Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi and welcome to the WP Innovator
Lee Matthew Jackson:
podcast, the WordPress podcast for design and web agencies.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Let’s make WordPress work for your business.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi and welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast. This is your host, LA Lee Jackson. And I’m super pumped for this episode. We have Dennis Brown, the LinkedIn genius. This was such a fun episode. I had a great time chatting with Dennis both before, during and after the episode. This guy has so much to offer and this was such a great interview to be a part of. Now, before we crack on, I’d love to meet you over at the Facebook group.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s the private Facebook group. Head on over to facebook.com and tap in WP Innovator. You’ll find the group there. Or go to leejacksondev.com group and you can meet other listeners, other like minded individuals who are working with WordPress, who are designing, who are building websites and we can all support each other and
Lee Matthew Jackson:
get to know each other more.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’ll see you over there and before then, enjoy the episode.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I have with me here in the studio, Dennis Brown. And you know, I lied, he’s over Skype. He’s not physically here in the studio in the uk, but we have Dennis Brown on the line from sunny United States of America. Dennis is an author of a very interesting book that we’re going to talk to you about in a minute. He’s a LinkedIn specialist and a, from what I can tell, serial entrepreneur. But instead of me trying to introduce you, Dennis, how about you say hi and can we have a bit of background about who you are, what you do?
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, surely, no problem. So, you know, I’ve been a serial entrepreneur. I’ve been, I’ve owned my own business for the last 20 years, you know, and we’ve been very, very blessed. You know, we’ve built three multimillion dollar companies over the last 20 years. And you know, back in 2007 I was one of those social media naysayers. I just didn’t get social media. I didn’t understand social selling. But you know, I decided to kind of get out of my comfort zone and I set up a profile on LinkedIn and we started using that as a major platform for building one of my traditional businesses.
Dennis Brown:
And we were fortunate over the next several years to generate over $20 million in new business through that LinkedIn marketing system that I’d put in place. I’ve since retired from that business, sold that business, and now what I do is I consult with entrepreneurs, business owners, speakers, you know consultants and, and I teach them my LinkedIn marketing and social selling system. So that’s a little bit about me. I live in Buffalo, New York, which is western New York area for those of you. A lot of you guys that are listening are probably overseas, but some of you, I’m sure, are in the US and, you know, live here with my wife and two daughters and glad to be working out of the house, back out of the house as opposed to kind of the more corporate structure. Have a lot more fun. So.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh yeah, I do love the work from home atmosphere. And hey, we were practically neighbors once. I was born in Saint Catharines, which is in Canada, just over the way from you guys in Buffalo. Although I know Buffalo is quite big, so.
Dennis Brown:
Oh yeah, yeah, it’s right. Right over the border.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Right over the border. That’s awesome. Now you also have written a fantastic book which people can grab hold of. So before we carry on, where can people find the book? What was the seven habits of highly effective LinkedIn users? Was that the title?
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, yeah. The book is the 7 Habits of Highly Success LinkedIn Users. And I put that together for people because what I found is that most people, a lot of people have a LinkedIn profile, but they really have no idea how to create an effective or optimized profile and they really have no idea how to start leveraging it to build their business. So I put this free book together for anybody to get. You can get it at www.linkedacademy.com. that’s Linked Academy. And I’m sure, Lee, you’ll put it in the show notes, but it’ll get you started, but it won’t overwhelm you. It’s one of those books that kind of gives you a by step, hey, here’s step one.
Dennis Brown:
Here’s step two. Follow these simple steps and it’ll get you started moving on your way.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. So, guys, the reason why I invited Dennis on here was I followed the steps that he provided. I heard him first on John Lee Dumas podcast Entrepreneur on Fire. I probably mentioned John Lee Dumas every other day. I’m not stalking, I promise. And I applied the steps last week. That was seven days ago. And within seven days I’ve already got three opportunities that I’m working on through LinkedIn.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that’s having been on LinkedIn for about six years and never getting anything from it, I’ve been able to totally set myself up as an authority on LinkedIn, get decent connections for my target market, and actually start to have conversations going, all three, which have then been taken out of LinkedIn and into email, phone calls or potential meetings, etc. So it blew my mind and I just wanted to get Dennis on. He was very gracious to come on, to kind of unpack a bit of where he was and how he’s gone through this journey of becoming the go to LinkedIn guy. So that’s linkedacademy.com if you head over to there, like Dennis said, I’ll put it in the show notes, but that’s linkedacademy.com Go ahead and check that out. You will not regret it. So Dennis, mate, can we kind of go back then before this kind of eureka moment of oh, social media is the way to go? How were you kind of, what sort of methods were you applying to try and generate leads before the world of social media? Because I want to see if agencies and people who are listening in can kind of, what’s the word? Connect with. Oh yeah, I’ve been in that place as well. Oh yeah, that’s the way I have or was doing it.
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, we did anything and everything we could to try to talk to our potential audience. So you know, we did everything from the old school trade shows where we would talk to all the non decision makers and then never get any business out of it. And then, you know, we did cold calling. I mean, I was a cold call guy for, you know, years and years. We would cold call huge Fortune 1000 brands. And, and you know, and I was fortunate enough we did, you know, in some of my businesses, my clients were Coca Cola and Metro Goldwyn Mare and Anheuser Busch and, and you know, record labels and all, and Marvel Comics, I mean we had some great clients. But what I realized is that cold calling, the return on investment, you know, statistically about only about 2% of cold calls end up in an appointment. And it was getting harder and harder and harder to do that.
Dennis Brown:
And I realized that, you know, it was a dying, it was a dying method and it just wasn’t gonna last forever. And so, you know, that’s when I stumbled across LinkedIn. And you know, even though I wasn’t really comfortable with it and I didn’t believe in it, I said, you know what, I gotta think outside the box. I gotta get a little bit uncomfortable here because that’s what I always preach is you gotta get uncomfortable, you gotta, you know, you gotta kind of eat that frog. And so I dove in and, and it only took, you know, within about a month or two, I landed my first Six figure client. And then all of a sudden I was a huge believer, right? I was at Epiphany and I’m like, holy cow, you know, I mean, what the heck just happened? I, I tell everybody I feel like I hit the LinkedIn lottery and, and in reality it was, you know, it was just getting out of my comfort zone and trying something new. And LinkedIn was that tool for me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So if you’re listening to this, you can you recognize these same sort of signs. And I’ve seen this in my own experience as an agency owner in other agencies. As you know, I’ve had shares in other agencies in the past and I’ve also got clients who I know struggle with this issue and that’s, you have to either pitch for work. So you’re putting in an awful lot of time and effort up front, pitching for work in advance and winning, or potentially not winning. You’re turning up at big events, meeting people who are not necessarily decision makers, collecting a whole load of business cards, maybe giving, giving a free bottle of wine, etc. Doing all the old school techniques. Maybe you even think that you need to get in some sort of call company to do a whole load of calls, appointment setting, etc. And then you’re finding yourself, you’re going out to lots and lots of chemistry meetings that aren’t really leading anywhere, then it’s certainly time to start considering the power of social media.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So you’ve heard people like Sarah Moore on here before, who’s talked about Twitter strategy, sorry, and Facebook strategies, etc. But having myself never considered LinkedIn as the go to place. I’ve always considered it the glorified CV or you know, go and find a job place. Having not realized the power of LinkedIn, you know, go ahead, check it out and again, check out linkedacademy.com so what was it, Dennis, that actually led to you going to social media? Was there someone who recommended it? Were you seeing someone else’s results?
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, you know, I had a close friend of mine who in sent me a connection request. He sent me an invitation and because I wasn’t on LinkedIn, it sent it to my email. And when I clicked on the invitation to connect on LinkedIn, I, you know, it showed me LinkedIn and I, it was the first time that I had ever seen it. I had never heard of LinkedIn before, this was back in 2007 and it just made sense. I mean when I looked at the conversations and I looked at the type of people that were on there, it was very different than my exposure to social media, which was predominantly, you know, Facebook. And while there’s nothing wrong with Facebook, you know, I just couldn’t connect the dots. But when I saw LinkedIn, it just made sense. So I set up my profile and just like everybody, you know, you’re bad at something before you’re good at it.
Dennis Brown:
And so I did everything wrong. You know, I did everything wrong to start, but I did one thing right. And the thing that I did right was my focus. I had two focal points. One was don’t be that sales guy, okay? Don’t beat people over the head with your pitch. And don’t be that overly aggressive guy that’s out there knocking door to door selling knives, okay? Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that annoying guy. And number two was convert these digital connections and these digital conversations offline as quickly as you can so that you can really, truly build rapport.
Dennis Brown:
Because online it’s difficult. Yes, you can build a little bit of rapport. You can build some credibility, but nothing good happens in the B2B space until you meet them face to face or you pick up the phone. And so I did that. I made. Those were my two simplest focal points. And, and like I said, I threw a whole bunch of mud up against the wall to try to find out what was working and what would work. And I honed that down into a system, you know, you hear all the time, you know, the 8020 rule.
Dennis Brown:
Well, you know, you’ve, you’ve probably heard it. You, you’ve read, probably read the book the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And you know, he kind of hones it down and it really resonated with me. Down to the 95. 5, right? What’s that 5% of activities that I can be doing that’s going to give me 95% of my results. And that’s how I built this system. And I, when I built the system, I didn’t build it to sell to people. I didn’t build it as a consulting business.
Dennis Brown:
I built it just as a tool for me and my organization to generate high quality leads and opportunities and grow our business. And, you know, and in 2007, when I started, I think we were doing about 12 million in sales, so we were doing pretty well. We were probably doing about a million a month in revenue. But by the time I retired from that business, we were doing about $50 million in sales. And 70% of that growth, 70 plus percent of that growth came from our LinkedIn marketing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s amazing.
Dennis Brown:
So it was crazy. It was huge.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s amazing. And there’s something so important, isn’t there, about having that relationship. We can kind of convince ourselves that we’ve got a lot of friends or a lot of followers, and that’s all great. But if you can actually convert that conversation, those likes and comments into a he, let’s go have a beer, or, hey, let’s have a telephone call, then the relationship takes on a completely kind of new. You take the relationship onto a completely new level and a lot of us might think, oh, I’m not a salesperson. But sales is not that guy with the knives. Sales is relational. If you know how to have a conversation with somebody, then that sales.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Listening to people is sales. And, you know, providing solutions or helping people is, you know, it’s all part of that sales process. So, you know, if you’re thinking to yourself, I’m not a salesman, I can’t sell on LinkedIn, then take that out of your mind and let’s look at, hey, who can I relate to? And, you know, who can I take kind of off of LinkedIn and turn this into a conversation? I found, like Dennis has said, my best leads, if they’ve come in through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, have always worked best. If we’ve taken the conversation as soon as we can away from that kind of social space with all the distractions, etcetera, and into some sort of telephone call or physical meeting. For me, a lot of physical meetings work best because there’s that instant rapport. But sometimes you do get a client abroad and find, you know, a telephone call, video calls, I find work particularly well for me. So, Dennis, you. You said that you threw up a lot of mud against the wall.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What sort of thing were you trying. I mean, how. I think you mentioned earlier, how long did it actually take you to get your first lead? Was it a month or a few weeks?
Dennis Brown:
Well, I started. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lee. Yeah, I started generating conversations fairly quick, you know, digital conversations. Where I struggled was getting them offline. And I think it was because, you know, I was a little over aggressive. I wasn’t. You know what I realized in the difference between traditional selling in the traditional world, as people view it, as opposed to social selling, is you have to focus on more about planting seeds and developing relationships, even more so in social than in the traditional world, because people are very skeptical about people that they meet online.
Dennis Brown:
Right. Let’s face it, right? There’s a lot of. A lot of people out there. That, you know, don’t always have the best of intentions. So the reality is people are a little bit more skeptical online because you’re not face to face. You mentioned it before. If I meet somebody in a coffee shop or a networking event, you know, you can get a much better read. So people are more cautious online.
Dennis Brown:
So you got to slow the process down. And so once I started slowing the process down and focusing on positioning myself as a valuable resource as opposed to just another guy out there trolling for a deal or a commission check, you know, it made all the difference. And then, you know, I just wanted to hone in on something that you said and that was this, you know, converting those conversations offline. The last thing you want to do when you get into that conversation is start beating them over the head with your pitch because they’re going to, at that point, if you turn your hat around and it becomes all business, at that point, you know, they’re going to sense that and they’re going to put their hands, hands up, you’re going to get the Heisman and you’re not going to get, you know, you’re ultimately not going to be able to have an opportunity to develop a real relationship. So what I did that I found was most effective and how I got my first client, my first six figure client on LinkedIn was this. I got on the phone with him and it was about a 15 minute conversation. And the first 13 minutes of that conversation, I swear to you, Lee, we didn’t talk about anything but him. We talked about how he got his job, we talked about what he liked about his job and what he didn’t like about his job and his family and football and the different, you know, just different things that we had in common and things that he was interested in.
Dennis Brown:
And then, you know, literally 15 minutes or, you know, 13, 14 minutes went by and, you know, we were about to hang up the phone and it was almost like he felt obligated to say to me, so, Dennis, tell me about this logistics company you started. And what I did is I took about one minute and I gave him a. I framed it in the form of how I had helped another company very similar to him. And it took, you know, it was like a one minute commercial. I didn’t go off in some big long diatribe trying to sell him on how I was, how I was the greatest logistics guy in the world and how he needed to, how I could save him all this money and how he needed to be doing business with me. I didn’t do that. I put it and framed it in the form of kind of a case study, a commercial really short that would, that he would resonate with him. And at the end of it, I just, we just exchanged contact information.
Dennis Brown:
You know, he said that I got permission to follow up with him down the road to have a conversation with him a little bit more in depth about what he was doing and how we might be able to help. And we hung up the phone. And within about a month, I get a random phone call out of left field by the guy. He calls me up and he says, hey, Dennis, remember me? And I said, yeah, of course I do. He said, well, listen, I remember that conversation we had. You know, you do logistics, right? And I said, yeah, absolutely. He says, well, I have a problem. And thus we landed a six figure client.
Dennis Brown:
Now let’s reverse that out and let’s do scenario B. Scenario B. Scenario B was I get on the phone with him and I beat him over the head with my pitch and I start hammering him with, you know, hey, let’s do this and let’s do this and here’s how I can help you here. And you know, the typical sales guy who’s overly aggressive and guess where that conversation goes. There’s a high probability the conversation goes nowhere because now I’m not different than every other guy that’s cold called him in the last year trying to beg him for business. But because I differentiated myself, I was a little bit more patient. And you know, I framed my profile as an expert and a resource and I framed my answers and my conversation in that same, in that same format. You know, he was very comfortable with it and called me out of left field and you know, I generated a six figure client that we had for over six years and generated close to a million dollars in business with.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I can really resonate with this. And I don’t have a million dollars to spend on a bed, but we recently went into the local bed shop to look at new mattresses, etc. And I have this real kind of inner rage the minute a salesperson starts to come near me. And there was, you could see them kind of all in the distance, all eyeballed us and we’re all kind over. And I was instantly putting up all the walls because I knew I was going to get the whole, you know, you need to buy this now and you need to buy it by the end of the day, else the special offer is not here, etc. So I literally ran out the door at top speed because I just couldn’t cope. And when we bought our car a few years ago, my wife kept saying to me, lee, just calm down, be patient with the guy, because he was doing the whole hard pitch sales. We really needed a car, so I just had to put up with it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But if there’s one thing that really does get my go, it’s when or grinds my gears, I should say, then, yeah, it’s. It’s that kind of beating you over the headset sales guy who’s not really interested in you and doesn’t strike up that conversation. Some of the best sales kind of, that I’ve given spent money has been when that person actually, like you did, Dennis, has had a conversation. And I’ve, you know, created a bond with them and felt like they actually care.
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, the great part about social media and LinkedIn and even Twitter and Facebook and other platforms is the fact that you can position yourself as an expert, but by providing content, information, resources to that person prior to ever getting on the phone call, that positions you as that expert, as that resource, as that thought leader. Without pitching, of course, now you’re just giving away freely of information and you’re positioning yourself that way. So when you get on the phone call, you’ve already differentiated yourself, so the conversations are completely and totally different. But if you don’t do that and you go and you just connect with somebody on LinkedIn and you pick up the phone and you. You hammer them on the phone, all of a sudden, you know, yeah, they’ve seen your profile and they. They’re a little bit. They’re comfortable enough with you to.
Dennis Brown:
To connect, but they don’t. They still don’t know who you are. So what I tell everybody is this. I was a. For the first 10 years of my career as an entrepreneur, I was a hunter. That’s what I did. I was a hunter. I was a deal maker.
Dennis Brown:
That’s what I did. That was my mo. So it was very hard for me. And I’m sure there’s people in your audience that are the same way. It was very hard for me to transition from a hunter into a farmer, but it was the most profitable and smartest decision I ever made because, number one, I’m able to have, you know, a huge audience, a huge pipeline of people that are. That are. I always have conversations with, and the conversations are completely different. It’s not that adversarial type of conversation that you’re talking about.
Dennis Brown:
You know, every time you try to buy something, it doesn’t work that way and retail is obviously a little bit different and, you know, they have to take advantage of the opportunity when you walk in the door and, and there’s a whole strategy to that. But, but yeah, it’s LinkedIn. My experience, my experience with that first customer on LinkedIn changed my entire. It was like a paradigm shift. And you know, when, when I work with clients, you know, whether they be in the digital marketing space or whether they be an IT consultant or whatever industry they’re in, I’ve worked in almost every industry you can think of and when they get it, when that light goes on, it’s amazing. And it’s just so I have such a great time with it because now I know they’ve got that tool and as long as they follow the system, you know, they’re going to be able to consistently and, you know, predictably generate high quality leads that turn into high quality conversations which will convert into business, whether it be today, tomorrow, next month or next quarter.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. Now, I can imagine people are listening. They’ve probably opened their LinkedIn profiles, to be honest, whilst listening to you thinking, oh, I’ve not, I’ve not touched this for a few months. I better have a look, see what’s going on. What would you think are the three most common mistakes people do on their LinkedIn profile?
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, so the number one biggest mistake that people make on their LinkedIn profile is they treat it like a resume. Right? You know, let me tell you something, guys, if you’re gainfully employed and, or an entrepreneur, both, right? You have to understand your LinkedIn profile is not a resume. You don’t need a job. You’re not out there trolling for a job. What you should be doing is you should be positioning yourself as an authority, a resource, an export, an expert in your space. So everything that’s on your profile, from your picture to your headline to your summary, to your titles to your multimedia to everything that’s incorporated into that profile. And the good news is, if you get that book, the 7 Habits of Highly Successful LinkedIn Users, it’s a step by step process on how to start optimizing your profile profile. But the point being, everything on there needs to position you as a valuable resource.
Dennis Brown:
So it’s much more of a reputation tool than it is a resume. That’s number one, hands down, that’s what you see the most. You see a lot of resume like profiles, and you even said it yourself when you started, that’s kind of how you viewed it. Well, I Think a lot of that is LinkedIn’s fault. Right? LinkedIn traditionally came out and what they were is they were a place where you went to get job or to find people to hire or to get a job. And, you know, slowly, over the last, you know, the last five years, five to seven years, it’s become much more of a platform for marketers to use as a way to develop relationship sales and build their pipeline. So that’s number one. Number two is they’re too aggressive.
Dennis Brown:
I hit on it earlier. You know, they lead with their pitch versus leading with value. And you hear that cliche all the time. You know, provide value, provide value, provide value. But you, you know, there’s no other way to describe it. The reason why you hear it all the time is because it works. It works, guys. If you lead with value, if you give away your best information, if you give away your best advice, if you give away information that helps solve problems for your target audience for free, you will be absolutely amazed how much that comes back.
Dennis Brown:
Now, is it all going to come back? No. But here’s what I can guarantee you. If you don’t put it out there, nothing’s gonna come back. So, you know, that’s the second thing. They have a tendency to lead with their pitch. You know, they connect with somebody, and the first thing they do is they hit them with an email or a LinkedIn message that says, hey, listen, let’s schedule a call. You know, I’d really like to do your website, right? How quick is it? How well is that gonna work, Lee? Right, it’s not gonna work very well. But if you provided them with a.
Dennis Brown:
Some sort of resource or a guide or an article that said, here’s the top 10 mistakes to avoid when selecting a web development company. Right now, all of a sudden, what are you doing? And I just made that up on the spot. I had no idea. I just kind of made that up. But if you provided that information, what did you just do? You gave them valuable information that now positions you as that, as the. Potentially as that guy, because now you’re much more likely to have that conversation. So that’s number two. And then I think number three, biggest mistake.
Dennis Brown:
And there’s a lot of them. But I think, you know, let me think here. You know, the biggest, the third biggest mistake is this. It’s more of a mindset. People get on LinkedIn and they think that because they’re on LinkedIn, the sky is gonna open and leads are just gonna start falling in their lap. They think that you Know that, hey, I’m on LinkedIn or I’m on Facebook or I’m on Twitter. Where are all the leads? Where are all the deals? Where are all the people? Well, guess what? I don’t care what platform you’re on. Doesn’t work that way.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly.
Dennis Brown:
Doesn’t work that way. You have to have a system. And I’m a big believer in creating a system that you work on and that you follow a basic, you know, MO every day. And here’s what you do. And if you do that, it will give you predictable, sustainable results long term. If you’re hit and missed and you’re inconsistent and you don’t have a system, well, then you’re going to be hit and miss, inconsistent, and you’re probably not going to get very consistent results. So I think those are three of the biggest ones that you see. Optimizing the profile is a big one.
Dennis Brown:
That’s your first one, you know, and I think that people can really get a lot of help with that from the book at Linked Academy, and I’d be glad to try to help anybody we can. Anybody I can.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I love that line, lead with value as well. That’s awesome. It just reminds me the amount of times I have received LinkedIn messages, and that was actually one of the reasons why I didn’t like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is that I regularly, even now, still receive that kind of pitch first email from all sorts of different people all around the world. You know, it’s not even, hey, how are you? Thought I connect. There’s none of that. It’s just quite literally, here’s an InMail, we’re gonna spam you with, you know, our offering and I can guarantee you 100% of those do not convert me. I have never purchased anything from any message like that, either via LinkedIn or via email.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Whereas when someone sent me some free information or answered a problem that I had online, I want to know that person a bit more. I want to find out what else it is they do, you know, and I want to get them involved in my projects. That’s awesome.
Dennis Brown:
Absolutely. Well, you know, the good news is, is I’m glad there’s people out there that don’t understand it. And here’s why. Because when I lead with value, it completely differentiates me. So you get 10 messages spamming people to buy their product, and I give you one message that gives you value, asks you for nothing, and provide you good, solid, targeted value to what your some of your challenges are. I automatically differentiate myself.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly.
Dennis Brown:
And that’s one of the biggest struggles in sales, differentiating yourself. How many times you get a question from a client. So what makes you different than, you know, the, any of the other 10,000 digital marketing companies that are out there? Well, you know, we have really good customer service. Well, we’re dedicated to you, right? We’re dead. We work hard, you know, well, guess what? Everybody works hard and everybody does customer service. But what makes you different? And so by using social selling and particularly LinkedIn and some of these other platforms, you can differentiate, differentiate yourself from Jump Street. And that, my friend, is all the difference.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. Now you mentioned setting yourself up as an authority through LinkedIn. Are there some regular tasks that people should be doing when they’re marketing themselves through LinkedIn?
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So after you optimize your profile, what I strongly suggest is this. Until you get an optimized profile, don’t do a whole lot of outreach, don’t do a whole lot of anything. Because remember, in life, in business and on social media, you get one chance to make a good first impression, one shot. And on LinkedIn, you got about five seconds to make a good first impression. So get that profile optimized. Once you get it optimized, what you want to do is a couple little things that you can start doing is this.
Dennis Brown:
You can, number one, you want to start posting updates that are very specific type of content that is specific to your target audience. So whoever your target is, you want to, you want to start posting updates at least once a day. You don’t have to do it 25 times or 30 times or 50 times a day like people do on Twitter. It’s not Twitter, okay? What you want to do is you just want to post one or two updates a day and you want to typically do it in the morning. Typically, you know, whatever your local time is from 8am to 9:30 in the morning, okay? Because that’s when you get the heaviest use. Nobody’s on LinkedIn at night and nobody’s on LinkedIn in the weekend. So don’t bother that five days a week. Do it in the morning.
Dennis Brown:
And you want to post relevant content, share relevant content. Now I’m not saying publishing this is just posting an update or sharing some content from a trade journal or a blog that you wrote or somebody else’s update. And the reason why you want to do that is because it’s what I call a top of mind campaign. It costs you very little, just a few minutes of your time. And but by doing that, if you do that consistently over the course of a month, you’re going to be able to touch about 60% of your network, meaning 60% of your network is going to see your name and your headline and it’s going to see it attached to that valuable information, to that resource, to that content, to that, to that information that was valuable to them. And that creates a familiarity that you can’t get in a lot of other places, right? So that’s one thing you can do. You can also use some, you know, you can use tools like hootsuite to set up the whole month. If you, you want, you know, you want to use Hootsuite and set up a whole 30 days worth of drip content, feel free to do it.
Dennis Brown:
You know, you can do that. So that’s one thing you’re going to want to do. The other thing you’re going to want to do is start learning how to use advanced search. The advanced search. Most people have no clue that there is an advanced search and they really don’t know how to use it. But the advanced search feature on LinkedIn is so different than any other social platform. Okay. Social media platform is the fact that it allows you to, to hyper target your audience.
Dennis Brown:
It allows you to get very, very granular. If you want to find business owners in the it, you know, in the IT industry that live in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, New York. Those are local towns near me. Okay. And you want them to be a certain company size and you want them to have, you know, all these different criteria. There’s so many different criteria that you can put in there. And you hit search, it’s going to give you a very filtered list of just your target audience. So the alternative is, right, I go in there and I just search for IT people that are in it.
Dennis Brown:
Or the alternative is I just search for CEOs and then I get a whole bunch of CEOs that are not in the IT industry. So learning how to use advanced search would be a really, really powerful way. You know, most people, when I share this with them, whether I’m in one on one training or we’re doing it via webinar or whatever the case may be, you know, they look at it and they’re like, oh my gosh, this is like, it’s amazing because there’s no other social platforms. Think about it. Try to do a search like that on Facebook, you just come, forget it. Try to do a search like that on Twitter. You can’t try to do a search like that on, you know, we were Talking about Blab and Periscope and those different things earlier, before we got on the call, you can’t do it, you just can’t do it. But on LinkedIn you can do that.
Dennis Brown:
And what I found is that if you start having one of the biggest challenges with people on social media, why they fail or why they think it doesn’t work is because they’re having the wrong types of conversations with all the wrong audience. They’re not even talking to their target market. You know, you can’t sell, you know something, you know, you can’t sell, you know, web development to a stay at home model. It just doesn’t work, right. You need to be talking to business owners, right? Vice presidents of sales and marketing within those organizations. If you want to sell web development or digital marketing or whatever it is you’re doing. And if you have, if you start hyper focusing your time and you spend 90% of your time having conversations with the right people on social, you’re going to end up with converting those conversations offline. And once you do that, if you follow some of the other social selling steps and some of the things that I talk about, you know, good things are going to start happening for you just like it did for me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s amazing. I love it. I love all of it. I’m excited. And when I did that search, it was in your book and I remember looking at that thinking, are you serious? I didn’t realize that I knew I could find like I’ve used it in the past to find mates from school, but I’d never connected the dots that actually I could go right down to this granular level and find, you know, specific people. So for me it’s agency owners, graphic designers, web developers and I can actually create lists of those people. I can then find the people in my area and then what I’ve done in my CRM is, you know, created a list of people that I potentially want to start to build up a relationship with. And this is some of the advice that’s in the book there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s phenomenal. In the past I’ve paid for data and I’ve got then a whole lot of email addresses, a lot of them. The info at or the secretary of. So you’re not getting decision makers or you’re just getting into the main inbox. I don’t necessarily have a name, I don’t know who the person is or anything about them, etc. And I can’t instantly strike up any sort of conversation either. So, you know, the power of this search facility is just phenomenal. And like you said, it’s nowhere else unless you’re going to start paying Facebook ad campaigns.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And again, you still cannot get this sort of granular information because, because LinkedIn started out, I guess, as, you know, a place where people would find jobs and that it’s also got all of this information. Whereas again, Facebook doesn’t have that information. Maybe someone likes graphic design, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a target audience. For me, it could just be quite simply they have an appreciation of design.
Dennis Brown:
Not only that, but the business owners and CEOs that are, that are your target market for graphic design or digital marketing, when they’re on Facebook, they’re typically not thinking about Facebook as the place that they go to find a provider for that service. They, they just don’t think of it that way. It’s much more of a social personal platform than it is a business. And again, you know, there’s a lot of people that are advertising on there and like you said, if you want to, if you want to put an ad spend together, you know, I, I have a lot of friends and people that I know that have had some super successful campaigns. But, you know, it’s not as easy as it’s cracked up to be. And, and you know, it’s a little different animal, you know, advertising budgets versus something that your sale, each of your salespeople do or everybody in your company. I taught every single person in my company how to use L LinkedIn and I taught them because every single one of them is a brand ambassador for my company. And they need to know how to position themselves properly and they need to know how to do those basic steps.
Dennis Brown:
Even though their primary goal is not reaching out and putting, you know, putting deals in the pipeline, it is to, is still to represent the brand properly and to make connections even with existing customers. So, yeah, I taught everybody in my company and it worked out well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Funny you should say that because I instantly passed your book on to Larissa, who’s my colleague here in the uk and then once she’s done it, she’s then going to pass the baton on as well over to the guys over in India as well. So, you know, just having everybody know how to use it better and kind of all strive together to generate leads as well, to create relationships, it’s really exciting. So I believe you’re going to be doing a course in a few months time. Can you just tell us a little bit about what to expect and how people can get notified when it launches.
Dennis Brown:
Sure. So for the last couple of years, I’ve been doing consulting with, like I said, business owners, speakers, consultants, consultants, you know, sales teams. And that’s great and I really enjoy that. They’re typically small groups of anywhere between, you know, three and 20 people, you know, but the challenge with consulting is, is the fact that it’s limited to my bandwidth, so I can only take on so many clients and a lot of times I have to push those clients out 30, 60, 90 days because of my, because of how busy I am. So what I really, I had people asking me, well, why don’t you create a course? Why don’t you create an online course that people can, anybody can go into and purchase the course and then they can take the training, you know, 24, 7, 365 on their own timeline. And, and I said, you know, no brainer, let’s do that. So I’ve been putting this course in place. It’s going to be called Linked Academy.
Dennis Brown:
I’m going to be releasing it, hopefully sooner than later. Unfortunately, I got a little bit behind because of the sale of my other business that put me, you know, that took me six months to navigate that and get that thing put to bed, but we finally sold that company. And so Linked Academy is going to be a course we’re going to be launching soon. You know, if you get the book, you’ll get notified of the course, you’ll be able to check it out, but it’s going to teach all the pillars of my system on how to go from optimizing that profile to building your network to developing, you know, that rapport, those, those relationship building and nurturing campaigns to converting those conversations offline and the whole social selling structure that I use. And, you know, it’ll be something that you can do online. It’ll be very video based on, and, and I’m really excited about it. I’m very excited about it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Dennis Brown:
I think I’m going to be able to spread the, the word and help, help a lot of other people with my, with, you know, start leveraging LinkedIn.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. Yeah, I’m looking forward to the release date, my friend. Yeah, I’m very happy you said videos as well, because I can read stuff, but I do so much better if someone’s doing a video.
Dennis Brown:
Yeah. Oh, it’s going to be very video driven. They’ll be supporting resources and documents, documents with it, but it’s going to be very heavy video and it’s going to be very tactical, step by step by step of exactly what I still do today to generate leads for my LinkedIn consulting business. Because I’m a guy that eats my own dog food, I do exactly what I teach.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve never heard of that statement. Okay, who eats his own dog food?
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, I do exactly what I teach. That’s. That’s just how it works. I don’t have my system, and then the one that I teach, it doesn’t work that way. No,
Lee Matthew Jackson:
sorry. I’ve heard of practice what you preach. I’ve just never heard the dog food one, so I’m gonna have to. That’s the great thing about interviewing people around the world. You get to hear some pretty cool things. So I’m gonna bank that one. So, dude, I guess then what we like to do with the podcast is when we wrap up, based on the fact that you’ve got years and years and years of experience in business, I mean, obviously you’re not that old, you’re only 21, plus a little bit of tax, etc. But in your experience, is there kind of one piece of entrepreneurial advice that you could leave us with? So one thing that you think somebody could start to do today that you really think is going to make a massive difference, and then after that, we’ll just find out how we can connect with you, and then we’ll wrap up.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So one piece of sage wisdom from the man, please.
Dennis Brown:
Yeah, so. So you know what I tell people to do? You know, I do a lot of mentoring and I talk to a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs and people like that that are just because of the audience I kind of run with. But you know what I tell people is this. You gotta get out of your comfort zone. And I’m gonna relate it back to my LinkedIn story. Had I not gotten out of my comfort zone, I was. I’m telling you guys, I was that social media naysayer. I used to get in arguments with my wife about Facebook.
Dennis Brown:
So when I set up my LinkedIn profile, I set it up very quietly so that she would never know. Okay. And then after the fact, I finally admitted that I did it, but get uncomfortable. Get out of your comfort zone. Just because you’ve been doing it one way and it, and you’ve been getting some results for it doesn’t mean that that way is going to continue to work tomorrow, next week, or next year. You have to keep yourself open to other opportunities. And so getting out of your comfort zone and keeping your eyes open. Now, I’m not telling you to go grab a hold of every shiny new Internet marketing idea that you see on Facebook or the Internet, but what I’m telling you is this.
Dennis Brown:
LinkedIn. The premise of LinkedIn is the six degrees of separation and networking and building relationships. And that’s never, ever, ever going to go out of favor. It’s never going to change. That’s what built businesses for the last hundred plus years, and it’s what’s going to be building businesses the next hundred years. So the foundation of what LinkedIn does is all they do is allow you to, to leverage on a global basis a huge network of your target audience. And so get out of your comfort zone. Try something new.
Dennis Brown:
Start with the book and if you guys enjoy it, you know, we can have a conversation from there. I always invite everybody to connect with me on LinkedIn as well. You know, you can find [email protected] in askdenisbrown. That’s kind of my username and that’s kind of my custom URL. So. So feel free to connect with me there and I’d love to have a conversation with you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. So that’s Linked Academy to go grab your book and to be on the list to be notified of when the course comes out, which I’m super excited about. And then if you head on over to the show notes, it’s going to be leejacksondev.com episode 21. I’m going to make sure all of those links are in there as well as Dennis’s link to LinkedIn. The unfortunate thing with LinkedIn profile URLs is they’re never quite so easy to read out, are they? So head on over. It’s leejacksondev.com episode 21 and you’ll get all of the details, you’ll get the show notes, you’ll get all of the links and kind of a synopsis of all the awesome stuff that Dennis has said as well. So some notes there as well. So, Dennis, all that’s left for me is to just.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Thank you so much. It’s been an honor to have you on the show, buddy, and you have dropped value galore. So thank you so much for being on and, and have an awesome day, mate.
Dennis Brown:
Thank you, Lee. I appreciate it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that wraps up episode 21 of the WP Innovator podcast. Remember, you can go and check out what Dennis is up to over@linked academy.com that’s linked academy.com and remember, you can connect with all of us over at the WP Innovative Private Facebook group over on leejacksondev.com group or if you’re like me and you live on Facebook and you’ve got it open right now, then just tap in WP Innovator into the search bar. Guys, thank you so much for listening. Really looking forward to connecting next week. Have a great day.
