Most People are Doing LinkedIn Cold DMs Wrong

I am sharing 3 things with you today:

1: The right way to cold DM

2: Curating your LinkedIn experience section

3: My lead magnet failed in an unexpected way

Let’s get into it.

The Right Way to Cold DM

Most people think that LinkedIn is the place to connect with people who are more highly placed than you. And then pitching those people (or connecting with them) so that they can bring you opportunities.

That is so wrong.

There was a time I believed that too. I no longer believe such. Instead, what I have discovered is much different and more profound:

Opportunities come from peers.

Those who are more highly placed than you will most likely ignore you. Think about it for yourself if you are in their shoes.

If someone sends you a connection request and you don’t know the person. You check their profile and you don’t see any connections to what you do. You also don’t see how they can be of value to your business (or professional) interests. Why should you accept such?

I have over 300 connection requests that are pending on my account. And I decline a lot of requests too. My mantra is if it is not connected to my niche and I don’t see any verticals that connect to my business interests, I don’t accept.

There are people who are way stricter and wouldn’t allow you to connect with them if you don’t have their phone number or their personal email. And I don’t blame them.

This is the way the game is played.

Everyone on LinkedIn is looking for people who can advance their business interests. This includes big time CEOs. So, opportunities rarely come from top down. Opportunities come from peer interactions.

This means people like you who are doing similar things to what you do. Those are the people you should be connecting with.

And when you do, engage with them on the LinkedIn feed first.

I have tested this. Engaging with people on comments before sending a DM gets you a much better response rate on DM.

Most people just go from connection accepted to DM. And I have found that this rarely works. There is a very high chance you get ignored. Even if your intentions are noble, it will likely be misinterpreted as a sales pitch.

So, start from the comment section. If they respond to your comments, there is a high chance that you will get a favorable response on DM.

The right way to DM is to engage on their posts. Write an insightful comment. Wait for them to comment back. If they do, that is a green light that their DMs might be open to you.

And always remember – opportunities come from peers.

Curating Your LinkedIn Experience Section

This past week, I did this for my profile. I cleaned up my experience section. And I love how it looks now. Let me explain.

First, this part is for people with unusual career paths. I have been a solopreneur and contractor for most of my life thus far. So, my work experience is kind of messy.

My work experience looks like a lot of short stints in multiple places. And that passes the wrong impression about me. I am not really a fan of short stints.

So, what I did is that I brought all my contractor experience under one roof. And I also gathered all my online writing in one place.

So, instead of looking like I did multiple short stints, it shows I spent a long time being self-employed.

You can take a look at what I did here.

Has that improved anything in terms of my account reach? No, I haven’t noticed anything like that. But I feel much better about the impression my LinkedIn profile now gives of me.

If you have an unusual professional experience that doesn’t look smooth like that of most people, you should adopt this.

Clean up your experience section to position you for the opportunities you want.

My Lead Magnet Failed in an Unexpected Way

Now, back to business.

As you may know, my niche on LinkedIn is remote work. And based on that, I created a lead magnet to keep building my email list.

But this failed in a spectacular way. Let me show you what I did first.

My lead magnet was a book I wrote that sums up all my insights on remote work. I called it the remote work 2025 guidebook. It was free.

I promoted the book by putting the link at the comment section of every of my post. And of course, I invited people to get it for free.

Did people click on it? Yes!

Did my email list start to grow? Yes!

But I noticed something. As I sent emails to my list, those people began to churn. In other words, they got the free book and they were unsubscribing.

After a while, I stopped putting the free book link in the comments of new posts. And I stopped getting new subscribers. This shows that the new subscribers were coming from newer LinkedIn posts. Once a post is more than 1 week old, it stopped generating new subscribers for my email list.

But the worst part is that the new subscribers were unsubscribing. After a few days, I realized that the net new subscribers over a period of time was zero. This was the point I decided to pull the plug.

So, even though the lead magnet brought people in. Those people are not the kind of people that stay. And I don’t want people that don’t stay. They don’t serve any business purpose for me.

Learn from this failure. Your lead magnet must incentivize people to stay on your email list. When people feel like they’ve gotten great value from the lead magnet and they see that all that is left are “sales messages”, they will churn.

You may not think of them as sales messages, but trust me that is how they will think of it.

Withhold some value for continuity. Don’t give it all away in your lead magnet.

My crime was that my lead magnet was too good that people churned right after they got it. I’m taking the book down now and I have uploaded it for sale on Amazon instead.

I have to find a new lead magnet.

Anyway.

If you learned something from this, help us reach more people by sharing with a friend or colleague. Thanks!