[Social Selling Success] Grow Your Business in 3 Steps with the Leading LinkedIn Training

Teaching SEO courses is my true passion but I’m also very passionate about LinkedIn since I know firsthand how this professional social network platform can help generate leads and boost sales. As a guest-author for Social Media Examiner, I frequently write about LinkedIn and I invite you to read the articles that I wrote for this popular social media marketing website.

Speaking of LinkedIn, Alex Pirouz, the CEO of Linkfluencer, a globally recognized LinkedIn training company, and I recently had the opportunity to team up in a complimentary webinar.

Alex’s company has trained over 18,000 businesses in 30 countries across 55 industries. He and I share similar thoughts on the potential of LinkedIn to grow a business, so I was thrilled when he accepted my invitation to present a webinar called 3 Proven Steps to Build Your Business and Influence Through LinkedIn for Boulder SEO Marketing.

Alex shared his 3-step methodology to expand your business and build your influence using LinkedIn. You can view the recording of this 80-minute long webinar right here:

If you’re struggling to get the most out of LinkedIn in order to build your business, then the Linkfluencer program may be a great fit for you. You’ll receive the back-end support, training and community you need to become influential and generate more clients through LinkedIn.

In this blog post, I’ll review his three-step methodology at a very high level. But first, we need to define your top business challenge.

What’s Your #1 Business Challenge Today?

What’s your biggest challenge? Are you finding it hard to consistently generate high-quality sales leads? Or are you struggling to stand out from the competition and build influence in an overcrowded marketplace? Take some time to articulate your #1 business challenge today. Your goal will be to solve this challenge and understand how to best leverage LinkedIn to solve that challenge, whether it’s through the use of media, partnerships, leads or a combination of these.

Step #1: Find Your Target Market

Once you’ve defined your #1 business challenge, you need to think about who your target audience is on LinkedIn. For example, let’s say your #1 challenge is building influence in your market space. One thing you could do is to start generating high-quality content and get others to share it so that your audience will rapidly widen. In this case, you might come up with some resources where you’d like to be published and then look up the editors on LinkedIn to see how you might be connected. You can engage with this audience by interacting with the content they produce, whether it’s commenting on it or sharing it. So figure out who your target market is that can help you with your business challenge.

Step #2 Connect with Your Target Market

The goal is to connect with your LinkedIn target market. When you do connect, you need to nurture the relationship and view it as a long-term commitment. So start with an outcome: do you want to generate 10 media publications or get 10 new clients? Define what the outcome looks like and then find enough contacts to meet your goal, keeping in mind that about 40-60% of people will connect if they don’t know you. If you have connections in common, you can use LinkedIn’s standard ways of connecting with people. LinkedIn also has paid tools that you can use to segment your contacts to see how you might be connected. View the recording of the webinar to learn more about paid LinkedIn tools.

You should make sure that your LinkedIn profile is compelling, complete, up-to-date and relevant to show how you can help your target market. You also want to make sure that you’re targeting those with a complete profile and who are regularly active on LinkedIn.

Step #3 Turn Those Connections into New Leads and Business Opportunities

Now that you have connections, you need to start nurturing those relationships. Thank them for accepting your invitation to connect. Send them relevant content while continuing to engage with their content, but don’t try to sell them anything yet. Think about where your goods or services fit in with theirs and what you can offer them. Also, come up with a call-to-action plan that makes sense for your business. Perhaps it’s an invitation to attend a webinar that you’re hosting or download a video that you created. Above all, the interactions and call to actions should help your target audience with their challenges.

Conclusion

There’s much, much more to Alex’s 3-step methodology but I could only cover it at a very high level here. Alex is a great guy and you’ll enjoy working with him and his team if you sign up for his program. He’s as passionate about teaching people how to leverage LinkedIn for their business as I am about teaching my SEO training classes.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and here’s to happy social selling 🙂

-Chris

About the Author

Hi- my name is Chris Raulf and I’m the founder and president of Boulder SEO Marketing. We’re a top rated search engine optimization and digital marketing training and consulting agency located in beautiful Denver and Boulder, Colorado. My team and I assist local, national and international clients with all of their digital marketing needs. I enjoy speaking at industry events and invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn.