Derick Mildred How I Build Powerful Connections with Top Influencers on LinkedIn

it, and it's an absolute pleasure to be here. A little bit of background, about 7 years ago, I sat up for many a night recording every speaker on a particular summit, and it was back then that I first came across AJ Wilcox, Richard Vanderblom, and numerous others. To give you a little bit of background about my journey on LinkedIn, and today I'm also going to take a leaf out of Deanna Russo's book, and a friend of mine walked into the office and she said, I have just heard LinkedIn described as the professional or business version of Facebook. And I thought, that sounds interesting, maybe I should have another look at that. So I found my old original login details, logged into the platform to discover in 2013 that I had 207 connections. And so that's when my real journey on the platform started. And so I modeled myself on just 2 people, and one of the things that I started doing was writing articles about about websites. The next thing that happened was I started growing. I have a company page now that's got about 23,000 followers. And the interesting thing about that particular company page, it's Derek Mildred LinkedIn for Business. And I built the following on that company page by publishing articles, articles that I never wrote. They were just articles about LinkedIn by people on LinkedIn who were sharing articles with LinkedIn. I didn't have time to write them. I just shared the things and gave them an intro. So that was one of the ways that I built a company page. The other thing that I've done is I've built my own personal profile now to over 90,000 followers, and that's been a journey in itself. And one of the things that I started doing was that I started connecting with people with big followings. And I had a valuable lesson about 4 years ago when a lady by the name of Bridget Hyacinth, who I'd connected with and had become friends with, She had 1.5 million followers at the time, and she commented on one of my posts. That one comment of Bridget's back then added 100,000 views to my post overnight. Okay, so that then taught me, okay, I've got to do something with more and more of these influencers. So then I started researching these influencers. I started following their content. I started liking and more importantly, leaving meaningful comments on as many of their posts as I could, as consistently as I could. And I started to build a connection with them before I actually reached out and sent them a request to connect. And so what literally happened is I started to have more and more of these influencers that I was connecting with. I was building more and more relationships with them. The, the best piece of advice that I can give with regards to those 90,000 followers, building that following, is consistently post. Okay, just post day after day after day, and importantly, reply to the comments on your posts. And you'll have some posts that perform better than others, and that's fine. That's what happens to all of us. Don't worry too much about it. If you have a post that bombs, yeah, take a little bit of notice from it, but make sure you just put up your next post. Okay, so consistently post, consistently interact with your audience, and importantly, and I learned this lesson many years ago, interact with other people's content, preferably content of either your prospects or people you're trying to build a conversation with before you post. Okay.

How much, how much before you post? This is very specific, and I, and I say this as well, you've got to, before you actually execute on a post, make sure that you're commenting And I say leave at least 5 comments, but what, what was your experience? How many comments do you leave and how, how much before?

Okay. Without sounding obsessive these days, I comment for an hour before I post.

Guys, think about that for a second. Think about that. By the way, how many comments do you guys leave a week? My goal is to leave 1,000 comments a month. What about you? How many comments? And everyone could write it in the comments.

The analytics each week tops out at 499.

So it says in the, in linkedin.com/dashboard, it says that you left 499 comments. during the week. Wow, that's incredible.

Tops out at that. So the first thing to do with these influencers is to understand 2 things. They're regular people just like you and I, so don't feel intimidated. The second thing to understand is because of the size of their following, they get approaches every single day, okay? And some of them wind up with an inbox with hundreds of messages going into it every single day. So if they don't get their— if they don't get your message, continue to interact with their Content and just be patient. Okay, so don't pitch them. Instead, what you do is you work on building that conversation. Okay, and you start that via their content.

Thank you so much, Derek.