The Transcript

5 LinkedIn Experts Share Power Tips That You Can Use Right Now

Voiceover: This is The Missing Link with your host, the insufferable — but never boring — Sean Jackson.

Sean Jackson: Welcome back, everyone, to The Missing Link. I’m your host, Sean Jackson, joined as always by the unique and essentially awesome, Mica Gadhia. Mica, how are you?

Mica Gadhia: I am awesome. You’re right, I am awesome, Sean. How are you doing today?

Sean Jackson: Always good, always good. The worst that I do is wonderful, but today is a far, far better day. Do you want to know why?

Mica Gadhia: Tell me.

Sean Jackson: Because we’re going to get into some tactical information on LinkedIn today, and I’m so excited. Here’s why. If you’ve been following the show for a while, you’ll realize that we are starting this idea of going from interview to tactical information, to interview, to tactical. I want to play with that for a while, Mica. Is that going to be fun? We can go from thought to practicality all in the same series.

Mica Gadhia: I love it. I think we’re geniuses.

Sean Jackson: I can’t disagree with you on that one, Mica. Here’s what I did, because I was really thinking about this one when I was coming up with this episode idea. I know a lot of quality thought leaders in our space. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to get a tip from each one of these people?”

I went to Pubcon Austin, and I took my little recorder with me. That’s why the quality sounds weird. I took my recorder with me, and I was grabbing people in the hallway that I had known and said, “Hey, can you get on the air and share a tip about LinkedIn with me?”

We have got a great sampling of power tips from some of the most influential thought leaders in online marketing. Mica, what do you think?

Mica Gadhia: That’s awesome.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I know. It’s going to be fun. This will be a very unique episode where we’re going back and forth and sharing tips. I ve got to be serious for a second, Mica. I owe our audience an apology.

Mica Gadhia: Okay.

Sean Jackson: I do.

Mica Gadhia: Is that because maybe you’re a Linkhole on the air, Sean?

Sean Jackson: Mica, you can’t call me a Linkhole. What the heck did you just do?

Mica Gadhia: I had to put it out there. I had to put it out there. If you’re going to give the apology, let’s just name it.

Sean Jackson: No, it’s not that. By the way, Sonia Simone, thank you for creating the new portmanteau for the Copyblogger lexicon. Linkhole.

Mica. No. That’s not why I’m apologizing. I’m apologizing because we have such a diverse audience, including amazing people overseas.

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: Every time we put a plug in for our text messaging, our 41411 with the keyword mylink, all of our international people who try to do it come back and say, “Sean, does this not work overseas?” It turns out it doesn’t.

If you are in the U.S. and Canada, you can pick up your phone right now and put in 41411 with the keyword mylink. What that will do is subscribe you to our text messaging system, and we immediately send you a link to our very private discussion group that we have over on LinkedIn, which has been pretty wild. Hasn’t it, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Yes. I’m loving that.

Sean Jackson: Isn’t it great? People are asking detailed questions and asking for advice, and we re responding to them, giving great insight, but then our international audience gets a little miffed.

Mica Gadhia: I’m sorry.

Sean Jackson: We are.

Mica Gadhia: I’m sorry, too, and I don’t even think I’m a Linkhole, but we never know.

Sean Jackson: What we’re going to do is this. I set up an email address, MissingLink@Rainmaker.FM. If you’re international and you want to get access to this awesome private group we have over on LinkedIn, where we’re talking about LinkedIn marketing strategy, answering questions, just send an email to MissingLink@Rainmaker.FM.

If you’re in the U.S. or Canada, pull out that phone, send a text message to 41411 with the word mylink, all one word. Don’t let it autocorrect. We’re going to then send you a link to our discussion group. You’re subscribing to our text message. We will never spam you, folks. Never. Go ahead, and take a chance to do that now.

For our international audience, you are so important to us. I feel terrible that the SMS system that we’re using doesn’t support it. But you know what, I think you got a workaround. Mica, what do you think?

Mica Gadhia: I love it. MissingLink@Rainmaker.FM. Email us, and we’ll take care of it.

Sean Jackson: Exactly. So we’re going to go to a quick break for our sponsor, the Rainmaker Platform, and when we come back, we are going to get in to all of these awesome power tips. Sound like a plan, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: I love it. I’m excited!

Voiceover: The Missing Link is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Sean Jackson: We’re back from the break, everyone. And Mica, you ready?

Mica Gadhia: I’m ready.

Sean Jackson: So who do we have first up on the power tips on using LinkedIn, Mica?

Mica Gadhia: It looks like Tim Ash is up first. He’s the CEO of SiteTuners.

Sean Jackson: Yes. Tim also has been a good friend of mine, a great, quality guy. I’m so excited. Let’s go ahead and listen to him and his tip for how he uses LinkedIn.

Tim Ash Shares a Proven Technique for Reaching out to People Who Have Viewed Your Profile

Tim Ash: LinkedIn has a unique feature, which I’m very fond of. Obviously, SiteTuners is one of the premier CRO agencies in the world, and most of our business is considered purchase. We’re working with a long sales cycle, and you can’t create that machine to suck money out of the bottom of the funnel. You have to just take people wherever they are in that process.

LinkedIn is the only network to my knowledge that allows you to see who’s viewed your profile. You don’t get the same thing on Facebook. You can see when someone has seen your private message, but not generally who’s looked at you. I have lots of people looking at our profile, my profile, and what I always do is take care to personally respond to each of those people every day. It’s a little time-consuming, but what you do is say, “Hey, you looked at my profile recently. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Sometimes, it’s people I know, that I’m pretty close to. Sometimes, it’s total strangers. But once in a while, you actually get the people at the point of consideration, and they care about the fact that you care about them and reached out.

Sean Jackson: I love this strategy, and I want to sum it up again, because I think this is really important. To sum up, you basically look at your stats, or you log in, and it will tell you

Tim Ash: How many people have viewed your profile and who they are.

Sean Jackson: Exactly.

Tim Ash: Some of them are anonymous, so you can’t reach out to those, but many are not.

Sean Jackson: You go in, you look at their profile and then you send then them an InMail message, basically.

Tim Ash: Yes.

Sean Jackson: And it says, “Thank you for looking. If I can be of any help ”

Tim Ash: If there’s anything I can do to help. And it’s a sincere, coming-from-a-service message.

Sean Jackson: And that’s I think the trick, though, right? It’s the trick that, “Hey, let me tell you more about what I’m doing” — no. It’s more of “How can I help you?”

Tim Ash: Right.

Sean Jackson: “I’m here. Is there something I can help you achieve?”

Tim Ash: By the way, Sean, it’s not a trick. It’s my real attitude, okay?

Sean Jackson: You mean you’re really a nice guy? Dammit, gosh! I’m completely flummoxed by this. I see your point, though. By reaching that point when they’re looking at your profile, they’re looking there for a reason, right?

Tim Ash: As a marketing tactic, it has something similar to do with abandonment recovery in email, for example. It s been shown that if you don’t reach out to somebody within five minutes, even if you just delay from five minutes to a half hour reaching out to someone, the chances of you ultimately closing that deal go down by a factor of 30. Yeah. So you’ve got to get them while they’re hot. When they just looked at your profile, they’re thinking about you for some reason. A week later, they’re not.

Sean Jackson: Got you.

Tim Ash: It’s the same principle. It’s really important to be timely, and that’s why I do it daily. I just look at who looked at my profile that day, and I send them a quick note. Ninety-five percent of people won’t respond. That s okay.

Sean Jackson: But it’s the 5 percent that make it worthwhile.

Tim Ash: Yeah.

Sean Jackson: So, Mica, what did you think of Tim Ash s idea? I was blown away.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah.

Sean Jackson: I think it is so funny, because I’m such a narcissist. I love to see who looks at my profile, right? But I never did anything with it, and Tim’s advice is spot on, which is that LinkedIn is sharing who is looking at your profile, so reach back out to them in a kind, giving way to say, “What can I help you with? What can I do for you?” I just love that.

Mica Gadhia: Right.

Sean Jackson: I think that’s one of the power tips out there that is easy to pull off and so easy to do. But, that’s not the only power tip we have. Mica, who’s next up on our power tip list?

Mica Gadhia: Eric Enge from Stone Temple, one of our favorites.

Sean Jackson: I love Eric. We’re going to actually have an exclusive interview with Eric about LinkedIn in another episode, but let’s go ahead and take a listen to what Eric has to share.

Eric Enge Tells You How to Use the LinkedIn Search Tool for the Best Profiles to View

Eric Enge: Here’s the thing. People notice when you visit their profile. A lot of people, who you visit their profile, they’ll reach out to you, which is by itself a good tip. They’ll ask you if you’re interested in anything: “Do you need any help?” Some of them will immediately send you requests to connect. Some of them will follow you.

If you actually use LinkedIn Search, a very powerful tool, to locate people, and then you visit profiles of interest to you, it’s kind of a soft way of making an initial introduction of yourself to someone without doing the unsolicited email or unsolicited communication.

Sean Jackson: Let me sum that up. Basically, you go use the LinkedIn Advanced Search feature, find people in the space, and you go visit their profile knowing that they’re going to get a report that says “Hey, Eric or Sean, somebody came and visited me.” And they may end up connecting with you, reaching out to you conversely, et cetera.

Eric Enge: Right. Now they’re initiating.

Sean Jackson: Excellent point.

Eric Enge: Sweet.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, that would definitely work.

Mica, Eric almost comes up with the complete opposite approach.

Mica Gadhia: Absolutely. He says, Go look at them, and then wait for them to respond to you.

Sean Jackson: I think that’s a good bracket, if you will, to this whole concept of visiting people, having people who visit you, reaching out to the people who visit you, and going out and actively reaching and visiting those people out there. Again, this universe, this ecosystem, of constantly checking who’s viewing whom can actually start to lead to some very solid connections, which if you do it right, could potentially lead to business. I just love those two because they’re the perfect bracket.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah, exactly. All the while, you’re learning about your niche. You re learning about other people, and you’re building your business. You’re building your personal knowledge base. And you’re building your network and your community all at the same time.

Sean Jackson: Absolutely. All right, but we have more, folks. We have absolutely more power tips. Mica, who’s next up on our influential thought leader LinkedIn tips and tactics?

Mica Gadhia: Next we’ve got Adam Riemer.

Sean Jackson: Adam.

Mica Gadhia: Yeah.

Sean Jackson: Oh, my word. Adam is such a big guy in the affiliate marketing space. Let’s hear what he has to suggest.

Adam Riemer Talks about Excellent Strategies for Getting People from LinkedIn to Your Website

Adam Riemer: I noticed that I was not getting a lot of LinkedIn shares or likes on my marketing blog, and I decided to play with it and see what was going on. What I noticed is that you can upload blog posts to LinkedIn, but if you upload your post, if it’s indexable, it could get indexed. And now you could compete with LinkedIn, especially if you don’t have a lot of authority on it.

You can also have all of your content there so that people don’t visit your website, which means you don’t get your newsletter opt-ins, you don’t get your monetization strategies, and you don’t get your traffic, which is what you want.

Sean Jackson: Basically sharecropping on LinkedIn, right? What did you do about it?

Adam Riemer: The first thing that I was doing was using the sharing icon. Once I realized, Okay, that’s one thing you can do, the next thing I started doing was sharing but also including a couple paragraphs. There was some more engagement from it....