Show notes.
This week’s show comes out early to remind you of this weekend’s price rise for the UpLift Live 26. We have an interview with our final speaker, the host of the Nudge podcast, Phill Agnew.
Postbag.
Ashley Leeds: Premium banner image buttons
Caryn Yuen: Some experts say that sharing glimpses of your personal life can help build your brand and make it easier for your audience to connect with you. How important do you think this is? How often should one be doing this? How do you decide what’s worth sharing, and what’s not?
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Phill Agnew interview: our final speaker at UpLift Live 26 on 26 March 2026. Get your ticket at uplift-live.com and see all speaker interviews at uplift-live.com/speakers/
More in this episode:
Full transcript.
At the conference and this is the first time I’ve spoken about this publicly. I haven’t spoken about it on the podcast, haven’t spoken about it on my newsletter.
That was the voice of the last speaker at our UpLift Live 26 conference. You’re going to hear more from him in this show. This is episode 478 of the Informed podcast.
I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. Today, we’re going to be learning a little bit more about what’s coming up in the UpLift Live conference.
But before then, let’s crack on with our usual section of listeners questions in the Postbag. OK, first question comes from an Espresso+ member. It’s LinkedIn trainer Ashley Leeds and he has sent me a voice note for his question.
So, let’s listen to Ashley now.
Hey John, it’s Ashley Leeds here, the 15-minute guy. Just looking at your profile and your banner on my mobile phone, and you’ve got one of those fancy scrolling banners, but have you noticed that there’s a little button there that allows you to stop the banner from scrolling, but the trouble is it is so big on the mobile phone that you cannot see your banner.
So, I’m suggesting that maybe we should stop the scrolling banners if we want people to see what we’re doing. What are your thoughts on scrolling banners and this new button?
OK, thank you for that question, Ashley, and I had to check this within the Espresso+community to see what others had been experiencing. And yes, it does seem that even for people on an iPhone like me and like Ashley, we are seeing different things in the Premium banner image.
So, at the top of the screen you’ve got this sliding banner that sits above your profile photo, and some people on iPhone are seeing a small white slider in the bottom-right corner of the screen, which is what I’m seeing, but Ashley is now seeing a much larger, chunkier black set of buttons that overlay quite a lot of the banner image and it’s really quite offputting, I think.
Ashley has sent me a screenshot which I’ll include in the show notes.
I’m not sure whether there’s any kind of workaround for that. It just seems that some people have one user interface and other people have another.
No one’s reported seeing this on Android, so perhaps Android users are lucky and getting away with a normal version of the banner.
Just on the topic of Premium banners themselves, so that’s the idea that you can upload 5 separate images that will swing around as a sort of carousel. For me, they move a little bit too quickly, so I don’t really like them that much. But at the same time, they do give you a chance to say a bit more about your product or service, and as a LinkedIn trainer, I’m keeping mine in place so that I can demonstrate to clients what they look like, as opposed to the standard static banner that people on free accounts get. So, that’s really the only reason I’m keeping it is for demonstration purposes rather than for the utility of them.
The other question for this week comes from Caryn Yuen, who’s asking, some experts say that sharing glimpses of your personal life can help build your brand and make it easier for your audience to connect with you. How important do you think this is? How often should one be doing this? And how do you decide what’s worth sharing and what’s not?
Well, I think people are leaving money on the table if they’re just 100% professional on LinkedIn all the time. If all you talk about is your product or your service, then people don’t get to know anything about the real human being or human beings running that service. And so you don’t form as much of a connection, you’ll become a bit less memorable, and any kind of interaction feels more transactional than anything else. And I think that’s missing out.
The flipside of that, if you go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, of course, is if all you do is talk about your personal life and you put out things that many people might consider completely private, then you’re probably just not talking enough about your product or service, and all people get to know is the person. And I think that kind of oversharing perhaps isn’t best for a business networking platform.
So, the answer is some kind of mix of the two, and where you fall on the spectrum is up to you.
So, Caryn’s asking, how often should one be doing this? I don’t know if there’s a really good answer for that. I don’t actually tend to post that much personal stuff myself.
What I do do, though, is try and demonstrate my personality wherever I can, and particularly when it comes out in comments and direct messages so that people who are paying a bit more attention perhaps can get to know me rather than just focusing on my posts alone.
So, my public posts, tend to be actually quite factual, and where the personality and the personal stuff, if any, comes through, tends to be via the comments and the DMs.
How you play that, it kind of depends on what you feel comfortable with. So, if you’re not doing it at all, then even just doing this once a month would be a lot more than what you’re doing now. So, it’s worth experimenting and see what works, see what resonates, and look out for the telltale signals. You know, are people making connections with you or sending you DMs and mentioning specific points that you’ve raised, because that could be a good sign that things are working, in which case you might want to do a little bit more.
But don’t do too much because let’s remember we’re on a business networking platform and the main idea here as service providers is to try and promote our business as well as we can. So, it’s a tricky one. But good luck with whatever you do with this, Caryn, and keep in touch to let me know how you get on.
This week I interviewed the final speaker announced for our lineup for the UpLift Live 26 conference in March next month. It’s on 26 March, and that speaker is podcast host and marketing expert Phill Agnew.
Now, I did a really good interview with Phill and I have shared that on LinkedIn, so I’ll link to that in the show notes if you want to listen to the whole thing. Here’s a quick clip of Phill explaining what he’s going to be talking about at the conference.
I wanted to do something really unique for your conference, John, because I speak a lot about on the show about behavioural science, how you can apply it, how marketers apply. And I think with your audience there’s a chance to really talk about something slightly more niche, especially in terms of how it applies to LinkedIn.
So, obviously I’m a marketer who has learned how to apply behavioural science. That’s what I’ve been doing on my podcast, but I’m also a marketer who’s tested these things out myself, used them, learned what works to grow one of the UK’s largest marketing podcasts, and alongside that, 18,000 followers on LinkedIn and other experiments I’ve done on TikTok and newsletters and all these different things.
And I think the audience you have will probably be uniquely interested in learning the strategies I have used to grow that following.
So, at the conference, and this is the first time I’ve spoken about this publicly, I haven’t spoken about it on the podcast, haven’t spoken about it on my newsletter, I’m going to be breaking down the strategies that I use today to grow all of these presences.
So, that is LinkedIn, definitely includes LinkedIn, but it’s also beyond that, it includes how I grow on my newsletter, how I grow the podcast, how I grow my public presence.
The strategy is loosely called, and it might change by the time the conference starts, but it’s loosely called 100 Small Bets, and it’s based around, I think, a really important idea, which most people within the entrepreneurial space don’t necessarily think about, which is that we live in a chaotic world.
So, the best way to describe this, and I’ll get into more detail about it in the conference, but the best way to describe this is, our world is not normally distributed, so we’re in Britain.
So, I’ll talk about cricket, but the original example of this is baseball. But in cricket, the most points you can score is 6 points with a shot. You hit the ball out of the cricket ground, over the barriers, and you get 6 points. In a chaotic world, in the world of entrepreneurship, the most points you can score if you take a fantastic shot, it’s not 6 points, it’s 1000 points. That’s to quote Jeff Bezos, who I think thinks about this a lot. Love him or hate him, but his strategy is based on this as well.
So, the idea here is essentially that if you live in a chaotic world, which most entrepreneurs do, most people on LinkedIn do, most people at the conference do as well, there is benefits not in just playing it safe and consistently the whole time, but there is benefits in taking risks, making small bets, trying things that you otherwise wouldn’t, because one of those small bets has the potential not to get you 6 points, not to get you decent exposure, but to get you ridiculous outsized exposure. So, I’m going to be breaking down the strategy not only of how that works, which I’ve sort of haphazardly walked through here without any notes, but I’ll be a bit more primed at the conference.
But then I’ll also explain exactly how I apply that and how I use behavioural science to make those bets, to try and get the exposure that I think all of us need within the entrepreneurial space to get the results we demand. So, that’s what I’ll be talking about at the conference. I’m really excited to talk about it. As I said, I haven’t spoken about it anywhere else before.
So, if you want to hear that, you have to go to UpLift Live, the conference.
Do you have your own, like, favourite psychological bias or consumer insight that you love to share. Is there anything like that you can share with us?
It often changes based on what podcast I’m working on. I’m currently doing a podcast on something called the Scottish Tea Scandal, which is this incredible story of a fraudster who sold supposedly Scottish tea but wasn’t actually Scottish tea. And one of the biases that he benefited from was the country of origin effect.
So, the idea that if you attach your product to a country that people value highly, you get more sales. So, that’s one that I’m thinking about a lot at the moment.
For those who are interested in that, go and look at your packet of Yorkshire tea and try and find where that tea is grown. You won’t be able to find it. Yorkshire tea do a very good job of trying to make you think that actually tea might really be grown in Yorkshire, in Harrogate, where obviously it’s absolutely not. It’ll be grown in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or India. Anyhow, that is one that I’m thinking about a lot at the moment.
But my favourite, the one I come back to the most, is the idea of input bias. I’ve spoken to you about this before, John. I’ve spoken about it at conferences.
But this is the idea that as an individual, as a creator, the more effort you put into something and the more you showcase that effort, the more people value that effort. And there’s so many examples of this.
I think one of the most classic ones is Dyson, how they promoted their vacuum when they released it. James Dyson came out and said, I’ve made 5127 prototypes. This is the best one. Burger King, on pretty much all of their stores, talk about how they’ve been flame grilling since 1954.
Companies try extremely hard to showcase the effort that goes into creating their product. And that has an asymmetric effect on how people value that product. So, knowing that time and effort has gone into creating a product makes people value it more.
I think it’s really important, and I think it’s so important for marketers to think about in this day and age, because we are constantly told about quick fixes and silver bullets. This idea that AI might be able to, in a click of a finger, change your marketing strategy, propel you to growth that you could never imagine before.
And yet what this field of psychology tells you is almost the opposite, that if you make a lot of effort, you put a lot of time into something, and then you showcase that effort and time, people will value your product or service far more than the AI-generated silver bullet, so to speak. So, input biases is definitely one that I think about a lot.
Yeah, I wish I’d started a timer when I started planning all of the stuff that we needed to do for this conference, because I’ve put in an embarrassing number of hours to help put this thing together and I need to probably work on how I communicate that to people.
Fab stuff from Phill there. He really is one of my favourites. I just love his Nudge podcast and I’ve taken his private course. It’s really good.
So, I can just vouch for him and I know he’s going to deliver an excellent talk and the fact that he’s doing something that he’s never spoken about before I think just builds up the intrigue to this talk, and we’d really love to see you there. So, if you haven’t got your ticket yet, as this podcast comes out, our ticket prices are still £269 for the in-person ticket.
They’re going up to £299 on Valentine’s Day, 14 February. So, get in quickly. If you can’t make it into the room, you can still buy a livestream ticket as well for £99.
All of the details are on uplift-live.com. We’d love to see you there. It’s our third annual conference. We know it’s going to be a great one. So, look out for UpLift Live 26.
Every week in the build-up to the conference I have a meeting, a planning session, with my Mission Control buddies, that’s Jeremy Freeman and Gus Bhandal, and we recorded a little bit of our planning video so you can just check out what it’s like when we’re kind of mashing our brains together and trying to think what we’re going to do for the conference. So, I’m linking to that in the show notes. That was a public post this week as well.
I think I mentioned in the last episode something about profile banner image sizes. So, I have now done a short blog about that with best practices for dimensions and where the safe zones are. So, go and check that out on the blog. Again, I’m going to link to that in the show notes.
And last item for this early episode this week is about the post-it notes that are behind me whenever I do a Zoom call. A lot of people see my background and ask what they’re all about, and so every so often I post about this. Now, that I’m in my new place, I haven’t actually done a video since then, so I’ve just quickly put one of those out on my public feed, so I’ll link to that again.
But those post-it notes behind me, they’re colour-coded with my brand colours and they’re all the members of the Espresso+ community, so I feel as though I’m taking them with me every time I show up for a Zoom call.
OK, and that will do. I hope you enjoyed that show. Hope you enjoyed that little interview with Phill Agnew. Love to see you at the conference, if possible. If you’ve got any questions about it, please let me know.
If you have anything that you’d like to ask for a future episode of the show, please drop me a line. I love those voice notes. So, if you send me one of those, you’re almost guaranteed to get onto the show. And have a great weekend and we’ll speak soon.
