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LinkedIn is a great place to connect with potential employees and clients, catch up with co-workers, and connect with other people in your profession. However, many users don’t utilize the benefits of LinkedIn to its full potential. In order to be successful while using LinkedIn, be sure to stay active in other areas besides your own personal profile. This includes LinkedIn answers and groups. These are great places to share information, find professionals in your industry and local area, and more.

Join a few LinkedIn groups that directly relate to you and what you’re doing- this includes local community groups such as “Kansas City Professionals” and industry specialty groups, like “Internet Marketing Experts” if you were a freelance online marketing consultant.

Post Job Openings

After joining applicable groups, regularly post job openings that your company may have. Along the same token, look for active members in your area that are participating in groups that you are also involved in. Posting a link to the job description, as well as a contact name and email address or link to the online application. Make it easy for people to apply. Be sure to monitor your post to check for questions people may leave in the contact section.

Promote Your Content

If your content is well-written and applicable to the main topic and discussions of the groups you are in, post a link to the blog post you wrote. Make sure to write a title and description and make it seem worth the time to click through and read the article. Be sure to not post the content in every group, and don’t post every blog post you write, unless they are all high quality or newsworthy. If you over-post, people will start ignoring your posts all together.

Participate in Conversations

Don’t go into the groups only to post content or share your items about your own business. Answer questions that other users have posted in a thoughtful, engaging, and professional manner. Try not to use slang terms like LOL, OMG, or emoticons and try to say something original that hasn’t been said before. LinkedIn is a great place to learn, build connections, and gain exposure from other users truly interested in your company. However, be sure to return the favor but answer messages, comments, and other ways that users may try to connect with you.

Don’t you just love it when your blog ranks #1 on relevant search queries? I do. Of course, the drawback here is that when a blog post becomes sticky in the number one spot, sometimes you tend to get too many visitors who are not too familiar with the format of your site being a blog. They turn the comment section into a question-and-answer forum.

Take for instance my post about Filipino economists dated four years back. It is, by far, one of my more best-read posts. It just consists of about four intelligible sentences. Thing is, that particular post has been getting dozens and dozens of inquiries from students asking for help with their assignment. It goes as far as these folks asking for the finished product itself!

I’ve actually updated the post to point prospective researchers to better resources, but many just ignore the note and ask ahead. Perhaps the presence of a comment thread and message box makes it seem as if it’s an online forum, which can be one good way of seeking feedback and posing questions online.

But what do you do when things get out of hand and people treat one particular blog post as a forum? Here are a few things I can think of.

Close the comment thread. Things could get out of hand, and comments might tend to be off-topic anyway. So you an always disable feedback for this particular post. Or, you can run a plugin that closes comment threads when a post reaches a particular age.
Participate in the conversation. This can be particularly useful if the post is about a hot topic, and if the discussions are still highly relevant even after dozens and hundreds of comments. Why not enjoy your post’s popularity?
Update your post. If people are looking for information, and others contribute in the comment thread, then you can update your post to include these relevant information. You could then hope that readers will get the idea, but of course users who are too lazy to really read through an article will still keep on asking questions even if the answers are right in front of them.

On my posts that get this much attention, I usually try a combination of these. But of course, I still get a ton of comments in which the reader is asking for something that is already there.

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