Going Viral On LinkedIn

In 2018, I created the most commented video on LinkedIn at that time.

The e-book attached to the post gathered 9,000+ new email subscribers for our agency, K&J Growth.

Here is how you can do the same.

PART 1: POST FORMAT & BREAKDOWN

I’ll start by breaking down the copywriting to show you how to create a post with a big outcome and a small cost (I wrote about this on LinkedIn recently) for people to replicate your results.

Intro: 

“Last week I connected with the Prime Minister of New Zealand.”

The introduction has to be a banger. Connecting with a notable human is a big asset. In this case, it was Jacinda Ardern (I’m not sure I’d use Christopher Luxon today, but you get the idea). 

Second sentence: 

“And only ninety days ago I had 400 connections, today I now have over 4800+ people who are a part of my community on LinkedIn.”

This is known as the hero’s journey. I started small, but in a reasonably short amount of time, I 12x’ed my audience. I started with nothing, then came out the other side with a lot.

The Middle:

“In this time, I’ve:

- I’ve connected with employees and CEO’s of New Zealand’s and Australia’s biggest companies

- Had over 500,000 views on my content

- Called and shared coffees with 77 different CEO’s, GM’s, authors, editors and entrepreneurs

- Had over 112 book suggestions from the Editor in Chief of @Entrepreneur Magazine through to New York Times Best Selling Authors

The greatest lesson I’ve learned from building this community is that regardless of who you are and what position you’re in, people always want to offer help, you just need to ask for it.”

This talks about all the benefits I’ve received since doing what I’ve done.

I won’t go into the details of how to build this offer but remember the golden rule: offer something that has a big outcome with little effort.

The Outro: 

This leads people to watch the video, but the most critical piece here is the call to action “Send it over”. 

“I want to say thank you to a few people who have helped me understand what real marketing is and how to build a community -Sarah, Jonathan, and Kate

I've also created this video to share with everyone I've connected with.

I’ve written a 50-page case study outlining exactly how I did this and if you want it just leave a comment saying, “Send It Over”

PART 2: GAMING THE SYSTEM FOR ENGAGEMENT

The goal for viral uptake should be roughly 40 comments and 40 likes within the first hour of publishing and an action point to make others copy that same action.

Here is how to ensure this happens.

1. Jump on Facebook or whatever platform has your besties (you’ll need at least 60 people on this list) on it that will comment on a LinkedIn post for you

2. Send a message to those people - here is an example of the one I sent

I sent a version of this message to 60 other friends and entrepreneurs to ensure that I’d get engagement on my post as soon as I published it. 

2. Once the post was published, I then sent this follow-up

In the first hour of publishing, my post had 52 comments, and the rest is history.

Notes:

It’s also hard work to create something that valuable. It took me roughly 20 hours to make that e-book.

Tune in next week for how to create offers people love.

Going From Self-Employed To Business Owner

We're a nation of the self-employed.

We love trading time for money. 

Which is fine; you can do very well doing just that. But if you wish for more - at least economically speaking, you need to build an asset, a business.

And to go from own boss to business owner, you need to hire help.

The mistake those wanting to make this transition make is waiting till they can afford a full-time employee before making their first hire.

That's wrong. Your first hire should never be a full-time employee.

Hiring and managing people is hard. It's a skill that needs to be practised. And you don't want to practise on a $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year person.

Instead, you want to make your first hire early. Long before you need an FTE and so you can get reps in. This will help you:

• Get good at hiring & managing while the financial stakes are low

• Think and learn about the value of your work

Dan Martell's replacement ladder best describes my framework for making these first hires. His method, which I've followed for all my businesses, is to:

1. Take stock of how you spend your time (track your time for a couple of weeks using a tool like Toggl)

2. Identify the value of the work you're doing (you can use this work value matrix to help)

3. Hire people to take the low-value work off your plate.

Usually, I start by hiring for admin work, like reconciling accounts, sending out invoices, completing job sheets and so on. Simple jobs that take a couple of hours per week to complete.

The benefit of starting here is:

• You can lay out these simple jobs with step-by-step instructions that anyone can follow (easy delegation).

• It's low-skill work - so you can hire cheaply.

Just this week, we've started recruiting for an accounts administrator at Get Funded - this person's sole job will be to write up something called resolution letters and get them signed by our clients. At max this will take five hours a week.

Shaan Puri calls these hires your train operators. The tracks have been laid, i.e. you have a defined problem and solution (like our resolution letters job) - now you need someone to keep the train on track.

Once you've onboarded one, worked through all your teething problems (there will be many, but it's worth the effort), and they're working well. Repeat the process.

Keep working your way up your replacement ladder - the further you go, the more you'll unshackle yourself from the time/money trade, and the closer you'll be to a sellable business.