World’s No 1 LinkedIn Expert: How To Grow a Personal Brand FAST in 2026

17:21Chris Donnelly:so once you've optimized your profile i think the next stage actually is and this is something that people don't do enough in my opinion is focusing on your network and your relationships so before you even start creating content you can find out so much information that is actually going to inform your strategy moving forwards for example is that some lady came to me the other day and she was like oh i'm trying to find uh sort of key ideas within my area i want to like start building out this linkedin strategy i spoke about finding creators to take inspiration from one because you can see the kind of core topics that are resonating and two because they've built up very specific audiences as well which you can tap into yeah and so when i say like uh your network and your relationships with people i basically just mean becoming a little bit more vocal in comment sections and starting to spot patterns with things like what are the key things that people are actually talking about yeah and if you do this in a very like specific and focused way with your icp instantly you're just getting like flooded with data and information about your icp and you're understanding the exact types of content that they're trying to consume the stuff that they like the you know maybe the opinions that they disagree with what they do agree with and that just informs so much of your strategy i honestly think you can make quite an impression on people just through commenting alone right yeah i think people they kind of like separate like creating content with engagement but i actually think they kind of like come together in a little bit yeah you can become known within a specific space just through commenting and just through like leaving genuinely thoughtful and inspiring comments mainly because one now linkedin is flooded with ai comments yeah and so naturally you're going to stand out to those yes we actually did this when we were like slowly pivoting chris's brand to talk more about search yeah basically found the top um search seo creators and we made sure that we were commenting um with chris's account you know sharing really valuable information um getting involved in certain conversations and this just made him a little bit more of a known voice around that community space because linkedin is very community driven and so if someone who is consuming the same content they're consuming you know seo content all the time and they see chris's name uh in the comments are you know making a really interesting remark here or making a joke about seo here it shows that he really understands the community and instantly you're going to trust him straight away even though you haven't even you know maybe even seen his content already you just know that he's involved within the community and he kind of knows what he's talking about because he's

19:50Josh Sanders:leaving like genuine thoughtful comments basically so i presume there's a thing there around you're also stealing someone's reach there as well in a way or yes you know you're contributing but you're also they've done the hard work their post is is done well already and you're just making sure you you land and you're present in front of all the people that follow them so how do you do that is there a system there because i'm familiar in the past with you know there's a group chat and we all comment on each other as soon as we post um i'm familiar also with like setting notifications on certain people so that when they post something i'm the first to comment and ironically george mac who's a great creator i noticed he's one of the first people to comment on a lot of chris's posts so do you recommend the system there like yeah actually kind of make sure you do that or is it just like by chance that you log on and you just make you you comment on five things at a time

20:48Chris Donnelly:or yeah you project you completely um systemize it so the easiest approach is just the notifications if you block out all the other notifications like post uh you know like comments and likes on your own post and you just have the creator uh notifications you can use that another approach is like having all of like creators in like a sheet with the time that they're posting as well you can just go through and make sure that you're you know one of the first people to comment yeah what you were saying with kind of like stealing the reach of other creators we call it like piggybacking on their audience yeah and so you're right if you're nice and early on that and you leave like a genuinely strong comment yeah and you can make quite an impact um which is which is pretty good we also have like different types of comments that you can make as well so we have like the entertaining slash joke slash meme comment we have like the storytelling comment which is like i think actually really nicely supported by an image as well and you have like the cruncharian take which is like where you go against a common belief or you know the status quo essentially yeah there are multiple different approaches that you can take and i think doing all of them really cements you as a voice within the community that deeply just understands industry as a whole so yeah it's it's completely systemizable you can also do it with you know if you've got like a VA for example I think that's another interesting piece that that people uh typically are usually against is you know having someone comment as you yeah it makes a lot of sense if you are a founder who has multiple different businesses or you're just someone that's really low on time yeah to train up a VA uh to know exactly how you talk your exact opinions and essentially comment as you people often get offended and like oh why is it not you but like if you think about it you know you think of alex homo's you steven bartlett like they're not in the comment sections themselves they've got so many other things on yeah they've got a social manager exactly exactly and as long as the people who are doing the content for you like know you inside out yeah i think it's it's very worthwhile for a lot of entrepreneurs we do recommend commenting a lot as yourself first i think that's a great way of really understanding the community yeah just getting very clear on your icp and the types of content that they kind of consume we're very uh systemizable with chris's brand whereas like he will do a certain thing for a certain period of time and then he will train people to do that thing at a time and it's just like a whole system

23:03Josh Sanders:is there a set amount of comments you're doing each week or is it like a certain number of people that you always comment on their stuff like what's what would you recommend to me there if i'm going to say to jonas i want you to do 10 a week or i want you to respond to everything someone these five posts is is what's the best so the first thing we say is is always respond to

23:24Chris Donnelly:audience that's like number one key thing yeah obviously on your own posts like it sounds so obvious but a lot of people will ignore it they'll post and then they'll just go off the platform yeah so we will always engage with the audience we'll try and provoke better conversation there and then when we're going with like other creators we are quite systemized with it within it where we you know we'll comment on certain people's um posts just because they're very involved within a certain community and so um yeah we will like make sure that we're around and we're active within that space but then i also think it's really important to comment on new creators as well we actually have a system um that we recommend within the career accelerator which is 30 30 30 10.

24:05Chris Donnelly:so 30 of your comments should go towards larger creators and the sole purpose of that is to piggyback from that audience. More people to kind of take their views and get people to recognize you from that. The second one is people within your industry. So these key voices, they may not necessarily be massive creators, but they're people that have a really strong following. Yeah. And a really strong audience who are directly related to the kind of audience that you're going after. The third one is your ICP. Okay. So as I said, if you're within that network, you're within the comments, you can really get a good understanding of who your ICP is.

24:39Chris Donnelly:That's a great idea, actually. And yeah, and if they're creating content, and this might be a little bit tricky, some people, well, the high majority of people won't actually be creating content. Yeah. And so you have to get quite creative on how you can start engaging with them. One strategy might be they may not be creating content, but their company is creating content. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of companies internally are like, oh, hey, guys, can you support the company page? And so if you become pretty active on there, you're kind of cementing yourself within that team already. So they already know who you are from that, which I think is a pretty good approach.

25:10Chris Donnelly:colleagues as well might be an interesting approach so they may not be creating content but their colleagues might be creating content yeah and therefore you can kind of go on start engaging with that if they are someone within a similar division they will probably be talking about similar things and again you just become known um within your sort of icp audience there which is great and then the 10 is for traditional colleagues friends you know people that you want to get and support within the journey of posting content because it is difficult yeah you know it's

25:39Josh Sanders:great to get support from your friends yeah that makes sense so i've got my comment system down that sounds really good and that sounds easy and achievable then do i start looking looking at creating yes yes okay give us the gold here like how do we get to three million followers very

25:56Chris Donnelly:quickly okay so if the goal is pure growth which is what our goal essentially was when i joined chris you have to think about okay what is the type of content that is going to drive as much follower growth as possible yeah so when i first joined chris he was very good at going viral he was very good at saying specific things that just resonated with a mass audience and so his posts were generating in the time like hundreds of thousands of likes which on linkedin was like unheard of back in the day yeah it's actually very hard to do that now but two years ago it was doable but But it wasn't necessarily converting into followers because people would see on the feed and they'd be like, oh yeah, I relate to that.

26:37Chris Donnelly:I'm going to like it. Maybe drop a comment and then scroll on. So the goal when I joined was how can we increase the follower conversion significantly? How can we effectively become the fastest growing creator in the world? And to do that, you have to kind of like break down the psychology of someone using LinkedIn and why they would actually follow you in the first place. And the majority of that is through educational depth, like high in-depth content. basically so content that makes you go wow like this has taught me something significantly interesting this will benefit me i think another key thing as well is making it super actionable if you can create something where someone can effectively do a certain thing and within minutes get a you know a little bit of a result from it instantly they're like wow okay this person has taught me this i've done this it's worked and now i want to like follow them i want to learn more about this sort of thing.

27:27Chris Donnelly:Yeah, if you understand why people will follow you on the first place, then that's a pretty good starting point.

27:33Josh Sanders:So how do we engineer our posts to drive those conversions to followers and people who take action? Is that like monitoring per post, what drove the most follows? I heard Chris also talking about how you would look at different creators and every day at like 9am, he would in the morning just have a look at what their follower account was yes and he'd notice okay well this person here they're growing really fast this person here isn't growing so fast so what is it that they're doing yes is there some some tactics there that that work absolutely absolutely yeah you you've definitely done your research so

28:13Chris Donnelly:i love that when i first started we were um very manual with it because there wasn't any tools

28:18Josh Sanders:about that could actually do this sort of thing and so you're right we would literally track

28:22Chris Donnelly:we had certain creators that we knew um would have a similar audience to chris and they were growing on linkedin and we're like okay you know which specific posts which specific topics are they talking about but people are like wow this is interesting enough to me for um to drop a follow basically another thing as as well is uh and this is specifically on linkedin is formats so So the algorithm as it is right now is really focused on dwell time, like a lot of social media platforms and carousels and cheat sheets. Things that go really deep on a certain subject is the thing that makes people stop, spend time, actually try and figure out and learn about what you're trying to tell them.

29:07Chris Donnelly:And that dwell time is a good signal to the algorithm and therefore pushes out to more people as well. So I think the reason that we grew so quickly, one, was because we were tracking, you know, the best creators, what sort of topics within Chris's content pillars that would grow his account. That was the first thing. And the second thing was we were the fastest to adapt formats. so there's multiple examples here where we would like and this would come just specifically from spending time on linkedin we would find uh we would try and find outliers from creators who would have you know smaller accounts or small smaller followings and they would share something in a certain format that has like disproportionate growth in comparison to something else and so one of the first things when i joined him was carousels carousels like kind of just come out at the time and there were things that were driving like massive massive follower growth so we were like okay we'll go from these like single images that he was doing already and we'll start going into carousels that was the first thing it's really random but there was um a time where linkedin uh just created like a link shortener and so people who were using this like link shortener or who were sharing links within their posts were going like insanely insanely viral um and this i think was fascinating because a lot of people were quite slow to jump on it yeah because a lot of the LinkedIn gurus were saying like, you shouldn't have links in your post.

30:29Chris Donnelly:You shouldn't be going, taking people off platform. And so a lot of people were quite apprehensive when it came out. Whereas we were like straight on it. We were like, okay, we've seen it have disproportionate growth for a smaller creator. How can we jump on this? How can we maximize and capitalize on this? And so we did, it's funny, I think Chris spotted it whilst he was at like a care show for Lottie. Like sent me the post and he was like, hey, let's jump on this straight away. You know, let's blend in with our own content. And we did so. And that post, I think, drove like something between like eight to 10 ,000 followers.

31:00Josh Sanders:Wow.

31:01Chris Donnelly:Just from one post. Wow. And it was like quite a simple post. It's quite a broad post. I think it was like seven TED Talks in seven days or something like that. But because it was using this new format that LinkedIn were like kind of pushing at the time to get people to use it a little bit more, it drove like significant outcomes. one of the main things within our approach because we were so focused on that follower growth was if we see something working we're going to double down on it and go very very hard on it and so for that week instead of being like oh you know maybe we should do an image post here we were like nope we know this works we're going to double down on it pretty much every single post is going to have links we're going to obviously change the topics up so it doesn't get really like repeated and boring but we're going to use the same format and this drove like significant significant growth so when i joined he was at 108 000 um we set a goal of like 250 000 by the end of the year which was three months and i remember seeing that goal and being like wow that is ambitious yeah that's going to be difficult but because we found these these small little format changes we managed to go from 108 000 to 350 000 within three months that's crazy that's insane it was quite mental to the point where it like surprised both of us we you know we were very much um consuming like we were very much on the platform for for a lot of time um but when we were doing it and we were seeing the days like we'd have some days genuinely but we'd do like 15 000 followers in like one day wow which like on linkedin was completely unheard of yeah it just kind of like skyrocketed uh chris's account and i remember those targets it was like 250 000 by the end of the year 500 000 by um the year after and then 750 ,000 by like 18 months within six months we were at 750 ,000 which was absolutely crazy yeah it was mind-blowing by that point we uh decided that hey like we're pretty good at this um you know maybe we can start like coaching people and that was when the whole education business idea came up one of the things i love about this podcast is

33:00Josh Sanders:all the actionable frameworks and strategies that my guests give me so if you want a copy of everything Josh has talked about so that you can implement it for yourself and your business, then you can get a copy at the link in the description. I really hope you enjoy it and I'm sure you will get value from it. Yeah, so in all of those posts and I guess in my posts if I'm creating, are there call to actions in those posts that are driving those followers or are people just really enjoying the content, the carousel, the image, the written text and going, yeah, I'm going to follow for more? or do you actually encourage people with a clear cta to subscribe and follow for more yes yeah it

33:40Chris Donnelly:sounds really obvious but like the easiest way to convert someone into a follower is simply reminding them to follow your account it's hilarious like people will see it on you know big creators accounts well they're always asking for a follow and all that but it's just a simple reminder because you know you may be reaching like different audiences and if they come on your post they read it they get value from it and it's like oh you know follow me and click on your name you can obviously tag yourself on LinkedIn click your name they go on your account and they can follow you and it's just so easy for them it makes it like super frictionless and it's just an obvious way of asking people to follow yeah I think that's like one of the main ways but I think the format how you represent the information and we actually have like a system for how to effectively write the the perfect post that's going to convert followers as well yeah following

34:28Josh Sanders:that system is important as well okay so let's get into that system but i'm just looking at a couple of posts and i can see how you guys have mastered it because it seemed when you see these posts it's so obvious it's so well optimized yeah what does the perfect post look like the first

34:47Chris Donnelly:thing is having an idea that is pre-validated as i mentioned so something that has worked well before either for a smaller creator and it's performed disproportionately either for yourself previously as well like repurposing that idea or for a big creator and even for the big creator it's like kind of an outlier within their current posts and so it's understanding within your industry within you know an area which your business is focused in which pieces of content which ideas which topics are going to drive the most followers that's the first part like starting within the ideation stage something that a lot of people often miss they will like try and really focus it on them and their business and i guess create for themselves like almost like strict their ego a little bit and like make it very personalized yeah um whereas we're constantly like it should be focused on your audience you should be providing education and value to your audience making sure it's actionable and so forth so that's the first stage like the idea The second part is then how can we show that idea in a way that is super actionable and people can share it with loads of other people.

35:59Chris Donnelly:So we will typically start with like the image or the carousel, for example. And we make sure that we have topics that have certain breakdowns or frameworks that are actionable. So an example might be a productivity cheat sheet and it has different frameworks like the two minute rule or Pomodoro method. Pomodoro, the Eisenhower matrix. Exactly. So it's having those sort of frameworks where people can use them and apply them and get value from them straight away. And it's visualizing that information so it stands out on the feed. Again, that's another underrated thing. People will not invest in the design and not invest in how they represent the information as well.

36:41Chris Donnelly:it's just such an easy way to stand out if you have beautifully designed cheat sheets or carousels it's just so much easier for people to like stop when they're scrolling yeah there's

36:50Josh Sanders:one here master problem solving use these seven mental models to make better decisions and then there's seven and they've all laid out beautifully with graphics is chris coming up with this or like you're finding you just said you're you're fine looking at smaller creators looking it was outperformed for them what does that process look like for coming up with these topics is it all based on okay we want to talk about entrepreneurship business marketing and ai so let's have a look for posts that are doing well there and then we take those ideas and then

37:26Chris Donnelly:make our own version of it yes completely completely yeah so chris specifically at the start was like so involved with like ideation and like finding these certain posts that he thought that he could add more either information on for his own experience and effectively improve that type of content as well um that's another thing i would say if you're taking like a pre-validated idea it's looking at that idea seeing why it's done well and then going okay how can i make this even better like if this is the starting point how can i make it so good that like there is no reason why people wouldn't follow me for this type of content yes um and so yeah he was very involved in the ideation process we work together so so closely um creating this content for literally like 18 months and to the point where like i i'm like basically in his head when it comes to content like i can see the exact things that he likes the exact topics that he likes talking about

38:21Josh Sanders:but how do i find my pre-validated ideas because then do i am i literally looking at other people's pages and scrolling through and yes like looking at the top people in my niche or people in my issue i find interesting and just scrolling through and going okay this one got 500 likes versus this one only got 10 so there must be something here and i add that one to my list of ideas yes yeah

38:44Chris Donnelly:exactly so we have what we call a creator inspiration bank where we have like basically across all of your pillars your content pillars you have just a list of creators who are like growing within that niche right and it doesn't necessarily mean they have to be growing as in a follower growth it could be they're getting like a lot of engagement you can see that they've got a nice community there and just having like a super tight list of people for each content pillar that's like a really easy way to get inspiration quickly you can actually like custom create a feed on linkedin as well um it's like an old school tactic that i'm not sure how many people know about it but you can basically if you go on the search i'm going to try and do this off the top of my head um you go on the search you click enter there's like the post settings you can then in the

39:30Josh Sanders:post settings uh like type a certain creator uh-huh you can there like posts will come up in a in a

39:35Chris Donnelly:select feed and you can do that for multiple creators so if you have this creator inspiration bank you can have you know maybe like 10 people um you put all their names in and you have like a legit feed from just those 10 creators and then you just bookmark that feed and it refreshes each time so you can come back to it time and time again nice and it's just a super easy way where you can just get like inspiration um you know from the creators that you want to take inspiration

39:59Josh Sanders:from basically would that be like at the start of the month or the start of the week that i'm running

40:05Chris Donnelly:that process yeah so we we recommend you do it within like the early phases so you've got your profile optimized you've then you know become a little bit more of a voice within the community space then the next stage is okay trying to find these people who are producing really high value content trying to get those ideas and those topics in and you should have it to the point where you're consuming that type of content so much that you and you're talking to the icp within the comment section that you have a very good idea even off the top of your head of what sort of ideas will resonate with the audience that you're trying to attract and once you have that in place that's when you can start thinking okay i know this topic is is really important i know a of people are talking about it how can i create a beautiful cheat sheet or a carousel that communicates genuine value that hits that topic area interesting interesting so what would be a good example of that for you guys for chris specifically i think this is really interesting because we had already built like an audience that was focused on business building ai leadership and culture i think the pivot into search was was fascinating for us and so we essentially took that strategy as like starting from from fresh again that whole pivot and so we got deeply involved within the seo community we found the top seo creators who had posts that were performing disproportionately that were growing that had a really tightly engaged audience on them and we just essentially saw the post that they were creating applied extra information extra resources chris's own knowledge about building this business as well and we would aim to like improve within those certain topic areas and release content that was within like a similar format so a good example would be old seo versus new seo that format is something that works across like multiple different niches as well it's so obvious but like it's just a clear comparison of like this is what it used to be like this is what it is now because i think people see that and it's like oh they feel updated it positions you as someone that's on the verge of like the technology of understanding what's happening within the industry and we would essentially present that information like old seo versus new seo and sort of build that community around the seo space that is so interesting i mean

42:24Josh Sanders:it's so true what you say as well because i'm already i feel like i'm going through this process with you now just by looking at chris's page looking at someone who's obviously successful on linkedin in a not too dissimilar niche i can see he's going much broader with the topics he's doing but just looking at the formats i mean so much it's the same with all content right it's just the people who are prepared to go further and deeper are the ones who win like the person who does the surface level gets up linkedin does the surface level post and presses send they get a certain outcome whereas the person who goes away and spends like three hours making the cheat sheet gets a certain type of outcome and we had caleb who um built the personal brand of alex and layla hormosi on the other week and you know on youtube is where they're focusing but they create created this six hour video yes i saw that it's done like 600 000 views it's driven 20 000 leads to their business but they were just prepared using the hormosi method of where everyone else would stop that's where we're going to start yes yeah but i love the formats here because there's a format here which is free report q3 25 25 algorithm report yes then there's the kind of cheat sheets then there's the comparisons like okr's these kpis what are the other formats that you really like i've also there's like the ai image driven carousel like what are the other formats that do well here and and what are some of the tactics there because in some of these you're saying repost

43:57Chris Donnelly:this some of these you're saying comment this yes there's so much to cover yeah as as caleb says it really is about how deep you go and we make that so clear within our accelerator it's like this will be the hardest 10 weeks like this is not easy you know like you're against uh people who have content teams people who really want to do this strategically and therefore you have to go so deep and treat it like a science in terms of formats you have the classic formats i call them the classic formats like cheat sheets carousels image based posts text posts you then have micro formats within each format so a classic one is the comparison the old versus new you can have that on a cheat sheet and a carousel so you can like split it down the middle another one might be one particular thing versus another particular thing versus another particular thing just showing like the contrast between each points we've done that with like llms for example like chat gpt versus claude versus gemini that's another micro format one that we're seeing particularly do well recently and this is like from the q3 algorithm report is these storytelling carousels which is something we haven't necessarily seen before so a really great example of this is someone uh sahil bloom yeah he did some really nice like storytelling carousels where they're not necessarily driven on like educational depth they're just essentially they're educating you in a way that's wrapped around a story so it might be like the empty boat mindset or the surfers mindset yeah so like a concept that you can explain through a story and takes people on a journey that's something that's performing pretty well at the minute but yeah there are so many different areas within each format that you can kind of like tweak and optimize in regards to the different call to actions this is based on goals another format that is particularly working very well on linkedin right now is these lead magnet posts um which is super obvious you know you provide an insane amount of value to people they're going to want it and they're therefore going to want to be more involved within whatever your brand is with those posts the the sheer goal is to get people subscribed to whatever it is you're trying to attract them to so it might be a newsletter it might be a specific segment that you're attracting to so you can you know put them in an email sequence where you can encourage them to do a certain thing like buy a course or whatever it may be and so within these lead magnet posts there's a very specific call to action a very specific we call it like a viral mechanic which is you know comment x and i will give you y basically yes um it's super straightforward but it works because people will then comment that you can then reply and there are multiple different approaches you can do it as well you can either reply with a link to the landing page and you know they can go straight through that way you can also say i'll send you a dm as well but because they're commenting that and you're replying it it just means that you're getting like a lot of comments a lot of engagement on your post which means the post is going to do better in general uh and then it's going to reach more people and then you get more people downloading and more newsletter subscribers as well is that also one of the

46:57Josh Sanders:unique things around linkedin where if someone in my network comments on something quite often i get sharing that i don't think that happens on other platforms yeah that was something that was

47:06Chris Donnelly:very prominent um over the last like two years or like 18 months it's not as effective as it once was yeah but yeah it used to be the case that like if you can drive comments and conversations it will get shown in people's feeds so another like quick tactic as well is like trying to encourage conversation within your comments so we always have like an engagement question something that allows people to talk about themselves um because people do want to talk about themselves they want to share their story they want to share you know what they've been through and so if you can have like a specific question that people are like oh yeah like i'm gonna comment on this and share you know what's happened with me um and then you can provoke that even more by replying and asking another question oh this is really interesting what happened here or you know did you get the results that you wanted blah blah and then you're starting these conversations within your posts and you're getting all of these comments and engagement towards your post and it's naturally going to promote it in comparison to other posts so what

48:07Josh Sanders:would be a good example of that like on this post eight strategy frameworks for fortune 500

48:14Chris Donnelly:companies would i do it on that type of post yes if you scroll down you should see an engagement

48:18Josh Sanders:question on there oh yeah which framework can you see yourself implementing today drop a comment interesting yeah so there there's quite a few ctas there's a comment and then there is a cta to the newsletter and then there's a repost as well yes yeah so there's like multiple ctas which i would have thought would have like be uh something not to do yeah but that seems to work for you yeah

48:41Chris Donnelly:yeah yeah we yeah we'll try and keep like a specific focus so for example if one post we're like okay the goal here is to show a certain topic we want to drive people towards the newsletter we're going to expand on that topic within the newsletter we usually have the newsletter is like the main call to action that comes a little bit further up the post um we will always have the engagement question we will always have the repost and follow um call to action just because like it's just so simple but it helps with the growth of the post itself yeah for the most part we will be driving people towards the newsletter as the main one unless it's something that's like a little bit lighter touch you know something that we want to go maybe like more like broader and viral with but not necessarily like really depth and educational then we'll just have like a repost and a follow call to action but for the most part it will be driven towards the newsletter very cool

49:34Josh Sanders:so i really want to get into the funnel and then the business behind this but is there anything else on the content that is really worth knowing or avoiding yeah yeah yeah there's yeah i just

49:47Chris Donnelly:realized as well i said we have the system i took but i spoke about two things and forgot the rest so i'll just break down quite quickly um what people can do so once you have the idea you have the cheat sheet you've created this beautiful thing that stops people on the scroll you then want a really strong hook now hooks are an interesting one on linkedin our general rule is you should be able to like cover your content and people should know exactly just from the first two lines uh what your content is going to be about and so there is character limits as well and by character limits i mean when you write the hook on linkedin it has to see more and most people forget about that yeah they'll like write a hook and then it'll just come off and cut off and that can cause a little bit of friction people are not really interested scroll on and so we try and keep it within the character limit which i think is something like 65 and 40 yeah i think for like one and line two that's the first thing with the hooks itself we have tested multiple different variants we've found that the line paragraph break line is the most effective so some people will do for example line and then two paragraph breaks or some people do three lines but we've just had the line paragraph break line is the most effective there are multiple different variants of hooks that you can use you can use a stat based hook there is like a contrarian hook there is like an open promise hook we've found the ones that have the most effective are those that have numbers in them as well because that serves as a bit of a pattern interrupt so you know there are so many posts that have text on them even just a simple number and we find the more interesting and bizarre number as well the more effective it can be i've

51:23Josh Sanders:studied over 318 842 linkedin posts that sounds like a weird amount of posts yeah yeah i mean

51:30Chris Donnelly:that genuinely that was the data set but um yeah a lot of people would go oh no let's just have like 300 ,000 plus.

51:37Josh Sanders:That looks interesting there, yeah, having all the different numbers. Yeah,

51:40Chris Donnelly:exactly. It just makes it feel more authentic and it just stops you. And that's the whole goal of the hook. You just want to stop people from scrolling. For most posts, and this will depend because you have, you know, different posts serving different purposes, but we will usually start with the hook. We will then have an expansion of the hook, which aims to get into the emotions of your ICP and people consuming the content. So it's kind of like the before stage of what this cheat sheet is going to be about to say for example you are teaching on productivity or habits productivity habits for example you have the hook which you know will be something that will stop the scroll you will then have an expansion of that of like that basically talks about the problems and frustrations of people if they're not feeling productive or like you know maybe it's like talking about like procrastinating and like the effects of that just a very short segment where you're kind of expanding out the goal here is to get people to relate to it in the moment so it's like oh okay i've seen this oh yeah i've had this exact emotion you then go into the bulk of the post which is effectively a summarized version of your image or carousel got it the reason we do this is essentially to strengthen the sort of core education and message that we're delivering you know people are different learners as well you have visual learners that will just check the sheet you have those that just read the text and so we want to make sure that the messaging positioning is clear on those yeah you then have the like dream destination after that so once you've applied this advice these are the good things that will happen to you and then we go into the call to action very nice and that's kind of like the kind of perfect post so to speak another thing to mention as well that it has to be optimized for a scan so we will do short sentences we will do we'll write in lines of one two and three we'll never do paragraph blocks we want to make it so easy for people to read the content we don't want to see a massive paragraph and i can't be bothered to read this and then scroll on yeah so we'll make sure that there's lots of white space it's super easy on the eye and it should feel like you're like reading it internally in your head and it's super easy to just kind of understand and um learn

53:39Josh Sanders:from basically wow i bet you've got in the accelerator you've got like a little map of this out right haven't you whereas that hook expand make them feel heard yes or seen then explain the value of what you're about to to give them and then the call to action because that would

53:56Chris Donnelly:be insanely valuable yes we go insanely deep on it we have like really long modules where we break down all of the science and that's for one particular post as well yeah there are multiple different posts that have different approaches that drive towards a certain outcome as well so yeah this is literally a science at this point like cool well we'll put a breakdown of some of

54:18Josh Sanders:those strategies and frameworks in in our newsletter and and so people can get a copy of that in the link in the description. Did you know that the highest converting call to action in podcasts is the share call to action? It actually beats a lot of the other organic growth tactics that you can deploy. Literally just getting people in your audience to take out WhatsApp and send an episode to someone who could get value from it. So that's exactly what I'm going to do now. I'm going to ask you to take out your phone and if you're getting value from this episode and you think it could help someone that you know, please send it to them or share it with your team or pop it in your team slack channel we'd really appreciate it and thanks if you send it to someone the same on all these platforms is that like these posts and content is not left to chance there's a formula and there's a system and a process yes and when you look at all the ones that have done well they tend to always follow a certain type of system or process and then it's like software you can go in and switch up some of the things over time and see how it changes the performance but yeah it's so so interesting to hear you talk for it you've obviously

55:21Chris Donnelly:study this and been in it for quite a long time so it's super valuable anything else on the perfect post and content that people should be thinking about with hooks as well it's just like a very specific tip for hooks but you want to have things that roll off the tongue easily because you have to remember that when someone's reading a post they're reading it in their head so they've got this internal voice going on and if you say something that's quite difficult to read in your head then naturally it creates that friction with people so we will always try and it sounds really bizarre but we'll think about okay we've got all these different types of like variations of hooks that we'll try what is the easiest to say out loud and we'll just like genuinely just go through and read them out loud and be like oh this is this felt quite nice roll off the tongue easily and

55:59Josh Sanders:so that's like a very small little tweak that you can make yes there's so much to talk about

56:05Chris Donnelly:within like the the content in the perfect post like that's one part of the strategy there's a whole like pyramid whole funnel um as well but that might take ages is that so is that because

56:16Josh Sanders:we basically have some posts which are kind of broader and some posts that are kind of more geared towards conversion?

56:24Chris Donnelly:Yes. Again, this is where most people go wrong. They will think about posting one kind of format and it's usually storytelling and they will just post that repeatedly and repeatedly to try and get them associated with a certain topic. But really, I think a much better approach is having a classic marketing funnel. So you have the top of funnel. The goal is to get broad reach, attention, as many people coming onto your profile as possible, you then have the middle of the funnel this is the the time where you build trust so it's the storytelling it's showing behind the scenes you're going a little bit deeper here and then you have the bottom of funnel as well which is like conversion this is like driving people towards a specific action so this will be the case studies the testimonials um you know clear transformational things that people will want to achieve themselves and therefore want to work with you So we really treat the socials as a whole marketing funnel.

57:16And there are also different areas that you can tune in on as a part of the funnel as well.

57:21Chris Donnelly:So, for example, we have the newsletter, which is a key area for us to build trust. Because on socials, you can only write a certain amount of characters. The newsletter is a perfect space to, you know, really go deep on topics and really like over deliver people. people and so we have like the goal for for Chris obviously is majority growth so we have a lot of top of funnel and then we will aim to bring people towards the newsletter and if they sign up for the newsletter then they're going to get really in-depth insight on AI on search on his kind of core pillars and that's what we use to build trust with people a lot of people will see like socials as like a one-dimensional thing whereas like there are so many different parts that you can use to kind of like take people through that journey from discovering you to buying your product that's

58:04Josh Sanders:Super interesting. Just in terms of tracking performance on the content, what do you track? Are there one or two metrics that are really important to be looking at? Yes. And do you do it per post versus general platform?

58:19Chris Donnelly:Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're super specific with it. The first and most important metric is the repost. The reason being is you want to distribute your content to as many different micro communities on LinkedIn as possible. So that really should inform your whole Tupper Funnel strategy. It's how can I make someone who consumes my content look good by sharing a piece of content?

58:44Josh Sanders:Yeah.

58:45Chris Donnelly:Because we'll have those people, you know, within, you know, colleagues or whatever that will share something. Oh, this is like so useful for me. Like, thanks so much. And that makes them look good. And so it's thinking about how do we create content that is super shareable and makes them look good for sharing. and usually that's things that are you know beautifully designed it's things that are less personal because that's where a lot of people go wrong they go super personal with things and it's

59:07Josh Sanders:like other people can't share that yeah they can't put that in a slack channel exactly exactly someone just had a baby on it simply put in the slack channel whereas like the report on your industry and you share that in the slack channel of your company yeah that's like oh he's always

59:23Chris Donnelly:ahead of the game isn't it exactly is that's so true and like you have to think of it like that and for pretty much every piece of content we will think okay like what will make them look good for sharing this and so the repost metric for us is super important we will usually try and monitor it like previously i think if you had posts that within the first hour we're hitting like a 20 repost rate we were like okay this is going to bang this is going to do very well yeah primarily because you're just getting distributed to all these different communities you know it's driving more attention to your post the second and third most important metrics which are more of a recent thing on LinkedIn and we've actually discovered it more through this this algorithm report is the saves and send as well so I think this has been a feature from LinkedIn for quite some time but it's only recently that you can actually track those now and so again it's it's how can we get someone to save something okay we must go super in depth on something so they save it and they're like okay I want to learn about this later and how can we make it so they want to send it to other people which is kind of the same kind of approach for the repost it's like how can we make it so they look good sending it to someone basically so they're the key kind of metrics to focus on honestly likes views in our eyes not that important unless we're you know trying to get as much attention on a certain post like a partnership post for example we're not necessarily too focused on those i think if you focus on the repost you focus on the saves and the shares they kind of come into play anyway you will generally generate more views yeah if you're

1:00:48Josh Sanders:being shared by multiple different people that is so smart yes it's never been our main focus they're kind of depth metrics as well aren't they like that's that's where you know something's actually hit yeah i mean i can see you know chris has just posted about having a baby it's got a lot of likes which is great but in terms of like the depth there in terms of actually someone being able to take some action learn something build trust yeah share it in a slack channel um it's

1:01:16Chris Donnelly:Probably not there.

1:01:18Josh Sanders:What about the newsletter signups or anything like that? Do you track that per post?

1:01:23Chris Donnelly:Yeah, yeah. So we have custom links that we track with those. They were incredibly effective a year ago. Right. It was one of our primary drivers towards a newsletter. We started the newsletter when I more or less just started working there from scratch. And at the time, because LinkedIn wasn't seen as this distribution channel, we were driving thousands of people simply by just having please subscribe to the newsletter in the call to action wow and it was generally at the point where we grew so quickly and in newsletter subs that the founder of kit nathan barry was like he messaged us and was like what are you guys doing yeah because like i've never seen anything like this i've never seen organic growth like this and so it was incredibly effective now it's not as effective i think as more people have clocked on and started doing it themselves it's it's you know it's kind of oversaturated but it can still work i think if you use like the right approach like i think the goal that we have is like okay we're going super deep on a topic on the newsletter how can we create social posts that lead nicely into that and if it has a natural lead in it usually they get some good growth from it and the obvious one is lead magnet posts like they will drastically increase the subs that you get to your newsletter that's really interesting because how many have you got on the on the newsletter like 250 000 it might be closer to 300 000 but yeah it fluctuates

1:02:42Josh Sanders:Nathan's a client of ours actually as well so it's always it's always interesting I uh we should ask him who's growing fastest at the moment actually that would be interesting yeah yeah

1:02:50Chris Donnelly:for sure I think like the main driver for our newsletter growth now is the creator network yes which I think is like just a genius genius model yeah because when you go to sign up to

1:03:00Josh Sanders:yours it then recommends Ramit uh Sahil um Eric Partake or a few others I think right yes yeah right yeah which which there's some really nice yeah tie in there and overlap between all of you

1:03:12Chris Donnelly:so that's that's that's active i saw a tweet from someone and they were basically just like my newsletter's grown by 2 000 subscribers i have no idea why it was like i didn't you know no none of my content went viral or anything like that but they were just in a creator network with someone who went insanely viral and just drove all that attention to them which is just like fascinating because if you have creators who are primarily focused on growing their newsletter you know maybe they're spending money on ads to drive people in everyone benefits from that like compound effect yeah it's just like such a hack for like getting fast newsletter growth within a specific

1:03:44Josh Sanders:audience that feels like a nice place to move into the funnel and the the product on the back end how did that come to be and and what's what does that look like we had the idea of of the

1:03:57Chris Donnelly:creator accelerated business um primarily because obviously we had all this growth and chris was doing a lot of consulting on the side so he was generally just doing like one-to-one calls with people they were booking in and he would always just be like completely at capacity

1:04:10Josh Sanders:he's like paid calls as well right yeah so yeah it's like was it on his newsletter on the newsletter or something it's like book a slot with me or yeah on the on the linkedin page yeah it was super

1:04:18Chris Donnelly:500 or yeah some pounds or something that was it we put it on and like we were unaware of like at the start how many people were really interested in it and so we were like i will start i know i and it was like$800 or something was his first one. And then it was just like, bang, sold out straight away. And at this point he was traveling and he was away. So he was like, oh my gosh, okay. He did all those calls and then realized, okay, we need to, you know, actually bring price to a point where it reflects demand. And so we like increased it, increased it, increased it. I think at one point he was in like$1 ,500 or like$2 ,000 for a call.

1:04:46Chris Donnelly:Which is mental really.

1:04:47Josh Sanders:And doing a few a week or like opening a few slots a week?

1:04:50Chris Donnelly:Yeah, yeah. So I think he has probably like 15 to 20 slots a week. Wow. And it was just great for him because him and Lou were traveling. it's like the first time that he had a break um from from building businesses and then he was like

1:05:01Josh Sanders:okay that's not bad is it 15 20 grand a week yeah just from doing calls yeah yeah and he's just like

1:05:07Chris Donnelly:in the beach on a beach like somewhere in the bahamas you know chilling um and so the idea came from that and he was like you know can we like scale this and do this with groups and at that point when i first joined he was like i have a habit of making people entrepreneurs which i like laughed at the time but all throughout this journey he's been like oh do you want to do business do you want to do that and then he mentioned this and he was like we can you know create this like group educational product where people will go through an experience at the end they should have their linkedin their personal brand like significantly different driving real attention towards their business and so we did that and i think at this time he was on around like 800 000 followers and so he was like let's find someone to replace you on the content side of things and let's like try and build this business together we launched very quickly um I think we had the idea and within the space of like two months, we were live with the product.

1:05:58Chris Donnelly:We had no idea initially of how many people would join. We had, I think, I think we were going to cap it at 50. And then we like accidentally left like the page still on and we got to like 69 people who had purchased. We had experienced, you know, like people getting results from one-to-one coaching. but we i think drastically underestimated the impact of a group of people all towards like all focused on the same thing and like helping each other within that space and so we created this product based on like a lot of research we found all of the you know products within the space and we were like how can we improve this how can we make this better we wanted to basically create the best product on the market for us we were like okay we can drive a lot of attention um towards accelerator just through organic just through chris's account because he was getting so much attention people interested they wanted to book calls in and so that first one there really wasn't much of a funnel it was literally just organic growth and trusting chris that it would work yeah um and we realized pretty early on if we can get the best proof the best results for people it should be much easier to sell this kind of self in a way and so we bled all of our time and resources into this first program it was literally just me and him yeah at this point we had people helping set up the actual community space itself but it was just me and him coaching

1:07:22Josh Sanders:being really active within the community so is this is this like a it's like a cohort it's like eight weeks or ten weeks ten weeks yeah ten weeks so is there a call each week yeah so we had three

1:07:32Chris Donnelly:calls a week so the way we worked we're like okay we want material to break down all the knowledge that we have that was primarily my goal my goal was like to help like build this product whilst he was doing sales and marketing for it um and so at the time this is when like ai wasn't great with writing either and so it was literally i was just writing down everything from my head into these like 10 modules it took ages man it took like it was like a 30 to 40 page document wow just from like typing wow and so we were like okay this is the launch date we need to get 10 modules for the first one it was just like so scrappy and we were just like i think i'd finished up to module four when we started so i had like up until those weeks to create the further six modules which was just a mad rush um but we got it done and it was probably the hardest i think well i mean for me personally the hardest i've ever worked in my life yeah but it just meant that yeah we had this product we would have three calls a week one would be like an overview of module so you'd go over the key points you should focus on the second one was a race my post which was done with me where people would put their links in and i would just like tweak and be like oh you can do this you can do this you can do this uh we would then have a q a where people could ask any burning question they wanted and we like incentivized things for prizes and things like that as well that's cool yeah basically just meant that people really grew quickly like we we knew that the the method worked we just were unaware of how well it would work in a group environment and we had people genuinely in 10 weeks go from like 20 000 to 100 000 crazy which is just like yeah just like we effectively created like the fastest growing creators um all within different niche spaces and it was just brilliant because then we were like as we were doing this we were like documenting a few things because the results were so good we went straight into the second one i think we were on like week seven of the first one and then we went straight into the second one wow yeah we were marketing it within like week three or week four of the first one and we went straight in and i think the second one was like 99 people again this was primarily driven through organic traffic so linkedin and newsletter um we weren't i didn't even did any paid ads or anything like that the ad side of things and the funnel side of things came much later it's been more of a recent thing what are the price points for these cohorts it was 5 000 for four payments and then 4 500 for one payment now it's 6 500 over four payments no over three payments and i think 5 000 or 5 500 for one payment yeah and so very high ticket um you know it's a lot a lot of money but we have put so much time and effort was the first cohort that much or was it a bit less i think it was a bit less so yeah i think it was 4 500 single and then 5 000 something for over four yeah we kind of were just blown away with with the demand like we wanted to create the best product on the market we wanted the best proof the best evidence we wanted to create it so we could just share the people who had the growth yeah just tag their account and people just go and see yeah it's just like that's that's the

1:10:37Josh Sanders:beauty of it right yeah it's just case studies the same way to grow any business yeah it's case case studies so interesting as well how simple that that is did did you do anything in terms of Is it in like Circle or one of those type online where you can post in the week as well? Yes. Would you give feedback on those posts or it's just on the calls?

1:10:55Chris Donnelly:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had a few channels. We were very much like in the early stages, like feedback driven. So we were like, you know, we have these ideas. What would be the most beneficial channel to you? And it basically turned out to be key channels. Like we have module spaces where you would learn.

1:11:10Josh Sanders:Does each module have like a lesson as well or a template or something? It has a homework. Homework, yeah.

1:11:15Chris Donnelly:yeah so we wanted to make it actionable so we have a module and then we would have an assignment we would have a place where you could post your assignment and we would encourage people to comment on and to you know start conversations around that which just meant that you went from having you know yourself on the strategy to now having hundreds of people just like yeah oh i've

1:11:36Josh Sanders:i've seen this person do this or i've done that it's also easier for them to learn when they see other people's stuff and it's easier to create to critique someone else than to critique your

1:11:46Chris Donnelly:own stuff exactly exactly and me and chris were in these channels like daily providing like advice and like what we would do we then had like a post feedback channel where people would post in and we would give like specific feedback we made it clear that you know it would take a little bit of time to get that that feedback it wasn't going to be like completely straight away yeah but we were like if you put something in that channel and it's due to go out in three days we will give you advice you can tweak it and then you can ship it out to that channel we had a wins channel as well which was my favorite channel because it was just a great place for people to share their progress share you know really exciting things like we've had some insane insane results that like still blows my mind and then we have a few other channels like tools and resources like templates and things like that but we wanted to create maybe like five or six core spaces where people could have conversations where people could find information really easily yeah that was kind of like the core

1:12:37Josh Sanders:offer of our product basically how many years have you had that live now 18 months started in july of last year are there any key lessons like if someone's listening to this and they are thinking okay yeah i've got an audience or i'm going to grow an audience around my expertise and i think i could probably create a product that sells itself and is delivered in a cohort style environment what would be kind of your key recommendations to them is an interesting one because i think

1:13:09Chris Donnelly:we were in a very rare situation with chris he is insanely credible already he'd already exited a business for 25 million dollars like he already had this proof that he was an incredible entrepreneur so naturally we had a lot of trust with him in built already which meant that even though we were optimized for growth we still had a lot of people that were like i still you know trust what he says he also made a very good impact on video as well like very charismatic in events and things like that yeah and so we had like a kind of perfect situation there if i was someone watching and i was like okay i'm trying to build an audience and then drive them towards a certain product whether it be a cohort or a you know digital product for example i would focus a lot more on funnels i would focus on developing a relationship over time you want to go really deep on educational content to show that you're an expert within that sort of area you want to share your journey and your experience within that content as well and then you want multiple different touch points so you know you want to take people through a newsletter one simple thing that you can do is on the end of your newsletter just having like a thank you quiz super simple offer something that they get for filling in the quiz so it might be like get this free playbook on how to go on linkedin they then fill in the quiz you then have a lot of data on the type of people that are subscribing to your newsletter and that's when you can start to really segment your audience and get a little bit more specific and personalized within your approach so i would have um like broader content mixed in with like trust building driving people towards this newsletter i would then really focus on how can i get as much data from them being on this page as possible and then once you have the data that's when you can go okay maybe i have i don't know 100 people who are earning more than 20 000 that's interesting if that's like the most popular audience out of the quiz so say you have a question that's like how much you're making monthly within your business you know zero to five hundred dollars a thousand to five thousand dollars 10k plus for example when you find okay the person that's coming on my newsletter is someone that is making more than 10k instantly you're like i can have higher ticket product here and that informs a little bit more of that strategy if you get really specific on the questions you can really figure out key things like what are the core pain points and frustrations they're having within your particular space so for us it might be like i'm really struggling with time to post on linkedin i don't have a strategy you know all these core sort of pain points and it just means that you can then once these people are segmented you can throw email sequences together that aim to solve that core pain point so if it's for example i don't have time we will do a three to five sequence that's like okay this is how you start freeing up your time this is an approach that you know will take less of your time and you can really kind of like handle their objections before them even like reaching out to you doing that will just significantly build trust and it will just make them far more likely to want to buy something from you because they've got all of this information for free you know they've seen your social content they've got that for free they've then got this really tailored and personalized sequence which has helped them they've got that for free and then it's like it's almost a no-brainer to go with the page because it's like if the free product is this good how good is the paid product if you do it in that approach and as long as you create a product that is genuinely the best within your industry i'm a big believer in quality like i really think that a lot of creators will be like oh i'm just gonna try and monetize my audience let me just throw up a course on this without actually doing a research phase of like these are all the courses these are all the positioning of the courses how can i make mine levels above every other single product because at the end of the day like people are gonna want to sign up for the thing that achieves the best results for them yeah and that's what we did with the accelerator we were like if we can see the the closest or the best linkedin based cohort and just 10x the results of that it's a no-brainer to choose us over there it's because it's just better results that's super

1:17:04Josh Sanders:interesting so in terms of your list and how you market the program do you only send those email sequences to certain segments or does everyone get it yeah because that was what i was interested in in signing up to the newsletter it's like am i going to get this weekly newsletter from chris at what point is is there going to be some kind of sales sequence does everyone get a sales sequence or is it only certain people who click on certain things or as i said because it

1:17:32Chris Donnelly:was just us two building this business we're very much based like we're a very small team and we just want to the goal is to scale the business using as little as chris's time as possible and so we didn't actually have these like segmentation funnels set up so what we were doing was um selling to the general newsletter now we put so much time into the newsletter like a lot of research like really making sure that it's like the best quality possible our kind of thing is through most of the year you will get free newsletter that drives significant value to you for free then we would do the odd mention within the newsletter itself the general one being like hey uh if you're interested in creative stuff you know we've got this next cohort out these are the results that we got for people if you want to join go ahead and click this link but now as we're like trying to build and scale it we have far more segmented emails so we will probably be selling less to the general newsletter because when you do sell unfortunately you get a mass um you know unsub kind of event going on so yeah we will be trying to protect the integrity of that and we are far more focused now on driving people towards a specific wait list and having these key segment areas where we will be creating personalized sequence to drive them towards

1:18:43Josh Sanders:the accelerator interesting so you would send a newsletter and it would say if you're interested in this join this wait list and then the people who join that they get a bit more of a targeted sequence on on that because they're obviously interested in it yeah exactly exactly so i think

1:18:59Chris Donnelly:right now we have our current like followers you put in your um name your email and then we have like a segment thing that says um hey we've got the create accelerator coming out in january it's going to be our biggest discount ever if you're interested click yes they click yes they get tagged and they're in that wait list area and then we can warn that audience up as well a key part of our strategy has been webinars yes so you have this like is it weekly webinar yes yeah so when we're in like a sales cycle it'll be um usually six to eight webinars and again this is like we really try and provide as much value in these in these webinars as possible and so yeah we'll go super deep on a topic um and we will try and basically build so much trust from our webinar itself and we've studied like people like russell brunson and things like that where we've seen like the perfect webinar and things like that ours is very much focused on educational content we're like if we get thousands of people into this webinar how can we give them as much value as possible yeah and we will still try and sell them um towards the end of the call and we will say that up front on the call but hey this is you know this is primarily um for people looking to sign up to the creator accelerator but i am just going to give you loads of value you don't have to sign up it's for those that want to take linkedin seriously if you don't want that that's cool i'm going to give this insane amount of value away for free anyway so you're going to get that as well yeah and that's been like a very core part of astrology chris is incredibly charismatic very good on these calls and he just has this like energy which is like super infectious and

1:20:32Josh Sanders:people get excited about it so how do you not give away the source from the accelerator in those or do you because you just don't care so you could probably tell there is so much depth and like it

1:20:44Chris Donnelly:really is like a science and so fortunately we can cover a lot of things and it also depends on the awareness stage of the person coming in as well so a lot of these webinars we'll have in our mine's quite basic information but for 98 of people it's not basic it's like super valuable

1:21:02Josh Sanders:yeah because i guess even explaining the story like i wouldn't if i've just come across your post i would have no idea who chris is or what the hell's going on here exactly and that's we

1:21:13Chris Donnelly:will usually start most webinars with like a brief introduction of who he is the things that he's done as well there is so much we can give away and it's actually at the point now where we're like trying to scale the business more we're trying to provide more free resources to people more leaf magnets and so we just want to give as much away as possible and then we found with the accelerator not only are you going to get this like insane amount of depth and like you know a large amount of educational content module content that you can learn from but the most powerful thing we found is the accountability and is the community and network that you're building from it as well yeah and so when we initially built the product it was like okay the main thing that you're gonna get here's the education you're gonna get that then get the transformation but as we've kind of like done it throughout the last year or so it's been like being in a space with 200 entrepreneurs who are making you know six seven figures is more valuable and if you're all pushing each other to like your very best limits that is so valuable and we've had like relations with people you know go into business together we've had um yeah people like form groups who are like their mastermind groups and they just learn constantly together on different topics and that community is something that i think is is probably one of the biggest reasons why people would join how do you foster

1:22:27Josh Sanders:that do you have like breakout rooms where you get into small groups and like create an

1:22:32Chris Donnelly:accountability group we so we played around with the idea of breakout groups we more focus on getting activity within the community within the circle within the onboarding process of coming onto the cohort, we're very much like, this is for you. You should help people because if you help people, you will go far. Like even for the first results, the people that got the best results were those that were in the community. They were active. They were helping each other. They were like asking questions. And so we very, very much just encourage this like participation very early on and we link it towards the success.

1:23:07Chris Donnelly:And, you know, the more likelihood of your results are going to good if you are active within the space yeah we will also incentivize it and be like we have an award for someone who's like the most engaged within the community which i think is is super powerful because then people are like oh if i'm i can win a legitimate prize here from just helping other people and having that mentality very early on is is something that drives like a really

1:23:31Josh Sanders:beautiful community yeah i i used to work for a cohort business in covid and i think we i think it did over 20 million a year in cohorts well obviously it was the best time ever for it because everyone's at home but that was always one of the things that we found was you would mark it based on the information you're going to get and the master classes you're going to get but actually 50 60 70 percent of the value people got was as soon as they joined it was they realized ah it's the community and the other 5 10 people that i i meet who i then grow with yeah or go on to become friends with on this journey and become lifelong friends, but they don't realize that when they're signing up because they think they're coming for the information.

1:24:13Josh Sanders:I'm excited to share that this podcast is produced by me and my content agency, 7x Content. We create incredible podcasts for world-class brands and creators. So if you'd like to create something like this, or you're thinking about taking your existing show to the next level, then you can reach out to us at the link in the description. I'd love to hear from you. This has been absolutely fascinating. I'm curious if I wanted to get started now what would you recommend the first steps i take in the next 30 60 days would be what's the main goal i think it's driving leads to my business but i'm also interested in you know i do a bit of coaching at the moment but i could see us doing more of that and particularly in the group style or the cohort style i think that could be really interesting we already have interest in that and we don't really do much we don't even talk about it okay so i mean i think you guys

1:25:02Chris Donnelly:have what i've seen anyway like incredible free resources you know from these podcasts you get like lead mallets and things like that i would make those incredibly visible i would set up some sort of funnel based on on the that you probably have it already but if you don't i would set that up i would make sure your profile is optimized i would do as much detailed research on linkedin of your icp as possible i'm active in the spaces they're active in my belief is if you grow even if it's not growth within your icp if it's just general growth i think that's a good strategy just because it's social proof it's like you know you have this number of following you know you're credible within that space and so i would encourage you to grow on linkedin as well and go a little bit broader with certain topics then you can really focus on you've got that growth these new people coming in what key topics can i talk about that are going to make them interested and build trust with them and then i would think about how can i bring them over to the newsletter I think deep platforming is like one of the most important things.

1:25:59Chris Donnelly:Unfortunately, on LinkedIn, you know, you can have a million followers, but still not reach a million people. So having their email is so important. And if you're looking to build like a group coaching offer, I would think about people that you've coached already. That was like a super early quick win we did for like the MVP of the Crow Accelerator. Chris basically messaged all the people that you coach and was like, hey, do you have any friends that would be interested in this sort of thing? Just be honest, share your journey. And if it works, then we can create a nice little group around it.

1:26:26Chris Donnelly:and so i think the first one like the og version was like 10 people some of those people became the fastest growing creators in the world and so it'd be the same thing it'd be like how can i build an mvp where i have a small group of people but i focus so much time and attention into it that they are guaranteed to have the best results out there and then that then becomes a strong part of your marketing for the first approach and you can also that stage is a feedback gathering stage so you want to gather as much feedback as possible on like how would this help with this help like Can I offer feedback in this way?

1:26:54Chris Donnelly:What would be beneficial to you? And then you can build a really clear offer. Once you have a really clear offer and you have the proof there already, it becomes so much easier to market.

1:27:04Josh Sanders:I remember referrals, we used to get at least 30 % of a cohort on that. Our ICPs were so dialed in that people had amazing connections that it was a great fit for as well. A lot of people said that cohort-based programs died after COVID. The world got drunk on them and then they got back to real life and they actually had things to do in the real world. Is your experience that they still work? Yes.

1:27:27Chris Donnelly:I mean, I have a lot of friends within this sort of area. I think we're very isolated as individuals nowadays, I think with social media and so forth. And so I think community is incredibly powerful. And I think the cohort can encourage that. And as long as you get people like within your first couple ones experiencing that, and then they're telling their friends about it, I think it's very hard for you not to get another round of people that are interested because a lot of people crave that connection a lot of people crave you know connection and results and although it is hard work and we are very clear that it will be hard work the results that you will get from it will be will change your life in a certain way and if you have that clear transformation then

1:28:08Josh Sanders:you can get customers in I think the question a lot of people I know will be asking me or shouting at me right now is how do they find their josh so if if someone wants to find their josh to run their linkedin or run their content like how did you hire your replacement uh good question it's

1:28:28Chris Donnelly:not easy unfortunately i wish it was because there are so many different people sharing different types of advice from you know about linkedin it means that there isn't necessarily many trained people on a way that works multiple different industries and so i would personally say the best way of doing it is finding someone that's deeply ambitious learning about it yourself completely so you have a very clear understanding of how it all works and then training that person and spending a lot of time with that person that's what Chris did with me he taught me so much stuff we're working together all the time to the point where you then become like you know exactly what they want to say exactly what kind of content they want to create yeah I would typically try and find ambitious people who are perhaps in current positions that they don't feel like their potential is used and so whether it's like certain like corporate businesses that have a very rigid structure there's no potential for growth I think that's an interesting place to look at certain agencies as well that may be capped at offering certain remuneration to people that might be another interesting place and I also think just like trying to find people on LinkedIn in who have a little bit of an understanding of personal brand is is a good approach because they get the benefit of it and they understand if you have a big enough goal a mission that's super exciting and they can benefit from that journey then it's just such huge incentive to

1:29:52Josh Sanders:join and is there another monetary incentive like are you a business partner of his in the cohort you made it 50 50 is there yes it's not quite 50 50.

1:30:05Chris Donnelly:well first of all within the initial job it was double my salary that i was on and so straight away i was like oh wow awesome but he was very much like yeah he was like very incentive driven so it's like we hit certain milestones then that will be rewarded and i've just been on this journey with him and it's been fun i've loved it i've really loved it so much i've grown myself personally i've learned so much from him i owe him so much and I really appreciate that. Having that incentive there with the growth I think is important. Cool.

1:30:34Josh Sanders:This has been so valuable Josh and I think we'll have to do a second one because it was so valuable but I absolutely loved it and there's so much depth to it that we can get into another time but yeah thanks so much you dropped so much game and yeah loved your energy as well so thanks so much man. Yeah no it's been great fun. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Josh. If you did I think you'll love my conversation with Caleb Ralston the former director of content for Alex and Leila Hormozy. He also worked with Gary Vee. It's an absolute masterclass on building a personal brand. Make sure you're subscribed and go and watch that next.

1:31:06Josh Sanders:I think you're going to love it. Appreciate you and have a great week.