Category: The Intensive: Freelancing

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Week 7: The Focused Followers Formula

Transcript

Okay. Week. What week are we on y’all?

Seven.

This is the this is the gang symbol for seven. That’s how they do it in Japan.

They do that in front. Yeah. They’ll do, like, like, that like, yeah.

Just so you know. Just so you know. A little trivia for you.

Cool. Alright. Alright. Week seven. Okay. This is the week where we talk about, the stuff that needs to be talked about before you start doing too much in the way of social media and list building.

And that is having focused followers and being someone your followers can focus on. So it’s called, drum roll, blah blah blah blah blah. Called Marshall Lampoon, so he does it all wrong.

Ah, the focus followers formula.

Tada. No. Just me? Again? Okay. I’m just gonna, like, be alone.

Happy, though.

There were some symbols in the background. I went at the end. Thank you.

Okay. So the objective here is, in week seven, to get a strong sense for quality followers and to get rid of the quantity game. I can’t tell you how many times through the years, no matter what stage your list is at, how many times people have, like, reacted to, oh, you have that many people on your list, and they never ever say how many of them are buying ever. So even people who know better still get really distracted by numbers.

Do you have so numbers of followers on social media, and although those can be useful signals for others, it’s really not the point. So I want to start by just prefacing everything here with we are not going to talk about masses of numbers of followers going forward, not in the intensive. We’ll talk about growing your followers and your list in Copy School Professional, but but I really wanna break it down to, hey. You’ve got this sales driven funnel, which we talked about in week four.

We gotta get more leads into that sales driven funnel, and we want them to be good quality leads. Otherwise, it’s all pretty pointless.

You’re gonna get we’re all gonna get distracted by all the cool opportunities that come up along the way. What we need to bring it back to is focus.

If I have seen anybody succeed in business, they have always always focused. So let’s focus. Okay? So I’m going to share my screen, and we’ll dig into what I mean by this and the work that we’re going to do this week.

Okay? So let’s get more of the right leads into our sales driven funnel and then use this to build your pipeline across social and email. We’re gonna talk a lot about social particularly because I know for most freelancers, it’s, kind of a source of stress. Like, oh, no.

Do I have to do Instagram, Joe? And I get that. I’ve said this before. I was not intentional about social until a business friend was like, start.

So I did.

And she was right.

We need to, though, go into it knowing that we have this. There’s a tension there. You might not wanna do it. You don’t know what you’re going to post about.

And so what can we do to solve that so that we can actually build our platform and social media and email list? So this week’s section of the sunshine growth model, we’re getting more done. We’re just moving some of the clouds away, working in, of course, advanced skills that you use for list growth and then marketing and biz dev, stuff.

Building on the work of week one where you really thought about who your ICP was, ICA, whatever you might call them, you might have started thinking about personas inside of those. Like, what Tim versus what are some of the names? We just did a whole exercise. What’s one of our what’s the woman’s name?

Do you remember? Sarah or Tina?

Larissa.

Larissa. Okay. Good. We just named a different set of personas. So I wanted to say Marina, but Marina is one of our students.

So, anyway, so we’re gonna be building on the work of week one. We’re always building on the work of week one, by the way. Also, on week four where you establish an Instagram account. So if you didn’t do these things, don’t look at me with, Joe, it’s not working.

Do the stuff, and then if it doesn’t work, then we can talk about it. But you need to establish an Instagram account whether you like it or not. I don’t like Instagram. I do now because now I use it, but I didn’t when I started out.

It’s okay to have resistance there. It’s not okay to let it dictate what you do with your business when so many businesses swear by it. Unless you absolutely know better and the world’s greatest leads are knocking down your door right now, you gotta do what some of the fine folks of the world who are growing their businesses massively say to do. Instagram.

Lead magnet. You’ve done that already. You’ve done ManyChat. You’ve done all of this stuff that’s showing here.

And if you haven’t, again, go and do that stuff. List the ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or whatever CRM you might have decided to use, and Instagram, those are the biggies. We will also be talking about LinkedIn today. In week four, we didn’t talk much about LinkedIn.

I just said, hey. This works on LinkedIn too. Now we’re gonna talk a little bit more about it because there are some good opportunities there.

Last week, you learned to call yourself a CEO.

Going forward, you’re a CEO. I don’t wanna hear other terms. I know you’re doing all the you’re doing everything. You also learned that last week.

Every single thing on your org chart is you, but we’re gonna refer to you as the CEO. You should do the same. Get uncomfortable with it so you can get comfortable with it. So these are what you’ll do by end of week.

We’re not gonna get into them now, but as usual, we start the worksheet off with where you’re going.

You will have tasks. If you’ve hired a VA or you have an assistant or associate of some kind, even a partner, that person will go through the second half of this checklist. You will see that you’ll need to brief them.

Always take time to brief people if you can. Five, ten minutes just hopping on a call really quickly at end of day even when your brain is like, I don’t want to. You have to no matter what.

So this is what you’re going to do to make sure that you are successful in your business. Okay? If you didn’t hire a VA or an associate of any kind, then everything on this part of the list is up to you to do. And you will see that this is low value task work, and you’ll be like, I should probably get into hiring somebody, in which case, pop back to last week and get going on it.

Okay. This week, I already hinted at this mindset shift. We’re switching from quantity, how big is your list, how many followers do you have, to the quality of those people on there. You are using social media not as a vanity space, not as just a place like, oh, Joe said too, so I do, but rather to attract and nurture real leads.

It’s not about a popularity contest. Sometimes it will feel like it. Sometimes it will be. But, overall, the vision for social media is not a popularity contest.

Okay?

Follower goals, not just to get followers. I’ve made this mistake. I sat for Mike and Nicole on my team. I was like, twenty twenty four. Here are your follower goals. Here’s how many I want each of you to have for YouTube or Instagram.

And I was wrong. That’s not what you’re looking for at all, and they corrected me on that. They’re like, no. No.

No. That won’t matter. Here’s what matters. Here’s what Instagram really likes. Instagram really likes when someone shares a link to your content or otherwise shares that they really like when your post gets bookmarked.

That’s a really good indication. So what are we doing to get connection requests on LinkedIn, produce content that gets bookmarked by the right people get a DM from those people and get shared by those people, by which I mean shared within Teams.

Alright. If you are focused on a single demographic, social media will be harder and easier for you at the same time depending on how you use it. What social media is, of course, great for is people all over the world find you. So if you are focused on only working with businesses in one area, you’ll have to have different strategies for social.

Most of us are not. Most of us are just like, I wanna work with the right people no matter where they are. Cool. Alright.

I mentioned personas.

I mentioned your ICP.

So has anybody actually gone through and developed the people inside their ICP? So your ICP is the business that you are trying to work for. The personas that you’re targeting at those ICPs, the people inside the ICP are the persona. Right?

So they’re the people that are going to follow you on social media. One of them will reach out to you, DM you, say, hey. That was cool. I’d like more of this.

Have you done this work yet?

As the teacher looks at you out of nowhere and you’re like, oh, no. She’s looking in.

That is a nod in detail. Okay. So we want to do that. So that’s our objective. We may do it in this session, but just know that that’s where we have to get. And I’m gonna show you why that’s where we have to get. Okay?

This is why. It’s really it’s a drawing.

What we wanna do is come up with a message map that will help us for each persona figure out what to say to them based on, like, what they care about most. So here’s what that really looks like. For each of the personas that you put together, that’s these, you want to create a message map based on their problems and your solutions. This is copywriting one zero one. This is like, if you took this in university, if they offered it, it’d be like the second semester, like, a message map.

So problems that they have and then the solutions that you offer for those problems. Now sometimes a solution might exist without a problem, and if that’s the case, you can see, like, oh, I have to wake them up to that problem or, actually it’s just a solution without a problem. There’s nothing I can do about that.

So here’s where we’re heading for all three personas so that we know who we’re targeting, what they look like, basically. Right? What they look like. We can have a picture in our heads of them. We know what their problems are. We know how we solve their problems.

So instead of having some content calendar that’s, like, on Monday, post about this. On Tuesday, post about that, which, to be fair, is also part of the job, and we cover it in CopySchool Pro. But you need to know what goes into each one of those. This is stepping back to a more strategic view that you can use across your marketing.

We’re going to apply it in your social media. So that’s what our objective is today. We’re going to focus our content on what our personas care more about than anything else when it comes to, like, the space that we’re in. That way you can attract good fit followers.

So if you only have three people follow you on LinkedIn or social media, but all three of them just fell in love with you and are thinking, how can I hire this person? You win. You win better than anybody who just got a thousand followers last week, and none of them give a shit about working with them whatsoever. So we wanna focus on our personas, not on anything else anyone else tells us.

And then we’ll know, of course, that there are ways to actually apply this. Right? So if I were to learn in this case that Harrison is a media buyer. Harrison has these problems as a media buyer.

This is where it’s an ad funnel authoritative offer. Okay? So I know that I’m in the business of ad funnels. What does Harrison, a media buyer at a large organization, what does he think about?

Okay. Maybe he thinks our return on advertising spend is slipping. That’s a problem he’s got right now. What are the things he’s talking to his boss about?

He needs more ad copy options. He’s annoyed that return on advertising spend is slipping. He needs more options, he thinks, because things are turning bad.

And with that, he doesn’t trust his in house creative’s expertise, and he wants to explore outside meta. So he’s got this, like, core problem, and he might have different problems as well. This is just an example. And then we get to figure out what our solutions are to those problems.

You already know these things. Right? This is already in your head. What I would put money on is it is not documented anywhere.

It’s the You can share with your VA to say, no. No. No. We don’t talk about that to this persona.

We talk about this to this persona. We don’t talk about this on LinkedIn. We talk about that on LinkedIn. This is what we wanna do.

CEO wants to make sure that we understand who we’re talking to, what they need to hear, and that they understand that our solution is the solution to their problem. So we can say, okay. Some of the solutions that I offer regarding return on advertising spend is I might say to them, hey. It’s time for you to implement value ladder emails.

So your ROAS is crappy, but or ROAS is crappy, but here’s what we could do on the other side for those leads that do come in. Hey. You wanna test out of the box copy? That’s probably what’s, like, hurting you a bit.

You might be thinking it’s time to start advertising off meta. And then, of course, down here, we see that they do wanna advertise off meta. Right? Right?

So they’re moving. So all we’re doing is connecting our solution with their problem. One solution might work from multiple problems. So you can add different these little lines in here, this is like me drawing lines to connect the dots between things.

Sometimes you don’t have enough of a solution here. If their salute if their problem is I need more ad copy options and you’re gonna say, okay. Well, I can give you that, but I actually don’t think it’s an ad copy problem, then you might dig into what the real problem is, in those solutions. But this an empty space can tell you there’s more that I could do here.

Doesn’t mean that you have to do more there, though you might be like, no. I don’t got anything for you. If that’s your problem, I got nothing for you. Or I got one thing for you, but I’m gonna focus on these problems instead when I’m trying to talk to you.

Does this make sense?

Okay. So we need to do that for our personas. So you can take your ICP from week one, which might have been refined in week two, but you should already have this documented pretty well and start creating those personas. Identify, are they on LinkedIn or Instagram?

If you do not have reason to believe they’re on Instagram, but if persona a isn’t on Instagram but persona b is, and persona a needs to hear x, where persona b needs to hear y, then you’ll only put y on Instagram. Does that make sense? Like, you’ll match the message for the person to the space or spaces where they are. Sometimes you won’t know.

Our team right now is going through lots and lots of our past customers to get a sense for who they are and where they’re actually active online. So we can say this persona is likely to be largely on LinkedIn, whereas this one is never on LinkedIn or they don’t make any decisions on LinkedIn, so we won’t put any messages for her on LinkedIn. We’ll only put messages for him on LinkedIn.

That can help us at least get more traction out of posting once a day on each of those spaces because you’re talking to one person all the time and importantly about the same things. You might be like, woah, Joe. There’s only, like, three groups of messages that I can share here.

That’s good.

Viewer. So you can keep repeating the same stuff again and again, which is part of thought leadership. You don’t need five hundred different things to say. You need to say one thing five hundred times, and then somebody will start to go, oh.

Oh, that’s what Ben does after hearing it five hundred times. I’m doing a, a podcast with Tommy Walker tomorrow where we’re just gonna rant about exactly this, how you have to. Just say the same thing again and again, and it is hard for you to do because you’re like, this is boring. This is killing me.

And this is the kind of thing that you will then want to get a VA or an assistant to do if it does feel like it’s killing you. Or you can just be Gary v about it and just, like, really go to town on repeating the same message aggressively, with whatever your tone is. But don’t try to add more messages on the page. If you find that this is cluttered in some way or you want to have persona a, b, and c all in one map so you can see overlapping messages for them, cool.

Go over to whimsical or somewhere like that and do a bigger map. Someone just chatted to me. I wanna see if there’s a question.

Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. About the meal kits for anybody watching the replay. Andrew just made a comment about, when you hear the same meal kit advertised on a podcast a hundred times, and on the hundred first times, you’re like, that might be good. Yeah. Exactly. Say it again and again and again and again and again and again, and again.

Okay. So this is what you’re going to fill in, and then this is the part that starts to connect us with what we’re talking about in week four, which is your sales driven funnel. And that is starting those Instagram and LinkedIn and email opens. But this is, like, a really specific call to action for you to drive them to say yes to talking with you or seeing a loom.

Okay. So here’s the idea. Once you know who your personas are, once you’ve got basic message maps for them, then it’s on you to and you’ll see this on the end of on the checklist up at the top. It’s on you to block out time and apply resources to actually posting about this stuff.

The more you can systematize this, the better it will be so that you actually get the work done and, and and don’t really, like, just give up on it and go like, well, I took the week off, then I came back and I forgot about it. Now it’s four months later, and I haven’t posted to LinkedIn in four months. So we don’t wanna do that.

Here is how we start fitting. We start connecting, getting followers with those automations and other things that go into your sales driven funnel.

Really simple template where you say, on Instagram, new follower every day. Every new follower you have, every new follower, go into Instagram in the DMs.

And once they followed you, now there’s a connection opportunity there, and and you can you’re gonna have some bad followers in there, but we’re not gonna worry about those people right now. Just go in and say, hey, Joanna Weave exclamation point or Joanna Weave exclamation point. Thanks for following. Hit enter.

Funny you did. I have a cool idea that could work to reduce churn for coffee hackers. I can fire it your way, or we can hop on a call. Hit enter.

You around. Hit enter.

Don’t be freaked out when they don’t reply immediately. Don’t be freaked out if this takes weeks and weeks and weeks to actually turn into something. It’s okay. The objective is just to do this follow-up every day with every new follower you have or on LinkedIn every new connection you have, which can also look like followers depending on how your page is set up.

So same template here. Thanks for the connect. Love what you do. I find love what you do.

Works really well on LinkedIn.

Funny to hear from you the exact same thing that we said earlier. Basically, play around with the wording there for whatever feels right for the person you’re talking to and your brand. But the idea here is you wanna make it sound chill and, like, you know the person. Not so chill that it’s not like, hey.

I don’t wanna get on a call and sell. Like, that’s not the point. No. You’re gonna get on the call and sell.

But it’s chill like, hey. I’ve got this great idea for you. If they’re in business, they want more ideas. If they’re in business and they’re profitable, they can find money for a great idea.

So don’t hold back here. You have a cool idea that could work to reduce churn for intercom. If you’re connected with the CEO or CMO or whoever, why not say, hey. Let’s hop on the call.

What does it hurt? They don’t answer you? Oh, well.

Move on with your life. Do the same on LinkedIn.

And then for your email list, which, again, you set up a couple weeks ago, for your email list for any new subscriber, this is the automation that replaces this letter to the or from the CEO, the one if you’ve taken ten x emails. There’s, like, the welcome email, then a couple hours later, you get, like, the letter from the c, CEO.

In this case, you’re just gonna be letter from you that feels one to one to the person. So you’ll need to ask for their first name as a required field when they sign up. This is on the checklist on the start of this worksheet. You’ll need to ask for their business name as a required field. And as a reminder, the reason that we do this, even though it will reduce the number of people who sign up, is that quantity is not the point.

Quality is the point. If so and so from x business has a problem entering their business name in your form, they’re probably not a very good fit for you anyway. So you ask for their first name. If you want to, ask for their last name.

Make it a required field. Ask for their business name, and that way you can then populate that information into the email you send them so it does feel more personal, which is good because that will pay off down the road. We should have been doing that from the beginning, but when I started out at CopyHackers, all that mattered was list size. Everybody all the time was saying, just grow your list.

Grow your list. You can sell your list. Grow your list. I’ve never planned to sell my list, but nobody said, hey.

Hang on on that grow your list thing. And now we have a great big list, but I don’t have business names. So take it from me. Make it a required field so that you can do something with those followers and connections.

Okay. That’s your objective for the week. We’re thirty minutes into the call. Do you have any questions, concerns, thoughts?

Do we understand the idea here is not to post about whatever whatever random thing comes up, but rather what your persona needs to hear on the platform they need to hear it. And then when they do follow you, then you get an open connection to them because you have reason to believe they’re a good fit.

K. Andrew just raised his hand, so I’m going to stop share.

Oh, half a second. One moment, please. Talk amongst yourselves. I have to go get my dog to the dog walker. Half a sec. She’s just standing upstairs.

Sarah, you can you entertain us with, like, a joke or something?

Yeah. I can’t. Oh, shoot. She’s fast.

That was really fast.

Oh, close. That was fast. That’s wrong. What were you trying to do without me, you little brat?

I was gonna make Sarah try to tell us a joke or something.

Oh, what was it? Back into the room. I can’t. Now it’s no. I’ll save it for another time. Next time.

Andrew, you were gonna go. You had something to share?

Well, I had a question about Okay. Instagram in general. So, I am I’ve created a page, but I’m starting for, for my agency, but I’m starting from absolute zero followers. Mhmm. Do I just start posting, or is it wise to, like, strategically start following some people first? I’m just wondering if, like, posting into the you know, posting into ghost on is, if that’s worth it, or is that how it works? Yep.

Yeah. There are a few ways to go, right, if you’re at zero followers.

So when I was trying to build my Twitter following, it was very different. And the strategy was, so now I have Nicole, and she’s not on the call. Nicole’s in charge of growing us our stuff over on Instagram. But what I can say is, in the olden days, for Twitter, you would follow twenty people in a day, give them three days, and then those who followed you back, you accepted as a connection, and those who didn’t, you unfollowed, and then you’d repeat again and again and again and again.

And I started to get more and more followers, and it was a really simple trick. I don’t know if it still applies today. I don’t know how that works anymore. But what I can say is there are those kind of, like, manual ways to start getting followers and to identify who’s a good person to connect with. I know others just flat out recommend that you buy followers early on, because no one’s looking anyway, and no one really cares.

So that’s, like, a consideration. I don’t have any thoughts on that. Like, obviously, buying followers is buying bots.

But if you’re worried that it looks like you’re shouting into the void and you don’t want that, you can buy them, and then you can delete them later once you get real legit followers because a lot of people won’t follow back an account that has no followers. Right? So you have to do things to manually to grow that. You can also throw some ad budget at it.

So get a lot of post some cool shit, spend five bucks a day just to boost it to the right people, and start getting more engagement that way too. So buying followers and advertising kinda nets out to about the same amount of money spent. One will get you ten followers that are legit. One will get you a thousand that are not.

You just have to decide that. But I know it’s it’s a hard slog out of the gate.

We can talk more about that. I know, actually, we have Copy School Pro list in social is the theme for July.

So you’ll see a lot more about that in July. The whole month we’ll be talking about that, and you’ll be out of the intensive by then. So you’ll get to benefit from that too.

Great. Okay. Yeah. That helps.

Thanks, Andrew. Naomi, question or thought about this topic?

I have to say I’m a bit skeptical because when I was working in house, I would get dozens of me these messages.

Mhmm.

And I would ignore all of them Mhmm. As and my my boss would get hundreds of them. He wouldn’t even look at them. He would just delete every single one of them.

Yeah. But we’re not talking about Naomi, we’re not talking about cold outreach or any of that kind of stuff. We’re talking about when somebody has followed you or requested to make a connection with you, then you say, hey. Thanks for connecting. You don’t I’m not just, like, review what I just shared with you. It’s not about cold outreach or even, like, any form of outreach like that. It’s responding when they connect with you.

Yeah. If it just feels like a lot of work when Well, you’re in the business of running a whole business, so it’s gonna feel like work. You don’t have to do all of these things. Right?

Like, you don’t have to. You can choose not to. But if you are trying to build your following in a space, you don’t just want to build it and then, like, walk away. If you get a single person on LinkedIn saying, hey, Naomi.

I wanna connect with you because they saw you did a cool post that, like, mattered for them because they’re one of your personas.

So they see that. They go, okay. That was cool. I’d probably like to hear more from this person.

They connect with you. In most cases, nobody does anything at that point. Like, nobody does anything. Like, who is the last person that when they connected with you, you were like, hey.

Cool to connect. Let’s hook on a call and talk. Like, never. So because of that, we need to scoop that opportunity up because we’re scrappy business owners, and we do things that other people don’t do.

We’re not reaching out to shitty cold leads and going, like, I think I could help you. Like, they don’t know who you are. We’re saying, hi. So cool that we’re finally connected.

I love this. Let’s talk about your business.

And then those who actually want to will. Yeah.

We’re not trying to do ignorable things.

But even if I did like somebody’s post and they reached out to me, I I feel like I would be quite skeptical because I’d be like, look. I have, like, six meetings a day. I have lots to do on my plate. You don’t really know our priorities.

You don’t know our values. You don’t know what we’re working on. This is kind of a waste of my time. I’m thinking, like, this is how I would respond even if I did like their post.

And so much Naomi, right now, how much money do you have budgeted for freelancers to help you grow in your business’ budget, Naomi?

I have for VA, seven hundred dollars a month. And I’m just starting to work with a ghostwriter, and I am doing about three hundred dollars a month for her writing.

Yeah. So two hundred target market is the point. You’re not the person that I’m saying people should be reaching out to. That’s that’s not it.

If you don’t have ten thousand dollars to spend, what you would think doesn’t matter. And so that’s an important thing for you to get out of your own head when we talk to the decision committee today. You are too present on your own decision committee. You need to put the right people on your decision committee so that Naomi, who worked in house, doesn’t get a board seat.

She’s off. She’s she’s out. She doesn’t get one. She doesn’t have the money to spend.

Naomi her Naomi the freelancer, also not allowed to make a decision here. The only people who get to make decisions about what you do and where you do it to grow your business are those who have done the thing or who are a good fit for the thing, not the skeptics in the room. Do you know how many skeptics are in the room? Every middle manager on the planet.

Every person who’s like, my life sucks. All of these people don’t get a say. They’re all skeptical about everything. Let them be.

More for us. So I’m not saying do crappy work. I’m saying wrap a connection by the reins when it happens. Don’t let it pass you by.

If someone if Tara from Bitly decides to connect with you on LinkedIn, she doesn’t have to connect with anybody on LinkedIn. If she does, that’s a good moment to say, Tara, I love what you’re doing at Bitly. Your emails are dope. I do emails as well.

In the event there’s ever any way I can help you, I would love to hop on a call with you. I know you’re swamped, but I love you. I’m here when you need me. That’s at least something real, and it’s based on the connection that really happened.

And Tara would be out of her mind to not file that away as, oh, that was cool. She will file it away as that was cool. She might not reply to you. That’s not the point.

Point is you’ve now started a relationship there.

Wait. But Naomi working in house, our marketing team spent a minimum of fifty thousand dollars a month, if not more. So I did have budget when I was working.

But were you the decision maker, Naomi? Were you running the budget? Yeah.

I mean, I was able to spend on a lot of different things. Right.

I would say. I would encourage you not to find the problem here. The problem is the wrong people are making the decision as you’re going through what to do next.

That’s not gonna get you where you wanna go. You’re letting too much of the skeptic in your decision committee, way too much. That’s just pure coaching. This isn’t up for debate.

You are. I have worked with you long enough to know you are letting the wrong people make the decision. And if that’s Naomi who handled fifty thousand dollar in largely ad spend budget back when you were in house, that person has to retire or they have to make themselves more useful to you than they’re doing. They’re not making themselves useful to you right now.

They’re just getting in your way.

Says Joe the coach with full love for you, not whoever else I might sometimes appear as. This is me telling you, left the right people on your decision committee. You have people to fire from it.

Awesome. Right. I know it’s a lot to take in, but do your best with it. Cool?

Cool. Yeah.

What’s that? You can keep going. You get more.

No. I mean, I I I I feel like in terms of, like, the eighty twenty, like, it it feels like it belongs in the eighty rather but, like, it feels like it’s a low return on investment, Like, to be doing all the time, and then you get trapped in LinkedIn, and then you get distracted, and it feels like it’s, like, a lot of work with a lot less return is my concern.

Yeah. Cool. Totally heard it.

There’s a lot of things that we’re doing that until you do them, you just don’t know. I would look at a plan like what I’ve heard other people have as plans or, like, I’m gonna guest podcast, that is an eighty on the eighty twenty.

If you are direct selling, if you are getting people on a call with you, that is extraordinarily high value. The question is, are you doing it right? So does it have to be LinkedIn? Mm-mm. That’s why I have email and Instagram as well. So there’s more things that you can do.

Don’t choose the wrong ones. I love that the person on your decision committee is there trying to look out for your time. That’s great. They need to stay there and stay on your decision committee, but there’s other people who are just getting in the way and don’t.

So if if LinkedIn is wrong, then who’s your ideal client sitting on your decision committee, and what do they think about you getting on LinkedIn? Do they agree that you should? If they’re in your three personas and they don’t, then listen to them. Right?

Maybe they have a voice, but just make sure you’re filtering things the right way, and actually trying something first instead of just saying, like, it’s not gonna work. It’s there are people closing million dollar projects over chat over chat without ever hopping on a call. So it’s a doable thing.

It’s very doable. It’s never gonna work if you’re a skeptic about it and you go into thinking it’s not gonna work. It’s not for you.

Cool. Ben, you are up.

Ready?

Alright.

Alright. So I I have, like, two questions. So I guess, like, the first one’s kinda simple.

So I’ve been posting reels a lot, and they’re horrendous. And I’ve got, like, more followers, like, the last couple weeks, which is, like actually, I just messaged them. Thanks for following, like like, ten minutes ago because I realized I should be doing that.

But I will say so, like, I know the message is the same. And, like, my my and I’m sure you agree with this, but I feel like a lot of messages on social media, like, especially on LinkedIn and Instagram are very boring. So, like, there’s nothing wrong with, like, like, we’re copywriters, and so we’re, like obviously, we’re persuasions, like, masters. So, like, I always feel like like, we we should be making, like, that message pop.

Like, there’s different ways to, like, you could say it like a really, like, boring person. Like, hey. You should improve this. Blah blah blah.

Or you could, like, figure out, like I mean, you shouldn’t spend hours, you know, doing that. Like but I I’m just saying there’s no problem, like, differentiating that message. So, like, when people are like that, they’re like, wow. That was a really great way of presenting it.

Like, presenting the message should like, we should be like, I just think we should present it in, like, a way better way than most people.

Yeah. Like, I hope that you are doing all of your reels while sitting where you are wearing your hat.

I just wanna I actually do. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Everyone loves it. Andrew just said it too. Like, who wouldn’t stop scrolling? I’d be like, what the hell, Ben? That’s awesome.

I know.

Love it.

So yeah. No. Agreed. You can say it. So what does your persona need to hear?

And then comes the question of how do you say it. So that one, they connect with it, and two, they connect with you. Obviously, as we you know, the undercurrent in so much of what we do is how likable are you? If you’re likable, you’re employable for life, and your money keeps going up.

It’s a really basic human thing. So the more likable you are, Ben, when you’re on these reels that you say are boring, just be your likable self and then boost them. If you’re not getting a lot of engagement, can you throw twenty bucks at it and just boost it and see what happens?

Okay. Okay. I know what like, and then I also know we’re talking about Instagram and LinkedIn. Yeah.

We could, like, easily repurpose Yes.

Instagram reels and put it on YouTube, for instance.

Yes. Put them everywhere.

Put your LinkedIn post, take a screenshot, put it on, Instagram as a screenshot. Like, it doesn’t have to just try different ways of repurposing with different formats. It’s our social media manager gives us a report every Friday of new things that she’s tried and what’s been working. And it’s always like, woah.

We tried this really dumb obvious thing, and it was super great over here. Like, we screenshotted one thing, and we reposted it somewhere else. And, like, that’s enough. It’s just yes.

You’re on the right track. Yes. Do all the things that you’ve said. Yeah.

And then another thing is, like, I’m sure you’ve gotten this question before, but, like like so whenever I think about creating content and, like, obviously, I’m getting inspiration from wherever books, past content, other profiles, I always feel like and, like, this is kinda like or ask your opinion. It’s like, I always feel like I should be, like, attributing, like, oh, I learned this from so and so. I learned something so and so. So I almost feel like everything I learned came from some place.

And so, like, I guess I’m always kinda, like, skeptical of, like, if I said this, I should, you know, call out who I learned it from. And I and I because I’m sure, like, people get upset in some sense. Like like, oh, you learned that from so and so. So I guess, like, what is your opinion on that?

Yep. Throw it in the caption on Instagram.

Put it in there. Like, you can talk about whatever in your video or however you present it, and then just make sure you say, like, I learned this from whoever. And then on LinkedIn, common way to do that is just your first comment. And then you can link to that if you’re like, by the way, I learned this in atomic habits.

Here’s a link to go buy the book if it resonated with you, and that works well in comments rather than in the actual LinkedIn post. But, yes, I wouldn’t overthink it. If you’re doing it off to the side, that’s enough. Just yeah.

It’s definitely important if that person especially if you can tag them too. Right? If you’re like, learn this from you, James Clear, and tag him in that, that could be a cool moment for you too if he’s like, wicked. Thanks.

Well, now now everyone’s like a habit expert.

So That’s true.

Poor poor mister clear. Yeah.

Cool. Okay. I’m loving that you’re doing this, Ben. What’s your schedule for posting? Do you have one?

Like, it’s just every morning at, like I’m trying to, like, every morning at nine AM. And so just try to get it, like, at nine AM, nine AM, and then, like, really the hard part is, like, I’m not trying to overthink it. So, like like, everyone’s like like, people are telling me to write scripts. But But instead of writing a script, what helps me instead is, like like, basically doing a video twenty times. So then it’s kind of like, I’ve already developed the script internally.

Rather than like, I’m gonna read the script. I’d rather just like because I already have the knowledge. So I’m just like, okay. Just say it twenty times and then practice.

Okay. Oh, say that differently. Say that differently. Say that differently. And then, like, I’m I’m like, Instagram’s unique, so I’m, like, practicing, like, screenshots, examples, do this, do this, do this.

Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot there, but I do the same thing. I have, like, notes that my social media person gives me.

Like, I have to hit these points, but then I go through it and I do it, like, thirty just as many times that you’re like, I forgot that point. But, yeah, that’s cool. Good for you. Do it every day.

Have it.

Love it. I my my goal is to do it so much where family and friends or whoever sees it, it’s not a big deal anymore. Like, this is not a big deal. I wanna like, that’s my whole thing. It’s like, this is not a big deal.

Cool. I love that. Yeah. Good insight. Wicked. Okay. Thanks, Ben.

Naomi, Andrew, I think we lost. Jessica was here, and then she’s gone. Anything else? How are we feeling as we get going on week seven? Focused followers.

Oh, Andrew says a free web based teleprompter. Yeah. That’s good.

Cool.

Love it.

Can I actually share a quick tip?

Yeah. So I’ve been using, yeah, like a free web based teleprompter, but then, if you all know Zscript, which is, like, the video editing tool Yeah. They now have an eye contact feature where it they use AI to make it look like you’re looking right at the camera. And so you can go ahead and, like, re you know, if you’ve ever filmed yourself reading a script before, it’s terrible. Like, even if you’re just occasionally glancing, it almost completely fixes that. And then all you have to do is just, like, get practice. Like, you still have to do it a few times because you don’t sound natural or normal reading it, but you don’t have to worry about, oh, it looks like I was reading there because it’s it’s and I would say it’s about ninety five percent plus effective.

So That’s so smart.

Yeah. Pretty cool.

Yep. That’s amazing. Thanks for the tip. And I also thought it was descript, not descript.

So It probably is.

I don’t know.

I said I was like I don’t know.

I don’t know.

So I said Zapier for, like, ten years Oh, I see.

Find Zapier. Zapier.

Zapier. The thing. Yeah.

I have to pause. Happier. Zapier. Okay.

Cool. Alright. Well, then, yeah, I’ll get thirteen minutes back to go get started on this, on the sheet on the work if you’ve hired a VA to get them hopefully scheduled to get briefed on the work of the week. Alright?

There are a few other tips in there as well around if you want to have your Instagram look a certain way. Creative market’s a great place to go if you don’t want to, if you’re not a designer or whatever it might be.

Cool. Alright. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you in our Thursday call. Have a good one. Bye.

Resources

Week 7 Workbook

Resources

Week 7 Worksheet