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It's Time to Sell Podcast: Strategies for 21st Century Selling


Jun 19, 2015

For the last few months I have been publishing on a consistent basis via the LinkedIn publishing platform. My goal in doing so is to simply share my thoughts and stories about sales and the sales mind-set.

 

My success has varied, so I decided to explore and study others who were having success with the platform. Success leaves clues, and I went in search of the clues.

 

This search led me to a connection with Glenn Leibowitz. Looking at Glenn’s profile, I saw we had much in common. We are both using LinkedIn publishing as a means to express ourselves and help others in the area of our passions: for me, sales; for him, writing.

 

But what floored me was the fact that his posts have gotten just shy of 400,000 views! I knew I had to learn more from this guy.

 

So I reached out and connected with him, which led to a conversation this week, during which we dove into his tips for better LinkedIn publishing. Glenn has published 50 posts on LinkedIn and has helped his coworkers publish another 140 or so posts.

 

The key tips Glenn expressed are:

 

  1. What do you want to be known for?

We need to be clear about this and fashion our content strategy around these areas, so that people will get to know us for writing on these topics. A positive byproduct of this is that we will be more focused and productive in our posts.

 

  1. Who is your target audience?

LinkedIn is enormous and covers a wide variety of areas. LinkedIn Pulse is segmented by channels, such as leadership, careers, social media, and so on.  Audiences follow channels based on their interests. Know your audience, and speak to that audience.

 

  1. What is your content calendar?

Decide on the frequency of your posting, and be consistent. There is a balance between posting too little and posting too much. Glenn suggests posting weekly. The more consistent we are with publishing, the more our audience will learn to expect our posts on that schedule.

 

  1. What topics should you write about?

The more we publish, the more ideas we will have for publishing. While he is on the move, Glenn uses the basic note-taking app on his iPhone to capture ideas for posts. He has published an excellent post (link) in which he lists sixteen types of posts that will generate ideas.

 

  1. Write, edit, and publish

We are all busy, and many professional bloggers hire people to write posts for them. This is OK, especially for a busy entrepreneur.

 

  1. Get the word out

You can alert LinkedIn’s editors that you’ve posted an article by tweeting a link to your article and including in the tweet the phrase “tip @linkedinpulse.” Glenn suggests that if this does not work the first time you should try again. Perhaps even more importantly, Glenn suggests that we add category tags to our posts. His key point is that, to get any significant traction outside our network of connections and followers, a post must be tagged by LinkedIn Pulse. In this way, the post will be displayed to viewers who have subscribed to LinkedIn’s channels and will have an opportunity to go viral.

 

The best way to attract the attention of LinkedIn’s editors is to write good content and be consistent.