I have been advocating for awhile that you must be using LinkedIn much more aggressively than the site recommends or allows.  I have even joked that unless you are getting kicked off of LinkedIn (actually “suspended for non-compliant actions”), you aren’t doing it right.  But before we dig into LinkedIn, let’s talk about what the point of marketing, now in the 21st century, really is.

Certainly not for every business, but for many businesses the whole point of marketing should be collecting email addresses and repeatedly marketing to those addresses.  If you have ever purchased anything from Omaha Steak, you know what I mean.  They take it to the extreme by emailing me 4,539 times a day, but the philosophy is good.  Once you buy from a company, you are very likely to buy again.  That whole 20% of your customers account for 80% of your salesthing.  Collecting customer email addresses should be a focus of your business.  And collecting email addresses of potential customers or people that could potentially help your career should also be a priority.

Jim Beach of School for Startups lectures

Collecting email addresses of customers is easy.  Getting potential email addresses is much harder, for two reasons, how do you target them and then how do you get their addresses?  Purchasing them is one possibility, but I have found it worthless.  Let me tell you about an experiment I am doing….

I use LinkedIn like others (stress “others”!) use Match.com.  LinkedIn says you are only supposed to connect with people you know, or in other words, it is a historic device, not a marketing tool.  I use it to target people I want to know and then to

introduce myself to them, or as a marketing tool.  To find people you want to know, go to the current connect of yours with the most contacts, someone connected to over 500 people.  Click on their contact list and look at each person.  You will find people that are possible customers or are just people worth knowing.

Here is the secret sauce.  When you ask to connect with someone going through the normal process (using search to find all the salt salesmen in Miami, for example), LinkedIn counts the number of requests you make.  You are only allowed 75 a day.  And if you request connections with lots of people that say they do not know you (I am not sure how many), you get a warning (see screen shot) and eventually, if you keep getting denied, your account gets blocked.  Don’t ask me how I know, and yes, you can get reinstated, but that is another blog. Back to the sauce, remember that list of contacts?  When you ask to connect to a contact of a contact, USING A CONTACT LIST AS THE SOURCE, LinkedIn does not count how many requests you make and does not penalize you for requests that are denied.  Over the weekend, I went through 7 contacts and requested connections with over 1000 people, in 3-4 hours.  A week later, about 400 people have said yes, I have no idea how many rejected me, and I still have not had my account blocked, again.

Now, I use the email addresses and the information about the contact to market to them, directly, outside of LinkedIn.

One point of clarification, on the form to request a new contact, where you must mark how you know them, I always mark “Have done business together” and then in the form I acknowledge that I don’t know them, but am trying to build my list of contacts.  And, the 400 contacts that I have made so far is a great list….  I will let know what happens….