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- [00:00]
A
If you can take content and turn it into helping people and starting conversations on LinkedIn, and then you're having conversations about the topic of the book and people become interested, the first thing they do is go and look at your profile. So you want your profile to really serve you, to get more people to click through to your book.
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B
Welcome to the Publishing Playbook, the podcast that goes behind the scenes of the book publishing world. Our goal is to help you understand publishing better, collaborate successfully with the team behind your book, and find your readers. I'm your host, Sarah Russo, the founder and CEO of PageOne Media and Page One Education. In this episode, I sit down with Louise Brogan. She is a LinkedIn strategist, digital marketing expert and YouTuber with over 100,000 subscribers. Louise is also the author of her own book, Raise youe Visibility Online. She's based in Northern Ireland and she helps authors and professionals around the world create effective content and enhance their authority on LinkedIn. She started doing this work back when, as she puts it, LinkedIn was seen as the boring one. Today, Louise and I dig into why LinkedIn is still one of the most underutilized tools in book marketing. And as well as what the platform's latest algorithm changes mean for authors, we also talk about why showing up as an authentic human voice matters now more than ever. Louise Brogan, thank you so much for coming on the Publishing Playbook. We're so happy to have you.
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A
Well, Sarah, thank you so much for asking me. It's going to be, it's going to be like we have to be professional and talk to the podcast and not
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B
just talk to ourselves, not just have a lovely chat. Yeah, no, I agree. We'll be able to do that. Well, you're a pro at this. You have your own podcast and it's phenomenal. And you have like a hundred thousand followers on YouTube and like, you're, you're amazing. So I'm the newbie here, so you're going to coach me through it and we're going to keep this fun. I'm going to start with a question on how did you get interested in thinking about LinkedIn in particular as a marketing tool? And will you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to this current work in digital marketing?
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A
Yeah, sure. So, like, a lot of women who start their own business kind of came about because of necessity through having a small, small children, not a small family because there's three of them.
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B
It's a medium sized family.
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A
It's a medium sized family. After doing A degree in geography. I went and did a master's in computing. So I ended up working in software engineering and IT project management. I was part time with three small kids because I wanted to be able to pick them up from school. And someone said, pointed out to me that I seem to know how to use social media for business. So I started doing Facebook and Instagram pages for small businesses locally to me. And that grew and grew and grew. I wrote about this recently, how I was invited to speak at an event where lots and lots of businessmen and I was invited to speak about social media and all of their questions were about LinkedIn. And I was thinking, I don't know enough about LinkedIn. Yeah, everything is about LinkedIn. And then I started working with a mutual coach you and I both worked with. And she said to me, louise, you should niche down to do one platform or one audience. I think that's how your business is really going to grow. And I thought, well, nobody's doing LinkedIn. This is back in 2017, 2018, Sarah. Nobody was doing LinkedIn because it was seen as the boring one. Yeah, I thought, right, I'm going to take that one. And that's kind of where it started. So I sure didn't work out for me.
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B
It's funny, you told me years ago that on LinkedIn only 3% of users are creators. Is that statistic still true?
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A
Yes. And do you know what's interesting about this? I made a video about this today actually on YouTube. LinkedIn. It's. It's kind of annoying me at the minute, Sarah, because it is giving more visibility to our comments than it is to our posts.
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B
Oh.
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A
I think it's because they recognize that like 97% of the audience on LinkedIn cannot get over themselves to post. A lot of people who work with me have a fear of posting. They don't know what to say. They don't know how to say something without fear of their peers looking at them. And I tell you what, guys, nobody cares about that. Just you get over yourself and start posting.
- [04:42]
B
So I've known you for several years now, Louise, and you are a connector if ever I've met one. You have these small business walks that you do in Northern Ireland that makes me want so desperately to move there just so I can come on these walks with you and your business friends. But you work with experts and small businesses of all sorts and authors to build visibility, consistency, authority on LinkedIn. Can you talk about these sort of three areas of focus and how you teach people to elevate their visibility. And there's something there about, you know, not wanting to post and the discomfort and how they get over that.
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A
So my favorite way to explain LinkedIn to people who maybe aren't that familiar with it or who are like, oh, it's something I have to do, but, oh, I don't really want to. If you think about it as being like, but going to an industry conference. So say, let's say I'm an author and I talk about manufacturing. Okay. Manufacturing processes. Or maybe I talk about historical fiction. Treat LinkedIn as though it is like your favorite conference or event that you want to attend. If you're going to go to that event you're going to do you say, spruce yourself up in America. I'm not sure. Yeah, sure, you're going to present yourself in the way that you would to that network. So the analogy there for LinkedIn is that you present yourself on your LinkedIn profile the way that you want to be seen professionally by the people that you want to connect with. So spending time on your profile is really, really key. And when I work with people, we do this one to one in a thing called the LinkedIn VIP package where literally I work with you on a one to one basis and we rebuild your profile together. So once you've got your profile, you've really got your foundation and then so you're ready to go into the conference. As you're going into LinkedIn, the people who are writing posts I see as equivalent to the people who are standing on the stage giving the talk. And if you comment on somebody else's post, that is the equivalent of you chatting to somebody. So you've just, maybe you've just seen Sarah speaking on stage and you're sitting beside me down at the table and Sarah does an amazing talk and then you and I turn to each other and we, and we say, what did you think about that? Oh, it was interesting what she said said about that thing, wasn't it? And that to me is the comments section. The thing about people who use LinkedIn or don't use it, don't use it effectively is it's the equivalent of you turning up at that event. You walk in, you don't speak to anybody, you sit down, you don't even get a coffee and you leave two hours later and you go home and your partner says to you, well, how's that event? You go, it's kind of a waste of time. Well, who did you speak to? Nobody. Did you listen to anyone speak? No. Well, what did, what did you do. Did you get lost?
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B
You just paid $250 to attend that conference and didn't talk to.
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A
Yes. So did you see. So that when I talk about that to groups of people, they're like, oh,
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B
that makes sense for some of us. Right? Like, going to a conference, especially if I don't know anyone at the conference, is my worst nightmare. I am an introvert, which seems absurd because I am also a book publicist, but I always say book publicist is an oxymoron because, you know, we like to just sit quietly and read, but we're also chattering about books all day. I use LinkedIn a little bit. Not a lot. You wouldn't be super proud. But I'm trying. I'm making an effort there. When you work with folks, you always start with their profile. Are there key things that people consistently miss or. Or make mistakes doing on their profiles?
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A
Oh, absolutely. Yes. The key mistakes I see people doing, there's really. There's a couple of things. The biggest mistake, which is really amazing to me, and I still get taken aback when I see it on a. If I'm doing a group training online, is the number of people who do not have an about section.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So, like, it's amazing. You. LinkedIn changed, completely changed towards the end of last year. Its algorithm setup. We now have to be really focused at the start of everything. So at the start of your headline, at the start of your about section, and at the start of your posts. Because if you bury the thing that you're talking about halfway down. So, for example, if I look at someone's headline, it says, I help authors to raise their profiles through working with them on xyz. The thing that you actually do to help people is they call it lost in distance. So you would have to have publicist at the very start of that headline. Then you can go into how you help people and all your services and the same in your posts. So that is a big shift that's happened on LinkedIn and it's taken people a little bit of time to catch up to that.
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B
Are there other ways that you're seeing social media marketing evolve and change as you're working in it right now, especially with AI? Yes.
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A
I actually wrote a post today and I said, I think I literally wrote, please, for the love of my sanity, do not put all of your AI generated comments on this post. Yeah, yeah. So it's really easy for people to spin up some kind of software as a service now, as an app. And the number of people who are cre creating apps that will create an AI generated comment for you. So in other words, you and I have a mutual friend called Shelly Warren Shell has an audience who are full of my ideal clients. So I could take Shell's post that I would never do this. And Shell, if you're listening, I do not do this. I could take Shell's post and stick it into one of these AI apps that there's like 10 a penny of and say, give me a thoughtful comment to this and then copy and paste it back in as the comment. And the people are doing this and worse, they're, they're connecting these apps to their LinkedIn accounts. Which is probably why Sarah, my most, second most popular video on YouTube is what do you do when your account gets blocked on LinkedIn? Because they do block your account, they delete your account for doing this kind of nonsense. They're just, it's just very hard to keep up with.
- [11:04]
B
We are in a very strange moment. We're seeing it across publishing too, with, yeah, all sorts of AI generated scams. Authors are getting multiple emails a day. It's miserable. It's actually something I posted about on LinkedIn last week. Do you think authors underestimate the power of LinkedIn compared to Instagram or X or TikTok?
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A
Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's so many ways that you can do it. So say for, for my book, right? When my book came out a year ago, I would put an image of my book into my background image at the top of my profile. I would then add a link to my featured section where people could go and buy the book. And the way LinkedIn works brilliantly for authors or for anybody else is that if you can take content and turn it into helping people and starting conversations on LinkedIn and then you're having conversations about the topic of the book and people become interested, the first thing they do is go and look at your profile. So you want your profile to really serve you, to get more people to click through to your book. But the other thing is on LinkedIn you have got huge volumes of people who book speakers. I spoke of the Independent Publishers of New England's conference this year.
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B
Oh, that's amazing.
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A
I know. Who knew there was one? It was really fun. And they found me through LinkedIn and you know, I loved it. And the lady on before me was like, I think she was a famous author. If I didn't, I didn't know who she was. And it was just really, there's a lot of them that's okay, but like they found me through LinkedIn, you know, so at the very least, authors should make sure they have a really good representation of themselves in their profile. The other thing about LinkedIn, Sarah, that I don't think maybe your, your listeners might not know is that the LLMs, which is to you and me is ChatGPT and Claude and perplexity. The second biggest place that they go for citing experts is LinkedIn. Weirdly, Reddit is the top one. I don't use Reddit, so that was really interesting to me. But LinkedIn is second. And the people who write articles and newsletters on LinkedIn are being found by AI search. It's, it's just really funny. When I started using YouTube and LinkedIn together, I discovered that LinkedIn was one of the top results on Google for any search. If you type someone's name into Google, their LinkedIn profile usually came up at the top. And I discovered it was because there's so much fresh content on LinkedIn every single day from people like me, but also from large companies and media outlets and everything, and organizations publishing fresh stuff every single day. If you think back to when I don't know if people listening might have had a blog like 15 years ago, and you're always told, oh, update your blog, write a fresh blog every week. And then the search engines will keep coming back to your website. It's just that, except it's a different thing. It's the AI search and it's the LinkedIn content. Long form content on LinkedIn. So long form content is still, still the number one thing that you should be creating, I think.
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B
And is there a difference between an article on LinkedIn and a LinkedIn newsletter? Should people be using one or both or.
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A
So this is really interesting because an article is a standalone, long form piece of content. You can publish a newsletter, which is a series of articles, but when you publish a newsletter, every single person you're connected to is notified that you have published a newsletter. And they are automatically invited to subscribe to that. When you publish an article, that does not happen.
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B
What an incredibly powerful thing, right? To be able to, you know. So if someone starts a substack newsletter, you could send an email to your whole network of people and invite them to subscribe to your substack newsletter. But that's. It would be time consuming, right? You'd literally have to, whatever it is, bcc thousand people, whoever's in your address book, this just does it automatically for you, for everyone you're connected to on LinkedIn.
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A
But the other thing about it as well is the newsletter, when it is published, the person who chooses to subscribe to it also clicks a button to say that they want to receive that in their email inbox. So the majority of people who read my Sunday morning newsletter actually get it through their email.
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B
Yes.
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A
So it's double whammy. So yeah, it's massively powerful tool.
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B
Are there any ways that LinkedIn can go wrong?
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A
Can't really go wrong if just, you know, if you and I went to a conference, Sarah, and behaved as we would at a conference and that's how we behave on LinkedIn. Yeah. What can go wrong?
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B
Well, yes, be a professional. But I think especially when Twitter sort of imploded and we saw lots of people seeking out new spaces online in which to connect, there was a shift in LinkedIn and people's behavior. Right. Like LinkedIn is not Instagram and it's also, it's not Facebook and it's not Twitter. It is a professional network where you are connecting and communicating with people you've worked with and people you hope to work with.
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A
Right.
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B
And you know, all of our authors are there, many of the academics we've worked with, the in house communications teams. Right. Like all of these people. So I'm not posting about my children on LinkedIn. Right. I'm just, I'm not doing that. Page one has a business page and your question there. And I have a personal page. We definitely see better engagement on my posts than we see on the business pages posts. So you know, once a week maybe I'll share something from the business.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Is there a method? Do you have a methodology for how to weigh those considerations?
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A
Yeah. So if you post content on Sarah Russo's profile, it's you, Sarah, having conversations. But at Page One Media, it should be more of the traditional marketing message from the brand. And for authors it could be more what's in the book and how do you get a copy of the book and all those questions that people have about how to support you. Or maybe you're going to be speaking at a, at an event and you could put that over there, but you're having the conversations with your network through your personal profile.
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B
I've always discouraged authors from, for example, making a book specific website. Right. Because then you have to make a book specific website for every book you ever publish. Right. What would be best for an author? Are they creating a book page? Are they creating a Louise Brogan author page? Like, how does that work?
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A
I actually, I've never had this question before and as you're asking me, I'm thinking on my feet, I think you could have a showcase page for each book. Okay, so I have Louise Brogan, my personal profile. I have Louise Brogan limited, which is my company page. And off my company page, I have my conference, which is called B2B Content Live. And it is a showcase page.
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B
Yes.
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A
And now I'm thinking my book should have a showcase page of it, don't I? Yeah. So maybe we'll do that, Sarah.
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B
Okay, well, we're gonna watch you build that because I'll be very curious to see what the components are and how it comes together. So for once, you make it. Folks who listen to this podcast should go follow that and see how you do it.
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A
And then the other place you could break out your different bookset, Sarah, would be in the Experience section. So anyone who's listening, go and look at my profile on LinkedIn and go down to the Experience section, and you will see that under my business brand, I have split out author, speaker, podcaster, grip, program host. They are all separate jobs, if you like, under the Experience section. And they all have blurb and they all have links to the different things under there. My experience section is quite extensive, and that's another thing we do together, and very few people realize you can even add in links and media to the Experience section.
- [19:37]
B
Are there any other sections that you feel like people routinely don't take advantage of? So, like, there's a section for volunteer. I know I add my volunteer stuff in there. Are there any other things that you feel like people really miss?
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A
There's a publication section.
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B
Oh, yeah. Well, for and for the academics we work with, how important is that? Right? Like both books and journal articles and the rest.
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A
So then majority. And I am talking like, 99% of people I work with have never updated their skills section since they started their LinkedIn account. So when I work with people, we clean that up. The reason we clean it up is because the algorithm is surfacing you in search based on your skills. So you want to make sure that they actually reflect what you do. And then the recommendation section is so powerful because it has to be written by somebody else. You can't just pop in your testimonials in there. And here's a lovely little tip. If there's somebody you've worked with previously, it's a really nice, generous thing and really good way to get yourself noticed by them again is to go and just send them a recommendation without being asked. I've had that happen a few times. And it just really makes you think so positively about the other person.
- [20:59]
B
You wrote and published your book Raise youe Visibility Online not very long ago. You have this tremendous platform both on LinkedIn and YouTube. Do you feel like it helped with the book, with both communicating about the book and its launch, and also with book sales?
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A
Absolutely. On LinkedIn, YouTube, not so much. People. I think people don't quite understand YouTube yet. How YouTube works and how you build an audience on YouTube is actually most people on there find you for the very first time. So my most popular video on YouTube is not how to use LinkedIn to grow your business, because that involves lots of steps.
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B
Yeah.
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It's how do you upload your resume to LinkedIn? Because that is the question that people have typed into a search engine. And my video comes up as the answer. It's two minutes long. They watch it, they're done. It's got like 300,000 views.
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B
So for authors on LinkedIn, do you ever propose that they repurpose some of their content from their books or. Yes. Like pull little excerpts. What do you think is the best to do so that they're not right? Like, not every post needs to be completely original content.
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No.
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B
Do you. Do you have methods that you feel like work best for this?
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A
Absolutely. My entire method methodology is called Create once, publish everywhere, which I thought I made up, but I think it comes actually from software engineering, which makes sense because that's my background.
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B
Yes.
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A
So if. So I have a book. So I said, if I have a book, I have a book. If I look at my book. So once you've done your profile, it's like, what are you going to actually put content about on LinkedIn if you already have a book? It's all in there. Because your pillars of content are your chapters.
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B
Right.
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A
And literally I did a video recently and I was literally holding my book and reading out of it, not showing my age here because, you know, I was like a cool, cool kid. I'd be reading off my phone, but I wasn't reading off my book.
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B
We like paper books here.
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A
I like paper books. So I have got, Let me just check here, 15 chapters. So it's 15 different topic areas to create content out of. So if you have already have a book, you've got all your key pillars, and then people get interested in it and then they go and look at your profile and on your profile they'll see all the links to your book. Sure. It works like a dream.
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B
Right, Right. That's really. That's really interesting. There's all sorts of different kinds of content within the book that you could utilize on LinkedIn or other social media.
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A
I mean, the way my brain works with this stuff, you could literally read me out a line from any book and I could turn it into a LinkedIn post.
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B
I wanted to talk about utilizing video on LinkedIn and what you feel like. So for authors who are often much like me, right, they're introverts. They like to be behind the camera, not in front of the camera. Are there ways that you encourage people to get into doing video on LinkedIn? Also, the LinkedIn lives, right, are video and conversations, which maybe is an easier entry point to set up a LinkedIn Live and have a conversation.
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A
It's so funny because I get asked to speak about video on LinkedIn and it used to be that I would speak about company pages that nobody wants to speak about, and now I speak about video and people don't really want to speak about it because despite LinkedIn telling us that, you know, video is the number one type of content and the most shareable content on LinkedIn, I'm like, please show me the evidence of that, because I do not see it. Yeah, but there's nothing more human than you showing up on camera. And in this world of AI nonsense, I mean, AI is brilliant tool, don't get me wrong. And I use it a lot and I teach my clients how to use it. If you show up on camera, then we know it's you and people are. You know, we are. We're only into this AI generation, like, not even two years, and people are bored and fed up with it already. I think people will pay more for human contact and there'll be more community and more events. So we need to get you to events, including coming to Belfast, get you all your authors in a big boat and sail across the Atlantic. Come to Belfast.
- [25:07]
B
I do not get on boats, but I'll get on an airplane to come see you anytime. This has been really, really fun, Louise. I love talking to you about all of this. I want to ask you one last question. What are you reading right now?
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A
I am reading a book called the Barbecue at Number Nine. Oh, it's brilliant. It's about Live Aid in a cul de sac. You know what cul de sac is?
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B
Yeah, yeah, we have cul de sacs here. But what's Live Aid?
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A
Sure. Language.
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B
What. What term? Yes.
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A
So it's live. It's. It's set on the day of Live Aid. The lady who lives at Number nine wants to. Has decided to Host the whole street to come for a barbecue. And in 1985, a barbecue was seen as what. What is that known? What's a barbecue? Who does she think she is? And the dynamic of everybody who lives in the houses on the street. And there's a. Her daughter that is carrying a secret that we don't know about yet. There is a guy who has post traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia who never leaves his house. In one of the houses, but his mom's convinced him he's coming. There's a lady that we don't really know what's going on with her. She's come back from living in Australia and it's all the conversations happening in the separate houses. And so far the barbecue hasn't happened yet. She's setting up her food and the sister in law and her husband have arrived and they're very judgmental. I'm very into this book. You might be able to check it out.
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B
I love it. I think this sounds great. Is it set in. Where is it set?
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A
It's set in England. I don't remember this because I was too young, but apparently it was very hot that day in Wembley. And all of the acts coming on stage are very sweaty, which sounds gross, but it's the. It's so brilliantly written of all different characters and you can just see there's something coming together and it's going to be. It's going to explode, but I'm not really sure yet how it's going to
- [27:00]
B
explode, how it's all going.
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A
Yeah, I'm loving it.
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B
So not to put you on the spot, but do you remember the author's name?
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A
Jenny Godfrey.
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B
Jenny Godfrey. Wonderful.
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A
And the title was again the Barbecue at Number nine.
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B
The Barbecue at Number Nine.
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A
My brain is a trouble exposing secrets of residents, including the host, Lydia Gordon. Dun dun dun.
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B
I love it. That sounds super fun. I like an entertaining novel and I love a period right like that. It's set around this moment in history that we remember. That's not like so far back. But it's.
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A
Well, it's really funny because the Australian ladies can't understand why everyone's making such a big fuss about a barbecue. Because in Australia they have them all the time. But in England at that time nobody had a barbecue.
- [27:48]
B
Yes, that's very interesting.
- [27:50]
A
Cool.
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B
I love it. Louise, thank you so much for coming and doing this with me. I really appreciate it.
- [27:56]
A
I've had a lot of fun. This is excellent. Thank you so much for asking me.
- [28:02]
B
Thanks for listening to the publishing Playbook. I'm your host, Sarah Russo. You can subscribe to our show wherever you like to get your podcasts or find us on YouTube at Page One Media. This episode was produced by Julie Kanfer with support from Bella Gibb and the team at New Books Network. For more information about Page One Media, please visit our website at www.pageonem.com. keep on reading and we'll talk to you soon.
- [28:29]
A
Sam.