Get More Eyeballs With Your Featured Section

The next edition of?The Mango Effect is out! ?? If you're new, this is where we talk about all things related to growing our businesses and personal brands "the mango way" on LinkedIn -- from personal branding to growing our networks to attracting more ideal clients to optimizing our profiles... and everything in between!

Each Tuesday, I share ONE strategy that you can use to optimize your personal brand or grow your business on LinkedIn. Whether you're a subject matter expert at the top of your field, a business leader looking to get on more boards, or a gritty entrepreneur trying to craft an ideal sales & marketing machine -- you'll find one action item you can take away and implement each and every week to get you one step closer to your goal.

No topic is off-limits. We discuss the good, the bad, and the fugly. I do take topic recommendations, too!

My mission is to help more professionals learn how to use LinkedIn, so we can all "up our game" on the platform, build thought leadership, and grow as leaders in our careers and businesses. And, I like to keep things fun, practical, and inspiring.

Now, onto this week's topic!

??Get More Eyeballs With Your Featured Section??

Is your featured section on LinkedIn an afterthought? Or are you attracting new leads and business opportunities because it's front-and-center?

Getting savvy with your featured section can accelerate your inbound results on LinkedIn and build your following FAST.

Too many experts don't understand what exactly to put here... should you feature posts or articles or videos or pdfs? Can you link to your lead magnet? What about promoting your LinkedIn Lives or Newsletter?

In this Mondays with Mindi episode, we get into the nuts and bolts of the Featured section, so that you can feel confident you're putting your best foot forward, showcasing your personal brand and highlighting your work.

Best part is that it's as easy as clicking a few buttons to make it look ah-maz-ing - when you know exactly what goes where. ??

Highlight Your Work in Your Featured Section

Your LinkedIn Featured section is something you should be using to your advantage as an expert, especially if your aim is to build trust and credibility for the long haul.

Too many experts either don’t know how to use this section or what to put here. If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

About five or more years ago, your personal website was the linchpin of your business, and it had to look darn good if you wanted people to purchase from you, especially if you fell into the creative freelancer segment.

Over the past few years, there has been a bit of a shift away from personal websites. Have you noticed??

Though I still have my own website and aim to drive traffic there, it’s not the ONLY place that matters. Just because you don’t “own” the traffic going to your LinkedIn profile does not mean that it’s not valuable.

I’d almost argue that it’s even MORE valuable to your business or brand than cold website traffic to your website coming from search engines, especially if you’re an expert, as people are looking for YOU as an individual and not just the indexed search engine terms in your content.

Think about it. When was the last time you hired an expert based on a cold website search? You likely heard about someone via word of mouth, seeing an ad at some point, hearing that person on a podcast, or some other HUMAN introducing you to this individual.

No longer should experts be so focused on things like keyword optimization and search engines or whittling away precious hours fine-tuning their websites for cold traffic.

That time would be MUCH better spent on a simple refresh or their Featured Section on their LinkedIn profile… taking them less than 2-5 minutes per update!

But the key is knowing WHAT to put here and WHEN to update this section to ensure it’s getting more of the right eyeballs. (Well, not literally. Apologies to my non-US friends for this turn of phrase!)

Why “Set-It-And-Forget-It” Doesn’t Work with Featured

Too many experts discover the Featured section and immediately rush to fill it up with content. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but they often don’t know what is going to be the most valuable in this section.

Then, they will tend to leave the same piece of content up for years without refreshing or playing with the order.

Thankfully, LinkedIn recently got rid of the timestamp on the Featured section items, because it used to stamp the time you featured a piece of content. This made items that were actually relevant look “old” even if they were evergreen, timeless pieces.

Now, you don’t have to worry about timestamped pieces of content, but you do need to pay attention to the mix of content you highlight in your Featured content.?

Just uploading content that looks, all the same, is not ideal.

You’ve got to be intentional about refreshing your Featured content every couple of months, if not every week or two, for those of you who do LinkedIn livestreams or have a LinkedIn newsletter.

Neglecting to update this section frequently enough will subconsciously communicate to your profile viewers that you don’t pay attention to the details.

Your personal brand matters A LOT if you’re doing anything on LinkedIn. Even if you’re a subject matter expert for a company and don’t think your face is out there as much as the company brand, you’d be surprised how many people “do their homework” and look you up.

What are they going to find? Is your LinkedIn profile going to leave them feeling less confident in working with your company or directly with you?

Treat your Featured section as the “above the fold” section on your website or landing page because that’s pretty much what it is to people landing on your profile.

Feature Your Best Professional Highlights

Following up on that idea of paying attention to your Featured section as if it was “above the fold” will help you shift perspective on what to put here.?

When someone lands on your profile for the first time, they should instantly know who you are, what you do, how you help people and what you actually deliver.

If any of these elements are unclear, you risk losing them.

I don’t know about you, but I love powerful images and content in the Featured section!?

As an expert in your field, there is something VERY specific that you do. You may have a ton of competitors, but you have a DIFFERENT way of approaching the same problem.?

This is the type of content you need to Feature because it immediately helps people categorize you as the expert you are.

If you look just like everyone else or put really dry and boring stuff in your Featured section “just to fill it up with something,” you’re not going to generate the new opportunities you were hoping for on LinkedIn.

The Featured section needs to be put together with your primary LinkedIn audience in mind. That means you need to think through which content they need to see here to begin that “know, like and trust” process we’re all pretty familiar with.

Don’t just grab any ol’ content and plop it here because it will look less than intentional.

Match your personal brand or company vibe to the content in your Featured.?

Keep it professional on LinkedIn, while also teasing a bit more of your personality here. It should have a feeling of showcasing you working within your zones of genius.

Get More Eyes on Your Featured Section

If you haven’t sat down to think deeply about your featured section, it’s high time that you do so as an expert. Too many experts just “start adding” a range of content and ideas that seem to be all over the place for their audience. There’s not a common thread that ties them all together.

Wait, Mindi, are you telling me I need to think about how my content comes across as a whole in the Featured section? Yes, I am.?

Viewing your Featured content as its own “body of work” will help you understand what should go there. I like to say it’s a more concise version of your professional portfolio.

As an expert, your job is to make whatever your area of expertise is as simple, understandable, and streamlined as possible. That means people should be able to glance at your LinkedIn Featured section without wondering what type of expert you are, what problems you solve, who your target market is, and how you can help them.

If there’s anything unclear in this section or it feels kind of random, you make people think too hard about categorizing you -- you will lose them. It’s got to be crystal clear, even when you think it should be more complex or you want to be seen as this multi-passionate person.

As an expert on LinkedIn, you represent the ONE thing you want to be known for. Until you develop irrefutable expertise in that ONE thing, you don’t add a bunch of other seemingly unrelated themes to your Featured section. Got it?

Let’s talk about the five types of content you can add to your LinkedIn Featured section!

#1 - Add a post

The easiest way to get started with building your Featured section IF you have been posting content on LinkedIn in the news feed is to “add a post” where you can simply feature a post that was insightful or seemed to resonate with your audience.

I recommend choosing posts that perform well or are an accurate reflection of your work and what you do. If you notice a post “take off” on LinkedIn, that is likely a good one to choose because profile viewers will see the number of engagements on that post.?

Instant credibility booster if there’s some engagement on the post, even if it’s a half dozen reactions or so. Doesn’t need to be dozens or hundreds of reactions to be a good fit.

Remember: Don’t build an entire Featured section with posts, as you want to also include other types of content. But it’s a quick-start way to get things going and also show that you are active on LinkedIn.

#2 - Add a newsletter

Unless you have LinkedIn Creator mode turned on, you will not have this option available to you. I’ve talked in some prior Mondays with Mindi episodes about Creator mode, so give those a look if you’re considering it.

If you have a newsletter, you can highlight the newsletter itself and show the exact number of subscribers in your Featured section. This makes it very easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter and also establishes you as an expert.

Even though the newsletter option is readily available these days, the majority of experts are not using it consistently or still struggling to figure out what to put in the newsletter. Subscribing to the newsletter is akin to getting on your email list.

I teach more about making the most of newsletters inside my Accelerator programs, so if this is top of mind for you, stay tuned. I’ll share a link at the end of this livestream where you can get on the waitlist.

Remember: If you have a newsletter and you’re trying to build the number of subscribers, be sure to feature it in one of the first few spots on your profile. This will help you get more traction, especially if you get good traffic to your profile.

#3 - Add an article

Do you have long-form content that you publish to LinkedIn as an article or as a newsletter edition? Not to be confused with subscribing to the newsletter, this is actually featuring an individual piece of content that you have written.

You do NOT need to have Creator mode to use this feature. As long as you have published long-form articles to LinkedIn, you can feature that content here.

Just about every expert should be creating some type of long-form content on the regular, and even if it’s a podcast or video show, you can turn that into an article to share on LinkedIn if you’d like.

Remember: Long-form content is a priority on LinkedIn right now, and LinkedIn is encouraging creators to take advantage of its features. I tend to recommend featuring at least one article, if you have some of these, in your Featured section.

#4 - Add a link

Publish content other than on LinkedIn? You can link to just about any type of content, whether a web page, a blog post, or a YouTube video in your Featured section.

This is a great way to pull that content into LinkedIn and drive traffic to other places for people who want to consume the entire piece of content.

Keep in mind that most people will simply glance at the content here and may not actually click through. The goal here is more to build credibility than to be a heavy traffic source, so keep that in mind with the content you link to.

Tip: If the content does not look good when posted here, you need to fix the image associated with the page at the source. That’s a common problem many people experience… and if that doesn’t work you can use the next option…

#5 - Add media

Upload media directly to LinkedIn! This can be anything from a white paper to an ebook to a PDF or podcast audiogram. Keep in mind that when you upload content, you are not automatically hyperlinking it to the original source.

One workaround is to actually put the link in the description section.

Tip: I tend to upload any content that doesn’t look good when linked to. It’s a good solution if you want to protect the formatting and ensure it looks professional.

So there you have it!

If you’re ready to get started with LinkedIn and take the next step to optimize your profile once and for all, so you can start growing your network on the regular or land your next opportunity, join me inside The LinkedIn Accelerator program which is opening in early April!

What additional questions do you have about optimizing your Featured section? If you want to see some really great featured sections - DM me or leave a comment below. I’m happy to share what these look like in real life??.