Tag: LinkedIn

I don't send manual invitations anymore on LinkedIn. This is a major milestone in my marketing on LinkedIn, because I have to tell you I have spent a lot of time manually messaging on LinkedIn.

Are you trying to expand your network of connections on LinkedIn? Despite all the benefits of being on LinkedIn, one thing that is not easy to do is expand your network of 1st level connections.

I was able to grow my 1st level connections to 10,000 in less than one year, but I had to work very hard at it. I am a LinkedIn trainer as well as an entrepreneur, and one thing I teach my students is to be careful not to send out more than 40 invitations per day. This is a restriction that LinkedIn puts on free and Business Plus paid accounts.

If you do the math, even if you work at it every day, you would not make it to 10,000 connections in a year, even if you had a very high 50% invitation acceptance rate. For most people, it probably would take around 3 years to do this, on average.

The only reason I was able to do it so quickly is that I had two paid LinkedIn accounts, a Business Plus account as well as a Sales Navigator account. With both these accounts, I was able to send out more than 100 invitations per day, since a free or Business Plus account allows for 40 invitations per day. I also found out that Sales Navigator allows up to 100 invitations per day.

The downside was that it took me 45 minutes to one hour each day to accomplish this. I wanted to send mainly personalized invitations. It was a lot of hard work, and many times along the way, I felt like giving up.

BUT, now I have found a much easier way to send well over a hundred invitations per day, and also to send invitations completely on autopilot. It now takes me only about 5-10 minutes per day to do what took me nearly one hour per day last year.

This particular tool was not available last year, but if I had been able to use it last year, I would have saved an enormous amount of time. I could have saved well over 300 hours last year alone!

You can use this program with either a free or a paid LinkedIn account, and the automation program is compliant with LinkedIn's terms and conditions.

Please review the video at the link below, and I think you will discover this is an automation tool you will not want to live without.

Check out Linked Group Messenger —-> Click HERE <—-

Thank you very much for reading this entire message.

Any questions at all, just reply to this message you received. I will be happy to answer any question you might have.

John Lombaerde
Goldfinch Digital Publishing LLC

Note: click this link below to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Uncategorized

LinkedIn — To Open Network Or Not

February 11, 2016

As an avid LinkedIn user, and as a member of the LinkedIn Open Networkers group (aka LIONs), it is a question I see being asked on LinkedIn and at other social media platforms and services on a regular basis. I actually think that the answer is more varied than simply the two options of "open networking" or "closed networker," and your individual answer depends on you and your objectives in creating a LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn system

The reason that the question exists to the extent it does, is that LinkedIn has created an online network which at its basic level is fundamentally different to any other Social Media network. LinkedIn positively discourages members to connect to those that they do not know and have not met. They even enforce the systematic structure by making supporting statements in both their terms and conditions as well as their User Guidelines. This is in stark contrast to the social side of others online networks which most will be more used to in the form of Facebook, where chatting and connecting to people who seem to be much like you is part of the whole ethos.

But, and here's the crucial difference: LinkedIn users have an average household income of over $140k, with 80% over $75k, the spammers would see an open network as list building shangri-la! Further, when 60% are senior executives and 90% are college educated, it would mean that any affiliate or direct sale would inevitably come with a high commission return.

LinkedIn market

Hence from a market trust view point, making it difficult to connect is ensuring just that: consistent, believable and hence trusted online networking. Further, that is what LinkedIn's target audience want. They are not used to the fast moving and Farmville-powered coffee corner that is Facebook. They want something more akin to a select and stable club, where one can mix with like minded people, and then be introduced by acquaintances when mutual needs which are mainly business orientated arise.

LinkedIn networking

So, what options are there between open networking and closed networking which can be adopted by LinkedIn users? Firstly, lets be clear here: there is no such thing as closed networking on any social network, including LinkedIn. If you choose to be wholly "closed" in your networking, then you wouldn't even have a LinkedIn profile, let alone connect to known friends whom you work with directly or meet with on a weekly basis. You choose to join a club or network and stay there because it gives you a professional marker post in a popular place, and opens up opportunity on both a personal, professional and business level.

But on the other hand, nor does truly open networking exist. If you were truly open, then you would accept every invite that any "profile" sent to you. The reason I mentioned those statistics about LinkedIn at the start of this piece, was because however difficult a systems designer makes connecting to others, those membership statics much like the challenge of stealing the British Royal Crown Jewels or the Mona Lisa from Paris will always attract ambitious opportunists.

While as a recruiter and CV writer I never encourage non-artiste job applicants to place a photo on their CV, in online networking one of the first signs of a spamming profile is the lack of profile image, or use of one that you may have seen once or twice before: its amazing how many photos of Rod Stewart, Bono and Sir Tom Jones are available! Then there are the names, most often three letters as that is the minimum LinkedIn will allow; or the incomplete profile records of both education and work history: one term at Harvard and a three months on Wall Street doesn't fool anyone!

So in reality, everyone is the same type of networker, but at different points along a line of how much trust they require to develop in others before they decide to offer to connect.

List of Social Networking Sites

This is a quick list of social networking sites, which can be used for traffic generation, or just getting your name out there for marketing and credibility.

Facebook – This was developed for the collegiate market and later expanded to professionals as these people graduated from college. The interface is clean and crisp, without a lot of extraneous stuff. It allows people to connect with others in their own network. It offers a profile and several ways to market yourself to your friends, although you are not allowed to spam marketing hype on your profile or elsewhere. It has many applications you can add to boost your profile or add marketing features to your profile.

LinkedIn – This social networking site has a far more business-like and professional flavor. It is noted for helping people network to find new jobs or business opportunities.

Squidoo – This site allows you to define your brand and even promote and market products. It is more of a marketer's social network and is based on the creation of lenses that are focal points of interest that you want to highlight about your personal expertise or your business.

Twitter – A social networking site with minute-by-minute updates, if that's what you like. It's unlike the other sites, but hugely popular, particularly for mobile phone updates.

By the way, do you want to add a LinkedIn coaching program to your business? If so, join me in Markethive and I will introduce you to someone who provides training. There is no cost to either of these. Good luck.

If you believe that my message is worth spreading, please use the share buttons if they show at the top of the page.

Stephen Hodgkiss
Chief Engineer at MarketHive
markethive.com

Al Zibluk

Uncategorized

How to gain more MarketHive subscribers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?

December 17, 2015

How do you increase your number of MarketHive subscribers, or "children" if you will?

I think LinkedIn is one of the best ways to accomplish this. It seems at though, I may have finally cracked the LinkedIn code to do this, well sort of. Today, I got 12 new invitations to connect with me this morning in my inbox, and I have added 981 connections so far this month. This is a fairly rapid increase, that I believe few people are currently doing now, on LinkedIn.

In addition, all of those new connections have been invited to join MarketHive. (I am currently getting nearly a 1% response rate on invitations to MarketHive). I am actively trying to find a way to increase that percentage, but it is resulting in nearly one new MarketHive sign-up per day.

I don't know how many entrepreneurs realize that their first level connections are already in their sales funnel? Everyone looking to market on LinkedIn needs to think this way. Ok, it may not be exactly the same, but it is very close to it. Everything depends on what you do with those connections.

Some kind of automation is needed here for sure. The manual way of messaging in LinkedIn will take you nearly forever to send a message to thousands of first level connections. Btw, the LinkedIn limit for invitation requests per day is 40 maximum with a free account or a paid account, (Sales Navigator has a limite of 100 per day). There is a limit of 250 messages per day to your 1st level connections on all LinkedIn accounts. If you do that every day manually, that is a very time consuming process, for sure!

I am in the process of setting up a step-by-step training program on how to use LinkedIn to promote Markethive. I may also expand it to a complete LinkedIn training as well, depending on the level of interest. In any case, this is something anyone can do. It can be done, even with a free LinkedIn account. With additional low-cost automation software solutions, the process can be greatly accelerated.

All for now. Thanks for your interest.

Best possible sucess in all your endeavors!

John Lombaerde

Al Zibluk

General

Why LinkedIn still rocks!

November 28, 2015

View image | gettyimages.com

If you have held the opinion that LinkedIn is one of the best social networks to find new leads and contacts to develop your business, here is yet another reason. From recent research, it seems that LinkedIn can send more traffic to your blog than other networks. Another reason to love LinkedIn, right?

It seems from this particular post that there are best times to post on LinkedIn. It is good to avoid the evenings and weekends. I have found that invitations are responded to at all times of day, but post reading may very well follow the workday pattern as the post suggests. One very attractive possibility exists on Pulse.

There are certain posts that LinkedIn will promote. If you are an industry "influencer", that helps a great deal, but also those with large networks on LinkedIn are favored as well. It is possible for your post to be seen hundreds of thousands of times if it is promoted on Pulse. Another reason to grow a large network on LinkedIn

7 Essential LinkedIn Marketing Stats

What are all those connections on LinkedIn for anyway?

November 11, 2015

A segment of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

The number of your LinkedIn connections is a critical factor in your long-term marketing success on this unique social network. If you connect with someone that has 10k 1st level connections on LinkedIn. That person's 10K 1st level connections automatically become your second level connections. their 2nd level, automatically become your 3rd.

The larger your network, the larger your reach of potential prospects. Or, to put it another way, large networks command a larger sphere of influence. With large networks it is apparent that you cannot know everyone in your network personally, but the advantage in my opinion outweighs the benefit of a smaller network of known associates.

As your network grows it will be more attractive for others to connect to you in order to widen their sphere of influence. For example, it is clear that a certain point, you will have to make less effort to find connections. (It has been reported that this usually happens on LinkedIn when 3,000 or more 1st level connections have been made).

3,000 connections may seem like a big number if you rely only on friends and associates. If you could add 30 connections per day, however, then it would take you only about three months to accomplish. Not bad, right?

The larger your network, the more invitations will come to you, instead of having to reach out for every one of your connections. It is healthy for the growth of your network to have a mix of incoming and outgoing connection requests. If you only send out connection requests and never receive any incoming requests, it may look unbalanced to LinkedIn. You might want to check your profile to see if there is anything that would prevent someone from connecting to you, if you notice this happening.

Every time you post on Pulse inside of LinkedIn, your post automatically goes out to all of your first level connections. If you have 10k connections, you have the chance for your content to be seen by over 10,000 people! You will likely get many more views, likes, and comments with a larger network receiving your posts. LinkedIn is much more likely to promote your content on Pulse, with a greater number of views.

If LinkedIn does promote your post, it could potentially be seen by tens of thousands of people. It is not an easy task to get a blog post to command that kind of attention on a typical hosted WordPress blog. It takes quite a bit of time and effort.

One caution here. You will inevitably get more spammy type messages in your inbox. How long does it take to click delete? If anyone becomes annoying and sends you repeated messages, you always have the option to remove them from your network. In my opinion the rewards far outweigh the risks, so I am busy building a large network on LinkedIn. See the following links to find out more about the best ways to do this.

MarketHive — Social Network for Entrepreneurs

Goldfinch Digital Marketing — one-stop shopping for all your local marketing needs

Goldfinch Digital Publishing — marketing blog

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