Master Your Finances Kurt Baker with Karen Yankovich – Transcript

Written by on August 31, 2022

0:00:00.0 ANNOUNCER: The financial views and opinions expressed by the host and guests on this program do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of 1077, The Bronc Rider University or Certified Wealth Management and Investment. The material discussed is not designed to provide the listeners with individual financial, legal or tax advice.
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0:00:26.6 ANNOUNCER: It’s time to grow your bank as 1077-The Bronc presents Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker, a certified financial planner professional with Certified Wealth Management and Investment. Kurt and his team of financial guests will help you turn those singles into seas of green and plan your financial future accordingly. Now, here is your money managing host for the hour, Kurt Baker.
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0:00:56.4 Kurt Baker: Are you taking full advantage of the development of different social media platforms that have created new avenues for marketing that aid in the success of companies and brands? Do you want to learn how to focus on creating profitable and personal brands on LinkedIn and the importance of social media in your business marketing strategies? CEO of Uplevel Media LLC and host of the Good Girls Get Rich podcast, Karen Yankovich is a LinkedIn strategist, business consultant and speaker who will guide you on how to create wealth by combining smart business practices with a simple proven systems that develop and maintain strong customer relationships. With over 20 years of experience, she will share profile tips that will help you become more confident to develop contact with people who can positively impact your lives, business and finances. Awesome, Karen. Thanks for coming back. I know you were on the show once before, and I didn’t realize that you had been doing this for 20 years, ’cause I didn’t realize LinkedIn had been around 20 years.
0:02:00.7 Karen Yankovich: Well, LinkedIn hasn’t been around 20 years. I’ve been doing marketing for that long.
0:02:04.6 Kurt Baker: I’m kidding. [laughter]
0:02:05.7 Karen Yankovich: I’m a little older than social media, but just a little bit.
0:02:07.5 Kurt Baker: There was something before social media?
0:02:09.6 Karen Yankovich: There was… You know what? We’re coming back around to what there was before social media, and that’s actually talking to people to market your business.
0:02:15.9 Kurt Baker: Yes, I do like talking to people. Now, I know what you do is really cool ’cause I remember the first time somebody said, Are you connected on LinkedIn? I had… I was like, What? Excuse me. [laughter] I didn’t know what they were talking about. And I think I knew about three people that actually were on it at the time, and many, this is many years ago. And I go, “Okay, connected. And there’s my profile.” And that was about it. I was connected, but I had no idea what it meant.
0:02:40.0 Karen Yankovich: So Kurt, you’re old enough then to remember then when LinkedIn first started, it was like, Well, I’ll connect with anybody on Facebook, but I’m really picky about who I connect with on LinkedIn, which is so silly because that’s where business is happening.
0:02:50.9 Kurt Baker: True.
0:02:51.5 Karen Yankovich: So I’m not really sure why that was happening in the beginning, but thankfully, that is not the case anymore.
0:02:55.6 Kurt Baker: Yeah. LinkedIn’s turned into quite an amazing thing. It really is. It’s a great way to contact people, stay in connection with them, and that’s the basics. ‘Cause what’s nice is when somebody moves jobs or starts a business, you can still find them. Like where did John Blow go? You’re like, Oh, there he is. There he is, he is wherever. He’s moved out of state and he’s over here, and this is what he’s doing now. So you get a great synopsis of what the people are doing, but I think it’s one of those things that’s awesome, but heavily under-utilized.
0:03:21.0 Karen Yankovich: Oh, yeah.
0:03:21.6 Kurt Baker: And I know. I keep having these periods where I’m like I’m gonna get on LinkedIn and start using it, and then it fades. And then I go, I’m gonna get on LinkedIn and start using it, and then it fades. So I think I’m doing pretty good now for this year. I think I’ve finally gotten it to where I’m actually using it. So tell us, how do people turn from just connecting with people and forgetting about it, and saying I have no idea what’s going on with this thing? Getting the basic set up and then starting to actually use it to promote what you’re doing.
0:03:47.9 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. So to take one quick step back before we jump into that.
0:03:50.5 Kurt Baker: Sure.
0:03:51.4 Karen Yankovich: You talked about LinkedIn is really getting to be hot, and I think the reason for that is the virtual networking. And when has that ever been more important in the world? So what we’ve learned over the past few years is that our digital footprint is important, people are Googling us, and what comes up is important now. And five years ago that was less important. Now, that it is incorporated into everything we do. So first and foremost, you have control of what they see, so you’ve got to take some time to create a great profile, you’ve gotta look worthy of people’s time and money and investment and whatever that looks like. And a lot of people… And I get this because this is what we all did. You look at LinkedIn, it’s like your online resume. And I firmly believe that your resume is all about who you used to be, and your LinkedIn profile should be positioning you for who you’re becoming, kind of like dress for the job you want. So shifting the energy of your profile from a resume to your brand, and you have a brand regardless of what your role is. Everybody has a brand. And that brand is a big part of what leverages your success and whatever success looks like for you.
0:04:57.6 Karen Yankovich: So first and foremost, you have to do the work on the profile so that you’re showing up looking as if you’re worthy of people’s investment and that they know why you and over a million other people that do what you do.
0:05:09.3 Kurt Baker: Well, I think that’s great. And you mentioned brand, which I think people forget. Companies talk about branding all the time, and they wanna cultivate their brand and they wanna re-brand, they wanna change, they wanna focus. Well, people have to do that too, because you fit within that and people reach out. I know there’s lots of people that have the advanced LinkedIn connect services, where they can actually try to locate employees that might fit jobs that they want. And even if you’re not looking for a job, it’s nice to have these contacts because if anything ever happens, you’re building up all these relationships online, which actually are extremely value… I’ve known a number of highly paid people that have used LinkedIn when they transfer from one job to another to find an even more significant job. And they were not looking for anything.
0:05:56.4 Karen Yankovich: Yep, yep.
0:05:57.2 Kurt Baker: This happens all the time. But most people don’t realize that’s what happens.
0:06:00.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. Well, there are so many things that we do know and we just don’t connect the dots to bring it back to LinkedIn. What we hear a lot is, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Well, I know what you know is important, but who you know is also important. And if you ask people where did they get their biggest opportunity from the last job or their biggest clients, nine out of 10 times, they tell you referrals. Yet they’re out there spending all their time on all these other platforms. So if referrals and the people to people piece of marketing is where the vast majority of your business, your opportunities, your jobs come from, then LinkedIn is where you need to be doing, spending more time at.
0:06:37.2 Karen Yankovich: Because that’s where that happens. And, you know, just keep in mind too, though, that LinkedIn is not the place to go to sell a pen. You’re not gonna sell something for 59 cents there, but it is where you go to get a distributor that wants to buy 100,000 of your pens. So you need to have a bigger mindset and be showing up, looking for the biggest opportunities. I like to refer to it as like flipping the funnel, like, just stop thinking about all the low-end things that you’ve got going to build your career or your business and start thinking bigger. And that’s where LinkedIn shines.
0:07:04.0 Kurt Baker: Because they’re all out there, all of these high, very, very influential people are… All your influencers are on LinkedIn.
0:07:09.7 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. Yeah.
0:07:10.2 Kurt Baker: They’re all on LinkedIn somewhere.
0:07:10.9 Karen Yankovich: And it’s the highest income, you know, the highest income ratios are on LinkedIn. The highest, like, I mean, I can go on and on and on about all the reasons to do that. But at the end of the day, it’s so much fun to be building relationships with cool people.
0:07:22.2 Kurt Baker: Absolutely.
0:07:22.3 Karen Yankovich: And that’s what we do on LinkedIn. We get to pick who we wanna hang out with and we get to hang out with them.
0:07:26.9 Kurt Baker: Okay. So that’s what we want. So in order to do that, you have to set your brand correctly. So it’s not a resume, it’s a personal branding platform where you’re gonna describe what you wanna become. How do we start that process to make your… ‘Cause I know there’s a lot of parts on the LinkedIn profile. Where do you start? I know we only have an hour together, but, so where do we start and what are the major pieces they need to make sure they get right?
0:07:49.1 Karen Yankovich: So here’s the thing. LinkedIn changes this stuff every five minutes. Like today, literally I’d three, I learned three new things about three new features on LinkedIn. So it happens constantly.
0:07:57.3 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:07:57.9 Karen Yankovich: So just know that it’s never finished, but it’s always… But just taking some time to really, again, remember that your profile is about you, not your business, not your job… Role at your job. It’s about you as an influencer. What makes you brilliant at what you do? You know, so start with that, keep in mind that it needs to be in first person. You’re building relationships, so a profile that says, “Karen Yankovich is blah, blah, blah.” Like it’s, it immediately puts a wall up.
0:08:23.2 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:08:23.7 Karen Yankovich: So you wanna make sure that you are remembering feeling like you’re speaking to people. And then also keep in mind that LinkedIn is a massive search engine. So I am never ever going to teach a strategy that says, “Do all these things and then sit back on the beach and wait for all the business to come in,” like that, that’s not what I teach. However, let’s not leave any money on the table. Let’s make sure that thinking about what are people searching for, that you wanna come up as the search result. If you’re a speaker, what do you speak about? Are you using those words in your profile? Right? So those kinds of things, use every character LinkedIn gives you in all of the different sections because it is such a massive search engine, and why not use all the real estate we’ve got offered to us, available to us there? So I think that those are some things that I would think about. The other thing that I would mention is, and this is a pretty big, hot topic right now.
0:09:11.4 Karen Yankovich: And that is, LinkedIn’s got this new-ish feature called LinkedIn Creator Mode. So when you log onto LinkedIn and you get a regular LinkedIn profile, you have a regular LinkedIn profile. And for the vast majority of employees, that’s great. That’s fine. It’s still fine for a lot of them. If you are an accountant in a big law firm… In a big firm, you’re using LinkedIn to build relationships, but you’re not creating content. You don’t really need to create a huge brand of yourself, but if you have any kind of a role as an entrepreneur or in sales or anything like that, you wanna use LinkedIn Creator Mode. It shifts the energy of your profile and showcases you more as an influencer. And it gives you all kinds of new features that, an additional features that you can use to drive people to your brand.
0:09:51.4 Karen Yankovich: And some of the features literally say, tell us more, give us hashtags you wanna be found for, tell us more about the kinds of services you provide so that we know when to send people to your profile. And that’s LinkedIn Creator Mode, and that’s literally a toggle box and there’s a, like a resources section in your profile. It’s just a toggle box, toggling it on and off. So that’s something that I get asked a lot about, and that is I 100% think if you are a business owner or have a role, have a sales role, you should be using LinkedIn Creator Mode.
0:10:21.0 Kurt Baker: So the creator mode is basically just additional features to the basic mode, right? So…
0:10:25.1 Karen Yankovich: And it reorganizes your profile.
0:10:26.9 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:10:27.4 Karen Yankovich: So your profile is… My profile is in creator mode, so if anybody’s not sure what it looks like, you can go look at my profile, but you can see I’ve got additional places. I can put links and I’ve got hashtags that I can put in places. And my content is reordered so that you see my content first. You see my featured section first. You see the content that I post. You see that before you see all the other stuff.
0:10:47.3 Kurt Baker: Okay. So you mentioned hashtags real quick. So how do I figure out which hashtags I should be using based on who I am?
0:10:53.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. There’s no wrong answer to that.
0:10:55.0 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:10:55.1 Karen Yankovich: There’s also no right answer to that.
0:10:56.4 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:10:57.7 Karen Yankovich: You know, it’s just another way to help being found on LinkedIn. I would go down a little bit of a rabbit hole, see what other people that do what you do are using, and you can see how many people follow those hashtags. So the reality is if there’s a ton of people that follow a hashtag, it seems stands to reason that you may wanna come up with those people. But at the same time, there’s a million people that come up for it, you’re lost in the crowd. Right?
0:11:19.0 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:11:19.3 Karen Yankovich: So if you can get… If you can get a little bit more granular with what specifically you do, for example, if you… If what you do is geographically important, a hashtag might be the region that you work in, or the state that you work in. So think about those kinds of things. If you just hashtag realtor, but you work in New Jersey, how is, who care… You know, what are you, somebody in California…
0:11:39.6 Kurt Baker: It’s a lot of realtors.
0:11:40.6 Karen Yankovich: Right. Like, so think about it like that. Like, what are the things that would get granularly to drive people to specifically to what you want them to find you for.
0:11:49.3 Kurt Baker: Okay. That’s awesome. So, as far as, okay. So you want us, put in creator mode and then what should I go through as far as… I know there’s some basic errors. I know you talk about this a lot. So what are some kind of best practices these days? I know it changes a lot. What are some of the things you often see? I know you review pages. I saw you doing that this morning.
0:12:04.7 Karen Yankovich: I do. Yep.
0:12:05.4 Kurt Baker: I was watching you for a little bit.
0:12:05.6 Karen Yankovich: I do that. Yep. Every week.
0:12:07.5 Kurt Baker: Yeah. You’re reviewing pages and so everywhere from somebody that hasn’t really started their LinkedIn page and they’ve like left everything out, to people that kinda need to tweak it a little bit to talk about themselves a little more. So what are some of the common things you typically see that we should really kinda pay attention to?
0:12:20.0 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. Well, most common is people don’t wanna do their about section. And I get that. Nobody wants to write 2,600 characters about themselves. It’s hard. So most people overlook that. And that is really, that’s what makes this not a resume. That’s where you can tell a little bit of a narrative about what makes you unique. Tell me the story of you. Don’t tell me that you… Nobody cares if you know Word or Excel, but they might care that… You know, I mentioned today, there was somebody on the thing today, and I know this woman personally, and I said, I know the story that you started doing this work because you woke up one morning and you had to care for somebody’s finances. And you had this massive pile of receipts somewhere, and you didn’t know what to do with them, and you… Like that, tell me that story, ’cause people can relate to that. And people might say, “Well, I need to talk to her ’cause I totally get what she’s saying.”
0:13:02.6 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:13:02.7 Karen Yankovich: Right? So make it more of a narrative than just bullet points about what you do. Hook people in, tell them a story and let them know what makes you excited about what you do. Right? What makes it different? Like I literally just changed my about section a couple weeks ago and I, I’m… We’re all in New Jersey here, so I literally said, Jersey girl rant, I don’t understand why everybody’s using all these other… Use all the platforms you want, but don’t do it till after you use LinkedIn. Do your LinkedIn work first because that’s where the money is, and then you can do all that other stuff. And I literally put that in my about section because I think it’s interesting than just reading about what skills I have.
0:13:41.1 Kurt Baker: That is awesome. I know… We’re gonna take a quick break. You’re listening to Master Your Finances.
0:13:45.4 ANNOUNCER: This is Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker, a certified financial planner professional. Learn about tax efficiency, liability, owning, managing and saving your money, and more from Kurt and his experienced panel of guests. Master Your Finances is underwritten in part by Certified Wealth Management and Investment and Rider University. Rider University offers flexible education for adult learners. For more information, it’s rider.edu/nextstep.
0:14:13.8 Kurt Baker: Welcome back. You’re listening to Master Your Finances. I’m here with Karen Yankovich and we’re talking LinkedIn, and I think it’s awesome. I said you were just talking about how people don’t like to do the about section, and I think that’s something that I know I get coached on all the time, is that people talk about, Well, what do I talk about? Because, I don’t know, I’m a private wealth manager. They’re like, Well, there’s thousands of them in the country. What makes you different? Well, nobody else has the exact same personal story that I have. So if you really boil it down to your real personal story and be honest, the good, the bad, the ugly, tell them why you do what you do, why you have a passion for what you do, and how you can actually help somebody through your experiences, your life experiences, plus your expertise. And that’s a unique story no matter who you are.
0:14:54.2 Karen Yankovich: Exactly.
0:14:54.8 Kurt Baker: And it’s interesting. If you make it interesting, people are gonna wanna read about that.
0:14:57.9 Karen Yankovich: Exactly. And Kurt, I know a lot of people that are in the finance world, some of them have licenses and they have to be careful about what they can and can’t say on LinkedIn. I totally get that. And probably this is not something anybody can say, but I’ll use it as an example, you can say, I’m a financial planner and I help people make a lot of money like 90 million other financial planners do. Or you can…
0:15:16.4 Kurt Baker: SEC may not like that. [laughter]
0:15:17.3 Karen Yankovich: Or you can say, I’m a financial planner and I focus on helping women over 50 create enough wealth to retire at 60. So then now you’re telling me about you, but you’re making it about me, and you’re making me go, I wanna retire at 60. Wait, what do I to make that happen?
0:15:31.2 Kurt Baker: That’s true. Nobody cares about me. They only care about themselves, truly.
0:15:33.9 Karen Yankovich: It’s true. It’s true.
0:15:34.0 Kurt Baker: You have to talk about your client, that you’re serving.
0:15:36.0 Karen Yankovich: Exactly. So tell us a little bit about what the results are in a way that is compelling for me to be like, Wait, I want that.
0:15:43.6 Kurt Baker: Absolutely. So we tell the story, we put it in a client-focused framework.
0:15:49.6 Karen Yankovich: Exactly.
0:15:50.2 Kurt Baker: And personalize it.
0:15:53.3 Karen Yankovich: Exactly.
0:15:53.8 Kurt Baker: So what else should we be doing on there? I know you gotta put the basics, you gotta put the photo, I think that’s gotta be a…
0:15:57.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, you wanna have a…
0:15:58.3 Kurt Baker: You don’t wanna put the photo from the kids camp where you gotta on the way out.
0:16:00.7 Karen Yankovich: Exactly. Exactly.
0:16:00.8 Kurt Baker: That’s gotta be a decent photo.
0:16:01.8 Karen Yankovich: And there are some cool things you can do. You can even do a little video in that photo now. If you do it from your mobile device, you can make a little video that just says, Hey, I’m Karen, and I can… Again, I have that on my profile. You guys can check that out. You wanna have a header image, which is that banner at the top, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It can be a beautiful picture of where you live, it could be… It doesn’t have to be anything created. I go back and forth between ones that are created with ones with me just sitting with a microphone in my hand in front of a group of people. But use that space because it helps you show up as… It makes people see that you’re paying attention. Another relatively new section on LinkedIn is the featured section, that is… It’s also really valuable because this is where you can drive people to what you want them to do next. What exactly… Well, they’re on your LinkedIn profile, now, what do you want them to do? You want them to call you. Do you want them to get on your email list? Do you want them to listen to your show? What do you want them to do next? And you can put those things in the featured section. And I will say one of the biggest mistakes I see people make here, and this is a personal opinion that this is a mistake, they put too many things in their featured section.
0:17:07.9 Karen Yankovich: Nobody cares enough to watch all your YouTube videos, I don’t care how good they are, if you put 10 YouTube videos in there, nobody’s watching them and you’ve wasted the opportunity to give people the opportunity to take the next step with you. Instead of having, here’s a link to book a call with me, or here’s a link to my latest podcast episode, so they’re gonna do one of those things. Instead you’re overwhelming them with all the things you’ve got. So many people put a lot of stuff there, and I’m a fan of two things max, because that way… Again, you really wanna think about what is it… Why are you there? What do you wanna build these relationships for? What do you want people to do next?
0:17:42.7 Kurt Baker: Yeah, that’s awesome. I know a couple of things I just discovered personally, this is really funny, I’ll tell you. One is that you can actually, I guess, state your name there so that people can know how to pronounce it, especially if… Mine’s pretty easy. Kurt Baker, that’s pretty simple, right?
0:17:56.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
0:17:57.0 Kurt Baker: But there’s other names that aren’t quite so easy, and I know that I’ve got people that I know that I’ve known ’em for a while, and I’m always have to think about how to pronounce their name, and if they did that themselves, I’ll be like, Okay, now I’ve got it, I know exactly how to…
0:18:08.0 Karen Yankovich: And don’t you appreciate it when they’ve done that?
0:18:08.8 Kurt Baker: I do, I do.
0:18:09.2 Karen Yankovich: Because now when you’re…
0:18:10.5 Kurt Baker: Because now I know how to pronounce it. So do you wanna describe that a little bit?
0:18:11.6 Karen Yankovich: That’s a really cool feature. Yeah, it’s like a little megaphone that is an option in your information section at the top of your profile, and you can just say your name, and I think you have to record it on a mobile device. A lot of people use that. You could say anything you want, you can say anything you want there, but I’m gonna be annoyed if I’m thinking I’m gonna hear what your name is and you say, Hey, buy my stuff, right?
0:18:36.0 Kurt Baker: Yeah, don’t do that. [laughter]
0:18:37.5 Karen Yankovich: So make sure if you wanna say buy my… Like I could maybe say, “Hey, my name is Karen Yankovich, and don’t miss the latest episode of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast at goodgirlsgetrich.com.” I could say something like that if I really wanted to, but make sure you at least say your name.
0:18:50.5 Kurt Baker: Absolutely.
0:18:51.0 Karen Yankovich: Because that’s what people are expecting when they go to that section.
0:18:53.0 Kurt Baker: Correct. The other thing I thought was really cool, and I used it for the first time. I’d heard about it and then I actually used it, was you can create a QR code to exchange and get connected. You wanna describe that feature? Which I thought was pretty cool.
0:19:05.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, it’s all built-in. It’s all built in. In fact, one of the things I did recently at a conference I was at, we had a little printer and we would print the QR codes for LinkedIn for people just on stickers, and they could stick it on the back of their badge at the conference to help people easily connect with people on LinkedIn. It’s just if… And you just go on your app, and there’s a place on the LinkedIn app that shows you what your personal QR code is so that people can connect there. So that’s pretty cool too.
0:19:29.1 Kurt Baker: Yeah, I just thought that was neat. As you said, things are constantly changing, they’re getting better.
0:19:32.4 Karen Yankovich: Constantly. Yeah. Yeah.
0:19:34.9 Kurt Baker: So when I’m doing my history portion, ’cause that’s a lot of information. Do you have any tips about how I describe my past history, ’cause it might be very, very diverse, but it also might be very different than what I’m doing now. Do you have any kind of tips about how you kinda tie all this together to give yourself an image?
0:19:53.7 Karen Yankovich: You know I do. [chuckle] You know I do. So here’s the thing. This is the most resume like part of LinkedIn. This is where it’s resume like. And I would like you to continue thinking about keywords so like if your title was vice president, nobody’s searching for a vice president. But if you’re like, for example, I was vice president of a company a bunch of years ago, and my title was vice president. But if you go to my LinkedIn profile it says vice president of marketing and media. Marketing and media are keywords for me, if what I was doing now was human resources related, ’cause I did everything. I might say vice president of human resources, it’s true. It was never on my business card, but I did do that work. So I don’t want you to make stuff up that you didn’t do. But be creative in your titles, thinking ’cause people are gonna wanna know a little bit more about that.
0:20:34.5 Karen Yankovich: But here’s the most important thing I think about your, that experience section. What you wanna do is you wanna build a story of what brought you to where you are today. So if you worked at McDonalds when you were 15, and you wanna put that on your LinkedIn profile, and right now what you do is customer service oriented, then tell me there that what you loved most about working at McDonald’s was when old man Murphy came in and you used to… Everybody made you go to the register because you were the only one that he liked.
0:21:05.3 Karen Yankovich: Relate everything back in the previous experiences to what’s important now. If I use that same example of the company, Infinity Communications Group, when I was a vice president of that company, I don’t even talk about doing HR work in that. Nobody… It doesn’t… It’s not relevant at all to what I’m doing now, so you don’t have to. It’s not a resume where you need to list all the things you did, just talk about the things you did that are relevant to what you’re doing now, to whatever extent you can. They may be things that are completely different, I do feel like there’s always a way, ’cause it’s all part of your journey, right?
0:21:36.8 Kurt Baker: Correct. Absolutely.
0:21:37.9 Karen Yankovich: It’s all part of your journey, so tell me a little bit about what… How that feeds into what you did today? I literally had somebody write their profile like that one time, and it was awesome, she literally said, “And when I did that company what… That made me uniquely qualified to do this, which I’m doing right now in every single one.” It’s okay to do that. It’s not, there’s no LinkedIn police that says, “Here’s how this has to be done.” So if you’re telling the story of what brought you to where you are today and make… Kind of look at that experience section as a place that you share your journey, that’s really the energy of that. From there, do what you gotta do.
0:22:12.4 Kurt Baker: See, right now, I was just talking about this, I’m envisioning myself sitting in an interview with somebody, explaining, it’s like, Well, why did that job when you were 15 at McDonalds, how does that relate to what you’re gonna do for me here at this corporation 30 years later? And you have to answer the question. So now you just answered proactively and just put in that information about…
0:22:31.6 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, exactly.
0:22:34.2 Kurt Baker: What experiences you hold for that not just that, Hey, I was whatever, I was flipping burgers in the back. And they’re like, “Okay, what does that mean?” But what does that do?
0:22:40.4 Karen Yankovich: But what you don’t know this guy… For all you know, this guy that’s interviewing you or this woman that’s interviewing you, maybe she worked for McDonald’s, and when she says, “I remember coming home smelling like French fries every single night,” it might actually be a nice connection point.
0:22:52.9 Kurt Baker: I actually do. [laughter]
0:22:53.2 Karen Yankovich: There you go, right? So it might actually be a nice connection point. So it’s not like… I will address something else that I get asked a lot and again, my opinion, so many people say, should I go all the way back to the beginning? And I don’t, I think yes, because somebody that worked with you at McDonald’s when you were 15, might say is this is the same Kurt that I worked with at McDonald’s? Whenever that was. So I think, yes, but there’s a lot of people that worry about doing that because of ageism, and they worry that people are gonna know how old they are, and at the end of the day, people know how old you are. The world of not people not knowing how old you are like 20 years ago or 30 years ago that’s over. You have your high school friends posted on Facebook that your 30 year and your 40 year, and your 50 and 60 year reunions happened last week, like people know how old you are now. We live in a world where everybody knows everything about you.
0:23:42.4 Kurt Baker: That is true.
0:23:43.1 Karen Yankovich: So I feel like just make it valuable to you and don’t worry about it. If you’re worried about it, I get it. I don’t think, I think you’re, I don’t think you’re able to hide it as much as you think you’re able to hide it. So I feel like just dive into it.
0:23:53.2 Kurt Baker: That’s it. So I should be telling people about the first time I bought cards when I was 11 years old and what sold them door to door? I should be telling people that?
0:24:00.2 Karen Yankovich: Yes. Why not? [laughter] Why not? ‘Cause that’s a fun… But you know what? That’s a fun little story to talk about when you are in your about section if it leads into work.
0:24:06.6 Kurt Baker: Yeah, that actually was an experience, that was… Yeah, my parents thought I was crazy. I ended up being a little crazy, so [laughter] it’s like, let’s just say a lots of cards for a couple of years, [laughter] I was done. It wasn’t my most successful venture, but it was a great learning experience, that’s for sure. So you write that in a way that works for you. So we’re going to take another quick break. You’re listening to Master Your Finances.
0:24:31.8 ANNOUNCER: This is Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker. Certified financial planner professional, learn about tax efficiency, liability, owning, managing and saving your money and more from Kurt and his experienced panel of guests. Master Your Finances is underwritten in part by Certified Wealth Management and Investment, and Rider University. Rider university offers flexible education for adult learners. For more information it’s rider.edu/nextstep.
0:25:00.5 Kurt Baker: Welcome back, you’re listening to Master Your Finance. I’m here with Karen Yankovich, and we’re putting together the profile, all the experience apparently go all the way back to your very first business venture when you’re 11 or 12 years old, I guess apparently, I don’t have that on mine apparently.
0:25:12.6 Karen Yankovich: If you want. You don’t have to but if you want, you can.
0:25:16.6 Kurt Baker: So maybe I have to go back and update mine, and go back a few more jobs [laughter] to give you the real basis of where I started. So once you got all this set up, so how do we go beyond that, how do we move beyond the profile aspect of it?
0:25:27.5 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. I was doing a talk one time, a live talk one time, and somebody after I talked stood up and said, “Alright, Karen. This was great, blah, blah, blah, I’m nailing you to the wall. Give me one thing, one thing I need to do about LinkedIn from now on.” And I so wanted to say do your profile. I really wanted to say you have to have a great profile, but the reality is, having a great profile that nobody sees is like nailing a beautiful flyer to a tree in the middle of the forest. The beauty of LinkedIn is the relationships. You have to be consistent. LinkedIn 100% can be a money tree for you, but it’s a money tree if you are watering that tree, and that means that doesn’t mean like get the profile done update when you need to update it, but now do some outreach and make sure.
0:26:09.8 Karen Yankovich: It’s interesting. So many people feel like there’s not a lot of people in their existing network, but start with your existing network. Spend some time, make a list of 50 people if you can, or 20 people that you’re already connected to that you haven’t talked to in a while and just reach out and say, “Hey, remember we were at… We met at that conference a couple of years ago and I see that you’ve changed jobs since then. I’d love to catch up. I’d love to hear what you’re up to.” Do it strategically. You wanna… Whatever your business goals are, your career goals are, do it strategically, but start with your existing network because there’s probably opportunities there that you are just not even know. You don’t know that they’re there because you haven’t talked to these people. But then be proactive in building your network, not a hundred people a week.
0:26:50.4 Karen Yankovich: Like we’ve got, there’s a lot of AI tools out there that are spamming LinkedIn these days. And I’m not talking about doing that. I’m talking about strategically reaching out to people. And I, there’s three categories that I like to build relationships in. And the first category is let’s not overlook the people that might be able to hire you, give you whether it’s a job or for whatever it is you’re looking for. But the conversations around, “Here is what I do. Give me your credit card.” It’s not really the top level conversation you wanna have, but we don’t wanna overlook that. Those are people who wanna build relationships with people that might wanna hire us. The other two categories is where the biggest power is on LinkedIn. The first one is who else serves an audience of people that you serve?
0:27:31.3 Karen Yankovich: And those conversations now are, “Here’s what I do. Who do you know?” Just like Kurt, you and I met at networking events, like a true networking conversation, but look like… Go to the member directory of the networking organizations you are a part of and make a list of another 50 people. And then just take five a week and reach out and say, Hey, we’re both members of this organization, looks like you’re doing some cool things. I’d really like to get to know more about you. Even if you think they might be a great client for you, or you want them to hire you for a job, that’s not the energy of the… The conversation is still around. “Here’s what I do? Who do you know?” And now you’re getting warm introductions to people and their company, or maybe their cousin or their neighbor or their business colleague.
0:28:13.7 Karen Yankovich: Basically, that’s how I grow my business with those conversations. And then the third category. And this is something that almost nobody does, but it’s so powerful is, who are the journalists that write about and talk about the kinds of things you’re an expert in? And are you building credibility by being interviewed on podcasts or newspapers or magazines or blogs and building relationships with those journalists. I’ve had some massive media opportunities that came from me just genuinely building relationships with the people that write articles about the kinds of things I do. I am routinely going to business publications and typing the word LinkedIn into the search bar to see who wrote articles about LinkedIn and it’s the people that wrote the article that I wanna be connected to. Not, I don’t really care that much about the article.
0:28:58.0 Karen Yankovich: I wanna know that who’s writing those articles? And I’ve had people have such huge, I’ve had people be on NBC News. I’ve had people be on The View by doing that, literally connecting. Like I have a student right now who is in media and she was gonna be in New York. And she was meeting with some morning show producers ’cause she wanted that to be connected to them for some of her clients. And we sat down and we just made a list of like 50 producers, of morning show producers. And she went through the list and started connecting with them all and said, I’m gonna be in New York. Wanna have coffee? I’m gonna be in New York, wanna have coffee? And she built her whole… A whole schedule around that. So looking to see, don’t just look for the articles about like, and to share the articles, look to build relationships with the journalists, with the publishers of those magazines. And the podcast, are you connecting with the host of your favorite podcast? So Kurt and I are expecting a lot of connection requests after this show. Right?
0:29:51.9 Kurt Baker: Of course.
0:29:52.9 Karen Yankovich: Are you connecting with the host of your favorite podcast? Because that’s how, if you wanna… Like I have a podcast, I get pitched all the time. I don’t know these people. I’m not very likely to take a cold pitch from someone not for any other reason than I don’t know them. But if you… If I wake up one morning and on LinkedIn, you shared an episode of my show and you said, love this episode, episode 202, you tag me, you tag my guest. Even if I don’t know you, I know you now.
0:30:17.1 Kurt Baker: Right. Sure.
0:30:17.7 Karen Yankovich: Right. It doesn’t happen all that often.
0:30:20.1 Kurt Baker: It takes some effort.
0:30:21.2 Karen Yankovich: So you will remember those things, right? And that’s the kind of thing. Now I’m gonna look at your link and if you’ve done the profile part right now you look worthy of my time. Now I’m paying attention and I’m gonna wanna build a relationship with you. And those are… These are much faster ways to build your business, build your credibility and build your visibility. And you don’t have to pay a $10,000 publicist every month to make it happen.
0:30:40.9 Kurt Baker: Well, that’s just awesome. Yeah. So just a little bit of working and a high return. Right? So leveraging your time is what this sounds like.
0:30:44.6 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
0:30:45.6 Kurt Baker: And so you can organize that. I know there’s different levels, some people just have the basic LinkedIn, do you wanna talk a little bit about the premium etcetera? I know there’s different things you can get.
0:30:54.3 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. So LinkedIn Sales Navigator is what I have and I like… It’s really the one tool that the, probably the number one tool in my toolbox. LinkedIn is very particular about, they will not, they will not, they do not want anybody to log into your account but you. So and they will flag you. At least once a week I get a call from somebody that says my profile got shut down, what should I do? And I wanna say to them, like, “You should have hired me instead of the person you hired because they got your profile shut down because they were doing all this illegal stuff.” So the bottom line is because of that, you have to do all the work. Right. And we’re busy. We don’t wanna do all this work. Right. So anything that we can do to leverage our time, I’m willing to pay for it.
0:31:34.6 Karen Yankovich: So Sales Navigator will do things like when you’re doing these searches, let’s say you’re doing these searches for journalists or people in a network that you belong to. One of the search parameters is narrow this down only by people active on LinkedIn in the last 30 days. So that saves you from even connecting or reaching out to so many people. It saves you time. There’s so many other things in Sales Navigator that are huge. You can save leads, nobody knows you saved them, but you can save leads. And what it does is you’ll have a separate wall just of the content that the people you saved gives you. So now again, this is about relationship building. So you don’t have to go searching for the podcast host or the journalist that you wanna build relationships with.
0:32:16.9 Karen Yankovich: Sales Navigator serving it up to you every day. So there’s a lot of features in there that helps you navigate the relationship building and leverages your time. And the people that I work with are all busy, and anything I can help them with that can help them save time to do this. ‘Cause we talked about a lot of things, but it really doesn’t take a lot of time. But again, if I can save them an extra half hour a week, I’m all down for doing that. So that’s why I love the premium version, there are other premium versions, there’s a job seeker, there’s a hiring recruiter, so if you’re looking for a job or you’re recruiting then you may wanna look at those, but I think for the vast majority of the people, Sales Navigator is well worth the investment.
0:32:55.9 Kurt Baker: Okay. So you set up the more advanced, I know you can track it, you can actually organize things a little bit better too.
0:33:02.9 Karen Yankovich: You can, yeah.
0:33:02.8 Kurt Baker: Which?
0:33:02.9 Karen Yankovich: You can. You can create lists, you can create… Yeah, you can create lists. So if you have a… If you go to a conference and you connect… You have 100 business cards, you can connect with those 100 people and put them all on a list and then manage that list within Sales Navigator, so you know how many times we’ve gone to conferences and you come back and you’re like what just happened? You don’t even do much follow-up at all, and then you go to the next conference and wondering how do you leverage this thing…
0:33:24.7 Kurt Baker: You’re just collecting business cards you’re not really doing anything with them yet.
0:33:27.5 Karen Yankovich: So Sales Navigator helps you dive deeper into actually using LinkedIn to get opportunities.
0:33:33.1 Kurt Baker: Wow, that’s incredible. So now I’ve got my profile set up and then I’m starting to manage it, so what else should I be doing to cultivate my business?
0:33:41.1 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, so this is gonna be a little radical Kurt, So I don’t know if people can handle this.
0:33:45.3 Kurt Baker: Oh, no.
0:33:46.4 Karen Yankovich: The goal is actually to get on the phone with people. [laughter] Get on the phone an actual good old-fashioned phone call. You can even Zoom if you want, but it’s not about having a big network, it’s not about having pen pals, it’s not about DM-ing. Your goal with every single person you connect with is to hopefully get on the phone with as many of them as you can. And those conversations literally are, “Here’s what I do. Who do you know?” Like having those kinds of conversations. If you’re having five of those conversations a week, your business has changed forever. I promise you that. But so many people… So this is what I mean about like. I think this was maybe before we went live, where we talked about good old… This is good, old-fashioned marketing, get on the phone with people. This is where we’re taking these tools that we now have that we didn’t have 20 years ago, and we’re using them to manage our time and now… But what still works is when you talk to people. So.
0:34:36.5 Kurt Baker: Yeah. We’re still human beings, we like to hear our voices and even meet. You can get together, you can have coffee.
0:34:41.8 Karen Yankovich: Exactly.
0:34:43.1 Kurt Baker: You can have lunch whatever. But you have to make… This is a great way to manage all these connections in a very efficient way and make sure you don’t forget about… I know when I’ve gone through mine, I’m like, Oh, I get that person, who just like totally drops off your radar ’cause I haven’t talked to them in a while, we should actually like reconnecting and because we do have a lot in common, we just, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a connection recently.
0:35:03.4 Karen Yankovich: And you can even… You can use… You can use LinkedIn. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has some built-in CRM type tools. I actually use Asana, which is an off… A separate tool, and I… But I only put people in Asana if I really want to follow up with them, like not everybody goes into Asana. You can just keep them as a saved lead and as a saved lead they’re gonna continue to be on your radar. And then at some point you may see that… Here’s the deal, we’re talking about this like it’s so easy, it really is this easy, but there’s also gonna be a percentage of people who are just not gonna respond to you, just let them go.
0:35:37.4 Kurt Baker: Oh, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
0:35:37.9 Karen Yankovich: Just let them go. Don’t worry about the people spamming you just let them go and just stay focused on the opportunities and the people that are responding and keep it going. Water that money tree every single week.
0:35:48.9 Kurt Baker: Yeah, it’s always a numbers game, right? So we’re gonna take another quick break. You’re listening to Master Your Finances.
0:35:54.5 ANNOUNCER: This is Master Your Finances with Kurt Baker. Certified financial planner professional, learn about tax efficiency, liability, owning, managing and saving your money and more from Kurt and his experienced panel of guests. Master Your Finances is underwritten in part by Certified Wealth Management and Investment and Rider University. Rider university offers flexible education for adult learners. For more formation, it’s rider.edu/nextstep.
0:36:23.0 Kurt Baker: Welcome back, you are listening to Master Your Finance. I’m here with Karen Yankovich, and we kinda went through the basics of LinkedIn, you wanna set up the basis of the profile, you wanna use some of these cool features, like pronounce your name so people know what it sounds like. And they’ll hear your voice, which is kind of cool. Set up your experience, get your contacts going actually connect with them. And there’s a lot to do. So I know personally, when I get coached, there’s all this information, where do I really start and how do I actually kind of put one foot in front of the other so I don’t feel overwhelmed then I’ll actually do it. ‘Cause you actually have to do this. Right?
0:36:57.4 Karen Yankovich: You do. You do. And that’s what I mean when I said LinkedIn really expects you to be the one doing all this. And let’s get real Kurt, you really can’t outsource relationship building. So it does have to be you. So is I’m really committed to making, having a simple a process as possible so that it’s doable. And I tell the people that I work with that I basically teach you to fish. I’m not fishing for you. Because when you learn how to do this process, you can literally take LinkedIn out of the picture and you can continue, it still works, it’s still building your business ’cause it’s building… It’s learning about how to reach out to people, what to say, how to say it, but honestly, once you get the profile piece done, which is the upfront work, there’s obviously more upfront work and you just gotta figure out what you’re saying and how to create searches and things like that.
0:37:39.0 Karen Yankovich: But if you’re doing outreach to five new people a week, that’s all that you need to do to make this really profitable for yourself. It doesn’t have to be… In fact, if you spend a day and say, “I’m gonna spend a day and do 100 today.” If you do what we talked about and you’ve done this research and they’re warm people and they are active on LinkedIn, you’re not gonna be able to keep up with their responses and now you just, you blew opportunities.
0:38:00.9 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:38:01.2 Karen Yankovich: So five people a week and just try to stay on top of it, if they don’t respond, let them go, and as you start doing this again every single week, like you brush your teeth. If you’re doing this every single week, you’ll start to see opportunities and you’ll… It doesn’t… There’s not a lot of time involved in the consistent strategy of this, but the LinkedIn message box then becomes one of your most valuable tools in your business because that’s where all business is happening. So I think it’s just a matter of taking the things we talked about here today, being consistent with it, but not being… Not… It’s not a… It doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
0:38:39.2 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:38:39.8 Karen Yankovich: Just reaching out to five people a day, use those three categories that I shared, maybe each week, pick a different category and find five in the different categories, and what happens when you’re building your network proactively is you have a network that you’ve created that is valuable to you versus a network that was reactive to you and you don’t know who any of those people are.
0:38:56.5 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:38:58.3 Karen Yankovich: Right? So in six months, you’re gonna be so happy that you did this work because you’ve got a funnel, you’ve got leads coming in, you’ve got a lead funnel, and you’ve got a network that you can count on when you need it.
0:39:09.9 Kurt Baker: That’s great. So are there any tools out there to help me kinda walk through? ‘Cause I know with LinkedIn, ’cause I remember one of my experiences like about a week ago, I’ve heard you could do the QR code thing.
0:39:19.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:39:20.7 Kurt Baker: That’s interesting. And I didn’t have time like most people to go actually figure it out ’cause it wasn’t a priority item, and then I was at a networking event yesterday, and I go, “Yeah, I understand you can do the QR code.” And one of the two people I was standing in front of, she goes, “Hey, I know how to do that.” She shows me.
0:39:34.4 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:39:34.5 Kurt Baker: And her co-worker didn’t know how to do it.
0:39:36.1 Karen Yankovich: Right.
0:39:36.2 Kurt Baker: ‘Cause and he was… They were both young.
0:39:36.7 Karen Yankovich: Right.
0:39:38.0 Kurt Baker: So that’s why I felt better.
0:39:38.0 Karen Yankovich: Right, right, right.
0:39:38.8 Kurt Baker: They’re both young people. I thought everybody young knew how to do this stuff.
0:39:39.7 Karen Yankovich: Just so many. There are so many things.
0:39:42.6 Kurt Baker: But it was kind of interesting. So is there a way to kinda get, kind of the basics and training and just say, “Hey, here’s how could… ” So you can kind of see how it’s not… ‘Cause LinkedIn is like… There’s so much stuff going on there.
0:39:50.8 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, listen, I think you should listen to my podcast. There’s a lot ways there.
0:39:55.3 Kurt Baker: Okay. There you go.
0:39:55.9 Karen Yankovich: And I have a YouTube channel, actually, if you go to linkedinprofiletips.com, it’ll take you to a playlist on my YouTube channel.
0:40:02.0 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:40:02.1 Karen Yankovich: That gives you… And I did it just a couple of months before we’re recording this, so it’s fairly recent.
0:40:05.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:40:05.7 Karen Yankovich: I mean nothing’s ever completely current in social media.
0:40:07.9 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:40:08.5 Karen Yankovich: But it’ll help you get through some of the profile stuff on this, but you know the one thing that we didn’t talk about, and I wanna talk about for two seconds and then I’ll tell you why.
0:40:17.2 Kurt Baker: Sure.
0:40:17.8 Karen Yankovich: There’s also the whole point… So many people say, “Well, how do I get… ” Nobody sees my posts on LinkedIn, do I have to post? When do I post? We didn’t even talk about that? The reality is, I don’t care if you ever post or not, the value of LinkedIn is the relationships. It’s getting on the phone with people. And yes, if you’re an influencer, and I talked about the value of creator modes, so creating content, and I have a podcast every week and you have this show, so content and staying top of mind with this network that you’re carefully crafting is important, but it is the least in my opinion, in my strategy is the least important part of this whole thing, it’s… What’s most important is that you do the work to get on the phone with people and follow that up.
0:40:53.3 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:40:54.1 Karen Yankovich: To build your business and your career to whatever you’re looking to build your business and career with.
0:40:57.0 Kurt Baker: So that interesting. It’s counterintuitive. So the goal is to get off of LinkedIn by using LinkedIn.
0:41:02.3 Karen Yankovich: Exactly. That’s exactly right.
0:41:03.8 Kurt Baker: That’s interesting ’cause one of the things I hear all the time is that, “Okay, well, you don’t necessarily have to post as you just stated, but it’s good to go in and interact with other people that post.”
0:41:11.1 Karen Yankovich: Yes. Yes.
0:41:11.3 Kurt Baker: And so if they see… So it’s people you wanna connect with, then they’re just gonna see your name, so-and-so liked your post, or they saw what you got, and I think that, if nothing else, it puts your name in front of them occasionally.
0:41:23.9 Karen Yankovich: Exactly, and I’m gonna qualify that by saying, of course, I think you should post.
0:41:27.0 Kurt Baker: Right. Yeah.
0:41:27.6 Karen Yankovich: I think you should post, and I think you should engage on other people’s posts, but not before you do the other stuff.
0:41:33.5 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:41:34.3 Karen Yankovich: You’re right, the other stuff is the important stuff, and then how many eyes are on my posts, I don’t care.
0:41:38.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:41:38.1 Karen Yankovich: Ever, how many people see my posts, I care if the right people see my posts and they do if you’re doing this right, they will, because LinkedIn’s algorithm is gonna lean towards the people you’re engaging with and interacting with.
0:41:47.7 Kurt Baker: So once I get the thing set up… The other thing I hear about is a lot of the times you wanna send people to your own website.
0:41:54.5 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:41:54.9 Karen Yankovich: Things like that.
0:41:55.0 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:41:55.2 Karen Yankovich: ‘Cause LinkedIn is owned by LinkedIn, right?
0:41:56.9 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:41:57.1 Karen Yankovich: So at some point, you wanna make sure you’re capturing the information.
0:42:01.1 Karen Yankovich: Yes.
0:42:02.0 Kurt Baker: So regardless of what LinkedIn does, you’ve got their basics. Name…
0:42:07.6 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:42:08.4 Kurt Baker: Their email address.
0:42:08.5 Karen Yankovich: You’re absolutely… Exactly.
0:42:10.8 Kurt Baker: Whatever the case is, you wanna get that somewhere. So how do you transfer it from the LinkedIn like, yes, I’m connecting with people to my own system, where I know I’ve got it.
0:42:16.5 Karen Yankovich: There are so many places on LinkedIn you can share a link.
0:42:18.6 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:42:19.0 Karen Yankovich: There’s in your featured section.
0:42:20.6 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:42:21.1 Karen Yankovich: There’s so many places you can do that because you’re absolutely right, you do wanna drive people to something you own, like your email list.
0:42:27.5 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:42:29.6 Karen Yankovich: There’s a lot of places you can do that. Just this week, LinkedIn came out with a feature where if you upload a picture from your mobile device, you have the option right on the picture to put a link, so let’s say you have a… You’re doing a master… A webinar, you can put a picture saying, join my webinar, and then right smack in the middle of the picture there could be a link that says click here to register, and I’ll take you to the webinar, and then that’s where they put their name and their email address in. So, obviously, you could put the link in the comment section as well.
0:42:57.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:42:57.5 Karen Yankovich: And there’s other places to do that, but there’s a few places on LinkedIn, and if you guys look on my profile, it’s typically my master class. I have an on-demand master class. Every place that I’ve got, watch my masterclass, is a place you should have something to send somebody to your email list.
0:43:14.0 Karen Yankovich: Okay. Well, that’s good, so we’ll just… So I’m gonna just look at Karen’s LinkedIn page.
0:43:16.4 Karen Yankovich: Completely copy my profile. You have my permission.
[chuckle]
0:43:18.7 Kurt Baker: You’ll see how it’s done right. Okay [chuckle] Okay. Alright, so what other tips you have for us? I know you had tons of them. So…
0:43:26.6 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, I think we’ve covered a lot. I think at the end of the day, I think… I just wanna say, I’m not here to say that don’t do Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or any of that other stuff, there’s value in all of those things, but if the vast majority of your business comes from referrals…
0:43:41.1 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:43:41.9 Karen Yankovich: Then do all that stuff after you’ve done the stuff we’ve talked about here today, like do this stuff first, do it first every week, connect with me. And like I said, I’ve got no end of tips, I’m on LinkedIn on a regular basis talking about this stuff, and I wanna also say too, remember that you are… People see you when you don’t know you’re being seen.
0:44:03.6 Kurt Baker: That’s true.
0:44:04.6 Karen Yankovich: So show up in a way that really positions you as an influencer, you are an influencer. One of my students that I talked to today, she has a podcast, and somebody had reached out to her and said… I had posted on social media and tagged her that they listen to her podcast, and based on her podcast, it’s a wellness podcast, for the first time in her life, she went to the doctor and her numbers were all improved and things like that, and she was telling me this, and I was like, does that make your speechless ’cause that’s the impact you’re having in the world.
0:44:28.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:44:28.8 Karen Yankovich: We don’t remember that sometimes that we’re doing all this stuff and that there’s actually people on the other side reading it and watching it, and their lives are being changed by it, so remember that as you’re showing up, that you… People need you to be showing up as an influencer, and you can… There’s probably a higher level you can go with really positioning yourself. We all, especially women, we have a tendency to kinda… I got it, don’t worry about it.
0:44:56.2 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:44:56.8 Karen Yankovich: No, tell them you’re the best there is, and tell them why.
0:44:58.2 Kurt Baker: [chuckle]
0:45:00.3 Karen Yankovich: Because people wanna hire the best there is, right?
0:45:02.0 Kurt Baker: True.
0:45:02.6 Karen Yankovich: So you have to show up as if you’re worthy, and you have to tell people you’re worthy of their time and don’t be afraid to do that.
0:45:07.5 Kurt Baker: No, I agree, 100%. So you wanna really tell your story and you wanna kinda put it in a way that identifies with people you’re trying to reach. You get on the phone with them. So the follow-up itself, you said like five people a week, so how long should I wait before I say, “Naah.”
0:45:26.1 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:45:26.8 Kurt Baker: They’re not really responding.
0:45:26.9 Karen Yankovich: There’s no real exact science to it. I think people, if you do it in the way where you’re connecting with people you know are active on LinkedIn, give it a couple of weeks, and if it’s somebody, again if it’s somebody that you just kind of…
0:45:34.6 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:45:35.3 Karen Yankovich: Took a stab, stab in the dark, let them go. But somebody that you really wanna be connected to, then you know, find another reason, maybe… There’s some of the tools and Sales Navigator will also tell you who’s been featured in the news in the last 30 days.
0:45:48.1 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:45:48.6 Karen Yankovich: So if maybe they’ve been featured in the news and you can tag them and say, “You know, I just read this article about Mary Smith,” and there’s ways that you can… You wanna do this as… The warmer you can make this engagement.
0:46:02.4 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:46:02.5 Karen Yankovich: The better chance you’re gonna have of getting results and building relationships with these people. So do whatever you can to warm it up.
0:46:06.7 Kurt Baker: Right, so basically, you wanna get to know them as well as you can.
0:46:09.5 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:46:10.0 Kurt Baker: On a real basis.
0:46:11.9 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:46:12.6 Kurt Baker: I guess we should be reading their profiles.
0:46:14.0 Karen Yankovich: Exactly.
0:46:14.9 Kurt Baker: We should be reading their experience.
0:46:16.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:46:16.9 Kurt Baker: What they’re about, connect with them, look at what they’re publishing, what they have, maybe their website.
0:46:21.1 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:46:21.8 Kurt Baker: So when you’re having a connection with them, even if it’s somebody you already know, maybe it’s been five years since you connected with them.
0:46:26.1 Karen Yankovich: Right.
0:46:26.3 Karen Yankovich: Things could have changed quite a bit.
0:46:26.5 Karen Yankovich: Yeah.
0:46:29.0 Karen Yankovich: And personalize it.
0:46:30.3 Karen Yankovich: Exactly. And start with…
0:46:32.4 Kurt Baker: To exactly who they are.
0:46:34.2 Karen Yankovich: Start with, I’m so impressed with this work you’re doing around this. Start with stroking them a little bit because they’re gonna… Everybody… Let them know that you read their stuff, it’s okay that you read their stuff, a lot of people say, I don’t like to go on people’s profile ’cause LinkedIn will say I was there, so what?
0:46:47.8 Kurt Baker: Right.
0:46:49.1 Karen Yankovich: People know you’re interested in them. That’s a good thing.
0:46:51.6 Kurt Baker: Yeah.
0:46:52.4 Karen Yankovich: As you’re building a career.
0:46:53.2 Kurt Baker: A lot of people will look at mine multiple times like, “Why do they keep staring at me.”
0:46:55.1 Karen Yankovich: Yeah. Yeah.
0:46:55.2 Kurt Baker: [laughter] What’s up with that?
0:46:57.1 Karen Yankovich: And you know what you can do? You can go backdoor around that…
0:47:00.6 Kurt Baker: I don’t care [chuckle]
0:47:00.7 Karen Yankovich: And say, “Hey Mary, I was just thinking about you the other day and Mary’s gonna be like, I was just thinking about you too.” But in the meantime…
0:47:04.4 Kurt Baker: That’s so funny.
0:47:04.7 Karen Yankovich: They looked at your profile, that’s how you were thinking about them, right? So… But again, keep it warm, this is… Doesn’t this feel better than just ads and spam and…
0:47:15.1 Kurt Baker: Oh yeah. Yeah. I don’t like the ads.
0:47:15.6 Karen Yankovich: And TikTok dances and videos and I don’t know…
0:47:17.5 Kurt Baker: Let’s keep it real, right?
0:47:21.2 Karen Yankovich: Yeah, just building actual relationships, talking to really cool people and… Yeah, it will change everything. If you take a step, if you kinda go back to the old way of marketing.
0:47:33.5 Kurt Baker: Okay.
0:47:34.2 Karen Yankovich: Actually talking to people…
0:47:34.3 Kurt Baker: Absolutely. This is amazing. Karen, any final thought before we… Yeah.
0:47:36.7 Karen Yankovich: I would love you to connect with me, anybody that’s listening wants to connect with me, just let me know this is where we met.
0:47:43.0 Kurt Baker: Absolutely.
0:47:46.4 Karen Yankovich: And I would love to have your LinkedIn connection.
0:47:46.5 Kurt Baker: Absolutely. Thank you Karen. As always, it’s been awesome. And we’re here. Thank you for listening to Master Your Finances. Have a great day.
[music]
0:47:54.5 ANNOUNCER: That’s all for today’s episode of Master Your Finances. Miss Kurt Baker’s biggest money managing tip or even a full episode? Head on over to Masteryourfinances.us or 1077thebronc.com/Masteryourfinances. Look for Master Your Finances on Anchor, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time. Only on 1077-The Bronc.

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