Why You Must Keep Your LinkedIn Profile Current

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Someone once asked a business colleague of mine who’s been working on LinkedIn for a very long time if it was okay to update their profile. In their case, they were talking about their profile summary. My colleague thought it was an odd question to be asked. After all, wouldn’t you want to update your CV or your resume? Upon further investigation though, they realized the person was asking a valid question. Basically, they were wondering if their older connections would react negatively to an updated profile. Here’s what my colleague told them that I think will help anyone asking the same question.

“It all depends! But what choice do you have? If your profile needs updating, then that really means that you’ve either moved on, or you’ve changed focus in your professional life. You’ve done something like get a new job, or you’re planning on changing careers. Something like that. If you want LinkedIn to work for you in this new endeavor, then you really need to update your headline, your profile summary, and quite possibly other parts of your profile.”

Indeed, over the past few years, as my business focus has changed, I’ve updated my own profiles significantly about 3 times. We no longer live in the world of people working at the same job for thirty years and getting the gold watch at the end. We live in a much more fluid world when it comes to career, employment, and skills.

Looking at it from a skills point of view, it used to be that you had to have a college degree specializing you in some discipline or other before you could get a job doing whatever that was. Nowadays, you can take an online course and within three months or so, completely change careers! You won’t necessarily need to start on the ground floor either!

With the flux that defines our business and professional lives, why wouldn’t you change your profile as you change? One: Will people really get bent out of shape over that? and Two: Would the opinion of someone who did really matter?

Get in there and show people you’re growing and learning. And enjoy all the new connections you’ll make as a result.

 

How To Simplify Your Social Media Marketing Strategies

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Social media marketing strategies can get incredibly complicated. There always seems to be so much to do and so little time. However, there are ways to keep it simple once you know how. Here are 7 tips for simplifying, honing, and creating more effective social marketing.

1. Know your niche.

The niche research you did when you first started your business should have revealed your people’s interests, pain points, problems, and spending limits. If you’re not sure, do some research. Above all, find out where they spend their leisure time on the Internet and target those sites. There’s no point in banging away on any and every social network if the ideal customer in your niche isn’t hanging out there.

By the way, I talk about creating customer personas and lots of other cool Marketing Tips in my free eReport. To get it, simply enter your info below and it’ll be headed your way!

2. Brainstorm hot content.

Hot content is the kind of content that will appeal to those in your niche. As you do your niche research, you will probably see the same questions coming up repeatedly. Make a list of them and create content that answers these questions. Be sure to create paid products that do as well. Free products lead to paid products.

3. Leverage the content you create.

Make every piece of content you create work hard for you. One of the best ways to do it is to put it into more than one format. For example, your content could be an article, top-10 list, or a PowerPoint deck. Your deck could become a video on YouTube which you would then embed on your site. You could also share the deck at popular sharing sites like SlideShare, owned by LinkedIn, which has very convenient sharing buttons for all of the major social networks.

4. Create a publishing schedule.

Once you leverage your content, schedule it. You obviously can’t publish leveraged content on the same topic back to back, but you can use your blog scheduler to set the date and time in advance and, for example, publish one each month for several months.

Make video your priority, though, to build up a robust YouTube channel full of interesting content that will gain followers.

If you are working alone, create your own calendar and follow it. The plugin “Editorial Calendar for WordPress” is incredibly useful. If you are working in a team, set up a shared calendar to make sure something of value is being published regularly.

5. Use automated tools.

WordPress has a range of plugins that will create share buttons so people can just click to share on the social networks. In addition, they have plugins that will announce your new content on your social sites automatically, such as WordTwit for creating a link to your content on Twitter.

Then there are specific tools that will allow you to schedule posts in advance, such as Buffer, which will link with a number of different networks, and ViralWoot, which allows you to schedule Pinterest pins in advance. These tools have both free and paid levels, so you have nothing to lose by trying them out and seeing how useful they are. If they make your publishing on the social networks easier, the cost will more than pay for itself in terms of the amount of time you will save.

6. Make an appointment with social for 1 hour each day.

Social media can devour your time if you’re not careful (ask me how I know), so block out 2 appointments of 30 minutes each, morning and evening, so you minimize the danger of getting distracted and wasting hours wandering around in an unfocused manner.

7. Outsource

Once you get things organized, outsource the work to a reliable virtual assistant. Idea: Draft in your teen or neighbor and free up your time to build your business in other ways.

Don’t have time to do your own marketing? Are you a service business that would rather focus on your business and your existing customers and have someone else handle bringing in new customers? Then we’d love to talk with you about partnering to reach your goals.

Three Negative Things Your LinkedIn Profile Reveals About You

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LinkedIn is about business, right? Right! Just about business, and quite frankly, no one wants to do business with people who are suspect, don’t believe in themselves, or to use a phrase common a few decades ago, throw off a negative vibe! Yet, I see so many profiles that do just this! They hurt your cause instead of help it. Often, I think this is unconscious. I don’t think people with profiles like this are trying to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, but they are? You might be wondering, what exactly am I seeing? Well, let’s talk about three things I see often that really put me off and make me not want that person in my world.

#1 – No Picture or Poor Picture

At least once a day someone sends me a connect request and they don’t have a picture! What’s up with that? How could anybody expect LinkedIn to work for them if they don’t have any kind of picture at all? It is, after all, a business networking site. It leaves you wondering: Why are they hiding? What’s wrong with their face? Should I trust them?

Then there’s the people who have photos, but they’re very poor in quality. You don’t have to have a professional head shot like an actor would, but you do need a clear photo that shows you at least wearing business attire.

#2 – Lack of Passion About Your Work

When I read your profile summary do I feel like I’ve read this all before? Are you faking it, or are you really stoked about what you’re doing? I don’t want to do business with people who aren’t passionate about what they bring to the table. And, frankly, I would never hire someone who seems that way, either. So, get passionate and pour that passion into your profile!

#3 – “Seeking Employment”

This last one might be my own pet peeve, but saying “Seeking Employment” in your headline is a real turn off for me. Seeking employment is not a job, it’s not a career, it’s not an occupation. It tells me nothing. Get rid of it! Instead, go out there, connect with businesses you’d like to work for and start a conversation. Not a begging or “you need to hire me right now” kind of conversation, but a real, professional conversation.

 

Make sure these three profile musts are in place and you’ll be ready to network with the best!

 

More Cool LinkedIn Hacks You Must Be Doing!

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LinkedIn just gets better and better and better! I’ll be honest. When Microsoft bought LinkedIn, I felt a little, how shall we say it…trepidation about what they might do to the platform. Honestly, I’ve not liked all of Microsoft’s changes. Especially the part about moving so many of the free features into the paid-only part. That said, I like free, but I also understand business. So, I get it that I should be paying for these capabilities. There are, however, quite a few things you can now do with LinkedIn that I completely adore. Let’s go over a few of what those are today. Hopefully, you’ll get as excited as I am and start utilizing more of LinkedIn’s cool features!

One of my favorite “hacks” for marketing on LinkedIn involves SlideShare. In case you don’t know, SlideShare is a platform where you can post your PowerPoint, Keynote and other slide presentations. It was bought by LinkedIn a while back, so it makes sense that the two easily complement each other! Many businesses make a lot of slide presentations for things like webinars or speaking engagements. And now they can get a lot more mileage out of those slides by making them available on SlideShare. Also, when you post a new slide presentation on SlideShare you can always share it on LinkedIn. Something I’ve done for clients and the results are amazing! A lot more views and a lot more interaction. Talk about branding, right?

My other favorite “hack” involves YouTube. This goes hand-in-hand with the PowerPoints you create. PowerPoints are many times created for making into videos. This gives you a lot more content to spread around. (#ContentRepurposing)

One great place to share your videos is on YouTube. You can then share the video straight to your LinkedIn feed, or you can post it to select groups that you belong to. This is a powerful way to get the right eyeballs on you and your profile!

Have another hack for re-purposing content or for getting a positive response from your LinkedIn audience through one of LinkedIn’s features? I’d love to hear what you’re doing! Just leave me a comment below.  🙂