LIMA

Guess what is the most interesting part of Linkedin marketing? Reading how people answer your spam. I started doing LinkedIn marketing over two years ago. At some point, I managed to send a spam campaign amounting 500 000 messages within a few months. Those were golden times! Each message not only got delivered to the internal message box but also e-mailed to the addressee by LinkedIn. My targeting was CEOs, company owners, and investors. This got me thousands of clicks to my website, which would otherwise cost 16-32 euros per click if I paid for LinkedIn Ads. Now I am going to teach my exact LinkedIn marketing process, step by step.

Why am I doing this? Maybe to give back to the community? Nope, because I didn’t take that much from BHW in the first place. The real reason is because I know this method is not everlasting. Sooner or later anti-spam systems will improve and existing holes get fixed. I am not doing LinkedIn marketing at the moment (you can read about my current journey here) and I feel like the knowledge I was collecting one piece at a time during more than two years of hard work is getting wasted by staying unused. This is why I decided to publish everything I know about LinkedIn. Every little dirty secret. Consider this to be my legacy to BHW community. I hope at the very least this will get you inspired to begin your own journey (which doesn’t necessarily have to be a LinkedIn journey).

Enjoy the reading!

Are you ready to spam LinkedIn to death? Fasten your seatbelt!

To help you navigate in this wall of text, here's quick reference:

PART I

FAQ

How to make money on LinkedIn?

Spamming LinkedIn to death

What to offer on LinkedIn

Account creation

Account stealth

Hiding IP behind a proxy

Aged or phone verified accounts​

Choosing best e-mail providers for registration

Finding perfect profile pictures

Getting initial connections

A 60-day LinkedIn premium for free?

Use A Multi Account Tool* or get fucked by LinkedIn​

How to make your profiles work

Opportunity positioning

Authority positioning​

Outreach with VAs

The secret sauce of LinkedIn outreach

How to send messages​

Outreach automation

Crafting the message

Automating message sending

PART II

Selling LinkedIn endorsements

The "Why"

Understanding your buyers

Where to sell

Fiverr

Own website

Other possibilities​

How to sell

Testimonials

Being at the top of the list

General advice

Fiverr related advice

Upwork related advice​

How to execute orders

Preparation

Execution

​

PART I

FAQ

Answer to 90% of all questions: I neither participate in Skype groups nor currently interested in JVs. If you have a question related to the topic, please post it here and I will try to answer.

How to make money on LinkedIn?

There are two major avenues you can take. The first is reaching LinkedIn users out and selling them either your own or your clients' products, inviting to events, finding highly sought after people like investors or professionals and so on. The second is selling profile-related things like endorsements, recommendations or profile improvement to LinkedIn users. Both avenues have own challenges to overcome. Continue reading to explore them in more detail.

Spamming LinkedIn to death

The general idea is as simple as a boiled egg. We connect with people on Linkedin. Once they accept our connection request, we send them a message with an offer, like affiliate offer, website link or maybe sex proposition if you feel playful. As always, the devil is in the details, which will be fully revealed further down the road.

What to offer on LinkedIn

There are many products and services that potentially could be sold through LinkedIn. You should find one by yourself as my choice was very specific to my situation (excluding LinkedIn endorsements, which anyone can do). I can only give some guidelines here.

The cost of LinkedIn marketing is relatively high, so whatever you sell should have the potential to cover the costs. Let’s say your monthly total cost is $1000 and one sale generates $10 in profit. To break even, you need to make 100 sales.

Let’s say your connection acceptance rate is 50%, link CTR is 15% and landing page conversion is 3%.

X is the number of connection request you need send to break even.

X * 0,5 * 0,15 * 0,03 = 100

X = 44444

While this number is not out of this world, it is still quite huge.

What if the profit margin was $100? You would need to send only 4444 connection requests, which is not only doable but also realistic to send manually. The best part: when targeting is right, expensive offers convert as good as cheap ones. However, the more expensive a product, the more you will have to invest into the sales process. The sales cycle also tends to take longer.

Treat LinkedIn only as a mean to establish the initial connection. If your product is best to be sold by phone, by all means, transit to a phone call at the very first opportunity. If a landing page is your salesman, funnel people there. You get the idea.

Account creation

The first part is that we need to create accounts. When creating an account, we need to focus on two main things: stealth and credibility. Having accounts undetectable by browser fingerprinting systems will allow you to have multiple accounts without them being linked and restricted. Having credible accounts will yield more connection request acceptations, and thus, more people to message and hopefully more conversions.

Account stealth

In order to make accounts undetectable, there are multiple things you need to do. Please find them listed below.

Hiding IP behind a proxy

When managing multiple Linkedin accounts, be sure to assign one proxy to one account. This is because Linkedin is notoriously strict towards accounts accessed from datacenter IP addresses. Once an account, which was accessed from a particular IP address, was banned, all other profiles, which were accessed from the same IP, might get restricted as well.

Therefore, use 1 proxy per account.

Definitely use private proxies from a good and trusted provider. If you can get your hands on residential IP proxies, by all means, do it. You can read in this article how to set up residential IP connections with multiple IP addresses for cheap. And if you don’t know what residential IP proxies are, read this article first.

Aged or phone verified accounts

This is very important as this may drastically affect how your accounts will sustain over time. From my tests, aged accounts performed best – they were able to still send messages even after around 10-30 complaints. I believe this is due to the fact that Linkedin categorizes users by the date of their registration and gives more banning preferences and attention to new accounts. Therefore, naturally, aged accounts avoid being “watched over”. So, yeah, Linkedin treats new accounts like an overly attached girlfriend. I used 2-3 years old aged accounts, which work extremely well, but cost us around 3-5 USD each, depending on the amount purchased at once.

If you can’t afford 3-5 USD for an aged account, first of all, please reconsider doing LinkedIn marketing in general as it indeed requires some upfront investment. That said, while PVA accounts don’t work as well as aged ones, you may still try them. Make sure to match the phone number and the proxy location of the account. You can use TextNow Android app for free and unlimited US virtual phone numbers (google: “textnow apk”). I think it could work, though I used physical sim cards.

Choosing best e-mail providers for registration

Obviously, if you are creating new accounts, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and Mail.com will work best.

Mail.ru, Gmx.com and so on will raise big flags.

Funny thing is that, when I bought aged accounts, they were already registered on mail.ru, which would be a big red flag in case of a new account. Aged Linkedin accounts with mail.ru addresses worked amazingly though.

Finding perfect profile pictures

This is, by the way, a pretty interesting example of how social media track every bit of information about you. If you upload a picture from the internet to Linkedin, which has been previously uploaded to Linkedin, Linkedin will automatically flag your accounts. It not only reads image hash but also has picture recognizing algorithm similar to Google Images, albeit seemingly less sophisticated one.

How to solve this? Mirror your images! Download the picture and “Flip horizontally” in either Photoshop or Paint. In most cases, it should be enough for LinkedIn (though not enough for Google Images). Skew the picture additionally and add some noise if you feel paranoid.

Getting initial connections

In order to do anything on Linkedin, you will need initial connections. This is because the way Linkedin works. It allows you to interact with people you have common connections with. For getting initial connections, you can use toplinked.com, which has a constantly updated database of people looking to connect.

However, if you try to import the list directly to your Linkedin accounts, in most cases LinkedIn will prevent you from doing so. It will display some error upon uploading the file.

To solve this, upload the list to contact book at any e-mail major e-mail provider like Gmail or Yahoo. Then connect the box to LinkedIn. It will synchronize the contact book with your account treating each address as perfectly legitimate. Genius, isn’t it?

Pro tip: try to synchronize around 300-500 contacts at the time from one email address. Linkedin can be pesky if you go very hard on it.

By the way, make sure, to do this step once you have a presentable account.

A 60-day LinkedIn premium for free?

Premium Linkedin users have fewer limits and Linkedin looks after them with less caution. You do not need to pay over 60 USD for such account, you can just get a 30-day trial and it will last you 60 days (you read that right, 30-day trial for 60 days!).

No need to assign your real credit or debit card. Go to Entropay instead and register an account there, verify it and you will be able to create an unlimited amount of prepaid cards with 10 maximum at a time. Keep a minimum deposit of 1 USD on those cards and use them to activate the Premium subscription. When Linkedin will try to charge you, you will not have enough funds to cover the cost. It will continue trying to do so for 30 additional days after the trial end, while you will be retaining your premium status of your account – it may say it’s expired, but the benefits are still there.

Sneaky cheeky peaky!

Use A Multi Account Tool* or get fucked by LinkedIn

Now, this may sound as promotion and in some sense, it is a promotion because a multi account tool is my software. However, there are not many (if any?) alternatives. You need A Multi Account Tool* to fool browser fingerprinting mechanisms employed by LinkedIn. I tried using separate browser profiles in Firefox, it didn’t work well. Multiple VPS or virtual boxes might work but at the end of a day it turns out to be either expensive or massively inconvenient or likely both.

A Multi Account Tool*’s development was initially fueled by the need to bypass LinkedIn’s fingerprinting mechanisms, so you may expect it to work very well with LinkedIn. It can also be easily automated to save you from doing repetitive manual tasks over and over again. For example, incoming messages could be answered with an autoresponder. You can order automation scripts for A Multi Account Tool* from freelancer developers.

How to make your profiles work

LinkedIn marketing formula is extremely simple: opportunity + authority. Position yourself as an opportunity to get their attention, then reposition yourself as an authority to get them do whatever you need.

While in a regular sales process we start from the authority positioning right off the bat, in LinkedIn marketing such move would decrease the connection acceptance rate. Let me give you an example. Have you ever bought any insurance? Would you connect with a random insurance broker on LinkedIn? If you answered the second question “no”, congratulations, you are in the 95% of the population who doesn’t like salesmen.

This is why you mislead LinkedIn users first into thinking you are their opportunity and then flip the script.

Opportunity positioning

The very first thing you need know is what your target audience is. If you don’t know this, go back to the drawing board or take a crash course of 101 Marketing Basics and find out.

If you know your target audience, you know your target profile. These are profiles, which you want to target.

Once you know that, you need to ask yourself a question: “Who present an opportunity to my target profile?” or even simpler “Whom members of my target group would absolutely like to network with?”

Here are some examples:

• For marketing managers, opportunity people are the following: new clients, marketing gurus, recruiters, HR managers
• For business owners: new clients, investors, potential business partners
• For recruiters: business owners, HR managers, highly skilled people professionals

Once you have decided, who is perceived as an opportunity by your target group, let’s build a marketing profile around that.

Pro tip 1: The ultimate authority for most Linkedin users are recruiters because most people on LinkedIn are somewhat interested in new job opportunities even if they are not actively seeking for one. An exception to this rule is business owners, though some of them still willingly connect with recruiters. I have managed to get up to 60-70% connection request acceptance rate when using recruiter profiles. This is an absolutely amazing result considering that some percent of LinkedIn profiles are totally abandoned.

Pro tip 2: Raise the amount of connections above 500+. Then disable the ability of other users and your 1st-degree connections to see your actual connections count and add in your tagline: “Over 50K+ connections”. This way people will connect with you like crazy because stupid fuckers are bedazzled with the opportunity to massively expand their own networks.

Authority positioning

Making profiles look credible is arguably the most important part of LinkedIn marketing. If your profiles aren’t trusted by other people, they are useless. And trust me, an average LinkedIn user is way smarter than an average Facebook user (IG and Snapchat users are hands down the smartest though /s). So you better position your profiles as an authority.

You need your accounts not only look real, but neat. The best possible scenario is that you have a professional photo with 3-5 positions and summary, which all has originally written content. However, there are ways to cut costs on content and still make them “good enough” to sell. This is what I did:

• Have a tagline that follows the formula “<position> @/at <current company> | <reason for connecting>”. For example if posing as an investor and targeting business owners, you may have the following tagline: “Investor @ Venture Capita LLC | Looking for business opportunities” or “Investor, Writer, Coach | Connecting with business owners to expand biz opportunities”
• Have a professional picture and don’t use stock photos! I am not even going to explain the reasons why this should be pretty obvious.
• Each job position description must contain some information. Don’t leave them blank, that looks bad! You can just use bullet points of what are the key responsibilities of that person in that position. Nobody reads them fully anyway; it’s just for “stuffing” (like Turkey stuffing). You can use Google to find websites that have descriptions of the positions you require. Just copy paste them. Google example “marketing manager job description”.
• Previous positions must relate to the current one and have logical time and date periods. Please don’t make an investor that has worked as a janitor a year ago. Be realistic.
• Add education. Add any university or college and use appropriate time ranges.
• You definitely need a summary. A lot of people on Linkedin, just copy paste their company description. You can do the same. Just Google “<current company> about us” and you will have an awesome summary. You can even add your own additions in the summary, such as “Connecting with awesome people to expand my network” and then copy paste stuff about your current company.
• Add relevant skills to the profile
• Buy recommendations to your profile for ultimate social proof authority. You may also make your profiles recommend each other. In this case, use your brain and keep things natural. One recommendation per profile is enough.
• Add other bits of information on the top of your profile, such as country, zip code and industry.
• Add miscellaneous bits of information, such as interests, causes, courses, birthday and so on…

Finally, the more little details you put into your profile, the better chances it will have high success rates. Take a look at the profiles of so called LIONS (LinkedIn Open Networkers) – they have every possible bit of information available on their profiles, from how many kids they have to how frequently they do squats (obviously a joke). While I personally don’t think information overloading is good, it definitely helps to make a profile look more credible.

The point here is that you need to pour your soul and willingness to make this account awesome. You can make shortcuts here and there, but always remember that by doing so you are cutting on your performance.

I have attached some screenshots, which showcase some example of our accounts that utilize most of the principles outlined above.

To make your life easier, I will provide you with a custom made content randomization tool later in this guide. It will speed up your data preparation process tenfold.

Outreach with VAs

When accounts get ready, the most tedious part of the job is done. The rest is easy: find targeted profiles, connect and send a message. Optionally communicate with those who answered and follow-up the rest.

Initially, I hired a part-time VA to send connection requests manually. The process was simple:

1. Clean all cookies, change proxy in a browser
2. Log into a LinkedIn profile
3. Send 100 connection requests to targeted profiles
4. Log out, repeat from the step 1 for the next profile

Because the initial results were promising, I hired a full-time VA to do the job. Later on, the process was improved by switching from Firefox with add-ons to A Multi Account Tool*. First, the account random ban rate has decreased drastically. Maybe due to better counter-fingerprinting, maybe because the number of human mistakes made by VA (e.g. forgot to clean cookies or used a wrong proxy) has decreased. Second, this eliminated a very time-consuming part of the process, which was switching between profiles.

I hired a VA for around $3/hour. One VA in 1 hour could do the following (with A Multi Account Tool*):

- Send 100 connection requests manually

- Respond to 30 messages

Whether this is enough or not, depends on your product. If you skipped “What to offer on LinkedIn” part, now is the right time to get back to it and perform necessary calculations.

Pro tip: if you need a cheap hard-working English-speaking VA for a boring job, hire Philippines. If you need a cheap VA able to perform tasks which require some creative input, hire from Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus or Ukraine. At the moment of writing, national currencies in those countries are significantly devalued relatively to euro and dollar, which makes hiring from there cheap for us.

I hire mostly from Kazakhstan. While the number of people fluent in English is not that high there, it’s not hard to find them either. They have universities with English as the language of teaching. Use your creativity and social networks to find suitable candidates.

The secret sauce of LinkedIn outreach

If you ever used LinkedIn, you probably know that you only can connect with 2nd-degree connections (friends of your friends), right? Furthermore, even these type of connections can ask you for a “reason to connect” or “email of the person”. These spam filters are built into LinkedIn to prevent from connection request spamming.

However, there is a way to completely bypass them. Feel intrigued?

Here’s the secret: LinkedIn mobile version doesn’t have those limits!

There are multiple options to connect as a mobile user:

• Use User-agent changer add-on in Firefox. This is the easiest and cheapest option, though LinkedIn is likely to track and link multiple profiles done this way.
• Use multiple mobile phones. I know in some countries you can get them for cheap. This option will require an ‘offline VA’ to manage the phones.
• Use A Multi Account Tool*.

You are free to go with any of the options, I will include here an instruction for A Multi Account Tool* because this is what I did:

1. Create a browser profile in A Multi Account Tool*
2. Enter all the details including proxies for that account
3. In the user agent field add a mobile user agent, such as this: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.3; en-us; XAOMI /JSS15J) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30 (Note! You will need to test different User-agents, because not all of them work. Some of them can redirect you to download the app after logging in)
4. Also, use different user agents for different accounts and don’t get linked and detected  (for example, play around with android versions and different mobile models).
5. Save the browser profile
6. Open it and log in to Linkedin
7. Go to search, find your target profiles, open them in new tabs and connect like crazy!

Pro tip 1: I was sending out 100 connection requests per day from one account. While I tried sending 200 per day from a single account without restrictions, still decided to stick with the 100 cap. To send more, I was increasing the number of accounts.

Pro tip 2: If you have the ability to scrape your target profiles’ links and then want to use them to add connection requests using the mobile emulation of your browser, you can use this link format:

Code:

https://www.linkedin.com/m/profile/<PROFILE-ID-CODE>/

For example, the profile code is „ADEAAAHGMugBcaG9zkL9sPxsEfuHbxogosC_ev0“, the profile will be

Code:

https://www.linkedin.com/m/profile/ADEAAAHGMugBcaG9zkL9sPxsEfuHbxogosC_ev0/

At first, I used LinkedIn Dominator to scrape these but it was a pain in the ass, so later developed own software. I will talk in more detail about automation later in this guide.

How to send messages manually

After we have sent the connection request to our target profile, we need to track if it has accepted our invite. The way you accept the invites is by going to your recently added connections:

Code:

https://www.linkedin.com/connected/?filter=recent#?filter=recent&

Here, you will be able to use the interface to quickly send them a message and after you are finished don’t forget the last person you have sent the message to.

Important! For sending messages you will have to use LinkedIn’s desktop interface. This means you will need to use a desktop User-agent. Remember: mobile is for sending connections, desktop is for sending messages.

Crafting the message

Here are the tips in order to make the message reach its goal:

• Use simple subjects, such as “hi”, “hello”, “hey”, etc…
• Make it personal and state your reason for connecting or say something nice about their profile.
• Thank the target profile for connecting with them! This ensures that you get off the right vibe. “You are just here to say hi”.
• If you are pushing any offer, say sorry for being pushy or annoying. I know it sounds funny and you will even get a smart ass or two trying to accuse you of “going smart about spamming” but it works.
• Use spintax if you can! And if you are sending hundreds or thousands of messages, spintax becomes a must. LinkedIn has a sophisticated algorithm that tracks the number of similar messages. When the number reaches some limit, all consequent messages with high enough percent of similarity will go to spam. When sending 3k+ messages, you need at least 10-20 spun words, for 10k+ you need nested spintax.

Here are some template examples with and without spintax:

Template 1

Spoiler

Template 2

Spoiler

Template 3 (spintaxed)

Spoiler

Outreach automation

The most fun part of any internet marketing campaign is automating the hell out of the thing. In the beginning, I used LinkedIn Dominator software for automation. Before I start bashing the hell out of it, I want to say that it is actually quite good software, which does a decent job.

While I fucking hate all its bugs and flawed workflow, I don’t blame the developers. LinkedIn is a tough nut to crack. It employs many protections, which are quite hard to bypass. To give you an example, a LinkedIn profiles has many IDs, which are used on different pages. When you scrape it from page A and then need to recognize on page B, there’s no simple way to do that, which would be available in other social networks. This is where further mathematics comes to the rescue. I know most of us (me included) have thought there was no use for math knowledge outside the school. Surprisingly, there is! I worked with high-class developers who made a bad ass software that employed many sophisticated formulas like Levenshtein distance to defy Linkedin’s defenses. This software allowed me to simplify the workflow to the point, where even a monkey could execute it.

If you don’t have means to develop own software, I suggest you starting doing things manually. You may try LinkedIn Dominator if you want but expect to spend some time fighting its bugs. The only thing you should absolutely avoid doing with LinkedIn Dominator is sending messages. Because it doesn’t know how to avoid duplicate message sending, it will constantly send the same message from a number of profiles to the same recipient. Of course, in such cases the messages will get marked as spam and your precious profiles will be banned in no time.

Automating message sending

While message sending automation on LinkedIn is hard, there is a huge reason to do it, which can be described with a single word. Autoresponder.

The first version of my software was scraping targeted profiles, then upon finishing the scraping job, sending messages. This is how LinkedIn dominator works. (Although, I didn’t have to deal with pesky .txt files and duplicate messaging problem was non-existent).

But then I noticed something. When I was connecting to some people, they would send me a prepared message within 5-15 minutes after connecting. I think they were sending it manually from their mobile phones. An idea spawned in my mind: what if I could send a message within 3 minutes after the connection request was accepted? Easier said than done but eventually it got implemented in my automation software. Link CTR skyrocketed! I honestly think an autoresponder is the best marketing tool you can have on LinkedIn. Even for a single profile.

I might add it as a plugin into A Multi Account Tool* later if the developers find some spare time.

One last thing you need to keep in mind when sending tons of internal messages on LinkedIn. LinkedIn utilizes some algorithm, which evaluates the similarity percent of messages sent from a single account. If you send too many similar messages, they will all get flagged as spam. The solution? Spintax the hell out of it. I attached an example of spintaxed message before in this guide. This was perhaps a relatively simple spintax.

Content preparation automation

Remember, we talked about uploading lists from toplinked.com to LinkedIn through an e-mail box to get initial connections? If you still remember, you need different lists for different profiles to diversify your networks. This is to reach different people on LinkedIn (if you upload the same lists, you will only be able to connect with the same people from all of your profiles).

Also, when you start preparing profile data en masse, you will need to collect job titles, university names, company names and other data, then mix it up and randomize. All this takes hell lot of a time when performed manually, so it’s a natural wish to automate the process.

I haven’t found any tools that could randomize lists and output them as separate ready-to-use text files. This is why I ordered a custom tool from developers. While I don’t want to give it away for free, I will happily share it with you in exchange for a small favor. If you read this guide until this point, perhaps you already downloaded and played around with the free version of A Multi Account Tool*.

What I am asking to do is simple:

Use your twitter account to write a short (under 140 chars) honest review about A Multi Account Tool*. Anything short and sweet will work. Make sure to use #A Multi Account Tool* hashtag in the tweet and optionally add a link to ***Removed***. When it’s done, send me a PM with a link to your tweet and I will provide you with a tool download link. This will help me a lot and I will be endlessly thankful to you!

PART II 

Selling LinkedIn endorsements

Now we transition to the second part of this guide, which will be devoted to selling LinkedIn endorsements, recommendations, and profile improvement service.

The "Why"

Before you jump into a new venture, it's always good to understand why you want to do it. Providing LinkedIn endorsements is by no means an easy task. You should be capable of either automating processes with help of virtual assistants or have an excellent web developer at your disposal. I believe that during the last half year 80% of all LinkedIn endorsements sold in the world were provided by only three people. All other sellers were reselling the services of those three.

Two of the actual providers utilized automated solutions, while the third one relied on virtual assistants. Later I will compare the former approach to the latter.

Everything mentioned above signals that this is a small niche market. The process of adding LinkedIn endorsements is relatively hard to automate. Hence, not much competition.

Understanding your buyers

I always joked with my team that selling LinkedIn endorsements is as close to selling canned air as it could get. Despite internet being filled with numerous articles about how bought endorsements are useless for your positioning, there are still myriads of people willing to buy them.

Why is that? I personally think that people are just prone to engaging in a dick measuring contest of all types, including this one. Nevertheless, there are some notable benefits of having a well-endorsed profile. First, it starts ranking higher in LinkedIn search by keywords, which partially or fully match the names of endorsed skills. Second, despite recruiters talking shit about LinkedIn endorsements, people still continue relying on them to some extent. This is just how our monkey brains work. We understand the social proof might be fake but it still influences us to some extent. Think about testimonials with photos of "real people" on some single-page landing and you will get the idea I am talking about.

Where to sell

LinkedIn endorsements can be sold through many channels ranging from own website to microgig platforms like Fiverr and SeoClerks. Let's explore them in detail.

Fiverr

Fiverr was my favorite platform for selling endorsements. It has the sheer volume of users browsing sales listings just for entertainment. When I used to sell endorsements on Fiver, getting 10-20 orders a day was totally doable. The bad thing about Fiverr is their tendency to wipe all gigs in some niches once in a while. Usually every 3 months but don't take my word for it as every wipe may actually become the last one.

Hence, when working with Fiverr you should have all content backed up. I used Redmine Wiki for backing up content, editing it and synchronizing work processes with virtual assistants. My instructions tend to be a little robotic but using them ensures the minimum amount of mistakes made by VAs. Here's an example:

Likewise, I strongly suggest using multiple Fiverr accounts. I had up to 5-6 seller accounts and almost 50 "waiting" accounts. I made them initially to avoid buying aged accounts later but actually used pretty intensively for kickstarting own gigs with fake reviews or gathering intelligence from competitors. Both sellers and buyers on Fiverr might be wary towards totally new accounts but 3+ months old account will barely raise any red flags.

Of course, Fiverr doesn't want you to be using multiple accounts, especially for selling gigs. You have two ways to prevent linking the account together: either utilize multiple virtual machines or use A Multi Account Tool*. I personally used A Multi Account Tool* with Stealthfox browser and had never had any accounts banned.

Although, I can write lots more about Fiverr, to keep things simple, let's move onto the next option.

UPDATE Jan. 2017: it took me a long time to write this manual. When I started writing it, selling LinkedIn endorsements on Fiverr worked well. During the final check today I discovered that around 80% of LinkedIn endorsements related gigs got wiped. I have no idea whether this is a temporary fluke or the final crackdown. If you think about going down the Fiverr avenue, please do your own due diligence.

Own website

An own website is superior to Fiverr in terms of controlling the price. Remember, we talk about selling something very similar to canned air here? How much does canned air cost? Exactly as much as you think. The only thing that depends on the price is how wide audience will be able to allow themselves buying the canned air.

When I sold endorsements on Fiverr, the most popular order was indeed $5, from which I got only $4. However, the average profit after the commission was slightly over $12 per order. For comparison, an average order on my own website was something around $30. Both channels were yielding around the same amount of revenue. However, with own website less work was spent on executing orders while more work was required to bring the traffic in. (Guess, where I got it for almost free?)

I tested a number of websites for selling LinkedIn endorsements. Here's an example of the most successful one:

Honestly, this website was far from ideal and I believe my competitors had had better ones. However, the amount of traffic I could drive to it somewhat compensated for the lack of persuasion on the page.

For getting traffic, I was sending mass spam on LinkedIn targeting people in expensive areas of USA like Silicon Walley. A word of warning here, your message should be crafted in a way that would make users hesitant regarding clicking the "spam” button. If you skipped the part about message crafting, go back and read it now.

Other possibilities

You can sell LinkedIn endorsements on SeoClerks. The market is much smaller there than on Fiverr but it is growing steadily. SeoClerks doesn't have two thousand stupid rules like Fiverr and is much more seller-friendly place.

You cannot register an account and just start selling social media services there because they consider this category already oversaturated. However, they are still people and it is not hard to convince customer support to let you in. To get in, I told customer support how buyers will benefit more from my service than from existing similar services on the market. I also stated I am not going to engage in pricing wars, which is something they are trying to prevent.

I also had a number of clients, who resold my services offline in USA. Personally, I am bored with selling stuff offline. But if you reside in some English-speaking country where LinkedIn is more or less popular, this might be worth a try. Prices offline are infinitely higher than online. Especially, when selling canned air.

Targeting LinkedIn users with Facebook Ads and driving them to your website might be an option as well. If I did it, I would funnel them onto a blog page first, which would describe positive sides of getting additional endorsements, which I briefly outlined before. This is just an idea.

Peopleperhour.com is trending and the volume of buyers looking for entertainment is growing there. Also, they don't limit gig base prices, so I think some money can be made there. They require a proof of competence before you start running services but I guess I don't have to teach you how to photoshop a LinkedIn endorsements expert diploma.

I tried selling endorsements at freelancer places like Upwork. Sometimes it went well, especially when offered combined with other services. But I couldn't get the volume of orders there.

How to sell

Before you skip reading this paragraph, here are two most important things you need to sell LinkedIn endorsements (and actually any other sort of canned air): testimonials and being on top of the list.

Testimonials

Get testimonials as soon as you can but make sure to keep things natural. For microgig platforms, you may buy fake reviews for $1-2 from BHW. Though, my experience shows that such endeavors result in a bunch of completely unnatural reviews. Even if you write idiot-proof instructions for review providers, they tend to ignore the instructions and fuck up something anyway. This leads to gigs being removed.

I figured out that the easiest way to boost the review count while getting exactly what you need is to use fake profiles. Remember, I suggested creating 50 additional accounts? You will have 50+ proxies anyway obtained for running LinkedIn accounts. Put 50 Fiverr accounts on those proxies too (A Multi Account Tool* will come handy here). Then use Bitcoin to buy your own gigs. Bitcoin payments eliminate the need of having 50 distinct PayPal accounts. For additional security, download Electrum wallet and choose “Use change addresses” option in preferences.

Leave 60% generic “Awesome experience” reviews, 20% short customized, and 20% long customized reviews. Do not complete fake orders instantly and do not do more than 5 fake orders per gig per day. In other words, use your common sense.

Being at the top of the list

It’s common sense that the first place in search results is better than the rest. Most of the times the first seller gets the most orders and it just strengthens his leadership position. This is why it is essential to becoming the first.

Writing about search engine optimization in regards to every platform is out of the scope of this guide. However, I will give you general guidance and also some specific details regarding Fiverr and Upwork.

General advice:

• Choose a keyword, study 3-4 results leading in the search engine and mimic what they are doing. Don’t touch the keywords! Only change parts which you consider non-essential.
• Run multiple accounts simultaneously and perform split-testing.
• Search engines on most online gig platforms still rely on keyword density
• Specialize! It’s better to be #1 in “linkedin endorsements” than #10 in “social media marketing”. Though at some point, I managed to get to the #3 place by “linkedin” keyword and it brought a lot of traffic to my gig.

Fiverr related advice:

• Plural and singular forms of keywords affect their weight. E.g. most people look for “linkedin endorsements” but “linkedin recommendation”. Using “linkedin recommendations” keyword in your gig description will put it under those having the singular form in search results.
• Keyword stuffing works well but there’s a maximum number of keywords Fiverr would accept
• Orders in queue affect ranking. With 20 reviews you can outrank whales with 200+ reviews by having a long order queue. To have a long queue, either increase delivery times or think creatively. I was offering a drip-feed service, which sometimes extended the delivery time to 20 days.
• Randomize non-essential tags across gigs. If you use the same tags in all gigs, Fiverr will consider those gigs identical and won’t show them in search results.

Upwork related advice:

• Specialize! If you need multiple specializations, create multiple profiles
• Listen “Secrets of a Six-Figure Upworker” audio course. If you pass on this, you will miss a lot.

How to execute orders

Preparation

Remember, before I mentioned that around 80% of all endorsements in the world were provided by only three sellers? At some points, I was providing over one million endorsements per month. No way you can handle these amounts by yourself. That said, the very first 5 orders I did manually. Each took 1.5-2 hours to deliver 

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For adding endorsements, you will need aged LinkedIn accounts. Don’t rush with purchasing them as you may need to test accounts from different providers first. By the way, you will need aged accounts for pretty much everything on LinkedIn. Newly registered PVAs tend to work worse than non-PVA aged ones.

When you have accounts, you need to make them accessible through a web browser. Optionally you can make them remotely accessible if you plan to outsource anything to VAs. Here are your options:

1. Make virtual boxes and configure each account to work in a separate virtual box.
2. Use portable Firefox and configure each account to work in a separate instance of Firefox, which should connect through a unique proxy of course
3. Use A Multi Account Tool* and it will take care of everything

I know that some of my former competitors went with the first option, so it must be viable, though too labor intensive to my taste. The second solution didn’t work well for me and was one of the reasons for the inception of A Multi Account Tool*. I won’t say the second option doesn’t work at all, it just doesn’t always work as expected. That said, the second option is the cheapest one. Use your own judgment to choose between the three.

After your accounts are accessible through a web browser, fill them with nice biographies. Put some work into this. The better profiles you have, the fewer complaints you will be getting from buyers. You may want to have profiles from different countries, this will attract a wider audience. Also, make profiles recommend each other. One recommendation per profile is enough.

Execution

The simple way to add endorsements is to hire a cheap virtual assistant and make them do it for you.

While the virtual assistant option is easier to start with, it comes with some limitations. It’s hard to squeeze the bottom line price in under $5, which makes competing with current market leaders harder in the beginning. Also, you won’t have such nice things as drip-feed or different types of endorsements order randomization.

Automated solutions are hard to develop but pretty easy to maintain and operate. When everything is automated, you have much more flexibility. You may both offer big amounts of endorsements super cheap and charge premium for advanced options.

Although the software I used had plenty of bugs in it due to the usage of open libraries, I still managed to control hundreds of accounts with it simultaneously. On top performance, it required a 8h/day VA to operate. However, to provide the same amount of endorsements manually one would need at the very least three full-time virtual assistants.

Summary

To conclude this guide, I wanted to recap what we discussed in it. But hell, it’s already close to 8000 words. So I will just stop at this point. Thank you for reading and I hope you got something out of it.

Mod Edit - 06/09/17 I Know SEO - * the OP mentions a tool they own, this is advertising outside of the marketplace which is against the rules but as the content is very good I've removed the name of the tool and replaced it with a generic description of what it does.