Welcome to the Small Business Big mindset podcast, where we dive into tactical strategies to grow your business. And to make an impact on this world. A huge part of success is keeping your mindset and vision on track. So this is a major part of our process. And this podcast, let's do this. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Small Business Big mindset podcast. I am so excited to have my friend Rachel on Rachel Simon, founder and CEO of connect the dots digital, she helps professionals look good on LinkedIn. If I could see the audience right now. And I took a poll of who needs help on LinkedIn. I think everybody's like canned would shoot up. So thank you, Rachel, so so much for being here.

So excited to be here. Yeah, it's great to have the chance to chat.

Love it. She every year, like one of my top LinkedIn professionals that I always go to, for advice, because like, I feel like LinkedIn is, as is a lot of social platforms always changing. And I'm like, Okay, now what works what's best. So you always have the detail. So why let's just jump right in. Will you tell me a little bit about you and your background? How you got started? Sure, yeah.

It's kind of a funny story. I think like most good things in life, you kind of fall into stuff without planning for it. So actually spent the beginning of my career working in nonprofit. And, you know, nonprofit is all about community and building relationships. And I did a lot of program planning. And I eventually kind of moved into social media because I had a personal interest in it. And the organization where I was working, you know, as the late, the late early 2000s, the end of the aughts, and everything was, you know, social media was just getting started. And they were very nervous about social media strategy. And I was like, let me do it. And so I launched your social media strategy. And it was really successful. And my husband was like, I think we could do this on your own, I was working part time and nonprofit, which is not a tremendous amount of money. Oleg is trying to like break down my door right now. And so I started doing marketing consulting on my own, which was pretty scary step at the time, and I was brought into a client through a friend, where there was a healthcare company based here in Atlanta, where I live. And they, they brought me in to do email marketing, which now I think is absolutely hilarious, because I do not, I am not an email marketer at all. And they were like, Let's put a call to action in the next email to connect with the CEO on LinkedIn. So I take a peek at his profile. And the CEO who had been in his industry for 30 years, had 12 connections 1212, like one, two. So I politely recommended that maybe wasn't the right time to put that in an email, because clearly he doesn't use LinkedIn. And I was like, why don't we help him build his LinkedIn presence and get more connections and, and we can try again in a couple of months when he has a more respectable network. But what ended up happening was that he started to see this great momentum building, you know, connecting with not only people that he knew in his industry, but new clients, and in one year, just from kind of putting a pretty consistent strategy together, he was able to help the business close eight new customers. So I was like, There's something really cool here. And I started doing it for more and more clients. And then I incorporated connected dots digital back five years ago, in January of 2018. And here, we are not now I focused solely on helping professionals show up and use LinkedIn to really help meet their business goals.

Okay, no, that's great. And how, how important would you say it is, if you work? A lot of my I have a lot of entrepreneurs on in the audience, but also folks who maybe do entrepreneurial stuff on the side and work for like a corporate life, you know, that kind of thing. So, how important is it on either side of the fence to have someone within your business within your company, be the face of the company on LinkedIn?

It's super important, but that's where you're going to be found. So let's talk on the entrepreneurs side. You are your business made? Yes. I have a company page you have a company page. But people are hiring me. Because I am the face of my business because I am my own. I In the business, and so having a LinkedIn presence that really shows clearly who you are, what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and present expertise, front and center, is how people can make that connection with you. So that you are top of mind. And then when that need arises, they think you to solve their problem. On the other side, on the company side. Same thing, right, except it depends on you know who that person is, but let's just use somebody within the sales team or a marketing team, right? They are not necessarily the face of their company, but they are a brand ambassador, they're putting that company brand, brand message front and center, so that their audience their network, people who see their content, associate them with the company, and then think about the company when those needs come up. So it's similar strategy, but a slightly different approach, depending on if you're a solo or small business versus a larger company.

Yeah, and I'm seeing that some companies are putting their, their founder or their CEO out there, you know, depending upon, right, if they have the right personality, and you know, they want to be out there. But they're kind of framing them as sort of their representative, you know, for the company on LinkedIn. And they're having them post like thought leadership articles, you know, that sort of thing to kind of make a more of a holistic view. And so that when people are kind of checking out like, Okay, do I want to purchase their product, or their service? Like, oh, wow, I see their CEO is very active, they're seen as an expert in this space, you know, kind of a thing, and it kind of lends to their credibility, you know, when they're looking at their product or service, versus other options that they might have. So I'm excited to dive in with you of like, okay, why it's so important to nail your brand message in the profile. And then let's talk about the struggles, let's get into it. Because it's, it's not easy like you, it's easy to look at others, you know, and you're like paying they're like on LinkedIn live every day. Like they're, you know, they're doing all this cool stuff. And it's so easy for them. It's not people are struggling. So first of all, let's get into like, why it's so important to to nail it. And then let's talk about some of the struggles and solutions that you have that you've come up with for your clients.

Yeah, so when it comes to the brand message? Here's, I think, something I see often. And what I tried to help people understand so many times, we are so in our business, of course, we know exactly what we do. And it makes perfect sense. But when you look at it from the outside, that's not necessarily the case. So use my company name as an example, if all I had in my headline was CEO and founder at connect the dots digital. What does that company do? I mean, okay, digital, so people might assume it's some sort of digital product digital agency. But these days, that means so many different things. So if I don't clarify that, it puts a lot of effort onto my potential connections, or people in my network to take the time to dig into my profile and figure out what the heck, what the heck does she do, right, you don't want people to not have a clue as to what you do. So when we feed that, through the headline, we give that you know, kind of serve it up at a silver platter. In, in the about section, it's so much easier for people to Why do they want to connect with you, because they understand what you do. And that they may potentially be somebody who needs to utilize your services. For example, I see this so often, there's so many like funky company names out there, which are super cool. But if nobody knows what that company does, those names don't mean anything. So I you know, the example I always like to share is unless you're the CEO of Delta Airlines, you gotta give us a little more information, right? We know what Delta does probably have all flown Delta many, many times. Most other company names are a little bit more, you know, unclear. And so let's make it easy for people.

Right? It could be very ambiguous or hard to spell and hard to find, as well.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. You know, and same with the about section, you know, so often, I think an old kind of trend a couple of years ago, well, first of all, that should always be written in the first person, right? Because we want to build that connection with our audience. But you know, how many times have you seen an about section that starts with I have a X number of years experience doing this, that and the other. That's great. I mean, wonderful. But I can see that in your experience section. And, frankly, I don't really care if you have 1518 20 or 25 years of experience, can you solve my problem? First of all, do you understand what my problem is? And can you solve it? So leading with that problem with that value proposition, where you are clearly understanding the challenge that your target audience faces is so much more impactful than just telling people how good you are at what you do?

And probably giving examples, right? Instead of just saying, Oh, I've done this for 25 years? It's like, okay, so what, like, Were you successful at it? Like, What have you accomplished? Good point. So it's like, yeah, so maybe, like, I don't know, would you recommend, like telling a story of like, or, you know, telling an example of how you've been successful in what what you do, whether it's in sales, and you're gonna say, you know, $1 amount, or a project you worked on, or, you know, or something like that, but in telling it, yes, the way that it's connecting, you know, to your audience,

storytelling is always a winner. And you cannot go wrong with storytelling. And I think you can also accomplish that in your experience section, where a lot of times people will use that section to kind of like, talk about everything, you know, all their responsibilities that they had in their past role, versus give it the high level understanding of what you did, and and what are the accomplishments? What were some of the high level accomplishments, right, so you can put those statistics, you know, quantifying success is always a good thing, you know, when you can show something that was measurable, you know, was able to increase revenue by X percent, increase sales by whatever percent. But storytelling is really good in your about section. And, you know, for the entrepreneurs out there, structure, and I actually have a have this, like, created as a slider, like a document post, I haven't posted it yet. But a structure that I utilize with a lot of my clients, particularly my, you know, small businesses, and those who are self employed is the structure of their bow section. What is the problem you solve? Why are you the right person to solve it? How do you solve it? And then what is the call to action? How do we get started? So, when you think about that, like almost like a formula, it becomes a whole lot easier to write that section and sitting down to a blank page.

No, I love that. And do you also recommend kind of adding some personal info about yourself in that section as well? Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So you know, that's a great way to get somebody to make a connection with you. So maybe, you know, you share a little bit about the things that you like to do outside of work, right, maybe you're a marathon runner, or you are, you know, a big fan of whatever sports team, you know, those are the things you can put those towards the end of your headline, again, another good way to kind of make those points of connection with people because you don't know what someone else's passions are. And if they have a similar interest in hobby that you do, it's such an easy way to start a conversation, right? It's, it's, I think it's shifting that mindset of LinkedIn that it is. It's a job search tool to sales tool, it is those things. But first and foremost, it's a networking tool. And so the key to networking, again, is the ability to build connection with people and kind of engage with them as human to human before we try to get them to do something for us.

Yep. And let's go back to the call to action to so how do you suggest people structure that? You know, I think some people might be like, What? What do I do? Like, do I go to my website? Do I like what you know, what works? Best? I guess is the question.

I usually keep it really simple, you know, like, DM me or feel free to reach out via put your email address, or you can put your Calendly link if you want to put it I mean, they're not necessarily clickable, but it's easy for people to copy and paste them. But it's mostly it's more of a invitation to open that door. So, you know, this is they've taken the time to read your about section and just let it in saying, you know, hey, feel free to reach out to me I'd love to connect. You can DM me, you can email me call, like my doors open

All right, and I assume shorter is better in this section. Right? Yeah. People reading a novel.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you know this from just copywriting best practices like you want it to be easy to read, keep the lingo to a minimum, that insider baseball language and make it digestible, right. So use, you know, you can't format through LinkedIn itself, but you can copy and paste bullets from like, you know, emoji sites and things like that not saying to use a ton of emojis but break up the text with some bullets or some arrows or something to make it easy to read. And, yeah, less is more

diveagar. And then there's this featured section, how do you suggest people tackle that?

Yeah, this is a fun section, I think. So in the featured section, if you don't have it on your profile, you have to click at the top where it says Add profile section to kind of start building that one out. What I like about it is that you know, it sits right in the middle of your profile. And it has a lot of visual interest. Because if you share a link to something on your website, it will pull the image associated with that link. But you can also now thankfully, change the image. So sometimes, like I was seeing when this feature first rolled out, you share a link and it wasn't pulling the graphic. And so it would get that gray, kind of blobby box. Now you can actually upload another thumbnail, which is really nice. So I like to use this. So you can put as many things as you want there. But you can only see three full pieces of content. And as you can see, like an itty bitty piece of the fourth one. So I usually don't recommend doing more than four pieces of content there because I just don't think people are going to continue to click through. And I like to use it for Call to Action content. So that might be subscribed to your email list. Do you have a lead magnet? If you have a LinkedIn newsletter, you can add that as a featured content. And I think that's a great piece to put in there. So some, you know, you can add posts, you can put LinkedIn articles, you can upload, you know, documents and PDFs. But I think that having it be something where someone has to take an action to do something has been very beneficial. I do that for myself. So I have my lead magnet, my newsletter and my email subscription link. And I'm always getting more new people because it's easy for them to find it right versus them having to dig through my website. So it's a nice tool to be able to direct people directly to your website. LinkedIn doesn't give us a lot of opportunity to do that. So what we get the opportunity to send them off site somewhere means take full advantage of that.

Yeah, no 100% Agree. Oh, and you know, I see so many different ways that people are leveraging their banner image on their profile page as well like their personal image and in the banner image. Do you have any kind of insight into that? Would you recommend how people should handle that?

Yeah, I think, first of all, if you're an employee, and you're comfortable, including your company, branding, I think your marketing director would be very, very happy with you. Exactly. I think you'd make their day if you went and ask them for a branded banner for your profile. If you're a business owner, you absolutely want to bring your company brand into your personal profile. And if you have multiple things that you do, you can create graphics that showcase those various things. It's a little trickier, but people do it all the time. I think the key is just to kind of keep it a little. Keep it simple. And remember that people are looking at this on mobile and desktop. So they look a little different on mobile and desktop. But as long as that visual brand stays consistent with whatever your business brand is, I mean, that's really what's nice about it when when it's empty. It's so sad. I mean, it's like I describe it when I when I do workshops and you know, do trainings. It's like it's the equivalent of a billboard you see on the street that just says your ad here. So you know, it's one of those other tools that let's say you're creating digital products, you have a course you're writing a book, you're doing a webinar, you know, switch it up, use it as your billboard, to showcase whatever your newest service or offering or product is. You can change it as much as you need to as long as the general brand thing stays the same right with your whatever your business branding is,

like that kind of looking at it as a billboard or like an ad unit, really, for your for your page. And I've, I've heard that the LinkedIn profile, people look at it as almost like an ad like an advertisement for what? For what they do you know, or what they can do for others. Okay, we touched on experience a little bit, is there the experience section? Is there more you want to add there? I know you're saying like, don't like it's not a laundry list of what you've done in the past. It's more of a highlights, like a highlight reel of what you've accomplished and how you can help. Is there anything else that we should be kind of tuned into in that section?

Yeah, I think it's just ensuring again, you're connected to the company pages. What I've, what I see often is, you know, some people, I've been on LinkedIn for a decade plus, right, so maybe when they originally put something in their experience section, there may not not have been a company page. But now there is. So just going in making sure that you're connected to the company pages exist. I've also seen the opposite, right, where companies get acquired, and those pages no longer exist. So there's ways of kind of putting in brackets, like let's say you worked for a company that was acquired by another one and that brand that the company pages gone, you can stay, you know, acquire imprints these acquired by whatever the new company is. So there's an understanding what happened to that company, keep it high level, as again, speaking to the business owners use that to bullet out your services again, right, we need to continuously repeat what we do. Because one user may go straight to our About section, and never look at experience, another user might do the complete opposite, and go to our experience and never read our About section. So we want to make sure that we're hitting people in all of the places where they potentially might learn about what we do and how we can serve them.

Okay, and do you how, how heavily Do you wait, like the skills section, the recommendation section, because I, you know, I've seen some people who are very seasoned in their career, and they have, like, maybe they have no recommendations for themselves. Maybe they recommended one person, you know, or like, their skills section is like, almost non existent, like, Does that, does that hold a lot of a lot of weight with you? Or what are your thoughts there?

I mean, personally, I like to use every section that we can use. So if I'm working with a client, we're going to do everything that there is to do up on LinkedIn, what I like about skills now is now we can connect them into our experience section. So when you add a skill, it's going to ask you, where did you use this skill? And you can literally click all the places and your experience where you used it. So I think it's, it's a more dynamic function. I know that. You know, it's it weighs into search. So you coming up in search based on keywords. It's just a good tool. It's one of those things, it's like, why wouldn't you use it to show sort of the various things that you have expertise in and making sure it's up to date. So you know, everybody who's listening, go and check out your experience, your skill section, and if you have Microsoft Word, Excel outlet, you need to remove those, because you probably put those on there five years, five plus years ago. I see that all the time. I was like, pretty sure we all know how to use those things right now. Now, seven or eight years ago, there probably was a different levels of like expertise when it comes to using the Microsoft suite. But I think we don't need to have those taking up real estate in our skills section. I personally put a lot of weight into recommendations. I mean, nothing is nobody. The best way to get a sense of what someone is like to work with is to see how other people experience them. So I like to ask for them. After I've worked with a client. I also like to give them when I've had a good experience, whether it was working with somebody or participating in a training, you know, you don't have to have a client relationship with somebody to write them a recommendation. You can write a recommendation for a podcast or podcast host that you are guesting on, and what a positive experience it was and what a good host they were. Because you want to give them the visibility that other people want to say yes. Where they ask if they would like to be on their show. So thinking about the recommendations, not just in a client perspective, but how else can you help highlight people was there you know, a book that you read by one of your LinkedIn connections that you thought was He's really great. And you want to give them some kudos for that. So it's a really nice section. And I mean, the reason why people who are very seasoned don't have recommendations is probably because they don't ask for them.

Right? Yeah. And would you say like that is that kind of one of the top struggles that you see with people is that it's, it's hard. It's funny, because like, they always say, oh, people love to just get someone talking about themselves. And you know, people love to talk about themselves. But then when you're sitting down, you know, to write about yourself, you know, or to showcase yourself in such a way,

it's so hard. It's so hard. That's why I have a business. It's really hard to write about yourself. I mean, because sort of like, when it like what I talked about with the company name, we're so in it, we're so in our everyday business, it's really difficult to understand what it looks like for me outside. And so having a structure, again, whether it's the about section structure I shared, you know, what's the problem you solve? Why you? How do you do it? What's your CTA, even just understanding how do I even structure this? Right? You don't sit down, I got to high school students, you know, they don't sit down. When they have to write a paper and just open their computer and start typing, they put an outline together. So thinking about your about section, almost like what would the outline of that look like for you? Like, it's really hard to write about yourself. And the other piece with LinkedIn is that like, always changing. So you know, I had a client that she and I worked together three years ago, we did a great update on her profile. Well, it's been three years. And she's like, I gotta, I gotta update it again. It's not relevant anymore. It's never done. Sorry, to break it to you. So we've never done progress.

So as you've kind of gone along, like, what is a tool or a process that like, has changed your business for the better, like, you know, that other people who are listening are like, Oh, I should try that. Like, what would you recommend?

Oh, my gosh, my new favorite tool, I'm actually gonna write a post about it is called fathom, I'm obsessed with fathom. So Fathom is a zoom app, where it integrates with your resume. And it's like, basically, like a note taker, but it records the Zoom call gives you a transcript, and it's free. So a lot of people, you know, spend money on some of those transcribing tools. And they're great too. But this one is, it's free. And it's nice, you feel that, you know, you can only use it in the moment. So that's my new favorite, because I can get on a call with a client, basically interview them, and use the transcript from that conversation to write their about section because I have those nuggets, you know, for every person that I work with, I'm utilizing their words in their LinkedIn profile. And so this tool has helped me so so much, because it just, I literally can just like copy and paste straight from the transcript and put it into a narrative that works for them.

It's so efficient, that's what we need, you know, we need to I think that a lot of companies, especially starting out in this year, it's like, how can we get more efficient? You know, how do we minimize our tech stack? How do we, how do we, you know, like, get what we need done, but in a shorter time.

Exactly. And that's a great tool to Yeah, that's a great tool, just like, I don't know about you, but I'm not very good at note taking during meetings, because I'm trying, it's just hard to, you know, be present in the meeting and, and then be taking notes and be focused on the conversation. And so now it's like this thing just gives me the transcription and go back and review and pull the high level pieces I need out of it.

That's awesome. So check that one out. Is there anything that you do as a routine to kind of keep your head straight? You know, some people like meditate workout, whatever. Some people eat doughnuts, I don't know. Is there anything that you do you?

I mean, I definitely work out. I have a workout person, I get my workout done. You know, first thing in the morning after I've had my coffee, so it's like wake up immediate cup of coffee, go down to the basement, get my workout in and start my day. And I just have made a commitment in the new year because I really struggle with prioritizing stuff like reading. Because by the end of the day, my brain is mush and I just want to watch Friends repeats on the counter that I've watched a million time. So I've made a commitment to sit down and read for 10 to 15 minutes every day. And I really hope that's a A Sunday I can keep up with, you know, it's only been a week or so I was like I did everyday last week. So that's good. So I'm trying to figure out how to, you know, it's so hard when you're a business owner, it's like you are in your business constantly, it's really, really hard to dedicate some time to work on your business. Because we spent so much time working in our business.

So. Yeah, and what speaking of at what goals do you have? Like, what was the vision for your business moving forward?

Yeah. So you know, for the last five years, and majority of my business has been working one on one with my clients. So you know, I'll have a individual hire me, we'll work on their will update their profile, we'll do some, you know, I'll help them with their content strategy, their overall LinkedIn strategy through some coaching. My vision is that, you know, I feel like the opportunity really lies with helping companies and really those midsize companies show up on LinkedIn with this consistent brand message. So the struggle is that in a lot of these organizations, nobody really knows who owns LinkedIn, does marketing on it to sales on it? Is it an HR tool, what is happening in the trade show space? Well, if nobody owns it, or if everybody owns it, like, there's no consistent strategy to it. So I want to come in and help companies really position themselves successfully with consistent brand messaging, and an understanding of how to empower their teams have truly the best brand ambassadors out there, right. So get that consistency going so that sales can be more successful. So trade shows are positioned to connect and engage with people when they're out on the road. So that marketing doesn't have to work so hard for marketing. And really get everybody on board. So that's my goal. I'm hoping that by this time, next year, the majority of my clients will be companies, and then I'll still have the opportunity to work with individuals.

Well, it's a huge need. So yeah, I'm so excited that you are trying to do that, because I've seen it, in my own experience. And in others, you know, it's like, yeah, who owns it? How do we leverage LinkedIn? And so many people are asking that question. Now, I think more than ever, as LinkedIn is becoming more of a networking tool, rather than or is not becoming it is a networking tool, rather than just slapping your resume up there. Okay, where can people find you online?

They can find me on LinkedIn, that's the best place to find me. So my profiles got, you know, Rachel Simon, I've got a teal background on my picture, I'm pretty easy to find. And, you know, if you want to connect from listening to this, just put the name of the podcast and a message. So I know where you found me. And, yeah, I'm on there all the time. I like to say that, you know, for my clients, you don't have to spend hours a day on LinkedIn. Now I spend hours a day, but that's my livelihood. But you can get a lot done in a small amount of time.

Love it. Okay, we have I have a question that I asked everybody at the end of every episode, which is, if you could only listen to one music artists for the rest of your life, who would it be?

Oh, jeez, well, that was easy. It has been the Beatles and my favorite band of all time.

Nice. That's cool. I think one or two other people have said that. And we have on Spotify, we have actually have a small business big mindset entrepreneur playlist, where we've kind of put it in there. Yeah. Which is kind of cool. So well, Rachel, thank you so much for spending the time I have absolutely loved as I always do chatting with you. So appreciate you giving me some time in your schedule.

Well, thank you. It's been really fun.

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