Dave Kerpen

Dave is a serial entrepreneur, New York Times best selling author, and global keynote speaker.

Dave recently started as the interim CEO of UMA Health, an online mental health and executive coaching marketplace which connects clients to top providers to help them deal with challenges and become happier, more productive, self-actualized members of society, achieving peak performance in their careers and lives.

He is the Founder and Chairman of Likeable Local, a social media software company serving thousands of small businesses, as well as the chairman and cofounder of Likeable Media, an award-winning social media and word-of-mouth marketing agency for big brands. His newest book, The Art of People: 11 Simple People Skills That Will Get You Everything You Want is out now.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Dave’s success

Using headlines to entice readers.

Result if you follow the steps in Dave’s session

A headline that grabs attention and doesn’t cost you readers.

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

First and foremost, this may seem obvious but I have to tell you, it is not obvious to most people.
Most writers or people that I know, when they write an article and then after they’ve written an article they think of a good headline or they try to think of a good headline. And consequently what happens is most of the time and attention is spent on writing the article and not the headline.

And frankly, you guys might be thinking right now, “Well of course, writing it is a lot harder.”

Well I beg to differ. I think the single most important factor in the success of an article on LinkedIn, or frankly an article and anywhere on the web, is the headline.

You have very limited amount of time to get people’s attention. and it is a noisier social media landscape than ever before.

Certainly on LinkedIn, annoys your landscape than ever before.

People posting, companies posting, hearing about jobs, ads, now it is crowded as all heck.

The only way to cut through the clutter and generate attention is to devise an amazing headline.

After you’ve thought of the headline, write the article to meet the headline. Most people put 90% of their attention on the article and 10% on the headline, I put 90% of my time and attention on the headline and 10% on the article.

A couple of tips within the headline writing space, I like to say it’s the BuzzFeed and Upworthy strategies.

The BuzzFeed strategy is a list, nothing shocking there. But the reality is people really do gravitate to lists.

There’s a reason that my post (11 Simple Ways to Become a Better Leader) is one of the top posts of all time and it’s done almost three million page views. It’s a promise with a list attached. People love a headline as a promise and people love a list because it tells them there’s a finite amount of material that they’re gonna grasp from this article and they appreciate that.

The second is the Upworthy strategy, the emotional connection. As an example, the title of this keynote “How LinkedIn can Change your Life” that’s a pretty big promise and it’s something that really resonates emotionally.

How can you deliver a headline in your LinkedIn articles that delivers a similar emotional promise.

You have to actually be able to meet it with the contents. It’s been my experience that you think of the headline first, you can crank out content that meets that promise.

Number one is headline, number two find or take a compelling photo.

Even though LinkedIn has been a little behind the eight ball compared to Twitter and Facebook and Instagram in terms of going visual, the reality is LinkedIn has become as visual a platform as all of those. Which means that after your headline, the second most important thing you can do is have a super attention-grabbing awesome photo.

You can go to Shutterstock or another place that you can license a photo, or you can take your own. Find a way to take a photo that will really get people’s attention.

Next, write the post and frankly keep it concise.

A lot of people think longer is better.

it’s been my overall overwhelming experience that writing a post that’s 500-600 words is more than enough.

Now the good news is on LinkedIn you can go longer, but it’s been my experience that conciseness is valuable everywhere on the web and including LinkedIn.

Some cool things that you can do with the LinkedIn platform along the way, you can embed SlideShare presentations, embed YouTube videos, you can do some block quotes to call out specific aspects of your articles, but by and large write a concise post.

Next, include two calls to action at the end of the post. Let me explain what I mean by two calls to action.

One call to action is of course whatever you’re selling, whatever you want to drive people to.

You’ll notice at the end of all my post you’ll see a push to either buy one of my books and pre-order the other people or sign up for a free account at Likablehub.com or some other or learn more about our process for big brands at Likeablemedia.com.

No matter what, there’s a call to action for folks to become a lead essentially and get off of the LinkedIn platform.