31 Days of LinkedIn: A Business Experiment

posted on Mar 01 by Tim Conley in the Internet Marketing category

Lately, I have been getting asked by small business owners about LinkedIn. It usually starts with the question, “What do you think about LinkedIn?”

And before I can get past my stuttering “uhhh,” out pour more questions about how useful it is, whether any customers can be generated with it and much more.

Here’s the thing. I’ve had an account on LinkedIn for about 3 years, but I haven’t really used it except to connect with people I know. Even then, I don’t communicate with them through LinkedIn. I use, in this order, email, phone, Facebook and finally Twitter to get a hold of them.

I have never tried to get any clients from LinkedIn nor have I ever tried to gain employment through it. I don’t have any first hand experience to share with others, which is strange since I tend to run business experiments to find out for myself if something will work the way others say it will.

I’ve done experiments with driving traffic from Web 2.0 publishing sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages. I’ve tested Twitter for click-throughs, viral messages, getting assistance with questions or problems. In over 3 years, I haven’t conducted any experiments with LinkedIn.

Since March has 31 days, I am officially starting my 31 Days of LinkedIn Business Experiment. I’m using the term experiment quite loosely here, but here is the goal. Within 31 days I intend to gain one new client. Hopefully, this client will want to rebrand his/her company website and implement conversion and follow-up systems, but getting a search engine optimization contract or even developing a single print ad will be acceptable for this ‘experiment.’

Note: I currently have 77 connections on LinkedIn and my profile is 85% complete, which means I’m not starting from scratch. But, that’s all I’ve got. I’ve never participated in a group or answered or asked a question on LinkedIn.

If you are on LinkedIn, connect with me. Please make sure you put LMM in the invitation so I know you are awesome and not just a spammy networker. You can find my LinkedIn profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tim411. If you are a member of a group or created your own group, please invite me to join.

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