My Journey From 300 to 15000 Followers on LinkedIn
Plus getting leads and growing my business by 98%. You can do it too.
Hey, it’s Marilyn
Every Monday, I share productized inspiration and ideas, plus what I’m learning to help you build and grow your service business.
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Last edition, I wrote about how I productized a service business and earn recurring income. If you missed it, check it out here:
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In this edition, you’ll learn the following:
The truth about vanity metrics
Grow your business with LinkedIn
Action plan cheatsheet
Many people tell me getting followers, engagement and leads on LinkedIn is hard.
Their reasons are as follows:
I’m not a writer
I can’t stand out
I’m not a creator
I’m not a marketer
LinkedIn is saturated
I don’t know what to post
I tried but there were no results
I’m taking too much time to create content
I don’t know what to say in DMs (Direct Messages)
I love creating content, but my posts get little impressions
If it’s not easy, make it a habit
— Marilyn Wo
I’ve been there and made those excuses too.
If you are just getting started, the first day on LinkedIn is pure excitement.
On the fifth day, you’ll be disappointed.
Two weeks on and you’d want to quit.
Still hanging on in a month?
Most people will start dropping off.
If you keep showing up, that’s when you win.
If you are looking for a LinkedIn course to take you to the next level, I’ve taken and highly recommend LinkedIn OS by Justin Welsh.
What I have here are what I’ve been doing.
While in Justin Welsh’s course, you will get lessons like your niche, content matrix, copywriting, building your tribe and selling on LinkedIn.
It’s not going to be easy, but it’s worth it!
The Truth About Vanity Metrics
Looking at my LinkedIn profile as of writing, you will see that I have 15,800+ followers and counting.
I know you may think I can grow my business with this number of followers.
Truth is, I didn’t start with 15000 followers.
I started with 0 to 300 just like many out there.
The numbers don’t just magically change to 15000 and suddenly prospects come flocking to me, no.
I’m not obsessed with follower count. But I know the importance.
We are herd animals, so even if follower count is a vanity metric, it is also helpful as a social proof metric.
However, although more followers and connections lead to more views and even more followers, there are more factors to getting leads and turning prospects into clients than just followers alone.
In other words, it doesn’t mean with 15000 followers, you will have leads flooding to you like a Tsunami.
Some of my posts got up to 100000 impressions, there are also times they didn’t get any engagements.
I’ve met people with only 2000+ followers and getting busy with free-flowing quality leads all year.
The point is, that you don’t have to be some divine God to get followers and clients.
Neither do you have to be like Nicolas Cole before you can get leads.
You can do something about it right now, using LinkedIn to:
Grow your followers
Build an audience
Get leads and clients
All at the same time, no matter how many followers you have right now.
The great thing about LinkedIn is, everything and anything you do in there builds upon each other like Lego bricks:
Do it right and get the results you want.
Grow Your Business With LinkedIn
Now that the vanity metrics are out of the way, let’s get to what I’ve done to grow my business by 98% with LinkedIn.
Why 98% and not 100%?
Any leads that were not from LinkedIn were either from my direct network such as friends and family or referrals.
Before I used LinkedIn, 100% of my leads came from referrals, and I was a busy bee with referred clients in the early days.
However, the number of referrals is outside my control.
The danger of fully relying on referrals is that, when they run dry, I also run out of leads, clients, and income.
This can happen at random, resulting in the feast and famine cycle.
Then in 2019, as I was building my business systems, I realized relying on referrals is not stable.
That’s when I turned to LinkedIn as my other trusted source of B2B marketing channels, learning to build my lead generation system.
LinkedIn is my favourite lead generation platform by far.
Here’s the framework you can use that I call the 3Cs:
Content
Conversations
Conversions
1. Content
Phase 1: Personal Purpose
When I started my journey on LinkedIn, I didn’t know it could bring me leads. My impression of it was that it’s more like a recruitment marketplace.
Then I started exploring it more and learning a lot of the content more than what I got from paid courses. That made me want to do the same too.
In the early days, I was worried nobody would trust my content, but I took a leap of faith and went for it, posting content daily.
Those days, my content topics were random and just ideas I got from reading what I saw out there.
I felt like I was talking to the void when impressions were low and nobody liked and commented on my early posts.
It was devastating to see zero engagements when I spent hours designing carousels and meticulously coming up with ideas for each post.
Worst of all, those were days when my income was negative and I had to start making enough money to feed my kids.
This made me want to give up because I wasn’t paid to create my content.
I carried on with it nonetheless, and after 3 weeks, something happened. People started requesting to connect with me.
Some of them even pinged me to say that they loved my content and were looking forward to more. But they did not engage with my posts.
Up till that point, my content engagement rate was still super low. That was when I realised, that people are reading without adding any reactions to my posts, and they go directly to connect with me privately.
Phase 2: Content Strategy
Knowing people are reading was a massive boost of encouragement. That led me to sort out the content I wanted to put out to increase engagement for leads.
At the beginning stages, I was still finding my voice. Similar to how many startup founders are building their products in public, I was building my voice in public.
I’ve changed my profile banner and header countless times, even up till now.
At that time, I heard advice on creating content to convert, that’s a great way to get leads. However, I got caught up in spending too much time trying to create content to convert.
This led to overthinking, little action and no progress. I realised creating content to convert should only be used in later stages when my profile is more well-known to my prospects and audience.
If you are just starting, I suggest getting started with content you know and with topics you have something to talk about.
From 0 to 15000, I didn’t use any copywriting frameworks, I didn’t use PAS, I didn't use TOFU, MOFU, BOFU, I didn’t use AIDA.
I am trying them now, but I didn’t use them before I reached 15000.
If you can use these frameworks quickly to create content and start posting today, go ahead, otherwise, just start without them and adjust along the way.
Since I am growing a design agency and helping others do the same, I am posting topics about design, marketing, startups and the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
If you don’t have a topic to write about, don’t give up, use this list as a system to create your posts and find your voice along the way:
Post 1: Personal Stories
Write about your back story, introduction of yourself and your personal experience in your field.
Repeat one personal story once each month.
You may remember your own story, but others don’t. It’s fine to repeat your stories once in a while.
Cadence: Once a week
Post 2: Thought Leadership
Write articles on what you have expertise in. For example, my field is marketing design, this is where I post about things like design teardowns.
Write about industry-related topics in your field. If you are in marketing, you can talk about how landing page copywriting helps with conversions.
You can also write about processes and systems you use in your business that can help people who fit your ideal client profile.
Cadence: 3 times a week
Post 3: The Ask
This is where you add information about your offer and your call-to-action for readers to purchase.
Here’s the thing, asking people to opt-in to email addresses, visit a website or buy your offer is taking away time, effort and money from them.
Don’t overdo this. For me, I don’t leave call-to-action links on my posts and comments all the time, just once or twice a week.
Cadence: Once a week
Note: Whatever topic you wish to post, be mindful that there will always be people who are ahead of you, but there will also be many people behind you who wish to learn from you.
If you are just starting, don’t overthink content strategy. It is important, yes. But figuring it out takes a couple of posts that may not lead to your goals for now.
Don’t worry about niching down when creating LinkedIn content. You can start with general topics first.
Why? Aren’t “riches in the niches”?
Yes, but LinkedIn is a networking platform, you have to get to know people and allow people to know you first.
Niching down first will narrow the exposure of your content to a small group.
You’d want your profile to spread wide first, get noticed, and build connections then start posting more specific content a few times a week.
It’s also better this way when you haven’t yet figured out your topics.
2. Conversations
Phase 3: Getting Noticed
Just like Google and other social media algorithms, the LinkedIn algorithm changes as often as they’d like it to.
Needless to say, we’ve no control over this. But I’m sure LinkedIn will want us to remain on the platform to keep conversations going.
In my case, I like to engage with other people’s content and DM them about their posts 20 minutes before posting my content.
After posting, I don’t go anywhere. Instead, I will reply to comments on my posts, and reach out to those who are not my 1st connection and engaged on my posts for the next hour.
Then, I will go to my LinkedIn feed and scroll to every post, make comments on the posts and comment on other people’s comments.
Next, I will look for hashtags that are the same topics that I usually post about, and comment in those posts.
You’d want to connect with those who write content that’s related to yours so that there will be more engagement on your posts which leads to more connections.
By this time, you will start to see people requesting for connection and following you in the Network section.
I would select the accept button and send them a message with this template:
“Hi [Name]. Thank you for connecting, I see you like [something of common interest]. How is that going for you?”
I will block off 15 minutes at least 3 times a day where I will send requests for connection from those I find are in the same space as I am, and if they are connected to my current followers.
I will do this very quickly (in sprints) so that I can request for connection with as many people as possible in 15 minutes.
Repeat this at least 3 times a week. I do this 3 x 15 minutes every weekday.
Phase 4: Leveraging Top Creators
Once you’ve gotten into the habit of creating and posting content and reaching out to your connections, the next move is to leverage top creators.
Top creators typically have quality content of great value and have high engagement rates. Their follower count does not necessarily matter.
Do not look at their current follower count but determine top creators by what they produce and whether other top creators are engaging in their posts.
Here is one of the many carousels I’ve done that feature great work created by other creators.
Within the carousels, make sure to show their names or profiles.
Then, in your posts, credit the work to them by tagging their names. This notifies them of your posts which compels them to engage.
When they engage only with your posts, their followers will see that they’ve commented or reacted to your posts in their feed.
That’s when the herd mentality leads their followers to check out your posts.
Most people on LinkedIn will engage in your posts because they are of value to them, related to what they like and connected to their community, aka, the creators you’ve tagged.
This post that came with the above carousel brought about 90000 impressions with 371 reactions in 6 days after posting.
This got me busy with tons of new faces I get to connect and have conversations with, including the top creators.
3. Convert
Phase 4: Email
As the conversation goes on, you’d want to bring it over to email instead of having it within LinkedIn.
Why email? Within LinkedIn, there’s so much you can do.
Any account can be taken down for any reason. Luke Matthews got banned from LinkedIn 8 times.
Without email addresses, and locked out of LinkedIn, there’s no way to reach your followers even if LinkedIn says you are connected to a million people.
One way is via the DMs.
Here’s a template you can use:
“Would you be open to chat over email instead?”
This is when they will send you their email address and you can contact them directly with where you have left off on LinkedIn.
On top of this, I’ve also set up a newsletter with free resources on how I start a scaling service business and linked the signup page to my LinkedIn profile.
This is the second way to keep in touch with email.
Here’s how you can do it:
Step 1: Click on the pencil icon on your profile
Step 2: Scroll to the bottom and select “Edit custom button”
Step 3: Select the option “Subscribe to newsletter” and add your link
Hit the save button and your custom button will appear on your profile.
Every time you post your content this link will appear under your name, like this:
When people ask me how many channels they should start with for B2B, I always say, start with two, LinkedIn and email.
With your consistent content and conversations with your connections, they get to know you better and trust you on LinkedIn. That’s when they want to know more and give you their email addresses.
You are now generating leads.
The above carousel post in Phase 4 led to people checking out my newsletter, reading the archives and signing up for more by clicking on the “Subscribe to newsletter” link in my profile.
Create Your Action Plan
Here’s a summary and cheatsheet to grow your business with LinkedIn:
Step 1: Post content at least 3 times a week
Step 2: Request for connection with a note
Step 3: Accept new connections with a message
Step 4: Comment on other posts
Step 5: Comment on other comments
Step 6: Leave call-to-action
These should be done consistently daily as much as possible, otherwise, minimally three times a week.
Keep testing your content, switching things up and adapting to what your ideal clients are looking for.
Research what others in your space are doing and what is doing well.
Double down on those that work best for you.
Take Action Now
Don’t let your goals die in conversations.
Talk less and start showing up.
Stop telling people your big ideas. Build them and tell us what happened.
— Justin Welsh
As we end off, I’m leaving you with some past results I got from posting consistently on LinkedIn:
Results get better over time.
You got this!
What a brilliant piece - best I have seen till now. Would love to share in my newsletter as well.
This is amazing, Marilyn! Exactly what I needed for this stage of my journey.