So, you’ve joined Linkedin on the promise that it’s a great business tool and you’ll definitely get clients from it, right? Now what? You know that clients coming from this medium won’t happen on their own, but what should you do next?

This is such a common question – what should I be doing on Linkedin and more importantly how do I get business out of it? – that I thought it was important that I gave you some tips.

You see social networking is just like networking at an actual business event. If you attend a business event once and never again and didn’t talk to anyone when you went to that event, how can you expect to get business from it? And yet, this is what many business owners do on Linkedin.

Like at an actual business event where you would have a one-to-one chat with people, start a discussion, ask a question, recommend someone or simply throw a comment out there and see what comes back, you can do all of these things on-line too.

Each week in an ideal world, you should be looking to spend roughly half an hour on Linkedin and do at least the following activities:

• Spend some time going through the connections Linkedin recommends for you. Linkedin finds potential connections based on the people you’re already connected with – it says if you’re connected to x person, maybe you know some of the people x is connected with and recommends them to you. Go through these recommendations and connect with people you know.

• Post a discussion in the groups you’re a member of – if you post a link back to your site in the discussions, you can automatically share this discussion in all of the other groups you’re connected with. Any replies to these discussions will come into your inbox meaning that you can start to build a relationship with people.

• Answer a question. Many, many people post questions in Linkedin. Search for your subject and then see what questions you can answer. Try to answer at least one a week which demonstrates your expertise and helps build relationships with people.

• Give a recommendation. If you recommend at least one person a week, they’ll be extremely grateful and guess what they’re likely to do in return? This is a great way to build up your own recommendations and improve your relationship with people on Linkedin.

If you then have time following these activities and want to improve what you do on Linkedin even further, you could:

• Start communicating and building relationships with your connections. Touch base with people you haven’t liaised with for a while and see how they’re getting on or build up further connections with the people you are in regular contact with.

• Build new connections with those people in the same discussion groups as you – connect with them and build new relationships.

• Post an event on Linkedin and tell your connections about it.

• Post a status update on Linkedin and tell everyone what you’re doing.

As you can see, that’s just a few ways that you can get involved more with Linkedin. Like an actual event, the more you go to it and build relationships with people, the more likely the networking event is to work for you. If you start getting involved in Linkedin and build your connections and your relationships, you’ll also find that it gets you business too.