linkedin profile tips
Project Ignite Podcast by Derek Gehl LinkedIn Profile Tips For Maximum Attraction With Dave Rogenmoser
00:00:00 00:00:00
  • Episode  26
  • Dave Rogenmoser

Summary:

Dave Rogenmoser was born an entrepreneur, and most recently he’s turned his entrepreneurial mindset to LinkedIn: a platform which he thinks is seriously overlooked by most businesses. If you’re working in the B2B space, or are trying to connect with business owners and decision makers, Dave’s surprisingly quick and easy LinkedIn profile tips will absolutely generate leads, more traffic, and more conversions.

Transcript: LinkedIn Profile Tips For Maximum Attraction With Dave Rogenmoser

Welcome to the Project Ignite podcast. I’m your host, Derek Gehl, and today’s guest is an entrepreneur, consultant, and coach that has unlocked the power of a social network that I believe is frequently overlooked as a lead source for many different businesses.
The network I’m talking about is LinkedIn, and the expert that I’m talking about is Dave Rogenmoser. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome Dave to the show.

Dave, thanks for taking the time to be here.

Thanks so much man, it’s great to be here.

Awesome. Now, I always like to start off the podcast with your story as an entrepreneur. How did you get to be the expert that I’m interviewing right now?

I was thinking about this. My first ever business was selling beer as a six year old. It was kindergarten, was a little strapped for cash, and arranged these beer cans I found in my house in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, and I wandered up and down the street selling to my neighbours. I called it the Eiffel Tower Beer Sales. I sold one can before I figure my neighbours called my parents and they came to pick me up. That was the end of that.

That’s awesome. That’s the best first business story I’ve ever heard.

Some people are born entrepreneurs and others can learn it, but I think I was always a guy that had a brain for it early on.
Anyway, it was about two years ago, I was working a job at university, but I felt this itch that I needed to go out and start my own business. I couldn’t get away from it. I started looking for different opportunities that would come up.
I wrote down on this little note card that by thirty, I wanted to be financially free by starting multiple profitable businesses and creating passive income. That was two years ago today, actually.
I wound up going to this wedding about a month later, with my note in my pocket, and I met someone that was starting an online business and I realized that this may be my chance to get into business.
I ended up with him doing a bit of a partnership and starting my own software company, invested a bunch of money into it, found out no one really wanted to use it–I could have prelaunched it or presold it but I was just so upside down about doing things in the right order.
The most important things were build a website, buy a logo, pick a cool name, get some business cards. But the money did not follow.
I quit my job, and launched into this thing, put the software business on pause, and shifted into consulting and internet marketing. That’s really the business that’s taken off.

Fantastic. Before we drill down into specifics, lets start with basics. LinkedIn is kind of a different beast from other social networks, and consequently, many small businesses overlook it. You’ve been using it, very successfully, and have kind of pioneered a few really cool strategies that have worked really well.
But before we get into that, in your opinion, which kinds of businesses could benefit from LinkedIn?

LinkedIn Profile Tips
I think in marketing, you need to start with the basics. Who is your target audience, and where do they hang out? You don’t need to be on every channel. You should choose a few and do them really effectively. But if you ask yourself, who is my target audience, especially if you’re business to business, LinkedIn will probably be a great place for you.
You can be reaching out to the decision makers of small businesses. We get really great results because I’m reaching out to a certain group of people: CEOs, marketing directors–those kinds of people are warmed to do business over LinkedIn

To highlight that–they’re warmed to do business over LinkedIn. It’s a very different platform than Facebook or Instagram. To highlight another point there is that for any business in the B2B space, LinkedIn is by far the leader in terms of which platform you should use.
I haven’t looked up the numbers in awhile, Dave?

I looked up the numbers about a week ago, and I can’t remember exactly what they were–but they’re growing. It almost seems like a bit of an underdog that’s slowly growing.

It’s always going to be niche to the professionals, which I think is a great thing. I think what’s happening now is that more and more people are realizing that it’s a great lead generating tool. It’s also great for recruiting, obviously, but you can use it to network.
I think LinkedIn is less understood than most other networks from an advertising perspective, though. So as a business, B2B, trying to connect with people–what are the tools people using LinkedIn should be focused on using to market themselves?

There is advertising on LinkedIn, just like there’s advertising on Instagram and Facebook. But honestly, we haven’t been using the advertising on LinkedIn. I don’t see that very frequently. It can work, I think, but we’ve figured out ways to monetize it using more organic means.
The way we’ve been doing it has been more about connecting with the right people. Different ways to set up and structure my profile on LinkedIn that then generates interests. It’s more actually in the basics of LinkedIn than it is about how to tweak an ad campaign.

So, let’s dig in there–I think that’s where the gold is. You mentioned your profile, and connecting with the right people.
Let’s start with profile, and move onto making the right connections with people. Everyone starts on LinkedIn with a profile. Most people treat it like a virtual resumes. I’ve listened to some of your teachings, and you’ve taken a different approach. If you start a profile with the goal of generating leads, what should they do with their profile?

Yes, so when I first started figuring LinkedIn out, I realized it’s a pretty stiff place. It wouldn’t be a fun party to hang out at. There’s a lot of new grads flooding in, it’s a pretty stiff place. It’s kind of hard to do business inside that formality. Some of the best deals I’ve made are ones that have broken out of that formality.
So I figured there might be a cool way to be a bit more informal and kind of break some rules. I’ve never really been an absolute rule follower. My buddies from college were all about resumes or networking events. I never was.
That was kind of when I thought that LinkedIn isn’t just a resume. It’s not effective. You have to have a single goal with your website, right? So I decided to think about my LinkedIn as though it were a landing page. What’s the conversion for this profile?
What would someone want to see on my profile in order to reach out to me? Having people shift from thinking about it as a resume, to figuring out how to convert your hits whether thats a message, a clickthrough, or a call.
You can start to see things that maybe LinkedIn wouldn’t want you to do, but that there are opportunities to do, and that creates a bit of a gap in the market. That’s kind of the mindset I’ve had behind it.
The two biggest practical ways that I’ve done that is put my name as my title, in the first box that LinkedIn offers, and in the second box, usually meant for your last name, put what you do.
Mine used to say, Dave Rogenmoser, and in the space meant for your title, I’d put CEO of Market Results. This is really ineffective. No one cares what your name is. And I was calling myself a CEO five years ago. It really doesn’t mean very much anymore.
So instead, in the two boxes meant for your first and last name, you put your name in the first box only, and your title in the second box. Mine says Dave Rogenmoser | Facebook Ad Expert. Where everyone else says their name, I have a name and a title. I’ve kind of doubled my real estate.
That catches people’s attention
How to write a good LinkedIn profile
The second thing I do, is instead of putting my title in the title field, I add a question. Right now it says, “feel like your marketing dollars aren’t quite working? Let me show you how profitable Facebook Ads can be.” I try to create a little hook there.
That question, that hook, will make people answer those questions for themselves. Then, they’ll check out my profile, and reach out. I’m saying right away that I can solve their problems within the first two lines of the profile.

I love that you hacked that first name, last name thing. That’s brilliant. You have doubled your real estate.
I pulled up your LinkedIn profile while you were talking us through that, and it’s super great. It’s a headline and a sub headline. You’re telling people what’s in it for them. I love that.
Do we want to dive deeper? Absolutely. Let’s do it. As we’re working down the profile, what else do you have?

The summary! We get so caught up in ourselves, we think that people want to read five big paragraphs about us. I just took my sales letter mentality and applied it to that summary. Instead of telling people everything about me,  I’m gonna write a bit of sales copy.
“We’re laser focused on results and ROI with Facebook ads for our clients.”
Just as a quick side thought, I offer more than just Facebook ads. But basically, I’ve chosen a hook that I think will appeal to people. I used to say we were doing digital marketing, which was true, but it was too broad. This appeals to people that are right on the verge of getting into using Facebook ads.
That’s why I say Facebook everywhere, even though we offer more.
So I write up my sales copy and then I give them an offer. For all of my LinkedIn connections, a special offer. Contact me and I’ll reveal your top two competitor’s marketing strategies for free, and if you qualify, you’ll get five high quality phone leads for free.
I say, I’ll give you this in exchange for testimonials and twenty minutes of your time. I’m giving them the call to action, and telling them what’s in it for them. I’m positioned as an expert here. I’m not just giving away hours of my time, because experts don’t do that. So I need to reach out without sounding totally free.
It’s how I can protect my time, but it also doesn’t make it just sound like a sales pitch. I don’t want to just invite people into a sales pitch. You’ve got to have real value that you’re able to give them for this to work

I love how you’ve done that. For everyone listening, you should go look at Dave’s LinkedIn profile. You’ve created a great lead magnet with a kind of a trade, so you don’t sound desperate.
Have you ever tried pushing people to a specific webpage with that summary versus contacting you?

Yes, I have–right now that’s under “Projects”. That one goes to my Clarity profile. I think it would work really well if you have a great landing page with an opt-in. It’s what we’ve done in the past and right now I’m just testing something different.

It would be really interesting to split test that. What you’re doing right now is probably more conducive to what LinkedIn offers, but it would still be interesting to see which would yield the best results.

I would love to figure out how to run split-tests on LinkedIn. I’d be all in on that.

So you have your link under Projects that will take people to your Clarity profile. Is there anything else on your profile here?

I think that again taking that mindset of your one goal, and applying it everywhere, is the best thing to do. So I have some endorsements, from people I’ve worked with in the past. I took off a lot of the positions that I’ve worked over the past few years that aren’t related to marketing. If it doesn’t help, it’s just a distraction. Only have relevant work on your profile.
If something isn’t relevant, its probably worth it to either downsize it or remove it altogether. With the endorsements and skills, a lot of people still have MS Word, or Powerpoint. But no one cares about that stuff! Put the ones that you really want to be noticed for and grow in.
Overtime someone views your profile, at the top LinkedIn gives them the option to endorse you. Just build it up over time in that way. I’m getting close to 100 on some of my endorsements. It starts to show you what people are searching for in their business.
It’s a bit like SEO for your LinkedIn page.

So I did a bit of a switch. I was looking at your profile without logging in, and now I have logged in, and am on your page. Now that I’ve logged in, I can see your posts. Any thoughts on that?

Absolutely. Posts are so easy to do. They’re not even that cool, honestly, but it appeals to the brick and mortar store owners. I just sort of pulled together a few ideas, and posted it all up. Back when I was starting up in January, I posted about the next marketing trends for 2015.
It was all pretty basic stuff. Mobile will be bigger. Social networking isn’t just nice to have. And the next day, I got an interview request. I was just getting started! So it was really cool to see how quickly that would ramp up just from a little bit of content.

That’s interesting. So for everyone listening, if you want to be found and invited to these things, as someone that has a podcast, one of my primary tools for connecting with different experts is LinkedIn. There’s a whole other element there.
I’m looking at one of your posts here titled “Eating the Beating Heart of a Cobra Made Me a Better Entrepreneur”, and that sounds like a whole other interview in itself!

Yep. That was me heating the beating heart of a cobra in Vietnam, and thinking, I have to work this into an article.

That’s a great headline. How can you not be intrigued?
Let’s shift away from the profile and move towards connecting. So connecting with people on LinkedIn, I get hammered with connections every day. What is the right way to approach LinkedIn and connecting?

I think my answer is a bit different than LinkedIn’s answer. But it’s a way that is effective and will get you business. I come from the standpoint that in business, and this is Grant Cardone, I believe, that your biggest problem is obscurity
My biggest problem is that people don’t know my name. Any time someone can see my name or my picture, that’s a win. I’m not super concerned with professionalisms or connecting with absolutely everyone.
I think when you get started, you don’t know what to do. Because when you look at someone’s profile, they’ll be able to tell that you did. But now, I want everyone to know that I’ve looked at their profiles. Because then, they’ll look back at mine.
So basically now, I do a search for owners of maybe, roofing companies in Washington, DC. I’d look at all these profiles in different tabs, knowing that some of them would click back to my profile and hopefully they’d reach out to me.
After doing that for a few days, I had someone reach out to me. It worked. He figured it was a coincidence that I had looked at his profile, and that they were wanting to get into Facebook advertising.
After doing that for a little bit, I started signing deals from LinkedIn for me to take over people’s internet marketing forums. It was so much cheaper and easier than everything else that I had done. So I figured, how do I scale this? Do I get a virtual assistant?
I found out that there were lots of little Chrome extensions that will go look through people’s profiles for you automatically. The one I use is called Autopilot for LinkedIn, and what it does is look at one thousands profiles per day for me in a specific niche. That’s 7,000 in a week that I few.
A certain percentage of those will add me back, send me a connection request, or send me a message. I do all of that just by hitting start every night, and it runs while I sleep. That’s kind of how we drive traffic to my profile.
So if my profile is our landing page, then this Autopilot for LinkedIn is how we drive traffic to it.

For everyone listening, that was an incredibly valuable tip that you just got, there. First of all, viewing enough people manually will take way too long. So by using an easy little extension, you’ll get a thousand views on autopilot.
LinkedIn won’t catch on, at 1,000 views per day?

Well, I don’t want to be held liable here… Maybe do 750 per day. I’ve seen a few people go over 1,000, and some people have been iced for a bit by LinkedIn.
I run 5,000 to 8,000 per week and I’ve had no problems.

As far as connecting goes, I have one more question: when someone does reach out to you, what is your first step with them?

I have a few different messages that I use for different people. If someone reaches out to me, my goal is usually just to take it to a phone call. So much more happens on a phone call, even just for five or ten minutes.
I’m trying to represent myself as an expert, so that’s how I try to respond. I offer two specific times in the next week, even if the next day is wide open. I try to take a bit of control. When I reach out to people, I look for a way to add value up front.
I basically do the same call to action as in my summary. It really does work in all sorts of areas.
My brother just graduated college, and he’s back at home right now just trying to figure his stuff out. He wants to get into commercial real estate. He came out to visit me, and I said, let me try something on LinkedIn to see if I can get you some jobs.
So I went through, typed in his name, Mike Rogenmoser, and had kind of a little joke in the subheader. Then I rewrote his summary with the intention of catching people’s attention. I tried to be a bit funny with it, and gave them a call to action. I ran that autopilot program, and we went out for dinner. We came back after about a half hour, and in that half hour, he’d already received two voicemails from people that had found his LinkedIn and wanted to connect.
They just said that they were in the commercial real estate space and they’d love to chat and see if there was some way to work together. My brother had tried all of the traditional ways, and just from that, he got two phone calls.
He went in for an interview a few days after, and then one more interview after that with a different company, and all of that came from like 45 minutes of work. It all comes down to your positioning, and your copy.

That’s brilliant. You mentioned you can’t message someone until you’re connected, right? But you can pay LinkedIn to let you send one or two messages per month to people you’re not connected with, right?

Yes, InMail.

Have you used InMail before?

I’ve not used it that much. I get a few credits per month, because I have a premium account. It’s good, but those messages are also separated out by LinkedIn so it’s very obvious that it’s someone you’re not connected with that’s trying to reach out and snipe you.
I just kind of wait to connect with people, and then it’s just free.

And I like the psychology behind your method too–this way, people are reaching out to you. It’s a great approach.
Okay, last question: how can people connect with you?

People can reach out to me at Dave@TheMarketResults.com, that’s our agency site. I’d love to answer any questions, I think this stuff is pretty fun, so I’d be happy to help you out with anything there. If anyone’s interested in learning how to start up internet marketing, they can head over to 6KSuccess.com, and that’s where we do lots of free training about closing deals and fulfilling with your own consulting business.

Thank you for your time and sharing so generously today.

Thank you! It was a ton of fun.

There you go, everyone. If you’re a consultant, or you’re in the B2B market, LinkedIn is a massively powerful platform for generating new leads into your business. Dave has taken a completely different approach to it. Thank you for taking part in this podcast, and if you like what you hear, please head over to iTunes and leave us a rating or review, and on Soundcloud, you can do the same thing.
As usual, all of our links and notes will be up on ProjectIgnite.com/podcast. Thank you again, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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  1. I loved this person’s article on getting clients through Linkedin which he posted as guest author on Scoperush and then followed him here to listen to this podcast interview. The looks very interesting and with lot of potential. I hope to try this one out soon. Thanks for sharing

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