Although considered as one of the most powerful social networking platform in the web, LinkedIn is not used often.  Others may not know but LinkedIn generates free, organic traffic to your blog.  Whether you just created your blog or you’re a popular blogger, you would naturally want more traffic for your site.  Additionally, you would want qualified traffic too, people who are genuinely interested in the content you produce.

But isn’t LinkedIn just a site for posting resumes for people looking for a job?  Absolutely No! Although LinkedIn has been a great help for job seekers looking for a job in this economic crunch, it’s more than that!  Individuals and companies have considerably been achieving their goals through LinkedIn.  LinkedIn can help you sell products, find new clients and employees, generate leads, receive funding for your company, get sponsorships, sell tickets for professional events, get national and local press coverage, and most of all, drive ridiculously high traffic to your blog!

But of course, all of these things do not come naturally.  You have to work with the LinkedIn system and experiment with various methods.  I have outlined below tips to achieve these goals and ways to drive enormous traffic to your blog.  Read on.

1. Profile – A lot of people complain that LinkedIn do not work for them.  When asked how much time do they spend using LinkedIn, the answer is the same – a little.  Remember that if your profile is weak, people will lose interest and won’t even dare clicking your link to your website.  If you want your profile to be read and your links clicked, you have to make your profile concise, compelling and value driven throughout.  Fill it up 100%, add your picture and take the process seriously.  If you want people reading it and visiting your links, make it compelling and complete.  The same goes with driving traffic to your blog.  If someone would look for your name using Google, chances are your LinkedIn profile will come up first (if you have one, of course).  Personally, my LinkedIn profile is number 3 at the Google search.  Darren Rowse is 7th, before Facebook and Twitter.  Try searching for your name and see for yourself how much you fair in terms of ranking.  The more compelling your profile is, the higher your LinkedIn profile will be.

2. Increase Your Connections – Each time you take action with your LinkedIn account, your 1st degree connections are updated with the change.  If you only have 100 connections, your potential clicks for your profile and your website is limited.  Constantly increase your connections.

3. Customize your Website Links – When you initially created your profile, your website link looks like this:

blog links

Boring, isn’t it?  It is not compelling and does not give readers that “call to action” thing that would make them click and visit your website.  If I were Darren Rowse, I would insert this to his profile:

The second image is more compelling and gives a synopsis of what the reader would see when he views your link.  If you want to change your website link with a custom headline, click on the “edit” button next to one of the websites.  Take a look at the one I made below:

Linkedin Blog

4. Answer Questions – One of the great ways to increase your credibility and authority is to answer questions.  When someone rates your answer as one of the best, your thought leadership will improve.  As it moves up the rankings, you will be a “featured expert”.  Readers then will feel intrigued and compelled to click on your link and view your blog and at the same time check what else you have to offer.

5. Update Status – LinkedIn is similar to Twitter when updating your status.  The only difference is that Twitter permits you to post up to 140 characters while LinkedIn allows for 148.  Just like Twitter, whatever update you put in that box, it will appear in the home page of your connections.  If you are smart, you would include a link to your blog  (something that I do to drive traffic to my site) and see what your blog has to offer.

6. Join Niche Groups – There will always be people who share the same interests as you do in LinkedIn.  To find groups, click on the Search Group tab and type in some keywords that pertains to your blog.  Like I have a sports blog that focuses mostly on social media with an audience of professionals who works in sports.  I joined all the sports group I can find:

If you are not a member of any group in your niche, then you’re missing out a lunch.  Take advantage of that because it creates traffic – new readers.  Join as many group as you can.  For starters, check out the Professional Bloggers Group.

7. Post Comments in Groups – For every comment that you put on those discussions, it gets posted on every home page of the members of that group.  If a group has 100,000 members, can you imagine the potential of your traffic?  You are getting the attention of those members.

8. Add RSS Feed to Group – Groups at LinkedIn allows you to add a link to your website with the latest news of what’s relevant to the group. It also allows you to add RSS Feed to the group so that they get notified every time you have new posts in your blog.  These feeds are automatically posted to each members’ home page.  Can you imagine the opportunity you have for people clicking on and visiting your blog?

9. Create Your Own Group – This move has helped me a lot to attain the traffic my blog has right now.  I created the Sports Industry Network Group at LinkedIn with over 19,500 members now.  When someone joins the group, they see a brief description of the group, the owner (that’s me) and my website url (www.sportsmaker.com).  My group gets over 100 new members each week excluding the existing 20,000 members who are actively engaging in the group and clicking on my blog links.

10. Add the Blog Application to Your Profile – An obvious suggestion as it is, but I can still see some top professional bloggers leaving this out.  This application posts the title and first paragraph of the most recent articles that you published on your LinkedIn profile.  It’s one way of showing readers a sneak preview of what they will see and read on your blog.  To download, go to Applications and choose either WordPress or Blog Link Application.  You then add your URL for your blog.

The power of LinkedIn does not stop there.  But these 10 tips have brought exponential traffic to my blog.  What other tips have you found using LinkedIn to increase your traffic?

admin Blog Marketing, Social Media, Web Traffic