In 2012 with 135 Million members worldwide LinkedIn is the place to network online for business.

My experience with LinkedIn over the years has meant that I have made many mistakes and learned a great deal about how to work LinkedIn to achieve business objectives  to either win sales, get recruited, recruit staff or manage a brand.

I now work for PaperLess Software Europe developing the Business Partner channel for our software application and I manage several LinkedIn groups.LinkedIn is part of my regular business life, I write from my personal experience and I am still learning.

You are welcome to connected to me on LinkedIn: Remember to add me as a connection using my public profile link www.linkedin.com/in/philrichards. I aim to accept all LinkedIn connection invitations.

How to write a LinkedIn profile that works for you started as a series of four articles all of which are available to read. The Ebook is available so that you can download it for reference.

The Ebook is for sharing ! So feel free to share it with your colleagues and friends and to contact me if your have any questions.

Remember to share this link on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/yeKqXg

Just click the image to  download your free Ebook: How to write a LinkedIn profile that works for you.

Here is what you will find in your Ebook:

• Key Level Strategy used to define your headline
• What kind of Profile photo to use
• How to write an attention grabbing LinkedIn headline
• Is it useful to add a Twitter account
• How to get your own Public Profile URL
• What are the essential things to include in your summary
• How to list your specialities
• The best way to show your experience (Jobs)
• What new sections (Vital details!) must you add to make your profile work for you
• Which applications make sense
• How to show your education
• Which additional information you will need to add
• How to configure your website links
• Which of your interests you can show on your profile
• How to boost your profile with the right recommendations
• Advanced search optimisation techniques to get you to the tope of the search list
• Vital settings for your Linkedin account, without which your profile will be ineffective
• Your 26 point check list

Many thanks to the following websites that link to this page:

• Free Business Information In Bristol

• Key Level Strategy used to define your headline
• Profile photo
• Headline
• Twitter
• Public Profile URL
• Summary
• Specialities

Part 2 covered:

• Experience (Jobs)
• Sections (Vital details!)
• Education

Part 3 covered

• Additional information
• Website links
• Interests
• Groups and associations
• Honours and awards
• Personal information
• Contact settings and interested in
• Applications
• Recommendations

Now in Part 4 we can go through our check list, use some advanced profile techniques and once we have ensured our LinkedIn settings are working for us we can launch our new profile and let it work for us.

100% complete LinkedIn profile

Adjust the order of the content sections

You can tailor the design of your profile as it appears to the public. As this is the showcase for your personal brand and identity on LinkedIn, and in the public arena, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to move the content sections into the order you want.

To do this just click and drag using those handles you can see on the left of the title of the content section.

Check that you have completed 100% of your profile

LinkedIn makes it easy for you to check that you have completed 100% of your profile.

With all the effort you have made in making sure your profile is going to be effective it would be most unwise to leave your profile at anything less than 100% complete.

Advanced Profile Techniques - A simple technique

What I am going to describe to you is uncomplicated, and actually quite easy to do however it would be so easy to abuse this powerful technique, and in fact some do.

My own experience is to draw the line at which I stop, which means that people get higher rankings than me on occasions in searches on LinkedIn™ for my targeted search term, because I refuse to do what they do.

The first stage of this technique is to decide what your search term will be and decide how far up the rankings you wish to go.

Then optimise your profile according to this search term, you need to have made sure you have done this step to the best of your ability before using this advanced technique.

You may well have done this already, ensuring that this search term is in your headline, your summary, current job roles, specialities etc…

Put this search term into the advanced people search and then look at the top few people in the searches.

Remember to change the sort order to Keywords, you can do this from the drop down menu at the top of the search. When you use the advanced search optimise firstly for your country, before you try optimising for world domination

Look at the profiles of the people in the search above you and look at their current roles and past roles counting the number of search terms highlighted.

This is the number of search terms you will need to have, or to have more of in your current and past roles in order to appear above them in the rankings.

Now change the wording in your current and past roles accordingly.

I have experimented with this and found that one current role, and plenty of past roles looks more effective as a profile, and operates just as well.

If you try and add too many current roles, it can look like a mess, you will find people do this, but remember that search rankings on LinkedIn™ is just one aspect of the overall game, the visual impact of your profile is another.

Luckily you can experiment and change what you need to. You will find the search rankings change very quickly after you have updated your profile.

When you repeat the search you will see where you have moved too. If you then want to go further, then you will need to click on a profile above you, and repeat the process.

Too easy ?

It cannot be that easy right ? Wrong, actually it is with a profile that is already optimised.

People do find this out and sadly abuse it, but I would offer you the strongest warning against being unreasonable with this information. Years ago Google searches would be manipulated by what is known as “keyword stuffing” which is abusing the search formula by repeating words with no reason.

When they changed their formula peoples websites got banned from being on Google. So if you want to avoid any potential trouble, use the information wisely and use it effectively.

It is also important to be clear on your targeting of these key words, you can change them, and as other people discover your keywords and challenge your position, changing the words is a great idea, and keeps your profile fresh.

Check your settings

To get the maximum impact from your profile here are some settings that you need to check to ensure your profile to the maximum of it’s effectiveness.

You can adjust your settings from the drop down menu item from the top right of your LinkedIn home page, where you see your name.

• Privacy Controls – Ensure you are broadcasting your updates to your network, everyone can see your activity feed, your name and headline are viewable when you views another members profile, your connections can see your connections, your photo is visible to everyone and you are displaying the box “Viewers of this profile also viewed”
• Emails – Ensure you have checked each box to receive all types of emails, and that anyone on LinkedIn can send you invitations
• Account – Add any email address that you are associated with, so more people can find you

Your LinkedIn profile Check List

1. Decide your Key Level Words or Phrases: High, Mid, Micro
2. Complete a strong focussed headline
3. Upload a great photo. Use a professional one if you can.
4. Add your twitter account
5. Configure your public profile url
6. Create a compelling summary including your key level words
7. Complete as many specialities as you can including your key level words
8. Enter your current experience (jobs) including your key level words
9. Enter your previous experience (jobs)
10. Detail your education
11. Correctly configure your 3 website links
12. List all your interests
13. List your groups and associations
14. List your honours and awards
15. Complete the personal information you are willing to share with direct connections
16. Write a good reason for people to contact you in the contact settings
17. Tick of all the interested in items that you are happy with
18. Update your skills in the skills section
19. Record a personal welcome video, upload to slideshare
20. Add the slideshare application, the Twitter application, and the blog application if you have a blog. Consider the other applications as required.
21. Join some groups to get some nice badges on your profile
22. Recommend someone today, just to get started
23. Check everything on the public profile, change everything your unhappy with
24. Is your profile at 100%, then if you have checked it its time to go public !
25. Post your profile announcement on a group and ask for some feedback
26. Sit back and enjoy your new LinkedIn™ profile, and enjoy how it looks

And finally

An effective LinkedIn profile is always work in progress so it is  a good idea to take a look at your own profile periodically and update it with your new way of thinking.

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Download your Free Ebook: How to write a LinkedIn profile that works for you

Learning what activity to take part in to get results is relatively simple, there are many great resources out there to learn what is possible; and then it is a matter of learning what works in your marketplace.

One challenge though is time., nothing new there then! The time challenge is solved through using technology to make the processes efficient, and by working with people in a team.

To apply the solution to the time challenge I have been using a variety of different applications to manage Social Marketing or Inbound Marketing tactics in the business I work in and am now at the stage where I will recruit extra resource soon to assist me.

The technology challenge has still been:

• Lack of multi user systems that cover all social networks I require
• Lack of integration with standard RSS and web search functionality
• High cost and therefore long ROI (Return on Investment)

Sprout Social now offers me all this functionality at a very reasonable cost (from $9 a user per month), and I signed up to the online Sprout Social service free 30 day trial to test it out straight away.

After a few days I got on one of their live webinars and sat through 1 hour of training with Peter Dykstra (@petedykstra) which was excellent, and so I can now summarise the advantages of using Sprout Social for Social Marketing or Inbound Marketing for your business.

1. Multiple social media profiles managed using groups by multiple users – easy to manage with different user rights for each user
2. Easy to view and filter conversations occurring with connections – and easy to engage in those conversations
3. Easy to monitor conversations about a keyword within social media networks, and then to engage in the conversation and capture the profile information of the people in the conversation.
4. Easy to monitor web content on the same keywords
5. Detailed social media profile information on for each person you are engaging with, influencers are indicated with a star to make priorities clear
6. Share from web content, RSS or Social Network feed. Schedule multiple posts from the same content. Facebook posts have multiple posting options to make full use of Facebook page functionality.
7. View results from your posts, see the actions by your readers and the reach.
8. Comprehensive reporting including Google Analytics social reporting integration; multiple output formats.
9. Monitor location based social media conversations, engage with people in a targeted location.
10. Spout Pages – an FBML Facebook Page Editor; design and manage all your Facebook pages.
11. Easy to set up, be up and running very quickly.

Take a 30 day trial of Sprout Social to see what you think, and come back and let me know what your experience is.

A strong protest against the new ACTA “Trade agreement” is gaining strength in Malta in a co ordinated effort to ensure that elected representatives in power take the opportunity to vote against a treaty that has been negotiated in private over the past three years.

Watch the short video on ACTA below to find out more:

To take action in Malta please use these links:

Protest against ACTA - https://www.facebook.com/events/372841852732565/

Malta Anti-ACTA group - http://www.facebook.com/groups/284478734946368/285495728178002/?notif_t=group_activity

Write to your MEP using the details at:

ACTA in Malta « Melaharts blogging adventures.

This is why I would take action now:

• There has been little public debate on this, most of the agreement has been created in secret. This means there is plenty of financial interest being wrapped up as something else “in the public good”. If it smells like a duck and quacks like a duck then you know it probably is a duck. The way this has been done smells like something to be avoided.
• The “police” for this new agreement are commercially orientated ISP (Internet Service Providers). That means the ISP’s will control what you find on the internet curbing your right to freedom of speech. Bad news – you want to have this level of control put on you?

Read a more in depth article from the EFF the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In Malta the Malta Independent reports that

Malta was one of 22 EU members to sign the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on Thursday, along with the EU itself – but the agreement will need the European Parliament’s approval to come into force.

Time for you to act to protect your personal freedom?

Filed under: Social Media Tagged: Social Media ]]> http://philrichards.biz/2012/01/28/acta-in-malta/feed/ 1 35.878100 14.474800 35.878100 14.474800 philrichards http://philrichards.biz/2012/01/01/how-to-write-a-linkedin-profile-that-will-work-for-you-part-3/ http://philrichards.biz/2012/01/01/how-to-write-a-linkedin-profile-that-will-work-for-you-part-3/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:00:14 +0000 Phil Richards http://philrichards.biz/?p=923 ]]> In Part 1 of How to create a LinkedIn profile that will work for you we covered:

• Key Level Strategy used to define your headline
• Profile photo
• Headline
• Twitter
• Public Profile URL
• Summary
• Specialities

In Part 2 of How to create a LinkedIn profile that will work for you we covered:

• Experience (Jobs)
• Sections (Vital details!)
• Education

Part 3 will cover Additional Information, Personal Information, Applications and finally Recommendations.

Additional Information – it is important!

It would be easy to fail to complete this section, as its description seems like it is unimportant.This is untrue; it is an important section so we will look at each part in turn.

In each section there are some important tactics to use.

Website Links

In this section we can create links back to our company website, blog, or other social media websites.

You can enter up to three websites only but always choose “Other” and write your own description, this helps your Search Engine Optimisation if you’re a business that uses this in your strategy.

If you are using a link here to your business, you could make this a better experience by using a link that goes to a specific landing page for visitors coming from LinkedIn,

You will get far more attention that way, and if every time someone uses this link, you have an opportunity to engage them; then make that opportunity as friendly and tailored as possible.

This is also useful for tracking how many people visit your website from your profile, so you can refine your actions. You could also utilise the Google Analytics campaign tracking to identify how many hits actually come from your LinkedIn profile.

Integrating your LinkedIn and business website strategy is important so it could be a good idea to start using a landing page to offer an immediate gift or download of value to your visitors and encourage them to sign up to your newsletter.

All this is equally valid as a professional employee of a business, and also as a professional employee and blogger in your own right.

You can forget your Twitter URL here as it’s unnecessary, there is a different place for that link and only enter your Facebook account if you are interested in using Facebook for business networking, remember you will need the complete url. You could enter the url of a group you are running, if you do this try and use some text that calls for people to join up, such as ‘Join Johns Tax Group’.

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

Interests

The first thing to notice about the interests section of your profile is that the words need to be separated by commas and that all the words are hyperlinked direct to a search that finds people with similar interests.

This opens up a huge opportunity for you if you complete your searchable interests in the right way. The interests section is an opportunity to expand your visibility to others by incorporating your personal interests as well as your business ones. It is also a way of doing research on finding people that have similar interests as you, and then seeing what groups they are members of. We will see this strategy in action in later modules.

Remember that capital letters will make this section look neater, but using commas between words and short phrases will make this section function. You will also see that we avoid using any graphics and as these words appear in other peoples search criteria, the closer you can get to using all your 1000 characters the more that LinkedIn™ will work for you.

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

Groups and Associations

The groups and associations section works in the same way as the interests section. Separate each group name by a comma, and use Capital letters without any graphics. The more groups you can put in here the better, and this can help you get found in searches by other people. The group names are the ones you use, you make them up, so where possible stick to official names, but remember you can use any name you want to.

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

Honours and Awards

The Honours and Awards box works slightly differently, you are unable to search directly by a hyperlink on people with similar awards, but the words you enter here will appear in search results, so use up as much of your 1000 character limit that you can.

To make a difference to how your profile looks you can use some simple graphics and also use line breaks. Remember that you will not see the affect of this until you click on View My Profile, they fail to show up when you click save after editing your profile; that’s just one of the odd things about LinkedIn that you just get used too.

This section is in addition to the Honours and Awards section that you can add from your experience, so it could just be duplication for your profile.

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

Personal Information

LinkedIn gives you the control over what you share with the general public and your connections, so it is up to you.

The level of detail here will depend on your strategy, so be strategic in your decision making. You could use your work telephone number and your Instant messaging details, and restrict your birth date information to showing just your year, for instance.

Remember that the more you share, the more LinkedIn can help you, but balance this with your personal security.

Your contact details will only be visible to direct connections.

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

Contact Settings and Interested In

The ‘Contact Settings and Interested In’ section is what tells your reader how to contact you and what you’re interested in.

The Interested In section, the tick boxes, will appear on your public profile. The text you can enter will be invisible on your public profile.

So once again we use our Key Level Strategy to ensure we get contacts from people who fit in our target market.

It is important to get the display right in this section, so use your simple graphics again, and space your writing out using line breaks and paragraphs.

There is probably a theoretical limit to the amount of data you can put here, but I have failed to find it as yet.

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

Applications

You can add up to 12 applications onto your profile. It is easy to add them, just use the Add Sections link and then use ‘Application’ and then choose the application you want to add. You can also view these from the More>Your Applications menu>Get more applications.

Amazon Reading List

An easy application to add is the Amazon reading list. You can use this to do quick reviews of the books you have read, and once again, keep these books to your Key Level words, and your Interests, so that they appear relevant to anyone looking at your profile.

Slideshare for LinkedIn

For instance if you regularly share ‘slide share’ presentations as part of your online strategy, then add this application to your LinkedIn profile, which will update automatically every time you add another Slide Show presentation.

This integration is powerful, you are then networking on two platforms simultaneously and SlideShare feeds LinkedIn and vice versa.

To add a video that plays every time a reader visits upload the video on Slideshare and then add it to your profile from the Slideshare dashboard. Whilst this does appear to be a  ”cool thing” to do, it can be very annoying for someone who visit your profile more than once!

Creative Portfolio

For anyone with a creative portfolio to share this application by Behance provides a simple way to show your work.

Google Presentation

Google lets you share presentations done in Google docs or from powerpoint straight from your google account, it is really a very useful way of sharing documents, however if you or your company use Google Applications the paid for versions of Google Docs then this application will fail to work, it only works on the Google free accounts. Its probably best to choose either this or Slideshare as there is duplication.

Huddle and Box.net

Huddle and Box.net are also great for the same type of application, these are more for sharing documents and files so this can be useful for you to share the free valuable gift when connecting with people. Both Huddle and Box have free accounts.

Both these applications work well for sharing documents in groups and for receiving documents from your connections.

WordPress

If you have a wordpress blog then you can link the the blog address onto your public profile in a couple of simple steps and this will refresh periodically. This is a useful extension to your networking as it brings your blog and LinkedIn together, if you do this make sure your blog links back to your LinkedIn profile so it works both ways.

Blog Link

Blog Link is useful if you have a blog on another platform as it support many different types of blog.

SAP

The SAP application is for SAP professionals, and if that is you then you are unlikely to want to miss out on this one, but it is just for SAP people.

MyTravel by Tripit

My Travel is a great way to let your network know when your travelling. it helps people get to know you a bit better and also arouses their curiosity, so share your travel details and it will help you get more connections and build relationships.

Manymoon Projects and Teamspaces

You get unlimited team spaces, documents and connections according to the application, but I am unable to comment further having never tried it! But it is free:)

Tweets

Tweets is a useful application. It is a fairly recent addition to the LinkedIn application suite and takes LinkedIn and Twitter that one step further to integration.

About one third of my connections are using twitter at the time of making this course, so this is a whole new way for me to connect with at least one third of my network on a different platform by using the Tweets tab called connections I can see who I am following and who I have missed, this is limited to 500 people for the free account.

Twitter is a choice that you could make, it has the potential of bringing in people from outside LinkedIn to your network if used efficiently, but it takes time and effort to get involved.

The tweets application on LinkedIn enables you to update your twitter and LinkedIn status at the same time, so that efficient, and it also enables you to follow every direct connection on LinkedIn that you are missing out on following. This is the real bonus of this application if your a twitter user.

Recommendations

Recommendation is in part 3 of thiese articles because all of the work you ahve done before on your LinkedIn profile needs doing before you receive any valuable recommendations. However the recommendations are a very powerful way of differenciating yourself when your profile appears in a listing.

You can see that having more recommendations and connections will add credibility to your profile when your details appear in a search as the image shows on a search for “LinkedIn” (for which I have no targeting currently).

Personal Recommendations

The number of recommendations you have received on LinkedIn is shown on your profile. The more you have the more you will seem like an interesting, reliable and trustworthy connection.

To be really effective on LinkedIn have a strategy to build your credibility and reputation by building the number of recommendations you have on your profile, and build them steadily week after week.

More reputations mean more social proof that you are a real expert in your niche; it is part of the social capital you create, the value in your profile.

Gaining recommendations is done by taking actions strategically. You can ask for them and you may wish to do this to close friends and colleagues, if you do this, ask them to use one or more of your Key Level words.

On the other hand the best way to get unsolicited recommendations is just to give them freely. So if you regularly write an unrequested recommendation for someone you know or have interacted with on LinkedIn, and it’s an honest and sincere effort to help someone else; you will find that people do the same.

In fact LinkedIn helps you with this as when you write a recommendation for someone LinkedIn  asks the person if they want to accept it and make it visible, and then will prompt them to return the favour.

So give plenty of recommendations and keep doing it regularly. One word though, if you give out 10 recommendations then be pleased if you get just one back, life’s like that !

Advanced recommendations

Currently video is making huge inroads into our behaviours and sharing on the internet.

One technique I have seen used is the video recommendation, this can enhance a persons normal written recommendation if you can request they can do it. Once you have received your video recommendation then upload it using an application such as Slidehshare and you have a visible recommendation and a back up recording too.

You will benefit more from this if you record video recommendations for others and host them on your slideshare account. What can be useful about this is that if you ensure that your profile links are in the video, or a way of telling people how to find you, for instance what to search on or using a bit.ly short url then you can make sure these videos are shared on video sharing websites, this brings people back to you on LinkedIn.

Service Providers

As a business and as a professional you will benefit from asking your clients to give you recommendations for your business. These appear as Service Provider Recommendations and are listed separately on LinkedIn enabling people to find suppliers that are recommended by their network.

This is valuable to your supplier credibility so you can see who your network recommends as a Business Consultant, for example and then order this either by date, to see the newest recommendations or by the amount of recommendations these suppliers receive.

Remember to make sure your profile is included in the Service Provider Directory, you can check your settings for this by looking for the settings menu in the top right hand corner of the LinkedIn home page. Look under Privacy Settings and you will see the menu for Service Provider Directory.

Now onto Part Four of How to create a LinkedIn profile that works for you; in Part 4 there is a full check list for you to help you make the most of your LinkedIn profile, some advanced profile techniques to help you in the search rankings, and some vital settings for your account to ensure your LinkedIn profile is effective.

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• Key Level Strategy used to define your headline
• Profile photo
• Headline
• Twitter
• Public Profile URL
• Summary
• Specialities

Now we can move on to completing your experience, education, and the special sections that add the important detail that connects you to others.

The Best View

Your experience and education is where you provide the back up to where you are today and your specialities. When writing your experience remember that it is part of your story and aim to provide contextual links, similar language and always refer to your Key Level words.

This can prove difficult, in my own case, relating the fact that once I was a Show Jump groom to my current work can be a challenge, but remember that your history is essentially part of your unique journey, so write up all your experiences for what they are, they may well make you look interesting to someone looking in detail at your profile.

Tell a positive story by all means, but remember to be authentic. As your experience gets older, it can be a temptation to suggest that this looses relevance but you cannot predict this, so enter everything and tell your story, you never know what buttons it may press for the reader.

If you are reluctant to put some experience down in your profile, it may be your fear and your judgements; but you have no way of forecasting what the person looking for you is actually looking for. So tell your story, and tell it well!

Experience – Your jobs

You can have as many current positions as you want, just leave the end dates and tick that you are there currently and they will appear as current positions.

Be careful to avoid updating your headline, you will see here that when you are updating the jobs there is a little tick box for avoiding updating your header; use this tick box to avoid overwriting your carefully selected headline !

It can be useful to your career to include unpaid voluntary positions in organisations such as committee posts etc. In the top section of your profile, the one most visible, 3 of your current positions will appear, followed by 3 of your past positions. You can also use a special section for this in Add Sections>Volunteer Experience and Causes, but my personal preference is to see the current positions listed in the current employment section.

Your current position often presents the challenge of duplication so be careful to aim to make this section different from your Summary. The current positions are listed in order of the Start date, so your latest start date appears first. This can prove challenging to get the order in a way that you want it to appear, but it can be managed to suit you.

In the image you can see that for “Self Employed” or a voluntary organisation you would enter the details in the Company Name field. When you do this LinkedIn will show you a list of all organisations and companies registered in the Companies section of LinkedIn. If your organisation or company is unregistered OR you have no desire to register it on LinkedIn:  just TAB away from this box and LinkedIn will ask you for more details of the organisation which you can ignore. For instance there is no reason to register “Self-Employed” although you will find that it exists as a company!

If you wished to add your company or organisation to LinkedIn then this would be a great time to do that.

In the Description field you can use all the tricks you used in the Summary section, so use some graphics and up to 2000 words per job. It is also an idea to  break up large portions of text and use several paragraphs and line breaks so your details can be scanned easily.

Remember to use your Key Level words, especially in your current position, and if you can provide some additional levels of credibility by showing your Key Level words in previous positions, where you are able.

You may well find that your High – level Key Word is used more than the Mid – Level and Micro – level word, this would be normal as your career has developed, and also depends on what stage you are at in your career.

Remember you are building your story, your brand and your history; its all in public view, so be authentic.

In the future you will be developing recommendations for these positions and the people you want to recommend you will be reading what you have written, so keep that in mind when describing your achievements.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “add new position” by where you see Experience

Consultant positions

You can enter more than just jobs,  as it is an “experience section”.

Independent consultancies and contractors can show their experience by adding a position and choosing Consultant/Contractor/Adviser for example in the title.

This can be especially important when showing your portfolio of work as a small business or independent professional consultant.

For each company that you add to your experience, you will appear on the companies listing, that’s another useful link back to you.

When completing these experience sections you may want to be especially careful of confidentiality issues, but you could also remember that these are rich sources of recommendations.

Add Sections

This section is a very powerful addition to LinkedIn that enables you to add specific sections that provide data which will mean that when people are searching using detailed data you will have more chance of being found.

The data in this section also brings you closer to people by showing others your connection in a relevant context to them.

The functionality is relatively new (Volunteer Section launched in July 2011) and the Add Sections functionality enables you to add more details for:

• Certification
• Courses
• Honours and Awards
• Languages
• Organisations
• Projects
• Patents
• Publications
• Skills
• Test Scores
• Volunteer Experience and Causes

Each of these is added to your profile as a separate section. When you see the section visible on your profile grab the Title Bar of the section and drag it to the position on your profile where you want it to appear.

There are special requirements for each section that are self explanatory when working within a section, but you may find that you have various options as to which section you use for a particular item. I believe there are no fixed rules here as long as what you do is authentic, LinkedIn provides you flexibility to choose how to design your profile and so it is up to you to decide.

Certifications requires that you publish a Certification Name with optional Licence Number and Certification Authority which would add credibility.

Courses will link a particular course to an employment, unless you select Other from the employment drop down. Honours and Awards can also link to a particular employment if you wish.

Languages is a simple list where you choose to declare your own level of ability.

Organisations is a great section for detailing committee posts which you can relate to an employment if you wish (choose Other to avoid this). Before this section was added to LinkedIn you may have entered these details in the Experience Section as an employment and so you may need to amend this with the introduction of this new section however LinkedIn has no functionality to enable people to give you recommendations for your work at these organisations, or at the Volunteer Experience; so you may wish to consider carefully where you wish to enter this type of experience. In 2010-2011 I had two volunteer posts that I had entered in the Experience section and that I received recommendations, so I left them in place and added them as Organisations. Overkill perhaps, but I wanted to avoid any chance of removing the recommendations!

Projects enables you to specify the employment at which you undertook the project and also provide a public Project URL and add Team Members, although at the time of writing (Dec 2011) I was unable to add LinkedIn profiles only the names of others. If you are describing a project outside of work then just select Other from the drop down menu of employments and no employment will be shown. This section is most useful for adding URL links to projects you are working on, for instance I added 3 of my projects:

• Business Professionals In Malta, a LinkedIn group
• LinkedIntoMalta , a website for members of the group to publish their expert articles
• Kiva Team Malta, a Kiva lending team based in Malta

Publications give you the ability to add the Publication URL. This would be useful for self published works as well as commercially published articles.

The skills section enables you to add up to 50 skills to your profile. LinkedIn has a skills search section found under More>Skills that enables public searching of skills listed in your profile, this enables you to find the groups related to that particular skill and also the people that LinkedIn relate to that skill description. Using the Skills page on LinkedIn, you can directly add a Skill to your profile which is most useful if that Skill is already listed.

The Volunteer Experience and Causes section enables you to identify what causes you are interested in and identify multiple organisations that you support. You can also add one or more Volunteer positions at any of the organisations listed as those you support.

I can find no record of any limit to the number of section you can use on your profile, however I found that I was unable to add every section so there is possibly a limit here.

Your Education

Your Education section is not just showing off your experience, skills and education, it’s also a way for people to find you as part of a university, college or school, just like jobs, you can get recommendations here, and recommend people.

Telling your story and giving LinkedIn as much data on you as possible will mean you can be found in search listings and so that you can appear as relevant to other people. Every piece of data you add is another way for you to be found by others with similar interests, experience or history. This enables you network to expand as the data means that linkedIn is working for you to show your profile when it is relevant.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “add new school” by where you see Education

In Part 3 of How to write a LinkedIn profile that will work for you we will cover  Additional Information (So important!), Personal Information, Applications and Recommendations.

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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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From my experience though WordPress.com has 7 key features that have inspired me to stay with it and develop a few blogs and websites without being too technical or artistic.

So here are my thoughts on the 7 reasons I love WordPress.com for blogging.

1. Be artistic easily with themes

Hundreds of free themes means that you can always find yourself something that suits. As your blog develops you can choose different themes with alternative options to suit your needs. If you need them premium themes offer extended functionality for you to make use of, and they are relatively inexpensive.

The themes are flexible also, so this month I changed my theme to Intuit Types away from Twenty Ten which I had started with, as I felt like a new look. I found it so easy to change that my plan is to change the theme regularly as I feel that it keeps the blog feeling fresh.

Widgets that are built-in to the Theme you choose enable lots of extra functionality such as the addition of links, images, blog rolls, RSS feeds, photo gallery’s, Twitter feeds and so much more.

2. Publish yourself in a few simple steps

I have always found WordPress.com easy and believe that if you can edit a word document then you can edit a blog. Drag and Drop for inserting images and simple controls for your text, wrapping quotations, inserting images and to make links to other pages are all easy to master.

I believe anyone of any age could master the few simple things needed to get started, and then learn as you need to for additional items such as embedding videos etc.. The support forums on WordPress.com are also very useful in times of trouble and there is a whole community of WordPress bloggers describing tips and tricks.

The additional help from the spell checker is something I find very useful indeed, and its is a cinch to draft posts and save them for publishing later or even to complete them and schedule them to be published when you choose.

3. A worldwide community

Built in to the WordPress platform is the Email Subscription option which enables anyone to subscribe to your updates by email. When you get the engagement from your readers WordPress also manages the comments from anyone. Akismet is all part of the platform and handles the spam comments for free, which is invaluable.

In addition the built-in “Like” button and a range of Social Media sharing buttons enable readers to share your writing in an easy way. These items are all very easy to configure in the WordPress Dashboard, and you can also automatically share your posts to your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook profiles and pages.

The community of bloggers on WordPress.com are there to support you whilst they also develop their own writing. Well that is how it feels to me anyway.

4.Mobile Apps

WordPress.com understand who important it is to be able to publish from a mobile device and so there are apps available for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

I have started to use the iPhone app more in recent times and it is amazing what you can write whilst waiting in the hair-dressers for instance The apps are also a great way of recording a draft article which can be polished off before publishing. With the mobile apps it is easy to add links and photos to your posts, so being able to take a photo and then write and article immediately is useful.

5. Categories and Tags

The categories and tags offered within the WordPress help me keep my blog articles focussed and also enable them to be found for the relevant content they are written to provide. Within WordPress itself articles appear in searchable tags very quickly so readers in the WordPress community will see those articles within a short period of time.

Categories mean that people can quickly jump to relevant content on the blog, I prefer fewer categories and have only one per blog article.

6. Free or with economical upgrades

It is simple just to set up your free blog, just land on WordpRess.com and sign up and then off you go! Simple as that. I chose to have a personal domain name which costs me around $10 a year to maintain and it was very simple to get that domain to work with my existing free WordPress.com blog. I followed the basic instructions and it was all working in 24 hours. WordPress charge around $17 a year for this service – so the cost of my blog with its own domain is under $30 a year.

Any person or business could have their own website or blog at this annual cost, and I believe it offers superb value for any organisation to communicate its message to its audience. There are of course a range of Premium Add-ons, but these are themselves cost-effective, and only really needed after you are really getting heavy traffic.

7. Stats

The integrated reporting within WordPress is perfectly suitable for many blogs and websites and provides enough information for you to know what engagement you are getting from your readers – if that matters; personally for me it is irrelevant for this blog. If you want more detailed analysis then you can easily integrate Google Analytics with your blog, and still access the WordPress stats.

In Conclusion

If you have ever wanted to try some blogging or you need a simple and effective website for your business or organisation, remember to head over to WordPress.com and sign up for free and give it a go. Enjoy

Images from WordPress.com

Matt delivers a powerful message and so I have repeated here:

Together we did some amazing things in 2011, and I’m proud to share a few highlights with you.Kiva lenders funded over $80 million in loans in 2011, and passed a quarter billion dollars funded since inception. We added partners and borrowers in Yemen,Zimbabwe, Turkey, and Burkina Faso, bringing Kiva’s network to 146 partners in 61 countries. We brought Kiva to entrepreneurs in two of the US’s hardest hit cities– New Orleans and Detroit– with more cities to come in 2012.This has been a year of innovation at Kiva. We began working with non-traditional partners whose business models are a bit different from the standard microfinance institution, enabling them to provide a unique set of services and technologies to their clients. An example is One Acre Fund who provides seeds and other inputs to farmers cheaply by buying them off-cycle and in bulk. We’ve developed social performance badges for loan and partner webpages, so that lenders can understand how a partner helps borrowers socially, in addition to financially. Looking at 2012, I’m very excited for what we’ve got planned. We’ll be adding new countries, including India. We’ll be offering more higher education, clean energy, water & sanitation, mobile & ICT, health, and innovative agriculture loans. There’s even more that we’re not quite ready to announce, so keep an eye out! Happy holidays to you and yours from all of us at Kiva, and we hope you have a wonderful New Year. Sincerely, Matt Flannery Founder & CEO, Kiva.org

You are invited to check out the Kiva Team Malta and consider if you wish to be a part of something truly amazing.

I felt this year that I wanted the gifts to mean something, and that I also needed to give. There have been years when I have felt unable to give Christmas presents as I felt that giving gifts for the sake of giving them was failing to feel quite right when my family has lots of “stuff’” already.

So this year I was looking to be able to gift something that had meaning and was still in the spirit of gifting.

For my parents I bought them a kid goat from Must Have Gifts . This is a division of World Vision who arrange sponsorship for children in many parts of the world, and I have received much pleasure from sponsoring a child in an African country over the past 6 years.

The Kid Goat will be for a family in South Sudan and the Must Have Gifts Website explains:

South Sudan: Many families lost precious livestock when they were forced to leave their homes in South Sudan. Your gift of a kid goat not only provides milk and cheese, but also security as an extra source of income as it can be bred, sold or used for meat.

I chose a printed card, despite wanting to avoid unnecessary post and waste of paper resources; this seemed kinder to my parents who I felt would want to display it. For once it felt better to avoid imposing my view of recycling and waste of paper for cards on them.

Crazy ? Well probably, but it felt good.

Kiva Cards – the gift that keeps on giving

For both my sisters and their families I choose the Kiva Card, a gift that changes lives.

These were easily delivered by email saving paper and avoiding wasting valuable resources, although in the USA they area available printed and delivered, and in other countries you can print them yourself.

The gift card entitles the recipient to lend the $25 to an entrepreneur as part of a group of people funding a microfinance loan in an underdeveloped country.

This is a gift that keeps on giving as when the loan is repaid the recipient can lend the money again, which is the awesome power of a loan on Kiva and why I feel strongly about the value of Kiva in enabling people to alleviate their poverty by engaging in a small business activity.

You can find our more about Kiva or even join our lending team Kiva Malta.

Fiance and Kids

So it makes sense to extend this to my fiance and the kids right?

Now you must be crazy. The kids are having computer games, skateboards and the like, and the fiance; well that would be telling…..

Seasons greetings