Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - From Zero to $5M Company | Hala Taha - YAP Media CEO

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Lessons - From Zero to $5M Company | Hala Taha - YAP Media CEO · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore why LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful, yet overlooked
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  platforms for organic growth and monetization. Discover how to leverage platform-specific algorithms
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  to maximize reach, understand how content design and audience behavior drive virality,
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  and uncover strategic frameworks for turning attention into sustainable business opportunities.
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  You keep bringing up LinkedIn again and again and again. Out of all the social platforms,
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  like if you think about the common advice that people give, well now you follow where the
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  company is trying to promote, so the reels and the shorts and the Snapchat spotlights,
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  and that's where you focus your energy with short-form video clips. No one really speaks
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  about LinkedIn. I'm obviously very bullish on LinkedIn. I mean, that's actually where I'm not,
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  it sounds like as granular a marketer as you are, but I still understood that LinkedIn is a
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  content-efficient platform. So when you put stuff on there, you get organic reach. I'm a big fan
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  of organic as somebody who did not have money starting at a podcast, then you have to find a way
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  to tap into an audience. So I get LinkedIn and also our content is very similar. It's business
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  content, so it hits. But I mean, I never put this much thought into it, so it's like sometimes I
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  just like a good accident. But I mean, you are very purposeful about all the shit you do.
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  Yes, very purposeful. Which is great. And that's probably why you have a $5 million
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  agency, and I don't have one. That's a lot. But how do you actually, or why is LinkedIn so important
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  in your content strategy? Why do you keep bringing it up? Like what is the thing about LinkedIn,
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  the differentiates it, and put in layman's terms over focusing on YouTube, or focusing on Instagram,
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  or focusing on Twitter, or TikTok? Well, number one, like I mentioned before, the leverage of me
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  being able to say, I'm the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. And I have a business podcast. So all
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  the business brands love to sponsor me. And we didn't talk about it, but I have a podcast network
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  where I grow and monetize shows. And a lot of my deals are 360 deals. So I'm one of the first
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  podcasters that have monetized LinkedIn lives. I sell my podcast as a simulcast across my podcast,
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  my YouTube, and my LinkedIn. I'm the first one to do that. And so I've been able to triple my
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  impressions just because I use LinkedIn live as another podcast monetization tool, essentially.
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  And so 360 deals are really important to me. Speaking engagements come from LinkedIn
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  primarily. A lot of my clients or authors, speaking engagements come from LinkedIn, not from
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  Instagram. So really important for authors and the types of clients that I run. Something that I
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  want to talk about, because you mentioned it before, but we didn't really get to talk about is,
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  you know, just basic rules of growing on social media. And I can take it from like broad cross-channel
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  to then we can focus on LinkedIn. So first, every social media platform, no matter what it is,
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  their goal is to keep users on that platform, right? And anytime you post on social media,
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  you need to remember that if you want to be rewarded on this platform, you need to keep users
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  engaged and you need to keep them on the platform as long as possible. So if you do anything that
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  brings users off the platform that boars them where people skim over your stuff, you're never
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  going to win. You want to stop the scroll. You want people to spend time on your posts to take
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  viral actions on your posts. And that means that you really need to know the content marketing that's
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  going to resonate with your target audience, but then also how to like hack things to make sure
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  that people do spend time on your posts and don't leave the platform. That's how you get rewarded,
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  no matter what. The other thing is that in this world, everything is mobile. You want to take up
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  as much real estate as possible on the feed. It's super important. People miss this. So on LinkedIn,
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  for example, people will put up horizontal images or text posts with no graphic. That's the worst
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  thing you can do because the average person on LinkedIn is scrolling through nine posts, right?
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  And if they just skim over your posts, you're actually going to lose points for the algorithm
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  because you didn't have dwell time. Nobody actually stopped and looked at your stuff. And so the
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  bigger the image, the better. So on LinkedIn, that's like a four by five aspect ratio for a graphic.
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  And if you have a photo with a person on it, people are spending more time looking at the person
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  rather than like a promotional graphic or something like that. And so big photos right now work the
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  best on LinkedIn. Videos don't work well. The only thing that works well with video on LinkedIn is
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  like LinkedIn Lives. That's why I do a lot of LinkedIn Lives. And so people try to take the same
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  strategies like Instagram Reels and do it on LinkedIn. It doesn't work. It's a whole different
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  platform with a different set of rules that are prioritizing certain features. It's not like
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  Instagram. So that's a big problem. I see people trying to replicate, you know, what they do on one
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  platform when it doesn't work that way. No, I was going to say one more thing from that point.
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  I don't want to fire. No, no, you're good. You're good. I love it. It's an easy interview that way.
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  But when you see people that are just copying the strategies, I just want to highlight something.
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  I think what you're seeing is you're seeing people that follow Gary Vee or some other social media
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  influencer. And they see that Gary has a very sophisticated strategy, but you do see that he'll
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  just take a random video that he posted on Instagram and he'll post it on LinkedIn and he'll get
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  thousands of likes and but you cannot equate what he has, which is critical mass of an audience
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  versus what you're doing, which is no audience. Yeah. And I think that's the issue. People
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  replicate that and they're like, well, if he's doing it, I should do the exact same thing.
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  You're playing at a different level and you and and you have to play at the level that you're at
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  to eventually get to where he is. Yeah. And by the way, so somebody like Gary has well over a million
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  a million followers on LinkedIn and his engagements the same as me and I have 200,000 followers. So
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  he actually has a very poor engagement rate because like you said, he's just replicating and
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  he's just got this huge audience. So it does well. But he could be doing so much better if he was
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  leaning into the features that LinkedIn is actually promoting. The other thing is skimmable content,
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  right? People don't like to read. And these algorithms want to keep users on the platform. So
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  platform like LinkedIn is actually going to deprioritize your post. If you've got big chunky
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  paragraphs and you're making people work because they know people are going to skim over them.
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  And so big chunky paragraphs, you get deprioritized linking in the caption,
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  taking users to another website, deprioritized. The other thing that's really unique about LinkedIn
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  is that the last stage of the algorithm is actually human editors. This is way different than any
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  other platform. And so an influence are like me and all my clients work. I know how to manipulate
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  the algorithm so much that like we're always going viral. So my worst performing post 1500 likes,
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  you know, and then ranging from like 1500 to like 5000 likes. But then sometimes I'll get 100,000
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  like posts, 60,000 like posts, million, eight million views. Tell me like nobody's getting these
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  types of results on LinkedIn. And the reason why is because my content is actually aligning to the
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  LinkedIn editorial agenda because the LinkedIn is actually scanning the most popular posts and
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  anything that aligns to careers, hiring, graduation, point in time holidays, women's day month,
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  black history month, whatever is on their editorial agenda, they're going to pour gasoline on it.
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  And they're going to stop anything that's salesy, anything that's promotional, anything that's
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  promoting me, my LinkedIn masterclass or whatever it is. And they're actually going to pour gasoline
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  on the stuff that aligns to their agenda. So whenever I'm thinking about client strategy in
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  terms of content marketing on LinkedIn, I'm like, what is the intersection of your niche and careers
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  because that's how we're going to go massively viral. What's your what's your ratio of promotional to
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  editorial guideline focus content on LinkedIn sales happen in the DMs?
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  Always, always. LinkedIn is going to do from the first step of the algorithm,
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  LinkedIn is deprioritizing sales and promotional stuff. If you link out, deprioritized. If you
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  have salesy keywords in your posts, deprioritized, LinkedIn is in the business of making LinkedIn money
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  and keeping users engaged and entertained on the platform. And they want to reward content creators
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  who do that. And by the way, only six percent of people who are on LinkedIn are actually content
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  creators. So there's a huge opportunity for everybody to be that dominant person in their niche,
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  just like I was the number one podcaster or the number one podcaster on LinkedIn.
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  Do you think if when you when you do sales, say you adopt this strategy,
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  nine, nine posts are great. And then the 10th one you sell, does that, is there a deranking of
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  your all your content now? So this is such a great question. LinkedIn actually judges your last
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  10 to 15 posts in the algorithm. We can talk about if you want me to break down the algorithm,
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  I'm happy to do. I would love to because this is really deep and I've never heard anyone speak
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  about something. Nobody knows this stuff. It's not a book. I've learned it. I've basically tested it
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  and I'm running all the influencers on LinkedIn. So I feel like I'm one of the only people who
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  actually know the algorithm besides people who were yet LinkedIn. So I'm happy to break that down.
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  So you want me to break it down? So there's four steps. Let me
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  I appreciate it. No, I mean, listen, I know that you speak a lot about LinkedIn and I know
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  that's part of like your your service offering. But like, there's a lot of people that speak a lot
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  about LinkedIn. No, they don't know anything. That's why I'm like, I didn't know if I wanted to
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  go into them. Like, yeah, I want to go into it because I want to learn this. Yeah. Okay. So
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  there's four steps to the algorithm. Okay. Number one is spam filters. So this is actually LinkedIn's
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  like AI machine, like their machine that is basically scanning every post that comes out. And
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  they're putting it into three buckets. First is spam, then it's low quality high quality. Okay.
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  So spam is the usual. It pornography, profanity, you know, using too many hashtags. So
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  compared to Instagram on LinkedIn, you really should be only using three hashtags. I can go into
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  hashtags for 10 minutes if you want. But really three hashtags, anything over five. They're
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  actually going to deprioritize you because they think you're spamming. Also like the way that the
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  platform works, just hashtags actually work against you sometimes if you don't use them smart on
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  LinkedIn. If you tag too many people, if you tag celebrities, a lot of people do this like tagging
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  20 people in their posts. I've had people tag me that I can know them. They spam. You know,
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  you get like for spam, it's not going to go anywhere. Okay. So those are some examples of like,
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  as soon as you do it, LinkedIn's just going to stop your posts, right? Then there's low quality.
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  And it's scanning for things that are really like nuance. So like I mentioned, big chunky
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  paragraphs. You have big chunky paragraphs. You get deprioritized. That's why all the influencers
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  on LinkedIn are doing that line by line style. That's on purpose to be skimable, right?
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  Linking out to an external third party website, deprioritized because you're selling on LinkedIn.
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  Okay. Not having keywords in your posts that align to keywords in the people who are in your
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  target audience, deprioritized. Okay. Not leveraging certain features. You'll get like not having
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  a picture, deprioritized. Okay. Then high quality. That's your following all the best practices.
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  You're not tagging. You only have three hashtags. You've got skimable content. You've got a graphic.
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  You get into high quality. Okay. Step two of the algorithm is it's basically feeding your content
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  to a subset of users on LinkedIn. Now, this is super important. It means that you need to make sure
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  that the people in your audience are actually active on LinkedIn. There's a lot of people on LinkedIn
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  who look at stuff and don't engage. There's probably a lot of people that are in your first
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  connections and you're only allowed to have 30,000 of them on LinkedIn that got a job and never
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  came back on the platform. If you've been on LinkedIn for years, you probably have a lot of dead
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  connections. You actually need to remove those people because you want to make sure that when you
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  first post something on LinkedIn, that it gets fed to your small subset of user and people take
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  viral action because then LinkedIn will serve it to more people. So really important to clean up
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  your following for that reason. And then this step is also just in case like something got like missed
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  and if people report it, hide it, LinkedIn can put the can on the post right away. Third step of
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  the algorithm is super interesting. It's content scoring. And LinkedIn is really looking at two things.
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  It's looking at what is the probability of somebody actually taking viral action on your posts and
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  this being a successful thing that keeps users entertained. Then they're also looking at author
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  stickiness. So like I said, only 6% of people on LinkedIn actually are content creators and LinkedIn
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  wants to reward content creators. And so they're not only looking to see if people are going to engage
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  on the posts, they want to make sure that you as a content creator are engaging on the platform
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  and staying longer on the platform. So it's judging you on what you're doing after you post. So
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  that's why you shouldn't use scheduling tools. You shouldn't post in ghost. That's why engagement pods
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  really well on LinkedIn because it forces you to engage on other content right after you post.
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  And so really important is author stickiness. Not many people know this. Then there's viral
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  actions. And basically LinkedIn is trying to see as it feeds more people your posts. How many viral
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  actions are you getting? And viral actions on LinkedIn are weighted. Okay. So a like for example,
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  this is I've made these numbers up based on my experience of what actually goes viral. A like
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  is one point. A comment is two points. A share is four points. A share with the captions four
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  point five points. By far, the most viral thing you can do on LinkedIn is to create a post that gets
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  lots of shares. That's how you go massively viral. That's how I get all my clients to go viral and
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  become influencers on LinkedIn. It's not about comments. It's not about likes about shares. And a lot of
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  people get that wrong and they don't create shareable content in their content marketing strategy,
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  which will, you know, put pull the plug on everything that I'm talking about right now if you
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  don't have shareable content, right? So you want to make sure that you maximize the amount of shares
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  and viral actions that you get. And also in terms of content scoring, you replying to comments,
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  you engaging on shares. That actually increases the virality of your posts and all the this
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  content scoring that goes on on step three. So let's say you did all this successfully. Your
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  post is going viral. You have a thousand likes, maybe 600 shares. Now you are in the bucket of
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  the LinkedIn editorial people who work at LinkedIn, they're going to actually start reviewing these posts
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  because they want to control the conversation. And then if it aligns to LinkedIn's agenda,
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  they're going to pour gasoline on it and it could go viral for weeks, okay? And if not, it's
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  going to stop. And you have a three thousand like post or whatever it is. Thanks for tuning in.
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  If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an
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  episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the
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  description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.