Business Marketing Monday: Using LinkedIn for Networking
July 21, 2008 by Bridget Wright
Filed under Business
The other day while I was working happily along, I got an email from an online company who wanted to engage my writing services. They liked my profile, my past consulting client work and my references. They wanted to hire me to do some writing work, and told me that they found me through LinkedIn. WOW.
I had heard that LinkedIn was good for business, good for networking, but had not directly experienced the effects of it. Unlike many of you perhaps “veteran” online marketers, I’ve only been actively online with my business for about two years. I’m still learning A LOT about social networking, HTML, etc. But a powerful tool like LinkedIn has proven to be invaluable. I mean, just imagine someone finding you via an online contact source and wanting to engage your services based solely on what they read. Cool.
LinkedIn is a powerful resource tool that the members can use to connect and stay abreast of marketplace trends, corporate news and changes and even find college classmates or former co-workers. A lot of us (bloggers) here at b5 are on LinkedIn and frequently help each other out by giving recommendations to each other. It has really been good for me, to say the least. The client and I are still in negotiations about the terms of the contract, but it does look promising and rewarding. I’ll keep you posted.
Sign up to try LinkedIn and see if it can work for you and your business. If nothing else, you’ll make new business contact friends, establish yourself and stay on top of the business world “happenings.” You will never know until you try.
Oh, by the way, my LinkedIn profile is: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bridgetwright
What’s yours?
© Content by Bridget Wright – 2008
Linkedin was just added to ABout.com’s top 10 employment site list. There was another site called http://www.realmatch.com also added this year. The whole top 10 employment site list here:http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm
Hi Bridget – I love your blog…I would also love to connect to you on LinkedIn – but they make it so difficult. Why can’t they be nice and easy like facebook where you can send a request? Am I missing something here? See if you can find me…
are you on FB or Twitter???
Can’t wait to get my next email alert from y’all…
thanks,
Julie
Bridget, that is so cool! My colleague Bryan Kress was just looking for people to talk about how LinkedIn helped with their careers in a LinkedIn Q&A. You should go answer it!
http://tinyurl.com/6q9y5r
Julie, when you look at Bridget’s (or anyone else’s) profile, to the right of their name are three buttons:
- Send InMail
- Get introduced through a connection
- Add NAME to your network
Just click the third one and send the person an invitation to connect.
Hope that helps!
Hey Julie!
So glad to see that LinkedIn is inspirational for you. I got your invite earlier this evening and accepted. Looking forward to connecting more with you and hope to see you again BCR!