G'Day everyone.

It is Coach Michelle J Raymond, your trusted guide for building

your brand and your business on LinkedIn and listeners this week,

I have brought a guest on the show.

The reason that I brought a guest on this show is 'cause just a few weeks ago I

was a guest on his podcast and we just kept talking forever and ever and ever.

Scott Aaron, we got onto the topic of all the red flags that we've seen from our

experience on LinkedIn, so I appreciate you coming on sharing your experience.

Welcome to the show.

Grateful to be here.

I'll say this.

It was my longest podcast episode.

Mine are typically bite-sized, either 15 minute solo episode

or 35 minute interview episode.

Ours was close to an hour.

We kept going, because the sad thing is there's more red

flags than ever on LinkedIn.

You and I have been on the platform for probably the same amount of time.

And there, there was a a, a day and an age where there weren't too many red flags.

But it just seems like the more that technology continues to advance in

social media, there's more and more spam that we need to be aware of.

Yeah, there absolutely is.

And I wanna talk about.

These LinkedIn scams that are going on because they are getting smarter.

And if you don't have the wisdom that comes with experience and amazing

networks that you and I have, it can really impact your personal brand.

I'm gonna start with the most obvious one.

And I call them cheaters.

It just infuriates me.

But let's talk about engagement pods.

Do we have enough time for this?

You know, I didn't even prepare a list of questions on this one 'cause I

thought there's no way we're gonna get to everything, even though I want to.

I want you to explain what an engagement pod is to people and how can we spot them.

So an engagement pod.

There are two types.

Some are free, some are paid.

And it's crazy to me that people pay 2, 3, 4, I've heard up to

$500 a month to be a part of that.

And basically they were formed and I will preface this by saying LinkedIn does

not support LinkedIn engagement pods.

They do not support it.

They've written articles on it.

They are trying to crack down on them.

It's when a conglomerate of people come together.

20, 30, 40 upwards of a hundred people and they agree to all post on the same time,

on certain days and like, and comment on each other's stuff regardless of any

relation to each other's industry, any.

Any form of relatability to the person's content, to quote unquote

"beat the LinkedIn algorithm".

Now, I will say this, there's 14 LinkedIn algorithms.

There's a gentleman by the name of Chris Penn who, if you guys are not

following him on LinkedIn, do it.

He studies algorithms and he just released, uh, his mid year report on

the unofficial LinkedIn algorithm, and there's 14 of them now.

And he said basically there's no beating the LinkedIn algorithm 'cause there's 14.

So this notion of getting people to like, and comment, like, and

comment, it's, it, it's, it's cheating the system, number one.

Number two, it's what I call forced inorganic engagement.

It's not genuine, it's not authentic.

It's basically becoming a job.

And Michelle.

I ended up talking to a colleague the other day and I said, how much time

are you spending on LinkedIn every day?

And they said, around five hours.

I, that was my reaction.

Well, for those that are listening on the audio podcast, my eyes just popped out of

my head, if you can't see it, five hours.

Wow.

I said, what?

God's Green Earth are you doing for five hours on LinkedIn?

And they said, well, about three and a half of those are engaging

in other people's content.

And I said, whoa, pump the brakes on that one.

I said, are you by any chance an engagement pod?

And they said, yes.

And I said, well, number one, I don't know who gave you that advice, but

get out as quick as you can because.

The number one priority that every single person should have on LinkedIn

is their business reputation.

And if people find out that you're participating in one of these

things, your reputation is gone.

There's no getting it back.

Once it's done, it's done.

So it brings up this secondary conversation, well, how?

How can I tell that someone is in an engagement pod, which

is a great follow up question.

So I always use benchmarks or KPIs, key performance indicators to

measure whether someone is or is not.

So i'll, I'll cut to the chase.

Gary Vaynerchuk, which many of you are probably familiar with.

I use him as my benchmark.

And just to let you guys know, he has under 6 million followers on LinkedIn.

If you look at his engagement, it is completely compatible with what

LinkedIn says, you should get.

LinkedIn says, anywhere between one to 3% of your network will engage,

sometimes even less than that.

And if you look at his content, 6 million followers, some of

his posts have 2000 likes.

Some of his posts have 200 likes.

Some of them have under a hundred likes, which tells me

he's got an organic audience.

Now if you look at some other accounts where someone maybe has 4,000 followers,

5,000 followers, and every single post they put out is straight fire.

No matter what.

It's straight fire like it's 500 likes, 40 comments and I'm just gonna

be honest with you, you should have a quote unquote dud post once a week.

You should have a post that just doesn't hit.

That's normal with social media.

But if you look at someone's post and every single thing, I think

Michelle, I shared this with you.

I was looking at someone's post and I totally knew they were an engagement

pod because it was a poll question.

Now for any of you listening or watching that have ever done a

poll question, the main object of a poll is to get people to vote.

It's for market research.

So this poll.

Had about 40 or 50 votes and 70 comments, and I'm like, well

warning, add up.

Warning.

Warning

There should be more votes than comments.

Not the reverse.

So the other way that you can spot an engagement pod.

If you really kind of dig a little bit deeper and just pull back some

of the layers of the onion further, if you see the same people commenting

over and over and over it, you see the same seven, eight names.

Seven, eight names, seven, eight names.

They're an engagement pod, and I will tell you right now, outside looking in, yes, it

sounds great to have all that engagement.

I guarantee you, because I've talked to multiple sources, Michelle,

it's all vanity, meaning it never turned into any monetary result.

No one was booking calls, no one was getting taken to the dms.

No one was getting hired.

So now you've created a job for yourself where your responsibility

on LinkedIn is to scratch the back of 380,000 other people just

because they've scratched yours.

And that is my definition of LinkedIn insanity.

It is the world's biggest Ponzi scheme.

Really, the people that this benefits are the people at the top, the

people that are getting your money.

Now, I'm gonna go back a little minute and just share my view on this.

I understand when you are starting on the platform and you haven't built

your network or your community and you haven't found your people around you

that are interested in your comments and are interested in your content.

When you are starting out and you look around and everybody else feels

like that they're getting huge numbers because you know, we immediately

go and start comparing ourselves to everybody else, what the attraction

is, to things like engagement pods.

And just so you know, listeners, they don't call them engagement pods.

Quite often they'll have fun and fancy names like communities.

Of course, I love community.

I would want to be a part of a community.

I've heard ones called Beehives, you know, I love that idea.

It's a great marketing name.

The idea of coming together to help and support each other.

I've got both hands in the air.

That to me is the dream.

That is one of my favorite things about LinkedIn.

That is when we're actually really aligned, not that we are paying each

other for pretend alignment, that essentially what happens is you are

supporting by liking and commenting other people's posts in that pod, and

ultimately you are just showing up to the wrong audience and you are going to

go really fast in the wrong direction.

And then one day you're gonna get down the track three weeks roughly

to three months, depending how long it takes you to figure out, hang

on a minute, what's going on here?

You then have to turn around, come all the way back and start again and hope

as you said, that you haven't burned the trust of those people that valued

you in the first place, who have now worked out that you are cheating.

It's no different to, if I turn up to the Tour de France and I'm on my high

speed motorbike, and I go flying up the hill while everyone else is pedalling.

Do I really win?

Absolutely not.

So, you know, engagement pods, I love the idea, and this isn't where you have

a small group of friends and you're all supporting each other 'cause maybe you're

small business owners, I'm not anti that.

We need some help in the beginning.

You need that support.

I'm really a strong advocate for this and raising these red flags and follow

a friend of mine, Daniel Hall, he is posting about this all the time.

He shows you examples of how these things work.

It's amazing, but I don't want people to give up.

And you and I are absolutely in alignment for this, and I don't want the whole

podcast to become about engagement pods.

Mm-hmm.

Because there's way more other red flags that I wanna talk about.

So engagement pods beware.

They're against the user agreement.

We're just gonna all agree that if you listen to this podcast, you are not

going to be part of an engagement pod.

If you are, you should unfollow this podcast right now because I'm not

the right LinkedIn teacher for you.

I wanna talk about something else that you've probably seen on the platform,

and that is, can we talk about how cheap it is to buy followers in general to

buy newsletter subscribers on LinkedIn?

Can you talk people through that?

Because I don't think people understand that you can literally buy.

What, 10,000 followers?

I think the last time I looked was about 350 US dollars.

Like it's nothing that temptation is real.

I'll share a couple things with you.

So number one, people may look at my, my LinkedIn profile and they'll see

that I have close to 35,000 followers.

But what they don't recognize is i've been doing the same thing every day

since 2013, so you're looking at 12 and a half years of success in a glimpse.

So it's been steady growth up until this point.

So there's a tipping point.

That's the first thing I want to say.

So don't compare my chapter 12 to your chapter two.

We're all on the same path.

Some of us are just a few steps ahead.

In regards to the, the buying of followers.

So this, this trend and this service, and I'm gonna call it a service 'cause that's

what it is, came about through Instagram.

So Instagram fame and Instagram popularity, everything was measured

on how many followers do you have?

How many followers do you have?

So as it came to be, you could buy followers.

Now I will be very open and transparent.

I had a business coach back in 2018 that told me if I really wanted to

be credible on Instagram, I needed over 10,000 followers, and I had

maybe three or 4,000 at the time.

And he said, here's a link buy this service and they're

gonna dump about seven or 8,000 followers right into your account.

I'm like, okay.

So I did it.

Yeah.

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made.

Not only did my engagement tank, but

the running backwards, as you mentioned, I had to hire another

company to undo everything that it had been done because all of these

followers, they were all fake accounts.

They're literally bots.

Now, as other companies have came about, you can do the same thing on YouTube.

You can do the same thing on Facebook.

You can do the same thing on TikTok, and unfortunately you can

do the same thing on LinkedIn.

So this is where the problem of all this comes into play, just as Michelle

said, it sounds like a great idea to be an engagement pod because you can have

all this, the vanity metrics galore.

It sounds great to spend $350 and automatically have 10,000

followers or all these subscribers on my, on your newsletter.

It sounds great, but using the same analogy, Michelle, that you just said.

The amount of backtracking that you're gonna have to do, because

here's the thing about LinkedIn.

What people don't understand is that you have to so carefully curate

the right audience because it's not a numbers game on LinkedIn.

I love what you said in Chris Do's podcast.

It's a slow burn.

That's exactly what it is.

You need to be so methodical with everything that you do.

So any connection request that I send, there is a reason for that.

I I sense some sort of business relatability between

myself and that other person.

Anyone that subscribes to my newsletter.

My, my newsletter is called LinkedIn Tips and Updates.

Someone is gonna subscribe to that, that once LinkedIn tips and updates.

Your follower count will grow the more aligned you are with the content that you

create and the presence that you have.

Just because someone has a lot of followers doesn't mean they did it A

the right way, or B, they have the right followers, because here's a clear sign of

someone that may have bought followers.

You see, they have a ton of connections, a ton of followers, and then you

go and look at their engagement.

Well, A, they don't have any because they haven't created content.

And B, their engagement is absolute crickets, meaning.

No one, not even one person is liking or engaging in their stuff, which means

they have bought followers just to give the vanity metric that they're a

quote unquote, some micro influencer in some industry that they're in.

But the real influence comes from providing that value added content

to the network of connections that you've built over time, not with

the press of a button to hit pay.

That's the real measure of success on LinkedIn.

It's how you're leaving people better with the thought leadership

content that you provide, which is exactly the strategy that you follow.

It's the exact strategy that I follow, and we encourage

everyone to follow this strategy.

If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is

. Amen.

I am sitting here the whole time going preach because this is exactly why

you and I are having this conversation so that people understand like, how

do I spot these types of accounts?

Number one.

They pop up their overnight sensations.

There is no such thing anymore on LinkedIn as an overnight sensation.

If you think that everybody around you happens to be a unicorn

and you are the only one that's not, nope, they're cheating.

That is the only way.

They've bought their way because LinkedIn restricts how many people

that you can connect with every week.

So I've been maxing out.

I think it's around a hundred or something.

I don't count, but it's not a big number.

I remember when I. First started being pretty active on

LinkedIn about 10 years ago.

I used to sit there on a Saturday night connect, connect, connect,

connect, connect, connect.

And it didn't have a limit.

So, nope.

The longer that people have been on the platform, the more advantage

we had back in the earlier days.

So again, if you are just starting now, you are limited to around, let's call it

a hundred, and LinkedIn is saying it pops up with all of these messages and says.

Hey Michelle, uh, do you really wanna connect with these people?

Like it actually pushes back as you work your way through those

hundred invites and says, hang on a minute, do you really wanna connect?

Do you know this person?

And it's giving you warning signs saying That's not what we're about.

And you know, I'm absolutely the same.

And I wish that we didn't get judged on numbers.

As much as I agree with you that it shouldn't work out, that the higher the

number where they buy these numbers, that life doesn't turn out great for them.

I unfortunately disagree with that.

'cause there are some people that are making a ton of money off other people

buying their crappy services because they look like they've got these

huge numbers, had overnight success, and who doesn't want a shortcut when

Michelle and Scott are sitting here going, Hey, LinkedIn takes time.

It's gonna take months, years.

Build your reputation, build your brand.

Or.

Person B, look what I did overnight.

You could have this in the next six weeks.

Like which one are you gonna be drawn to?

Especially if your business is in trouble.

I get why these are so attractive to people and I understand that for the most

part, they will burn people, but there are definitely people profiteering off this.

Now, there is one other type of thing that I've seen pop up recently.

Maybe you've done some more research into this.

I keep getting emails from people asking me do I want to

rent other people's accounts?

And I assume that it's like essentially I then control my own pod.

So I've got my own fake rented accounts that I've now got commenting on my stuff.

Is that how rented accounts work?

'cause I honestly, they make me so angry.

I just hit delete as fast as I can on those emails and

resist the urge to write back.

You are the scourge of LinkedIn.

I hate you.

Like that's what I wanna write.

But have you come across those?

'cause that seems to be a relatively new thing for me.

It is.

Luckily I haven't received any of them yet, but that was

popularized before LinkedIn.

So a lot of the strategies and a lot of the spam tactics originated on Meta.

Um, they also originated, on YouTube as well.

Instagram also became big for this when people would do account takeovers and

a lot of big brands would do this, and a lot of these people picked up on it.

And now you are seeing the same thing unfortunately happen on LinkedIn.

Again, I'm just gonna go back to the adage that I said a few

minutes ago that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Michelle, for, for me, I am so protective of my LinkedIn

account for a number of reasons.

Number one, I honor and appreciate every single connection I have, because

it's my due diligence to protect them.

So I don't want to give any spammer access to my connections because if they're

spamming me, they're gonna spam them.

The other thing as you mentioned

I, I really wanna be, quote unquote, the good guy on LinkedIn.

Like just being very honest, open and transparent with people that to

build a sustainable and successful business, it's not supposed to take six

days, six weeks, or even six months.

It may take six years.

And if you don't have the time, energy, effort, and patience for that.

LinkedIn may not be the best fit for you.

It, it just, it really isn't because mm-hmm.

Any, anytime you take a shortcut.

I believe in shortening the learning curve.

Now, shortening the learning curve could be working with someone like

you, working with someone like me.

Anyone else out there that's shortening the learning curve.

You're, you're investing in yourself through someone else to learn something

quicker so you don't have to go through all the patchwork quilting and the

failure in forward, you're, you're paying that person who failed forward

for you to show you what they need to do.

Anything that is taking a shortcut, it means you're trying to build

a boat with wood that is rotted.

Eventually, as soon as that wood, that boat hits the water, it's gonna

spring a leak and you're gonna sink faster than you can ever imagine.

So the one thing that I am seeing, so in, in regards to getting these

emails, I personally have not seen the email that you mentioned.

But what I do get is I get these emails from my LinkedIn connections and somehow

I ended up on their email list service.

It's almost like I opted in for something of theirs, when I never did.

So now you're seeing this uptick in what are called data scrapers.

Meaning people are using these scraping tools and not actual scraping

for people listening or watching.

It's literally a service that you attach to your LinkedIn account

that extracts all of the email addresses attached to your account.

Via connection wise and imports them into an email listserv that you have, like

MailChimp or Constant Contact or Kartra or Kajabi, and then you start getting emails

from these people and you're wondering, I. How the heck did that happen?

Now, words of the whys.

If you end up seeing that you've done nothing wrong, it's not on you,

they, they basically have invaded your account, stolen your email, and

put them into your email listserv.

My recommendation, as soon as you get that type of email, you report it as spam.

And the reason why that's important is because their spam score will increase

on their email listserv, and they could get in trouble and they could

be removed from their email listserv platform because if they've done it

to you, they've probably done it to hundreds, if not thousands of others.

Oh, it makes me so angry.

I was sitting there listening, I don't even remember where now because I, I

switched off and tried to block it out.

I was listening to a strategy around growing emails and, you know, that

whole email marketing type of thing, and it's why it took me so long to actually

get my own email newsletter started.

'cause they're like, I don't wanna be like this.

These people were sitting there talking about, so we have our warmup

email address and when that one burns, 'cause we've scraped out details from

here there and everywhere, bombarded people gone against all the GDPR and

all that kind of stuff over in Europe.

Bombarded people, they did report them like you said.

Then we've got our backup email, which we'll start sending.

Then we'll do this.

And I was like.

How is this something that you think is honestly gonna work and

build relationships with people?

And I've noticed that a lot recently.

Now.

I don't wanna go down that path too much because you know, we've

only got a few minutes left.

Yeah, totally.

But

I also wanna talk about automation tools and there are so many of them right now.

And I have to say on the surface and, and these are tools, I'm gonna call one

out, like Taplio is probably one of the most popular ones that are out there.

And I don't normally like naming names, but I think it's important

that the listeners understand that these tools exist on the surface

who wouldn't want a tool to do the grunt work that happens on LinkedIn?

These tools are super capable.

I love them on the outside, but then we're automating relationships.

You're putting your account at risk.

You're against the user agreement.

Like there is red flag after red flag, after red flag.

And some of these tools, Daniel Hall has done the research,

which scared me even more.

They then use your account to comment and you don't even know

what's happening because you gave them access to your LinkedIn cookie.

That scares the bejesus out of me and that's why I wanna talk about this.

Do you have anything you wanna add?

Yeah.

So.

I'm a rule follower, so one of the first things that I did is read the

user agreement on LinkedIn and the, the two biggest red flags that gets people

kicked off of LinkedIn is using scraping software, uh, that that exports data into

an email listserv and also any automation that connects in messages for you.

You for mentioned this.

You're only allowed to connect with a hundred people a week.

Right now on LinkedIn.

When Michelle and I first got started on LinkedIn, you could send

thousands of connections a day.

And so there was this game that people played called the Race to 30,000.

So it was to see how quickly could you get the 30,000 connections because

in theory you could probably do it in a month if you send, you know, a

ton of connections every single day.

And a lot of these softwares.

Would do that, they would send 10,000 connections in one day.

So overnight, someone looked like they had a ton of followers and connections.

So the thing is this, LinkedIn always claps back.

So in, as in, in regards to the connecting and messaging, they limited the amount

of connections to a hundred per week because of this reason, and I, I shared

this with Michelle when she was on my podcast, that there were, at the time

that we were recording a few weeks ago, there were two highly, highly

accredited softwares that were completely blackballed from LinkedIn forever.

seamless.io.

Apollo.

Ai.

Now, these were two of the most popular softwares that had presences on LinkedIn

that were basically automating processes, scraping data, and what I mean,

blackballed LinkedIn just kicked them off.

It was like literally the lights were turned off.

And you know what?

Not only did that obviously affect those two companies, but all of

the users that were using that platform, they lost everything.

The fact of the matter is, is that if you can't organically just block out about

15, 20 minutes a day to send some genuine connections, genuine messages, really good

content, and you're gonna just fall into that trap of hitting that easy button,

which one does not exist on LinkedIn?

It's not worth your time.

Read your user agreement.

Michelle, I don't know about you.

I get emails every week from people saying, help me.

I'm restricted.

I'm in LinkedIn jail.

I can't get out and I have to reply.

I don't work for them.

But if you broke the user agreement, you're not getting it back.

So do not play in that sandbox.

Do not take the risk because once you lose it, you never get it back.

It's a slow burn, as Michelle always says.

Take your time.

Do your due diligence.

Build your business like a retirement fund.

You have to treat it like a marathon.

It's small steps every day that compound over time to create

the result that you want.

It absolutely is compounding all the way.

Small actions pay off, but you have to show up and do them no matter

how many disclaimers you see on the websites of all of these tools.

So yeah, probably, maybe we won't get your account restricted 'cause yeah, we kind of

play the game 'cause they know about all the rules that LinkedIn has internally.

Ultimately, if it is going to take income away or the integrity of the

LinkedIn platform for all its faults.

The fact that LinkedIn is a place where we can come and there is

a certain level of integrity and sometimes it's up to us to call it out.

So be mindful of the types of people that you're working with.

If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

If that person has a huge amount of followers, especially if they come from

a small country and all of a sudden they have hundreds of thousands of

followers, and it's the same people commenting every time immediately,

as soon as that person posts.

They come from third world countries because you have to remember, this

is happening because there are people in third world countries

that are sitting in awful conditions doing a lot of this stuff.

Not all of it is automated, and that's like a whole other side of

this conversation that we need to be mindful of these farms that are going

on out there to make this happen.

And so from this perspective, work with people that are showing up,

adding to conversations, showing genuine thought leadership, not things

that can just be pumped out on mass.

And this is the thing people you are going to fall into times on LinkedIn

where you wonder if it's all worth it.

Do not jump in the lane of trying to shortcut that

success as we've shared today.

I am going to wrap this conversation up because I want people to think

about, who is it that you've been engaging with in your community that

perhaps you may need to disconnect with after this conversation?

My mum gave me some great advice as a teenager, which

I will leave everyone with.

If you hang out with garbage, you smell like it.

If you hang out with garbage, you smell like it.

And the two of us are here to protect your brand on LinkedIn, help you grow it.

Now Scott, I want to make sure that people listen to your podcast as well.

What's it called, and what's the best way to get in contact with you?

Thank you, Michelle.

So my podcast is called Networking and Marketing Made Simple.

Uh, it is a LinkedIn themed podcast.

You can find it on all the major platforms, Spotify,

iTunes, everywhere else.

Uh, also if you wanna connect with me, obviously gimme a follow on LinkedIn.

And you can also find more on my website, Scott Aaron.

Love it.

Thank you for all of those, and thank you to everyone that joined this podcast

was recorded LinkedIn live, uh, which I forgot how much I love doing those.

So thank you to everyone that joined us.

Until next week, cheers.