Louise: One percent of people on LinkedIn write posts. When I go to LinkedIn, it’s usually the same 30, 40 people I see in my newsfeed. And I have to remember I have 15,000 people in my who are following me. So when you think of it that way, you go, oh, okay, that makes sense. It’s people, they’re people just don’t bring themselves to write posts. Especially people who are in corporate jobs. But most people in corporate careers don’t post anything. Most people are lurking on LinkedIn. Which means that if you can get yourself into a frame of mind of starting posting once or twice a week on LinkedIn, you will see the number of people visiting your profile and connecting with you rise stratospherically. LinkedIn is about building relationships. It is a massive networking party that people want to connect with you and have conversations.

Louise: But if you’re never actually posting anything, then how do they even know you exist?

Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. A lot of the authors that I work with when they are first getting into marketing, their themselves, their book, their mission, their message, they are often really nervous about social media and about video marketing. Especially just the idea of getting on a video and sharing that video is really scary for people. And so today I’m really excited that our guest will help put you at ease, help you understand some of the things that you should know about LinkedIn and about video content marketing. Really excited to welcome this week’s guest.

Stacy: Louise Brogan is an award winning LinkedIn expert, author, podcaster and YouTuber who helps people raise their visibility online. Mom of three and I had to say the British mum there or the Irish mom, I should say mom of three. Louise runs a boutique marketing agency working with B2B clients to create their LinkedIn content with a focus on video marketing. Louise is a small business champion in the UK who has been recognized by King Charles at a special reception at Buckingham palace and is very proud to champion other entrepreneurs, especially women over 40. Welcome Louise.

Louise: Thank you so much, Stacy. I’m really looking forward to our chat today.

Stacy: I’m really excited to get to talk with you. I was on your podcast not too long ago, so this is like our second we get to have kind of a follow up conversation. But focusing on you this time, I’d love for you to share with our listeners a little bit about your background and what led you into the work that you do today, helping people raise their visibility online through content marketing. I mean, I’m sure as you know, little girl that wasn’t the thing that you thought of doing when you grew up, but I’m curious what led you into this work?

Louise: That’s so funny. No, it definitely was not. So my background’s actually in it. I did a master’s in computing. I was a software engineer. I went, I left my software engineering role to go traveling, which I think a lot of your listeners were probably going, yep, I understand that. And when I came back I was getting married and I got a job as an IT project manager in the health service here in the uk, a job that I really loved. I did it for about 10 and a half years and I probably would have stayed in at Stacy except that when I had my kids, I have three children.

Louise: When I had my kids I went part time in my role and was basically told in no uncertain terms that I would not progress any further up through the ranks unless I went full time. And I thought, no, I don’t want to do that. I want to work, I have a good job and get a job that does that I deserve. So, you know, nothing wrong with lesser admin roles, but I was really well qualified. I thought no, I want to progress through this organization and I don’t see why I can’t doing that in a part time role because I always delivered my work and my boss was very happy with my work. But it was pretty clear to me unless I went through a tribunal process that this was the way it was going to be.

Louise: I thought, well stuff that and I thought what else will I do then? So I started my business, kind of came around through like everything does a chance conversation with somebody. I had a little craft shop selling card making supplies alongside my job and my three kids. When I look back now, I think how I don’t know how I managed honestly, I don’t know how I was seen. And that shop did not do very well. It didn’t make a lot of money. And somebody came out to see me and look through my books and she said to me, this business is not really work. Can I be honest with you? This business is not really working for you. And all the money you’re bringing in is going out to pay your staff and the rent and everything to cover the shop.

Louise: But you’re not, you know, I don’t see how this is going to change for you. And she’s. But, but you’re one of the first people I’ve met who understands how to use social media. You seem to know how to use Facebook. And she says, I meet so many clients, small businesses who have no idea how to get on the Internet. And this was back, this is now, oh, my gosh, 2010, 2011. So I thought, oh, there’s something in that. So I started helping out local small business owners. And I’m talking about people who run Pilates classes or people who were someone who owned a kebab shop, you know, like real small local businesses.

Louise: And I put all the money away I earned from that into a bank account and didn’t touch it until I had enough money to replace my salary and I handed my notice in. And that’s when I became a proper small business. Wasn’t making a lot of money, but was a lot happier.

Stacy: Yeah, I love that. That’s so cool to be able to leverage something that you’re finding that you’re naturally good at and then also to be able to go and be like, oh, yeah, you said I’m not going to progress. All right, well, I’ll do it on my own terms. I love that. I’m curious to know, you know, your background in the early, earlier days of social media and tech, all of these experiences they’ve had that you’ve had over the years, how does that influence the work that you do today? Especially with, gosh, there’s so many things changing rapidly. So rapidly. Even just in the last couple weeks, I’m finding that people are telling me they’re finding me through ChatGPT, like, what? Okay, that’s awesome. But also, like, this is just totally new, you know, all of the Google SEO.

Stacy: When is that going to be kind of obsolete? When now we have, you know, chatgpt pulling the strings on who gets noticed. And anyway, it’s just so much. There’s so many things that are Changing. But certainly there’s some foundational things or some experiences that you’ve had that influence how you work with people now.

Louise: Yes. So I think the fact that I love tech and I’m quite geeky, I think that has played out really well for me because I like understanding how things work. And when I started out, initially I was helping small businesses with mainly Facebook and Twitter, and then as they brought more platforms, I had to learn how to use those as well. And I thought, this is. How do you keep up with all of them? It’s too hard. And I worked with a coach who suggested that I niche down to one and we had a conversation and I said, when I spend time on Facebook and Instagram, I do get business, but when I spend time on LinkedIn, I get business really fast. And she says, well, you know, this is back in 2018, maybe nobody was a LinkedIn expert.

Louise: Nobody was, because it was seen as the boring one. So I thought, okay, this could work for me. And so that’s how I got into LinkedIn. And then I got. I had a kind of a stroke of luck, really, although I think you make your own luck too. But I. A friend of mine suggested that I could apply to be a writer for Social Media examiner, which is a global website, social media expertise. So I did apply and this really helped me to become. To develop my writing skills. Don’t think I would have written a book if I hadn’t gone along this path. They were looking for specialists on the different social media platforms and I put myself Forward as a LinkedIn specialist and they gave me a go. And I think in the end I wrote seven articles for them.

Louise: But they had to be really clear, clear, step by step. One particular little area of LinkedIn which actually really deepened my knowledge of the platform, so. And taught me how to write for the Internet. So where it’s a real skill, you know, that you’d have those rules that you had to write, you had every second paragraph, you had to have an image. You couldn’t have three paragraphs of text without an image. These kind of rules I had to learn headings, subheadings, when do italics work? You know, all this stuff. And that really sharpened my writing skills, but also sharpened my knowledge on LinkedIn. And so I started to become known as somebody who was an expert on LinkedIn. And that’s when I suppose things started to really grow in the business because I became very referable to other people.

Stacy: It’s just that I think it’s that clear messaging, clear you know, it’s, there’s so many marketing companies or people that teach marketing to have real clarity of this person is excellent at this thing. That’s when, you know, somebody goes, oh, I really need help with my LinkedIn. And they go, oh yeah, I know exactly who to should check out Louise. You know, I think that’s so smart and it’s something we talk about a lot on this podcast and in my work with clients that understanding your niche is so important. People are really like scared, I think, to niche down because they feel like they’re limiting themselves. But there’s a lot the many billions of people in the world.

Stacy: So if you think about it’s actually making it way easier to reach the people that you need to reach with the message that you need to reach them with. So I love that you had that really early example in your work. I’d love to dive a little deeper into LinkedIn again. As I mentioned in the intro today’s conversation, a lot of my clients, a lot of the authors I’m connecting with, either through working with me directly or, you know, they’re in my audience of some way listeners. This is a big question we get is, oh, how do I grow my LinkedIn? What do I need to do for LinkedIn? And it’s, it can feel really overwhelming to people.

Stacy: A lot of people are transitioning from, you know, maybe they are starting their own thing, but their LinkedIn right now just has their job role at a company, you know, and so they’re now stepping into this totally new territory of building a personal brand. And maybe they’ve never done a video in a social media context. Maybe they’ve done some for things, but like, it’s weird to look at the camera the first time and just talk to it. It’s strange at first, so that’s a little scary. And then there’s all that self critique that you go into before, and some of them don’t even get published. So I’d love for you to start with the pillars for us, because I know you have four pillars.

Louise: Yes.

Stacy: Can you walk us through those four pillars and talk about how you can use those pillars to build a sustainable presence on LinkedIn.

Louise: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was the thing that I niche down further then was into video LinkedIn as well. Yeah, but yeah, so I came up with this concept of having four pillars of LinkedIn because I think one of the things I’m known for, especially I get so many comments on YouTube, is that I Explain things in a really clear way and a really simple way. People like that, they’re like, oh, I didn’t know how to do this and you just literally walked me through it step by step. So with LinkedIn, the way I explain it is if you think about having a three legged stool, if you take away one leg or the seat, you’ve just got four pieces of wood, so you need all four pieces to make it into something that actually functions.

Louise: And I think that’s, I really think that’s how we’ve got to look at LinkedIn. So the foundation piece of LinkedIn is your profile. And there are so many ways to do your LinkedIn profile nowadays. There’s so many ways to get help with it. I mean, I literally walk you through it in my book and all my YouTube videos. Literally walk you through how do you update your profile? But your LinkedIn profile. So say you’ve just come out of a corporate career and you’re like, Louise, my LinkedIn profile is like my project management job that I’ve done for the last 10 years. And that’s okay. A lot of people transitioning ask me about how do you do both? And you can do both. It’s a bit tricky, but you can do both.

Louise: But basically, when you look at your LinkedIn profile, the key things you want to think about are that top rectangle where your name and your photograph are and your headline, that’s called your introductory card. And that’s when someone, if someone sees a post that you’ve commented on or written and they think, oh, who’s this person? And they go to your profile, the first thing they see is your introductory card. So that should be a really nice clear photograph of you. It should have your name and then your headline should tell people what it is that you do and who you help. So if you are someone who’s worked, you’re a consultant who’s helping authors to get more visibility online.

Louise: When I look at your headline on LinkedIn, that should be really clear to me that’s what you do, but then filling out your whole profile. So a lot of people that I work with and we write profiles for people and what happens is they’ve got the bit at the top sorted, but they haven’t filled out the whole profile. A lot of people don’t even know they have an about section because They’ve had their LinkedIn profile since they started their job many moons ago. And when they go and look at it, they’re like, oh, do we have an about Section. There’s lots of sections we have on our profiles, but if you haven’t created them yet, you won’t see them.

Louise: So really filling out the whole thing in the about section, it should really be about the purse, how you help the person who’s reading it. So rather than saying Louise Brogan is like the introduction you did about me at the start of this podcast, it shouldn’t be that. It should be if someone is looking for help with LinkedIn and video, then when they start reading my about section, it should be speaking to them. So I raise the things that they might be having issues with. I kind of qualify as to why I might be the person to help them. And then I list out here’s the way we can help you. And then really key is having a call to action that says get in touch with me. You know, book a call, whatever it is.

Louise: But then filling out the entire profile and all of that is the first piece I do a thing called the LinkedIn VIP package where I do, I help people with. It’s like a two part package and the entire first half is the profile and then the second half is really the other pillars. So that’s it’s so important to get your profile properly written out.

Stacy: I like that you talked about this as being like this kind of step by step process to do it. Because first of all, writing the about section is no walk in the park. It takes time because you have to pull together your like you have to. The first bit of it really needs to capture your reader’s attention and share your kind of core message of how you function in the world and whatever you do. And then you also have to gather a bunch of data points to weave it. I mean there is a lot to that and that’s one piece. But to your point, there’s all these other components to it. And I think sometimes when people go to work on this they’re just like overwhelmed. What’s the first thing that you people should do on their profile?

Stacy: Like if they were to do one thing after today that would help, what would be the very first thing that you would have them do?

Louise: Get a. Write a headline that attracts attention.

Stacy: Very actionable. And that’s something that you could do immediately. I love that. Okay, I want to take, I don’t want to take you off track because I want to get the other three pillars.

Louise: No, absolutely. But the reason why. And we kind of go into the second pillar. I’ll come back to the headline and why it’s important. But the second pillar is content. So I think it’s something like 1% of people on LinkedIn write posts.

Stacy: Really?

Louise: Yeah. Do you know when you go to LinkedIn, Stacy, and you’re like, oh, but I don’t know what Louise is talking about because everyone’s writing posts. But when I think about that, when I go to LinkedIn, it’s usually the same 30, 40 people I see in my newsfeed. And I have to remember 15,000 people in my. Who are following me. So when you think of it that way, you go, oh, okay, that makes sense. People just don’t bring themselves to write posts, especially people who are in corporate jobs. You know, the number of people I’ve met, like marketing managers who say, okay, we need a strategy for our LinkedIn company page. And then you get talking to them and then they’re like, well, you know, kind of the issue is that none of our staff will share any of the content.

Louise: You know, and there’s a whole thing there where if you have a team, if you’re. If you put content on your company page and your team share that out with their network, it massively amplifies the reach of that content but then the individuals are like, well, this is not. Is this not my personal profile on LinkedIn? And there’s a way of, you know, talking to everybody that everybody wins with that. But most people in corporate careers don’t post anything. Most people are lurking on LinkedIn, which means that if you can get yourself into a frame of mind of starting posting once or twice a week on LinkedIn, you will see the number of people visiting your profile and connecting with you rise stratospherically, because people do actually. LinkedIn is about building relationships. It is a massive networking party that people want to connect with you and have conversations. But if you’re never actually posting anything, then how do they even know you exist? So content is definitely the second pillar. And if you are a writer, to me, this is really simple.

Louise: And what I did when I was writing my book, I published a part of my book as my LinkedIn newsletter every Sunday morning, which kept me on track with writing and started to. People started to follow me because of it. But then you take what you’ve written in that newsletter or longer piece and you take little chunks out of it and you post it through the week. But it’s. It’s such an easy way to grow your thought leadership. And if you are an aspiring author, it gets you into the muscle of building a writing habit. So that’s what I did then. Of course, I’m all about doing video content. But we’ll cover our four pillars first. So the next pillar is connections and connecting with people.

Louise: When you are on LinkedIn, a lot of people I work with might come to me and they have like 460 connections. So at that stage, when you understand that 1% of people post on LinkedIn, that’s why when you go to a newsfeed, you think it’s the same people posting all the time. And then people are like, oh, I don’t want to be that person posting all the time. But you’ve got to start connecting with more and more people. And this is also the transition away from your corporate job into building a community of people who are going to be interested in what you have to say, which is kind of the fourth pillar. It kind of falls in together. But connecting with people, how you find the right people to connect with will be. Louise:
So when, Stacy, when you post about this podcast on LinkedIn, the people who leave comments underneath our post. And this brings us back full circle to the headline. If someone leaves a comment underneath the post on LinkedIn, we see their name, their face and their headline. If their headline is interesting enough, we will click on them to go and find out who they are and read their profile. That is the best place to find people to connect with. So if you’re really interested in, let’s pick a random topic. Horticulture, right? You’re really passionate about horticulture. You’re going to write a book about horticulture. You want to find other people who are interested in horticulture, go onto LinkedIn, type in horticulture at the top of the screen and all the people who are talking about that.

Louise: When you see a post where lots of people are commenting and engaging, those are the people that you want to go and look at and see, are these the people I want to connect with? And you can comment on that post and then people will see you as well and will start to click on your name to connect with you. One thing I will say about connections on LinkedIn is don’t go too fast because you will get your account frozen by LinkedIn. Stacy: What does too fast mean?

Louise: Too fast would be more than a hundred a week.

Stacy: Okay, that’s a good metric for people to know. Like, don’t go. What about like when you first, you know, when you’re building your profile, as I. It’s been a long time, but I think they Let you, like import your contacts and, you know, reach out. Is that going to penalize you as well if you do their process to connect with people?

Louise: If you do it too fast? Yes. I mean, you will, it will penalize you. Yes, yes. Okay, interesting. But also, the way I build My network on LinkedIn is slowly and steadily because I like to have conversations with everyone I connect with. And that brings it back to, you’re building a network of value of people that you, when you post something, they’re interested in what you’re talking about. So they start to have conversations with you. When they post something, you’re interested in what they’re talking about. And so it becomes much more of a community of people. So when you go to LinkedIn, all your newsfeed is full of stuff that you’re interested in. That’s the other thing people don’t really realize. You train the algorithm to show you what you’re interested in.

Louise: I spoke at a conference in America recently and one of the keynotes said was talking about the algorithm and all the social media platforms and they totally turned it around as a reframe and said, you are the algorithm. And I thought, you know, I’ve never thought of it that way before, but it’s so true, especially on LinkedIn. I can tell LinkedIn exactly who I want to see content from and what I’m interested in by engaging with that content. And you’ll see this if someone goes after listening to this and you come and you connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn and if you comment one of my posts, LinkedIn will serve you up my most previous post within a day in your newsfeed because it goes, oh, this is what she’s interested in. Let’s show her more of this.

Louise: And so it’s really, once you get these things, LinkedIn becomes a much more enjoyable place, I think, to engage and interact with people. So creating content, building community and connecting with the right people, not just anybody and everybody.

Stacy: Okay, this has been so helpful. We’ve talked about three of the pillars so far. We’ve discussed your profile, we’ve talked about content and connections. What is the fourth pillar?

Louise: Consistency. So, and this is actually why the video piece works really well. But being consistently showing up on LinkedIn and people always say to me, well, how many? What does that mean? Let me. What does that look like? One of the things I love and why I was drawn to LinkedIn as well as it being not the super popular platform was that you can post on LinkedIn once or twice a week. And you are so far ahead of everybody else in the platform that you know it’s. It’s brilliant. So you don’t have to worry about being on there every day. Although people will notice when they start to connect with me. They’ll see that I do post most days. But being consistent and showing up. And you can even put this in your diary.

Louise: You can say, okay, I’m going to make an effort at LinkedIn. I’m going to post on a Tuesday and a Thursday, and you can schedule all in advance if you want. But on the other days, I do recommend that you go in and comment on other people’s content, because it’s such an easy way to get noticed by other people on LinkedIn. And I’ve always found that the business that I get on LinkedIn comes through the private messaging. It doesn’t come out in the main newsfeed. And it’s when people reach out through private messaging to ask about your products or services. But trying to be consistent. And the way we have set up this video piece that we do, and I teach other people to do it for free on my blog and in my newsletters and everything.

Louise: I even have, like, I have a little free guide on it that everyone can grab a copy of at the end, but it’s. I call it the COPE Framework. Create once, publish everywhere. And it is one hour a month to get on video. And you can do it on your own or do it with your assistant or do it with somebody like me, but we strategically plan what it is you want to say on LinkedIn over the next six months. Say, for example, and we get on a video call once a month, and we record for an hour. The person that I work with knows exactly what it is I’m going to ask them. I ask them four questions.

Louise: They answer those questions, but because they’re talking to me, and it’s not like this podcast where we’re both on screen, I ask a question, then I get off screen. So then the person on the other end is literally answering me, Louise. Rather than just hitting record on their phone by themselves. And, you know, there’s encouragement and cheerleading and everything like that, and we can redo bits, but once we get that recording, we then take that and turn that into a whole month’s worth of content. And it just makes things really easy for people. So you can get your video, turn it into video clips, take the transcription, turn that into short video, short LinkedIn posts, take the ideas and the Concepts behind the video. Create carousel posts and schedule all out in advance so that you know you’re building your presence on LinkedIn.

Louise: It’s all done and all you need to do is go in. Now, the caveat here, Stacy, that you can’t just then ignore it, which I’ve had previous clients are like, okay, this is great, but nothing’s happening. And I’m like, well, when did you last actually go onto LinkedIn? And you’ll see they’ve got 47 connection requests or they’ve got all these comments that they haven’t answered. So you do need to go in and respond to comments and comment on other people’s stuff. I don’t know if I talked to you about my LinkedIn is like a conference analogy. Would you like me to go into that?

Stacy: But let me just say before you go into that analogy, Rita that produces this podcast and manages my social media, I guarantee you right now she is so excited about this idea because this has been, we are very consistent with content. I would say this is like something we’re very strong with in our business. But the video side has been something that’s been a little trickier. We get most of our video from this podcast and we’ve been wanting to do more on YouTube, more on LinkedIn, that’s less conversations with other people and more of this, you know.

Louise: Yeah, you start leadership. Yeah.

Stacy: Yes. And so I love this. I think it’s very, a very cool. And then as the person that is like struggling to function sometimes with like all the things to. We’re getting better. I mean, we have so much efficiency, but there are certain periods that it’s like, no, I can’t create any more content. I’ve, I’ve done all the newsletter, I’ve written the, you know, it’s like, I’ve done the podcast. So I love this idea of once a month getting all of that. So, yes, I just want to say that. And now I want to hear your conference life has conference life.

Louise: And business should just be as easy as you can make it, I think.

Stacy: Yes.

Louise: So, okay, so if you imagine that LinkedIn is like an in person event or conference, you are going to go along to a concert, you’ve planned a conference, you’ve bought a ticket and you’re, you wake up that day and you dress up as though you’re going to go and meet your potential business audience or podcast audience. So that is how you, literally how you dress yourself, how you present yourself to me is how you write your LinkedIn profile, right? So it should present the business or professional self or the author that you want to be seen as out in the world. Then you go to the conference and you get your name tag, that’s your headline, and you walk in the door.

Louise: And if you do not speak to a single soul in that conference that day, you’re going to leave and go home and think, well, that was an almighty waste of time. So when you go into LinkedIn, just pretend you’re at a conference. You start talking to people. You start listening to people who are on stages. That’s the people who are writing all the content and the videos that you’re seeing. Imagine you go into a room and there is Stacy on stage talking about how authors can market their books better. So I go in, I sit down, and Rita’s sitting beside me. I, as a normal human being, I’m probably going to say hello to Rita. We might even have a conversation that is the equivalent, Stacy, of you putting your Little video on LinkedIn.

Louise: And in the comments, I’m reading it and I go, I say something and then read your response to me. And then we might decide, oh, I’m really interested in this person Rita and what she does. So we might go for coffee and have a bigger conversation. Well, that’s Rita and I connecting on LinkedIn and having a private conversation in the DMs. So all of these things. You know, the other analogy I love is when you go for coffee at your conference in the networking break, you start speaking to the person in the line next to you. Most of us do, right? And going to LinkedIn, not commenting, not connecting with anybody. And just like some people go to conferences, hopefully none of your listeners hand out their business cards. I went to. This is a total segue.

Louise: I spoke at a conference or like a event last year for Chamber of Commerce. There’s about 200 people in the room. I spoke about LinkedIn and I was having a conversation with somebody afterwards at a table, and a man was going around and putting his flyer down in front of everybody. And he literally, I think he reached over my shoulder and put it on the table in front of me and walked off. And I was like, who is that? Who is that person? And it was. He was. He was selling LinkedIn workshops. But that’s the equivalent of going to LinkedIn and just sending out sporadic connection requests and not having messages and conversations with people.

Louise: It’s like, I would imagine a lot of his flyers went in the bin, you know, so that’s how I like to look at it, as an in person conference.

Stacy: Yeah, I like that analogy. And I think it also takes away some of the, like, oh, I don’t know what to do here. You just be a human being, that’s what you can do. I like thinking about it that way. In hindsight, I wish we had set up like a live profile critique or something like that. This would be a good, that would be a good illustration of my next question, which is what are the top mistakes that you see people making on LinkedIn? And I’m going to be mentally like assessing whether I’m making those mistakes as you walk through those.

Louise: So people who listen to my podcast or hear me speak will know that I, I don’t do negative. So I wouldn’t do a roasting of a podcast or a link.

Stacy: Come on and roast anyway, roast me on LinkedIn.

Louise: But yes, I will see people who, you don’t see this so much anymore. People who don’t have a profile photograph. As human beings, we connect with somebody when we can see their face. You do see a lot of people still have a really old photograph, you know, the one that they had when they were at their cousin’s wedding 10 years ago when they looked amazing. You should have, your photograph should really be taken in the last two years and it should be a head and shoulders photograph, not one of your full body because we still, we can’t see your face and there shouldn’t be anybody else in that photograph. So nice, clean, clear photograph of your face that’s up to date, definitely fill out the whole profile, you know, don’t have lots of gaps. When I say that, I mean, we didn’t get.

Louise: Because the profile piece could take like two hours to go through. But people don’t realize on your LinkedIn profile there’s loads of sections like experience and skills and things like that. And in those areas, when you fill those out properly and you add in the right skills, what that actually does is it helps LinkedIn’s search algorithm put you at the top of the search result for those things. It’s not, it’s not that your network are looking through your skills. Nobody’s doing that. But the computer’s algorithm is doing that. So if you went and you typed in at this, at the top that you’re looking for a copywriter or an editor for your book, for example, if that person doesn’t have that throughout their whole profile, they are not appearing at the top of those search results.

Louise: So that I can’t talk strongly enough about how important it is to actually get your profile done properly. So that’s another mistake. The other mistake is people connecting with somebody and then trying to sell them straight away. Just like it’s like back at the conference, if Rita walked up to me and I said, oh, I really enjoyed that talk by Stacy. And she said, yes, me too. I’m a podcast producer. Here’s my card if you ever need one. I’d be like, oh, I didn’t actually ask you what you did. So that’s another issue. And then a big one that you can’t avoid seeing right now is people who are using AI bots to write their comments for them. It’s a nightmare. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Stacy, but it’s the AI.

Louise: So LinkedIn is pretty good at slamming down on these third parties who claim they can be used on LinkedIn, but they can’t. There’s. There’s a list of companies that are approved and it’s very short. So people are selling like, you pay $10 a month and we will build your network on LinkedIn for you. Do not do that because you’ll probably get your account shut down for spamming or for. It’s just, it’s just against their terms and conditions. But you’ll see. So if I write a post about 10 ways to update your LinkedIn profile and go through it, you’ll see an AI comment that said, thank you so much for these 10 ways to update your LinkedIn profile literally rewrites my post in AI. So let’s not do that. Because we’re humans and we want proper connections and conversations.

Louise: So those are just a few of the things that I see people doing that I’m like, please don’t do that.

Stacy: Yeah, I could not agree more with that. And I think as we get more into this world of AI, I think there’s. I definitely have felt myself having more mistrust about messages that I receive because it’s like, you can tell. Yeah, you can tell. I mean, you get this like 4 paragraph email that’s like perfectly tailored to your exact business and mentions a specific podcast episode and you get like multiple. I get so many emails a day and now I’m getting spammed on LinkedIn with like, we’re founding a new company and your expertise would be perfect. I’ve been getting a ton of those lately. I don’t know what that is.

Louise:
It’s upsetting because you. Initially there’s always. Because I am a huge optimist. I was like, oh. And I go, oh, that’s not real.

Stacy: Yeah, exactly. I think, I mean, I think that it’s like everything. The pendulum has to kind of shift one direction and it will level out and we’ll also, you know, I feel that I’m very good at sniffing that out at this point. It’s going to get harder over time, but I’m glad that you called that out.

Louise: Yes.

Stacy: Oh, my gosh. There’s so much we could dive into, but I think I’m going to. I’ll bring our conversation to a close with one last question. Sure. And that is if you could recommend one book to our listeners. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with LinkedIn. It can be any book that’s impacted you, one that’s profoundly impacted your life, or what would it be?

Louise: Oh, I’m such a reader. I’m such a reader.

Stacy: You’re perfect. You’re perfect for this podcast then.

Louise: I think if I think so. If I think about. I’ll give you one business book and I’ll give you one novel. Okay. A novel that I read that just stuck with me was the Poison Wood Bible. Oh, I. Barbara Kingsolver. I was talking about it the other night. I went to a book festival, my first book festival in Northern Ireland. I went. It was called Crime Queens in Conversation. It was fabulous.

Stacy: I mean, you live in a land of, like, literary gold. So, I mean, I’m sure it was amazing.

Louise: It was. It was inside. It was in a 1500 year old cathedral. It was amazing.

Stacy: Wow.

Louise: Yeah, I loved it. And I ended up sitting beside one of the author’s husbands just by accident. And were chatting away and of course he knew my best friend from when I was 4 years old because we are such a small country too.

Stacy: Love it.

Louise: But the poison. And we talked about the poison with Bible. So it is a story. And I must reread it. I read it years ago. It’s a story about a man who is a missionary and takes his family to. I think it’s somewhere in Africa, I can’t remember. And it’s through the story of the children and someone who’s listening who’s like, read this more recently to me, Louise, that’s not the story. But it really is. But there’s a scene in the story where they have to flee and the mum, so the dad starts kind of think. The dad starts to lose his mind a wee bit. And the mum, they have to flee with the kids and the kids are little and the mom picks up the youngest and there’s this whole thing about. She explained that you always carry your.

Louise: The last child that was born, I was like, what? It’s always stuck with me, this scene. But it’s wonderfully written. She wrote Demon Copper Head, Demon Copperhead last year and I couldn’t really get into it, which is a bit disappointed because I’ve loved her other books. But yeah, I love that novel, so highly recommend it. And then the business book that I probably impacted me in my business. Well, there’s two, there’s Think and Grow Rich for Women, which is really about networking and building up.

Stacy: Networking for women. Interesting for women.

Louise: Yeah. It’s actually, it’s by another lady called Barbara. That’s funny. Barbara somebody is up. Are her surnames R? I can’t remember And. But yet she took the Napoleon Hill book. But she wrote it for women and all the stories and examples are all women. So yeah, that’s amazing book. But the other one is Built to sell and I don’t remember the name of the author but it talked about having a productized service in your business and that’s what I have created. So people, you can’t just work with me and do whatever you want to do on LinkedIn. I have very specific packages. So I have my VIP package and I have my retainer package and it is, it’s a product.

Louise: It’s, you know, it’s a six month minimum product where we start with video and we repurpose that all out for LinkedIn and blogs and articles. And when you can get clear on that, it’s so much easier to sell because people who follow me know, they know this is what you do. And there’s no, oh, let’s work out a proposal together and back and forth. It’s very. There is one price, one product and that’s, and that makes things a lot easier and it makes it easier to build a team around you as well.

Stacy: Thank you so much for those book recommendations, Louise. Those are great. I’m going to add them to my reading list. I have read Built to Sell, but it’s been a long time so I’ll need to revisit that one before we close out. I would love for you to share where our listeners can connect with you, learn more about you. You mentioned a guide as well that they can get. So tell us how to find you and learn more about what you do.

Louise: Perfect. So louisebrogan.com and the free video guide and it’s a proper, it’s like 16 pages on how to do this.

Stacy: Nice.

Louise: So it’s louisebrogan.com videoguide and connect with me on LinkedIn. We didn’t. We’ll have to come back again because we didn’t even get near talking about YouTube.

Stacy: Oh yes, maybe we’ll have to have a follow up conversation.

Louise: I have also on there too.

Stacy: Thank you so much, Louise. This was such a great conversation and it was so actionable. I love getting to be practical because it’s so helpful for listeners. I know that they learn things that they can go implement today and if they want to go deeper, they can learn more about you and your work. So, so thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining me.

Louise: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Stacy: And thank you to you, our listener or viewer, for being with us. If we’re not on LinkedIn together, you can also go find me Stacy Ennis on LinkedIn. We can connect. And if you are watching on YouTube or listening on your phone, if you could just take a moment to rate and review, I would really appreciate it. Or subscribe if you’re on YouTube. It makes a huge difference for me in reaching a bigger audience and more people with the message of living a life that is not just better, but beyond better. And as always, I have to thank Rita Domingues for her production of this podcast and also everything else she does.

Stacy: She really makes it possible for me to get my video and other content out into the world and I am grateful and I will be back with you before you know it.