The New Marketing Paradigm for Small Businesses: An Interview with Jaime Masters

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Frustrated with online marketing? You’re not alone. With diminishing results, higher ad costs, lower email open rates - the staples of online marketing just don’t work as well as they used to, especially for small businesses. 

If that’s you, definitely pay attention to this Marketing Minute post because I’m going to share with you a fantastic interview I did with Jaime Masters. She recently invited me to be on the Eventual Millionaire Podcast where we discussed my new book, The Trust Equation.

You’ll learn:

• Why I wrote the Trust Equation
• Why small businesses are getting the short end of the stick
• The four pillars of the trust equation
• Tips on building relationships with new prospects and maintaining relationships with existing network and connections
• Different approaches to email marketing, especially for those with smaller databases
• What Connect 365 is (who it’s for and how to use it)
• How to efficiently segment your list and communicate to it
• Tips and tricks on having a high open-rate and engagement from your list
• The constraints in using LinkedIn as a marketing channel

How Small Businesses Are Taking Back Control of Their Growth & Marketing

Here’s the full interview:

If you’d prefer to listen to the audio, just click below.

For you readers, here’s the full transcript:

Jaime Masters: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I am Jaime Masters, and today I am so excited to have my good friend Josh Turner back on the show. You can check out his site at Linkedselling.com and he's got a brand-new book coming out called The Trust Equation that you can actually get for free if you stay tuned to the end of the interview. Thanks so much for coming on the show today Josh.

Josh Turner: Hey, thanks for having me Jaime.

Jaime Masters: You're giving your book away for free? Number one, tell us why it's absolutely amazing and everybody needs to get it. Number two, it's free?

Josh Turner: Yes, this is my third book that I've released. We've had one that was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and did all of that kind of stuff. This time I just wanted to get it in the hands of as many people as possible, as quickly as I could. That's why we're giving away free digital copies and anybody who wants one can go to Connect365.io/EM (and that stands for Eventual Millionaire.)

Jaime Masters: So, everybody remembers –

Josh Turner: You guys probably already figured that out. Yeah, but the reason why I wrote this book is because over the last few years we've been seeing a lot of things with our clients and a lot of folks in the community we serve, which is small businesses who are really finding that the things that used to work for them aren't working the way that they used to anymore. They're seeing diminishing results. They're seeing ad costs going up, they're seeing ad performance going down, they're seeing email open rates dropping. Just a lot of the online marketing tactics that are kind of the staples just not working the way they were supposed to.

A lot of people are just getting diminishing results and getting frustrated, especially really small businesses who are getting terrible results and just finding themselves not growing. One of the things that we're finding and seeing out there and that I'm hearing from so many people and that you hear it on the news all the time, is that trust today is at an all-time low, not just in business but just in general in the world with these tech companies and all the scandals that are coming out around that stuff, our politicians.

We don't need to get into all that right now, but a couple of weeks back for their big year– not their year, but their decade wrap-up of the 2010s the New York Times had a huge cover story that was titled “A Decade of Distrust”. People are just feeling like everything that we know is crumbling. In business, what we think is happening is that this is all seeping through and that the prospects that you're trying to reach with your marketing, they really have their guard up. The stuff that used to work isn't working anymore. They're hip to it; the email newsletter type stuff that people send out doesn't work anymore.

People are just far less responsive than they used to be. They're very hard to breakthrough. What we're seeing is that a lot of people are getting back to good old-fashioned personal relationship building. At the same time though, there's only so much that can scale. Over the last few years, my company was looking for a solution to, how can we combine the power of these marketing automation tools but do it in a way to where it doesn't feel like such garbage that actually feels like it's personal so that you're building relationships and building trust with people instead of the opposite, breaking it down. That's what “The Trust Equation” is.

We've developed a methodology that we think is the best for doing exactly that, for building relationships with new prospects, for maintaining relationships with your existing network and connections and clients and prospects and doing it in a way that it really has a personal touch to it. We believe really the future of how small businesses are going to be marketing. We can get into that more, but that's the gist of it.

Jaime Masters: Oh, we're definitely going to get into it more. I just have to say, especially on LinkedIn, because I know you're the LinkedIn guy also. It came from getting bombarded with messages and I'd be nice to everyone like, "No thank you. Okay, great." Now I'm just like, "No, I don't care anymore. You're taking up so much of my time." Right? So, my guard has gotten deeper and deeper, deeper. Normally I love connecting with people, but it's just so much, it's information overload.

I want to totally get into how we actually build that trust because it's really difficult to break through all of the noise in the world that we have right now. What is this equation that we now need to know?

Josh Turner: Well, the one thing I would like to say is that in the past there were really two options. Number one, you could just do things, old school and just be totally offline. A lot of people have success with that. A lot of people build great businesses before the internet even existed.

Jaime Masters: I know some people are like, wait, really? I used to do only online businesses. There are ways that you can get to people without the internet. Just so everybody's clear. I just a reminder, go ahead Josh...

Josh Turner: Yes, absolutely. Until very recently it was either you got to do things the old-fashioned way one-on-one, it's going to be time-intensive. Or you decide to really go deep into marketing automation, online tools and technologies to try and gain leverage and efficiency to reach more numbers and more reach and scale than you can through one-on-one.

The problem with all the online automation stuff in the marketing automation stuff is that for so many small businesses, that stuff is really built for bigger companies. It's designed for bigger companies that have massive email lists and really market in a very impersonal way; whereas that doesn't work for small businesses. This is the problem that we've seen. Is that so many of us grew up being exposed to big company marketing.

Then when it's time for us to think about how we're going to market our businesses, too many people use that same playbook. But for smaller companies that have small audiences, it really doesn't work. So, they're just sending out these really not very effective marketing messages that are like old school email newsletter kind of things. In the past, it was basically let's choose one of those options, the lesser of two evils. We felt like we needed to have a way to combine those two things.

Now here's the thing. In marketing, there's never a 100% solution. If you're going to be doing outreach to new prospects or just sales, in general, is not a 100% situation where you're going to get everybody. What we're finding is that, if let's say you've got a few hundred people in your database and you're going to try and just run them through your Infusionsoft or AWeber account and see who ends up popping out the other side, you're going to get a really small percentage of people that are going to end up converting off of that email list into whatever the next step is that you want them to take. Because only like 15% of them are going to even open the emails in the first place, and then maybe 10% of those people click through, et cetera.

That's okay if you've got 300,000 people on your email list, but when you only have a few hundred or a couple of thousand, you need to market to those people in a much more personal way. You need to be communicating with them in a way that is more informal. With messages that feel like the kind that you would send to a friend that doesn't have unsubscribe links in them. That you know don't end up in their promotions tab or their spam folder.

Jaime Masters: Yeah, seriously.

Josh Turner: Right? Yes. There's technology that now allows that to be done in a way that can be automated for people who have smaller databases so that you can make personal touches; so that you can have those kinds of personal emails going out to lots of people but have it automated. Have the follow-up automated, but have all of it come across looking like you just wrote it to them as a friend. So, that the emails feel very personal and not like a marketing message with lots of images and calls to action and all that kind of stuff.

What we're seeing is that people who are implementing this kind of a methodology are getting over double the open rates that they would get using something like MailChimp or whatever, which are great tools for certain things. But for trying to build trust and build relationships with your most important prospects and clients, those tools are just – people are just ignoring those things now. That's at the heart of really what the trust equation is all about.

In the book, I go into depth on really, there's basically four primary pillars to it of getting connected and building and having ways to continually build your list and then how to be reaching out to new prospects who are coming into your world or that don't even know you and maybe you're reaching out to them cold. How to build a relationship with them really quickly and do it in a way that actually is building trust instead of you just looking like another person, like you said, on LinkedIn.

Jaime Masters: Can you give us a tip on that then too? Because I think that's the thing that's so incredible. It's like, well, what do I actually say to actually get them to pay attention in that first message, regardless of how we get that message?

Josh Turner: There are a lot of different ways to go about that depending on your business. Your show is a great example of that. For some people, it's inviting them to be a part of something. It could be inviting them to be a part of a LinkedIn group that you start or inviting them to be a part of a Facebook group that you have that is full of people like them. So, sometimes it's giving first other times it's just the way that you position the message to really come across as more of a peer as opposed to somebody who's just trying to sell them something. And we're getting into cold email best practices here. I think for a lot of people, cold email in the traditional sense is really not going to be effective.

Jaime Masters: I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, you need huge numbers for the minuscule amounts that you need even when the messages are pretty on point.

Josh Turner: Yeah. You got to think about this more in terms of building relationships as opposed to getting an email list and then pitching those people on your services and having a conversation with you because the latter can work, but to your point, very low response rate. And for a lot of businesses, it just doesn't work like that. Yeah, if you're a B2B SaaS company, you know you work with this specific type of prospect and every one of them is going to be interested in what you do.

Yeah, there are some companies that crush it with cold email. Absolutely, but if you're a business coach or if you're a real estate agent, any one of a litany of types of companies like that who it's – you need to first position yourself as somebody that they see as a leader and an expert and you need to build the relationship a little bit first. You're not just going to reach out and cold email somebody and pitch them.

Jaime Masters: Totally.

Josh Turner: Hey, let me sell your house for you. It's not going to work.

Jaime Masters: So, question on that though too, because I know we've got more pillars to go through, but I really want to dive into this because I feel like what's being taught, especially in LinkedIn, regardless of platform, it's like, Oh give, give, give, jab, jab, jab, right hook. But the jabs nowadays are like, here's the thing, long thing of text, random links that I don't actually care about. Great, bombarded with stuff. Technically pieces of what you're saying and that noise because it's really difficult to get somebody to read something from you. So, any tips on what that – even if you're trying to give, even if you're trying to invite them into a Facebook group unless it's super exclusive like Millionaires, I'm like, I'm okay, right?

Josh Turner: Yeah.

Jaime Masters: So, how do you get through?

Josh Turner: Yeah. Well, you're not going to get through to everybody and so you're going to be a difficult person for people to lure into their Facebook group I would say.

Jaime Masters: I am. I'm very difficult. Yeah.

Josh Turner: But there's other people who if they have a Facebook group, let's say it's somebody who helps podcast hosts and they've got some sort of service and they have a community full of podcast hosts sharing resources and stuff, and they invite you to be a part of it. Now, you may not be interested, but a lot of people they message might be interested in it and so it's always a numbers game with this stuff. But when you provide value first, the numbers are much greater than when you just cold pitch.

Jaime Masters: Yeah.

Josh Turner: And you can replicate these strategies whether you're using email or LinkedIn messaging, whatever platform you're doing it on. For example, if you just reach out to somebody on LinkedIn and you're just cold pitching people or sending InMails, you might get 1% or 2% response with people like, okay, sure I'll talk to you about the thing that you sell.

But if you first connect with them, provide some value, invite them into a group that's full of their peers and then wait a little bit, develop the relationship and a little bit of top of mind awareness and then invite them to a conversation to learn more about each other. You will get more like a 15% to 20% response rate. You're never going to get a hundred, there's always going to be people like Jaime who are not going to respond to your messages.

Jaime Masters: Yeah.

Josh Turner: Yeah. But you can dramatically increase it. And the key I think is the importance of really caring about the relationships and building relationships with people. And the other thing that people do, and this is getting into really the third pillar of the system, but not only just the initial outreach is important because if you look at in the Ultimate Sales Machine, they have this thing called the demand gen pyramid; And at the very top of the pyramid, the smallest little triangle, 3% of people who in your target market are ready to buy. And so, there's a very small percentage of your market out there who's thinking about buying what you want right now.

And so, a lot of the people that you're making initial contacts with aren't ready right away, but people do a terrible job of following up. And one of the best ways to use this kind of a methodology and with the trust equation is not just for that initial outreach but to maintain contact with people in a personal way for months or years even.

And so, the key is if you have a call with a prospect, you meet somebody at a conference or an event or whatever it might be, and then you go home and you dump them into your Infusionsoft, that is one layer of – it's a way to stay in touch with people at a minimum if you're not doing anything else. But for a lot of, they're not really getting much out of that because then there's just what are those people really receiving from you?

People know it's not really you keeping in touch with them; you're just getting their marketing messages. But on the other hand, if you were able to send your contacts and the people that you care about keeping in touch with a personal email once a month, once every six weeks, whatever it might be, maybe once every few weeks, it's different for every business.

But if you're able to send people a personal email saying, "Hey, was just thinking about you. Came across this article the other day and thought you might be interested in checking it out, hope you're doing well." And then maybe six weeks later you send them another message that's just a, "Hey, keeping in touch. I got this new client I'm working with who's doing amazing things and yada, yada, yada, hope you're doing well."

But if you just have a plan to keep in touch with people and there's a variety of ways you can kind of mix up those messages so that it kind of stays fresh and doesn't feel like you're just pestering people month after month.

Jaime Masters: I found another article. Yeah, exactly.

Josh Turner: You have to vary it up.

Jaime Masters: Yeah.

Josh Turner: But the point is, is also just being transparent with people and saying, "Hey, I am working to stay in touch with the people who I really care about and I value our relationship. And so, I hope it's okay with you, but I might check in with you every month or two and just make sure that we're keeping in touch." Because people always say let's keep in touch and then they really don't. And so, I think that there's a great way to do it. Again, in the book we've got all sorts of templates and ideas on how to do this kind of thing and people will say, "Yeah, but that takes too much time to do."

Jaime Masters: That was going to be my next question because I want to talk about tech also in a second, but I want to go how many people can we actually manage, especially as the business owner and not the team, because 150 people is a lot of people potentially sending emails and we're trying to get out of our inbox all the time.

Josh Turner: Nobody's going to do that, right? And that's why you have to use technology that allows you to do it, but that allows you to send those emails to those people in a way that they come across looking like you wrote to each of those people one-on-one. So, we have a software that you can read about in the book as well that allows you to do that, which we built because we needed something that could really solve this problem so that people could have something that works with their personal email that would allow them to upload a list of a few hundred people and send them all a message that looks personal coming from their real email that doesn't have an unsubscribe link that hits their normal inbox, not the promotions tab and all those kinds of things.

Jaime Masters: Okay, so questions about that. So, that's Connect 365, the Software?

Josh Turner: Yeah.

Jaime Masters: Okay, so how can you do that with CAN-SPAM and everything like that, especially with the no unsubscribe link, you know what I mean? I came from mail server days back in the day.

Josh Turner: You just have to have a little thing in your footer of the email. This is usually how we deal with it. There's a lot of ways. So, if you have something in your email at the bottom that says, "PS if you don't want to hear from me anymore, just hit reply and let me know," and then you can remove them from your list that way. So, the way that the CAN-SPAM rules, basically what they say is you have to give people a clear way to get off of your list.

Jaime Masters: Yeah. But it doesn't have to be a link. Okay.

Josh Turner: Doesn't have to be a link.

Jaime Masters: Okay.

Josh Turner: You also have to make sure that the email is clear about who this is coming from and include your business information in the email. And so, we always recommend people just put your business name and your address and your signature in your emails. So, there's some really easy ways to do it. The other thing too is that for some folks who have lists of say, under a thousand email lists with less than a thousand people on them, we have a lot of customers who are using Connect 365 for all of their email.

They can add an unsubscribe link if they want to. But even when you do that using this technology, because it comes from your real email and it's not being sent through like a third party provider; like SendGrid or some of the other big email sending platforms, the emails get such a greater open rate, and reply rate, and look like a real email you sent to somebody instead of a marketing message. And so, it's really effective for that kind of thing too.

Jaime Masters: Yeah. I typically use Mail Merge or something like that, but then it starts to get a little squirrely for me after a little bit, right? So, you're like, "Oh wait, where did the –" especially when I have a team that sometimes works on them, right? So, how do you keep track and should it always be the owner and coming from the owner or should it be from the team members so that way it doesn't get to be too crazy if you have a bigger list?

Josh Turner: Yeah. If you have a big list, you would use this kind of a methodology for communicating with your most engaged segments of your list. So, for example, if you've got a list with 10,000, or 30,000, or 300,000 people on it, one way that a lot of our clients are using this is to pull out smaller segments of that list, let's say, hey, the most engaged people on your list in the last 30 days, and send them a personal email that comes from somebody on your team inviting them into a conversation. Things like that are really effective.

Jaime Masters: Yeah. You're always really good at segmenting your list anyway. Like back in the day when we used to chat, I was like, wow, you got a lot of segments. You were always paying attention to the curation of that. Do you have any tips on that also because it would be helpful, especially for open rates I'm sure, and engagement?

Josh Turner: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it, but I think that – I'm just trying of what I can best share that would be helpful for most people. The thing that I think is most important with that in terms of open rates is just less cleanliness. If you've got a big email list, making sure that you're not mailing to people who haven't opened an email in forever, and so scrubbing the list is important. Segmenting I think is something that I don't consider myself an expert in. You could probably have somebody on here who could talk about that for an hour, but we just try and make sure that we have the right data we need to determine who's interested in what content.

And so, that's why tools like Infusionsoft, HubSpot, MailChimp, etc., are really good at that kind of a thing, and then we can take those people in those specific segments and send them more personal communications that get a much greater reply rate, open rate, all that stuff, through Connect 365.

There's a lot of other things that you can do if you've got a big list. We communicate with our JV partners using Connect 365 instead of Infusionsoft. We use Infusionsoft in our business. And we have some really neat things that we're doing to send emails to people before webinars from Connect 365 because the emails get such a greater open rate and reply rate than the Infusionsoft campaigns, and so it increases the show-up rate.

Jaime Masters: Okay. What's different? Because I mean, the open rate issue is a big deal. Deliverability is a big deal. Promotion stab is a huge deal. Everybody's like, "What?" I know I've had. We were blacklisted last year. It was great. It was awesome. My own fault from I was managing my own mail server, which was a really bad idea; side note.

So, trying to get back on track after something like that does Connect 365 or whatever mail merger, does it automatically not go in the promotions tab or can you get flagged and we put in the promotions tab also?

Josh Turner: You can end up there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it has to do with the – eventually, if you've got a bunch of people who are still clicking the spam button on your emails, then eventually Gmail is going to say, "Hey, anybody who’s got this, whenever this email comes through from this person, put it in that promotions tab or the spam folder," right? So, you can't use this for evil and expect not to get those same kinds of negative results basically.

But to your question earlier though, when you brought up Mail Merge again, this is one of the reasons why we created this because, for a number of years, we were using spreadsheets and Mail Merge to do this exact thing because it gets such great results, because the emails come across looking like you wrote them one-on-one to a friend. But with Mail Merge, it becomes cumbersome to manage. If somebody replies to an email, how do you make sure they don't get the next one that you send out to that batch of prospects?

Jaime Masters: Totally.

Josh Turner: It's just not smart enough to do anything except a one-off broadcast to those people. And so, Connect 365 allows you to build out long-term sequences so those people are going to get dripped out a series of messages, and it does a lot of advanced things such as remove them from the campaign if they reply to a message and things like that, so that it functions like a true auto-responder would except that it's coming from your personal email.

Jaime Masters: Do you –

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Masters: – all those and stuff like that like you do with – or does the system actually throttle it so that way you don't get in trouble?

Josh Turner: Well, there's only so many you can send.

Jaime Masters: Yeah. Well, I know, like even in a cold email campaign. Exactly, yeah.

Josh Turner: Yeah. Most of our customers we're recommending, "Don't send more than a few hundred in a day." Now, once you kind of get ramped up you got a feel for things and you're doing things the right way, the technical maximum that you can send is 2000 a day. And that's just a Google thing, that's what they say. And to that point too about Google, this is not like a bot or something like that, this works directly with the Google, Gmail API and G Suite as well as Outlook's API. It's approved by Google. We have to go through a security audit every year where they have a third party team review the entire application and make sure it's not doing anything nefarious.

Jaime Masters: I appreciate you saying that, because sometimes people are like, "What gray area are we in right now?" Right? Like – "

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Masters: – where are we at?" Because nobody wants to get shit done without knowing, and of course, you have a business built and you're talking all about it, so I'm assuming it's okay. But I appreciate you saying that too. Is the interface in Connect 365 or is it in your Gmail? Because I want to know if the team can actually go in and not have it be messed up with your own inbox.

Josh Turner: Yeah, it's an app. It's not like a browser extension or something like that. So, yeah, you log into Connect 365 as a standalone application and then that, on the backend, is integrating with your email account.

Jaime Masters: Do you still get it in your email account too though or does it go somewhere – Do you know what I mean? Are we dealing with the messages twice in two separate things or no?

Josh Turner: No, no. Only shows up once.

Jaime Masters: Okay; just making sure.

Josh Turner: Yeah. You could have your team manage it if you wanted to, but there's a lot of different ways to do it. Some of our customers will set up unique emails that they only use with Connect 365, there's all sorts of different ways to set it up. But yeah, yeah, it's a different way of marketing than what people have been doing and it's really important because there's so many people out there who the old way of doing things is just not working for them anymore. 

And once folks get the book, go through the instruction, the book's in the weeds, meaning, it's really tactical, it kind of really gives you everything that you need to implement this. And you can try it. There's a link in the book where you can get a free trial of the software for 14 days. You can use it with unlimited access so that you can implement what we teach in the book and see if it works for you without even having to spend any money.

Jaime Masters: Nice. Well, I'm not an affiliate yet people, just so you all know, and I'm actually curious. How much is it ish?

Josh Turner: It is normally $197 a month, and for the launch of the book, we've got some special pricing that is much, much lower than that. So, if you're listening to this, go get it now so you can lock that in.

Jaime Masters: I appreciate that, awesome. So, tell us a little bit more about the pillars, because I know we sort of went to one and then three because I want to make sure that what they're actually creating is going to actually work for them. And again, regardless of platform, this is really important stuff.

Josh Turner: Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is, how do we get new prospects? Like how do you create your first list, basically? The second is then initial outreach and messaging. The third is nurture follow-up messaging. So, you basically got, how do I get my first list? And then what do I say to those people initially? And then what do I say to them long term to keep in touch with them? And then the fourth is strategies for continually adding new prospects into your pipeline.

Because one of the – and this is such a problem that so many businesses have. We did a study a few years ago, it was over 3,000 businesses that we interviewed and surveyed, and we were really just trying to get at what are problems that people in the small business world are having. And what we found was really interesting and kind of disturbing also. But 88% of people in that study said that they struggle with cash flow.

So, then we were like, "Okay, that sucks. What are the 12% doing, or can we find any common points here that the 12% are doing that the 88% are not?" And then there was one question that stood out and that most – I mean, the vast majority of the 12% said that they have systems in place to consistently bring in new leads into their business, and the majority of the 88% said they do not.

Jaime Masters: Yes, preach. Sorry, I see this all the time. It's these hills and valleys, right? So, you're so busy, especially service-based businesses, delivering that then they get cash flow crunch and time. When they have time, it just, we're not good as business owners in general of really refining the systems and just setting them up so that way you don't have to worry about it long-term. This is all I do, so I really appreciate that the data shows that also, because people are in so much pain over something that is actually fixable. So, sorry. Continue.

Josh Turner: Yeah, absolutely. And there's a lot of ways to fix it. What I share in the book and the way we teach is one way to do it that I think is really good, but the moral of the story is that if you don't have a system for getting new prospects into your business, then your business is on a shaky foundation. And so, we spend a lot of time in the book, and it's a really key part of our entire methodology, to help people put simple to implement solutions in place so that they can consistently be adding new prospects into their pipeline. And no matter what you're doing, if you're doing traditional email marketing and you have a list of a few hundred people, and if you're not adding people to that, every time you send out an email, you're losing people. You have to have a way to keep replenishing it.

If you're using LinkedIn as your main marketing channel, you've got to continually add new prospects into it. If you're using the trust equation, you have to continually add new prospects, otherwise, you're just going to have this database that is going to grow stale eventually and at some point isn't going to be effective for you anymore.

And so, one of the ways that we, really the primary way that we teach for most people to do this with the trust equation is to use LinkedIn in combination with Connect 365. To use LinkedIn to first get connected with people and then move the relationship over to email. There's a lot of stuff out there too – I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have seen a lot of different LinkedIn tools and bots and things like that, that people are using to automate messaging on LinkedIn.

And if you're technically savvy you probably can do some things with that that might get you some results, and I know I see people out there talking about doing exactly that. But what we find for most of our customers is that that stuff is just not really the best thing for them to be doing because you can jeopardize your LinkedIn account. Sometimes those tools are wonky and don't really work the way that you expected they would, but at a minimum, LinkedIn's been cracking down on them.

And so, if you don't know how to stay under the radar, then you're risking losing your LinkedIn account overusing these tools. And remember like five, six, eight years ago or something, there used to be these bots and tools to do things like that on Facebook and then Facebook just completely eliminated all of them. And eventually, LinkedIn will do the same.

And so, what we teach people to do is get connected with prospects on LinkedIn and then move the relationship and the conversation to email if you want to automate the messaging process. There's also amazing way to use LinkedIn to do messaging on LinkedIn, but to message people manually. There's a lot of people out there saying, "I need to find a way to create some efficiencies with these messaging and campaigns and such." And so, doing that, connecting on LinkedIn and then moving the conversation to email is a really effective way to do it.

Jaime Masters: Do you know what the constraints are on LinkedIn? Because this is the other thing, clients are like, "I can only connect to this many." But it seems very squirrely on or vague on what it is. Do you know what some of the constraints are, so we can know how many to automatically go connect with or anything like that?

Josh Turner: Yeah. This stuff's always changing. So, last I heard it was you can have up to 30000 connections on LinkedIn. Most people have 5000 connection requests they can send out. Once you hit that, you can ask LinkedIn for more and they usually give you more to use. So, for most people, there's plenty of –

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Masters: Is there a daily? Yeah. Is there a daily connection? Because I know some people get throttled also.

Josh Turner: – Yeah. Yeah. I think that if you send out way too many in one day, you can probably raise some red flags. But I don't know. We have an agency where we implement LinkedIn lead gen strategies for our clients every single day and we never come close to hitting those kinds of issues. Because you would never want to go on LinkedIn and just try and send out a thousand connection requests in one day anyways because what if like you get a low response rate? Then you've kind of wasted all of those connection requests. So, what we recommend to most people who are doing this is take 5 minutes a day, 5 or 10 minutes, and send out 10 connection requests to people who look like great prospects for you.

Maybe you get half of them to say yes. If you do that 5 days a week, over the course of the month you're going to have an extra – a hundred or so connections. Then over time, you can see how that really snowballs if you have the discipline to stick with it, and just put in those few minutes a day. For most people, that's enough. Sometimes people say, "I want to spend two hours a day doing it." Then you can send out a lot more connection requests, but that's what we recommend.

Jaime Masters: I've also noticed engagement just on my own going down, right? The videos that I used to have would get a lot more reach, especially a lot faster; we'd have a lot of engagement. And then just in general sort of, even though it seems like we're getting as much engagement that we're not getting as far reach. Do you know any updates on what's going on with that right now too?

Josh Turner: With the organic, like in the feed, homepage?

Jaime Masters: Yeah.

Josh Turner: Yeah. How recently have you seen the results diminish?

Jaime Masters: Just the past few months.

Josh Turner: Yeah, past few months. It's interesting because I'm still seeing a lot of video on LinkedIn that's getting lots of engagement, lots of likes and comments. I think the big thing though is that what – And I do see your content from time to time. Now that you mention it, I haven't seen it much over the last few months or so.

Jaime Masters: See? Crap. Yeah.

Josh Turner: What I'm seeing is that the videos that are like, "Oh, wow, look at that, 20,000 views" also is accompanied by hundreds of comments. And what I'm not seeing as much of the – Maybe a year ago, it was like any video you put up on LinkedIn is just getting tons of views regardless of the engagement. And so, I don't know the way their algorithms work, but that's kind of what I'm seeing. What I've seen with my posts is that if I just put a video on LinkedIn that I think is some cool content, it doesn't seem to get much reach.

But if I put something on there and I game the system or whatever you want to call it to get a lot of comments by like offering some free thing if you leave a comment, I'll message you with it or whatever it is. Those seem to take off much more. We had a post yesterday that has over almost 11,000 views as of this morning. But it was basically saying, "Leave a comment if you want a copy of my new book for free."

Jaime Masters: That's smart. That's really, really smart. Yeah. Well, I just noticed that articles are actually doing a lot better. So, it was just interesting that video wasn't, and that written was, that's why I was wondering if you knew some ideas. But that's a good idea too.

Josh Turner: Well, they've come out with this new newsletter feature; ours is called the Marketing Minute. And so, you can have subscribers who aren't your connections on LinkedIn, who will subscribe to your LinkedIn Newsletter and this newsletter gets basically sent– Your followers or subscribers of it getting notified whenever you publish a new one. And so, really quickly with ours, I mean, I feel like it's only been a thing within the last six months. I think we have 27,000 subscribers right now and it's really, really growing. LinkedIn – You're on point with what you're saying there about articles may be more reach. That specifically they're really pushing.

Jaime Masters: Are your followers automatically subscribers, or is it different and you have followers and subscribers?

Josh Turner: They're different. Yeah. So, you can have, this is like this –

Jaime Masters: We got a whole bunch of things. We have connections, we have followers, and we have subscribers. Okay, good; just making sure.

Josh Turner: You can have firstly free connections on LinkedIn. Then who are automatically followers of your content, which would be normal articles that you would push out on LinkedIn. They're considered followers at that. Then you can have other followers who are not your connections, who have just signed up to be your followers so that they can see your articles that you publish on LinkedIn, and then you can have subscribers of your LinkedIn Newsletter who get that different thing delivered to them as well.

Jaime Masters: In the same feed?

Josh Turner: What's that?

Jaime Masters: In the same feed? So, the newsletter's the same feed or is it email?

Josh Turner: It's not delivered to their inbox. No.

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Masters: That would have been great. Okay.

Josh Turner: LinkedIn has been really smart about not doing things that overwhelm people's inboxes any more than is already happening from people messaging each other. But no, the newsletter, typically they're going to get a notification, so a little less intrusive. But man, we're just getting tons of views on these things. Every one we put out is getting like 10,000 views; even the ones that don't get a lot of comments actually, now that I'm thinking about it, so it's working really well.

Jaime Masters: That's awesome. Now, I love hearing the now updated information. I know this is going out in just a handful of weeks because it's always changing and not everybody can keep up with the LinkedIn craziness that's going on and we just see diminishing returns and go, "Well, there goes that, it's not working anymore." And then who has the time to go in and actually try and figure out the whole new system again? Besides asking you, because that's why I asked you. I'm glad I get to do this and get to ask you all the questions. I know we have to start wrapping up and everybody needs to go get the book of course. But besides that, what is one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Josh Turner: Well, I'm going to get a little philosophical here because you know, I talked a lot about a lot of tactical stuff today, so you could do any of this stuff I talked about today. Go out and build a relationship with one of your best prospects and start connecting with people and be proactive and don't just sit back and hope it happens. But aside from that, when I think back to before my company had reached the seven-figure mark, etc., the thing that I think [inaudible] [00:41:37] I could have gotten there quicker is I would have had a greater belief in my ability to do it.

Because I remember when I started my business, my goal was I was going to get to 200,000. I didn't even have an intention or an idea that we can create this INC 500 company and yada yada yada. It was like that's for other people, I'm just going to try and make a good income. And one thing led to another and you get from this level to this level and you think, "Ha, maybe we could get to that level up there." And then you just keep building on it. And you know, for anybody who's at that place in trying to get to their first million or anything like that, I would say just, to think big.

Jaime Masters: I have to do a follow-up because I feel like you've done such a good job of that belief in going out after what you want. So, it's really cool to hear because you were like a shark to me going, and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this, and I just thought you just innately had that belief, because some people do. Some people are like, "I can crush it." So, it's amazing that you were able to share that you didn't. So, everybody that's listening, just know that it doesn't matter where you are right now. You can be Josh – when you grow up. INC 500, I think that's awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Make sure you give us the link one more time so everyone can go pick up that book.

Josh Turner: It is Connect365.io/em, and thanks so much for having me Jaime, I appreciate it.

Jaime Masters: Awesome, and we will definitely link it up in the comments. Everyone can click on the link if they don't remember. Thanks so much, Josh. Have an absolute amazing day.

Josh Turner: See you guys.

****************

I hope that this interview has been helpful for you! 

Here are the links I referenced in the interview:

The Trust Equation

Connect 365

The Eventual Millionaire Podcast

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