234 – The Power of Centers of Influence

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich Podcast, episode 234.

Intro 0:05
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 0:23
Hello there. I’m Karen Yankovich, the host of the show. And I talk a lot about visibility in the show in i She’s linked up programs. And of course, this show is a big part of my visibility strategy, right. And you know, over the years, we’ve experimented with more guest shows more solo shows, we’re currently doing more solo shows, just for a short time, because that’s what you’re asking for, right. But on this show, what I want to talk a little bit is about the guest shows and about collaborating as the host, with other people in your industry or outside of your industry, or whatever other people you want to collaborate with, that you think would bring value to you or to your audience, right. And over the years, I’ve had some really cool people on the show, I’ve had Marie Forleo, on the show a few times I’ve had, you know, I don’t even want to start talking about the people because I don’t want to leave anyone out. But I’ve had some really, you know, people that have big audiences, as guests on the shows, and I’ve also interviewed my students, people that are just getting started, and people that are just doing cool things in this world. And, again, it’s always an experiment, I tell people that a lot when we’re talking about their LinkedIn strategy, I wish I could tell you that this one strategy is going to work for everyone. But there’s always a little bit of experimenting that I like to do so that I can see what works best for you or for me or for whatever we’re working on. And the interesting thing about just, I guess just take a step back in the beginning, I really thought that I really wanted to have a lot of influencers on the show people with that had a lot of influence. But what I found over the years is that the smaller audiences, the niche audiences actually do better for my brand and my marketing than having the biggest influencers on because let’s get real, the biggest influencers, maybe they’ll post here and there. Occasionally, they’ll post it there on the show. Very rarely, though, the smaller the influencer, the more they’re promoting it. And the more their audience is in tune with who they are. And when their audience is in tune with who they are, they’re going to pay more attention to their recommendations, right. And that’s how I get more really cool, lower influence people on my show, and that into my programs and into my world. So what I thought was going to be the case when I started this podcast a few years ago, meaning I would like to have all these really fun, influential people on the show turned out to not be as much the case, I actually really enjoy having smaller influencers, people with smaller audiences. And I think that it serves the podcast purpose, which is to just bring more people into my world right, and to serve more people on the planet help more women become women, wealthy women of influence, right? It serves that goal more because they are more attuned to the recommendations of the smaller influencer. Does that make sense? Can you see how that can be the case. And it’s really interesting, because I actually didn’t connect the dots. Before I had my own show. I didn’t realize how valuable it was when I was a guest on someone else’s show that I shared those episodes. And I tend to use, I tend to use Twitter a lot for this kind of thing. And of course, I share it on the places too. But I tend to use Twitter a lot. And I’ve had people over the years reach out to me and say I really appreciate a year after you’ve been a guest on the show that I still get tagged in tweets about it. Right. And to me, it was again, I didn’t It’s not something I realized when I first before I had my own show how valuable it was when I was a guest when I promoted the show that I was a guest on. So that is I think the the heart of what I wanted to talk about today is as you’re building your influence, hopefully you have something that positions you as influential whether it’s a podcast, or just a video series, or maybe you go do Facebook Live, maybe you’ve got a YouTube channel, whatever it is, or maybe you’d write blog posts, and you talk about you know, other people, other people’s audiences is a great way to create a magnetic marketing strategy, a strategy that brings more people to you, as opposed to you going out and saying buy my stuff by myself, right? And those magnetic audiences, those other people’s audiences, I want to make sure that you’re not overlooking the power of the smaller audiences. So first, I want to talk a little bit about centers of influence, I call it centers of influence, right? This is, this may be the most powerful marketing strategy in my business and for many of my students, so get your pen out. This is a good one. You know, when I am looking to use LinkedIn to build relationships, I’m going to talk about that how I do that in the next step on this process. One of the categories that is front and center for me are centers of influence. So what does that mean? People that have audiences similar to mine, and they don’t have to be huge audiences, right? I’ve done some small, kind of like guest webinars for people where there was maybe there has been 10 people on the webinar, but two or three of those people join my program. Right, see how that works. So the smaller the audience, when you when you have somebody that is an influencer, that brings you to that small audience, you tend to get high results. I’ve also done you know, the opposite. I’ve been in front of audiences where, gosh, I remember one time where I built a relationship, same kind of thing center of influence, but it was a huge audience. I did a webinar for like, I don’t know, 5000 people. And my, I think it swamped my business, it absolutely swamped my business with calls afterward. And very few of them actually enrolled in my program, because they didn’t have that same high touch connection with the person that brought me in. So think about those centers of influence, think about who they might be, and look at them, not necessarily from the size of their audience, but from the size of the influence they have over their audience. And that is where you’re going to see the highest result, if your goal for getting in front of their audience is to build your business. I hope that that makes sense. And by the way, I would do it again, I would do that 3000 person audience again, because over the years, I’m still getting like, you know, I got other speaking engagements from it. So there was a lot of collateral opportunities from that. That being said, if I had to choose between one or the other, get a few people that enroll in she’s linked up from one small talk versus swamping me for three months, I choose the ease any day, anytime of the day, any day of the week. I want to stop for a second and just tell you a little bit about our she’s linked up program, we have our choosing accelerator program, which is the entry program to our world. Basically, that program teaches you how to get on how to build your calendar full of people that can change your business, change your life, change your bank account. It’s not about how many eyes can you get on your content, although that’s a part of it. But that’s not the main focus, the main focus is who’s on your calendar. And we’re very authentic place. From a no cold messaging ever standpoint, we hold firm, to there never been a need to do cold outreach, and to have a calendar full of people that you’re just so excited that you see on your calendar. The program is a 12 week program that takes you step by step through how to do that. It’s got evergreen enrollments, you can join at any time I build as much ease as I can into my business. That’s what I want for you. And you probably have heard me say before that LinkedIn is not the place to sell a pen, it’s the place to get a distributor to buy 100,000 of your pens. So the very first thing we do when we work with our new clients is to help them find what that 100,000 Pen distributor looks like for them. So we help you create your high ticket offer. Great your higher ticket opportunity. And then we reverse engineer a plan for you to land that my goal is for you to have at least one if not more than one contract for that high ticket opportunity. By the time you graduate from our 12 week program, you want to learn more about what it looks like to join the program, just go to Karen yankovich.com/call. Get on the calendar. So all starts with that initial let’s see if it’s a fit call.

Alright, so now we talked a little bit about what a center of influence is and how powerful I think they are. Let’s talk a little bit now about how to find these centers of influence. How do you find these smaller center of influences on LinkedIn? There’s so many ways to do this. But I’m going to just list three ways here. The first way I want you to think about is look and see what industry events are happening in your industry. Maybe there’s a conference, maybe there’s a summit, right? Like we’ve seen so many of these online summits certainly, when we were in lockdown, right? Everything was virtual look to see who the speakers are for the summits. Now remember I said no cold outreach. You don’t know who these people are. Now I’m saying look to see who these speakers are. But it’s not quite cold outreach. If you’re saying hey, I listened to your talk on the ABC Summit, and I loved when you talked about this, this and this, I’d love to connect you’re on LinkedIn. Right? So it’s still like you don’t know the person but it’s not cold outreach. It’s not hey, we have people in common or, you know, hey, you should buy my stuff. It’s I love your work. I loved your message. And I want to deepen our relationship. I want to know more about you. Okay, so thinking about that, think about all the events that are happening in your industry and all the people that are speakers on those on those events. And and make a list of 15 or 20 of them, and then just reach out to two or three of them every week, right? Simple. The next thing you may want to do is look at other platforms, maybe there’s a Facebook group or you know, you follow some Instagram influencers around these things, who are the people that are talking about this on other platforms. And again, you’re going to come over to LinkedIn, because I’m going to presume you have a great LinkedIn profile, right? So that when you reach out to these people, you are reaching out to them from this position of power, if not go to LinkedIn profile training.com, and take care of that. But when you’re reaching out to these people on LinkedIn, it’s very different than reaching out on Facebook or Instagram, because you’re not reaching out from the position of strength that you are on LinkedIn, because on LinkedIn, you’ve got this great profile, right. So your profile does a lot of the heavy lifting, as you do this outreach. So look, for people that are talking about the things you talk about on other platforms, maybe there’s some Instagram collabs, that you can do or right, but again, don’t get they don’t necessarily have to be these huge centers of influence, they can be these smaller groups as well. And the third place you can look for these things are literally going over to Amazon, and searching who wrote these who wrote the book about these things, right. And then looking for the authors of these books. And then going back to LinkedIn, building the relationships, right, and finding centers of influence that way, and just continually building your network full of these smaller centers of influence. And your goal then is to start the conversation, and invite them to your thing, your podcasts, your YouTube channel, your Facebook Live, whatever it is, okay, this is we’re talking about bringing these centers of influence to your world. And they don’t, you know, it’s not, you don’t have to just be bringing the biggest names in the world to your audience, the smaller people. So powerful, I can’t wait for you to try this and come back to me and tell me how this works. All right. And the last thing I want to talk about here is once you start doing this, I want you to go deep, not wide. I am never ever, ever going to tell you reach out to 100,000 people this month, or reach out to 100 people a week. Now, like I just said to you earlier, when you’re looking to find like people that speak on your topic, find 15 of them and reach out to two to five a week, right gives you a week. Like if you’re doing this consistently, every week, your calendar is getting full of the kinds of people that you want it to be full of. So going deep, not wide on this, invite them to your thing, maybe you can follow up with a Facebook Live, maybe you can follow up by being on their show, I don’t want you to be on a million play in a million places, I want you to go as deep as you can, with every person that you build a relationship with. Because that’s how we get that credibility, we borrow their credibility for our audiences, right. And that’s how we build our credibility, and we build our businesses by kind of other people’s audiences. And it’s a real, it’s a true collaborative energy right now trying to steal their audiences, right. It’s just a collaborative energy, I firmly believe from the bottom of my heart, that our shoes linked up programs are such a natural fit with so many other coaching programs out there. Because, again, for from a collaborative standpoint, think about this, if I have a student that comes to my program, and they have a business coach, we’re not business coaches here, right? I help you find the people you need to find that can buy your stuff, okay? Like, I’m not looking for you for you to build out your programs, your product or service, I want you to get a contract in your hand, right. And that’s what we focus on. So sometimes our people, the clients that come to us have other business coaches, I love collaborating with those other business coaches and say, Hey, Mary, I understand that Jane is a student of yours. And you know, you’re her coach, tell me what your goals are for Jane, because I can help her focus on that as we build out her LinkedIn strategy, right. So I have worked really hard to make sure that my program is does not replace other people’s programs. It’s a natural collaboration, and it enhances other people’s programs. So when I go into these centers of influence relationships with that collaborative energy, it’s just win, win, win, win win. All right, so just to recap a little bit, remember that what a center of influence is, it’s just people that have that are influential over their audience. And they could be the most powerful relationships you’re building in your business. use LinkedIn to do the research and to connect with these people, you can do some of the research and other places too. We talked about using Amazon we talked about, you know, Instagram influencers, tick tock influencers, but coming back over to LinkedIn to build the relationships, you’re coming from that place of power from that amazing, beautiful profile that you have. And then go deep, not wide with these people go deep, not wide use multiple ways to get in front of their audiences. Because this is how the deeper the marketing is so much more intimate in this point in time this episodes coming out and you know, mid 2023 marketing is very intimate right now we are looking less for the noise and more for the intimacy and this is one way you do that you can do this doesn’t matter how big you are. Because remember, you know, I’m telling you here and now that the smaller influencers are some of the most powerful ones out there. So don’t just have the confidence to do this outreach, and start to build these relationships and watch how powerful this is and watch the changes that come to your business. You know, I mentioned earlier that in our shoes linked up programs, our goal is to create more wealthy women of influence in the world. I know that when more women have more money, that’s when we can make the changes in the world that we want to see. And I can tell you, the women in my world, the women in this program, blow my mind. Every single day, I’m thinking about two new women that just joined us this weekend, I cannot wait to dive in and get to know them better. Because I wake up in the morning thinking how grateful I am that I get to hang out with these beautiful, amazing women, you get to hang out with them too, if you want. If you want to hang out with some, it’s hard to build your life full of these beautiful, incredible women who by the way, are building collaborations in addition to the work they’re doing with us, right, because we have such a collaborative vibe, a collaborative energy and everything we do, just grab a spot on the calendar, Karen yankovich.com/call get you to the calendar. If you loved this show, and you think that you you know maybe other people in your audience would like to hear it too. I would love for you to share this. Just take a quick screenshot, share it across social media, use the hashtag good girls get rich, or tag me, I’m Matt, Karen Yankovich. When I see it, I get to share your posts with my audience. And then I help you get more visibility that way. You know, if you’re feeling it, I would love your reviews, I would love for you to review the show, and Apple podcasts or wherever you review podcasts. It helps me understand how we know what kind of shows are resonating with with my audience. So I can do more of those kinds of shows, right? In the show notes. There’s a link to speak pipe where you can leave an audio review. You can just leave a message or you can just leave us a message and say, you know, Hey Karen, I think you should interview this guest or love this topic do more of that. Or have you thought about doing a topic like this? I love getting messages from you on SpeakPipe. I respond personally to every single solitary one of them. So I would love to see that. If you just go to Karen yankovich.com/ 234 You’ll see the show notes for this episode and all the links we talked about here today. I do this podcast to support you. I am here to support you every step I can remember that a rising tide lifts all boats. That is the first step to LinkedIn Success. Let’s lift each other up. Help me help you share this podcast. I’ll share it with my audience. And I will be back here next week with another episode of The Good girls get rich podcast. I want this to be simple for you. I want you to be a wealthy woman of influence and I’m here to support that