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I believe LinkedIn is a great tool for keeping track of your business contacts (learning more about them, what they are doing, and when they switch companies, etc.) It is also the best tool for identifying new potential clients and what common contacts you may have with potential clients. LinkedIn now has 60 Million registered users.  I highly encourage people to participate in the system for their  professional benefit and the benefit of their firm.

Here are ten steps you can take to increase your connections (i.e. contacts) on LinkedIn

1.  Fill out your profile by copying and pasting from your resume
2. Add a bio.
3.  Export your outlook contacts into a comma separated value file (.csv)
4. Under settings in “privacy settings,” change your “connections browse” setting to “No, hide my connections list.”
5. Import that csv file into Linkedin through the section called “Import Your Desktop Email Contacts”
6.  Go into the system and select “imported contacts” under the contacts menu.
7.  Uncheck all the contacts, then go through and put a check next to the ones that have the “in” symbol on the right
8. Once you are done, push “invite selected contacts.”
9. Go back to the main screen and select “people you may know.” Invite anyone there that you actually do know (and know you).
10. On the right of that screen, select find colleagues and invite the people you used to work with to become one of your connections.

Once you get going on LinkedIn, you will receive an email every week giving you updates about your contacts. It is not like Facebook where you have to be on checking it all the time. If you have any questions about LinkedIn, post a comment.