Linkedin tips with Steve

Can you see them when they come in?

I've got recording going. Okay, and then we will go— um, okay, and then we'll go— now we're live. Lee Almond is in. Did you like— do I need to let them in or are they just in? They're, they're in. So then, okay, go to— okay, let's see how I do this time with Facebook again. You guys ready in hopes that I do this right? This is hilarious. Next, we'll see if I'm going to be publishing to myself or to the masses. I really thought last time it was public. Okay, let me do that. And okay, and then we'll— oh, title. Wait. Oh, add a title. What the— okay, um, okay. And then, I don't know, Steve, this is new to me. So, okay, we're live. It says we're live on Facebook, we're live here. I think we, we did it.

Can attendees post and let you know they can see us and hear us, or—

Yeah, I'm hoping. We'll see. But we can just say welcome to, uh, our Legal Accounting Wednesday, and our special guest this week is our dearest friend and member Steve, whom we love and adore.

Hello.

And we're going to talk about some cool things that you've learned about LinkedIn and your journey with making this work for you as these tips and tricks that you've kind of the last, what, 3, 4 months now that you've kind of cured, which is really neat. And I know we have at some point Compliments of you in our mastermind group, we're going to have a really amazing special guest of yours come on and, and help us learn a deeper dive and really train us on some really fundamental, important pieces.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I've got a— I have a client and a friend. Her name is Miranda Vieira. She'll be joining us hopefully in November. And she is the owner of Denver Legal Marketing, which is a huge presence in our market here out in Colorado, and she's going national with some of her products. And she caters to law firms specifically, and she is a huge LinkedIn user and promoter and trainer. And, um, we will be bringing her in at some point. We just don't have the date yet. Sarah and I were just talking about it. But, um, I see that Brandy and Joy are here in the room.

Oh, awesome.

Oh yes, they attended the BKX conference in June and I was there with them as well.

Okay.

And they may recall that we had a presentation by somebody, uh, under the name of Chad Nicely who gave a presentation on how to get high-paying clients from LinkedIn. And, um, one of the things that Chad talked about during his presentation was taking a look at your LinkedIn SSI score. And if you don't know what that is, go out and do an internet search on how do I see my LinkedIn SSI score and take a look at it. And there's several components of it. And I took it all to heart during the convention. And my score was a dismal 10%. I remember getting on my phone at the convention and going, oh, my score is going to be awesome. Well, it just sucked. I was, I was at 10%.

Wake-up call.

Yeah, wake-up call. And so I started doing a lot of the things that he was talking about, and I came home and talked to Miranda, and she's like, okay, you're gonna do this, you're gonna do that. And we made a checklist of things. And it takes a while to get your score up. And I think probably that especially Brandy, I'll bet her score is super high because she's— she does a lot of things on LinkedIn. You'll see her in there. You'll see Tanya in there who's in our group.

Mm-hmm.

But my score today is 52%. And so I brought it up from 10% to 52%. And that was with a lot of work the last few months. And I'm in the top 72% now of my network. So that's real important. And there's, there's lots of different components that go into it. Establishing your brand, finding the right people. Engaging with insights, building relationships, and you get, you get different scores based on the things that you're doing in those components. As an example, I really want to focus on law firms. And you've heard me talk before when I get all excited about marketing and all of that, because I'm just one of those people that loves marketing.

Yeah.

You've heard me talk before about looking for the right kind of people, how important it is to have that niche, and then looking for the right kind of people in it, especially with law firms, having your niches within a niche. What kind of law firms do you want to work with?

And so— Yeah, the micro stuff that you get into as well. Yeah.

You know, for those of you who are in smaller towns and cities, don't discount that there aren't attorneys networking In your neighborhood and go on to LinkedIn, LinkedIn, and find who they are. Um, here, of course, I live in the Denver area and Joy lives in just north of Denver. We have a great opportunity here in that in Colorado we have the largest concentration of licensed attorneys in the nation.

That's amazing.

It's because of our lifestyle here. Everybody wants to live here. And so all these attorneys come move here, go to school here, stay here, and then they get out of school and cry because they're not making any money. Um, and there's a huge market here, and we have so many subgroups that are meeting— the Colorado Hispanic Attorneys Association, the Colorado Women's Bar Association. There are probably 20, 30, 40 subgroups. that are out there meeting not only in the Denver area, but Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Greeley, in the mountains on the Western Slope in Grand Junction.

Yeah.

And that just supports what I was saying a minute ago, that align yourself with your bar associations in your part of the country and do it through LinkedIn.

You have, you have to think bigger than, than you, like, as far as like, okay, your presence is this, Where— and, and you have to commit. So whatever you're gonna do, right, you have to commit to that medium or that, you know, find a, find a pattern to make it so that you can support yourself to do what you just did, which was— it's amazing— 10%. We are glorified, oh, I'm gonna be great, to, oh my God, I'm 10% now, I'm 50-something percent. That's awesome. But I think it— you look at your community like you're saying support your community in the niche or the micro niche that you want to do, and then make that commitment to that social output, whatever that medium is that you're going to do. Like LinkedIn is the one we're featuring today. So I love that.

Well, if you suddenly start following all these different groups in there and find out where the law schools are that are in your neck of the woods and start following them on LinkedIn and start networking with the students, it's really funny. when they're getting ready to graduate, they get really serious about bookkeeping and all the things that they didn't get taught in school.

Yeah.

And, you know, the thing that's— the thing that you want to do is, is you want to identify yourself as an authority and as a service provider on LinkedIn. What do you do? Um, and you're connecting with the real business owners. It's not, it's not just everybody that's in Facebook. It's really focused in LinkedIn. It's really provides us with an opportunity to capitalize on a focused network of people. I had a client or a potential client that I just didn't feel good about them, and I didn't take them on as a client. And they dogged me on LinkedIn for about 6 months. And finally, I did a project for them. And it proved that I didn't want to work with them. But, but we were able— but they gave me a great review on LinkedIn. from the project that I did for them. Yeah, you know, there's lots of different ways to, to work with LinkedIn and communicate with people and follow them and, and learn from them and, and, and get articles about— as an example, I posted this morning in Law Toolbox, and I'm sure several of you would know what Law Toolbox is.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

I, I worked closely with some people in Law Toolbox. They're based here in Denver. And I worked with them closely in a law firm that I was in and helped get them lots of leads with lots of other law firms, again, because I'm just a marketer type person. But they had a webinar that they just did, and I posted in LinkedIn about their webinar. And so, you know, we're all feeding each other in LinkedIn so much more than we are in other social platforms.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny if you think about the— what we used to think of it as And what it's becoming and what vehicle it can be. It is amazing. Um, it's just, uh, for those of you that are timid and like a little bit reserved by it, um, I think what you've just said in the beginning too was really important is, is find, uh, like the SSI score that you were saying, do the research there. Um, I'm sure there's some other great tips that you probably have and we'll be sharing in our mastermind group. So for those of you that are In our Friday sessions, at some point we're going to have a deeper dive in this, and this will be so exciting to have. But the value, probably the value of the content, the messaging that you're going to do, like you said. And what a great story that you had somebody that was in a position of not being very friendly to you to becoming a friendly place like that, because that's also a fear of people is these testimonials or these types of interactions. It's such an exposure. But I think if you start small and gravitate like you're doing and do these pieces, it's of huge value to what you're offering as a service provider and your knowledge. And, you know, it's— I get that we have clients who have people in office that are not as skilled as us that are doing the work. But how can we support them? What's important for us? How do we value add to the team? Those are other pieces that we can do. In, in our marketing that supports, um, supports the entire ecosystem of the community that we're serving, right? Like in any venture, you're gonna have that. I mean, it doesn't matter what niche you're in, you're gonna have those people, um, that you need to support on staff. A go-to person is what I like to call them. They're important to us. They're our conduit of info. So So, um, well, okay, so in your experience in taking this class, once you learned your score, was there something else that you did that was also as key to you to pay attention to or kind of tweak in how you interacted with LinkedIn?

Within LinkedIn, number one was working on my SSI score. So looking at the mix of people, not necessarily following people who are just friends of mine that I might share a woodworking idea with or a recipe with or what have you, but really focusing in on people within my niche because LinkedIn is for me a great business builder and that's where my focus is. Number 2, it's on my calendar every morning. I spend 15 minutes to 30 minutes in LinkedIn whether I post something or not. I'm just looking, but I'm contacting people. I'm reading things from the associations I belong to. And building my SSI score because I'm in there doing things. Yeah, um, I worked on my profile in there and changed it. That was a huge one. I couldn't wait to get home and do that.

Um, I love that.

And the big one is responding to people when they post something about you or they take a look at your profile. Now, this, this Chad Nicely that I mentioned, go out and do an internet search on him. Yeah, he did a great presentation at our convention. One thing that he recommended that I personally don't subscribe to is he said that if you're contacted by somebody on LinkedIn to immediately have a very super short, like 30-second video about yourself that you send to them and you do a call to action. I just, for me, that's not what I want to do. Yeah. You know, so I came home and worked about on the About Me section and told a story about myself without making a sales pitch. He recommended, and I followed this recommendation, about listing my skills, but choose about 5 of them, not 20 of them. You know, not that I know Word and I know this and I do that and I know how to do PDFs and I know You know, all these things, but to have 5 really key points about you and what you do in your business.

Okay.

And then getting existing people that are on your contact list on LinkedIn to give recommendations about you.

Nice.

And you can filter through those as well. Having your photo professionally done, you know, a really— that just pays off. A few years ago, I mean, I look like this wrinkled up old thing in the presentation. About 3 years ago, I went out and had a professional photo shoot done. And yeah, yeah, that's the photo that I use on Facebook and on LinkedIn and those sorts of things.

You touched on something I was thinking of, is which you want to be consistent with, with your— so that you're recognizable, right? They want you to kind of have that same thread, I guess, in different places. Platforms that you're in, right? Yeah. So yeah, that's important too. It's interesting. Some of these tips, these are some amazing little nuggets of info, and they're small. We can—they're bite-sized. We can do them.

Like well, and when you when you have one of your cohorts post in there, comment about it. Make a comment. Say yes, Sarah is correct. I but I really support what she says because of bup bup bup bup bup. All of a sudden, Sarah is building her SSI score. Because she's got people commenting. You're building your SSI score because you're being involved and you're discussing the same sorts of subjects, which then opens up the networks that each of you have to each other. It's amazing how it just starts feeding on itself.

And, and just for those that are wondering, the SSI score is the sell— the Social Selling Index, um, is the, is the actual name of it. So if you just Google it, you'll see. That's what I did in the background as Steve is so kindly like saying, go look at this, go look at that. I'm like, okay, I've got layers of information back here that I'm staring at. But it's interesting how it interacts with you and our mission on how we're going to work within that platform. What do we want? I guess the thing is too is how do you want to present yourself? What would you like to come from it? And what sort of interactions are you looking for? Like you said, there's not— you don't want everybody. You're not gonna do the video call because that's, that's just not for you, um, which I can respect that because I'm kind of probably in that boat a little bit. I'm just a little different in how I approach things. But everyone, that's the beauty of it, is it becomes a very authentic or original way of how you're going to interact with people. So my goodness, I am so— Steve, I'm just so looking forward to when we do our deeper dive of this and kind of growing together as a group in our community with this. I just love that you have such a success story that you were able to share that with us today, and it's just been such a pleasure. I really enjoy our group. I love highlighting those of you that want to join on a on a Wednesday or something. We love highlighting our members because without you, I mean, it just makes it so fun for us to engage in our Friday sessions. So thank you.

Well, I'd like to throw out a challenge if I could.

Sure. Yes.

Maybe what we all do is start researching our SSI scores. Okay. Maybe you guys could put on your agenda every Friday, every other Friday, what's your score this week? Where are you at? It takes a little while for it to start building once you start working on it, but then all of a sudden it becomes addictive. Okay, every morning I look at my score and it's like, you're up 1% from yesterday. I'm like, all right. Then the next day I'm down 3%. I'm like, what'd I do wrong? And yeah, it worked.

Is it like, uh, is it like our stocks? Like, I look at my little app and I'm like, where am I at today? And then sometimes I'm like, oh God, I won't look.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was able to bring up my network score to rank in the top 72%.

That's awesome.

In all of my contacts and all my legal contacts. And it was a dismal, like, 31% or something in June when I was at that convention. I was just like, oh my God, this is just pathetic. So it really works. And I've, I've been able to really build some good legal relationships, even on top of what I have the past few months. So maybe we all start sharing our score and how we raise them.

Yeah, no, I'm excited. Okay, I love that. And when Linda gets back up, we'll definitely do that this Friday before we start into all of our other stuff. But I love that, that we should just do a check-in point and hold ourselves accountable to each other and grow together because that's the point is we're learning and growing together. So yeah, we'll totally take you up on that one. You could lead the church too with me.

I'm curious to see what some of the other people, what their experiences are. Because I see some of you out there in LinkedIn and I'm like, okay, what are you doing? How are you doing it?

Yeah, you get inquisitive. I get it. Yeah. No, it'll be exciting. A new challenge for us to do together as a team. But wonderful. Well, thank you everybody for joining us this week. Next week, I'll see what Linda has in store for us. I had to run the first 2 of this month, so we did it. High five!

Great.

Thank you. And I loved having you on. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

And we'll see everybody on Friday. All right, bye-bye.