I recently had the pleasure of launching my second book, The LinkedIn Playbook – a definitive guidebook that offers a step-by-step process in creating leads, clients and sales on the LinkedIn platform. One of the main reasons I wrote the book was to create a more affordable package to help people to succeed on LinkedIn as an alternative to my role as a social media strategist. In this article, I want to share a few insights that I get into in detail in the book so that you have a better understanding of how LinkedIn works, and how harnessing its potential can lead to great things for your business.
Why write a book?
But before we get into that, let’s just briefly talk about the merits that writing a book can have for business owners and entrepreneurs. First of all, it’s a great way of creating credibility for yourself in business and a major step toward achieving pre-eminence in business. By being a published author, you immediately position yourself as an expert in your field, which increases your reputation and in turn generates leads and, ultimately, paying customers. Besides the actual sale of the book itself, this increase in credibility and reputation can often result in a huge increase in revenue. This is why so many business owners are writing books, and why I’d recommend it to anyone who has the time and resources to do so.
Why I wrote a second book
Of course, having already written my first book, Social Media Secret Sauce, this second book was less about becoming a published author and more about offering the industry a step-by-step methodology that I use with my clients. In my role as a social media strategist, I offer a more hands-on approach with customers. However, The LinkedIn Playbook offers readers a process that they can implement themselves, plus lots of tried-and-tested techniques and advice showing you how to create a successful LinkedIn profile.
Obviously, I can’t share all of that information here in this article, but what I can do is offer the fundamental steps that you need to go through in order to generate leads with a view to ultimately creating sales.
The Three Stages: Engage, Connect, Convert
Engage
This is the first step you need to go through when implementing a successful LinkedIn strategy. This step is simply about getting your ideal clients to know that you exist by creating visibility on your profile. The LinkedIn Playbook covers a very specific methodology about how to optimise your profile using keywords and how to write different sections of the profile. I’ve also written an article with a few tips on how to use keyword optimisation on LinkedIn, which you can find here.
Connect
Once you’ve created a profile that your ideal client will be able to easily find, you want them to open that profile and read the content on your page. This step is all about having a professional looking profile that will make potential clients want to engage and connect with you. Again, there is an in-depth methodology for this in the book, and I’ve also written an article with some pointers on optimising your profile that you can find here. The key is really to produce a profile that shows that you know what your clients’ problems are and that you have the solution to those problems.
WARNING #1!
It’s a wasted opportunity to connect with a potential client without having first optimised your profile. Too often LinkedIn profiles are written all about the user, kind of like a resume, and don’t offer any practical information. More often than not, potential clients won’t even bother to read this and will instead disengage and disappear before they’ve had the chance to learn about your business.
WARNING #2!
Another common but critical error that many LinkedIn users make is to pitch to a potential client as soon as they make the connection. This rarely works and should be avoided at all costs. Instead, you want to consider the long-game of converting leads into clients, as we’ll discuss below.
Convert
Of course, the endgame of all of this is to find genuine customers. However, never forget that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. You’re far more likely to succeed if you’re patient and follow tried and tested methodologies. The role of LinkedIn is not as a selling platform for businesses. In fact, you should never try and sell anything on LinkedIn as far as services and products are concerned. Instead, this process is about setting yourself up for the next step. Your final objective on LinkedIn is to develop a relationship, and you do this by building trust and credibility through steps of interaction and by supplying value, such as free gifts and copies of books. Then, once you have this relationship, you can take your interaction to the next level. Ultimately, you want to get your lead on a Skype or phone call, or have them attend a webinar or live event.
For example, one of the most successful campaigns my team and I ran for a client was using LinkedIn to connect with potential clients and then invite them and their companies to a free info night. We provided free food and drink, there was a keynote speaker and finally a subtle pitch. You can easily see how this type of long-term vision is far more likely to succeed than pitching an idea to someone you’ve only just connected with.
Hopefully from reading this you’ve started to get an idea as to how to use LinkedIn to generate real leads and begin converting them into clients. For the more detailed, step-by-step methodologies and approaches go ahead and check out my latest book, The LinkedIn Playbook.
Also, I’d like to quickly mention a project close to my heart. It’s an organisation called Buy 1 Give 1 and they’re doing amazing work by allowing businesses to create meaningful impacts all across the world through the profits they make. We created plenty of impacts for them at the book launch of The LinkedIn Playbook, so thanks to everyone who came and donated. You can find out more about Buy 1 Give 1 by going to their website or checking out this article I wrote about them.
The LinkedIn Playbook has become the third Amazon Bestseller to be released by the founders at Web Traffic That Works thanks to the unique campaigns run by the team. If you’re interested in finding out how you can turn your book into an Amazon Bestseller, you can read more about the packages offered right here.
Finally, if you’re looking for ways to generate high-quality leads on Twitter then be sure to check out our FREE 4 Week Twitter marketing course just below.