Get Your Small Business "Linked In"

Linkedin is a great tool for small business marketing. In this post, I will discuss some of the best features central to your Linkedin profile.

The Events tool helps you market an event to other Linkedin members. You can also look for events you might wish to attend, actual or virtual.

Events Home is a list of events you are hosting or wish to attend.

Search for events you want to attend under Find Events.

My Events features events you produced in the past and those scheduled to take place.

Add an Event is where you publish your event for automatic updated and email it to up to 50 Linkedin contacts within your network. For a price, you can also market the event outside your network.

Blog Link and Word Press can be used to have your professional blog automatically become part of your profile by utilizing these tools for promotional marketing.

Google Presentation and Slide Share will take your best existing presentations and publish them to Linkedin for marketing and business promotion.

Discussions and groups are very prevalent on Linkedin. Right now over 357,000 of them are up and running as virtual markets to share news, find jobs, and promote your business or service within Linkedin.

The Searches feature helps you reach out to business contacts (even someone you don't know) for a specific need or opportunity.

Network Update lets you know the revisions people have made to their profiles. It also makes aware if they've added new contacts to which you should reach out, widening your contact network.

Browser Toolbar installs a thumbnail into your browser, making it faster to navigate through the Linkedin network.

The Questions and Answers feature allows you to answer posted questions, proving your expertise and knowledge in your field. If one of yours is chosen best answer, it will be included in your profile to help with promotion of your business.

Mass Email up to fifty people at once or send a question to up to two hundred.

Job Postings can be done for free in groups of which you are a member when the "jobs" feature has been activated by the "owner' of the group. You can also choose to pay for a posting. The cost is one hundred ninety-five dollars for thirty days.

You can utilize the Tagging feature to arrange contacts according to groups that make sense to you.

This is not an all-inclusive list detailing all of the business marketing tools available on Linkedin. It is simply a quick over-view of what I consider to be the best for small businesses. Next time, we'll talk about how some businesses are actually using these tools as marketing promotions.