You may remember a while ago I posted about re-framing how we approach others. Thinking ‘How I can help this person?’ whenever you encounter another person, even a stranger, really changes the perspective. I am now happy to report that I have successfully applied this principle to connections on Linkedin, and the results are amazing!

I became a regular user of Linkedin as I was trying to change my career direction – from corporate to impact. My journey is not over yet, but I am getting there. What I did before is I used to passively observe who viewed my profile. It’s not like I could just talk to these people, right? Well, why not!

What I do now is I contact almost every person who views my profile and I say that it’s nice to e-meet them (which it is!) and ask them how I could be of help. And I mean it. If they ask me for something, I do it. Most importantly though it feels great to be connecting with great people, it feels even better to be able to help them. And I am getting involved into conversations which would have never been possible before, when I was not doing anything about people who showed interest in my profile!

Of course, to drive traffic to your profile, you have to participate in the group discussions, and leave interesting comments reflecting your professional value, bla bla, but this has to be genuine, you can not just fake your interest or leave so-so comments. You need to add value to the conversation. You also need a reserve of inmails which means you will need to pay Linkedin for premium membership. That’s probably the only downside to it 😦

Come and connect with me on Linkedin! Make sure you mention you are my reader 🙂  And as a bonus, here is a fantastic post which helped me to finally get twitter (I am tech challenged) by an amazing Matt Trinetti who is a very nice person, just featured in a book, travelled all over the world and is doing great things on his escape.