In February, one of our clients added over 8,133 LinkedIn followers and collected 4,877 email opt-ins.

Here's what the LinkedIn stats looked like if curious:

This was not over a quarter. In a single month. And the strategy behind it was simpler than you’d think.

We ran viral giveaways.

You’ve probably seen these on LinkedIn: the “comment X to get Y” posts. Somebody offers a lead magnet, you drop a comment, and you get it delivered to your inbox.

But most people do these wrong.

They give away something generic, slap a weak hook on it, and wonder why they got 40 comments and zero business results.

Here’s what we did differently.

First, this client had already created several dozen lead magnets. Guides, templates, frameworks, etc. real stuff that people in their niche would pay money for. We compiled all of those into a library. A spreadsheet where we could look at every asset, assess perceived value, and pick the ones most likely to go viral.

That’s key. The more valuable people perceive the lead magnet to be, the better the giveaway performs. A 2-page checklist won’t cut it. But a comprehensive playbook that looks like it should cost $200? That gets people to take action.

Then we dialed in three things on every post: the hook, the media, and the lead magnet itself. All three have to hit. A great lead magnet with a boring hook dies in the feed. A killer hook with a mediocre freebie gets comments but no conversions downstream (and frankly just hurts your brand).

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

Of those ~5,000 email opt-ins, about 1,000 opt-ins were from promoting a lead magnet exclusively to people on the list.

But the other ~4,000 were directly from LinkedIn.

When a new person opts in, they hit our automation. They enter a welcome sequence that introduces them to the client’s world: who they are, what they teach, why it matters. Then three emails a week sharing insights about their niche, each one with a call to action back to their paid product.

And there’s one more piece that ties the whole thing together.

After someone submits their email on the opt-in form, they get redirected to a thank you page. The lead magnet download link is there in small text at the top. But the main real estate on that page is a pitch for the client’s paid product.

So before these new leads even open their first email, a percentage of them are already buying. Every single giveaway generates new revenue on the front end while building the list on the back end.

The results over time:

We’re generating an average of 20-30 new customers per month for their paid product, which has an average price point around $1,000. On our best month we’ve hit 50+ new sales. Just from email, mind you.

LinkedIn itself is driving another ~1,000-2,000 clicks to their sales page every month, which has a 2% conversion rate...

That's another 20-40 customers per month.

Pretty awesome.

So let me walk you through the full system one more time, start to finish:

1. Build a library of high-value lead magnets
2. Write a LinkedIn post with a strong hook, great media, and a compelling giveaway offer
3. Set up the automation: new subscribers get the lead magnet delivered, then the welcome sequence if they're new, existing subscribers just get the lead magnet
4. Create a thank you page that delivers the freebie AND pitches the paid product
5. Send 3 emails per week nurturing the list and driving sales
6. Repeat

That’s a lot of moving parts. I won’t pretend it isn’t.

But we’ve got this system hyper-streamlined at this point. We write the posts. We manage the automations. We build the pages. And the client gets to watch their LinkedIn account, email list, and revenue grow on a systematic, predictable basis.

If you want us to build this for you - either owning your LinkedIn account entirely or just implementing this lead magnet system - reply to this email and let me know you’re interested.

We’ll find a time to talk through what it looks like for your business.

Matthew

PS - many of you thanked me for putting together some of my favorite tools I use to run my business in an email earlier this week, so I put them on a Notion page you can reference whenever.​