World’s No 1 LinkedIn Expert: How To Grow a Personal Brand FAST in 2026

If you're looking to blow up for a massive brand and this is something that people don't do enough if you do this in a very like specific and focused way instantly you're just getting like hundreds of thousands of followers wow algorithm as it is right now is really focused on likes views not that important that post drove between like eight to ten thousand followers wow just from one post that's josh sanders head of content for chris donnelly one of the fastest growing linkedin pages and personal brands in the world we've had some insane insane results we have some days genuinely where we do like 50 000 followers like one day that's insane in this episode josh reveals how he grew chris's pages to over 3 million followers on linkedin find the reason to why you want to post on linkedin always respond to your audience optimizing your profile page the easiest way to convert someone into a follower is how they converted that audience to a 10 million dollar a year education business and how you can too we were driving thousands of people simply by just having please subscribe to the newsletter that's crazy it sounds so obvious i'm not sure how many people know about it but you can and how they use newsletters to compound their growth and build trust the most powerful thing we found is that is so interesting it was generally at the point where we grew so quickly in newsletter subs that the founder of kit nathan barry was like he message or something like what are you guys doing i've never seen anything like this i've never seen organic growth like this this is an absolute content masterclass i really hope you enjoy it let's dive in josh thanks so much for doing this thanks for having me it's great to be here you have made almost 10 million dollars from linkedin in the last 18 months working with chris donnelly and you've grown his pages to over 3 million followers yes yeah i would like to make 10 million dollars a year from from linkedin i'd like to have three million followers so i'm sure there's loads of people in our audience who are watching this and listening to this who would like to do the same so if you're down for it i would love for you to talk us through step by step how we can replicate some of your success would you be up for that yeah absolutely i'm so down to get into this linkedin it's this incredible platform there's like a billion users yes and something crazy like only one percent of them are actually posting yes you're correct yeah if i'm looking at this platform and i'm looking at growing my business from it what would be like the first place to start is it the content is it some other place what what do you what do you say to people so the first thing that we say to everyone is find the reason to why you want to post on linkedin like the overall why basically because a lot of people will start with quite an unclear vision and they'll post for the sake of it and that basically just means that you're going to have of like confusion with your content down the line so if you have like a very very clear why and like a reason and a purpose for doing it that basically just means that you can reverse engineer it from that why and you can break down like your clear content pillars you can break down you know all the different types of formats that you want to do and all drive them towards that first why basically yeah and so i guess with chris what would that have been it was like he had a business or he just wanted to build his personal brand or what was what was kind of the thinking there so with chris it was quite an ambitious mission which is i think something that really attracted me he essentially just wanted to become like the most well-known business creator entrepreneur on the planet which is obviously a massive goal with you know homozy and cody sanchez and people like that but that was the mission and so we started off with linkedin when i joined he had about 180 000 followers at that time i think he had very little following on on the video platforms i think he had like five to maybe ten thousand on my tick tock he had an instagram but i think the positioning he didn't feel like quite comfortable with so we basically restarted that from scratch when i started working with him because he had the large audience on linkedin already that was a platform that we were like okay but the main focus on this it was also something that throughout his businesses he had like benefits from using like it attracted a large amount of the clients that came in to his first agency verb and so we we were just like okay this platform is really great there's way less competition on there already if we like really like go in all in on this it'll mean that we hopefully should benefit and and get some advantage that you wouldn't necessarily get on other platforms basically yeah because it feels like linkedin is probably the most slept on platform almost like the easiest to create on as well because it's kind of written posts and i know there are carousels and there's video on there but it still feels like anyone could get up linkedin and type whereas the barrier to entry on instagram youtube just feels a lot more intense it kind of feels like the easiest to create on and then to your point around the value there people are on there to do business yes they're they're on instagram tiktok youtube to probably be entertained yeah and relax and have a bit of fun whereas on linkedin you are literally there to do business or to waste some time when you're at work but it looks like you're working. Yes. And I remember Chris had one client, was it like Bugatti for his previous age for his agency business from LinkedIn, from a LinkedIn post. You've got those decision makers at all those companies there. It feels like the place where if you want to grow your business and win business, like that's the platform to go on. And perversely almost like the easiest one. So first of all, let's say I've set my goal is build my personal brand because I think good things happen when i do that opportunities come my way okay and then i guess for me it would be grow my podcast agency sure um and my content services business okay that that would probably be like my goal there okay you said something about content pillars and like yes starting to think about how what type of content i create yeah absolutely so okay so if the goal for you would be to grow your podcast agency i would think okay what sort of pillars can we break down into that and it's actually interesting so when we say content pillars the traditional approach is like three to five things that like relate to you or your business that you know are very specific very focused have a very targeted audience and we actually break it down in a different way we have what we call interest pillars which are topics that will relate into your business but have a much broader appeal for example with with you guys with the podcast stuff maybe it's something to do with i don't know like video in general or like the creator economy it's something a little bit broader yeah it's not necessarily directly linked in with you guys but it's something that can reach a much larger market yeah it's like general marketing brand marketing cool things brands are doing yes yeah exactly yeah marketing would be a good one as well like just a general marketing sort of strategy so you have the interest pillars which are those that are much broader and then you have the more expert pillars so these are things a little bit specific to you a lot more focused on like one or two key sort of icps you kind of want your content your personal brand to accompany for both of those types of pillars right yeah so we usually say you want to have like sort of like maybe five to seven uh and it also very much depends on your goal so if you're looking for very specific business growth over a short period of time i would say you're probably going to want to focus more on the expert pillars if you're looking to blow up and you know grow a massive brand and then attract attention that way i would say you probably want to focus more on the interest pillars right it's very dependent on what you want but we would usually say maybe like five to seven pillars some within the interest some within the expert and they should all align towards your business essentially even with interest pillars for example it will be things that even though they're much broader they can still kind of link into your business and you can still have some storytelling elements in there that relate to your business for chris did is that what you have as well yes yeah so for chris his goal was as i said to like become the most recognized entrepreneur in the world and so for him it was very much focused on the interest pillars at first so we had i think like four or five it was like leadership and business culture ai business and entrepreneurship growth personal development and the goal was to blow up in those those topic areas and to reach as many people as physically possible and then as we've kind of like grown throughout the last 18 months or so we've slightly changed we've slightly become a little bit more niche with things especially as it's launched uh the new business searchable we've actually pivoted our strategy um to go more into marketing to search to eo and geo that sort of thing so it's been a fun one a lot of people will think that their positioning at the start is like something that they have to have for the entirety of their personal brand yeah you can actually pivot pretty easily if you focus on we call it pre-validated content so this is content that performs well across multiple different creators it's like outlier content essentially you can find ideas within a specific industry that you're looking to go into you're looking to talk about it basically means you can slowly start to pivot your brand and you can change it based on the business goals that you have let's say i settled on my pillars which were kind of broader marketing greater economy entrepreneurship personal brand and then maybe the niche stuff would be uh maybe more like podcast industry specific maybe like case studies and things like that from from from clients i settle on them what do i do next okay so the next thing and it's quite an underrated thing in my opinion is optimizing your profile page okay so when we say that we basically mean turn your profile page on linkedin like a landing page for a website right so it needs to have a very like clear um and confident profile photo like professional headshot basically doesn't have to be anything like really high-end budget yeah as long as it's not like a selfie or a picture or anything like that yeah um and then you have a few sort of key areas within your profile where you can actually drive a lot of people to your business already right and towards the goal that you already have so you have the banner which sits just above your profile photo that's a really underrated place in my opinion a lot of people actually don't even have a banner or it would just be like some generic one with their logo in the bottom corner you can drive people towards a certain action so for us one of the key focuses is to get people on chris's newsletter and so we will have very like specific image um that is all within his brand colors and drives people it says you know i click the the newsletter link in the featured section for example and so when people come on his page straight away like the first thing they see obviously is his face and then right at the top with the banner it's like newsletter already like so they're on their page and they know that he's got a newsletter and he wants you to check it out so that's one of the first things and then after that you have the tagline which again is something that i think not enough people pay attention to because with a tagline when you're commenting on other people's posts on linkedin you can see the name and you can also see the tagline as well yeah so it's a great way to show what you're about what your goal is and who you help effectively and unfortunately there's not like a magic formula for the tagline very dependent on your goals which is why you know i said about setting that why in the first place you can have very like lead specific taglines which is like we help seven to eight bigger entrepreneurs uh build podcast empires for example i would say it's a little bit more specific yeah or you can have something that's a little bit more generic if you're looking for that like explosive personal brand growth you'd say like i talk about uh marketing the creator economy ai or whatever it may be yeah essentially just a space where people can come in and see what your profile is about what sort of content you're posting about already and who you're helping effectively so you have the profile the banner the tagline you also have the featured section too which is um again most people will just put up an old post that's done well here you can actually use this to drive more people towards your business your website or whatever it may be interesting and you can nicely like you can edit these so you can have it like very branded so if you have like a branded banner for example with your own colors and pointing towards a certain thing you do the same thing with the featured section so you can have like for us obviously it's it's the newsletter we have another call to action there as well as the creator accelerator link as well so driving people towards that page and it basically just means if people have seen your content they click on your profile they already know exactly what you're doing what your offer is you know what sort of content you post already really underrated way of showing what you're about basically yeah i always find this with clients and creators they start creating but they forget to actually think about what happens if i blow up yes so or even worse which is they start creating and they do blow up and then it's crickets to the business or the service or whatever, because they've actually forgot to set the infrastructure. So this, this kind of feels like the infrastructure and I'm looking at it and I'm loving it. It is so well optimized here. There's so much to it. So we'll definitely kind of have it up on screen as Josh is talking it through. But yeah, I guess if you do blow up, then someone comes to the page presumably, and they immediately see step-by-step newsletter delivers actionable advice on business and growth joined 400 000 people receiving weekly tips subscribe in my in my featured section you've even got a little image of where it looks really valuable and there's loads of stuff i can't actually see what it is but it looks valuable it looks like i should probably sign up for it and then it says founder follow for posts on business marketing and ai all pretty interesting topics i guess if i'm interested in those things it would appeal to me there's actually also a website link is that fairly new on on linkedin it says searchable waitlist yeah i could join yes that's quite interesting my new feature another spot within the profile as well so this is like the first thing that we teach people when they join the create accelerator is like you really want to optimize that in every capacity to drive people towards your offer yeah because if you had two people who had the same business you know person a and person b person a has maybe a profile photo no banner no information about their business at all and person b is like completely optimized and you see the exact same content and you click on their profiles instantly you're going to trust person b a lot more it seems far more legit and it's just inherently clear to where you actually need to go if you want to you know be a part of the business for example there's a lot of social proof on here as well and the use of the images is really good so again in the features section subscribe today join 250 000 people receiving my newsletter with actionable business advice and then apply to the creator accelerator which is your education product learn how i grew my linkedin from 30k to 1 million in 24 months so again there's like quite a nice yes a bit of value i'm presumably going to get if i click on that i am going to click on it um that's i'm already on the newsletter and i'd love to get into your funnel for the 10 million revenue education business so we'll get into that yes but i presume the next step from optimizing this is what starting to think about actually creating i mean you've got few more sections you can make use of the about section as well right this one again is not necessarily a magic formula people will tell you to do it in certain ways it's usually based off their own experience we find the best approach is just sharing more of your story in there it's actually sharing like what you've done and going a little bit deeper on who you actually are because i think that just makes the most sense for an about section and you can also drive people towards certain links whether it be your business or certain contact for example like an email to reach out to a commercial manager or you know anything specific like that yeah there's a lot of building trust here and getting your story so the short life story chris has got age 21 did this age 22 left uni and started verb brands age 27 acquired age 28 won bugatti as a client age 30 sold the business age 31 founded this other company raised 35 million so all of a sudden i'm educated on chris and i can see he sounds pretty legit and interesting in a way that most people on linkedin from their page i would have no idea what their backstory was and i would be unlikely to trust them but he sounds pretty legit and interesting sounds like he's making stuff happen and doing interesting stuff yeah yeah i mean i think it definitely helps that he he is genuinely a very impressive entrepreneur that's helpful yeah he's got a lot of credibility but yeah i mean it's so important to communicate that because a lot of where most entrepreneurs go wrong is they don't necessarily want to brag about it or talk about their achievements in a way and so the about section is just a really nice way to kind of do it in an authentic way where you're sharing a story you're sharing a few of your achievements and like you said you're just trying to build trust with people trying to get them to you know come on your page as a visitor someone that doesn't necessarily know you and instantly know what the offer is and who you actually are yeah that's really good actually the only thing he could improve here or you could improve is actually have a failure on there yes i think that would actually be that would be nice because then there would be uh again that element of depth i think that's always good a bit of transparency on a failure 100 quick one over 80 of the people who watch this channel are not subscribed so if you're getting value from these episodes please subscribe to the channel it helps me book bigger and better guests and create more value for you i'd really appreciate it so please subscribe so is my profile page done now once i've changed all those things yeah i think so yeah cool then do i start creating content so once you've optimized your profile i think the next stage actually is and this is something that people don't do enough in my opinion is focusing on your network and your relationships so before you even start creating content you can find out so much information that is actually going to inform your strategy moving forwards for example is that some lady came to me the other day and she was like oh i'm trying to find uh sort of key ideas within my area i want to like start building out this linkedin strategy i spoke about finding creators to take inspiration from one because you can see the kind of core topics that are resonating and two because they've built up very specific audiences as well which you can tap into yeah and so when i say like uh your network and your relationships with people i basically just mean becoming a little bit more vocal in comment sections um starting to spot patterns with things like what are the key things that people are actually talking about yeah and if you do this in a very like specific and focused way with your icp instantly you're just getting like flooded with data and information about your icp and you're understanding the exact types of content that they're trying to consume the stuff that they like the you know maybe the opinions that they disagree with what they do agree with and that just informs so much of your strategy i I honestly think you can make quite an impression on people just through commenting alone. Right. Yeah. I think people, they kind of like separate, like creating content with engagement, but I actually think they kind of like come together in a little bit. Yeah. You can become known within a specific space just through commenting and just through like leaving genuinely thoughtful and inspiring comments mainly because one now LinkedIn is flooded with AI comments. Yeah. And so naturally you're going to stand out to those comments. Yes. When we were slowly pivoting Chris's brand to talk more about search, we basically found the top search SEO creators, and we made sure that we were commenting with Chris's account, sharing really valuable information, getting involved in certain conversations, and this just made him a little bit more of a known voice around that community space, because LinkedIn is very community-driven. And so if someone who is consuming the same content, they're consuming SEO content all the time and they see chris's name uh in the comments are you know making a really interesting remark here or making a joke about seo here it shows that he really understands the community and instantly you're going to trust him straight away even though you haven't even you know maybe even seen his content already you just know that he's involved within the community and he kind of knows what he's talking about because he's leaving like genuine thoughtful comments basically so i presume there's a thing there around you're also stealing someone's reach there as well in a way or you know you're contributing but you're also they've done the hard work their post is is done well already and you're just making sure you you land and you're present in front of all of the people that follow them so how do you do that is there a system there because i'm familiar in the past with you know there's a group chat and we all comment on each other as soon as we post um i'm familiar also with like setting notifications on certain people so that when they post something i'm the first to comment and ironically george mack who's a great creator i notice he's one of the first people to comment on a lot of chris's posts so do you recommend the system there like yeah actually kind of make sure you do that or is it just like by chance that you log on and you just make you you comment on five things at a time or yeah you approach it you completely um systemize it so the easiest approach is just the notifications um if you block out all the other notifications like post uh you know like comments and likes on your own post and you just have the creator uh notifications you can use that another approach is like having all of my creators in like a sheet with the time that they're posting as well uh you can just go through and make sure that you're you know one of the first people to comment yeah what you were saying with kind of like stealing the reach of other creators we call it like piggybacking on their audience yeah and so you're right if you're nice and early on that and you leave like a genuinely strong comment yeah and you can make quite an impact um which is pretty good we also have like different types of comments that you can make as well so we have like the entertaining slash joke slash meme comment we have like the storytelling comment which is like i think actually really nicely supported by an image as well and you have like the cruncharian take which is like where you go against a common belief or you know the status quo essentially yeah there are multiple different approaches that you can take and i think doing all of them really cements you as a voice within the community that deeply just understands industry as a whole so yeah it's it's completely systemizable you can also do it with you know if you've got like a va for example i think that's another interesting piece that that people uh typically are usually against is you know having someone comment as you yeah it makes a lot of sense if you are a founder who has multiple different businesses or you're just someone that's really low on time yeah to train up a va uh to know exactly how you talk your exact opinions and essentially comment as you. People often get offended and they're like, oh, why is it not you? But like, if you think about it, you know, you think of Alex Ramos, you Steven Bartlett, like they're not in the comment sections themselves. They've got so many other things on. Yeah. They've got a social manager. Exactly. Exactly. And as long as the people who are doing the content for you, like know you inside out. Yeah. I think it's, it's very worthwhile for a lot of entrepreneurs. We do recommend commenting a lot as yourself first. I think that's a great way of really understanding the community yeah just getting very clear on your ICP and the types of content that they kind of consume we're very uh systemizable with Chris's brand whereas like he will do a certain thing for a certain period of time and then he will train people to do that thing over time and it's just like a whole system is there a set amount of comments you're doing each week or is it like a certain number of people that you always comment on their stuff like what's what would be recommended to me there yeah if I'm going to say to jonas i want you to do 10 a week or i want you to respond to everything someone these five posts is is what's the best so the first thing we say is is always respond to your audience that's like number one key thing yeah obviously on your own posts like it sounds so obvious but a lot of people will ignore it they'll post and then they'll just go off the platform yeah so we will always engage with the audience we'll try and provoke better conversation there and then when we're going with like other creators we are quite systemized with it within it where we you know will comment on certain people's um posts just because they're very involved within a certain community and so um yeah we will like make sure that we're around and we're active within that space but then i also think it's really important to comment on new creators as well we actually have a system um that we recommend within the creator accelerator which is 30 30 30 10 so 30 percent of your comments should go towards larger creators and the sole purpose of that is to piggy back from that audience more people to kind of take their views and get people to recognize you from that the second one is people within your industry so these key voices they may not necessarily be massive creators but they're people that have a really strong following yeah and a really strong audience who are directly related to the kind of audience that you're going after the third one is your icp okay so as i said if you're within that network you're within the comments you can really get a good understanding of who your icp is that's a great idea actually and yeah and if they're creating content and this might be a little bit tricky some people and well the high majority of people won't actually be creating content yeah and so you have to get quite creative on how you can start engaging with them one strategy might be they may not be creating content but their company is creating content yeah and you know a lot of companies internally like ah hey guys can you support the company page and so if you become pretty active on there you're kind of cementing yourself within that team already so they already know who you are from that which i think is a pretty good approach um colleagues as well might be an interesting approach so they may not be creating content but their colleagues might be creating content yeah and therefore you can kind of go on start engaging with that if they are someone within a similar division they will probably be talking about similar things and again you just become known um within your sort of icp audience there which is great and then the 10 is for traditional colleagues friends you know people that you want to get and support uh within the journey of posting content because it is difficult yeah it's great to get support from your friends yeah that makes sense so i've got my comment system down that sounds really good and that sounds easy and achievable then do i start looking looking at creating yes yes okay give us the gold here like how do we get to three million followers very quickly okay so if the goal is pure growth which is what our goal essentially was when i joined chris you have to think about okay what is the type of content that is going to drive as much follower growth as possible yeah so when i first joined chris he was very good at going viral he was very good at saying specific things that just resonated with a mass audience and so his posts were generating in the time like hundreds of thousands of likes which on linkedin was like unheard of at the end of the day yeah it's actually very hard to do that now but two years ago it was doable but it wasn't necessarily converting into followers because people would see it on the feed and they'd be like, oh yeah, like I relate to that. I'm going to like it, maybe drop a comment and then scroll on. So the goal when I joined was how can we increase the follower conversion significantly, how can we effectively become the fastest growing creator in the world, and to do that, you have to kind of like break down the psychology of someone using LinkedIn, uh, and why they would actually follow you in the first place, uh, and the majority of that is through educational depth, like high in-depth content basically so content that makes you go wow like this has taught me something significantly interesting this will benefit me and i think another key thing as well is making it super actionable if you can create something where someone can effectively do a certain thing and within minutes get a you know a little bit of a result from it instantly they're like wow okay this person has taught me this i've done this it's worked and now i want to like follow them i want to learn more about this sort of thing yeah if you understand why people will follow you on the first place then that's a pretty good starting point so how do we engineer our posts to drive those conversions to followers and people who take action is that like monitoring per post what drove the most follows i heard chris also talking about how you would look at different creators and every day at like 9 a.m he would in the morning just have a look at what their follower account was yes and he'd notice okay well this person here they're growing really fast this person here isn't growing so fast so what is it that they're doing yes is there some some tactics there that work absolutely absolutely yeah you definitely done your research so i love that when i first started we were um very manual with it because there wasn't any tools about that could actually do this sort of thing and so you're right we would literally track we had certain creators that we knew um would have a similar audience to chris and they were growing on linkedin and we're like okay you know which specific posts which specific topics are they talking about that people are like wow this is interesting enough to me for um to drop a follow another thing as as well is uh and this is specifically on linkedin is formats so the algorithm as it is right now is really focused on dwell time like a lot of social media platforms and carousels and cheat sheets things that go really deep on a certain subject is the thing that makes people stop you know spend time actually like try and figure out and learn about like what you're trying to tell them and that that dwell time is like a good signal to the algorithm and therefore it pushes out to more people as well so i think the reason that we grew so quickly one was because we were tracking you know the best creators what sort of topics within chris chris's content pillars that would grow his account that was the first thing and the second thing was we were the fastest to adapt formats so there's multiple examples here where we would like and this would come just specifically from spending time on linkedin we would find uh we would try and find outliers from creators who would have you know smaller accounts or small smaller followings and they would share something in a certain format that has like disproportionate growth in comparison to something else and so one of the first things when i joined him was carousels carousels like kind of just come out at the time and there were things that were driving like massive massive follower growth so we were like okay we'll go from these like single images that he was doing already and we'll start going into carousels that was the first thing it's really random but there was um a time where linkedin uh just created like a link shortener and so people who were using this like link shortener or who were sharing links within their posts were going like insanely insanely viral um and this i think was fascinating because a lot of people were quite slow to jump on it yeah because a lot of the linkedin gurus were saying like um oh you shouldn't have links in your post you shouldn't be going taking people off platform and so a lot of people were quite apprehensive when it came out whereas we were like straight on it we were like okay we've seen it have disproportionate growth for a smaller creator how can we jump on this how can we maximize and capitalize on this and so we did um it's funny i think chris spotted it whilst he was at like a care show for lottie like send me the post and he's like hey let's jump on this straight away you know let's blend in with our own content uh and we did so and that post i think drove like something between like eight to ten thousand followers wow just from one post wow and it was like quite a simple post it's quite a broad post i think it was like um like seven ted talks in seven days or something like that but because it was using this new format that linkedin were like kind of pushing at the time to get people to use it a little bit more it drove like significant outcomes one of the main things uh within our approach because we were so focused on that follower growth was if we see something working we're going to double down on it and go very very hard on it and so for that week instead of being like oh you know maybe we should do an image post here we were like nope we know this works we're going to double down on it pretty much every single post is going to have links we're going to obviously change the topics up so it doesn't get really like repeated and boring um but we're going to use the same format and this drove like significant significant growth so when i joined he was 108 000 um we set a goal of like 250 000 by the end of the year which was three months um and i remember seeing that goal and being like wow that is ambitious yeah that's going to be difficult but because we found these these small little format changes we managed to go from 108 000 to 350 000 within three months that's crazy that's insane it was quite mental to the point where it like surprised both of us we you know we were very much um consuming like we were very much on the platform for for a lot of time um but when we were doing it and we were seeing the days like we'd have some days genuinely but we'd do like 15 000 followers in like one day wow which like on linkedin was completely unheard of yeah it just kind of like skyrocketed uh chris's account and i remember those targets it was like 250 000 by the end of the year 500 000 by um the year after and then 750 000 by like 18 months within six months we were at 750 000 which was absolutely crazy yeah it was mind-blowing by that point we uh decided that hey like we're pretty good at this um you know maybe we can start like coaching people and that was when the whole education business idea came up one of the things i love about this podcast is all the actionable frameworks and strategies that my guests give me so if you want a copy of everything josh has talked about so that you can implement it for yourself and your business then you can get a copy at the link in the description i really hope you enjoy it and i'm sure you will get value from it yeah so in in all of those posts and i guess in in my posts if i'm creating are there call to actions in those posts that are driving those followers or are people just really enjoying the content the carousel the image the the the written text and going yeah i'm going to follow for more yeah or do you actually encourage people with a clear cta to subscribe and follow for more yes yeah it sounds really obvious but like the easiest way to convert someone into a follower is simply reminding them to follow your account it's hilarious like people will see it on you know big creators accounts like oh they're always asking for a follow and all that but it's just a simple reminder because you know you may be reaching like different audiences and if they come on your post they read it they get value from it and it's like oh you know follow me and click on your name you can obviously tag yourself on click your name they go on your account and they can follow you and it's just so easy for them it makes it like super frictionless and it's just an obvious way of um asking people to follow yeah i think that's like one of the main ways but i think the format how you represent the information and we actually have like a system for how to effectively write the the perfect post that's going to convert followers as well yeah following that system is important as well okay so let's get into that system but i'm just looking at a couple of posts and i can see how you lot guys have mastered it because it seemed when you see these posts it's so obvious it's so well optimized yeah what does the perfect post look like the first thing is having an idea that is revalidated as i mentioned so something that has worked well before either for a smaller creator and it's performed disproportionately either for yourself previously as well like repurposing that idea or for a big creator and even for the big creator it's like kind of an outlier within their current posts and so it's understanding within your industry within you know an area which your business is focused in which pieces of content which ideas which topics are going to drive the most followers that's the first part like starting within the ideation stage something that a lot of people often miss they will like try and really focus it on them and their business and i guess create for themselves like almost like strict their ego a little bit and like make it very personalized yeah whereas we're constantly like it should be focused on your audience you should be providing education and value to your audience making sure it's actionable and so forth so that's the first stage like the idea the second part is then how can we show that idea in a way that is super actionable and people can share it with loads of other people so we will typically start with like the image or you know the carousel for example and we make sure that we have topics that have certain breakdowns or frameworks that are actionable so an example might be a productivity cheat sheet and it has different frameworks like the two minute rule or pomodoro method pomodoro eisenhower matrix exactly and so it's having those sort of frameworks where people can use them and apply them and get value from them straight away and it's visualizing that information so it stands out on the feed again that's another underrated thing people will not invest in the design and not invest in how they represent the information as well it's just such an easy way to stand out if you have beautifully designed cheat sheets or carousels it's just so much easier for people to like stop when they're scrolling yeah there's one here master problem solving use these seven mental models to make better decisions and then there's seven and they've all laid out beautifully with graphics is chris coming up with this or like you're finding you just said you're you're fine looking at smaller creators looking at what's outperformed for them what does that process look like for coming up with these topics is it all based on okay we want to talk about entrepreneurship business marketing and ai so let's have a look for posts that are doing well there and then we take those ideas and then make our own version of it yes completely completely yeah so chris specifically at the start was like so involved with like ideation and like finding these certain posts that he thought that he could add more either information on for his own experience and effectively improve that type of content as well um that's another thing i would say if you're taking like a pre-validated idea it's looking at that idea seeing why it's done well and then going okay how can i make this even better like if this is the starting point how can i make it so good that like there is no reason why people wouldn't follow me for this type of content yes um and so yeah he was very involved in the ideation process we worked together so so closely um creating this content for literally like 18 months and to the point where like i i'm like basically in his head when it comes to content like i can see the exact things that he likes the exact topics that he likes talking about and how do i find my pre-validated ideas because then do i am i literally looking at other people's pages and scrolling through and yes like looking at the top people in my niche or people in my niche i find interesting and just scrolling through and going okay this one got 500 likes versus this one only got 10 so there must be something here and i add that one to my list of ideas yes yeah exactly so So we have what we call a creator inspiration bank where we have like basically across all of your pillars, your content pillars, you have just a list of creators who are like growing within that niche. Right. And it doesn't necessarily mean they have to be growing as in like a follower growth. It could be they're getting like a lot of engagement. You can see that they've got a nice community there and just having like a super tight list of people for each content pillar. That's like a really easy way to get inspiration quickly. actually like custom create a feed on linkedin as well um it's like an old school tactic that i'm not sure how many people know about it but you can basically if you go on the search i'm going to try and do this off my head um you go on the search you click enter there's like the post settings you can then in the post settings uh like type a certain creator uh-huh you can there like posts will come up in a select feed and you can do that for multiple creators so if you have this creator inspiration bank you can have you know maybe like 10 people um you put all their names in and you have like a legit feed from just those 10 creators and then you just bookmark that feed and it refreshes each time so you can come back to it time and time again nice and it's just a super easy way where you can just get like inspiration um you know from the creators that you want to take inspiration from basically would that be like at the start of the month or the start of the week that i'm running that process yeah so we we recommend you do it within like the early phases so you've got your profile optimized you've then you know become a little bit more of a voice within the community space then the next stage is okay trying to find these people who are producing really high value content trying to get those ideas and those topics in and you should have it to the point where you're consuming that type of content so much that you and you're talking to the icp within the comments section that you have a very good idea even off the top of your head of what sort of ideas will resonate with the audience that you're trying to attract and once you have that in place that's when you can start thinking okay i know this topic is is really important i know a lot of people are talking about it how can i create a beautiful cheat sheet or a carousel that communicates genuine value that hits that topic area interesting interesting so what would be a good example of that for you guys for chris specifically i think this is really interesting because we had already built like an audience that was focused on business building ai leadership and culture i think the pivot into search was was fascinating for us um and so we essentially took that strategy as like starting from from fresh again that whole pivot and so we got deeply involved within the seo community we We found the top SEO creators who had posts that were performing disproportionately, that were growing, that had a really tightly engaged audience on them. And we just essentially saw the posts that they were creating, applied extra information, extra resources, Chris's own knowledge about building this business as well. And we would aim to improve within those certain topic areas and release content that was within a similar format. So a good example would be old SEO versus new SEO. that format is something that works across like multiple different niches as well it's so obvious but like just a clear comparison of like this is what it used to be like this is what it is now because i think people will see that and it's like oh they feel updated it positions you as someone that's on the verge of like the technology of understanding what's happening within the industry and we would essentially present that information like old seo versus new seo and sort of build that community around the seo um space that is so interesting i mean it's so true what you say as well because i'm already i feel like i'm going through this process with you now just by looking at chris's page looking at someone who's obviously successful on linkedin in a not too dissimilar niche i can see he's going a much much broader with the topics he's doing but just looking at the formats i mean so much it's the same with all content right it's just the people who are prepared to go further and deeper are the ones who win like the person who does the surface level gets up linkedin does the surface level post and presses send they get a certain outcome whereas the person who goes away and spends like three hours making the cheat sheet yes gets a certain type of outcome and we had caleb who um built the personal brand of alex and leila hormosi on the other week and you know on youtube is where they're focusing but they create created this six hour video has done like 600,000 views. It's driven 20,000 leads to their business, but they were just prepared using the whole Mosey method of where everyone else would stop. That's where we're going to start. Yes. Yeah. But I love the formats here. Cause there's a format here, which is free report, Q3, 25, 25 algorithm report. Yes. Then there's the kind of cheat sheets. Then there's the comparisons, like OKRs, these KPIs. What are the other formats that you really like? There's like the AI image-driven carousel. What are the other formats that do well here? And what are some of the tactics there? Because in some of these, you're saying repost this. Some of these, you're saying comment this. There's so much to cover. Yeah, as Caleb says, it really is about how deep you go. And we make that so clear within our accelerator. it's like this will be the hardest 10 weeks like this is not easy you know like you're against people who have content teams people who really want to do this strategically and therefore you have to go so deep and treat it like a science in terms of formats you have the classic formats i call them the classic formats like cheat sheets carousels image based posts text posts you then have micro formats within each format so a classic one is the comparison old versus new you can have that on a cheat sheet and a carousel so you can like split it down the middle another one might be one particular thing versus another particular thing versus another particular thing just showing like the contrast between each points we've done that with like llms for example like chat gpt versus claude that's a gemini that's another micro format one that we're seeing particularly do well recently and this is like from the q3 algorithm report is these story telling carousels which is something we haven't necessarily seen before so a really great example of this is someone uh sahil bloom yeah he did some really nice like storytelling carousels where they're not necessarily driven on like educational depth they're just essentially they're educating you in a way that's wrapped around a story so it might be like the empty boat mindset or the surfers mindset yeah so like a concept that you can explain through a story and takes people on a journey that's something that's performing pretty well at the minute but yeah there are so many different areas within each format that you can kind of like tweak and optimize in regards to the different call to actions this is based on goals another format that is particularly working very well on linkedin right now is these lead magnet posts which is super obvious you know you provide an insane amount of value to people they're going to want it and they're therefore going to want to be more involved within whatever your brand is with those posts the the sheer goal is to get people subscribe to whatever it is you're trying to attract them to so it might be a newsletter it might be a specific segment that you're attracting to so you can you know put them in an email sequence where you can encourage them to do a certain thing like buy a course or whatever it may be and so within these lead magnet posts there's a very specific call to action a very specific we call it like a viral mechanic which is you know comment x and i will give you y basically yes um it's super straightforward but it works because people will then comment that you can then reply and there are multiple different approaches you can do it as well you can either reply with a link to the landing page and you know they can go straight through that way you can also say i'll send you a dm as well but because they're commenting that and you're replying it it just means that you're getting like a lot of comments a lot of engagement on your post which means the post is going to do better in general uh and then it's going to reach more people and then you get more people downloading and more newsletter subscribers as well is that also one of the unique things around linkedin where if someone in my network comments on something quite often i get sharing that i don't think that happens on other platforms yeah that was something that was very prominent um over the last like two years or like 18 months it's not as effective as it once was yeah but yeah it used to be the case that like if you can drive comments and conversations it will get shown in people's feeds so another like quick uh tactic as well is like trying to encourage conversation within your comments so we always have like an engagement question something that allows people to talk about themselves um because people do want to talk about themselves they want to share their story they want to share you know what they've been through and so if you can have like a specific question that people are like oh yeah like i'm going to comment on this and share you know what's happened with me um and then you can provoke that even more by replying and asking another question oh this is really interesting what happened here or you know did you get the results that you wanted blah blah and then you're starting these conversations within your posts and you're getting all of these comments and engagement towards your post and it's naturally going to promote it in comparison to other posts so what would be a good example of that like on this post eight strategy frameworks for fortune fortune 500 companies would i do it on that type of post yes if you scroll down you should see an engagement question on there oh yeah which framework can you see yourself implementing today drop a comment interesting yeah so there there's quite a few ctas there's a comment and then there is a cta to the newsletter and then there's a repost as well yes yeah so there's like multiple ctas which i would have thought would have like be uh something not to do yeah but that seems to work for you yeah yeah yeah we yeah we'll try and keep like a specific focus so for example if one post we're like okay the goal here is to uh show a certain topic we want to drive people towards the newsletter we're going to expand on that topic within the newsletter we usually have the um newsletter is like the main call to action that comes a little bit further up the post um we will always have the engagement question we will always have the repost and follow um call to action just because like it's just so simple but it helps with the growth of the post itself yeah for the most part we will be driving people towards the newsletter as a main one unless it's something that's like a little bit lighter touch you know something that we want to go maybe like more like broader and viral with but not necessarily like really depth and educational then we'll just have like a repost and a follow call to action but for the most part it will be be driven towards the newsletter very cool so i really want to get into the funnel and then the business behind this but is there anything else on the content that is really worth knowing or avoiding yeah yeah there's yeah i just realized as well i said we have the system i took but i spoke about two things and forgot the rest so i will just break down quite quickly um what people can do so once you have the idea you have the cheat sheet you've created this beautiful thing that stops people on the scroll you then want a really strong hook now hooks are an interesting one on linkedin our general rule is you should be able to like cover your content and people should know exactly just from the first two lines uh what your content is going to be about and so there is character limits as well and by character limits i mean when you write the hook on linkedin it has to see more and most people forget about that yeah they'll like write a hook and then it just come off and cut off and that can cause a little bit of friction people are not really interested scroll on and so we try and keep it within the character limit which i think is something like 65 and 40 i think for like one and line two that's the first thing with the hooks itself we have tested multiple different variants we've found that the line paragraph break line is the most effective so some people will do for example line and then two paragraph breaks or some people do three lines but we've just had the line paragraph break line is the most effective there are multiple different variants of hooks that you can use you can use a stat based hook there is like a contrarian hook there is like an open promise hook we've found the ones that have been the most effective are those that have numbers in them as well because that serves as a bit of a pattern interrupt so you know there are so many posts that have text on them even just a simple number and we find the more interesting and bizarre number as well the more effective it can be i've studied over 318 842 linkedin posts that sounds like a weird amount of posts yeah yeah i mean that genuinely that was the data set but um yeah a lot of people would go oh no let's just have like 300 000 plus that looks interesting though yeah having all the different numbers yeah exactly just makes it feel more authentic um and it just stops you and that's the whole goal of the hook you just want to stop people from scrolling for most posts and this will depend because you'll have you know different posts serving different purposes but we will usually start with the hook we will then have an expansion of the hook which aims to get into the emotions of your icp and people consuming the content so it's kind of like the before stage of what this cheat sheet is going to be about to say for example you got a cheat sheet on productivity or habits productivity habits for example you have the hook which you know will be something that will stop the scroll you will then have an expansion of that of like that basically talks about the problems and frustrations of people if they're not feeling productive or like you know maybe it's like talking about like procrastinating and like the effects of that which is a very short segment where you're kind of expanding out the goal here is to get people to relate to it in the moment so it's like okay i've seen this oh yeah i've had this exact emotion you then go into the bulk of the post which is effectively a summarized version of your image or carousel got it the reason we do this is essentially to strengthen the sort of core education and message that we're we're delivering you know people are different learners as well you have visual learners that will just check the sheet you have those that just read the text and so we want to make sure that the messaging positioning is clear on those yeah you then have the like dream destination after that so once you've applied this advice these are the good things that will happen to you and then we go into the call to action very nice and that's kind of like the kind of perfect post so to speak another thing to mention as well that it has to be optimized for a scan so we will do short sentences we will do we'll write in lines of one two and three we'll never do paragraph blocks we want to make it so easy for people to read the content we don't want to see a massive paragraph i can't be bothered to read this and then scroll on yeah so we'll make sure that there's lots of white space it's super easy on the eye and it should feel like you're like reading it internally in your head and it's super easy to just kind of understand and um learn from basically wow i bet you've got in the accelerator you've got like a little map of this outright haven't you whereas yeah like hook expand make them feel heard yes or seen then explain the value of what you're about to to give them and then the call to action because that would be insanely valuable yes we go insanely deep on it we have like really long modules where we break down all of the science and that's for one particular post as well yeah there are multiple different posts that have different approaches that drive towards a certain outcome as well so yeah this is literally a science at this point like cool well we'll put a breakdown of some of those strategies and frameworks in in our newsletter and and so people can get a copy of that in at the link in the description did you know that the highest converting call to action in podcasts is the share call to action it actually beats a lot of the other organic growth tactics that you can deploy literally just getting people in your audience to take out whatsapp and send an episode to someone who could get value from it so that's exactly what i'm going to do now i'm going to ask you to take out your phone and if you're getting value from this episode and you think it could help someone that you know please send it to them or share it with your team or pop it in your team slack channel would really appreciate it and thanks if you send it to someone the same on all these platforms is that like these posts and content is not left to chance there's a formula and there's a system and a process yes and when you look at all the ones that have done well they tend to always follow a certain type of system or process and then it's like software you can go in and switch up some of the things over time and see how it changes the performance but yeah it's so so interesting to hear you talk for it you've obviously uh studied this and been in it for quite a long time so it's it's super valuable anything else on the perfect post and content that people should be thinking about with hooks as well it's just like a very specific tip for hooks but you want to have things that roll off the tongue easily because you have to remember that when someone's reading your post they're reading it in their head so they've got this internal voice going on and if you say something that's quite difficult to read in your head then naturally it creates that friction with people so we will always try and it sounds really bizarre but we will think about okay we've got all these different types of like variations of hooks that we'll try what is the easiest to say out loud and we'll just like genuinely just go through and read them out loud and be like oh this is this felt quite nice roll off the tongue easily and so that's like a very small little tweak that you can make oh yeah there's so much to talk about within like the the content and the perfect post like that's one part of the strategy there's a whole like pyramid whole funnel um as well but that might take ages is that so is that because we basically have some posts which are kind of broader yeah and some posts that are kind of more geared towards convert conversion yes again this is where most people go wrong they will think about posting one kind of format and it's usually storytelling and they will just post that repeatedly and repeatedly to try and get them associated with a certain topic but really i think a much better approach is having like a classic marketing funnel so you have the top of funnel the goal is to get you know broad reach attention as many people coming onto your profile as possible you then have the middle of the funnel this is the the time where you build trust so it's the storytelling it's showing behind the scenes you're going a little bit deeper here and then you have the bottom of funnel as well which is like conversion this is like driving people towards a specific action so this will be the case studies the testimonials um you know clear transformational things that people will want to achieve themselves and therefore want to work with you based on that so we really treat the socials as a whole marketing funnel and there are also different areas that you can like tune in on as a part of the funnel as well so for example we have the newsletter which is a key area for us to build trust because on socials you can only write a certain amount of characters the newsletter is a perfect space to you know really go deep on topics and really like over deliver for people and so we have like the goal for for chris obviously is majority growth so we have a lot of top of funnel and then we will aim to bring people towards the newsletter and if they sign up for the newsletter then they're going to get really in-depth insight on ai on search on his kind of core pillars and that's what we use to build trust with people a lot of people will see like socials as like a one-dimensional thing whereas like there are so many different parts that you can use to kind of like take people through that journey from discovering you to buying your product that's super interesting just in terms of tracking performance on the content what do you track are there one or two metrics that are really important to be looking at yes so and you do it per post versus general platform yeah yeah yeah we're yeah super specific with it the first and most important metric is the repost the reason being is you want to distribute your content to as many different micro communities on linkedin as possible so that really should inform your whole top of funnel strategy it's how can i make someone who consumes my content look good by sharing a piece of content yeah because we'll have those people you know within you know colleagues or whatever that will share something oh this is like so useful for me like thanks so much and that makes them look good and so it's So it's thinking about how do we create content that is super shareable and makes them look good for sharing. And usually that's things that are, you know, beautifully designed. It's things that are less personal because that's where a lot of people go wrong. They go super personal with things and it's like other people can't share that. Sure. They can't put that in a Slack channel. Exactly. Exactly. Someone's just had a baby on this simply put in the Slack channel, whereas like the report on your industry and you share that in the Slack channel of your company. Yep. like oh he's always ahead of the game exactly that's so true and like you have to think of it like that and for pretty much every piece of content we will think okay like what will make them look good for sharing this and so the repost metric for us is super important we will usually try and monitor it like previously i think we had posts that within the first hour were hitting like a 20 repost rate we were like okay this is going to bang this is going to do very well yeah primarily because you're just getting distributed to all these different communities you know it's driving more attention to your post the second and third most important metrics which are more of a recent thing on linkedin and we've actually discovered it more through this this algorithm report is the saves and sends as well so i think this has been a feature from linkedin for quite some time but it's only recently that you can actually track those now and so again it's it's how can we get someone to save something okay we must go super in depth on something so they save it and they're like okay i want to learn about this later and how can we make it so they want to send it to other people which is kind of the same kind of approach for the reposts it's like how can we make it so they look good sending it to someone basically so they're the key kind of metrics to focus on honestly likes views in our eyes not that important unless we're you know trying to get as much attention on a certain post like a partnership post for example we're not necessarily too focused on those i think if you focus on the repost you focus on the saves and the shares they kind of come into play anyway you will generally generate more views yeah if you're being shared by multiple different people that is so smart yes it's never been our main focus they're kind of depth metrics as well aren't they like that's that's where you know something's actually hit yeah i mean i can see you know chris has just posted about having a baby it's got a lot of likes which is great but in terms of like the depth there in terms of actually someone being able to take some action learn something build trust yeah share it in a slack channel um it's probably uh probably not not there what about the newsletter signups or anything like that do you do you track that per post or yeah yeah so we have like custom links that um we track with those they were incredibly effective a year ago right it was one of our like primary drivers towards a newsletter like we started the newsletter when um i more or less just started working there from scratch and at the time because linkedin wasn't seen as this like distribution channel we were driving thousands of people simply by just having please subscribe to the newsletter in the call to action wow and it was generally at the point where we grew so quickly and in newsletter subs that the founder of kit nathan barry was like he messaged us and was like what are you guys doing yeah because like i've never seen anything like this i've never seen organic growth like this and so it was incredibly effective now it's not as effective i think as more people have clocked on and started doing it themselves it's it's you know it's kind of oversaturated but it can still work i think if you use like the right approach like i think the goal that we have is like okay we're going super deep on a topic on the newsletter how can we create social posts that lead nicely into that and if it has a natural lead in it usually they get some good growth from it and the obvious one is lead magnet posts like they will drastically increase the subs that you get to your newsletter that's really interesting because how many have you got on the on the newsletter like 250 000 it might be closer to 300 000 but yeah it fluctuates nathan's a client of ours actually as well so it's always it's always interesting i uh we should ask him who's growing fastest at the moment actually that would be interesting yeah yeah for sure i think like the main driver for our newsletter growth now is the creator network yes which i think is like just a genius genius model yeah because when you go to sign up to yours it then recommends rameet uh sahil um eric partake or a few others i think right yes yeah you're right yeah which which there's some really nice yeah tie in there and overlap between all of you so that's that's that's active i saw a tweet from someone and they were basically just like my newsletter's grown by 2000 subscribers i have no idea why it was like i didn't you know no none of my content went viral or anything like that but they were just in a creator network with someone who went insanely viral and just drove all that attention to them which is just like fascinating because if you have creators who are primarily focused on growing their newsletter you know maybe they're spending money on ads to drive people in everyone benefits from that like compound effect yeah it's just like such a hack for like getting fast newsletter growth within a specific audience that feels like a nice place to move into the funnel and the the product on the back end how did that come to be and and what's what does that look like we had the idea of the creator accelerator business um primarily because obviously we had all this growth and chris was doing a lot of consulting on the side so he was generally just doing like one-to-one calls with people they were booking in and he would always just be like completely at capacity he's like paid calls as well right yeah so yeah it's like was it on his newsletter on the newsletter or something it's like book a slot with me or yeah on the linkedin page yeah it was super simple 500 or yeah some pounds or something yeah that was it we put it on and like we were unaware of like at the start how many people were really interested in it and so we were like i will start i know it was like 800 or something was his first one and then it was just like bang sold out straight away and at this point he was traveling and he was away so he was like oh my gosh okay um he did all those calls and then realized okay we need to you know actually bring price to a point where it reflects demand yeah and so we like increased increased increased it i think at one point he was doing like 1500 or like 2000 for a call which is mental really like doing a few a week or like opening a few slots a week yeah yeah so i think he has probably like 15 to 20 slots a week wow um and it was great for him because him and lou were traveling it's like the first time that he had a break um from from building businesses and then he was like okay that's not bad is it 15 20 grand a week yeah just from doing calls yeah yeah and he's just like in the beat on a beach like somewhere in the bahamas you know chilling um and so the idea came from that and he was like you know can we like scale this and do this with groups and at that point when i first joined he was like i have a habit of making people entrepreneurs which i like laughed at the time but all throughout this journey he's been like oh do you want to do this business do you want to do that and then he mentioned this and he was like we can you know create this like group educational product where people will go through an experience at the end they should have their linkedin their personal brand like significantly different driving real attention towards their business and so we did that and i think at this time he was on around like 800 000 followers and so he was like let's find someone to replace you on the content side of things and let's like try and build this business together we launched very quickly um i think we had the idea and within the space of like two months we were we were live with the the product we had no idea initially of how many people would join we had i think i think we were gonna cap it at 50 and then then we like accidentally left like the the page still on and we got to like 69 people who had purchased we had experienced you know like people getting results from one-to-one coaching but we i think drastically underestimated the impact of a group of people all towards like all focused on the same thing and like helping each other within that space and so we created this product based on like a lot of research we found all of the you know products within the space and we were like can we improve this how can we make this better we wanted to basically create the best product on the market for us we were like okay we can drive a lot of attention um towards accelerator just for organic just through chris's account because he was getting so much attention people were interested they wanted to book calls in and so that first one that really wasn't much of a funnel it was literally just organic growth and trust in chris that would work yeah um and we realized pretty early on if we can get the best proof the best results for people It should be much easier to sell this kind of self in a way. And so we led all of our time and resources into this first program. It was literally just me and him. Yeah. At this point, we had people helping set up the actual community space itself. But it was just me and him coaching, being really active within the community. So is this, is this like a, it's like a cohort, it's like eight weeks or 10 weeks? 10 weeks. Yeah. 10 weeks. So is there a call each week? Yeah. So we had three calls a week. So the way we work, we're like, okay, we want material to break down all the knowledge that we have. That was primarily my goal. My goal was like to help like build this product whilst he was doing sales and marketing for it. Um, and so at the time, this is when like AI wasn't great with writing either. And so it was literally, I was just writing down everything from my head into these like 10 modules. It took ages, man. It took like, it was like a 30 to 40 page document just from like typing. wow and so we were like okay this is the launch date we need to get 10 modules for the first one it was just like so scrappy and we were just like i think i'd finished up to module four when we started so i had like up until those weeks to create the further six modules which was just a mad rush um but we got it done and it was probably the hardest i think we well i mean for me personally the hardest i've ever worked in my life yeah but it just meant that yeah we had this product we would have three calls a week one would be like an overview of the module so go over the key points you should focus on the second one was a roast my post which was done with me where people would put their links in and i would just like tweak and be like you can do this you can do this you can do this uh we would then have a q a where people could ask any burning question they wanted and we like incentivized things for prizes and things like that as well that's cool yeah basically just meant that people really grew quickly like we we knew that the the method worked we just were unaware of how well it would work in a group environment and we had people genuinely in 10 weeks go from like 20 000 to 100 000 which is just like yeah just like we effectively created like the fastest growing creators um all within different niche spaces and it was just brilliant because then we were like as we were doing this we were like documenting a few things because the results were so good we went straight into the second one i think we were on like week seven of the first one and then we went straight into the second one wow yeah we were marketing it within like week three or week four of the first one and we went straight in and i think the second one was like 99 people again this was primarily driven through organic traffic so linkedin and newsletter um we weren't even we even did any paid ads or anything like that the ad side of things and the funnel side of things came much later it's been more of a recent thing what are the price points for these cohorts it was five thousand four four payments and then 4,500 for one payment now it's 6,500 over four payments no over three payments and i think 5,000 or 5,500 for one payment yeah and so very high ticket um you know it's a lot a lot of money but we have put so much time and effort was the first cohort that much or was it a bit less i think it a bit less so yeah i think it was 4 500 single and then 5 000 something for over four yeah we kind of were just blown away with with the demand like we wanted to create the best products on the market we wanted the best proof the best evidence we wanted to create it so we could just share the people who had the growth yeah just tag their account and people just go and see yeah yeah it's just like that's that's the beauty of it right yeah it's just the same way to grow any business yeah it's case studies so interesting as well how simple that that is did did you do anything in terms of is it is it in like circle or one of those type online where you can post in the week as well yes would you give feedback on those posts or it's just on the calls or yeah yeah yeah so we had um a few channels we were very much like in the early stages like feedback driven so we were like you know we have these ideas what would be the most beneficial channel to you and it basically turned out to be key channels like we have module spaces where you would learn because each module have like a lesson as well or a template or something or it has a homework homework yeah homework yeah so we wanted to make it actionable so we have a module and then we would have an assignment we would have a place where you could post your assignment and we would encourage people to comment on and to you know start conversations around that which just meant that you went from having you know yourself on the strategy to now having loads of people just like yeah oh i've seen this person do this or i've done that it's also easier for them to learn when they see other people's stuff and it's easier to create to critique someone else than to create to critique your own stuff exactly exactly and me and chris were in these channels like daily providing like advice and like what we would do we then had like a post feedback channel where people would post in and we would give like specific feedback we made it clear that you know it would take a little bit of time to get that that feedback it wasn't going to be like completely straight away yeah but we were like if you put something in that channel and it's due to go out in three days we'll give you advice you can tweak it and then you can ship out to that channel we had a wins channel as well which was my favorite channel because it was just a great place for people to share their progress share you know really exciting things like we've had some insane insane results that like still blows my mind and then we have a few other channels like tools and resources and like templates and things like that but we wanted to create maybe like five or six core spaces where people could have conversations where people could find information really easily yeah that was kind of like the core offer of our product basically how many years have you had that live now 18 months started in july of last year are there any key lessons like if someone's listening to this and they are thinking okay yeah i've got an audience or i'm gonna grow own audience around my expertise and i think i could probably create a product that sells itself and is delivered in a cohort style environment what would be kind of your key recommendations to them is an interesting one because i think we were in a very rare situation with chris he is insanely credible already he'd already exited a business for 25 million dollars like he already had this proof that he was an incredible entrepreneur so naturally we had a of trust within inbuilt already which meant that even though we were optimized for growth we still had a lot of people that were like i still you know trust what he says he also made a very good impact on video as well like very charismatic in events and things like that yeah and so we had like a kind of perfect situation there if i was someone watching and i was like okay i'm trying to build an audience and then drive them towards a certain product whether it be a cohort or a you know digital product for example i would focus a lot more on funnels i would focus on developing a relationship over time you want to go really deep on educational content to show that you're an expert within that sort of area you want to share your journey and your experience within that content as well and then you want multiple different touch points so you know you want to take people through a newsletter one simple thing that you can do is on the end of your newsletter just having like a thank you quiz super simple offer something that they get for filling in the quiz so it might be like get this free playbook on how to go on linkedin they then fill in the quiz you then have a lot of data on the type of people that are subscribing to your newsletter and that's when you can start to really segment your audience and get a little bit more specific and personalized within your approach so i would have like broader content mixed in with like trust building driving people towards this newsletter i would then really focus on how can i get as much data from them being on this page as possible and then once you have the data that's when you can go okay maybe i have i don't know 100 people who are earning more than twenty thousand dollars that's interesting if that's like the most popular audience out of the quiz so say you have a question that's like how much you're making monthly within your business you know zero to five hundred dollars a thousand to five thousand dollars 10k plus for example when you find okay the person that's coming on my newsletter is someone that is making more than 10k instantly you're like i can have higher ticket product here and that informs a little bit more of that strategy if you get really specific on the questions you can really figure out key things like what are the core pain points and frustrations they're having within your particular space so for us it might be like i'm really struggling with time to post on linkedin i don't have a strategy you know all these core sort of pain points and it just means that you can then once these people are segmented you can throw email sequences together that aim to solve that core pain point so if it's for example i don't have time we will do a three to five sequence that's like okay this is how you start freeing up your time this is an approach that you know will take less of your time and you can really kind of like handle their objections before them even like reaching out to you doing that will just significantly build trust and it will just make them far more likely to want to buy something from you because they've got all of this information for free you know they've seen your social content they've got that for free they've then got this really tailored and personalized sequence which has helped them they've got that for free and it's like it's almost a no brainer to go with a paid because it's like if the free product is this good how good is the paid product if you do it in that approach and as long as you create a product that is genuinely the best within your industry i'm a big believer in quality like i really think that a lot of creators will be like oh i'm just going to try and monetize my audience let me just throw up a course on this without actually doing a research phase of like these are all the courses these are all the positioning of the courses how can i make mine levels above every other single product because at the end of the day like people are gonna want to sign up for the thing that achieves the best results for them yeah and that's what we did with the accelerator we were like if we can see the the closest or the best linkedin based cohort and just 10x the results of that it's a no-brainer to choose us over there it's because it's just better results that's super interesting So in terms of your list and how you market the program, do you only send those email sequences to certain segments or does everyone get it? Because that was what I was interested in, in signing up to the newsletter. It's like, am I going to get this weekly newsletter from Chris? At what point is, is there going to be some kind of sales sequence? Does everyone get a sales sequence or is it only certain people who click on certain things or? as i said because it was just us two building this business we're very much based like we're a very small team and we just want to the goal is to scale the business using as little as chris's time as possible and so we didn't actually have these like segmentation funnels set up so what we were doing was um selling to the general newsletter now we put so much time into the newsletter like a lot of research like really making sure that it's like the best quality possible our kind of thing is through most of the year you will get free newsletter that drives significant value to you for free then we would do the odd mention within the newsletter itself the general one be like hey uh if you're interested in creator stuff you know we've got this next cohort out these are the results that we got for people if you want to join go ahead and click this link but now as we're like trying to build and scale it we have uh far more segmented emails so we will probably be selling less to the the general newsletter because when you do sell unfortunately you get a mass um you know unsub kind of event going on so yeah we will be trying to protect the integrity of that and we are far more focused now on driving people towards a specific wait list and having these key segment areas where we will be creating personalized sequence to drive them towards the accelerator interesting so you would send a newsletter and it would say if you're interested in this join this wait list and then the people who join that they get a bit more of a targeted sequence on on that because they're obviously interested in it yeah exactly exactly so i think right now we have our current like followers you put in your um name your email and then we have like a segment thing that says um hey we've got the create accelerator coming out in january it's going to be our biggest discount ever if you're interested click yes they click yes they get tagged and they're in that waitlist area and then we can warn that audience up as well a key part of our strategy has been webinars yes so you have this like is it weekly webinar yes yeah so when we're in like a sales cycle it'll be um usually six to eight webinars and again this is like we really try and provide as much value in these in these webinars as possible and so yeah we'll go super deep on a topic um and we will try and basically build so much trust from our webinar itself and we've studied like people like russell brunson and things like that where we've seen like the perfect webinar and things like that ours is very much focused on educational content we're like if we get thousands of people into this webinar how can we give them as much value as possible yeah and we will still try and sell them um towards the end of the call and we will say that up front on the call but like hey this is you know this is primarily um for people looking to sign up to the creator accelerator but i am just going to give you loads of value you don't have to sign up it's for those that want to take linkedin seriously if you don't want that that's cool i'm going to give this insane amount of value away for free anyway so you're going to get that as well yeah and that's been like a very core part of our strategy chris is incredibly charismatic very good on these calls and he just has this like energy which is like super infectious and people get excited about it so how do you not give away the source from the accelerator in those or do you because you just don't care so you could probably tell there is so much depth and like it really is like a science and so fortunately we can cover a lot of things and it also depends on the awareness stage of the person coming in as well through yeah so a lot of these webinars will have in our minds quite basic information but for 98 of people it's not basic it's like super valuable yeah because i guess even explaining the story like i wouldn't if i've just come across your post i would have no idea who chris is or what the hell's going on here exactly and that's we will usually start most webinars with like a brief introduction of who he is the things that he's done as well there is so much we can give away and it's actually at the point now where we're like trying to scale the business more we're trying to provide more free resources to people more lead magnets and so we just want to give as much away as possible and then we found with the accelerator not only are you going to get this like insane amount of depth and like a large amount of educational content module content that you can learn from but the most powerful thing we found is the accountability and is the community and network that you're building from it as well yeah and so when we initially built the product it was like okay the main thing that you're going to get here is the education you're going to get that then get the transformation but as we've kind of like done it throughout the last year or so it's been like being in a space with 200 entrepreneurs who are making you know six seven figures is more valuable and if you're all pushing each other to like your very best limits that is so valuable and we've had like relations with people you know go into business together we've had um yeah people like form groups who are like their mastermind groups and they just learn constantly together on different topics and that community is something that i think is is probably one of the biggest reasons why people would join how do you foster that do you have like breakout out rooms where you get into small groups and like create an accountability group we so we played around with the idea of um breakout groups we more focus on getting activity within the community within the circle within the onboarding process of coming onto the cohort we're very much like this is for you you should help people because if you help people you will go far like even for the first results the people that got the best results were those that were in the community they were active they were helping each other they were like asking questions and so we very very much just encourage this like participation very early on and we link it towards the success and you know the more likelihood of your results are going to be good if you are active within the space yeah we will also incentivize it and be like we have an award for someone who's like the most engaged within the community which i think is is super powerful because then people are like oh if I'm I can win a legitimate prize here from just helping other people and having that mentality very early on is something that drives like a really beautiful community yeah I used to work for a cohort business in COVID and I think we I think they did over 20 million a year in cohorts well obviously it was the best time ever for it because everyone's at home but that was always one of the things that we found was you would market based on the information you're going to get and the masterclasses you're going to get but actually 50 60 70 of the value people got was as soon as they joined it was they realized ah it's the community and the other 5 10 people that i i meet who i then grow with yeah or go on to become friends with on this journey and become lifelong friends but they don't realize that when they're signing up because they think i think they're coming for the information yes i'm excited to share that this podcast is produced by me and my content agency, 7X Content, we create incredible podcasts for world-class brands and creators. So if you'd like to create something like this, or you're thinking about taking your existing show to the next level, then you can reach out to us at the link in the description. I'd love to hear from you. This has been absolutely fascinating. I'm curious if I wanted to get started now, what would you recommend the first steps I take in the next 30, 60 days would be what's the main goal i think it's driving leads to my business but i'm also interested in you know i do a bit of coaching at the moment but i could see us doing more of that and particularly in the group the group style or the cohort style i think that could be really interesting we already have interest in that and we don't really do much we don't even talk about it okay so i mean i think you guys have what i've seen anyway like incredible free resources you know from these podcasts you get like lead magnets and things like that i would make those incredibly visible i would set up some sort of funnel based on on that you probably have it already but if you don't i would set that up i would make sure your profile is optimized i would do as much detailed research on linkedin of your icp as possible i'm active in the spaces they're active in my belief is if you grow even if it's not growth within your icp if it's just general growth i think that's a good strategy just because it's social proof it's like you know you have this number of following you know you're credible within that space and so I would encourage you to grow on LinkedIn as well and go a little bit broader with certain topics then you can really focus on you've got that growth these new people coming in what key topics can I talk about that are going to make them interested and build trust with them and then I would think about how can I bring them over to the newsletter I think deep platforming is like one of the most important things unfortunately on LinkedIn you know you can have a million followers but still not reach a million people so having their email is so important and if you're looking to build like a group coaching offer i would think about people that you've coached already that was like a super early quick win we did for like the mvp of the crow accelerator chris basically messaged all the people that he coached and was like hey do you have any friends that would be interested in this sort of thing just be honest share your journey and if it works then we can create a nice little group around it and so i think the first one like the og version was like 10 people some of those people became the fastest growing creators in the world and so it'd be the same thing it'd be like how can i build an mvp where i have a small group of people but i focus so much time and attention into it that they are guaranteed to have the best results out there and then that then becomes a strong part of your marketing for the first approach and you can also that stage is a feedback gathering stage so you want to gather as much feedback as possible and like how would this help would this help like yeah can i offer feedback in this way you know what would be beneficial to you and then you can build a really clear offer and once you have a really clear offer and you have the proof there already it becomes so much easier to market yeah i remember referrals we used to get at least 30 fill 30 of a cohort on on that our icps were so dialed in yeah um that people had amazing connections that it was a great fit for as well a lot of people said that cohort based programs died after covid like the world got drunk on them and then they got back to real life and they actually had things to do in the real world is your experience that they still work yes i mean i have a lot of friends within within this this sort of area i think we're very isolated as individuals nowadays i think with social media and so forth and so i think community is incredibly powerful and i think the cohort can encourage that and as long as you get people like within your first couple ones experiencing that yeah and then they're telling their friends about it i think it's very hard for you not to get another round of people that are interested because a lot of people crave that connection a lot of people crave you know connection and results and although it is hard work and we are very clear that it will be hard work the results that you will get from it will be will change your life in a certain way and if you have that clear transformation then you can get customers in i think the question a lot of people i know will be asking me or shouting at me right now is how do they find their josh so if if someone wants to find their josh to run their linkedin or run their content like how did you hire your replacement uh good question it's not easy unfortunately i wish it was because there are so many different people sharing different types of advice from you know about linkedin it means that there isn't necessarily many trained people on a way that works multiple different industries and so i would personally say the best way of doing it is finding someone that's deeply ambitious learning about it yourself completely so you have a very clear understanding of how it all works and then training that person and spending a lot of time with that person that's what chris did with me he taught me so much stuff we were working together all the time to the point where you then become like you know exactly what they want to say exactly what kind of content they want to create yeah i would typically try and find ambitious people who are perhaps in current positions that they don't feel like their potential is used and so whether it's like um certain like corporate businesses that have a very rigid structure there's no potential for growth i think that's an interesting place to look at um certain agencies as well that may be capped at offering certain remuneration to people that might be another um interesting place and i also think just like trying to find people on linkedin who have a little bit of an understanding of personal brand is is a good approach because they get the benefit of it and they understand And if you have a big enough goal, a mission that's super exciting and they can benefit from that journey, then it's just such huge incentive to join. Cool. This has been so valuable, Josh. And I think we'll have to do a second one because it was so valuable, but I absolutely loved it. And there's so much depth to it that we can get into another time. But yeah, thanks so much. You dropped so much game and yeah, I loved your energy as well. So thanks so much, man. Yeah, no, it's been great fun. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Josh. If you did, I think you'll love my conversation with Caleb Ralston, the former director of content for Alex and Layla Hormozy. He also worked with Gary Vee. It's an absolute masterclass on building a personal brand. Make sure you're subscribed and go and watch that next. I think you're going to love it. Appreciate you and have a great week.

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Josh Sanders is the Head of Content for Chris Donnelly, where he helped scale one of the fastest-growing personal brands in the world from 0 to 3M+ followers across platforms and a 0-250,000 subscriber newsletter in under two years, then engineered the systems that turned that attention into a $10M+ education business.

In this episode, Josh breaks down the data-backed LinkedIn growth playbook behind that rise. We cover how to grow a personal brand on LinkedIn in 2026, how to turn views into customers using offers, funnels, and attribution, why “don’t chase, attract” is the most effective creator strategy, how newsletters compound audience growth, and what most creators misunderstand about monetisation. Unlike most LinkedIn advice, Josh’s insights are backed by large-scale dataset reviews, rigorous testing, and real revenue outcomes. This is one of the most practical LinkedIn and creator growth masterclasses ever recorded.

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Timestamps (accurate + true to transcript)
00:00 Introduction to Explosive LinkedIn Growth
00:21 Meet Josh Sanders: Content Mastermind
00:36 The Power of LinkedIn for Business Growth
02:32 Setting Clear Goals and Content Pillars
09:23 Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile
17:21 Engaging with Your Network and Building Relationships
25:57 Creating High-Impact Content
28:10 Analyzing and Adapting Content Strategies
45:50 Leveraging Lead Magnet Posts for Engagement
46:56 Driving Conversations and Engagement on LinkedIn
49:35 Crafting Effective Hooks and Content Structure
51:47 The Science Behind High-Performing LinkedIn Posts
58:06 Tracking Performance Metrics on LinkedIn
01:03:55 Building and Scaling a Creator Accelerator Business
01:07:23 Creating a Cohort-Based Program for Maximum Impact
01:12:45 Marketing Strategies and Community Building
01:28:10 Finding the Right Team and Incentivising Growth
01:30:34 Conclusion and Next Steps