How to Leverage LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

Unlock the full potential of LinkedIn with us! Today, we are joined by Beverly Smith, founder of Career Success Strategies and LinkedIn expert. With her expertise in LinkedIn, we’re diving into how LinkedIn can help you grow your business, sharing tips and essential strategies to make the most of this powerful platform.

From why you should be using LinkedIn to how to maximize your LinkedIn profile and attract your ideal clients effectively, we will be diving into surprising tips that you will want to incorporate into your LinkedIn strategy. And don’t miss out – stay tuned until the end for a special discount on Beverly’s amazing services.

Connect with Beverly Smith

Website: https://cssar.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverlydsmith/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CareerSuccessStrategies

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Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:01

Today we have an awesome episode ready for you. We're talking to a LinkedIn expert, Beverly Smith. She's going to help you understand how LinkedIn can help your online business grow, with tips including why should we use LinkedIn for our business, and many of the statistics she gave me shocked me. I was super excited to hear these statistics. Also, whether you should use your personal profile or your business profile when you're on LinkedIn, and the answer here might surprise you as well. How to maximize your LinkedIn profile. She gives us great tips on actionable steps around how to maximize your LinkedIn profile that I'm definitely going to revisit mine and review, and also, finally, how to attract your ideal client on LinkedIn. This episode is so jam-packed with great nuggets you're going to want to listen to it and likely come back and listen again with pen and paper, so let's dive right in.

Carrie Saunders: 0:57

Welcome to the eCommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry, and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast.

Carrie Saunders: 1:36

Today, we have a special guest that I met this past year and her name is Beverly Smith. She's an expert in LinkedIn and we're going to be diving into some great business tips for your online business entrepreneurs on how to utilize LinkedIn to your best ability. And first off, though, I want to start off by giving you a little bit of background information about Beverly, so I'm going to read her bio because I don't have it memorized, and so here we go. Beverly Smith is the founder of Career Success Strategies, which specializes in helping senior and executive professionals with their resumes, linkedin branding and job search strategies so they can land their career or their dreams. She is also a LinkedIn top voice in job search strategies. Beverly also uses her knowledge and expertise to help business owners establish themselves and their businesses on LinkedIn through hands-on, one-on-one coaching. Known for building successful businesses, she previously owned a staffing and recruiting firm, which was selected the 2022 Arkansas SBA Women-Owned Business of the Year and a finalist for Arkansas business publishing group staffing business of the year in 2021.

Carrie Saunders: 2:48

Beverly and her husband, michael, live on a farm in rural Arkansas where they raise chickens and Berkshire pigs using permaculture farming methods. I had to read that one slowly. She enjoys running, running, crocheting and spending time with her family, and we are going to link to some ways to connect with Beverly in the show notes. So be sure to check those out wherever you're listening or on the eCommerce Made Easy podcast website, and also stay tuned to the end, because Beverly is going to share with us a special discount on some of her services. If this sounds like something you need help with, all right, so welcome Beverly to our podcast. Thank you so good to be here with you, k. Yeah, so a little background. Beverly and I met via a mutual group. We're in with Tracy Beavers, an online group, and we've kind of hit it off as friends since then. She's got some great knowledge. She's super helpful and always willing to help out wherever she can, so it's great to have Beverly on our show today.

Carrie Saunders: 3:49

Awesome, I'm excited, yeah, so let's first get started with why do you advocate that business owners should build a presence on LinkedIn? I know some people are wondering is it worth my time to build a business on LinkedIn and build a business presence there? So can you go over some of that for us?

Bevery Smith: 4:10

Yeah, sure. So I think it's common that when we think of social media and building a business, we think of Facebook and Instagram and probably Twitter and I X and some of those more traditional platforms, and we tend to think of LinkedIn as being, oh, it's for job seekers and obviously, with my background in staffing and now working to help people with their job search and with resumes, obviously it is a really good place for me to be, but what I discovered is it's a really good place for business owners to be in general. Number one is there's like over 7 million people on this platform and I did a LinkedIn training last week through LinkedIn itself and they were saying they were given the statistic that there were 7 million users. I was like that is unreal and they had just rolled over to 7 million. So they were given the statistic that there were 7 million users. I was like that is unreal and they had just rolled over to 7 million, so they were touting that. So it's kind of cool, but on top of that, so only 4% of people, 4 to 5, I've heard two different statistics, so we'll just say 4 to 5% of people that use LinkedIn are what I would call I don't want to say active on the platform, but they are the ones that are actually posting and putting out content. So you have a wide open opportunity here on LinkedIn. If only 4% are putting out content, you know, it's just wide open.

Bevery Smith: 5:48

I personally have found that the algorithms are a lot better on LinkedIn than anywhere else. So when I post, my post is likely to live a little bit longer and, depending on what it is, some posts get different traction. But I'm just checked my notifications before we jumped on and you know somebody had commented on a post I did like three weeks ago, so I thought that was kind of amazing and it was something too that I noticed really before I started really studying LinkedIn is that you did tend to get a little bit of better traction with the algorithm. The other thing I will add here is statistics show that your average income for users of Facebook and Instagram tends to be in that 40 to 50 range 40 to 50,000 a year range. Instagram tends to be in that 40 to 50 range, 40 to 50,000 a year range. Linkedin your users, your average income, tends to be 100K plus, and so we're talking about people with money to spend, and that is important when we're trying to sell things on LinkedIn and to make a living, as we want to be targeting people that can actually afford to buy our product. So your audience is here, I would also say, too.

Bevery Smith: 7:13

The other thing that I have found is and I heard this too on this training I did last week LinkedIn users come to the platform to learn, so it is a great place to share your expertise, to educate your audience, to talk about what it is you do with your products or your services, and not necessarily, as you know and you and I have been in the same group with Tracy it's not like you're sell, sell, sell, but you're putting out content that is educational and informative, and people actually want to see that stuff on LinkedIn, and you very rarely see a lot of personal things, but it is more educational, more business oriented. That being said, it is some of my personal content that does very well, and so what's kind of neat about LinkedIn is you can mix that in. People like to see that behind the scenes, they like to know that I'm on the farm. Some of my farm posts get great, great pictures. Matter, are you still there?

Carrie Saunders: 8:24

I'm still here. Okay, good, we you're locked up for a second sorry about that.

Bevery Smith: 8:29

so I was. What I was saying is, um, one of one of my posts that I just checked on that did so well, was when I did a few about two or three weeks ago, and it was the post of our new berkshire Piglets. They like to know that behind the scene, you know what's going on in your life and what's cool is you could take those behind the scenes stuff and you can. If you formulate your content right, you can always tie it back to business in some way. So it's just a great place to be and I think, even if you still are going to put all your weight into Facebook, you really are doing yourself a disservice if you don't build on LinkedIn as well, and LinkedIn is pretty easy to build on, which I'm sure we'll touch on later.

Carrie Saunders: 9:21

Wow, actually, I'm actually shocked by some of those statistics and it's making me. I do post on LinkedIn, obviously for our business, but it's making me think, wow, I kind of really need to focus on that one a bit more than Facebook, cause we tend to work with the business owners and the people who have, you know, the money to invest in their website and in our businesses and I'm thinking, wow, I'm I, wow, I'm kind of treating LinkedIn as kind of like a side thing. Like you know, I do it, but it's not like where I'm really focusing on and I think you've just changed my mind. I'm going to focus on it a lot more. That, just it totally makes sense.

Carrie Saunders: 10:00

I agree, I originally had in my brain that LinkedIn was mostly for job searching and things like that, but I have actually reconnected with some older clients that used to use the software that we build with and you know, maybe seven, eight years me. They thought, oh, we really enjoyed working with pieces engineering. Maybe they can help us with this new business that they're working for via linkedin to how they connected to me, because that's just what they knew to do and we connected on linkedin before he left that company we worked with him with.

Carrie Saunders: 10:38

So yeah, I yeah, I, I need to focus on linkedin more Yay.

Bevery Smith: 10:44

So, top of mind too, I mean, had you not been posting on LinkedIn and things like that, or not even just even you know, making it a little bit of an afterthought you probably wouldn't have found them. So this could be opening up doors. So, and we'll talk a little bit too, I'm sure, later about building an audience as well.

Carrie Saunders: 11:08

Yeah, that's a great point. All right, so this is, I know, something that's super confusing for a lot of people, whether I mean, I know people ask these questions a lot on Facebook and they also ask it on LinkedIn, but should business owners promote their business through their personal profile or through their business profile, and what's the advantages?

Bevery Smith: 11:27

Yes, okay. So the short answer is both. The simple answer, though, carrie, is you want to do it through your personal profile. People want to connect with people, and they're more likely to engage with you, a person, versus you, your business. So, that being said, I would still tell you, at the very least you need to create a business page. So like when you go to the experience section on your profile and you put in your work history Well, if your business or the company that you've worked for previously is on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to select that company and link you up to it, which hence the name LinkedIn.

Bevery Smith: 12:24

And so it's kind of neat, because if you don't have it there, it's just going to be a grayed out little icon, and it's not very attractive. And if you will, at the very least it's so easy to do create a business profile, put your logo up there and just put in the basic information. It's social proof. So when they go to your pay, or when they go to your profile and they see, they go, scroll down to your experience section and they're looking. And especially, you know, if you're just getting into business too, this is going to give you some credibility. You're not going to look like fly by night. Oh, you know, we're not really sure about her. You know it looks like she's had all these jobs. Is she really in business? Is this a side hustle? And here's the deal. There's a lot of people on LinkedIn with side hustles, and that is great. And if you're listening to this and this is a side hustle for you, that is great. You still need to be here, and I am.

Bevery Smith: 13:26

I guess what I'm saying is this is for both whether you are a side hustle or whether this is your full-time gig. You need a business page. So just for that social proof. And secondly, you're going to post primarily from your personal page. You're going to post primarily from your personal page, but you can definitely use that content over on your business page as well. And like what I would tell you, just getting started, on your business page, you know there's a place for you to put in your website and any other contact information that you want to give out. I just wouldn't overthink it at the time. And if you don't feel like posting over there, you know, at least put some basic information about this business. But you can definitely take posts that are doing well on your personal profile and then go post them over there. So if you were to go back over to career success strategies, my page you'll see I try to post two or three times a week over there, you know, but it's not a big strategy.

Bevery Smith: 14:42

Where it's going to be important is, let's's say, down the road. I do all my live streams through my personal profile right now, but let's say that down the road. For whatever reason and there's a couple of people I follow that actually got their start in the e-commerce business, actually got their start in the e-commerce business and she has built up her business page enough that she can do her live streams through her business page and she has reasons for wanting to do that. I think there's a little bit better reach maybe there to others, but again, you'll need to be established to do that. So in order to be established, you got to start somewhere. So do it now, focus on your profile and then, you know, put some content over there when you can.

Carrie Saunders: 15:37

I know one thing I do to try to get a bit more reach on my business page on LinkedIn is I will share a post from my business page to my personal. That way people can see like the connection there. Is that something a good idea to do occasionally? I?

Bevery Smith: 15:53

think it's a great idea. And the other thing too is on your business page you can go and invite people to follow you. Very much like the Facebook situation. And you know you mentioned Facebook. It's kind of I think it's a LinkedIn business page is probably a little bit better than a Facebook business pages right now. But if you remember a few years back on Facebook, it was like you better have a Facebook business page, kind of for the same reason, that whole social proof thing. But yeah, I really do like that and I use that same strategy with my Facebook business page as well, as I'll take whatever I post over there and I'll post it over to my personal page and you can even go vice versa as well on that.

Carrie Saunders: 16:43

Yeah, I know I like to try to speaking of the being able to invite to to your page on LinkedIn. I try to, once a month, utilize that because you can invite up to 250 people on your free LinkedIn, if I remember right. So I try to, at least once a month, invite 40 to 50 of my new connections. At least once a month, invite 40 to 50 of my new connections right, and a lot of them will accept it.

Carrie Saunders: 17:05

So I feel like it's good to promote both, because I do agree, you're going to get different reach from each side, sure?

Bevery Smith: 17:10

sure, and I also think too, if I remember correctly, if the people once they accept, um, that gives you more credits back, um, so, um, you can continue. You might, you might check. But I think I really liked something. You said you do that once a month. So I think if you just put on your calendar, I was like this is going to be a monthly duty that I do and I'm going to invite it, then you know it's getting done and um, then you don't have to worry about you know it taking up a lot of your time or anything like that.

Carrie Saunders: 17:43

Yeah, I tend to do it on a once a month on a Friday late in the afternoon, when I'm kind of brain dead, don't want to think too much. I can just click that button and start inviting people. Good idea, right? Let's jump on to the next question that we have. So I know, when people are starting out on LinkedIn and they may already have a LinkedIn profile or they, you know, might decide after this podcast interview to create one what are the most important pieces of a LinkedIn profile that a business owner should complete to make sure they have credibility and are standing out, and things like that?

Bevery Smith: 18:18

Sure, I think this is a good question because I think when you go to your LinkedIn profile, there's obviously a lot there for job seekers as well, and you don't need to get lost in that rabbit hole. So, as a business owner number one, your profile picture this is extremely important. This does not need to be a selfie. Please don't take this in your car. Don't take this and cut your spouse out of the side or your frat buddy or whatever. You know whoever you're standing at. Don't wear your tux either if it's your wedding picture. You know this needs to be a professional headshot and you know it's so easy to get one done and just invest in that. Just know that that is an investment.

Bevery Smith: 19:11

I know for me personally and here's a tip that I would encourage people to do is build a relationship with a photographer friend. Mine is a running buddy of mine who is a school teacher, and her side hustle is her photography business, and I, once a year, get not just a headshot, but I get just a series of pictures that I can use in creating my content, series of pictures that I can use in creating my content, and so it is the best money that I spend because it makes it easy for content creation and that kind of thing as well. So, number one, your profile picture. Number two would be your headline. So that is the little verbiage that is below your profile picture. It is automatically going to default to your most recent position unless you change it. So real easy to change. Real important that your headline be attention grabbing. So this is where I think some of the stuff that you and I learned in Tracy's class is very helpful. But you want to think about um, you want to think about things that is going to be eye catching about your business, and so if I were you, I would research other business owners that are on the platform and look at theirs, because I advise business owners to do this differently.

Bevery Smith: 20:49

Versus a job seeker. For a job seeker, these are keywords that are searchable, so you may want to have some keywords in this as well, but you know, founder at BCS Engineering, I probably wouldn't start my headline off with that. I want something more attention grabbing than that, Like, what problem do you solve? And make it interesting, and y'all, I've seen some really cool ones, because I invested in a course that I took with lead generation on LinkedIn and they can be really neat. So what's interesting and I know we're going to talk a little bit about this down the road but when you're in your feed and you are looking at comments to somebody's post, that headline not all of it is there, but the first line of it is pretty much there. So if it says something like 10X your sales, I'm going to be going okay, I haven't known more and I'm probably going to click on that person's profile just to see who this is and what they're 10xing and how they can help me 10x this or that. So just keep that in mind.

Bevery Smith: 22:07

So headline is number two. Number three is your cover photo. So that's that long photo across the top. Do not leave it the LinkedIn default and do not leave it the LinkedIn default. This is a wonderful piece of real estate for you to tell a little bit more about what you do and who you are, who you serve. Don't put too many words in it, though, because if it's too wordy, first of all, if you're scrolling on the phone, it's going to be hard to read, so you want to keep it really simple. You also want to make sure that when you set it up, you want to check and see how it does look on your phone, because your profile picture might cover up parts of your work. So be careful when you create this, and you can make these very easily in Canva. Canva has the right dimensions for you. Also, LinkedIn has some default ones, but I wouldn't recommend them.

Bevery Smith: 23:10

I would say you know this is again. This is an opportunity to tell who you are. You can put your contact information. The only thing about the LinkedIn cover photos is they're not clickable. So, unlike like Facebook, if you click on it and it pulls up something you know, like information about the picture, it's not like that. And if you change yours on Facebook regularly, it's going to show up in your feed that you changed it. This one's not like that, but I would still recommend updating it. But I would still recommend updating it.

Bevery Smith: 23:40

Some people say quarterly. I don't know that. I would say that often. Do it if your business changes. Do it just every once in a while just to refresh. But that would be my third one. And then the fourth thing is do complete your about section If you don't do anything else. I mean, I do feel like you need to have some experience in there, but click that about section Again. The first few lines are going to be visible on your profile and then they'll have to click see more. So make sure whatever you put is not. You know I started out doing this and then I started doing this and then I helped this.

Bevery Smith: 24:25

You want to talk about a pain points that you solve and you want to be really appealing. Again, you know, it's kind of like that 10X, your sales kind of thing. You want to talk about a problem that you solve and how you can fix it. So, if y'all want, go look at my about section for ideas. Great place to put in emojis, though you can't. You're going to have to copy and paste them in. You can't just like type them as you go. So, but definitely you want to break up that text, make it easy to read, and those are probably the main things. So, again, profile picture, headline cover photo and about section, and I put them in order there, but honestly, you need all four of them Absolutely.

Carrie Saunders: 25:16

I would agree with that. And actually now, now I'm looking at mine over here on my other screen and I was like, well, I have more than just partner business engineering. But that's the first thing and you had made a really good point that I didn't really even think about that. When you're commenting on somebody, you do see that that starting of their line mine, because it's better than than I would say it was maybe a year or two ago. But now I want to rewrite it because I'm like I can.

Bevery Smith: 25:43

I can optimize this one even better absolutely, and I just rewrote mine about three weeks ago, so this is something I would tell the audience as well as let this one evolve as your business evolves, as you get better especially like, if copywriting is not your thing, you know, play with it. And as you explore, keep a swipe file of ones that you like and just use those for inspiration as well.

Carrie Saunders: 26:13

That's a good idea, All right. So next, here's something I know I struggle with. So how do you find the right, how do you find the clients, Like, how do you find your ideal, the right clients on LinkedIn? I struggle with this Sometimes. Sometimes it's a hit, Sometimes it's a miss it you know how could I do this better?

Bevery Smith: 26:30

Yeah, definitely.

Bevery Smith: 26:32

You need to first of all be very clear on who it is you're looking for, because if you're just going out there targeting everybody, it's not going to be worth your time, and so I'm going to make the assumption that our audience that's listening to us knows who their ideal client is and already speaks to them. So if you're doing that, then this makes the step a whole lot easier. So you want to strategically connect with people that are your ideal client. Let me kind of back up and say if you're new to LinkedIn and you're going to go and build a profile after listening to this podcast, then connect with the people that you know in real life. I mean connect with everybody you know in real life. Just to start building connections. You want to make sure that you've got over 500 connections at least to start getting some visibility, and honestly I would try to inch that up towards a thousand, but I'm going to stay. Once you connect to all your real life people, start strategically connecting with people and don't connect with people that are not your ideal client. Do that strategically. I mean, there's going to be times where like for example, for me, I'm very selective on what resume writers I connect with. I initially connected to a whole bunch of them, but then that was all that was showing up in my feed. And then what I have found is, when I'm very strategic about who I connect with, linkedin starts serving me up more of those people. Here's someone based on your other connections that you might be interested in connecting with, and so when you go to that my Network button, you are going to have the opportunity to connect with people from your school, which I would definitely go through and give those a look over and see if any of those make sense for you to connect with. They're going to have people from your community and then there will be influencers for you to connect with and things like that. So one of the things that I do is sometimes there's people that I'm interested in like I'm interested in because I want to see their content and things like that I follow them instead of send them a connection request. So you can always do that and they may come back and send you a connection request and that's cool. Then you can decide and just because somebody sends you a connection request, if it does not make sense, don't connect with them. I mean, it's not a popularity contest. You're not going to hurt anyone's feelings if you never connect with them.

Bevery Smith: 29:25

Another thing that's real important when you're sending out your connections, really study their profile and so you can go to their activity and look and see and it may say you know, mary Jane has not posted recently. Okay, fine, I'm still going to connect on that activity or click on that activity because I want to look over and they'll say posts, comments, reactions or maybe a few more, depending on how active they are on the platform. I always go to that reactions button. If Mary Jane is liking people's posts, she's reacting and so that tells me and then I can look and see how that post is and get an idea. So if she likes someone's post last week, she's on the platform. If she likes someone's post two years ago, she's not on the platform.

Bevery Smith: 30:23

And the reason I tell you this is depending on what version of LinkedIn if you're paying for LinkedIn or if you are using the free version you have a limit on your connections and you want to be strategic on using those. If you are using the free version I believe it is and I was trying to. Last I checked it was only 10. You can send out up to 10 messages with each connection a month and I think you've got something like 200 connections that you can make. So and that's fine, and you can still connect without sending a message and there's a good chance people will connect back. When they connect back, then you can message them and LinkedIn doesn't dock you for that and I would. I would message them and say thank you for accepting my connection request.

Bevery Smith: 31:25

I noticed that we both attended, you know, arkansas State University and you know something like that. You know Arkansas State University and, um, uh, you know, um, something like that. You know just something to engage them or you can ask them a question. If it's especially, you know, if it's relative, don't go into cell mode. But here's something that I learned very recently and some training I did and I thought was genius by engaging with them in those direct messages, they're more likely to see your posts in the feed, in their feed. So that's really cool. So you want to do that, you also.

Bevery Smith: 32:02

The other thing is, if anybody comments on your posts, you always, always want to respond to them and if you can keep the conversation going and you can keep it going with asking them a question back, make sure that your posts have some sort of CTA that gets them to take an action, and it doesn't have to be by my thing, it can just be drop a heart in the comments. I see Mel Robbins doing this all the time. It'll be like drop a heart in the comments. I see Mel Robbins doing this all the time. It'll be like drop a heart in the comments. Another way to find your people is go to influencers like a Mel Robbins. If your audience is following her, go there and interact with her posts. You know, leave comments I get. When I do that, I will all the time get people that want to connect with me because I'm a fellow follower and things like that, and so it's a great strategy to go and look for that.

Bevery Smith: 33:04

And as you begin to grow your network and you're engaging with the comments in your feed, you can look at people that are responding to other posts and maybe they're a second degree or a third degree connection. Then they might be your ideal audience too, and so that's when you can go and you can have conversations with them. You can send them a connection request and then again, when they respond back and say, hey, I really liked the post, I really like what you had to say on such and such as post, that was really interesting. So that's just some of the ways that I use to develop my audience. I strategically connect with people weekly. I try to do it daily but sometimes it just doesn't work out for me to do that. But I strategically connect weekly. It's not, like I said, a popularity contest, so I'm not trying to blow up the number of my connections. It's more important for you to have 500 highly engaged, targeted connections than it is to have 500,000 people that could care less who you are.

Carrie Saunders: 34:18

I totally agree with that. I actually really love that. I think this is this conversation is really making me want to make it a habit on Fridays to really connect with people. I feel like that's something I can do weekly, so that's why I picked Fridays. So I feel like Fridays are going to be my social media day, particularly for LinkedIn. I'm going to focus on it more. I'm going to. I love your strategies on how to find the perfect person because you know we work with specific shopping cart platforms and with WordPress, so sometimes that's a hard thing to search. So kind of our niche is what they use, not necessarily what they sell.

Carrie Saunders: 34:52

So that's a little bit harder sometimes to find the right people, but I feel like if I'm strategic about making sure that I'm doing these connections regularly whether that's weekly for me or monthly for some people, depending upon where they are in their business making sure you have that you want to always be growing your audience because you never know who is going to be on your new connection list and you never know who who you might've connected with, who they know that might actually need what you have. It may not be them that needs it. You know there's such. I've found that if there's some something that draws me to somebody and I feel engaged with them and I want to have conversations with it, many, many times it's because they know somebody that that would, that would work well with me, or or I can learn from them. Could be either way, but I find following your gut on who to connect with is is honestly a really good idea too.

Bevery Smith: 35:44

Yeah, you know. It's. Something else too I think is really important is when you are in your feed and you're looking like. So you may have a post show up in your feed that I commented on, and it may be nobody that you know, but what it's going to show up is at the top, as you scroll through your feed. At the top it's going to say Beverly Smith commented on this and or like this, and then that can trigger you to go oh, I know Beverly, I'm going to go and see what she had to say, and you could scroll down and then you know, maybe it's a post that has 20 or 30 comments. Well, my goodness, that could be a whole new world for you to go in and look at and say, maybe you know, let me look at these people. So there's going to be.

Bevery Smith: 36:44

It can be a little bit of a strategy, it can be a little bit of time to do this, but I think once you kind of get in the habit of doing that, and also, too, the more you strategically select who you're going to follow or who you're going to connect with, and the more you strategically comment on posts and things like that and engage with it, then LinkedIn's algorithms are going to understand what content you want to see in your feed. So one other tidbit I will add for your audience is before you post, make sure that you do what I call priming the algorithm. And the way you do that is you just go strategically and engage with the posts that are in your feed and what you're doing is you're letting LinkedIn know I'm here, I'm here, I'm not just scheduled and this is just content that's going out and whatever, whatever. But LinkedIn knows that you're a real person, you're really here, you're on the platform, you're using the platform and guess what? They're more likely to boost your post up to where it's going to get seen more and to the same point, don't jump off as soon as you post it either.

Bevery Smith: 38:04

So make that time that you post, give yourself a five minute before and a five minute after to stay on and engage with, because if anybody starts commenting, you want to make sure you comment right away and let them know that, hey, I'm here and you're letting LinkedIn know, and then you're more likely to have to continue the pattern, like it's going to keep your posts more engaged that much longer. So, real important. Linkedin also does not like for you to schedule, use a third-party scheduler, but LinkedIn has its own scheduler. So there's going to be times that I will go ahead and schedule posts and try to come back and engage, but if I can't, I'm just like, okay, whatever, I don't for this time. But most of the time I post mine, I have my content created. I create it well in advance, and then I just go grab it out of my project manager and put it in LinkedIn and then I'm there and ready to go.

Carrie Saunders: 39:03

So just I actually really liked that last tip, where you've already got it pre-planned. You've, you know, kind of blocked your time, probably to create these posts ahead of time so that you're not worried about interacting. And then what am I going to say? And then interacting again. You made you've just made your time so much more efficient doing that, so I feel like that's a really good time. Efficiency too, and using social media.

Bevery Smith: 39:26

I'm going to add one more thing about LinkedIn. What's really cool is like okay, as opposed to Instagram, if you go to someone's profile, like, you can really see all their content, just if you just keep scrolling. You can do that on LinkedIn. It's a pain in the rear to go back and you're never going to go back on someone's feed or someone's activity post and go back six or seven months and see, oh, did they repost this? Is this something they've said before? So don't be afraid to recycle your stuff and I think a six-month timeframe is probably more than you need, but it's a good safety bet and you could just, you know, create content for six months and then come back and start reposting and, and, and you may find too, as you grow in your creation and things like that, you're going to probably tweak it just a little bit, but I mean, you can use the same image and everything, and they're not going to know.

Carrie Saunders: 40:28

They're just not going to know that's a really good point because I knew that, I knew it would be hard to like, go and see, like your old posts, but I didn't really think about it and that it's kind of a pain to be able to try to find your old post, but I didn't think about it as the advantage, as the creator, that you can more easily and more comfortably reuse your posts, because people aren't going to remember three, four, five, six or so months ago what you posted. It actually might just, you know, subconsciously trigger oh yeah, I was thinking about that and I did want to act upon that, and now I will because it was already subconsciously my brain from a previous post, you know, months, months ago. Yeah, I would also add to that as well.

Bevery Smith: 41:07

If you're strategically connecting with new people, every week you've got a whole new audience that never saw your stuff six months ago. That's going to be seeing it and so and the better you get at that, the more true that's going to be. Is that these people because maybe you've been DMing them and things like that they're more likely to do to see those things. So, and you can also repost if you have a post that does really good, you can repost that as well. I see people doing that all the time.

Carrie Saunders: 41:43

That's great. So these have been some great tips, beverly. I mean, I just I want to re-listen to this honestly and I will, and you know, write down some notes for myself, because I just feel like I've been under utilizing LinkedIn for years now and this is just going to really help me. I'm just so excited. All right, so let's, I want you to share with us some great ways to connect with you, in case people want to learn more about you, and just so everybody knows too, any links that she says we're going to put in the show notes too, so it's a bit easier. But go ahead and let us know how do we connect with you more?

Bevery Smith: 42:20

Sure, sure. So obviously, linkedin is probably the best place to find me. If you want to follow me on social and I'm actually Beverly D Smith is my full link on there, though it does not say there's not the D in the actual like on my name on my profile. So, and that is the best way on Facebook I have a business page called Career Success Strategies and you can follow me there Also. My website is cssarcom. It's kind of nothing fancy. I actually converted my website over from my staffing business was Career Staffing Services, so it was the same URL, so I just converted it. This was career staffing services, so it was the same URL, so I just converted it over, since I knew people already know that and I just haven't done too much with my website right now. And if you want to email me, it's Beverly at CSSARcom.

Carrie Saunders: 43:29

Great, and then. So Beverly has a special um offer for any listeners too, if you want to take advantage of some of our services. So let us know about that, beverly okay.

Bevery Smith: 43:40

So this has been so interesting because I have had several of my my circle of friends and connections reach out to me and say, okay, what are you doing on LinkedIn and can you help me? So I'm like, okay, let's just create a package for them. So my package typically runs 675 and you get three hours of one-to-one coaching. During that time and where we help you with setting up your profile, we talk about all these strategies that we've talked about. I hope you build your audience, teaching you how to engage with it, get your business page set up and basically I teach you how to do these things and record the sessions and stuff like that. And so, for your listeners, if y'all will reach out to me and tell me you found me on Carrie's podcast, then I will give you $100 off that session and would love to help other people get involved on this platform because it's such a beneficial tool. It's just really been obviously huge for my business.

Bevery Smith: 44:48

And I know some of you may be saying again well, you're in the careers industry. That makes sense. I'm telling you I have worked with, I took a, I took a, I invested heavily in a lead. Very few of them were in the careers industry. There was a lot of e-commerce people, a lot of people in direct sales that are using it. It's a great platform and my clients that are business owners that are working with me are in real estate and insurance currently. So, yeah, just come wide open.

Carrie Saunders: 45:27

That's great. Thank you so much, Beverly, for being on our show. I'm super excited to take some action steps with many of the things you shared with us today and I really appreciate you coming on.

Bevery Smith: 45:38

Thank you for having me. Keri Enjoyed it.

Carrie Saunders: 45:40

You're very welcome. Well, I will see you more online, all right. So wasn't that such a great episode? I know I learned a ton from it and will be re-listening to it and making notes myself. Beverly really gave us some great tips on how to connect them all together to really maximize our reach and visibility on LinkedIn and make it effective for us. Be sure to visit our show notes wherever you're listening on our podcast, or you can visit our podcast website at ecommercemadeeasy easy podcastcom. Forward slash 56 for this specific episode. If you're watching on the YouTube channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you're listening on the podcast, hit that follow button wherever you're listening. And if you're loving my e-commerce made easy podcast, I'd be thrilled if you'd rate us and review us on our Apple podcast link. Your readings and reviews help me reach more listeners, just like you, and empower more people. Thrive in the online business world. Thank you again for listening and we will see you next week.