Episode 154: 7 Places To Help Inspire Your LinkedIn Content

Bob Woods  00:00

Welcome, everyone to Making Sales Social Live! Brought to you by Social Sales Link. I’m Bob Woods, and I’m joined by the LinkedIn whisperer and fellow LinkedIn and social selling professional Brynne Tillman. What’s up, Brynne? 

Brynne Tillman  00:15

Bob, how are you?

Bob Woods  00:16

Doing really, really well. And today we’re going to be talking about a subject that I love because of my background, and I know that you love it too, content, especially when it comes to LinkedIn and social selling. 

Intro: 

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live! As we share LinkedIn and social selling training strategies and tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live!

Bob Woods  00:48

So content is really important as it’s the main way that helps salespeople, entrepreneurs, business development pros, people like us essentially to attract, teach and, engage and nurture existing connections and potential prospects with the goal of course of converting them to sales conversations. 

In today’s show, we’ll share these seven places where you can get ideas and derive inspiration to develop those content pieces, and will also have an ebook link for you to actually download that stuff as well. But before we get to that, Brynne, what should people look for overall with their content?

Brynne Tillman  01:27

It’s a great question. There’s a lot of things to consider. First of all, what is the goal of your content? If the goal of your content is to start more sales conversations, then we need to attract the right people. Bob and I had a client, it’s probably a year and a half ago now since we’ve had, but it was a financial advisor who started sharing content and got lots and lots of engagement. But then, when we looked at who was engaging, it was other financial advisors because they were sharing content they wanted to share. So as we start to really dive into where to get ideas, keep in mind, we need to share content that our buyers want to consume. It’s really about the value that we can bring for them. If you really want to break down what works for content. There’s kind of five pillars.

Bob Woods  02:23

Ideas?  Pillar… Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Sure. Yeah.

Brynne Tillman  02:27

Elements is good. Alright, so we’ll go with elements. So the first one is you need to resonate with your buyer, they need to immediately see, when they look at your content, that you’re talking to them that this is content for them. Next, you need to create curiosity; creating curiosity is what’s going to get them to want to keep reading. So we’ve got to do that really fast in our content. 

Number three is we need to teach them something new that leads to number four, which is that gets them thinking differently about their current situation, and number five creates a compelling moment. When we move them from Lurker to engage because we can’t start a conversation until we know that they’re there.

Bob Woods  03:16

Yeah! And then when you combine all of those things together, you are then position as the thought leader and subject matter in whatever industry you’re in. Call yourself a micro-influencer if you want to as well, since it kind of a hot term lately, and I kind of like it too 

Brynne Tillman  03:33

I like that term.

Bob Woods  03:16

Yeah, yeah, I do, too, yeah, definitely. So that’s what you want. You want to be the Oh god, I’m trying to think of general influencers, like Bill Gates, or Tony Robbins, or Grant Cardone, or whatever. (Brynne: Brené Brown) Yes, exactly of your specific industry, and that industry can be a big industry, it could be a small industry, no matter what, though, when you’re the thought leader and subject matter expert of your industry, when you become the go-to person when people think about “Hmm, this is going on. I wonder what this person thinks about it.” That’s when you know that you’re the thought leader, and that’s where content comes in to develop yourself as that.

Brynne Tillman  04:15

I want to ask you a question even though usually you asked me the question. I’m gonna ask you the question. The biggest thing we hear when it comes to content, is I have absolutely no idea what my subject matter expertise is, I don’t know how to write I’m a salesperson, or I’m a CEO, and I don’t I have time to sit down and write and then when I do I get blocked like writer’s block. What do we do? How do we overcome the challenge to come up with ideas?

Bob Woods  04:50

Yeah, so I mean, just like, you know, almost anything else in business, it really comes down to having a plan so that you don’t have that blank sheet of proverbial paper, which is probably a Word document staring at you in the face going filmy and you don’t know how to do that. So that’s why we have these seven potential places you can go to, and you probably don’t even need to go to all these places, either a couple will probably do you just fine. But just know that you have up to seven to actually go to, and the very first one is one that I really, really like because this one talks directly to what your specific clients are asking about. 

And this is basically reviewing emails that you’ve sent or emails where you’ve had a conversation chain and this could even be LinkedIn messages or whatever too but this type of thing that answers questions that your prospects and clients have asked you. This one’s really good because this one’s directly speaking to what people are talking to you about, and you could even put this in your content too. You know, recently, I had someone asked me about X. Well, here’s what I told them. I mean, obviously, you would build it more like that, but it can be as simple as that you can get really great content pieces just out of doing that.

Brynne Tillman  06:13

I love that. And you know, when you start thinking about it right now, as Bob said, go back, you could look it up, you know, at these emails, but when you start thinking about it, and you’re answering these questions, I just copy and paste into a doc, but have some organization, right, make sure you have a place that you can go ahead. I actually say Doc, I use notes on my phone, which actually syncs to my computer. So I can add those ideas wherever I am. So I love that, and I think Ken does, too.

Bob Woods  06:53

Yeah, Ken does too. Love that. So yeah, I appreciate hearing that, Ken. So number two, this is definitely a little bit broader, but I like it because it kind of gets your mind expanding and thinking a little more outside of your box as well. Searching Google and YouTube based on keywords and phrases that relate to your business. Now the key here is to actually don’t read and consume the content because you really don’t want to spend too much time doing this. Just get inspired by the titles that you’re seeing and just make this stuff your own at that point because as you become a thought leader, it’s your thoughts that are going to get you to that thought leader thing. So don’t be tempted by someone else’s thoughts. Pick out a title and go, “Oh, I know what I could do with this.” Create your own stuff from there.

Brynne Tillman  07:43

Yeah! And I love that. Sometimes, and I think what you said is brilliant, which is don’t listen or read or consume it before you write your own content. You could look at something if it got lots and lots of engagements, clearly a topic, but we don’t want to plagiarize, which might have been if we listen to something, not even accidentally.

Bob Woods  08:05

Inadvertently, very, very inadvertently, yes. Absolutely!

Brynne Tillman  08:10

However, what I love is, after you’ve published it, go back and listen to that, or watch it or read it, and then mention that person in the comments asking or send it to them directly saying, “You know, I know that this is an area that you are an industry expert in and I would love your thoughts.” or link their other posts to that and mention them like so that you’re driving traffic back but listen to it and make sure you agree with it, but that’s a great way to take an influencer and leverage their network. So great one, what’s number three?

Bob Woods  08:51

Number three is searching for past conferences, and you know, keynote speeches within those conferences that your prospects and clients either attended, or you can imagine them attending because conferences, they’ll, you know, conferences nowadays are still a little bit tricky at times but check out the keynote topics as well as other topics that come up and the reason why you want to do that is because these events were already vetted. All of these topics were already vetted by the people who put on the conference. So you know that there’s some thought that went into this, and so they’ll likely be topics that your audience is attracted to, because they were attracted, you know, they were hopefully attracted to at least consider going to this conference, why not borrow those ideas and again, just pick up the titles or whatever and then you could do everything that Brynne suggested as well there. 

So the fourth one is a site that I’m sure no one has heard of, and no one spends any amount of time whatsoever on Amazon. So but we’re going to use Amazon at a very specific way here, and you could do other books sites and things like with this tool, we just pick on Amazon because they’re Amazon. So, search for best-selling books in your industry and look at the table of contents. So again, you’re not consuming the whole book. If the table of contents is listed for these books, simply grab inspiration from the table of contents and then write about whatever it is that you picked up from your perspective because, again, you’re promoting your thought leadership, you’re promoting your subject matter expertise.

Brynne Tillman  10:30

Yeah!  And really, it’s just inspiring the idea so I love that.  All right, so number five.

Bob Woods  10:38

Number five, this one might be a little bit more advanced because you do need to know how to get to Google AdWords, but you can use Google AdWords to see the most searched keywords and phrases that your audience is interested in and then write about that. So if you do have a little bit of that expertise, this is actually a really good way to drill down more into potentially more specific topics because AdWords has just, there’s just so much data that comes out of that. You might get some different types of, you know, adjacent, I guess, types of ideas that you can be inspired by that maybe not a lot of people are talking about, but a lot of people are thinking about.

Brynne Tillman  11:20

Yeah! But before we get to this comment, I wanted to add and this is something that I love to do. If you Google a topic and then scroll all the way down to the end of the first page, it will show you keywords and phrases that other people have been searching for related to that topic, and that’s another place of inspiration.

Bob Woods  11:43

Yeah, that’s true and if you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to do AdWords, but I do want to do what Brynne just suggested.” That’s more than fine, too. I mean, that’s another really good place to go to. So number six, and this is another one of my favorites, too, just because I love LinkedIn Pulse. So use LinkedIn polls to learn from your audience. So again, this is you actually learning things directly from your audience because you’re asking them about it. So when you do the polls, give them several topics to choose from. Also very important to ask them to share in comments, not only more insights about that poll, as well you can also ask them about other topics that they’re interested in, as well. You know, find out what your audience wants by asking them.

Brynne Tillman  12:33

Yeah, I absolutely am obsessed with LinkedIn polls for lots of reasons. One, just that it’s a little bit of research. So what if you reach out with “What is your number one priority for 2023 around X, Y, and Z?” Or “What is the number one challenge you see happening?”  And you have four, you can take a look at what your audience really thinks and drill into that content but you can take that poll and create content from that poll. Make an ebook that talks about, like, here’s the question to the poll and then you know, 27% of people answered this, and then you could put in, you know, content around that, you know, “15 said this…” I’m not going to offer it because I can’t add to 100 but ultimately, you can take that poll itself and create content. So love that.

Bob Woods  13:29

There are so many different ways to develop content that really can germinate from one initial inspired thought through anything that we mentioned here. I mean, there are so many different ways to like, you know, start a poll, do results from that poll, and just take things from there. You can do videos based on the poll you can do, they’re just, there’s so many different things, that it’s mind-boggling, you just need to get started. And that’s what this episode of this podcast is all about to really get you started and then, you know, once you start doing this, even after a couple of times, you’re going to think, “Oh my god, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.” And then you are well on your way to becoming that thought leader in your industry. 

So we’re gonna … Number seven, use hashtags to find trending content and you can do this on LinkedIn. So the key here is identifying the hashtags your clients and prospects are using, not your competitors. So just look at the content they’re sharing and the hashtags they’re using to develop your own ideas based on that again, you know, maybe not necessarily really dwell to what they’re talking about, develop your own ideas, promote your own thought leadership.

Brynne Tillman  14:48

I love it. So let’s bring this in for a landing. 

Bob Woods  14:51

We are going to bring this in for a landing by reminding you the ebook it’s at socialsaleslink.com/inspire. We have a question here.

Brynne Tillman  15:06

Oh, all right, so Ron Fleming asks, “If I create people, and then I send that poll into the message inboxes that have several connections, all in one action? Do they all get individual messages? Or can they all see each other in the subject line?” So yeah, so there are three, three answers here. The first one is, if you send the poll from the send button, send it to one person at a time. or if there’s a couple of people inside of the same organization or friends, you can add them, but there’s no blind copy. So they will see it. 

Number two, if you grab the link from the poll, so if you click on the three dots and copy the link, you can actually send that out in a newsletter or a blind CC in email, if you choose to. So that they can get it that way. And then the third, the only blind copy that’s going to happen that was in your email, sending it directly into the inbox. Oh, I think that a,  if you send it to one person, it’s a private message, that’s what my three were. One person is a private message, but if you send it to a group of people, they will see each other.

There are times where it’s fine. So we you know, our membership, we have a, it was probably fifth 40 ish people in a LinkedIn message. We have a lot more members than that, but 40 people that are in this LinkedIn messaging group. So if we put in a poll there, all of them will get notified that there’s a new poll, but we’ve all agreed to be in this group messaging. So that’s it. 

Bob Woods  16:51

Yeah, generally speaking, you don’t want to put someone into a group message type of environment if they haven’t already said, “Yes, I want to be in this group message environment.” Two reasons for that one, you just don’t want to do that. And number two, if someone actively removes themselves from that group, everyone in the group sees that. So if you send it to, like 10 people and nine people remove themselves, they’re all going to see when they’ve been removed and that’s just not… that’s kind of an icky feeling, you know what I’m saying? So, yeah, so definitely, you know, do what Brynne suggests and what I recommend as well send those messages individually.

Brynne Tillman  17:32

Yeah! And never thought about sending it outside of LinkedIn. Yeah, you could put it in your signature link. Lots of ways.

Bob Woods  17:38

Yeah. 100%.

Brynne Tillman  17:41

All right, my friend, we are wrapping this up. I’m going to pass it to you to put a bow on it.

Bob Woods  17:50

Passing the baton

Brynne Tillman  17:52

You actually had the baton pass back and forth, but I’m gonna give you the baton for the last time. 

Bob Woods  17:58

All right. I’m the anchorman, as I say anchorperson, I guess, nowadays. Thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live! If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter right now, we do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, which means this is recorded and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe follow button, whatever it is that you have there to access all of our previous shows and to be alerted when new ones dropped. 

More information on our podcast is available at socialsalesllink.com/podcast again, the ebook is at socialsaleslink.com/inspire and so we’re gonna go ahead and wrap this up when you are out and about, make sure to make your sales social. Thanks, everybody. Have a great, great day. Great week. See you. Bye.

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Resources Mentioned:

socialsaleslink.com/inspire