LinkedIn has reached the tipping point for lawyers.

More and more lawyers sign up for it every day and recognize that it is low hanging fruit in the world of online networking. It's free, easy to use and safely professional in demeanor. Like most things in life, though, the people who get the most out of the service are the ones who put the most in.

In that vein, here are 3 easy ways to get more out of LinkedIn:

1. Check the LinkedIn inbox regularly.

One of my chief complaints about LinkedIn is that the notifications from the inbox are not as dependable as they ought to be. I have received several messages in my LinkedIn inbox that were never delivered to my email inbox. I verified that they were not caught in my overactive spam filter, either. These emails just did not come through, much to my later embarrassment.

I've learned over time that I just need to double check the LinkedIn inbox manually once or twice a week. It's not a big problem, and is probably beneficial as it keeps me more active in the site, but it is another inbox I've had to incorporate into my organizational system.

2. Send your Wordpress blog posts to your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn has incorporated some cool applications to help users get more functionality out of the site, and one of the easiest is to send your blog posts to your profile via the Wordpress application. You spend time writing the content and you spend more time maintaining your network on LinkedIn, why not put the two together? I have recently switched blogging platforms from Wordpress to Squarespace, so I have to (unfortunately) disable this application for myself. If you are blogging on Wordpress, though, this is a winner.

It probably goes without saying that you should only add your professional blog to your LinkedIn profile. If you maintain a personal blog where you rant about religion, politics, your boss and the world in general, you might just want to keep that one to yourself.

3. Use the RSS feed attached for network updates

The home page of your LinkedIn account has a rolling update of what your contacts have been up to. It says who has added contacts, who has made a recommendation, and other adjustments your contacts have made to their LinkedIn profiles. There is, at the top of this screen, an RSS button.

I'm an avid RSS fan and I am far more likely to read the items that end up in my RSS reader than I am to read the home page of LinkedIn. Having all of the updates go to my reader allows me to bypass the homepage when I am in LinkedIn and know that I can quickly scan all of the updates in my RSS reader at my convenience. I normally catch one or two updates that are useful each month, so the benefit significantly outweighs the 10 to 15 minutes a month I spend reviewing that feed.