If you thought LinkedIn was a place to upload your resume and forget about it until someone contacted, you are missing out on one of the most important social networking tools available today. LinkedIn is a great way to make sure that organic and free traffic is driven to your blog or website with little effort. Let us take a look at how you can optimise your LinkedIn page to drive traffic to your blog.
Complete your Profile
Most people and companies are usually quick to open accounts and enter a few details in social media sites, and forget about them. An incomplete profile gives a very bad impression to you or your company. LinkedIn allows you to enter as many details as possible and in fact encourages you to fill in 100% of what it believes to be important. One of the most important steps for a complete profile is adding a great picture of yourself or that of your company’s infrastructure or logo. When people search for your company or your name in Google, your LinkedIn profile is one of the first results to show up. It only makes sense to have a complete LinkedIn profile and never incomplete or shabbily filled out profiles.
Build your Network
LinkedIn allows you to add people that you do not know personally but may have worked with you in the same company. It also allows you to add people who are your friends, colleagues, or just about anyone as long as you know their email address. The more number of people you add on LinkedIn, the more number of clicks you can expect when you share stuff on your company page. Remember to ask for recommendations whenever possible, and return the favor.
Optimize Links
LinkedIn allows you to share 3 links of your choice, which can also be customised to look in a certain way. For instance, you could have something like ‘My Blog’, My Company’ and ‘My Portfolio’. Instead of typing the domain name of websites, or just name them as your blog or website, it is better to describe what exactly the web link is all about. Custom headlines to these links can be altered to attract more attention of your visitors.
Participation
Like any other social network, it is important to participate in conversations and engage in discussions. LinkedIn groups allow people to post questions when they need information. Depending on what your area of expertise is, it helps to answer questions and help people genuinely. Not only will the person who asked the question get interested in you, but also other people who are viewing your answer.
Update Status
It is important to update your status at least twice a day. This helps your updates to appear in the LinkedIn stream, and people might click on the links you share in your updates so that more traffic is driven to your blog or website. Twitter updates can be automatically published over LinkedIn, which actually can be a very smart thing to do, unless you tweet a lot of irrelevant stuff.
Join Specific Groups
Depending on what your company or blog is all about, you can join similar groups on LinkedIn. People who are within the group you join can be easily added to your contacts, and that again builds your connections. Participating and engaging in conversations in niche LinkedIn groups will almost certainly help drive traffic to your website. Only, you must not spam the group with links to your website.
Start your Own Group
Starting niche groups is a great way to drive traffic to your websites and blogs. LinkedIn allows you to start a group, which can welcome those who are interested in the niche area. A LinkedIn Group can raise you to an authoritative position. This would automatically encourage group members to click on links that you share.
RSS Feeds
It is also important to add RSS feeds of your blog or website to the group you start. Each time you publish new content on your blog or website, the feeds show up in the LinkedIn group automatically, which helps people to click on those links.
Blog Application
There are WordPress and Blog Link applications that post the title and first paragraphs of your most recent articles. These widgets offer a sneak peek to your blog posts and other content, which encourages people to click on the links to read it completely. Again, this helps in driving traffic too. The blog applications can be downloaded from the “applications” link.
Importance of Keywords
Nothing is more important than adding keyword rich status updates, and filling your profile with keyword rich text. It is important not to stuff your updates and profile text with keywords, as that will definitely put off people. The idea is to intelligently use keywords to reflect what your company or business is all about.
LinkedIn can prove to be an extremely useful tool to drive niche traffic to your websites. It is important to note that the demographics of LinkedIn are very different from that of Twitter or Facebook. You get more directed and specific traffic which would be helpful for your business goals.
