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Published:
April 20, 2021

LinkedIn For Dummies

Overview

Brand yourself like a pro on LinkedIn 

LinkedIn multiplies what you know by the power of who you know to deliver the number one social platform for business professionals and new job seekers. LinkedIn For Dummies shows LinkedIn newcomers the best ways to discover new opportunities, enhance their personal brand, network with other professionals, and give an exponential boost to their career. Consider this book a passport to help you connect more successfully with many of LinkedIn’s 660+ million members in over 200 countries, as well as an expert guide to the platform’s tools and features and the proven tactics that get you noticed.  

In this friendly, all-access introduction to the LinkedIn scene, entrepreneurship guru Joel Elad clues you in on the essentials. Get the latest insight on how to create an attractive profile that will make employers give you a second glance as well as techniques for making useful connections across the globe. In no time at all you’ll also be right at home with the profile user interface and getting busy with adding content, searching for career opportunities, and, if you’re looking to hire for your company, recruiting top candidates.  

  • Build your personal brand and market it 
  • Sell yourself by highlighting skills, awards, and endorsements 
  • Get connected with LinkedIn groups 
  • Manage and make introductions via InMail 

Relationships matter: LinkedIn For Dummies gives you the online social skills to turn six degrees of separation into the colleagues, mentors, and friends who will transform your career—and your life.  

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About The Author

Joel Elad is a social networking, Internet, and ecommerce guru with a software development background and a yearning for entrepreneurship. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Facebook Advertising For Dummies and Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies as well as previous editions of LinkedIn For Dummies.

Sample Chapters

linkedin for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Signing on to LinkedIn means you’re part of the largest online professional network in the world. Look here for helpful guidelines for using LinkedIn, especially when job searching. LinkedIn helps you create and maintain an online profile you can then use to build a professional network. © metamorworks / Shutterstock.

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Articles from
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The more you do, the more contacts you could have in your LinkedIn network! If you want to build and expand your LinkedIn network, follow these steps: Fill out your LinkedIn profile completely. Check for former colleagues and classmates who are on LinkedIn by using specific LinkedIn searches. Import your Outlook contacts.
Your LinkedIn profile page is your personal home page to the business world. To enhance your profile, log in to your LinkedIn account, hover your mouse over Profile on the top menu bar, and then select Edit Profile from the drop-down menu. Then follow these tips: Create a customized URL. For example, you can set up your LinkedIn profile to be found at www.
To make effective use of the functionality and advantages of LinkedIn, stay updated, and enhance your professional life, keep these helpful LinkedIn tips in mind: Start leaving recommendations for first-degree network connections that you feel have earned a great one. Invest a good amount of time upfront to create a great, detailed profile.
You may wonder how LinkedIn pulls together relevant articles and news sources. LinkedIn uses an undisclosed algorithm and additional variables to decide what articles are included in your news feed. In addition, your first-degree connections plus the following three sources help determine the content of each person’s news feed: Influencers: Years ago, LinkedIn reached out to 500 prominent people around the world — from CEOs such as Jack Welch and Richard Branson, to authors such as Deepak Chopra, Guy Kawasaki, and Tony Robbins, and to popular entrepreneurs such as Mark Cuban — to share their wisdom and experience and generate discussions in the business community.
LinkedIn allows you to create public profile badges. Many people have more than one website that communicates what they do, both professionally and personally, on the Internet, such as a variety of social media accounts, a website, a blog, or a company website. Why should you repeat yourself, in terms of your professional identity, across all these sites, when you can simply provide a link back to your LinkedIn profile from any other web page!
The good news is that you don’t need to install anything or pay to use many of the LinkedIn features that will help you keep up regular communication with your network. You may have to adjust settings to get some automatic notifications.One of the easiest ways to get started with good communication is to share a LinkedIn update, as follows: Pull up the home page and click in the update text box, in the middle of the screen, where the prompt reads Share an article, photo, video, or idea.
Sometimes, you might have to send a file that documents your experience instead of pointing people to your LinkedIn account. Suppose that your resume or CV is out of date, but your LinkedIn account is current. The easiest solution is to quickly take a snapshot of your LinkedIn profile and save it in a file that can be easily shared.
When you go to make changes to your LinkedIn account, you’ll likely start with Account settings. On this Settings page, you see the basics of your account, what automatically plays or is saved when you use the account, and even how to download a set of your data. Let’s then move to Partners and Services, where you configure how you work with other services, and finish with Subscriptions and Account, which control your account status.
On the Communications Settings page, you see every major facet of communications involving LinkedIn, starting with Basics: what kind of notifications should LinkedIn alert you to, what kinds of messages you want to receive from members, who can invite you, how often LinkedIn can email you, and what options you want when using LinkedIn messaging.
LinkedIn’s search screens allow you to perform detailed searches by using check boxes and drop-down lists, so you don’t need to know any programming to dig deep into the LinkedIn network. However, built-in options are available if you want to add specific words, called boolean operators, to your search. Here are some of your options: OR: When you do a search that could call for one or more options, but the search must contain at least one of those terms, the OR command is incredibly useful.
When you want to find a specific person on LinkedIn, you most likely start your search by entering the person’s name. When you start to type a name in the search box, you see a list of people based on what you’ve typed so far. If someone is a second- or third-degree connection to you, that info shows up next to the name.
Part of the success of finding a job is to have an appealing LinkedIn identity so hiring managers can find you and want to contact you with an opening. According to Forbes magazine, 90 percent of employers are using social media sites to recruit employees, with LinkedIn the most used of those sites. After all, the best search is when someone comes to you with an opportunity without you sweating the details.
All LinkedIn members, whether they have a free or premium account, may publish a long-form post (or article for short), which can reach your entire network. Guidelines prevent someone from spamming the network with purely promotional information or information without value. Check out LinkedIn for help with pages for articles, including guidelines.
LinkedIn recommendations are important for job seekers and employers. Recommendations are a good way to highlight your experience to your LinkedIn network. Occasionally, a recommendation may not fit with your goals and it could be time to remove or revise. To remove a recommendation you’ve received or to request a revision, do the following: Click the Me icon, in the top navigation bar, and then click View profile in the drop-down list that appears.
After you use LinkedIn to post a job request, you can continue to use LinkedIn to assist you in the screening part of your hiring process. In addition to asking for references from the applicant or possibly ordering a background check from an independent background check agency, you can use LinkedIn to verify information in your applicant’s resume and application at any stage of the process, without paying a dime!
There’s an old saying: “You have to know where you have come from to know where you are going.” This holds true even for LinkedIn. Before you start searching throughout the network, it’s helpful to understand the reach of your own immediate network and how your first-degree connections’ networks add up. The first task is to become familiar with your own LinkedIn network.
As you grow your LinkedIn network, you need to keep track of the invitations you send and receive. Here, you discover ways to manage your invitations on the LinkedIn website. Tracking sent invitations To avoid sending a repeat invitation by mistake, or to review your sent invitations to see whether someone has responded, you need to track your sent invitations.
What’s the value in getting a premium account on LinkedIn? Besides the features listed in the previous section for each account level, premium accounts are designed to give you more attention in areas such as job searches.When an employer lists a job posting and collects applications through LinkedIn, premium account holders show up at the top of the applicant list (similar to the Sponsored result in a Google search) with a Featured Applicant status next to their name.
There is a wealth of information contained in your LinkedIn account — from your list of connections to your experience, education, skills, and other profile information, to your status updates, long-form publisher posts, and publications posted through LinkedIn. As time goes on, the information from this account may contain more up to date info than your email or contact information systems.
If you use Evernote to help control all the information you record and access on a constant basis, you can benefit from an official integration between Evernote Premium and LinkedIn that will make your networking life much easier.LinkedIn + Evernote = automated networking processesAn Evernote mobile app feature parses a business card you photograph, pulling out key contact information.
Signing on to LinkedIn means you’re part of the largest online professional network in the world. Look here for helpful guidelines for using LinkedIn, especially when job searching. LinkedIn helps you create and maintain an online profile you can then use to build a professional network. © metamorworks / Shutterstock.
LinkedIn lets you publish articles or long-form blog posts. After you click Publish, you may think your job is done, but it has only begun. As people read your post, they can interact with it and with you as the author. Remember the following after you publish a post: Monitor the statistics. When you look at your post, you’ll see three key numbers associated with views, likes, and comments.
Similar to other social media sites, LinkedIn allows you to stay connected via the news feed. Imagine if you read a newspaper that showed you only articles that mattered to you. (For that matter, for many of you, imagine the days you might have read a newspaper.) Customized news is ubiquitous on the Internet nowadays, and on LinkedIn, it’s called your LinkedIn news feed.
Over the years, LinkedIn groups have evolved to provide a quality place for interactions and content while fighting attempts to flood groups with spam or promotional content. Therefore, LinkedIn groups are now private, members-only groups, which means that you can’t join a group without approval or an invitation, and the conversations in a group are not visible to the outside world (including search engines).
LinkedIn is a great way to help you use professional networking to job search. Here are some helpful hints when using LinkedIn to look for employment: Make sure your profile is up-to-date, accurate, and matches whatever you provide to a hiring manager or recruiter. Stay on top of your network updates so you know if someone in your network has been promoted or switched jobs to a company where you would like to work.
The LinkedIn Settings & Privacy page is, by default, full of information about how you interact with the site. Think of the Settings & Privacy page as your command console for working with LinkedIn. You can get to the page at any time by clicking the Me icon, on the top navigation bar, and then clicking Settings & Privacy under Account.
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