E77 | Leveraging LinkedIn: The Riches Are In The Niches
Do you know how to use LinkedIn? As in really know how to use LinkedIn? As in to generate leads, make sales, connect with meaningful prospects and make decent money from the platform?
Because if LinkedIn is a platform you want to be leveraging, or you’re trying to leverage, then listen to this week’s episode of The Melting Pot with John Nemo, author and marketing coach, for some amazing advice and top tips.
John helps business coaches, business owners, small business owners and consultants use platforms like LinkedIn to find and engage and win new business online. He will show you how to leverage LinkedIn to find and engage your ideal prospects, along with how to use content as currency to “purchase” the time, attention and interest of your target audience.
In fact, John was an inspiration behind Dom’s transition from the corporate world to becoming a solopreneur, so it’s quite poetic to have him on the podcast, sharing his secret sauce.
And what is John’s secret sauce?
“The book I launched my business on was called ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie, written in 1936. I built my whole business around that book. I built my whole business around this one line, which is: ‘your ideal prospects don’t care about you, they care about themselves, morning, noon, and after supper, so make it all about them’.”
So if you want to find and attract the type of prospects who will be a real fit for your brand, then keep on listening – this is a great conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
On today’s podcast:
- You’ve got to have a story and be memorable if you hope to succeed
- How to leverage LinkedIn
- Using content marketing to get big wins
- How to deal with failure
- Success is 98% mindset and 2% talent
- Be unique when connecting with prospects
How to use LinkedIn
When Dom was considering transitioning from the corporate world to being a solopreneur, John seemed to have the perfect mix of tools. So he bought the book – LinkedIn Riches, followed John’s advice, watched a lot of his free stuff, listened to his podcast Nemo Radio, and people started calling, started contacting him, asking him to do work for them.
John’s guidance for how to use LinkedIn works.
So what do you need to do to start using LinkedIn effectively?
Well, according to John, despite over 700 million of us having signed up to use LinkedIn (with 2 more joining every second), not many of us actually leverage LinkedIn to our advantage, so here are a few top tips to get the most out of the platform.
Be memorable
John teaches his clients content marketing, and if you want to stand out from the crowd you have to have a point of difference, a story, a narrative. So don’t use LinkedIn to showcase your resume, use LinkedIn to showcase you – what sets you apart from the competition.
“You need to be a character and you need to share your journey to make yourself memorable, right now the biggest sin in marketing and branding is to be boring.”
John believes that with such stiff competition on LinkedIn, putting yourself out there and showing who you really are will not just allow you to attract the right clients, you will attract the sort of people who get you and your sense of humour, your communication style, and you repel the people who would be a terrible fit.
“At the end of the day we still want to connect as human beings. And that’s part of what I try to really train people to do. Whether it’s LinkedIn or content marketing, is how can we infuse and overlay the real life you online?“
Find your niche
Besides highlighting why you are an individual, different from all the other coaches/businesses/entrepreneurs on LinkedIn, John advises that you find your niche to also set you apart.
“The riches are in the niches, the more hyper-focused you are on serving a target audience, the more successful you’re going to be.”
Nobody cares about you
John is a firm believer in one thing – nobody cares about you.
It’s what he built his business on. Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People taught him that.
“Nobody cares about you – your prospects, your customers only care about themselves, morning, noon, and after supper.”
The LinkedIn quick win
So knowing that you need to be you, to find a niche and to realise that LinkedIn isn’t about you at all, people are merely on LinkedIn looking to get their problem solved. How do you leverage the platform?
John says, “when you approach people on LinkedIn, don’t use your job title, don’t barf out your resume, you say, ‘you know what I do is I help this audience get these benefits they want by providing this industry specific service’, and you hyper niche it.”
Treat online people like real people
For John, LinkedIn works because it’s the fastest and easiest way that he’s found to win business online – and the reason he thinks it’s so great is because it allows him to carry out one to one personal marketing.
“It’s one on one virtual coffee meetings, you can literally find anyone in the world, there’s 700 million people on there that you can connect with. And then the real secret sauce is treat people online like you would in real life, because in real life, you wouldn’t hammer them with sales pitches and offers and links.”
So how do you treat online people like real people?
You practice professional courtship and break the ice by bantering a little. You then ask them questions about them and offer value. Be hyper-focused on what the other person wants, and build rapport – don’t know anything about them? Of course you do, this is the beauty of LinkedIn after all, it gives you all that information.
Book recommendations
- Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
- Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk
- Superfans by Pat Flynn
- The Freaks Shall Inherit The Earth by Chris Brogan
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
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