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Let’s be honest, if you own a business, you want to make money. You probably also have a great product or service that genuinely helps people, but you also have a desire to make an income. As a business owner, you’re probably also extremely busy. Therefore, anything you do needs to contribute to your bottom line. Networking on LinkedIn is no different.

LinkedIn is not just another social network. It’s the the world’s largest Business to Business network with over 450 million users. Having a LinkedIn profile and being connected with former colleagues and friends is simply not enough. If you want to generate new business, which leads to future earnings, you have to monetize your LinkedIn connections. Here are 4 tips on how to do so:

1. Connect to Your Ideal Prospects

One of the first things you need to do when you want to use LinkedIn to generate new business is to connect with the right people. If you’re just getting started on LinkedIn, it’s perfectly acceptable to connect with former colleagues, current clients and friends. In fact, you want to be connected with these people because they can endorse your skills and leave you recommendations, which are valuable for future prospects.

When you’re ready to connect with your ideal prospects, the first step is to determine who they are. You can do this by creating an ideal prospect profile based on the Advanced search features LinkedIn provides or better yet Sales Navigator. The key is to be specific in narrowing down your ideal prospect.

If you already have a client base, look at who your best, most profitable clients are. This will help you identify who you want to target for future business. However, it’s also important to be open to new audiences and new targets.

What’s great about LinkedIn is that it will help you identify who to target. When you go to LinkedIn, go to the Advanced Search tab. This will allow you to target individuals based on Keywords, Title, Company and Location, and so on. If you’re a premium LinkedIn member, you will have access to additional filters such as Company Size, which can be very valuable.

Once you’ve filed in the information, you hit search and a list of potential prospects comes up. You can then begin sending these prospects connection requests. Be sure to send a personal message with each request stating why you want to connect. Also, LinkedIn only allows you to send requests to a certain number of people each day so be sure to save your searches for the future.

2. Send Messages Once a Month to Stay Top of Mind

When you first connect with someone, you’ll want to send them a message. After that, you’ll want to strategically message them to stay on the top of their mind. The key is not to bombard your prospects with information, but to send them useful blogs, articles and webinars that pertain to their business.

These messages don’t have to be extremely long or detailed. The key is to provide value while staying top of mind. You can simply say you’re reaching out to share some valuable information, and then explain what you’re sharing and why it’s beneficial to them.

Remember, the goal is not to sell them a hard pitch. You want to provide value and become the go-to expert in your industry. They may not need your service now, but if you stay top of mind, you’ll be the first person they think of when they do.

3. Manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other Tracking System

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with LinkedIn Marketing is not properly documenting your progress and results. Once you start getting connected with hundreds of people and sending several messages, it’s easy to get disorganized. The best thing you can do is manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other tracking system from the beginning.

You may not have the money to invest in a CRM system and that’s okay. You can create your own using Excel.

Get Started!

As a fellow business owner, I know you’re busy. LinkedIn is a great source for generating new business, and you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of the time spent on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in using LinkedIn for marketing purposes, I’d love to connect.

Click this link to schedule a meeting with me: jimena.biz

When used correctly, LinkedIn can be one of the most powerful tools for converting prospects to clients. I say “when used correctly” because unfortunately, I see so many people using LinkedIn incorrectly all the time, and then getting discouraged when they don’t see results. If you want to get business results with LinkedIn, it starts with your profile. Too often, I see profiles written exactly like a resume. Here’s a fact: your prospects care less about you and more about what you can do for them. So today, I’m sharing the secret to using the experience section of your profile as a convertion tool.

Write Compelling Copy

If you want to attract prospects and convert them, you have to write your LinkedIn profile using compelling copy. The key is to create copy that is intriguing and enticing without being too sales-y. You never want to pitch yourself too hard on LinkedIn. Rather, you want to share what it is you do and the results you can achieve. One of the ways to do this is through the experience section.

The way LinkedIn is set-up, it’s easy to think the experience section is a place to list past work experiences, and most people do. It asks for your title, company, the time frame you worked at that company and a description. This is the place so many people go wrong. They fill in this section just like their resume and make it about themselves. As I previously stated, potential clients don’t want to know about you. They want to know what you can do for them, and the experience section is a great place to discuss that.

The Title

The secret to getting prospects to convert on LinkedIn is to use your experience section as a case study. Start with your title and create it as a headline. Instead of a basic description such as CEO or V.P. of Marketing, make your headline descriptive and value driven. Additionally, use your title as a place to optimize keywords. You will be ranked on LinkedIn based on your keywords so it’s important to incorporate them into your profile copy.

For example, one of the titles on my LinkedIn is: SEO Lead Generation Expert Helps CPAs, Attorneys and Small Businesses Gain a 300% ROI

The Description

The next part of your experience section is your description. This is where the compelling copy becomes extremely important. You’ll want to write your description like a sales letter but you’ll want to avoid being too sales-y. Always keep in mind the end-goal in mind: you’re writing this to attract new clients.

You’ll want to first peak the interest of your prospects. One way I recommend doing this is by discussing the pain or problem they are experiencing. This draws the prospect in because they can relate to the problem and they want to find a solution to. On my LinkedIn, I discuss the various changes to Google’s algorithm, and how because of these changes, so many people lost their ranking and stopped receiving organic traffic. Again, this directly speaks to the problem many business owners face, and the pain they experience doing SEO.

Next, I recommend discussing what is it you do. Focus specifically on what it is you do rather than how you do it. On my LinkedIn, I discuss how the strategies I use to align with Google’s efforts, which allow me to keep my clients on top of search rankings, even when Google makes changes. Make this section brief, yet specific. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about results.

Which bring me to the next part of your description: client results. Results are what your prospects are looking for. This a great place to use real client examples and discuss the results you’ve achieved for your clients. This part of the experience section doesn’t need to be lengthy but it should be specific.

For example, on my LinkedIn I simply, yet specifically discuss the results I’ve been able to achieve for one of my CPA clients.

“One of my clients a CPA, saw results in as little as 45 days. In just 3 months this client has received a large increase in phone calls that resulted in new business he would not have received otherwise.

In less than 2 months the client was able to stop their Google Adwords campaign as he increased the number of calls he received. This is in part due to as much as 95% of the people doing a search on Google, Yahoo and Bing will click on a link within the organic search – while only 5% will click on an ad.”

After you’ve discussed the results of one or two clients, you finally end your description with a call to action. This could be sending people to your website or encouraging people to sign up for your email list.

I encourage you to create 3 to 5 case studies using the method above: Pain First, What You Do Not How, Client Results and Call to Action.

Tidbits

Your experience section can also feature your past work experience. If you’ve worked at well-known companies or you feel your past work experience greatly contributed to where you are today, you can feel free to leave that experience on your profile. I would suggest listing your case studies first and then your actual work experience.

Additionally, if you’ve had experience speaking at conferences or leading large group facilitations, and it’s something you’re interested in doing again, list it as an experience. Talk about the success you’ve had speaking in the past and the benefit to audience members when you speak at events.

When you organize your profile using compelling copy and focus on the value you provide to the client, your prospects are half-way sold. They’re able to see what you’ve done for other people and they’ve warmed up to you based on the marketing copy used within your profile. When they do contact you, it shortens the selling cycle because you don’t have to prove yourself. They can read your profile and see exactly what you’ve done for others like them.

If you would like to speak with me on how I can help you with your LinkedIn strategy, please visit jimena.biz and fill out the questionnaire on the page.

I discovered this marketing method, truly by accident and from my ow necessity to get clients. It all started back in 2012, when I launched my SEO company. The first 6 months were very difficult. I attended networking events tirelessly, and I met a lot of people who either wanted to barter services, or wanted me to do their SEO for such a little investment, that I would be losing money on the deal.

So I wasn’t meeting the right prospects. Prospects who not only needed my services and understood the value, but could also afford them.

Attending networking events took so much energy and time! I then became exhausted and started to look to other strategies to get clients. One such strategy was reading through Craigslist posts from companies looking to hire an SEO person. The people I came across here wanted the world for a dollar, so needless to say this did not work too well either.

Next I tried direct mail, this was beyond my budget at the time because I was a new business and had no clients, so I was living purely off savings, without adding much of anything to my nest egg and while still having to pay all the regular bills plus business expenses.

I did one campaign because that’s all I could afford and got no calls. So after all of this, I finally got 1 client from a referral from someone I met at a networking event. Still, 6 months later and 1 client wasn’t going to cover the bills, so I started to look for a job. I decided to use LinkedIn as one of the places to try to find work.

As I was looking for a job, I realized that the people who I wished were my clients were right there on LinkedIn.

At this point I had nothing to lose while I waited for a job offer to come in, so I decided to figure out a way to get the attention of these perfect prospects I was coming across on LinkedIn.

2 weeks later, I got my next SEO client (who by the way is still with me today). Once I discovered how much easier it was to generate targeted and high value leads on LinkedIn, I stopped everything else that was wasting time and money, and decided to “perfect” my LinkedIn strategy.

Long story short, I did not have to go back to “working for the man” and instead grew my business to 6 figures in just 12 months, just from the clients I got through LinkedIn.

Since then, I have helped several other companies add 6 and in some cases even 7 figures to their bottom line from our LinkedIn lead generation campaigns.

So are you curious to find out how we have been doing this?

Well, you can book a meeting with me to see if we are a good fit to work together here:

www.jimena.biz