Today on Freedom In Five Minutes, I talk about how LinkedIn is still an awesome place to connect. Some people might disagree but there is a secret behind the positive impact in my business when people see content through Linkedin.
Listen to this episode and learn how to grow your business by utilizing automation with LinkedIn.
Overview & Episode Content
- Is LinkedIn a Pool of Leads? Or a Pool of Bots?
- Do People Still Use Linkedin to Connect?
- Connecting is All About Building Rapport
- Make Connections on LinkedIn with These Tools and Automation
- How to Utilize If-Then Conditional Flows in Lead Automation
- You Can Make Connections on LinkedIn via Automation Without Being Spammy
Is LinkedIn a Pool of Leads? Or a Pool of Bots?
For years, LinkedIn has been one of the best places to do lead generation. But recently, it has become a salesy and spammy platform. A lot of people that I know on LinkedIn feel like people only want to connect so that the autoresponder can invite them to buy stuff.
I was interacting with people on LinkedIn not too long ago and it wasn’t long before I got a thank you and a “by the way I do this stuff…”
I wonder why people would do this?
A lot of people just are despondent. They do not like LinkedIn anymore. It used to be such a beautiful place to connect with people and it has turned into a spammy, automated, and nasty place.
And then, you get very obvious bots that try to connect with you — or using some kind of automation.
These bots usually say something like, “Hey, love your stuff. I thought it would be mutually beneficial to connect.”
Or it might say, “I love what you’re doing at ProSulum, LLC”
And it’s obviously a bot using a merged tag because who says “ProSulum, LLC?” A spammy and bot infested platform can be a really annoying place to be sometimes.
Do People Still Use Linkedin to Connect?
A lot of people are done with LinkedIn. It is already so saturated with spam bots that people feel like they can no longer sell and connect to people on that platform. People feel that LinkedIn is no longer a good marketplace.
Well, I beg to differ. A lot of the things that people get stuck with when it comes to any type of automation is that it needs to be robotic. The fact is, most people suck at automation and people can tell right away if something is automated or not.
Part of the reason why people get so fed up with platforms like LinkedIn and email is because of spam. These days, people cannot do cold email lead generation anymore. It no longer works because everyone hates spam.
If you are going to just blast your mail to ten thousand people, of course, you will be marked as spam. Of course, it is not going to work. You have to do things in a way where it is much more personalized and creative yet automated.
Personally, I am going to stick with LinkedIn in this particular case because there are only two things to keep in mind when doing any type of lead generation.
Connecting is All About Building Rapport
First, if everyone says something does not work, then more than likely it will work if you do it the right way.
Second, if you are doing any type of automation when it comes to lead generation, you have to be much more creative nowadays.
Most of the people on LinkedIn are business people looking to connect with other business people. The biggest problem is that they are also looking to sell to other business people.
To differentiate yourself, you must develop a rapport with people and give a lot of value upfront. By doing that, you are able to build a relationship with your target audience in a way where you are not being an annoying pest.
As Dan Kennedy would say, “From an annoying pest to a welcome guest.”
I remember back when I started my business in 2009, I would go to a lot of networking events. One thing I noticed were two types of people in these events.
There were those people who literally just wanted to chat, have fun, talk, and connect to someone. The other type of people were those who came around and simply tossed business cards in your face, “Hey take a business card. Hey, take a card, here you go.”
They would throw out a thousand business cards to a thousand people. And then, they wonder why no one called. No relationship was built whatsoever and no one would buy from them. That is the way most people use LinkedIn.
Make Connections on LinkedIn with These Tools and Automation
A few months ago, I went back to LinkedIn. I thought that there was an opportunity there and I had already been using LinkedIn to grab names and data for sending out cold emails.
The tools I used were Dux-Soup to scrape LinkedIn Premium along with other apps like Hunter.io to find emails. And then, my team would send cold emails to those people but the communication would not be within LinkedIn itself, it would be off-platform.
I wanted to figure out how to build my network on LinkedIn with people who would definitely be one of my best types of customers; I want to connect with people who would love my services and would benefit from what I have; I want people to look at what I post and share on LinkedIn, like my interview and training videos.
How can I build that up automatically without sounding spammy? It is almost like farming where one starts working the field, planting seeds, watering, and nurturing the crops. Over time, people see the value in what I am saying and willing to give my services a try.
One of the problems that I was facing is that in order to reach more people, I needed to connect with more people. Dux-Soup was good for connecting but it did not have the sophisticated automation that I wanted to have.
How to Utilize If-Then Conditional Flows in Lead Automation
Most automation allows you to modify or merge the first name so that you are able to send customized messages like “Steve, Hey, how’s it going?”
Or, “Jeff, Hey! Came across your profile…” Automations allow you to send these types of personalized messages and it is such a great thing!
However, what most automation does not have is the “If and Then” feature. If they have “X”, then do “Y”.
When you are doing any type of automated conditional workflows or conditional statements, If-Then statements are extremely powerful. Humans make thousands of If-Then statements or conditional workflows and execute on those workflows every single day.
I teach this at FreedomInFiveMinutes.com.
When people see something that utilizes If-Then conditioning, it resonates with them much more than if something does not. I know that sounds far-fetched, but the power of it is so underutilized. It is the reason why most automation looks like crap and why most people hate it.
I wanted to find a tool that allowed me to utilize If-Then statements with LinkedIn. I ended up moving to a tool called Linked Helper. They had just recently introduced the ability to use conditional workflows for messaging and it is so cool! One of my main problems was the connection part of the reach out.
You Can Make Connections on LinkedIn via Automation Without Being Spammy
If you are a spammy connector, that is what will get you in so much trouble with LinkedIn. When people are constantly ignoring and flagging you as “SPAM”, you can get shut down very quickly.
So, how do you connect with people through automation? Linked Helper allowed me to connect with people through mutual connections.
I could say in my messaging, “Hey Steve, I noticed that we both know Sam Carpenter,” and Sam Carpenter being our mutual connection.
If we had two mutual connections then it will mention both mutual connections in the automated message, “…noticed that we both know Ramit Sethi and Sam Carpenter…”
And then, the message goes on to say, “I want to connect with other people in the X industry like yourself,” whatever industry that might be like the packaging or merchandising industry for example.
The point is, if the person I want to connect with on LinkedIn has mutual connections with me, the automation will mention those mutual connections in the message.
Think about it, if someone says to you, “Hi, I think we both know George. He’s a great guy. I just wanted to see if you wanted to connect maybe over coffee or something,” it sounds a lot better than, “Hi Dean, I would like to be your friend.”
Doing this has skyrocketed the number of acceptances I have on LinkedIn to about a hundred daily connections now and these are all automated.
I even get people who say, “I usually do not hire consultants, but I’m listening.”
Conclusion
Through this strategy, I have gained customers with just $79 a month for LinkedIn Premium plus $15 a month for Linked Helper. This turns into several thousand dollars in revenue per month.
That’s not bad at all, and not even counting clients from LinkedIn that came from connecting and developing valuable content or sharing valuable things and growing rapport. These are extremely important.
If you are just looking to connect with people, I highly recommend using something like Linked Helper or Dux-Soup just to get the connections going. Rather than focusing on the connections themselves, you can create valuable content as connections are being made.
Over time, people will see your valuable content through the LinkedIn algorithm. The more that you do that, then the more you are able to reach people make a huge difference in their lives.
And you can grow your business at the same time! It is amazing what you can do by utilizing automation with LinkedIn. You can use it to create a pretty awesome LinkedIn lead generation machine. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
Resources and Links
You can use a Virtual Systems Architect from ProSulum.com. You can also schedule a discovery call at FreedomInFiveMinutes.com for the same and have them do other stuff like replying to people who have directly messaged you.
Virtual Systems Architects can do a whole bunch of other stuff so that you do not have to do it. Anyway, I am going to continue building the fence that I have been working on in my garden and I will catch you on the next Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast episode.