Full guide on how to generate leads on LinkedIn

Last Updated on 28 August 2024 by Wil Son

Everyone says that LinkedIn is the best place to generate leads. For example, based on statistics:

“LinkedIn is the #1 social media platform to generate business leads. And it’s 67% ahead from the 2d place (Twitter).”

According to recent research from Really Simple Systems, 43 % salespeople use LinkedIn as a primary tool in generating leads.

But when people come to LinkedIn lead generation and just at the beginning of this road – they usually don’t get any results (A-N-Y).

Why LinkedIn outreach doesn’t work

Here is what people usually do:

1. Google “how to generate leads on LinkedIn” or “the best connection request templates on LinkedIn”.

2. Find outdated tactics and strategies that worked 5 years ago

3. And do what 95% of people do – sent the same messages

Aaaand they usually fail.

Here is the example of messages you definitely got at least 20 times.

So, why it’s not working?

There are might be lots of reasons, but I’d say: “it’s super hard to be relevant to people”.

So they just send 1 message to thousands of people and try to play in “Game in numbers”.

But in their defense I can say that it’s hard to be relevant.

You can spend a few hours on segmenting a small target group with dozens of LinkedIn Search Navigator filters.

But people will still say to you:

“I’m not interested in it right now.”

I know that feeling – it’s horrible.

It happens even with well prepared cold outreach campaigns because you can’t be always relevant to your leads. Someone doesn’t need your service right now, someone has a huge focus on other tasks and so on and so forth.

Solution

But here is a solution – you need to nurture your audience with cool and relevant content on LinkedIn. It works really well for 2 reasons:

1. People start to trust you more because when you share valuable content you become an influencer in this topic.
2. You can proactively engage with the hottest leads and as a result, your campaigns will be much more successful.

Today I’ll focus on how to do that. So here we go, there are several steps in it:

1. Write valuable content
2. Make it viral
3. Scrape everyone who engaged with your content
4. Reach out to them

This approach gave us:

+ 2k paid users

+ 20k traffic

For example, this is the results for the last article we shared on LinkedIn:

So let’s dive deeper on how to generate leads on LinkedIn:

Step1. Write valuable content + make it viral

There are 2 factors that make a huge impact on whether your post will be viral or not:

Quality of the content + Initial engagement = Viral post

There are lots of tips and tricks on how to create valuable content on LinkedIn, but I’ll focus on the main points you need to follow, when you’re posting on LinkedIn:

1. Tell a story in your post

That looks obvious, but just believe me – there are a lot of people who still think that if they put the link to their website and post it – they will get clients and leads.

Come on!

It’s 21st century and now NONE clicks on links if there is just “hey, we wrote this amazing article … bla-bla-bla … check it out here”.

Why?

Because we live in an era of ads. We watch ads every single day. And just because ads are everywhere we ignore 99% of it.

So just forget about that quick sales pitches. They WON’T work.

What should be instead?

Story.

It’s impossible to sell anything with just a pitch (unless you’re Coca-Cola with their ” Holidays are coming”), but it’s possible when people feel the story behind a product.

With a story you can describe:

• problem that you’re solving, so people can understand whether they have this pain,
• why are you solving it,
• and the way you do it.

Example of good LinkedIn post with a story

Here is the link to this post by Ricardo.

2. Give value so people can improve their business right away

What is the best LinkedIn post?

Great question with many answers.

But what I always tell on it is – “the best LinkedIn post changes readers’ business once they finish reading it”

LinkedIn is a professional network where people talk about business.

So, to get engagement and make your posts viral – help other people improve something in their area.

Cats and Memes won’t work.

(Frankly speaking, they will become viral, because it’s … cats! But you won’t get traffic and leads from these posts)

What you can share:

• tactics that you used to reach X% of growth,
• your favorite tools that you can recommend
• a story from your life about something (for example, “How I raised XYZ millions of dollars)
• and many other valuable things that lead to “Oh, I need to try this”

Example of a great valuable LinkedIn post

Here is the link to this post by Ilya (me).

3. How to post a link on LinkedIn in 2020

DON’T add direct links to your LinkedIn posts.

This is the mistake that 99% of people make.

I’m not joking when telling about “99%”, I had 100+ calls with people who are doing content on LinkedIn and they all (ALL) add direct links to their posts.

Here is why you SHOULDN’T do this:

LinkedIn is a social network which earns money by showing you ads. If you can’t easily move from LinkedIn to another platform (for example your website), LinkedIn won’t show you enough ads. So if people can easily add links to their posts -> LinkedIn earns less amount of money.

As a result LinkedIn cuts the reach of posts with links by 7-10X (from my experience).

Looks awful, right?

But no worries, here are 2 ways to generate traffic to your blog/website from LinkedIn posts with links:

1. Add the link to the first comment

This is the hack that Stapho has shared with me.

When you add links to the comments, LinkedIn doesn’t cut the reach. And that’s awesome!

But what if there are 10+ comments?

It becomes muuuuch harder to find the right comment (because LinkedIn ranges comments not by the date, it ranges it by the engagement this comments got).

Here is the solution –

Step #1 – Leave the link to your blog to the first comment.

Step #2 – Copy the link to this comment by clicking on “three dots” button.

Step #3 – Edit the post and add the link to the comment

So you will have the post with the link which leads to the comment with the direct link to your blog.

Looks like a super hard thing – but frankly speaking, it’s easy to do. Check the gif below👇

2. Ask people to leave a comment, so you can send them the link

How does it work?

You don’t add the link anywhere, but you ask people to leave a simple comment (for example “+”), so you can send them the link directly or as a reply to the comment.

And then you tag a person (with “@” + name) and add the link to your blog or website.

I really love this technique for 2 reasons:

a) When people leave comments, they really need your content and will read it for sure once they get it.

b) When people comment on your posts it increases LinkedIn reach.

How does it work?

When you comment on anyone’s post -> LinkedIn thinks that this is great comments and starts showing it to your audience.

So more comments people leave -> More LinkedIn post reach you get.

We’ve prepared the fullest LinkedIn Marketing Checklist – that will help you find the weak points you should improve in your LinkedIn marketing. Get it here.

Step2. Boost your LinkedIn posts with LinkedIn engagement pods to reach more people

LinkedIn has its own algorithm on how they boost posts.

I’m not 100% in this formula, because I don’t work for LinkedIn, but from my experience it totally makes sense.

So what LinkedIn does after your post there:

Step #1 – LinkedIn shows your content to a small group of people

Step #2 – If they engaged with your post-LinkedIn starts showing it to all of your 1st connections + to friends of your friends

Step #3 – If 2d or 3d connections will like or comment on your posts, your content will appear in their network as well.

So that’s why people started creating “LinkedIn Engagement Pods”. In a few words – LinkedIn engagement pod is a group of people (usually this group is closed), where everyone is ready to support each other with mutual engagement. So if you’re the part of this “pod” you will need to like others’ posts but at the same time, you will get likes and comments as well.

Because of LinkedIn Engagement Pods, my posts easily can reach 100k+ views:

There is a solution that automates the “likes exchange” process. It’s called lempod (by the way, it’s one of my favorite LinkedIn marketing tools), and this is the hugest marketplace of LinkedIn engagement pods.

Once you install lempod Google Chrome extension, you can visit the “Marketplace” page where you can search for new pods by using keywords and tags.

For example, if you need some “Growth-oriented” pods, just type “Growth” in a search bar and you’ll find relevant pods.

Once you join pods you can get likes and comments from other lempoders. To do that you need:

1. Copy the link to the LinkedIn post you’ve just created,
2. Go to the lempod and choose the right Pod,
3. Add the link to “Add post” field
4. Write your custom comments that other members will leave automatically. Note! these comments should be relevant to the content of your post.
5. Start Engage This Post (button)

As a result, you’ll get a huge impact on your LinkedIn post views. For example, this is one of my most successful posts:

Here are some bonus pods with secret codes:

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

Step 3. Scrape everyone who engaged with your LinkedIn posts and reach out to them on LinkedIn

There are 2 ways to do that:

Phantombuster and Expandi, I’ll show both of them.

Expandi

Expandi is a great cloud-based solution, which makes a strong focus on safeness. Apart from a lot of cool automation features it also provides:

• Dedicated IP in  your country
• Human behavior
• And a dozen more features for safeness

But there is one more cool feature – “Post Engagement”. It’ll scrape everyone who liked (or/and) commented on your content.

So here we go, once you create a new account you need to go to the “Search” section.

Click on “Start New Search”

Click on “Post engagement” and add a LinkedIn URL of a post you want to scrape.

It’ll take some time to scrape everyone. But you can check the status on “Search” section

When scraping is done, you can go to the “Campaigns” section and click on “Add campaign” to create an outreach campaign:

Choose “Connector campaign” – it means that we’ll connect with 2d & 3d connections (new people to our network):

Choose your audience from Search:

Go to the “Steps”.

Prepare the message that people will get and click “Apply”:

Set up the limitation (my recommendation – 50 messages/day)

Click “Apply” and your campaign is done 🎉

Phantombuster

So here we go:

Go to Phantombuser LinkedIn Post Likers API and click on “Use this API”

Click on “three dots” – it’s the API Configuration Menu where we need to set up everything.

a) Install Phantombuster Chrome Extension .

b) Fill the “Session Cookie” row by clicking on “Get Cookies From LinkedIn” button (which appears after you install Phantombuster Chrome Extension).

c) Add a link to the post where you want to scare everyone who liked this post.

d) Run it!

Set up LinkedIn Marketing Automation tool – Phantombuster

NOTE!

To copy the link to the post, just click on three dots and click on “Copy link to post”

The best posts for this are viral posts with lots of likes.

Just to remind you, if you want to make your posts viral you can use lempod LinkedIn marketing tool and boost your posts with likes/comments from other content makers.

Once this process is finished, click on “Download/get link” to save results.

Now you have the list of people who liked your LinkedIn post.

Now you can upload this list to almost any LinkedIn automation tool to send them the campaign.

Step 4. Connect with everyone who liked your post

Create a connection message that will be sent to people who liked your LinkedIn post.

I personally used this one:

“Heyo {first_name}!

Thanks a lot for your “like” on my post about X

Hope we can share the experience with each other and be helpful,

Let’s connect here!

Ilya”

What’s in result?

With this template I got:

85-90% of people accept your LinkedIn requests

30-35% of people reply

What’s important in this template – I don’t want to SELL anything, I just want to build relationships with other people.

It’s muuuch better than just doing a cold outreach. And it’s obvious, because people already saw you and they trust you.

Summary

LinkedIn is the best place to generate B2B leads with content and outreach. But you shouldn’t choose only one (content or outreach) – I’d recommend you go with both.

So the whole process looks like this:

1. Write cool post
2. Make it viral with lempod
3. Scrape everyone who liked your post
4. Connect with those who engaged with your post
5. Repeat