I’m working on my third book, titled Eight Lunches. It’s a cool idea and I’m actually looking at people to review the latest draft (more info and an excerpt here).
While I’m asking for people to review the draft and provide feedback that can help the book be more solid, I’m using LinkedIn for business development. I mean, er, marketing. I mean, perhaps PR.
What I really mean is I’m using LinkedIn as a tool to help me network into certain places to help me market my book.
I’ve identified a number of media outlets I want to approach with information about my book. Last week I did a few simple searches on LinkedIn to find editors and writers of one magazine and came up with about a dozen contacts I’ll reach out to. Here’s what I did:
- I searched on “editor [magazine name]” and came up with a bunch of names. Most of the names are interesting to me.
- I went to each LinkedIn Profile to learn more and see if they really were a contact who I want to network with.
- On the right of each Profile I looked in the “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” box to see who I was missing, or who didn’t come up in the search, or who key people were at other magazines. This is a KEY area when you are searching for contacts you might want to reach out to.
- I recorded the name, location (so I know what time zone they are in – not all are in the same time zone), title, URLs (always the LinkedIn URL, sometimes the Twitter URL (if they are on Twitter), and the name of the magazine (because I’ll put these contacts into a spreadsheet and then import them into JibberJobber – I figured it’s best to put the “company” name in before the import, rather than one at a time).
This week I’ll work on my message (aka, pitch) and then send them messages. But I won’t send them messages through LinkedIn… I don’t have any introductions left (I can’t find the outstanding 5 that should be recalled – it’s a horrible weakness in LinkedIn to not be able to find those), and I can’t InMail them because I’m on the free level now.
That’s okay, a simple google search shows me that the company email structure is simply the first initial of the first name plus the last name @magazinename.com…. I’ll check out the magazine to make sure that’s what they say in there, but emailing each of them individually should be easy.
As a side note, I noticed that ALL of them have weak/skeleton LinkedIn Profiles.
