The average LinkedIn users are over 225M who logs at least 3 or 4 times a week. What is awesome in this social media is the most the users are people who are involved in different kind of business making this social network into a community of professionals who are looking to increase their business.
Most of them do not pay for a premium account and have joined at least one group. The majority of LinkedIn users find the network useful for meeting clients and future clients.
To build a network that will bring high quality prospect you don’t need to have be limited with people, the best way you can always approach them is by getting yourself in groups and participating in forums asking and giving potential solutions. Another way to get closer to these personas will be improving the contents you have in your head, creating blogs with tips and educative information that can help your persona to improve their business. Your network can be largest as your contents or ideas can be. In that way you will be inbounding yourself and business at the same time.
Be in a network is not about promoting your business services or product, getting yourself in a social media is more about promoting first yourself by giving ideas and sharing information that other people might don’t understand. “if you want to get found, then you should start to promote yourself first.” This is the best practice you can do in any network, you are the only who knows about your skills and what you can do, once you prove what you can do, then your business will be branded already by you. This is what I call Inbound Sales.
How do I Inbound Myself?
- Try to keep yourself update with multiple contents, whatever you can get on internet, as a referent can be always helpful for others.
- Create your own forum or groups and let others participate on it, providing ideas, cases and solution points.
- Create original contents and make them shareable, so everyone can have access to them easily.
- Follow people who will inspire you to keep making contents.
- Solve problems in real time, giving tips or eBooks with cases and solution problems.
- Kill the pain, most of your target personas will always get on the network looking for help to their needs or problems, so the best way to get closer to them is providing kits, templates, worksheets or samples of “HOW TO” by doing this You can kill their pain in few minutes instead of letting them looking on internet over 5 hours.
At this point you will be able to have followers who will be interested in what you do and who you are but everything needs time and sacrifice that means as much contents your head can handle then your brain will be start to connect the contents you are holding in your head pulling ideas between them.
This also will be another awesome practice that will allow you to create business solution ideas more easily.
Brainstorm Exercise will get you closer to them
Elevator Speech: This exercise works great with everyone, “if you were in an elevator and you had the chance to promote your business service or product to the people on the elevator in 30sec?”
Kathy McAfee explains how exactly you need to make your elevator speech online.
See the Whole Picture: This can be really helpful in order to see the whole picture, when it comes to help other people about their business and problem we can understand their history on the forum but sometime we or I also miss parts of their problem, so one of my best practices is just put all in the board or paper and after that start to connect values trying to digging into the whole picture getting myself clear and allowing to provide better ideas.
