73: Linked Strategies – Featured Interview with guest expert Nate Kievman

Nate Kievman, Founder and CEO of Linked Strategies

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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Interview Insights

Listen to this interview to learn:

Some of the standards you must clear to be considered a thought leader
The power of saying “no” to opportunities and how it helps you grow your business
What “platform maturity” allows you as an expert to do to serve even a larger customer base
How to convey trust, authority, and credibility using your LinkedIn profile
Emerging trends with LinkedIn that will allow businesses to build a larger platform in even less time than before

Read the Show Notes from this Episode

1:02 Kievman tells about his transition from a degree in Sports Administration to being a LinkedIn platform leader.
3:11 “What I found was that LinkedIn was my premiere tool for helping these little startups build their advisory boards.”
3:52 How his work consulting small startups led to the creation of his book.
4:17 “LinkedIn is purely a business tool.”
4:28 “I saw a big opportunity and said, ‘You know, no one is really owning this. There’s an opportunity here to be a thought leader in a fast growing market.”
5:10 “I’m a true believer that to be a thought leader you have to demonstrate success. You have to be able to come from a premise of authority.”
6:25 How Kievman used an interview series to establish himself as a thought leader.
6:57 “I think the premiere thing is having demonstrable results and then sharing those, and people resonated with those so that they could use them and apply them immediately, and get results.”
7:50 [On claiming expert status] – “Base it on the credibility of results and talk about those results and then people will flock to you.”
8:39 “My biggest challenge actually has been, not so much in the marketing or lead generation, it’s actually been scalability…being able to take on all of the inquiries.”
9:35 “Most experts have a book, most experts have some kind of automated product, but they really live on their training and consulting.”
10:35 “It’s understanding a balance between lifestyle, scalability, and then optimizing our own revenue channels.”
11:41 “So at any one time I could have 10 or 15 projects running and instead of being able to focus 100% exclusively on fixing my business and making sure I can make it a really optimized process.”
13:27 “I put my intention in what I did actually want to experience which was scalability and since then I have already taken on a partner who’s built a $44M company.”
14:53 “There’s a very simple process for generating business on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, like any other platform, has to start off with two pieces, and if you’re not generating business from it, you’re probably missing one or both of these pieces. The pieces are not what you do, not tasks that you do, but actually positioning plays.”
15:20 “So if you don’t have trust and credibility, it doesn’t matter what you communicate or to whom you community too, your response rates are going to be extremely low.”
15:38 “Anyone can establish trust and credibility, you just have to look deep.”
16:10 “Your profile has to be able to portray that trust and credibility, and your copy needs to reaffirm your authority.”
16:51 “There’s an authority in numbers. If you can quantify anything you’ve done, quantify it.”
17:00 “You’re not looking to close the deal on an e-mail or an in-mail within LinkedIn, you’re looking to generate a conversation and then it’s kinda gonna be up to you to close the business.”
17:15 “LinkedIn is a tool that can generate the right conversations with the right people at the right time.”
17:25 “The business happens in the In-Mail.”
17:40 How owning a LinkedIn group can establish you as a subject authority.
18:55 The story of how Tom Circe generated $118,000 in speaker fees just by using LinkedIn.
20:58 “There’s such a value in personal face-to-face connection time.”
21:37 “If you don’t create your virtual stage for yourself, then getting on a real stage is going to be really hard.”
23:01 Tips for creating a virtual stage for yourself.
23:17 “[LinkedIn] has a challenge, which is, they have a disconnect between their membership, the needs of you and I, and their profit.”
22:57 The evolution of LinkedIn company pages, and what users can do to get ahead of the curve.
25:40 The importance of avoiding SPAM in groups.
26:00 “My hope is that LinkedIn will embrace the midsize and small businesses more effectively.”
27:40 [Platform maturity] – “The companies or individuals that are at the right place at the right time at a platform’s maturity are going to be the bestowed thought leaders in that space.”
29:49 “Most people don’t know that LinkedIn’s a huge database.”

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Expert Bio

Nathan Kievman is the Founder and CEO of Linked Strategies and creates cutting-edge business solutions maximizing all of the power of social media platforms. Considered one of the leading authorities on social media and LinkedIn, Nathan has a robust following as the owner of the number one LinkedIn Strategies Group on LinkedIn. He has taught more than 35,000 people how to master the platform.

Nathan is the executive editor of LI & Business, now with more than 14.5 million subscribers. He has authored three books on the topic, including the currently available LinkedIn Mastery: An All-Inclusive Guide to Mastering LinkedIn. Nathan presented as the keynote speaker on Social Media Strategy for the National Speakers Association winter meetings in 2011.

Contact Info for Nathan Kievman