LinkedIn for Small Business Owners – 6 Ways to Improve Your Business Performance Using LinkedIn

This is a guest post by Joseph Archibald. Joseph is perhaps best known for his 40 Days Challenge work on Warrior Forum, which is the exact same method Pat Flynn used to gain rankings for his highly renowned security guard training site. Joseph now resides in the Philippines, after having left the shores of the United Kingdom a few years back for want of something better. He funds his lifestyle purely through his personal online projects. You can find his main blog at http://josepharchibald.com and his LinkedIn profile URL is http://www.linkedin.com/in/josepharchibald where he discusses being a fatso in the kitchen

As a small business owner, no matter how small your business may be, it goes without saying that these days you really ought to have a web presence. When I say web presence, what do I mean by that? I mean that you should have your own website in the form of a blog. By maintaining your own blog you are then in a strong position to interact with your customers online. If you’re not doing that by now, then, as the saying goes, you are simply leaving money on the table!

Creating and maintaining your own blog if you’ve not already done so, may sound overwhelming, but in actual fact, these days it’s easier than ever it was previously. Nevertheless, that’s a whole subject matter unto itself. Today I’d like to focus on something rather different, and that is, with the assumption that you do in fact have a blog, just how are you going to attract potential customers to your business via your webpages? After all, there are many millions of weblogs online these days, so how is it possible to have yours stand out just enough in order to gain a regular customer flow? After all, if you own a website which is devoid of visitors you may as well not bother.

Using LinkedIn to Drive Visitors to Your Blog

The simplest way to describe LinkedIn, in a brief manner is that, similar to Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is a social networking site. Unlike Twitter and Facebook however, LinkedIn has been created and designed specifically with the business community in mind.

That’s all well and good, but how can we use LinkedIn to enhance our own business prospects? After all, it’s a gargantuan site, with over 200 million registered users (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn), so where on earth do we begin? Let’s look at that now.

Build Out Your Profile

The first thing we ought to focus on is building out our LinkedIn profile. This is certainly one of, if not the most important referral source in terms of using LinkedIn. Your profile is the pivotal point whereby other LinkedIn members will learn more about you and what you do. From this information, they can then work out in what way you can be of benefit to them.

If another member takes a particular interest in your profile, one way they will be able to find out more about you is to check out your Contact Info which is the tab situated on your profile page, just below and to the right of the very top section (see image 1 below).

Currently, the probability is that you’ve already changed this information to show your blog URL, as is shown by example in image 1. However, it’s more prudent to use this as an opportunity to add a descriptive and interesting link within your profile, which will act to encourage viewers to click through. But how do you do that? Simple when you know how. Follow the instructions provided within the images just below.

You may link straight to your blogs’ homepage, or you can link to an internal page where you have a special offer or something of that nature.

 Being More Active on LinkedIn

The more active you are on LinkedIn, the more profile views you will gain. The more profile views you gain, the more chance of achieving your end goal, which is to drive visitors to your blog and then hopefully convert those visitors to a sale. How does this work?

For each action you take on the LinkedIn network there’s a knock-on effect in that it shows up on the LinkedIn homepage of your connections. If you are particularly active, you may find that some of your updates appear within the “Update” email that LinkedIn sends out to everyone on the network on a weekly basis.

What sort of activities are necessary?

•  Posting a status update
• Commenting on someone else’s status update
• Updating your profile
• Participation in a group discussion
• Posting to your LinkedIn company page
• Answering questions in LinkedIn Answers

Obviously, from the list given above, it’s relatively easy to maintain an active profile. Sharing what your connections have posted is also a good way to garner more profile views.

Commenting on a regular basis is also a particularly effective way to engage in dialogue with first-degree connections and others besides. By commenting on someone else’s update, the comment in addition to your profile image, will show on the homepage of all your connections.

We’ve briefly looked at the first two methods whereby using LinkedIn can very much improve our offline or online business. In the next post, we’ll focus on four more powerful strategies to use in order to drive tightly targeted visitors to our website.