When you join LinkedIn you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients and partners … so be sure to fill out your profile with your full employment and education history.

Your LinkedIn profile has more depth than a traditional resume, by allowing you to also display:

• Recommendations you’ve received
• Recommendations you’ve written
• Your Questions and Answer on LinkedIn Answers
• Links to your website, portfolio, company, etc.,

For some tips on creating a great profile, check out Guy Kawasaki’s ‘LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover‘ post.

Public Profile
After you’ve created your LinkedIn profile, you can control what parts of it are publicly viewable on the web by clicking on ‘Edit My Public Profile‘. Your public profile will appear in search engine results for Google, Yahoo!, etc., and you can opt to show just the basics, a full view, or show nothing.

Customize your Public Profile URL
From your ‘Edit My Public Profile‘ page you can create a personalized URL of anything you’d like (e.g. linkedin.com/in/ClevelandRawks), however if you want your page to appear near the top of search engine results, you’ll be better of just going with your first and last name (e.g. linkedin.com/in/RobertSmith).

Promote Your Public Profile
You can easily create a link to your public profile from your blog or website, by grabbing the code for a variety of buttons. If you’re a Typepad user, there’s also a widget to quickly add a button to your blog.

Economic and environmental impact of Whole Foods?

My neighborhood of Potrero Hill, San Francisco will soon be home to San Francisco’s largest Whole Foods.

• What impact, if any, will this have on the surrounding neighborhood, as well as mom and pop stores?
• Will the value of commercial real estate increase in the surrounding areas?
• Will this impact parking and traffic? (They’ve allotted 100 parking slots for Whole Foods customers)

Both first hand observations or hard data would be great.

Answer this question or view answers

If you use Outlook, be sure to download the Outlook Toolbar. Scroll down to the footer at the end of the page, and click on the ‘Outlook Toolbar‘ link or the ‘Get your free LinkedIn toolbar’ link.

Benefits of the Outlook Toolbar include seeing the LinkedIn profile of people who e-mail you, as well as the ability to invite them to LinkedIn directly from the e-mail.

Build Contacts Wizard
Don’t have contacts in Outlook? Know there are a lot of people you e-mail with that aren’t in your contacts? You can run the Build Contacts Wizard to have the Outlook Toolbar look in your sent and received e-mail to build contacts, which you then upload and invite as you want.

View more features of the Outlook Toolbar:

To take full advantage of LinkedIn, you’ll want to build your network. The easiest way to do that is to invite the people you already know.

There are a couple of different ways to add people to your network.

1. By clicking on the orange ‘Expand Your Network’ button in the upper right hand corner, you can invite friends by manually typing in their name as well as their email address.

2. An even quicker way to invite friend is by clicking on the ‘My Contacts’ tab, and then clicking on the ‘Other Contacts‘ link in the nav bar.

On the ‘Other Contacts’ page, click on the ‘Add more contacts‘ link. You’ll see this page:

Outlook
If you have Outlook, click on the ‘Check Outlook contacts’ button. This will search your Outlook contacts for people that are already on LinkedIn.

Webmail
If you have use a webmail program like Yahoo! mail, AOL mail, Gmail, or Hotmail, click on the ‘Check webmail contacts’ button to find people that are already LinkedIn.

Other options
On the right hand column there is the option to import contacts from many address book applications, and the option to enter contacts manually.

Once you’ve either uploaded or entered contacts manually, go to the ‘Other Contacts’ page to quickly invite multiple contacts, or to view which of those contacts are already LinkedIn.

Colleagues & Classmates
From the ‘My Contacts’ tab you can also click on the Colleagues and Classmates links. It’s a great way to reconnect with colleagues and classmates for free, and you can also easily invite them to be a part of your network.

What’s the best Visa / Mastercard rewards credit card?
Answer this question or view answers

Here are a few tips for using LinkedIn Answers:

Post your own question to a website or blog
LinkedIn Answers now has a ’share this’ link which appears at the lower right hand corner under each question. Click on ‘Share This’ to e-mail the question to a friend, add it to del.icio.us or digg, or grab a permalink to a publicly viewable URL.

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View all your Questions & Answers
From the homepage of LinkedIn Answers you can click on the ‘View all your questions & answers’ link in the My Q&A module (located in the upper left hand corner), or on the ‘My Q&A’ link (located in the global navigation).

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Managing your Questions
By clicking on your question within My Q&A (see above), you have a few options for managing your question depending on whether or not it’s open or closed.

For open questions, you can:

• Extend the closing date

• Forward this question to people who might be able to help answer it

• Close the Question

For closed questions, you can:

• Choose a different best answer

• Completely hide question

• Re-open this question to answers

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Subscribe to categories via RSS
Have a favorite category that you like to answer in? You can subscribe to RSS feeds via several blog aggregators (such as Bloglines) or copy the RSS link to subscribe to an aggregator that’s not listed.

Simply use the ‘Browse’ module in the left hand column to navigate to the category you’re interested in subscribing to, and you should see a link to that category’s feed.

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Search Answers
There’s a great depth of knowledge that’s already been collected within LinkedIn Answers. You can use the pull-down in the search box to search LinkedIn Answers from most pages on the site.

Japan based Blog TV recently paid a visit to the LinkedIn offices. Check out footage of our office as well as a bit of four square action.

LinkedIn Answers is a free service which allows members to ask their business-related question, and receive answers from their personal network and the hundreds of thousands of experts in the LinkedIn network as a whole.

The service gives the site’s 9 million users a quick and reliable way to get industry specific answers to business questions and to build upon their professional reputation by responding to questions relevant to their expertise.

There’s a broad range of categories to select from including: blogging, charity and non-profit, personal real estate, and internet marketing.

Sample questions:

• Is the Internet an inherently good force in the world, evil force or neither?

• What are the best locations in the greater Bay Area to host company events, like offsites or parties?

• What the best way to get a business (advertising) book proposal in front of the right people?

Explore LinkedIn Answers:

Learn More or visit LinkedIn Answers

Each week, for the next 9 weeks, I’ll be asking a question on LinkedIn Answers, and re-posting it here.

This week’s question:

What type of online tutorials would you like to see about using LinkedIn?
Answer this question or view answers

LinkedIn will be turning four on the cinco de mayo, so in celebration of that event, I’ll be blogging for 9 weeks on different features of the site.

For those unfamiliar with LinkedIn, it’s an online network of more than 9 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries. It’s mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.

In Week 1, we’ll explore the newly launched LinkedIn Answers.