One of the largest and most popular professional networking sites on the Internet, LinkedIn has more than 62,000,000 users spanning more than 200 countries and territories. Beyond being an excellent place to make business connections and build professional partnerships, you can use LinkedIn for marketing your business too.

1. Don’t Fly the Group

LinkedIn has a directory of more than 557,000 alumni, professional and nonprofit groups. Unfortunately, most people sign-up with a group and do little else afterwards. Avoid dormant group participation levels and get involved, that’s why you joined in the first place. Get involved in discussions, give feedback and start speaking with other like-minded individuals. Positioning yourself as an active member and engaging resource will expose others to your services, products and business.

2. Endorsements Equal Enforcements

One of the best marketing tools on LinkedIn is the ability to request and provide recommendations for connections. You don’t have to write a Tolstoy-sized endorsement. Keep it short and sweet with a few well-crafted sentences that highlight something about your connection. Conversely, third-party support builds credibility and showcases your key features in a positive way.

3. Make Each Word Count

You’ve spent time building your blog, so why not show it off. LinkedIn features two blog integration applications to ‘connect’ your blog to your profile. The first is Blog Link which helps promote your personal brand by posting your current blog entries directly to your profile. It supports TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more. The second is a WordPress application that’s an ideal solution for anyone who’s already a WordPress blogger. Again, for marketing purposes, joining your blog to your LinkedIn profile is another way to entice connections and profile visitors to visit your website and learn more about what you have to offer.

4. Advertising

A social networking site just wouldn’t be complete without the option of advertising. Users have an average household income greater than $106,000 so advertising is definitely worth considering. Don’t panic about costs. LinkedIn offers both click and impression ad options, as well as campaigns for large corporations ($25k+ budgets) and one for the rest of us. With LinkedIn DirectAds you can also create up to 10 ads variations to see what text and images are producing click throughs. Advertising is always a great marketing strategy, but not a necessary one. With so many other LinkedIn marketing alternatives, you may decide to pocket your cash.

5. A Little Q&A

LinkedIn Answers is an excellent place to market your knowledge of business by sharing advice and answers with people who have questions. There are a multitude of questions classified into categories for easy identification. Contributing to Answers is similar to participating in a group except that you’re able to enhance your reputation as an expert more quickly depending upon how well you answer posted questions. This translates into targeted traffic to your website as you gain exposure through Answers. The RSS feature comes in very handy since not everyone has time to manually comb through all the questions.

6. Promote Freely

Grab a LinkedIn badge to display on your website. This clickable icon serves as a direct link to your LinkedIn profile and is a fast way for people jump on your connection train. Similar to other social networking sites, all profiles come with a badge creator that makes is super simple to use. Click and you’re done. Once you have your LinkedIn badge, post it to your website and other social profiles. Completely free social media marketing just for you.

Visit MindSprout Marketing’s profile on LinkedIn and connect with us today.

Tags: how to, internet, linkedin, Marketing, small business, Social Media, tips

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.