Uncover The Top Secrets Of LinkedIn To Expand Your Business Network | Avi Arya | Vaibhav Sisinty |

People want to learn from people who they want to become. I started something. It eventually led me to a long way. Every Internet company founder has to be on LinkedIn. If he is not, then Abhi Arya. Father of two girls, six dogs, husband.

To a superwoman, a streetcar raiser, turn hotelier. Then marketer and founder of Internet moguls.

What up Internet moguls?

So Vaibhav, you know what, we have a format that we start, you know, we talk about this hero introduction a lot. So I'll start the hero introduction in my style and then we'll ask us to give us yours. We'll start with a Q and A and take it from there.

Done.

So my name is ABHI Arya. Father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, streetcar racer, turn hotelier. Now social media marketer and founder of Internet moguls. Vaibhav, what is your hero introduction?

Okay.

My name is Vaibhav. A father to one dog, single, happily single. Run a startup called AS Growth school. Started as a marketer right now.

Awesome. I remember the first time we spoke was. I think Covid had hit and I was wearing my tracksuit, sitting at home not knowing exactly what we are all doing. And I think and I got a call from you and we just started talking and we had some common friend, I think Deepak from London. And so we just started connecting and. And you told me a lot of things about LinkedIn and you know, some of those hacks and you also checked out my profile and gave me a lot of things, things with that from there to now becoming the person, the LinkedIn man in the country. So you know, but my first question to you is whenever you enter a market as, as a brand, as, as a company, do you think it should be a deliberate strategy to master one profile, say yours is LinkedIn and then now you're doing 20 other things. But you go in with one strength so that people recognize you for that and then you expand or can you go as a generalist? What are your views on that?

A lot of things are figured out or became more clearer as I started to do things right. Like the first thing that I did like four years, three years back was to start a LinkedIn course, right. I started to only sell that to the international audiences. Never sold to India. Still sell it at like $500 to the international audiences. Fourteen hundred dollars, right. All organically thought India doesn't pay. India as a market doesn't pay. It's not worth it. People don't value content, people don't value a lot of things that I was wrong with a lot of things, right? And then Deepak, who is also a common friend, Kanak Raju, like, literally said, dude, do one webinar for my audience. Do one webinar. Literally convinced me to do a webinar for his audience. And a lot of people wanted to take that program. Obviously they cannot pay 13, 1400 dollars. So we had a discounted price. But there was a massive volume that came in. And that made me realize that India as a market does buy, right? You just have to explain and the value of things and what they're going to get out of it. Because they're very outcome oriented, right? Which made a lot of sense. That is how I am as a person. Because I'm an Indian too, right? Like, I come from that same thinking process. And then when I started to do LinkedIn workshop, I realized when I started to think through it, saying, why are thousands of people joining my workshop every month? Like, and that too by paying, coming from a market which I never thought will pay, right? LinkedIn Workshop is taken date. It runs right every month with 700 to 800 people joining Nice on a monthly basis, right? When I asked myself, like, why is this happening? I went on to research to understand, boss, like, why are you even buying my program, right? There are 100 other people selling you LinkedIn. Why is buying from me? Then this thing that came out very clear was people want to learn from people who they want to become, right? They wanted, they looked into me and said, this guy has not done anything in life, like, not from an iit, not from a fancy college, but has achieved something on LinkedIn. And I am like him. They empathize. I'm not a big founder. I'm not like a, you know, not like a big personal brand to have a lot of following, right? A Kunal Shah coming and teaching won't make sense though he has Kunal Shah. They saw that they can become like me. So that worked really well. And I said, boss, this is actually applicable in a lot of other places, right? A guy who works in a company that you aspire to also kind of has gone through a cycle, right? So that is when the idea of growth school kind of originated where I said, how can I get the best people? People are working at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, WhatsApp to come and teach the skills that they operate at on a daily basis so that people can get a download of their lives and they learn from people who they want to become, right? So for me, if you Ask me if there is a way to. There is no prediction here, right. I didn't think that, hey, I will start doing growth school first. Okay, I didn't say I will start LinkedIn first. I started something, it eventually led me to a lot of places. So when my. I'm sorry if I dragged it too much but my.

Not at all.

My answer here is it doesn't matter, at least for me. As long as you intend to not give up and keep trying, you'll figure your way out. Because if the idea is that if there's a template that one can follow, follow that template and will where it is, right? Like if I had to do this all over again, I don't think there's a better way to do this.

I love that. I love the closing. If I had another. If I have to do it all over again, I don't know if there's a better way to do it. But, but it has to be, it has to be like that. And thank you for giving it, you know, straight, straight up. Because a lot of people think servo secret formula. What's that? Secret formula. So there is no secret formula. You keep trying. You know, day before yesterday we had one of our teachers, Trevor from the UK and he was teaching a subject over here and one of the things he said was, he said when people do give you a blueprint abcd, he said, you must realize that person has gone from A to Z to F to Q to whatever to find his next B. And then he, you know, so when he gives you his. So that's how a blueprint is created and in the first place. And even though you have the blueprint, you'll take your own time, switch time to be able to find your own.

So doesn't give you the success, right. Execution of the blueprint does a lot of people confuse between these two things, right? Like, because I mean like I said, if, if it was as easy as following a B or step one, step to step three, like this will increase your chances. That's. That's my way of going about it.

So.

Got it, Got it. So I have a few questions from people over here. So Ajay Singh says, you know, I have a digital marketing agency. Any strategies on how to market people of, you know, different kind of audiences on LinkedIn?

Yeah. If you're running a digital marketing agency, I don't think there is a better place to get clients than that of LinkedIn because whoever you as a target prospects unless until you're targeting offline stores, which was always Offline and never was online. Every Internet company founder has to be on LinkedIn. If he is not, then I doubt the existence of his company being an Internet first company.

Right.

And digital marketing is something that you do for an Internet first company.

Right.

Which has an Internet layer of it.

Right.

So obviously founders are all there. There are things that you should create.

Right.

In the end, as a creator on any platform, if you're trying to generate inbound leads or inbound clients through a platform, it has to happen by you talking about your product in a non advertising way.

Right, right.

Way you go about it is you talk about a case study, but in form of a story. By not saying come join my link or come join my, come buy my thing. Right. We just put the story out there, figure it out to come find you. And inbound process is always harder because it takes you time to set that process. It takes you time for people to listen to you. But on an outbound level, it's as simple as finding a sales navigator, putting up filters of the kind of people you want and start DMing them.

Right.

It's as simple as that. Like yes, there are ways to automate it and those are the, you know, like the deep stuff that I can kind of end up teaching in the main programs. But fundamentally it's actually very logically, it's very simple that you find the right kind of people and start hitting them up. And as long as you've done some work for people like them and there is some case studies out there, it will work. I mean, the same strategy kind of follows up everywhere else.

So just. So find them in the search and just hit them up one on one.

Yeah. I mean if outbound is your way to go, then yes.

What about, you know, the second question is what. What is your view on LinkedIn ads versus when somebody's setting up a budget with Google, Facebook and everything? What about LinkedIn ads to get in touch with, you know, these kind of people?

Yeah. LinkedIn ads is actually incredibly powerful. We are 30% of ad budget which is decent sized, I must say today is going to LinkedIn and we are trying to divert more and more ad budgets to LinkedIn. Here's the thing. For you to be able to run LinkedIn ads properly. Okay. Before even I go there.

Right.

The reason why LinkedIn ads is more powerful is because it's much more niche.

Right.

That is you can literally target like you can have this targeting. You know what I want people who are founders of companies with more than 25 employees, which is in the category of hospitality, right? Like I can go much more granular which is impossible on any other social network. The quality of leads is always 10 times better. You, you just getting a lead from LinkedIn just makes it better because of how like, because of how many people have a LinkedIn and you know how many people are active on LinkedIn right? If somebody is active on LinkedIn then he's obviously a much more high quality user than that of Instagram or Facebook for that matter. Now because it comes with such high quality leads, it is expensive because it has limited audience unlike Facebook. So a cost per lead on Facebook for us is about let's say 100 rupees. LinkedIn is usually 350 to 400 rupees, right? A lead, right? Like let's say you run, like let's say you're running a funnel on webinar. Your webinar cost per registration could be 50 rupees on Facebook. That would be like 250 rupees on LinkedIn.

Right?

So if you don't have, if you don't have a clarity on lifetime value of your customer, right. Not going to work for you. As long as you have a LTV in India. If you're, I'm talking about India as a market of at least 3, $400 then you can use LinkedIn. If you're trying to sell a hundred dollar product or something like that, then LinkedIn is not going to work for you. LTV is very important but extremely powerful. Heavily under tapped even now. Wow, nice to know that in India. Yes.

Awesome. So next question we have from this was these were Ajay's question next we have from Amit which is once I have a contact detail and I know exactly who are the people I need to hit up on LinkedIn, is there a specific strategy you would suggest on how to reach out to them if.

You have the contact? You mean like an email or.

No, if I've understood on LinkedIn like you know, I need to reach out to this particular person. Is there a specific.

Yeah, the process very simple. Keep it really real and non salesy. Santosh Kumara script would help. Santosh, I don't have a script to give it to you right now. And also never rely on scripts. Scripts are optimized for that specific person. For example, just because he said script in my LinkedIn workshop I show them an example of a LinkedIn invitation message that I used to send back in the day.

Right.

Today obviously 70,000 people have taken that workshop and God knows how many people have pirated it right now, right? Because of that, there are memes about that specific LinkedIn invitation that nobody originated from. I know it originated from my workshop because it was my message which says, hey, hey, hey. Like, you know, like it starts like that. It's little copy paste that people are. Right? Literally copy paste every five invitations out of one that I get is that too? Because that a few people have done with ads where they're like, copy paste but remove my name and remove my creator's names. All that crap has happened. But that's essentially why scripts should not be used, right? Like you have to understand what it is, understand the framework and build yours, right? That's the only way you're gonna stand out. Take learnings, but don't literally copy paste. At least with scripts. But with that being said, right? The flow usually is you start. One fundamental thing that you have to think about is you have to make it as personalized as you can.

You can, right?

Because LinkedIn also has a lot of people and a lot of people are getting a lot of invitations. And if you think that one person is potentially your customer, all your competition also thinks that is your customer. So everybody is chasing the same person, right? So, for example, I have 15,000 pending invitations right now on my LinkedIn. I don't even know who sends me because I stopped looking at it completely. Whenever I skim through it, the only thing that gets my attention is when somebody has written me a note. And if that note gets me intrigued about the person, that is when I accept that too, by a chance, when I just came through it, right? So start with a good note. The moment the acceptance happen, make sure you drop a follow up of thank you. Because even if you send a note, you might be like, why didn't the person reply to my mode?

Right?

Probably because that the person never got a notification of that note that doesn't go in as a message. It's a note. He can only see it and preview. Or if you open inbox, there will be a note, but it doesn't send you a notification. So it's always important for you to kind of drop a follow up. And I think the real money is always in the follow up, right? Till someone says, stop following up with me, there's nothing wrong with you. Follow up.

Love it. Absolutely.

This is what I do. In fact, sometimes I also like in my old sequence and today also, right? We do a lot of prospecting because we're reaching out to a lot of international mentors to create programs with. Right so we kind of reach out to around thousand people a day today.

Right, Nice.

On multiple platforms and we usually add an email sequence message towards after a couple of follow ups saying that hey, if you're not interested, we get it, just reply us with a no, it will not bother you anymore.

Right.

A few people just replies with a no, which is great. That's a closure. And a few people also feel guilty.

No, no, this is not what I meant. I was meaning to reply to you. I was just busy and happy to accept.

Yeah, so I mean you can always use tweaks. The reason why I'm afraid to say these things is people will just start copying themselves. Right. So think about how to get a reply. Of course, try to add some value. Don't sell. That's one big problem that people do. You send an invitation, the person accepts and bang, big block of text. Of all the amazing services that you provide, nobody gives a about what you provide.

Right.

You have to create that. Like you have to have a conversation with the person to even understand if he needs the service.

Right.

So yeah, that's the way to go.

Got it. We have A question from Mr. Prabhakar says if I'm starting off on LinkedIn and I'm trying to create my own personal brand, you know, should I start writing blogs? Should I start doing videos? Little bit of everything. Know, how do I get started?

The easiest way to get started is writing once a week content, which is the lowest friction point. Videos you have to shoot, blog you have. It's very long form for LinkedIn written post, seven to eight lines of text is more than enough to get started. That's exactly why I Keep saying people, LinkedIn is the easiest platform to create content on.

Right?

On Instagram you have to create some design creator and all that. For YouTube and everywhere else, the minimum that you have to do is shoot a video. I have to put a face to it. But LinkedIn, whatever you have as a thought, just put five lines to where post it, right? That's it. That's all you have to do. Funnily enough, even today LinkedIn content, written content works better than any other format of content, right? So that's all you have to start doing. Start doing with one post a week, move it to two posts a week, three posts per week, whatever you're comfortable with, right? Get to that number, but just be consistent. And every piece of content that is going out has to be the best quality of content. And the quality of content is not decided by you. The quality of content is decided by the amount of engagement you're getting.

Nice.

What I was saying is actually lost the line of thought. Sorry.

No, no, that's. That's all right. So totally understood. So even now, today, in 2022, in June, you're saying that's one place where you don't need to go through all the editing and all the fancy hassles of what happens thing, Just put in post.

Yeah.

Awesome. Shayanthini has a question. She says can we replicate what we're posting on other channels on LinkedIn as well?

Or does it, you just have to like. You just have to like repurpose it. Let's say you're putting a carousel on Instagram, right? You can repurpose the same content onto LinkedIn as a long written post rather than a carousel, right. You're putting a Twitter thread that goes in on LinkedIn directly, right? You're writing, you're doing the reel. The transcription of that can go into post with the reel in itself, right? Like whatever works for you. So absolutely you can. I think content repurposing is something that everybody should do, obviously, right. You start with a piece of content, start with the social media that you're native to.

Right?

So I'm native to LinkedIn, so I always start with writing a post for LinkedIn which gets repurposed to Twitter thread, which gets repurposed to carousel sometimes and things like that. But you could be native to something else. Start there and repurpose it.

Absolutely.

Fine. See, one thing that you have to understand is in every social media there are people, same people you'll find everywhere. So I've seen this over and over again, right. In fact, I repurpose my single line Tweets also onto LinkedIn now.

Right?

Because if something works, that will work in every social network.

Got it.

You just have to get the format right.

Understood. That makes sense. We have a question from Bina Rajput who says that, you know, normally people go for. For E commerce fashion brand owners like myself, people normally go to Instagram and other places. Can LinkedIn help an e commerce person as well? And if you have any ideas to.

Share, frankly, no, because it totally depends on the. Again, like I said, the ticket size. When you're trying to do things organically, you really need to. How do I put it? You need to get to scale. Usually on E Commerce you need to do thousand orders, 100 orders, 200 orders, thousand orders a month. But on LinkedIn, organically, that's very hard to put. You might, if you do a lot of Hustle and tussle, you get five, six orders. But where LinkedIn kind of outshines is when the product that you're trying to sell is like 25,000 rupees. 20,000 rupees, then it makes sense to get you 10 orders in a month because that's a bunch to get from.

Right?

So yeah, I mean that is what will make more sense than this.

Got it. Unless if I'm looking, so. But if I'm looking like for a, for a distributor or a partner overseas, which completely changes the game, that is.

That is not E Com anymore.

Right?

That's, that's basically you're trying to do business development. It's completely different. So that's a different line of doing things.

So you won't find your direct B2C client. But if there's a B2B relationship you're wanting to make, I'm not saying you won't find.

For example, event today, growth pool generates about 50% of organic sales from LinkedIn.

Right.

That is not the point.

Right.

Like scale is the problem.

Webhav, do you find a lot of cross pollination? Like when you say 15% comes from here, 20 comes from here, do you eventually look at the whole mix and say I've spent 50 lakh rupees on 10 platforms and this person went from here, but he then saw me again on Twitter and then finally he saw my Facebook ad and then he converted from there.

Yeah. So attribution, right? So we currently follow Last Touch.

Right?

Last Touch attribution is no matter where the person saw, where did he eventually buy from? That is where it's attributed to. Usually we have seen Last Touch being very powerful on Facebook because people don't have a tendency to buy things off LinkedIn or off YouTube, but they have a tendency to like, you know, like discover things on different platforms. But eventually most of the attribution ends up happening on Facebook. Going forward, we do look at touch points of where it's happening, but usually the last touch eventually ends up at Facebook and Instagram. But the kind of products that we sell on different social networks is also very different. So we do something these days we do something called intensive programs which is priced at 25, 30, 35,000. These are rock stars teaching you stuff, right? Like head of Dunzo brand teaching you brand marketing, head of growth strategy of Facebook teaching you management consulting. Like these are like absolute rock stars, right? They're teaching you. So it's very application driven. When we are trying to do application driven, we know we can only take 50 people for that program and we want to pick the best 50. So for these products we usually run ads only on LinkedIn because I can clearly narrow down on the kind of TG because I don't want to get 10,000 leads, right. I want to get only 200, 300 high quality people out of which I will select the 50 that will get into the port.

Interesting. So essentially are you, are you saying that if, if you have a high ticket program and the difference between your lead cost and your eventual selling cost is considerable, LinkedIn is going to help you? You know, if you're selling apartments, you're selling watches, you're selling high ticket stuff, LinkedIn is, is a no brainer.

It's interesting. I've never seen an ad on watches on LinkedIn. But if you think about, if you are someone who's trying to sell a Rolex or a Birtling or a Rado or you know, let's say a lakh rupee watch, I can't think of a better social network than that of LinkedIn. Because you can, you know that people less than a director level cannot afford to watch. People with less than 15 years of experience in the career cannot afford the watch because they don't make, you know, 50 lakhs a year to afford a three and a half lakh will be watch.

Right?

Because you can, you know that people less than a director level cannot afford to watch people with less than 15 years of experience in the career cannot afford the world because they don't make, you know, 50 lakhs a year to afford a three and a half lakh watch.

Right.

So that way it makes a lot of sense to kind of become a discovery layer as well on LinkedIn.

Got it. So we have a guest, a question from Padma. Padma, if you're here, you can come and ask the question yourself, but Parth has given you access to switch on your video and till we get. Padma, I had a question. When it comes to Weber, when it comes to growing a company, now you're growing a company and you're saying you're growing it on multiple levels on LinkedIn separately and different platforms separately and teams are growing and all of that. So how important in your experience so far has speed been over getting it right? Is there something called getting it right with speed? I mean, what's your experience? Or you keep breaking things faster and you know, building it up as fast?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest reason why I raised funding, right. Was to have this option of experimenting when you I think the biggest disadvantage of a bootstrap business is a, is the, you know, like appetite to experiment at scale. Right? When I was running growth school as a bootstrap business for about one year before I raised the 40 crores that I did, right, I was always like one experimental, move on to going, go back to doing what you want. Right now this venture fund has allowed us like literally I have an experiment team of four people, rock stars who are like product manager and growth strategies, growth strategists and one performance marketer focusing on experiments, statistical relevance of that experiment, getting the data points, testing it with enough angles, right? Doing, not giving up before we should give up, being okay. So today we are okay to lose that one cr because that's exactly what we raised. But that loss of one cr will get us 100 crs tomorrow. So that is the biggest advantage that you get as a venture funded company. But it also comes with disadvantages, right? Like the moment you like flip around and start focusing, like start focusing on wrong things like growth over revenue and profitability, you get tossed up as a business, right? But like in my way of going about it, because I'm a bootstrap business owner at heart, right, we are still a CM1 and a CM2 positive business business which not many well funded companies are today in the country and the world.

So Nice, nice to know that. Padma, you hear? Yeah, go for it.

Can't hear you.

Yeah, hi. I was actually waiting for this session. To be very Frank, for me LinkedIn is the only social media. I still say that. So I am into recruitment services. We offer recruitment services to oil and gas construction and manufacturing companies across globe. Okay, so two things I wanted to ask is the way in B2B like the. Will LinkedIn work for B2B ads like targeting HR people of the corporates, big corporates, will that work? I mean if I want to run an ad for entire oil and gas industry, you can head off talent acquisitions.

You can.

Okay. And similarly, will the ads for candidates, if we have multiple position, maybe you know, 50 position in similar oil and gas and I want to make a ad and then will that be B2C also will that work?

But for that you have LinkedIn jobs, right? Where you can actually spend money to show to more people.

Yeah, LinkedIn jobs. But then those are very, very costly.

And these ads are much more expensive than LinkedIn ads.

Oh, is it? Okay, because LinkedIn ads have not checked at all. But these are like, you know, it's.

Quite expensive like the CPMs, like I said four, five times of that. Usually on Facebook and LinkedIn is 200, while Facebook and Instagram is 200, while LinkedIn is like 600, 800,000 rupees sometimes to show it to thousand people. And as you go more narrower, right. If you think about HRS in this specific industry, there'll be like what, 5,000 of them, 10,000 of them, the total number of audience in that bracket. So it just get more expensive to show them the ads.

Right.

The narrower the audience gets, the more expensive it kind of becomes.

Okay, okay. And second question is, is there any outreach tool available for LinkedIn, any automation? Because here what does is we always put a note why we intend to connect with you. Okay. While sending there. But it is like now since the business is scaling up, it's like tedious task to send it one by one. So is there any.

Yeah, so there are, there are a bunch of tools that does the job. One of the tools that we teach is Phantom Buster.

Right.

But with automation, something extremely, extremely important that you need to know is if you don't get it right, you will lose your account forever.

We actually just checked last week we tried to check from LinkedIn that is there any outreach tool available? Our account was blocked. I was like, okay.

Yeah, I mean it's, it's quite finicky like that. LinkedIn has been very, very strict about it also because there have been a couple of data leaks that has happened in the past because scraping and all. But yeah, I think if you're doing automation, you have to do it right or else you'll get screwed like it's. It is, it is what it is.

Okay, can you repeat the name of the, the automation tool once again?

Phantom Buster.

Phantom Buster, yeah.

Great, thank you, Padma.

Thanks a lot.

Okay, so guys, webhav has to leave. Webhav. Last question for everyone. Just the last sort of. Things are changing in the e commerce space, in the digital marketing space and you know, showing ads, getting people conversion. When Covid happens, people are home, you know, things your webinars start doing well and then so what is your one message or one learning? I know it's difficult to wrap it up into a thing, but people see ups and downs and give up. You know, like, oh, my webinar did very well. I made five lakh rupees or this webinar didn't do well at all. So I don't have the money. I go back to a job or start or give up very easily. What is your message? How do you see the future of all of this, getting people online education and all of this.

I think there are a couple of things, right? One is persistence, right? The reason why there are very few people are able to do it is because the fact that if it was so easy, everybody would have done it, right? It comes back to the fact that how persistent are you? If you can only. If you can only sustain during a green time, and the moment the dead time jumps off, you will fail at any business that you start.

Sure.

It is a fundamental. Like, Avi, you must have seen this 500 times already, right? Because you've been building businesses much longer than I then I have. Like, I've been speaking, probably. So, yeah, that. That is. That is there. That is one. Yeah. I think in. In the field of education, right? I think one of the most important, most fundamentally important part that I think lacks all over the world, not just in the country, is the fact that are you. Nobody's gonna ask you if you're good enough to teach, but you should know if you are good enough to teach, right? The reason why we came out to do things that we want to like, it could be you, it could be me. Like a lot of people that I admire, right? Is because they know their shit. That's why they're teaching. And when you know your shit and you're teaching, people get results. And when people get results, ads might not work, something else will work and it'll keep the cycle going, right? There must be something, Avi, that you're doing, right, because of which you've been managed to, like, recover. I mean, run post pandemic while 90% of the people have just died.

Sure.

There is something that I'm doing, right? While my LinkedIn workshop still runs today at the same scale that used to run at pandemic, and 100%, 5,000 more people join different workshops every month, right? That is basically you being true to the art and the skill that you're teaching. If you are in this game to make money, you will lose, period. If you are, you are in the field of education, which is giving, right? You will win. If you're giving, you'll win.

If you're.

If you're here for greedy reasons, you'll lose. And that's what education is, and that's what it's always been, Right?

Perfect. Love that. Love that with that. Guys, can we give a big Internet mogul thank you to WebHub.

Ra.