Bonus: LinkedIn Masterclass Session One

Jim James: 0:23

I've got here Simon Chappuzeau in South Africa. And me, Jim James here in England, and we're gonna embark on something. Love you to come with us. We've. A 12 week program because the problem we're trying to solve is that I've got a new book out, uh, called The Unnoticed Entrepreneur and I wanna try and use LinkedIn to, you know, show everybody the book. There are 50 entrepreneurs we featured in the book all on the subject of getting noticed. But what I don't know how to do is to use LinkedIn to do that. And so I've asked Simon, who is an expert, who here runs a company called Story Lux in South Africa to help. To do LinkedIn properly. Simon, welcome.

Simon Chappuzeau: 1:05

Thank you. And what a lovely introduction, Jim. Good to be here and I'm very excited about, uh, what we are going to do over the next 12 weeks. Um, yeah, let's get started.

Jim James: 1:17

good. And just so for anyone that's interested, uh, we basically have got, um, 30 minute session. The same time each week, hopefully without the technical troubles that we had this morning. Uh, 12 o'clock on a Thursday, we are gonna track the progress and Simon's gonna share with us. What we need to do each week to improve our LinkedIn engagement, the, uh, the impressions, the number of connections we've got, and how we start to get people across from LinkedIn into a newsletter and into learning more about the books. That's the basic concept behind this. We thought, why don't we build in public? Why don't we do this, uh, on. LinkedIn as we do it cause other people wanna know how to use LinkedIn to drive connections and a result of some kind in this. Getting traction for the book, Simon, where do we start?

Simon Chappezeau: 2:14

Exactly. Sounds wonderful. And I'm very excited to be doing this with you and, um, for a number of reasons. First of all, I mean, you're a lovely guy. We've had lot, many, many nice chats. Um, we share the bond with eo, which I think is always a cool thing. Yep. And uh, I think, um, you have a great podcast. You have a book, your third book is coming out. So what I'm excited about here is you have a lot of great assets on your hand. On your hands. And, um, what I wanna do over the next couple of weeks with yous to really. Leverage them because I think you have a lot of potential, um, with the books, with the podcast, um, I see a lot of low hanging fruits and, uh, I wanna embark on a journey with you and pick these fruits and, uh, and uh, make nice apple juice and apple sauce and whatnot. So,

Jim James: 3:06

perfect. Let's get started. Sophie. Thanks for the kind words. Mutual. Of course. So, um, yeah. Terrific. So where do we start, Simon? You're the expert on LinkedIn. Um, exactly. And. you, you let us know where you wanna stop. Exactly.

Simon Chappezeau: 3:20

Let's, let's start by taking a look at all the assets that you have, and then I want to define what we are aiming for over the next weeks. Um, and, um, yeah, let's, let's just, uh, start with, look at your profile and, okay. These stats that we have or that you have, and then.

Jim James: 3:44

Yeah, so, so what Simon did was Simon gave me some homework and hopefully you can see this is my LinkedIn. Uh, I've been on LinkedIn now for over, over 10 years. The first, um, number of years I was in China, actually, of course, LinkedIn's blocked in China, so I didn't have a lot of content for many. It's sort of been the last three years since I came back to the UK that we've been building this out. Simon, uh, this is my snapshot, if you like, on week one of

Simon Chappezeau: 4:17

where we're at. Mm. And yeah, bit of comment here for our listeners. So what we see is the number of connections. Those are people that are connected with, uh, Jim. Then we have the number of followers that we don't see here, though we do, uh, which is a slightly different thing cuz connections are people who. Connected with you and followers is more like a one-sided, uh, thing. So we see that content producers that, um, post regularly or pod podcast hosts, they can have a lot of followers, but they can have very few connections. And, um, to give an example, in my case, I have um, I think 2,800 connections, but I have, um, 5,300 followers. So some of them are connections but not. Right. Okay. So yeah, we see the connections here in front of us. Uh, we see that you are in 96 groups. That is a lot. Um, and, uh, you have been part of a lot of events. So let's, let's move on to the next slide.

Jim James: 5:28

Okay. And I think what Simon's gonna be doing is a little bit of an. on my profile, and you can find this by just clicking your own picture by the way, and it'll show your profile. And over the next 12 weeks, Simon will be sharing with us some of the. Hidden depths within LinkedIn where you can find and optimize your profile. And just to say, I don't pay for LinkedIn, I just have a normal account, I don't have navigator or premium. So everything you're seeing is for free. And that's what we decided we would do is just show, uh, people that are not spending extra money. Right. Simon on LinkedIn, how to optimize what you've got to start.

Simon Chappezeau: 6:08

And, and on that note with uh, every account and set Navigator, LinkedIn is. Offering amazing value for free. You can have amazing reach. Um, that's one of the nice things with LinkedIn and I know some of the content creators that have a huge following don't even pay for LinkedIn, so it's insane, um, what you can do with LinkedIn for free. Yep. So what we see here is the LinkedIn content performance, as it said, says, uh, over the past seven days, And, um, so we, we've created, we've prepared three slides, um, for the past seven days, I think the past 28 and, um, 90 days. And, um, what we see here is the number of impressions that you had on all of your posts, um, on a given day. And the interesting thing is to. keep in mind how many connections or followers you have, because that has an impact, um, on your impressions. It's not directly correlated. You can have a lot of impressions with very few connections, but in theory, um, you see that the more connections you have, the more impressions you have. And, um, maybe you can jump to the next slide. So

Jim James: 7:23

get into your picture. And I think. perhaps notable here too, is, is the inconsistency, right? That, you know, it was on a downward trend then. It had a lot of impressions in, in, you know, February 4th, fifth, and then down again. And that's one of the things I wanna deal with and have this sort of long-term downward trend, which doesn't seem to make sense either. So, next slide.

Simon Chappezeau: 7:46

Mm-hmm. So that's, uh, basically the past four weeks. And again, we see the. spike here, uh, beginning of February, and we see that, uh, beginning of January had also a lot of impressions. Um, let's move to the next one for the past 90 days. Okay. Oh, was it 360 19? Yeah. So that, that is interesting because now we begin to see a bigger picture, which is that you basically have a. Consistent number of impressions over like many, many days. Um, interesting to see is, and always that you have these outlier posts. We can see one here where you had, uh, how many impressions? Um, nearly,

Jim James: 8:31

nearly, nearly 50,000. Yeah. Back in November 50, 50,000 for something, right? Yeah. And this is only what we're gonna talking about, isn't it Simon?

Simon Chappezeau: 8:41

That's.

Jim James: 8:43

So this is good and so plainly I can do it with something I just don't know what kind of posts I need to be doing. And we can see this kind of fairly low lumpy. Um, and also, yeah, you know, although 243 seems like a lot of impressions, 243,000 impressions seems like a lot. It's down 13 point a half percent in the last 90 days. So even the stock market's doing better, uh, than that at the minute,

Simon Chappezeau: 9:11

Okay. Well, I can say you definitely should have more impressions with the number of connections you have, but we're gonna work on that, so we're gonna. Keep that as a snapshot and then we will, uh, keep coming back to these, uh, stats over next weeks. Um, now what we see here for our listeners as an explanation is the number of followers, um, and what LinkedIn does. It gives you the number of followers that you have and that you have added over the past, in this case, seven days. So we can see that you have added. I have to squint my eyes. so small, we're

Jim James: 9:51

about another 130, uh, followers because you can see for some reason it's done an exclamation mark. We've got 5,000 total followers in the last, uh, seven days it says here. Uh, so we've gone out nearly 4%.

Simon Chappezeau: 10:07

Those make, that sent edit 5,000 to 300. So every indivi individual dot on that line. Um, so you added about like 1525 up to what, 75 on one day? In two days you added 75 each. Um, yeah.

Jim James: 10:29

Yeah. So that's pretty respectable, right? So we've been putting something out for a couple of days over a week where we're adding 75 people a day, right? So,

Simon Chappezeau: 10:38

and that correlates with the, with the, with a spike that we saw with the one post. So you can see there's a correlation between a good post and people following you. Um, yep. So that's why we wanna have good content, because that's what makes people

Jim James: 10:53

wanna follow. Yep, exactly. Okay. So again, it's the inconsistency, isn't it? Mm-hmm. you can see here. Um, so in the last picture.

Simon Chappezeau: 11:05

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim James: 11:09

So it's, it's that we're doing the right things. Sometimes I just don't know with my virtual assistant team in the Philippines, Simon, what is the right thing at what time? So next slide.

Simon Chappezeau: 11:22

next slide. Yeah, and, and the interesting thing is we basically see the same thing like with your posts. One, one huge spike and what was it, November or something? Yeah. And you added that's right, like 500 people in one day, which is phenomenal. Um, so that post apparently has done a lot of good to your profile and, uh, we see again also this mini hub like couple of days back. So you see correlation between good posts and uh, followers. Okay. and um, yeah. And then this is my job title. That is by job title. And that is very, something very important, um, cuz I think there's a lot of vanity out there with people trying to get a lot of followers and sort of grow the, the, the, the audience. Um, which is a good thing, but it's always very relative. So the other day I had a conversation with a friend who is a specialist for insurance, for the insurance industry. Outsourcing market, um, and he's specializing on Ukraine. Now you can imagine how many people there are that are potentially interested in outsourcing for the insurance industry in Ukraine. Um, so would it be realistic for him to expect to grow an audience of 10, 20,000 people and have hundreds of likes in this post? Probably not. And um, so one thing that. That we need to keep an eye on is to, to, to be clear who we want, uh, us to follow, um, who's our target market, and then use that as a benchmark. To, to say, okay, we are going in that right direction. So what we don't wanna do is to turn you into some LinkedIn poster who talks about LinkedIn, and then you have sort of like through the roof followers, but they're all copywriters because that is not your target market. Um, yeah, you want, who, who do you want to have in your audience? Who, who is your target client?

Jim James: 13:24

Yeah. Tell me. So I think that Now, what's good about this Simon? You know, I'm getting to founders and really with the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast and the Unnoticed Entrepreneur book that's coming out in 24th of February. Founders, ceo, co-founders, MDs, you know, that's who I want to get to. Um, so we're gonna focus in on the content and the groups. Uh, for example, I've got 96 groups. Some of them go back to when I was in automotive and when I was in food, and when I was in China, and when I was in Singapore. So, Part of what I need to do over the next 12 weeks is to refine my, uh, audience and the groups I'm in and with your help to define the content. So, shall I shut the, um, the, the screen share now, Simon. Okay. And then part of what we're gonna do each week, we're

Simon Chappezeau: 14:16

be more if you want to. Okay. Sorry.

Jim James: 14:21

That's okay. By the way, we're only gonna be about 20 minutes on these shows, just so that people can follow on maybe while they're having a cup of tea or something at lunchtime. So here we go. Oh, my profile, actually, if I share the screen, um, it shows, um, you and I, is it gonna go to Infinity? There we are. It actually shows you and I talking. How cool is that, right? What?

Simon Chappezeau: 14:50

Ah,

Jim James: 14:50

that's cool. Yeah, so Simon and his, I, as you can guess, we are experimenting, we are learning how to use LinkedIn live. Mm-hmm. uh, as we speak. So, um, Simon, what do we, what would you like me to.

Simon Chappezeau: 15:05

um, your profile. So I'll give you a quick rundown, um, of your profile feedback on the profile and, um Yep. That we're gonna use a Oh, that's definitely, um, we're gonna use to work on your profile. So, um, First thing to look at is always the, the top section. Um, and I have to say, you already have a good profile. You have a great headshot, you have a great head banner, which we don't see at the moment, but it's really done nicely because you have a, the, the, the, the unnoticed entrepreneur. Um, and it nicely blends in with a white, so, uh, anybody who comes to your profile will see your face, which is good because it builds trust. Um, it's a very professional photo and, um, they instantly see the brand, which is the unnoticed entrepreneur. So that, that, that is great. We don't have to do anything here. Um, your headline, um, aspiring Entrepreneur podcast host, adventurous spirit is, um, Interesting. It sounds like you are a, a guy that I want to talk to because he has something to share. Um, what it doesn't, that's very kind. What it doesn't do, sorry to say, is it tells me what, what, what, what do I get from you? So why should I follow you? What's in it for me? And that would be the first thing to think about until next week. Um, what is it? The thing, what, what is the thing that you want people to. to know what they can get from you so that they get in truth, right? Because how it works is if you post something or somebody comes to your profile, that is the first thing they see and that's where they check you out. And, um, this is interesting, but it doesn't give me a reason why I should follow you. It's, uh, unless I'm No, that's right into podcasting hot call then, then maybe, but, um,

Jim James: 17:02

okay. That's a really good feedback. So, so many of us write what we. In our profile, but not if you like why that matters to somebody else. It's kind of a a 1 0 1 mistake, isn't it?

Simon Chappezeau: 17:16

Exactly. And it's very tempting because LinkedIn was set up as a CV tool. So everybody writes, so many people write their role. I'm a sales rep or CEO or whatnot. Yes you are. But it doesn't really say what I can get.

Jim James: 17:33

Okay, so what should I write there, Simon? So what, what sort of things should I be writing? So what,

Simon Chappezeau: 17:41

what do you want to give to people? What do you want them to, to get from

Jim James: 17:44

you? I want to share, you want entrepreneurs and business owners how to get noticed. I'm sharing information, creating connections for them, introducing tools, hosting, uh, live events like this. So really providing information and, and guidance inspir. Uh, for entrepreneurs on how to get noticed.

Simon Chappezeau: 18:06

So it's everything around, uh, marketing, pr, um, it's, it's, um, I'm, I'm, I'm

Jim James: 18:18

thinking, um, I put you on the spot there. Well, what, this is exactly the sort of thing that Yeah, you've identified the problem and then over the next. we'll work together on getting that right. Okay. So just mindful of, of the time, what else do we need to show today?

Simon Chappezeau: 18:35

Um, yeah, let's, uh, scroll further down. Um, the other thing that is interesting and now we see the inside view of your profile. So yeah, again, you had 6,600 post impressions. This is the past week, I think. Mm-hmm. And, um, that definitely is a number that. Have to get up and I'm pretty confident we will get that up. Um, let's go down to the featured section because that is the other thing that people will see when they come to your profile. Um, What feature, the feature, that section is a great thing on LinkedIn and a lot of people don't really understand what you can do with it. And, um, see sort of a similar thing with you. Um, so the, the, the rookie mistake is that people, um, highlight their best performing post, which is nice. If you had a viral post, but what the featured section allows you to do, and you've already taken advantage of that, is it allows you to link to an external page and, um, you want to use that super valuable real estate that you have to drive people to do something that you want them to do. The thing that I see here, which is, um, as good as could be, you offer four things and, um, whenever you offer people a choice, the the danger is that they don't do anything because they don't know what to do. So it's always better to only have one thing. Okay. And I would think in your case, since you wanna promote the book over the next week and the weeks, um, it's gonna, it, it should be something about the book. It's, it probably could be a landing page leading to the book to learn more about the book and. that could then tie back to the headline at the top, um, that you released this new book where entrepreneurs can learn about how to get noticed. And then you would have a landing page that, um, takes them to a page where they sort of get the gist of what they get from this book, which is how do you get noticed?

Jim James: 20:41

Okay, great. So would I remove those? uh, posts and just have the one, is that the idea? Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Alright. So we can do that and make a link to the, to the place where people can get the book. Okay. And then what else do we need to show

Simon Chappezeau: 20:59

then, then, then a quick thing here with the activity, um, that is a. I always see itself like as a social proof thing because if I come to somebody's profile and I see a lot of activity, people liking commenting on the posts, it gives me confidence in that person that that person is well connected, has something to say. And that is something that is a problem here because we don't really see, um, that you get a lot of likes and comments, which. It is weird because you have a lot of followers, relatively speaking. Uh, 10,000 followers is, is a good number. Uh, most people are sort of in the low four digits, so that is a great number, but it's not correlating to the number of, uh, posts and, uh, comments here and. getting that up gives you a lot of socially cloud here because people see, okay, this guy has something to say and people are listening.

Jim James: 21:53

Okay. So we need to look at why the posts that we are sending out, which are, you know, twice a week we are sending out, um, posts with the links to the podcast shows and then also the articles that we've been writing as a transcript. Um, so they're very much sort of almost information rather than engagement. I'm not asking questions or doing polls, so maybe that's why. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Simon Chappezeau: 22:20

Let's, so maybe look at, we have to look at that. Let's come back to that in a second. Let's finish this off with the, about section. Yeah. Which is the other important piece that you have profile. And if you click see more, we can see the whole, um, and, and on the, on the about section, we wanna see the whole, the whole text that you have at in about you go down, go down.

22:44

activity.

Jim James: 22:45

Oh, sorry. See more. There we go. Okay. Exactly.

Simon Chappezeau: 22:47

Seymour, so what you've done here is, um, also like I would say the old link then you've basically given a cv, um, what you've done in your life in a very sort of bullet point way, uh, location states and, um, roads You had, um, that is all good, but it's not really, doesn't really give me a sense of who you are. Okay. And so what we are going to do over the next week, um, is we are gonna rework this bit because that is, um, what they like to call and cvs. The what? The motivational, the motivational background or something. Okay. So what we want to do here is to create. Backstory that gives your profile visitors an idea of, uh, who Jim James really is. I mean, oh, okay. It starts with like, if, if we go up, it says, you, you, you were in Singapore in 1995 and, uh, China 2008. I mean, the first thing I'm asking myself is like, what the hell did he do? Didn't Singapore and China and sort of what. Person has it become because of that experience. So that is, okay, so

Jim James: 24:01

first question I fugitive of some kind, right?

Simon Chappezeau: 24:05

Exactly. Um, so again, it's, it's sort of it. I get an idea of that. You must be interesting cuz you've seen and done a lot, but I don't really. get a detail, sort of like, okay.

Jim James: 24:22

Comfort. Very interesting.

Simon Chappezeau: 24:23

Yeah. Okay. And that's something we've, that we're gonna work over the rest next week. Okay. And if you go back to your, um, yeah, the rest we can spend hours, but those are the main elements. We're gonna spell the audience. Uh, the rest, let's go back to, yeah, no, that's right.

Jim James: 24:43

It's a washing list. Yep.

Simon Chappezeau: 24:46

Yeah. Let's go back to the, to the content and, um, let's see, we have five minutes left, so let's do a Yep. A very quick, um, review of the content. Um, and I think we can explain in very few words what, what the challenge is here.

Jim James: 25:01

Okay. What do you want me to click on

Simon Chappezeau: 25:03

next? Um, the, the, the content. Uh, the activity, exactly. If you go to activity and at the bottom you have see more show all activity. Yep. Okay.

Jim James: 25:14

There we go.

Simon Chappezeau: 25:16

And then you can click uh, posts.

Jim James: 25:19

Oh, I think we can, I think we should celebrate that we're doing this, right? Yeah, we're doing this. Okay. 55 impression's. Fantastic. As we're learning, and this is exactly kind of word that Simon does for his clients, uh, we thought would be fun to share this.

Simon Chappezeau: 25:34

Click on posts. And what do you want me to show? So what we see here now, and it's very funny to see as live. Yeah. Um, what, what we see here now is the whole, uh, list of, um, posts that you've published, like since you start publishing. And, um, let's, let's just take the first one. Okay. And if you can the second one, not the livestream. The first content posed. Yeah. Okay. Here that one. Scroll up here and then click See more. Yep. And, um, I've, I've looked at the other, so it's, it's not like this is an outlier. So I see a pattern and the pattern that I see with your posts and, um, that I think is a challenge to take a, a positive word, um, is that you sell a product, which is the podcast, um, but you don't tell me why I should care. So, um, again, it's very small for me. I need glasses. Um, okay.

Jim James: 26:45

I dunno whether I can zoom that, uh,

Simon Chappezeau: 26:48

anymore for, so it says in this article of the Unknown Entrepreneur, Ashley Klein talked about how entrepreneurs can build an event. There you go. How's that? Where when own the et and d instead of. you give sort of a very high level summary of the post. Um, yep. But I don't know who Ashley is and, um, I assume she's not super famous, so it's not like only me that doesn't know her. Um, so it, th this post would be okay if she's like, if, if she would be Whitney Houston, then, I mean, you don't have to tell me anything, but it's like, I don't know who she is. I. I don't really know what she, I, I know what she's talking about or what, what, what, what to expect. That it's, it's, you can't sell with her because she's not a big name. And, um Right. Instead of sort of leading with this is a podcast, or this is my book and this is the, the guest that I had, and it was super interesting. The, the baseline that we have to work on over the next weeks is to lead with interesting content. And, um, so the, the direction that I wanna take with you is to get away from, this is a podcast to. These are three things that I learned and I da, da, da. So you break it down, you give a nice post on that, and then at the bottom there's a link and it says, Hey, if you like this, um, this came from a podcast that I had with X, Y, Z. And um, feel free to check it out on TM o on this topic from X, Y, Z. And that is probably gonna work better here because, um, Grab the audience. If you talk about pains and gains that they can get, that they can relate to, um, rather than leading with a person that nobody knows. Um, and a podcast that's probably is not, that's known, um, at the

Jim James: 28:55

moment. Okay, Simon, that's. you're being very polite and diplomatic Um, but the brutality of what you said, uh, and the naked honesty is great. So what you and I are gonna do over the next week, Is revisit how I do this. And I work with a team in the Philippines, a a virtual assistant team in the Philippines, which is really powerful because it releases me from a lot of the, the work. But plainly, the danger of having a VA team is you also outsource the content generation and it sort of, the automation has to some degree caused, um, Really sort of a, a failure in the quality, uh, not as a disrespect to the team, but my lack of creative leadership there. So an understanding of how we do it. So, Simon, thank you a lot for us to do this. Next week and then you and I are gonna come back next week, same time, same place. Um, so next Thursday, 12 o'clock LinkedIn live. We'll figure out how to get it on time next time. Um, my fault with some camera stuff. And we're gonna revisit those pages and start to see improvements. Is that right? Exactly. Great. That's what we're gonna. Perfect. So, um, we didn't do a lot of promotion about this because we thought we would just see how we get on and if we can do this. For me, it's my first time doing a LinkedIn live. I think Simon, for you two? Yes,

Simon Chappezeau: 30:25

indeed. Yeah. So

Jim James: 30:27

LinkedIn live using Riverside. Um, we're gonna do this with. The next 12 weeks, we'll also put links to the video and also to the pages, um, so that you can follow this. So we're gonna build in public, um, so you can follow along and, and work on your own profile. At the same time. Um, exactly. If you want to, and obviously reach out to Simon as well, who is the expert. So with that, Simon, any last comments wanted you to say goodbye from South

Simon Chappezeau: 30:59

Africa? Um, yeah, I'm excited about the next weeks. That's gonna be great fun. Thank you. Great. Thank you

Jim James: 31:06

so much for. you, Simon, for your input. And thank you to those of you that are listening and watching. Do leave comments in the messages below if you've got any questions for Simon and I drop them in and we'll come to those as well. And the idea is to build this out together and not be unnoticed entrepreneurs anymore. Thanks for

Simon Chappezeau: 31:24

watching. Thank you.