Jeremy Weisz 6:13
people for I mean, it’s like, because listen, if you’re reaching out to people you are basically, they’re going to check you out on LinkedIn. And by the way, and John, you know, this too, if you search people’s name on Google, LinkedIn, your LinkedIn profile is typically in the top three search results. So even if they’re not on LinkedIn, you’re like, well, I don’t use LinkedIn that much. It doesn’t matter. Like, if someone’s searching for you, and trying to find out information about you, LinkedIn may come up in their search results, and they’re going to go to LinkedIn. And see, this person is not credible. So you really want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile shows your expertise, and its full capacity. And so some of the things to look at is, I think I told someone this last week, and I said in a nice way, but I said your LinkedIn profile is a disgrace. I mean, it’s an absolute disgrace. And I said it in a loving way, because it doesn’t represent how amazing you are, you know, and one, people don’t even put a picture, like if you were to think of a website, your what your landing page, your website, your homepage, you wouldn’t just not have a banner on your website, you just would not have a just leave off what you do. Okay, that’s what people are doing with LinkedIn. So make sure you have some kind of banner that actually displays what you do. I’ve seen people do flowers and rocks and mountains, this is like nothing to do. So they have something there which is better than just the default blunt like blue, whatever comes in LinkedIn, but it doesn’t give you your authority. And so you want some kind of banner image that shows that you’re an authority in the space, it may show, you know, shows social proof logos on there and you know, shows what you do in action in front of a crowd, whatever it is. The next piece is the title underneath your name, you know, you want something people are often looking at your name, they’re looking at what you do, and people put founder, CEO, that’s it. That’s what they have, like, you need something that displays that shows people what you do. You know, like for us, it’s helping b2b businesses connect to their dream 100 clients and get it making sure you get ROI using a podcast. So what we do, I don’t say, founder or CEO, or whatever it is, the next piece that you should think about is the about piece, what do you do and remember, as you could see, if you’re watching the video part, you only get like a sentence. And when I say that, you could click see more and open up but most people aren’t going to click the See More button they’re just going to read what you have there and move on. I don’t remember the last time I clicked the See More button on someone I just kind of got a general gist of them. So you really have that one sentence so look and see what actually shows up in that one sentence because when you click pro John, you want to click the see more but I mean it opens up into like a lot of stuff, but which is great, which is it’s good to have and you want to have it but make sure you pay special attention that first sentence the next piece is the video right? If you scroll down, if you’re watching the video, there’s the featured section and people may look intimidating if you don’t have anything there. It’s really just a link to a video. Okay, this is a link to a YouTube video and it shows up very nicely on LinkedIn. So you should if you don’t have them, you should Have some video, you should create videos. It could be if you have a podcast you can create, you know, have podcast videos, if you um, you know, don’t have a podcast Get Started start up I guess no but um, have a video podcast or if you have client testimonials, right? Um, client testimonials have those made, you know, our friend Ian Garlic is awesome at creating. If you have questions about that, ask him and he will actually help interview your clients and create a nice video for you.
John Corcoran 10:30
And we have Ryan Howard here who volunteered. Thank you.
Jeremy Weisz 10:34
All right, let’s bring him up. Yeah, there you go. Ryan Howard. We’ll do it real time here. Yeah, Ryan Howard. I have to bring it up on mine because it’s a little smaller than yours. But you could see like, actually, it’s pretty good. He’s got like some kind of customized banner that’s really good. Learn more free masterclass it seems it still doesn’t tell me exactly what he does, in that in that headline, your faith at work transforms the way work? So maybe to him, it’s clear to me, I’m wondering if I should hire him like who is a good fit for him. And so maybe the headline could be a little clear to me. Discover how your work fits into God’s plan. So I’m still not sure if my business is a fit for what he does. So make sure that you know we have help. Who do you help like helping blank, do blank accomplished blank. So more more, maybe a little more copywriting a good, so he’s got he’s got a great picture there, he’s got at least a banner with something with a website, which is good, more than 95% of most people may be a little clear on who you serve, and then discover how you work. So you’re Ryan, you’re doing a good job. Overall, I think there’s a few tweaks you can make to make it even better. And I think if you scroll down, I would probably end he’s with over 500 plus connections. That’s another thing. Sometimes people if you see 197 connections, it just doesn’t look like this person is an authority in the space, like you’ve no connection. So you want to get to that 501502. So it says 500 plus connections, just get to that point, at least I know, John, you have like 17,000 or more connections on LinkedIn. But it still says 500 plus, so it doesn’t really matter. Um, so I would say get really clear with who you serve, and how you help that person. Because I don’t know who you serve from the get go. And in John and I Who do you know, make a lot of referrals to people, it’s helpful, even if we’re not a client, like, oh, when we hear this, you know, Ryan serves this type of person, we can recommend them. So one other
John Corcoran 12:42
thing I’ll point out here, it’s kind of buried down here, but it says he has a PhD. So I’m wondering if maybe it should say Dr. Ryan, is Howard at the top here or Pat? Yeah, he cuz that’s a real common
Jeremy Weisz 12:53
PhD or something. Exactly. Right. Right.
John Corcoran 12:57
Yeah. Don’t say it anywhere until you get further down, you know? Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 13:02
Yeah, that’s a good point. Follow Ryan to discover how you work. So again, same thing, I would, I would probably work that, if that headline of who, you know, follow Ryan, discover how your work fits in, it doesn’t really tell me who’s an ideal client for you, when they’re reading this that would speak to them. Like if you said, whatever organization we help this type of organization and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So and if you want to, you have some featured stuff there, which is good. I don’t know, one of them’s an eBook. And one of them is actually a podcast. So that’s, that’s good. So you can see, you know, you have around, you know, 1000 connections, and that’s really credible, like the John Deere, that obviously, it’s a well known brand that you have there. So it’s good that you have that in 13 years, you could even add some stuff about what you do in there, where it’s like, senior supplier development engineer, add some details in there. But I mean, that’s, that’s kind of a low hanging fruit. I mean, this is all good, good stuff that you have in here. So those
John Corcoran 14:11
I’ll point out that sometimes you see people where they have a company written in under-experience, or a university, it happens with the universities as well. And there’s no logo next to it. And sometimes you see it up here too, or you see the company name, and there’s no logo next to it, it just says the default. One. The reason for that is that they don’t have a LinkedIn page, which immediately gets companies to pitch a company page, right, exactly. A company LinkedIn page and and and so when I see that, and I think a lot of people say that they question is this person legitimate? And sometimes the reason is because they’d have their LinkedIn page for a long time. And if it’s if the company does have a company page, all you need to do is go edit your profile, go into where you’ve listed that university or that company. delete it and type it out again and LinkedIn will automatically suggest other official pages. And then you can connect it and then that will bring in the logo. And it just gives you a little bit of legitimacy. It’s surprising to me how many people that are really established, you know, authorities and experts, but they haven’t done that one thing. And it’s one of those subtle things that kind of diminishes their credibility. One other thing I would just throw in, then I’ll get back to you, Jeremy. Throw out here as you mentioned earlier, the backgrounds at the top. This is a beautiful background, Ryan, that you’ve graded here, or Dr. Howard, I should say. But you see how the city is backdrop? A lot of people, they just put their city’s backdrop, in, in the image at the top there. And I’m not sure that it doesn’t really hurt you. But it doesn’t gain you anything. And I don’t know if he’s from Waterloo, I was I don’t know if that’s Waterloo. But other people do this. They’ll put Seattle as a background or Chicago’s skyline in the background, or San Francisco scholars background. And what you want there is to convey to someone who’s just landed on your page immediately who you are and what you do. And this city of San Francisco background doesn’t do that, it doesn’t accomplish that. So I just wanted to bring that up. But back to you.
Jeremy Weisz 16:14
The other thing I was going to talk about, if you go down, you brought up a good point about the John Deere thing. So it seems like from looking at this, he’s still working at John Deere, but he has helped discover how your work fits into God’s plan. But like you just mentioned, he may not have a LinkedIn company page. So that’s not showing up here. So right, he should have a LinkedIn company page for whatever his, you know, company is that helps, you know, discover how your work fits God’s plan. And then that should come up first as the actual company experience, along with John Deere. Yeah, it looks like he doesn’t have, you know, that company page set up or he doesn’t have a link to his profile here.
John Corcoran 17:03
Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, I think that’s great. There’s a great, great overview. Ryan, thank you, Dr. Howard, for being our guinea pig on that. Appreciate that. Hopefully, that will be helpful for all of you for forgiving, you come with the background on that. So we talked about optimizing your profile, let’s mention about building your connections. You want to make sure you have at least 500 plus connections, because then it will say 500 Plus, it doesn’t say exactly the number that will say the number of followers on there. And the next phase we want to talk about is what your outreach message should be. So when you’re proactively reaching out to reaching out to people, whether it’s part of a consistent, dedicated effort to reach out to people in your industry, or it’s just one person or two people, like someone you casually came across, and you just want to connect with them. What should it be? What Shouldn’t it be? So Jeremy, what good outreach etiquette?
Jeremy Weisz 18:00
Yeah, I mean, you want to reach out in a giving fashion, okay. And you want to customize it, I mean, I actually go through, and when someone writes a good message, right, to connect, this is not an inmail message, right? I’m talking about when you connect with someone, you can write a customized message. And I mean, I, I don’t accept everyone, I want it to like, what’s the reason I’m, I’m connecting with this person, the person connects with me. So you know, there’s the, I guess the best all the way to worst, the best is customizing it. Like if I said, John, I see you know, you know, just find some common commonality, and also the best outreach messages to give to someone. So if I said, John, I saw, you know, from your, you know, you’re looking, I saw from your comment somewhere that you were looking for good places to eat, I found that this is a great place, you know, just something serving them. And it’s, you can see, when I read something that you’ve written, to, I’m answering something that you’ve written in a given fashion, and how can I help, you know, obviously, if you have a podcast, you can, if that person’s a fit, you can give, you know, ask them to be on the podcast and give, you have to give a backup of all the social proof elements of why they should say yes, but it doesn’t have to be right off the bat. You can, you know, serve them in some fashion if you actually care about looking at what that person has posted. So any giving message, whether it’s, you know, I’m going to feature you and you know, we’ve written articles and say, Hey, we want to teach you in this article. We want to feature you on our podcast. There’s people who are still skeptical when they get that so you have to back it up. You know, I guess on the other end of the spectrum, what things not to do is you know, just throw a pitch of three paragraphs. we’ve all gotten those like A three paragraph pitch and all the services, someone does go, Hey, we have web development, we have this, we have that we have this, we have that. And I’m like, I didn’t even ask you that I didn’t say I need for that nor to ask you. And then kind of like the laziness factor is, I think I customize every single one of my connection requests. So I will at least put their name, I’ll find something about their profile or their company that I admire or like, and a reason why we should connect. People sometimes put zero message. So it just says I forgot what the default message in LinkedIn is. And sometimes it’s just people, right? You know, you came
John Corcoran 20:42
up with a very generic, yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 20:45
you came up in my search or something? Yeah, you give me my search. I’m like, well, that’s not a good reason for why I should connect with you. Right? So we’re trying to be compelling. You came up in my search, I’m like, well, so I just came up to you, you thought I’d be good. Or, you know, we share a mutual connection. I give the name to someone I actually know it’s different. But they go, we have a lot of mutual connections. Well, you know, John, you have like, 17,000 connections, like, you probably could have 100 mutual connections with a perfect stranger. So if they said, Oh, I see you’re, you’re also connected, you know, Jeremy, so do I, like you’re obviously going to respond to that, because you know, me.
John Corcoran 21:28
Yeah, or the other thing, you know, you see one of them here that I’m showing on the screen. Alyssa hopes you don’t mind me, using you as a guinea pig. But, you know, people will say I’m looking to connect with insert, you know, who whatever type of person you are. So if you’re a lawyer, and you see an incoming message that says, I’m looking to connect with lawyers, and it’s from a web developer, that doesn’t benefit you, that doesn’t benefit that person in any particular way. Rather, it’s to your benefit. So why would you say, it’s like saying, like, I’m looking to, like, grow my sales leads, and you are a lawyer. And I tell them that you wouldn’t say that. But that’s basically what you’re, you know, telegraphing to that person. So I think you want to be careful about what you say
Jeremy Weisz 22:14
Well, let’s say she had good guests for you. Right. So she could say, John, I see you have a podcast, I have some Rockstar guests that you may be interested in, I’d love to connect and, and that could be a benefit to you.
John Corcoran 22:28
Right. And the other thing I just want to point out is that when you do a short message, it’s 300 characters. That’s it, you have a very short amount to communicate. But it’s actually much less than that. Because as you see, from my screen here, it’s really more like, I don’t know, this is 45 characters or something before you have to hit that see more button. And not everyone’s gonna do that. So you really got to grab them in that short amount of time. You know, one person here intervenes again, apologizes for using you as a guinea pig here. But he says, I hope you’re doing good in these difficult times. Well, you know, that’s a nice sentiment, but it’s rather General, a lot of people are saying it these days, it doesn’t really stand out in terms of a rationale for why we should connect with one another. It’s just, at best, it’s wasted space, a wasted opportunity.
Jeremy Weisz 23:21
Yeah, I mean, if you talk to some of the best copywriters, they, they, you look at their work, they invoke curiosity. And so if someone invokes your curiosity with that first sentence, like Spencer, Spencer Walters there, yeah. says, I like, I like the picture. But like, it’s almost there. Like something about if they open some kind of loop there, and you really Oh, what are they? What are they talking about? And you have to see more. but not quite. I mean, it’s not quite, not quite, not quite reality based. But yeah, but I could see you were really only having a sentence.
John Corcoran 24:02
Yeah. But you know, these are better than the ones who don’t say anything at all. Yeah. Because then the person on the other end who’s receiving the incoming message, all you have is their tagline, their headline to go off of, and sometimes people’s headline is like, Vice President.
Jeremy Weisz 24:19
That’s it. Sarah, that’s a good example. Like, I’m looking to expand my network, please accept my connection. Like, it’s not a compelling reason. Because you’re looking to expand your network exam. It’s just not that compelling.
John Corcoran 24:34
Yeah, so apologies
Jeremy Weisz 24:35
I like to pick on anyone I mean, it’s just to demonstrate if you are one, if you’re just blanketing a lot of people, it shows like if you actually, you’re reaching out because there’s a deliberate reason that you should connect your gift to that person. If you write that reason it will show
John Corcoran 24:56
right. So just to kind of sum up what we’ve covered so far. So first of all, You want to have to optimize your profile, that’s incredibly important, because people are being people, other people are recommending you to other leads out there. They say talk to Ryan Howard or whatever they Google Ryan’s name, boom, one of the top three results in all likelihood is LinkedIn, they trust LinkedIn, they land on that page. And then they’re making a split second decision whether to go further with that person, if that person doesn’t email you, or doesn’t pick up the phone and call you. Because they were confused or not sure about what your LinkedIn profile said, You don’t even know about it. So optimizing your profile is important. Second, you want to build your connections over 500 plus connections, and keep on going. I mean, jeez, like, it gets really interesting, really powerful when you get into the 10s of 1000s, like Jeremy and I have. And so it’s really valuable. That point, the outreach message is critically important. So we talked about that as well. And then finally, the last piece we want to talk about is once you build a bit of a network, in your industry, people you want to connect with you want to deepen relationships with you need to be sharing content on this platform, LinkedIn has really moved towards a content sharing platform. And we of course, are huge fans of creating podcasts because you talk out your content, which is wonderful, your networking your content. And then you can share that content very easily. One of the really powerful tools we’ve used is interactive dynamic audios, we call them, which is you’ve probably seen them before, they are basically a video of a static, you got a static image of someone, a guest on the podcast, he’s got the words kind of going across the screen, I’ll pull up an example for a year here, got the words of transcripts kind of pulling across the stream, and you’ve got a headline at the top, I’ll pull it up for you here. There we go. This is kind of what they look like, they get a ton of engagement and interactivity and conversation with people. And most importantly, it brings you up and other people’s feed. And then you can take that and then you can proactively reach out to people who’ve commented, I am a big fan of doing that as well. So reaching out to people who’ve commented, or who’ve liked it, just checking in with people and seeing how they’re doing. Because a lot of times that’s how people will raise their hand they’ll like something, but they might not send you a message and say, hey, let’s talk about doing business together.
Jeremy Weisz 27:19
Yeah, I was talking about someone the other day too. And what’s important about that is a lot of times at least for me, let’s say I’m in bed searching through social media and responding. I’m not having my volume on. So having those words going across the screen for something like that. Really, if I’m stopping on it, there you have heard of Double Dare or being slimed. There’s Marc now John interviewed Marc Summers. I don’t know if he’s, you know, was a part of Nickelodeon or whatever it is. But I loved that. I loved that show.
John Corcoran 27:52
I worked with Marc in college on a game show. So Game Show.
Jeremy Weisz 27:58
So those are yeah, you can see the words going across. And so allows me to consume the content without having to turn my volume on and get yelled at by my wife, “Why do you turn the volume on? I’m trying to sleep” while I’m sitting here.
John Corcoran 28:14
yeah, that’s really important that you add that, in fact, it’s interesting. We’re doing this as a LinkedIn live. And LinkedIn recently added a feature where it transcribes the words as we’re doing a LinkedIn live. And the reason that they did that, the reason they added in that feature is because of the importance of how many people are going to be scrolling through, they’re not going to unmute it, at least not right away. But if they’re able to see the words they might, they might watch it all the way through or it might encourage them to unmute it and then actually engage with it further. So that’s it for this episode. Jeremy, where can people go to learn more about us?
Jeremy Weisz 28:51
You can go to rise25.com to learn more and our About page. You can email us if you have questions about LinkedIn, podcasting, these dynamic audios that we also produce and everything else, but we’re here to help. So feel free to email us with any questions.
John Corcoran 29:06
All right. Thanks, everyone. We’ll talk again soon. Bye. Bye.
Outro 29:10
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.