How To Grow Your LinkedIn Network

But only with the right people

I recently explained how I quadrupled views of my profile and started to get regular clients through LinkedIn. The key to this was growing my network. By making them the right new connections, the chance of succeeding grows exponentially. Let me explain how I did it, starting with a technique that my business partner calls ‘ninja stalking’…

Ninja Stalking!

The number one way of growing a quality network is selecting the right connections. Oh, you were expecting something more insightful?

That is coming, but honestly, you’d be surprised by the number of people that just use the scattergun approach to connections.

Identify the people that are right for your business. These are your ideal customers or the gatekeepers to your ideal customers. Don’t know who your ideal customer is? Get off LinkedIn, get back to basics and come read this article again when you know — none of your marketing efforts will work without this information.

Assuming you’ve identified an individual, let’s work out how to get on their radar, so they are open to a connection AND a conversion. We do this by starting to see what they are doing on LinkedIn. Go to their profile. This immediately flags to them that you’ve looked at them, so any future approach will have a lead-in.

Next, go and look at their activity (scroll down their profile to see all activity), focusing on posts that they have put up or commented on. Now it’s time to engage your creative and sales sides — you have to engage with them via these posts. This doesn’t mean just listing pointless ‘great stuff’ or ‘really interesting’. Yes, they will see that post, but it won’t be memorable. Write something that engages them in a conversation, give them a reason to reply.

For example, they have put up a post talking about a new product range they are working on. You could say ‘that looks nice’ but much better would be ‘love the product, how long did it take to development?’. You have given them a reason to respond. They respond and you have an active conversation and when you send a connection request, it won’t feel out of the blue. You even have a simple intro you can add to the request.

The Direct Approach

If the person you are looking to connect with doesn’t have much activity you can engage with, then you need to go for the direct connection approach, but using your investigative skills to stand out.

The first thing to do is to find information about the person. There is an amazing secret tool that you can use, so I need people to keep this to themselves — it’s called Google…

That’s right, the most popular website in the world will enable you to find information about the person or company that you are looking to connect with. News articles, company websites, their other social media platforms.

Once you have this information, then focus on using it to approach them.

NEVER request to connect with someone that doesn’t know you without adding a comment.

I am not saying it won’t work, but your chances of successfully connecting increase tenfold by putting a message in the connection request and making that message personal. We’ve just made the effort to find information about them, please don’t add the message “Would be great to connect” or “We seem to have similar connections, would be good to add you to my network”. Bland!

Highlight something you know about them in the request. “I saw your product launch last week in the metro, looks really interesting” or, “I noticed you are a big fan of Aston Martin’s, me too!” It needs to be something that’s not creepy but tells the person — they know a little about me, maybe I should connect and find out more.

Engage With People

The final method to getting the right connections is just being an interesting person, sharing valuable posts and attracting the type of people that you want to work with. Nothing is better than a potential client approaching you to connect because then you have the excuse to open a dialogue with them, so how do we make this happen?

Again, we start with identifying our ideal customers and thinking about the type of content they would be interested in. Don’t write about what interests you, find what interests them AND that you can talk well about. If it could be something your company or you are good at, even better!

Engage with the posts of others talking about these subjects, because your customers will also be looking at them. You should have people in your feed discussing these things if you’ve made good connections already, otherwise use keyword searches for the topics and look for posts that are attracting attention.

Find the ones that your ideal customers are already commenting on, then any time you add a comment they will get notified. Do that more than two or three times a day and you’ll be very visible to them, meaning they will probably check out your profile.

On your own posts, the key will be putting up content that many people will want to interact with because this will widen the spread of your content and give you a better chance of it appearing in the feed of the people you want to attract.

Metrics to Monitor

One final thought is to track your success to see if the things you are doing is working.

Ultimately, the only metric that counts are generated leads, everything else could be classed as a vanity exercise without that, but there are metrics to track that will tell you if your efforts on LinkedIn are working.

Start by tracking the number of people viewing your profile. This is a great indicator of profile quality or that your content is being seen by a large audience.

In the same area of your profile, you can see the number of people finding you in searches. That is purely about the quality of your profile and if you have included the right keywords to be found for the things you do.

Finally, monitor your posts and the traffic they are getting. Not just the comments and responses, but also the total reach. This last metric is a great barometer for how far your message is getting spread and will highlight if the LinkedIn gods are smiling on you.