Accelerate Your Business Success With Linkedin

http://www.linkedin.com

The growth of LinkedIn, which has signed up over 41 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world, confirms there is a distinct business social networking market. The site has over 1.5 million in the UK - a tenth of the professional workforce.

Its average user is 41, with a salary estimated at £70,000.

LinkedIn remains a great way for professionals to strengthen their online brand reputation and leverage their professional network.

Relationships Matter

Your professional network of trusted contacts gives you an advantage in your career, and is one of your most valuable assets. LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network and help the people you trust in return.

In a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries. You can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals that you need to work with to accomplish your goals.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form enduring connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of qualified professionals and experts.

Through your network you can:

• Manage the information that’s publicly available about you as professional
• Find and be introduced to potential clients, service providers, and subject experts who come recommended
• Create and collaborate on projects, gather data, share files and solve problems
• Be found for business opportunities and find potential partners
• Gain new insights from discussions with likeminded professionals in private group settings
• Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
• Post and distribute job listings to find the best talent for your company

LinkedIn is free to join. They offer a premium version of your accounts that give you more tools for finding and reaching the right people, whether or not they are in your network. LinkedIn participates in the EU Safe Harbor Privacy Framework and is certified to meet the strict privacy guidelines of the European Union. All relationships on LinkedIn are mutually confirmed, and no one appears in the LinkedIn Network without knowledge and explicit consent.

10 WAYS TO OPTIMISE YOUR SUCCESS WITH LINKEDIN

1. Increase your visibility.

By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with. In addition to appearing at the top of search results people would much rather work with people who their friends know and trust.

2. Improve your connectability.

Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities.
You can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

3. Improve your Google PageRank.

LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.

To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.

4. Enhance your search engine results.

In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicise websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.

If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”

5. Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.

LinkedIn’s reference check tool to input a company name and the years the person worked at the company to search for references. Your search will find the people who worked at the company during the same time period. Since references provided by a candidate will generally be glowing, this is a good way to get more balanced data.

Companies will typically check your references before hiring you, but have you ever thought of checking your prospective manager’s references? Most interviewees don’t have the audacity to ask a potential boss for references, but with LinkedIn you have a way to scope them out.

You can also check up on the company itself by finding the person who used to have the job that you’re interviewing for. Do this by searching for job title and company, but be sure to uncheck “Current titles only.” By contacting people who used to hold the position, you can get the inside scoop on the job, manager and growth potential.

By the way, if using LinkedIn in these ways becomes a common practice, we’re apt to see more truthful resumes. There’s nothing more amusing than to find out that the candidate who claims to have caused some huge success was a total bozo who was just along for the ride.

6. Increase the relevancy of your job search.

Use LinkedIn’s advanced search to find people with educational and work experience like yours to see where they work. For example, a programmer would use search keywords such as “Ruby on Rails,” “C++,” “Python,” “Java,” and “evangelist” to find out where other programmers with these skills work.

7. Make your interview go smoother.

You can use LinkedIn to find the people that you’re meeting. Knowing that you went to the same school, plays football, or shares acquaintances is a lot better than an awkward silence after, “I’m doing fine, thank you.”

8. Gauge the health of a company.

Perform an advanced search for company name and uncheck the “Current Companies Only” box. This will enable you to scrutinize the rate of turnover and whether key people are abandoning ship. Former employees usually give more candid opinions about a company’s prospects than someone who’s still on board.

9. Gauge the health of an industry.

If you’re thinking of investing or working in a sector, use LinkedIn to find people who worked for competitors—or even better, companies who failed.

10. Track startups.

You can see people in your network who are initiating new startups by doing an advanced search for a range of keywords such as “stealth” or “new startup.” Apply the “Sort By” filter to “Degrees away from you” in order to see the people closest to you first.

[Republished from: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn via "How to Change the World" -- Guy Kawasaki's blog]

Nice 1 Limited Comment : "We are new to LinkedIn but can see clear advantages of joining already. As our core product Theft Protect traverses the insurance and motor sectors, the benefits of networking and connecting with our business contacts are invaluable. Easy to set up and start connecting"

Carl Brandrick

Managing Director
Nice 1 Limited

To visit the Theft Protect page on LinkedIn click the LinkedIn button on the right of this page.

To Twitter Nice 1 click here

http://www.linkedin.com/

WHO USES THE INTERNET IN THE UK?

If your business transacts business over the internet, this information from the National Office of Statistics may be of interest to you.

To see or download the full report click here.

As the tables are self explanatory, we'll let you form your own assumptions about the relevance and usefulness of creating an internet marketing strategy for your business.

To view or download the full report click here.

For the majority of businesses these days, the increase in internet use is too important to ignore.

Look out for further internet marketing articles from these pages, or explore the previous articles from the archives links on the right side of this page.

Kind Regards

The Team at Nice 1

Twitter For Business - An Excellent Free Guide

In a previous article on Twitter For Business (click here to see it), it was estimated that 700,000 small companies in Britain are currently using Twitter – 17% of the 4,559,000 small businesses in the UK that employ less than 20 people (source: Federation of Small Business); furthermore, the number is growing at the rate of 6,000 a day.

The team at Nice 1 Limited are delighted to share with you a really useful free article

A guide for people who want to start getting business results on Twitter. Author: Mark Shaw

UK small businesses are Twittering at record levels

The advent of the aggregators, and the continuing threat of direct insurers has witnessed many UK Insurance Brokers exploring alternative routes to their customer. Many are now busy creating marketing blogs and devouring articles on search engine optimisation, e mail marketing and networking ideas to capture more new business and increase retention of existing clients.

This article is the latest in the series from Nice 1 Ltd, sharing information on the latest strategies for business development.

TWITTER

Small businesses are sending three million ‘tweets’ a day in the UK, according to a study on the usage of the free networking site Twitter by telecommunications company O2.

O2 questioned over 500 small businesses and found that nearly two in ten (17%) are using Twitter, with over one quarter (28%) signing up in the last four weeks.

It is estimated that 700,000 small companies in Britain are currently using it – 17% of the 4,559,000 small businesses in the UK that employ less than 20 people (source: Federation of Small Business); furthermore, O2 found that the number is growing at the rate of 6,000 a day.

For businesses, the focus is on cost-cutting, particularly on marketing and recruitment. It was cited by almost two thirds of the O2 sample. Over one in ten said they had saved up to £5,000 since signing up while three in ten reported benefits of up to £1,000. Almost 75% said they were using Twitter to stay in touch with customers and suppliers, while a third admitted they had signed up to monitor competitors’ Tweets.

Simon Devonshire, Head of Small Business Marketing at O2, said: “The way small businesses are using Twitter is a great example of how the community is embracing new technologies in order to adapt and survive in the current economic climate. The increase in small businesses using converged devices such as the iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones combined with the simplicity of Twitter represents a fantastic opportunity for businesses to further raise their profiles and increase efficiency.”

Despite its relative infancy, Twitter appears to be making its mark in the small business world over and above its social media competitors.

Four in ten small businesses revealed they are using Twitter more than LinkedIn or Facebook with 60% claiming their usage of the social networking site was likely to increase. Despite three times more businesses having a blog, nearly seven out of ten (68%) of those questioned admitted to using Twitter more regularly.

To sign up or find out more, visit: http://www.twitter.com/.

See this article and other useful links at http://www.icm.ac.uk/home/ The home of the Institute Of Commercial Management.

http://news.icm.ac.uk/business/uk-small-businesses-are-twittering-at-record-levels/

Whilst it is early days yet, the team at Nice 1 Ltd, promoting Theft Protect, can be followed on twitter at http://twitter.com/niceoneuk

Look for the avitar alongside our "tweets".

Business Blogging For Brokers

Quickie Definition of a Blog

Here’s the plain-language, quickie answer to the “Er, what is a blawg?” question:

A Weblog or blog is an instant publishing tool anyone can use to add fresh content to a Web page.

No technical expertise is required.

Blog is both a noun and a verb. When you blog (verb), you write.

When you blog for business you should write coherently, purposefully and with the goal of establishing your company’s credibility and expertise. No drivel allowed. But an authentic, informal voice is encouraged.

A blog is a new way to market your services or products by positioning you and/or yourcompany as thought leaders in highly competitive markets.

A blog is the new cost-effective way to communicate quickly with — and get feedback from — your audience of readers, whether they are colleagues, competitors, the media, prospects or customers.

A blog is just a tool, albeit a cool one. As with any tool, there is a right way and a wrongway to use it. There is proper blogging etiquette.

Who is blogging for business?

Lots of companies, often technology-oriented. And lots of savvymarketing types.

Individuals (behind companies) blog. Corporations communicate in marketing-speak, whether it’s glossy collateral or their corporate home page. Which do you think is more persuasive to the reader? Who wants to be marketed at or sold to? Wouldn’t you rather have an intelligent conversation and decide later whether to buy?

In this, the Nice 1 introduction to business blogging, we'll keep it short and deal only with the basics at this stage. Plenty of time for us to show you the detail over the coming weeks, if it's of interest to you and your business.

At Nice 1, we have found the Blog to be a great additional form of marketing, both to the consumer and to our intermediary partners. As stated earlier, although just another marketing tool, the fact that Technorati, the major tracking site currently states it is tracking over 112.8 million blogs, (not including 72.82 million Chinese blogs) tells us that it is a rapidly growing business communication tool.

Blogging software is available free, which adds tremendously to its business appeal. The most popular blogging sofware is Blogger (owned by Google), of which this is blog is one example, and wordpress, again free to download and use.

As promised, we'll keep it simple on this introductory post. Each blog comprises of page(s) which are static and posts which are the frequently changing pieces of news and information, such as new product developments, newsworthy items, etc.

In later posts for supporting broker members, we will issue posts on blogging practice to get you started if you haven't yet dipped your toe in the water and would like to have a go!

For now though, here's a couple of FREE downloads for you that you might like to read at your leisure. . . . . Just click the link to open the file, then click save as to save it to your computer.

Beginners Business Blogging

A Useful Little pdf on Blogs

Our Top 10 Tips For Search Engine Optimization

We're still newbies at blogging ourselves, but we have to say we're delighted with the positive reaction they are creating.

In future posts we will talk about creating your blog, then using google FREE tools amongst others to get your blog out there "syndicated" as it's called, so that your readers will know you're there and want to communicate more with you.

For now though, best of luck with your blog. If we can be of any assistance, don't hesitate to shout up. You'll find as we did, that blog creation is a lot faster, easier and more dynamic than tradional websites.

You can contact us via e mail at enquiries@nice-1.co.uk or ring the number at the foot of this blog. If you wish, you can post a reply to this post. Just send us your e mail address and we will register you as a member of the site so that you are free to reply and comment at will.

Best Regards

The Nice 1 Team

Grow your business with effective e mail strategies

Nice 1 Limited are pleased to introduce you to a business partner that has really helped our business grow.

We wanted to get the Theft Protect brand in front of as many decision makers as possible, for the purpose of building the business and increasing our presence in the insurance marketplace.

E mail marketing plays a large part in our communication strategy, both with our existing broker partners and with prospects.

We were seeking an economically priced yet simple solution to achieve our ambitions, and we trawled the marketplace for the best solution.

Chillishot is designed for the SME market into which most brokers fit.

Fearful of doing the guys an injustice, we will leave them to promote their features and benefits.

They would appreciate calls from any broker seriously considering e mail marketing as one of their tools for customer retention.

In the meantime their website address is http://www.chillishot.net/

Where will ChilliShot fit into your business?

ChilliShot will fit into any business no matter how big or small. With today's web based environment, most companies have a web presence and many conduct many aspects of their business functions through the computer. The web is a powerful tool and so it makes sense to utilise this in your company's communication to others.

Reduced marketing costs with greater information gained can only be seen as beneficial, however, you may well like to keep your current marketing procedures as they have always proved successful? This is a perfect time to run a cheap direct comparison exercise and run the two methods side by side. The results gained and the unit cost per lead comparison will leave you asking why you have not done this before!

Simple to set up, simple to monitor, cost effective and displaying your company as forward thinking, ChilliShot makes a lot of sense.

Have a look at their website, check out the feautures on :-

• Template Design
• Customising Templates
• Tailor Made Templates
• Email List Management
• Campaign Analysis
• How a campaign is sent

It works well for us at Nice 1 and, knowing that so many brokers are looking at e mail as another communication vehicle, we thought you might like to see if it would work for your business too.

Increase Your Customer Flow With Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimisation:

New and Improved 10 Tips to the Top

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are our latest and greatest tips to get you started:

1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. Due to Google's aging delay for all new domains, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website if at all possible. If you're redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect to wait a good 9-12 months before your site will show up in Google for any keyword phrases that are important to you.

2. Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those "someones" are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet *their* needs. If you don't know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

3. Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as "travel" or "vacation," as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.

4. Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research. Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let's say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they're looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child's stage of development? (Look for keyword phrases such as "preschool toys.") Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys? Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site's navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as
specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.

5. Program your site to be "crawler-friendly." The search engines can't fill out forms, can't search your site, can't read JavaScript links and menus, and can't interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn't mean that you can't use these things on your site; you most certainly can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search
engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You'll need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you'll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. (Please note that HTML links do NOT have to be text-only links. There's nothing wrong with graphical image navigation that is wrapped in standard tags, as search engines can follow image links just fine.)

6. Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (also known as alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (the anchor text) to help them understand what they're going to find once they click through. Don't make them guess what's at the other end with links that say "click here" or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you're pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.

7. Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market's needs, and make sure it's copy that the search engines can "see." This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn't be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. (This is where that target audience analysis comes in handy!) Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn't going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

8. Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page's unique Title tag. Title tags are critical because they're given a lot of weight with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you've written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it's on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.

9. Make sure your site is "link-worthy." Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site's overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it
without your even asking. It's fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

10. Don't be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings. If you've done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. A good free resource is statcounter.com at http://www.statcounter.com/

It certainly won't hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don't simply add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something. It really is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products. Neither your site visitors nor the engines really give a hoot!

A copy of this Top Tips article can be downloaded by following this link :-

Download the Nice 1 Top Ten SEO Tips

Watch these pages for our Top Tips on Google, how to access lots of FREE gadgets that will help drive business to your sites, and lots more besides.