This is a guest post by Mark Williams, AKA Mr LinkedIn, An Independent LinkedIn Trainer.

Prof Diana Derval is a Shanghai based expert in neuro marketing.

She has a decent sized network with over 4500 connections on LinkedIn and she is a premium account holder. She also has a twitter account with 699 followers.

She is not an ‘in’fluencer nor does she work for a publishing company.

Her activity on LinkedIn and Twitter is at best described as ‘moderate’.

On the 28th Feb 2015 she posted her third published post on LinkedIn, she also Tweeted it to her followers and got about 12 retweets.

On LinkedIn her post was viewed….wait for it…..

3,543,969 times!

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you, that is over three and a half million!

It also received over a thousand comments and over a thousand likes.

All this just from an ordinary Linkedin user!

LinkedIn Publishing is making blogging mainstream, people from all walks of business are enjoying the opportunity to have a voice on the world’s largest online business networking platform.

You too have the opportunity to promote yourself, your business and your events for free, so what are you waiting for?

All you need to do is go to the top of your homepage and click on the ‘publish a post’ link.

Then you need to think of something to write!

My advice would be to write a post related to the event that you wish to promote. Avoid directly promoting an event as this is unlikely to be shared. Instead write something that would be of genuine interest to people who may wish to attend or exhibit at your event.

For instance you may be hosting a conference for entrepreneurs such as this one I found on Eventbrite today:

Fast Forward Your Business – London 12 & 13 September 2015

In this case I would look to write a post around some of the subjects that will be featured in the conference.  The aim is to stimulate interest through quality content rather than trying to directly sell the event and include a link to the event within the article.

Once the subject has been agreed I would find a suitable channel in LinkedIn Pulse.

Channels

When you publish a post on LinkedIn a notification will be sent (email, website and mobile app) to your connections and followers. This has some advantages over a standard status update but the real win comes when you manage to get your post into one of the Pulse channels.

There are many channels on LinkedIn Pulse from a diverse range of niche subjects from leadership and management (11.8 million followers) to hospitality (120,000 followers).

LinkedIn members can select to follow a channel resulting in every post in that channel appearing in their homepage feed, notifications and occasionally by email.

The bottom line is that if you can get your post into a channel then you have the potential to widen your reach considerably.

You can find channels by going to the ‘interests’ menu, selecting Pulse and then the ‘Discover’ tab, scroll down and you will see a list of channels.

With regards to the event above I would select the entrepreneurship and small business channel (7 million followers).

You cannot request for your post to be added into a channel, you have to write it so that it is selected by LinkedIn. This is done in two ways;

• An algorithm picks up your post from relevant keywords included in your headline and main body of the post. It will also look for relevant tags (added by you at the bottom).
• The LinkedIn editorial team can also select posts for a channel manually.

Having decided on your topics and selected some important keywords (take your lead from successful posts in the target channel) you now need to write your copy.

You can check out my top publishing tips here to give yourself the best chance of getting into a channel.

Once you have published your post you need to start promoting it as follows;

• Post a status update to your connections every morning for 5 days minimum. There is a share link at the top of the post that makes this easy.
• Repeat the same exercise for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter
• Ask your colleagues (the more the merrier) to add a comment or at least like your post within the first 48 hours of posting.
• Start a discussion in any relevant LinkedIn groups regarding the same subject and support the discussion with a link to your post.
• Send the post directly to connections you know (or who owe you a favour!) and ask them to directly share it with their network.

There is no doubt that luck plays a big part in the success of any post but if you follow the guidelines in this article and my top tips document you will give yourself a great chance of reaching way beyond your network.

I am not suggesting you will get 3.5 million views or anywhere near that but just imagine the impact just 1% of that would have on the success of your event?

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