LinkedIn Isn’t Just a Job Site: Building Relationships with Gus Bhandal

This week on Live & Linking I’m joined by Gus Bhandal, Founder of The M Guru and a marketing strategist with 30 years of experience. Gus knows LinkedIn inside out, so naturally we had plenty to talk about. We started with something I think a lot of people get wrong: LinkedIn isn’t just a job site. It’s a place to build your personal brand, start conversations and develop relationships with people who might eventually become customers, suppliers, collaborators or simply good connections.

We got into the practical stuff too. Gus shared his four-step approach to LinkedIn: optimise your profile, curate your audience, create useful content and engage with other people. We talked about why your headline and About section matter, why commenting is such an underrated way of getting noticed, and why you should think about LinkedIn like a networking event. We also covered content consistency, with Gus recommending at least one useful post a week rather than going mad for 30 days and then disappearing. There was even time for an unexpected visit from Andrew and Pete to talk about Atomicon.

And then we roasted one of Gus’s LinkedIn posts. A simple, funny comment on a post about LinkedIn becoming a dating site ended up generating around 13,000 impressions. It was a great example of the point we’d been discussing all along: you don’t always need to create huge amounts of content to get noticed. Sometimes joining the right conversation is enough. If you want practical ideas for using LinkedIn more confidently, building genuine relationships and letting a bit more of the real you come through, this is well worth a listen.

TIMESTAMPS

00:23 – Welcome to Live & Linking
01:26 – Meet Gus Bhandal
02:16 – What LinkedIn is really for
05:12 – Where to start with an old profile
07:37 – Gus’s four-step strategy
08:18 – The power of commenting
09:09 – LinkedIn as a networking event
15:03 – Creating consistent content
16:13 – Content albums
32:06 – The Squeeze membership
33:11 – Roasting Gus’s post
34:07 – The LinkedIn dating site post
36:28 – Wrapping up

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Guest contact details

Gus Bhandal
Email: mguruuk@themguru.co.uk
Phone: 07958 477 890
Website: https://www.themguru.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mguruuk