If you use LinkedIn actively, you need to be doing a few things monthly in order to maximize your benefits from the platform. These have to do with the maintenance of your contacts and your profile, as well as making sure your profile shows you in the best light. In this article, I want to discuss this all in some detail. Don’t worry! This isn’t going to take long. A few minutes per month should do it!

Monthly Task #1: Export Your Connections List

You should be exporting a list of your connections monthly. Look, if you’re spending time building up your connections, you sure don’t want to lose all this work if something should happen – like your LinkedIn account getting shut down, even temporarily. If you play by the rules, this shouldn’t happen, but why let an asset you’ve spent time building be in jeopardy?

Monthly Task #2: Download Your Profile

Another extremely important monthly task is to download your profile. Now you can do all of this at the same time. This is a handy change LinkedIn has made recently. Just go to your profile page, click “More…” and choose to Save to PDF.

You especially want to download your profile summary. As you grow and change, your LinkedIn profile headline and profile summary will change as a reflection. You’ll naturally want to emphasize some aspects and deemphasize others. As you modify your headline and profile summary, though, it’s tempting to just delete the old ones. That’s probably a mistake. There’s often information or ways of saying things in an earlier profile summary that you might realize later are better than what you currently have. If the summary is deleted, you’ll have to try to reconstruct it. This is a less than ideal scenario! Save time and the extra work by simply downloading and archiving your profile PDFs.

Monthly Task #3: Review Your Endorsements

Finally, the third task I think is very important is to review your endorsements. Visitors to your profile scan your endorsements in order to quickly figure out who you are and what your skills are. Again, that changes over time. If you had a certain quality or skill four years ago and you were endorsed a lot for that skill, should it still weigh heavily in your current profile? Personally, I don’t think so. You might have changed jobs, changed roles in your business or profession, or even changed professions totally!

Bottom line, you want to make sure your LinkedIn profile reflects and brands who you are Right Now so it shows you in the best light for your current purposes.

Doing these three tasks just once a month will make sure the time and effort you invest in LinkedIn get saved and kept up-to-date.