Transcript
Steve Gordon: Welcome to the Unstoppable CEO Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Gordon, and today, I got to tell you I’m super excited. We’re going to be talking about one of my favorite marketing subjects and favorite marketing tools today with Tracy Enos. She’s a Kansas City LinkedIn expert and a single mom of four and really has quite an Unstoppable Story. In July of 2015, she sustained third-degree burns and spent six days in the burn unit, five surgeries over the course of nine months. Not long after that, she wrote her very first article, which I think she’s going to tell us, it was published in LinkedIn on LinkedIn Pulse and after saw wild success with it.
Since then, she has really gone on to be one of the top LinkedIn experts in the country. If you don’t have her book, you need to go get her book for sure. I’m just excited to have you here, Tracy, and to be talking about all the great things that are happening on LinkedIn.
Tracy Enos: Thanks Steve. Thank you for having me today. I’m very honored to be here.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun and I think it’s going to be important for everybody that’s listening. I know for a lot of the folks that we attract LinkedIn is a good platform for them. We’ll dive in to that. First, I’d love for you to give us a little bit beyond just what was in the bio about your background. How did you get to this stage? How did you become a LinkedIn expert?
Tracy Enos: Actually, it was quite by accident. I was downsized twice in four years. First from National City Bank, I was in mortgage origination back in ’07, ’08 and National City was one of those banks that did not get bailed out by the government at that time and so PNC Mortgage came in and bought them out and PNC laid all of us off. I was one of those folks here in the Kansas City area, but actually worked down in Branson at the time. I worked out of my house out of Branson. My office here was in Leawood, Kansas and I couldn’t find a job and I still have my real estate broker’s license, so I had to move back up here to Kansas City and I worked for a firm back in ’08 through 2011.
We did mostly Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac foreclosures and we had a huge foreclosure market. When the economy started improving, she decided to close her shop and move us over to Keller Williams here in Lee Summit and decided she wanted us to be her buyer’s agent. Not only would I have to pay Keller Williams bare fee, I would also have to pay her a cut of what I made, and I told her she could take her job and shove it. I closed my last transaction on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2011, and in fact, I had an article in LinkedIn that shares some of that situation and why I quit the real estate game after that, but then I really had a hard time finding anything that was equivalent.
Now, I’m kind of used to be in an entrepreneur and working my own hours and didn’t want to be tied down to a job with two young kids still at home, but I did. I looked. Lo and behold, daycare before and after school was going to cost me $600 a month. That’s twice my car payment and so I dabbled insurance for a little bit and it just didn’t work out. I found a position on LinkedIn from a company by the name of SGN Nutrition. They’re out of Carlsbad, California. They sold and promoted their product in Costco’s and Sam’s Clubs and so we would go demo like four times a week and sell boxes of this nutritional supplement.
I did so well that I got promoted within a few months to regional manager, which meant I was in charge of seven states and 83 stores and I did a lot of traveling.
Steve Gordon: Wow!
Tracy Enos: Things are going well. I was making six figures. They partnered with the second largest pharmaceutical company in the country and was given a significant amount of money and they blew through that in three months. The pharmaceutical company came in and said, “You got to lay off some of your staff and they let all the field people go except for one.” Now, I’m out without a job again in October 2012. Now, I’m living off a savings and I’m not sure what I’m going to do at this point, but in between times, what I was doing is we were actually sourcing our demo folks on Craigslist and LinkedIn.
I got to dabble in LinkedIn a lot at that time and I had some friends and colleagues that were kind of spinning into that LinkedIn. They were curious about it and I was showing them, back then it was totally different than it is today –
Steve Gordon: I remember.
Tracy Enos: But how to do things for free, so it’s teaching people how to use LinkedIn for free. I happened to go see my sister who had an inoperable brain cancer that day after Christmas in 2012 and she was starting to lose her short-term memory, so this is kind of my last time to sit and talk with her. We sat down with a glass of wine and confided in her about what the heck had been going on and I was scared, and she said, “You know what? You just need to go and take the risk. You’re already doing it for free. Why don’t get paid for it?”
I actually took her advice because my sister, too, has been in a similar situation. Back in the ’80s, she was working for a very prestigious advertising firm in San Francisco and she just wasn’t getting the notoriety and the pay for her worth. She decided to start her own company. She learned a few more strategies as far as painting goes. She went watercolors, and within just a couple of years, she opened up her own art gallery in San Jose and was selling her paintings worldwide.
Steve Gordon: Wow!
Tracy Enos: Just amazing! I listened to my sister, and when I got home, I took the leap. It was very short going at first, but I wasn’t just doing LinkedIn. I was actually going to network meeting after network meeting. I did three or four a week and trying to get people to do like the Google Maps and the reputation marketing, building their websites, a digital marketing agency and it was until I had a referral from a new startup here. A biotech startup was my very first LinkedIn client and I’m still friends with him today. That’s how it started, and I was just having a hard time here, anybody wanting to pull the trigger.
I mean I was just charging like their digital marketing $300 a month. That was cheap, super cheap and very time consuming. No one was wanting to pay me, so I took to LinkedIn and I started sourcing my clients from LinkedIn and I started gaining clients in Canada and almost every state, major metropolitan area and state here in the country and that’s when I decided that’s it, that’s what I’m going to do. I concentrated most on LinkedIn and it wasn’t until I went to a marketing conference in San Diego in 2014. I got set up on a hot seat for seven minutes.
They dissected my business and said, “Fire all your clients and you should do LinkedIn consulting and write a book.” I haven’t looked back since.
Steve Gordon: Well, you did write a book, LinkedIn Publishing to Profits. It’s a good book.
Tracy Enos: Well, it took three and a half years later, but I got it done. Actually, I wrote that book twice and then I scrapped it and started over.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, before I wrote my first book, I had written two others to varying degrees of completion and the same thing. It wasn’t the right thing. It wasn’t the right message, so I totally get that, although it’s really frustrating when you put in that much work to scrap it and start over.
Tracy Enos: Well, part of the reason why is in August I was going to release it in August or September of 2017 and then LinkedIn decided to take down the Pulse channels and my book at that point was obsolete, so I didn’t publish it at that point and I waited a full year later to publish. I kind of have everything, the strategies on how to do that. My strategies were actual strategies that we use not only for myself but my clients in promoting their articles.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s a good book. I have had it on my Kindle for a couple of years now and continue to go back and refer to it to make sure that the stuff we’re doing is on track.
Tracy Enos: Thank you.
Steve Gordon: Who doesn’t have, they need to go get it. It’s LinkedIn Publishing to Profits and will link to that in the show notes, so everybody can go find it. You’ve had I think probably of all of the people that I’ve interviewed in a short period of time over a course of it sounds like about six years, you just had tremendous challenge.
Tracy Enos: I would say that.
Steve Gordon: We’ve never gotten to 2015 yet.
Tracy Enos: Nope. I think it’s in one of my articles. The burn wasn’t even the start of it. That was the last thing, I think. What’s the saying about it comes in three’s or something like that. That spring was actually the fourth thing that had happened to me. The first thing that happened to me was on Good Friday of 2015 and nobody was home. My kids were at Easter with their dad. It was their time and my boyfriend at the time was down seeing his mom and like three hours away. It was just me and the boxer. I’m out there working on my garden and we had this creek rock that we brought in and one of the rocks was loose and I stepped down and I have a decline.
I’m stepping down on a decline out of the planter and I rolled my ankle and I gave myself a stage 4 sprain which was worse than a break. My neighbor just happened to be outside and she came and picked me and brought me back into the house. It didn’t swell right away, so I didn’t know it was a stage 4 sprain until Sunday. Well, my dog decided on Sunday because he was one of those tricky dogs, he like to try and do these little funny weird jump twist to get out of his collar so that he cannot be in the backyard running around. He hurt himself. I went out there and to go let him back in because we didn’t have a fence and he couldn’t move.
Steve Gordon: Oh, no.
Tracy Enos: Seventy pounds and to try and pick up that dog on a rolled ankle, which I was hobbling as it was, I think the adrenaline kicked in. That’s how the only way I got him in the house.
Steve Gordon: Wow!
Tracy Enos: That was number one. Number two, my uncle passed away. He lived here in Kansas City. Number three, my computer got hacked. I fell for one of those, “Microsoft is calling you to help you fix your computer.”
Steve Gordon: Yeah, that went around for a while.
Tracy Enos: I recognized them now but not back then. They had done like a team viewer thing and I didn’t get all the way through. I said, “Something’s fishy here,” but I was on there long enough for them to hack my computer. When I had the burn on July 7th on a Tuesday morning, I got back to go into my computer and I restarted it and I couldn’t get into my computer. They’d locked me out. They wanted $185 to get my computer back and, “Well, go fly kite,” and I spent I don’t know $200 or $300 and called Dell and I had to reinstall the operating system.
Steve Gordon: Oh, gosh!
Tracy Enos: I had quite the spring.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it sounds like it. With all of that, even going back to where you started in 2011 and working all the way forward, what do you do? What is it that when you get challenged like that, what do you draw on to say, “No, I’m okay. I’m going to keep going”?
Tracy Enos: Well, Steve, I’ll tell you this. Being a single parent and I don’t have really any family here, it’s hard for me to just kind of I guess just lean other folks and I’ve always done a lot on my own. With a few of my close friends here in the city, I will say that there are some books that I read that really helped because I can tell you when you go through stuff like that, I mean your mindset could just tank and then you start playing that victim game and everything like that. I started reading books and books helped me get back my mind back into that frame where I could actually, “I can do this,” but I will tell you this, after the burn, it wasn’t something that happened right away.
I fell into depression. I gained like 60 pounds. I became a hermit because of that burn, so I couldn’t see the light of the sun for a year. I wore a compression sleeve for a year and I kind of played the “lowest me” game, but I will tell you this, if it wasn’t for the foundation that I had already created in LinkedIn, I would have gotten evicted, car got reprocessed. I don’t know what could have happened. I only think about it. I turned around almost a year later when I walked in to my doctor’s office and said, “Hey, you know what? Something’s going on. I can’t figure it out.”
She diagnosed me with clinical depression and so sent me over to a referral to also a psychiatrist for anxiety. I sat on that script and that referral for a week and I decided, “You know what? I’m not going to do this.” I did not fill that prescription and I did not see that psychiatrist and all I did is lean on some good friends and I read my books and I just dove right back in to LinkedIn and I made more money in those six months than I did the whole year prior.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, there’s nothing like action, forward motion to make a lot of things better, particularly I mean I found this just over the years that when I get into tough situation, if I can just stop and think clearly enough to get moving and that’s what it sounds like you did that just that motion itself begins to fix all the mental chatter and the mindset challenges. It’s just something that I’ve observed over the years and it sounds like that was maybe some of what was at work here with you.
Tracy Enos: Yeah, I will tell you what, I took great joy and I still do, great joy in helping people be successful in LinkedIn. That’s what I’m saying like because when I dove right back in to my work, when I started seeing people having good success and were utilizing LinkedIn the way I was helping them, that made me happy. I think that’s kind of got me out of my funk and my fog, I guess you would say.
Steve Gordon: That’s a powerful story and I think there are a lot of lessons there for folks listening to kind of draw from. What I want to do is I want to take a quick break and we’re going to come back, and I want to hopefully make you happy, so we can talk about LinkedIn. We can help a bunch of people who are listening with LinkedIn. Why don’t we do that when we come back right back. We’ll be right back with Tracy Enos. Hey, everyone. It’s Steve. Welcome back and I’m talking with Tracy Enos. If you listen to the first half of the interview, you know that’s she’s an absolute LinkedIn expert and we’re going to talk about LinkedIn now and the other things that she’s really focused on right now to grow her clients’ businesses.
Tracy, where do we begin with LinkedIn? I mean it’s been around for a long time. I know I’ve been on the platform for a long time, but it’s always changing. Where’s the best place for us to start?
Tracy Enos: Everybody needs to get back to basics. I know LinkedIn has changed a lot, and nowadays, you’re seeing the newsfeed go crazy and everybody wants this new shiny object or this new growth hack and I tell people, I say, “You shouldn’t do that until you’re ready to do that.” What you should have in place is your foundation should be completed and the basic marketing campaign that you’re doing on a consistent basis before you try and go out in growth hack. I think that’s where a lot of folks are seeing and they’re getting sidetracked and they still have profiles that are incomplete or not client focused.
They’re not keyword driven unto folks could find you for products and services and solutions that you offer for potential prospects. I think that’s where a lot of folks go wrong. I’ve seen and I’m not going to take the high road here, but I’ve seen a lot of these Millennials get on the platform and they’re killing it with video and stuff in the newsfeed, but I think they’re getting a lot of views, getting a lot of likes and comments, but how much of those really equate to dollar signs?
Then all of a sudden, they’re saying, “Well, we can teach how to do this too.” Again, I’m going back to, “How many of those are really ideal clients? How many of those people have actually sent your personal message?” or whatnot. I tell folks, “You got to start with your profile,” because even if you get in the newsfeed and you write something or you post something or an article that goes viral, more often than not, those folks are going to come back and view your profile.
If you’ve not made over your profile to be the best that it could be that it’s showcasing your expertise and authority and it’s client-focused, then you may have lost a great opportunity. It could even be a six-figure opportunity or more. That’s where the basic come from. That’s when I talk about the foundation worked. This applies in any marketing that you do. You got to sit down and define the who, create an avatar. I know everybody regurgitates this all the time, but it really is the truth. You got to define the demographics because you’re going to use those in LinkedIn, a lot of those anyway in LinkedIn especially in Sales Navigator.
Those are your filters to go and find those folks and then you want to define those psychographics. Ask those deep questions about their deepest fears and desires and who is it that they follow, what influencers, online publications, what are the pains that their having within their position or their jobs or the company. Once you can sit down and define those, then those are the foundation to articles, to post in LinkedIn and even messaging those prospects once you connect with them in LinkedIn.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It’s funny. All of us in marketing talk about this whole idea of your avatar, your ideal client, whatever you want to call it. Do you fight clients over that? We have constant battles with new clients as they come on because they have the hardest time narrowing to focus and I think there’s a lot of power in bringing focus to that. Frankly, most businesses don’t have a clue. I mean they have a clue, but they haven’t really put it to paper like here’s who we want to work with and find that just taking somebody through that exercise is really powerful, but all of a sudden, they go from not being able to see where the opportunities are to now seeing them everywhere because they’ve gotten specific about who they wanted to work with.
Tracy Enos: Well, I require that in our coaching and consulting programs because I can’t help you unless we really define the who and the why and the what and I don’t usually get a lot of backlash. If they don’t want to work with me and they don’t want to do the homework ahead of time, then I won’t work with you. That’s just how it is, but the ones that do, they sit down and we do it together. Then they’re like their eyes were opening like, “Wow! I really didn’t know this about my clients,” or, “I’ve never thought of it that way,” or, “You’re asking questions that have never been asked before.”
A lot of times, some of them, they’re still kind of clueless when I started asking questions. I said, “Okay, here’s what we need to do. If you’ve been in business for at least three years you’re still struggling to define those, then go back to your past clients and start asking them a series of questions,” and I actually have a document with some of those questions and asking them how did they find them, the conversations they had and they take them through that whole sales process to ultimately find out why was it that they hired them in the first place. Now, they’re going to have a lot of those questions answered that I had been asking them that they didn’t have any idea how to answer.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s a powerful exercise to go through. Once we’ve got the foundation in place, so we’ve gone in, we’ve fixed up our profile and aligned it with the keywords that we think people will be searching for and really made it about our potential client rather than about us, what do we do next? Where is the next best place to begin leveraging the platform?
Tracy Enos: The next best place is to get yourself set up with Sales Navigator. I cannot stress that enough, and in fact, I don’t work with folks who won’t use Sales Navigator. It’s probably the best and cheapest tool that you will find out there, even if you just paid monthly, was it like $799.99 a month, is one of the best tools ever. I mean you get so many different insights and they’re even improving it by the way. I’ve seen some improvements over the last couple of weeks. Folks don’t understand how to use search outside of those search filters and now even LinkedIn is going in there making suggestions. It’s really cool, but you can save leads, save accounts.
You can go in there and their homepage is not like the regular LinkedIn’s homepage. If you save leads and accounts, they give you insights, giving you opportunities to go and start building that relationship with them by spending the messages and you don’t even have to be connected to them which is amazing. I just honestly love it. I just love it.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s really powerful and if that clients asked me, “Will I get the Pro …” I forget what they call it. They call it Pro still or is it Premium?
Tracy Enos: It’s Business Premium.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, Business Premium, they keep changing the names of things and, “Do I get the Sales Navigator?” I’m like, “It’s not even a choice. It’s only like a $20 a month difference. Get the Sales Navigator because with Pro, you get like no capabilities whatsoever. You get some above free, but all the ones that you want are in Sales Navigator.”
Tracy Enos: Yeah, the only ones that you get are different than the free version is unlimited searches and you get to see everybody who’s viewed your profile in 90 days instead of live per day.
Steve Gordon: Right.
Tracy Enos: That’s the only difference.
Steve Gordon: That’s not worth $60.
Tracy Enos: Sorry, I take that back. You get some emails too.
Steve Gordon: We’ve got Sales Navigator. We’ve got some searches in there. I mean it’s a fantastic tool. We do a process called the Target 100 where we pick out 100 to 200 prospects that will work at a time and I mean we tag them all in Sales Navigator. It’s just so great to kind of see what they’re doing and what’s changing overtime. It gives you a lot of opportunities to open conversations.
Tracy Enos: I agree. Even LinkedIn will make suggestions on how to open up conversations which I think is great. Icebreakers they call it.
Steve Gordon: Absolutely, yeah. What do we do? We got that worked in. We know that we’ve now can build a list of people. How do we get in contact with them and not be the three or four people that I had in my inbox at 5:00 this morning?
Tracy Enos: Maybe you want to buy my stuff?
Steve Gordon: Yeah.
Tracy Enos: You know what? This is what we do. First, we personalize an invite and that’s going to improve our chances of them connecting with us. I would hate to have a hot 100 or 200 lists and not personalize an invite and then lose an opportunity in my hot 100. That’s a must, must, must do. After that, when they connected to you and LinkedIn is going to tell you in your own inbox that they’ve connected with you which is an opportunity for you to start opening up a dialogue, and typically, we don’t go straight for the jugular, “Buy my stuff. I’m really awesome! Check us out.” We’ll go in there and thank them for connecting. “Hey, that’s awesome! Thanks so much for connecting.”
We can kind of do a couple of different approaches and we test things, and anything that we do, we test a couple of different messages. First, sometimes we’ll go and ask them, “We already know this because we’ve done our homework already, the foundation work.” We’ll go ask them about the pain points in their business but depending on what they’re title is. We ask them about business and what they’re pain points are and whatnot, and believe it or not, people will go in and sometimes they’ll write you a book and I’ll call it a book because it’s a big long paragraph, and if you are on your mobile phone, it looks like they’re writing like a huge article or something, but they just open up.
Sometimes, we’ll just thank them and say, “Hey, I’ll tell you what. Thanks for connecting and because you’ve connected to me and I’m so honored, I wrote something I think might be beneficial to you or send it to someone, please, that who you think might benefit from this.” It’s typically an article, something they don’t have to opt in for, not yet. Like I use my articles on LinkedIn. We just take that, grab that link and there you go. That’s how we started conversation. A lot of times, they’re going to go back and look at your profile. Hopefully, your profile is well done, but that kind of already gives you a little bit of likeability and breaks down those barriers a little bit and they start to trust you and then they want to respond to you.
Steve Gordon: That’s such a smart approach. It kind of takes in to account the factor of time. I mean I think to build any real relationship that’s going to support doing business, there is this factor of time that has to happen because that’s part of what builds trust is that they see that you’re going to treat them in a way that they’re going to appreciate, that you’re not just out to sell them, that you’re in it for a relationship and that actually enhances the whole process, not go straight for the kill so to speak. I think that’s one of the reasons that a lot of people hesitate to do more outreach on LinkedIn is because you get so much bad stuff that you don’t want to appear like that.
Tracy Enos: Oh, it happened. Believe me, I’ve gotten some really nasty responses before. I’m not even asking to sell anything or even a meeting or a phone call. I mean they’re all out mad. I’m like, “I’m really sorry, but if you would go back and look at what I sent you, I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m trying to be valuable to you. I just want to give you value.” A lot of times, they’ll come back and go, “Oh, I’m really sorry.” Yeah, it’s because they get a lot of spam in their inbox and people get it the wrong way.
Steve Gordon: Absolutely. If we turn our attention a little bit to publishing. I know you talk a lot about that in the book, is LinkedIn Publishing still a good place to invest time do you think?
Tracy Enos: I do and here’s why, even though LinkedIn kind of took away the fun out of publishing back in August 2017, they took away the Pulse channels, they took away an opportunity to get your article featured in one of those channels. They took away the fact that your whole network was notified that you wrote an article. Now, nobody knows it’s there unless they go hunting for it or unless you promote it. LinkedIn rolled out a beta feature back this last fall. I think it was October or November. I wasn’t privy to this new feature. Boo! I get a lot of them, but this wasn’t one of them where you can actually now get people to subscribe to your signature series. They’re calling it a series.
Whether you denote it to be once a week, biweekly or once a month, people can now subscribe to it and then now get notified when you post a new article, which I think is fabulous because look, if you’re not an influencer or you didn’t get on that publishing bandwagon earlier and got a falling already, people are struggling to put that content out and I’m telling you, there’s some great content, great articles in LinkedIn that no one is seeing at all. I think this is just a great opportunity to bring it back to life, so I’m excited about it.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, that would be fantastic. Everybody tends to think that to be successful with this stuff you need a billion followers. I don’t know if you’ve read Seth Godin’s latest book, This is Marketing, but he talks in there about a concept called the minimum viable audience and I think for the vast majority of businesses, that’s really what you’re looking at is what’s the smallest number of people that I need and how can I round them up because that’s an easier problem to solve for than, “Oh, my goodness! I got to get a gazillion people following me, but what’s the smallest number I need today? Yeah, my growth in the future, what’s the smallest I need today to make this begin to work for me and then focus on that,” because now you get down to the level of really being able to target people.
I just think that for most businesses, that’s going to be effective and I hope they roll that out. We’d use it in a heartbeat.
Tracy Enos: So would I. Actually, I haven’t published an article in a year and that’s partly the reason. It’s not that I don’t have articles within me or haven’t written them offline. It’s just who’s going to see it, but I will say, hopefully, they roll that out pretty quickly so those of you who are interested or already have content you can repurpose it from your blog. Sometimes people are on Medium, so you can take from there and repost it in LinkedIn. According to Google, it’s not considered duplicate content because LinkedIn is an authority site. Best practice is to within the article put the link to where the original article is.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, definitely.
Tracy Enos: Good.
Steve Gordon: It happened in all of those places.
Tracy Enos: Yeah, exactly, but you’re really right and Seth Godin is right about this. I get a lot of questions about, “Do I need 30,000 people in my network to make this LinkedIn thing work?” I’m like, “No.” One of the case studies in my book, when he was first doing this, he has 1,800 connections, but he only had 1,400 connections. He was making six figures just focusing Gmail and LinkedIn. That was it. No website. No smartphone. No camera on his Mac. He didn’t have any sales funnels or opt-in pages. Nothing like that and he’s making six figures because he had a select audience of folks that he had the right message to the right people and that’s all it took.
You don’t need 30,000 people. Maybe you just need a few hundred people. That can equate to an ROI of 20% to 50% more a year.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I know things are always changing on LinkedIn. You’ve kind of given us some great advice to go back to the basics, focus on our profile, focus on making real connections and definitely leverage all of the intelligences in Sales Navigator. What haven’t we covered that you think would be important for somebody who’s looking at LinkedIn and are there any other platforms that you think people need to be paying attention to?
Tracy Enos: Well, I think the newsfeed is so important because it’s now public and anybody can find your articles, and as a matter of fact, I got a call earlier last year. It was summer of 2018 out of the blue and because I had posted a how to video and put it in the newsfeed on LinkedIn, and it being public, she found me on Google for that keyword and then she clicked on the link which brought her to LinkedIn and then she went to my profile, went to my contact info and called me. It was amazing. Now, that’s never happened before. I don’t know if it will happen again, but wow! You kind of wanted to get active in the newsfeed.
I’m not saying that you have to do it five days a week. It’s just really hard to come up with great content and the algorithms have changed a lot and the other new feature that is coming up with LinkedIn is now it’s live at video. They’re behind the times from Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Thank goodness. They’re coming up with that. That’s in beta too. I’m hoping that will roll out to everybody here in 2019 as well but just get in there and get active. You have to be consistent.
Don’t make it all about you, your company, your solutions, your products and your services. Yes, every once in a while, give yourself a promo. You need to go in there and start being valuable to your network because when your network starts engaging with your content whether it’s publishing or in the newsfeed, they’re network gets notified and then so on and so on. This is where you could start getting more folks coming into your network that could be prospects for you that you would never probably find on your own depending on the size of your network.
I think that’s also important as well like two to three times a week. I mean make it fun. I have some ideas in the book. Go in there. I like to tell people if they’re like, “Well, I don’t know where to start.” Well, think of this way. How about your 10 most frequently asked questions? We all know what those are. Give 10 two-to-three-minute videos, sharing the answers to those frequently asked questions, and if you posted that once a week, you have 10 weeks of content. Now, you could also do 10 should asked questions. Now, those are questions that people should ask but they don’t.
Now, you’re starting to become valuable. Now if you do that twice a week, now you’ve got 10 weeks and you only need one more post for the week and you could do something fun. You could show the culture of your company, just get in front of the camera and just talk, something that sparks something that you just got to share it with the world or you could go in and share your favorite productivity tools or maybe something that has to do with your family. People like the human side of you too. It’s not always about business.
I found that more people start watching my stuff when I give them a little bit of me, the side of me I’m not perfect, I do dumb stuff, I say dumb things and I’m totally in love with my boys and I will put them on LinkedIn every once in a while and they love it and they eat it up, but that gets some backend to checking out your profile and sending messages to you. Like I just posted one, well actually which is this last one about being on this podcast with you, Steve, and a couple of others. Some people are asking me to send them some info in the newsfeed, but I got several messages privately as well.
I only got what, 28 likes on that. I didn’t get hundreds and hundreds of likes or views on it, but guess what it did? It gave me an opportunity to open a dialogue and potentially post new consulting deals.
Steve Gordon: I think your point on consistency is really important. You’re not going to post one thing and all of a sudden land 50 clients, but if you’re showing up over and over and over again, not everybody’s going to see it every time and that’s okay, but that repetition and that consistency is going to increase your odds of success exponentially.
Tracy Enos: Right and here’s another thing that LinkedIn just gives out, gives you on the platter that people are not taking advantage of is they’re going to notify you of who’s engaging with your content and you should just spend five or 10 minutes and going in and seeing if those people are first connection and go thank them for sharing your stuff or reply to their comments and send them a personal message or if it’s somebody that found your content because your network liked it, commented or shared it, go in and see.
If they’re an ideal prospect for you, go ask them for a connection request and let them know that they engage with your content that’s why you want to connect with them and start a dialogue there, but people aren’t taking a time to do that. It’s very little time, five to 10 minutes. Now unless you have something that goes absolutely viral on you which I have had a post that’s done that a couple of years ago, then you might need to get a VA to help you do something of that sort and go and do there, but for the most part, you just get in there on your phone and just reply to those folks, connect with those folks, start a dialogue. You would be surprised how much business that you can create from that.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it really is. It’s astonishing when you break it down to actually looking at who’s interacting and then going connecting with those people. You can engage people in conversation. I always like to equate that real world of conversation to be like the same thing that you’re doing on LinkedIn. You walk up to somebody at a networking event. You ask them some questions. At least if you do it well, you don’t give them the whole sales pitch all at once. You probably even don’t give them the sales pitch right then and there that evening, but you ask a lot of questions and then you tee up a next interaction where you take it a little bit deeper and all of these social tools really are the same way.
It’s just like people something flush what they already know about how to be a human being and then turn into this creepy sales mode.
Tracy Enos: Right.
Steve Gordon: We’re still working on some of the people in the planet which is good for you I would imagine.
Tracy Enos: Yeah, it’s good for me, but I will tell you, it almost happens on a weekly basis that I run into somebody who’s still so mystified on how to use LinkedIn. It just baffles them. I think a lot of it is there’s so much to LinkedIn. It’s more robust than any other social media platform and I’m not talking about the ad side of things, it’s just the platform itself. I think they mystified and then they get overwhelmed and then they just don’t do it.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it is easy to get confused because there’s a lot to it particularly when you get into Sales Navigator, there are lots of knobs and dials and things to click on –
Tracy Enos: Exactly.
Steve Gordon: That can be overwhelming. Well, Tracy, where should people go to find out more about you and the good work that you’re doing?
Tracy Enos: Well, they can go to tracyenos.com. We’re totally revamping the website, but you have an opportunity there to grab my book for free or schedule a consult with me, and then of course, my social media links are in the there. You can connect to me on LinkedIn from there or you could just go to linkedintopublishing.com and that will take you to a landing page and you can get my latest book for free plus the case study with Bob Lovely who I just discussed a little earlier about, the publishing fellow who wins six figures and an extra little bonus in there too which I only give to my private clients, but what’s good about this is if you want to get a notify about 2.0, because once LinkedIn rolls out these two new features out of beta to everybody else, all the rest of the membership, I’m going to be updating the book to reflect those with new stuff.
Steve Gordon: Outstanding! That’s great. We’ll make sure we’ll link all that up in the show notes. For those of you who are listening in the car, don’t worry, it will be there. You can go check it out there and find those links. I highly recommend the book. I’ve had it for at least, I don’t know when it published, but I know I’ve got it for at least two years and we turn to that often just to make sure that we’re doing things the way that we need to be doing on them, so outstanding book. Tracy Enos, thank you for being here. Thanks for being unstoppable and I just had a pleasure talking to you today.
Tracy Enos: Thanks Steve very much. I had a good time.
