5 Tips For Using LinkedIn To Drive Traffic and Boost Sales

As you may be aware, LinkedIn can be very effective for people selling to other businesses (B2B) - for many such businesses, it's a key source of traffic and leads.
In fact, it can be a more logical place to concentrate your marketing efforts than Facebook. Facebook users are often less interested in business or sales talk, and traffic can be harder to convert.
In contrast, LinkedIn is mainly used by business professionals as part of their working life. It's also rapidly growing, with numbers approaching 400 million.
But how should you use it for marketing? Here are 5 ways to start using LinkedIn as a key part of your overall marketing strategy, and help drive traffic and sales:
1 - Optimize your profile
Spend time on your profile and consider the image you're presenting through it. Also, consider who you want to attract.
This will help build your LinkedIn network, building your own authority and credibility, and can lead to new partnerships, business opportunities, and direct traffic.
LinkedIn can be traditionally thought of as a recruitment tool, and a lot of people craft their profiles in line with this--even when they're a business owner and/or they're not actually looking for a job.
If instead you're on LinkedIn with the primary purpose of finding new leads for your business, craft your profile accordingly.
In what way can you "sell" yourself?
A sales message talks about the benefits, rather than just the hard cold facts of what something does.
Do the same for yourself--what's the benefit for the other person in connecting with you? How would they benefit from the association?
2 - Get involved with LinkedIn Groups.
Search for LinkedIn Groups related to your niche or industry, and join them. Get involved by creating appropriate and useful content and participating in discussions. Work toward establishing some deeper relationships with others in the group.
Once you get your feet wet, you could also try setting up a group of your own and encourage people in your niche to join. Groups will be most effective for you where you aim to 'give' value as much as possible rather than 'take.
Avoid making blatant sales pitches in the groups. Instead think about how you can attract leads to you by simply contributing and helping others. You'll get much better results this way.
3 - Post content on Pulse.
Yes, just like I'm doing here.
This article is actually based on an original blog post, albeit with some adaptations and updates, so you don't have to create content from scratch each time. You can just rewrite other content you already have, and adapt it as necessary for the Pulse environment.
How does this help you?
Here are just some of the benefits:
-- You attract people on LinkedIn who may not have come across you before - those who wish to read more of your content in future can start following you and be notified whenever you publish something new.
-- When someone does follow you (or Like your post), an update is posted for their connections to see, potentially attracting more Follows and Likes.

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