If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for reading.

Once you have finished learning the ropes of LinkedIn, you can give yourself a pat in the back because now all you need to do is find people that you trust and connect with the ones that you know personally. Some people have a hard time in doing this even after they have filled up their profile completely and tweaked all of their settings. The reason may be because the people in your area may not be very familiar of LinkedIn. A good number of small businesses use other social network sites as a means of communication simply because they are popular and do not know of the existence of LinkedIn. As an existing member of LinkedIn, you can make the difference by following these steps.

Introduce them to LinkedIn

If you are actively chatting with friend either online or offline, you can simply say that you know a nice website where you can connect with people professionally. The most important thing in this step is giving the site address. The homepage shows more than enough information to get anyone to sign up right away.

Import your Contacts

If you have a huge address book in your webmail, you can add all of them to your LinkedIn address book and optionally send them all invites. You can also find any existing members of LinkedIn that matches your imported address book. If you see their profiles bare, they may be experiencing the same problems as you. Show that you are around by messaging them so they can give LinkedIn a second look. When inviting new people on board via e-mail, make sure you personalize your invite message to convince others to join without hesitation.

Add your invited Contacts to your Network

This should be done automatically if you invited them through e-mail, but if you gave the address instead, you should ask the person’s e-mail address so you can add the person to your network. Make sure you do this right away or else the person may lose interest with the service.

Show your Profile to the others that you have invited

To demonstrate the full capabilities of LinkedIn, you can use your profile as an example. Providing that all the information and details is complete, new members can easily grasp the idea on how valuable LinkedIn is. If you are an upgraded member, you may end up convincing others to upgrade as well in the long run.

Teach them how to complete their Profiles

This is an easy step since LinkedIn offers a meter illustrating how complete your profile is. This meter can be missed by new users so all you need to tell them to do is click the small “Edit” button below the meter and complete their profile from there.

Encourage them to look for others

Once they are all finished, you can finally encourage them to find other colleagues that they may know by using the search bar on top. If the person manages to forge some connections of his own, that means more 2nd degree connections for you. By then, the person should be deeply involved with LinkedIn and willing to grow from there. Try to get more people on board for even better results.