How my client made £5k from commenting on LinkedIn.

Last week a client of mine won a £5k client from one comment they put on my post.

So, in this week's edition of Signal, I’m going to talk about the three benefits of commenting and how commenting can make you money doing it.

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Commenting as a strategy

We often think that the be-all and end-all is how many likes, comments, and impressions we get on our posts.

The reality is, for us to make money, it’s about the right people seeing our content. Commenting can be used as a strategy to get your message in front of more of your ideal clients.

There are three reasons to deploy a commenting strategy on social media:

• Grow your audience: Commenting on posts and people feel obliged to return the favour.
• Retain your audience: Commenting back onto people's content who comment on yours to keep them returning to your posts.
• Building your brand and bank balance: Commenting to get your brand and expertise in front of a bigger audience.

Commenting to get engagement can be tiresome and suck up a lot of time.

So, I only recommend commenting where it will help you achieve your bigger financial and business goals - winning clients and making money.

Comments are content too

When you shift your thinking, you can turn comments into content. You can hunt down some people with the audience you want and choose to be the most valuable person in the comments that day.

Not just a random or flaky comment.

Something really valuable that their audience will love and get loads more value from.

People do this in my feed all the time.

I love it.

It’s a win-win.

I get more visibility, my comments come alive and the commenters get more visibility from my audience.

Back to my client.

They serve business owners. My audience is predominantly business owners. From solopreneurs to CEOs. My client has been consistently commenting on my posts, not just with the classic “great post thanks for sharing”.

They’d been posting chunky, insightful and helpful comments for my audience. They’d sparked ideas and discussion. They didn’t spam-comment or post links, they just shared their opinions and related my topic to their world.

This is the comment:

That comment took time to write.

It took effort.

But it sparked a conversation in the comments, which led to a business conversation - that led to them winning a new client.

Repurpose your comments

I do this a lot. I have a list of people who have a bigger audience than me. I add value to their comments. As a result, I gained new followers, more engagement and inbound leads.

But here is the double whammy. The best comments, the ones that get me leads, followers, and increased engagement - I turn them into posts.

For the last three weeks, all my content has been from repurposed comments I’ve written.

Instead of guessing, I’m sharing what’s worked in the comments as posts.

How to post valuable comments

It’s really hard to comment. So, I have a simple method to do it.

Choose one line of the post which relates to your world the most.

Now ask yourself, how does this point cross over from their topic to yours?

E.g.

Post Line: X is a great place to network and find new copywriting clients.

My topic: LinkedIn.

Cross-over: LinkedIn is a good place to network and find copywriting clients too.

My comment:

I agree X is great for finding copywriting clients. This is where X and LinkedIn line up really well, as both copy heavy content platforms.

I find X more difficult to find exactly who I’m looking for, but with LinkedIn it’s much easier.

I can:

➡️ Search for marketers 

➡️ Hunt through Sales Navigator for active posters

➡️ Filter for people who are more likely to have a budget.

Sales Navigator is a great tool, X would be great if it had something similar. No doubt Elon is working on it.

The most important part is that you add value and speak to the same audience as the original poster.

You don’t want to be commenting on posts that don’t have the right audience. If you want to speak to copywriters, the last thing you want to do is comment on posts from people who say AI can do your copy.

Why? Well, it will bring you constantly into conflict with the original poster. I need to be able to accept the original poster's point and add to it or compliment it.

They won’t like that.

Where to start

Step 1: The first thing you need to do is get a list of 20 people who:

• Have a bigger audience than you.
• Have an audience that you want.
• Share regularly on LinkedIn.

Step 2: Create a list so you can quickly click them and go to their profile.

Go to their ‘all activity’ and copy the link in the address bar: 

The links should look like this:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/social-selling-expert-dean-seddon/recent-activity/all/

Collate them into a doc, this will allow you to quickly visit their profile to post your high-value comment.

Commenting on each one of those 20 users posts daily might be a stretch, but start by commenting on at least 5 per day.

This is your chance to share your insights with a bigger audience than you currently have, increase your brand and visibility to hundreds if not thousands of ideal clients.

I get the best results if I comment at the same time as posting.

I see more of those people on my own posts.

How influencers do this

You’d be surprised how many influencers also do this.

The first few minutes when posting are critical to the overall success of your content that day. If you have 100k followers, you're bound to get 50+ people to see it in the first few minutes of posting.

Half the battle of success with content is simply getting the content seen by people in their feeds. So, Influencers content is often easier to get off the ground.

Influencers practice this insightful commenting on a whole other level. So if you’ve ever beat yourself up, wondering why your content, which is so similar to someone with 100k followers, isn't taking off, it’s often not about their content, but the engaged audience they’ve built.

You build a highly engaged audience in the comments, not in the content.