Sunday, 6 March 2016

“21 Days” Gives Insight into LinkedIn Success

LinkedInIn the past, geographical restrictions may have prevented you from networking with those in your particular field of interest or business. Launched back in 2003, LinkedIn has made it far easier to network on-line with your ideal fellow professionals and to help grow your business. “21 Days to Success with LinkedIn” follows the activities and lessons learned by a marketer being mentored in the use of LinkedIn, and underlines how simple and powerful it can be to master the use of LinkedIn for your business.

What is “21 Days to Success with LinkedIn” About

“21 Days to Success with LinkedIn” covers a three-week period in the life of the fictional character Gnik Rowten, the owner of a year-old marketing firm. Gnik decides that he wants to use LinkedIn to improve his business network and connections, and the book takes a look at how, with help from friends and mentors, he learns how to use the most common features available from a free LinkedIn account.

Gnik’s mentors are real life LinkedIn experts who include Ted Prodromou, Donna Serdula, and Viveka von Rosen to name just a few. Having ascertained what he wants to use LinkedIn for and what he expects to gain from it, he is guided by his mentors on what he needs to do on LinkedIn to be able to fulfill his goals. During meetings and conversations with his friends and mentors, Gnik is provided with sound advice and tips on how best to make use of the features contained within LinkedIn to help grow his business network.

As Gnik soon finds out, having a good profile is a start but there is much more required to achieve success using LinkedIn. His mentors teach him the best methods to connect with like-minded people in his field of expertise. They advise him of the need for a strategy of accepting incoming connection requests and the risks of just accepting all connection requests. The difference between recommendations and endorsements is explained in detail, as is the need for joining groups and making personal conversations a precondition to connecting to people online.

Much more information is supplied to Gnik, and by the end of the three week period he is already comfortable with, and extolling the power of the LinkedIn platform.

Gnik’s fictional but based-on-reality experiences are the creation of two authors who certainly seem to know their way around the topic of networking for business.

Ron Sukenick (@rsukenick) has been writing about networking for over twenty years. Sukenick is the president and founder of The Relationships Strategy Institute and provides personal coaching in the relationship building activities of businesses and organizations.

And Ken Williams formerly worked as a sales manager at Vector Marketing American Income Life Insurance. His work there gave him the insight into the importance of building and maintaining relationships, and he now is a highly regarded public speaker and author.

What Was Best About This Book

Firstly, I must confess to having a LinkedIn account which I use rarely and ineffectively. In the past when I owned my own businesses, as far as networking was concerned, I was a big fan of BNI. “21 Days to Success with LinkedIn” shows the power of networking on-line as well as in person, and the way the book has been written really puts this point across as well as making it an interesting way to learn about the LinkedIn application.

What Could Have Been Done Differently

I thoroughly enjoyed the way that the authors made what could have been a dry subject/book into such an enjoyable book and subject to read about. In fact, I was enjoying it so much that I was sorry when it came to an end. Maybe it could have been slightly more detailed and longer?

Why Read “21 Days to Success with LinkedIn”

One of the key facets to growing a business is to network. If you are still networking the old fashioned way, or have simply overlooked LinkedIn as a powerful tool to use to network, then you really must read “21 Days to Success with LinkedIn”. It provides those who may be skeptical and have yet to use LinkedIn — or even those who have made only a half-hearted attempt to use it — with a true insight into the power of the platform. As stated in the book: “It’s the largest accessible database of professionals for professionals,”

And failing to use it is a failure for you and your business.

This article, "“21 Days” Gives Insight into LinkedIn Success" was first published on Small Business Trends

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