Lessons - From Zero to $5M Company | Hala Taha - YAP Media CEO

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Lessons – From Zero to $5M Company | Hala Taha, YAP Media CEO

Podcast: Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Air Date: February 7, 2026
Host: Scott D. Clary
Guest: Hala Taha, CEO of YAP Media

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on how Hala Taha, CEO of YAP Media, built her company from scratch to a $5M business—centered on the overlooked power of LinkedIn for organic growth, content virality, and business monetization. Scott and Hala dive deep into the specifics of designing content for LinkedIn, nuances of its algorithm, and actionable strategies for leveraging LinkedIn to drive both audience and revenue—dispelling myths, especially around repurposing content from other platforms.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Unique Power of LinkedIn (00:00–01:42)

• LinkedIn is Underutilized:
  Hala repeatedly returns to LinkedIn as the strategic platform for organic business growth, contrasting it with the focus many marketers have on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok.
• Why LinkedIn?
  • Hala is "the number one podcaster on LinkedIn"—significant because business brands specifically want to sponsor her.
  • Most speaking engagements and client leads (especially authors) originate from LinkedIn, not Instagram or Twitter.
  • Hala uses LinkedIn Live as a monetization tool—simulcasting podcasts across her platforms and creating lucrative 360° deals.

  "I’m one of the first podcasters that have monetized LinkedIn Lives. I sell my podcast as a simulcast across my podcast, my YouTube and my LinkedIn. I’m the first one to do that." – Hala Taha [01:42]

Cross-Platform Content & Algorithm Essentials (02:45–05:31)

• Platform-Specific Strategy is Vital:
  Every platform is designed to maximize user time spent. Using the wrong content format (ex: horizontal images or plain text) loses favor with the LinkedIn algorithm.

  • Big vertical images with people “take up more real estate” and generate dwell time.
  • Viral actions (stopping the scroll) are crucial for success.

  "If you do anything that brings users off the platform...you’re never going to win. You want to stop the scroll, you want people to spend time on your posts, take viral actions." – Hala Taha [02:46]

• Don’t Mindlessly Copy Influencers:
  Scott points out the mistake of copying high-follower influencers like Gary Vee, whose results rest on massive built-in audiences—not content strategy alone.

  "You cannot equate what he has, which is critical mass of an audience versus what you’re doing, which is no audience." – Scott D. Clary [04:41] "Gary has well over a million followers on LinkedIn, and his engagement’s the same as me, and I have 200,000 followers. He actually has a very poor engagement rate..." – Hala Taha [05:31]

Content Design & Editorial Alignment (05:31–07:28)

• Make Content Skimmable:
  Chunky paragraphs and outbound links are penalized; concise, readable, and native content wins.
• Human Editors:
  LinkedIn is unique—viral posts are reviewed by real editors. If your content aligns with LinkedIn’s current editorial agenda (careers, milestones, DEI topics, etc.), it’s amplified further.

  "My content is actually aligning to the LinkedIn editorial agenda...they’re going to pour gasoline on [it]." – Hala Taha [06:31]

Organic Sales & Promotional Balance (08:41–09:16)

• Sales Happen in DMs:
  LinkedIn’s algorithm deprioritizes anything overtly promotional; instead, use content to generate inbound interest.

  "Sales happen in the DMs. Always, always. LinkedIn is deprioritizing sales and promotional stuff." – Hala Taha [08:41]

• Only 6% of LinkedIn Users Create Content:
  Huge room for dominance in any professional niche.

The LinkedIn Algorithm: Breakdown & Secrets (09:28–15:18)

• LinkedIn Judges Your 10–15 Most Recent Posts:
  Salesy content too often can reduce your total reach for all content.
• Four Critical Steps of LinkedIn’s Algorithm:

  1. Spam Filters:

     • Three buckets: spam, low quality, high quality
     • Use only three hashtags; over five is penalized.
     • Avoid excessive tagging (spamming followers).

     "If you tag too many people, if you tag celebrities...you get flagged for spam, it’s not going to go anywhere." – Hala Taha [11:09]

  2. Sub-Sample Testing:

     • Posts are first shown to a small segment of your audience (emphasizing the need for active, quality followers).
     • Clean out inactive or irrelevant connections to improve virality odds.

  3. Content Scoring:

     • Looks at both post engagement (“viral actions”) and author engagement (“author stickiness”).
     • Most viral actions: shares > comments > likes.
     • Engaging on others’ content post-publish increases your reach.

     "The most viral thing you can do on LinkedIn is...lots of shares...not about comments, not about likes, it’s about shares." – Hala Taha [13:22]

     • Responding to comments and engaging with those who share your post are key.

  4. Human Editorial Review:

     • Top-performing posts are reviewed by LinkedIn editors, who amplify those that fit the broader platform agenda.
     • Content misaligned with editorial priorities (careers, DEI, employment milestones, etc.) stalls before reaching wider virality.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You have to play at the level that you’re at to eventually get to where [big influencers] are." – Scott D. Clary [04:41]
• "Only 6% of people who are on LinkedIn are actually content creators. So there’s a huge opportunity for everybody to be that dominant person in their niche." – Hala Taha [09:00]
• "LinkedIn actually judges your last 10 to 15 posts in the algorithm." – Hala Taha [09:28]
• "Shares are worth 4 points, a share with caption is 4.5—by far the most viral thing you can do on LinkedIn is to create a post that gets lots of shares." – Hala Taha [13:12]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–01:42 – Introduction to why LinkedIn is uniquely powerful for organic and business content
• 01:42–02:45 – How Hala leverages LinkedIn for monetization and 360 deals
• 02:45–04:41 – Cross-platform content mistakes and critical differences on LinkedIn
• 05:31–07:28 – Skimmability, editorial agenda, and tips for content optimization
• 08:41–09:16 – Why sales should happen in DMs and the rarity of content creators
• 09:28–15:18 – In-depth breakdown of the LinkedIn algorithm and actionable best practices for organic growth

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Actionable Takeaways

• Go Native: Adapt your content specifically for LinkedIn instead of reposting formats from Instagram or TikTok.
• Maximize Shares: Design posts that your audience wants to share, as shares drive virality far more than likes or comments.
• Prioritize Skimmability: Use line-by-line formatting and avoid large blocks of text.
• Limit Hashtags and Tagging: Stick to a maximum of three hashtags and avoid mass tagging.
• Stay Active Post-Publish: Engage with commenters and those who share your post—this “author stickiness” matters for amplification.
• Monitor Editorial Themes: Align content to LinkedIn’s editorial agenda (careers, milestones, DEI) for wider reach.
• Keep Promotions Subtle: Use content for brand-building; take sales conversations to DMs to avoid algorithmic penalties.

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Transcript

[A]

In this lessons episode, explore why LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful, yet overlooked platforms for organic growth and monetization. Discover how to leverage platform specific algorithms to maximize reach. Understand how content design and audience behavior drive virality, and uncover strategic frameworks for turning attention into sustainable business opportunities. You Keep bringing up LinkedIn again and again and again out of all the social platforms. Like, if you think about the common advice that people give, well, now it's. You follow where the company is trying to promote. So the reels and the shorts and the Snapchat spotlights and that's where you focus your energy with short form video clips. No one really speaks about LinkedIn. I'm obviously very bullish on LinkedIn. I mean, that's actually where I'm not. It sounds like as, as granular a marketer as you are, but I still Understood that, like LinkedIn is a content efficient platform.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So when you put stuff on there, you get organic reach. I'm a big fan of organic. As somebody who did not have money, starting at a podcast, then you have to find a way to tap into an audience. So I get LinkedIn. And also our content is very similar. It's business content, so it hits. But I mean, I never put this much thought into it. So it's like sometimes, I mean, it's just like a good accident. But I mean, you are very purposeful about all the shit you do. Yes, it's very purposeful, which is great. And that's probably why you have a $5 million agency and I don't have one. That's why. But how do you, how do you actually. Or why is LinkedIn so important in your content strategy? Why do you keep bringing it up? Like, what is the thing about LinkedIn that differentiates it and put it in layman's terms over focusing on YouTube or focusing on Instagram or focusing on Twitter or TikTok.

[B]

Well, number one, like I mentioned before, the leverage of me being able to say I'm the number one podcaster on LinkedIn and I have a business podcast. So all the business brands love to sponsor and we didn't talk about it, but I have a podcast network where I grow and monetize shows. And a lot of my deals are 360 deals. So I'm one of the first podcasters that have monetized LinkedIn lives. I sell my podcast as a simulcast across my podcast, my YouTube and my LinkedIn. I'm the first one to do that. Right. And so I've been able to like triple My impressions just because I use LinkedIn Live as another podcast monetization tool essentially. And so 360 deals are really important to me. Uh, speaking engagements come from LinkedIn primarily. A lot of my, you know, clients are authors. Speaking engagements come from LinkedIn, not from Instagram. Right. So really important for authors and the types of clients that I run. Something that I want to talk about, because you mentioned it before, but we didn't really get to talk about, is, you know, just basic rules of growing on social media. And I can take it from like broad cross channel to. Then we can focus on LinkedIn.

[A]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

So first, every social media platform, no matter what it is, their goal is to keep users on that platform. Right? And anytime you post on social media, you need to remember that if you want to be rewarded on this platform, you need to keep users engaged and you need to keep them on the platform as long as possible. So if you do anything that brings users off the platform, that bores them, where people skim over your stuff, you're never going to win. You want to stop the scroll, you want people to spend time on your posts, to take viral actions on your posts. And that means that you really need to know the content marketing that's gonna resonate with your target audience, but then also how to like hack things to make sure that people do spend time on your posts and don't leave the platform. That's how you get rewarded no matter what. The other thing is that in this world everything is mobile. Um, you wanna take up as much real estate as possible on the feed. It's super important people miss this. So on LinkedIn, for example, people will put up horizontal images or text posts with no graphic. That's the worst thing you can do because the average person on LinkedIn is scrolling through nine posts, right? And if they just skim over your posts, you're actually gonna lose points for the algorithm because you didn't have dwell time. Nobody actually stopped and look at looked at your stuff. And so the bigger the image the better. So on LinkedIn, that's like a four by five aspect ratio for a graphic. And if you have a photo with a person on it, people are spending more time looking at the person rather than like a promotional graphic or something like that. And so big photos right now work the best on LinkedIn. Videos don't work well. The only thing that works well with video on LinkedIn is like LinkedIn Lives. That's why I do a lot of LinkedIn Lives. And so people try to take the Same strategies like Instagram reels and do it on LinkedIn. It doesn't work. It's a whole different platform with a different set of rules that are prioritizing certain features. It's not like Instagram. So that's a big problem. I see people trying to replicate, you know, what they do on one platform when it doesn't work that way.

[A]

No, I was gonna say one more just on that point. No, no, you're good. You're good. I love it. It's an easy interview, that. But when you see people that are just copying the strategies, I want to highlight something. I think what you're seeing is you're seeing people that follow Gary Vee or some other social media influencer, and they see that Gary has a very sophisticated strategy. But you do see that he'll just take a random video that he posted on Instagram and he'll post it on LinkedIn and he'll get thousands of likes and comments. But you cannot equate what he has, which is critical mass of an audience versus what you're doing, which is no audience. Yeah, And I think that's the issue. People replicate that and they're like, well, if he's doing it, I should do the exact same thing. You're playing at a different level, and you. And. And you have to play at the level that you're at to eventually get to where he is.

[B]

Yeah. And by the way, so somebody like Gary has well over a million followers on LinkedIn, and his engagement's the same as me, and I have 200,000 followers. So he actually has a very poor engagement rate because, like you said, he's just replicating and he's just got this huge audience. So it does. But he could be doing so much better if he was leaning into the features that LinkedIn is actually promoting. The other thing is skimmable content. Right. People don't like to read. And these algorithms want to keep users on the platform. So a platform like LinkedIn is actually going to deprioritize your post if you've got big, chunky paragraphs, and you're making people work because they know people are going to skim over them. And so big, chunky paragraphs, you get deprioritized. Linking in the caption, taking users to another website, deprioritized. The other thing that's really unique about LinkedIn is that the last stage of the algorithm is actually human editors. This is way different than any other platform. And so an influencer like me and all my clients I know how to manipulate the algorithm so much that like we're always going viral. So my worst performing post, 1500 likes, you know, and then ranging from like 1500 to like 5000 likes. But then sometimes I'll get a hundred thousand like posts, 60,000 like posts. Million 8 million views. 10 like nobody's getting these types of results on LinkedIn. And the reason why is because my content is actually aligning to the LinkedIn editorial agenda. Because the LinkedIn is actually scanning the most popular posts and anything that aligns to careers, hiring, graduation point in time, holidays, Women's Day Month, Black History Month, whatever is on their editorial agenda, they're going to pour gasoline on it and they're going to stop anything that's salesy, anything that's promotional, anything that's promoting me, my LinkedIn masterclass or whatever it is, and they're actually going to pour gasoline on the stuff that aligns to their agenda. So whenever I'm thinking about client strategy in terms of content marketing on LinkedIn, I'm like what is the intersection of your niche and careers?

[A]

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[B]

Sales happen in the DMs always, always LinkedIn is going to do from the first step of the algorithm, LinkedIn is deprioritizing sales and promotional stuff. If you link out deprioritized. If you have sales keywords in your post, deprioritize. LinkedIn is in the business of making LinkedIn money and keeping users engaged and entertained on the platform.

[A]

Mm.

[B]

And they want to reward content creators who do that. And by the way, only 6% of people who are on LinkedIn are actually content creators. So there's a huge opportunity for everybody to be that, like, dominant person in their niche. Just like I was the number one podcaster or the number one podcaster on LinkedIn.

[A]

Do you think if. When you. When you do sell. So say you adopt this strategy. 9. 9 posts are great, and then the 10th one you sell does that. Is there a deranking of your all your content now?

[B]

So this is such a great question. LinkedIn actually judges your last 10 to 15 posts in the algorithm. We can talk about. If you want me to break down the algorithm. I'm happy to do.

[A]

I would love to, because this is really deep and I've never heard anyone speak about some of this.

[B]

Nobody knows this stuff. It's not a book. I've. I've learned it. I've basically tested it. And sp. I'm running all the influencers on LinkedIn, so I feel like I'm one of the only people who actually know the algorithm besides people who work at LinkedIn.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

So I'm happy to break that down. Um, so you want me to break it down?

[A]

Scratch.

[B]

Okay, so there's four steps. Let me get a drink of water.

[A]

I appreciate it. No, I mean, listen, I know that you speak a lot about LinkedIn, and I know that's part of, like, your service offering, but, like, there's a lot of people that speak a lot about LinkedIn.

[B]

No, they don't know anything.

[A]

That's why I'm like. I didn't know if I wanted to go into it. I'm like, yeah, I want to go into it because I want to learn this shit.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, so there's four steps to the algorithm. Okay. Number one is spam filters. So this is actually LinkedIn's, like, AI machine virtual, like their machine that is basically scanning every post that comes out and they're putting it into three buckets. First is spam. Then it's low quality, high quality. Okay, so spam is the usual pornography, profanity, you know, using too many hashtags. So compared to Instagram on LinkedIn, you really should be only using three hashtags.

[A]

It's.

[B]

I can go into hashtags for 10 minutes if you want but really three hashtags, anything over five, they're actually going to deprioritize you because they think you're spamming. Also, like the way that the platform works, just hashtags actually work against you sometimes if you don't use them.

[A]

Smart.

[B]

On LinkedIn, if you tag too many people, if you tag celebrities, a lot of people do this, like tagging 20 people in their posts.

[A]

I've had people tag me that I don't even know them.

[B]

Spam, you know, you get flagged for spam, it's not going to go anywhere. Okay, so those are some examples of like as soon as you do it, LinkedIn's just going to stop your post, right? Then there's low quality and it's scanning for things that are really like nuanced. So like I mentioned big chunky paragraphs, you have big chunky paragraphs, you get deprioritized. That's why all the influencers on LinkedIn are doing that line by line style. That's on purpose to be skimmable, right? Linking out to an external third party website. Deprioritized, because you're selling on LinkedIn, okay? Not having keywords in your posts that align to keywords in the picture. People who are in your target audience, deprioritized, okay? Not leveraging certain features, you'll get like not having a picture. Deprioritized, okay? Then high quality, that's you're following all the best practices. You're not tagging. You only have three hashtags, you've got skimmable content, you've got a graphic, you get into high quality, okay? Step two of the algorithm is it's basically feeding your content to a subset of users on LinkedIn. Now this is super important. It means that you need to make sure that the people in your audience are actually active on LinkedIn. There's a lot of people on LinkedIn who look at stuff and don't engage. There's probably a lot of people that are in your first connections and you're only allowed to have 30,000 of them on LinkedIn that you know, got a job, never came back on the platform. You probably have a lot of, if You've been on LinkedIn for years, you probably have a lot of dead connections. You actually need to remove those people because you want to make sure that when you first post something on LinkedIn that it gets fed to your small subset of user and people take viral action because then LinkedIn will serve it to more people. So really important to Clean up your following for that reason. And then this step is also just in case, like, something got like missed and if people report it, hide it. LinkedIn can, you know, put the can on the post right away. Third step of the algorithm is super interesting. It's content scoring. And LinkedIn is really looking at two things. It's looking at what is the probability of somebody actually taking viral action on your posts and this being a successful thing that keeps users entertained. Then they're also looking at author stickiness. So like I said, only 6% of people on LinkedIn actually are content creators. And LinkedIn wants to reward content creators. And so they're not only looking to see if people are going to engage on the posts, they want to make sure that you as a content creator are engaging on the platform and staying longer on the platform. So it's judging you on what you're doing after you post. So that's why you shouldn't use scheduling tools, you shouldn't post and ghost. That's why engagement pods do really well on LinkedIn because it forces you to engage on other content right after you post. And so really important is author stickiness. Not many people know this. Then there's viral actions, uh, and, and basically LinkedIn is trying to see as it feeds more people, your posts, how many viral actions are you getting? And viral actions on LinkedIn are weighted. Okay, so a, like, for example, this is, I made these numbers up based on my experience of what actually goes viral. Alike is 1 point, a comment is 2 points, a share is 4 points, a share with a caption is 4.5 points. By far, the most viral thing you can do on LinkedIn is to create a post that gets lots of shares. That's how you go massively viral. That's how I get all my clients to go viral and become influencers on LinkedIn. It's not about comments, it's not about likes, it's about shares. And a lot of people get that wrong. And they don't create shareable content in their content marketing strategy, which will, you know, cut, pull the plug on everything that I'm talking about right now. If you don't have shareable content, right? So you want to make sure that you maximize the amount of shares and viral actions that you get. And also in terms of content scoring, you replying to comments, you engaging on shares, that actually increases the virality of your posts and all the content scoring that goes on on step three. So let's say you did all this successfully. Your post is going viral. You have a thousand likes, maybe 600 shares. Now you are in the bucket of the LinkedIn editorial. People who work at LinkedIn, they're gonna actually start reviewing these posts because they wanna control the conversation. And then if it aligns to LinkedIn's agenda, they're gonna pour gasoline on it and it could go viral for weeks. Okay? And if not, it's gonna stop and you'll have a 3,000, like post or whatever it is.

[A]

Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the des. Watch the full episode. See you in the next one.