Update your status.
Update your status regularly and strategically. Use your status update to remind your network what you do and what you know. Example: “David is writing a LinkedIn best practices piece for his blog.” You can also use your status update to share articles with your network. If you provide interesting links the people in your network will be much more likely to pay attention to your updates, which keeps you top of mind and also positions you as knowledgeable in your area. That trust in your ability will make it much more likely that people will consider you as an expert to whom they can refer their contacts. If you plan on doing this, use a URL shortener like bit.ly to save space in your status updates and to track how many click-throughs a given link garnered.

Learn Advanced Search.
LinkedIn’s Advanced Search is extremely powerful. LinkedIn’s Advanced Search helps you find very targeted audiences. LinkedIn’s Advanced Search is your friend.

Join industry groups.
Search for and join industry-related LinkedIn groups , even if there is no activity within them. The icons for those groups will show up on your profile which tells people at a glance that you are involved in your industry and presumably knowledgeable about it. It also creates a connection between you an anyone else who is a member of that group. If the group is active, join in the conversation where appropriate. This is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise.

Post news.
Many groups allow you to post links to news articles intended to spark conversation. More often than not, conversations do not arise from these links but that doesn’t mean that no one pays attention to them. Like status updates, this function can be used to position yourself as knowledgeable in your field. But think before you go down this route. Before you post anything, ask yourself if what you’re about to share is truly valuable to the group. If it’s sheer self-promotion don’t do it. Only post content that you sincerely feel will be of value to your fellow group members. I have shared some of my blog posts and, because the pieces were useful to the group members, I got a lot of traffic to my blog because people genuinely wanted to read it. If your article is not going to add value, it’s spam; don’t post it.

Ask and you shall receive.
If you want to make connections with a specific type of person, you can use LinkedIn’s Answer feature to try and attract them by posing a question the LinkedIn audience. Think about the type of person you want to reach and then formulate a question for which you think that person would have an opinion about that they’d like to share. If you’re looking for an open source web developer, for example, you might ask “Which is better, Drupal or Joomla?”

Spread the love.
Answer questions posed by others. This, again, is another aspect of LinkedIn that can be used to demonstrate your competence. Only answer the questions for which you know the answer intimately. If you use this tactic, don’t just do intellectual handstands to show off your knowledge, actually answer the question. Your attitude should be that you want to help the person who posed the question by sharing your expertise. If you are truly helpful to the person, they’ll consider assigning you as the best answer among the group. Your answer but also the fact that it was the best answer will be displayed on your profile.

Install applications.
LinkedIn doesn’t have many apps, but those that they do can be helpful for positioning and to create more contact points.