The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and Attachment Parenting Blog. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

You're invited to attend my LinkedIn workshop

I've been honored to work with a group of very smart, highly connected entrepreneurial organizations on developing an important new professional workshop focused on how to use LinkedIn to build a stronger Colorado networking community. These organizations include The Association Catapult, Integrated Alliances, The da Vinci Institute and Rockies Venture Club.

We've got a fabulous venue at DU, a date, and are ready to offer our first workshop in the series on April 7th in Denver, Colorado, focused on how to use LinkedIn to find employees, land a new job, network with specific businesses or industries and even to make sales contacts and avoid cold-calls.

My role? I'm the person who will be leading the workshop and I can guarantee that it's going to be a highly educational event, one that would even be worth a day-trip to Denver if you're not local to Colorado.

Note: seating is limited to 80 people, it's an incredibly inexpensive $69 for this half day workshop, and tickets are going fast.

Alright, I have more space, so let me tell you a bit more about what we're planning to really fire you up for this workshop. First off, it's 1.30pm to 4.30pm, and needless to say, the networking at the event is going to be superb. I can already tell you that some of the best and brightest in Colorado have RSVP'd and are going to be in attendance.

But more than that, we're working closely with the team at LinkedIn to ensure that we cover all the key areas and concepts of this powerful professional networking tool, and you'll learn how to enter your online profile to gain maximum advantage from your inclusion, how to invite others to join in a way that ensures that they happily link to you and are available next time you need their products or services, how to politely decline invitations from people who you don't want to work with, and why you might accept some invitations but not others.

If you're not familiar with LinkedIn, let me ask you a question: the last time you sought a product or service provider, how did you go about finding them? Probably you asked your friends and colleagues for recommendations. But here's the flaw with that: what if you know thirty people and it turns out that Joy, person #26 on your list, is pals with someone who would have been a brilliant choice, but you only ever got to the first eight people on your list? Connection not made.

Now imagine you could utilize a tool that would let you search for that same service provider and get a list of matching individuals, organized by your connection with them. Now you'd see that Miguel, the perfect match, is connected to you through Joy and you could easily email a note to Joy asking for an introduction or even just pick up the phone and ask Joy about Miguel directly.

That's exactly what LinkedIn quantifies with its connections. Through LinkedIn, you can not just search your own connections, and not just search the connections of your connections, but you can even find people three hops away, sort of colleagues of colleagues of your colleagues.

Would that be useful? You bet it is.

My full network of connections is exponential: I have 294 direct connections through various means who collectively have over 127,000 people in their network, and they have a staggering 1.6 million connections. This means that I have an extended network of 1.6 million professionals (no kids, no social networking, LinkedIn is focused on professionals) whom I can search and make contact with at the tap of a mouse button.

Perhaps my showing you a list of all the sponsoring organizations will help convince you that LinkedIn is a powerful tool that you should already be using and give you a sense of how committed we are here in Colorado to improve our networking capabilities:

• Integrated Alliances
• da Vinci Institute
• Rockies Venture Club
• Colorado Business Leads
• Business Connection Network
• AITP
• The Mark Crowley Show
• NewBCI
• Colorado Photonics Industry Association
• The Association Catapult

I feel very strongly that LinkedIn can help your career as you learn how to more efficiently network in this digital age. As an example, when I come back from networking events I now automatically invite everyone to connect with me on LinkedIn. That way I'll memorialize our connection rather than add to the already overflowing stack of business cards on my desk.

Now, having said all of that, let me also say that there are only 80 seats available in this state-of-the-art presentation center at Denver University, and a lot of organizations promoting this to their members, so if you are interested - and heck, it's only $69 to attend, less than one good business lunch! - I entreat you to sign up immediately so you don't miss your opportunity to join us.

Finally, if you want to see my LinkedIn profile, having said all these wonderful things about LinkedIn, you're more than invited: Dave Taylor's LinkedIn Profile.

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