LinkedIn Growth Hacking: 9 Hacks LinkedIn Influencers Don’t Want You to Know

LinkedIn Growth Hacking. Is there really such a thing?

You’re manually connecting with a bunch of people each day, writing a lot of posts, but, guess what! You get 2 – 5 likes per post and a reach of 200 – 300 people.

How can this be when you’re doing everything, right?

You just read an amazing article on LinkedIn Growth Hacking that explains how to become a LinkedIn influencer in 2 days and get a ton of leads and customers.

But, things don’t get any better than they are.

Don’t be ashamed of that. I was in the same situation as you:

As you can see, everyone went through that.

I’ll be honest with you. There is no magic trick you can do to get 1M+ views on LinkedIn in one day.

But there are some simple and tiny LinkedIn Growth hacks you can do to boost your LinkedIn reach, become influential in your market, acquire more customers through LinkedIn, and align LinkedIn Marketing with your overall growth strategy.

In this article, I’m going to show you how we at lemlist, lemtalk, and lempod managed to grow our newsletters, be seen by millions, and put more money in the bank account.

Now let’s get started!

Continue to read, if you want to find out:

LinkedIn Growth Hack #1: How to Get 1018 LinkedIn Connections Straight on your Doorstep

Before I joined the lempire family, honestly, I knew too little about LinkedIn and LinkedIn Growth Hacking in general (as you can see in my previous image).

While I was searching for our company resources and inspiration, I stumbled across one of Guillaume Moubeche’s LinkedIn posts.

And I was amazed by its results.

Here are the post and the LinkedIn growth hack that helped Guillaume get exactly 1018 connections on his doorstep in one single day:

He got:

525 likes

1054 comments

177,654 views of his post

And exactly 1018 connection requests (according to his words).

The best part? The vast majority of these connection requests are coming from his target audience.

So, how exactly did he do this, and how can you replicate it?

As you can see, the structure of this article itself has one purpose:

To drive engagement (i.e. comments in this case) and thus to improve visibility and reach.

The more comments the post has, the bigger its reach will be.

But, instead of just saying: “comment “guide” and I’ll send you the content”, Guillaume added one more step:

“Send me the connection request” in a funny way and intriguing way.

Why is this a great LinkedIn growth hack?

Because if you were sending connection requests manually:

You will not have success with these conversion rates

You will have a limit of sending 150 – 200 connection requests per day

It will be much more time-consuming

But of course, if you want to replicate a post like this, you will need to have a lead magnet or some content worth sharing with others. That content should solve some pain in a really impressive way.

On the other hand, it doesn’t need to be anything special. It can be a basic article that provides value to the readers and your potential customers. It doesn’t need to be an ebook. It can also be presentations, infographics, or even videos.

But, a good lead magnet is just 40% of the work.

What really matters, in this case, is the anatomy of the LinkedIn post itself.

Let’s break the post into a couple of sequences and take a look at them:

There are 4 crucial sequences in this post:

A warm welcome – don’t start promoting your product/content straight away. Build “little relationships” with your readers right at the start.

Show social proof and value – In a funny way, Guillaume told everyone how good and in-depth his content is. You need to show someone the value before they even see it themselves. It’s called unleashing the “aha!” moment.

Humor – don’t be a robot. You’re human beings as well as everyone else. Make a joke from time to time. Funny posts with less value will always perform better than boring posts with more value.

Share the love – Although it doesn’t seem to look important – believe me, it is.

By the way, I tried to replicate this amazing post by myself (hope you will do as well).

Here are the results:

The results aren’t as great as the Guillaume’s, but at least, for the guys with around 800 connections at that time, getting 100 or so connection requests on my doorstep wasn’t bad at all.

Now, let’s dive even more into LinkedIn Growth Hacking.

LinkedIn Growth Hack #2: How to Get 100,000 Post Views in 2 Days

Here’s the story of how Ilya Azovstev got 100,000+ post views in just 2 days. Keep in mind that before this LinkedIn Growth Hack, Ilya had approximately 2000 – 3000 post views on each post.

As a proof, here’s the screenshot Ilya gave me:

As you can see, Ilya got 28 times more post views than he has connections and followers.

Pretty amazing, right?

Let me ask you:

What’s the proportion of the LinkedIn followers and post views you have?

In most cases, it’s 1:1 or at least 1:2.

And don’t get me wrong, that’s really good (I had these proportions as well). But, there’s something you can do to improve this 5,10, or even 30 times like Ilya did.

While I was speaking with Ilya, he told me that there were two things that helped him to get this massive number of views:

The way he structured and optimized the post

A little LinkedIn Growth Hack I’m going to mention later

First, let’s see, why this LinkedIn post is so special and how can you replicate it.

Here’s what the entire LinkedIn post looks like:

As you can see, it’s nothing special. It’s short, but it’s also catchy.

The first thing that blew my mind was how he leveraged the power of one sentence.

If you carefully watch both screenshots of his post, you will see that there’s a huge blank space between the first and the second sentence.

That blank space “hidden” the information that’s actually in the post. So when you scroll through LinkedIn and find his post, you can’t actually see what’s inside before clicking on “read more”. It’s an amazing hack for improving your LinkedIn engagement.

Here are the other things that made this ordinary post amazing:

Tell a story in your post – stories are binding us together.

Give value so people can improve their business right away – as you can see, he basically described his entire article in the post, but people still wanted to see the full content.

Don’t post direct links in LinkedIn posts – they’re reducing your reach and engagement

Ask people to engage with your content – the more engagement you have, the better reach you can expect. The same as Guillaume did.

Divide posts with paragraphs – shorter paragraphs are easier to read, not to mention that they’re mobile-friendly.

These are the LinkedIn growth hacks you can take from Ilya and improve your reach as well.

BUT

There’s one more LinkedIn Growth Hack Ilya did to reach 100,000+ views in 2 days.

He “boosted” his post views a little bit by letting other people engage with it.

To be precise, he got around 100 likes and 50 comments immediately after publishing his post. This helped him to kickstart his post views and reach a massive number of people.

But, how did he do it?

It’s simple. He used a LinkedIn marketing tool called lempod.

Lempod is the Chrome extension where you can join different groups of people that have similar interests or they’re in a similar industry as you.

As soon as you publish a post, all of them will automatically engage with your article and give you a little boost.

Everything you need to do is to copy/paste a URL of your LinkedIn post in your pods and the people will automatically start engaging with it.

Here’s what it looks like:

You can also follow in real-time who did or still needs to engage with your post.

As you can see, it’s super quick and easy to boost your LinkedIn posts and kickstart your post views.

When the people from the pods engage with your post, your post will automatically start appearing in their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd connections – leaving you with thousands of views.

If you want to see more amazing LinkedIn Growth Hacking techniques Ilya did, you can join his Facebook group of LinkedIn Growth Hackers.

But, this is not the end. More amazing LinkedIn Growth hacking tips are coming!

LinkedIn Growth Hack #3: How to Become an Influential Person in Big Companies

If you’re looking for some big clients and customers, or you’re looking for a job opportunity in a big company, this is the right LinkedIn Growth Hack for you.

I’m directly working at lemtalk – online Slack Live Chat app.

For us, it’s crucial to be recognized by the Slack people, so, I decided to do something I never tried before.

As the end result, some of my posts are viewed by 100s of Slack employees while I personally have over 400 connections inside Slack.

How did I do this?

Simple.

I used PhantomBuster to send 80 connection requests each day with a custom message.

Conversion rate? Around 20 – 30 of these 80 connection requests accept my invitation.

In the beginning, it was way fewer people, but as your connections inside the big company grow, and people working there start seeing that we have a lot of mutual connections, they will start accepting my connection requests more and more.

But, what’s the catch?

The catch is inside the message I’m sending them.

Here’s what it looks like:

There are a couple of things why this connection request message worked best for me:

It shares love

It’s personalized

It talks about them, not me (whenever you’re sending cold messages, try to start with YOU, not I).

I’m not trying to sell things – I just show appreciation for the amazing work they’re doing.

To add things on top of that, I even started publishing content related to Slack:

After some time, this LinkedIn Growth Hacking technique helped me to leverage some influence inside Slack and build a couple of benefits for my company.

Key takeaway: If you’re searching for prospects, leads, or influence inside big companies, start adding their employees into your network and build content upon that. It will definitely pay off after some time. Or you can reach out to a lead generation company.

LinkedIn Growth Hack #4 – Make your Potential Customers Popular on LinkedIn

Remember one thing.

Whenever you want to sell something or whatever you’re trying to do,

It’s never about you, it’s always about them.

Remember this and your results will be drastically better in whatever you’re doing.

This LinkedIn Growth Hacking technique is relatively correlated with the last one.

While I was trying to build relationships with Slack employees, I was also making them popular on LinkedIn and helping them to expand their reach.

Whenever they published something important or shared my posts, I boosted their posts with lempod to gain engagement and make their voice spread over the LinkedIn.

Here’s a concrete example:

As a result, here’s what happens:

I’ve got this message on a different platform but it was from the same man who shared the original post – and it arrived one day after I boosted his post with lempod.

Key Takeaway: Make your LinkedIn strategy focused on your prospects, desired customers, and desired partners. Not on yourself.

LinkedIn Growth Hack #5 – How to Build a Personal Brand on LinkedIn

This is something a lot of people want to achieve with LinkedIn.

And yeah, it’s possible to do so.

But, before we see some great examples, let’s first understand how should you behave on LinkedIn if you want to build a personal brand:

Don’t try to sell – provide value instead

Don’t post too much – twice per week is more than enough. People will lose a tendency to engage with you if you’re spamming.

Don’t talk always about your company – you should also include scenes from your personal life as well.

Show your expertise

Videos are great for engagement and building brand awareness

Here’s the man I love to watch on LinkedIn, and his content is amazing. Not to mention that he gets thousands of likes and comments on almost every post.

Do you see how he included both professional and personal life in one post?

This is the type of posts LinkedIn audience is seeking for.

Here’s another great example from Dave:

If you want to reach more views, create a personal brand, or write better content, the thing that a lot of us (including me as well), are lacking is empathy.

Empathy is what brings us together. What binds us. Empathy is what makes us human beings.

On top of all of that, this is helping Dave to have a reach of the millions on almost each LinkedIn post he writes:

Key Takeaways: Focus on empathy and don’t try to sell your product. Provide value, and fast enough you will get an influence in your target market.

LinkedIn Growth Hack #6 – Improve your Profile Conversion Rates with These Best Practices

There are a couple of LinkedIn profile conversion rates you can focus on depending on your goals:

Connection request conversion rate (improving the chance of other people to accept your connection request or making other people more likely to send you a connection request).

Generating more leads

Acquiring more users

And so on.

No matter what your goal is, here are a couple of LinkedIn Growth Hacking methods that can help you improve conversions on your LinkedIn profile and do more.

Make an Outstanding LinkedIn Profile Picture

The profile picture is super important – and probably one of the most crucial things you need to consider before you start any work on LinkedIn.

Don’ts of LinkedIn profile picture:

Don’t put pictures of other people

Don’t put cratonic or animated pictures

Don’t put low-resolution photos

Don’t share negative feelings.

Do’s of LinkedIn profile picture:

Let your picture be high-quality and professional – fortunately, with new phones, it’s easily achievable

Be creative

Smile and show emotions and empathy

Now that we know what the perfect LinkedIn profile picture should look like, let’s see some great and stunning examples.

Let’s start with the simplest one – Dave’s:

As you can see, it’s a simple profile picture.

What I like about it is that’s professional photography (so high-quality). The smile is dominant in the picture, and the background is black or one-color – so the entire focus is on the face.

The next one is a little bit more creative:

Honestly, when you search for people on LinkedIn, would you rather click on a photo like this or on another one?

The photo of Antony Bonney really jumps out from the crowd of other boring photos.

Think outside the box, and unleash your creativity!

Let your cover photo work for you

The cover photo is super important for profile conversions.

It can work as the CTA and tell more about you, your company, and your product.

Here are a couple of great LinkedIn cover examples:

The first one comes from Antony Bonney – as you can see, he showed the social proof and added call to action buttons.

The second one comes from Shay Rowbottom, and what I like about it is how she leveraged the pain and turned it into a solution straight on her cover photo.

Pretty amazing, right?

LinkedIn Growth Hack #7: How to Get 312 Email Subscribers in One Day

Here’s one LinkedIn Growth Hacking method I leveraged to get exactly 312 email subscribers.

After writing an extensive guide about CRO marketing and how can companies leverage the power of human element on their website to improve conversions, I decided to share it with my LinkedIn community.

The result?

Exactly 312 email subscribers and an amazing reach of 27,000+ people in one day!

Not bad or someone with around 1500 connections, right?

Here’s what the actual LinkedIn post looked like:

After I published this post, to boost it a little bit, I shared the link of the LinkedIn post to several lempod engagement pods where around 150 people automatically liked my post in the next 3 hours.

15 minutes after boosting the post, I started to receive comments, comments, and comments.

They were coming next 10 hours, and some of them came even the next day.

I was overwhelmed with the number of messages I was sending, but, what can I do – when the post performs great, we need to focus and make the most out of it.

As you can see, I asked people to comment “guide” in the comments. What I did next, is asking them for their email because the guide was “too big” for LinkedIn.

After they received the guide, I usually asked them: “Do you want to receive my next guide when I release it?”

Of a little bit over 350 people who gave me their email, 312 of them answered with a big “YES!”

And that’s the story of how I added 312 emails to my newsletter in a single day with a single LinkedIn post with the help of lempod.

LinkedIn Growth Hack #8: How to Schedule 110% More Meetings through LinkedIn

Let me tell you a little story about how Pedro Cortes leveraged the power of LinkedIn to acquire more customers and schedule more meetings.

A couple of months back, I was amazed when I saw Pedro’s LinkedIn content for the first time.

Pedro Cortes helps SaaS companies acquire more customers through dedicated positioning and messaging.

Since this is a relatively new “field” in SaaS marketing, Pedro decided to educate his market on LinkedIn.

But, how does he do it?

Does he simply write posts and links back to his website?

No.

Pedro creates valuable presentations on his computer and records himself while talking and explaining the topics.

In this way, he does not just provide pure value, but he also keeps his content on LinkedIn. Thanks to that, LinkedIn boosts his content even more.

Here’s what his posts look like:

While I was chatting with Pedro to understand what results in this type of LinkedIn content marketing gave him, he told me that he managed to schedule 110% more calls per month than before he started doing LinkedIn marketing and implementing this simple LinkedIn Growth Hacking technique.

On top of that, he also shared with me the screenshot of his inbox:

To understand how is he getting new leads and prospects, he’s running a little survey before every meeting with his prospects.

On the question: “How did you find me?”, the vast majority of people answer with “LinkedIn”.

As you can see, it’s definitely possible to:

Build influence in your niche

Educate the market

And acquire more leads and customers at the same time through LinkedIn

Everything you need to do is create amazing content your target audience will love, show your expertise, and keep the content on LinkedIn.

In that way, LinkedIn will automatically give you better reach, and you will be able to acquire more prospects.

Key Takeaways: Become influential in your focus niche by talking about the problems and solutions. Provide amazing value and keep your content on LinkedIn. Clients will come.

LinkedIn Growth Hack #9: Take advantage of the Engagement Pods

LinkedIn’s algorithm is pretty simple and straightforward.

The more likes and comments you have in the first 30 minutes of publishing your post, the better reach you can expect.

That’s the reason why engagement pods, for people that are still not popular on LinkedIn, are a must.

Now, there are different types of LinkedIn engagement pods:

Community-driven engagement pods – these are great for building personal partnerships and acquiring a couple of likes and comments, but since the other people need to manually engage with you, sometimes you can’t expect more than 10 – 15 likes or comments

Automatic engagement pods – mainly hosted on lempod. These are the pods of your target audience and people with similar interests like you. In lempod, after you upload some LinkedIn post, other people will automatically start engaging with it. Depending on the number of pods you’re in, you can have from 50 to 1000 or 1500 likes and comments on each of your posts – so you can expect an amazing reach.

When it comes to the community-driven engagement pods, the one I’m usually very active in is one group on LinkedIn called – Game of Content.

There you can share your LinkedIn posts, Growthhackers articles, Quora answers, or anything else where you need a little boost.

On the other hand, if you want to reach more people, I will suggest you using lempod.

It’s pretty simple.

1. Join relevant pods

Lempod has 100s of different pods. You can easily find the pods full of your target audience or people with similar interests to yours

2. Publish your post for engagement

This LinkedIn growth hacking technique can be easier. After you join relevant pods, everything you need to do is copy the URL of your post and paste it into the pods where you want to promote it.

If you’re thinking right now: “Is the lempod worth it?” just remember that Ilya was able to reach 100,000 people in one day, and I collected 312 emails in two days.

That’s the power of lempod.

But, this is not the end!

As someone who reads this article all the way to the bottom, you’re deserving one award.

Do you?

So, we decided to give you secret codes to join some exclusive engagement pods on lempod!

Here they are:

SaaS Haven – All things SaaS – The secret code is: 6129

Growth Hackers – Worldwide – The secret code is: 6031

High-level Marketing Club – The secret code is: 1042

Startup Factory – Achieve Fast Startup Growth – The secret code is: 3348

The HR Mastermind – Everything about Human Resources – The secret code is: 4763

To join these pods, simply go to the bottom of your lempod extension, and you will see a blank space for entering the secret codes.

Try Lempod