LinkedIn is a business networking website that aims to connect people and businesses and to help you expand your network.

The site has over 30 million active users and over 3.2 million visitors per month. It can be used for a number of business-related tasks:

1. Building a contact network in order to do business
2. Getting introduced to people you would like to do business with
3. Find an employee and check their references
4. Find a job and check out the pedigree of a potential employer
5. Find answers to business-related questions
6. Recommend others or recieve recommendaions from others that will enhance your business reputation

There are many reasons to use LinkedIn, including the ones above but the main reason is that it makes networking easy and that it is an easy way to see who others know and to approach them for business.

You may have heard the adage "It's not what you know but who you know that counts" - LinkedIn makes it easy to see who others know and helps you to get to know them too. Knowing more people makes it easier to get things done at a reaonsable price to get business and to get help and advice.

Another reason to use LinkedIn is that it is free to join and use.

Furthermore, you can ask quesitons on LinkedIn and find answers to quesitons that you have. Many professioonals give free advice on LinkedIn and are happy to answer your questions on anything business-related as a means of expanding their own network. This means that you can get business advice for free.

The reason that netwokring is so powerful is due to something called the 'network effect'. This states that as a network expands, the potential for that network expands at a faster rate. Your potential earnings in a large network are massively increased over your potential earnings in a small network.

For example, if you are the only person with a telephone, the 'phone network is useless. The more people on the 'phone network. the greater the potential for that network and the number of people you can contact & influence.

The Network Effect was popularised by Robert Metcalfe who said that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. In short, you recieve a massive boost in your earnings potential by having a larger network. 

There are a number of ways of quickly expanding your network with LinkedIn. The first is to use LinkedIn's tools to find people on the LinkedIn network that you already know. These might be people in your contact database, they might be firends or university colleagues. You can quickly and easily upload your contact database to LinkedIn & find out who is already on the network. You can also invite people on your contact list who are not in the LinkedIn network to join. Furthermore, LinkedIn can login to your mail accounts (Yahoo, Hotmail etc) and trawl through your contacts in order to find who is using the site already.

The next way to quickly expand your network is to join some of the many groups on LinkedIn. Groups are where like-minded people get together. These groups have common interests (alumni from a particular college, a society or trade body, people interested in shoes etc). Like-minded people will be some of the easiest people to befriend and to expand your network.

Furthermore, you can answer questions or even ask questions on the site. LinkedIn has a massive repository of business-related quesitons and answers that expands by the minute. If someone wants to know about an aspect of your expertise, you can send them an answer and begin the befriending process. Depending upon the qualiy of your answer, you might make a new contact or even get some business out of the advice you give.

Finally, you can recommend the people you already know and ask them to recommend you. By recommending people on LinkedIn, you can show others how trusted they are. Likewise, anyone searching for someone in your profession can see that other people have used your services and recommended you.