Week 32 - Prepare, test, adjust, try again 🤓

A long time ago, I used this tactic: every time I connected with someone on LinkedIn, I always added a connection message so as to remind a person of how we’ve met, and also (a little trick 😏) to remember about it myself, because sometimes we might have connected but haven’t talked for the whole year or even more 😲

When LinkedIn took this free option away, it sucked a lot because I didn’t want to pay, so I sent just connection requests without messages, hoped people would accept them, and afterwards told them why I’d sent them connection requests.

A lot of hurdles, huh 😅

Still, recently I invested in LinkedIn Premium exactly for this feature, and also to be able to have unlimited searches, I need to connect with people who might work with freelancers. So I reworked my current approach of sending connection requests.

Usually, I connect with:

• CEOs, founders, or other management

• HR, recruiters, consultants

• Sales experts, partnership managers, etc.

So I made different cohorts, a list of possible titles for each cohort, and a specific message I think they might be interested in receiving to accept my request (of course, I need to test them), and afterwards, a few follow-ups to continue the conversation.

Also, I use colors for messages, and here green means a message I’m already sending, and yellow means messages I need to adjust and test to see what will work best.

Creating such cohorts makes it easier to choose what message to send to whom, and also removes a little bit of decision-making paralysis and speeds up my work because I just do a quick check of what a specific person does based on their title and job description, and then just send a specific connection request.

And I’m not saying it’s the only way to do cold outreach, still, it’s a new system I’m currently trying, so I will definitely share some feedback later! 😉

Also, once people accept my request, I will never let them go unless they tell me never to write them again. Because it’s easy to think they ghost me by not answering my messages, but I prefer to think that they are busy and maybe my message to them is not the right thing at the right time, so I keep sending them different things to test and understand what exactly brings them the most value, and double down on that afterwards!

So if you’re messaging someone, and they’re not answering, but still not blocking you, keep messaging them. The worst-case scenario is that they'll block you, but for the best case, the sky is the limit 🤩😉

Continuing my small motivational videos experiment with this one 😉🤓

Thoughts of the week:

• “Teams must build trust before achieving success.” - Nudge podcast

• “People quickly and unconsciously adapt group norms, even for weekly held beliefs.” - Nudge podcast

• “Highlight your fears, your flaws: the very thing you don’t want to talk about is the very thing you need to talk about.” - Rob Lowe, A bit of optimism podcast

• “Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.” - Henri Frederic Amiel, quote from The Economist

Song of the week:

Book and quotes of the week:

Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

“It’s important to ask what they want. It’s an invitation for people to tell you who they are.”

“The best negotiators didn’t battle over who should get the biggest slice of pie. Rather, they focused on making the pie itself larger, finding win-win solutions where everyone walked away happier than before.”

“We get drawn into stories because they feel right.”

Tools that I use with referrals:

• Descript - for anything around podcasting and video editing

• Manus - for building complex systems and projects

• Beehiiv - for a newsletter (that’s what you receive 😅)

• Text Blaze - to access message templates with shortcuts (like “/ty”)

• Exali - promo “FROMYURII” - indemnity insurance for independent experts in Europe

Daily actions:

• invite 5 people to give feedback about how I helped them

• invite 5 people to check my website and ask them for advice (postponed)

• participate in a secret LI support group

• read a self-development book/listen to a professional podcast for 15 minutes

• make a valuable post/comment on LinkedIn

• tag 30 people in my database

• work 30 minutes solely on my business 😎

Weekly actions:

• transcribe one new episode of the Creator Spotlight podcast and learn something from it

• transcribe one new DOAC video and learn one thing from it

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to walk The Road To $1M+ Freelance Business with me 👇

See you next week! 👋