A conversation from the strange, suspended spring of 2020 about the quiet giant of the social platforms, and the human connection no algorithm was ever built to give us.
LinkedIn Marketing with Scott Aaron: Building a Brand, a Network, and a Bankroll the Organic Way
There is a quiet giant among the social platforms, and it does not shout. It does not flood the feed with dancing strangers or filtered sunsets or the manufactured glitter of borrowed wealth. It simply waits, patient as a library long after closing, for the people who have come to work rather than to wander. That giant is LinkedIn, and on the fourteenth of May in that strange, suspended spring of 2020, I sat down across a screen with Scott Aaron on the Digital Marketing Solutions podcast to ask what the platform truly is, what it can do, and what no algorithm on earth was ever built to give us.
What follows is not a tidy transcript but a fuller telling, a gathering of the ideas Scott handed me that afternoon, arranged so that a business owner brand new to LinkedIn and a marketer weary of the platform might both walk away with something worth keeping.
The Man Beneath the Method
Scott Aaron did not begin his working life staring into the cold blue glow of a business network. He began it in the warm and sweating world of the flesh, in the clang of iron and the hum of treadmills, a certified sports nutritionist and personal trainer who owned his own gym and understood the human body the way a mechanic understands an engine. He built people. He watched them grow stronger under his hands. And then, somewhere around 2013, he went looking for a second stream of income, and he found the internet.
I’ve been in online marketing now for about seven years. That journey began with network marketing. I was making a pivot from a traditional brick-and-mortar, which was a health club. I was a certified sports nutritionist, personal trainer, and gym owner, and I was looking to expand my wellness business by adding that extra stream of income.
Within four and a half years he had turned that pivot into roughly four hundred thousand dollars. But the real turning, the hinge on which his whole future would swing, arrived in 2015, when he stopped scattering seed across the crowded and trampled soil of Facebook and Instagram and planted himself instead on LinkedIn.
I realized that the best building block for any successful business is the amount of connections you can have, and the amount of human connection you can create. I wasn’t finding that organically through Facebook and Instagram, but I was finding it on LinkedIn.
A friend named Joe Lonzo watched Scott’s method working, watched the calls stack up and the clients arrive, and told him plainly that he ought to be teaching it. So Scott did what he had done his whole life with workout plans and diet plans. He built structure around the thing that worked. In February of 2016 he launched his own coaching and consulting firm, devoted to a single stubborn idea, that entrepreneurs could grow on LinkedIn organically, without costly tactics, without paid tricks, and without ever renting an audience they could instead earn.
Why LinkedIn, and the Barbecue That Isn’t a Business
I wanted to know why. Scott uses every platform under the sun, omnipresent as weather, findable on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Tumblr and all the rest. So why had LinkedIn become the ground he chose to build on? His answer arrived as a series of small, perfect parables, and they are worth carrying with you.
Pinterest is a search engine. That’s where people go to look for things, do-it-yourself, business, home, work, and life. Facebook is the barbecue of social media. That’s where people go to hang out, to talk shop, to share pictures of their dogs and their kids, to complain about the weather, the traffic, and the government. Instagram is a reality TV show. That’s where people go to get lost in other people’s lives wishing it was theirs. It’s the most disingenuous platform out there.
Do carry that comparison, because it does more work than a hundred marketing seminars. Facebook is the backyard cookout where everyone is loud and no one is buying. Instagram is the glossy broadcast where the wealth is frequently painted on and the confidence is frequently a costume. And LinkedIn, in Scott’s telling, is something else entirely, a different animal running in a different league.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, it’s not social networking, it’s not social media, it’s social entertainment. People spend time on those platforms to entertain or to be entertained. LinkedIn is different. LinkedIn is a search engine. It’s a business network. It’s not social entertainment, it’s social education and social information. That’s why people are there.
Then he reached for the demographics, and the numbers tell their own quiet story. On Facebook and Instagram, he said, the average user skews young and thin of wallet, roughly eighteen to twenty-nine years old and earning thirty thousand dollars a year or less. LinkedIn’s average member sits between thirty and fifty-five, earning seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars or more, and where Facebook caps your friendships at five thousand souls, LinkedIn opens the gate to thirty thousand organic connections. He borrowed a line from the entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk to seal the point.
Your net worth is always in direct correlation to your network. If you’ve got a small network, you’re going to have a small net worth. Build a large network, and you can build a large net worth.
Beneath all of it runs an older current, a book from 1910 that Scott returns to like a compass finding north. Wallace D. Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich more than a century ago, and its central instruction has outlived nearly everything written since.
Instead of living in a world of competition and comparison, live in a world of creation and collaboration.
On Facebook and Instagram, Scott found egos too large to fit through a doorway and almost no one willing to genuinely collaborate. On LinkedIn he found people who would answer a message, who would talk, who would connect. That was the whole of it. That was where he chose to stay.
The Search Engine Hiding in Plain Sight
Here is the insight that separates Scott Aaron from the great milling crowd of people posting into the void. LinkedIn is not merely a place to be seen. It is a place to be searched. When Microsoft purchased the platform, they wove search-engine optimization into the very fabric of every profile, which means your profile is not a resume sleeping in a drawer. It is a page waiting to be found.
When Microsoft bought them out, they embedded SEO into everyone’s profile. If you keyword-optimize your profile the right way, there’s a dashboard everyone now has that shows you how many searches you appeared in this week and how many profile visits you’re getting. If those numbers are substantially low, your profile isn’t optimized.
He offered proof drawn from his own life. A man was scheduled to call him the very next day, a stranger who had gone to Google, typed a phrase about marketing oneself on LinkedIn, and found Scott’s LinkedIn profile ranking first, above even Scott’s own website. The lesson lands hard and lands clean. Treat the words of your profile the way a careful web builder treats the words of a website. Do not write a vague little sentence about helping businesses do this or that. Salt your title and your description with the exact terms your ideal client will type, so that when they go searching for a digital marketer, or a nutritionist, or whatever it is you truly are, yours is the face that surfaces first.
Three Ways to Stand Apart in a Crowded Field
I pressed him on the hardest problem in any saturated market. If a hundred people claim the same expertise, how does one of them rise above the roar? Scott gave me three answers, and they stack upon one another like stones in a wall.
The first is to build an audience organically, an audience assembled so deliberately that it becomes a mirror of your ideal client. When you know precisely who you serve, and you gather a network shaped in that image, and you feed that network genuinely good content, they engage. Engagement lifts you. Slowly, steadily, you become the thought leader you already were.
The second is the quiet power of the testimonial, which on LinkedIn takes the shape of personal recommendations. Scott calls this feature the Better Business Bureau of the platform, a public square where the people you have served can testify to the work you did for them.
Since I launched my coaching practice in 2016, I’ve been very consistent about asking the people I’ve worked with to write me a recommendation. I’ve gathered close to 450 written recommendations. It’s more than anybody else on LinkedIn. I want my clients to speak of my work for me, without me having to sell.
The third answer is content, but content of a particular and generous kind. Not the shrill sales pitch of the freshly certified guru who promises to carry you from zero to eight figures by Thursday, but content that informs and content that educates, and above all content aimed at what the audience actually wants rather than at what the author happens to wish to say.
Don’t inform and educate your audience on the things you want to talk about. Educate and inform your audience about what they actually want to hear.
Talk About Problems, Not Tools
Scott has little patience for the trick of the day and the tool of the day, the endless carnival of shiny software that marketers wave like barkers on a midway. His attention lives somewhere deeper and steadier.
I don’t really want to talk about tools, I want to talk about problems. The better we understand the problem, the better we can diagnose which tools we need to solve it.
A gym owner does not need more phone calls in the abstract. A gym owner needs more memberships. An online business does not need more money, because that ambition is too broad and too blurry to act upon. It needs more subscribers, or more course sales, or more downloads, some specific and nameable thing that can actually be pursued. Find the real problem, Scott insists, and the right tool reveals itself almost on its own.
There is a fierceness in how he guards his own work, a refusal to be ordinary that he describes with a memorable phrase.
It’s called locking all doors and windows. That’s why I have patents on my programs. They’re copyrighted, they’re trademarked, they’re licensed. In a saturated digital world, we need to do whatever we can to separate ourselves. I want to stay in my own lane. I want to carve my own path.
The Human Beneath the Handle
For all his talk of dashboards and demographics, Scott circles again and again back to something almost tender, the biological truth that we are creatures built for connection.
As human beings, physiologically, we are built around connection. We are built around forming communities and building relationships. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. When you’re able to form true, genuine, meaningful relationships, your business will skyrocket.
I asked him whether trust could be earned quickly, whether a person would truly hand over their hard-won money after only a conversation or two. He surprised me. Sometimes, he said, the sale happens in a single interaction, and the secret is not a clever pitch but a single disarming question, asked at the very beginning.
I ask one of the most important questions you can ask when you first talk to someone you don’t know. I say, great to connect with you, what specifically is your business needing most that I could help you with? People want you to tell them about your business. I don’t do that, because I don’t know what my business can do for that person until I hear how I can help them.
He listens. He anchors what he hears. He repeats it back and threads it gently into how he might help, and in doing so he builds the know, like, and trust that closes the distance between strangers. And then, with the grin of a man who has said it a hundred times and means it every single time, he gave me the line I have not been able to shake loose since.
Comparing LinkedIn to other social media platforms is like comparing apples to bowling balls.
You Are the Brand
When I asked how personal branding differs from branding a business, Scott answered before I had even finished the question, because to him the two are not separable at all.
You are the brand. You have your business and what it provides, but you are the brand. You are what brings and breathes life into that business. People right now are looking for thought leaders, people willing to give without expecting anything in return. The best way to show up on LinkedIn is to give, and give, and give, because you will get back in return more than you can ever imagine, if you stay consistent with it.
Authenticity, and the Thing You Cannot Automate
Scott automates plenty. He is no man frightened of systems. But there is one thing he guards from the machinery entirely, one thing he will not surrender to the gears.
There are some things you should absolutely automate, but you can’t automate human connection. It’s impossible. The more organically, genuinely, and authentically you show up every single day on that platform, the better your results are going to be.
He grieves a little for the buyers of the world, the ones getting robbed blind by strangers posing before borrowed cars and rented houses, holding cash that was never theirs, selling a success that was only ever a stage set built to fall apart the moment the money changes hands. His antidote is simple and old-fashioned. Be verifiable. Be real. Let a doubter search your name and find dozens of reviews of your book, dozens of reviews of your podcast, hundreds of recommendations on your profile, all of it consistent, all of it true.
I always tell people, just Google me. Type in Scott Aaron LinkedIn. It’s all out there for you to read. If you don’t believe I’m real, go follow me on every single platform I’m on.
The Magic Formula for the First Message
Because so many people ruin the very first message, Scott has reduced the art of the opening to a small, repeatable ritual he calls his magic formula. It is five sentences, no more, and it never once tries to sell.
The first sentence names the person, a simple human courtesy that most people somehow skip. The second builds a bridge, a genuine point of connection between the sender and the receiver. In my own case, Scott would have noticed that I host a business podcast just as he does, and he would have said so plainly. The third is a call to action, a question, because questions are the small keys that turn answers loose into the light.
Step one, mention the person’s name. Step two, create the connecting point between you and that person. Step three, a call to action. Questions lead to answers. You have to ask to get.
And woven quietly into that formula is one small word that Scott chooses with a surgeon’s care.
It’s been physiologically proven that when someone simply reads the word support, it triggers a chemical release of oxytocin from the brain, the feel-good hormone, just like dopamine or endorphins. When someone reads the word support, they’re automatically put at ease.
The Mistakes That Sink All the Rest
I confessed to Scott the small daily irritations of the platform, the insincere comments and the cringing little videos, the connection requests from interesting-seeming strangers who reveal themselves within seconds to be salesmen in a terrible hurry. He knew them all, and he told me a story to prove it. A man had sent him a connection request bearing a polite note that swore he was not trying to sell anything, only to connect. Scott accepted the request. Two days later there arrived a seventeen-paragraph sales pitch, and Scott removed the connection without a second thought.
You have to earn the right to sell someone. You earn that right by taking some time out of your day to hop on a call and learn about each other. People just overcomplicate the process. The reason so many aren’t succeeding in business right now is that they don’t know how to be a human being.
Where to Spend, and Where Never To
On the practical matter of money, Scott was blunt to the edge of comedy. There is exactly one thing on LinkedIn he begs you never to buy.
There’s one thing you should never, ever, ever spend a single penny on, and that’s LinkedIn ads. They’ve got the worst cost-per-click of every single platform. Don’t even think about it. LinkedIn has the highest organic reach and visibility of any social media right now, so you don’t need to pay for it.
And when it comes to groups and forums, which on LinkedIn can decay into the same wall of self-promotion that clutters Facebook, his counsel is to stop hunting for a good room and simply build your own. Name your group with the right keywords, invite the right people into it, and when a stranger goes searching for a group in your field, yours will be the one that rises up to meet them.
Create Your Own Economy
I ended where the year itself lay heaviest, in the depths of a pandemic that had emptied the streets and filled the news with dread. How, I asked, does an entrepreneur keep their head above water while the whole world seems to be drowning? Scott refused despair the way a lighthouse refuses the dark.
You have to go create your own economy. Don’t fall to the mercy of what’s going on. You are the most valuable asset to your business. This is the time when everyone’s home, when people have never been more available. Turn your excuses into reasons.
And then he said the thing that lifted the whole conversation up out of marketing entirely and set it down somewhere close to philosophy, a small hymn to human possibility that I will let stand as his final word.
Human beings are the only creatures in the world who can actually become something different. Gorillas have the same life cycle, butterflies the same, bumblebees the same. But we can become athletes, astronauts, teachers, speakers. We’re the only species that can learn something new and become something different at any given time. People don’t realize how magical they are. You want to become something? Go become it. We’re the only ones who can think something and make it our reality.
That is the strange and stubborn gospel of Scott Aaron, delivered at the bottom of a hard year and holding up remarkably well in the light of every year since. Build the network, and the net worth follows behind it. Optimize the profile, and let yourself be found. Give before you get, ask before you sell, and never, ever automate the one human thing that cannot be faked. LinkedIn, in his hands, stops being a website and becomes instead a way of moving through the working world, patient and personal and quietly compounding, one real connection at a time.
Listen or Watch the Full Conversation
You can watch the full interview on YouTube or BitChute, or you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Listen Notes.
About the Guest
Scott Aaron is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning online marketer, a best-selling author, a top-ranked podcaster, and a sought-after speaker. He is the go-to specialist for converting traffic, establishing connections, creating residual income through LinkedIn, and building personal brands built to last. After immersing himself fully in LinkedIn and social media strategy, he rose quickly as a leader in generating real results for entrepreneurs, online business owners, and business coaches, and his program has helped thousands experience explosive, organic growth without complicated or costly tactics. People-focused and result-driven, Scott teaches others how to create wealth and organic traffic online, and you can find him at scottaaron.net.
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Once the connection is made and the trust is built, this is where the relationship gets remembered and tended.
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