What and What Not to Include in Your LinkedIn Profile

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Ever hear the phrase, “TMI”? – Too Much Information. Every now and then I’ll read someone’s profile where I feel like they’ve included too much. Now, frankly, it’s usually the reverse. Normally if there’s a content problem with a profile, it’s that the user hasn’t included enough information. Their profile summary isn’t long or complete enough. They haven’t included enough skills and endorsements. Or they don’t have enough recommendations. Or, given their age, their work history looks incomplete. That’s what I usually see. Every now and then, however, I see the opposite.

When I see too much information on someone’s profile, it’s not the length that bothers me – after all, a profile summary is limited to 2,000 characters including spaces. What I mean is, what they’ve included shouldn’t be there. For instance, snide or defensive remarks about a former employer absolutely have no place on your LinkedIn profile! I get it. Your last boss or company you worked for were, how shall we say this, less than stellar. Call your sister, best friend or your mom up about it. Don’t spew that venom on social media. This is a sure way to never get hired for any but the lowest of the low jobs again.

Another “cardinal sin”: I see vis-à-vis content in LinkedIn profiles has to do with changing careers. If you feel you were underutilized in your former career, you don’t need to say so. Just emphasize how your talents are being used in your new career and you should be fine!

The bottom line here is don’t be negative! It’s kind of like your grandmother might have said to you (I know mine did), “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Employers and potential clients are allergic to negativity! It puts them on the defensive. And it tells a lot about what kind of person you are and who you’ll be as THEIR employee or contractor. Why spoil your chances at landing a new job or getting a new client just because you said a little too much on your LinkedIn profile? Put your best foot forward, keep your profile on-point and positive, and get those jobs!

 

Take Your Brand to the Next Level with These Content Marketing Methods

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Building your brand is a big topic, so instead of trying to cover it all in one bite, today we’ll dive into the topic with 5 pillars of what’s called “Content Marketing.” Most companies today are participating in some form of content marketing. Studies show that companies that can produce a majority of their leads through online channels will grow more quickly and are more profitable than companies that rely more heavily on traditional marketing campaigns for generating leads.

So to start off this series, let’s hit 5 content marketing channels that you can incorporate into your overall marketing strategy to increase growth and profits.

 

#1 – Your Website

Although laser-targeted lead generation campaigns are the way to go for quick revenue and business-building when it comes to content marketing your company’s website is one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. With a little attention, it can become a powerful tool for generating leads. Your site can be used to leverage both blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) to increase traffic to your site.

To gain the highest return on investment, your company website should include:

  • static web page content,
  • stock educational content, and
  • engaging, flow educational content

 

#2 – Social Media

A natural extension of content marketing are the numerous social media platforms that have become popular. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram… They all work as content marketing tools in a couple of ways. First, your content can be posted directly to the platforms in the form of tweets, status updates, and dialog with other users so you stay top-of-mind and build a relationship with your market. Secondly, you can use them to introduce different pieces of content that link back to blog posts, whitepapers, and other content on your site to bring them to your “home field” as it were.

 

#3 – Email Marketing

Email marketing is a technique that involves acquiring/cultivating a targeted list of contacts and sending them emails periodically that contain educational content and offers. You are offering your prospective customers information that will help them, making them more eager to do business with you down the road.

 

#4 – Web Analytics

Web analytics is not necessarily content per se, but it’s imperative that it be part of your strategy as it comprises the unseen data behind your content marketing efforts. Analytics allows you to monitor the activity on your website and landing pages such as how many visitors you have, downloads, and where the traffic originated from. You should use these tools to measure the success of your content marketing campaigns.

 

#5 – Stock Content

Stock content refers to the educational resources that you make available on your website for potential and current customers to download. Stock content includes whitepapers, guides, ebooks, research studies, and other media. They help to enhance your reputation as a thought leader in your industry and will lead prospects back to you when the time is right for them to purchase.

 

When you begin to implement your content marketing campaign, it’s important that you don’t rely on any single tool, but leverage multiple content marketing tools to get the most effect from it. By leveraging these five methods or channels, you can start turning your online presence into a lead generating machine, helping you grow into a high-profit business.

Want more about content marketing? Check out our related posts to get more tips and strategies on how to leverage content to your business-building advantage!

 

Is LinkedIn Facing Competition from Facebook?

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On the surface, it seems that LinkedIn and Facebook are polar opposites. LinkedIn is a professional, work-based app that people use to network and find jobs. You don’t post your pictures from your latest vacation on LinkedIn like you do on Facebook, and you don’t generally post information about job openings or even information about your profession hoping to secure a job on Facebook. Or do you?

Recently, Facebook has decided to encroach on LinkedIn’s territory by allowing businesses to post job openings and for job seekers to apply for jobs right from Facebook. At first, this capability was rolled out only in the US and Canada, but recently, Facebook opened this all up to over forty countries worldwide. Businesses and job seekers alike can use this part of Facebook in order to find applicants and jobs respectively that are local to the business.

It’s too early to tell if this new direction that Facebook is moving in will impact LinkedIn or not. But it is kind of like watching an old Japanese horror movie where two city-sized monsters battle each other over Tokyo. LinkedIn has over half a billion users, while Facebook is four times that size. Either platform is used by a significant portion of the global population.

Having said that, there are some differences in how Facebook is rolling out their job capability versus LinkedIn’s platform. One important difference: The unity of currency on LinkedIn, if you will, is the individual. Although LinkedIn has business pages, the main interaction that’s occurring is between individual people. By contrast, Facebook’s focusing on the business itself. Another difference is that the businesses that Facebook seems to want to cater to are small businesses that will be hiring people who are already local to the business.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn are free, although there again we have a slight difference with LinkedIn having several paid tiers, which Microsoft seems to be intent on pushing people into. Competition is never a bad thing, however, and it’s going to be interesting over the next few years to watch this all unfold.

Do you have a preferred platform or an idea of where this new development will lead? Let me know in the comments!

Three Ways To Boost Your Or Your Company’s LinkedIn Profile

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Once you have your profile on LinkedIn all sorted out, you’ll want to use it to start getting business for yourself or use it to find the right job. There are several ways to do this, three of which I’m doing to talk about here. I’ll cover other methods in my other articles. So, check those out!

Tip #1: Understand Your Audience
Advertisers, copywriters, and salespeople of all types understand the necessity of really understanding who their target audience is. You need to too! You must understand what your target audience wants, why they’re there reading your profile, and what their hot buttons are. Just like a professional sales letter writer, you need to get inside their proverbial heads and talk to them the way they’re already thinking. If you can do this, you’ll automatically mesh with your audience. They’ll not only like you, they’ll believe in you and frankly, buy from you. If you alienate your audience, however, you might as well quit. This is that important!

(For tips on getting inside your prospect’s head, here’s an excerpt from the report I wrote: “5 Tips For More Effective Online Advertising That Gets You Re$Ults”:

“…if you haven’t ever sat down and put together a persona for your perfect customer(s) doing this will really help with your demographics choices. This could be a whole article by itself, but a couple quick links to get you started: I would recommend watching a few YouTube videos on the persona making process, and then you can either Google “customer persona worksheet” or “template” or use something like Digital Marketer’s avatar creation process (you’ll find a PDF download of the template at the end of their article) that will walk you through filling in each section of the PDF. Having that persona in mind every time you create an ad, write a blog article or make a social media post will be invaluable.”

Tip #2: Get Your Keywords Right
Keywords are the phrases that someone types into a search window in order to find web pages that match what they’re looking for. So, if you type in “restaurant Boise”, you should get a list of restaurants in Boise. Works the same way on LinkedIn. Someone might type in “accountant Dallas” in order to find accountants in Dallas, TX. I’m sure you can see how important having the right keywords in your profile are for people who want to do business on LinkedIn. So, a couple of things. First off, you need to find what keywords people are using (or might use) to search for you on LinkedIn. You can ball park this by doing some searching yourself and keeping track of what results you find. Second, you’ll need to use these keywords both in your headline and in your profile summary.

Tip #3: Make Use of LinkedIn’s Own Analytics
Although the amount of information you can get from LinkedIn varies according to whether you have a free or paid account, on both types of accounts you can glean a lot of useful information from your LinkedIn analytics page. You can see who’s searched for you and you can also get an (albeit small) list of keywords used. This isn’t a lot of information to go on, but it does help!

Once you’ve made these couple tweaks, you’ll be better ready to be found by the right types of business people and make those valuable connections on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for more on LinkedIn marketing next week!  Spoiler: it’s gonna be on LinkedIn’s possible new competition from Facebook.

Have a great week!

Your Secret Marketing Weapon—LinkedIn Groups

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LinkedIn Groups used to be hot! Then they sort of fell by the wayside. I think what happened is that everyone discovered the power of groups and jumped on the group bandwagon. Virtually overnight, groups were hammered by people trying to hawk their wares in the group. People got tired of it, started leaving and, eventually, the group died, was deleted, or just became a pitch fest. A lot of marketers in my niche quit using groups as one of the main engines of our marketing efforts. Well, I’ve got something important to say about LinkedIn groups.

It’s time to come back!

You can join up to 50 groups. Given that each group might have, oh let’s say, 1,000 members, 50 groups puts you in front of 50,000 people potentially! Nice, huh? That’s a lot of potential clients and a lot of people with whom you might want to connect.

There’s a lot you can do with groups. I love content marketing on LinkedIn and something I’ll be doing a lot more of for myself. One of the big things I do to get more people into my clients’ world is to create and publish quality content. I publish this via LinkedIn Pulse. After my content is published, I’ll write a short blurb about it, get the link to the article, and then go to relevant groups and post my blurb there. I can triple the number of people who look at an article I’ve published just by doing that.

Another thing about groups that I love is that they’re very specific. If I want to focus my energies on a specific sub-niche – let’s use public speakers as an example – I can search for relevant groups, ask to join them, then once I’m in, I can start the process of reaching out to members and asking them to accept my connect request. By doing this, I can build a following in a very narrowly defined niche! Not only that, but I’m setting myself up to market to that niche through the group itself!

Groups are a great platform if used correctly. So don’t abandon them completely. Get in there, find your niche groups, and start using content marketing to your advantage and grow your business!

Four Ways to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Excellent!

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Your LinkedIn profile is the central core of any LinkedIn marketing strategy.

LinkedIn, after all, is really not much more than a massive Chamber of Commerce meeting online. And, you can look at your profile as a combination of your 5-minute elevator speech and your business card all rolled into one. Get your profile right, and you’re in business. Get it wrong, and you might as well take your ball and go home.

In this article, I’d like to talk about 4 things you can do to make sure you have an exciting and dynamic LinkedIn profile.

One:

Get a professional headshot. No, you don’t need a glamour shot like an actor needs, but you do need a really nice, professional looking headshot. If you’re serious about marketing yourself, either for a job or for business, on LinkedIn, your profile picture is worth investing a little money in.

Two:

Sub-par recommendations are almost just as bad as bad recommendations. You get to choose whether to have a recommendation included in your profile. What I often see, though, is people who accept low-quality recommendations, probably thinking a ho-hum recommendation is better than nothing at all. No, it’s not! Yes, you need recommendations but you don’t need limp, wishy-washy recommendations. You want your recommendations to be specific and exciting. How to get those? Well, if you know the person who wrote your recommendation, just ask them if they’d consider punching it up some with more specificity. If you don’t know them and you don’t feel you can contact them about what they wrote, then don’t include it in your profile.

Three:

Writing your profile summary in the third person. This screams “dull, dull, dull!” It’s just weird to read someone’s profile summary in the third person. It’s as if someone else wrote it, but we all know that the profile summary is written by the person whose face is on the account! Also, remember this: LinkedIn is a networking platform. What would you think if you went to a BNI meeting and someone started telling you about themselves but was talking in the third person? “He did this,” “She did that,” Etc. Weird! Just don’t do it.

Four:

You should know better than to do the following anyway, but just in case—don’t leak out proprietary information about your former company! If you want to make something public, an example of your work, a case study, etc., run that by your former employer and get their okay first. You’ll save yourself at least a nasty phone call or maybe even more grief!

So now that you’re armed with four easy things to make sure you’re doing (or not doing) on your profile, go out there and make that profile great!

 

Why Endorsements, Skills, and Recommendations Matter on LinkedIn

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Many LinkedIn users that I’ve seen have great profiles. The exceptions? Profiles that are weak in endorsements, recommendations, or skills. Often all three.

It’s like these three are the stepchildren of the various fields that make up a complete LinkedIn profile. Here’s why you don’t want to ignore these all-important parts of your LinkedIn profile.

Look at it this way. When’s the last time you bought something that cost more than a few dollars? Being an Internet-savvy person, what did you do? If you’re like most folks, you Googled whatever you bought first and read about what other people thought, right? Well, people do essentially the same thing on LinkedIn. We call this “social proof” in the marketing business. People are highly influenced by what other people think. Being endorsed is one of the ways of providing this social proof to people who visit your profile on LinkedIn.

Recommendations work much the same way. Have you ever asked a colleague about the car they just bought, the new restaurant they tried, or their dentist or doctor? For important purchases, finding the right product or the right service provider is often done through recommendations. Recommendations carry a huge amount of influence, and you should be asking the people you’re connected with, at least the ones you know well, to recommend you.

Finally, listing your skills matters a lot! Seeing a large list of skills along with the number of people who’ve endorsed you for them is a great way to position yourself as a professional. Not only that, but the selection of skills helps viewers get to know you. Both recruiters and people who are potential clients are going to scan these skills to help them understand who you are and what you bring to the party!

So don’t ignore these three important areas of your profile. Get the ball rolling by making sure you have your skills up there, then contact just one LinkedIn connection today about giving an endorsement or referral. Get your profile shining!

 

Three Mistakes You’re Making With Your LinkedIn Profile

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When it comes to marketing on LinkedIn, the #1 most important part of the process is getting your profile right. What I mean by that is:

1. You want your profile to be complete and
2. You especially want your profile to pre-sell you!

I see a lot of people’s profiles on LinkedIn that fail on one, or often both, of these points. So, let’s see what we can do about the three most common problems I often see and make your profile stand out.

Problem #1: Poor Profile Photo

LinkedIn is a business site! Unless you run a beach-side concession renting out umbrellas and surfboards, you don’t want your LinkedIn profile picture to be from your last vacation.

You know the one I’m talking about, right? Yep. The one where you’re wearing your multi-colored swimsuit, and you’re carrying around that boogie board you love so much.

Would you dress like that for a job interview? I don’t think so. (or I certainly hope not!)

You don’t need to spring for a professional headshot. Go dress up as you would for that job interview and get your significant other to take a well-lighted picture with your phone. That should do the job!

Problem #2: No Summary or Poor Summary

I see this all the time. People with otherwise great looking profiles, but their summary is either not there or it’s only one sentence long. That summary space has a 2,000-character limit. Use it all, or as close as you can!

Problem #3: No Recommendations

This one’s a little more problematic than the first two because you actually have to get someone else to do the recommending. But, here’s the deal. People are actually scrolling down and looking for those recommendations! You don’t need many. Two or three will do nicely. So do this if you don’t already have some: Ethically get some of your closer business associates to fill out a LinkedIn recommendation for you. You can either write it for them and they can copy and paste, or they can do it all themselves!

The bottom line is this: to be a success on LinkedIn, you need a full and complete profile. LinkedIn even prompts you for this, so if you haven’t filled out everything, you should know better! Stop what you’re doing right now and get that LinkedIn profile in tip-top shape. You’ll be glad you did!