What still works for freelancers on LinkedIn? ft. meredith farley (S1 E5) (Copy)
If you use LinkedIn to market your freelance business, you've probably felt the shift. Reach is down, engagement is harder to come by, and the DMs from potential clients that used to trickle in have slowed to a drip.
In this episode, Liam sits down with his longtime friend Meredith Farley — CEO of Medbury, a LinkedIn-focused agency that creates strategy and content for everyone from Fortune 500 executives to solopreneurs building their first real pipeline — to talk about what's actually working on the platform right now.
They get into the post types that consistently perform, why a photo with your face in performs so well, how to use outreach automation tools without feeling spammy, why your follower count matters less than you think for post performance, and how a simple list of 50 people can completely transform your engagement strategy.
Meredith also walks through a real client case study — a solopreneur who went from 300 followers and no pipeline to six qualified calls in six weeks — and shares her agency's free downloadable resource that's worth bookmarking regardless of where you are in your LinkedIn journey.
Meredith's resources:
📎 Download: 8 LinkedIn Post Types that Actually Work
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Freelance Success is a community built for freelancers at every stage — with expert sessions, curated resources, and daily conversations with people who get it. Try it free for one month at JoinFreelanceSuccess.com.
Episode Transcript
Liam: I just finished reading Chuck Ting's recent bestseller, Bury Your Gays. It's a really fun read about a screenwriter in Los Angeles who is being tormented by his own creations from his horror and sci-fi TV shows and movies. I don't want to give away any spoilers, but one of the things I loved about the book was that one of the big villains was an AI algorithm.
The characters in this book had to deal with some serious life or death situations at the hands of this algorithm. And I'm not saying that anything I do in my freelancing business is life or death, but I do spend a lot of time pandering to algorithms. And if you use social media to market your freelance business, then you probably do too.
And the number one altar where I spend the most time praying to an algorithm is on LinkedIn. I started using LinkedIn very early on in my full-time freelancing career back in 2019 when I started. A few of my freelancer friends showed me that they were getting multiple clients off of LinkedIn just by posting a few times a week.
So I decided to try my hand at it, and it worked really well. For most of my freelance career. LinkedIn has been the number one driver of new business for me, aside from word of mouth, and I'm thankful for that. But something changed in the last year, and if you use LinkedIn, you probably noticed it too.
Suddenly it became very hard to get reach. Posts that I think would have done just fine with the algorithm a few months ago, fall dead in the water and then slowly pick up engagement as time goes on. But it just feels like it's become harder to get attention out there on LinkedIn. On top of this, we have lots of people generating AI posts, so there's more people than ever trying to get attention on the platform.
And I've noticed that a lot of the dms I'm used to getting of new business have started to dry up as well. This was pretty distressing for me. I wasn't really sure where my new clients were going to come from if they weren't coming from LinkedIn anymore. Then, I remembered that I have a really close friend here in Boston, someone I've known for a very long time,
who understands LinkedIn's algorithm better than anybody else I know. Her name is Meredith Farley and she's the CEO of her own business called Medbury, which helps business owners make a name for themselves on LinkedIn. I pulled her in for a conversation because I know I'm not the only one that's struggling with all of these changes happening at LinkedIn, and she had some really eye-opening advice
that she shares in this episode of the Freelance Success Podcast. Make sure you check out the show notes at the bottom of this podcast because there you'll find a link to this really fantastic resource that Meredith is going to share about the types of posts that are successful on LinkedIn.
And you'll also be able to use the show notes to gain access to some of the LinkedIn specific resources we have in the Freelance Success Library. That includes a full course on optimizing your LinkedIn profile as a freelancer, and a list of 30 prompts that you can turn to if you ever are facing writer's block on LinkedIn, which trust me, happens to the best of us.
Okay, here's the conversation with Meredith all about succeeding on LinkedIn. In today's environment,
When you join the Freelance Success Community, you're gaining access to exclusive resources, tools, and templates created by successful freelancers to help you grow your business. You'll also be able to ask questions in a private and supporting environment that can consists only of other people who are already freelancing successfully.
With your free month trial, you'll also be able to join the regular expert sessions we host. These are private events that are only happening inside the Freelance Success community, and you'll be able to check out the weekly gigs and jobs listings that we post to help you find your next freelance client.
Just go to join freelance success.com and you'll be able to access your one month free trial. I'll see you in the community.
Meredith, welcome to the Freelance Success Podcast.
Meredith: Thank you for having me, Liam. I'm happy to be here.
Liam: Of course. Meredith, you and I go way back to so far our very first jobs, or at least one of my very first jobs. I know that you though introduce yourself, tell people who you are, and maybe a little bit about how we met.
Meredith: All right, so my name's Meredith Farley. I'm the CEO and founder of Medbury. Medbury is a LinkedIn focused agency and we create strategies and content and for our clients, most of whom are enterprise level executives at big organizations. And we're collaborating with our marketing PR comms team.
Some of our clients are founders of seven or eight figure businesses, and we're working more directly with them. Occasionally we also support solopreneurs who are looking to build up their LinkedIn profile and build up some pipeline for their business, which I think maybe you'll ask me some questions about and we can get into.
And we also run a cohort quarterly where we teach folks how to use LinkedIn. For themselves, for their business, or for their exec marketing or sales team. And the folks who sign up for that are usually freelancers, solopreneurs, or marketers or PR folks whose companies are paying for them to join and learn about these things.
So that's what I do now. And let's see. My backstory is that I was a writing major in college and after school I wanted to, I had a PR internship in Boston. I graduated in oh nine, which as was a super dark time for job searchers. And I had a PR internship that was meant to be work for the summer, and then if you hit certain KPIs mid-September, you could move into an associate role.
And when I got to the PR offices, two thirds of the beautiful office was totally boarded up. Everybody was like, had this freaked out, panicked look on their face. And a woman who was also in the internship to associate program told me she'd been working for free for a whole year. So I was like,
Liam: wait, I didn't know this story at all.
Meredith: Yeah. So I was like I can't do that. I don't have, I had I don't know, $700 in my bank account or something. So I got a full-time waitressing job and I started looking for writing jobs on Craigslist as one did back in the day. And previously in my senior year of college, I feel like I got really lucky because when I was a writing major, I loved writing.
I didn't really, I couldn't see myself in an office job. I was having a hard time figuring out how am I going to make money? But Ithaca College at the time had just started this marketing magazine fuse and there was one job open for a student to work part-time, and it was $25 an hour, which was so much money at the time.
And I got the role and that was so helpful to me because first off, that was like 2007, 2008, the very dawn of SEO and I realized. Like I started to learn about it and I was interested in it. I was writing content, writing blogs, doing a little graphic design and figuring out photos and how to use CRMs and things and SEO, and I was like, I actually really like this.
I like creative content with a purpose and I like all the strategy and the data side of it too. And I stayed, I had that job for a year. And the second half of that year, the second semester, I was promoted to a manager role, so then I started managing videographers and a couple other writers to organize and create content schedules and edit content for.
The magazine and for the website version of it. And it was amazing. because I was like, I actually really like this. And it gave me like a different vision for myself where I was like, I think I could go have a job that I find creatively fulfilling, get to collaborate with people and actually make money as opposed to just like being a writer in a hovel, which is what I pictured myself previous.
So that was cool. And so when I started to job search on Craigslist, I had that in mind. And then the job that I landed at brafton, an agency, I was like, employee number 23 and. It also is the dawn of SEO. It was a lot of what I'd been doing at the previous role. I felt really happy to have it and I ended up staying there an absurd amount of time, like 13 and a half years, but moving up and into different roles as the chief product officer for a couple years, and then the COO for the last three and a half years there.
But the agency had grown and I, it was great. I learned so much and my, I think. You started like a year after me. Is that right? Did you start 2010? And that's where I met you and so many amazing people.
Liam: Yeah. I think it was probably around like late 2009. Actually. No, I know exactly when it was because I still remember my password to my computer.
Oh, which was, yeah, so it was oh nine. It was April of oh nine.
Meredith: Amazing. I think I was September. No wait, I graduated in oh nine. I think you were 2010
Liam: maybe. I was say, wait, let me say the number in my head. Oh yeah. April, 2010. Yep.
Meredith: So you were
Liam: like April 9th, 2010.
Meredith: Seven. Seven months after
Liam: me. And now you can probably break into all of my laptops because I still use that password.
Meredith: And that's how I met you. One of my great friends of how many years ago? Is 2010. 16 years.
Liam: 16 years, my God. Okay. Yeah. So we both started there. You had, we both had some jobs before that, right? But that, but we went in very different directions. When did you start Medbury?
Meredith: It was 2023.
Really? The first technically March, I think. Really the first six months it was just more consulting and like playing around with product market fit, trying things out with a few clients and then as an agency with folks like in a team was really winter slash early spring 2024
Liam: Okay, so about two years now.
Two years ago? Yeah. Two-ish years ago. I can't believe it was actually that long ago. It feels more recent to me. Because I remember we, we talked a lot through those early stages. because our paths diverged. You stayed at our former employer and I went off and did my own freelancing thing after a while, and then used that as started your own business and became first a solopreneur and now you own a, an agency.
What made you want to start with LinkedIn as a focus?
Meredith: There were a lot of things. First, in the last year and a half, or maybe the last year when I was a COO at the agency, one of the teams I oversaw was social. And we had started to get a lot of interest about LinkedIn. The, our client base at the time was mid-market B2B and enterprise B2B, mostly in the tech SaaS space, but a whole smattering of other client types in there and the sales team, project managers, and sometimes clients who were reaching out to me directly to be like we, the gist of it was we hear you can make a bank on LinkedIn, we hear LinkedIn's really important.
We don't, we're not, how can we really make it work? So I did dug in at the time we had just like a really simplistic LinkedIn product, which was X, Y, Z number of company page posts per month essentially, which is not like the best way to move the needle. So I like started to do a lot of research and was really.
There is a lot of opportunity on the platform. There are a lot of signals around growth too, around like an incredibly increasing daily user rates. And I did a few custom projects with a few clients, one of which was in the EdTech space. We had a nice relationship with their CEO. She and I worked together really closely because I clocked that really for a business to grow a lot content really needs to come from people as opposed to the brand page.
And she was very open. We had a lot of success in working with her and creating content for her LinkedIn. And I just got really interested. So it was in the back of my mind. I really, at that time, did not have time to totally focus in on just like LinkedIn as a product, but I had learned a few things.
I knew it was a lever to pull. I knew there was more to dig into. And then the first six or so months of me. Just doing some consulting and trying to figure out what I wanted this business to look like. I was working with a lot of female founders who, and it was a broader package. It was like productization, helping them figure out product market fit pricing.
A lot of them were interested in fractional work, so figuring out for them, okay, what does your fractional offer look like? How much does it cost? What are the value props for the clients or prospects? And also how do you put boundaries on this so that it's reasonable for you. And I had experience across email, Instagram, LinkedIn, et cetera.
But where we kept finding the most success in helping them get clients was LinkedIn. Again, I was just like, back in it. I was in a rabbit hole around it. And I think for me I was like a moth to a flame. I was really drawn to it. It's kind of like a puzzle. It's like a black box, figuring out how to make it work.
And there's a lot of things about the LinkedIn work that Medbury does now that I just find so interesting. Which is. On one hand, a lot of our work is creating content for the C-level folks and execs that we're collaborating with. So we'll do a voice interview with them to get to know them, to figure out how their story, their beats, their personality, overlaps with the core messaging of the brand that we're also supporting.
And there's, so there's like a psychological element to it. You get to interview people, you get to think about them, you get to think how, what makes them tick, like how would they say this? That kind of stuff I find really fun. And the writing, it's like a very editorial first platform.
And the writers on our team are amazing. One of them has written a novel. She writes for Vogue. Another is the former head of editorial and social for the Nextdoor app. We just brought on this wonderful woman who has a lot of experience in the the medical and health space. And so there's like a. We get to devote a lot of time to the craft of writing, really optimized content that really performs, but is also really thoughtful.
It's the opposite of like bro-y or cringe. So I like that. It's these little encapsulated mor souls of storytelling and messaging. And then on the other, the more database side. I find that really interesting too. There's so much from an algorithm perspective to be mindful of. It's there's so many frameworks you can utilize.
So I feel like in the way that kind of framework support creativity there's a lot of structure that we can work within, which I think makes it a really fun little craft. And on the marketing side, I also feel like I get to use almost all of my marketing strategy experience We're utilizing.
Tools, lists. We're being really creative and strategic about how we build lists for our clients, how we get them connected to those lists, how we message to those lists on their behalf. We also run ads too. So there's just so much like within this one platform, which is really powerful. There's the art, there's the science, there's the client side collaboration, there's the internal creative work.
It is just like the perfect little, I don't know. Universe to get to utilize all these fun things and work with interesting people.
Liam: I've never heard the phrase bro-y, but it's so funny. And I totally knew instantly what you meant.
Meredith: Yeah. What
Liam: I like hearing is you really talking positively about LinkedIn, and I think that is actually pretty rare.
Usually when I talk to people about LinkedIn, it's a lot of oh God, I don't know what to say. Or everyone's so full of themselves or nothing is working. There's a lot of negativity around LinkedIn from people that I talk to, and it's really refreshing to hear somebody talk about the ways that it can help, my own business.
Survived on LinkedIn for many years. That is how I have gotten the vast majority of my clients, is through consistent work on LinkedIn. I do sense some changes in the platform. So what I'd like to talk about now is what you are seeing that's working for people. I don't know. I guess my first question is, you work with two different groups of people.
You work with these sort of high level execs and then you also work with people who are solopreneurs, freelancers. Are there different rules for these? Two groups? Or do you find that the same thing is working across the board?
Meredith: We are finding the same thing as working across the board for the solopreneurs that we work with, we do a little more pipeline support.
But sometimes when we're working with execs, we do the same thing if they're really embedded in the sales process. So really the same thing is working, I would say. I would say. So I guess, we, I know you and I have talked about this too. What's a solopreneur? What's a freelancer? What's an entrepreneur?
You could be a freelancer making 500 K in an entrepreneur making 50 k, like
Liam: right.
Meredith: I think, I don't, we. Get such amazing results for our clients on LinkedIn, but it's because we're, we are a team of nerds who are obsessed with it, and also everyone's pretty talented. I presume that the negativity, I will say just to speak to that point for a second I think.
Here's one thing I find difficult, I'll say is sometimes if someone's could you just talk to me for 30 minutes about how to, how I, how my what I should do on LinkedIn? And I'll be like, sure. But if you're someone who say you're a freelancer who does videography work. And maybe you're not, writing's not really your forte and maybe you've never really done much marketing or social media.
I think because we all know how to write technically, like we can, put together words on a keyboard, people presume that they can market themselves as a marketer. And I think one thing that's really hard is LinkedIn is a platform that requires deep expertise to work and to be worth your time.
And I do think, I can imagine people getting really discouraged if writing's not really their forte. They don't really know all the ins and outs of the platform. They're putting together a few posts a week and getting crickets and they're like, this isn't worth my time. And I think if that's how you feel, their two options, which is if you can't afford to work with someone like double down and get obsessed with how to make the platform work.
Or put up one post a week just to show you're alive to your network and invest in other sources. Because it is a hard platform if you don't know what you're doing. And it can be a really big time sink. And sometimes, folks will come to me and they'll show me like posts they've done. And I say sometimes it's hard because I'm like.
My team and I could rewrite these in a way that's going to make them perform. That's not your skillset. And I can't in 30 minutes teach you how to write a beautiful LinkedIn post that's going to blow up and get you some clients, if that makes sense.
Liam: Okay. So part of the deal is like you actually have to think about whether you want to use this platform.
And invest the time necessary to learn how to use it appropriately.
Liam: We have a lot of writers in the Freelance Success community. I would say it's probably 60 to 70% of the people in there are writers. So I think I trust most of our listeners to be able to be. To put together a good, yeah, not just a technical clickity clock of a keyboard, but like actually writing something that's compelling, but it's different.
Writing a LinkedIn post is a different horse than writing a blog or writing a short story or whatever. So what, I know you just said I don't have the time to teach people how to like Perfectly, totally fair. We only have another 30 minutes or so, but. Let's say that you're someone who does want to make this platform work for you.
Liam: What are the things you need to be thinking about right now? Yeah, if you are going to invest the time,
Meredith: the first thing, and I can send you the link after this, maybe you can throw it in the show notes. We have a, an a, an asset on our website that is our post types document, and I feel like it is gold.
It is the nine or so. Key post types that we utilize for clients and we apply these across the board, whether you're a solopreneur or the CEO of a Fortune 500 data company, we utilize these exact same post types. And the post types are essentially like the nine or 10 different archetypes and styles of a post.
And we in the document include about how many characters they should be, what you should be mindful of around the hook the type of image that you should include with it. And they range from like a milestone post where you're announcing something or celebrating a win. I just hit 1 million annual revenue, or I we're so happy to announce that we just partnered with this amazing agency, et cetera.
Like an announcement style post, it'll show you exactly how to do that so you don't sound like, so it's, and there's a few things. So like Milestone, I'll talk through, for example, the hook. You need to tell the audience exactly what you're celebrating. It has to be really direct. Say you were announcing a million dollars annual revenue, you'd say I'm so happy to announce that Berry has hit a million a RR.
Get it right in the hook, and here's why a lot of your friends are not going to click. Read more. They're just going to see, oh, this person is celebrating something like,
A couple things is that first people like to like good news. They like to celebrate their friends. And second, the algorithm loves it when people react instantly as opposed to clicking read more and waiting a little bit.
Liam: Oh.
Meredith: So that's where those posts do so well. When people are like, happy to announce, blink. Because it has so many positive knock on effects. People like to celebrate their friends. People are going to click they're not going to read the whole post. So it's going to get that instant little, like boost. There's just so much there.
Second, I would say if people are like, oh, people are I don't want to be braggy. If you're putting out a big announcement like that, we say internally gratitude is the antidote to arrogance. Meaning say, thanks, express gratitude, and that can totally reframe a post so that it's not embarrassing, it's just expressing like.
For example, for one of our clients, they actually hit a hundred million lifetime revenue. So crazy big milestone. So put that in the headline, and then it was from the founder and we really made it more about how grateful he was for the clients who trusted him in the early days, for the incredible team who helped him build to this scale.
And the meaningful work that he got gets to come in and do every day. And then we posted it with a really cool photo of the whole team. And I think that got like almo almost a hundred thousand impressions. And something like that is so great for a business because if you share a win, it really does telegraph success, which has such a huge knock on effect.
So if people are like, I'm embarrassed to post something good, I don't know how to not feel braggy. Check out our post type doc. Remember gratitude and do it. Force yourself to do it.
Meredith: No. You're bragging.
Liam: There's a certain element of that on LinkedIn, right? Of like you just have to swallow your pride a little bit and just.
Brag or just say the, write the hook that feels a little click baby maybe, right? Yeah, you're going to have to play the game if you want to play the game.
Liam: And I think that I want to just also focus in on what you're talking about when you're talking about the hook.
because you hear that phrase a lot, that read more button is important to think about when you're creating a post, in my opinion. Yeah. because that's all people are most, most people are only going to see what happens before the read more button. So that's why you I think it was important what you're saying.
Yeah, no, go ahead.
Meredith: I was going to say I 100% agree and images and photos matter a lot, and a post with a photo is going to perform 45% better than a post with a graphic image or no image in most instances.
Liam: Okay. So are we talking selfies? It
Meredith: could be a selfie, but it has to have a face in it. You need
Liam: has
Meredith: have a face.
It can also just be a photo with you or other folks, but you need your face for that full effect. And it's interesting, for example, like around podcasts, those are hard to promote because often you're posting a photo of the, a headshot and graphic image with the guest as opposed to you. Your audience is always going to respond to your face.
As opposed to there's lots to figure out. There's a, the post, I'm trying to think the other post types in there. We really walk through in that doc how to post a thought leadership. Piece how to post proprietary data, how to post about events, how to do community update posts. Those are great posts for people trying to grow awareness and reach you once a month.
Maybe do a post, especially like if you're a freelancer and you're just trying to grow your platform, this could be great for you where you're like, I want to shout out some success from other people in my network this month, and it could be. So and so just launched this really cool new offering. This person just landed a really cool brand.
They, it's so great to see 'em doing good work, blah, blah, blah. A few of those, and then do a little personal one at the end. And, it could even be like end, in total this month I logged 150,000 steps with my dog, Uhhuh Milo, and then a photo of you and Milo. Get a little bit personal at the end.
If you're comfortable it'll blow up. There's so much you, there's a lot in there. And I would say that, some, if you're someone who's tried LinkedIn before and you felt like you didn't have success, learning frameworks like these can be really helpful because they do give you a roadmap. And they also, if you're like, I don't know what to post this week, you can look, scroll through and be like, all right, I haven't done a personal storytelling post in a while.
Lemme remind myself of like how it works, how to put it together and get it out. So it can be helpful in that way. But there are some things that almost across the board are true for LinkedIn post too. The hook matters to your point. Number two seventh grade reading level or under. Number three, try and have sentences that are 10 words or less per sentence.
You can break these rules and subvert them all you want, but like you have to remember that these are digital readers reading quickly on teeny tiny screens, and you have to be willing to accommodate that. Since there are a lot of writers, as you listening, as you mentioned, I'd say one thing we talk a lot about when we're creating or editing content for our clients is the velocity of the text.
It needs to move with velocity. You have to pretend you're the reader and word it in a way that keeps you moving through it in the like you want them to be eager to keep reading the next sentence. And you don't want to put up any roadblocks. It's subtle, but using words like modifier words that make things feel fluffy, like often, if you don't need it, don't say it.
And actually one book I recommend all the time. To writers on the team or writers interested in social media is actually a, I actually have it right here. It's a Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Have you read this one?
Liam: I haven't, but my book club is reading the new George Saunders book.
Meredith: Oh, I really want to read that. Is it like vigil or
Liam: something? Yeah, vigil. Yeah. I love George Saunders. Wow. So you're right. Is what is this fiction, nonfiction stories.
Meredith: This is nonfiction. I love it so much. I've read it twice and I also have it on Kindle version and on audio, so I can read it whenever I want.
Yeah. It's nonfiction and it's essentially a book version of the writing course that he teaches at Syracuse University and the, it's really digging into the book. Sorry,
Liam: say that. What's the name of it again?
Meredith: A Swim in A Pond In the Rain
Liam: by George Saunders. Okay.
Meredith: By George Saunders. And he's. He breaks down a lot of Russian writers.
The first chapter is so valuable for anyone who works in social media because what he's doing is going line by line through a checkoff article that I think is called, not Article Checkoff, short story that's called, I want to say it's called In the Cart, and he breaks down how. Checkoff is beautifully setting up our expectations, subverting our expectations, and enticing the reader to quickly move on to the next sentence.
It might sound a little funny to be like, if you want to get really good at LinkedIn checkout checkoff, but you should like, these are all the little things that matter. And being mindful of all these things in such a competitive space can be really helpful. And if you're a writer, I think over time.
If you start to put in the time, you'll start to get stronger results. And then it could be motivating. And I think LinkedIn can actually be a really strong way to practice your craft and to if you treat it as, as much an art form, as it is just something you need to put out for your business, it, I think it can give you some satisfaction too.
But post types and content aside, if I was talking to a freelancer. My biggest piece of advice would be to utilize Dripify. Have you and I talked about that tool?
Liam: I don't think so. Maybe we have.
Meredith: Dripify is there are a lot of tools that do what it does. This is our favorite and for almost every single person that Medbury creates content for, we utilize Dripify.
Dripify hooks up to a personal LinkedIn profile. And you can do a lot of creative things with it. The first is you can upload lists of people and set up sequences of actions, so it integrates beautifully with Sales Navigator. If you have Sales Navigator, which I know is a little expensive, it's like a hundred and something bucks a month.
If you create a list of, say you search the titles, the. Companies, the locations, the industries of your exact like ideal ideal client profile. Say, you create a list of a thousand of those folks. We usually start with a thousand with clients just to test things out. You can just take the link, the URL, from that sales navigator list, paste it into the correct spot and Dripify, and set up a sequence of actions to the folks on that list.
And the actions are usually, we start with first, just a connection request. Make sure you're automatically connected to these thousand people. Usually, it depends on your profile. If you're a big CEO, 70% of the people are going to accept those. If maybe you're a smaller account, you might have a smaller acceptance rate and of say 20%, but that's still 200 new followers of the exact people who you want to be working for, who are going to be seeing your content each day
So that's like such a simple win. But you can also send DM automated. Messages to those folks. So for some of our clients who are solopreneurs, we just put together a really simple message. For example, one client who we just did a case study for this week on our newsletter, she came to us with 300 followers, like a really small LinkedIn, almost no footprint.
I don't even think she had a photo or a banner up. She might've. And we did a lot. We did. We were, we did a couple debrief calls with her to understand her experience, her position, and we revamped her profile. We put together a strategy for four posts a month, and that's what we do. Just four posts per month, one post per week
But then we put together a Drip I campaign. And what was cool about this client is she had a lot of experience. She had been a producer on major network shows, major TV shows Oprah Machine produced for Oprah.
Meredith: And she had been doing a lot of, she would basically coach folks ahead of their interviews to su make them feel comfortable and make them feel like they had their, the, their language right.
And even on what to wear. And she's translated that into supporting female founders who are getting interviewed by the press, going on big panels or pitching investors. So she has this incredible network and a ton of experience. Almost no pipeline for her business. And so our little note to her 1000 ideal client profiles that we put together was really simple.
It just said, Hey, this is my name. This is some of my experience. This is what I'm doing right now. If you'd ever be interested, I'd love to have a chat. And I think she's had six. Really strong responses and calls In the last six weeks. One woman replied back and said, this feels like divine intervention.
Yes, please, can we get on the call tomorrow? One person replied back and said, I actually work at a branding agency and we need someone like you and are like. Talent bench so that you can come in and support our clients. When we land them big, it's like a PR agency, so they need folks to help their clients if they're about to get a big interview or something.
So I say this because Dripify, it's the leanest per month, I think it's 59 bucks. So if you're investing in Sales Navigator and Dripify, it's about 200 a month. It's not, nothing you can find leads cheaper elsewhere. Maybe you have an email list that you can utilize instead of buying leads from Apollo or investing in Sales Nav.
But I think LinkedIn really is two pronged. You need to be doing the at least four times a month, a really strong organic post. And I'd recommend one from our post types document for each of them. Then two, you need to be doing something like Dripify in the background to be actually driving some action. And that's a really important part of it.
And I think sometimes freelancers do a lot of work to put out organic content, but if they're not also on the backend in a savvy way, connecting to and trying to message their ideal audience with a quick Calendly link so that those folks can just book time. If it feels right, they're not going to really, it's going to be a lot slower.
And so for this client, it's been great. She's had. She in a couple months, she went from 300 to more than a thousand followers. Her content's getting a lot of engagement, but the biggest win for her and what she most cares about are these calls that we're getting booked. To via address by for sure.
Liam: Yeah. because the other option is to just post and post and hope that the right person sees it at the right time and then sends you, goes out of their way to send you a dm. And that's pretty. I do think that used to happen more often on LinkedIn, at least for me, but more recently with more people posting, with the algorithm changes that we've seen, you have to be doing that work.
And it sounds like this Dripify and Sales Navigator combo. Makes a huge difference. But we're not talking, like I know a lot of people might cringe at the idea of automated dms because I get so many that are completely irrelevant. To me, people asking me like, Hey, what if I were to book you 40 speaking spots in the next six weeks?
And I'm like, that actually would be hell. Please don't do that. But this is different because you're choosing a list of. Targeted connections and a pretty simple message here. I, here's who I am, here's what I do. If you ever want to chat, here's how you can connect with me.
Meredith: Exactly. We do. It's very, it's it's exactly, those two things you mentioned are key to not feeling spammy.
Number one, make sure you're targeting the right people. I'd rather a thousand, a list of a thousand folks who are exactly the type of folks who we know needs a client service compared to 10,000 folks who are maybe in, in the range. Make sure you're, you've got a list of the people who would really need or want to work with you.
And then number two, exactly as you said, it's like a very human message in the same way that the posts that you craft, when people like just roll their eyes at automated messaging, I get annoyed because I'm like, it's anything else it's how you execute. And so if it's the message takes just as much craft as a really good LinkedIn post.
It's like, how do we make sure it feels really human? How do we make sure that it's like clear, confident, but not. Aggressive. How do we make sure that they know there's another human on the end here who thought about what they're saying and be inviting and real. And also too, I'd say we always typically end it with a real soft self.
Usually when it's from a person, it's if not a fit, no worries. Like really glad to be connected. Thanks for accepting that and happy to have you on my network. Just something that's like. Most people are not going to book the Calendly thing. If 2% do, that's amazing. So like you don't want to burn the bridge with the 98% that didn't by being like abrupt and spammy.
Liam: And then you can go in. And, pick these conversations up yourself, right? Yeah. So that's what I like about this idea is that it's not just a robot, booking calls, but if somebody asks a question or somebody starts a conversation, you can then go in and continue that organic conversation on your own.
Right?
Meredith: Exactly. Yeah. So they're like maybe they don't book the call, but they're like, oh, thanks for reaching out. Do you have a website or is there a case study? Or how much do things cost? Exactly. You can just go in and respond as a person in a really tailored, organic way. Totally.
Liam: I also think for people listening who are thinking like, I can't spend 200 bucks a month on this, so one thing I'll point out is that if you have never used Sales Navigator before, then there's a free month waiting for you, I think.
Yeah. Everybody gets a free month, so you could technically get on there and do this over the course of a month and just test it out. Spend the 50 bucks or whatever on Dripify. Maybe they have. Free month. I don't know.
Meredith: I think they have 10 days free. Yeah.
Liam: So you
Meredith: could de 10 days of this whole thing free
Liam: block off your calendar and try it and see if it happens.
Because like you said, you send a thousand dms and 2% book a call with you. That's 10 leads, 15 leads that you didn't have before. So we've talked about DMing. What are there other things like, I wonder if you can just do some MythBusters for us about LinkedIn. So we've already talked about the selfie thing and actually I wanted to ask your opinion.
Do you think the selfie thing, the face thing, is that an algorithm thing or human thing or both?
Meredith: I think both. I think it's the, we are just such social creatures. We are so naturally going to be way more attuned to a picture of a face than almost anything else that the algorithm is just responding to our responses there.
I don't think LinkedIn decided that it wants to be a platform of people's faces. That's just what we want.
Liam: Yeah, it's probably the algorithm responding to reality. Yeah. What about, and I heard you talk a little bit about business profiles before. Is it worth setting up a business profile and making posts from a business profile?
Meredith: I think there, here are the pros and cons and everyone can decide for themselves if you have less than 5,000 followers. On a business profile, your post won't perform anywhere close to the performance and engagement and reach that you would get from a personal profile. So especially if you're being mindful of your marketing bandwidth, if it's just like one person, you're just doing it for yourself.
You have x, y, z hours a week or a month to leverage LinkedIn as a pipeline tool. I wouldn't do it until you're like, yeah, I've got plenty of bandwidth. This makes sense. And then the benefits if you are, say, a solopreneur or a freelancer who's managing your own page, the only real benefit is, I think until it really gets big enough is more just like a, it's the way some people use their website as more of just a business card or a validation tool.
It's a place for prospects to go and see, all right, they're up, they're running, they're posting or reposting on a regular cadence. But I would say unless you're really, you've got marketing time or budget to burn, don't focus on it. If someone was a freelancer and they asked me, I was like, I've probably would say until you get to the point where you feel like you're competing with major agencies that have a big presence don't do it.
Liam: Okay. What about commenting on other people's posts? There's been a long time where the popular idea has been, comment before and after you post on LinkedIn in order to gin up the algorithm. Is that true? Is how important is commenting in your strategies?
Meredith: Commenting is really important. So for at a bare minimum, after you post, you should comment. For about maybe 20 minutes, go through your feed like and comment on other people's posts. Try and vary it up so you're not always liking and commenting on the exact same people's folks' posts. And that can be really helpful.
It, it does. LinkedIn likes it. LinkedIn likes people who are active and using LinkedIn. So if you are active and commenting and engaging with other people's stuff, it's going to show your stuff around a little bit more naturally. And then also your comments themselves are going to boost your visibility because, for example, if I comment on something since we're connected, first degree connections, Liam, you might see in your feed.
Meredith Farley.
Meredith: So it just reminds other people that you exist and you're doing it. We have kind of three different tiers of commenting for when we're working for clients. The first is just that. Our project manager will, after posting, will go in, logged in as our client and and comment on other people's stuff for about 20 minutes.
And we're generally choosing things that are really easy to be kind, positive and swift about. So it's like. Congrats Susan, who just started a new job or someone posts a milestone or a something great and it's this is amazing. Like congratulations, really happy for you. Positive is important. I would not get into like spiky conversations in LinkedIn, comments.
It can be alienating to folks and it can make them way less likely to engage with you. It's a professional platform and people can be very wary of folks that they perceive to be like. Even just a touch of a troll sometimes.
Second, another approach, and if you want to get a little more systematic about it, or you want to make it easier for yourself, would be to create a Google Doc.
A spreadsheet of 50 people, maybe 50 prospects, maybe some of them are colleagues of yours you want to support. Some are friends, some are clients, and some are prospects that you want to remind. You're out here and you're doing this. After you post, go in and and comment on, go through the list.
And you don't have to go through the whole list every time, but maybe you go through 15 people and if they've got anything new you like and you comment on what they posted. That's a good way to just be controlled and organized about it and keep it simple for yourself, because I think sometimes people find it a little overwhelming.
They're like. I know I need to post and then I just need to troll around and find people to comment on. If you build your own list, it just makes it that much more strategic, like the time you're spending. And also it just makes it a little more of a task to just execute as to a opposed to something that's a little vague and take some brain power.
And we do
Liam: that. I love that idea. because I hate. My feed, sometimes I'm like, my feed is just showing me either the same, like eight people over and over again. And I love those people, don't get me wrong, but like it's either showing me the same people over and over again or things I don't really care about or want to comment on.
So I love the idea of having this list of 50 people, change it every three months or something.
Meredith: Yes,
Liam: take 10 people out, add 10 people in you. Really good idea.
Meredith: And then the third option is like super robust. We do this for some of our clients, mostly who are in the VC space. This makes sense for them because their work is so network focused.
We'll have a maybe 150 contacts and they'll be divided into three categories, like only and comment or we like and comment, and we send the comment to the client for their review ahead of time, usually in a big batch. And. That can be having it broken down, whether it's for yourself or maybe if you can't afford to work with somebody like Medbury, you find like a really cheap executive assistant who you trust and train over time to do this for you
That can be great because it really like the, like sometimes for our clients in the VC space are just people that they want to warm up the relationship with. They're like, I think in the next year. Being in touch with these people is going to be helpful. Two is maybe people, they have an existing relationship with their nurturing or friends
Like for some clients, their husband and daughter is on the list. Just to make sure we're always supporting them. So I think you can get as in depth as and strategic as you want. But to your point I agree. I think just having, it feels more intentional when it's a list of community folks. You want to just see support and to remind them that you're out here and if you're struggling, if you're like, how am I going to nurture my leads
This is a really great first step is put them on your LinkedIn engagement list and make sure that they are. Getting a like or a comment from you when they post something new for a few months, it's really going to warm them up to you and it's going to remind them that you're there when they're ready.
Liam: I have another question about followers.
because I know you've, we've brought up the count, follower count, and this is something I thought recently. Sometimes when I see somebody's and I get that, jealousy that you get on LinkedIn when you're like, why is that post blowing up? And my post, it's like very similar, didn't, and then I'll look at follower accounts and I will rationalize to myself like, oh, they have twice as many followers as I do.
So let me ask you, is follower account important and are there ways to grow your follower account? If so,
Meredith: yes. For the latter question, I would definitely say Dripify is the best, fastest way to grow your follower account in a really intentional way. A request automatically requesting to connect with the people that you want to know you and work with you means that it, if they accept your request, they become a follower.
So it's so intentional. So that's like our favorite hack to grow follower account. But it doesn't matter. There's actually some reports out there that show increasingly that linkedIn might not be necessarily that focused on showing your content to someone be just because they follow you. So increasingly it's more of a vanity metric, I think.
Be, and like we have one client who has about 15,000 followers, which is not bad, and I would say that, but the posts that pop off are not. A lot of it is who en who just randomly engages with it. If someone who's really prominent on LinkedIn likes or comments on it, it's still going to do a lot be, it'll do a lot better than if that person hadn't.
But that's a little babbly that's not making total sense. It's just a random thing we've noticed. So I just will say that I think it's helpful. Someone will be a little more likely to see your content if they're a follower of yours, but it doesn't, it's increasingly less important to how well your content performs, number one.
And number two, though, it can be a validation. If someone goes and looks at somebody's page and it's oh. This person's got 15 K followers. That's pretty good. It, it's a brand building thing. So it still matters, but it might not matter as much as it did in so far as overall post performance.
Liam: Okay.
Meredith: But one that's once you're getting up there, if you've got 300 followers and you put out a post, it's going to be hard to get traction on it. You need building it up is still worthwhile and I recommenDripify to do that for sure.
Liam: I think a lot of people listening to this will find comfort in the idea, and I certainly do, of reducing the amount of time you spend posting and replacing it more with this direct engagement kind of thing.
I've started doing this recently. Where I was posting, because of the, for a long time, the kind of common wisdom was like, you got to post three times a week and that's how you get seen. And if you drop your consistency, that's it. But I like the idea of going down to one really high quality post a week and then all these other activities.
Posting, commenting, liking. DMing people, maybe trying sales navigator, using these post structures. When you are going to write a post, we'll definitely post some links to that document that you talked about. And actually we have another one in the community that people might not know about.
It's my prompts. I have 30 prompts that I use just as a it's for people who. Just are constant I don't know what to post about today. So they're literally just almost like a writing prompt. Yeah. And I think the two documents are probably going to work really well together because a lot of my prompts probably fit into the archetypes that you're talking about.
Yeah.
Meredith: So
Liam: we'll have all that in the show notes. If people want to learn more or join one of your cohorts or just read about what all the smart things that you post, what can they do?
Meredith: I will, they could follow us on our newsletter, which is on Substack. It is meredith farley.substack.com. They could check out our website, Medbury.com, and it's medburyagency.com.
They could follow me on LinkedIn. And I can send you all those links if you want, so you can just pop 'em in the show notes. And you can also, if you want to have a chat to reach out, feel free. My email is just meredith@medburyagency.com. And I'm pretty accessible. If you check out my LinkedIn or Substack, there's all kinds of links to book time with me.
And our next cohort is going to be next quarter. We actually just yesterday wrapped up the final session of this quarters. It was great. I think that we, the pricing. Is the first one was 1 8, 9 5 per person, 1,895 for three sessions. We have really strong feedback, so I think a lot of people felt it was worth it.
And we really go in depth to a ton of the stuff that we're talking about right now. And we also do profile optimizations. We talk about ad types for solopreneurs or larger teams. So yeah, follow us on all those spots. Reach out if you'd like to have a chat. Obviously I'm obsessed with LinkedIn and figuring out how this stuff works, so I'm always glad to chat about it.
Liam: Okay. Awesome. Meredith, thanks so much for joining us. It was great talking to you.
Meredith: Thank you, Liam.
Liam: Thanks for listening to another episode of the Freelance Success Podcast. We'll be releasing new episodes every week for the next few weeks, so make sure you subscribe below if you want to hear those episodes, and it always helps if you can leave a review and a comment so that other freelancers can find us.
Remember, you can join Freelance Success for free for one month and gain access to all of the exclusive resources, tools, templates, and events that we host for freelancers by going to join freelance success.com and signing up for a one month free trial. Until next week, I'm your host, Liam Carnahan, and this is the Freelance Success Podcast.
