202 – Using LinkedIn Creator Mode

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 202.

Intro 0:05
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, KarenYankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:22
Hello there. I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is episode 202 of the good girls get rich podcast. And this show is brought to you by she’s linked up where we teach simple relationship heart based LinkedIn marketing to women, a system that gets you on the phone with the kinds of people that can change your business, change your life, change your bank balance for ever, people that can help you seek help see you as a wealthy woman of influence as digital marketing. But it’s what the human touch right human to human marketing. So if you love what you hear today, or if you’ve listened before, you know, we love to hear from you. So make sure that you subscribe to the show. And wherever you’re listening, we love your reviews, if you’d love to leave us a review. But most importantly, take a quick screenshot of the show and share it with your social audience. Because then, if you tag me, Karen Yankovich, or use the hashtag, good girls get rich, we’ll see it and then I can share your post with my audience. And then we all get more visibility Right? in the show notes. There’s a link for SpeakPipe where you can leave an audio review, I would love that. Or you can just leave us a message where you know, I don’t know who maybe a guest you’d like to hear me interview or topic you want to hear me talk about. We love your messages, just go to Karen yankovich.com/ 202, you’ll see the blog for this page, you’ll see the link for SpeakPipe. And it’s another way that we can communicate and stay in touch. So even on this show, this episode today is a topic that I get asked a lot about. So I wanted to really talk about it today. And you know, it’s interesting to me, because when I teach LinkedIn, like one of the biggest questions I get is, How do I get more eyes on my posts? How do I get my eyes on my content? How do I get more people to see what I’m doing? And like, to me, that’s the wrong question. I don’t care how many people see your my posts, I really don’t, I want the right people to see my posts. Because I don’t really look at LinkedIn as traditional social media, right, I don’t even really think of it as in the same category. For me, LinkedIn is a place that I can research and introduce myself or make introductions with the kinds of people that can grow my business, true lead generation, not just audience building, like I use a lot of other platforms. But I see that as audience building more than lead generation. And we track this stuff, we track this stuff, right, I know where the people that join my program come from, for the most part. And you know, I don’t know you feeling that too, like something maybe has changed in social media. I remember, there were days I have, I have a lot of Twitter followers. And we use Twitter pretty much the same way we used to use it, although we’ve changed it right as time goes on. But I used to get leads from Twitter, I used to get people call me up and say, Hey, I’ve been following you on Twitter. And I want to know what it looks like to work with you. That just doesn’t happen the way it used to happen. That, you know, social media has changed it to me, it’s more about influence building audience building now, the work that I do on Twitter and the work that I do on some of the other platforms, and maybe maybe you’re starting to recognize that as well. So when I think about using LinkedIn as a creator, because we’re gonna be talking about creator mode, you know, it is I really have to shift my mindset, a little bit about LinkedIn. But it is definitely a place to create, we’re going to talk about that today. But what I’ve learned over the past, you know, whatever, 10 years, whatever, how long I’ve been doing this is that we do have to be on our toes, right? Things are changing in the online market. But what doesn’t change, no matter what happens in all of his social platforms, what doesn’t change is the need to create influence around you and your brand. Right? And that’s what creator mode does. So, you know, let me let me talk about that for a second. You know, people want to do business with the best people in the industry. And it’s on us to tell people that nobody wants to be the best kept secret in town. And or if you do, you know, I don’t know how you’re making any money. I don’t know how you’re keeping the roof over your head. So it’s on us to let the world know that we are the bomb that we are worthy of their investment in us whether it’s an investment of time or money or whatever, right? You guys are investing in me right now you’re investing your time and listening to this, right? So I need to do my job in hopefully making sure that this podcast is worthy of your time. And I do that by creating influence around me and my brand so we can get more people that listen to the show that you know lead to building my influence which leads to growing my business right? Does that make sense? So maybe you’re maybe you’ve experienced the same thing maybe you know, some of the ways you used to get business isn’t happening anymore. So we’re not really talking about the lead gen hear on this podcast. And you know, that’s my favorite topic right is getting on the phone with people. What we’re really doing here is talking about creating influence around you. And by the way, that’s why the work that I do my show is linked up program and all of the work that I do is heavily influenced by publicity as well. Because I know that if you are the realtor that’s featured in the newspaper or the magazine or interviewed on TV or As quoted in and on NBC, you are going to have influence over all the competitors, you have, even in your same office, not to mention your town in your market, right. So so while we use LinkedIn to build relationships, a big part of that is building relationships with the journalists that talk about what you’re an expert in. Because I know that that influence helps you land customers. Okay, so this isn’t the direct pass to lead gen. This is how, when you have an opportunity to work with somebody, and you know, let’s get real. It’s very rare that we’re the only person they’re looking at right 10 Chances are they’ve interviewed a few other people or are talking to some other people, we need to do our job to show up as an influencer. So I’m talking about creator mode today, which is, it’s part of your LinkedIn account. And what LinkedIn did was it created creator mode A few years ago, well, not even a few years ago, I guess it was in 2021. Creator mode came out in 2021. And what they did at first, when it came out, I was like, What the heck is this, and I didn’t know that I really saw any value to it. And I’ll be honest, I was like, I don’t really get it. I’m doing it. And I turned it on and off for a while. So I wasn’t really sure if I needed to, but true to LinkedIn form. And you guys know how much I love LinkedIn. I you know, sure there’s some things that can be fixed. But I’m always looking for the good stuff, right? They have they have doubled down on it, they’ve made it more and more valuable to us. So what the difference is, is traditional LinkedIn, or maybe LinkedIn or even 10 years ago, right was your online resume. And traditional LinkedIn is kind of set up that way, right? When you have a resume, it starts out with like a little headline, and then and then a little pop of like, which is like your, you know, your what you’re talking about. And then it talks about your you know, you do a couple paragraphs, like what about me, what kind of things you’re looking for. And then and maybe that’s kind of like your, your cover your cover letter, right. And then you’re the experience section, which is kind of the most resume part of LinkedIn. And that’s how resume LinkedIn was built, and designed initially. But LinkedIn has become so much more than a resume, write a resume, I like to say like a resume is all about who you used to be. And LinkedIn, the beauty and the brilliance of using LinkedIn strategically, is it’s positioning you to become the person that you were stepping into right dressing for the job you want. So it’s become your personal brand, that has become the home of your personal brand online, not just your resume, talking about all the things you used to do. So LinkedIn creator mode doubles down on that for us. And you know, listen, if you are, depending on how you use LinkedIn, I think that the majority of the people that listen to this show, and the majority of the people that I connect with are using LinkedIn to build influence around themselves. And sometimes it’s building a business of your own, sometimes you’re in sales, right, and you just need to be talking to more people and you know, getting more opportunities. So it doesn’t, you don’t have to be building a business to do this. But again, building the brand of you if you sell widgets, right, somebody want whoever buys your widgets wants to know that you are the best you are going to make sure that your brand is that they are never gonna need to talk to anybody but you ever again, because they can trust you with their widget needs. Right? So that comes down to your branding, you know, that comes down to branding. So if you fall into any of those categories, you own a business, you have a role that is in a lead gen type role in the business you do. You’re a coach or consultant, you’re, you know, an attorney, a, you know, an insurance agent, any of those things a consultant, I think LinkedIn creator mode is should be turned on for you. Because what it’s doing is it’s showcasing the brand of you. And I’m going to talk in the show about how it does that and how you can use the features that creator mode gives us to that to its best advantage. So the first thing you need to do is turn it on, turn it on. So as you go into your profile, and you’re looking at your profiles, you’re in LinkedIn, you’re not just looking at the wall, but you’re looking at your profile. When you scroll down, you’ll see a section that says resources. Now I’m going to just stop here for a second and say, I very often the minute I record something LinkedIn changes it, right. So at the time of this recording, this is how you turn creator mode on. And these are the features that creator mode gives us it could change in a week in a month or a year, right. But at the you know, in June of 2022. This is how this is a turn creator mode on. So you go down and you scroll down to resources. And then you’ll see you’ll see an option that says LinkedIn creator mode, and what you want to do, there’ll be like a little slide button, right. And what you want to do is you want to slide that button to on that’s all you need to do you need to slide that button to on and what happens after you slide that button to on is a few things like another window will pop up. And we’re going to talk about what pops up when you turn it to on at but the first thing that pops up when you turn LinkedIn creator mode two on is you get to choose hashtags and these hashtags because what it says is topics you select will be displayed on your profile to show potential followers what you post most about. So Thinking about your brand again, right? What are the topics that you want to be known for? Right? Thinking back to those journalists, if you’re reaching out to a journalist, because you want to be interviewed, or you want to be known as an expert in their, you know, in their back room, you need to make sure that those hashtags that you get to choose five are things that you want to be known for. Right, so you want to carefully choose those five, obviously, you can change them, but you can only choose up to five. So that’s the first thing you want to do is you want to spend some time maybe doing a little bit of research on this, right, but coming up with the five hashtags that that you want to most be known for. The other thing that happens when you change your profile from you know, to creator mode, is it changes your link from connect to follow. So let’s say I’m standing on a stage in a room, and I’m speaking at an event, and I’m like, everybody connect with me, if I’ve got creator mode on, when they pull up my LinkedIn profile, they’re not going to easily see a way to connect with me, they’re going to see the Follow button, not the Connect button. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t connect with me, you still can go to more. And then when you go to more, you’ll see the option to connect. But what it does is it prompts people to follow you, instead of building tons and tons of connections. I teach this stuff. So I happen to have a lot of LinkedIn connections, I don’t really think most people need a million LinkedIn connections. I’m all about cherry picking, and micro targeting, and really wanting to get to know the people that you’re connecting on LinkedIn with. So if somebody’s just interested in the content that you post, they can follow you. And here’s the beautiful thing about that. You don’t have to accept that. Right? Sometimes you get a connection request on LinkedIn, and you’re not sure if you should connect with them or not. And until you say yes, or while you say yes, if you had no, they don’t get to see your content. But until you say, unless you say yes, they don’t see your content. So now if there’s somebody that’s like, Well, I really want to follow Karen Yankovich. But I don’t really know just gonna accept my connection request, because I don’t really know her at all. I’m just gonna follow her so I can see her content. That’s why creator mode is prompting them to do that. Now, I will say in the beginning, I wasn’t a huge fan of this, I’m still not a huge fan of it. Because technically, if I’m standing on a stage, and I want to speak to people I want people to I don’t want there to be a barrier to people that truly want to connect with me. And I feel like this is a little bit of a barrier to people that truly want to connect with me. But I do love that I now have like 2000 more followers than I have connections because it what it means is that there’s 2000 people that are just interested in seeing my content, right. And I didn’t have to make the decision of yes or no, I wanted to connect with them or not. Right. So I have a little bit of a love hate relationship with that feature. But I just want you to be clear that that’s what will happen. It doesn’t mean that people can’t connect with you still, they just have to go through a little bit of an extra step. I do think in some ways I what I do like about that is it does prevent some of the spam that’s happening. You know, because the bots have to take an extra step. And bots don’t do that well, right. So there’s that benefit to right another. The third thing that I want to mention is that you also have the option to have a profile cover video. And what that means is if you go to my LinkedIn profile and watch the picture of me like the my profile image, if you if you don’t see it, refresh the page, and you’ll see that my profile image kind of shifts to a video for a second, and then shifts back to the image. It gives me a chance to say, Hey, I’m Karen and I teach LinkedIn marketing. And I’d love to talk to you if you’d love to talk to me or you know, something like that. It’s kind of a cool feature. I don’t know how valuable that one is, either. But it’s kind of cool when you have it activated. And just know that you have to record that video from a mobile device, you can’t record it from a desktop device record or from a mobile device. So you might as well set it up from there. And it’s just a fun little thing that you get to add to your profile. That gives you a little bit of juice in your profile. Right. The next thing that I want to talk about the fifth thing that I want to talk about is the featured section. And you guys, if you’ve listened to this podcast, you know that the featured section on LinkedIn is one of my favorite sections. Now, LinkedIn pulled the media out of the about section about a year or two ago and created a separate section called featured one of my favorite sections. And what it does is it pulls that to the top. Right remember I said that LinkedIn was originally created like design as if it was like kind of like a resume? Well, this is where we’re starting to see LinkedIn focusing on your content, right creator mode assumes you are an actual creator, right. So if you go to my profile, you’ll see that my featured section is at the top. So the first thing you’ll see are the things I want you to see most, which is the things I have featured, right, which is so cool. So I love that my profile is reorganized in a way that you can see the things I want you to see most and I am a fan of having maybe two twos, probably my favorite number for this different types of content and your featured section. Because I do think that LinkedIn is probably not the place where people are going to go and watch all your videos, I think you want to pick one or two things that you most want people to do when they’re at your LinkedIn profile. So I have watched my free masterclass and book a call like those are the two things I most want people to do when they’re on my LinkedIn profile. So I’ve created and I’ve pulled that right to the top so there’s no question about what people what the next step that I want people to take is when they’re looking at my LinkedIn profile. The six thing that happens is now underneath that featured section is now my activity section. And typically, on LinkedIn proper, your activity section is lists all the activity you’ve done on LinkedIn. Right? So not only what you’ve posted, but also where you’ve liked and commented on other people’s things. Right. So like, if I have, you know, I like and comment on my students content all the time. And it’s not like, I don’t want to showcase their content I do. That’s why I like and comment on them. And sometimes I’ll share them if I really want to showcase it. But you know, again, like, I might jump into a conversation with a bunch of other LinkedIn experts, I don’t really want to showcase that content on my LinkedIn profile, right? I want you to reach out to me. So what I love about this is that linked with creator mode, it just shows you what you’ve actually posted, not what you’ve liked, and commented on other people. So you can feel free to have conversations on LinkedIn, that aren’t going to show up in your activity section, where you’re gonna be driving people that come to your profile to other conversations, right? All they’re gonna see is what you’ve done, you’ve done and that’s what you want. On your LinkedIn profile. You want to continue to position yourself as an influencer. So I love that the activity section just shows what I’ve done. Now, if you go to all activity, you can still see all that other stuff. So it’s not like it’s not there. It’s just not showcased, right. It’s a beautiful thing. There’s two other things I want to talk about here that you have the option to get if you have LinkedIn creator mode. And this, these two things are probably the best reasons to get creator mode. And I know I’ve talked about a lot of things that I love. The first one is LinkedIn live, LinkedIn live is available. Again, you know, LinkedIn doesn’t have a published thing. But when you click that button to turn on creator mode, one of the things it says to you is, do you know you also have the option to turn on LinkedIn live, and newsletters we’ll talk about newsletters in a second makes it available to you and you get to you get to choose if you want it or not LinkedIn, you definitely want to say yes to these things. LinkedIn live is a great way to reach your audience in a new way. I’m a huge LinkedIn live fan. I have, you know, a LinkedIn live show I do most Mondays. And you know, I’ve done like I did like in December of 2021. I did daily LinkedIn lives where I did a LinkedIn Tip series, right. So there’s lots of fun ways you can use LinkedIn live. So you definitely want to have access to that. And the last one is newsletters and let me tell you something, LinkedIn, newsletters are the bomb. Okay, they are the bomb. Because what they basically get to do so let me tell you a little bit of what a newsletter is. But LinkedIn newsletters, what it does is, is I don’t want to get into a whole thing with it here. But when you go into create an article, one of the things that says, Would you like to set up a newsletter, and I’ve set up a newsletter that’s called the she’s linked up diaries, right. So if you go to my activity section, you can see that she’s linked up diary series. So what I did was I every once a week, I send out the she’s linked up diary, and it comes out every week, the first time you send a newsletter out, you get the option to invite all of your contacts to follow that newsletter, I’m sure that you’ve gotten LinkedIn notification saying, Would you like to follow Mary Smith’s newsletter, right? So what the beautiful thing about our newsletter is, is that not only do you get a notification on LinkedIn, when I’ve put out a new newsletter, you get an email in your actual inbox to the email that you have associated with LinkedIn. So I have 1000s of people that have subscribed to my newsletter. So what I do with my newsletter, just and again, this isn’t newsletter strategy, but just so you know, like I, my newsletter goes out on typically on Sundays, and then like, when’s Tuesday or Wednesday, I’ll send that same content out to my LinkedIn in a LinkedIn newsletter. So 1000s more people. It’s like having 1000s more people on your email list. And y’all know how hard it is to build an email list, right? How important it is to build an email list. So LinkedIn, newsletters allows you to get in people’s inboxes, which is brilliant. Brilliant, right? So you absolutely want to use that feature. As the eighth reason that you want to use LinkedIn or the eighth tip I wanted to give you here on LinkedIn creator mode. So we recap these tips. First thing is you got to turn it on, just go to the resources section, slide the button and you got it turned on. Second thing is define your hashtags. Make sure they’re searchable visible, because it created immediately defined your brand right it helps people immediately know who you are and what you do. Third thing changes your link from connects to follow. Okay? Pros and cons. Now I feel like mostly pros I’ve embraced it. I’m drinking the Kool Aid. Fourth thing is you don’t get to have a profile cover video. Fifth thing is your featured section moves to the top brilliant sixth thing is your activity shows only what you’ve posted to showcase that seven LinkedIn live eight LinkedIn newsletters.

So is it worth it? Absa friggin Lully Absolutely. It really depends on your purpose for using LinkedIn. You know, if you are using LinkedIn, I feel like I could probably find a purpose for it for most people that use LinkedIn. You know, certainly like if you’re a student and you’re just graduating, absolutely start creating content, right? Whatever you do, creating content helps position you as an influencer. Right? And all of that helps you stand out from whatever your crowded market is that you’re in. Okay, so I 100% Don’t think that creator mode is good for most people. I think that I, you know, go through this again, while you have your computer open, and you can go through the steps to turning it on and setting it up for yourself. And then you know, just see what happens. See what happens. I think it’s, I think it definitely helps position us to be influencers. And that helps us build our brand and helps us build our business. So of course, if you are serious about building your network serious about building your brand on LinkedIn, serious about, you know, whether you’re a job seeker, business owner, salesperson, you know, whatever that is, LinkedIn is the home for you. LinkedIn is the home for you. And she’s linked up, we help women become wealthy and become Women of Influence. And we would love to talk to you about that if you if you want to hear more about what it’s like to be using this powerful platform to be growing your influence in your business. Let’s talk go to Karen yankovich.com/call. I’d love to chat with you. And we’ll just, you know, talk for 45 minutes an hour. Sometimes it’s somebody on my team, it’s not always me, but sometimes somebody on my team, and you will we’ll talk for an hour, 45 minutes to an hour. And we’ll just chat and see if we think LinkedIn first and foremost is a good fit for you. And if we do think it’s a good fit, and if we do think we can help you with it, I will tell you what that looks like. But I promise you we are first and foremost looking to just serve you. And we show up as advocates. You’re gonna hear more about that on this podcast soon for every single person that we work with. And if you don’t know what that looks like Karen yankovich.com/call get you on the calendar. You know, I mentioned earlier that if you if you love what you’re listening to on the show that we love when you take a quick screenshot, share it on social media, because what that allows us to do we appreciate I appreciate you sharing this show with your audience. And it allows me then to pay you back by sharing your posts with my audience to help you get more visibility right a rising tide lifts all boats. I do this podcast to support you. I’ve got this free masterclass and we offer free consultations, all of which you can find on my LinkedIn profile and in our show notes here. Let’s lift each other up and help me help you share the show. And I will see you back here again next week for another episode of The Good girls get rich podcast