A quick trick to get free traffic from LinkedIn

In these days I’m busy finding ways to generate traffic to our website. A while ago, I read about this trick and I decided to test it out.

Some background info

The BD School offers content and training to help business development professionals acquire and enhance BD skills. We produce a lot of content and one of our challenges is to make sure enough people see it.

If you’re just starting your blog, chances are you won’t have many people reading your articles at the beginning. And if nobody reads your articles, your content is basically useless.

You won't get leads and you won't reach the goal you originally set for yourself.

Of course, there are many ways to generate traffic, but some of them require a budget that you might not have. So what you can do, is to be creative and think out of the box.

So, what's this experiment about?

STEP 1: Choose one of your articles

The first you have to do is to choose one of your blog articles to promote. When choosing the article you can use different criteria:

• You can promote an old article that already gets traffic. If it's already generating traffic it means it's interesting enough for your audience.
• You can promote a new article that you think is interesting enough to generate traffic.
• You can promote an unusual article. If you decided to test a new framework, it could be a good way to validate your assumptions.
• You can promote your favorite article!

For this experiment I chose an article we recently wrote about misconceptions in business development. I chose this one because it's a new article and it's quite relatable to my audience. Besides, I really enjoyed writing it and I believe it's quite helpful and actionable.

STEP 2: Start writing a LinkedIn article

The next step is to start writing an article on LinkedIn. You find this feature on your homepage, in the space where you usually write your posts.

Just click "write an article" and the LinkedIn publishing tool will open!

The article you are about to write should be a sort of a teaser of the article you chose to promote. It should be short, provide valuable insights and catch the attention of your readers, without giving too much information.

In my case it would be something along these lines (do spend some more time on this than what I did):

“Have you ever felt frustrated in business development? You’re not alone! We asked our community Business Developers United and it turns out we have quite some frustrations in common.

The top 4 frustrations are:

• You are only a salesman just with a fancier title
• Business Development means nothing, anyone can be one
• Clients or managers expecting you to close a deal in one week
• Business Development is a one-man show

Very often people don’t realize they make these mistakes and they see them just “innocent” comments.

However, if you are a manager and keep doing this, you can end up demotivating your team.

What can you do to prevent this from happening? There is actually a number of tips to...read more.”

STEP 3: Exploit curiosity to generate traffic

Now, the trick is to exploit curiosity at the right time. As you see, I left the sentence unfinished and you guess it, the “read more” link takes you to the article I originally chose.

Why this is supposed to work:

• Curiosity is a very powerful psychological trigger. Humans are curious, especially if there is something to learn! So why not using it for a good cause?!
• You provide an initial value. It's not just a random list of things. What you write needs to provide some sort of relevant information, so even if the reader doesn’t follow the link, at least s/he learns something.
• You leave the sentence unfinished at a strategic point. If you leave the reader hanging, right at the point where s/he's about to get the most valuable info, s/he's most likely going to click and learn more. 
• LinkedIn articles rank quite high on Google. You will use its influence to bring more people to your blog.
• Ideally, your LinkedIn connections are part of your audience. If they hang out on LinkedIn, then you definitely have to exploit its power.

Some practical tips

• Choose an interesting article among the ones you have.
• Make sure there are internal links to other content.
• Use a UTM tag for your custom url. In this way you will be able to track the performance of your experiment. To create a UTM link, You can use this builder.
• Don't copy your original article. Instead, try to make a short summary and rephrase it a little bit.
• Before doing it, ask some of your connections or friends to interact with the article within the first minutes you post it. In this way LinkedIn will see it as a relevant article and show it to more people.
• You can use other words like "continue reading" "read more" "find out more"....Test it out!

Pretty easy right? Try it out and let me know how it works for you!