Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 71 - How to Build a Following (And Get Clients) on LinkedIn
Synopsis:
In this episode of the Peaceful Profits Podcast, LinkedIn coach Mildred Talabi shares what happened when she ran an experiment comparing two approaches to client acquisition on LinkedIn: organic personal branding vs. direct outreach using the Sales Navigator method taught inside Peaceful Profits.
Mildred breaks down the results from both strategies, including what worked, what didn’t, and how she ultimately landed on a hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both methods. She also shares how her time with Peaceful Profits helped her refine her messaging, streamline her offers, and confidently build a client pipeline that works—without burning out or relying on one-size-fits-all tactics.
This is a must-listen for anyone using LinkedIn to grow their coaching or consulting business.
Transcript:
Peaceful Profits Review: How to Build a Following (And Get Clients) on LinkedIn
[00:00:00] Chanelle: Hello, Peaceful Profits nation. Welcome to the Peaceful Profits podcast. I'm your host Chanelle Nielson. I am joined today by Mildred Talabi. Mildred, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:11] Mildred: Thank you so much. It's so good to be here with you all. Yeah,
[00:00:15] Chanelle: we are grateful to have you. Glad that you are a new part of the Peaceful Profits team.
[00:00:22] Chanelle: And Mildred has joined us and is an expert on LinkedIn, which is what we're going to talk about today. So to start off, I'd love for you [00:00:30] to tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into LinkedIn and then your role here with Peaceful Profits.
[00:00:37] Mildred: Sure. So when I left university many years ago, what's exactly how long I revealed my age, but it was a while.
[00:00:46] Mildred: What I do today as a LinkedIn personal branding coach and visibility coach for women was of course not even on my radar because social media was not a thing back then. So I studied journalism and I trained [00:01:00] as a journalist, worked in the media for a bit before I transition into communications and PR.
[00:01:05] Mildred: But I always had a business on the side. So I side hustled my entire career and it was this process of balancing the career and the business on the side where I got turned on to LinkedIn in terms of as a platform. I realized that this is a professional platform that I could just use to share things, put ideas out there.
[00:01:25] Mildred: And I would, I was very inconsistent with it, but I would see some [00:01:30] traction, over the years and long story short, at the beginning of 2020, I was like, you know what, I'm going to put all my eggs in this one basket called LinkedIn. And this is what I'm going to channel my business and start helping people to build their brands on here as I've managed to do and continue to do today.
[00:01:47] Mildred: So that's how I got into LinkedIn quite by. Incident never intentional, but I absolutely love what I do now.
[00:01:54] Chanelle: That's wonderful. So in 2020, the transition was to start to teach other people [00:02:00] how to use LinkedIn.
[00:02:01] Mildred: Yes. So I up until that begin, literally the beginning of 2020, do you know how you make your new year resolutions?
[00:02:08] Mildred: And my was right. I'm going all in on LinkedIn this year, so I went on a 30 day I paid for a 30 day challenge where it made us do post on LinkedIn every single day for 30 days. Now prior to this, I was posting on LinkedIn as and when I was inspired. Probably like most of us, yeah. Like an inspiration can be pretty unfaithful. It does [00:02:30] not come very often. So it was maybe a few times a month I would be posting on LinkedIn. But from that 2020 point, I started posting every single day on LinkedIn for the 30 day challenge. And then when the 30 days were up, I didn't stop. I've continued since, and it's been three and a half years of daily posting on LinkedIn.
[00:02:49] Mildred: Wow. And it's amazing things for my brand.
[00:02:52] Chanelle: Wow. Okay. We're going to talk a little bit more as we get along in the podcast about what you recommend, but right off the bat, just [00:03:00] daily posting is what you do. So that's very interesting and good to know. So let's talk a little bit then about, obviously you help people here at Peaceful Profits with their LinkedIn.
[00:03:12] Chanelle: Now, I know for listeners, some of them are probably thinking, is LinkedIn for me? So talk to us about what niches work best for growing a business on LinkedIn. And are there niches that shouldn't use LinkedIn?
[00:03:28] Mildred: Okay. Yes. Sorry. [00:03:30] Somebody else had decided to have a party, right? I hope the music is not too distracting, but so in terms of what niche Should use LinkedIn.
[00:03:40] Mildred: I find LinkedIn straight off the bat. It can be used by pretty much all professions in all fields. But if you have a service business in particular, LinkedIn is really good for you. If you have a business where you need, where you attract clients and you sell your services as opposed to products in particular, [00:04:00] LinkedIn is brilliant for that because you can attract The right audience through their LinkedIn is the difference between LinkedIn and all the other platforms is LinkedIn was created as a professional platform, whereas Facebook on Instagram and TikTok and all the rest of our social platforms.
[00:04:16] Mildred: So the nature is different from the get go. So if you have a service based business, if you're a coach, if you're a consultant, if you do anything like that, LinkedIn can potentially be a goldmine for you to find your clients. [00:04:30]
[00:04:30] Chanelle: Yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. So with that difference, can you explain the difference of a social platform versus a professional platform?
[00:04:42] Mildred: I would say it's the mindset that people come to these platforms with. So for example I've been on all the before. I really honed in on just LinkedIn as the main platform. I used to be big on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, all of them at some point, Twitter at a point was my favorite.
[00:04:59] Mildred: [00:05:00] But the Facebook, for example, is a platform where and I know most people have this experience. I certainly did. It's a platform where you can put stuff out, you can share pictures about your kids, about cats, and about fishes, whatever. And people would love it and celebrate, you get loads of reactions and then you share something about your business and it's like crickets, nobody wants to buy anything.
[00:05:20] Mildred: They want to, they're there to support their friends. They're there to like, like stuff, but they're not there thinking I'm here to do business. Because [00:05:30] they, most people are using Facebook in that sense in their off time, not in their work time, not during the day kind of thing. Same with Instagram.
[00:05:38] Mildred: I don't know about you, but I spend, I watch like funny videos on TikTok and Instagram when I'm brushing my teeth at night. That's what I go there to do. Yeah. But LinkedIn, it's like something that. People can use during their day to their daily life, during their work hours. It's something that some employees have linked to learning, it's part of [00:06:00] their routine.
[00:06:01] Mildred: So it's the mindset of it is that people go there with a I'm here to work. I'm here to do business. I'm here to I'm in here in a professional mode as opposed to I'm here to just look at cat pictures, which means that, it's if you are doing business on there, people are more receptive than they would be in some of the other platforms.
[00:06:19] Mildred: That's one of the key differences I've noticed.
[00:06:21] Chanelle: Yeah, and that is a key difference. Thank you for pointing that out because that mindset, why people are there in the first place is going to make a really big [00:06:30] difference to what they do once they get there. So as far as selling on LinkedIn, we were business owners and we want to use these platforms to sell.
[00:06:41] Chanelle: What do people need to know about selling on LinkedIn?
[00:06:46] Mildred: Yes I really believe selling on LinkedIn, the old school method of cold sales is gone out the window in a sense, because people we've become, we've become, what's the word? [00:07:00] Not dehumanize. What's the word? When you don't have the feelings.
[00:07:03] Mildred: It's the D word. It's escaping me. Desensitized maybe? That's the word. That's the word. I think it's desensitized. It's too much sun out here. That's making me not think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we've become desensitized to all of that, all the markets, employees, all that kind of stuff. So LinkedIn, what works powerfully on LinkedIn is that social selling, so this is where, this is the whole thing of where you're selling via sharing useful, relevant content.
[00:07:29] Mildred: [00:07:30] You're becoming part of the habit of your target audience. You're teaching them, you're educating them, you're entertaining them, you're informing them. And as you do these things through your content, primarily they come to do free things. And your audience comes to know you. Like you and trust you.
[00:07:46] Mildred: And when that process happens, they buy into you as a brand. And when they buy into you, it's so much easier for them to buy from you. So that's what really happens. That's the magic of the type of selling that can take [00:08:00] place over time on LinkedIn, selling through your content, selling through being helpful and useful to your audience.
[00:08:07] Mildred: And then you become a trusted brand that they would go for when they have the needs that you provide the solution for.
[00:08:14] Chanelle: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And talk to us a little bit about, are there any special considerations when selling high ticket on LinkedIn?
[00:08:29] Mildred: One of, one [00:08:30] of my mentors, Myron Golden he talks about it's, he always says it's easier to make A lot of money fast than it is to make little money slow,
[00:08:40] Chanelle: yeah,
[00:08:41] Mildred: so he says that so the whole idea of it is that if you're going to sell something that's worth 10.
[00:08:48] Mildred: You might as well sell something that's worth a grand, because you're still going to go through the whole selling process anyway. So in terms of the high ticket kind of thing, because sometimes people say I have a [00:09:00] high ticket program, but where do I find people who are willing to pay high ticket?
[00:09:04] Mildred: It's not so much about finding people who are willing to pay high ticket because people are everywhere. We buy what we want, so we pay for things that matter to us. We pay for things that are important to us, that we place value on whether it's the 10 pounds or 10 grand. So it's a case of when it comes to selling high ticket, it's really about demonstrating that you are that trusted brand that you are really, this is where building a personal brand on LinkedIn [00:09:30] becomes powerful because now you're, You are your unique selling point.
[00:09:35] Mildred: It's no longer that you're just another coach or just another consultant who is selling a product or a service on LinkedIn. You are now this particular coach or this consultant. So for example, if you Google if you type in a LinkedIn search, LinkedIn coach, LinkedIn trainer, LinkedIn, whatever, you'll find thousands of results.
[00:09:54] Mildred: But you're only going to find one Mildred to love you, there was only one me doing it this way that I [00:10:00] do it in terms of visibility is my angle to this. So when people come to me and the woman that come to me is because they want to be visible and they want to do it free working with me. They don't just want to learn about LinkedIn algorithms or whatever kind of thing.
[00:10:14] Mildred: When you sell high ticket, when you build a personal brand is so much, it makes it easier to sell high tickets because now people are buying the experience of working with you to get a particular result rather than just trying to just buy a service off the [00:10:30] shelf, so that's how you sell high ticket by building a personal brand around what you do.
[00:10:35] Chanelle: Yeah, I love that. All of there were so much good stuff in there. This idea of we buy what we want to buy, and that the quote that you gave, it's easier to make a lot of money fast is finish that for me. It's easier to make a lot of money fast.
[00:10:53] Mildred: And to make little money slowly. Yes,
[00:10:56] Chanelle: that's so good.
[00:10:57] Chanelle: That's so good. And I think [00:11:00] sometimes clients come in and they are a little afraid of charging high prices, but the things that you just explained and the reasons why, and the reasons how they can, as they differentiate themselves in the market, I think. Are so key and so powerful. Now, one of the keys that you gave us is you need to stand out as a personal brand.
[00:11:24] Chanelle: You need to have visibility is what you teach. I would love to hear a little [00:11:30] bit more about, you mentioned earlier that you're posting daily. Let's talk about the overall strategy. So let's say that I wanted to promote my business on LinkedIn and I'm just getting started. What would you recommend as an overview of the process for how to do LinkedIn?
[00:11:49] Mildred: Sure. Sure. This is what I wrote about in my book, start being visible, which is all about how to build your personal brand on LinkedIn through being visible. So now [00:12:00] in there, I talk about, I call them the four pillars of success in the LinkedIn success in the book, but I've since rebranded it to the PACE formula because it's much more catchy, so the PACE stands for the P is for profile, A is for audience.
[00:12:15] Mildred: C is for content, and E is for engagement. Now, these four things working together, all of them together, will help you build a powerful presence on LinkedIn that helps you to attract your clients. Now, the profile is having a [00:12:30] profile that's really well written and targeted to your audience. So that essentially because people are, LinkedIn is a global platform, people are there 24 hours a day while you're sleeping, people are logging on.
[00:12:43] Mildred: If you have a powerful profile that really speaks to what you do with some clear call to actions on there, people can be selling themselves on you without you doing a thing, just based on your profile alone. Now,
[00:12:56] Chanelle: before we go on to audience, let me interrupt you there and just ask, [00:13:00] what do you see people messing up on in their profile?
[00:13:04] Chanelle: What are people missing when they do their profile?
[00:13:08] Mildred: Sure. So one of the, one of the key mess ups, that I see in profiles is when people write the profile about themselves. So even if it says about section, it's not about you, it should be about how you serve your audience. So the minute your potential audience, your target audience lands on your profile [00:13:30] page, they need to be able to see and recognize themselves based on what is there.
[00:13:36] Mildred: From the headline to your banner, to your featured section, to your back section, it should speak to your target audience, everything. So if you take a look at my profile at the moment, because my thing is about visible women, it's like from the top to the bottom, everything's screaming at, if you want to be visible and you're a woman.
[00:13:55] Mildred: Come check me out. So is that whole kind of being really clear? And that [00:14:00] leads us to the audience. So being really clear about who your audience is and making sure that your profile is targeted to them is one of the things that if you get that it will really help you to stand out on LinkedIn.
[00:14:12] Chanelle: Yeah, that's so good. Thank you for that. I think that's really key. Okay. And so what else do we need to know about our audience? Yes.
[00:14:21] Mildred: So audiences is important to have that, but it's so tempting when you're in business to want to serve everybody, even if your [00:14:30] business can serve everybody, what I teach on LinkedIn for Peaceful Profits, I teach that for men, for women, both, but in my own business is for, I aim for women.
[00:14:41] Mildred: But that's because again, another business coach, one of my early business coach, she said this it's, although it's possible to serve everybody. It's not possible to market to everyone, so you have to be clear on who you are marketing to and niche down on that. So audience is important, knowing who your audience is, [00:15:00] because that's going to help you to find them.
[00:15:02] Mildred: That's going to help you to produce content that speaks to them. And of course, that's going to help you to write your profile in a way that targets them effectively.
[00:15:10] Chanelle: Yeah, perfect. Okay. And then comes the C in your method, which is content. And this is a question I hear a lot. What do I post? So let's talk about that.
[00:15:23] Chanelle: What is this content and how do you come up with ideas? All of the things you would tell these people who [00:15:30] just aren't sure where to go. Sure.
[00:15:33] Mildred: So when I, as I said at the beginning, when I started in being intentional on LinkedIn, I went on this 30 day content posting challenge. And I tell you, it was hard.
[00:15:44] Mildred: It was hard to go from just posting every now and again, when I'm inspired to post in every single day, some days it's what do I talk about? How do I produce content? And then it's Oh no, nobody's commenting, like it's You know, so that kind of thing, but one of the good [00:16:00] things about commit, committing to something is that when you commit to something and you do it, you will get better in the process.
[00:16:08] Mildred: It's just like going to the gym. The first time you work out, you're going to feel rubbish. The first 10 times, probably, if you're anything like me, you're going to feel rubbish, but gradually if you stick at it and you continue to do it, you're going to get stronger. You're going to get better.
[00:16:24] Mildred: That six pack might even start showing itself, so in the same way with content, when you [00:16:30] first start out producing content, it might not be your best content. And that's okay because in the beginning. What's important is that you develop the muscle of showing up on posting content on LinkedIn.
[00:16:41] Mildred: You develop the muscle of putting content out there. Now I know that on Peace for Profits that the pathway is to write a book, and to use that book as a selling point for your audience. So if you can write a book, you have got at least months of content for LinkedIn, from your book.
[00:16:59] Mildred: So if [00:17:00] all else fails, take little snippets from the book that you've written and work those into small posts, bite sized pieces for your audience on LinkedIn and put a point of engagement at the end, maybe asking them questions or pulling them into the conversation somehow. So that is going to work powerfully on LinkedIn and that's how what I did with my book start being visible when it came out.
[00:17:21] Mildred: I used a lot of that content on LinkedIn as my, cross promoting in terms of the content of the book on there and it's great, so if in doubt, [00:17:30] use your book, but you have it in you. So to, to work the content, so get working on it.
[00:17:35] Chanelle: Perfect. Okay. I love it. As you talked about that, I was reminded of a story of a professor who divided his class.
[00:17:43] Chanelle: It was a ceramics class. And he asked one of them to come up with a perfect pot over the course of the semester. And he asked the other group to make as many pots as they could. And at the end of the semester, he looked and. Who had the better pot [00:18:00] were the people who had made as many as possible. We get so stuck in perfection in trying to make the perfect pot or the perfect LinkedIn post that we don't do as much as we should.
[00:18:13] Chanelle: And what I just heard you saying is the same idea, make more pots, make more posts as you make more, you're going to get better and better. And you're going to end up with a better product all along the way. And so I think that's very, a very powerful message that I hear you saying [00:18:30] is just put your stuff out there.
[00:18:31] Chanelle: Just do it. You'll get stronger. You'll get better. And you mentioned engagement, that's one of the things in your post. What do you recommend to get engagement? And what are the calls to action that you're putting in your actual posts?
[00:18:47] Mildred: Sure. So engagement is the last of the four pillars of LinkedIn success.
[00:18:52] Mildred: So E, so engagement really, it's all about if you think of LinkedIn as a community, you [00:19:00] will get so much more out of it, honestly, because it's not, it's a marketing platform, but it's also a place where there's people and there are many different communities on LinkedIn. So it's about finding yours. I'm plugging into that.
[00:19:14] Mildred: So engagement is this whole act of building community. So what you don't want to do is make it a one way street where you're, what I call, dropping and running. You're dropping around Daisy, right? So you drop your post and you run. You don't reply to anybody. You don't comment on [00:19:30] anybody's thing.
[00:19:30] Mildred: You don't want to do that. So you want to put your content out, you want to make time to engage with anybody who engages with you. So if somebody comments on your post, comment back, but also more than that, you take some time and I say to my clients and when I work with them that so content, because another question people ask about content is how often you don't have to post every day like I do, but I recommend at least three days a week for visibility at a minimum, three days a week minimum.
[00:19:58] Mildred: But engagement [00:20:00] should be a daily thing. So if every day you look for about five posts that you can leave meaningful comments on that's engaging. So if you want to be really targeted with this, you want to look at posts that relate to your area, your field, who you're serving, your audience. So I give you a practical example.
[00:20:22] Mildred: So because my audience is women, so whether it's senior women in careers or women in business, so they're my prime audience. So I [00:20:30] would, when I'm being strategic with my comments, I would go and comment on posts on pages like the female leader the female leads. So they've got over 3 million followers and they really speak to women who want to get into leadership, who are in leadership.
[00:20:44] Mildred: So commenting there gives me visibility with my target audience. So when you're strategic about where you comment on LinkedIn, it really opens that door. So you want to be doing a lot of strategic commenting and then you also want to be commenting on just people in your [00:21:00] network because that builds relationship and you don't know where that relationship is going to lead over time.
[00:21:06] Chanelle: So this has been so good. I feel like you've given us a lot of really great strategy pieces to finish out. I would love if you could give us a little vision piece. If you could talk to us about the results, like we have so much strategy and I think we can get excited. Okay, yes, I'm going to go and do this, but on day five or day seven or somewhere down the line, as [00:21:30] we start to feel like, wait a minute, this is work.
[00:21:33] Chanelle: Tell us why and the vision of what results we can hope to achieve on LinkedIn.
[00:21:40] Mildred: Oh yes. No, I love that. And to be honest, this is what has kept me going for the three and a half years of posted on LinkedIn because one it's, I see LinkedIn as this is my main marketing place. So as a business person you need to be marketing.
[00:21:58] Mildred: That's if you want to [00:22:00] survive you need to be marketed, right? Now you've got the choice to being trying to be everywhere Trying to be on Facebook on Instagram on Twitter a bit of LinkedIn trying to be everywhere trying to market everywhere. Oh You can look at, okay, where is my target audience?
[00:22:17] Mildred: And then dedicate your time, energy, and your efforts to that mainly to mainly that one platform, as such as LinkedIn and put all your energy there. Now, what happens if you choose to do that is over [00:22:30] time, you will, Honestly, start to build a community on LinkedIn. You will start to build a community of people who come to want to hear your voice, want to hear your content, and in the midst of that community, you're going to have friends, you're going to have supporters, and you're definitely going to have clients.
[00:22:48] Mildred: Every bit of content that you put out today is potentially creating your future clients of tomorrow. One of the things I want you to understand about LinkedIn, if you're listening to this, is that there's a lot of [00:23:00] people on LinkedIn, but at least 80 percent of people on LinkedIn are lurkers. Which means that they're watching in the background.
[00:23:06] Mildred: They're not commenting, they're not posting themselves, but they're watching. But they are watching you, and they're engaging, and they're doing, and they're taking in what you're putting in. And then when they're ready for what you have to offer, because they've watched you for so long, you're the person that they're going to come to.
[00:23:23] Mildred: But if you stop before then, if you don't, if you are here today, not here tomorrow type of thing, you are not going to be [00:23:30] able to build that trust, which is crucial to building that personal brand, which opens doors for you. So I would say start doing it as a marketing thing, but in the process, fall in love with it , and when it becomes a part of your routine and a habit, it just, because some, it becomes something that you do.
[00:23:48] Mildred: Relatively effortlessly that gets you long term results in terms of attracting your ideal clients. So that's how it works for me. And that's what I teach my clients to do in terms of [00:24:00] how they show up. And that's how it works for them. It can work for you too.
[00:24:03] Chanelle: Wonderful. Okay. Definitely feeling the vision here and the inspiration.
[00:24:09] Chanelle: Mildred, thank you for all that you've shared today.
[00:24:12] Mildred: Thank you so much. Thank y'all can talk about LinkedIn for hours. Yes.
[00:24:16] Chanelle: We will have you again. We'll talk again and go a little deeper on some of these concepts for sure. So Peaceful Profits nation. Thank you for being here. If you are interested in learning even more [00:24:30] from Mildred book, a call she is on the inside.
[00:24:33] Chanelle: She does our weekly LinkedIn Q and a calls. You can book a call at PeacefulProfits.com/call. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week. Bye.