Linkedin Tips to Build Your Brand and Find Prospects

Have you ever wondered how you can use the popular site LinkedIn to grow your business? These tricks will help you get the most out of it.

• Join groups: Find some groups that relate to your industry or to the industry of your prospects/clients. Once you join a group you can begin posting news and discussions within it (see below).

• Post questions to your group: Start a discussion that involves your area of expertise. As people respond to the question, post comments with additional information or your opinions. Hint: never post a discussion that’s simply a solicitation or a link to your site.

• Answer questions in your groups that fall in your area of expertise. Showing off your knowledge and expertise helps build your reputation and credibility, and position yourself as an industry expert. Give genuine and detailed answers; don’t post links back to your products unless it truly relates to the discussion.

• Post news in your groups. You can call attention to a recent blog post, press release or article by (or about) your company by posting the URL of that content as a “news item” in groups that you belong to. These news items will drive traffic to your blog or article.

• Update your status often. Try to update your status daily with information that relates to your business. Use a headline of your latest blog post/article and link to it. Or link to recent company news, a press release or an article online about your company or products. You can also describe what you’re working on at the moment. When you update your status, you stay “top of mind” to everyone in your network—they can all see your update.

• Add URLs to your profile. Put the URL of your blog in your profile (under tag “my website”) and the URL of your company (under the tag “my company”). People browsing Linkedin click on these links and search engines find them which improves your overall search rankings.

• Create a “Full View” public profile. After completing your profile, make sure you make it public with the “Full View” setting enabled. Search engines will find your public profile as will people searching online. Linkedin allows you to customize the URL of your public profile. For the best search engine exposure put your company name in the URL of your public profile. Your public profile URL should look like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/company-name-here

4 Linkedin prospecting tips

Why use Linkedin to prospect? Guy Kawasaki (social media/content guru), answered this question well on a recent blog post, “Most people use LinkedIn to ‘get to someone’ in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It works well for this because it is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries.”

• Send invitations to connect. Every time you meet a new prospect, customer, vendor or others, send them an invitation to join your network. Your business will remain highly visible to the people in your network.

• Conduct a search of prospect within 25 miles of your business. Use the location box in the “advanced search” function along with other search parameters to find likely prospects close by your office or within a certain geography. Once you find the prospects you can either send them a message via Linkedin or you can just look up their company phone number on Google and give them a call.

• Rewrite your profile, making it client focused: Sales coach Ian Brodie says on his blog: “When you first meet potential clients, don’t rattle off a huge list of companies you’ve worked for and the responsibilities you’ve had – that would bore the pants off them. Most effective introductions focus on who you help, and what problems you help them solve or results you help them achieve. Then if asked more, say a bit more about what you do – and give a little “backstory” as to why you are uniquely qualified to help.” In other words, instead of making your profile about you, make it about how you help your clients.

• Check out who views your profile. On the right side of your LinkedIn homepage you’ll see a blue bar that says “Who’s Viewed My Profile.” Under the bar you can see how many people have viewed your profile recently. Click on the text under the bar for names of those who viewed your profile in the last 24 hours. Check in daily to see if prospects you have reached out to have viewed your profile, and follow-up with those who have.

Linkedin Tips to Build Your Brand and Find Prospects by Paul Diamond