“There Could be Trouble” by Ben Grey
Some rights reserved
If you make heavy use of LinkedIn there’s a fair chance that at some point you’ll get yourself into trouble with LinkedIn and face greater restrictions.
Network
This isn’t the magical cold selling system. Don’t start selling the second you have any contact information from people. It’s a social network. Just because someone connects with you doesn’t mean they want 100 emails, voice calls, InMails, Skype IM’s, Twitter DMs, etc. Get to know them. Violate this by starting out selling immediately and being annoying and you will likely get flagged as spam.
Be Careful With Promoting Your Content
You write great content people love. You’ve been invited to blog on LinkedIn. You jump in with both feet. Once you’ve written stuff, you want to post links to it on every LinkedIn group you can find. This is where you need to be careful. Even if you get approved for every post and all of them have lots of positive feedback, LinkedIn will bust you for massive cross posting and require you to get approval for every post going forward. Here’s a thread on this issue with examples of this happening.
Don’t Have Too Many Invitations Out
You’re a friendly person, an open networker, there are no strangers, just people you haven’t met yet. Awesome stuff. Me too. There are even groups that congregate people who feel this way too. In theory. The problem is, some people change their mind, but still belong to the group. Or they joined the group and then forgot to ever look at LinkedIn again. Or they look at LinkedIn every 3 months. You send out a million invitations, and before long to send out another, LinkedIn is requiring you to add an email address to invitations, even if that wouldn’t normally be required. Likely your problem is you have too many outstanding invitations.
Make a policy of only having invitations out there for a week. Modify as you need. Go to your LinkedIn email sent folder here. Hover over the subject and teaser and you’ll see some links, including the trash can to delete. Delete anything you don’t need, and particularly all invitations older than a week, or whatever you decided. For the sake of simplicity, delete all sent invitations older than what you want – don’t worry if they were accepted or not. Do you need to go back and look at what you wrote when someone accepted an invitation? Probably not.
Copying Blog Posts
You get invited to blog on LinkedIn but you already have a blog. Can you just copy/paste posts from your blog to your new LinkedIn blog? The jury is still out on this one. While it may not violate LinkedIn’s policies, it might violate Google’s, and it may impact how well your content is ranked in searches. That would be a bad thing.
Do these things, keep an ear out for other things that are not helpful, and LinkedIn should work well for you.
