There's one very important thing you need to do. Accept all invites. Even if it's a competitor. The more connections you have, the bigger your network and 2nd and 3rd connections net will be.

The bigger your network, the more often you'll come up in the search results as you'll be considered very influential.

The next thing you want to do is go into the "Connections" menu and start grouping your contacts by groups of 50 into specific tags. The reason for this is that LinkedIn only allows your to message a group of 50 people at a time. For this reason, you may want to export your connection to a different mailing list tool than LinkedIn.

You can begin by clicking the contacts tab along the top navigation. This will take you to the "contacts" page we briefly explored earlier. Along the left hand side where all the categories are listed you'll notice the "Tags" category. Mine has quite a few, but you can add your first tag with the blue link "Manage" in the top right corner of that area.


The Manage field will bring up this page, allowing you to manage your existing tags and create new ones. This is exclusively for you, your contacts won't know what you've tagged them as.



Now we haven't tagged any of your contacts with the labels we've just created. To do that, you have to click on an individual contact to pull up their details on the far right, and about half way down, you'll notice a section called tags.

If they've been assigned to a particular tag it'll show up here, if not, you can add a tag to that individual.