Outside of the fact that you happen to be reading one right now, I find that there are lots of smart, business savvy folks out there who when placed in the position of having to explain, strategize or build a blog (or decide if one should be built at all) are at a bit of a loss. Blogs are usually easy for most people to recognize but harder for folks to define.

When I hosted a free class on the subject (as I do from time to time) it "sold out" (in the way only free classes can!) the room filled to capacity.

Even those who can sort of describe a blog, often find it hard to understand when, why and how to create one so that it will actually create benefit for a business, organization, cause etc..

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Of course everyone who manages a successful blog has found themselves in a similar position at least once and gotten past it, so I thought I could impart a few words of advice.

First of all, what is a blog really?

A blog is just a Web site.

Let me repeat that for the non-believers – A BLOG IS JUST A WEB SITE.

But it's a special kind of Web site.

Let's start by looking at the different kinds of Web sites that exist. Many of the students of my in-person classes will recognize this.

According to my calculations and ruminations, there are essentially 4 kinds of Web sites you can build based on how your business attracts revenue:

Web Site Types

Branding Examples: Coca Cola, Dove

Advertising Revenue Examples: Inc.com, Google.com

eCommerce Examples: Amazon, Zappos

Lead Generation Examples: messagemedium.com, razorfish.com

A branding site like Dove is working hard to immerse the viewer in the company's ethos. You can't actually buy any product from their site, they don't seem to sell ads, nor are they pushing hard for you to give up your contact information. Dove's site is all about convincing you of their commitment to improving women's natural beauty and self-esteem in the hope that this will generate an emotional affinity to their brand.

Related Articles by Maisha: Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3) Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2) Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business

An advertising revenue site like Inc.com has articles and information as its content. It is designed and organized into categories like "Business Advice" "Tech Startup" "The Internet Strategist" to display that content in a way that's easy for you – the reader – to find, read and pass along.

An Online Store like Zappos.com has products – shoes - as its content. So it is organized and designed to make it easy for you to find the kind of shoes you're looking for. One of reasons Zappos is so popular is it provides a variety of ways to find what you're looking for.

A service Web site like message medium has services as its content. So our site is organized to make it easy for you to find our services and also to find the things that make us a credible company to work with – testimonials, articles, client samples, news clippings etc.

As a business owner, more than likely you are not looking to spend millions of dollars on a branding Web site so let's focus on the other three.

So How do Blogs fit in?

Blogs are an interesting breed of Web site. In structure, they are most like Advertising Revenue sites. Like a newspaper, they usually publish content with some predictable regularity, and the content is typically arranged by date and/or by category so that it can be easily found by readers.

But what's interesting about blogs and has made them so ubiquitous, is that they, with all of their content and social elements, can be used very effectively to support an Advertising, eCommerce or Lead Generation Web site.

• My blog "The Internet Strategist" is designed to fit within Inc.com's business model of generating revenue through advertising and things like events.
  
  
• The blog of Tony Hsu, the CEO of Zappos, is designed to generate brand loyalty and increase sales of the products Zappos sells.
  
  
• This blog also does double-duty, helping you the reader understand my areas of expertise as an Internet Strategist, which my company message medium hopes will help us generate more consulting, Web site design and construction, and Internet marketing clients as well as attendees in our classes.
  

So the first thing you have to identify when considering blogging is – what kind of business do I have and how do we stay afloat? How do we generate revenue? This will help you determine your ultimate blogging purpose.

Next time – I'll discuss "The Big Payoff" what can you expect a blog to actually accomplish for you?

Post Your Comment Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed? Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.

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Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (final/part 3)
  
• Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2)
  
• Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn
  
• LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business

The last 2 posts I've written have focused on featuring real businesses that have created highly successful social marketing strategies using LinkedIn as a key element.

I started the series with an overview of LinkedIn concepts, then moved into a guide for creating your LinkedIn profile, followed by a list of the 11 most powerful LinkedIn tools for small businesses. Finally, I outlined 6 core strategies that small businesses use to leverage LinkedIn for building a tribe and covered the first three:

• Building a live community (LinkedIn tribe part 1)
• Business development (LinkedIn tribe part 2)
• Promoting a blog/branding/building traffic (LinkedIn tribe part 2)

I also hosted an in-person Social Media Marketing workshop in New York City in which I provided the hands-on help many small business owners need to translate these strategies into action. If you missed it, click here to be notified of my upcoming Social Media Marketing events.

Today we cover the final 3 strategies.

• Getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• Promoting a product
• Strategies for everyone

The Freelancer or Consultant

As a consultant, outside of being good at what you do and generally being able to successfully run a business and manage clients, success is heavily dependant upon two things:

1. making sure people remember who you are and what you do
   
   
2. making sure enough people are in group number 1 to keep your pipeline full.

Finding ways to stay on the radar of people who will either hire you or refer you to new business is a critical challenge for freelancers and consultants.

You will find many examples of business owners who are using LinkedIn's "Q&A" feature as a significant element of their visibility and lead generation marketing.

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Heidi Cool, owner of Heidi Cool Consulting is one great example. Heidi shared with me how by providing excellent answers to the questions of other LinkedIn members, she has built visibility and credibility for her business, more and higher quality traffic to her Web site and more leads.

Here's what Heidi did...

Using LinkedIn Q&A

The key for Heidi is not generic visibility, but high quality visibility - where her answers set her apart. She focuses on answering questions that are directly relevant to her areas of expertise and will possibly get selected by the questioner as "best" answers. When this happens, both the question and the answer show up in her profile further building her credibility as an expert in her field.

To give you a sense of scale, Heidi has spent 1-2 hours per week over the last 6 months answering questions related to Web site design. Questions her take about 5-30 minutes each to answer properly.

As a great example of the inherently holistic nature of social marketing, Heidi relies heavily on her existing blog content to make sure that questions get a thorough response in a way that would not be possible by just answering the question on LinkedIn alone (as of this writing there's a limit of 4,000 characters for responses). Heidi's Results

Related Articles by Maisha: Building Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies (part 2) Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist

• Heidi received more than 3 times the number of visitors to her site in July when she focused heavily on this technique. She adds:

  "I can generate traffic from other sites for much less effort, but the quality of visitors isn't as high"

• Heidi defines quality as both how many pages visitors view on her site ("stickiness") and how many real inquiries/leads she receives from site visitors. For example, the visitors from an article aggregator site she posts content to are not "high quality". 86% of those visitors leave after viewing only one page, "and so far none have made an inquiry through my contact form".




• But during July when she ramped up her Q&A strategy, LinkedIn visitors sent her 29 email requests for more information or project proposals.

Other Freelancer/Consultant techniques:

• Create an Email Signature and consider including your LinkedIn Custom URL on your business cards and on more of your marketing materials to enable potential customers to learn more about you and your company


• Create a group


• Send connection invitations immediately after conferences and events


• Recommendations as strategy. Michael Zittel Owner, Serr.biz LLC offers this advice (in response to a LinkedIn Q&A of course):

  We use, and recommend to our clients, to at least utilize Linked In as a validation service of testimonials and "recommendations." It's easy for anyone to write a bogus testimonial about their services and post it on their site. It is not possible to do so on Linked in. So, having recommendations here, and posting on your site, then linking to LINKED IN so people can validate the reference is, in our approach, one of the simplest methods of utilizing LinkedIn.

The Product Promoter

LinkedIn is a very interesting tool for those who have a product to sell or promote. The same way communities must be built for the purpose of congregation, businesses also need to build communities around services and products.

Author Gary Unger shared a great example of how he uses LinkedIn to regularly sell out of his book which is available for sale at Amazon.com. In July 2008 he published the book "How to Be a Creative Genius (in Five Minutes or Less)". Gary spends about 4 hours per day on LinkedIn, reading messages, looking for questions to answer, writing answers and interacting with people he meets. His results? He explains that for every good answer he posts, about 15 people will email him asking to connect. For his Web site he gets up to 500 unique visitors per week if he is as he says "in the zone" - active in answering questions. He also regularly checks his book sales during these periods and says that he will easily sell 20 books per week and see his Amazon ranking jump when he is actively posting.

Supporting this experience, freelance copywriter and marketing consultant Leon Altman cautions "You shouldn't try to sell directly from LinkedIn. But you can start building the bridge to marketing your products and services". Leon's also underscores the importance of landing pages "on your website you must get people to opt-in."

To Connect or Not to Connect?

One of the questions that often plagues early LinkedIn users is deciding who to connect to.

LinkedIn offers these suggestions:

Thoughtfully select those people you know and trust because these are the people you will seek advice from and request a recommendation about your/other's quality of work. Because of this, the quality of your contacts is always more important than the quantity of contacts. It is important you know your connections because you may be asked to recommend one of your connections to another. If you know little about the connection you weaken the integrity of the recommendation and your network...Choose your connections wisely as there are certain questions you might only ask a connection because you know and trust that member with this information. Be sure you trust your connections with the information you make available to them."

However on the opposite end of the spectrum, many members of LinkedIn support what's called "open networking" meaning they will connect with pretty much anyone who sends them an invitation.

Also keep in mind these LinkedIn facts:

• all connections are visible to your direct connections by default (although you can change this)



• maximum number of connections is 30,000



• maximum number of invitations you can send is 3,000

My take on this is that I think once you know your goals, resources and the tools you have to work with, the question of who to connect with no longer takes on the same importance. If you need to build out a community of 500 people with very specific goals like Daniel Tunkelang from LinkedIn strategies part 1, perhaps open networking is not necessary for you. If however you're trying to build a community of 5,000 people with broad interests it's probably more important. Keep in mind that the more people you have in your network, the more people you can contact directly. This is probably the biggest advantage to accepting most of the invitations you receive.

Strategies for Everyone

Here are tips for other things you should do regardless of what category you fit into:

• Update your job description – your profile and the details in it are the center of ALL activity on LinkedIn and are at the core of your credibility for whatever you do on LinkedIn. Keep it current with new accomplishments by updating it a few times per year.



• Check in – often a tactic used by successful business owners as a core of their business success. Use your profile as a Rolodex and check in with a few contacts each week or month just to say hello



• Check References & Interests – it is always good to do a little research in preparation for a new relationship. In fact these days it's not at all creepy, it's respectful. The same way you'd research a company before an interview or a big sales presentation, these days each person is his or her own walking brand. Research their interests and know a little before you interact with them to help make the interaction more successful



• Find people you should meet – if you know who your target audience is, you should also know some search criteria for finding them on LinkedIn. Perhaps it's not cost-effective for you to try to reach out to every one of your potential customers individually, but perhaps it's super smart to reach out to that guy or gal who runs the local chapter of the retailers association who could make a great strategic partner for your business.



• Consider a LinkedIn ad – and tailor the reach to your target audience



• What are you working on now? – this feature is often not noticed by your connections in my experience, but it can be used to share good news, newly completed projects, new hires with your connections



• Maximize Travel - check the locations of your connections before you travel so you can schedule time to see people in the city your going to. (Thanks to @merylkevans for the reminder on this one!)



• Maximize New Connections – Barbara Rozgonyi offers these words of advice "After you accept an invitation, consider replying with a quick personal message that includes a few bullet points about what you do, an opportunity to ask questions about your industry and additional ways to connect with you online such as your blog, ezine or forum." A great tip and something I try to do as well. Thank you, Barbara!



• Connect Your Connections - helping others find the people they need from within your own network can go a long way. (Thanks to
  

  Post Your Comment Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed? Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.

  
  
  
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I hope that you have thought of or already found some ways to put last week's list of LinkedIn Strategies for Small Business to good use.

We covered the first of the 6 LinkedIn Strategies that I'll share with you:

• Building a live community
• Business development
• Promoting a blog/branding/building traffic
• Getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• Promoting a product
• Strategies for everyone

Business Development

A piece of advice that I will never forget receiving from an older, wiser mentor of mine who started and ran 2 successful businesses including a luxury goods marketing firm – he has a rolodex of more than 1,000 people who he keeps in touch with on a regular basis. How does he do this? For him it's a simple phone call that usually lasts no more than 5-10 minutes and if appropriate leads to a follow up email and possible work. This very simple technique kept him busy.

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One of the simplest ways of using LinkedIn is just as a "modern Rolodex" a list of the people you want to communicate with on a regular basis so that they remember you're out there, what you have to offer, and why they like you. The only tools you need for this is your LinkedIn profile, sending LinkedIn invitations to people you know and an hour per day to make phone calls. One of the biggest challenges for a freelancer or consultant is just making sure people remember you when they need something you offer. These quick check-in calls (with an appropriate time lapse in between) are a great way to just stay on your prospect's radar.

Of course LinkedIn search is also a great tool for this – whether you are searching within your networking or outside of it, using keyword searches on LinkedIn to find people who match your target audience is a great way to "mine the network".

NileGuide, a trip planning website, used LinkedIn to help with a variety of successful "business development" campaigns.

The primary tools? LinkedIn Search & LinkedIn InMail. Here are the 3 ways they used it:

• Fundraising - to identify relevant venture capital firms during their fundraising process
  
  
• PR - to identify a target list of publications to build awareness of their product, they searched on the publication names, and proactively contacted journalists with whom they had at least a "friend of a friend" connection.
  
  
• Strategic Partnerships - to contact people in the right departments at target companies with whom they wanted to explore business partnerships in selected industries. Their goal was to find partners who were interested in providing personalized travel guide functionality to their users.

Let's look more closely at how they leveraged LinkedIn for strategic partnerships…

Maisha will be leading a Hands-on Social Media marketing workshop on September 8th in New York City. You can get more details about the workshop here.

How NileGuide used LinkedIn to build Strategic Partnerships

1. Identify Companies they identified the top 20 companies to partner with in each of several target sectors within the travel and online media space.
   
   
2. Identify Contacts they laid out a process to search for people with specific job descriptions in these organizations that aligned with who they believed would either be the key decision maker for a business development partnership, or one rung up or down the ladder.
   
   
3. Filter Contacts - given the effort invested per contact, the contact list was filtered for both relevance and "closeness" to improve response rates. Contacts had to be at least 3rd level (i.e. a "friend of a friend of a friend"), and they carefully decided whether to reach out to the contact directly using LinkedIn's InMail tool (which requires a paid subscription), or to request an introduction through a mutual contact when the relationship with that mutual contact was strong.
   
   
4. Craft & Deliver the Message - NileGuide's messaging strategy was a great example of creating a targeted message that caters to your audience. Josh Steinitz, CEO of NileGuide describes how they did it:

   "We referenced a personal connection in order to qualify ourselves. Then, as a relatively new company, we knew we needed to provide a short, pithy introduction that summarized our core value proposition and differentiation in the marketplace. Finally, we summarized in no more than 2-3 sentences or bullet points some areas of opportunity, indicating that we'd been thoughtful about their business before contacting them... and had some specific ideas to discuss."

   BIG CAVEAT: they never attempted to add the new contact to their network

   "saying you know someone when you don't undermines your credibility (not to mention that it can get you 'dinged' by LinkedIn)."

5. The Investment - the NileGuide team invested 20 hours to contact approximately 100 people.

   Related Articles by Maisha: Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine

   They also spent time creating a visually detailed landing page on their site, and in a few cases they put together creative mockups customized to the contact. NileGuide learned that these visual aids were key. The sooner a contact got to "seeing something interesting, the more likely they were to 'buy' from us."

The results - roughly 33% of their inquiries yielded immediate results, which is an incredibly high success rate. These partnerships have yielded customers, brand benefit, content, and a variety of other valuable assets for NileGuide.

Promoting a Blog – Traffic and Brand Building

A blog is basically about building a community. Instead of a community of people who meet, it's a community of readers and comment-ers. So generating traffic for a blog can certainly use all of the "tribe" techniques, although when you are using it to drive traffic to your own blog, you have to be a little more careful about how you reach out. Connecting with other practitioners, industry experts, leaders of communities where your target audiences congregate, and directly with the communities themselves needs to be done respectfully or else face the "spammer" label which could get your ability to email and invite people on LinkedIn dramatically limited.

A great example of how to drive traffic to a blog or content site and build your brand via LinkedIn is the new content portal Ventureneer started recently by Geri Stengel. Ventureneer offers free Webinars and other content relevant to socially driven enterprises.

When launching her business and Web site Geri had three goals – 1) to build her brand, 2) to build relationships with content providers and 3) to build her "contact" list including email subscribers and Twitter followers.

Here's what she did:

1. Build the Network - Geri spent 9 months carefully building out her connections on LinkedIn one person at a time. Mind you these were not *new* connections – these were people Geri already had worked with, served on boards with, volunteered with, gone to school with. Geri now has more than 300 close connections on LinkedIn – their familiarity with her makes them more likely to be interested in what she has to offer. She spent about 2-3 hours per week doing this for 9 months (72-108 hours).
   
   
2. Plant the seed - when Geri was ready to start letting people know about her Webinars, she very carefully chose groups and carefully chose discussions within those groups to post to. She spent 20-30 minutes per week finding and posting LinkedIn discussions.
   
   
3. Support growth with valuable content - Geri's marketing also extends beyond LinkedIn, and the things she used to fuel her growth include:
   - free Webinars
   - Twitter
   - regular online submission of press releases
   - a viral survey
   - a blog with regularly updated content
   - a staff member who helps her write, edit, manage and publish her content

Her results – having launched her site just a few months ago, she has more than 1,600 followers on Twitter (@ventureneer), more than 300 LinkedIn connections, and gets about 150 attendees per week to her free Webinars. Way to go Geri!

Tune in next week…

We still have a whole block of advice, stories and strategies to share.

Coming up:

• Getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• Promoting a product
• Strategies for everyone

I look forward to hearing more about your LinkedIn strategies in the comments below and to hearing from you the next time I'm looking for businesses to feature!

Post Your Comment Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed? Your feedback, comments, real world experience and questions are an important part of the discussion. Post your comment, question or feedback below.

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Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn
  
• LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business
  
• How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist
  
• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine

All around us we see evidence that the world is becoming more transparent. People are sharing information about themselves, their knowledge, their businesses at a wondrous rate. As transparency proliferates, success becomes a little less about just access to information and resources, and a little more about how you use those resource and what you're using them to do.

Part of my goal in writing this column is to help along this information equalization - who knows how far it will go, but for now the shift is great for small business.

In this article in my series on LinkedIn for small business, I'm sharing the case studies of individual small businesses who took nothing but their time, their creativity and (mostly) free tools and turned them into successful marketing strategies on LinkedIn.

Each of these business owners has gracefully shared their knowledge, experience and prowess not just for a few moments in the spotlight, but because they know the transparency is coming, and they have much more to offer the world than just the ideas I'm sharing with you. I owe them thanks for their contributions to this article. I hope you too will reach out and send a quick note of thanks for sharing some of their secrets with all of us. And I hope to see your business here – sharing your story and your success so that the world can see that what else you have to offer us.

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The most persistent theme in the LinkedIn strategies that I've used and encountered, is that people are seeing success when using LinkedIn as a very targeted, high-touch marketing tool. Not as a spam blaster. When people spend the time to craft targeted messages to targeted groups of people, they see fantastic results. But this isn't a big shocker -- this is marketing 101. The more specific your audience and the more targeted your message, the better your results. So if this is marketing 101 why doesn't this kind of targeting happen all the time?

Often the reason business don't target (outside of not knowing who to target!) is that typically targeting is hard or expensive or both. How do you find all those small businesses owners in Arkansas in the welding industry? In the past you had to buy a list, spend $$ for an ad that was mostly wasted or do a lot of cold calling. Now? Do a search on LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes it much FASTER, CHEAPER and EASIER to find and communicate with exactly the right people.

And we can all understand the value of fast, cheap and easy when it comes to marketing.

While a lot of marketing can be just a numbers game, that's not really the point on LinkedIn. I mean, it still gets down to numbers, but not in the anonymous, send-a-million-spam-messages-because-at-least-one-of-them-will-get-suckered-in kind of way. In fact that same search that allows you to find exactly the people you know you want, can even help you figure out who you want by simply looking for the commonalities and/or the points of difference in your search results.

The "killer app" for LinkedIn, is its particularly effectiveness for maintaining your weak ties with a purpose. That purpose is what I called "building your team" and what Seth Godin calls building your "tribe".

Building Your Tribe on LinkedIn

Building a tribe is good advice for any business. Who is that group of 1,000 people who will be ecstatic about what you're doing? For a lot of industries, I'll bet you can find a good number of them on LinkedIn.

Once you have an understanding of:

• the reason you want to use LinkedIn (I'm trying to build a community, I'm trying to support product sales, I'm trying to find consulting work) the tools available to you – search, groups, email blasts, Q&A your resources – i.e. I have 2 hours per week so either I can't do this on my own or it's going to take me much longer

And the most important question:

• who are you looking for

You can build a tribe that even your networking-iest friend would be envious of.

The List of LinkedIn Strategies for Small Business

Related Articles by Maisha: LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)

While we cannot possibly cover every LinkedIn strategy in a single article, and I unfortunately could not include every example I received, I've chosen some of the most widely used strategic goals and provided great examples of what small businesses have done to make LinkedIn work for them. They include:

• building a live community
• doing business development
• promoting a blog/branding/building traffic
• getting work as a freelancer or consultant
• promoting a product
• strategies for everyone

Building a Face-to-Face Community
LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for pulling people offline to congregate in the real world. Anyone looking to build a very targeted community of people who share a common and specific interest can use LinkedIn extremely successfully to find and build that community. Whether building a community that congregates online or in person, there are 3 tools that can put your group on the map quickly:

Using LinkedIn Search
Daniel Tunkelang who is the Chief Scientist at Endeca is a great example of how a very well thought out search for exactly the right people can turn into a huge win. He was helping to organize an event called the Workshop on Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval and wanted to let people who had a strong interest in these topics. After conducting a search on LinkedIn for everyone who matched "human computer interaction" and "information retrieval" and chose just 100 people to send a personalized connection request.

His results? More than 50% of the 100 people he contacted accepted the connection. Only 1 person responded with LinkedIn's "I don't know this person" field which is the equivalent of invite spam. This is an excellent return. He adds

"Some will submit papers to the workshop, one ended up volunteering to review my new book. And I got very positive feedback from the people I targeted--they clearly didn't feel spammed, but rather were happy to receive information so carefully targeted to their interests. Some even commented that they'd never been as happy to receive unsolicited email via LinkedIn."

Create a LinkedIn Group
Groups offer an easy way to enable your community members to congregate, an easy way for you to invite people to participate and an easy way for you to communicate with those who are already participating through group emails. This is a great option if you have a specific topic or idea around which people can freely congregate. Not such a great idea if you just want them to be "fans" of your business.

Use LinkedIn Events within a Group to build Offline Community
It's debatable whether the free LinkedIn Events are effective for promoting an event outside of an existing LinkedIn group. There is a paid option that allows you to promote your event to the top of the events list. But using them to promote an event within an existing group can be very successful. A great example of this is what Larry Moffet, who is an e-strategy business consultant in Brussels, did. Over several years, Larry's business partner had built a group of "expats" in Brussels. His goal was to use LinkedIn to launch a series of events that would enable expats to congregate and network professionally once a month, but at a time of the evening that was unusual for that community. And so, Larry and his partner created the "Expats Networking in Brussels" group on LinkedIn, began inviting their Brussels based connections to join it, and then began inviting group members to events.

Within 2 months they had about 117 members in their LinkedIn group, and as of May that number had doubled to 232. They estimate it took them about 3 hours per month to manage this process on LinkedIn.

Maisha will be leading a Hands-on Social Media marketing workshop on September 8th in New York City. You can get more details about the workshop here.

Also of note, the LinkedIn group not only served as an administrative and marketing tool to build his offline community, it also made the community and the events themselves better!

"Group members can sign up for the event on LinkedIn, view the profiles of other members, decide whom among the other attendees they would like to meet and connect via LinkedIn before or after the event. This ensures that the face-to-face meetings aren't just random encounters but can be prepared in advance in order to make the most productive use of the event… Inevitably, people who meet face-to-face and hit it off will subsequently connect on LinkedIn, which ensures continuity between the monthly events."

Tune in next week...

I've received so many wonderful submissions that I'm going to split this coverage so as not to overwhelm everyone with too much of a good thing.

Coming up:

• business development strategies on LinkedIn
• promoting a blog and generating traffic and branding on LinkedIn
• being a freelancer or consultant on LinkedIn
• promoting a product on LinkedIn
• Strategies for everyone

I look forward to hearing more about your LinkedIn strategies in the comments below and to hearing from you the next time I'm looking for businesses to feature!

Post Your Comment Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed? Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.

Share:

Click here to share "Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn" with your fans on Twitter

Stay up to date:

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Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• LinkedIn the 11 Most Useful Features for Small Business
  
• How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist
  
• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine
  
• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)

In doing the research for this post, I heard from many LinkedIn users and business owners.

One of the things I have found fascinating about LinkedIn (which was corroborated by the conversations I had and emails I received), is that the individual tools on LinkedIn seem to form their own intense user groups. One person may focus their whole strategy on maximizing LinkedIn Q&A, another might focus on LinkedIn Events, while a third builds an entire strategy around participating in LinkedIn Groups discussions.

Once you have completed your profile an individual tool on LinkedIn can be a cornerstone of your business' marketing.

Next Monday I will publish the much anticipated and well contributed article on LinkedIn strategies. I have received many submissions by small business owners and look forward to sharing them with you!

This week – a primer on LinkedIn Tools and when we discuss strategies we'll all be on the same page about how the underlying tools used in the strategies work.

Note this is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all the tools on LinkedIn, just of the ones I think are most useful for small business owners. Next week we'll put these into some perspective by exposing how small businesses are successfully using these tools.

All About LinkedIn Applications
In the bottom of the left column on your LinkedIn profile is a section called "Applications". You might notice that in comparison to Facebook, there are relatively few applications available on LinkedIn. But the dearth of applications is more of a strength for LinkedIn – there's far less clutter and the apps are focused on a single purpose – helping you present your professional wares. Many of the tools listed below are actually LinkedIn "Apps" that were developed by 3rd parties (i.e. not LinkedIn). There are only 4 third party apps that I've included in this list (and they only represent 2 "Tools"). The rest of my recommendations are tools that are core to your LinkedIn profile.

So here's my Top 11 list...

LinkedIn Events
This feature is very simple. You can submit your event allowing you to promote it to other LinkedIn users both within and outside your network. You can also go here to find events you might be interested in attending. Both live and virtual events can be included.

• "Events Home" displays a list of the events related to your connections (created by, attending or interested in).
• "Find Events" allows you to search for events you may be interested in attending.
• "My Events" are events you have created that are upcoming or past.
• "Add an Event" is where you, well, add an event. Once you publish the event, your connections will automatically receive an update. You can also share it with up to 50 specific contacts at a time via LinkedIn mail, and you can pay to advertise the event to people outside your network.

Maisha will be leading a Hands-on Social Media marketing workshop on September 8th in New York City. You can get more details about the workshop here.

Blog Link or WordPress
If you write a blog (a professional one of course), have the blog content automatically "sucked in" by one of these 3rd party applications so that your most recent posts are actually displayed and promoted in your profile.

SlideShare or Google Presentation
Have a smashing presentation you did in PowerPoint? You can use this 3rd party application to post your presentations publicly on LinkedIn to help you build credibility and clarify your areas of expertise.

LinkedIn Groups & Discussions
This is one of LinkedIn's most useful features (and I would hazard a guess that it's the most used too). Individual LinkedIn members start groups where other members have discussions, share news and post jobs. The wonderful thing about these groups is they are basically segmented mini-markets ready and waiting for you to tap into. As of this posting, there are more than 357,000 groups on LinkedIn ranging in size from 0 to more than 100,000 members. Approximately 5,000 new groups are created each week. Some groups have a spam problem but often there are worthwhile discussions to be had and news to read. Groups are also a great place build visibility among people who are interested in your area of business (we'll dive into this more next week!). Be careful though – the line between "sharing information" in the form of links to your site or blog and spam can be very faint.

LinkedIn Searches (within your network and outside it)
Many people use LinkedIn as a simple contact management database. Having a lot of people in that database can provide you access to any company, person or network with whom you want to connect.

In fact especially if you don't know who to reach out to for a particular question, need or opportunity, a quick keyword search on LinkedIn can tell you who you already know that meets your criteria, and can also find people you don't know but should - and that's where the magic begins!

Network Updates
These updates are useful obviously to keep up with what people are doing, but also as an excuse to reach out to someone and reconnect, and as a means of finding people you might want to know. You receive a list of updates both via email and at the bottom of your profile letting you know of the changes people have made to their profiles. Did they change their headline? Change their current job? Are they connected with 5 new people some of whom you might know?

LinkedIn Browser Toolbar
This application installs a thumbnail into your browser bar. The application simply opens different pages on LinkedIn to save you the time of typing them in. http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=browser_toolbar_download

LinkedIn Q&A
This is a tool that many LinkedIn users swear by. This tool can provide a great deal of exposure. When you answer a question, and your answer is rated "best answer" it will also appear in your profile which not only adds to the good will surrounding you but help you build credibility as an expert in your field. Beware however – this can be very time consuming.

Send Mass Emails
LinkedIn does limit your ability to do this outside of groups, typically you can email up to 50 people on your list at a time. But it can be a great way to get the word out. Note that when you post a "question" in Q & A, you can send the question to up to 200 of your connections in addition to making the question public.

Job Postings
For $195 for a 30-day posting, you can use LinkedIn to post jobs to a wider network of people or you can post jobs for free through groups that you're a member of if the group owner has turned on the "Jobs" feature. Note that job descriptions are limited to about 3,900 characters.

Tagging
I included tagging in the last article on How to Set up your LinkedIn Profile but it really belongs here in the list of tools. It is a great tool for organizing your contacts into groups that are personally meaningful. Right now the tool is in Beta so it may not be visible yet to everyone. But when it becomes available I would definitely suggest checking it out.

That's my power list of what I think are the most important "tools" for small business owners on LinkedIn.

Stay tuned next week for LinkedIn Strategies. Much like the article I wrote covering Twitter strategies I will highlight how real people actually use these tools to create successful LinkedIn marketing campaigns. I will share with you examples of how small business owners did it, how much time it took them and what their results were.

Post Your Comment Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed? Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.

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Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist
  
• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine
  
• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)
  
• Facebook Demystified: Profiles and Pages and Groups (oh my)

So how did you do with your LinkedIn homework assignment?

Just getting the lay of the land on LinkedIn is a great start but wouldn't it be nice if more of the social marketing tools come with a "recommended usage" manual?

Twitter has just launched Twitter 101 which I think is pretty great.

If you are on LinkedIn profile but wondering how to maximize your use of it, I've created this profile "Cheat Sheet" so you focus your attention on the features that deliver the greatest impact AND understand how much time you should reasonably expect to spend on it.

Overview on Completing Your Profile
As I described in "A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses" all social networking sites begin with a single user creating a profile. Unlike other sites where your profile questions ask you to reveal your secret lust for sci-fi action flicks, your LinkedIn profile is showcase of your professional preferences and accomplishments.

You want to consider how you'll be using your profile when you complete it. I'll be covering LinkedIn strategies in one of my next articles (and I welcome your submission of your LinkedIn strategies here).

Linked in also offers its own suggestions on the LinkedIn Tips and Tricks blog, plus user submitted LinkedIn case studies which may be helpful to you.

I Can Email You When I Post to this Blog Click here to get notified of new posts to The Internet Strategist by Email

Let's get started…

The Photo
I do recommend including a picture. LinkedIn profiles seem incomplete without them. Also try to be consistent with your photo – if you have a photo on other social networking sites it's a good idea to use the same photo everywhere. Note: it's also wise to be consistent with your name – use the same spelling, middle initial, honorific etc. everywhere. This is important for SEO and for building your online brand.
5 minutes

The Headline
The headline is a bite-sized explanation of what you do and what your value is. Note that your headline shows up ALL OVER LinkedIn, especially in lists. Your headline very often accompanies your name. Make sure your headline is at least clear and concise. If you are building "brand you" consider making it more engaging.
You could spend countless hours tweaking and refining this single 120 character field. Just try not to.

"Current"
Hopefully I'll save a few minutes of confusion by noting that yes, your "current" section is created directly from the Experience items for which you check "I currently work here". It is not editable separately from the Experience listing but do consider what you use for your "title" for your most current jobs since this will show up at the top of your profile.
15 minutes

Web Site fields
You get to include three active links to external sites. Links you include in other parts of your profile won't be clickable so these are valuable. Make sure you use one of these for your company's Web site, then perhaps use the other two for your professional blog, and perhaps another profile like your company's Facebook page. TIP: don't use the generic "My Website" labels. Instead select "Other" and you will be able to choose your own label which will become the text of your link.
10 minutes

Public Profile
Social networking sites are now giving you the opportunity to create a "custom URL" for your page on their site. Here I explain how to set up a custom URL for your Facebook Profile or Facebook Page. On LinkedIn you edit this through your "Public Profile" field.

For example, my standard LinkedIn page is: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=257307&trk=tab_pro
But my lovely custom URL is: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maishawalker
5 minutes

Your Summary
Use this area in a similar way to a cover letter. Explain in (relatively) normal-speak what makes you unique or different, why someone might want to connect with you, and possibly few details about your products or services. Note that you cannot create clickable links in this area.
30-90 minutes

The Resume or "Experience"
While it might seem tedious to enter every job you've had for the last 20 years this really is an opportunity. Think of it this way, while it would be strange for you to randomly send your resume to everyone you meet, sending your LinkedIn profile is perfectly reasonable and can give you that extra edge.

As LinkedIn user Divya Gugani aptly describes "Adding my profile link in outgoing emails adds credibility and the extra qualification nudge with certain requests... I like being able to subtly sell my expertise."

There is some debate how long each job description should be. I think this depends on your experience. If listing more than 5 jobs, perhaps use brief descriptions that include important keywords. If listing 5 jobs or fewer, longer descriptions won't be as problematic.
1-4 hours (depending on how badly your original resume needs an update!)

Contact Methods
If you would like to receive emails from strangers who might have opportunities for you, choose to accept "Introductions and InMail" so that anyone can email you. Also use the checkboxes to indicate what kinds of inquiries you're interested in.
5 minutes

Build Connections
LinkedIn doesn't have a lot of value without connections. This also tends to be a big strategy question for most people – do I connect broadly or intimately? I will address this question in my future post on LinkedIn strategies, but for now, if you're just starting out you don't have to worry about this. Just go into "Imported Contacts" and check your email address books for people who are on LinkedIn. The best and easiest way to gain useful connections is with the people you already know.
30 minutes

Create your Company Profile
Lots of people miss this one. When you mouse over or click on a company name in LinkedIn it takes you to a profile describing that company and displaying it's current and former employees plus details like where the company is located. To do this for your company, you first have to add your company to LinkedIn beyond adding it in your "Experience". Here are instructions for how to add your company profile to LinkedIn (you'll need a valid and accessible company email address). Once your company is added, click on your company name from your profile and then you can alter the company description to your liking by clicking on the Edit Profile link in the top right corner.
45 minutes

Set updates to be sent weekly not as they happen
If you don't want to receive an email every time someone in your network makes an update, you can change your settings to send you messages weekly or not at all. Just click on the "Account & Settings" button in the top right corner. I pretty much set everything to weekly except discussion replies, connection invitations, and emails from my connections
5 minutes

Recommendations
I've seen a lot of recommendations lately on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the more I see them, the less of an impression they make on me. Often people send generic emails out asking for recommendations from almost everyone in their network, and often people get generic recommendations back. The recommendations that most impress me are the ones that are not generic but really specific and sincere. Did the recommender use a specific product? Attend a specific event? See high return from a specific service you provided? Were they one of your partners in a venture? Sometimes a profile's long list of recommendations shows only that the person knows how to get lots of people to write something generic about them. Is this meaningful?

If you want a meaningful recommendation, sometimes the best way to get one is to write one if that's feasible. And while there are always exceptions, if you can't write a meaningful recommendation for someone there's a reasonable chance they won't be able to write a meaningful one for you. Writing recommendations is time consuming so I suggest that you write them only when you really have something worthwhile and not generic to say.
15-30 minutes per recommendation

Sneak Peak: Tagging
For a natural categorizer like me (INFPers unite!) LinkedIn's tags are a dream come true. It's a quick way to categorize the people in your network in a way that is personally meaningful. So if you are trying to build out a client base in Cincinnati, you can do a search for all of your contacts who have the word "Cincinnati" in their profile, and then "tag" the relevant profiles for future reference. After getting very excited and telling a colleague about this feature, I discovered "tagging" is still in beta so not all LinkedIn users have access to it yet.

One problem I've found with tags so far is they aren't integrated with other LinkedIn features. So as of this posting you cannot for example select all of the people you tagged as Cincinnati and send them all an email. Nor can you use tags in the "compose message" area. But you can export your tagged lists for use in other software.
30 minutes - several hours depending on # of contacts and # of categories

Keywords & Search Engine Optimization – this is a profile bonus
Keep in mind that when someone does a Google search for your name, it's likely that your LinkedIn profile will be one of the first links that shows up (unless you have a very common name or share a name with a celebrity). Take advantage of LinkedIn's high search-ability. Think about the keywords you'd want to be found under on search engines and on LinkedIn itself. Make sure that you include keywords relevant to your industry and position. You might decide to go back and rewrite things at the end to address this.
30-90 minutes

A Warning
Some have complained about the difficulty of deleting a LinkedIn profile. While LinkedIn does provide instructions for how to terminate a LinkedIn profile or close a LinkedIn account there have been some posts that describe user frustration in not being able to delete one's profile.

So, what's the damage?
According to my estimates, doing all of the things I outline above should take you between 4.5 hours and 9.5 hours (not including recommendations or the countless hours you'll spend transforming your 120 character headline into iambic pentameter). That's 1-3 days working a few hours per day, or 1-3 weeks working just a few hours per week - stretching it over a longer period is often a better plan for additional objectivity and less burnout.

I look forward to your comments outlining things I may have missed and your submissions of LinkedIn strategies for my upcoming article! We'll also cover things like Groups, Applications and other ways you can use LinkedIn beyond basic profile setup.

Post Your Comment Have a question? Got something to share? Something I missed? Your feedback, comments, real world experience and tactical questions are an important part of the discussion. If you have a comment, question or feedback post it below.

Share:

Click here to share "How to Use your LinkedIn Profile – a Checklist" with your fans on Twitter

Stay up to date:

		Follow me on Twitter
		Add "The Internet Strategist" RSS updates to your reader or your Web site

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• An Introduction to LinkedIn: In Restrictions a Gold Mine
  
• Top Twitter Techniques (or 9 Good Excuses if you want to Ignore Twitter)
  
• Facebook Demystified: Profiles and Pages and Groups (oh my)
  
• A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses