Not bad for a boring little social networking site, right?

That"s when it dawned on me that I was completely missing the boat with LinkedIn. LinkedIn"s search feature wasn"t about finding contacts I knew, it was about finding contacts I NEEDED to know. The whole "degrees of contact" bubble weren"t a fun way to see who knew who, it was invaluable insight into how to make contact with new companies.

(For those new to LinkedIn, the site will track the connections between you and every other member of the site and will tell you how many "degrees" apart you are from any one contact. 1st degree means you know them personally, 2nd degree means you know someone who knows them, 3rd degree means they"re a friend of a friend of a friend...and so on.)

Using LinkedIn"s Search Feature to Expand Your Business

So how exactly am I using LinkedIn these days? Well, I"m using it to daisy chain my contacts and meet new people. Search Engine Guide and our network of sites has been growing like crazy and with the introduction of our new Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference series, we need to expand our network of advertisers and sponsors accordingly. While I"ve been around long enough to be pretty well connected in the search realm, I"ve only just begun to get actively involved on the small business side of things. That means working my network to expand my network is essential.

Here"s a quick example of what I mean.

For our last show, we"d been in touch with the team at Carbonite, a subscription based service company that backs up your hard drive online. This time around, we"d stumbled across Mozy. Mozy offers up a very similar service, but with prices starting at under $5 a month, we knew they were perfectly targeted for the very small businesses that attend our show. Unfortunately, I didn"t know anyone at Mozy. We all know cold calls don"t tend to go over well, so I did what I now always do in these situations...I headed to LinkedIn and ran a search.

A simple search for the word "mozy" turned up a slew of Mozy employees.

A few days later, I decided I wanted to try and get in touch with Stamps.com. Once again, I headed over to LinkedIn, ran a search and was greeted with a list of possibilities.

Once again, it took a matter of moments to find out Jim Bortnak was the Chief Marketing Officer over there and the person I needed to get in touch with. This time, I had better news: Jim was a second degree contact. That meant I already knew someone who knew him. Next step: click through to his profile page to find out who "someone" was. LinkedIn makes this part simple. On any member"s profile page, you"ll find a little box that looks something like this:

It"s a bit like asking your friend to pass a note to another friend two aisles over in study hall when you"re in junior high.

That"s just two examples, but I"ve used LinkedIn in this way dozens of times over the past few months. Sometimes it pays off in spades. Sometimes you never hear anything back. Either way, it"s far more effective than sending blind emails or making cold calls.

Even apart from the convenience factor, you get an added boost of credibility when you are introduced by someone who knows you. I trust my contacts. If they emailed me to say I should speak with someone, I"d speak with them. In the meantime, as a business owner, I hope they say the same about me.

Don"t Miss Out on LinkedIn"s Potential

That"s not the only reason to love LinkedIn of course. There are groups of like minded people for a wide range of topics you can join and make contact with and you can send out questions and survey"s to get feedback from your personal contacts. There"s great value in those things. But for me, the real value of LinkedIn is in using it to discover the hidden connections among my network and the rest of the world. You never know who you almost know. Why not find out?

Want more from your web site?
Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.