LinkedIn for Business: 9 Unfailing Ways to Connect with Ideal Clients

LinkedIn could connect you to future customers. Yet, how many of your current customers are converted LinkedIn leads? If your answer is a few or none, you are yet to unlock the potential of your LinkedIn presence.

John Nemo build his business on LinkedIn. It took him 90 days post-quitting to match his old job’s 6 figure salary with the revenue generated via LinkedIn leads by his marketing agency.

Everyone who matters to your business is approachable on LinkedIn. But how?

1. Create client-centric profile descriptions

Most LinkedIn users have profiles that resemble online resumes. While this format works for employees who want a job change, it does nothing for business owners, agency partners, business development executives and consultants.

How do you address client concerns and solve their problems?

Don’t fall into rut of writing about your achievements in third-person. Instead, try proactive storytelling. Clients care about how you can solve their problems.

Who can you help and how?

Begin by identifying whom you can assist with your abilities – CEOs? Marketers? Models? Then, make a note of the different ways in which you can help them. So, you should be able to say that, for example, you can help small business owners set-up their web presence by building them websites.

How are you different from other service providers like you?

Tell this story on your LinkedIn profile. You can expand this story by filling in the details, which can be more of how you assist clients and why your services work better than others. Establish clear-cut differentiators here, so you can make an impression on profile visitors and stay top of mind for a long interval of time.

Can other people substantiate your claims?

You can also increase the credibility of your claims by curating testimonials on your LinkedIn profile. Ask your most satisfied clients and partners to share their experience as testimonials. You could even share testimonials in the video format.

Text vs video – how visitor-friendly is the content on your LinkedIn profile?

LinkedIn doesn’t yet support native video upload in the profile section, but you can use YouTube and SlideShare video links under [Link to Media] to provide access to video. Apart from testimonial videos, you can also share how to videos, advice, information and tips, or impressive company news and updates. In fact, if your profile itself provides value to visitors, they’re more likely to follow you and approach you for advice and services.

2. Leverage LinkedIn’s Advanced Search

LinkedIn’s search engine works wonders with profile hunting. You can find anyone (who’s on LinkedIn) on LinkedIn – if you know your target and have the right keywords. On both the web and mobile apps, you can search for people using Job Roles.

Who are you looking for?

You can’t drum up business by barking up the wrong tree. That’s why it’s critical for you to know exactly whom to target. Social media managers? Marketing VPs? Or Digital Analysts? Who is it that makes the calls on decisions related to your business?

What’s the right Job Title?

LinkedIn’s search is keyword-specific. So if you’re hunting for [Social Media Manager], only the profiles listing that exact Job Title and the profiles that include those words as part of their Job titles will appear. When searching for someone in particular job role, it makes sense to try a few variations so you don’t miss any prospects.

Which filters can save you time?

Location and Industry filters can help you narrow-down your prospect list to only high-potential prospects, so you don’t have to waste time and energy reaching out to those who are not likely to convert.

Should you use InMail or send a Connection Request with a custom message?

Either works, but if your business has long sales cycles, it probably makes sense to turn prospects into connections. Longer sales cycles demand more contact between a business and it’s prospects. So, you’ll probably need to send 2-3 cycles of messages with some time in between them and that’s easier done when the prospect is a contact.

3. Craft compelling custom invites

LinkedIn’s inbox is where you build relationships. And your invite can help make an impactful first impression. That’s why it’s super-important to customize every invite/message that you send out.

How can you personalize invites?

The more you know about a prospect, the more you can personalize the invites that you send out. In fact, even viewing a profile on LinkedIn can have some impact. I’d even suggest viewing profiles first, taking notes and going back to send invites a few days later. Try and use details that prospects have revealed on their profiles to customize the invites that you send to them.

Can you initiate live-chats with prospects?

LinkedIn messaging is now real-time. You can see little dots next to a person’s chat window when they’re online and typing. If you have warm leads who you’d like to convert, you can always initiate non work-related chats when they’re online from time to time.

What value can you offer within messages?

Again, LinkedIn prospecting is all about what value you bring to the table. Can you show prospect clients transformation even before they turn into clients? The transformation doesn’t have to be great and it certainly shouldn’t cost you money. But if there’s something substantial that you can share with prospects in the initial invite or later messages, you should.

Are you being intrusive?

Just because someone has accepted your invite, doesn’t mean that they want you to send them messages. Ask for permission, always. Get feedback, always. And try and craft your messages so they’re genuine and noticeable.

4. Consciously share conversion-oriented content

What you share on LinkedIn matter a lot because it’s the only contact that prospects have with you away from messages. Sharing content because everyone says you should can be more counter-productive than anything. Everything you share should have a purpose.

How can you curate exceptional content?

Everything you share should ideally be exceptional. But finding exceptional content on a daily basis can be taxing – unless you have a team of people just for the job. However, you can simplify the task with the assistance of a content curation app such as DrumUp.

What are the types of content that you can share on LinkedIn?

Remember Seth Godin’s purple cow principle when curating content for LinkedIn. Unless it’s a purple cow, people won’t pay attention. They’ll continue scrolling through their feed without giving your post a second look. What are the types of content that will make them stop and look?

Videos? Content in story-form? Content with powerful visuals? Content with a catchy copy?

Take your pick and ensure that you choose well for every post.

How can you simplify content sharing and engagement on LinkedIn?

By using a social media management tool like DrumUp, you can organize your content assets within your scheduling tool and create an engaging content queue using analytics data and themes that you can get an overview of in calendar-form.

Whose content can you share for additional engagement and relationship-building?

It’s a great idea to share other people’s content on LinkedIn for extra-engagement and exposure. Anything you share with attribution will earn you goodwill and trust from your audience and the people whose content you share.

5. Collaborate with your community via LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are where professionals in the same industry network, share content and opinions. There are tons of active LinkedIn Groups that you can join to build rapport with people in your industry.

How many relevant types of LinkedIn Groups can you work with?

You don’t have to stick with one type of LinkedIn Group to attract the attention of prospects. You can also join Groups in similar niches, within your industry (to find co-marketing partners) and in parallel niches (so you can find potential advocates).

What can you do in Groups to build relationships?

Every marketer who joins LinkedIn Groups typically just uses them as extra channels to share the content that they create. Again, think purple cow. What can you do on the Group that will initiate conversations with its members?

How can you convert Groups conversations into business conversations?

It’s not enough to just have conversations in Groups. You also need to figure out a way to take your prospects from Groups to business discussions. It’s best to have these routes planned in advance. For instance, you could share/comment on conversion-focussed content – view someone’s profile – leave a few days of time in between – and then send them a connection request with a personalized invite.

Can you create/manage your own LinkedIn Group?

Managing LinkedIn Groups is effort-intensive. Unless you can invest that kind of time and effort, it doesn’t make sense for you to own a LinkedIn Group. If you have decided to go ahead and create one, you need to have a core-objective, rules and a moderator to monitor Group activity. As it’s not advisable to create a Group just promotion, you have to decide how you will connect participants of that Group to your business eventually. If your Group adds value, chances are that people will inquire about services/products on their own.

6. Get employee advocacy right

Employee advocacy can reduce the length of your sales cycles, promote more conversions and increase your customer retention rate if implemented properly. Client-facing employee advocates can help you boost such business goals if they are given the right content to share.

What content can you get client-facing employees to share on LinkedIn for maximum impact?

The success of your employee advocacy program depends on your content, among other factors. Considering LinkedIn is the platform, the best types of content you share are – client success stories, how to articles and tips that also feature your products and services.

Which employees can you get to be a part of the program?

While you can get just about anyone to participate, some selective participation can do your program a lot of good. For instance, you can get sales executives to share content useful to people in the last stage of your sales cycle. Other employees can share content that’s targeted at the rest of your conversion funnel.

What this means is basically this. Sales executives can share something like – 5 Factors to Consider When Purchasing Riding Gear while other employees can share something like – 6 Safety Measures to Take When on a Ride in which one point can be about riding gear and feature your products.

How can you convert the attention you earn via employee advocacy?

What’s the point in having people share content at random if it doesn’t amount to anything? Every piece of content you share should have a purpose, a road back to your products and means to measure its impact. Custom URLs can help with two out of three of those requirements.

7. Enhance your brand’s personality

When there are tons of LinkedIn Pages to follow, why should audience members follow yours? Even if you’re giving people value, you can’t expect them to follow you if you’re not very interesting. That’s why it’s important for you to enhance your brand’s personality, so audience members have the opportunity to connect with you.

What personality traits can you associate with your brand?

When building your brand’s personality, you have to assign it certain traits. And these traits need to have an impact on your target groups. What kind of humor suits your brand? Will you be sassy, quiet and meek or outspoken? The answer to these questions will shape your brand.

How can you express your brand’s personality via the content you share on LinkedIn?

It isn’t enough to just assign traits to your brand. You also have to figure out how you will express those traits through LinkedIn content. Will you share jokes? Will your post text exhibit humor? Will you reproach people making the wrong choices in terms of products?

Is it necessary to regulate content shared by employees to ensure it matches your brand?

Some companies strictly regulate employee activity on social media while others take a more relaxed stance. The choice is yours. I would recommend requesting employees to share more on-brand content without enforcing them to do it. Usually, when you get employees in at the grassroots level as in the case of employee advocacy, employees are more enthusiastic about cooperating.

8. Converse with relevant LinkedIn users

Listening is a critical part of building relationships, on LinkedIn and otherwise. One way to show your connections that you are listening is by reading their content and engaging with it. That’s why commenting becomes so important on LinkedIn. Even the marketing greats like Brian Dean still dedicate time to this activity.

What are the different ways in which you can strike conversations with LinkedIn users?

You could initiate conversations by asking questions. The questions don’t have to be related to your work. They can always be casual questions that everyone wants to answer. But, if you’re seriously looking for leads, you can post more conversion-focussed questions and content.

How do you ensure that the conversations you have on LinkedIn are goal-oriented?

Every conversation you have on LinkedIn need not be goal-oriented, but you can earn business on LinkedIn only when you make conscious conversations. Ensure that you know exactly whom you’re conversing with and which conversations you’re joining. Also, be sure that the conversations you’re having are pushing you towards a specific goal.

How do you turn conversations into conversions?

Firstly, it’s important to keep track of the conversations you have using a CRM or an excel sheet. CRMs work better because you can classify leads as cold and warm leads on some of them. When you’re keeping track of conversations, you’re more likely to achieve goals through them.

9. Publish stories instead of regular updates

Stories generally perform very well on LinkedIn. People share success stories of clients and other people to inspire their connections and give them actionable insights. Storytelling enables you to grab attention, awaken emotions and create memories, all of which are a critical part of making an impact on your target groups.

What kinds of stories can you share on LinkedIn?

Client success stories are probably the best form of content that you can share on LinkedIn. By sharing client success stories, you can show prospects your ability to help companies achieve their goals. However, you can also share employee success stories to attract the right talent and success stories of people in your industry, in general, to provide your audience with insights.

How can you place your products and services in stories?

While you can’t make your products and services the heroes of LinkedIn stories, you should definitely mention them strategically. It’s always best to make your target audience members the heroes of LinkedIn stories and place your products as the tools that can assist them in achieving their goals.

How can you add visuals to your storytelling on LinkedIn?

While the rest of social media has already been taken over by visuals, LinkedIn remains a primarily textual platform. That gives you the opportunity to experiment with visuals and begin to capture the interest of your target audience before your competition.

Wrap

Everyone important to your business is available and accessible on LinkedIn. With the right idea for content and the right outreach strategies, you can make invaluable connections on LinkedIn that can help you generate substantial revenue.

Feature image: asierromero / Freepik

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Are Online Courses the Right Move for Your Online Business?

 As online entrepreneurs, we’re all looking for ways to increase our profitability. With only so many hours in the day, having multiple streams of income in your business can help you quickly level up your online business.

You probably have noticed a significant rise in the sheer number of business owners who are offering online courses to their audience. You’d have to be living under a rock not to!

What you may not know is exactly what goes into an online course, or why it’s revolutionizing the way we learn and earn an income online.

To start understanding the what and why, we first need to define what an online course actually is.

What is an online course?

An online course is essentially a collection of lessons on a central topic that can be accessed on the web from anywhere and is often broken into modules with in-depth lessons underneath each umbrella topic.  Many educators call this “distance learning” because there are no location limitations.  

While online education is nothing new, its influence in the world of online business in the last two to three years has been staggering.

We’ve seen many online business owners go from full-time freelancing to solely selling online courses. Years ago, that would have seemed risky, but today it’s become almost a new normal.

Now anyone with a computer and Internet access can sign up for an account and start selling an online course. And while it may seem like the marketplace is already oversaturated with online courses, we’re really only at the beginning.

There’s still so much room for you to grow your online business through online courses. But you still might be wondering what the big deal really is. So why are they worth working into your current business model?

What can an online course do for your online business?

Online courses provide the unique opportunity for you to teach a wide audience about a topic in your particular skillset. And not only do online courses generate more revenue, they also build your online business’ credibility and authority. This is important in building trust with your audience as the go-to expert in your field, all of which lead to better conversion.

Here are a few additional reasons why online courses are worth incorporating into your online business:

Online courses are scalable

When you’re solely providing services, how much you earn is largely tied to how much time you put into a project. This is true even if you’re pricing on a project-to-project basis vs. hourly rates.

Time is the great equalizer in online business. We can’t buy additional hours, so we want to make the most productive use of the time we have.

Online courses help you scale not only your income but also your thought leadership. In a sense, you’re getting paid to share your knowledge and build your platform as an expert in your field. Solidifying yourself as an expert is invaluable and well-worth the investment, especially if you’re able to generate revenue along the way.

Online courses fit lower budgets and create niched-down audiences

If you’re a service-based entrepreneur, some people in your audience may not have enough room in their budget for your services. It’s understandable, but you’ve spent all this time building your audience from scratch that it’s worth looking into options on how to further monetize your influence.

While these audience members may not work with you one-on-one, they might have an interest in a lower-budget option that helps them DIY what you do. Maybe they want to dip their toes in before they make a larger investment. This is where creating an online course comes in.

Let’s say it costs $100/hour to work with you as a consultant. If you sell a course for $200 with four hours of content (not to mention all the bonus material and freebies you’d include), the student gets double the value of hours. If you include a course community, which I highly recommend, they’d get even more value from connecting with other students.

Online courses at a lower budget (often priced around $100-$500) create a stronger connection with your audience. One of your online course students may even turn into an ideal client down the road. They’ll already know how much value you provide so when they have the budget to outsource, you’ll be top of mind.

Online courses give you flexibility and freedom

Have you always dreamed of working from anywhere as a location-independent entrepreneur? Do you fantasize about not having to ask for permission to take time off? Do you want to be more hands-off with your work?

This can become a reality with online courses. When you’re creating an online course, you can set your own schedule and work at your own pace. If you know you have a busy month, you can work ahead or pause your schedule when you need to.

Online courses can be created at any time during the day, too. No one has to know that you recorded one of your online course video trainings at 11 p.m. or wrote your sales copy at 5 a.m. This flexibility can be especially helpful for side hustlers.

Most common content types within online courses

Now that you’re warming up to the idea of weaving online courses into your business model, let’s chat about what kinds of content go into an online course. With the recent rise in multi-media, there’s more options than ever to create a unique course in multiple formats.

As we all know from our time in traditional school, not everyone learns from reading a textbook or listening to a lecture. That’s why including different content types ensures that all types of learners– from visual to auditory– feel like they’re comprehending the material.

Let’s break down the most common content types that are used within online courses:

Email or plain text

Although there are multiple visual and audio formats that can be incorporated into online courses, plain text is still widely used. Some online course creators create their course solely using plain text. More often than not, online course creators mix plain text with other visual formats.

With the flexibility and creative freedom of plain text-based online courses, you can mold and shape your lessons to fit your audience’s needs. You may wish to create a separate PDF worksheet your students can print out and fill in on their own to test their knowledge, or include step-by-step written instructions within the text of your email or lesson web page.

Want to test plain text course creation for yourself? You can start creating an email course using only ConvertKit and Gumroad. This can be a great way to test the market with free, user friendly tools.

Video

Including high-quality, engaging videos within your online course raises its perceived value. In a sea of long-form blog posts and eBooks, online courses provide concise videos for maximum learning.

Video engagement drops after six to nine minutes so it’s best to keep your videos around this length. This gives you enough time to prime your students for the subject, answer any important questions, and share an actionable activity.

But if you’re thinking “I can’t boil down all this information into a five minute video”, don’t worry. Your best option is to take longer videos and break them into smaller, bite-sized chunks. This will help your content become more digestible for your students.

To help you film and edit your online course videos, our friends at Teachable have some best practices for getting started:

• Best file types: mp4 or mov
• Recommended resolution: 720p (1280 x 720px)
• Recommended frames per second (fps): 24-30
• Supported file size: 1.5GB or smaller
• Audio specifications: H.264 + AAC audio (advanced users)
• Compress videos when possible

Audio

Maybe your audience wants to learn on-the-go or your topic doesn’t need visual instructions. Audio can be a great option for this type of audience.

For the best audio quality, invest in an external mic (usually priced around $40-$90) and a pop filter (usually $9-$20). You can record your audio files using free software like QuickTime, and edit them using GarageBand or Audacity all on your own.

Also, don’t worry about being weirded out by the sound of your own voice. You’ll get used to it after a few times, trust me.

Slideshow viewers

If your students want to go through your slide deck on their own time, embedding a slideshow viewer is a great option. This way students won’t have to watch your video with commentary if they want to pull out a quick quote from a slide or go through an activity after the lesson.

Some online course platforms like Teachable have slideshow viewers built into their software so you can be up and running in a few clicks.  Another option is to create a slideshow on Slideshare. It acts as a public slideshow viewer so you can share it with a wider audience if so choose.

Quizzes

Want to test your student’s knowledge of what they’ve learned so far? Many online course platforms give you the option to create custom student quizzes with select lessons. We recommend looking into Teachable and Thinkific if you’re interested in including quizzes.

How do you know if you’re really testing your student’s knowledge? Here’s a few tips:

• Use multiple question formats. Most quiz builder tools allow you to ask multiple choice questions, rating questions, or even simple yes/no questions. Use a variety of question types to keep your students interested.
• Ask open-ended questions. These are used for answers to larger themed questions that can’t be summed up in a simple sentence. Think of it like a mini-essay for students. These answers will also give you great qualitative feedback.
• Be concise. Clarity is more important than cleverness so keep your questions short and actionable. Also, determine how many questions are needed by how much content you’re covering. Does it make more sense to ask five questions every lesson or give a 25 question quiz at the end of the module? You can decide depending on your format.

Downloadables

Along with quizzes, you may want to give your students what Regina of byRegina likes to call “adult homework”. These worksheets and workbooks give your students an opportunity to complete exercises and apply what they’ve learned. You can give online course students the option to print them out or create fillable PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Some examples of downloadables include:

• PDFs
• Worksheets
• Workbooks
• Checklists
• Timelines
• Calendars
• Spreadsheets
• Trackers
• Planners

Are online courses the right move for your online business?

The first step is to survey your audience to discover what they want to learn about. We’ll talk more about this in our next article on How to Find the Problem Worth Solving for Your Online Course Audience.

In the meantime, share your thoughts about online courses with us in the comment section below. Are you intrigued by the idea of creating and launching an online course? Is there anything specific holding you back? Let’s talk about it below.

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5 Ways to Repurpose Your Popular Social Media Posts

 Want to get more out of your social media content?

Wondering how you can save time and increase engagement?

By repurposing popular posts and content on one platform for use on another, you can give your followers more of what they want.

In this article, you’ll discover five ways to find and repurpose your most popular Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts.

Find Your Popular Posts

With the right tools, finding your most popular posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is easier than you might think.

Facebook

On Facebook, you’ll find the most popular posts for your business’s Facebook page by going to Facebook’s Insights tool.

To use Insights, click the Insights tab at the top of your Facebook page. Then in the sidebar on the left, click Posts to see data about your Facebook posts.

Scroll down to see the area where you can filter your posts. If you click Engagement, you’ll see data about Post Clicks as well as Reactions, Comments & Shares. It’s interesting to look at both. However, to find your most popular Facebook posts, disregard content that you paid to promote and focus on the posts that rank highest for Reactions, Comments & Shares.

Twitter

Finding your top Twitter posts is even easier than finding top posts on Facebook. Just head to your Twitter Analytics dashboard. Scroll down and you’ll find your top tweets month by month.

Instagram

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Instagram doesn’t have a built-in analytics tool. However, you can choose from plenty of third-party Instagram analytics tools.

If you’re looking for something quick, free, and simple, 2016 Best Nine can display your top nine posts for 2016 in a simple graphic. Unfortunately, the 2016 Best Nine tool doesn’t factor in comments or video views, so it’s limited. But hey, it’s quick and simple. What more can you ask from a free tool?

Now that you’ve identified your most engaging social media posts, here are five ways to repurpose the content in those posts.

#1: Pin a Top Instagram Photo on Pinterest

Whether you added a sweet quote to a beautiful scenic image or simply took a shot of your cluttered office and the picture went viral, turning it into a pin is an easy way to gain extra traffic.

First upload the photo to a relevant page on your website. Then log into Pinterest, go to your profile, and click Pins > Save Pin. You can either put in the URL or upload your own image.

After you pin your image, edit the description. Make it catchy and point it back to the page hosting the image on your website. Then post the pin to a relevant board and tell your followers about it. Creating pins in this way will send extra traffic to your website and expand the reach of your content.

#2: Repurpose Well-received Tweets as Graphics

When you have text that your audience loves, repurpose it for easy engagement. Many popular tweets are stand-alone text quotes. You can pop the tweet text onto a picture and tweet it again. Heck, you can also post the image quote on Instagram, Facebook, and even Pinterest.

For help creating the image, try a tool such as Adobe Spark, Canva, or Buffer’s Pablo. After you create an account, choose a template designed to work with a specific social media platform (for example, a Facebook- or Instagram-sized image). Then copy and paste the quote into the text box, choose a background, and tweak the image until you like the result.

#3: Turn Stand-out Facebook Posts Into Blog Posts or Videos

If content marketing is a part of your business’s bag of marketing tricks, coming up with great content ideas can be difficult. With proven Facebook posts, it doesn’t have to be.

Normally the Facebook posts that get the most engagement are longer posts about serious opinions, cited research, or inspiration. If you have a post like that among your top posts, consider writing a blog post that repurposes content from the Facebook post.

Similarly, turn a written post into a video to help your proven content reach a new audience. Check out this guide on how to create video on a budget if you’re ready to start with video.

#4: Compile Favorite Quotes or Stats Into a SlideShare Presentation

With over 70 million users, SlideShare is becoming a social media platform in its own right. If you’re not already creating SlideShare presentations, you should be!

To create a great presentation, you need great content. If you already have a list of quotes or statistics that your followers love, all you have to do is put that content into a SlideShare slideshow. For example, this blog post was turned into this SlideShare.

Of course, creating a quote presentation is only one of the many uses of SlideShare for business. You could also create a how-to guide or share popular information about your industry.

#5: Pull Popular Tweets Into a Twitter Moment

Twitter Moments is a new feature Twitter launched in October of last, but it only recently became available to everyone. It’s great for telling a story or bringing together awesome content.

If you have a set of related top tweets, you can combine and reshare your tweets as a Twitter moment.

Here are a few tips for making your moment:

• Keep the title and description short and sweet. Give just enough detail to make someone want to learn more.
• Create a story, if possible. The best Twitter moments include a narrative.
• Use lots of image posts. A picture is worth a thousand words, which is a lot more characters than you get in a tweet.

Conclusion

Repurposing proven content is the easiest way to attract extra engagement out of the work you’ve already spent a lot of time creating. Use these tips to grow your levels of engagement and find out more about your target audience.

You already know this: Social media is about building relationships, not posting things for the sake of posting. Spend time looking at that list you’ve created to learn how you can deepen those relationships with your followers and give them more of what they want.

What do you think? Have any other tips on repurposing content? Drop a comment so we can chat about it!

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