How I Hit 375,604 Linkedin Followers & Got the "Top Voice" Tag

alrighty SAS open what up how's everyone doing hey by show a hands who here was with me in Austin a few months ago all right we got a few well if you joined me in Austin and you saw me speak last time that was on the CFO stage what I'm going to be talking about today is so much sexier than how to read a profit and loss now see now we're on the growth in media stage and on the growth in media stage

we talk about things like how to get this many Impressions from a LinkedIn post or this many Impressions over a year of posting but it's not just Impressions it's also qualified hungry inbound leads people begging you for conversations and when those conversations take place well they already know you a ton and the ability to convert them is so much

easier but I'm not just talking about customers and Impressions I'm talking about incredible opportunities to be flown out across the country and record a course at LinkedIn learning Studios I'm talking about getting recognized from one of the most incredible companies in the world the Microsoft MVP logo only about 3,000 people get that but perhaps the craziest thing that has happened to me really big

people commenting on my post who here knows this guy well believe it or not this is how our relationship started he runs one of the biggest SAS conferences in the world and I'm actually scheduled to speak oh snap it's right now LinkedIn is hugely underserved but that is changing quickly so I am a total open book I am going to show you guys my tried intruded

method for how I grew to almost 400 th000 followers I need about three or 400 more so if you guys are out there you want to hit the follow button you can help me get to 400 I'm going to start by talking about five devastating mistakes that I made if you're starting out do not make these mistakes I'll then talk about content formats that are hot you're going to want to steal these I'll then go over how exactly I scale my content not just

on LinkedIn but across all social media platforms into a newsletter of almost 990,000 sub subscribers and then I'll answer the most common questions I have a bunch lined up but I'll also do a Q&A as well a little bit on who I am first I'm a fractional CFO chili Piper you guys heard Nicholas and Alin speak earlier today well they're actually one of my clients I started this agency about five years ago and that's how I started posting content on LinkedIn but it very

much turned on into a life of its own and now I have a separate media agency called your CFO guy which is where all my my content gets produced and then finally about three months ago inspired from SAS open in Austin I became a SAS founder an Excel plugin that we've launched with about 40 paying customers that I was able to get very quickly through this audience that I created so let's start with the mistakes that I

made but first I got a question how many CEOs do we have in the room all right we got a few Keep Your Hands Up how many of you know what ASC 842 is no one maybe a more relevant question how many of you care as 842 represents accounting leases and this was the first mistake that I made I assumed that my ideal customer Persona the people who I was going after with my agency were the

people who I was trying to build an audience with but that isn't the case see publishing content is not about targeting your ideal customer Persona sure that's great that's what we ultimately want that's what drives the sales it's about building an audience it's about thought leadership these channels over here they're sales Le we got premium and paid trials that's

product Le well what we're talking about today is thought leadership that is Authority Leed so how exactly do you build an audience how do do you establish your Authority well one of my favorite things over here stepen Barlett in his book The Diary of a CEO he talks about the five buckets that you need to fill each bucket needs to be filled before the other one and the most valuable the most powerful is your personal

brand so let's talk about audience engagement let's go over the actual psychology of how audience engagement works first we got our Lookers you people in the back I see you taking a look at my post not commenting or liking that's okay no worries we go one level deeper we got the likers people who throw up a thumbs up then we got the people who comment on your posts then we get your subscribers whether they follow your page or they

give you an email which then brings you to your customers but customers is not the end the end is your DieHard fans the people who anytime you post something they're going to go ahead and like it they're going to comment they're going to buy everything that you put out these are the people that you want to be building in your audience and if you think about how do you build an audience of DieHard fans well let's think about it this time from the inside out I post content of Finance and Accounting

professionals the absolute most Niche that I could think about is other fractional CFOs just like me but that would represent just a really small part of the market when we then Branch out from that we get fpna professionals Financial Planning and Analysis people who are trying to become a CFO then we got accounting professionals as a whole maybe we even combine those together to Finance and Accounting professionals we can then take that one level deeper or one level more Broad and we got to just

Excel users as a whole and finally if I really wanted to broaden my reach I could focus on business so this is the mistake that I see so many people make they focus over here with their content this is where they need to be focusing their content they need to build that engine they need to build that audience so that each time you post you get hundreds of thousands of Impressions and those hundreds of thousands of Impressions will pour over into your

ideal customer Persona so in the early stages I recommend everyone focus on the broad picture don't get too far from what you're doing there's obviously a trade-off there's a balance but you'll be able to build the engine and eventually reach your target persona when you go fishing don't just use a fishing rod throw a net out and when you throw that net out you're bound to catch a few whales all right we're going to do a quick experiment here I want you guys to

study these next two slides for about five seconds and I want you to try to retain as much information as possible in these next two slides starting with this one

and now

this which one do you think you understood more quickly which one do you think you recognized more quickly you're were able to actually grasp which one did you enjoy looking at more quickly I imagine all of you would say the second one let's take this one level deeper like I mentioned I'm a fractional CFO what would you think if this is what I presented at a board meeting would you be able to get any data out of this maybe you'd feel like you're kind of taking the SATs just looking at this over here with how complicated it is

what about this over here the exact same data presented differently using a relevant color scheme a relevant graph beautiful overall visuals so that was my second mistake not realizing how powerful posting visuals can be when you're educating your audience oops this is the wrong one here but don't just take my word for it take this guy over here the most powerful guy

on Earth let's see what he has to say don't take my word for it take his each algorithm favors a different form of content YouTube long form landscape they also do some shorts but for the most part YouTube is a long YouTube is a long form platform X primarily threads they're now starting to get into graphics and videos as well that's starting to get hot we got short form platforms like Tik Tok

YouTube shorts and Instagram LinkedIn to me the most viral piece of content you can produce is an infographic one that conveys the messages that you're trying to put over here via beautiful images that not only make it attractive for someone to consume but also Aid in the comprehension much more quickly so my advice to all of you here is find a designer it is actually really

easy so far almost every speech that we heard today was talking about how important hiring is I use upwork for almost all of my hiring you can get really affordable rates overseas if you don't want to use upwork you can also use this we website right here you can post a design contest throw it up for 100 hours bunch of people will then submit their submissions and you can go ahead and choose the winner from that invest in a designer your content will get easily X the reach that it would if you were to just use

text but you could have the best content in the world the best infographics in the world and you still don't have what it takes in order to get the right eyeballs on your post look at this over here this post right over here this guy posted it 35 likes what about whenever I posted it close to 50,000 likes 12 A5 million impressions what exactly is the difference see when I first started posting on

LinkedIn this was the mistake that I made and I'm sure all of you who are getting into content creation you're making the same exact mistake and it is costing you a ton especially on a platform like LinkedIn you spend 98% of your time producing your content and 2% of your time engaging with others well LinkedIn is a social network the more that you engage with others the more they will engage with you and when those people engage with your content

especially those with large audiences they will then carry over those audiences their audiences will see all of your content so you need to flip the formula the majority of your time should be spent engaging with other creators especially those in your Niche that's right in your Niche they are not your competitor they are your complimentary they're your allies in producing content and in building an audience there's so many benefits in

finding other people in your Niche even if you feel that they're your direct competitors because they're capturing their market share I used to think this exact same way but when you find these people when you engage with their content when you form these relationships like I mentioned they'll bring over their audience you'll also get inspired you'll see what they're doing and you could steal their tactics and use it for yourself but biggest of all you'll form some amazing relationships like I have

look at this guy over here commenting on my post 68 likes just from commenting on my posts so just by you commenting on other really big accounts you'll be able to drive a lot more eyeballs to your account now you may be wondering okay great so how exactly do I get big people to engage with my content well I've seen a number of different ways and the most common way is also my least favorite you could ask for the engagement now people call this a pod generally I'm not a fan of it I'm really grateful that I've been

able to build this audience with very very limited interactions where I've asked people for engagement maybe if I'm doing like a sponsored post or something I'll ask for some help you want to go ahead and do it I'm not going to be the one to judge you but there are much better ways you could ask someone to leave a thoughtful comment on your post and share it that's a little bit better I don't know to me it's still a little bit cringeworthy this is my favorite approach over here engage with their content there's this law of reciprocity I think I pronounce that

correctly the more you engage the more you give to someone else the more they will see your content in their feed the more they will feel the need to give back and when they give back like I mentioned that is easily one of the biggest things that you can do in order to get new people into your audience at the start but if you're just posting content on LinkedIn you're making a mistake let's see again what this most powerful guy in the on Earth has to say about repurposing well for those those of you

who caught that what he was saying was the cost of a rocket is $50 million but that's only if you use it once each time you use that rocket the cost exponentially comes down and your content is the same do not make the mistake of just spending all this time hiring a designer potentially spending hundreds of dollars and using that just once repurpose your content check this out over here I first posted this one 10 questions for an entry-level accountant

120 well I took that and I spun it into an infographic same exact content presented a little differently this time we got a few thousand likes look at what happened this time over here again same content repurposed differently into a different infographic over 8,000 likes but it's not just infographics like I mentioned I have a newsletter of close to 90,000 people and that

newsletter so many times people ask me we have every single day besides for Thursdays that we post on our newsletter during the week people ask me how can you possibly produce content for a newsletter every single day to 990,000 people it is through repurposing this exact thing we repurposed into a newsletter we repurposed into a YouTube video we repurposed into a short form video repurpose your content and utilize

the economies of scale when you do all right let's go over now cont part part two content type so I spoke about the five mistakes that you need to avoid let's now go over what are the content types that you want to steal my method over here number one this is one of my favorite deep technical howtos a cheat sheet as I like to call it you get an infographic it has all the information that you need people bookmark it they come back they zoom in even better you give a little link on the bottom people can get it in high resolution now you

have their email now you can warm them up via your newsletter and eventually you can sell to them we also have topics explained like your five this is honestly one of the best forms over here people love things dumbed down I'm amazed at how often this works explaining things like your five or explaining it to kids cartoons building on that cartoons are amazing for those of you who have kids in the room what happens when you're stressed out you don't have the energy to entertain your kid you put them in front of the TV and they watch

some cartoons well it's really no different when you become an adult you still love these cartoons it's a fun way to learn something there's also the this versus that format which also works really great whether you're comparing something good versus something bad or different things lined up against each other lists are also incredible like this post over here 21 types of Revenue this may have taken me like 10 minutes in order to come up with I was amazed that this post actually did well people

just love lists and here is easily my favorite content type taking something complex and simplifying it being able to showcase the relationship between the financial statements using something like the universe or taking Excel shortcuts and making it actually look like a keyboard look at that close to 18,000

likes 3.5 million impressions this is also another really great way do a giveaway where you share something and say if you want it you got to like and you got to comment below now what happens is people start commenting and you respond to those comments with the link but people don't realize when they see it that they could just go to the other comments and get it and you'll constantly get people continuously commenting look at this guy over here Rich one of my good friends 44.7 th000 likes from this over here

very effective technique all right that was part two we're going to wrap things up now with part three you may be thinking okay I have the formula I know exactly how I'm going to do this how do I scale this I don't the resources on my team how am I going to do that I'm going to show you my method for how I scale this first this is my tech stack I use notion notion is where all of my content originates Loom is how I coordinate with my team a lot of my team members don't even speak fluent English I am amazed with platforms like Loom how easily I'm

able to coordinate with them figma is where we produce all of our Graphics slack is where we communicate we create tasks out of each and every item on a SAA we use Excel and canva and all the other stuff Camtasia we use for our videos so let's go over an example of how exactly this looks we got notion over here what's great about notion is you have databases so you can actually create a calendar in notion and you'll showcase this is exactly what I'm going to be posting on what date you can

assign it to people you can then access that information via different formats if you click into one of these cards you'll then get over here this is what I do I put the post details for my team I say this is the outline this is the exact content go ahead and make this beautiful and then we go back and forth then I put the actual post that I'm going to put over here Asana like I mention is how we do our task management system so that we

can keep track of each and every piece of content as it gets produced and Loom like I mentioned is how we um coordinate and do asynchronous communication all right we got just about coming up on time I'm going to go over the most common question that I get Josh I don't have the time and resources for all of this what can I do how can I bypass all of this and get an insane amount of leads to my business you really just need two things number one a really fat

marketing budget and number two is to book a meeting with me right over there joshou CFO guy.com you guys have been awesome thanks so much for joining