LinkedIn is one of the best social media websites for connecting with business to business and other like-minded professionals. In fact, it’s the most used social media platform among Fortune 500s and has over 260 million active users each month. So with so many people using LinkedIn, it’s easy to get lost in the noise. And that’s why I created this article to go over 5 ways to get more connections on LinkedIn.

1. Import your email contacts. This is by far the easiest and fastest way to get more connections. How this works is LinkedIn has a feature were it can log in to your email account and pull a list of all your contacts (people that have emailed you or people you’ve emailed). Then you’ll see a list of these contacts and you can select which ones you want to connect with. To access this in LinkedIn go to My Network > Connections > More options > type in your email info > click Continue > and now you’ll see a list of all your email contacts to connect with. And you may want to do this every once in a while since your email contacts will continue to grow.
2. Connect with people you already know. This is another simple yet effective way to get more connections. What I suggest doing is sitting down and writing up a list of all the people you know, business college, school mates, friends, and family, and then going on to LinkedIn and search for these people and connecting with them. These people are pretty likely to accept your connection request so they’re a gold mine of easy connections. Also don’t forget to connect with your follow employees. For example here at our Tampa web design company we’ve make sure each of our employees is connected with each other on LinkedIn.
3. Add people who view your profile. This one is pretty simple. Just keep an eye out for people that view your profile. LinkedIn usually sends you an email when someone views your profile. You can also see who these people are by viewing your own profile and looking on the right-hand side column. They’ll be a list there of people who have most recently viewed your profile. Then simply send each of these people a connection request. They should be more receptive of accepting that request since they’re somewhat familiar with you since they viewed your profile.
4. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get you connections. This is a killer strategy to really gain a ton of new connections. What you do is you sign up for LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. This does have a monthly fee but you can usually get a free month. Then once you have this Sales Navigator use it’s search feature to search for people who would be your ideal customer type. You can do this by narrowing down the search fields to thinks like job title, location, etc. Then in the results, you can click on their profile and request to connect. But don’t go too crazy with this as LinkedIn limits you to how many connect request you can do per day. Usually, it’s about 3–5% of your total LinkedIn connections.
   
   
5. Connect with people from your school, and organizations your part of. This is another gold mine of easy connections. For this strategy go to your profile and click on your school under the Education section, or under the Interests section click on an organization. This will bring you to a page for that school or organization. On the school’s page click on the Alumni tab on the left. Then you’ll see a list of alumni. Simply click the Connect link to send a request to them. You can also use the filters on this page to narrow down the alumni to the years you attended. For organizations, when your on an organization’s page click the See all link in the top right hand near the member’s photos. Then you’ll see a list of all members. From there you can click on their profiles and then request to connect.
   

If you need help with any of these above points, getting more connections, or just social media in general take advantage of our free evaluation by using the link below.

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