I Hired a Digital Marketing Guy, and It Wasn’t Good

I paid him to grow my followers on LinkedIn. What a disaster.

I was preparing my book proposal in April 2022. My writing/publishing consultant suggested I grow my LinkedIn followers to demonstrate to potential publishers a substantial following. Sounded reasonable to me. She and another person recommended a digital marketing guy.

So Jon James, CEO and founder of Ignited Results in Reno, Nevada, and I chatted. Nice guy.

He told me he could increase my followers from about 2,000 to 17,000 in a few months. I asked him how he could do this. He gave me a vague answer about promoting my profile. I pressed for more details, but I got zippo. This was my first digital marketing rodeo, so I was flying blind but trusted his reputation.

$3,645 to Jon James, and off we go.

Within a few weeks, my followers grew by several thousand. And they kept growing, hitting 17,000 about five months later. I asked him several more times to explain his secret sauce. No explanation.

I signed my book deal with SelectBooks out of NYC in June 2023. They didn’t care how many followers I had. They wanted my book. Out of curiosity, I checked my LinkedIn profile. My followers were back to about 2,000.

I did some digging into the analytics. 15,000 followers dropped off sometime in April. All at once. I searched on LinkedIn for possible explanations. I found this on my follower analytics page:

We’ve recently removed hibernated and restricted accounts, so your list of followers may have changed.

Yeah, they sure did. Restricted and hibernated accounts? What are those?

Here’s what LinkedIn has to say about that:

In order to better support LinkedIn members and contributors with more reliable insights about reach and engagement, inactive accounts, including restricted and hibernated accounts, will no longer be included in the total number of followers listed on a member’s profile.

Restricted Accounts are member accounts that have been removed for violating the Professional Community Policies or the User Agreement. Hibernated accounts are those that members choose to deactivate as an alternative to closing.

So, my interpretation, and perhaps I’m wrong, is that Mr. James sent out his bots, or whatever the case may be, and linked me up to a whole bunch of inactive accounts. Nice. Thanks for that, Jon.

Now that I have a book deal, 17,000 legitimate followers would have been an excellent audience to market to. But they don’t exist!

In fairness, Jon gave me two options: a more targeted approach (way more costly) and a nontargeted approach, which is what I chose. However, I believed he would connect me with real people, whatever choice I made.

When I discovered all the paint had fallen off the walls, I contacted Mr. James and asked him to explain what happened.

Here’s what he had to say:

I share the stress and concerns regarding the need to rebuild the numbers. (No acknowledgement of what he did).

We are working to help in this matter, no we didn’t create any accounts to connect you with. (I asked him if he created fake accounts).

You will see traction within your follower growth by the end of next week, (No, there was no traction),additionally I suggest we conduct a connection outreach campaign to accompany the followers to enhance engagement because this is more critical now that you have a publishing deal. We had discussed this before, and I think the timing is appropriate for it now. (Thanks but no thanks for the upsell).

Let me know your thoughts on the connection aspect.

I wrote him back the next day.

Jon, Thanks for your note. I appreciate you getting back to me on this. Before I even consider doing more work with you, I’d like two things to happen:

1. Your explanation as to how 15,000 followers can suddenly disappear if they are real people with real accounts on LinkedIn.

2. My numbers return to where they were, permanently, per our agreement, or a refund of the $3,645 I paid you in good faith to do the work you promised to do.

I like you personally and believe you’re a man of your word. I trust you to treat me fairly.

This is what I got back (edited for brevity):

I cannot definitively tell you why your followers dropped, and neither can I guarantee that a person/profile will decide to follow you permanently.

We don't offer those sorts of guarantees.

We do, however, stand by our work, and I am more than willing to put forth the effort to rebuild your account.

He continued the upsell but, again, without taking any accountability for 15,000 followers disappearing overnight.

I wrote him back and said this (edited for brevity):

I have been posting articles every few months on my profile. (Actually it was about once a month) That generated the usual amount of traffic I had before we engaged in April of 2022. No significant uptick. I don’t think posting, or the lack of posting has anything to do with 15,000 followers disappearing.

On April 14, 2022, I had 1971 followers. This is the day before we started the campaign. I have about 2,000 now.

Come on, Jon, please don’t insult me by suggesting that 15,000 followers all of a sudden just stopped following me.

Imagine if I hired you to paint my house. 6 months after you painted it, all the paint fell off. How happy would I be?

I would like you to reimburse me for the job that failed, which it did. The paint didn’t stick. I don’t want you padding my account with another 15,000 followers. You won’t explain what you are doing, and that makes me not trust you.

He wrote a long email summarizing our original discussions and offering more services to rebuild my followers, which would be very costly. The one thing that stood out for me was this:

Considering the circumstances, no refund is due since we successfully delivered the end result as agreed upon.

I laughed out loud. The paint fell off the walls six months after the job was completed, and he still believes he delivered a quality result! OMG!

At this point, I told him I was deeply disappointed as a customer and would report him to LinkedIn, which I’ve subsequently discovered is almost impossible to do through their automated system. I also said I’d publish an article about my experience with him. Not my usual M.O. but as a customer, I feel misled and mistreated.

I sent him a copy of this article before I published it. Crickets.

No doubt, he’s helped people I know build their businesses on LinkedIn through targeted lead-generation campaigns. When it comes to increasing legitimate followers, something went awry.

I trusted I would be served a healthy meal. Instead, I got junk food.

The obvious lesson: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Live and learn.

Perhaps this piece can save someone from getting bamboozled by some nutty digital marketing scheme.

I hope so.

I’m Don Johnson. I write essays about life, love, and the pursuit of peace, wholeness, and freedom.

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