Top LinkedIn Strategies, 3X Your Sales & Podcast Growth with Logan Lyles

[00:00:00] Welcome to Content Is Profit. If you have struggled growing your podcast, your LinkedIn presence and driving significant revenue through these platforms, today's conversation is for you. Because LinkedIn looks at the people that you're engaging with and puts that content in front of them, if you can streamline some of that process of connecting with the right people, you're going to start to grow your connections.

[00:00:24] Logan Laos tripled revenue after only three months in the new agency. From then, he ranked number one in the U.S. marketing category with two of his podcasts. Which also turned into creating content for myself and other evangelists within the agency. So it kind of became this double-edged sword. And all this while growing 20,000 followers on LinkedIn.

[00:00:50] You need to be able to do enough volume on the networking side for it to make sense. Today, we break down how he did it all. The ethical and profitable way to drive revenue through content-based networking. And trust me, listen to find out how to do this without pissing people off. You know, if you're at the 11th hour and you don't have any pipeline, that's when you get desperate. That's when you start to burn a lot of bridges. So invest in building that pipeline early.

[00:01:18] His approach and strategies on how and why you want to rank number one in Apple Podcasts. And no, it's not just flipping your podcast. And finally, how you can beat LinkedIn burnout and grow without babysitting your feed. And this is the perfect approach for antisocials like myself. Now, make sure to take notes, connect with Logon after the episode and visit bizbros.co forward slash monetize to get a hold of some goodies.

[00:01:50] And welcome back to Content is Profit. How are you doing? Amazing. We're testing a lot of things today. You know, maybe that's for another episode, but I'm excited, man. I'm warm inside. Florida is going through a winter storm. You're feeling warm and fuzzy? Warm and fuzzy. You're going to have to like take my sweater off, man. Yeah, I think it's in over 500 episodes is the first time I think we record back-to-back interviews. I know. Well, no, episode one and two. Well, those were in back-to-back interviews.

[00:02:20] Those were just solo episodes, is what I'm saying. You are correct, my man. Of course, of course. The content is perfect historian. Well, yes, today we have an incredible guest. He helped grow an agency three times, a podcast production agency, after six months of taking over sales from the founder. That is very incredible. I want to dive into that because, of course, we want to triple sales in our agency as well.

[00:02:46] He's been the host of seven different podcasts, and two of those have ranked number one in marketing in the U.S. Absolutely amazing. We want to rank number one in marketing in the U.S. The horns are coming, baby. We're definitely diving into that. And he's grown at 20,000 following in LinkedIn, and he was awarded the invite-only Top Voices badge in 2024. This guy is incredible. Studio clap. This guy is incredible.

[00:03:13] Please welcome the one and only Logan Lyles. Let's go. What's up, Logan? That might be the best. I have, as you said in the intro, I've hosted a lot of podcasts. I've also been a guest on a lot of podcasts. That was the best hype session intro I have ever had. You guys are number one in my book right there. Let's go. Money comments. Thank you. Thank you. I was going to say, you know, that is our whole business plan.

[00:03:40] You know, we bring people on, we hype them up, and then we upsell them with the, we are hype men's for hire. You want to take us around to the grocery store and we can hype you up? That's what we do. One time it actually worked. We ended up in Montana, in the middle of nowhere, hosting a two-day mastermind with our awesome George Bryant friend. So anyways, it worked out. We'll see. But Logan, I'm stoked. Francia has been hyping you up for like weeks. And I know, you know, this is not the first time that we try to do this. So I'm super grateful.

[00:04:10] Can't wait to learn more about, you know, what you're doing, especially in this, you know, world of podcasting and content. So thank you for being here, man. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you guys for having me. You guys run a great show. I'm honored to be a guest. All right. Let's get this started. Yeah. You know, when we had our call, getting to know each other, there's something very specific you're working on and, you know, you're developing a course for that as well.

[00:04:31] But I do want to backtrack a little bit into that intro and dive just a tad bit into your experience on growing the podcast production agency. Right. You took sales from the hands of the founder, right, and tripled the company in six months. That is absolutely amazing. I'm curious, what was the method behind that? What was it that you were doing?

[00:04:56] I love, by the way, we've had the founder of that agency here on the podcast, and we talk about how incredible is that they're the people, their employees are, you know, they evangelize the company and they're they love it. They share content about the company all the time. So not sure if that was the approach that you implemented in there, but I'm very curious. Well, what was the method? Yeah. Great question, man.

[00:05:22] And yeah, I've got to give a shout out to my friend, James Carberry at Sweetfish. He's the one who had faith in me, brought me on to the podcast production agency back in 2018. And at that point, you know, you were talking, Luis, about backing up. I think it makes sense to back up a little bit. Not that I have this amazing origin story. I grew up a poor child or anything like that. But I graduated college in 2008, which for those of us old enough millennials to remember, that was a terrible time to hit the job market. Right.

[00:05:51] Great recession was right upon us. And I hit the job market with a journalism degree. And I'm in Colorado. Like Denver was one of the areas where newspapers, you know, we had two major newspapers between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. And like within a few months of graduating with a photojournalism degree, ready to hit the job market. One of the two major newspapers here in Denver shut its doors forever, which was the case in a lot of markets. And I say all that to say it was indicative of what the journalism industry was going through.

[00:06:21] Right. And so I realized, OK, I'm not going to be able to support a family. I was already married at that point going into journalism and I quickly got a job in sales. So, you know, people oftentimes hit the job market and they're like, I need to actually support a family, make enough money. You go into sales or something like that. And I absolutely hated it for the first probably six months. I'm like, I don't like talking people into things. I don't like having to try and convince people. What were you trying to sell? What's that? What were you trying to sell?

[00:06:51] Oh, it's real cool stuff. Copiers, printers, scanners, the occasional fax machine. So if you guys know my friend Dale Dupree, known as the copier warrior, he is definitely another guy to have on the show. He cut his teeth in a similar industry and we got to know each other on LinkedIn. And so anyhow, I was in sales there. I kind of found my groove in educating over selling.

[00:07:18] And that became kind of the way that I found like, okay, I can do this. I kind of like technology. This is kind of boring stuff, but I can sell it. But all the while, I was kind of looking at the way that marketing was changing. You know, HubSpot was starting to talk about this inbound stuff. And I'm like, that's a lot like what I learned in journalism school over here of, you know, being able to create content, whether that's text or video or whatever to draw people in. And so I kind of had my eyes on that.

[00:07:45] So fast forward about 10 years into my sales career, I met James through LinkedIn and we got to know each other there, started both putting out content. And then he was like, hey, I'm looking for someone to take over sales for the agency. We're starting to see some traction in the market. And I was like, this could be really cool. Because one of the first things he asked me was, hey, if you come in and own sales, are you okay with hosting the podcast and creating content on LinkedIn?

[00:08:12] I was like, so you're saying I get to still sell, which I had grown in my sales career for 10 years. But I get to incorporate now marketing and I'm selling marketing services to marketers. So to me, it was like this really cool intersection of sales and marketing. And then it was really about executing the evangelism play came a little bit later to your question, Louise.

[00:08:33] At first, it was the content-based networking strategy, which at that point, James was working on writing the book about that was the primary strategy, interviewing potential clients as guests on our podcast, B2B Growth. Which also turned into creating content for myself and other evangelists within the agency. So it kind of became this double-edged sword, if that makes sense. I have a question on that, right?

[00:09:00] Because we, you know, we use a very similar model in the sense that we bring, you know, a majority of our clients have been our guests, right? And you develop that relationship. And it's like a natural progression. The conversation goes to, hey, do you know what we do? Let us know what you do. Oh, you need help in this area. And then it kind of like transitioned. One of the challenges I would say that has been presented during, you know, during this model is the volume, right, of conversations.

[00:09:27] So I'm curious, how do you guys approach that with, you know, the content-based networking that you mentioned, right? Like I noticed you guys had multiple hosts. Were you guys doing, you know, kind of like rotating? Were you publishing the episodes fast? Because something that I've had a, not sure if a moral issue is the right way to put it, right? But we've been on interviews where we noticed the host might have the same approach.

[00:09:55] But then they're like, oh, by the way, this episode is going to be released. I have a backlog of like 200 episodes. It's going to be released in like three years. I'm like, what the heck? You know, and then it gets released and we're like, wait, did we do that episode? We don't even remember, right? So I'm curious, like with the volume, I'm guessing does it come an increase in the publishing? Does it come a decrease in the value of the publication, right? And the quality. I'm curious, how did you guys tackle that?

[00:10:22] Yeah, it's a really good question because just like we talk about in content marketing, the balance of quality and quantity. And I have some thoughts on that. And I'm sure you guys have covered that in a lot of different episodes in 500 plus here. It's the same with this content-based networking strategy. Like I was on a call with a small video agency just yesterday out here in my neck of the woods in Colorado. And he was like, I was toying with this idea of like, do I create a podcast for a thought leadership in my own marketing?

[00:10:50] Or do I do this kind of networking strategy? And my advice to him was do both. If you can do bandwidth, you need to be able to do enough volume on the networking side for it to make sense. And at that, if you're going to do that, then you have to make sure that the quality is there. And so I do think it's a yes and answer is the way that I would put it. So one of the advantages that we had at Sweetfish was that we were a podcast production agency.

[00:11:19] We already had audio editors and writers and folks ready to go. Now we didn't like, we actually were pumping out episodes daily. So to keep from that, like, Hey Luis, this was great. Your episode is going to be here in eight months. And you're like, well, this wasn't valuable. This doesn't make me feel good. And so then it is actually detrimental to the goal that you're trying to achieve with this. Now we didn't turn it into a blog post and do everything we would do with our other content

[00:11:48] that was more thought leadership. And so it's kind of like, what are the things that you can templatize? Kind of ask maybe the same sort of questions, the same format. Maybe your episode description is fairly templatized. I mean, the other thing right now, especially with podcast production, if you're going this route, AI can help a lot, right? Like I've either used some of the things built into Riverside, the platform we're recording on right here or in Descript, you know,

[00:12:18] to be able to crank out descriptions, chapter markers in your YouTube videos, those sorts of things that used to take you hours to do. So I would say, you know, the bar has raised, like it used to be like, you ask somebody to be a guest on podcast. It's like instantly now, you know, fast forward, what's it been since then? You know, seven years now it's like, you want to be on my podcast? Okay, dude, what is your podcast like? Is it legit? You know, let me see the quality, those sorts of things.

[00:12:47] So you have to raise the bar, not only for kind of that ethical question, but also because people aren't going to say yes. The good thing is there's tools that you can use that can automate and accelerate your process of post-production. So that's a long answer to a short question, but I think it's evolved a bit over the last five to seven years for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to encourage everybody to look at, you know, the post-production aspect of their show, if this is something that they're looking into and like really dive in

[00:13:13] and like almost like do a time audit on exactly what it takes you to get from your creation process, like your original recording to the final product and assess it, right? Because at the end of the day, it's like really, I mean, you guys were a big company and you guys did daily episodes, but that takes some capacity. There's some investment. So, all right, take an account of, you know, who do you have in your team? Do you have any producers? Do you have any editors? Do you have any writers? If that's you, how long does it take you?

[00:13:41] And then how can you remove the friction to make it, you know, compact? So then you can achieve your consistency commitment at the end of the day, right? Like for us, for example, we ran the show three times a week for the longest time and we used to do live. And then we released the episode maybe a week later. And then about a year ago, we acquired the studio on the level of commitment to the people here in the studio and maybe on the product with the production team increased.

[00:14:06] So our capacity to create more episodes got reduced by one episode a week, right? We're like, okay, we need those hours to, we need to allocate those hours in a different way. But now we have a library of 500 episodes that maybe we do a rerun or maybe we do a quick intro. Maybe we do a different type of episode, right? To keep up with the consistency. So I encourage everybody to look at that production and be like, can we do the nitty gritty, right? And make sure what's my commitment. Can I stick to that?

[00:14:35] It's like, it's very, definitely very interesting, right? What I, you know, I love that conversation about bandwidth because the more we are in this industry and the more content we try to produce, right? Or the better content we try to produce, you know, and the more fulfillment we got to do for clients and people here in the studio, I learned to value more my bandwidth. I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to cut things out, right? And we always use that little analogy from books, right?

[00:15:05] Before, actually books, they didn't have margins. And when they had them, you know, this was like centuries ago and they had them in warehouses or whenever they were, you know, saving them in their library. Rats would eat part of the book. So when people would go to read them, since they didn't have any margin, they would eat the words of the books. And you're like, well- I've never heard this story, man. Yeah, you're like, what happened there? What is that word that I'm missing? So they started printing books with margins.

[00:15:33] So the rats, if they would go and they eat it, something happened to the book. Obviously that doesn't happen anymore. Hopefully, you know, hopefully you don't got rats running around your house eating your books. But if they do eat it, they eat the margin and you still have the whole idea. So it's a great representation of the power of bandwidth, right? If you are so tight, anything can eat up, you know, at you. Because those words in the book, that is you, yourself, your own capacity.

[00:16:01] And, you know, anything outside, if you don't have any margins, can eat it up. But if you have margins, then you have room to play. You have room to write down stuff on the margins, right? And come up with better ideas, improve things. So I always thought it was an incredible analogy. And I love that you brought it up. Now I'm curious on with such level of, you know, because one a day, it's a lot, right? It is a lot. Again, you guys have multiple hosts. So I'm guessing each one had different responsibilities and all that stuff.

[00:16:29] But growing a podcast to number one in marketing, right? In the U.S., that is huge. Again, so I'm curious for that person that is listening and they have their own podcast. And they're like, okay, how do I grow my podcast to be number one? We've been ranked in the top 10 a few times, a couple of times, right? And most of the part we notice is when we have, you know, bigger podcasts, they shout us out. And, you know, we get obviously a rise on downloads and all the stuff. What was the approach for you guys on those podcasts, right?

[00:16:59] Um, were you guys buying advertising and running it? Were you, I don't know, doing a collaborative advertising campaign with the guests? Uh, were you guys doing a podcast swap? What was your preferred method? So you guys could rank number one. Yeah, it's really all of the above. I've done anything and everything when it comes to podcast promotion. You know, it seems like everybody has gotten on the bandwidth of cutting out clips and posting those to social, which has some lift, right?

[00:17:28] But you're also, it is a slower growth trajectory, which podcast growth in general is slower. Now you can go deeper with that audience because people who listen to podcasts tend to listen to all of them, tend to listen to almost every episode. Like it's a more intimate medium than it, than, than other channels. Like I would say a podcast subscriber does not equal even a follower on LinkedIn, right?

[00:17:52] I think the value and the connection between that, that audience member is worth more, uh, for a number of reasons without getting too nerdy on the stats and stuff like that. But doing that part on social, um, I think one of the things I've even struggled with is doing those collaborative campaigns with guests. What I used to do is like, Hey, you were a guest, you know, and then wait until after the episode is published. And then, you know, Hey Luis, we created these clips. Here's a graphic. Here's a link. We even wrote some social copy for you.

[00:18:21] And then crickets, um, one, because it's probably been, you know, a couple of weeks since you recorded. It's not the first thing in the guests mind. Um, even though it's featuring them, it feels like more of an ask than it does value. And so a couple of things that I've done is try and get pre-commitment with the guests to do that collaborative campaign, even before you record or, you know, what? Like, let's say we hung up today and you're like, Hey Logan, this is our plan for promotion.

[00:18:50] If we send you an outline, um, like, does that sound good? And I might be like, well, I can't commit to that, but I could do this, you know, and getting that pre-commitment and not waiting for that email two weeks later. The other thing I've found is doing a post like the day of, or the day after you record, maybe again with bandwidth, you got to find a way to do this efficiently. Maybe it doesn't have as high touch as the rest of your micro content that's coming out of the podcast, but what's a quick way you could reinforce the value

[00:19:18] and keep the guest hyped going back to where we started today about this interaction and being willing to share it. Um, uh, another thing that I always recommend is, you know, don't underestimate the power of email in promoting your podcast, both yourself and your guest. Cause your guest might have a large email database and that could be one of the questions that you bake in. And like, I've been a guest before I'm, uh, my buddy, Joseph Lewin's podcast and in his guest, uh, form, which you guys do a really good job with your kind of guest intake form.

[00:19:49] You ask a question of like, how willing are you to, to promote this? I'm like, uh, not really. Okay. Maybe I'll post about it or like, give me all the stuff right now. You know, okay. Now I could ask them about what channels do they want to promote? How big is their email list? Could we write copy for your email to get you to do that? Yeah. So those are some of the things with like social and guest collaboration that aren't groundbreaking, but there are little tweaks that you can make that I think will help, um, make it have a bigger impact.

[00:20:17] And the two other things you kind of alluded to them getting on other podcasts as guests, because when you're posting stuff on social, you might be reaching the right target audience, but they might not have any interest in subscribing to your podcast or watching you on YouTube. Cause they just don't live on that channel. When you get on other podcasts that are in the same industry, you're, you're reaching the right audience, but you're also reaching people that have already said, Hey, I listened to podcasts. So that one can be really effective if you can do it efficiently.

[00:20:45] And then the last thing that did help is running some display ad campaigns very strategically, uh, for the podcast with a very tight landing page. Um, not sending people to your whole website with all the episodes and all that sort of stuff, but like just a landing page with the show, you know, uh, subscribe here, you know, and focusing on Apple.

[00:21:08] Um, if you can target folks based on iOS devices, um, because again, if you get subscribers in Spotify or get more downloads via Buzzsprout or whatever, that's not necessarily going to affect your Apple ranking. Um, and is Apple ranking everything with the goal of your show? No, but can it help you get bigger guests? Can it help you, you know, pitch the show out? Can it help you get on other podcasts? Cause you say you host a top rank show, all of those sorts of things I think come into play there. Yeah. Leverage for sure. Yeah.

[00:21:38] Thank you, Logan, for breaking it down. Uh, you know, there's definitely a short list for people listening to the show or even watching, you know, Hey, what are the things that we tackle first? I think one important question as a host, I guess on the show is to understand what the goal of your show is, right? Like initially for us, the first like a hundred or 200 episodes was like, we are going to keep production as frictionless as possible because we need to connect with as many people as possible to have conversations with as many people as possible. And see if we can find opportunities. Right. And that's what, that was a liftoff.

[00:22:08] And the commitment was huge. 200 episodes, right? Three a week. That's, that's a ton. And then after that, I think around 300, that's when it started to change with, you know, hustle coming on board and all these things. And now with the studio, this is a little bit different, but there's an element to it. Um, so like, what is the goal? And then from there, like you said, getting familiar with these outlets, because obviously the clips are super popular because they're all over the place.

[00:22:30] I think today we see it more as a, as a brand awareness play more than anything, because like I said, like an Instagram reels consumer might take like 20 touches to go listen to one of your episodes. Right. Versus if you guess on another show, they're already in that medium. Um, so it's understanding like, what is the role of that platform? Where is that? And, and tackling those according to, to your, uh, to your ranking of what you need to do first.

[00:22:52] And to add onto that, the other thing, I think a big mistake people make with, with clips is making your clips just about promoting the podcast. Right. Now there's a place for that. Like, I think diary of a CEO does so good with those intros. They're like teasers. They're like leaving you on a cliffhanger of like, that's why. And then it cuts. Right. And it's like the most important thing. You can do that sort of stuff with your clips for reels or shorts or LinkedIn or whatever. Right.

[00:23:21] But then don't forget that like, if people are just seeing your teaser or like a trailer for your podcast over and over again, those five touches might get wasted. Cause they're like, Oh, I'm so tired of hearing about this podcast. But if you are purposeful in creating micro videos or clips that actually deliver value on the platform, on Instagram or YouTube or LinkedIn, then it's going to be like, Oh, I'm getting so much value from this. I should go listen to the podcast.

[00:23:49] So think about kind of those two ways of repurposing what is promoting the podcast and what's truly repurposing the podcast content to add value on other channels. And I think a lot of people aren't doing it. I want to add a big asterisk here. First, I agree a hundred percent. The second thing is I think a lot of people listening to this might be like, okay, I'm going to talk to my video editor or I'm going to go hire this person or whatever. Right. But we forget that if there's a crappy message, it's gotta be a crappy clip.

[00:24:17] But there's no amount of post-production that can fix that. Right. So I think we need to look internal and be like, okay, what are the kind of questions I'm asking? Right. What are the type of content I'm creating? I mean, just recently we have this little bit of a side project with a football slash soccer show that we're doing. And we're testing an external team for this. And they got us back a clip prototype. Right. And we both die laughing. We was like, this is awesome.

[00:24:46] We like, it was like, we really focused on like the energy of both of us and the dynamic. And the, obviously it's a topic that, that we feel very passionate about. And it was like very different style of, of, of content creation for us. And the comment that the editor told me was like, you guys made it easy for us because of that energy and like the expressions and the things that we will say. And it's like, how, like, what, what can we deliver in our message to make the job of that editor?

[00:25:13] That's treating that content so easy that they can pull this like very interesting things for the trailer so we can put out to the world. So focus on the messaging and maybe it's not the, the, the editing that makes it all this. Maybe it's us. So we got to look internally and be like, are we actually doing a good job on the messaging and delivering that raw content? Dude, you are so spot on. I'll put a double asterisk on that. Like huge, bold, italic, underlined, like terrible, you know, emphasis copy wise.

[00:25:42] Like, uh, no amount and talk about bandwidth. Like if you find yourself like, man, post-production is just taking so long back to what Luis was saying earlier. Maybe you're not spending enough of time in pre-production. It's like, what's that old saying about, uh, health, like a, a dose of, or, uh, you know, a drop of prevention is worth a pound of cure, something like that. Basically like the more you invest in preventative, the less that you're going to spend on, you know, medicine and cures and those sorts of things.

[00:26:11] It's the same thing with this sort of content, especially podcast audio and video stuff. Uh, if your pre-production is strong, that is going to make your post-production so much more efficient. And it's not going to take as much bandwidth and as much margin as you, as you actually think. So invest some time there, like one and to get real practical. Cause I think this can be like people listening to this and be like, Oh, that's great theory. But like, what does that look like? Exactly.

[00:26:34] Before, before we hit record, Luis, you were talking about something that I've done on podcasts before that I've gotten feedback on from listeners. And that is instead of just short starting the show with welcome back, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Like do a live intro, but then record in post-production, a real strong hook, like with a compelling question, with teasing a couple of things that, uh, that they're going to get from the episode. I did that for agency life. One of the past top rank shows that I hosted.

[00:27:04] And I literally got, uh, some listeners texting me like, I love these intros. Now, did I get those edited super fancy, like diary of your CEO? No, I didn't have to, because I would end recording. I would script out my intro to about one minute. I put it on the teleprompter and I would record that as succinctly as possible. I dropped that in, in the beginning and guess what? That script was also my show notes. So now I don't have to write show notes separately. So that's one example.

[00:27:32] Your show might be a little bit different, but that's one thing where you could take what you guys are talking about and put it into action. Yeah. I love it. A triple asterisk out here. Oh, all around. We got all three. We're going. Yes. Yeah. Um, no, I was just going to say one of our kind of like pillar one liners that we share all the time with everybody is quality of the message over quality of the production. Yeah. Right. And I think I want to add to that. I really love what you said.

[00:28:00] And maybe we can dive another day into just a deep conversation about pre-production, but, you know, quality of the message and the pre-production over just the production itself. But I want to move on here to talk about your LinkedIn growth, right? 20,000 followers. You are a top voice of LinkedIn, which is an invite only. That is pretty freaking legit.

[00:28:25] And now you are the director of growth for business builders, which is our good friend agency. Jay Owen. Shout out to Jay. Um, we've had him on the podcast before too. So actually, you know, we, we were chasing James and Jay, so we could get to you, Logan. I'm just going to say that, you know, we just wanted to talk to you. It's funny. After I met Jay, uh, James was one of the first people of like, Hey, you guys need to, you guys just need to know each other.

[00:28:53] Um, because having the opportunity to work for both of them and call both of them friends, um, I think has been, you know, just a blessing and a benefit to me in my career and my personal life too. Great, great guys. So they deserve the shout outs for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a little bit about that LinkedIn, uh, growth and also a little bit on what you're working on right now. Cause I know you got something pretty good there in the books. Yeah.

[00:29:18] So, I mean, I honestly, I've got a little bit of love, hate relationship with LinkedIn right now, because you guys have probably seen like organic reach is not what it used to be. Um, I, I started on LinkedIn, as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, like 2018, that really came from having conversations with marketers on B2B growth as I was hosting that show with sweet fish at that point. And then turning that into LinkedIn content.

[00:29:44] Some of it, you know, clips, some of it just seems like LinkedIn then was much more, um, emphasizing text only posts. And now there's still room for that, but images do better carousels videos at time, obviously over the last year, the video feed, you know, has expanded. And so, um, I am not one of those that's like, Oh, I can say I went to 20,000 subscribers in like six months.

[00:30:08] Okay. It took me several years. It's been kind of slow and steady growth. Um, but I have found some things that, that work. And I think what is interesting, the part that I am still really excited about is that while, you know, folks like me who have been active for six plus years on LinkedIn, like, man, it takes a lot more to hit the same number of views versus five years ago.

[00:30:31] I think I've seen it where some of the folks I've consulted on their own LinkedIn content, just starting out. It's almost like LinkedIn is like giving them a little taste, uh, for those new users. And like, Oh, I'm going to make this first post blow up for you. Um, which then most people would say, well, what good is that? If it just craters after that, I've actually seen it kind of sustained.

[00:30:51] So I think there's an opportunity if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm sub 500 or a thousand connections or followers on LinkedIn now could be a really great time to just learn some of the basics, get active, um, and start to, to grow your network.

[00:31:07] Whether you are a marketer in house and you're looking to create awareness for your brand or you're looking to, you know, you're a founder and you're looking to network with investors or just test the market, or you're a professional in any other, you know, department. And you're looking to build your personal brand because that will benefit you in your current role or just in your career in general.

[00:31:29] I think, uh, if any of those things are true now is a really good time, um, to, to start out. Cause I think, um, there's that opportunity that I'm seeing with some folks who are just getting started. Yeah. That's amazing. I've seen, uh, I mean, yeah, just yesterday I was like, uh, I barely go on LinkedIn on my phone. Like normally I use it on my desktop. Uh, but I went in there and, um, and there's a video tap, right? It's almost like, oh, like real, it's the same thing, right? You go up and up and these thoughts pop to mind, right?

[00:31:59] Out of the new generation, right. That has grown with like the, the Instagram reels or the YouTube shorts or the snaps or whatever that now are transitioning to a professional, you know, environment. Right. So now my thought was, well, we have these new generations that are coming into, into LinkedIn that are already indoctrinated in this way of consuming content from the other platform. So my thought was like, like how aware is LinkedIn of this? Maybe that's part of the decision process of like, now it's looking like the other platform is because,

[00:32:29] this new user is already used to interact with content in that specific way. So it's frictionless for the platform to onboard them into that. Right. Because if you go into this new environment, you're like, oh, there's these new ways to, to connect, or there's these new ways to create content. I'm already creating content this way. So part of me is like, how much of that is in these new platforms? Right. So as, as creator or business creator,

[00:32:51] I think it's interesting to, I'm a big fan of test the platform yourself, like go in, interact with a platform, whatever fits. Right. And obviously for LinkedIn, I was very surprised the other day. Like LinkedIn is the, my personal platform that has the most amount of people in it compared to anything else, probably Facebook is like we were born there and in those communities and so on like that. But I'm like, wow, like, this is so interesting. Like being probably my second biggest one, I spent the least amount of time there.

[00:33:17] So that's an indicator is like, can we go in there and experiment a little bit more in this platform? So as a, as a business creator, experiment with those. And obviously LinkedIn, there's a number one because people already expect to do business from that. Right. Like it's not, it's not like this layer that you have to go through and like, oh no, I'm not entertaining you. I'm actually selling you. What has been the biggest lever for you so far in LinkedIn? Cause you know, we interview a lot of people here in content is profit.

[00:33:46] We've, of course we've lately, since we joined the HubSpot Podcast Network, we've done more of the solo episodes as well. But, you know, I hear a lot of the time that you gotta be engaged and, you know, answering, you know, commenting on other people's posts and all that stuff. And let me tell you, I love the thinking part of it. I love, you know, sure. I want to share my ideas, but I don't want to live like attached to the platform and not,

[00:34:09] not in the selfish way, not in the selfish way of, I just want people to come to me. Like I do genuinely love talking about the ideas. I love talking about, you know, what we learn on the podcast. So, but I do not really enjoy jumping on, you know, social media and feel obligated to like read everything that pops up and just answering everything.

[00:34:32] You know, I, I, I kind of like say that the dichotomy of like, you know, working in social media, you know, that you want to have a good reach. What happens when I'm anti-social and I have to work on social media? Not that I'm calling you anti-social. Yeah, no, no, no, no. He's anti-social. Yeah, that's accurate. Yeah, he chimed in. Yeah, this guy. So, I mean, two things. One, LinkedIn does more than any other platform reward you for being social, for networking.

[00:35:02] I heard it said the other day from my buddy, Marketing Max, he runs a great newsletter called Growth Daily and I'm co-hosting a show with him right now. And he's like, LinkedIn still makes a lot of their money through their recruiting and their sales navigator, even more so than, than the ads. And so they're actually kind of bent towards that. And so they like to see people directly engaging with, with people.

[00:35:26] And so I've seen it where I'll comment on one of Luis's posts and guess what? Then I'll see a comment back from him. Well, maybe you're a bad example because you wouldn't, but there is something to the nature of, and also if your email is tied in where I've been on calls with people, I've been in DMs with people on LinkedIn. I've been emailing back and forth with them or I've commented on their posts. All of those touch points with those individuals, I will then see their content more in my feed.

[00:35:56] And I know that they'll see mine more in their feed. So that's the opportunity. But then the challenge is exactly what you just laid out. And I've felt this over the last six plus years of like, man, I'm just burnt out of like having to spend time going in and commenting and those sorts of things. So here's two ways that have worked for me to automate or at least streamline some of this process.

[00:36:18] Cause I don't think the answer, like some people are doing right now, which is so obvious and I just is kind of gross is just turning on AI bots to comment for you. They look all the same. They add no value. They're not going to increase your brand or reputation on LinkedIn. Don't do that. Here's two things you can do. I'm ferociously taking notes by the way. Create a, create a, yeah, create a customized feed for LinkedIn.

[00:36:45] So there is a way that you can, um, you can basically do a search and you can say like, okay, I'm in B2B marketing. I want to be following Dave Gearhart, Chris Walker, uh, Jay Akonzo. I know has been previous guests on the show. Like these are some folks where if I'm commenting on their stuff, the people in those comment sections are my ideal buyers. Right. And that's an example. You could take this and apply it to HR or manufacturing or whatever.

[00:37:12] Um, and, uh, you can basically like create that search of the stuff that you want to see. Show me in the last week posts from these people, uh, and save that to your URL bar. Like this is best on desktop. So I'm going back to being on desktop rather than mobile. And when you're like, okay, now is my block to like go comment, engage that sort of stuff. Instead of scrolling forever, it's like, boom, post.

[00:37:41] I want to comment on boom posts. I want to comment on it. And you take that 30 minutes and you shrink it down to 10 or 12. Yeah. Um, so that's one strategy I'm going to unpack in a little bit more detail with a full screen share in the LinkedIn course that I'm launching soon. So that's what you're, you're alluding to. So plug, plug there. Um, you can sign up for the wait list at loganlyles.com. It's L-O-G-A-N-L-Y-L-E-S. Um, so that's what happens when you sign up to that. You hear that in your own bank account. Awesome. Yeah.

[00:38:11] Not Logan's bank account. I mean, both. Yeah. Cause you have way. Yeah. There you go. Way to win with. That's a way to make it awkward. Trade of value. Content is profit for everybody. Exactly. Right. That's, I got to bring it back to the show here. And then the second thing is I've been using a tool called Dripify. And again, if you want a link to that, hit me up. But Dripify, I think a lot of people are using for automated sales outreach and biz dev. So it's one of these LinkedIn automation tools where you can say, Hey, here's a, here's a

[00:38:39] list of people I've pulled from sales navigator. Here's the sequence. I want them to go through, send them an in-mail or send them a connection request after they accept, do this and that. Now what most people are doing, and I get these all the time, whether they're using Dripify or a similar platform is then what I call pitch slapping people in the DMs. It's like, Oh, we connected. Hey, Luis, are you interested in dah, dah, dah? We build websites at business builders. Are you tired of your website? Not converting to no one wants to hear that in the first message. Right.

[00:39:06] But because LinkedIn looks at the people that you're engaging with and puts that content in front of them, if you can streamline some of that process of connecting with the right people, I actually think you could use a tool like Dripify that's maybe more often used for business development and just use it as kind of a channel to help you build up your audience organically. And then like after people connect with you, like my automation is just like, Hey, Luis, thanks for connecting.

[00:39:35] See you around in the feed. Right. And then maybe, you know, a week or so later, like I might offer like, Hey, did you see this post or something like that? But even if you just said like, these are the people I want to connect with. You build that list. You automate some outreach that is just simply like, Hey, I'd love to connect. No pressure. I see that we're both in the marketing space where we were both in the agency space or HR or whatever, and then just see you around in, in the feed. You're going to have, you're going to start to grow your connections.

[00:40:05] And if you're putting out content, then one thing LinkedIn does is like, if we're new connections, they want to see, you know, does this, does Jay want to see Logan's content? Does Logan want to see Jay's content? And so one of the things it's going to do is put that content in front of those new connections in their feed. So if you can kind of streamline some of that, you can increase the chances as a new creator on LinkedIn. I use that term really loosely. If you cringe at that, that's okay.

[00:40:32] But just putting out content on LinkedIn, if that's new to you, this can help you get a leg up. So those are my two points of advice to what you guys are asking. That's pretty good. Let me quick, quick comment here. I think is kind of funny. The timing of this actually, yesterday I was on a call with a friend that we met in a mastermind, I don't know, half a year ago. And he was actually walking me through his Drippify setup. Yeah. His Drippify setup is more, is more casual.

[00:41:00] It's not the pitch slapping people, you know, which I do appreciate a lot. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. But it's, it's really amazing to hear your side and how you play with that to get in front of them on the feed. I think that is extremely valuable as well. My theory is that people getting this into these tools or maybe these strategies, way too late when they're way too desperate. Right. Because they're like, oh, we need to hit this quota. We need to like make a sell or we need to do this. And then they're pitch slapping.

[00:41:27] And yeah, I mean, the, the, the default is going to be that. Right. And, uh, you know, like you mentioned earlier, this is a long-term play at the end of the day. It's like that your buyer is maybe six months away. And if we use these tools correctly, we can build those genuine relationships. Cause if I am helping you, I'm directing you maybe for a piece of content that I know that you ask on the DMS, or maybe this is a question I can use it that way, or you can aim it to provide more value other than anything.

[00:41:55] And I think, you know, today people are very well-trained to go past, you know, these things. I mean, I don't know how many requests I have on LinkedIn that I know it's like, there's a pitch coming after if I accept this, right? Like you get, you can smell it from a thousand miles away. So, uh, you know, I would like to see more people kind of taking a more proactive approach. Kind of like what you said. Well, they can do that by joining the course that you're building. Absolutely. How can people find a course? Obviously we're going to put it right here below, but if, if they don't, if they skip

[00:42:23] through the links right below and they want to do it right now, where can they go? Yeah. And just go to loganlyles.com and there's a link there for the course. It's called becoming a LinkedIn legend. And that's little tongue in cheek. I'm not trying to over promise that you'll be the next Justin Welsh or something like that. But it's funny. I built the first iteration of this course while I was an in-house marketer at teamwork.com. And I was working with a lot of Irish colleagues and they would be like, Oh, Logan, you're a legend. And I was like, man, they really liked me over here.

[00:42:52] But then I was like, Oh, that's more of like a UK thing of like, you're the man of like, we say it a lot here in the, in the States. I was like, Oh, that wasn't as flattering as I thought it was. So then I was like, that's what I'm naming the course. Cause I love a good alliteration and it's got a little backstory to it. Yeah. So I love it. And what I plan to do in the course is show you how individually you can create content and reach your goals on, on LinkedIn.

[00:43:18] Much like we were talking about with a podcast, like start with the goals in mind and then develop the strategy around it. Don't hear this great new tactic and think, Oh, I got to run and do this. Right. I love what you just said, Luis is you know, it's similar to what I heard from John Barros several times was that a big fat pipeline solves a lot of problems. And it, you know, if you're at the 11th hour and you don't have any pipeline, that's when you get desperate. That's when you start to burn a lot of bridges.

[00:43:48] So invest in building that pipeline early, but then back to the course, one of the other things that I've been a part of when I was at teamwork was building a thought leadership or evangelism program to not only grow on LinkedIn personally, but like, how do you activate a group? Because it's a lot of the same principles, but there are a lot of different friction points. Much like with getting podcast guests to share content, you could have a podcast, you could be creating clips. You could divvy that up between the three of us and be like, we're all going to post this

[00:44:17] like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Yeah. But how do you operationalize that? Who's writing the content? How do you schedule it out? Are you assigning tasks or are you doing some automation? So those sorts of things I've tried and struggled, failed at some, found some tools and some tactics that work. So that'll be part of it as well. So if you're looking to like, if you're a marketer and you're like, I want my CEO to get active on LinkedIn, there could be some, some good stuff in there for you too. So, so cool. So cool.

[00:44:46] We're going to have to have you back for business creator.club is a, by the time of this recording, it's been live just for a podfest conference, but February 12th, we open officially our, our community. We've been talking about it for like two years, but we need to have you back just to do like a specific training on LinkedIn. And then obviously we'll, if people want to go in and deep dive with you on your course, absolutely a hundred percent. We're all about that. So open, open invitation to where can they find you? Where can they connect with you? Yeah.

[00:45:16] So, uh, you can find me most often on LinkedIn. Just look me up there. Uh, L O G A N L Y L E S. I'm pretty easy to find. I'm the only Logan Lyles that I know of. Just don't make the mistake of searching for Lyle because some people want to take my last name and call me Lyle so much so that he's kind of become known as like my doppelganger. Like my friends are like, Oh wait, who didn't, uh, you know, finish editing that podcast. Oh yeah. That was Lyle. That was Logan. That's hilarious.

[00:45:44] Or you can go to LinkedIn and just type legend and he's going to be the first one that pops up in there. Awesome. Look at that. Thank you so much. This was absolutely amazing. I think we cover a lot of ground. Um, yeah, I'm excited to bring you to, to the club so we can do a little bit deep dive on, on LinkedIn specific. And thank you so much. I hope you have a, an incredible experience and you know, time to attempt to say goodbye. Absolutely. Uh, guys, with that said, thank you so much for tuning into the content is profit podcast.

[00:46:14] Go ahead and follow the show in your favorite podcasting platform and on social media at please first go. That is right. And if Logan here help you move one step closer towards your goal, please don't forget to share this episode and of course, don't forget to leave a five-star review. See ya. Bye guys.