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LinkedIn: How to Build Your Own Powerful, Profitable Custom Network

December 11th, 2007 by Mike Mann

The following isn’t the way LinkedIn is “supposed” to be used, but I wouldn’t let that bother you. Your job is to get paid.

1. Decide how you want your long-term network to look and how you want it to work. The beauty here is that it can look like anything you want because LinkedIn has practically an unlimited number of people in each industry and sub-industry niche that you can attempt to associate with forever. Today would be a good day to start building your network, so you don’t get any further behind.

2. Keep in mind that just as you should “dress for the career you want to have,” you should associate with those on LinkedIn that you perpetually want others to believe you are “like.”

3. Whoever you try to add can see the others in your network before they approve you as part of their club. Over time, new people will believe you are one of the same with those in your own network, as if you are at a country club. Mind you, this may be considered pretentious (just like a country club). Again, the job is to get paid, which is what I would think is the best goal of joining a private, fancy club.

4. So if you were a graphic designer and you wanted to expand your practice, you could identify your future, target market and the best future makeup of your company; with those ideas, start building a network full of people who will help you create your world. There is an unlimited amount of choices, but it’s not easy, it’s competitive and time consuming—as making money should be.

5. So for example, you can start adding the world’s best graphic designers to your own network, and the same great, marketing managers from the industry. They can all be found with simple, key word searches and/or using the LinkedIn advanced search menu system, which is very simple and straightforward.

6. Next, target your sales prospects. For example, you might find you have specialty design work for Venture Capitalists, so target all of them on LinkedIn. There are millions of options. True, you will only be able to add and close a small percentage of your attempts in the beginning. But as you adjust your messaging based on feedback, and as others see your growing, powerful network, you will get an ever-increasing portion of your attempted LinkedIn “Adds” to say “yes” and therefore become part of your network to leverage and for others to see. Keep in mind; it will be very rare for any executives to delete you from your mutual network once added, so this is great. And all of the people you link to will expand their own networks perpetually, which enhances your mutual one.

7. So the object is to add as many people that you want to associate with over time that will help your company. Don’t add anyone that would make you look correspondingly weak because that will reduce your high-end network building prospects.

8. If you made it this far, then you are ready for the hard part: asking huge numbers of great people to add you to their LinkedIn and probably get rejected a lot, less and less each day, but a lot nonetheless.

9. The time consuming part of building your network is to figure out email addresses to add folks. Once you find the people, then discover their email address and send them a standard LinkedIn form email, and then you just wait and collect a certain percentage of them in your network. Thank them and ask for a call, send them emails and newsletters, arrange meetings, all based on your long-term business agenda. Thank you very much LinkedIn for the megabucks this creates for proactive prospectors at no basic charge.

10. Here is how you find the email addresses:

You can try to find the common syntax used at their company with other employees by discovering their domain and typing into Google “@acmecorporation.com.” This might find the record for Mary Jones to be mjones@acmecorporation.com, and Tom Williams to be twilliams@acmecorporation.com. So if you know the president is John Smith, you can assume he utilizes the same syntax in his email and try to contact him through LinkedIn at jsmith@acmecorporation.com. If that “bounces” in their system, don’t give up; try john.smith@acmecorporation.com, john@acmecorporation.com, ceo@acmecorporation.com, etc., or call the secretary and pretend that you know something and ask for his email address. In any event, persistence truly pays.

Bingo—you just bypassed a bunch of bureaucracy, got to the boss, and permanently associated her with your network and vice versa. Even though you may ultimately be ignored or rejected, it’s another notch on your belt and having it over with means you will be one-step closer to the ones who won’t ignore you.

If you only add the execs that you want to work with, then those are the only ones that will ever be on your network, and it will keep giving you additional leverage to try to work with them and any others you seek.

11. Keep in mind this is free and easy, but it won’t do a thing if you don’t spend the time and energy to do it correctly—like anything else in this world

12. Thanks and LMK what you think. Cheers

- Mike