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Grow your LinkedIn Network by 2+Million … in Two weeks!

Grow your LinkedIn Network by 2+Million … in Two weeks!

Grow your LinkedIn Network by 2+Million ... in Two weeks! 2

In this article, I provide step by step instructions to grow your LinkedIn 3rd degree connections to 2+ Million within two weeks. This is especially useful if you are generating leads from LinkedIn. (SDR, Sales, Marketing, Recruiting, coaching…)

Why is growing your 3rd degree LinkedIn network important?

  1. Even though LinkedIn has 400M+ people, you only get access to people that you are connected to by at least 3rd degree. For every person you connect with, LinkedIn will provide you access to that person’s network (2nd degree), as well that person’s connection’s network. (3rd degree). So for every person you connect with, your network can grow by 1K to 100K people depending on how connected that person is. So it is important you develop a strategy to ensure all your prospects are somehow connected to you within 3rd degree – else, they won’t be visible to you. (its relatively easy to get Millions, once you know how – I will show you how later in this article)
  2. For a LinkedIn search of prospects, it is quite possible you get to see less than 100 people, while your competitor gets to see 10,000+ . That’s because your competitor is connected to more relevant people via their 3rd degree network than you. This puts you & your company at a huge disadvantage in generating appointments
  3. Even if you have a premium or Sales Navigator account, you won’t see more names than those in your 3rd degree & Groups. The advantage of those paid accounts are – you get to shortlist the results with more filters. So even with these paid accounts, to see more people, you must increase the size of your 3rd degree network.

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This article gives a way to find how big your visible network is in an industry or field. It also shows a quick way to connect with LIONS and other ways to increase your 3rd degree network rapidly. Using these techniques, you can increase your 3rd degree network by several million within 2 weeks.

As a rough rule, your 3rd degree network will grow by 1K — 10K+ for every well connected person you add as a 1st degree connection.

Find size of your 3rd degree network by clicking link below (This is your visible LinkedIn network)

As a first step, get base value of what your current 3rd degree size is by following steps below. Write the number. Check every few days to see how well your network is growing. (You can report the growth to your boss and get brownie points!)

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  • Multiply results by 100, to get estimate of your 3rd degree network size
  • (Technical – I use the number 100, as an estimate of new people each person in your 2nd degree is connected to, that are new to the network).
  • As you grow your 1st degree, you will find the above number grow by 1K — 100K+ for every well connected person you connect with.

1 – Connect with LinkedIn LIONS in the Link below (what is a LinkedIn LION)

Click link below to find LIONs that you can connect with to expand your network rapidly. Click on Industry to connect with people in the industry you want to search for prospects or expand your network

  1. Click this LinkedIn search link to find LIONS with large networks – each connection will get you 1M+ 3rd degree
  2. As a general rule, people who write LION on their profile are willing to connect with any person that wants to connect with them. So don’t worry about getting rejected. At best they will ignore you
  3. Please note, each LION or any person on LinkedIn is limited to 30,000 connections – so it is best to look for people who have far less than 30K contacts. They are more likely to connect to anyone than those with 25K+ contacts

2 – Connect with people that network with your prospects OR people that know your prospects

When you connect with a person, that person’s entire 1st & 2nd degree network will become your 2nd & 3rd degree contacts. Even though the person connecting with you may not reveal their contacts to you, LinkedIn knows who they are & they will show them in your search results 🙂

Here are types of people I recommend you connect with. As a general rule, you can expect a person with 500 contacts to add 100K+ people to your 3rd degree network! That is worth picking up a phone to call them or getting them a coffee.

  1. Connect with all sales, marketing & executives in your company – this will immediately give you a multiplier effect of several million 3rd degree connections.
  2. Connect with all prospects you get in touch with, regardless of their intent to buy now or never – the chances are, they are hanging around where your prospects are, and they will be visible via a LinkedIn search to you if you are connected.
  3. Look at your customer’s profile, and join groups they have in common – this will get you in front of more people like them

CEO’s (Management) must have a list of internal executives & staff + groups, their new sales & marketing recruits should connect with as part of their on-boarding process. This will be a win-win for everyone in their company. The network of new employees also become part of the network of others in the company!

3 – Join Relevant LinkedIn Groups

Joining a LinkedIn group, is just like visiting a industry trade show and getting a list of all attendees. It doesn’t cost anything to join. You can join up to 50 groups for free. There are 2M groups to search and pick from. why wouldn’t you join?

As far as LinkedIn is concerned, it assumes everyone in a group is part of your 3rd degree network (whether you are connected or not) and shows them as prospects in your search results. Join groups that are in the industry you want to target OR have the keywords or technologies your prospects are likely to associate with OR have the title at which you prospect. If you pick groups properly, you can easily add 1M+ people to your network within a week. Again, groups are free to join. You can join up to 50 of them.

  1. Join groups your executives and management have joined – the chances are likely to be fishing in the ponds where the prospects are
  2. Join groups your prospects have joined – chances are they are networking with people who are similar to them, and are your future customers (or customers of your competitors!)
  3. Look at profiles of your competitor’s top sales & marketing pros to see what groups they joined – chances are, they know where your prospects hang out

This is just a starter way to grow your network. There are dozens of other great ways to grow your network – just google and get more ideas.

If you connect with me, your 3rd degree network will instantly grow my 1M+; Because my 2nd degree is 1M+

Was this article useful? can you like share please? That will encourage me to write more articles on B2B lead generation techniques … thanks

Why a Backup of your LinkedIn Connections is Important

Why a Backup of your LinkedIn Connections is Important

LinkedIn being a professional community and a great platform for networking, B2B lead generation, Job search and recruitment, it is always a good practice to backup your LinkedIn connections since you’ve spent years to build your network and engage with the right audience.

You will have to backup your LinkedIn connections for two reasons.

  • To connect outside of LinkedIn – It is important to create new business opportunities. So it is essential that you export LinkedIn connections, take them offline to meet in person or connect via phone call or email.

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  • Unannounced Account Suspension – LinkedIn might delete your account without any prior warning, on any particular contract breach or ignorant violation of LinkedIn professional community policies. When you backup your LinkedIn connections, it not only helps you to have control over your data but also to prevent the risk of losing access to your data.

Therefore, it is always advisable to take a few minutes and backup your LinkedIn connections once in a while if you have a rapidly expanding network.

How to Extract Data from LinkedIn

To extract data from LinkedIn, click the drop-down from your profile icon and click on Settings & Privacy

In the Privacy tab (This tab is displayed by default), click on Getting a copy of your data option.

LinkedIn allows us to download a larger data archive including connections , contacts and your account history or something in particular like Articles, messages and etc..

Select the desired option and click Request archive button.

Your archive will be ready for download in a few minutes. The data is exported as a zip file with many .csv files.

The .csv file of your connections includes the following information:

✔ Name
✔ Title
✔ Company

How your Exported LinkedIn Connections can help your business

Now that you have exported your LinkedIn connections, the next step is to leverage them. Your LinkedIn connections are more likely to respond to your email message since they are familiar with you. Therefore, taking these connections offline to another medium can help you to increase your sales & marketing engagements. Hence, you can kick start your own marketing initiatives.

However, to initiate your marketing activities, you need the email address and phone numbers of your connections in your CRM or email marketing software. But the catch is LinkedIn doesn’t provide the email address & phone number of your connections.

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Until 2018, when you export your connections, LinkedIn was providing Name, Company, Title & email address of your connections. But now, LinkedIn has stopped providing email addresses. Many people having large number of 1st degree connections are upset about this. However, you still have access to your contact’s direct personal email/phone when you open their profiles one by one.

Even though you manually extract data from LinkedIn (copy-paste the email of your prospects), you end up only getting their personal email addresses. This is because people sign up with their personal email address as they also see LinkedIn as a job site. But reaching your prospects via a business email address has far more benefits than reaching them via personal email address.

Why work email address is better than personal email?

If you are in B2B business, it is better to get work email addresses than the personal (Gmail/yahoo..) emails because of the following reasons:

✔ Unlike personal email, business email inbox is not often bombarded with unsolicited or promotional emails.

✔ Reaching out to your prospect’s business email address helps you to stay out of spam.

✔ Helps you to maintain good email sender reputation

✔ Increases credibility and makes you look more professional

If you have a list of potential prospects with name and company, we can help you to get their work emails & phone# in no time.

What’s the Best Header Image Size for LinkedIn Articles

What’s the Best Header Image Size for LinkedIn Articles

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Quick Summary – Best image size to upload for LinkedIn blog is 600 x 322 pixels (or 2x ). However, for best sharing experience, use only the center 560 x 282 pixel for image. That’s because LinkedIn randomly crops out 11 to 20 pixels on all sides, depending on device it is rendering on.

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My frustration – Every time I uploaded an image for posting, I found issues with images being chopped, in what appeared to be random fashion. When I did get the image to look nicely in article such as this, the image seems to be randomly chopped when i view it in my profile or when it is shared in other people’s profile. Also the images appeared different on my iPhone 7 as opposed to my desktop. (see image below of different ways the same image appears on different LinkedIn screens).

I Googled and found a few blogs with Guidelines.. none of the advice seemed to work with the new LinkedIn layout. It looks like LinkedIn changed the way images are being posted & shared, when they changed all other User Interface elements in 2017.

I experimented – I experimented this weekend (Mar 2017) and found a working methodology. I am not a graphic artist, but a fairly methodical experimenter. My findings are for those that just want a quick & easy formula that works. I hope this article saves you time. (let me know if it does.. means you made my time worth more!)

Image size requirements are different for Articles, Posts, devices etc – I found there is a different optimal header image size for posting Articles such as these, and different requirement for doing direct posts. In this post I am addressing image size for LinkedIn blogs & articles, such as the one you see above this article.

  • Best dimension of image – best overall dimension for LinkedIn Article posting is 600 x 322 pixels or some multiples of it. (I found 2x larger at 1200 x 644 image is better if you are saving as JPG in paint). This ensures all the image is visible when people view this post. You can upload a larger image & use the image navigator to slide and see a section of the image. (Talking technical – on desktop, I found the Aspect ratio for posting is 1.86 )
  • LinkedIn chops Images when sharing – Just because the image looks great above, doesn’t mean it will look the same when LinkedIn shares on other peoples screens & devivces it…. it turns out, when LinkedIn share your post on your profile, activity log or devices such as iPhone; they display the image at different aspect ratio than it was created in. That is means, anyway you slice things you will end up losing original visual content. There is no way to get around cropping. (Talking technical – aspect ratio for desktop posting of the image seems to be 2.0,but the aspect ratio of the image displayed when creating content for the post is 1.86).
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  • Tip – Add into image a 20 pixel white border – It is easy to ensure your images don’t get chopped, cropped or distorted when LinkedIn shares your post across different types of devices and views. Just Leave a 20 pixel white or border around the image. This ensures, no matter where your blog is marketed by LinkedIn, your post looks professional. (Talking technical – I noticed you only need to remove 11 pixel rows on top and bottom rows for desktop viewing – this gets the 600 x 322 image into 600 x 300; an aspect ration of 2.0 that seems to be what is shown on desktop post sharing.)

Quick step by step process for the graphically challenged

  1. In Paint – create blank image of size 600 x 322
  2. Open image you like to post in another paint window. Select & copy 600×322 size part of image you like
  3. Paste the copied image into the first 600×322 pixel blank image window
  4. Select image you just pasted, and resize to 93% using resize command. Center image & save it. The image is now optimal for posting on LinkedIn blog

If you are constructing image in paint and saving as JPG, start with image 2x larger (1200 x 644). You get a more crisp image on LinkedIn desktop.

If you have links & tips that can help a person adding image to their LinkedIn blog post – can you share in comments below please. I know what I shared is very basic info.