25. Why Every Podcaster Needs to Leverage LinkedIn, with Jennifer Goeser

Are you using LinkedIn to boost your podcast’s visibility? I haven't been...but after this conversation with Jennifer Goeser, I'm about to start! In this episode, we talk about how to get started on LinkedIn and some best practices for your episodes to reach a wider audience.

Connect with Jennifer:
www.hiringhub.digital
LinkedIn: HiringHub
Youtube: @HiringHubTV

Thinking about starting a podcast? Grab my free Podcast Roadmap: 10 Simple Steps to Launch Your Own Podcast (No Fancy Tech Required!) at www.ThePodcastTeacher.com/roadmap

This episode was produced by me, The Podcast Teacher! Contact me at Hello@ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Get on the waitlist for the podcast growth pilot program to have first dibs on the limited spots: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com/grow

Transcript

Julia Levine:
Hey. Hey. And welcome back today. I have Jennifer Goeser on the podcast. I'm so excited to have her here today to talk about LinkedIn. Jen. Welcome. Go ahead and just tell us a little bit about what you do and what kind of audience you serve right now.

Jen Goeser:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Julia. I'm super excited to be here and talk about LinkedIn with you. My name is Jennifer Goeser, and I am a hiring expert with over 17 years of experience hiring for big and small businesses throughout my career. And I created Hiringhub because I really wanted to help small business owners that need to hire, but they don't have a big HR department or recruitment department, or they don't have the budget to hire an agency and spend 1,000 and 1,000 of dollars for that. So Hiringhub provides resources and courses that teach small business owners how to hire. And one of my courses teaches small business owners how to leverage LinkedIn to increase their SEO and brand visibility, which all plays a big impact on hiring.

Julia Levine:
Fantastic. That sounds so interesting. And I know that anyone who has a background in corporate, their ears are probably perking up right now. But for people who they're not in that corporate world, they're not hiring maybe a solopreneur. Can you give us kind of like the bird's eye view of what exactly is LinkedIn? Is it social media? Is it networking? Is it somewhere in between? And then why if someone is not looking to hire, why would they want to be on LinkedIn? Why would this be beneficial for them?

Jen Goeser:
Yeah. Absolutely. So LinkedIn is really awesome in so many different ways and it's my personal favorite platform to use. But if you've never heard of LinkedIn, it's the world's largest professional networking platform. And actually, since 2024, there are over 1,000,000,000 users globally. So it does not matter if you are a small company or a big company or you're a solopreneur. It's a great way to make authentic connections and grow your professional network.

Julia Levine:
Okay. So grow the professional network. Awesome. I am actually someone who has not gotten on LinkedIn yet myself, which is one of the reasons I'm so excited to have this conversation with you because I'm learning right alongside my listeners. And so I'm super intrigued. You mentioned SEO, there's networking. It sounds like there are a lot of good reasons to be on LinkedIn. And so for someone like me, who's brand new, never been on LinkedIn before, doesn't have an account, has no idea what they're doing.

Julia Levine:
Do you have any tips for getting started? What do we do first?

Jen Goeser:
Yeah. So if you're brand new to LinkedIn and you've never used the platform, I have created 4 tips for you. So number 1, you're just gonna wanna get on and create an account. And then you're gonna wanna upload a professional photo and a background photo. So if you've used, like, Facebook, it's very similar. But you wanna pick a background photo that reflects your brand, and then you wanna create a headline that tells your audience what you do and who you serve. My third tip is, and especially for podcasters, I would highly recommend using the search bar and the messenger tool to grow your network and increase collaboration opportunities. For example, if you're a podcaster, you can use Messenger as the tool to find and, like, book guest speakers for your podcast.

Jen Goeser:
And then number 4 is my favorite. It's activating creator mode on LinkedIn. And that will give you special access to features like LinkedIn audio events, LinkedIn Levine, and newsletters, and things like that.

Julia Levine:
Wow. Okay. That was a lot of information. Let me just see here. So first, we're creating an account and you mentioned a headline. Is that what it was called?

Jen Goeser:
Yes. So you can tell your audience what you do and who you serve. So if you're a podcaster and your audience is teaching how to create podcasts for small business owners, then, you know, you wanna put your audience in there. So tell your audience what you do and who you serve.

Julia Levine:
Gotcha. So it sounds kind of like it's like the one liner on, like, Instagram or Facebook.

Jen Goeser:
Yes. That's a great way to describe it.

Julia Levine:
Okay. Great. And then creator mode, that sounds like that unlocks some additional features, which sound really cool. And is that literally just a setting you can just, like, toggle on that you wanna opt into creator mode?

Jen Goeser:
That's a great question. And, yes, you want to activate creator mode, but you have to have a couple requirements. So you wanna make sure that you have at least a 150 followers, and you want to make sure you share your content, and then you follow the professional community standards, which is a fancy way of saying follow the LinkedIn rules. And once you do that, you can access all these amazing features on LinkedIn, like your audio events, or if you wanna do LinkedIn live, or you wanna get really fancy, you know, people can follow you. Because you have connections on LinkedIn and then you have a follow feature. For example, I have over 20,000 followers on LinkedIn. Now I've been using it since 2008, but these are all authentic real connections. LinkedIn is really strict.

Jen Goeser:
So if they get, you know, with a view buying followers, they will not let you use the platform. So it's a real authentic place to make connections in business.

Julia Levine:
Okay. So I'm a little deer in the headlights here because this is just such an interesting foreign world to me. And so this is probably a stupid question, but how does someone get followers? Is it just like any other social media where you post content, and then once people see your content, they can follow you?

Jen Goeser:
Yeah. Absolutely. So when you're making connections on LinkedIn, and this is not a stupid question at all, once you make a connection, that person that you're connecting with is an automatic follower.

Julia Levine:
Okay.

Jen Goeser:
And once you grow your audience, like, every day I have different people following me in my industry, People can actually follow you without connecting with you once you have that creator mode turned on. But just starting out for somebody that's never used LinkedIn, you just wanna grow your network and increase those connections so you, in turn, get more followers.

Julia Levine:
Gotcha. So if we have other friends or colleagues that are on LinkedIn, we should look them up and create a connection with them. Is that right?

Jen Goeser:
Absolutely. I always recommend when I'm teaching people how to use LinkedIn, like, try to set a goal of, like, 20 a month, and you'll be surprised how quickly your network will grow.

Julia Levine:
Okay. That is some valuable stuff right there. I'm learning so much. This is great. So let's shift into talking about the content piece. So we're supposed to post content on LinkedIn, and, you know, this is not Instagram. We're not up there doing our little dances. So what type of content can we post on LinkedIn, and how do we do this? Is it an article?

Jen Goeser:
So first, you're gonna wanna create a profile and grow your network before you start doing this. But once you do that, you can create and share posts. So for anybody in the podcast world, you can actually create content and share it on your feed. You can also share your podcast link on your post, and that's a really great feature too that LinkedIn offers. And then if you wanna go further than that, you can embed your link on LinkedIn articles, and you can do that through, like, SoundCloud or Spotify.

Julia Levine:
Okay. So one of the things that I've heard about using LinkedIn is for podcasters, they've created this podcast content. And then we want to milk that content for all its words. So we repurpose it. We take a sound bite and we make a reel. We post 4 takeaways and we post that as an Instagram carousel post or whatever we're doing to try and get that same information, that same message out to different people on different platforms, in different ways, to appeal to different learning styles, etcetera. So some of the advice that I've just heard throughout the industry is that you can kind of take the text from your podcast episode, whether you are scripting it out or whether you use the transcription service to transcribe it after you've recorded it. So you have this text, this print, this writing.

Julia Levine:
And then I've heard that you should kind of turn that into almost like a blog post and put that on LinkedIn, and then you can leverage the SEO from that to, you know, kind of get your content in front of more people. Is that advice that I've heard, is that correct? Is that a good thing to do with our content?

Jen Goeser:
I think that's a great thing to do with your content, just hearing from you. I'm not in the podcast world, but I would think that would be great if podcasters are doing that. One thing I've just it came to the top of my head is you can create a LinkedIn article that could be your quote, unquote blog post. And when you do that, you can talk about your podcast, you know, who your guest speaker was, And then you could say, listen here, if you wanna hear the full podcast and you can embed your link, something like that. But absolutely, LinkedIn is so good for SEO and just getting your content out there in another way.

Julia Levine:
So on that note of SEO, do you have any suggestions for best practices? Obviously, I'm sure there's a whole rabbit hole we could go down here, but just kind of surface level, like basic tips. Are there any like, top things that, you know, you need to make sure that you do if you're posting an article or written content on LinkedIn?

Jen Goeser:
Well, I would say best practices are just completing your profile. That's a great starting point. And then when you complete your profile and you optimize it, your keywords are gonna pop out and increase your SEO, which is gonna actually have a ripple effect on your content and your articles and that's really gonna help you.

Julia Levine:
Okay. Good to know. SEO is a whole rabbit hole, as I mentioned, and I've kind of gone down this rabbit hole lately because because I've been learning web SEO, but I've also been learning podcast SEO, and they're very, very different. And so kind of the just high level overview without going down the rabbit hole is that podcast SEO is like really general generic keywords. So marketing, podcasting, like things like that. Whereas web SEO is you really wanna hit those unique phrases, like best podcasting equipment or best podcasting equipment for beginners. Like, you're targeting more specific, more narrow things. What is the SEO land like on LinkedIn?

Jen Goeser:
Yeah. So you're just going to want when you fill out your profile, your headline should definitely have the word podcaster or podcast, the name of your podcast on your headline. Then there is a summary, you can kind of summarize what you do in LinkedIn, and you can definitely use those keywords throughout your summary. That's all gonna increase your SEO. And like you said, it's different. Right? So on LinkedIn, you just want those keywords. Like, you wanna use the word podcast or podcast. But number 1, definitely in your headline.

Jen Goeser:
Number 2, in your summary. And then when you're posting your content, that's gonna pop up more whenever you're using hashtags. It all ties together.

Julia Levine:
Okay. Great. So sounds like similar to podcasting where you kinda wanna use those big general terms. Yes. Exactly. Fantastic. That's really good to know. That's really helpful.

Julia Levine:
Yeah. Alright. Well, do you have any other tips about LinkedIn?

Jen Goeser:
Get on it. Get on LinkedIn today. Just sign up. And then another tip I will give you all before I leave is download the app because the app can go on your phone. And as you're growing your network, it's just gonna be easier for you to set aside 5 or 10 minutes a day and say, okay, I'm gonna connect with at least a couple people today and grow your network, and the more you grow your network, you can grow your audience and your podcast can be heard locally because there's over 1,000,000,000 users locally on LinkedIn.

Julia Levine:
Wow. That's a lot of people, for sure.

Jen Goeser:
It's a lot of people and it's important when you have your podcast, you're able to reach a larger audience and LinkedIn is a great tool for that.

Julia Levine:
Fantastic. Well, how can listeners connect with you further if they have more LinkedIn questions, they want to learn more about LinkedIn, where can they connect with you? Do you have any resources?

Jen Goeser:
Yeah. So if you wanna check me out, go to hiringhub.digital. I do have a LinkedIn course. It's kind of a starter course for small businesses. And if you ever ready to hire, I'm your girl. Look me up on hiringhub.digital.

Julia Levine:
Well, thank you so much for being here today, Jen. This was a valuable conversation. I know I learned so much, and I'm sure that the audience did as well.

Jen Goeser:
No. You're so welcome. Thank you so much for having me.