3 things holding you back on LinkedIn

Let's face it – when it comes to crafting content or expanding your network, targeting is key. Sure you can sit on thousands of connections and followers, but if they aren’t the right people, it’s all for naught.

If you fill your network with irrelevant people, it will negatively impact your content and it won’t help you get clients. I’ve met people who have grown their network with people who aren’t the right fit and they always regret it.

Let's look at 3 things which could be holding you back.

🚫 Watering down your network

Sure, growing your network feels fantastic, but quality beats blind quantity any day. For those reading this, the best scenario is always a quantity of quality. It’s not one or the other, you want volume and relevancy. 

There is a theory doing the rounds that has quite a big flaw. Connect with commenters and likers. The theory goes that if you connect with commenters and likers, your content will take off more - it’s kind of true. The problem is as soon as you start posting industry specific content, as soon as you stop sharing broad appealing content, those likers and commenters check out.

When I’m speaking at events, people often ask me WHO should be in their network. My answer is simple: the people you want to do business with, the people who influence those people and the people who work with those people.

The world doesn’t care about self-sealing stem bolts….but your most valuable clients do. If you sell these gadgets all your content should be addressing the people who need them, use them and want to buy them. You want your network filled with people who might need those self-sealing stem bolts. Interestingly, birds of a feather often flock together. This means, as your content relevancy increases, your content gets distributed through the networks of those who do engage, you can play a relevant ripple effect game if you have a tight network and stay on topic.

Sure it might be nice to have a load of love from your network for your selfie and quote, but the warm feeling from that fades when you haven’t sold anything for months.

🚫 Ditch the pitch

The success of your business depends on the number of quality conversations you have. It’s about the depth of the relationships you build. Many choose to only invest in relationships if they know it will be profitable.

That's selfish and self defeating.

What most people are doing in the DMs is trying to find low hanging fruit. The send a pitch and hope if they send enough, something will turn up. It's a low rent way to market your services. The pitches often get ignored because they aren't targeted. Cold pitching is the most ineffective way to sell.

But....people love it because it's a lazy way to sell. Many of the people who do it don't care about their reputations, it's just a job.

If you’ve got a million self-sealing stem bolts and you want to shift them - simple - just fire out the pitches on LinkedIn and offer them to buyers. They either need them or they don’t.

But what happens when the sale is more involved? What happens when the sale is not a physical product? Can blind pitching really work?

The data says it doesn’t (despite what you see). For every 200 pitches you are likely to get less than 2 positive replies. This approach is optimised for output, but when you optimise for conversion - you can get 10-15 positive responses.

How? It’s really simple, invest time in prolifically building trust and name recognition before you ever reach out. The data shows that if you have name recognition with your prospect, they are 3 times more likely to read your message or open your email.

If they’ve seen your content before, engaged with your content before or you’ve had a non-salesy conversation with them, that goes up even more.

When you’ve built that trust and name recognition, you don’t have to hard sell people or pitch them, you just have a conversation - it’s more natural and more authentic.

🚫 Avoiding being labelled

I hated being known as the LinkedIn guy. I help clients build their marketing strategy, messaging, email marketing campaigns - I do more than just LinkedIn. My resistance to owning the LinkedIn label held me back.

Why? Like it or not, humans like to label and define things. I was resisting the very reason why I was known in the market. I wanted to be the marketing guy. The problem was - that was pretty broad. 

I didn’t want to own the label.

Eventually, after years of frustration, years of getting limited success - I decided to own the label. Guess what? As soon as I tacked into it, as soon as I owned it, my business got a ton of traction. I went all in on LinkedIn and it paid off.

To this day, my business does way more than just LinkedIn, but by owning the LinkedIn bit, I could cut through the noise. There are millions of ‘marketing people’ - I narrowed myself down to a LinkedIn person which provides very focused services, whereas the marketing label could mean anything to anyone.

I meet lots of people who resist the label. They try to straddle three or four labels and as a result their social selling strategy is a disaster. They can’t create a message that cuts through to anyone.

Be the go to person for one specific problem. You’ll be surprised how much of a difference it makes.

Trust me, if you resolve these three elements, things start to come together.