7 Tips to Promote Your Business on LinkedIn

Until a few years ago, one of the biggest challenges you faced as a small business owner was how to make people know that you were good at what you were doing. Despite superior products or service and happy customers, you may have had trouble showcasing your achievements to the world and growing your business.

Technological innovation has come to your rescue now, and its name is LinkedIn.

As a professional networking site, LinkedIn helps you promote yourself or your business without costing you a single penny. You can use LinkedIn to identify potential customers, make and maintain business contacts, improve your visibility, and establish yourself as an expert in your field. With more than 90 million registered users worldwide, LinkedIn brings the business community together under one umbrella and facilitates smooth business communication.

Here are a few tips you can use to promote yourself using LinkedIn:

• Create an effective profile: Your LinkedIn profile is your face for potential business partners. Complete your profile in all respects. Provide all details of your business without being too verbose, and include the URL of your company website and any additional links that highlight your achievements.
• Improve your presence in search results: LinkedIn profiles are ranked quite high in Google and other search engine results. To raise your ranking, set your profile to Full View and modify the default URL of your LinkedIn profile to include your company name.
• Expand your reach: The bigger your network, the greater the visibility of your business. Try and connect with the maximum number of people relevant to your company from the huge network of professionals and experts on LinkedIn. You can use the Advanced Search feature of LinkedIn to trace people you might want to connect with. In addition, you should regularly explore the networks of your connections to identify any profiles in which you see business value. Then ask your direct connections to introduce you to their connections. Avoid directly sending a connection request to someone you don’t know to avoid the perception of spamming. 
• Use LinkedIn applications: LinkedIn provides several applications that you can add to your profile to improve sharing and collaboration with your connections. For example, WordPress App will link your WordPress blog posts with your LinkedIn profile. Or you can use Tweets to post the critical parts of your business conversation on Twitter from within LinkedIn.
• Establish yourself as an expert: There are numerous groups on LinkedIn where people with common interests have discussions, share opinions, and resolve questions. You can become a member of the groups relevant to your field of business and provide answers to the queries of other members. This will help you establish yourself as an expert, and other group members will be inclined to visit your profile and your company website. You can also answer questions on LinkedIn Answers to gain credibility for yourself and visibility for your business. Make sure that you provide only meaningful responses to queries. Vague responses given just for the sake of promoting your URL might be viewed as spam.
• Create your own group: You can create your own LinkedIn group and invite your connections to join it. You can lead the discussions, at least initially, by bringing up topics that are relevant to all members in your field of business. Add keywords in the title and description of the group so the group name appears in the beginning of search results in LinkedIn and Google searches. You can also add your company URL and links to your blogs on the main group page to attract traffic and gain visibility.
• Showcase your good work: Request that your existing business partner connections recommend you on LinkedIn, highlighting the good work you have done for them. Visitors to your profile will notice and read these recommendations, and it might open new windows for business opportunities and growth.

Following these best practices in using LinkedIn will raise your visibility significantly while building relationships that lead to increased business activity.