what are boolean searches and how can you use them to find clients on linkedin now if you have been wondering about the same thing stay tuned because in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to use boolean operators to find new leads for your business i'm bendy and i'm all about helping coaches and course creators attract the highest quality inbound leads on linkedin without the need for code selling now if you're planning to use linkedin in your marketing this year be sure you subscribe to my channel and hit that bell to be notified every time i release a new video all right so what are bullying searches in the first place now let me try to explain this to you in the simplest possible way boolean searches include operators and modifiers such as and or not quotation marks and parentheses and using these operators you can refine incredibly specific searches on linkedin to find your ideal clients now chances are that you still have no idea what in the world i'm talking about so let me hop on my computer and show you exactly how each of these operators work and how you can use them going forward all right so let me show you how each of these operators actually work so let's start with r and or basically means either when you're using this operator on linkedin you're telling the algorithm that you want to see all profiles that have either x or y keywords in them so let me give you an example here if you were looking to find all accountants and all bookkeepers on linkedin then your search should look like this bookkeeper or accountant you're basically telling linkedin i want to see all profiles that have either of these keywords in them now it's important to know that they don't have to have both of those keywords in one profile it is enough that they have either one or the other all right another example you might be looking for ceos or founders or entrepreneurs right they don't have to have used all these three keywords in one profile but if they have one of these keywords in a profile it would get returned in the search results another example you could say i want to see all people in marketing and all people in advertising on linkedin so then your search is marketing or advertising now it's very important to note that you must use capital or for this search to work and it applies to all boolean operators you must use the capital letters all right now let's go into the next one the next one that is very commonly used is and operator and it basically means including all so you're telling linkedin show me all profiles that have both x and y keywords in them so again the example here you might want to find all profiles that have both accounting and law keywords in them together so basically if the if one profile has just accounting keyword in them it will not get returned in the results because you're telling linkedin both of these keywords must be in the one profile for it to be returned and if they don't it's not going to come up in the results okay so here's another example nutrition and fitness you're telling linkedin both of these keywords must be on one profile for it to get returned in the results similarly ceo and nutrition and fitness so you're basically looking for all ceos that have that are in these niches right and both of those keywords must be in one profile so sorry let me correct myself all of these three keywords right must be in one profile for it to be returned in the results now then we have an exact phrase so these are basically quotation marks that you use around your keywords so typically if you're looking searching for more than one word you would put it in quotation marks so basically you're telling linkedin show me all profiles that have these consecutive keywords together in this order okay so for example freelance writer you're telling then these two keywords must be together in this specific order personal trainer these keywords you know have to be together in this order business development manager same thing you're challenged linkedin these three keywords must be in this exact order because that's what i'm searching for all right now then we have not which basically means exclude you're telling to link to linkedin exclude all profiles that have these keywords in them so for example you might be looking for you know vice presidents or directors but you don't want assistance to come up in a search because as you know you know they're going to be many people who say they're you know assistant to vice president or assistant to director so you could be clever about your searches and make sure you're yes looking for directors but you're excluding the people you don't want to return in the results so another example you might be looking for personal trainers but not personal trainers who are within weight loss because for whatever reason you're not interested in weight loss okay so that is how you use the not operator and it is actually one of the most powerful operators on linkedin because you can get very specific when you start saying i want to find this not that not that not that all right and then the final one um the final operator you use on linkedin is parentheses and this allows you to structure put it all together and structure very specific searches so basically parentheses means perform functions in the parentheses first so kind of similar to maths class okay so basically let me give you some examples here this is how you start putting together all these searches so you're looking for business owners and coaches or consultants and health or fitness or nutrition so basically what is going on here you're telling linkedin that you want to find all business owners who are also either coaches or consultants and you're saying they must be within health fitness or nutrition niches right again looking for business owners but not just business owners business owners who are also either coaches or consultants and are within these specific niches because you have used and operator in the middle all right let me give you another example here personal trainer and moms or pregnancy or weight loss not injury so what exactly are we searching for here you're basically telling lingvin i want to find all personal trainers that also have basically that also specialize you know for you know their there's either specialized to helping moms or pregnancy or weight loss right so you're basically saying these all personal trainers i'm searching for must have either of these keywords in them because you know that might be what you're exactly looking for and you're saying no injury right because again they're injury personal trainers you're saying i'm not interested in injury personal trainers all right so i hope this is all coming together and starting to make sense this is how you build upon operators to structure very very specific searches that will find and bring back your ideal clients in the results so let me just hop back to the main video and give you some more pointers there all right all right so now that you have an understanding of how each of these operators work we need to put our knowledge into practice so let's open up linkedin and actually craft your very first boolean search together all right so let's perform our very first boolean search together okay and let's just look for some personal trainers on this platform now the biggest mistake the majority of people would make is that now we just basically type in personal trainer in the search bar and then i will click enter and they would go to people and think okay well 1.4 million personal trainers are on linkedin but now that you understand bullying operators i want you to think of what is wrong with this search now basically we must use the exact we need to use quotation marks so to do an exact phrase search otherwise if you do not use the quotation marks you're basically telling linkedin show me all profiles that have personal in them or that have trainer in them right so basically this could be pretty much anyone that have you know let's say i have used trainer in my profile and i'm saying i'm a linkedin trainer and then someone has used personal in their profile and they say you know my personal view on something is x y and z so this is a very incorrect search to use so it will bring up some correct results but it will also bring up many many people that are totally irrelevant so we initially had 1.4 million search results when we used a search like that so now if i'm telling linkedin these two keywords must be together like this in this consecutive order and we click search then now our search went from 1.4 million to 500 000 so now we're getting way more specific on bringing back the right people we're actually looking for now we could next build up on our search and let's say you know that you want to find personal trainers that help moms in particular so you're saying i want to find all profiles that have personal trainer in them and also a keyword a mention of mom or pregnancy um if i could just do that okay pregnancy or weight loss so i'm basically telling linkedin i want to i want to see all personal trainers that also have either mom or pregnancy or weight loss keywords on their profile okay and we're going to click enter here we go now that brought the results back from half a million to 44 000. this is brilliant the more specific we get um with our searches the more you know the more of the right people we're going to see in the results and that's what you want to do when you're looking for your deal clients on linkedin so again 44 000 and we can probably bring this down even more by saying well i don't want these uh trainers to to be basically helping with injury because you could say that's not relevant to me in jury here we go and that brought down our search from 44 000 to 36 000. so i hope this has given you an idea of how specific you can get with your searches because i always recommend that you want to get your results under okay basically 5 000 um results because your your whole purpose of using boolean operators is for you to find your ideal clients on linkedin so the more specific you get with your search the more quality people you're going to find in the results all right now one thing i need to mention is that in linkedin premium so the premium business plan and the free linkedin plan is going to allow you to do boolean searches however it's going to start limiting you when the search is becoming too long so for example if i made a search even longer and said pregnancy or weight loss or let's say muscle building okay we're getting results but basically um the more keywords you include there the sooner um linkedin is going to stop your search you're sort of basically saying not injury um or boxing so let's see that and here we go this is what i wanted to show you linkedin is basically telling you no results found um which is actually not um quite true the reason why you're getting this is because linkedin does not allow the free plan or premium for business very long searches you see this is too long on the kind of the standard and the cheapest premium plans so this is where you would have to invest in sales navigator if we go over here um to actually be able to run searches like those so i'm gonna put this very same search in the search box and you can see that i am actually getting 32 000 results so not no results found but actually there are a lot of people under the search however you have to invest in sales navigator or the recruiter plan to be able to run super super long searches um on linkedin now if you are new to sales navigator and if you want to understand kind of the benefits of using it and if it's even worth the investment make sure you check out my video on how to use sales navigator and i'm going to link that in the cards above so you have a clear idea of the of whether or not it is worth basically the investment but i'm personally absolutely in love with sales navigator but this should have given you a good idea of how we actually use um boolean searches in practice and unfortunately you're not going to be able to run super long searches um in the basic linkedin plan but it's going to get you started so again if i just make this shorter you know it is allowing us to narrow to a certain extent all right so let me just hop back to the main video again um and share a couple more tips with you all right you are now an expert at using boolean searches on linkedin just make sure you always capitalize each of the operators otherwise they're not gonna work so always use all caps and all caps or and all caps not when running your searches to make sure you get super precise results in the search box okay now if you're interested in growing your business on linkedin and you're ready to sign up your very next client on this platform be sure you also message me on linkedin and ask me about the linkedin bootcamp i would absolutely love to help you grow on this platform now if you're brand new to linkedin i highly recommend you download my quick start guide to linkedin below this video you might also want to check out this video next on how to grow your following on this platform i would totally appreciate you could give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel as it really helps me grow on youtube thank you so much for being here and i'll catch you in the next episode bye