By now, you might know that I’m having a love affair with LinkedIn. I’ve blogged before about how to improve your LinkedIn engagement and how to use hashtags on LinkedIn for better performance. In this blog, let’s talk more specifically about a few LinkedIn lead generation hacks you can use as a freelancer to connect with brands and people to who you’d like to offer your services.

BTW, I’ve also got a couple of videos on LinkedIn, as well!

3 LinkedIn Lead Generation Hacks to Land Your Next Freelancing Client

Alright, let’s dive in!

Hack #1: Use LinkedIn Like a Search Engine

You have to remember that LinkedIn actually functions similarly to Google. People go on there, search for what they’re looking for, and LinkedIn delivers the most relevant results.

This means you’re going to want to type into the search field keywords that are related to either the type of company you want to work with or the type of person you’re trying to find.

Let’s say, as an example, that your niche is cryptocurrency. You provide your freelancing services to businesses that fall under the cryptocurrency industry. You’d want to go on LinkedIn and search, you guessed it, “cryptocurrency.”

But we’re not going to stop there. There’s another step we want to take, which brings us to…

Hack #2: Filter Down Your Results

When you search for something on LinkedIn, the results page is going to show you a bunch of different things. It might show you companies, people, job postings, a mixed bag. You can see that in the screenshot above.

We want to get much more specific than this. That’s where LinkedIn’s filters come into play. Check this out.

We’re going to go to the results page for “cryptocurrency,” we’re going to click on All Filters, and then we’ll filter by Companies.

From here, we can get a lot more specific about what kinds of leads we want to target. For instance, I don’t typically go after companies that are very big or very small. When they’re too big, it’s really hard for me to connect with the right person to pitch my services to. And when they’re on the smaller side, they often don’t have the budget they’d need to pay for my services.

For this reason, I’ll usually start my search by narrowing the results according to company size. I select 11-50 employees and 51-200 employees.

Of course, if this happens to narrow your search results too much, you could always expand beyond these numbers.

How you set your filters is entirely up to you. Company size is where I start. Sometimes, I’ll also specifically target companies in the United States (although I work with brands around the globe).

The point here is that we want to get specific. We don’t want to target everyone, because everyone isn’t your ideal client.

I really want to emphasize this: When you try to target everyone, you end up reaching no one.

Let’s keep going.

Hack #3: Find the Best Employee to Connect With

At this point, we’ve used filters to narrow down a company we want to reach out to. You still need to find an actual person to connect with. We always reach out to a human being, not some random email address that starts with info@ or support@. That’s not good enough.

Here’s what you’re going to do.

You should now be on the search results page for companies that operate in the cryptocurrency industry. What you’re going to do is click on each of the companies, and then click on their employees.

This is what you’re looking for.

If you click on People, you’ll go to a page showing all of the people who have that company listed as their employer. After that, you want to find the best person/people to connect with about your services, and you’re off to the races.

Once you get the hang of this process, you’ll be able to use LinkedIn to generate tons of leads, quickly. And they’re going to be high-quality leads because you hand-picked them, very specifically.

This is important because it’s during this step that I see a lot of freelancers try to cut corners. They’re thinking of using bots or scraping email addresses or buying email addresses. Some people will go on LinkedIn, and rapid-fire hit connect! connect! connect! on a million different people.

That is not how I teach client acquisition, and whatever method you choose to follow, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, I will always encourage you to put quality right up there with quantity. Black hat tactics and low-quality habits are a good way to get your page locked.

I know landing clients as a freelancer can feel incredibly overwhelming. And with so much terrible advice online, how do you know who to listen to? In my program, I teach freelancers my complete process for making money as business owners, from start to finish. Check out Revenue Spark and if you’re interested in enrolling, book a call with me to speak more.