Click through to the good bits.

000:00 Introductions.

07:51 How are you qualified to talk about video marketing on LinkedIn?

14:47 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives?

24:53 How to make LinkedIn personalised videos?

34:11 LinkedIn newsletter.

49:12 Why limit the video distribution to LinkedIn?

56:33 How to produce video content?

1:05:27 What is your recommendation to either start or get better at video marketing on LinkedIn?

1:08:08 What should people read?

1:14:21 Who would you throw under the bus who might also enjoy to have a conversation like this with me?

Martin Henley: [00:00:13] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley, this is The Effective Marketing content extravaganza and if you haven’t been here before you won’t yet know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. Providing that is, what you need to be successful in your business, is to know more about marketing and be more effective and efficient when you implement it in your business. So what goes on here is we bring you the marketing news. We review the very best and the very worst of marketing content from the Internet. And whenever I possibly can, I pull a guest in with experience to share that will support you to be more successful in your business and that was that’s what’s going on today.

Martin Henley: [00:00:55] So if that sounds like it might be useful to you, now would be a really good time to like, comment, share, subscribe, and all of those good things, because all of this content is being put together to be useful to you. This is our mission.

Martin Henley: [00:01:13] Today is Talk Marketing so we have a guest and today’s guest is a psychology graduate from the University of York. She appears to have started work proper as a computer trainer and technical writer, designing computer-based training programs and writing SOPs. She ran one of her businesses from 1995 for 21 years, which provided communications, technical writing, online education and marketing and communications consultancy. She has been a video marketing coach with Launch for Life since 2019 and now does that exclusively with her business Video Easy Peasy. She is a long-serving member of Toastmasters and won first prize for The Table Topics in her chapter or region in 2016. I’m not entirely sure which. She was introduced to us by the wonderful John Espirian, who tells us that she is the Queen of LinkedIn video; absolutely fantastic; really patient and has five passports. Today’s guest, all the way from Las Vegas, is Gillian Whitney. I made it through that, Gillian Whitney, in the end.

Gillian Whitney: [00:02:29] Woo hoo hoo!

Martin Henley: [00:02:31] How are you doing? How are things there in Las Vegas?

Gillian Whitney: [00:02:35] Awesome. Awesome. Sunny and just wonderful and it’s an actual honour to be here. So I’m excited.

Martin Henley: [00:02:43] Excellent. Well, thank you. Bless you for saying it’s an honour. What we need to address first is why John Espirian lied to us. Why did he tell us you had five passports when you’ve only got four? As if four isn’t interesting enough?

Gillian Whitney: [00:02:55] I don’t know, because it’s confusing. It’s confusing. I think John thinks I’m a global citizen or, you know, I talk about my Scottish background, so, you know, maybe he thinks I got a Scottish passport and a British passport actually got the EU passport before you guys seceded. Is that the correct word? I don’t know what it’s called, but I got the EU UK passport. So at one time I guess it could have gone anywhere in Europe.

Martin Henley: [00:03:25] At one time you could have done, but no longer. We are not. We left the European Union as what happened.

Gillian Whitney: [00:03:32] I know. Sad.

Martin Henley: [00:03:32] I don’t know if seceded. That might be the word. I think left, ran away, I think might be more accurate.

Gillian Whitney: [00:03:41] Well, we won’t get into politics. We won’t get it.

Martin Henley: [00:03:44] Let’s not get into politics. No, that’s no good. So you are a citizen of Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Correct. Is that what you’re saying? Wow. And does that and is there a benefit to being I think you are a global citizen if you’ve got four citizenships?

Gillian Whitney: [00:04:03] Well, I actually call myself an international video marketing coach, and I specialize in LinkedIn, but I literally have clients all over the world. So I think there is a benefit to that. And if I don’t like one country, I can pick up and move to another one. So, hey, you don’t get better than that.

Martin Henley: [00:04:21] You don’t get better than that. No, I’d like that. I qualify for dual citizenship, which would get me an EU passport because I qualify for an Irish passport. But I don’t know what rigmarole is involved in proving that my parents were both born in Ireland, etc., etc., etc.. So I don’t know. So I haven’t done that yet, but I’m going to do it because I want to remain European. Even if everybody or 50.2% of people in the UK decided they didn’t, I’m going to remain.

Gillian Whitney: [00:04:50] Gives us options.

Martin Henley: [00:04:51] Gives us options. It absolutely gives us options. Okay, cool. Well, we’re not here to talk about citizenship today. We’re here to talk about marketing. And you know that there are only five questions. So the questions are all around your specialist subjects. Is your specialist subject video marketing on LinkedIn or is it video marketing more broadly? Shall we keep it specific? Specificity sells, doesn’t it?

Gillian Whitney: [00:05:19] I niche down. So niche niche, whatever you want to say. You know you got you got four passports, you’re going to have a lot of different accents and you’re going to use a lot of words, you know, I know chuffed and everything else. So, you know, I speak all languages. I won’t speak Hebrew on you because I’m not very good at it, to be honest with you. Video marketing, what I’ve niched over the years, and as you so eloquently read through my bio, I did marketing in general, niche down to video, niche down to LinkedIn video so that’s my specialty.

Martin Henley: [00:05:56] Okay, good. So we have to clear this up because you’re welcome to have as many accents as you like, but you can’t use the word niched. Niched isn’t a word. The word niche from the French niche is pronounced niche always. Okay. So it’s like, you know, the cheese and egg flan that you get. What do you call that? That’s a quiche. So it’s like that.

Gillian Whitney: [00:06:22] Oh, a quiche. A quiche. Okay. Yeah. You know, I’m thinking Monty Python, you know, the Knights of Niche. You know, just I just.

Martin Henley: [00:06:30] I think there were the Knights of Nie.

Gillian Whitney: [00:06:33] Okay.

Martin Henley: [00:06:35] Good. Okay, let’s not go any further down this road. I don’t see again any better for you. Okay, So can you just. Let’s you and I. And not just to you and I. Every American I’ve spoken to so far in this series has committed to use the French word niche and pronounce it as niche. So can we commit to do that? Is that okay?

Gillian Whitney: [00:06:54] I promise. I promise. Quiche and niche got it.

Martin Henley: [00:06:57] We’re right there. So you niche down from my general marketing to specific marketing. Now to video marketing. Now to video marketing on LinkedIn. Excellent. Okay, so there are only five questions. The five questions are firstly, how are you qualified to talk to us about video marketing on LinkedIn? Secondly, who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? Thirdly, what is your recommendation for anyone who wants to get better at video marketing on LinkedIn? Fourthly, what should people read? And then fifthly, and lastly, who can you throw under the bus who might endure or maybe even enjoy to have a conversation like this with me? And we will check in to see if you’ve enjoyed the conversation when we get to the very end. How does that sound?

Gillian Whitney: [00:07:48] Yeah, sounds good.

Martin Henley: [00:07:51] Excellent. Okay, so question number one, how on earth are you, Gillian Whitney, qualified to talk to us about video marketing on LinkedIn?

Gillian Whitney: [00:08:02] OK. Drum roll. Ten years of video experience and I started behind the camera doing online courses. So I really know my way around video editing, recording, doing video, screen shares, educational stuff. I started with a Lego robotics course that was my very, very first online course, Lego Mindstorms, so that was really tough. Did Google Ninjas and all sorts of different courses and I was literally just one step ahead of the kids, learning it myself and then repackaging and teaching kids and that’s sort of how I started. Then as I became good at video, I did things for clients, things for adults, marketing videos, I learned about marketing. I did a lot of training and then I decided I knew a lot about Facebook and YouTube, and I saw that video, because I used to do SEO and that sort of marketing, people would always say, How do I get on the first page of Google? That was always the goal. They were blogging and we helped with websites and all that stuff. But, if you’re on the sixth page of Google, nobody’s seeing you. So people want to know, how do I get to the top of the Google search results? We began to see video was that Disneyland fast pass that gets you found, gets you seen, gets you known.

Gillian Whitney: [00:09:29] Then I had to step out of my comfort zone and learn how to get from behind the camera to in front of the camera. So that’s, I think, what makes me qualified for doing LinkedIn video, and then coupled with for the last three years, I have gone all in on LinkedIn. I gave up every other social media platform. I don’t do Pinterest, I don’t do Instagram, I don’t do Facebook. I still keep YouTube because you should always have something in your back pocket. Don’t put all your social media in one basket. So I do 10%. I have a YouTube channel, but 90% of the time I’m doing LinkedIn and I do it hard and thorough and I have grown my following in three years from 700 connections to almost 10,000. I think I know what I’m doing. I think I know what I’m doing here and you really have to do video and know the platform well, because video for YouTube, video for LinkedIn, it’s totally different.

Martin Henley: [00:10:35] Good. Okay. What you will learn about me, Gillian, is that I’m just a bag of issues. Okay? So I’ve just got all these issues that need to be addressed. So there’s several things that have come up for me already. Firstly. I think like in marketing in 2022, digital marketing 100%, you have to be, if you’re going to be successful, you have to be part geek and you have to be part creative. Now, John introduced us to you. I think he’s sitting nicely in that, but is definitely coming from the geek origin and I would put you in that category because you’ve done the technical, you’ve come from the technical writing space because you were producing, designing computer-based training all the way back in 1992. That has to have given you like a huge headstart in terms of being able to produce content that actually has some effect. Do you know what I mean?

Gillian Whitney: [00:11:40] Yeah, it’s instructing people how to do things. But knowing your way around and knowing how things can be so complicated. Because I’m a tech writer by nature and trade, I know how to make it easy peasy and that became my moniker. If you look at my history on YouTube, I started with marketing easy peasy, Facebook easy peasy, SEO easy peasy, that now that was a tall order because SEO is anything but easy peasy. I’ve always been about helping people to be empowered to do their own video and I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed with the tech and break it down into small chunks. So I think that’s important.

Martin Henley: [00:12:33] Right. So, like, even now I’m distracted because I’m seeing that I’m getting a little bit of feedback off your mike, and I’m worried that it’s going to echo. So I’m trying to get headphones working and it’s not working, so I’m going to stop being distracted by that. There might be a tiny bit of echo on here, but it makes the point beautifully, which is the video isn’t easy peasy.

Gillian Whitney: [00:12:55] No, it’s hard.

Martin Henley: [00:12:56] Absolutely, definitely isn’t. Now, I think because of the nature of me and I think the nature of you because I’m a presenter, I don’t I don’t mind being on camera, I don’t care about being on camera. I think the easiest thing, the easiest way to produce content, full stop, is to sit in front of a camera and start speaking. Even if that doesn’t make it into the world as video, you can then take that text, you can transcribe it, and then you’ve got thousands of words and then you can fashion that into something that might be interesting or useful to people. It can be blog content, then you can, you can put it on a teleprompter and then you have something that’s very polished that you might want to put out in the world. So 100% for me video is the easiest way to produce content. Especially when you start interviewing people, then that’s really a great way to produce lots and lots of content and really interesting and useful content, I think. But that’s not the case for most people, I don’t think. And that’s not the case for the people that you work with. If I’m understanding where you’ve positioned yourself, getting over that hurdle is the first thing and then the technical is the second thing. So let’s do it in that order.

Martin Henley: [00:14:14] How do you get people to a place where they are comfortable producing video content, being on camera? How do you do that? We’re already on question number two, which is weird, it normally takes much longer than this, but I’m very happy to let you know that I think you’re qualified to talk to us about video marketing on LinkedIn.

Gillian Whitney: [00:14:35] Okay.

Martin Henley: [00:14:36] So that’s good.

Gillian Whitney: [00:14:37] Check.

Martin Henley: [00:14:38] Check done. It’s going to be embarrassing. One day I’m going to have to say to somebody that I’m sorry you’re not qualified to talk to us. Goodbye.

Gillian Whitney: [00:14:45] Hit that stop button.

Martin Henley: [00:14:47] So here’s the thing. Who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? I think the first hurdle is going to be getting people to appear on camera because people have don’t like it particularly.

Gillian Whitney: [00:15:00] You’re right and it’s interesting because in the beginning I thought it was about the tech if I could help them with, here is a program that you can make your videos, edit your videos, caption your videos because you really believe in all that sort of stuff. I thought that was the hurdle that people needed and they were like, No, it’s turning on the camera, that’s what’s really freaking me out. So you had alluded or not alluded to, but you had mentioned in my introduction that I was the winner of Toastmasters for table topics. Now, Table Topics for anybody who’s not in Toastmasters is impromptu speaking. I did that contest because I didn’t like doing impromptu speaking. I found it frightening and intimidating. So sometimes I lean in to things that are scary, and I won for seven states. I went all the way through because I had to learn how to trust my gut. That’s what we have to do with video. That’s what we have to do with being a talking head on camera. We have to learn that our message is more important and if we can focus more on the audience and adding value, we can get over the fear. That’s what people get wrong. They think they’re going to be judged, there’s a lot of video shame that goes on. I know that sounds like a weird, touchy feely thing, but people really think, who am I to teach anything? The thing is, is that if you don’t do it, that idiot over there could do it and he might be saying the wrong things and not helping you.

Gillian Whitney: [00:16:42] So that’s why I teach people. You’ve got to know who is your target market, who’s your ideal client, what are their problems, and then how can you help them? I am not salesy. If you watch my videos, you might say, Where are the heck is their call to action? I don’t have a call to action. My call to action is to just make video easy peasy. I give away a lot of free content. I have YouTube channels, I do PDFs and LinkedIn lives, and I do all this stuff to create valuable content because I want people to be able to do this. I think video is the way that people will get to know, like and trust us. And that’s why we have to overcome it. All these stumbling blocks, all these things, the mindset is the first thing. It’s not the tech, it’s the mindset. So you have to get over what you have to say is valuable, but you also have to follow through and make it valuable. It can’t just be, Hi, I’m Gillian. Buy my $10,000 course, send me checks. It’s not going to work.

Martin Henley: [00:17:54] It’s not going to work. Okay, good. So the point there is that’s really powerful motivation. This is my motivation. I don’t know how long, I know you spent a little bit of time looking at our videos. My motivation, I don’t like Gary Vaynerchuk, I think what he’s saying is junk. So that’s my motivation, to put out the truth in the world because what other people, Gary Vaynerchuk, like, the really big guys, what they’re peddling isn’t true. For them it works, they put out a video saying, Buy my $10,000, course it works. Why does it work? Because they’ve got relationships with millions of people, they are famous. People know them, like them, I’ve got no idea why, and trust them. I’ve really got no idea why. They’ve done that groundwork over 15 years to be in that position and I think that causes them to be lazy.

Martin Henley: [00:18:47] So 100%, that’s a really powerful motivator. The idea that if you’re not saying the right thing, somebody else is going to be saying the wrong thing and for me, I think that causes harm. My mission is small businesses have a very slim opportunity of actually being successful. You know, and I think it all comes down to their marketing. They don’t understand what it is, yhey don’t understand that they should be doing it and when they go out into the market, they get robbed by people talking absolute junk. So that’s a hugely powerful motivator.

Gillian Whitney: [00:19:24] Yeah.

Martin Henley: [00:19:26] Is that true across industries? Does that have a broader resonance? Because marketing, it seems to me, is full of people just talking absolute junk, but can that be true in other markets?

Gillian Whitney: [00:19:40] I think so. I think that there’s always the people that, you know, they they want to persuade you to just buy the expensive thing, raise up your prices just because, we’ll buy the thing that’s most expensive. If she’s charging, you know, $500 an hour, she must be good. I’ve seen people in so many different industries rope people in with this terrible, terrible sentence; “If you’re serious about your business, you’ll buy this.” That hooks people and then they get in. How many people I know just consume. They are consumers of content, consumers of courses, training programs because they think, I just have to buy that silver bullet, then I don’t have to do the work, just buy the silver bullet and I can do it and it’s not true. You have to do the work. You have to roll up your sleeves and put in the work.

Martin Henley: [00:20:44] 100% and I think this is particularly frustrating for me in marketing is because everyone’s talking about the secret of marketing and everyone’s saying, Oh, if I consume this content and I take away one nugget. For me this is much more important than that. You know, it’s like important information doesn’t come in the form of nuggets, you know what I mean? It’s like you studied psychology. I’m sure you didn’t go to a lecture and say, Well, I took away this one nugget. You went to a lecture and you’re like, okay, I understand now this principle and how this principle applies to everything that I’m doing. So it does feel to me like, but maybe it’s true, you know, I think maybe it’s true of of IT like there are a lot of people talking a lot of rubbish night.

Martin Henley: [00:21:29] Maybe it is true. Maybe the question I’m asking is which industries, which kind of markets is LinkedIn marketing video most effective for. That’s kind of maybe what I want to know.

Gillian Whitney: [00:21:43] I think B2B, you know LinkedIn is, you know, it is B2C, it is B2B, I kind of think of it as P2P, it’s social selling. It’s relationship building.

Gillian Whitney: [00:21:56] I use video in many different places on LinkedIn, and that’s what I coach my clients to do. We all automatically think, Oh, I got to make catchy eye catching videos to go in the news feed. That’s not true. If I could go back in my time machine, I would start with LinkedIn Live, because doing live videos really builds trust because they’re not overproduced, they’re candid, you’re doing things. I did a video today and I showed people making a mistake doing LinkedIn live. That makes me human. That makes me human. Even after two years, I’m still hitting the wrong buttons. It just happens. That’s what happens. So I prefer to make live video content and then, you know, snip those down and repurpose them as clips. All being said, I also like LinkedIn for the relationship building and I like to send people video messages because that’s real and honest. If I was to send you a video message in LinkedIn and I wish you happy birthday, that would make you feel good. If I do things like, Hey, I see it’s the anniversary of your company and I send you a personalized video that is going to get me much more remembered by my ideal customers than just some sort of cute, snappy video that’s in the news feed. Plus, I like to do thought leadership videos that I’ll put into articles and newsletter. Your profile video on LinkedIn is something that welcomes people to your profile so that they can get to know you and you can stand out and you don’t look like a bot or a fake profile. So there’s many different places that you can be doing video, and I think video is key for relationship building.

Martin Henley: [00:23:47] Yeah, I think 100%. I didn’t know that there were so many places. The first ever video message I received on LinkedIn was from John and I was a little bit freaked. I’ll be honest with you.

Martin Henley: [00:24:01] You’re right, the thing about video is, as long as it’s not contrived, then it’s real. It’s like the washing powder adverts, like where they knock on people’s door and they’re like, How happy are you with your. We all know those people are actors. You know, we all know they’re actors. So it’s not effective, although it must have been effective because those businesses are still in business, here we are 30 years later. So if that’s effective and it’s clearly a lie, then the much more authentic thing must be that much more effective again, I would say. Do people get? How many? So when you say personalised, you don’t mean personalized in a artificial intelligence, you’re saying you make a personal video for each of those messages with your phone.

Gillian Whitney: [00:24:53] Okay. Yep. You can do it on desktop, too. There’s ways you can do it on on desktop. But LinkedIn is really set up for personalized videos using your phone. I don’t have a canned video that it’s like, Oh, upload to this guy, the welcome to my network video. I don’t do that. I do real videos that would say, Hey, I saw you just hit 10,000 followers. Good for you. That’s awesome. Or Hey, I heard you just won an award. Congratulations. Or I’m sorry to hear that your dog died. It’s just like human being things where you just reach out to people and you just make a personalized video. Plus I caption my videos, which makes me a little bit different. I caption my videos outside of LinkedIn, and then I upload them into the messages. It’s a little extra step, but I like to be inclusive because I don’t know you. You might be deaf, you could be hard of hearing, or you could be in a place that watching a video and listening is not appropriate. So I want you to have the option to just watch captions if you like.

Martin Henley: [00:26:03] Okay, good. This is all coming as news to me. I didn’t realize this was going on, I 100% didn’t realize this was going on on LinkedIn in this way.

Martin Henley: [00:26:14] So the mechanics of it are if I open the app, there’s somewhere there’s a record button is there where I can just start recording a video and then I can just select somebody and send it to that person.

Gillian Whitney: [00:26:25] Correct.

Martin Henley: [00:26:26] Okay, good.

Gillian Whitney: [00:26:27] Within the app, if you want to add in captions, you have to use an external third party tool. One I recommend is Cap Cut. It’s free, anybody can use that. It’s good. Again, I strive to be inclusive, so that’s good for iPhone and Android users, you know, because we can’t just assume everybody has the same stuff. We have to always try and help everyone. So Cap Cut, it’s with a C, Cap Cut. It’s by the makers of TikTok. It’s completely free and it’s a video editor, and captions, and special effects, and green screen removal. You can start off with the basics, but you could make a documentary with the darn thing. It’s amazing.

Martin Henley: [00:27:11] Okay, good. Right? So when you say captions, are you talking about the subtitles on the bottom? You’re not talking about big text over the video. That’s different.

Gillian Whitney: [00:27:21] No, no, just. Just just sub sub subtitles at the bottom. But you can brand them, you know, like I just go for basic black background with white text because I just think that’s easier for everybody to read. But, you know, if you if your brand colors or, you know, red and yellow, that probably be hard to read. But you know, whatever colors you want, you can brand it. You can make it whatever font you want. There’s so many different things and you burn them directly into the video. So it’s not like closed captions, like YouTube that you toggle on and toggle off.

Martin Henley: [00:27:53] Right? So they’re always on. Okay, good.

Martin Henley: [00:27:56] What sort of response to you get when your video falls into somebody’s inbox? Literally, I’ve had one of these in my life, so I’m guessing that there’s not very much of this going on.

Gillian Whitney: [00:28:15] There’s not. It makes you stand out. It makes you stand out. First of all, it’s wonderful when people just go, Oh, my goodness, this made me feel good. You just feel good as a human being. When you get that kind of response. A lot of times I’ll find people want to somehow have a personal response and not necessarily will, many do a video back, there’s just been a few. Most of the time they’ll do a voice note back. So now you’re getting into a conversation, you’re breaking out of that text barrier and it can lead to meetings. It can lead to, hey, why don’t we hop on a Zoom call and get to know each other and chat and this and that. So it begins to break down the barriers. The nice thing is, is that when you get on a Zoom call and people have seen your videos, they say you’re exactly like you are in your video, that’s a nice compliment because then you’re being human. You’re being a human.

Martin Henley: [00:29:17] It’s good. Yes. Okay. So I’ve got an issue with this because I don’t leave voice messages. It’s just too weird. It’s like if I want to have a conversation with somebody, although it is increasingly hard to have a conversation with somebody, I will phone them up. Very often now what you have to do is you have to message them first, say, are you free for a chat? You know what I mean? Which really annoys me as well. So because you’ve made that correlation, like if that’s the journey from voice message to video message, I’m worried that we don’t just speak directly to people anymore. But you’re saying the point of this is to get face to face with people or Zoom or whatever it might be.

Gillian Whitney: [00:30:03] Well. And also, too, we’re global like we’re global and we have global connections now. That was one of the biggest things when I left the United States to move to Israel, this was just before the pandemic hit. Terrible time to actually move abroad during just before a pandemic hit. When I moved there, I began to realise I have to work outside of my time zone. I can’t necessarily always call people up if I called anybody in the U.K., you know, when it’s a good time for me, they could be in bed. So having those voice notes is a way of having a delayed conversation globally. I have a friend in Belgium. Every morning we send each other, I’m in Las Vegas, she’s in Belgium. We send each other a voice note or a video note to just keep practicing our social skills. We’re like, become best friends, global friends and that’s a way to do it. We do an occasional zoom once or twice a month, but our schedules can’t make it. So this is a way to engage in a way that can meet multiple time zones all over the world.

Martin Henley: [00:31:13] Okay, good. Has anybody ever said to you, Look, I’m sorry, Gillian, this is a bit creepy. Please don’t send me any more video messages.

Gillian Whitney: [00:31:22] No.

Martin Henley: [00:31:23] Okay.

Gillian Whitney: [00:31:23] Never.

Martin Henley: [00:31:25] I promise I won’t say that if you ever send one to me.

Gillian Whitney: [00:31:28] But I would not do it on the first connection, like the first date. I get to know people and then I send them a message. So I don’t usually do a hi, I just connected with them and then boom, I’m sending them a video message. But I always send a video message back to anyone who sends me a message because I think as a video marketer, it’s expected. It’s just polite. So I’ll do it. Even on a crappy hair day, I’ll still do it.

Martin Henley: [00:32:02] Okay. I suppose it’s eating your own dog food, isn’t it? That’s what that’s what it is. It’s like practicing what you preach, which doesn’t go on enough, I don’t think, in the world anymore. What am I thinking now? So basically you’re saying video messages linked in lives. There was something there’s another place you can put video.

Martin Henley: [00:32:25] What are all the places you can put videos, or use videos on LinkedIn?

Gillian Whitney: [00:32:30] So first of all, I always tell people to start with your profile video and that’s behind your picture. You have 30 seconds to let people know a little bit about who you are, what you do. Don’t don’t make it too salesy. I think of it as like rolling out the welcome mat of, Hey, you know, here’s who I am. It gives people a taste of your personality. So add a little personality to it, but it doesn’t have to be fancy. So that’s the first place to do it is on your profile. You can also do newsfeed videos, of course, and I recommend keeping them below 2 minutes, that 1 to 2 minute time spread is about the sweet spot. Then you can do videos on your company page. There’s a whole tab. It’s like kind of having a YouTube channel on your company page. So that’s another place. Then inside articles or newsletters, LinkedIn newsletters, you can embed videos, excellent for YouTubers because you can embed a long video that’s on your YouTube channel and then it plays within the article. They don’t click and hop out to YouTube. They watch it within the article and it’s Google searchable. That’s for the long game. If you have an article that you do and you’ve got a really nice video to go embedded with inside that article, that article could be found on Google two years later, three years later. It’s amazing how those Google search results will point them to a LinkedIn article. And if you got a video, what an awesome tool.

Martin Henley: [00:34:11] Okay, so you can embed them in articles. We do that. That’s that’s cool. We don’t see much benefit from it is the truth. I think we can talk about that in a second. The newsletter.

Martin Henley: [00:34:24] Am I missing a trick on LinkedIn if I’m not sending a newsletter, how many people can I send a newsletter to?

Gillian Whitney: [00:34:31] Whoever will subscribe. So I have subscribers, I think on my newsletter I have maybe about two or 3000 subscribers. So, you know, that’s pretty decent. You know, I have 10,000 followers. I might have more than that. I don’t even know. I don’t really kind of keep track of it. The only thing is I would not recommend you give up your other email marketing. So it’s in addition to because you cannot with a LinkedIn newsletter, you cannot get a list of your subscribers. You can see who your subscribers are, but you would have to scroll through and look at all those names, which is like, you can’t do very much. But here’s the good thing. When you send out a LinkedIn newsletter, it is emailed to everybody who has raised their hand and said, Yes, I want to be a subscriber and it could pull them back into LinkedIn. What I do is I like to embed how to videos within my newsletter and then I will tell people click here to watch it, which takes them out of the email inbox and hops them into LinkedIn. So that’s what I do.

Martin Henley: [00:35:44] Right?

Martin Henley: [00:35:45] So how would I get people or what’s the mechanism for getting people to subscribe to a newsletter on LinkedIn?

Gillian Whitney: [00:35:52] Well, there’s a couple of different ways. One, you can click on your newsletter and there’s actually, like, you know, a link and you can send to people, you can invite people, you can get a newsletter link. You can put it as a featured item on your page so that if someone as soon as somebody comes to your page, they’ll see it. So there’s many different ways that you can market your newsletters. Right now the problem that LinkedIn had is when everybody got newsletters, we all got them the same week. So people were absolutely deluged. There was a lot of people that started to do newsletters and they they can’t write, they’re horrid, they’re hard writers, and you really need to know how to write to do a good newsletter. Their newsletters were garbage. I think we all became sort of inundated with newsletters, and now it’s starting to kind of shuffle through. So it’s not too late to still be a part of this, and I highly recommend it. You can do them for company pages too. So I think there’s more success on LinkedIn working everything through your profile. I, I just really have a company page to have a nice logo that goes with my profile. I don’t do a lot on my company page.

Martin Henley: [00:37:06] Yeah, 100%. I think company pages are largely about recruitment. That’s what I think company pages are about. And the opportunity always on LinkedIn has been, I think, as an individual and as an individual to be very proactive. But you’re making me feel Gillian, like I’m a long way behind. I didn’t even know this this LinkedIn newsletter thing was a thing. Right. So are these your recommending that your customers do all of these things? Is this what you’re coaching all to do?

Gillian Whitney: [00:37:40] I’m teaching people, I don’t do content for people. I like to help them learn how to do their own content. So when I’m working with clients, I look at them and say, What are your goals? What what are you trying to accomplish with video? And then let’s look at LinkedIn and see what parts of it will work for you and then let’s make you a workflow so that you can do that. We can figure out should you be doing lives, should you be doing lives and then repurposing them? I like to repurpose my lives to, you know, YouTube and all sorts of other different things. I make video snippets. You can get a bunch of snippets from one live. I also do a podcast and I push my podcast out, which is my LinkedIn live repurposed to five podcast platforms. So I believe in marketing you do it once and spread it out in many different channels. So with clients, I don’t tell people to do everything video, let’s figure out what video works for you and like you said before, sometimes you just transcribe a video and you make a blog post out of it, or you make an e-book out of it.

Gillian Whitney: [00:38:56] There’s so many different things you can do with video. So but those are all of the things, but I never recommend all of that. And I also do not recommend doing video every single day. I think that’s the kiss of death. You need to vary your content and have text posts. That’s what I like about LinkedIn. You could do a text post like people are intelligent, they’ll read a text post and they like them.

Gillian Whitney: [00:39:23] You can do document posts, you can do a poll. I did a poll the other day about video meetings, Was anybody using the video meetings? There’s three kinds of video meetings you can do on LinkedIn. I asked people if they were using it. I did a poll and then I followed up a week later with a PDF document that went through and said, Here’s the summary and I gave the poll results. I gave my interpretation of the summary, and then I highlighted the comments that people got and that got a ton of engagement and to me it’s crowdsourcing market research. There you go. You can do some market research with this. There’s a lot of people that abuse polls, you know, do you do you do you use Apple or Android? Do you like vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream? Those are silly. They’re a waste of time. You could go out there and say, do you like single shows, LinkedIn lives or do you like it with two guests? Do you like a panel and really find out what the people like? So one of the things I did a poll on was I asked, When are you watching lives? The majority of people are watching them on the replay. Then I knew to record for the ear and people also said they were doing other things, they were cooking, and cleaning, and walking the dog and all sorts of things. So then I realized record for the ear and also record for the replay.

Martin Henley: [00:40:53] Brilliant. Good. I think the thing about polls is that LinkedIn really likes them because they are high engagement. So then they can say, Look, this is how many people are engaging. So you’ve got to play these platforms a little bit like that. So you’ve got to go with, you’ve got to produce what they want. They want polls. So you produce polls, so you get more engagement. I think 100% people abuse that because they just want to get more engagement for themselves. Of course they do. Or else why would they do it? What’s the other thing I’m thinking is like, I am aghast. That’s what I am about the standard of posting on LinkedIn. It’s shocking to me. It feels like watercooler conversations for the people who have too much time on their hands. These very emotional or very emotive posts where somebody died, or somebody got cancer, or they climbed a mountain. I don’t particularly enjoy that. Thankfully, I’ve cleaned up my feed a little bit by following the people that I’m really interested in, people who’ve been on the podcast mainly, but people that I’m interested in, and I don’t see that so much anymore. I can imagine if people take that attitude into video marketing on LinkedIn, it’s going to be a horror show.

Gillian Whitney: [00:42:17] Oh, for sure.

Martin Henley: [00:42:18] Imagine the drama that will unfold. It’s like if people are producing these, instead of writing it, they’re producing them as video. So what was the point that I wanted to make about that? One of the questions I still don’t think we’ve quite got to the bottom of; how you motivate people to be in front of a camera when they don’t fancy it. I know, because I’ve got my nemesis, he doesn’t know I exist. That’s fine. So I’ve got my negative motivator. But what do you do? Because this is almost like public speaking, isn’t it? It strikes me that public speaking is a combination of, Well, Mary Gardner said this to me, I don’t know if you know Mary Gardner, but she was on the show a few weeks ago and she said it’s basically a combination of content and personality.

Martin Henley: [00:43:10] People don’t feel like they’ve got the content and they don’t feel like they’ve got the personality. So how do you address that issue? How do you get them actually doing it?

Gillian Whitney: [00:43:21] I go back to again, knowing who your target market is, knowing what their problems are, and then positioning yourself with the solution. When you make a video, you make that video for that one person. It’s kind of hokey, but that whole who is your person that you envision on the other side of the camera? Speak to them, Speak to them. I’ve actually had one client who was very, very nervous about getting in front of the camera. So I told him to get on a zoom with his wife and I said, have her be in another room you get on a Zoom call. Pin yourself as the speaker hit the record button and let’s work with that. He was able to talk to his wife. Sometimes it’s all about when you care more about the other person on the other side of the lens you get out of your own head. That’s something that I learned in Toastmasters. It’s never about you, it’s about your audience. Plus I tell people we’re all natural storytellers, so if you can work your videos within a logical short story, one idea, one story, one point, you know, there should always a story, make a point that is much easier than the stress of, I wrote a whole script and now I have a teleprompter, but now it’s shining in my glasses and people can see it.

Gillian Whitney: [00:44:54] I tell people, Don’t do that. Just think about what you want to say. Make that one point. Put it on a business card. If you can’t put your point on a business card, your point’s too big. So make one idea and then come up with a story. That’s how I want it. Toastmasters. That’s how I won impromptu speaking. I have a story file, it’s an Excel spreadsheet, and I have everything; How did I get my dog at the rescue? What did I do when I was on the cruise? What happened when I was a kid and I was locked in an elevator between floors? I list all those stories from my life because any time I’m anywhere, I can pull out one at the drop of a hat. That story, that one story about being trapped in an elevator at eight, it could talk about fear, it could talk about being resourceful. There’s so many different things. So that’s what I tell people. Make a story library for yourself and use that as a way to do videos. You don’t have to worry about having special effects and a studio and all that stuff. Turn on the camera, tell a story to the one person on the other side of the camera and stop over editing with everything. People overedit and just know somewhere out there someone needs to hear your message. It’s that easy.

Martin Henley: [00:46:20] Genius, because this has always been my attitude to public speaking is if you’re scared, you’ve got it wrong, don’t do it. Because if you are standing up and you think it’s about you, you’ve got it 180 degrees wrong, you know, it’s 100% about delivering value for the audience. If you’re not delivering value for the audience, then you deserve to get into trouble. If you’re more concerned about yourself than you are about them, then you are going to get into trouble. This thing comes back to this nemesis idea, the fact that somebody doesn’t care about the audience but is doing better than you, That, for me, is a real spike. That’s a real motivator.

Gillian Whitney: [00:47:00] I had this, I had the same thing. I just want to let you know, I had the same thing and that was my actual motivator to get in front of the camera. There was a huge influencer on LinkedIn. I won’t name the person. And they talked about, and I at the time was wondering, how do you do those square videos with the captions underneath? And I just didn’t know how to do it. And that influencer did a lot of video that I would have liked to do, and I just didn’t have the skills. I didn’t know how, how it was done. I remember she said, If you want to learn the secret, I hate that word, but if you want to learn the secret to doing video on LinkedIn, click here to watch this video and I click to watch the video and she threw, in the video, she threw up money and she says, money. Money is the secret. And the idea is, is that you don’t have to know how to edit your videos. You just make enough money to buy a video editor and have someone else edit your videos. That made me so angry. I don’t know why, but it was just like I thought that was the biggest bait and switch I’ve ever seen. I just made a pledge. I would never do that. I’m absolutely honest. Everything I do, there’s tons of people who will watch my stuff, who follow me, who go to my YouTube channel, and I will never, ever work for them. I’ll never see a penny from anybody. I just feel I’ve made the world a better place by making video as easy peasy as possible.

Martin Henley: [00:48:40] Okay, cool. Really good. Now I really like that. That’s not even a bait and switch. That’s bait and throw it in your face. I’m doing better than you. It’s disgusting. This is going on. This is going on. I think Gary Vaynerchuk does that a little bit as well. Like he swears, he swears at his audiences when he’s public speaking. It’s like why? He doesn’t know any of those individuals, you know? Yeah. Anyway, let’s not say Gary Vaynerchuk too much because we might start appearing in search and then he will know that I hate him.

Martin Henley: [00:49:12] The next question I have is that once you have content, then why not just put that content everywhere? So you said that you’re clipping it up, you’re putting it on YouTube, you’re putting it out as clips, why not put it on Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, and Tik Tok, and Facebook and all those other places? Because producing the content is 90% of the work. Distributing it then can only be 10% of the work. So why limit the distribution purely solely to LinkedIn? You are a LinkedIn video specialist so it makes sense for you. Why would other people do that? Now I have all my content why do I not just put that everywhere?

Gillian Whitney: [00:50:06] It’s very hard to monitor multiple channels. You don’t know what the rules are. I have a Twitter presence, but pretty much my Twitter presences go to LinkedIn and find me on LinkedIn. You know, that’s what I do. I do YouTube but then what I do is I go by YouTube’s rules. So I will take a video on LinkedIn, I like to make my videos square because then they look good on desktop and they look good on mobile on YouTube. I like my videos to be 9 -16 sorry, 16-9. I take the same video, but instead of having the captions burned in which is what I do on LinkedIn, I opt for closed captions because I want the SEO boost that you get with YouTube by having a text file as opposed to the burned in captions. So if you’re going to play by the rules of the different platforms, you have to now start changing your content. Also being a content creator is just part of having a presence on a social platform. So I monitor my YouTube channel, I monitor my comments, I do that on LinkedIn. I don’t think I could do that on Twitter and Instagram and well, Facebook I gave up on years ago anyways. I can’t be all those different things. With LinkedIn I comment more than I post. I don’t post every day. I post three or four times a week and that’s it. The majority of the time I’m relationship-building and I’m commenting on other people’s content. I don’t have enough hours in the day and I do all my own stuff. I’m never going to go get a VA that’s going to start interacting with you in the DMS. It’s against LinkedIn’s terms of services, but also you want to talk with me, not my VA from another country.

Martin Henley: [00:52:04] Yes. But isn’t the point just to build an audience? Is that not the point? To have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, hopefully, of people watching your content. Gillian, That’s the point. Come on, let’s not have an argument.

Gillian Whitney: [00:52:22] No, it’s not the point to me. The point to me is relationship building. I only need to be working with 5 to 10 clients at once. I can’t work with thousands of people. I do custom coaching 1 to 1 so I don’t have enough slots in my week to work with that many people. So I just want to work with the few people that I resonate with, that I can help. So I don’t want to be an influencer. I want to actually just pay my bills and I want to book clients of people that want to work with me. So I don’t do it for vanity metrics. It feels good to me when people tell me this really helped me, and a lot of people are my silent audience that I never hear anything from. I’ll get clients that have said, I’ve been following you for the last year and a half, they’ve never even commented on a post, but they came to me when they were ready to buy, and that’s the main thing.

Martin Henley: [00:53:20] 100%. And I love that. And I think this is. The problem with marketing in 2022 is that 99.9999% of people have this ridiculous, without wanting to sound like Greta Thunberg, really not wanting to sound like her, but this ridiculous illusion of ever-growing, more, and more, and more. There’s no ceiling. There’s no sense of what do I actually need and why don’t I just go out and get what I need? Then once I’ve got what I need, then I can think about other ways that I might be able to get more. It’s always this blind, grasping more, more, more. It seems to me that’s where the pressure comes from and it seems to me that that’s where the consumption comes from. Because you’re driving more product down people’s throats, they’re consuming more products, they don’t get better necessarily. Like you say about content. You can consume as much content, as many courses as you like, it doesn’t work like doing the work. That’s the issue. Yeah. Okay, good. Yep.

Martin Henley: [00:54:33] Right technical. We have to talk about the technical, because technical is an issue. Can I give you a little story from my experience of producing video content?

Gillian Whitney: [00:54:45] Absolutely.

Martin Henley: [00:54:47] I started my business in 2005. Camera phones. They must have been alright then, because what I started doing is making my customers say nice things to my camera. It would get to a situation where they say, Wow, this is really good, thanks for your input, it’s working, whatever and I would then point my camera phone at them and say, okay, now you have to say nice things. I would do that all the time. I ended up with hundreds of these little videos. It was a really cool thing, like hundreds of these little videos. It became kind of formulated is like, who are you? What do you do? How did you find us? Why did you invite us into your business? What did we achieve? What’s the best thing? You know, it was like a really simple thing. It was a really cool thing. My wife hated it. My wife at the time hated it. She said, You look desperate, it makes you look desperate. I’m like, Shut up. So there was that. The criticism from video production companies was that it doesn’t look professional enough. Like the production isn’t right. Like, of course it’s not. It’s like this was a candid moment, my customer was enjoying what I was doing. The way I had of capturing it was that like, I’m going to drive around with a video production crew in my car on the off chance that my customer were to say something nice. It happened pretty regularly, but I can’t have a video production company sitting here while I do 2 hours of work with these people for them to capture the last 2 minutes. You know what I mean? It’s ridiculous. So I think this is the point that you alluded to earlier, is that the production isn’t the most important thing. Is that what you were saying? Is that what you think?

Gillian Whitney: [00:56:33] That’s exactly what I think, people want honesty. That’s why lives are so popular, because you can’t you don’t have the production crew. It’s just you in your house. You have to go look at big companies. Big companies are starting to do videos like Apple or whatever. We Work, when We Work, a couple of years ago, when they were going through all their scandals and stuff like that, they started doing videos where they were using their phone and that’s a big company. So big companies are starting to do raw video, so it’s okay for us to do that. It’s okay for us to do that and people don’t trust polished. They want honest.

Martin Henley: [00:57:23] Yeah. And for me, that is the mission to get to the point where the content is the value rather than the production. We know there are cardinals in video. If the sound is bad, people aren’t going to listen, they have a really low tolerance for really bad sound. Because I do it quite a bit, I’ve invested too much money in a microphone and lights and all of these things, a camera. Actually, what you said before starting, hitting the record button is the hardest thing. I’ve got all of this wired to a button under my desk. I flick the button, I move my screen and the camera’s on and we’re recording, so I’ve removed those barriers, but you don’t have to be that invested. This is the thing. We now have cameras that weren’t available 15 years ago on our phones. We’ve got 4k cameras, you need to invest in, so everyone’s got that camera, most people have that camera. You need to spend $20 or $30 on a microphone because people will not suffer bad-quality sound. They won’t. You can do yourself a favour. Spend another $20 on a tripod so that it’s not moving around all over the place and you are producing, in 2022, the kind of work that a video production company could have been producing in 2005. That’s where the technology has gone. Then I think it’s just about practice, isn’t it? It’s like public speaking. It’s just about getting up and doing it.

Gillian Whitney: [00:59:09] Exactly. I like to tell people, just get comfortable talking into your phone. Don’t give yourself the stress of, oh, I have to make a social media video. Just get comfortable. I’ll go back to my friend in Belgium again. That’s a comfort level, she’ll pick up her phone and hi, I’m going for a walk today and she’s taking me for a walk and I’m like, I’m cooking soup. You know, It’s like we’re just getting comfortable on camera and truly, what’s the best equipment to use, the equipment you’ll use. People can get real hung up on buying the most expensive kit. Oh, I can’t do video until I have a studio, and I have to have it soundproof and this and that and everything else. You’re just creating stumbling blocks. Start with what you have where you are, even in terms of doing video. If you’re not comfortable being on camera, do a Loom video so you’re just one of those little circle bubbles and share the screen and do something like that. It’s better than doing no video at all. Dip a toe and then dip your whole foot and then a whole leg. Just do it in chunks and you’ll get there. You’ll get there 100%.

Martin Henley: [01:00:26] The thing is, there are people talking absolute shit. So if you are going out into the world and you have a genuine interest in your market and you have genuine solutions for them, you are already streets ahead of the mouthy people who are just putting junk out there. You are already streets ahead. I think that if your motivation is to benefit your customer, I think you are almost duty-bound to put these messages together and get them out there. If you are in the business of resolving issues for people, genuinely in the business of resolving issues like this person has this issue, this is what we did, this is the outcome then, again, you are duty bound to put that into the world. That’s how I feel about it. This isn’t limited to video marketing, we’re talking about marketing. If you are in a position to resolve issues for people and you’re not letting them know that you can do that, that is a disservice. That, for me, that’s a disservice. That’s talking about, I think, the value of actual marketing. If you go outside with your camera and a little tripod and a little microphone on a cloudy day, not a cloudy day where the sun’s going behind the clouds and coming out, but just on a regular cloudy day, that’s the best light in the world. You can’t buy that light. There really is, I don’t think there is any technical barrier anymore. I think you’re right. It is just about motivating people to want to be in front of the camera.

Gillian Whitney: [01:02:10] Then the second part is, once you have the video recording, just know that you do not have to be perfect. That’s where the editing comes in. That’s where you got those big monster hands, because you leaned in to turn on the camera and you want that bit edited out. Record for the edit. I’ll start a video and I’ll hit the play button, I hit the record button and then I’ll sit back, count one, two, smile, Hi, I’m here with another video tip. Then I’m going to cut out all that stuff at the beginning. There’s so many tools out there now that are easy peasy to use that weren’t even there two or three years ago. Now there’s captioning tools, video editing tools. It’s really made it easy to get in. You don’t have to go and buy the most expensive video editors like Adobe Premiere. You don’t have to go buy the expensive editors, just get something that’s simple so you can trim things at the beginning, at the end, add some captions and then you’re done. Move on with your life. You got other things to do than sit around editing videos for the rest of your life. Keep it simple. If you can use one program that you can do your editing plus your captioning, that helps people, because too many people they do video on a computer, they’re like, I don’t know where I downloaded it. It’s here somewhere. Then they download it again and then if you tell them now you got to upload it to this program to do this and then download it again. They don’t realise every time you’re uploading and downloading, you’re making your file ickier and ickier if you can even find it.

Martin Henley: [01:03:59] Yes, if you can even find it.

Martin Henley: [01:04:00] This is my issue, I am overegging it at the moment because I’ve got to the place, I think you’re going to be 82 or 83 in this series of conversations. We transcribed a lot of them at the beginning because we wanted the SEO benefit on the website. Are we getting the SEO benefit? We don’t know. Now I’m transcribing them, we put them through a tool and then I clean it up and then I can timestamp them for the clips. Now each one of these conversations has timestamps. We haven’t got to the point where we’ve actually checked to see if it is a decent clip, but they’ve got like 20 clips in each of them. So with the five that we’ve done already, that’s 100 clips and I want it to on TikTok and to Shorts and to Reels. I want our brand text over the top, you know, pulling out the good bits – it’s too much work. We can’t do it.

Gillian Whitney: [01:04:56] You’re a professional marketer too. For the average person who’s just, not just, but for the average person who is running their business, they need to spend their time running their business. So they can’t be doing all that.

Martin Henley: [01:05:16] Yes, yes, yes it is too much. We’re up to question number three, but you need to keep this short because we definitely want to clip this and put it on TikTok.

Martin Henley: [01:05:27] What is your recommendation for people who want to either start or get better at video marketing on LinkedIn? If you can let us know, tabletop conversation starts now. 2 minutes. What’s your recommendation for those people?

Gillian Whitney: [01:05:43] So the first thing is know who your customer is; know what their problems are; figure out how you can solve those problems and then begin chunking out your videos into short videos, 2 minutes or less. Nowadays, if you can get it down to a minute, you’re doing even better and just make sure you’re not faffing around at the beginning with a lot of Hi, I’m Jillian, I work here and dadadada – you have got to have a hook. You have to get somebody. Attention spans, they’re very, very narrow now. So start with a question. Start with something that’s going to draw people in, answer that, have a call to action and move on. So that’s how I suggest people make their videos. Use the tool that you want to use. If you like using a phone, use a phone. If you want to use your desktop, use your webcam, do your desktop and caption your videos. So that’s what I would recommend people start at and just know you have to have to take that plunge and do it, but do it in baby steps.

Martin Henley: [01:06:50] You know, I’m such an idiot. I’m such an idiot because, you know, I’ve got this huge vision of the way I expect it to be. I think this is what goes on for people. I’ve got this huge vision of the way I expect it to be. I teach people this, I motivate people this, and I tell them people want to see the evolution. They want to go all the way back to your first ever YouTube video and see how bad it was and see how you’ve progressed and all those things. So it’s Peter McKinnon, your compatriot from, one of your many hundreds of millions of compatriots from all over the world, but from Canada. He’s a huge photography video YouTuber, and he says done is better than perfect, which is 100% right. So we can be putting these things out. Then, if we start getting some money back, maybe we can employ a YouTube video editor. We’re going to start throwing money around. Well, maybe we can bring someone else in to take us to that next level.

Martin Henley: [01:07:56] This has been a hugely, hugely, timely conversation. Bless you. Thank you, Jillian. I really needed to hear this today. I really did. Okay, cool.

Martin Henley: [01:08:08] So that brings us then to question number four, which is what should people read? You haven’t written a book, have you?

Gillian Whitney: [01:08:15] No, I have no book to peddle. No book to peddle. 

Martin Henley: [01:08:16] No.

Gillian Whitney: [01:08:19] One day. One day.

Martin Henley: [01:08:20] Mostly. People have written books. So normally I have to just say, of course, people should buy your book, read your book. But it should maybe be brought in. That it should be. What content should people consume? Does that make it inclusive to you?

Gillian Whitney: [01:08:32] Well, no,

Gillian Whitney: [01:08:33] I’m actually prepared to talk about some books that have made big differences for me. I’m a huge book person, used to be a librarian in my former life, so that was before I did even anything and I love libraries, I love books, I love reading. So I’m a bit of a book hoarder, if truth be known.

Gillian Whitney: [01:08:53] So anyways, I start with content DNA by John Espirian. The reason why I love that book so much it is responsible for making me pivot my business, for giving me that idea of niching down to LinkedIn video marketing. I love that book because it’s not just for LinkedIn, It is for understanding your building blocks of your brand. I thought brands were logos and fonts and stuff like that. That book taught that it is much more about thought leadership and the value that you’re going to bring to the conversation. So I like to think I’m a disciple of John’s because I really take everything to heart that I’ve learned from John Espirian. So that’s my favourite book there to start with. Can I do another two?

Martin Henley: [01:09:45] Another two, yeah.

Gillian Whitney: [01:09:46] Okay. Okay. So then the next one is I want to make sure I get the title right. It’s called The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown. This is where I sort of bring in that psychology because it’s all about mindset and so much of marketing in general, and especially video is about all of those things of feeling that we should be perfect. People wear this I’m a perfectionist as some sort of badge, like we’re supposed to like bow down to you or something, Oh, you’re a perfectionist. Oh, that’s awesome. It’s terrible. Perfectionism leads to procrastination. It is something that should be kicked to the curb. We are not perfect. We shouldn’t aim for perfect. We should aim for progress. Just be better than you were before and you have to suck at something. Right now I’m learning how to do sketch noting, which is one of the reasons why I loved your videos, but I’m learning to do sketch noting and I did my first sketch noting video this week and you know what? It was horrible. I had a vision of what it would be. It was nowhere near it, but I did it anyways because you’ve got to be willing to suck and I will get better and that’s just where I’m at today. It’s a skill I want to acquire and you’ve got to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run. So the gifts of imperfection kind of go through all that stuff we have and the baggage that we need to let go of to move forward with marketing and video.

Gillian Whitney: [01:11:14] The third book is a fiction book, and it’s called The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and that is basically my wowzer book of of the year that I read. It’s all about a woman who is between life and death, and she’s committed suicide and she’s at a library, which of course, I love libraries; and she’s at a library. In the library is all the books of her possible life. If she had made this decision instead of that decision and she has a big book of regrets and it’s like, Oh boy, don’t we all have that big book of regrets? What a metaphor? The whole book is about she has the opportunity to go and experience and choose a different life, but she’s on a time limit because she’s in between life and death. So she’s got to make a decision of which life she would prefer to choose based upon. What if I married that guy? What if I done this? What if I’d been a swimmer? All these different things? How would that affect you? I thought that was fabulous. It’s a page turner, you know, It’s a fabulous book. I love it, love it, love it. I would reread it. It’s fabulous. So those are my three books that I would recommend.

Martin Henley: [01:12:31] Brilliant. Thank you very much. We’ve got an absolute treat coming up for you on the talk marketing show. There’s a guy in Australia called Simon Bowen and his business is called the Models Method and what he does is, you are going to absolutely love this, I mean, he blew my mind about 100 times in this conversation, he convinces through sketches, he’s got his iPad and he stands up in front of audiences and just starts drawing stuff. I mean, not drawing stuff there, like diagrams. It’s like it’s insanely good. It’s so good, so good. So I will make sure to let you know. When that is coming up.

Martin Henley: [01:13:18] I have thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. It has been exactly what I needed to hear, I think, today. This is essentially counselling for me. I don’t know if you’ve twigged yet or not, but that’s essentially what it is. Between what John was saying about being patient and not taking shortcuts and investing in a considered way, and what you’re saying, which is essentially this is going to be your headline, by the way, aim for progress. Just be better than you were before. That’s what that’s what we need to do. So between the two of you, this has been hugely, hugely valuable for me.

Martin Henley: [01:14:03] How are you feeling about your experience of being on the talk marketing show?

Gillian Whitney: [01:14:08] It’s been lovely. Your you’re a wonderful and engaging host and it has been an honor to speak with you. I just. I really like you. So this has been a wonderful experience for me. So thank you for having me as a guest.

Martin Henley: [01:14:21] Bless you. Thank you. Now, there is there is, what is there? Intent behind that question, because if you’ve enjoyed yourself, then I would imagine you will find it less difficult to throw a couple of people under the bus who might also enjoy to have a conversation like this with me.

Martin Henley: [01:14:38] Have you got some people in mind for us?

Gillian Whitney: [01:14:41] Yes, I do. So they’re all ladies. They’re all ladies. So the first person, the first person is Michelle J. Raymond. She is a LinkedIn coach specializing in company pages. So that’s a little bit of a mindset in that she knows everything you need to know about company pages and she actually wrote a book called Business Gold about it is the most underutilised part of LinkedIn. So she’s a radical paradigm shift for people that think company pages don’t work. She’s rocking it. She is just rocking it. She has LinkedIn lives and all sorts of different things. A great YouTube channel. She is an excellent marketer focused on company pages and LinkedIn. So that’s my marketing person.

Gillian Whitney: [01:15:40] My second person would be Jules White, who is Oh, and by the way, Michelle J. Raymond is in Australia. Okay. Our next guest, potential guest would be Jules White, who is a sales coach and so she brings the sales side. What I think is distinct about Jules is that she sells with heart, so she talks about finding your unique human proposition. She is also a dragonslayer. She won Dragonslayer and she’s a TEDx speaker and she has a podcast and she’s just an incredible woman and she is based in the UK, so she is the second person that I would recommend. And then did you want a third person?

Martin Henley: [01:16:28] I will take a third person if you’ve got a third person.

Gillian Whitney: [01:16:30] Okay, so a third person, another lady. This lady is in the United States and her name is Vicky O’Neill and she is a video marketing specialist. And unlike me, she is broader. She does YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. She’s a video marketing generalist across multiple channels. She is still building a very big LinkedIn presence, but she is across all channels, so she’s rocking it. You know, we’re actually colleagues and friends and we’re not competitors because we’re doing different areas. Plus I don’t have competitors anyways. I just have colleagues.

Martin Henley: [01:17:14] Excellent. Cool, brilliant. Thank you so much. And these are people that you can actually make…you’ll probably make a little video LinkedIn introduction or something.

Gillian Whitney: [01:17:23] I will do that. Yeah, all three of them. I will make a lovely video with captions introducing you.

Martin Henley: [01:17:29] Absolute legend. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, so we got to the end. So all we have to do now is say goodbye. So we’ll say goodbye now for the benefit of anyone who’s still watching and then I’ll stop recording and we’ll say goodbye like normal human beings. Gillian, this has been such a brilliant conversation. This is. I really feel like the universe has bought me what I needed today in this conversation. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, I’m going to keep it simple, stupid, and get stuff out the door and then see what happens. That’s what I’m going to do. So you have changed the course of my content creation. Yeah, you really have. So bless you. Thank you so much for being here.

Gillian Whitney: [01:18:18] Thank you. Thank you for having me it was a delight.

Martin Henley: [01:18:21] You are very welcome.

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