LinkedIn Profile – Let’s Start At The Beginning - Success Unscrambled

Success Unscrambled

Are You Happy With Your LinkedIn Profile?

Today we will be looking at the very basics that you need in order to build a strong foundation for your LinkedIn profile to bring you success. Here is a brief list of what will be covered in today’s podcast;

• Applies if you are an employee, contractor or entrepreneur
• Get a professional photo done
• Background photo
• Media – photos, video, audio, embed.ly providers
• Summary for each role
• Contact details for the main summary
• Writing a story
• Talk about the problem
• Adding a disclaimer
• Compelling media
• Switch off auto updates

We will cover what you need as a minimum and the next time we will look at more advanced features.

[00:00:11] Hi folks, Alvern here. Welcome to the setup for success series. Let’s start at the beginning. Today we’re going to start at the beginning. By setting you up for success with a LinkedIn professional profile. Now there are many, many courses and books written on this topic. But as I have been told that I have a really good profile. Over 12,000 followers and I belong to 50 plus groups, get between 5 and 15 connection requests every single day and I have an SSI score of 80+. I’ll explain what an SSI score later. I tell you where I believe or why I believe I get success on LinkedIn. So this particular episode applies if you are an employee or contractor or even an entrepreneur.

I don’t know if you are aware of it but one of the best ways to be found online especially when it comes to professional networking is through the platform called LinkedIn.com. I believe I joined me back in the year 2007, so that’s 10 years now. And I have been growing from strength to strength since then. Now one of the first things I would encourage you to do is to get a professional photo for your LinkedIn profile. It doesn’t matter if you’re photogenic or not. It really is important because as they say an image or a photo, or picture speaks a thousand words. Just your picture can attract whoever you want to attract whether it be customers or clients or even potential employers to your particular profile.

[00:02:19] So you know if it even if it cost a bit of money it would be worth it to have a professional photo on your profile going forward. So something that you need to look into there are many photographers out there you can go to a photography studio and get a professional photo done for your profile.

[00:02:45] Next thing we’re going to look at then is your past and current experiences.

[00:02:50] So there’s many, many different schools of thought that say that you should have probably the last 10 years or even last five years depending on how often you have moved jobs on your LinkedIn profile. If for example you have any sort of gaps in your experience in other words it wasn’t a continuous service from one job to the other and you have gaps of one month or two months it shouldn’t should be such a big deal. However, if it is you were a homemaker for example a housewife or even a househusband.

Now, this is particularly for ladies so housewife then you probably been home looking after the kids for that amount of time. You probably had a hobby even at that point in time my advice to you is even write down that hobby whatever it is you were doing be it photography, basket weaving, fishing you decide whatever those hobbies were and put those down because they actually help especially if they’re relevant to what it is you want to do in the future they actually help you build up your particular profile. In terms of the background photo if you go into a LinkedIn and click create you’d see the option to add your own profile photo as well as a background photo in terms of the background photo. I’d advise you to put a professional photo.

[00:04:22] It doesn’t have to be something that you pay for but you can get either a picture from your current company’s marketing library or you can actually get something that represents a city that live in a popular location in your city just to show where you are where you know where you’re based or something representing what you stand for example right now this particular podcast is about helping women empowering woman so you can probably have something about empowering women as a background photo. You decide but ensure it’s professional enough and not a picture of some sort of party where you attended or beach or whatever it is. Just ensure it is professional enough.

[00:05:05] Another thing to bear in mind as well is media. So, after writing for each experience, make sure to include either some photos, videos or even audio embed go to embed.ly/providers for all of the different kinds of providers that you can actually embed into your LinkedIn profile and you can see there are 400 providers there including on Twitter. You know.

[00:05:47] SlideShare there’s all sorts of weird and wonderful things that you can actually get into your profile whether it be past project work portfolios, video of the current company that you work for etc. Another thing to add to your profile would be something like your educational background. This normally helps because a lot of companies are interested in seeing what sort of formal as well as the informal education you have to get where you are today. So don’t think it’s not important. It really helps with items like presentation skills, negotiation skills, any kind of awards even if you received scholarships etcetera.

Don’t forget to include those as well in your particular profile. The other thing that you want to do is your LinkedIn profile at the very top is a section called a summary. So just after your photo, you have your summary of you know, a summary of who you are and what you stand for.

[00:07:01] Okay. For each past and current experience as well as for your education try to stay away from jargon (unless of course, it relates to something that you want to do in the future) you know for Accounting they have their own jargon like double entry bookkeeping and all of that. Or for other roles depending on what you would be going for, what your aim is what a future, what your passion is about. Try, try as much as possible. I’m, no to include it necessarily in the summary which is the main summary but includes it in your past experiences because that’s you get found in either through the google search engines or on LinkedIn itself. ‘Cough’ sorry excuse me, in the summary don’t forget to add your contact details as well as Ah, let’s see what else is there?

[00:07:59] Hmm, a story. So, it’s really important that in the summary itself the main summary you sort of focus on writing it as a story as opposed to you know saying, verbatim, saying, I did this, I did that. I did this, write a story because people relate to stories much better than they do, a long paragraph about, you know technical are or industry related material. Write a story as to who you are you know. What are you looking for? So that your customers or clients or even potential employers can relate to you more efficiently. And to stay in top searches for your particular in your particular specialty.

Talk to your reader about what the problem that they are facing, or client, whoever it is and how you can solve it for them. If you’re an employee, one thing you may be asked to do by your employer is to add at the very end of the summary, Em, an actual wording for example, if it is you work for Google, for example, you’d say ‘all views are my own and not the view not that of Google’.

So your employer would ask you to do that because it is your personal profile, after all, there’s nothing that the company can do to take that away from you. So they would probably ask you to make sure you have a disclosure there saying that whatever you wrote there is nothing to do with them but your personal views. Em. Really important and in your summary as well. that you don’t forget to add compelling media like again photos of successful clients, testimonial videos and you sort of audio. If you are podcaster like myself you can add links to the podcasts.

[00:09:52] And while editing your profile it is really important not to forget to switch off the auto updates.

[00:10:00] Because obviously when you’re editing doing a sort of entire makeover your particular profile every time you change something and click save your whole network, even if your network is 50 people, gets the find out that you just changed your title from executive to cooperate to whatever it is and you keep annoying them because all of these updates they don’t want to be doing that so make sure you switch off those auto updates until you’re done all of your editings and fix it finally and then switch back on all the updates, okay?

So, that is all for this particular episode I hope you’ll find it very useful to you and to your future prospects. What I would like to do, if you can give me feedback of what you thought of this particular episode if you found it was helpful if you had any sort of questions about what I shared and in next episode we’d be looking in more detail at other aspects like, em, awards, your title and other ways you can actually optimize a profile. Okay, thanks so much for joining.

[00:11:12] And until then see you next time. Bye for now.