You'll just need an email address and a few minutes of your time.

Let's take a look at how it works to get started, goto Lincoln dot com and your Web browser into your information.

Choose a password and then click the join button.

Lincoln will guide you through the steps of adding more detail to your profile.

Next, you'll need to verify your email address.

To do this, go to your inbox, look for the message from LinkedIn and then click the confirmation button.

You can also choose to sink the context list from your email account at this time.

This will make it easier to find people you already know on LinkedIn, so we recommend you do this eventually.

However, if you don't want to do it right now, you could just skip it.

A few more screens will appear, asking for your photo and professional interests like with email contacts.

You can skip these steps if you'd rather deal with them.

Later, however, we encourage you to explore everything Lincoln has to offer to ensure you're getting the most out of it.

After the sign up process, Lincoln may ask you to upgrade to a premium account, which costs a monthly subscription fee.

While the premium account provides additional features such as more messaging options and job opening details, we found that you can get a lot out of linked in using just the free account.

We recommend sticking with that one.

For now.

Now that your account is set up, you're ready to start creating your profile and adding connections.