How To Network On LinkedIn

LinkedIn makes it very easy for you to network with other people. At the simplest level, you could simply type in the name of people who you might know so and just type your name and do your search and people will come up. Now, you can see when the list of results come up, LinkedIn will show second or even third period.

There will be a number here that will shows. Now what that means is these people have second level connections. What that means is you don't know them but someone who knows he knows them.

So, John Smith, I have a connection here that might know John Smith so how want my network is I would approach this guy and ask him to connect me with him. The other way I could find people is actually go to 'contacts' and click on 'add connections'. Now there's two ways in which I can add connections.

One is I can actually log into my email and the other way I can do it is enter email addresses. Now, this is a common separated list so you basically, just put in all email addresses and separate them by a comma. You could also import your desktop contacts if you've got Outlook, you can explore your Outlook contact file and just click on choose file and then from your desktop import the Outlook file that you want to use and what will happen is that all your Outlook contacts will get an email from you saying that you would like to connect with them on LinkedIn.

If you already know these people, it's a good chance that they'll connect with you. LinkedIn also gives you something, an option called 'people you may know' and what's it's doing, it's looking at people who are connected to people you already know and it's working out that you might know these people and gives you the option to connect with them. You can also connect with people on LinkedIn through membership on various LinkedIn groups so if you're a member of any professional associations for example, if you're a member of the Chamber of Commerce, go into your group and see who is on there that you'd like to connect with.

So for example, I'm a member of company of director of networking; I can go onto here, click on members and see who I'd like to connect with. Again, you can see, according to the number, whether it's a first or second, you can see how well you know them. Here's a word about LinkedIn Etiquette.

When you want to connect with somebody, I would always recommend that you've actually had previous contact with that person. If they don't know who you are, they're not going to be interested connecting with you. They're also not going to be very useful to you.

So how do you connect with people who you are not yet connected with? Well, the first thing you would do is, if you are a member of this group, you might have met some of these people at a networking meeting. If that's the case, what you can do is, you can request to connect with them. So what we're going to do is we're going to find a second level contact, what you do is you invite the person to connect and then you have a few options.

If you know their email address, you could put their email address in and if you've done business together, you have that option. If you are a part of the same networking group, you have that option and you can put in a customized message. There should always be a starting point, either you have chatted with this person on line, you've done business with him, or you know him from a previous meeting.

The better you know somebody, the more useful they'll be to you. And that's how to network with people on LinkedIn. .