This book was written for owners of small businesses who simply have no time or patience when it comes to LinkedIn and other forms of online networking. You are probably too busy to take a full day out of the business to go on a LinkedIn training course, where you know you would learn loads, but implement none of the great tips because you are just too busy being busy.
You want someone to give you an easy to understand, simple and practical guide that will be effective for your business and take very little time to implement. As a small business owner myself, I know and appreciate the pressure you are under and believe me if someone had given me this book at the start of my LinkedIn journey, I would not have had to spend years and years trying to work it out.
You really can get massive business opportunities and new clients from what is simply a phenomenal sales and networking tool (if you know how). You will really like this book and benefit hugely from it if:
– You have no profile at all on LinkedIn and are starting from scratch
– You already have a profile on LinkedIn but can’t remember the last time you looked at it
– You are using LinkedIn already but currently do not get any business from it
– You have limited time to spend on LinkedIn although you know it’s important to your business
– You are ready to take your online reputation and your business to the next level
– You want to position yourself as the ‘go-to’ expert in your field
– You know your target market is on LinkedIn but you have no clue how to gain access to them
– You have employees that you could replicate this advice to
– You have less than 10 minutes a day to spend on networking sites like LinkedIn
This book was written for every busy Entrepreneur that knows the huge potential of LinkedIn, but has no idea how to unlock it. There are many resources available on the subject of LinkedIn. You can access thousands of free articles and blogs out there about how to make LinkedIn work for your business, so why choose this one? What we have done here is pull it all together, wrap the information up into 107 easy and simple steps, almost like a checklist that you can work from and dip in and out of as and when you have the time.
If you put aside 1 hour a week for the next 4 weeks you would be able to completely revamp your LinkedIn presence and start to see an increase in visits to your profile, an increase in the number of people attracted to your profile and a significant increase in the amount of times you show up in search results. In 2015, a staggering 6.7 billion searches took place in LinkedIn’s search bar. If you are not being found on LinkedIn, then you can be assured that your competitors are. We wrote this book to make sure it’s your profile they are looking at and not your competitors!
This book should be used as a checklist of tips for you to implement. Depending on your current knowledge of LinkedIn and how much you use it, you may find that some of the items on the list of 105 tips are already in place for your LinkedIn profile. If so just quickly move on to the next one. I know that your time is precious and I would not want to waste it!
We have made things very easy for you by providing a downloadable checklist with all 107 tips listed so that you can simply mark them off as you complete each one.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR CHECKLIST
The checklist won’t mean much to you if you choose not to go on and read the book, especially if you are pretty new to LinkedIn or if you don’t use LinkedIn that much today as this list doesn’t give any explanations. That’s all coming up in the book. Our purpose in writing this is simple. We want to help you win more clients, and the more tips you complete from the list of 107 ways to do this, the better your chances of securing new business opportunities from LinkedIn.
The way this book is written, you would be able to delegate many of the tips to your staff if you have a team around you. We have also written this with your team in mind, if you do employ staff then every single one of them should also implement these tips on their own LinkedIn profile. Why not gift this book to every employee as a thank you for their hard work, and in return your business will massively benefit from the maximum exposure you will get.
Having an increased online presence and a wider network from each of the team will really give you an added edge over your competitors. You never know, you may find a LinkedIn whizz in the team who fancies taking on more responsibility in this area and could really ramp up your LinkedIn presence as a business.
Co-Author of this book, Sam Rathling, wrote about this in the book ‘GIVE: 16 Giving Strategies To Grow Your Business’. You will find some great chapters on saying thank you, giving responsibility, staff happiness, employee engagement and time management. As a thank you for purchasing this book, we have included a bonus chapter for you at the end, enjoy your free gift.
So now that you know how to use this book, let’s start by looking at how to win more clients by having a really credible LinkedIn profile.
The VCO Process is vital for you to understand if you are to be successful at marketing your business through LinkedIn. This process is usually referred to when we talk about referral marketing, when networking on a face to face basis, and the key is in the power of relationships. The system of information, support and referrals that you assemble from your networks, both online and offline, will be based on your relationships with other individuals and businesses. Referral marketing works because these relationships work both ways and both parties benefit in some way.
A marketing plan where referrals are centric to the success of that plan, involves relationships of many different kinds. Relationships don’t just spring up fully grown, they must be nurtured and as they grow, the relationships are fed by mutual trust and shared benefits for each party.
The relationship evolves through three phases: Visibility, Credibility and Opportunity. We call this evolution the VCO Process®. First your business and you must be visible, if we discuss the VCO Process in relation to LinkedIn, this is all about you having a presence online, having a personal profile and a company profile and being seen to be active online. When it comes to moving an initial connection through to the next stage, which is Credibility, you must always keep in mind that any successful relationship, whether a personal or a business relationship, is unique to every pair of individuals, and it evolves over time. The relationship starts out tentative, fragile, full of unfulfilled possibilities and expectations. It grows stronger with experience and familiarity, and then it matures into trust and commitment.
Credibility online and especially using LinkedIn is all about how you message your business, how you start and build relationships and how you position yourself through your profiles and in the way you approach relationship building and growing your network. The VCO Process describes the process of creation, growth and strengthening of business, professional and personal relationships. The main problem with people’s lack of understanding of this vital process is that they forget the step that involves the ‘C’, credibility is all about growing and nurturing the relationship before moving to a sale or moving into a place where someone will refer you to one of their clients. All too often we see people using LinkedIn as a selling platform, spamming their network with requests to buy products or services from them, or visit their website. The credibility part is vital if you want to grow your business on LinkedIn.
Only when you add Visibility to Credibility can you move to Opportunity and Profitability in a relationship. When you move the relationship to the next level you will be referred, recommended, promoted and will spread great word of mouth about you and your business. When you are networking online the VCO Process® is even more important as you may not get the chance to actually meet the person you are networking with on a face to face basis. Always bear in mind that V+C =O. This simple concept has made a bigger difference in more people’s networking efforts than any other single idea you will come across and should be remembered as you read this book.