How to Use LinkedIn for Growing your Business

I was recently asked to present a 10 minute talk on LinkedIn for my BNI chapter, Business Builders, in Woodbury, MN. I have been asked to give the talk again for other groups and I'd like to share this with all of you.

I’m here not as an expert, but to join you on the journey into social media, specifically through LinkedIn, so we can all further our efforts to BUILD TRUST among our contacts, GROW OUR NETWORKS and therefore GROW OUR BUSINESSES.

What do Boston, an avocado, Shakopee, MN, and a banana have in common? LinkedIn.

My husband sells printing for Imagine Print Solutions in Shakopee. They print packaging and custom displays, post of purchase, labels and signage. He was contacted by a print rep out of Boston, who was contacted by Chiquita thru LinkedIn, to broker a job for their new avocado launch. The connection was made possible by LinkedIn, and could prove to be a very loyal and profitable customer for my husband in the future.

WHAT IS LINKEDIN? LinkedIn is a business networking website that allows its users to identify, make and maintain contact with other business professionals. It also has forum sections and "groups" where users can ask and answer business related questions.

• Has more than 30 million users
• 1.3 million new people sign up each month
• of that 1.3 million, 750,000 are senior executive level
• Average annual income exceeds $109,000
• The average age for LinkedIn users is 41, with all the top Fortune 500 business decision makers having LinkedIn accounts.

8 Tips to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

1. People use LinkedIn as an online resume. Members create profiles that provide a snapshot of their professional background – where they work currently, past work history, the businesses they own, and even the side businesses they run. So, if I am checking someone out, I visit LinkedIn because it’s usually the most streamlined place to scan professional qualifications.

LinkedIn Profile Tips: Use a current photo; Include keywords in your headline, summary, experiences, and interests; Add your web URLs, blogs, links and any part of your online identity; important stuff about what you do; reinforce your marketing message. You can also add the LinkedIn Blog application to add more information to your profile; Make it public.

2. LinkedIn is also a way to connect and establish relationships with new people, and expand and reinforce existing relationships. So what exactly can LinkedIn do for your business? Use it to:

LinkedIn Tips: Expand your contacts. The right contacts can help you grow your business, whether you need to find business partners, suppliers or customers. Place a link to your LinkedIn profile prominently on your website (perhaps on the About page) and/or on your blog. That will encourage people to become one of your LinkedIn contacts. In addition, answer questions on the LinkedIn Answers network. Giving someone valuable information makes it easy to strike up an online conversation and from there build a relationship. You are building TRUST. It’s about reputation. Networks like LinkedIn are systems for communicating reputation so people can determine how much they should trust you. It's a virtual representation of your reputation. Both what you list and who you are connected to, give critical information about who you are.

Tips on contacts: use LinkedIn Search people—who are you looking for? You are only one, possibly two, linkedin connections away from your next large customer. Bring your network online. Your network is one of your most valuable assets, but it does little good for you offline. Upload your Address Book, invite the people you want to connect with, and get connected. Having your network online means that you can now use it as a personalized search engine for both who and what you know.

STORY: It’s important to find the right person at a company. For Jeff Ragovin, doing just that has netted his company “over two to three million dollars”. Jeff writes: “I look at my network on LinkedIn,” “And I look at that as a gold mine.” As the VP of Sales and Business Development at Buddy Media, Jeff brings in marquis clients like Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft and New Balance by reaching out to the right person with a valuable proposal. Jeff says they’re more inclined to reply when approached via LinkedIn, because “they already have the opportunity to look you up … and maybe even see in your network where you have 14 recommendations. So there’s trust.” Perhaps that trust is why Jeff likes to keep his network “large but lean”.

“It’s not a numbers game,” Jeff says. “It’s not about how many people can I have in my network. With LinkedIn, it’s about how many qualified people that are valuable to me.” Jeff’s track record suggests that success is found in quality, rather than quantity. Though as quantities go, $2-3 million is nothing to sniff at.

3. Stay connected with existing business networking contacts. You’ve invested precious time in developing business contacts through networking –don’t let those contacts evaporate. Using LinkedIn, you can keep track of people you’ve met at in-person events or at trade shows – or people you’ve only met online. LinkedIn offers profile photos, letting you remember the person’s face even if you haven’t seen them in a while. Also, if you need an up-to-date email address for one of your connections, you can find it on LinkedIn.

Find connections. Who knows your client or customer before you do? Keep track of old friends. LinkedIn Identifies good networkers. Identify relationships between people you know and people you want to know. Pay attention to people’s job titles.

4. LinkedIn Recommendations - With LinkedIn, you can receive ongoing testimonials. When your clients and vendors give you recommendations, you gain instant credibility.

We are now in a time where most people will do a Google search for your name and company before deciding on a purchase. Your LinkedIn profile along with the recommendations from your clients and vendors will be near the top of any search on your name clearly adding to your credibility.

Invite and connect to people who have worked with you and can give you a glowing “specific” recommendation. You’ll want to help the person giving the recommendation use the right key words and specific solution for best results.

Give recommendations whenever possible. It will show up in Recent Activity on all the connections for both of you. In other words, you’ll both go up the referral curve!

5. Draw traffic to your website and blog. You can link to your website and blog from your LinkedIn profile. Adjust your LinkedIn settings to notify your contacts whenever you update your profile. Then update your profile once a quarter and LinkedIn will send out a notice to remind your contacts to come see what’s changed. For instance, if you redesign your website or add a product line, you can update your profile and your contacts automatically will be notified.

6. Get PR visibility. Many bloggers and journalists have LinkedIn profiles. While it may be difficult to get their attention by “cold call emailing,” try getting introduced to them through LinkedIn. You certainly do not want to spam them or annoy them. But connecting through LinkedIn is a low pressure way to start developing a relationship. Later on, after they “know” you, they may be more receptive to hearing about your online store, particularly if you serve a niche market or have distinctive merchandise. Take advantage of what you are working on to promote what you do. (keywords)

Join relevant Groups based on your interests, position yourself as an expert. Read the comments and add helpful, appropriate comments. Follow other groups. Use the news. Involve your coworkers into discussion.

7. Reinforce your business brand. Your LinkedIn profile will include your company name. You can even include detailed information about what your business does as well as your products and services. Some savvy entrepreneurs include their URL as part of their name and title so that it appears every time their name is displayed on LinkedIn. These actions reinforce your brand at no cost to you. Announce significant news about your business (new launch or joint venture. By way of a profile update. Make sure your website, blogs and other web-based content are SEO for YOUR purposes. Add something of value to the content, linked, tips, etc.

8. Use LinkedIn to hire service providers, freelancers, independent contractors and employees. LinkedIn is excellent for finding or checking out qualified help. All you need to do is request an introduction through an existing contact.

Lets review these LinkedIn Tips:

• Come recommended and reach out to the right person at the right company.
• Update your professional summary and request recommendations from your LinkedIn contacts who know what you do best.
• Search for the right person to connect with by job title, company, location or keyword.
• Review profiles to see if they’re a fit for your proposal and request an introduction through a common connection, or send an InMail directly to that person.
• By answering questions in your field of expertise you can help others while showcasing your knowledge of your particular industry in front of a wider audience. This will allow you to connect with interesting people and hopefully bring in new contracts.
• Have people familiar with your work recommend you!

Given our current economic conditions, there is no better time to utilize marketing opportunities like social media which are right at your fingertips to promote your business.

I hope you utilize 2009 to jumpstart social media strategies to improve your business.

With LinkedIn, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

Marketers Using Social Networking, Online Resource Centers to Reach Small and Medium Businesses

Own a business? Chances are marketers communicating to you via social media.

Emarketingandcommerce.com posted on April 16 an interesting story. They say major marketers targeting small and medium businesses (SMBs) are relying less on traditional marketing tactics because of the economic downturn. Although SMBs say they prefer to receive product and service information though traditional tactics, marketers are relying more heavily on social networking and online resource centers. And they are saving money doing so.

Tell me more! These were among the findings in a study conducted recently by Bredin Business Information, a Cambridge, Mass.-based business information firm. BBI conducted two surveys in late January and February, asking 50 marketers about their outreach and research efforts for 2009, as well as 741 SMBs about their online and offline media preferences, top concerns and brand ratings

Results from the survey of marketers include the following:

• Marketers are attempting to capitalize on competitive weaknesses to gain market share instead of focusing on customer retention efforts. Forty-eight percent said they're balancing their efforts, while 32 percent are concentrating more on acquisition and only 20 percent on retention.
• In response to the economy, marketers are increasing their online activities for greater impact with less budget risk (17 percent) and targeting their efforts more (15 percent).
• Marketers are shifting their efforts to the Internet. Offline tactics received an average rating of 2.6 on a scale of one (significantly decrease) to five (significantly increase), while online marketing increased, with an average rating of 3.5.
• Among offline marketing efforts, PR ranked highest (3.5), followed by telemarketing (3.4), print newsletters (2.8) and direct mail (2.8).
• Receiving the most attention online are social networking (3.7), resource centers (3.7) and search marketing (3.6).

Results from the SMB survey, however, revealed that SMBs rely most on newspaper and magazine articles (43.6 percent) and direct mail, including letters, postcards and catalogs (43.5 percent) as sources of information about products and services. Receiving the least amount of support were radio/TV ads (32 percent) and phone calls (27.4 percent).

Except for referrals from friends/peers and search, all other online tactics ranked lower than direct mail. As sources of information about products and services online, for example, referrals from friends and peers ranked first (71.9 percent), followed by SEM (57 percent). Next came educational Web sites (44.5 percent) and e-mail newsletters (38.2 percent).

SMBs rated social networking at 27.8 percent. Among the social networks, Facebook ranked highest (19.7 percent), followed by LinkedIn (15.6 percent), Meetup (11.3 percent) and Twitter (11.2 percent). Bringing up the rear were forums/chat rooms (20.2 percent), videos/podcasts (19.2 percent) and ads to cell phones (8.1 percent).

Source

The benefits of a content management system

If you are publishing a lot of content from a number of authors, you should seriously consider a content management system (CMS). A quality CMS can help you streamline your publishing processes. It can allow you to develop an information architecture that is robust, yet flexible. It can allow you to manage your content efficiently and cost-effectively.

A CMS makes it easier for people to create, edit and publish content on a website. Historically, website publishing has required significant technical skills (HTML, programming). A good CMS allows non-technical authors and editors to easily and quickly publish their content.

A CMS makes it easier for you to manage who creates, edits and publishes content. Because it establishes defined publishing processes, you can allocate specific publishing rights to various individuals.

By easing technical hurdles in the publication of content, a CMS can reduce the need for training, while facilitating more people to publish. At the same time, it reduces the daily stream of calls to the IT department for changes to the website.

A CMS reduces time-to-publish, allowing you to get content published faster. This is an important issue for the modern organization. The quicker you get key content published, the more value it creates.

A CMS allows for the design of a common and consistent information architecture (metadata, classification, navigation, search, layout and design). Inconsistent and poorly designed information architectures plague many websites.

A CMS will allow for the consistent management of metadata through content template structures. Of the many benefits this delivers is a significantly improved search process. Basically, if the appropriate metadata is captured on all documents, then people can find the right content a lot more quickly.

Security is an important issue, particularly for intranets. A CMS can facilitate better content security. It can control who is allowed to publish to the website, and who is allowed to see what content.

A CMS can allow you to more easily measure the success of your publishing efforts. You can track who is publishing what, how quickly content is getting published, whether the publication schedule is being adhered to, whether out-of-date content is being removed quickly enough, etc.

A CMS really comes into its own when you have a lot of authors and editors, based at multiple locations, publishing substantial quantities of content on an ongoing basis. Without a CMS, such an environment can become a nightmare to manage.

Without a CMS, what often happens is that there is a publishing free-for-all. The content quality is not properly monitored and becomes inconsistent. The navigation and layout changes from section to section, creating a frustrating experience for the reader.

When does a CMS begin to make sense in comparison to using raw HTML or a package such as Microsoft FrontPage? Well, you need to be publishing at least 10 new documents a week. There should be a minimum of 5 authors/editors publishing this content. As the number of documents, authors and editors rise, a CMS begins to make more and more sense.

Check out Indigo Branding Client Discover Strength on Fox News Training the Viking Cheerleaders

For some weekend entertainment, check out Discover Strength on Fox http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/morning_news/MA_VIkings_Cheer_Strength_April_14_2009

Indigo Creative Solutions just finished rebranding Discover Strength. It's also a phenomenal place to workout!

Do you have Social Media Strategy for your business?

It's time to take this question seriously.

Social media is not just a fad, it's here to stay. Research shows that every day, large corporations invest millions of dollars to jump in the social media arena.

Given our current economic conditions, there is no better time to utilize marketing opportunities like social media which are right at your fingertips to promote your business.

What can you do in 2009 to improve your business? The following are three tools you should be using consistenly:

1. Facebook: Do you have a personal facebook account that reflects your current interests and activities?
2. Linked In: Do you consistently connect to other professionals and are you maximizing all of its tools and opportunities for discussions?
   
3. Twitter: Are you creating meaningful relationships within the twitter community? Are you researching what successful companies are doing to make millions with Twitter?

I hope you utilize 2009 to jumpstart social media strategies to improve your business.

There’s no better time than right now to build your business and to take advantage of all the great opportunities that a slightly down economy presents to you.

Quote of the Week

The best way to predict your future is to create it.
Tony Robbins

Joomla Components News

Great news in the Joomla CMS Community -
A new Release is out!

Joomla 1.5.10 security release is out today 

What's New?
RssFactory Pro 1.2.2
The new version of rss Factory PRO brings two new important features.
The first major feature is the ability to Import the RSS feeds to the Joomla
Content. Here you can set for each existing RSS feed the section and
category where it will be imported and also set the author and publishing
period.

The second major feature is the Archive System. The period of how long the
feed contents should be kept is admin configurable. Both new features are
extending and maximizing the SEO SEF abilities of a website. Importing the
feeds directly to the content will simplify the work of each webmaster,
providing always new and updated content on his site. The archive system
will provide for regular webpages the possiblity to be found again in a
search engine.

Regular websites are not so often indexed by the search engines machines
and an archive system is providing the necessary requirements, that the
indexed pages are still available on your site and any search result will
lead to a valid page. They hope that the new version will increase the
productivity of the sites and the whole Joomla Community will benefit
from it.

* Import the RSS feeds to the Joomla Content
* A lot of UTF issues solved (due to great feedback from our users!)
* New feature: show first X chars from feed content in the module.
* New feature: add multiple categories from textarea.
* New feature: enable/disable read more link.
* Several issues fixed, including itemid on search result, some charset
  issues, display issue involving js, segmentation fault (11).

Hot or Not 1.0.0
The native MVC Joomla 1.5 component provides an easy voting system,
requiring only a single click action for a speedy process. The component
can be used to rate different images like landscapes, art, etc. or if the
genre mode is enabled, more particular for male and female images. The
upload is very easy, allowing also multiple upload. For each picture a
sharelink and the number of hits will be visible and if admin enabled the
description, comments and tags. To allow the administrator content control
on the site, each picture and comment can be reported.

* Menu Module including Top Rated, My Pictures, Upload and advanced Search option.
* TAG Cloud Module.
* Random Picture.
* Last Voted.

Ads Factory 1.1.0 
Ads Factory is the new release from the Factory -  A new classifieds
extensions with detailed attention to SEF related issues that will fully
integrate into your Joomla 1.5 website. No Briges or Legacy support needed!

Version 1.1.0 brings new features and several tweaks:

* New feature: enable/disable messaging
* New feature: Start/End date editable in admin.
* Improved Private System; for private ads:

Community Components - replacements for the well known "Community Builder"
Since the days of Mambo - Joomlapolis Community Builder (in those times it
was Mambojoe's community builder) - was the only way to enhance the scarce
profile of  Mambo/Joomla. CB is now one of the most popular Joomla extension
in Extensions Directory and an Editor Pick(one of the few picks there are).

Althou there is nothing wrong with Joomlapolis Extension, with time appeared
some interesting alternatives to it. There are several Free, some
Commercial and some of them even Encrypted (Joobi). We analysed two free
Extensions that look very promising (and are both now in Beta stage)