The #1 Reason to Open a LinkedIn Account and Begin Using it Immediately

Without further ado: the biggest and best reason to become active on LinkedIn.com is the “Recommendations” area of their website. Most people in the current economy are either continually on the lookout for employment, or they’ve given up entirely on “working for the man” and instead have turned to small business as a means to earn their livelihood. In either case, there’s a pretty strong chance that someone, at some time, will be typing your name into Google in order to find out whether you’re a responsible, trustworthy and competent professional.

If you own your own business, as I do (I write copy via my website, Wordfeeder.com), then people looking to hire you will immediately want confirmation of your worth. Thus, you should have a page on your website that’s full of honest-to-goodness testimonial written by people who have partnered with you before, either because they hired you on a temporary freelance basis, or because you both worked for the same company.

The “old” method of gathering testimonials involved contacting your work associates via email or telephone and asking them to please endorse your work. These days, you can simply log into your LinkedIn.com account and then send an automated Recommendation request to as many people you’d like.

This is pretty cool because 1. it’s become commonplace on LinkedIn to swap Recommendations, and 2. they set up their email system so that if the person on the receiving end doesn’t reply after a certain number of days, another email invite automatically goes out.

If you’re the type who would prefer to give before you receive, then you’ll love the reciprocal nature of LinkedIn’s Recommendations feature. Set a tone of gratitude and put the ball in motion. Write testimonials for people with whom you’ve worked. Each time you do this, the person will then receive an alert via email. At the bottom of the email note they receive, they are encouraged to return the gesture and write an endorsement of your work as well.

Now, I’m definitely not suggesting that your whole reason for endorsing people on LinkedIn.com should be because you want a bunch of testimonials to appear on your own profile. Every recommendation that I’ve ever made of another person’s work was given because I truly feel that individual did an exceptional job, and deserved recognition for their talent and expertise. I would certainly never expect that someone who didn’t have a positive experience working with me to claim that they did; nor would I falsify an experience for another party. I advise you to maintain the same code of conduct when giving and receiving endorsements on LinkedIn.

Finally: there are a couple more reasons to choose LinkedIn’s Recommendations feature as a starting point for building a list of testimonials on your website.

LinkedIn is a highly popular site and very likely to appear first in a list of search engine results that come up after people research your name. LinkedIn organizes the information for you. Whenever you’re ready to then transfer your list of recommendations to your website, you can simply grab the copy directly from LinkedIn. You don’t need to get special permission from people who have already recommended you on LinkedIn. It’s a given that because they publicized having known and worked with you before, as well as had a positive experience doing so, that there is no need to ask them a second time if you can publish their words on the web. (Note: as a matter of courtesy, you may want to alert them prior to publishing their words on your website. You can ask if they’d prefer to have their last name omitted, or their title omitted, for whatever reason. This can only enhance your relationship with said person!).

Beyond this, I’m sure there are many other ways to leverage the power of LinkedIn to build your credibility online; however, the Recommendations area of their site, to me, is by far the best one.

To your networking success!


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