So when I look at what should you be doing for LinkedIn, I put it in three buckets. Number one is making sure you have your profile dialed in to be a marketing machine. There are a lot of facets that go into that, which we can talk about. Number two is making sure that you know the people that you want to connect with and why it's not just about connecting with prospects, leads, prospects, leads. There are a whole bunch of other people out there you should be connecting with to help you get referrals for your business. And number three is post. So I just name them the 3p's to

make it easy for our brains. Threes easy. Ps are easy. People profile posts, and I've decided, after working with many, many smart, very busy professionals, that there are four kinds of what I call power posts, or I'll say 4.5 kinds of power posts that we should really focus on. All the other types of posts can be maintenance posts, can be whenever you need them. But for me to think that any of my clients has the time that the big guru LinkedIn experts have to dedicate towards LinkedIn is crazy. So how can it be simple?

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time you're consuming this content. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules Growth Strategies for Law Firms podcast. Easy for me to say, huh? And we'll meet Jennifer in just two minutes, for those of you who are regulars, you know we always do a very short ad for my company, 10 Golden Rules, right off the top. And today I wanted to talk about referrals. If you are part of the 10 Golden Rules extended family, if you've been to TJR Live, our conference, or if you're a client, past client, we'd love a referral to someone else

who you think we could help, and there's something in it for you too, because we're a partner of the Legal Aid Society, and we'll give a $250 donation to the Legal Aid Society in your name for any referral that generates a meeting, not even a signed client, just someone who you think could use 10 golden rules services, or you can choose $250 gift certificate to this steakhouse of your choosing. So 250 bucks for a meeting, not so bad, huh, Jennifer?

No, I think it's great. I'm ready.

That's our referral program, and we'd love you to participate. So just you know, if somebody could use our help, connect them with jay@tengoldenrules.com, or just go to 10 golden rules, fill out a form, or do a chat, or call us, and we'd love to meet someone else that we could help out. Anyways, Jennifer, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules Growth Strategies for Law Firms podcast.

Hey Jay, I'm so glad to be here today. Good to see you.

Now I recently got to see Jennifer Darling present at a meeting, and she has some of the best current modern LinkedIn training content that I've seen in a long, long time. And so, as you all know, the regulars know when I meet someone smart who can help us out, and help our lawyers out, and help our any business person out. Frankly, with how to really develop your your LinkedIn presence, it's much more than just your LinkedIn profile. I invite them on the show. We we spend about 45 minutes learning more. So Jennifer, we always start out by learning about your journey, and so

tell us where you started out and how you became an advertising guru, and how you now became a LinkedIn coach.

Sure. Well, I have been in advertising and marketing for my whole life. I actually graduated from Western Michigan University. Go Broncos in a double major with television production and advertising and promotion. And my first job right out of the bat was in Northern Michigan in Cadillac, Michigan, at a TV station doing advertising sales. I froze my biscuits off in Northern Michigan, very different climate than southwestern Michigan, and I had an opportunity to go to to California my first year at my job, and so I was out of there. I was out in northern Michigan. I went

to California, and I spent. I went

from Canada to Florida, so I you

That 90-minute training turned into a little mini book that I have on Amazon. Turned into bigger and bigger things, and here I am, 11 years later, sharing my LinkedIn strategies for very busy business professionals.

Tell us one crazy story from the Ad Wars.

Oh my gosh! Well, I'll tell you a crazy fun one. This actually is from my radio station days. So I worked at this classic rock station, 96.9, the Eagle in Sacramento, and

did they announce it like 96.9? The Eagle,

exactly. Yeah, all the DJs did, except we had one female DJ, but all the male DJs did.

Sorry, and

I just have to relive my youth. Well,

we had these things called radio station remotes. Usually, they were at car dealerships on weekends. So you pull your whole crew up there, and you give out Eagle keychains, and a bunch of people come to the place they don't want to be on the weekend, which is a car dealership, and to get a keychain. This one weekend, I had sign on this motorcycle company, and it wasn't it wasn't in Harley Davidson or Indian. It was a special custom motorcycle motorcycle manufacturing company, and we had a remote at their location in their parking lot. I remember we had the Fried

you run out of keychains?

Who knows? But they ran out of. They sold out of like almost all their inventory inside the store, and it was just a super duper fun experience. I'll never forget

it. Yeah, I always tell the story that advertising works. We it just wasn't precise enough for me. I was always a little frustrated because I worked on McDonald's and Coca Cola advertising. Start the advert, and you you know this. You had McDonald's as clients too. We'd start the advertising Thursday night at 6o'clock for all of our new promotions. The goal would be to get busy on the weekend, and so if we had like a Disney Happy Meal by like Friday night, we were swamped in the stores.

Yeah,

and the word got out, but the the franchisees always wanted to know: was it the radio? Was it the billboards? Was it the TV? And we always tried to. And Jennifer's putting her hands up. We always tried to have a definitive answer. We would even do testing, like in two similar sized markets, we'd run the radio and the billboards, or the billboards and the TV, and not the not the radio. And you know what I learned, Jennifer, was the most successful thing.

What's that?

Was the weather good that weekend? Oh yeah. But the tricky thing is we couldn't. I can tell you for sure, and Jennifer can tell. There's proof positive. They had 25 people at a bike shop. We would pack the McDonald's, you know, with with families looking for these Happy Meal toys, but we couldn't. I couldn't tell you definitively what worked. But one one theory I have. Tell me if you also subscribe to this theory. I believe that one plus one doesn't equal two; it equals three. And what I mean by that is, like, if you only ran billboards, you kind of get like a one times

effect. But if you run billboards and radio, or if you weren't run radio and TV, it seems like you get three or four times. And I, I personally would experience that. You'd see the billboard and be like, "Oh, okay, there's, there's the new billboard. And then you'd hear the radio the next morning, you know, as you're driving your kids to school. Wow! Then, then you okay? The happen guys, we're gonna go. We're gonna go to McDonald's tonight for the happiness. Do you believe in that theory?

Oh, I think so. My client, he was the largest Toyota and Chevy dealer in the United. Well, maybe one of the largest in the United States, the largest in Northern California, and he would call this the recency theory. When people were looking to purchase something. All of the ads came in your face, so it didn't matter if it was TV or billboard or whatever. But they they needed to be there because it just confirms to your brain that yeah, that's the thing that you need to be doing. Go buy that McDonald's.

Yeah, like when your lease is coming up,

yeah,

you start noticing all the cars on.

But do you know one of the most successful McDonald's campaigns happened recently without any advertising?

Please tell us the story.

Did you get your Grinch socks?

No. My sister-in-law

works for corporate McDonald's in in Chicago, and they did this promotion where they gave out Grinch socks for they had an adult Happy Meal. It came with a Big Mac or I don't know how many nuggets of fries with Grinch green Grinch salt. It was totally different salt than you've ever seen, and a pack of socks, either green, yellow, red, or blue, with different rich characters on them. They never even advertised that, and yet everyone was talking about it. I went and got my green socks, and then I became a fanatic trying to wheel and deal in these Facebook groups to get

another. I got two green socks. I needed another color. I still haven't got them. So yeah, it was a huge promotion that they'd never even had to advertise, and they were sold out within days for a 10.

I have a similar story, and then we're going to start talking about links. Okay.

When I was working on the McDonald's McDonald's Canada, they asked us for some new promotional ideas, and I had three what I thought were great ideas, but one of them became our most successful promotion for the next 10 years, and my idea was to do hockey cards, a collectible set of hockey cards in Canada. And when I told the the VP, his brain like blew up. He's like, "Oh my God, that's brilliant! Because we sponsor NHL All Star, and they could never figure out what to do with it. So they had this multi million dollar contract, and a bunch of the franchisees would go to the All Star

game, but they had never really actualized that that promotion. So we did this an exclusive set of hockey cards with all the NHL players in their all-star gear, and these hockey-it was a four-week promotion. In a week and a half, you couldn't find a hockey bird anywhere in Canada. Wow! Like you said, you had to buy. It was like an adult Happy Meal sort of thing. You had to buy either a Big Mac or a quarter pounder or a breakfast sandwich in the morning, and sales were through the roof. And these things were gone in a week and a half, and then you know obviously they printed a lot more

hockey cards the next year. The next year we did these 3d cards, which was the latest technology, and they were sold out like crazy. It was fantastic, and it was a lot of fun. All right, so now we're going to talk a little bit about LinkedIn and perhaps LinkedIn for lawyers, but really the strategies are great for any type of business person as well. So Jennifer, when you want to revamp your LinkedIn presence and start really doing some business, where do you get started?

I think first I want to share that the framework I'm coming from, Jay, is for very busy people, because I love to follow LinkedIn experts, and I love to follow the gurus who are always in LinkedIn. But they have the time to spend 40 hours a week on LinkedIn, trying different things, doing different things. But I don't, and I don't think that lawyers do either, or most business professionals running a business, I have time for three things: selling, speaking, and serving my clients. I don't have a ton of time for social media, so I really need to be strategic and

smart about what I'm doing. So I'm not trying to be there 40 hours a week. Granted, all the other things I have on my plate. So when I look at what should you be doing for LinkedIn. I put it in three buckets. Number one is making sure you have your profile dialed in to be a marketing machine. There are a lot of facets that go into that, which we can talk about. Number two is making sure that you know the people that you want to connect with, and why it's not just about connecting with prospects, leads, prospects, leads. There are a whole bunch of other people out there you should be

connecting with to help you get referrals for your business. And number three is post. So I just name them the 3p's to make it easy for our brains. Three's easy, P's are easy. People profile posts, and I've decided after working with many, many smart, very busy professionals that there are four kinds of what I call power posts, or I'll say 4.5 kinds of power posts that we should really focus on. All the other types of posts can be maintenance posts, can be whenever you need them. But for me to think that any of my clients has the time that the big guru LinkedIn experts have to dedicate

towards LinkedIn is crazy. So how can it be simple? So

you're going to break them all. Down for us a little bit.

Yeah, so we can break them down. You ready?

Yeah. Start with the first P.

We'll start with the first P, the profile. So what happens with the profile? Often people go by what LinkedIn calls the profile. For example, your about section. Most people look at that and their brains say, "Well, that must be about me. So let me go put a bio about me. Well, that's one way to do it, but from a sales and marketing standpoint, the way to do it is more customer focused and customer centered. So I put this an imaginary word after about, and the word is them, about your ideal customers. If you can really grab their attention right in the beginning of that

about section, talking about what are their challenges, what are the outcomes and results they're looking for, what's keeping them up at night. It's pretty standard marketing terms, but for some reason we don't even apply these marketing theories to LinkedIn. We just write about us, and nobody really cares about you first. They care about what you're going to do for them first. Often, I find that information down in the experience section, and if you really think somebody's going to scroll all the way down to the experience section for you to be able to see that you get them, you're

wrong. You need to start at the top, and even before that, about section the banner. I have just such a great privilege lately of speaking to some provisors groups. That's how we met, Jay. And I have a privilege and honor of doing LinkedIn profile assessments for members of that group. And just yesterday, I met an absolutely amazing woman, and I look at her banner, and she has a beautiful picture up on the banner. It's gorgeous. It's these beautiful rocks. It looks very spa-like, but that says absolutely nothing about her business. She's an HR consultant. What does that have to do with her

business? We need text on those pictures, and even better, we need pictures that relate to the audience. So the Indiana University Kelly School of Business they did a great research project on digital ads, and what they did was they used EMDR eye movement therapy or eye movement something or eMRI's whatever eye movement and they looked at they showed a bunch of ads, and the ads that were the simplest ads with the simple text people spent more time with, but ads that had too much information on them, either text graphics, they didn't even look at their eyes went away. They looked away.

They didn't even get the message

about billboards, and and an internet banner is a lot like a billboard.

Yes, yes, your banner is your billboard. If

someone's driving 50 miles an hour, you can probably have four or five words, right? One clean graphic and your local. That's

it. So people either make the mistake

in profiles to be like the billboard on

exactly. Yep, exactly. And all of your prospects are driving by. Yeah,

because we're going about 40 miles an hour on the internet too. So yeah, people

have this rule. It's all these rules are seven second rules, right? The seven second ab. Well, now we have the like seven seconds to make an impression. I don't know. I think it's like one second, Jay. Our our we're like gnats. Our attention spans nothing these days.

Yeah. No. We used to have. I forget what it was the the seven sec on websites, but now the refined research says it's two and three.

Yeah,

men and women actually women are quicker to make a decision. Does the website have? Is this what? Does it answer the question I ask Google when I arrive on this website?

Yeah,

who are you and what do you do and and is it what I'm looking for? Yeah, and so your website has to answer that in two or three seconds. So I guess your LinkedIn profile has to have a clean headline that's consumer benefit rich, as opposed to banging myself. Exactly. Yeah.

And so I see too often either people don't have anything, or just a picture that doesn't mean anything to your audience, or they have too much. We want the right amount. So, Jay, you're right. The right amount is like three to five main words and a really good graphic that represents what you do.

So, a great banner and an about them section, not an about us section.

Exactly.

And a couple other tips on the profiler. Yeah, 100%

100% So that's the banner text, but the headline super important. Usually, what people do in the headline is they start with their job titles: attorney, account executive, banker, insurance broker. Okay, that does not really pull anyone into your network. You want to start with. The outcome of what you're going to help your ideal clients with. The first 10 words in that headline-it's called a headline. It's not called your job titles line. Headline-that is the most frequently viewed 10 words of your whole entire LinkedIn profile because every time you post or every

time you comment in somebody's newsfeed, those 10 words are what get seen. So, would you rather have rocking corporate sales results or account executive? You want to have that outcome statement first. The 10 golden rules for attorneys. Oh, I want to know what those 10 golden rules are. The fact that you're an author, speaker, blah blah blah. Nobody cares. And you know, the the thing is, as attorneys, I mean this with all due respect. You're a dime a dozen. There are many of you, so you need to differentiate yourself, and you can do that by all the things I'm sharing today by making your

headline more of an about section. At the end of the headline, here's a super tip: put something personal and fun about yourself, because the way we read, you might remember this from school. We read the first sentence, the last sentence, and then we read the middle. Same thing on a headline. We read the the outcome statement and the last sentence, and then the middle. So if you have something fun, like I just worked with an attorney a couple weeks ago. He's actually also a race car driver. I'm like, that is so cool. We need to use that to differentiate yourself. So at the very end, we put

amateur race car driver, and then in the about section, we put an essence of racing. Do we go all in on the race car theme? No, because that's too hokey. But we use words like accelerate, even on the banner. We use words like accelerate. What are high-powered racing words that would also work in your attorney firm? That helps differentiate you. So, okay, so now we have the profile. We have the banner is really important. It needs to be simple words, simple graphics, and oh, by the way, I do like to have a call to action, so we can tell brains what they need to do next.

We I'm going to do a little bit more work now. Thank you. Oh, good.

You're giving me my

weekend project, but I just changed mine. I had professor on mine, which I actually wrote this the curriculum for an internet marketing course, but haven't done that for years. And I just changed the last word from professor to former hockey goalie.

Perfect. Yes. So see, I think some of the best audiences for me to talk to are people who already are in marketing and advertising because they get it, and they're kind of like, "Oh, why did I do that before? Right. So yeah, you change that. I had dog mom. Dog mom got me a lot of friends, a lot of. Some people

think I took a few too many pucks to the head, but I'd argue that I always had a helmet. So hey, let me

see your teeth. Let me see your teeth. Are they all yours? Yeah, no, no, and it was

it was a it was a soccer coaching incident that cost me my teeth.

Ah,

okay, so this is awesome. More on on profile, or you want to?

I'm going to add one more thing because it's super duper duper important. I love everything

so far. So

okay, awesome. There's a thing called a featured section, and you have to turn it on. It does not automatically come on. You have yours on, Jay. So people can go to your LinkedIn. Okay, great. People can come to my LinkedIn. It's Jennifer Darling Speaks. You can go to either of ours, and you can see we have a featured section turned on. Okay. This is where super high value information and marketing materials belong. So, for example, if you're a personal injury attorney, you're probably getting other referrals from other people. I meet somebody; they were in a car

accident. I'm going to tell them about my favorite attorney, Jay. You know you're going to have a lot of referrals coming to your LinkedIn. So, what is a great marketing piece you can have on LinkedIn for your referral partners to be able to share with other people? Are you a speaker? Do you speak to groups to help promote people? I loved. I had a lot of PI attorneys whenever I was in advertising sales, and we would get really creative. We would download. We would create like the five tips you need to know if you're in a car accident. Download this now, and of course, the last tip is you need

to contact this attorney ASAP to help you out. Don't say anything. But that's a that's something that could be in your LinkedIn featured section if you're speaking on that. Topic or you're doing webinars that would be a great thing. Do you have a lead magnet? You could put a lead magnet in there. So you want to have three really high-profile marketing pieces, and I highly recommend either a client testimonial video reel, a lead magnet that they can download and get onto your email database, a speaker reel. If you're speaking to promote your business, I highly recommend you do that. If

you don't, and I would say, and then some type of a brochure information that your ideal clients or prospects or your referral partners could download to share with their network of people. But you have to go turn that section on. It just doesn't automatically sprout up.

Well, thank you. I love it because I do have a featured section, and the stuff I featured on there is at least 10 years old. Oh goodness, right? Yeah, yeah. So when you're watching this, you're not going to see my 10 things you need to know about Google Plus. Google Plus is all right. Google Plus was like when Google tried to create a social network. Yeah, but now competitive Facebook.

Oh, I remember that. It was so awful.

No one will see this because I will update my feature to Susan. Yeah, because

if you change that to 10 things you need to have on AI, because we're not legal searching. We have a great new

presentation on AI. Yeah, we

are no longer legal searching.

Yeah,

we are AI searching. In fact, Google search paid advertising is really hurting because we're going to free Gemini to start searching. So if I get, I know you reach a lot of attorneys, and we're talking to people who are also in professional service. But I have a special spot in my heart for PI attorneys because I worked with so many great ones, and I'm still good friends with several. Is that if we get in a car accident, what do we do? Well, we used to go to Google. Now we go to AI. I go to Google Gemini, and I say,

Jennifer,

what do I do?

Jennifer's only about 5% right.

Oh, am I?

Google is yeah. Google's still 90% of the game.

Okay. Well, we're going to go to one. Google defended

their turf by creating the Google AI results. So, when I say defended their turf, they created a great AI answer so that we didn't have to go through the two steps of opening Chat GPT.

Ah, so I'm just advanced. I'm advanced. Yeah.

Okay. And we are most of the people listening to this are very attuned to AI, but still only about 5% of the population is regularly using Claude or Perplexion. Yeah, and and you're the

advanced internet marketing guy for these guys. But I will say one thing to add to that is when you have an awesome LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn profile becomes highly searchable in both Google and in any AI Chat GPT Claude Perplexity Gemini whatever your LinkedIn profile is highly I call it googolicious

love it love it awesome so that's great so quick review. Then, the first thing is you want to have a great banner, and think of it like a billboard or a banner that you would use in advertising. Four or five words, and really simple text, and something that really is eye catching. Simple, like you're writing an advertisement, and the seven second rule you mentioned, which is now two or three seconds,

and then

you talked about the about section is not about you. You should add another word. LinkedIn should call it an about them, and make it a really great section. I think you had a great example: challenges, outcomes, what's keeping them up at night? Nobody cares about you. And then the headline are the the words not only on your profile, but whenever you post anything or anyone sees you in a search throughout LinkedIn, they see your picture and your headline. And and you had another great example there where you said rocking sales results is a much better headline than account

executive. Don't put your job title in your in your headline. Put it in

the headline, but don't put it first.

And the final portion is a featured section, and you have to opt in to get a featured section, and don't be like Jay and have 10 years old features. You can update that on a regular basis.

I don't even know if I believe you. I'm going to have to go look.

Trust me, Google Plus. You're going to have to look fast because I already changed one of them.

Good,

awesome. All right, so you mentioned the 3p's of LinkedIn, and they are profile, people, and posts. So the first one is profile. We covered that.

Yep. The

second P of LinkedIn is

people. So get your profile done first, and then set it and forget it, and just. Update. Look at it every six months or 12 months to make sure that it's up to date. You want to do that because when you go to start increasing your connections, you want them. The first thing they're going to do is go look at your profile. So we've got to get a set. But you want to be inviting people always to your network. And what happens is sometimes we think about. I just want to invite prospects or leads to my LinkedIn. Well, there are so many other people that you need to be having in

Like, who are the movers and shakers in your community that would be really good for you to have in your LinkedIn profile? Who are industry experts? Maybe not people exactly like you, competitors like you, but who are industry experts who serve other clients like you serve? Those would be a great group of people to have in your LinkedIn community. Number three, networking groups. Who are the networking groups that you're in, and who are those people? So Jay and I met improvisers. That's a huge network across the United States. I don't know. Maybe they're in Canada too, but I know they're

in the United States. And so you want to connect with a lot of Provisors people. Their whole foundation is about referrals. Being with other people who are in memberships of the same groups are you as you. Those could be excellent referral partners. I think that city and of leaders in your city. So I lived in Sacramento for a long time. The people who are in charge of visit Sacramento, they're in my network. Why? Because they share things going on around Sacramento. I see what's happening. I'm connected with them. I've reached out to them before and said, "Hey, if you have know of any clients

who are having speaking engagements and they get a cancelation, I'm right in the backyard. You can call me up any time to fill a spot. So people who are in your local leadership area, your past clients, well, your past happy clients, any past happy clients-they're the ones who will talk about you to other people. And sometimes past happy clients, when you reach out and connect with them, they may just have some more new business for you. Current customers-sometimes we're so involved with our current customers we forget to invite them to our LinkedIn profile. If you are on the board of

directors for a nonprofit organization or an association, invite the other board members. Invite some of the other members. So I don't even know how many I just listed, but there are several different groups of people that you should all be thinking. These are people I want in my sphere sphere of influence. And then how do you give to those people? Like, what's the value you can give to them? You could share posts that they're making. You could talk to them. You can invite them to interview for an article you're writing on LinkedIn. There's so many ways you can give value to people and build

relationships beyond just thinking about prospects,

or maybe they'd be a great podcast guest. Oh, guess what! I saw Jennifer present. She was fire, and we immediately set up a Zoom meeting and talked about what we're going to talk about. And here we are in the podcast. But I love exactly interview for a LinkedIn article. You know, if you don't have a podcast, and just start out sharing their posts, and then do you like asking them for a Zoom one-on-one meeting or a virtual coffee?

I think it's really good to have. I call those connect calls.

Yeah,

I don't have many because there's very little space in my am on my calendar.

Yeah, I'm the same. Where, if with we both mentioned provisors a couple times, like I'll be on two, three provisors meetings a week, and I'll I'll generally pick out one person in the room, or two people in the room who I should have a follow-on meeting with. Someone who's one of two things: either they directly do business with my target audience. So if they work with law firm owners, marketing directors, and in particular personal injury and consumer-facing law firms, and they sell to those folks and talk to those folks every day, I want to connect with those people. The

other great person is so. Someone like Jennifer, who's an influencer, because you'll always be able to identify that person in the room. If you go to a networking meeting, like a provisors or your chamber of commerce leads meeting, or any of these BNI, any of these kinds of meetings, there's always one person in the room. Even if you're the guest, you can spot them. They're probably on the executive committee. Jennifer mentioned that. They're probably going to get lots of thank yous when the testimonials come around. They're probably going to give lots of thank yous because they got a

bunch of referrals. They're probably going to be the the spotlight speaker that that week, or the speaker is going to mention them in their presentation. So it's not hard to figure out who are the one or two influencers in the room. Those are great people to connect with, and probably have a one-on-one because those are the people with a wide network and a wide sense of giving, and the givers often get as well.

Yeah, it's purposeful. I love what you're saying. It's purposeful, and too often I find some partner connections aren't super purposeful, and so that's. But but I think they're great if, as long as you make them purposeful like you do, Jay. They're purposeful and strategic, and they give value both ways.

Yeah, yeah, and it always leads to something. You know, I met, I mentioned, I I did a podcast interview earlier today with the patent professor, and this is the guy who's written a book, created a brand, built a huge firm, hosted a party for our revisers group at his home. You know, it's easy easy to pick out who the player, the patent professor, was in that room. I met another guy who's a new member of our our provisors group. I looked at his LinkedIn, he's successfully started 12 businesses.

Wow!

Bing, bingo! Hey, how about we hop on a Zoom one to one, and immediately we found someone he's going to refer me to, and a group I'm going to ask him to speak at. And when you meet those type of the players in the room, the influencers, something comes of every single one of those meetings.

That's awesome! I love that. And you know, they don't have to be super long. They can be 15 minutes. You'll fill whatever time you give it. So if you make it 15, I do half an

hour because invariably everyone's two or three minutes until we're laughing because we were both adjusting backgrounds and taking water breaks and stuff. But it's always two or three minutes to get started, and invariably two or three minutes to to get out early. Awesome. So we we covered profile. We covered people. The final P of LinkedIn's 3p's

is posts, and this is probably what trips most people up. What do I post? How often do I post? What algorithm hacks are today's flavor of the week? I say LinkedIn changes their algorithm like people change their underwear. So I just got tired of chasing it, and you know what I I figured out eventually. While everyone else is chasing LinkedIn's algorithm, what do you think LinkedIn is chasing?

You know, I heard your presentation, so it's give it away.

It's eyeballs. It's readership.

It's us,

people.

It's us. We're out there chasing their algorithm, but then we're they're trying to chase us. Why? Because they want us on their platform, and they want what's called dwell time, sticky time. They want us lingering on their platform because the longer you linger, the more likely you're going to see one of their ads, one of their clients' ads. So they want us on the platform, and so what I've done is I've taken a look at. No, Jay and I have both been in advertising and marketing. Well, I won't say how many years because because I don't know yours, but you know, over 20

years, longer than that for me. But over 20, and human behavior actually doesn't change all that much. The way we consume things changes. When I started, there were like four television stations, and everyone watched those four TV stations. Is it are people not watching video these days? Yeah, they're watching a ton of video. They're just watching it in different places, YouTube, wherever. They're just more consuming it in different places. And so the thing is, these types of posts always work for people because they're based on human behavior. And so one of those is what's called a LinkedIn

newsletter. I don't like the word newsletter because to me, a newsletter implies that you're going to write all about what's going on at your company this week? Who's the star salesperson of the week? Blah blah blah. It's all about you. So it is called technically a newsletter in LinkedIn, but to me, it's about writing articles that give value first. The 10 golden rules that gives value first.

Give us some some more examples.

Three tips to build your connections on LinkedIn.

Love it.

What's the one I wrote this morning? How to use AI as your thought partner for creating content. I

love that.

And I think I did three ways. Three ways to use AI. Five. Oh, here was a really popular one. Two ways to get engagement on LinkedIn during the summertime.

Love it at the seasonality.

Exactly.

The threes, the sevens, the 10s. When you go through the checkout, the magazines don't have three ways to spice up your love life, seven ways to lose those 10 pounds by, you know, date. The reason those things work and they sell magazines is that it simplifies it for us. They're great little listicle headlines that catch our attention.

Yeah. So the newsletter is great. It's very powerful, and we want to give value first. And I'm going to give you a few tips around newsletters that I've discovered. And this is the

LinkedIn newsletter. The

LinkedIn newsletter. So they actually have a publishing platform. It's a publisher, and when you publish a newsletter on LinkedIn, it gets a unique URL, meaning that every individual newsletter is searchable on LinkedIn. I'm sorry, on Google. So you increase your Google presence by publishing newsletters. Number one. Number two benefit is that still today, high level decision makers read articles. They may read Harvard Business Review on their phone these days, and not get the physical subscription, but they still read articles. People still read. Newsletters are

excellent. Number three is that it's a great way to build influence and get people more engaged with your content because it's a longer format that you have. Now, when you create a newsletter, you want to have a headline, you want to have a body, you have to have an image. What I also do on my newsletters is at the bottom of the newsletter, I give my lead magnet, ultimateprofilechecklist.com. If you click that link, you will go to my LinkedIn Ultimate Profile Checklist and be able to download it and get on my email list, so I can send you more amazing, valuable articles. I highly suggest

everyone has a lead magnet to do that because you never know when LinkedIn decides to change things up, but now you've lost half of your audience. If you get them on your email list, they're now your audience. The second thing I do is a little about the author, about 75 words, and the reason I do this is because that article is searchable. I use the word article. There is a thing called article in LinkedIn. Don't use the feature. I have not seeing it working very well lately. It's tricky. Use newsletter, but I'm still going to say article or edition because I can't help myself. But if that is

searchable on Google and they get there from Google, you have a little about the author section at the bottom, and this positions you. You gave value. Now you're positioning yourself in what you do, and you give it a call to action. That's the newsletter. When you publish your newsletter, it's now going to go in two places. This is so cool. Number one, it's going to go out into other people's news feed, first, second, third person connections. So those people you're not even connected with that could go into their newsfeed if they've told LinkedIn they want that type of information, and

Wow,

that's powerful.

That's spectacular because then every time you publish, they're going to get a notification.

Yep. So we said we were going to publish monthly, but I said, "Well, Helen, oh my gosh, we have so many subscribers. They're interested. Let's not wait for more weeks to publish again. Let's publish something today, because they're saying they're interested. So let's put something. So we put another article. Well, we're in the middle. Before I met with you today, Jay, I was in the middle working on article with her to put out. So newsletters to me are one of my. Hot tip, favorite things, and you can repurpose it-the same newsletter to your own email list. So much

repurposing here with this content,

So amazing. It's so so good. All right. So that's my that's my first power. I call it a power post.

Power post number one.

Power post number one. Newsletter. Power post number two. LinkedIn calls a document. We might call it a carousel because it is a graphic that you hit a little right arrow and it advances. You can create it on PowerPoint, Canva. You could art Canva, yeah. PowerPoint, Canva, Keynote, and it is less about text, and it's more graphics, less text. It's a visual piece. Now, the cool thing about this one is that people who are more into seeing visuals and pictures, they're going to like this medium better, and it has a little advance key. So if you click on that little

advance arrow, kinesthetically, now we're moving into some neuroscience here. Kinesthetically, when people actually physically are involved with your post, they get a bigger boost in those happy hormones, And it tells LinkedIn they're more interested in your posts because they clicked. Therefore, LinkedIn will more likely send them additional content that you create in your newsfeed because you engaged in that post. The more people engage, the more LinkedIn wants to send that out, because remember, what they're looking for is dwell time.

I love it. You can

repurpose those newsletters to the really high level information and make those into simple documents or carousels, and then add images. Power number two.

Number two, the document or carousel. Power post number three.

Power post number three is you speaking and networking, whether it's virtual or in person. You speaking and networking. You being a member of your community. And if if you are somebody who's perhaps on a nonprofit board, you're philanthropic. Take pictures or have your assistant take pictures of you doing those things and post them on LinkedIn. Not only is that goodwill, but that shows your community that you're a good human, and if you're a speaker, even better because it shows your LinkedIn audience that you're a speaker. Helps you get more speaking.

Love it.

If you're on a podcast, do the podcast person a favor and post the podcast.

Yeah, I do it all the time. Take a selfie at the back of the room of a big room. When I get on stage, take a selfie on stage. It crushes. It's great content.

Yep,

you got to do

about me losing over 100 pounds. I was 300 pounds. I've lost 127 pounds as 128 as of this morning, but at the time I was writing this, 115 pounds or whatever.

So awesome, and we're going to talk about that too.

Thank you. I posted before and after shot of me, but what I did was this is the secret. I started with the personal experience, and I turned it into a business lesson. What did I learn about my business, and what could I share with other people about that experience and that journey? That's really valuable for other people. So it wasn't really about weight loss. It was about the fact that I gained more energy, and when I had more energy, I had more energy to do my business. I had more stamina to run my business. People love that kind of post, and I help people with short

story posts all the time. So the basic framework is taking there's five questions I ask, but the basic framework is taking a personal life experience, turning it into a business lesson, and sharing your advice or your ideas with your ideal audience. People love it, and then put a picture-a real picture, not a fake one, but a real picture of you or and or the experience. Not you don't need to stop a picture.

That's great.

That's number four.

Is that four of four? Is the that's four? Oh,

there's a point five. I'm going to give you a point five, and the reason it gets a point five is because these first four are the most powerful. Number point five, 4.5 is the most powerful medium there is, but it just doesn't seem to get as big of legs on LinkedIn, and that's video. Videos hand down the most powerful medium. I sold billions of dollars in video. It combines sight, sound, color, motion, and emotion. It's super powerful. But for some reason, I think I know LinkedIn audience. LinkedIn would love it to have more video, but the audience doesn't seem to engage

on it. But if you are going to have some video mixed in here, I'm going to give you a couple of tips: make it less than 60 seconds. Add the closed captioning. More often than not, people are on their computers on LinkedIn than other social media platforms, and they're at their office sometimes looking at this, so they have the audio turned off, so audio doesn't blast the computer when you're in your working office, so they have the audio off. So put the closed caption on so people could read it. Anything over 60 seconds, the LinkedIn audience fades away. Now there's an exception. We were

talking earlier about what the right length of a podcast is. Well, if you have amazing video, people watch it, but they're not on LinkedIn to watch video. They're on YouTube to watch long-form video. Naturally, where their brains go. When I sold digital advertising at Comcast, we had all kinds of advertising opportunities to sell digitally, and we could measure every second that somebody watched a digital ad. Our standard ad unit for television was 30 seconds. When we put that 30 seconds on on digital, nobody watched it. What they watched was about five seconds max 15. I'm not saying there

weren't exceptions where people watched longer video. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying the average though was 15 seconds. LinkedIn, it's about 60 seconds is as max you could get. So if you're going to do a LinkedIn message and you have a call to action, don't put that call to action at 62 or 63 seconds. They're gone. They're out of there.

Where should this call to action be?

Put it 30 seconds, 15 seconds. and do not only do video because you need to have a media mix. One of the most frustrating things about selling television advertising, and I loved it, and frustrating about selling radio advertising, and I loved it, is that I only had well. Now you have digital and TV, but that a long time ago only had television. And what I really believed in was a good media mix was the right thing. So as we talked about in the beginning, the billboard, the TV, the radio, the mixture of things together worked really well. And so the same principle applies on

mixture of the newsletter, mixture the carousel, aka document. Mixture short story post. Mixture a short little video. Mixture you networking. These 4.5 things working together will really help you build influence in your sphere of your your audience.

Jennifer, I love it, and this is such great advice. I promise you, I will use it, and everybody else honor yourselves. Get together with your marketing teams. Rewatch this. Re-listen to this. Take notes and make it happen. I want to expand on one part of this, please, which is actually quick summary. The 3p's of LinkedIn are profile, people, and power posts, and the 4.5 types of power posts are newsletter, the the document which is actually what we call a carousel. People click on those, and you get a high engagement rate. The pictures of you and your community, particularly

if you're doing something of value for the community, or if you're speaking at a conference, the the power post number four is the short story post. Something if you could adapt a personal lesson and share that as a business lesson, like Jennifer's weight loss story, which we're going to get into. And point five is the most powerful format: is video. Which doesn't always work on LinkedIn, but you can try the 62nd format with a call to action at 15 or 30 seconds. How did I do on that, Jennifer?

You did awesome. You're such a great student. I took good

notes. All right. So the question I had for you is: AI is so powerful today. How can we use AI for LinkedIn to save us some time and effort because you know all that stuff sounds like like for me I'm going to bring it to my marketing team which I have a marketing team but most people don't how can we shortcut some of the strategies and use AI for LinkedIn

so here is one thing that I do I've been doing the last couple of months that I love and you're not going to be able to do this with every audience, so I totally get it. But I record my coaching calls now, and I record my training calls. So if I'm going to go speak for a group, I'm going to record that call unless they have a strict policy not to. But I will record that call. If I'm going to have a coaching call, I'm recording that call, and I'm going to give the client the replay. But what I do with that is I take it to my AI. Now we're talking about attorneys here, so there

are some things that are super private, and that you cannot do this with. But imagine if you're speaking to a group, you could do this with speaking to a group. I upload the transcript to AI, even when I'm coaching, and I say I don't want you to take out anything specific about this particular client, but what I want you to do is take out my golden advice, what I said to the client extemporaneously, and take that information and write three emails to my ideal clients who are on my email list. And my ideal clients are professional service people, for example, emergency management

consultants, environmental consultants, leadership consultants, attorneys, insurance brokers, business bankers, and turn my advice into an email I can send to my email list. I am doing. I have coaching calls every day, so it's amazing. I have three emails every day. I have so many emails I don't even know what to do with. I take those emails now and I put them in a Google Doc and I go back through them like I did this morning. I actually started a new Substack account because sending out that many emails to my list would overwhelm them; they're not used to it. Creating that many

newsletters on LinkedIn would overwhelm my subscribers on LinkedIn; they're not used to it. So what I'm doing is I'm just going to take the best and I'm going to put those on those two platforms. Or I might even say, here's a roundup for the week, and I'm going to publish everything on Substack because Substack can take multiple. They could take a daily a daily article, but I have them write it as an email because then it's more personable to my email list. But I'm repurposing what I'm already saying. If I write myself, what end up happening happening is I end up writing the same thing over and

over. But it's these golden nuggets, these extemporary extemporaneous things that I say to my clients, and even speaking, that are the gold nuggets of what I say. So I'm just asking AI to pull them out. I'm not asking AI to write anything for me. I'm saying take my own advice, and share that.

I love it. I actually did something similar, and I asked my AI to listen to my last 200 calls and pull out the top 50 questions and answers. Wow,

I love it!

And they they got a list of 269, but the top 50, and we created a again. I just asked Claude to create it. We created a tool called JI. That's

amazing. amazing.

Jay's brain, and it's a lot of it. Frankly, is stuff that I've learned from previous staff and clients, but they're kind of like our policies at the company, or they're answers to questions like we got asked today, like what's the best content for LinkedIn, or what's the best, how do you get your AI, your SEO to rank on Google AI and Chat GPT and Claude and Perplexity? And I've answered that questions dozens of times in the last several months, and I have a very good standard answer. But now it's in JI, so my staff can access it at any time. And we also did the same thing

with the last 100 sales meetings, and I asked the the AI to pull out the top 50 questions and answers, and we're now recording those as videos, question and answer videos. But I'm going to adapt your thinking and turn them into emails, because those are the questions that people. Are asking in a business context that I want to proactively provide the answer and position myself as the perfect person for my profile. Yeah, I love it. I'm throwing as many peas as I can, but you own the peas today. Awesome, Jennifer. I teased this a couple times, but for those of you listening only on the

audio, you got to go look up Jennifer Darling, because well, actually, it's not it's not true because what I was going to say, your um, your call to action, what was it, the ultimateprofilechecklist.com.

Yep.

So you definitely want to go to ultimateprofilechecklist.com, but believe me, you're not going to see the beautiful, high energy, amazing business person who's with us today, Jennifer Darley. She did her. She's got her old photo shoot, so it's almost like the before and after picture. Hey,

Joe.

And hopefully, you do. If you are listening to this in a few months, Jennifer is going to take my advice and do a new photo shoot. She looks fantastic. Her energy's fantastic. I don't even recognize the person@ultimateprofilechecklist.com. But Jennifer, you know, share with our our listenership how'd you do it. What's the secret to such tremendous generating such great energy? Your health and wellness, and how did you keep it off? How are you keeping it off?

like, wow, you are in such great shape. I don't know why you could be having all this weight on you. My dad came and visited me another week, and he came for three weeks this time. His doctor reduced his insulin. My dad's diabetic. His doctor reduced his insulin because his diet had improved so much with me in three weeks that they decreased the insulin because the sugar had dropped. So my dad has been my biggest proponent of anything, seeing every in everything. I'm exercising. I am eating like a you know a health nut. He called me a health nut. That's right. That was his term, health nut, and

Jay. I couldn't not lose a pound to save my life. So full disclosure, I did do GLP one shots, but I still didn't lose weight on this GLP shots alone. It was a freaking marathon what I have done. I changed to intermittent fasting, so I'd stop eating at 7o'clock at night and start eating 11 o'clock in the morning. I practice Ayurveda, A Y U R D E A, Ayurveda. Hopefully, I spelled that right. Lifestyle, and that has to do with food combining and the certain types of food to eat. I ate high protein, high vegetable and fiber diet, low carb cut out snacks. I don't drink alcohol anymore.

That's a hard one for a lot of people, but I don't. I don't drink alcohol. I don't eat a ton of sweets. I eat a few sweets, but not a ton. I also started getting IV hydration, so I started getting shots. I went to a Chinese functional doctor and found out that I was deficient in four different vitamins that produce energy: vitamin D, B12, paradoxine, and manganese. So I started IV therapy every other week. So to say I did a marathon, I did a marathon, and I'm not one of those people who lost 100 pounds in 10 months on a GLP-1. No, it took me two and a half years. But then in April, or

actually in March, I took my last shot. So March, April, May, June was five months. I took my last shot. I hadn't been losing any more weight from it anyway. Oh, I also became a cardio, drumming, fitness instructor. I forgot that's a really big piece. Yeah, I started teaching. Yeah, drumming inspired cardio. I've done that for three years now. Didn't lose any weight doing that either, but all these things, all of the things together, helped me over two and a half years lose 115 pounds, and then in March I stopped taking it because I was stalled and wanted to give my body a break, and I've

lost 10 more pounds. Actually, no, I'll be about 18 more pounds, 13. I don't know. I'm losing track now. Yeah, at least 10 more pounds I lost, keeping it off. But I'm still doing the same things, and that's all I ever wanted was a tool to help me get to where I am today, so that I could keep keep this weight off and create. Even though I already had healthy habits before, for some reason, probably my age, I'm. Female, probably those things really worked. Really worked against me in trying to lose weight. So that's what happened. And

you create some some cardio too. Like you're in the gym. Oh,

and now now it's crazy. I love going to the gym. Actually, I'm injured right now, so I have to see an orthopedic doctor on Tuesday because I walked six miles the other day because I was enjoying myself outside. So I did stair climber for 30 minutes. I did elliptical. I taught a cardio drumming class. I did hiit class all in one day, and then I took the next two days and did it slow. And then I did a six mile walk and walking out of all the things. You know, bam! I hurt my knees. So taking it slow this week.

Short term.

Me too.

Yeah, Jennifer, congratulations. That's awesome.

Thank you. We

did it. We're at the final portion of the book. Wow. Those of you who stuck with us, I hope you enjoyed this even half as much as I have so far. So these are the short one-liners we've been asking for over 10 years to a number of celebrity guests like yourself, the first one is: Do you have any personal productivity tips, hacks, or AIs that you use?

Well, the the big professional productivity hack was the recording the coaching calls and then redoing those. But I'll say I'm I laughed because this is one I tell my husband all the time: If you're going into the kitchen, grab something to take to the kitchen. If you're coming back from the kitchen, grab something that belongs from back from the kitchen. Don't take three trips back and forth. Think, what can I take to the kitchen? We need to be doing multiple things. We only have so much time.

I learned that as a waiter. So, do you apply it to business as well?

Oh, maybe that's it. I was also a server, so maybe that's where I got it from. You just have to maximize your time. Yes.

No, you you can't as a as a server, you cannot do like one trip back and forth. If somebody wants more water, you've got to set up. We used to have lobster. We had to set up the the butter drawn butter heaters. We you had to put in a drink order. You had to check on the meals and then bring out the water. And then on your way back, you had to clear two tables and take a drink order and then go back. Like you had to do two or three things on every trip, otherwise you couldn't survive-not even survive. Never mind tips, but that's

right. You wouldn't make any money.

All right, can can you apply that to business? How can we use that? I

listen.

Yeah, so I think it's more about awareness. What things could I be doing with this? So especially when it comes to social media. Remember, we started with we work with very busy people that don't have time, so how can we? What multiple things? If you write a newsletter, you have so much content to work with and repurposing in different ways. So I think we apply it to business in every way. I think we're always looking for how can we make this smarter, how can we make this bigger. I love AI, but I don't just put a prompt into AI and say write something. I really am going to

architect that prompt, and when it comes out, it's going to be beautiful and brilliant. And how can you take what you're currently doing and make it even better?

Best business books.

Best business books. Ooh, I love Mark LeBlanc's little business book. That is so much fun. That is a book that just keeps giving and giving. I have a humongous cabinet of business books, and I will say, one of my favorites is called The Leader's Brain, and that is by a professor at the Wharton School, and and also I think he's at Pennsylvania University. But it's about it's a neuroscience book. Trying to think, Michael Platt, Dr. Michael Platt. It's a neuroscience book, so it's about how our brains work and how that applies to leadership. A lot of people think that AI is

the biggest invention ever right now. I actually tend to think that what the work we're doing in neuroscience with brains is really a bigger deal than AI. How does the human brain work? Is fascinating to me.

Wow, that's high high stuff. Next one, you got five minutes. You're waiting for a call, and what blogs, podcasts, YouTubes do you subscribe to? It hits your feed. You stop everything else and read or listen to.

Yeah, I'm. I'm probably in a big group of people on this one, and I just discovered her two years ago. I was not one of the fanatics before, but I discovered her recently, and then I learned she was from Muskegon, Michigan, which is about 50 minutes from where I grew up. Is Mel Robbins?

Yeah, good stuff. And what's a great referral? Where where. All networkers, and we'd love to send business your way. Who's a great person to send together for darling?

Yeah, people who are in professional services, and those particularly who really have a strong desire to stand out as a thought leader in their industry. Because one, on one half, I do sales and help people with speaking to position themselves, but on the other half, it's not just about that. I want people who really want to make a meaningful difference in the world. Those are the things that I value: is how can we increase our revenue and sales, and how can we make a meaningful difference? For me, those people tend to fall inward B 2b industries, and they're working as

consultants or in private professional services, or even or even B 2b sales people, sales teams, B 2b sales teams, where I could go train those B 2b sales teams on high dollar high dollar efforts.

So the apple didn't fall too far from the street. Jennifer was a sales superstar working in B 2b, developed a phenomenal LinkedIn profile. Figured out how to market herself on LinkedIn, and now she teaches all the above. And if you wanted to access it, Jennifer, where do we find you?

Yeah, so you can first thing I go to LinkedIn, look for Jennifer Darling Speaks. I'm going to be the one in bright pink. You know, there are more than one. There's more than one Jennifer Darling, so you have to find Jennifer Darling Speaks as my unique URL, and you'll see me. I'm in I'm in pink or you know some other lab color.

Jennifer, this was so much fun. I took four pages of notes. I loved it. So thank so much for your time, your energy, and your expertise.

Thank you, Jay.