Five tips for succeeding on LinkedIn

Get your profile to 100 percent complete.
It’s not hard to do and it doesn’t even have to be done at once. Try doing one step at a time and it will be done in no time.

Connect with others
Connect with your friends, coworkers and contacts. When you meet someone or get a business card look them up and connect with them.

Join groups and participate
There are a lot of groups on LinkedIn under just about any category you can think of. Take a day of the week and check out some topics, comment on them and connect with others.

Update your status
Whether you do it on LinkedIn, Twitter or another outlet, make sure to keep your account fresh and let people know any recent accomplishments, any insight you can provide or a bit more about your personality.

Be real and interact
This is not a numbers game. You don’t need to race to get a lot of contacts. Grow your contacts in time and juries the relationships you have and always remember to be yourself.

Be sure to check out the various apps on linked in that you can add to your account there are a plethora of apps that can add value to your page

LinkedIn as given me many opportunities and I’m sure it can work for you. Setting aside even five minutes in a day can make a difference. Now go get to it!

Feel free to connect with me LinkedIn.com/In/Kennyharper

Follow Key Theory at LinkedIn.com/company/Key-Theory-llc

Now as a busy guy myself I totally get there isn’t enough time in a day to get involved in every social media channel out there and make a thousand updates a day but even spending five minutes in a day can help you expand your reach and build your personal brand.

Three reasons to utilize LinkedIn

Seventy percent of the top fortune 100 companies utilize lined in for recruiting talent.
so if your looking for a job or may in the future don’t you think it might be worth your while to start building your account?

You can easily organize and categorize your contacts
Sure you may be able to organize your contacts elsewhere but LinkedIn can help keep everyone’s information up to date.

You can be introduced to great contacts through your connections
Just like in the real world your contacts ca hook you up with great people but on LinkedIn their contacts are all listed out for you. You can see who your contacts know and easily extend your network and connect with people you’d like to meet.

LinkedIn can build your personal brand.
By making one update a day or every other day via LinkedIn or a connected LinkedIn channel you will start increasing your presence and gaining attention of others. I know this works. People know what I’m up to with out me having to tell them.

LinkedIn has introduced me to great new contacts and brought me new business.

There are many other reasons to participate on LinkedIn so get on it. It’s fun and easy so there’s no need to think of excuses why you can’t do it. ; )

Sign up at LinkedIn.com

Next post I’ll share some tips for those who are already on LinkedIn for making it more successful.

My LinkedIn account is http://linkedin.com/kennyharper feel free to look me up.

To use tags effectively, try these steps.

1. Make sure you’ve defined your categories, limiting the number of main categories is a good idea.
   For an example, if you were writing about recipes you may use “Lunches”, “Dinners” and “Desserts” as some possible categories.
2. Go through your categories and think of minor sub-categories or topics that may relate and note for using as a possible tag.
   So to continue with our recipe example. Under the “Lunches” category you may come up with “Sandwiches”, “Beef”, “Chicken”, “Soups”. These words could be used under both “Lunches” and “Dinners” so they would serve great as tags.
3. Aim to define your tags proactively, ahead of time, to avoid diluting their impact or having redundancies.
   If you aren’t careful and create a whole bunch of new tags with every article, the following could happen:
   A. You will have too many tags and it will be hard to manage.
   B. You will have a lot tags that don’t have any related articles and therefore serve little purpose.
   C. You could have redundant or similar tags such as “Soup”, “Soups” and “soup recipes” each serve the same purpose but would end up creating three lists of posts rather than one concise list.
   
4. Tag articles that are related in nature to your tags.
   That’s really the whole point to tags; to help further categorize your posts. So if you had a great “Chicken Noodle” recipe, you might tag it with “Chicken”, “Soups”, “Quick Recipes” etc…

A Common Misconception With Tags:

A lot of people think that tags are like keywords and one should put all the keywords that you want to rank well in search engines as your tags. This is not quite the case. You should use tags to categorize your articles, however, while creating the tags you should keep in mind your keywords and use them appropriately, and that can help optimize your site for search engines.

If you need help planning or growing your blog efforts, contact me I can help you plan out your goals and work with you to incorporate the techniques and strategies to help make your blog successful.

How to not Use Tags:

I purposely tagged this article with every tag that I had in my blog when I created this post. Please don’t do this. This provides little help to users who want to read related content. Then why did I do it? Because I did want to have this article pop up when a user clicked on any of my blog’s tags. However this is an example of what not to do… unless there is a purpose.

If you are NOT using LinkedIn, you can sign up for a free account at http://www.linkedin.com/; it’s easy and  FREE.

Don’t be left in the dark, times have changed, communication is continuing to evolve.  But as e-mail replaced  “snail mail”, social media is replacing other traditional references.
Take into consideration these benefits of using LinkedIn or other similar professional, business networking sites-

Connections & Credibility:

Imagine two candidates for a job, with similar experience and credentials.
One candidate has a resume and the standard three references.
The other also has a LinkedIn account:

• With hundreds of connections, active in discussions and engaged in their industry
• With recommendations from various jobs and positions
• Is proving they are an expert in their field by participating in industry groups and discussions on LinkedIn, which show up on their LinkedIn profile

Which one do you think has the better chance of getting that job?

Opportunity:

By being engaged and aware of what’s going on in your business industry, you become aware of many new opportunities that are available. Perhaps a company is looking to hire,  or someone is in search of a particular service. Getting your name out there and getting your voice heard will open many opportunities for you.  It’s not only what you know, it’s who you know.

For those of you who ARE on LinkedIn already:

Are you effectively using the channel? You may have created an account and put your info on the site but:

• Are you engaging with people in your industry?
• Are you making new connections?
• Have you joined a group?
• Do you participate in a group?
• Are you promoting yourself, your services or your knowledge?
• Do you recommend people?
• Do you ask for recommendations?
• Have you added any engaging content to your page?
• Do you login semi-frequently?
• Do you promote your channel?

How do you score on professional networking?

Ask yourself the questions above and give yourself a point for each that you can say yes to. It takes some time and effort to work on building your base, but it does not need to be done over night, just with effort and persistence.

Make a plan to advance in your skills.

So make some goals towards getting better at professional networking and set a plan for yourself to complete them. Maybe you do it as a morning ritual or maybe it’s setting aside your own “Networking Tuesdays”?  I recently went from a score of 7 to a 9, and I am working my way to a 10.

Feel free to connect with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/kennyharper

There is more info on using LinkedIn effectively to come in future posts.

Good luck and keep pushing!

Below are some of the websites that I frequently use to market a business online and track results.

1. Google Analytics: Site Statistics & More

   A free tool by Google to check your website stats. You can get some good marketing data; see who came to your business website, from where, how they clicked through your site, how long they were on each page and much more.

2. Quantcast: Monitoring Demographics

   Quantcast is a free tool to get demographic data about your business site’s online audience. Combined with Google Analytics, you can see trends in people’s viewing behavior, see what’s working for you and what’s not.

3. Facebook: Social Networking

   I created a Facebook page for Key Theory a few months ago, and now have over 200 fans. Facebook is a great way to get your business more good internet exposure; connect with people and make new friends, business partners and potential customers.

4. Twitter: Micro-Blogging

   Although I didn’t get it at first, now I understand the business marketing benefits of using a tool like Twitter. You can follow topics you’re interested in, connect with others in your field, see what people are saying about your company and just keep people up to date on what you’re up to in 140 characters.

5. YouTube

   With YouTube you can have your own channel and share your message with the masses for free. I started a YouTube channel and I’ve posted up some test videos to get my feet wet. YouTube makes it easy to share your video messages.  The more videos I do, the more I learn.

6. LinkedIn: Professional Networking

   LinkedIn is a great site for professionally connecting with others and marketing yourself and your business. You basically upload your information and connect with others in your industry and with your clients. You can receive referrals as well as make them. You can join groups and participate in discussions to share ideas and for more social networking. At the very least it’s helping me remember people’s names.

7. Delicious: Access your bookmarks from anywhere

   Delicious can help you to access your bookmarks from any computer, import your current bookmarks, share your bookmarks with your friends, and much more.  To start using Delicious, you need first to set up your personal account, and then you can download a Delicious browser toolbar for FireFox (my preferred browser) and make bookmarks to your account.  If you like keeping track of good websites, use Delicious.

8. Digg: Keeping up to date & self promotion

   Digg is a great place to be inspired, keep up to date with trends and news. The best content is voted to popularity by anyone uses Digg. You can also submit your own content to Digg and get some good exposure. You must keep in mind that nobody wants spam. I have Dugg a few things but haven’t submitted anything… as of yet.

9. Stumble Upon: Discover the best of the web in less time

   Instead of blindly surfing through the internet wouldn’t it be better to look at stuff that peers found worthy? Choose a topic that interests you and start Stumbling into new things. Go places you probably would  have never gone to prior.

10. Web Site Grader: Grade your site and make improvements

    Quite a handy tool provided by HubSpot. Enter your site and see how it ranks. It will give you tips to how to improve your score and get better search engine ranks.

Well, these are just a few of the sites that I currently use in business marketing online, and some ideas how you can use them to help your business.

Have you found some of these websites helpful, too?  Do you have some other helpful suggestions to share?  Please share your comments.