5 mistakes to avoid with your LinkedIn profile!

Your LinkedIn Profile For 2014!

Your LinkedIn profile is your calling card, it is your opportunity to make a great first impression, it is the reason why people should want to connect with you and more importantly have a conversation with you.

During my workshops I am often surprised how many people who are exceptionally good at what they do in business underestimate the importance of a LinkedIn profile or have just misunderstood it.

Misunderstanding

When LinkedIn started all those years ago it was perceived to be a networking site for people to post their CV and to be found or look for new jobs, this has changed in such a huge way. LinkedIn is now a very powerful lead generation and sales tool. Your LinkedIn profile is all about you and your personal brand, whether you are looking to find a new job, using it for lead generation or to network professionally.

5 Tips To Improve Your Profile

When I coach clients on their LinkedIn profile I focus on 5 key areas which can drastically improve your ability to find job opportunities, connect with prospective clients or increase your connections to enable you to network more effectively.

1. Profile Picture

Mr/Mrs Anonymous

I was only speaking today with a client regarding his profile picture… well lack of one. Don’t worry about not being photogenic, I hate having my photo taken and I am sure there are many others have the same feelings. Having a profile picture makes you more likely to appear in LinkedIn searches (some suggest figures that you increase your chances by 70%). Check out my article on profile pictures for further advice and tips, but if you really feel that photos of you do you no justice (me too by the way), invest in having a professional shot taken. I have several connections in my network that specialise in LinkedIn profile pictures, invite me to connect and I can make an introduction for you.

2. Your Headline

There is no room for vanity on LinkedIn! Having a great job title is all well and good but if it doesn’t quickly tell people what you actually do and what is in it for them it is a waste of the 120 characters available. I have seen some fantastic titles on my clients profiles and think wow that’s great…. but what is it you actually do… or what is a “titanium gungenplate technician”? An article on making the use of your headline can be found by clicking here.

What was it you actually do?

3. Your Summary

What a great opportunity to tell the world what you do for them and their businesses. Several of my clients have not even used this section and have just listed their experience. If I come across a profile, with a picture, and read a really engaging headline I am going to want to know more about you. If you are going to take advantage of writing a compelling summary… please don’t use third person. There is nothing worse than reading a profile which is meant to be all about you and it looks like it has been written by someone else. Another good tip to remember when writing your summary is not to “we” on yourself! The “We” bit can come in under your position in the experience situation. I won’t post an example but if you feel you are making this mistake please let me know and I will have a look for you.

4. Recommendations

What I love about LinkedIn is the “Recommendations” feature and to some extent the “Endorsement” feature. Here you can provide the evidence you are as good as you say you are. I can stand up and say how great I am, you might believe it, (my wife doesn’t seem to agree) but having someone else endorse you and better still, take the time to write a recommendation for you, is such a powerful message when approaching new contacts. A the very least it may install confidence in a prospective client when they are looking to make a purchasing decision.

5. Contact Details

Great, I love your picture, I am engaged by your headline, your summary reads great and you have provided me with evidence that supports your position and I connect with you. Once I have connected I want to contact you, (your gmail or yahoo email address is ok but an @somecompany.com is better) but what if I want to pick up the phone! I am looking to take our connection off line and invite you to tell me more and begin building that all important business relationship, I am lazy… (I am sure some others are too) make it easy for us. Complete the fields in this section that gives your connection the option to connect with you in different ways. You be surprised how many people connected with me wanting a coaching call and don’t have a number in their profile for me to call them. If you have concerns who sees them, these details are only available to your first line network. Also worth noting is changing your personal LinkedIn URL, change it to something you would be happy to put on a business card, found out how to do it here.

So make sure you are not making these 5 mistakes with your profile and give your LinkedIn presence an revamp for 2014.This has other added advantages because LinkedIn likes regularly updated profiles and makes you more search friendly.

I hope this article was of interest to you and that you enjoyed reading it. If you found it of some value please share it with others you may know who could benefit. I can’t thank people enough for their input, questions and feedback as you are the ones who are inspiring me to write these articles.

If you would like a question answered, or a complimentary assessment of your LinkedIn profile please drop me a line through my Contact Page or a message below.

Have a great 2014! – Stuart Carpenter

Drive traffic to relevant web pages on LinkedIn!

This is another tip on how you can optimize your profile on LinkedIn. Did you know you can edit your contact info? Did you know that you can edit the little bit that says website?

So many times I see a link to “Company Website” in the Contact info of a particular profile, that tells me nothing except I am going to go to a company website.

Lets say for example I am looking for an accountant who can provide me with a Payroll service, would I not be more inclined to start a conversation with one who can direct me to one of his/her specialities without me having to trawl through the company website. (To be fair I am a lazy so and so, I like the easy option)

LinkedIn has a great edit feature so you can direct traffic straight to the pages they want to look at. “Company Website”, personally I feel that is lazy and uninspiring. Better still you can select 3 websites on LinkedIn, so (the accountant for example) can allow me to select

• Payroll
• VAT
• Annual Returns

This way I can select the page which is most relevant to me.

Go to your profile and select “Edit Profile”

Find the “Edit Contact Info” tab.

By “Websites” there will be a little blue pencil/pen (I think it actually looks like a crayola, but that is just me) and click it!

This will open a menu and you will see “Company Website” and the URL to your site. You will notice there is a drop down menu button by “Company Website” which will bring up a list of options. At the very bottom of these options is “Other” … click on it!

You will now notice this brings up two boxes where you can input text, the first of the boxes is what will appear as a title, the second is the URL.

Open your website and navigate through your menus to get to the page you want your viewer to be directed to, e.g. Payroll, notice the address in your URL bar? Copy that address and go back to your LinkedIn profile.

Now in the first box type “Payroll” (For example) and in the second box paste your website address which you copied from your website. You can do this for up to 3 websites/pages, so if you have different websites relevant to your profile, why not call them something other than “Company Website”. 3 x “Company Website” on your profile to the average user would just think you are trying to direct them to the same place. Give them a name!

• Insurance Services
• Mortgage Advice
• Accountancy

Remember your profile should be about you and relevant to you, why not do something different and dare I say useful to your contact info.

I hope you enjoyed this tip on how to use LinkedIn a little better than you maybe doing at the moment. Actually that has given me another idea… watch this space.

Thanks for reading!

Stuart Carpenter.

Personalise your LinkedIn URL!

LinkedIn is a hugely powerful business to business sales tool for Small and Medium Enterprises. If used correctly it can help you gain more leads, more sales and create better opportunities. Some consider LinkedIn to be more effective than any other marketing strategy, personally I feel that it should at least be adopted as part of your marketing strategy. Sadly I work with a number of small businesses who feel that just by having a LinkedIn profile is enough and wonder why they are not getting results only to soon give up on executing a LinkedIn marketing strategy. Consider this, would you just buy a telephone for your business and just wait for it to ring in hope the first phone call was a potential customer?

I help SME’s create a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy which will benefit their business, which can be more fun, more cost effective and more sustainable than some of the traditional methods businesses use to let the world know they have arrived. However I can only show you the path, you have to choose to walk it.

If you have read this far then great, you want to know how to make LinkedIn work for you. On my workshops I go into the process of using LinkedIn in far more detail and have live examples, but for the purposes of this blog we will look at keeping things simple.

Customise your LinkedIn URL!

Why? I hear you ask. Well two main reasons, it is your personal identity that allows you to be found on LinkedIn and LinkedIn profiles rank very highly on search engines. Secondly it tidies up that bit underneath your profile picture, who can remember “uk.linkedin.com/pub/john-jnr-smith/67/207/615”? Would you put that on your business card, bottom of your email or even your sales material? Do you think it would be much better to have “uk.linkedin.com/in/johnsmithjnr”

Here are some simple steps to customising your LinkedIn URL.

At the top of the screen, hover over “Profile” and click on “Edit Profile“. (You can also click the “Edit Profile” button on your profile)
Under your profile picture you’ll see your current LinkedIn public profile URL. Click “Edit” in blue to the right of it.
On the right side of the screen towards the bottom you’ll see “Your public profile URL”.

Click ”Customize your public profile URL“.

This will bring up a pop up box where you can type in your desired URL. I would suggest FirstNameLastName. You are restricted to what you can put in and your public profile URL must contain between 5-30 letters or numbers and you can’t use any spaces, symbols, or special characters.

In the pop up box type in your desired URL.

If you see a red “x” instead of the green tick symbol, it is likely that the name is taken or you have inserted a space or special character. If you have a common name it is likely that your chosen URL has already been taken, especially with over 225 million users of LinkedIn. In these cases I would insert a middle initial or as a last resort swap to LastNameFirstName. LinkedIn will try and be clever and offer you suggested alternatives, my advice would be choose something you would be happy to put on your business card.

Click the “Set Custom URL” button.

That is just about it. Nothing too hard. This is the first of my LinkedIn tips, please follow me on Twitter for more tips or better still join me on LinkedIn.

Stuart Carpenter