How powerful can LinkedIn be for your marketing?
And what might you be missing out on that is relevant for LinkedIn in 2022?
I have written 2 books on LinkedIn, and more recently have written a free ebook, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business, that I try to update every year according to the latest trends of LinkedIn and features it offers.
I just came out with my latest version of the free ebook, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business, which is now available for immediate download here:
https://nealschaffer.com/maximizing-linkedin-for-business/
Learn what the latest LinkedIn features that I recommend you focus on are in this episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Key Highlights
[00:16] My Definitive Guide to Email Marketing Ebook
[07:17] LinkedIn Can Deliver Results
[10:08] My LinkedIn Data Points
[14:30] Main Newest Features of LinkedIn
[14:46] Freebies On My Website!
[15:24] First Thing I Would Prioritize Now On LinkedIn
[16:22] Generating Emotional Connection
[18:24] Featured Section
[20:44] Visuals Attract!
[22:14] Creator Mode
[24:00] Benefits You Will Get On Creator Mode
[26:05] Speculations on LinkedIn
[26:37] Newsletter Feature
[28:15] How To Turn On Creator Mode
[29:55] LinkedIn Automation Tools
[32:11] How To Get Massive Exposure On LinkedIn
[34:42] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
How powerful can LinkedIn be for your marketing?
And what might you be missing out on that is relevant for LinkedIn in 2022?
I have written 2 books on LinkedIn, and more recently have written a free ebook, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business, that I try to update every year according to the latest trends of LinkedIn and features it offers.
I just came out with my latest version of the free ebook, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business, which is now available for immediate download here:
https://nealschaffer.com/maximizing-linkedin-for-business/
Learn what the latest LinkedIn features that I recommend you focus on are in this episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Key Highlights
[00:16] My Definitive Guide to Email Marketing Ebook
[07:17] LinkedIn Can Deliver Results
[10:08] My LinkedIn Data Points
[14:30] Main Newest Features of LinkedIn
[14:46] Freebies On My Website!
[15:24] First Thing I Would Prioritize Now On LinkedIn
[16:22] Generating Emotional Connection
[18:24] Featured Section
[20:44] Visuals Attract!
[22:14] Creator Mode
[24:00] Benefits You Will Get On Creator Mode
[26:05] Speculations on LinkedIn
[26:37] Newsletter Feature
[28:15] How To Turn On Creator Mode
[29:55] LinkedIn Automation Tools
[32:11] How To Get Massive Exposure On LinkedIn
[34:42] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
You know, you need to build a list, you know, you need to do email marketing better. You know that email marketing is proven to have the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. Why aren't you doing more with your email marketing. That is why I wrote the definitive guide to email marketing. And I would love for you to download it so that I can best help you. All you need to do is go to Neal Schaffer comm slash email slash marketing slash guide, and you can get access to it's almost like a book in itself. It's, you know, a few dozen page PDF, but I think that it will really really help you and if you do download it, love to hear your feedback as well. What other resources what other free ebooks can I create for you? Let me know but for the time being, download the definitive guide to email marketing how to generate the highest ROI from Digital Marketing at Neal schaffer.com/email-marketing-guide. From your digital marketing coach. How has LinkedIn changed over the last year? And where should you focus your LinkedIn sales and marketing efforts on? Well, let's find out in this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast, digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got, Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, greetings to you all, wherever you are in the world. And like many of you, the situation in Ukraine is deep in my thoughts. That's actually the primary reason why I'm a little bit late publishing this week. If you're curious. You know, we're all interconnected globally. Internet social media, I reached out to a guest blogger. And she was supposed to submit a blog post hadn't heard from her in a while. It turns out she's Ukrainian. She's in Kiev. They're in a very tough situation right now. Please pray for us. I know that my my podcast editor is not in Ukraine. But in a nearby Eastern European country. I have visited Estonia, I've worked in Finland, I've been to St. Petersburg. And seeing the lovely people there, Gandhi or montage and seem that the beautiful Russian culture and traditions they're, you know, one of my favorite tools, companies sem rush, although they're based in Cyprus, I believe their headquarters when I did a video shoot with them, they came out to Los Angeles, they were also from St. Petersburg. These are some of my favorite people out there in digital marketing. And, you know, on the other hand, one of the video marketing tools that I use for YouTube optimization, VID IQ, most of their employees are Ukrainian. So all of this, and I'm going to get to LinkedIn in a second because I know you didn't tune in for some motivational, inspirational, you know, global peace speech. But I'm a big fan of you, too. For some of you who know, or maybe not know, you know, teaching in Dublin, I was able to actually see them in Dublin, which was always a dream of mine Live in Concert just a few years ago. And I'm reminded of one of their most famous songs, and I just like to repeat the lyrics from them as a reminder, because I think it's really relevant for the situation we're in. And it's from their song that if you're a YouTube fan, I'm sure you know, called one one love one blood one life. You got to do what you should one live with each other Sisters Brothers, one life, but we're not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other one, one. And, well, if you're a big YouTube fan like me, you would know that that is the song that literally brought the band back together. They were sort of fighting. They rented a studio in Berlin and didn't have the songs written they didn't know if they should go back to their past of like war Joshua Tree or go into the future with more techno what have you. And I quote, Bono and Bono when he talks about that song says it is a song about coming together, but it's not the old hippie idea of Let's all live together it is in fact, the opposite. It's saying we are one. But we're not the same. In fact, apparently Bono was invited to a event from the Dalai Lama in Tibet. And that's how he responded, he couldn't make it. We are one, but we're not the same. And Bono went on to say, it's not saying we even want to get along, but that we have to get along in this world. If it is to survive, it is a reminder that we have no choice. I have Russian friends, I've Ukrainian friends. In fact, I have some relatives that are really into ancestry.com. And when I was growing up, I knew that my grandfather on my father's side fought in the Russian Revolution, when in fact, those days, a lot of that area was called Russia, because they spoke Russian. But as it turns out, my grandfather was born in Odessa, Ukraine, my grandmother was born in Belarus. But we're all one. And it is with this heart, that I really hope and pray for peace in the area, and that the Ukrainian friends can all live on their lives as they should. And that all of my Russian friends, and my Bella Russian friends, and everyone else in the area can just live as one in peace. Alright, Whew, that was a lot. So I want to get onto the topic of today, which is LinkedIn. I, you know, there's a few topics that I love to talk about. And obviously, I wrote a book on influencer marketing, the age of influence. I love to talk about that. Well, the first two books I wrote were about LinkedIn fact, some of you may remember me as this, you know, I won't say like LinkedIn guru. But earlier my days, my brand new was LinkedIn expert. And I never wanted to be a one trick pony. Because I know the needs of the market are not just one social network. That's why I've tried to go above just one network and focus at this strategic level, really. But hey, you want to go deep on LinkedIn, I'll go deep with you. So LinkedIn plays a very, very special role. And obviously, if you're a b2b company, you understand that if you're a b2c company, and you've just focused on Instagram and Tik Tok and Facebook, that's great, right. And LinkedIn for b2c is going to be weaker, right? But the demographic is there. And what's really interesting is that even though LinkedIn has a smaller population than Facebook, or Instagram, or tick tock, it still can deliver a lot of results, especially in the organic feed. So even if you're a consumer brand, you know, LinkedIn does have consumers. LinkedIn does our businesses. LinkedIn does have distributors, partners, affiliates, employees, so I believe even for b2c, there's a way to use it. And obviously, as a professional, there is no better site to use. In fact, some of you hopefully, you're following me on YouTube youtube.com/neal Schaffer, my most recent video has gotten a lot of great feedback, LinkedIn, profile tips for students are talking about how I'm helping my high school daughter on her LinkedIn profile, and how she has already used it to find internships. So now I have friends that have college students, I'm like, Hey, I know that this works. And obviously, your professional. If you have branding, it works as well. And if you're an entrepreneur, it's a goldmine. Right? So before I get into sort of my advice, and I'll get into why I'm providing this advice today, I always like to share with you the data behind my decisions behind my strategy. And I am looking at two different data points to talk about the quality of the LinkedIn audience. So I, you know, on Twitter, verified account have like 230,000 followers or 20 20,000, Pinterest, I'd maybe have like 40,000 followers Facebook page, probably around 40,000. And very similar on LinkedIn, if you count my followers above and beyond my connections, it's like 45,000, something like that. So outside of Twitter, there's a lot of parody. And I publish pretty much the same content. When it comes to my YouTube videos, which I'm going to talk about at the same frequency Twitter, I obviously publish at a more frequency. But what's really interesting is now that I'm getting a little bit of traction on my YouTube channel, my subscribers went from about 750 to close to 900 over the weekend, which was a pretty incredible jump. No, I'm not buying fake followers. Come on, you know that. I believe it was the video before the LinkedIn video was about sem rush and how I use it to define my SEO process. And I saw that that all of a sudden got a bunch of views. And I think that's really the YouTube algorithm is starting to show my videos and that video, in particular, a little bit more love. But when I go into YouTube, I see that 43% of my traffic to YouTube to my videos actually comes from outside of YouTube. So I know if I work on my YouTube SEO, there was so much more traffic I can get within it. But in the meantime, I want to tell YouTube Hey, I have a big community. And I'm going to drive as much traffic as I can to my videos on YouTube, in hopes that, that helps in the algorithm see that the videos are worthy of being promoted to more of your internal audience. Now I bring this up, because when I looked at the data for the last 365 days 24.6% First of all, 43% of my traffic, as I said, comes from outside of YouTube. 24.6%. About a quarter of that comes from Google search. That was pretty cool. I thought, I mean, I only have like 20 Something videos, right. But guess what? LinkedIn did better than Google search, LinkedIn generated 26.1% of my traffic to YouTube over the last year over Google searches. 24.6%. If you're curious, my own website, which gets pretty significant traffic, I embed YouTube videos that people click over to us I have this little widget on the bottom right that maybe you've seen, that is a combined 18.5% In third place. Interesting enough, you're curious, Twitter is next. Facebook is even below that. So basically, Facebook's at 2.1%, LinkedIn is delivering 13x more traffic to my YouTube channel, then Facebook is at a pretty comparable follower size, which goes to show you that organic content published on LinkedIn can perform really well. Now, what about the website you asked? So I don't have the data for my podcast unfortunate because people see podcasts, or I should say, listen to podcasts and all sorts of different apps. I do know, talking to my friend Andrew Smith, go back a few episodes, Andrew Smith from leap who I interviewed here. He's also one of the founding members of my digital first mastermind community, talking about a solution that allows you to basically pixel in your podcast listeners if you use a certain platform to publish your podcast on. And you can then see sort of where that traffic's coming from. But I digress. Right now, I'm not there yet. And that's more of an enterprise solution. But it does exist. And if you want to find out really cool tricks like that, you obviously have to join the mastermind. But getting back to I talked about YouTube, right LinkedIn number one now, on my own website. If you heard me talk about my digital marketing strategy for 2022. A few episodes ago, you'll know that traditionally, Twitter has generated the most traffic in social media from our website. I mean, Google search, by far generates the most traffic but Twitter is in terms of social media. Number one. In fact, once again, I go back from January 1 2021, to pretty much the day that I recorded this podcast episode, which is March 2 2022. I'm not publishing these episodes from months ago, Twitter generated 42.6% of my social traffic. Pinterest, believe it or not, is still number two, at 24%. Facebook is number three at 16.1%. LinkedIn is actually number four is 15.4%. Very interesting that it skews really high on YouTube, compared to the competition, but much lower on traffic. But when I look at the conversions now, conversions on my website, I'm not looking at the people that convert into my mastermind community, because I know that there's multiple touchpoints. And I get that information otherwise, I mentioned before that data that I get from a survey, but in terms of conversions, a third of the conversions, well, you know, Twitter generated 42% of the traffic, and they generated 36% of the conversions. But guess who generated 15% of the traffic yet generated 26% of the conversions? That's right, LinkedIn. So number one, in terms of traffic, YouTube, number two, in terms of conversions, I know that it is a high quality audience that generates real traffic, and real conversions, real leads. So I want that data to hopefully give you a little bit more confidence. If you've been focusing on different networks, you should be doing more with LinkedIn. And if your LinkedIn is way outperforming the other networks, that's awesome. But hey, don't forget the other networks as well. Right? I obviously we want to focus on LinkedIn here. But there's more to just LinkedIn as well. And we you never know how long this favorable algorithm to organic content is going to last. So I want to now transition now that we sort of see the potential that LinkedIn have in terms of traffic and conversions. I want to look at the main newest features LinkedIn has now every year, I revise, I'm committed to revising my ebook on LinkedIn, maximizing LinkedIn for business, and I'm really excited to let you know that my third edition is out right now. And instead of giving you the URL of a specific ebook, I just launched a new freebies page on my website. It's in the menu. Just go to Neal schaffer.com/freebies F R E B ies and you'll see all The free ebooks I have. And yes, right there, you'll see maximizing LinkedIn for business as well. So once you see it, if you downloaded it a year ago, I want to talk about the areas of updated, because that's basically what has changed in LinkedIn over the last year or what I would prioritize on LinkedIn, compared to where we were at a year ago. Focus on four things here. Number one is the content. You know, millennials are the largest demographic in the workforce. LinkedIn is a professionals social network. So it should come as no surprise, even though older people, my daughter would call them boomers are still very active on LinkedIn, and are used to using it in a certain way, there is a whole new generation of younger audiences that are using LinkedIn more like they would, they would use a Instagram or a Facebook, this means the content has gotten a little bit more personal, a little bit more emotional, more selfie photos, more selfie videos. And while obviously, if you're a b2b business, or you're like an entrepreneur like myself, you want to share information that's going to generate leads. But the other side of it is your human side. The ability to generate an emotional connection with people that together with brand awareness does lead to that content that you want to convert on being seen by more people. And when they see it, they remember the emotional connection they have with you. It's the reason why I started this podcast the way I did, I want to build more of an emotional connection with you, I want you to understand I'm a human, I have the same feelings and emotions that you do. And in fact, when I talked about this in my newsletter last week, hey, you should be subscribed my newsletter go to Neal schaffer.com. There's widgets everywhere sign up. One of my subscribers thanked me for talking about what's going on in Ukraine and for for saying it's okay for you know, letting ourselves have some grace, that it's okay. When there are crises, I went through a similar crisis with my, my mother, may she rest in peace very recently, that it's okay to give ourselves some grace. But I also want to remind you that there's a bigger picture outside of this, of people that we do business with on the other side, and lives that we have in families that we have in global peace. That's the emotional side. That's the emotional side of I'm getting into my podcast. Now. I've also invited out began publishing more political content on Twitter, Visa V, what's going on in Ukraine, I have the Ukrainian flag as part of my profile name. I don't really like to use social media for politics for a variety of reasons. But I think this is truly a unifying moment. LinkedIn is still not Twitter. And it's not Facebook. But you can get more personal. You can share more personal stories, and more personal things about yourself that are inspirational because guess what, if it's inspirational to you and your friends, it's probably going to be inspirational to other LinkedIn members. So think a little bit differently with your content, continue what you've been doing, but try to mix in more of that personal content. And I think you're going to get more engagement and with that, all of your other content afterwards is going to get more visibility. And I think at the end of the day, it will lead to more website traffic and conversions for you. The second thing I want to talk about are featured images, or the featured section. So while I'm talking to you, I am pulling up my LinkedIn profile. No, this is not a video podcast, we'll talk about that. And right here, I, I go to LinkedIn. And immediately I see a selfie from Gavin Hamer, who is the founder of the social media dashboard sendible. And he has a t shirt and he's smiling pointed at the t shirt, which says humans, not bots, right, which really goes through a lot of what I was saying, obviously, this is getting a lot of engagement already has 111 likes and 23 comments, the power of just the selfie and being personal on LinkedIn. But if you were to go to your profile, talking about the featured section, and once again, this is all in the e book that go to Neal schaffer.com/freebies and download it if you're interested. But when you look at a profile, you see the top section, which has your name, your what I call it, the professional headline, your background photo, right, and as you go further down. The next thing you see above what is now called activity which shows sort of the content that you shared is a featured section. The featured section allows you to add a number of different visual elements. They're almost like pins, or cards on a Trello board. They're basically visuals which can have text underneath it, which are linkable, so you can add a A link to an external site and it'll pull up the featured image from that site, you can add media like a photo, which will then you can add a link to that the link, you can also do for a YouTube video, you can add a link to an article there, an article being a blog post that you wrote on LinkedIn, you can even add a post. So if you had a status update that you're really proud of like you joined a new company, or you launched a new product, you could actually add that there. And you're basically creating a link, almost like a highlight on Instagram, right? Also, you can add a newsletter, I'm going to talk a little bit about LinkedIn newsletters, I have mixed feelings about them. But you should enable your ability to access them through something I'm going to talk about shortly. But the thing here is that visuals attract. And the only visuals in your LinkedIn profile are primarily at the very top there, that background cover photo, and then your profile photo. So as people skim through right before they get to the activity, and the about those featured images really catch the eye. And if you have YouTube videos, lead magnets, PowerPoint presentations, corporate presentations, whatever it is, I would highly recommend that you take advantage of the space, you can show up to three at one time, although you can scroll and you can put up as I don't know what the limit is on how much you can put up. But clearly, this is an area that I highly recommend if you haven't done it. And if you don't know what it is a lot of people don't because it's a feature they introduced maybe two years ago, but I just think it has more and more importance. And it could definitely come to your benefit. I have not put UTM parameters on this to see how much traffic I'm getting from LinkedIn is coming to these areas. But definitely one of the areas in addition to just thinking a little bit different about your content that you should consider optimizing your profile on. So this gets to the third point that I wanted to get to. So I hinted before, this third feature or third new thing to focus on. I hinted before, about newsletters, and you might be scratching your head saying hmm, some of you may know this, because I know that I have some LinkedIn experts that subscribe to this podcast as well. But it's something new that LinkedIn has called Creator mode. Now, creator mode. Well, we talked about the crater economy with Joe politican. Last episode, didn't we? And I think every social network is trying to attract creators. So LinkedIn actually has like an advisory of some creators, I think, I heard on another podcast is a lot of tick talkers, and a very, very young generation that is part of this. But their mission is how can we get more creators to be more active on LinkedIn. So I believe that's why they created what's called Creator mode. Now you're probably wondering, first of all, what it is. And then number two hiking, turn it on. I mean, it's all in the e book with visuals that will handhold you through the process. But first of all, what is it well, creator mode, sort of like, you know, Instagram also has a creator mode that I have the Creator profile, I think that's what it's called. And creator mode gives you access to a few more things that normal profiles don't have. So number one, if you've gone to my profile, linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer, or you've gotten other profiles on LinkedIn, maybe you've noticed that underneath the professional headline, it says talks about in my case, it's blogging, LinkedIn, content marketing, influencer, marketing, and social media marketing. So there's five hashtags I've been able to add to my brand. And I still have my professional headline intact. So I basically have additional real estate, for my professional headline with these hashtags that define my personal brand. This is available to you, should you turn the Creator mode on. And I'm going to get to how to do that in just a sec. but just hear me out and what you get when you turn it on. So number one is you can decide on five hashtags, get them up in your profile, I think that alone is a huge benefit of being part of the Creator mode. The second one is LinkedIn live. Now LinkedIn live, I have an absolute love hate relationship with because I applied, not everybody got access to LinkedIn live. I am one of the people that did not get access, even though I've written two books on the subject, and I applied twice. And I didn't have access into our turn creator mode on because creator mode automatically gives you access to LinkedIn live. Now, they continue to roll out creator mode, maybe not everybody has access to it. And maybe not everybody has immediate access to LinkedIn live, or some of the other things I'm going to talk about. But that was clearly another benefit is you have access. Do you have to use it right away? No. But should you want to do a live stream on LinkedIn, you now have the ability to do it. That's the most important thing here. And another reason why I would recommend creator mode so The third reason, and this is speculation. But if you are able to choose five hashtags, maybe at some point LinkedIn, when you publish content related to those hashtags, LinkedIn will think maybe you have a little bit more expertise on those subject matter than other people do. It might actually help your content perform a little bit better in the algorithm? Should it include one of those hashtags that are affiliated with your profile? This is like Seo 101, right? You only have one title and one meta title, one meta description for your website, your homepage. So obviously, Google is going to prioritize those keywords, I would imagine, LinkedIn would do the same, or they would start to include it as one element of the algorithm. So we don't know how much it's going to help or if it's already helping, but that's another reason, not just from a brand name perspective. But from a potential SEO perspective, I would absolutely turn creator mode on and include those hashtags. Now, one of the other benefits Well, you know, let's get back to the speculation. More speculation is that LinkedIn is going to launch a Twitter spaces like feature. And that and or clubhouse right social audio, and that this will primarily only be available to those that are in the Creator mode. So sophists say when LinkedIn comes out with things that would benefit the Creator economy, they're probably first going to launch them in creator mode. As you can imagine, let those people test it out. First, let them let the creators be the guinea pigs. So the last feature is something I hinted at before called the newsletter feature. Now, if you remember my conversation with Joe Pulizzi, I believe, and I quote him often, and I've said it before, you know, we've all said it, but don't build your house on rented land. So while the LinkedIn newsletter, it might be interesting, like repurposing your blog post on LinkedIn, to repurpose your newsletter on LinkedIn, and see how many people end up subscribing, if I had a huge list of in the, you know, six figures, and I wanted to just expand on it and maybe expand it to a new audience. And, you know, I don't necessarily need to get well, I mean, the more the better on my own list, but I'm okay. If people subscribe on LinkedIn instead of my own list, because I already have a really good cushion, already have a huge list, it might make sense, if I don't have a huge list, it also might make sense to begin on LinkedIn. where I'm at now, I'm in the five figures, not the six or the four figures, I still want to sort of build up my list, once I get to six figures, maybe I'll launch a newsletter on LinkedIn. So for me, that's my personal decision for you, it might be different. I would say, once again, you know, I want to leave people to my own list. But if you're okay, building a list on rented land, then the newsletter is a feature that you'll probably want to look into. Because I believe, not only will it be delivered in the feeds, of your subscribers, or maybe notifications, or maybe messages, but there's always that chance of morality that someone likes it, and it gets introduced to other people in the feed. So how do we turn creator mode on, if you go back to your profile, you go to Edit Profile, if you're ever wondering how to go to Edit Profile, I want you to just go to homepage, right when you log in, and on the left there, you're gonna see like a little bit of a profile who's viewed your profile views your posts, I have the premium packets, I'm able to see a little bit more than you might be able to do. But there's going to be your picture a little circle, once you press on your picture, it immediately gets to your profile in edit mode. And what you're going to see on the top is your basic cover photo photo professional headline hashtags, if you have creator mode turned on, you're then going to see analytics, you're then going to see something called resources. And if you click on right now that there are five resources that I have access to, you might not have access to all of them, because you're not a premium, but the Creator mode is irrelevant of being free or premium. And the Creator mode is the first top resource that you'll see. You click on Creator mode, you will either toggle it on or off once you toggle it on. It gives you the ability to select the hashtags as well as access or give you more details about LinkedIn live and then newsletters. And that's it. It's really, really easy to do. So my recommendation is it can only benefit you turn it on and at a minimum just put those hashtags that are relevant to you and or your brand up on your profile. So the last one I want to get to and this is a tricky one. And I go into more depth about this on my or I should say in my ebook Neal schaffer.com/freebies is LinkedIn automation tools. So I see a lot of case studies of people that have done really well, LinkedIn. And the net net, is I have a high belief similar to how some people did really, really well on Instagram, that they're using automation tools. Now Instagram has really clamped down on automation tools. And they will really hurt you, LinkedIn. I've seen people get banned from LinkedIn by using automation tools. But automation tools are getting smarter. And people, you know, enterprises use LinkedIn, for sales. And in sales, we have pipelines, and in sales will send cold outreach emails with funnels behind them. So there's sort of this infrastructure, and, you know, a way of doing business, that these automation tools basically are providing to those businesses that are used to doing this sort of thing. So before automation tools, you would connect with people that you thought were relevant customer. And then once you connected with them, at some point, you'd reach out, maybe you'd introduce a webinar you're doing, you'd announce a new product, or you'd say, I'd love to get to know how we can help each other, instead of a cup of coffee, maybe you're nodding your head, because you've received as have I a lot of these messages over the last few years. And they continue to today. If you try to do it on your own, even with a virtual assistant, it's going to take time, and then you got to track how you're doing, you don't want to send the same message, twice the same person, etc, etc. So there are a number of automation tools that have become quite robust, and allow you to automate all of these things, from viewing profiles to connecting to sending a message. And if no one replies a follow up message, for instance. Now I cannot say that they do not exist. Do I use these tools? No. Have I experimented with them in the past? Yes. So that I can give better advice to you and my clients, right. But if you want to get massive exposure on LinkedIn, and you want to start building out a big network, and there's a type of person that you think, if you did a LinkedIn search for, you would invite almost everybody who appears in the search results, and you think they would also find value from your relationship, or knowing about your product or service, you can easily right now the limit on LinkedIn automation tools, is or LinkedIn period is 100 invites a week, although there are people that say you can do more than that. But I digress. You can reach out to 100 people every week. And it's similar to how people are doing this on Facebook. And similar to how people are doing an Instagram. And it might feel slimy. But guess what, you don't have to send messages. You can dig your well before you're thirsty, and just connect. And when I experimented with a tool, that's what I did. I have a book out an influencer marketing, I want to connect with other influencer marketing professionals around the world. And that's it. I'm not trying to sell anything indirectly if we follow each other, and they see that I wrote this book. And it might be other opportunities. But that alone gives me a network that maybe at some point I might want to tap into. I'm doing a virtual Summit. And I wonder I want to do a virtual summit on influencer marketing. And I want to bring in leading practitioners. And I'm going to start with my LinkedIn connections. So I'm not going to say LinkedIn automation tools don't exist, because they do, I'm not going to say they can't be efficient, because they can be efficient. I'm also not going to say they don't come with a risk, because they do come with a risk. And you never know when LinkedIn is going to come in and shut down your account. Because like I said, it has happened. I have a blog post that has done very well. How do I send a complaint to LinkedIn, I have people sending me complaints thinking that on LinkedIn, so I see a lot of stuff. And I get pinged by a lot of people. And I'm not talking about people overseas, I'm talking about successful American business people that are locked out of LinkedIn. And when I asked what they did, a lot of the times, it definitely is the fact that they use some sort of automation tool. So I would look into what they are. I would maybe test one out I have some recommendations in the e book, the ones that I would most recommend, yes, their affiliate links in full disclosure, but they help fuel my listening to YouTube and I can drop those analogies to you and drink my coffee while I'm recording this podcast for full effect, but those are the four things the content, featured images creator mode, and LinkedIn automations that I think you should have renewed focus on once again, maximizing LinkedIn for business third edition is out. Neal schaffer.com/freebie. When you're there, check out the other ebooks. And I'm on a roll, I have my next e book, I just published the definitive guide to email marketing. I have an e book on guest blogging, believe it or not, because it's such a powerful tactic to not only generate better SEO, but to build relationships with other companies, other bloggers and ultimately other influencers. So I keep working away, trying to provide you as much value trying to give you the competitive edge for listening to this podcast. So please, if you haven't, subscribe, please, if you find value, take a minute or two to write a review on your favorite platform. Obviously, you know, even really, really big podcasters have so few reviews compared to the number of downloads and listens that they get. And I'm in the same situation. So I would really appreciate if you would take the time to do that. And once again, if you want to get a further competitive edge in your competition, please consider joining my digital first mastermind community, you can go to Neal schaffer.com/mastermind. I do plan in the very near future to be slightly raising the price on this community. I think it delivers pretty incredible value for a $50 a month community. So you can find out more about it. And you'll say for our comm slash membership. And obviously if you want one on one attention, go to Neal Schaffer at our comm slash cmo for my fractional cmo marketing consulting services. Well, that's it for another episode. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and Neal Schaffer calm to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. 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