How to Make $25,000/Month With LinkedIn

Alternatively, "How to add $25,000/month to your pipeline using LinkedIn."

LinkedIn is currently the highest-leverage content marketing channel on the face of the earth. And I mean that in every sense of the word.

This is a slide from my pitch deck emphasizing LinkedIn’s importance.

It’s scalable, undersaturated (seriously, you’re early), creates results quickly, is easily repurposable, and has an incredibly high presence of B2B decision-makers. And it’s super easy to contact them, too—just send a connection request and/or a DM.

If you have a LinkedIn account — no matter where you are — you are staring at an absolute gold mine of potential, more than any other platform can offer you.

Almost nobody realizes this yet (again, you’re early). And even if you do realize, there’s a good chance you don’t know where to start.

This newsletter will solve that.

In this post, I’ll teach you how to add $25,000 in revenue to your personal income/company pipeline using the highest-leverage platform in the world (LinkedIn!).

Selling Something People Actually Want

If you’re going to make money with LinkedIn, you have to sell something.

This “something” has to be something people actually want because a scarily large number of people do not understand that there’s no amount of marketing that can sell something nobody wants.

I repeat: if your offer (the thing you’re trying to sell) sucks, nobody is going to buy it, no matter how much credibility you have or how good your copywriting is.

Imagine I offered you these two cars for $20,000:

Offering the first car for that price—a junker—would be insulting. You would accuse me of being a con artist, and be offended that I’d think you’d be stupid enough to pay $20k for something that’s worth, at most, $500.

I could assemble the greatest sales team on the planet in one room, give them enterprise subscriptions to Sales Navigator, Smartlead, and Apollo, offer them a $10,000 commission,* and 0% of them would be able to sell the car.

*No, offering the prospect part of their commission to buy the car wouldn’t count.

But the second car—a Ferrari LaFerrari?

You’d jump through flaming rings of fire for the opportunity to buy it for $20,000. Even if the salesperson showed up drunk, in their pajamas, and insulted your mother, you’d do whatever it took to get your name on the dotted line.

Why? Because the value is immediately clear to you.

Even if you didn’t know the exact value (somewhere between $3M and $5M for those who are curious), you’d understand the immense potential in the deal. Even if you had no interest in the actual car, you’d know you could sell it for a minimum 150x return.

And that’s fundamentally the exact same reason people will buy things from you: they expect to get more money out of it than they paid for it. It’s literally that simple.

If your offer sucks—specifically, if people don’t see a way in which the thing they’re paying you for is going to create a minimum 5x ROI—your life is going to be so much harder than it has to be.

Bad offer, hard life. Great offer, easy life. Great offers create lots of leads, and it is really hard to be poor when you have a lot of leads.

What Should You Sell?

This newsletter isn’t about sales as a whole, so I’m not going to pretend otherwise and try to include every piece of sales knowledge I have.

However, to get you started, you’re probably best off building an offer around your prior experience. The reasons why are simple:

1. You’re experienced. You wouldn’t be building your systems from scratch.

2. You have credibility. Your prospects know you have experience in the thing that you’re doing.

For example, if you’re a Head of Content at a venture-backed B2B SaaS, you’re likely only 4-6 months away from $10,000/month (and beyond) as an independent entity delivering fundamentally the same service.

You could pitch developing content strategies and fulfilling them (using a team of freelancers) to the exact same market you currently serve.

Since you’d deliver said services as an agency, you could pitch them reduced costs (your retainer would cost less than a full-time employee, most likely) at the same (or higher) level of quality.

Since you already have experience to point to, it would be a no-brainer for the prospect.

And, of course, there are many more ways to add value beyond simple cost savings.

Side-Note: Total Addressable Market (TAM)

By the way, it’s really important that there exist at least 1,000,000 people/businesses on earth who are capable of purchasing your service. In marketing, this is called TAM, and it completely defines the way you market your services.

Marketing a service with a large TAM is relatively straightforward because, at its core, it’s a numbers game. Assuming you have a good offer, the only barrier between you and more revenue is the number of decision-makers who are aware your offer exists and the benefits it provides.

But if you have a small TAM, it’s only a numbers game to the extent that numbers are available.

Take, for example, Steinway Tower in New York City.

This is an apartment building, with its “cheapest” entry available at $15,000,000 and topping out at around $50,000,000.

The most generous TAM possible for these units is 295,450 people (the approximate number of people with a net worth of $50M+ in the world).

You’d then have to filter the number of people who are interested in property in NYC and further filter it for those willing to invest in a newer building that’s yet to stand the test of time (when they could invest the same money in proven real estate).

This is probably less than 10,000 people globally. Maybe less than 1,000.

Due specifically to the small TAM, this unit requires a highly intensive marketing process to sell—including highly personalized outreach, countless private tours, extensive awareness campaigns, months of negotiation, and much, much more.

Even then, there’s no guarantee. Many of Steinway Tower’s units remain vacant.

The developer most likely realized this would happen and is betting on Steinway becoming an iconic building over the years that UHNW individuals feel comfortable investing in. This is obviously not a viable strategy for the vast majority of people.

In contrast, consider a townhouse in a desirable part of Washington D.C. or San Francisco hovering around $1,500,000.

These probably cost more than $1,500,000 now, but I digress.

Units like these are much, much easier to sell since they not only have a large target market but also offer clear value to the client.

The takeaway here is that, assuming your offer is fundamentally worthwhile, TAM completely defines your ability to market and sell your service.

This is why you should not niche down too much. Be a B2B SaaS marketer, not a B2B newsletter marketer for health tech brands that are training to raise a Series B.

Proving Your Credibility

I’m probably going to have to reiterate this in many newsletters, but before you think about using LinkedIn to draw attention to yourself, you have to be ready to receive it.

Let’s start with your profile.

Your LinkedIn profile is your digital first impression, and it needs to prove your credibility to the amount maximum extent possible.

When people talk about “optimizing your profile,” what they actually mean (or should mean) is “making your credibility flagrantly clear and directing the resulting high-quality attention to a high-converting landing page.”

Here is Justin Welsh’s profile:

This is a very credible profile; maybe you’ve seen it before.

It’s very, very credible.

Not just because he has a lot of followers (that definitely helps), but because it looks professional and showcases prominent media features he’s received (Forbes, Insider, Vice, etc.).

After viewing this, you’ll then be directed to his landing page, which further showcases his credibility (a 4.98/5 rating from 25,000+ students).

While you won’t be selling courses*, you’ll still follow the same fundamental formula: offer something enticing, multiply the appeal of said enticement with your credibility, and transition the now-intrigued prospect to a channel in which they can convert.

*Why shouldn’t I sell courses?

Selling courses is an unproductive pursuit for the vast, vast majority of people. The reason is that “it’s not a real business” (quote from Daniel Fazio, an entrepreneur producing over $600,000 per month, with his income streams including a portfolio of educational products).

Courses only have one sales channel: your social media profile. No serious business can depend on a single sales channel because the lack of diversification massively exposes it to catastrophic income variation if (and when) the status quo stops working in its favor (even if temporarily).

That is not a real business; it’s a glorified lemonade stand, capturing and converting attention from passing cars in the neighborhood (yes, some people make tons of money this way, but 99.99% of people do not!).

Maybe if you become a gargantuan influencer who can afford to potentially lose money (I’m talking tens of thousands) on ads developing an alternative sales channel, you’ll have a chance at a slight amount of sales channel diversification. But even then, it’ll be a shadow of what you could achieve by investing the same energy into a proper offer.

Finally, the sporadic nature of the income—and this is perhaps the worst part. ~80% of your income will come from launches, meaning you may make $30,000 one month and have to live off of that—combined with whatever residual you collect in the following months—until your next big offer in 6-12 months. And that’s only if you know how to launch a product at all.

If you think I’m wrong, don’t take my opinion—take it from Justin Welsh and Nicolas Cole, the most successful course-sellers I know who aren’t grifters. Both of them will tell you that you’re much better off investing in a proper service and, maybe down the line, adding a course as a side-income stream.

Creating (Qualified) Leads

We’ve cleared the fundamentals. Now comes the fun part: creating leads.

There are two ways of doing this on LinkedIn:

1. Content marketing (posting)

2. Outreach (sending DMs)

The top performers will combine both—here’s how:

Content Marketing

Content marketing is marketing with content. In this context, that means posting.

I’ve done this quite a lot, and it’s lead to me building over 220,000 followers since beginning (seriously) in mid-2022.

Ironically enough, lead generation isn’t the primary objective of posting.

While it’s certainly an effect of it (among other things), the primary outcome of you hitting “post” is brand awareness. In this case, awareness of both your personal brand and the company you represent (if any).

Every time I hit post, both myself and Soleo itself occupy just a bit more real estate in the minds of people around the world.

Thanks to the compounding effect of doing that for a long time, it’s resulted in some rather wonderful outcomes—outcomes that are just getting started.

Yes, that outcome often includes qualified leads. But it also includes podcast invites, sponsored post offers (which I turn down most every week), real-life networking opportunities (or virtual ones), and many more.

But fundamentally, I’m creating brand awareness. Specifically, it’s awareness of:

• The service(s) I offer

• The expertise I’ve earned

• The credibility I’m building (case studies, prominent clients, etc)

…all manifesting in a variety of very cool things.

However, impressions don’t create brand awareness in a vacuum.

Engagement bait (e.g. posts like, “Bosses should be nice! I’m very smart and cool!”) doesn’t create admiration from decision-makers; expertise-driven content does.

Don’t post stuff like this:

This type of content does not help you. PS: I used to post cheesy stuff that got lots of likes but stopped once I realized how unproductive it was. I still see people plagiarizing those posts to farm engagement to this day.

Post stuff like this:

Or this:

Or this:

…or anything else that clearly defines you as a credible, high-value authority in your industry.

When abroad, no matter where they are, people generally opt for chain hotels—Hilton, Hyatt, Marriot, etc—because they understand they can be relied on to hold a certain standard, while local hotels are a wildcard.

People will opt to work with you for the same reason—you’ve convinced them you can deliver consistently where others can’t.

By the way, this newsletter is content marketing. I could do weekly releases*, but I release these more occasionally when a genuinely awesome piece is ready—this channel is best for deep dives (a weekly phone-in post would be a huge waste).

*Some people have great weekly releases, this isn’t a knock on them

The goal is to establish myself as an uncontested ultra-top authority on all things LinkedIn. That’s the goal of my posts, too, of course, but as a rule, they have to be more bite-sized.

Outreach

Outreach represents the most proactive way of cashing in on your credibility and creating leads.

If you’re cooking up something good, there’s no reason to just sit around and hope the smell wafts around the neighborhood, enticing random people to walk in the door and see what’s for lunch.

You should be proactive about making people aware of your cuisine. Otherwise, there’s a very high chance you’ll just waste your time cooking.

On LinkedIn, you do this “proactive awareness” with connection requests and direct messages. This dovetails extremely nicely with content marketing because the brand awareness derived from that will accelerate your outbound results.

Prime example: I recently converted a venture-backed SaaS (Series C) into a client through a relatively basic outbound sequence.

I offered them a small sample of my service. They found it intriguing, spoke 1:1, and, after a brief deliberation, began working with me.

What made it work was, fundamentally, my credibility.

There’s no shortage of people offering some sort of done-for-you (DFY) LinkedIn service, but very, very few actually deliver. And pretty much nobody else has my level of credibility (followers, case studies, clients, etc). In many ways, I am in my own league.

So, once you’ve optimized your profile and started creating credibility-driven content, you need to start maxing out connection requests.

LinkedIn has a de facto limit of around 350-400 connection requests per month, which is a bit over ten per day. This is pretty trivial to fulfill manually—which you’ll need to do since LinkedIn is very sensitive to these sorts of automations.

How to Perform LinkedIn Outreach

Next, I’ll show you how to actually do the thing we’re talking about.

Building a List of Targets

First, purchase a Premium subscription. By default, you’ll be limited in your ability to view profiles, and LinkedIn will hard-limit you pretty quickly.

You’ll need a Premium Business subscription to get past this—but if you’re really serious about maximizing outreach, I recommend getting a Sales Navigator subscription.

Sales Navigator is a nice-to-have tool because it’s a pretty robust research platform.

You’ll need to build a list of targets, and using Sales Nav for LinkedIn outreach will be much more straightforward than using something like Apollo.

But Sales Navigator or not, start building your list of connection request targets.

I first recommend clearly defining your ICP (ideal customer profile). You can do so in a basic spreadsheet like this:

You need to fill out only as many lines as you have ICPs. If you have only one, do only one.

It’s nice to have this on paper—not just for your own benefit but also so a VA can build the list for you (if you don’t want to build it yourself).

Once you’ve defined your ICP, start building the actual list. The best research tool for this purpose is Sales Navigator, but other sales tools can work, too.

Whatever you choose, use a Sheet like this to track them:

You can also use Sales Naviagotor’s internal list tool for this.

Once you’ve filled it with 100-300 targets, fire away.

“Should I send a message in my connection request?”

In my opinion, you should only attached a message in your connection request in two instances:

1. You have something genuinely meaningful to say (e.g. you met them at a party, you really like a specific piece of content they created, you’re a user of their software, etc.)

2. You have zero connections in common

Otherwise, I find it hard to develop something meaningful to say, consistently, that doesn’t seem templated and off-putting. Trying to do so will slow you down too much, too, and really won’t help you all that much

If someone hasn’t responded after 3-4 weeks, withdraw the connection request (you can do this from the invites menu).

They’re unlikely to respond beyond this period, and keeping your pending requests as small as possible is considered best practice for maintaining your “sender” reputation on LinkedIn.

Sending DMs

Once somebody accepts your connection request, wait at least 3-5 days before sending them a message. This gives them time to look at your profile and have your content appear in their feed before sending anything out.

This is a good time to mention that LinkedIn is a quality-over-quantity outreach platform—or at least it leans that way.

If you DM someone you’re connected to (or send them an InMail, which comes with Sales Navigator), there’s a 99% chance they’ll see it if they’re active on LinkedIn at all. That’s really awesome coming from cold email where a 30-40% open rate is considered extremely solid.

But it’s counteracted by the fact that you can only realistically reach out to 100-200 people each month—LinkedIn's biggest weakness as an outreach platform (it’s really meant for recruiters, who generally have the upper hand in outbound, thus making the outbound limit inconsequential).

This begs the question: what should you actually say? How do you make the most of your limited chances with your target market?

There’s a prevalent school of thought that effective outreach on LinkedIn means becoming best personal friends with the person, traveling to their wedding, and buying them a new puppy before you ever think about selling them anything.

To be frank, if you feel afraid to pitch people your services, you probably feel unconfident in your offer. If this is the case, your offer might suck, or you have so few case studies that it may as well suck as far as your target market’s concerned.

If you appear credible and authoritative, people will respond to your outbound. Many of my outbound messages are pretty basic,* but they work—again—because I’m extremely authoritative.

*Basic doesn’t mean spammy. I send short, concise, and conversational messages, generally referring to a case study and offering to send a free sample of my service.

I’ve tried very personalized outbound where I reference something specific about their accomplishments, a recent milestone, or a nuanced aspect of their business.

It never seemed to affect the response rate much, and the reason for this is extremely obvious: mature business owners can always recognize when they’re being pitched, no matter what you say.

With that in mind, you may as well get to the point. They’re either going to want your service or not. Outside of improving your offer, there’s really nothing you can do to change that.

Side note: the same rules don’t apply to long-term “dream clients” that would be life-changing if you were able to secure them as a client. There does exist a hyper-personalized mega value-add approach that is completely worth investing in, but that’s for another newsletter.

It’s the same way that a woman at a party knows that the men approaching her most likely aren’t making conversation for the fun of it—they perceive her as attractive and available and thus are pitching themselves as potential partners (even if they’re coy about it at first, opening with basic conversation).

Assuming they have basic respect and social competency, the woman is either going to be interested in a relationship or not, whether in general (general need for services) or with them specifically (interest in their services).

The “need” is almost completely out of their control—it either works out, or they need to move on. Sales is the same way in every medium (nobody runs ads expecting to convert everyone).

If you’re of the school of thought that success in sales depends entirely on your ability to build pseudo-social relationships with targets, you don’t need to be here. All you need to do is pitch your good friends and family on your services.

In this case, if the strength of the relationship is the “X factor,” you should have zero trouble in converting 100% of them to your services.

Obviously, that won’t happen because, most likely, 0% of them have a need for your services. There has to be a need. Welcome back.

The good news in sales is that everyone likes making money. If you offer a good service that offers your target market a transparently good chance of making more money, generating interest is not difficult, and people will respond to your outreach.

So just be respectful and to the point, knowing that your results almost completely depend on the strength of your offer and the authority you present with your profile.

For example, Sunny Bonnell.

Sunny is the co-founder of a world-renowned brand strategy agency that’s worked with Google, Virgin, the NFL, and other household names.

She also has 15,000 engaged followers and the blue Top Voice badge, as well as features on Bloomberg TV, Yahoo! Finance TV, and Cheddar TV.

If you’re the founder of a tech startup that’s just raised a Series A funding round and Sunny messages you something like…

Hey Jimmy Startup, congrats on the Series A. Just so you know, we started working with Unicorn after that same milestone, and thanks to the strategy and branding we built for them, they were acquired by Netflix for $40M five years later. Can I send you that case study?

…there’s a good chance you’re going to respond in the affirmative.

It’s overtly promotional, but because you recognize her authority, credibility, and ability to create an ROI an order of magnitude higher than what she invoices you for, you’re probably going to say, “Yes, I’d like to see that case study.”

She doesn’t need to send you a vicuña sweater from Loro Piana that includes a hand-written invite to The French Laundry coupled with a Delta One ticket to San Francisco, in which she’ll then mention the case study.

True, that probably would make you more likely to respond, but because of her credibility, it’s not necessary at all.

Now, keep imagining you’re that Series A founder. But instead of Sunny messaging you, it’s someone with a selfie profile picture, a low-quality portfolio, and no real case studies to speak of.

You wouldn’t respond. And even if they sent you the vicuña sweater, you’d probably assume it was fake. You surely wouldn’t go to meet them in the Bay Area.

This should be extremely comforting because it takes a load off the shoulders.

You don’t need to invest in the convoluted social selling processes many people cite as mandatory. You just need to not suck at what you do.

Unless you’re selling Park Avenue Tower units, competence and credibility are all you need to book calls with prospects—your sales skills are just an optimization.

Does your offer suck? Scroll back up and build a Ferrari LaFerrari offer.

Does your offer not suck? Then start sending messages—people will respond.

When people respond, get them into a 1:1 call. Then, pitch your services and convert them. Your revenue/added revenue will grow and grow and grow—to $25,000/month and beyond. Just keep putting in the work.

Yes, I’m leaving a lot of detail out, but this is a high-level overview of the process, and the little details of each part are best left for another day.

Rest assured that what’s written here is, fundamentally, all you need to do.

Conclusion

To reiterate, LinkedIn is the highest-leverage content marketing channel on the planet right now. It’s pretty darn good at outreach, too—as I mentioned above, I recently signed a Series C SaaS client through DMs.

That said, if you’re a leader at a business generating over $1M per year in revenue, you have zero time to devote to this with everything else on your plate.

And given that I’m extremely good at this, you should outsource it to me. If that interests you, please book a call with me here.

If that doesn’t describe you, but if you’d still like to work with me, please book a paid coaching call with me here.

In any case, I’ll see you in the next newsletter (coming when it’s ready).

Thanks for reading.