LinkedIn is a very powerful tool that can help us find potential customers, employees, suppliers, partners, experts or a new job. To be able to reach them you need to have a network what LinkedIn calls your first degree network. That's the only way to see the relationships between people and to be able to tap into the power of LinkedIn.
In this article the first phase to build your network will be shown. In part 2 you will be presented two more ways. Phase 1: Lay the Foundation of your Network
1. Upload your contacts from Outlook, webmail like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL or other address books. You can do this via the green "Add Connections" button in the menu on the left on every page and then click on the "Import Contact" tab.
When you upload these contacts they are only visible to you. There is also no message sent by LinkedIn.
2. Look at the contacts, which are now available in "Imported Contacts" (under "Contacts" in the menu on the left on every page). The people who are already on LinkedIn have a small blue icon with the letters "In". Since they are already using LinkedIn they will be open for a connection with you.
Select the people who are already on LinkedIn and who you know (with some people you may have just exchanged business cards with them10 years ago which decreases the chance that they will remember you and you them in some cases). If you have lots of people in your address book this might take a while and several pages to go through. If this is the case for you, you can divide this group in several smaller ones. The people you have selected will appear on the right hand side.
3. Write a semi-personal message to them. First check "Add a personal note to your invitation". Then replace the standard "Hi, I'd like to add you to my network" message with a semi-personal one. You can't make it too personal when you use this method because you have selected several people.
Remark:
If you have a large address book you want to split it into more groups. At the same time you don't want to type your message again and again. Of course, you can use notepad or Word to store your text and do copy/paste. However, there is also another tool that you can use for many repeating tasks, which can help you with this. It is called "Texter". Read more in the chapter "Free Tools to save you time when working with LinkedIn" in the book "How to REALLY use LinkedIn".
When you have done these three steps people will start to react. They will accept your invitations and your network will start to grow. In part 2 of this article you will be presented two more phases to quickly build the foundation of your network.
To your success !
Jan
Jan Vermeiren, founder of Networking Coach
PS: more tips can be found in the Amazon Best Seller "How to REALLY use LinkedIn".
Make sure to get your FREE light version of the book at: http://www.how-to-really-use-linkedin.com