I often hear from people who don’t see how using LinkedIn can give them new business. They will ask: “So I have these connections… Now what do I do?”

What they are not understanding is that LinkedIn is no different that face-to-face networking. You can’t expect to meet someone only onceand turn that relationship into a referral. LinkedIn is the same way; you can’t merely add someone as a connection and expect business to just happen.

LinkedIn is like traditional networking; the internet has just made it easier. The same rules apply. Let’s start by looking at what works for traditional networking.

1. Who: Your networking strategy starts with who to I wish to meet? What are you looking for in a good referral partner or targeted client.
2. Where: Where can you best find these people? Chamber events, professional associations or even Rotary meetings?
3. Make a plan: who will be in attendance and why are they there?
4. Listen: Networking is not about you; it is about meeting people, asking questions, subtly qualifying them, and then listening to them. Find out how you can help them.
5. Have a message: Lets people know what you do and how you can support their need.

So how can you make this work with LinkedIn? Start with a complete profile that has your photo, links to your website and a complete story about who you are. After all, when a person is interested, this is the first place they will go to learn about you. An incomplete profile shows you in a poor light .

The best networking in LinkedIn is LinkedIn Answers. This is where you can ask or answer questions. Anyone can ask or answer any question. That gives you access to over 20 million people. By asking a question that interests your targeted client; you get a chance to start a conversation. A well written question can get over 50 answers.

I follow up with a personal response to everyone who answers one of my questions with one of 3 possible responses:

1. Already a connection: I thank them for taking time to give an answer and tell them I appreciate their taking time with my question.
2. Not connected, but I want to: I thank them for their answer and ask them to send me an invitation to connect if they are likewise interested.
3. Not connected, but not interested in connecting: I just thank them for their answer.

This gives you a way of increasing your connections, interacting with current connections and becoming increasingly known by the LinkedIn community. This gives me a steady stream of leads and an increasing network of people that I send referrals to.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 7:02 am and is filed under BLIF Marketing. 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.