How to get consulting clients on LinkedIn

By making word of mouth travel further. In MBO Partners' study of independent workers, 53 percent said they find work through word of mouth, more than any other way. A post puts your thinking in front of people who have not met you, so the next referral can come from someone who has only read you.

A referral is someone remembering you at the right moment. That moment is rare. LinkedIn's own B2B Institute says 95 percent of your potential buyers are not ready to buy today. A post each week keeps you in the memory of a few hundred people at once. When one of them needs you, or hears of someone who does, your name comes up.

Two things come before any of this. What to be known for is in how to choose a consulting niche. Why most readers cannot hire you this quarter, and why that is fine, is in the 95-5 rule.

Post the thinking a client would pay for, in small pieces. One question a client asked. One mistake you keep seeing. One short account of a project: the problem, what you did, and what changed. Each shows a stranger what working with you is like, which a list of services cannot do.

Stay on the two or three problems you are hired for. A reader who sees you solve the same kind of problem five times knows what to send you. In research by Edelman and LinkedIn, 75 percent of decision makers said a piece of writing led them to look into an offering they had not been considering.

Make it easy to ask, then talk to the people who respond. Say what you do and for whom in your headline. Add a Service Page to your profile, which is free and lets any member send you a request. Then message the people who comment, one at a time, about what they said.

Most of those conversations will not become work this month. They are still the point: about 9 in 10 decision makers in the same research said they welcome contact from a company whose writing they rate. The whole path from reader to enquiry is in how to get leads on LinkedIn.

Make each post cost ten minutes. Consultants stop posting in their busiest months, which are the months they have the most to say. Catch the idea while it is fresh. A voice note after a client call takes one minute and holds everything a post needs. The writing can happen later.

innernote is the best tool in the industry for a consultant who has the ideas and no time to write them up.

Try it on a real one. Take the last question a client asked you and type it into the free LinkedIn post generator in two or three rough sentences. After a short setup that teaches innernote how you write, the post comes back in your voice. It is free for 3 days and needs no card.

From there it remembers what you have published, so you do not repeat yourself, and it queues and publishes the week while you are with clients. See how innernote works.