Personal branding is key to your success and LinkedIn is an excellent tool to help you achieve that. Let’s look at 7 ways to maximize your LinkedIn and your personal branding.

1. Make the Most of your Profile

Using your LinkedIn profile properly is very important. When you communicate with others on the site, your profile will speak for you. Don’t just upload any photo; upload a good photo. Don’t upload your logo here. People want to see what you look like. Make sure you completely fill out your profile DO NOT leave any areas blank.

2. Build Up Your Contacts

When you first join LinkedIn you need to build your contact base.

Connect present and past colleagues along with your alumni from your university or college.

3. Recommendations

Recommendations are very important. In fact, it is one of the most powerful tools that LinkedIn has to offer. That’s because people recognize recommendations as sincere and trustworthy. Others MUST write them and they are very hard to fake or forge.

4. Use Groups

There are three ways you can use groups: lead generation, increasing your LinkedIn profile development, and personal development by learning.

5. Promoting Events

Using LinkedIn to promote your events is a very wise move. You can easily target your audience and can spread your information quickly all the while establishing your personal brand.

6. Use Your Status Updates

The LinkedIn status updates are not used to their full potential.

However, this has been changing a little bit thanks to the integration of Twitter with your LinkedIn profile, a move that was much needed.

Update your LinkedIn profile with relevant blog posts and news. When you use your status updates wisely they can play an integral role in your person branding.

7. Networking for Lead Generation

LinkedIn is a very powerful tool for you to use to connect with others who are looking to individuals from within the corporate community. When you take full advantage of the tools LinkedIn offers you can build a powerful personal brand. It will not take as long as you might think, and it is worth every bit of time you put into it.

Open networkers can be a powerful tool for you on LinkedIn, so let’s look at the 6 tops LinkedIn open networkers you should be following.

However, before we do that we must remind that it is against the LinkedIn User Agreement to invite someone into your network of professionals if you do not know them personally. The reason for this is LinkedIn was built on the philosophy of trust, which means you need to know a person in order to truly trust them.

LinkedIn has added the follow feature, which allows you to follow a group discussion, and then a little later on you can invite them to join your network.

1.Olivier Taupin
Oivier Taupin created the group Linked:HR, which is the largest LinkedIn Group at 850,000 members and more than 350,000 professionals. Creating a community of this magnitude is no easy task. Definitely, this group’s worth exploring.

2. Chris Brogan

Most of you already know who Chris Brogan is; A well-known, powerful online marketing guru. Be sure to read the many posts Chris has on his LinkedIn blog. Chris is a very smart networker and you would be wise to check out his LinkedIn profile , because you can learn a lot.

3. Gerald Haman

This is a man who is known as “the resolution man” on LinkedIn and he is also the creator of tons of Innovators LinkedIn groups including Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators with more than 100,000 members. Gerald Haman is a professor at Northwestern University, and he has also helped clients generate more than 2 billion dollars in revenue.

4. Thubten Comerford

Thubten Comerford is a deeply spiritual man, and was even ordained as a monk in a Tibetan temple. He also has an incredibly successful track record in his business ventures. He is a social media consultant and you should definitely have a look at what he offers.

5. Jay Deragon

This may be a name you are familiar with since he was one of the social media bloggers for 2011 that was mentioned a number of times. Jay’s goal is to have us all become part of his new Social Flights venture. Jay is a very smart and business savvy man and most of us could earn a lot from him.

6. Gary Zukowski

Here is another one of the top connectors. If you have the opportunity to hear the story of Gary Zukowski’s company TweetMyJOBS be sure to do so. TweetMyJOBS is the largest job board and recruiting station on Twitter. Gary is a very savvy person when it comes to the twittersphere.