I’ve recently been focussing more of my time on LinkedIn - working to get my profile accurate, interesting and building up my contacts.  I’m also looking for business partners so I joined several groups and started a discussion.  I’ve been amazed by the responses I’ve had and it shows how you can really make some far reaching connections just by asking a question.

For those of you who don’t know LinkedIn, it is the professional Facebook. It allows you to connect with your business  colleagues, stay in touch with clients, search for prospects, build a community amongst your partners and maintain your professional profile online.

I’ve been a member for a few years and have gradually connected to people I used to work with. However, I haven’t really used it to find new people to connect to.  Hence it with a little trepidation that I posted a discussion on several groups.  I was impressed that each one has given me at least one contact that I hadn’t known before hand.  Not only is it great to get support from your local community and get their feedback on who I could work with but I’ve also had a bunch of replies from events businesses in the US, Italy and UAE.  As I work with US companies this has been valuable to my future business but even better, I heard from a lady in New York State who seemed to be having very similar thoughts to mine.  We chatted by phone for over half an hour and talked through our businesses, how we were planning to move them forward and if we could do any joint promotions.  It was fantastic to find new friends and some objective opinions just by asking one simple question.

I’m sure I’ll take some of the contacts further and explore ways of working together.  At the very least it’s given me a different perspective on the future of my business and enabled me to look afresh at my business plan.

LinkedIn is a fantastic tool which every business person should explore but make sure you are active and use it to promote your successes, find new opportunities and don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions - the community will answer and probably tell you that they were wondering about the exact same thing but were too nervous to post it.