Internet Marketing

5 Tips for Marketing Your Business on LinkedIn

What is LinkedIn and how do you leverage it for your business?

LinkedIn is a social networking site designed specifically to link and network business professionals online. It’s also a powerful way to meet new potential customers.

Simply put, It can be a great way to find new customers in a B2B environment, providers for services you need, and potential partners.

To do this correctly and reap the best benefits from establishing a marketable presence on LinkedIn, here are a few tips to consider:

#1 Use and Ask for Recommendations

LinkedIn offers you the ability to write recommendations for other associates. By all means, write recommendations for those associates and business connections you feel comfortable recommending. At the same time, enhance your own presence on LinkedIn by asking others to write recommendations for you. These recommendations are a wonderful way to market yourself and your business on LinkedIn.

#2 Ask and Answer Questions

LinkedIn offers a question and answer feature on their website. People post questions and members have the opportunity to post answers or responses to their questions. Answering questions is a valuable marketing opportunity because it gives you the unique chance to highlight your experience and knowledge; to show yourself as an expert in your industry. Asking questions on the other hand allows you connect with other members on LinkedIn.

#3 Use Your Photo

Because LinkedIn is a professional community, experts strongly recommend you include a professional photo of yourself. This photo will help brand you and your business. It’ll also help any networking associates connect and identify with you.

#4 Fully Complete Your Profile

It should go without saying but your profile and your summary need to be top notch. No spelling errors, no grammar errors. This is an opportunity to market yourself and your business. Think of it as your brochure, not a resume! Resumes are boring to read and generally people don’t care. They want to know what value you can offer them. Work hard to create the kind of image you want others to have of you. Start it off with an attention grabbing headline for extra impact!

#5 Don’t forget your website!

LinkedIn, of course, offers you the ability to list your website and/or blog. However, when creating your profile consider this expert tip: Select “other” instead of “website” or “blog” on your profile page. This makes it possible for you to give the link a name, which could be your Company name or marketing message. This tactic helps you create brand awareness, memorability, and a little keyword help when someone is looking online for you by your company name.

Finally, don’t be afraid to brag about your accomplishments. However, when you’re talking about what you have done make sure to phrase it as a value or benefit statement to the viewer. Again, your audience wants to know “what’s in it for me?”

WordPress Plugins | Use Contact Form 7 to Block Spam email

Back in my early days on the internet, I used to display my email address right there prominently on my website as a link that people who wanted to contact me could click on and send me an email. It was, what I thought was the best way for my readers to contact me.

I soon realized that most of the responses I was getting were from spammers! Believe it or not, there are people out there who send little programs known as “spiders” to scan websites for email addresses and add those email addresses to databases that are not only then used for their own uses but sold to others. This is also known as “scrapping” websites. The spam email was soon way out of control!

But what to do?

I started looking around and asking other internet marketers how they handled it and what they recommended. I found that there are a couple of ways to deal with this.

First, if you are running a business site, you might find that people feel more comfortable knowing your email address. Transparency is good right? Customers want to see things like your company name, address, telephone number, and email address. Not providing this information can make your business seem less legitimate. Using an email address like “info@mywebsite.com” might help a little but again, it may not seem legitimate to potential buyers visiting your website.

If you are in an e-commerce situation and do need to make this information available, I recommend that you implant the information and especially the email address into an image such as a .gif or .jpeg file. Images, can not be scraped.

The best solution is to provide this information in an image AND create a contact page for your website. There are many contact form plugins out there for your WordPress website but the one that I use and recommend is “Contact Form 7“.

This WordPress plugin allows you to create multiple forms with customization. You can create custom fields to collect the information you want and need.

Once you’ve installed and activated this plugin, you can access it from the left menu on your WordPress website. Now you can customize the submission form. You can use their default:

contact form 7

Or you can edit the text as you wish. If you’d like to add your own text field, CAPTCHA box, radio buttons or a quiz, you can do that on the right side of the page:

Contact Form 7-generate-tag

You can also specify where the form goes and how the email is formatted:

Contact Form 7-generate-tag

You can customize the completed/error messages the user sees as well.

Contact Form 7 -messages

Once you’ve saved your form, you can copy and paste the simple code it provides into a post, page or widget. The code will look something like this and the form is automatically added to your site.

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

Δ

Your readers can use this form to contact you for any reason and you’ll not only be able to respond to their requests but you’ll be able to block all that spam email you’d get by having your email address published on your website.

To Your Sussess!