What is the best way to generate business leads from LinkedIn?
LinkedIn leads automation with dux soup.
A lead is a term used in sales/digital marketing to describe interaction with a possible customer, also known as a “prospect.” The term “lead” has several definitions depending on the organization/business. For some businesses, a “lead” is a contact who has already been identified as a potential customer, whilst for others, a “lead” is any sales contact.
LinkedIn’s Importance in Lead Generation
LinkedIn has several effective lead creation tools. It is an effective lead creation tool for any company. LinkedIn can help you generate leads. It is the world’s largest professional site, bringing together people from all walks of life on a single platform. It is one of the most often used methods for generating leads. LinkedIn can help you produce the leads you need. To produce the most leads, expand your network.
Follow these tips to boost your LinkedIn profile.
1. Use a professional photo.
Including a personal photo with your profile should be nothing new to you, given that social media has been around since the mid-2000s. If the most visible element of your profile is missing, a recruiter, hiring manager, or firm CEO will not take it seriously. The first step should be to upload a headshot of yourself.
While some may believe that you must appear in formal business clothing for your photo, you should be willing to match your clothing to the industry you work in. If you’re an accountant, for example, your professional headshot should include a suit and tie. If you’re a creative writer or artist, on the other hand, you might be able to get away with a good headshot in something less formal.
2. Consider SEO (search engine optimization) (SEO)
You should think like a content writer when creating or overhauling your LinkedIn profile. What are the responsibilities of content writers? They optimize their material by peppering it with important keywords to help it rank and gain visibility. Incorporate relevant keywords into the following areas of your profile:
- The headline; It isn’t necessary for this to be your current workplace. You can use your imagination here.
- The summary; This is a section about you, but it’s also a fantastic area to put keywords.
- Your experience; Don’t forget to include keywords in your previous job descriptions.
This might be a lengthy process. Recruiters, human resources professionals, and hiring managers use keywords to find candidates for open positions (s). The more you optimize for the industry terms these decision-makers use, the more likely you are to show up in their search results.
3. Make sure your LinkedIn URL matches your name.
Get rid of the obnoxious URL LinkedIn gave to your profile at the start. A unique URL that matches your name makes it easier to market your profile. If your name is “Margaret Taylor,” for example, you may change your URL to “linkedin.com/in/margarettaylor.”
You can change this in your profile’s ‘Contact and Personal Info section. If someone searches for your name directly on Google, your profile will appear.
4. Boast your achievements
Any projects, languages, honours & awards, patents, publications, certificates, volunteering, and more can be included in your LinkedIn profile. This is a fantastic opportunity to show off your skills even more. An employer, for example, may be more interested in someone who has a specific certification than someone who does not.
Volunteering is also a terrific advantage to have highlighted on your resume if you’re currently unemployed. It demonstrates that even if you are not currently employed, you are still working to better yourself and others around you.
5. Add and accept invitations to connect
The more contacts you have, the more likely you are to appear in LinkedIn search results, according to Convert with Content. You can add people by searching for certain industry phrases or directly from your cell phone’s “phonebook.” Remember to send each invitation with a unique note.
6. Be active and update frequently
This may be the most difficult part to implement. Whether you want to increase your following/connections or stay relevant. It’s critical to stay engaged in the newsfeed regularly. Update your status with articles you’ve enjoyed or written, initiatives you’ve led, or any other career-related news. Consistency is the key to social media engagement.
How to get 500+ connections on LinkedIn
After you’ve optimized your profile, your second aim on LinkedIn should be to have 500+ connections. Yes, bragging about how many people you know may seem insignificant, but it may make or break a contract in the business world.
Once you have at least 500 contacts on LinkedIn, your profile will reflect “500+” connections. This is referred to as a social signal, and it informs people that you are highly connected on the site without having to explicitly state it.
LinkedIn hides the exact number of connections you have once you reach 500. When you reach 500 points, your profile may have 510 points, 800 points, or even more.
Basically, after you reach 500 connections, you may stop counting them as a vanity measure. Please do not, however, fill your LinkedIn profiles with random persons to reach this magical number. You’d be doing yourself a disservice, and there’s a much better approach, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
LinkedIn has never specified why this function exists, but I’m guessing it’s because they don’t want the platform to become like a high school popularity contest. However, with around 30% of all LinkedIn users having 500 or more connections, you can bet it’s a worthwhile goal.
Aside from showing your social connections, having a wider network has a few other advantages that you may not be aware of.
- Priority in the LinkedIn algorithm. While we don’t know exactly how the LinkedIn search and suggestion algorithm works, some experts believe that the number of connections you have may influence how some features like search are weighted in your favour.
- A greater number of links can imply trustworthiness. — While it may not appear to be a logical conclusion, connections constitute a type of social evidence in some ways. Demonstrate to a stranger that you are not a scammer, bot, or phony account. Of course, other forms of social evidence are stronger, but this one plays a little role.
- More connections equal more possibilities. — If you’re using LinkedIn effectively, each of your connections should serve a purpose. Even if that individual isn’t immediately in your sales funnel, you may leverage that relationship to make introductions and meet additional people who share your interests. Most of your connections should be your ideal consumers if your connection approach is on target.
- Your content will be seen by more people. — Long-term, posting helpful information that establishes you as an authority is a successful LinkedIn tactic. More opportunities will come your way if you have more connections and followers.
The Easiest Way to Accumulate 500+ LinkedIn Connections
LinkedIn considers what I’m about to say to you to be “naughty.”
As in, if you abuse this method and go crazy with it, they may put you in LinkedIn time out for a few days.
Dux-Soup, my favourite LinkedIn tool, may help you kickstart your LinkedIn connection request quest with a little automation.
(If you don’t want to utilize the program, I’ll also show you a slow way to do it manually.)
Dux-Soup is a service that lets you automate and streamline a lot of the time-consuming operations you conduct on LinkedIn, such as sending connection requests and looking for profiles.
Dux-Soup has a free version, but if you want to send automated connections, you’ll need the Pro version, which costs $15.00 per month. If you’re interested, I recently finished a comprehensive review of the software last week.
I’ll show you how to use Dux-Soup to gain 500+ LinkedIn connections below.
You’re ready to go as long as you’ve got Google Chrome and a Google account. To download Dux-Soup, simply click on the button below.
Get Dux-Soup + Free Strategy Guide
Once installed, a nice little duck should appear in the top right corner of your Google Chrome browser. That duck, believe it or not, will assist us in gaining 500 LinkedIn connections.
Create A Search of The Ideal People You Want to Connect With
Dux-Soup interacts with LinkedIn as if it were a real person. To connect with your ideal customers, we’ll need to run a filtered search.
Select People from the drop-down menu, then All Filters.
From here, we’ll want to narrow down a search result to find people in our target market with whom we can connect. You may wish to filter by geography, school, or previous company, depending on your industry.
The Industries, Services, and Language tabs are the most critical filters to make sure are correct. Make certain that your ideal client’s language and service are included.
Consider who your ideal client is using the criteria. I personally attempt to recruit for roles in the middle or top management that still have decision-making authority. Inside an organization, these are persons who aren’t quite C-level but have access to CEOs. In the Search Filter, you can target by Title.
Why I do this,
While LinkedIn automation is fantastic, I don’t want to risk making a bad first impression with a huge company’s CEO due to a bug or badly executed automated outreach.
I advocate a far more individualized strategy to contacting CEOs of huge corporations. (I’ll go into more detail about this in a later piece.)
Getting Ready for Your Connection Request
Let’s double-check that all of our ducks are in a row now that we have a list of optimal connections. (sorry)
Select Options from the Dux-Soup menu. Under the Action tab, we’ll want to tag the people to whom we’re about to send a request.
I like to categorize them by industry and position within their organization. This will come in handy in the future when I need to send tailored messages to my connections.
Let’s go on to the Skipping tab now. We’ll tell Dux-Soup who we don’t want to receive connections from in this section. This is significant because, if we only have 100 connection requests each day, we want them to be counted. For this example, these are the parameters I used.
Individuals that aren’t in my network, don’t have a profile picture or match a specified regex pattern are skipped.
What exactly is a regex pattern?
Simply put, it’s a regular expression that allows Dux-Soup to ignore profiles that include keywords. I’ve chosen to skip profiles for Facebook, IBM, and self-employed persons, as you can see below.
(^|>)[^<]*?(?:ibm|self employed|facebook)[^<]*?(<|$)
Please feel free to copy and paste the preceding code into your Dux-Soup Skipping settings so that you can modify it.
We’re ready to send now. Let’s bring up Dux-Soup while we’re still on the search screen and make sure the “include custom message” slider is turned on.
We’ll use the form below to send a request with a personalized message. This section is crucial, so devote some time to it. I prefer to keep things brief and to the point. I also mentioned that we hadn’t met, but I noted that we worked in the same field.
Here’s is a quick message I just up. It may have been better, but believe it or not, it was a huge success.
You can see how it was short, explained why we’d make a good connection and was kind in the example above. I didn’t go overboard with the merge fields, either. If you wish to use this template, go ahead, and do so, but please modify it to fit your industry and personality.
Better still, use our affiliate link to sign up for Dux-Soup and receive our free Dux-Soup outreach guide.
After you’ve double-checked that your merging tags are right and that your personalized message appears okay, click Visit & Connect.
Sit Back, And Relax
That’s it for step four. Dux-Soup is now taking care of all the grunt work for you.
After a few days with Dux-Soup, you should notice that fresh connection requests are being accepted daily. You’ll be well on your way to 500 LinkedIn connections in no time! If your phone is continuously buzzing, you should turn off LinkedIn notifications in the app settings.
It’s completely fine if you get a bunch of generic “thanks for connecting!” responses back. I propose personally examining their profile and striking up a chat with certain people who respond with a personal message. These are people in your target market who are actively engaged on LinkedIn.
Keep the Dux-Soup search page open as you meet new people so that the automation can continue the next day. You’ll have 500 LinkedIn connections in no time if you work hard over the following several weeks!
Once you achieve 500 followers, you’ll have a good list of people in your target market that you can individually contact or nurture with content you share on social media. In a later piece, we’ll go through this in further detail.
Getting 500 LinkedIn Connections (The Slow Way)
So, you don’t want to automate the process of making connections?
We’ll go through the same mental process as before, but this time it’ll take a little longer. You’ll still search for your ideal target audience in the first step, but you’ll need to copy and paste your template message and edit it with the necessary information.
You can also just send generic connection requests, but the quality will suffer and the number of requests approved will be reduced.
To narrow down our target audience, we’ll use LinkedIn search. If you read the first half of this essay, you’ll notice that the steps are identical. If not, here’s a screenshot of my search filter for who I want to target.
When you click Apply, you’ll be taken back to the search results page. Skim through the profiles manually until you locate someone who you believe would be a good match.
Look for persons who have profile pictures and check to see if they are still employed in your target industry.
Connect if you think you’ve uncovered a winner.
Now choose the option to send a personalized message.
Copy your template and make manual changes to the name and firm. Give it a once-over and then click Done.
Now do this repeatedly for 12,000 more times, or until you develop arthritis.
Or, you know, try Dux-Soup.
Conclusion
While obtaining 500+ LinkedIn connections may appear to be a silly aim to some people, it is essential for establishing a strong presence on the platform.
You’ll be perceived as someone with a large network if you have more connections, and you’ll have more opportunities to engage and do business with individuals on the platform.
If you have any queries, please leave them in the comments section below. If you’d like to try Dux-Soup, click the huge blue button to get a free Dux-Soup Outreach Guide before being sent to the Dux-Soup website. Get Dux-Soup + Free Strategy Guide
