Happy Saturday ,

Welcome to this issue of the Bold Career newsletter. Following a break from publishing, I am rebooting with this new issue today. As a reminder, you subscribed to the newsletter at BoldCareer.com (see the bottom of this email as a reference).

Here’s what to expect: You will receive a weekly dispatch from me Saturdays at 7am PT. I’ll share a story, tips, an insight, and resources you can use. All are focused on helping you achieve career success, fulfillment and overall well-being in your professional life.

7 Easy Ways to Create Stronger Relationships with Your LinkedIn Connections

You and I have connected with people on LinkedIn who we wouldn’t recognize if we bumped into them on the street.

And yet, we often hear statements like "LinkedIn doesn’t work. I put up my profile, and connected with people, and nothing happened."

While there can be benefits to having passive connections on LinkedIn, I see these loose connections as untapped potential. Every connection represents a relationship opportunity. And relationships are a key driver of a successful career.

Here are seven easy ways to develop and deepen your professional relationships on LinkedIn.

Visit Profiles: Develop a practice of getting to know the profile of people in your network. Familiarize yourself with their professional background and interests and maybe understand their goals. The trick: How can you potentially help them?

Touch-base: For connections as a high priority, reach out to make that coffee meeting, call or email conversation happen. Say hello:

• Thinking of you: send a quick hello / check-in message (if appropriate to your relationship).

• Let’s get together: Schedule a real or virtual coffee chat to catch-up

• Refer a resource: If you share overlapping industries, professions, or interests, you may know of a resource to share

Engage with their Content: If someone has taken the time to write or share a post, they want people to see it. What you may not know is that LinkedIn throttles distribution, only showing a new post to 10-20% of 1st-degree connections.

The more comments (and to a small degree Likes), the more LinkedIn rewards the post with greater distribution. Little or no engagement: the post gets no traction.

This matters to you because you can do someone a huge service by commenting on their content (minimum 5 words for it to count). Do this a few times, and they will get to know who you are.

Make a Recommendation: Recommendations on LinkedIn are huge for building the Know - Like - Trust factor. For relationships where you’ve had a working relationship with someone AND are a fan, offering to do a recommendation can be deeply impactful.

Endorse a Skill: Where you have confidence that your connection has a particular skill or expertise area, support their branding efforts with your endorsement. It takes just a few seconds.

Refer an Opportunity: If you know the goals of one of your relationships (career change, job search, business referrals, speaking opportunities), try and refer when the occasion arises. Referrals are a high-value activity, and they’ll be grateful that you thought of them.

Make Introductions: Become more valuable in the network as a connector. Someone who knows people and who brings people together. When you know two different people who you think would mutually benefit from meeting each other, make the introduction. Write about the overlapping interests and talk up the achievements of each individual. Everyone wins.

Relationships are key! LinkedIn functions like your CRM. Develop the practice of better understanding your network through regular profile visits and follow-ups.

Until next week,

Ian Christie
CEO & Chief Career Strategist - Bold Career