The 5-Minute Linkedin Growth Hack

Here is one hack you can use instantly!

My LinkedIn profile has been largely unmaintained since 2009. I log in every few weeks and indiscriminately accept all my requests.

The result? I now have 715 people that somewhat give a shit about me.

Here’s the clincher though — LinkedIn makes it easy to export your contacts. Like… stupidly easy.

Hit the Keep in Touch menu item under the Connections drop-down. Then, find the Settings icon in the top right to get to this page:

And just like that, I now have a CSV file of every single contacts e-mail address.

You can easily sign up for a free account on mailchimp.com that should be sufficient for this email.

Navigate to the Lists section of their impeccably designed admin panel and choose the Import List button and upload the CSV you just generated.

Mailchimp does all the work for you here and automatically matches the first name, last name and email address.

I chose to Skip the other columns and boom — I now have a 712 person mailing list ready to be used.

The beauty of this approach is how highly targeted this list is to people that CARE about you.

In online marketing, that is as powerful a hook as you are ever going to get.

Here is an (anonymized with my name) e-mail template that an instructor of ours used to get over 100 free signups to his school:

Looking for a new job? Chances are one of your Linkedin contacts knows exactly the right opportunity.

Raising money for Alzheimers research? This approach is a lot more effective than updating your Facebook status 7 times a day.

Trying to find a worthy beneficiary for Nigerian royalty money? Done, done and done.*

As long as you promise to remove my email from this experiment, I’d love to hear how it works out for you on Twitter.