LinkedIn For Lawyers (Without The Cold DMs)

In this episode of The Lawyer Podcast, host Awais sits down with LinkedIn specialist Daniel to dismantle common social media myths and reveal how legal professionals can turn their profiles into real revenue drivers. They dive deep into why treating LinkedIn like traditional social media fails, how to optimize your profile for humans over algorithms, and the exact keyword strategy to attract valuable referral partners.

Daniel shares his counterintuitive framework for direct outreach, explaining why success really only lies in shifting from "most connected" to "best connected", and why paid tools like Sales Navigator can actually harm your brand if misused. Tune in to discover how to spend less time posting content and more time building meaningful relationships that grow your practice.

Timestamps

0:00 – Sales Navigator Myth Busting

1:10 – Free Law Firm Marketing Checklist

1:29 – Introducing Daniel

2:16 – Is LinkedIn Actually Social Media?

4:00 – Power of Referrals

4:31 – The Most Common Profile Mistake

6:03 – 3 Steps to Optimize Your Profile

9:44 – Keyword Research Without Paywalls

13:00 – Testing Your Profile on Humans

15:36 – Authentic About Section

20:43 – Are LinkedIn Service Pages Worth It?

22:33 – Taking Conversations Off LinkedIn

24:23 – Most Connected vs. Best Connected

31:15 – If You're a Shy Lawyer

38:01 – Cold DMs and Brand Image

45:43 – Daily Posting or Quality Content

50:02 – How Daniel Helps Lawyers

Full Transcript

Sales Navigator Myth Busting

Awais: I was subscribed to LinkedIn Sales Navigator plan for a very long time, I think it was for one whole year. And I have paid a lot of money to LinkedIn. But in reality, I never actually found any sales there, to be honest. I made no sales. Do you think it is important to know who visits your profile, who is looking at your post, or maybe going and looking at different companies and mass emailing, mass DMing people through Sales Navigator? Does it work, or is it just something you keep on paying LinkedIn and it does nothing really?

Daniel: I think it is worse than doing nothing. It actually hurts your brand, because what will happen if you send 500 spam messages, then maybe two people will bite it and reply and maybe something will come out of them. But 498 people now associate you with something that is unpleasant.

Free Law Firm Marketing Checklist

Awais: Most lawyers I talk to cannot figure out which marketing channel brings them the highest ROI. It might not be your agency, but probably it is your data. So if you feel the same, download our 15 point ROI checklist today. Link in the description.

Introducing Daniel

Awais: Okay, so my next guest joined LinkedIn back in 2004, practically prehistoric in social media terms, and has spent years since turning it into a science where others believe it is just an algorithm and it is really hard to build networks there, specifically when AI is here. So let us learn from Daniel himself how we can leverage this social media network into a big community where our business can grow. So thank you, Daniel, for coming in today on the podcast.

Daniel: Awais, thank you very much for having me on The Lawyer Podcast.

Is LinkedIn Actually Social Media?

Awais: So Daniel, I was actually very excited to bring you in on this podcast because this is a hot debate topic right now, and there are a lot of different opinions on LinkedIn. So my friends in the legal space, some of them think it is just another social media sort of place where people like to brag a lot. It is filled with people lying, and the reality is quite different than what people teach. So what is your point of view, and why do you think that LinkedIn is some place where people have excelled? Share your experience in this particular space.

Daniel: Excellent. Thank you very much. So I will start by saying that I do not think LinkedIn is actually social media at all. It is a mistake, from my perspective, to consider it as social media because in social media we come for the content, and what you said and what many legal leaders are doing is basically drop content and hope that something will stick. It is not the layout to play the game. It is not the best way to play the game. I think the highest proportion of AI content is on LinkedIn. No one can know for sure, but some estimates are anything from 40% to 60%. It is absolutely mad. Let us get back to the basics. What will help the law firm grow?

Power of Referrals

Daniel: What will help it have faster and better intakes and scale its operation? In the service based industries, it is often the art of referrals. If I need someone with your skill set and I am not a legal person, I am just a client, then I will ask around and someone will tell me, "Maybe you need to speak with this person, maybe you need to go to that firm".

The Most Common Profile Mistake

Daniel: The most frequent action LinkedIn users perform on the platform is visiting other people's profiles. Now, that is based on LinkedIn statistics. So, what I challenge everyone to do is simply to run a Google search for their own full name. My guess is that for most of the listeners to The Lawyer Podcast and The Awais Haq Show, they would find that their LinkedIn profile is on page one, often it will be the very first result. Even if they shared nothing, even if they do not remember the password to the account, even if they have not visited in two years. There was a case study you discussed on Time Technologies, and you said the firm had a WordPress website, but it was more of a liability than an asset, unfortunately. All I am adding to that, maybe the managing partners, maybe the general counsel should review or assess their LinkedIn presence and make sure it is on brand. Make sure it is up to date. There are many mistakes that are done there without even discussing content at all.

Awais: So what I am getting from this is that obviously when you are a lawyer, your profile has to be optimized.

3 Steps to Optimize Your Profile

Awais: Now let us keep it very simple, give me a walkthrough on how we can fix that in the first place. Suppose I am a new guy and I want to, or maybe I am practicing since many years, but I have not really focused on my LinkedIn. Now I am back, I have 20 connections and a couple of followers here and there. What do I need to do in the first place before posting anything on LinkedIn?

Daniel: Great. So, I would suggest remembering what sort of legal practices are best used on the LinkedIn platform. The aspects of business law, corporate law, labor law, intellectual property, environmental law, all these are very strong. But if I am basically a law firm that focuses on personal injury, maybe I would advise you to forget about LinkedIn. Just set it up and forget about it. However, if your clients are on the platform and your clients are more in a business transaction mode, then there are three layers. The first is to fix your presence, improve your profile. We can discuss that very simply. The second layer is optimize your network, the people you are connected with, the people who follow you. And only the third would be sort of a lead generation that does not involve content in many cases. First step, make sure that when someone visits your profile, you do not have to apologize and say, "You know what? I am sorry. It says A, B, and C, but actually what we are doing now is D, E, and F". It is not their fault, it is ours. We need to make it up to date. If you are really new in town, then take half an hour and you will bring it up to speed. You can take content from your website. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. Take the content that works and make sure that your profile is customer facing and customer ready. I would start by asking, who is your ideal reader on the platform? Who is your ideal reader, what action would you like them to perform, and are you providing that person with the right keywords in the right order at the right time so they say, "This is someone I need to speak with"? Start by optimizing your presence before you do anything different.

Awais: Right. So recently I had a conversation with a midsize family law firm, their CEO wanted to build his presence on LinkedIn. There were a lot of ROI metrics that we discussed, but suppose I want to do that, and my goal is to attract other attorneys, or let us say wealth management companies, maybe CPAs, where I want them to send me referrals and I could do the same. If I am targeting a couple of different industries which are parallel, what do I actually write on my LinkedIn that attracts them in the first place? And how do I research the right keywords that these people might be searching for without using any tools or if I do not know about it? What do I do there?

Daniel: Excellent. Can I answer the questions in the reverse order? Because I think it makes sense.

Awais: Cool.

Keyword Research Without Paywalls

Daniel: So the last question you asked is about the keywords. You know so much about your specialty that the keywords you may be thinking about are not the keywords that the layman client would actually use. They are not bad words, but they are not the instinctive terms that someone would use. You know too much about your field. So the easiest thing to do would be either to use a free AI tool and ask it. The prompt will be very simple: "Give me 50 terms that someone would enter looking for my specialty". wealth management, or change it. And when you look at it, you use your judgment and you say, "Okay, this is a good keyword. This is not such a good keyword," but I think you will get a very good basic list. The second thing to do would be to ask a new client of yours. Once you have completed the transaction and they are happy, ask them a very simple question: "When you started looking for someone like our law firm, would you mind telling me the keywords you used? How would you run the search?" Most people will tell you, "I ran a search for A, B, and C". The follow up would be, once you have a list of keywords, I believe that many of those keywords are on your profile today, but if you have a list of 50 keywords, maybe we will find ways that 30 keywords are there and 15 keywords are not there. Again, you use your judgment and you say out of those keywords, which words are the most important that I want people to find me with, and then where is the most logical location within my LinkedIn profile so the term is appropriately woven into my profile. It could go back to your intern job, it could go back to a skill, it could go back to something you did before, or the last position you held. Because you do not want to try and game the system. You do not want to stuff keywords. You want each word you are writing to be for the human reader, but you try to use the words that the algorithm is looking for. The human reader trumps everything else. And going back to the friends you were asking, you could ask them, "Would you mind looking at my profile and telling me what you think?" And when they bring up your profile, if they say, "Okay, so it says this, but do you mean it this way or that way?" The secret is not to answer them. The secret is to keep asking clarification questions because if they are not sure, then it means you may need to go back to the drawing board and change it. So it will not help us to educate them.

Testing Your Profile on Humans

Daniel: We want to understand what they are not grasping from what we did. Some people would be surprised by the questions people ask. "I see this, so does it mean you are doing X?" If that is the case, then you understand you have written your profile in a good way for you, but not necessarily for the layman out there. So you thank them, you go back, and you improve your profile, simplify, and streamline it. So the terms people would use would appear up front, above the fold, in your headline, in your about section, in your current position. And the technical terms, bury them somewhere that is not the storefront, because it will make people feel, "I am not sure this is the right term, maybe they are not dealing with my specialty". Bring people in with the general, I may even say sometimes wrong keywords, but people would use them, and do make sure that somewhere at the bottom you explain exactly your specialty. But do not start with your specialty because it would alienate or be too technical for maybe 80% of your clients.

Awais: That is correct. I think the simpler your message is, if the readers get the right stuff from that, they will probably want to connect with you, learn from what you are posting, or read a couple of featured case studies that you put. But I need to be very sure about that. Is this like the headline, where obviously when you comment or post it is the first thing people read, but then you also have a whole about section where you can write a lot of stuff about yourself? Now, how would you basically write that? Should it be more keyword focused? Should it be something where you show that you are a good human in general and show your personality, or should it be like, "I help XYZ customers with XYZ service"? Should it be a personal story, a note where you tell what you do and who you help, or could it be just about your achievements at the front of that section?

Daniel: All right. Many of the options you mentioned are good, and I would start by reminding you that you have a real life personality that is not related to LinkedIn, and that means I do not think you need to come up with a new personality. Helping X with Y is great.

Authentic About Section

Daniel: Let us get back to the story. Imagine three questions you would ask yourself. The first question: Do you always like the story or not? Because if you do not like it, then it does not make sense to try and come up with an artificial thing. Let us imagine you do like the story, or someone that listens to this says, "Yes, I like the story". Let us move to the second question: People who know you well, when they read the story, will they say, "Yes, this is you. This is your style, this is aligned with the way we perceive you, your writing, your personality, your humor"? Or will they stop and say, "Hey, who wrote this?" If there is a gap, we lose. So we started by asking, do you yourself like this decision? We are taking the example of the story, but you can apply it to any other question on LinkedIn. Do people who know you well think it is aligned with you as a person? And lastly, the ideal readers you want to contact you, will they stop and say, "How do I get in touch with you?" This is what we want to achieve. We want it to be aligned with you as a person, with your network, and lastly, with the ones you want to contact you. That means your headline and the about section should be written for humans, and not be too jargon and keyword stuffed, because the headline is seen by people when I message you. The Lawyer Podcast host where my guests build authority, this is amazing. Thank you, and this shows your humor. If someone does not feel comfortable using humor in real life, then LinkedIn is probably the worst place to start. Just make sure that when people see this, they do not go and say, "Hey, what happened to him? Why is she acting like this, weird?" No, it has to be aligned with your personality.

Awais: Yeah, exactly. That is so true. Honestly, I never thought I would write that headline after doing 30 episodes now. I realized that is what I do in every single episode. So I thought maybe that would be the right thing to say about myself. But Daniel, the thing is, I still want to be, when somebody contacts me, they should not actually consider me a joker. The personality has to be humorous, people should be comfortable around you, but how do I build the authority part then? If I put all the humor here, what will I do to show them that I do have the skills they need, after all?

Daniel: Okay. The very fact that you are hosting a podcast about the business of law and legal marketing should help them understand your credentials. And when they scroll down and see your experience, you founded the company, and on your website you have dozens of examples and case studies, I think most people would know that you are serious and you know a lot about it. Maybe one of the best additional benefits of the podcast is that it is very easy to listen to an episode. And if I listen to the episode and I liked what you said, then when I come to you, I am less of a cold lead because I understood how you behaved. I listened to the episode you had with Matthew Fornaro about AI and what will happen to billable hours, and I think I got a basic understanding of you as a person, as a podcast host, and that is a great way both to build your authority, build your thought leadership, and also to make people start the conversation almost like they are meeting an old friend, someone they have already heard in a past life. That is a great way to do it.

Are LinkedIn Service Pages Worth It?

Awais: Right. Now moving on to the next one. There is a specific section where you can list your skills and services. How important is that, and should I really care about that particular section, or should I just leave it and put it away because maybe that is not that converting for me?

Daniel: Can I give you a frank answer?

Awais: Yeah.

Daniel: I would not invest in that. I do not think you will get many new clients clicking on the LinkedIn section of services and suddenly out of the blue ordering a major redesign of their website. I removed mine a couple of months ago, probably because what will happen in real life is that just like when someone is looking for a lawyer and someone mentions your name, then I will ask people who know you. If they say, "Yes, I think it would be a good idea to speak with you," then I will reach out. So the website has to be there. It gives you authority, it helps me understand what you have done. But the actual due diligence for a client will not be just clicking on the services and putting the check in the mail. That does not happen in real life. So it is less important than other sections. It takes more time to scroll down and see what you are actually doing. So play with it, but if you see for six months that nothing happened, it is not you, it is the system. Get rid of it and get back to real life. In real life, it is referrals. You have a real life network.

Taking Conversations Off LinkedIn

Daniel: You mentioned the possibility of messaging people and trying to nurture the leads with them. Actually, one of the biggest secrets is to know when to leave LinkedIn. Imagine I saw something you posted and I sent you a message, you sent me a connection request and I accepted, or the other way around. The best thing to do at one point is actually to leave the LinkedIn platform. If we connected, then I would have access to your primary email. Why is email better? Because most people find it easier to sort their email than their LinkedIn messages. LinkedIn messages are a lot of spam. If I am a client, maybe I want to communicate with you and maybe I need to bring someone else into the conversation. I want to send it to my assistant, I want to send it to my team. If it is a LinkedIn message, there is no easy way for me to do it. Leave the LinkedIn platform. Maybe LinkedIn helps you discover the clients, excellent, but in real life, you would move to a conversation like this or something that would make it easier for you to build a proposal and start working with them. You do not have to stay on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is part of the process.

Awais: Understood. That is great advice, actually. I never thought of it in that particular perspective. And honestly, yeah, you are right, because I do get a lot of messages on LinkedIn and sometimes I hardly respond to anybody. In fact, funny thing, I will tell you, I am not sure you are the expert, I made this, maybe it is a mistake or maybe something I did good.

Most Connected vs. Best Connected

Awais: A couple of months ago I had around 1,800 followers and many connections. I realized whenever I post something, the industries that read my post, because I go to the analytics section, are not even related to my industry. I read an article about how if your post is being shown to people who are not really the right ICP and they do not interact with it, your post gets pushed back. So I was like, "Okay, what should I do then?" I actually removed all my connections which were unrelated and dropped to like 300, or maybe 250. Ever since, that has grown in the legal industry. Do you think that is a good idea, to remove all those connections which are not related to your current work or industry anymore?

Daniel: I think it is a very good thing you did. I would maybe tweak just 10% of it. The reason, maybe we will go into the reason later, because LinkedIn has launched some AI system that changes the algorithm, but the question I would ask is: In three years time, if you had to pick one, would you like to be on LinkedIn as the most connected, or the best connected? Very simple question. Most people will basically say, "If you are not sure, then I would ask you six months ago what would be your choice, or next year what would you think?" And people would say either most or best. The advantage of most is exposure. If you have 40,000 followers and you post something, then many people will see it. The advantage of best is the ability to open the door. You run a search, you identify a second degree contact, you know who the mutual connection is, you leave the LinkedIn platform, you communicate with them, you ask them, and if they are ready to make the introduction, you are starting a meaningful conversation thanks to that person's name. Many legal professionals started by thinking they want to be the best connected. Then they kept hearing they needed to grow their network, so they started walking towards most connected, but they never reached most connected. They are stuck, they are stranded somewhere, and they think they have exposure when they have 2,000 connections. I am sorry, you do not have exposure. In order to have exposure on LinkedIn, because many people will check it 15 minutes a day or even less than that, you need 30k, 35k, or 40k. So most connected, if you have 40k, is great. Best connected is simplest for most people. The quality of your relationship is more important than anything else. In other words, if I see you and we share two mutual connections, John and Jane, what would you like them to say about you? If I reach out to John, would you like him to say, "I am not sure, I think Awais sent me a connection request," or would you like the person to say, "Hey, he can help you automate your business, take your outdated website, and make it work. I think you need to speak with him"?

Awais: Yeah, that makes a hell of a difference.

Daniel: The people who can give the second answer are people who worked with you, people who know you. So you can be very successful with 22 connections on LinkedIn if they know you very well, and you might have 1,800 and not be able to translate those connections into real life revenues. Most or best, it is very difficult, you cannot switch like, "Tomorrow I will be this and yesterday I was something else". Pick one and you will see better results than trying to move around and switch every quarter because you are doing something else.

Awais: Yeah, I think that is the most important part, because obviously if people can vouch for you, that is automatically a sale because you do not have to explain a lot, give them a lot of case studies, or show them examples of what you have done. But my biggest challenge, and I think most people face this, is to make new friends who are actually the kind of people you are talking about. The reason is that nowadays everything seems very artificial. When I started doing podcasts, I did not know about any platforms like PodMatch, so all I knew was LinkedIn. I messaged around 30 or 40 people that I am starting a podcast. It is not there yet, but I plan to do it. One guy actually asked me, "Is it free?" And I was like, "Yeah, why would I charge you?" He said, "No, a lot of people message us and they are like, 'Give us 200 bucks or 500 bucks'". I said, "No, it is free". Then he said, "If it is free, are you trying to sell me anything?" I was like, "No, not at all". In fact, every guest I have talked to, I ask this very often: "I have talked to you, have I ever tried to sell you anything?" They say no. That is strange to them, that I am not trying to sell them anything. When people ask me why I do this, I say chatting with somebody is different than sitting, even virtually like this, and making a connection. My question is, not everybody can start a podcast to build connections, right?

If You're a Shy Lawyer

Awais: Not everybody is confident enough to go on video and start making friends. But the guy who is shy and wants to make friends or meaningful connections like you said, how do I go about that? How should I add random people and then start messaging them? What do I do there? It is very confusing for any person just starting on LinkedIn.

Daniel: Okay, so let us make this simpler. Unless you started when you were a toddler, you have a real life network: people who went to school with you, people you worked with, let us say maybe 200 people, maybe for you 500, maybe for someone else 300. Start only with those. The belief that many people have is that they need to reach someone new, knock on their door, and say, "Hey, I am not sure what you are doing, but I have the best solution for you". It does not really work. However, if you think about people who really know you, and you simply run an advanced search and narrow it down by geography: only Boise, Idaho; only Akron, Ohio; only San Francisco, California; and only people with whom I share one mutual connection. Then you will be able to find someone who could be a good prospect, a good ICP for you. Leave the LinkedIn platform, chat with that person, and be introduced. If I come as a referral, I am less price sensitive, I may stay with you longer, and I may actually send new business your way because I am happy with the service you provided. I know that what I said is like business 101 from the 1970s or 80s, but it is still the way business is done, because legal decisions are frightening for most managers, for most companies. It is very personal. We are not buying something in a supermarket where I do not mind if it is good or not. It is very important for a company, it is very important for us. You do not need a larger network, you need to cultivate your network. One of the simplest ways to do it is to visit your notifications and see what happened to your connections. Say we reach February 25th. On February 25th, I will ask myself a very simple question: Is Awais from The Lawyer Podcast important enough for me to stop my busy day, ask how it has been, and send something that could be interesting for him because it is his birthday, or will I just go on with my life? If I am not sure you are important enough, then we do not need to be connected on LinkedIn. Why is that? Because we have a limited bandwidth. Maybe your bandwidth is much larger than mine, but it is still limited. No one can really keep in touch with 2,000 people easily. No, we cannot. So keep your sandbox of people you care about and who can bring you business. Specifically about LinkedIn, think about someone who could send business your way, and someone you would send business to. The trick is first to send business their way. Because if I meet you and I say, "I do A, you do B, maybe we can exchange something," excellent, we shared a beer, a coffee, a Zoom, and we are moving on. But if I see that you sent me something and it could be an interesting project, I will speak with that person, reach an agreement, and start working with him. If I am a decent human being, I will write, "Awais, thank you very much. In fact, I met with him and I am very happy to say that we started collaborating. Now, tell me a bit more about what you wanted to do and how I can be of help". Very simple, because most people will not feel comfortable receiving leads from you and just saying yes. You do not owe them anything. A question you could ask when you meet someone new: "Who would you like to be introduced to? Who is the ideal person you want to speak with?" Most people will be able to tell you something: "I am very interested in X". The good news is that once you hear X, you continue with your life, but at one point, maybe in two weeks time, you will see an X front and center, and you will know that the label for X is A. Then I will message you and say, "You mentioned X, would you like to check this out? Maybe it could be interesting for you". The way to help people is to ask simple questions like, "Who would you like to be introduced to? Who would be a good lead for you?" Once they tell you something, you do not have to scout and look for that content. At one point, you will find it. So you do not ask them about half a dozen things they are interested in, just the most important one. You have one label, and if you have one label, at one point you will find something interesting and pop it their way. You do it to help them, but most people will try to help you back because it is human nature.

Awais: Exactly, and that is great advice, actually. Giving value or giving something first is always good because that is how you build relationships. That is one thing that I believe works every single time. In fact, I met this guy in Australia, and he sent me a contact from Australia and asked, "Will you be able to help him?" I was surprised that I did not even give him anything in return, why would he send me anything? But that is how relationships are built. Every time I think about somebody who is within his line of business, I always think about him because he is always on my mind. So that is a great advice.

Cold DMs and Brand Image

Awais: Now I have one particular question. I was subscribed to LinkedIn Sales Navigator plan for a very long time, I think for one whole year, and I paid a lot of money to LinkedIn, but in reality I never actually found any sales there, to be honest. I made no sales. Do you think it is important to know who visits your profile, who is looking at your posts, or going and looking at different companies and mass emailing, mass DMing people through Sales Navigator? Does it work, or is it just something you keep on paying LinkedIn and it does nothing really?

Daniel: I think it is worse than doing nothing, it actually hurts your brand. What will happen if you send 500 spam messages, then maybe two people will bite and reply and maybe something will come out of them, but 498 people now associate you with something that is unpleasant. Down the road, in three months or six months time when they hear your name, they will not say, "Wow, I want to meet that person". It is not exactly what we want to do. One of the common misconceptions is that we need to pay LinkedIn, and in fact we do not. The currency we need to use is actually time. If you forget about paying LinkedIn and invest 5 minutes, there is a free way for you to see who visited your profile. You do not have to pay LinkedIn. What you have to do is be visible. Forget about paying LinkedIn and try to ask yourself, "Is my practice or my career important enough for me to invest X amount of time on LinkedIn on a weekly basis?" Maybe someone will say an hour a week, and maybe another manager will say 30 minutes. Make those minutes count. Be in touch with people, see what happens. And again, in many cases, instead of commenting publicly and saying, "Wow, congrats," leave the LinkedIn platform and take the road less traveled. If you see that a connection of yours has just started a new position, the fact they updated their profile today does not mean they started today. Take the time to go to their profile, and if you scroll down and see they started working there last year, do not send "congrats". Something has changed there. Or if February 25th comes, instead of sending the cookie cutter "happy birthday," the 45th time someone sees "happy birthday," they are less excited about it. Take that person's email, leave the LinkedIn platform, run a search, and see what they asked you last time. See if you can find a way to make that conversation more meaningful for them, and in the long term, that will help you more than paying LinkedIn. The free platform is so overwhelming, most people never fathom more than 5% of it. If you pay, you get something, but you are not really able to leverage it because you have not found the limits of the free account. You do not have to do it.

Awais: That is actually nice advice, because if the way you told me and everybody who is listening today, they would understand that your first degree connections are the most important to build relationships, and then your second degree connections can get introduced to you naturally rather than going on Sales Navigator adding everybody up. Now, I have to admit here, when you go on a new platform, like everybody else, I actually followed some of the YouTube gurus who were teaching how to be successful on LinkedIn, and they filled a lot of garbage in my head. The first thing they said was you could go from zero followers to 100k followers in 3 months if you follow my advice. That advice was: you add X amount of connections every day, leave a message every single day, comment on their recent post, and then they would engage with you. If they do not engage, you comment again, and finally, you slide into their DMs and say, "Oh, I loved your post and whatever you have written, I am so impressed by you". That is where you start connecting with them, you keep sugarcoating everything, and ultimately they will be your customer. Could you please clarify if this particular thing really works?

Daniel: Maybe in 2010 it worked, maybe in 2011 it worked. There are two problems with that. A, we have become more skeptical, more suspicious. We have learned that in 90% of cases, anyone sending us a cold connection request will pitch us 30 seconds after we accept the invitation. The second thing is, going back to basics, you are a master in the business of law, and the metrics we should follow are not the LinkedIn metrics at all. What are the LinkedIn metrics? The LinkedIn metrics are the number of followers, connections, views, impressions, SSI score, endorsements, stuff like that. But if you are here for business, then you should watch your revenues, and you should build a machine where LinkedIn feeds your revenues. If you do that, then it does not matter if you have 15 or 50k followers. The clients I work with are less interested in LinkedIn metrics and more interested in real life metrics, because your bank account is more important than LinkedIn.

Awais: Yeah, that is true.

Daily Posting or Quality Content

Awais: The next thing I want to ask is about posting. These gurus have been telling everybody to have a consistent schedule of posting, like you should post one post every day at least, or maybe two. The idea is if you post more, you are all over LinkedIn and people will start noticing you and following you, even if it is AI slop where you type, "Create me a post on this" or "Create a story". I see people posting three times a day, or every single day. Does it really work and help build connections and followers?

Daniel: It hurts your business. What will happen, let us say again going back to the new guy on the block. If I just met you and we connected on LinkedIn and I see that you shared something, the first time I will say, "Okay, let us see what you have written," and I will check it out. By the second or third time, I will say, "Okay, let us look at the title, do I have time for that?" By post number five, I will become blind to your content. It will be just like traffic noise. At one point, if you are hijacking my feed, if I sense that you are sharing too much, then I will either intentionally unfollow you or disconnect from you, because most people are not interested in seeing content coming from one source all the time. The fact that it is easy does not make it right. You have to ask yourself, "Am I doing what is right, or am I doing what is popular?"

Awais: That is the most human thing to do, you have to have quality. If you are posting after a week, people should be able to connect with that on a human level or business level. But there was one guy on a podcast who was a LinkedIn guru, and he said, "I have never posted a single thing on LinkedIn. What I do is slide into the comment section and try to get the attention of the writer of the post by challenging their ideas or agreeing with them. I comment all the time, and that is how I built a six figure, million dollar business". When I thought about it, I got blanked out. If I see a random post, I do not know what to comment because I cannot relate to it. How can we keep commenting on people's posts if we cannot even relate to them, just because we want to make a connection?

Daniel: If that person's superpower is the magical ability to analyze and come up with a unique, humorous, interesting input to every post, then I think they should do it. But for most of us, if it becomes a mechanism, we see it as a chore. You do not have to. The comments will be shown to your network, and if they see that you are basically pasting the same message to the AI guru, to the legal marketing startup, and to the general manager automation thing, then they will stop thinking of you as an expert and think of you in less favorable terms.

Awais: That is excellent.

How Daniel Helps Lawyers

Awais: Daniel, we are running out of time, but how can you help a lawyer who is right now listening to the podcast, and what do you bring to the table that would make them want to contact you and connect with you?

Daniel: Thank you very much. Assuming the lawyer is in the business world of labor, IP, environmental, or corporate law, focused on company information or things appropriate to LinkedIn, then what I would do is have a one on one with them and ask all sorts of questions about their business. As long as they can say, "This is the sort of client I am looking for," there is often a gap between what they want and what they do. It is only natural. So we analyze the gap, identify the gap, and then see what sort of simple system can be used. Sometimes it would be with the lawyer's assistant, sometimes with them, sometimes I would do some of that, and we will bring sanity to what they do. Sanity means: No, you do not have to post more, make the post count. No, you do not have to add three more people every hour. You need to see what you are doing with people you are connected with who do not remember who you are. So less stress and more real life revenues. This is the system we are building. It enables the lawyer to see pretty fast that they are in the right direction, and then they would say, "You know what, we said we would only catch up once a month, I want to catch up next week because now I have more bandwidth". How do they have more bandwidth? They saw the results.

Awais: That is excellent. Everybody listening, I loved this conversation with Daniel because he does not give you any hype, he tells you the truth, and it is very hard to find people like this. We are going to put his website, danielalfon.com, and his LinkedIn in the description below. Feel free to get in touch, and I believe you will get immense help here to take less stress and make sure your actions really count. Thank you, Daniel, for joining in today, and I hope to see you again very soon.

Daniel: Thank you very much, and good luck with The Lawyer Podcast and The Awais Haq Show.

Awais: Thanks a lot, thank you so much.

Resources & Contact

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About the Guest

Daniel joined LinkedIn back in 2004 (practically prehistoric times in social media) and has spent over two decades turning the platform into a precise science. Rather than relying on the algorithm, spam outreach, or endless content schedules, Daniel helps legal and corporate professionals streamline their LinkedIn presence, optimize their existing networks, and convert connections into business revenue.