LinkedIn Marketing – An hour a day

About This Book

Success on LinkedIn requires that you be clear on the reason you are using LinkedIn in the first place, a manageable LinkedIn strategy and diligence. I am not here to create your brand for you or design your marketing strategy (although many of the exercises will help with that as well), but I am going to share with you the tools and strategies I have learned and developed over the years.

Topics Covered

LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day is organized to walk you through every aspect of the LinkedIn platform while showing you how to optimize LinkedIn to increase your exposure, and develop, implement, and optimize a winning LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Chapter 1: Get LinkedIn

This chapter introduces the idea of social marketing and LinkedIn:

Introduces the idea that social marketing is still marketing and that you probably already have the skills you need to succeed with LinkedIn Gives you the history of LinkedIn, some useful statistics, and describes where LinkedIn might be heading in the future

Shares some basic definitions you might need to use LinkedIn more effectively

Chapter 2: Weeks 1–2: Get Started on LinkedIn

This chapter is a must for a user new to LinkedIn, but it’s also recommended for more experienced users because it covers the basics most people miss when establishing their LinkedIn presence:

Before getting started, there are some necessary but often ignored steps people should take to prepare them for their journey into LinkedIn.
One part of the preparation is defining your goals, and this chapter will take you step by step through the process, as well as provide a very useful LinkedIn questionnaire you can use to make your journey easier.

Chapter 3: Weeks 3–6: Ready, Set, Profile

This is the chapter to read for creating an optimized, findable, and powerful profile on LinkedIn:

Getting your keywords so that your profile can get found Optimizing your profile with those keywords
Customizing your profile so you stand out in a crowd
Using the extra real estate LinkedIn has to offer that most people are unaware of and you can use

Chapter 4: Weeks 7–9: Use Your Company Profile for Branding and Positioning

This chapter is all about LinkedIn company profiles: how you can create your own, optimize your existing profile, and strategically follow and analyze other company profiles:

A closer look at what a company profile can and can’t do on LinkedIn so that you can use or create an effective one (and don’t make any inadvertent mistakes)
Instructions for adding your products and services to your company profile Information on company updates, analytics, and job postings so that you can begin to work them into your strategy

Chapter 5: Weeks 10–15: Creating and Managing a Network That Works

This chapter will guide you through how to find the people you need to connect to, what to do once you find them, when you should connect and when you shouldn’t, and what to say when you do reach out.

Using LinkedIn’s Add Connections tool so you don’t get in trouble and render LinkedIn useless
Using the Advanced People search to connect effectively with strategic contacts

Using LinkedIn’s People You May Know feature to safely grow your network
Monitoring your network to make sure it is growing how and where you want it to grow

Managing your network so that you can communicate more effectively Giving and getting recommendations from your network

Chapter 6: Weeks 16–18: Getting Strategic with Groups

In this chapter we will take a look at best practices for both interacting in groups you join as well as the specific step-by-step process for creating and setting up a viable, interesting, and engaging group:

Building your network with strategic groups to increase visibility and connectability
Creating relationships with groups through reversed engineering and search features

Creating your own group for better communications and thought leader positioning

Chapter 7: Weeks 19–22: Get Strategic with LinkedIn’s “Other” Options

LinkedIn has several tools and applications found on the More tab. In this chapter we’ll take a look at:

LinkedIn Answers LinkedIn polls LinkedIn skills LinkedIn events LinkedIn applications Third-party applications

Chapter 8: Week 23: Putting It All Together

In this chapter we’ll look at some of these daily, weekly, and monthly practices producing powerful connections and dramatic increases in business resulting from those relationships:

Using your updates every day as an inbound marketing tool
Monitoring your brand and your competition, and creating relationships with LinkedIn Signal
Creating a powerful inbound marketing connection strategy
Marketing subject matter expertise through Answers
Using the “3 and 3 technique”

Chapter 9: Optimizing Your Time Using LinkedIn

This chapter will provide you with the checklists I use with my clients.

Chapter 10: LinkedIn Ads, Labs, Apps, and Tools

There are several other features that LinkedIn offers that aren’t really a part of the user interface. In this chapter you’ll learn about:

LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn labs
LinkedIn third-party applications LinkedIn Mobile

Chapter 11: LinkedIn and You: Getting Specific

This chapter gives you tips for specific areas:

Job seekers
Recruiters
Legal professionals Women
Entrepreneurs
Real estate professionals Nonprofits