LinkedIn is a huge opportunity for any business that is in the B2B market. It is a great gathering point for people who are decision makers when it comes to selling items to other businesses. The conversion rates can be amazing when it comes to these kind of markets, I have received rates as high as 1 conversion per 20 visitors. This is pretty amazing especially when you consider how much traffic LinkedIn can drive.
So how do you promote content through LinkedIn? Well it is a little tricky, and once again I want to warn everyone that the whole point of this site is to teach marketing skills, we will not talk about any ethics that go along with this. Instead we will go over the exact techniques that get results, just follow the below steps and you should end up having a lot of success on LinkedIn.
Create a Profile Based Around Your Niche
This is the first and most obvious step, you need to create a profile that speaks to the other people who are in your niche. You may either create a pen name or your own profile. The key is to make sure that it’s a profile that looks trustworthy and will draw the interest of anyone in the related field.
A lot of people tend to skimp on this step, they just upload an image, put a job or career on their profile and away they go. Don’t be one of these people, fill everything out that is possible, the more legitimate you look, the better your results will be. The community on LinkedIn is extremely close, and they have no problem flagging you for spam if they don’t feel like you are legitimate.
Add Connections From Related Groups
The next step is to find connections. Our end goal is to send hyper targeted traffic, and in order to find this traffic we need to add people who are interested in our topic. The best way to do this is find related groups and to add the people in these groups as connections. When it asks you how you know them just choose other. Be careful with this, if too many people flag you as unknown you may receive a temporary ban. This isn’t a big deal, but there are safeguards set in place to keep you from spamming.
In my experience most people will be happy to add you, after all this is why they are all on LinkedIn in the first place, to build up connections with other people in a related field.
Participate In Groups
Try your best to get into every single related group possible. Obviously the more people in the group the better off you will be. Participate by answering and asking questions, become a top contributor, don’t be there to just promote your own content. The point is to make a name for yourself and to build up a lot of trust. This part does take time, but it will pay off in the end. I like to do this for a few weeks before I even consider pushing content onto groups.
Continue To Build
While you are participating in groups continue to build up your connections as you go along. This is important, these two phases should be going on at the same time. Sometimes I like to build a back up pen name just in case my main one gets flagged. It’s always good to have a backup, especially if your client is expecting traffic and promotion as quickly as possible.
Start Posting
Alright, this is the hard part, you will now need to promote your content on LinkedIn. Posting content onto your home page is easy and with your connections that are all in a related niche I would definitely recommend it.
Posting on groups is where things can get difficult. If your post looks too promotional you can be flagged. If you get flagged you will be unable to post to groups without the administrators approval first. They rarely approve articles so getting flagged generally ends with you being unable to post to any LinkedIn groups. This is why it’s so important that you are active in the community, and that you don’t come off as self-promotional.
When I post content onto a group in LinkedIn I like to ask a question about the article. The best thing you can do is start a conversation based around the subject, this will usually end with people talking about the article, instead of getting angry at you for promoting your own content.
Creating Your Own Group
Creating your own group in a niche is a good long term offer. The hardest part of course is getting other people to join your group. You may invite your connections to join your group, however, with a basic account you are only allowed to add up to 3,000 connections. If you are planning on building your own group you may want to look into upgrading your LinkedIn account, or look for other ways to work around this problem. In my experience it takes around 10,000 people in a group before it really gets active, this isn’t an exact number though and will depend on the niche.
The plus of having your own group is you don’t have to worry about getting flagged for any of your content. As an administrator instead it will be your job to make sure that no one else is too self-promotional in your group.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a great platform, especially when it comes to advertising. There is a reason why it costs so much to advertise on LinkedIn and that’s because the traffic is all highly targeted. By following the above steps you will be able to gain this high quality traffic for free. The best part is you will continue to build connections in your industry, which will allow you to begin large sales over LinkedIn as well.
In my experience LinkedIn is much more targeted then the kind of traffic that I get from going viral over twitter. If you need targeted B2B traffic, this is the perfect place, and the best way to get it.
