Media Millionaire: How To Leverage Linkedin To Grow A 100k / Month Business w/ Hala Taha

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right. Hala Taha, how are you?

I'm doing great. Happy to be here.

I actually remember seeing you back when I believe when I was entering the workforce, when I graduated college, and I discovered this new platform, Maybe some of you guys have heard of it, that are listening to this LinkedIn. I remember seeing this girl post on LinkedIn and that was before this podcast was even a twinkle in my eye and you were popping off on there. And I remember then LinkedIn went through this phase where it it just seems to be recruiters and seems to be cookie cutter content all over again, and now there's this massive resurgence that we're seeing to where everyone's like, Holy crap. Look at this platform of what it's doing. Again, I'd love to hear your input about how you got started on LinkedIn and what you're seeing now with this resurgence wave.

Yeah. It's so funny that you say that because I've been in the thick of things. So from an outside perspective, you might think it's a resurgence. I've, LinkedIn has been popping for me for five years from the beginning. Yeah. So for me it's, it hasn't felt like this resurgence, like you're saying. For me, LinkedIn for the past, I would say six, seven years has been a place where a lot of people go, professional people go to post content about. Life about their business. And it's not just about HR and recruitment anymore. And so LinkedIn to me, has been one of the biggest game changers. I've been able to make millions of dollars, literally off the LinkedIn platform for my business from my podcast, and LinkedIn to me was the thing that really started it all. So when I decided five years ago to launch my podcast less than five years ago, like four and a half years ago, I, at the same time decided to start my LinkedIn personal journey. The first day I posted on LinkedIn and really, gave effort and became consistent. Then on was the first episode of my podcast. It coincided. I was gonna use LinkedIn as a way to reach the professional audience, and I was really smart about it because I literally abandon. Every other social media platform. I didn't post on Instagram, I didn't post it on Twitter. I only posted on LinkedIn. Wow. And I took it really seriously and I pruned my community and I was super active on the platform, engaging with everyone. And I remember I started my podcast as a side hustle and I worked at Disney Streaming Services and marketing, and I. My only job on the train was to post on LinkedIn every single day no matter what, and I would prepare whatever assets I needed the night before, and my only job was to write that post on LinkedIn every day. And that was my habit. And then on the way home, I would do all of my community engagement. So I would respond to all the comments, I would respond to all my dms and literal. Then a year I got to 60,000 followers, which at the time, this was four years ago, made me one of the biggest influencers on the platform. That wasn't like an HR person. And so I just became this personality on LinkedIn and then I leveraged that to grow my podcast. That

is huge, and you actually set a point there that I wanna bring out. That is contrary to popular belief, and it's something that I struggle with myself to where a lot of people that listening to this show are seasoned entrepreneurs. They really know their stuff like they are killers. But when it comes to the content game, it comes to social media. I preach a lot to them that they need to use this brand and leverage this because this is one of the three levels of leverage you have content, community, and capital that you can leverage in business. And I'm saying you need to. Onto social media and leverage your content. But what happens is people get overwhelmed with all the different things that your air quote's supposed to do. And I'm in the same camp to where I've got a podcast that's five episodes a week. I've got all of this video content, and I get so overwhelmed with saying, Okay, I need to post , five times a day on TikTok. I need to post two on LinkedIn. I need to post five tweets. I need to do YouTube shorts. And it's just so much that nothing gets. So you started with one singular platform and went all in on that. , is that what you would recommend? Yes. For growing a media empire all over again?

Oh yeah, 100%. But first, you need to figure out where your target audience is hanging out. And so I wanted to first of all, stand out on a social media platform. Second of all, reach the people that would be interested in my content and so linked. Perfect because there was podcasters out there, but they weren't focused on LinkedIn. I quickly became the number one podcaster on LinkedIn, and that gave me so much leverage to get sponsorships, to do trades, cross promos. If I had focused on Instagram, I might have been the same size. But I could never say I'm the number one podcaster on Instagram. And by the way, there's a lot of podcasters, so I couldn't break the noise. I stood out on LinkedIn cuz I was talking about a topic that nobody else was talking about. So when you're thinking about what platform that you wanna be on, you wanna think where's organic reach? First of all, that's. That's very important. So that's LinkedIn, that's TikTok, right? YouTube, Instagram, Even podcasting. No organic reach. So where is organic reach? That means it's gonna be easier to go viral to build a community. Where are your competitors not focusing? You also may wanna think, where are your competitors doing? This is all, it's not black and white, right? So you wanna see where are your competitors not focusing, where there's sort of an area for you to break in, or where are your competitors doing really well, but you feel like there's still more pie in the sky for everyone, right? . And then where do you. Stand out in terms of the topics, right? So if you're on TikTok, for example, a lot of like painters started doing really well where originally it was people who were dancing, but then they started doing other things that were visually pleasing and people started going viral for their paintings and their artworks on TikTok. So you always wanna think about how you can stand out. I always think a personal trainer or a makeup artist if you guys went on LinkedIn and started doing that stuff, People, some people would be like, Oh man, don't post this here. It's a professional site. But a lot of people would be interested and you would break the noise. And so I think I stood out not only with my super bright assets, the fact that I was a young woman in podcasting when nobody else was doing it. I was one of the first people to actually do video podcasting and post it on LinkedIn. I did a lot of things to stand out, but I think the topic itself and that's not something people really think about often.

I love that. And it's just so cool to be able to watch You have absolute mastery at one thing. It's it's something my grandfather actually used to say to me. He was like, You don't wanna half ass five things. He's Whole ass one thing. . Yeah,

that's, I love that. And you can break out. And by the way, once you start making a lot of money and you have more resources, you can hire a team that can help you manage other things. You can find experts who are really good at, the platform that you're trying to reach. And the other thing they wanna add, just from what you said before that I didn't get to touch on, was the importance of content marketing. A lot of entrepreneurs, they don't realize that if they don't have something that organically sells organic demand and they don't have a lead that is content marketing. Pulling people in. The other alternative is push marketing. It's paid ads. And a lot of entrepreneurs mess up because they have a product that doesn't really sell naturally or organically, and instead they try to just pour, add money on it, and they think it's converting well. But what they don't realize is at some point that's not gonna be sustainable. So if you wanna build a sustainable business first, you wanna have product market fit, and then you wanna have a content marketing machine that's luring people in so that people. Asking you for your services rather than you pushing it on them and trying to sell to them. And

then you're also playing a completely different game because when you're playing the game of push advertising, you're just, doing something that's gonna disappear in the chop and it's gonna, it's like a wave, it's gonna come. And it's gonna go. But then when you change the game that you're playing to the pool marketing, like you said, then it's something that's a compound. And now all of a sudden you go to where you're about to create something brand new in your business and create a new arm, and now you can do it in two weeks. Something that would probably have taken you two years before because you have the resources there.

Exactly, and I have the people ready to buy because I've been educating my network for so long. People don't like to be sold to anymore. They like to be educated. There's no such thing as selling anymore. It's all about education, right? And so I've been providing free value, and. Also, doing it for my clients for high ticket prices. But now that I'm offering something that is accessible for everyone, people are gonna be ready to buy, and I won't have to spend money on a single ad. I just have a community that's ready to buy for me because I've been providing value for so long.

Exactly. And Alex Harmo, which shout out. Shout out Alex. I'm talking to you, dude, I'm getting you on this freaking show,

man. He's coming out my show next to me. Oh my God. Jumper 17th. I'm so

excited. My God. Haa had a one up me. She had to come on the show and she had a one up me. But Alex has this quote. Tell him I said hello. Alex has this quote where he says and it's, I've heard it before, but he was like, If you can delay your ask for a. , you will never need for money. If you can just give without needing anything back for a year, you'll be rich. If you can give without needing back for a decade, he goes you'll be a billionaire. That's like the Mr. Beast model right now to where he doesn't even care about the money. He just wants to provide value and provide content, and then he'll get back whatever he gets back. So that's why he'll be worth a hundred billion dollars by the end of it. I wanna take a slight pivot here and dive into your business because your revenues. And your growth and skill is insane. But first I'm really interested about a mindset shift that you had to go through. I know you started in public radio but then you got your MBA and then you went into the corporate world. You worked with Disney and you worked with these streaming companies for, what was it, seven years?

Yeah, I worked at Hewlett Packard and Disney, but all the while I had the podcast Okay. Not all the while, but like halfway through I started the podcast. It's so funny because I feel like I've always been an entrepreneur. Even when I worked in corporate. I just love it. Always since I was a little girl, I had this like entrepreneurial spirit. I used to have a bit since literally four years old. I think I started my first business. I would sell paintings to like mothers at Sunday school. I used to work at Hot in 87. I was Angie Martinez's assistant at the time. She was the voice of New York and I was. Intern and so I worked at the station for free for three years. And on the side I had lots of different online radio shows throughout my twenties, so I had maybe five or six online radio shows and I would interview rappers. It was all about music. I used to date Chris Brown, like Chris Brown was my boyfriend, when I was 25. So I worked at the station and I had all these online radio shows on the side. I loved radio, but there was no money in radio. Had I stayed there, I would've gotten a $30,000 job a year. And that was like my trajectory. So I ended up getting fired from Hot 97 cuz I asked for a paying job and then I was like on revenge mode and I decided to start something called. The sorority of hip hop, I ended up going back to college, finishing college and launching this website within three months. We were one of the most popular entertainment sites in the world. And then all the DJs where my job used to be to get them coffee, to do their work for them, . All of a sudden these same DJs called me up and wanted me to host all their parties and we were like the hottest thing in this city great LinkedIn content, right? I totally switched my whole thing, like my whole brand switched. But anyway, I had to take a break because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to do what I'm doing now. So MTV rejected us. I got rejected from Hot 87, rejected from radio. Then I got rejected from tv. So this is six years into the entertainment industry of me basically working for free and working marketing jobs and things on the side to keep everything afloat and. I'm going back to school, get my mba, got an , internship at Hewlett Packard because I was getting my mba. And then I get to my internship 70 k a. , . So at the time this was so much money for me, right? Oh yeah. I was like, first stable job I gotta take this seriously. I graduated number one in my class while I was working the whole time at Hewlett Packard. I'm an entrepreneur. Get into Hewlett Packard and I'm like light years ahead of everyone, tech-wise cuz I was this girl that, like I used to blog at Honey seven. I had a huge Twitter following. I hacked Twitter to blow up. Website. I knew everything about seo, graphic design, all this stuff I knew how to do already. I self taught it and I used to teach all these girls. So it was really good because not only did I know it, but I was like teaching it to everyone. So I was really good. So I get into Hewlett Packard and I'm totally an entrepreneur. Within the company. I had five promotions in a row. I was leading huge global teams. I had every job in the marketing department possible. I was president of the young employee network representing 7,000 employees across the world and interviewing the CEO and the CMO and doing this. Same stuff I was doing, but figured out how to do it at Hewlett Packard. Then I got bored four years in and I was just thinking ah, this is not enough. Like I, I wanna be a voice for my generation. I wanna get back to my passions. And I decided I was gonna start young and profiting podcasts as a hobby. , I wanted to just give away. My knowledge to the world and I thought, Hey, I have all the experience. I know how to do radio, social media, I think I could do this and two years later it really took off. But the. Really cool thing is that as soon as I put out an episode, people are usually really embarrassed by their episode one and two, and three and four. Mine were like masterpieces, and people got obsessed, totally obsessed. And people would reach out to me on LinkedIn and they'd be like, Hey, listen to your podcast. I can't get enough of it. How can I help you? I wanna be part of this movement. And so by episode two, I had my first volunteer, who's now my business partner, Timothy Tan, who's literally a millionaire. Smart kid was super young when he started with me. By episode eight I had 10 volunteers in a Slack channel and one guy would be working on my website, one guy working on my videos, one guy working on my graphics, and I would work my day job and then work with my team at night and on the weekends. And it really helped us level up. I don't think many podcasters can say they had a team of 10, like two months into it. And by the way, I started out saying I have to do this by myself, . brian: So lot to unpack there. . Yeah, . So let's start with, I am a podcaster that does it by myself. And I've gone through multiple different assistants and it just never works because the vision doesn't match up so I'm curious about how you built this into a movement in such a community to where these people were just like, Hey, I'll work for you for. Because for me, I was just like, I did the same thing as a as like a hobby. I was just like, Oh my God, like I've got this huge network. I was like, I've got all these people that I know and I talked to them and so how did you go about making this bigger than being a podcast? Bigger than being a media company? You made it a movement. How do you think you captured lightning in a bottle like that? I think it was because my intentions were genuine, so I wasn't making any money and my goal wasn't to make money at the time. I just wanted to make the podcast as big as possible and to provide so much value. And I feel like because I was very hands on with everyone, imagine you go from listening to someone and you really like their podcast, and then all of a sudden you're in a Slack channel with them and they're spending hours with you teaching you how to video edit. And I always made sure that once somebody got really good at something, that I would teach them the next thing and then they would go teach another person how to do what they had learned. And so it was just this cycle of everyone just learning and leveling up. And it was really exciting because we were getting huge guests from the start. So for us to be this like, these underdogs trying to like take on all these huge podcasters and then, episode five, we get David Allen, episode 23, we got Chris fo, we just kept getting all these huge guests and then we get so excited and they see that the traction on LinkedIn is happening. It's just that we had such good momentum. So it kept everyone really motivated. And to be honest, it was easier to motivate people before there was money involved. , once there was money involved, it became a whole different dynamic. Once we had responsibilities and clients, it was very actually difficult for. Get out of the previous mindset that we had, which was like a totally volunteer mindset. Everybody do what they can. And we just had my podcast, once we had clients, it was a whole different story.

Yeah. And now all of a sudden there's other mouths to feed here. And you've gotta, you gotta like actually run an organization. Exactly, , Talk us through the growth from there to all of a sudden, you said you are popping up to a hundred thousand dollars months. What was the timeframe there?

It all happened so quickly. It was, it, So we built the podcast and the LinkedIn at the same time. Okay. Two years into it is when things really started to pop off. What happened , is that I started getting creative, in the way that I approached marketing. And I think I always say this, I am a really good podcaster, but. Even better marketer. And so one of the reasons why I think my show has grown faster than other people is because I focus it a lot on the marketing, not only the content and the production, right? And so year two. That's when everything really started to accelerate. I had thought about what can we do to actually. Be number one when everybody on Apple who's dominating Apple right now, started their podcast five years before I did. So all the people who are big on Apple are Jordan Harbinger Lewis house you, Rogan, jld. They started, yeah, they started 14 years ago. And so I felt like it was impossible to compete with them. And I was thinking how can. Achieve my goal of becoming a huge podcaster and eventually getting sponsorships and just dominating this field without necessarily worrying about Apple because that's where it was most difficult to compete. And I thought, where can I like get ahead? So I started reaching out to every single podcast brand that I was knew of and most of the softwares that I used. So I reached out to riverside.fm and I reached out to script and I reached out to Good Pods and I reached out to castbox and Podcast Republic and all these different brands and I said, Hey. I would love to promote you on LinkedIn. I have a, I'm the biggest podcaster on LinkedIn. Again, using it for leverage and in exchange, give feature me on your blog. Feature me on your website. Wow. Feature me in your email. Feature me on your app. And everybody said yes, Geez. And then cap. And Ca box really liked me and they featured me every month. And now I have 260,000 subscribers on castbox alone, right? Over 3 million downloads on castbox alone. And so I started doing this on these apps. So I have 80,000 followers on Player fm. I have 10,000 followers on Podcast Republic, and so I became the biggest podcaster in my category across all apps. Then that got me noticed, I got on the. A podcast magazine, Matthew McConaughey came on my show. Then everybody wanted to come on my show and then it just exploded. I went from getting, $10,000 a month to a hundred thousand dollars a month to 200,000 to 300,000, and it just kept growing and growing because then it was word of mouth and the podcast really spread. Now I'm just starting to get popular on Apple. I'm still not that huge on Apple. It's literal. 15% of my downloads really. Because yes, because I focus on everything else. It's the same thing how I blew up on social media. I focused on the thing nobody was focused on. Now everyone is doing what I was doing like with focusing on the other players, and I became one of the biggest experts in the industry on media buying, and I learned how to sell it. That's a whole different story, but it's another one of the things that I do is media buying for podcasters. , I got all these relationships and then I learned that the things I was getting for free, people pay for. And I started doing tests and studying subscriber acquisition costs and getting better at it. And once I started making money for my business, I would reinvest and grow my show using the same tactics I used to get for free from trades. In terms of how I actually started making money on my podcast, two years in, I am getting big authors, CEOs that are coming on my show and I'm working at Disney. I have a very high paying executive job at Disney that I'm crushing at. But I actually don't like my job at Disney at the time because I felt like it was a boys' club and I was starting for the first time in corporate. I always thought I was gonna be the CEO or CMO of some Fortune 50 company. For the first time in corporate. I don't see myself going anywhere here, and so I was aware of my opportunities. At the end of every, almost every single show, the guest would say to me, Hey, ho, how did you blow up on LinkedIn? Hey, ho, do you have a team? Could you do this for me? Hey, ho, could you help me grow my podcast? And I'd always be like, No, I'm so sorry. I have a job at Disney. I have a volunteer team. They don't get paid. We have too much on our plate. And I would always say no. Until one time Heather Monahan, she's. Huge influencer on LinkedIn. She had like maybe 80,000 followers at the time. She came on my podcast. She asked me that question. I blew her off. She didn't leave me alone and I did, still believed I didn't have time to do this and that I didn't want to do this. And so I said hey Heather, I want her to be my mentor. Cuz I felt Oh, I may wanna be a speaker when I, get older and all these things. Sure. I told her, I was like, Hey, I'll teach you on the weekends how to do this. Cause I, I do, I know how to do everything, Audio, edit, graphic design, whatever. And so I started training her on the weekends and on Saturdays and she just stopped me one day. It was like maybe our third session. She's Hala, I can't do this. I just had a call with Gary v's. Company. They told me how much how much it costs, everything like that. Your stuff is better. She's Your team is better. You can do this ho I'll be your first client. Let's do this. Wow. I said, All right, fine. I'll do, I'll start with your videos. And so we started with Heather Monahans videos. Then all of a sudden I took over all of her LinkedIn, all of her podcasts, and we do a really good job. Then I get asked to guest on a billionaire show. His name is Jason Waller, true underdog, and he found me. Of my podcast and everything. And at the end of it, he asked me, Hey, could you do this for me? And I knew he was a billionaire, He's And I was like, Yes, I can definitely do this for you. I like, let me, let's have a call. And he wanted me to run his LinkedIn, his Instagram, his podcast. And I was very good at PowerPoint presentations. That's all I had. I had no website. , I had nothing. I had no website. I had no proof. All I had was like us doing Heather Monahan for a month. and I put together this PowerPoint presentation. And at first, like we had we had priced everything at three K each service or something like that. And my business partner Tim, he's Let's just do 10 Ks each service and see what happens. So that's 30 k We were pitching for this monthly retainer, 30 k a month. Okay. And we, I do this pitch, my first pitch ever for the company and he's Let's do it. And that was it, 30 K a month. All of a sudden we went from zero to 30 K a month. Then I got Kara Gold, the CEO of all these people were guests on my show. Kara Gold, the CEO of Hintwater, Brit, me from Bri co. Then we get the CEO of 100 got junk, Marshall Goldsmith, the top best selling author, number one executive coach. And we just started landing client after client and literally six months into it, I'm still working at Disney Streaming services. I have 30 paid employee. Making over a hundred grand a month. And then I was like, Okay, I gotta quit my job. And I quit my job. And I've literally only been an entrepreneur. Now I guess it's been a year and a half only of being an entrepreneur. So this all happened so fast, right? And , we start this company, it's goes really well. And I never had to do a paid ad. It was all just leads from my podcast, which were my guests, and then referrals, and they started just telling their friends and it's this, very luxury social media service that I was offering Now. I started my podcast agency because I learned how to monetize my show. What I always do is I learn how to do something myself, and then I sell it to other people. So I learned LinkedIn and we offer LinkedIn. We learned Instagram. Now we offer Instagram. We knew how to do podcasting. We offered podcasting. We figured out how to monetize my show. Then we started offer offering monetization, and so we just always do that. We figure it out for me, and then we start selling it for everybody else, and. We started this podcast network in January and in the first year we made $500,000 already. The year's not even over, just like having an idea that we started in January. Everything's going really well. And the key lessons here is follow the organic demand and follow what you're good at, what you love, what you have passion for, and what people want and will pay service, pay money for.

Yeah. My big takeaways from your story are that what you did, It's what we talk about on this podcast a lot is where you normally, on this show, we talk about building like a financial foundation to where it is you have the unsexy stuff, like you have the real estate index funds, whatever, and then you can grow the sexy businesses on top of it. But you did the exact same thing. But instead of, a financial foundation, what you did is you built a platform found. So like really all of this is from how freaking rock solid your one platform, like LinkedIn was the catalyst of all of this. And then you were able to take that and I'm sure after a while it became like mundane for you because you were just doing it over and over again. But now you've built all this stuff on top and then now you can branch out to whatever you want because you are great at one thing instead of just good at like. that's insane.

100%. 100%. And I would say it's my LinkedIn and my podcasts were the two really foundational things. Yeah. And what it is, like we were saying before, it's this content marketing engine, and it's me providing free value to a community that then, provides for me at the same time. But the key here is that for two years I didn't sell a thing, all I did was build social proof, build trust. Gain skills, train my team and get everything ready. A lot of people, they're not ready yet. , like they, they don't have the foundation to build a business. I almost start too late. I have everything like ready to go, like 90% and then I'm like, Oh yeah, I could start a business with this. You could start a little earlier, but a lot of people, they start way too early and they need a lot more skills and social proof and experience. Before I think that they should start a.

What do you think are some good indicators of that? Of knowing like a barometer to be able to judge, engage when you are ready and when you're not. Because I see that a lot too. I've got a lot of people, It's for me, I talk about all of this because I went and I worked the corporate job, made it to the top, quit that, and now I'm traveling around the world. So I teach people how to do that. It's just like you said, it's like you do it and then you teach others. But there's a lot of people that say, Oh, I wanna start a podcast on this and that, But they haven't done. What's your advice on that? Yeah, what

should they do? First of all, you never wanna sell anything. Especially service based. I'm talking really about service based right now because if you wanna bootstrap anything that's really how you do it. It's through some sort of service offering that you have. If you haven't done it for yourself, like for example, if you're like a graphic designer but you haven't designed anything nice for yourself or for somebody else you obviously need to level up your skills. So what do people compliment? What do people ask you questions on that signal that they think that you're an expert. Those are the things that, that are your real skills that people value and may pay money for. So if nobody's asking you for advice in these areas already, if you haven't done it already for yourself and or for somebody else that something that you're really proud of, then you're not ready. . And you need to make sure that you level up yourself before you go try to sell something that you. That well qualified to sell, right? Because nobody will want it from you. There's too much competition.

Yeah. I love that you did that as your litmus test to where you were like no. Uhuh. Okay, fine. I'll do it. , I think that's a good example. If nobody will take up, if you are offering something for free and nobody's taking you up on it, you're not ready. like you're just not ready. And now if you're offering something for free and you're getting blown up and people are saying, Hey, take my money, it.

And by the way, you can learn while you build your community. Exactly. So if you wanna learn it, let's say you wanna be a painter and one day you wanna sell painting, start an Instagram talking about painting and educating people about painting. And as you do it, you're gonna learn and then you're gonna have a community. And then by the time you're ready to sell something, you have a community there for you. I feel like a lot of people think that the community and the business comes at the same time. I think it's way smarter to start the community first.

I agree. I agree. And then you can also build it around how you are learning. So you're either the grizzled expert or the enthusiastic beginner that's learning. And as podcast hosts, we also can play, we can wear both hats. And it's awesome. That's why this is such a cheat cut to be able to do this. But anyways, I wanna be conscious of your time here and lets you be able to get outta here. So where can people go and find you? I'm sure it's very. What would you prefer?

Yeah. First of all, I would love for you guys to check out Young and Profiting podcasts. We interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom. So I've had Deepak Chopra on, I just interviewed Jim Quick. We've got Alex for Mosy next week, Ryan Holiday coming up. So very excited for all of our upcoming guests. You guys can check out Young and profiting podcasts on your favorite podcast player, and I'm on Instagram at ya with chala, TikTok at ya with chala and LinkedIn. You can't miss me. Just search Chala and you'll find.

There you go. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been freaking awesome, a marketing masterclass, and I appreciate everything you're doing. Keep printing out the content and maybe you and I will be working together here soon.

Yeah, I hope so. Brian, congratulations on your show and great job.

Appreciate it. Thank you everyone. This has been Brian Lubin and Hala Taha, the LinkedIn queen with the Action Academy Podcast, signing off.