What I learned when I offered to give away a list of 500 game publishers on LinkedIN.

The first lesson: Clear your schedule for the week.

I had no idea what I was getting into. I had this idea late on Friday July 5. The plan was to use the list to help raise awareness for our upcoming virtual business event. No big deal. I'll just offer it up to anyone on LinkedIN who could use it.

By Sunday I knew I was in trouble. Good trouble mind you, but trouble none the less. The post took on a life of it's own. It was all I could do to keep up with the requests, plus get the actual work I needed to get done as CEO of a company as well. By close of business one week later the post had been viewed over 115,000 times and we had over 900 requests for the list. Here's what we learned.

1. LinkedIN groups weren't helpful. I shared the link in six groups, each with tens of thousands of members. Less than 1% of the requests came from those groups. More could have seen it and gone to the original post, but in terms of comments by location it was tiny.
2. Next time build a landing page. I finally gave up and did this on Thursday after six days of traffic. Pointing people there was much easier and they still shared their email address. Said page is here.
3. Ask people to share. Doing this helped the spread and people don't mind doing it.
4. We doubled our mailing list. I know we will have people unsubscribe, but given how low our current unsubscribe rates are, I doubt it will be many. When you have a compelling lead generator like this list and you don't use your newsletter to constantly sell something you build a reliable following.
5. We received immediately new leads. Within that one week we already had a new client and several more prospects.
6. Anti-virus sites hate you. We started getting false positives on AVG and Avast for the PDF. After testing the file against both programs it was clear the issue was not the PDF. We think this came from the high volume of emails we had to send out.

All told we ended up with over 115,000 views with no paid boosts or advertising, 900+ new subscribers to the newsletter, 250+ new connection requests, and hopefully a lot of goodwill from the game industry in general.