As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a solopreneur that finds a great deal of value in LinkedIn.

Today, however, we’re going to focus on connections.

The first way to add connections is to go to your LinkedIn profile and click on “Connections”

If you then go down to “add connections,” you can connect your address book to LinkedIn.

You can then add everybody in your address book. If you have an address book that is strictly for business, then you will only get business connections. But, if you use the same email for both (or have Gmail and it just grabs all of your contacts), then you will get a listing of

*E*V*E*R*Y*B*O*D*Y*

…your son’s soccer coach from when he was 6, your daughter’s third grade teacher, the health tech from the middle school.

You get the idea. There might be some people in there that might not really be considered business contacts.

So it might be time to step back and see who you WANT to actually add to your connections.

From what I can gather from what I’ve read and what I’ve seen, there seems to be three schools of thought.

1. Grab for ALL the connections you possibly can. This is where you would add your son’s soccer coach and the ex-boyfriend of your second cousin once removed.
2. Be purposeful and specific in the people you do or do not add.
3. Change with your whim week by week. 

As you can see, I’ve put a strikethrough through #3. This plan doesn’t have any logic.

#1 has some benefits, and there are advantages to having a large number of LinkedIn connections. This is spelled out in the first article below (9 Reasons Why LinkedIn Friendship is the Mightiest of Magics). This was written by someone that does Online advertising so increasing the size of a market is a significant part of their business. (As a complete aside, as the mother of a “brony”, I have got to admire someone that manages to write a blog post outlining their professional services while using lessons from My Little Pony – props to Larry).

The second option is the one that I’ve personally chosen. I want to have the ability to speak to the business acumen or character of my connections.

As I was working on this blog post, a call came in from another member of the Virtual Assistant community looking for graphic artists. I sent her information about 3 graphic artists that I know and their LinkedIn profiles. This way she can see their experience and recommendations right off the bat.

Related articles

• 9 Reasons Why LinkedIn Friendship Is the Mightiest of Magics. Larry Kim (wordstream.com)
• When to Refuse LinkedIn Connection Requests. Quentin Fottrell (marketwatch.com)
• Attention! You’re More Transparent Than Ever. Colleen McKenna (business2community.com)
• 6 Ways to Grow Your LinkedIn Connections. Melonie Dodaro (socialmediaexaminer.com)