What is your advice for personalized LinkedIn outreach when just starting out, and is a LinkedIn connection viable?

Yes, a LinkedIn connection is viable and very viable, but it needs to be heavily personalized. The highest‑ROI way to personalize these days is a Loom video, because video has far more bandwidth than plain text—a picture is worth about a 1,000 words, while a video at 24 fps is worth roughly 24,000 words per second (even more at 30 or 60 fps). If you’re good at what you do, there’s a multiplicative relationship between the medium’s bandwidth and the value you deliver, so using video greatly boosts your conversion rate. After you’ve spent five minutes making that Loom, you should send it through email, your LinkedIn profile (the easiest path for scrapers), and any other platforms you have—Twitter/X, Instagram, etc.—because each extra channel adds another chance of being seen, which raises the expected return on your time investment. As for Instantly, if you’re trying to send emails one‑by‑one with Make, you’ll realistically manage only about 10‑15 a day before you start getting blacklisted, so a dedicated cold‑email service like Instantly is worth using. They offer cheap plans (around $37/month) and let you avoid burning your main domain. While you could split several Gmail accounts and wrestle with Make authorizations, the simpler, more scalable recommendation is to use a cold‑email service to handle your campaigns.

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Do you recommend using Instantly for email campaigns, or is Make automation sufficient when starting lean?

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What’s the current effective cold Loom video strategy on LinkedIn in 2026, and how many follow‑ups should I send when I get no replies?

Sending just a few Loom videos per day (e.g., nine in three days, about three per day) yields low reply rates. Successful students in Maker School send 20‑30 videos daily, seeing a 30‑40% connection acceptance rate and a 30‑50% reply rate, which translates to roughly 10‑15% overall reply rate and about five warm leads per day. To improve results, break your outreach into a funnel and boost volume at each stage. The Loom video itself should be dynamic—start with high‑value content in the first few seconds, avoid AI‑generated templates, and add personal touches like zooming in on the recipient’s picture or embedding a short GIF. Consistently send more videos (20‑30 per day) and follow up as needed; there’s no strict limit, but higher volume with personalized content drives better engagement.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

Are you referring to using Loom videos for Upwork job applications when you say they're the best form of cold outreach?

Email deliverability isn’t a simple spam‑or‑not‑spam binary; it’s more like a sliding scale. Adding a link to an email nudges it toward the spam side, but excellent copywriting can pull it back toward the inbox. Adding images moves it further toward spam, yet a strong warm‑up routine, a pristine list, and high engagement can still keep you in the inbox. If you send a Loom video that’s incredibly high‑value and gets a great response, you might willingly take a small deliverability hit because the back‑end conversion makes up for it. Likewise, cutting your daily email volume—say, from 25‑30 down to 5‑10—improves your sender reputation and helps the mailbox provider see you as a real user. Platforms like Instantly let you run separate campaigns (e.g., a Loom‑video‑only campaign) and monitor deliverability on just those mailboxes, so you can isolate any impact. In short, when I say Loom personalized videos are the best form of cold outreach, I’m talking about using them to apply for jobs on Upwork (and similarly via Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn DMs, and email).

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I've tried a bunch of outreach channels — 60 super-personalized videos (booked 1 call, no conversion), a bit over 200 cold emails (no booked calls), Looms — and I keep feeling like I'm starting from square one each time, stuck in analysis paralysis about where to invest my time and money. What should I do?

First, 200 emails is very little in the grand scheme of things — getting zero booked calls off that just means your positive reply rate is under 0.5%, which about half of people land at, or you could have a decent reply rate but are still in random-noise territory because the sample is too small. You need to send 2,000, honestly more like 10,000, before drawing conclusions — that's the hard pill to swallow. On the 60 super-personalized videos only getting 1 call: if you send high-quality personalized videos across 3-4 platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, email), people realistically have about a 50% chance of seeing it, and a really high-quality personalized video might add another 20% chance of a reply — so you might reasonably expect a 10-20% reply rate. Getting only one call out of 60 like that is odd — it suggests either the service isn't actually valuable/solving a real problem, or you're not presenting it well, or something else is off that's hard to diagnose without seeing it directly. If you want real feedback, link a video and the exact outreach copy you're using so it can actually be looked at.

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