If You Want to Make Money on LinkedIn, Do This

I grew my LinkedIn by 15,000 followers in 18 months, and LinkedIn has been key to memaking over $53,000,000 in sales.

This is the exact process that I followed to fix my profile, publish content that gets noticed (without feeling overwhelmed creating posts), and get connected to people who send me business.

I used to think that LinkedIn was just a resume holder (or I’d just ignore it). But when you invest just a few minutes a day using this process, you get predictable results. 

Why People Fail on LinkedIn

So let’s talk about the real reason why people fail on LinkedIn: their profile, their posts, everything, is “look at me. I’m so great.” Have you ever seen the posts where somebody is humbled and honored to be presented with something or to be chosen to speak? That kind of stuff just DOESN’T work. It really turns people off.

Building a Customer-Acquiring Profile

So how it actually works is you need to be able to answer these questions:

1. Is it 100% clear who you help? Often it’s not clear who you help. If all you’re saying is you’re a CEO of XYZ corporation, that’s not helpful. The reader needs to know when to think about you. What is special? What is unique about what you are doing? What’s something that makes them go, “I want to learn more about that?”

2. Is it clear what to do to connect with you? How do they engage with you? Is there an invitation to take a next step? So all of these things, I’m gonna show you how to do them, but this is how it actually works. This is what you need to be doing in order to engineer contacts coming to you from LinkedIn, getting prospects, getting referral partners especially (more on that in a sec).

Key Elements of Your Profile

Key elements of the profile are your photo, your wallpaper, your headline, the about section, featured resources, and then your resume, which is what I think they call experience now on LinkedIn. So these are the key elements, and we’re gonna work through each one of those.

Profile Photo

Don’t use a crappy selfie, and it looks unprofessional. This first impression is a trust factor – they’re one click away from doing something else online if they think you’re unprofessional.

Now I’m show you how to get a really good picture, and actually be sure (with science) that it is a good picture. 

Either get a professional headshot, or now there’s a bunch of AI generators where you can upload some pictures of you and will make it into a professional headshot. Either one is fine.

Once you get it, head over to Photofeeler.com – and you can have real people “vote” on what they think about your picture.

You’ll get REAL data about how good your picture is, and if it’s turning people off. Here’s mine:

Wallpaper

At the top of your LinkedIn profile, you can upload a banner that goes on top of your LinkedIn profile. Here my friend Andrew has done an excellent job:

Number one, it clearly says what his business does, what they do,  and they “deploy AI solutions that CEOs brag about” – that’s very good phrasing. Then it’s got a bunch of credibility builders. So this is a really great way of showcasing what you do.

Headline

There are three examples of headlines, and we can play ‘which one does not belong’ here… So first, we have Alan. “I help SDRs and founders increase their meetings,” and you see it gets cut off. Now I took these screenshots from a post. So when you post on LinkedIn and you are putting up a post, your little photo goes there, and then a few words of your headline go there, but not your whole headline – it gets cut off.

So what happens before the cutoff is important. But I can tell from Alan’s that who he helps, SDRs and founders, increase their meetings. Now I can’t see the rest, but already I know, if I’m a founder, and I want to increase my meetings, Alan might be the guy I should be listening to. So good job, Alan.

Peter, “transformational leadership, strategic vision, and planning”. I kind of understand what he does but I don’t understand how that helps me. Do I need my leadership transformed? Why? Anthony, “homepage messaging for early stage B2B startups.” Great, I know if I’m an early stage B2B startup, and I need my homepage messaging fixed, I should listen to Anthony. So if you’re that person and you have that problem, I know exactly what you think about.

About Summary

Most people will put more self-promotional stuff here. Instead, you want to start out with who you help and what you do for them. 

You don’t lead with YOU. You lead with THEM, and that is what attracts people to you and cause them to dig deeper. Now I still put it there as credibility material, but it’s at the bottom. Above that, I have identifying the person who I want to talk with, and then I give them a couple links.

Featured Resources

Here, you can put in links. You can put in up to three links. My suggestion is that you have something to give away for free. It gets people into your world, and it’s a way for them to take action.

Resume

Just doesn’t really matter compared to the other things. The important thing is that you are showing credibility for what you’ve done. So in my case, I’m showing a bunch of experience, cut it off here (because I’m old) and it goes on for a long time. But it’s got some current things, and it also shows that I’m an investor. It shows that I’ve been a founder and CEO so if you’re coming to me looking for an investor or for advisory work, you know I’ve been in your seat before.

The VIP Referral Process

Let’s get into one of the coolest things that I’ve ever created, which is the VIP referral process. It’s how you get business from LinkedIn. I used to do old school networking before the Internet (I know, imagine that, a world before the Internet). Online is awesome, but it is never a substitute for meeting in person.

LinkedIn, you can use in a way unlike most other social platforms because it’s about work, like an old school networking meeting.

What LinkedIn lets us do is have those warm introductions targeted at scale because the number one problem with this kind of in-person networking is speed. There are only so many coffees you can have before you’re hopped up on caffeine. There are only so many drink meetings you should do before you’re falling down, and it’s just not healthy.

Also today, often the people that are most valuable for you to meet are not where you are. If I think right now about my network, there are very few of them within fifty miles of where I live. The vast majority of people that I talk with and have been the best contact have been hundreds or thousands of miles away, and it’s all been because of introductions online.

For instance, one of my oldest business relationships and now good friend, he lives two thousand miles away. We’ve met a decade plus ago through a post on LinkedIn, and that never would have happened otherwise.

So the brute force way of doing meeting is to DM a thousand people, that’s assuming that those people want to buy or spend time in a meeting with you. That is really time-consuming. And especially if you’re selling something that’s lower cost, that doesn’t make any sense.

So this referral process is we ask ourselves the question, “who already has access to my customers?”

In other words, I’m not going directly for my customer. I am going for people who have already put in the time and effort to get connected to my customers. Somebody out there HAS already done this. They’ve already stocked the pond. I’m going to fish.

Now might I have to pay them for access to that pond? Maybe. But it’s better than sending out thousands of one-on-one attempts to meet people on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is the way in which we connect with these leveraged relationships.

If you’re thinking, “I sell products to consumers, people don’t refer me business.” That is not correct thinking. I own an ecommerce business – but I have used this process not to get referrals of business, of partnerships.

(For a copy of this sheet visit CEOworkbench.com) 

Publishing Content

The last part is publishing content. There’s a specific tool for that available for free on the CEO Workbench along with my full LinkedIn training.

What this tool lets you do is spend just a few minutes to generate a “perpetual content calendar” – that tells you what to publish, every day. You do that by brainstorming the top problems of your audience, then it gives you specific ways to write about those problems that have the right mix for marketing and selling.

Then – it shows you how to use AI to write the posts.

Resources

For more resources, check out Using LinkedIn To Generate Business and explore the CEO Workbench for additional training and resources.

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