LinkedIn is preparing their platform to help you take your business to more people than you would ever have imagined. Learn how you can take advantage of this new platform to reach many more business owners and decision makers.
LinkedIn Influencers Paved the Way
If you are a LinkedIn member (and you should be!), you will know that influencers like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Martha Stewart share unique business insights with LinkedIn members via posts on the LinkedIn platform.
These influencer posts have proven highly successful, generating thousands of views each (which obviously serves LinkedIn’s Alexa ranking very well — the site is now the ninth most visited site on the Internet, with more than six million unique visitors per day!).
Now You, Too, Are Invited to Participate
So successful was the Influencers program for LinkedIn, they decided to open up their platform to professionals like you and me.
LinkedIn believes (quite rightly) that all professionals have valuable knowledge, opinions, and insights that other people can benefit from. Because of your specialized knowledge of writing (whatever niche you are writing for), you are ideally positioned to give valuable advice to others, especially business owners and decision makers.
By posting your valuable advice on LinkedIn’s platform, you will benefit many of those key people, some of which will not be your clients yet.
Thus, you become the trusted expert to your readers — and their go-to person when they want something written.
Prolonging the Benefits
Any articles you post on LinkedIn’s platform will automatically become part of your professional profile. With a growing portfolio of articles, you will cement your position as an expert in your field.
While LinkedIn will “eventually” enable this functionality to every member, they opened the door now to some people on a request basis. That simply means you have to apply to get “early access” to this functionality.
This Is a Major Opportunity
So why is this a MAJOR opportunity for you?
Well, it means you now have access to a platform where millions of professional people go.
And while many of the LinkedIn members are “just” employees, there are many business owners and top decision makers who also visit the site regularly. So you now have the opportunity to showcase your business to these key decision makers, which can result in more B2B copywriting work for you.
You can get followers (á la Twitter), and everything you post will automatically be sent to them. More importantly, however, is the fact that LinkedIn has proven to generate some of the highest levels of viewer engagement on the Internet. Joe Pulizzi, of the Content Marketing Institute, mentioned that Facebook has nothing like the levels of engagement that LinkedIn has. The numbers of comments on a valuable piece of information blows the mind … as does the number of times it is shared!
Maybe that is why the Content Marketing Institute called this new move by LinkedIn a strategy “to dominate content publishing!”
In their own words, “When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network, and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled.”
Imagine posting an article and getting hundreds of comments on it, as well as being shared thousands of times! Of course, not every single article will achieve those numbers — it will depend on the value of the information shared in the article. At least you know that the visitor numbers are there already … all you have to do is to provide quality information that is valuable to your readers.
You Can Make LinkedIn Your Blogging Platform
Even if you already have a blog, it would still make sense to publish some of your posts on LinkedIn to help spread your inbound links onto a major platform with millions of users. Since LinkedIn rates high with the search engines, those inbound links will prove valuable to your search engine rankings.
Improving your search engine rankings is only a small benefit, however.
LinkedIn’s raison d’être has always been to bring together professionals from all over the world … and it has succeeded in building the biggest social media platform dedicated to professionals.
There are probably more business owners and decision makers on LinkedIn than anywhere else on the Internet. With this new platform, LinkedIn now makes it possible for you to position yourself, and your business, “in view of” all those business owners and decision makers.
This, I believe, is the biggest benefit for you as a B2B writer.
What to Write About
LinkedIn is all about business, so we will (fortunately) not see the kinds of useless information that people put on Facebook. The good news about this is your articles won’t be like million-dollar houses among shacks.
You should, therefore, publish your best business advice and/or tips, as well as lessons learned from your mistakes — all things that will prove valuable to business owners and decision makers.
How to Get Started
For more information about publishing on LinkedIn, go here.
This is a major opportunity to get in at the beginning of a new program with a vast built-in target audience. Go for it, now!
