4 Things for Businesses to Consider When Marketing Your Website

From:  http://www.inc.com/drew-hendricks/4-things-for-businesses-to-consider-when-marketing-your-website.html?cid=sf01002&sr_share=facebook

 

Consider all your options when it comes to marketing your business

By Drew Hendricks

Contributor, Inc.com@DrewAHendricks

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IMAGE: Getty Images

Where do you start when laying out your small business or startup website? The following are some important things to consider and steps to implement them, increasing traffic to your website and increasing your return on investment!

Begin with your value proposition.

Take a step back and think user experience first, before focusing on keywords. Google's Webmasters Youtube Channel is a great resource for understanding the basics of SEO and items Google and other search engines expect to see on your website. Start with the value proposition and build the rest of the web page and if possible, the entire website around that proposed value. Value propositions should about clearly and concisely communicate your services to a potential client in the fastest way possible so they can self-judge their need.
When building solid value propositions, you should have...

• A clear headline: This is different than your Page Title, which should be factual, while the headline is more descriptive of the end benefit you are offering to the customer. This should be the ONE THING that distinguishes you in your industry and should highlight the cost benefit of your product or services.
• A sub-headline or paragraph: This is where you get to back up your claim of what benefit the client will receive, by elaborating on your offer and defining the 'why'.
• Bullet points listing the unique benefits of your service: Psychologically, three supporting points are the magic number of "evidence" needed to assure the potential customer of the validity of a value claim. These should address the top questions potential customers have about your service.
• A visual element: A photo or video demonstrating or explaining the product or service and how it actually works is ideal.

Minimize barriers to entry.

Free trials and free consultation are the most common tactic, but there are other tips make to make it as easy and harmless as possible for potential customers to enter information, helping your conversions. For service-based businesses, online signups are the quickest and easiest. They also allow use of existing Google, Facebook, or Twitter profiles as logins - a growth hack that has been key to the success of many services ranging from Airbnb to Pinterest. These APIs are readily available for developers and even have plugins for simple WordPress sites.
Reduce barriers to entry on your website by...

• Letting them know what to expect: Showing the faces of your sales team communicates that a human will be on the other side. An assurance that credit card is not required for a free trial sign up is another example. The key is to understand what apprehensions people may have for providing you with their information and address it in the call to action.
• Putting the call to action on every page: Every website should have their name, address and phone number in the header or footer of every page on their site. It is equally as important to have a simple call to action in a prominent position on the menu or sidebar of every page, using a color that stands out and compliments the rest of the site. Most conversion optimizers indicate various shades of green is optimal for CTA buttons.
• Reduce form abandonment: One of the primary causes for form abandonment is too many fields on a contact form. Keep it as simple as possible.

When possible always send an email confirmation of your inquiry, so there is an immediate feeling of action.

Every part of your website should support your value proposition.

Think of your website as a college paper. Your value proposition is your thesis. Most of the pages of your website should serve the purpose of answering the who, what, when, where, and why of your value proposition. While other pages may or may not directly relate to that goal, even things like security and privacy policies add to a value claim. As proper grammar and a good glossary will help your college paper, having good pages provides supporting evidence of your claim. Testimonials, case studies, and links to reviews will add the credibility both humans and machines need in order to trust any claim of value you make to your potential clients.

Be a contextually omnipresent thought-leader in your industry.

Big words, there. Within any industry, there are events, publications, and networks that are seen as the must-read, must-see, must-do - this is contextual omnipresence. A great small business or startup should not only "be there" but they should be contributing original thoughts and ideas to every venue of conversation. In other words, you should be writing and speaking anywhere and everywhere that makes sense. While it can be difficult to come up with topics to write about, the internet is full of tips and resources to beat the writers block.
Search engines will pick up on the links and co-citations of your content, and thus improve your search engine visibility. Meanwhile, the content you produce should be designed to saturate the minds of leaders in your industry and establish your brand as a credible authority on all topics that relate to your business and the problems you solve.
Wherever your website marketing takes you, think back on your primary value proposition and think to yourself, "does what I'm contributing reinforce my credibility to actually accomplish what I claim to do in my value proposition headline?"

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Published on: Mar 4, 2016

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Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up Your Company Page on LinkedIn

From: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242723

 

In his book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business, search engine optimization and online marketing expert consultant Ted Prodromou explains how you can use LinkedIn to quickly engage with ideal customers, partners, and employees, showcase your company and attract new opportunities. In this edited excerpt, the author offers tips to help you create a LinkedIn company page that works hard for your business.
Your LinkedIn company page is a mini-website for your company, but it’s located on LinkedIn so it’s easy for LinkedIn members to find. Your company page will always appear when a member types your company’s name in LinkedIn’s search box on their homepage or on the Companies link on the top toolbar.
Your LinkedIn company page will also appear in Google search results. Because LinkedIn is a very popular and trusted website, its company pages rank well in Google, which means people can view your LinkedIn company page without logging into LinkedIn, giving your company significant exposure. For this reason, you want to make sure your LinkedIn company page is complete and updated frequently with your latest company news and product offerings.
Other ways your company page will appear include when you:

• View the LinkedIn profile of one of your employees
• Receive a notification when your products or services are recommended by one of your employees’ connections
• See an open position from your company via a job search under Jobs You May Be Interested In
• See your company under Companies You May Be Interested in Following, which appears in the right sidebar on your homepage
• Follow your company and receive status updates

Company pages let your customers and prospects get to know the people in your company. You can feature the employees behind your brand and show how customers use your products. Your company page is a great way to solidify your reputation and build trust with your clients and prospects.
You can also post company status updates to share company news, product releases, promotions, or relevant industry news. Company status updates are a powerful communication tool, allowing you to send messages and links directly to your followers.
Company posts can be seen on the company’s Overview tab by any LinkedIn member and in a member’s network update stream. All LinkedIn members have the ability to view company status updates, click on embedded links, or view posted videos. They can also comment on, like, or share a company status update, allowing your updates to spread virally to grow your following and engage your members.

Components of a company profile

In a typical company profile, there are many options to customize it for your needs:
1. Overview of your company homepage. The Home tab shows the viewer a snapshot of your company, including your Recent Updates, a brief description of your company, and all employees in the network, including first-, second-, and third-degree connections. You can also display your company’s blog posts on the Home tab. It’s a great way to give people a quick overview of your company and an opportunity for you to make a direct connection with them if they follow your company.
2. Careers. This is where any job openings you’ve posted on LinkedIn will appear. If you purchase a Silver or Gold Career Page, you can also add a brief description of your company culture, and people can get a good idea of how fantastic it is to work there. The Silver and Gold Career Pages also let you feature top employees and create targeted messaging to help fill your open positions quickly with the best talent. If you have a Gold Career Page, your jobs will be targeted to the individual member viewing the page. For example, you can target members based on industry, job function, seniority, and geography, so your message to a programmer in Silicon Valley is different from your message to a sales professional in Sydney.
3. Showcase pages. You can feature your products and services on this sidebar widget. When a prospect or customer visits this page, they'll see how many of their network connections comment, like, or share posts on the Showcase page. You can create a directory-style listing of your Showcase pages in your sidebar. Each product or service can have its own showcase page including descriptions, features, images, display banners, videos, and special offers.
4. Sponsored posts. LinkedIn Advertising lets you promote posts from your Company page as Sponsored Updates. When you sponsor an update, the post from your Company page is featured in the timeline of a target audience using the same targeting you use in normal LinkedIn ads. This lets you get your message in front of your target audience, and they’ll see your Sponsored Update in their personal timeline.
5. Analytics. This tab is visible only to an administrator of your Company page. The Analytics tab shows you who your visitors are, what they do, and which other companies they follow. You gain valuable insight into what content they're most interested in, their job function, industry, company, and which products they're researching.
6. Updates. This data tells you exactly how many impressions your Company page updates reach, how many people click on the content, how many interactions (likes, shares, and comments), how many new followers resulted from the post, and the engagement percentage.
7. Followers. This is where you see the demographics of who’s following your company. You’ll see how many people organically followed you compared with the number of people who followed you from promotions. You can sort your followers by seniority, industry, company size, function, and employee/non-employee. This gives you valuable insight into the professionals who follow your company so you can structure Sponsored Updates and promotions targeted to your audience. You’ll also see Follower Trends and How You Compare with companies similar to yours.
8. Visitors. This data is similar to Google Analytics. You’ll see the number of page views and unique visitors to your Company page so you’ll know which content and products they’re most interested in. You can also sort your Visitor data by Seniority, Industry, Company Size, Function, and Employee/Non-employee.

Happy St. Patrick's Day !!!

10 Ways You Are Sabotaging Your Search Ranking

From: http://success.com/article/10-ways-you-are-sabotaging-your-search-ranking

Stay away from these common SEO mistakes to get the online traffic you want and need.

Jayson DeMers

Search engine optimization—you think you understand it, or at least the basics. You want to be seen on Google, and you’ve read up on how to do it. Simple, right? Not that simple.
The bad news: This SEO stuff isn’t just a “quick trick” as some people make it look or sound. You did your research on the basics, and you’re pretty sure you’re doing everything right… except you’re not getting the results you really wanted. Where’s the traffic those tips promised? It can be frustrating, especially if you’ve already put months of hard work into your initiative. So what went wrong?
 

The good news: There are a handful of usual culprits, small steps commonly neglected or best-practice misconceptions, that negatively affect search rankings and lead to decreased online authority—and entrepreneurs, with that do-it-all-yourself attitude, are sometimes more prone to making them. But by becoming aware of these problems, you can change direction, fix what you’re doing wrong and see SEO success as a result.
 

As the CEO of AudienceBloom, a content marketing and social media marketing firm, I steer the strategy behind my clients’ SEO campaigns—increasing web traffic and securing higher search rankings. I’ve seen what works—and I’ve seen what doesn’t. Here are 10 all-too-common mistakes that entrepreneurs accidentally or unwittingly make in their SEO campaigns:
 

Content is king. The rule of thumb is that the more high-quality content you have on your site, the more credibility, authority and positive branding you’ll earn. But too many entrepreneurs sabotage themselves by neglecting the most important part of that idea—“high-quality.” 

Writing content too fast—in other words, writing as much content as you can, as quickly as you can—is ultimately going to compromise your chances for success. Google scans content and evaluates it for quality, so make sure your content is the best it can be before publishing it.
Falling into a rut is bad news for onsite and offsite optimization alike. Recycling blog topics? Google could see that as a red flag, similar to flat-out duplicate content, and you could alienate your users, who are constantly on the prowl for new information. Similarly, if you try to build links using the same sources or the same strategies, eventually Google will take notice of this repetition. Keep diversifying and refreshing your strategy for best results.
 

It can be tempting to build as many links as you can, as easily as you can, when you want to see results now. But the easiest strategies in SEO are often the least effective, and when it comes to link-building, the more effort you spend to do the job correctly, the more value you’re going to get. Using cheap link-building tactics—like relying on low-authority sites, buying links in a package or participating in link farms—is only going to end up hurting your ranks.
Keywords aren’t as important as they used to be. Including your target keyword phrases somewhere on your site is still a good idea, but including multiple instances of keywords throughout all your copy and blog posts is a bad one. Over-optimizing with keywords is going to earn you a penalty, and even worse, it’s going to make your content seem spammy, which will turn your customers away.
 

If you have a better understanding of a specific element of your SEO campaign, you can accidentally spend too much time developing that one element—ignoring all the others. If you have experience or talent in social media marketing, you might spend an exceptional amount of time building your social audience but neglect your onsite development or your content program. If your SEO strategy isn’t balanced, it’s going to fail.
SEO is about far more than just the logical steps. Yes, the weekly blog posts, inbound links and daily social posts are all important, but SEO depends heavily on what your users feel about their browsing experience. When a person comes to your site, what’s their first reaction? Do they know where to go and what to do? Do they find value in your brand and how it’s presented online? If you don’t know how to answer these questions, you need to address your onsite user experience—evaluate your navigation, your layout and your design standards to start.
Some people pick keywords based on what they think their audience is searching for. This isn’t a bad strategy to use as a starting point, but if you want to see better results, you’ll need to back those keywords up with actual, legitimate data. How much traffic do they get? How hard are they to rank for?
 

Another problem is an overabundance of keywords. The theory goes that ranking high for 20 keywords will get you more visibility than ranking high for 10 keywords—but it’s also much harder to rank for 20 than it is for 10. The more keywords you try to optimize for, the further you get from your company’s core focus, and your site will become less authoritative for the most relevant searches.
 

Everyone goes through a site redesign at some point. Unfortunately, many site owners fail to double-check their work. Redesigning usually involves building an entire new site structure—a new sitemap and new links. If you don’t make sure all old links are redirecting to new site locations, you could be prone to crawl errors and lose out on referral traffic from offsite links.
This is the biggest recurring mistake. Reviewing and analyzing the results of your campaign is the only way to see how you’re doing—and the only way you’re going to make it better. Take a look at metrics like organic search traffic and user behavior and see how they grow over time. 

 

Keep the strategies that work and weed out the ones that don’t.
Anything sound familiar? Eliminate that practice immediately. Bear in mind that you might not be able to fix it with a one-time correction—a lot of these strategies tend to creep up over time due to deteriorating standards or gradually changing approaches. So take time to audit your progress and your strategy at least once a month. Make sure you’re adhering to best practices and doing what’s most appropriate for your campaign.

- See more at: http://success.com/article/10-ways-you-are-sabotaging-your-search-ranking#sthash.HvqBWoMY.dpuf

Goodbye, Mr. Spock. Thanks for the Marketing Lessons.

From: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/goodbye-mr-spock-thanks-marketing-lessons/2 By Heather Fletcher




Marketers love quoting Mr. Spock. His logic boils down problems. Solutions appear that seem obvious. Not first to arrive at the golf course? "Vulcan nerve-pinch" the competitor down and reach the finish line of the "race." Advertisers were among millions who lost a friend on Friday morning when Leonard Nimoy, the actor most famous as Mr. Spock on "Star Trek," died in his Los Angeles home of end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 83.
Nimoy seemed to have a sense of humor about his role in the public eye that advertisers liked to play up, especially in the 2013 Audi S7 commercial titled "The Challenge." (More recently, Nimoy and actor William Shatner —"Captain Kirk"—appeared in an October 2014 Volkswagen ad in German.)

In the Audi spot, Nimoy beats actor Zachary Quinto , the Spock in recent "Star Trek" movies, at an online game of chess. In return, Quinto challenges Nimoy to a race to the club to play golf.
"Stand by to have your wallet emptied by a tractor beam," Nimoy says.
Of course, the Audi beats Nimoy's Mercedes, but Nimoy isn't cowed.
He knocks Quinto over and strolls into the club first. At nearly 2 p.m. Eastern on Friday, the YouTube video had nearly 9 million views.

It's this logic that makes direct marketers love Nimoy/Spock so. A Google search of "Spock" and "marketing" on Friday afternoon returned "about 466,000 results in 0.32 seconds." Here's a sample of what marketers say he taught them:
1. Copywriting. "Use logic to define your goals," to develop a plan of action and to measure progress, writes Sonia Simone  in Copyblogger in a post titled "The Mr. Spock Guide to Effective Blogging."
"When I sat down to write about the need for rational, logical planning for your blog, what better model could I have found," she asks. "Sure, blogs are personal, emotional constructions. But if your blog isn't performing the way you want it to, try using a little Vulcan logic to move it in the right direction."   Simone ends her post with this: "Use emotion to create fascinating content."
2. Video Marketing. Lisa Arthur, CMO of Teradata Applications, writes in Forbes about that Audi video in "Spock vs. Spock: A Logical Argument For Video Content."
She suggests marketers follow these tips to increase ROI from video content:

• Get Feedback—track and analyze video engagement and performance.
• Create Customized Experiences—build a user-centric view of your video content.
• Operationalize—pull video data into your sales and marketing tools.

3. Data. Hardly a blog post goes by that Stephen H. Yu, president and chief consultant at Willow Data Strategy, doesn't mention "Star Trek" or a character thereof in his Target Marketing blog.
"Be logical: Illogical questions do not lead anywhere," Yu writes on Dec. 4, 2014. "There is no toolset that reads minds—at least not yet. Even if we get to have such amazing computers—as seen on "Star Trek" or in other science fiction movies—you would still have to ask questions in a logical fashion for them to be effective. I am not asking decision-makers to learn how to code (or be like Mr. Spock or his loyal follower, Dr. Sheldon Cooper ), but to have some basic understanding of logical expressions and try to learn how analysts communicate with computers."
4. Marketing Strategy. In this example, article writer Jorden Roper tells the TriDigital audience on Aug. 22, 2014, that Kirk and Spock complement each other because emotion and logic are both necessary in marketing. "Why Kirk and Spock Would Make An Awesome IT Marketing Leadership Team," says any important business decision should be greeted with "What would Kirk and Spock do?"
5. Marketing Research. Marketers think they know what customers want, writes Bruce La Fetra on Sept. 8, 2014, in LinkedIn Pulse. "Better Marketing the Mr. Spock Way" says mind-melds are out of the question, but "open, honest and probing customer interviews are the most effective way to accurately evaluate your existing knowledge, perspective, and biases."
What's the best lesson Nimoy/Spock taught marketers that isn't listed here?

When It Counts, Print It.

Following is an excerpt from http://xerox.bz/1EJt0AU by Justin Doyle|Jan 30, 2015|Color, Customer Stories|2 Comments.  Since this blog is not about endorsing a particular product, I left the product specific information out.  I included this posting on MarCom Central because print is an integral component of the marketing mix, especially for consumer products. 

Print (on cartons, wrappers, corrugated boxes and labels) turns the product itself into a stand-alone point of purchase display on the store shelves.  With so many products competing for the attention of consumers, it is critical to have quality and consistency in the print.  For brand continuity, it is imperative that color is repeatable and predictable across the entire spectrum of brand presentation from direct mail to POP displays to packaging to magazine and television advertising to billboards to the color of the side of the company's delivery trucks.  To reinforce the power of the brand, color consistency is required across all representations of the brand (both physical and electronic). 

In the chapter "Flexography redefined" from my book, Common Sense Flexography: A user's guide to improved pressroom productivity,  I talk about the incredible power of print to capture attention, reinforce brand equity, exude qualities of the product itself and elicit an emotional reaction that triggers the purchase of that specific product even though it may be surrounded with hundreds of competing products on the store shelves. 

Following is the posting. While it is geared to MFPs (multifunction printers), there are important points that the author makes.  If you would like to read the entire piece, just click on the link above. 

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If you’re one of the millions of business owners still relying on print as part of your marketing mix, give yourself a pat on the back. Contrary to what the SEO companies of the world have tried to tell you, print is alive and well, and spelling success for businesses across the globe. But for millions of businesses, it’s more than just a means of communication; it’s an important step in quality assurance, and an essential part of the creative process.

Print: It’s Here to Stay

Forget the blogger buzz: extensive research continues to show that print is an integral part of your marketing mix, with 70% of Americans reporting that they prefer to read both print and paper communications instead of relying exclusively on digital. Print forms a connection between brands and customers because it appeals to the senses – it allows for a tactile connection you can’t create with any other medium.
But what about creative companies, for whom the imagery itself is their product?

A Means and an End

In a direct mail campaign, the printed piece your clients will hold in their hands may be the only chance you have to make an impression. The quality has to be exemplary. You achieve that result with excellent design, but also with outstanding print quality. But what about billboards? Business cards? Television commercials and other mediums? Would it surprise you to know that print is an integral part of assuring quality across nearly every marketing medium employed today?

In recent years, the creative industry has reached a global agreement on color perspective. Print is an essential means of providing color management and consistency across every platform.  No matter how great your colors look on the screen, if your printer isn’t calibrated properly or isn’t the best in quality, those colors just won’t look right in print. Whether you’re printing a direct mail piece or designing a logo that will be placed globally, this presents an enormous challenge, and a serious roadblock on the path to quality assurance.

Getting it right the first time saves both time and money. Getting it right the first time means printing it out, and choosing a printer you can count on to do the job.

11 Lesser-Known LinkedIn Features You Should Be Using

From http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/linkedin-features

Written by Andrea Brinkman | @andicdote

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This post originally appeared on the Insiders section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Insiders.
We often hear marketing and sales reps expressing their love/hate relationship with LinkedIn. Are you one who views the site as social stalking for business professionals? If you’re a user that only checks the site to look up a prospect’s credentials or check a connection request email, you are missing valuable opportunities to grow professionally, to grow your sales leads, and -- ultimately -- to grow your business.
The benefits of using LinkedIn go beyond prospecting and recruiting. The site can also be an incredible inbound marketing tool. I tapped into the knowledge of LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth, who shared a few tips on the following features that you should be utilizing.

Making Yourself Irresistible 

Like most social platforms, LinkedIn is constantly evolving and adding features to help you get the most out of connecting with others, typically for professional reasons. Consider using these features to your advantage by giving your profile a professional makeover. Features that will help position you as an expert in your respective area include:

1) Keywords

Incorporating keywords will boost your SEO and help you become found on LinkedIn and your LinkedIn profile found by search engines. Consider the ideal person your profile would speak to, consider your buyer personas, and -- if your profile were side by side with another -- which words would make you stand out. Have these words thought-out and ready when you create or edit your profile.
Areas to incorporate great keywords include your headline, summary, interests, job titles, job descriptions, and skills. A keyword-centric headline will boost your profile traffic and makes you more appealing to prospective employers.
Your summary should include keywords that are relevant with your goals and objectives in your area of business. Your interests area is under the additional info area on your profile and another place to incorporate even more keywords related to your business or career goals.

2) Recommendations & Endorsements

Recommendations can be a critical part of your LinkedIn profile, while endorsements seem to just confuse people. That said, both play a role in how you are found during advanced people searches. Endorsements make it easy for a connection to quickly say that you are experienced in a certain area without a full recommendation.
The fact that it's so easy for a connection to endorse someone makes some LinkedIn users, especially recruiters, dismiss the authenticity of the expertise. Endorsements do add to your presence on LinkedIn, though, and can be thought of as a kind of  "pantry" full of your best keywords. There may be some cases where endorsements for specific skills should actually be hidden so no one can see it if it is an expertise that you do not feel is a good reflection on your personal positioning.
To hide an endorsement, go to the pull-down menu at the top of the screen and under “profile,” click “edit profile.” When you scroll to the “skills” section, you will see a pencil icon. Click the pencil and you will see your "skills and endorsements settings." Simply hit the “X” next to the skill you would like to delete. You can also reorder these skills simply by dragging them into a different order.
Recommendations are important to your profile because the number of recommendations you receive is highlighted at the top of your page when your name appears in a listing of group members. The number of recommendations you have is also a criteria factor for search rankings.
Oftentimes, recommendations can only be acquired if you ask someone to provide one. Be sure the writer include specifics such as the results of your work together, sales increases or how your expertise was put to use. Always thank a connection that provides a recommendation.

3) Professional Gallery (with work examples, photos, videos & Slideshares)

If you’d like to really stand out on LinkedIn and attract more business opportunities, a great way to get noticed is through visual content and creating a portfolio of work examples. There are a few ways you can create a portfolio by adding project examples, images, embedded video and slideshare presentations to your profile page. (If you need help creating your LinkedIn professional portfolio, this SlideShare that will walk you through the process.)

4) Use Your Profile Link

One way to customize your LinkedIn profile is by acquiring your unique URL. Each LinkedIn user is automatically given a default address when you setup your profile, but having a unique URL improves your ability to be found on search engines and when users are doing targeted people searches. Plus, a customized address is much easier to remember and use when directing people to your LinkedIn profile.
To customize your LinkedIn URL, click here and click "customize your public profile URL" on the bottom righthand side.

Building a Bigger Following

For yourself:

5) Use the "How You’re Connected" Tool (a.k.a. The "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" Tool)

The “How You’re Connected” tool helps introduce you to other LinkedIn users who may be connected to you or other connections you have. When you visit someone’s profile, the tool (which lives in the righthand column of the screen) allows you to see who in your network knows that person, and how. Clicking "Get Introduced" opens up a new message where you can ask the person to make an introduction. Using this tool is a great way to view people you want to be connected with and who might be the best person to ask for an intro.

6) Perform Targeted Searches with the "Advanced People Search" Tool

LinkedIn is more and more becoming a database for finding people, connecting with prospective business associates and individuals with very specific competencies and keywords included in their profile. Searches can be performed by typing a person’s name, keywords, or titles into the search box at the top of the page. Advanced searches can be performed by using specific criteria such as location, school, industry, etc.
To open the "Advanced People Search" tool, click the “advanced” link at the right of the search box or the top of the search results page. This video will show you how to use it:

For your business:

7) Create a company page, Use the Showcase Pages & Review Your Analytics

Creating a company page not only allows a business to provide the latest company and industry news, event information, and job opportunities, but it also helps position your business and its employees as experts within your industry. Registering and maintaining a company page is an incredible opportunity for businesses that not only to recruit the best, but also establish a thought leadership position in their industry.
Here's an easy, step-by-step guide for what to include on your LinkedIn company page. Another great feature of the company page is the ability to collect insightful analytics regarding the level of engagement for individual posts, trends across key metrics and follower demographics.
LinkedIn recently introduced a new feature for companies called showcase pages. These pages allow companies to target different buyer personas by providing single pages that focus on specific products, product categories and services. For example, a hair salon may have different showcase pages for product lines, service offerings, seasonal trends, and so on.

8) Use the "Alumni Search" Function

The Alumni search function is a great tool to find people associated with a particular school, industry or location. Visit www.linkedin.com/alumni, and your college or university will already be selected. This will then allow you to break down connections by “where they work,” “what they do,” and “where they live.” Additional categories include “where they studied,” “what they are skilled at,” and “how you are connected.”

9) Don’t Be a Stalker – Create Personal Relationships

Use the "who’s viewed your profile" feature to increase visibility, discover new opportunities and check out analytics to see specifics about the people who have viewed your profile.
With this tool, there are basic and premium features. The basic version (free) allows you to see where your five most recent viewers work and live, how they found you, their industry and job titles and keywords that led to you. The premium version (paid) allows you to see your list of viewers from the past 90 days, as well as trends and insights. By using the "who’s viewed your profile" feature, you are better able to customize content shared on your profile, identify valuable connection prospects, and reach out to people in a more personal way.

Gaining and Imparting Knowledge

10) Join Groups to Gain Visibility

One of the easiest ways to boost your profile and personal brand on LinkedIn is to connect with other professionals in similar industries, with similar interests, and with the competencies or connections you are looking to target. A great way to connect and exchange ideas is with LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn allows a user to join up to 50 groups – and it is highly recommended from a SEO, personal branding and search-ability standpoint that you join the 50 groups that are best for you.
By joining groups, you strengthen the opportunity to position yourself and your business as an expert in your respective field or industry. To get the most out of a group, post relevant information and contribute by commenting on other’s input. Be conscientious of posting information that could be considered overly sales-y or spam – it is against group rules and a horrible way to try to get members’ attention. (Click here for more tips on what not to do in LinkedIn groups.)

11) Write Appropriate and Thoughtful Posts

Sharing content on LinkedIn is a great way to showcase your knowledge as well as provide your expertise that can help other connections. When you share a post, provide information on the relevance to your audience or group. If you’d like to share a post with a group, be sure to check the “post to groups” checkbox and include a question or comment that will encourage member engagement.
Social networking sites are changing every day and LinkedIn is at the forefront of channels adding new features and engagement tools to improve content sharing, relationship development, recruitment and lead generation.
How are you using LinkedIn as an inbound marketing strategy and what new features do you find most useful?
Image Credit: LinkedIn

Topics: Social Media