Key areas we will cover in chapter 3:

• ✓ creating personal profile content
• ✓ making the most of groups and Publisher
• ✓ networking and making connections with LinkedIn
• ✓ creating your own company page
• ✓ using InMail
• ✓ advertising on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s main function is networking with people you would not ordinarily come into contact with. By connecting with other like-minded people, you can effectively build your business connection base, and have the potential to grow your business.

This chapter will work through the real basics that often get missed when people set up their LinkedIn profile, and then move on to how to actually use it to get real results. We will cover what should be in your profile, adding in rich media content, to really give a full 3D effect, and networking for success. We will also cover setting up a company page for even more online presence.

Quick facts on LinkedIn

Here are some interesting LinkedIn facts:

• It’s the number-one business-to-business-only networking site in the world.
• It has nearly 500 million members worldwide.
• Fifty-seven per cent of all usage is on mobile devices.
• It is for adults only, although it is starting to allow students to join.
• It is open 24/7 for networking.
• It has a database of prospective contacts.
• Two new members join every second.

Your personal profile

Don’t underestimate how many people will be checking you out online, and LinkedIn is definitely the easiest place to start looking. Whether you are meeting a new prospect for the first time, or have sent a connection request to someone, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will have looked you up or clicked back on your name to read your profile to find out more. Wouldn’t you?

The first thing to mention is that your profile has to be your name rather than your company name because it is you people are interested in networking with, not your business. It is also against LinkedIn’s terms and conditions to do otherwise.

If you take a look at your own profile page now, would you be happy with how it is representing you or your company, or could it be better? I am guessing it could be a whole lot better.

It is worth investing a little time one rainy Sunday afternoon to get it right. I would suggest putting a couple of hours aside to do it, but bear in mind it is never finished. It will always be a work in progress that you will add to as time goes on to keep it fresh and up to date.

Your professional headline or title

Most people make the assumption this should simply be their title — for example, director at your company — but that doesn’t necessarily tell someone looking at your profile what it is you do. With a company name like Blue Banana, you couldn’t possibly know what the company does — unless you are familiar with it — so ‘Director at Blue Banana’ means nothing.

The professional headline area gives you 120 characters, including spaces to work with to really create something precise, and should be filled with keywords if at all possible. It really needs to be the essence of what you do. Mine says ‘Social Media Done For You. Speaker, Author and Trainer on Building Relationships Online’. Not only does it tell someone exactly what I do, it also contains vital keywords for the search robots to retrieve, and it also exposes my authority on the subject by telling everyone I am a published author.

Your image

The image that you add of yourself should be a close-up head and shoulders, rather than a picture of you way off in the distance with your fishing rod — save that for your Facebook profile page.

When you do eventually meet up for a coffee with someone from LinkedIn, it helps to know what they look like: you don’t want to rely on looking for the ‘red rose’, so to speak. Think also about the professional image your personal brand is portraying: have a photo that reflects that. Having no image or using a company logo gives me the impression the person doesn’t want to be seen, and I have to wonder why. Having a great image also means you are seven times more likely to show up in search results, so give yourself a chance. It’s also important that you keep it up to date — women are particularly bad about having quite an old picture on display that doesn’t bear much of a resemblance now. Mine changes every two to three years.

Your website details

LinkedIn gives you three hot links: areas that when clicked go through to another site that they have been pointed to. Those three links need to be put to good use.

Often you will see a person’s profile making use of only one of the links, because they have only one website. But why not use all three of your links and point them to three different pages on your website, such as your ‘services’ page, ‘about’ page and ‘special offer’ page? You can point them to your business Facebook page, your blog or even a club website that you are a member of. Either way, you may as well make good use of them.

The trick here is in the drop-down box. Select the option ‘other’. This then creates a bit of choice. Yes, you can simply choose ‘my website’ or ‘my blog’, but by clicking ‘other’, another box appears for you to type in what the page you are sending visitors to is all about.

Your public profile address

The purpose of this feature is to allow you to hyperlink to your LinkedIn public profile address from your email signature or a job application. That way, the person is able to read the correct profile, which is particularly useful if there is someone with the same name as you but with a less salubrious past. To do this, simply click ‘edit’ next to your public profile address while in edit mode, and set it to your name. Then whenever you want to direct someone from, say, your email signature to your page, you simply have to set up a hyperlink within your email signature that they will be able to click on.

If your name has already been reserved, why don’t you try adding in your middle initial or name? If, like me, you don’t have a middle name, you could use your social media username (mine is bluebanana20). Sadly, even all those years ago when I started out in social media, the name Blue Banana was already taken.

Your summary

This is another really underutilised part of the profile, which surprises me as it seems like a simple thing to fill in. To do it right, though, takes a bit of thought. You have space for 2000 characters in all, so you have a reasonable area in which to write about yourself. But what should you include to get the most benefit?

To my mind it should say:

• who you are and what you do
• what makes you different from your competitors
• why someone should use you rather than your competitors
• something light-hearted and interesting about yourself such as your sailing ambition or your weekend-warrior activities.

Write this piece of your profile in the first person rather than in the third person, to make it more personal and real. When you have finished, just check down the left margin and see how many times you started a sentence or paragraph with ‘I’: you may find you need to change a few for another choice of word. This is picky, I know, but plenty of prospects or clients could be reading your summary and they will pick it up. Also, ask yourself if it sounds great or spammy. Have you stuffed it full of keywords for the search robots, or does it sound natural and informative?

Additional information and personal information

Write as much or as little in these two areas as you want. For ‘additional information’ you can add clubs and associations that you belong to, such as Rotary, Entrepreneurs and so on, and add in important achievements you have attained in your life. I rode my bicycle around Lake Taupo, which is 160 kilometres — and hard work, let me tell you — so I am proud and pleased with my achievement. I put it on my profile so that others can see I am a keen cyclist, and if I am meeting someone and their profile also mentions they are a keen cyclist, it gives us a point to connect the conversation immediately. I find it a real icebreaker.

The ‘personal information’ tab is visible only to those who are directly connected to you or whose email addresses are in the system after uploading your contacts but you are not necessarily connected to. I add my contact details, but it’s a matter of personal preference whether you disclose your marital status or not.

Other profile options

There are also other options available for adding information about yourself, including:

• certifications
• languages
• patents
• projects
• publications
• honours and awards
• test scores
• volunteering
• courses.

Skills

Adding skills to your profile does more than you might think. First, they are searchable, so when someone is searching through LinkedIn for what you do, you come up in the results. Second, you can endorse a connection’s skill and they can do the same for you. This then populates the skills section and adds another endorsement to the count. The maximum number that will show is 99+ though your endorsements can be many more than this. It’s a great visual when someone is looking at your profile and there are 99+ endorsements for your skills — it may just give you the edge over the competition. When you receive an endorsement from someone, you will be notified via LinkedIn email. Turn endorsements around by endorsing someone else — it puts you back on their radar just for a moment, which is always a good  thing.

Rich media

You can also add some great visual content to your profile, which really makes your profile stand out because so many people just don’t bother with it. So what can you add?

• PowerPoint. Add a PowerPoint presentation with a handful of great slides about what it is that you do. Make sure you add a final page with your contact details on it and either post this to your profile directly or, better yet, load it up to a Slideshare account (www.slideshare.net). As LinkedIn owns Slideshare, it’s another free place where your content can be accessed by another bunch of viewers. You can then link your Slideshare account to your LinkedIn account, or simply post the link to it on your profile. While in edit mode, use the odd-shaped icon over on the right that looks a little like a square with a plus sign attached to it.
• Video. Use this same icon to link a YouTube video to your profile. You can also upload the whole file if you wish.
• Documents. PDFs are a great way to add terms and conditions, price lists, brochures and the like so that your connections can download them easily.
• Links. You can add a link to anything here, such as articles you have written on another site or news stories about your company — the list is endless.

Whatever you add to your profile via the rich media square icon, make sure it’s visually appealing to allow connections to see the best you can offer.

That covers the basics of your profile, but there are some very cool applications that you can add to really show yourself off in a good way.

Recommendations

This is another overlooked area: I don’t think people realise the importance of recommendations. The average person on LinkedIn has fewer than a handful, with many people not having any at all. As a great percentage of us trust word-of-mouth advertising, or recommendations, and not many of us trust advertisements, it makes sense to have recommendations from satisfied clients and customers visible for all to see. They can also stand you in good stead when you are in the market for a new job as they can be used almost as references, and that may be the one thing that sets you apart from the other candidates.

I think a good number to aim for is 10, though there is no harm in going for more as I think the more people can endorse your work, the better it is for you. Be true with your recommendations, though. Don’t ask your close friends, neighbours and half of the team at your place of work to write one: that simply looks dumb. A recommendation simply saying that you are a nice person is not really of much value.

So what should a recommendation include? You don’t want it to be fluffy, so try to choose ones that are as factual and as relevant as possible. Include any or all of these suggestions:

• how the person knows you
• how they found you to work with
• what the working relationship was
• some personal traits, such as personable, expert or has integrity
• how their business changed as a result of your product or service.

Update your status

The ‘share an update’ box is here for you to post heaps of interesting things as and when they happen. For example, if you are being interviewed for a TV show tonight, have an article appearing in a well-known publication, are running an event, or just simply have some great news to share, this is the box to put it in, and it’s on your home page. When you update this box, simply post a teaser sentence about what it is you are sharing and a link to it. The box will automatically populate, then just click ‘share’. You can also share other files with your connections such as interesting PDFs, images and PowerPoint presentations here.

Using Publisher

You also have the option to write articles. LinkedIn’s ‘Publisher’ allows you to write a full article and include images, links and video. The space contains basic formatting, but the finished articles look great and encourage you to write for your connections, who are your ready-made audience. Back in 2012 LinkedIn gave the longer article option to 150 worldwide ‘Influencers’ and I was lucky enough to be one of them. Now this option has been rolled out to everyone. From experience, I can tell you it’s great to be able to use this as my main blog and have a ready-made audience to interact with. It’s a great tool and I strongly recommend that you use it. Publish opinion pieces, market updates, learnings — anything you feel your business connections might find interesting.

You can get a huge amount of great content to share from LinkedIn’s Pulse or newsfeed on your home page. This is where some of the best and most shared content on the web is filtered into, depending on what you have opted in to receive, as well as posts from LinkedIn’s now 500 Influencers all around the world. These are thought leaders and businesspeople who write on the LinkedIn platform to share their wisdom with the rest of us about mainly business topics, which gives another dimension to the content available.

Content you may want to share:

• articles you have written online
• details about an exciting project that’s about to start
• a job vacancy
• interesting business-related articles
• an upcoming TV interview
• a link to a useful YouTube video
• an opinion piece
• an upcoming event that you are running or attending.

Whatever you post in this box will appear on all of your direct connections’ home page activity, so they can see what is going on in your business life. Think of it as a rolling newsletter — so don’t post uninteresting or spamming content — and you can also tick the Twitter box to feed that same piece of information out to Twitter at the same time.

You will notice other people’s updates in your own newsfeed and under them you have some options to share:

• Like. Similar to Facebook, you can simply click on anyone’s status update’s ‘like’ button to show approval for the posting without feeling you have to leave a comment, and that puts you on their radar for a moment again.
• Comment. Feel free to leave a comment about a connection’s post, as by doing so, you are again putting yourself back on that connection’s radar and also publishing the article and comment into your own newsfeed. It’s great when people do this with your content because it then puts your content into their own newsfeed, which really helps with the viral spread, leading to many more eyeballs taking in your post.
• Share. This gives you the ability to share the status update box content with others and, again, when they share it your content is in their newsfeed for their connections to see. You can share your connections’ content back to your own box, or share with groups that you are a member of on LinkedIn. You also have the choice of sending it as a tweet either just to your LinkedIn connections on Twitter, or to everyone you are connected to on Twitter: it’s a very easy way to spread exciting or useful information with others.

Adding your connections

This is the last thing you should do on your page, and only do it when you are completely happy with how your page looks. The first thing your new connections are going to do when they accept your invitation is see what you are up to. If there is nothing there, you may have missed an opportunity.

If you are using Outlook as your mail program you can export your connections. Go to ‘file’, ‘export’, ‘create CSV file’ and save the file; then from LinkedIn click on ‘my network’, ‘import from other providers’ and then follow the instructions to import your list. If you don’t currently use Outlook, follow your system’s instructions for exporting your contacts into a CSV file. Don’t worry at this point that your aunt Mary is on this list: you are simply uploading the file into LinkedIn. Until you decide who to send an invitation to, LinkedIn won’t do anything with it.

When it is uploaded, it will tell you who in your contact list is already on LinkedIn, and you can then choose who to invite by ticking the relevant boxes.

You can also remove connections by going to their page and clicking the option under the three dots or by finding them in your ‘my network’ tab and removing them from there.

Networking with LinkedIn

Now that you have joined LinkedIn and have a reasonable profile of yourself up for everyone to see, you have to use it. I am sure there are people out there who think that just because they now have a visible profile and a handful of connections, the phone is going to start ringing off the hook. Let me be the bad news bearer on that one: it won’t be ringing just yet. You now have to market yourself through the various meeting points within LinkedIn so that others get to meet you and you them. This is largely done by networking within the LinkedIn groups, and getting in touch with your connections’ connections. (In chapter 9, we look at networking etiquette in more detail: just what is the best way to reach out to someone to connect and start a conversation?) You may feel a little unsure about where to start, so let’s take a look.

Networking with LinkedIn groups

If you type in keywords for the types of groups you would like to look at, a good selection should come up as there are thousands and thousands of groups worldwide. An example of this is my search for social media groups: there are nearly 11 thousand groups on that topic alone. It does, however, depend on which keywords the group originator puts in the group’s profile details and title, so you may have to try a few different combinations. I like to add the country in the search terms too, which will bring results that are a little closer to home, but if you are looking to network further afield, you don’t need to do this.

Once you have a list of the groups in your industry, there are a few things to point out before you decide to join:

• Groups are listed in member number order, so those with the most members will be listed first and they run in descending order. There is very little point in joining a group that has only a handful of people as the discussions will dry up very quickly.
• You can see who the group owner or admins are and view their profile.
• You can also see how many of your own connections are already in the group.
• LinkedIn will also automatically offer you a selection of group choices based on your profile for you to look at.

You’ll be able to see a little bit more about what the group is about, and what the group rules are, before you join. From all of this information you should be able to decide whether or not the group is for you: if it is, click ‘join’.

Once you have requested to join the group there may be a vetting process from the group owner or manager, but many groups are automatic entry. The choice is up to the owner as there may be competition or certain types of companies or industries that they don’t want in their groups.

When you have been accepted, do abide by any rules that have been set. The rules tend to be the same in most groups:

• no promotion of yourself or your services or direct sales pitches
• no spamming of other group members
• be respectful of others.

These rules are so everyone can get the same enjoyment and great results from mixing and mingling online.

What should I discuss?

A few tips to get you started:

• Make it easy for anyone to contribute.
• Encourage a short answer — people are busy.
• Respond occasionally — after all, you did start the discussion.
• Don’t be afraid to dive in and make a start.

People often tell me, ‘I don’t want to say the wrong thing’ or ‘I don’t have anything worthwhile to say’. This is quite common so you are not on your own.

Even though I work with social media each and every day, I don’t very often start conversations about it on LinkedIn as I see that as self-promotion. Instead, I might ask a more general business question such as, ‘What is your referral process?’ or ‘What exciting things are happening in your business world at the moment?’

You see, it’s not necessarily about talking shop all the time, but about encouraging other group members to take part and make themselves known, because just like you, they may feel a little self-conscious, but you are all there to network.

Some discussions are started with a statement such as, ‘The economy is going down the toilet — here is what I think’, but from practice and a bit of monitoring, I find a question will get you a better response. I suppose because you are asking a question, you are really giving a call to action: you are asking someone to answer it and, by our nature, we do like to help others out where we can.

I once asked a large group, ‘What stops you from taking part in or starting a discussion?’ and the answers surprised me. Many people were unsure whether they had anything to offer, while others simply wanted to watch, listen and learn. That’s an important point to remember if you get a little disappointed when there are not as many comments to your discussion as you would like. Remember there are those silently listening, so you are adding value to someone’s business life — you just may not see it at the time.

Another good way of getting others into the discussion is to ask something a little easier to answer and perhaps ‘off topic’. For example, the question I had the best response to was, ‘What famous person would you like to have a coffee with and why?’ The answers were varied and sometimes surprising. I got over 40 people chatting away and mingling with each other over a very easy question. I would love to know what real business eventually came out of that ‘networking event’.

Examples of questions to ask or discussions to start:

• What is the worst invention you can think of and why?
• What motivates you in business?
• What are the best business books you have read?
• What is the best thing that is happening in your industry right now?

Another thing to note in the group discussions is that when someone has taken the time to respond to your question, you should follow it up with a comment, even if it is only to say ‘thanks for your input’. Remember your manners, just as you would do at a face-to-face networking event when someone has taken the trouble to chip in.

If you find that the group is not for you, you can always up and leave by going to the group settings and clicking the ‘leave group’ button, but a word of warning: if you leave a group, you can’t message any of the group members directly anymore unless you are directly connected to them, and they can’t get hold of you as easily either. What I suggest instead is simply turning off the email alerts by visiting ‘settings’ and ‘communication’, then ‘email frequency’. Then uncheck the box so you don’t receive any more notifications. That way, you have not left all of those wonderful people forever — you just don’t hear from them regularly, and you can always turn them back on.

Creating your own group

Running your own group on LinkedIn is a great way to make new connections, and put yourself forward as a leader in your field, but running a group is a bit like running your website or Facebook page: it’s easy to set up, but it needs some time and effort to keep the momentum going and the group growing. It does take a while to get group members to engage, but it is well worth the effort. Once you have a group that is actively starting discussions, and people are actively engaging with each other, that’s when relationships are formed, referrals are swapped and deals get done.

Here are some key things to consider when you decide to set up your group:

• What is the aim of the group?
• Who is going to manage it?
• What resources will you use for content?
• Who is going to add discussions and news stories?
• Who will send consistent announcements out periodically?
• What are the guidelines for group participants or the group rules?

So, what can you do to help your group get up and running? LinkedIn gives you a few templates that you can customise a little, so that you can add in your own flavour about what the group is about and how you run it. The templates include:

• a welcome message
• a decline message
• a ‘we are thinking about your application’ message.

By personalising each template, you can add all sorts of promotional information and links, so take note of these points and see how you can maximise your own templates:

• Include links back to resources in the welcome message template and really maximise the use of the space with useful information, but not spam.
• When you set up your group profile, give as much information about the group as possible: what you are trying to achieve, what the purpose of the group is, and so on.
• Use the group rules section to set clear rules for your group.
• Include keywords in the group title and profile that you think people will be searching for when they are looking to join a group.

Sending a group message (announcement)

This is a real benefit to running your own group. As the group manager or owner you can send a group message to everyone in the group once a week. It really does give you another database to talk to, but don’t abuse it. You don’t want your group members leaving in droves because you have overdone the self-promotion.

I received announcements from one group manager that were really nothing more than a catch-up email containing information about what they had been up to in a business sense, and their recent trips abroad. Now I haven’t really got time to be reading other people’s long catch-up emails, but I did read these and it made me wonder if that type of email group announcement was in fact a bright way to correspond. It was a little different, after all, so why not give it a go and see? It certainly put them back on my radar again.

With any social media tools, you have to give them a try, monitor the response and maybe tweak things a bit before trying again.

Featured posts

If you have something important to discuss and would like to keep it at the top of the group page for a while, make it ‘featured’. When you have finished with the topic, un-feature it to move it back down the page and allow something else to be featured.

Growing your group

A bit like getting Facebook fans to ‘like’ your Facebook page, getting new members to join your group can be frustrating: it just doesn’t happen quickly enough. There are a few things you can do to help it along, though:

• Send invitations out to others to join your group by clicking on ‘invite others’ while you are in your group. This gives you the ability to share the URL of your group and pass it on to others. If you decide to do this, ask your connections to invite their connections in too for a bigger mix of people.
• Use one of the three website links on your profile page we talked about earlier, to invite people to join your LinkedIn group.
• Make sure your group description and profile contain the right keywords so that when someone is searching for a group like yours, you come up.
• Tweet the group URL and invite others to join.
• Add the group link to your website asking others to join.
• Add the group link to your email signature.

Setting up your company page

Just as Facebook has created its version of a company page with its business page, so has LinkedIn, but the appeal of having a company page on LinkedIn is the professional, business-oriented community it sits in.

Normally, the profile pages that you set up on LinkedIn are for your own personal use, and it is indeed against LinkedIn’s terms and conditions to set up a personal profile page as a business. But LinkedIn has seen that by capturing and promoting more business information in this community, it can make way for a whole lot more engagement and knowledge sharing.

So how do you set it up?

Only one person from your company can set up the company page, and you will need to have an email address that matches your domain, so using your Gmail address won’t work. This stops others from setting up company pages that they are not authorised to do.

To start your LinkedIn company page, simply click on ‘more’ and ‘create company page’. From there it is self-explanatory and you just need to follow the very easy steps. You can now do the following:

• Set up a showcase page for the main aspects of your business. This is particularly useful if your brand is known for its sub-brands. For instance, Restaurant Brands could be the company’s main page, but underneath that will be Starbucks, KFC (and so on) showcase pages so interested parties can follow the elements of the company that they are particularly interested in.
• Add a careers page if you have vacancies to advertise. If you are currently looking for new employees, what better place to advertise than on a database with about 500 million people! The listed vacancy will pop up on the home page of people LinkedIn thinks may be interested and many companies have had success filling vacancies using this method. What is also great is that anyone who clicks on the advertisement can easily see a whole lot more about the company and the other employees who are in their network.
• Follow any company that interests you. Each time a company that I am following updates something, I am notified on my status update page. How cool is that for inside intelligence, particularly if I am a recruitment agent! I may need help to fill the vacancy that has just been created, or the person who has just been promoted may want to hear from me in their new role.
• See how you are connected to a company. The company overview page allows you to see how you may be connected to that company: it’s a bit of inside intelligence. If you are looking to do business with that company in some way, you may have some inside connections who could possibly be helpful to you, or who may even pass an introduction message on to the person you need.
• Post your blog posts onto the page. Let your followers find out more about the company via your company blog posts. Each time you write a new post, post the link to show it on your page.
• Add a disclaimer. Even if you don’t add a disclaimer, make use of this space to write something else.
• Add a button to your website that says ‘Follow us on LinkedIn’. Simply copy the HTML code and you’re done. You may need your web person to do this bit for you.

Anyone who views your company page also has the option to like, comment on or share a post with their own connections, and if you are the page manager for your company, you have the additional option to feature a post. This keeps the post at the top of your page, which is especially useful if you have an offer or promotion running or simply need to share an important message for some time.

Using InMail

As part of the premium account, you have the option of sending emails directly to people on LinkedIn if you don’t know their email address. While you could possibly find out their email address by phoning their company, the beauty of using LinkedIn is twofold:

• You share the same community (LinkedIn).
• They can easily click back to your profile and read about you before they respond, something they are not likely to do via ordinary email.

I have used InMail with great success. But you need to keep your message limited to 100 words, making it direct and to the point. If you have a connection in common, you are 50 per cent more likely to get a response by mentioning them in your message. If you get a response back within 90 days, you get a credit InMail in return so it incentivises you to write a great email that does the trick in the first place. Withdrawn InMails, on the other hand, can’t be credited back, so make sure before you hit ‘send’.

Here’s one company’s experience of marketing online and using its network to get real results. This is Lindsey from Outbox’s story.

Advertising on LinkedIn

Most social media platforms now have an advertising opportunity to get your content in front of the right people. LinkedIn is no different. While you will definitely need a bigger budget than for, say, Facebook, if your target market is on LinkedIn, it could be money well spent.

You can create an ad that appears in a person’s newsfeed, or smaller ads that pop up around the site, or promote a post from your company page. You can even send ads directly into other members’ inboxes through sponsored InMail campaigns.

As with other sites, you can target pretty well by:

• location
• company name
• company industry
• company size
• job title
• job function
• job seniority
• member schools
• field of study
• degree
• member skills
• member groups
• member gender
• member age
• years of experience.

That means you can create an ad that you only want shown to people in Sydney who work at a particular company, are female and are 30 years old. Or many other variables. Very, very powerful. Like the other sites, payment works on an auction basis, so how much others are prepared to pay to have their ad delivered to the same type of audience determines how much you pay per click. Or per 1000 impressions. In my recent experience, I have been spending between $5 and $14 per click, so while you may think it’s expensive, a new client from it could be worth far more. As with all online advertising, your headline, the image you choose and the text all have a bearing on whether someone clicks on your ad or not, so try different versions and test as you go.

To start using LinkedIn’s ad platform, find ‘tools’ and ‘advertise’.

Conclusion of chapter 3

We have covered quite a lot about LinkedIn in this chapter, so by now you should have an idea of how you will use it effectively for your own business. Your LinkedIn profile is not set in stone, so plan to revisit it in a month to see if you can improve it any more.

In order for you to get some traction with LinkedIn, try to allocate 10 minutes per day to networking online within your chosen groups and posting status updates.