Easiest Way to Grow Your LinkedIn Following as an Entrepreneur (But Should You Do It?)

0:00All right, guys, we're coming to you virtual today. And Neil didn't bring his microphone, so he's going to sound crappy. So it's okay, guys. It's temporary. It won't happen. We're not recording live. Usually we have a microphone. But at least Neil has a nice background. So why don't we get started today, Neil? Here, I'll tell you what. You pick the first one. The easiest way to grow your LinkedIn following is entrepreneur. But the real question is, should you do it? Okay. All right. That's a good one. You started off. So I don't know if you follow Lars Loffer again on LinkedIn. Ex-employee of mine went out on his own.

0:39I've worked with him past being an employee. Great guy. Really smart marketer. Did a lot of affiliate stuff in between. Following like the old PG, you know, Patrick Gavin model. Setting up those sites like online education. Getting tons of traffic. Oh, the education guy? TechSync Ads. TechSync Ads. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he ended up creating some auction. I think texting guys was like an auction based site to buy links. And then from there, he created like online education database and had like online colleges.org or whatever the domain names were ranked them, did lead gen and then sold it to what's the company that owns Bankrate?

1:20I forgot. Red Ventures. I don't know what it was, but the number was public. I think it was like 600 million or something like that. So good for him. but Lars was doing a similar thing. And then his business partner, Corey, used to work for Patrick Gavin. But going through his LinkedIn, I think a lot of people have seen that Ahrefs post, if you're in the SEO space, where he was complaining about like$7 ,000 a month for data from LLMs. And it went viral on LinkedIn. Tim Solo ended up commenting on the cost of data and what Ahrefs is doing. And you're talking about the brand radar thing that Ahrefs is charging for and it's very expensive.

1:58Yeah, so he put a comment on that or a thread on that on LinkedIn or more so a post, went viral. And one that was done really recently that did extremely well was Google posted on their blog how SEO traffic hasn't gone down. And Lars was like, I just read this, so it's catching up. And he's just like, and I'm paraphrasing here, I'm putting words in his mouth, but it's pretty much like this. whoever wrote the blog post let's say their name was mary i'm making it up and he was like you know mary i don't know where like the f you're getting your data from like you know i have access to tons of google analytics and seo sites and everyone's going down like what the heck are you talking about you know you're smoking some crack maybe your employees don't want to tell you the real truth and like posts like that have done really well and the reason i bring up lars as an example is he talked about his linkedin growth in one of his posts and he's had some massive growth and he took six months off and he still had massive growth and his reach is expanding but if you look at the type of post i'm talking about he's just not just speaking the truth but just being direct and really up front and most people probably would never dare to right like honestly would you create a linkedin post calling out google like that well i actually have a thought on this so i'll answer your question but maybe finish your thought and then i'll kind of tell you where i'm steering this yeah so when you think about the type of content he's posting that's doing really well he's taking things that people are thinking but just saying them and most people aren't willing to say what they believe is true, what they believe.

3:45And even though the majority believe that's true, just most people don't have the guts to say it, including me, by the way, right? Like I'm not going to create a post on social media calling out Google or Facebook or any of the other platforms. Why? It hurts you a lot more. Yeah, we generate business from this. Or I'm not going to post on LinkedIn using a cuss word while he can. And I'm not a saint. I've cussed many times in my life. I'm assuming you have as well. I've at least heard you. What are you assuming? You know. Yeah. But I would never do that online. At least now being 40 plus. But even in the last quite a few years, I wouldn't put that stuff online.

4:26And I'm not saying Lars is wrong. He's saying what people believe. But I wouldn't do it because it can hurt my business. And he's just speaking the truth. As a solo entrepreneur, though, which he is, and he probably has a small team or a few contractors that he works with, it's not going to negatively impact him as much as me dealing with enterprises. And I'm not saying I'm right. I'm not saying Lars is right. I love his viewpoint and I love reading his content. So I'm liking it. It's just more so I don't have the guts to say. It's just not for you. It's for me to consume. It's not for me to state those kind of things online.

5:06So I'll tell you what, I was watching, so when I sit on my couch, I watch YouTube. And so I was actually watching, there was a Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. So he had Daniel Priestley, Cody Sanchez, and Alex Hormozzi on there at the same time, right? Those four of them. And I wanted to understand what they're doing on the content side that might have been unique or different, right? So I kind of skipped around and then I got it got to the content side. And then Cody mentioned something about her and her husband. So Cody Sanchez, mutual mutual acquaintance of ours, even say friend. And so she said that if someone doesn't go out and say things that are controversial or kind of go out on a limb that says something that they that they really think, you know, she kind of looks at them and be like, that person's too safe or they're playing it too safe.

5:51Right. I'm paraphrasing here, but basically like she's kind of on guard with that person, right? Because they're not being authentic, right? Now, at the same time, I understand where you're coming from too, because you're trying to protect your business. And you can't say all the things that you want to say, right? Because you have so many different constituents, right? Now, here's what I would say. I message, remember Gaetano? Yeah, he used to work for Yaneve as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I texted him. I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to become the Triple H of LinkedIn. So remember in wrestling and WWE in the 90s, Triple H was like a heel.

6:22He was a really bad guy, right? Everyone hated him. I hated Triple H. You love Stone Cold. You love The Rock, but you hate Triple H, right? And so I posted something last week that I knew would piss a lot of people off, right? So I don't know if you saw it. It was basically like, you don't deserve to be CEO or CMO unless you have 100 ,000 followers. I knew it would piss people off. And then someone wrote it there, dumbest comment on the internet, all these people attacking me. And then one guy posted, this guy was an enterprise lead for Carrot, right? And I just didn't give a crap. I just, I just like kept fanning the flames.

6:51And then, and he posted something. I was like, yeah, and that's why you're not CMO. He's like, well, you're not either, blah, blah, blah. So I just, I just try to get, just try to piss people off more and more. And I got a lot more reach than I usually would get. Right. And then I remember a few months ago, six months ago, I said, harsh reality. Everyone's going back to the office. Right. So when you make a statement, like it's not most people are going back to the office. It's everyone's going back to the office. You're going to fan the flames. and so it's no different than what the clearly people are doing it's very controversial marketing right so my take on it right now when i said when i told guy town i was like maybe i should become the triple h of marketing um and just try to piss people off and rage bait more and more um i'm not really going to do that but i kind of enjoyed that when i when i became the the heel or the villain so but it works your reach is skyrocket yeah and you know what's interesting it's this is a quick thing and there's a quick detour and we can come back to what you're saying but um i actually don't know if you'd agree or disagree with this, but I was talking to our mutual friend Yaniv about it, and they do really well, right, as a company.

7:50I was like, you know, maybe five, 10 years ago, you don't necessarily need to understand at least one of the social channels to have a CMO role. I believe now the world that we're going into, if you're going to be a CMO, you have to at least know how to play the game on one of these channels. Yes, you have to know how to manage a P &L. You have to know how to hire people. You have to know how to fire people. You have to know how to do all these things, right? But I do think you actually need to understand one channel really well. For you and me, it started with SEO. But I think now that the game's moving into organic, the reason why I said 100 ,000 followers isn't because of the followers.

8:21I just really mean that you should at least understand one channel, if not multiple. So when I talked to Yaneve on the phone about it, he was like, at least multiple. So my take is at least one. His is multiple. What is yours? Mine's multiple. I don't think one. And before you even mentioned Yaneve, I was like, I agree you need one, but it can't just be one. It has to be multiple. Because if you look at Facebook, Facebook grew through the email invite flow, right? Dropbox through social media, tweet, and we'll give you more space for free. But back in the day, companies were able to grow into gigantic organizations through one channel.

8:55If you look at today, all these channels are saturated, and any good channel quickly becomes saturated. So you have no choice but to take the omni-channel approach. Now, it doesn't mean you need to be great at every single channel because there's too many channels. not everyone's going to be applicable, but you need to understand a lot of the most major channels. That's one. And you need to understand how marketing platforms in general work. So like, for example, if you're going after AI, just generally speaking, how these AI platforms work or how organic social works, because if a new platform comes around or you want to learn a new another platform that's existing like a Snapchat or Pinterest, a lot of the principles and the frameworks are similar, right?

9:36Like when we create video-based content, it doesn't matter if it's Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. The better the retention, the more views you get. It doesn't matter how many followers. But the fundamental concept and strategy of how to create video that people are intrigued with and want to keep watching, it's the same. And if you don't understand not just the basics, but the platforms, and you're not good at, you know, a handful of them, I just don't think you're going to do well in today's world. And I would say the most important thing as CMO is, you know, most people look at it as like player coach, you need to be able to get your hands ready.

10:15I do think that is very important. but I would say the most important thing if you want to scale fast is you need a CMO who not only understands strategy but knows the people to hire assuming you're trying to grow into a large corporation that just can execute amazingly on every channel that you want to go after like this person, you're just doing Google Ads this person, only Facebook Ads this person, managing only affiliates this person, organic for Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and nothing else, right? Now, this person, AI SEO, this other person, traditional SEO, you just email, right? And when you start piecemealing it like that, and you have role class people who are in charge and don't need to be micromanaged, that's typically when you see the best results.

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13:09And what I think we're both trying to say, what we're both trying to say here is, is if you're a dynamic marketer, you have taste in these different areas. If you're pretty good at each channel, if you don't have taste and you're an old school marketer, you haven't learned these new things, how are you going to know the patterns to detect? Because everything in work is really just pattern recognition, especially in hiring. And so I stand by what I say, and maybe I'll triple H myself more. We'll come back to a post I actually threw up on threads. and there's so many people here calling me an idiot.

13:35Only idiots repeat this nonsense. These people are drinking Kool-Aid. These people sound insufferable. It sounds like a delusional crowd. And I responded, I was like, yeah, some company's doing nine to 10 figures in here. So I suppose these people must all be idiots. So I think I'm just gonna fan the flames more and milk the reach out of it. But yeah. The one thing I agree with you, and I know when you said 100 ,000, you're not actually saying they had to have exactly 100 ,000 followers, but I get the point. You're saying they need to have followers and understand how to grow. So the one thing that's important as a CMO, if you have followers and you have an audience, it makes it that much easier to recruit amazing people in your network is probably bigger.

14:14CMOs that don't have that are not going to grow as fast for organization. Like I'll be very frank here. Both you and I, I know we can execute on marketing, but let's go with a hypothetical that we could not. I guarantee we both have amazing people that we know whether it's independent contractors or just people that we can hire for Facebook ads meta ads, organic on pretty much all major platforms maybe not the snaps and Pinterest as well as actually we probably both have on both of those but we definitely have people on the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the YouTubes all the major channels, email for sure, conversion optimization and these things are super important because if you and I can't do crap as marketers, just hypothetically, I'm not saying we can't, at least we have a role in this.

15:02We like go run. We know you guys will just perform and produce. Yeah. And by the way, this goes into why some of you should figure out multiple channels here and build that network because even though Neil says that 10 % of his revenue is driven from brand, that's attributable revenue. But also I'm like, man, all the amazing people he recruited, like huge, massive. So, and then we realized, but by the way, Neil and I both started as marketers, but in order to do the things that we want to do for the long term, I'll tell you what, Neil, like the majority of my time right now is spent on recruiting.

15:33So, yeah. I don't spend as much time on recruiting. I never actually really did. You're at a different stage, though, too. Yours is marketing, strategy. What else right now? A lot of software and AI. Product? Yeah, a lot of product. I actually spend most of my time on product, more product and engineering than anything else. I'm not actually coding, but if I had to sum it up, it would just be summed up as product. I probably spend like 70 % of my time on product right now. I think what's worth calling out here before we move on to the next topic is you're working, you and I are trying to focus on the highest leverage things.

16:07Highest leverage we're doing right now is recruiting. For you, it actually, I mean, because you have a lot of distribution already in product, you're affecting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people with product, right? And you're going to drive more leads that way. And so you have to constantly be asking yourself when you're waking up in the morning, when you're looking at yourself in the mirror, what is the absolute highest leverage thing, the number one thing I could be working on every single day that will grow the company the most? And that's something that we both try to focus on.

16:31I agree with you. And I do think recruiting is really important. It's just, we have a whole recruiting team that deals with it. Plus, I don't think you like to deal with it either. No, but I do interview the people when it gets close to the end, at least for like the main roles. And it actually really depends what you consider a main role. Like we hired a head of Germany years ago and I never interviewed him. Same with the head of Italy or Spain or most of the countries. Man, that's scary. But at this point, I got a CEO that knows a lot of people in the industry and he's just plucking people that he's already worked with in the past.

17:08Yeah. He has trust established with these people if he's already worked with them. So it's a lot less risky versus you interviewing someone off the street that nobody knows. so dude our head of latem his name is hobby so mike and i funny enough interviewed him at your event i remember yeah okay uh hobby's worked out really well for us yeah pitched a lot of companies really well networked like dude he's in partnerships like with um other publicly traded like ad agencies i'm like oh how do we get this client he's like oh i need someone at ogilvy they kicked over the account to us for seo and i was like ogilvy's owned by a large holding company they must have an SEO division.

17:47And he's like, yeah, they do. But he's just like, because of my relationships, I was able to get them to kick it to us instead of, you know, one of their sister agencies. I was like, all right, we'll take it. I'm not going to complain here. And when I interviewed Javi, not only did he say he could bring revenue, it was a big client. He's just like, you know, he's like, I think I can close you Sony. And this is before we were before he was hired and it ended up coming true it took a few months you made that a big deal i remember that was like hey we better get sony i remember that yeah and then he brought it it took i think two or three months um but what was interesting about javi what really made us hire him was i would probably say 50 the sony thing because i was like dude if this guy's full of it i'm gonna fire him i know that sounds bad um but he was the one who says i'll bring an account i'm like what's the certainty?

18:41He's like, 100%. I was like, okay. He's like, I have strong relationships in that organization. I know what they're looking for. Never tell me 100%. Yeah, because I'll expect it. But the other 50%, which was huge, is Mike G, our CEO, knew Javi, not directly, but indirectly, because one of his team members that he worked with in the past, that he truly respected and was amazing, worked directly with Javi. And that guy's like, hubby's a rock star you can never go wrong with him you should bet on him and you know a lot of our hires come from just our executives who we trust and we don't micromanage and when i say don't micromanage like i don't know what a lot of my executives do on a daily basis but they're good and they just produce results and you just let them go do their thing when those people that are known to be producers vouch for someone and saying you should go hire them i don't really care to interview them like at that point i'm just like how do you know they're good oh i've worked with them for six years in the past and they did all of this stuff all right sounds like those are the people that have worked out almost 100 for us yeah that's good i think also when you're talking to people too not i'm just talking to the crowd it's you have to think about what values are important to you and then hire for those obviously what's important for especially working with you is is your they have to have a bias to action not to be able to figure things out on their own right yeah and they have to be driven ideally if they're working with you they know how to run a pnl in some way, shape, or form, or if they know how to impact the numbers, right?

20:11So I think those things are all important. Okay. Well, the leaders, we make sure they know how to run a P &L. And some of them, we know going into it, they may not be the best, but we have a massive accounting team. So like Javi, for example, he knew how to run a P &L, but he of course could use improvement in that area. But his strong suit or his strong skillset was sales and massive network. So what we'll do is things like a P &L, you can put internal people to help fix that for someone. It's hard to fix the gap of you have strong relationships with clients and you can bring in revenue. That is not that fixable or trainable.

20:54It's much easier to be like, you don't have great P &L experience or you have some. Javi actually wasn't bad at P &L. He wasn't the best though. We coached him and he got great. And if he couldn't, we wouldn't care because he's amazing at revenue generation and managing our team. We'll just go to have the accounting team help him with it and walk him through it every time. Yeah. I think relationships, that type of stuff, sales will be one of the last things to fully get replaced by AI. So it's hard. Hands down. And that is it for today, guys. And we'll see you tomorrow.

21:31Thank you.