2. What to offer on LinkedIn
There are many products and services that potentially could be sold through
LinkedIn. You should find one by yourself as my choice was very specific to
my situation (excluding LinkedIn endorsements, which anyone can do). I can
only give some guidelines here.
The cost of LinkedIn marketing is relatively high, so whatever you sell should
have the potential to cover the costs. Let’s say your monthly total cost is
$1000 and one sale generates $10 in profit. To break even, you need to make
100 sales.
Let’s say your connection acceptance rate is 50%, link CTR is 15% and landing
page conversion is 3%.
3. • X is the number of connection request you need send to break even.
X * 0,5 * 0,15 * 0,03 = 100
X = 44444
While this number is not out of this world, it is still quite huge.
What if the profit margin was $100? You would need to send only 4444
connection requests, which is not only doable but also realistic to send manually.
The best part: when targeting is right, expensive offers convert as good as cheap
ones. However, the more expensive a product, the more you will have to invest
into the sales process. The sales cycle also tends to take longer.
Treat LinkedIn only as a mean to establish the initial connection. If your product is
best to be sold by phone, by all means, transit to a phone call at the very first
opportunity. If a landing page is your salesman, funnel people there. You get the
idea.
4. A 60-day LinkedIn premium for free?
• Premium Linkedin users have fewer limits and Linkedin looks after them with less
caution. You do not need to pay over 60 USD for such account, you can just get a
30-day trial and it will last you 60 days (you read that right, 30-day trial for 60
days!).
No need to assign your real credit or debit card. Go to Entropay instead and
register an account there, verify it and you will be able to create an unlimited
amount of prepaid cards with 10 maximum at a time. Keep a minimum deposit of
1 USD on those cards and use them to activate the Premium subscription. When
Linkedin will try to charge you, you will not have enough funds to cover the cost.
It will continue trying to do so for 30 additional days after the trial end, while you
will be retaining your premium status of your account – it may say it’s expired,
but the benefits are still there.
Sneaky cheeky peaky!
5. How to make your profiles work
• LinkedIn marketing formula is extremely simple: opportunity + authority.
Position yourself as an opportunity to get their attention, then reposition
yourself as an authority to get them do whatever you need.
While in a regular sales process we start from the authority positioning
right off the bat, in LinkedIn marketing such move would decrease the
connection acceptance rate. Let me give you an example. Have you ever
bought any insurance? Would you connect with a random insurance broker
on LinkedIn? If you answered the second question “no”, congratulations,
you are in the 95% of the population who doesn’t like salesmen.
This is why you mislead LinkedIn users first into thinking you are their
opportunity and then flip the script.
6. Opportunity positioning
• The very first thing you need know is what your target audience is. If
you don’t know this, go back to the drawing board or take a crash
course of 101 Marketing Basics and find out.
If you know your target audience, you know your target profile. These
are profiles, which you want to target.
Once you know that, you need to ask yourself a question: “Who
present an opportunity to my target profile?” or even simpler “Whom
members of my target group would absolutely like to network with?”
7. • Here are some examples:
For marketing managers, opportunity people are the following: new
clients, marketing gurus, recruiters, HR managers
• For business owners: new clients, investors, potential business
partners
• For recruiters: business owners, HR managers, highly skilled people
professionals
• Once you have decided, who is perceived as an opportunity by your
target group, let’s build a marketing profile around that.
8. • Pro tip 1: The ultimate authority for most Linkedin users are recruiters
because most people on LinkedIn are somewhat interested in new job
opportunities even if they are not actively seeking for one. An exception to
this rule is business owners, though some of them still willingly connect
with recruiters. I have managed to get up to 60-70% connection request
acceptance rate when using recruiter profiles. This is an absolutely amazing
result considering that some percent of LinkedIn profiles are totally
abandoned.
Pro tip 2: Raise the amount of connections above 500+. Then disable the
ability of other users and your 1st-degree connections to see your actual
connections count and add in your tagline: “Over 50K+ connections”. This
way people will connect with you like crazy because stupid fuckers are
bedazzled with the opportunity to massively expand their own networks.
9. • Authority positioning
Making profiles look credible is arguably the most important part of
LinkedIn marketing. If your profiles aren’t trusted by other people, they are
useless. And trust me, an average LinkedIn user is way smarter than an
average Facebook user (IG and Snapchat users are hands down the
smartest though /s). So you better position your profiles as an authority.
You need your accounts not only look real, but neat. The best possible
scenario is that you have a professional photo with 3-5 positions and
summary, which all has originally written content. However, there are ways
to cut costs on content and still make them “good enough” to sell. This is
what I did:
10. • Have a tagline that follows the formula “<position> @/at <current company> | <reason for connecting>”. For example if posing as an investor and
targeting business owners, you may have the following tagline: “Investor @ Venture Capita LLC | Looking for business opportunities” or “Investor,
Writer, Coach | Connecting with business owners to expand biz opportunities”
• Have a professional picture and don’t use stock photos! I am not even going to explain the reasons why this should be pretty obvious.
• Each job position description must contain some information. Don’t leave them blank, that looks bad! You can just use bullet points of what are the
key responsibilities of that person in that position. Nobody reads them fully anyway; it’s just for “stuffing” (like Turkey stuffing). You can use Google to
find websites that have descriptions of the positions you require. Just copy paste them. Google example “marketing manager job description”.
• Previous positions must relate to the current one and have logical time and date periods. Please don’t make an investor that has worked as a janitor a
year ago. Be realistic.
• Add education. Add any university or college and use appropriate time ranges.
• You definitely need a summary. A lot of people on Linkedin, just copy paste their company description. You can do the same. Just Google “<current
company> about us” and you will have an awesome summary. You can even add your own additions in the summary, such as “Connecting with
awesome people to expand my network” and then copy paste stuff about your current company.
• Add relevant skills to the profile
• Buy recommendations to your profile for ultimate social proof authority. You may also make your profiles recommend each other. In this case, use
your brain and keep things natural. One recommendation per profile is enough.
• Add other bits of information on the top of your profile, such as country, zip code and industry.
• Add miscellaneous bits of information, such as interests, causes, courses, birthday and so on…
11. • Finally, the more little details you put into your profile, the better chances it will have
high success rates. Take a look at the profiles of so called LIONS (LinkedIn Open
Networkers) – they have every possible bit of information available on their profiles,
from how many kids they have to how frequently they do squats (obviously a joke).
While I personally don’t think information overloading is good, it definitely helps to make
a profile look more credible.
The point here is that you need to pour your soul and willingness to make this account
awesome. You can make shortcuts here and there, but always remember that by doing
so you are cutting on your performance.
I have attached some screenshots, which showcase some example of our accounts that
utilize most of the principles outlined above.
To make your life easier, I will provide you with a custom made content randomization
tool later in this guide. It will speed up your data preparation process tenfold.
12. The secret sauce of LinkedIn outreach
• If you ever used LinkedIn, you probably know that you only can
connect with 2nd-degree connections (friends of your friends), right?
Furthermore, even these type of connections can ask you for a
“reason to connect” or “email of the person”. These spam filters are
built into LinkedIn to prevent from connection request spamming.
However, there is a way to completely bypass them. Feel intrigued?
Here’s the secret: LinkedIn mobile version doesn’t have those limits!
13. • There are multiple options to connect as a mobile user:
Use User-agent changer add-on in Firefox. This is the easiest and
cheapest option, though LinkedIn is likely to track and link multiple
profiles done this way.
• Use multiple mobile phones. I know in some countries you can get
them for cheap. This option will require an ‘offline VA’ to manage the
phones.
• Use A Multi Account Tool*.
14. • Pro tip 1: I was sending out 100 connection requests per day from
one account. While I tried sending 200 per day from a single account
without restrictions, still decided to stick with the 100 cap. To send
more, I was increasing the number of accounts.
Pro tip 2: If you have the ability to scrape your target profiles’ links
and then want to use them to add connection requests using the
mobile emulation of your browser, you can use this link format:
