As a real estate investor you know that the most important element of your business is constant contact. You must cultivate relationships on a constant basis, and of course you need to find homes that would make for quality investments, whether you are seeking to fix-up-and-flip or rent out those properties. An amazing online tool for keeping you ahead of your competitors is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a powerful business networking tool. As a real estate investor, you need to know real estate agents, loan officers, contractors, and title agents in various areas. And–you also need to stay in touch with all those people who may want to sell their houses, or buy houses. You need relationships with all of these people, and LinkedIn is an incredible hub that works. How should you use LinkedIn to further your business? 1. Once you have created your profile, immediately import all of your e-mail contacts. You’ll be told which ones are using LinkedIn and you can send them invitations to view your profile and link up with you. Also, add in all of your networking contacts. Take every business card you have and add those people in, too. When they receive your invitation to link up, they will better remember you and discover an easier, faster way to contact you. 2. Begin joining groups, recommending other businesses, and answering questions. The last thing that you want to do on LinkedIn is sell yourself. Never do this–as a matter of fact, any overly aggressive contact can be viewed as spam and could result in you getting your account terminated.LinkedIn is all about passive contact. * You can build your own group! To do this the right way, choose some broad theme that includes real estate investing under its umbrella. Lead the group in topical discussions about your theme. Be creative in how you get people to join your group. Invite your relevant contacts; place your group on your website; create a group blog; advertise your group or create widget for it to include in your autoresponder e-mails; even invited other real estate investment experts to join (it’s best, of course, to invite those who work in geographical locations where they are not competing with you). * If you give teleseminars or do trade shows, invite your leads and audience member contacts to join your LinkedIn Group. Then you can notify all group members about your forthcoming seminars or other events in the future, so that they come back and visit you again. 3. You can try LinkedIn’s Direct Ads.These work in a similar way to Google AdWords campaigns. You can have targeted ads going out only to relevant LinkedIn members. (They are not sent as spam, don’t worry.) LikedIn already contains 49 million professionals who have average household incomes over $100,000–meaning that you will be reaching out to people who can afford to do business with you