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This is a show about content marketing for established, sophisticated online businesses. Unlike other shows about marketing, we focus on sustainable, measurable content creation, how to authentically automate your marketing, to build up your know, like and trust factor with a nurtured, engaged audience between launches and get back to actually living your life instead of working to live.

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Hello. Hello. No, like and trusters. We are going to be talking about being lazy today. And, yeah, if that sounds a little bit provocative, that is intentional.

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I have guest Tania Battacharya on today and she's going to explain before I give away the whole farm here, that lazy isn't necessarily lazy. And you can get epic results on LinkedIn without a huge time investment, even if you are investing a lot of yourself. And there I go, teasing our content a little bit too much. So let me just tell you a little bit about Tania. She's the founder of Lumos Marketing, a thought leadership consultancy for social impact entrepreneurs ready to stand out as they stand up for their mission.

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She also hosts the podcast The Campfire Circle, which explores the idea of replacing the boardroom table as the ultimate space of leadership with a campfire circle, a place to share our stories, build inclusive community and spark visionary ideas. And I can't think of a better person to help guide us on this concept of being lazy on LinkedIn. So let's dive in. All right, Tania. Welcome to the no like and trust show.

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Thank you so much. I love the name of the show, first of all. It is so clever and good and I can't wait to have this conversation. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I feel like I stumbled on the name of the show and I've really leaned into it, obviously, over the years.

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And I was lucky enough to have the author of that phrase, Bob Berg, as a guest on the show a couple of years ago. So that was really cool. But it kind of leads into everything that I think we're going to be talking about today, which is like, how to be you on social and make it work in a way that works for your life, right? Absolutely. Especially in a place like LinkedIn where people still think and I got this phrase from Diane Mayer, they still think it's TikTok's corporate grandpa in a way.

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Right. How could I actually be myself on LinkedIn, right? But you can. That's a funny corporate grandpa. Oh, my gosh.

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Diane Mayor, you said. I'm going to keep that one in mind. That is such a good phrase. I do personally think we've left behind the days of it being corporate grandpa, or at least the way I think I think of corporate grandpa. Right.

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It's so funny. And this is probably a tiny aside here, but there's someone I follow on Instagram who usually posts really good, like, hey, here's a faster way to do this. Kind of like good tips. And maybe a month or so ago, this guy posted something about building a resume and I was reading through it and I was like, no, that is not how you should do that. I've seen my husband go through the gauntlet of 68 job applications, 100 connection calls, like, all these things, right?

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And this advice piece was basically saying to write your resume for the recruiter. And it's like, no, don't write your resume for the recruiter. Write your resume for the AI screener that's going to allow your resume to get seen in the first place. And I said that. I wrote a comment on that saying, that's not a good idea.

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I usually agree with what you say, but anyone who gives advice like this in this day and age is giving bad advice. And I think like, 103 people or something like that have liked that comment that I put on there since then. And I think it goes to show, like, LinkedIn is not what it used to be. It's not the way it was five years ago or ten years ago when we all entered the scene. 100%.

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It has changed so much and I've seen it change rapidly, just like everything else, right? Just like life has changed throughout the pandemic, as everybody went virtual, everybody went online. So many of us started businesses during the COVID pandemic or watched them explode. And so, yeah, I think you're 100% right. I think LinkedIn is very different than it was even three years ago.

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I'd say this concept of lazy on LinkedIn, I really like the title. And last year around this time, actually, I was in a bundle. My friend Dama put it on and it was the lazy funnel bundle. And the premise behind it wasn't, hey, all, let's be lazy, right? The premise was, it doesn't have to be a stress basket to set this thing up.

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It doesn't have to be something that we manage to the nth degree. And I think that's where you're going with lazy on LinkedIn, am I correct? 100%, yeah. Lazy is a little bit tongue in cheek. It's just a little bit, like, provocative, I guess, because none of us are lazy.

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It's laughable to think that the people who that I work with, that this show is for are actually lazy. Jordan Gill likes to say Life first, and that's a big one. It's not really about being lazy, it's about being life first. It's about doing the things that really matter, that will move the needle for your business and for your brand and then getting time back on your calendar to cuddle your dog or take a nap or do the things that light you up. 100%, absolutely.

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Life first is like a really short, punchy little thing, right? Life first. I 100% agree. We should be operating our businesses to allow our lives to flourish, not the other way around. Yeah.

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Otherwise, what's the point? What is the point. I think so many of us started our businesses so that we could find freedom and be our own boss and be a new kind of boss that we maybe have never gotten to have before. And then so often we just become that old boss because we don't know another way. We don't know another way out of overwhelm and burnout and people pleasing, et cetera, et cetera.

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And so I think being lazy on LinkedIn, beyond just supporting your business, I think it's like a lifestyle, right? It's like a practice or just being life first, being not all about being on social media all the time. Well and I think a lot of people who are aspiring to go full time in their side hustle or whatever, a lot of the people who probably did that at some point during the pandemic right, they've all grown up if you want to call it that. Watching the Gary Vee's or the Alex Hermosis of the world who are like I mean hey mad respect to them. They've built incredible things.

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I am impressed by that. But that's not the kind of life I intend to live ever. Even if I was really good at what they're talking about, I don't want that. Yeah. And actually I obviously know who they are.

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I purposefully haven't really consumed a bunch of their content because it's so different from how I like to live my life. I like to say the only Gary I listen to is my dog. That's my dog's name. He's a chihuahua. But that being said, folks have mentioned to me that those folks have started to change their message a little bit.

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They've started to lean more into the like, okay, how can you also take care of yourself, right? So we can't be going on all the cylinders all the time, right? So burnout. People everywhere are talking about burnout. And if we can find a different way to build our brands without burning out, like, I'm all for that.

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Let's do that. So on that vein, how do we do that? How do we start employing the tongue in cheek or not lazy on LinkedIn idea? How do we show up authentically? How do we be that but also still make sure that we're doing it in a way that supports the kind of life that we want to live?

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Yeah. So maybe I can share a little bit about how I discovered being lazy on LinkedIn. And it was actually before I even started my business. It was when I was a nonprofit executive director, which is right up there with kind of solopreneur or small business owner in terms of time commitment. Days would start before 07:00 A.m., sometimes with donor meetings or networking events, things like that.

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They'd end way after 07:00 p.m. With grant receptions or just trying to respond to the backlog of emails and all of those kinds of things. But every day there were so many amazing things happening, so many stories taking place. The nonprofit I worked for was an addiction treatment program for women and their families. And so every day, like a story about a kid who felt like it was safe to say I love you again to their mom, or the stories just go on and on and on and, you know, so I knew that some of these stories needed to be shared, obviously in a very ethical and consent first way.

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But I challenged myself to tell one interesting story per week. Again, we were a small shop. We didn't have a marketing team. We didn't have a PR firm. So scrappy was really the name of the game at that point.

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But I would schedule 1 hour, a recurring hour block on my calendar each week. And it was protected time, right? I committed to it. I was like, this has to happen. So I'd share a story.

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I'd send a couple of messages to maybe past donors, to potential donors. I'd leave a thoughtful comment on a local business influencer or like a thought leader in the addiction treatment space in their post. Kind of like you said, I'd leave a post and try to get that 100 plus comments on it because it was a good comment. And I'll be honest, Britney, it felt very inconsequential at first. Like, it felt like nothing was happening.

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But I committed to it. And after about four weeks to six weeks, I noticed things started to shift. And every week after that, it started getting exponentially more. So what happened was our nonprofit would get organic opportunities for PR without pitching. Local corporate leaders would reach out to ask if they could sponsor our breakfast, and we would get organic referrals from doctors, interventionists therapists, just from sharing these stories, right?

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And so when I left my job as a nonprofit ed to become a consultant, right? I was like, oh, let me keep doing this and see if it's going to work. And it does, right? It does. And it works because LinkedIn is the place where you can really access, movers, shakers, power brokers, people who have the funds to be able to hire you, people who have the deep connections to be able to refer people.

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To you people who have podcasts and stages of their own, who are happy to invite you to share their stage if they can fall in love with the work that you do through storytelling. And so that's what really being lazy on LinkedIn is about. It's about spending about one intentional hour per week. And it works because giving ourselves the grace to let that original storytelling emerge is great. Nurturing the people that are already showing up for us is great.

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It's just doing the right things to move the needle forward. So how does that land with you? Abundantly? Well, no, it lands really well. I heard two key things that I'd like to touch on one is that you had protected space and time to do this.

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So it wasn't trying to squeeze it in while you were in the waiting room at the doctor's office, look, oh, I can use these five minutes to do this thing right. It wasn't that, and it also wasn't something that you felt pressured to because it was blocked off on the calendar. This is what I do during this time period. The second thing actually, I lied there's three, but the second thing I heard was there was a good period of time where you're like, am I making a good decision with this time? Is this working?

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And then after some time, because you were consistent, because you kept protecting it, you started seeing some small results, and then they started compounding over time. And then the third thing I heard was storytelling. And I'd love to dive more into that next, if that's okay with you, because I think that is where you probably really hit the nail on the head because you can spend a dedicated hour each week on posting on LinkedIn and still not get results. I think the reason you were getting results is because you really believed in the stories and they touched your heart and they were going to touch the hearts of other people like you who hold the same values as you. And I think for a lot of people who have tried consistent posting and they're not getting results, I think that's the missing key.

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Totally. I agree. And I think so often the work that we do is somehow related to an experience that we went through ourselves. So in my case, when I was working for the addiction treatment program, I wasn't just sharing the stories of the people who I wasn't just sharing the stories of the patients and the family members. I was also sharing my personal story as it relates to mental health, as it relates to recovery, as it relates to making a tender decision to change the way that I'm going to live my life, right?

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And I'm what they would call a normie, right? I don't have the allergy to drugs and alcohol, but we all have things that we are working through. And so when I would share those types of stories, it would get a different kind of response. And of course, that was a very vulnerable thing. That's not something that I was going to do.

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The very first post that I did. It took time to build that muscle to get there. But once I did, the people in our audience, the people in my audience who were kind of they didn't really get what addiction was. They didn't really get what we did at that nonprofit. They started to lean in because storytelling is really a shortcut to trust.

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And people, again, like the no like and trust piece, they want to know the face behind the organization. And so when we relate that to our businesses. You might think that you help business owners with their systems, but you're solving for disorganization and chaos. And what's a time in your life where you experience that if you help folks with their TEDx Talk, like if you're a TEDx Coach, you help people with invisibility, right? You help people with their feeling like they don't have a voice in many cases.

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And so what's a time in your life that you felt that that you felt like you weren't getting heard. And oftentimes it's those brave pieces of storytelling when shared on LinkedIn, that kind of blends, that personal and that professional that is going to get the greatest response and is going to make the right people lean in to say, oh, my gosh, you have been voicing something that has been in my head and my soul for so long. Tell me more. How do we work together? The voicing that soul, right?

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That's a big thing. There's a photographer I used to be friends with when I was in that world more, and she had a line on her website that the moment I read it, I was jealous because I could now never use it. Right? But basically what she wrote was, if my pictures make you feel something, we should work together. And I had never seen it so succinctly put, and I was like, Dang it, I want that line.

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But that's storytelling. That is what we're talking about. It's putting that thing we haven't been able to put into words out there. Someone else did it. We see it, and we're like, yeah, that's it right there.

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Yeah, absolutely. It does make you feel something. It creates a moment of shared humanity. It makes people realize, like, oh, it gets you out of that potential sales dance and into the human conversation, which is just such a beautiful thing. Something that you mentioned, and you phrased it very differently than the way I typically phrase it.

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You were talking about a TEDx Talk. We're talking about taking someone out of invisibility. Right? And invisibility is not the pain point that most people are talking about when they start waxing on about pain point marketing. Right, right.

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Invisibility is a deep rooted feeling beneath what we would consider the pain point. And it gets kind of raw sometimes when we start talking about those really deep, tenterhook kind of feelings that just feel like they have a hold over us. So when you've been posting like this, have you ever gotten to a place where you're like, no, not going to write that. That's too much? Yeah, it's such a good question, and even you framing the question this way is making me grateful.

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And remember, that how much experience I have in working it through the muck from working in the mental health field for, like, 15 years. I think without that foundation, I think this would be a lot more difficult. I just have built that muscle even before I started my business. And that being said, everybody's decision on whether or not they want to share their story is a deeply personal and intimate one. And it might not be the time for everybody, right.

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Like, I once worked with a burnout coach. She wanted to support women with their burnout, and something was, like, funky and something was stopping her. And through that process, we realized she hadn't quite healed from her own story. And Glenn Doyle always talks like, share from the what does she say? Share from the scar and not from the wound.

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And so if you can share from the scar, absolutely go for it. If you're still in the wound, there may be some additional work. And I always recommend people like, hey, work with a coach, work with a somatic specialist, maybe have a therapist. All that stuff is complementary to this work, I think, if you're really going to go for it. But I've definitely had situations where I'm like, oh, is this too much?

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But those are always the posts that do the best. Like, if I go into my LinkedIn analytics and look at the last year, it's always the posts where I'm like, should I really say this? That got the most engagement comments, inquiries, leads, attention, followers, like, all of those kinds of things. And I think that's because we're voicing what other people are already thinking and feel like they can't say out in the public, again, it creates that trust and that resonance. Yeah, I love storytelling.

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There's so much that goes into it. I also really enjoy storytelling, and that kind of leads me back to what we said at the beginning, right? The corporate grandpa that LinkedIn has the perception of being with LinkedIn in particular. I'm curious for you, and this might just be your opinion. It might not be something that you'd, like, prescribe to everybody, but with LinkedIn in particular, is there a different line with how much storytelling is too much than there might be with other social platforms?

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That's a really good question. I don't think that I would differentiate it from other platforms like an instagram, per se. I think storytelling, I think lead with storytelling no matter where you are. And I think there's still a way to infuse information and facts and things like that into your storytelling. But I love having a little bit of a story in almost every single post, because, again, it's that shortcut.

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Like, stories are 22 times more memorable than facts. And I'm surprised that I remember that fact, in fact, because if you think about the last fundraiser or community event or gathering or webinar that you attended, I would ask you to think about how many of the facts and figures you remember and then compare it against how many of the stories you remember. You're going to remember more of those stories, and it's just that vehicle for change in a way like nothing else is. Humans were programmed for stories, right? We don't have as many evolutionary adaptations as bears and tigers and lions.

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We don't have fangs and we can't run that fast, but we can tell stories. And that has allowed us to adapt over time and literally get on the same page. So we can innovate and build together and create. And so, yeah, use it for your benefit. And it's a big part of being lazy on LinkedIn because when you can share those stories, they are memorable and they are sticky.

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So you don't have to keep showing up every day. Like, you can post once per week and people not only will still remember it, but because of the way that LinkedIn is built, it will keep showing up in the feed. There's just a longer shelf life right, than other platforms. Yeah. I'm constantly amazed if I pop into my notifications on LinkedIn, someone commenting on a post from six days ago.

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That does not happen on Instagram. Totally. And there's a lot of reasons for that, one of which is, even though LinkedIn has over 900 million active users, only about 3% of them actually post their own content on a regular basis. And so when you share on LinkedIn, you have a really good chance of standing out because it's still relatively unsaturated compared to other spaces. So, yeah, I have the same thing.

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Sometimes people will comment on posts that are even older than a week and I'm like, how did you see that? And I guess LinkedIn is still showing it to people. And of course, when people comment on it, then it gets like a little bit more juju to it again and then more people are going to see it. So, yeah, it just has a longer shelf life on LinkedIn. Yeah.

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And I appreciate that we're spending time creating our content. Knowing that it has a shelf life longer than 45 minutes is not just happy for all of us that put the work into it, but it's good for me from a content strategy point of view. Right. I know that if something is still popping up six days, nine days, whatever, after I've posted it, it gives me a really good kind of read on the interest level for that type of content, because there are absolutely other LinkedIn posts that are not doing that. And it makes it easier for me as a strategist to start measuring, okay, this is the kind of content that does well.

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And you said it yourself earlier, when you pull up your LinkedIn analytics, you see your bus posts from this last year have been the ones where you pushed a little bit harder and you delved a little bit deeper into that storytelling. And now you've got that information to walk ahead into the future with. Yeah, absolutely. And whether or not you want to repurpose it, like you actually Britney joined me for an awesome LinkedIn Live last week about repurposing. And so literally go into your LinkedIn analytics, see which posted the best, and reshare them, right?

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Repurpose them, reuse them, regurgitate them. What was the third one? It was a third one reuse, maybe. I don't know. So don't be afraid to reshare them on LinkedIn.

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I know that you have a lead magnet. I am a huge fan of quality lead magnets, by the way. I have a few rants and raves out there in the Internet land about people just googling something and slapping their logo on it and calling them a lead magnet. So I know that's not what you do. So I would love for you to share it with the audience because LinkedIn in my sphere has been getting a lot more mentions lately.

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A lot of people who are like, yeah, I feel like I've kind of avoided it for four years, and it's time for me to really take LinkedIn seriously this year. So I know that people just they're looking for good guidance on LinkedIn strategies. Yeah, I think we're going to hear more and more about LinkedIn over the upcoming months and years, especially as Twitter has kind of been self exploding. A lot of those folks have been dusting off their LinkedIn, if you will. Absolutely.

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And so, yeah, I have a resource. It's 14 free prompts that will help you, again to the theme of this show. Help build your know, like and trust factor on LinkedIn. Because the thing is, your current clients already know how amazing you are. But when you're not sharing consistent, good content, you're missing out on a whole new world of potential supporters that are living on LinkedIn that are probably, in many cases, just a second degree connection away from you, right?

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They're missing out on your awesomeness. So this is a prompt with 14 prompts that you can use to create thought leadership content specifically for LinkedIn, and really position yourself as that go to guide, as that practiced voice, as that wise person in your space that has insights to share. So we'll stick that in the show notes. Awesome. I appreciate that.

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And then for everyone else who's listening and wants to hear more about Tania and her company Lumos Marketing, we'll have links for her actual business in the show Notes, as well as her LinkedIn profile. Awesome. Thank you for that. And if you want to visit my LinkedIn profile, send me a connection request I would love to accept. Just let me know that you've listened to Britney's show and I'd love to stay in touch with you.

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Wonderful. Tania, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Of course. Thanks for having me on the show.

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All right. Thank you, Tania. Again, I love how our conversation meandered, and I feel like I say this about a lot of my guests here on the show. We end up talking about something that theoretically doesn't have a whole lot to do with our stated topic, and then we circle back and connect them all. And I love that.

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I love that magical connection where we start seeing that it's really not that hard to do this particular tactic if we come at it from a place with a good heart and with a good purpose, and it all kind of works out for us in the end. Thank you so much for sharing with our audience. We again will have in the show notes, links to Tania's LinkedIn profile and her lead magnet so that you can get those prompts and start showing up authentically in a good way that fits in with your life. If you found value from this episode, there are two things you can do to thank me. The first is share it with a friend.

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If you enjoyed this episode, you learned something from it. ODS, are you know somebody who needs to hear this message? I do truly believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, and if you help that friend with something that they need to do, we're going to have less crappy marketers out there, which means less scams, and we get to help more people in those ways that we uniquely are meant to help them. The second thing you can do is leave a rating on whichever podcast app you are listening to the show on right now. Doing that helps me reach more people, getting again this same great information out there, and we all make a better, happier, effective and ethical world as a result.

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Thanks so much. See you next week.