The LinkedIn Mistake Most Business Owners Make (And How to Fix It)

Welcome to the Business Behind Your Business, the podcast where we delve into the financial strategies and insights that drive success for small and medium-sized business owners. I'm your host, Paul Sweeney, and in each episode, we bring you expert guests who share practical advice, real-world experiences, and actionable tips to empower you on your business journey. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, get ready to uncover the secrets to success and gain valuable insights into the business behind your business. Welcome back to the Business Behind Your Business podcast. I'm your host, Paul Sweeney, and today we're going to deal with a topic that a lot of business owners still don't understand, and if they do think they understand, they're making a lot of errors in this area. And look, there's a lot of missed opportunities here for not using this tool correctly. And what we need to do today is find out, firstly, what is LinkedIn, why you should be using it as a business owner, and then what you're getting wrong, and to fix what you're getting wrong, we're going to learn from our guests some of the things that you should be doing with your LinkedIn profile and how to get the most out of it. Our guest today, Daniel Alphon, who's the author of Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success, and he joined LinkedIn back in February 2004, yeah, 2004, way before many of us even understood what LinkedIn was or even heard of it, but he spent the last two decades, it's two whole decades, he's not new to the scene, two whole decades, helping entrepreneurs and business leaders use the platform to generate leads, build credibility, and grow their business organically. His approach is refreshingly simple, and if you've been on the end of some LinkedIn spamming, you'll be really pleased to know that he is not about cold connecting, paid ads, or pretending to be somebody that you're not. What he has for us today is just a smart, authentic strategy that works. I'm excited. Daniel Alphon, welcome to The Business Behind Your Business. Well, thank you very much for having me at The Business Behind Your Business. I thought you were discussing accounting. It's so powerful, but nobody knows how to know it, how to use it. That's right. Look, LinkedIn, I think so many people still don't understand what it is and how they should be using it, particularly a lot of business owners. I think they're dabbling in it and getting it really wrong. I agree, but dabbling with it is part of the process we need to take, so let's perhaps scale back and ask why LinkedIn and what LinkedIn is, if that's okay. Yeah, yeah. Let's look at it. What is LinkedIn? Why LinkedIn? Yeah. Sure. The simplest answer is LinkedIn is what you want it to be. Instead of thinking of it as a social media, social network, think of it as the world's largest business repository and business community. Before that, most SMB owners, if they run a Google search for their own full name, unless their name is Paul Sweeney, their LinkedIn profile will top the results without them needing to pay for LinkedIn or for Google. Do this. Check this out and understand that if people just Google you and find your business profile on LinkedIn, then it's time to have a look at it and not let LinkedIn call the shots, but we, Paul, we need to own it and we need to manage it. Not a social profile, that's not a social networking, but it's a business opportunity, a connection, a way of connecting. You mentioned that that's coming up as one of the top results when people search for you. Now, unless, and you mentioned my name, and you said unless it's Paul Sweeney, now I've been very deliberate with my branding in that I've registered the domains Paul Sweeney Accountant. So if you're looking for Paul Sweeney, he's an accountant, I'm going to be there first. And LinkedIn will still show up on my search profile, but it won't be the first thing. But if you're just searching for Daniel Alphon, the first thing that's possibly going to come up might be his LinkedIn profile. Is that correct? I looked you up and there's a Scottish Labour Member of Parliament, so that's the reason I mentioned it. I think my website, danielalphon.com and LinkedIn will stop the risk. Okay. Great. Okay. Fantastic. So a lot of people haven't been on LinkedIn, a lot of business owners are staying away from it. They're looking at Facebook, they're looking at Instagram. What's the primary reason a business owner needs to be on LinkedIn? Simplest way to answer to this is whether our clients are on LinkedIn or not. So no two SMB owners are alike. And if you cater to consumers and have a grocery store, then you don't have to manage LinkedIn. You can have Instagram, you can have whatever works for you. However, if your business is service-based, if there's a technology ingredient in it, or if it's a business-to-business sale, then for most of us, our clients would be on LinkedIn. Okay. So we're going to be present where our clients or our potential clients are hanging out. I would say we fish where the fish are. That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we go to where our prospective clients are. So LinkedIn is, I guess, the fish pond that we're going to be fishing in. Let's start with the basics. So what sort of presence should we start to try and put onto LinkedIn? It's a great question. I mean, it's not that simple, but the answer is our profile. Many SMB owners think that the LinkedIn page is what they need to nurture. But in fact, 99% of business is individual. That means that our individual profile and not our page will be where leads are coming from. Simplest answer is check the number of followers or connections you have. And you, Paul, have eight times more connections or followers on Paul Sweeney than on the company page, on Pretium Solutions. And this would be the proportion for most of our audience here. So make sure that your business, your profile is where you invest your time and not your page. Set it up. Forget about it. Check it every three months. Post something. But forget about it. Focus on our profile. Okay. So we have an individual profile, but we can also have a company or a business page separately. Absolutely. It's free to create. It wouldn't be the first thing I would do. If you have dozens of employees, then it becomes more interesting. If you're a Fortune 2000 company, obviously, but for SMB owners and the rest of us, you don't have to spend too much time on it. Okay. Great. So we're focusing on our individual profile because that's where people are going to go to first when they're looking for us. Is that correct? Yes. Connections are based on individual basis and most people do not follow company pages. Okay. That's interesting. So what's your thought about why people want to connect with people instead of following a company or maybe even a type of business or a well-known brand? 90% of the action is individual based on LinkedIn. And the reason is we only follow by default. We only follow companies we worked for or the universities we went to. And maybe the only exception would be job seekers who could be tempted to follow a company page because they would be interested in the jobs, which if you're a business owner, forget about the recruiting aspects of LinkedIn. It's not what you have to do. Focus on your business. Okay. So 90% of the traffic goes to our individual profile. So that's a pretty important place to work on. I would agree. That's great. So in terms of that profile, what should be on there? What are some of the mistakes, I guess, that people are making in terms of not showing it correctly or putting the wrong information on there? Excellent. So if you want to have an up-to-date profile, we ask three simple questions. Question number one, Paul, who's our ideal reader? And for SMB owners, the answer should usually be our prospects. So let's take an example of someone who's owner of a small business and they specialize in IT services. So maybe the ideal reader for those people would be a local company owner whose company is growing and now they need to have some more servers, some more power, some more tools, and they're looking for a service provider. So question number one, who's our ideal reader? And question number two, if we could make those people visit our LinkedIn profile, what action program would we like them to perform after they read our profile? Not too difficult. And if you say that what you would like them to do is to go to a certain destination, for example, you could say that you want people to go to postmanaccountant.au or to go to preconsolutions.com.au. Make sure that anyone visiting your profile sees the next call to action. Don't make it too difficult for them to wonder, should I go this way or maybe should I go that way? Have a streamlined process showing them what is the next logical step. For example, if they're starting a business, they must have lots of questions about how to start a business. So you would want to guide them and answer basic questions they would have instead of say, come to me. You'd say, ask yourself, what questions are my prospects struggling with? And you know the questions because you've been asked thousands of times. All you have to do is pick one or two and give them the first step. By giving them that educational content and showing them that you understand where they are and by helping them take a baby step from point A to point B, now they're looking for the next step and they would visit your website and maybe they would schedule a strategy call and then you would be their trusted advisor to set up the business. So we've identified our audience and we've identified the questions that they're going to ask and then we've made it possible for them to take the next step. That's three very simple things. But we seem to be getting this very wrong. You're right. LinkedIn hasn't changed the way our minds are wired and I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel. There's a good way of growing a business and it's based on our reputation. And even if I could spend 2,000 people in half a second, it would hurt our business. Because if you weigh the five people who would sign up and the 90, 95 people would say, I don't want to hear ever again from that person, then we have lost. We have worked on our reputation. Some of us decades or our whole lives. So don't throw it easily. Okay. So we need to be targeted about who hears the message as well. So we don't want to be reaching the wrong person. Yes. It could disqualify prospects based on your interest. If you're, again, an SMB owners who specializes in business solutions or business supplies and your business has a local aspect. So let's say if you're less than half an hour from greater Sydney, we offer ABC. So if I'm way out of Sydney, you don't want me to go and do anything because you don't want to serve me. That's fine. But the other side of that is if I live within the greater Sydney area, I'm tempted to read on and eventually to contact you. Okay. So we're narrowing down to a very specific group of clients we're trying to target and the actions we want them to take. Now I think you've written the book, Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success. Those steps are fairly simple, but I think we're still getting it wrong. One of the things that has come out is you've mentioned this idea of, I'm going to jump down a little bit in my thinking, but here, don't serve the platform, serve your business is one of the things that's come out. Can you just explain what you mean by that? Because I think a lot of us unintentionally, we are serving the platform. We're creating more interest in the platform, but not looking after ourselves. With pleasure. So let's take content as a litmus test or content as a very simple question. My guess is that a lot of our audience here do not produce daily educational content for their business. And for those people, I would say you don't have to create content for the sake of LinkedIn. It doesn't matter that you see people sharing videos or talking about stuff. If you don't produce content for your website, then you don't have to produce content for LinkedIn because we don't own the platform. We basically want to leverage the platform for people to go to our website or to schedule a call with us or to go and download a specific resource. Of course, Paul, if you have high quality content, then by all means, LinkedIn is a great platform to share it. But don't do anything for the sake of LinkedIn because it would be very time consuming. You would see very few results and then you would scratch your head and say, the LinkedIn thing isn't working for me. Of course it isn't. You don't have to create a business for LinkedIn. You have a business. Simply ask yourself, what's the best way I could leverage this to support my existing business, my existing process? Okay. So I think a lot of us get sucked into thinking we do have to produce a lot of content for LinkedIn because we think that, okay, if we're not at the top of somebody's feed, we're not visible to them. What do we need to do to change that, I guess, approach to how we think about LinkedIn? This was so sad. We hope that some people remember us. We hope that they remember us favorably. We can gain a lot of business just by referrals, even if we only have three close friends. Our business could be based on referrals. I know my businesses and I'm not the exception. Instead of trying to produce content for someone else, what we have to do is ask ourselves two simple questions. Is my profile converting and have I connected with the right people? I just want to clarify there. When we say about converting, what would be the goal? What would a conversion look like? I guess we're not talking about a follower or a connection. Going back to, I think, your first couple of points of what should be in our profile, a conversion could probably mean somebody's going through to our website or making that initial discovery call booking. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. The transaction will not happen on LinkedIn. LinkedIn could facilitate, could help prospect, discover our solutions. Going back to the question of discovery calls, say you have a business with one new discovery call a week and say that 50% of them are converted into paying clients. Paul, what if the business behind the business listeners could leverage the LinkedIn platform to triple the amount of discovery calls, staying with the same 50%? You would be able to say, okay, so instead of having one call, I now have three calls a week. Instead of having half a client, now I have 1.5. It's best to have revenues than connections. Don't fall in love with the LinkedIn metrics. You have to look into your banking account. If the LinkedIn metrics are growing, but your bank manager is worried, then we haven't achieved anything. I'm loving this. I'm loving hearing this message because I think so often as a business owner, we get sucked into trying to win the wrong game. Some of us are trying to win the social following to get the most followers, but we're ignoring the fact that the real win is the happy, successful client that we can work with profitably for year after year after year. We could also discuss the metrics you focus in. Obviously LinkedIn would like you to care about the connections you have, the followers, the views, the impressions, stuff like that, but oh, revenues are way more important, order is way more important. This is what we need to focus on, the business metrics. Absolutely. If somebody was starting on LinkedIn, we've got three key things they're going to do. They're going to have a personal page, not worry about the business page. They're going to link to their website and they're going to make it easy for the person to take the next step, which could be booking a discovery call or even placing an order. They're the three things we want. The key measure of success there is what's happening in our bank account. Business 101, I haven't said anything revolutionary, I hope. You would say that it's not revolutionary, but it's really shattered the belief system I think of a lot of people already because we've allowed ourselves to get caught up in chasing after clouds or metrics that don't really have a real meaning. I think that chasing that metric, that false measure of success is really distracting us from the main game, which is, as you mentioned, revenue in our bank account, that's the ultimate goal for LinkedIn. You're right in the sense that LinkedIn is a strange animal. It's a different beast. If you think of it, Paul, then to be successful on any other platform on earth today, except LinkedIn, we have to produce content. There's no way we could be successful on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube without uploading content. However, our prospects are more interested in the ways we could help them and what we actually do than reading our content. In other words, you could be highly successful on LinkedIn without sharing anything. There were long periods of time I hadn't shared anything and my bank account was growing. You don't have to keep producing content just for the sake of the LinkedIn or the vanity metrics. Focus on the simplest things, you don't have to produce or share content unless you want to. What I'm hearing here is, in terms of setting up and getting started on LinkedIn, we've got a relatively small commitment in terms of our time to set up that profile correctly. We don't have a need or an obligation to keep producing content week after week after week, which a lot of business owners are struggling to fit everything in their time. Yeah, AI is great, it'll save you time, but it's just going to create more noise and more distraction there. We can get on LinkedIn, we can use it to our advantage smartly without overloading what we need to be doing, but drill down very tightly on the end goal and making sure that we can lead a prospect from finding us to how they can work with us to actually turning that into revenue. That's the best way to put it. And a simple question we would also ask is, have we started connecting with people who know us well? And there's a certain amount of people who know us well. Say we know 100, maybe your bandwidth is 500. Maybe some of the business listeners have 5,000, but it's still limited. Focus on the people you know well that are on the LinkedIn platform and make sure you're connected with them and only them. I know it sounds strange, but you could gain a lot more business by connecting with 30 people who know you well rather than 20,000 who don't know and they would say, Paul, who? That's not what we want. We want people to know that if they're looking, if they have business questions about maybe exiting the business and handing it over to a family member, or they're worried about their business growing too fast or about starting a new business or this sort of accounting software they need to use, we want them to hear Paul Swing is the person to go to because he's helped me. Don't chase the vanity metrics and remember that the single most frequent action that LinkedIn users perform on LinkedIn is visiting other people's profiles. Okay. So visiting other people's profiles is important to do. Yes, because that's the frequent action that people will make. Make sure that you even ask someone, if you could look at my profile and you were my prospect, when you describe your prospect, what would you think? The small thing to do would not to put words in their mouth, but to ask a question, be silent and wait for their feedback. And when they say, Paul, I don't understand what, when you say X, do you mean A or B? You don't answer them. You keep asking other questions and then we go home and say, if my prospect doesn't understand that term, then it's not their fault. It's my fault. And I thank my friend and I go and I try to explain it in a simpler way. This is the simplest trick you could do with 10 minutes. Anyone who can give you feedback about the way you set up your profile could help you create or improve your LinkedIn profile. Wow. Okay. So there's some great tips and it's not that complicated really. You've made it sound so simple, but you've also reduced it down to some very manageable tasks that a business owner can take. So let's say we've looked at our LinkedIn profile and we've got a lot of noise on there that's just confusing, I guess, a person coming to see us for the first time. Should we be removing that content from our profile? What we could do is decide there's some sort of hierarchy of contents. So we want to educate people and to make them understand they've landed in a right place and then basically they scroll down and want to understand more about your business. Think of it as the window of your store. Say I walk past your store and at the window I see newspapers and I see a Hamburger ad and then I see a baseball bat. Now contrast this with a window where I would see only one item. We have to pick the item. For some people it would be this service, for other people it would be that service, but what is the service or single product that would make people want to discover more about us? Because, Paul, once we step into the store, now we can see the richness and the variety of services you offer, but even then you don't swamp people. You don't want to make them say there is too many options for me to decide. You want to make life as simple as possible. You show them two main avenues and when they choose one, you show them the variety of services you offer. Think of it as a store. It's basically the same mechanism. It makes so much sense, not confusing the message by putting too many things there. Focus on that one thing that you want people to see, which, as you mentioned, is you, you, the business owner. Make them see you and then come in and say, right, now what's the next step? Look, I'm absolutely being fascinated by this conversation because it's been a real eye opener. How to simplify and just drill down on what's really important with LinkedIn. If you're not already on it as a business owner, you should be, providing you're doing B2B or as Daniel mentioned earlier. If you really want to find out more, the book is a great place to start, Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success. If you're waiting for the book to arrive, I suggest you jump onto Daniel's website and grab a copy of his free checklist, the LinkedIn cheat sheet, which is at danielalfon.com forward slash freebie. We'll put the links in the show notes so you don't have to worry about those but follow those through and they'll also be on the business behind your business.com podcast. If you go and visit Daniel Alfon on LinkedIn, I'm sure that the key messages that you need to do and how to work with Daniel will be there because very clearly, you'll find Daniel, you'll know what to do and you'll know how to book him in and say, Daniel, I need you to work with me and help me get this right. Would that be a fair way to describe what you can do for our listeners, Daniel? Thank you very much. It would be an honor and just to say that you're listening to the business behind your business and you can also learn from going to linkedin.com plus linkedin.com so check it out. Fantastic. Look, it's been great. I've really enjoyed this. I'm going to go and personally revisit my own LinkedIn profile. I'm not going to worry so much about my company page at the moment. I'm just going to leave that there but I'm going to focus on Paul Sweeney's LinkedIn profile. I've learned a lot today and I know that you have. If you have learned and you're still listening, which is really important, make sure you share this message with another business owner that really needs to hear this because you're helping them and they will know that you're the right person to go to as well when they need advice and when they need a good quality product or service. Do yourself a favor, share great content like what Daniel shared with us today with your friend. Share it on a podcast player or on YouTube or just share a link to the show notes and help your friend grow a great business as well as you and Daniel, it's been absolutely great to have you on the show today. Really appreciate it. You shared some wonderful tips and I know all of our audience are going to be absolutely fired up to go and fix up their LinkedIn profiles as a result. Well, thank you very much and thank you for helping business owners. That's a wrap for this episode of The Business Behind Your Business. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and valuable for your business journey. Before we go, don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform, share it with fellow business owners who could benefit, and send in your burning questions because we love hearing from you. Missed any of our previous episodes or looking for additional resources to help grow your business? Head over to our website at thebusinessbehindyourbusiness.com. There you'll find our full archive of past episodes along with show notes, transcripts, and links to valuable resources mentioned in each episode. Your journey to business success continues at thebusinessbehindyourbusiness.com. Until next time, stay inspired, stay informed, and keep building the business of your dreams.