10+ of My Best Top Tips, Tools & Strategies to market yourself or Business on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has over 500 million users that come from more than 200 countries. LinkedIn lists more than 10 million active job posts and data on more than 9 million companies. All professions, all age groups, varied skill sets, different cultures. Professionals Globally at your finger tips!

Your Profile

Your profile is your first opportunity to show case who you are. 

First Summary Section:

• Add an overview of your background this gives the reader a summary of your past experience.
• Focus on bringing out your key skills/attributes that you want the reader to know about you.
• Try and add a personal element about you, more professionals now are adding interesting facts i.e. coffee lover, warrior mum, etc. Draw the reader in, what makes you stand out from the crowd.
• Enough content that would allow the reader to know you in a few paragraphs and keep their interest.

Current and Previous Roles:

• Clear headings and structure of content, most people skim read.
• Only add content that adds the most value, avoid a shopping list approach of job responsibilities and add more of where you added value.
• Focus on evidencing your strengths bringing out your individual contributions in the tasks that you completed.
• If you are a self employed business be clear in what solution you can fix with your service/product, why are your services of value to the reader and what are the next step’s i.e. Free Discovery call to explore if your services are a good fit. 
• Add a scheduler for people to take action if this is your aims.
• Professional feedback helps to elevate your experience. Reach out to your colleagues/clients to provide a review for your profile.

Bringing your Profile to Life:

• Blogging is a great way to build credibility, interest and doesn't need to be extensive writing, a few paragraphs of content can be enough to get the reader interested in your daily feed.
• Consider your target market and what content would they like to hear? Focus the content on what service/solution you are providing and draw the reader in, 7 ways to set up a franchise business, 10 tips to change your mindset and get your dream job, 5 strategies to deliver a killer resume. Headline Phrases that drive the most engagement.
• Great tools to use to help come up wth great headline’s, search google for killer headlines optimisers. Headline Analyzer
• Use your profile to showcase images that relate to who you are or what your company stands for. Pictures can bring to life your profile.
• Build a brand, Canva is a great free tool to professionalise images/logos and branding.
• Be different, stand out from the crowd, we are all drawn to unique confident individuals.
• Take tips from other profiles the look and feel to inject some ideas for yours.
• Ask others in your network you trust for feedback and refine.
• Skills - select wisely as always the top of the list of skills that are validated first, choose the key skills that you want people to know about you so the reader see’s them first.
• Complete all sections of your profile, it is good to see that you volunteer or support a non profit charity, it brings you to life as a person out with your professional role. People connect with people.
• Add your personal website, social media presence if you wish to your profile.
• Use videos to showcase services.
• Post business updates that showcase what you do, meeting with a new client, group training.

Follow Other Companies:

• Show your interest in who you are through who you follow - Tony Robbins, different Organisations give the reader insight to who you are and what influences you. 
• Stay away from anything that has a political connotation unless your intention is to divulge your direct views.

Connecting with Others

It is relatively simple to connect with others as most people on LinkedIn will accept your connection. Good to decide if your strategy at the outset, is it to increase the number of followers or a targeted type of audience only. Traffic is only as good as what you aim to do with it.

Increase Connections:

• Search the type of people you want to connect with by title, company so you can narrow down your niche you are looking for.
• Add a personal message on the invite, reason for connection/intentions/aims or interest.
• Connect and engage with every person that interests you this will grow your network. 
• Post your thoughts/interesting articles/share your targeted niche information to generate conversation.
• Questions are always good in the body of your post to generate a discussion.
• Validate you audience’s skills if you know them or not, this will generate an automatic message to them which will encourage them to do the same for you and this drives traffic to your profile.
• Be bold/brave start a conversation with the people you serve.
• Building an audience requires consistency of a few steps undertaken every day.

Reaching out to your Audience with a Specific Product or Service

A number of ways to offer your products or services to others:

• Messaging is available to do this but I rarely take up any offers on messaging without a warm up approach first to the relationship. I believe the conversion would be low without a relationship.
• Advertising is a great way to get your message out there and general rule is 2% will look at or click your advert, so consider aims, budget, intentions and possible conversions.

Building an email list of subscribers will provide current and future opportunities, you can do this by an Opt in approach in your advert, the best ones are something free to generate interest that captures their email address on a landing page for example 5 Free ways to write a killer resume, 7 ways to land your dream job. 

• Click Funnels is a great tool to build opt in pages, think of the adverts that you click on suitable for your niche.
• Use the email list to build a long term strategy, are you offering a newsletter, building up their interest by offering insight into your services, the reason for a free discovery call, focus on the pain points and how you were able to turn these into solutions for your clients. Why should the person work with you? Use automated tools for email campaigns, Mail Chimp is free for so many emails.
• Collaboration is also a great way to build your influence, reach out to others and suggest ways to work together or ask for advice. People are mostly happy to help others and don't be afraid to ask for help.
• Ask others to complete a survey/quiz so you can understand your audience needs better, a great way to delve into vital information and use relatable information for pain points/topics. Type form and Lead Quizzes are really great tools to do this.
• Surveys are also a great way to let others know what you do.

Tools I Use:

• Lead pages - great for templated opt in pages and landing pages.
• Click Funnels - for the more savvy marketer this system brings everything together in one place to run smart campaigns. I am an affiliate for Click Funnels and happy to walk through the benefits of this system. 14 Day Free Trial. The best system and training I have received to date.
• Blogging strategies to drive traffic to specific information.
• Lead Quizzes.
• Type form- Free for a percentage of surveys and easy to use.
• Canva branding and pictures.
• Face book advertising and add your linkedIn audience email addresses for targeted approach - Download the HTML file from LinkedIn and import into face book advert manager.
• Face book to understand your audience and build lookalike audiences for targeted campaigns. Vital information for high converting campaigns.
• Click funnels - smart automation, slicker, quicker approach to successful campaigns.
• Did you know you can analyse high converting products/service sales funnels, the amount of traffic to their advert, WHERE the traffic is coming from and then put your advert in front of the same audience!! More on this another day.

Lastly and most importantly - Always be your self, you are unique and interesting. Never under value your services or products, charge what you are worth.

Connect with me here - Book a Free Discovery Call to grow your visibility on line.

Tracy Schofield