If you have been thinking that LinkedIn was only for posting resumes and looking for jobs, you need to think again. If you are able to broaden your thinking a little, you will find out that LinkedIn offers several opportunities for driving traffic to your offers, blogs or websites.
There are several ways you can leverage LinkedIn to your benefit, that you might not have thought of, but if done correctly, can bring streams of traffic in your direction.
LinkedIn Groups and Answers hold the key to this traffic source, although there are even more opportunities within LinkedIn to use to your advantage.
LinkedIn Groups
You will find out that LinkedIn Groups are a great source of traffic but you need to do it correctly so that you’re not marked as a spammer.
The first thing you need to do, is to make a research within LinkedIn groups, for relevant to your niche groups. Narrow your search down to approximately between 5 to 10 groups which really zero in on your subject area.
Then you will need to post relevant comments, to these groups. You can’t just post any old comment. You need to become responsive and be involved in the discussion thread.
When people comment on what you have posted, make sure you reply every time with something pertinent and relevant. Lively discussions can result in many more threads being started and every time this happens, it will show up on the profile of everybody in that group.
There is huge potential with this, for you to end up with a lot of eyes looking at your comments and if they find them interesting people will certainly want to learn more from you.
Blogs And RSS Feeds
Another thing you can post when participating in group discussions, is your blog articles, or any other relevant articles you may have written on the topic.
You’ll need to do this for each group you have joined. Experiment with this first and you’ll soon see which articles and posts are working the best, so you can refine this method until you are achieving the result you want in terms of traffic to your blog.
It’s also a good idea to install the LinkedIn blog widget. This will ensure that your articles and blog posts are automatically posted to your profile through your RSS feed.
Start Your Own LinkedIn Group
Another thing you might want to consider, is to start your own LinkedIn Group. This will boost your credibility and help you get loyal followers to your blog or website.
A great advantage of having your own group is that you can send a welcome email to your new members and even up to one message per week to your members whenever you want to announce or share something.
Try to not overuse this because if you just send messages promoting your business you will lose your members, instead try to give value by sharing information that will actually help them.
Your LinkedIn Profile
One important thing you will need to take care before you start engaging in LinkedIn groups, is to set up your profile in a way that it stands out from the rest.
If people visit your profile and it is not grabbing their attention, they will probably go away without clicking on your website links or connect with you.
Your profile needs to be concise and contain value that a visitor will want to see. It needs to be interesting and have an excellent photo of yourself. You have to give your visitors a reason to search for you.
Another tip is to make your website links as compelling as possible, so instead of ‘my blog’ for example, you could say ‘find out about “widgets†on my blog’. This is a call to action customization which will bring you traffic.
Make sure you complete all the sections of your profile and when combined with the RSS feed postings of your blog articles, you will have harnessed a powerful tool to drive targeted traffic to your websites or blog.
LinkedIn Answers
Another excellent way to take advantage of LinkedIn and get targeted traffic in your direction is to answer questions on LinkedIn Answers.
You need to answer as many questions as possible. This will ensure you increase your chances of having that visitor check out your blog or website, because they will want either more information, or they’ll want to find out a bit more about you. It is also likely that other people who answer the same questions, will also want to learn more about you.
If your answer is rated as the best, there’s a good chance that you might end up being perceived as an expert on your field. This could lead to more connections on LinkedIn and actually it will be easier to sell your services or even gain loyal visitors to your blog. Don’t forget to include a relevant link to your content in the website area as well in the text area.
You are still not using LinkedIn as a Traffic Generation Tool?
All these ways can help you get targeted traffic to your site that actually converts easier than any other source of traffic, and best of all, it’s free. So if you haven’t been using LinkedIn as a traffic generation tool, then you might want to try these methods and be very pleasantly surprised at the boost in traffic and conversions.
Kostas Chiotis is an economist and entrepreneur both in the online and offline world. You can find his blog at OpportunitiesPlanet.com,where you will discover everything you need to know about SEO Opportunities, Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing and more…