The Shady Hack People Are Using to Get Crazy LinkedIn Growth

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu.

0:20All right, we're going to talk about the shady hack people are using to get crazy LinkedIn growth. Now, Neil changed this title on me last minute. So Neil, you can go first. Yeah, so the way people are getting a lot of traffic on LinkedIn is it's all about comments and engagement. How many good comments can you get from profiles that have over 500 plus connections? and are those comments engaging where other people want to interact and respond with. So the shady tactic people are doing right now is they're going to sites like playerup.com and you can find LinkedIn accounts with over 500 plus connections and they're buying like not five or 10 of them, they're buying like 20 of them.

0:58So they're spending maybe up to like a thousand to$2 ,000 because if you buy them in bulk, you also get discounts. Now, if you end up buying the ones and Erica and I aren't recommending this tactic, we're just telling you how it is and neither him or I focus on this tactic or use it. But if you buy accounts with less than 500 connections, it doesn't work as well. You need accounts with 500 plus connections. The LinkedIn profiles need to be verified. And what you'll wanna end up doing is, you don't want the LinkedIn account to just have random connections. It needs to be actually connections with real people.

1:31That's what I mean by verified. So you need to go through the connections and just make sure they're legitimate. And what people are doing is They're logging into each of those profiles. And right when a post goes live within like four hours at the latest, they're leaving crazy thorough comments. And when they do that, the original poster starts going viral. And people have been doing this for a while. They try to do it with corporate pages because corporate pages where you get the most virality or company pages. And it's a numbers game. It's how often can you end up doing it? I know quite a few people who are doing this.

2:04And if you end up leveraging the same accounts over and over again, we're seeing it work well for the first month, two months, even three months. We're seeing it though. If you do it for like six months, you do need to refresh the accounts that you're buying, at least from the friends that I talked to who are doing this and I'm tracking their stats. Yeah. I mean, I don't do this. Neither does Neil, but I think it makes a lot of sense, right? You know, if you buy a couple of these, you can even refresh them every three, six months or so, and then just have someone offshore running these. And then, you know, you can even chat GPTDs probably just to make sure they're grammatically correct, you know, run this stuff through a VPN.

2:38And, you know, it's hard to kind of track, you know, how legit or fake these are. I mean, the other thing is from an algorithmic standpoint, if you're Microsoft and you own LinkedIn, it's pretty easy to see if these pages are dormant and they aren't updating other things. So it's like, you know, how much longer can this charade go on for? Go on for? I don't know. But, you know, it's available for you if you want to use it. And I do talk about LinkedIn quite a bit. And so does Neil. So we'll leave it with that. The other thing is, you know, we talk about in our recent kind of reaction video, we talk about the power of company pages, which is what kind of Neil alluded to, too.

3:10There's little or no throttling, relatively speaking, versus like a company page versus a personal page. And so you can post, you know, more than you would with a personal page, because typically with the personal page, like you don't want to post too many times a day. Otherwise, you start to get throttled, right? So just keep that peace of mind. And what tends to work well, like we talked about Daniel Murray, who got 110 million impressions over a 12-month span, he utilizes a lot of memes. And the memes do well. And then he'll add in his link to subscribe to his newsletter. And he has over 100 ,000 people on his newsletter now, over 600 ,000 subscribers on that company page, and millions and millions of impressions.

3:44That's not necessarily the shady piece. I would just say the reason we talk about blackout or shady stuff sometimes is how can you utilize this stuff, but also think about it in a white hat way. And there are white hat ways to do this, which we've talked about before. Anything else, Neil? No, you know what Eric and I are getting, actually, yes. What Eric and I are getting at is look at what people are doing in a shady way and figure out how you legitimize it. So there's a lot of marketers that get into pods together and when they like each other's posts, assuming they actually like them, I'm not saying they're actually clicking the button, but if they like something they see, then they will engage.

4:19And what people are doing is they're creating like WhatsApp groups and they're saying, hey, I posted this, check this out. If you like it, feel free to engage and promote it. and it's a more quote-unquote ethical way to make your content viral because you're connecting with people right when it goes live and these people if they like the content they would engage anyways but now more so you're getting them to engage right when the post comes out which just really helps it spread faster i'm in some of these groups and what i'll say is like the initial premise of the group is to help boost each other but like we actually started to like build relationships with each other and i understand these people a lot more now so even though the group started out as Like let's help boost each other.

4:57These people are building legitimate businesses or they're building legitimate brands. And I'm happy to support these people. So the white hat way is often the path that takes longer to do, but it's, you know, it's the short-term pain that you take for long-term gain. And then the black hat way is you get the short-term gain, but you get the long-term pain, right? And like, we've learned that the hard way and feel free to learn that your way. Like sometimes you just need to learn your lesson. So go learn your lesson. Just don't burn your main thing down. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, rate, rate, and subscribe.

5:25and also subscribe to us on YouTube and we will see you later. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool.io. Until next time, class dismissed.

6:00We'll see you next time.