246. Justin Welsh - LinkedIn 3-Step Growth System

246. Justin Welsh - LinkedIn 3-Step Growth System

Discover the secrets behind Justin Welsh's impressive business success. In this insightful conversation, Welsh, who has built a business generating close to $8M in revenue with over 90% profit margins, shares his simple yet powerful three-step LinkedIn funnel. Learn how to transform a visitor to your LinkedIn profile into a paying customer, and get actionable tips on creating compelling content and strategic calls to action. Dive in to explore Welsh's strategies on simplifying complex ideas, finding unique knowledge, and leveraging your obsessions to build a distinctive personal brand.

Links Mentioned:

 • How to use Atomic Habits to achieve y...  

  • Justin Welsh $2.25m/yr Content Strate...  

Timestamp:

00:00 Introduction to Unique Knowledge

00:39 Justin Welch's LinkedIn Funnel Strategy

00:57 Crafting Compelling LinkedIn Posts

02:37 Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

03:35 The Art of Simplifying Complex Ideas

05:38 Choosing a Niche vs. Embracing an Obsession

07:27 Developing and Owning Unique Knowledge

09:14 Conclusion and Next Steps

Ash Roy's and Justin Welsh's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):

Justin Welsh:

And so, I, I kind of crafted in that order first, second, third, and I try and drive people to suddenly you're the owner of this very unique knowledge.

Ash Roy:

My friend, Justin Welch has built a business to 7. 9 million in revenue with a 90 plus percent profit margin using the simple three step funnel that he's about to reveal in this video.

He also explains how he comes up with unique knowledge and uses James clear as an example. If you'd like to watch my conversation with James clear, who's also been on this YouTube channel, check out this link. I'll also link to it in the description below. Let's do this. You talk about in your course, how to create a LinkedIn funnel as you describe it, starting with your profile.

And you'd beautifully describe how you can get someone who's a visitor to your LinkedIn profile to eventually become a paying customer. Could you talk to our audience a little bit about how that is set up.

Justin Welsh:

Yeah, I'll give it a shot. Here goes. LinkedIn is interesting. LinkedIn is very different than Twitter.

Twitter, you scroll through your feed and you get full tweets, right? You see the whole thought 280 characters. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you come across a thread and the thread is essentially a trailer. It's a preview for the movie that they're trying to get you to watch, right? So, like you see the tweet and it's like, they're trying to get you to click through and read the whole thread.

That's actually Every post on LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn has a 3, 000-character limit. So, I think there's 300 characters on what I would call being above the fold. So, before you click see more, you've really got 300 characters worth of room to be compelling and interesting. So, I call that the trailer. It's like a trailer for a movie.

Better be compelling and interesting or people aren't going to show up to the theater, you know, rent it on Netflix or whatever. So, there are ways that you can create compelling copy above the fold in less than 300 characters using, you know, some white space, some copywriting techniques, things like that.

I won't go into the massive details, but essentially that's the most important part of the post. The second most important part of the post is what the call to conversation or call to action is for your audience. Do you want them to repost it? Do you want them to leave a comment or ask a question or subscribe to a newsletter or go to a website page?

So, you have to be strategic about your ask. How many asks, usually just one, how specific, why are they going there? All these different things. I say it's the least important part, but it's not, it's still very important. The third part is the meat. Like, what are you actually saying in the post, right? It's not clickbait in the headline if you deliver, right?

So, you got to deliver that, the meat, the story, the tactic, the strategy, the learning. And so, I kind of crafted in that order. Trailer first, call to conversation second, meat third. And I try and drive people to my profile, right? And my profile is set up in a way that is very similar to a landing page.

Again, you have real estate that's at the top of the page, which is generally your banner image, your headshot, your tagline, things like that. So, you got to nail those things, professional headshot, looking the way that you want to come across to your audience, your banner image, talk about either a problem that you solve.

Or a value that you give your tagline should talk about. What do you, what do you say on the internet and why should someone pay attention to you? What's interesting about you? Why should they follow? And it pays to be clear, not clever. I see so many people trying to be clever and it's so unclear. If you can do that above the fold, you get people below the fold.

And below the fold is where the gold is. It's where your featured section is. You can take them to your website, to your newsletter, to your product, to your, you know, one on one coaching call, whatever it might be. And so that's like a high level overview of how I think about those two things working synergistically.

Ash Roy:

You know, you seem to have this remarkable ability to Cut through all the complexity and the noise and go to the simplest, clearest path forward. And that is not only the case with the content that you put out, but clearly is also the case with your thinking based on what you just said to me, like for you to have explained what you just did, I was listening to you and I was thinking, man, I would have been tripped up about 25 times by the By the third thing that he said, and I would have chased another 12 rabbits by then.

You're an exquisite thinker. How did you become that way?

Justin Welsh:

First of all, thank you. I don't, I don't consider myself, um, to be that. The longer that I, this is going to sound really arrogant. So, so please pardon my arrogance for a moment. Um, the longer that I do this, the more I like to think that maybe, maybe I am good at simplifying stuff.

Like if, if a thousand people have said it to me over the course of my career. Maybe there's some truth to that, but I've never really considered myself to be a great thinker or a simplifier of things. Um, I guess sometimes when I look at stuff, I think through my coaching cap from my SAS days. So, I used to run a sales team of 150 people, and that ranged from experienced 10 plus year sellers down to kids who were just coming out of college and becoming sales development reps.

I had to train a lot of those kids who had never learned their first thing about selling or the first thing about making cold calls. I had to train them, and the easiest way to train them was, was with the basics. You had to simplify everything. You had to make it easy. So, a fifth grader can understand, uh, understand it.

And I don't mean that, um, in a mean way, I just mean that. That's how most people learn. And so, I think I've taken a lot of that coaching and managing and training aspect from my previous life and brought it into what I do today. And then last but not least, when I first write something, it's not simple.

It looks crappy. I spend a lot of time editing it to make sure that I'm taking out every unnecessary word. So, when you read it, it feels like you're just getting a lot of juice and not a lot of fluff. You know?

Ash Roy:

Yes. Absolutely. A lot of magic happens in the editing. So, you talked about choosing a niche versus embracing an obsession, and that's what leads you to being able to find unique knowledge.

Can you tell our listeners about that? Because I think that's a really important thing.

Justin Welsh:

Yeah, sure. So, um, here's another great example of that. Let's take James Clear, which is who I write about in this example. There's a million people on the internet and in the world who talk about habits, right? Oh, build good habits.

The, the, your business will be as good as your habits. Uh, if you have good habits, you'll be in physical shape, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all cliches, all, all, not a lot of like, you're not getting a lot of value from those, but like James Clear. Was so obsessed with habits. I've had a chance to speak to the guy.

He's, he's as obsessed with habits as you might think. Super smart guy, super obsessed with habits. And like, because of his obsession, he went and analyzed thousands of people's habits, hundreds of stories, all kinds of data points. And he was able to pull together some really interesting things. I think there's like, there's something of latent potential habit stacking of

Ash Roy:

latent potential.

Yep.

Justin Welsh:

That that's right. These are all. Unique terms, processes, and systems that James Clear created because he was obsessed with habits. And when you're obsessed with something and you analyze it and you create things that work from a data perspective, suddenly you're the owner of this very unique knowledge.

You'll never hear James Clear go out and be like, the best way to build a habit is just stick with it. Like he knows that doesn't work. So, he's like, no, here's how you have it stack. It's very, very specific, very, very tactical. That is a unique piece of knowledge that James clear owns. So now he can write about it.

He can trademark it. He can use it in comments. He can link to it when people talk about habits, when you read it, you're like, this is the habits guy. Right? This is the guy I want to learn about habits from because it's unique knowledge.

Ash Roy:

And that's how you have developed your unique knowledge. What would you say is your unique knowledge through your obsession, through what you've been doing over the last few years?

Justin Welsh:

Tons of things. Like, uh, the thing we just talked about with the UTMs and the tracking, like, that's a unique piece of knowledge, um, you probably haven't heard that from someone. And I'm sure there's someone doing that somewhere on the earth. I'm not suggesting that I created the idea of tracking where your newsletter subscribers come from.

Just, just to be clear. but that very particular nugget, I can go out and I'll write a newsletter about it. And it'll be potentially the first time that 116, 000 of my subscribers have ever read about that. Particular way of tracking your analytics, right? Because I'm going to do it differently than someone else does.

So that becomes a unique piece of knowledge. I wrote a blog post about something I call the creator funnel, which is how I think about people and how they make buying decisions on social media. I think I created the term. I don't know, maybe it existed before. Uh, and the idea of moving from trust to authority expertise, to community building, to monetization is certainly not fresh or new, but it's something but my perspective on it was fresh and new, so it becomes a unique piece of knowledge that I now own and can repurpose my hub and spoke model, how I think about creating content using long form, chopping it into short form again.

I'm certainly not the first person to think of that. Gary Vaynerchuk has his pillar strategy, but this is my unique strategy. It's different than his. It's I own it. And so, it becomes a unique piece of knowledge by creating all of those things. When people interact with my brand, my hope is that each day they're like, damn, this is really unique and interesting.

I haven't read that before. And so I became, I become, I hope sort of this consistent value adder on social media, which. Should at some point people will go. Yeah, I'll spend some money to see what else this guy knows and in his courses That's my hope.

Ash Roy:

I hope you found this video useful This video is brought to you by short form. Be sure to subscribe because we'll be releasing another episode with Justin Welsh and if you found this video useful then check out my other conversation with Justin Welsh right here I'll also link to it in the description below.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you soon