Inside this month's issue:

In addition to being easy to use, LinkedIn is well adapted to the needs of an insurance agency. Sign up today!

A successful marketing program is vital—but you must have a strategy before you implement any new technology.

If you’re thinking about passing your business along to your kids, make sure to avoid common traps.

Introducing GoToMyPC, DropBox, Mozy, and Jing—4 Web-based services you may find useful.

Is your brand and message being tarnished by sloppy e-mails, faxes, letters, and proposals?

Ready to move? Take note of some lessons learned before you travel too far down the wrong path.

In part 5, learn to succeed at e-business by measuring progress, setting milestones, and purchasing gear.

LinkedIn makes improvements; BCBS suffers $7 million data breach; insurance industry launches personal lines initiative.

Quickly find missing contact information using LeadResearcher, an intelligent research tool.

March 2010

Bits&Bytes

LinkedIn Improvements

LinkedIn is one of our favorite tools for researching and finding information about prospects and clients. Over the last several months, LinkedIn has made improvements. One area of improvement is the address book, listed under Contacts | My Connections.

The new setup has three columns. The first column allows you to easily sort your connections by tags, companies, locations, industries, and recent activities. The results show up in the middle column. Then, if you select one connection, you get a preview of their contact information. From the preview, you can send an e-mail, edit the contact details you have for them, or—most importantly—tag the connection to put it into one or more groups.

The nice part is that you can add and customize the tags so that you can group your connections in as many ways as you like. This is especially handy if you are using LinkedIn to generate new business. You can create tags for each of the different stages of your sales cycle. Is someone a center of influence? A referral source? A business partner? A prospect? Tags allow you to categorize your network so you can take the...

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