Effective Marketing on LinkedIn

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a professional niche social networking site. On LinkedIn, you can connect with professional colleagues, meet new people, find recommended services and find new contacts in your current network.

What You Can Do With LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a good tool to reach specific people; it is not so good at mass market broadcasting. If you want to reach ten million people, then this may not be your best avenue.

By using LinkedIn effectively you can:

• Increase the visibility of your business and brand
• Pursue direct sales
• Generate traffic and support your SEO efforts

Building Your Network on LinkedIn

There are people known as “open networkers” on LinkedIn, who tend to link to as many people as possible. By inviting a few of these “power networkers” to your network, you can access to all of their first degree and second degree contacts. These Open networkers can be found by doing simple search on LinkedIn for “LION“.

The other way to find high volume LinkedIn networkers is to visit TopLinked.com.

Marketing Strategies

Increasing Your Brand’s Visibility

There are several ways you can use LinkedIn to increase the visibility of your business.

· Display your expertise in “Answers”

· Announce your services to others in Answers.

· Drive readers to your blog posts

· Get your service recommended in “Services”.

Generating Sales Leads

· Reach potential clients through LinkedIn by conversing with people in “Answers”.

· Respond to service requests, such as when people are looking for a consultant in your field.

· Look for the right person to contact at the organization you are seeking to do business with.

Supporting Your SEO

· In order to make the link viewable to search engines, it is important to add the “show website” feature to each profile that will link to your site. This can be done in each account by clicking on “Edit My Public Profile“, make sure “Full View” is checked, and that also “Websites” are also checked. This will make the website link public.

· You can also respond to service requests and other questions in LinkedIn “Answers”, in which you can post a link to your website as a reference.

LinkedIn is not meant to be a mass market platform, and it is difficult to reach a wide variety of people on the site. However - LinkedIn allows for very highly targeted-marketing. LinkedIn allows you to reach the one influential person who is in need of your services.

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