The free LinkedIn account will allow you to join up to 50 Groups.  In LinkedIN Groups, you can network, join conversations, and show prospects that you have the solutions to their problems.  Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs do not utilize Groups to reach prospective clients.

When most people join Groups they often make these two common mistakes:
  1. They join the group but never participate.  You can't expect prospects to come to you for a solution when you don't take the time to make yourself heard.
  2. They join groups where there are similar members.  Does it make more sense to join a group that is full of your competition or full of prospective clients?  You should be in the same place as your prospects, sharing your knowledge of your industry so they can see you are a useful resource.  

To take the most advantage of Groups, create a group for your company and post all of your articles/discussions there.  This creates a community of followers for your company.  Then using the LinkedIn share tool, share that article with all of your other Groups with one click.  To explain the power of groups, I belong to 32 Groups that I post in regularly.  Those 32 Groups contain over 188,000 members.  If you figure that some Groups have some of the same members, you can easily say that you are reaching at least 130,000+ people every time you make a post to these groups.  You do the math - in a few minutes you can post content that will be read by over 130,000 people either daily or weekly (depending on how often they get group updates).  When I started this for our company, our site traffic went up 1200% in 4 weeks, because my posts were links to our company blog, which drove the readers back to our company website.

LinkedIn can be a powerful marketing & networking tool if you use it properly.