SPI 842: The LinkedIn Experiment Begins

SPI 842: The LinkedIn Experiment Begins

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. If he could, he would time travel back to high school age, just to be in the marching band again, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: It’s happening, and I’m gonna give it three months. And then I’m going to assess whether or not I’m going to continue going. And I’m not going to let the results during this three months dictate whether or not I give up or end early. My goal is to get to three months posting consistently on LinkedIn.

Yes, LinkedIn. LinkedIn, which has been the social media platform that has been at the bottom of my list ever since pretty much day one. I’ve had a LinkedIn account. I’ve posted to it very rarely. I’ve gone years without posting on it for, you know, the mid 2010s. But recently I’ve been noticing that this is where a lot of focus is is for certain industries. Now I can’t use LinkedIn, although truthfully I haven’t tried, but it doesn’t make sense for me to, for example, post my Pokemon content there. That’s not the target audience. These aren’t people who are looking for entertainment. These are people looking for connection, partnership, collaboration, learning to help them with their resume, their business, their career.

That’s what LinkedIn is about. And for a while I was not focusing at all on it until recently. I’ve gotten a little bit of inspiration and that’s where most things start. They start with a little bit of inspiration and then motivation, right? I’m inspired by the success that others have had by how others who have once neglected LinkedIn and then put some focus in it have now seen results, results in fellowship, but also results in revenue.

Because of the specific target audience that exists on this platform. A little bit higher level of an audience, a little bit more revenue in that audience’s pocket, right? More educated, you know, more of a salary. So I’m very excited to give this a shot. Just like I did the Pokemon thing and the Pokemon thing is continuing and I’ve got that down pat, pun intended, and I’ve gotten the systems down to on the shorts channel, create a new Short in just 15 minutes a day. And I can batch process those and so I’ll take a couple hours, three hours in one day, get it all done for the rest of the week. And I have all this extra time and those things are working like magic right now. And at this time of this recording more toward the end of November, we’re approaching 600,000 subscribers on YouTube.

And that experiment is continuing to go. I’m looking forward to hitting a million there at some point pretty soon. But on LinkedIn, I have been struggling and I’ve been testing and experimenting, but most of all, I’ve been learning, learning what works and what doesn’t, and learning from the guidance of others, both asynchronously and just simply by following and paying attention, which is sort of level number one, but also level number two, which is which is having direct conversations with people who are doing really, really well on the platform, and I’m starting to begin to understand how the algorithm works and what small things are working for me already, like being more personable, making sure I use images.

I’ve been testing carousels out and I’m noticing that how engaged I am on other people’s profiles and how active I am in interacting with other people’s posts has made a difference. And so I like that. I like how you have to be active and there are tools out there that I’m using to help manage that.

But I’m going to share with you the results three months from now. I want to share and I want to also have you follow if you want to see this in real time. I’m going to aim to post daily at the start of the year, and it’s going to be three months starting in January. I am just warming it up now, and I’m going to hopefully go daily before that the experiment even begins.

It’s just like with New Year’s resolutions. Why wait till January 1st if you have the idea and the inspiration and motivation to take action on that now, why wait? So that’s sort of what I’m doing now. But I am going to give till March 31st to understand whether or not this is something worth continuing or not.

And that’s, I feel an adequate amount of time to discover whether or not LinkedIn is going to continue to be a part of the strategy. But I do have a hypothesis. It is an experiment. And with a scientific method, this is the hypothesis. If I post daily and I understand what value means to the audience on LinkedIn.

I’m going to attract the right kind of audience who will be learning from me and trusting me and see me as an authority in the space to then push people toward the community and all the amazing offerings that we have. And this is a part of our strategy next year is it’s one of the decisions that I have made and that we have made to help with the top of funnel stuff. We’ve been struggling a little bit with getting new people to find us. Number one way people have been finding out about us is through word of mouth right now, really more than anything, which is amazing. And it’s such a blessing and that’s ultimately what most people want, but it’s not as scalable, it’s not trackable, but what is trackable are links on these platforms and tracking links and those kinds of things.

So if we continue to provide amazing value inside of the community. While also growing our email list from these platforms and understanding through the lead magnet building that we’re going to attempt to do to just, again, discovery on what kinds of posts work and which ones don’t following the example of many others and really digging in, like really getting obsessed with it, I do hypothesize that after this experiment, we will see some success. And I’d love for you to follow me on that journey. I am on LinkedIn. This is, I think, my first time mentioning LinkedIn on SPI, which is crazy. So I invite you to follow along as this experiment unfolds. And I’ll be trying a number of different things.

Like I said, inspired by many others. I do want to give a shout out to some of those people who are inspiring and helping me understand what works and what doesn’t on these platforms. Number one, Chris Donnelly, he currently is the number four ranked person in terms of engagement and followers. He’s from the UK, Chris Donnelly, and he and I have had a direct conversation together.

Such a kind guy, there’s no surprise why he’s there, but he’s got nearly a million, a million followers on LinkedIn and his posts get thousands of comments and thousands of likes and I can see what he’s doing. He’s building his email list from LinkedIn and it’s it’s probably going into a program. Eric partaker who’s been on the show before. I interviewed him. He was the former founder of Skype, but now the CEO Coach. And he’s doing extremely well too. And then I’m looking at like the number one ranking person on LinkedIn and it’s Simon Sinek. I mean he has 8.3 million followers and he’s just like, wow, the big fish in that sea. Even Gary Vaynerchuk has 5.7 million. And there’s a number of other people, amazing creators that I’m following some that are much smaller, but still just as inspirational and just as much I can learn from them from Neil Patel, Amy Porterfield and several others. So thank you to those of you whose names I’ve just mentioned. I hope to make myself proud number one I do and have always felt like I and I do believe that LinkedIn is is an opportunity that is worth experimenting if the audience makes sense for you.

Again, I can’t and shouldn’t probably promote my Pokemon stuff there. Although I have mentioned, I’ve talked about it in a case study format for growth on social media platforms and how I’m doing things on YouTube and I’ll be sharing more of that. But As far as like actually posting the Pokemon videos, it probably wouldn’t make sense.

So how would I know if this is successful or not? This is an important question to ask if you’re trying any of these experiments. Again, number one most important thing, give yourself an adequate amount of time and focus your results and your behavior and your wins on whether or not you keep it up versus just, okay, how many views am I getting today?

Because it can be very easy to give up too early on the YouTube shorts experiment that I did, 20 days in I wasn’t seeing any movement. And then on day 21, everything just skyrocketed. I didn’t even really change anything. I just kept going until finally things started to happen. And I imagine the same thing can happen here too.

So that’s number one, you want to give yourself enough time for that to happen. Number two, to track so that you can see what is working and what’s not. It would, it would not be smart to just post and be like, okay, I got my post in, but I want to know what is working and what’s not. I’m not going to have that determined whether or not I quit because I’m going to go the three months, but it is going to determine where I focus and how I make the next one 1 percent better or that much better.

And that’s where tracking things like, well, on LinkedIn, yes, there are things like likes and comments and engagement. And that’s important because that all leads to impressions that you have on your posts, but more importantly, I mean, the KPIs are going to be the email list growth that’s going to determine very, very quickly whether or not this is actually working for the business or not, because at the end, yes, I might have a lot of views, and a lot of likes and a lot of impressions and a lot of comments. But if it’s not helping grow the business, then it’s just all facade that it’s all just kind of surface level value and not really something that should continue to grow the business because it’s not growing the business. But, Again, I suspect that if I were to grow on LinkedIn, I will grow the business here at SPI as well.

I have so much to share. I mean, I share things once a week on the unstuck newsletter. If you’re not on that smartpassiveincome.com/unstuck, but more importantly, I think that there are going to be ways to bring new people in who haven’t heard of SPI or know a little bit about me and want to get deeper involved.

The better positioning of our brand is going to help too. And I think the exercise of posting daily on LinkedIn and finding a space to do that and a rhythm to do that is going to be really, really fun. And that’s the last thing I want to talk about is just finding the fun in stuff like this. That’s what made the Pokemon thing work.

It’s what kept me going despite there not being results for those first 20 days. I was just having fun. And of course, when results came, I was having a lot of fun and I hope to have a lot of fun and find my unique voice here, which is going to take some work. It’s going to be a slog in the beginning, but this is why I’m giving it three months and I want you to, uh, to join me.

So hit me up on LinkedIn. @PatFlynn3 is the username, Linkedin.com/in/patflynn3. And I look forward to following your journey there too, and connecting and hopefully engaging as well. So thank you so much. I appreciate you. And I just love attempting these experiments and to share the results one way or another.

I had once attempted tick tock before and it failed, tried again, did a different approach and it absolutely has blown me away and hopefully we can get it right on this first time here on LinkedIn, but I’m not sure. Maybe not. And maybe I’ll try it again later, but either way, subscribe. So you can follow along.

I’ll be sharing the updates here on the podcast every once in a while. And let’s make some magic happen. Cheers everybody. Take care. And I’ll see you in the next episode.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!