World’s No 1 LinkedIn Expert: How To Grow a Personal Brand FAST in 2026

If you're looking to blow up from a massive friend, and this is something that people don't do enough, and if you do this in a very specific and focused way, instantly you're just getting hundreds of thousands of followers. Wow. Our rhythm as it is right now is really focused on likes, views, not that important. That post drove between like 8-10 thousand followers. Wow. Just from one post. That's Josh Sanders' head of content for Chris Donnelly, one of the fastest-growing LinkedIn pages and personal brands in the world. We have had some insane and safe results. We have some days genuinely where we do like 15,000 followers like one day. That's insane. In this episode, Josh reveals how he grew Chris' pages to over 3 million followers on LinkedIn. Find the reason why you want to post on LinkedIn. Always wish onto an audience, optimising your profile. The easiest way to put that something into a follower is. How they converted that audience to a $10 million a year education business and how you can, too. We were driving thousands of people. Simply by just having to subscribe to the newsletter. That's crazy. It sounds so obvious. I'm not sure how many people know about it, but you can. And how they use newsletters to compound their growth and build trust. The most powerful thing we found is. That is so interesting. It was generally at the point where we grew so quickly and in newsletters subs that the founder of HitMate and Barry was like, "You messaged us and was like, 'What are you guys doing?' I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen organic growth like this." This is an absolute content masterclass. I really hope you enjoy it. Let's dive in. Josh, thanks for my stimulus. Thanks for having me. It's great to be up. You have made almost $10 million from LinkedIn in the last 18 months working with Chris Donnelly and you've grown his pages to over 3 million followers. Yes, yeah. I would like to make $10 million a year from LinkedIn. I'd like to have 3 million followers. So I'm sure there's loads of people in our audience who are watching this and listening to this who would like to do the same. So if you're down for it, I would love for you to talk as through step-by-step how we can replicate some of your success. Would you be up for that? Yeah, absolutely. I'm so down to getting to this. LinkedIn, it's this incredible platform. There's like a billion users. Yes. And something crazy. Only 1% of them are actually posting. Yes, you're correct, yeah. If I'm looking at this platform and I'm looking at growing my business from it, what would be like the first place to start? Is it the content? Is it some of a place? What would you say to people? So the first thing that we say to everyone is find the reason to why you want to post on LinkedIn. And then it's like the overall why, basically, because a lot of people start with quite unclear vision and they'll post for the sake of it. And that basically just means that you're going to have like confusion with your content down the line. So if you have like a very, very clear why and like a reason and a purpose for doing it, that basically just means that you can reverse engineer it from that why. And you can break down like your clear content pillars. You can break down all the different types of formats that you want to do and all drive them towards that first why, basically. Yeah. And so I guess with Chris, what would have that have been? It was like he had a business or he just wanted to build his personal brand or what was kind of the thinking there. So of course, it was quite an ambitious submission, which is I think something that really attracted me. He essentially just wanted to become like the most well-known business creator, entrepreneur on the planet, which is obviously a massive goal with, you know, Hormozzi and Cody Sanchez and people like that. But that was the mission. And so we started off with LinkedIn. When I joined, he had about 180,000 followers at that time, I think he had very little following on the video platforms. I think he had like five to maybe 10,000 on my TikTok. He had an Instagram, but I think the positioning he didn't feel like quite comfortable with. So we basically restarted that from scratch when I started working with him because he had the large audience on LinkedIn already. That was a platform that we were like, okay, put the main focus on this. It was also something that throughout his businesses, he had like benefits from using, like it attracted a large amount of the clients that came in to his first agency verb. And so we were just like, okay, this platform is really great. There's way less competition on that already. If we like really like go in all in on this, it'll mean that we hopefully should benefit and get some advantages that you wouldn't necessarily get on other platforms, basically. Yeah, 'cause it feels like LinkedIn is probably the most slept on platform, almost like the easiest to create on as well because it's kind of written posts and I know there are carousels and there's video on there, but it still feels like anyone could get up, LinkedIn and type, whereas the barrier to entry on Instagram YouTube just feels a lot more intense. It kind of feels like the easiest to create on and then to your point around the value there, people are on there to do business. They're on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, to probably be entertained and relax and have a bit of fun. Whereas on LinkedIn, you are literally there to do business or to waste some time when you're at work, but it looks like you're working. Yes. And I remember Chris had one client, was it like Bugatti for his previous agency, Business From LinkedIn, from a LinkedIn post. You've got those decision makers at all those companies there. It feels like the place where if you want to grow your business and win business, that's the platform to go on. 100% and perversely almost like the easiest one. So first of all, let's say I've set my goal is build my personal brand because I think good things happen when I do that. Opportunities come my way. And then I guess for me it would be grow my podcast agency and my content services business. That would probably be my goal there. You said something about concept pillars and starting to think about what type of content I create. Yeah, absolutely. So if the goal for you would be to grow your podcast agency, I would think, okay, what sort of pillars can we break down into that? And that's actually interesting. So when we say content pillars, the traditional approach is like three to five things that relate to you or your business that are very specific, very focused, are a very targeted audience. We actually break it down a different way. We have what we call interest pillars, which are topics that will relate into your business but have a much broader appeal. For example, with your guys with the podcast stuff, maybe it's something to do with, I don't know, like video in general or like the creator economy, it's something a little bit broader. Yeah, it's not necessarily directly linked in with you guys, but it's something that can reach a much larger market. Yeah, it's like that general marketing, brand marketing, cool things brands are doing. Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, marketing would be a good one as well. Like just a general marketing sort of strategy. So you have the interest pillars, which are those that are much broader and then you have the more expert pillars. So these are things that are a little bit more specific to you, a lot more focused on like one or two key sort of ICPs. You kind of want your content, your personal brand to accompany for both of those types of pillars. That's right. So we usually say you want to have like sort of like maybe five to seven and it also very much depends on your goal. So if you're looking for very specific business growth over a short period of time, I would say you're probably going to want to focus more on the expert pillars. If you're looking to blow up and grow a massive brand and then attract attention that way, I would say you probably want to focus more on interest pillars. Right. It's very dependent on what you want, but we would usually say maybe like five to seven pillars, some within the interest, some within the expert and they should all align towards your business. Essentially, even with interest pillars, for example, it would be things that even though they're much broader, they can still kind of link into your business and you can still have some storytelling elements in there that relate to your business. For Chris, is that what you have as well? Yes. Yeah. So for Chris, his goal was, as I said, to become the most recognised entrepreneur in the world. And so for him, it was very much focused on the interest pillars at first. So we had I think like four or five, it was like leadership and business culture, AI, business, entrepreneurship, growth, personal development. And the goal was to blow up in those topic areas to reach as many people as physically possible and then as with kind of like grown throughout the last 18 months, also with slightly changed, with slightly become a little bit more niche with things, especially as it's launched, the new business searchable. We've actually pivoted our strategy to go more into marketing, to search, to AO, and Geo, that sort of thing. So it's been a fun one. A lot of people will think that their positioning at the start is like something that they have to have for the entirety of their personal brand. Yeah. You can actually pivot pretty easily. If you focus on, we call it prevalidated content, so this is content that performs well across multiple different creators, it's like outlier content, essentially. You can find ideas within a specific industry that you're looking to go into, you're looking to talk about. It basically means you can slowly start to pivot your brand and you can change it based on the business goals that you have. Let's say I settled on my pillars, which were kind of broader marketing, greater economy, entrepreneurship, personal brand, and then maybe the niche of stuff would be maybe more podcast industry, specific, maybe case studies and things like that from clients. I settled on them, what do I do next? OK, so the next thing, it's quite an underrated thing, in my opinion, is optimizing your profile page. OK, so when we say that, we basically mean turn your profile page on LinkedIn, like a landing page for a website. Right. So it needs to have a very clear and confident profile photo, like professional headshot, basically, doesn't have to be anything like really high in budget. Yeah, as long as it's not like a selfie or a picture of me, sorry, anything like that. Yeah. And then you have a few sort of key areas within your profile where you can actually drive a lot of people to your business already, right, towards the goal that you already have. So you have the banner, which sits just above your profile photo. That's a really underrated place, in my opinion. A lot of people actually don't even have a banner. Or it would just be like some generic one with their logo on the bottom corner. You can drive people towards a certain action. So for us, one of the key focuses is to get people on Chris' newsletter. And so we will have very specific image, that is all within his brand colors. And drives people that says, I click the newsletter link in the future section, for example. And so when people comment on this page straight away, like the first thing they see, obviously, is his face. And then right at the top with the banner, it's like newsletter, already, like, so they're on their page. And they know that he's got a newsletter, and he wants you to check it out. So that's one of the first things. And then after that, you have the tagline, which again, is something that I think a lot of people pay attention to. Because with a tagline, when you're commenting on other people's posts on LinkedIn, you can see the name, and you can also see the tagline as well. So it's a great way to show what you're about, what your goal is, and who you help effectively. And unfortunately, there's not like a magic formula for the tagline. Very dependent on your goals, which is why, I said about setting that Y in the first place, you can have very like lead specific taglines, which is like, we help seven to eight bigger entrepreneurs build podcast empires. Good example. I would say that's a little bit more specific. Or you can have something that's a little bit more generic, if you're looking for that like explosive personal brand growth, you'd say like, I talk about marketing, the creator economy, AI, or whatever it may be. Yeah. Essentially, just a space where people come in and see what your profile is about, what sort of content you're posting about, already, and who you're helping effectively. So you have the profile, the banner, the tagline. You also have the featured section too, which is, again, most people will just put up an old post that's done well here. You can actually use this to drive more people towards your business, your website, or whatever it may be. Interesting. And you can nicely, like you can edit these, so you can have it like very branded. So if you have like a branded banner, for example, with your own colors and pointing towards certain things, you do the same thing with the featured section. So you can have like, for us, obviously, it's the new setter. We have another cool to action there, as well as the creator accelerator link as well, so you're driving people towards that page. And it basically just means if people have seen your content, they click on your profile, they already know exactly what you're doing, what your offer is, what sort of content you post already, really underrated way of showing what you're about, basically. Yeah, I always find this with clients and creators. They start creating, but they forget to actually think about what happens if I blow up. Yes. So, or even worse, which is, they start creating, and they do blow up, and then it's crickets to the business, or the service, or whatever, because they've actually forgot to set the infrastructure. So this kind of feels like the infrastructure. Yes. And I'm looking at it, and I'm loving it. It is so well optimized here. There's so much to it. So we'll definitely kind of have it up on screen as Josh is talking it through. But yeah, I guess if you do blow up, then someone comes to the page, presumably, and they immediately see, step-by-step newsletter delivers actionable advice on business and growth. Join 400,000 people receiving weekly tips, subscribing in my featured section. You've even got a little image of where it looks really valuable, and there's loads of stuff I can't actually see what it is, but it looks valuable. It looks like I should probably sign up for it. And then it says, "Found a follow-up "or post on business marketing in AI." All pretty interesting topics, I guess, if I'm interested in those things, it would appeal to me. There's actually also a website link, is that fairly new on LinkedIn? That it says, "Searchable waitlist." Yeah, I could join. Yes. That's quite interesting. It's my new feature. Another spot within the profile as well. So it's like the first thing that we teach people when they join the creative accelerator is like, "You really want to optimize that "in every capacity to drive people towards your offer." Yeah. Because if you had two people who had the same business, you know, Person A and Person B. Person A has maybe a profile photo, no banner, no information about their business at all, and Person B is like completely optimized. And you see the exact same content, and you click on their profiles, instantly you're gonna trust. Person B a lot more. It seems far more legit, and it's just inherently clear to where you actually need to go if you want to be a part of the business, for example. There's a lot of social proof on here as well, and the use of the images is really good. So again, in the feed section, subscribe today, join 250,000 people receiving my newsletter with actionable business advice, and then apply to the creative accelerator, which is your education product. Learn how I grew my LinkedIn from 30k to 1 million in 24 months. So again, there's like quite a nice bit of value. I'm presumably gonna get if I click on that. I am gonna click on it. That's, I'm already on the newsletter, and I'd love to get into your funnel for the 10 million revenue education business. So we'll get into that. But I presume the next step from optimizing this is what, starting to think about actually creating. I mean, you've got a few more sections you can make use of the about section as well. This one, again, there's not necessarily a magic formula. People will tell you to do it in certain ways. It's usually based off their own experience. We find the best approaches just sharing more of your story in there. So actually sharing what you've done, going a little bit deeper on who you actually are, 'cause that just makes the most sense for an about section. And you can also drive people towards certain links whether it be your business or certain contact, for example, like an email to reach out to commercial manager or anything specific like that. Yeah, there's a lot of building trust here and getting your story. So the short life story, Chris has got. age 21 did this. age 22 left union started, verb brands. age 27 acquired. age 28 won Bugatti as a client. age 30 sold the business. age 31 founded this other company, raised 35 million. So all of a sudden, I've educated on Chris, and I can see he sounds pretty legit and interesting in a way that most people on LinkedIn from their page, I would have no idea what their backstory was and I would be unlikely to trust them. But he sounds pretty legit and interesting. Sounds like he's making stuff happen and doing interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it definitely helps. He is genuinely a very impressive entrepreneur. That's helpful, yeah. He's got a lot of credibility. But yeah, I mean, it's so important to communicate that because a lot of where most entrepreneurs go wrong, is they don't necessarily want to brag about it or talk about their achievements in a way. And so the about section is just a really nice way to kind of do it in an authentic way. We're sharing a story, you're sharing a few of your achievements. And like you said, you're just trying to build trust with people, trying to get them to, you know, come on your pages of visit to someone that doesn't necessarily know you, and instantly know what the offer is and who you actually are. Hmm. Yeah, that's really good. Actually, the only thing he could improve here, or you could improve, is actually have a failure on there. Yes. I think that would actually be, that would be nice because then there would be again, that element of depth. I think that's always good, a bit of transparency on a failure. 100%. Quick one, over 80% of the people who watch this channel are not subscribed. So if you're getting value from these episodes, please subscribe to the channel. It helps me book bigger and better guests and create more value for you. I'd really appreciate it. So please subscribe. So here's my profile page done now. Once I've changed. Yeah, okay. I think so. Cool. Then do I start creating content? So once you've optimized your profile, I think the next stage actually is, and this is something that people don't do enough, in my opinion, is focusing on your network and your relationships. So before you even start creating content, you can find out so much information that is actually going to inform your strategy moving forward. For example, is it some lady came to me the other day and she was like, I'm trying to find sort of key ideas within my area. I want to start building out this LinkedIn strategy. I spoke about finding creators to take inspiration from one, because you can see the core topics that are resonating and two, because they've built up very specific audiences as well, which you can tap into. Yeah. So when I say your network and your relationships with people, I basically just mean becoming a little bit more vocal in comment sections, starting to spot patterns with things, like what are the key things that people are actually talking about. And if you do this in a very specific and focused way with your ICP instantly, you're just getting flooded with data and information about your ICP and your understanding the exact types of content that they're trying to consume, the stuff that they like, the opinions that they disagree with, what they do agree with. And that just informs so much of your strategy. I honestly think you can make quite an impression on people just through commenting alone. Yeah, I think people, they kind of separate creating content with engagement, but I actually think they kind of come together in a little bit. Yeah, you can become known within a specific space just through commenting and just through leaving genuinely thoughtful and inspiring comments. Mainly because one now linked in is flooded with AI comments. Yeah. And so naturally, you're going to stand out to those comments. We actually did this when we were slowly pivoting Chris' brand to talk more about search. Yeah. Basically found the top search SEO creators. And we made sure that we were commenting with Chris' account, sharing really valuable information, getting involved in certain conversations. And this just made him a little bit more of a known voice around that community space. Because linked in is very community driven. And so if someone who is consuming the same content, consuming SEO content all the time, and this E-Chris' name in the comments are making a really interesting remark here or making a joke about SEO here, it shows that he really understands the community and instantly you're going to trust him straight away. Even though you haven't even seen his content already, you just know that he's involved within the community and he kind of knows what he's talking about. He's leaving genuine thoughtful comments, basically. So I presume there's a thing there around. You're also stealing someone's reach there as well in a way or you're contributing, but you're also, they've done the hard work. Their post is done well already. And you're just making sure you land and your present in front of all the people that follow them. So how do you do that? Is there a system there? Because I'm familiar in the past with, you know, there's a group chat and we all comment on each other as soon as we post. I'm familiar also with like setting notifications on certain people so that when they post something, I'm the first to comment. And ironically George Mack, who's a great creator, I noticed he's one of the first people to comment on a lot of Chris's posts. So do you recommend the system there? Like, you can actually kind of make sure you do that. Or is it just like by chance that you log on and you just make you comment on five things at a time? Or do you project? You can completely systemize it. So the easiest approach is just the notifications. If you block out all the other notifications, like post, you know, a comment and like some your own post and you just have the creator notifications, you can use that. And a road approach is like having all of like creators in like a sheet with the time that they're posting as well. You can just go through and make sure that you're, you know, one of the first people to comment. Yeah, what you were saying with kind of like stealing the reach of other creators, we call it like piggybacking on their audience. Yeah. And so you're right, if you're nice and earlier on that and you leave like a genuinely strong comment. Yeah. And you can make quite an impact, which is pretty good. We also have like different types of comments that you can make as well. So we have like the entertaining slash joke slash meme comment. We have like the storytelling comment, which is like, I think actually really nicely supported by an image as well. You have like the cruncharian take, which is like where you go against a common belief or you know, the state it's quote essentially. Yeah, there are multiple different approaches that you can take. And I think doing all of them really cement you as a voice within the community that deeply just understands industry as a whole. So yeah, it's completely systemizable. You can also do it with, you know, if you've got like a VA, for example, I think that's another interesting piece that people typically are usually against is having someone comment that you. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense if you are a founder who has multiple different businesses or you're just someone that's really low on time to train up a VA to know exactly how you talk your exact opinions and essentially comment as you. People often get offended and they're like, oh, why is it not you? But like if you think about it, you know, you think of Alex Mahmouds, you're steeping, but like they're not in the comments sections themselves. They've got so many other things on. Yeah, they've got a social manager. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And as long as the people who are doing the content for you, like no, you inside out, yeah, I think it's very worthwhile for a lot of entrepreneurs. We do recommend commenting a lot as yourself first. I think that's a great way of really understanding the community. Yeah, just getting very clear on your ICP and the types of content that they kind of consume. We're very systemizable with Chris's brand, whereas he will do a certain thing for a certain period of time and then he will train people to do that thing at a time. And it's just like, is there a set amount of comments you're doing each week or is it like a certain number of people that you always comment on their stuff? Like what would be recommend to me there? If I'm going to say to Jonas, I want you to do 10 a week or I want you to respond to everything. Someone, these five posts is what's the best. So the first thing we say is always respond to audience. That's like number one key thing. Yeah, obviously on your own posts. Like it sounds so obvious, but a lot of people will ignore it. They'll post and then they'll just go off the platform. Yeah. So we will always engage with the audience, we'll try and provoke better conversation there. And then when we're going with other creators, we are quite systemized with it within it, where we will comment on certain people's posts just because they're very involved within a certain community. And so yeah, we will make sure that we're around and we're active within that space. But then I also think it's really important to comment on new creators as well. We actually have a system that we recommend within the query accelerator, which is 30, 30, 30, 10. So 30% of your comments should go towards larger creators. And the sole purpose of that is to piggyback from that audience. More people to kind of take their views and get people to recognize you from that. The second one is people within your industry. So these key voices, they may not necessarily massive creators, but they're people that have a really strong following. Yeah. And a really strong audience who are directly related to the kind of audience that you're going after. The third one is your ICP. OK. So as I said, if you're within that network, you're within the comments, you can really get a good understanding of your ICPers. That's a great idea, actually. And yeah, and if they're creating content, and this might be a little bit tricky, some people, and well, the higher majority of people won't actually be creating content. Yeah. And so you have to get quite creative on how you can start engaging with them. One strategy might be they may not be creating content, but their company is creating content. And a lot of companies internally are like, hey, guys, can you support the company page? And so if you become pretty active on there, you're kind of cementing yourself within that team already. So they already know who you are from that, which I think is a pretty good approach. Colleagues as well might be an interesting approach, so they may not be creating content, but their colleagues might be creating content. Yeah. And therefore you can kind of go on, start engaging with that. If they are someone within a similar division, they'll probably be talking about similar things. And again, you just become known within your sort of ICP audience there. Which is great. And then the 10 is for traditional colleagues, friends, people that you want to get and support within the journey of posting content, because it is difficult. Yeah. And it's great to get support from your friends. Yeah. That makes sense. So I've got my comment system down. That sounds really good, and that sounds easy and achievable. Then do I start looking at creating? Yes. Yes. Give us the gold here. How do we get to 3 million followers very quickly? OK, so if the gold is pure growth, which is what our goal essentially was when I joined Chris, you have to think about, OK, what is the type of content that is going to drive as much follow a growth as possible? Yeah. So when I first joined Chris, he was very good at going viral. He was very good at saying specific things that just resonated with a mass audience. And so his posts were generating in the time hundreds of thousands of likes. Yeah. Which on LinkedIn was like unheard of at the end of the day. Yeah. It's actually very hard to do that now. But two years ago, it was doable. But it wasn't necessarily converting into followers, because people would see on the feed, and they'd be like, oh, yeah, I relate to that. I'm going to like it, maybe drop a comment, and then scroll on. So the goal when I joined was how can we increase the follow a conversion significantly? How can we effectively become the fastest growing creator in the world? And to do that, you have to kind of break down the psychology of someone using LinkedIn and why they would actually follow in the first place. And the majority of that is through educational depth, like high in depth content, basically. So content that makes you go, wow, like, this has taught me something significantly interesting. This will benefit me. And I think another key thing as well is making it super actionable. If you can create something where someone can effectively do a certain thing, and within minutes get a, you know, a little bit of a result from it, instantly they're like, wow, okay, this person has taught me this. I've done this, it's worked. And now I want to like follow them. I want to learn more about this sort of thing. Yeah, if you understand why people will follow you on the first place, then that's a pretty good starting point. So how do we engineer our posts to drive those conversions to followers and people who take action? Is that like monitoring per post? What drove the most follows? I heard Chris also talking about how you would look at different creators and every day at like 9 a.m., he would in the morning just have a look at what their follow account was. And he'd notice, okay, well, this person here, they're growing really fast. This person here isn't growing so fast. So what is it that they're doing? Yes. Is there some tactics there that work? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, you definitely done your research, so I love that. When I first started, we were very manual with it because there wasn't any tools about that could actually do this sort of thing. And so you're right, we would literally track, we had certain creators that we knew would have a similar audience to Chris and they were growing on Nick Dern and we were like, okay, which specific posts, which specific topics are they talking about? But people are like, wow, this is interesting enough to me for to drop a follow. Basically. Another thing as well is, and this is specifically on Nick Dern is formats. So the algorithm as it is right now is really focused on dwell time, like a lot of social media platforms and carousels and cheat sheets. Things that go really deep on a certain subject is the thing that makes people stop, you know, spend time actually like try and figure out and learn about like what you have to try and tell them. And that dwell time is like a good signal to the algorithm and therefore it pushes out to more people as well. So I think the reason that we grew so quickly one was because we were tracking, you know, the best creators, what sort of topics within Chris' content pillars that would grow his account. That was the first thing. And the second thing was we were the fastest to adapt formats. So there's multiple examples here where we would like, and this would come just specifically from spending time on Nick Dern. We would find, or we would try and find outliers for our own creators who would have, you know, smaller accounts or smaller followings. And they would share something in a certain format that has like disproportionate growth in comparison to something else. And so one of the first things when I joined him was carousels. Carousels like kind of just come out of the time and there were things that were driving like massive massive follower growth. So we were like, okay, we'll go from these like single images that he was doing already and we'll start going into carousels. It was really random, but there was a time where LinkedIn just created like a link shortener. And so people who were using this like link shortener or who were sharing links within their posts were going like insanely insanely viral. And this I think was fascinating because a lot of people were quite slow to jump on it. Yeah. 'Cause a lot of the LinkedIn gurus were saying like, I shouldn't have links in your posts. You shouldn't be going taking people off platform. And so a lot of people were quite apprehensive when they came out, whereas we were like, straight on it, we were like, okay, we've seen it, have disproportionate growth for a smaller creator. How can we jump on this? How can we maximise and capitalise on this? And so who we did, it's funny. I think Chris spotted it while he was at like a care show for Lotti. Like, send me the post and he was like, hey, let's jump on this straight away. You know, let's blend in with our own content. And we did so and that post, I think, drove like something between like eight to 10,000 followers. Well, just from one post. Wow. And it was like quite a simple post. It was quite a broad post. I think it was like seven TED talks in seven days or something like that. But because it was using this new format, that LinkedIn were like kind of pushing at the time to get people to use it a little bit more, it drove like significant outcomes. One of the main things within our approach because we were so focused on that follow-a-growth was we see something working, we're gonna double down on it and go very, very hard on it. And so for that week, instead of being like, oh, you know, maybe we should do it. An image post here, we were like, no, we know this works. We're gonna double down it. Pretty much every single post is gonna have links. We're gonna obviously change the topics up so it doesn't get really like repeated and boring. And we're gonna use the same format. And this drove like significant, significant growth. So when I joined, he was at 180,000. We set a goal of like 250,000 by the end of the year, which was three months. And I remember seeing that goal and being like, wow, that is ambitious. Yeah, that's going to be difficult. But because we found these small little format changes, we managed to go from 180,000 to 350,000 well, within three months. That's crazy. I was saying, it was quite mental to the point where it surprised both of us. We were very much consuming, like we were very much on the platform for a lot of time. But when we were doing it, I mean, we were seeing the days, we have some days genuinely, but we do like 15,000 followers in like one day. Wow, which like on LinkedIn was completely unheard of. Yeah, it just kind of like skyrocketed Chris' account. And I remember those targets. It was like 250,000 by the end of the year, 500,000 by the year after. And then 750,000 by like 18 months. Within six months, we were at 750,000. Which was absolutely crazy. Yeah, it was mind-blowing. By that point, we decided that, hey, we're pretty good at this. I mean, maybe we can start like coaching people. And that was when the whole education, business idea came up. One of the things I love about this podcast is all the actionable frameworks and strategies that my guests give me. So if you want a copy of everything Josh has talked about so that you can implement it for yourself and your business, then you can get a copy at the link in the description. And I'm sure you will get value from it. Yeah, so in all of those posts, and I guess in my posts, if I'm creating, are there cool to actions in those posts that are driving those followers? Or are people just really enjoying the content, the carousel, the image, the written text, and going, yeah, I'm going to follow for more? Or do you actually encourage people with a clear CTA to subscribe and follow for more? Yes, yeah. It sounds really obvious, but the easiest way to convert someone into a follower is simply reminding them to follow your account. It's hilarious. People will see it on big, created accounts, but they're always asking for a follow and all that. But it's just a simple reminder, because you may be reaching different audiences, and if they come on your post, they read it, they get value from it, and it's like, oh, follow me. Then click on your name, and obviously tag yourself on the them, click your name, they go on your account, and they can follow you. And it's just so easy for them. It makes it super frictionless, and it's just an obvious way of asking people to follow. Yeah, I think that's like one of the main ways, but I think the format, how you represent the information, and we actually have a system for how to effectively write the perfect post that's going to convert followers as well. Yeah. Following that system is important as well. OK, so let's get into that system, but I'm just looking at a couple of posts, and I can see how you look, guys, of Marcel, it because it's seen-- when you see these posts, it's so obvious. It's so well-optimized. Yeah, what does the perfect post look like? The first thing is having an idea that is revalidated, as I mentioned. So something that has worked well before, either for a smaller crater and it's performed disproportionately either for yourself previously as well, like repurposing that idea, or for a big crater, and even for the big crater, it's like kind of an outlier within their current posts. So it's understanding within your industry, within an area which your business is focused in, which pieces of content, which ideas, which topics are going to drive the most followers. That's the first part, starting within the ideation stage, something that a lot of people often miss. They will try and really focus it on them and their business. And I guess create for themselves, almost like, strict that you go a little bit and make it very personalized. Whereas we're constantly like, it should be focused on your audience. You should be providing education and value to your audience, making sure it's actionable, and so forth. So that's the first stage, like the idea. The second part is then how can we show that idea in a way that is super actionable and people can share it with loads of other people. So we will typically start with like the image or the carousel, for example. And we make sure that we have topics that have certain breakdowns or frameworks that are actionable. So an example might be a productivity cheat sheet and it has different frameworks like the two-minute rule or Pomodoro method. Pomodoro, Eisenhower matrix, exactly. So it's having those sort of frameworks where people can use them and apply them and get value from them straight away. And it's visualizing that information so it stands out on the feed. Again, that's another underrated thing. People will not invest in the design and not invest in how they represent the information as well. It's just such an easy way to stand out. If you have beautifully designed cheat sheets or carousels, it's just so much easier for people to stop when they're scrolling. - Yeah, there's one here, master problem solving. Use these seven mental models to make better decisions. And then there's seven and they've all laid out beautifully with graphics. Is Chris coming up with this or like you're finding, you just said you're looking at smaller creators, looking at what's outperformed for them. What does that process look like for coming up of these topics? Is it all based on, okay, we want to talk about entrepreneurship, business marketing in AI. So let's have a look for posts that are doing well there. And then we take those ideas and then make our own version of it. - Yes, completely, completely. Yeah. So Chris specifically at the start was like so involved with like ideation and like finding these certain posts that he thought that he could add more either information on his own experience and effectively improve that type of content as well. That's another thing I would say, if you're taking like a prevalidated idea, it's looking at that idea, seeing why it's done well. And then go, okay, how can I make this even better? Like if this is the starting point, how can I make it so good that like there is no reason why people wouldn't follow me for this type of content? - Yes. - And so yeah, he was very involved in the ideation process. We worked together so, so closely creating this content for literally like 18 months and to a point where like I, (laughs) I'm like basically in his head when it comes to content. Like I can see the exact things that he likes, the exact topics that he likes talking about. - And now how do I find my prevalid ideas? 'Cause then do I, am I literally looking at other people's pages and scrolling through and yes. Like looking at the top people in my niche or people in my niche, I find interesting and just scrolling through and going, okay, this one got 500 likes. First of this one, no one got 10. So there must be something here. And I add that one to my list of ideas. - Yes, yeah, exactly. So we have what we call a creator inspiration bank, where we have like basically across all of your pillars, your content pillars, you have just a list of creators who are like growing within that niche. - Right. - And it doesn't necessarily mean they have to be growing as in like a follower growth. It could be they're getting like a lot of engagement. You can see that they've got a nice community there. And just having like a super tight list of people for each content pillar. That's like a really easy way to get inspiration quickly. You can actually custom create a feed on LinkedIn as well. It's like an old school tactic, but I'm not sure how many people know about it, but you can basically, if you go on the search, I'm gonna try and do this off my head. You go on the search, you click enter, there's like the post settings. You can then in the post settings, like type a certain creator. You can, they're like posts will come up in a select feed. And you can do that for multiple creators. So if you have this creator inspiration bank, you can have maybe like 10 people. You put all their names in and you have like a legit feed from just those 10 creators. And then you just bookmark that feed and it refreshes each time. So you can come back to it time and time again. - Nice. - And it's just a super easy way where you can just get like inspiration from the creators. So you want to take inspiration from basically. - Would that be like the start of the month or the start of the week that I'm running that process? - Yeah, so we recommend you do it within like the early phases. So you've got your profile optimized. You've then, you know, become a little bit more of a voice within the community space. Then the next stage is, okay, trying to find these people who are producing really high value content, trying to get those ideas and those topics in. And you should have it to the point where you're consuming that type of content so much that you and you're talking to the ICP within the comment section that you have a very good idea. Even off the top of your head, and what sort of ideas will resonate with the audience that you're trying to attract. And once you have that in place, that's when you can start thinking, okay, I know this topic is really important. I know a lot of people are talking about it. How can I create a beautiful cheat sheet or a carousel that communicates genuine value that hits that topic area? - Interesting. Interesting. So what a big example of that for you guys? - For Chris specifically. I think this is really interesting because we had already built an audience that was focused on business building, AI, leadership and culture. I think the pivot into search was fascinating for us. And so we essentially took that strategy as like starting from fresh again, that whole pivot. And so we got deeply involved within the SEO community. We found the top SEO creators who had posts that were performing disproportionately, that were growing, that hadn't really tightly engaged audience on them. And we just essentially saw the posts that they were creating, applied extra information, extra resources, Chris's own knowledge about building this business as well. And we would aim to improve within those certain topic areas and release content that was within a similar format. So a good example would be old SEO versus new SEO. That format is something that works across multiple different niches as well. It's so obvious, but they're just a clear comparison of this is what it used to be like, this is what it is now. So I think people will see that and it's like, oh, they feel updated. It positions you as someone that's on the verge of like the technology of understanding what's happening within the industry. And we would essentially present that information like old SEO versus new SEO and sort of build that community around the SEO space. I mean, it's so true what you say as well, because I'm already, I feel like I'm going through this process with you now just by looking at Chris's page, looking at someone who's obviously successful on LinkedIn in an octu-dissimilar niche. I can see he's going a much broader with the topics he's doing, but just looking at the formats. I mean, so much, it's the same with all content, right? It's just the people who are prepared to go further and deeper are the ones who win. Like the person who does the surface level gets up LinkedIn, does the surface level post and presses send. They get a certain outcome. Whereas the person who goes away and spends like three hours making the cheat sheet just gets a certain type of outcome. And we had Caleb who built the personal brand of Alex and Leila Hormozzi on the other week. And on YouTube is where they're focusing, but they created this six hour video. Yes, that's a lot. It's done like 600,000 views. It's driven 20,000 leads to their business. But they were just prepared using the Hormozzi method of where everyone else would stop. That's where we're going to start. Yes. Yeah. But I love the formats here because there's a format here, which is free report, Q325 algorithm report. Yes. Then there's the kind of cheat sheets. Then there's the comparisons like Okiyazoo's KPIs. What are the other formats that you really like? I've also, there's like the AI image driven carousel. Like what are the other formats that do well here? And what are some of the tactics there? Because in some of these, you're saying repost this. Some of these, you're saying comment this. Yes. There's so much to cover. Yeah. As Caleb says, it really is about how deep you go. We make that so clear of an accelerator. It's like, this will be the hardest 10 weeks. Like this is not easy. Like you're against people who have content teams, people who have really wants to do this strategically. And therefore you have to go so deep and treat it like a science. In terms of formats, you have the classic formats. I call them the classic formats, like cheat sheets, carousels, image-based posts, text posts. You then have micro formats within each format. So a classic one is the comparison old versus new. You can have that on a cheat sheet and the carousel. So you can like spit it down the middle. Another one might be one particular thing versus another particular thing versus another particular thing just showing like the contrast between each points. We've done that with like LLMs, for example, like Chapgitipus, it's Claude, that's a Gemini. That's another micro format. One that we're seeing particularly do well recently, and this is like from the Q3 algorithm report, is these storytelling carousels, which is something we haven't necessarily seen before. So a really great example of this is someone, Sehill Bloom. Yeah. He did some really nice storytelling carousels where they're not necessarily driven on like educational depth. They're just essentially educating you in a way that's wrapped around a story. So it might be like, in the empty boat mindset, all the surfers mindset. Yeah, so like a concept that you can explain for a story and it takes people on a journey. That's something that's performing pretty well at the minute. But yeah, there are so many different areas within each format that you can kind of like tweak and optimize in regards to the different cool twactions. This is based on goals. Another format that is particularly working very well on LinkedIn right now is these lead magnet posts, which is super obvious. You know, you provide an insane amount of value to people. They're going to want it and they're therefore going to want to be more involved in whatever your brand is. With those posts, the sheer goal is to get people subscribed to whatever it is you're trying to attract them to. So it might be a newsletter. It might be a specific segment that you're attracting to so you can put them in an email sequence where you can encourage them to do a certain thing, like buy a course or whatever it may be. And so within these lead magnet posts, there's a very specific cool traction, a very specific, we call it a viral mechanic, which is comment X and I will give you why, basically. Yes. It's super straightforward, but it works because people will then comment that you can then reply. And there are multiple different approaches you can do it as well. You can even reply with a link to the landing page and they can go straight through that way. You can also say I'll send you a DM as well. But because they're commenting that and you're applying it, it just means that you're getting a lot of comments, a lot of engagement on your post, which means the post is going to do better in general. And then it's going to reach more people and then you get more people downloading and more news that are subscribed as well. Is that also one of the unique things around LinkedIn where if someone in my network comments on something quite often I get a hearing that, I don't think that happens on other platforms? Yeah, that was something that was very prominent over the last two years or 18 months. It's not as effective as it once was. But yeah, it used to be the case that if you can drive comments and conversations, it will get shown in people's feeds. So another quick tactic as well is like trying to encourage conversation within your comments. So we always have an engagement question, something that allows people to talk about themselves. Because people do want to talk about themselves. They want to share their story, they want to share what they've been through. So if you can have a specific question that people are like, oh yeah, I'm going to comment on this and share what's happened with me. And then you can provoke that even more by replying and asking another question, oh, this is really interesting. What happened here? Or did you get the results that you want it? blah, blah, blah. And then you're starting these conversations within your posts and you're getting all of these comments and engagement towards your posts. And it's naturally going to promote it and compare us into other posts. So what would be a good example of that? Like on this post, eight strategy frameworks of 14, 14, 500 companies, would they do it on that type of post? Yeah, so if you scroll down, you should see an engagement question on there. Oh, yeah, which framework can you see yourself influencing today? John, a comment. Interesting. Yeah, so there's quite a few CTAs. There's a comment. And then there is a CTA to the newsletter. And then there's a repost as well. Yes. So there's like multiple CTAs, which I would have thought would have like be something not to do. Yeah. But that seems to work, you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll try and keep a specific focus. So for example, if one post we're like, OK, the goal here is to show a certain topic. We want to drive people towards the newsletter. We're going to expand on that topic within the newsletter. We usually have the newsletter as the main call to action that comes a little bit further up the post. We will always have the engagement question. We will always have the repost and follow call to action just because it's just so simple, but it helps with the growth of the post itself. Yeah. For the most part, we will be driving people towards the newsletter as the main one, unless it's something that's like a little bit light-to-touch, you know? It's something that we want to go maybe more like broader and viral with, but not necessarily like really depth and educational, then we'll just have like a repost and a follow call to action. But for the most part, it will be driven towards the newsletter. Very cool. So I really want to get into the funnel and then the business behind this. But is there anything else on the content that is really worth knowing or avoiding? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just realized as well. I said we have the system. I took, but I spoke about two things, and then I forgot the rest. So I will just break down quite quickly what people can do. So once you have the idea, you have the cheat sheet. You've created this beautiful thing that stops people on the scroll. You then want a really strong hook. Now, hooks are an interesting one on LinkedIn. Our general rule is you should be able to like cover your content and people should know exactly just from the first two lines what your content is going to be about. And so there is character limits as well. And by character limits, I mean, when you write the hook on LinkedIn, it has the Seymour. And most people forget about that. Yeah. They're like right hook and then it will just come off and cut off. And that can cause a little bit of friction. People are like, ah, I'm not really interested to scroll on. And so we try and keep it within the character limit, which I think is something like 65 and 40. I think for like one and line two. That's the first thing. With the hooks itself, we have tested multiple different variants. We've found that the line paragraph break line is the most effective. So some people will do, for example, line and then two paragraph breaks or some people do three lines. But we've just had the line paragraph break line is the most effective. There are multiple different variants of hooks that you can use. A stat based hook is like a contrarian hook. There is like an open promise hook. We've found the ones that have been the most effective are those that have numbers in them as well. Because that serves as a bit of a pattern interrupt. So, you know, there are so many posts that have text on them, even just a simple number. And we find the more interesting and bizarre number as well, the more effective it can be. I've studied over 318,842 LinkedIn posts. That sounds like a weird amount of posts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that genuinely, that was the dataset. But yeah, a lot of people would go, "Oh, no, let's just have like 300,000 plus." That looks interesting there, yeah, to having all the different numbers. Yeah, exactly. It just makes it feel more authentic and it just stops you. And that's the whole goal of the hook. You just want to stop people from scrolling. For most posts, and this will depend because you have, you know, different posts serving different purposes. But we will usually start with the hook. We will then have expansion of the hook, which aims to get into the emotions of your ICP and people consuming the content. So it's kind of like the before stage of what this cheat sheet is going to be about. To say, for example, you are cheat sheet on productivity, or have it's, productivity habits, for example. You have the hook, which, you know, will be something that will stop the scroll. You will then have an expansion of that. Like, there basically talks about the problems and frustrations of people if they're not feeling productive or like, you know, maybe it's like talking about like procrastinating and like the effects of that. It's just a very short segment where you're kind of expanding out. The goal here is to get people to relate to it in the moment. So it's like, okay, I've seen this. Oh, yeah, I've had this exact emotion. You then go into the bulk of the post, which is effectively a summarized version of your image or carousel. Got it. The reason we do this is essentially to strengthen the sort of core education and message that we're delivering. You know, people, a different learners as well. You have visual learners that will just check the sheet. You have those that just read the text. And so we want to make sure that the messaging positioning is clear on those. Yeah. You then have the like dream destination after that. So once you've applied this advice, these are the good things that will happen to you. And then we go into the cool to action. Very nice. And that's kind of like the kind of perfect post. So to speak, another thing to mention as well that it has to be optimized for a scan. So we will do short sentences. We will do, we'll write in lines of one, two and three. We'll never do paragraph blocks. We want to make it so easy for people to read the content. We don't want to see a massive paragraph and that can't be bothered to read this and then scroll on. Yeah. So we'll make sure that there's lots of white space. It's super easy on the eye. And it should feel like you're like reading it entirely in your head. And it's super easy to just kind of understand and learn from basically. Wow. I bet you've got in the accelerator, you've got like a little map of this outright having you. Yeah. And make them feel heard, yes, or seen, then explain the value for your about to give them and then the interaction because that would be insanely valuable. Yes, we go insanely deep on it. We have like really long modules where we break down all of the science and that's for one particular post as well. There are multiple different posts that have different approaches that drive towards a certain outcome as well. So yeah, this is literally a science at this point. Cool. We'll put a breakdown of some of those strategies and frameworks in our newsletter. And so people can get a copy of that in the link in the description. Did you know that the highest converting call to action in podcasts is the share call to action? It actually beats a lot of the other organic growth tactics that you can deploy. Literally just getting people in your audience to take out WhatsApp and send an episode to someone who could get value from it. So that's exactly what I'm going to do now. I'm going to ask you to take out your phone. And if you're getting value from this episode and you think it could help someone that you know, please send it to them or share it with your team or pop it in your team Slack channel. We'd really appreciate it and thanks if you send it to someone. The same on all these platforms is that like these posts and content is not left to chance. There's a formula and there's a system in a process. Yes. And when you look at all the ones that have done well, they tend to always follow a certain type of system or process and then it's like software. You can go in and switch up some of the things over time and see how it changes the performance. But yeah, it's so interesting to hear you talk for it. You've obviously studied this and been in it for a quite a long time. So it's super valuable. Anything else on the perfect post and content that people should be thinking about? With hooks as well. It's just like a very specific tip for hooks, but you want to have things that roll off the tongue easily. Because you have to remember that when someone's reading a post, they're reading it in their head. So they've got this internal voice going on. And if you say something that's quite difficult to read in your head, then naturally it creates that friction with people. So we always try and it sounds really bizarre, but we'll think about it. Okay, we've got all these different types of variations of hooks that we'll try. What is the easiest to say out loud and we'll just like genuinely just go through and read them out loud and like, oh, this is this felt quite nice. Roll off the tongue easily. And so that's like a very small little tweak that you can make. Yes. There's so much to talk about within like the content and the perfect post. Like that's one part of the strategy. There's a whole like pyramid hole funnel as well, but that might take ages. Is that so is that because we basically have some posts which are kind of broader? Yep. And some posts that are kind of more geared towards convert conversion? Yes. And again, this is where most people go wrong. They will think about posting one kind of format and it's usually storytelling and they will just post that repeatedly and repeatedly to try and get them associated with a certain topic. But really, I think a much better approach is having like a classic marketing funnel. So you have the top of funnel. The goal is to get, you know, broad reach attention as many people coming onto your profile as possible. You then have the middle of the funnel. This is the the time where you build trust. So it's the storytelling. It's shown behind the scenes. You're going a little bit deeper here. And then you have the bottom of funnel as well, which is like conversion. This is like driving people towards a specific action. So this will be the case studies. There's testimonials. You know, clear, transformational things that people will want to achieve themselves and therefore want to work with you next one. So we really treat the socials as a whole marketing funnel. And there are also different areas that you can tune in on as a part of the funnel as well. So for example, we have the newsletter, which is a key area for us to build trust. Because on socials, you can only write a certain amount of characters. The newsletter is a perfect space to really go deep on topics and really like over-deliver for people. And so we have like the goal for Chris, obviously, is majority growth. So we have a lot of top of funnel. And then we will aim to bring people towards the newsletter. And if they sign up for the newsletter, then they're going to get really in depth inside on AI, on search, on his core pillars. And that's what we use to build trust with people. A lot of people will see like socials as like a one-dimensional thing, whereas like there are so many different parts that you can use to kind of like take people through that journey from discovering you to buying your products. That's super interesting. Just in terms of tracking performance on the content, what do you track? Are there one or two metrics that are really important to be looking at? Yes. And do you do it per post versus general platform? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're super specific with it. The first and most important metric is the repost. The reason being is you want to distribute your content to as many different micro communities on LinkedIn as possible. And so that really should inform your whole top of funnel strategy. It's how can I make someone who consumes my content look good by sharing a piece of content? Yeah. Because we will have those people within colleagues or whatever that will share something. Like, oh, this is like so useful for me. Like, thanks so much. And that makes them look good. And so it's thinking about how do we create content that is super shareable and makes them look good for sharing. And usually that's things that are beautifully designed. It's things that are less personal because that's where a lot of people go wrong. They go super personal with things. And it's like other people can't share that. Sure. They can't put that in a Slack channel. Exactly. It's like someone just had a baby on the assembly putting this like, where is like the report on your industry and you share that in the Slack channel of your company? Yep. So, you're like, he's always ahead of the game. Exactly. It's not so true. And like, you have to think of it like that. And for pretty much every piece of content, we will think, okay, like what will make them look good for sharing this. And so the repost metric for us is super important. We will usually try and monitor it like previously, I think, we had posts that within the first hour were hitting like a 20% repost rate. We were like, okay, this is going to bang. This is going to be very well. Yeah. Primarily because you're just getting distributed to all these different communities. You know, it's driving more attention to your post. The second and third, most important metrics, which are more of a recent thing on LinkedIn. And we've actually discovered it more through this algorithm report is the saves and send as well. So I think this has been a feature from LinkedIn for quite some time, but it's only recently that you can actually track those now. And so again, it's, how can we get someone to save something? Okay, we must go super in-depth on something. So they save it and they're like, okay, I want to learn about this later. And how can we make it so they want to send it to other people, which is kind of the same kind of approach for the reposts, like how we make it so they look good sending it to someone basically. So they're the key kind of metrics to focus on. Honestly, likes, views in our eyes, not that important, unless we're trying to get as much attention on a certain post, like a partnership post, for example. We're not necessarily too focused on those. I think if you focus on the repost, you focus on the saves and the shares, they kind of come into play anyway. You'll generally generate more views. Yeah. So they're, like, they're not necessarily too focused on the cost of the repost. So they're not necessarily too focused on the cost of the repost. It's probably not there. What about the newsletter signups or anything like that? Do you track that per post or.? Yeah. So we have custom links that we track with those. They were incredibly effective a year ago. It was one of our primary drivers towards the newsletter. We started the newsletter when I more or less just started working there from scratch. And at the time, because LinkedIn wasn't seen as this distribution channel, we were driving thousands of people. Simply by just having, please subscribe to the newsletter in the cool to action. Wow. And it was generally at the point where we grew so quickly in the newsletter subs that the founder of Kite Nathan Barry was like, "You message us and was like, 'What are you guys doing?'" Because I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen organic growth like this. And so it was incredibly effective. Now it's not as effective. I think as more people have clocked on and started doing it themselves, it's oversaturated. But it can still work, I think, if you use the right approach. Like I think the goal that we have is like, okay, we're going super deep on a topic on the newsletter. How can we create social posts that lead nicely into that? And if it has a natural lead in it, usually they get some good growth from it. And the obvious one is lead magnet posts like they will drastically increase the subs that you get to your newsletter. That's really interesting. Because how many have you got on the newsletter? 250,000. In my case, it's 300,000. But yeah, it will actually raise. Nathan's a client of ours, that's just well. So it's always interesting. We should ask him who's growing past his at the moment. Yeah, that would be interesting. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I think the main driver for our newsletter growth now is the Creighton Network. Yes. Which I think is just a genius, genius model. Yeah, because when you go to sign up to yours, it then recommends, "Romeat, Sahil, Eric Partake or a few others, I think, right?" Yes, yeah, right, yeah. We should, there's some really nice tie in there and overlap between all of you. So that's that's that's active. So I sort of tweet from someone and they were basically just like, "My newsletter's grown by 2000. Subscribe, say, I have no idea why." It was like, I didn't, you know, none of my content were viral or anything like that. But they were just in a Creighton Network with someone who went insanely viral and just drove all that attention to them. Which is just like, ass name. Because if you have creators who are primarily focused on growing their newsletter, you know, maybe they're spending money on ads to drive people in. Someone benefits from that compound effect. It's just like such a hack for getting fast news out of growth within a specific audience. That feels like a nice place to move into the funnel and the product on the back end. How did that come to be and what does that look like? We had the idea of the criteria accelerated business. Primarily because of who we had all of this growth and Chris was doing a lot of consulting on the site. He was generally just doing like one-to-one calls with people that were booking in and he would always just be like completely at capacity. He's paid calls as well, right? Was it on his newsletter or something? It's like, "Book a slot with me." Yeah, on a LinkedIn page. Yeah, it was super simple. $500 or some pounds or something. That was it. We put it on and like, we were unaware of like, at the start, how many people were really interested in it. And so we were like, "I will start." I think it was like $800 or something was his first one. And then it was just like bang. Sort that straight away. At this point, he was traveling and he was away. So he was like, "Oh my gosh, okay." He did all those calls and then realized, "Okay, we need to actually bring price to a point where it reflects demand." And so we increased, increased, increased, increased. I think at one point, he was doing like 1,500 or like 2,000 for a call. Yeah. Is men's what really like a six? And doing a few a week or like, opening a few slots a week? Yeah, yeah. So I think he had probably like 15 to 20 slots a week. Wow. And it was just great for him because him and Lou were traveling. It's like the first time that he had a break from building businesses. And then he was like, "Okay." That's not bad as a 15, 20 grand a week. Yeah. Just from doing calls, yeah. The job. And he was just like on a beach, like somewhere in the Bahamas, you know, chilling. And so the idea came from that and he was like, "Can we scale this and do this with groups?" And at that point, when I first joined, he was like, "I have a habit of making people entrepreneurs." Which I like laughed at the time. But all throughout this journey, he was like, "Oh, do you want to do this? It's nice to do that. Do you want to do this?" And then he mentioned this and he was like, "We can create this like group educational product where people will go through an experience." At the end, they should have their LinkedIn, their personal brand, like significantly different driving real attention towards their business. And so we did that. And I think at this time, he was on around like 800,000 followers until he was like, "Let's find someone to replace you on the content side of things and let's like try and build this business together." We launched very quickly. I think we had the idea and within the space of like two months, we were live with the product. We had no idea initially of how many people would join. We had I think, I think we were going to cap it 50 and then we accidentally left like the page still on and we got to like 69 people who had purchased. We had experience, you know, like people getting results from one to one coaching. But we, I think drastically underestimated the impact of a group of people all towards like all focused on the same thing and like helping each other within that space. And so we created this product based on like a lot of research. We found all of the, you know, products within the space and we were like, "How can we improve this? How can we make this better?" We wanted to basically create the best product on the market. For us, we were like, "Okay, we can drive a lot of attention towards accelerated just through organic, just through Chris's account because he was getting so much attention. People were interested. They wanted to book calls in." And so that first one that really wasn't much of a funnel. It was literally just organic growth and trust in Chris, they would work. And we realized pretty early on if we can get the best proof, the best results for people, it should be much easier to self, it's kind of self in any way. And so we, we led all of our time and resources into this first program. It was literally just me and him. Yeah, at this point we had people helping set up the actual communities, space itself. It was just me and him coaching, being really active within the community. So is this like a, it's like a cohort? It's like eight weeks or ten weeks? Ten weeks, yeah. Ten weeks, so is there a call each week? Yeah, so we had three calls a week. So the way we worked, we were like, "Okay, we want material to break down all the knowledge that we have." That was primarily my goal. My goal was like to help build this product whilst he was doing sales and marketing for it. And so at the time, this was when AI wasn't great with writing either. And so it was literally, I was just writing down everything from my head into these like ten modules. It took ages, and it took like, it was like a 30 to 40 page document just from like typing. Wow. And so we were like, "Okay, this is the launch date. We need to get ten modules." For the first one, it was just like so scrappy and we were just like, "I think I'd finished up to module four when we started." So I had to like up until those weeks to create the further six modules, which was just a mad rush. But we got it done. And it was probably the hardest, I think we'd, well, I mean, for me personally, the hardest I've ever worked in my life. But it just meant that, yeah, if we had this product, we would have three calls a week. One would be like an overview of the module. So you'd go over the key points that you should focus on. The second one was a "Race my Post," which was done with me, where people would put their links in and I would just like, "Tweet me like, you can do this, you can do this, you can do this." We would then have a Q&A where people could ask any bad question they wanted. And we like incentivize things with prizes and things like that as well. That's cool. We just meant that people really grew quickly. Like, we knew that the method worked. We just were unaware of how well it would work in a group environment. And we had people genuinely in 10 weeks go from like 20,000 to 100,000. Which is just like, yeah, it's just like we effectively created like the fastest growing creators, all within different neospaces. And it was just brilliant because then we were like, as we were doing this, we were like documenting a few things. Because the results were so good, we went straight into the second one. I think we were on like week seven of the first one and then we went straight into the second one. Yeah, we were marketing it within like week three or week four of the first one and we went straight in. And I think the second one was like 99 people. Again, this was primarily driven through organic traffic. So LinkedIn and newsletter. We weren't even, we even did any paid ads or anything like that. The ad side of things and the final side of things came much later. It's been more of a recent thing. What are the price points for these cohorts? There's 5,44 payments and then 4,504 one payment. Now it's 6,500 over four payments. No, over three payments and I think 5,500 or 5,500 for one payment. Yeah. And so very high ticket. You know, it's a lot, a lot of money. But we have put so much time and effort into the first cohort that much. Or was it a bit less? I think it was a bit less so it was 4,500 single and then 5,000 something for over four. Yeah, we kind of would just blown away with the demand. We wanted to create the best products on the market. We wanted the best proof, the best evidence. We wanted to create it. So we could just share the people who had the growth. We could just tag their account and people would just go and see. Yeah, that's just like that's just a beauty of it. Right. Just the same way to grow any business. Yeah, it's okay. It's that A studies. So interesting as well. How simple that is. Did you do anything in terms of is it in like circle or one of those type, unknown way you can post in the week as well? Yes. Would you give feedback on those posts or it's just on the calls or? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had a few channels. We were very much like in the early stages like feedback driven. So we were like, you know, we have these ideas. What would be the most beneficial channel to you? And it basically turned out to be key channels like we have module spaces where you would learn. Because each module have like a lesson as well or a template or something or it has a homework. Homework, yes. Yes. So we wanted to make it actionable. So we have a module and then we would have an assignment. We would have a place where you could post your assignment and we would encourage people to comment on and to, you know, start conversations around that. Which just meant that you went from having, you know, yourself on the strategy to now having those people just like, yeah, I've seen this person do this or I've done that. It's also easier for them to learn when they see other people's stuff. Yes. It's easier to crit, to critique someone else than to crit, to critique your own stuff. Exactly. Exactly. And the increase within these channels like daily providing like advice and like what we would do, we then had like a post feedback channel where people would post in and we would give like specific feedback. We made it clear that, you know, it would take a little bit of time to get that feedback. It wasn't going to be like completely straight away. Yeah. But we were like, if you put something in that channel and it's due to go out in three days, we will give you advice. You can tweak it and then you can shift out to it. That channel, we had a Wins channel as well, which was my favourite channel because it was just a great place for people to share their progress, share, you know, really exciting things. Like, we have had some insane and safe results that like still blows my mind. And then we have a few other channels like tools and resources and like templates and things like that. And we wanted to create maybe like five or six core spaces where people could have conversations where people could find information really easily. Yeah, that was kind of like the core offer of our product basically. How many years have you had that live now? 18 months. That in July of last year. Hmm. Are there any key lessons like if someone's listening to this and they are thinking, okay, yeah, I've got an audience or I'm going to grow an audience around my expertise and I think I could probably create a product that sells itself and is delivered in a cohort style environment. What would be kind of your key recommendations to them? It's an interesting one because I think we were in a very rare situation with Chris. He is insanely credible already. He'd already exited a business with $25 million. Like he already had this proof that he was an incredible entrepreneur. So naturally we had a lot of trust within in Bill already, which meant that even though we were optimized for growth, we still had a lot of people that were like, I'd still trust what he says. He also made a very good impact on video as well, like very charismatic in events and things like that. Yeah. And so we had like a kind of perfect situation there. If I was someone watching and I was like, okay, I'm trying to build an audience and then drive them towards certain products, whether it be a cohort or a digital product, for example, I would focus a lot more on funnels. I would focus on developing a relationship over time. You want to go really deep on educational content to show that you're an expert within that sort of area. You want to share your journey and your experience within that content as well. And then you want multiple different touch points. So you want to take people through a newsletter. One simple thing that you can do is on the end of your newsletter, just having like a thank you quiz, super simple, offer something that they get for filling in the quiz. So it might be like, get this replay book on how to go on LinkedIn. They then fill in the quiz. You then have a lot of data on the type of people that are subscribing to your newsletter. And that's when you can start to really segment your audience and get a little bit more specific and personalized within your approach. So I would have like broader content mixed in with like trust building, driving people towards its newsletter. I would then really focus on how can I get as much data from them being on this page as possible. And then once you have the data, that's when you can go, okay, maybe I have, I don't know, 100 people who are earning more than $20,000. That's interesting. If that's like the most popular audience out of the quiz. So say you have a question that's like, how much are you making monthly within your business? You know, zero to $500, 1000 to $5,000, 10 K plus, for example, when you find, okay, the person that's coming on my newsletter is someone that is making more than 10 K instantly. Like I can have a higher ticket product here. And that informs a little bit more of that strategy. If you get really specific on the questions, you can really figure out key things like what are the core pain points and frustrations that having within your particular space. So for us, it might be like, I'm really struggling with time to post on LinkedIn. I don't have a strategy, you know, all these core sort of pain points. And it just means that you can then once these people are segmented, you can throw email sequences together that aim to solve that core pain point. So if it's, for example, I don't have time, we will do a three to five sequence that's like, okay, this is how you start freeing up your time. This is an approach that, you know, will take less of your time. And you can really kind of like handle their objections before then even like reaching out to you. Doing that will just significantly build trust. And it will just make them far more likely to want to buy something from you because they've got all of this information for free. You know, they've seen your social content. They've got that for free. They've then got this really tailored and personalized sequence, which has helped them. And it's like, it's almost a no brainer to go with the paid because it's like, if the free product is this good, how good is the paid product? If you do it in that approach, and as long as you create a product that is genuinely the best within your industry and the big believer in quality, like I really think that a lot of creators will be like, oh, I'm just going to try and monetize my audience. Let me just throw up a course on this without actually doing a research phase of like, these are all the courses. These are all the positioning of the courses. How can I make mine levels above every other single product? Because at the end of the day, like people are going to want to sign up for the thing that achieves the best results of them. Yeah. And that's what we do. But the accelerator we were like, if we can see the closest or the best LinkedIn-based cohort and just 10x the results of that, it's a no brainer to choose us over there. It's because it's just better results. So in terms of your list and how you market the program, do you only send those email sequences to certain segments or does everyone get it? Because that was what I was interested in signing up to the newsletter. It's like, am I going to get this weekly newsletter from Chris? At what point is there going to be some kind of sales sequence? Does everyone get a sales sequence? Or is it only certain people who click on certain things? Well, as I said, because it was just us to building this business, we're very much based, like, we're a very small team and we just want to, the goal is to scale the business using this little as Chris' time as possible. And so we didn't actually have these, like, segmentation funnel set up. So what we were doing was selling to the general newsletter. Now we put so much time into the newsletter, like a lot of research, like really making sure that it's like the best quality possible. Our kind of thing is, through most of the year, you will get free newsletter that drives significant value to you for free. Then we would do the odd mention within the newsletter itself. The general one would be like, hey, if you're interested in creative stuff, you know, we've got this next cohort out, these are the results that we've got for people. If you want to join, go ahead and take this thing. But now as we're trying to build and scale it, we have a far more segmented email. So we will probably be selling less to the general newsletter because when you do sell, unfortunately, you get a mass, you know, unsub kind of event going on. So yeah, we will be trying to protect the integrity of that. And we have far more focus now on driving people towards a specific wait list and having these key segment areas where we will be creating personalized sequence to drive them towards the accelerator. Interesting. So you would send a newsletter and it would say, if you're interested in this, join this wait list, and then the people who join that, they get a bit more of a targeted sequence on that because they're obviously interested in it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think right now we have a current like finalist. You put in your name, your email and then we have like a segment thing that says, hey, we've got the creator's other way to coming out in January. It's going to be our biggest discount ever. If you're interested, click yes, they click yes, they get tagged and they're in that wait list area. And then we can warm that audience up as well. A key part of our strategy has been webinars. Yes. So when we're in like a sales cycle, it will be usually six to eight webinars. And again, this is like we really try and provide as much value in these webinars as possible. And so yeah, we'll go super deep on the topic and we will try and basically build so much trust from our webinar itself. And we've studied like, people like Russell Brunson and things like that where we've seen like the perfect webinar and things like that. As is very much focused on educational content. We're like, if we get thousands of people into this webinar, how can we give them as much value as possible? Yeah. And we will still try and sell them towards the end of the call and we will say that up from the call, but hey, this is, you know, this is primarily for people looking to, I'm to the creator accelerator, but I am just going to give you loads of value. You don't have to sign up. It's for those that want to take LinkedIn seriously. If you don't want that, that's cool. I'm going to give this insane amount of value away for free anyway. So you're going to get that as well. And that's been like a very core part of astrology. Chris is incredibly charismatic, very good on these calls. And he just has this like energy, which is like super infectious in people get excited about it. How do you not give away the source from the accelerator in those or do you because you just don't care? So you could probably tell there is so much depth. And like it really is like a science. And so fortunately, we can cover a lot of things. And it also depends on the awareness stage of the person coming in as well. So a lot of these webinars will have in our minds quite basic information, but for 98% of people, it's not basic. It's like super valuable. Yeah. Because I guess even explaining the story, like I wouldn't, if I've just come across your post, I would have no idea who Chris is or what the hell is going on here. Exactly. And that's we will usually start most webinars with like a brief introduction of who is the things that is done as well. There is so much we can give away. And it's actually at the point now where we're like trying to scale the business more. We're trying to provide more free resources to people, more leaf magnets. And so we just want to give as much away as possible. And then we found with the accelerator, not only are you going to get this like insane amount of depth and like, you know, a large amount of educational content, module content that you can learn from, but the most powerful thing we found is the accountability and is the community and network that you're building from it as well. Yeah. And so when we initially built the product, it was like, okay, the main thing that you're going to get here is the education, you're going to get then get the transformation. But as we've kind of like done it throughout the last year or so, it's been like being in a space with 200 entrepreneurs who are making, you know, six certain figures is more valuable. And if you're all pushing each other to like your very best limits, that is so valuable. And we've had like, relationships with people going to business together. We've had people like form groups who are like their mastermind groups and they just learn constantly together on different topics. And that community is something that I think is probably one of the biggest reasons why people would join. How do you foster that? Do you have like breakout rooms where you get into small groups and like create an accountability group? And played around with the idea of breakout groups. We more focus on getting activity within the community within the circle within the onboarding process of coming onto the cohort with very much like this is for you. You should help people because if you help people, you will go far. Like even for the first results, the people that got the best results were those that were in the community. They were active. They were helping each other. They were like asking questions. So we very much just encourage this like participation very early on. And we link it towards the success and you know the more likelihood of your results going to be good if you are active within the space. Yeah. We will also incentivise it and be like, we have an award for someone who's like the most engaged within the community, which I think is super powerful because then people are like, oh, I can win a legitimate prize here from just helping other people and having that mentality very early on is something that drives like a really beautiful community. Yeah, I used to work for a cohort business in COVID and I think we did over 20 million a year in cohorts. Well, obviously it was the best time ever for it because everyone's at home. But that was always one of the things that we found was you would mark it based on the information you're going to get and the masterclasses you're going to get. But actually 50, 60, 70% of the value people got was as soon as they joined it was they realised ah, it's the community and the other 5, 10 people that I meet who I then grow with or go on to become friends with on this journey and become lifelong friends. But they don't realise that when they're signing up because they think they're coming for the information. Yes. I'm excited to share that this podcast is produced by me and my content agency, 7X Content, we create incredible podcasts for world class brands and creators. If you'd like to create something like this or you're thinking about taking your existing show to the next level, then you can reach out to us at the link in the description. I'd love to hear from you. This has been absolutely fascinating. I'm curious if I wanted to get started now. What would you recommend the first step-size-taking in the next 30, 60 days would be? What's the main goal? I think it's driving leads to my business but I'm also interested in you. I do a bit of coaching at the moment but I could see us doing more of that and particularly in the group style or the cohort style. I think that could be really interesting. We already have interested in that and we don't really do much. We don't even talk about it. I think you guys have what I've seen in the way, like incredible free resources from these podcasts. You get lead highlights and things like that. I would make those incredibly visible. I would set up some sort of funnel based on the bit you'd probably have already but if you don't, I would set that up. I would make sure your profile is optimized. As much detailed research on LinkedIn of your ICP is possible. I'm active in the space as there are active in. My belief is if you grow, even if it's not growth within your ICP, if it's just general growth, I think that's a good strategy just because it's social proof. It's like you have this number of following. You're credible within that space. I would encourage you to grow on LinkedIn as well and go a little bit broader with certain topics. Then you can really focus on, you've got that growth, these new people coming in. What key topics can I talk about that are going to make them interested and build trust with them. Then I would think about how can I bring them over to the newsletter? I think deep platform here is one of the most important things. Unfortunately on LinkedIn, you can have million followers but still not reach a million people. Having their email is so important. If you're looking to build a group coaching offer, I would think about people that you've coached already. That was a super early quick win. We did for the MVP of the crew accelerator. Chris basically messaged all the people that he coached. He was like, "Hey, do you have any friends that would be interested in this sort of thing? Just be honest, share your journey. If it works, then he can create a nice little group around it." I think the first one, the OG version was like 10 people. Some of those people became the fastest growing creators in the world. It would be the same thing. It would be like, how can I build an MVP where I have a small group of people but I focus so much time and attention into it that they are guaranteed to have the best results out there. Then that becomes a strong part of your marketing for the first approach. You can also, that stage is a feedback gathering stage. You want to gather as much feedback as possible on how would this help, with this help? Can I offer feedback in this way? What would be beneficial to you? Then you can build a really clear offer. Wouldn't you have a really clear offer and you have the proof that already it becomes so much easier to market? I remember referrals we used to get at least 30% of a cohort on that. Our ICPs were so darned in that people had amazing connections that it was a great fit for as well. A lot of people said that cohort-based programs died after COVID. The world got drunk on them and then they got back to real life and actually had things to do in the real world. Is your experience that they still work? Yes. We now have a lot of friends within this sort of area. I think we're very isolated as individuals nowadays. I think we're social media and so forth. I think community is incredibly powerful and I think the cohort can encourage that and as long as you get people within your first couple of ones experiencing that and then they're telling their friends about it, I think it's very hard for you not to get another round of people that are interested because a lot of people crave that connection and a lot of people crave connection and results and although it is hard work and we are very clear that it will be hard work, the results that you will get from it will change your life in a certain way. If you have likely a transformation then you can get customers in. I think the question a lot of people I know will be asking me or shouting at me right now is how do they find their Josh? So if someone wants to find their Josh to run their LinkedIn or run their content, how did you hire your replacement? A question. It's not easy. Unfortunately, I wish it was because there are so many different people sharing different types of advice from about LinkedIn. It means that there isn't necessarily many trained people on a way that works in multiple different industries. And so I would personally say the best way of doing it is finding someone that's deeply ambitious, learning about it yourself completely. So you have a very clear understanding of how it all works and then training that person and spending a lot of time with that person. That's what Chris did with me. He taught me so much stuff. We were working together all the time to the point where you then become like you know exactly what they want to say, exactly what kind of content they want to create. Yeah, I would typically try and find ambitious people who are perhaps in current positions that they don't feel like their potential is used. And so whether it's like certain corporate businesses that have a very rigid structure, there's no potential for growth. I think that's an interesting place to look at. Certain agencies as well that may be kept at offerings, certain remuneration to people. That might be another interesting place. And I also think just like trying to find people on LinkedIn who have a little bit of an understanding of personal brand is a good approach because they get the benefit of it and they understand if you have a big enough goal and mission that's super exciting and they can benefit from that journey, then it's just such huge incentive to join. And is there another monetary incentive? Like are you a business partner of his in the cohort just made it 50/50 is the rest? It's not quite 50/50. Well, first of all, within the initial job it was double my salary that I was on. And so straight away I was like, "Aw, awesome." But he was very much like, "Yeah, he was like very incentive driven so it's like we hit certain milestones, then that'll be rewarded. And I've just been on this journey with him and it's been fun. I've loved it. I've really loved it so much. I've grown myself personally. I've learnt so much from my own so much. I really appreciate that. Having that incentive there with the growth I think is important." Cool. This has been so valuable Josh and I think we'll have to do a second one because it was so valuable. But I absolutely loved it and there's so much depth to it that we can get into another time. But yeah, thanks so much. You dropped so much game and yeah, I loved your energy as well. So, thank you so much, man. Yeah, no, it's been great fun. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Josh. If you did, I think you'll love my conversation with Caleb Roelston, the former director of content for Alex and Layla Hormozzi. He also worked with Gary Vee. It's an absolute masterclass on building a personal brand. Make sure you're subscribed and go and watch that next. I think you're going to love it. Appreciate you and have a great week.