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Introducing Ticket Port X multi-day events.
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Hosting a festival, seminar, conference, tournament, or event series.
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No more manually sending tickets 24 hours later.
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No more scrambling to issue comps and catch up with attendees.
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With Ticketport X, everything happens in real time.
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Sell tickets for multiple events on one page.
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Create ticket packages across different dates, manage entire event series from a single storefront, and spend less money marketing multiple links and event pages.
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One platform, one link, endless possibilities.
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Ticket Port X, powering your brand, your events, and your growth.
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And welcome back to the Link Through Social Podcast.
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Well, what if your next client already trusted you because you taught them something valuable before they ever said hello?
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Well, that's the idea behind my guest Colin Herdman's work.
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Colin started his first company a week after graduating college and has been building ever since.
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He's the co-founder of Monkey Island Ventures, and it's named after the park he and his two best friends played in as kids.
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And in 19 years, the trio has launched more than a dozen software and service businesses.
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Today, Colin is focused on Rainmaker, which helps professionals grow their LinkedIn brand, network, leads, and sales.
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And his big idea, people buy from where they get educated.
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So he helps you turn your expertise into LinkedIn live streams that build trust before the first conversation.
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Colin, welcome to the program.
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Well, thanks so much for having me.
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Really excited to be here.
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And uh yeah, I love uh what you're doing in terms of spread education yourself.
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This is great.
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I appreciate it.
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Now, uh I mentioned off the top uh your company is is Rainmaker, and the URL for that is Rainmakergrows.com.
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Um other than what I've mentioned off the top there, Colin, maybe uh you can just uh discuss a little bit more about your background.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I kind of just fell into entrepreneurship, like you said.
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Uh started my first company a week after graduating from college, had that for uh about a decade, uh, sold that, and then started Monkey Island Ventures with my two business partners uh here in the Twin Cities.
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And um, yeah, we've um been building businesses since 2007.
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SaaS Companies, um, we have a digital marketing company, a software development company, and um some side things just for fun as well.
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But I'm spending most of my time now on uh Rainmaker, which I've been running for a couple of years, and I'm really excited to really dive into the details of uh what I'll be able to share with your audience today, because um I think it will be uh enlightening and very educational.
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And I would love for people to reach out and let me know what they think of the process or ideas, or if they you know have any contrary thoughts or beliefs.
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Like let me know.
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I'd love to uh hear it all.
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Yeah, no, absolutely.
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I'm uh I'm excited to dive into this.
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Now, I've uh been doing this podcast uh this year.
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We're uh coming up on episode 41, and um a lot of the professionals and experts that I've had on the show um find LinkedIn a very intrical tool in their the way they they get their their points out and their marketing out and to tell them about their company or the type of business that um that they have.
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Uh before that, I had been under the impression, and a lot of people used to say, oh, kind of LinkedIn is uh kind of uh is fading away, but I I I I beg to differ.
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And uh before we get into what what you're doing at Rainmaker, tell us you know the the actual current relevancy of LinkedIn.
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Yeah, well, I mean it's the only business social network out there.
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Uh there really are no other competition.
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So uh the the numbers keep growing.
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90% of the people on LinkedIn are lurkers, right?
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So they're not creating content.
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Um, they may do a little bit of engaging, but really most of the content you see is by a small percentage of the people actually on it.
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So there's still a lot of uh engagement.
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And one of the things that you know I really like to tell people is that you know, nobody wants to be sold on LinkedIn, but I think virtually everyone's willing to be educated on LinkedIn.
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And because of the monopoly it has, it gives all of us as you know, business owners, founders, or if you sit in the sales and marketing seat, a real uni opportunity to get in front of prospects and clients uh in ways that really relationship.
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Now, you know, the the the common thread is always you don't want to
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feel too you know salesy uh that you're you're you're just uh giving them a sales pitch.
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So how would you start a conversation that to bring this up?
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Yeah, to what do you say to to to bring this up?
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Just um I just want to make sure I understand what you mean by that.
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Yeah, to to to to bring up uh um how you're you can potentially help their findings.
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Okay, so you're sure, sure.
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Okay, yes.
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So um, you know, a third of my clients are you know solopreneurs or fractionals, the other third are you know founders or a founding team that has employees, um, and then the last third are salespeople um and uh marketing people at larger companies.
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And the process that um I use is the same across all three.
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I'm also not doing anything outside of LinkedIn, I'm using the existing LinkedIn features and functions.
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So your door, you and anyone listening could literally go and do this yourself.
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Um, clients are really hiring me for strategy and for um taking a lot of the load of managing this off of their plate.
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So they're just focusing really kind of on the end result, which is um more kind of sales-related activity.
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So the way that I think about LinkedIn is kind of in these three um levels.
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The first is around philosophy, and it's very, very simple.
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You have to be authentic and genuine to yourself and the brands you represent.
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Think LinkedIn is not a toxic place.
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Um, and most people are who they say they are, and LinkedIn has been doing a fairly decent job of starting to really crack down on a lot of the AI slot uh that's happening on the platform.
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Um, the second thing is around mindset.
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Uh, number one, you have to have an educational mindset.
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Like I said, nobody wants to be sold on LinkedIn, but virtually everyone is willing to be educated around the pain points that they have.
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Uh and the other part of that is an experimentation mindset, which means you're gonna try different things on LinkedIn, you're gonna stack the things that work and table the things that don't.
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Um, and then the final part of that is, and this is where I put pressure on myself as a founder, as I put that same pressure on anyone else that's a founder if you sit in the sales and marketing seat, which is it's incumbent on us to understand the pains and the barriers that our prospects are trying to overcome.
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Okay.
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We need to understand what that is.
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But once we do, it gives us massive opportunity to be able to educate our prospects around the pain points that they have.
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And really what that boils down to is our ability to educate and to teach.
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And so that's really my base philosophy is just being authentic to yourself and the brand you represent, having an education experimentation mindset, and then knowing what your audience can learn from you, what can you teach?
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So that's kind of that first layer.
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And then there's um two layers below that.
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But I'll pause right there really quick just to see if you have any thoughts or questions, or else I can run to the to the next level below that.
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No, I I I think uh you you you covered it very well in that first level.
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I I'm curious to know about the second and third.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So the second level is very brief, but it's really around the audience that you want to build relationship with.
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Okay.
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Um, and I'm typically using um, you know, sales navigator to to build out these audiences, or what we're also calling them like personas, like who is it that you want to build relationship with?
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Um, and uh you can use regular LinkedIn search, uh, you could use a third-party product to build out these audiences as well.
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Um, and sales navigator is just the sales tool that LinkedIn provides.
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Um, about half my clients have it, half don't.
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If they don't have it, I'll use mine.
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But the main thing about that middle level around audience building is focusing on who you want to build a relationship with.
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So focusing on like industry, title, geo, you know, um these different filters around who you want to build a relationship with, who do you want to have as clients?
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Okay, so that's that middle layer.
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Okay.
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So the the bottom layer then is actually activating um the philosophy and um the audience that you want to hone in on.
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So the the foundational thing that you want to start with is continuing to build your first degree network week in and week out.
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So what I recommend is reaching out to around 100 prospects a week.
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Uh, do not include a connection message.
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And then uh if somebody uh doesn't uh connect back with you after like a month, uh
then withdraw the invite and you can re-invite them uh at a later date.
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Okay.
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Uh LinkedIn will automatically remove um uh invites after six months.
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Um one of the things that you could do is just kind of have good hygiene around that.
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But growing your first degree network uh with uh the people you want to build relationships with uh is something that just gives you more opportunity when you want to invite them to a poll or send them a direct message or invite them to a LinkedIn event.
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It just gives you a bigger audience from which to draw from and therefore grow your business from.
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Okay.
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So that kind of engine of building out your first degree network is something you should just be doing week in and week out.
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Um, any questions on on that?
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No, no.
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Uh I I actually just have maybe uh maybe one question.
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Um with with LinkedIn, you said that you can withdraw your um your invites if you're not getting uh feedback from them.
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Um I th I think it that that's a very important point because you are you're you're streamlining your lists and uh you're also showing that I think you're not just trying to add everybody and then and then not uh do anything about it.
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So that that's a very important point I think you brought up there.
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Yes.
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Yes, yes, yep, yep.
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And again, um data has proven that if you do not use a connection message, you'll actually get a higher connection rate.
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Right.
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Uh so just keep in mind that um it's just hard not to kind of sound canned or spammy if you don't have a real in on why you're connecting with that person.
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Certainly if it's a referral, do that.
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If you're going to the same conference and you would like to connect with them before or after a conference or something, and and you would use that's fine.
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But yeah, kind of the general um audience building, do not use a connection message.
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Um okay.
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So then um there's other LinkedIn strategies that you can do, but what we're gonna focus on for the rest of this talk is LinkedIn events.
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Yes, and um more specifically uh LinkedIn live streams, which is an event type.
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Uh, there's three event types.
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One is a LinkedIn live stream, one is an online event, not on LinkedIn, that would be like on Zoom or something.
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And then the third would be an in-person event.
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Now, one thing that I want to talk about really quick here is that LinkedIn's algorithmic changes now are focusing more on the expertise of the individual and of a company.
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And what LinkedIn wants to do is to show your relevant expertise not only to your first degree network, but also to people outside of your first degree network.
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And so it's really important that you're showing um expertise through the content that you're creating.
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Okay.
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And that's one of the benefits then of using um LinkedIn events and especially LinkedIn live streams.
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And so, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna literally walk through the process of how I use LinkedIn live streams.
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Okay.
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Perfect.
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So the first thing that you want to do is yep, identify your audience.
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Um, again, that audience um could be the kind of people you want to build first connections with.
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It might already be an audience that you already have a lot of connections um with um right now.
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Um, but the main thing is identifying the audience um that you want to direct this live stream um toward.
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Okay.
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Yes.
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The second thing you want to do is identify a topic.
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Okay.
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Your topic has to be educational.
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The topic is not about your business and it's not about you.
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It's about solving for the pain point that your audience has.
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Okay.
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So for an example, and I'll I can use Rainmaker as an example through this.
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Um, you know, my audience has been founders, sales executives, fractionals, business coaches, and EOS implementers.
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Okay.
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Yes.
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And my two topics that I've used for over two years now is learn how to grow your network leads and sales on LinkedIn, and then learn how to do LinkedIn live streams.
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Okay.
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So those are the two that I do over and over again.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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So then the third thing then that you want to do is to build out the LinkedIn event.
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Okay.
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You just go on to LinkedIn, you can build it out as an individual or as a company from the company page.
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And um, you need like a nice image,
you need a title, you need a description, um, and then the date, time, and then who the speakers are.
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Okay.
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So that's how you're building out uh the event.
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And the event then gets built out as an event.
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It also goes out at a as a post through your personal profile or your company page at the exact same time.
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Okay.
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And then the event page gets created during that process.
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Okay.
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So now that the event page is created, we get into the front half magic of what makes this so incredibly powerful.
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Okay.
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We we all want to grow our businesses, and marketing and sales are the two ways that we do that.
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So the front half magic of doing LinkedIn events, um, and especially LinkedIn live streams, is that you're able to send LinkedIn event invites to people on LinkedIn that is a function of the event.
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You don't have any control over the invite other than sending it using the LinkedIn event invite function.
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But the beauty of this is that those invites get sent as an invite alert.
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They do not get sent as a direct message to someone's inbox.
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So, what ends up happening is when people check their invites, they get invites to connect, invites to follow my LinkedIn newsletter, invites to um attend my LinkedIn event.
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Okay.
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Yes.
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And what ends up showing is that invite bundled in with all the other invites that they get.
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And the beauty of that is that you can invite the same people to the same topic over and over and over again because you aren't spamming them.
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They don't feel like you're spamming them.
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They're just saying, oh, Colin's doing another one of his events.
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You know, it's bundled in with all the other uh alerts we're getting, and they can click through if they want.
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Um, and it's up to them.
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Okay.
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So that is what drives a lot of the attendance um is using LinkedIn event invites.
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And you can only invite your first degree connections as a person.
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And that's why it's important to continually build out your first degree network.
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So you can also build, you can also drive um awareness to the event through email marketing on your website, on other places on LinkedIn, um, because everyone's logged into their LinkedIn account all the time.
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When they see the the event um URL, they just click to it no matter where they are on the internet, and they get on the landing page, and then they can decide if you want to click attend or not.
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Okay.
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So that's how you're driving traffic to the live stream event.
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Now, um then you have um the uh the actual day of the event.
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Okay, so you're gonna do the the live stream event.
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Okay.
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Now, part of the um the magic of also getting people to click the attend button on your event, number one, if somebody's on mobile and they click attend, um, LinkedIn does a pop-up add to calendar on every mobile um interaction.
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Okay, so LinkedIn's trying to get your event on their calendar.
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The other thing is regardless of whether, and sometimes it happens on this top too.
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It actually happened to me today when I did it on another event.
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And um, when when someone clicks attend on your event, they also will get an email into their email inbox off of LinkedIn.
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They actually get an email from LinkedIn that says you just registered for this event with an add to calorie link in the email.
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The other thing that will happen is the day of the event, LinkedIn will send all of your registrants another email reminding them that they registered for the event that's happening today.
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Okay, so so far we've seen we're getting awareness on alerts, we're getting awareness in their email box, and it's none of it is spam-y or sales-y, and it's all um marketing driven.
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Okay, it's all brand awareness.
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Okay, now you do the LinkedIn live stream.
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There's three ways of doing the live stream.
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You can do it solo, right?
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Or within your company walls.
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You can, um, which is great because you control it, you're not dependent on anyone else.
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The second way of doing a live stream is inviting uh a guest.
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Okay, the guest could be an expert that you want to bring on, like you're bringing on with me.
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Sure.
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The guest could also be a prospect that has expertise in your area that you want to deepen relationship with and get them as a client.
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And you could invite as a guest, right?
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And that'll deepen the relationship.
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I've also had clients that'll invite um existing clients to be on their live stream because they want
to deepen the relationship and actually get more work from an existing client.
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And then the third thing is you can you have these high, high-level educational live streams like we've talked about, and that needs to be most of what you do.
00:18:20.480 --> 00:18:34.160
Um, but one of the things you can also do is have a live stream that is further down your sales funnel that's more talking about your business, the ethos of why you do what you do, case studies of clients that have succeeded with your process and things.
00:18:34.319 --> 00:18:36.480
So it's not so much about me, me, me.
00:18:36.559 --> 00:18:43.200
It's more about like this is why we do what we do, and this is how we do it, and people can learn from that.
00:18:43.359 --> 00:18:54.240
But what you do is you invite everyone that's registered for your previous educational events, and you can invite them to uh a more sales-focused event on your company, which is the exact same process.
00:18:54.400 --> 00:18:54.720
Okay.
00:18:55.039 --> 00:18:55.440
Gotcha.
00:18:55.599 --> 00:19:01.279
So then once the event is is is so when you're doing the event, you have to use a third-party product.
00:19:01.440 --> 00:19:05.200
Uh, you can use Zoom, you can use uh StreamYard, which is what I use.
00:19:05.279 --> 00:19:08.799
Um, and there's a free version of StreamYard um that you can use.
00:19:08.960 --> 00:19:11.200
Um so uh it's great.
00:19:11.359 --> 00:19:19.119
Um when you're doing the live stream, you are showing who you are, you're giving person your personality, you're sharing your expertise.
00:19:19.279 --> 00:19:21.759
People will just they will see you as a thought leader.
00:19:21.839 --> 00:19:26.000
And if you're providing educational information, people will really appreciate you for that.
00:19:26.079 --> 00:19:30.640
And then you can take comments, questions, thoughts live while you're doing the live stream.
00:19:30.799 --> 00:19:31.119
Okay.
00:19:32.079 --> 00:19:36.160
And then um answer those and um you know while you're doing the live stream.
00:19:36.400 --> 00:19:41.680
Then when the the live stream is done, it gets saved as a recording on LinkedIn.
00:19:41.839 --> 00:19:49.920
You can download the video off of LinkedIn, you could break it up into video snippets and make that organic posts across all different types of social networks.
00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:59.759
Um and um the other thing is um after the live stream or the event is done, this is the back half magic.
00:19:59.839 --> 00:20:01.920
And this falls now more into the sales bucket.
00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:02.319
Okay.
00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:09.119
You can send or you should send a follow-up message on LinkedIn to everybody that registered.
00:20:09.200 --> 00:20:10.240
Okay, you know who they are.
00:20:10.640 --> 00:20:10.799
Sure.
00:20:10.960 --> 00:20:12.960
You want to send a follow-up message to everyone.
00:20:13.119 --> 00:20:17.119
Those follow-up messages go into
their inbox on LinkedIn.
00:20:17.279 --> 00:20:21.920
Okay, so a hundred percent of your registrants will see this message.
00:20:22.160 --> 00:20:29.119
And really, what you're doing is you're saying, like, um, like, hey Paul, thanks again for registering for the LinkedIn live stream I led.
00:20:29.279 --> 00:20:30.640
Here's a link to the recording, okay.
00:20:30.720 --> 00:20:32.640
And you're giving a link back to the event.
00:20:32.799 --> 00:20:40.799
And then underneath it, you can have a thought, a question, you can have another call to action, like maybe an asset that you built out on your website.
00:20:40.880 --> 00:20:52.000
Um, I even play around with like putting my calendarly um in that where I'll say, if you ever have any questions around you know, LinkedIn strategy, feel free to grab some time convenient for you here, and I'll put in my calendarly link.
00:20:52.079 --> 00:20:52.319
Okay.
00:20:52.799 --> 00:21:09.599
But that follow-up message is how you get in their inbox and you're able to do it in a non-salesy and a non-spammy way with a simple call to action that um would get them to potentially take an action that you want them to take, much less direct brand awareness again of what you're doing.
00:21:09.759 --> 00:21:10.000
Okay.
00:21:10.799 --> 00:21:14.319
So that is that's kind of the process from beginning to end.
00:21:14.400 --> 00:21:18.799
And then, of course, you get analytics um on the event that you can take a look at.
00:21:18.960 --> 00:21:24.160
Um, but you know, LinkedIn loves live streams and events.
00:21:24.319 --> 00:21:28.480
People, LinkedIn wants more people doing those and sharing their expertise.
00:21:28.720 --> 00:21:43.279
And, you know, one of the things around just you know doing that education is when you're providing education in the way that I'm talking about, um, you know, clients and prospects, they want um clarity around their payments, right?
00:21:43.440 --> 00:21:45.519
They they want someone to help them.
00:21:45.680 --> 00:21:54.079
Um, and so by kind of greasing the wheels in doing these kinds of events, um, you just naturally get seen as a thought leader.
00:21:54.400 --> 00:21:58.480
Naturally, people would uh will want to reach out to you if you have questions.
00:21:58.640 --> 00:22:01.359
Um people buy from Where they get educated.
00:22:01.519 --> 00:22:15.519
Um, and the last thing I'll say here is the referral engine that I see for myself and my clients by doing this process um at least once a month, doing a live stream, like at least once a month, I do live streams almost weekly.
00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:28.559
Um, and what ends up happening is because of this whole process that I've gone through, you're building out the brand awareness and you're doing it in a way that everyone wants, whether you're a human or whether you're LinkedIn.
00:22:29.039 --> 00:22:32.000
And what that ends up doing is it keeps you top of mind.
00:22:32.160 --> 00:22:36.880
And so when your prospects have that need, they're going to come to you.
00:22:37.039 --> 00:22:46.640
When your prospects and clients are talking to um people, and those people have uh that issue, they're going to refer them to you as well, right?
00:22:46.799 --> 00:22:58.640
And so um, so that's that's that's the big that's the main kind of I think killer strategy uh really on any social network uh is is doing these kind of educational live streams.
00:22:58.880 --> 00:23:00.960
Yeah, no, I absolutely love it, Colin.
00:23:01.359 --> 00:23:30.319
And uh just uh another point, you could also do this because I'm I'm learning a lot from some of these uh AI experts that if you take a transcript of your live stream and you put it out as a blog post or something on your website, that will help you uh get found by some of the AI agents when people are trying to search because a lot more people are using AI for search now instead of traditional Google.
00:23:30.559 --> 00:23:30.720
Right.
00:23:30.880 --> 00:23:38.640
And it shows relevance and uh expertise as well by uh putting out transcripts of these streams.
00:23:38.799 --> 00:23:40.000
Yeah, for sure.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:42.319
Right, yeah, no, that that's exactly right.
00:23:42.400 --> 00:23:57.440
And so, you know, one of the things that um you know, just to keep in mind again, around like the topic or the topics that you present on is that you know, when you're doing a live stream, you want to demonstrate expertise.
00:23:57.839 --> 00:24:02.240
And uh you don't want to have to keep coming up with new topics all the time.
00:24:02.400 --> 00:24:02.720
Okay.
00:24:02.880 --> 00:24:12.240
So what I recommend again is focus on like one topic that you can do over and over again, as relevant now as it will be six or 12 months from now to your prospects.
00:24:12.400 --> 00:24:12.640
Sure.
00:24:12.799 --> 00:24:15.599
And do that over and over again.
00:24:15.759 --> 00:24:18.319
Um, obviously improve and iterate on that.
00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:29.440
Um, but what you want is for LinkedIn and AI and humans to see you as an expert within this vertical that you are creating content around.
00:24:29.839 --> 00:24:38.720
If you have you if you have enough time to build out some other topics and decks and things like that that you want to bring into the mix on on LinkedIn, that's that's great.
00:24:38.880 --> 00:24:40.000
Um, feel free to do that.
00:24:40.160 --> 00:24:58.799
But don't shy away from using one topic and just really getting good on that specific topic, because you are going to be able to translate that um because essentially you're practicing, you're getting better and better at delivering the content every single time you do one of these um live streams.
00:24:59.119 --> 00:25:14.319
And so when you go on podcasts like this, when you're presenting to uh you know a company, um, when you're at a networking event and talking to someone, um, this information and content just flows out so easily because you've been doing it over and over again.
00:25:14.400 --> 00:25:17.519
So you're just getting so many benefits uh from from doing it.
00:25:17.599 --> 00:25:19.200
Yeah, absolutely, Colin.
00:25:19.359 --> 00:25:25.119
Well, I've really enjoyed uh speaking with you today, and you've brought up some amazing points.
00:25:25.279 --> 00:25:32.160
And I encourage everyone to go to Rainmaker.com and you can also uh reach out to Colin.
00:25:32.319 --> 00:25:37.839
It's Colin Herdman, H-I-R-D-M-A-N, on LinkedIn.
00:25:38.160 --> 00:25:48.319
And uh I'm lucky to have you uh back uh in the future when we have more time and maybe discuss some other uh things that you do offer at Rainmaker.
00:25:48.480 --> 00:25:53.599
Uh Colin, really appreciate you joining us today here on the Link Through Social Podcast.
00:25:54.319 --> 00:25:56.079
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
00:25:56.960 --> 00:26:00.960
Okay, well, we're just gonna take a brief break and the Link Through Social podcast.
00:26:01.359 --> 00:26:03.519
We'll be back right after this.
00:26:05.440 --> 00:26:08.720
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