5 steps to get new customers on LinkedIn - FREE!

Finding new customers with LinkedIn is actually fairly easy, especially with the new user interface. This social media platform is an incredibly powerful tool. Because most of us don't know how to use the LinkedIn search tool, we miss out on finding and connecting with new prospects.

So, Here Are My Top 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Get New Customers on LinkedIn.

1 - Define Ideal Customer

Your your company's success depends on how well your understand your ideal customer. In order to communicate the value that your product or service delivers to your customers, it's essential to understand their pain points and how they seek to solve them. Sometimes this is called a persona or an avatar.

It doesn't really matter what you call it as long as you identify who you're targeting, so you know which prospects you're looking for on LinkedIn.

2 - Start with clicking in the "Search" field. For example, if you sell a service to videographers, type "videographer" in the search box. With no other qualifiers in the advanced search, over 100,000 results come up. Now, you can narrow your focus by adding specific locations, like cities, states and countries.

After focusing on a specific location, I recommend adding the connection qualifier to see who you and your contacts know who meet your ideal customer profile. Connections with people you already know are warmer and easier to nurture.

3 – Narrow results with additional qualifiers. You can narrow the results down by the location by typing in the area you want to search in the location field. Below that field, you'll see the check boxes for first, second, group and third and everyone else. You can further narrow the field of prospects by selecting these. Select third and everyone else for the broadest list of results. You can get more specific and with other details as well, like industry, past or current company, school and more.

4 – Create your hottest leads list. You can message first connections directly through LinkedIn. You can also access contact info for first connections. Often, they will have email, website and social media details listed.

You can connect with second degree contacts, so go ahead and click the "connect" button next to their names.

Sending an "Inmail" through LinkedIn is an option for reaching out to second connection. I find that it's not as efficient as some other ways to connect.

Insider's secret! #5! ---> You can connect directly with people who are in groups with you! That's right! You can connect with complete strangers if you share membership in th same LinkedIn group!. As of this post, LinkedIn allows membership in up to 50 groups. 

A quick message saying you look forward to hearing more about their business and would like to stay in touch is all you need. Finding something specific in the contacts profile or group discussion to mention will make your message stand out.

The easiest way to discover some interesting details, is to look at the contact's LinkedIn profile and review what they have posted recently, where they have worked the past few years, school they attended and even nonprofits they like. Using a bit of a personal connection goes a long way to begin the conversation and start a potential relationship. Other ideas are to watch videos, view SlideShare or samples of work to get some insight about the new contact. a look at any of these videos like this.

Connecting with the new contact on Twitter or other social networks can be really useful for starting a conversation. Approaching people them from multiple platforms can increase your success rate. and reach out to

Success tip! -->  Making a positive comment about a prospect's work or post can increase their response rate! Click here to download email templates that work great to connect with new prospects on LinkedIn.

"I deliver a service that helps videographers edit and deliver their videos quicker and more cost-effectively and wondered if you'd be interested in hearing more about this. "

"I'm a fellow Tarheel and wanted to reach out to you to talk about a tool that I've got that will help HR managers work more productively. I went to that Final Four basketball game and it was crazy!

As you can see, researching on LinkedIn can be very powerful! The amount of information you can discover takes a little bit of time but can be like uncovering gold. It's always good to know people who are successful, so it is extremely valuable to take your time to do your research to uncover the riches available to you on LinkedIn.

I'm looking for specific companies and want to find the contact I need to approach. I may find a contact of mine is connected to the person I'd like to reach out to. I could send him a message asking for an introduction. "I'd like to meet x and it looks like you and I are both connected to him or her. I'd love to talk to her about what it's like so you could I could have absolutely do that I could also i wanted to warm it up.

Some more I could look at the organizations and the groups and I could do all kinds of research on where people are what they're doing and find ways to reach out to them and connect with them

Now we've looked at different ways to use LinkedIn's advanced search to find prospects - people who meet your profile an ideal customer.

• Jobs
• Title
• Geography
• Group memberships
• Post and activity
• Company – past and current
• School