LinkedIn Can Be One of Your Most Valuable Traffic Sources
February 22, 2010
LinkedIn is often discussed as a powerful social networking tool, particularly for business professionals, employers, and jobseekers. What is not discussed as frequently is the site's ability to simply drive traffic to your site. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes (who claims that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs) about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic.
Is LinkedIn part of your strategy? Comment here.
We asked Howes why he thinks people don't generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. "Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don't see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site," he tells WebProNews.
LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.
"Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site," says Howes. "The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well."
In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.
"You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers)," Howes tells us. "That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals."
Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he'd rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. "For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs," he says.
Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:
1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.
10. Add the blog application to your profile.
Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.
Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.
Have you considered LinkedIn's potential as a significant traffic source? Do you already get significant traffic from LinkedIn? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....
LinkedIn Celebrates 3 Million Members In The UK
November 25, 2009
If you didn't read or somehow couldn't guess from the title, LinkedIn's hit a significant milestone, attracting its 3 millionth member in the UK. This is a very good sign for the networking site that's focused on connecting people aside from those who see each other at school or parties every week.
Indeed, LinkedIn made something of a big deal out of the occasion. Kevin Eyres, the managing director of LinkedIn's operations in Europe, wrote on the LinkedIn Blog, "To mark hitting yesterday's special milestone, one of our co-founders Reid Hoffman made a special trip to the UK to personally thank and celebrate with some our members at a networking event (naturally) in central London last night."
Eyres then continued, "As the conversation flowed it was humbling to see the variety of our membership all in one room; from financiers to software developers, journalists to entrepreneurs and public sector figures to marketers, all these and more were represented from young rising stars to established industry leaders and CEOs."
Depending on what sort of destination Eyres and Hoffman have in mind, LinkedIn has a ways to go, of course. On the financial front, Hoffman indicated that an IPO is not in the company's immediate future. And in terms of traffic, Facebook hit 3.5 million users in the UK more than two years ago (and has since seen growth skyrocket).
Still, netting 3 million members is an impressive achievement, and Eyres promised that more interesting stuff is on the way.
Have You Read This?
> Now LinkedIn Will Be Featured In A Lot More Apps
> LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties
> LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates
Now LinkedIn Will Be Featured in a Lot More Apps
November 24, 2009
LinkedIn has opened up its platform to developers. It can be accessed at developer.linkedin.com.
"Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today," says LinkedIn' Adam Nash. "However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work."
Now developers can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications. LinkedIn's developer site has APIs and widgets.
"Over the past months, LinkedIn has supported integrations with some of the most prominent and critical software applications in the enterprise," says Nash. "Partnerships with companies like IBM, Blackberry (Research in Motion), and most recently Microsoft, have given us time to invest in both functionality and scalability of the platform."
Developers interested in using LinkedIn in their apps need only fill out a form at the site. The LinkedIn platform leverages the open OAuth standard, so integrations should be that much more simple.
On a related note, Twitter client TweetDeck is already utilzing the LinkedIn platform. They just announced that you can view or take action on your LinkedIn network updates from within the TweetDeck application.
It should be interesting to see the kinds of apps that start taking advantage of LinkedIn's APIs. This could turn out to be a very significant event for increasing business networking, and even matching prospective job candidates with jobs.
Have You Read This?
> LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties
> LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates
LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties
November 19, 2009
Heavy users of LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook will soon have to do a lot less tab-toggling. Microsoft has introduced something called the Outlook Social Connector, and early next year, LinkedIn will become the first networking site to support it.
As you'll see in a moment, the Outlook Social Connector is an accurately named offering. A post on the LinkedIn Blog explained that, with it, a user will be able to "[k]eep up with LinkedIn connections right from your email inbox." You can see a picture of what that'll look like below.
Then comes click-saver number two: the ability to email LinkedIn contacts straight from Outlook. The Outlook Social Connector will create an Outlook Contacts folder with all of their info, and automatically fill in "to" fields when users start to type out people's names.
Finally, while using Outlook, it'll become easier to forge new connections. The post suggested, "Just click a button next to any e-mail you receive and instantly send an invitation to connect to the e-mail's sender."
We'll admit: there may not be a huge market for this sort of thing. But in certain sectors (HR, PR, etc.), the Outlook Social Connector's tie-up with LinkedIn should come in handy, and will likely increase the profiles of both entities.
Have You Read This?
> LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates
> LinkedIn Announces 50 Million User Milestone
