How to become a top ranked expert on LinkedIn, without really trying

I'm rather shocked to tell you that out of LinkedIn's current 15 million users, I am now ranked among the top 15 Charity and Nonprofit experts on the site. This after joining just a couple of months ago. If you wish, you too can quickly become one of the top experts on the Internet's leading business networking site. The secret is to take advantage of LinkedIn's powerful Answers features.

Search and Share Answers
LinkedIn’s Answers is somewhat like a modern day oracle. Do you have a question -- any question -- that you need answered quickly? Post it online and within hours dozens of people will have shared with you their thoughts and opinions. Some are wise -- some are not so -- but collectively you will have received pretty good advice. Odds are somebody has asked your question already, so often you do not even need to post a new query to get find a good answer. The site archives hundreds of thousands of previous responses that you can easily search.

LinkedIn Answers offers a “share this” link that appears at the lower right hand corner under each question. Click on the link to e-mail the question to a LinkedIn personal connection, add it to del.icio.us or digg, or grab a permalink to highlight it on your blog or other social networking service like Facebook. This is a great way to strengthen your network by helping your friends get their questions answered quickly, or letting them shine by answering a question within their subject expertise.

Ask Questions
Posting a question is an excellent way to quickly survey the community. You can post your question privately and forwarded to just a few of your select contacts; or you can choose to make it public and have it available to be answered by anyone of the site's millions of registered users. It will also then show up on the home pages of all your network connections. This means if even I am the only person you are connected to and you ask a question, it will show up on the home page of over 15,700 people. (If you answer one of my questions, the answer will be linked to the home page of over 1,245,000 people!)

When asking a question, just be careful or you can come off looking rather silly. For example, avoid asking something that has been posted before or could be answered through a simple Google search. Remember good grammar and spelling still count. Don't post just to fish for new clients; people can always tell. Most importantly, be clear about what you are asking and why it is important to you. If you receive permission and give credit, answers make great source content for republication to a blog or elsewhere.

Answer Questions
You can become a ranked expert like me by consistently providing useful answers to other's questions. LinkedIn uses a rating system to award expertise points. If you follow the above posting advice for asking questions, your reputation will strengthen when responding to others as well. By answering questions, I have made connections with individuals as far away as Australia, India and Israel.

Do you have a favorite category in which you would like to become a recognized expert? My suggestion is that you subscribe to its RSS feeds. Simply use the "Browse" module in the left hand column of the Answer module to navigate to the category you are interested in subscribing to, where you can find link to that category’s feed. This is one way I'm strategically keeping up to date with the pulse in the Charity and Nonprofit sector. Many of my answers have ended up inspiring recent posts here on this blog.