You’ve heard that LinkedIn is a terrific business development tool, but you just don’t have time for one more activity, and aren’t really sure how you would use it anyway.

What if you could be shown how to use LinkedIn, and get five phone calls with hot prospects each week by spending just 30 minutes per day on LinkedIn. Interested?

Brynne Tillman, CEO of Social Sales Link, was our guest on the SkillBites Show this month, and she shared a number of strategies for leveraging LinkedIn. LinkedIn can be used to search for hot prospects, learn about the decision makers by reviewing their profiles, get warm introductions to those decision makers from members of your own network, provide valuable content in the form of blog posts so that decision makers are not only willing to talk to you but are interested in your call, and then nurture those connections.

According to Brynne, when you get warm introductions to prospects, you’ll get twice as many of those prospects accepting your invitation to connect with them. Spending 30 minutes per day, you can reach out to at least 20 members of your network to make warm introductions for you to hot prospects you’ve identified. On average, 10 of those prospects will agree to join your network on LinkedIn, and if you have valuable content and a good profile, 5 of those prospects will accept your offer to call them.

Brynne advised that your profile needs to attract, teach and engage. It is not a resume. You need to include your key words, a strong headline and a high level value proposition that describes what you do and how you can serve your target market. You should also provide valuable content that leads to commercial insights or ‘ah ha’ moments; and you should have a call to action, such as a link to schedule a call or a book that can be downloaded.

Brynne also recommended using Twitter as a lead in to the conversation on LinkedIn. You can create a private list of prospects on Twitter, and like, retweet or quote them to start the conversation. Once you get the conversation going, you can then invite the prospect to connect on LinkedIn.

Brynne offers a 15-minute free coaching call, which you can schedule by going to scheduleacallwithbrynne.com, and, of course, you can connect with Brynne through LinkedIn.