Joe Apfelbaum - How To Dominate LinkedIn Marketing

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hey, what's happening everybody? Welcome to the show. I really appreciate you taking some time out of your day to listen to me. Chat about things that I find interesting that I hope you'll find interesting. This show is brought to you by my friends at Self Publishingschool.com. I'm currently writing my second book with Self Publishing School. They've got an incredible program. They put over 2,000 people a year into their program. That means 2,000 people a year are writing a book with their proven system and program. You too can write a book just like I am. Find out more information. Schedule a free consultation call with a book launch specialist just like I did. And uh you too could be making your book dreams come true. More information at self publishingschool.com forward slash Beyond the Story. What is happening, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome back to another episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. I know I already welcome you to the show because well you just got done listening to that, but my guest this week on this episode is back again. Was previously on the old show, the separate show. Now here for the new show, the one, the only Mr. Joe Appelbaum. That is not an easy last name to say, but I believe that I may have mastered it. Joe, welcome to the show, buddy.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my last name is a mouthful, but you know what? It's worth it.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Fair enough. Well, I mean, again, with a guy named uh a guy named Sebastian, I can't be speaking about long names.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

But yeah, you got the easy last name. I got the hard last name.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Absolutely. So uh you uh you've been in the SEO game for a minute, but then you really started to get active in the LinkedIn game just as a user. And then people started to say, hey, listen, you know what you're talking about. Come teach us about this. You do some speaking and some coaching on it. Um but let's back up. How did the whole how did you get to to start doing what you're doing right now? Um and then I want to mainly talk about LinkedIn, but I want to get some background.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Yeah, there's a fame, there's a famous thing, if you build it, they will come. So I used to build websites for people, but nobody came. I would build hundreds of websites every single year, but people wouldn't come. And what I realized is that actually it's not true. If you build it, they will not come. You have to learn how to market your business in a way that makes Google want to send people to your website. And in today's world, in the world of referral marketing and the B2B world, where social media is king, you have to learn how to leverage LinkedIn. So you can build the best LinkedIn profile in the world, but if you don't understand how to post, how to engage, how to message, how to work the algorithm, how to use dashboards, how to create content calendars and asset libraries, how to set a strategy, you're probably gonna fail. So that's why we're educating people. We have a course called the Evergreen LinkedIn Foundations course, and we teach people how to go from lurker to influencer in just 15 minutes a day. And our company, Ajax Union, that we started 12 years ago, that's a full service B2B digital marketing agency that builds marketing funnels for B2B companies. And, you know, it's one thing to do it for you, it's another thing to learn how to do it yourself. You can teach a man to fish, but if you if you actually give the person, sometimes a person's like, listen, I don't have the time to do this. I it's nice for me to learn it, but I don't have the time. I don't need you to teach me how to fish. I want to go to a restaurant and I want to get it done. So we can have both ends of the coin with coronavirus. A lot more people realize that you know what, they have to get down and dirty and get their hands dirty. And that's why we were like, all right, we gotta, we gotta start a course, we gotta start educating people and customers, someone who actually knows what goes into marketing. So there's always an education process in general. I'm an educator, I'm a certified Google trainer. Google hired me to train small business owners on how Google AdWords work and how SEO works and so on. And I've been training people over the past 10 years on how to use LinkedIn, how to use Facebook, and so on. So I've seen the transition go from it just being a profile where you connect with just your classmates, just your friends, just your the people that you work with, to a full-blown digital marketing platform where Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn. And you know, when you have a website and you launch something on your website, you could hope that people come to it. Maybe you'll get a trickle of people coming to it, especially if your website's pretty new. With LinkedIn, you add a bunch of followers, which is not really hard to do. You have a built-in audience to every single post. Your articles rank on top of Google because articles rank with SEO. There's a lot of different ways for you to leverage LinkedIn and it's a networking platform. It's like a networking event that happens every day. So things can easily go viral. You can start getting likes and comments, you can start getting views from your ideal target market. So I'm excited about that because it generates hundreds of thousands of dollars at our company, Ajax Uni, the Done For You Company, the B2B Marketing Agency. But it also helps our clients. We have over 400 people that have taken our course in the past couple of months, and people have been blown away by what they've learned, like simple things like picking your target market, simple things like how to create a content calendar or a connections dashboard or an asset library or how to optimize your profile, or even the best ways to post, or the best ways to engage, or the ways to get people on the phone using direct message. Instead of getting rejected, you get accepted, you get loved, and you get money.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Right. So I want to talk about all those things because a lot of this could be Greek to people that have no idea what they should be doing on LinkedIn and really aren't active on LinkedIn. And I get this question a lot because I am very active on LinkedIn now, thanks to individuals like you and our good friend Shea Robottom and people that have really shown me the light and said, hey, listen, this is a land of opportunity that is completely untapped, and it's the first social media platform that was ever on the block. So if let's let's take a few steps back real quick. Let's let's talk to the majority of the people that are watching this right now. That they utilize LinkedIn, but they're not utilizing LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not a resume platform. LinkedIn is not just a job search platform, and LinkedIn is not just a place where you throw up uh information about your business and brand and cross your fingers and hope that people connect. It doesn't work that way. So let's start at the beginning. Yeah, I'm sitting in a sharing an Uber with you pre-COVID, and um we start talking about LinkedIn because we have a 15-minute cab ride or Uber ride. And I say, you know, I I I want to I want to get active on LinkedIn, I just don't know what to do. How do you explain that to me?

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Yeah, so if we're pre-COVID and we could rewind it, I'll be like, forget about LinkedIn, let's invest in some stocks. On March 22nd, the market's gonna tank. Let me tell you where to invest money. That's the conversation we would have. Um, and I would also tell you to buy some masks in advance and some Lysol wipes or whatever. Right, right. But when in terms of LinkedIn, what I would tell you is very, very simple. Most people are lurkers. What are lurkers? Lurkers are people that like to watch, but they don't engage. They're too afraid to engage. And then there's a lot of people that show up and throw up. There are people that are showing up and they're just randomly posting stuff and they're not getting results from LinkedIn and they easily give up. First, they show up, then they throw up, then they give up. Instead, they could be following up. But you have to learn how to do that. You have to learn the right approach, just like you have to learn how to ride a bike. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, Oh, I can ride this bike. Someone has to teach you how to maneuver and you have to fall off a few times, and you have to learn what to do and what not to do. And same thing with driving a car, and the same thing with writing, and all the different things that you've learned in your life, it's a skill. But if you don't have the mindset, if you don't have the mindset, it's not gonna work. Tony Robbins says it's 80% mindset and 20% skill set. That means if you believe that LinkedIn's not gonna work for you, it's not gonna work for you. There's a woman, she's an interior designer. I had a conversation with her yesterday. She called me up and she's like, Joe, I need more clients. I said, Have you considered using LinkedIn? She's like, LinkedIn, LinkedIn's for my resume. What's linked? What am I gonna use LinkedIn? You can't even put an image on LinkedIn, you can't even get clients on LinkedIn, you can't do any things with LinkedIn. And I said, We have a course that teaches you how to do all those things with LinkedIn, and you've been able to do it for years. She's like, I don't believe you. Have a good day. And she hangs up on me. I'm like, okay, well, that obviously is not a person that's gonna be signing up to any course because they're not coachable, they don't have the right mindset, you know. And and Sebastian, you've spoken to people like that that are totally oblivious, and they're like, What? Did you know that there are close to 7 billion people in the world right now? But there are only 690 million people on LinkedIn. Not accounts, I should say, not even people. So there's 690 million accounts on LinkedIn, and only 40% are logging in on a regular basis. That means there are only a few hundred million people on LinkedIn that are that are logging in on a regular basis. So you might say, Oh, I should go to Facebook that has 2 billion users. Wait a minute, wait a minute. LinkedIn is the only professional social media platform. It's the platform that has the most millionaires. It's the only platform that it's 100% okay to be spending hours on the platform during work, during business. So if you're the CEO of a company or you're a CFO, you're a director of marketing, you're a VP of sales, whatever you are, it's totally acceptable to be spending your day on LinkedIn while you're at work. And that's what people are doing. And you don't get this. Although there are 690 million users on LinkedIn, there's only a million posts going up a day. That means there's a lot of eyeballs on LinkedIn, but very few people are leveraging that and pub publishing information. And the people that are publishing information, like you said before, are just showing up and throwing up, they're not doing it the right way.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

So if you learn you can totally tell when you see that too.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Yeah, and so if you're doing it the right way, if you see somebody that has zero likes, zero comments on something, and they're just posting links to stuff, you know they're doing it the wrong way. Then you look at Shay's stuff and she has hundreds of likes, hundreds of comments. She's doing it the right way. She's been doing it the right way for a long time. If you look at my stuff, I have a goal. My goal is for a thousand people to see me a thousand times a year. That means if I get a thousand views on a post, I'm super happy. I'm ecstatic. I'm not looking to go viral. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to be that rock star. I do want to generate millions of dollars in revenue, and I'm doing it strategically by targeting the right people, by sending them the right messages, by getting on the phone with them, and by building relationships. I don't know about you, Sebastian, but I get on a thousand calls a year. Now you might say, whoa, a thousand's a big number. It's not. It's five calls a day, four days a week, five days a week if I'm lucky. And so those are 15-minute calls, just checking in. I have a script, I have a process, I know exactly what I'm doing, and I'm building relationships, I'm making introductions, I'm adding value. So learning how to do this is key to making sure that you always have a pipeline of qualified leads waiting to do business with you. I have a $2 million pipeline in the middle of a pandemic. So if I was sitting in an Uber with you, Sebastian, what I would ask you is who's your ideal client? Who do you want to do business with? And who's in a position to refer business to you? Now, LinkedIn's not for everybody, Sebastian. There are people that have clients that spend less than $1,000 lifetime value with them. LinkedIn's not the best place to get those clients. You want to use Facebook ads or Instagram ads to get clients that are low-value clients. But if your clients are worth several thousand dollars, in your case, maybe five or ten thousand dollars per client, you know, a client, a lifetime value of a client, if it's several thousand dollars, the best place to get it is through networking. And the number one professional social networking website is LinkedIn. There's no better place. And if you learn how to leverage it, you're going to get lots of clients. So my question to you, the listener, is how many clients do you want? How big do you want to grow your business? And if the answer is as much as possible, well, then you're limiting yourself because life, life punishes the vague but rewards the specific. You want to make sure that you're super specific in every area of your life. And if you can write down your goals, if you can figure out your target market, now we're on our path to creating a LinkedIn strategy that will save you a decade. Tony Robins said this. He said the right strategy will save you a decade. And energy, I love energy. I have tons of energy, but energy without strategy is a total waste of time. Yeah. So stop just doing things and instead be like Stephen Covey. Sharpen the saw. So instead of taking you nine hours to cut the tree down, spend 15 minutes learning how to sharpen the saw. You sharpen that saw, now you can get the tree down in two minutes.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Right. Right. But it's work, it takes work. And that's what a lot of people are not willing to invest in right now is the fact that, well, I have to actually go do the work. I can't I just hire somebody and like, you know, pixie dust magic. It'll happen.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

The crazy thing is it is work. It is work, but once you understand how to sharpen the saw, then you realize that, oh my gosh, it's not really that much work. It really only takes 15 minutes a day to be proactive on LinkedIn. It really only takes 15 minutes a day to take the three major actions on LinkedIn that will get people to know you, trust you, and like you, stay top of mind with you, and help you build a relationship that lasts for decades.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

I couldn't agree more. So, what can people do today to go, wow, this has been a great episode and great information from Joe? I really want to give this a crack. I mean, after after I'm done watching this, I'm just gonna go over to LinkedIn and what are what are five things people could do today?

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Well, number one is you want to make sure that you have a written strategy. Most people don't have a written strategy. So if you don't have a written strategy, sit down and take a moment and write a strategy. If you need someone to help you write your strategy, our course teaches you the three steps to writing a strategy for LinkedIn on the back of a napkin. You have to write a strategy down. Most people, they just basically wing it. They log in, they spend all their time on their feed. Don't spend your time on your feed. Have a plan. Know what you're going to be doing. So that's my number one tip is have a plan. The number two tip is make sure that you document everything before you're going to go out and do stuff. Make sure that things are documented. Like write down your stories, write down the questions people could typically ask you and the answers to that. Start putting together a library of content. And if you don't have a library of content, we give all our students a framework for producing a library of all their stories. But it's really important for you to make sure that everything is documented in advance. I know that you work with people on podcasts and you tell them make sure that you get your stories out of your head before you launch your podcast so you know what episodes you're going to create and the flow of it, and it's going to come out like cheese. It's going to come out really smooth. So that's tip number two. Tip number three is make sure that you have an all-star profile. Most people have a crappy profile. They don't have a custom URL. They don't have a headline that's customized. They didn't set up their identity, their summary, and their history. So there are three specific sections on your profile that will give you 10 times more profile views. Go check how many profile views you have. And if it's less than 200, if it's less than 100, you know that almost nobody's visiting your profile. I have thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Check out my profile every single month. And so what I tell people is if you want thousands of people to check out your profile, you got to optimize it. You got to add the right keywords and you got to make sure that it's set up correctly. You got to get recommendations, all that stuff. And then the fourth thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you're posting at least once a day. Most people don't have a content calendar, they don't have an asset library, they don't have a plan, and they don't know the six most popular types of posts to post. And that's why those are the things that we teach our students on exactly how to do. And then the next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you're engaging because posting will give you visibility, but engaging that's what's going to get you that credibility and make sure that people know. Sebastian, when you leave a comment on my stuff, when you like my stuff, I see that you're real. And most people are not willing to give a like. Most people are not willing to give a comment. And so that's why they're not getting the exposure that they need to get. So it's super, super powerful to make sure that you're liking, that you're commenting, and that you're building an actual real relationship. Now, that was five tips that I gave you. And we have over nine hours of content inside our course. But what I would tell you guys to do is the last thing, I'm gonna give you another bonus tip right now, and I can give you like a million bonus tips. I'm gonna give you a bonus tip, Sebastian. If you want to get people on the phone, you can post from today till tomorrow. You can engage from today till tomorrow. That's not gonna get people on the phone. If you want to close high-ticket deals, Sebastian, you got to get people on the phone. You need to have conversations with people. And so the number one way to get conversations with people is after you post and after you engage. Now people know and know you and trust you. Start sending those people direct messages. Start sending DMs. Now somebody might say, Joe, can you really DM someone that you don't know well? Someone that you're connected to, but you don't know well. Absolutely. People are actually waiting for your direct message. I've got over 500 direct messages that were sent to me yesterday, wishing me happy birthday. And it's not even my birthday.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

When properly executed, I might add, because I get some some malarkey on a daily basis, and I, you know, I just tune the things.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Here are three things not to do in the DM. You want me to give you three things, three mistakes. This is why people suck at DM. Because number one is people send long DMs. TLDR. You know what that stands for? No. Too long didn't read. Here's my cell phone right over here. 57% of people, you how long do you spend reading a message on your cell phone till you get into the next notification? Two seconds, five seconds? If you're a goldfish, then you have patience. You have seven seconds. If you're a goldfish, if you're a human being, you don't even have seven seconds. So if I can't read your message in seven seconds, it's done. If we have a really tight relationship, maybe you'll take the time, maybe it'll take 15, 20, even 30 seconds. But if I'm just a LinkedIn connection of yours and random and we never met and all that, forget about it. I'm not spending 30 seconds reading, or certainly not two minutes reading a 1,000-word direct message. It's not gonna work. So you can't, you gotta keep it short, you gotta keep it punchy. The second mistake that people make is they send you a time waster. You want to know what a time waster is? Yes, hey, just hey, hey is for horses, right? Hey is for horses, not for human beings. There are no horses on LinkedIn, it's against their terms and conditions.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

There's some jackasses, but no horses.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Just a couple jackasses, but there's no horses on LinkedIn. So number two is don't waste people's time, don't just ask random questions, don't hit on them, and don't say hey or hi or hello. That's such a waste of time. Or how are you? Hi beautiful. Or hi beautiful. Well, to me, you can say hi beautiful. If you're listening to this podcast, please send me a DM and say hi beautiful, please. I I need some of that. Yeah, and then and then the last thing that people do, which is probably the worst thing, the worst thing. This is the worst thing, worst, worst, worst thing. Can you guys guess what this is? Sales. Don't sell. Because if you sell at a networking event, you smell at a networking event. So number one is use a mint, number two is use deodorant, and number three is don't sell because selling is smelling. Instead, what you want to do is you want to build a relationship. You're like, ooh. Imagine that. Imagine that. And you know what? This might sound obvious, but we're so hungry and we're so frustrated with our lack of results. We end up wanting just to get to it. Oh, let's get married. Chill out, dude. What's your name? What do you do for a living? Let's build some rapport. So we have a three-step process to sending direct messages that make sure it's short, punchy, it never wastes any time, always adds value, and it never sells. But people love to buy from our clients. We had a client that used our messaging strategy and he closed $375,000 deals in 30 days from using our strategy. We know this stuff works. We had another client who came to us. He started using our messaging strategy before. He lost 100% of his business due to the pandemic, like many people. They lost everything, all clients. He came back to me two weeks ago. He said, Joe, I'm at 100% capacity. Because I said, Dude, why are you not posting? He's like, I'm at 100% capacity now. I said, How'd you do that? He said, I learned your course. I am now DMing like a pro and I'm getting into people's people on the phone and they're turning into clients right away. It's amazing. So I said, it's not really that amazing. It's science. And science is one plus one equals two. If you know how people work, people take action based on what? Logic? Hell no. Throw that logic out the window. They got President Trump as the guy. No, it's emotion, it's how you make them feel. People only remember how you make them feel. They don't even remember what you said. You're probably listening to this. You won't even remember a word I said, but maybe I'll give you some goosebumps because I'm a rock star.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

You heard it first right here, ladies and gentlemen. Well, you've heard that before again. We've been hearing that for years here. Joe, speaking of that, this is by the way, this is all what I like to refer to as LinkedIn Goal. Okay. The podcast is free to listen to. These live broadcasts are free to. I mean, listen, the ball is literally in your course. Now, there's probably a few of you thinking, well, this is the guy Joe probably knows what he's talking about with all these awesome knowledge bombs that he's dropping right now. I need to take a closer look at his course. And you're gonna be able to do that. The link's gonna be available in the show notes and you'll be able to hit me up directly. I've got direct access. I got like the bat phone to Joe Applebaum. So if you if you're interested in this course, which I highly recommend too, the link's gonna be in my profile or excuse me, in in the show notes. So you're gonna be able to take advantage of that and you'll get emails and et cetera of this episode. So, not to fret. Joe's uh course is available to the public. We'll try to put something special together for your beyond the story podcast listeners, and you'll be able to get that link uh in the show notes. You and I met back in 2014 in the beautiful city of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Yeah, I remember that. My first book came out, Social Media Sucks, and a fellow member, Adam Whitty, with uh uh with Advantage Media, uh fellow EO member, uh put that gig together for me. So right when the book came out, I ended up going and and giving a talk. Uh my boy Gary V was the keynote that year, and you got up in the middle of his QA and asked if you could come take a selfie with him on stage and uh you know talk about being memorable. I never forgot meeting you, and then we had the pleasure of staying in touch all these years later. So that was a good time back in uh back in Philly.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Yeah, I remember that. I mean, he got up and he said, uh, only ladies, only women um like doing selfies, men don't do selfies. And I said, WTF, I love doing I raised my hand. He's like, questions. I said, I like doing selfies. Can we do a selfie right now? And he's like, Hell yeah, come up on stage. And so I got a selfie with him and 700 CEOs. That was unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

That was great. That was a good time. That was a that that was a good time. I love the entrepreneur organization. For those of you not familiar, business owners out there, successful business owners, phenomenal, phenomenal organization. Uh well, Joe, I know you're a busy guy. Appreciate you carving out some time out of your schedule to come and drop all this knowledge. I know that term is over over overused on a daily basis. It's kind of like pivot, but I mean, that's you got to call it what it is. I mean, that is LinkedIn gold right there. You gotta realize that if you're active on LinkedIn and you're actually actively creating content and and engaging with the community as a perpetual 24-7 or 365 days a year networking event and you treat it as such, um, you're you're gonna find some tremendous results. I I can I can't even begin to tell you the opportunities that have come out of LinkedIn based on the encouragement of, hey Sebastian, you need to start getting serious about this, which Joe told me years ago, and I continued to focus on that and then met Shay and then from there had her on my show, and then from there she hired us to launch her podcast. And now, you know, if I ask her to go comment on one of my posts, I'll go from like a hundred likes to like 4,000 in about 10 minutes, just to give you an idea of the power of LinkedIn. I'll post something like I posted her testimonial that she gave me the other day, and we did a skit things podcaster say a few weeks back. So anytime we're doing some shared content that I post, um, I'll I'll ping her and send her a link and she'll go comment. And that makes the LinkedIn algorithm go bananas. So I'm just trying to put in perspective. Yes, she has 450 plus thousand followers on LinkedIn, and it might take a lot of us a while to get there, but the power of being able to engage with individuals at her caliber and the impact they can make on just our little bitty post is is incredible.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

So yeah, very, very powerful. Yeah, it's mind-blowing. And you know what? If you have a hard time building relationships, if you're not like this connector, this like you know, super duper person that's been networking offline for a long time, LinkedIn is the perfect place for you to practice. It's safe, it's an easy environment to get rejected because ultimately, at the end of the day, you're going to get rejected when it comes to networking. 90% of people are afraid of public speaking. That's the reality. 90% of people are afraid of public speaking. And so networking is the same like public speaking. You're putting yourself out there in an environment where you don't know what's going on. So I highly recommend you take a step back and you ask yourself, are relationships important to my business? Do I need more referrals? Do I want to grow my business through referral marketing? And if the answer is yes, and your clients are worth several thousand dollars a year, I highly recommend you take a look at LinkedIn. Start logging in for 15 minutes a day. And if you want to take a course, you could always go to joelinkedin.com, you can connect with me, or you can ask Sebastian for the information. Our course is available on my profile, you can check it out. And we love supporting entrepreneurs just like you. If you want to grow, if you're a coach, consultant, entrepreneur, professional, you're looking for a job, or you're looking for your next gig or you're looking for clients, LinkedIn can help you do all those things, but you have to use it appropriately instead of just spending all your time on the feed, you have to learn how to leverage it. Just like you need to learn how to leverage money. If I give you a million dollars today, did you know that 80% of people who win the lottery lose it within three years? So just because you won the lottery and you got onto LinkedIn and you have all this access, it doesn't leverage it. You have to learn how to leverage it. And just like Sebastian learned how to build the right relationships that gets him thousands of likes and then millions of dollars in clients, you need to learn how to do the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Absolutely. Listen, if you want to connect further with Joe and his team, hit me up. I'll make a personal introduction. There'll be a link to his LinkedIn course in the show notes. You'll be able to take advantage of Joe. It's always a pleasure to hang out with you, buddy. And I after this whole COVID thing blows over, I look forward to seeing you again.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

I'll see you in Florida when the quarantine is over. Boom. Absolutely. Uh, come back to the show soon, will you? I will. Talk to you soon. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Thanks, guys. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.