If you are actively working towards establishing your online presence, there is no doubt that you have come across social networking sites. So which is the largest and most popular one out there? Its LinkedIn.
Guy Kawasaki states that, "All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.”
For those of you who are already a part of LinkedIn, the question on your minds must be, how do you get all that connections. You are limited to around 3000 connections, so what after that? But there is a limitation there, you may not know more than a handful of associates and you do not want to be accused of spamming.
Step-By-Step How to Guide to increase your LinkedIn connections on autopilot
1) For someone to connect to you, you need to know them or have access to their email id. LinkedIn allows you to post your email id as part of your profile. Use Google’s gmail id specific for this purpose, as it has some of the best filtering mechanism.
2) Contact members who have LION on their profiles. LinkedIN Open Networkers (LIONs) are a group of people that are open to all connection requests and most have their emails listed on their profile for connection request. So the next step is to make some modifications to your profile to be identified as an open networker. Add MyLink500 and/or LION to your headline on your profile
3) Many people on LinkedIN search for other networkers to connect to that have their email ids listed for keywords like LION, @gmail, @hotmail, @yahoo, etc To be found in the same search results add the following text to your contact settings:
4) Next you need to register yourself to be found as open networker at http://toplinkedin.pbwiki.com/
5) Next we import all the open networkers who are willing to accept connections from the same site. Open the file and paste the results into your Excel or any spreadsheet application. Export the data as a csv file. Next, upload your contacts at http://www.linkedin.com/uploadContacts?displayUploadContacts=
You send invitations to select list of these open networkers or everyone with one keystroke (in the below screen you will 484 connections requests in one shot. 41 others with the letter A were sent separately) LinkedIN will not allow you to send multiple invitation requests to the same person in under 72 hours (a really cool feature)
Emails that no longer match with records on LinkedIn will give an "error" message (these users have dropped these email ids or are no longer in Linkedin. With these steps you should see your connections increase over the next few weeks. In a few hours after the connection request you will see your connections increase (this is 3 hours after the above request – a million new connections in few hours)
6) Once you get approved to the MyLink500 network at http://toplinkedin.pbwiki.com/ (usually 3-5 business days) you will find yourself receiving 10-20 new connection requests each week. Here is a tip. You do not have to accept each connection individually. You can select all your invitations and accept them all together from your Inbox.
Now, what do you do with all these connections? Anytime you update your profile, your connections are informed. They say, the money is in the mailing list. Do you think you have a mailing list now? Do you see what I am getting at?
There will be many people out there, interested in your service or product offerings. The fact is that, they just don’t know you exist. Leverage these connections and watch your business grow exponentially.