You would be surprised at how many professionals fail to effectively use LinkedIn to advance their career. They spend hours on the platform, but when it comes time for a job search, they come up short.
The good news is that there are some quick-fixes you can incorporate into your LinkedIn game plan that will help you find opportunities, connect with likeminded individuals and ultimately bring more success.
In this post, I’m going to share with you some of the most important aspects of how to use LinkedIn like a pro. While this is relevant to the entire professional world – it is especially important for anyone planning to work online or who wants to build an online business.
With that said, let’s get right into what you can do right now (and soon) to boost your online business using LinkedIn as a powerful marketing and networking tool.
Key Points of What You Can Do Now
Stay motivated with your goal of finding new jobs and landing new clients. If you are not working on these tasks daily or at least weekly, then chances are the tasks are not moving forward quickly enough.
Make Sure Your Profile Is Always Current and Updated
Keep a list of the groups that you are members of. Make sure to check them regularly and comment on other people’s posts. The goal is to be an active member who adds value to the group and contributes regularly. Doing this will help your visibility in the group and you might help others out too!
Join at least 10 new groups per week or more if you have time. You can use LinkedIn’s search feature for this task – just type something like “groups about business.” You will get a list of groups that includes an option for joining, reading more information, etc.
Join groups that interest you, but that also might be relevant to your business or your career.
Make sure you connect with one or two people in each group. It can be a member or the owner of the group, but make sure they are at least one level above you in terms of your connections. This will show them that you are interested in their group and you are adding value to it. If they are active members – then do not hesitate to connect with them!
Go back every other week or so and check if any new groups have been added. With this method, it is fairly easy to find more groups for yourself!
Go back and make comments on the posts from earlier.
To Effectively Connect with People on Linkedin, You Need to Follow These Simple Steps
- Start by checking out social profiles and looking for people you know or that might be a good connection.
- Set up your profile so it reflects your true self, not someone else’s idea of who you should be.
- Use the company pages on LinkedIn to find people with similar interests at companies you want to work for or go to school at in the future (or both!)
- Search people that currently work at the companies you want to work for and reach out to them.
Connecting With People You Know
- Find groups that are relevant to your job search and join conversations within those groups.
- Be active; comment on others’ posts, share articles and reply to people’s comments.
- Connect with alumni from your college, or high school if you went to a very small school so that you can get a direct line of communication with them about certain companies.
- Connect with people at companies you’d like to work for.
- Start a discussion with people that recently joined LinkedIn, but who are not your connections. This is an easy way to start a conversation.
- Follow everyone! If someone is following you, they probably want to know all about you and what you are up to, so it’s important that they know who you are and what things you are interested in on the web.