Episode 317: Leverage LinkedIn for Podcasting

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:40 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Alright. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Making Sales Social. I’m Stan Robinson Junior. Bob Woods is out today, but I’m here with my co-host, Brynne Tillman, the LinkedIn whisperer, and LinkedIn sales insider. How are you doing today, Brynne?

0:00:59 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m great, Stan. How are you?

0:01:00 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Doing excellent, thanks. Looking forward to diving into how to leverage LinkedIn for podcasting on today’s great topic. Yes. One we love. Podcasting is super popular. People listen to them all the time. With me, it’s when I’m on a walk, usually, or just doing things around the house. Brynne, when do you usually tune into podcasts?

0:01:30 – (Brynne Tillman): So, I am walking my dog. If I do that, now my boys are home, so I do it a lot less. But, yeah, I actually have been listening to it a lot in my car. I’ve had a couple of long drives when I’m at night, sometimes when I’m not ready completely for bed, but I’ll put it in my ear and listen to a podcast. Sometimes I even do some of those YouTube AI trickery things. But those are the times, I think, the downtimes, where I really leverage my time to learn.

0:02:11 – (Brynne Tillman): And that’s really my goal, by the way, in the podcast, every podcast I listen to, I don’t listen to the true crimes. I listen to business podcasts. And my goal is for every podcast to take away at least one thing that I can implement.

0:02:28 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep. And that’s a great approach to it. Great approach to it. So let’s jump in because I have a few questions about how you’ve been leveraging LinkedIn to help with podcasting. Start with being a podcast guest. How do you leverage adding podcasts where you’ve been a guest to your LinkedIn profile to basically improve your visibility?

0:02:59 – (Brynne Tillman): So my profile is built for many things. It’s for prospecting, for networking, for education, for thought leadership, but it’s also to attract people who want to interview me. So much of our exposure is beyond our bubble, we all have a bubble. Everyone has their bubble, right? So to move beyond that bubble, one of the best ways to do that is through being a podcast guest. Right? Really very powerful. So your profile should be positioned to attract those hosts.

0:03:42 – (Brynne Tillman): There are lots of ways to do it. Now, I don’t do this 100%, but there’s a whole bunch of ways that we can do this. Number one, you can actually add that you’re a podcast host in your headline if you want to host or guest, right? Maybe both. If you have both, you can actually, and this is something I highly recommend, add a couple of your podcasts if it’s guesting, because we’re talking about guesting.

0:04:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Add a couple of podcasts, your best ones, to your featured section on LinkedIn, right? And then, so when people are going through, there’s, you know, listen to me on these podcasts, and hopefully, if you’re looking to be a guest over and over again, you have a couple under your belt. If you don’t for any reason have any kind of podcast experience out there, consider doing a LinkedIn live or a YouTube live to give them the experience of what you would be like as a guest. Right? Maybe have a colleague interview you or create a mock podcast in video form and then bring that in as sort of your sizzle reel of sorts. Right? So for people to see this.

0:05:15 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep, that is a fabulous idea. Even before you get invited as a guest, you can basically create your own and, and link to them. Now, on a related note, what are some of the benefits that you’ve seen as far as having featured your podcast guest appearances on your LinkedIn profile?

0:05:39 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, so again, we’re expanding our network. But when people get to your profile they get to experience you, especially if you’re doing a great job of thought leadership education, right? Really drawing in what your audience cares about most, you’re going to get a lot of engagement. You’re going to see that people come back to your profile. You’ll probably get more people asking you to connect and accepting your connection request in one of the areas. And I would say this is a little bit of an advanced tip, but consider creating a Bitly link that’s just connected to your LinkedIn profile or your podcast or your YouTube or whatever that is.

0:06:31 – (Brynne Tillman): You can’t see who clicked through, but you can see how many clicks. So you can see that 17 people clicked through my link that’s only posted on my LinkedIn profile. So I can measure the success of that. Now I’ll go one deeper. If you have smart links with your sales navigator, you can actually have a hub of six or seven podcasts that you’ve been on. You can create a list of your top podcasts and add that link to your featured section, and when they get there now you even see who’s looking and which ones they actually click through to listen.

0:07:21 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Wow, that’s awesome. Those are some great tips, and thanks for sharing the advanced tips as well. So, I know you’ve been talking extensively about the featured section. Do you also include the podcast information anywhere else on your profile, like experience, or do you suggest it?

0:07:40 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, you share, because I didn’t have that on my list, and you added that to the list. So you share a little bit about having that on your experience. Because I thought that was brilliant.

0:07:51 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): It’s funny because that’s something that I looked and I said, you know, that’s something I need to do because both as a actually as a podcast host and as a guest, potentially. So both sides of it. Yeah, go ahead.

0:08:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I love the idea. If it’s as a guest, you can put that under your current position, as another position, if being a guest aligns with your job or being, if you’re a speaker, an author, if you have or you’re an entrepreneur with your own company, you can have the founder of the company and then podcast guests as a threaded job description, where in that you can have an abstract and a list of the seven topics that you talk on or whatever that might be.

0:08:53 – (Brynne Tillman): So, I did not think about this before our pre-show preparation, Stan, when you came up with this idea, but now you’ve got my wheels turning. And FYI, the bottom of every single experience. You can add media, so you can add links to podcasts there as well, or if you have smart links, you can add that there, as well.

0:09:24 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Good deal. Yeah. That’s why I love these sessions because they always generate new ideas we hadn’t thought of before. Now, one thing I’ve heard you mention, which is a super useful tool, is listen notes. Can you talk about how you use it and its benefits?

0:09:44 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And we’re still kind of, from this perspective, talking about the guesting on podcasts. Right. So, listen to notes. It’s a freemium product. You could get pretty much everything you need, I think depending on how much you use, but I get everything I need, and what listen notes does is it lists, I believe, almost every single public podcast, I think. Are there any private podcasts? Probably, but in every public podcast, who the hosts are, every episode, the names of the guests, and it’s really easy to search by topic, by lots of things. So if I went in and the podcasts I want to be on, are you AI podcast sales podcasts?

0:10:30 – (Brynne Tillman): So, I can go in to listen to notes, and I can put in AI for sales, and I’m going to get either I could get episodes, or I could actually get podcasts that focus specifically on AI and sales. So I put it in and let’s say I get 80 podcasts from there I can click through and I can see who the hosts are and then know the LinkedIn in me now goes and puts in that name and LinkedIn with the name of the podcast, and I can now connect. So my typical process is I actually listen to one or two before I reach out, and I will reach out with a simple stan, I really loved the podcast interview that you did with Bob Woods on AI and sales.

0:11:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Here are some of my major takeaways. I’m not sure if you’re exploring other guests, but I do have a few topics that align with your mission and this podcast. If you’re open, I’d love to share those with you. Now, we start a conversation with the podcast host first around that, clearly, you listen to the podcast because you’re sharing your takeaways and you’re aligning what you do. You know, you’re aligning what you do with and what you speak about with what matters to that host in the podcast.

0:11:57 – (Brynne Tillman): And you know, is everyone going to say yes, no, absolutely not everyone is going to say, but you’re going to be shocked. First of all, how many hosts are hungry for people to interview? So, you know, if you do it right, you have a high likelihood. By the way, we have, Jonathan says he does host a private podcast inside his membership. Interesting. So I thought there could be. I just hadn’t run into them.

0:12:29 – (Brynne Tillman): And then Rick says, great tips. Say, really love the idea of creating your own sizzle reel or LinkedIn live episode to feature to give others a glimpse. Thank you. That’s awesome. So having kind of an outreach, I hesitate to call it. It’s more like a media page. If you go to, we have them. I think if you go to socialsaleslink.com Brynne, and then there’s a press page, you can see how we’ve put them together. But it doesn’t have to be on a website, it could be in a PDF, but it links to lots of things, right? So really consider if you are going to do this outreach, have a press page ready. If you have smart links, your press page could be in smart links.

0:13:23 – (Brynne Tillman): If you don’t have that, you can actually create an article, a blog, or an article on LinkedIn. That is your press page that has links to podcasts and your how-to introduce you. And I like, you know, maybe the list of your topics. So that way when people are interested then either a link to schedule with you or you’ll say, you know, what’s your preferred way of scheduling? If it happens to be a calendar link, there’s one on my press page.

0:13:56 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s how I think about that.

0:13:58 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Good deal, good deal. So we’ve been talking about being a guest and how to use LinkedIn to find podcasts to appear on as a guest. You want to flip and talk about hosting. Say you’re the host and you’re looking for great guests for your target audience and how you leverage LinkedIn for that.

0:14:24 – (Brynne Tillman): So I can go back to listen to notes and look at the guests that have been on the podcast that I love and invite them to be a guest. It’s so simple to do. But you know, I listen to, you know, let’s just say I listen to Stan in an interview with Bob and I’m like, man, that’s Stan. He is brilliant. I’d love to have him as a guest. I reach out and say, hey, stan, I heard you as a guest on Bob’s podcast. I really loved what you said about X, Y, and Z. Are you open?

0:14:57 – (Brynne Tillman): Are you considering being a guest on my podcast? And guess what you’re going to get? Like, I’m going to make up a stat. 93.2% of people are going to say yes, right? Like they’re already guests on podcasts. They love this. So that is absolutely a great way to do this. Another way that a lot of people use podcasts is they interview their prospects. So if that’s the way that you’re going, and we have a whole program around prospect by interview and podcasts fall under that.

0:15:30 – (Brynne Tillman): So be careful because you can totally ruin your reputation by making this a bait and switch. So you want to make sure that you’re truly interviewing them for the podcast. And if you have ideas for how they can improve their business, it’s a second call. Even if they ask you, so what do you do or how do you help people? Say, that’s an awesome question. I would love to share that with you. Can we set up a second call?

0:15:57 – (Brynne Tillman): Because if you pitch at the end of that podcast, they’re going to think you bait and switch them even if they ask. It’s just the way it is. So just make sure if you are going to be interviewing your prospects that you have a really good process and a follow-up process so they don’t feel like you manipulated them.

0:16:18 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Good deal. Yep. Yep. Excellent. Now, Brynne, are there any questions that I haven’t asked you that I should have asked about this topic?

0:16:34 – (Brynne Tillman): Are you pulling a brin on me?

0:16:36 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Oh, have you heard that before?

0:16:41 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So the one thing that I would say is you can go all in as a guest. It’s really simple. But if you want to launch a podcast or you want to put out a podcast, it’s a lot of work, but you can be quite successful with LinkedIn. So we kind of covered a lot about the guesting. I’m just going to kind of leave this with a little overload on podcasts. So in order for you to launch an official podcast and include Apple iTunes, we need to have ten episodes, so you can launch on Spotify with less and a couple others. But when you do it, you want to just do it. We use a program called Bcast, which allows us to upload it once, and then it goes live everywhere.

0:17:33 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m sure there are 50 tools out there that do the same thing. The reason I like Bcast is you can drop in sponsorships and ads and things like that, but you could say, well, any editor can do that, but you can drop like, let’s say we’re running an ad for our twelve-week program in September. We can drop that ad in all 285 episodes all the way back. So if someone’s listening to an old episode, they’ll hear the current ad. So that’s why we picked Bcast.

0:18:06 – (Brynne Tillman): We don’t advertise a whole lot. Most joining our free library is our advertising, which is great. That’s really what we want to it to grow our community and bring value. But we really do like that feature. So when you launch your podcast, you want to do a lot of pre-launching. I would create the event on LinkedIn and invite up to 1000 people. And then if you have a guest or your first guest, they can invite up to 1000 people. And I would actually, this is my.

0:18:39 – (Brynne Tillman): I would either do it as a webinar or as a live stream and get a ton of people to be part of the video launch and then use the audio for your podcast. It’s a great way to go. The live stream is great because you can control any of the conversation and you can save Q and A till the end or however you want to do that. And actually we use restream. You can use Streamyard or Vimeo or I heard Zoom is going to come out with one that goes directly from live streaming, which would be really cool.

0:19:15 – (Brynne Tillman): That probably would get me to switch, but there’s so much that you can do. But here’s. I want you to think about things. The name for search engine optimization really matters. Your description and your topics are named specifically for search. And then you want to share. We share ours in a newsletter to our 30,000 active members, or whatever the number is that we saw the other week. I think around that it was like 30,000 active people.

0:19:56 – (Brynne Tillman): So we share that once a week. We share it on social. We take mini clips edit them out and share them. We use a lot to drive traffic. So you’ve got to have a plan to launch a podcast. It’s a very. It’s an endeavor. Happy to talk to you about it. We have lots of resources for people that can help you with it. I think we might have an ebook somewhere along the line on how to do it, but there are a lot of steps in launching it.

0:20:27 – (Brynne Tillman): There are very few steps in being a guest. And remember, being a guest is going to get you in a lot more circles. Bubbles, being a guest is going to open you up to many new networks with the least amount of work. So if you’re like, well, how do I really leverage LinkedIn and listen to notes and maybe even a little chat GPT in there for podcasting? My biggest recommendation is to start as a guest, get it on your profile and get some examples, and then prospect through listening to notes to find the right podcast to guest on.

0:21:16 – (Brynne Tillman): That was a big answer to your last question.

0:21:20 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): It was fabulous because I know anyone who’s listening got a lot out of it, and people may be asking us, Brynne, can you just do an episode on starting a podcast one time? So this was, this was awesome. Yeah, thanks for that.

0:21:38 – (Brynne Tillman): All right, so now we have to end this half as good as Bob does.

0:21:42 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Oh, that’s asking a lot. That is asking a lot.

0:21:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Let’s do it at 25%.

0:21:48 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Okay, well, we will say thanks to all of you who are listening in Making Sales Social, and thank you for joining us. Now, to learn more about our podcast, listen to past episodes. Just go to socialsaleslink.com /podcast and you can consume some of our past content and of course, subscribe to join us. So when you’re out and about this week, remember to make your sales social.

0:22:25 – (Bob Woods): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us.

0:22:37 – (Brynne Tillman): Next.

0:22:38 – (Bob Woods): Register for free [email protected]. you can also listen to us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleselesslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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