10 LinkedIn Groups, 13000 members, 0 revenue

lifegauge

lifegauge

Finance Pimp
Oct 8, 2007
42
0
0
www.felixsim.com
Hi

I went through the WF forums to see if anyone posted anything about LinkedIn, and couldn't find any so thought I'd start.

About 3 years ago I started my first niche group on LinkedIn, the Asian Investors Group. The initial idea was just to create a group which has investors, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who was interested in Asian-based investment opportunities to exchange deals and ideas. I then moved on to create 9 other groups, all with their geographical niches (European Investors Group, USA Investors Group, etc.) and everything started growing organically from there. I even went to the effort of "branding" the groups so that every group had a different logo, but had a similar feel to them.

Here are two examples:
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The groups organically gets about 20-30 new applications a day, and I approve each and every single application. When someone applies to join a group, an email (which I can customize) is automatically sent to them from LinkedIn. Once the application is approved (or denied), another customized email is also automatically sent by LinkedIn. The only time I spend on managing these groups is just to go through the profile of the members who apply. Basic turnkey stuff.

Occasionally, I use the Group Manager function to send out a weekly group message to all members, usually promoting a press release or sharing an interesting piece of news that I find that is relevant to each group. I've tried ways and means to think of a revenue model around these groups that I've built in the past 3 years, but nothing came up.

I wonder if anyone here on WF has any thoughts on this and could share a tip or two?

Thanks
Felix
 


Regional penny stock pump n dumps? :P

The only things I can think of are to try to target your members with relevant offers. You could approach one of those (Region) Investor Forum style organisations and offer to promote their conferences to your members. Unfortunately, nature of LinkedIn (imho) means that it is quite likely that a lot of your group members are inactive and probably useless in terms of marketing. You are also going to have problems in that a lot of your members are going to be low quality, unable to afford the stuff you are going to want to promote.
 
Pretty neat model you've got there, lifegauge!

Have you considered offering some sort of investors course?

You could offer it free for emails, which you already have through LinkedIn, so I guess it depends on if you want to actually own the list. Honestly though, some recurring monthly fee seems way more worth your while.

Going either of these routes relies on quality of traffic as ulixes said. I know nothing about LinkedIn traffic so these may actually be terrible ideas, but just more food for thought.
 
Thanks guys!

Ulixes: I'm not sure how active members in the groups are in terms of reading and acting on information sent to them, but you're right that only a handful are actively posting on the discussion boards within the groups. The quality of the members in the group however are high, as they are almost all in the finance and investment sector and all sign-ups are manually approved. I have stopped approving students, educators, etc. since 4 months back.

I have tried talking to some conference organisers in the regions but the only thing they seem interested in offering me is a free ticket to attend the conference in exchange for promoting their event. Probably the way to monetize that is to sell the free ticket :P

@pf: No, I haven't considered offering an investor course in exchange for emails, as I really don't want to start another one of those "free ebook for emails" model. Something recurring is what I'm really trying to think of.

Thanks for your replies again and hopefully someone else shares their thoughts as well!
 
did you start these groups with the intention of monetizing?

do you have a product or course you could gain affiliate sales from without sounding spammy?
 
No, I didn't start these groups with the intention of monetizing... I currently do not have any product or course that I could gain affiliate sales with but I was hoping someone could point me to one that I might be able to use.

Interesting that almost all the suggestions so far have pushed towards affiliate marketing as opposed to using the huge contacts in the groups to create a product or service that is targeted.

Keep the ideas coming guys!
 
Sounds like a high quality, engagable audience. Leverage your access to them by starting a site or forum that they can become regular visitors at, get info (blog) or talk (forum). Once you move them away from Linkedin and use that as your traffic funnel, you're one step closer to building something of value. Even if you're not monetizing the site but it's getting visitors, that has value.
 
Hi Maximus

Your idea is the closest to one I ever had. I was seriously considering that, even thought you rightfully pointed out that it is not a monetization strategy. I know of two other LinkedIn group owners who have executed this successfully, namely OnStartups and VC4Africa.

Other options I had was to produce a publication of all the group members and profile their companies in this publication, and send it to all the other members. This basically takes advantage of the fact that LinkedIn only allows Group Owners/Managers to send mass emails (once a week) to all members of the group, and many group members do not go through the entire membership list to see who else are in the group. One way of monetizing this is to reach out to members individually and ask if anyone wants to buy an advertisement on this PDF feature.
 
I'd at least start trying to link out to properties you own/have access to stats, even if you just repost the articles/press releases you've been linking to now. That way you can work out how active the user base is and how much time you should actually be spending on this. If it works out ok, you can always build out that site that you originally just posted the articles/press releases to as well.
 
Thanks tencentpiece. I'm already sharing posts from my main finance blog, Felix Sim - Advisor based in Dubai and Singapore who works with Hedge Funds, Private Equity Funds, Investment Banks, Venture Capitalists, Government entities and other business and financial institutions.. My experience with users on LinkedIn groups is that they are usually passive users, i.e., they stalk and view posts but do not respond to them.

The 2 most active topics for all LinkedIn discussions are "Job Opportunity" and "Investment". If a recruitment agency posts a job opening that looks professionally written, that discussion post is almost certain to generate at least 20-50 responses in 3 days. If someone posts a discussion topic such as "I am an investor looking for investment opportunity: $10 million to be invested by 2011", this discussion post will generate more than 50 responses in 3 days for sure.

There must be a way to crack this LinkedIn code.
 
@pfgannon suggested earlier in this thread to start building a list of these members. Interestingly, I had since September put together a "set and forget" sequence for all new members who join the group.

Basically, as a group owner, you can set Templates which LinkedIn will automatically send to all new members who request to join the group. Another template can be set to those who have been approved/denied access to the group.

What I did in September:
1. Create a Google Docs form to gather data from new members who bother to complete a sign-up form (non-compulsory). This means that whether members complete the form or not does not affect their ability to join the group. I will tend to approve most requests anyway!
2. Put a link to this form in all the groups' Templates (joining and approved messages), and write a convincing paragraph for all members to complete the form. If you're curious what the form looks like, here's the link: Global Hedge Funds Groups on LinkedIn (I'm using a URL shortener just to see how much response I get from WF, no other hidden agenda)
3. Forget about what I did.

Below is a screenshot of the Google docs form, as you can see from the data, I am getting on average 1 submission every 2 days with no effort.



I hope this helps to generate more ideas.
 
Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had a fantastic celebration and are back to business now!

Anyone has some more thoughts on this as I thought during the holiday season there might not be many people online to respond with ideas.
 
Concentrate on getting them off LI onto your own email list.

Social Media followers are notoriously unresponsive, because there are too many other distractions on the social media site.

If you can lure them away from LI and get into their inbox with good free content, you have a much better chance of making money by sending them offers.

Another alternative is to use them as social proof for your amazing skills as a social media consultant, and change $X,XXX per day to companies who are currently wetting their pants with urgency to 'do social media'.
 
Hey AS, thanks for responding to this!

Unfortunately there is no secret to this and no "amazing skills" to creating this huge community. It just takes time and patience :) so I won't be banking on this success to sell any social media consultancy services.

I'm convinced now the first step would be to lure them away from LI, either to an email list or to a website. It is probably easier to do the former as it is less resource intensive (do not need to create a website/portal). However, the problem is the frequency of this newsletter, and the content. Do I pay someone to write content for me, what topics should I start with so I don't start turning people off in my first newsletter, etc. Quite a lot of things there...

Alternatively, I was thinking back on the website/portal idea. What do you guys think of creating a discussion forum? I know this is nothing new or novel, but if executed correctly it works.

I have 10 groups on LinkedIn, and it is impossible to communicate across groups. Discussions posted in the USA Group does not get shown in the European Group, vice-versa. Members also cannot send messages to other members easily due to the privacy settings, etc. I could use a LinkedIn profile mod so that all members who register on the forum can add their profile to add more credibility to their account on the forum. As we all know, forums (especially new ones) are difficult to build because most posters do not have credibility.

Any thoughts on this forum idea?
 
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