Build Your Business with LinkedIn Mastermind Daniel Alfon

Daniel Alfon is the author of the successful book, How to Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success- An Ultimate Guide. We spoke with Alfon to discover how businesses like yours can leverage LinkedIn. Alfon opened his first LinkedIn account in 2004 and since then has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and consultants constantly hit their targets. Alfon began his first sales job in 2006. Like many first timers, he stumbled. One day Alfon realised LinkedIn was helping him slash his sales cycle by 30%. After beating his sales quota he began to understand LinkedIn's usefulness in achieving business success. The platform currently has over 800 million users with two people signing up every second. He has developed a simple method that can help entrepreneurs reach their objective without cold connecting, without paying for a premium account and without paying for advertising. According to Alfon, LinkedIn is a powerful tool that is often misunderstood.

Treat Your Profile Like Your Personal Website

As the owner of an eCommerce business the main goal is gaining new clients—you are not a job seeker. If you are an entrepreneur it makes business sense to treat your profile as a website.

Alfon simplifies the process as follows: 

Create an attractive banner highlighting your business. 

Write a headline that draws in the clients you want. 

Include a profile picture—a headshot that is professional, smiling and attractive.

These three factors determine if prospects will stay on your profile. Your aim is for your leads to scroll through your profile and direct them to other parts of your profile such as your service offerings or your features section. You may want your clients to visit your website, enjoy your content and connect with you on an authentic level.

 "Conversion happens best outside of LinkedIn," says Alfon, "LinkedIn is a simple way to drive qualified leads to your website, allowing them to engage with your business and content—a funnel for your website, giving you the opportunity to get people to subscribe to your social media platforms, newsletters or podcasts."

Four Tips For Business Owners Using LinkedIn

Profile versus page

On LinkedIn the natural action is to connect as individuals. Your potential customers are people who are looking to connect with a person—by looking at your profile and sending an invitation. 

Connection strategy

What connection strategy do you have in place? Choose the strategy that will work best for you. According to Alfon, you can do this in two ways, quality– when you connect with people you know well, and you can gain referrals, or you can aim for quantity and exposure. Both can work, but if you try to do both of them you will end up with little of neither. 

You don't have to pay for a premium LinkedIn account

Alfon suggests spending time to learn how the LinkedIn algorithm works. Once you understand the free platform, then you may consider the premium account. If you do not have this knowledge you will be in a poor position to leverage the premium facilities.

Content is more important than advertising on LinkedIn



Organic content that your lead prospect is struggling with is the gasoline that will lead people to discover you. 

Myth or Fact- Is it essential to have 500 Connections?

When and how often should you focus on sharing content on LinkedIn?

Educational content is the best content. Focus on the questions your ideal customers are asking. Create content that helps them understand the problems they have and the first step they need to take into in order to solve that. "Give value first, show people that you have more. Take them through the first step, and show them the second step that will make them understand that you can be trusted for the long term in order to help them achieve their goals."

An Ideal Prospect Accepted my Invitation but Nothing Happened?

According to Alfon, when this happens, you need to get back to basics. "Speak with your mutual connections. Ask them how they have been, mention the name of your ideal prospect and ask if they know the person well enough to introduce you? Aim to get into a meaningful discussion with a person. This will make it more likely to convert your lead into a proposal."

Is Exposure Overrated on LinkedIn?

A genuine connection is more meaningful than the first result on Google. LinkedIn does have hundreds of competitors— set yourself apart by leveraging your network in order to gain an introduction. You need up to 30 000 connections to gain any meaningful exposure. Businesses will find more success with fewer connections where they can get introductions based on trust and communication. 

The Perfect Introduction

According to Alfon, the ideal introduction happens outside of LinkedIn. LinkedIn enables you to find the name of the prospect and to identify a mutual connection. "The secret no one will tell you is that you need to leave LinkedIn at one point." You should have a process that nurtures your connections— including real life, offline networking with meaningful conversation. 

Can Tasks be Delegated?

Business owners should dedicate a minimal amount of time to LinkedIn in a consistent fashion for at least a couple of months to start seeing success. Repetitive tasks can be delegated as your network grows.

Listen to the CPA Marketing Genius podcast with Salim Omar. If you are a CPA firm who is interested in taking your business to the next level, visit our website to learn more tips and to find our services. Don’t hesitate to contact us today.