The ultimate guide to growing your LinkedIn network [2021 Updated]

With 630 million users, LinkedIn is the most prominent professional social network in the world. In a global, interconnected world this means you have thousands of business opportunities waiting for you. It’s a whole world of untapped connections to develop B2B prospects, business partners, and potential hires.

To really make the most of LinkedIn you need to develop a sizable following and contact list. But it takes time and dedication to get there.

LinkedIn has become an ocean of business opportunities. If you connect with the right people and grow our network, you can generate hundreds of leads from LinkedIn every month. In this guide, I will be showing you step-by-step processing to grow your network and followers on LinkedIn.

Let’s divide this blog post into four sections.

All the strategies I have listed here are verified and tested by me and our team. This is going to be a long guide and we will be discussing everything that you need to reach your goal. Grab a pen and a notebook, start making notes if you find anything interesting.

So, let’s get started with our first step – CREATE 🎉

Creating content on LinkedIn

In this step, we will see how to create great content to get maximum views. We must plan our content really well and before we even start writing the content, we should list down the growth objectives of each month and then plan our content accordingly.

Let’s see the step-by-step process of creating valuable content on LinkedIn.

1. Define growth objectives each month

Turning LinkedIn into a lead machine needs patience and being consistent is the only way to grow your LinkedIn followers. The best way to not lose your sights on your goal and work steadily to fulfill it is to set realistic monthly growth goals that you can review at the end of the month.

This way you can evaluate the success of your current growth strategies and identify possible solutions to problems. Setting monthly goals can make an ambitious objective, for example reaching 80,000 followers, appear more approachable with realistic monthly goals.

Use the first months to evaluate how realistic you are with your goals. You can also estimate your conversion rate. If you know how many people you reached out to, and you can see how many are following or connecting with you, you can get your conversion rate. This will be useful to estimate how many people you need to reach out to each month to achieve your goals.

This is how I write my growth objectives or goals for each month:

• Publish at least 12 posts on LinkedIn [ Three times in a week ]
• Reach 400,000 views in total
• Add 600 highly targeted people in my network [ How? more on this later ]
• Generate in total 1000 leads from my posts

2. Write consistently

When people connect with you or follow you, they are performing a social transaction. They are giving you social currency in terms of connection or attention and engagement. And they expect something in exchange. What they expect is that you can bring them enough value to justify that social transaction.

This means you need to make an effort to write posts and engage with users regularly. This has to be a well-thought strategy. Don’t leave the research and writing for the last minute. In order to create valuable content, you need to define your strategy and develop a content calendar that you will follow precisely. All the time you invest in this stage will go a long way in helping you make your goals a reality.

I have been constantly writing on LinkedIn for the past 3 months and grew my network from 3000 connections to 6000+ connections. You can see on average each of my posts has received 15,000+ views. I will tell more about the strategy to get more views in this post 🙂

If you want to reach your goal, this is the most important part. You have to push yourself to create valuable content related to your niche and keep writing consistently. Write at least after every 2 days.

3. Explore your expertise in your writing

There’s no established playbook for what works when publishing content in LinkedIn. Unconventional topics or unusual perspectives can help to get you noticed, but in the end, people will follow you because of your expertise in a particular professional discipline.

Explore and develop your expertise in your writing, but don’t hesitate to give it a personal touch. LinkedIn is not a professional blog. People don’t want to read case studies or ultimate guides for anything. Ultimately LinkedIn is a social network, where people get together to discuss issues and celebrate successes. Giving your unique point of view to a common problem could be a great way to give personality to your personal brand and develop a stronger, emotional connection with your followers.

When it comes to writing posts, this pattern of writing works really well!

1. One emotional or negative statement or a problem that we were facing initially
2. Describe in short paragraphs how you dealt with that problem
3. Write what worked and what did not work
4. End with a positive statement
5. Talk about what you’re offering [ In case if you’re sharing any guide or material ]
6. Call to Action [ For example, comment Interested and get your guide ]

People really care about emotions and it’s common human behavior to read something when emotions are involved. You know 90% of all the TV ads will show something about families, parents and play with your emotions to generate revenue.

POINTS TO NOTE:

1. Don’t add any external links to your posts
2. Always add the link as the first comment and then edit your post and include that comment link.
3. From my experience, when we include comments links in the post, it got more views than I had added a direct blog post in my LinkedIn post.

Connecting with targeted users on LinkedIn

Now you have started posting valuable content on LinkedIn for your targeted niche, you need to make sure that you’re connecting with the right people so that they can see your posts, interact with them and possibly communicate with you about your work. We will see in this part, how you find targeted users on LinkedIn.

1. Use the search feature to find new targeted contacts and followers

The search function in LinkedIn is a great way to develop your network and grow your following numbers in a targeted way.

All the LinkedIn search filters for people

The current search engine in LinkedIn aggregates search results for jobs, people, companies, and groups. Once you narrow down what you want to see in the search results, you have access to more search filters to help you clean up your search results. For example, if you choose to see only people, which is what we want, you then can have access to filters like:

• Contacts: here you can decide whether to see only people in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd connection degree. 1st degree means you have already connected with them. A 2nd-degree contact it’s a connection of a connection. This means they will see who they have in common with you when they check your profile or you send a connection request, which can make your request more relevant and more likely to succeed. Finally, a 3rd connection degree means that it’s a contact of a contact. Connecting with them will probably require some extra effort.
• Locations: You can narrow down your search to a specific area. This is great if you want to grow your network in a specific country or city, so you can keep your search results relevant.
• Current companies: If you want to make sure you develop your network inside a specific company, you can trim your search results accordingly.

Those are the main search filters. But if you click on All Filters, you will see a much longer list with interesting and useful search filters, like:

• Connections of: You can search into the contact network of a specific person. This filter is great to target the connections of a competitor.
• Past companies: Very useful to identify people who, for example, used to work with your company, which may help you increase your chances to connect with them.
• Industries: When you search for a generic job function like, for example, Marketing Director, it can be useful to narrow down the search by industry if you’re specializing in a specific sector.
• Schools: You can select one or more schools to focus the results only on people who attended those schools. Useful to reach out to alumni of your school, for example.
• Contact interests: You can filter the search by selecting one or more interests.
• Profile language: This way you can avoid contacting people that don’t speak your language.

2. Using boolean operators in LinkedIn search

Besides filters, you can also use boolean operators to help you uncover more interesting potential contacts through search. Not all boolean operators are supported by LinkedIn. Here’s what you can use:

• Quotes: You can enclose your search in quotes to find exact matches to a specific phrase. For example, "UX Designer".
  

• Question marks: Useful to find people with multi-word titles. For example, you could search for product ? to uncover product designers, product directors, product managers, etc. Use them with question marks.
• NOT: you can use this operator to exclude certain terms from your search results. For example: UX NOT researcher will return a list of people working in UX, except researchers. Use always in all-caps.
• OR: By default, when you input more than one word, LinkedIn returns results that match all the search terms. By using OR, you can broaden your search results. For example, Copywriter OR marketer will give you people with either job title. If you search for marketer copywriter you will see only the profiles that include both search terms. Use in all-caps as well.
• Parenthetical searches: You can nest some of these boolean operators inside others using parenthesis. For example, if you want to find C level profiles on LinkedIn, you can write (manager OR VP or Owner).
  

3. Find your target audience from Facebook, Quora, and Twitter

Apart from LinkedIn, we all know that many of our targeted audience is hanging out in different groups on Facebook, following known people in your niche on Quora, and following your competitors on Twitter.

It will be great to find these users from Facebook, Quora, and Twitter and then find them on LinkedIn to connect with them.

I will share more about this in automating section. We have a solution for this 🙂

4. In case if you have a Sales Navigator account

It is not mandatory to have a Sales Navigator account but in case if you have a premium account on LinkedIn, you can use advanced filters in Sales Navigator and connect with your target audience.

Perform a search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator and then save the users in a list. I will show you how you can use the saved list to send them connection requests.

5. Sending LinkedIn connection requests — templates

Our team is working on preparing series of templates for you for different scenarios. If you would like to receive the email templates, simply respond to the TexAu bot and share your email ↘

If you use all the four steps mentioned above very well, you can add 10-15 new users to your network every day.

Converting users from LinkedIn to your customers

Converting LinkedIn users to your customers requires a good amount of effort. Well, the good thing is now they are a part of your network so they will be seeing about your product continuously and at one point if it is of value, they will signup to check what you have built, because we all are curious.

I will be writing an in-depth guide on how to convert leads into customers in a separate guide. Let’s go through the basics quickly.

1. Using cold email outreach

Once the user is connected on LinkedIn, you can easily see the email by click on “Contact Info”. You can copy this email and add it to your cold email outreach campaign and start cold emails to the user.

2. Send LinkedIn messages

It is a good idea to prepare a sequence of messages for your newly connected users and once they accept your invitation, start sending them messages every alternate day until you get a response or achieve your goal. Your goal can be – schedule a demo, replied to your message, downloaded the ebook, or started a trial of your product.

We will take a deeper look at this section in our upcoming blog post.

Scale the process with the power of automation

You have come this far and this is the last topic of our guide, how we can scale the whole process and automate our work. We know, if we do this work automatically, it will take hours and days to complete, and hiring VAs to do this work is very expensive.

TexAu helps businesses automate manual work and scale businesses faster. Let’s see how you can use TexAu to automate most of the work we discussed above.

1. Engage with contacts you find automatically

Finding great contacts is only half the work. What do you do with that endless list of potential connections? Sure, you could visit them one by one, engage with their activities, send them a connection request. But that would take too much of your valuable time. You could spend that time better by developing great content and nurturing those relationships.

So then, how can you do it? Enter growth automation. With a growth automation tool like TexAu, you can easily automate this process and increase exponentially the number of people you can reach.

How does it work? With TexAu you have ready-to-use automations you can set up in minutes, and you can also build Recipes, which are automation workflows that will allow you to perform a complex chain of actions.

For example, in this case, we should start with extracting the LinkedIn search results. TexAu has automation that will give you a neat spreadsheet with the URLs of all the profiles that match the search terms you used.

Extract LinkedIn search results

Let’s see step by step process to extract search results from LinkedIn. Plan what you want to search, don’t just write like “Marketing specialist” and get the results. Use available LinkedIn filters I explained to you in the first step and search your targeted profiles.

I’m going to search for people:

• with a role as “Growth Hacker” OR “Marketing Manager”
• In the US
• In industry, Marketing & Advertising
• who is also providing marketing and consulting services

Let’s see how to add those filters on LinkedIn and download all the results using TexAu!

What can you do with that list? Lots and lots of things.

2. Send each LinkedIn profile a personalized connection request

Once you’ve made some initial contact with them, it’s time to make it official. Send them a contact request with a nice message. If you want to (and yes, you want to), you can personalize the message you send with the connection request through TexAu. Personalizing a connection request will boost the chances of them accepting it.

See how to send personalized messages using TexAu here: https://support.texau.com/en/articles/3580655-how-to-send-personalized-messages-using-google-sheet-data

3.Endorse automatically the skills of LinkedIn profiles

You can use that spreadsheet as a source for other automations in TexAu. One of these would allow you to automatically endorse the first three skills of a list of LinkedIn profiles. This is a personal but low-key approach to get them to notice you through an in-app notification.

4. Automatically like the latest activity of a LinkedIn profile

An alternative is to have TexAu extract the recent activities of a list of LinkedIn profiles. Then you can run that list through another automation that will like each activity without you having to do anything else. It would be ideal to set this chain of actions as a workflow in a TexAu recipe to minimize your involvement and save even more time.

Check this video for more details.

5. Follow up with the connection requests

You’ll have to do some wiggling with your spreadsheets, but you can easily identify who has accepted a connection request and who didn’t. For those who didn’t, you can follow up with them with another message to reactivate the relationship.

6. Don’t forget to engage with your existing LinkedIn connections

Getting them to accept your connection request is half the job. You need to keep the relationship close and warm so that they will engage with your posts and activity. Having a decent engagement rate is crucial to maximize the exposure of your posts and make sure that all the work you devote to your content pays off. To achieve that, you can:

• Run your connections periodically through the automations we discussed for liking recent activity and endorsing skills. You could also use another automation that will simply view their profile. It’s a very low-key way to insert yourself in their notifications.
• Send your connections a message every once in a while to send them a particularly relevant or popular article you’ve published.

What is coming in the next guide?

I will be sharing with you some advanced strategies to use Facebook Groups, Twitter Following, and Followers, Quora communities to grow your business.

If you would like to get updates when we release our post, don’t forget to share your email in the chat window below ↘️

Would you like to use TexAu completely free for 21 days?

I can offer you an exclusive TexAu deal that is not available on our website – TexAu

What do you have to do? Just follow the steps below:

1. Connect with me on LinkedIn
2. Shoot a message “TexAu trial for 21 days”
3. I will enable the trial for you ASAP

If you can any questions about this article, any suggestions, or feedback on what we can more to improve this Part 1 of the Ultimate Lead Generation series, please write in comments, we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you so much for reading this guide 🙏🏻

P.S. – If you would like to receive an email when we release a new guide, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter below. 👇🏻