Justin Welsh: No-BS LinkedIn Advice in 5 Minutes
Want LinkedIn advice without the fluff? I asked Justin Welsh, who built an $8 million business on LinkedIn, six rapid-fire questions.
Justin hasn't missed a day of posting in two years, and with one hour a day he says to write one idea five different ways and post it once a week for five weeks. To reach people with big followings, he helps them first and never asks for a favour on first contact.
The lesson works for any consultant or expert who sells what they know. Show up every morning with something useful, help people before you ask them for anything, track where every subscriber comes from, and test what works for you, because Justin says all advice is contextual, his included.
Timestamps:
0:00 — The advice he wishes he hadn't followed
0:21 — Only one hour a day? Do this
0:35 — Value or personal brand?
1:46 — How to reach people with big followings
2:55 — Where do your subscribers come from?
3:48 — How he reached his first 10K followers
4:16 — His final word: all advice is contextual
Ash Roy and Justin Welsh's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Justin Welsh: The one piece of advice I received that I wish I hadn't listened to was running automated webinars to try and sell things. It felt wrong. I did it because, like, that's what everyone told me to do. I look back on that and feel foolish about that.
Ash Roy: And what's that one factor that's contributed to most of your LinkedIn success?
Justin Welsh: Showing up daily. I haven't missed a day of posting on LinkedIn or Twitter in two years.
Ash Roy: What is the best strategy for posting weekly on LinkedIn if you have only one hour a day?
Justin Welsh: Say the same thing five different ways. I would write an idea, say it five different ways and stagger it once a week for five weeks. And I would do that every day. So you have a ton of content every time you write one piece.
Ash Roy: Isabelle asks, how do you strike a good balance between providing valuable content to your LinkedIn audience and promoting your personal brand? How do you cultivate meaningful connections while having a large audience base?
Justin Welsh: Providing value to your LinkedIn audience is building your personal brand. Brand building isn't like a thing that you do outside of providing value for your audience. The value that you provide is the brand that you build. I try and provide value every day, right, which is another cliche term. But like I educate, empathize, inspire, motivate, challenge. Those are things that I do on a regular basis. It's more difficult.
I have done that mostly at this point through introductions. If a creator friend of mine says, hey, this is a guy or gal that you should definitely spend some time with or meet, I will almost always take that meeting. I'll give you an example. A guy named Luke Shalom has written a lot of complimentary things about me on LinkedIn. He is in my comment section quite often.
And so I just reached out to him and said, hey, I like the stuff that you're putting out. Thanks for featuring me. I'm honored. We should get to know each other. I scheduled some time with him. I met a guy, Jay Alic, yesterday and chatted with him over in Bosnia. And he is just making noise on the Internet and doing a really great job of that. And so I reached out and said, hey, we should get to know each other. It's really targeted mostly by me at this point and by introductions from friends.
Ash Roy: Actually, a lot of people with these huge followings, I feel very anxious reaching out to them, especially asking them to comment on my posts, because why would they? What's in it for them?
Justin Welsh: When I was a smaller creator, I never reached out and asked people to do that. Like, I wanted my content to stand on its own. I wanted to know that my content was working because the message was meaningful and not because Sahil Bloom commented on it, right? Like, that's not why I want my content to thrive. Now, over the course of becoming a bigger creator, I've built relationships with other big creators.
We've become friends. And when I see my friends write something on Twitter or LinkedIn, I want to help them. I drop a comment, right? Hey, you're launching a course? Cool. I'll comment on it and help you get some more sales. That's just human nature. You do it for someone offline, do it for someone online. So what I would suggest instead of saying, like, will you comment on my post?
Is what Jack Butcher coined permissionless apprenticeship, which is like take someone's content and make a visual out of it and share it with them or share it online, like doing things that help somebody else. I think this is the old how to win friend Dale Carnegie. Like if you want to make friends and people want to help, if you want to help yourself, help other people. That's the easiest way.
Don't ask for a favor the first time you reach out to somebody. One challenge I was having as a creator was understanding where my newsletter subscribers were coming from. So were they coming more from my Twitter profile, my LinkedIn profile, my LinkedIn featured section, my actual tweets, my actual LinkedIn post, the LinkedIn comments. Like there's a million different places that people can visit and subscribe to my newsletter.
And I thought one thing that I've never done is tracked all of that by the link. Right. So I went out into my analytics platform and I created trackable links. And I said, like, this one's my LinkedIn profile. This is for Twitter. This is for my featured section. This is for my June 9th post. This is for my June 10th post. This is for my June 11th comment.
This is for my Twitter thread. And I started tracking where all of my stuff was coming from. And after doing that for 30 days, you learn a lot about where you acquire newsletter subscribers. You learn a lot about what works and what doesn't, what's a waste of time, what's a great spend of time. And so I can double down on those things.
Ash Roy: Last question from Adriana, how did you reach your first 10K followers?
Justin Welsh: Writing a bunch of content about how I built a 50 million or $75 million ARR SaaS business. Like I just dropped a new tip each morning for like eight months. And people who wanted to build SaaS companies and build sales teams started following me. There was no big gotcha or trick or hack. It was just writing content, publishing it every single morning, sticking around, engaging with the audience and becoming someone that people could expect some value from every morning.
The last thing I would add is all advice is contextual, mine included. So like a lot of people when I write content or when I go on a podcast and people listen, they're like, Justin said to do this very specific thing or they take whatever I did as like the gospel. And it's not. It's not just because I say something doesn't make it right. I'm just an average dummy on the Internet, right?
Like the easiest way to grow an audience or grow a business or build your Twitter, LinkedIn following is to try a bunch of stuff and figure out what works.
