How 1,300 LinkedIn Followers Landed Them Google

LinkedIn is one of the most underrated tools a creator can use to land brand deals. And two of my sponsorship coaching clients, Juliana and Martine, are proof. This husband and why travel creator duo built a system where every campaign they complete turns into a public portfolio piece that attracts the next brand. So in this episode, they break down exactly how they're using LinkedIn to get on the radar of marketers at companies like Google with fewer than 1,300 followers.

Juliana, Martine, you guys are here to talk about the power of LinkedIn. I mean, you guys are absolutely unrivaled at drumming up interest and excitement about your creator brand with these amazing LinkedIn posts that you guys are doing. So first and foremost, walk me through why do you even spend time on LinkedIn? Well, you kind of opened our eyes to the idea of it at first when you had mentioned it throughout your book.

And we kind of were like, how could we use this to our advantage? You know, how can we think outside of the box? The only thing I had been familiar with with LinkedIn was from like my corporate days. and seeing just like really annoying posts that I didn't even enjoy.

And I was like, how can we have fun with this? How can we make this our portfolio? And so we started to just kind of come up with ideas of how we can use this as a way to showcase what we're doing with our brand, put ourselves out there, and we've been enjoying it a lot. And I have to give it to Juliana because I think everything started maybe like one year and a half ago.

And it was like her little baby. I think she put like a lot of effort over there. Of course, I'm involved too. But all the ideas we always, you know, with the morning coffee, we talk about like what is going to be the next post and how we can make our business grow over there.

Tell me about was there ever a moment where, you know, you had your past corporate life, right? And people that you had connections with on LinkedIn in your corporate life. Was there ever a moment where you were like, this is cringe, like, I don't want to post about my creator stuff on LinkedIn. Like, can you talk about that?

Because this is one of the biggest objections I hear when I tell people to do this. Yes, I felt like I was living a Hannah Montana life. I also felt like, should I not be talking about what I'm doing in my personal life? Because I'm worried that people from work are going to think like, I'm going to try to get out of here, or that maybe they would think I'm not taking work seriously.

But once I started to post, because I had my vision, I, we wanted to be full time. And the only way we're going to have to do that is if we push through the cringe. And so I started posting and I found that people from my work were actually so impressed And like, wow, I had no idea you were doing this. People told me they'll keep me in mind if there's ever anybody that they think might find what we're doing useful.

And so once we pushed through the cringe, we found that we actually had a lot of respect from people for putting ourselves out there. So how did you push through the cringe? Oh, gosh, I think that when we've done YouTube for like 12 years, and we kind of hit this point that we were like, we're tired of sitting around and waiting for it to happen for us and for us to be able to go full time. Like it's either now or never.

We told ourselves we had a year to get ourselves to be full time. And so when you're that hungry for it, I think you're just willing to try and innovate something new. That's incredible. So you, it was a conscious moment.

You were like, all right, like it's either now or never, like what is it gonna be? Rather than waiting for something to happen to us, what can we do to facilitate this dream that we've had? So walk me back to that very first like cringe post that you made about your content or about the types of things that you're doing. Like how did you approach it in the beginning?

Sure. So at first I was writing about event recaps because that was kind of like where I felt like, okay, I attended an event, you know, with Martine. We went to like the Disney Creators Lab, I think was the first thing I wrote about. I think that's a key point.

Yeah. Disney had selected us as one of 20, two of 25 creators to go to this like weekend in Disneyland where they taught us all about how to grow as creators. And I learned so much there and had also like took some great notes of the speakers. that were there.

And so I was like, I'm going to post a little event recap. I'm going to tag the speakers because I know that they would love to show off what they just did, kind of boost them up a little bit. And so I did an event recap and it got so many views. The speakers had reposted it.

They were so pumped. They connected with me after. And after that first post and seeing how people were really excited to see my summary of what I learned, it made me want to keep going. And so then I had attended a couple of local events in the Bay Area with Martine and they were like Patreon.

We went to Patreon and I did a little wrap up that same night. People posted it, reposted it. The Ocean as well? Yeah, we went to a Notion event.

And so I kind of found my groove with the event recaps. And then from there, I was like, well, what if we start making this more of a portfolio, you know, talking about what we just did with a brand? That's around the time I had read your book, too. And so I was like, why not think outside of the box?

This could be whatever we want it to be. Right. And so how do you juggle this with your normal content creation? Because I think a lot of when I make this suggestion to some creators, they're just like, I'm already on the content hamster wheel.

I'm trying to just keep the gears, you know, going with my quote unquote normal content. How do you find the time to prioritize this LinkedIn stuff? Or how do you like look at it in terms of the hierarchy of importance within your business? I think that like definitely one element that is super important for us to always accomplish is like with our post campaign reports when we're doing summaries for the brands, like a part of our checklist of like finishing up the campaign is doing a LinkedIn post tagging the brand.

So that one's like very much a part of the workflow there. And then in terms of other ways of posting about things that aren't related to campaigns, I find that the LinkedIn schedule feature makes it so useful to schedule content in advance. And what's amazing about the LinkedIn algorithm is that you don't need to post every day. Actually just one post a week is great.

It's not a platform where you have to be on there all the time. That's right. And there's also, you know, we all have days that we are more creative than other days. So if you have like a great days, whenever you we have all the ideas for the new post.

Yeah, exactly. So like bulk, right? That's right. Super smart.

So do you talk about the different types of content that you're posting on LinkedIn? So you've got event recaps, you've got summaries of partnerships that you've done with brands. Like, have you seen certain types of content perform better than others? Yeah, I think when we do those post campaign summaries, those do well because the person who usually we've tagged in the post wants to repost it and then it gets pushed out to their network because they want to show off what we just worked on together.

So I find that those do well. But also sometimes I found the post that I am thinking is the most obvious tip for working with influencers. I did was like the difference between UGC and a regular partnership. I thought I wasn't saying anything new in this post.

I almost didn't post it. And that did so well. So sometimes sharing insights too about how to work with creators lands really well. There's a huge gap between the people working on the brand side and the creator side.

And there's not many people talking about it on LinkedIn. So say more about this, because I think, you know, if you look at, you know, your quote unquote primary social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or whatever, the audience is like travel enthusiasts or whatever consumers. Right. I guess you could say.

But you're being a bit more intentional that the content that you're posting on LinkedIn maybe is targeting marketers or brands or agencies. Right. And so you're twisting or you're kind of thinking about the angle of the content, knowing who's who's probably going to read it. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. And so it's kind of been fun too, because, and that's another reason it's easy for us to make this type of content, get out of the hamster reel of travel content, which sometimes is a lot. It feels like we're talking about all the time is because it's something so different from what we do on our other platforms that it's actually quite enjoyable because it almost feels like we get to share a side of our business that we don't get to talk about with our audience, but we're incredibly proud of.

One thing I'd love to hear your perspective of, so from the outside looking in, like, you know, this type of content is just such a big differentiator for y'all because, you know, one of the biggest gripes that I hear candidly from other types of, you know, especially travel creators is that there's just so many people out there who are just happy to accept a free trip, right? Like, like I'm, you know, no one wants to pay me because, you know, yeah, you can come on this free cruise or this free trip or whatever.

We're going to give you accommodations or whatever. So talk to me about how you approach that objection or just that... I'm sure you heard that grievance from other travel creators too. Like what is your philosophy on how you differentiate yourself relative to others?

I think that working with hotels, working with cruises and things like that are very obvious first steps for travel creators of where they'd want to target. But I actually think it's interesting when you try to work with brands that maybe aren't travel focused and connected to travel. For example, people who want to travel need to save money for their trip. So what about pitching some finance companies?

People who travel have a home base likely that they don't want to return to after their trip and they don't have their maid anymore cleaning their house. How can we connect cleaning products? Or maybe they have a pet. Yeah, exactly.

So one other thing I've enjoyed posting about on LinkedIn is sometimes I'll do a little case studies of like, if I were this brand, this is how I'd work with a travel creator. Fascinating. Yeah. So I think it's fun to open up people's minds to what else we can do because we don't just travel.

We're people. You know, we all have hobbies and stuff beyond travel. Right. All right.

So speaking of this, you made a post here that was in partnership with Adobe. Right. So not not maybe a super obvious brand that a travel creator would work with. So walk me through how this partnership came to life and how you thought about integrating this into your content.

Yeah, so Adobe reached out to us and invited us to their creator program, and the prompt was very open-ended. It was pretty much just show us how you use one of our tools, we're not going to really tell you what you have to make. And we could have taken the easy way out here and just done like a screen recording walkthrough of how we edit a photo. That's right.

But we were thinking bigger picture here of how this could be a really great portfolio piece to show other technology brands, how we can integrate them into our storytelling. And so we wanted to hit on the emotional point of like, you know, summers fly by and a lot of times we miss what's happening right in front of us. And so we took the time to capture a little story about how Martine wants to capture the summer creation. quickly be in the moment and actually do something with his photos.

And we just integrated Adobe naturally. Just a quick little thing showing how we edit people out so that we could focus on the moment, quick tweaks to the colors. And we really enjoyed that one. So yeah, we were also, like I said, thinking beyond just what this is, this partnership is, and thinking bigger picture of how we could really make this piece stand out in our portfolio.

Yeah, and as I told you, everything, it goes from one idea that we talk in the morning and then just evolves. I'm the one that's taking pictures for our content, and I'm five years older than her. So it started with a conversation like that. So we want to really, and sometimes it looks like we're only having a piña colada in the Caribbean or a pasta in Italy, but...

But no, actually, we're working. We have to get up before the sun rises in order to take a better pictures in order to record the best content. And sometimes we don't fully enjoy the trip as well. So we also have to make time in order to enjoy it as husband and wife, you know?

So that became like the main idea of the video. And I think it was nice. You'll see like in one of the shots there where there's like a map of the Caribbean. We like bought that ahead of time on Amazon specifically for one stupid shot.

We're like, this is it's going to tie it all in. Well, the level of intentionality that y'all have behind your content, I think a lot of people don't understand how necessary that is to bring a creative vision to life. I mean, the fact that you're thinking so far in advance that you're like, OK, even though this particular brand is not asking for such a comprehensive execution of this campaign, we know that this is going to potentially serve us in our portfolio or as a case study to show future brands that like, here's what we can do.

So it's like you're serving. It's like a double purpose, right? It's like, yeah, this brand is going to be thrilled, even though we weren't required to do that. But like, here, great.

Now we can take this to Notion and we can take this to these lots of other SaaS companies and software tools. You know, very few people, I'll tell you this, very few people are thinking about it in that way. Yeah, exactly. It almost feels like we also have like a snack sponsorship coming up that we just landed.

And our first instinct once we landed that, we're like, great, this checks the food and beverage box that we can show for other brands. Yeah, it's an interesting way to think about it. It's huge. So you mentioned that for this particular deal, Adobe reached out to you.

So like, what is your relationship with inbound versus outbound, right? Like, it's obviously the dream for like, you know, an awesome brand to land in your inbox. But I imagine like part of the LinkedIn strategy also is like being able to connect with a lot of these marketers who are on your dream brand list. Like maybe you've never I've.

You know, I've seen you post about other brands like, you know, hotel chains or things like that, that it seems like you haven't worked with yet. But like the goal, hopefully, is like you get on their radar and, you know, potentially you can do outreach to forge a partnership with them. So how do you think about the balancing those two? Right.

I think we don't ever assume inbound is going to be something we can rely on. We are always pitching. Every week, sending pitches. Because it makes us feel a little bit more in control.

It's also incredibly fun and gives you a rush of like, wow. they responded or, oh, they didn't. What can we do next time to get their attention? And so, yeah, I'd say most of our focus is on outbound, but in the process of putting ourselves out there, especially on LinkedIn, we do see things come in.

We do see more inbound things. Word of mouth is crazy. We just did something with Google and they found us through LinkedIn, which is wild. That was like beyond our biggest dream.

So sometimes in the process of putting yourself out there, some other people hear about you too. Well, I mean, one thing I hope you're you know what I'm about to say is all with love. Is it like it's not like you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn either. Right.

You have I'm looking at it. You have twelve hundred and eighty seven followers on LinkedIn. It's crazy. Right.

Yeah. Right. So so this is this is this is for anyone listening or watching this and you're thinking like, oh, gosh, I got to like. I spent all this time building a following on, you know, these other social platforms.

Now you're telling me I got to start from scratch on this other platform. I don't even know what I'm doing, but like it's I'm not saying you have to write it. You don't need 50,000 followers or something on LinkedIn to have meaningful impact. Because again, if you can network with the right people, these are the these are the folks in decision making roles at a lot of these organizations.

Right. Yes, it's like it's the socially acceptable social network to have open on your computer at work. And, you know, they're on it all the time. And, yeah, I'm obsessed also with just sending invites to people, you know, putting myself out there.

You'd be surprised how many accept it. OK, so what's the cold invite strategy? Are we just sending a cold? Are we sending a message, a note alongside the cold request?

Like, what's your strategy? You know, usually I don't go that far about sending the note. I just send out the invite along with at the same time as we're sending out an outbound pitch email. So those two happen at the same time so that they can kind of see the email and then they'll check their LinkedIn and say, oh, this girl, she just sent me an email.

So that's kind of how I'm doing it. Okay. One thing, you know, when you guys first started working with us in our sponsorship coaching program, you know, brand deals were one of those things where it's like you'd made a little bit of money. And but as you know, you had this big goal to like transition to become full time creators.

And you guys have had like a pretty remarkable like experience, you know, landing a lot of very significant deals. So can you talk through a bit about what your experience has been like in the program and like how your perspective has changed about working with brands since then? Yeah, it's been really great. It just kind of made us realize that it's more in control than we thought.

And I think the big thing we learned is about just having a system down that you're not straying from the idea of like, you know, the certain follow up cadence. And just trusting that the system works and continue staying with that. Because I think before we were just, we would pitch and we would doubt ourselves. Is this the right thing?

Did we word this right? And now we don't have to worry about that part because we know that it's solid. We know that it's a formula that works. And so it's just more so about time, continuing to follow up.

So that's been great. Also, the sponsorship program has been great about getting us out of deals that were not beneficial. Absolutely. Um, there were two long-term partners that just once we had gone through the program, we realized, man, we are not getting paid what we should be.

Um, and Joe, one of the coaches helped us through that. And it was fantastic because it got us back on the right foot and we've been able to continue those relationships, um, at a higher price point. Yeah, exactly. Because especially for for new creators, it's easy to have like deals for a small amount of money.

But then after a while, you have to know how much you're worth. So, yeah, I think the key point is whenever we if you want these to give you money as a business, you have to treat it as a business. So whenever we put the entire focus and entire energy towards this is whenever we got the results that we wanted. Yeah, and it was also great because, you know, we had read your book before and then we went to go apply it and it was going great.

But we also had a few questions. We're like, wait, but what about this weird situation? Because we're travel creators. There's a little nuance here.

So it was really nice to have a sounding board that we could go to through the coaching program to just make sure we were on the right track and not doubting ourselves. That's amazing. You know, I think one of the things you said really resonated with me was that you have a system in place. Because I think, you know, when you if you think about, you know, one of the reasons why a lot of folks want to become full time creators is that I just get to escape the corporate job.

Like I no longer have to like have a manager. I can do my own thing. But the cold reality of it is, I think, is that you quickly realize that like this is a job, too. Well, right.

This is a job. You have to treat it seriously. You know, yeah, maybe you don't have to like punch a time card or whatever and like wake up at the same time. Maybe you could sleep in a little bit, but like at the same time, you need a bit of routine, a bit of predictability, especially if brand partnerships are one of the primary ways in which you're making income.

You need a system behind it to introduce that level of predictability, because like you said, if your only like strategy is just like work. waiting, sitting on your hands and waiting for them to email you. Yeah, maybe, you know, there may be seasons where things are going well, but then all of a sudden you wake up and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't have any deals in the pipeline for the next six months. Like, what am I going to do?

And so I'm assuming like that has helped you guys introduce some level of, again, predictability into where your income is going to come from. Exactly, yeah. I feel like also just when you're trying to learn all of these things by yourself from scratch, because obviously you'll see videos come onto your feed telling you how you should get the partnership, whatever, and it just felt like we were always switching strategies, switching strategies based off of what someone was saying on our feed.

And so, yeah, seeing a system that is gonna work if you just keep putting out the effort, how much effort you put in is how much effort you get out, it was great and it made us feel more in control. I think also it's interesting when you work for yourself and maybe you have a big expense coming up and then you start viewing it as, OK, how many pitches can I send to like pay that off? Like, let's just work a little harder there, you know? Right, right.

Well, I mean, I think that the amazing part about working for yourself and as a creator is that unlike a corporate job where you'll maybe get, you know, a cost of living raise once a year or maybe a promotion and you'll make 10 or 20 percent more or whatever, your income is kind of uncapped. as a creator, when you run your own business, right? And so the harder you work, the more strategic you are, utilizing things like LinkedIn to really, you know, network and connect, like you can, the ceiling is kind of unlimited.

And so I don't know, at least for me, that was always like the really exciting thing about entrepreneurship that is just kind of different from the corporate track. Absolutely. The hardest part for us right now has been like setting boundaries of not working all the time, because also when you know you can always be earning more, it's really hard to sit and be like, okay, I'm going to spend this weekend just relaxing. And you always think of like, what could I be doing?

So that's been a hard adjustment for us, but we're working on it. Yeah, 100%. My wife and I, my wife is the one with that has to set the boundaries because otherwise I would at any date night anytime we're up for dinner, I'd be like, so about this deal? Like, no, like, come on, we need to, we need to.

This comes on the one that's setting boundaries, because sometimes it's like you haven't had lunch. It's 4pm. Yeah, or like, right. Or like, right.

Ended up working Saturday and Sunday till 9pm. Yeah, exactly. If you had to give some advice to a creator who really wants to kind of emulate your success, especially on LinkedIn, and they're just saying, like, I don't even, you know, I don't even know the first thing of like, what's the first step? Like, where would I start to really feel comfortable sharing this level of my, the side of my personality, the Hannah Montana double life?

What would your advice be to them? If you could just like speak straight into the camera, into the microphone, what's the advice? I would say start noticing what you notice while you're creating things. What are the things you're learning?

What is the thing in your workflow that maybe saved you a little time this week? And start documenting all that. And that can be a post. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there.

Tag the brands in LinkedIn that you want to work with. And you'd be really surprised by how supportive people are. That's awesome. Martín, anything from you?

Yeah, for me, it's like, don't assume that people, they already know what you want to say. Like, just open up and probably there's going to be someone over there. You don't know who's listening. You don't know who's reading.

That it thinks what you have to say is interesting. Yeah, there's that fantastic example of there was somebody who got a job working for Oprah because he posted on YouTube and he only would get like 10 views per video, but one of them was Oprah. You never know who's watching. Juliana and Martine talked a lot about how they're using LinkedIn to attract brands and turn every campaign into their next pitch.

But if you're still wondering, well, what do I actually say when I reach out to a brand cold? Well, make sure to check out this episode right here.