I'm almost through my first 90 days of Blogging exclusively within LinkedIn. It's been exhilarating and exhausting - the honeymoon phase of my affair with LinkedIn Publisher is very much still alive. I'm besotted by LinkedIn as the most powerful publishing platform on Earth:
- There are 330 million members
- 40% of LinkedIn members use it daily
- 60% of business-to-business (B2B) buyers research before engaging
- CEO members have an average of 930 connections.
- 90% of business decision-makers in Australia are there which is highest penetration in the world
- Two people join LinkedIn every second
- There are 200 million unique views of page content every day
- There are 28 billion page views in an average quarter
You are 500% more likely to secure a meeting using a LinkedIn 'warm introduction' than from a cold call or cold e-mail. But not with clumsy 'spam' InMail. Salespeople who use LinkedIn intelligently are also 50% more likely to achieve their sales revenue targets.
So, LinkedIn is the world's most powerful social platform for business-to-business (B2B) and one key to achieving cut-through is 'insight publishing'. But how frequently should you be 'doing it' - what's the right amount of posting? Being a newlywed to LinkedIn Publisher, I'm propagating content several times a day when I can - certainly once a day is my minimum. My wife, in the real world, has given me permission to spend evenings with my publishing mistress and I've been going at it like a rabbit.
Some people have asked how in the world I'm punching out such a high volume of quality content. I've been asked: 'Surely you're paying someone else to write all this?' But let me share a secret - It's 100% all my IP and I'm writing 4 hours a night; no TV at all and my wife has been wonderful in allowing me to disappear after dinner to plunge into social media to launch myself globally. I'm not paying anyone to ghost write and I've re-purposed a lot of my previous website, book and whitepaper content. My biggest post has had almost 200,000 reads in LinkedIn compared with just 76 reads on my website previously as a whitepaper. I'm a writer and have already published a best selling book, The Joshua Principle, Leadership Secrets of Selling.
Writing is like a muscle; it becomes stronger the more you use it but I am under no illusion; if I post low value 'white noise' rubbish, I will be unfollowed faster than you can say #StrategicSocialSelling. Nor can I get away with disrespecting readers by posting 'let me tell you what you already know' dross - I would be dumped like a jilted lover. But I'm giving my best and the response has staggered me. I write for you assuming that you know the fundamentals of social media, professional selling, leadership, and sales enabling technologies. I write for an adult audience, not at a tabloid or high school reader level. I never publish click-bait to lure you away from LinkedIn.
But I'll admit that my LinkedIn publishing is new ground... a bold experiment. To my knowledge, I'm the first person in the world to dump their website blog completely and go all-in on LinkedIn. I do this even though there's no RSS capabilities for me to be able to use tools such as Tribber to easily amplify content within my trusted network (John Smibert at Strategic Selling and Anthony Iannarino from The Sales Blog are top of my list).
In a few weeks I'll publish a 90 day case study and transparently reveal the results of my LinkedIn mania and it will surprise you. As an example of what's happening for me (without any push marketing or interrupt selling), ten days ago LinkedIn themselves invited me to write for them and you'll begin to see my content published by them from March onward. Yesterday Kelly Riggs from #BizLockerRadio invited me to be interviewed on his hugely successful program.
There have been many genuine people who've reached-out to me offering advice and few suggested I reduce the frequency of my posting. Almost all of them have subsequently written to me with a change of opinion and encouraged me to continue. This InMail from David is an example and he kindly allowed me to provide this screenshot as an example.
I've been told that there's actually such a thing as 'bad sex'... wow. And now backwards... WOW! It's hard to imagine such a thing. Yet bad writing abounds and we see it everywhere in social. Volume kills quality and we're all so incredibly busy. But commitment can overcome the most insurmountable of difficulties.
Almost all of us would love to experience exhilaration at least once a day. Think back to when you were hormonally in love... fifty shades of beige but without the weirdness. It's not about how often you indulge and the best sex occurs when you give yourself fully to the other person. I've always believed that great sex is had with genuine love, skillful enthusiasm and a little humor.
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Tony Hughes is ranked as the #1 influencer on professional selling in Asia-Pacific and is a keynote speaker and best selling author. This article was originally published in LinkedIn where you can also follow Tony's award winning blog. Also visit Tony's keynote speaker website at www.TonyHughes.com.au or his sales methodology website at http://www.rsvpselling.com/.
Main image photo by Flickr: Mark Taylor Cunningham
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