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I am going to share with you how you can get “super-connected” quickly and easily on Linkedin. Why is this important? Well, just like in real life…sometimes it is all in who you know. Once you are connected with someone on LinkedIn you are able to view up to 3 levels down from them. For those that are in your first group you can send email and communicate with them more easily.

In the 2nd and 3rd levels, you will need an introduction from someone in your 1st level or let me give you two tricks of the trade:

Tip #1: Call the contact directly.

If someone is at the 2nd or 3rd level, you can still view their name, title, and company they work for. For example, if someone has Sally Smith, Director of Human Resources at ACME Company in their network. You can simply call them up by name and tell them who you are and that you wanted to introduce yourself. Also take a minute to brag about the company and that you would like to get your info to her and see if there are any potential opportunities.

Tip #2: Email the contact directly at work.

Most of the time an email address is not going to be visible to you. By doing a little research you can usually find out the email pattern of any company online. Do a quick Google search and you will find the pattern.
Here is a sample email script that I would send (you can always come up with your own as well).

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Dear _________,
My name is Jay Mills and I am a CPA with 8 years of accounting experience working with publicly-traded companies. I have heard great things about ACME Company over the years from people in my network and I would be very interested in speaking with you. Attached is a profile of my background and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Thanks!
Jay Mills, CPA
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Then I would possibly follow up with a phone call (which in many cases is much warmer since they noticed your email). I realize some of you might be saying, “won’t they wonder how I got their email address?” Truth is email is such a common practice it honestly doesn’t bother people to get email at work from someone they did not know before-hand. Even if it was an issue, just let them know that you knew the email pattern and it wasn’t too hard to figure out.

Ok, back to growing a network fast. There are essentially 4 steps for you to do to grow a large network fast. I am going to share with you the first two.

1. Extract all of the email addresses from any of your current email contact list.
LinkedIn has a really cool program that will allow you to pull your contact list from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo and many other email systems. From there you can decide who you would like to send an invitation to. It will also show you which of the people from your contact list are already on LinkedIn. For those that are not you can still send an invitation for them to join. For those that might not be in your contact list think of all the names of people at your current or last company and send them an invite.

2. Join Speciality Groups inside LinkedIn.
This is a great feature that can really work well for you. Let’s say you are CPA in Jacksonville, Florida. Well, there is a group called “Jacksonville Accounting & Finance Professionals” which last I looked there were over 160+ members. The great thing about groups is that you have something in common and if you send an invite to connect you could say, “We are both in the Jacksonville accounting & finance group and I just wanted to network with you.”

Another great group to join beside people in your specific industry niche is HR groups. This will give you access to people who assist in the hiring stages at various companies

LinkedIn Tip: Be careful of sending too many “invitations” to connect on LinkedIn unless you know that the person will accept. If too many people reject from being connected to you LinkedIn will put you in a probation period in which you will need to know some one’s email address to send an invitation to them.

If you are sending an invitation to someone and you are a little unsure if they are going to accept it use this script when you send the invitation:
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“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Please feel free to utilize my network! I have a variety of connections throughout the country!

If you don’t wish to connect, please archive the invitation!”
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By asking them to “archive” the invitation it does two things:
1. It allows them to get rid of the invitation
2. It does not count against you as a reject invitation would.

In my next post I am going to discuss third and fourth way to grow your connections on Linkedin (these I consider to be the most powerful way to “super-charge” your connections). When I started using these features my entire network grew from 2 Million to 6 million people in my network in the matter of 2-3 weeks. If you believe in the six degrees of separation theory then this is the ticket to your next position.

If you can’t wait for the next post or you want to read the entire five step plan, then download the full 30+ page free ebook to the right of this post.