← AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
The Two-Channel Rule: A System for Growing Expert Podcasts
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- [00:00]
Dan Sanchez
Foreign. For multiple episodes in a row. You've probably gotten the drift that we're kind of into this channel called podcasting. There's good reason. We've talked about all the different pros, all the different benefits of having a podcast, how it's authentic, how you can repurpose it, how it's actually easier to sit down and record a podcast and drop your expertise than it is to sit down and write a blog post. Unless you. You're an English major or an expert writer. Easier than a YouTube channel. Easier than lots of different long form mediums. But. But there's always a downside, Ken. There's always a downside and podcasting has a big one. So in this episode, we're going to talk about podcasting's one big downside and the solution that I've been using for years in order to overcome it so that you can actually get your expertise out there in an authentic way to overcome the sea of AI nonsense, all the AI content out there that's coming out into the world and will continue coming out. So welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez and I'm joined by my co host, Ken Ferre.
- [01:07]
Ken Ferre
What's up, bro? This is gonna be a good one. I like it.
- [01:11]
Dan Sanchez
And this is again a another episode in our own the show series where we're going from podcast to book. Yes, this is going to be turned into a whole chapter, so stick around to the end. We'll be recording our whole experience and documenting the whole thing and tell you how exactly we did it and if it was any good and if you should do it. If it's good though, we promise we'll share the whole playbook for you to execute for yourself. So let's get into the episode though. Podcasting, it's one critical flaw and it's the reason why it's kind of a blue ocean. Because there's very few podcasts compared to YouTube channels, compared to blogs, compared to social channels. There's very few. It's because podcasts don't have distribution.
- [01:51]
Ken Ferre
It's huge. That's a big problem.
- [01:53]
Dan Sanchez
You could literally pumping out the most amazing content on a podcast consistently over years and have pretty much no audience. It's possible you could be creating the best thumbnails and the best titles and the best show notes and the best audio content, even video content. Nobody will come. Now, there is a chance that you could probably grow with what we call podcast SEO. So if you're lucky and you get in on a niche, I was one of those people because AI was starting to become a thing. So I rank for AI Marketing, but if you're not one of those shows, then you're probably in trouble. There's. You get a little bit of growth. I get a little bit of growth off that ranking for AI marketing being one of the first shows on the category to do well. But we're going to talk about the real way you can actually grow a podcast because every other channel has its thing, right, Ken? Like if you do a YouTube channel, you don't need what we're gonna talk about. You can just focus on YouTube. There's lots of ways to get found on YouTube. There's YouTube search, second largest search engine in the world. Right. There's the homepage, the sidebar, the related videos at the end. There's a lot of different ways to get found on YouTube. It even gets indexed in Google Search. Like social platforms have the feed and blogs. Well, blogs used to have SEO. Now they, they don't so much. So I don't know what the bloggers are gonna do now. I'm kind of waiting to see what happens to them.
- [03:18]
Ken Ferre
Yeah, we'll find out in the next year or two.
- [03:20]
Dan Sanchez
They're gonna have to pick up what we' with podcasts, so. And newsletters have had the same problem that podcasts do. So newsletters are all going to benefit if you're, if you're pushing hard on the newsletter. It's like this is the same game, the podcast problem, same problem podcasts have. So what we're going to recommend is what we call the two channel rule. And that essentially says that yes, your podcast is your main long form content channel, but you're gonna need to grow another channel. You're gonna have to pick probably a short form podcast channel that something like X or LinkedIn or TikTok or Facebook, Instagram, any of the big other short form channels out there in order to actually grow your podcast. So the short form channel is important because it becomes a good place to do a lot of things that you can't do in a podcast. You can test ideas. There's. You can actually build relationships with people because podcasting is not interactive. I wish it were. I wish I could have a comment thread underneath Episodes and we do a little bit like on Spotify, you guys, like all five of you have commented on a Spotify video, YouTube every once in a while. YouTube people are mean. Actually Spotify's there. You guys are nice. Thanks. If you're listening on Spotify, you're My. You're my people. YouTube People just kind of show up out of nowhere and just decide to bash episodes. YouTube, they can always find something to bash you on though. So I'm just kidding. Like, cool.
- [04:51]
Ken Ferre
I feel like that's like X, dude. X is like a dumpster fire of hate.
- [04:55]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah, you got to have some thick skin to make it on X. Which is why I'm not on there. Because I'm like, I don't know if I can handle that. It's like slam fest. That's like their love language over there. So you need a short form channel to do those things, to test the ideas, build relationships, and most of all, promote your show. Because if you don't have a short form channel to promote it on, you can be producing the best content ever and no one's going to know about it. It's a shame. It's a real shame. But there's an important caveat that I want to give. But before I give it, I'd say, Ken, have you ever heard of a podcast growing that didn't have some short form channel behind it?
- [05:34]
Ken Ferre
I mean, it's hard to say because if it did, that person was already really popular or the word of mouth was super contagious. But that, that is like few and far between that word of mouth really kicked in. You know, I'm, I'm thinking of several of them that I've listened to, but at the end of the day, it has such a massive, a secondary following or people were interested in it that people were all about it.
- [06:03]
Dan Sanchez
I can think of every podcast I've listened to, generally I found out about it from social media or it was already somebody I followed. Like I was reading the blog of Michael Hyatt and then he launched a podcast. I was like, sure, so I want to listen to it.
- [06:17]
Ken Ferre
And that's what I'm saying. Like, most of them, they had a following, you know, or even the ones I'm, even the ones I'm thinking about right now. Like for example, the. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill was a super popular podcast that came out. It, it blew up because of word of mouth, but then they put more social behind it. But that, that's because if you were in that realm, you know, you wanted to listen, you wanted the tea, in essence, of what was going on, or there was a man. What was the one that it was all about? J.K. rowling, did you ever listen to that podcast? I'm trying to remember. Oh, dude. It was a fascinating.
- [06:56]
Dan Sanchez
I feel like I've Heard of it somewhere because it was popular enough that I'm like, it sounds, it sounds familiar.
- [07:02]
Ken Ferre
Yeah, that, that was like, those come up because of Word of Mouth or the History of the World. I think you recommended that one to me. It was all just, those are word of mouth because they're so exceptional, but they're few and far between.
- [07:13]
Dan Sanchez
You mean Dan Carlin's Hardcore History?
- [07:16]
Ken Ferre
Yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah. History of the World as well.
- [07:18]
Dan Sanchez
I'm like, what are you talking about? Sounds like my kids text history textbook.
- [07:22]
Ken Ferre
I think History of the World is actually a Melbourne Mel Brooks movie, now that I think about it.
- [07:26]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah, yeah. Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. And I will say, like, amongst podcasters, when I get with other podcasters and we all share some of our favorite podcasts, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is often one of the most quoted. Yeah, as, as, as a podcaster respecting other podcasters, Dan Carlin, you're like, like, he's the one I, the one I like most admire and want to become. Like, when it comes to actually getting on the microphone and sharing something worth remembering, I'm like, if I could just do it the way he does, I could go, I could do a whole episode on like, what I pull from his content. But also if you're like, history man, so freaking good. He makes the most boring things so fascinating.
- [08:06]
Ken Ferre
And that's where most people, the reason their podcast grows is because they already have a following somewhere else. And that's what we're talking about. There are the occasion that they might not have a massive following, but that's because their, their podcast is so unique. Right. Or that the way they pivot, the way they communicate, it's so intriguing that people want to listen to it.
- [08:25]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. And even the most popular podcasts, you'd be surprised, the dirty little secret behind them is they're spending a freaking ton of money keeping them popular. Yeah, they spent a ton. I know because I've dealt with the companies that promote them because I've paid to promote podcasts too. And you're kind of like, dang, a lot of the top ranked podcasts are top ranked because they're just spending ad money every single month. You'd be surprised how many NPR shows or top shows because they're spending a hundred thousand dollars on each show each year. Surprise. So when your podcast's like, well, I'm not one of these podcasts. Like, well, some companies are dumping stupid amounts of money into them to be that. So we talked about having this second channel, hence the two Channel rule. And if you were listening just like a few episodes ago, we talked about this thing where podcasts. One of the reasons why podcast is amazing is because you can, you can splinter it, you can, you can repurpose it into so many different pie is the content and the way we made it sound. It seems like if you could just have one podcast and you're posting everywhere. And that's true. That is true. From one podcast. This single podcast I distribute almost everywhere because I get a bunch of clips, I clip them and it goes to all the clip channels, plus more like I clip. And every time it goes on Instagram, it goes on TikTok, it goes on YouTube shorts, and it goes on X and it goes on Facebook and it goes on my LinkedIn page. Like every time I publish one clip, bam, everywhere I get a lot of text post content and I publish those all over the place. I get a lot of additional content. I get a blog post, I get a newsletter and I'm distributing those. The thing about all those is while you're posting everywhere, there's a difference between posting somewhere and engaging somewhere. And I don't know what it is and maybe other people have this, see this differently, but I find I can really only engage with one platform.
- [10:15]
Ken Ferre
Yeah.
- [10:16]
Dan Sanchez
And that's it. So you have to pick one that becomes your dedicated one. Sure. You post in syndicate. That's how I think about the other channels, is their syndication channels. And then you pick one where it's like, nope, this is my main place. Yes. I publish my main, my big ideas, my key assets, my courses, my videos to the podcast. And that's where people really start to get into the deeper ideas. But this one other short form platform is where I talk to people. It's where I test ideas, it's where I promote the podcast and a lot of other things. But I don't, I don't, I don't. Every time I see somewhere they're like, oh, you should really engage on. What's the new one that everyone talks about? That's like the newsletter platform.
- [10:58]
Ken Ferre
Oh, beehive. No, not beehive. Hold on.
- [11:02]
Dan Sanchez
You know what I'm talking about.
- [11:03]
Ken Ferre
Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure.
- [11:05]
Dan Sanchez
Substack platform. Substack. That's it. You're like tempting. You're like. But that's a whole nother. Now that's kind of interesting because you can give you your long form newsletter and your short form and monetize it, but it's like one, your whole platform's pretty much owned by them. So That's a problem. But it's a whole nother platform to engage on if you want to succeed in Substack. Probably. Chances are, unless you have a big following somewhere else, you're going to have to crank the engagement engine over there. And it's, it's. You only have enough time for one. And maybe substack's your thing and you can do that. Great. But you're gonna have to pick one main channel other than your podcast, some short form channel to actually engage with.
- [11:44]
Ken Ferre
Yeah. And, and even with Substack, I've heard the fees are like, kind of pretty like extreme. And you can't necessarily pitch them outside of substack. Like if you try to pitch too hard, they'll like kick you out. So there's pretty strict rules to substack. I don't know all of the details, but from what I remember looking into it, I was like, oh, this is not worth it. And then just to piggyback on what you said, like, it's not owned. Like, they can shut you down at any time. If you're going to put that much work into a newsletter and commenting, you might as well just make sure you own it. It's your own newsletter somewhere that you house it. And then also that you can comment and engage with people in a different way. There's a ton of ways at that point, just start a community that you can engage your own people on that work.
- [12:28]
Dan Sanchez
I will say it's not all bad because you might look at this and be like, ugh. So you're saying, Dan, if I go all in on podcasting, I really have to pick two things to go all in on. Then you're not all in, you're 50, 50 on each. You're like, yep, that's the thing. But you could go all in on YouTube and do relatively well. True. But you also run into a problem if you go all into something with distribution because you don't. The problem with that becomes you don't own your audience.
- [12:56]
Ken Ferre
Yeah.
- [12:56]
Dan Sanchez
So you could go all in on YouTube, but if the YouTube algorithm changes, if YouTube, and this is happening a lot right now, it's like start sending you a cease and desist letter because maybe you use some rights violated music or content. You know, I'm saying this is happening a lot more because AI is making it easier for copywriters to find their stuff being used. Then all your eggs are in one basket. So it's the nice part about the two channel rules. If you do this well, then you have two different Channels to kind of play with. And if one goes down, you still have another leg to stand on. And that's kind of what I like about it. Now podcast is pretty reliable because nobody really owns podcasting. People have tried to own podcasting. Apple has a market, Spotify's got it, YouTube's got some of my podcasts has a split between those three and then the fourth is like everything else. So podcasting you don't have to worry so much about. But it's nice to have a podcast and a short form channel because then you don't have to worry about one getting disrupted over the other. You got two legs that kind of you can roll with. Because we know these platforms change. A lot of people invested heavily in growing a Facebook page audience. And then, you know, we all know how that went, that died. Now it's kind of coming back. But like these go through seasons, right? So that is, that is an upside of having two channels versus one. But you know, you can only focus on so much. So I tend to just double down on just one short form channel. Great content one place, engage in another.
- [14:21]
Ken Ferre
And you have to remember it is two channels. But I almost like to think about it as like a channel and a half. Because most of your content is coming from the podcast.
- [14:31]
Dan Sanchez
That's right.
- [14:31]
Ken Ferre
It's not like you're building new content or new creatives. It's like I'm taking the content, distributing it to that platform and now I'm engaged heavily on that platform and I'm networking, I'm dming people, I'm commenting on that. That's the key part to it. No one ever just grows by posting. You think of any popular influencer creator out there, they're heavily engaged with their audience because they're creating those super fans.
- [15:00]
Dan Sanchez
Now when it comes to picking your short form platform, I have a recommendation of two. Chances are if you're listening to this, you're probably someone who works for a company or are you personally selling some kind of expertise or your company maybe is a software product and the way you sell that software product is selling a methodology that that software maps to. You know what I'm saying? Like you're selling through content and you're trying to educate and you have a position. That's why this thought leaderships thing is interesting to you. Chances are if you want to do that, well, you're in B2B space or you're in a B2C space. That's targeting a very specific audience with your expertise for that reason, for the Short farm audience. I almost always recommend either LinkedIn or X. The reason why is because both those platforms are the most inherently social. Still, all the other ones are more what they call interest graph media now. Yeah, expand harder to engage there. It's based, it's like every. The feed is based more on what you want to see versus who you want to see.
- [16:09]
Ken Ferre
Yeah, you may be following a whole bunch of people on Facebook or Instagram, but that may not be the stuff that comes up on your feed all.
- [16:15]
Dan Sanchez
The time on LinkedIn. While it's still. Both platforms are still leaning towards the interest graph, there's still a very high social component of it. It's still very much about the comments and the replies and X it's much more about the relationships. You can get into someone's feed and actually have a conversation with them. That's not happening so much on TikTok and Instagram. Sure, there's comments, but comments. It's almost like a whole little weird thing going on in itself. That's just different than actually relationship building, which is what's going on in X on LinkedIn. Personally, I prefer LinkedIn because I find that it has a much higher caliber of audience. I'm selling B2B. I'm trying to engage marketers and LinkedIn is the best source for that. If you're selling B2B, it's hand down, gotta be LinkedIn. Like there might be exceptions. Like if you're a photographer selling B2B then maybe Instagram maybe. But even then, if I were photographer selling B2B and not B2C, I'd probably still do LinkedIn. Yeah, it's funny, I haven't seen a lot of photographers on LinkedIn. Man, that would crush. They're all focused on Instagram and wondering why they don't get more views. I'm like, change your, change your go to LinkedIn. Trust me.
- [17:26]
Ken Ferre
Yeah, well, and I was gonna say that, you know, if you are a like lifestyle coach or some sort of, you know, more lifestyle consultant, anything more to do with personal life, that's when Facebook and Instagram do really well. If you're trying to get like a younger generation and you're more focused on Entertainment and products, TikTok does well on those things. So you definitely need to figure out where your customers are typically at. So while we're giving these recommendations and I know we're gonna talk a little bit more about LinkedIn if you're in that space. Cause that's the space we're in. Keep that in mind. That you're gonna have to think about your ideal customer and where do they typically land. I'm thinking of a customer right now that we work with. He works with Gen Z people, right? And he was like, let's go all in on LinkedIn. And I was like, man, I don't think they're there. I mean, they might start yet, but they will eventually. So I was like, I think we actually need to pivot and move into a different social media platform that they're regularly on and start to engage them there.
- [18:36]
Dan Sanchez
So ultimately it's where your audience is at. But my two recommendations are still going to be LinkedIn and X. If you're not sure, probably LinkedIn. The reason why I share LinkedIn a lot is because I've had. I found that it's the most useful for most podcasts that are sharing expertise and finding that audience. It's also the easiest to work engagement wise and actually building relationships, engaging in comments and it actually works better for you that way. So let me tell you, because that's the one platform I've grown. I've grown a Twitter following a little bit or X following a little bit. I've done okay on the other platforms, but where I've really excelled is LinkedIn. So everything I'm going to say is my best tips for LinkedIn. A lot of these carry over to X almost equally as well. Those platforms are oddly, the culture between them is completely different, but the way you grow on them, pretty similar these days. So when I'm approaching LinkedIn, I'm looking to engage in as many posts as possible. That's kind of the social part of social media and it's the one that most people ignore. Everybody. A lot of people finally get to posting content and you have to do that. You have to post your best content post, especially the more you post, the better. A lot of people be like, oh, once a week, oh, maybe only once every workday. I'm like, no. If I could, I try to focus on posting three times a day, seven days a week. That would be my ideal. If I had extra bandwidth, I'd probably then start throwing some over on X, but then go back and do more on LinkedIn before going to another platform. Still, that's how bullish I am on posting just more because you get more swings and some of those posts won't do well and some of them will. But the thing that really makes it work is not just posting, it's actually engaging. And I think people start to feel the unlock when they actually enter the feed and systematically engaging with as many accounts as possible. I actually kept tabs for a while of like how many people I was engaging with. And I don't mean like, hey, nice post. I mean like actually reading their post, considering it, adding some helpful $0.02, asking a really good question, or tagging a friend who might want to weigh in on the conversation. Substantial comments, the kind of comments that you should have in an online college discussion forum. They're substantial, but not word count based, right? If you've ever done that, then you know that pain.
- [21:01]
Ken Ferre
Oh, it's brutal.
- [21:02]
Dan Sanchez
But I was doing probably 50 a day. Between 20 and 50 conversations a day, that's a lot. That's like hours a day. And that's when I wanted to grow LinkedIn aggressively. I was doing that many every single day on top of posting multiple times a day. It's great if you can get to five to 10 a day, but it's like, how fast do you want to grow? Then getting in the conversations, it's kind of like working the room or moving to a new city, knowing nowhere, no one. So showing up to every public party and then systematically working the room, shaking people's hands, asking them good questions, giving your $0.02 sometimes and just showing up as that friendly guy. Like, if you're new to a city and you start working every single party that's around in a friendly and helpful way, chances are you're going to know a lot of people in six months. Especially when you start running into the same people over and over again. You're like, hey, I remember you. And then you start the conversation again. That's how social media works. So if you actually go do it and work it, then people remember you. And that's the secret, is that they remember you because they had engagement with you. And so you're almost like it's like one to one, hand to hand combat. Like you're getting people to remember you and you're being helpful one person at a time. So that when they see your post, because the algorithm saw that you interacted and is much more likely to be primed for them to see your post, they're going to comment on it. Not, but just not just because of what you said, but because of who you are, because there's a relational factor there and that builds momentum. You start doing that 10 times, 100 times, a thousand times, thousands of times, Your posts start to become popular and it might not even be because of what you said, it's just because, well, people know you and they like you yeah.
- [22:46]
Ken Ferre
Your friends start to kind of connect with you. There are some practical things. And Dan, I would. You're the expert. You've taught me a lot of these things, but that I have done over the time to grow the engagement. And I'm a very how to person, right. So the first thing that I've typically done, and we've talked about it a little bit in the previous chapters, right? But like, I have a list of people that I'm engaged with and I have them on a spreadsheet like that I am actively engaged with these individuals and I have their LinkedIn profile link there too. So, like every day or every other day, depending on what you decide to do, I'm like checking, did they post something? Did they, Are they engaging something? Because I want to make sure I'm interacting with them. So that's the first thing to do. The second thing I always do is that whenever I notice that they have a problem or something that they need help with, this is key to networking. I don't give them my solution. I try to connect them with someone else. I'll be like, oh, hey, do you know this person? This person would be great for that. There's, There'll be times I'm like, hey, I'm. I know I'm the expert, but I have arrived. Yeah, I've arrived, but nine out of ten times, I know someone better.
- [24:02]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
- [24:03]
Ken Ferre
So I'm just like, being helpful. It's just being super helpful. And that, that reciprocity, man, just builds so much momentum when I'm engaging new people and building relationships.
- [24:16]
Dan Sanchez
And it's not even just trying to show up and be helpful. Sometimes it's showing up and asking for help. You'd be surprised. Especially on LinkedIn. People are much more helpful on LinkedIn. X you ask for help, someone gonna smack you first. And someone might show up and ask, like, help. You just be prepared. If you go to X, it's freaking war. And that's the game. So just be ready that you're in spar, sparring mode all the time there. And sometimes you gotta get ready for some real battles and you and your friends go against, like, go at it together. In LinkedIn, everybody's there to help each other. Some people call it fake, I call it being considerate. That's it. So that's why I like LinkedIn. People are much more helpful because everyone's selling B2B there, so everyone's, everybody wants to be helpful, so it's great. But ask for help, get help, be help. Like, it's it's a give and take there all the time. Now a lot of people have asked me when they start getting, getting started with this. They're like, well, who should I comment with? Who should I engage with first? Just start engaging with people on your feed. It's probably past colleagues that you've connected with before. But the place where, if you want to, to accelerate the process is find out, ask around like, who are this. You can even ask ChatGPT to do a search and be like, who are the most influential people on LinkedIn to my target audience. If LinkedIn's your game, you could do this for any social platform. But then go and find those people's posts, follow them, watch every single post they have, every time they post, show up in the comments and engage with those people. Not just with the author, but in the, in the replies of all the people showing up. Because those are all your ideal buyers. Like, engage with your ideal buyers. Start conversations on social with the people who could be buying from you.
- [25:57]
Ken Ferre
Yeah.
- [25:57]
Dan Sanchez
And get their replies to that post and then connect with them. Like, I send connection requests to a lot of those people, sometimes with a message, sometimes not. I'm just like, hey, you look awesome. So I'd be connected with you. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they don't. Doesn't really matter. I just go and I'm. It's kind of like Dale Carnegie. Like be, be the friendly dog who just goes on wagging his tail. And if someone says, I don't like you, you're like, okay. And you just go to the next person and you have a friendly disposition and help try to be helpful again, you're like, I don't know, you just go to more people. And it's that way on LinkedIn.
- [26:27]
Ken Ferre
Yeah. And one thing that, you know, when you're following that large, you know, profile, there's gonna be a lot of people who are going to praise whatever the comment is. Right. They can be like, this is the most amazing thing ever. Right. That's, that's fine. The one, the comments you're actually looking for are the ones who, with people who have questions and you know that that influencer or creator is not going to respond back. You can step in and be like, hey, here's what I've done. Right. And put that. You can also. And Dan, you're much better at this. You can give a contrary viewpoint or a contrarian viewpoint to what the person posted about. And just be considerate though, Right. Like there are times when Dan and I, I'm Like, Dan, I'm a post this and I'm a blast this person. They're like. And you're like, no, dude, don't do that. It's LinkedIn. You got to be a little bit more cordial, a little bit nicer. I'm like, okay, fine.
- [27:25]
Dan Sanchez
You know, like, try to be. It's so easy to slam. I get why people do it. Because it's easy. It's easy to react, to be like, dumbest thing ever, you know, it's so easy. I even do it sometimes and I have to go back and remind myself, try to just don't slam them. Ask a question. It's much more considerate. Like, what was the point?
- [27:44]
Ken Ferre
I. I will. This is my personality. I will slam someone if they're being completely unethical and they're, like, lauding about it. I will slam them all day long.
- [27:54]
Dan Sanchez
Because I think that has happened a few times.
- [27:57]
Ken Ferre
Yeah. So there are times we're not saying don't do it, but there, there's a, a technique towards LinkedIn. That's why sometimes you could come across as fake.
- [28:06]
Dan Sanchez
But if you're engaging with the comments and you're posting every day, like, you will get the rhythm of LinkedIn with pretty quickly because you're engaging a lot.
- [28:13]
Ken Ferre
Yeah.
- [28:15]
Dan Sanchez
Now you might say, like, dang, that sounds like a lot of time. Yes, it's a lot of time. And you might even notice that there's ways to automate this whole process. Using AI to make it sound like it's you posting on, engaging in all these comments.
- [28:28]
Ken Ferre
Oh, I hate those.
- [28:29]
Dan Sanchez
And I just got to tell you, if you're listening to this, do not do that. Do not do that. You build authority. You actually put negative energy into your profile. Like, people will pay less attention to you because you're building a bad reputation. These are the people that are trying to find the quick hack to gaining a gaming a LinkedIn profile to go up. And it might work a little bit, but it's not gonna work too well. It doesn't work. At least I have not seen. And I would have seen, because people like to brag about this stuff. A single case study be like, I automated my full LinkedIn presence with the comments and here's the millions of dollars I made. No one's made that video. And I look around for stuff like that all the time. I don't look for it, but, like, I get targeted with it all the time. And I'm like, no one's done it. The only people bragging about that are the software companies selling you the tool. Yeah, that's it.
- [29:16]
Ken Ferre
And I, and I, dude, I hate it. Everybody hates it. You could tell even now if you use AI enough, you could tell when someone has left an AI comment. I'm like, one more obvious.
- [29:28]
Dan Sanchez
It's getting harder every day to tell.
- [29:30]
Ken Ferre
Yeah, but sometimes I'm like, bro, you didn't even read my post. Yeah, like, what did you just comment? Like, what are you talking about? And I finally call them out. I'm like, oh, you must be automating things right now. Like, and I'm just actually seeing if they're going to reply back to me and they don't. I'm like, come on, like, let's engage. Let's, let's have a conversation. So even if you're going to use the automation tool and it, just make sure you're commenting back or replying back, because sometimes people will reply and you want to be there to engage them. Dan, we've been talking about engaging and I want to just remind people while we're doing all this, right, all a lot of we're doing all this because of we're trying to grow your audience, we're trying to grow your authority, and then that could potentially lead to you getting some customers and that leads to optimizing your profile. So kind of walk us through. What does that look like to optimize your profile?
- [30:26]
Dan Sanchez
The profile on LinkedIn is important. Most people treat it like a resume. But when you start getting good at LinkedIn, you start treating it less like a resume site and more like an actual channel for engagement and camaraderie and distribution for your show. Then you start to treat your profile like a landing page for you. It's you incorporated. What is your value proposition? Come on. This is a show about marketing. You have to market yourself. This is the place where you market you, you, your thinking, your services. And yes, your podcast is where you ask people to subscribe or check out maybe some top episodes or a lead magnet you have that gets them to a form that fill out and then you plug the podcast after they fill out the form. So you have your email. Right? There's a couple different ways to do it, but the profile is the place where you can do it. Some key points about the profile, and I won't go into detail about like LinkedIn profile optimization, but there's a few key points. One, you want to call that main call to action to go off site from off of LinkedIn and you can do it in the feed. There's a Couple places where it'll let you feature like little cards that become links directly out. So you can do that. It's awesome. You can put graphics in there, make it look like whatever you want. Some people make them look like buttons, some people make these little visual cards and they're great on mobile and on desktop. It's amazing. Very few social platforms let you customize a profile and put as many links in a profile as LinkedIn does. For all the things that LinkedIn doesn't get right, you gotta gotta give them props for the amount of links you could put on your profile and the way you could customize it and get content up there. It's amazing. So there's that, but there's also the most important part that shows up on your profile, but it actually is more important because it even shows up without your profile and that's your byline. This is like a one sentence statement where you get to tell people what you do. Most people just put your title in it. So it's like your name, your title. But here you can actually customize. It doesn't have to be your title. It could be a statement like I like the easiest statement of all time to put there is a positioning statement like we help these types of people accomplish X easiest thing. It's clear, it's simple, it's straightforward. The reason why that one part of your profile is important is it anchors who you are and who you help. But that part also follows you on every single comment. So if you're out there commentating, engaging with everybody, it's like a little bit little tiny advertisement selling who you are and what you do to everybody on LinkedIn on every single comment. So that's pretty cool. And then lastly, trying to think of all the copy on that page, that byline, those call to actions and think of it less like a profile and think of it more like a landing page. We're all marketers here. We know we want to optimize an outcome. We want to create an experience like, okay, what are they coming for? What are they going to see? What do I want them to do? How do I want them to perceive me, think about me? Optimize that profile like you would a high conversion landing page. And if you just have that mindset with your profile, it will change the game for you. You might have to look around and see what other people have done for some inspiration and test a bunch of things. Great, do it. But if you have that mindset of treating it like a landing page versus a resume, it goes a lot further.
- [33:27]
Ken Ferre
Yeah. And the beauty of this, you know, going back to the two channel strategy, is that the more you optimize your landing page or your profile, the more people are going to click on your page, right? The more they're going to see stuff and they might hear about you talking about your podcast or joining your newsletter, different things like that. And that's, that's how the, the podcast actually grows. This is beautiful flywheel that as you're posting in the short form, you are reminding them of the podcast or what you like to do a lot, Dan, is you're pushing them to a newsletter, right, in the short form. So really it goes podcast to short form, short form to newsletter. And then in the newsletter you start talking about the podcast again and be like, hey, this is the last week's episode, this is next week's episode. And little by little, your podcast starts to compound. And that's the beauty. This is why we talk about the two form strategy here, because you want to find ways to continue to get people to listen to you, to trust you, so that when they're ready to buy, the first person that comes to mind is you.
- [34:34]
Dan Sanchez
So start a second channel, grow authority on both. They work well, synergistically together. You diversify your channels a little bit more and you can watch it compound. Coming up.