Fundamentals of Inbound

✨ Start Here

Building Credibility

Outbound Prospecting

Building Your Lifeline on Inbound

Breaking into Strategic Accounts

Daily Workflow

Additional Resources

Not joking. Personal branding is mostly a distraction, advocated by marketers and influencers who sell courses. Remember: the main challenge you have is building credibility.

Let’s consider a few personal branding strategies that we see recommended:

All of this is nonsense. You do not need to post daily to create an inbound funnel. You do not need a point-of-view separate from your company’s to create an inbound funnel. You do not need to increase your follower count. You do not need viral posts. You don’t need any of these things to be successful on social.

Remember this graphic?

Now that you’ve worked your way through Outbound Prospecting, you’ll see that some outbound plays include “indirect” activities. This means inbound traffic happens two ways:

Each of these activities expose your profile to a new audience, indirectly.

For outbound that becomes inbound, this is when your direct activities create exposure to new audiences. So even though your comment (for example) is to a targeted ICP prospect, a different ICP prospect sees that comment and views your profile.

For content creation, this is when your content pops up in the feed, it resonates, and someone views your profile and/or clicks follow.

When you think about constructing your inbound funnel, these are the two primary leverage points to create inbound traffic. But where do you send them?!

As we hinted at in Building Your Profile Funnel, the primary activity of an inbound lead is to land on your profile.

This is where the 3 Second Test becomes very important. Since it’s likely the person viewing your profile is from an interesting comment or piece of content, they haven’t been warmed up in the same way your outbound prospects have.

Your profile needs to accomplish a few things:

If you’ve been blazing through this guide all at once, make sure to review Building Your Profile Funnel before going any further. Make sure you have each element of your profile dialed in before seriously working on your inbound.

Again, we’d like to emphasize that our approach in this guide does not prepare you to become an “influencer” or “build your personal brand.” We believe those are noble goals, but they’re not for everyone. Not everyone’s superpower is social.

In that spirit, we’re only focusing on the scalable, repeatable processes that can help sellers of any kind (superpower or not) use LinkedIn effectively.

Creating inbound then serves two purposes:

The primary focus of your inbound activities, in our view, is to nurture lurker accounts. This is when you combine the Connection Strategies we laid out with the Content Strategies we’re about to describe.

Lurkers, by definition, will never comment or like your content. They will see it though 👀  This is the drastically underrated part of creating content –– and why the vanity metrics of likes/comments don’t matter as much as you might think they do.

When accounts aren’t as active, you can build your lifeline over the next 90-180 days by using these inbound plays. It gets your profile in front of lurkers passively, since the outbound plays won’t work as well.

Creating great content –– or comments, even –– that resonates with your ICP audience extends your reach. This gets you in front of new ICP audiences that you haven’t strategically pursued with the Outbound plays.

This is a nice side-benefit: gradually earning credibility with the new audience. Instead of running warmup plays, you can use inbound plays to build credibility.

Remember: you can always run Outbound, based on the criteria we set up earlier (qualified lists, triggers, insightful outreach, etc.). Inbound is just a nice complement that builds your long-term lifeline.