LinkedIn: I'm all out of invitations. Now what?

If you're not already aware, LinkedIn only gives you 3000 invitations to work with. I've recently exhausted my 3000, so I've been thinking about how to continue to grow my network. Here are a few ideas:

1) After sending my last invitation, I noticed that I still had a few hundred that were outstanding. By withdrawing these outstanding invitations, it freed them up for new invites.

2) Ask customer service for more invites. They'll take a look at your acceptance rate vs. IDK's and make a decision from there about giving you more to work with. I recently asked for more and, despite having a few IDKs, they gave me an additional 60 invitations.

3) There are a few sites with open networker lists that you can download into a spreadsheet (themetanetwork.com, myLink500.com). If you're out of your 3000 invitations, you've probably already invited a good portion of the people on those lists, but it doesn't hurt to send them an email (outside of the LI interface) with a quick invite link. I recently did this and picked up another few hundred connections that had been added since I first uploaded the lists to LI.

4) Make sure you're registered in the open networker lists (metanetwork, mylink500, toplink). People will do what I suggested in step 3 (or just upload them directly to LI) and you'll get a decent number of invites per day.

5) Join lots of groups. This is somewhat controversial as many LI users think that you should only join a group if you are going to be a contributing member or have some professional reason to join. All that aside, I get a dozen or so invites per day just from people in the groups that I'm in. Even better, start some LinkedIn groups and grow them. You'll get hordes of people joining because they saw the cool badge on one of your connection's profiles. Then send an email to all group members asking them to connect with you.

6) Be active in the Q&A section of LinkedIn. When people see you asking engaging questions and responding well to others, it will draw them to your profile (which will hopefully lead to an invite).

7) Put a quick invite link in your email signature block, on the home page of any websites that you run, and on any other sites where you have a profile. I am a frequent visitor and blog contributor of talentbar.com and recruitingblogs.com. I get a few invites per day from people who visit my profile and read my blog.

Have other ideas on how to grow your network? Please share them here.