Why LinkedIn's "Best Practices" Might Be Your Downfall in 2024 with Matt Clark

What do you want your life to look like? Last week I talked about how not being intentional is kind of like driving a car without the GPS. But goal setting without knowing what you want – that’s a bit like driving a car without having a destination in mind. 

Well, today, Tanya Alvarez is going to help us figure out the destination – you can think of her as your own GPS. And much like that Google Maps car, she’s well-traveled and has a ton of experience to back up her advice – from funding her first startup with credit cards to completing a Half Ironman and traveling to 42 countries, she’s done it all. And now she wants to help you do it too, by sharing her system for prioritizing your goals.

Top Takeaways

• Take the time to define and rank your personal values. Understand how these values shape your goals and prioritize them to ensure alignment with your desired outcomes.
• View your goals as hypotheses and break them down into manageable time frames. This approach provides flexibility for adjustments while promoting focused and effective work periods.
• When faced with multiple business ideas or tasks, evaluate them based on effort, impact, and activity categories. This can help you understand your capacity and prioritize tasks effectively.

Show Notes

• Tanya Alvarez

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Not being intentional in your business is a bit like getting in your car and driving without the GPS. Sure…you generally know where you’re going. But what if a road is closed? What if there’s avoidable traffic? A GPS can help you navigate around those things.

When you’re intentional about your business, you go from wandering aimlessly, taking any work that makes ends meet, to setting and achieving your goals. And today, I’m going to talk about how I’m being more intentional in my business, and why that decision has led me to end my membership.

Top Takeaways

1. Take the time to identify tasks that provide the best returns on your time investment. Focus on work that aligns with your income goals and brings you closer to achieving your business objectives.
2. Take control of your schedule by tracking your time and evaluating the effectiveness of your tasks. Use tools like time tracking apps to make data-driven decisions and maximize your productivity.
3. Reflect on your business goals and values, and make decisions that align with them. Ensure that your business endeavors are in sync with what matters most to you and contribute to your overall happiness and success.

Sponsors: 

• Check out Liquid Web
• Go to http://porkbun.com/HowIBuiltIt24 to get $1 off your next desired domain name at Porkbun!

Do you really need social media to build a following? To build expertise? To be successful? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I think lots of creators are too. The rote advice that you see from the ultra successful people just doesn’t work for most of us. And it doesn’t have to. What if I told you there was a better way. 

As it turns out, today’s guest, my friend and Amazon best selling author of the book start a binge-worthy podcast, Krystal Proffitt, agree: starting a podcast is a great way to build your business. 

In today’s conversation, we talk about why podcasting is the best way to build expertise and trust, why there aren’t too many podcasts, and how you can start a successful one. 

Plus, in the pro show, we talk all about how to do interviews the right way. 

Top Takeaways

• Podcasts are a great, intimate way to get your content in the hands of your ideal audience. And, as Seth Godin put it, they are the generous act of showing up. 
• You differentiate your podcast by making sure your audience feels seen and heard. This could (and should) be through relatable stories, and by engaging with them through feedback. 
• The first thing you should think about, before you every consider which mic to buy, is what’s your message? Without a message, you don’t have a podcast. 

Show Notes

• Krystal Proffitt
• My interview with Krystal on Podcast Automation
• Amy Porterfield

Sponsors: 

• Check out Liquid Web
• Go to http://porkbun.com/HowIBuiltIt24 to get $1 off your next desired domain name at Porkbun!

During the pandemic, we were told one thing seemingly over and over again: You need to start a membership. You need a community. That’s the only way you can scale your business. And to be honest, I fed into it. I believed that a membership was the key to stop trading for hours for dollars. 

But the truth is I was trading more hours for fewer dollars. See, what most solopreneurs don’t realize (what I didn’t realize for a long time) is that you’re always trading hours for dollars. That’s what work is. The key difference is how many hours you're trading for how many dollars. And that’s what Maggie Patterson is here to talk to us about today. 

See, when the pandemic ended, we both noticed something: many of those people who were preaching the importance of basing your business off a community or membership were going back to one thing: services. Because when you do services right, you can make a lot of money. 

Today, Maggie, who has over 15 years of experience successfully selling client services, tells us the key to unlocking more income: selling strategy. 

Top Takeaways

• It’s important to understand what kind of business you want to run. 1-to-1 business is a lot different from a 1-to-many business. And they require different strategies.
• The key is in pricing. Don’t just price on gut feeling. Tether it to some reality (like how much money you need to make to pay yourself, and run the business), and then listen for feedback. The market will tell you if you’re priced correctly. 
• Too many solopreneurs give the strategy away for free in their proposal. They say exactly what they’re going to do. Instead, hold paid strategy sessions (sometimes called Discovery projects) where you get paid to truly understand the scope, and give the client something tangible. 

Show Notes

• Maggie Patterson
• Reverse Salary Calculator
• The Best Advice I Never Took

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Choosing the right platform can feel like an impossible task sometimes. There are so many options, from services to creating your own website and owning everything – how do you choose? Well, Nathalie Lussier and I have both been around the block. She owns a popular WordPress-based LMS called AccessAlly, and I’ve tried dozens of platforms for memberships, including ones I’ve built myself. 

So it was interesting timing when we both decided to start publishing on Substack in late November/early December. Today, we’re going to trade notes, going over why we decided to move there, what migration was like, and what we like and dislike about the platform. For members, we’ll discuss our timing to move within the context of a bigger controversy surrounding Substack. 

Top Takeaways

• Social Media for promoting and growing your work has been going downhill for a while now. But Substack has built in a number of features, like Notes and Recommendations, to incentivize sharing while also staying on the platform. 
• One of Substack's best features is its interoperability. You can easily import email lists, content, and even paying subscribers through Stripe. And moving is easy too. Everything you can import, you can also export. 
• The best way to leverage Substack’s network effect is to find your tribe – people who you can work with to restack, recommend, and follow on Notes. Just like any social network, don’t discount the “social” part. 

Show Notes

• The Momentum Memo
• AccessAlly
• How Knowing Your Customers Lets You Charge More with Nathalie Lussier

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One of my favorite Disney+ shows is Loki. It’s a truly fascinating look at time travel, predetermined events, and controlling your own destiny.

And now I’m going to give you a major (if not very simplified) spoiler, if you haven’t seen it.

In the finale, Loki masters the ability to “time slip,” or transport to any time, any place, in any timeline (for all intents and purposes, a timeline is a parallel universe). This also allows him to relive events over and over again.

So as all of existence faces eradication, he can take as much “time” as he wants to learn how to save everything and everyone, on every timeline.

He continuously, over thousands of years, learns everything he needs to learn, and practices, through trial and error, to improve his process, and his odds of saving everything and everyone.

And while we don’t have thousands of years, or the ability to time travel, we do have the ability to take a step back and consider the question, “What’s missing?”

Read the full article here

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It was Christmas Eve, and I was waiting in line for bagels.
As someone who grew up in New York now living close to Philly, I’m admittedly a snob about the quality of the bagels I eat. But there’s a bagel shop not 5 minutes from my house that makes the best bagels I’ve ever had outside of NY/NJ.
And they offer preorders for Christmas Eve. It’s become a bit of a tradition in our house to get those bagels and do a Christmas Eve brunch.
They also have a select stock for people on a first come first serve basis. People who preorder can buy from this stock. The many preorders combined with the select stock creates a long line. After-all, these bagels are superb.
So we waited.
And during that wait, there were some people who complained about the wait1.
But no one left the line or cancelled their order. After all, if all they wanted was bagels, they could have gone to the grocery store a few doors down and buy bagels immediately.
But those are not even good bagels. And we wanted great bagels.
See, there’s a dirty little secret that no one wants to hear these days:
Great things require time. And they’re worth the wait.

Read the full article here

In the PRO show, I explain how I plan for conferences, and how I measure direct ROI from events. Join here.

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I sweat bullets over finding the right tools. Some might say I am an Overthinker.

And that is an asset to me. But occasionally, it causes crippling analysis paralysis. I’ve spent every day of this very young year, thinking about the implementation for my membership, even though I know the simplest solution is to use Substack. And last week, I would have told you that’s the end of the story. But it’s not.

So today, I’m going to tell you about a journey that led me to Substack and grossly overcomplicating my publishing process. And why that could be a good thing.

For members, we discuss how I’m managing multiple publishing places, why “Be Everywhere” is so important to me, and my goals for this experiment.

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It was a wild year for social media in 2023. Twitter turned into X. Meta launched Threads. And LinkedIn started off the year as a promising platform for engagement and growth before tweaking the algorithm and tanking all of that. 

Matt Clark, founder of The Virtual Edge, host of the Rainmaker Show, and expert in sales argues that we shouldn’t treat LinkedIn like a social media platform because it’s not one. It’s a professional networking platform. 

That means we need to treat it more like a networking event if we want to make the most of it. And today, he’s going to tell us how.

In the subscribers-only show, Matt and I talk more about building a lifestyle before you build your business. We touch on how people like Alex Hormozi oversimplify how they do things in order to push how "easy" it is to build a business. We also talk about the difference life choices we've made, and how our businesses support that — and what you should consider as well!  

Top Takeaways

• LinkedIn wants you to be intentional. That means you need to know WHO you’re talking to, and HOW you help them. 
• Make sure your profile is optimized for your client. Do some research to figure out their biggest problem, and how you can fix it for them. 
• If you don’t know where to start, run a poll. This will re-engage your connections. Ask 3-4 questions that are targeted to your ideal client. Then for the people who DO engage, follow up and ask to get on a quick call.

Show Notes

• Matt Clark
• Matt on Linkedin
• Stop doing “Sales” and Start Having Conversations with Nikki Rausch
• Why You Need to be on LinkedIn if You’re a Creator with Kathleen Celmins
• How to be a Scrappy Researcher (to Actually Sell Products) with Becky Pierson Davidson
• Power vs. Force
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• Chris Lema

Sponsored by: Liquid Web

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The word 'Control' evokes various thoughts and emotions, many of which are negative. Control is often associated with an excessive desire to dominate or dictate every aspect of a situation.The bad guys in movies and in real life desire control at almost any cost. Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars said the only way to improve life in the galaxy was for him to seize control. Thanos said the only way to save the universe was to control the population by controlling the infinity stones.

Countless dictators and wannabe dictators have justified taking control because they’re the only ones who can save us.

It sounds micro-managy, almost authoritarian when you say, “I want to be more controlling.”

But Control at the right scale is super important. If you don’t control your car, bike, or other vehicle, for example, you will end up hurting yourself or someone else.

In thinking about my next yearly theme, a recent conversation I had with my therapist was top of mind. I told her that I didn’t feel like I was in control of anything. Not my health. Not my money. Not my time or schedule.That's why my 2024 Yearly Theme is *The Year of Control.*

For members, we discuss the themes I didn’t choose, how the membership will work in 2024, and the direction of the podcast in general. You can join here.

Links

• My 2024 Yearly Theme
• Favorites of 2023
• Cortex 2024 Yearly Themes

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