LinkedIn

Posted by | Posted in Social Marketing | Posted on 21-11-2009-05-2008

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Christine Gallagher asked:

I have had a profile on LinkedIn for a while now, but as with my MySpace account, I let it languish for a long time. I wasn’t seeing LinkedIn as a place to make connections and find others in my niche. It also seemed heavily corporate, with people looking for jobs more so than small business services or products.

Originally, serving that more corporate-type population was why LinkedIn was established. However, I have recently noticed more activity among small business owners, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. While Facebook offers a more personal snapshot of a person, LinkedIn has really become a good place to create beneficial professional relationships as well as be found by potential clients and customers.

If you are interested in finding out how to use LinkedIn to help grow your business and boost your visibility, here are a few ways to use this social network to do so:

Do a search for people in targeted fields and positions. Send them a request to join your network and be sure to personalize your message.

Create a thorough profile with your photo, websites and title. It is a good idea to include past experience, positions and education as well–the more information you supply, the more ways you allow others to find and connect to you.

Answer questions posed by other members in your community that fall into your area of expertise. “LinkedIn Answers” provides a place for you to view open questions that you may respond to. This is a wonderful way to promote your specific knowledge.

Ask for recommendations of your work and offer to provide them for others. The glowing recommendations you receive will be posted right to your profile.

Develop a targeted group of contacts in your niche and start connecting each other. Try to help others expand their own networks.

Look through your contacts’ networks. Select a few people each month you think would be good to know and request that your contacts introduce them to you.

As with Facebook, LinkedIn offers a way to feed your blog posts right into your profile. Add an application called BlogLink–this supports blogging platforms such as TypePad, Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, Blogger and more.

Invite people in your network to ask others in their networks to a discussion group or an on-line networking event.

A great tip for increasing your search engine ranking with your website listing: when you go to type in your web address for your profile, you will have several choices in the drop down menu. If you choose “other” you have the option to type in any text you’d like which will then link to your site. Choose the keywords that you think would best get you found when someone searches in the search engines and voila, instant search engine optimization! (LinkedIn is ranked very highly in Google.)

Get some publicity. Many members of the media as well as some of the top bloggers have profiles on LinkedIn. Why not reach out to them and connect? You never know where the relationship will lead. Of course, don’t spam them. Send a polite and personalized message and you will have a spot on their radar.

Finally, don’t forget to add a link to your profile in your email signature. The great thing is that LinkedIn allows you to customize the link to your public profile to include your name. You should always include your social networking profiles in your signature so that every time you send an email, others have a way to connect.

As you know by now, connection is what it’s all about!

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Linkedin Hot Tip – Misspell Your Last Name In Your Linkedin Profile?

Posted by | Posted in Social Marketing | Posted on 11-07-2009-05-2008

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Summary:

Why would you misspell your last name in your LinkedIn profile?  Because other people might misspell it when they look for you. 

When old friends and colleagues look for me in LinkedIn, I knew a lot of them would use the misspelling O’Mally (without the “e”) even though my last name is spelled O’Malley, but I still wanted them to find me.  I discovered a trick that will do it, and I’ll show you in this article.

Details:

I have done many seminars and workshops on LinkedIn, and I see that about 30-40% of people have names that are commonly misspelled.  If you are one of them, people might search for you and not find you, since the LinkedIn search engine won’t find an exact match between their misspelling and your actual spelling.  If they look once, and they don’t find you, they probably won’t look again.  This is a real shame if that person respects your work and would work with you again.

Here is how you solve the problem.  Put common misspellings of your name in the “Summary” field of your LinkedIn profile as follows:

Go to your LinkedIn Home page Expand the Profile button Click Edit My Profile Click the word Edit beside Summary Note that the Summary field is a “free form text” field, so you can put in anything that you want in there.  Put in any common misspellings for your last name.  In my LinkedIn profile, I actually say “Common misspellings” so that people know why I do it (and so my mother knows I can spell my own name). Click Save changes.

Now look up Patrick O’Malley in the “Search People” box in the upper right hand corner of a LinkedIn page, and my profile should be the first match (out of about 60 matches).  If you then look up Patrick O’Mally (without the “e”), and I’m the only match.  Since  a lot of people misspell my last name, I’m happy that they can still find me.

In conclusion, this could be your best LinkedIn tip of the month if you 

have a last name that is misspelled a lot have a friend with a last name that is misspelled a lot.  (Pass it on to them)

Cool, huh?  Pass it on to your friends!

Some good news:

You can also use this technique with maiden names, first names, and nicknames, which I will discuss in the future I have a video that shows how to do this at LinkedIn tip misspell last name 

Some bad news:

After you make the change, you may have to wait, since it may take the LinkedIn search engine a little while to find the new words that you put there. This only works when people use the standard search in the upper right hand corner.  If someone uses advanced search and puts in the first and last name separately, this technique won’t work, but very few people do that.

By: Patrick OMalley

About the Author:
Patrick O’Malley is an independent LinkedIn expert, keynote speaker, and corporate trainer. His web site is LinkedIn Training and you can find more powerful, undocumented tips there. His phone number is actually (617)-PATRICK, because he’s that cool.
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