Podcast Princess, Business Baddie ft.Hala Taha (Ep 382)

following and influence on LinkedIn. Young and Profiting Podcast is a top one hundred podcasts globally, and Holla has interviewed starred studded guests from the likes of Matthew McConaughey, am, Alex Hormozy, I'm the worst, Deepak Chopra, We love depat Okay, David John, Seth Godden, who Seith Godden is like the

man when it comes to marketing, and countless others. Her show was recognized in twenty twenty two as a webby Honoree Am You know we love Webb's around here and Holla has been featured in publications like Entrepreneur, Founder and The New York Times. She is an expert on networking, marketing, social media, personal branding, side hustles, entrepreneurship, and podcasting. Whoo hollow we call that what being Ah, you're a brown girl. How I'm gonna ask you where you're from?

a terrible situation. So I'm trying my best. You know. Yeah, this sounds tough because there's a lot of misinformation going on, there's a lot of emotions, and to be quite honest, a lot of people have literally learned history wrong, right, and so Palestinians and Arabic people and Jewish people also are a lot of Jewish people are really aware of the actual facts in history and really against everything that's happening. There's literally apartheid in Israel. You know, this is proven

by multiple human rights organizations. I even as a US citizen, if I go to Palestine, I'm literally treated as an oppressed person who has to drive on separate roads, who has to go through checkpoints, who somebody could kill me in Israel and literally nobody would be prosecuted, nobody would go to jail.

something was going on, I have to say something. There's innocent people at stake and not and the media is controlled, right, so I have to put myself out there. But now as an entrepreneur, I feel really lucky. You know, so many of my clients are Jewish. So many of my friends are Jewish. They know that, like daily I advocate for everyone, all races, black, white, Jewish, doesn't matter. So my daily actions show that I'm a fair person who loves everyone. So it gives me a platform now to

just be able to speak freely. So many of my clients are Jewish, and literally they're like, keep talking. You're educating me so much. So it feels good this time around that people are actually listening. But man, it's been a tough week. It's been a tough ten days.

the history. I don't you know. I've watched a couple of videos and I'm not sure. I'm like, is this the right video?

news is only going to give you one side. One side is literally controlled by propaganda and is basically paid for by the other side, right, And so if you want to seek out other sources, they have to be online on social media. Seek out. Human Rights Watch put out a report about the apartheid. Amnesty International put out a report about the apartheid. You can read through all those reports that will give you all the history, current

and previous that you need to understand. And then there's lots of documentaries about Gaza that you can look up and watch. So I would say, seek out voices. The other thing I would say is like, you've got to refuse to be called an anti semit when you want

to speak about human rights. So every post that you write, I'm not an anti Semite, I am allowed to speak freely, and I am pro human rights, I am pro peace, and then start off whatever you're going to say, you know, because that's the one thing that we need to start to isolate is that this is not a religious issue. This is a human rights issue. There's actually a lot

of Jewish people. Jewish people storm the Capitol, Jewish Voice for Peace, if not Now or all, these are like huge Jewish organizations that three sixty five days a year, even before this conflict, are trying to work towards equal human rights from Palestinians in the region. Right, So there's just a lot going on, and I think the number one thing that I want from leaders and you know, we weren't expecting to talk about Palestine on this podcast, so I do not need to talk about this this

whole time. But the number one thing that I think leaders should seriously consider is at least foster a dialogue in your business. At least recognize that the Arabic people and Palestine people that may work for you, they're not doing well right now. They need to be treated like humans, be given humanity. Their people are literally a genocide is happening in Palestine, and we're hurt, you know, we don't

feel like our lives are valued. I think that we're in a very similar spot to how black people felt during Black Lives Matter, when everybody was screaming all lives matter. Meanwhile we are having a genocide, right so it's tough. And I think having open dialogue, not persecuting people for speaking out, you know, and advocating for people to have

healthy dialogues with each other. This is the only way that us as a society is going to be able to move forward is if we actually have open dialogues and if people start learning new information on both sides so that we have like more empathy towards each other, and that takes dialogues, So not closing down comments when you put up a post, not persecuting people for speaking up, and again just like fostering this open dialogue.

I'm not afraid to say something. It's just I didn't feel educated enough to join the conversation, you know, because I'm just like, I mean, but I know then murder is wrong, no matter what side, and I know that lives have been taken on both sides, and I just feel like, across the board, that's wrong, you know. But I also know, you know, from because I am black and visibly black, that for brown people across the world

that often our voices are more easily suppressed. I mean, I'm seeing there was this I just was reading this morning on like ink dot com that there's this conference in that they do every year in Europe. I think it's called like the Global or something Summit, and the CEO or whatever, the conference leader, let me say if I can find it. He said something that just basically said, like, you know, like killing people is wrong and that genocide

is not okay. Facebook dropped out of the conference. Google dropped out of the conference, and I was like, wait, it is it wrong just saying to kill so he literally he didn't say I'm with It's just, hey, like, genocide is not okay, killing people is not okay. We should have peace, just that simple. And people are dropping out because like, what are we saying so it is okay to kill people? I just I'm confused about what the pushback.

A year later, the British armed Jewish people to take over Palestine. They forcibly drove out eight hundred thousand people out of five hundred villages. They killed fifteen thousand people. These are the descendants of the people in Gaza right now. They're refugees that were literally forcibly removed from their homes. People are still living in homes that they have that Palestinans have the keys to their homes. Their grandmothers still

have the keys of their homes. There's Jewish settlers and people in Israel who literally live in the same homes that Palestinians used to live in. They have a saying they took it fully furnished, because they literally just moved into people's houses with their furniture. Okay. And so these people are now in Gaza as refugees and they've been blockaded for sixteen years. They're not allowed to leave. They're

blockaded from Egypt and Israel, not allowed to leave. And these people Hamas who committed the actions on October seventh, have been under blockade. Most of these people are between seventeen and thirty seven years old, most of either their entire lives or most of their lives. Not even allowed to leave Gaza. Okay. They're trapped in an open air prison, A better name for it is a concentration camp. Because

they've committed no crime other than being Palestinian. They're not allowed to leave a city that is the size of Detroit, okay, and it is blocked off by a wall, and that is one part of the occupied territories in Israel. The other occupied territory is the West Bank, and so the West Bank is a small piece of land that was given to the Palestinians. It is occupied. People have to drive on separate roads, their water is rationed. All this

is all controlled. There's checkpoints and so on. And again, if somebody gets killed in the West Bank, there's no persecution of any Israeli that did it. And people are still stealing people's homes, demolishing homes, stealing land, and they're just taking over more and more of the West Bank. They don't respect the boundaries that they gave the Palestine people. Before this conflict, two hundred and fifty people were murdered,

including forty seven children, by Israeli radical settlers. Nobody talks about this, right, so it was not unprovoked. It was seventy six years of oppression and literally like violence ongoing to Palestinians constantly. They're basically controlled. It's like segregation like how it was back in the day in America. Right, that is what's going on in the region. And so

then this Hamas attack happened. Of course, nobody condone that, but we can't help for people to be radicalized if they're literally trapped behind a wall and have don't have equal rights, and there you know, family is killed, bombed every five years and whatever right, people are obviously going to become radicalized. They're not treated equally. So that's the root cause of the problem, and that's what people need to get educated on.

are using car batteries because they have anticipated power outages before. Yeah, car batteries just to charge their phone, solar panels just to get electricity. But anyway, it's hard to communicate. But the stories that I have heard of young twenty somethings, families who will just get a phone call and say,

this is the Israeli Army. We're letting you know there's going to be a strike, get out now, and then they don't know if that's real, or if they need to like pack up and leave and that state of high alert, that state of fear, and I know that it's been going on for decades as you've described. That's for me, it's never okay. And I feel like we just don't learn from our own fricking history. I know it's crazy for I and a war does not equate peace.

happened to them, literally to the Palestinians. And we had nothing to do with the Holocaust, right, So it's a I feel that the Palestinians have taken the brunt of the Holocaust, like all the pain and the terror and everything has just for seventy six years Palestinians have been unrightfully punished for something they did not do.

It wasn't as wide as a street, like you know, and like I just remember thinking like wow, like you know, for so many people, you know, like whether you're Christian or Jewish or or Muslim, Jesus is a figure in all three of those like religious whatever that figure takes on,

whether it's a prophet or savior or whatever. But I just remember thinking, how sad is it that this important, beautiful place to these three religions is radicalized where I can be in the water that's clearly touching both sides, but I can't get close to this imaginary line that

men have created. And I just thought, wow, it just seemed it was such a beautiful place Jordan, but this underlying sense of like impending violence, and I just remember thinking, like it just seemed that part just hit me as really sad, Like yeah.

so they don't even know that happened. They don't know that like it started with ethnic cleansing, and so there's just all this misinformation and essentially me having an identity of being Palestinian, it is threatening to anybody who has an Israeli identity because it threatens their identity. So they want to act like we don't exist, or we were a lost people, or Israel was a land with no people.

But in reality, we were ethnically cleansed, and even now gaz is being en cleansed with they forced a million people to move out of their homes and they bombed all their homes. Now those million people they have nowhere to go. They might end up going to Egypt or Syria,

and they're just again like moving more Palestinians out. The last thing I'll say about this is that there's five million Palestinians still living in the occupied territories of Palestine which are now Israel, and there's like seven or eight million Israelis. It's like literally almost half the people are still Palestinian there, and there's like ten million Palestinians outside of there that basically are refugees now not allowed to

go back. So it's a big issue. Like there's people who are alive today that both think that they're Palace. There's people alive today that believe there Israeli. We need to figure it out, we need to live in peace together.

helping us. Thank god. This is really the first time that like really the black community is mobilizing and supporting us, and Jewish people, Jewish people who know what's going on, and now we never really had other communities supporting us, and now we have these two communities really helping to amplify our voices and it feels like maybe there will be some real change.

have been from Black voices that have shared other Palestinian voices. Yeah, and I'm just like wait, and so as I'm reading and I'm learning about, I'm loving is that I see a lot, especially like the lack influencer women are posting for better understanding, and then you see people angry and you're like, well, she's allowed to say I don't know much about this topic if you can share respectly in the comments, because I'd love to learn, because I'd love

to support humanity overall. And people get really, really really angry at that, and so that's very telling when you say I believe that people shouldn't be murdered, and people getting mad at.

It's retally like there's like, what do you We're defending ourselves, defending yourself from what from little babies who literally didn't vot for Hamas, Like we need to be fair and like just all human lives need to be treated equally, and that that's like I think what all the pales Studians are crying about. We don't we're not supporting Hamas. It's but we can't control Hamas. And until the occupation is over, Hamas is not going away because they're resisting

against uh not having freedom right. So it's just we just need a bloodshed to stop, and I hope it stops because I need to focus on work.

And all my cousins were there. They're all my age, and everybody's like really open where you can just like I didn't ever call to go over my aunt's house, you know, I would just like wake up, knock on her door and she'd come make me breakfast, and then I'd go, you know, take a walk and like check out the olive trees and the fig trees with my cousins and climb trees and just be kids, you know, find like stray dogs and puppies and take care of them, or like little birds and take care of them and

stuff like that. So we were just like regular kids, just you know, enjoying the outdoors, and you know, and then in the meanwhile of all that, there'd be like a Israeli tank driving by, like and that was normal, right.

so heartbreaking to see here what's happening. But it's just like it's just it's this strange juxtaposition that like it could really be this war torn area, and kids will find a way to play and laugh and enjoy each other in the midst of all the terribleness. They will find the little piece of joy available and then use use it up the most but so I'm glad you were able to have some good memories. I think maybe we should take like a cleansing mode, come back and talk a little bit about business.

we answer questions about entrepreneurship, business and money. So we would love for you to maybe answer answer some business entrepreneurship questions. Yeah, perfect, great. So so yeah, so, I mean it's hard to switch on, Like my brain is like, oh, that's just so twenty twenty three. I have found how

that has been. I would say eighty percent of my friends that are in business, including myself, had a harder time in twenty twenty three than like then it's been in a number of years, and it was kind of

a hard business year. Have you seen that kind of like trend in your business and your business friends, and what can people do to kind of like, you know, like what are your suggestions of what have you done to make sure that business still runs despite whatever it happened in twenty I don't know what happened in twenty twenty three, but I feel like there was a bit of a squeeze for most people.

in order to get leads for our business. Obviously every business is different, but I would say putting yourself out there, creating a personal brand of course, was just something that I talk a lot about, and then just proactively generating leads rather than just expecting them everybody to just like find you. You've got to put yourself out there, create content and So talk about.

So we lost a lot of clients. And unfortunately, the social side of the business is really talent heavy, and so that caused me to have to like let go of some people, which was really tough because it was nothing with their performance, but it was just because we didn't have a lot of clients, and I sort of had to consolidate and restructure the social team so that it would be more flexible as clients leave and come and so on. Now we're like fully stacked. I'm hiring

again and all this stuff. But it's scary because again, if the economy goes bad again, people are going to pull out and I'm gonna have to, you know, downsize my team. So agencies that are talent heavy are really tough in these economic times because you're always having to scale down talent scale up talent. The network side is really scalable. I have like a five person team, and whether we have like twenty podcasters or fifty podcasters, it's

really the same size team. So that's a little bit more scalable, and that's one of the reasons why I've been moving toward and focusing more on growing my network because it's not so talent heavy, understood.

to hire. Like every time I get like three new clients for social, I have to stand up a whole new social team where I could hire or bring on like twenty podcasters and bring on one per to support them or something.

that's like one example of a DM campaign. Another one would be like, let's say one of our clients has a new book coming out. Every time they put up a post about their book, anybody who likes and comments, we then retarget in the DMS. Hey, I noticed that you liked my post about my upcoming book. I'd love for you to check out the pre order. You can get this free thing x y Z Here's that's such a.

to run someone's account. It's really intensive, right. But I have a LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. The next one is Decemmer thirteenth and fourteenth, and basically I have a two day training where I take everyone through what I teach my

team about how to hack LinkedIn. So we go over creating a personal brand, copywriting design, and then day two is all about the algorithm, engagement hacks, DM campaigns, and I basically teach the same thing that I teach my team, and a lot of people will like send in their social lead or send in a couple team members and then they're literally up to speed. And I've created influencers. I started this about a year ago and there's been like dozens of influencers that have come out of this program.

blogs were super hot. We were like, you know, up there with rap radar and all those other types of blogs. We almost had a show on MTV. They filmed me all summer. I was going to be the lead of a show right after they ended Jersey Shore, and I was like hosting parties at the time with this blog site and everything like this. MTV backed out two weeks before they were supposed to air the show. I was devastated because by then I got rejected for eighty seven.

I also was swaying the morning's co host for two weeks, and then they fired me after two weeks. And then I didn't get MTV, and so I had all these at bats but didn't make it. So then I got like sort of thought, all right, maybe this isn't for me. Let me go into corporate. I worked at HP than Disney, and I started my podcast young and profiting about four years into my corporate career when I just felt bored and wasn't doing it for money. I was just thought,

you know, I know how to do this. Podcasts are hot. Now I had all these online radio shows working on the side of Hot ninety seven and when I had the blog site, so I knew a lot about radio and production, right, Okay, let me just do this, And so I started this podcast. By episode two, I had ten volunteers in a Slack channel. I had all these fans on LinkedIn because I started my LinkedIn journey at this point that would reach out to me and be like, I just want to help your show change my life.

And so I knew how to do all these different things audio editing, video editing, social media, blog posting, building websites. I knew all this different marketing stuff. So I started

taking these volunteers and then teaching them things. I taught one guy how to do videos, one guy how to do a website, one girl had to do my social Then fast forward two years later, my show is like really big, and all the guests that are coming on my show are these rich CEOs, authors, influencers, And at the end of my show, I kept getting asked the same question, how did you build your LinkedIn? Can you do this for me? How did you grow your podcast?

Can you do this for me? And I had all these volunteers, and I would always say like, I'm so sorry. I just have a volunteer team. I've got a corporate career. This is just for fun until COVID hit and I found myself with all this free time and a couple of these guests on my show were being very persistent about being my clients, and then I just started taking my first clients. My second client, guys, was a thirty

thousand dollars retainer a month. Oh, my second client. And so within six months my company was already making one hundred grand a month. I had thirty paid employees around the world, quit my job, and just the rest is his story. Now I'm like, you know, my company is making probably almost five million dollars by the end of the year this year. So it's been an awesome journey of just lots of struggle until one time it hit, you know, and then I just kept rolling with it.

I'm writing books. So like, personally, I'm going to put out a book in twenty twenty five hopefully. So I don't have a name yet, just getting started now. So like I just signed a contract and thank you, thank you, So going to be writing a book, going to be putting out I'm sure I'll put out a podcast course,

But really it's just honestly growing my network. And we're the only network that has a full service social media arm so we're not just monetizing people's podcasts, we're monetizing their YouTube, we're monetizing their social branded content, and then we're able to execute on all of it on their behalf. So it's a really innovative approach, and there's no other networks that are really even competing with us in this space.

amplify their career and maybe build a brand. Do you have any keys to LinkedIn that you can share?

That way LinkedIn can basically match your post and serve them to people who have those keywords in their profile. So again, LinkedIn is looking for experts. So if you put up a post and it has a keyword, like let's say you're in real estate, you put up a post that has the real estate keyword, your profile is validated that you're a real estate expert. You've got that keyword, You've got people who have like put skills related to real estate on your profile, and so LinkedIn can validate

through their algorithms that you're an expert. Now LinkedIn is going to serve that real estate post to other people who have real estate in their profile in their first connections. If those people engage on your posts, they're going to share it with those people's followings who are likely in the same industry niche, and then you'll have more visibility.

That's more important than the actual content itself. So, for example, in your caption, if you're trying to go viral, you should not link out to an external third party link because LinkedIn's goal is to keep people engaged on the platform for as long as possible, So you never want to bring them to like YouTube, for example in the caption, because LinkedIn will suppress the post. There's also all these different like other spam filters that you need to avoid,

such as like chunky paragraphs. People like to skim because everybody's reading on mobile, So you want to have like line by line content on social media. A paragraph is really one or two sentences, not three to five sentences, right, So you want to have paragraph breaks and make it more skimmable in terms of your caption and as short as possible. Also, you want to make sure, like I said, that you have got keywords in your posts. You want

to make sure you're using hashtags correctly. Three hashtags max.

you tracking the trends of LinkedIn? Are you just seeing it because you're in it so much?

keep testing poles and see how they do. Right, So I see the trends really quickly because of that, and can validate things like that.

So there's so much like room to grow. There's there's not a lot of competition, and if you know the engagement acts like if you took my class, for example, anybody who takes my class from the first week, they're getting three hundred likes on their stuff, like they're doing really well and getting a lot of visibility because there's not a lot of competition, especially if you sort of know how to leverage the algorithm to your benefit, so

you can become the dominant person in your niche on LinkedIn, and that can give you a lot of leverage. The other reason why it's a actually great for business owners is because it allows you to do really great proactive lead generation. You can send out an unlimited amount of dms. There's a couple different hacks, like, for example, you can

join a group and on LinkedIn. You guys, if you're not really LinkedIn savvy, you may not know this, but you're only allowed to DM your first connections, right, But you can unlimitedly DM your first connection. So let's say you get up to the limit of thirty thousand first connections. You can DM those thirty thousand connections about one thousand or two thousand a day and generate leads just through

those thirty thousand connections. So it's always a goal to try to reach and get those thirty thousand connections with people who are in your target audience for your business. Right outside of that, you can join groups that have your target audience, and once you're in that group, you can then DM everybody in that group. So, for example, when I'm soliciting my LinkedIn masterclass, I'll join all the social media groups and I'll be dming people to join my and I get so many leads in business and

business folks that way. The other thing that you can do is just understand the titles that you're looking for who typically buys from you and then proactively invite those people to your network and then again DM them and start a campaign with them. So there's no other platform like that that you can like search. LinkedIn has all

these different search attributes. You can search by locations, title, company, you know, so many different search factors, and also by behaviors, the events they sign up for, the groups they sign up for, the people they engage with, and then you can retarget them in the DMS, which is really different

from any other social platforms. So when somebody comes to me for social media and they are like a coach or they have some sort of B to B business, anybody who basically offers a service that's not necessarily like a product, right, products don't do that well on LinkedIn, but any services do. I'm always like, LinkedIn is where I'm going to get you ROI. Let's start with LinkedIn. I'll get you ROI. Then you can go onto other

platforms because that's it's the easiest place to make money online. Honestly, it's crazy.

Thank you for being so vulnerable and open, you know, as a Palestinian about what's happening and just giving us, you know, educating us on some which I'm sure so many of our listeners have never really known or heard before, and maybe you have, but to hear from someone who gets to experience it, you know, from that group, I think is really critical. So thank you for sharing your

voice in that way. But also thank you for being this amazing business woman that was able to pivot and then share like all this insights about what does it look like to market yourself, what does it look like to grow a business, and you know, what does it look like to pivot? When you get so many knows, it'd be so easy to give up, and you didn't. So we really thank you for sharing all parts of yourself today.