Local Market Monopoly

Have you subscribed to the Local Market Monopoly newsletter yet? Each week you get one actionable digital marketing tip delivered straight to your inbox. Designed specifically for small businesses like you who want to increase their market share and grow their online presence. Each tip focuses on strategies for growing your online reputation, increasing your company's reach, and improving sales and referrals without wasting money on ineffective tactics. Sign up now at LocalMarketmonopoly.com and start receiving our best of the best strategies immediately. Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly, where we help you dominate your local market. As we call, as we say, own the block. I'm your host, Clarence Fisher, and today we are focusing on a tool often overlooked by local businesses actually, but brimming with untapped potential, and that tool is LinkedIn. By the end of this episode, you'll transform your LinkedIn profile from a digital ghost town.

I can't whistle. I was trying to do the Old Western, the whistle where the tumbleweed goes across the street. But anyway, from a digital ghost town into the bustling hub of customer, client, patient engagement that it is so you can grow your business. We'll talk about a, there's a simple tweak that you can make to your profile that can suddenly turn you into an expert in your market and actually ignoring this can leave you invisible to your community. Actually, I'm going to give you the one type of content that resonates deeply with local audiences on LinkedIn. If you're missing that, you're probably missing lots of opportunities. And this thing that I've developed called Local Leverage, it's a unique method that we're going to reveal in this episode that turns your LinkedIn presence into a dominating force in your local market. Lastly, I'm going to share with you a tool that I have used that taught me all of this stuff actually, and I've been using it for the last few months and it's been incredible. So don't go anywhere. Put the recorder, I said the recorder. I'm so old school. Put whatever you're listening to your phone in your pocket and let's go.

You are listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher. Uncovering the tools, tactics and strategies, the most successful small businesses use to dominate their local market and own the block.

Alright, we're back and so glad that you made it through the intro. Now we're talking about your LinkedIn profile today, and I will confess that my LinkedIn profile was said ghost town. We posted to it, but I didn't really start taking it super duper serious. Hey, I'm busy. I did not take it super serious until probably two years ago. That's when I thought I should probably practice what I preach. But the old saying of the, what is it, the son of the barber never has a haircut. The kid of the cobbler has old shoes, things like that. But anyway, we got to work on it and it has really, really turned things around in short order. So that's what we're going to share the purpose of today is so that you can have a LinkedIn profile that actually works for you and converts. We covered stuff like this by the way, at Main Street Marketing Coach is what I'm giving you.
All of this stuff can get kind of confusing. If you want some expert help from 'a moi' and our team also we have some community there backing you up, making sure you're hitting your goals, head over to MainStreetMarketingCoach.com. Now, the absolute quickest way, the quickest win that you can have on your LinkedIn profile is to use a professional picture, professional image. I think we all kind of get that, but some of us don't. And ask me how I know that some of us don't. You have to use a professional picture on LinkedIn, okay? No questions. Like period. That is it. I know Clarence, but I want things to feel real. I'm going to tell you, it's going to feel, your profile's going to look real unprofessional without a professional image. So make sure you get that done. After you've got that, you've got your professional profile picture.

You've reached out to at least the person that is in your circle that is really, really crazy about photography. Maybe they're not a professional, but they take better pictures, they take professional pictures, use them. If not, get a professional profile picture done. But after that you want to create a compelling headline for your profile. What is the thing that you want to be famous for? And really think about this, the thing that you want people to know you for. Right? So if you go to our LinkedIn profile, you'll see that I am pushing Local Market Monopoly for where you can own the block. Right? And so whatever your headline is going to be, that's what you want to put there. It should be really more than your job title. A lot of times people will just put what they do and I want to tell you, lemme give you a hint, it's who do you help, who do you help and what do you help them do?

Not necessarily what you do, but you do want it to clearly articulate what you do, how you add value, and if you can include some keywords. Again, you can look at my profile, include some keywords that are relevant to your industry, relevant to the expertise that you have. So put all of that into your headline. So now we've got a great picture of yours, truly of you, not me, but of you. And you've crafted a great headline that is not just what you do, but it's who you help, how you help them. And now let's summarize how you help them in your summary. Really, you want to tell your story as well though. In your story, focus on what you do, focus on why you do it and how you help others. Again, if you're picking up the theme, it's how do you help people?

What am I calling you for? I'd also use a conversational tone. Stay away from all the stuffiness unless you are in an industry where really it is attractive to be stuffy, which even doctors are not, or attorneys aren't straight up stuffiness anymore. Again, this is why we're removing the tie from Local Market Monopoly is, you know, it can come off super stuffy. So I would use a conversational tone and include a good call to action in your summary. What do you want people to do next? And we talk about this a lot as far as a lot of the messages that we put out. We fail to put out a call to action to it, but if you have someone's attention, ask them to take the next step for you. Invite them to connect with you or to reach out to you. This is on LinkedIn, whatever you feel like you want them to do.

And in talking with me, I'm always going to ask, what do we want them to do? What do we want them to do? If we ever have a conversation, I'm going to ask you, well, what do we want people to do? And a lot of times we think, well, we duh. They know what they should be doing. Nah, they don't. We have to tell people, well, people know. But if we just leave it as implied, people will not do what we want them to do. So I know it seems super plain and self-explanatory, but you have to tell people what you want them to do. Now on your LinkedIn profile, now we're going to move down to detailing your experience. Not only just your work experience, but we're going to focus on your achievements and then not only on your achievements, but the outcomes, not just the responsibilities like you were responsible for creating a new program at the hospital.

What was the outcome from you creating that program? Because I'm telling you, when people want to connect with you, especially people who are trying to hire you, they're looking for outcomes. They want to know that you didn't just show up just to show, okay, yeah, you had that position, but you could have just shown up every day just to get a paycheck. I want to know the outcomes that you helped produce rather than just the responsibilities. You want to have your responsibilities there, but also provide the outcome. Make sure that you're using short bullet points and they're readable because people skim. This is really a kind of crazy thing on LinkedIn. You see some of the profiles that have the three-page descriptions of your experience, but I promise you people are skimming. And then if they want to reach out to you to find out more, then that's when they do that.

And so we're looking at, you're listing your experience, you're saying, Hey, I've gotten people these outcomes. And then the next thing that we're going to look at is actual proof of that. So that's when you're going to list your skills and you're going to get endorsements from your colleagues. You're going to get endorsements if you own a business like us, we have clients that have given us endorsements, okay and so we're going down here and okay, well, he says that he can get that outcome. And then there are these people who are saying, yes, he did get us that outcome. That is awesome. And the recommendations part as well, you want to make sure that you get recommendations from your team members, from your clients. Anybody else that can vouch for your work? These are super powerful. Who talked about this? It was Russ Knight. If you listen to the episode with Russ Knight, a big thing for Russ was when he's, and Russ runs a successful business, and when he's looking at the LinkedIn, he also mentors other people.

So when he is looking at LinkedIn, he was saying one of the big things that stands out to him that says you haven't spent any time optimizing your LinkedIn profile is that you have not changed the URL. You have the default numbers, gibberish, URL. So you want to go in there and personalize your LinkedIn URL. And I will, again, I'm going to lay myself out there. When Russ said that, I thought, what is my, and I'm sure he had gone and looked in my URL and saw that it was trash. So we got the URL customized, like I said, a couple of years ago. I just didn't, it was there, we posted it. But I started diving into this super deeply and then started interviewing people who I know who are having success with LinkedIn and Russ is one of them and putting these strategies to place, and this is why I'm sharing it with you.

So customize your URL. Now let's roll to the content creation. And what resonates most with the local audience here is sharing the insights, the stories, the experiences that you are experiencing in your field, but then also tying that into areas of the local community. So if you are a banker, for instance, we want to talk about things that are happening in the local community. And it's not even just your city nowadays. People are attaching, they are relating more to the neighborhoods that are in the cities. Like we have the Pearl District here. So if you're posting about the Pearl District, you're not just talking about Broken Arrow as a whole. You're connecting to me now because the Pearl District is right down the street and I'm in the Pearl District quite often. So start to connect your content as locally as you can, and we call that hyperlocal is really what that's called.

This podcast was actually started to help people with hyperlocal marketing, meaning marketing that is within a 10 mile radius of your business. That is really resonating on LinkedIn, at least it is for the local market, really leveraging the neighborhoods. Now, as far as the actual content that more about the content that you post, and you may, on LinkedIn right now, you're seeing a lot of images. People are downloading, making these slides, downloading images of their Twitter or their X feed, and one post may have 30 different slides on it. You have stuff like that or you can keep it simple and just create some educational type content that's informative. Like I said, you can do industry news, any industry updates with your industry. You can also put your personal stories on there. But if you're going to put personal stories on there, I would tie it into business in some way.

Maybe like your professional journey or some challenge that you've overcome. How did you become successful? The stuff like that can resonate. I would not do the thing that you do on Facebook where it's like, oh my goodness, I'm so sick. I ate three Cheetos last night and I'm puking and it's all orange. Oh my goodness. Don't do that. Don't do that. Not on LinkedIn. Save that for Facebook. Okay? But also you can do polls on LinkedIn. You can do those. You can do the questions or have you ever, but also don't ask for in search of a handyman on LinkedIn. Those aren't the type of questions I'm talking about. I'm saying questions related to career stuff. If you're giving advice or you're giving opinions, post that type of stuff on LinkedIn, your company news achievements with your company, you can put that on there. You can do videos and images and stuff like that are really taking off on LinkedIn.

Just let's just keep it focused. I'll tell you what, keep it focused to how you help people with what you do. In fact, put case studies in there, any success stories that you can put on there, put on there. But let's just keep it very focused to how you help people. If you're going to put personal stories in there, put stories in there about how you're helping people. If you're going to ask questions and take polls and put interactive content, make it about how you help people. One of the things that we've done and started doing is to actually write down the frequently asked questions that people have that your audience are the, I mean, you can start with the 10 frequently asked questions and answer those. Answer those on LinkedIn. And then write down the list of, and if you've been listening for a while, you've heard me say this, it's the F-A-Q-S-A-Q and on the SAQ, the questions people should be asking, but they don't know to ask just because they're not you.

They don't have the expertise you have and you're thinking what you need to be asking is this. Well write the list of those questions and then answer those. Because when people read those or say you post a video, even if writing's not your thing, you post a video. Notice that podcasting is my thing, and we post podcast episodes on LinkedIn, but answering the questions that people should be asking but don't know to ask increases their trust in you because you're bringing up things that they just did not think about. So hopefully some items in this podcast. So let's see, we told you what type of content that you need to be posting. Also, gain the local leverage by connecting yourself if possible, to the actual neighborhoods in your city. If you are at an event at a district or a neighborhood in your city, talk about the neighborhood.

Not necessarily, Hey, we're at Tulsa's Tulsa Business Businessman meeting. We are at, well, we're probably at Tulsa businessman meeting, but it's in Southern Hills. Man, I can't imagine. I haven't been over to Southern Hills in a while. It looks great over here. You know what I mean? So stuff like that, we can super dive into this. What I wanted to cover today was the profile, and hopefully you've got that. If you want to take it to another level, which is what we did. And this guy, Justin Welsh, and he's got like, I don't know, 300,000, 500,000 or something. A huge amount of followers on both LinkedIn and X. Don't quote me on the followers, I don't know. I know he's made over $4 million without any advertising. That was the biggest thing that drew me. It was like $4.2 million with no ads, just posting on LinkedIn, and then he added X or Twitter.

So I'm like, okay, how does somebody make 4 million bucks just posting on LinkedIn? So I went and I got his course. It's the LinkedIn oss, and that's what we started using it, and I absolutely love it. So if you go to local market monopoly.com/linkedin oss, we'll put the link also in the show notes and news slash It is an affiliate link. So if you purchase through there, we will get a little bit of change. It doesn't cost you anything extra. It's the course exact same either way, but it's like an hour and a half. It's not even that long. And my man just breaks it down and drops everything for you. And so if you want to take LinkedIn to the absolute next level, I would advise at least checking it out local market monopoly.com/linkedin oss and check the link in the show notes. Okay?

So that's going to be it for this week. Take what I gave you even before, and you know what? You don't have to have that. You can search LinkedIn and just go to our website and search LinkedIn and listen to all the episodes that we're putting out because that's what I'm doing. So you can listen to that and then put that stuff in action and you got it all right. But if you want it from the man himself and breaking it down and all that stuff and stuff that people always leave out something when they're trying to tell other people about things, then you can go check it out. Okay? So until next week, take what we have today. Go optimize your LinkedIn profile and own your block.

We appreciate you listening to Local Market Monopoly. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show and visit LocalMarketMonopoly.com for more resources that will help you dominate your local market and own the block.