Josh Steimle - 60 days to LinkedIn mastery

"There are words you should not use on your LinkedIn profile." 

Josh Steimle is the founder of Influencer Inc. He coaches c-suite executives to leverage their personal brands and influence to become thought leaders.  

Listen to the podcast HERE.

EARLY CAREER

Josh started his entrepreneurial ventures as a teenager. He borrowed $1,000 from his dad to start a skateboard business. With the money, he bought a bunch of skateboard stuff then sold it out of the back of his car at skate parks. 

He would drive around the skate parks, walk up to the skaters and give his sales pitch, which was something like, "Hey, I've got skate stuff. You want to buy some skate stuff?"

That's how Josh got interested in entrepreneurship and decided he wanted to start a business. Fast forward a few years, Josh runs a marketing agency, is the author of two books, and has spoken all over the world.

LINKEDIN

As he was growing his businesses, Josh became an "accidental" expert on using LinkedIn to generate leads. Like everyone else, when he started using LinkedIn, Josh put up his information and then left it alone.

If he did use the platform, it was primarily to look for potential employees or to conduct research before an interview. 

On a whim, Josh decided he would post one of his Forbes articles on LinkedIn to see what would happen. He was shocked when the post received ten times the traffic, engagement, and comments than his typical article on Forbes. 

After posting a few more times to LinkedIn and getting similar results, he decided to dive deeper into LinkedIn.

He began to experiment with it to see if it would drive more traffic to his business. He started to see results, and as his success with the platform grew, so did his knowledge of how it works.  

60-DAYS TO LINKEDIN MASTERY

In his upcoming book, 60-days to LinkedIn mastery, Josh shares his tips and tactics on how to use LinkedIn properly.

He also shares the same information in a 60-day email course which you can access at https://www.influencerinc.co/60dayslinkedin

Your Purpose

Josh believes to be effective on LinkedIn, you need a defined purpose. Without a purpose, you end up putting content out into the world that does nothing to help you become known for something. 

To define your purpose, Josh recommends starting with your target audience. Ask yourself what do you want to convey to them, what are your goals, and what strategy will you use to achieve both.

Following this methodology, Josh has been able to track over $5 million in business directly back to the articles he published on LinkedIn. 

Your Zone of Genius

If you struggle to determine what to write about or how you can best serve your customers, Josh recommends finding your zone of genius.

The idea came to him as he was reading the book The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. 

In the book, Gay discusses this thing he refers to as the genius zone, which is the thing that makes you unique, that sets you apart from other people. It's your calling, it's your mission.

The way to find your genius zone is to overlap your expert zones. Josh maintains we're all experts at something, whether we realize it or not.

Consider the things you can do that other people cannot. Those "things" are your individual expert zones.

As an example, Josh is an expert at running a marketing agency. He is also an expert at skateboarding. By themselves, neither is very unique. But when you overlap them, like a Venn diagram, you get something special in the overlap.

Using Josh's expert zones, how many marketing agency owners also skateboard?

LINKEDIN PROFILE OPTIMIZATION

The book and email course, 60-days to LinkedIn Mastery, focuses on both high-level strategies and on actionable tactics. Here are a few highlights from our discussion.

Your Profile Photo

Profile photos have been written about ad nauseum. You know you need a professional-looking pic, but is it ever ok to use your company logo as your profile picture?

Josh is not a fan of using a logo as your personal profile picture because LinkedIn is about people. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. 

When you put a logo on your individual LinkedIn profile, you're not showing that you're a human being. Instead, you're showing a corporate entity. 

When it comes to personal profiles, people expect to find your smiling face.

Your Banner Image

The banner image is the big square area at the top of your profile. It's kind of a billboard which is how Josh thinks of it. In his mind, LinkedIn has given you a free advertisement space to put up whatever you want. 

The banner image is one of the first things people see on your profile, yet many people still don't use it.  

Josh suggests using the banner to reinforce your personal brand. The banner can quickly let visitors know who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. 

Your Headline - You are not a Ninja (more than likely)

Unless you are a ninja in real life, Josh suggests you never use the term in your profile, especially in the headline.

People are not searching for ninjas on LinkedIn. The same goes for visionary, guru, or wizard. 

Your About Section

The first three lines of your About section are super important. When somebody visits your profile, they only see the first three lines. After that, the rest is truncated by the "see more" link. 

If you don't get people interested in those first three lines of your bio, they will not want to click through to read the rest of your bio.

The first three lines have to draw people in and make them say, "I have got to read the rest of this."  

Tell Stories in Your Profile

People are coming to your LinkedIn profile to learn about you, so tell them a story. Josh suggests starting off with "once upon a time," then just continue and tell your story. 

In Josh's experience, people love this. They'll be drawn into your story. Josh recommends following the framework laid out in Donald Miller's book Building a StoryBrand. 

As a certified StoryBrand guide, I agree. 

Multiple Languages

Josh advocates for creating your profile in multiple languages, even if you don't speak multiple languages. 

Linkedin provides an option for you to add languages to your profile. To be clear, you are not creating two separate profiles with separate logins and passwords. 

Instead, LinkedIn allows you to take your existing profile and add a new language. To add a language to your profile, log in and look on the upper right-hand side for a link that says, "Add profile in another language."

Use Keywords

Keywords in LinkedIn are essential. They help you get found. Finding the best keywords to use requires you to understand your target audience, your purpose, and your zone of genius. 

The key to the keyword game is to put them where people look the most. Your title or headline, for example, shows up everywhere.

It's in search results, it's in comments, so having keywords in your headline is critical.  

Josh recommends taking a look at other people's bios as well. Pay attention to how you review the profile. What do you read first, what do you read the most, and that's where you want to put your most important keywords.

Connect with 30,000 people

Josh recommends connecting with as many people as possible on LinkedIn. He likes to think about LinkedIn as a broadcast medium you can use to get your message out. 

LinkedIn is, after all, a networking platform. Anytime you post content, it goes into your feed where people can see it. The more people you're connected to, the more people will see your content. 

When people interact with your content, then their connections will see your content as well. So, if you're connected to a thousand people and you post something, 5% of your contacts are going to see the content, be able to interact with it. Once they do, then their connections will see it.

When you're connected to 30,000 people, then 30 times the number of people are going to see the content and have a chance to interact with it, so your content goes a lot further. 

Think about LinkedIn as being Oprah. Oprah's TV show had millions of viewers. Obviously, she didn't have close friendships with all those people, but they all received value from her content.  

Content-based Networking

Content-based networking is where you use content to have conversations with people you find interesting. It's kind of like dangling a carrot in front of them. 

As an example, let's say you have a podcast, and you want to interview Bill Gates. The first question you'll ask is, how can I get in touch with Bill Gates? If you send him an email, he'll likely never respond.

But, if you've got a popular podcast, you can use the content-based networking method to reach out to him and ask if he'd like to be interviewed for the podcast.  

This is the exact method I've used to interview a number of my guests, including Josh!

The content-based networking method is very similar to the discussion I had with Dorie Clark about "picking people's brains." Dorie told me about the difference between giving requests and taking requests. 

A giving request gives you something in return for your time. A taking request, on the other hand, just takes your time and you get nothing in return. 

Hashtags

Hashtags seem to be everywhere we look. LinkedIn recently released hashtags on the platform. 

He does find hashtags useful for finding the content he's interested in or something he wants to learn something about.

He does use hashtags in his posts but hasn't seen a flood of traffic; as a result, he believes the verdict is still out on how effective they will become from a content creation standpoint.  

THE BEST WAY TO GET IN TOUCH WITH JOSH

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joshuasteimle

Web: Joshsteimle.com

Email course: https://www.influencerinc.co/60dayslinkedin