SHOWNOTES
In this episode, I sit down with LinkedIn expert, Scott Aaron to dig into what’s really working on LinkedIn right now—and what you absolutely need to stop doing. Whether you're brand new to the platform or trying to reignite your strategy, Scott drops an insane amount of wisdom (and practical steps) to turn LinkedIn into a business-building machine.
From content strategy and newsletters to short-form video and avoiding dreaded "pitch slaps," this episode is packed with tools, tips, and new features you probably didn’t even know existed.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
Why only 1% of LinkedIn users post weekly—and how that’s your biggest opportunity
The exact 3-part weekly content strategy Scott recommends (hint: variety matters!)
How to turn your LinkedIn profile into a lead-generating homepage
Why LinkedIn newsletters are the most powerful tool on the platform right now
How to use LinkedIn Live and Events to build credibility (without being pushy)
The surprising truth about LinkedIn’s support for AI—and the automation tools that will get you banned!
Why short-form video is exploding on LinkedIn (and how to avoid getting throttled)
Tips on filtering your network and connecting with the right people
This is one of those episodes you’ll listen to more than once…it’s that good.
RESOURCES
Join the Expert Content Society: Time to Grow - Expert Content Society
Other Tools Mentioned:
📲 Connect with Scott Aaron:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scot
Instagram: @scottaaronlinkedin
🎧 Don’t miss this episode! If you loved this conversation, DM me on Instagram@jen_lehner and let me know your biggest takeaway! 🚀
TRANSCRIPT
Gary Vaynerchuk (00:00) Hey, guys. It's Gary Vaynerchuk. And you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
Jen Lehner (00:09) Our guest today is a LinkedIn expert, top podcaster and bestselling author. And I am so excited to have him with us today. Welcome to the show, Scott Aaron.
Scott Aaron (00:22) Well, thank you, Jen. I am grateful and absolutely honored to be here today. Looking forward to the conversation.
Read more...
Jen Lehner (00:27) Me too, because I got to tell you of all the platforms and I've always been interested in social media, LinkedIn has been the one that I have really not been able to get a grip on. So what is it about it that made you like it? Like how did you land into this role as LinkedIn expert of the planet?
Scott Aaron (00:48) First, I want to kind of recognize what you said. That's how a lot of people feel that haven't spent as much time as I have in the last 13 years on the platform. That's completely normal. Most people that are watching this and listening to this are like, yeah, I have a LinkedIn profile, but dot, dot. And that's typically where it ends. So for me, in my past life, I was in the fitness industry. I had a family owned fitness business. We had three gyms.
I was a trainer, sports nutritionist, corporate wellness speaker, started in 1998, left the industry officially by closing my last gym in 2016. But things kind of pivoted in 2012 with the birth of my son, who is now 12 and hit his first home run in Little League last night, which was really exciting.
Jen Lehner (01:37) Woohoo, that's a big deal.
Scott Aaron (01:39) crushed it 50 feet like over the fence like it was a no-
Jen Lehner (01:42) Could you even go to sleep last night?
Scott Aaron (01:45) I've still, I've watched it about a hundred times. Like the dads have been like some of the dads that weren't at the game that are involved in the little league, they're like, heard he crushed it. was majestic. mean, it was, it was amazing. Like I'm so happy. I'm so proud of him. He's working so hard. That's kind of like, that was kind of like my aha moment because I realized, you know, as a personal trainer, as a nutritionist, anyone that's watching or listening that is still, or has ever been in a.
Contractor type of business where you're exchanging time for money if you're not working you're not earning and that is the exact position that I was in and I remember a Friend of mine. I was out to lunch with them and he asked me he goes if you got sick or injured Where you could not physically train people or could not get to the gym. How would you earn money and that was a really powerful question to be asked because
I never thought about my business mortality. And that's exactly what I was looking at. I was literally looking at the mortality of my business because I was the tool. I was the income stream to make those monetary transactions happen. Now, I had been on social media for a while, you know, going, I mean, I'm dating myself. If anybody remembers Friendster, which was actually before MySpace, I was on there and then MySpace and so on and so on. Yeah.
So for me, I knew that I had to create an online arm of my business because I was just physically training people in person or at their homes, this, that, or the other. And when I was looking at the demographics of my clientele base, they were all business professionals. They were people that would drive to see me in the morning on their way to work into the city in Philadelphia.
or on their lunch break if they were in the local area at a local business, or on their way home from the city to the burbs and this, that or the other. So then I said to myself, well, if these people would be willing to come see me in person, there's gotta be business professionals online that would rather work with me online than not at all. And then I started replaying all the tapes in my head of people saying, I wish I lived closer because I would work with you.
Right. I wish I didn't move out of the area. wish I didn't live in California. You know, I would work with you and that's so there was definitely a need there for what I did for people. So I thought about what social media platform, if I could go all in with housed the greatest opportunity for me to connect with other business professionals. It wasn't Facebook, wasn't Instagram. It was LinkedIn. So
I had originally started an account in 2009, but just like most people, I set up a profile and then just let it collect dust for about four years. 2013, I logged on there. I switched everything within my profile to say, you know, online wellness, online nutrition, online trainer, like everything online. So people knew that I was in the virtual capacity to work with them.
I started searching, connecting and reaching out to people very genuinely and authentically looking to get to know them and just having organic conversations, seeing if there was maybe a fit for what I did, whether it was for my workout plan or my nutritional coaching or a combination of the two. And within eight months of doing this and providing content, obviously, I was able to match the revenue that I was making in person online.
Jen Lehner (05:18) Wow.
Scott Aaron (05:19) And I said to myself, well, if I could do this remotely and I could do this online, I don't need to pick up any more clients in person. So as people's packages started to obviously set up for renewal in person, I either didn't renew them or I raised my rates so much in person that people said, you know what, I'm just going to do it on my own. And I basically started to dwindle down. And as.
As it happens, and I think you can probably resonate with this, when you figure something out yourself for business, you want to share it with other people. So I reached out to some of my friends that were in the business coaching and consulting world because I knew not that LinkedIn was a one size fits all, but they were also looking for clients. And as was I, and I said to a few of them, said, listen, I've been using LinkedIn.
It's got a lot of business professionals. I really feel you can benefit from it. You should try X, Y, and Z. And I kind of told them from a very foundational standpoint, from what I remembered, what I was doing, what they should do. One friend in particular got back to me two weeks after I showed him what to do. And he texted me and he said, dude, call me. So I called him and I said, what's up? And he said, listen, he goes, I don't know what you figured out with this whole LinkedIn thing.
but it works because I have 14 appointments booked this week. He you should be teaching other coaches and consultants and business professionals how to use it. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm like, what are you talking about here? And this was kind of that tipping point moment for me when he said this one thing to me. He said, listen, you've spent the last 15 years training people and coaching people to have a healthy body.
Now you can do the same thing, but you can help them to have a healthy business. And it meets, and like literally like my eyes lit up when he said that because I'm like, no, he's right. You know, I've, I've put in the sweat equity. I've been using the platform myself. I proved the concept for myself. I showed it to a friend. He proved the concept of what I was doing. And then that culminated with me going on a podcast and Jen, know you'll
relate to this. This was back in the day of 1-800-CONFERENCE-CALL.COM and I was on a podcast, you know, on the phone, obviously walking around my condo at the time. And it was with my business coach and I was kind of just spouting out all the things that I started to research because once something works, I die. I get my hands dirty. Like I want to know facts and statistics and you know, how to leverage. I want to know as much as I can with what I was doing.
So I was just kind of spouting all of these facts and information of compelling reasons why coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs, service professionals need to be on LinkedIn. Not have to, need to. After I got off that podcast, I went on Facebook just to check some notifications. I had eight inboxes of people that I knew that were coaches and consultants that I'd been friends with for a while that said, how much do you charge to coach with you? And I'm like,
coach with me, what are these people talking about? I didn't have a website. And I realized that I kind of hit the nail on the head that there was actually a need and there was a gap in the marketplace for what I was doing. And at that point, that's when I went all in and started coaching and consulting people that was towards the end of 2013, early 2014. And I have a look back.
Jen Lehner (08:54) Well, over the years, I'm sure that, I mean, obviously in order to stay current, you keep up with what's working now and whenever now may be. And when you started and you did that conference call and you got your inboxes, I remember those days. Those were really wonderful days because if you were smart enough to be on social media, it didn't take much for people to see what you were doing and to really like ignite things.
But now it's a different world. so like what I mean, kind of a general question, but like, what do you have to do now to be successful on LinkedIn?
Scott Aaron (09:36) So some things have, have changed on LinkedIn, obviously, you know, the days of booking 30 calls a week, which I was doing in the very beginning, those days are gone. The reality is if you really optimize what you're doing from profile optimization, network optimization, content optimization, and networking optimization, you can book easily.
five to 12 calls a week, like highly qualified calls. Now for anyone listening or watching, and if you compound that over a month, that's, that's an average of about 20 calls a month extra on top of whatever you do or do not have right now. And in any business, it's, it's a numbers game. It's a quality over quantity. So what I'll say is that what is working less is what I just for mentioned the messaging, you know,
There's been so many spammers and pitch slappers on the platform that people have gotten pretty disenchanted with responding to messages. It still works from a foundational aspect of it's done the right way, but you have to be very mindful to make sure when you are messaging, you're evoking some sort of emotional connection between you and the other person. What has become, I would say more prevalent
and better for people on LinkedIn is all of the SEO that you can embed into your LinkedIn profile and how you can turn your LinkedIn profile into a homepage of a website with clickable links. You can easily collect emails every single day from what you have on your LinkedIn profile, but content is the biggest driver right now. That is the number one thing that LinkedIn is really wanting people to do because only 1 %
of the LinkedIn population publishes one post a week or more on LinkedIn. 99 % are silent engagers. So as far as a visibility and reach standpoint, the opportunity has never been greater as far as getting those eyeballs on what you're doing than right now.
Jen Lehner (11:49) Why? is it greater? Because so many people are posting good content? On a regular basis?
Scott Aaron (11:56) are not posting. most social media platforms, the numbers are completely skewed. There's a ton of people producing content that compare to the users, right? So if you look at Instagram or Meta in general, a very, very high populous percentage of the users of the platform are producing content on a weekly basis. Like everybody's producing content. On LinkedIn, it's the exact opposite. Most people are not. Only 1 %
of the people on LinkedIn are producing one piece of content or more per week. 99 % do nothing. Now,
Jen Lehner (12:34)
Very interesting, even with the introduction of AI and their integration with AI.
Scott Aaron (12:38) 100 % because number one, people are what we call silent engagers. They're people that kind of just kind of scroll through. They read articles, they read posts, they watch videos, but you don't know they're there. But if you end up going to a networking event, you may get an inbox saying, hey, love your content, you know, keep it up. Like a lot of people silently engage. They're not gonna like, they're not gonna comment, they're not gonna share. They're just going, that's why.
LinkedIn shows you so much data. They show you impressions. They show you visibility. They show you your reach. So they show you all this to let you know, Hey, you may not get a lot of likes and comments, but this post got 900 impressions, which means it was 900 people viewed your post, which again is good data to look at. Now, the other thing that people need to understand is why people aren't creating content is because a.
There's a fear of putting themselves out there for ridicule. Like I don't want to sound stupid. I don't want to look stupid. And number two, what to post on LinkedIn. Like what should I do? What I'm doing on Instagram? Should I just share my TikTok on there? What should I be posting on LinkedIn? And that is the big thing that my wife, Nancy and I have figured out and solved for people, how they should be positioning themselves on LinkedIn in a very simplistic way.
Scott Aaron (13:42) We don't know what
Jen Lehner (14:03) Which begs the question, how?
Scott Aaron (14:06) So the idea of this, and there's a two-pronged approach to this. without literally just making it all about a community that Nancy and I have, which I'll kind of get to, from a foundational standpoint, you need to position yourself on LinkedIn as the go-to person. So people are on LinkedIn from a consumer standpoint to get educated and informed. They do not want to be sold to, they do not want to be pitched to.
They wanna be educated. So you need to build the know, like and trust. And I think Jen, you can relate to this and I'm sure you've, teach your clients the same thing. No one buys anything from anyone or does business with anyone that they don't know, like and trust. And the number one catalyst to create the know, like and trust is creating really good high quality content. And if I'm being very truthful, there's a ton of garbage out there. There's a ton of just high garbage content.
And then people wonder why no one's liking, no one's my stuff. Well, LinkedIn is not going to show garbage to high quality people on the platform. So storytelling has become really popular on LinkedIn, really just unzipping yourself, so to speak, to your audience, letting them know why you're positioning yourself the way that you are giving people tangible tips and takeaways. And the other thing that I love about LinkedIn is that
Scott Aaron (15:08) once come.
Scott Aaron (15:32) They cater to how people like to create their content. Some people are writers. So they just want to do text posts or they want to write articles or newsletter editions. Some people like being on camera like me. LinkedIn has a new short form video feed, much like TikTok or Instagram reels. It's just called LinkedIn short form video. So now people are producing and word to the wise.
Scott Aaron (15:45) love video.
Scott Aaron (15:59) Do not repurpose a TikTok or an Instagram reel to LinkedIn. You need to create separate content because you have to, if it's business focused, don't just click the easy button and post to all, really put some thought and feeling behind it because LinkedIn obviously will pick up on that, that it's from another platform and they won't push it out.
Jen Lehner (16:17) So can you, I haven't looked at this yet. I'm going to open up my LinkedIn app now. So are you saying, can we, the way that we do with TikTok and Instagram, we can.
Scott Aaron (16:27) You'll see a little video button at the bottom of the feed. it'll be like a little YouTube little, yeah. And you click on it and just scroll up and down. And it's just like any other short form video feed that you find on the platform. So LinkedIn is really encouraging people to post short form video content, just like a lot of the other.
Jen Lehner (16:46) But can I create the video in here? Yes. Where's that?
Scott Aaron (16:51) So if you actually click on, if you go into the LinkedIn app and you click on the little pencil and paper at the top right where it says create a post.
Jen Lehner (17:03) yep, okay.
Scott Aaron (17:04) and then you click on the media icon on the far left and you click your camera button. You can switch it to video and you can record right through that.
Jen Lehner (17:14) There we go.
Scott Aaron (17:16) And
Scott Aaron (17:17) If you've ever done it before, it'll ask you can we access your mic and your, your camera. And then literally there's a red record button. You hit it, you record, and then you can directly publish rate to LinkedIn.
Jen Lehner (17:29) Okay, well I just recorded you saying that as my short form video.
Scott Aaron (17:34) Well, make sure you tag me and I'll make sure that I support it.
Jen Lehner (17:36) I will, that's so awesome. Okay, all right, keep going. So short form content.
Scott Aaron (17:40) Yep. So short form video content. The other thing is some people like to do longer form content. So LinkedIn live is now you had to like qualify and apply for it in the day. Now if all you need is 150 connections slash followers and you automatically are granted access to it. So 150 connections or followers somewhere, you know, it could be combination of the two, one or the other. And basically you can connect a third party streaming software source like
Jen Lehner (17:59) 50
Scott Aaron (18:10) a Riverside, Restream or StreamYard, which is my preference because of the capabilities. And you can link it directly to your LinkedIn personal or LinkedIn company page profile. And you can go live whenever you want. So you can create LinkedIn live events. You can do pop-up LinkedIn lives like I do every Monday and Thursday. And it's such an awesome way to show your brilliance. And it's almost, I tell people it's like doing a Ted talk every single week.
It's your own stage. It's very highly engaging. LinkedIn will push out the replay of that. So when I do my LinkedIn lives, there may not be a ton of people on there live, maybe 10 or 15 people live by the end of maybe a two or three day cycle of that video. It'll end up getting five or 600 views at that point. So a lot of people, you know, cause they view it at their own leisure and whenever they want. So LinkedIn really is encouraging.
thought provoking content creation on the platform. And again, I think the biggest stranglehold right now for the business professional is how do I position myself? What do I do? And I have a content posting strategy from a very baseline perspective that I teach three posts per week. I called the bookend methodology and you have two choices. You can post Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. More recently, Jen, I've actually flushed that down the toilet where I told people like, I don't
when you post, just post three days a week. You could post Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I don't care at this point because I care most about is people taking advantage of the visibility that they can get by just being consistent on the plot. And I recommend three different forms of content. So for me, I like variety. And I think a lot of people get very comfortable with doing certain things. So they'll just do text posts. They'll just do image text posts. They'll just do LinkedIn poll. They'll just do videos.
Scott Aaron (19:45) What I what I have found.
Scott Aaron (20:08) from a business perspective is that there are different types of people that like different forms of content. So just take people in general. Some people still like reading a newspaper, watching the news. People like watching it on YouTube. So people get their information in different forms from different sources. So I take that information and I bring it to LinkedIn. So what I recommend people to do is have one
Scott Aaron (20:20) people like
Scott Aaron (20:38) written form piece of content per week. So that could be a text post. That could be an, a LinkedIn article. It could be a newsletter if you have one on LinkedIn, which I highly recommend. Then one market research post. Now the market research post is done in the form of a LinkedIn poll, just like you could do polls on Facebook. You could do polls on Instagram. You could do polls on LinkedIn. And the great thing about LinkedIn polls is that
If you have built the right type of network on LinkedIn of connections, all you're doing each week is asking pain point questions. If you want to find out what your ideal potential clients or customers are struggling, ask them. And the simple example, Jen, that I give is again, my demographic is helping coaches, consultants, and service professionals with LinkedIn. So traditionally I'll ask a question like, what's the biggest area that you need help with in regards to LinkedIn?
Scott Aaron (21:18) with you.
Scott Aaron (21:35) optimizing your profile, connecting with the right people, nurturing your network, producing content, other. And from that, I can then gather the necessary data to find out the gap that my network actually has. So if it's overwhelmingly obvious that people are struggling with creating content, now I can create content that links back to the market research. So this is where my strategy comes into play. So if I run that LinkedIn poll,
Scott Aaron (21:41) Comment below.
Scott Aaron (22:05) And it's very abundantly clear. People are struggling with creating content. Well, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to take that data and I'm going to do a LinkedIn live training on three simple ways to create consistent content on LinkedIn. So I'm going to deliver exactly. And I do that same thing every single week. If anybody follows me on LinkedIn, you'll see the same thing. I talk about. Topic. I don't try to come up with a new topic each week. So.
Scott Aaron (22:20) what they want one all week long.
Scott Aaron (22:35) If there's a new LinkedIn feature, there's a new analytics tool right now, I'm gonna squeeze as much juice out of that new feature as I can. So I'll do a poll, I'll do a video, I'll do a post about it, and I'll do a newsletter edition about it. So that one topic becomes four different pieces of content on LinkedIn, and that's what really helps me be consistent. But the people that I work with also are consistent because they are at ease, because a lot of people think they have to create a new
Scott Aaron (22:43) about it.
Scott Aaron (23:04) topic of a new piece of content every single day on LinkedIn. No, pick three days a week. You can talk about the same thing all three days in three different formats and it's gonna engage a new audience every single time you publish it.
Jen Lehner (23:20) Wow. Mike job. Love that. If we don't talk about anything else for the rest of the show, that's you've already given us so many, so much value. And I will say that I saw you post about doing polls on LinkedIn and so I was like, all right, I'll do a poll. Cause I used to love to do them over on Facebook back in the day. And it was the most engagement I've gotten on LinkedIn in like ever. I I was just so funny. was like, wow. So, so.
Scott Aaron (23:48) When I give advice, Jen, I only tell people to do things that I know work. That's really it. And I practice what I
Jen Lehner (23:54) Yeah, that's great. All right, go back to newsletters if you would, because you said, which I highly, highly recommend.
Scott Aaron (24:00) So this could be an episode in itself. So just like LinkedIn Live, LinkedIn Newsletters, it's a creator tool functionality of your LinkedIn profile. So prior to that, there was an additional one called, which was LinkedIn's competitive product to Clubhouse. When Clubhouse first came out, LinkedIn wanted to capitalize on it. They created LinkedIn audio rooms. I did a few of them.
Scott Aaron (24:27) Not my thing. I like seeing people or I want them seeing me. It was almost like a walkie talkie room. That's not. Anyway, LinkedIn saw that a lot of people, yes, were using them, but they were getting very depopularized. They got rid of it. The two creator tools that are left that are still extremely popular and growing are LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Newsletters. Now, in my honest and humbled opinion, the most powerful content feature on LinkedIn right now,
Scott Aaron (24:57) are LinkedIn newsletters. And here's one. Are allowed to build, cliently through LinkedIn, a whole subset of subscribers to your newsletter. So I have 34,000 followers in my LinkedIn network, and I have close to 10,000 subscribers to my newsletter, which is a really nice metric to look at. That's almost a
You know, almost 30 % of my general network subscribes to my newsletter, but that's 10,000 eyeballs guaranteed every single week that have the option to see your newsletters. Now, why is this important? It acts as a lead gen generator because what you can do is, and this is what I suggest to my clients all the time, go to the hub of your newsletter on LinkedIn.
Scott Aaron (25:42) Number one.
Scott Aaron (25:54) call on the subscribers, because you have visibility to this, and you can see every single human being that subscribes to your newsletter. And then what you could do is you could nurture them with a nice little thank you message. You hey Jen, saw you just subscribed to the newsletter. Thank you so much for supporting me. Any topics you want me to cover, don't hesitate to reach out. So you're not asking for a call, you're not asking for a sale, a pitch, you're just tapping them on the shoulder and letting them know, hey, I appreciate it.
People like that. So I do that every single week. I'll choose a few new people and I'll drip on them, right? Because then what it's gonna do is they're like, man, Scott's a good guy. You just thanked me for subscribing. All I did was hit subscribe. But what that's gonna do is it's gonna to engage more in your newsletter because obviously there's value there. LinkedIn actually helps you grow your newsletter. So when you create your newsletter, you first have to create title of your newsletter, the description of your newsletter, the frequency of your newsletter, and a little image to go along with the newsletter. So mine is called LinkedIn tips and updates. The description is this newsletter is dedicated to teaching coaches and consultants, LinkedIn tips, LinkedIn updates, and LinkedIn features, right? Frequency, once a week, every Friday, I drop my newsletter and the image is a picture of me, right?
Scott Aaron (27:19) where the magic happens is when you actually publish your first newsletter edition, because here's what happens. So if you're watching this or listening to this and you have an existing blog on your website, or maybe you have a newsletter through your email listserv, just copy and paste, take an existing newsletter and then create it as a LinkedIn newsletter, because here's what happens. As soon as you hit publish on that first newsletter edition, LinkedIn
sends an auto invitation out to every single first connection that you have on LinkedIn to subscribe. So when I initially launched mine two years ago, I had probably 20,000 followers. So it's really grown over the last two years. Within three days, I had a thousand subscribers.
Jen Lehner (28:12) Okay, important question. Yes. Are we allowed, we don't get their email addresses, right? And if we do not, do we get penalized for trying to get them to opt in somewhere in the newsletter to get our list?
Scott Aaron (28:25) I was just gonna get to that. Great minds think alike, Jen. So anyway, so after you start publishing your episodes, Number one, LinkedIn will send out an auto invitation to all of your existing network of connections to subscribe. So from the onset of that first published newsletter edition, you will have a baseline foundation of subscribers overnight. Like it may not be as many as mine when I started mine, but...
Jen Lehner (28:27) Okay.
Scott Aaron (28:51) you may have 50, 60, 100 subscribers, which is amazing because you can see exactly who they are because that means they are interested in you. are, those are people that are interested in everything that you have to say.
Now, every additional newsletter edition that you publish, three things happen.
Scott Aaron (29:14) Number one.
Scott Aaron (29:16) LinkedIn sends a push notification. There's a little notification bell on LinkedIn. They will send a push notification to let Jen know that Scott has released a new newsletter edition. Go check it out here. So they will push the subscribers to see your most latest edition. That's number one. Number two, LinkedIn personally emails.
on your behalf.
Jen Lehner (29:42) Oh wow.
Scott Aaron (29:43) every single subscriber on your subscription list that within their settings and security and their profile, some people they turn off the ability for LinkedIn to email them. So if you've ever received emails from LinkedIn, people can opt out of that. So if people have opted out, they won't get them. So here's the thing. There's a new metric that you can actually, an analytic tool you could measure within LinkedIn newsletters, they actually show
how many emails that LinkedIn has sent to your subscribers, the number, and the open rate percentage of the people that actually opened it. So now you have open rates and click through rates to see, again, does that correlate to the amount of impressions, which are the total views of your newsletter edition? The third thing, and this is very, very important to know, is if you're doing what I always suggest people to do, which is,
Scott Aaron (30:43) Every day you should be connecting with new people on LinkedIn from either an ideal client avatar standpoint or a business ally collaborator standpoint like Jen and myself. As soon as someone accepts your connection request, LinkedIn sends them an invitation to subscribe to your newsletter automatically.
So now, not only is your network growing, but your newsletter subscription base is growing at the very same time. Now I want to go back to something that you said, does LinkedIn frown upon trying to collect emails? No. I always recommend every single person that coach that is any of our programs, you have to ask in order to get, you have to ask at a G-E-T. At the end of every single newsletter.
Scott Aaron (31:35) should be a clear call to action. I'll load my free infograph here. Register for my free workshop here. Book a call with me here. Book more calls? Ask people to click to book a call. So now your LinkedIn newsletter is acting as an email capture system to convert compliant your LinkedIn connections into email. subscribers and it's the most direct way to do it because you can actually see, here's how many emails LinkedIn sent. Here's how many people opened it via email. Here's how many total views I have. Then you can check your email listserv and you can see, was there any new opt-ins this week to what opt-in? So maybe you dropped a specific lead magnet that has tags and sequences. You can actually see the correlation to people opting in from your LinkedIn newsletter, you know, obviously clickable link.
to your email listserv so you actually have quantified metrics to measure every single time you publish an episode.
Jen Lehner (32:36) Okay, that's incredible. One other question. LinkedIn events. So the few times that I've set up a LinkedIn event on my company page, I've been really impressed with all that is given to you to promote it and to have a conversation underneath it and to invite people. Like, the problem is, as I remember, I think I can invite everybody that follows the page
Or can I invite all of my connections like with one click or I can't remember. does that.
Scott Aaron (33:11) Yes.
So there's two things that we're talking about here. So you can create a LinkedIn live event to either a company page or a personal profile. I always recommend the personal profile because that is where the majority of your connections are going to be housed. To your point, if you do it from a company page, you can only invite your, people who follow your company page. So if you only have the thousand floors of your company page, you're maxed out and inviting a thousand people every time.
Scott Aaron (33:41) For me, I always invite people through my personal page because I have up to 34,000 people that I can invite to every single event that I do. But here's the thing, there are limitations to that. You can invite up to a, I believe you could invite up to 3000 people per week to an event on LinkedIn. So the way that I teach people how to leverage LinkedIn live events is the same way if you're doing a live workshop series.
You train for 30 or 45 minutes. You give yourself at least a two to three week runway from when the event is happening to when you actually launch it. And you invite about a hundred of targeted connections every single day, Monday through Sunday, three weeks leading up to it. So basically you're, you're inviting up to 2000 people.
Because again, you need, I don't like people going like all in with that because here's the thing, Jen, if they only have 2000 connections, they can only invite 2000 people. But here's the thing. Not everyone is the right person for that workshop because here's the beautiful thing about LinkedIn. When you go to invite people to your LinkedIn event, when you click on, so on the, on the left-hand side of the event itself, there's a share button. You click share, gives you a dropdown menu. There's a little mail icon that you click.
Scott Aaron (35:06) and it takes you to the invitation section of LinkedIn. There are filters already preset. And what you can do is you can scroll all the way over to the right-hand side of the filters to industry. So you basically can filter your entire connection list by industry. So maybe the LinkedIn live event that you're doing is directed towards business coaches and consultants.
There is actually an industry tag on LinkedIn for that. If there's a coaching and consulting tag. So I would type that in. We'll check box. So it would basically refilter and it would only give me people that are in the professional coaching and consulting space. And then I would choose, would. We'd click the top left box, which basically is the select all button. And I would invite a hundred of those people. And I would do the same thing every day leading up to the event. The one other thing that I wanted to say is that.
Scott Aaron (36:05) Everyone's, I would say, percentage of sent to acceptance rate is a little bit different on LinkedIn. That's why you have to send a ton of invitations because people are getting these invitations every day. I've found is it's probably somewhere around a 20 to 25 % acceptance rate. So for maybe every 100 to 150 requests that you send,
Scott Aaron (36:30) And expect anywhere between 15 to 25 people to say yes. So if you want a hundred people, you know, attending quote unquote, this LinkedIn live event, figure that you're going to have to send close to 750 to a thousand invitations. Now everyone's network looks a little bit different. I have a client of mine, Gary. He's a coach. He's a lawyer himself, but he coaches other lawyers.
He's got an unbelievably accepted network because he teaches a lot of lawyers how to escape burnout. Yeah. So he'll have on average 250 or 300 people attend his LinkedIn lives just because it's people that are in the law field. So you have to understand what you title the LinkedIn live and what you're going to be teaching has to be related to the people that you actually want to show up. So a lot of things have to be correlated the right way.
And it's okay if your network doesn't look like the way that you want it to right now. You have plenty, you're allowed 30,000 connections in total, organically, before the follow feature even really hampers you or kicks in. So you're allowed to connect with up to 30,000 people, you know, through LinkedIn, but only a hundred per week. So again, you can grow very steadily if you have a very hyper-focused attention to it, but also system in place.
Jen Lehner (37:53) Yeah. And that filter tip that you gave is just huge. I, you know, I don't know how many other people have the problem I have, which is when I first joined LinkedIn, which was, you know, 112 years ago, I, they prompt you, they would prompt you and say, do you want basically to dump all your contacts from your phone? And I made a horrible mistake of saying yes, especially because not long prior to that,
I had done this like revitalization thing at a local farmers market and I had all of the vendors, the farmers market vendors, like several hundred in my phone to this day, I get birthday announcements for these people. Because it is too anyway. So I also feel like,
Scott Aaron (38:40) You know, so I just want to kind of touch on that, Jen. So when people go into the My Network area and you'll see if you click on like My Network on the left-hand side, it'll have your connections. But then depending upon the phone number that you have listed, so if it's your mobile phone, whether it's iPhone or Android and email, you can basically sync your LinkedIn account to your phone.
and to your email address and for the listeners and watchers, basically you can import all those people. And basically what it does is it sends them an email or text invitation to connect with you on LinkedIn, which you don't want to do. again, like,
Jen Lehner (39:27) You do not want to do this.
Jen Lehner (39:31) And I feel, I really feel like LinkedIn penalized me because they can see that I have a large number of connections and very few because those are my people. Do you know what mean? It's the cable guy and the refrigerator repair man. it's, you know, it's the, it's all those people, the dog groomer, like those people, most of them, right? Cause I don't keep my business contacts in my phone. And so anyway,
I keep them, they're more in my email address, right? Like, you my CRS.
Scott Aaron (40:06) You got to segment the contacts that you have, whether it's from your CRM, your email listserv, and your social media. they all, yes, there could be some overlap, but you never want personal contacts to cross pollinate over into business CRM, business email listserv, or business connect.
Jen Lehner (40:29) Which is why I've never taken advantage of the invite feature because I start to go one by one by one by one and I'm like I'm gonna be here for forever and so filtering by like the coaching industry that's genius because the farmers were not coaches therefore that might work
Scott Aaron (40:46) Yes, it will. It'll definitely work.
Jen Lehner (40:50) Awesome. All right. Well, what do you think like with AI and everything? Do you have any insights on what you think is ahead in LinkedIn and how we might best prepare?
Scott Aaron (41:00) Well, LinkedIn is very supportive of AI. So with LinkedIn premium, they actually have their own AI tool. It's actually through, I think it's through Gemini. So LinkedIn does have partnerships with Google, with Yahoo, obviously they're owned by Microsoft. So I think it might be Microsoft's AI tool. forget what is. Copilot, yes. So basically you can use the AI prompts if you're using LinkedIn premium.
to help you rewrite content, help you comment. So they're very supportive of A.
Now what they don’t like is using automation tools. So that actually violates the user agreement. So there were actually two big AI companies that were actually blacklisted from LinkedIn about three weeks ago. Wow. One was Apollo.ai and the other was seamless.ai. Both of them were data scrapers. So basically they would scrape data, import them into your email list over in CRM. So if any of you that have ever gotten an email from someone that you're like,
guess I'm connected to LinkedIn, how the heck did they get my email? Well, that's how they did it. And basically LinkedIn didn't even give them a warning. They just said, you're violating the user agreement, you're done. So LinkedIn is really big on people abiding by the user agreement, which I would say the two big things is never using software that scrapes data that acts as you, meaning you have some sort of automated software that connects and messages, or having someone log in pretending to be.
You do not want someone outside in somewhere else in the world logging in and interacting as you and commenting as you. LinkedIn wants people to be actual business owner and the business professional using the platform themselves. So they do support AI, do support the advances of where business is going, but they want people to do it by hand. They want people to use the tools that obviously they support. They just struck up a new partnership with.
They want you to actually connect your calendly account.
to your LinkedIn. People can book through Calendly, right through the LinkedIn DMs, which I think is really awesome. Account. Yep. You do not have to pay for that. Again, they're, very supportive of AI. They, they really, again, they want people to, if, people need prompts, if they need a tool and their tool belt like an AI tool to help them be more consistent on LinkedIn.
Scott Aaron (43:37) They're all for it. They just don't want any of the automated processes disrupting the organic way that people should be using it.
Jen Lehner (43:44) Okay, I'm so glad you mentioned that. My audience knows that they have heard me say, because I teach so much about working with VAs, and most of the VAs are in the Philippines, that for a lot of our tools, VAs are logging in using one password, right? Like, so they don't know our logins, but they're logging into certain accounts to do certain things. Correct. On LinkedIn, my own team will go in and post content. They're not messaging on my behalf.
Scott Aaron (44:12) That's okay.
Again, they're not acting as you, they're basically going in and scheduling. So LinkedIn has their own content scheduler. So if a team member is going in just to pre-schedule content and that is it, but you're doing the connecting, the messaging, the nurturing, the engaging, you're going to be fine. Maybe a two-step verification process. So it may send that person a verification code where they need to log in, but just make sure that, you know, they're never doing anything outside of what they're instructed to do.
Scott Aaron (44:46) Now I had a client recently that they, actually got in trouble because they did have their VA login and start to post content. So it's not allowed, but I would say of all the things that LinkedIn frowns upon, that is the one that they least frown upon that they do let people kind of slide. But sometimes they get a little bit finicky and they, if they see people doing it too often to too many accounts, they will restrict those accounts.
Jen Lehner (45:15) That's great to know. All right, well, you're just a wealth of information. Thank you. you know, you had mentioned, and I know this is true because my people in my community say this, that they have such a hard time figuring out what to post and they don't want to look, you know, foolish on LinkedIn. And it's so funny how LinkedIn is so different in that regard than the other social channels. Like we take it so much more seriously. Like it's where the grownups are, you know? So you help people with this and how so?
Scott Aaron (45:46) So my wife and I have a private community called the Expert Content Society. So this is a community for coaches, consultants, service and business professionals that are struggling with creating consistent content. Now, it's a lot of fun. Obviously, there's daily and weekly and monthly challenges. We do a once a month master class. We have guest trainers.
But I would say the core functionality of it is to create collaboration and obviously accountability so people are partnering up and keeping each other accountable. But we also love AI. And what my wife beautifully did was she actually each month there is a different theme for your business. So to give you the example, the month of April, which is at the time that Jen and I are recording this,
The theme for April in the Expert Content Society is your origin story. So there's a lot of people on LinkedIn that maybe don't know how you got started into what you're doing. So Nancy kind of themed out six different posts per week. So there's three beginner posts for people that are just kind of getting started with LinkedIn and then three advanced posts. Now the advanced posts could be a newsletter edition, a video script, and an image text post. Beginner posts could be a LinkedIn post.
Scott Aaron (47:11) text post and an infograph slash quote tile. And what she did was she created a custom GPT for each one of those posts. So basically you go in there, it says April week one, April week two, week three, week four. So you get prompts for each month and you get 24 of them to kind of pick and choose from. So all you have to do is click on week one. It'll say, you know, post one, two, and three beginner.
Scott Aaron (47:37) post one, two, and three advanced. And you're like, okay, you know what? I just want to do the beginner post. I want to do the text only. So you click on it, shows you the example, and then it says, grab the prompt here. And you just click here, logs you into your chat GPT, and it says your origin story with a little smiley face, and you click get started. The prompt will kick in. It'll say, so tell me what you do and who you work with. And you basically will start typing and it'll say, love that. And then it'll ask you another question, another question, another question.
So I'll ask you a series of five to seven questions. And by the end, it'll basically take all that information, which you typed in there, both beautiful post sharing your origin story that you can copy, go on to LinkedIn, post it or schedule it. And now we're helping people create more consistent content because they can sit down and they can schedule their content out a week at a time, two weeks at a time, and now a month at a time. Now, the other benefit to the expert content society is that we don't make people wait for the next month.
Scott Aaron (48:37) So May, the theme for May is debunking industry myths. basically all the professionals in there are gonna just spend the whole month debunking myths in their industry and their profession. So we don't wait until May 1st. We actually, the final week of April, people will get their content ahead of time. So if they wanna start scheduling a week or two ahead, they can. And then we always do obviously a training on the themes, but this is the
beautiful mind of my wife, every month she creates 24 brand new GPTs that correlate to that specific month. So we actually have the entire year built out so people can see the themes of every single month that's coming up the pike and coming down the pike. And people are saying that they've gotten the most engagement they've ever gotten. They've actually had people reach out to ask about their coaching and their consulting.
based on what they read. So now we're taking the painstaking process out of what should I post on LinkedIn with the single click of a button, you answering a series of questions, spits out your post that you can then put that's really thought provoking, engaging, and obviously is gonna create more visibility. It's gonna help build your brand. And obviously we give a lot of other tips of things they need to do, but that is the big concept. We wanna help people become more successful on LinkedIn by creating the best content.
in the most easy and simplest way with what we've
Jen Lehner (50:10) Yeah, with easy and simple being the key. I love it. And also the fact that you're kind of holding our hands and just the minute, you know, that I sign up and pay you, I'm already gonna, I'm already better off because now I'm like, okay, I bet I got to do this. I got to be consistent with my LinkedIn. You know, the accountability is huge. So I love that. And where can people find out about this?
Scott Aaron (50:34) I'll give you the link. It's if you go to the time to grow backslash the expert content society, I'll give you the link so you can send people there. It's only $79 a month. People can pay monthly. They can pay in full. We're going to have a affiliate program set up where people can obviously share this and the idea of this. And this is the thing that I want to leave you and your audience with is that Nancy and I are not the stars of the show. You are.
That is the number one reason why we wanted to create this community is that we wanted to create a community of the good ones, the people that are using LinkedIn the right way, the ones that deserve to continue to grow their business and help more people and not do it in the engagement pod style and all the spammy junk that you're seeing on LinkedIn. We wanted to create a community of the good ones and helping people shine their light, share their business and help them grow, but have
one another, cheer each other on because again, we're going to be obviously delivering all the value, but we want the community members to just take it, to run with it and grow it with us as much as they want.
Jen Lehner (51:44) Love it. Okay. We're going to, before we sign off, and I hate to put you on the spot, but I love to, I love to give actionable and you've given so much actionable. Tip. Yeah. So what, what it like is the minute that they end, press stop on this podcast. What's the first thing everybody needs to do?
Scott Aaron (52:00 So if anyone goes to my website, scotern.net, there's a free download. Basically, it's like the starting point. It helps you to optimize your LinkedIn profile to free infographs. But basically, that's where you want to get started. And what I would say is take a look at my LinkedIn profile and use that as the benchmark of what you do or don't have on your profile. Like, do you have a clear background banner that lets people know what you do? Because basically, if someone goes to my LinkedIn profile, my background banner says,
the LinkedIn marketing and sales system for coaches and consultants. So when someone visits my profile, they're already seeing, this is the guy that can teach me LinkedIn marketing and LinkedIn sales. And you want to have some clickable links. So I have clickable links in my headline, in my featured content section, but the easiest thing to do, download my infograph, but also look at my profile and how I have it set up and make sure that you set it up where you are your own best.
client. So if you wanted to work with yourself and you go to your LinkedIn profile, would it be abundantly clear how you help people and what you do? So let people know that. The second thing is strategically build your LinkedIn network two ways. Number one, connecting with potential ideal clients from an industry or professional aspect and co-collaborators, business allies, people that, you know, like myself and Jen, they can do collaborations like this.
Do not connect with more than a hundred people a week because LinkedIn will restrict you. That is the max amount that you can connect with. So I always tell people 15 people a day, that'll keep you flying under the radar and you're never gonna get dinged. And I would say the third thing, outside of all the content strategy that I went over, building a business is a contact sport. You can't wait for people to reach out to you. You gotta reach out to them. Now,
When you are going to message someone on LinkedIn, do not pitch slap them. Do not sell to them to get to know people that the number one form of, of marketing now that exists in the world is relationship. Or quality relationships that you build online, the bigger and better of a business you will have. reach out to people with intention, right? You know, Hey Jen.
Scott Aaron (54:31) Thanks for accepting my connection. Love to learn more about you and your business. Share more about me and mine and how we can support each other here on LinkedIn. Anytime for a call or a Zoom this or next. You're doing, you're just reaching out to let them know, hey, I'm here. I want learn about you. I want to share more about me, how we can support each other. Now, where that could go, acquiring a or a business ally that now knows what you do, they can refer you business. And I would say,
If people want to stop listening now and you want to get ready to work, I would do those three things immediately before you do anything else.
Jen Lehner (55:04) So, so good, Scott. Thank you so much for sharing all that really valuable information with us today. I hope I can have you back for a part two. This was so good.
Scott Aaron (55:16) Part two, part three, part four, anytime you want, Jen, I'm available.
Jen Lehner (55:19) Thank you so much.
