Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
How to Win on LinkedIn With Adam Houlahan
Show Notes
Adam Houlahan is an International Keynote Speaker specialising in LinkedIn strategies for entrepreneurs and CEO of one of the few truly global LinkedIn agencies, Prominence Global. He hosts arguably the world’s largest free online LinkedIn training event, with thousands of people registering 5 times each year and is considered to be one of the world’s leading experts in harnessing the power of LinkedIn for business.
Adam is also the author of three Amazon best-selling books Social Media Secret Sauce, The LinkedIn Playbook, and Influencer. He believes real and meaningful change comes through the world’s entrepreneurs. His purpose is to positively impact 12 million people in need and has surpassed 10 million impacts on the way to that target.
4 Pillars of Linkedin
In the world of marketing, things have changed so much in the last even six months, 12 months. Knowing these pillars can really help you stand out on LinkedIn. Using Linkedin can help you with your personal branding and using that personal brand to do very ethical lead generation.
So, what are these 4 pillars? They include:
- How you optimize your profile
- Who and how you connect with people on LinkedIn
- Content strategy
- Conversion strategies
Linkedin Marketing
LinkedIn is not the platform to do the conversion or where people are going to take that next step and and buy your product or service or consulting fees, you know, program or whatever it might be. There is a place for that, which is the paid ad platform. You can certainly do that off the page. That platform, like everything any other tool, but especially on LinkedIn, the paid ads are very expensive. They do work if like anything, you got to know how to put them together. But what we’re talking about today is how you can do all this organically and ethically.
We’re not trying to do the old marketing tactics, like the bait and switch type things where you’re talking about one thing, but it’s just really just to get someone hooked in and then take them off in a completely different direction. You’ve got to keep in mind that, you know, your audience on LinkedIn, just by their demographics, tend to be a little more savvy at about these types of things.
Conversion on LinkedIn
The first part of conversion on LinkedIn is not the sale, it’s the next, it’s just the next step of making sure that to start with the people you’re in conversations with know who you are.
They like what you’re about and they’ve consumed, you know, a reasonable amount of content from you. Now, again, you know, everybody’s got different levels of price point of products and services. We get the privilege of working with people with stuff as low as, you know, hundreds of dollars and products is in the millions of dollars. And of course, to some degree, that process is a little different as you go up, that process up that tier and pricing.
However, the fundamentals all are all the same. You’ve got to have trust before anyone’s going to talk to you. And so that’s that’s the first thing is through those other three pillars is deliver the ability for people to trust you. As I said, it’s the old marketing. It’s it’s kind of all the same. And then getting them to willingly want to take that next step with you.
So the conversion part of the process is not the sale. It’s getting people to take that that next step that kind of alludes to the fact that the higher the dollar value of your product or service, the better this process actually works. Believe it or not.
Linkedin Connection
During the old days of LinkedIn, which is, probably a couple two years ago, you used to be able to send as many connect almost as many as you wanted. It was almost unlimited, like a thousand a month, you could send a thousand connection requests with people per month.
Where that really kind of started to change was around the end of the pandemic era. Obviously, you know, a lot of things went crazy over that that period. A lot of people got onto platforms like LinkedIn out of necessity. They still really didn’t know how things should be done.
But also, you know, what is etiquette and forge. I believe it’s a good thing that these days you cannot connect with that many people. In fact, the maximum you can, you can outbound send connection requests to people is 100 per week. And if you’re doing that, believe it or not, if you’re doing that really, really well, you’re probably going to get an acceptance rate of around about 30%, so 30, 30 and every hundred that you send will accept your connection requests.
When creating a linkedin profile, make it look professional because your profile kind of gives a good outer outline of who you are. It looks professional. It covers a lot of other bases because most people these days will go and check, you know, just because you send them a collection request that those are just accepting them because you got sent, it’s now very, very low.
People are getting check out your profile. And again, you know, part of that reasoning is around the amount of fraud and things that happens online. It’s people are just more understandably more cautious about everything these days. Absolutely. So they will go and look at your profile, hence why, you know, if you if you don’t put any form of collection request message, then this is just a bit random and more often not they’ll hit the delete button.
Type of Content for Linkedin
It’s a 80, 20, 80, 20 rule – 40% of stuff that’ll get you 80% of the outcome. Good content is great, but if nobody sees it, then it’s kind of a waste. So LinkedIn’s algorithms favor content creators that put a bit of variety. So what I mean by that is short form videos, you know, one minute to maximum of 90 seconds, they may give videos any longer than that status post, which is just your standard written format polls document post, which is where you can attach slices of some sort of a PDF download the Newsletters longform newsletter content.
And you’ve got to show that you know how to fix and solve a particular problem and what that problem is without actually showing how to fix and solve that problem. Because, of course, if you do that, yes, you’ll get more interaction, you’ll get more engagement on your content.
Why wouldn’t you? You’re solving people’s problems for free. So there’s this fine line between, you know, going too far and giving the solutions. And I know, look, there’s this concept in marketing. You would not very well that yes, people say give away all your best stuff for free. And to some degree I agree with that except for the how you are doing it.
And another great tip: always end your content by giving a call to action. What is it you want people to do next? You know, that could be as simple as asking a question, You know, what’s your point of view on this? You know, have you ever experienced something similar?
Using Chat GPT
So, you know that the right content strategy will help with your Linkedin marketing but how can you do that? You actually do have time to work on your business, not just purely on your content strategy. So I guess that brings us to tips and tricks and where of course such as chat GPT.
For high level content creation, it’s great to just get the subject matter and then you can use it to form, you know, say to give you the starting the basis of a of a LinkedIn post and there’s commands and things you can use. Like you say, Hey, create me 200 words. Yes, I give it the size.
Include three relevant hashtags, these type of things. It’ll give you a rough draft. It won’t give you finished content. And not in my opinion, we’ve all seen you can kind of, Well, yes, it’s cheap. It’s not been around that long, but it’s been around long enough where we can kind of spot, you know, the ever-written basic content these days out though.
However, you should be careful when using chat GPT because your content should be about your opinion and your point of view but chat GPT can’t do that. It can give you the fact but they’re not always right. So you can use chat GPT to just draft the first version of that and then you, you tidy that up and make it, you know, like you said, you know your point of view on that.
Links
How to Win on LinkedIn With Adam Houlahan
If you don’t innovate, you die. So whether you innovate with something new or you modify what you’re doing, you just can’t stay there the way you’ve been forever. Marketing has changed quite considerably from when it started because there was no digital, definitely no websites and social media before. So you have to keep coming with the times.
Listen to the full episode of Small Business Talk episode 206.
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