Using Linkedin To Get A Real Competitive Advantage For Your Business with Josh Turner

Entrepreneur and Author of Connect – Josh Turner

Josh Turner has helped thousands of business owners and professionals demonstrate their expertise, generate leads, and increase sales with LinkedIn. Josh has tripled the income in his own business every year for 3 years straight and his training on Linkedin selling is the best and most comprehensive on the market! What I love about this interview is how Josh explains that no matter what your advertising budget is (even if it’s NONE) you can get started on Linkedin today!

HIS BOOK IS RELEASED TODAY — 6/15/2015!

Check out LinkedUniversity.com for more info!

This podcast is brought to you by 99designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic design. 99designs connects business owners with great graphic designers from all over the world.

Whether you need a logo, website, t-shirt or other design, 99designs has you covered. Go to?99designs.com/EM. As an Eventual Millionaire listener, you’ll get a $99 upgrade for free.

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy today on the show we have my good friend Josh Turner. Josh is coming out with a brand new book called 'Connect' - you can check it out at TheConnectBook.com and he created and special page at TheConnectBook.com/EM just for you guys, you should check that out. He also runs LinkedIn University. I'm so excited to have him on the show today - thanks so much for coming on.

Josh: It's awesome to be here, Jaime. Seriously.

Jaime: Sweet. We were on a boat in San Diego from Rick Day, who's another guy who I interviewed, so you got to hang out with a whole bunch of other millionaires that I've interviewed so I feel like you've already been on the show but you haven't been on the show yet so why don't you go ahead and tell everybody what you do with LinkedIn University and the new book.

Josh: Sure. My company, actually most people know it as Linked Selling, which is our agency, and we help B2B companies generate leads specifically using LinkedIn. We have clients all over the world in lots of industries - companies like GKIC, Neil Patel, we've done work for Microsoft, just to name a few that people might know and then lots of small and medium-sized businesses that are awesome too but a little lesser known. Then we have our online training program called LinkedUniversity.com where we teach people how to do it. So those are really kind of the two main divisions of our company. We've been doing this for 5+ years now and we have a team of 15 here in St Louis and my new book 'Connect' is really the playbook for how we do what we do for our clients and how we've grown our business.

Jaime: How did you pick LinkedIn? People talk about niching all the time so it's amazing that you have an agency based on LinkedIn and can build products from that, I think that's awesome. How do you just go ahead and go 'Okay, we're going all-in on LinkedIn?'

Josh: I wish it was as sophisticated as 'I created a business plan, I saw the opportunity.' It was really just opportunity meeting hard work, right place, right time and things coming together. I started using LinkedIn back in 2006. I was the CFO of a construction and manufacturing company here in St Louis and that company went under in 2009, it was hit really hard by the downturn in the economy and that's when I started working for myself, so I was working as a freelance CFO - so a business consultant, basically - for companies here in St Louis and LinkedIn was one of the things that I was doing to get the word out about my business and generate some more clients and by 2011 I started getting asked by some of my clients 'Hey, what are these things you're doing on LinkedIn? Would you be willing to do them for us?' and I thought 'Hey, maybe there are some other companies out there that would like help with this too.' I've never really been afraid to try new things, especially at the time when I was working out of my house. I think when you're working as a solo-preneur freelancer you have the flexibility to try different things and it's not like a lack of focus - it's like you're trying to find the thing that gets traction. So it caught fire and we built LinkedSelling.com in 2011 and the business has really taken off since then.

Jaime: See, that's insane. How did you know? Because some people are like 'Oh, you were a CFO kind of person,' how do you totally switch? How do you know it caught on like wildfire? Like, what does that mean?

Josh: The sign that I had that there was something to this was when we signed a client out of the UK for what, at the time, was by far the biggest contract that we had on the books, and by 'we' I mean 'I' because I was the only person in the company at the time and it was at that point that I turned to my buddy Ben who was doing some part time work for me, helping out as the client base had grown a little bit beyond my capabilities and I said 'There's something to this, man. If we've got companies in the UK finding us on the internet and coming to us and signing these $2,500 a month contracts, six month minimum and all that kind of stuff, I think we've got something here.' So at that point Ben came on full time with me and we just started going after it, started doing webinars, started putting out case studies and content, started running Google ads to show up for terms like 'outsource LinkedIn marketing' and we just started growing the business and it's just taken off since then.

Jaime: Did you have a lot of competitors? Were there a lot of competitors in that niche? There are tons of agencies and agencies will be like 'Oh, sure, I'll do LinkedIn for you too,' but were there any specific niched competitors?

Josh: A couple at the time but almost none and it's really like that today. I mean there are a few out there but not that many. There are very few times when we're talking with a prospective client and they say 'We're evaluating a couple of different companies. We'll let you know once we've worked through this process.' We don't hear that from people. We are, almost 99% of the time, the only ones they're talking to about doing this because we have such a unique offering. We're working hard - our mission, big picture, is to be considered the number one company in the world when it comes to helping businesses grow using LinkedIn so we've got a lot of work to go before everyone in the world recognizes us as that but it's been a lot of fun along the way, for sure.

Jaime: So tell me what it was like, because I know you've grown this and to me it seems quick - like four or five years, when you're doing something, for how big you've grown it, is really impressive. I know you said 'I did Google ads and I did whatever,' tell me about the process of testing. So you knew there was a market, you're like 'Okay, great, there are people coming to me,' what was the best way to figure out your marketing strategy to get to those people?

Josh: It's a good question. So we started initially just putting the content out there and sharing it in LinkedIn groups because if you're in the right kind of LinkedIn groups where your prospects and your ideal clients are hanging out and you've got content you can share that's relevant and is going to resonate with them it's pretty easy to just distribute content in the LinkedIn groups and drive traffic back from it which will then get a percentage of people on your e-mail list if you've got the right offer set up and such. So that was one of the first things that we started doing. From there, we started running webinars and just kept testing different things and really seeing 'Who is this resonating with? Who are the types of clients who seem serious about these kinds of services? Which ones are not?' and we really started ticking off those when we built Linked University in 2012. We launched that in August of 2012 and by having that training program/university that teaches people how to do it, it positions us in a way that's much, much different than just another company saying that they do something, because agencies are a dime a dozen and the other thing is that it's a ridiculously effective funnel for folks who end up hiring us to do it for them because we've got low priced offers to get people in the door and then, as they get comfortable with our business, we have opportunities for them to go deeper and to spend a little more money with us, all the way up to just having us do it all for them. WE didn't build this all in a day, obviously - it's taken time and there's never even really a point where we can rest on our laurels because there's always going to be somebody out there who's trying to beat us. Marketing always changes so we always have to be testing new things and trying new things. Does that answer your question in a roundabout kind of way?

Jaime: It does. I have a question, though, based on that - when you started doing webinars, were you selling it as a service? Because then you didn't have a product, so you were selling your service at the end of the webinar?

Josh: At first, yes, we would do a webinar where we would provide some training on how to do some LinkedIn stuff and at the end we would have a very soft pitch of 'If you're interested in more about this, then here's how you can get in contact with us and here's the kinds of services that we offer,' and then we were pretty consistent with mailing to our list. Some people would say consistent - I was sending basically an e-mail a week, one or two a week, and some people would say 'Well, you're not e-mailing them daily, that's what consistent would be,' but for us at the time it was working and we were getting a lot of traffic to our blog because of that and getting people filling out the contact form for consultations and whatnot but, yeah, in the beginning, for probably the first four or five months, we were doing webinars, we didn't have Linked University so it was just pitching our services at the end.

Jaime: And it worked well for you then?

Josh: It worked okay. I mean the business was growing slow in 2012 until we launched Linked University.

Jaime: Okay, so tell me more about that.

Josh: We launched in August 2012. I didn't know what I was doing. At the time I had never purchased any raining programs, I didn't really have a mentor that was working with me through it that had done it before, I had just noticed that Marie Forleo had this launch for this thing, I forget what it's called, something business school.

Jaime: B-School.

Josh: B-School, yeah, she launches it every year, amazingly successful program, I'm sure it's awesome. I noticed all sorts of people promoting it that summer of 2012 so I thought 'Well this must be really good. I'm going to look at what she's doing and I'm going to try to model my marketing for this launch of my program, Linked University, against what she does.' And so, like a mad scientist, I had printed out all of the e-mails that I was getting from her on her launch, I had taped them up on the wall in my office and I had arrows pointing to different ones for the different things that were happening and printouts of the different landing pages and sometime, maybe a year or so later, I had figured out that basically what I was doing was executing a Jeff Walker-style product launch with the three video sequence, but at the time I didn't know that, I was just copying what someone else was doing.

Jaime: That's hilarious.

Josh: It worked pretty well.

Jaime: You didn't even buy a course that told you how to do that, you were like 'I'm just going to do exactly what she did.' Great!

Josh: Even down to studying her videos, looking at 'Well, video one does this so how can my stuff be similar?' and speaking to the different desires that people have and the pain points. It was a lot of work putting it together but that's what it takes with these kind of things. So the first month of Linked University being around I think we had a hundred sales and that was just me promoting it to our list of what was, at the time, maybe a few thousand.

Jaime: That's pretty darn good, then!

Josh: It was alright. We were stoked because we had priced it, at the time, because it had to be successful, we had to get a certain base in the program so I was really nervous about pricing it too high because I wanted to make sure we got people in this program so that we got the testimonials and we could actually say that we had a program with people in it, so I think we sold it for $97 for an initial 12 month membership to the first batch of people and we made $10,000 that month and we didn't pay out affiliates or anything like that so it was almost all profit so we were pumped and it's grown from there ever since. It's like a monster in and of itself. Tens of thousands of people have been through our trainings.

Jaime: That's insane. There are two different things I wanted to talk about. I definitely want to talk about LinkedIn and how a service business or any business offline can really go into that but we're going to do that later because I'm really interested in the webinar thing. I've seen you, over the past year, rocket out on webinars and I feel like I've been talking to a lot of people, especially in San Diego, and people are like 'Webinars aren't doing as well as they used to - people aren't showing up as well, especially in cold traffic.' Can you give me the lay of the land of what you see right now and what's working really well for you?

Josh: It's different for every business in terms of what the attendance rate is going to be, in terms of what traffic sources work - I mean really the gamut, and that's why it's difficult to just copy someone else's market and expect it to work for you.

Jaime: Which is hilarious, because that's exactly what you did with Marie Forleo, but go ahead.

Josh: I know, and that's why I wanted to say that, because it's a bit of a disclaimer because I can't really recommend that for everybody. It kind of worked for me but without understanding the strategy behind it and stuff it might not really be the right fit for you. What's working now in terms of webinars? We're seeing that a traditional model of putting on a good, solid presentation where you give people great content and then make them an offer that has some sort of scarcity built around it and has tremendous value, so give people an offer that they really can't refuse and a percentage of people will buy it. There are a lot of folks that we're working with that are still doing exceptionally well with webinars - webinars are still a huge driver of my business and with a lot of cold traffic channels that we have in place right now we're still seeing 2: or 3:1 ROI. With LinkedIn ads, I was just reviewing some of the numbers for campaigns we're running internally with a couple of my guys yesterday and for LinkedIn specifically we have certain campaigns in there where we spent $2,000 on one last week and generated something like $9,000 in sales. No, I'm sorry, I misspoke - that one was $5,000 in sales off of $2,000 in ad spend.

Jaime: Which you'll do all day long if that works.

Josh: Yeah, that's awesome.

Jaime: Put some money in, get more money out.

Josh: Typically, what we like to see for our marketing is we make a 2:1 return on investment in the first week, so if we spend $10 to get somebody on a webinar I would like to see that we make, on average, $20 per registrant on that funnel and that's usually going to take us seven days to see those results come around - by the time they sign up, by the time they see the webinar, by the time they maybe watch the replay and the offer closes - but even at 1: to 1.5:1 ratio, so if we're spending $10 on a registrant and we're only getting $15 of revenue per registrant then I'm still happy with that and for a lot of people, like a lot of businesses are like 'Dude, you're making money on your advertising in the first month? That's fricking amazing!' because you're basically acquiring customers at a profit, not even a breakeven, so it's a great model but a lot of people, and they're totally right, will say that the real money is going to be made on that backend, if you will. So if you've got a business that's kind of similar to mine or you've got an information product or a training program or something that you sell at a lower cost, whether it's $500 or $100, whatever it is, you've got to look at what's that next step beyond that, because that's really, I think, where the real profitability is going to be had for most people.

Jaime: Yeah, but then you can make money, have all of the leads and then sell them something on the backend later. It probably took a while for you to get there because conversion rates on your webinar, you're not just going to go in and throw $2,000 on a webinar that you don't know will convert, unless it's a test. Tell me about your process on how that worked and how long that took to get it up and running so that you could do that.

Josh: Well the first time we started spending money on advertising was probably a year and a half or two years ago, something like that. We had done the webinar to our list and it went well and the numbers were good and I had bought a $150 Facebook advertising webinar - a premium webinar that was put on by David Siteman Garland and Amy Porterfield and they were just kind of talking for a couple of hours about what's working today for Facebook ads and so I took some of the stuff they said about what they were seeing in terms of cost per click and things like that and I just kind of backed into what would the scenario look like for my business. So I did this webinar with my list and I knew that I had this many people sign up and so if I can get this many people to sign up from Facebook and maybe they're not as hot so maybe the numbers are half as good then I should be safe to at least break even on this and so we just took a risk and we started running some Facebook ads to a live webinar. The first one, I think we ran ads for three weeks leading up to it and the conversions were going very well and the costs we totally acceptable. We took some risks initially because we didn't have a test but I was like 'Let's just spend some more money,' and I think the first one we ever did with cold traffic from Facebook ads we had 800 people sign up for the webinar or something like that and 2-300 actually showed up and it was really successful - and ur product was cheaper then, too. I think at the time we were on $4-5 per registrant, is what the conversion cost was, so for that particular webinar we probably spent $4,000 on ads and we did $7-8,000 on sales so we were like 'Let's keep doing it.'

Jaime: Yeah, that worked. So your predictions were pretty darn spot on, is what it sounds like.

Josh: In that particular case, yeah, I think we were in the ball park.

Jaime: What is working for you now? You mentioned LinkedIn ads and that gets people really excited. I interviewed somebody who was super excited about LinkedIn ads and then, when you look at how much they cost per click, it is crazy. Of course you already know your numbers - which platform do you think people should be starting with? LinkedIn or Facebook - what do you suggest when someone is just getting into this?

Josh: I think it's tough to give a blanket answer. I started with Facebook ads because at the time, a couple of years ago, it was significantly cheaper than LinkedIn ads and LinkedIn didn't even have what they now have, called sponsored updates, which is their version of newsfeed ads and are working very well now. So where somebody should start, I guess just depends on who their audience is and where their people can be found but also maybe it comes down to what they can afford and how much they can pay to get somebody to opt in to their lead magnet, their webinar, whatever it might be, and so on LinkedIn specifically I always tell people 'If you're not willing to pay $10 or more for a webinar registrant then you probably don't want to do it because it's going to be very difficult to get it for less than that.' For some people, they can make Facebook work at a cheaper conversion than that - they can get a webinar registrant for $5, it depends. Things always change - right now, with a lot of our campaigns that are running, just fill disclosure, we're struggling with some things on Facebook for our own internal marketing and LinkedIn is turning into our A player and Facebook is costing more money for us right now. I don't know if it's because it's more competitive because more and more are using it or Facebook is just increasing the costs, similar to what Google did many years ago, but Facebook is becoming more and more challenging for us and LinkedIn is working pretty well.

Jaime: See, that's really good to know. That's what I've been hearing from friends and we're doing it took. Everyone is going 'Okay, Facebook is being fickle lately.'

Josh: Right, yeah.

Jaime: That's why I'm really curious too, if LinkedIn ads are working really well for you. I'm always looking for better marketing tactics, right.

Josh: Sure.

Jaime: So tell me a little bit more. Of course you're the LinkedIn guy, so you know about this stuff in general anyway, but give us a framework of ads on LinkedIn. Like you said, sponsored posts - do I need to have a huge LinkedIn profile in order to start doing that? How do I even work on LinkedIn ads?

Josh: So LinkedIn ads, first off, are going to be run through a company page, not your personal profile, so you have to set up a company page first, which is a good thing for anybody to do anyways, and then there are two basic types of ads that they have available on the self-serve platform, which are the old school ads - they call them ads - and those are the ones that are in the right sidebar and they show up in some other places and they're really inconspicuous and they get terrible click through rates and most of time they're very expensive cost per click. Then, what they came out with about a year and a half ago, is something called sponsored updates and those show up in your newsfeed, your homepage on LinkedIn - they don't call it a newsfeed but it's the same thing. It basically appears just like a status update from one of your connections, so it shows up there on your LinkedIn homepage, and those are getting really, really good click through rates and, for the most part, those are what we're focusing on for our own marketing and for most of our clients. There are other types of ads that you can get access to if you're a big company but you have to have a pretty big budget to get access to those - you work directly with LinkedIn and there are some cool things that you can do if you are a big company but we'll save that for another discussion. Then, of course, it's not just about ads - there are a lot of organic things you can do on LinkedIn too, so if you're not quite ready to spend money there's the ability to reach out to people that you're in groups with on LinkedIn. Any group that you're in, all of the members in these LinkedIn groups, they have essentially opted in to receive messages from other group members - and the reason why I say 'essentially' is because, when you join a group, LinkedIn makes you uncheck the box if you don't want to receive messages so the vast majority of people are opted in to receive messages from other group messages and if you're not just blatantly spamming people with crappy, weird offers and you're sending relevant stuff and you're not abusing it, it can be a really great way to get in front of highly targeted prospects to let them know about a webinar or 'Hey, I've got this new eBook I put out,' or whatever it might be, and that's totally free, it's just the time that you or maybe an assistant puts in to do it for you. So that's another play. Another one is just marketing to your first degree connections and another one is distributing content to your LinkedIn groups like we talked about earlier. One that I talked about a lot is finding LinkedIn group owners and brokering JVs or affiliate deals with them so that they will promote your stuff to all of their group members. There are a lot of different ways to go about it; it doesn't have to be a platform only for people who have money to spend.

Jaime: Which I love. You actually helped me with a bunch of stuff too and we've done a lot of the things that you suggested also, although on the opposite side I'm in quite a few groups and I've been spammed by people going 'Hey, you like this, you'll love this!' and I'm like 'Oh my gosh, another one,' so it is hard to break through the noise. What do you suggest? Do you have ae template? How do we break through that noise? Because there are people spamming you. I know they're trying not to, but they are.

Josh: I think that it comes down to a couple of things. One, it's a numbers game - what  we typically see when we're doing what we call cold messaging through LinkedIn groups is if you're doing it right and you've got a message that's being sent to the right person and it's not some spammy BS then we're typically going to see that somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% of the people who are messaged will opt in for whatever you're telling them about, which is actually pretty good - five out of every hundred - if you compare it to other things, it's a pretty good conversion rate there, but to get that, what we've seen work best, is don't put together a press release, don't make it sound like a marketing brochure - you want it to feel like a personal message that you are just sending to a friend. The key is to really work on the script and the subject line and everything so that it totally feels informal, like you just came across this person?s information in this group and you thought 'Hey, I?ve got to get this into this person?s hands because it looks like something they would love.' But seriously, write it like you would be writing to a friend and your results will be much better, because as soon as people start seeing that sales pitch they're going to hit the delete button.

Jaime: Definitely. It's funny, I did that when I launched my book - I went through all my friends that I had and I wrote one e-mail as if I was writing it to the person I was writing it to and then I just copied that one and erased the name and I sent it to everybody else and it was hilarious because everybody thought that it was a personal message - I mean, don't get me wrong, it was personal, like 'Hey, I have a book coming out,' but I got so many people going 'Oh my gosh, it's so great to hear from you. I'm definitely going to get the book this week. How have things been?' all of that stuff. I have a lot of connections on LinkedIn and it was as if I had personally e-mailed all of them. It did take a lot of time, don't get me wrong, it was a lot of time. So how do we manage that? Because if it takes a hundred to get five and it will take you an hour to do this to a hundred people it does not seem worth the time to have people do some of that stuff.

Josh: Think about it this way - first off, you can actually send 200 messages in an hour.

Jaime: Oh you can? You know these numbers, good.

Josh: I do know these numbers. Let me also be totally candid about this - we would never recommend somebody send more than a couple of hundred messages a day using this strategy. You don't want to just sit on LinkedIn all day messaging people, you want to keep it within reason. If LinkedIn sees that this person messaged 900 people today through their groups, there's a good chance that they're going  slap you on the hand or restrict your account, potentially, and you don't want to do that, so keep it within reason. To answer your question, if you look at the cost of doing it, so if you can send 200 messages in an hour and you can get ten people to opt in to your webinar, what was the cost of doing that? If you did it yourself, what's your hourly rate? So if your hourly rate is $200 per hour then maybe the cost per opt in isn't that good but maybe if your assistant did it for you and that person gets paid $15 or $20 per hour then, all of a sudden, your cost per opt in is $1.50 to $2 on that strategy and that makes sense at that point, or if you have somebody overseas who is maybe at an even lower cost, a virtual assistant or whatever. I think that's really the way to look at it. The other thing to consider is sometimes figuring out how to generate those leads when you're just starting out and you're really on a budget and you don't have the money to be hiring people and investing in ad campaigns and setting up stuff, there are people out there, I know, who have the time to do that themselves and it will be valuable use of their time to do it when they're just getting started.

Jaime: Heck yeah. For me, I charge $1,000 an hour so it didn't make any sense on my part but you're right, I have an assistant! Especially on a day where she doesn't have as much to do and I?m like 'Oh, shoot, if you're bored or whatever...' not that anyone is ever bored in our business, but you know what I mean, 'Here, take an extra hour or two just to do this because we have a webinar coming up.' That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so that actually seems a lot more manageable. Thanks for flipping my head around it because I was like 'That seems like a lot,' but when you actually work out the numbers it's not that bad at all. So tell me this - I have a lot of people that are one-off service providers, they're solo-preneurs, they're graphic designers, they run the gamut, and they want to connect with more people, they want to prospect as much as humanly possible - how do we do that really, really well on LinkedIn? Is it the same messaging strategy or is it something else?

Josh: No, it's going to be different. I've just been throwing out all of these different tactics and things that you can do because I wanted to make sure that we give something for everybody but really, for those types of people, the best bet is going to be developing relationships and really getting connected with relevant prospects and relevant potential referral partners and influencers in their space and really positioning yourself as one of the good guys - putting out good content, staying in touch with them, sending them messages every once in a while. If you really want to take it up a notch, start your own LinkedIn group so that you can position yourself as a leader in your market and attract prospects into that group so that then, whenever they're getting the group communications, they're seeing your name in this really favorable, positive light. That's an amazing way to execute a drip marketing campaign that can literally keep your name in front of your prospects on a daily basis without them getting turned off and there are not many other ways that I know of to achieve that. If you're doing e-mail marketing, there are some people that advocate - I already touched on this - e-mailing every single day, but for a lot of people they don't want to do that or it's just not in the cards, maybe they send an e-mail once a week or whatever it might be, but the systems within LinkedIn, especially if you run your own group, there are mechanisms that LinkedIn gives you that really allow you to keep your name in front of people every single day and so what happens then is when you then start reaching out to those people over time, who you've really developed this relationship with and positioned yourself as a real leader in your market, when you start reaching out to them, saying 'Hey, I'd love to chat sometime and learn more about your business. Would you be open to grabbing a coffee sometime?' and all those kinds of things, you'll get a much better response rate at that point and that kind of system is what we do for, I would say right now, probably 75% of our clients, building out those kind of campaigns, and they're more long-term, nurture campaigns to position our clients as somebody who their  prospects will know, like and trust so that then, when we reach out to set up a phone call, people are very receptive to it.

Jaime: So you actually do this for other people too. That's really interesting. So it doesn?t necessarily have to be personal, even though I'm sure it feels personal. So what is the strategy? I'm especially thinking about creating LinkedIn groups - if you create your own group, nobody joins, like if I create an Eventual Millionaire group, who says anybody is actually going to join it at all? How do you get people to join?

Josh: Well people would join your group.

Jaime: That's nice!

Josh: I'll join your group.

Jaime: Yes, one, thank you!

Josh: You're right, though - just launching the group doesn't mean it's going to catapult to success, no matter who you are. You have to have a marketing plan behind it, just like any new initiative. For our clients it's typically a combination of a couple of things - one, we just want to make sure we have a foundation of first degree connections on LinkedIn that are highly relevant prospects that are the right fit that are going to want to join this group so when we first launch the group we have this database already to promote it too. Then we can usually get a 1few hundred people to join the group right out of the gate using that strategy. Then, of course, our clients have things like e-mail lists and any other marketing channels that they're utilizing where they have an audience and we'll ask them to promote it there too, but for many of our clients you guys just do all of it and we don't have that at our disposal. So then we turn to the ongoing marketing of it and one of the most effective ways to grow a LinkedIn group is to use that same messaging strategy that we talked about for promoting your content and webinars but use it to invite people to join your group - so you reach out to people who you think look like a good fit for the group and say 'Hey, I started this new group. It's about X, Y and Z. Here's why it's going to be awesome. I would love for you to join it. If you think it's something you would be interested in, here's the link if you'd like to check it out.' Again, that's a labor intensive process but it's a pretty quantifiable way to grow the group. Then, aside from that, on an ongoing basis just sharing updates about your group on a regular basis so people are continually seeing that and, once your group gets to a certain size, if it's niched the right way and positioned the right way, it kind of takes off on its own. That number - what size? When does it take off on its own? - can be different for everybody. What's an example? We have a group called Commercial Construction Professionals and once it got to around 5-6,000 members it started taking off and now it's got 15,000 or something like that. It just grows organically now because every time somebody goes on LinkedIn and searches 'commercial construction' it's the biggest LinkedIn group out there so it's constantly being discovered by people. So it's really grinding it out in the beginning to get it to a decent size and then it can go from there. For most of our clients, they're not looking for massive numbers, they're looking for the right quality potential clients who are in that group. They don't need 15,000 people in that group; they need 15 of the right people, so what the group allows people to do, instead of just creating this big list and asset to market to bunches of people is it positions them as a leader in front of their prospects.

Jaime: That's awesome. One question, like when dealing with Facebook groups - you don't own it, and when you don't own something they could take it away. Like I'm on YouTube and YouTube flagged me because someone was mean.

Josh: What did you do?

Jaime: I had Tucker Max on my show. My editor forgot to flag him. Of course he was explicit - we know Tucker, you know Tucker well - we forget to mark it as explicit and I was shut down for six months and can only do 15 minute videos, which is lovely. That stuff can happen to anyone on Facebook and LinkedIn - do you currently try to drive them to an e-mail list? What do you do so that you can actually capture some of those? Because when they're just in a group, that's great, and you own it but you don't own it.

Josh: Of course. I totally agree with you on that. We make offers to the groups periodically to promote webinars with our own internal groups. For our clients, oftentimes it's really a mechanism for them to generate leads in the short term. That is for qualified prospects agreeing to a phone call with them or somebody on their sales team.

Jaime: So it's usually a phone call, not 'Hey, opt in for my sales book,' or something like that.

Josh: It really depends. There are a lot of ways to structure it. You can use your group to drive people to something like that, so you get people opting in for your eBook or your webinar, you can be driving people to strategy sessions, you can be working the messaging behind the scenes to get them to agree to phone calls, there are a lot of different ways to structure it. So for our clients who are using it to generate consultations and strategy sessions and phone calls, to be totally candid with you, I think most of our clients just look at it as a lead generation campaign. We have some that look at the group as a long term aspect but it's a smaller percentage so most of our clients are looking at it as part of this lead generation campaign that we're running and when the lead generation campaign doesn't work anymore we'll be done with it.

Jaime: Huh, I?ll just have 15,000 people sitting over here. That's crazy. That's really awesome, though. I see it as an asset - if you're going to build something, you might as well build something that will last longer than a month or two as you're trying to get leads because people, especially solo-preneurs or people who only have a couple of people on their team, only have so many hours in the week and so if you're going to build something you want to make sure that you're building something that's for a little bit longer. What can you guys see for this LinkedIn strategy? How many leads can you get? I know it depends on how much time you put in and how many people you message but what are you seeing for ratios?

Josh: First off, I don't think LinkedIn groups are going anywhere any time soon. LinkedIn has been making changes recently, developing them and improving groups, so they're going to be around for years to come. Ratios of what we see in terms of leads, strategy sessions, phone calls and things like that, for most of our clients they're generating something in the neighborhood of 20-25 appointments a month, somewhere in that ballpark - some are less, some are more - and that can be through a combination of different strategies. On the flipside, for clients of ours that are doing things like promoting webinars and eBooks and stuff it can be hundreds or more of opt ins per month but for the companies who don't really do all of that webinar and eBook stuff, they want people on the phone with their sales team, you're utilizing these types of campaigns, usually, for every LinkedIn profile that we manage for our client, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 leads per month, which are appointments, phone calls with prospects they've identified as somebody that they want to do business with, and we take it all the way to the point where that person says 'Yeah, I?m cool getting on the phone with you, let's do it,' and that's where we hand it off to our client.

Jaime: Nice, okay, so usually for those type of things they're usually higher priced items - they have a sales team or someone doing sales so usually it's not a $100, $200, $300 thing, which is probably why it makes a lot more sense to have you guys do that stuff and 20-25 appointments is awesome, especially if it's higher priced stuff and they know what their conversion ratio is.

Josh: For sure, no doubt about it. We have a lot of clients that are more solo-preneurs, for lack of a better term. I feel like these days you can take any word and append it with 'preneur' and there's probably a podcast about it.

Jaime: Hell, yeah. Toilet paper-preneur, we've got all sorts, people just trying to come up with other things with 'preneur' at the end.

Josh: Solo-preneur is a common one but we have a lot of clients who are small businesses where the owner is the one who handles the sales in the company too, so it's not just big businesses.

Jaime: That's really interesting. I love that you know the wide range that's out there, because a lot of people that are listening don't have a couple million dollar business and they just need another stream. Some people are like 'Shoot, I need ten appointments this month in order to meet my goals that I?ve set out.' We have a lot of people in Millionaire Hustlers that are like that - they're like 'Okay, I need ten appointments. How do I get ten appointments?' and they're going through the marketing, testing, trying to figure out the best way. So what do you think as far as avatars go? Who is on LinkedIn? I know it's more businesses and more professionals and I?ve heard that they make way more money than the people on Facebook make but if somebody?s trying to decide whether they should go with LinkedIn or not, because it's a whole market testing strategy that they're going to have to go through on their own, who should be saying yes to LinkedIn?

Josh: I'm trying to think how to say it without just repeating what you said you already know.

Jaime: Just say 'Jaime, you're smart and you got it.' No, I?m kidding!

Josh: Obviously if you're targeting people that are working for businesses, so if you're B2B, then LinkedIn is going to make sense for you, but I think that doesn?t have to be the only place that it makes sense. Let me think of a good example - let's say you've got a personal development program. It could be a front end program and then you have higher end coaching off the back of that and all that kind of stuff and let's say it's for women specifically and you're going after professional women, 35-55 years old, so you might think of your business as B2C because you're selling to women consumers, you're not selling to businesses, but all of those women, if you're targeting professionals, are going to be on LinkedIn, or let's say that professional women isn't even one of your parameters or criteria - if you're just looking for any woman aged 35-55, well a ton of them and the ones that have money are going to be on LinkedIn so there's a lot of different applications for it, even if you're like 'Well, my ideal avatar is not going to be buy on LinkedIn.' I use this example a lot - let's think about a small business manufacturing dog collars. Say you're making dog collars in your basement at night when you get home from work and you're trying to figure out how to sell these dog collars - you're not going to go on LinkedIn and have much success if you're just hitting people up and saying 'Do you want to buy a dog collar?' because on LinkedIn that's just not going to work. But you could use it to reach out to people in the press, so editors of blogs and websites or newspapers. Journalists, people that are in the media in general, are all on LinkedIn so you can develop relationships with them and give them story ideas and potentially weasel your way in to having them give you a plug and talk about your business in whatever outlet they run. That's one thing. Another thing would be reaching out to buyers that potentially could be interested in placing your product in retail locations or maybe the owner of a mom and pop shop - maybe there's a mom and pop pet store or something like that - you could find those people and reach out to them and talk to them about carrying your product. So I think that, for a lot of businesses, maybe even if they're not going to go after the direct consumer, there's more of those back office type of relationships that can be pretty fruitful and LinkedIn can be a good place to find those people and connect with them.

Jaime: I love hearing that because LinkedIn sort of gets pushed off to the side, I think, by people, especially because everyone?s excited over Facebook, you know what I mean? So it's really interesting to hear. It makes a lot of sense - it's just connecting with people and knowing exactly what they do. It would be kind of weird to get a message like that on Facebook, going 'I see you're the person who does this. Hey, friend me.'

Josh: Sure. I was just going to say, because you mentioned that post, I heard recently from one of our Linked University members who has bene testing a new approach where, when he sends the connection request on LinkedIn, he also adds them as a friend on Facebook and he says he's getting exceptionally great response rates from it, so you never know.

Jaime: Yeah, so you're actually paying attention.

Josh: These days more and more people are connecting with business type folks on Facebook. I've seen it - in the last six months my number of friends on Facebook has doubled. They're not real friends, they're business acquaintances.

Jaime: 'Real' friends. I know, it's kind of weird. I started, at the beginning, just accepting everyone on Facebook and then I don't put anything about my kids or anything because I don't know half of the people who are watching my Facebook stuff. The same thing with LinkedIn - I have tons of people that I don't actually know and I'm like 'Accept, sure, why the heck not?' So I have all these random people - they're probably listening to this show and I?m calling them all random! Can you get analytics from this? So can I go onto LinkedIn and go 'Okay, I do want to reach these types pf people and they're in these types of group'? Are there any sort of analytics? I know on Facebook you can get quite a bit but can you get any of that sort of stuff on LinkedIn?

Josh: Using the advanced people search you can get pretty granular with the type of person you're looking for, searching for keywords in their profile all the way to what companies they work for, what industries, certain tittles, company sizes, all sorts of stuff, so you can do a lot of good with that. The same with groups - searching for groups to try to figure out what groups your prospects can be in - there's a lot that you can do with that. There's no doubt that Facebook, just as a whole, has just got so much more power behind it than what LinkedIn offers. LinkedIn's ad platform, for example, is kind of rudimentary, almost in the stone age compared to Facebook's power editor, but sometimes that's not such a terrible thing because it makes it easy to use - and they'll catch up one of these days.

Jaime: That's really awesome. That's the thing, I guess Facebook is just sort of leading the way, which is why everyone is gung-ho, but we've been talking about YouTube ads and LinkedIn ads and there are so many other options, it's just that Facebook is the hot thing that everybody's talking about and it's amazing, supposedly, right now, so it's not like anyone is going to stop doing Facebook but I'm always wondering 'What's the next big thing?' because everyone has hopped on the Facebook wagon so I'm always wondering what's the next thing, especially with LinkedIn.

Josh: For sure. I see more and more people that are jumping off the Facebook bandwagon or getting their accounts shut down or seeing that things aren't working as well anymore. I see more and more discussion about that in certain circles. For me, personally, of course I know all about LinkedIn, I'm a big advocate and seeing great results there, but I think one of the other things I'm excited to see is the new Pinterest ad platform.

Jaime: Yeah, and I know Instagram is going to be doing it. That's the cool thing, I feel like all the other platforms are finally catching up. Someone told me about Twitter ads working really well for them and I was like 'Oh, I forgot Twitter had ads,' and it's amazing to see them all come up because every platform has a slightly different type of avatar so if you're a business owner that's B2B of course it makes sense to go to LinkedIn, it's just a no-brainer, but for other things like Pinterest, I mean reaching moms on Pinterest would be insane. Would that be beneficial for you? Because your avatar is a little bit different, isn't it?

Josh: It is but I think there are applications for us on Pinterest. There are a lot of people on Pinterest who are putting business related content out there, inspirational quotes and things like that. I don't have the strategy nailed down yet but I've seen some people doing some stuff on Pinterest that I think makes a lot of sense. I don't even know what they're called, I know so little about Pinterest, but the images that you're sharing can have links embedded in them so if you can just figure out how to get it in front of enough people you can drive traffic to anything that you want.

Jaime: I love the internet. I know we have to start wrapping up. I always ask the same last question - what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Josh: I think it would be to do something bold and do it in the marketing department. What I mean by that is that when I really saw my business start taking off is when I started taking risks and placing some bets and nowadays in our business we look to try some sort of new, substantial marketing investment typically once a month. They're not all going to work out - sometimes we lose money - but, on the whole, if two out of three or even one out of four of them work out, we're usually going to be pretty far ahead. When I first started, I wasn't spending any money and I think the business could have grown faster, I could have gotten to that $1 million quicker if, a little earlier, I had realized I was being a knucklehead and taken some of this money and invested it in some things. So that's what I would say.

Jaime: Perfect advice. People need to be hit a little bit because we like our safety. Entrepreneurs are riskier than most, but still we like our safety, especially if you're a solo-preneur and don't have a lot of cash or your cash flow has issues.

Josh: Sure.

Jaime: So tell us where we can get a copy of the book and where we can find out more about you.

Josh: So the book, you can go to TheConnectBook.com/EM. I set up a special link just for your listeners, Jaime. Do you mind if I take a quick second and tell them what they can get if they go there?

Jaime: Of course.

Josh: Awesome. First off, the book is the playbook for how my company has tripled our revenue every year for the last three years and for how we're getting some really awesome results for our private clients. It's taken us a few years to really perfect the system but now we're there and the book is the playbook for how we're doing it and what we see is that utilizing this process that I work through in the book, 29% of targeted prospects that work through the process will agree to a phone call or a meeting with you or somebody on your sales team or you can use the same process to move them towards other offers like webinars and free reports and lead magnets and whatnot. The whole thing has been designed over a number of years - like I said, it took us a while to really dial it in but the reason why I started down this path is because the old fashioned way of having coffees and lunches and just networking to try to get referrals and stuff, I tried that when I was first getting started and it doesn't work. It didn't work for me, it just wasn't saleable, I wasn't meeting with the right people and so this process has allowed me to transform my business and I know it can help a lot of people. So if you go to the link that we shared, TheConnectBook.com/EM, the book is actually coming out, I believe, today, and for the next week you can still get in on our initial pre-order launch, even though it's out, so if you go to that link there are instructions there on how to do it but basically if you buy the Kindle version for $4.99, send us your receipt and we will ship you the physical, real copy of the book for free and we will also enroll you in a LinkedIn course called 'Your LinkedIn Marketing Masterplan' and we will enol you in that for free as well when you send us your receipt.

Jaime: See, I love that. We actually bumped up the interview so that way it could go out live during this timeframe because I know a) you're going to want it and b) I want you to hit the Wall Street Journal list - so, everybody, it's five bucks, go and get it and you're going to get a whole course that he created for free too. It's kind of a no-brainer so everybody should definitely check that out and you need to come back and let us know if you hit the Wall Street Journal list for sure.

Josh: I will. Thanks so much, Jaime.

Jaime: Thanks so much, Josh. I really appreciate it. I hope you have an awesome day.

Josh: Same to you. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much.

Jaime: Bye.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: advertising budget, Business Growth, Business Scaling, Decision Making, Josh Turner, lead generation, Lead Magnet, LinkedIn, millionaire interview, Strategic Decision

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

Learn More