The Land Geek's Podcast #89

Welcome to the Land Geek Podcast, your resource for information and tips to making money by buying and selling money. Let the Land Geek show you how to make a passive income by working smart, not working hard. Learn strategies and tricks to make money buying and selling raw land today. And here is the man that's gonna help you do that. The Land Geek.

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today is super special because if you're driving pullover, you're probably going to want to take notes. This guest is. I'm going to put on my anchorman voice a really big deal because she can literally, with one platform, transform your business and your marketing and your networking and is a true expert. So I want to introduce everyone to Donna Serdula. She is the LinkedIn makeover. She loves LinkedIn. She is the author of the popular book LinkedIn Professional Secrets to a powerful LinkedIn profile. And back in 2009, she decided to break free from corporate America and set out on her own path. Donna, that's a big deal. Why don't talk about that. She started Vision Board Media with the goal to help business and individuals leverage the Internet in their quest to market themselves. Everyone needs to be marketing themselves. Everyone should be their own personal brand. We're going to talk about that. Donna is the foremost expert in LinkedIn profile optimization. I have no idea what that means. She founded LinkedInMakeover.com where she helps individuals from around the world brand themselves successfully using LinkedIn. She's appeared on some very small media outlets, probably you've never heard of, like Sirius XM Radio, NBC and other news outlets. But you know, let's face it, the Land Geek Podcast is probably going to be her biggest platform that she's been on. How are you?

Thank you. Mark, thank you for that wonderful introduction. I loved it. And the Land Geek is. I have a feeling this is going to be my proudest moment ever.

You know, probably, I mean, look, Sirius xm, I don't know. They have a few listeners, but probably not as big as the podcast, as the Land Geek podcast and my niche community of land investors. But Donna, what's going on? Like, how did you become this person in 2009 in corporate America and then just wake up one day? You know what? LinkedIn.

A very competitive sales environment. I used to make 75 phone cold calls before noon every day. And I just, it was one of those. I had a moment, I had an epiphany. I was cold calling. I had hit upon this amazing prospect, and I wanted to learn everything that I could about this prospect. After being able to set up a call with them, a meeting, it was funny because I remember I wanted to learn everything that I could so I could go in there and really sell them. And as I was Googling this guy's name, I realized he was probably Googling me. I had never Googled myself, so I backspaced his name. I put in my name, I hit enter, and the very first result that I found, the only person pertinent result, quite honestly, was my LinkedIn profile. And it was a copy and paste of my resume from a few years earlier. And it was dry, it was boring. It made it look like I was a job seeker, since it was my resume. And I looked at it and I realized, oh, my gosh, this is how I chose to present myself. This is the best that I could do. And I thought, here's this chance to really showcase who I was and how I could help this person. And instead, I just copied and pasted my resume. And that was my epiphany that professional branding is important, especially in this Google world. The successful people are the people who are easily found. At that moment, I realized, you've got to optimize. You've got to optimize your profile. What LinkedIn optimization means is, is really branding yourself online, choosing how you want to be perceived and telling a story that's engaging, that gets people interested in who you are and what you deliver and how you can help them. And that's what I did at that moment. And I had tremendous amounts of success. As soon as I did that, I started to find that calls went easier, I was building rapport faster and earlier, and I was able to make sales all that much more easier. And it was shortly after that I decided, all right, well, rather than line someone else's pocket, let me go out here and do it for myself. And that's what I did.

Right. You've built this up. You started in 2009, right?

Yeah.

Let's say you had zero LinkedIn followers and zero Twitter followers and zero, 2009.

No, I wouldn't say zero. I didn't have a lot, but I certainly didn't have zero. But I think I had about a thousand Twitter followers and maybe 150 LinkedIn followers.

Now, if we combine your LinkedIn followers and your Twitter followers, Donna Serdula, you're like a small country. I mean, that's how many people are.

I think I'm bigger Than Rhode Island.

No, I'm sorry, that's probably not an exaggeration. I mean, you're huge. How does that happen?

Well, you know what, the way it works, at least with LinkedIn, It's really kind of strange to say this, Mark, because I came of age in my career believing that you wanted to keep a lot of your stuff to yourself and you don't consult unless you're getting paid. I realized that that's not true at all. And so what I had decided very early on was I was going to share as much of the information that I had as possible. And I really do seek to educate and add value as much as I can. And when you give freely, it's amazing the people that want to come and learn and hear you. And that's how I've been able to build up the following that I have. It's really by educating and providing value and always giving.

I love it. Yeah, I mean, that's. That credo really applies, I think, to every business because I talk a lot about this on the podcast. Is building your list so you can go to your community of people that now consider you an expert in land investing, email them a promotion, and now you have a channel that you've created of people that know, like, and trust you that you can then sell land to. So given that, how can we use LinkedIn to build our list and sell more properties? How would you advise the community to do that using LinkedIn? Because you know, the flavor of the month, and I mean the flavor of the year has been Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. I can drill down, I can get such great demographics. I know everything about this group, and if I get my keywords right, I can really start focusing on building my list through Facebook. But I think LinkedIn might be an even better way to go. But I don't know. You tell me.

It depends on who your demographic is and who your audience is.

Okay, here's our demographic.

I'm sorry, say it again.

Here's our demographic. We want people that can afford to invest in land they believe already we don't have to convince them that raw land is a good asset to buy.

And I will tell you, I don't know if you saw this, and I hope to goodness I'm getting the number correct, but it just came out that 40% of LinkedIn users make more than 100,000 a year. So it's a really good demographic. It's full of professionals. It's full of people who have money and people who are business minded. So LinkedIn is a really great demographic and it is a channel. It's just one network, but it is your network. And ultimately for me, I think the very first thing most people, all people should do is they need to look at their LinkedIn profile because that is who you are, that's how you choose to represent yourself.

I'm going to my LinkedIn profile.

Let's go to your LinkedIn profile together.

And the thing is, it's only for Frontier Properties, it's not for Land Geek. Yesterday, because I knew you were going to be on the podcast, I tried to log in as Langeek and make a new profile just to kind of like, okay, can I impress Donna? And I couldn't even do it.

Well, here's the thing. You can only have one profile. So even if you have, I mean, you can have numerous company profiles, but for a personal profile you can only have one. One per person.

Okay, I think I'm a mess on LinkedIn, but you tell me.

So when you look at this, you really want to say to yourself, if a person looks, are they going to be impressed? Are they going to feel confident and comfortable in my expertise? Are they going to look at this and are they going to say, yeah, you know, I can understand how this person is going to help me. Because you always have to remember it's not necessarily what you want to say, but it's what that other person, your target audience, needs to hear. Right? Because everyone's always thinking, what's in it for me? I look at this and to me, I don't know how you could even if you could help me. I just see that you're a managing director and you specialize in acquisition of raw and developed Land. You're a managing member of Land Geek Enterprises. It's very much, I'm not going to tell you it's a bad profile, but it's certainly not optimized because it doesn't tell your unique story and how you can help people.

Yeah, I have thick skin. You can say, you know what, Mark, this sucks.

Mark, this sucks.

Alright, so, okay, so if you're okay, I'm gonna hire you. And if you're gonna give me a LinkedIn makeover, where would we start? We start at background. Or does it depend on what I'm trying to accomplish? Because I'm obviously not going to be looking for a job, right?

Exactly. You just hit upon the really big thing and that is everyone has a different goal. Some people are looking for a job, some people are looking to prospect, some people are looking to portray Themselves as an expert, as a thought leader within their industry. And with all of these different types of goals, the story that they're going to tell is going to be totally different. Right. And so the first thing we always do is we try to figure out, okay, what is your goal? What are you trying to say? Why are you on LinkedIn and what do you hope to accomplish? And once we figure that out, then you can write very specifically, very strategically towards that goal. Right.

What if I have two goals? What if I want to sell land and I want to be a thought leader in land investing?

In that situation, you're going to want to try to weave those two points together. That's not hard to do, but you want to be very clear, okay, these are the two areas that I want to go after. And then you can get closer to that goal. Typically, what happens is, and this is what I had done years and years ago, back when I signed up in 2005, I looked at that profile. It looked a little bit like my resume. So I opened up my dull, dry, out of date resume and I just started copying the fields in. When it said, what is your experience? I just answered the question. I worked here, I did this, and this is what I did. Well, your LinkedIn profile isn't your resume. Your resume is just your professional past. It's what you've done. I like to think of your LinkedIn profile as your career future. It's who you are, it's how you help people. So what you want to do is really figure out what your goal is, and then you want to write towards it and really think in terms of that target audience. What do they need to hear? Then once you have that idea in mind, you also want to think in terms of your keywords, because LinkedIn is a database, and it's a database that people query. People might not know Mark who you are, but they might know that they need help with, you know, raw land development. And that might be the terms that they put into the search engine, but if those words aren't in your profile, you will never get found.

Right? Right. Okay. So let's say that I want to help professional people get out of what we call solo economic dependency. Right.

Okay.

So my life's mission is to help people build up their passive income to the point where their passive income exceeds their fixed expenses. And, and then they have total financial freedom and they can go and do whatever they want to do in life. And I'm going to make the argument that raw land is the best way to accomplish that because we don't have to deal with any renters, we don't have to deal with renovations, we don't have to deal with rodents. I mean, it's just an easy asset to maintain versus, say, apartments or single family homes or whatever you want to say in real estate. Right.

So in that regard, you'd want to write a profile that talked about what a person, are they looking for passive forms of income? Are they doing these things and how can this help and how does it work? But the one thing that hits me here, mark, is with LinkedIn, it's so much more than just a profile and it really is a platform. What I would suggest is what you really need to do is educate people, because that's one of the things how many people recognize what you just said, that, hey, you can actually have passive forms of income that exceed what you're doing every day when you trade your time for money. And I think very few people, when they do think of real estate, they don't think in terms of the raw land. I think most people think in terms of houses or buildings, and who could even bother affording that or even put the time in that it needs. In that regard, I almost feel that you would do very well with two other areas of LinkedIn. And the one area is the status updates. It's on the homepage and it's very much like Facebook.

I'm going to the homepage right now.

Yeah, so if you click on the.

Homepage, I see it, I see share an update.

There you go, you share an update. And this is where you want to educate, this is where you want to inspire. This is where you want to add value. I am not, I am not a fan of people who are like, hey, you want to learn about raw land, Click here. That's not educating, that's being an obnoxious marketer. But if you could write articles and share little tidbits and really give an idea of what the magnitude of this and how it could help a person, and you do it consistently, you could really get people interested. There's another aspect to this, status updates. And it's something that LinkedIn just recently added, just over the summer, in fact. And it's their publishing platform. A lot of people struggle because they want to write blogs, but how do you get a blog? How do you buy a domain? How do you get that WordPress setup? It's just too much for a lot of people. Well, with LinkedIn, there's the publishing platform, so you can Write posts on LinkedIn. That are attached to your LinkedIn profile and you get a built in following. All those people that have followed you, that have connected with you, who are first degree connections within your LinkedIn network, they're going to get notified when you post something. These posts can be over 500 words. So you can actually get, it's no longer like 140 characters and that's it. You can actually get into, you know, build a little bit more depth into these articles and you have that built in audience and people can comment and they can share and before you know it, your article can really expand far beyond just your LinkedIn network into other people's networks as well.

Interesting. That's fantastic. Okay, so, you know, I'm finally getting the LinkedIn makeover. I'm starting to understand it.

Good, good, good. The other thing, a lot of times people talk about, when I talk to them about LinkedIn, I think the number one question I always get is so, should I connect with everyone? I get people who want to connect with me, but I don't know them. Do I connect with them or don't I?

This is so funny because I was arguing with Duran, my buddy, who was saying to me he won't accept anybody into his network because he doesn't know that I'm like Duran. It's like going to a party and saying, no, I'm not going to talk to you.

Exactly, exactly. It's kind of crazy. I don't know why people are so hesitant to connect. Especially if a person is wanting to connect with you. You check out their profile, if they look professional, if they look like they're operating on the up and up, of course, why not hit accept, accept them into your network. Now if they're from Nigeria and they want to put a large amount of money, bank account, you know, in that situation, I think it's okay to say no, I think I'll pass on this one. But you know, I think most people are on LinkedIn, they want to connect and I don't think there's anything wrong with connecting.

Okay, so help me with this, help me reconcile this because this is something I've struggled with since day one on social media. I'm a big believer in if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Right. How can I measure my social media efforts? So, and I certainly like for my business, I don't think Twitter makes any sense. For me, you might disagree, but I think for my business, being a thought leader makes a lot of sense on LinkedIn and maybe Facebook. But certainly LinkedIn and Google. Right? But how much time should I be spending on this and what's your philosophy? At the end of the day, you know, what's going to put money in my bank account is selling land.

With LinkedIn. I think a lot of people look at it and they're like, okay, how much time should I spend on it? I never look at it in terms of that. I look at it as a tool. And as a tool, it's something that is on my computer, it's on my smartphone and I access it when I need it. It's one of those things where it should become just a part of your daily process. It's something that you want to think in terms of. I'm always building my network so everyone that I meet, the people that I interact with, I'm going to connect with on LinkedIn and it just make it a part of just the natural everyday function that you have. You eat breakf, you check your email, you make sure you connect with people on LinkedIn and as you find interesting things, you share it. And certainly you might want to go so far as to have a content schedule, but I think for most users it's not necessary.

So you don't recommend me leveraging my time and hiring a social media manager?

It depends, you know, Mark, probably for you and what you're doing, it probably would be a good thing for you to do. I mean, I'm going to assume the goals that you have, you might need to. But for most everyday users, I don't think it's necessary. It's nice to keep these things if you have the time. And that's the one thing that a lot of people forget with social media. Yes, it's free, but your time isn't free. But if you look at it as a tool and you research people, you know you're being researched. You go on there, you read it with your morning cup of coffee, you comment, you share, you like things and you just make it part of your life. It really becomes something that you're doing because you enjoy it. And when you do, that's when you start to reap rewards. It's when you look at it and you're like, okay, how can I get on LinkedIn and just sell. You're never really going to have any success.

Okay, so in social media, especially LinkedIn, your attitude needs to be, how can I add value?

How can I inspire? How can I educate? How can I help?

How can I help? How can I inspire? How can I educate? It's not how can I sell more land?

Right.

Okay. So given that. Right. And given that I have a certain niche expertise, is it okay for me to talk about, like, I'm going to go skiing next week and comment about that?

Do you want to go outside of it? Unfortunately, not on LinkedIn.

Not on LinkedIn.

Okay. You can do that on Facebook, you can do that on Twitter, but with LinkedIn, it still has a very narrow focus. And so when you're on LinkedIn, you're talking about your profession, your business, your career, you're talking about your industry, you are not talking about your cat, you're not talking about the movies or tv, which in a way I've always. That's one of the things that I think a lot of people do like about LinkedIn is a lot of people who are very private and they feel almost like, oh, if I go on Facebook, I'm going to be assaulted by, you know, kids playing soccer and football team scores. Whereas with LinkedIn, LinkedIn has a very narrow focus. It's really about your industry, it's about your career, it's about what you do and how you help people as it relates to business. And that's it.

That's okay. That's really important because you can see how much time I spend in LinkedIn. I mean, honestly, I joined some groups, right? And I really don't spend a lot of time at all on social media. And I think I'm really missing out. And I think my attitude has been completely wrong the entire time because I just want to get to the chase. I want to be like, look, you want to buy land or not?

You know, and typically, I mean, I always say with, you know, with social media, it's no different than the real world. I mean, you'd never walk up to a person and say, hey, you want to buy some raw land? They'd be like, no, I don't know who you are. I don't know what you're talking about. Why would I want to buy anything from you? And the same thing goes with social media. I mean, I know in some situations that absolutely it can work, especially if you have a relationship with people. But I'm just talking about that cold. Let's just avalanche people with an offer. It doesn't work very well. But when you're on LinkedIn and you're on it and you're helping people and you're adding value, you're giving information, it's not a quick sale by any means, but if you spend time and you really put effort into it what you will find is things turn around and people do want to work with you because they trust you and they feel that you've given them information and help and they want to come to you because you're someone that can offer them help. And at that point they will want to buy. You know, I think Jeffrey Gittamer has, you know, said it best, he says, and you might even know this quote, but people hate to be sold, but they love to buy. And I feel that's very, very true.

That is true. Yeah, I love that. So, okay, let's talk a little bit about the book.

Okay.

What's going on in this book, Donna?

My LinkedIn makeover. Professional secrets to a powerful LinkedIn profile.

Yeah, yeah. Like, you know why? Okay, I'm definitely gonna buy the book, but why would I buy the book? Like, I'm a huge believer in that. My most precious resource is my time. Right. Why wouldn't I just hire you and just get up and running and really get this LinkedIn?

And quite honestly, Mark, most people do. I mean, a lot of people think, oh, how hard can it be? I'm going to just, I'll get her book, I'll spend the 10 bucks and I'll just do it. My. And then before they know it, they've cleaned out their cabinets and they're working on cleaning out their garage. Because everything becomes much more interactive than actually sitting down and writing about themselves. And that's really the thing, the key. It's hard to write about yourself, and it's even harder to really see your own strengths and abilities because you sit so close. And so it does actually make sense to work with someone. And that's why I created my company, is to help people. It's to really help them, give them that hand and interview them, talk to them, find out what it is that you do and then have a professional writer write that profile for them. We talk to you, we understand who you are, and then we write it for you. That by far is the best use of time. But there are still a lot of people who want to try to do it themselves. I try to lay out every single secret, every single item that I've discovered in my book and it's there. And if you want to do it yourself, it's certainly available. And I like to think that it's kind of funny as well. Try to throw in a lot of jokes and make it as entertaining as possible.

Great, great. Okay. So I mean, this is just a no brainer for me. As soon as we hang up with the podcast. I'm going to get going on this and hire you. But now when I hire you though, what am I getting? Am I getting you or am I getting a LinkedIn coach or how does that work?

Well, I will tell you, in the very beginning, you would have gotten me, but then my business exploded and it became absolutely impossible for me to work with everyone. What I did is I started to look around and I found people who I admired, people that challenged me, people that I thought were fantastic, and I brought them on board and I taught them what I know regarding LinkedIn profiles. They are now my branding specialists. I have, oh my goodness, almost 20 now. And when you work with us, I'm still your partner and I'm going to make sure that you're very, very happy and that everything that you need is there. But you'll be working directly with a branding specialist who will interview you, who will write the profile for you, and we'll review it and make any edits and answer any questions that you have. So it's a real end to end process and it's very consultative and we're there for you.

So they're gonna save me a lot of time, which is gonna save me a lot of money. And then, and then are they going to help me, like, okay, Mark, this is what you need to be doing on LinkedIn. This is how many times you should post. Like, I've got, you know, I've got YouTube videos, my coffee talk videos, I've got the podcast.

You'Ve got the content. Now you just gotta put it out there, you gotta unleash it on the LinkedIn public.

Right, right. But how do I do that without seeming like the sales guy?

Yeah, I think that's more of a conversation we would have. But I mean, I always think in terms of get yourself hootsuite, start looking at that content schedule and you want to just, again, just look at it, phrase it in a manner that lets people realize that you're there to help and you're sharing information.

Okay, so you'll stop me from being completely obnoxious on LinkedIn?

We will certainly try.

No, no promises.

Okay, no promises.

All right, well, great, great. All right, well, this is the point in the podcast that I absolutely love because hopefully I'm gonna make you sweat. I'm gonna put you on the spot. I'm gonna ask you, what is your tip of the week? What is something, where's something like a resource or book or something that we can go? Obviously not your book, because we talked about it. But where can we go to learn something actionable that we can take right now to leverage LinkedIn and that profile and really get going?

Sure. Well, I of course have to suggest my LinkedIn headline generator because I've always believed that right next to the profile picture, the LinkedIn headline is one of the most important parts of your LinkedIn profile. It's what really gets people interested and it makes them want to learn more and it makes them want to click to open up your profile so you get more of those views. My LinkedIn headline generator. You can download it free of charge. LinkedIn-Makeover.com It's a step by step guide and in five minutes flat you'll have a sexy, marketable, interesting, unique LinkedIn headline that you can immediately upload to LinkedIn and people will start clicking to learn more.

I love it. I love it. Okay, so I go to LinkedIn-makeover.com and then is it on the front page or do I go to Free Resources?

It is on the front page on the right hand sidebar. And if for some reason you're not seeing it right now, I think I, it should be there. If it's not there right now, it'll be there in a few minutes. But it is a, it's just a little picture of a book, an ebook, and you just click it. You just put in your email, hit send, and we'll send it to you.

All right, great. Well, this is fantastic. I've got two tips of the week, and my tip of the week is obviously going to be go to LinkedIn-makeover.com because I think it's really important, and I think it's important that you leverage your time and don't waste time. Just, you know, start hiring Donna. But. And her team just get going and do it. Because what's the percentage of people that make over 100,000 on LinkedIn? 40%.

Oh, on LinkedIn, I think we're well over 300 million users on LinkedIn with.

The demographic, like they're professionals, like they make over $100,000.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. 40% make over 100 grand.

Yeah, that's. And there's 300,000 people in there. Wow. I mean, wait, 300? No, 300 million?

Million? Yeah.

Million.

That's crazy.

That's a big country. That's a little smaller than the US Just a little bit. That's crazy. Okay, so that's my first tip of the week. My second tip of the week. Donna, check this out. It's ope nr. Ope nr. And basically what it is is let's say you found a great article that you want to share, and you drop that URL into their converter and then they create what they call an opener window, and they add your message and a call to action that you want to appear on the page along with the article. Right. So basically what you share then comes back to your site. What do you think of that?

Wait, give me that address again, because I'm not finding it here.

I'm going to going to send it to you in Skype. Here, hold on. Ope nr. I'm going to instant message you.

Oh, I got it.

Yep, you got it. Okay. What do you think?

Interesting. I can't wait to play with this.

Yeah, and it's got a free. I mean, here, let's go to pricing. It's 10 links per day, one polar form per day, one image per day, one profile, one user. That's free. That's a pretty good free plan, don't you think?

That ain't bad at all.

It's not bad, right? I don't know how many links per day you would suggest that you share on LinkedIn, but I would think 10 links per day would be pretty good.

Yeah, I mean, I typically, I myself now, again, I'm trying to take over the world, so I share about 15 a day, but 10 links, I mean, if you're doing that, you're doing a lot, so that's fantastic.

All right, great, great. Well, Donna Sirdulla, thank you so much for coming on the Landing podcast. I mean, I know it's not NBC, but look, you know, hey, I am.

Happy to be here. This was a fun interview. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Well, I really appreciate you coming on. And then if you wouldn't mind, if you have time, just hang with me for two minutes after the podcast because I want to get started and supercharge my LinkedIn profile and then show everybody in my community, hey, look. Look how cool I am now. LinkedIn.

Awesome.

You know, go from a profile that sucks to, you know, a thought expert in all things land. So I'm looking forward to the transformation. So, anyways, for everybody listening, I want to thank everyone for listening. If you want to learn more, Please go to www.thelandgeek.com, download for free the Passive Income Blueprint, get the ebook how to Avoid the Three Fatal Land Buying Mistakes, and of course, get this always informative and engaging podcast delivered each week to your email inbox. And look, give me some love. Go to frontierpropertiesusa.com invest in some wholesale land. Let us know how we're doing. Please leave a comment on itunes. I really appreciate it. If you send me an email telling me that you left a comment, I'll go ahead and get you the $97 passive income launch kit for free as a thank you. Anyways, this is Mark Podolski, the Land Geek. Donna, are we good?

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Will you come back?

I will always come back. Absolutely.

All right. Fantastic. All right. Well, I want to thank everybody. And thanks again, Donna. We'll see everybody next week.

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Land Geek. Join us next time for more tips, secrets, and information that will help you succeed. Stay connected with the Land geek on Facebook. Facebook.com thelandgeek.