This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen shares how to use your birthday as a way to build meaningful relationships.

Relationship-based marketing is more valuable than sales-based marketing, and your birthday provides you a valuable opportunity to grow relationships.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

Many people on LinkedIn don’t understand why they should add their birthday to their profile. After all, LinkedIn is for business, right? But don’t forget, you should be focusing on relationship-based marketing, not sales-based. And birthdays are the perfect opportunities to build relationships.

LinkedIn and Your Birthday

If you include your birthday on your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn will notify your connections when it’s your birthday. And that’s cool! It’s nice to receive birthday wishes. But the real value is in the opportunities to build meaningful relationships.

The Fortune is in the Follow-Up

How do you build meaningful relationships on your birthday? The fortune in the follow-up. Because LinkedIn birthday messages are all private, start a personal conversation with the people who wished you a happy birthday.

Don’t just say, “Thanks,” or send a thumbs up and end the conversation. Have a meaningful conversation like, “Hey, remember when we…” or “I heard you’ve been doing…” or even “It’s been a while since we’ve met up.” As they reply back, don’t let the conversation end. Keep genuinely communicating until you’re able to get on the phone with them.

Be Intentional

Keep in mind, however, that you don’t want to have these intentional conversations with just anybody. Take your time to look over their profiles. Are they someone you’d want to do business with? Would you be able to mutually help each other? If so, go for it! If not, just be grateful and thank them for their birthday wishes. You don’t want to burn yourself out building relationships that won’t go anywhere.

Keep this in mind, and as your next birthday comes around, try using this birthday technique. You’ll be amazed at the business that’ll roll in.

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/118
  • Introducing this episode’s topic (2:57)
  • The opposite of what you should do on LinkedIn (6:35)
  • Relationship-focused, not sales-focused (8:06)
  • Social media and your birthday (9:10)
  • The fortune is in the follow-up (11:50)
  • Be intentional (13:43)
  • The most powerful thing for your business (19:36)

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

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Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast Episode 118.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the Good girls Get Rich Podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. 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 0:24
Hello there. I’m your host Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 118 of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast. And this podcast is brought to you by Uplevel Media where we teach simple and authentic relationship and heart-base LinkedIn marketing for women that get you on the phone consistently with your perfect people. None of this throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks none of this bug everyone you know, bug everyone you don’t know and hope to get a sale, very targeted, very focused, very much relationship-based. And when you start to see how this works, you start to get excited about who you see on your calendar. So it’s we teach digital marketing with the human touch over here in Karen Yankovich World. So I hope that if you’re new listener, welcome. If you’ve been listening before, you’re gonna love this episode, I guess either way, I think you’re gonna love this episode. Because this episode came to me kind of like, Oh, this technique that I’m going to teach you in this episode came to me, like kind of by mistake, but it worked so well, that I’ve talked about it a few times in my private groups. And I wanted to just do a whole podcast episode on it, because I think there’s a lot to talk about because it really does get to the heart of relationships. So if you’ve listened before and you love this podcast, you know that I’d love for you to take a quick screenshot and share it on social media and tell everyone that you’re listening and you can’t wait to hear what this week’s episode brings. If you’re new, then do the same thing and maybe say, you know, “My first episode of Good Girls Get Rich. I can’t wait to hear what Karen’s about to teach.” But when you share Share this with your audience. If you tagged me, I’m @karenyankovich, then I see it, and then I can share that with my audience. And that’s how we all get more visibility, right? We love your reviews and be really specific, tell us what you love so that we could do more of that. You can also leave us an audio review, if you go to the show notes of this episode, you’ll see a link for Speakpipe or you can go to karenyankovich.com/speakpipe, and leave us an audio review. And you know, when those audio reviews, you can also or call back a second time and let us know if you have a guest you think we should interview or if there is a topic you want me to cover, I’d love to help you or I can use the hashtag #goodgirlsgetrich, so that we don’t miss your post, and then we all get more visibility. So yeah, just go to karenyankovich.comm/118. You can see the blog for this page, the show notes, you see the link for Speakpipe. All the links of everything we talked about here on the show today. And yeah, that’s how you get more on this. So let me tell you a little bit about how this time technique that I’m going to teach you today came about. So my birthday is in December, and it’s December 6 for you astrologists. And this past year, December 6, 2019. I actually was on a panel, a social media panel, actually, it was like a finance panel in New York City. And it was really early in the morning. I don’t remember what time it was. But I remember I was done by like 9am. And it was my birthday. So I was meeting a friend, Sharon Haver, who I will link to her episode in the show notes. We actually had her on the podcast, Sharon and I were going to have lunch later that day, so I had some time to kill. And and Sharon lives in a city so it was a good chance for me to meet her. I don’t live in the city, so I’m not in there all the time. So I had a few hours to kill and there was a really cute little cafe right near where my panel was. So I went down to the cafe and I had my iPad with me and I got some, you know, avocado toast, which was yummy and some coffee or something. And, you know, it’s my birthday and you know what that’s like in social media and especially, you know, when teach social media because because I teach social media, I have just a ton of people that I’m connected to on multiple sites. So my inbox was crazy. My Facebook page was crazy. And I sit down, I’m like, I’m going to start responding to some of these people. And I intentionally decided that I was going to, at least on LinkedIn, personally respond to every single person that wished me happy birthday on LinkedIn. And you know, we don’t think of LinkedIn we think of birthdays and digital marketing, we think of Facebook, right? But I decided I was gonna because, you know, LinkedIn is my thing. I decided I was going to use the opportunity to to start conversations with people actually, they started the conversation, right? So that made it even more beautiful, because instead of just saying, you know, thanks, thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. And because it was me doing it and this is really why I know that a lot of you listening don’t want to hear this, but this is really why you need to be doing a lot of this stuff. You can’t have your assistant doing a lot of this work. It’s got to be you. Because I knew that it was my cousin or my friend or my college friend. And I could say things like, I can’t believe how long it’s been since this or oh my gosh, I think about that event we both spoke out a couple years ago. Wasn’t that crazy? So I could I could personalize the response to these Happy Birthday things. And it started conversations. Well, it took me three days. It took me three days to get through this. Now I have, like 12,000 LinkedIn connections. And that’s mainly because people connect with me. You know, if you’ve listened to this podcast before that, I do not say you need to connect with a ton of people, you need to connect with a few people a week, right? So I can enter the few people a week but at the same time, a lot of people connect with me. So I have a lot of connections, which meant I had a ton of birthday messages on LinkedIn. Well, I am not kidding you when I tell you, I shook so much business out of those conversations that I blocked December 6th, 7th, and 8th off of my calendar for 2020. To do this again next year and do it more intentionally and not be in a cafe in New York City, where I’m like scribbling notes on places that I can remember to follow up with people, right? I shook so much busy, I will celebrate my birthday a week later, with all the money that my business is making from the relationships that I reengaged because these people reached out to me to wish me happy birthday. So I’m gonna so how cool is that? Right? So I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you a little bit more about that in this episode. But here’s the thing. You know what I mean, right? You know that you get LinkedIn connection requests, and they’re immediately followed by, by my stuff, right? Or worse, then you get a connection request and they’re selling you something on that connection request. That is the complete opposite of what I teach on LinkedIn. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. In fact, I had a call as I tried to get on the phone with a lot of the people that connect with me, especially if they look interesting where they initiate the connection request. And I got on a call with somebody yesterday. And it was clear that he had no idea what we were talking. And it was clear that it was all automated. And it was a complete waste of both of our times. And, like, Who needs that I was frustrated because I usually can pick up on those things. And I missed it in this case. So you don’t want to be that person. I don’t want you to be that person. I surely don’t want you to say, Well, I’m doing this because this is what Karen Yankovich told me how to do like, No, no, no, no, no. relationships, right? So this is about building relationships, not selling. So I mean, like, Listen, if you’re a business owner, or an entrepreneur, or even a career, you know, like a at a job, you’re in sales, relation building relationships, like listen, putting your kid to bed at night sometimes is sales right? Getting your spouse to do the load the dishwasher is sometimes sales. So yes, the sales were there. That’s why you’re here. Even if it’s not like directly like I sell widgets, right? But if you if you’re in services, or if you whatever your businesses there’s a sales component to it, especially if you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur. We’ve talked about that a ton on the show. But this technique isn’t sales focused. It’s relationship focused. But here’s the thing. This is a tweetable, you guys. When you focus on the relationship building with intention, the sales will follow. So I’m going to say that again, when you focus on the relationship building with intention, the sales will follow. So let me talk a little bit about this technique. This birthday technique. Okay, I need a good name for it. So if you guys have a good name for it, tweet me or Instagram, DM me or LinkedIn messaged me What a good name for this birthday technique should be. So first of all, I wanted to say one more thing. Just I had this scheduled to be recorded today. And just yesterday. I’m part of a Facebook group that a lot of other LinkedIn trainers are a part of. and somebody’s like, Oh my gosh, somebody’s out there saying change your birthday a couple times a year so that you get birthday requests a couple times a year. Please don’t do that. Please don’t do that, like be authentic. You only need to do this once a year, don’t change your birthdate and make this happen more than once. Just do it once a year, but the once a year you’re doing it really powerful. Okay, so first, let’s talk a little bit about social media and your birthday when you are getting birthday requests on Facebook, or even Twitter. Did you guys know that if your birthday is on Twitter, Twitter doesn’t announce it at your birthday. But when you post, Twitter wishes you a happy birthday with like balloons and stuff that pop up. I actually was doing the webinar when you’re on my birthday. And I was like, and I was doing I guess I was doing it about Twitter. And I was posting and then all these balloons came up. I was like, Oh my gosh, Twitter’s wishing me a happy birthday. So now of course, I always want to go into Twitter on my birthday and post something. I mean, I post all the time, but post something. So I can have Twitter. Wish me a happy birthday. But Twitter does not, you know, push out today’s Karen’s birthday, but Facebook does, right? But on Facebook it’s public, right? It’s 99% of the time is public. And frankly, if you are dming me on Facebook, I don’t. I mean, there’s a big difference between Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is all business. Right? my LinkedIn, DMS, don’t wake me up in the middle of the night. My Facebook, DMS, although I don’t get I don’t get Facebook notifications on my phone. But Facebook is like kind of human interesting. So it’s part personal part business. So, yes, it’s okay. If you DM me, especially if you know me actually know me. But 90% of the birthday requests you get on Facebook are public and in the public when you’re responding. Yeah, it’s fun. If you say, you know, hey, let’s talk about this. Or remember when we did this, or when we did that, that’s, that’s fun. But remember, it’s public. It’s not really a business conversation, right? It just isn’t. And I love Facebook, but it’s not a business conversation. LinkedIn is all business. So and when people wish you a happy birthday on LinkedIn, it goes in your messages, right. So it’s up private conversation between you and the person that wish you Happy Birthday. So when you when you reply to those messages, it’s just like chatting. It’s just chatting. So it’s much more personal. yet. It’s business, right? It’s business. So it’s not on your Facebook page, you’re not sending notifications to 45,000 people about the messages, right? It’s all business. So if you are looking to use the birthday message as the person that is reaching out to people, then do it on LinkedIn. Right do it on LinkedIn, cuz that’s all business and certainly, certainly be paying attention to the people that wish you a happy birthday. In fact, what you should be doing right now is going in and making sure your birthday is only done that you actually have it noted there because a lot of people don’t because they’re like, Why don’t people on LinkedIn need to know my birthday? This is why when you’re done listening to this episode, you’re gonna, you’re gonna want to do this. Alright, the second thing is, you know, you’ve heard this before, and you’ve heard this from me before, but the fortune is in the follow up. So when you respond to so One, the reason that it took me three days to get through it was because they were responding back. Right? So it was following up with the people. It wasn’t just replying to the people that said Happy Birthday to me. It was following up and staying into in those conversations. I am not kidding you when I tell you it was completely overwhelming. And I will say that for me, I’m a fan of using my I have the iPad Pro, which is amazing. And I like the app to do this better than I actually like LinkedIn built in messenger on on desktop. So I use the app, the iPad app for this and I feel like it’s much easier. But in any case, it is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work, because you have to follow up. You can’t just take that one. I mean, the The point is building a relationship and having a conversation. You have to follow up and you have to be ready with you know what, like, let’s jump on the phone. Let’s jump on the phone, right so but you have to not just respond once you have to continue conversation when they respond back to you, not with a thumbs up emoji, okay? Not with a thumbs up emoji with conversation. Right? I’m gonna go back and repeat this again. When you focus on the relationship building with intention, the sales with will follow. So let me talk about intention for a second. And by the way, those of you that, that now are listening to this, I don’t want you to think I’m gonna try and sell you when it’s my birthday is not about sales, right? It is about seeing how we can support each other because many of these conversations, maybe I was now an affiliate for their programs, right? Because it’s about building relationships. And that puts money in my bank account, but it also helps you right? relationships is where the collaborations happen. Oh, my gosh, I could talk about this forever. Okay, so the fortune is in the follow up. But now I want you to be intentional. Okay. I’m not saying if you get 100 birthday requests on LinkedIn, that you need to be like if there’s people that you look at them, and normally, I’m a big fan of like, if They want to know you there’s a reason right? As your influence grows, people are going to want to know more about you, they’re going to reach out to connect with you. So I’m not saying if you don’t know them don’t respond. But I am saying, if you look at their profile and you feel weirded out, or you feel like there’s just, I want you to be intentional about who you do this with, okay? So yes, with every single person, be generous, you know, be gracious, and be full of gratitude that they took the time to reach out to you and say, you know, thank you so much for the birthday wishes that was so nice, I hope business is going well for you or something like that. If they respond again, now you have a conversation, you can decide if you want to take that further. But take your time with this. Take your time with this, I want you to actually look at the profiles of the people that wish you a happy birthday. And if it’s someone really cool for you, right? If it’s somebody who you think could be an ideal client, if it’s somebody who’s got a podcast that you’d like to be a guest on, if it’s somebody that’s part of conferences that you think if it’s somebody that maybe just has a similar market to you that maybe you can go elaborate and get in front of each other’s audiences, if it’s somebody that just has influence and you don’t really know where you don’t have an idea yet what it could be valuable, but you just know having that person in your life a little deeper would be a cool thing. Then take your time and be really targeted in your reply. say things like, wow, you know what, the last time we talked was in, you know, 2018 I see in 2019, you totally pivoted your business, now you’re doing this, this and this, I would love to hear more about that. Just drop it at that. Thank you, again, so much for your birthday wishes. Be really intentional and don’t make it about you. Let me tell you about what I’m doing. Talk about them, right, who wants a relationship with somebody who’s, who’s a narcissist who’s completely self centered. Please don’t be that person. Be the person that is genuinely interested in the person that wished you a happy birthday because again, you’re building relationships. And when you build relationships, the sales follow. So take your time with this. Look at the profiles. If it’s some One that’s you know, really cool that you really want to you’d love to get on the phone with be really custom and targeted in your response to them. Okay, and again, back to the second thing I mentioned, the fortune is in the follow up, be ready to respond. I’ve said to you guys many times on this podcast, that my linked in inbox is way more valuable to me than my actual inbox. Not that my actual inbox is invaluable to me. My LinkedIn inbox is where the money is in my business, to where the money is, at the time that I’m recording this podcast like full disclosure, I am so far behind and accepting connection requests because we’ve been so busy. And I don’t just accept connection requests, I accept them and look at the profile and say, is this somebody I want to actually get on the phone with because if you’ve reached out to me to connect, there’s a reason for that, right? If I think you’re just trying to sell me something like right off the bat, I try to have a good sense for that. And I’ll probably still accept, but I won’t necessarily take a lot of time to say Do relationship building. But if it’s somebody really cool, or somebody that I think is in my ideal client target market, I might respond and say, you know, it’s so you know, thanks so much for reaching out to me, it’s so nice to be connected. I love what you’re doing. You know, I teach women this, it looks like you teach women that, you know, I’d love to hear I mean, you know, for a quick call. Now remember, they started the connection request, I’m not into 15 messages to them, sending them BS articles that you think might be a value for them to read. I don’t have time for that. I don’t, I don’t know you. I don’t have time for that. But if I say to you, I really want to know more about you. I can get on the phone with them probably in that first phone call. If they don’t respond, then they’re not my people, right? And that’s okay. Same with this birthday thing. If they don’t respond to your request, you know, to your response, then don’t worry about it, then don’t then just let it go. Like you don’t need to continue when I say the fortune is in the follow up. Don’t bug them don’t want them. Right. But if they respond to you, I want you to continue that conversation because these Conversations is that your bank account is going to be singing the happy songs. I’m not kidding you, like the month after your birthday if you do this intentionally. So do you understand how cool that can be. So the first thing you need to do is understand the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook and even Twitter or Instagram. LinkedIn is all business, the conversations around Happy Birthday are private. And you can say, tell me more, you know, this is so cool, obviously be gracious and, and, and full of gratitude for their wishes. But if it’s somebody that’s cool, take it to the next step. The fortune is in the follow up. So it’s not just one more step, it’s as many steps as you need. If it’s a cool conversation with a cool person, as many steps as you need to actually get on the phone with these people, or to drop it, right? Or to drop it. I don’t want you on the phone with a million people that are not going to be valuable to you, right? So it could also be just dropping it and then the last thing is take your time. Take your time. Look at the profiles. If it’s someone really cool for you. Be really, really tired. uted in your reply to them, and you know, say things like, Wow, it looks like you’re doing some cool things or I just read your most recent blog posts, maybe even share it right? Or if you use like Evernote or if you haven’t a VA forwarded it to forward it to that and say, you know, put this in a stash somewhere. Let’s share this next week cuz I don’t want to share everything on your birthday, right? Usually, you’ll be blowing everything up. So you know, one of the things that I think, you know, I’m recording this, it is April 2020, I am still you know, we’re still quarantined here in New Jersey. And one of the things that I am seeing is that lots of other people are starting to really recognize that the relationships are the most powerful things in our business, the relationships, having people to pick up the phone and talk to building relationships, kind of looking to see what kind of collaborations you can be doing. diving deeper into the relationships with people like maybe you go to networking events, or maybe you’re just part of lots of Facebook groups are lots of groups, and you just kind of know a lot of people, but when you start it what we’re seeing To see now that we’re stuck in behind our computers all day long, is that it’s when we dive deeper, maybe we need to go to half as many networking events and spend twice as much time following up with these people and building actual relationships with them. And I think more and more people are starting to learn how to do that. I teach a workshop on how to do this with integrity with authenticity, not just on your birthday, but you know all year long how to how to leverage your existing network, how to build a new network that has you jumping up and down when you see the names of the people that are your on your calendar, so you can get that it’s at free LinkedIn workshop comm if you’re listening to this on the replay, even if it’s 2023 you can… freelinkedinworkshop.com always goes to our latest workshops. So check that out there. You know, here’s the deal. I do this podcast to support you. I’ve got this free workshop that I do to support you. How you can support me is by sharing this and telling people, if you enjoyed, telling people they should listen to this. A rising tide lifts all boats, I want to support you, I will share your share with my audience. And we all get more visibility that way. And that’s how we start to build a relationship, not just me talking to you through your speakers on your computer, right, but actually starting to build each relationship. So let’s lift each other up, help me help you share this podcast, take that quick screenshot of this episode on your phone and share that on social. I’ll share that with my audience. And the bottom line here is I really want this to be simple for you. I know that despite the challenges we’re facing the world we’re living in that we’ve never seen these kinds of challenges before I know that we can kick some 2020 booty together. So let’s create our simple, relationship based marketing strategy together. I will see you back here next week for another episode of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast.