The Renegade Writer Blog

This post is by guest blogger Michelle V. Rafter, owner of the fabulous WordCount blog. Thanks, Michelle!

Last September I was getting ready to start writing again after spending most of the previous seven years at home with my kids. I was totally out of touch with the freelance world and way behind on the subjects I’d once specialized in, technology and the workplace. So when I friend told me about a social network for businesspeople, I was all ears. I signed up the same day and was immediately hooked. Within a month I’d reconnected with a bunch of former colleagues. One of them even gave me an assignment — I was back at work.

That was my introduction to LinkedIn. Since then, LinkedIn has grown substantially — to 26 million people — and the ways I use it have too. Today it’s one of my workday mainstays, something I use to research companies, find sources, organize contacts and a lot more.

I also joined LinkedIn to get up to speed on the whole Web 2.0 thing, which had passed me by during my extended hiatus. LinkedIn was my entre into the world of social networks, and from there it was an easy jump to blogging and learning new forms of online storytelling. I immersed myself in it so thoroughly, I now write about it for several clients, and happily answer questions about LinkedIn for freelance friends who are where I was a year ago.

If you haven’t taken the plunge yet, or just want to get more out of it, here are my top 10 secrets for how writers can successfully use LinkedIn:

Flesh out your profile. Include all your previous jobs and schooling. The more companies, schools and organizations you affiliate yourself with, the bigger your circle of contacts will be able to grow. Add a picture or some kind of illustration that lets a little of your personality shine through. Be aspirational: describe what you want to do, not just what you’re doing now. The LinkedIn police aren’t going to call you out for dubbing yourself a freelance magazine writer with only one or two published pieces under your belt. If that’s what you consider yourself, say so.

Join groups. There are lots of groups on LinkedIn. Joining writers’ groups is one way to build up a virtual support system. Joining those or other groups also gives you the ability to send group members invitations to join your network. So if you see an editor at a magazine you’ve been interested in writing for in a LinkedIn writing group you belong to, you can use the connection to send them an invitation.

Build a network.The more people in your network, the wider the net you can cast when you’re searching for story sources. If you haven’t already, use the tools LinkedIn provides to import information from Outlook, Gmail or another contact manager, then go through the list and pick out people you’d like to invite into your network. When you happen upon sources you think you might want to use again in the future, ask if they use LinkedIn and offer to send them an invitation.

Create a phone book. In late August, LinkedIn expanded the amount of information you can store on your LinkedIn connections. In addition to their profile information, you can now input office and cell phone numbers, IM addresses, address, Website and birthday date; there’s even a notes section for adding anything else you’d want. This makes it possible to store info on a source in one place so you don’t need to toggle between Outlook and LinkedIn.

Troll the Answers section. Forget ProfNet or HARO. This is probably the No. 1 way I use LinkedIn. Use the Answers Advanced Search feature to look for keywords related to subjects you’re researching. If you find someone you want to interview and you don’t pay for LinkedIn’s premium-level service — frankly, I haven’t found a reason to — look at their profile to see if they’ve listed their email address or blog. If they did, jackpot! If they didn’t, go to the Website for their company, group or agency and track them down through a company PR representative or even a main phone number.

Query your contacts. Another way to find sources on LinkedIn is to send group emails to subsets of your connections. LinkedIn lets you slice and dice connections list by geography or industry, which makes it easy to put group emails together. You can also hand pick a group of names to send a message to.

Update your Status line regularly. The Status line is LinkedIn’s answer to Twitter or Facebook’s “What are you doing right now?” Use it to point people to your blog, solicit sources for a story or brag about your latest publishing achievement.

Check for work on the Jobs board. Most of the positions on the Jobs board are full time. Every once in a while, though, there are listings for freelance, part-time or temporary full-time gigs. And the caliber of available jobs is much higher than what you see on Craigslist.com.

Use Companies feature to research new markets. If you identify yourself as a writer in your profile, the Companies directory will automatically show a list of industries related to writing and editing. Click on any of the industry links — book publishing, newspapers, magazines, education, marketing and advertising, public relations, software — and you’ll see lists of all the companies in those industries LinkedIn has in its database. Clicking on the Newspaper listing, for example, brings up 930 newspapers. Like everything else on LinkedIn, they’re ranked according to your LinkedIn network connections, so newspapers where you have a 1st degree connection come up first. This is a great feature when it comes to pitching stories. First, you’ve got a list of who’s got what position at a paper or magazine — again, if they subscribe to LinkedIn. If you see someone you want to pitch but don’t know and there’s another editor you do know, you could use your LinkedIn connection with the second editor to ask for an introduction to the first. Of course, you could do that without LinkedIn too.

Mind your manners. Do you really want to notify your entire LinkedIn circle every time you make a minor change to your profile? Probably not, so make sure to adjust your account settings accordingly. Likewise, it’s easy to reach out to people, but don’t overdo it. Sending group emails to every source on your list every day, or even every week, might be OK with some but others could start to think you’re a spammer.

Copyright 2008 Michelle V. Rafter