The other day I shared a story about a new LinkedIn connection relentlessly pitching me so hard that I had to remove her as a connection.
"Lisa" was only the second person I had to remove in my 20 years on LinkedIn.
The first person I removed was my first death threat on LinkedIn.
I know I’m sounding a bit dramatic.
Here’s the entire story, so you can judge for yourself.
Yes, I was born before the internet existed.
Yes, I did play with wooden swords.
We even used sticks as guns when we played “Army”.
We only had three channels on our television and I had to walk across the room to change the channel.
I started working with the internet in 1991, right after Al Gore invented it.
I was building HTML websites BEFORE this guy was born.
I learned SEO when it consisted of stuffing keywords into your META Keyword tag and waiting months for Google to crawl your website.
I would love to know what this guy is doing five years after threatening me.
Is he still doing Amazon SEO?
I don't remember his name, and our conversation is gone from LinkedIn since I removed him as a connection.
It takes a lot to make me remove you as a connection.
I love to help people and I give them the benefit of the doubt when they cross the line.
LinkedIn calls itself a networking site but you never hear from 99% of your LinkedIn connections unless you reach out to them.
I don't recommend reaching out to them with a sales pitch.
I reach out to colleagues and past clients to check in and say “hello”.
If you want to learn how to network like a pro, I highly recommend reading How to Work a Room by my good friend Susan RoAne (over 1.2 million books sold, and the principles work better than ever).
Pinging your LinkedIn connections puts you back on their radar.
It also triggers the LinkedIn algorithm so you start seeing each other's activity.
People will often re-engage you after you ping them.
They’ll also refer you to people in their network.
Spend five minutes every Monday morning and say "hello" to your colleagues and past clients.
They'll appreciate you.
- Ted
