Part 2 - Boost Your LinkedIn Followers By 300% In Just 4 Months

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Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

When you started running, you had to prove to yourself that your, that LinkedIn was going to work. I mean, you know, when you started this thing, it was a theory. It's just like starting a business. It's a theory. And I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to see if it works, see if there's a demand for it. And then you do that with your marketing. And in this case, we're talking about LinkedIn as a marketing target. And so you launch into LinkedIn and you ran some exp. I assume you ran some experiments about different kinds of posts, frequencies and how to do it. And so did you start with the model that you have now? Because right now it's basically to summarize, it's a photo, not a video, and some texts, something to read, basically. Right?

Yeah, exactly right. I would go further than that and I would say that every post should be an experiment. The way you, I think you win at LinkedIn is that you basically have this relationship with the algorithm. The algorithm is constantly evaluating whether you as a person should get impressions and whether the thing you've just posted should get impressions. And there's no rulebook for the algorithm. And LinkedIn don't publish what you need to do. But if you have awareness and you make every post an experiment, you can learn about what LinkedIn values for both of those things, whether your profile is authoritative, whether the post is good. And then if you compound a 0.5% learning every time you post and you're posting every day, in three months, you're going to be a lot better at posting.

Yeah. And so if we're giving a clue for your editors that are looking for a sound bit or a short video clip to take out of this, it would be one heading would be why every post should be an experiment.

You are absolutely nailed that, Larry.

And so how are you experimenting right now?

I am experimenting with the image. So the posts that like really popped off for me in the past three months have been, as you mentioned, text posts about culture, remote work management, and an image of me and sometimes the dog. And it works. But some feedback or criticism I get sometimes is that the picture has nothing to do with the post, which is valid.

Yeah.

Now, one of the things I learned early on is that the algorithm does like when there's a person especially quite close up in the picture. And so I did a post on Monday on about 10 million impressions now. And one of the big reasons is that my face is quite big in the post. And so I would say 80% of my posts have just picture of me sometime the dog. Because of that reason, now I was in Italy for two months of this year and so and my girlfriend's also a photographer and so we got a loads of great pictures. We were doing loads of stuff and being in Italy is amazing for pictures. Now we're back in London, we don't really do that much stuff and I'm running out of pictures. So I'm like, what else can I do to for pictures for these posts? And so then I study other people that get a lot of attention. This is like the key thing, they're not listening, that wants to win on LinkedIn. Just follow like 20 people that have over 20, 50,000 followers and then just look at what they're doing and adapt it. And so what I'm actually going to test hopefully tomorrow is a new type of image where I'm paying someone, a freelancer to hand write, make it look really pretty, like the big message from the post. And I'll write the post and then it'll be like a handwritten image picture of a handwritten note that's going to be on the post. And so that's the experiment that hopefully is going to happen tomorrow and we'll see if it, if it works.

Handwritten rather than typed or.

Exactly. So she is. So I literally gave her the post and gave her the thing and she's going to. I'm actually going to check to see if I've got it back yet and hasn't been delivered, otherwise I could share it with you. But yeah, basically handwritten, like the big message handwritten on a piece of paper.

Have you run experiments with picture of you versus you and the dog and then you versus you and the girlfriend and then you versus the girlfriend and the dog.

So the girlfriend has actually only ever been. Oh, you're right, she's been on one with me and she's been. Been on one with the dog. The one with her and the dog actually did perform really well. The one with me didn't perform so well. So. But I don't know if she's that keen on me, like using her to in the algorithm and pick up impressions, you know.

Yeah, it gets into other, other considerations there. But now when, you know, talk about impressions, you know, when you started this. How many months have this, has this been a program, you know, a focus? And then how has, how has your, your followers, your subscribers, your impressions jumped in that period of time?

It became a real focus in January. And in January, I had roughly, I'm going to get the exact data up 25,000 followers. As of today, I have 110,000. So we 4x this January and in.

Terms of depression, January, February, March, April, May, just starting June. So it's a little over four months. Four times 400% increase.

Exactly. And then the number of impressions in January was 115,000. In March, we hit 13 million. April and May were nine and a half million. And I think June is going to be more like 20 million.

And have you monitored, do you have other kind of monitoring that you've noticed, like calls for business and, you know, clients like that? Because I know, I know that right now that you, you don't have to market. I mean, you got people calling you.

Yeah, but I think that's largely down to stuff like this. I mean, yeah, I, I would say that because our sales process is people request a proposal, then we jump on a call. We don't actually do any outbound. And so for the lifetime of the company, up until a year ago, the percentage of people that would come and say, because we asked people how they hear about us when they request a proposal, the percentage of people that would say LinkedIn was probably like 5%. And then I actually have been posting on LinkedIn for like two years. And so, and it's been very slowly growing. And so maybe it went up to 10%. But now in these last three months is probably like 30%. So that's on the customer side, on their hiring side, in the past five, six months, we have 10x the amount of applications we get.

And so when you say you take half of your time on this, is it, you know, like pod, you know, in a podcast situation, you try and bunch them up in, you know, do a couple in a day at least. You know, and you know, you, you get your, it's not like every day can be interrupted with a podcast. You know, you try and batch process. In any business, you're trying to batch process. And so in terms of batch processing, these. Preparing your posts for LinkedIn is that once a week, once a couple of times a month. You know, you have to get your mind into it. You know, it's like you don't have to switch, you know, when you're CEO, you know, got a lot of hats that you're wearing. And you can't make flippant decisions. You know, whatever the issue at the moment is, you got to give it your total focus. And so you can't be doing a post and someone comes in with a complicated problem and you, you know, call a shot. It's like, oh, I forgot the most important thing there. So when you dedicate your, you know, you. You slip into posting mindset, how does that work and how often is it?

Yeah, you're totally right. It's once a week. I'll spend most of a day, maybe six hours, like, researching and writing the posts, and I'll get between 7 and 10, like, 80% done. And then each morning when I wake up, I'll select the post, do the remaining 20%, select the image, and post it.

So you're doing this on a daily.

Basis, One post seven days a week? Yeah.

And so as opposed to twice a month taking a couple of hours and knocking out 15 posts and say, line them up and here's 15 pictures and 15 posts and turn it over to somebody else to put them out there. You're not doing it that way. You're not doing a batch process.

I would say I'm batch processing it. Well, partially, but on a weekly basis and only to like, 80%. So still is some daily work. Yeah.

Now, are you actually typing them up and posting them or you got an assistant that you're. You're doing?

I'm doing 100% of the work, yeah.

And why is that?

I think to really make a social profile work, there have to be. I don't think it needs to be 100%, but I think there has to be significant input, at least at the start, from the person. I think when there's a number of examples of content that's worked, then it can be operationalized and potentially handed over to someone else. So I think that's coming. But it could be, like, in a month or so, once I've really understood how this thing works, and then we can hopefully drastically reduce the amount of time I spend on it by having someone else manage it.

Yeah.

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Notes Foreign can we, you know, take and look at this and as a process and kind of point out to people that that's pretty much how anything new works. If you're a CEO or you're designing a company or designing a new operation because you're always, you're always designing, there's always new things. If you're a CEO and you're expanding business because you got to grow or die and there's only so much growth that will come by expanding what you're already existing in place. You know, you got to have a new system, you got to have some people, a new division, a new beachhead, new product line or something like that. And in the beginning there's really no other successful way to. And I, I heard this, you know, with this kind of came up in your, your podcast with Alan Pence is other the personal involvement because in the beginning you have to get your, you have to become an expert to some extent in what works, what doesn't work before you can design a system to turn it over to somebody else. And then when you do that and you get someone else doing it where you can quickly keep an eye on it and know this is being done right or this, you know, you got to, you know, if you offload it someone else, you've got to be able to keep an eye on it instinctively. You know, you can't like okay, I'm going to go into, look at all the lines and no, you got to know it well enough to where you can instinctively look at it and say no, this is not working, problems probably over here or whatever. And you can't, you, you're not going to have that instinct unless you spend time doing it yourself. Would you say?

Totally agree. I don't understand how somebody that doesn't have a good grasp of the work can manage anybody that does. Yeah, it's just not like you're just not going to know if they're like how they're doing or if what they're saying is true. So I think this worked out really well that I had to do every role in the company. So now I can be a pretty competent CEO because I can probably jump in and do pretty much everything now. If we had more money at the start then maybe I wouldn't have gone through that process and I would have hired people where maybe I wasn't. And I would have like missed out on getting that experience. So I think that's a hidden benefit of bootstrapping.

Well, the other thing, Tom, in my experience, when you have the money, whatever, I've been usually disappointed when I brought in someone who's going to be an expert to solve my problem in whatever area. It's like, oh great, this guy knows this, he knows that he's done this, he's done that, my problem's over. We finally got this guy and then he turns into such a whopper of a dud, you know, he said, I don't know what, you know, he sit in there, you could be eating donuts for a month and be more productive than whatever in the world he's been doing because nothing, you know, and, and when you hire the expert, you tend to leave them alone, like, oh, they're the expert. I don't know what they do, but I'm gonna, you know, I'm not gonna micromanage something I don't know. And so you, they go out there and just drive you right into the dirt. That's been my experience. You know, it's, you know, if you can grow your own or if you can have expand as a natural outgrowth of, of, of what you're doing, it always works out better because you know what's going on.

The other kind of way we've expressed our fame is that we haven't ever hired anyone for somebody that isn't an entry level role. So those three people in the leadership team I mentioned all joined as account managers in the past two to three years and then they rose through the ranks and now we only promote internally. So the pro of that is that we kind of like the person is tried and tested, they fit the culture and it's worked very well. Now the downside is that maybe we are missing out on some expertise of someone that's run a sales team or run an OPS function, but it seems to be working okay at the moment.

Yeah, if you're growing, you know, and that's the thing about as a CEO, you have to be the one to grade yourself, you know, self edit your performance. And if you're growing, you've got to pretty much say, I'm doing enough of the right things. If we're growing, you know, and where you get critical on those things, it's when you stop growing and you don't know why don't you think?

Totally agree, totally agree. And we've had months where we've been flat for two or three months. And yeah, you really have to dig into everything, dig into all the data as the founder, CEO, and try to come up with hypothesis on what else could be changed in order to get a different outcome.

Now, I'm going to give you something I thought about when this is the way I operate and I was going to join your conversation with Alan Bell. That's. But the method that's worked for me, Tom, is when you're growing, you know, you brought those people entry level and you train them up and you got, you know, they're running things. What we always did, the approach we had was basically whatever you do, that's. You take the most important thing and you try, you develop seven people, seven to 10 people. Jesus had 12 disciples, but he was God, he could keep up with more. But if you go, if you get seven to 10 people that you train up to do a certain account manager, you know, over this, that and the other, what you do, then you're not limited by one or two or three. If you have, if you get seven to 10, then you can get them to compete against each other. And you're now running the competition. Now you grant. The idea was if you get seven to 10 people to do what you do, you have promoted, you earn the right to promote yourself up to managing those seven to 10 people. And you can get them, you can keep them on track, beating heads against each other there. And the thing is, from that, there's no, you know, you challenge them to develop teams underneath them and that's where you get. You can go from 7 to 10 to 20 to 30 wide. Yeah, know. And you're not really limited because you're, you're 7 to 10. If they're training other people, they're learning, you know, if they're training other people, they're going to be learning. And so. And then they're competing against each other. That keeps them on their toes. And so that's a way to kind of keep things bubbling underneath in terms of growth. And you can pretty much figure out, either you'll figure it out or they'll go find the answer somewhere else and bring it into the group. And you can keep growing internally that way. Anyway, that was going to be my conversation, my additional conversation.

And then would you use the carolist or the stick or combination of both to incentivize performance in that pool of seven to 10 people?

Right. Because what will keep a company honest is internal competition, of course, external competition, because that monitors you on the possibilities of what you could be doing because other people are doing it, and that's an inspirational thing to the whole group. But to keep people honest inside the internal competition is a great. You know, it's like Napoleon said, there's. There's no telling how many wars have been won with a few pins and ribbons, you know, and so as you go out and you have, you know, you had to get yourself convinced to put the time into LinkedIn, and you couldn't have done that if you didn't have an idea, a method that you believe would work. Did you? How did you get that method in your mind? Because now we're talking about, you know, you've offloaded some of your responsibilities back in January, you freed up your schedule, but. And you. Beyond that, Tom, you got yourself excited about this new venture. You, you had to be excited about doing this in LinkedIn because of something you saw or had had a potential, otherwise you wouldn't have done it. And so what did you see? How did you get to the point where you were convinced that. That, you know, in other words, for you to be the leader into this new marketing thing. This is a key piece. I'm excited about leading in it. Not that, you know, hiring someone to do it, you know, because a lot of people say, okay, this is great LinkedIn, I'm going to go hire a social media person, and I promise you there'll be a dud. You know, I, I hate to say it, but God almighty. Every one of these experts, social media experts, most of them, you know, turn into duds. I'll have people that'll have. I, you know, there'll be people I try and get for my podcast, and I'll say, this guy is great. He's unbelievable. You know, I'd love to get him on the podcast. And he'll say, well, call, like, you know, talk to my social media person. She'll arrange it all. Okay. You know, like two years, and I'll even go back into the office, say, where is the social media part? Oh, we talked to her again. She said, yeah, I hadn't gotten around to it yet. Jeez. And. But you didn't do that. You said, I'm going to lead the way. And that's, you know, we. We all should learn from that. But somehow, you know, we're not going to lead the way if we not convince. And what I'm wanting to happen from. One of the many things I want to happen from this hour is that people get excited about this as a possibility for them expanding their brand on LinkedIn and could be a fun thing for them. So how did you get to that point?

I think I looked on the platform and I saw a number of people who were getting like big numbers, like 1, 10, maybe even 100 million impressions organically. And I didn't think that there were that much like, because you need two things. You need like the ideas and then you need the ability to package those ideas up in the content. And I didn't think that any of these people were like that much better than me on either of those two points.

Right.

And so then I was like, okay, well let's try this out. Let's do three months, 50% of my time and see if I get enough feedback that I should invest more.

And of course, you know, you've got a good looking dog and so.

The dog helps. The dog has been a cost center for six years.

Okay.

And only in the past six months has she started to repay the investment.

Well, thank goodness, you know, your efforts, your investment has paid off there. Thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you.

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