By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
Your LinkedIn profile is like your CV, your elevator speech and your business card all in one place. It’s a mini-website that is supposed to drive traffic to your maxi website.
If you want to use LinkedIn to get more business, it all comes down to your LinkedIn profile. If it’s not optimized, you won’t get found & contacted.
There are many tips on how to improve your profile and many of them we’ve heard a million of times: ‘upload a photo, enter your experience, create a compelling summary, ’ etc.
In this post I tried to come up with new tips, that are just as important but often overlooked. Find them below:
1. Make your profile visible
Google likes LinkedIn profiles. If you do a search for someone’s name and they have a good presence on LinkedIn, chances are that the link to their profile shows up in the top 10 search results. BUT… unfortunately when I work with clients I often discover that their settings were wrong and they had their public profile visibility completely turned off. So please go and check those settings right now. Here’s how:
> Edit Profile mode
> Click on ‘Edit’ next to the public profile url in the top section of you profile
> On the right hand side make sure that ‘Make my profile visible’ is selected
2. Get a vanity url
By default your public profile url will be a random list of numbers after your name. That’s not very easy to remember or use as a reference in your e-mail signature for example. I recommend that you go ahead and customize that url. It will also increase your chance of getting found on Google if you use your name in that url.
3. Enter contact details (e-mail & phone)
It’s one thing to get found. It’s another thing to get contacted. I see so many LinkedIn profiles who forgot to mention their contact details. You need to display a phone number & an e-mail where you can be reached, otherwise your profile is a waste of cyberspace.
4. Add links to specific landing pages
Remember in the intro I mentioned that the purpose of your profile is essentially to drive traffic to your website? Well, in order to achieve that goal you need to add links in strategic places on your profile. In the contact section you get to display 3 weblinks. Most people only have 1 website, so they only use one of these links. But your website probably has more than just 1 page, right? So instead of sending people to your generic home page, send them to specific pages on your site. And if you want to build your e-mail list at the same time, why not send them to an opt-in page?
5. Don’t be a stalker
I usually check every day who has visited my profile (via the home page, in the right hand side bar). I’m always a little annoyed with the ‘anonymous’ stalkers. Because it feels a little bit like as if they were stalking me, since they are hiding their identity while checking out my profile. However, I know that most people don’t even realize that they’re ‘stalkers’, so I don’t blame them. Are you a ‘stalker’? Go check your settings, top right corner, privacy & settings
These are just 5 tips. There are many more ingredients to an optimized LinkedIn profile. If you’d like me to have an in-depth look at yours so you get to increase your leads by 200%, click here to book your LinkedIn Profile Video Review now.
3rd Edition of my LinkedIn Challenge
If you'd like to find out more about LinkedIn, why not join me on the 3rd edition of my LinkedIn Challenge, where I challenge you to participate and spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn every day, for 21 days! All you have to do is implement the tips that you will receive via e-mail, share updates, update your profile, grow your network and build relationships. Click here to find out more.
Author's Bio
Sarah Santacroce is a certified social media, internet marketing, and virtual event specialist. She enjoys every aspect of small business marketing. It is her mission to help other small businesses and solopreneurs increase their visibility and use social media tools as part of their marketing strategy.
Sarah draws on 12 years of experience in Business Administration, in fields ranging from Employee Training to Public Relations at big and small companies. She became interested in Online Marketing and Social Media to promote her own business and after lots of research and numerous classes and webinars she is now offering that knowledge to other small- to mid-sized businesses who struggle to find their place on the web.
This article is part of a series of regular contributions that Sarah will be making to her guest blog on knowitall.ch. You can see more articles from Sarah on her own website at: www.simplicitysmallbiz.com
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