Last week, I was listening to a podcast with Jabez LeBret, CMO of Get Noticed Get Found – the podcast was on the 5 Things You Should Never Do on LinkedIn, and of course the title got my attention.

You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out what those are – it’s only about 30 minutes long, so head on over for a listen.

But one of the things that struck me was something Jabez said right at the end. His co-host asked if he had any advice for listeners, and he said that sales training often suggests that you go through your contact list, and call three people every day for a month. Not to sell them anything, but just to check in and see how they’re doing.

So his suggestion is to apply this to LinkedIn. And I love it, so I’m passing it along to you:

Every day, for a month, reach out to three of your connections by email.

Now, there are some rules, here, of course.

• Before you send them an email, you should first look at their profile and their recent activity to see what they’ve been up to lately. In reaching out to them, you want to make your email about THEM, and not about YOU.
• Your email is not to pitch them on anything or remind them of services you offer, even if you’re reaching out to a potential client. I know for 99.9% of you reading this, that’s obvious and I don’t even have to say it. But for that 0.1%, I do, so I’m including it.
• Bonus points if you reach out to people who are in your city and offer to meet up with them for coffee or lunch in the next four weeks too.

We all have a lot of LinkedIn connections these days (it’s really easy to say yes to them!), but how well do we know our connections, and how well are we actually connecting with them? If you’re like me, even if you log into LinkedIn (which I do actually do daily), you’re only scanning through your feed and maybe “liking” a few updates, adding a “congrats!” here and there for an anniversary or new job, and maybe clicking on one or two interesting articles that someone has shared.

So there’s a huge opportunity to amplify my LinkedIn community efforts by better engaging with my network there every day. If I email three of my connections every day for the 31 days in January, that’s 93 people I will have reached out to by the end of the month.

I’m taking the challenge in January to do it. Will you?