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Avoid This One Trap If You Want To Make Real Money On LinkedIn

Identify your target audience and the problem they face and solve it better than anyone could ever possibly do.

I wanted it so bad. It was an obsession, a rare form of addiction I have never experienced before.

I checked my phone just before I dozed off to sleep. I checked it the first thing I woke up from sleep. Everywhere I went, I was on the phone. It affected my love relationship. I wasted a lot of time and it became my main cause of distraction, disappointment and misery.

Why? I wasted more time on social media rather than spending quality time with people that matter to me. I wasted more time on social media than doing the things that would bring money into my business.

But for what, why all these pain?

Vanity metrics.

There is a trap on social media that I don’t want you to fall into.  LinkedIn is a social media platform and I keep seeing many falls into this trap. And it is called Vanity Metrics.

Vanity metrics are data such as social media followers, page views, subscribers and other flashy analytics that are satisfying on paper. They are good in the sense that they provide Social Proof, but they don’t necessarily translate into income.

I’ll put it simply. You can’t pay bills with social media likes or page views.

Unless you are converting those likes, comments, shares etc. on social media to customers, these metrics are just numbers and trust me some of the pages or individuals who have the biggest following on social have zero ideas how to turn those raving fans into money.

If you seriously wish to build an influential brand, you need to reach the right audience. And to do that, you need to know your target audience.

Enters customer profiling.

By knowing your target audience and the pain points they have, you will then create a LinkedIn brand that offers a solution to their pain points.

What is Customer Profiling? Customer profiling is a marketing tool that businesses use to understand their customers and help them make better business decisions. If I ever had to go back to the beginning and start all over again, customer profiling is the first thing I would do.

Here is the simple reason why. You have a skill or expertise or passion that you use to help solve others problem.  I am assuming you are already doing that as a professional. The challenge now to package that skill or expertise you have, create a brand and sell that brand.

Let me give you an example…

John Grey is an accountant by profession and owns a small accounting business. His dream is to grow his business and expand to rest of the country. But he doesn’t have enough capital to advertise consistently using mainstream media including newspaper, TV, radio, magazine.

Because he doesn’t have enough money, he doesn’t do much advertising and as a result, not many people know about his business and that means fewer people buy his product or services. That’s why his business is not growing. His pain point is the lack of money.

What John doesn’t know is that using digital marketing, which is less costly and more effective, he can reach a large number of potential clients and turn them into sales. Because he offers accounting services, which is relevant to companies, his best bet is to be on LinkedIn where all the professionals are.

There are entrepreneurs and corporate executives of companies big and small on LinkedIn that he can reach out to and offer his services. But first, he needs to really understand the core problem affecting these organizations. And once he knows them well, he needs to start producing contents that capture his target audience attention. Producing content and distributing across multiple digital channels doesn’t cost a fortune. As a matter of fact, this is the cheapest form of marketing anyone can do now.

Because John knows his target audience deeply, when he produces content on LinkedIn, it would be like him speaking directly to his audience. From using the right accounting systems and processes to how to save cost and all other tricks and tools his target audience needs to solve their daily accounting problem.  

And the more content he produces, he eventually becomes the go-to expert for any problems related to accounting. Know your audience, speak to them, and if they are happy they speak to others about you and it goes on and on.

What if John just started a random Facebook page or LinkedIn account and grows a big following that has nothing to do with accounting?

Well, I hate it to break it to you but if John did this, he is after the vanity metrics and chances are that no one will convert to become actual sales. There are folks on social media who are famous but are dead flat broke. A million followers don’t mean someone is earning millions.

Having 1000 followers, 100 of whom know, like and trust you and buy from you continuously is better than million followers that buy nothing from you. I don’t want you to get caught up in the vanity metrics shit and I plead with you to give very serious thought about this.

All successful businesses around the world have one thing in common. They identify problems and they solve those problems better than others.  I want you to do the same. Identify your target audience and the problem they face and solve it better than anyone could ever possibly do.

If you seriously wish to make money on LinkedIn, you need to build a target network by first doing your customer profiling and next doing a LinkedIn advance keyword search that i’ll cover in my next article.

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Written By

Ian is a CEO of LinkPad, a marketing company that helps businesses scale up through effective branding and inbound marketing. Follow him on LinkedIn.

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