Welcome to The Asylum, where we don’t just touch on subjects, we dive deep and emerge with actionable insights. I’m Neal Veglio, your host, and in Episode 5, "LinkedIn - Cringe vs Credibility" we're breaking down the do’s and don’ts of utilising LinkedIn for effectively building your professional network.

We're shedding light on the hidden pitfalls and golden opportunities this platform has to offer, all while keeping it real and engaging.

Whether you're new to LinkedIn or finding your way back after some time off, this episode is packed with valuable lessons that you won't want to miss.

From debunking myths about LinkedIn experts to sharing practical advice on creating a genuine profile, we've got you covered.

In this episode, Tracy Bedwell advises on how to find credible LinkedIn trainers who understand more than just daily posting. She talks about strategies that can genuinely boost your engagement, such as participating in LinkedIn groups and utilising Sales Navigator.

Meanwhile, Michelle Eshkeri breaks down the elements of a professional LinkedIn profile, particularly focusing on the banner and the importance of connection quality over quantity.

Sophie Lee gives us a fresh perspective on thought leadership, emphasising the need to be clear and consistent about the value you provide.

As you listen, you’re going to learn how to create a professional yet authentic LinkedIn profile that stands out, how to engage meaningfully on the platform without falling into the trap of artificial engagement, and why focusing on solving customer problems can lead to better results than just promoting your products.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of LinkedIn fundamentals that many overlook.

You’ll be better equipped to build genuine connections, avoid common pitfalls, and navigate the intricate balance between being professional and being true to yourself.

So, let’s get into it and start transforming your LinkedIn experience from a mundane task into an exciting professional venture.

Guests this episode:

Katie McManus (host of The Weeniecast)

Michelle J Raymond (host of Social Media for B2B Growth)

John Espirian (LinkedIn consultant and Espresso community head honcho)

Philip Charter (Copywriting coach)

Daniel Hall (Spotapod)

Fred Copestake (Sales trainer)

Stephen Watson

Paul Smart

Tracy Bedwell

Jo Watson

Sophie Lee (Electric Peach)

Problems, not products.

Talk about the problems that your customers have, not the products that you're trying to sell.

Welcome to the asylum.

LinkedIn will not like this podcast, but you will love it.

Behave LinkedIn lunatics.

We have visitors.

LinkedIn where everyone is a thought leader, a change agent or brace yourself, a disruptor.

But that's only the people that have been on there for a while, right?

This is the episode for you.

We're going to talk you through exactly what the best practices are for starting on LinkedIn the way you mean to go on.

And spoiler alert, that probably won't involve entering an engagement pod.

Just saying.

We've got another episode about that coming soon.

But for now, let's get to this week's visitors.

Joining us on a visit to this crazy asylum this week are Fred Koepsteik, sales trainer John Aspirian from the espresso community, Michelle J.

Raymond, company Pages expert Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach Philip Charter, copywriter coach Tracy Bedwell, sales expert Michelle Shkary, brand new visitor premium finance ghostwriter Paul Smart, business big brother Sophie Lee, all round whirling dervish, beautiful human being and marketing expert Daniel hall, the nemesis of all engagement pod users and the brainchild behind Spotterpod.

Joe Watson, copywriter, who is literally the definition of hilarious and Steven Watson, digital gonad.

Kinda.

With our first visitor, I think it's pretty important the message that he's going to convey about how no one really cares about you.

Sales trainer Fred Cope's day products, utterly boring.

Everyone will scroll past, they won't care.

It's self centered.

You're doing nothing for yourself, your company or whatever.

And you'll probably need a bit of courage to do this because your company might well be telling you to post about products and share stuff off the site and all this sort of thing.

The easiest way to do this and you can pretty much post every day is just look at the conversations you had the day before.

Think of a question that you've answered somebody and then wrap that up into a post.

You don't have to put who it was and what they actually asked you, but this was a problem I spoke about yesterday.

This is what it was doing to the customer and this is kind of how we dealt with it.

All right, so you're going to listen to Fred and you're going to stop shouting about your products.

Great.

Good stuff.

But let's be honest, nobody's clicking on your profile unless you've nailed those magical 40 characters.

Brevity really is your best friend here, Right?

Community membership expert John Esperian.

So the first 40 characters of your headline have to convey what you do with an interesting spin.

So that's hard in 40 characters.

Five or six words.

Get that right and then go and find conversations that are happening in the feed about a topic you know about, that you can contribute to constructively so that people who've never heard from you before will see your contribution and that 40 character snippet of what you're all about and go, who's that?

That's interesting.

Let's, you know, double click to dive deeper on that person.

And that's where relationships start.

Yeah.

So optimize your whole profile, ideally.

But if you're going to start anywhere, get the headline right because it's the most important bit of text, and then go and start getting involved in the conversations that are happening on LinkedIn.

The big trick to getting any kind of results from LinkedIn is to really think about the basics first.

Get those right.

I think that is the continuing message you're going to hear throughout this episode.

But branding.

People talk about branding all the time on LinkedIn and it's not just a clever catch word that everyone likes to use.

Branding is the costume that you need to wear to overcome the chameleon camouflage.

In the world of sameness on LinkedIn, get it right, you might just stand out.

Like one of Jon Aspirian's really vibrant colored post it notes on his wall.

Michelle J.

Raymond is a company pages expert.

I think if I look in hindsight of what I wish I had when I started on LinkedIn is to understand about branding and what the purpose of branding is and how you can actually understand where you fit in the world and what makes you different and how to stand out and still be yourself.

And so any of my episodes that are all about personal branding or just being authentically yourself, they're the ones that I would definitely send people to, because that's the lesson.

And it's the reason that I wrote the LinkedIn branding book with Michelle was to share our stories so that people that were getting started, they would actually have a resource that we didn't have when we were getting started.

And the reason that branding is so important when you're getting started is it's how you Stand out and not just sound like everybody else.

Because when you sound like everybody else, your results that you want from the platform take longer or don't happen again or go to somebody else that's more established and that's when people give up.

So we're back at how do we keep you going and how do we keep you persistent?

Grab a copy of the LinkedIn branding book.

I'm just going to throw that out there because it has a workbook in there that comes for free that I wish I had.

That's why we did it.

That will help you step through the steps that it takes to build a personal brand.

Not this thing that people always Talk about on LinkedIn or this year, it's, let's all be thought leaders, actually getting back to the basics and figuring out how do you want to show up on the platform.

Really important to note, the way that some people use LinkedIn is just literally a CV depository.

Nothing wrong with that if that's what you want to use it for.

It's essentially an online document sharing site for some.

But here's the thing.

Your LinkedIn profile is not your diary.

Nobody's here to admire your rowing medals or your perfect qualifications.

They want to know one thing.

Let's find out what that is, shall we?

Time to connect the dots.

Katie McManus, your profile is not for you.

Your profile should not be about what you think is interesting about you.

Because whether you're applying for a job or you're trying to attract clients, your information that you present on LinkedIn should connect the dots for them about why you are the best person for them to do business with or to bring into their business.

Right?

So, for instance, you know, a lot of people want to showcase, you know, the different certifications that they have, like the different extracurricular activities they did in college, different jobs that they've had and like, what their responsibilities were in those jobs.

If you're applying for a very specific job and all those things aren't obvious connections to how you're going to be relevant to that company in that role, it's irrelevant.

It's just noise.

It's just like, it just creates clutter so that whoever's looking at your LinkedIn profile has to really look for, is this actually the right person for us to bring in for an interview?

It's the same with running a business.

So if you're creating your about section, for instance, on LinkedIn and you're making it all about you and your past and you did this in your Last career and you're doing this.

How is someone who has a problem that they're hoping you'll solve gonna take you were on the rowing team and connect it to.

You're gonna help me get a promotion.

They're not.

They're just not.

Look, the truth is LinkedIn is a bit of a jungle.

Some people are here to network, some are here to sell you snake oil and disguise that as a mentorship program.

So how do you spot those predators?

Buckle up, sunshine.

Paul's got some survival tips for you.

Business big brother Paul.

Smart.

Take everything you read first of all with a pinch of salt.

Always be aware that some of the lowest of the low of humankind are on LinkedIn and they're looking to prey on you.

If somebody drops into your DMS with a nice friendly word, listen to them.

Not people that drop into DMS to sell you stuff.

People that drop in and say, I see you new.

These are a couple of things you should probably watch out for.

Some of these people are horrific.

You don't want to go nowhere near them.

And if you see people calling other people out, nobody does that just for a laugh.

They do that because genuinely underneath they don't want those people to be successful at pulling the wool over people's eyes.

So if you happen across Michael in a post where he's saying, don't listen to Bartlett, the man's a moron, then don't listen to barlogist because the man is a moron.

Look at the people then that interact at that level with people like Mike Winnett, always you or with Daniel.

The people that are saying LinkedIn can be useful as long as you stay away from certain types of people.

I've always thought when I've looked at company pages in particular, if LinkedIn was a real life party, then a lot of posts would be that awkward guy in the corner that people are trying to get away from because he keeps saying, I'm delighted to announce.

So how do you grab attention without being that guy?

This is copywriting coach Philip Charter.

Try stuff.

Don't be boring.

Take risks.

It boggles my mind that there are people investing a lot of time into writing for like company pages that like we are happy to announce our new partnership with Nobody cares.

I mean, a good tip that I always give my sort of writing like my coaching clients or my community is think about the so what test, like if you can read the hook of your content or your post or your video, whatever it is, or even after reading the whole thing and you can say so what?

Don't write it.

It's just not worth the time because people won't read it.

We're scrolling at light speed and we think we were trying to discount things.

That looks boring.

That looks.

I've seen that before.

I don't care about that.

So what?

So you have to take risks, Just be brave.

Because if you do something that fails, doesn't matter, you just do something different tomorrow.

You have to fail like nine times before you get something which goes viral or does well and you learn over a long process, like the type of content that works well for you.

And even that changes because the platform and the zeitgeist and everything changes.

Don't just jump on the current trend because that to me is boring.

It's like, leave it, leave it for a little while and then see what you think about it.

I Remember when the ChatGPT3 launched and it just.

The whole of the platform was hot.

Takes on AI for like a whole month.

And I thought, everyone's got a notice that nobody gives a shit about their opinion because it's swimming in a sea of a million others.

Just wait, just wait and let the dust settle.

And then say, hey, we've seen all the opinions.

Now here's what I think people might care about that.

Experts, experts everywhere.

And not a drop of credibility in sight.

But thankfully, our next visitor is here to help you figure out who's worth listening to and who's just riding the LinkedIn gravy train.

Sales trainer Tracy Bedwell.

I saw somebody the other day who was now a LinkedIn trainer who, funnily enough, a year ago, said to me, I know nothing about LinkedIn.

We're still telling people to put hashtags on things.

And I was like, hashtags don't really exist anymore.

Be mindful as to who you choose, maybe have a look at some of their references, speak to other people who've used them, because there's a lot of, you know, LinkedIn experts out there who are really not LinkedIn experts.

It's a process, you know, you've got to get your profile right.

You've got to understand who to connect to and how to connect to them and get them to connect to you.

Then it's about engagement on posts and other people's posts, and then it's about outreach and it's also about maybe choose a trainer who can tell you some of the extra things as well, like how to use groups, how to use Sales Navigator, if you want to choose for that as well.

There's Some very good LinkedIn trainers out there who really know their stuff and they won't be saying to you, you have to post every day.

They'll be saying to you, be consistent, define your market.

And then I think it's really important as well to have a good bank of what I call lead magnets to be able to use on there.

It doesn't have to be massive because we can repurpose content, but I would say mix up your content so maybe get, do some videos, do some infographics, do some, you know, set up a little newsletter, do a poll, do, you know, mix up your content so people are not bored of seeing the same thing all the time and just understand all the different things on LinkedIn that's available to you and start small and build it up.

Oh, now here's an interesting thing.

We've talked about the profile and the importance of that, but what about the banner?

That is precious real estate.

So why does yours look like it was designed by the work experience kid on their coffee break?

Time to hear from Michelle on how to make sure your profile doesn't scream I'm new here, everybody.

Michelle Escari.

The first thing is your profile.

You need to make sure that your profile is good quality.

You know, if, particularly if you're a business owner, it needs to be, you know, on brand with your colors and your fonts, you know, use those in your, in your banner.

You know, for goodness sake, please don't have the green or gray block or some random landscape in your banner because that's such a waste of valuable real estate on LinkedIn, isn't it?

So, you know, it's about going through every part of the pro profile and making it as good as it can possibly be.

Don't even think about starting to post content or connect with people until you've done that.

That's like number one priority.

The next most important thing I think is starting to get the right people into your network.

Offer something in the connection request, but not selling.

So when I say offer something, I mean show them that you have taken notice of what they've been doing.

So you know, if you've seen that they've written a nice article, you know, skim read it and just pick something quick out of it so they can see that you've taken, you've, you've offered up a bit of your time to them.

Only then once you've done those three things, go on to posting your own content.

Because point in posting brilliant content if you've got nobody in your audience or if you've got the wrong people in your audience and your profile is absolutely crap, because why would you.

It's a waste of time.

You know everything.

You've got to build it up to the point where it makes sense to start posting your own content.

Thought leadership, is that a title that you earn or just a box you tick on?

LinkedIn Fresh new visitor Sophie is here to tell us about how consistency, not cringe, will help take you to the top.

Sophie Lee.

It's about being really, really clear on who you're talking to, what their pain point is, how you solve that and what your, I call it a one burning message.

What is the thing that you really, really want to be known for, that you can show up for over and over and over again.

That's really what creates thought leadership.

I hate the word, but it's better than influencers.

So there we go.

It's the best of the two.

It's what creates the understanding of who you are and what you stand for and what you're going to bring to somebody who might want to work with you.

Consistency is so important as well.

Don't go on there and think that you're going to get results immediately.

It takes time.

It takes consistently showing up, consistently engaging with people and also being interested in what other people in your audience are talking about and sharing and understanding what they care about so that you can improve your message over and over again.

My personal point around this is it's called social media for a reason and it really needs to be about the social interactions that we have with one another, rather than just seeing it as a broadcasting technique to get what you want.

And I really don't like that some people do that.

That's not for me at all.

It is for me.

It's about a symbiotic relationship that you get to give something of value through your content.

You get to meet amazing people and hopefully get opportunities and leads and what have you through that.

And you get to learn from other people by listening to what it is that they care about as well.

And if you do that, you actually have the opportunity to learn so much more about people, about your industry, about your audience, and it helps you to be better at your job.

That's actually what marketing is, but that's not how everyone understands marketing to be.

But that constant feedback loop is really where you can make the most of LinkedIn.

We can't do an episode of the Asylum without talking about vanity metrics.

I mean, this is an ongoing theme that's going to run through this podcast.

They look great, but they mean nothing.

And so when it comes to some of those posts, you'll see from the big creators, it's important to realize they're about as real as a chatbot's emotions.

Daniel Hall.

So when it comes to identifying people that are in pods, you always look for those big numbers.

One, you look at the content.

What?

They're pushing out a lot of big creators that are usually narcissists.

I'm not calling anybody narcissists.

I'm saying that they are probably narcissists because they're posting pictures of themselves, they're posting skin shots or whatever, or they're posting cigars.

You know, whatever drink of the week it is.

Who cares what that is?

Who cares?

I don't care what kind of scotch you're drinking, I don't care.

What kind of car are you driving?

You're a human being.

You know better than anybody else.

Look at the content.

Think to yourself, why is this getting so much engagement?

Is it Snoop Dogg is a Gary Vaynerchuk?

No.

Have you even heard of this person?

No.

All you're looking at is all those vanity numbers.

Go ahead, look at those vanity numbers.

But then I challenge you to actually take one post that might have maybe a hundred shares on it.

Open it up, scroll to the bottom.

Yes.

Take five or ten minutes and scroll.

Keep scrolling, Keep scrolling until you get to the bottom.

Look at the profiles of those first five or 10 people that are sharing that content and click into their accounts.

What you're going to find is companies with zero people in it, fake company accounts, people that have created these accounts like in the last month to use as a fake account.

You're going to start looking for the devils and the devil in the details, which is all these fake accounts that are driving it to be reshared and manually.

That's how you can spot and then you'll start seeing it all the time.

You can't unsee that kind of stuff because if the content is crap, then you're just going to fall into the trap.

Do you know there was a time when I started on the platform that LinkedIn was kind of known as that place for professional banter selling of services.

Now it's overrun by pathetic and ridiculous rags to riches stories.

But our next visitor ain't buying it.

And neither should you, Joe Watson.

I mean, back in the day when I joined.

I don't know, Neil, about you, but when I joined, I didn't know where an influencer was.

I don't think they existed.

And everyone just did their own thing.

It just seemed to be people having conversations and doing nice things and sharing a couple of stories.

But now, of course, it's all about the ridiculous hooks and the.

Just these ridiculous stories that never happened.

It never happened.

And the sooner that LinkedIn gets that bullshit button.

Bullshit, oh, the better.

Well, we could all just go, yeah, either that or just fuck off.

Just the fuck off button.

Oh, fuck off.

And it has to be an oh, fuck off.

It's about finding something that does work for you.

Find what you're comfortable posting, when you're comfortable posting it, and how you're comfortable in going about the whole whole thing.

You know, whether you just post something and walk away feeling like you've done your bit to advertise, or whether you're happy to give it quite a bit of time and engage with people who are genuinely seeming to be interested in you and what you offer or what your business is offering.

It is about finding something that's comfortable for you.

Because if you're going to turn this place into a, into a strategy and one that's a main one for you, you're going to have to be comfortable either A, giving the time or, or B, looking in the mirror after you have given that time up to get involved.

I mean, ideally you want both to be okay for you, but yeah, I think that would be the advice I'd give because the majority of other people would probably say, oh, follow this person, see what they do.

Buy this course.

And, you know, that's the complete opposite.

And it's one thing I hate on LinkedIn, and it's one thing I hate in business and in life in general.

And it's the whole, if I can do it, you can do it too.

And you're there thinking, no, no, no, no, that is bollocks.

It really is.

So imagine you've gone through your paces, setting up your profile, making it optimized, getting your connection sorted out, doing the engaging commenting DMing, doing all the stuff that all of our experts have been telling you to do, and you've built a account that gets attention.

In fact, every single post seems to go micro viral, but nobody actually knows what you do.

That's a problem that our next visitor has.

Steven Watson.

My advice would be don't do any of the stuff I've done.

No.

So first of all, it's worth clarifying that I'm so I work for a company, but I work for a company that's that the three founders all Went to, you know, we mates since they were at school, pretty much.

I've worked with one of them for, on and off for 20 years in different jobs.

And we are within the world of it.

We're a very specialist IT company, but quite a small one with only, I think it's 25 of us or something like that at the moment.

So we were customers, we work with, we work with major banks, all sorts of significant organizations, but we're not a big reseller, we're not a big brand.

So in many ways it is the same in terms of marketing as being a, you know, a solopreneur.

So you're trying to win business from maybe some bigger, more established companies.

And so making a bit of noise and getting a bit of attention is a big part of it.

So in that respect, I don't think there's really anyone or not very many people within my section of IT who don't know who Coffee Cup Solutions are.

They probably a lot of them did already, but certainly any you didn't do now.

And so that's cool.

Right, so we're not this little company that no one's heard of.

Everyone knows what we are and we have some skills and expertise.

How much revenue has it led to?

Well, it's difficult to measure, but anything to do with marketing is almost impossible to measure.

We get a phenomenal hit rate, for example, on our website, but I don't think the conversion rate is necessarily as high as it could be because my content has nothing to do with what we do.

You know, most of the people who follow me think I sell coffee cups, like genuinely, or I'm.

Or I'm a parody account that doesn't.

Isn't real, so I can't handle.

And I would also say that I'm.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'm convinced I've lost business as well as a resolve because I've dealt with customers that have gone a bit quiet and they do at times, you know, with anyone who's worked in sales, that does happen, but I suspect it may be because they just, you know, there's different.

Like I say, if you're a security or a company that's very focused on security, I'm not sure that it would be a tick in the box.

I think it would be more of a red flag, actually, seeing me clowning around.

Well, there we are then.

That pretty much wraps up our visit to being new on LinkedIn in the asylum here and whether you've been on the platform for a number of years.

Just never bothered doing anything with it, or whether you've actually been trying to proactively get involved for the last few months and have found very little in terms of ROI on your time.

Hopefully this episode has helped you to understand some of the fundamentals you might need to be looking at in order to get better results.

If you've enjoyed this episode, click Follow in your favorite podcast app to make sure you get the next episode of the Asylum in your library.

And if you have any feedback on the show, you can always leave us a comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any of the other podcast apps that allow you to leave comments.

That's it for this week's visit to the Asylum.

A big thank you to our visitors this week.

You can catch a list of all the names of our contributors in the description for this episode.

And as now tradition on the Asylum, we're going to have our experts give you some final thoughts.

If you have zero following, you'll get more visibility, much more traction from commenting on other people's stuff than you will by publishing your own stuff.

So put it another way, if I wrote the best post that's ever been written and I've got zero followers, basically no one's going to see it.

If I write the best comment that's ever been written and I put it in the right place underneath the right conversation, that thing might get much more visibility than the the rest of the post put together.

And it might find you investors, clients, referral partners, who knows what.

So commenting potentially is the gold route to finding new business on LinkedIn.

So even if you haven't got a big following, start by optimizing and commenting.

You will have had maybe timing on your side.

You might have had a lot of luck on your side.

You may have had someone in your corner who could do something for you.

There is no such thing as if I can do it, anyone can.

That is the absolute hallmark phrase of someone who is about to sell you a course on telling you how you can do it, just like I can.

It's utter bullshit.

It really is.

So yeah, advice would be avoid those people completely and just, yeah, do your own thing.

See what works.

Like the human brain is creative, but like we don't think that way when we're assessing someone to hire.

So you literally have to say, here's who I work with, here's where my clients start off and here's what they want more than anything.

And I help.

And I think also there's this fear of looking unprofessional on LinkedIn Professional is boring Professional, like, you just blend in with every other person who has, you know, a nice headshot of them in, you know, slightly conservative professional clothes.

I'm very, very, very lucky in that they let me get away with it.

But I do think it is something that they're a little bit.

There is a little bit of nervousness about, if I'm honest, because I've got two or three customers that regularly bring them up on calls and follow them religiously and say they're hilarious.

So I think it's been a good way of making me a human being, not a salesman, which is half the problem in sales these days, is everyone's expecting you to mug them off somehow.

So showing a bit of God, I'm going to sound like Leah Turner, but showing my authentic self, I think has helped in some ways.

Definitely wanted to get that plugin.

For all these different browser extensions that people install, they don't have to have your password.

These big companies use cookies in your browser.

If you're not paying attention or you're too trusting, you'll inadvertently give away those cookies.

The company doesn't need you anymore.

Whoever the Chrome created the Chrome extension, they don't need you anymore.

Once they have that you're there, it's party time for them.

They can access your account, they can get into your credit card information.

You're basically pretty much hacked.

Unless you know 100% where that data's going, what are you giving away in order for that to happen?

It's hard, and you want to be successful and you want to do it quickly.

But there's a right and a wrong way to be successful.

Like, everybody bags on cliches, right?

But cliches only become cliches because they're true.

There's no such thing as an untrue cliche.

So be careful when you turn them all the way up, because you probably will make them all the way down and your way down make them sooner than you think when you realize you've actually got no discernible skill, talent, product or service.

And in fact, all you're trying to do is get other people to buy other People's products on LinkedIn.

Because that's not a skill.

That's just multilevel marketing.

Before you even worry about who you're connecting with, before you worry about any posts that you're going to write or messages you're going to send or commenting that you're going to do, just spend some time to work out where you fit in the world.

And who you want to work with and things along those lines.

It's a game changer.

And it probably took me two years to get to that point.

And by doing this work up front, I could have just kind of brought the timelines forward, forward.

I'm literally a case study in how not to make the most of your LinkedIn following.

And I think this is quite, for me, it's quite an interesting example of the challenge of being a salesman and also the challenge of being the environment we work in now, which is so transactional, which is that I can't seem to be both.

I can't seem to be a salesman.

And also, like a good, like a normal human being, I have to kind of put on this salesman hat.

Goodbye.

Watch your back.

When we'll talk to you soon.

On another episode of the Asylum.