An Important, Daily Habit. Every day, look for LinkedIn Questions reflecting your personal or professional interests. You don't always have to answer a question. But, a daily monitoring habit (i.e., 5 to 10 minutes of review every morning) can help you gradually and continuously build your online reputation and personal brand within specific topics.
A Two-Phase Process. The process for efficiently monitoring questions in LinkedIn Answers requires two (2) tools:
- A LinkedIn RSS Feed for Your Favorite LinkedIn Question & Answer (Q&A) Categories
- A Dedicated iGoogle Tab Centralizing Your Multiple LinkedIn Q&A RSS Feeds
The time investment for building this process is less than 15 minutes.
The Multiple Benefits of RSS Feed Subscriptions
Turn Your iGoogle Home Page Into a Custom Content Dashboard. RSS feeds enable you to create personalized content or news dashboards. When you set up your RSS subscriptions, you'll realize multiple benefits:
- Time Efficiency: Centralized content from multiple sources is easier to find and consume
- Fewer Emails: Multiple RSS feeds allow you to receive updated content without email notifications
- Content Customization: Your RSS feeds subscriptions reflect only the content / knowledge you choose to receive
Here's an example of how my LinkedIn Question & Answer RSS Feeds for multiple categories look in my iGoogle Page:
Subscribing to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers RSS Feed
How to Get Started. Here are the steps, you need to follow so you can set up the LinkedIn RSS Feed:
1. From your LinkedIn Home Page, highlight the "More" link in the top, right-hand corner. You'll see a prompt for "Answers":
2. After clicking on the "Answers" link, you should arrive at the LinkedIn Question & Answers Home Page. It looks like this:
3. The next step is to select a category you find interesting. The "Recommended Categories For You" is LinkedIn's custom feature offers suggestions based on your LinkedIn Profile. You can also select a category by selecting one of the categories on the far, right-hand side under "Browse":
4. In this example, I selected the "Blogging" Category. To subscribe to the RSS Feed for "Blogging," click on the orange RSS icon on the bottom, right-hand corner:
5. Copy the hyperlink highlighted in the text box where it says "or copy the RSS link:"
Creating a LinkedIn Answers Tab in Your iGoogle Home Page
Hold on to the RSS link you just copied! We're not going to paste the LinkedIn RSS hyperlink just yet.
1. Open a new tab in your Internet browser. In this new tab, please select your iGoogle Home Page.
2. Click on your "Google Home" tab. You should see a "little down arrow / toggle switch" to the right-hand side of "Google Home."
3. Click on "the little down arrow." You should be prompted with a command that says "Add a Tab."
4. After clicking on "Add a Tab," the following screen should appear:
5. Fill in the name of your new tab and click on "Ok"
6. I named my new tab "test tab." Your new tab should look something like this (but with the name you selected for your tab):
7. In your new tab, click the prompt on the top, left hand-side that says "Add gadgets"
8. After clicking on "Add gadgets," you should see a prompt at the bottom, left-hand side of your screen that says "Add feed or gadget"
9. Click on this link and you should get a screen that looks like this:
10. Now, remember that RSS Link you copied earlier from Step 5 from Subscribing to the LinkedIn Question & Answers RSS Feed so you could be alerted to any new questions in the Blogging Category?
That box above is where you're going to paste that RSS Link. After pasting in the RSS Link, click Add.
11. If the RSS feed is added correctly, you should now see a prompt that looks like this:
12. To make sure the LinkedIn Answers Blogging Category Feed is added correctly, you'll want to click the prompt on the top, left-hand side that says "Back to iGoogle"
13. Voila, your new RSS Feed is captured in your iGoogle tab. Now, you can add multiple LinkedIn Answer Categories to this iGoogle tab to monitor several types of LinkedIn Questions — a big time saver.
14. Adding Multiple RSS Feeds to Your Custom iGoogle Tab is Now Super-Easy. You might be thinking that sure was a ton of steps to follow! Well, you're right. But, you've done the hard part — creating your customized iGoogle tab.
From this point forward, whenever you want to add a new LinkedIn Answers Category to your custom iGoogle tab, repeat steps 7 through 12 of Creating a LinkedIn Answers Tab in Your iGoogle Home Page.
Photo Credit by Teia MG via flickr