How to Build Links on LinkedIn by Starting a Group

Michael Bergbauer - October 4, 2011

You can use your LinkedIn profile for much more than managing your professional connections. By starting a LinkedIn Group and engaging your professional community, you can also have a small but solid link building campaign.

LinkedIn Groups are special pages that anyone can set up on LinkedIn. They gather like-minded professionals to discuss their respective industries. LinkedIn Groups foster a lot of interaction among professionals and are a good starting approach to link building.

When you are starting your own group, you must keep in mind that LinkedIn hosts hundreds of thousands of groups. If you want yours to stand out and gain members, you should try to target a niche theme or audience. If your group is too similar to the others pertaining to your business, you may not gain much traction.

When you start a new group, you become the group’s manager – allowing you to do things such as moderating discussion posts or approving new members. More importantly, you also have more control for displaying your links. There are a lot of link building options you have when you’ve started the group, including:

• Putting your website link in the “about this group” section
• Sending a weekly message to the group with a relevant link
• Adding your site to the RSS feed in the News Section
• Creating a discussion and including your link (as the group manager, you have some automatic credibility so you can post your links a little more frequently).

By maintaining an active group that contributes to the professional community, your posted links can get a lot of traffic. Furthermore, if you’ve developed your group to target a specific audience or demographic, you’ll be getting meaningful traffic – and hopefully, higher conversion rates.