It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about LinkedIn, with my last post being about how to use LinkedIn to help your business. With this in mind I thought I would expand on my last post and see how else LinkedIn can help promote yourself or your business online.
Primarily I want to look at how you can use the site as a source of referral traffic, helping to increase the number of targeted people visiting your site.
If anyone else has some other ideas on how you can use LinkedIn to generate referral traffic, I’d love to hear from you via the comments section at the bottom of the post.
1. Answer Questions via Blog Posts
LinkedIn isn’t only a great source of traffic, but also a source of inspiration for possible blog post topics. If someone asks a question about something you’re knowledgeable about, why post the response directly on LinkedIn? Instead you could create an entire post about it, populating your blog at the same time. You can then answer the question on LinkedIn, with a link directed towards your blog post for more information.
This has added value to both you and your site/business. It gives a direct link back to your site in front of numerous people who are looking for the information you can provide. Also this can help with any link building activity you might be doing on your site, as well as making your site look up-to-date and authoritative.
If you only have a finite amount of time each week to build content, why put that content on LinkedIn when you can get people viewing it on your own site instead?
2. LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn’s advertising is currently based on a CPC or CPM model and allows you to create and place ads on a variety of pages. The site gives you the ability to target individuals based on job titles, particular industries, geographical areas, company size or even company name.
Whilst the reach of LinkedIn Ads is nowhere near that of Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter, the advantage of this product is that it can be far more targeted with your advertising. For example, if you’re a Digital Marketing Agency with LinkedIn Ads, you could set up advertising to target only Digital Marketing Managers working in London for companies larger than 100 employees. As you can imagine, this would be far more targeted and likely to get a better response than trying to target these individuals through AdWords or adCenter.
3. Company Profile
This is your centralised location on LinkedIn for users to engage with your business and allow you to showcase news, business opportunities and job openings. All of these features gives you an opportunity to link back to relevant areas of your site. Having a well thought out and populated LinkedIn page guarantees your company is presented in the best light for anyone looking for you on the site.
LinkedIn is also great for online brand protection as it is seen as a highly authoritative site and will usually rank quite well. If you’re looking to dominate page one for your brand name, then a claimed and up-to-date LinkedIn profile is a must – take a look for yourself, Google ‘Koozai’ and our LinkedIn profile should be on page one. Doing it this way means that you’re more likely to funnel any brand related traffic from search engines back to your site.
4. Group Engagement
There are thousands upon thousands of groups on LinkedIn, with which you can engage with to help relevant users find out more about yourself and your business. If you’re looking to get your name out there and known in your industry, then engaging with groups and answering questions is a great way to start. If you’re knowledgeable about online marketing for example, then it makes sense to engage with groups related to SEO, PPC and Social Media.
Engagement with these groups will give you an opportunity to create links back to your site, get your social profiles out there, like Twitter, and increase your reputation within the industry as a knowledgeable source. All of this can help drive more traffic to your own site.
5. Ask Questions
Instead of just simply asking a question to a group in full on LinkedIn, with little to no opportunity for people to engage with your own site, post the question in full as a blog post on your own site and post a summary of the question on LinkedIn. Doing it this way will help you populate your site with new, unique content and you get the question out there via LinkedIn. This will help you get more people viewing your site and even engaging with your blog post directly, either by commenting on it or sharing it amongst their own social circles, on Twitter for example.
For this to work, the post needs to be well thought out with lots of opportunities for engagement, pictures, graphs; a detailed explanation about your question is also recommended to get people responding to the post and sharing it. This also has the benefit of possibly getting your own content to rank for anyone asking that questions themselves in search engines – helping to increase search traffic in the process.
Other ways of generating traffic via LinkedIn you might like to consider:
Integrate your WordPress blog with your profile by adding the blog application to your profile. Viewers of your profile will now see what you’ve been blogging about and are more likely to visit a blog post of interest than just a link to your blog.
Add your site’s RSS feed to groups that you are a member of, which will update the group each time you publish a new blog post and show a link back to the post on the member’s profile page.
Sign off your responses to answers with a signature by including your name and site URL. As you’re legitimately responding to a question, your likely to be seen as authoritative on the topic and more likely to get someone to click on your link.
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