 Let's talk about hoisting your flag on LinkedIn. We've talked a lot about going to networking events on this show. We talk a lot about in-person communication. And over the years, I've had a lot of one-on-one clients approach me first starting to work on growing their network and social skills, and then realizing that they wanna be an influencer, they wanna be a thought leader, maybe they wanna start a podcast or a coaching company. I've found that LinkedIn is one of the best ways to grow your online platform. It has tremendous organic reach, meaning you don't have to pay a lot of money to get eyeballs, to get traffic, to get people to see what you're posting. And because of that, there are a lot of amazing thought leaders in the business world already posting on LinkedIn, already active on LinkedIn. Now, maybe you don't wanna be a thought leader, maybe you don't wanna be an influencer, maybe you don't wanna be a podcaster. That's fine, I totally understand it. Maybe you are a little shy, maybe you're a little introverted. You can still use LinkedIn and the organic reach and the power of LinkedIn to build amazing connections and relationships. And I'm gonna share a strategy that I learned from Gary V around building a platform on LinkedIn, but I made some tweaks to it so that you can actually build real relationships, not just gain followers. So Gary V, and we'll link this in the show notes, Gary V wrote a post about growing your business on Instagram with his $1.80 strategy. Now, Gary V's $1.80 strategy is all around finding 10 different hashtags or 10 different niches or subjects and commenting on nine posts in those 10 categories. So that's 90 comments and he says you should do this a day. Now, those comments are worth two cents, right? Give your two cents, give your opinion, your thoughts, your feelings, whatever strikes your fancy in those comments, that's how he described his $1.80 strategy. Now, we use this strategy to grow our Instagram and we use it to grow our LinkedIn back in the day. And I realized that, well, what's so awesome about this strategy if you're not a thought leader, if you're not an influencer, if you don't have a network currently on LinkedIn, you're essentially a nobody on the platform. You can still use this strategy to enter the conversation that's happening online, to raise awareness around you who you are by adding thoughtful comments, relating to what people are posting, adding your opinion into the conversation. And very quickly, you can start to use the power of propinquity, familiarity by people seeing your thoughts, your comments and your name to start to build connections on these platforms. And I've helped our client Sid become a thought leader and a coach from scratch on LinkedIn using this exact strategy, entering other conversations. So not posting yourself, you don't have to write long articles, you don't have to be a published author on Forbes.com, you don't have to be good on camera and create videos or be a podcast and post all of that content. Instead, you can leverage content that other people are posting, other thought leaders, go in the comments and start adding your two cents. Why I love this so much? And the tweak that I made to it that creates these real amazing connections is because once you start adding your two cents and people start reacting, meaning they're liking, they're commenting back, they're interacting with your opinion, right? So I like to think of LinkedIn like a party where there's a bunch of conversations happening around the party and you're just sauntering around the party and you overhear something interesting. Oh, maybe they're talking about Russian history like Johnny was earlier and you happen to take a course in college and you're gonna add your two cents to that conversation or maybe they're talking about sustainability and you happen to work on this awesome project in your community around harvesting rainwater to grow crops inside an urban center. And all of a sudden you add your two cents, you add your thoughts, your opinion, your views, your perspective, your commentary. People are gonna turn, they're gonna listen, they're gonna react. Every single person that likes, that comments back, that interacts with that post, you can then go click connect on LinkedIn and start building that relationship. This is where so many people get LinkedIn wrong. They take a shotgun approach. They go to LinkedIn and they just start spraying connections. And if I were to go to my LinkedIn inbox right now, there's a bunch of people that I don't know messaging me, trying to sell me things that I don't want or need that I have no connection with and immediately they start pitching me on something. And guess what? I don't click connect. I never answer those messages. I completely ignore them.