He Got 20k LinkedIn Followers In 14 Months, Here's How | Dan Rosenthal

This founder grew his LinkedIn audience to over 20,000 people in only 14 months and has been able to consistently post content that gets thousands of engagements on every post, which is not easy to crack on a B2B platform like LinkedIn. Now, I don't think the number of followers is exactly the best metric to optimize for, but Dan's efforts alongside his team members has enabled Cold IQ to scale to over 5 million in ARR, and since the time of this recording has allowed Dan to start his own company, which I'm sure the leverage gained by his audience has made an easier choice. Now, in this episode, Dan is going to break down the exact playbook he used to grow on LinkedIn, as well as at the end of this episode, he's going to talk through some low ticket monetization tips that Cold IQ has done to squeeze their funnel for more money. So, enjoy the episode. All right, sweet. Excited for this conversation. And Dan, I think um I came across one of your posts recently where you saying you have grown on LinkedIn, I think it was from to 20K followers. I don't know where it was from, but either in like 14 or 18 months, which is like rapid fast. Um, so I'm looking forward to digging into what's working with LinkedIn content at the moment. Um, so I want to approach this in like a sequential order where we go through the motions of how we come up with ideas all the way to, you know, frameworks that you have for writing posts and maybe some tactics you have for distributing those posts, getting more reach, all that good stuff. Um, so let's start with content ideas. Um, I think this is where a lot of people struggle. They they don't know what to talk about. They sort of get that writer's block and so therefore they um can't remain consistent. They don't post content in the first place. I'm just interested to hear how how are you approaching uh content ideation?

Yeah. So, I mean, I think the advice that we give to our team to start posting more is your day-to-day like you might feel super comfortable in all the topics you engage in and the skills that you use, but don't assume that everyone else has the same knowledge as you. So, like when you get super good at something, you people have this tendency to maybe think it's easy, maybe to think it's redundant, but it's like all those day-to-day insights um are super valuable. So, I think like if you don't have content uh to post, look at your day-to-day and think of like what are the most interesting things that you did, where did you gain the most unique insights. Um, and if you don't have any of those, like maybe you need on your, you know, your day-to-day work to do, you know, take on some more difficult uh challenges, do some new projects, you get those ideas. But I I think, you know, 95% of people in this whole B2B SAS space have enough context in their in their work. you know, if you're a closer, then you know, the different things you see in in sales calls, if you're in marketing, you know, what you're seeing on the maybe paid ad side of things or SEO, like whatever you're engaged with day-to-day, that's where your content ideas come from. But I have some, I guess, frameworks of synthesizing those ideas into um pieces that that you can write on and then also doing that on a routine basis to make sure that like you're not I don't I guess too sporadic in and when you create content and what I like to a lot of people call a content system.

Nice. Nice. Um I I agree with the point about substance. Like I think this is where a lot of people go wrong is where um they they struggle with the content ideas. And so maybe then they lean too much into AI or automation. Um but that what makes good content is having actual substance in the first place. I.e. sharing a story, a unique story or a unique useful insight or having some credibility um and turning that into good content. um the the framework you talked through, is that one of the ones you wanted to share or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but what you said makes, you know, a lot of sense. Uh I I see right now there's so many AI posts, uh you can notice them right away if it's a if they're using like bold or tons of emojis. I actually heard somewhere that like if you use more than five emojis in a post or something like they they silence it or something. I mean, I use like the numbered emojis, but like I feel like you can tell when something's AI written. Um, even though AI is super super powerful and it's getting better, like you can tell. Um, and so I think a big thing is also like figuring out your style and I want to touch on that later, but uh I think that's that's for everyone listening to to figure out.

There's no style that someone can kind of hand to you and you got to figure it out like what works with you and your experiences. Yeah, made sense. I there's there's a whole top the whole discussion at the moment on LinkedIn about m dashes and content looking like AI and stuff like that. I mean I heavily use it. Everything everything I do nowadays is AI assisted. Um I don't use it 100%. But even like you know content ideas, content writing, uh editing, everything I'm using AI. But certainly if you just click hey generate a post for me about ads or something like that, that's where you go it goes wrong. 100%. I mean, AI assisted is you you'd be silly not to be AI assisted. So, don't get me wrong. It's just AI written is that that's where the issue lies. You got to be AI assisted and put your human touch on top of uh what AI is helping you to essentially save time on. Yes. Sweet. All right. Let's jump into the the framework you have. I'm excited to go through that. Cool. So, let me share my screen here.

uh this one right here. So, um one thing I I typically talk about in in most of my LinkedIn posts is tools. So, even when I talk about a a process, I like to always like base it in tools just so people can check out different tools that that help them um do this stuff. But honestly, you know, you could you could implement a content system like this without any tools or very minimal tools. But this is kind of and let me open this into a new tab so we can zoom into it. This is kind of what uh how I like to think about content. And maybe some of you have heard of this before. Um maybe this is new, but I'll explain it as if it's new. So I think everyone should choose maybe five to seven. I think that that could be a good number of like your your content pillars. Uh if you want to be hyper specific, like we're I'm in like the the go to market space, but like specifically kind of outbound. I I I do think I'm expanding and I want to expand, but let's say I only wanted to talk about outbound. My content pillars could be like deliverability, messaging, list building, data enrichment, signals. Um but you know, so that's like I guess very granular content pillars. But let's say um you are a marketer. you want to talk about all things marketing. Well, then you could have a bit more broad content pillars of like paid ads, SEO, content marketing, um positioning, right? So, so these are your content pillars and these are kind of the uh the the top level guides of your content and with those content pillars, every piece you can assign to one of those pillars and so you can start to understand your traction on each of those pillars and whenever you you run out run out of ideas, you can go to go to those pillars. So, one thing that um we sometimes do with uh clients who we're advising content on or or or with the team is we'll take a Google sheet. The uh first row will just be your content pillars and then under each pillar, you're essentially just asking yourself questions to answer uh in that pillar to to answer in your content. So, like uh again, let's go back to um cold email messaging for example. You might ask, how do I um how do I achieve relevancy?

How do I ensure personalization? How do I create an offer that people actually are interested in, right? You can ask yourself questions that you think prospects uh might ask and and you can answer those questions in your in your in your content. So that that's what I like to call like a content matrix. But so once you have those pillars, if you're if you don't have any initial ideas and there's not something that comes uh comes to you, let's say in your day-to-day, I think there's a few different sources you can look to to spark that uh creativity. So you could look at your um your AI noteakers. So AI noteakers don't just have you know transcripts on one of your calls. Most of the note takers these days you can actually ask questions about all your calls. So you can say, you know, to your to your AI uh notetaker assistant, what are the questions people typically ask around uh content marketing or messaging? And then you can get those insights from the people you're talking to and that's a good indicator that the audience that you're posting content about are actually interested in in answering that question. The other is uh discussion boards. So, Reddit is a good one. Like, uh, Liam, I'm sure, you know, you being in the in the SAS space, you're you're looking at Reddit is, you know, for for product ideas and all this stuff. Um, any thoughts on Reddit? Sure.

Yeah. I mean, so, um, I feel bad for saying this because you said I must I'm not a massive fan of Reddit, but that's just because I think and not not that I think Reddit is bad, it's just that I've never, you know, spent a lot of time on Reddit and so it's never been like a habitual thing that I've looked on it for ideas or or or just posting content either. Um I've started going on it more often. I think it's personally I use it uh actually I think it's quite good for um competitive insights. Uh so what organic conversations are happening? How many times are competitors getting mentioned? Um, there's this whole uh area of like guerilla marketing that happens on Reddit where people post these viral posts and they're sort of indirectly promoting products. Like that side of Reddit really interests me. Um, but I haven't really gotten into the the weeds of say scraping Reddit for content ideas and and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean I think some of those competitive insights can turn into to content ideas. I' I'd say that's probably like the most interesting that you can get from Reddit is like people's raw feedback because it's somewhat deanonymized. So people really give their opinions on using a tool or their experiences like solving a certain problem. So I think like you could just spark ideas from there. I'm not sure about like I haven't created a Reddit scraper for content ideas, but uh if I'm talking about a very specific problem, I'll refer to Reddit to see like the online discussion about that because it could be a diff a bit difficult to find discussions on LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn, in my opinion, like is is great for optimizing your feed, but it's really hard to find like old posts and to like refer to older discussions around topics, whereas Reddit is much better optimized for that. It's true. Yeah. I I don't know if um uh Chat GPT scrapes Reddit. I'm not sure, but I I feel like uh with Chat GPT's deep research module, I I feel like it pulls threads from Reddit. And so that's kind of a way to indirectly look at Reddit. There is this um product, it's called F5Bot, and you can set it up to monitor uh keywords in Reddit. Um and yeah, it will basically give you an email. I think you can also um integrate it with Slack.

This is really good. Um I mean you know whatever monitoring competitors maybe maybe there's certain topic ideas you're interested in like sales or compensation or you know any keyword you can think of. Um that's like a good way to sort of stay on top of of what's going on. Yeah. Wow. This is completely free. So that's a that's a nice find. I might have to try that out. Yeah, for sure. Oh, it's hack and use as well. I didn't know that. Uh the other thing is X. So I think um I mean some people use both X and LinkedIn. Uh I mean Liam, you might have more context here, but I feel like people are either like ex people or LinkedIn people. Maybe neither, but like uh there's I feel like there's entirely different types of people and creators and discussions on both of those platforms. So like a good technique could just be to see what's performing on X with your topic and like LinkedInifying it because there's a bit of a different write writing style. So that could be a place to to get ideas. Um yeah, obviously obvious obviously LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups. I mean LinkedIn groups um some people use them. Um but but the other one is like uh Slack and and maybe even Discord depending on on your subject matter. Um essentially like you want the raw insights because that's like what's actually going on in people's heads that you're writing content for. So, I feel like if you're trying to get inspiration just from like I guess like trendy LinkedIn posts, you you might be missing those raw insights behind that post that allowed it to to to perform well. And then there's topic research. And this is what we meant by AI assisted like if if you are talking about a complex topics, it's in your best interest for sure to um use AI to to do all that deep research. So, deep research is great.

You can use perplexity. Uh Gemini is getting really good at all the search stuff. You might want to read some like uh Substack articles about that stuff. But essentially like because what we mentioned is like it's all about the depth and the I guess the you know the uniqueness of your insights then it's best to you know go super deep into every topic that you write about and then you know maybe simplify from there. I think whenever you're writing about any type of complex topic, use AI to to supplement it. And then yeah, seeing trending content and this is um this is kind of what I meant by when I said like see what's trending on on Twitter. Another great thing you can do is see what's trending on YouTube. Uh you can use a tool like Vid IQ and then turn that into LinkedIn post. Cleo is this extension right here. So you can look at people's top performing posts of all time. You can search through their posts and so you can just go to anyone's profile. Liam's mind um you know all the other famous LinkedIn creators and see their top performing content and get inspiration from there and then you might want to build an agent with a tool like relevance AI or NAD to like go help you find trending content and give it to you and invest uh WhatsApp or Slack or just in a doc. And I think you know you have your content pillars uh you figure out like what people are interested within those pillars uh um pillars and then you grab information from many different online sources and if after all that you don't have ideas uh like you should have an idea after doing all that. Yeah for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. I think this is a good way to look at um the the thing not necessarily content or topic idea but more so strategy. Um like what we're seeing be popular today on LinkedIn. I know you do this quite a lot. The um it's called a two-step. I don't know this what we used to call it where hey comment comment something and I'll DM you this resource that that was really popular two years ago on ex Twitter. And so, um, you make a good point there with with regards to things that are like trending on different platforms. Sometimes if you can bring them across to a new platform, um, it can it can do really well. And I like the I've only used Cleo a few times, but I found a bit of value in um and I don't know if there's a an easier way to do this, but I've found the top performing posts of creators who I'm researching um and I put them all in like a txt file and I get something like chat GBT 4.5 to analyze their posts just to understand like what are the patterns, um tone of voice, uh do They use numbers in every post. Like basically just trying to reverse engineer certain um characteristics of their content. Um not to copy them, but more so uh so I can use some of that in my content. Maybe you know like a classic thing is usually numbers perform really well inside a post. And so okay, well when I create my post I'm going to put numbers in the hook. Um I found quite a bit of value in that. Yeah. I mean I think numbers is a big one. And I think like as you start to create content, you notice these like these little I guess tricks or you know um strategies you can implement that that increase the performance. So another one that that comes to mind is like people always I guess people just starting out to create content. I feel like the what they assume is that they need to be like a mentor. You should do this, you should do that. But what um I was speaking to the CMO of Skype, which is a LinkedIn content writing tool, and they've analyzed like 500,000 LinkedIn posts.

One thing that she said um is that across all posts, I performs better than you. So instead of like telling people what they should they should do, you should say what I've done and then numbers is a great way to back that up and to provide social proof. So I did this and it achieved this, you know, quantifiable results. that is like a much better performing content angle, then you should do this without any like numbers or statistics to to back it up. Which which is tougher, right? Because to use I and share personal anecdotes, you have to have substance. You have to have done things. Um and so therefore less people have done that and so yeah probably it probably leans into that unique useful insights that only you can share and hence is is going to make you stand out. And I think also maybe um probably leans into that instinct we have to listen to stories. I think usually when if I look at some of the top creators where they're talking about their lived experiences, they're telling a bit of a a story and I think that sort of content just stands out a bit more as well. um yeah I think like if you're posting techy you know like like my content which is a lot of like tool stuff and automations I think that storytelling is an important element to add into your you know your your content pillars. So I think like realistically one content pillar for everyone should be storytelling because that's what gets people to associate the value you provided them with your technical knowledge with you as a person and start to be a fan of you as a person rather than just the knowledge you share. Yeah, for sure. Just just one question before we move on because um there's so much stuff to get through. Um how how much time do you personally spend per week, per month, per day, however you know whatever frequency you do it? um ideating content like sitting down and actually thinking about okay what do I want to post about in the coming days, weeks, months, like how much how much time are you dedicating to that? Yeah.

So, I mean I'm I feel like I could be an interesting I guess like case study for some people here because I break a lot of the rules. Like let's go through my content. Uh one week ago, uh one week ago, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I post one to two times per week max. And so a lot of creators out there will tell you post five times per week and be consistent. I think there's a ton of merit in that, but at the same time, like there's there's different ways to achieve the same result, different angles. My my assumption has always been I want to spend the most amount of time on one banger post. I would I some of these posts I've literally spent 10 10 hours on easily, right? But I I'd rather do that and have every single one of my content pieces be a banger so that when people see my name in a post, they're like they they have some expectation to that. But, you know, you can also be more consistent and maybe drive better results. So, I think there's like different ways to do it. So, personally, I will spend probably around like four hours per content piece and like I aim for one a week at least. Sometimes I get two out, but that's like I put a lot of time into one post. And in terms of the idea for that post cuz I only do one a week. I if I was uh doing more, I'd probably have to uh you know search for more ideas. But I actually have too many ideas that all take too much time. So I have a big backlog of stuff that I that I want to do. That's just I think of stuff dayto-day. Like you know when you get into the content mindset, you start to find angles again in your day-to-day as you're experiencing stuff and solving problems. Yeah, I get that. I I feel like some Yeah, I feel like a bit of a loser sometimes cuz there there's part of me who goes through life looking at life through a lens of as a of a marketer where I'm just like, "Oh, that could be a good angle. That could be a good piece of content." It just Yeah.

Yeah. It comes to you um intuitively like after after a while for sure. And there's a bit of a flywheel, right? Um you create a piece of content, uh people comment on that content, they say certain things, people DM you and you're like, "Oh, okay. that's a good idea. I'll like, you know, I'll um say that in a different flavor. And so then you have this flywheel that's going where you don't actually have to sit there like writing down ideas all the time. Yeah. I mean, I you make a a good point about the flywheel because let's be honest, like posting content and getting no engagement can be can be grueling. And I think that's why a lot of people stop. And like let's compare it to other marketing channels. With cold email, for example, you know who you're reaching out to. So you already have your target audience. And like, yeah, the reply rate, let's say, is is is pretty low compared to, let's say, other marketing channels, but like you have a guaranteed shot at that person. There there's some sort of guarantee there. And and you know, like you could just improve that message um you know, and get it across. Ads, you're paying to to be seen by by that person. With content, if you're just starting out, your impressions will be low. So, you're putting in all this work for it to simply not be seen by people. So, you have to like build up that audience um to get the eyeballs, but then also build up the confidence in people showing you appreciation uh and like reinforcing that flywheel effect.

So, it's I'd say it's probably the most effective marketing channel, but I'd say it's the hardest to start out because like there's really this like uphill battle at the beginning that I don't think you see as much in the other marketing channels. For sure. Yeah. uh content takes long to get it to work, but when it works, the the compounding that happens like just such a a point of leverage, it's it's insane. Um um so what what what's next in the framework? I think underneath the the um the ways to come up with content ideas, it was like yeah, we have some stuff to go through and this is I'd say the the more um like quick part, but essentially I think you should arrive at the central idea or topic and you should write write it in the in your desired format. So I know like I've heard Greg Eisenberg his first piece of content of an idea is always a long X thread. Mine would always be like a long LinkedIn um you know LinkedIn piece. Someone else's might be a blog article or someone else might just want to write a giant notion sheet and not post it anywhere. But you should like capture the idea and its wholeness in um in one format and then you want to essentially cross-pollinate across different formats. Like once you have that piece, what's a visual I can associate to this? And then I just have some guides here of like you can have a mind map, carousel, infographic, etc.

What's a short I can create out of this? What's a long form idea I could create out of this? And you can look at each platform, the types of um content formats that perform on those platforms that you feel comfortable with. So you could I think that's the best way to multiply your content. Start with one idea, but you could effectively create 20 pieces of of content out of that. And there's some tools you can use to to help you there that I've listed there. But that's essentially the idea. Could we just zoom in a bit just to see some of these content ideas? Uh for sure. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think to give an example here and maybe you have a few like um so I had this a post that did quite well on LinkedIn. It's maybe over a year ago and it was very simple. It was like I think the hook was here's how I'd beat uh an SDR team um with le um for less than $700 a month or something. Yeah, I found that post. Yeah, here it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um and by the side note, how do you know um when a post is good when you uh you piss off like at least 20% of people who who look here? Um yeah, quite a few upset people on that post. Um but basically the the core topic there is like cold email but not just cold email it's this new way of cold email right which has been popularized by instantly in smart lead and the hook is quite you know it's interesting if you're someone who wants to be more efficient i.e. you might you don't want to hire a large sales team.

Um, but it's also a bit controversial cuz, you know, people were like, "Well, this is Of course, it's not." And that's actually like a good signal. But that core idea of this, I call it cold email 3.0. That's what I refer to it as. I then took that and turned that into a YouTube video, which is maybe two hours long, like a and it's basically a VSSL, video sales letter. And again, that like did really well and has generated a lot of money. And so, I think that's a good example of like this core idea. I validated that it was a good angle um on LinkedIn. It performed really well as an organic post. We then to turned it into a paid ad. It performed even better. And then also turned that into an organic long form piece of content. Again, created that several months ago and still to this day I jump on calls with potential clients or people who have just become a client and they're they comment on on those pieces of content. You know, it it played a part even though these pieces of content are several months old. So I think maybe that's a good example of like taking one idea or topic and um just you know rinsing and repeating until it it stops working basically.

Yeah. But I mean also people like to consume content in different format. So someone might have not got value out of that long LinkedIn post but they prefer video. So they like you also appeal to a wider audience to convey that message. So, I don't like I think people kind of maybe are afraid to repurpose, but like there's a way to strategically repurpose and for it not to feel like you're rinse and repeating, but you're just, you know, being creative. For sure. For sure. Yeah. And I mean, even that 2-hour video, I could turn that into several 10-minute videos. Yeah. It's I think the the you don't every post you uh make doesn't have to be like some net new idea. It could just be um taking a slither of an existing winning post and and you know running with that. Um you certainly don't have to like every every um content piece of content you post doesn't have to be some crazy thing like you could just be um I I call it like hammering the same nail. If you find the nail that works it, you know, it hits the nerve of the market, i.e. um it has maybe some virality baked in or it's a a message that uh resonates with people, then you just want to hammer that nail as much as possible. And this, you know, you can say the same topic in a hundred different ways. Yeah. And I think like everyone's talked about this thing right here where it's like a tool guide and like a setup guide for cold email, but why did yours perform better? It's because you had this unique angle of like talking about a budget. So you're comparing the tool budget to the SDR performance budget and then, you know, you said this, you know, this idea of like comparing two things. People love to compare things and then telling them exactly how they do things the better way. I think like the way you put it together is is what made this thing stand out. Whereas like I've seen a 100 posts kind of explaining the whole tool stack you need to do cold email 3.0, but it was the packaging that you did it that made it interesting for people.

Yeah, for sure. I think I think that's like the maybe the art side of it where um you know you can have the idea the topic but how do you package that in a way that gets you know people stops the scroll gets people's attention is maybe a bit contrarian or controversial that's like the the the skill that that comes into it which just kind of develop over time 100%. And so like that you could have turned into an expost, you could have turned that into a newsletter, you could have posted that on your blog. Um so that there and you could have turned it into infographic, posted on Instagram. So that's you know and some ideas of how people can repurpose a central idea across pretty much every every platform. Uh and then then just the last piece of this and um people can just like pause the video if they want to see. Um, but I think you know you can use tools to essentially enhance the um time to market for each of these channels. So if like you're mainly focused on long form written uh you might think that perform uh doing short form video is going to take you long but like you might be able to save a lot more time than you think just using you know the modern tools. So you could like use an AI avatar and you don't even have to record anything or you could just record something that's messy and use Opus clip to turn that into a short. So, I think people should also think about like tools they can leverage to reduce the the friction of creating content so they can get more out there. And then I think there's this big loop of of repurposing things. So like if you had a good angle that performed three months ago, think of like a different way to to say that same idea even in the same format or a different format. But um like don't be afraid to to repurpose things. That's essentially what I wanted to convey in this content system is like you do all this work to get to the central idea but feed that into the flywheel so so you don't you know run dry of ideas. Yeah. Nice. This really useful and like um people can can find this on your LinkedIn if they want to dig deep into it. Um let's talk about the posts themselves then. Are there any patterns with regards to what you're seeing succeed uh in 2025? Maybe it's certain types of formats, certain angles, certain tactics when it comes to the the posts um themselves.

Yeah. Um I I think what's working for short form uh could could probably always work like LinkedIn is probably because of the nature of the platform. It's like a little bit behind on the trends. So generally uh you mentioned one with numbers. I think another angle that that's that works quite well is like top 7x or best for this or this versus that or before and after. Before and after is actually an interesting one. Like for our miniourse page, I will show this right here. Uh I just created like this um before and after thing. Old way, new way. I never posted this because I was just like, you know, this is just a website widget. uh a few people like we've gone viral with this exact graphic multiple times across the team and it wasn't even me, it was other people using it because I think people love like comparisons, transformations. So I think that all works well on short form like on Tik Tok you see it all the time and I think it works well on LinkedIn and long form as well. Yeah, for sure. And it's easy to digest as well, right? like um that that's the good thing about visual graphics or also kind of the artistic side of content is conveying the core idea in like a way that's easy to consume and you know people don't have to do mental gymnastics just to understand what you're trying to trying to say. Um and I think there's there's this undertone of I think generally content that performs really well is I think content that challenges the status quo, right? So whenever you're talking about the old way, you're always talking about a status quo. And usually there's I think why this performs well in content is because usually there's people who are emotionally attached to that status quo and it sort of puts you in that area of being contrarian which is like fuel to to go viral. And so I think there's like an element of it there and and then there's that other group of people who are maybe more on the innovative side who agree with what you're saying and then you know they they rally behind you. Yeah. I mean discussions are are a great way to boost engagement so the algorithm also will will show you to to more people and some people actually just chase the the bad press because you know it's an effective way to grow. The other thing I'll say when it comes to like content angles I think like if you look at uh I wanted to just quickly show this post. This is like one of my quintessential pieces. I created a YouTube video out of it. We booked a ton of meetings from this. I've reached a character limit here, you know. So, a lot of people will tell you not to write long stuff. You can break any rule you want. This was a giant post. I could show you Fivos from our team. He's gone just as viral with like five lines. So, I like do whatever feels right. The one thing I will say is like let's un I don't know if I can unsee more. Okay. Uh in the feed, right? all they see is this and then see more. So like just like on YouTube, uh YouTube professionals will tell you just to think about the thumbnail and the title because that's like everything that gets them to click on it. On LinkedIn, it's the hook and the rehook. Everyone knows this. What people don't talk about enough is the visual is taking up 80% of the screen space if you are posting a visual. Uh if you don't, like you have a smaller place on the feed. So, I think like the number one thing is to get an enticing visual that makes people want to click and think that there's something to learn. So, I'd say like the number one piece of advice I'd give to anyone posting on LinkedIn is create engaging visuals that make people click see more uh and and actually have a ch like there's some people post great content but they have no visual and so no one feels like clicking see more and and and seeing what they have to say and if they just attached a visual to that exact same post it would perform way better. So, that's the one thing I'll say is like you can write long, you can write short, but always have a nice visual in my opinion. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm totally on board with this.

Um, there's um a guy or there's two of them, Fletch PMM on LinkedIn. I'm not sure if it it will be in your bubble. It's sort of uh product marketing and they built a whole product product marketing consultancy um where they they have a productized service. So they were like do your homepage for like seven uh $75 thousand. And I'd say the majority of their growth and uh both on LinkedIn and their business has been down to the fact that uh down to these graphics that they've created. And so they they really like popularized this um content strategy of breaking down frameworks into graphics. Um, and I think like just that alone, the visual aspect of it, you know, there's no shortage of product marketers, there's no shortage of consultants in the world on LinkedIn, right? But just the fact that they spent hours putting these really nice graphics together that broke down complex topics into really like easy to understand concepts uh and frameworks, I think was like the single biggest thing they ever uh most impactful thing they did for their business. So like I'm totally on board with this um approach with with graphics. Is it Anthony Perry or that's a different Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I know him. He I I have his company's called You said Fletch. Yeah. Fletch PMM, I'm pretty sure. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. So, I He's one of the people I I I I gained some inspiration from in terms of uh how how some of his visuals um Yeah. stuff like this. Um you you don't fully understand it. And so that's also what makes you want to click on the post. So I'd so also like leaving some some space for allure and uh you know curiosity gap. Yeah, for sure. And it's it's there's this baked in um moat with with visual graphics because 95% of people are too lazy to spend, you know, Anthony said he'll spend hours sometimes on these graphics.

Most people don't want to spend that amount of time doing that. And so it's just such a good way to stand out. And I think LinkedIn just in general is I think most people if you're in B2B know that um LinkedIn content is is a good strategy and so it's becoming busier. You know um uh LLMs have have made it even more busier. And so I think then it's a question of okay well how can I get an unfair advantage? How can I get an edge? And I think visual graphics as part of your content strategy is like a a good way to do that. Yeah 100%. And I I I guess we're speaking a lot about LinkedIn, but um in my opinion, yes, there's some issues with, you know, some parts of the platform, but there is no other place where this many, you know, qualified uh like if you're in B2B and you want to work with other businesses, there's, you know, Twitter's good and stuff, but I I think there's nothing that matches, you know, what's possible when you when you take off with LinkedIn if if you run a B2B business. Yeah, for sure. like we could be jumping around platforms right now, but I think, you know, because of the B2B focus here, like that's why we're we're focusing on LinkedIn 100%. Yeah. Um interested to hear about this clay table that you've built um to because at the end of the day, um you know, I think most people aren't just posting content on LinkedIn as a hobby. They're doing it to generate some kind of business outcome. And I think you guys have a pretty um solid system for doing that. So, I think it'll be interesting to hear about For sure.

Let me give like a five minute max 101 of what what I believe is is some good content conversion tactics. So again, um we talk a lot about tools, but I I don't want to be one of those people that says you need tools to do stuff. So you could buy sales nav, scan your profile visitors, you can scan your content engagers. Like you could do all this manually. Uh do you know Matt? Uh his last name is always uh hard to pronounce, Lacagev. Matt Lacage. He uh uh is is he like LinkedIn selling or a consultant or Yeah. Yeah. selling. He's all about Yes. Australian. He's all about his his thing is sell by chat is what he calls it, but it's pretty much all manual where you're just like starting conversation with people and your audience and um you sell them by chat, right? So, uh, this is the automated, uh, like hands-free way to do it. But I I'd say per per lead, it's probably more effective to do something manual, but this takes us no time to keep running. So, so that's why I think it's effective. But like I guess even more important to this, um, I don't even do that good of a job. I think uh, our CEO, Alex, does a much better job of this is like your profile is kind of like a landing page. So, um, yes, you can retarget people and sell them by chat, but I'd say number one is like you want to have your your profile optimized. So, here we have our $1 mini course gets people into our email list and our ecosystem. So, we have that CTA right here. Uh, you have these services here that that tells people you have a a service that you can help them solve. He has this YouTube link here again embedding them in the ecosystem and then a link to to work with us. So, I'd say like in terms of conversion, I'd say number one is optimizing your actual profile. But then if you want to go the step further, we have this clay table.

Um it it was recently um kind of changed because I used to I I I used to have uh run this table to sell the agency services, but now we are switching that to sell more of our info product services. So it's been changed up a little bit, but basically these are Mish's uh social engagers. We have this downloaded right now, but you could do this automatically with a tool like Trigify. I think Max, you said Max Mitchum was on um yeah, last week. So, so Triggerify is is perfect for this and doesn't risk your account whatsoever. So, it's probably my number one tool for for doing this with content engagers. And then there's Team Fluence, which does have an extension. So, you know, be beware of using it. But what Team Fluence does that trigger doesn't do is it also gives you your profile visitors, uh which is a unique source that a lot of people aren't using because realistically like 95% of your audience have never engaged with your post. maybe they've liked one here and there. So, it's a good way to like capture those people. But here, this is a clay table for those of you who don't know. It's just like a a spreadsheet hooked up to a bunch of different APIs and AI that you can use to to basically qualify leads and and find their contact info and then send them to like an email sequencer like like instantly. So, here we have the uh all of all the engagers on on on Mish's post. We have if they've commented or not and the post content uh if they've liked and and pretty much all these people have liked their profile URL. From there we are enriching their uh their profile using Clay. So Clay grabs all the information from LinkedIn so we can know stuff like um where they work, where they live, uh their their title. And so these are going to be the the key factors of of qualifying them for your service because one of the worst things you can do for you know your brand is to like send people automated messages who aren't qualified for your offer. Like those people are great. They're supporting your content.

Don't don't bother them if if they're not qualified for your offer. So that's a super important step. Um we're we're getting their domain and then we're riching that on Apollo just to get a um sometimes Apollo can have a better data than than LinkedIn. Um, and we are, again, these are just exports from from those um, from those tabs. We're then looking up the person or HubSpot to make sure we're not engaging with any people already in our our sales cycle. Um, we're cross referencing them to the the people already in some of our programs that might not, for whatever reason, be in our HubSpot. And then we are using Clay Gen to do some research on them and uh, calculate if they're tier one, tier two, tier three, or unqualified. We have some filters here. That's why you're only seeing qualified people. We're sending them through this email waterfall. And the reason we're using email here is because it's scalable and you don't risk your LinkedIn accounts. Um, and we're doing a bunch of like email validation stuff. But then the end result is we send them to an instantly campaign. Um, that that engages with them and basically asks if they want help on on GTM coaching. So, this campaign right now, I kid you not, is sitting at like a five or eight positive uh uh 5 to 8% positive reply rate. I could check on instantly right now, but it is performing super well just cuz they're ready warm to you. Uh it's a pretty no-brainer offer of like, hey, do you want to see this resource? Um and and then kind of the the selling happens from there. But it's a good way to just essentially get more out of your audience. key being you like I see people all the time like other cold email agencies pitching me cold email services like you really want to qualify people because that just destroys your brand but um yeah for sure yeah yeah I think when people think of automation they what they're actually doing wrong is not the automation itself is the laziness is the they're not um qualifying the leads or they're not you know mapping the right message to um different personas like automation itself I think is totally fine but I what I like about this is you're not just posting all this content and waiting for people to come to you.

You're actually capitalizing on all of that engagement and reaching out to those people and you're not now no longer a stranger. That parasocial relationship has been formed and so it's like you're more like a peer. It's like going to a part uh you know a networking event and everyone already knows you. You're going to have a much easier time to have conversations, right? Um I know we got a bounce in like three minutes. Um, and kind of unrelated, but I saw this uh that $1 offer you have uh you guys have this miniourse. Um, what what's the objective of that? Is it to convert people to the agency to a higher ticket consulting model? Maybe both? Like what what's the the the thought behind that? Yeah, for sure. I'm I'll actually show you show you the funnel. So So the one thing is um this was actually my my my idea. So if if people pay you for something and then you deliver on that promise, they will grow trust with you, right? And so even if it's $1, they're still paying you. There was still a checkout process and we completely overd deliver on that $1. It's like a 1hour course, super well edited. Um ton of value there. So it's like they paid us $1, we got their email, so we're already engaging with them that way and they they gained some trust with us. And we have this uh course platform. So, this is the same course platform that um a lot of like big creators use. So, there's an agency called GenFlow and they helped us build this, but we essentially have the miniourse that they see and then if I I'm a full member, but if you weren't, you would see this coaching program un uh locked. And so, you could click this and there's also an upgrade button on the left if you're a $1 user. But because we have your payment information on Stripe, it already autofills that.

So, you're one click away from upgrading to our full full coaching program. So, it's to to gain trust at scale. Uh to like people love to buy stuff, but buying stuff for $1 that overdelivers feels even better. So, it's like creating a fun experience. Uh and making it very easy to for people to to buy our like our bigger offer. For sure. For sure. are are you um uh okay to share what percent of those $1 offers convert to uh like a coaching program or or agency? So, I mean ultimately very low. So, we've had like I I think we're approaching 2,000 p purchases. Like, it's funny. We've made two 2,000 bucks from this $1 offer, which is which is funny. If it's an hour, it's like you could have easily given that away for free. And so, like the the effort into that probably wasn't a bunch if it's like a 1 hour video. So it's quite a good return. Honestly, content takes way longer than you think. So like each of these videos, we have all these links and big descriptions and I created like this whole I created email campaign to sell the miniourse and then presented that that whole campaign. So it it wasn't too too effortless, but honestly super worth it. So right now in our coaching program, I think we've sold 120 or 130 spots overall. A lot of these were before the miniourse. I can't tell you the exact conversion rate, but what I will say is all the time, like literally almost daily, someone mentions it. Like, oh, I saw your miniourse.

People in the coaching calls mention it. So, maybe it wasn't a direct upsell, but it started the, you know, the buying process. So, it's definitely had some like ripple effects. And even the agency side of things, people have seen this this mini course and mention it. So, I I couldn't quantify it, but I'm one million% sure this was was well worth it. Yeah, for sure. G generally like content, right? It's really hard to attribute directly conversions to any specific piece of content, but people always bring it up in conversations. That's how they heard about you. So nice. I like this strategy. I think we could do a whole different episode on this sort of uh ascension model you have from this low ticket offer to consulting an agency. Um any any other thoughts there or or should we wrap it? Yeah. Um, I mean I I guess just to to cap that off, I think like anyone in in in B2B services like SAS, you know, you're you're doing this at a much smaller scale, but like our services start from $4,000 a month. So it's unrealistic that you can service the entire market with that. And I'm sure you can implement similar frameworks into SAS, but like it it's what you said, you want to ascend people into your offers for like the the people who you who don't have the budget, you want a DIY offer. For people with like mid-tier budget, you want a done with you offer. And then you know your high ticket offer should be your done for you and you should send people well most of the time people only choose one but sometimes people might grow in your in your ecosystem. So that was the whole idea there. Uh but yeah super cool uh conversation about about LinkedIn content and you know realistically it's uh it turned into a conversation about you know marketing and uh growth in general because you know content is is one of the best if not the best marketing channels right now. So it's like you can't talk about it in a silo.

It's it should be like a core part of your of your growth strategy. So that's why we we kept extrapolating to like different different areas because it's super embedded into into how we're finding clients. All right, man. Well, good stuff. Appreciate you running through that. Good to chat.