Every Entrepreneur Should Do This on LinkedIn. Avery Sly, Co-founder of Agency 8, Shares Tips for Organic Traction

Susan Sly 00:00
Hey everyone, Susan here. I know, as entrepreneurs, we're always looking for strategies to build brand awareness to generate new clients, customers, investors. And in today's episode, our recurring social media strategist expert, and my daughter Avery is going to be here sharing tips on how to build a LinkedIn newsletter, why to build it. And we also riff off and talk about AI, Open AI's new Sora tool and how she feels about AI marketing tools and content creation as someone who's in Gen Z. So it's going to be a great episode. And if you hear of anything in the episode, in terms of a service, I invite you to check out Agency 8, that is the agency that Avery runs. And you can even hire Avery to do a one on one coaching session with you to help you with your brand and your strategy and your content. So with that, let's go ahead and get into the episode with Avery where we're gonna talk about LinkedIn, AI, and who knows what else we'll talk about. It's gonna be fun. This is Raw and Real Entrepreneurship, the show that brings the no nonsense truth of what is required to start, grow and scale your business. I am your host, Susan Sly. Well, what is up, Raw and Real Entrepreneurs, wherever you are in the world, I hope you're having an amazing day. And as you heard in the introduction, she's back our resident entrepreneurial, social media expert extraordinaire, who advises small businesses,brands, on their content, their strategy and how to get more organic impressions, which is, I think, personally, her zone of genius. And we're going to be talking about LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn today. And you know, I'm incredibly biased. You never know what we're going to talk about when she's here, because she's also my daughter. So Avery, welcome back to the show.

Avery Sly 01:58
Thank you. Thank you. It's good to be here.

Susan Sly 02:01
So Avery, I want to jump right in you, you know, here you are in your 20s. And a lot of people are not using LinkedIn in your age cohort. But you've decided in terms of the agency that you run that you are going to prioritize LinkedIn. So what is it about LinkedIn that you think, in your expert opinion, is something people should be focusing on?

Avery Sly 02:24
Sure. Well, LinkedIn has definitely increased in popularity over the last few years. And with all the tech layoffs, and people getting laid off all over the place, more people are spending more time on LinkedIn. And additionally, like you'd like to say, professionals are allowed to use LinkedIn. It is the only social media network they're allowed to use during office hours. So I thought to myself, as someone who runs an agency that's really targeted towards helping business owners, where can I meet business owners where they already are, and I figured, honing in on LinkedIn, especially compared to other platforms, such as Instagram, or Facebook. To me, I wanted to turn to LinkedIn, because the tone over there is a lot more professional and polished, and people are going on there to consume professional content. Whereas you go on Instagram, when you want to get a good recipe, you want to see what your friends are doing. If you're in my case, you want to look at Vintage trucks all day, every day. But LinkedIn is where people expect to see professional content, and a lot of people want to learn on LinkedIn. So I really turned to LinkedIn as an opportunity for me to help educate my audience and become an industry thought leader in terms of digital marketing for small business. Yeah, and I

Susan Sly 03:43
think it's I think it's so smart, because there's so much like going back to when all the streaming platforms came out. The first one being Netflix, everyone said, it's the end of the movie theater. And there was all of this talk with generative AI, that would be the end of consumption of written content, or people are going to stop reading. And we're actually seeing the reverse is true. And then just before we started the show, you and I were talking about the new open AI Sora platform, which for the listeners, you need to go to my personal LinkedIn, I wrote an opinion piece about it. If you don't know what this is, this is open AI is latest baby they're giving birth to which is text to video content, and it looks so real. The humans look like real humans, the puppies look like real puppies, which, you know, it makes me wonder what the future of real video content is going to be because it is so tough even for humans to differentiate AI generated content versus human generated content. And it's, you know, if a human's having trouble AI models also have trouble with it too. So I love that you're turning to this this medium of the written word, but you are using AI tools to do it. But before we jump into how you're doing it, we're going to talk about LinkedIn newsletters today. And the power behind that. So why should companies be considering a LinkedIn newsletter?

Avery Sly 05:05
Oh, I love this question. And first and foremost, it's a startling statistic that I found is that between 2022 and 2023, in just a year, LinkedIn newsletter readership actually tripled. So now you have 1.3 million daily newsletter readers, and who out there listening to this wouldn't want to have 1.3 million eyes on their content, right? So a newsletter has so many different benefits, the only real requirement that you need to have in order to have a newsletter is that you need a minimum of 150 followers on your business's page, or connections on your personal page to be eligible, you also have to put your account into a creator account on LinkedIn. So for example, the newsletter that I run, I run it from our agencies LinkedIn page, but myself as a creator on LinkedIn, I've set up a creator account, I can have a newsletter on my page as well. You can actually have up to five newsletters if you're feeling really keen. And they can have different topics, different frequencies, etc. But there's some real key benefits, I wanted to answer your question that I want to highlight. One, of course, is that engagement is higher than regular engagement, again, you got 1.3 million daily readers. Additionally, you can build trust with your audience. So by creating consistent content on your platform, you can help foster those relationships with your connections. Plus anybody on the platform, whether or not they're connected with, you can actually subscribe to your newsletter. So it's a great way to get in front of a new audience as well. And you also, when you do your inaugural edition of your newsletter, it will send out an email blast to all of your pages followers. So I definitely recommend making sure you have obviously you need that minimum of 150. But you want to make sure that you have an audience that is read engaged so that they get that email and they're like, Heck, yeah, I want to subscribe. And then lastly, it demonstrates thought leadership. So it's a great opportunity for you to share your insights and really provide a lot of value and highlight yourself as an expert in your field. I

Susan Sly 07:23
love that. And and so Avery, that if someone's just getting started, and you mentioned significant layoffs, you mentioned that people are looking to position themselves differently and set themselves apart. And they're they're just setting up their page right now. What tips would you give even stepping back before they start their newsletter just in terms of because there are a lot of gray pages on LinkedIn. And there are a lot of pages where you're like, What is this business? Do? It's very confusing. So what tips would you give?

Avery Sly 07:54
Yes, and I actually wrote an article about this on LinkedIn. And it's, this is something that I'm very passionate about. Because on LinkedIn, you have to have, first and foremost, you need a profile photo. And in today's day and age with AI, headshots and all that you really don't have an excuse not to have a professional image. There's software out there where you can take any selfie that you have, as long as it's clear and well lit, and it will turn it into a professional headshot that to me doesn't even look like AI. Or you can grab your iPhone and take one in your home, just wear some professional clothing, dress for the job that you want. That's Those are some big things. The next thing you want to do is have a cover photo, go to Canva look up LinkedIn cover photo, there's hundreds and hundreds of templates there for free. Or if you have a premium account, you can either way, there's tons of templates to choose from, find one that speaks to you and your brand and make sure you have a cover photo first and foremost. Next up the most important thing and I know I'm dumping a lot of information, but so much is important about a LinkedIn profile. And in order to make it robust, and especially with all the layoffs, you want to be found by potential employers. So the next thing you want is a good headline. Headlines are an opportunity for you to optimize your search engine optimization, SEO. So you can basically include keywords. So let's say you're a programmer, or let's say you're my mom, right, you're awesome already. But you know, in her case, for example, she's just started her new tech company called The Pause, and she has a lot of skills. She's an artificial intelligence speaker. You know, she's a world renowned salesperson. So what she would do in her case is use her headline as an opportunity to highlight her key skills, especially those that are relevant to her position. And she already has one her her headline is great if you guys want to go check it out. I don't unfortunately have it memorized. Sorry, mom. But But That's what you want to do is you want to use that as an opportunity to highlight your key skills that employers would want to see. On the flip side of your business owner, you want to highlight your key skills that are relevant to your clients. So definitely, those are my three main tips. Other than that fill out all of the profile information that LinkedIn gives to you, a full robust profile is going to get found a lot more. And it's just going to make it easier for people to see who you are, connect with you and resonate with you on the platform. Absolutely. And

Susan Sly 10:32
the the hashtags are important too. Because in your professional profile, you can have I can't remember how many hashtags it is now that you specifically speak on and are a thought leader on and then LinkedIn will invite you to comment. And that gives you badges so that you're considered an expert in that field, and sometimes their AI will serve me up things that aren't relevant to who I am now. And that would be my other cautionary tale to you is don't comment on everything unless it's something that you really want to be known for. Because people do look at that, whether it's potential customers, partners, and I'll talk about that one in a minute. Or people who are looking to hire you. Now this obviously, there's a lot of entrepreneurs listening this show, and there are they have businesses, one, I will share a story. So in a in a company I had co founded, we were we're growing and growing so quickly, and we were posting on LinkedIn. But we hadn't gone and updated, like our total number of employees and a whole host of things in actually, that company before they did business with us. When they looked all through our LinkedIn profile, they looked at our all of our existing employees, they came back to us and said, Okay, this employee doesn't comment on anything you guys put out, but they're commenting on others, they did a whole LinkedIn audit of us and which was really interesting. So don't discount that your potential partners and customers are going to go thoroughly through your LinkedIn. And so that's a great point every has to be updating it all the time. Now, I want to I want to ask you, so going back to the newsletter, you have some great results. And if everyone listening isn't following Agency 8, you need to that's where Avery is doing this newsletter. But can you share your results and how you are creating the content for the newsletter? Sure. So

Avery Sly 12:24
I started this newsletter in January, and it's called Unicorn Social, and I share weekly social media tips. And again, January was about a month ago, and I was today I pulled up our LinkedIn analytics, and our page now has 250 followers, which may not sound like a lot, but since the newsletter started, we have gained 30 followers. So out of those 250 in the entire span of the time that we've had our agency page, in the last 30 days, we've gained 30 followers. And that's an increase of following by of 1400%. And that is just from the newsletter, the newsletter is most of the content I've been creating. I have been adding a few other things in the mix. But primarily right now, it's just been the newsletter. And I when I set up the newsletter, I publish it weekly. Again, on LinkedIn, they give you the option to choose different frequencies. You can do, you know, bi weekly, monthly, daily, if you again, if you're really ambitious, and you just love to create content. I chose to do weekly for mine and I release mine on Tuesday. Now you do have to be accountable. Because LinkedIn is not going to baby you. It doesn't send you a hey, don't forget to post your newsletter today reminder, like you've got to be on it yourself. And you've got to make that commitment to yourself and your audience that you're going to consistently post on the day that they expect you to post and the more consistent you are, the more they're going to trust you and then continue to consume your content. They're gonna like heck yeah, it's Tuesday. It's Unicorn Social day. In order to write mine, what I've been doing, and my mom might laugh at me a little bit. Because I I've been using Microsoft copilot a lot recently. I have really enjoyed it. So I don't, I definitely do not recommend having AI write your content for you. I actually was I was scrolling through LinkedIn just as an aside, and I saw this post. And this person I knew, because I have I've prompted chat GPT to do similar things that they literally copied and pasted their response to an article from chat GPT it didn't sound anything like them. It still had the little asterisks that chat GPT puts in the headaches. And it was just I was like, Oh my gosh, it's so obvious so people can tell when you're using AI. So what I do I don't I we're all business owners, right? You're you're listening to this podcast because you're an entrepreneur and a business owner. We're short on time. Let's be honest, writing a newsletter can be daunting. Unless you're doing it on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has all the hosting for you. So you can go right into their article editor. What I do is I go to Microsoft copilot, and I have it basically create an outline for me. And I follow that outline in order to create the article. And then that way I can, I can play around with it a little bit. But I found that that's the best way where I can just organize my thoughts, I am ADD, so I tend to go off on tangents that aren't relevant. So copilot helps me stay on track. And it also provides links. So it links to the sources it gets the information from. So if it cites any statistics or anything relevant, I can then go do those sources. So it cuts down on my research time. I then write my article in Google Docs, just a preference and I copy and paste it into LinkedIn, you can just write it right in LinkedIn. I go to Canva, I create a cover image. And then I publish it. And after publishing my newsletter, I will share it to the agency page. And then I also share it to my personal LinkedIn page. So I'm maximizing the visibility of each edition of the newsletter, which

Susan Sly 16:01
is fantastic. And I think that the other thing too, is what we're seeing, as well as people are using their social platforms for search. And so people even use chat GPT for search, they're using, you know, in addition to Google, and so forth, but people are searching within LinkedIn. They're looking for local speaker, they're looking for consultants on LinkedIn, they're looking for all sorts of people. And so in that way, you're gonna set yourself apart and which is significant. Now, every with regard to you know, your only a few issues in you know, it's raw and real entrepreneurship, what has been something you've learned in the process? And what is, you know, where do you see yourself going with this?

Avery Sly 16:52
Awesome, yeah, I'm glad that you asked that question. I have been having so much fun with the newsletter. I know, that's silly, but doing all the research. And really, it's, it's not only helped me, hone in my expertise on these topics. I feel like I'm genuinely helping the people that are subscribed to my newsletter, because that at the end of the day, that's what it's about. I've I don't, it's not very sales heavy, I will sometimes put a promotion in there if I have a relevant service. But predominantly, it's, here's the value that you can get. What I have learned is that in order to keep myself on track, I have actually planned out and this is my mother showing me, I've planned out the next 10 weeks of my content. So I have a topic for the next 10 weeks. And of course, you know, things change, or I might do some interviews, I might bring on some guests, and you know, kind of connect with them in that way do do interviews, so it might change. But I have my baseline schedule. And that has made it so much easier, because I can start to think of my topic in advance, I can start to write in in advance, when I have inspiration for something that it relates to a topic or if I find something that relates to a future topic, I can bookmark it. And that has been my big key. The other thing is that in terms of where I'm I think that LinkedIn is super fun, because you can add images, you can embed videos. Unfortunately for me, you can't embed Instagrams. So I've just been like hyper linking to examples and stuff like that. But it's just so much fun, honestly, like the way that you can edit in the platform, the way that you already have that base of your followers, unlike an email newsletter, where you have to have all these permissions and stuff like that on LinkedIn, they subscribe by themselves, and then they get all that content in LinkedIn. So it's very consumable, they don't have to leave the platform. Again, they can scroll it during work. And I think the most fun I've had obviously, I mentioned earlier, not using AI to write your articles. I have to, like, poke fun at my mom in the most respectful way because we were chatting before and I was like, yeah, like, you know, like you have a you've trained your own GPT to sound like you to help you write these articles. And I'm like, nobody's done that. And she's like, I thought everybody made their own GPT and I'm like, no, that's just you. And I just I just love that I think that's so fun. But yeah, it's a lot of fun writing the newsletter for sure.

Susan Sly 19:28
Well and and I think that is the one of the big things is there are people listening and they're like, oh my gosh, it sounds like I don't even know where to get started. And you do have a you do have a service like it's so everyone knows they can go to Agency 8, you can hire Avery. Buy an hour of her time to do some coaching to help you get it set up. Because, again, you you also want to be very specific about what you're writing about when people are consuming content on LinkedIn. Like even AI so yeah, So I was voted this year as one of the top women to watch in real time AI. And there's there is newsletters dedicated to just computer vision for retail or computer vision for healthcare, there are all sorts of different subsets. So you, you really want to be a specialist to set yourself apart. Yeah, and I think that from that, the other thing around that Avery and I love what you said is it is so easy to create those newsletters. And it's so easy to create custom LinkedIn content, even my editorial on Sora, I was easily able to put in the photos of the puppies in the snow and the Spaceman and I'm using their prompting language. By the way, if you don't know what that is, you can you can go to my LinkedIn and look at my dialogue on it. But that it is really easy to create the content. I want to ask you a question shifting gears. So with regard to Sora. And here you are Gen Z. And you you have a lot of your peers who became Instagram influencers in very specific verticals. I mean, you have significant followers for yourself in automotive on Tiktok and Instagram. Having seen Sora. And having seen some of these AI video tools, what would you what, how do you think that's going to impact influencers?

Avery Sly 21:30
That's a great question. I think, honestly, seeing the power of Sora seeing the quality of the content. I mean, goodness gracious, there's one prompt in there, where they asked to see wildlife on a specific river. And it looks like a clip out of planet Earth. Like it just, it looks so real. And I think that there's going to be I mean, there's a bit of a dichotomy here. On one hand, I just actually wrote an article about a flood, my most recent edition of the newsletter was about casual content, and how there's a demand for more laid back funny, humorous content from businesses and influencers. And for me, Sora and AI is not going to be able to replicate that they're not going to be able to do Day in the Life videos. Of course, the people that. They create are very real. So and we already do have full AI influencers that everybody knows are AI, and they get brand deals and all kinds of stuff. But that being said, there is still a demand for on these social platforms for people to connect with the people that they know. And while brands are thriving on platforms like this, you know, there's still that need for human connection. I do think there's an opportunity here for content where you can really do some amazing beautiful B roll with Sora. Especially if you're doing promotional videos, of course, it's going to depend on licensing. But if you're doing promotional videos for your business, or if you're making Instagram reels that are more polished, you can add in some of that for B roll, and stuff like that. It's going to really enhance that ability of content creation. But I don't necessarily think that it's going to negate that need inherent need we have for connection and for realness. Funnily enough, actually something that Sora couldn't replicate. There's this woman, I was having dinner with my best friend last night. And she was like, have you seen that 50 Part Tiktok series where the woman talks about how she met her husband and was like, No, and she pulls it up and shows me I didn't I haven't watched any of it yet. But some of you might know what I'm talking about. The first video is she was like, she starts the video by saying, here's the story of how I met my husband. And no, we are not in contact with each other anymore. So it's this huge 50 part drama session. And she's just talking to the camera. Again, I haven't watched it yet. But each one of those 50 videos has over 2 million views. So people obviously are connecting to her connecting to her story getting entertained by that. And to me, that's just something that those real life stories that hook you in is not something that AI can really replicate.

Susan Sly 24:09
That's a that's an interesting perspective. And I would say that AI can't replicate yet, right? Because when we we look at the different kinds of AI that are being used for marketing, so Sora is the, you know, props to I've been very critical of Open AI having no women on the board, they have a board observer who's a woman, but now, but that. Props to them, at least for saying, Hey, we're going to release this in to a limited number of people. We're going to get feedback. We're getting feedback from people in the media, we're getting feedback from content creators. And so either way, they're releasing it in a way that I would consider more responsible than things that have been released in past not just by them but others. But where when we look at AI generated voice I've created a lot of videos where you have an AI voice and it's getting better. It used to sound really tinny. Now, you can choose your voice if you want, you know, a British sounding male, or if you want, I have a friend of mine, Tyler Murray, at Ghost Retail and shuts out Tyler. He's been a guest on the show, he showed me a new AI video tool they have and it's just ridiculous what it does. And so we're going to be using that on Susan sly.com, which I'll, I'll bring Tyler back on the show. We'll talk about that. But there are a lot of tools out there. And I think that my biggest thing is, to your point, there, there are podcasts that are just AI, someone has put some inputs into a generative AI model, then the voice is created the podcast. People know it's an AI, it's not a real human. There's AI news where there are people talking and they look like humans, but there are AIS, there are all sorts of things that I think, to your point that that there's this need for human generated content. And I love that you're saying no, I'm actually writing my newsletter, but copilot is helping me with that structure. And you know, at the end of the day, the content someone's getting in that is from you. So any any final thoughts before we you know, send everyone off to either hire you or create a newsletter?

Avery Sly 26:21
You're actually really quick to your point to actually in 2023, an AI made a Drake song, and Drake had no part in it. And it went completely viral and everyone thought it was really Drake. And it turns out it was an AI model that was Drake. So that AI voice has really improved a lot. And I know that was really offhand but it.To leave everybody with some parting words, I think that a LinkedIn newsletter is really a great opportunity to build that connection with your audience. Not and not only is it an opportunity for you to write some long form content, you can use that one piece of content and repurpose it. You can make on Canva, for example, you can make slideshows that then you can upload to LinkedIn people can click through, I recently put one of those on the Agency8 page. So you can take that content, break it down into bullet points, do a slideshow, do an Instagram carousel, make a video about it. My mom has had so much success on her LinkedIn making video content talking about the industry. So like the tech industry. So what I recommend is, if you're going to step up and write a newsletter, one be consistent and make that commitment. That was the big thing. My mom said to me when I first started, she was like, you have to be consistent. And I was like I'm ready. And so here we are. And the other thing is that you need to take that one piece of content and use it as an opportunity. You've now sat down, you've done the research, you've written about it, get up off your bum after you publish it and make a video about it, talk about it. So you can post the newsletter, then the next day, you can post the video promoting your newsletter talking about it. There's ways to make one piece of content and all that time you put into that content lasts longer. And like my mom said, I am here to help with anybody that wants brainstorming, I can help you plan out your newsletter in advance. There's a lot of stuff that we can do together in an hour. But in my opinion, a newsletter is great, fill it with keywords, start Googling some of the stuff you guys and you will see so many LinkedIn articles and newsletters come up. When I'm doing research for my articles, you have no idea how many other LinkedIn articles, so they're really getting a lot of SEO, it's a great opportunity for you to be found. And either get your business's name out there or get your own name out there. So you can get hired and get these partnerships with big brands and big businesses. So with that, I wish you all the best writing your newsletters, and I hope you guys have as much fun doing it as I am. Well,

Susan Sly 28:56
thanks so much, Avery, it's always great to have you here and to be providing your tips and insights. And I think that what we're seeing right now is that it has never been easier to deploy content. And it's also something just because it's so easy, doesn't mean people are going to commit to it. Or they're they're going to actually be consistent as we talked about. And so that's the raw and realness of it. At the end of the day consistency is going to be what sets you apart. Even for the show. We have a production company who reached out to us because they're like you have done 347 shows most podcasters, 90% podcasters haven't put a show out in the last 90 days. And so it's that consistency at the end of the day. So anyway, every thank you so much for being here. You can check out every in the show notes. Go to susansly.com, go to LinkedIn, go to Agency 8 or DM Avery on LinkedIn. And she's more than happy to send you a link to set up a session with her and she can help you out. All right All right, everyone. Well, thank you everyone for being here. God bless everyone. Go rock your day, and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, this is Susan and thanks so much for listening to this episode on Raw and Real Entrepreneurship. If this episode or any episode has been helpful to you, you've gotten at least one solid tip from myself or my guests. I would love it if you would leave a five star review wherever you listen to podcast. After you leave your review, go ahead and email reviews@susansly.com. Let us know where you left the review. And if I read your review on air, you could get a $50 amazon gift card and we would so appreciate it because reviews do help boost the show and get this message all over the world. If you're interested in any of the resources we discussed on the show, go to Susansly.com. That's where all the show notes live. And with that, go out there rock your day, God bless and I will see you in the next episode.