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To stand out on LinkedIn, there are a few things you should know…

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms for job hunters and business owners alike, offering an online professional network, unlike any other social media platform. Like any platform, understanding the do’s and don’ts can help you stand out from the crowd and land the opportunities of your dreams. 

We’re joined today by Hala Taha, who is one of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn, alongside her many accomplishments as a podcaster and business owner, to discuss how to stand out, land more gigs, and put your best foot forward on LinkedIn.

You’ll learn:

• What kind of content will get you noticed (and what not to post!)

• Why the LinkedIn algorithm is different than any other social site

• How to take the best profile picture using the science of body language

• Bonus networking tips!

Hala’s Links:

Podcast

YouTube

Website

Instagram

LinkedIn

Resources:

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Transcript:

Hala Taha:

When I think of branding, it’s really about consistency. Your brand is your consistency in all the actions that you take online. If we just look at LinkedIn in particular, it’s every single piece of real estate that you have access to. It’s your profile picture, your profile banner, your title, what’s on your actual profile page. Then it’s also all your posts that you write, the way that you respond to your comments, the way that you respond to your DMs. It’s every little action that counts. If you’re consistent over time, then you’ll become like an old friend and have a brand, right?

Tori Dunlap:

Hi, Financial Feminist, welcome back to the show. I’m so excited to see you here. I hope however you’re spending your summer, whether it’s escaping the heat or diving right into it, it’s going well. And as always, I’m so thankful that you are spending a little bit of time here. My name is Tori. I am a money expert. I am a New York Times bestselling author. I’m a Forbes 30 under 30. I’m also Timothée Chalamet obsessed. But if you are an oldie but a goodie, you knew that already. If you are new, welcome.

We fight the patriarchy by making you rich. A couple things before we get into the episode. One, if you are listening on Spotify, we have this lovely community feature where you can comment down below. You can share your thoughts about an episode. You can ask new questions or ask for a certain episode topic. We actually read all of them. Kristen and I sit there and read all of them. We would love to get your feedback and also see how you’re liking the show. That’s always helpful for us, and if there’s anything you would like us to cover.

And if you’re new here or you’ve been here for a while and you feel a little bit lost about your money, you’re feeling like I don’t know where to get started, you can go to herfirst100k.com/quiz, herfirst100k.com/quiz. We have built you a free money personality quiz. It’s not a pass/fail thing. It’s not like you can fail this quiz. We ask you six questions for us to be able to deliver our best resources that make the most sense for where you are in your financial life. It allows us to serve you best.

Me and my team have spent literally years creating thousands of hours of content and we want to deliver that to you in a way that makes sense wherever you’re at in your financial life. The best place to get started consuming our tools and resources, herfirst100k.com/quiz. Can’t wait to see you over there. All right, let’s talk about today’s guest. We’ve touched on layoffs and job transitions a few times before, especially since every single headline these days seems to be about a new company, especially a tech company, laying off hundreds of employees.

And we’ve also talked about how to grow a business and how to not only brand yourself, but if you are branding a business, figuring out how to do that and on what platforms to do that. If you’re job hunting or trying to start a business, one of the best tools, but often the most confusing and overlooked is LinkedIn. I think there’s this perception of LinkedIn that it is like your dad’s social media platform. I have been posting a lot more on LinkedIn.

You can follow me, Tori Dunlap, on LinkedIn, and I’m actually seeing really interesting growth and conversations in a way that I haven’t seen on social media in a long time. I was really excited to talk to today’s guest who is the queen of LinkedIn, Hala Taha, to talk about how to utilize the platform to either land your dream job, build a clientele network effectively, and brand either yourself or your business. Hala Taha is the founder and CEO of the award-winning social media and podcast agency, YAP Media, as well as the founder and CEO of the YAP Media Podcast Network.

She started her podcast and company as a side hustle while working in corporate marketing, scaling to 50 plus employees and 5 million in revenue in less than two years. She’s interviewed the likes of Dave Asprey, Matthew McConaughey, all right, all right, all right, Deepak Chopra and more. She is frequently recognized as a top female voice in the podcast industry and was featured in The New York Times, the cover of Podcast Magazine, and received a 2022 Webby Honoree for Best Live Podcast.

Hala is well-known for her influence and popularity on LinkedIn, as well as non-traditional apps like CastBox and Player.FM. We talk a little bit about her background getting into radio and podcasting and how she utilizes LinkedIn to build her business and get noticed. She’s such a wealth of information on LinkedIn, and quite literally during this episode, I went on my own LinkedIn and made some updates. We’re excited to have her here, so let’s go ahead and get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. Where are you tuning in from?

Hala Taha:

I’m in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Tori Dunlap:

Oh, nice. How far is that from New York? This is my classic, I don’t know geography very well.

Hala Taha:

I’m right outside the Holland Tunnel, so it literally with no traffic takes me about five minutes to get into the city. I’m always in the city. My boyfriend is in the city. I’m basically halfway in New York City and Jersey City.

Tori Dunlap:

We’re so excited to have you. It’s been so fun to watch you and I and then a couple other women on the charts for business podcasts. In the top 50, there’s you and I and three others and that’s it. I love seeing us just trying to navigate that space full of a bunch of men.

Hala Taha:

I know. So few women are really doing it in the podcast space. Kudos to you.

Tori Dunlap:

And right back at you. We’re so excited to have you. You started out in radio before eventually becoming your own podcast and media agency owner. Can you take us on a tour through how you got there?

Hala Taha:

Yeah. When I was in college, I took an internship at HOT 97. At the time it was New York’s number one hip hop and R&B station. Actually the top one in the whole world. It was a big deal to work at HOT 97. This was over 10 years ago now, maybe 11 years ago. It was a big deal to work at that station. I was just a normal intern. I was in my junior year of college, and then they had asked me to basically take my internship to another level and become an unpaid intern, but my benefit of that is that I’d be working in the studio area directly with Angie Martinez, The Voice of New York.

I was to be her associate producer on The Angie Martinez Show. The catch was I wasn’t going to get paid and it was not on the books and totally not legal and all these different things. I jumped on the opportunity because I always wanted to use my voice as a positive mechanism for my generation. My voice is something that I’ve always leveraged even since I was a young girl. I lov
e to sing and all these different things, and I’ve always used my voice in different ways. I thought of this radio opportunity as another way to leverage my voice and hone my skills in this area.

I jumped on the opportunity. I ended up dropping out of college for about two years and just taking this radio internship, apprenticeship really, super seriously. I became Hala from HOT 97. Everybody from college knew me as Hala from HOT 97. I would make money hosting concerts and showcases at night, underground rapper showcases, and learned different sales skills. I would run their social media on the side. I would do blogging for the DJs on the side. I had my online radio shows, which was the precursor of podcasting on the side.

I just totally dived right into this online radio space at the time. And then I was really itching for a paid job. I remember basically asking HOT 97 like, hey, can I at least get paid minimum wage? Everybody in my family is doctors. I had dropped out of school. My parents were like disowning me at this point.

Tori Dunlap:

It seems like the bare minimum they can do is compensate you for your labor.

Hala Taha:

Yeah, and I was really doing a good job. You don’t keep somebody around for three years that doesn’t do a good job. I was training all their interns and so integrated within the company and on air. I was singing commercials. I was a character on air for Angie Martinez’s show, but still not getting paid. I asked to get paid and they fired me immediately because I became a risk. They cut the key cards. I didn’t get to say bye to anyone. I was absolutely devastated because I had tied my identity with being an employee at HOT 97.

I was literally on Twitter @halahot97. Everything was @halahot97. I was really, really devastated, but I’m one to get back up on my feet very quickly. I got fired on a Thursday. By Sunday I had already thought of my new idea. I was going to create something called the Sorority of Hip Hop and I was to be the president. I went back to school and I started recruiting girls for the Sorority of Hip Hop. Within two weeks, I had 14 girls on this thing called the Sorority of Hip Hop. We had our first board meeting, and I started a blog.

We were talking about how you started out with a blog, so it was called thesororityofhiphop.com. Within three months, we were one of the most popular hip hop and entertainment websites, and I was already getting solicits from MTV to have my own show. We had a very small pilot with MTV when we first started. Nothing happened and I didn’t really care because I was like, it’s just three months in. What’s going to happen six months from now? Let me just keep going. And then about two years into it, we were hosting parties, we had online radio shows, all these different things.

MTV came back to us again for a pilot that we shot the entire summer. They might have invested I would say at least $100,000 in this pilot. They got us a studio on Broadway. I almost became famous, and I remember thinking this was such a pivotal moment in my life because I had worked for free for three years at HOT 97, got rejected. Then I started my own thing. It blew up. The same DJs that wouldn’t pay me minimum wage started hiring us to promote their parties. I became pretty famous in the tri-state area running this Sorority of Hip Hop.

I got shouted out on the radio more running this blog than I did when I worked at HOT 97. I felt like I had finally made it, and then I was going to actually get paid. MTV was giving us a paycheck for every show. I was getting paid the most, and I was very excited. Two weeks before we were going to air, MTV pulls the plug. No reason why. “Sorry, Hala, we’re moving in another direction. Really sorry.” This is after they swore to God that I was going to get this show. They told me it was like 90% and everything.

Again, it was one of those devastating moments in my life. And at that point, I feel like I was so chipped away at that I just gave up. I was like, you know what? My parents are right. My family’s right. I’m not going to be famous. I don’t know what I’m thinking. Let me just forget about all of this entertainment life. Let me forget about broadcasting. I went and got my MBA and I decided I was just going to get a real job. I’ll pause there. I went to Hewlett-Packard, and then Disney. I’ll pause there for now.

Tori Dunlap:

I just can’t get over three years unpaid. How did that affect your psyche? Because you’re doing all of this great work and you’re seeing all of this progress, and you also are saying, okay, my identity is this thing, and yet I’m not getting compensated financially for any of it. That’s got to fuck with you.

Hala Taha:

It does. But at the same time, I think it’s the reason why I’m so successful now. I got so much experience and so many contacts, and I was still making money, but just doing different things. I was selling underground rapper showcase tickets and hosting rapper showcases and getting sponsorships from my online radio show.

I was still figuring out how to be scrappy and make money. I think everybody saw how scrappy and hardworking I was. I don’t regret for a second the three years I got very little money from HOT 97 because I think that I honed skills that I was able to make millions of dollars off later on.

Tori Dunlap:

It’s really interesting. It’s one of those things. Obviously, I don’t have your experience, although there was internships I took that were unpaid. I have to respectfully disagree. There’s something like I think people deserve to get compensated financially in order to pay their bills and in order to navigate that.

I get that there’s certain payments that you can get that aren’t financial. There’s connections, there’s opportunities, but it’s really hard to leverage that. I imagine you had to make all of these opportunities for yourself to make money because you weren’t getting paid for the thing you were doing in the 9:00 to 5:00. That’s tricky.

Hala Taha:

Here’s my role. Now I have a real business, right? All my interns, even my interns now, get stipends and get paid and whatever. But when I was first starting out, nobody was making any money, and everybody knew this was a volunteer type of thing. People should get paid as soon as you’re not teaching them anything new. Nobody ever felt, I’ve never had one person in my organizations when I’ve done intern volunteer work, I’ve never had one person complain because they’ve learned so many skills that they’re then able to monetize.

Anytime somebody is doing something and it becomes valuable and I can’t teach them anymore, then they get paid and they get hired and they get a job. I think as long as you’re teaching somebody new skills, there’s value in unpaid work. I disagree with you on that. There’s lots of opportunities to work for free and get those skills.

Tori Dunlap:

You mentioned your MBA. You basically started over, got your MBA, did the corporate thing for a few years. What did you
learn during that time that helped you come back to radio and podcasting successfully?

Hala Taha:

I wouldn’t say that my MBA really had a correlation with my success. What it did allow me to do is… I had a crazy resume at the time. If you think about what my resume looked like when I got my MBA, I was a college dropout that left for two years, went back. I was an unpaid intern at a radio station, and then I had a blog site, a hip hop blog site, and I hosted parties. My resume looked crazy to try to get a corporate job, and that was my goal.

My MBA internship enabled me to get a corporate job because I was able to get an MBA internship at a corporate company, and then I was able to prove myself and then get a job. My MBA actually enabled me to start my corporate career. Now, in terms of me going back on the mic, four years into my job at Hewlett-Packard, I felt really unfulfilled. I felt like I really need to go back to my passions. I was doing a great job at Hewlett-Packard. I got promoted four times in four years and was doing really well, but I felt like something was missing and I was honestly bored.

I could do my day job and I felt like I had more to offer to the world. I started my podcast this time. It was my first actual podcast, my first solo show and my first business show. I felt like I had more credibility to come at it with a business angle, and then also because I had done a really great job in corporate. I thought that I was going to go into corporate and be really behind. But actually being an entrepreneur and learning on the internet, I was actually way more tech-savvy than everybody else.

I was known as the tech whiz kid at Hewlett-Packard. It actually really helped me. I felt like I could come at it from a different angle, both having this MBA business background, corporate background and entrepreneurship. I went at it.

Tori Dunlap:

Well, and you’ve interviewed some really incredible people. Was there a particular interview that was impactful to you, whether that was from your radio days or from now the podcast?

Hala Taha:

Yeah, I would say one of the highlights of my podcasting career was when I interviewed Matthew McConaughey. That was right before my podcast really took off. I got on the cover of Podcast Magazine. A lot of people who have followed my journey from five years ago, one of the things that they always say is, “I’ve been listening to you since before Matthew McConaughey.” That’s like everybody’s turning point of when I made it. It’s funny, because when it’s you yourself, you don’t feel that there’s pivotal milestones.

But to the outside world, that was a pivotal milestone. That one was really special to me. And then I recently interviewed Daymond John. That’s somebody who I used to watch on Shark Tank with my father who passed away. My dad was a big fan. For me, that one was really special because I feel like he would’ve been really happy about that one.

Tori Dunlap:

Shark Tank is also a Dunlap family thing. We sit together and watched it when I was living at home. It was a family tradition for us too. Let’s transition into talking about LinkedIn and networking. LinkedIn gets this bad rep as being this very corporate social media experience, but I have seen how it’s helped my business grow and helped me connect with people I might not have otherwise. What are other reasons someone might use LinkedIn, or why is it powerful for somebody that might be listening?

Hala Taha:

LinkedIn is such a great site. It is not just a site to look for jobs. There’s millions of people who are going on there and consuming content just like they would any other platform, Instagram, Facebook, and so on. For me, it’s a really big business opportunity. LinkedIn is really great for entrepreneurs, freelancers, small business owners, corporate professionals who also want more job security and want more opportunity. It is a great professional network. People on LinkedIn generally make more money. They have an average of $75,000 a year salary at least or above.

They’re mostly college educated, almost everybody has a job. This is a market that can afford services and products. If you’re an entrepreneur, you definitely should be on LinkedIn trying to reach out to these people. The other thing with LinkedIn that makes it really interesting is that it is really good at search. You can actually search people by title, by the companies they work at, by how big their company is. You can search keywords in people’s profiles. It enables all this targeting when it comes to business that is not accessible on Instagram or other platforms as easily.

You can do a lot of different selling tactics in the DMs, I teach this in my LinkedIn masterclass, that you just really can’t do on other platforms. The other thing is that people on LinkedIn are in the mode to buy. People use LinkedIn when they’re making purchasing decisions, when they’re researching.

If you reach out to somebody about a product or a service you think that might be relevant for them based on the information on their profile, they’re less likely to disregard it compared to Instagram or something when they’re posting about their family. And that feels intrusive. It’s also a platform that’s primed for these sales conversations.

Tori Dunlap:

I think one of the things, because I have this background of social media as well, that people get wrong is there are social media sites that are what we think of social media of conversations or life updates. I got engaged, or I’m doing this thing. I got a new job. And then there’s social media that really is just another search engine. I think of Pinterest. Pinterest is not really social media. I don’t know about you, but I’m not commenting on my friend’s pins.

I am searching things on Pinterest that I would normally search on Google, how to sew something. I’m looking on Pinterest for an image or for some sort of answer to my question. I think LinkedIn is similar, and we’re starting to see that from TikTok a little bit. Can you talk to me more about the difference in how we view LinkedIn as social media when really I think for me it feels more like a search engine?

Hala Taha:

It’s interesting that you say that. I feel like LinkedIn is really a social media network, just like any other social media network. People are posting about their family and their stories and their experiences.

Tori Dunlap:

It might be a little bit of both in a way that maybe some of them aren’t.

Hala Taha:

It’s both. Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely both. There’s like the feed portion of LinkedIn, which is very traditional. You can almost think of it as an old school Facebook feed where people are posting about their lives, their accomplishments. Now, we can talk about the LinkedIn algorithm if you’d like. Here’s the thing, the LinkedIn algorithm is very different from other soc
ial media algorithms because the last stage in that algorithm is actually human editors who are monitoring the content to make sure that it aligns to LinkedIn’s agenda.

LinkedIn is a professional network, so they are prioritizing content that is hiring, recruitment, careers, graduation, entrepreneurship related. That’s why when you go on LinkedIn, you see all those stories at the top of your feed because LinkedIn wants their editorial agenda to be that. LinkedIn is a social media network, but it’s got this professional spin around it when it comes to the content. That’s how we can think of the content.

And then there’s this whole other angle of DMs and all these cool things that you can do with invites and invite notes and InMails and DMs. That’s the second layer of it, especially if you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, that you can really leverage and utilize on LinkedIn.

Tori Dunlap:

I have a two part question. What is the biggest mistake that people are making on LinkedIn, either as W-2, people who are not interested in running a business versus people who are What mistakes are you seeing for both of those kinds of people?

Hala Taha:

People who are corporate or people who are entrepreneurs, you’re saying? First of all, people don’t understand the algorithm, and LinkedIn is definitely the type of platform where you could have the best content in the world. And if you don’t understand how the algorithm works, it’s never going to work for you and you’re never going to get any engagement. A lot of people get discouraged and they think like, “I’m just not going to make it,” when really they’re just not following the rules.

Some of the rules include you can’t put a link in your caption, and this goes for most social media sites. Their goal is to keep users on the platform engaged for as long as possible. You go and you point them to your website, you’re taking them off platform. That is not aligned to the agenda of LinkedIn, which is to keep users on their platform so they can see their ads and see their recruitment posts and whatever it is. As somebody who creates content, you never want to link out to a third party site in your caption because LinkedIn’s going to deprioritize that.

That’s one example. Another example is the fact that in the beginning of the algorithm, LinkedIn categorizes your posts into three filters. They’re called spam filters. Spam is the obvious, nudity, profanity, grammar mistakes, that kind of stuff. But then they’ve got this low quality filter that isn’t as obvious. For example, using big chunky paragraphs. People on LinkedIn like to skim. LinkedIn knows that the more skimmable your content, the more enjoyable and entertaining it is, the more likely that people are going to stop and actually read it.

If you’re using big chunky paragraphs on LinkedIn, you’re actually going to be filtered as low quality and LinkedIn’s going to serve your content to less users. Just being skimmable. That’s why you see all the influencers doing this line by line style on LinkedIn because it actually is related to the algorithm, not just people’s aesthetics and preferences to how they read content. The other thing is tagging too many people in your posts. A lot of people think they should tag all these influencers or tag even the company they work for.

If these people are not engaging on your posts within 90 minutes, LinkedIn is going to think that’s spam. They’re going to think you’re spamming people and they’re not engaging. It will actually deprioritize your post. There’s lots of little rules that you need to understand. And if you understand those rules, you will be way far ahead of the game.

Tori Dunlap:

I’ve always wondered why the LinkedIn text is read in one-liners. I’ve always wondered. I didn’t know if that was just the trend of just like this is the way we write on LinkedIn. Because I’ve done the same thing where it’s like, yeah, you don’t read blocky text. And also, I don’t post blocky text on LinkedIn. That’s so interesting. I think a lot of our listeners have this idea, it’s just like networking feels really sterile.

It feels really confusing. Even the word networking for me conjures pencil skirts and high heels and a lot of hand shakes. How can you stand out and own that individuality that makes you special, but also make sure you’re communicating your resume or your offerings well?

Hala Taha:

Yeah, this is a really great question. In my LinkedIn masterclass, I talk a lot about branding and how to create a brand. And to me, when I think of branding, it’s really about consistency. Your brand is your consistency in all the actions that you take online. If we just look at LinkedIn in particular, it’s every single piece of real estate that you have access to. It’s your profile picture, your profile banner, your title, what’s on your actual profile page. Then it’s also all your posts that you write, the way that you respond to your comments, the way that you respond to your DMs.

It’s every little action that counts. And if you’re consistent over time, then you’ll become like an old friend and have a brand. When I share something on LinkedIn, we didn’t talk about it yet, but I’m one of the most popular influencers on LinkedIn, and I’m the top podcaster on that platform. I became an influencer on LinkedIn before my podcast blew up, and it’s because I leveraged LinkedIn to grow my podcast.

In terms of branding, I came up with a framework and basically it’s aligning your personality, your values, the transformation that you want to make with your audience, and the way that you deliver that transformation. To me, that is the cohesive view of the elements of a personal brand. It’s very important for you to know what your values are, what your personality type is, how you want to make a transformation with your audience so that you can be consistent in all these different actions and create a brand.

Tori Dunlap:

What is creating an optimized version of LinkedIn look like for an individual versus a brand?

Hala Taha:

One of the things to note on LinkedIn is that if you look at the most popular influencers, they’re all people. This is a big question that I get a lot. Should I focus on my company page? Should I focus on my personal page? My answer is always personal page. If you think about anybody who’s crushing it on LinkedIn, think Gary V, everybody knows he’s VaynerMedia, but he’s Gary V. You see Barbara Corcoran, Grant Cardone, everything. It’s all the CEO or the spokesperson of the company’s page who’s generating all the momentum.

There’s a reason behind that, and that’s because company pages have less capabilities. Company pages don’t have DMs. DMs is a huge strategy on LinkedIn, and it also feeds the LinkedIn algorithm in terms of the posts that you write. For example, when you DM somebody, they see your content at the top of their feed for two weeks. If you have a new connection request on LinkedIn, they’ll see your content at the top of their feed for two weeks.

If you don’t have this DM invite capability
on the company page, you’re losing all this potential momentum that you could be having on your personal page. I always say prioritize your personal page first. And then if you have bandwidth, you can have a company page and that company page can work in tandem with your personal page to like and comment and share and post. You guys can basically cross-promote on those pages. But by far, you will get much more traction on a personal page than a company page.

Tori Dunlap:

We talked a little on a previous episode with our guest Alina Ansari about networking with intentionality. What does that look like on social media, especially when your audience is larger or when you are trying to build a brand, because that feels a lot less personal?

Hala Taha:

The first thing that pops in my head is this idea of collaboration over competition. For me, one of the ways that I blew up on social media was actually by collaborating with my competitors. For example, on LinkedIn, have you ever heard of the concept of an engagement pod?

Tori Dunlap:

Yes. Yeah. In the good old days of Instagram a couple years ago, the big engagement pods. Yeah.

Hala Taha:

It’s still the good old age on LinkedIn. Engagement pods are alive and well. They’re not against terms of service. Again, you’re bringing people onto LinkedIn, so LinkedIn likes that rather than pulling them off. They’re not against terms of service. One of the ways that I grew on LinkedIn is I saw all these other up and coming podcasters on the platform. And anybody who is making any sort of noise, who got any sort of engagement, I reach out to them.

I was like, “Hey, what’s up? My name’s Hala. I’m in the podcasting space too. I see you’re doing your thing. I’m really impressed. I respect you. Do you want to join my WhatsApp group and let’s support each other’s content?” I got 60 other podcasters on LinkedIn in this pod, and then I would host monthly calls with them. We would share tips. We would support each other’s posts, and it really helped me get ahead. I learned faster. I networked with all these people. When Clubhouse came out, we were hosting events together.

We met each other at conferences, and these people became my friends and advocates and really helped propel my career in this space. Essentially, I use this tactic all the time, and it’s basically being the glue that brings like-minded people together. If you can be the glue that brings like-minded people together, people will respect you really more. They’ll think of you for other opportunities. It’s like the law of reciprocity.

You’re giving to them because you’re like, “Here, this is a platform that I’ve started. I’m proactively inviting you to it. I’m taking up my time to facilitate this group for us,” and then people will want to repay that favor for you. That’s one way that I leverage networking on social media.

Tori Dunlap:

I have a group chat with fellow women entrepreneurs that we call the Hype Squad, and we do very similar things. To take it even a step further, and you were mentioning this, of like beyond just engaging on posts, it’s also just like they’re who I go to when I’m like, hi, I have this question in my business, or somebody’s asking a question of us.

It’s so nice to be able to have that community of like-minded people to be able to answer it. “I know this person. I can connect you to them.” That’s truly what networking is, right, is it’s a give and take just like any other relationship. That’s what it is. We just have a fancy label put on it.

Hala Taha:

Totally. To be clear, these engagement pods sometimes can be very transactional. You don’t want to join one where they’re just like, “Come here like and comment on links. We don’t care about who you are or what you like.” You want to find people of common ground and then also have other opportunities to speak to each other outside of just supporting the post so that you guys actually care about leaving meaningful comments and care about each other’s success.

Tori Dunlap:

Yeah, because you’ll see it. People will see it if it feels very transactional.

Hala Taha:

Yeah. They’re like, that’s great.

Tori Dunlap:

Nice job emoji. You run a podcast agency, as we mentioned before. Why do you think podcasting as a medium works so well for both big creators and small creators? I, as a fellow podcaster, feel like everybody in the past year has tried to get in the podcast game. Why do you think it works so well?

Hala Taha:

Podcasting is such a special channel, and I think that there’s so many ways to monetize a podcast. It’s like you can monetize a podcast through the guests that come on your show. That’s originally how I monetize a podcast. You can monetize a podcast even with a small audience and sell them your products and services. If you grow it big enough, you can get sponsorships. There’s just lots of angles that you can use podcasting to leverage. And then also, it’s just such a great long form content channel.

It’s just such a great way to create long form content and then chop it up into small form content for your socials, for your newsletter, whatever it is. I feel like there’s just lots of ways you can use a podcast in your social media and marketing efforts. For that reason, I think it’s a good one. But the thing is is that I think a lot of people are entering podcasting not knowing enough and not taking it seriously enough. I don’t think there’s room for people who are taking it more as a hobby. I feel like you need to actually really try. It’s a lot harder than it looks to do it well.

Tori Dunlap:

If you want to rank and make money. If you just want to have a conversation with your friends and record it and put it up, cool, but that’s probably not going to make you any money.

Hala Taha:

Exactly.

Tori Dunlap:

It’s actually a great segue. One of the questions I always think about as an entrepreneur is like, how can I make content once and utilize it on a bunch of different platforms? Working smarter, not harder. When you talk about podcasting or LinkedIn, how have you thought about taking content, creating it once, and then turning it and transforming it into content for various social media platforms?

Hala Taha:

I think this is a really great strategy. I think the key though to doing this strategy is understanding that when you do create this micro content let’s say from your podcast, you’ve got to customize it for every platform. That means understanding the features and the algori
thm of every platform, understanding the different sizes that you need to put it in, understanding the different styles that work in terms of the captions on every platform or the way that hashtags work on every platform.

It does enable you to do something once, but then you definitely have to customize it per channel. Because that’s one of the biggest mistakes I see with podcast promotion. They take what they put on Instagram, they put it on LinkedIn. For example, IG Reels do the best on Instagram, but videos do terrible on LinkedIn, unless they’re LinkedIn Live. Videos are typically deprioritized on that platform. Everybody’s listening with the sound off, and also sensory adaptation. People are sick of these talking head videos because it was done so much.

That type of style, talking head micro content from podcast, actually does very poorly on LinkedIn, while it does really well on Instagram. It’s understanding the platform and what you can use from each one. For example, we might use vertical style reels on Instagram, creating that from the podcast. And for LinkedIn, it might be transcribing the podcast. And then whatever stories come out of it, writing a story instead on LinkedIn with a graphic. That would do better than a video.

Tori Dunlap:

Do you think there’s value in podcasting or starting a podcast for somebody who isn’t a small business owner?

Hala Taha:

Yes. The networking aspect of it. When I first started my podcast, I did not think I was going to make a dime. That was not my goal at all. It was just to fulfill this need to want to serve and meet new people and interview experts and learn myself. If you have really pure intentions like that, that’s actually one of the best reasons to start a podcast. I think one of the worst reasons to start a podcast is to think you’re going to make all this money because it’s not that easy. It takes years.

Tori Dunlap:

Well, and that addendum is to my previous comment too. I agree. I think that there is a play of like, oh, I want to monetize this eventually, versus yeah, you’re definitely not going to make money right off the bat. There’s not an immediate transition to that

Hala Taha:

Unless you’re already a social media influencer and unless you’re already a really established business person.

Tori Dunlap:

You’re Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who just launched her podcast.

Hala Taha:

It’s like if you are a really established business owner and you’re an expert and you have got some service that you’re offering, even if you have 50 people listening, maybe they’ll buy because you’re such an expert and you know what you’re talking about. It’s like if you have experience or clout already, yeah, you could probably monetize pretty quickly. But if not, it’s going to be anything else, it takes time to build.

Tori Dunlap:

We were talking about on my episode of your show this idea of side hustles. If you’re feeling like, okay, I need to make money right now, starting a business or a podcast is not the way to do that, unless, like you said, you’re already a name. This is a long-term play. When I first started Her First $100K, I didn’t make money for a couple years. I didn’t make substantial money to pay me my own bills, yet alone everything else that I needed to make money to do. It’s important to think about.

Hala Taha:

It’s interesting, if anybody’s interested in starting a podcast, like I mentioned, there’s so many different ways to monetize. I remember when I first started podcasting, the idea of getting sponsorships felt so far away, because you need to get 100,000 downloads a month at least to be eligible even for sponsorships in this space. For me, when I first started, even though I was big on LinkedIn, I still wasn’t getting those big numbers in terms of the downloads. For me, it seemed like just such a far off goal. It would never happen. I actually started monetizing with my guests at first.

The guests that would come on my show, they would leave the show almost every time, Tori, they’d be like, “How did you grow on LinkedIn? Can you do it for me?” And I’d be like, “No, no, I’ve got a corporate job, or I just have volunteers that work for me. I can’t do this for you.” They would always ask me, “How’d you grow your podcast? How’d you grow your LinkedIn?” And then eventually I was like, all right, well, maybe I’ll start a marketing agency because all these famous people are asking me to do it for them and I keep turning them down. And then my agency blew up overnight.

Then I was able to invest back in growing my podcast because I learned about how people grow podcasts. I started doing advertising on different podcast apps and this and that, and then I grew my podcast big enough to get sponsorships. It’s like I took a totally different approach. There’s so many ways that you can achieve success in the podcast world, but it’s all about being strategic and how you go about monetizing it initially, I think.

Tori Dunlap:

And the intentionality of that. I think plenty of people ask something to make money before it’s ready to make money. I think being intentional of like, okay, we’re going to grow this and it’s not going to make money, so we need to go make money somewhere else in order for it to see the kind of growth we want, is so, so important.

Hala Taha:

Yeah, exactly.

Tori Dunlap:

What’s something someone can do today or this week to update their social media to help them either hone in on their personal brand or make themselves more visible to potential jobs?

Hala Taha:

I would say on LinkedIn specifically, make sure that you pay attention to your title. You get about three lines in your title, and the first line is what pops up when you post something on LinkedIn. I want everybody to go to their profile page. First of all, make sure you’ve got a profile picture that’s not too far away, that’s not too close up where we’re looking up your nose. It’s got to be just right in terms of it’s your face. I always say that a good rule of thumb is a head tilt, eyebrow flash, and a smile for your profile picture. People like to see the whites of your eyes, the white of your teeth.

If you tilt your head, you’re basically showing that you’re friendly. These are friend signals. You’re showing your carotid artery, which is the most vulnerable part of your body. A head tilt, a smile, and an eyebrow flash in your profile picture is the way to go. Something that’s not too distracting in your background of your profile picture, a high contrast. Looking at your LinkedIn banner, realizing that your LinkedIn banner is actually a real estate space that you can update whenever you want. If you’ve got a new book or if you’re a speaker, mak
e sure that it’s pictures of you speaking.

Whatever your main thing is, make sure that your banner on your profile page on LinkedIn is soliciting. And that can change all the time. When I have a new masterclass, I update my banner promoting the masterclass. The other thing is that LinkedIn now has a new feature called LinkedIn Bio. If you’re not that familiar with LinkedIn, you probably don’t realize this is a new feature. It’s called their Work With Me link, and you can update that link to an external website. I get thousands of clicks on this every single month.

This is something that if you’re a small business owner, you want to make sure you go and update right away. It’s called your Work With Me link. And then like I mentioned before, your title, make sure that you’ve got keywords in your title. Make sure you’ve clearly identified who you service and what you do in your title, and make sure it’s things that people are actually searching. Don’t use jargon that you only know. Think about how your clients would be searching for that specific type of person on LinkedIn and then put that in your profile.

Tori Dunlap:

I have to ask before we go, any other body language tips for networking? Because even that, you dropped that and I was like, I didn’t know that.

Hala Taha:

Oh my gosh, I know so much about this because I interview so many different people. I have a couple different ones. In a networking event, you can tell if you are able to approach people by their feet. If their feet are pointing to each other, that means that you’re not allowed in this conversation. This is a private conversation. If their feet are pointing out where there’s sort of a space, that means that they’re welcoming other people into their conversation. That’s one example. It’s okay to meet, it’s something about their feet. I don’t remember what. I think Dr. Schaeffer taught me.

Tori Dunlap:

Well, it’s kind of like if you have two people facing each other, they’re having a private conversation versus the one where you’re right next to each other shoulder to shoulder.

Hala Taha:

If it’s opened up a little bit, you can go and talk to them. Another thing with feet is that people judge you by your shoes really, really heavily. People will judge your financial status by your shoes. For me, I’m always like I never wear any scuffed heels. I always wear really expensive shoes because people will literally make snap judgements just based on the shoes that you’re wearing. It’s one of the first things people look at when they’re trying to judge your social status. I know this went left and we started talking about feet.

Tori Dunlap:

No, that’s super interesting. I wear my $25 Adidas when I speak, and I actually do that intentionally to appear more accessible. I have like tailored suit, and also because I can’t wear heels. My back will not allow it. I have a bad back. I’ve often wondered, I’m like, are people judging me for my shoes? But also for me, it doesn’t matter, but it sounds like it does. Now I’m going to have a whole existential crisis. What is next for you? Where can people find you?

Hala Taha:

You guys can listen to my podcast called Young and Profiting. We interviewed the brightest minds in the world. I’ve interviewed people like Seth Godin, Alex Hormozi, Chris Voss has come on my show five times, Robert Greene, all these great people. We talk mostly about entrepreneurship, human behavior, how to get influence, sales strategies, marketing strategies, finance. We just had Tori on the show. It’s a really great show. I hope you guys take a listen. I also have a LinkedIn masterclass. I launched a new arm of my business called the YAP Academy.

Our first program is a LinkedIn masterclass. We get hundreds of people who do it every month, and it has rave reviews. If you guys want to learn more about LinkedIn, how to convert your following into leads, how to go viral, how to become an influencer, you can go to yapmedia.io/course.

Tori Dunlap:

Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for your insight.

Hala Taha:

Yeah, thank you so much. It was so much fun.

Tori Dunlap:

Thank you again to Hala for joining us. Make sure to check out her podcast, Young and Profiting. I will be there. We did a little interview swap. We’ll make sure to link all of the important deets in the show notes for where to follow her and engage with her content. And again, as always, don’t just listen to this episode and be like, cool, that was fun. Actually use it to change your life. Maybe make some updates to your LinkedIn. Use some of her strategies to optimize your profile, whether you are, again, a business owner or a soon to be business owner, or you’re trying to find that new job.

LinkedIn is all about telling your story effectively. While we didn’t dive into reaching out to recruiters or optimizing a resume, there are so many impactful things that you can do on LinkedIn to stand out in a very crowded space. We thank you as always for being here, Financial Feminists. You can follow the show @financialfeministpodcast on Instagram, @herfirst100k on all of the social medias. And again, if you want personalized resources to better your money, you can go to herfirst100k.com/quiz. Thank you for being here, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields. Marketing and administration by Karina Patel, Sophia Cohen, Kahlil Dumas, Elizabeth McCumber, Beth Bowen, Amanda Leffew, Masha Bachmetyeva, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sumaya Mulla-Carillo, and Harvey Carlson. Research by Ariel Johnson. Audio Engineering by Austin Fields. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.

A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests, and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.