Resources

• Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business
• Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Business
• Trent Dyrsmid’s LinkedIn Profile
• Ted Prodromou’s website

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent:

Hey there bright idea hunters. Welcome back to episode 172 of the Bright Ideas Podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help marketers to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business. So if you’re a marketer and you’re for proven tactics as opposed to just untested theories and ideas, well this is the podcast to listen to because we are going to get people here to share with you exactly what has worked for them.

In this episode my guest is a fellow by the name of Ted Prodromou and he is a Twitter and LinkedIn expert and has written a couple of books on the topic. So I wanted to do the interview and see if we could uncover any new ideas, things I haven’t yet heard of(and we did discover a couple) on ways to use LinkedIn to help you to generate more leads.

So this is specifically an episode for people who are tasked with the job of revenue generation. You need to get new clients and you are looking for ways to find ideal customers and to engage with them and to build a relationship and to get a conversation happening that can result in business.

LinkedIn is a very, very powerful platform for helping to make that happen. So Ted and I are going to talk about that in detail in just a few moments but if you’ll allow me before that I am going to take an unusual little sidebar. I don’t talk about my personal life really hardly at all here on the podcast but some of you may know that

I had a daughter about six and a half months ago.

And she is just now at the phase – her name is Kiana and she is the cutest little thing ever and she is just now at the phase where she is starting to explore eating solid foods and for the parents out there I am sure you are going to be chuckling as I being a first time parent describe this, holy cow, what a mess that kid makes [laughing] and stubborn. If you are trying to put food in her mouth she’ll have no part of it but if you let her put it in her mouth she is quite happy to let it drool all over her chin and cheeks.

So anyway being a parent is a pretty awesome experience and I hope you get an opportunity to do that some day.

The other announcement that I wanted to make; if you are looking for learning of help or guidance with inbound marketing we have an agency called Groove Digital Marketing and on that site – aside from the fact that there is a very popular blog there is also a library of free ebooks and webinar archives and so forth. And that is all at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/resources.

With those to quasi announcements out of the way please join me in welcoming Ted to the show.

Hey Ted, welcome to the show.

Ted:

Thanks for having me Trent.

Trent:

No problem at all, it is a pleasure to have you here. This is actually a particularly timely conversation because we just recently came out with our latest ebook which is all about how to leverage LinkedIn to help your business to grow so I thought that this would be a really good interview to do at this point in time. Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of how to flip up to hood on LinkedIn and get to the good stuff and figure out ways to make your phone ring and generate leads and so forth for folks who don’t yet know who you are let’s start with that. Who are you and what do you do?

Ted:

Okay, my name is Ted Promdromou. I am the author of ultimate guide to LinkedIn for business and ultimate guide to Twitter for business. Editor from Entrepreneur Press which is Entrepreneur Magazine’s publishing arm. Gosh, I’ve been in the hi tech world since 1980 if you can believe that.

Trent:

Oh oh, you’re aging yourself man.

Ted:

Yeah really [laughing]. Can you believe that? I wrote my first social media ebook back in 2005 if you can believe that.

Trent:

Really?

Ted:

Yeah.

Trent:

Wow. I don’t think most people knew what social media was in 2005 unless you were going to Harvard.

Ted:

Yeah, it was barely any Google or Facebook or LinkedIn. It was all Friendster, Myspace.

Trent:

Absolutely [laughing].

Ted:

Yeah.

Trent:

Alright so you have invested a great deal of your professional time into becoming quie an expert with LinkedIn. So that is good. You should be able to answer all the questions that I am about to ask you. With that said let’s just jump right into it. For folks – I think everybody listening to this probably has a LinkedIn account. So let’s not talk about how to get started because everybody got started.

But I know I have looked at a lot of LinkedIn accounts myself whenever I am prospecting or I am looking at a prospective client or what have you and most times they are little more than an online résumé. And they are not even very good at that.

So with that being the foundation, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see people making and let’s assume the audience for this discussion is not someone looking for a job, let’s say the audience for this discussion is someone who is in B2B sales.

Their job is to generate leads and ultimately generate business. So what should they be doing with their profile?

Ted:

I think what you said goes back to – I joined in 2005 and they used to have a wizard that took you through and asked you questions and you filled out your profile. All it was was a résumé site back then. So now it has this professional headline that says “Job Title”. So 95% of people have job title there. It does you absolutely no good.

It is so boring. I work with a lot of financial advisors and they all say, “I am a financial advisor.”

Well how do you stand out from the other 120,000 financial advisors that are on LinkedIn? So that is the biggest mistake I see. People filled out their profile years ago and they just tell me, “I don’t have time for LinkedIn or it doesn’t help me get business. They don’t realize people are going to their profile and looking at them. Just like you said, doing your prospecting.

You’re looking at profiles.

Trent:

It is good that you mention that because I actually had a client after one sales call sign up. And I said to him afterwards, “I am sure my content played a pretty heavy role in your decision to do business with us.” And I say, “Was it my website that you looked at or a bunch of blog posts?” He goes, “No, I looked at your LinkedIn profile.”

And I was surprised because I thought people would have looked at my website and all my glorious ebooks and blog posts and videos and all this other stuff that I put all this effort into making. But their decision was based upon LinkedIn.

Ted:

I saw a stat from Hubspot, it was last year, they said 78% of business to business professionals look at your LinkedIn profile before they do business with you.

Trent:

Yep, every time someone enquires about doing business with us or if I am looking to build a relationship with someone it is one of the very first things I look at because I want to know about them. I want to know what they have done, what their history is, what groups they are a part of. If they are publishing I want to see what kind of stuff they published and it is the one place you can go to get it all.

Ted:

Yeah.

Trent:

Okay, let’s go through the tacs, the steps at a time here. The first mistake you see people making is Job Title putting in a boring job title. What are some of the other things – and let’s not get too nitty-gritty. Let’s go for the low hanging fruit that has the highest return. So what are the really important things that you need to get right?

Ted:

Well, like you did with your profile. I take perspective of, “How can I help these people?” What problems do I solve because you go on Google you search to solve a problem usually or find a resource to solve a problem. So if your LinkedIn profile reflects that, just like you experienced the sale is half way closed before they even call you.

So if you customize it, a lot of people do the: “I am wonderful, I won a million awards, I am the best sales person or I can do this for you.” I take the perspective of the problem solution method. I find that much more effective instead of a sales letter. A lot of people teach, “Put a sales letter up there in your summary.” Where it is all about me but if you are going to be my customer I have to focus on you.

Trent:

I couldn’t agree more. So I am assuming you’ve looked at my profile?

Ted:

Yep.

Trent:

And so the summary that I have there; is that in line with what you just said?

Ted:

Exactly, yep, it is perfect.

Trent:

Alright folks, so if you want an example, just go look at my profile and you’ll see what we are talking about. But basically I’ve phrased it as you always should when you are writing copy. Make it about the person who is going to be reading it. Don’t make it about you. Because they are only interested in you because they think you can help them solve their problems, right?

Ted:

Yeah, we’re in business to solve problems for people and reflect that in your summary. They’re going to scan your summary really quickly. Your whole profile they are going to scan and what they are going to look at is your picture, your name – if you put too many characters in your name field – a lot of people like to put all their credentials in there and certifications.

It just distracts people – and then that professional headline. And then they are going to scan your summary. We all do that, we just scan quickly if it catches our attention and then we’ll read the details.

Trent:

What are some of the other things that you can put in the summary besides words?

Ted:

Bulleted lists is always pretty effective, of ways you solve problems or just a list. Because they will scan that list because they will scan that list and say “oh”. Keywords will catch their memories. It is like writing copy, or I did SEO for ten years. It is all about getting those keywords in front of them that is going to resonate with them and make them want to learn more about you.

Trent:

You can also put links to videos and put links to blog posts that you have written as well. That is one of the things that I’ve done. Some of my more popular pieces of content; I want to make sure that people see that stuff.

Ted:

I wish that we could put hyperlinks in the text. I hope someday they’ll let us do that too.

Trent:

Yeah, that would be nice but the visuals; folks just go to my profile and you’ll see what I mean. The image on the left in the summary is me standing in front of a whiteboard. Ooh, I got a typo there, I just noticed, click with an e on the end of it. Then another article about how to build trust and another article about prospecting on LinkedIn, so there is all sorts of stuff that you can add into that summary as well.

Ted:

Yeah, YouTube videos, content from SlideShare.net, yeah.

Trent:

So I don’t want to do the whole interview on just how to set up your profile. Again folks, just go look at my profile, I think it is pretty well optimized and you’ll see what I’ve done in the publication section, you’ll see how I am publishing all of our blog posts on LinkedIn which is just basically we cut and paste. Once they get published on the blog we republish that exact post on LinkedIn a couple of days later.

Much to my surprise there is 2124 people who are now followers of me on LinkedIn. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t use any paid ads or anything to get those followers. All I did was publish content that people seem to enjoy. In your publication section you can do (again as you’ll see in my profile) really quite a large – I don’t know if it is an unlimited amount.

I don’t think you’d want an unlimited amount but some of my blog posts that I want to make sure that people read or some of the guest articles that I have written on other authoritative sites are listed down in there.

Okay, so once someone has the profile all tuned up Ted, what are some of the little known tricks? The goal here is to be able to establish contact with people to have a meaningful discussion about doing business together; to prospect, to generate leads. What are some of the little known tricks that you think are effective for that?

Ted:

What I teach my students is, your profile is like your website and the more people you drive to your website, the more people are going to call you and learn more about you and the more clients you’ll have. If you treat your profile on LinkedIn like a website you want to drive people to your profile and get them to view you.

So just by being active every day, I actually set a timer and in fifteen minutes in the morning I’ll go through the contact section where it says keep in touch, and on silly little things like when people get a new job title you say congratulations to them and put a little thoughtful message in there, a sentence or two and people will actually reach out back to you and thank you.

It just kind of pings it, so it gets you back on top of mind with people. I recently had a financial advisor who, he said happy birthday to somebody he hadn’t really worked with in ten years and the guy came back to him and said, “I didn’t know you were a financial advisor. I am looking for someone to manage my money.” And he got a new client just by saying happy birthday. It is ridiculous but it works.

Trent:

And there is a new iPhone app for that by the way. Just came out the other day. So make sure folks that if you have an iPhone that you -and probably they have one for the droid but I am not a droid user so if they do I don’t know about it, just make sure that you download that app onto your phone and you’ll see that it prompts you to anytime that someone is having a birthday or a work anniversary or whatever.

You’re going to have just all of them pop up on the lap on the phone and it makes it really easy do while you are having your morning cup of coffee or you’re riding the bus or driving your car – or maybe not driving your car [laughing] but some kind of commuting where you are not in control of the vehicle.

Ted:

Or you’re standing in line at the grocery store, it is called connected. And it is very quick.

Trent:

Yes, it is exceptionally quick. Okay, so keeping in touch with people who are on your contact list. What about if I’m prospecting, so someone is unknown to me, they’re not a connection of mine, I haven’t been able to find their email address through the traditional means of guessing an email address. And LinkedIn is the only way, aside from me picking up the phone which I don’t want to do, they don’t want my call anyway, of getting a hold of them.

How can I reach someone that I am not connected with?

Ted:

So like a second level or third level connection?

Trent:

Sure.

Ted:

If you do the advanced search, you’ll find they say “similar to” and also shared connections. So those are two features that are really powerful. Sometimes you’ll have twenty or thirty people in common so you can reach out to those people, like maybe you know Joe Smith and I want to reach Joe Smith I can reach out to you and say, “Hey can you introduce me to Joe Smith?”

So that is an easy way, you just look for those shared connections in the search function.

Trent:

Okay, is there another way, I can think of another way?

Ted:

Yeah, there is a lot of ways.

Trent:

Well, I only got one other that I can think of. What are some of the –

Ted:

Oh what is that one?

Trent:

Look at what groups they are a member of –

Ted:

Oh yeah.

Trent:

Join a group and as soon as you are in the same group as anyone you can send them a message.

Ted:

Yeah, without being connected, you don’t have to waste an Inmail.

Trent:

Yep. Another thing that I just learned recently too and I am sure that you know this one already, let’s say that you are trying to build a list of prospects, like “who should I go after?”

So the search feature in LinkedIn is pretty powerful for that, but here is another really cool little thing; when you join a group, let’s say that you’ve found a group on LinkedIn that you think would be populated with the type of folks that you would like to get in touch with, once you go into that group there is a search feature within that group when you are looking at all the members list and just type in, if you want to get a hold of CEOs just type in CEO.

It will return to you a list of all the people who are in that group who have the CEO title.

Ted:

That is like a secret feature, they hide the search button. It is not really hidden but it is not obvious. Very few people know that you can search through groups like that and it is so powerful.

Trent:

Yeah, like I say, I only learned that two weeks ago or so and I thought, “Wow, that is pretty cool.”

Ted:

What I also do is I do advanced search criteria where you could put all the like Job Title and Company Size and Demographic Area or Geographic Area, and then you can save that search. And then automatically every week LinkedIn delivers me new leads based on that search criteria.

Trent:

Oh I like that.

Ted:

I think you can save three searches with free account and then with premium accounts you can save more search criteria.

Trent:

And you get access to all sorts of different things to search by Use of Experience, Job Function, Seniority Level, Company Size, if they are on the Fortune 500 or not, and so forth.

Ted:

People don’t realize that LinkedIn is a big search engine like Google but it is all business data. And it is all pretty accurate data, it has become a pretty big authority site. A lot of people use it for research, because they assume we are not going to lie on our résumés and professional history.

Trent:

One would hope [laughing]. Alright, before I move on, are there any other really neat little ways to either search or get in touch with people that are little known like the things we just finished talking about?

Ted:

Company pages is also a very valuable place to search for information.

Trent:

How do we do that?

Ted:

So every company should have a company page which is like a little mini website. And on there a lot of times they’ll have job openings and then they have press releases they post maybe. There is just lots of information that companies are posting on there of their companies. Like say the just hired some new CEO, so you would know that and in the article it may reference other people in the company that you could connect to that can get you in touch with the CEO.

Trent:

So you’re not talking about a search functionality on a company page as much as you are just go and read the company page, is that correct?

Ted:

Correct. Yeah.

Trent:

Alright, so we’ve uncovered some crafty ways to get in touch with people, what should you say or what shouldn’t you say maybe is the better question?

Ted:

Yeah, I try to avoid sending out invitations with the standard message and you find most people do respond to them anyway.

Trent:

Yeah that is for a connection request, but let’s say that you want more than a connection. You want to be able to have an opportunity for a phone call or in some way shape or form you want to go from being a total stranger to someone that they might be willing to have a conversation with.

Ted:

That is why I start the conversation with the invitation request because I’ll find them in a group maybe and I’ll like what they are posting so I’ll actually send them an invitation to connect. “So I noticed you talked about XYZ in the group the other day.” I mention the group name too so there is some commonality. And that just kind of says, “Okay, they’ve been reading my stuff” and they like it. So they automatically like you because you like them or yeah you complimented them.

Trent:

What if there is someone who is not saying anything on LinkedIn? Like there is a lot of people who don’t publish anything, you and I are marketers we publish like mad but most executives, they are not publishing anything.

Ted:

Probably 80% of people, they are just readers of LinkedIn.

Trent:

Correct.

Ted:

So for those people you just find something in common. The alumni section is a goldmine too. If you went to a college they have an alumni section and you can go through and find out all this incredible information about industry, where they work, their job titles, and you can reach out to them and say, “Hey I went to the University of Pittsburgh too.”

That is where I went to school and they work for a certain company that I might want to get into as a consultant, I can get an introduction from them, say the right person.

Alumni just love to help each other out.

Trent:

Absolutely, so that is one method of communication. Let’s say you don’t have the alumni thing in common what are some of the ways that people have tried to connect that you think are really ineffective.

Ted:

I get a lot of messages lately, people are emailing me, we are in a common group and they don’t try to build a relation to me, they send me this really long, probably a thousand word email that is all about them and their company and how wonderful their product is and I should sign up for a free trial or get on a call with them and they haven’t built a relationship.

It is like meeting someone in a bar and asking them to marry you on the first drink. People are getting a little too aggressive. I don’t do business with people unless I know, like or trust them. I’m not going to give you a lot of money to hire you as a consultant unless I can have some reason to trust you.

So going for the hard sell on a first email, first touch that just turns me off completely and sometimes I’ll just email them back and say, “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why I would give you any money. Give me a reason to like you or trust you.”

And they go, “Oh I get it now.”

Trent:

I actually wrote a post, one of the most popular posts I have ever written and if you Google what I am about to say you’ll find it. The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again. Yeah, that post went viral on I think Stumble Upon when I originally published it and I screenshotted examples of three of those horrible emails that you just described [laughing].

Ted:

What I tell people, LinkedIn is not a sales tool, it is a relationship building tool and sales will come from relationships and you’ll get long term relationships and long term repeat sales but if you go for the quick sale you may get an occasional sale but you are not going to get repeat customers and they are not going to spread the word about you. It is just going to be a onetime event.

Trent:

Not only that, if you abuse it enough, enough people complain about you you’ll lose your account.

Ted:

Well exactly, or if you spam to much in groups they can flag you and then every post you do in every group has to be moderated by the group moderator. I love that feature because it was turning into a spam fest.

Trent:

I still think it is to a certain degree. I am curious as to your thoughts on this; we use LinkedIn groups aggressively to promote our blog posts. So I started off just putting blog post titles in, in a link to the post and that obviously didn’t work super well.

And then I spent a bunch of time seeing does anybody actually have conversations within LinkedIn or are every new thread to promote a piece of content. And in all the groups I am in every new thread is to promote a piece of content of the person who started that thread.

There is no conversations happening in any LinkedIn group and I’m in like 50 of them. But what I’ve found works is if you instead change; let’s say your post is about how to build relationships on LinkedIn, come up with a question so when you are making that post into that group, I found that if I asked a question in the headline and then put a couple of sentences in and then a link to the post it worked fine and it got published.

Ted:

That is much more effective, what I like to do is look through the previous posts in the group. Which ones has conversations going on? And structure your headline just like they did and usually it is a question. A lot of groups now, they won’t let you put links in your posts and discussions so they’ll move it to the promotions tab. I had a couple of clients ask me about that last week.

Trent:

I am curious, can you think of a group where that is the case. I’ve never ever found a group where people are actually having discussions that there wasn’t a piece of content in the initial post.

Ted:

There is a Fresh Sales Strategies, Joel Conrad runs it. That is one of the best groups I belong to, it is not huge but there is real conversations going on. There is no spam or very little. So there are groups that are well moderated and has people get it. But most groups, yeah your right, Fresh Sales Strategies, I find that a very valuable group. There is not a lot of activity but there’s good discussions.

Trent:

And that one is called Fresh Sales Strategies?

Ted:

Yeah, so there is only 13,000 members, seems to be that I’ve run into a lot of good conversations there.

Trent:

Okay, so we are kind of dancing around what is a very controversial topic about how to properly use social media. I’m the first one to admit that I automate the heck out of – I spend no manual time publishing content to groups.

And I use a tool called Oktopost. It is a wonderful tool, it allows me to build campaigns, get analytics on my campaigns so I know for a fact that the approach that I am using works.

And I also use that same tool if anyone comments on any of the stuff I comment back. But I am not out there manually spending time reading these groups and seeing what the conversations … Who the hell has time for that stuff?

Ted:

Right.

Trent:

And there is a post that was written by Jay Baer who wrote a book called Youtility and he is very well known. I wish I had a link to the post. He basically said spam the hell out of social media because the organic reach is lower than it has ever been. If you put a post on your business Facebook page of all of the people that you paid to say “like that page” none of them are going to see it.

And that is because these companies; now that they’re public, they have to generate revenue, they have to generate profit. So the only way to do that is to force you to use their paid methods to get any kind of reach at all. So Jay’s article basically said, so as a result of that, the whole manual, hope you are going to have a meaningful discussion bla bla, he says that it’s hogwash, it is not going to work.

You just need to plaster your content all over the place as much as you can so that some people are going to see it. Make it good content, make it relevant to the group that you are “plastering” it in front of. This is a controversial topic. Some people think, “Oh my goodness that is horrible.” I just want to say folks it works just fine if you do it properly.

Ted:

Yeah you got to be careful of posting into groups because they could flag you but I use Hootsuite to do the same thing. Spread the content, I don’t blast the same content everywhere at the same time. I have it all scheduled out so one blog post will go one place one day on Twitter and then a different one will go on Facebook that day, a different one to LinkedIn.

Trent:

Oktopost allows you to do that as well and the way they’ve structured the interface is actually pretty cool. You can, for your groups, apply tags to each group to talk about the category of what that group is about. Maybe inbound marketing might be one of your tags, maybe B2B lead generation might be another tag. Maybe SaaS marketing , software as a service marketing might be another tag.

So when you make an update instead of thinking about, “Well which groups of my 50 that I’m in do I want to add this to.” You can just click on the tag button and say, “Send this to all the groups who I have tagged as a group about inbound marketing.” And of all the groups that you are a member of it will just choose those ones. So it is a huge time saver.

Ted:

Do you have the premium account so you can see the detailed who’s viewed your profile stats?

Trent:

I used to have a LinkedIn premium account and I got rid of it; didn’t really see the need for it.

Ted:

They’ve added some analytics features that you may want to reconsider.

Trent:

Really, so tell me about that?

Ted:

Who’s viewed your profile, it tells you how they found you, like where on LinkedIn or on Google they even search for you. It tells you the keywords they searched for. It also compares you how you rank for profile views with a hundred people LinkedIn considers similar to you and also how you rank with all your connections.

Trent:

I think that is part of the free, isn’t it?

Ted:

Well they give you a lot more information with the premium now.

Trent:

Do they?

Ted:

If I look at the professionals like me, right now I am number 12 out of 100. The people ahead of me all blast at least 10 to 20 messages a day on LinkedIn.

Trent:

Yep.

Ted:

And it is not bad content they do it at least two or three times an hour it seems like throughout the business day, they get their name in front of people over and over.

Trent:

I do as well. That is why I accept every connection that ever comes my way because if you’re going to connect with me that means I have to opportunity to have my content in your feed. Actually I haven’t written about this test yet. I ran a little test and I used Oktopost to create a campaign for this and I called my campaign Trent’s Micro

Blogging Campaign. Essentially what I did, I didn’t write any of my own new content for this campaign.

I simply went out and found articles that other people have written as well as a few articles that I’ve written already and then I started making sure I did two updates to groups each day. Different groups with different articles, so one in the morning and one in the evening, and bunch into my stream in the middle of the day and that campaign was started November 10th so this is eight days in and it has generated 159 clicks so far and five comments.

So that is 159 people who know that I exist in one way, shape or form and some of them probably viewed my profile, some of them probably came to the website and maybe some of them – I might have to go and look at the actual individuals – maybe some of them will even become leads as a result of that.

Ted:

Exactly.

Trent:

And that didn’t take hardly any time at all to do a whole week’s worth of content, maybe it took two hours. Because I wanted to read the stuff and put some actual effort into it to see if this was going to be a worthwhile experiment and so far I’d say it was not a bad use of my time.

Ted:

How much time do you spend writing content every week?

Trent:

I have writers so I don’t write hardly anything anymore. I used to write everything on all of my blogs. I just don’t have time to do that and now we have cash flow so I pay people to do it.

Ted:

And you don’t have to write your own content, you can curate content.

Trent:

Yeah.

Ted:

Find good articles like you said and add your comments to it and share it with your audience.

Trent:

Absolutely you can, because the thing is if you find a great piece of content and you have a very interesting comment about that content, in my mind that is almost as good as to having written the content to begin with because all you are really trying to do is put your thought leadership out there so that people will see it, consume it and think about maybe wanting to do business with you.

Because if you make an intelligent comment about somebody else’s article and somebody reads that article and then they read your point of view what is to stop them from going, “Wow, Trent, I agree with his opinion. He is a smart guy, maybe I should do business with him. Let’s go have a look at his LinkedIn profile. Let’s have a look at his blog and see if there is stuff that is continued to be of more interest to me.”

I should say, you asked me how much do I write. I still do write some of my articles but I probably only write a fifth or a sixth maybe of the amount of content that we produce.

Ted:

I shared a Zig Ziglar quote a while back. Just a little banner, a square banner, I said, “I love Zig Ziglar” or something, I shared it. I had over 3000 people view that within a week and it went all three levels. These analytics shows you how far it goes viral it went all three levels of my network and I had over a hundred comments [laughing].

Trent:

Yeah.

Ted:

So I got my name in front of all those extra people out of my network just by sharing a Zig Ziglar quote which took literally like ten seconds.

Trent:

Absolutely, and I think that is the thing that – and we’re a little off the topic of say how to use LinkedIn but we are very much on topic of content marketing and thought leadership. If you take time to put your opinion on things and that could be your article or your comment on somebody else’s article, in a public forum you are going to get exposure. Some people are going to read it and if you liken this to say outbound marketing, well the whole reason people will make cold calls is they’ll make a gazillion cold calls in the hopes to have an opportunity to have a proper qualified sales discussion.

Content is much the same thing only it is far less intrusive and it is not nearly as exhausting as making cold calling. So if you are not being really active on social media each and every day and you are not reading other people’s stuff every day, maybe you should be.

Ted:

Yeah.

Trent:

Alright Ted before we wrap this up is there anything that I haven’t asked you – and this panned out to be more of a two way discussion than just an interview and so I hope people enjoyed that but is there anything else that you think I should have asked you during this particular discussion to make it more valuable for the audience?

Ted:

That is what I like about talking to other people in the industry, because there is so much to learn. All these little things that work for you and then there is a little trick that you can pick up from somebody else and you can just leverage what is working for other people. That is why I find it so fascinating because you can’t just say that there is one formula that works but consistency is the key.

Trent:

I am glad that you added that because there is no one right way. People emailed me one time and say, “Trent, what is the key to lead generation?” Like there is some super one secret way that works in all cases at all times. I’ve never found the one super awesome way that works all the time.

What I find that works all the time is doing a lot of different things so that in aggregate you are getting your name or your company or your content out in front of as many eyeballs as you can. I look at it, it is like a billboard.

If you have a billboard beside a freeway or if you have a billboard beside a dirt road, I’ll take the one beside the freeway any day of the week even if the message isn’t quite as good as the one beside the dirt road because there are just so many more eyeballs that are going by every day.

Ted:

Yeah, you can get your message in front of millions of people every day for free, literally.

Trent:

Yep, alright Ted well thank you very much for making time to come on and having a chat with me it’s been a pleasure. If anyone wants to get a hold of you what is the one way that they can do that, the one easiest way?

Ted:

My website is TedPro.co that is the easiest way.

Trent:

Alright, Ted, thank you so much, have yourself a terrific day.

Ted:

Okay thanks.

Trent:

To get to the shownotes for this episode just head on over to BrightIdeas.co/172 and if you enjoyed this episode and want to help other people to discover it just go to BrightIdeas.co/love. Now, on the topic of inbound marketing, if you would like to learn more about it we have an entire library of complimentary ebooks and webinar archives and so forth and you can get to all of that at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/resources.

So that is it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in, it has been a pleasure to have you back and or maybe this was your first time. It will be a pleasure to have you back for another time so stay tuned. More episodes are headed your way soon. Bye-by

About Ted Prodromou

Ted Prodromou (pro-dro-mo) is the award-winning author of Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business and Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Business (Entrepreneur Press). Ted is also a frequent contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine and Entrepreneur.com.

Ted is an online advertising consultant generating leads for his clients using Google Adwords, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms. He also teaches online and in-person classes on LinkedIn, Twitter, and online advertising.