Social Media | smallbizdream blog

How Can Small Businesses Survive COVID-19

COVID-19 has started taking its toll on millions of small businesses. Doors are closing and people are losing jobs. Luckily, some countries are finding ways to buy business owners some time with mortgage deferrals, wage subsidies, and low-interest loans.

Other businesses are looking into other options like branching out to serve immediate needs of customers like health, food, online selling, and delivery services. Let’s look at some ways to get you through the lull during COVID-19 lockdown.

Make Good Use of Your Time

Remember when businesses were bustling with activity and you didn’t have time honing your craft or learning something new? COVID-19 came about, and suddenly you’re left with very few customers, not enough cash, and too much time in your hands. Time well-spent can turn things around for your business even in difficult times. You can still be productive by learning some skills to tide you over until you’re up and running again.

Learn New Skills

Skills that make you money are worth its weight in gold. Think of it like storing up assets or training for an Olympic event. Here are a few things you can learn at home during COVID-19 lockdown:

1. Copywriting. Instead of reading about the doom and gloom in social media, why not learn something that would actually make you more money, or at least save you hundreds of dollars in marketing budget? Copywriting is a multi-million dollar industry and it’s not going away anytime. Hint: you don’t need an A+ in grammar school to become a successful copywriter. You can find dozens of free copywriting tutorials online so you can put that extra time of yours into good use while waiting for the pandemic to die out.

2. Vlogging & Podcasting. Big media companies used to have the monopoly in broadcast. But with YouTube and podcast’s growing popularity, that may no longer be the case. YouTube has made it easier for average users to create professional videos at home with a stable internet and a decent smartphone. Take a look at some examples on YouTube with around a thousand to 10,000 views. You’ll be surprised to see how even the simplest setup (home studio, green screen, whiteboard and pen, etc.) can rack up more than a thousand views on YouTube. So it’s definitely worth looking into with so much time to go around.

3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM). If you’ve never heard of CRMs and sales and marketing automation, now’s the perfect time digging into it. Check out our comparison blog post on Infusionsoft vs. Hubspot vs. Small Business Dream if you want to have a good grasp on how CRM and sales and marketing automation works for small businesses. We created a system that can take your small businesses from zero customers to getting hundreds of leads, customers, and referrals. However, it’s not a silver bullet so you need to put in some hours learning on how to make it work for your business. If you need help learning about CRM, don’t hesitate to schedule a FREE 45-minute consultation with us and we’ll reach out to you in every way we can.

Build a Following Online

Most people are glued to their monitors and smartphones, so you might want to put out some good content your audience would appreciate during these long periods of isolation. It doesn’t always have to do with what you’re selling. It can be anything from keeping yourself fit during lockdown, e.g. cardio and bodyweight exercises, to indoor games to keep your kids from going out.

You’re not concerned about selling anything at this point, but it’s more about adding value and building an audience while your business goes into hibernation. Ideally, you’d go for the ones that are more likely to give you traffic, i.e. YouTube and social media. After some time, you can slowly work on your newsletters and autoresponders for your CRM and sales and marketing automation.

1. YouTube posts. Video tutorials, walkthroughs, and customer reviews are some of the most popular videos on YouTube right now. Think of any tutorial related to your business. Do a cooking demo. Walk them through your car tune-ups. What’s your take on a certain product, and would you recommend it to your viewers? Keep them interested and be as creative as you can be. Look for examples in YouTube if you’re a bit camera-shy to give you an idea on how it’s done without focusing much on you.

2. Social media posts. Curate some good content over the internet and share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Find something positive and uplifting, useful or informative. However, just be mindful about your posts from other sources. Always fact-check for veracity and credibility. Better yet, you can share your own blog and YouTube posts. Try repurposing some of your old blog posts or do some of the things mentioned above (no.1). Create a business page for your posts so you have something to go back into when you’re ready to build a list, i.e. getting contacts for your CRM. We’ve created our proven and tested LinkedIn strategy to help you build connections on LinkedIn using Small Business Dream CRM.

3. Email Newsletters. People rarely read emails these days. Good news is, it’s not going away and it can still be an effective follow-up tool even if it takes you three to five years before making the sale. You don’t have to rush on this one since you won’t be sending too frequently (anti-spamming laws won’t let you anyway). Just one newsletter per week and setting your autoresponder to send one for each month goes a long way to keep you in touch and top-of-mind during the lull. Here’s a quick tip: you don’t have to start from scratch. Look up your inbox for old newsletters from your previous subscriptions and make it your own. Improve on it. Customize it for your own business. Play around with your CRM’s email builder and autoresponder and create email campaigns for your subscribers. Ask us if you need help setting up and we’ll spend 45-minutes of our time with you – no strings attached.

Get Everyone On Board

You don’t have to do all these things on your own. In fact, if you can get everyone involved, you probably won’t have to lay off your employees who are counting on you for their survival. (If it’s possible, borrow some capital for your running expenses and try to recoup them when business goes back to normal. This might also mean cutting their working hours in half.)

Get them to learn CRM with you and help you with some marketing stuff. We’ve come up with a LinkedIn marketing strategy and put it down in book form, “LinkedIn 5-Step System: Generate 10 fresh qualified leads in 10 minutes for you small business,” which you can download here for FREE.

Think of it like training your employees on a payroll. You might not get as many sales as before but you’re investing on skills which will pay off eventually. Just hold on to it. You’ve invested a lot of your time and resources building up your small business and you can’t let a few weeks or months of inactivity take it all away from you.

Struggling to Keep Your Business Afloat?

Why not spend some time with us? Schedule a FREE 45-minute business consultation with us and we’ll reach out to you in every way we can to help you with your small business.

Take a look at our 5-step Rapid Sales Growth Blueprint where we lay out every possible means to rapidly grow your business, whether it’s through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email series, sales funnels, landing pages or business directories.

Want to stay mobile? Get our SBD Sales and Marketing Automation App for your mobile and keep tabs on your business everywhere you go.

This LinkedIn Strategy Has Helped Our Clients Build Successful Six-figure Businesses

LinkedIn has become one of the fastest-growing social networking sites for business-oriented users since 2018. Millions of small business owners from around the world are riding on to this new wave of network-building to leverage growth through partnerships, joint ventures, and highly targeted marketing across different industries using LinkedIn’s set of tools and features designed specifically for business.

Today, we’re going to share with you one of our best methods to grow your small business using the power of LinkedIn and Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation.

Why LinkedIn?

Facebook has a huge advantage when it comes to reach – 2.7 billion users or more than 1/3 of the world’s population while LinkedIn has less than 600 million. However, there’s more to LinkedIn than just being a social networking platform – it’s a business-oriented platform so you get quality over quantity. You’d still be able to do most things on LinkedIn but with a clear purpose in mind. You don’t go there just to make friends; you’re looking to find friends who might be clients or joint venture partners.

But you’re probably thinking, if I can do the same on Facebook, what’s the point of using LinkedIn? Here’s why we think every small business owner should have his own LinkedIn account:

1. Your LinkedIn profile will show up first on Google.

Open a new tab on your Chrome browser, and, assuming you’ve already signed up to LinkedIn, type your name or business and you’ll see right away your LinkedIn profile on the first page. Google ranks LinkedIn as an authority site, and you, as a business owner, can use this algorithm to your advantage.

However, you don’t create a LinkedIn account just for the sake of having one. Remember, you only have one chance of making a good impression about you and your business. We’ll talk later on why you need a professional-looking LinkedIn profile.

2. Your LinkedIn profile doubles as your online business card.

One advantage of LinkedIn over Facebook and Twitter is that it can turn your profile into a powerful business networking tool. Business cards are pretty much the norm. We still go home with a big stack of business cards every time we go to business networking events.

Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t have that much time and they usually end up in our circular “filing cabinet” by the end of the week (or, if you’re like us, you can have someone do it for you by using our online transcription service). With LinkedIn, you can make connections right then and there if you can find access to a microphone. If you want to know precisely how we’ve done it, we’ve written an entire blog on how to use LinkedIn at networking events to increase sales.

3. LinkedIn gets you to your next client faster than any social networking site.

Another important feature that separates LinkedIn from any other social networking sites is it gives users the ability to search people from a particular industry they want to do business with. Again, we want to be clear about why we’re making these connections. So for instance, if you’re an insurance company, you probably want to search for clients or joint venture partners in the automotive or housing industry (these properties need insurance, or required by law). Add your city or country if you’re a local business to limit your results. In most cases, you’ll end up with around 1000 to as high as 10,000 depending on your country.

But don’t get too excited and click “Connect” on every user that shows up on the search page. That won’t work. We’ll show you how we’ve managed to get a much higher acceptance rate by using a simple, yet effective LinkedIn strategy.

If you’re interested, you can download a free copy of our book, LinkedIn 5-step System: Generate 10 fresh qualified leads in 10 minutes for your small business, where we show you everything from step one to finish in much greater detail.

We use LinkedIn on a regular basis to find small business owners who lack the tools or need our business coaching. As a leading consultancy and software provider for business, we’ve already made thousands of connections and have helped hundreds of clients build successful businesses. What we’re about to show you is one of our most effective methods to rapidly grow small businesses using LinkedIn and Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation.

Get More Clients on LinkedIn Using this Hybrid Approach

Now that we’ve covered the importance of creating a LinkedIn account for your business, let’s get down to the details.

1. Create a professional-looking LinkedIn profile.

People spend thousands of dollars on professional media services just to look great and make that big first impression. How you look on LinkedIn – everything from outfit, hair style, and your background photo – speaks a lot about you and your business. It’s important to work on you LinkedIn profile FIRST before trying to reach out, since it’s the first thing they’ll notice when you’re sending invitations.

We’ve talked to a lot of small business owners and one of their problems is they don’t have the time and commitment learning photography and photo-editing skills (unless you’re already good at it). We’ve come up with a done-for-you (DFY) solution for our Small Business Dream clients where we set up everything from business coaching, LinkedIn profile, landing pages, sales funnels, and autoresponders – the whole nine yards of getting more clients for your business.

2. Connect with Clients Using Small Business Dream.

You can read hundreds of blog articles on how they used LinkedIn to leverage your business, but they don’t tell you the right way of requesting and maintaining that connection with a LinkedIn user. Hint: you don’t click “Connect” on the search page.

Here’s an interesting fact. LinkedIn users can figure out if you’ve read their profile by looking at their profile views. So instead, you go to their LinkedIn profile to tell the system that you’ve viewed them before inviting them to connect with you. It might seem like a little thing, but it has a BIG impact on how people would respond to your request.

Since you’ll be doing thousands of these, you’re going to need a contact manager to store all the names of LinkedIn users you’re trying to connect with. This is where Small Business Dream comes in. You can set up your own LinkedIn series and the system will tell you which message to send first or if you need to transfer them to another series depending on how they respond to you. It’s a semi-automated approach which is extremely powerful for starting that conversation with your prospect.

3. Keep your connections warm – always follow-up.

Follow-up is crucial to the system. Check your new connections first thing in the morning and send a follow-up message right away. The sooner, the better. If you’re using our Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation software, you can set up a new series for new LinkedIn connections.

Your follow-up message may go something like, “Craig, thanks for accepting my connection request…(state your business, what you do, and your name at the end of your message)”. Take some time to scan through your previous messages and their responses to see if your next message makes sense. Don’t spam your new LinkedIn connections. Space your next message appropriately and always ask if they’re interested before making the offer.

If you’re not sure how to properly space your messages or you need some advice on how to write your LinkedIn copy, you can reach one of our business coaches at Small Business Dream and have our team of experts set it up for you.

Where Do We Go from Here?

If you’ve read this far, then you’re pretty convinced with LinkedIn’s potential in finding more clients and joint venture partners for your small business. We’d like to spend a moment with you and help identify ways to increase your sales whether it’s through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email series, sales funnels, landing pages, business directories – every possible way you can think of.

Visit us at Smallbizdream.com and take a closer look at our 5-step Rapid Sales Growth Blueprint or schedule a FREE 45-minute call with one of our seasoned business coaches.

Want to stay on the move? Get our SBD Sales and Marketing Automation App for your mobile and keep tabs on your business everywhere you go.

Practice Your Copywriting Skills with Small Business Dream

Small business owners rarely write their own copy. Most of the time, they have copywriters to do it for them. The great thing with copywriting is it’s a learnable skill. It’s not rocket science. You can start with a few basics and build your copywriting skills as a business owner.

Let’s take a look at copywriting and find opportunities to practice copywriting for your landing page, sales funnels, and email campaigns.

More Research, Less Writing

Copywriting looks a bit too easy. After all, you just need to find the right words to get more people to buy from you. But after spending hundreds of hours on your first copy, you realized you can’t just write a bunch of emails, send them to everyone on your email list, and expect to find more customers.

Copywriting is 80% research, 20% writing. So, before writing your copy, you’ll need to get these down first:

Value proposition. This answers the question, “What’s in it for me?” or “Is it for me?” To answer the question, you’ll need to do some research. Interview people, conduct a survey, look for customer reviews at Amazon, or visit forums like Reddit. Try to look at people’s problems and frustrations, and create your value proposition around those issues.

Target Audience. These are the people who will benefit most from your product or service, also known as your ideal clients. One commonly used method is to come up with a detailed buyer persona to guide your marketing efforts.

Customer Segmentation. Since you’ll be doing a lot of email marketing through your autoresponders, segmenting your email list is a must. Lay down a list of categories in your demographic such as age, gender, specific interests, brands, etc. This will come in handy when writing your email copy for your drip mails and email campaigns.

We won’t go much into the details like the length, type of language, and font size. You can find lots of video tutorials on copywriting over the internet. Instead, we’ll give you some ideas on how to practice your copywriting with our Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation.

Landing Page Copy

Internet marketers spend a ton of work on their landing pages, for good reason. Landing pages are essentially print ads and commercials on a web page, but they’re more specific to a given audience and allows for user interaction (call to action).

A well-written landing page copy can instantly double your sales and is way more cost-effective compared to traditional advertising. However, you can’t just read one article and write amazing copy for your landing pages overnight. You need to do some actual work and test things out yourself. Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation helps you become a better copywriter by giving you templates to experiment on.

Notice there’s no navigation like a typical website. Landing pages are more direct-response — visitors will either leave your page or take the offer (click the ‘call to action’ button). Your copy should state your value proposition in your title and copy text.

You can slowly improve your landing page copy by making a slightly different version of it to see if it makes any difference on your conversion rates. Small Business Dream provides an easy way to do your own A/B Split Testing or you can try our DFY (done for you) package and have our team of experts set it up for you.

Sales Funnel Copy — the AIDA Principle

For those who are new to sales funnels, AIDA stands for Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. These are sequential steps your visitors take in the buying process. Some compare this to a buyer’s journey.

Sales funnels are extremely versatile. You can use it solely for sales conversion or for many other purposes such as up-selling, cross-selling, one-time offers, customer acquisition, lead generation, and so on. You can practice your copywriting skills using Small Business Dream’s sales funnel template.

Begin with your title and value proposition, similar to a landing page. However, with sales funnels, you can take a step further. You’ll be able to narrow down your audience to a particular type of customer based on how they respond to your offer. They can take the offer straight away, choose a different option, or they can decide later, in which case, you can keep them interested by offering freebies, one-time offers, and newsletters.

Sales funnels are a bit slower compared to direct marketing, but the goal is pretty much the same. One advantage of using a well-executed sales funnel is that it almost guarantees high-quality leads and repeat customers every single time. Combined with a solid email marketing strategy, sales funnels are an amazing, must-have tool for your small business.

Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation offers a complete suite of tools designed to rapidly grow your sales from landing pages, sales funnels, customer acquisition, email auto-responders and more.

Email Marketing Copy

Email never gets out of style. Don’t believe it? Find any Android and iOS phone that doesn’t have a built-in email app, or any online service that doesn’t require an email account (think Google Play, Apple Store, etc.). However, getting people to open, let alone respond to your emails is more challenging than ever.

The problem lies with not being able to properly segment your email list and poor copywriting skills, e.g. sounding too robotic or salesy. The key to successful email marketing is to be relevant with your recipients. Hence, you have to be very specific with your email copy.

What’s truly amazing is that with Small Business Dream Sales and Marketing Automation, you can fine-tune your email campaigns, drip mails, and follow-ups, all the while using automation. Set up a survey page, and automate certain tasks like sending them to your landing page, sales funnel, or switch to a different email series when clicking specific items on your survey page.

Another strategy we’ve talked about in our previous blog about the best follow up tips for small businesses is by giving value each time you send an email like a newsletter or links to highly informative blog articles. Once again, be very specific whom you’re sending to. All your email marketing efforts will be a waste of time if you’re just sending them out to random people.

Conclusion

Need help promoting your own business? We’d like to spend some time with you. We offer a FREE Sales and Profitability consultation where we identify key aspects in your business to rapidly boost your sales. Come visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our 5-step system to rapidly grow your sales and profits with less stress.

How to Use Content Marketing and Social Media to Grow an Audience

When it comes to brand awareness, nothing beats a well-thought-out, well-executed content marketing strategy. However, you don’t have to wait for people to come to you. What you need is a system that puts you right in front of your intended audience in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible.

Content is king, no doubt. But with more than 500 million blogs and a new blog post published every 0.5 seconds, it’s almost impossible to build an audience on Google if you’re not among the few established companies and authority sites dealing on a certain topic. In fact, many businesses that rely heavily on website traffic took a beating after Google started implementing some major updates.

We’ve seen this coming a few years back, and we’ve perfected a system that helps small business owners grow their audience more rapidly without slugging it out with the ‘big guys.’ We’ve learned through experience, after working with over 700 clients, to combine different methods of customer engagement that allows them to attract the right people and keep them coming back.

Create a following on social media

Content marketers would often tell you to just create awesome content and let Google take care of the rest. However, things have changed and it’s no longer just putting out great content, but becoming pro-active in getting the right people to see your content.

1. Facebook & Twitter

No, we’re not selling to people on Facebook or Twitter. We’re here to make connections. Sure, you can buy some ads to give your post a temporary boost, but the main purpose is building that relationship and trust with people who might be a customer or a business partner.

Here’s a great thing about social media. You don’t have to be an ‘authority’ (or sound like one) to get an audience. You just have to use Facebook & Twitter the way they’re supposed to work but with a clear purpose in mind – to get more people into your business.

Show people what you do with your business, share some thoughts, some interesting articles or videos. Interact with users. Better yet, if you have your own blog or website, you can share your featured posts or repurpose old content for social media (e.g. quick tips, testimonials, etc.).

Ideally, you want to have a system already in place before going in on social media. People often make the mistake of going in and not being able to handle it right. So they end up either spending too much time doing everything by hand or sending bulk messages that are too generic to create meaningful connections.

Think of social media as your springboard. It helps you start a conversation but you’ll need to follow up on them and move to a more ‘stable’ platform like your email list as you go by.

We’ve developed our own sales and marketing automation which enables you to collect data and keep track of your conversations on social media. It’s a complete system that comes with a landing page builder, sales funnels, autoresponders and many others.

2. LinkedIn

We’ve devoted an entire blog article on this topic about how to use LinkedIn at networking events to increase sales. It’s the same idea with Facebook & Twitter, but we’re looking to find business partners, preferably those which are complementary to yours. Hence, if you’re a restaurant or catering business, you’ll probably want to partner up with event planners in your area.

We recommend having your own blog or website before looking out for potential business partners on LinkedIn. It creates a bit of impression. Like being able to write your own book, people tend to trust you more with your knowledge and experience when they see your blog or website.

Quality content still reigns supreme, but you need the right tools to get them to the right people – precisely what our system does for many small business owners like you.

3. YouTube

Videos will take center stage as technology improves and the majority of online marketers migrate to a much less competitive space. Unlike Google, YouTube is an untapped goldmine for a lot of content marketers. You don’t need a professional studio or expensive video editing software to get a thousand viewers on your channel.

Think of all the YouTube videos you’ve watched with more than ten thousand viewers and subscribers, using nothing more than an inexpensive camera, a whiteboard, or just them talking to you through their smartphones. Even if you’re a little bit “camera-shy,” you can still build a massive following using whiteboard animation software like VideoScribe and Doodly or even a slideshow made from Pixabay images with your voiceover.

Now here’s the best part. Your audience will get notified each time you have a new post by simply clicking on that bell notification icon. And, unlike a static post or webpage, your YouTube videos will continue to get more viewers, comments, and more people will subscribe to your channel long after you’ve published your videos.

Just like your Facebook and other social media platforms you’ll be able to use your YouTube content to get them to your site and keep them coming back for more.

Collect data for your sales and marketing automation

All your content marketing efforts and social media posts should all come down to this – collecting data for your sales and marketing automation. This is where most small businesses hit a dead end. They don’t know what to do with next, or they don’t have a system to capture all the data and use them to turn followers and subscribers into buying customers.

Small Business Dream offers a solution to take your fans and followers into that journey, whether it’s through sales funnels, landing pages, newsletters, drip mail, email series, and push notifications. We’ve covered every possible way to keep them interested after doing all the work of creating great content for your business.

Conclusion

Content marketing doesn’t require a lot of resources aside from your time and creativity. Like any other skill set, you’ll get better with practice and gaining more experience. However, not all business owners have the time and commitment to produce high-quality content. We offer services which includes online and offline solutions to drive your message home.

If you need help, you can reach us and take advantage of our FREE Sales and Profitability consultation where we identify key aspects in your business to rapidly boost your sales. Come visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our 5-step system to rapidly grow your sales and profits with less stress.

How to Use LinkedIn at Networking Events to Increase Sales

Today we’ll talk about LinkedIn, and how almost any business can use LinkedIn to increase their sales and not tick people off in the process.

LinkedIn and Facebook are the two big ones that we use. LinkedIn is required in most businesses, particularly in North America. I didn’t start using LinkedIn ’til only about five or six years ago. At first I was like, “What the heck is LinkedIn? How’s that going to help me? Isn’t that just really for putting your resume up online and people follow what you do?” That was the question I had. So, I started looking into LinkedIn and developing a LinkedIn profile.

How Important Is Social Credibility in Business?

I realized how important it was to add credibility to who you are in business. I’ve seen a lot of good profiles and bad profiles (profiles with pictures of their dog instead of their actual picture, pictures that were cropped out from a group photo, pictures that are out of focus or have a really bad background, pictures that are not professional-looking, etc.).

LinkedIn is not Facebook. It’s not for posting what you had for breakfast or for dinner. If I’m going to be looking for people I want to do business with, I’m not going to Facebook, first; I’m going to LinkedIn.

Collect Data at a Networking Event in 3 Simple Steps

There’s a neat little system you could do at a live networking event using LinkedIn to capture the whole room’s data. Here’s how it works:

1. Download the LinkedIn app.

One of the things I learned by me starting just from scratch over the past five or six years is there’s a way that you could get everybody in LinkedIn if they have the app. It’s really important that you download the LinkedIn app to your phone.

2. Be in control of the room. Find an opportunity to ‘control’ the room and get a chance to get the microphone to tell everybody to open up LinkedIn. At the very bottom of the LinkedIn app there are five icons. The first one looks like a little house. The second one is two people sitting side-by-side (that’s the one that you want to click). When you click that button, most of you in your LinkedIn app will have a little blue circle appear on your bottom right corner of your screen.

3. Find other users in the room.

That little blue circle has a picture of a person with a plus button. Clicking that little blue button opens up three menu items on your phone. The very first one says, ‘find nearby’—that’s exactly what it’s going to do. Turn it on, and now everybody that is in the room that is on this page in LinkedIn will appear so that you can connect and talk with them right there in the app.

They need to make sure they’re doing it on the app, they’ve enabled Bluetooth, and they need to enable their location services—couple of things they have to do, but LinkedIn will let them do that right off the bat and you can use this to connect with an entire room in seconds. It’s really interesting because it works off of a Bluetooth mesh, so it’s not even a matter of it only meets people as far away as your phone’s Bluetooth circumference. It actually goes to the farthest guys in the room’s phone. We’ve been at events where we actually picked up on someone that was at a train station a good mile from where we were. So, it’s really, really fantastic technology, but it only works if you’re ‘in control’ of the room.

Things to Keep In Mind

1. Ask for permission

My recommendation is, if you’re going to try to do this tip during your 30-second or your one-minute personal introduction in a room, make sure you have the organizer or the main speaker’s permission, because if you go fire up something like this and the speaker wanted to keep the data only for him, you could really, really frustrate someone and probably not be welcomed back to their events again. So, make sure you get permission.

If you’re worried about ‘giving away your data,’ it’s actually the opposite. What we found is everywhere we’ve done this, the tone of the event changes to, “Wow, this is one of the best events I’ve been to. I got some really, really helpful tips that I can take away and use in my business.” We talked about it at a big event, but it also works if you’re just sitting around a boardroom with a bunch of people and you all want to connect real quick. It’s extremely fast compared to any other way of connecting with people.

2. Make People Want to Connect with You

We have some networking events that we go to every week. When I stand up to do my forty seconds, they know what I’m going to do. They’ve already got their phones out, they’re already on LinkedIn, they’re all ready to go and get in the room because they know the power of being able to connect. You become the ‘hero’ that everybody connects to with, and you know that the speaker is going to forgive the fact that you take one minute and forty seconds instead of your allotted forty seconds because it does take a little time to get everybody to turn it on and get interacting with you.

You need to be animated when introducing this cool tip. Stand up and get everybody to hold up their hand. When I do it I tell everybody, “How would you like to connect with everyone in the room, raise your hand. Hold your phone up. I want you to use your phones right now. Get your phone in your hand. Everybody, put LinkedIn on your phone. Open your LinkedIn app. Raise your hand when you’ve got LinkedIn on your phones.” Make it interactive. Step by step, tell them exactly how to do it to get in there and then connect.

Now, if you’re not going to send somebody a message, don’t do it. Just connecting with somebody doesn’t do you any good. At least reach out and say, “Hey, what did you think at the event tonight?” Do something, say something, and make that connection. This helps you remember where you met them. So, for instance, if you copy and paste it to everyone you’re connected with and you get good engagement right away, you’ll be able to see where you met them when you open them up in the future.

Why Small Businesses Should Use LinkedIn

So how can a business owner actually start increasing his sales from the comfort of his bathrobe, over the morning coffee with a LinkedIn system that allows people to literally sharp-shoot the best people as far as their ideal client, tracking, how much work’s involved, and what the flow of the messages are? You create the engagement instead of just being another person that sends you the 9-page introduction the minute you connect to them.

What many smaller businesses don’t have is a big budget. Same with small businesses, say, a restaurant that’s not busy for three hours in a day, or someone who owns a clothing store, or a hair salon. Here’s something you can do with a free LinkedIn account. You don’t even need premium or Navigator. You do it with free and you could target demographics.

The great thing about LinkedIn is you can go and you can only search, say, for CEOs in Vancouver, you can search for anybody that has a certain thing in their description somewhere in their profile, like a title or a job description, skills—any of these things can all be searched for in LinkedIn.

Let’s say you’re a travel business—cruises and all. You could search for certain areas and search for certain likes and skills. You could search for people that are in the right demographic area like people that are most likely traveling. A teacher maybe? They get their summers off and they’ve got the holiday time. They probably save up for a vacation. Maybe that’s your perfect kind of client.

Be sure to put some thought into this step, because if you target the wrong people it’s not going to work. So, you do need to think outside the box a little bit in trying to define what demographic of people through what LinkedIn allows you to select (and it shows you all the things you can select from) would lead you to your people. So, it’s a really important part of your system that doesn’t even really get written down other than ‘go look for the kind of people you’re looking for.’ Defining that and figuring out how to search for them is half the battle.

Once you’ve done that, my system is simple. You’re going to reach out to and attempt to connect with 10 people a day. Consistency is key, and you do it the first thing in the morning. First thing with your morning coffee or your morning breakfast, have your computer out, your LinkedIn out, and attempt to connect with ten people in your demographic.

We have this availability in Small Business Dream, enabling users to track it all in the software, but you can do it manually with a spreadsheet. There’s lots of ways to do it. We just happen to have a tool that makes it really efficient. In other words, we’re giving you a great system but we just think it’s better if you use our tool.

The 10-a-day Rule — and Why It’s So Effective

I’ve used the system for years, taught the system to people in different businesses to be able to use it effectively, and what I found is that most people don’t have a lot of time. So, if I can show you how to use it in just 10 minutes a day to connect with 10 new people every day and then do the follow-up, they’ll give that a shot. I could find 10 minutes in the morning before I head off to work. You do need to find the time to follow up as well, so this will take up to an hour a day, throughout the day, but at 10 a day you can handle this follow up.

You’re going to get some follow ups and some questions back. If you do 50, you’re going to get a lot more questions back, but then you’re going to have even more follow-ups. Next thing you know, you’re into eight hours every third Friday just because that’s how things start to fall. So, spreading it out will keep it much more consistent, easier to maintain and easier to keep up to date with.

Ten is a magic number. That means you would attempt to connect with every day, 300 people every month (that means you’re working weekends, or, just do twice as much on Friday). Out of the 300 people, only about 25% are going to accept your connection, and out of those 75 people that accept your connection, only about 25% of them are actually going to engage with you. So, only about 15 or 20 people will actually turn into a conversation. And out of that, only 25 percent will turn into a possible conversation. So, four or five, and maybe only one will end up being the customer.

Create a Sales Funnel to Boost Online Engagement

Of course, you can increase your odds to a degree with things like a lead magnet where there’s a free giveaway (if it’s relevant to them), or a free call. A lot of it will depend on what tools you have in place to create the maximum amount of engagement. So, having a simple lead magnet funnel where you can collect their data outside of LinkedIn and with the right giveaway or giveaways, you might be able to increase that and create engagement a little bit more because you’re offering help. Don’t give them something they don’t need. Send them to a lead magnet funnel type scenario if what you had you knew could benefit them without a cost. So, it’s not a salesy thing; it’s a true benefit.

If you go to 88ur.com/craigbook, it will take you to a sales funnel that will allow you to put in your name, your email and click a button, and you’ll be able to download my book. You’ll be able to learn the whole system step by step on how to increase your sales quite rapidly again. If you have the time and you can do 20 a day and you’re ready for the ‘snowball effects,’ you can do it faster. If you have an employee who’s underutilized, it doesn’t have to be you.

Once you’ve actually written all of the follow ups, directions and the content that you want to use through your follow up, you literally assign this to a personal assistant. You can assign it to your daughter, to your son, to your friend’s daughter. It doesn’t have to be you until things get serious. When they get serious your assistant, or whoever is operating the controls for you, would then just reach out and say, “Hey, you need to intervene with this person because they’re ready to talk.” The great thing about my system is it’s not confined to LinkedIn.

I wrote specifically for LinkedIn, but you can do the exact same system in Facebook. It’s not as easy to target and find people in your demographic without ads on Facebook (Facebook really doesn’t want you reaching out and doing stuff). But with simple ad campaigns or reaching out to your friends, it could work. So, there’s definitely ways to be able to do that.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, at the end of the day, the way my LinkedIn system works is not to rely on LinkedIn. You need to pick up your phone and talk to people you need to as quickly as possible, making a real genuine engagement and have a conversation. You don’t want to talk for hours. Also, try to get out of LinkedIn because a lot of people don’t have notifications on in LinkedIn. Some only check it once every three or four days, so quickly in your process, you want to try to capture their contact details whether it be phone number, email, etc.

Another way to contact them outside of LinkedIn is by trying to build your list. Build your Linkedin list into your actual money-making list. It’s essentially your goal. Consistency is everything on LinkedIn. If you’re brand new, the magic number to get started to get to a number of connections is 500. You’ll see in your profile how many connections you have whether it’s under 500, and then it goes 500 plus. You could have a thousand. That way people will connect with you better, you’ll find your connection rate will increase the more connections you have.

Also, make sure that you send a custom message when you ask to connect with somebody. Don’t use any of the LinkedIn default stuff. That’s what the lazy people do and that’s why it doesn’t work. If you download a copy of my book, I show you some things that I use that are really popular, that work well, to be able to increase the engagement. If you can turn that out of the 300, increase it from 25% to just 35% accepting your friends in LinkedIn requests, to 50%, that would be great.

I now typically get around 75% of the people that I asked to engage and connect with me; they accept my connection. Why? Because I have over 6,000 connections on LinkedIn right now, and I’ve done that organically with people, not through any system, but it’s my own system—nothing automated, one person at a time, connecting with the right people to build my businesses.

If you’re interested in learning how to increase your sales quickly with LinkedIn, go to 88ur.com/craigbook. If you do decide you need software to help you do it more efficiently, Smallbizdream can help.