SPEAKERS
Sid Meadows, Host of The Trend Report
Joshua B. Lee, the Dopamine Dealer of Linkedin 

Coach Sid Meadows: I'm just going to tell you — this is going to be an informative, fascinating, and a really fun conversation today with my guest who is known as the dopamine dealer of LinkedIn. Please welcome Joshua Bailey!

Hey, Josh, how are you, sir? 

 

Joshua B. Lee: I'm excited to be here, and we're gonna have a fun time today.

 

Sid: So Josh, take a minute and introduce yourself and your business to our community that's listening today.

 

Josh: You know, I'll try and make it as quick as possible, but still give everyone a background. I started my career back in 2013 in the online advertising business with a client that a lot of people forgot about… This used to be the only social media that people all used, but now people may not remember anymore, which is MySpace, right? So one of my first clients was Myspace on how to monetize their traffic. 

I had done so much business with so many different companies, like Yahoo and Google, to be able to monetize traffic online. And I did a lot of companies — but I felt like my work didn't really create a lot of change or impact, just looking at that monetization aspect. So I went through a reset in my life about eight years ago. 

I began to ask myself, “How do we actually take the things that are human in our world and take the marketing aspects — and combine them to be humanized the way we are online?” 

How can we get rid of that b2b or b2c, and go 100% h2h — human to human, because every company is run by another human being. We found that with my company StandOut Authority, the best platform for human-to-human contact was LinkedIn. So, now I get to work with amazing people like yourself. A lot of men and women who’s booked I used to read on how to be able to start my own company 20 years ago — now, I get to go over this H2H concept with known clients with friends.

 

Sid: That's awesome! So your company is called StandOut authority. You guys are headquartered in Austin, Texas. It's you and your wife, Rachel Lee — and you focus on personal branding and helping people succeed on LinkedIn. 

And I love what you just said, which was referencing b2b and b2c marketing — but most importantly, h2h. I've not heard that before, but when you said it, I thought, “Ah, that's exactly right!” Because people do business with people. So let's be human to human.

 

Josh: That's what it's all about. When you start realizing that worrying about how you are algorithm wise, or how you're actually showing up on social things like that — everyone's doing that, everyone is always trying to play well. What am I supposed to do on LinkedIn, as opposed to how I’m showing up on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, and all these other platforms. But when you just show up and be human and worry about that one hour and that human algorithm, it's amazing what you can connect with people, because you don't have to continue to learn new things. It's just the things that our mothers and fathers taught us as kids — how to treat human beings — we're just doing it online. And that approach draws people in, rather than actually selling something online, which gets exhausting for everybody. 

 

Sid: When all you do is sell — it's overwhelming. We do it on social media and in other aspects of our business. I've said this before — nobody woke up today and said, “I want to be sold to.” They woke up and said, “You know, I have this problem in my life or my business, and I really need to figure out how to solve it today.” Right? So we're going to talk more about that — but I really want to talk about why is LinkedIn so important.

 

Josh: LinkedIn is one of the most important platforms out there! We get a need to be able to see this, it's finally coming to light. LinkedIn has been around for 18 years, since 2003. It's been around a while, but it was a platform that most people would put their resume to be able to get a job. And it should be!

But a couple years ago, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.4 billion cash. Microsoft is one of the largest companies out there — they've been around for longer than almost everybody, so if you're gonna bet against them, you're making the wrong bet. And that's just the business side of it. 

The reason why people need to be on LinkedIn is this — that's where four out of five decision-makers are spending their time. The average income of a Linkedin user is much higher than the world’s median income. When you look at different platforms, you want the people you’re having conversations with to be able to buy your products or services, to be able to hire you. You want them to have a higher disposable income. 

Well, you look at Twitter's around $50,000 a year, Facebook's around $64,000 — but your average income on LinkedIn is $120k. So I mean, that's a very simple way to have a higher educated audience. So when you go through these data points about Linkedin users — I have someone that can actually make decisions, the ability to be able to afford those decisions, and they're educated enough to know what they're buying — that's a Win-Win-Win for me! 

There's so much opportunity because 99% of the people out there do not know how to be able to use LinkedIn effectively, to build relationships — not to sell pitch and spam people. 

 

Sid: We could talk about that for a whole hour. But you just said three things that I think are really important: 

1. It's an educated audience, 
2. they have a higher income. 
3. But most importantly, four out of five decision makers are on that platform. 

That's a powerful number. That means there are a tremendous amount of decision makers on the platform. 

But let's go to the other side for just a second. Josh, what's the percentage of people that have a LinkedIn profile that actually create content? 

 

Josh: You know, I appreciate you just setting that up for me.

 

Here comes the easy pitch, I can knock it out of the park, because this is that big thing, right? There's over 800 million people on the platform — but out of those 800 million people, only about 1% actually post on a regular basis. That's a huge difference, because when you look at the numbers, there's over 9 billion content impressions weekly on LinkedIn. That means only 1%, roughly 300,000 people are getting access to that 1 billion impressions. 

Think of the opportunity for organic reach! On a platform like Facebook, we pay to play, we built groups, we had to get these likes now to get in front of our audience organically. LinkedIn makes sense. You do not have to spend the money, if you understand how to connect with the right audience.

 

Sid: So historically, Linkedin’s audience is made up of business leaders, decision makers, high income educated — and only 1% of 800 million users are creating content, which is for a content creator or someone who posts on a regular basis. It's an incredible discovery tool, but I believe that so many people use it wrong. Before we talk about the sales aspect of it and some of the creepy stuff that actually happens on LinkedIn, because there's some creepy stuff… Why is it that you think people are not using the platform correctly?

 

Josh: I don't think they've taken the time to even understand the shift that it's made. Over 18 years, people haven't really spent time on LinkedIn and “taught” the algorithm to show them what they're seeing; most times they're seeing the wrong things being put out there. So they're not shifting to a different perspective. 

Here’s an example. I've got kids, and they like to play Pokeyman. On LinkedIn, they were trying to collect them. It became a whole thing like, “Now all I've got is junk on my LinkedIn, I’m going through spam messages all the time.” 

Well, that’s because you connected with every single person that sent you a message request. So you're using the platform wrong, because you don't know any better. Because if that's all you see, is people pitching and talking about themselves — there’s a different way to present yourself. And once you actually start curating your feed, start connecting with the right people — there's so much opportunity.

Not only are the decision makers on LinkedIn, so when they log on, they’re able to make their buying decisions — but they do their research on Linkedin. Because of how well LinkedIn is actually indexed on Google and its SEO ability — that content not only gets found on LinkedIn, but potentially, that content is also getting indexed on Google. So it's a double win to be able to actually power “on” the biggest platform out there when you create quality content, which is Google.

 

Sid: So this is so important! I just recently went and did it — I set up Google Alerts on myself, just because I want to know. Especially when you live out loud, like I do on platforms — we probably get a lot the Google Alerts, and we need to know what’s being said. 

So I went into an incognito window, and I googled myself. I do this probably every three months or so just to see what comes up, because I don't know if people are googling me directly. My LinkedIn profile was the second tab to come up on Google. My web page was first; my LinkedIn profile was second. And then there were actually some LinkedIn content further down on the first page of the search. My podcast came up, too, with certain episodes listed. But what really prompted me to do it was a real, live conversation with someone the other day. They were telling me that they discovered my podcast through a Google search of one of my guests. 

So we went in and made some adjustments on our website and how we write the podcast page copy, because it needed to be done. Now if somebody Googles one of my guests, maybe the CEO of a company, or they search for that company — my podcast is coming up in more searches. And of course when they go there look at the podcast, they're naturally going to wonder, “Well, who is this guy? Let me go check him out.” And then they go to my LinkedIn profile to see who I am and what I do. 

 

Josh: I want to make sure I communicate that based on all research and all studies, they put LinkedIn as the most trusted social platform out there. So that's why people are going to LinkedIn. When people go to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, they go to get to know someone. They go to LinkedIn, because it's a trusted platform. So that’s something to pay attention to.

 

Sid: Really, really great point. Several months ago, I was having a conversation with a sales leader in an organization that probably had about 30 salespeople in multiple locations. We were talking about social media, and I mentioned that I personally think most people need to shift their mindset and to realize that platforms like LinkedIn, even Instagram, are not just social media — they're actually sales tools. 

So I asked how his people were on LInkedin, and this guy looked at me and said, quote, “We do not have time for our salespeople to spend all day on LinkedIn. So we've blocked it.”

 

Josh: Wow…

 

Sid: I know! How would you respond to this guy? What would you say to a sales leader that told you that?

 

Josh: I would say that you are missing out. You have the ability to have a social selling army on LinkedIn. That's the beauty of it, because everyone ties back to the business. So each one of their actions tie back to the business, and it creates an army of opportunity for everyone. So unlike Facebook, where everyone's disconnected, right? On Linkedin, you're all connected to the company. That's what the beauty of volunteers when you're running a company. You want all your employees — everyone — on that platform, because it all leads to the business. They all represent you. Each individual has an individual voice, and because of the H2H nature of sales — people like to buy from other people — your salespeople could be that person online. 

Maybe they connect with the personality of one of the other sales team. In that case, you can see that content. So when they're all putting content there, we're all on that platform. It's powerful.

 

Sid: Thank you for saying that. I honestly believe that many business leaders just don't see that Linkedin is truly a tool. They see it as a standard social media.

 

Josh: They might think that too, like, “Oh, they're on LinkedIn, maybe they're gonna get scooped up for another job or another opportunity.” 

I've been in sales for long enough, right? How much more powerful is a salesperson that feels empowered? That's what we want to be able to do to their frontline. We've seen a shift over the last year or especially post-COVID, it used to be employees used to advocate for their brands. Now, because of the way employees are working, brands are advocating for their employees, because they see them, they understand that trust for individuals (as opposed to organizations) is shifting. 

So why not empower them? If you empower them to own their personal brand and support them, they feel it! They think like, “Wow, man, my company wants me to be able to stand out.” They’re promoting YOU, your company, on LinkedIn. Suddenly, they want to work harder; they want to stay with that company; they want to make more money with that company. 

 

Sid: There's two things here that I want to follow up with. First off is personal brand. Sometimes I think it's an overused word, but tell me what your thoughts about people and their personal brands.

 

Josh: Personal brands stick with you. Whatever you do, no matter what business opportunity — impressions stay with you. Your personal brand moves with you through your career. And that's the biggest thing, right? We are each building our personal brand. Even if we don't realize we're building a personal brand on our social.

 

Sid: That’s so important right there. We are building our personal brand, even if we aren't building our personal brand. What I'm going to say to that is if you're not engaging in content, and you're not creating content — you are building your personal brand that says this is not who I am. Would you agree?

 

Josh: 100% 

That separates people out. Earlier on with social media, people were saying, “Hey, but watch what we put on our MySpace, because companies look at it.” Yes, there are people looking at what you post, and it can make or break you. The beautiful thing is that when a company empowers and actually teaches their employees how to be able to leverage Linkedin — it becomes a sales tool that they're not actually having to pay for. It's empowering employees, and it's bringing more opportunity to management and the business. 

It's not another expense that has to go in the budget sheet. This is a free platform that you can learn how to use without spending money on advertising dollars. If your business has a physical zip code — you can use Sales Navigator to be able to go in and build the zip code area and see who in that world is a business owner that needs the product. Then, you can go from there to start a conversation with a great relationship opportunity.

 

Sid: Yeah, it is really a powerful platform. With personal brand, it's important that you control the narrative, because if you don't, somebody else is building it for you. 

It's important for employees to be on the platform creating content. So let's talk for just a second about the types of content. LinkedIn is a big ecosystem with so many different things that you can be doing as a beginner or somebody that's been on it for a couple years. 

What are your recommendations as someone who teaches people how to use LinkedIn? What types of content should people create?

 

Josh: Well, first and foremost, before we get in content, go through looking at your profile. If we start doing content and then someone goes back to a profile that's cluttered or has outdated information — you’ve wasting their time on the content aspect, because you're driving to an opportunity that's going to go nowhere. So let's just take that out of the picture. Start off by building that personal profile, share all the relevant information, and make sure it stands out. Because that's the tip of your spear, that's your sales funnel. If you build out your personal profile, and do it well, it will do the selling for you. 

So start there, then with the content aspect. When you're creating content, you know it's showing up on the feed. 

So for me, the easiest way that I tell everyone is the 10-20-70 method. 10% of your content needs to be personal. So human beings connecting, people buying from other people. They don't buy from businesses — if they want to be able to buy, they still have to go talk to someone most of the time. (Unless you're going to Amazon.) 

When you go through your feed, we look from a personal perspective. We look for commonalities. For example, look at everyone on your podcast, right? They are all in a similar industry. That's why they're together. That's where they listen to you. That gets you, as I call it, “From the door to the couch,” and you have that personal perspective.

Someone might say, “I listen to Sid’s podcast. You, too? Awesome.” Well that connects us really quickly. So we're able to be able to go in quickly — that takes me from the door to sitting on the couch. So that's personal content at 10%. 

20% of your content needs to be around your company, but focus what you have done for others (not what you can do). We don't want to be that person out there saying, “I can help you.” 

In my world, I work with a lot of people that are saying things like, “I can help you make seven figures” or, “I can show you how to lose 100 pounds.” No, show me how you've done that for somebody else already. Show me how you can help someone, how you are able to fulfill all their needs. How can help someone solve their pain problem? Tell the story. 

And then 70% of your content — and this is the easiest one for everybody — share your expertise. How can we be destination sites or educate people in our industry? Because if our audience and connections are educated enough to be able to understand they have a problem, they're gonna be smart enough to go to you for the solution. So 

1. 10% personal — not about my kids or going to school, but personal enough to where you should know I have them. Right? 
2. 20% storytelling — around what you've done for your clients or in your company
3. 70% added value — educating them on why a certain chair is designed the way it is.

 

Sid: I love this framework. I've heard you talk about this framework before. I'm part of Josh and Rachel's community — they have a community called StandOut Authority Community. The hub is on Discord; we put a link to the invite to the discord in the show notes. I own their cryptocurrency called the SOA coin, I own enough of that to get to a certain level, and that gives me a lot of benefits, including coaching with them. 

Josh has outlined this framework for us a couple of weeks ago, and I think it's really, really powerful. I want to frame it a little bit differently, using me as an example. 

 

So, 10% personal. One of the best posts I've ever done on LinkedIn was four months ago. My daughter tore her ACL, and I posted about it. But the whole purpose of it was what I learned from my 19 year old daughter as she injured herself. The post blew up, like 10,000+ views. Then the views, the comments and the likes, were the number of people that actually reached out to me, that said, “thank you for sharing this story. I've been there, this happened to my child.” I learned when this happened, that people that know me personally would email me and call her by name and say, “How's she doing? When is her surgery?” So there's a lot of power in personal posts. 

Now as for company posts, I love how you framed that up to answer the question, “What have you done for others?” That's a case study. That's a before and after picture, not just an after picture that says “Look at this cool installation.” 

And then there’s the 70% educational posts. From my perspective, for the people that sell office furniture, this is not about posting, “here's my chair, it does X, Y and Z.” What it's about is you being a student of our industry, you being a thought leader in our industry, and you sharing information about trends within our industry or about how your company is leading the way in sustainability. It’s posting about what your manufacturing process means for you and for the customer, as well as for our environment. People don't want to just see the product. They want to hear the story. 

 

Josh: I'm getting educated here too. I didn't want that chair.

 

Sid: We as an industry, we check a box that says, “we posted on LinkedIn today; we posted a picture of our chair and our picture of our desk and said here is our desk. This is its name, click this link to learn more.” That's what we’re seeing. Obviously, I'm generalizing, but as an industry this is how we historically use the platform. There's such a better way to do it, as you just outlined.

 

Josh: Well, there's no emotional trigger with that type of post either too. That's the whole piece I want everyone to understand — as human beings, we make decisions. I don't care what you say, like, “Oh, I've got process,” — no, every decision is based on some emotion we've experienced currently or in our past. We make decisions based on some degree of love or hate; we do not make decisions based on being indifferent towards something.

When you post a picture of a chair and a link to buy — I'm gonna tell you right now, you're not only wasting your own time, you're wasting their time as well. And that's the one resource we don't get back. So why post with no emotional trigger to it? When you talk about your post, Sid, about your daughter — that's what people are looking for. You have to be able to evoke a conversation to build a relationship, and the relationship creates those business opportunities that we're all looking for.

 

Sid: That is so, so good. I know there's so much information that we've talked about already, but I want to just shift the conversation to talk about selling. You earlier described employee salespeople as a social selling army. We could spend a whole day talking about how to sell on LinkedIn, but could you highlight for us just a little bit about some best practices as it relates to selling on LinkedIn? 

 

Josh: No one wants to be sold to. On LinkedIn, you want to be able to build relationships, so the ways that we do it on LinkedIn are honestly just the same things that my mother taught me — and that’s simply how to treat other human beings. One thing I want people to pay attention to is if you are drawing in your ideal audience. Are you able to start the conversation and create the opportunity? What is your audience looking for? Find out which of them are actually posting because the average person on LinkedIn gets less than 1% engagement on their posts. So if you find them, and then you see who they are, you can deal them good content. This is why they call the dopamine dealer of LinkedIn, because I'm dealing dopamine, giving people what we're looking for. 

Wherever we are, no matter where we are in the world, we’re all looking for dopamine. But those little hits of dopamine when someone likes or comments on our post — that’s validating the work we put in to post on social media. So become that dopamine dealer for your audience — like, comment, post, and reach out to them. 

I love the example of how people reached out to check on your daughter after surgery — that builds the relationship without a pitch. My mom always taught me to be able to give someone a compliment. LinkedIn has an amazing tool to be able to do that. Endorse one of their skills, right? It allows you to start a conversation, and be able to ask questions about who they are, what they do, and provide value based on what they need. If you're constantly adding the right content, as well as educating them, it becomes a trifecta relationship. So that allows you to be able to continue to have organic lead flow every single day, not just on the ones you're working on now, but building opportunity for your future as well.

 

Sid: This is so important in understanding that Linkedin is long cycle sale. This is not a quick hit, you're not going to go and comment on somebody's post or connect with them and have two chats in the messenger and then all of a sudden get a million dollar sale. It's not going to happen that way. 

You’ve got to build a relationship with them. It takes time, and you have to be strategic about it. You need to use tools like Sales Navigator, in order to categorize your leads in your audence. When you're following up with them. It tells you about your relationship status with them, all those kinds of things. I think what's important here is to not “go straight for the jugular” and try to sell them something the very first time. 

I mean, Josh, this is the LinkedIn spam box we talked about — like it is off the rails. I swear I'm going to take the word “coach” out of my profile, because I get messages like, “I see you're in the coaching industry” every bloomin day. I pulled up my Linkedin messenger, and there's this one person who sent one message with an attachment, a second one with an attachment, a third email, a fourth message. I haven't responded to him whatsoever. He's never engaged in my comments, never liked my comment, or liked any of my stuff ever…but I've gotten four messages from him. 

 

Josh: Absolutely. So if I send them 1000 messages, you may get the one sale. Like yeah, you get the one sale, but now use pissed off 999 people or connections in your feed. I think there's a better way! If you treat them like human beings, the potential for you to get 909 leads. An advocate is so much more powerful than just one sale.

The average salesperson continues to look for that next sale, rather than going, “Man, if I build this relationship, this one relationship might bring me 10 sales.” That's not me searching or having to work for each sale; it’s a relationship. That's where the power is; that's where the opportunity comes from. 

And that's what I want everyone to be able to see — LinkedIn is not a lead generation site. It is a relationship building opportunity, to build high-level opportunities that will convert for you from now to the end. It's a short game, long game, mid game, all those things all wrapped in one, because the right people will show up when they need you.

 

Sid: I'm literally at a loss for words on how to comment. So I’m just going to jump into my next follow up question. In order to be successful on Linkedin, like Josh just so eloquently described, you have to come out from behind the curtain and quit being a ghost. You have to be active on the platform. That doesn't mean just liking every post. That means leaving a thoughtful comment, because a comment is content. Linkedin is promoting a comment on somebody's post. Be sure you tag them, and maybe you comment something like, “This is such a powerful post, I learned my key takeaway is BOOM” or “I had this experience.” It can just be a sentence or two. 

LinkedIn even gives you a little pop up box that says do you want to share this? I don't know that I like it, but it does offer that to you — because what it's telling you is that commenting is content. So content doesn't mean you have to go create graphics or put your face on video. But engaging is critical, because that's going to be the step that's going to help you build relationships.

 

Josh: And I'll give a little story on how this actually works, because we had a physical security company client that wanted to add the security systems at this burger company’s locations in Texas. They’re called what a burger. So, what we did was we didn't just go after the person that we felt would actually be able to make that decision — but we used a the LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform, their built in CRM system, and we were able to see all the decision makers. Then we're able to go through and be able to see all the ones that have posted content on LinkedIn, and we started going through and leverage that one profile to be able to reach out to all the people engage with that content, build relationships, and talk about a million dollar deal. Sometimes those take a long time to be closed, but if you already have advocates within the company rooting for you to close the deal — when that deal comes to fruition, someone inside the company goes, “Hey, I'm thinking about working with Sid,” and your Linkedin connection advocates for you, saying, “Oh, I know Sid from LinkedIn; we've got a great relationship.” 

It's amazing how much you can fast track closing opportunities, because of preexisting relationships. So that's what I want people to pay attention to, as well — don't just go after who you believe is the decision maker, but build relationships with everyone at the company. That will create a faster opportunity and a shorter sales cycle for you.

 

Sid: I love how you just explained the simplicity and the power of Sales Navigator. Now it does cost the platform’s premium cost to access it, but it's so worth it in the information and the insights that it gets you as you start your journey of social “selling on LinkedIn”...without selling. 

So we've covered a lot, I'm sure people's heads are spinning.. There's so many ecosystems inside of LinkedIn. But if I can sum up, I think the important things here so far have been: 

1. to build your personal brand and be sure that you're owning your personal brand. 
2. make sure that your profile / your landing page on LinkedIn is optimized. (And that includes a banner picture that's appropriate with a profile picture that doesn't have a baseball cap and sunglasses so that people can see you.) If you have the Creator mode turned on, do the video and then tell people who you are what you do and the communities that you serve. That's what's important. Make sure it's optimized. 
3. then start doing content within the model of 10-20-70. And if you're not a content creator, then or someone who likes to create content, then at least start engaging with others to get comfortable with it. 

The bottom line is you have to be if you're selling in today's world, LinkedIn is a platform that you have to be involved in,

 

Josh: Especially if you’re selling to businesses, this is where they live. This is where they spend their time. And if someone else is on Facebook or Tik Tok or something like that, people then go to LinkedIn to be able to get information to make a decision or to build those powerful relationships. So this is where people want to be able to spend their time. 

This is why if you're not on LinkedIn or if you're sleeping on LinkedIn — you're missing a huge opportunity, because even though it's been around for 18 years, I see a huge shift in where LinkedIn is going.

I know because I work with the team over there often, and what they've got coming out, it's going to blow people's minds on where this company is going to be headed soon. You want to be ahead right now, because there's still opportunity. Look, there's influencers out there on every platform; I don't want to be an influencer, I want to be a person like selling sunglasses or sunblock or whatever people want. I want to be a thought leader, and I've got to fight 1000 kids over here on these other platforms, when I have the opportunity to be a thought leader with influence on LinkedIn right now. And everyone listening has that same opportunity, too.

 

Sid: So Josh, the information you've shared is off-the-rails good. I have one follow-up question that I'm gonna ask you. Tell us about the community, okay? In your opinion and your experience, which type of content works better? Text, video, imagery? Tell me what do you think is like the most powerful content you could put on LinkedIn today?

 

Josh: So there's two ways that people look at it, right? 

Polls are amazing. If you're asking an irrelevant question on LinkedIn, you may get a whole bunch of responses — but what does that do for anyone? On the other hand, if you ask a relevant question that can also help you provide value down the line and get the right people into your poll, that’s what you're after. 

Video is great, but it does take a lot longer to process those on Linkedin. So my second content suggestion for LinkedIn, I would push people to be able to add PDFs. You use a PDF, because it allows you to be able to share your content in the biggest format on there. You can actually create a carousel of images on a PDF, so people might can download it, they can look at it, they can view it. We've seen the most success from those two things right there being able to have flat content.

You can have a carousel, like we see on Instagram, and just add individual pictures and upload them in a PDF format. Or you can add white paper, and talk about what's going on or a case study. It works really, really well. And that’s where we see the most distribution of content.

 

Sid: PDFs take up the biggest part of the screen, and most people are viewing on their their mobile device, not their desktop device. So we will go to your profile, we'll grab one of your PDFs that you've posted, and we'll put it in the show notes for everybody to go click on it and see exactly what Josh is talking about. PDFs are really, really a great tool on Linkedin, one I don't use enough. And you know, it doesn’t have to be long — it can be only like four slides that you can build in Canva or PowerPoint or Keynote or whereever you make a presentation.

 

Josh: Yes, we use Canva and PowerPoint to be able to create that PDF carousel.

 

Sid: So you create the presentation, let's say three to five slides. You have the information in a font large big enough that people can read it like a graphic, and then you save it as a PDF. Then you upload it with some text as your caption, and it shows up on the screen as a swipe through experience. People can look at each page and zoom in if you need to.

Now, I gotta know, you mentioned it earlier, and I haven't asked you yet… Why do they call you the dopamine dealer?

 

Josh: It's funny! I was on another podcast, and I talked about the human condition of being online and what we do on Linkedin. I talked about going in on everyone posts online for one reason, above all else. While most people go post online for branding, opportunities, sales, marketing — when we post, we focus on giving those little hits of dopamine. We’re all looking for it! So when you start looking at your content that way, “How do I continue to be able to give these little hits of dopamine and put someone in a flow state?” 

Now dopamine actually puts us in a “flow state” mentally that allows for easier conversation and for relationships to build — because that dopamine hit means people are paying close attention. So, that's what I kind of explained and when the podcast came out, it said, “Josh will be the In the dopamine dealer of LinkedIn,” — I was like, alright, I can work with that. We've had some fun with it!

 

Sid: Thank you for sharing that. I love how things like that happen. 

Tell me about the mistake, Josh, that got you in the boot. I think this was a personal post on LinkedIn with Joshua and his wife, Rachel. I loved it… I didn’t comment on it, but I loved the title, “mistakes suck.” So why don't you elaborate on that. 

 

Josh: Ahh, so it got someone's attention! You know, that's the whole piece of the copywriting medium. Everyone, make sure if you're going to create content on LinkedIn, don't try and be too smart. The average person reads a fifth grade level. So you can use apps like Hemingwayapp.com, to be able to put your content in there and tell what grade level you're writing. So I had to set I can't not just continue to be able to kind of give them old hints and stuff like that. This is who I am. But yeah, a year ago, and it's funny, like I guess some people a picture and were like, “Oh, Josh, I'm so sorry, you're in a boot.”

 

Sid: Wait a minute, this is not recent…

 

Josh: Yes, this was a year ago!

 

Sid:I I literally thought I saw this post yesterday…

 

Josh: So this is a great piece of insight for me, too, because I'm always looking at the human condition, and I want to see who reads posts, but doesn't write.

So I actually decided a year ago, I was like, “Oh, I'm gonna go to this leadership conference.” And when I was there, I had arthritis in my left knee, and I hadn't really danced in a while. While I was there, I thought, “You know what? I'm not gonna let that stop me anymore.” I went to the circle, and I was five steps in and I was on the ground. I’m still dealing with that today! 

A year later, that Achilles is going through healing. So, they do suck — mistakes suck, because you have to go through these learning experiences. Just like with your daughter and her injury, I'm getting so many people saying, “Hey, I want to reach out. What's going on?” And, “thank you so much for sharing.” There isn’t any “Oh, that shouldn’t be on Linkedin…”

That’s always the goal is connecting to another human being in a way that allows conversations. That's what we're looking to be able to do. If you can be able to share a personal moment that can educate people or spur conversation, do it each and every time. 

 

Sid: YES. And just to bring that around full circle, I just made a big mistake, because I didn't read the full post, I didn't engage on the post. If I done my job as a podcaster, I would have read that post and would have realized that that was a year ago, and I would not have brought it up. 

 

Josh: But that's the whole piece, right? I mean, absolutely, you want people to be able to go in and see quick images only, but I didn't do my job either, because those first few lines of a post are so important. So it was too compelling to be able to look at the picture and be able to keep scrolling, so I need to work on making those first three lines more compelling. 

So when you're making posts, you have to make sure those first three lines push someone down to keep reading the rest of the post and maybe not continue to scroll. Honestly, Sid, thank you for bringing it up, because it allowed me to be able to remind people — you've got to be compelling in those first three lines of content.

 

Sid: Absolutely. So guys, you can tell by listening to Josh talk. He knows this platform and knows how to help you be successful with this platform. I'm fortunate enough to be part of his coaching community, where I'm continuing to uplevel my skills on LinkedIn. 

So Josh, tell us a little bit about the StandOut Authority community on Discord, and some of the things you're doing over there. Give us the elevator pitch, please.

 

Josh: It's been an amazing experience. Before, we were working on such a high level with our clients. Rachel and I really wanted to be able to affect people on a bigger scale right now, so just being able to go in there and bring people into our what we call “our family.” I'm not sure if everyone's watching, but we've got the family lead, with the last name B. Lee, so we’re using the whole brand. 

Really, for us, it's about being able to have different levels where people can join us. Of course, we've got the coin sieve, and we're also making it web-friendly. I mean, we did it where you can pay $250 and get a year-long access to group coaching calls, webinars, and all our future monthly live trainings. It's all about how we actually love to grow our business, and we wanted to create an opportunity to really build those human connections, build those relationships with real live people, and that's kind of why we created a standard learning community.

 

Sid: So we will put a link to your website, as well as to the discord server, so people can go click on it, check it out. This is not a pitch, but I'm just gonna tell you there's so much value that I get out of that community and learning from people that I've met, the guests that you guys have brought in — it's just powerful $50. It's a no brainer, Josh. 

So, you know, I love the Linkedin platform, it is my preferred platform, with Instagram being my second preferred platform. I think it's THE place to be if you're doing business, you need to be on LinkedIn. Josh is obviously super knowledgeable about it. 

Man, I appreciate you coming and joining us today and sharing your insights about the platform and why we need to be on there. If our community would like to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do that? 

 

Josh: I want people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I love to be able to connect, but I don't want that blank connection request. I want someone to send me a message and say, “Hey, Josh, I heard you on Sid’s podcast, and I love listening to the podcast because of ______.” Tell me why! Because for one, I'm getting to know you as a person really quickly, and that helps us build a better relationship. Then, I go back and look at all these amazing comments of why people connected with me, and that’s what it's all about — building those relationships. So connect with me, Joshua B. Lee on LinkedIn, and send me a message. Tell me why you love the podcast, and we'll have a great time.

 

Sid: Josh, that's awesome. Thanks again so much for being here. We will drop your LinkedIn profile information in the show notes. I'm honored to have you here, because of what you just said to them — I say every episode, “If you're gonna send a connection request on LinkedIn, be sure to add a note and let them know why!” 

So thank you for reiterating that for me. What a pleasure it’s been, thanks again for sharing all of your amazing information. I look forward to seeing you inside the discord again soon!

 

Hey, go out there and make today great! Thanks for joining me today on this episode of the Trend Report Podcast. I'm glad that you're here, and I hope that you got some amazing value out of today's conversation. For more about our podcast and this episode and our other episodes, please visit my website at SidMeadows.com