How can I view others' LinkedIn profiles without them knowing?

Here is a 4 step process to make sure you can view others’ LinkedIn profiles without them knowing.

• Click on your profile in the upper right corner.

• Go to the tab “settings & privacy”

• Scroll down until you see “profile viewing options” in the 2nd paragraph.

• Click “change” and you’ll see these options.

• Pick which ever suits you better.

Time to visit some profiles. :)

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How can I download videos from LinkedIn app?

You can’t, but here is another way.

If you want to download a video from LinkedIn, you’ll need to open it in a Chrome browser first.

If you are scrolling through your feed on your mobile. Do this first.

Remember or write down the name of the person that posted the video .

Go to a Google Chrome browser and type in the name in LinkedIn.

Scroll down on his or her profile and click ‘see all activity’

Head over to ‘posts’.

If the video was recently shared, you’ll see the video in his posts.

Now right click on the video, and save the video to your computer.

That’s it! :)

Is there a way to hide your activity section on LinkedIn?

Here is a two step process to change the way people can see your profile (and also activity section.

• Go to this link: https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/settings
• Toggle on and off what people can or can’t see.

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What's the difference between a LinkedIn article and a LinkedIn post?

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The easiest way to visualise the difference is to think about it like this:

“Think of articles as your own personal blog and posts as a tweet”.

Here are the main 3 differences.

• Tweets disappear, your blog is there to stay
  
  Just like food in the supermarkt, articles are created to stay, posts to go.
  
  Every single time you write an article, it will show up on your profile, like this:

Once people click on it, they’ll be able to read it.

Once they read it, LinkedIn will suggest other articles you wrote in the past.

Just like a blog.

This is a great way to show a good impression to prospects landing on your profile.

With posts, it’s different.

Every post you’ll make will stick around for about 3–5 days, (depending on how good it performs with likes, comments and shares).

Each day that passes, your post will get less reach, until it’s not shown anymore.

For example, this post that was created a week ago, isn’t getting any likes and shares anymore because LinkedIn prefers up-to-date content, not old content.

Pro-tip: Because LinkedIn has a high domain authority, your articles will rank well in google without a single effort. The downside is that you don’t control the platform and loose all the good stuff like analytics.

• Posts are limited to characters

When you write a post on LinkedIn, you’ll be limited to exactly 1300 letters.

With an article, you have the freedom to write as many characters as you would like.

• Posts are better to reach people.

As for now (1st of Januari 2019), Linkedin prefers to show posts instead of articles to your audience.

For one of my recent articles, with 93 likes, 23 comments and 2 shares. I got about 441 views.

For one of my recent posts, with 146 likes and 19 comments. I got 16080 views.

Talking about a difference.

My piece of advice?

Use both in a smart way.

Here is how.

In my article that is shown on LinkedIn, I wrote about the 4 key takeaways for B2B SaaS companies from Saastock.

Here is a screenshot of the article where I talk about the first take-way.

This article, as mentioned before, reached about 441 people.

Now it’s time to repurpose that content into a post.

A post to reach more people with the exact same content.

All I had to do?

Copy paste from the article into a post, and add some minor changes to the structure.

That’s it.

That’s how you use the power of articles and posts together.

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What's a great headline on LinkedIn for an entrepreneur/self-employed individual wanting to find employment?

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Remember the last time you were on a website for the first time?

This is probably what happened.

You opened the website.

You read the headline and first paragraph.

You scrolled through the first page.

You decided on either these two options:

1. The website peaked your interested and decided to spend more time on it.
2. The website didn’t peak your interest and left forever.

Now think back at people landing on your LinkedIn profile.

The exact same process happens.

In matters of seconds, the person that lands on your profile decides wether to spend more time on your profile or leave forever.

This is why a well optimised LinkedIn profile matters.

Here is the process we go through for clients and will help you solve this question:

1. Map out what type of skills you have.
2. Decide which people you can actually help (this is the most tricky one).
3. Adapt your headline towards who you are targeting and what you can help them with. When done right, you should have something like this.

• My target audience whom I can help are B2B marketers and Founders.
• My skillset I can help them with is acquiring and nurturing leads on Linkedin with Content Marketing.

3. Once you have a headline, don’t stop there. Just like a landing page, it’s key to have your personal story and proof you can help that person with the job you are trying to land.

When done right, this should be the result:

Hope this helps!

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What's one of the best LinkedIn profile you've seen?

When you attract the attention of your target audience, the next step they usually take is visiting your profile.

Since curiosity is just something that is baked into us humans.

The destiny of the further customer journey depends on how good your profile is optimized.

Does it build credibility?

Does it clearly inform what are you doing?

Does it have clear call to actions?

Think of a profile page as a landing page.

Here are 8 tips to create optimized and effective profile page.

1. Use the power of first impressions

People make judgments on a daily basis and we do this within seconds of seeing something or someone. Those first impressions are etched in our memory and it is very difficult to change an initially bad first impression. Research has even shown that sometimes mere milliseconds are enough to form an opinion.

This is the reason why crafting a powerful and dynamic headline for your profile is such an important thing to do.

You want people landing on your personal profile to be understood within these first crucial seconds whether you can help them or not.

I wrote ‘dynamic headline’ because depending on who you are targeting for your campaign, you’ll need to swap it to make it more personalized.

In my case, if I am targeting B2B SaaS founders to join our B2B Marketers and Founders Facebook Group I’ll have a headline saying: “Connecting talented B2B SaaS founders to exchange valuable knowledge in a closed group”.

This means that every time I comment on a post, such as the one below, where I am asked to speak at B2B growth event, they’ll have a clear idea what to expect when they click on my profile.

Although it seems like I am really bad at drawing red lines, we are compensating it with finding creative headlines for people.

In the meantime, here are some great examples of people that have crafted a good design USP oneliner.

2. Empower yourself with credibility

By now you should know that people buy from people they know, like and trust.

In order for people to trust you, you need to show them that you are a credible and reliable person.

When people land on my profile, this is one of the first things they’ll see.

1. A picture of me speaking at an event
2. I open up with a very personal story that sparks curiosity (“Did he really shake the hand of Obama?”). This makes people read my full story.
3. They can see I wrote a book about B2B marketing, an article on how to track your full customer journey and side project marketing.

This sparks initial interest and incites one to look a little further.

If done right, this is what happens:

When people scroll down they’ll notice the second part that shows my credibility in the world of B2B SaaS Marketing

They’ll see my blog post I wrote about the 4 key takeaways for B2B SaaS companies from SaaStock.

This shows people that I know what’s happening inside my area of expertise and how it’s going to evolve.

When they read the article they’ll notice that I have added links to my other blog posts on my website. This is already a first key step to getting some organic inbound leads from LinkedIn.

Make sure to add UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tags to all the links you share to your website. This will allow you to understand which links generated the highest quality leads down the road.

3. Use the power of verbal recommendation

Yes, everybody is going to tell you about why having highly endorsed skills is important.

But you might want to hear this story before you judge.

Through the power of social selling, I have landed myself in places I wouldn’t have dreamed of.

The following story was one of them.

One day I met up with a connection I hadn’t seen in a while.

He started the conversation by congratulating me on the amazing B2B Marketing & Founders community we were running.

We had a chat about growth marketing, social selling and entrepreneurship itself.

Nothing sales related, everything life related.

The next day, he calls me up and says: ‘Ricardo, I would love to squeeze you in one of the projects I’ll be working for. I think you would be a great fit’.

I will never forget the way we were sold into this project.

They added my LinkedIn endorsements to the proposal to claim credibility.

They didn’t even spell my name correctly but I couldn’t care less.

One coffee and a proposal later, the deal was signed.

The power of social selling.

4. Personalize and promote your profile

There appears to be another hidden page that most of us can’t seem to find on LinkedIn.

It’s the page where we are able to create our own personalized LinkedIn URL and badge.

First, let’s start with removing our ugly URL with numbers and add our name or expertise.

Head over to https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/settings

Change your URL to something more personal.

Now we have our personal URL, but what if we wanted to promote our profile on our blog, personal website or newsletters?

This is where a LinkedIn Badge comes in handy.

On the same page, scroll down and head over to badges.

Paste the first code into your website (you can ask your developer or add it yourself through Google Tag Manager or plugins).

You can now add a badge to where people are already finding you by adding a simple snippet of code.

5. Your profile description nails the exact challenges you or your product can help with.

6. A clear call to action what your profile visitor should do.

7. Your profile includes your previous background - employers, your job role, major achievements.

8. You have recommendations.

Here is how the exact process of lead generation looks like:

1. You publish content that attracts the attention of your target audience.

2. They like your content and are curious to see what you do.

3. They land on your profile, learn how you can help them and what makes your different.

4. They reach out to you with an existing challenge or you reach out to them if they fit your ideal customer profile to start a conversation.

Remember, 3% of all people are ready to make a sale straight away.

The other 97%, you need to nurture.

Just like making a great stew, your prospects need time.

During that time, its’ important to clearly state what you could help them with in the future and why they should work with you.

What's the biggest mistake you see when someone sends a connection request to you on LinkedIn?

The biggest mistake I see people make on LinkedIn when sending a connection request, apart from not understanding the platform, is forgetting the magic 3% rule.

A rule that states that out of 100 people you will contact today, 3% of them will be sales-ready.

This is exactly where companies go wrong, leaving about 97% on the table.

They find this little tool to auto-connect with people on LinkedIn.

Place them into sequences from the moment they accept the request.

Hoping on a response.

Companies are running the numbers games because somebody once told them a simple equation.

If you want to have 3 sales, you need to be reaching out to 100 people a day.

The problem with this simple math formula?

It places quantity over quality.

It places numbers before people

It places a ‘doomed’ sign on your marketing campaign, right from the start.

Why?

LinkedIn isn’t about creating the biggest network.

It’s about creating the right connections that can move your business forward.

Connections you could have never made without it.

Because quality over quantity, always wins.

Is Social Selling effective on LinkedIn?

While writing this post, I closed a 20K deal for my company.

Jumped on 3 sales calls.

Created 2 appointments.

And got 19 people downloading my LinkedIn Content Marketing book.

The best part?

I didn’t spend a dime on advertising.

It was all done through Social Selling.

But before I explain why it’s so effective, let’s get the definition straight of what Social Selling really is.

What is social selling?

When I was 18 years old, I moved to India to learn Hindi.

One of my first jobs, aside from teaching dancing classes on rooftops, was selling scarves in a tourist shop.

My job was to approach people that were merely interested, and sell them a cashmere scarf.

On top of that, I was taught tricks on how to sell a fake cashmere scarf.

How do you spot the difference?

When burned, cashmere wool smells like burned hair.

This is how you know it’s real cashmere.

All I had to do was take a lighter and burn the outer parts of the scarf that contained a little cashmere to make the sale.

I hated the job.

It clashed with my values and the way I saw the world.

I wanted people to come to me because they believed I could solve their actual problems.

I wanted people to work with me because of the enormous value upfront.

Not because of some sleazy sales trick.

This is the reason why I am a strong believer of social selling for B2B companies.

This is how I see social selling on LinkedIn:

“Social selling is all about nurturing your prospects by providing valuable answers and thoughtful content until the prospect is ready to buy from you.“

It’s a scalable blend between content marketing and sales.

It’s making a sale by being helpful instead of being pushy.

It’s making yourself top-of-mind whenever your prospect is looking for the solution you can offer.

What kind of B2B companies apply for LinkedIn social selling?

One of our group members in our Facebook Community asked us about the ideal method/channel to generate leads.

This is something a lot of us tend to struggle with.

The channel and method differ depending on your business model and AARPU (average annual revenue per user or company).

The reason for this is simple.

Depending on the specific needs of your business, some channels will not be worth pursuing at all.

If you are selling a 10€ CRM software with an AARPU of 120€, you can't afford to use social selling on Linkedin.

You need scale.

Scale can be achieved by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for example.

If you are selling services or software with a high AARPU, long sales cycles, and many stakeholders, things change.

In this case, there is a good chance you’ll need social selling as a method, and LinkedIn as one of your channels.

This is called product/channel fit.

Before you decide to invest in a channel, talk to an expert about the channel and understand your business model.

Here is the catch. You'll need to watch out for the so-called experts.

They will tell you that your target audience is part of the 1,2 billion messenger users.

They'll sell ice to eskimos if they need to.

This is the lesson I would like to instill:

“You can run fast by using tactics, but if you are running in the wrong direction, you are better off standing still.”

My advice?

If you are selling services or products with less than 500€ in value.

Don’t even start.

How do I make Social Selling work for my company?

LinkedIn Content Marketing or Social Selling is divided into two major parts.

1. Content Creation
2. Audience Building

Why?

If you are creating amazing content, but you have no audience, you will fail.

If you are connecting with relevant people, but all you are hoping for is them answering your spammy messages, you’ll fail.

You want to create relevant content, to relevant people to make the flywheel work.

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