Up to your limit? Have you been a good boy?

Something that not many people have paid attention to is that, a while back, LinkedIn capped the number of invitations you can send for life at 3000.

Now, for most people, that's not an issue, particularly if you play by the rules. But for anyone who's been seriously inviting new contacts and taking full advantage of LinkedIn's own Outlook upload tools, then you've probably already exceeded this limit. (btw, those days are over!)

In that case, LinkedIn probably gave you 500 more to play with.

Want to check? Click on the big "add connections" button in the top right hand corner of the home page and then, on the next page, you'll see a note on the right hand side "Please note: You can send XXX more invitations." (the XXX being how many you have left).

But, fear not, if you run out of this final allotted amount you can apply for more.

In a recent Yahoo!Group post, Konstantin explained the procedure:

If feedback from invitees has been average or above from mass inviters, the limit gets raised 500 invitations at a time. You don't have to be a model citizen.

It's 200 if users are just below the average and 100 if they are way below--the 100 are there basically to demonstrate that users are willing to target invitees more carefully and write more compelling invitation messages (resulting in higher acceptance rates and fewer complaints/declines).

So there you have it. If you keep your nose clean, don't get too many complaints or declines, you can get another 500.

I like Konstantin's phrase "You don't have to be a model citizen." :-)

LinkedIn know they have a number of people on their network who, maybe in the early days, helped LinkedIn grow by inviting thousands. Now they've got the numbers, they need to reign these people in otherwise, in LinkedIn's view, this same element could drive away the people already there.

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