How to write a LinkedIn profile that will work for you – Part 1

This is the first of four articles on designing a LinkedIn profile that will work for you.

Your LinkedIn Public Profile

Much of your LinkedIn profile will be visible on search engines and to the public through your public profile link.

You can configure the public visibility on your account settings to how you want, it is up to you. This is your personal brand, your shop front, and LinkedIn values your privacy.

Remember, that the more you show publicly the greater opportunity you have to be found by the right person at the right time.

Your personal brand is also your online identity so it is your design, so invest in it wisely.

You create value with your brand, this is known as “Social Capital” your positive actions on LinkedIn will create effective social capital for your personal brand.

You may have a business, or be a professional in a business; but you still have a personal brand and people buy from people. So you create your own brand, which you can then choose to link to a business. Your personal brand is portable too, you can link it to a different business when you choose to.

When creating your personal brand be clear about who you are, make it easy for people to see who you are, what you do, what your niche is and what you are an expert in.

Your Key Level Strategy

Before you really work on your LinkedIn profile lets take a step back and think strategically.

You can do this by defining your Key Level Strategy:-

The High Level – is about your profession, trade or industry: such as an Accountant.

The Mid level – is about your specialist area within that industry such as Tax.

The Micro level – is about your niche, what really makes you special: what will really set you apart. An example might be International Tax, and additionally perhaps: Malta International Tax.

These Key Level words are about what work you do, as your public profile is targeted for business and professional use.

These words avoid describing your personality and character; when people are looking for the solution to a business problem they will be attracted by the description of the work you do, the problem you solve. Descriptions about your personality, character and interests are important but we will use them later.

Now you can configure your profile to work on all these levels, on LinkedIn and in the global internet. So first you decide your three Key Level words and then we work on each of those three levels in all our actions; this makes for the effective use of LinkedIn.

Using a Key Level Strategy will help you to be clear and use this same personal brand over all your web profiles.

We will be using the Key Level Strategy in your profile and then in your connections, questions and answers, groups and discussions, and recommendations: This is a key factor in being effective with LinkedIn.

Your Photo

Your photo for your profile is important. This is business networking so choose an appropriate photo, if you can have a professional one taken.

Your photo makes a difference, use the very best one you have, and check how you appear to others when you do some searches on your industry. Get some friends to take a look maybe. Remember, a little effort in this section will pay dividends over and over again on LinkedIn™.

When you upload your photo be aware of the 4MB limit of the file, and use an image about 100 by 100 pixels square, you can crop it to make it show well. Make sure you use the right format.

Remember to look at your profile when you have uploaded a photo and check it is to your satisfaction; you can always change it.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and click on “edit” below the photo

Your Headline

The headline is what drives your header snap shot so this is a key factor in making your profile work for you on LinkedIn.

Remember that the Header Snap Shot is what people see when you take actions around LinkedIn.

Try putting your mouse of another members name on LinkedIn and seeing what the Header Snap Shot looks like. Once you have configured yours, make sure you do the same and that you are happy with what you see.

Make sure that all the words in your three Key Levels appear in the header.

As you have a 120 character limit, you may wish to design your headline in a word processing document, making sure you have used all your available characters. You may want to use the spell checker too.

You will see some people use graphics in their header. This was a good strategy before LinkedIn changed their search algorithms, I would suggest avoiding using any special characters in your header apart from spaces, pipes, hyphens and tilde’s (grapheme).

Hyphen: -

Pipe: |

Grapheme: ~

The default headline will be your current job role and company – Remember to change this.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “edit” by your name.

Twitter

You can add as many twitter accounts as you like. Twitter is a microblogging platform and I am avoiding going into details here as it warrants a whole course on its own, but if you have an account, or multiple accounts then you can add them here.

You can use this in a variety of ways. Remember that if you choose your updates to be visible to everyone you will be found by more people, so that is probably the most effective strategy.

You could feed all your Twitter updates to LinkedIn on the next choice, but you could spare your LinkedIn network too many of your details by adding #in to selective tweets that you want to share with LinkedIn and Twitter.

If you are going to be active on LinkedIn then be careful with the tweets you feed into your LinkedIn stream. If you are already careful with the Tweets you put out and are doing fewer Tweets of better quality then you could consider putting all tweets on LinkedIn.

Try and take a look at your profile, see what happens, and develop a strategy that suits you; it’s about conversation instead of broadcast, remember?

With the development of LinkedIn Signal Twitter now plays an integral part of your LinkedIn success as it makes you consistently more visible. The Twitter updates that you post from LinkedIn are visible to the online world, your LinkedIn updates are only visible within LinkedIn. This combination of public and private available updates work very effectively.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “edit” by where you see Twitter

Your public profile url

Before we leave the header and start to look at our summary information and experience we are going to configure our LinkedIn public URL.

The URL is the web address for your profile and so as this is a key part of your personal branding it is worth making sure it is exactly how you want it. It is a unique address so keep the URL appropriate and professional and in the way you would like to see it.

LinkedIn gives you a default URL, if you want to change it then click on edit and then enter a new URL address, making it consistent with your personal branding strategy.

For instance if you are unable to obtain a sensible URL that shows your name, you could go for something that uses your Key Level words. Be careful with that though, remember that your career may change! I would recommend using your name or name variation.

Once you have saved your profile URL you can use it on Business Cards, email footers, websites etc… .

You can also configure your public profile to restrict the items it shows about you. You may wish to do this, but remember the more you show you the world, the more chance you have of being found. So clicking each box to show on your public profile allows LinkedIn to work more for you.

You can also use a URL shortener service like http://bit.ly to make a memorable url shortener for your LinkedIn Public URL and then use this in email footers, Tweets or Facebook shares.

I use http://bit.ly/phil-linkedin to shorten the public profile url that is http://mt.linkedin.com/in/philrichards

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “edit” by where you see Public Profile

Your Summary

Your summary is an important part of your overall branding. It is much more than just your standard 30 second elevator pitch and it is certainly best to keep this section very different to your current role, although of course it will have some similarities.

You have just a few seconds to capture your readers attention, and in total you have 2000 characters to get them interested in you.

Start your first three paragraphs strongly, saying exactly what you do, your specialities, and your niche.

Remember to use your Key Level words in the summary, and if possible in your first three paragraphs.

Use the rest of the summary to expand on your Key Levels using paragraph spacing and some simple graphics nd build on the first three paragraphs offering more detail building up a written picture of your experience.

I do see some people incorporating links and urls into their summary, if you do this remember that people cannot click on them to use them, they will just cut and paste them:

I am unsure how effective this is, especially when LinkedIn already gives you the opportunity to create clickable links in another section. (Websites)

To ensure you show yourself in the best way possible try formatting your summary in a word processing document first, and checking the character count. It’s a good idea to use the spell checker too.

When you are ready click Edit on your profile page to edit your summary, and remember to save your work and then go back and look at it.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “edit” by where you see Summary

Your Specialities

These specialities are the ones that come up in the searches when you keyword search in the people section of LinkedIn.

You can also prepare this list in a word document using simple graphics and putting a line break at the end of each speciality.

If you do this, remember that once you save it, LinkedIn will not use the line breaks until you click on View Your profile at the top of the page, or look at your public profile; its just one of those strange things about LinkedIn™.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “edit” by where you see Summary

Part Two

In How to write a LinkedIn profile that will work for you – Part 2 we will look at Experience, Education, Websites and Contact Settings.

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