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Aug 25, 2015

LinkedIn Pulse: Powerful and Effective Lead Generation How-To’s

by jimena | No Comments

So many of us just want to drive more traffic to our websites in an effort to get more leads, which would then turn into sales. It sounds so simple, like it should happen naturally, and many have success with this strategy…but for a price. So how can you drive more traffic without having to spend a ton of money? The truth is you can, but it will cost you something, a little bit of time.

With so many social media platforms available to us today, it can be difficult to decipher which one is the best for your business. Each one has a little something different to offer. What is important is that you test and measure to see if your efforts are actually paying off. If they are not, then you will need to change something in order to get the results you want. Consistently testing and measuring is the name of the game, as most of you probably know.

Today, I want to talk about the power of LinkedIn. Facebook has gotten a lot of hype for being the go to social media platform for driving traffic since it has so much of it, while LinkedIn is more of a secret social media weapon, which not many people seem to know how to truly leverage it. There are some powerful facts about LinkedIn that just might change your mind.

Just a few months back LinkedIn passed the 350 Million Member milestone and they average two new members every second, with 40% of them logging in daily. This is one of the biggest reasons that LinkedIn is so powerful, the potential for organic reach. How many members can you reach without having to pay?

Many sites are moving to a pay-to-play system due to a high volume of information creating a flooding effect, thusly rendering much of the information useless. So what is Facebook’s organic reach currently? Well as of March of this year, it was estimated to be only about 2.6%. It has been declining for years, as far back as October 2013 the rate was still only 4.04%.

For Twitter the numbers aren’t as bad, claiming about a 10% reach rate of your followers, but some claims have stated that rate is actually below 4% for them, as well as tweets usually score poorly on the engagement side.

LinkedIn’s Reach (Its Secret Power)

So where can you get the best organic reach? Glad you asked, the answer is LinkedIn. LinkedIn and Instagram reportedly have the stronghold on organic reach in the social media world. Instagram boasts a 20% organic reach rate, which makes sense as it is a photo based social media platform, which are processed faster than content.

LinkedIn also boasts a 20% organic reach rate, but can be seen as superior in that it is content based, similarly to Facebook. Yet LinkedIn tends to be more serious than Facebook, which can make a big difference when it comes to business and targeting your market, particularly if your company provides products and services in the B2B space. Members on LinkedIn do not tend to be on LinkedIn to entertain themselves or their “friends,” they appear to be actively involved in some sort of task like, growing their business, improving their career, building their brand, connecting with business professionals they’d like to work with, or researching specific industries and industry news/trends.

These members are looking for information and opportunities, so why not get yours in front of them? Another powerful aspect of LinkedIn that makes them a game changer is their lead generation rates.

Hubspot reports that LinkedIn is more than 3 times as likely to convert visits to leads as that of Twitter and Facebook.

LinkedIn’s organic reach rate and content-hungry members creates a golden opportunity for you, so let’s talk about how you can do that while paying nothing.

Content Rich Blog Posts on Pulse

LinkedIn purchased Pulse, a content publishing platform, back 2013. Anyone who has a LinkedIn account can publish a blog article to their page. The significance about this is that there is an opportunity to be featured on pulse. Having one of your articles featured on Pulse means that you have a potential of being viewed and read by all 300 Million plus members on LinkedIn. With those numbers and applying the visit-to-lead conversion rate, that is an opportunity of 82,200 leads, not bad right.

Okay, so not all 300 Million members on LinkedIn are likely going to read your article even if it is featured on Pulse, but 50,000 might which still translates to a potential of 1,370 new leads. I am sure we would all be happy with that number.

So how do you get featured? It is relatively simple. The number one most important factor is that you have relevant content that is compelling. You want to offer your audience something that actually informs them, to a point that they are thankful as well as they share the content with people they know. There are a number of websites out there to help you come up with good quality content.

You will want to research what your content should include, don’t guess. Go to a content explorer website and search a relevant keyword related to your business and knowledge and sort the results by the most LinkedIn shares. This should give you a good list, you will want to copy into a spreadsheet the first 5-10 results. Then search another keyword or variation of the same keyword and copy the top 5 of those results, you should have a pretty sizable list to choose from by the end of the process.

The blogging platform in LinkedIn is pretty user-friendly, although I would suggest using Chrome as your browser as opposed to any other browser. Things seem to go a little crooked in Mozilla. You will paste your content into the post, you can attached a featured image, which you may want to consider a picture including a face as our eyes our prone to facial recognition and therefore draws are attention.

You will want to include a CTA at the end of your article. Remember, you want to be informative, tell them about yourself. You could also offer them something for free, e-books are popular, or free software, or something of the like. You just want to make sure it has some value to helping them in their business or personal life. Also, encourage them to comment, share, and follow.

Lastly, you will also want to cross promote other great content on the same topic you have provided. This helps your audience learn more about the value you provide and your expertise. Plus, it helps drive more views to your other posts.

So I hope you enjoyed this post and now share your comments below. Also, if you want a free PDF on the strategies I used to get 6 clients in 7 days from LinkedIn then visitwww.jimenacortes.com and retrieve your free report.

Related reading:

How to Get 6 Clients in 7 Days on LinkedIn

Make Sure You’re Not Making this LinkedIn Mistake

My Highly Guarded LinkedIn Secrets