LinkedIn connection

A LinkedIn invitation

How To Quickly Get Your First 5,000 LinkedIn Connections …

Finding classmates, colleagues and friends is just the beginning. To leverage the real power of LinkedIn — gaining access to your connections’ connections — you have to invite these people to join your network.

On LinkedIn, the people who are part of your network are called your “connections.” A connection on LinkedIn is different than a “friend” on MySpace or Facebook. Connections imply that you know the person well or that they’re a trusted business contact. LinkedIn warns against adding complete strangers to your network, or accepting an invitation from someone you don’t have a trusted relationship with. We’ll talk more about this later.

To turn a contact into a connection you need to invite that person to join your network and they need to accept. Likewise, for another person to add you to their network they need to invite you and you need to accept. Regardless of who invites who, when an invitation is accepted, both parties are automatically added to each other’s list of connections.

There are several ways to send an invitation through LinkedIn. If you found the contact during a colleague or classmate search, or he or she is already one of your e-mail contacts, then the process is simple. You click a check box next to the name or names of the people you want to invite and press a button that says “send invitations.” LinkedIn will send a generic invitation unless you specify that you want to add a personal note. Click Here to get started.

How LinkedIn Works

1. Build Trust – You can build trust by filling in your LinkedIn profile as completely and honestly as possible.

• Upload a friendly looking photo of yourself.
• Fill out your name.
• Use a good headline (this can be your current title, but it does not have to be). For example, you write Adam A. Adams, VP of Marketing or you could write Adam The Go To Guy For Apples.
• Use a shortened url for your LinkedIn profile. This allows you to have a url which tells something about you while being short enough to share on your resume, website, emails, etc. People can click on this url and view your LinkedIn profile.
• Summary – use this area to tell as much good stuff about yourself as possible without coming off seeming like a prince/princess or a pauper.
• Go back at least 10 years with your job history.
• Include your education
• Fill the rest of your profile out completely. (If you need help with this, LinkedIn has a lot of good advice online or you can place comments below and I will attempt to answer your questions and/or update this post). Scale up your LinkedIn connection up to 9800 Connections instantly Click Here.

 

2. Send Invites – Okay this is where I messed up big time. I thought that I could have a partially completed profile and just send invites to everybody and they would accept. Things didn’t work out that way. LinkedIn will block users from from sending invites if too many people click. Get all the secrets and tutorials on how to master LinkedIn with professional advice here.

Here is how you can avoid this mistake.

• As I said, fill out your profile as completely as possible.
• Change your LinkedIn message. For example, instead of using the standard message of “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn,” you can write something like, “Hi, I don’t know if you remember me, but we met at …… I would like to add you to my professional network. If you prefer not to connect for any reason please click “Ignore” instead of “I don’t know this person.” PS Please don’t report this as spam.

The above message may sound a little desperate, but it is better than being banned from sending invitations on LinkedIn.

If you don’t know the person, but would like to connect anyway, follow the above and be honest about not knowing the person. Most people understand that people who haven’t met each other can still “know” each other. In fact, by today’s social network standards you probably “know” a person as soon as you read their profile.

Building Trust

3. Have Something To Offer – No, I am not talking about giving away gifts. I am simply stating that we all have something to offer to others. This is expressed in your profile. For example, if you have a common occupation, potential connections are more likely to accept your invitations.

If a fireman in NYC sends an invitation to connect to a fireman in California, odds are good that the invitation will be accepted and the connection will be made. However, if two people simply live in NYC or any other common location, that is probably not a strong enough bond to make an invitee accept an invitation to connect.

courtesy: Linkedin