Did you miss me? I unexpectedly took last week off while drowning in client and teaching work. I’m back, and so excited to introduce you to Yinka Ewuola.

How I met Yinka, and most of the people I’ve interviewed, is all down to LinkedIn itself. I attended a LinkedIn Live audioroom with two of my favorite coaches, Charlotte Lloyd and Lara Acosta, and at one point Yinka was called on stage. I don’t remember what she said but whatever it was, I was like, “I’ve got to meet this woman and learn more about her!” And that’s when I found out: She’s posted 1695 days straight. I’m in awe!

And that’s what I love about LinkedIn, and writing this newsletter. I get to meet and talk to some of the coolest people on the planet. So let’s get to Yinka, because I think you’ll think she’s cool, too.

Welcome, Yinka. Please tell us about yourself.

I'm a business strategist, and strategy is definitely my first love, but I also have other tools and skills that I use as well. I am a coach. I am a public speaker. I support women in creating wealth in and through their businesses.

I help them to do that by focusing on the most important things for the business, which are the cash flow and the strategy, and the most important things for the business owner, which are the mindset and habits.

What’s your industry?

My superpower is getting people to do stuff. While a lot of my time is spent in education and through coaching and mentoring, I'm probably in the get-stuff-done industry. 

One of the real differences between the work that I do and what most other people do is that it actually shows up in the results of my clients. I will absolutely help you to see things new, to see yourself differently, to learn a new thing, and to create a change in direction.

What does LinkedIn do for you?

LinkedIn is the primary platform for bringing clients into my world. I began posting on LinkedIn on the 16th of March, 2020, because we went into lockdown here in the UK one week later. I got to the Friday and thought, if I stop on Saturday and Sunday, I'm probably not going to come back to this on Monday. So it kept me going. I have done it every day, never missing a day. 

For over four and a half years, LinkedIn has helped me grow my business and create and craft the brand. We did our calculations recently, and LinkedIn has brought in £1.1M!

What are your main goals for using LinkedIn?

Make money. I'd be lying if I said it was any other thing first.

But how I make money is through the lens of my own values. My values are about helping people, excellence, and integrity. They’re the things I care about. I am not somebody who focuses on my values because I live my values. I don't need to look at them, I know what they are. I live by my values, and then I focus on the most important things. In this season of my business and my life, that's making money.

Yinka’s content strategy

Who’s your target audience on LinkedIn?

I am reaching ambitious women who are running businesses and who are passionate and committed to actually making proper money. They often find themselves busy and broke because they are doing all the things and they're trying really hard.

What they don't recognize is that they are creating the mindset that we've all been given about money, self, work, and business, and creating the results that they actually want is proving to be a struggle. They often take lots of action but do not see commensurate results. They are telling themselves stories about being bad at money because they are bad at maths or they are bad at finance.

To be honest, that's a myth because money isn't about maths or even about finance. Money is holistic, and finance is only one of the parts.

So, my audience is women who are committed to making a change in this world, and they know that they want to do it as themselves, as their authentic selves, in order to make that happen. 

How do you decide what content to create and share on LinkedIn?

I use my content as a funnel. At the top of my funnel, I am sharing my thoughts, my insights on the topics of leadership, and money. 

A lot of our leadership, business, and entrepreneurship content glorifies people that I don't think require glorification. A lot of men are glorified. They are often our examples, but they don't look like me and don't think like me.

I'm saying why we need to think differently about entrepreneurship and leadership. So much of women's lives have taken place not in the workplace, but that doesn't mean that women are not eminently qualified. They wear leadership as a life role. So that's at the top of the funnel. 

In the middle of my funnel, I'm sharing my own unique frameworks, ideas, and my own stories about how I'm essentially my own first client in my methods and ideas for my work. The bottom of the funnel is really to support women to be able to step forward through case studies, testimonials, and women sharing the difference that the opportunity to work with me has made.

How do you differentiate your content from others on LinkedIn?

I'm pretty unflinching in my thoughts. I'm someone who has and can carry a very strong opinion. I'm polarizing—the people who like my content like my content, and the people who don't, don't. 

I am clear and strategic in how I present authenticity. I don't use my audience for therapy, but I do share. Whether it's my experience as a black woman living as an ethnic minority, hailing from the global majority, as a mum, or as a wife. So, there are many things I do share. And there are many more things I don't. Enabling my audience to get a strategic glimpse of what is true to my thinking has been really helpful.

What are the processes you use to create content? 

• Schedule in advance ❌

• Batch create content ❌

• Optimize for SEO/keywords ❌

• Follow an editorial calendar ❌

• Have specific content pillars/themes ✅

• Repurpose content to/from LinkedIn or reuse on LinkedIn ✅

• Use AI in any part of the content writing process ❌

• Have team/human support for any part of your LI process ❌

• Keep a list of potential topics somewhere (Notes, Notion, etc.) ✅

• Design or source visuals including infographics and carousels and video ✅

What types of content do you post to LinkedIn?

• Text only ✅

• Polls ✅

• Audio ✅

• Video ✅

• Carousels ✅

• Photos of yourself (selfies) ✅

• Photos of other people or things ❌

• AI generated images ❌

• Infographics (single image) ✅

• Links to outside content ❌

• Reposts of others’ content (repost only) ❌

• Reposts of others’ content (with your thoughts) ❌

• LinkedIn Live events ✅

• LinkedIn newsletters ❌

How much time does it take?

How much time do you spend each weekday on LinkedIn on comments or Direct Messages (DMs), outside of content creation?

90 minutes. It surprises people that it's so little, but I don't sell LinkedIn, I have a business to run. I've got clients to serve. I'm generating sales out of LinkedIn. I don’t have time to spend 12 hours a day commenting, unless you’re paying me to comment.

Are you active on LinkedIn on the weekends, either posting or commenting or both?

Yes, it will take me 25 to 30 minutes to deal with the post and the commenting and make sure I am supporting my audience from a commenting perspective. I'm not deep in the DMs on the weekends; I only do so if someone DMs me. So, probably an hour max, 90 minutes.

How do you use DMs (direct messages) in the service of your goals?

I use DMs to connect further with people who have an interest in my content, to pivot them into sales conversations, and to answer lovely invitations to come and speak. It's an opportunity to go deeper with individuals and to further your goals accordingly.

Yinka’s biggest growth levers

What has contributed most to your growth?

Focus. I came for the cash, and I've been relentless at getting good at the things that create me cash.

It's my work, and I want to make sure that I get good, but I stay good in light of the changes on the platform to help others. So, I haven't deviated. For example, video is about to explode. But if I can't figure out how to use video to help me make cash, then I don't care. Focus has been the number one thing.

How do you track what’s working and know what to change?

I'm very specific because I have a system. When I have top-of-funnel content, my call to action is to like and follow. I can track my likes and my followers daily, and I can see what works from that perspective. 

When I'm calling in the middle and bottom of the funnel, I'm asking people to use code words to help me know what posts they came from. It isn't automated, but it's very clear, and it works.

How Yinka makes money

How do you generate revenue in your business?

A couple of different things. I was part of the LinkedIn Creative Accelerator program, so LinkedIn paid me to post. I have generated speaking engagements. I enroll women in my coaching programs. I work with women one to one.

While I don't have the biggest following, the fact is that I have an audience of women who have generated a lot of money for me. And therefore I have and audience that other brands would be very interested in. As I am growing my audience, I can also now monetize the attention that I'm creating. I'm in growth phase at the moment.

How do you quantify your success on LinkedIn?

My intention is to work less and earn more. So I'm trying to get less meetings. 

What I can say is that one of my recent successes was meeting a woman on a Friday, and we sat next to each other in a real-world space. She asked me what I did, and we connected on LinkedIn. Two business days later, she paid me a strong five-figure amount to come and work with me. 

In terms of the sales cycle, that was someone who had no knowledge of my existence, and yet my LinkedIn did the heavy lifting in terms of accelerating the buying cycle. To go from we met on Friday, we had a sales conversation on Monday, and I got the money on Tuesday. That is the dream, and it's wild. 

Yinka’s top tips

What challenges have you faced on LinkedIn? What’s made you almost—or actually—quit? What got you back on track?

I've wanted to quit plenty of times. There were days when I woke up, and because I don’t batch [my writing], I had nothing to post and didn’t know what to post. If I don't know what to post and I can't really get into the vibe of something to repurpose, I will be that person who'll be like, “I don't know what to post today. I'm really sorry,” or, “This post is crap, and I'll see you tomorrow.” I'm not breaking my streak because I don't know what to post. It's quite simple. 

Yes, I've been frustrated. Yes, I have had periods where I believe my content was better than the engagement that I was getting. Yeah, I felt salty about the algorithm. It's not for the faint of heart.

But at the same time, the challenges of LinkedIn are also some of the best things about LinkedIn, which are the people. I've met some of the most incredible people on LinkedIn, and some people who are not nice. I am frequently targeted with racism and sexism and the double whammy of misogynoir, which is racism and sexism all rolled into one. It's not fun. It's not helpful. It's not kind. It can be very exhausting, but you just have to stay the course. Remember what you came for and why.

What advice would you give others who are looking to grow and, ideally monetize their LinkedIn platform?

Decide why you are doing what you're doing and make sure that why is big enough to get you through a down day. Because it's okay to have a why that's glamorous and lovely, but if on the day you don't feel like doing it, if the why isn't a big enough reason, then it wasn't a good enough why. 

The second thing is to decide your single focus, because a person who tries to catch two rabbits catches neither. This is why I talk very unapologetically that I'm here for the cash, because businesses go out of business at a rate of 90% in five years. A dual focus is not effective.

Decide what you want, and then commit. Be that person who is willing to obtain mastery in the things that create the outcomes that you want. You then have to have that intrinsic motivation that says, I will not stop until it's done. Once you're that person, and once you behave in that way, it creates a completely different way of you. Being able to be on the platform, to show up, informs what it is you do when you get there.

Is there anything else you want to tell me that I haven’t asked you?

I really love LinkedIn as much as it's frustrating and irritating. The thing I love about LinkedIn is that there is a real rise in the number of female voices on the platform.

I would really encourage more and more people, in general, to look at what the women are creating. All of the people who are often glorified as the bigger creators, and the fastest-growing accounts are often guys. Women are creating incredible, incredible quality of content. It's now about us learning the rules so we can create the impact in the same way.

There is a massive opportunity on LinkedIn. The fact that it's free is wild, and the more you are focused on gratitude for it, the more you can create out of it.

Yinka’s best post

Stephanie’s note: I’ve asked each Networker to give me one “best post,” based on their own criteria.

Read this post on LinkedIn

Why Yinka considers this her best post.

I think it's ability to normalize exceptional was really powerful, and I converted two clients into two of my programs with it.

How to network with Yinka

• Follow Yinka Ewuola on LinkedIn

What’s new related to LinkedIn? Here’s what caught my eye this week.

• News you didn’t know you wanted but are happy it’s happened: LinkedIn has retired those celebratory post templates. (Social Media Today)

• A millionaire’s engagement news was panned on LinkedIn (though celebrated on Instagram). (Toronto Sun)

• LinkedIn reports record engagement last quarter. (Social Media Today)

• Now you can have a Lead Gen objective for LinkedIn boosted posts. (Search Engine Land)

I just worked with my digital marketing students on their LinkedIn profiles, including how to craft their About sections. And, great timing, here’s a really in-depth carousel from Jessie Van Breugel about that About section. Even if you implement only 20% of this, you’ll be way ahead of the pack.

Read this post on LinkedIn

I’m always on the lookout for something that changes the way I use LinkedIn. It could be an idea, a tool, a process, or something strategic.

Have a tip I should consider? Hit reply to this email and let me know!

That’s all for now—I look forward to seeing you again next week for another Networker interview.