In this LinkedIn Live broadcast, Joe Apfelbaum explains how to harness LinkedIn automation safely and effectively. He warns against using Chrome‑extension based automations that LinkedIn can detect, and stresses keeping activity low‑volume to avoid triggering rate‑limit (429) errors or account bans. He demonstrates a custom automation that scans Inc. 5000 CEOs to prioritize outreach, illustrating how modest automated actions can free up time without annoying prospects. Apfelbaum then introduces LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a premium tool that mitigates many restrictions, and showcases Evvy AI, which integrates inside Sales Navigator to generate comments and alerts on prospect activity. Throughout, he uses live examples (opening multiple profiles, receiving a 429 error) to show the platform’s safeguards, and repeatedly invites viewers to engage via chat keywords (e.g., “Sales Navigator,” “influencer”). The session’s core message: automation is powerful when used responsibly, with the right software and within LinkedIn’s usage limits.
Chapters
1. Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of LinkedIn Live with Joe Apfelbaum. Today, I would like to talk to you about the benefits of using automation, but be careful because if you use automation in the wrong way, you're going to annoy a lot of people and LinkedIn's going to take notice. Number 1, don't use Google Chrome extensions that do automations because LinkedIn can see when you're doing that. Instead, you want to use a piece of software that does automations for you, but it doesn't break LinkedIn and doesn't do things in an abusive way. So for example, I have an automation right now that's reviewing all the CEOs on the Inc. 5000. It's taking all their information and letting me know who are the ones that I should prioritize reaching out to. This tool allows me to be able to do things on an automated basis. While still not annoying anybody and not doing too much activity. The key is do very little activity, but do automated activity, and that will allow you to be able to tap into the power of LinkedIn without you having to sit at your computer like a zombie every single day. The key is don't spam people, don't annoy people, and do— don't do too much activity. Sometimes when you do too much activity on LinkedIn, even if you're doing it manually, LinkedIn will think it's automation and will slap you on your wrist. When I'm doing LinkedIn Live, you see I'm live, you see I'm real, you see right here I'm real, and there's a lot of things that I can do that will assist me to do the things that I want to do, but the key is not to overdo it. You want to have activity that seems normal. Too much activity will cause something called a 429 on LinkedIn, and that will stop you from being successful with LinkedIn. So for example, if you take a look at this video over here, you'll notice that I had 9 people that liked this video. I'm going to refresh it. Sometimes LinkedIn breaks. I refresh the video and I have 9 people that like this video. When I click on it, I want to be able to see the profiles of these 9 people. So if I was using automation, automation would go real slow. It would look at one, then it would look at— it would wait like 10, 15, 20 seconds, look at the other. But I'm just going to go crazy and I'm just going to open up all the profiles at once. You see that? I'm opening up more profiles and more profiles and more profiles. And LinkedIn's going to start having a conniption. At profile 10, it's going to be like, what the hell are you doing, Joe? What are you doing? Why are you opening up all these profiles so quickly? Are you a machine? Are you a robot? You see, if I started doing even more activity, let's say I opened up 100 profiles at once, when I got to profile 20 or 15, LinkedIn would freeze my account and say, okay, we're putting you in purgatory for an hour just to make sure that you're not a robot. You know? And if you do it too often, LinkedIn will eventually ban you. The reason they're doing this is because LinkedIn has a billion users. And if too many of the billion users do things too big, they're going to break LinkedIn. LinkedIn's not going to work. And so they have to limit each account to making sure— and also cost them money every single time you load anything. Every one of these profiles that I loaded costs server for reads and writes. That costs money. And so you got to be careful to make sure that you're doing things in a normal way, even if you're using automation. Here's another thing that you have to be careful is you have to make sure that you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator. What's Sales Navigator? Sales Navigator is the upgraded version of LinkedIn. You see, I just got a 429 error. You see that? 429, 429. Joe opened up too many profiles at once. So LinkedIn is punishing me. This is punishment right here. I just got spanked. You see, I opened up 10 profiles at once. I got a 429 error. Now I gotta chill. I gotta chill. LinkedIn's saying chill. I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna try to go to Sales Navigator. Now I can go to Sales Navigator. Okay? And I gotta be careful. If I do too much activity now, LinkedIn's gonna spank me again. If you get spanked too many times, they throw you in jail for a week. So you gotta be careful. And sometimes they throw you in jail for a long time. So anyway, so I go in here and I see all these different things going on in Sales Navigator. Did you know that Evvy AI now works inside Sales Navigator? So if you're paying for LinkedIn, You can click on Evvy AI, you can see which one of your prospects posted recently within Sales Navigator alerts, and then you can easily use Evvy AI to leave comments on those profiles. You just click on the little button over here, a little box pops up, and then you can just generate a comment just like that. It's really easy to do. LinkedIn right now is having a heart attack on me because I'm using too much, too many of the resources. Uh, but Sales Navigator is the upgrade of LinkedIn. And so I'm over here, um, going live, showing you how this works. If you guys wanna learn more about Sales Navigator, I'm happy to kind of share more information. Just write Sales Navigator in the chat and I'll do a full LinkedIn Live on Sales Navigator. Well, I gotta hop right now. Thank you for watching this live. If you did watch this live, if it did come up live for you, do me a favor, give this post a like, leave a comment. Let me know that you watched it live. If you catch the replay, just write replay in the chat so I know you watched the replay. And if you want to learn Sales Navigator, write Sales Navigator. If you want a list of LinkedIn influencers, just write the word influencer in the chat. I'm going to compiling a list of the top LinkedIn influencers like Bill Gates, Gary Vaynerchuk, and much, much more. If you want to see that full list, I'm going to make it available to my connections. So go ahead and write the word influencer in the chat and I'll send it to you. All right. We'll talk to you again soon.
