LinkedIn continues to roll out new features and interface improvements at breakneck speed. In this first call of my Linked Accelerator course, I'll take you on a tour and show you the “new” LinkedIn and how to use the new features to gain a competitive edge.
There's still time to join us and you can win free tuition if you are the most active class member.
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Here's the transcription of our Linked Accelerator Kickoff Call
Ted Prodromou: Hey, everybody. It's Ted Prodromou. Happy Friday. Welcome to the first call. This is Linked Accelerator Class. Today, I'm going to take you through, LinkedIn has made so many new changes. It's just been really crazy. I'm having trouble keeping up myself. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through some housekeeping rules for this session and then, we’re going to go through. I'm going to kick it through my normal LinkedIn morning. I'll show you how I use LinkedIn. I’ll take you through my little, I'll do about 5 minutes' worth of. I do about 15 minutes of this to 20 minutes in the morning. Then, we'll jump into some LinkedIn updates, show you around the new dashboard, and some of the big changes they've had, and some I like, some I don't like, some I'm still trying to figure out. Let me jump into this.
If you have questions along the way, type them in the chat window. I’ll pause for questions. If you can see the screen. Hi Forrest. How are you doing? If not, type in where you’re from too, everybody. I’d love to see it. We have a lot of people registered for this call. Forrest, can you hear me okay? Can you see the Linked Accelerator slideshow? Hi, Mary Lee. Where are you from? It’s always good to see where people are from. I get people from all over the world. Got some people on Australia that want to do this later in the day so they don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to watch this.
There’s Mark from York, PA. I can hear you fine. Joe, “Will you send out a link to recording?” Of course, yes, there’s always going to be a recording for this. Miriam from Nigeria. Connie from Guatemala. Katie in California. Wow, got lots of people here. Karen is from Costa Mesa. Can we see the screen okay? Can we see the Linked Accelerator logo? Lots of people jumping on here. John. How are you doing, John? Mary Lee is from Florida. Teresa from Louisville, welcome. Bob says he can see it. Joel is from Chicago. Hey, Joel, for coming on late to be exact. No. Robin from Lane County. I’m just half hour away from you, Robin. I hope you’re okay with the fire up there. Probably pretty smoky. Hey, Menard from San Anselmo, where I am. Check in over with my office, you could hang out here.
Let’s jump into this. Let me take you through this. This Linked Accelerator is my class for LinkedIn, and this is the first session of the new class. I let everybody come in for free. Then, if you want to join us, you can rock and join us. I take you through what we’re going to through. I’m actually doing something I’ve never done before as I’m doing mega sessions. I usually do five weeks where I do a training video that people can watch and then, we have a Q&A call but this time, I am actually going crazy. We’d get over to this.
Here is how the class schedule is going to go. We do five weeks, the next five Fridays. We’re going to do three webinars a week because really, I want everybody to get incredible response here. Everybody, I’ve had a lot of people take the class, 80% says great but they don’t take action. What I’ve been doing with my individual coaching, I’m getting on the phone with people. We do a shared screen through join.me, and we just go through their profile together, and we make the changes on the spot so they don’t have any excuse for not doing their homework, they didn’t have time to watch. We just do it all live on these calls.
Every Monday and Wednesday, we’re going to have Q&A calls and our special guests. We have lots of special guests lined up to teach you other aspects of LinkedIn, or messaging, or just different aspects in networking. Monday and Wednesday, we’re going to work on your profiles, and we’ll answer all your questions. Fridays is going to be where I’ll be teaching. I’ll teach you all the LinkedIn things that I’m doing, and I’ve got my own approach that’s working really, really well right now. Then, we’ll do Q&A.
Today, I’m going to show you around LinkedIn. I am going to talk about some things that are working, some things that aren’t working anymore, and I’ll prep the questions. Then as part of the class, this is something I’m really going crazy. My coach says, “You’re crazy for doing all this for what you’re charging,” but what the heck, and I want everybody, I want 80% to succeed, not 20%. At the end of this, we’re going to do Q&A sessions every Friday until the end of the year, up into the holidays. We won’t be doing on the holiday weekends but there’ll be 24 webinars total in this class, and I’ve never done more than ten in a class. I just want everybody to succeed, that’s the bottom line here. Then, all webinars start 9 AM Pacific, noon Eastern, and they will be recorded.
I just want you all to be successful on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is such an untactical mine right now. It’s just it’s changing a lot but most people don’t use it. I read something where people spend an hour to 80 minutes a month on there but the people that do get it, they’re spending enough time, they’re spending an hour or two a day. Salespeople live on it, and it’s their main source of leads these days. If you’re in business for yourself, or you’re in sales, you’re in real estate, you’re a coach, you’re an author, a speaker, LinkedIn is where you need to be. Let’s jump in here.
Here’s the approach I take, AIDA. This is really what’s important on LinkedIn. I’ll show you why this is so important but AIDA, it’s an old term from years ago. I’m dating myself now but this is how people used to do marketing. They still do it. This is what works. You got to get the attention of your prospect, you get them interested, then you increase their desire, and you get them to take action, and that’s when they hire you or buy your service or product, whatever you’re selling. Just using these four steps, this is going to be the foundation of my class for the next five weeks. Actually the next 14 weeks, I think it is. This is really the foundation for everything.
Let me jump into LinkedIn. If you have questions along the way, feel free to type them in. I’ll pause for questions along the way. Right before I just jump on, lots of people jumping in. This is great. Let me jump over here to LinkedIn, switch screens. Here is LinkedIn. Let me get the other window over here to this side. It’s nice having two screens involved [inaudible 00:07:27]. Here’s LinkedIn, and this is really what I do every morning. I log in, and you see the new dashboard here. They’ve really changed how it looks. I don’t know the last time you logged in but it’s a lot more user friendly.
Here’s my profile. It shows my recent activity. You can see what I’ve been posting, things I’ve been sharing. Here’s 77 things I’ve done, shared information. I like to comment and share it on things. This gives you a summary of what’s going on. What’s good is you can see who is interacting with you, if people are liking it or sharing it. Here, I got one thumbs up. Here, I got 19 thumbs up for a comment. You just find out what kind of content your people really like. That’s really good feedback for you. Let’s get back to homepage here.
Over here, I’ve had 19 people viewed my profile in the past day, 13 people viewed this post, How to Get More Exposure, and this is actually a webinar, a Hangout I did with Alex Mandossian a couple of weeks ago where we broadcast this live on LinkedIn. This one you can tell who has been viewing, and how many page views, what industry they’re in, what their job titles, what locations. The top traffic from my LinkedIn, they found this, 35%. This tells me posting content in your LinkedIn profile gets people to view your profile. That’s good. Here’s people that responded to my posts. I’d like to reach out to those people, people that like it, people that commented. This is good. Question about repurposing. This is good. Good information for me.
Here’s one that was really good. I spent a lot of time promoting this one. This is the one from three weeks ago, and we got over 21,000 views on this one. What we did, we actually drove people back to this page instead of our websites to sign up for the next webinar. We have a video her that’s not showing up right now. It’s loading slowly but we transcribed this. The whole transcription of the webinar here and it came up in Google search results. Here’s the image I added to it. The video is still loading. It’s slow when you get screen sharing but here is the replay of the Hangout which we actually broadcast live through here. We put the YouTube link right into our post so it’s streaming live which was pretty cool but this got lots of action, and my profile view spiked that week. I’ll show you how to see that but LinkedIn content is really taking off. Google is picking it up now. It’s really a good thing to do. Start putting all your content on LinkedIn.
What I’ll do, I’ll go over here. Here’s 15 ways to keep in touch. They added this a couple of months ago. If I like this, I can just like it, comment, or I can skip. Let’s say, I’ll just like that but it’s that easy. Here, I could say congratulations on your job. It takes a couple of minutes. You can go through 15 and then, they just queue up 15 more for you. That’s a good way to keep in touch with people.
Then, I’ll go over here and look at this. Here’s nine invitations to connect. I get anywhere from 10 to 30 connection requests a day depending how active I am on LinkedIn. What I can do here, I can look at all my invitations. What’s really cool, now, you can just click on this. If I don’t want to connect with him, I just hit the X. If I want to connect and accept the invitation, I just say accept invitation but here is a little trick I have been doing. It works really, really well. I could see how, yeah, he sent me the generic message here. What I’ll do, I actually click on this, I can reply to his message. It opens up a whole new window. It’s a little slow with screen sharing, sorry. Let’s go back here while that loads.
What I’m going to do is I am going to accept this invitation because he’s a B2B lead gen specialist, and when the message comes up, then we’re connected. Here I have a message queued up. I use a text expander. I have some messages, and then I’ll customize them. I’ll say, “Hi.” This is something you can teach your assistants to do because the messages are pretty generic. Oops, I got to turn off this. This is something new. Uncheck that if you don’t want the message to go in. Here’s the message I just put in and I’ll send that to him. I’ll customize it. Usually, when you put the name on it, that’s good enough. Here, you can add these little icons now, the emojis. You can add photos now. You can add attachments but you got to be careful with that. It’s just running really slow today with the screen sharing.
I’ll paste this message. Basically, it says, “Thank you for connecting. If there’s anyone in my network you want to meet, let me know, I’ll introduce you.” It’s a very giving message. I am offering to help them. I don’t know if you can see the whole message down here at the bottom, and I send it to my webpage, and I get a lot of people that actually click that link, and go visit my webpage. I’ll show you that. It’s this whole little process I worked out, a couple of us have been casting this. It’s working really, really well for engaging people on LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn-friends. I send them to this page. It says, “Welcome LinkedIn Connections,” and thank them for connecting.
Then, click here, it goes to my LinkedIn profile. I tell them a little bit about me, and how I could help you if you want to schedule a call with me. Then, I have speaking at your event, here is how they can connect with me. Then, they can download the strategy guide from my book. As part of my book, I extended a chapter so they can download that. Then, I have a free LinkedIn course they can take right here. Then, when they go to leads, it will take them to this, and this is the free course they can take. It’s a one-hour LinkedIn course. I get a significant number of people actually opt in to that. Just by sending this message, there. I just sent that message to him, and it has all my contact information, and this just starts a conversation with people.
It’s incredibly effective when you don’t try to sell them, you just want to meet them, learn about them, learn about their business, and offer to help them, and they respond like crazy. Try that. It works crazy. This may takes a few minutes. Text expander lets you put these generic messages for certain industries, certain jobs, all customize this message a little bit. With text expander, I can create hundreds of messages that I can just with a couple of keystrokes. It works that crazy.
Suzie wanted to know, are those pages you made in LinkedIn? No, they’re actually on my website. You’re going to drive them to your website, and then they’ll get to know you by going to your website. That works all right. Alex says, how do you decide whom to connect with? Let’s go back over to that and look at that. That’s a good question. Get back to my invitations. I connect with almost everyone. For a long time, I’ve cut my number very small but I’ve been growing a lot this year. The more people I connect with, the more my profile gets up in front of other people. I can get more profile views. I get more people calling me, more people downloading chapters. The more people I connect with, the better it’s been for me. I’m about to almost 8000 connections now.
Here, this looks like a project manager. She’s a speaker. I would connect with her. Now, what I do here, it’s an experienced C-suite exec ready to help you, consultant, and you can see more. Here’s someone I wouldn’t connect with unless I check out. She has nothing in her profile. I assume this is a fake profile. Let’s take a look and see. I would not accept that invitation. Obviously, someone who sending out, they’re just getting started or they’re trying to fake a profile here. I wouldn’t connect with this person. Here, I would just say no, come back another time. Here is another one, Save the Women. That’s not a person. LinkedIn doesn’t like people putting their company names in their personal profiles. I want to connect with women, so I am not going to connect to Save the Women.
I’ll just go through that and look. A lot of times, you get these people. That’s a lot of people. You can just tell it’s a fake profile. You’ve gotten those emails from people about you won the lottery, give me your bank information. There’s more and more of that on LinkedIn. I’ll actually flag those people and sometimes, I’ll report them as a fake profile just to get LinkedIn to remove their profile. That’s really the kind of process I use there. I go through my invitations, send them the welcome message.
Here, I just look and say, “Okay, 45 people viewed my profile five minutes ago.” We’ve got Marcy Ruberto who likes my photo. What I’ll do, I know Marcy here got a conference, she likes my photo. Just see what they looked at and what they liked. A lot of times, I’ll reach out and thank them if they comment or they shared it. I’ll personally send them a message saying, “Hey, thanks for sharing it.” Then, I’ll share their content to return the favor. This is just active people, people that are following me, commenting on my information. Here’s Back and the Practice of Mindfulness. My friend, Ben, wrote this blog post so I shared it. I shared it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for him, and he got more traction for it. He said thank you. You just help each other out. Spread the word. Spread your content.
The next thing, you see, I’ve got 474 unread messages. It’s just another inbox I don’t have time to really check. Here, I’ll show you the new messaging again. It loads very slowly. This is not great. I’m sure they’ll be working on this but it feels like a different app. Instead of being an inbox, it’s more of a chat session. It’s more like when you’re messaging on Facebook. Here is somebody I saw his profile. This is another great little trick because you see profiles on the sidebar that you’re interested in. You view them. Then, people a lot of times will get back to you, and sometimes people get back to you and they’re angry, why are you viewing my profile? It is like, “You got to be kidding me. You’re on LinkedIn.” We want to look at your profile.
Then, I’ve got conversations going. I take this from the respective. I meet these people live face-to-face, and you just have conversations, and build relationships. This is just conversations that I’ll follow up on. I was on Jim Beach’s podcast this week as a guest, and he’s going to be a guest on mine. Just go from that perspective of starting conversations with people. Don’t sell them, just build relationships, help them out, share their content, and it works like crazy. Just that’s how I go through the messaging. Sometimes, obviously, I don’t get through all my messages. I am actually going to have my assistant screening them because most of them are actually self-promotions. It’s getting to be maybe eight out of ten messages that come to me are pure sales pitches.
Here’s people who viewed my profile. This is a really key feature of LinkedIn. These are people who are viewing my profile. I see, here is where we did those posts, and things just started taking off where I did that live post. Then, I wasn’t as active this week. I was actually out a little bit on vacation. Things are picking back up. You see, the more active you are in LinkedIn¸ the more profile views you get but when you do go away, and take a little break, things can decline. It’s all about momentum.
Over here, it tells you exactly what you’ve done. Added 106 connections last week, 13 updates, liked 9 updates, endorsed 5 people. I’ve been connecting with a lot of realtors lately. Here are six people that are realtors who viewed my profile, eight people at IBM, nine people at Sitecore, 16 people. I am trying to get the attention of people at LinkedIn. I am part of a pilot program there now so they’re starting to view my profile. I am trying to get some inside connections there so I can maybe present at their events.
Here is people that I am targeting, different job titles, CEO. If I am not connected with these people, I can just click connect here and connect with them. If I am connected, I could send them a message saying, “I noticed you viewed my profile. Any way I can help you?” Start a conversation. Let’s look at some questions here.
Mark wants to know, when I should upgrade from basic to premium. I would say, make sure your profile is in order. The benefits of the premium, I heard they raised the prices, I have to check on this. I heard $69 a month, it’s maybe $700 a year but if you kept one client, that more than pays for it but you could advance search features, you could save searches. There’s just a lot of benefits to it. When you’re ready, definitely do it but if you’re just starting out with your profile, get your profile in order because you don’t want to start driving people to your profile. It’s like if you’re building a new website, don’t send them to your website before the website is done. Wait until you’re all and running.
Joel says, “Do you use sales navigator?” I’ve tried it and it’s a great tool but I really don’t need it for my business and I was paying $70 a month for it. I am having to turn it on again just to see what’s new but for my job, I can get enough leads just by doing all these daily activities but if you’re in sales, definitely it’s worth the investment because it lets you do so many things. You can target companies and actually, send you leads based on who you’re connecting with, and you’ve set criteria for certain companies or job titles, and LinkedIn will actually send you things automatically.
Allen says, “Don’t say no to me.” Okay, Allen, connect with me on LinkedIn. I won’t say no. Is it a good idea to reply? I usually say yes and leave it to that, good tip. I’ll show you. Sometimes, you don’t see my cursor. I’ll say where you’re clicking. Forrest says, “Is it better to post content in your profile or to publish it?” There’s two different things, the status updates, let’s go back over to that. Here, you share an update which is just under my name here. That is like a twit. I tell you, this get people’s attention. That shows up in the newsfeed. Right here, Chuck Murphy posted this status update with a link. It’s a good way. It is like just grab their attention and then, send them to a webpage, like an article on your website. That’s how you get then to drive people to your website.
When you’re on publish content, you click on the “publish a post,” and this is like if you have WordPress for your website, just you put a full article in here. You add an image at the top. Down in here, you put your title. Your profile will show up here. You put your headline. It’s loading very slowly. Usually, when I do the screen sharing, it loads slower but you paste full articles here like I did the YouTube.
I pasted the YouTube code from the Hangout. We streamed it live. If you have YouTube videos, you can post some here. What really works well is if you add a lot of text with it, then it has a better chance of getting picked up in the Pulse because I don’t want to see just very short blog posts here or articles. Actually, it I’ve worked really well when we did the video and transcribed it. It cost like I think it was a $1 a minute for transcription. It was a 60-minute Hangout so it costs $60 to transcribe but we got 21,000 views plus a lot of people came to my website from that, what I noticed.
This is just loading very slowly so go back here. That really surprised me. My website traffic increased 50% that week after putting that post on LinkedIn. They actually went to my profile, found at the bottom of the post too, also I put my website so it drove a lot of people to my website from LinkedIn. What I’m going to do, I’ll show it in time back there in two weeks. Yeah, we’ll be getting more of them in the afternoons Pacific Time. That will be morning for Australia.
Glen wants to know, can you use HTML codes in this section? Unfortunately, you cannot. I’ve tried to do that and put links. It’s unfortunate. I’d love to. Maybe someday. They will actually view that but we’d like to do that but that’s important but back to the view profile. See who viewed your profile and connect with them. Obviously, they came across you for some reason, and you want to find out why, and connect with them. Then, here you could see who viewed your post. This is really great information because this is the number of people that are engaged. You’ve engaged them in some way. That’s the way I look at this. There’s the more popular posts.
Now, these views and likes. Here, this is just the last seven days. Let’s see the last 30 days. These are the kind of people that did marketing and advertising, 26% of people. That’s a lot of my target market. Salespeople, they are my target market. I live in the Bay Area, and they found me on LinkedIn Pulse. Some found it on Facebook. See, I searched, it came up on Google searches. I posted on Facebook and my page is there. These are the people you can engage with now. If you’re not connected with these people, connect with them. There’s Joel. A lot of these people, I’m not connected with. A lot of people are but I’ll thank them for viewing it and sharing it, and it builds relationships.
Then, here is something else you want to watch. How do you rank for your profile views? LinkedIn compares you with 100 professionals in your niche. I am not sure of the exact criteria but I’m number two out of 100 members. That means these are people, this is where you want to get people’s attention with your professional headline. See, this is my professional headline and since I’ve changed it, my profile views have gone up significantly. Here, I got CMO at HubSpot. If I want to connect with Kipp, I can just connect with him right here, and it just sends an invitation. That’s one of the downside to some of these updates. If you do this for a mobile device, you can’t customize your invitations.
Now, all they people, when they customize the invitation but I found that it hasn’t really made a difference. I used to customize every invitation at connect and now, I do it maybe 10% of the time, and I still get tons of connections. I think people have gotten pass having to have a personal invitation now. They trust people in LinkedIn. They’ll look at your profile, and that’s why that first impression is important. Here, I got 7503 members connections, and it tells me where I am out of this 7500, I’m number 65.
See right here, your professional headline is so important. This is where you’re going to grab people’s attention when they see your profile here. Then, this is where it’s also critical. When I look at Peter’s profile, over on the sidebar here, you can see this, people also viewed. What LinkedIn does, it looks at your profile, looks at your industry you’re in, looks to your network, looks at groups you’re in, looks who’re interacting with, and they match you up with people.
Based on Peter, everything in his profile and what he does, they’ve matched him up with Tony Robbins, Mark Cuban. I saw some Richard Branson, Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s trying to associate himself with those kind of people. When you look at my profile, I’m associated with a lot of big internet marketers because that’s my industry, that’s where I’m connected with, that’s who I interact with. Do that, complete your profile completely, and that’s what we’d be doing next week is really focusing on optimizing your profile so you show up in LinkedIn search results, you show up in Google search results, and you get noticed in the sidebar because about 40% of my profile views actually come from this little sidebar over here in the right column.
Joel wants to know, how do you connect if you don’t have their email address? I haven’t seen that in quite a while. Most people let you connect with them if you don’t know their email addresses but a lot of times, you can guess what it is. Look at Peters here, I see we’re connected. We’ll go to someone here I’m not connected with. Let’s see if we can find it. a lot of times, you can just click around the contact info on their profile and have their email address in there. He’s not showing his.
A lot of times, it’s easy or you can just do their first initial and last name, and the domain name where they work. You can put something in. Here, look at contact info. Now, she’s not showing it either but a lot of times, you can just guess it here and put it in. Sometimes, you can put an email address, pretty much just guess, and I’ve never had one say that’s not their correct email address. You can search the internet for their name, and a lot of times you can find it.
James, “I can’t hear. Hearing double audio.” You may want to disconnect and reconnect because nobody else is saying they’re hearing double audios. Anyone else hearing double audio? John says, “Do they limit the number of connections at some point?” I think it’s 30,000. I’m not sure if they have a limit anymore because I think some people started complaining. 30,000 is a lot of connection, even 20,000. If I get to 10,000, I’ll see if I want to continue growing. We’ll see because I’m getting so many more messages. It’s a balancing act there. How many messages do you want?
That’s what I do in the morning. It’s that whole process here. I look at my new invitations. I’ll connect with them if I want to. I’ll send them a thank you and welcome message, and then I’ll go through my messages, and I’ll look at some, start responding to people. I’ll look at the notifications here. I’ll post some content. I’ll scroll through the line here. Here’s another good trick. Here, three people have showed up on this post, says your network is talking about this.
Here is some article or some post that is a YouTube video. These people have common they’re talking about. I may want to jump in to that conversation if it’s appropriate, if it’s related to my business or related to what I do because when I start jumping in ,I’ll start showing up in this , and then more people. People in the Jesper’s Network will see it, and Laurent’s will see it. I’m getting traction on, not just my network when I post, and Soren. If you’re all people I used to work with, if I comment on this conversation, my comment will go in front of my network and all of their networks. You’re exponentially expanding your reach. You can reach out at a lot of different networks that way. That’s why it’s good to connect with a lot of people.
I’ll just scroll through here. Sometimes I’ll just come back at lunchtime while I’m eating lunch, I’ll just scroll through, and see if there’s some content I want to share. I’ll post content. I use a lot of content from Hootsuite. I have things written about my book, excerpts from my books that I actually schedule to go out periodically throughout the day on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. I can automate a lot of that, and then complement it with actually commenting. If
I want to comment, Michael is a good friend of mine, he’ going to do a workshop, I can comment on that, I can share it with my network, and help promote his class. If I want to do an impromptu workshop or my friends may want to so I’ll share that information with them. I do that sometimes in the evening when watching TV or something, I’ll just scroll through if there’s anything I want to share with people. If you spend 15 to 30 minutes a day throughout the day, you can get a lot of momentum. Like I showed on that one graph, it’s all about the momentum.
No other question at this point. Let me show you some more features of LinkedIn, what’s going on here. Pulse, they changed the whole format of Pulse. I don’t know if people used Pulse before what this is, is you can subscribe the content here. I’m following Jamie Dimon’s content. It shows up in my newsfeed here. You want to look at how people are tiling things, how lazy bosses avoid doing their jobs, and those are the kind of articles that get a lot of attention. The how to, or the seven ways to. Here we’ve got, this was posted yesterday, 105,000 views, over a 1000 likes, 190 comments.
Look for content by all these people that are getting a lot of traction and write similar content. Here is, How to Stop your Employees from Leaving. These are really, a lot of people like to read these articles or leadership in management type of topics are very popular. What you can do is you can sort it by here’s the top post, and then if I want to look at what’s the top ideas and posts in technology, you want to put a good graphic up here. I am not sure if that’s the greatest one.
Here is why a professional headline is important too. Right here, this is where you can grab their attention. Using the job titles, to me it’s boring but here, he hasn’t gotten any views on this but it’s in Pulse. What would make that good in Pulse? I am trying to figure that out with some friends now. We’re all experimenting the sea because if you get your articles into Pulse, you get hundreds of thousands of views in just a couple of days. Subscribe your content here, you can go to discover more.
If you use the Pulse app, it’s a separate app from LinkedIn. Pulse was an app on the iPad years ago, and LinkedIn actually bought the company because it’s a great way to aggregate information. Here, I got articles from thought leaders, we’ve got leadership and management topics, technology. If you want Motley Fool information, Wall Street Journal. These are all thought leaders. If I want to follow Avinash, I can follow him. Every time he posts a new article, it will show up in my newsfeed and be notified.
Then you can look at, here’s the channels. Subscribe to the channels that are related to your industry or where your target market is, and you know what they’re talking about. You get the latest and greatest and what people are interested in. Here’s publishers. You can get information when they post content. That’s a great little way to get consolidated information, news. If you use it on the iPad or a tablet, I see it seems much easier to read than on the website but this is what your network is talking about. This is what your prospects are talking about. This is what they’re interested in learning about. You create content based on what they’re responding to.
Now, the thing to even do, if you view Slideshare in the past, they’ve added this to the menu. Slideshare, I’ve been using for years. You used to just put PowerPoint presentations up there but it’s one of the most popular websites on the internet, and it’s got tons of content, lots of searches. If you have PowerPoint presentations, definitely get a free Slideshare account, and LinkedIn bought Slideshare a couple of years ago because the content was so good. They integrated it now into a menu item. This is a whole another world of content. It’s all about content. You want to create content, repurpose your content, put it out all these different ways.
Here is Joel Comm. He’s posted some things from Inbound. There’s tons, and tons, and tons of content here. Now, it’s all available through here, through your interest. Then, you get the exposure on Slideshare, plus you can embed that Slideshare content in your profile. On my one analytics there, you get a lot of people viewing the content within your profile. Here’s Lynda.com. LinkedIn bought them a few months ago. Now, they’ve integrated this. I don’t know if anyone has ever used Lynda.com. You pay a monthly fee, and you can take online classes about all these different topics. You have great websites, web development, photography, business. It’s an incredible site.
I guess I am not subscribed anymore but I think, LinkedIn wants to become the largest content site on the internet, and this is why they bought this. You get training for business people. You’ve got lots of great information. You got Pulse. You’ve got articles. You need to really start jumping in on all this because it’s going to make a huge difference as LinkedIn grows. 83% of business professionals in one survey by, I think it was HubSpot, say that they look at your LinkedIn profile before they will do business with you or before they meet with you. If you’re meeting with that potential new client, they’re probably going to check out your LinkedIn profile to learn more about you. If you don’t have a complete profile or it’s just not as polished as you want it to be, you’re going to get that first impression, and people aren’t going to want to connect with you or do business with you.
Any other questions? James solved his problems. Does anyone use Pulse? Have they gotten any luck? I am not sure if Maggie is on the call. Maggie had some good luck where she got picked up two or three days in a row with content she posted. Tracking to see what time of day do you post, what kind of headlines. Really, there’ no rhyme or reason to it yet. You can get 20,000 views and you may not get picked up in Pulse. We’re experimenting with that to see what gets you in the Pulse but it’s very, very powerful.
What else do we have here? Some other things they’ve done. Here you look at how your updates are. I was telling you, here is your recent activity, what you publish, how many followers you have. The difference between followers and connections is if you put content, you publish content, people can follow you but they may not necessarily be connected with you. I have 7500 connections and 7700 followers. I got a couple of hundred people that I’m not connecting with. Let’s see if they let us sort by who is connecting with you.
This is what’s cool too, it tells you what industries, what job titles, CXOs, entry levels. Most of my connections are senior type of people in businesses, marketing and advertising industry. Here, you can just scroll, and look at your network, and see who you’re connecting with. Are you connecting with the right people that would potentially hire you? If you’re looking for a job, you should be connecting with people in that industry. Most of my connections are local, New York City, LA, Phoenix. They’ll give you lots of great information. If they don’t tell you if you’re connected, that’s unfortunate.
These people are all following me. They’re my connections but it doesn’t say which ones are actually not connected with me. Helen, yeah, you have a number of followers but you don’t actually post. Do you have more followers than you have connections? The way to find your connections, one easy way is just really in your sidebar, very easy to find. What you can do is, we’ll get into advance search and I think week three of this. Really, that’s the key. Once you get a profile, you already want to start searching. Here, this is my advance search. This is your first connection, 3539 is my number of connections.
David says, “Is it true you can no longer export your connections?” They took that away for a while, and it’s back. Let me look at that. Here, you can just go to connections. They took it away, and people are just screaming, I guess. Click on this little wheel over here at the top right corner. I’ll go back and do that again. You go to connections, just the top menu item here, and just click on connections, and go over to the right side here, and you see this little wheel, the gear. Click on the gear. Here, you can just export LinkedIn connections on the right column there. It dumps into an Outlook CSV file.
A lot of people do, they’ll export their connections, and they import them on their email list which I am not a big proponent of because I’ve connected with these people on LinkedIn but they haven’t given me permission to get on my email list. I know a lot more and more people is trying to do this, and technically, I don’t think it’s ethical and it’s really against spam rules because they haven’t given me permission but one thing you could do is import them to your email platform. I use InfusionSoft so I can send them a message and say, “Hey, we’re LinkedIn connections. I’d love to have you on my newsletter,” or something. You have to have them opt into it.
Helen has connections, not followers. If things hang or pause with the Hangout, just hit your refresh button on your browser. Sometimes, you get kicked off Google Hangouts. Sometimes, I get kicked off. You hit refresh and it will bring you right back in. That’s some of the big new thing. There’s like business services, the whole advertising platform has changed. If you want to upgrade, you get over here, the upgrade button on the menu. I have that basic business account. I got it years ago. Here’s my options. I pay $29 a month I’m grandfathered in. I can upgrade to business plus. Here’s the features I would get or I could go to Executive. It’s this $75 a month if I billed annually.
InMail messages, LinkedIn has really … let me show you that. This is one of the big change that turned things upside down but they’re pushing InMail messages instead of reaching out to people to do the messaging. Let’s get back over here. I can take a while to get to it, come back to messages. In the past, I taught this technique where you can tag all your connections. If you’re an attorney, I have a tag for attorney. If you’re a coach, I would tag you as a coach, and then I could send a message to all my coach connections but with this new update, you can’t do that anymore.
Right here, let me find this thread. Some guy tried to send us his email newsletter in a PDF and he sent the message 10 times. Let’s see, where is this guy? He has 185 people in the conversation now. Maybe I deleted it but he keeps adding people to this conversation, and they’re not blind carbon copy. They’re all showing up in email address. Everybody is saying, “Stop spamming me. Stop spamming me.” You could uncheck this box so it blind carbon copy. I would send a message to 50 attorneys saying, “I am doing a webinar for attorneys about LinkedIn. If you’d like to attend, here’s the link,” and it worked great because they didn’t see it as sending a mass message but now, it sends a mass message. LinkedIn is shifting to making us want to … They want you to communicate one on one.
Another thing they changed is the group messaging where they keep flip-flopping back and forth, I hear but you can only send 15 messages a month to group members. In the past, you could message people. If you join the group, you could send messages to as many people as you wanted, I think up to 50 a day if you weren’t connected with them. You’re going to say, “Hey, we’re on the same group together. Let’s connect.” So many people are getting spammed and limit it to 15 total now
Mark, what about a welcome message by email? That’s good but in LinkedIn, they know that you just connected because they get a message saying you guys are just connected. They’re familiar with your name. If you send a message to regular email systems, they may or may not connect the dots. Now, what I have found too is most senior level executives check their own LinkedIn mail but their secretaries may be screening their email because they get so many other emails. That’s worth testing, Mark, to see which one you get more of a response to but I wouldn’t just add them to you email list, and start sending bulk emails without their permission. Eric says, “Is this all available without a premium account?” Yes. The big advantage of the premium account is you can do advanced searches, you get more InMails but yeah, all this stuff you can do for free.
Let’s switch back over to the presentation here. That’s what we’ll go through over the next five weeks is really get their attention with that profile, get their interest, get their desire, and get them to take actions. That’s the whole process we work through over the next few weeks, and actually through the end of the year at this time. In between, I have a Facebook group instead of a LinkedIn group because nobody was interacting on LinkedIn groups. People are more open to speak on Facebook. They’re more interacted. It’s weird.
For those of you who enrolled in the class, we have an ideal client profile worksheet I have in the members’ area. That’s going to help you really hone in on who you want to search for in LinkedIn. You identify your top three benefits to provide your clients because that’s going to help craft your professional headline. What I like to do is view my competitors’ profiles, see what they’re using for professional headlines, look at it. Anytime I come across one, I use Evernote to save screenshots of these profiles. I see when it grabs my attention, it helps you stand out because if you do a search for maybe … Let’s see what it is. Financial advisers, I work with a lot of them. If I search LinkedIn for a financial adviser, there’s over 200,000 people with financial adviser in their job title. How do you stand out from 230,000 financial advisers? It’s through your picture and your professional headlines. It is the main way.
After you start shaving those screen tests, that’s what we work through next week is building your profile out so you grab their attention. Register for the rest of the webinars. There’s a link in the members’ area to register for those. It’s a separate link from today’s webinar. Join the Facebook group, there’s a link in there, and schedule your one-on-one call. That’s something I’ve added. I want to meet with everybody that’s in the class, just get an idea what your business is so we can really help you get started and get a good jumpstart on this, and there’s a link in that members’ area. If you want to join the class, really it’s dmclassroom.com. It’s $997. You get 24 webinars, the one-one-one call with me. You’re going to get lots and lots of activity, lots of help.
People say it’s crazy but if you don’t get ten times your investment in this, we just keep working together until you get that. I never have anyone take me up on my guarantees because everybody gets results if they take action. If they don’t take action, they’re embarrassed to ask for their money back, I guess, but it’s a no brainer. If you want to get business from LinkedIn and your competitors are definitely getting that LinkedIn is just taking off right now, and it’ll grow like crazy. Every business professional is going there now. It’s your professional image so you really need to know how to take advantage of it.
If you have any other questions, you can type it in the chat window here. How to connect? We’re not using mail quota to connect to someone new. I’ve gone to college and mentioned, my connection email used to make connections. You’re saying how to connect or not use InMail to connect to someone new? You can just send messages to people. With groups, you can only do 15 a month now. It’s getting a little tricky but if you have the premium account, you get InMails but I think I’ve only used an InMail once or twice in the … gosh, I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2005. Yeah, I’m not sure if you really need to use InMails. That’s why we go through this strategy of reaching out to people and connecting. I find that if I view people’s profiles a lot of times that I want to connect with, they’ll connect with me or they’ll email me, they’ll message me, and say, “I know you viewed my profile. Is there anything I can help you with?” Then, we start that conversation, and you connect with them, and build a relationship.
Anybody have any other questions? If you want to join us, I’d love to have you. We’ve got quite a few people signed up already and we’re going to go until the end of the year. Everybody is going to get good results. That’s it. I don’t see any more questions. Thank you everybody. It’s dmclassroom.com, if you want to join us. The rest of you that are in there, I’ll see at the members’ area on my Facebook group, and we’ll see you on Monday. That’s our next call. We’ll start the Q&A calls on Monday. We’ll start building your profiles Monday and Wednesday. Then, our next lesson will be on next Friday. Thank you everybody.
