Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation with Louise Brogan

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
linkedin, people, post, profile, headline, alastair, clients, connect, specialize, write, comment, starting, podcast, wexford, business, louise, page, person, expert, talk

SPEAKERS
Alastair McDermott, Louise Brogran

 

Louise Brogran  00:00

Don’t use general verbs. And your headline is a massive tip. Okay, you’re wasting space in your headline by saying, we support people to do this now get your key thing in there. So, LinkedIn consultant not I help people to learn how to use LinkedIn for business. I’ve just used up the first line of my headline. So they’re missing podcaster, small business Britain champion, speaker, all the other things that I do so I am an advocate for keep it as concise as you can.

 

Voiceover  00:31

Welcome to The Recognized Authority, a podcast that helps specialized consultants and domain experts on your journey to become known as an authority in your field. So you can increase your reach, have more impact and work with great clients. Here’s your host, Alastair McDermott.

 

Alastair McDermott  00:47

Hey, folks, before we get into today’s episode, I just want to briefly mention that I’m going to be doing a couple of webinars in December and January. And they’re going to be focused on the journey to authority and helping you niche down. So if those are things that you’re interested in, sign up for the email list, if you’re not signed up already. You can get that at TheRecognizedAuthority.com.  Today, my guest is Louise Brogan. Louise is a LinkedIn consultant. She’s a speaker, a podcaster. She works with entrepreneurs and small businesses to help them leverage LinkedIn. She’s also a small business Britain champion. And she has a podcast called LinkedIn with Louise.

 

Louise Brogran  01:26

Thank you very much, Alastair. I’m looking forward to this.

 

Alastair McDermott  01:29

Yeah. So you are one of these LinkedIn spammers, you’re responsible for these horrible messages, right?

 

Louise Brogran  01:36

Definitely not.

 

Alastair McDermott  01:37

Okay. So let’s talk about people sending spammy messages on LinkedIn.

 

Louise Brogran  01:43

Yes, let’s do that. Because that is literally what I teach. The opposite of somebody actually contacted me and said, Do you have like a cadence of, of messages that I can send to somebody to get leads on LinkedIn? And I said, No, I don’t. Because I mean, LinkedIn is all about building relationships with people. And if you’re copying and pasting the same thing to everybody, you’re not really building anything with anybody. You’re just annoying people. I got a message from somebody. I was saying to you, Alastair, that I accepted this person, because I like to err. On the side of positivity. I’m hoping it’s not like a cut and paste.

 

Alastair McDermott  02:20

Give people a chance. Yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  02:21

Yeah. But potentially is. So what made me laugh about it was this person sent me a message and said, they wanted to connect with me. And they said, I was looking through the top podcasters in Europe. And that led me to your profile. And I thought, Wow, I’ve never been called that before. That’s pretty cool. I thought, how many other podcasters in Europe are receiving this message right now? So yes, I teach people to build genuine relationships on LinkedIn. And please, not to copy and paste things, because it doesn’t serve anybody very well.

 

Alastair McDermott  02:59

So let’s talk about that. And I know that one thing people talk about relationship building on LinkedIn is that it feels like it’s so much work. It’s so time consuming. It’s really hard to do it. And then how am I going to have time to, you know, do my real work as well. So can we talk about that for a minute?

 

Louise Brogran  03:17

Yes, we definitely can. So it’s actually something I help my clients with. Interestingly, they still window opener there, I don’t think he even realized. And so I work with people who don’t want to spend time on LinkedIn. They know that’s where they’re going to win business. But they don’t want to have to think about it too much. So what I do is I help them with their posts. I have a team of writers, and we write posts for them, which we send to the client, but then the client has has a piece to do too.  So the client, they’re written in the clients voice for a start, because you know, we’re a good surface. So we get to know the glands voice there in the pants voice that we can post them on behalf of the client, use a third party tool, but I prefer that the client posts in themselves. And then when people react to those posts, which they do, that the client replies, rather than that, like I’m not going to reply as you I would never log in as somebody else and send a message to somebody else.  When it happens to you. It’s quite weird, someone replied back Tuesday. Hi, yeah, this is Alastair’s PA and I managed his messages for him. I’ll be sure to pass that compliment about his podcast on and it just makes you feel a bit better. But the other thing is, LinkedIn doesn’t take a huge amount of time when you understand how it works. So when you’ve got a good optimized profile, and you know what key things you’re going to talk about on there thinking about your business to say you are a leadership development coach or something. And you write down here are the key things I’m going to discuss on LinkedIn. I’m going to stick to those and you can post twice a week as a thought leader in your space. And as long as you are connecting with people who are actually interested in what you have to say, you can really raise your profile and become recognized as an authority in your space. Because you, you stick to the topics that relate to what you’re doing in your business, you connect with people who are actually interested in those topics.  When you’re on LinkedIn, go and see other people who share interesting content that is related to what you’re doing in your business, and comment on those things. And that, that those simple things to do, will raise your visibility and your profile on LinkedIn enormously. And it’s really funny, when I work with clients, I do this thing called the LinkedIn VIP service where we basically go over someone’s profile. And then I show them how to use LinkedIn, how to format your posts, how to come up with the topics you want to write about, and how to start conversations with your network. Again, people come back to me like a month later, and they go, I can’t believe that worked. No, of course it worked. This is what my business does.  And so it’s not about going in every day, and struggling for something to say I don’t really know what to say. And someone told me I need to be in there every day posting. And other something else to me, I need you there for two hours a day building my networks, etc, etc. No, you don’t. Think about the key people you want to connect with and talk about the areas that you’re an expert in. And you if you decide right, I’m going to post twice a week, it could be Tuesday and Thursday, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, set a time in your calendar to check LinkedIn, maybe you’re at lunchtime, or maybe 11 In the morning, see if anyone’s replied to your posts. And then pick three people strategically, who you want to go and see what they’ve posted. And it might say strategically, it could be someone who’s a good business contact for you. So someone that you want to open up a discussion with about your services, it could be somebody you’ve worked with before, or it could be somebody who also serves the same clients as you. So when you’re commenting on their posts in a thoughtful way that shows you as an expert, their network, and their audience will see your name and your headline, your interesting comment, and they will click over to your profile to find out more about you. And because you’ve done the work, optimizing your profile and getting a great headline that brings more people to check out what you do. And when you written your profile properly, it should lead people to reach out and connect with you or at least to try and find out more about you. And that’s what leads to business on LinkedIn.

 

Alastair McDermott  07:41

Okay, so let me see if I can recap all of that.

 

Louise Brogran  07:45

It’s a lot of information, sorry.

 

Alastair McDermott  07:48

Okay, first thing is, and we’re gonna get more into a lot an optimized profile is but so optimize your profile, make sure you have a great headline, have a couple of key topics, so two to three key topics that you’re going to be writing continuously on, post twice a week with your own posts. And then also look, look into your connections. So you should I want to ask a bit more about that. So you should be adding connections on a regular basis, I’m guessing. And then finally, looking at strategically commenting.

 

Louise Brogran  08:20

Yes.

 

Alastair McDermott  08:20

Have I got everything you mentioned there?

 

Louise Brogran  08:22

Yes. So I talked about having four, four key areas to work in profile, network, content, and messaging. Those are the four things you need to think about when using LinkedIn.

 

Alastair McDermott  08:34

Okay, now messaging, what does that mean for you?

 

Louise Brogran  08:37

Well, what we opened up the conversation with about you –

 

Alastair McDermott  08:40

So literally messaging?

 

Louise Brogran  08:41

Literally messaging,

 

Alastair McDermott  08:42

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  08:43

Because that is where you get business on LinkedIn. You don’t get it out on the newsfeed, you get it in the messaging inbox.

 

Alastair McDermott  08:49

Okay. Okay, I want I do want to ask about messaging. But let’s go back to some of the other stuff that we mentioned first.

 

Louise Brogran  08:55

Yes.

 

Alastair McDermott  08:56

In terms of an optimized profile, you mentioned great headline, is there anything else there that we should dig into in terms of the optimized profile?

 

Louise Brogran  09:03

Well, there’s a massive volume.

 

Alastair McDermott  09:08

And what’s what’s important,

 

Louise Brogran  09:09

I do have like a short 10 minute or five minute video on YouTube, about what you shouldn’t have your profile, people will check that out. But you as a service provider, you want to have a great headline that catches somebody’s eyes. Now bearing in mind, if you’re commenting on someone’s post, the reader will only see the first line of your headline. So yes, there are hacks to write four lines in a headline and crammed full of keywords, etc, etc. But we are writing headlines to be noticed. So keywords at the start of your headline.  Then you’re about summary. You’ve got 5000 characters, and how I do this with clients is we write it in a way that the reader resonates with you and what you’re doing. So you might start with some key issues that the person that who needs your services struggling with. So if you’re right, if you are a leadership development coach, and you go in and work with senior teams. Someone who is the person who makes the decision to bring someone in to work with their senior team, if they’re reading your profile isn’t just all about you, how amazing you are? Or have you written something in there they go, yeah, that’s an issue, we’ve got work. Actually, I’m really interested to find out more about Louise.  So starting out, writing it in the way that the reader gets kind of hooked in to what it is you do, and then explaining to them how you can help them back it up with some, you know, I didn’t just step off the ferry today and turn up as leadership development coach, here’s my you know, I have years of experience working in this industry, but not too much about yourself, then you want to say how you can help people, what are your services, and then make an easy way for them to reach out and get in touch with you, or send them to your websites, and then do your podcast, ask them to connect you on LinkedIn, whatever it is, you want them to do, make sure you include that in there, because so many people have just used this space and written three lines, like I’m a management consultant working in the corporate industry. You know, that’s it, like, Okay, well, you know what, that’s not engaging me, it’s not leading me to want to reach out to you or find out more about you. So they’re right, something’s really important.  But the rest of your profile needs to be filled in as well. So having key skills listed, and, you know, relevant, current skills, I work with so many clients, who, when you go look at their skills, their skills in their, from their career that they did two careers ago, that just never got data that LinkedIn uses your profile to show you in results to people who are searching for what you do. So if you keep getting fined as a software engineer, and you’d have software engineering 10 years ago, you’ve probably got less to like CS plus, plus programming Java programming in your skill sections have taken out, you know, up to your skill set.

 

Alastair McDermott  12:09

Right. Yeah. That’s, that’s something I’m probably guilty of because I was a software engineer.

 

Louise Brogran  12:15

Everybody has it. Yeah, it’s really funny.

 

Alastair McDermott  12:17

Yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  12:17

And yeah, how you can check is if you go to your personal dashboard, which is on your profile, when you can see, you’ll see the keywords that you’re coming up for and search on that will tell you what people are finding you for. And if it’s if it doesn’t fit what you’re doing know, that shows you need to update your profile.

 

Alastair McDermott  12:33

Yeah. Okay. So that’s the optimized profile. For headlines, for headlines for websites, I really like when people use what some people call positioning statement or a value proposition. So we help these people solve this problem, or I help these people solve this problem. How do you like that as a headline?

 

Louise Brogran  12:50

I hate it.

 

Alastair McDermott  12:54

I figured as much so, okay,

 

Louise Brogran  12:57

I’ll tell you why.

 

Alastair McDermott  12:58

Enlighten me.

 

Louise Brogran  12:58

okay. Don’t use general verbs, and your headline is a massive tip. Okay, you’re wasting space in your headline by saying, we support people to do this now get your key thing in there. So LinkedIn consultant, not I help people to learn how to use LinkedIn for business. I’ve just used up the first line of my headline. So they’re missing podcasters, small business Britain champion, speaker, all the other things that I do, so I am an advocate for keep it as concise as you can. And also, so many people have helping or supporting in their headline, I think you don’t really stand out.

 

Alastair McDermott  13:42

Right. And that’s the opposite of the advice that I would give people on their webpage, where you have a bit more space for it. I think it I think it’s a space constrained thing. That’s what it sounds like to me. Because when you when you do have this space, I think it’s better to not categorize yourself as something like LinkedIn consultants, I’ve actually dispelled out a bit more. So that’s interesting.  Okay, so so we have our we have our headline, we have our optimized profile, the summary that resonates with the reader and a call to action. Okay, so you’re talking about having, having connections let’s talk about actually connecting with people what like, what’s, what kind of rhythm or cadence or frequency do you recommend that people connect? Because I’m hearing people getting banned from LinkedIn, for doing something as simple as looking at a lot of profiles pop up this week, so that that sounds crazy.

 

Louise Brogran  14:39

I don’t believe everything people say, I have to say about things. There’s other things that might lead you to getting back being bad. I think looking at other people’s profiles wouldn’t necessarily like you’re doing as a human being. And others,

 

Alastair McDermott  14:52

Right.

 

Louise Brogran  14:53

I’m sure there’s other software’s and things that people are coming up with.

 

Alastair McDermott  14:57

I think actually what they said was They had a Google spreadsheet with a whole bunch of links to profiles. And what they did was they went down the list and right click open, right click open a new tab. And, you know, you open open 100 profiles in two minutes. Maybe LinkedIn thinks that’s a bit spammy looking.

 

Louise Brogran  15:15

I personally agree.

 

Alastair McDermott  15:19

Don’t do that. Right. So, so basically, slow down, relax, yes, get a cup of tea.

 

Louise Brogran  15:26

Okay.

 

Alastair McDermott  15:27

When you’re, yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  15:28

Build a genuine network, around you on LinkedIn, that is people who may become your clients, people who you may collaborate with people you’re interested in having conversation with. LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to connect with more than 100 people in a week. I think it is nice that they’ve limited it to. Stop thinking of LinkedIn as this is my lead making machine, and start thinking of it as I am going to this place where I’m going to build a valuable network of contacts, who are going to grow my business.  If you connect with I say, you connect with 100 people today and let down how on earth san you have a conversation with more than two or three of those people? You can’t. You know, I always love the analogy of going to think of LinkedIn as going to your industry trade fair or conference. So say you and I go, maybe you know, I’ve got tickets to go to, you know, Social Media Marketing World, in Los Angeles, right? And you go there, you probably want to go and look for people that you’ve heard of you want to go follow them. You want to start connecting with people, because you meet them, you have a conversation if you know, say you set off in the morning, and say right, My goal is to is to meet 200 people at this conference today. How many conversations you’re going to have it’s going to make any impact? I would say zero.  But if you decide that I’m going to go along to the talk that’s about podcasting, and you in the room, but podcasting, you’re sitting beside somebody, and you start talking to them, they say what they do you see what you do, and you connect with each other? Or maybe you don’t, you connect with each other. And then if you do that several times that day, and you go back to your hotel room that night, you’re going to remember all of those people what they do, you might reach out to them to work together on a project. Or they might say they might go to some event tomorrow. And they say, Yeah, I met this podcast or she talks about LinkedIn, you should connect with her because you know, you’ve been talking about needing help with your LinkedIn.  That is how LinkedIn and the network work, going out and connecting with hundreds of people never sending a message to say why you’re connecting with them and connecting with anybody and everybody does you no favors whatsoever, is just such a better plan of attack to decide who you want to connect with. Maybe you want to connect with all the sales managers in I don’t know and Wexford. So you go through and you see a bit less a sales manager to expert in the industry you want to target and you send in connection requests. And you say, Oh, I you know, I’m coming to Wexford next week, I’d love to connect with you added to my network, you want to apartment us stick out and their connection request because you actually bothered to leave a message.  And I’m most people, not everybody. Most people will reply. Now all of a sudden, you’re having a one to one conversation with that person. And I mean, this is the way I approached LinkedIn, Alastair, and it has been so beneficial, and it worked so well. That that’s what I teach my clients to do. And you know, people will say that No, I want to get to 10,000 people always because then when I screw up my sales event, you know, I’m going to hit the mark with you maybe 50 of those. It’s not X not Hi, I use LinkedIn. That’s not what I see it I see it as a place to really build relationships with people rather than broadcast out. Whatever thing it is you want to say to the world.

 

Alastair McDermott  18:57

Yeah, yeah. And just for anybody not familiar with Ireland. Wexford is the sunny southeast. It’s like the Florida of Ireland. So yeah, I think people who know expert will laugh. Yeah, so Okay. So what you’re talking about there is you talk about a very kind of non-spammy approach. You’re talking about taking effectively like real world networking as if you were at a real conference or something and applying those same like rules of etiquette and things to your online virtual networking on LinkedIn. So that makes that makes that makes sense.  Okay. So we have an optimized profile, we got a great headline with some important keywords like near to startup that we have, we’re talking about putting up connections. How many connections like obviously, do you limit to 100 weeks you can’t go more than 100 a week. If you’re probably talking about like a few a few a day if you are adding those.

 

Louise Brogran  19:58

That is genuinely what I think. Now I’ve worked with some people who’ve maybe only got 200 connections. And I do ask them training them to get at least 500. Because most people LinkedIn will tell you that what’s seen as a sign of an active user on LinkedIn as someone who logs into the platform once a week. Okay. And the stats, like there’s 750 million users, I think, and the stats are that most people log in, check LinkedIn, by once a week.

 

Alastair McDermott  20:25

Yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  20:26

And for like, honestly, not very many minutes. So you do want to have a good enough number that when you put out your brilliant thought leadership piece that somebody actually sees it, to comment on it.

 

Alastair McDermott  20:40

Yeah. So let’s talk about those thought leadership pieces. So you’re talking about two posts per week. And LinkedIn does have a character limit, which can be quite annoying if you write something nice, and then you have to chop it all up. But yeah, those are like they’re, they’re I don’t know, what is it like? It’s about 500 words or something like that.

 

Louise Brogran  21:00

I think it was about 500 words. Yeah.

 

Alastair McDermott  21:04

Yeah. So it is a bit longer than it used to be.

 

Louise Brogran  21:06

Yeah, they doubled it.

 

Alastair McDermott  21:08

Yeah. But it’s still you know, for somebody who writes a long article, it’s it’s still could feel quite short. So,

 

Louise Brogran  21:13

You can post post an article, Alastair.

 

Alastair McDermott  21:16

Okay. Let’s talk with it on the on the LinkedIn, like not as opposed as,

 

Louise Brogran  21:22

Yeah. So what if you if you and I are looking at LinkedIn right now, at the top where it says, it actually says status update, I think and write the post. But the fourth option is article. So you can publish an article, I have written an article about how to write an article in LinkedIn. For Social Media Examiner, it’s called write articles that people will read and share.

 

Alastair McDermott  21:46

Yeah. Do you find that the numbers of views that you get on that article as the same as on your posts?

 

Louise Brogran  21:53

they don’t measure them in the same way?

 

Alastair McDermott  21:56

Right.

 

Louise Brogran  21:57

So the view of the article is someone’s actually read the article, a view of your posts is that your posts has showed up on someone’s screen for 300 milliseconds. Measurement, which is funny,

 

Alastair McDermott  22:11

And very different.

 

Louise Brogran  22:11

The person who looks at your article read it is someone who is way more invested in what you’re talking about. But the way I do this with clients, it would be that you write your article, so whatever your big article about thought leadership is, then you write your posts, shorter posts, pulling out key pieces of that, and that people are interested in you send to the article.

 

Alastair McDermott  22:35

Yeah. Okay. You mentioned thought leadership content. What is thought leadership content?

 

Louise Brogran  22:44

You may have heard our thought leadership expert on your podcast before. And so,

 

Alastair McDermott  22:50

I have actually, I’ve got one to go out and one day, so that’ll be a few weeks in the past, I want people listening to this.

 

Louise Brogran  22:59

Okay, so what my idea of what a thought leader is, so I have a client who works in diversity and inclusion. And rather than this client, just taking new stories and sharing them on LinkedIn, she’s writing her opinion on this topic, and sharing that, or if there’s a big news story about something about diversity and inclusion, that she shares that but she writes, you know, a good piece that shows that she knows what it is, here’s what her thoughts are on it. And she’s starting conversation with her network around that.  So a lot of people don’t really know what to talk about on LinkedIn. And a lot of people, a majority of people that come to work with me feel completely overwhelmed by it a little bit fearful of it. And and if you talk about what you know, and you are already knowledgeable about or working in. That’s, that is my recommendation. And that’s like that I work with universities and students. And that’s really tough. Right? So that’s, you’re talking a different, you’re looking at something different there. Because you can’t talk, you know, as an expert, or something that you are literally just learning about at college.

 

Alastair McDermott  24:18

Yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  24:18

But you might want to try to start building yourself up as the expert that you are, like for most of us who go to work as consultants, because we’ve been doing this stuff for a while. And we know what we’re doing, like when anyone connects with me or follows me on LinkedIn. I generally talk just about how to use LinkedIn to raise your profile online to get business. You know, I don’t tend to talk about other stuff. I mean, I have I have this small business Britain Champion, as well. And I do talk about small businesses and I am passionate about small businesses, which is kind of why they gave me the role. So I will talk about that as well. So you’ll see me sharing stuff to help small businesses resources to help small businesses. And but my thought leadership piece is more about how to someone can raise their profile, using LinkedIn in a non spammy, genuine way that leads them their business to grow. That’s, that’s what I talk about.

 

Alastair McDermott  25:19

Right. Okay. So and I like the idea of using your writing to develop your thinking, because I think that’s an important part of developing your thinking is, is, I think, a friend of mine, who will be on the podcast, give him give him Vatra, he had a great quote for me on a song last week, he said, I don’t write because I have ideas. He said, I don’t write a lot because of that. I have ideas. I have ideas, because I write a lot. You know, and I think it’s really important to do that.

 

Louise Brogran  25:55

That is so interesting, because I’ve been writing for Social Media Examiner for by the year, maybe longer. And I, yeah, since since pre pandemic, which we all think is like a year long, but it’s longer than this stage. And I’ve been writing for them for quite a while now. And every time they give me a topic to go and write on, I get really, really stuck in to those topics. And I come out of them, like knowing so much more about them than I did. Yeah, not an article about LinkedIn creator mode, because I know about that. And then you get into it. And you have to really research the life out of it come up with ideas and examples. And you come away going well, I know a lot more. No.

 

Alastair McDermott  26:36

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Louise Brogran  26:36

So I love I love writing blog posts.

 

Alastair McDermott  26:40

Yeah. And so, okay. So we have now we have our two posts per week that we’re talking about, or maybe even writing them as articles. And so when you’re talking about, you’re saying that they count the candidate a different way. But basically, do you get the same mileage, the same value from posting it as an article as you would from a post?

 

Louise Brogran  27:01

No, you don’t, you don’t get more visibility a 100% more visibility with writing posts,  Right.  If you write them in a way that people engage with them, okay, that’s the key. You post on LinkedIn all day long. But if you don’t understand how to post something that someone will respond to, you’re not going to get very far.

 

Alastair McDermott  27:25

Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I’ve seen people do a lot of stuff, they won’t put an external link in their post, they’ll put it in the comment. Is that is that is that is, does that hack work?

 

Louise Brogran  27:37

I have a podcast episode from a year ago called the LinkedIn hacks that everyone’s talking about, that I don’t do any of. There are people, Alastair, there are lots of people who work in the same space as me, who will swear blind on either side of that fence. I, I would prefer to focus on putting out something that people want to read about and engage with or start conversations over, as opposed to do I put my link in the post or the comments. Does it matter? What if I post it 11am When I post at 1pm, I’m going to test this for a month, and I’m going to give you the results. There are people out there who do that, and you know, fair play to them. That’s what they love doing. That’s not That’s not why I use this platform. I don’t get hung up on those types of things. And if anyone’s listening to me going, but that’s exactly what I talk about the reason I’m sorry, to be offended.

 

Alastair McDermott  28:41

So this sounds really similar to SEO search engine optimization, because particularly, that was one of the first things I worked in, back in 2007-2008 when I when I started my business. And back then it was worthwhile, actually, like trying to game the algorithm because the algorithm wasn’t very sophisticated. And Google weren’t keeping the promise of we will rank the best content. Whereas I think now, yeah, so, so whereas now they’ve gotten a lot better about that. And they have started to, you know, to penalize spammy content and people hacking, using using kind of hacks and gaming the system. So it sounds it sounds to me like what you’re talking about is playing the long game, creating good content for people putting up good content and doing things properly. Rather than looking for kind of cheap hacks.

 

Louise Brogran  29:34

I mean, it’s interesting, because I’ve been doing LinkedIn for a long time, but I’m doing I’ve been working on my YouTube channel for a short amount of time. So when you are like if someone’s listening, and they’re just starting to build their LinkedIn, they’re looking for that you get distracted by Oh, try this and try that the shortcuts and it’s the same with same with any any platform, but it’s the same with YouTube people like oh, you can get you know, monetized in six days. If you do this, it’s really, really hard not to get distracted by these big promises that other people are making. If you follow these, you know, beat the algorithm. It’s like when we all started Facebook pages, you know, 10 years ago. And they said, Do this to get your Facebook or Facebook stopping people from seeing your page unless you do this, that and the other. And actually, at the end of the day, you just realize you just got to try and put a bit of hard work and learn how something works. And then do,

 

Alastair McDermott  30:31

Yeah, yeah. No, because it’s hard work. It’s hard to work that way. But let me ask you, because like, I know that this is a service of yours. But I’m also interested just in the idea of hiring people to write for you. I mean, that sounds like it, that sounds like maybe you’re not doing the right thing. So can you talk to me a bit about that?

 

Louise Brogran  30:50

Yes, absolutely. So it’s funny dichotomy, the right word, I’m not sure if that is the right word. But basically, I know how to format a post, in a way on LinkedIn that people will start to engage with. And there will be somebody out there who loves lots and lots of people who want to build their profile on LinkedIn, they want to be known as an expert, Podcast Producer, or they want to be known as whatever, but they don’t understand how LinkedIn works. And they like so busy over here developing their podcast clients, they’re like, I don’t want to have to learn how to do this stuff.  So what the way I do this is that person will say, Okay, well, we’re producing a podcast about podcasting, or we’ve got a blog, maybe easier to do blogs, we’re producing a blog every two weeks that showcases our expertise that we’re putting on our website, they then give me that blog, my writer takes the blog, and creates a LinkedIn post that is LinkedIn formatted. And you’ll see as complete in brackets, you’ll see lots of people who put this exact same thing on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, still still, people are on this platform for different reasons. And the way you write has to be different for every platform.  But for those clients, we take what they want to say, and write it in a LinkedIn friendly way. And then they post it as themselves. And if they’re, if they have a company page, it’s really easy, because I just got out of it as a page admin, and I want to post it for them and respond to comments, and you’re responding as the company that’s, you know, really simple and easy.

 

Alastair McDermott  32:31

Can we talk about that for a second?

 

Louise Brogran  32:32

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

 

Alastair McDermott  32:33

The company page thing versus the personal profile.

 

Louise Brogran  32:36

Yeah.

 

Alastair McDermott  32:36

So a lot of people listen to this will be like me, there’ll be a, either an independent consultant, or maybe like me, they’ll have a full time VA, or maybe a part time, VA. And so I like I’ve been considering, you know, should I start using my brand page? Should they start like building up this company page as a brand? Or do I just keep working on my own? Like, I’ve got 5000 connections on my personal account. And then I’ve got zero on my company page. So like, is it worthwhile to invest any time in that?

 

Louise Brogran  33:08

My answer is yes. That’s what I believe. Not everyone believes this. And again, but you know, I can sound I think, yes, solo entrepreneurs, or independent consultant should have a LinkedIn company page for a multitude of reasons. You’re giving yourself a second way to find when people are doing search, not just on LinkedIn, but also on Google, because Google loves LinkedIn and LinkedIn content. That’s what you know. One of the things I was told a couple of years ago was it because there’s fresh, so much fresh content published on LinkedIn every single day. And Google has loves that, because it’s fresh content.  But it’s like, if you think of the millions, at least 55 million company pages, as well as all the solo people posting on LinkedIn, there’s in Texas, massive volume of fresh content all the time. So Google loves it as a platform. And if you type your name into Google, your LinkedIn profiles, one of the top results that comes up, but having the company page, to me, it’s like, if you think of a traditional shop, your company page is the front of the shop. And on that if people look at the company page, they understand what your company does, and your key services or products, and it’s much more of a traditional marketing platform, in my mind, and then if you think your personal profile is we’ve gone into the shop and we’ve met the owner and we’re having a conversation with the owner of the shop. So that’s I, I will be look out definitely can of course, if you are starting to hire people, you can add your team to your company page and involve them and even if you’ve got like a team of maybe four or five people working with you, maybe you’re so you started out as an independent consultant. You’re not creating a consultancy or agency and you’ve got four or five consultants who are working for you, and they’re going out there delivering the work and you are the CEO, and you’re you putting out thought leadership.  Well, if those people are attached to your company page, they can be sharing the message. But also, when someone clicks on your profile, you can see the company logo on your personal profile. When you’ve company page, people can go and check out your company page. Other people, if you’re starting to hire might go and look to see what kind of company are you. If you do work contracts for large corporates, they’re going to go and seek having a company page gives you more credibility in LinkedIn, there’s just there’s a lot of things, I think, going for it. And but also, they’re starting to develop like company pages a lot more.  So I’m in a LinkedIn run group for page administrators. And they are constantly working on new things to come out with company pages. So I think it’s definitely worth having one. And the final thing I say on it is your company page can attach itself to three hashtags. And if anybody posts a post with one of those hashtags on LinkedIn, you can comment as your company or as your brand as opposed to just use the individual as well.

 

Alastair McDermott  36:12

Okay, that sounds interesting. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is creator mode. I’ve seen this thing and it’s prompted makeup science I’ve posted to pull on creator mode. But there was one thing that really put me off it. It, it sends out a message when somebody wants to connect to me with me. It’s an MMS message that says Alastairs prefers to be followed, rather than connected with, which sounds to me like that sounds a bit like Alastairs thinks he’s too important to talk to. So I don’t want to turn on creator mode, because just that one thing. Can you talk about, like, what the benefits of it are? What what it is?

 

Louise Brogran  36:51

I know it’s really funny. I wish they I wish they hadn’t done that a bit, because it is the thing that people don’t like about it. and I were talking about hacks earlier, I have a video on YouTube about how to switch your back to contact. And somebody commented on a video and said they think that LinkedIn have cottoned on to that and changed it. I’m not I haven’t gone back to Jack.

 

Alastair McDermott  37:11

Oh, yeah, no, I have checked that it says if you have creator mode turned on, turning off, follow primary will also turn off creator mode.

 

Louise Brogran  37:20

Well, that’s not true, because I did that. And that didn’t happen for me.

 

Alastair McDermott  37:23

It wasn’t previously.

 

Louise Brogran  37:26

Yeah. Okay. So what I like about creator mode is I have it turned on, I will keep it turned on. On my profile on the introductory card right off my head, my profile, my headshot, and my name and my headline, roll up to my heads. It tells you the five key things that I talked about. So it says I talk about LinkedIn, I talked about small business, I talk about podcasting, can’t remember the last one. So people know if they follow me, this is what I’m going to talk about.  But what I like more than that is when you scroll down through someone’s profile, instead of you seeing my recent activity that I commented on someone’s post, or even more annoying, I hope they update this. If you had a post and you responded to everybody’s comments on that post, your last four pieces of activity can be literally Louise commented on this, Louise comment series, commented on it. Whereas with your Creator mode, it has the six most recent pieces of content that you have created and posted on LinkedIn. So I like that but that that is really getting down to the nitty gritty of how LinkedIn works, Alastair, and most people, that general population of LinkedIn, probably don’t even know the Creator mode exists. Nevermind. You think about what’s in the activity section. If someone doesn’t know squat, what is their intent? What’s it tell me a section?

 

Alastair McDermott  38:49

Unless it pops up? Because unless it pops up with suggestion to turn it on, like it did for me when I was writing a post.

 

Louise Brogran  38:57

Yes, that’s true. Yeah. So I have it turned on. I like it. But it’s not for everybody.

 

Alastair McDermott  39:02

Yeah. I think if they, if they decide to change that that message because I think it does sound a bit like you know, just a bit too self important to to deal with you mere mortals. You know, that’s what it sounds like.  So, okay, listen, I want to start to wrap this up, because I know we’ve only got a couple more minutes. And there’s one thing I just want to ask you about, because specialization is a massive topic for me in this podcast. And I know that you specialize your business because I was listening to you talking to Natalie on her podcast. And I think she’s a business coach of yours.

 

Louise Brogran  39:37

Yes, Natalie. Yeah.

 

Alastair McDermott  39:39

Yeah, yeah. And so you were not specialized. And then then you niche down to focus only on LinkedIn. Is that right? Can you tell us briefly about that decision? Like was it scary?

 

Louise Brogran  39:50

Yeah. Well, actually, it was that took me a long time to actually make the switch. And one of the big reasons being that I was working With Facebook and Instagram as one of their as the only Facebook-Instagram accredited trainer in the whole of Ireland north and south, and I, I got up to specialize on LinkedIn. And I made the decision not to do that anymore.  And so I am not the kind of person, Alastair, who goes, right, I’m going to do this, let’s just go for it, let’s just you jump off the cliff and tie my umbrella on the way down or parachute. And I don’t know, that is not me. I’m like, Oh, I’ll go down the ruling hill. And I might need to have snacks on the way and make sure got my water bottle. That that’s much more my style. So now he said to me, you know, Louise, are lots of people who do social media training, and you’re very good at it. But what if you specialized in one, and we talk through the different options. And the reason I chose LinkedIn was it was pure and simply because when I spent time on LinkedIn, I got business far faster than the other platforms.  But why you should niche down or specialize is because you become known for that area, the number of people who have connected with me and said, Mary said I should get my colleague Mary said that I should speak to you because you’re the LinkedIn expert. I, Oh, my goodness is like the woman said, I’m not I’m not one of the top podcasters. And you’re not ridiculous thing to say. It’s very flattering, but it’s not too. But I have, like a, There’s so much I know about using LinkedIn. And I love it. And I love helping my clients with it. And when I was trying to understand how Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and Pinterest at one stage, and LinkedIn are worked, you, you know so much that you couldn’t hold on your hat, really.  So by specializing one area, you can really, really understand whatever field you’re working in, you know, but also people will pay to work with someone who is an expert. So for example, in my business right now, I’m looking for someone who’s an expert in Asana. I’m not looking for someone who knows how to use all the project management tools. I’m not interested in someone who has learned. Here’s all the five top you I can do Trello I can do click up I can do Asana, no, I I’ve already bought Asana, that’s what I’m using. I want the person who lives and breathes Asana because they will know so much more about it than the person who is also trying to get to grips with using Trello on tech up, etc, etc. So it’s the best decision hands down best decision I’d be in my business because I can focus on the one platform. People know me for it. I get invited to speak at conferences, and pre pandemic, I went to Dublin, London and Los Angeles to speak about LinkedIn. You know, if I was doing all social media, that never happened.

 

Alastair McDermott  43:01

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And these are the kind of things that a lot of people who specialize sorry, everybody who specializes has those kind of results. But it is it is a scary thing to do. You said, you said it took it took you some time. How long did it take you? Oh, gosh,

 

Louise Brogran  43:17

I think the first time and at least suggested to me I think it was about a year.

 

Alastair McDermott  43:21

Yeah. took about a year to make the decision or to actually do the decision.

 

Louise Brogran  43:26

I cast a vote with the decision. And I started to tell people that’s what I was doing probably. But six months in but I still accepting work from people who wanted to do other things. I would say for Yeah, for another six months, until I went back to what actually why when I’m accepting this social media and workshop over here, I’m turning dying this person over here, who wants me to teach them LinkedIn for three hours is gonna pay me far more money than these people over here. A lot of journalists social media workshops.

 

Alastair McDermott  44:02

And they’re paying you more money because you’re the LinkedIn expert. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, there’s a good place to wrap it. Louise, where can people find you if they want to learn more?

 

Louise Brogran  44:12

At LinkedIn. I know my website is LouiseBrogan.com and I have a YouTube channel, LinkedIn with Louise, my podcasts, LinkedIn with Louise, come and connect with me on LinkedIn and say if you heard me on this podcast, that’d be super.

 

Alastair McDermott  44:27

Super, Louise Brogan, thank you very much.

 

Louise Brogran  44:29

Thank you.

 

Alastair McDermott  44:33

If this is your first time tuning in, I encourage you to subscribe to the show so you can hear all of the other great episodes that we have coming up. You can subscribe for free at TheRecognizedAuthority.com/subscribe