Using Linkedin to promote your blog

One of the most powerful ways to drive quality traffic to your blog is Linkedin, but most bloggers including me have neglected this. Recently Comscore reported that 65% of Linkedin consisted of people who earn up to $100,000 a year, so this means you’ve got a big audience if your site promotes expensive affiliate products. Conversions and sales are secondary, so for now lets just concentrate on driving traffic.

Linkedin may look very confusing at the beginning, especially if your an addicted Facebook user, but you’ll sure get a hang of it, though Facebook has a much larger audience, Linkedin is better for bloggers as it has got very less restrictions on self promotion and moreover its much more easier than Facebook to find a targeted network and build on it.

However, nothing comes in social media without hard work and planning, Linkedin too takes up the same effort and hard work like any other social media site. But the results from it are just fantastic and are better than any other site. In the long run Linkedin means more than just traffic because many people have gained funding, advertisers and even big contracts over it.

An appealing profile

On Linkedin the first thing a person would see before visiting your site or connecting with you is your profile, so this should be given the most importance than anything else. Its recommended that you complete your profile 100% with all the information about your past, present and future goals. Its also necessary that you put a good profile picture of yours, so that the person reading your profile takes you seriously.

Your profile isn’t something which is going to give you traffic, but its really important if your looking for advertising deals, partnership opportunities or other business activities, and its also necessary to build your network on Linkedin, not to forget that once your profile has been built its going to appear on the front when somebody types in your name, so it plays a key role in brand exposure as well.

After you’ve built a nice profile, its time to promote it, for this I started off by inviting my Facebook friends to connect with me on Linkedin and I placed a big button on my site which brought in a lot of visitors. So I did build a good network on Linkedin and as most of you would know, Linkedin helps promote you to different people immediately after you find a few connections, so my network kept growing.

Increase your connections

The more connections you have the more exposure your site gets, your first few connections can be made as I mentioned above and with that method you’ll surely be able to touch upto 100 connections and the later on the number of connections will keep increasing, but if your looking to make it grow fast then their are a few steps I took for doing so.

Firstly join a few groups related to your niche and start getting active there, comment on all links and discussions and try to build a good reputation among the members, this way many people will try to contact you and I’m sure you’ll find a huge network if you do this continuously everyday.

Answer questions

One of the best ways to promote your blog on Linkedin is to answer questions in their QnA section, find questions related to your niche and try to answer everything possible, this is sure to bring in exposure to your profile, but for traffic you’ll need to post links inside your answer or inside the resources section, that is why I recommended that you search for questions related to your niche. You’ll have to be careful about users who could report you, if they feel that your scamming them.

Answers also has features such as best answers and ratings, so if your answers are consistently good, then you have a chance of being a featured expert, which allows your blog to be exposed in a new front. So initially don’t try to promote yourself, instead contribute something worthwhile to the community and then you can wait for the long term returns.

If you immediately start putting up your links everywhere your sure to get flagged and you’ll surely loose the reputation built over hours and maybe something from which you can never recover.

Niche groups

Whichever niche your part off, I’m sure you’ll find a suitable audience on Linkedin and the best place to look for your audience would be Linkedin groups. Just go to search groups tab and search for keywords relevant to your niche, all the groups matching the keyword are ranked according to their popularity, so I’m sure you’ll find a few groups in the first which have thousands of members. So after you’ve made your search, join all the groups which have a big audience.

You can join how many ever you wish, but choose a few to get active on and after you’ve made your choice start commenting and interacting with the other members of the group, start submitting stories and try to get as much interaction as possible on them. This will surely improve your reputation in the group and many people will start contacting you, when this happens to you, then you can be sure that its time for you to start self promoting in the group.

Actively use your status

If your in love with Twitter or Facebook, you don’t have to be worried about missing both as Linkedin provides exactly the same system for updating friends and fans. What ever you type as your status, it’ll be seen by all your connections and this maybe a great way to update them about your latest post, but like everything else in social media you’ll have to give something to get something.

So start off by liking and commenting on your connectors status updates and then start posting a few resourceful links, messages, quotes and thoughts, which would bring about a discussion and when this discussion reaches to an high extent you can be sure to post your own links. Even after that make sure you do this actively and respond to all comments and likes your updates get.

Start your own group

I’ve already mentioned above on how powerful groups are on Linkedin and now just imagine if you could own one such group, then I’m sure you’ll be able to promote the hell out of your blog. This surely requires a hell lot of time, thats why my group is still lonely, but you’ll surely find this of great use in the long run.

Creating a group is really easy, then you can start off by inviting your connections to join your group and then promote it in other related groups as well, I think this is more than enough to get a few members inside, but it takes a hell lot of effort to make them active members.

On to our readers

This is our first post on this topic, and we hope we have managed to update you with something better, this post took a hell lot of work and I hope you could gain something from this, If you have any suggestions or opinions or anything related to this topic please do feel free to use the comment form below and also don’t forget to follow me on twitter and subscribe to our feed.

I’m doing everything possible to build my profile on Linkedin, so if your interested in connecting with me for having mutual benefits, then please do connect with me here.

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