What have I learned from coaching hundreds of people?

Over the last four years I have worked with literally hundreds of people, helping them to create strong personal brands which they have used to increase their visibility and influence, create opportunities and ultimately generate revenue.

What I am about to tell you is not opinion, it is fact. Each assertion I make will be based on the data of what works and what doesn’t across those hundreds of examples. Each idea has been tested on some of our own DLAignite profiles and then, if successful, the results scaled across those that we train and not once have I had an instance where a person/region/industry doesn’t obey the findings I will outline here.

Personal Brand - your personal brand should be personal. Every person who changes their profile focus from "what they do" to “who they are” sees a benefit. Every single one. If you make that change, you too will see the benefit. The reason for this is that in a LinkedIn universe of nearly 700,000,000 people there are often millions of people who do the same thing as you. If you simply look the same as them you are instantly forgettable. The advertising copywriter Dave Trott called the idea of looking different from others and being more recognisable “Gestalt Thinking.” The idea is that standing-out makes you memorable and by consequence gives you a competitive advantage (I wrote a blog about it here). The more personal and different you can make it the more memorable and unusual you will appear. I have (and so does Tim and Eric and Laura ...and many of the individuals who have been through our various programmes - clients, associates, resellers and DLAignite team) a unique headline. This is a hook to get people to read the “about” section, which is in turn a hook to get people to read the remainder of the profile. The more you read, the more you know (and I hope like) me and the more likely you are to engage with me. The same is true for you. Listing achievements and successes if boastful, ineffective and incredibly dull and it just makes us all look the same. As Oscar Wilde said "be yourself, everyone else is taken."

Network - you should always be trying to grow your network. Fresh people, fresh opportunities. “I only connect to people I know” might be your natural stance on this, but would you go to an exhibition and never speak to people you don’t know, or go to a networking event and never introduce yourself to people? Of course you wouldn’t. This is the digital equivalent of precisely that. Meet as many interesting people as you can and ask them to connect. If you currently have 1000 connections and you double that number (assuming that nothing else about your behaviour improves) you have doubled the opportunity of being in the right place at the right time - twice as many introductions, pieces of inbound and opportunities. But I like to know everyone in my network…you would never hold the viewpoint “I know enough people so I don’t want to meet anyone else”… so swallow your beliefs and go out there and meet new people! I am not a fan of Kylie Jenner (to pick a person at random), but like it or not she has more influence than I will ever have and whilst she isn't in the same business space as me I can learn a lot from looking at her influence.

Engaging - you have to make yourself visible to people in your network. If you have 1000 connections it’s highly likely that half (or more) of them are people that you don’t really know (and probably don't know you). Many of those might well work within companies you’d dearly like to be having conversations with. You need to make sure that these people notice you. Like some of their content, comment on some of the things that they comment on, perhaps tag them in one of your posts. This “bumping in to them” as you move around the online world will, over time, mean that they will start to recognise you…you will look familiar to them. If they recognise you they will be more likely to connect to you and have a call with you should you want one.

Publishing - what you publish (either as a post or an article) is the “outreach” to your network. You need to do it regularly and you need to do it often. Exactly how often will depend on your network and how much time you have, as a rule of thumb once every hour is too much, once every week isn’t often enough… A more scientific approach would be to track the views/hour on your post and don’t post again until it has fallen below a particular threshold. For example, if I post a video, after about an hour or so it receives 200+ views per hour so I don’t share anything else until it has fallen beneath 100 views/hour because if I do the latest post cannibalises the earlier post. For you that level might be 25 views/hour or 1000/hour but this is quite an effective way of determining when another post is a good idea.

Success in this space is based on two things - the number of views AND the number of likes/comments/shares that a piece of content receives. There is a distinct difference between the benefits (and the return) of each. A view is great and the analytics on the LinkedIn platform shows company/job role/region of the viewers of each piece of content and these insights are extremely valuable in helping you to see whether your content is “landing” where it needs to be and if it isn't landing within your target accounts you should connect to more people in that account. Whist this is valuable, there isn’t anything you can “action” from this as those are all anonymous views. The likes/comments/shares however highlight the individual that has clicked and this is of course an opportunity to reach-out and strike up a conversation with them or connect to them if you’re not already connected. Which is exactly what you should do. If you look at your newsfeed you will often see a post from someone you’re not connected to with a note saying “Adam Gray has commented on this” so when people comment on (and like/share) your content it is also shown to some of their network (and this is why your articles are sometimes liked by people you’re not connected to).

Your behaviour in each of these areas must be driven by the results that YOU get rather than what you assume will happen.

These are the inalienable facts of what I see.

• I have never seen the success a person gets go down by making their profile more personal.
• I have never seen a person’s success (inbound, conversations, meetings) decrease by growing their network
• I have never seen someone’s engagement decrease by having more conversations.
• Posts you write out-perform posts you share, personal posts out-perform business posts. Always.

Most people recognise all of these truths because they are presented with the evidence every single time they switch-on LinkedIn. Most people don’t use these truths though to alter their behaviour to maximise their returns.

Your success in in your own hands.