173: {Solo} How to Leverage LinkedIn to Grow Your Personal Brand and Business

In today's episode I'm spilling all of the good on how to start, grow and scale your personal brand and business on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is what Facebook and IG used to be 20 years ago. You don't have to dance on the internet or keep up with trends. Heck, you don't even have to have a hook to get people paying attention and engaged. And the crazy thing is, only 3% of people post content on LinkedIn. And do you know what that means for YOU? Hardly any competition. And you can grow and scale organically without spending money on ads or boosting posts. The visibility is insanely high on the platform. And I'm here to help YOU grow! 

Supercharge your learning curve on mastering LinkedIn with Level Up Your LinkedIn . I teach the exact formula to start, grow and scale organically on the platform. There is even content examples that you can plug and play into your own niche! 

Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:00.942)
All right, in today's episode, I am taking it back to the very beginning of not only this podcast, but my personal branding journey, specifically on LinkedIn. And so we're taking it back to 2023 when I started this whole journey. And I wanted to tell you exactly what worked and what didn't work when it came from building my personal brand and podcast, okay? And this episode is mainly gonna be focused on personal branding, specifically on LinkedIn, okay?

Because at the time, if you guys remember, I was still a recruiter. was an executive search recruiter with a firm based here out of South Carolina. And I had been doing recruiting pretty consistently over the past 15 years. So when I started my recruiting journey back in 2010, I was placing temporary employees, entry level professionals, receptionist, file clerks, legal secretaries, data entry.

professionals, you name it, okay? So fast forward 15 years later, and then I'm placing the C-suite professionals. So CEO, CFO, COO, executive directors, I was placing people in executive positions within big Fortune 500 companies. I was working with private equity groups when they would go and change out their executive staff. I was working with...

small, medium-sized businesses when they had to do an executive replacement. Maybe someone was getting canned or fired, or maybe somebody just was tired of running their company and they wanted someone else to come run it. All different situations, that's all happened. Maybe somebody was on the way up to retirement, you just name it. So I've seen a lot of different hiring scenarios and the common and primary place of the tool I was using

when I was recruiting intro people versus and all the way up to C-suite is I was using LinkedIn. Okay. And LinkedIn has evolved. So I had actually been on LinkedIn for over 15 years at this time. And at the time I had just used it for my corporate job. Well, in 2023 is when I made the leap to start my personal branding journey. And I don't care if you're listening to this podcast and you work in corporate or you own a business, you're an entrepreneur. You need to be building your personal brand on

Caroline Pennington (02:25.518)
LinkedIn and if not LinkedIn, another social channel because you want people to know who you are, what you do, who you serve. And you have less than three seconds to capture their opinion. And I will tell you most professionals are hanging out on LinkedIn rather than some of the other platforms like Meta, Facebook, Instagram, because on those platforms, people are doom scrolling. They're looking to be entertained. They're watching cat videos or whatever.

On LinkedIn, you have a huge opportunity to become a thought leader in whatever your industry is or your expertise. So in 2023, when I was still at my corporate job, I decided to start my personal branding journey and holy moly, what happened? I never ever, ever could have imagined. And I had no clue what I was doing, like no freaking clue. But I just started and I started my personal branding journey on there and this podcast at the exact same time.

So you don't have to start both at the same time. You can start one or the other, but they just fueled off each other and created a huge personal branding, rocket ship explosion and all the best ways that I could have never imagined. So I'm here to encourage you to start that and starting is the scariest part. It was the scariest part for me too because everything was so visible. My coworkers are watching me, my...

boss, the CEO of the company was watching me, my clients are watching me, my former colleagues, my former clients, like my family members, people from church, college, whatever, fill in the blank. And here is my number one piece of advice I'm gonna give you that helped me is if you have somebody in your network or that you're connected to that you're like, I don't really want them to see what I'm doing over here.

Go in and unconnect from them. So go to your connections, click on the far right and click unconnect. That way they don't see your stuff and your posting. And they also don't get a notification. So they have no idea that you boot them out of your ecosystem. And it will just be a huge relief as far as like if there's someone like, I don't want my old boss to see this or we're connected. Just go and connect from him or her, who cares? All right, moving on. So what worked?

Caroline Pennington (04:44.404)
So I decided at my time at that time, I had the capacity to post on LinkedIn five days a week, Monday through Friday. And y'all, when I first started my journey, I had no clue what I was doing. I had so many cringe posts, so many crickets. People were watching me. They were saying comments to me like, how's your little LinkedIn posting going? How's your little podcast going? And now that's for three years later. They're like, how the heck did you do it? So

And any media that you've seen that I've done, been featured in articles, I've been a guest on over 100 podcasts, I've been featured in over 45 media outlets, completely organically, I've never paid a PR firm, I've never paid to have anything featured. You guys, the people that are publishing these articles, these materials, who have these magazines, who have these larger platforms, they are looking for material all the time and the place for them to start seeing you show up is on LinkedIn.

Also, the average user on LinkedIn makes over $100,000, which means they have the money to spend with you and your products, offers or services, okay? When I first started my LinkedIn journey, 1 % of people were posting content with over a billion users. Now that number has fast forwarded up to 3%, which means if you're gonna get in the LinkedIn game, now is the time to do it, okay? Because trust me, in the next three to five years, that number is gonna continue increasing.

which what that means is more competition. And the really cool thing about LinkedIn is that you can really grow and scale organically without paying for ads. Like no ad spend, you don't have to boost any posts. You literally just have to start showing up. LinkedIn is what Instagram and Facebook used to be 15, 20 years ago. And you don't have to sit there and dance on the internet or do B-roll or have all these fancy hooks to catch people's attention.

And don't get me wrong, if you don't have a lot of engagement in the beginning, don't beat yourself up. I did not either. Just keep going. And the stuff that you do start getting attention or comments or engagement to start really focusing in on those posts and keep making them better and better. So one hack I like to do is every Wednesday, I like to do a poll and I like to talk to my audience and I like to ask them questions like, what do you want to hear on the podcast? You know, what is your favorite?

Caroline Pennington (07:06.742)
See, we're in spring right now. What is your favorite season of the year? You know, we're in full blown flowers, the greenery are blooming here in South Carolina, pollen central, but I love the springtime. So it's okay for you to talk about some non-professional related stuff on LinkedIn too. Trust me, it's okay. I literally had a post that I did about my dogs, my two wine writers, Zina and Zara go freaking viral on LinkedIn, talking about them being my podcast managers. So.

Now I wouldn't do a post like that all the time on there, but once a month or once a quarter is completely okay. At the end of the day, people, yes, they wanna know you as the thought leader, as the professional, but they also wanna know you as the human. Like who is the human behind this personal brand? And the more you can give on that, the more engaged and connected your audience is gonna feel. Now there's a couple things that are no-nos for LinkedIn. I would say no cussing.

no politics and no religion, everything else is fair game. So whatever it is that you do, your profession, your niche, start talking about it and you will be considered a thought leader and an expert. And I would say give yourself at least three months to start working at growing LinkedIn muscle. And then by months six to eight is when you're really gonna see a lot of growth.

And again, it's a great place to get visibility for if you want to speak on stages, if you want to be a podcast guest, if you want to write a book, if you want to start a business, if you want to be considered an expert witness in something, LinkedIn is the place to be for all of that. And even if people don't engage with your post or like it, I guarantee you they're watching you. So when I was recruiting at my last job, I had been a headhunter 15 years, I was recruiting to C-suite professionals.

These are the high six figure, seven figure, eight figure income earners. Guess where they're hanging out? On LinkedIn. And the magic's happening in the DMS on LinkedIn. Okay. So when you connect with someone, I would highly encourage you to send them a DM. Don't connect it to your connection request, but send it to them separately. And if you are super busy like me, or this is just too much, you need to outsource this either to a virtual assistant or to someone else on your team, but say their name, Caroline. Nice to meet you. I look forward to connecting further.

Caroline Pennington (09:27.97)
You're going to get one of three responses. One, they're going to go to you. Two, they're going to do the AI likewise response or three, they're going to turn around and go creep on your profile and do due diligence on you. And if they like what they see or they need your products or services, they're going to cry creep back in your DMS and ask you for the meeting. So it's a great entry level way to get warm connections, to get coffee connections, to get meetings.

Even if those meetings are 15 minutes, that's completely okay, but the magic is happening in the DMS. So you want to start utilizing those to continue connecting with your audience and your, connections further, because that's just going to lead to more sales, more opportunities, more jobs, more speaking engagement, more podcasts, you name it. So if any of this has piqued your interest and you're like, Hmm, I'm really interested in getting started, but don't know where to start.

I have created a digital course for you called Leveraging LinkedIn and it goes through the exact process of what I use. I have in there post examples, I have in there the exact formula, five days a week, what to post on what days. And I have also material in the course that you can literally just copy and paste and change to your niche. And I promise you it'll do well. And keep in mind the goal on LinkedIn is not to get virality.

Not to be viral because viral just brings in a bunch of people from the ecosystem that are not your ideal customers or buyers or employers, but it'll bring in people who actually need what you have. And so I would highly encourage you to get started doing this. Leveraging Lincoln. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. If you want 20 % off, use the word podcast P O D C A S T. That'll be good for the next 30 days.

And I just can't wait to teach you all the things. So thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. I appreciate you more than you know.