LinkedIn is more than just a resume holder, it offers you the opportunity to connect yourself with the business world; this can only be achieved if you set your profile up properly, which can be difficult if you’ve never successfully set up a LinkedIn profile before.
With over 300million LinkedIn users in over 200 countries, it is very important that you do not miss out on this mass networking opportunity.
Here’s a quick list of tips that you will need to use to optimize your LinkedIn Profile for MAXIMUM exposure:
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- Make sure your profile picture reflects who you are
- Choose the perfect banner image
- Sell yourself using your headline
- Be SEO friendly
- Change your LinkedIn URL to your name
- Turn your summary into your story
- Add your relevant skills
- Show the world what you can offer them
- Connect with others
- Stay active!
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But how can you make sure your profile shows up when someone is looking for a person with your expertise?
Well, it all happens by optimizing your Linkedin profile.
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You may think you’re finished with it and you’ve done everything correctly, but the fact that you’re here reading this suggests otherwise.
There are things you can and should change if you want to be successful on Linkedin so that you can level up your career.
Thankfully, we have knowledge of LinkedIn optimization and the necessary changes needed to help increase your own exposure, and we’re going to reveal them to you right now.
Regardless of what you specialize in.
Make sure your profile picture reflects who you are
This is a basic step and the first thing you’re going to want to consider when you’re optimizing your Linkedin profile, as this is also the first thing people see too.
You can easily get carried away with this part, spending hours taking photos of yourself to find your best angle, so that you look your best but also look professional.
But don’t overthink it too much.
A picture where you’re wearing your smartest clothes and your most welcoming smile will be just fine; there’s no need to go out and get some professional headshots done…unless it makes sense too.
What we are saying is that It would be a little strange to wear your finest clothes if you’re someone who is in the art industry, as you probably will never wear these sorts of things in your day to day life.
It would be better to use this opportunity to get your artistic personality across in your own LinkedIn profile picture.
Wearing clothes and adopting a pose that reflects this would be a good idea.
The banner image
To follow on from your profile picture, you also want to use a thinking process when selecting your banner image.
You want your banner to reflect your personality, perhaps even reflecting the industry you’re wanting to work in – although this doesn’t have to be the case.
To many people these days, whether it’s on LinkedIn or just when they think about themselves and their resume fall into the trap of playing it too safe.
Too scared to reveal too much about them as it may put off potential employers.
We say hell to that, you want to make sure you can get you and your personality across as much as possible.
Stand out from the crowd.
So, if you’re a performer, then make your banner picture an image of you on stage performing (this would also act as an awesome talking point if ever your employer wished to question you about your LinkedIn profile).
But if you’re career is something more vanilla, such as admin, then why not show off one of the hobbies you love in your banner?
Perhaps you’re a keen rock climber; show this off and let the 300 million people on LinkedIn a little more about you.
Sell yourself using your headline
After your profile picture and your banner.
Your headline is the first thing someone is going to read about you in terms of the sort of work your specialized in.
So you’re going to want to make it catchy and unique that is beyond the boring ‘Digital Marketer’ stuff, for example.
As we’ve already said, there are 300million people on Linkedin, how are you going to make yourself stand out if you and everybody in your line of work use ‘Digital marketer’ as their headline?
Hint: You Won’t!
Your headline the first and perhaps maybe only time, before the user, clicks off to the next profile, to sell yourself about who you are and what you do.
Here is a good example of a headline:
‘Social Media Engager/Influencer Marketer/Dragon Slayer/Brand Cheerleader’
It may not seem like a huge difference, but just with this small change, we’ve managed to tell a potential employer everything about us and even had a bit of fun with it.
The ‘Dragon Slayer’ part catches people off and might even give them a chuckle, making your profile much more rememberable than the other 2000 profiles they may have checked already today.
Again, allowing you to stand out from the other people in your field!
Be SEO friendly
To make sure you can maximize your profile’s potential, you’re going to want to think like a content writer; write for your potential viewer and for the search engine.
The way they do this is by adding popular keywords that are relevant to them which will help them show up when someone searches for a profile like theirs on Linkedin.
Without doing this for your own profile, you’re essentially throwing away free exposure, so your profile won’t be seen as often as other people who stuff their text with keywords; there are many places on your Linkedin profile you can do this too:
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- The headline
- The summary
- Your experience
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This can be quite a time-consuming task and will take a few revisions to make your text flow properly with the keywords in place, but it is absolutely worth your time.
And something that is necessary if you want to see success.
Change your LinkedIn URL to your name
Continuing on from our SEO Tip, you should also change your LinkedIn profile URL to your own name – if you can.
One of the main reasons for doing this is that it’s much easier to publicize your own profile when it matches your name, and it can very easily be worked back to if someone wanted to find you again – as they can just type:
‘linkedin.com/johndoe’
Into their search bar, which is very, very easy than crawling through LinkedIn profiles to find you again.
Doing this will also help you show up on Google if people search for your full name, helping you to place yourself in front of even more eyes.
Turn your summary into your story
A lot of people like to leave the summary field blank when they’re creating their LinkedIn profile and we don’t really understand why.
Perhaps it’s out of fear of messing this part up and turning away potential employers
Or they are too lazy to spend 10 minutes filling it out.
But when you fill this out yourself, don’t fall into the trap of stuffing your achievements and skills into it for the sake of doing it, although they absolutely matter, you’re going to want to do it in a more interesting way
The same thing you did with your headline, you want to incorporate that sort of creativity here.
Whilst still giving the reader the correct information about you.
Oh, and don’t forget to be SEO friendly here too like we suggested – adding in relevant keywords when you can!
To sum it up; you’re going to want to let the world know your skills and abilities whilst making it interesting, telling them how these skills and abilities can benefit their business.
Add your relevant skills
This may seem like a silly tip because it should be done anyway.
But again, we want to make it known in case people really are that lazy to skip over this, just like they do with their summary. – for whatever reason.
One of the best ways you can increase your exposure on Linkedin is by choosing the skills you have from this particular section on your profile.
This gives proof to what you wrote in your headline and summary and confirms what you wrote in these sections is in fact true, and also helps people connect with you – since they know what you’re all about at a quick glance.
You might have many, many skills but make sure to only list the ones that are relevant to you and your industry; a long list can be quite jarring to read through.
Show the world what you can offer them
One of the newest features to come to LinkedIn is the services section, which allows you to show your viewers what sort of service you offer; this will also help to boost your visibility in the search engine of LinkedIn as you can put keywords in here too.
As people looking for say, Graphic Designers, will be able to find your profile much more easily if you state that you offer a logo creating service on your service section.
It essentially just rounds out your profile and shows people what you do with your skills to help change the world.
Connect with others
One of the main selling points that LinkedIn offers users is that they can connect with many, many different industries in the business world.
Whether that be business owners or social media managers – LinkedIn offers you a way of connecting with these sorts of people through the contact feature.
You can do this by searching for specific industries or job titles.
Make sure you’re connecting with people who are relevant to you though, so that you build up a network of people people that matter and can make an impact on your career.
You are also more likely to show up in search results if you connect with more people too!
To make it more likely that people will accept your request, remember to include a personalized message so you don’t just look like you’re sending invites to anybody you see – make these people feel like you REALLY want to connect and get to know them.
Stay active!
Now that you’ve optimized your profile to the best of your abilities, it’s important to stay active to help you gain followers and connections.
Though this is the part which nobody likes because it’s not a one-and-done sort of job, it will require you to come back often, revisit your headlines and summaries to make sure they’re always reflecting you correctly, and update your status with articles you liked or have written.
This is because the key to any social platform and social engagement, whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, or in this case Linkedin, is consistency.
So making sure you;
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- Update your profile regularly
- Engage with other users
- Post your articles
- Connect with other users
- Endorse other relevant users
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This will make a world of difference when it comes to getting your name out there on LinkedIn.
Summary
Before we round this post up, we just want to reiterate the points we have made here in a nice neat bullet-point list so that you can take it with you and apply what we have discussed to your own Linkedin profile.
To summarize everything, here’s a a great video on LinkedIn profile optimization
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- Choose the right profile picture + banner: Make sure your profile picture reflects who you are and what you do; your banner cant be chosen the same way – it doesn’t necessarily have to be related to work, it could reflect a hobby you love!
- Sell yourself using your headline – You’re going to want to state in a short but entertaining way what you’re all about.
- Be SEO friendly – not only does your profile need to be good for a human to read, but you also want to make sure you have the right keywords in place so you can appear in LinkedIn’s search engine too!
- Make your summary interesting – You want to outline your skills and abilities but do it in an interesting way, as well as mentioning how they can help others.
- Add relevant skills – Only add the relevant skills that make sense to the line of work you’re interested in. Less is more!
- List your services – It’s great letting people know your skills and abilities, but it’s equally important to let them know what exactly you can do with them!
- Connect with others – Make sure to send contact requests to like-minded people so you can get to know others in your industry.
- Stay active – whether it’s regularly updating your profile, posting long-form content or adding new contacts a few times a week, the most important thing to do on Linkedin is to stay active!
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Setting up your profile on LinkedIn is very easy, the hard part is making sure that you’re optimizing it fully so that you can best take advantage of the 300million people that are already using Linkedin to help further your career.
Using the tips we have provided, there is no doubt once you’ve taken action, you will start to see an increase in exposure and finally, get your career to where you need/want it to be.
