Weird trick to create content partnerships on LinkedIn

Helloooo content enthusiasts!

It’s your friendly neighborhood content guy.

Today, we’re going to talk about the most depressing place on the planet: LinkedIn. I kid, but really, content marketers sleep on LinkedIn, and I want to show you one way to light that fuse.

In this issue:

• Main course: Using LinkedIn to create explosive content collabs

• Snack: HomeAdvisor’s brilliant Simpsons content campaign that got featured in Today, Wired & more

• Morsels: Headlines from Brian Dean, Noah Kagan & more

Let’s dig in.

Main course: How to create explosive content partnerships on LinkedIn

This is for my B2B homies.

Content marketing in B2B spaces can be — what’s a nice way of putting it? — difficult.

I don’t know about you, but when audiences are smaller and people need to commit more to become a customer, I always feel like the margin for error is just so much bigger.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun. And it doesn’t mean we can’t stack the deck in our favor a little bit.

One of the better marketers I know is the absolute best at stacking the deck. He’s grown a multi-million dollar services business without running a single platform ad, without a sales team, and without any kind of significant organic audience.

I asked him to explain how in the hell he managed to pull that off.

This is what he said: “All my marketing activities revolve around one one thing: leveraging other people’s audiences”.

What a b o m b s h e l l.

His view is that you don’t need to build an audience if you can just build relationships with people who already have them (even if you have to occasionally drop a few dollar bills in their pocket).

And as content marketers who often have embarrassingly small budgets, it can be cheap ass way to create significant results.

Here’s the method I came up with to leverage other people’s audiences on LinkedIn…

Step 1: Find people who have audiences we can leverage.

Thank you Captain Obvious, right?

There’s some nuance here though. Follow along if you like.

In LinkedIn, go to the search bar and type in any topic you like — but obviously something close to your business (broader is usually better). I’ve been investigating the cybersecurity content space recently, so I’m going to use that as an example.

From there, navigate to the People tab.

There will probably be a lot of results. Don’t worry. I won’t be asking you to sift through them all.

From here, click All Filters.

That’ll open a tab with a bunch of filters you can use to narrow your search. We’re looking for the Talks About section.

In that section, check off every relevant topic and click Show Results.

That’ll give you a much smaller list.

In my search, it took our 1.7M results down to 37,000. 

That’s still a lot, but it’s 37,000 people who are actively talking about cybersecurity and information security, and LinkedIn also does a relatively good job filtering for relevance.

Some napkin math that doesn’t actually mean anything: if we suppose the average follower count for those 37,000 people is maybe 500, that’d be a potential audience of 18.5 million people we could potentially get in front of for free.

Can you imagine trying to build an audience like that yourself?

Here’s the important bit…

In this list of people, you can see how many followers each has. Check it out.

In just the followers of the first five results, there’s an audience 30,000 potential people we could reach if we collaborated on some content.

Now, make a spreadsheet, and start putting people in there.

Use something like VoilaNorbert or Hunter to find emails, which we may need later.

One quick recommendation…

Click through to each profile to see what kind of engagement they have, what they talk about, etc. Someone might have lots of followers, but they may just be spamming dorky work memes.

You never know. But we can just exercise a bit of common sense and fill our spreadsheet with people who really are talking about the same topics we are.

Step 2: Reach out & offer to collab.

Now we reach out and ask these people to collaborate.

HERE’s THE THING THO…

We need to make a possible collaboration as juicy as humanly possible. To do that, we need to satisfy three conditions:

• We need some truly interesting content to share

• We need to make it easy for them

• We need some kind of reciprocal offer to sweeten the pot

For content, as long as it’s in line with what people are already talking about, we should be able to get people to share it.

But we really do need to make it easy for that. That usually means removing as much friction and thought as possible.

And as for reciprocation, we need to find a way for them to also get something out of the collaboration. That might include:

• Promoting some of their content

• Making an introduction

• Co-creating content

• Just offering to pay them

Usually, co-promotion is easiest.

Then, send a connection request to everyone on the list — keeping in mind that you can only send 100 connections per week maximum — and send a message like the following:

The whole message didn’t fit in the screenshot, but obviously, you’d close it out in some kind of fun, nice way.

Step 3: Share.

Get everything set up & share. Follow up with everyone who agreed.

Recap of how to do this, like, TODAY.

• Search for people with lots of relevant followers on LinkedIn

• Make a spreadsheet of the people with the most followers and highest engagement

• Reach out and offer to collaborate on promotion

• Share & measure

**NOTE: Make sure this isn’t all for nothin’. Your content needs conversion points, a lead magnet, or whatever else you can think of to drive a business outcome.

Snack: HomeAdvisor’s brilliant Simpsons content campaign

…Duh duh duh nuh nuh duh nuh nuh nuh nuh… duh nuh nuh nuh…

Could you hear the Simpsons theme song?

Who would have figured that wacky yellow family was a ripe for a content marketing campaign for, of all places, a home services marketplace.

Think for a second: how would you even do that?

And don’t look at me here… if you asked me to come up with some kind of content campaign featuring the Simpsons that would work for a home services marketplace, I would have quietly faded into the bushes…

But HomeAdvisor found a way, and it was bloody brilliant.

Here’s what they did…

They created a listicle where they mocked up the Simpsons living room into six different interior styles. You can see it for yourself here.

This is a great example of what “above and beyond” really looks like.

Aside from starting with a wonderful idea, to pull this off, they needed to employ some actual, good, savvy graphic designers who could come up with compelling, interesting, funny concepts.

If you’ve ever hired a graphic designer, you know that’s not easy, and they’re usually expensive.

My favorite was the Bohemian.

But why?

What does this do for a business.

This is a PR play, and a backlink play. A PR play because getting hyper-interesting content featured on major publications can result in a strong brand push. And a backlink play because those features also include links to HomeAdvisor’s original blog post with the mockups.

This is what it looks like on Today.com:

The result?

This content generated 18 very strong backlinks and some significant brand exposure for HomeAdvisor, being featured on sites like Today, Apartment Therapy, Wired, etc.

What you can steal & deploy for yourself

• Create some content that leverages a deeply ingrained cultural trope

• Tie it to your business & create “above and beyond” content

• Reach out to the largest possible publications & pitch it — go for quality instead of quantity

• When you generate links to that post, link internally to revenue-generating pages

Morsels: Unexpected content marketing news & headlines

• Meta launches Threads, a Twitter competitor (Meta)

• “The Social Media Content Calendar Template Every Marketer Needs” (Hubspot)

• “Keyword Analysis: The Definitive Guide 2023” (Backlinko)

• “Google’s Helpful Content & Other AI Systems May Be Impacting Your Site’s Visibility” (Marie Haynes)

• “How Pros Optimize Conversion Rate” (Kevin Indig)

• “What Is Brand Perception? How to Measure It and 4 Examples” (Hubspot)

• “SaaS Growth Through Good Old-Fashioned Outreach” (DemandCurve)

• “The State of Search 2023” (SEMRush)

• “23+ Content Marketing Skills You Need for Today and the Next Five Years” (CMI)

• “The biggest rebrands and refreshes of 2023 so far” (MarketingDive)

That’s the issue.

Go forth and conquer.

—FNCG