Hala Taha on How You Optimize Content for Explosive Growth EP 496

25:27And I felt this same thing. My brand, before I got into podcasting and the book and everything else, was definitely a business executive whose identity was that of the brands that he was representing. And I remember as I was going down the path to write the book, et cetera, I started to talk to agents and every agent, book agent came to me and said, you don't have a brand. No one thinks of you in the confines of how you want to write this book, everything else. And they were very right as I look back upon it, because at that time, those brands weren't encouraging you to have a personal brand. They wanted you to be an extension of their brand, which benefited them, but did nothing for you personally.

26:17And as I think about it now, I think some companies still do that, but I think the benefits of having a personal brand are so important. Even if you're in a company, if someone is going to do a sales call with you or you want to reach out to someone, they are obviously going to research you. And the more information that you can put in the way that you want to be portrayed, the better it helps with that, a new career decision. So recruitment, other things. My point with all of this background is if a person doesn't understand how to create their own personal brand, how do you suggest that they decide on the core elements?

27:03There's multiple steps to figure out your personal brand. So number one, you need to think about your values, right? Your values are who you are in the worst possible circumstances. So essentially your values are your decision-making compass. When you're feeling emotional, what can you look at to figure out how do I make these decisions? What matters in life most to you? The other thing that you need to think about when you're thinking about your personal brand is who are you actually targeting? What is your audience? Because when it comes to creating content on social media and actually attracting people, you need to actually mirror your audience.

27:39It's not really about you. It's about them. So what is your audience? What is their age? What is their gender? What is their desires, their interests, right? How can you mirror that in your tonality, mirror that in the way that you communicate so you can talk like them and think like them so that you can actually mirror them and attract them to your profile, right? So you need to think about who your audience is and what parts of you and your brand can mirror them in and bring them into your network, right? The next thing that you need to do is consistency, which is consistency in your messaging.

28:13So when it comes to branding, it's really just all about being consistent. If I could come up with one synonym for branding, it would be consistency. So you need to be consistent in your messaging. So that means coming up with four or five points that you repeat over and over again, that people know that's what you represent. That's how you get auto engagement, where people will just share your picture, because they already know what you represent. So for example, for me, it's like you're never too old to learn something new. I always talk about how life is limitless, right? And that you can literally do anything you want, as long as you work hard.

28:48So I've got these messages that I repeat over and over again in a million different ways. Okay. And lastly, you need to figure out how are you going to deliver these messages? What is the mechanism that you're going to deliver these messages. And that really varies from platform to platform and understanding what works on every platform. The other tip I'll give for people who are just starting their personal brand is to do something called a story journal. So this is something that I did when I first started to get asked to go on podcasts. It was really frightening for me because I was always the one on the mic.

29:21I had plenty of time to research and study. And suddenly people wanted to ask about me. And suddenly I had to come up with something good to say all the time to any question that anybody asked me, right? And something that I found really helped was creating a story journal. So basically I sat down and I thought about all the different buckets of my life, childhood, high school, college, my career, starting my podcast. And I thought about all the big milestones and all the stories that I told. So for example, what was I like as a kid? And like, I'm very entrepreneurial. So I have all these stories about how I started all these businesses when I was like four years old.

29:59Right. And then in, in high school, like nine 11 and how that impacted me. And then in, in college with hot 97 and getting fired and all the different stories I told, and I wrote them down and I thought about what is the meaning that I want to share behind these stories? And how do I want to frame these stories later on? I got smarter. Like, how do I actually want to positively frame these stories so that I don't come off as a victim or so that I don't actually hold myself to my past self and think about my past negatively, which is not a good thing. Right. And so having a story journal basically gives you material to then write on social media and share your authentic stories.

30:39And, and really the goal is to tell all these stories. You might only have 20 or 40 stories, but you can tell those stories in a million different ways, right? So having those stories in your pocket, people love stories. They learn from stories. It triggers their own stories and wanting to give feedback or sympathy or whatever it is. So you get lots of engagement on stories. So creating a story journal is also a very effective way to kickstart creating content for your personal brand. I love it. A story journal. That's something that I'm going to have to go back myself and do a better job of. Mm-hmm.

31:13So another thing that comes to mind when you were talking about your own journey into podcasting is a bridge I crossed myself. And similar to you, I looked at Jordan. He was someone I studied heavily. I was studying Lewis Howes, a number of the other people we've talked about. And I found myself going into the trap of instead of being my authentic self, I was trying to be like the host that I had studied. And at first, I didn't even realize I was doing it until I started editing my episodes. And I realized that the way I was asking the questions was in the way like they would ask them. And I came to this conclusion, to the point you're making, that if I really want this show to break out, it needs to have its own lane.

32:02And I also came to the conclusion that people don't go to Jordan's show or your show or Jay Shetty's because Michelle Obama's on it. They might. But the bigger reason is because they like Jay Shetty or they like Jordan or they like you. And so I figured out that if I really wanted this thing to work, I had to be known for something and I had to double down on it and really immerse myself in that lens. So I love that you brought that up because for me, that's what hockey stick my podcast. It sounds like for you, that's what hockey stick your personal brand as well. Once you have all that in the backdrop, how do you utilize different social channels then to expand upon it and get the word out?

32:52Because it seems to me is I'm trying to navigate this, that each one of them is different. each one of them is different and what I would recommend that if you're just starting out you really want to figure out where your target audience is in mass and where you want to focus there's no shortcuts in any of this if you go the shortcut route what you end up do is you end up ruining your profile because you just have to keep like paying for boosting and whatever nothing's actually real and there's just no point to doing any of that fake stuff right so if you have limited resources, if you can't hire like an award-winning social media agency or somebody to actually help you, what you need to do is just figure out where your audience is in mass and focus on that one platform.

33:37So for me, when I started, again, when I started my podcast, I was just working in corporate. I had nothing fancy to my name. I decided that I wasn't even going to post on Instagram. I literally didn't post on Instagram for two years and I only focused on LinkedIn and And I posted every day on LinkedIn. And what happens when you post every day is you start to learn what works and what doesn't work. You start to experiment and realize, oh, on LinkedIn, if I post a picture of myself, it does a lot better than if I post a video. So I'm just going to keep posting pictures because that's what's working.

34:11Oh, LinkedIn came out with this new feature and I know about it because I'm on it every single day. Platforms love to push their new features. So why don't I try to experiment with some of these new features? And if it works, I'll keep doing it. And if it doesn't work, I won't do it the next day. Right. So doing it every single day, really, you get like instant feedback about how things are working. And that's exactly what happened to me on LinkedIn. I really honestly know the algorithm inside out because I posted on it so much. And then I started a business where I started posting for other people.

34:42And so I had all these, aside from my own experiences posting for myself, I knew how to basically run other people's profiles who had totally different circumstances for me. So for example, running Marshall Goldsmith's profile, who had a million followers and zero engagement and was super famous and had all these other things and factors that I didn't have. So figuring out how to resurrect his dead profile, I never had that problem, but I had to re-engineer it for him and figure out how to do it. So then it gave me like a lot of experiences of how to use that specific platform. But back to your question about like, how do I know what platform to focus on?

35:19You need to find your target audience in mass. So marketing, that's like the whole thing with marketing. The last thing you want to do is have a platform where there's few and far between of who you're looking for, because it's going to be harder to build a following, harder to get engagement, right? So you need to really figure out where is your target audience. So for Instagram, it's a highly visual platform. It's mostly like millennials and Gen Z on LinkedIn. It's slightly older, right? Most people are 25 to 54, lots of professionals, lots of entrepreneurs. People have a lot of money. Also primed for sales conversations, right?

35:57So that's a really big difference from LinkedIn and Instagram is on Instagram, people are trying to escape. People want to have fun. They want to look at food and fashion and dancing and news and like escape. Where on LinkedIn, people are trying to learn. People are learning about their solutions. They're using it for work. They're open to having sales conversations because that's the purpose of the platform, right? So if you're an entrepreneur or a corporate professional, a thought leader, you might want to focus on LinkedIn, which still has a hackable platform and organic reach where Instagram is very hard to get organic reach right now.

36:37Well, I agree with everything you said, and I promised the audience we'd talk a little bit more about LinkedIn. So since you brought it up, I am having personally a very difficult time understanding the LinkedIn algorithm. You are much better at this than me. I am finding that very few of my posts, even though I post daily, are going viral. And it really frustrates me because I have tried pictures of myself. I have tried audiograms. I have tried videos of my guests. I have tried just doing quote posts. I have tried taking a post that someone else has done and adding content to it all over the place, and I am still not getting the engagement.

37:21So maybe if someone is like me and they're getting more and more frustrated with it, what am I doing wrong? And how do you optimize your content for better visibility? Can I ask you some questions about your profile? Sure. How many followers do you have on LinkedIn and how long have you been using LinkedIn for? I got in very early. So I've been using it since 2004, 2005. I wasn't heavily on it when I was working. One, because I didn't have time. Two, I really wasn't trying to build a network. So I have at this point about 10 ,000 followers and that has stayed pretty stagnant. It goes up by maybe a handful a week.

38:02Okay. And how much engagement are you getting on your posts right now typically? Probably 10 to 15 people engage on it. Got it. My students that have 10 ,000 followers might get 300 to 400 likes on their posts. And the reason is because you probably have a lot of dead, dormant followers. Okay? If you've been on LinkedIn since 2004, have you ever gone back and potentially removed some of your first connections that you had years ago that may never log on to LinkedIn, might not be active and no longer interested in your content. Have you ever removed any of your 10 ,000 connections? No, I have not.

38:45But surprisingly, at one point, I had many more followers, like 30 or 40 ,000 and LinkedIn. And LinkedIn removed them. Yeah. So LinkedIn has done a lot of the dirty work for us, which is a good thing. A lot of people were sad about that change. But anybody who knows how to go viral on LinkedIn was removing dead profiles and inactive profiles before that. So for example, when that change happened, so many influencers lost 50 ,000, 60 ,000 followers. I lost nothing because that's the game. You've got to remove the dead followers. So I would always do that so that I would go viral. So here's the thing.

39:22I'll explain how the LinkedIn algorithm works, okay? So you put up a post. LinkedIn automatically puts it into filters. These are called spam filters. And LinkedIn's just trying to make sure that you're not putting out something that is inappropriate. So it's gonna put your stuff into three buckets, either spam, low quality, or high quality, okay? So if it goes into spam, you did something wrong. You cursed, you might've put your phone number, your email in the post, nudity, profanity, that's spam. No one's gonna see your content. it's dead. Okay. Low quality is stuff that you might not really be aware of.

40:02LinkedIn doesn't like one big long paragraph. You've got to have paragraph breaks. LinkedIn doesn't like grammar mistakes. You got to make sure you don't have any grammar mistakes. LinkedIn doesn't like, for example, if you talk about a topic that has no keywords that are not on your profile. So like suddenly put out a finance post, but you never wrote about finance and you don't have any finance keywords. LinkedIn doesn't want to show that content to other people because you're not a finance expert, right? So there's also like low quality things that can get you not totally stopped in your visibility in the feed, but like way less visibility in the feed.

40:39And then there's high quality where you've got keywords that match the keywords in your profile. You're talking about topics that you have expertise on. You're utilizing best practices in terms of having proper formatting and you've got meaningful content and things like that. So you are good to go. You have the potential to go viral because you're in the high quality category. Okay. Second step of the algorithm is why you are failing. It is because LinkedIn is basically servicing your content to a small subset of your first connections. And LinkedIn is basically trying to judge if your content is good or not.

41:15And if when you post, you get no initial engagement and what we call the 90 minute golden hour on LinkedIn, the first hour to hour and a half of you posting, you get no engagement because your followers, first connections don't go on LinkedIn or they don't take viral action or they're not interested in your content, then you are going to do bad because LinkedIn is going to think even if your content is good, that it's boring and it's not working. Right. And so one of your things that you want to do on LinkedIn is actually to proactively try to get active, engaging followers, active followers who take viral action on LinkedIn.

41:53Now, let's say you did get a decent amount of engagement. Now you're on to the third step of the algorithm, which is all about content scoring. So essentially, as people engage on your LinkedIn posts, every viral action is counted differently. So it's called weighted viral actions. And this was like an aha moment to me because for a long time, whenever I did engagement rates and I would do it from my clients, we would go viral. And then I would used to report that engagement rate went down. I used to always be like, oh, well, because impressions are really big and we are getting a lot more engagement because people were getting 30 ,000 likes, a hundred thousand likes.

42:32And suddenly their engagement rate was like 0.7 when it used to be 4%. And they would be like, well, our engagement rate is down. And I would always be like, well, it's because impressions are up and engagements did not go as high as impressions. So your engagement rate is down. That's always going to happen. And then it was an aha moment for me when I realized that viral actions are actually weighted. So a like is we assign it at YAP Media. A like is one point. A comment is two points. A long comment is two and a half points. A share is four points. A share with a caption is four and a half points.

43:05If you want to go viral on LinkedIn, by far the number one way is to get as many shares with a caption as possible. So you need to make sure that you're optimizing your content for shares. That's how you actually go viral on LinkedIn because it's considered the highest viral action. If somebody shares your stuff, they're like 70 % more likely to see your content in their feed the next time they log on. Whereas if they only comment, they're like 50 % more likely. If they like it, they're 20 % more likely to see it in their feed. And also if their first connection engages, they're like 20 % more likely if their connection engages to see that notification.

43:43And then same thing, if somebody shares it and you're a first connection with them, you're like 80 % more likely to see that notification that your connection shared that post. So it's like shares are what makes you go viral. Total aha moment, right? So you want to optimize for shares on LinkedIn. The other thing that I'll just say, one more thing that's really important is that DMs are super important. And if you don't have a DM strategy, you do not have the ability to really go viral on LinkedIn. DMs, aside from shares, are really the top performing viral action, even though it doesn't happen in your feed.

44:19If you DM somebody and they DM you back, They're 85 % more likely to see your content the next time they log on. So you need to be continually DMing your first connections. And for example, for you, John, you've got a lot of dormant connections. What I would be doing is actually going on those profiles. If they're inactive, removing them. If they're active, send them a DM that's of value where they'll DM you back so they start seeing your content again. That's called reinvigorating your first connections. So the last step of the algorithm is the fact that LinkedIn is prioritizing professional content.

44:54So LinkedIn is actually interested in pushing their agenda of being known as a professional platform because they compete with Indeed and ZipRecruiter as a hiring platform. So therefore, if you use keywords like jobs, workers, management, entrepreneurship, and you use these career type related words and concepts, LinkedIn is more likely to push your content in the feed. There is a point of what you can do on your own. And LinkedIn has basically turned down the gasoline on what you can do on your own. I used to be able to get all my clients to get like 2 ,000, 3 ,000 likes a post, no matter what.

45:35I hacked the algorithm, no matter what you were getting 2 ,000, 3 ,000 likes a post. And then if we aligned to LinkedIn's editorial agenda and we talked about careers, professionalism, or like point in time events, holidays, anything that LinkedIn was pushing, I could get a 30 ,000 like post, 100 ,000 like posts and go mega viral. LinkedIn actually is what determines. They've got real life editors who are scanning the top posts of the day and they're deciding what they're turning on to be mega viral or not. So that's the other thing you need to know is that if you don't align to LinkedIn's editorial agenda, you're not going to go mega viral.

46:10If you're trying to sell something, you're not going to go mega viral. LinkedIn only wants to push what they want to push in their feed to go super viral. Hopefully that helps. No, that's super interesting. And in some ways sitting here, super intimidating. The other question I have is I've experienced gains and then drops. I started doing a newsletter at first it was pretty popular. And then I stopped getting engagement as more and more people started doing them. So my question comes down to content types, articles versus posts versus videos, et cetera. What is the best to use? Really great question.

46:54There's definitely hot or not features on LinkedIn. They're changing all the time. So back to your newsletter thing, we did a study at Yap Media last year. And for clients who posted newsletters versus not, But the clients who posted newsletters overall did 30 % worse in the feed. And so we recommended for a long time to no longer do newsletters. Now, I have some people like Heather Monahan who are like, holla, my newsletter is rocking. I do her LinkedIn too, but sometimes she'll just do stuff on her own. And she swears her newsletter is working again. So everything's always changing, right? And you always need to reevaluate what's working, what's not working.

47:31I would say right now, by far, the best performing asset are pictures, okay? Okay. Photographs. People really connect to human faces, the whites of your eyes, the whites of your teeth. If you're mirroring the way that your audience looks, like you're dressed really professional or you're in like a, I'm not talking about like a white background headshot. I'm talking about like you sitting at a desk, you want a computer, you want a phone, something that's relatable. A lifestyle photograph with a story that works super well on LinkedIn. And then when it comes to the actual content on LinkedIn, something that I just want to make sure is super clear is that everything on all social media platforms are now really shifting towards interest relevancy and not really engagement and virality.

48:14These platforms more and more don't want you to go viral. They just want to make sure your content is reaching the right people and keeping people on the platform for as long as possible. So a lot of it is based on keywords across all platforms, not just LinkedIn. So you need to think about what are like the four topics that I'm going going to talk about over and over again. What are those keywords? What are those sub keywords and how am I going to infuse that in all of my posts? Right. The other thing that's like new and trending on LinkedIn supposedly is videos. So vertical videos in particular, they just opened up a new part of their feed where they're competing with reels and Tik TOK.

48:50LinkedIn has tried to do this in the past and it hasn't really worked out, but a lot of people are saying they're getting more traction on their videos. It's something that we're testing. Polls. So polls were really hot, like a year and a half ago, then like everybody was doing polls and suddenly LinkedIn was a poll platform and they didn't like that. So then they pulled the plug on polls and they did really bad. Now they're doing good again. Just the thing to think about with polls is that votes are basically likes. So you really want to pay it. You really want to combine your likes and your votes to try to see like how it actually performed and they get a lot of impressions.

49:25So like polls are really easy way to make sure that you post every day because it takes two minutes to just put up a poll and they get a lot of engagement. So those would be like the main ways. I do see some influencers lately, like Alex from Mosey doing like text only posts that are going super viral. So I would say get creative for sure. Stick with the staples, photographs and stories with meaningful content that has keywords. I think that will do a great job for you. And the other things I mentioned are things that are trending as well. I guess the other thing I've been told not to do that I've been trying to is anything that takes them away from LinkedIn.

50:02So don't put links, for instance, in the body of a post. If you're going to put a link like to a podcast episode, do it in the comments below. Is that accurate? That's not a thing anymore. This is something that like last year I was teaching that you can't put an external link. Now LinkedIn has totally change their algorithm. So in general, LinkedIn is more about interest relevancy and keywords than they are virality and going viral. And one of the changes that they've done in all of this is that they're allowing you to promote whatever links that you want in the caption now. And so we see very little difference in performance now.

50:39And so now I'm putting links in almost all of my captions because I'm not getting penalized for it. Okay. Well, I'm glad I asked you because Yeah, it's a big one because it's counterintuitive. I'm sure they're going to change it again. That's the thing. They're always changing things. They are. Well, I wanted to ask you, Hala, about influence science. Are there some psychological principles that you believe are essential for building influence? Oh, yes. This is such a good one. So I'm glad that you brought this up because one of the first books that I want to write is actually about how to use some of these learnings of influence that I've learned from amazing people on my podcast, like Robert Cialdini and Chris Voss and all these things, and how to actually take those strategies and use them online.

51:24So I'll talk about a couple of them. Number one, the law of reciprocity. This is one from Robert Cialdini. So what this basically means is that if you give to somebody and serve somebody, they feel compelled to give something back to you or to buy from you, for example. So on social media, you really want to think about being of service? How can you give? Because then you grow your social capital so you can make an ask so that when you sell a course or you have an offering or whatever, people are going to buy from you because you've just given them so much, right? So you always want to think about like, what is your lead gen tool?

51:59What is the free thing that you're going to give away? What is the best thing that you have that you can give away for free where people will value it so much and then feel like they're obligated to do something back for you, whether that's write your review, support your posts and write comments, buy your course or whatever it is. So law of reciprocity is huge on social media. The other thing that if we're going to talk about Robert Cialdini is like the laws of likability, right? So people like people who are like them, people like people who share shared identities, who ask them questions, and you can use all of these strategies to have super engaging DM and invite campaigns.

52:38One of the things that I mentioned to you earlier, John, is that you really want to, on LinkedIn specifically, you want to be able to recruit people to your profile who take viral action, who will engage on your stuff. And one of the things that you need to do is actually find these people, invite them to your network and get them to like you. So they start accepting your invites and engaging on your stuff. You need to be likable, right? So what does that mean? I'll give you an example. When I started on LinkedIn, I thought that Gary Vee had an audience that I wanted. People were calling me the young female Gary V.

53:12He had a podcast. He talked marketing. He talked motivation. I thought anybody who likes this stuff is going to like mine too. I went on his content, his posts, and I saw anybody who recently liked or commented on his posts, I invited to my network. At the time, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know the impacts of what I was doing. I directionally thought it was right. But I didn't know that in reality, you need people who take viral action and that DMs are the highest viral action and all that. I didn't know any of that stuff that I just taught you guys before. So people who recently liked stuff on Gary V's profile are showing a few things.

53:47A, they take viral action. They like, comment, they share. Okay? So you want to prioritize by that. Who's sharing? Who's commenting? Who's liking? Because the sharers are the goldmine that you want to reach out to because they'll likely share your stuff. They take those kinds of viral action, right? So you want to pull those active people to your profile. The other thing is that they were interested in similar content. So those are two things that told me this is my target audience. I could go deeper and look at their titles and look at where they work and all these other things. But those were two factors that were good enough, right?

54:18And Gary Vee is what I call a lookalike profile. And you can find lots of lookalike profiles. They don't have to be your competitor. It could be anybody who has an audience that you want, okay? You go on their page. Whoever's liking and commenting is your target audience. So then I use the laws of likability to attract them to my page. Hey, I noticed you're also a fan of Gary Vee. I would love to be connected and provide value on your feed. So what am I doing? People like people who are like them. I noticed that you're also a fan of Gary V, right? The other thing I could do is pay somebody a compliment.

54:50I noticed you're also a rockstar female entrepreneur. I'd love to get connected, right? So people love compliments. I could do something else and say, hey, I noticed that you're an expert in the finance space. I'd love your advice on XYZ, right? People love giving advice, especially when they're not celebrities and they don't get asked for advice all the time, right? So using some of these laws of likability, shared identities, hey, I noticed that you also went to NYU. I'd love to connect with you on my feed and provide value. So using these kinds of laws to get people to like you and accept you, the laws of reciprocity, like I mentioned, are just some of the few ways that I use psychology and all the things that I've learned on my podcast on social media.

55:30So I need to go back to LinkedIn just for a second here. Sure. So if you're not paying for one of their tools, it only lets me reach out to a handful of people every single month, and then it shuts me down from sending new DMs. Yeah. So how do you get around that? Yeah. So DMs are unlimited, but invites are not. And this is new, right? again, things are always changing. Now you need to buy premium, which I think is like, I want to say$20 a month, max$40 a month to get unlimited invites or not unlimited invites, more invites. You get 75 a week or something, but DMs are unlimited. So really the game, John, as you become a bigger influencer on LinkedIn is to max, get your max first connections, 30 ,000 connections.

56:18Okay. So for example, right now I have 245 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. I have 30 ,000 first connections. I am constantly removing those first connections and adding new ones that I want to be able to DM. And my team is in the DMs literally 24 hours a day soliciting my first connections. We're doing things like post retargeting. Anytime I do a post, we have an associated retargeting DM that goes along with that post. For example, I have a BetterHelp webinar. If I'm posting about mental health in my BetterHelp webinar, my team, anybody who hasn't gotten a DM in X amount of days is getting a DM inviting them to my webinar.

57:00Even if I already promoted it in the post, they're getting spoon-fed the link in their DMs. Another thing that's going on is we might be going to events and groups, seeing who's signing up for entrepreneurship events or entrepreneurship groups. Hey, I noticed that you're also a fellow entrepreneur. I'd love to invite you to listen to my number one entrepreneurship podcast, Young and Profiting, right? They respond back. Oh my gosh. I love your show. It was so good. Blah, blah, blah. Thank you. Can you copy and paste this as an Apple podcast review? That's how I stay number one in the charts, right?

57:29So we're DMing 24 seven on LinkedIn because DMs are unlimited to your 30 ,000 connections. So it's super important. You're always like pruning those connections, bringing in new ones and continually just like making sure it's people that are engaged with you, want to buy from you. You don't need to DM more than 30 ,000 people if you're just always bringing new people in, if that makes sense. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. And the last thing I wanted to talk to you about is something we haven't really engaged on is you've taken what you've doing with the podcast and you've now grown one of the fastest growing podcast networks.

58:09And one of the things that attracted to me what you're doing is you're building online communities that don't just engage, but are also making purchases, which I think is extremely important. How important is content strategy for fostering a community that trusts and values your offerings? So important because you need to be in your integrity. You need to be trustworthy in order for people to want to actually pay you. So this goes back to my initial thoughts about being of service. I love to just give away free content. Every single month, I put out an hour long webinar that I bust my butt for and actually teach people things for free.

58:55And this creates super fans. This creates trust. This creates the ability for me to then sell on my podcast, sell on my feed, sell my courses, because everybody knows that not only do I sell, but I give a lot of stuff away for free. And people appreciate the fact that I'm not just trying to only just sell to them and that there's options if they can't afford it to learn for free. But guess what? All the people who are learning for free from me, they attend two, three webinars. By the fourth one, they've saved up their money to get the real deal because they know how much value they've gotten. So it's just so important to try to be of service to everyone, whether or not They're going to buy from you, knowing that it's a long game, that if you keep investing in your audience, they will invest in you back.

59:48And then lastly, what techniques have you found to be the most effective in converting your online community members into customers? Good question. So I would say a couple of things that I've alluded to. Number one is content retargeting. So closing the loop. it's not enough to, for example, let's say you're trying to get people to convert to listen to your podcast. It's not enough to just put up a little micro content reel and then expect people to do all the legwork, to go on Google, search the episode, find the episode, even to go to your story and find the link. You need to spoon feed it to them.

1:00:24So anyone who's liking and commenting on your post is basically raising their hand and saying, you have permission to message me. I took the first action. I took a behavioral action. Now you can message me and you won't come off as spammy. You'll come off as helpful. Hey, I noticed that you engaged on my recent post about my latest podcast. I'd love to give you the link to the episode. Here's the link. Let me know your thoughts. Now you're helpful. You're not spammy. They took the first action. So retargeting your posts, closing the loop, making sure that every single post that you have has some sort of retargeting action where you're engaging people in the DMs.

1:00:59That's really important. And number two is webinars. I love, love doing webinars now. So for example, I have an upcoming LinkedIn masterclass coming out in September. And so what I'm going to do leading up to that is put out free content, free webinars, where basically I go on social media. I promote these webinars. I invite people to come. It's a private Zoom webinar. They've got to put their name and their email in order to register. So now I have a couple ways to reach out to them. They're either following me on LinkedIn or Instagram. And now I have their email where I can message them on email as well and try to get them to convert.

1:01:38So I have this webinar and it's usually two hours long. I'm giving away so much free content, real strategies they can learn, engaging people in a two-way manner, staying on and just doing Q &A live so that they can hear my credibility, hear my expertise, understand how I can help them personally. And we get super high conversions. And the thing is, like I said before, people will show up two, three times and that's okay. They're not going to convert necessarily the first time, but I'm creating super fans. I'm creating trust and people who are helping me in other ways. Maybe they can't afford to buy my course, but now they're going to tell their friends about me.

1:02:14Now they're going to listen to my podcast every day. They're going to engage on my social media and help me grow my brand. So things that offer two-way communication are definitely the strongest to sell online. So live streams, webinars, those are the two strongest ways to actually convert people on social media and then DMs, which is another personal way to connect with people. Well, Hala, thank you so much for everything you've discussed today. It was pretty enlightening for me and I'm sure for our listeners as well, because we don't do this type of episode very often. If someone wants to learn more about you and your brand and what you're doing, where's the best place for them to go?

1:02:50Cool. So if anybody wants to learn LinkedIn from me, I have a two-day workshop coming up in September, yapmedia.io slash course. And if you want to get 30 % off, you can use code John. So just John's name, J-O-H-N. You can get 30 % off. If you guys want the podcast, Young and Profiting, I interview the brightest minds in the world. I just had Gary V on the show. I've had people like Alex Tramosi, Seth Godin, amazing people. I unpack their entrepreneurship stories. I really focus on one topic. I love to talk about sales, human behavior, leadership, mental health, all those kinds of things. So if you're an entrepreneur, you'd love my show.

1:03:29And my company is called Yap Media. If you guys want social services or are interested in the podcast network, you can go to yapmedia.com. Interestingly enough, I just released an episode with Gary V myself today. Oh, congrats. There you go. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. It was such an honor to have you. Thanks, John. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Hala Taha. And I wanted to thank Hala and Hannah Clark for the honor and privilege of joining us on Passion Struck. Links to all things Hala will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.

1:04:06Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our Clips channel at Passion Struck Clips. Please go subscribe and join over a quarter million other subscribers. Advertiser or deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Do you want a daily dose of passion struck inspiration? Then follow me at John R. Miles on all the social platforms. And if you want to express your courage muscles in a more meaningful way, then sign up for our weekly courage movement, which you can do by signing up for our weekly newsletter, Live Intentionally, where in every issue, I post a weekly challenge that's based and inspired on the episodes that we did the previous this week.

1:04:44Just go to passionstruck.com to take the challenge. Curious to know if you're an imitator or a vanquisher in the great game of life? Then take the Passion Struck quiz, which consists of just 20 questions and only take about 10 minutes of your time. And it shows you where you are on the continuum to becoming Passion Struck. You can also find it at passionstruck.com. Join me on the next episode of Passion Struck, where I sit down with my friend, Michael McCourt, the CEO of EpiOne and a visionary in the fight against cancer. From his roots in West Berlin to leading groundbreaking innovations in early cancer detection, Michael's journey is one of resilience, personal loss, and unwavering dedication.

1:05:21Discover how his mission to revolutionize cancer diagnostics is making a profound impact in healthcare. This is an episode you don't want to miss. I firmly believe we're at an inflection point in terms of the amount of resources that have gone into cancer research. When I meet young researchers, old researchers, I can see it in their eyes. They're saying, we're starting to figure this out. I was introduced about a year and a half ago to a woman in New York City that had made a discovery that the best way I can explain it to your listeners is that there's a section of the DNA molecule, a section of the genome, that has been forgotten by science.

1:05:59It's a big molecule. And you say, yeah, that part we don't really worry about. And she discovered, it's an epigenetic section of the DNA molecules, maybe the way to say it, that when cells turn cancerous, at the very beginning when it's really stage zero, when cells turn cancerous, that there is a signal. It's not a radio signal, but almost like a signal that starts broadcasting on that part of the DNA molecule that is so strong that if you know what you're looking for, if you don't know what you're looking for, you'll never hear it or you'll never see it. But if you know what you're looking for, you can actually detect it with very standard laboratory equipment.

1:06:33And so when you first hear this, you're like, wow, there's no way. And frankly, that was my reaction. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or inspirational. If you found the content that we shared today with Allah inspirational, then share it with your family and friends. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share it with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become passion strong.