Linkedin has yet not stopped growing in 2022, which is not a common thing since it was launched multiple years ago.
One of the reasons LinkedIn has grown is that some years after it was launched, it was bought by Microsoft and since then, the leadership of Microsoft has been putting a constant focus on making Linkedin a better platform for marketers to grow on, especially for those in the B2B niche.
Linkedin has got many updates over the years which have added multiple features to LinkedIn which made LinkedIn a way better platform.
Even in 2022, Linkedin is getting regular updates which keep making it even a better place than it is now.
Linkedin gets over a billion visits every month which places Linkedin as the top website for having the most traffic on the internet.
And most of that traffic consists of B2B users which means that those users on Linkedin are for business purposes and not for entertainment purposes which makes marketing on it even easier.
So if your niche comes under B2B, you have a great chance of getting the best results from LinkedIn than all the other platforms because for B2B, Linkedin is the most ideal place that you can think of.
In this article, I will be mentioning all the ways to market on LinkedIn, I will be explaining every single step in detail from creating an ideal profile for LinkedIn marketing to making connections with other LinkedIn users and marketing your services and products to them.
Setting up a Linkedin Profile
The first step in starting LinkedIn marketing is creating an attractive and professional profile so to anyone who sees your profile should be able to click on the profile and get all the information about your professional career that they need.
Name
The first thing that you will need to do when creating your Linkedin Profile will be to obviously enter your name in the name field of the LinkedIn field, make sure that you only enter your name in that field, and do not try to benefit from that field for other purposes such as to enter keywords to rank up for certain keywords.
This field is specifically to show your name to anyone who sees your profile.
Headline
You can use this Headline section to add keywords and express your niche in just one line.
Unlike in the name field, in the Headline section, you can add keywords so that you can rank for the keywords that are related to your skills, your niche, or to your professional career.
These keywords that you will write in your Headline will also be shown to people who see your profile in the search results or which your profile shows up to the ones who are looking for connections.
Therefore, you should use this section of your Linkedin profile wisely, express your professional career, your skills, or your niche in just a line, and also use Keywords so that you can rank for them.
Contact information
Contact information is another really important field that you will need to fill out so that anyone who visits your profile should be able to contact you if needed.
Since Linkedin has received some updates, the contact section of the profile appears in the top section with other fields such as social media handles such as Twitter, your blogs, etc, Unlike your profile, your contact information will not be shown directly, rather the user will need to click on the contact button.
Before the change in the user interface of Linkedin Profile, contact information did not only contain the contact information but also showed websites and other social media accounts but now they are separate.
Summary
A summary is a field in a LinkedIn profile that is used by Linkedin users to describe their whole professional careers in a short form usually not consisting of a lot of pages rater on some paragraphs.
You can also use this field to express your professional journey in a number of paragraphs, not dragging to a long-form.
Express where you started to where you are now all in 3 to 4 paragraphs, however, you can change the number of paragraphs according to how long or how short your journey has been in your professional life.
The summary section is not only limited to expressing your journey via text but you can also add visuals to your Summary section, but you can also add images, videos, and graphics as well to better express your professional journey to the ones who are visiting your Profile.
You can also include Youtube videos in the summer if you want to.
Even though there are other sections for Linkedin profiles where you can also add visuals and media to express your achievement and your experience but in summary, you can highlight the ones which you think were your biggest accomplishments.
Past and current Job experience
In the Past and current job experience section of your profile, you will need to express the previous experience that you have had in your professional career, the jobs that you have done, how was your experience up to the current experience that you are having right now in your professional career.
Other than the headline section of the LinkedIn profile, the Past and current job experience is another section that can also be used for entering keywords so that the specific profile can rank for LinkedIn results.
Since you will be expressing your past and current professional experiences you can use all the keywords you want that can be relatable to your professional career, however, it does not mean that you should spam the past and current experience section with keywords just that you can rank for search results.
You should keep a balance of the number of keywords that you use in the past and current section of your Linkedin profile.
Skills and expertise
In this section, you will be describing the field and the niches in which you are an expert, or to which your skills can be relatable.
You will be using Keywords to express your skills and your expertise as well which will be another factor for your ranking on the search results of Linkedin.
It is not only important for ranking on Linkedin search results but also for people who visit your profile, they can know what are your skills and if your skills are good enough, and if they inspire them they can also endorse your Linkedin Profile.
When someone endorses your profile on Linkedin, you will get a notification by Linkedin about this event and if you’re kind enough or if you want, you can endorse the one back who endorsed your profile in the first place in an old follow-for-follow tradition, I added the last line by myself.
Another advantage that you can gain when someone endorses your profile is that you will have a chance of increasing your connections which I will talk about later in the article.
Accomplishments
You would have most probably already guessed what this section is used for in the Linkedin profile and that is to show the accomplishments that you have made throughout your professional career.
If you are confused that what type of accomplishments you should be adding here, well the most common type of Accomplishments can be products that you have made which can be as simple as writing an Ebook or making a course into something more complex such as an online tool that you have made.
The one thing which is unique for accomplishments is that it gives you the choice to enter a direct link with the accomplishments that you have added in the Accomplishments sections of the Linkedin Profile.
In this way, you will be directly able to direct Linkedin Users to the products that you have entered there.
This can also be used to make your mailing list grow if you have entered a lead magnet in the form of a free ebook that you have made, as the users can directly visit the ebook from your profile, and you will have a chance of getting their email.
Making connections
Making your connections on Linkedin and growing your network will be considered the next step for doing Linkedin marketing after you are done setting up your professional profile.
The more connections you will have on Linkedin, the bigger your network be.
If you are confused about networks on Linkedin, do not worry I can explain that to you.
A network on LinkedIn refers to the number of different types of connections that you have, they can vary from 1st to the 3rd degree which we would discuss later on, the network also includes the other Linkedin users which are in the same group as you and at last your followers.
1st degree = people who have a direct connection with you
2nd degree = people who have connections with your 1st-degree connections
3rd degree = people who have connections with your 2nd-degree connections.
So basically, your network on Linkedin will be the list of people who Linkedin thinks you are familiar with.
By this, you can easily understand the concept that the more connections you have, the bigger your network will be on Linkedin.
And simply, the bigger your network will be on Linkedin, the better you will be able to do marketing on Linkedin since the bigger the network you will have, the bigger the reach you will have.
There are different ways of making connections on Linkedin and I think all of them are fairly easy, you will not need to do anything hard into making the connections, just some simple and easy steps.
Use an email address for making connections
First of all, you can use your email list to make connections on Linkedin, you can use the email addresses that you have in your Gmail, and then the addresses which will also have an account on Linkedin, you will be able to send them a connection request through Linkedin.
After you have sent the connection requests o each of the addresses in your Gmail which had an account on Linkedin, now it is time that you start using Linkedin for finding people to make connections with.
Use the “people you may know” feature
The first method will be to use people you may know feature of Linkedin.
In this section, Linkedin will be showing you all the profiles that Linkedin Thinks you know, in this way you will be able to send connection requests to all of the profiles that Linkedin hows to you.
This is the most accessible method of making connections on Linkedin that I can think of.
But you will quickly run out of the profiles that Linked presented by itself to you that you may know in order to make connections with them.
Sending connection requests
After that, you should be looking to send connection requests to the people who are in the same group as you on Linkedin.
Since there are a lot of groups for every single niche on LinkedIn and each group has thousands and thousands of members to whom you will be able to send connections, you will never need to worry about running out of profiles to send connections to as you had to in the people you may know section and in the part where you had to use emails to make connections.
However, when you are in the process of sending out connection requests, you should be careful to whom you are sending out the connections if you make a mistake while sending connections and end up sending a lot of connection requests to the Linkedin Users you do not even knew and just saw their profile and decided to send them the connection request.
If you send connect requests to Linkedin users you do not know and neither do they know you, you can seem like a spammer who is spamming connection requests all over and you can get reported by the ones who received your connections without having any engagement with you before, this will cost you to lose the ability to send connection requests for some time.
That is why it is better to send connection requests to the users you may know or with which you have engaged before.
Therefore, it is a really good practice to engage with a user before and then send I’m a request for making a connection, in this, you will not seem like a spammer nor like a complete stranger who just randomly has sent a connection request as you would have already engaged with them early on and it will also make a logic for sending the connection request.
At last, you can use your audience from other platforms for making connections on Linkedin.
For example, if you have a good amount of followers on Instagram or if you have a good audience on Facebook, you can direct that audience to your Linkedin profile in order to make connections with them.
in this way not only you will be able to make more connections but you will also have more grip over your audience, you will be able to connect with them more strongly as you will not be limited to a single platform for engaging with them and you will be able to increase the trust that they have on you and they will be more loyal.
Your website can be another good platform for mentioning your Linkedin Profile and then sending visitors from your profile to Linkedin and then making connections with them.
Increasing your recommendations
Just like making a big network on Linkedin is important, having recommendations is also beneficial for you and important at the same time, the more you have, the better it is for your LinkedIn marketing.
What are recommendations
If you do not know what recommendations are on LinkedIn, then do not worry, I can explain them to you.
A recommendation is by its name a recommendation or if you want to call it praise given to your skills and to your work on your LinkedIn profile by your connections on Linkedin.
These recommendations will be showing up on your LinkedIn profile and if you have a lot of them, that will be another proof that your work and your skills stand out since you are being raised and recommended by so many people.
Sending requests for recommendations
You can ask your connections on Linkedin to give recommendations to you.
To do that, just go to the recommendations section on LinkedIn and then click on Ask for a recommendation.
there you will be based to choose the recipient which will be the person to who you will be requesting for giving you a recommendation.
That person should be from your connections.
After you have chosen the person from which you want to get the recommendation for your work, then you will need to personalize the message.
LinkedIn will also you some questions by itself which you will need to answer to make your message more precise.
Then, you can also type a personal message by yourself to the recipient to whom you are requesting a recommendation.
In this way, you can request recommendations from your connections on Linkedin and increase your recommendations, however, it will depend on the recipient whether he is impressed by your work or not for giving you the recommendation.
Another way to increase the recommendations is to first give a recommendation to a person you worked with in the past, in this way it will not be random.
And in return, you can expect the person to give you a recommendation as well however it will depend on that person if he has enough information about you or not.
But this is another method for growing your recommendations on Linkedin.
There is also a third method for increasing your recommendations on Linkedin and in this method, you will not need connections nor will you need to use LinkedIn, you will be doing it outside Linkedin.
If you have worked with a business before and provided your services to them, you can also ask them to make a connection with you on Linkedin and then give a recommendation for your work On Linkedin through their email.
This is a very good way of requesting Recommendations outside Linkedin and the success rate is also really high.
Linkedin groups
Just like a lot of other social media platforms such as Facebook, on Linkedin, you also have an option to join groups as well.
Groups provide a lot of value on Linkedin from helping in growing your professional network on Linkedin and expanding your beach by providing you users to make connections to driving traffic to your website.
Joining groups
To join Linkedin Groups, just go into the search bar and type in a keyword that should be relatable to your niche, and then Linkedin will present you with a lot of different groups in the search results that you can join.
Some groups will let you join immediately, while others will first analyze your request and then decide whether to make you a member of the group or not.
but most of the time, you will not be facing any problems while joining groups on Linkedin.
After you have joined the groups, now you will be able to share the latest news about your website on the group by sharing links as well.
You will be able to share links to your website but make sure that you do not become a spammer.
in this way, you will be able to directly drive traffic from a Linkedin Group to your website.
Other than that, it is also important that before you start sharing links in a group, you read the policies and the rules of that group as some groups do not like users sharing links inside the group so you also want to take care of that.
On Linkedin, joining other groups will not be the only option that you will have for using Linkedin Group features for marketing, because you can make your own groups on Linkedin as well.
Making your own group
Making your own groups on Linkedin will provide you with even more value than you would have gained by joining other Linkedin groups.
You might say that when you join another group on Linkedin, you already have an audience to which you can promote but when you make a new group by yourself, you have to grist grow that group and then market through it.
That might be correct to some extinct but the reach you can get with the audience of your Linkedin group can not be achieved by joining other groups.
First of all, in your own group, you will be the admin and all of your posts from the beginning will have more importance than other members of the group.
And secondly, Linkedin Groups have a feature that the admin of the group can send direct messages to group members once a week for the announcement which seems similar to sending emails, and therefore you will be able to use your group like an email list without having the need to put in the efforts that you need to do put while making an email list.
However, when you’re making a group on Linkedin, you have to keep in mind various things, first of all, is that the group should not be based on your brand name or on your website name.
Because if you create a group on Linkedin under the name of your website, then it will not grow.
How many people on LinkedIn will know your website? not many, and that is why your group will not grow as fast just by the cause of its name.
you should think of a name that everyone in your niche should be able to relate to.
For example, if you are in the affiliate marketing niche, then instead of naming your LinkedIn group according to your website, you should name it affiliate marketing sales tips, in this way such a name will be able to attract a huge amount of Linkedin users who will be in Affiliate marketing because they can instantly relate to affiliate marketing and getting sales through it.
With your own Linkedin group, with more reach and with more advantages, you will also have to deal with more and more responsibilities.
For example, when users will be sending you requests for joining your group, you should make sure that the user is authentic. make sure that he or she will not start spamming in the group, that is because, on every platform, there are a lot of users who are just there for spamming and hoping to get a sale out from their spamming campaign.
If you just accept everyone without analyzing them properly, your group will be full of spam messages and will have no value to provide therefore, your Linkedin group will not grow as much because who will want to join a group where there is nothing except spa marketing messages.
You will also need to put in efforts to make your Linkedin group seem like it is active.
you will need to try to engage with the posts that other users are making so that they should know that the posts they are making in this group are getting engagements and are not just staying there in vain.
Create a page for your company
Just like on Facebook, you can also create pages for your website or for your brand on Linkedin which will provide you with a lot of advantages.
When you search on Linkedin for a term, if the term is relatable to a company, a page for that company will also show up on Linkedin results.
However, if you have not created such a page for your company, then when you will search for your company name, your company page will not appear because simply you still have not created one for your brand or for your website.
For creating a page for your company, you will need a business email and not just a normal Gmail or yahoo, etc based email address.
The business email that you will need for creating a page for your company should also be based on the domain of your company.
For example, if I want to create a page on LinkedIn for my website idrize. I will need a business email that will be based on my domain idrize.com and will look like this example@idrize.com
For you, the email should like this example@yourwebsitedomainame.com
If you try to build a page with a normal email like @gmail.com your page will not be accepted by Linkedin and you will be rejected.
Fill the overview section
After you have started creating a Linkedin company page, you will need to also fill the overview section of your page for your company which will be showing information about your company to the ones who visit your page.
You will need to add the name of your company, also add how big your company is, how many employees it has, how long your website has been around, and all the other basic information that you can think of.
You also be mentioning the niche in which your company is based if it s based in digital marketing, you should mention it, or if to any other niche your company is related to, you should be mentioning the field in the overview section of your company page
Conclusion
Linkedin is one of the best social media platforms to market your business and your brand and drive sales from it since its uses are not there to entertain rather they are there to find business, that makes Linkedin an ideal platform for you and gives you a better chance of finding customers.
However, for beginners, Linkedin can seem hard to market, since its certain features cannot be found on a lot of other platforms and are often not understood by most of the users who have just started using Linedn such as Recommendations and connections.
In this article, I have explained to you all the basic parts of Linkedin that you will need to understand in order to effectively do marketing on LinkedIn.
All the methods that I explain here are for free and you will need to pay money in order to execute the strategies that I have mentioned in this article, not even on ads.
From growing your connections and increasing your network on Linkedin to making your company’s page, I have explained it all and hopefully, now you will be able to start your marketing on Linkedin and start getting results.