Four Ways to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Excellent!

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!