Adding a LinkedIn button, oftentimes referred to as an icon, to a webpage is an easy way to encourage your visitors to share your page with their friends and family. The button essentially allows them to add you to their favorites on whatever service applies. The popular social networking service LinkedIn, which is primarily aimed at professional users, has a button feature that you can use to network your company or personal website and your profile on this networking service.

Using It

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Using a social networking button is actually quite easy. The way you find it on the LinkedIn system is by going to your profile. Under your profile, you will find an option to edit your public profile settings on the upper right-hand side of the screen. After you click on this, you will see a button that reads, “promote your profile with customized buttons”. Clicking on this button allows you to choose from a selection of social networking icons that you can include on your webpage. You can also include them in your e-mails, if you wish. After you select an appropriate design, you simply copy the code and paste it into whatever webpage or other service you wish to use it on.

Social networking has become one of the most important ways that businesses connect with potential clients. By harnessing the power of social networking and putting it to use on your blog, website or other Internet presence, you can make sure that all of your various web presences are networked together, which helps you to drive traffic to each of the sites that apply. It’s important to have all the social networking icons on all your webpages!

Considerations

Because LinkedIn is used by professionals more than it is used by individuals that want to share personal information, it is more sensible to open up your profile so that everybody can see it. When you use one of the social networking icons, you have to make certain that you have your profile set to public so that people can actually see your profile when they click on the icon. Clicking on the icon brings them to your profile, at which point they can choose to follow you or take whatever other action they wish. Hopefully, they will use this feature to share your profile with their friends.

Depending upon what service you are using, there may be different procedures for including the code for a LinkedIn Icon. If you’re using a WordPress blog, for instance, you may have this functionality built into your template already and not need to use the LinkedIn feature itself. The same applies if you’re using the Blogger service, where you have to enter the code as a new gadget.

This can be a powerful social networking tool, but be certain that you use it in the appropriate places. Most of the time, people will prefer to use their Facebook icons for personal sites and to use their LinkedIn profile as a way to network with other professionals, which makes it more appropriate to put these buttons on sites that are designed for business more than anything else.

Do you have LinkedIn on your webpages?

In my last blog I talked about security issues related to technology and social media websites. As George Butters,  CEO www.NewMediaDrive.com says, the best way to keep hackers away is to use secure passwords. But what is a secure password? In order to figure that out, it’s probably best to find out what isn’t a good password. Butters says bluntly, if your password is “in dictionary, it’s a lousy password. If you use the same password for everything, shame on you.”

Here is his suggestion on how to generate secure passwords and keep them safe, based on his own personal method.

1. Have a series of passwords, perhaps 20, that range from 8 to 10 characters and include upper and lowercase letters and numbers.

2. Don’t use the memorized passwords feature in your web browser software. Manually key it in every time. “The memory is in the muscles,” he says. “Type it 50 times when you create it. That goes a long way to solidifying the memory. Plus, having to enter it completely every time helps maintain the memory.”

3. To remember passwords: Butters suggests using shortcuts to identify them in a file on your computer desktop or on your mobile phone.

Example: If the password is P4jkcY87, the short version would be P4. When you see P4, you know the password is P4jkcY87.

4. Creating passwords: Take an old reference book that’s always on or near your desk. Turn to a page, for example 259 (that number can also be your password reminder). Starting from the upper left-hand character at the top of the page, read down the margin listing off the first eight (8) characters. (Note: don’t use a dictionary or you’ll get passwords like gggggggg).

Another idea is using a random password generator. For example: http://smartypants.com/randpass.php

http://strongpasswordgenerator.com

http://www.goodpassword.com

Or key “passwords generator” in a search engine and you’ll find many websites that will help you do this.

Do you have ideas for creating safe passwords and remembering them? Please post them here to share with everyone.