Ep51 Darren Pallatina - Pink Gangsters & Professional Profiles: The Art of Standing Out on LinkedIn

Darren Pallatina  0:00  
People scroll 300 to 700 feet per day, your content better be recognizable in color and brand, because if it flies past, yeah, if it's just text only, it's not gonna grab the attention.

Suzanne Taylor-King  0:15  
Hey, hey, welcome to a podcast where dreams meet determination and success is just around the corner. I'm your host, Suzanne Taylor King, and I'm here to help you unlock the full potential of your business and your life. Welcome to unlock your way with SDK, let's unlock your path to success together. Good morning. Good morning everyone. Suzanne Taylor King, here for another Friday episode of unlock your way with STK. And I am super excited for today's conversation with Darren Palatina. Palatina designs, who total transparency just made over my LinkedIn profile, and I couldn't be happier. Welcome, Darren.

Darren Pallatina  1:07  
Cheers. Thanks a lot for me on the show.

Suzanne Taylor-King  1:09  
Yeah, super excited. I love how your background is on brand for you. So well done. How the heck did you get started making over especially the visual part of this, I'm totally intrigued. How'd you get started doing this for other people?

Darren Pallatina  1:30  
So I'll give you a little bit of a background to my sort of journey through past careers and that to get to where I was at now. Yeah, and when I was really young, I was bit of a rebel. I was in a punk band. I used to do a lot of joy. Do a lot of drugs. And then to get away from the drug scene, I joined the Army. So I was in the military for 14 years. I went through the Army and Navy bond disposal, or part of a bond disposal unit in Afghanistan. And then I went to the Navy in the aviation side. And then when I was coming out, I was leaving the Navy, and I was asked by the guy that recruited me into the Navy. Said, would you want to work in the careers office for in recruitment, naval, naval recruitment. So I went into recruitment for a couple of years, and then that led on to another career or another, a short career in in defense recruitment for a company called BAE Systems. They do all the manufacturing of the ships and submarines and that. And then while I was in recruitment, I'd come across like, different profiles of, you know, like influences and that. And I started to notice, like the banners that they had, and, you know, look really nice, and their profiles look smart. And when I decided I was going to leave the recruitment, the recruitment job, I decided I wanted to set up my own business. I wasn't sure what business it was going to be to start with, it was going to, I originally looked into coding, and I did a week of coding. I was like, this is frying my head. I just can't get my head around, and it's just too much. So then I thought, well, I wanted to, I was interested in design for like, 15 years before actually stepping into it. So when I was a lot younger, I was like, wanted to do design, and really good at drawing, but I ended up in the military, and I thought, now I started, I'm just gonna go and go ahead with the design. So I started to do some YouTube, found out, you know, Adobe is, like, the, you know, the standard for design. And then I started looking to go, you know, where, where can I go with design? What do I want to do? And I started playing with my own banner, you know, just designing my banner, figuring out, you know, back then, I didn't know the aspect ratio, you know, the dimensions of the banners and all that. And right, started to play with that. And then I came across a guy called Danny Townley, and he was already about two years ahead of me in the profile space. So he's doing banners, and unlock that. He's known as banner man, Dan. And so that was, that was his name on LinkedIn. And he inspired me. I got really friendly with him. He taught me a lot with Photoshop and things like that. And then the business sort of started to start to take, not necessarily take off, but it was starting to get traction. And when I was designing banners, I offered, like, a few free banners. I did, like, 10 or 12 banners for free, just to get a bit of experience working with people and, you know, trying to figure out my own process. And then there's a lady called Leah Turner. Don't need to know. Leah Turner, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So, Leah Turner, she saw my designs back, you know, within the first three months of restarting what I was doing. And she said, Oh, how much do you charge for banners? I said, I'm not charging anything at the moment, so I just want to get a bit of practice. And she said, I'll tell you, what do me a little advert, and I'll pop it in my community, because she's got a big community, isn't she, and yeah, she put it in the community, and I have 48 banner orders in two weeks now, 50 pound a banner. So she said, you know, charge 50 pound a banner. And bear in mind, I was just starting off, so I was still learning the skill, and people were saying, Oh, could you do like me as a cartoon character? Could you do this? Could you do that? And all these little ideas. I was like, Holy shit, I've got to, like, figure this out, like, real time, learning. And I was trying to learn it real fast paced, because people were asking me to do stuff that I didn't have a clue. So I was on YouTube, following instructions on YouTube, designing in real time, trying to figure it all out and vanish. Used to take me hours and hours and hours back then, because I was having to learn. And then, obviously, as time grow, you know, time went on, and we sort of started to get a name for ourselves, started to get better design. Better design. Start to figure out things like, you know, the feature section, thumbnails, the back end of the profile, for carousel, templates, and all that sort of stuff. Start to come into our offer. So that's kind of a a long, strung out journey of how I got from being in a punk band through the military to where I'm at today.

Suzanne Taylor-King  5:41  
Well, listen, we're gonna have to address the punk band thing first, because I was a total punker in high school and short, spiky blue hair, nose pierced safety pins in my ears the whole I had a choreographed dance with my high school boyfriend to certain punk songs at school dances, which they very rarely played. We had to beg. And was really into that whole scene. So very interesting, how I often meet people who have this music thing in common with me, who is your favorite punk band?

Darren Pallatina  6:23  
So I was more into my funk, so I like the relative chili peppers, and they were, like, my all time favorite, especially, you know, like, 1520, years ago, and when they were still, yeah, still at the peak, you know, just before they hit mainstream. And when, you know, kind of become a bit of a seller after, you know, going, going to the mainstream. But back then they were really good. I used to love, like, like, anything I had a good I was a bass player, so anything that had a good baseline, so like, Jamiroquai was another good one. Oh yeah, and, you know, and stuff like that. So then, if you go more towards the punk side, it was things like the offspring, Bad Religion, you know, then sort of bands, and then my guitarist Slash vocalist. He was just punk all the way. He was, like, well, into his punk and scar. You like, punk and scar. And then my drummer was a metal head. Came from a metal background, so we sort of blended it all in. We became, say, again,

Suzanne Taylor-King  7:14  
nice combination. It was good, yeah.

Darren Pallatina  7:17  
Like, we became more of a pop punk band, rather than a full on punk band, because I played a lot of fun and slap bass, my guitar was more of a punk. And then we had the, you know, the metal drummer, nice,

Suzanne Taylor-King  7:30  
well, nice. Well, I'm totally gonna show my age and reveal who my favorite was, the clash and the clash The Ramones Generation X Billy idols, first band obsessed, still obsessed with Billy Idol and that whole type of music. Then we wave the 80s stuff, but some of the original punk bands out of the UK, you know, the dead milk men and the circle jerks and like all of that sex pixels and all of those bands were so influential in the 80s, and that's when I was in high school and most influenced by music. I think, I think that's, that's the time in your life when you're most affected by music, whenever you were in high school. It's

Darren Pallatina  8:27  
funny, I changed you then, because I turned 40 in November last year, like now my my taste in music is more like, a lot calmer. I like a lot of Lo Fi hip hop, but now, you know, so I calm down a lot. Yeah, you know, I still listen to some of the old bands sometimes, but like, I don't know, just, I don't know, just sets off, like, anxiety now, I think it's just yeah, and that's part of the history, and it's, you know, back in the day, and you know, there's a lot of memories back there, but yeah,

Suzanne Taylor-King  8:58  
my my Podcast Producer, Jason, just said, forget that stuff. Run DMC, yeah, that's more my you know, college, college time, you know, my son just listened to something from a modern day rapper. I don't know who it was, but the back beat was Belle Biv DeVoe. And I was like, I know that song. And he was like, No, you don't I'm like, Yes, I do. And so it's really fun having having those music conversations. I have a 15 year old, so lots of the music today that he's listening to has the undertones of, you know, stuff I used to listen to, stuff you used to listen to so it's really fun. All right. 

Darren Pallatina  9:42  
Now, second, a four year old daughter just off before you go on, we got a four year old daughter that's massively into Black Sabbath at the moment. Oh,

Suzanne Taylor-King  9:50  
really. She likes that.

Darren Pallatina  9:53  
She likes that. ACDC, yeah, that's

Suzanne Taylor-King  9:56  
really cool. She likes the vibe. Above that music, which is awesome, yeah. Now the second thing that I want to talk about is your transition into this field. I want to applaud the doing, the banners for free, the learning on the fly, the being willing to learn, and then this idea of being of value to a major influencer, you were a value to Leah, and then she shared you with her community, which really accelerated your learning curve and your exposure. How incredible.

Darren Pallatina  10:48  
Off the back end of that it, you know, obviously, off the back end of that you get referrals, and right? You know, your portfolio grows fast. There you get recommendations fast. They're like, something I always say to people who are starting out is like, you've got to do free work if you're trying to build a business to initially get going. Yes, you can't charge for your work, because one year, I've got the experience, especially if you're new to business, and you this is your first time. You've got no no no, um, social proof, no recommendations, no portfolio. You got nothing there to go and charge for. When people come to me saying, I can't get clients, is that all, you know, how many clients have you worked with? Oh, none at the moment. Or why are you charging and you're paying for service and you've got no proof that he works. Like I had a guy reach out to me a while back and he's trying to sell Facebook ads, okay? And I was like, right, okay, well, I'm not on Facebook. It's relevant to me. You know, we still do banners for Facebook and and people when they want their, you know, brand across all social media platforms. But I said, you know, if you've got any any stats about these, these adverts, he goes, Oh, no, not yet. I said, Well, you know, how, why would I put my money out for that and you got nothing to back it up, you know, so a lot of people that they're too ego driven to do free work. And I think that is where a lot of people either delay the growth of their business or they end up failing in business because they will not do it. Because what if you, if you say to say you're good at what you do, and you got any a client that you're really interested in working with, if you go to them, say, look, I will give you, I know if it was content, say, say, you're a content strategist or whatever, I will give you 20 days of content for free. And if you're happy with the result, let's work together to talk about price, yeah. And then if they are and they get results, and they get some sales off it, or whatever it be, if they're looking for exposure, growth, followers, whatever, whatever the goal is, if you achieve that, then they know that you can do the job, then you're worth the money to them, and then you can talk about working on a paid, on a paid basis, you know? So, yeah,

Suzanne Taylor-King  12:49  
well, so many people are willing to do that, and I'm, I'm not sure, you know, I think it's part ego and maybe part even feeling desperate for money, not in a bad way, but like, they need money so badly that, you know, it just becomes, I can't, I can't give it away. And I'll give you a great example of that, somebody from Instagram, one of my Instagram followers, messaged me on WhatsApp, because I have that out there. I don't know. I mean, it's on my Facebook business page to message me on WhatsApp, and he messaged me, gave me some like, just tips on Instagram. And then he said, I've been on your email list for I don't know how long your emails are, really, really great. I love the story emails, but your sales emails, I struggle with them. And I said, how? So? He said, I wasn't ready to buy. I said, Okay. He said, I'm gonna write a sales email for you. If you're into it, I'm gonna write a sales email for you. I was like, Sure, have at it. He said, If it makes sales, will you buy more of those emails from me? I said, Absolutely, I would consider that. And he is young, go getter. He researched me, he knew what I needed, and then said, could I do this for you? And if it works for me, I know I will send people his way. So I just think you have to be willing. I did a lot of that in the beginning. A lot of help people. I still help a lot of people for free, but I think it's really important as you're growing

Darren Pallatina  14:57  
the thing is, like I said earlier, it's important to get. Experience. Like, if you're new to business, you don't have to work with people. Like, when I first started, you know, and Leah got 48 banners come through within two weeks, everything was written on a piece of paper. I didn't have any any processes, no, no. Like, man, if it's software, we use Trello now, nothing in plates. And I was like, Mama, I don't even know where. I didn't know who paid, who unpaid. And I was like, yep, chasing people like, you know you're ready, or whatever. And it was crazy, absolutely crazy. Like,

Suzanne Taylor-King  15:26  
well, let's talk a little bit about that. You didn't over prepare for that, right? You didn't have a CRM in place, you didn't have a website. You didn't have an SOP for Okay, client, a pays, and then this happened. So no automations, you were doing everything yourself, and you figured all that out after those 40 some clients, correct?

Darren Pallatina  15:55  
Yeah, so when I, when I was getting started, like I said, it was all on paper. Like, you know, just like, written down in a notebook, trying to figure out crossing names off and want to add them, them orders. I put all the, all the names in a post, and I said, you're next, you're next, you're next, so people could see where they were on the list. Um, but then it started to get to a point where I need something to manage here, and I was looking for free software Trello is, is fantastic. Yes, I absolutely love trailer. It's free. It's got more than what I need. I've now got a small team that are in there, and we manage it all in there. But like, you know, like you're talking about automation. And now it's like, I've got all my, all my list with the columns of, you know, partly process. And when you move it across, it adds a tag to it and notes and labels and and all that stuff. So it's really, it's much better to manage things now, um, but going back to the website, we don't even have a website, you know, so we bought, you know, a good business, um, with no website at all. Like, I'm planning to get a website now, because we're starting to open bigger offers, and we're starting to partner with companies as well for ongoing design support, you know. So we are expanding. We're starting this year. We'll start to see scale this year. But like, yeah, the website for me, I feel two things. I feel people put too much weight on when they're starting to business. One is a logo, right? Forget logos. Like, yep, with your brand and your logo should be the last thing you should be thinking. Like, people come to me and they go up, you do a logo. Okay, well, what fonts you use and what colors you use? Oh, I'm gonna need brand and admit so forget, forget the logo. It's not important. Like, I can say, if I said to people, now in my I got, like, I think about like, 17 and a half 1000 followers somewhere around there. If I said, you know, if I put 12 logos together, and mine was in there somewhere, and I said, point my logo out, I bet out of 17 and a half 1000 people, maybe 10 would know what my logo looks like. Yeah, going because nobody sees it. I don't put it on anything. I never share it or anything like that. Like a logo not important. And you know, the colors I find that you use are really important with branding. So I use pink, magenta I use and then I've got, I don't know how long you follow my content for, but I use pink gangsters in my in my content. So I used to use gangsters with suits, and then I now use, I really like Grand Theft Auto, the games now gone more towards gangsters in like, pink hoodies, yeah, and kind of that style. But like, I'll tell you the story behind that in a minute. But with the pink and the gangsters, I became very popular with the pink gangsters, and they were, like, recognized across LinkedIn and Upper King light brand. And now, if I tell you about why that brand existed, was in the 1940s My grandad was part of the Italian Mafia. He was a Sicilian jeweler, and so he was connected to the mafia in Italy. And in the 40s, they fled. When the Civil War kicked off, they fled to UK, and then obviously, the generations carried on from there. So that was the gangster element. Obviously, Palatina Sicilian, that's my last name. And then the pink came from when I was in a punk band, I used to have pink hair, so I merged both the gangsters and pink together to form pink gangster, which we now use mid journey for to create the images now, and that's where my my brand, really started to come together, you know, so, but yeah, going back to the website, like people shouldn't be thinking about where, unless you're selling products, right? I think, you know, services or crime, a store, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, like, with us now, like, you know, we put a good business. We haven't got a website. It's all on LinkedIn. People come to us without us even trying anymore. People refer people. People hear us off content or whatever, yeah? Um, yeah, I found

Suzanne Taylor-King  19:35  
you. You were in someone else's comments. So you commented. I saw your comment. I saw, you know, the picture of you in the hoodie and the pink. And I was like, Who is this guy? Clicked on it, and I read the first line of your header on LinkedIn. And. It's like, I love him, straight to the point, straight to the point, and I'm so no. Bs, when I hear and see someone else who's No. Bs, I love it. I read the rest of your profile, followed you. I don't think I sent a connection request yet. So I was looking at your content at least three times a week for a very short time, very short time, and then you had an offer in one of your posts, and I said, I'll take that. Never met you saw some of your work. Obviously, you share your work on LinkedIn, plus you're a product of your own work, which is stellar, and never even talk to you to make a purchase, which in today's day and age, for that to happen, your content built trust with me. Your Visuals spoke for themselves, and it was just the experience was seamless. It was an email and a form for me to fill out, which was very thorough. I was very impressed. Google Drive. Everything was there, easy to do, and a couple little back and forth on LinkedIn messenger and my makeover was complete. It was amazing

Darren Pallatina  21:35  
that that process that you just talked about now, that was something that I really pride myself on is the the onboarding and processing experience, because I don't, when I first started to look at that, there's, there's a website called jot form. Have you heard of JotForm? Yes. So we use JotForm. I set up jot form. It had all the form. It had a payment gateway on there. And I had a client who was also a friend. He's over in Australia, well towards Australia, way New Zealand, sorry. And me and him are quite close anyway, communicating. And he said, Oh, could you do my profile? I said, Yeah, I'll send you a link and you can get started. And he felt this was on JotForm, and it was before they went onto the cloud. They've only recently gone onto the cloud now. But he spent, you know, half hour, 45 minutes, filling this form, and when he went to pay, the payment gateway failed and lost the entire form. That was the first time I'd use jot form. So straight away I was like, right? I'm not using jot form. And we do a Word document, because once you downloaded it, if you lose signal, you can just save it. Yeah, no, it doesn't matter. You can do it on the train, wherever you are. Come back to it. You've got a copy. I've got a copy. And it's like, that's solid at that point, yep. So I found, you know, if I could make email templates with links to download the assets, obviously the form the portfolio for inspiration and then give you your own Google Drive folder, then you had everything you need to carry on doing, yeah, rather than me jumping on a 45 minute call and we're trying to fill in the form on a court it's just, it's a waste of time. It might not be convenient for you. And you know, if you got bad signal, or I got bad signal, the calls a nightmare, you know? So there's so many reasons why I've gone for that approach to make it as smooth as possible. Now I am about to automate that a bit more, where you would make a payment, then you'd be sent an email automatically with everything, rather than me sending an email, you know. And then from there, then you fill it all out, send it back, and then the email will then pick it up. I've built it so AI picks up the email, and then that will send it to Trello, ready for me and my team to process. So Jeremy, so at that point, then I don't even have to get involved within the initial contact on the onboarding. Now, like you said about the content of my profile, attracting you to me. Now, I've got a friend called Fran collardo, and he's an email he's an email marketer, and he's good at what he does, but he's so big on email marketing and getting an email list and stuff like that. And I found, you know, he says, you know, most people aren't ready to buy. You know, like you said, That guy wasn't ready to buy. And he said, most people aren't ready to buy at the time. And I was like, we had a call, like another podcast I was on with him, and we were talking to another guy, Kevin, Kevin Dowling. He was saying, you know, most people don't buy straight away, and I was starting to build an email list, but it for me personally, it doesn't feel the right direction. Like me emailing people trying to sell. It's like, well, they go to my profile on they see me in a comment, they look at my banner and go, Holy, this guy's banners A and then, like, you say, like, I've got to be my own product, and it's different for different services, because for me, because we specialize in profiles and banners and, you know, the copy and all that sort of stuff, my profile and my portfolio is the social proof where, like, if you were, like, a sales coach or something like. Up, they're going to want to know what stats that you've got for sales. Who have you worked with? What are their you know, their outcomes of working with you. You know, what sales are they made, how much revenue? All the data, and it's very hard to prove that. You know where, if you look at design, it's like, this is what you're going to get. And that's it is easy to market, you know, so and then in terms of the the branding just being straightforward, straight to the point, like, I swear a lot in my content, I really don't care about offending people. Like,

Darren Pallatina  25:31  
I know, like, I don't like it a whole lot, yeah? But the thing is

Darren Pallatina  25:35  
that, you know, you get some people that complain and they're like, Oh, you shouldn't use swear words. It's like, just get lost because you're not my client, right? I don't want, I don't want people. I don't want to work with, people who, one, get offended, and two, waste my time and just like and people who complain about my language in my posts. The second they put a negative comment in my posts about the way I write, they took blocks. They're blocked. I don't even hesitate to go write block. I don't need you. Yeah, you know, there's, there's a billion users on LinkedIn. I'm sure I can find enough clients to keep me

Suzanne Taylor-King  26:03  
going. And there's a freedom in that, in that polarizing because as soon as I read that, you can't get or I forget how, but basically, if your profile looks like shit, you're not going to get clients on LinkedIn, and did I need to hire you? My LinkedIn was okay. It was doing okay for me, but you made me see that I wanted it what? It could be better. Oh, it could be better, and I just loved it. And I will say one other thing about being polarizing like that, you end up working with people who really resonate with your brand, and because your brand is visual, you can behave like you're behaving because it's, it's a visual product you're selling, which just means you could go to Instagram and do the same thing, you could go to Facebook and do the same thing, repeat, repeat, repeat, if it's visual, like that. So I think it's just really a matter of when I saw and there's been a couple people that saw my banner and said, Oh, that looks good. Did you do that? No, I did not send them to your profile, not a website, not a opt in form for them to get emails, but for instant gratification on the visual, Oh, you think he did a good job on mine. Look at what else he can do, yeah, and I think that's so so repeatable, and it's such a good message for those out there who are struggling to attract people that the visuals are important, not a logo, but the visuals are important.

Darren Pallatina  28:09  
So I always look at it from a standpoint of, if you were going to go to a job interview or an important business meeting, will you turn up in jeans, in a hoodie, or would you want to go in a suit? Yeah, and that's, that's the difference. And a lot of people don't want to put um, investment into the way their profile looks. A lot of people just DIY it. And we think that that'll do but the problem is, when you look at DIY jobs, you can tell it's a DIY jobs, spacing, alignment, you know, text, sizing, colors, blending, anything you can tell it's not done properly, you know, like, what you know, can it's a Canva job. And the problem with Canva, you can download it, you know, get a banner done on Canva for free. But it's like, the same as, like, 10 of 1000 people have done the same banner. So it's nothing unique about it. And the way I look at profiles is when, when somebody comes to your profile, if your profile looks like shit, as I say, right? Is going to give two potential opinions on your business. Right? One is, if you're not spending money to look or present professionally, it looks like you aren't doing very well financially, which means if you're not doing well financially, you're not very good at what you do. Yeah, that's one or two. If you don't care about how your profile looks, clients are probably going to presume that's how you'll treat their business. Yeah. So they're the two ways I look at this. Okay, so when somebody comes to your profile, they should initially go, Holy shit, this looks smart. It looks presentable. It's professional, it's clear. Good call to action. Good headline. I know what to do next. I know where I'm going. Okay, like with us, we go, yeah, with the banner headline, featured section, featured section, get them off the platform, into bucket, a call, email, website. You. Newsletter, whatever on wherever you want to send them. Um, so that depends on what the clients have got. So like, like, with me, I don't have a website, and everything's on LinkedIn anyway, so it's easier just to drop me a DM, and we're there on the platform that we need to be, where it's pointless me send it into on LinkedIn, go to my website, then come back to LinkedIn. It's pointless where, if you're making sales as like, you know, proper coaching, you go, okay, profile, get them off the platform, into your website or book in a call, then you want them off the platform. So it depends what your approach is. So we've got, because of what we do is very different on how we how we attack that angle, compared to what the clients are that we work with so well,

Suzanne Taylor-King  30:41  
I think it's the speed to your customer journey is. I don't know what the average is, but I'm assuming it's much shorter than for somebody like me. You know, I know most of my clients, we've either had a conversation or they were referred to me. So it's a, it's a longer customer journey. I I've had people in my sphere for three years before they've hired me. Yours with me was less than two weeks. So I wonder what you what do you find is the norm for your customer journey.

Darren Pallatina  31:25  
So with us, depending on what they want, so typically, I would say, when it's profiles, we've got, we've got a 48 hour turnaround. So obviously that doesn't include the beyond, like, you know, getting you the email and getting the form back. But you know, if you take two weeks to to fill in the form, then obviously it's going to take two weeks to to get the job done. But when we get the the form back, so I should plug my phone because it's running that battery, and when we get to a point where we get the form back, usually the same depending on what time of day we get it. But if it's normally like in the morning, within a couple of hours, you've got the copy, which gives you the 15 headline, the banner strap lines, 15 headlines and five different variations of your about section. And then what we do? Then we obviously, we just ask, you know which, which strap lines you want to go for, for the banner. When we get that back is normally 24 hours after that, you've got the full profile complete. We're pretty quick. Like I said, I've got a team now. So my team is exceptionally fast, but very high quality as well. Like one of my designers, is eight years senior designer, so he's always in Trello. He's always active. And then, if we decide, you know, when we when we do profiles, we then go, right, do you need content support? So if you come to us with a copy, we can build your carousel template all on brand to match your profile. We can build the template. You take it away to Canva and do your thing on there. Or we can build the template. Then we've got offers for do you want eight carousels doing? If you want eight carousels, this is the price. And, you know, you just come to us with a copy slide, 123456, up to 10. And then once we get all that back, we just go and process it again. Usually, you know, once we got the carousel template built, we normally do 1010, carousels into that.

Suzanne Taylor-King  33:18  
Now I want that you're good at this. You're good at this.

Darren Pallatina  33:23  
But the thing is, the thing is, what it does is it's branded recognition. Brand recognizable content. Yeah. So with me now, I've started to go towards the Grand Theft Auto stuff. So I use a lot of like Grand Theft Auto style, image generation, but it's still got the pinks and yellows in there. Okay, so when somebody's scrolling faster, so do you know Justin Welsh? Yes, yeah, Justin Welsh. So he's, he's got a course, I can't remember how much course was it? It's one of his low, low tickets. My God, I think it is around there, yeah. But in the course, it talks about, there was a study done, and they reckon that people, on average, people scroll 300 to 700 feet per day, scrolling right, which is phenomenal, phenomenal. Man. Now, if you're scrolling at pace, your content better be recognizable in color and brand, because if it flies past, yeah, if it's just text only, it's not going to grab the attention. You know, sure, people get like notifications that you're posting and stuff, but LinkedIn isn't the most reliable for notifications. You know, you miss a lot of stuff there. You might follow 100 people or 200 or 5000 people, but you're not going to get all that content coming to your into your feed, you know. So, right? But then, you know, when you look at the content, you go out that looks really cool. This world design well presented, looks really smart. I like the branding. And then you go, I'm going to click on the personal profile, bang. The banner matches the profile photo matches. To feature section matches, then you go one step further. Now the the website matches, because now a lot of our clients, what they do is contrast for profiles, we effectively do their branding at that point, then if they haven't got any and then they go right and go work with a web designer. So what we're going to do now is replicate what you've done with my my profile, my profile on LinkedIn, and we're going to replicate that on the website. So they end up working with a web designer for that part, you know. So everything aligns. Then,

Suzanne Taylor-King  35:27  
beautiful. Beautiful. I remember the first profile I saw a couple years ago when I was making the transition from Facebook to LinkedIn, and I remember noticing, uh, Ben Mears profile, it's, you know, black and gold letters, very simple, very stoic, very just, factual, clean. And I clicked from his featured section to the website, and it looked exactly the same his emails look exactly the same, and it's this feel of so much professionalism, clean, memorable. I know immediately when I see one of his posts or images or carousels, and I love that. And the people, the other people that you mentioned, are exactly the same way, and I think that's why they've become so visible and so recognizable, right? It's this idea that you just be that part before you have 100,000 followers before you have you know, you just be it now and it'll happen.

Darren Pallatina  36:49  
Love it. The thing is, you can also take it like my email signature block. It's another one. If you're emailing people all the time, you can do an email signature block, and at the bottom of the block you can say, Click here to find me on LinkedIn. And then you put a hyperlink to the email block, and it takes you to LinkedIn, if they, if you don't deal with them on LinkedIn, you know, so you've got the brand in there as well, and it's just little splashes of branding everywhere you go. You then have to bring into life, use business cards or anything like that. You can bring it into that. And, you know, so so many places that branding can take place, you know, we do like presentations, PowerPoint presentations. We do pitch decks, carousels. We do, you know, we used to do animated DMS, where you pop up in a DM and say, Hi, thanks for connecting. We used to do that, but there was a lot of work in that for what we could charge, and it was not really worth our time. But, you know, we can still do like the still images, and when you connect with someone, you can just send them the image and say, Thanks for connecting, or whatever. And you know, all the time you're, you're flashing your branding in the face all the time say, Yeah, I think that's important. I do too.

Suzanne Taylor-King  37:47  
I I really, I so look forward to because one of, one of the things I help my clients with is the confidence in their knowledge and their authority and their influence within their network. You know, are you the go to person in your network for what you do? Yeah, you've demonstrated that to me, and that to me, that means that there's eight or 10 of my clients that need what you offer. And I love that. I love when that happens. And I'm the tester, I'm the example, like I knew I needed it to elevate my brand to the next level on LinkedIn and follow my example, and I just want to thank you for doing such a great job and just being that example for my people. I appreciate that.

Darren Pallatina  38:54  
Well, you know, I'm glad, I'm glad that everyone's like it, you know, like say, like, I'm glad that you're happy with the outcome as well. And another thing to look at as well is, like, one thing that people ask me, because obviously, we don't just do the design with you all the copy and SEO and everything from that. A lot of people say, Oh, I've had quite a few people in the past. So does a, you know, fully optimisable design profile guarantee sales? I'm like, No, it doesn't, because you've still got to drive traffic, still got to engage you, still and you know, if you just build your profile and go, I'm never logging into LinkedIn again, well, the profile is not going to do anything, right? You know, it's a conversion tool and but what I do say to people is, although a good profile doesn't guarantee sales, a bad profile guarantees you'll be repelling clients. 100% like people look at it and it's all over the place, sporadic. It looks a mess. It's not clear what to do, what to do next for call to actions, things like that, they're just going to log off and go to someone else. And if you were to look at like you versus nine of your competitors. Yeah, if you were to line everybody up now on a line, all the same service, same offer, but yours is the only profile that looks professional. Who are they going to choose? And you know, and it's not blowing smoke up your own backside saying it'll be you. You look like you've taken pride in how you're presenting to clients and other people, you know. So I think it's really important that people take that away. Is always, you know, your presentation is a first impression. I've just done, um, just done a banner for a guy called Mike Green. And he was, he was the secret millionaire on BBC. He was on the TV program, Secret Millionaire. Oh, okay. Um, I said, you know, why did you want, why did you want us to do your profile? He said his first impressions. He understands the importance of, you know, straight when you need to give that impact. And, you know, because if you, if you log on to someone's profile and they've got a picture of the cat and a profile photo of them, you know, five of them drinking around the table, it's like, Well, which one are you? And it's like, the headline, I love football. It's like, well, it's irrelevant, completely relevant, you know. So thought is always important to make sure it's professionally well presented, clear on what you do, who you do. It for good calls to action, which is what we call from the banner to feature section to your next part. We call that the prospect pathway, because it's what you want them to do next and get them into the next places. Place as easy as possible. Yeah. And then, from that point, then you've got to manage your onboarding and processing on the other side of that. So, you know, if it's one cog in a massive machine, you know, your content, engaging, connecting with people, that's that's the first driver, then they're going to go to your profile. Do they want to connect with you? Do they want to engage? Okay, yeah, I do. Okay. Well, now I'm interested in buying. Is your processes? Okay, you know? Like I said, I'll take a lot of pride in how we process clients. It's all important. You don't want any of that to be messy, you know. Yeah. So I

Suzanne Taylor-King  41:58  
love it. I love it so much. Darren, thank you so much for for being who you are and doing this. I just want to share your LinkedIn profile. Let me see if I can share that on LinkedIn. I will make sure I share that, there it is, and I will also share that in the comments, for anybody who's looking to get in touch with you. Thank you so much for the work you did for me, and thank you for being the example for which I teach. From this example, be the authority in your space, look the part of your experience, and then be able to attract more people to you. And I love what you said about just because you have a website or a LinkedIn profile that looks the PAR. It doesn't mean you don't have to drive traffic to it. So you have to be having the conversations and having the content that drives people to go look at your profile in the first place. So thank you for being here on the show with me today. I appreciate you and look forward to sending lots of people your way.

Darren Pallatina  43:25  
I appreciate you having me on. Cheers.

Suzanne Taylor-King  43:29  
Thank you for tuning in to another empowering episode of unlock your way. I hope you found today's discussion inspiring and you're ready to take your business and personal growth to that next level. If you're feeling as fired up as I am and eager to unlock that full potential, I'm here to help you on your journey and provide that personalized guidance tailored to your unique goals and challenges, simply book a one on one coaching call with me, and we'll dive deep into your business aspirations and see how we could co create a road map for your success, and whether you're striving to scale an enterprise or just getting started. I'm here to support you every step of the way. To schedule your coaching call, simply visit the website at unlock your way with stk.com click on the book a call button, and we'll turn your dreams into that reality. Subscribe and review on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube, plus, you can join over 800 entrepreneurs in the IDEA Lab Facebook group. Let's make success as an entrepreneur happen together. Until next time I'm SDK, keep dreaming big. Stay focused, and most of all, have fun while you're doing it. You.