LinkedIn and the Power of your Personal Profile

If you are selling to other businesses, LinkedIn is a powerful brand building and selling tool. To get the best out of your organic posting, network building efforts, and pursuit of new customers, it’s important to take a good look at your personal profile and ensure you are using it to its full advantage.

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Maximum Impact

Your LinkedIn profile is already set up with all the prompts needed to get you compiling the information potential clients and networks want to see. That part is easy. The part that requires a little more effort is making sure that you will stand out from the crowd.

Here are 12 ways to make that happen:

Use the Prime Promo ‘Real Estate’ to Paint a Picture of Who You Are & What You Do

The graphic banner at the top of the page along with the wording immediately underneath are your prime promo ‘real estate’. This is where to make yourself and your brand aesthetic shine by:

1. Using a clear profile photo

This means choosing a welcoming, clear photo of your full face. People want to know who they are interacting with and get a good sense of who you are. A friendly smile and eye-contact (albeit virtual!) can do that.

2. Picking an eye-catching cover image

This is the banner behind your profile picture where you have the opportunity to communicate your brand, services or expertise by incorporating your unique personal brand in the context of the work you are doing or the organization you work for or run.

3. A good headline: the who, how, what & why

This is the text immediately underneath your name.  It needs to spell out what you do, who you do it for, how you do it, and why someone should work with you. The first 47-50 characters (of the 200 character maximum) are critical as this is very visible every time you comment.

4. Services

Linkedin provides a prescribed list of services for you to choose from, making it easy and efficient to find the right wording with which to describe your services and/or industry.

Going Into Detail: Here’s Where You Can Really Sell Yourself

Now that you’ve covered your basics, it’s time to get into the meat of things.

This is where you’ll have the opportunity to introduce yourself, your work experience, ethics and specialities and all the things that make you and your organization the ideal candidate to work with.

5. About

The first three lines are the most important here as that is the wording that will appear on your profile page. Engage the reader as quickly as possible by addressing their problem and explaining how you can help. Give them an idea of the types of results you have achieved and try to elicit a ‘see more’ click through.

This is the biggest section to complete with a 2600 character limit; a great place to promote the best of yourself.

6. Featured Content

This is where you can incorporate some visuals of your outputs and activities as a set of 5 ‘tiles’. We suggest considering posts, articles, newsletters, videos, or the promotion of upcoming events you are attending/hosting to market your offering.

Use content that demonstrates who you are, what you do and the results you have achieved through testimonials, for example.

7. Experience

This is the section about your past and current work roles. Focus on demonstrating relevant experience to help build credibility with the audiences you want to engage with.

Don’t feel the need to list every job you’ve ever had - focus on more recent and relevant posts and those you held for longer periods of time. 

8. Education, licenses, and certifications

This is pretty much exactly what it says – list your relevant qualifications, accreditations and training and keep it up to date.

9. Skills

This is a pick list activity - LinkedIn will suggest some skills relevant to the information you have already provided. If the skills you are looking for have not been suggested already, you can search for them manually.

10. Recommendations

Endorsements from colleagues/team members, past employers and partners and customers are always a great way to help build credibility. Make it a habit to request a recommendation after you finish a project.

11. Keywords

When you complete your headline, about, services and experience sections, it’s very important to ensure you use keywords relevant to your business. This helps to ensure your profile is optimized for keyword searches you ultimately want to be found for.

12. Edit your public profile and URL

Often profile URLs can contain a random selection of numbers and letters which can make it hard to be found. You can edit this to simply read:

www.linkedin.com/in/yourname

In this section you can also control your visibility to ensure you can be found in search engines by setting your public profile visibility to ‘on’.

Let Us Help You Bring Out the Best About You

Setting up a LinkedIn profile isn’t difficult - optimizing it and maintaining it is what is time-consuming and, as is generally the case for small businesses and non-profit organizations, time isn’t easy to come by!

We are fond believers in finding a good work/life balance so, if the only time you have to spend on this is during your well-deserved after-work hours, we kindly suggest you do yourself a favor and delegate this task on to us.

The optimization of Linkedin profiles is one of the services we offer at Sustainable Digital. We can also help you build your network and use it to find new partners or customers. Get in touch with us for more information.