Introduction
I can’t remember a world without social networking. Whatever did we do without Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter? How did we connect? Set up meetings? Reach our audience? Connect with employees and investors? Oh, right. The phone. And email. And face-to-face meetings. And coffees and networking events. How much, and how little, our world has changed.
I remember the first time I heard about LinkedIn. It was at a networking event I had set up for the members of my business center. I had invited Laurie Macomber, a Web 2.0 expert, to come talk to our entrepreneurs about this crazy new world of interactive web communication. At the very end of the presentation Laurie mentioned an online business-networking site called LinkedIn.
This was early 2006, when Facebook was still a newfangled site for college students, MySpace was scaring the pants of parents, and the only social networking people knew about was Match.com. So the idea of a business-focused social networking site was fascinating to me.
I had managed to double our business in a year with face-to-face networking events (which I still strongly espouse) and thought, “If I can do that in a town of 100,000 people, what can I do with 7 million (the number of LinkedIn members at the time)?” Apparently I was not the only person having these thoughts.
A year later when I joined Twitter and got the username @LinkedInExpert, I realized I better start living up to the name. Eventually I was training and consulting so much on LinkedIn that I had to quit my day job. And I have never looked back.
Every strategy I share with you in this book I have used myself and with clients. There’s no magical mystery solution. There’s no sophisticated secret formula. This book is here to guide you through the ever-changing landscape of LinkedIn and give you the tools and strategies you need to succeed. I am so excited to be on this journey with you! Together we create a cohesive and powerful strategy you can use to create greater success in your business and personal life. No matter what your business, or reason for being on LinkedIn, it can definitely help move you forward. So, are you ready? Then…ready, set…get LinkedIn!
Who Should Read This Book
Raise your hand if you have been told you must be on LinkedIn but are not sure how to get started. Raise your hand if you have a LinkedIn account but have gained little, if any, business from it. Raise your hand if you need to grow your organization—your business, association, church, practice, or nonprofit. This book is for you. It is intended for both LinkedIn newbies and experienced LinkedIn users:
- Salespeople wanting to expand their network and visibility and increase sales, whether for business-to-business or business-to-consumer
- Marketing professionals looking to establish their company’s brand
- Job seekers looking for connections to increase their likelihood of gaining employment
- Entrepreneurs hoping to position themselves as experts and gain new clients
- Churches and religious organizations hoping to increase membership
- Artists, authors, and creators hoping to expose their work
- Nonprofit directors and volunteers hoping to increase donations and visibility
- Project managers looking for a way to find and coordinate team members
- Recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers looking to find new candidates and employees
- Legal professionals hoping to retain and attract new clients
- Event planners looking for vendors and strategic partners
If you fall into any of these categories, you will find this book useful.
What You Will Learn
Success on LinkedIn requires that you be clear on the reason you are using LinkedIn in the first place, a manageable LinkedIn strategy and diligence. I am not here to create your brand for you or design your marketing strategy (although many of the exercises will help with that as well), but I am going to share with you the tools and strategies I have learned and developed over the years.
In fact, I include the LinkedIn checklists and schedulers I use with my clients as an added bonus to help ensure your success. (Did I mention I sell them for $250 each?) I can’t do the work for you, but I can give you the steps you need to take and the tools to get you there.
What You Need
What do you need to get started on mastering LinkedIn marketing?
- A basic understanding of social media and social media marketing
- A clear idea of who you are and what you have to offer the world
- A defined goal for beginning this process
- Access to a computer and the Internet
- The willingness to devote an hour a day to yourself and your business
What Is Covered in This Book
LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day is organized to walk you through every aspect of the LinkedIn platform while showing you how to optimize LinkedIn to increase your exposure, and develop, implement, and optimize a winning LinkedIn marketing strategy.
- Introduces the idea that social marketing is still marketing and that you probably already have the skills you need to succeed with LinkedIn
- Gives you the history of LinkedIn, some useful statistics, and describes where LinkedIn might be heading in the future
- Shares some basic definitions you might need to use LinkedIn more effectively
- Before getting started, there are some necessary but often ignored steps people should take to prepare them for their journey into LinkedIn.
- One part of the preparation is defining your goals, and this chapter will take you step by step through the process, as well as provide a very useful LinkedIn questionnaire you can use to make your journey easier.
- Getting your keywords so that your profile can get found
- Optimizing your profile with those keywords
- Customizing your profile so you stand out in a crowd
- Using the extra real estate LinkedIn has to offer that most people are unaware of and you can use
- A closer look at what a company profile can and can’t do on LinkedIn so that you can use or create an effective one (and don’t make any inadvertent mistakes)
- Instructions for adding your products and services to your company profile
- Information on company updates, analytics, and job postings so that you can begin to work them into your strategy
- Using LinkedIn’s Add Connections tool so you don’t get in trouble and render LinkedIn useless
- Using the Advanced People search to connect effectively with strategic contacts
- Using LinkedIn’s People You May Know feature to safely grow your network
- Monitoring your network to make sure it is growing how and where you want it to grow
- Managing your network so that you can communicate more effectively
- Giving and getting recommendations from your network
- Building your network with strategic groups to increase visibility and connectability
- Creating relationships with groups through reversed engineering and search features
- Creating your own group for better communications and thought leader positioning
- LinkedIn Answers
- LinkedIn polls
- LinkedIn skills
- LinkedIn events
- LinkedIn applications
- Third-party applications
- Using your updates every day as an inbound marketing tool
- Monitoring your brand and your competition, and creating relationships with LinkedIn Signal
- Creating a powerful inbound marketing connection strategy
- Marketing subject matter expertise through Answers
- Using the “3 and 3 technique”
- LinkedIn Ads
- LinkedIn labs
- LinkedIn third-party applications
- LinkedIn Mobile
- Job seekers
- Recruiters
- Legal professionals
- Women
- Entrepreneurs
- Real estate professionals
- Nonprofits
How to Contact the Author
I welcome feedback from you about this book or about books you’d like to see from me in the future. You can reach me by writing to [email protected]. For more information about my work, please visit my website at www.linkedintobusiness.com.
Sybex strives to keep you supplied with the latest tools and information you need for your work. Please check their website at www.sybex.com/go/linkedinhour, where we’ll post additional content and updates that supplement this book if the need arises.