LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn is the leading social networking site for professionals and offers countless opportunities for building your brand, advancing your career and career search and marketing your blog and entrepreneurial efforts.

Here are just some of the ways that you can leverage LinkedIn’s features to more effectively market your blog and offerings:

Profile

Subtitle: In addition to including your personal brand, list that you’re an author, a blogger, founder of an organization or community, an entrepreneur or any other appropriate and relevant designation. This is a great place to mention that you’re the founder of “XYZ” blog which will help create more awareness for your blog and make encourage profile viewers to learn more.

Summary: Your profile’s summary section is a great place to introduce and describe your blog and offerings in more detail.

Customize Your Website Links: Use your external profile links to connect your profile viewers directly to your blog and/or any other offerings or resources you want to share.

Status Updates: While these are more manual, you can also keep your profile status updated with your latest blog posts as this will appear in your network’s activity log and can help drive more traffic your way.

Experience: You can actually list yourself as Founder, CEO, Chief Evangelist, you name it as a previous position and your blog as a previous employer under the Experience section of your profile. This helps promote your blog and makes it appear more official and professional. You can also create a company profile to link to when creating this listing under your Experience.

Groups

Join Groups: LinkedIn allows you to join over 50 groups. There are groups for every industry, functional area, association, company, university, event and more. Joining groups also can help expand your visibility and that of your blog etc. within your network.

Discussions: In your group discussions, be sure to include a link to your blog as part of your signature, as well as providing links to content on your blog, when 100% relevant, as a value-add to the discussion.

Start Groups: If you choose to start a group, there are a number of ways to promote your blog and offerings. First, you can include your blog’s URL as the group profile URL, linking new members directly to your site. Second, you set up your blog’s RSS feed to automatically stream into your group’s discussion area. Third, you can set up automatic responses that are sent to prospective members once they have requested to join your group, as well as once they have been approved as members of your group. This is a great way to make them aware of and hook them with your blog content before they even get involved in the group’s activity. Lastly, LinkedIn allows you to send a weekly announcement to all of your members which offers you the perfect opportunity to link members to your blog, recent blog posts and more.

Companies

Add Your Blog: You can actually create a company profile and URL for your blog to which you can link directly from the Experience section in your profile. This helps promote your blog and makes it appear more official and professional, but also generates more links back to your site and more visibility for your blog on LinkedIn.

Answers

Ask Questions: Answers is a forum where LinkedIn members can literally ask questions in many different topic categories and elicit responses from other members. If you are looking for experts to feature on your blog or are seeking information, opinions etc. to use in new and valuable content on your blog, LinkedIn Questions can be a great networking tool and content development facilitator. Once you create your content or interview an expert or two, you can leverage those whom you have featured on your blog to help promote and drive traffic back to your site.

Give Answers: In addition to asking questions, you can answer questions. The “asker” will get the opportunity to rate the answers provided and will rate the “answerers” with the best answers experts in that topic area (which also shows up in your profile). This is a perfect way to brand yourself as a thought leader, network with professionals in your industry and build your credibility. Just make sure to include your blog URL in your signature to drive more awareness of your site and build your credibility.

Applications

Blog Link & WordPress: These two applications allow you to feed your blog posts into your profile so that readers can see and link to the content you offer on your own blog.

Tweets: Link your profile to your Twitter tweets so your LinkedIn contacts can connect with all of the valuable content you may be sharing on Twitter. Many of these tweets may be your blog posts which can help drive more traffic back to your site.

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