Like many people, I was not quick to join LinkedIn. As a matter of fact one of my friends invited me and it took me 2 months to accept his invitation and join. What I thought was “not another time wasting black whole of a social network”.When I finally joined the network I added people from my outlook and found that several of them where already on the network, a total of 30. I thought, “Cool, I know some people here” so I added them to my network on LinkedIn. After that I joined 4 different groups that where of interest to me including one on venture capital, one on marketing, another for book authors and the last one on keynote speaking.

Promote to Five Hundred C Level executives on the social network LinkedIn.com

Now I was on LinkedIn and had thirty connections, my four groups and thought that was all I needed. Then I asked myself: “What next?” I already know the 30 people I added to the network I don’t need them to contact them. I wondered what the value was? What’s the difference between this and Facebook, or MySpace, or Hi5? What’s the buzz on LinkedIn? Can you use Linkedin for marketing?

For months I did nothing, thinking this was a place to socialize with people you already know. One day I was looking on Google the keywords “Venture Capital” as I was advising one of my customers get some funding. I then visited LinkedIn and logged in. Then I did a search on Venture Capital once more. Wow, 50,000 + came up. Quickly I noticed that these where not just company names, I was getting the name and many times email and phone number of actual people, with photo, title, interests, hobbies, all what you would wish for.

The bad news about my search is that none of the venture capitalists where in my network. Now it was clear that this web 2.0 site called LinkedIn had value for self promotion. Imagine if of these 50,000 I could have a few hundred connected to me directly. I could call them and ask for advice. I could email them and see if they are interested in my project or ask them to point me in the right direction. Now the job was connecting to all of them.

What are to top benefits of using LinkedIn?

• Promote yourself, your products or your company to hundreds of thousands of executives quickly
• Reach five hundred thousand executives with your message every week
• Position yourself as an expert in your industry and build a following

I did have a few connections at the third level. This means that I know someone that knows someone that knew lot’s of people in Venture Capital. This great connector happened to me my cousin Frank. My friend is an engineer and one of his is a Venture Capitalist Exetive. That one person connected me with 300 people at a third level. If I really wanted to speak with one of those 300 people I could ask Gustavo for an introduction through his customer; but that was not my idea, I did not want just one connection, I wanted hundreds, or thousands.

I played more with the software and did more targeted searches by clicking on “Advanced Search”. I searched by zip code to see the closest contacts to me and therefore the ones I could contact in person. I also searched for keywords like “beverage” and “consumer goods” as the company I was working with was a beverage company. For every search I got great contacts. I thought this could turn out to be my very own private rolodex.

Jorge Olson is an author, speaker and entrepreneur. You can find his latest book on self promotion and marketing “The Unselfish Guide to Self Promotion” can be found at www.Amazon.com and www.UnselfishPromotion.com