This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen discusses how to build connections on LinkedIn.

You need to be building connections on LinkedIn, but they need to be the right connections.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

Have you been receiving a lot of connection requests on LinkedIn? 

Deep down, your gut knows most of them are scams. In the long run, it’s hindering you from connecting with people because you fear being labelled a scam. I understand you!

In the last episode, I shared how to build credibility. Today, I’d like us to put the credibility we’ve built to work by making connections. The journey to building connections on LinkedIn starts with building a network. You must create a group of people you want to surround you. These people can range from podcast hosts, CEOs, journalists, and others in your industry. Episode 205 expounds on the various relationships you need to have. I challenge you to make sure that you connect with five people weekly this year.

As you look for people to connect with, I want you to refrain from playing small. Feel free to get in touch with influential people and work downward. Forget about going through the gatekeepers first. You’ll meet them somewhere along the way. For instance, you can connect with a CEO who connects you with his/her assistant for information or to book a meeting.

Listen in to learn more about how to build LinkedIn connections. 

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: https://karenyankovich.com/221
  • Introduction: the essence of building connections [02:30]
  • How to build a network on LinkedIn [05:40]
  • People to connect with [07:17]
  • Connect with the most influential people [08:02]
  • Places to find warm LinkedIn connections [10:28]

Magical Quotes from the Episode:

“Networking/talking to people is what’s going to build your business. Nobody will invest in your highest ticket opportunities before they talk to you.”

“The beauty of LinkedIn is not the algorithm and the reach, which I get asked a lot about. It’s in the connections.”

“When I say to you start connecting at the top level, you have to feel and believe and truly understand that you are worthy of connecting with these the most influential people in your industry.”

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

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Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 221.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:24
Hello, I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is episode 221. The good girls get rich podcast. And this episode is brought to you by she’s linked up where we teach women simple relationship, a heart based marketing, it’s a LinkedIn marketing strategy that helps you get calls on your calendar gets you on the phone consistently with the kinds of people that can change your business, change your bank account, change your life for ever, we want to create more wealthy women of influence in the world. And we’re doing this one woman at a time door she’s linked up program. If you’ve listened before, if you love what you hear today, I love hearing from you. So if you haven’t yet, please subscribe to the show on wherever you listen, if you feel on it, leave a review, especially if you feel about five star review in you. It helps me get a sense of the kinds of things you are that’s resonating with you. And that maybe we should talk more about right. So I’d love that. And also take a quick screenshot of this episode, share it on social media, use the hashtag good girls get rich, tag me. And I’ll be sure to share your post with my audience. And that’s how we all get more visibility. In the show notes. There’s a link for SpeakPipe where you can leave an audio message, I love your audio messages, I personally respond to every one of them. Maybe there’s a guest you think you’d like to have me interview or a topic you’d love for me to talk about. Or maybe you just want to say hello, or give us a review on SpeakPipe. I love that. And like I said I respond to every single one of them. So you can find that at Karen yankovich.com/ 221. You’ll see the blog for this page, you’ll see the link for SpeakPipe and all the other goodies that I talked about on the show. So if you listen last week, you’ll know that this is a three part series. This is part two of the three part series of the three part framework that’s behind the scenes, in all of the work that I do, right are choosing to program and all the private work that I do it, there’s a method to the madness, right. And there’s a simple three part framework. Last week, we talked about credibility, that’s the first part of the three part frame of the three parts in the framework. This week, we’re going to be talking about connection. And next we’re gonna be talking about conversation. But this week, we’re talking about connection. Okay, this is the second part of the three part framework. And, you know, here’s the thing about the connecting piece. This is what makes I really don’t look at LinkedIn as social media even, it’s kind of like digital virtual networking, and networking, talking to people is what’s going to build your business, nobody’s going to invest in your highest ticket opportunities, before they talk to you, it’s very unlikely that that’s going to happen. So I’m not saying don’t do all the other stuff, right, maybe the lower ticket stuff, the whole funnel, 97,000 sales page thing, but we’re thinking about your highest ticket opportunities. That’s where the connecting piece comes, that’s where you have to get on, you have to talk to people, right. And that’s going to be the third piece of this the conversation piece. But right now, what we’re doing is we want to fill our network full of the kinds of people and I said this earlier, that can change our business, change our bank balance and change our lives forever, right. So you know, I’m sure that if you are on LinkedIn now that you’re probably getting a lot of LinkedIn connection requests from people you don’t know. And you’re like, This is spam. I’m not interested in spamming my network. And I 100% agree with you. Okay, I’m going to talk more about that. But the beauty of LinkedIn, in my opinion, is not the algorithm and the reach, which I get asked a lot about. It’s in the connections, it’s in the ability to reach out to and connect with the kinds of people that we just simply didn’t have the ability to connect to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, right. And this has become even more important in the last few years, right? When the we realized when the world went virtual, the absolute value and beauty and the unbelievable brilliance of using LinkedIn to reach the kinds of people that we never had reached to before and LinkedIn is where that happens. Right? And here’s the thing, I honestly don’t care about the algorithm. I cannot tell you how often I get asked about that. How do I post? When do I post? How often do I post? Oh, you know, of course, we want to post on LinkedIn, we want to stay top of mind with these people that we’re connecting with. But I honestly don’t care a whit about the algorithm. You know, do I want my people to see my posts? Of course I do. And do I if there’s if there’s ways that I can post this way instead of that way, then I’m going to do that because why not? If I know what’s going to feed the algorithm better, but that is where I draw the line. I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about how do I get more eyes? How do I get 1000 or a million people eyes on my content? I don’t really care about that. What I care about is the connection Since I care about the connections link, if you just want visibility, go start tweeting, right? Twitter’s gonna get you a ton of visibility, go, you know, go on some of these other platforms, yes, you can get visibility on LinkedIn and we want to do that. But the biggest benefit, the biggest value of LinkedIn is the connecting piece is to be able the ability to show up credible, right, we talked about that last week showing up credible so that when you move to this connecting piece, people are like, Heck, yeah, I want to connect with this person. They look like a rockstar, right? So how do you do that? How do you then start to build your network full of these beautiful, amazing, wonderful, fabulous people without spamming your network? How do you do that? Right? Well, the first thing you need to do is there’s a couple things we’re going to talk about here today, the first thing I want you to understand is that this is something that I want you to do consistently, okay, be consistent with this connecting piece. And I’m not ever gonna say connect with 100 people a week, I don’t even want you to connect with 20 people a week, when I work with people, we start at five people a week, if I said to you, for the entire remainder of this year, for the next 52 weeks, whenever you’re listening to this, whether you’re listening to it when it came out live, or if you’re listening to this two years from now, if I said to you for the next 52 weeks, I want you to put on your calendar, and no matter what, like you brush your teeth, no matter what, you’re going to connect to five people every week. That’s it. But I want you to be very intentional about who those people are. And I want them to be people that you actually want to meet and people that you actually want to have a conversation with. We’re not looking to just build your network full of people, faceless, voiceless people, I want every single person you connect with for you to have the intent to ultimately have a conversation with them. Now, is that going to happen? Probably not. Right, you’re not going to have 100% Return on conversations with the people that you connect with. But going into it, that’s the intention, I want you to have five people a week, be consistent do this every single week, no matter what. Okay, no matter what. Now, in Episode 205, I talked about the three different categories of relationships you could build. And we’ll link to that in the show notes. So when you’re when you’re thinking about these five people a week that you want to connect with, you want to do it across those three categories, category number one, and I go deep into this in that other in that other episode, I think it’s 205. Category number one, people, obviously that might want to buy from you. Category number two potential partners. And category number three potential journalists, right, be consistent do this connecting every single week. And when you’re doing those three categories. I mean, I’m talking five per week. So I’m not saying five in each category. I’m saying maybe one week you connect with five podcast hosts that you know, you want it, you love their show, and the next week you connect with some people from a conference you met. We’re gonna talk more about that later. But I’m not saying five in each category, I’m saying there’s three categories, five people a week, very, very easy to do for every single person listening to this. The second thing I want you to think about is as you are doing this, as you are connecting, connecting, connecting every single week with five people, I want you to remember to think big, connect with the most influential people remember, you did the work last week to establish yourself as credible, right, if you listen to last week’s show, so you’re already a presenting yourself as credible as worthy of their time. And let me tell you something, we talked about this a little bit there, too. This is identity stuff, right? When I say to you start connecting at the top level, you have to feel and believe and truly understand that you are worthy of connecting with these most the most influential people in your industry, the most influential people you want to connect with. And those of you that are as old as me might remember the days of having to get through the gatekeeper. Right. So what that means if for those of you not as not as old as me, is when you were you know, if we were in sales back in the day, right, when there wasn’t social media to build relationships, and you wanted to get in touch with, you know, let’s say the sales manager of a company, you’re gonna get through the receptionist, right? Whether you walked in the door, the first person you saw with the receptionist, whether you called on the phone, the first person you heard was the receptionist, right? That’s the gatekeeper. And that’s the person that we had to get through. Before we could get to the person we actually wanted to talk to. We don’t have to do that anymore. We can go top down now, instead of having all those years ago, we had to go bottom up to find the people we want to we wanted to reach now. Now we can go top down. Because if you reach out at the top level to the CEO, or the president of the company that you want to connect with, and they can and they respond to you and say, You know what, maybe they’ll maybe they won’t respond to you. Who cares, right? But if they maybe though, maybe they’ll respond to you and say like, what do you want? Again, who cares? We’re not looking to spam people, and we’re gonna get to that, but maybe what they’re gonna say is, you know what, that’s a great idea. Reach out to Margaret at this, you know, here’s her email or here, you know, Margaret, so and so. She’s the person you want to talk to. Now, when you reach out to Margaret, you’re not getting past the gatekeeper to get to Margaret. You’re going Hey, Margaret, your boss told me to reach out to you. Right? Understand the difference. So think big when you’re doing this consistent, connecting. I want you to think big. You want to be connecting with the most influential people you’re showing up. You know, as the CEO of your business. I As the CEO of your life, remember that you’re connecting with people as and you’re positioned as if you’re peers with the most influential people in your industry, right? So think like that when you’re connecting with these people. And then the third thing I want you to think about as you’re doing this, and this is something I’m gonna refer you to another episode I did this was episode 82. So we’ll link to this in the show notes. 208. Karen yankovich.com/oh, a two in Karen Yankovich Shot comm slash Oh, eight two,

it was the the episode was how to stop spamming your LinkedIn network. And I talked about 20 places to find warm LinkedIn connections, you absolutely never have to do this five per week to the cold audience. Right? So I’m going to just kind of read off some of the things we talked about on that other episode. Do you belong to a chamber of commerce mind to the directory, you don’t have to go to every person in the directory but cherry pick through the Chamber of Commerce directory? Hey, we’re both members of the chamber, right? Have you taken classes? What about the other people in your class? Maybe they’re peep, maybe it’s classes? Maybe it’s an online marketing class? Maybe, you know, there’s there’s lots of other you know, there’s lots of people in the classes that might be, you know, have the same interest that you have? What about your college alumni? Are you attending a conference? are you connecting with other attendees? Are you attending a conference? are you connecting with the speakers in the conference? Maybe there’s meetups in your area. Maybe there’s local business organizations, maybe there’s industry, business organizations, connect with former co workers, right? Journalists whose work you admire journalists who write about what you do, people that you meet at networking events, hosts of your favorite podcast, fellow students in online classes, you enroll in speakers and online summits that you listen to or participate in. Right? local politicians and business leaders, favorite authors, favorite, you know, Facebook groups for the kinds of things that you’re interested in. Maybe there’s a networking app like Bumble biz, right? We know there’s Bumble and Bumble dating, but there’s also a bumble biz app. And there’s other business apps like that, right? networking apps. What about LinkedIn groups for your common interest? Right? That’s I just whipped off 20 different places, do you know how long it’s gonna take you? If you’re doing five people a week to get through those 20 places of places you can connect with people warm? Before you run out of these things. And some of these things you might be like, yeah, Karen, but when I connect with my favorite author, that’s not warm, that’s cold. But you know what, let me just tell you something, your favorite author, if you reach out to your favorite author, and connect with them on LinkedIn, and say, I just read your book, and I loved it. And I’m telling everybody about it. And you post about it on LinkedIn, and you post about it all over the place, and you tag that author, you write them a recommendation on Amazon, that’s what I want you to do. We’re talking about, we want to actually build relationships with these people, right? What author is not going to love that? I’ve talked about this on the show a lot. You know, I have a podcast, we’re in Episode 221. For goodness sake of this podcast, I would love to tell you that every day I when I wake up, I open up LinkedIn. And there’s 30 people that said, Ken, I loved your podcast just this week. That doesn’t happen a lot. It doesn’t happen. I mean, it happens. And I love when it happens. Please do that if you want to write. But I remember those people. So even so even though it’s kind of cold, you’re doing it warm in a warm fashion. Because you’re you’re saying I loved your book. Here’s what I loved about it. I’m sharing it all over the place. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for writing this book. Right? So again, episode on episode 82. So you can see how long ago I’ve been how much long I’ve been talking about this stuff, right? Episode 82, we’re at 121. I talked about not spamming your LinkedIn network, and these 20 places you can find warm, LinkedIn connections. It all comes down to the people you meet, we know this, you know, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, right? You’re the sum of the five people you surround yourself with? We’ve heard these things, we believe these things, when we hear these things. Are you actually doing it? Are you actually doing it? Are you connecting consistently with the kinds of people that you want to have in your life in this upcoming year? So let me recap this a little bit. As you’re, as you’re building out this second piece of this framework we’re going through, right, the first thing I want you to remember is to be consistent five per week, no matter what if you need to get out a Google sheet or whatever you need to do five per week, no matter what, making sure that you’re being intentional, and only connecting with people that your goal is to ultimately get on the phone with and have a conversation with. These are the kinds of things we teach you in our shoes linked up program, how to do this what to say, you know, and of course, we’re always here for you to have those conversations, right. And then the second thing is think big as you’re building this, this list of these people that you want to connect with, make sure that you’re not worrying. You’re not intimidated by people that you might feel are so influential. They might not want to know you. They’re just people. They’re just people they want to know you. Right? So remember, you can go top down, not bottom up when you’re doing this relationship building. And then the third piece of this is there are no there’s no end of places for you to find warm introductions to people that you want to connect with. Episode 82 went through a whole list of these things. I there’s even a download there that you can download and stick on your wall if you go to Episode 82 Where you have with the list of these 20 things right? This is what changes everything for you. It’s this connecting piece and this is What makes LinkedIn different than every other platform out there? Because on LinkedIn, we’re not just, we’re not just talking to nobody, we’re not just like, like, as I sit here and talk to my, to my microphone to nobody in my office as I’m doing this, right? Hopefully, I’m not talking to nobody. But you understand what I’m saying, right? Like, you’re actually building relationships. This is LinkedIn is where you actually want to have conversations or want to talk about those conversations next week, right? But this framework with this, it’s such a simple framework, right? Credibility, you got to look worthy of their time, connect, start to connect with people consistently. And the next we’re going to talk about how to turn those things into conversations, you have enough of these conversations, brilliant, beautiful, amazing things start happening. I mentioned earlier that, you know, our she’s linked up program teaches you how to do all this, it’s everything we do in that program is based on this framework. It’s a very, very high touch program. We have amazing things I have in store for our students in this upcoming year. I can’t wait for them to find out about it. If you want to know what it looks like to be a wealthy woman of influence, like the other women in our program, I would love to chat with you just there’s a link in the show notes to book a call on my calendar, or just go to Karen yankovich.com/call. And let’s chat, you’ll get to hang out not just with me, but all the other incredible women that are making change that are changing the world. These are women that are changing the world. And I know that can be the same for you. So I hope this part two, inspires you a little bit to understand that all of the other busy work, like social media can be an absolute time suck. Don’t worry about all that other stuff. If you have time after you’ve done this connecting piece, then by all means do that other stuff. This stuff is what you have to do first is connecting piece if I never posted again on another platform, but didn’t stop the connecting on LinkedIn. My business probably wouldn’t even take a hit. Think about that for a second. Think about that. Where do you want to spend your time as you move into this new year? All right. I hope that’s I think I’ve evangelized about this enough, please, let’s lift each other up. Help me help you. Share this podcast. Take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone. share that on social media tag me I’m at Karen Yankovich across all social media, and then I can share it with my audience and that helps both of us gets more visibility right. I’m here to help you kick some 2023 Booty grab a spot on my calendar and let’s talk bottom line. This can be simple for you. I will see you back here again next week with another episode, part three