Just Get Started, Episode 436 — "Personal Brand Strategist and Networking Coach"

Brian: Someone comes to you today and says, Liam, all right, I'm ready to go on LinkedIn, what's my first step, what are you sharing with them?

Liam: Great question. So the first thing is you want to start with your profile and make sure that it's a landing page. I mean, I think that the term 'profile' is almost a misnomer. Think about LinkedIn as your professional landing page. Everything that you do on the platform comes back to your profile. People are going to land there. You want to make sure you have a nice banner. Canva has 10,000 banners that you can choose from for free for LinkedIn banners, so anything's better than the default gray, right? A headshot. Don't take a picture of yourself in the back of an Uber. This is the headshot that follows you around all over the platform, so make sure it's recognizable, make sure that your face is centered, make sure it's a large, like sort of right up front and you're smiling and you look approachable. Your headline, your headline is going to be, again, like I often say, every action you take on LinkedIn is a micro ad for your personal brand, and that's powerful. And so you want to make sure that whenever you do leave a comment on a post, the first 50 or 60 characters of your headline convey to whoever's looking at your comment exactly who you are and what you want them to take away from it, right? So for me it's 'personal brand strategist and networking coach,' that's what I want them to know I'm doing before anything else, and that follows me everywhere on the platform. So make sure that your headline is really buttoned up. I typically tell people: put what you do, then put a section that's sort of who you help and what you help them do, and then the third sort of section of your headline should be something a little bit more personal, something that lets people get to know a bit about you that they can't tell from your professional experience. So for me, I talk about the fact that I'm a blockchain and artificial intelligence bull, I'm very bullish on those two things. I talk about the fact that I'm a family man first, tells people I have kids, right? I talk about being a hot sauce aficionado, which is probably my most successful icebreaker, if I have to pick one, because people actually send me hot sauce on a regular basis now, and they will tag me in on things where they see hot sauce conversations happening on the platform. So the whole idea of a personal brand is to make it so that people are thinking about you when you're not in the conversation or you're not in the room. And so having a really good profile setup is good. Your About section should be more than just the standard, like 300 characters. You have 2,600 characters to work with. You can tell a really good story in 2,600 characters. So talk about what you do, how you got there, why it matters to you. There's an opportunity to really bring people into who you are and what you do and why you do it. That's a very powerful thing. So the profile is the first thing, I'd say, is very important.

Liam: Second, you want to make sure that you're filling your feed with content that inspires you to converse or consume the content. So a lot of people think, 'I'm going to show up on LinkedIn, I'm going to create some posts, and then boom, I'm going to be Gary Vaynerchuk.' And it doesn't happen that easily, obviously. If you really want to leverage the platform effectively, you need to make sure that you have plenty of content to work with. So find people who are having conversations on the platform, find people who are posting content regularly. You can leverage LinkedIn search to find people by specific industry, by specific company, by title, by topic, right? There's no shortage of ways to find interesting content on the platform. You just have to think a little differently about it than you traditionally have thought about it. And then, you know, grow your network. That's the other thing, right? Finding people who are of interest to you, connecting with them, having conversation with them, because the posts alone are not going to get you tons and tons of followers. You have to start building your network of new people who are showing up every day. And again, if only 5% of people are posting content on a weekly basis, that gives you an opportunity to get ahead of the curve just by being in the conversation on those people's content. So really spend time trying to curate your feed. Think strategically before you start following people: What am I trying to do on LinkedIn? Am I trying to surround myself with all of the thought leaders in the revenue operations space? Am I filling my space with people in the branding space? For me personally, I work a lot with small business founders, entrepreneurs, coaches, so that's where I'm spending a lot of my time, building connections with those people, commenting on their content, having them comment on my content. It just starts a conversation. So you're always in conversation with your ideal customer profile, or your target profile. So for example, three years ago I was adding every COO in Washington DC to my network because I wanted to see if I could get another job in operations. And you want to be on the radar of people who have opportunity. So that's the other thing.

Liam: And then the third piece is really that content piece. So notice how I put the content piece last, yeah, because you've got to check the first two boxes, right? And once you've done that, then you can start focusing on the content piece. And I tell people to think about content on LinkedIn in three different buckets, because you don't want to just be a one-trick pony. You don't want to be blasting people with the same thing over and over and over again, because people don't like getting talked at, they want you to talk with them. And so I typically encourage people to break their content into three buckets. The first is your skills bucket. These are the posts that you're going to talk about what you do, why you do it, who you help and how. Those are your sales and marketing posts. Whether you're looking for a new job or you're looking for clients, you're basically using those posts to put out a message about the value that you deliver, if given the opportunity to do so. The second bucket is fascination. People love consuming content that people love creating. If you love to create content about artificial intelligence, people are going to sense that passion and they're going to sense that you are really fascinated by that topic. It's also going to come naturally to you. So a lot of people are like, 'I don't know where to start on LinkedIn, how many times can I talk about accounting or law or whatever?' That's the whole point: share some of your fascination that's related to business, and people will start to consume that content and they'll want to get in on the conversation. So I say: a couple posts a week with the skills, a couple posts a week with the fascination. And then the third bucket is what I call 'window into your world' posts. And these are the posts that are a little bit more raw, they're a little bit more vulnerable, they're more human. And they take a little bit more effort to publish, because it's really kind of putting yourself out there, and it's letting people see something inside of you that maybe they wouldn't otherwise get to see. But it's also highly relatable, because it's a little bit more vulnerable and it's putting yourself out there. So for me, you know, I'm talking about my weight loss journey, right? Not necessarily a comfortable topic. It's acknowledging that you're struggling with something, but everybody wants to lift you up, they want to see you succeed. I talk about being a working parent, about being a first-time founder, about my wife. I talk about her all the time because she's just such an inspiration to me. So I think those are the ways that I encourage people to think about LinkedIn. And if you do all those things in parallel with one another, in congruence, you'll start to see a pretty big impact pretty quickly. But I think the challenge is that a lot of people pick one of those areas, double down on it, and then realize they're not seeing as much traction as they'd like, and then they stop.