How I Reached Over 25 Million LinkedIn Views in 4 Months

Step 1: Optimize Your Profile

When people look at your profile, they decide whether you’re worth connecting with in several seconds. These are the questions that go through their head when making this decision:

Do they look like a domain expert? Do they look like a leader? Can they help me?

If you can trigger a “yes” to each one, then you can connect with venture capitalists, Fortune 500 founders, and thought leaders – at scale.

1. You with a relevant influencer in your industry
2. You speaking in front of prospects
3. You at a local landmark (only works if you’re connecting with people in your city)

If you can’t state your business proposition in two sentences, then you don’t have a business.

Step 2: Auto-Connect to Thousands of Prospects at Scale

With several clicks, you can connect to hundreds of targeted prospects at scale.

Founders of 500+ employee companies in the software space? Done.
Directors of Innovation of 250+ employee companies in the marketing and advertising space? Done.

And they’ll accept your connection request because your profile is optimized. To make this magic happen, you need to buy the Chrome extension, Linked Helper ($15/month).

To use the tool for expanding your network, write an invitation message. You’ll see the option in the middle drop-down. Write an intro message that’s NON-SALESY. Focus on establishing a common bond.

For example, in the message below I’m reaching out to founders in Los Angeles. I ensure that I include both keywords (e.g. founders, Los Angeles) in my message.

This message will go out to everyone you auto-connect with – possibly thousands of individuals. Next, I plug-in a relevant search query into LinkedIn Sales Navigator. If you don’t have Sales Navigator, then don’t bother to run automation. You’ll get your profile banned.

Now I click “Connect all 2nd contact in Search.” The tool will automatically start connecting with personalized messages to everyone in the search query.

Don’t connect with more than 150 people in a 24 hour period; otherwise, you risk the potential of getting banned. If you send out 150 requests every other day, you can expand your connection base by a couple of thousand targeted prospects every month. Powerful.

Now that you have a strong connection base let’s ramp up engagement.

Step 3: Publish Viral LinkedIn Posts Every Week

You have many prospects in your network. Do you immediately follow-up with a sales message?

Look at this status I created – over 8 million views.

Step 5: Use Engagement Posts to Drive Subscribers

To turn your engagement into email subscribers, you can offer a relevant download or ask them for their opinion on a content release.

Because LinkedIn decreases engagement for posts with links, I’ll put the link in the first comment. When I hit thirty comments on the piece, I’ll move it to the text area because garnering the initial engagement is the hardest.

Step 6: Use Appreciation Posts to Develop Key Relationships

LinkedIn loves when you appreciate people in your network. They go crazy over it. The formula:

1. Introduce the problem you had before your meeting
2. Explain the credibility of the person you’re meeting using a tangible example
3. Dive into the key learning lessons from the conversation using bullet points

Step 7: Prep Your Statuses Using Quora to Create the Best LinkedIn Content

All my best LinkedIn statuses were written months before I began posting them. How?

They were my answers to questions on Quora.

In fact, 8/10 my most viewed statuses were initially written on Quora. I use Quora to validate my content before I post it on LinkedIn. This means that if my content gets high engagement on Quora, then I’ll repost it on LinkedIn.

There’s a slight mismatch. LinkedIn statuses only allow for 1,300 characters, unlike Quora which has no limit. As a result, when answering questions on Quora, it’s best to keep the 1,300 character limit in mind.

Step 9: Interview High-Value Prospects at Scale

If you implemented the content tactics outlined above every day for a month, then people are starting to follow every post you publish. Your network knows of you and people in their network know of you.

It’s time to make sales. We sell in a genuine way – by focusing on relationship building using content marketing. This tactic is more useful if you have high-value prospects.

This means your average deal size should, at least, be one thousand dollars.

Because almost every conversation leads into “What do you do?”, our angle is to get high-value prospects on the phone with you before they even receive a sales pitch. How does this work?

We offer to include them in blog posts, podcasts, case studies, live stream videos, or even online magazines where you can highlight them. We’re playing to their ego – and it works.

Here’s an example message:

This message has over a thirty percent reply rate. Here’s why:

1. Appreciation “I love the work you’ve done for [X company]”
2. Credibility
“Podcast that gets 2,000 listens an episode”
3. Community first
“As an entrepreneur building a vibrant community of founders”
4. More appreciation
“Knowledgeable speakers and people crushing it in tech such as yourself”
5. Example of a previous episode (not in the picture)
“Here’s an example of a previous interview with [insert credible name]: [link here]”
6. Straightforward call-to-action (not in the picture)
“Do you have fifteen minutes to talk this Wednesday @ 2 P.M. PST?”
With this template, I’ve had the founder of Zapier and Zoom respond to me. It’s that good.

Step 10: Turn Your LinkedIn Connections into a Vibrant Tribe

Once you’ve connected with and nurtured many of your target LinkedIn prospects, you have the leverage to build a tribe. This happens in a Facebook Group, not a Slack community or a LinkedIn Group – those are dead zones.
To get people into your community, there are two ways:

1. Email
2. LinkedIn messaging (more painful, but still works)

1. Email

Here’s the email template I’ll send out to all my LinkedIn connections:

“Hey [first name]

As a LinkedIn connection and fellow founder, I wanted to personally invite you to a founder Facebook Group I organize that’s very active, Marketers & Founders.

I happen to run one of the largest marketing communities in Silicon Valley (3000+ members) and the Facebook Group (6000+ members).

The Marketers & Founders Facebook Group is moderated by a few of the best, so it’s invite-only.

Our moderators:

1. Aj Cartas; 1.2 million social media fans and is an influencer lead @TopBuzz

2. Taylor Pipes; content strategist @Evernote

3. Me ???? Past head of growth for @22Social, @UpOut, and @GrowthX. 

You can join the Marketers and Founders Facebook Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/growthmarketers/

If you want to know more info, feel free to reply.”

To email them at scale, you need to have a few warmed up email accounts tied to a domain you don’t use for your website or primary business but sounds relevant to your brand.

For example, I used “marketersfounders.com”.

Here are the two tools you need to send emails at scale:

Tool #1: Google Apps 

A Google Apps account will enable you to create many email addresses tied to your “temporary” domain. I recommend sticking below 300/day per an email address and starting off at 20/day for the first three weeks.

Tool #2: Mailshake

This tool will enable you to send thousands of emails/day if you have many emails attached. It’s the best tool for sending emails at scale with the shortest learning curve.

It took me around twenty minutes to understand the entire tool and another twenty to begin sending emails.

2. LinkedIn Messaging

Andrei posted on LinkedIn asking whether people were interested in joining his B2B SaaS community. As a result, he received almost over 1,000 responses.

That’s 1,000 new members from one post. He only had 2,000 connections when he posted this.

The next step is paying a VA to use your profile to connect with all these people and send them a message with your community link.

After emailing and posting on LinkedIn, you should have a couple of thousand members in your community. Well done.

Step 11: Encourage them to Subscribe on Messenger

The first step is to pick a messenger tool.

I use ManyChat because of its feature versatility to capture leads with dedicated landing pages or people commenting on a Facebook post.

If you’ve ever used an opt-in tool on a blog, then you’ll have a similar experience when setting up ManyChat. The learning curve is only a couple of minutes.

To get the initial subscriber base, I ran a giveaway encouraging people to jump on. This gave me three-hundred-and-fifty Messenger subscribers.

When I had enough traction for the Facebook Group, I required members to opt-in via Messenger to gain access. As of writing, this approach has led to over five hundred more subscribers in the last month.

After a month of using ManyChat, I leveraged my base to bring in another several thousand subscribers by having the most successful book launch on Product Hunt.

Soon after, I ran another giveaway. If people commented on my Facebook Fan Page post, I’d send them my viral LinkedIn templates. I received over one hundred comments.

As per ManyChat, if someone comments on your post, they immediately become a subscriber.

Play ball where they play ball. It’s easier to get someone to subscribe via Messenger if they’re already on Facebook.

Step 12: Follow-Up with Quality Inbound Opportunities

I have a problem.

Too many messages. I get hundreds every day across LinkedIn, Facebook, and email. To sort them out, I hired an assistant.

If you’re looking to stay lean, then you can hire a virtual assistant, too.
I’d check out Upwork; it’s one of the best resources to hire virtual assistants.

If you’re publishing content, building your list, and driving engagement, then you’ll get flooded with inbound opportunities. I don’t have the time to look through them all, so I hire people to do that for me.

I pay more to hire people who have experience in my industry. They’re far better at identifying valuable opportunities.

Create a Powerful Ecosystem</strong id=”create”>

To excel at one social platform, it often requires the help of others because excellent marketing is an ecosystem. You’re competing for attention.

To drive millions of views on LinkedIn, you need to combine the forces of Facebook and Quora.

Wherever your prospects go, they’ll see your engaging content. And by the time they hop on a call with you, they have already trusted you. Say goodbye to your normal sales cycle by mastering LinkedIn.