Daniel Alfon — LinkedIn Mythbuster

what's your dream what's your goal what's your motivation what's important to you what's your passion what can you do to change the world this is what's involved conversations with thought leaders and change makers from around the world hear stories of hope and inspiration to help motivate people like you to live your life find your passion and live your dream together we can all bring positive change to our world now here's your host David Watts and once more days what's involved so good to have you along with us we know about the guests that I get in and chat to you and I managed to track down a guest that I think is absolutely fascinating and what he does because I'm very much of the old-school and don't believe that what we're gonna be talking about actually works who is he well he is the author of build a LinkedIn profile for business success and his name is Daniel Alfon hello Daniel how you doing fine David thank you much very much for having me on the what's absolutely pleasure I love having you you know when we when we first sort of got together one of the big things that I noticed is is you are a LinkedIn author you're an expert in terms of LinkedIn you offer training etc etc and I first thought to myself but nonsense I mean LinkedIn that's where you post stuff if you want a job and subsequent to our chat you said to me David you are terribly wrong about that so let's let's find out a little bit about Daniel before we before we get into to LinkedIn and what it can and cannot do how did you sort of get involved in this whole LinkedIn thing Daniel what is your what is your story with pleasure I signed up to early in to LinkedIn in early 2004 I'm old-schooled myself and I started using LinkedIn extensively when I held a sales position in 2006 and LinkedIn simply helped me cut my sales cycle because I was the only salesperson to know the name of the person I needed to reach out to within the organization so then I decided to dive a bit and see what's under the hood and ever since I specialized in in LinkedIn and and this is the only platform I really engage with okay but why why LinkedIn though because you know if I have a look you know there's there's many many many social media platforms and we all hear all the time you know if you want to grow your brand whether it be your personal brand or your business got to be on social media and when you say to people a lot of times you go okay well what social media and how they just go well all of it now I for one am on a couple of platforms I am on LinkedIn but I don't think I'm doing terribly wealthy so why LinkedIn though what is what is special what makes it special Daniel okay I like the question I think it's well for most of our listeners when any prospects or anyone would look their name up when we Google you then for most people their LinkedIn profile would top the list okay doesn't matter if they visited only two years ago or if they're active on it but Google gives a very high rank to LinkedIn profiles so even if you don't have a website or even if you're a published author and you've done that talks LinkedIn is going to be one place that most of your audience is going to check so you have to make it work for you and that's one of the reason sorry Daniel this is you know you say make it work for you and and I'm thinking you know people that are spoken to everybody's gone like oh you got to be on tik-tok and I was thought to myself over my dead body will I be on tik-tok because I don't know what it is and I don't understand it but again we come back to LinkedIn is it misunderstood by many people like like myself where I think well it's just somewhere where you go if you're looking for a job or if you want to hire somebody is it more than that because you've mentioned a couple of things that have got me interested and that's why I'm trying to focus on on why that why LinkedIn is it the people that hang out there you know do the do the youngsters not hang out there tell me about about that with pleasure I'll try to sell you little the LinkedIn idea and the best thing about it is that LinkedIn can become what you would like it to do for you and in one way or another link is a victim of its own success because like you said many people view LinkedIn as a place to post a job or to look for to look for a job and it is still one way that the platform is used but David LinkedIn has close to 900 million users since you hit record hundreds of people have joined LinkedIn each second two people sign up Wow okay so the sheer size of LinkedIn and the fact that it's conservative professional and slow certainly if you compare it to TikTok makes it a platform where you don't have to share a lot most people are not interested in seeing us share five times a day anything on LinkedIn but we need to look professional and that reflects the importance of our profile on LinkedIn much more important than anything else okay now you mentioned profiles yeah there in a lot of times on LinkedIn you'll see in somebody's profile it reads like a CV because it's all the stuff they've done where they've worked what they do etc etc etc is that the wrong thing to do what I would ask this question are you interested or you are you looking for a full-time position as an employee or are you looking for prospects and clients and if our audience here is also made of people who are in business then there shouldn't their profile should not look like a CV their profile is best considered as a website and by that I mean you have you have to ask yourself three simple questions the first question is who's your ideal reader on LinkedIn okay if you want to help people launch and grow their podcast your ideal reader could potentially be anyone who's thinking about launching their podcast and would appreciate a professional help about doing it right for someone with years of experience they say my ideal props my deal reader is X or Y or so that's question number one question number two if we are making those people visit your LinkedIn profile what action would you like them to perform and most people will say I would like them to reach out to me or to visit my websites or to download this specific resource or to do X or to do Y so if you know who's your ideal reader is and what action you'd like them to perform the last question is are you we make it as easy and seamless as possible for anyone who discovers our profile for two seconds they know they need to get to what'sinvolved.com okay I like that we're talking about because this is something that that I'm fascinated about because I'm on LinkedIn and you know when I publish a podcast episode or whatever I put it on LinkedIn and sit back and wait in the vain hope that somebody's going to do something but you know you know there's there's so much I mean if I'm if I look at at LinkedIn the one thing I get all the time is people saying to me well you need LinkedIn sales navigator and I'm like yeah I don't want to pay that so let's let's take me for example as as a business person it doesn't matter I don't think that I'm doing podcasting but that I want to sell my product or my service to people and I want to reach the right target market can we go through a step-by-step process and and see how we would do that and where we would look excellent all right so I like before we start to take a quick break this is what's involved my special guest Daniel Alfon who is a LinkedIn expert as well as an author about all things linked in when we come back some more steps with Daniel this is what's involved don't forget to subscribe and leave a review more next and we're back it is what's involved my special guest Daniel Alfon and we're talking LinkedIn so just before the break I said you know let's let's let's use my profile for example as a place to start and then you know because it's I think it is fairly the same Daniel if you're selling a product or a service you know you want to get people to see your profile to be interested in it and to contact you or to visit your web your website so if you look at my profile for example is it horrible and how horrible is it and what what do we need to look at when we're doing these things David I think you're being way too harsh on yourself the top of your profile is excellent above the fold it's excellent I see the mic in the banner and that's a very strong visual element attracting anyone who wants to launch a podcast and your headline is absolutely impeccable instead of saying owner what's digital and that would be the usual way people would draft their headline the headline is probably the most important real estate we have on our profile and yours is focused on your reader it says I help businesses and individuals increase their sales but up to 33% within six months by hosting producing and curating tailor-made podcast series now who does that attract your ideal reader if someone reads this and have no interest in launching a podcast or communicating or doing then there will go elsewhere but on the other hand anyone who fills or thinks they need to do something about it they're intrigued like what exactly is your offer who are you could we perhaps work with you so the first five seconds that you created on your profile are spot-on they're excellent if I can make further suggestions then the rest of your profile could be a bit more inviting or give a bit more information and the way to do this would would be to add links to your profile one link could be to the to this podcast and to what's involved in general it will take you 30 seconds and it will enrich the experience of anyone visiting your profile if you think of your profile as a website then our objective should be to convert anyone who visit David what's profile owning tin to reaching out and say hey I listen to the podcast I see that you're helping other podcast is grow their activity I'd like to speak with you and the conversion is likely to happen on your websites and not on LinkedIn the conversion is likely to happen on what's involved calm so the simplest way to think about it when I visit your profile eventually I need to leave LinkedIn and discover more but what you could do is take text and information and visuals and links from your website or from Twitter or any other platform you have and show it to anyone visiting your LinkedIn profile so the top of the profile is excellent you can enrich very easily within five minutes the rest of your profile and I'd like to remind our audience here of perhaps four questions they need to ask themselves first is about the profile does it convert and that's what we've discussed so far but the next three steps are also important their connection strategy or your connection strategy is going to influence the way you will generate leads from LinkedIn you can connect with people you know well or you can aim for quantity my guess is that you connected with people you knew well am I wrong in this yeah most of the people on my profile I actually know or I've spoken to so yeah yeah this this very few that I've just kind of gone out for excellent so this means that whenever you run a search on LinkedIn and you see someone's profile someone with whom you share one mutual connection that that means you are able to reach out to that person outside of LinkedIn and ask them whether the mutual connection is willing to make the introduction to your ideal prospect so if I look and I see that Sarah Boulon is a mutual connection of ours and I look at her or Kim Sorrow or anyone you worked with recently when I ask them about you they will not go David who it will say you've got to speak to David when we chatted last month he asked great questions he knows a lot about podcasting I think you should speak with him and that is the greatest benefit of connecting with people you know well it simply transfers the transfers the lead generation or the searches to your to you if you run a search and you find interesting people then it's your responsibility David to ask the mutual connection and in case you have a meaningful introduction that can grow your business simply thanks to that person who can make a referral and explain why people need to speak with you so number one was profile number two was connection strategy last two bits we can mention is your content strategy and then the lead generation so I'd like to to dive a bit into the content strategy yes that that is that is important because that's actually one of the questions I'm like I'm really grateful that you said the profile looks okay but in terms of what I post what my content strategy is etc etc it's literally I'm doing what I call the shotgun approach I'm just putting stuff out and you know hoping that somebody is gonna find it interesting excellent so perhaps what I could suggest is one or two simply simple way for you ways for you to try and be a bit more engaging with the contents and I see that you roughly share once a week the new episode yes that's correct cool so what I see as a visitor when I see that I see them in the episode 210 with Ken Atard or episode 209 with Liam Aaron and that's from your perspective but what that does is that anyone who is a connection of yours and goes on LinkedIn and sees that you shared something by the third time they see this they know it's an episode of what's involved I'm not saying this in a negative way but if you make it make it more intriguing for them they're likely to engage with that content so how about when you produce the the the episode itself perhaps take a quote from the interview itself and have this as the anchor text or have an image of the guest and not just the link itself so it would engage more with the readers because episode number 212 is from your perspective but our listeners couldn't care less if it's 210 or 215 they care about the content so why should they listen to this other than it was episode 212 you have great content you have great quotes you have great guests you spoke about the the future of work with the great resignation and coffee then and I listened to the episode it was amazing but if I look at the activity on LinkedIn there is no quote from the episode there is no reason for people to go and discover that episode and you competing in a pretty busy environment perhaps one thing to do would be to spend one minute and grab a one-liner or a quote or a question from that episode and I think it needs to be authentic from the episode itself and when you share the episode itself this is what I would start with and eventually I would say this here's the link to the episode but that's one simple suggestion I could make and the second suggestion would be to probably tag the guests themselves the guests themselves so we when you share the episode and Ken is the speaker or if Liam is the speaker there's a way for you to tag the guest when you share it and that David immediately notifies the guests if you if they're on the show then they're likely or to engage within minutes there you can ask them to comment or to like or to share and the LinkedIn algorithm tries to assess what is what is it that you shared and if you happen to have a lot of activity within the next 60 minutes or an hour or two hours after you share the episode or the link then LinkedIn is going to gradually show it to more people and who would be more interested in highlighting the episode than the guest mm-hmm this is this is making this is making more and more sense to me and and just on the subject zone to take another break quickly but on the subject of tagging people and things you know I often see that post will come through on LinkedIn and they've got like five six maybe even more of these little hashtag things are those important and and how do you know which ones to use okay so so hashtags and tagging are different activities if you'd like very quickly the hashtags I think I would stick to probably no more not more than three hashtags and I noticed that the hashtags that you use seem to be the same I would I would try to I mean podcast is one good hashtag but I would try to because your your guests come from different they're working for different companies in different industry different specialties then you would get more eyeballs if some of those were relating to the guests specialty or the guest or what the guest is actually discussed and and that could be one way to to have up to three hashtags but maybe changing them and tagging is something that you need to be cautious about because what happens when you text someone and they don't do anything they don't engage with that content then LinkedIn the LinkedIn bot will look at you say David you have tagged someone and they haven't done anything without content so if the person is proficient with LinkedIn they would usually immediately comment or like or share or all of them but if they're not then one thing you could do is message them and say tomorrow morning I'm going to share the episode one of the platforms I'll use is LinkedIn the second is Twitter I looked you up on both and I would like to tag you on LinkedIn and on Twitter that will be around 10 a.m. your your time would you be willing to share it and that would maximize the chances of those people to go and immediately engage with your content they would add a comment they would thank you they would share it they would like it they would comment about it that's about tagging okay wonderful stuff we're gonna dive in even more because I'm starting to see a picture that's starting to emerge here and I think I've been very wrong about LinkedIn so let's find out more from my special guest Daniel Alfon who is an author about all things LinkedIn he's also an expert on LinkedIn we'll be back with Daniel in just a bit this is what's involved we'll be right back with more what's involved David would love to hear from you to leave a voice message visit what'sinvolved.com and click drop me a voice note and we're back what's involved it is my guest is Daniel Alfon we're talking LinkedIn now just before the break I mentioned that I'm seeing this picture that is starting to to emerge here and and it makes sense when you said cheat your profile like a website so with the website I mean you know on a website you always hear content is king but also interacting I think perhaps where I've fallen short and maybe other people do as well is to me it's almost been like this static website thing you know that's that's who I am that's what I do every week I publish a podcast episode and and that's about it I don't respond or I don't interact very often at all is that is that something that is a problem as well you leave David okay let's let's put this into into proportion what I would this what I would say is this if you think that LinkedIn is a platform that can help you grow your podcasting your business in general then perhaps the question I would ask is how much time on a weekly basis can you commit to and you can say even five minutes I don't mind but find the amount the minimal amount of time you're you're able to spend on LinkedIn for at least the next three months and even if you say 15 minutes or five minutes there are a number of things you could do during those minutes to make it count one thing that you could do is simply visit the notifications tab on on desktop or mobile and you would see some changes that happen to your network and I'd like to remind our listeners here that you know most or almost all of your connections and you you have probably around 700 connections that means that every day maybe one of two of them will have their birthday stated in the notification step what you could do is visit that person's profile see what they're up to and then hear me out leave LinkedIn and go to the platform that you like it could be email for most people it could be other things and there you would ask Jane or you would ask Bob you will wish them a happy birthday and you will mention something that you saw maybe they've been recently promoted maybe they shared something last week that was of interest to you that can be done within five minutes and you don't have necessarily to perform lots of actions on LinkedIn LinkedIn has just served as a reminder for you to see that this is the person the person's birthday and why did I ask you to commit to a certain amount of time a week because it won't help us if you commit to 24 hours once every quarter because if you visit your LinkedIn in three months time and then you want to do everything then you will it doesn't make sense to wish someone a happy birthday three months ahead of time or three months after their birthday occurred right so even if you spend only five minutes a week nurturing the relationship with your network is what I consider the most important element you need to think about and LinkedIn is just the tool what I mentioned didn't involve LinkedIn at all if you have other systems use them but the thing is that we if we only reach out to people when we need them no one likes it to be called only when we need them and if you manage to keep in touch with that person it won't take you a lot of time it's lost a lot less time-consuming and if you need something from them like an introduction in six months time I think you you'll feel a bit easier when you ask that person because you have exchange and commit you communicated with them and they're likely to want to help you and to remember who you are so networking is more important than LinkedIn hmm I see and you know what Daniel I have to be honest now I just looked at my notifications and there were 13 of them and I literally very seldom interact on any of those notifications and now I understand that this is this is relationship building this is network building but just getting involved and saying hey well done happy birthday congratulations on your on your promotion or love the last article you wrote and you write it literally takes five minutes so I need to I need to start doing that I think anybody that's that's that's listening Daniel at the moment and they're going yep we know all about this LinkedIn and this this LinkedIn thing that's happening but you know we we sort of hear what Daniel's saying about treating your website like a teaching your profile like a website not a CV but what else is there because a lot of people like there's a friend of mine who gets all of these leads somehow through through LinkedIn okay he runs a company called the Sales Institute and that's where he gets done 90 90 odd percent of his business with my profile in the way that I'm interacting at the moment I haven't even had one one bite nobody's been interested again I haven't used the platform and I'm not going out there saying to people hey hello this is me this is what I can do but in this in this chat Daniel we're not going to be able to get through everything so what what do we what is important what else do we need to focus on there are many topics we could discuss maybe we could mention the importance of the right metrics David because many people who use LinkedIn fall in love with the LinkedIn metrics the metrics are the number of connections or views or likes or the maybe the SSI or endorsement but I'd like to be old-school and mention the business metrics and the best metrics that count to business owners should be revenues orders subscribers inquiries demos downloads things that help our business grow and the question to ask is not about your LinkedIn metrics it's about your business metrics so say you have three people reaching out to you every month asking about podcast production and you start using LinkedIn and you notice that every month you have now four or five people and you can convert that into real revenues and that means you can attribute the extra revenues you have to your LinkedIn activity so when someone says you know I'm God I'm popular I have 30,000 connection just ask them how they translate that into revenues and if they look at you and they don't have an answer then forget about it the LinkedIn metrics are just a tool at the end of the day what counts is your business metrics as a business owner you know what metrics count in your business and the best way to consider LinkedIn is top of funnel when you see now funnels I understand I understand all right okay let me suggest okay so so if our listeners here are interested in in growing or launching their podcast then what I would suggest is this ask yourself what questions are they asking themselves before they reach out to you or before they even look for someone with your specialty why launch a podcast does it mean I have to spend hours post-production does it mean that I have to pay hosting companies you know the questions they ask yeah yeah but if you produce high quality evergreen content that will answer your ideal readers questions then David you were taking them from point A to point B and you providing them with value and at the end of that journey you say I can take you from point B to point C and further but the way to do it is not to try and sell but to simply have educational high quality evergreen content that answers the questions your ideal prospects struggle with you know the answers you've been answering people about it for a lot of time simply grab that content and make it make people on LinkedIn discover that content another way to do it instead of relying on your connections is look for LinkedIn groups where people who want to launch a podcast or people in business or people in South Africa whatever the demographics you'd like are and by joining that group you may be one of very few podcast producers there and you can share that evergreen educational content there and that could also bring more inquiries for you for what's involved with time that is a brilliant idea and you see again one of the things that that people do is for example I have my what's involved.com website it's where I post all my episodes and it's got links to my guests etc etc I also spend a lot of time writing blog posts and those blog posts live on my website but I don't actually tell anybody about them so this is something and even if you're in a whatever field you read Shirley you know if you have a company blog that's got really good valuable information you could share that on LinkedIn or share some of it with with a you know go to go to my blog to read more does that make is that am I understanding you correctly Daniel absolutely David because what is the best software so the best software for editing podcast is one key question anyone interested in podcast is likely to ask before they jump in so you provided and you captured interesting questions for them and and by asking that that question in producing contents on your website on what's involved calm I don't think that our listeners need to rush and create content for the sake of LinkedIn what I could suggest is assessing the current content we have such as on our website and make sure that this content is seen by LinkedIn members and that's much easier because writing and producing high quality content can take hours but sharing it on LinkedIn will take literally minutes hmm all right Daniel we're running out of time and I want to just wrap up with you it and find out what else you do and find out if like people like me could rather just go listen it seems too much like hard work for me to do please help me so we'll find out all about that when we come back what's involved it is my guest is Daniel Alfon he is a LinkedIn expert back in a bit hey like what you're hearing share the podcast with your family and friends and spread the word this is what's involved we're back with my special guest Daniel Alfon wrapping it up so Daniel we've spoken about some of the things that you can do on LinkedIn but there's so much that that we haven't even touched on I mean you know a questions like do you have a private page do you have a business page what happens if you have more than one but all of those things we haven't touched on yet so we may have to have you back again to ask some more in-depth questions but if somebody is listening to this and going okay sounds fair enough but really isn't there training or something that I can go on isn't there a way to to do this you know everybody's looking for the hacks and the shortcuts do you offer help in that area do you talk to people is there training where do we go with pleasure thank you very much David my website is the best place to go that's Daniel Alfon calm it has all sorts of hacks articles downloads digital guides programs giveaway lots of information and I'll be glad to answer any question anyone has all right and then are you gonna are you gonna give us a little bit of a little bit of a freebie a little bit of a giveaway for the listeners with pleasure there's a giveaway on the homepage of my website and and the giveaways about building a killer headline so there are two ways to do to do this one is to go to Daniel Alfon calm and download the cheat sheet and the second is to visit your profile and to see the way you crafted your headline and say can I take what David has accomplished here and make it and tweak it for me and if I if I'm you know you're not sure how to do it and how to build such a killer headline then make sure you head to my website and download the cheat sheet fantastic Daniel do you also do you also offer training online training for example could I go on to Daniel Alfon calm and sign up for a course yes sir there are there are two courses and and live training is one of the best ways to implement and not only understand but really implement the changes that we weigh beyond optimizing the profile and deciding about the connection the lead generation and growth is usually associated with live trainings that I offer okay and it's a lovely it's a lovely a lovely website I must tell you and in my other life that's what I do I build websites and we do a lot of digital marketing so very very nice website Daniel Alfon so it's D A N I E L A L F O N dot com go and check it out there's a wealth of knowledge there and I definitely think we're gonna have to chat to you again Daniel but one of the things that I like doing before I let my guests go you're known as as a as a LinkedIn guru you've written a book about LinkedIn what are you currently working on and what's next for Daniel well I think next is trying to keep in touch with a wonderful host I was privileged to to meet over the last couple of months and I now treat the the recording not as the end of the relationship but as a beginning of the relationship so what I would typically do is ask post recording who would be a good guest for what's involved and if you're interested in being on other people's podcasts what sort of podcasts would you like to be on and that enables me to help the host by by sharing by introducing them to wonderful guests or host I was lucky to speak with

Daniel I lost you there you said I was lucky to speak with and then you were gone I'm sorry all I said was that that enables me to acknowledge and to thank the hosts that I've spoken with by introducing them to great guests and great hosts they could be on fantastic and again I mean this is I can see your marketing brain working in this as well because it's a great way to connect it's a great way to share value and to share ideas and and yeah I'm definitely looking forward to knocking on your door again and saying okay Daniel let's do a follow-up let's talk about the race to the first 500 because that was that's something we didn't even touch on you know and I was told when I got on to LinkedIn before anything happens you have to get to 500 connections and I was like I don't even know if I know or like 500 people maybe five or ten and and so my whatever you call it my connections are there are over 500 now but it's taken years and it's been organic I mean I haven't tried to to grow it in any way shape or form but yeah I look forward to collaborating some more because you raised an interesting point in several people have said to me David your story is very very interesting would you ever consider being on a podcast and I'm like hmm I don't know how I would do being on the guest side of the microphone maybe I have to give it a bash but Daniel thank you so so much I'll post the link to the freebie as well on Daniel's website that'll be in the show notes and well we'll let's see what happens and please get in touch with Daniel he's a great guy always willing to to help and to give some advice Daniel thank you so much for taking the time out and chatting to me it's been a pleasure David and thanks for having me on what's involved there we go that wraps it up for this edition of what's involved my special guest Daniel Alfon and all about LinkedIn go and check out his website Daniel Alfon comm and yeah get working on LinkedIn man it looks like it can work maybe we'll do some feedback at some stage and I'll tell you what's happened with mine now that I'm going to implement some changes to each and every one of you take care look after yourselves and thank you for listening thanks for listening to what's involved we hope this episode inspires you to find your passion and live your dream don't forget to rate review and share the podcast and to see what's happening what's going on and what's coming follow what's involved on Facebook and Twitter at what's involved thanks again for listening