More small business networking

I posted back in April about how I had started to use LinkedIn, and since then I’ve been actively working at building and using my LinkedIn professional network. I regularly review my connections to see if there is anyone who I should be following up with, and I sometimes browse my connections’ connections to see if there is anyone that I should be networking with. I started following that trail tonight, and a couple of hours later, here I am at 1:30am still poking around.

Christian Mayaud, a second-degree connection who has almost 8,000 connections of his own, lists his Sacred Cow Dung blog in his LinkedIn profile, on which I found his “Cheaters’ Guide to LinkedIn” (most of which I don’t see as “cheating” but as best practices for making the most of the network). That pointed me to two Yahoo! groups, MyLinkedinPowerForum and LinkedInnovators, which in turn contain a ton of other information about using LinkedIn for professional networking (plus a lot of the usual crap). Just when I was almost caught up on my reading…

Update: I saw this link this morning that describes to newbies how to get started with LinkedIn without being overwhelmed. I think that I’ll send it to all those people who accepted my invitation but still only have one contact (me) a month later.