If people are minting money from a social networking site like LinkedIn and you are not, there is a reason for you to sit back and review your strategy. There are a lot many people out there who are making tons of money from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
There are a number of ways you could use LinkedIn profitably. If you are one of those who like to write your own script and invent your own system, good luck to you. However, there are two proven ways that could cut down your time and money investment in getting started.
The first one is to follow an already successful LinkedIn marketer, copy the exact same process and implement. But how do you do that, no one is going to spill the beans and increase their competition. Yet, you will find people offering mentoring or training on a one on one basis. This will surely be an expensive proposition, but then all businesses require some investment or the other.
The second way is to join or subscribe to an established online training and learning institution and acquire the required skills.
You should be careful in selecting your mentor or the training institution as the web world is full of people waiting to rip your wallet.
Having said, that here are few tips that I followed to start marketing my business on LinkedIn.
You are What Your Profile Is
LinkedIn being a social networking site for professionals is quite different than the Facebook or Twitter. People are quite careful of who they connect with. Practically everyone who wants to connect with you will visit your profile as a first step.
It is therefore extremely important that you craft a very professional profile. Who you are, what you do and how you could add value to fellow professionals. All this must come our very clearly. I would strongly suggest that you go through LinkedIn guide and follow LinkedIn best practices. Professionals respect and internships (relevant web site) like people with a 100% complete and updated profile.
Select and Join Your Interest Groups
The best aspect about LinkedIn is the huge number of professional groups in the system. I think there is hardly and profession, activity or business without a number of groups for each and every segment, niche or sub segment.
With so many groups available it becomes quite a task to select the right one. I simply check the group stats and look for activity within the group. Are people engaging in self promotion – you can see from the number of discussions or are people actively engaging in making comments – interactions.
Why join a group. Well the entire networking and lead generation is through group and its members. Using LinkedIn and not joining groups is like having an inactive bank account.
Start Interaction – Join discussions
Just joining the groups will not take you anywhere. You must go through discussions and chose ones that interest you. Get involved in these discussions. Add value packed comments that will pull potential leads to you.
Not just this, you initiate a couple of discussions on your own. Chose a topic that will be of interest to other members of the group. Your aim should be to become and remain a top influencer in most of your groups by quality of your discussions and comments. LinkedIn displays the top influencers graphic in its side bar. That is how your start building “You” brand, creating a “pull” towards you.
LinkedIn permits you to join a maximum of 50 groups. Join as many as you could handle with ease and proficiency.
Make Connections
LinkedIn is a social networking site and you can network only if you have people connected to you. In the past over one year I have made over 500 connections which links me to over 11 million professionals.
There are two schools of thoughts on LinkedIn connections. Some prefer to be very selective and choosy in their connections, and the others just connect for interactions. As Neal Schaffer says in his blog “-If you are only connecting with people that you know, what is the value in LinkedIn?” Those who connect freely are known to be a LION – LinkedIn Open Net-workers .
What type of net-worker you want to be depends squarely on your networking objectives.
Once you make connection, evaluate them by engaging them in discussions to filter who might be interested in your opportunity. Once you have identified people who show interest, move the discussion offline, get into a phone or Skype interaction. This is where you start working on your lead conversion.
Network marketing is a dynamic process. You keep on improving the process, system and style. You also need to review your groups and connections. Adding, deleting to keep them both relevant and productive.
LinkedIn is an amazing networking platform. The art is in mastering how to use it to further your business interests.