Hala Taha:  [00:00:00] young Improfiters, my two favorite topics to teach are LinkedIn and sales. They're two topics that I've completely mastered, two topics that have enabled me to become such a successful CEO, entrepreneur, and founder. at such a young age. in this episode, I'm replaying a webinar that I did hosted in partnership with Pipedrive.

The top sales CRM, made by salespeople for salespeople. It is basically taking the whole industry by storm. really user friendly, really cool platform that integrates with everything very easy to use and basically it will help you really advance your whole sales process.

Now they have a super cool LinkedIn integration where you can see all of your LinkedIn DMS, you can automate templates for your DMS and if [00:01:00] you guys know. Anything about what I teach for LinkedIn. It's all about the DMS when it comes to sales on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is a platform that is primed for sales conversations.

 So in this webinar. I talk about how to go about selling on LinkedIn, the different strategies you can use from your post content to your DM strategy.

And then I talk about how you can leverage pipe drive to manage all your communications in one place. We do a demo of pipe drive. If you want to get the full webinar, we have the entire webinar with all the slides and everything like that posted on our YouTube channel.

And if you want to just take a listen, we've cut it down to the parts that make sense to be audio and we're replaying it on the podcast so that you can level up your LinkedIn and sales strategy. If you enjoyed this webinar and you want to try pipe drive, you want to try that new LinkedIn integration, which is awesome.

By the way, you can sign up no credit card, no risk at young and profiting. co slash pipe drive for a free 30 day trial and 20 percent off your membership for one [00:02:00] year. I'll put the link in the show notes. Again, that's a young and profiting. co slash pipe drive. You get a free 30 day trial and 20 percent off your membership from one year.

Play around with pipe drive, see how you like it.

I promise you it's going to help you stay organized, track your sales. If you want to scale your sales operations, you can't do it all in spreadsheets. You can't really scale your team without having one place for everybody to understand where all the communications are happening. So your team members They don't step on each other's toes.

Pipe Drive is the solution to that. We use it at YAP Media for all of our network sales. I love it. Now I love it even more with this LinkedIn integration. So if you're ready to master your LinkedIn sales, let's jump right into this webinar. 

If you guys were at my previous Pipedrive webinar, we really focused on sales and things like driver trees and tracking your leads and all that kind of stuff. Today we're going to take a focus on LinkedIn. 

 And by the way, [00:03:00] if you guys missed it, Pipe drive has a new LinkedIn integration, which is so cool because I teach a LinkedIn masterclass. And one of the things that everybody always asks me is how can I track all these conversations more efficiently?

And now we can, you actually get the DMS in your pipe drive 

So, uh, very excited to go over a lot of my different secrets about LinkedIn and sales today. And, uh, for the agenda, we're going to be talking about why there's a good opportunity to sell on LinkedIn. Why LinkedIn? Why is So many entrepreneurs and people who have something to sell focusing on LinkedIn.

We're going to talk about the winning formula for direct messages, how to effectively find your target audience, invite them, not seem spammy, send value and make a sale via DMs. We're then going to talk about tracking all of this because it's a lot to manage if you're only managing it in the actual social media platforms or email platforms, [00:04:00] everything's going to be disjointed and you're going to lose deals and it's going to be slower to actually close deals.

So we're going to talk about how pipe drive is going to streamline all of that for you guys. Thanks. Then we're going to talk about how to optimize your profile. And then lastly, content strategy. Now, these are things that I literally sell for thousands of dollars in my course.

You guys are getting it all for free. so let's talk about selling on LinkedIn. Let's get right into it. So why LinkedIn? First of all, LinkedIn has this angle of having a professional focus. When you think about LinkedIn, it is a platform where people are looking to get jobs, People are talking about their promotions.

People are talking about their businesses. And when you think of other platforms like Instagram or TikTok, they're not talking about those things. People are talking about fashion and makeup and dancing, and it doesn't have the same professional focus. 

And so people are going to Be open minded to listen to what you have to say regarding your business on LinkedIn, [00:05:00] and they're going to feel like it's an appropriate place for you to be talking about that content. So that's number one.

Number two is that LinkedIn is one of the only social media platforms that essentially acts like a search engine. So everybody on LinkedIn is real. There's no bots on LinkedIn. Everybody has a profile that has so much information and keywords about that person. You know, their title, you know, the past jobs they had, you know, where they live, where they went to school, you know, who they're connected to.

You've got a bio about them, you know, what they look like. This is so much more information and searchable information than any other social media platform. On top of that, you know, what events they went to, what groups they're part of, and these are all things that you can actually search and find your target audience via these methods.

And we're going to talk a lot about that in a bit. And number three is that it's just an overlooked opportunity. While all the business owners are trying to dance on Instagram and TikTok to get leads, it's not. You could be dominating on LinkedIn. [00:06:00] There's over 135 million daily active users on LinkedIn, and less than 6 percent of them are creating original content.

That means you can stand out in your niche. It's also a completely hackable algorithm. And I'm going to give you a couple insights about the algorithm, what you really need to know so that you can go viral and that you can get more visibility and eyeballs to your page.

So it's an overlooked opportunity. It's a hackable platform. You still can get organic reach. You don't have to do paid ads. If you put in the work on LinkedIn, you are going to be able to rock it. And this is simply not the case with other social media platforms. Okay, so what are the ways that people sell on LinkedIn?

Number one is educational content. Educational content is how you're going to target niche audiences. Usually you're going to want to infuse these with keywords. And then anybody who likes comments and shares on these educational posts are essentially raising their hand and saying you have permission [00:07:00] to message me.

I took the first action and you can now retarget me in the DMs and spoon feed me whatever lead gen asset that you have. Okay, that brings us to direct messages. Now, direct messages can be used by retargeting the posts that you have by retargeting your competitors posts. By finding people who sign up to events and messaging them that way.

Finding people who are in groups and messaging them that way. Finding people based on their titles and messaging them that way, right? So there's a million ways to do DM campaigns and we're going to talk a bit about that. Number three, LinkedIn live streams. So if you have a low ticket offer and you're an expert on a topic, you can do Q& As.

So for example, when I have a LinkedIn course, I might hop on LinkedIn live and just be like, hey guys, ask me anything. Anything related to LinkedIn or selling on LinkedIn, ask me whatever you want. I'm going to answer all your questions here. And by the way, I've got a course coming up in September. You can sign up [00:08:00] at yapmedia.

io slash course. I can talk in the chat with people, respond back, drop my links, and you can literally be selling on live stream. Super effective way, especially if you've been growing your following through content and posts and people actually show up to your live streams. It's just basically a live webinar like this that you can do whenever you have the time and just show up and start selling on live stream.

Similarly. You can also do that on audio events. And then anybody who shows up to these live streams and audio events, you can retarget them in the DMs. And give them a link and a lead gen to save their email or whatever you need to do to keep that conversation going if they didn't close on the actual live stream or the audio event.

Okay, so there's actually live events that you can do on LinkedIn and sell that way. And then lastly, you can do events like this. So you create an event page. People can search it, find it on their own. You can share that event page on your content, your posts, You can email out that event page and basically you just link it to either a live stream, an audio event, or a private [00:09:00] Zoom webinar.

So events like this are another way that you can sell, it's off the platform technically if you're going to do a private Zoom webinar, but you promote it with a LinkedIn event page.

 So now we're going to talk about the winning DM formula. Now, some people come off spammy on LinkedIn. But want to know something?

When I messaged somebody on LinkedIn, I would say about 99 percent of the time I get a thank you and I create a fan if they don't buy from me because I make it something relevant and I offer value. So it feels spammy if you make it all about you and you don't make it about them, if you're not relevant and if you start selling before you actually add value, right?

So it shouldn't come off spammy if you know the winning formula. 

 So first of all, you need to determine your target audience. Who are you reaching out to? Why are you reaching out to them? What is the point of this campaign?

Right? You need [00:10:00] to step back, think about who you're targeting, how you're going to make it relevant. What is the point of this campaign? What is the ultimate outcome that you want? What is a link or links that you're going to be promoting throughout the whole process? Conversation and you're going to want to create your target audience.

Number two is if there is second or third connection, you're going to have to, based on LinkedIn's capability is send them a personalized invite with a note, and you're going to say why you're reaching out to them. And usually the way that you found the person is the common ground. So if you're searching for titles, I'm looking for social media managers.

Hey, I noticed you're in the social media space. Would love to invite you to my webinar or whatever it is. So usually the way that you find them, or for example, Hey, I noticed that you are a powerful female in the finance industry because you looked up the finance industry and you found like, that's the common ground, the way that you found that.

So once they accept the invite, [00:11:00] then you're able to send a DM. And if they're a first connection, you can just go straight to the DM stage. So basically at this stage, you're going to want to provide value. So you're going to want to provide top funnel lead magnets. And then mid funnel lead magnets, and you're going to want to keep warming them up until you want to basically, if it's a high ticket offer, you're usually going to want to take them off platform and make the sale, whether that's in a webinar, whether that's on a discovery call or a one on one call, you're usually going to want to take them off platform to make the sale.

But before you make that ask, you're going to want to provide so much value. That they feel the law of reciprocity that they have to do whatever you ask them to do to take them offline or that you built that trust, you built that credibility and that social currency where they're actually going to want to do whatever ask that you have, okay?

And if it's a low ticket offer, you might be able to just do the sale in the actual DM itself and not take them [00:12:00] offline. Okay? So how do we find our audience on LinkedIn? There's all these attribute based. Ways to actually search and find your target audience. And basically what this means is just all the inputs that people put in their profiles.

And that's the way that you can actually find these people. So you can find people based on types of connections. Are they your first connection, second connections, third connections, what location they're in, their current or past companies, their schools, their industries, their service categories. And then my favorite way, Is free keyword search.

You can literally search anything on LinkedIn, like it's Google and find your target audience that way. So that's what we mean when we say attribute based, it's basically any content that they have on their profile. You can basically search that in LinkedIn search, and then you can filter by people by posts and there's a million ways to filter.

Okay. So you can find your audience this way. The other way that you can [00:13:00] find your audience is based on the behaviors that they take on LinkedIn. So, for example, what events are they signing up for? What posts are they engaging on? Who do they follow? In my LinkedIn class, we talk about identifying look alike profiles, so people who have an audience you want.

So, let's say you want my audience, who's commenting and liking on my posts, and how can you help? Reach out to them, invite them to your network. Uh, who's attending audio events that are related to what you sell or do. Right? So there's so many different behaviors that people take on LinkedIn that you can also find your audience in mass.

And when it comes to effective marketing, the goal is to always try to find your audience in mass because it's the easiest way to save time. You're not trying to find your audience like it's a needle in a haystack in a million different places, right? So where can you find your audience in mass? Is it through their title?

Do you have specific titles that you're looking at that [00:14:00] you sell to? Could it be certain events that have keywords related to what you do or sell that you're going to find everybody in mass? Or is there an influencer that has the audience that you want and you can find them in mass on their posts?

Okay, so these are things for you to think about, about how to find your audience. And then, like I said. The way that you found them is the common ground. So I noticed that you follow Gary Vee and I think anybody who likes his content is going to like mine too. I'd love to provide value on your feed. So that's an example of that.

Okay, so, establishing common ground. Once you have your audience in mind, you need to establish relevancy or similarity so you don't come off as spammy and so that you quickly build rapport. I talked through this already. So next you're going to be sending a personalized invite. And again, you're going to use the way that you found the person as your common ground and relevancy point.

And then you're also going to be using the law of likability. Okay? So here's an example of sending a good personalized invite or DM. [00:15:00] Now, I believe it's a 300 character limit. This is something that you can basically boilerplate. And customize slightly per person so that you're not every time you're inviting somebody you're coming up with a new message, but you might customize it by first name, for example, because hopefully you're finding your audience in mass.

So again, you're not having to do an individual new invite for each one. You're just customizing something like their first name. Another tip is if you want to not even have to customize it with their first name is to say, Good morning. Happy Wednesday. Happy Thursday. When you say something like that, it makes people feel like it's customized, even if it's not.

Because it feels like it happened genuinely at that time, and it's you talking to them. So, hey, first name. I noticed you engaged with Heather Monaghan's content. Heather Monaghan is a lookalike client of mine. I recently spoke at ABC convention alongside Heather. She and I talk about similar topics, and if you like her content, I think you'll like mine too.

You seem [00:16:00] like the type of person I would love to have in my network, and I'm curious to learn more about you. Now, something else that's going on in this message is that I'm not being assumptive. In the beginning of the sales cycle, you never want to be assumptive. You never want to make people feel like you're pressuring them and pushing them.

And so if I said, I recently spoke at the ABC convention alongside Heather, she and I talk about similar topics. And if you like her content, you're going to like mine too. This opens the door for somebody to slam it in your face. Don't tell me what I like. You don't know anything about me. Why are you assuming that I'm going to like your stuff?

This is how people respond in a nasty way to you You need to be soft, neutral language, disarm, 

 Law of liking is also something to keep in mind for invites. Because first of [00:17:00] all, if somebody accepts your invite, LinkedIn is going to increase the amount of invites that you send a day.

They're actually looking at your acceptance rate. And so your goal is to try to get people to actually accept your invites on LinkedIn. And one of the ways that you do that is by using the law of likeability, because people are going to accept you into that invite. If they like you, if they don't like you, they're going to ignore you, right?

So what do people like? People like people who are similar to them. People like people who give them compliments. People love to be asked questions. They want to be asked about their own lives, their own interests, their own opinions. People like people who share the same identity and are part of the same community or group.

People like people who feel that they think they're experts, that ask them for advice because it makes them feel powerful, like they have value to give to the world. So we want to harness this powerful principles of the law of liking and some examples of this. [00:18:00] I noticed that you engage on Gary Vee's content.

I'm a big fan as well and I follow his work. If you like his content, I think you'll like mine too. I'd love to provide value on your feed. You look like somebody who really knows their stuff in the real estate world. I'm in this industry too and I'd love to connect. So we're giving them a compliment.

They know their stuff. They seem accomplished. I noticed you recently posted about skydiving for the first time. What was that experience like? As two strong female leaders in this space, I thought we should connect and support each other. I noticed we both went to NYU. Always happy to connect with a fellow NYU alumni and look forward to getting to know you better.

What are the ways that you can establish the law of likeability? Did you, are you guys similar in any way? Did you guys go to the same schools? Are you in the same industry? Right? Do you follow the same people? Can you give a compliment to them? Something that seems impressive. Next is sending a personalized GM to establish common ground, add value, build rapport, and then you're going to just keep going, keep going, keep [00:19:00] going, until you make your ask.

So again, part of this is upfront campaign planning. We don't have time to go through all of that today, but usually what you're going to do is actually map out your whole campaign before you even get started. So what is your invite note going to say? What is your first DM? What is your second DM? If they answer this way, if they answer that way, how are you going to respond?

So like, you're going to try to boilerplate it and templatize it so that you can do this in mass. And now a platform like Pipedrive is going to help you manage all of that. You can actually insert. Your templates and pipe dry. So building value and rapport. So here's an example of a first DM. Hey, first name.

Thanks for connecting. I'm all about helping individuals clarify their personal brand and mission. I've been a personal brand coach for 20 years, and I read on the topic based on your profile, this may be interesting to you. I have tons of accessible content on my newsletter here. My goal is to help people understand their core values and missions to solidify their brand.

Let me know what you think about the newsletter. I'd love to [00:20:00] get your feedback. So this is introducing them to a Top Funnel Legion, a newsletter where they're going to insert their name, their email. You're going to get their email so that you can also retarget them on email. And hopefully you're providing them relevant free value.

so the first invite message Clarified why you're even reaching out to them. So this campaign and the invite message for the invite might've said something like, Hey, I noticed that you're in the branding space and you're doing an awesome job, I feel like we have a lot of commonalities I'd love to connect.

So then this message doesn't seem like, why is this person giving me content about personal branding? Right. So it all has to kind of work together. So there's all different lead magnets that you can have. And one of the things that you need to do before you even start these campaigns is decide what lead magnets are you going to leverage?

How are you going to collect people's names and emails? That is so important, right? So top funnel magnets can be an ebook, a white paper. There's [00:21:00] Different web pages where you can create quizzes or calculators. You can create a checklist, a cheat sheet, right? So there's all these different things that you can do.

And then you use your email CRM typically to create a gated asset page, which is very easy to do. You don't need to be tech savvy. And you basically just have a form that people fill out with their name, their email, and then they get the downloadable and then you can reach out to them on email and you have two ways to reach out to them.

Then a platform like pipe drive will consolidate all that info for you, their email, the emails that you've sent to them, what they've responded to the LinkedIn DMs that you've sent to them, all their contact information, then you have everything in one place. 

Now for mid funnel activities. Basically, as people start responding, Hey, I love the calculator that you gave me.

It was so useful. Oh, if you love that, I'd love to invite you to my upcoming webinar coming up. Here's the link to register. And Zoom webinars are also a great way to collect people's names [00:22:00] and emails as well. So you can invite them to, Hey, I've got a live stream. I do every Wednesday. I'd love for you to show up.

Hey, why don't we do a free coaching call? I'd love to really figure out what your problems are and see if I can help you solve them. So you want to bring them to mid funnel activities and offline LinkedIn if you can if it's a high ticket offer so that you can close them and give them some one on one attention or at least like a closer attention if it's some sort of webinar or live stream.

So this is just highlighting the fact that email is everything. One thing that you guys should know is that these social media platforms change all the time, the algorithms always changing, you could get locked out of your account, especially a platform like LinkedIn, any social media platform, you need to de risk yourself by constantly taking your connections and getting them to give you their email.

One of your biggest goals. Should be going through all your first connections on LinkedIn, [00:23:00] whoever's your target client. Do you have their email? If not, figure out a way that you can provide them value so they give you their email. We do so many sales on email, and one of my biggest regrets is not starting my email list even sooner.

Like I mentioned, Zoom webinars are a great way to get emails in mass. For example, when I do these webinars. Let's say like 500 people register, half of them always show up. So 500 people will register, half of them show up, but you know what, I get 500 emails. Very important, very effective. Email also has a very high click and conversion rate, people are in their inbox all day, and it's a way to personally reach out to them.

Okay, this sounds all great, but how do I track all of this? We need to have the right systems in place, we need to facilitate simple pipeline management. And this should be one of our top priorities. The more that you can streamline things and see everything in one [00:24:00] dashboard, be able to manage your leads because last thing you want is you're selling to somebody on LinkedIn who you're also selling to on email and they're like, geez, you're sloppy.

I'm already talking to you on email. Why are you messaging me on LinkedIn? You need to make sure that you're handling all these communications with care because one mistake, you lose the deal. So a dedicated CRM. Put all of this in one place so that you can follow up with your leads. You don't lose your leads.

You have all the comms in one place, your email, your LinkedIn messages and so on. And so this is crucial for sales managers and reps to track their performance. measure their progress, stay organized, close deals faster, close bigger deals, and so on. So let's talk about Pipedrive. Pipedrive is the CRM that we use at Yap Media.

It's a CRM by salespeople for salespeople. And essentially, in a nutshell, Pipedrive enables sales teams and small businesses, businesses of all sizes to streamline processes, consolidate sales [00:25:00] data and CRM tool. Track the progress of sales opportunities and see sales data in real time. Automate follow ups and ensure timely responses to leads with automated reminders.

This also includes automated DM messages, automated emails. Assess team performance for ongoing improvement with dashboards and reporting. So basically it's everything in one place. And it also has this like Kanban format. So you can kind of like move deals from stage to stage, map out your sales process.

You can have every lead and know exactly what communications you've had with them, what stage of the sales process they're in, and so on. The other thing with PipeDrive is that you're able to embrace automation. You can automate just about any step of your sales process. You can automate repetitive tasks like creating a deal when a new contact is added, triggering personalized emails to go out.

Again, now you can do personalized DMs, which is awesome. [00:26:00] Transferring ownership to another rep when a deal reaches a certain stage, like if you've got multiple people involved in your sales process. And there's also an AI powered sales mentor that further boosts your performance. So for example, if you have a requirement, like your sales reps need to send out a hundred emails a day.

If they don't do that. An A. I. Notification will send the rep a reminder like, Hey, you didn't do what you're supposed to do in order to make sure that you hit goal, right? So setting things up in advance is a little bit of upfront work, but then it makes everything happen so much smoother and more organized later on.

Now, pipe drive also has so many integrations also very affordable. It's something that can scale really easily, which is nice. It's very easy to use, very user friendly. I know that there's other sales CRMs that, for example, when I worked in corporate, people used to have to take week long trainings to learn how to use it.

Pipedrive is something like on day one, it's [00:27:00] just so easy to use and it's easy to understand. It's not scary, even if you're not tech savvy. It's just really intuitive and they've got a million integrations. So, jot for them. Your email CRM will integrate, Zapier will integrate, Slack will integrate. So, it's really, really useful, and especially if you've got all your tools working together, and PipeDrive basically is the way to consolidate all of that when it comes to sales.

There's a new integration that we're especially excited about, and we've started to use on PipeDrive, which is called CERT. And essentially surf saves you time by improving your outreach and bringing pipe drive on top of LinkedIn. So the two main things that you can do with surf is you can add your contacts to your CRM.

So basically you can find a contact on LinkedIn and a lot of the times their LinkedIn email is actually visible, right? So whatever email that they signed up with LinkedIn will pull into your CRM so you can get their email, [00:28:00] their name. You can type in customized information about that person, maybe tag them in a specific way.

Alright, so you can basically pull your contacts from LinkedIn into Pipedrive via Surf. The other thing that you can do is use personalized message templates, schedule meetings, and follow up before they forget you through Pipedrive. So you can actually send your LinkedIn messages through Pipedrive and then use templates, which is really cool.

Like I mentioned before, one of the biggest asks that I get from my mastermind masterclass, I do a two day workshop on LinkedIn and I have hundreds of students that take this program. I do it every couple months. And one of the biggest things that they complain about is they're like, I keep losing all my leads.

How do I track my leads? And this is a way for you to basically categorize your campaigns, tag your campaigns, and basically start to monitor leads. In a more cohesive way in your CRM. Okay, so before we get into the demo, one last chance for you guys to sign up. There's no [00:29:00] credit card required, no strings attached.

You get to try it for free for 30 days. So why not try it for free if you like it? You get 20 percent off for the year. Kajal, if you don't have an email list, the best day to start is today. You got to start sometime. Rose, how would you tailor that message if you don't post on LinkedIn? I would say start posting on LinkedIn and You'll have more credibility if you start posting on LinkedIn, 

So let's talk about optimizing our LinkedIn profile. first of all, you guys got to make sure you have a good profile picture. You want to show your face. You want to make sure you're not too close or somebody's looking up your nose, but you're far back enough where basically you just have like the top of your chest and your head and you don't want a body shot.

One of the things that people get wrong with their profile picture is that they don't understand that part of the success, especially when it comes to going viral, is getting people used to your face. So if you're really zoomed [00:30:00] out, people don't know what you look like. Also, if your profile picture actually doesn't look like all your other People are not going to connect the dots that it's the same person.

So you want to make sure that your face is visible, it's super clear, people are really attracted to the whites of your eyes, the whites of your teeth. This is stuff that you can get FaceTune or apps and like modify if you want to make your teeth and eyes whiter. And the other tip that I have is actually an eyebrow flash, a head tilt, and a smile.

Because those are friend signals, okay? So like imagine you're in a hallway, you see somebody that you know, what do you do? You raise your eyebrows, you smile and you tilt your head because you're showing, Hey, I'm your friend. Right? So same thing, smile. Don't have like a mean looking profile picture. That's going to be the opposite of a friend signal.

All right. And show a little bit of your neck because that is the most vulnerable part of your body. That's where your carotid artery is. And that's why. When you do that, you're basically showing [00:31:00] off a friend signal. It's the same reason why, like, a dog, when you see a dog rolls over on its belly, it's showing you, like, I'm not a threat, right?

So, eyebrow flash, head tilt, and a smile, whites of eyes, whites of teeth, not too close, not too far. If you've got a certain brand color, you can make your brand color your background. You want to be high contrast. So if you have blonde hair, don't be on a yellow background.

If you have brown hair, don't be on a brown background. You want high contrast. Uh, the other thing to know is that when it comes to all your pictures on social media and your profile page, you want to mirror your audience. So actually I've recently changed my profile because I look like Dorothy in this picture.

I don't think I'm trying to attract Dorothy, but. If you are trying to attract wealthy professionals, you better be in a suit and a blazer in your profile. You shouldn't be, like, looking like you're a hippie in your profile picture or something. You need to mirror the type of client that you actually want in all your photographs, especially your profile picture, [00:32:00] okay?

Now, your LinkedIn profile banner is often real estate that people ignore. You want to treat this basically as a rotating billboard. So what are you promoting? So for example, if you go on my LinkedIn profile right now, as of yesterday, I was promoting this webinar. And then my LinkedIn bio, you see this little like link right here.

This is a new, new ish feature, says sign up to my sales LinkedIn masterclass webinar, pipe drive webinar, whatever we put there. We can customize that text and basically I've got a banner that I use when I'm not promoting anything that's basically either going to my social agency or my podcast, like a standard off promotional banner that we just swap in whenever we're not promoting anything.

And then anytime we have a webinar or a course, we're promoting that webinar or course we're utilizing this real estate. Okay. So in your non promotional [00:33:00] banner, you can put another picture of yourself. You can put your title, your tagline. You want to keep it really clean. You want to keep it really direct.

Like, what are you selling? Who are you helping? How do you help? And easy to understand. The other thing that you can do is that you can solicit. your link in bio and use like an arrow and point down like sign up in my link in bio, like spoon feed it to them because not everybody's used to these new features.

So you want to use your profile banner like a rotating billboard. And get creative with it. Okay? So, some new things. This is also new content. And I've never shared this before. There is some new features in LinkedIn. You've got the link in bio, like I mentioned. And then you also now have something called premium custom button.

Now this is only available for premium users, but if you guys are trying to get serious on LinkedIn, you're going to have to use premium because you get more invites, you get more [00:34:00] search capabilities, There's just like a lot more features, like if you're actually gonna be selling on LinkedIn, you probably want to invest in premium, okay?

So Linkin. Bio is what I showed you here, so it's this link, this My New Book link here, okay? Now Linkin. Bio is available to everyone, it's free. You can hyperlink an external link with custom text, so you decide whatever text is here. You could say Whatever you want here and link out to an external link.

So you usually would want to do something where you get somebody's email. So some sort of freebie, again, these top funnel lead magnets, your cheat sheet, your calculator, whatever it is, or sign up to my webinar. So you want to solicit your link and you can be very explicit in your text. And because you can be very explicit in your text, what we find is that you get way more targeted clicks.

So for example, with this button, I'm going to go over in a bit, you can't customize the text. So you have just these options, visit my store, visit my website, visit my portfolio, [00:35:00] visit my blog, book an appointment, subscribe to newsletter. So if I'm promoting a webinar, and I just like we've tested this and we use premium custom button, the closest thing we could do is like visit my website.

Or maybe book an appointment and then people click and it's like most people actually don't sign up because they click and they're like, what is this not booking an appointment, right? So it has to all connect. So LinkedIn bio is good for something very specific that doesn't have to do with these buttons.

And then premium custom buttons basically integrate on your posts. So on your actual post content, and unfortunately we screenshot of it here, but on your actual posts, Next to your name, it gives a solicit like view my blog, view my portfolio, view my website. So if something's going viral, you might want to turn on your custom button.

So you can get more clicks, get more appointments. And this is something that my team basically swaps on and off. Sometimes we're using link in bio if it makes more sense. [00:36:00] Sometimes you're using custom buttons. If we want to solicit something more generic that fits in. one of these categories in our posts because you get more clicks on the button but it's more targeted clicks on the bio link especially if it's the cta that doesn't match the button text essentially unfortunately and i wish this wasn't the case once you turn on custom button you don't get the link in bio option it's one or the other okay so experiment right experiment with your link in bio experiment with the custom buttons i think one of the coolest things about custom buttons is if you do a lot of discovery calls And you do a lot of sales content posts, I would lean into book an appointment and see how many people book an appointment just from your sales content.

 so let's talk about LinkedIn titles. So your title is really important. I'm going to talk [00:37:00] about this in a bit, but keywords are everything on LinkedIn, and it's all about keywords these days. The whole algorithm is switching towards interest relevancy. How do they know what people are interested in, the keywords they use, the keywords you use, and they match them.

Hala Taha: So if you have a title right now that doesn't have keywords, you're making a big mistake. So let's look at all the keywords that I have in my title. Podcast, business, LinkedIn marketing, I could probably do even better and infuse more keywords. The more keywords, the better so that you show up in people's searches, so people can find you, so people know exactly what you do.

The other thing is like, this is an opportunity to show your personality. So are you fun, light, warm? Use some emojis. Are you serious? Then you're going to maybe want to break it up through those like vertical bars if you're more serious. But you want to make this easy to digest. Usually it's like different phrases that just Say what you do.

I'm going to give you some more examples of titles in a [00:38:00] bit. When you put up a post, and this is also an example of the custom button, all right? So this is the top of a screenshot of a post. You get the first 40 characters of your title. For me, one of the main reasons that I'm on LinkedIn is I want a broad following and I want to get subscribers for my podcast.

So Young and Profiting podcast, CEO and founder, Yap Media. These are the things that I want people to know.

If you put your main Things that you want people to know at the end of their title, it's not going to show up in your post. If your post goes viral, people might not click on your profile, and you're missing all that connection for people to know what you actually do and who you help and what you're focused on.

Then you have your custom button under here, Visit My Website, that is on your post. Now here are some examples of some of my students that take my master class. So Rosemary is a gut health expert. Transform digestive issues. And as little as 30 days. Pharmacist, board [00:39:00] certified functional medicine practitioner.

Functional medicine coach. So she's showing credibility. She's board certified. She's a pharmacist. She's got keywords. Digestive issues. Functional medicine. Right? These are the main keywords that she has. She's got a great profile picture. She's smiling and looks like very professional who she's trying to attract.

Okay? Unlocking the power of brand stories to boost sales and expand your reach. Keynote speaker, brand strategist, scaling businesses, internal teams, business coach, story, brand certified guide. So again, credibility, she's certified story, brand guide. She's keynote speaker. We've got brand, we've got sales.

We've got brand strategist, business. We've got all these keywords, Robert. I help auditors become awesome audit trainer, keynote speaker, 2022 Internal audit beacon and a word again, credibility. His main thing is auditing. So he's got audit a few times, three times in his keywords. all right. [00:40:00] So let's talk about content strategy.

Like I mentioned before, 135 million daily active users and less than 6 percent of members are actually publishing content on LinkedIn. So this is a huge opportunity for folks. 

All right, let's talk about some of the ranking signals on LinkedIn. What are the ways that LinkedIn knows to serve your post to other people?

Now, I don't have time to go over every aspect of the algorithm today, but I'm going to give you a high level of how LinkedIn decides whether or not it's going to serve your content to other users. Number one is engagement probability. Has the person previously engaged on your content or similar content or profiles?

Meaning, has the user engaged on content with similar keywords as you, or profiles with similar keywords as you, with similar work experiences as you, right? How fast is your post getting engagement? That's going to tell LinkedIn that it's a good or bad post. If it's not getting a lot of engagement [00:41:00] fast, LinkedIn's going to just slowly not show it to anyone and it's going to die.

Then it's going to go into content scoring and weight of viral actions. So every viral action on LinkedIn, likes, comments, shares, are actually weighted differently. So a like, for example, is one point, a comment is two points, a share is four points. So the more shares that you have, the more higher your content score will be, the more that LinkedIn's going to share to more users and you're going to go viral.

Personal connections. It's also looking. Are you guys friends? Are you first connections? Have you guys DM'd with each other? If you DM somebody, they're 85 percent more likely to see your next post on their feed. Do you guys have mutual connections? Did you go to the same school? Did you work at the same job?

Okay, so what's the personal connection? If they feel like, hey, this person's like relevant because they're friends, they're going to show your content to them. The last one is the most important and is becoming the trend on almost all social media platforms. Do you [00:42:00] Which is interest relevancy. It's no longer about who's the most popular, who's going the most viral, who's getting the most like, who has the most followers.

It's more about sharing relevant content to people who want that relevant content. So, does the person have shared interests and skills with the author? Do they have interest in the same post topics? Does the author themselves have experience and expertise in the topic they're talking about? So for example, if you're talking about finance, but you have nothing about finance in your profile, LinkedIn is going to feel uncomfortable to serve your finance content to people who want to hear about finance content because you're not an expert, or they feel that you're not, right?

So everything has to be connected. The keywords on your profile, the keywords in your posts, you need to be repetitive. And that doesn't mean that you can only talk about one thing. It might mean you can talk about four things, but you need to be consistent, and it all needs to be keywords on your profile, and [00:43:00] you need to be talking about these topics over and over and over again, so you can start to build up some credibility of somebody who speaks on these topics and is an expert on these topics, and your content will do better and better and better.

Okay? So, let's talk about author relevancy and expertise. Like I just said, LinkedIn is not factoring just your post content. It's judging your expertise based on the data in your profile. So when you're looking at your keywords, you want to customize everything, your title, your bio, even the descriptions and the way you title yourself in your past jobs.

Do you have a description for your past jobs that have all the keywords that you talk about? Probably not, right? So it's like go through everything. Your whole LinkedIn profile is basically a searchable page. So you're going to want to infuse everything with keywords. You're going to want to think about what these keywords are.

And that brings me to my next point here. I want you guys to realize, and I'm just going to say this [00:44:00] one more time because I feel like I've said it a bunch. LinkedIn is basically based on your keywords that you use in your profile and your post. They're matching that other people's keywords they use in their profiles and the content they engage with and even the content they create and their keywords.

They're matching your posts with people who they feel like will get value and want to read that type of content. So that means we need to think about the keywords that we're using. So I want you guys to brainstorm keywords that are pertinent to your industry. this is something you can do for homework. You search a keyword on LinkedIn and look at the profiles that pop up and look at the keywords they use.

You go look at your competitors on LinkedIn and look at the keywords and their profiles and posts. You go on your own website and go look at the keywords that you look to describe your business. You go in your PowerPoints. What are the keywords that you use to describe your business? Go look at your clients or target clients LinkedIn profiles.

What [00:45:00] profiles are they engaging with? What keywords do those people use? What keywords do they use in their posts in their profiles? You need to start scanning this and seeing like, what are the ways that people search? What are the ways that people talk about the things that I sell? How can I start to create a bank of keywords that I'm going to start using in my profiles and my posts over and over and over again to build up my interest graph on LinkedIn so LinkedIn knows what I talk about, what I'm an expert on.

And so that I talk in a way that people are talking so we can get matched. 

 um, let's talk about some of these questions. With so many people on LinkedIn, are there specific days in which users are most active?

In terms of post timing frequency, once a day is good for posting. I would say generally, like, there's not that much difference of post performance day over day. Saturday, though, is a day that people sleep on. And because there's less competition, you're more likely to go viral on [00:46:00] Saturdays. is what we found, especially if you talk about professional content.

Now, again, I do a two day workshop on LinkedIn. We really didn't get to go through like the algorithm tooth and nail. There's a lot more to it. No, Wendy, I don't think faceless accounts is going to work on LinkedIn, to be honest. All right, so we're going to talk about niche first broad strategy when it comes to content strategy on LinkedIn.

Usually somebody falls. Either niche or broad or somewhere in the middle. Okay, so when it comes to niche, that means you don't care about becoming a huge influencer. You don't care about growing a huge community. You literally want to attract the exact person to your profile that's going to drive growth for your business.

And that's all you care about. It could be that it's a very niche product. It's a high ticket offer, usually. And you just care about that. You just want the leads that are going to buy from you. You don't care about becoming this big influencer and selling something more low ticket. Now, the broad strategy is you [00:47:00] want maximum impact, maximum reach.

You aren't really specific about who you want. Your stuff is relevant to a lot of people, right? And usually that means you offer something pretty low ticket, or maybe you don't sell anything at all. You just have a podcast. Or like a blog or newsletter that you're pushing. And so, you can be somewhere in the middle of this.

You can be broad and then change to niche. You can be niche and then change to broad. But you do want to think about like, what do you really want? So right now in the chat, are you more niche? Are you more broad? Are you somewhere in the middle? Yeah, you can be somewhere in the middle and be both. Every post has a purpose.

So, I teach this in my course, but like, every post has a purpose, right? So, as long as you're really organized, you can literally do both. But you can only message 30, 000 people. So the people who you want to sell high ticket offers to should be part of those 30, 000 first connection. that's what I do, right?

My 30, 000 first connections are more niche. They're [00:48:00] people who are going to buy my course. or become my social client. If they're not somebody who fits that bucket, I don't connect with them as a first connection because sales happen in the DMs primarily for high ticket offers, right?

But then I have 210, 000 followers that see my content and we're selling the low ticket stuff through our content, our post content, our LinkedIn bio and that kind of stuff. Okay, we don't need to necessarily DM them to sell the low ticket offer or get them to subscribe to my podcast, which is free. Now when it comes to content, niche versus broad, if you're niche, you're going to really lean into educational posts, posts that position you as an expert, where you're giving meaningful content, where you're teaching people how you solve their problems, how to content, live streams, Q& As, that's going to be pulling in a niche audience.

Infusing it with very specific keywords about what you sell. now if you're trying to [00:49:00] become an influencer and you want to get a large audience, you've got something free or low ticket, you've got something relevant to a lot of people, you're going to really lean into more motivational content.

You're going to want to share stories. You're going to want to be inspiring. You're going to want to share shareable content, popular quotes, viral videos. really nice pictures of yourself, right? So it's like less meaty and more motivational and shareable because everybody wants to be positive. Everybody wants to have a feel good story that they share, you know, and not everybody's going to be interested in your educational niche content.

That's why it's going to be more targeted. There's a lot to this guys, but I'm going to give, I'm giving you some good information that can at least get you started. So let's talk about the LinkedIn content funnel. Basically, your content is the way that people are finding you and they're using your content to make their buying decisions, [00:50:00] whether or not they want to work with you.

And every week, every month, you need to be doing all sorts of content because some people are brand new and just started following you. Some people have been there for a while. And so you need to be creating content that basically fits everybody at their different stages. So if you're just starting off on LinkedIn and you don't have a lot of followers, and you want to get a niche following especially, one of the things that you're going to want to do is create how to content.

So content with educational tips, doing LinkedIn live webinars, hosting audio events, posts that talk about how you solve people's problems. Essentially, you want to bring in people who are finding you from search based on the keywords that they're putting in search. You want to be able to have people find you from your how to content, your meaningful content that is showcasing your expertise, that is teaching something valuable to other people, and then you retarget those people in the DMs with your lead gen, whoever engages on that.[00:51:00] 

are raising their hand and saying that you can basically retarget them in the DMs and give them your lead magnet. Okay? There are other people who are following you that came to you because you were solving their problems and in order for them to actually work with you, they need more. They need to be inspired and transformed.

They want to know who you are. People buy from people they like and from people who they think can solve their problems. They want to understand what you're about, what your values are, and this is where you bring in more of your personal stories, utilizing storytelling, transformations, how do you transform other people, how have you transformed yourself, and I teach about this in my master class, but basically you're gonna want to have four to five impact statements.

that are basically statements that tell people what they can expect when they read your content. What should they walk away feeling and learning? So for me, for example, you're never too old to learn something new. I always talk about how life [00:52:00] is limitless. Like anything you work hard, like you're going to be able to do it.

It's going to take hard work, but if you put your mind to it, if you work hard, if you are focused, you can literally achieve anything in life. So there's certain things that I just repeat over and over and over again in different ways. And everybody knows what I stand for. That's how you end up getting shared.

That's how you end up going viral. Because people will auto engage. I always stand for what Hala stands for. I'm going to re share her stuff. Okay? Now, you mess this up when you start talking about other things. Like, for example, at one point, I was talking a little bit about politics. Because there was something going on that I really was passionate about.

And That messed up my auto engagement because now people didn't know what I stood for because I never talk about politics. All right, wait, Hall always talks about motivation, doing whatever we want, marketing this. Now suddenly she's talking about politics. I don't think I can auto engage with her stuff anymore.

Okay. So you want to be consistent. Branding is consistency. And then [00:53:00] lastly, how are you different? What is your social proof? What makes you unique in the market? What are you doing differently? Did you get press? What are the ways that you want to change your industry? How are you closing the gap in your industry?

That's how you become a brand, actually differentiating yourself, bringing in your personal life, helping people understand why you're uniquely qualified, and so on. So in my masterclass, we go over lots of examples of all these specific content funnels. So let's talk about hot or not features. 

 Photographs are still the highest performing asset on LinkedIn. Now, LinkedIn is very recently starting to get hotter on videos. So vertical videos, even talking head videos, which previously was a not feature, we're experimenting with them. Videos typically work best if they're engaging with the sound off.

Most people who are on LinkedIn have a [00:54:00] job, they're on LinkedIn when they're in meetings at work, and they don't have their sound on. Also videos that stand out with a unique background, like people running a race, animals, kids dancing, anything that's gonna like sort of break and stop the scroll will do well.

Poll, super hot, especially for sales. Oh my god, people do not use polls enough and they're so easy to use. They get so much engagement, they get so much impressions, and you can use it as a way to qualify your leads. So do you feel like you need help with your tax planning this year? Do you feel like you're buttoned up with taxes this year?

Yes? No? Anybody who says no, hey, I heard that you're not comfortable with your tax planning, do you want to talk about it? I have this free resource, blah, blah, blah, and you can just start a DM, right? So you can retarget based on what they said in the poll, all right? LinkedIn lives are really great. Now you're not going to go viral with your LinkedIn live, but you're going to create [00:55:00] super fans.

That's really important. You're going to warm people up and they're more likely to buy your offer. So if somebody shows up to a webinar, a LinkedIn live, an audio event, they're going to buy my course. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, it's, it's, you want people to just, even if they don't buy the first time, I bet you, I'm sure I have students in the chat right now.

How many webinars did you attend before you actually bought probably a few things and then you decided to buy, right? So part of it is just getting people to show up over and over again until they're ready to pull the trigger. So what's not hot? Text only posts, articles, newsletters are not hot. Ooh, reposting, re shares.

This one is like a maybe. You can't repost and reshare other people's stuff. But lately, we've been doing strategies where I actually repost my own content four hours later and then I delete it. And that helps, like, give it a little boost. Okay? There's some debates on if this is working or not, but we're testing it.[00:56:00] 

So, let's talk about, this is, I think, the last slide here. Let's talk about getting people to click. Uh, this is definitely new guidance. Again, these algorithms change. Pretty often, and LinkedIn is being a little bit more lenient about links in the past. If you put a link in your caption, your post would bomb.

It's not really the case anymore. So we put links in the caption now. We're getting the highest clicks. I would get creative with your link placement. Don't just always put it at the bottom. My team actually needs to be better at this. Put it at the top, put it at the middle of the post, you'll get more clicks because people just expect the link to be at the bottom and not everybody gets to the bottom of your post.

So put your link at the top, in the middle. You can also put your link in the comments, but you can't pin a comment on LinkedIn anymore so it could get lost. So if you want to keep your link in the comment high, you gotta like and comment on your comment. Try to keep it high, try to get other people to like [00:57:00] and comment on your comment to keep it high in the feed.

When it comes to links, you actually don't want to link out to like a link tree. A lot of people think like, oh, if I link out to all my links, then it's going to be even better. It's not. People are going to get overwhelmed. They're going to have too many choices. So it's like one CTA, one CTA of going straight to wherever you want them to go.

All right. And then I've said this a million times already in this webinar, but you want to retarget users With your content. So it's not enough to just hope and pray that they click your link in the caption. Anybody who likes, shares, or comments, retarget them in the DMs with the link.

Tell them why they're going to benefit from it and start a conversation with them and you'll get so many more clicks if you do that. 

Well, guys, I am so happy that we did this webinar. Again, if you want more webinars like this, the way that you do it is actually signing up to PipeDrive.

So pipe drive is going to keep sponsoring webinars, free webinars like this. So long [00:58:00] as I get people to sign up to pipe drive, to give it a try. So if you haven't yet, that's the one way to thank me.

And thank you guys so much for your time today.