about them because everyone wants to be able to talk about them, right? We all would love to be able to share. So if I ask a question, especially around their mindset, it allows me to understand them, to be able to then give value. So, like we have one question we did for Dan, which was, do you consider yourself an entrepreneur or a business owner with an entrepreneurial mindset? Because that allows me to know where they're at in their career, right? They're burning them in irl. They're still on their entrepreneurial stage or they've leveled up, they become that business owner, but they haven't lost that Entrepreneur mindset or third option, I work for somebody else. But it allows us to be able to understand where they're at and then provide value. Is it a webinar that we can actually offer them that's going to add value to them and if we educate them enough and inspire them enough, they will choose to work with us? Is it, hey, you know what? They're not our I O client, but most people go, not our client. Walk away. Well, you know what? Hey, I'd love to give you access to my book. You know, I got a free plus shipping offer, right? Boom.

You're able to.

Because always give value. We're trying to create advocates and treat people with respect or man, that's an amazing way to think about whatever that question might be. We have so many different ones we create for our clients. I'd love to be able to jump on a phone call and learn more on your thinking.

And by doing that thing.

Yeah, whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Because then you allow them to talk first. And we all know like, we get you and I just, let's say we just met, which we did, and we're getting in and you're like. And I go through. And I'm like, like, man, I just talked about myself the whole time. Matt, Joe, why, why don't you guys tell me about what you guys are up to right now? Yeah, I just took down not all my barriers of being sold and I've invited you in.

Right.

So that's how the whole process. And we're constantly doing that. We're doing, you know, for our clients. We're doing, you know, over a hundred, you know, engagements and connections a day. We're doing over a hundred endorsements a day. We're having these many conversations and drawing through and it's, it's not legion, it's business development because we're developing a relationship with seven to eight touch points with that person understanding it, making all about them and educating and inspiring them through great posts. That allows us to be able to rearrange how we work with everyone and everyone within our, our ecosphere of LinkedIn. Because now you're treating with them, you know, you've treated them with respect. You had many coffee conversations and, and we've done it within seven days. You know, to be able to do that kind of mini conversations, to be able to take someone from engagement to, you know, value add. That turns into an opportunity quickly. Now it can go longer, but it's, there's short tail and long tail opportunities. Because when you go through this whole Process, you have the people that are ready to be able to find out more and work with you or, and you're going to have the people that you educated enough that down the line because you, you just gave them value without asking that they're going to choose, they're going to go and tell 10 other people about you or they're going to go, man, I think I'm ready to go work with Matt and Joe now because they were just awesome. We had a great conversation. Even though it's going through a whole process.

This is interesting because I'm just thinking using this psychology which is very human, of course, it's just the human algorithm which I love and knowing that LinkedIn has a higher net worth basically or earnings on with the user types, I would assume you can really turn.

A new connection into a client very quick. If you're following this process here you can.

And we do it all the time. I mean we have, you know, like we've seen 40% conversion ratios and higher based on connection. I mean and we're talking, most of my clients have anywhere from $5,000 products or services on a monthly basis all the way up to $50,000. So you know, I mean we're able to go through that and they don't, they're not being sold. Right. And I mean it's like, look, as I ever tell everyone, like there's LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it's their built in CRM system, it's like $89 a month. LinkedIn is not a website to sell widgets. Right. If you're trying to sell a thousand widgets, don't do that especially don't go through my process. It's gonna, you're gonna exhaust yourself. Because $89, if one sale does at minimum cover that $89 a month, it's not the platform for it.

That's good, good criteria. Good criteria, yeah, because you're right. If you're trying to scale this thing and you have like a $20 ebook or you know, this, this little software thing that's a one time fee, then maybe not this, but you're right like for anybody with a coaching consulting offer, high ticket thing, I mean, no better way to actually kind of do an audit process through conversation. It seems like you can kind of skip a lot of stuff steps.

We've even done it reverse. We had a client of ours in here in San Antonio that was, they were like a security company but like physical security, like you know, screwed, you know, like doors and all the cameras and stuff. Like that. And they said, hey, we want to work with Whataburger. It's a big burger. You know, you know, you guys know. But, you know, here in Texas, and they've expanded a little bit. They're tasty. They're good burgers.

We've never been. Yeah, I've never.

They don't have them in San Diego, but I see them every time we're in Texas.

There you go. There you go. But they're like, hey, we want to work with them. So what we did was we were. We kind of reversed a little bit where we used Sales Navigator again, Sales Navigator is where most people go in and they're trying to understand and pitch and spam everybody, Hey, I see you're in marketing and you live in San Diego and you wear a black shirt. I'd love to be with, connect with you.

They must like my product.

Yeah, good question.

But we went back and so we use it for a social listening tool because, I mean, again, being able to go in and listen to people. So on Sales Navigator, you have people that post in the last 30 days what we did for that, we went to the company, whatever worker, their main page, we then went down to. It defines who the decision makers are. And then we started to then engage on their content and reach out and be able to engage on their content first. Everyone that was a decision maker, because you never know who's gonna be the right person, especially when they all get. Get in a meeting.

That's right.

They're like, oh, man. Yeah. I talked to Matt and Joe. Dude, those guys are awesome. And when that decision comes to effect, we were able to help them close a multimillion dollar deal within a matter of two months by doing this process because we engage with all the decision makers on their content first and reached out to appreciate them, have, you know, and go through that entire process. And I mean, that was a. A very large deal for every single location. Now on other parts, when you're doing smaller, you don't have to be able to go through every single decision maker. But I mean, it helps and it allows you to be able to cut through the process so much better.

Yeah. I also love this whole thing because I'm just thinking anyone who's struggling right now financially or they're looking for a reset of their business, especially right now in Covid times, this is a great way. If you have obviously the skills and can back it up and give value, why not give this a shot and just start.

You don't have to spend a dollar not at all.

You don't have to even have a network. It sounds like you just kind of, you just start using the listening tools, the sales navigator, which sounds brilliant for that use, not the use of criteria, and start spamming, not that use listening and then just engage one to one or maybe to a few people in a single company or trying to just create some relationships.

Yeah, that's the whole piece, right? That's one piece of it. The other piece is the posting, right? We want to continue to add value.

I'm a big fan of when you're doing that, creating that content, because everyone go, how do I create content? Well, you know, think about it this way, right? I'm a big fan of the 10, 2070 content rule. Have you guys heard that before?

No, I've not. What's this?

And I think this is really should be across all platforms. But LinkedIn works really well, right? So 10% of your posts need to be personal, right? Human beings connect with other human beings. We just talked about us having kids, right? That means that. But more than likely you don't need to know when my kids are going to school or even what age they are, but you do need to know that I have kids, right? Because like, oh, Matt and Joe have kids. I got kids. I bet you we're going to be able to work together better because we're going to relate more. So these are those people connect. I always call it my, my couch, my door to the couch mentality. Like if I tried to sell you a pen, knocked on the door, like, hey, I'm Josh Lee. I want to see. You're like, I'm done. But if we're sitting on a couch, I'm like, matt, Joe, dude, check out this pant. I don't have to say more than that because there's something that's connected us already that's put me on your couch.

I love that.

So that's where 10% of your posts need to be around that.

What's our 20%?

So 20% is company content, Right. Telling stories about how you've helped people, not how you can help people. Right? So because as I said earlier, you don't want to be that same person in the room, always talking about yourself. That's everyone on LinkedIn. They're always talking about themselves. So that's one of the biggest things that you want to be able to do there is really be able to, you know, give value. It's like kind of like, oh, I can teach you how to use, lose weight and you're like, you know, it's a 300 pound dude. Or you know, like, I can show you how I've helped my other clients, right? I mean, I love when you guys sent the whole thing like, hey, show me results, right? Like the podcast. Like, don't you see? Like, oh, I've helped people do this. You're like, show me for real, right?

That's right.

Don't go through it's. Is it, is it Pat Flynn's? He's always asked everyone exactly that. Look, show me your numbers.

Show me the numbers.

Your numbers then.

That's right.

That's where, that's where they're. So that's the same thing, right? Like, tell me stories. So 20% of your post be around your company and then 70% of your posts need to be adding value.

Right? You want to be an aggregator of value. We're always constantly, all of us are researching, trying to be the best in our industry. Think about Yahoo back in the day, right? It was an aggregate, a site that aggregated all the content that we wanted to see every day. So that's what we want to do, right? Like, if I see your podcast and it adds massive value, I'm going to share and be like, man, I saw this podcast with Matt and Joe and you know, they really did X, Y and Z. I think you should check it out. Because, look, if I educate you with someone else's content, once you decide that you're educated enough to make a decision, you're going to come back to me to be able to find the solution. And we want people coming back every single day, not just hearing the same stuff off. So that's the 10, 27, 10% personal, 20% company, 70% other. That adds value, not just your content. Because when I do a post and I share about you guys, I can tag each one of you, right? I can be like, oh, you know, I heard Matt and Joe talking to Brad with bacon wrap. You know, podcast being able to go in just because we were talking about earlier, like, dude, you guys, I love you guys talk about me so much.

Yeah, no, we definitely.

He is one of them.

You restricting his ego hard right now. So bacon rap business.

I hate myself so much for this right now.

Brad, go reach out and give him a hug. Virtually.

There we go.

You know, but I can tag that and then like his audience gets to see my post and hears me talk about those things. So I mean, I just, this process is so much easier. Like you, you'll have. It's Gary Vee does you know he's. He's doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on LinkedIn. And he's like, he's got his whole mentality of giving your. I think it's your $60, right? Oh, yeah.

Or something.

Every single day. Like, you need a comment. You know, everyone has their two, their two cents. So you need to comment on 80 people's posts a day. And I'm like, dude, who has time to make a relevant comment on 80 people's posts a day? Like, even if you hired someone. Yeah, you know, that's exhausting. That's why it's like, look, going through, engaging on the right people's content, going through this entire process, having your convers on the backside, adding value, not ever selling through your post. It's a much more. Just anyone can do it. Now can you do it at the fact. I mean, we have big, a lot of human beings on our side going through and being able to do the things that we do, but it takes a while. This is the human factor, right? I want people to understand, like, even with this, right? This is nature. Like, you don't have to go through and pretend like you're perfect. That's what everyone does. This perfect effin life. I mean, we all have issues we all go through. Sometimes I even do a spelling mistake for people to go in, like, hey, you misspelled something. Like, I know, thank you and I appreciate you for telling me for actually noticing. I'll put like little messages in my post. Like, hey, if you got to this point, just make sure, like, you know, say this exact word. Don't or do not comment on this post, only like it. Or do not like this post, only comment on it just to see what people will say. Or if you hit the like button, make sure you only hit something else, you know, so because you want this interaction, LinkedIn wants interaction. LinkedIn wants human to shine through. Like, that's the only platform that based on their algorithm. It's not based on how much money you spend. It's based around. A lot of. It's around the SSI score, the social selling index score.

Without going like super deep. Because I'm sure it's a rabbit hole. What. What is that? And if it's important, like, I'm sure it's important.

Yeah, no, I mean, it really is. I mean, let me see if I can even do something real quick.

Now. Am I allowed to share my screen or is that too crazy for a podcast?

It might be crazy with the bandwidth we're getting right now, but we can try.

You're right. You are allowed. Yes.

Never mind, man. Social Sense selling index score is based around four different things. Establishing your personal brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships. So their algorithm, first and foremost is a base around that. Like I said, nothing is spent around my money like Facebook. We spent years getting all these likes and now we actually have to pay to get in front of them. Right? So the difference on LinkedIn is it's all about how much you engage on this platform. And they have a score of 0 to 100. So like 0 to 30 is kind of like. Like think about back in the day, right? SAT's test. Like, if you put your name on the Test, you got 300 points. Like, yeah, you know your name. So that's kind of like LinkedIn. You created a profile.

Yay.

30 to 65 is like, you're engaged. You're like more of a voyeur. You look at people's stuff. You kind of engage here and there. And then like when you're actually doing the things like having conversations, engaging, adding insightful information, that's 70 and above. This is where you kick in that LinkedIn algorithm. And I mean, that's the first thing you want to make sure of. You're above that 70. You're doing the things that they're looking for. Because not only is there an algorithm, there's also real people. On LinkedIn's post, whenever something starts getting more, they'll actually have a real person go in and look at it and they go, is this adding value or just self promotion?

Wow. Is there a way to. Can you find that score for yourself?

So it used to be everyone can have it. They just recently changed, which is very annoying to only premium users that are actually paying something can actually access their score.

They're trying to make a little bit of dough. I can't blame them.

I mean, it's. You look at it with Microsoft bought them for $24.6 billion cash, one of the largest cash purchases ever, a couple years ago. They've had their highest return on any purchase in the history of Microsoft. So, I mean, look, they're doubling down, they're tripling down. I mean, they're investing money into this company. This is where you're going to see LinkedIn's. All that information is tied into everything. Microsoft, I mean, Microsoft, it just became like they're having some of their biggest profits in history now. I mean, they're. Dude, they're running this telescreens at you Know the NBA games, those are all Microsoft Teams.

Yeah. There was a whole crowd was just screaming.

That was awesome.

Yeah, it was.

Tried so hard to actually get on that screen. Didn't work.

I just love the. But it's like kind of a perspective change thinking about LinkedIn as a way to use LinkedIn. They're not going for dollars like Facebook or Instagram or all these other platforms or really those platforms the most, because they have such a fat algorithm around traffic and paid stuff. But yeah, you have LinkedIn. It's people. It's like you almost just have to look at yourself. You're like, cool. What's the algorithm? Okay, this is what I would like to see from other people and just.

Put it out there and you'll see that kind of stuff. So, I mean, this is how you can actually leverage this platform, man. I mean, there's so many different ways. I mean, when you're doing these things, not only are people gonna see, your posts are gonna go up. Right. You're gonna see more engagement kind of happening. Your post, that brings opportunity. I don't care about views. Right. Views are branding. That's great. But I care about people that take the time out to actually like or comment on my post. Those are the people I want to engage with because they've taken time out for me. They didn't just look at it and go, ah, cool, keep on scrolling. So, you know, and at the same point, when you do these things, you know, it's being able to be found in search results. Like, the more you do it, like, we've taken clients from like 40. You show up 40 times in search results on LinkedIn to 800 to 1000 times a week. That's opportunity being drawn to you without you having to actually go do that. Which, you know, we'd have to sit here for hours for me to go through all the different pieces. But like, your LinkedIn profile, that's the tip of your spear. That should do all the. Tell everything about you. Right. You know, the same thing that 10, 20, 70 allow that human piece to be able to come through too. Go through all the different pieces. Because when you educate people and you start having messaging with them, they're going to go to your LinkedIn profile. 80% of all B2B leads to B2B websites across all social media come from LinkedIn.

Wow. That is true. That's one of the first places I ever, when I meet someone, goes there.

Yeah. So make sure the profile is on point. I mean, make sure these things are there. Like, and tell a story, right? Like, you go, look at my profile, dude. I go back in. And you can go back in and see that I've got Chili's. I worked as a server at Chili's as my first job on there. People are like, why would you put that? Like, you know how many times people come in? Because I want to learn how to connect with people, right? They go, dude, you worked at Jilly's. Me too. Like, did you steal the tortillas?

That's a great idea, man. I gotta add Burger King. I was the fryer guy, man. I didn't want to make burgers.

I didn't all wake up and be like, oh, look, I'm a CEO now.

You see that?

You look on people's profile like, wait a minute, you had one job, and that was four years ago. How old are you?

Matt didn't have any of these, like, grounding jobs. You just end up.

You worked a legitimate job.

Going through. Add that stuff, man.

Tell a story.

This is all ways for people to be able to connect with you. Like, if you volunteer anywhere, like, you know, I've. I've gone on there, like, up until Covid, you know, I used to volunteer at Dell Children's here as the local Spider Man. Look, dude, I always spandex ready. You know, it was. I might have been a fat spider man occasionally, but, you know, it happens.

The kids have been flying around as much.

Yeah, but I mean, it allows you to be able to be allowed that you human side of you come in. Right. Like, just talk about your interests, talk about what you've done, be able to build that out. These are all pieces. Because, I mean, outside of every other social media platform, when people are researching, they're going to this platform.

Yeah.

If you're not taking time out to be able to spend on it, you're missing out. They're adding new features. You know, I did a post on it the other day, like, look, I'm here, like, this is what I do. I go through and research and understand, and I'm playing around with the entire algorithm, and I'm sharing freely all the time because I want us all to rise up, like, together. Because that's the only way we do it, is together, is to rise up. So you've got to be able to use this platform, engage with your audience, and get rid of the people that are doing it wrong.

Dude, you're making me pumped up on LinkedIn and just showing up differently online. I mean, it's telling the story. It's so true. Just call it out, just be you. And it's. I don't know, it's just such a perfect time because, yeah, LinkedIn I'm seeing on Google, you know, you look up someone's name, it's right there. It's not like Facebook's on there, but no one's really clicking on Facebook for this, let's be honest.

So, yeah, well, I mean, think about this. So, Matt, I push you, right, like Monday through Friday, right, do a post. But I mean, let me just tell you this stat. I'm going to make sure I just get it right. But there's over 9 billion content impressions weekly currently on LinkedIn. All right. If you compare it to Facebook or something, not much. But what I'm going to light your eyes up on is only 3 million of those people on LinkedIn out of the 700 million people that are on there are posting weekly. So that means 3 million people are getting access to 9 billion impressions.

You can't even pay for that.

So this is where everyone's missing out. They're like, wait a minute. If you're talking about 700 million people are on the platform only, on average, 3 million are sharing weekly.

9 billion impressions.

I mean, this is almost like going back to MySpace days for you. How do you arbitrage attention?

And that's it, though. And I mean, we. And we don't have to, right? Like, most of my clients, they're not looking to sell a thousand people. I mean, they're looking to be able to connect with the right people to be able to bring on and we go through and we're able to be able to help them. And it's, it's. And the reason why I do it, I'll tell you this story because it's one of those stories that just kind of sticks with me. Hopefully we don't get caught paused or something like that. One of those pieces. So I was working, when we were working with strategic coach and Dan, we got this one message back and this is my why, right? Like, yeah, the byproduct we do, we help our clients. We're able to educate people. I met, teach people about it. But we reached out and appreciated this one person on LinkedIn that like, one of Dan's posts and his response was just like, like made you stop. Because he goes, dan, thank you so much for this. You'll never know what it means to me. Today I had planned on being my last, but by you showing me to appreciate things that I took inconsequential Gave me new hope for this world. Thank you. I will continue to push forward.

And that's the thing is, like, if you're not engaging emotion like that, then you literally, Dan, saved a life and your help saved a life. And the fact that the little things.

Right, those are those things that you just don't know. Like, we forget to appreciate these people. So that's the biggest thing I want everyone to take away from. Right. The power that we all have with social media right now is so great. And especially the ones that we. The ones like us, that we want to be leaders, we want. We want to be change bigger. We want to create the new future. We have to remember that. We have to realize the people that help us be who we are today. And those are all our followers, those are all our listeners, Those are all our people that engage in our content, and we need to make sure that we acknowledge them from time to time.

Yeah, man. No. And we could show up everywhere, not just LinkedIn. So take this to LinkedIn, everyone listening and show up there. But, yeah, I mean, do it in your support desk, in your Facebook groups, online, anywhere, in your zoom rooms.

Yeah, we had like, we were talking to our friend Travis Houston. I mean, Travis went and took it. Took the same process after I did a training with him, and he did it on Facebook and on Instagram. He's like, holy crap, I'm.

This is.

Of course it's working. Why wouldn't it work? You know?

Yeah, you're just dealing with freaking algorithms. That's the only thing in the way, really, other than that we're all human, so, yeah. Same rules apply. Talk about standout authority, because that's your. What you're training and the ability that people can actually go deeper with you. I saw my buddy Mike Koenig's on there too, who I know works with.

A client of mine back in the day. Yeah. So, I mean, we've worked on all the different things. I mean, it's. It's been awesome, man. I mean, I've to be able to work with some of the people that we do. But I mean, that's not just it. Right? I mean, we work with anyone. If you're, you know, first and foremost, if you're adding value to this world, not just trying to monetize it, we can help you. Right. That's always the biggest thing that I say with everyone. Right. It's. And being able to go in if you have a high product or service that does these kind of things. You know, we work with standard Authority is here to be able to, you know, get rid of and humanize your brand and be able to, you know, educate, inspire and draw in your audience. And we go through that, you know, in different ways. We're doing that. Most people don't have the time to be able to do all those things that I laid out for you every single day we're going and we have human staff on our team to be able to go through and, you know, do that every single day. We're, we're, it's called our engagement engine. So, you know, we're running that engagement engine on the backside with our clients and you know, it's great. I mean, we get, we get to be able to do it. We see the impact that going on. We be able to help our clients dramatically, you know, really be able to access those right people on LinkedIn, those right connections, and be able to not just do lead generation, but actually business development on that side. And that's the difference of what we're doing at Standard Authority. Right. I do run a masterclass here and there. We've actually got one starting December 1st. I ran it for my birthday, just had my birthday and my anniversary and Halloween all in like one week. So there are people like, how long ago was this podcast? You guys like, don't, don't mention dates.

Yeah, whatever. It doesn't matter. Out the window now.

Yeah, but you know, it's like, so we do the master class occasionally too. And that's just a six week course that we take people through once a week and really take them through all the process to make sure they get educated enough to understand all the different aspects. It's like a LinkedIn 102. But I mean, those are the two different ways that we really work with our clients. You know, either we're. I've been blessed, right? Like I said, like there's no one at Dan's, no one. He's never allowed anyone else to be him online. And you know, being able to be that person, to be able to come in and do that, it's an honor. And you won't see me. Yeah, I'll talk about a little bit here and there and some of my clients, but you're not going to see me post online about it. You're not going to see ads about me online. Like, only way that anyone ever, we ever work with Owen is 99% of it's referral or they've heard me on a podcast. They reach out like, hey, can I, you know, connect? And like, if Someone wanted to connect with me on LinkedIn, like, please, God, tell me. Like, you. You loved all our breaks and, you know, in the podcast, you know, technical difficulties or, you know, my hair or whatever it is, you know, it's like, yeah, give me something that you learned from this podcast. Because I want everyone to be able to connect, right? Follow me, connect with me, reach out, send me a message, because I'm adding value there every single day. People that want to get there faster are the ones that want. That will work with us, and we'll help them be able to get there together.

Nice. So, yeah, check Joshua B. Lee out on LinkedIn and standout authority.com. anywhere else that would be a good spot.

You know, those. The main things the. The. I think the. The master class is@so authority.com.

Cool. Okay.

So. So authority.com.

So authority.

It's really more like SOA. And. But again, this is where my wife kind of gave in. You know, Sons of Anarchy back then, I was like, oh, it's gonna be amazing. She's like, no.

I'm not gonna have one of these shirts.

It'll be like, you know, we'll get leather jackets. And she's like, now get the cuts, man.

I love it.

Who's the new guy? When they. They dubbed the new guy the kid in the. In the biker crew. It's been so long since I watched.

It's been a while. I enjoyed the show, but.

Yeah, okay, we'll leave it there then.

They have, like, probies or something like probation. I don't know.

There we go.

Yeah, probies, you're right.

But, yeah, I wanted to just give you, like, a public shout out for hanging with us and being a cool human on this show because of all the said technical difficulties that hopefully our Jacob, our editor, has worked out. So no one knew that we had difficulties until right this moment when you said it earlier. Thank you, man.

So make sure everyone to send Jacob a thank you card at.

He's gonna need, like a week. A week off or something. It's not that bad, but I just wanted to acknowledge you because, yeah, I mean, anyone who's, like, for your true character and just what you do into the world, I mean, it's. It shows here in this interview, but also the results, too. So appreciate you.

I appreciate it. Had a blast. And hopefully we can if we have to. We'll just, you know, have a couple more of these and we'll put them all together to make one final pie.

If we have to, man. But thank you. And we'll hopefully see you in San Diego kind of soon. Maybe.

Hopefully.

Yeah.

I mean, I'll give you guys a call. I mean, it seems we'll have to make sure. I'll just hit map add up on Pokemon. Like, hey, there you go.

There you go.

Yeah, we can all. We could go do a raid together somewhere.

Oh, yeah.

I want to be the guy filming the two of them being weird and then.

And just realize that even though we download these apps for our children, they might. You might not see them always around us, but they're there somewhere.

Yeah.

I still bring the app home and show off to my kids the Pokemon that I did catch. So there you go.

Gotcha.

All right, Josh, man, thank you, my buddy. It's been awesome.

Have a good one.

No worries, guys. We'll talk soon. Bye.

Bueno. Hello. Hi there. Thank you for translating.

Yes. I'm going to be in Mexico next week, so you're helping me. Actually, by the time people hear this, it will have been a few weeks ago.

How was your vacation, Matt?

I was amazing.

It was amazing. Yeah.

I mean, study the whole time.

You're going to jinx.

Kids were behaving perfectly the entire time. The travel was easy. They actually got us there early.

Yeah. No covids. No Covid.

Nope.

That's good.

Everything went good.

That's good. How many margaritas did you have?

I lost count after, like, seven.

That's fine. Did you black out this time on the beach with your buns up?

I blacked out on day one and came out of it on day eight.

Your buns must be very red.

Yeah, yeah, that time. Remember?

Yeah. They frown on sunbathing nude, though.

It was that one time, though, but. Ah, we'll forget about that anyway. All right.

Joshua B. Lee.

Yeah. Talking about Mr. Josh.

Yeah. So that was an interesting episode. Should we tell him the truth?

Should we? I don't know, Matt.

Or should we lie?

Let's lie, obviously, because that's what we do best.

I mean, that's what the whole conversation was about, was how much we lie to people.

Yeah. That's the point. Right? That's my takeaway. Thanks, Josh. Just kidding. That's a joke. Both of those are jokes. Your cheeks weren't red at one time.

I haven't even been on my vacation yet.

I know.

No, but while we were interviewing with Josh. So, long story short, my Internet went out yesterday and we use a company that will remain nameless. Or should I name it why?

Cox?

Yeah, we use Cox Communications.

And it was.

And I had a horrible Experience. They sent me out a new modem. The new modem didn't work, and I actually spent about four or five hours yesterday on the phone with Cox trying to get my Internet working all the.

Way up until, like, late last night.

All the way up until 12:30am and I got it.

I was very asleep.

I got it working to where the Internet was working at, like, a trickle of my Internet speeds. And we thought, let's try the podcast with this.

That was with their top of the line modem they sent you, too, right? Yeah.

And so anyway, we had a lot of Internet tech issues throughout this one. Hopefully. I'm assuming Jacob did a pretty decent job of making them fairly seamless, but I don't think we're gonna make them all super seamless. In fact, there was one point in there where I think I'm gonna leave it in because he was talking about how, like, these tech glitches just sort of make you human. They make you realize that this kind of stuff does happen. And I'm like, I think I might leave that in there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's big. Big. I already gave a shout out to Josh while he was on, but. Shout out to him because he was being super cool with. Literally, it was like. I think it was five different times. It glitched up, and then he was just cool. And. Yeah, he just checked his notes. Yep. It was five. It was five. Oh, man. Yeah. But Josh was just super rad, and. And it honestly shows that it was the first time we met him, so I was like, this is cool. All right. Respect. And it goes all the way down to what he presents as an offer and how he serves his clients, too, and people. It's like, yeah, cool. That was a good test of character.

Thanks, Josh.

Oh, man.

No, but he was a great conversation. I'd like to probably have a round two with him someday in the future without all the text. Text tech glitches. Because, you know, when. When all the tech is in your head and stuff, it makes it a little bit more difficult to keep the conversation flowing when you're talking and then all of a sudden, he can't hear you and he's going, hello? You still there?

Hello?

Oh, man.

So I think around 2 might be. Don't get me wrong, I think the content in this episode was amazing, but I think we can have another even better conversation with him without the tech issues.

I hear you. Yeah. Yeah. We're. We'll figure something out. Some alien technology.

Yeah.

Can we.

The new recording studio. We're literally gonna go look for.

After we record this, we should do. Could we do VR recording with podcasts? Like, have you ever thought about this? And then we can make a badass set that has like a video of us in whatever set we want. We can have the most like upgraded podcast looking set.

Would that be the most authentic thing for us to do?

No, because we'll have a new set every time and it'll be customized to whatever is happening in the moment. And it'll be.

I thought you were going in a different direction with the virtual reality. I was thinking like you and I record in a room and then there's a third camera and listeners could sort of virtually be in the room with us while listening to the interviews. So like imagine like listening to a Joe Rogan podcast and you're in his little like red bunker thing in one of the chairs, like looking at the conversation.

I like that even more. No, I like it both. Because we can make the. That it's super authentic.

Yeah. I don't know.

And every once in a while we just look over at that camera and be like, what do you think?

What's up? From the right over there? Yeah, no, this is, I don't know, something to think about. I'm just thinking. I'm like, man, because yeah, it's different with communication. Matt and I have chat. You and I have chatted about this for a while. It's like, man, when we're in person, you and I just doing this, there's this cadence and there's no delay. Even if it's like a microsecond delay. On Zoom. You feel it.

Yeah.

And I think Zoom has these auto like audio buffers or something that like if you try to say something while they're talking, it's gent just block your microphone.

Yeah.

And then they're always like, wait, what, what, what? And it's like, you would never get that in person.

Yeah.

So it's. And then with video it's different than just audio. And then, then you bring in the lags where they can't even.

Yeah, we're gonna. We gotta get this dialed in. We've been doing this VR, VR for 10 years now. This podcast before. And this was probably one of the worst sort of tech gremlin days that we've had.

Yeah.

Anyway, we are going to go look at a podcast recording studio actually after this. So we're trying to get another setup that will be a little more consistent. But let's talk about LinkedIn and human to human connection. And Joshua B. Lee.

Okay, we will and we shall.

It always makes it so much harder when I say, let's talk about that. Because that transition is so harsh that it's like, like it makes it hard to just smoothly flow into it.

Yeah, I know what you're trying to get at there. I'm like.

Gears are switching in my brain. Yeah. So Dopamine dealers. I thought that was a funny title.

I wrote Become a Dopamine Dealer. That's like the very first note at the top of my notes here. Because I'm like, that might be the title of this episode. I don't know if it is or not, but something to do with Becoming a Dopamine dealer.

It would be an intriguing hypothesis. Headline. That's how to be a dopamine dealer on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I don't know. But basically, yeah, the whole point of, like, yeah, you want people to get attracted to your messages, actually stand out and all that. But really, at the end of the day, if you flip it, yeah, you're just going for the dopamine. Like a lot of folks, like, you don't want to have that be. The metric, of course, is like, what are my likes? What am I? You know? But you want engagement, but you want true connection.

Yeah, Well, I mean, the dopamine hit is essentially the opening the door to start a communication. Right. So if you're going around and you're seeing other people's posts and you're liking them and you're commenting them, you're giving them that dopamine hit, which makes them feel good. And then if they hear from you in the DMs, now you've given them some dopamine hits already. So when they do hear from you, it's kind of a pleasant surprise to hear from you kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. And it's. And I'm just thinking of, like, there's always this other perspective. You could just take it as like doling out dopamine, even for yourself, dealing it to yourself, and getting addicted to.

Liking my own stuff. I already do that.

Oh, you do that. But no, just obsessing over the likes. But that's how you get your value. And I think he was kind of saying that as well.

Your value isn't in that, of course, because you're not counting likes. You're actually trying to engage with people on the other side and have a good, good connection with them. And it could be. I mean, shoot, you could probably have like three likes. But if those people, if you further a conversation with them, then that's the true value there. Yeah. I don't know him is interesting because he's definitely been on the other side and has kind of nice story arc, I would say, to this whole thing.

Yeah, Josh. Well, I also, when we kind of talked a little bit about, you know, if, you know, how should I focus on growing a LinkedIn account?

Right.

Because my approach has always been just, hey, if you submit to be my friend on LinkedIn, what do they call connection?

Right.

If you submit to be a connection with me on LinkedIn, I'm just like, cool. Another friend, I get to collect. And then, of course, the next thing I know, my DMs on LinkedIn are just a fricking trash can full of spam, basically.

Pretty much, I would say 98% of that is.

It's a dumpster fire full of spam.

Light it up. Yep. I mean, that's. Yeah. And so don't restart a new account. Don't make a Mateo Wolfie or something like that.

Wolfe.

Wolfe. True. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. With a tilde at the end or something. No, don't do that. Don't do it. I know you were about to, but. But yeah, you could revitalize your account. And I like the fact that he. It's not necessarily for everyone. You know, the fact that. But you're going to have to do a lot of work if you have a product that's like 15 bucks. We're not going to go do that to try to sell our newsletter, but we might go on LinkedIn and do that to spur up more podcast listeners. And especially once we have our new email system dialed in by Joe Kearns and Mike Alvarez over at Magic Marketing. Whatever. It's got to give a shameless plug. But maybe they'll charge us less if.

We keep saying their name.

That's right. Joe Ernst. Mike Alvarez. You just deducted another percentage off.

Wishful thinking.

The funny thing is, I know they are literally listening to this right now, probably laughing, hopefully laughing.

Nod your heads, boys. Come on, fellas. I love it. Ah, we need to get those guys on the show. God, we're tangent y today.

We are very tangent y today.

It's all good. But yeah, the fact that like, like LinkedIn. I like the fact qualifiers. Hey, you got a higher net worth or earner that is on LinkedIn, so know your audience and if your audience is there, you know, you probably don't need all these tricks and gimmicks and all these things to. To try to woo them in. Give Me. You like shaking my hips? You are trying to woo Matt in, but, like, there's specific posts to make, you know, he said 10% personal, 20 company focus, and then 70% value.

But you don't need to be a trickster and try all these marketing gimmicks. Just have a true connection. If you have a product that's going to pan out for your efforts there on LinkedIn.

Yeah. No shenanigans.

You're really creeping me out.

Every time I shake my hips, Matt gets uncomfortable. I do just got to shake him the whole time.

I just get uncomfortable when you're in the same room as me.

How does this pink microphone cover look to you?

The essence you give off makes me uncomfortable.

Is that my bo?

Yeah, that's what I call your bo, Your essence.

Anyway, I feel like we should wrap this up.

Let's go ahead and wrap this one up. I think we're both at that point where we're just delirious.

I feel great. I'm just trying to creep you out. Yeah.

All you had to do was show up today.

Job done. Where did I take a nap? Check out. All righty.

Well, go check out Joshua B. Lee stuff. Look him up on LinkedIn. Tell him that.

Tell him we said hi.

Tell him we said hi. Tell him you heard him on the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Yeah.

And then his company is Standout authority. So standout authority.com. and then he does these master classes every once in a while. This episode is coming out a little later than when he said his next one is, but you can check out when his next one is at so.

Authority@So authority.com.

So authority.

That is so Authority.

Hey. Yes, it is.

All right. And also, get the notes, man. We're having a good time today. See, our authentic selves are coming in. Shining twinkle stars. We are. I don't know. Isn't that. That's that Molly Mahoney thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what that. She says sparkle. Yeah, that's it.

Isn't she the one who said, like, tacos full of awesome or something like that?

Or different person, I think.

No, it was Molly.

But was it Molly?

Yeah, she said something about, like, a taco. Awesome taco or something.

Noah Kagan.

No, Noah talks about tacos a lot.

He loves tacos.

Yeah.

You know who else likes tacos? Me. Me. But also, I don't know. We all like tacos. We all love food. But we took the notes for this episode for you, not of this banter section. Because it'd be useless. You could burn it for kindling next time. But don't do that because we didn't take notes for you. You want to get the notes over@flowchartgroup.com and if you're there two weeks of this episode going live, we'll get all those notes. You'll get all those notes from Joshua's episode and us talking on LinkedIn and how to basically be humans to all other humans and not do what Matt's doing right now. So don't be like Matt. Go to flowchartgroup.com but I'm in that.

Group, so be like me in that sense.

Yeah, you just don't use that redirect. So if you go to flowchartgroup.com, you'll get the notes and join a cool group and you'll see Matt doing weird things in the group.

You're dissuading people now. But anyway, let's talk about Easy Webinar.

What kind of weird stuff you do in the group yet until they're in there. So it's for them to check out. It's free.

It's true, I guess. Open that loop. Easy Webinar is an awesome webinar platform.

That it is. And I feel like just saying that they do webinars is an understatement. I say that it allows you to be more human. It does two more humans all at once. Be a scalable human. But you can also show up in different modalities where said humans on the other side of your webinars. In this case, you are using a webinar. Easy Webinar actually allows you to distribute that webinar in numerous ways. And basically all the ways that you can think of webinars being distributed and probably some that you have not Automated, live, hybrid. And then I know there's more. I think there's about seven or eight types that are defined.

What was that one? That old platform where like, it was like pre zoom.

No other platforms can be said during a sponsored.

But it had like the four squares and there was like a person in each square.

Like that was called Family Feud. No, that's not.

No, it was like Babel or something like that.

Okay.

Something like that. Anyway, it does that.

Oh, yeah. Kind of like zoom in a way, like when you're in a grid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. It actually does have a live view. Maybe that's what we should try for our podcast on some of these tech Gremlin days. Hey, let's give it a shot. Actually never tried that for podcasts, but that's not endorsed to say use this for podcasts. But just know that Easy Webinar is more than just hey, slap up a webinar and then you get to do that. It's like a replacement of a lot of different things that you might already be paying for. But either way, if you want to go scale be human to human with folks, I would say Easy webinar is where you want to check it out. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle they are hooking you up with a fatty discount fatty and that is a special offer for you. So that's easywebinar.com hustle and share this with anyone that likes to talk to humans and hear a lot of rambling at the end of an episode. We would appreciate that.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode.

Of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for.

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