Feb 13, 2019
In this episode we meet Ted
Prodromou, America’s #1 LinkedIn Coach, and talk about perception,
connecting properly with purpose, and standing out
online.
As you will pick up from this
episode, Ted has bounced back from many setbacks, and offers up a
number of immediately actionable tips for super-charging both your
LinkedIn profile, but also your online presence and online
etiquette in general. So get that pen and paper handy, log into
your LinkedIn profile and be prepared to put your best foot
forward!
A special thanks to
Alex Mandossian
for recommending Ted.
You can connect with
Ted Prodromou on
LinkedIn.
You can find Ted's books on Amazon.
Key Quotes from Ted
On the LinkedIn platform as a whole:
- The
last three to six months, LinkedIn has been rolling out updates
like crazy. And they really are pushing it as a content management
platform, content distribution. So you post a video on there now,
and it goes out to first, second and third-level networks.
First-level is people who have accepted invitations with each
other; so when we connected, your network became my second-level
network. And then there’s the third-level network behind that. So
now, content you post isn’t only seen by people you’re directly
connected with. It’s seen by everybody, and it’s pushed out to
Google and Bing now, and all the different other search
engines.
- 83%
of people will look at your LinkedIn profile now before they take a
meeting with you. I’m always harping on telling people, “You need
to complete your profile to make a great first impression!” What
impression does that make of your company if somebody comes to your
website and it's like, horrible looking? Or like a third-grader put
it together or something like that? Same with your LinkedIn
profile.
Profile improvements: Profile picture:
- They've made the images fit better, but with
your cameras today, you can take a great picture. Stand in front of
a blank wall and have somebody take your picture. Don't crop out a
photo of you at a wedding or something or with a busy background.
This is your professional image, people are out there looking at
you.
- Say
you're going to a meeting, you're trying to sell a $20,000 coaching
package to a client. And they just looked at your profile and it's
you half-drunk in a wedding somewhere and you got somebody cropped
out and it's all blurry. And then you come in and say, "My charge
is $20,000." And they go think, “Who is this guy?”
Profile improvements: Professional Headline
- One
of the things, the professional headline they call it, is right
under your name. And by default, LinkedIn takes your current job
title and sticks it in there, but you can edit it to make you stand
out.
- If
you search for an executive coach on LinkedIn, there are literally
millions of people with executive coach in their title. And almost
all of them will have their job title, like executive coach at XYZ
Company. That doesn't make you stand out. People are scrolling on
their phones now, most of the time, so you have one second to get
their attention.
- So I
always use the USP, unique selling proposition. What problem do you
solve and who do you solve it for? Get that into your headline and
they'll click on it and learn more about you. I have the keyword
phrases in there.
- One
of my clients was a financial advisor, so I helped her create it.
It said, "Would you like to retire with the same standard of living
you have now or better?" That just got people's
attention.
- Treat
it like a sales letter, or an article. The headline of the article
or a book. What's going make you pick up a book at the library and
read it? The title. We're all in sales, whether we're working for a
company or not. To get the job, you got to go in and sell
yourself.
Profile improvements: Summary
- Tell
your story. Don't put it in the third person. It's more
conversational and people really get to know you and like you
faster. If you're writing in the third person, it’s pretty
stuffy.
Company Pages
- They
revamped the company pages recently, they've been evolving over a
year. Now they have places you can post your products. They're
called showcase pages so a company like Adobe has lots of different
product lines, so you can create a showcase page for each major
product line and then people can go there and have conversations
about what's going on with that product, like Photoshop. But the
company pages show up in Google search results, so it's a good way
to get your name out there.
Posting Content on LinkedIn
- My
strategy is to post a lot of other people's content, such as other
LinkedIn experts’ from their blogs. And people ask, "Why are you
sharing your competitor's information?" And I reply, "Because I
thought it was a good article and a great tip." I learned this from
Dan Kennedy years and years ago when I was learning marketing, when
I was failing as a coach, he always said, "The pie is big enough
for all of us. You don't need to go after your competitors and
destroy them."
- And
one of my wife's co-workers, her husband came up to her and said,
"Wow, Ted is all over the internet, man, he is just crushing it."
And I'm just laughing because I wrote 20% of the content I'm
sharing and 80% I'm sharing other people's. I've got it all
automated through a programme called Sendible. Just pumping content
out there with my name associated with it. So even if I share an
article from Forbes magazine, people perceive me with Forbes
magazine because they see my name with Forbes. It's all perception.
But consciously, they're thinking, “Oh wow. Ted's really, he's
posting 10 or 12 times a day on social media. He must be really
famous and really know what he's doing.”
- Post
as much as you can, but don't sit there and blast. Sometimes I'll
connect with someone on LinkedIn and I'll see them all of a sudden,
they're posting six or seven times an hour. That's too much. I do
six to ten posts a day on LinkedIn throughout the day. I wrote four
books now so I hired someone to go through the manuscripts and they
created social media posts from excerpts from the books. And then I
have those in these queues in Sendible so that they're just always
going and recycling. Each post comes back about every three or four
months, because I've got so many posts queued up now. But
otherwise, I actually blocked out time to start writing one article
a week.
Writing an engaging LinkedIn Article
- One
really good trick, there's a site called quora.com, and people are
asking questions about everything there. And I have a friend, he
gets all of his LinkedIn consulting from answering questions on
Quora and speaking engagements. And the articles only need to be
about 500 words anyway.
- And
don't make it all like you're perfect. I share a lot of
vulnerabilities, things that have happened to me, big failures in
my life. I share all that, and I send out to my email list, you
wouldn't believe how many people reach out.
Accepting LinkedIn connection requests
- Everyone has all sorts of philosophies about
accepting certain people or should they try to reach out to certain
people. I kind of filter out people if their profile looks not
great or they didn't even put a job title in. I won't accept them
if they don't have a picture. And not to pick on certain people,
but a lot are SEO experts and marketing experts, I don't accept
theirs, because they're just going to try to pitch me something. I
know they're trying to grow a business and stuff but they're not
going to add value to my network. Just think about that. Who are
all these people connected with, would their connections be
valuable to my network?
- If
it's the CEO-level or C-level, a lot of times, they don't really
log into LinkedIn very often. Only 24% of LinkedIn members log in
more than once a month. Now they're almost at 600 million, so
that's still a lot of people that are active on LinkedIn. But with
LinkedIn, if it's the CEO that you're trying to get to, you can
send an InMail to them, but don't just say, "Hey, I want to connect
because I want to work for you." You have to compliment them and
get creative of what's going to get them to accept your invitation.
Open the conversation on other social networks.
- I've
seen a new trend on LinkedIn. I don't know if you're getting this
too. We all have that experience where you connect with people and
say, "Hey, thanks for connecting." And then they try to sell you
something, a long sales pitch. Now they're starting to do that in
the invitation to connect. Like, they're not even waiting to
connect, they're already trying to sell me before I say, "Sure,
I'll be your friend." I can't tell you how many times people ... at
least three times a week, people send me a message. "Hey, do you
need help with your LinkedIn? We are a LinkedIn lead generation
firm." I'll reply and say, "Did you read my profile?" They'll say,
"Yeah, I read my profile." I'll say, "What do I do for a
living?"
Resources mentioned in the episode: