How to generate sales on LinkedIn for your creative business

LinkedIn is known as a social network for professionals to talk business. This means it’s the perfect social media platform to start generating sales for your business.

The same goes even if you’re a creator, selling digital products like online courses and digital downloads. Finding the right audience on LinkedIn and putting products that they need front and center can help you generate more sales.

Throughout this guide, we’re going to walk you through how you can use LinkedIn to increase sales for your creative business.

Related: The Anatomy of a good LinkedIn post

1. Complete your LinkedIn profile

First things first, you need to fully flesh out your LinkedIn profile before you begin any promotion. This will help you provide a clear background into who you are as well as additional details about what you offer and what got you into this type of business.

We’re going to walk through every section or area of your LinkedIn profile that you need to fill out and how to do so. This will be a comprehensive guide for those brand new to LinkedIn. If you’re simply optimizing your profile, you may not need all of this information, so simply skim for the sections you need help with.

Profile and background photos

The first thing to pay attention to is your profile photo and background photo. These will appear at the top of your profile, like so:

Your profile photo should be a professional headshot of you. Bonus points if it’s the same image that you use on your website, email address, and other social media platforms for consistency and recognizability. This should be a high-quality square image around 400 x 400 pixels.

Get creative with your background photo. The recommended dimensions for this image are 1,584 x 396 pixels, providing you with a great way to grab attention and share more about what you offer.

Some ideas include:

• A graphic sharing your product or service offerings
• A graphic showcasing pages from your digital download
• An image of you at work
• An image from an event you attended or spoke at
• A stock image relevant to your work
• A graphic showcasing your creative business’s logo

Sophie Van Tiggelen’s profile below showcases a great example of what you could do with your background photo:

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Intro

Next is your intro. You’ve already seen a couple different examples of intros in the last section—this is all of the information that appears at the top of your profile, right underneath your profile and background images.

It includes details like:

• Name
• Name pronunciation
• Pronouns
• Headline
• Contact info

Click the pencil icon in this section to edit your own information. You’ll get a pop-up like this:

Scroll down to fully fill out this introductory area so you can provide as much helpful information as possible.

The area you’ll want to spend the most time on is your headline. You have a maximum character limit of 220, and you want to use it as strategically as possible. Your headline appears within the LinkedIn news feed, so it should be an accurate description of exactly what you do, cut down to a concise 220 characters.

Here’s an example of a more creative headline from Tyler Hakes:

However, you might choose to use more space to really detail out what you do and how you can help others, like in this example from Kawusara Salley:

About

Your LinkedIn summary has a character limit of 2,600 characters, which means you’ve got plenty of space to tell your story. Use this space to introduce yourself and talk more about your background.

Include things like why you do what you do, what got you into this industry, how you realized there was a pain point you wanted to solve with your creative business, and other important information.

Here’s an example of what this might look like from Polly Clover:

Services

If you offer any services on top of any digital products you might be selling, you can include those in a section on LinkedIn. This way, interested users can create a proposal for your services, starting the conversation about working together right on LinkedIn.

They’ll appear like this on your profile, and potential clients can click “See more” to learn more and create a proposal:

Experience

Next, you’ll want to input all relevant work experience to your existing creative business. Your first jobs or any random work you’ve done over the years don’t need to be listed; instead, you want to focus on your applicable experience.

Input each job or project you’ve worked on over the years, as well as a summary of what you did and how it’s helped you gain necessary experience for the business you run today.

Education

If you have formal education, feel free to list it here. However, this section isn’t really necessary, especially if you may have a degree in a different field from what you now work in.

Licenses and certifications

This section is often more pertinent than listing formal education. If you’ve taken well-known online courses or certifications that are relevant to your business, those can be helpful for potential clients and customers to see.

Here’s what this might look like:

Miscellaneous

Remaining sections include Skills, Courses, Languages, Interests, and Causes. Fill out as much of these sections as is pertinent to your experience and your business. They aren’t required sections as they don’t add a ton to your profile, but can still be fun to have.

2. Create a content strategy

Just having an optimized LinkedIn profile won’t be enough. Once you’ve completed your profile, it’s time to build out a content strategy so that your posts might reach your intended audience.

Your LinkedIn content strategy should include details like:

• When to post
• How often to post
• What to post

LinkedIn recommends aiming to post new content at least once each day, however, if you look at Sprout Social’s data from LinkedIn engagement, you’ll see that it’s best to stick to weekdays as not many users are checking in on weekends.

So we’ve covered the first two sections: aim for at least once daily on weekdays. Around 10am-12pm is best.

But let’s talk about what to post. How can you create content that grabs attention and brings your target audience into the folds of your business?

A few ideas include:

• Sharing a personal story or anecdote that related back to your business
• Writing out helpful or actionable tips about your industry
• Sharing company or industry news and updates
• Linking to blog content or other interesting information online
• Promoting your services and/or digital products

3. Promote your digital products

And that brings us to our third tip. If you want to generate more sales, you need to ask for them directly. Make it easy for LinkedIn users to see what you offer and make a purchase.

There are several ways to do this, but each of them involves creating engaging content that mentions any digital products you have to offer.

Here’s an example that can at least start getting people in the door. CJ Haughey shares an actionable tip that he then ends with two call-to-actions: one is to connect with him for more tips, and the other is to DM him to get access to a free digital download.

This is a great way to start building your network and even your email list—offering free value on LinkedIn and a free lead magnet for new subscribers.

Or, you can promote a fully paid digital product by sharing a tip that’s covered within the product and linking to it. Take a page out of this creator’s book by also offering a discount to further incentivize purchases:

Make sure your digital products are a regular topic of conversation in your LinkedIn content so you can increase awareness about what you offer as well as sales.

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4. Incorporate LinkedIn into your sales funnel

Your creative business should already have a solid sales or marketing funnel that helps bring potential customers down the pipeline. What we mean by this, is that the sales journey often follows a funnel.

Said funnel looks like this:

Source

People enter the top of the funnel as they learn about your business. But only those who need your product will funnel through to become customers.

However, you can help some of those customers make it through the funnel by creating content and other marketing assets specifically for each stage of the funnel. And to generate sales on LinkedIn, that means incorporating this platform into your existing funnel.

To do this, you’ll need to be more strategic about your content creation, ensuring you post LinkedIn content that fits each stage of the funnel.

For example:

• Top-of-the-funnel posts: Stories, introductory content, tips, how-to’s
• Middle-of-the-funnel posts: Lead magnets, freebies, webinars
• Bottom-of-the-funnel posts: Your paid digital products

Create a variety of funnel content to help consistently bring new people into your sales funnel and help them find their way through to the bottom: becoming a customer and purchasing one of your digital products.

5. Take advantage of LinkedIn creator tools

LinkedIn offers a number of creator tools that can help you further provide value to your network and increase their buying potential.

Some of these creator tools include:

• Writing articles
• Creating a recurring newsletter
• Live streaming to your audience
• Promoting virtual events
• Accessing analytics

These tools help you to create even more valuable content—and analyze its performance—to ensure you’re reaching your audience, resonating with them, and making an impact.

6. Engage with your network

Our list tip is all about engagement. Sure, if you create great content, hopefully they’ll all flock to you. But that isn’t realistic. You need to put in the work as well to engage with other users on the platform.

This looks like:

• Sending notes alongside your connection messages
• Reacting to posts you enjoy
• Commenting on posts when you have thoughts to share
• Reposting content from others in your network
• Attending virtual events

The more that you engage with others, the more likely they are to see your content in their feeds and interact with it themselves. With this in mind, make sure you’re consistently connecting and engaging with users who may be in your target audience to increase the chances they’ll want to buy from you.

Start increasing sales with LinkedIn

Start creating and selling your own digital products and online courses with Teachable. You can easily promote them via LinkedIn or any other marketing channel of your choosing, building up a profitable creative business.