How to build your personal brand and crack the LinkedIn code

For a limited time, I am giving away my expert's guide to personal branding for FREE. Get your copy here.

For many professionals today, it is crucial to build a personal brand to help take your reputation to the next level. For 20 years, I’ve been working with CEOs, executives and founders across the globe to do exactly this.

The questions I get asked time and time again are: How should I build my personal brand? How can I stay ahead of the competition and boost my career? How can I leverage my social networks like LinkedIn?

Why LinkedIn?

Gaining traction with LinkedIn is not an easy feat, but a worthwhile exercise, nonetheless. LinkedIn really is the number one professional social network of today to create content and build your personal brand. It’s designed to foster reciprocal connections with people in your industry.

I myself use LinkedIn every day. It's always open on my browser and I go on it and engage with people and connect with people several times a day. It's really my number one professional network.

But how can you crack the LinkedIn code if you're looking to enhance your personal brand?

The first question you have to ask yourself is: What is my ultimate objective on LinkedIn? Is it finding new clients? Or do I want to be a digital thought leader? This will determine a lot of the activities and all the tactics you may use. To really crack LinkedIn, there are a few simple things you can do first.

#1: Build a strong profile

Nothing else you do matters if your profile is blank, so ensure you have a complete profile. This includes ensuring you have a great, professional photo and cover image, filling out all the information on your profile and have started adding some relevant contacts.

#2: Create great content

Creating original content is really what LinkedIn is about and how you can start to gain traction. Focus on developing your unique perspective for LinkedIn. Original content will help you stand out and have the biggest impact on your LinkedIn presence. I've worked out a few simple tricks for how often you should post, what kind of topics and how many hashtags to use. I cover all of this and more in my new online course on LinkedIn for Personal Branding.

#3 Building your audience

Posting great content on a regular basis helps build the foundation to start engaging with your audience.But there are also some active steps you can undertake to build and grow your audience more rapidly. First of all, send invitations to connect to everyone you already know - people in your network, colleagues, friends, etc. Secondly, consistency is key: try to add people on an ongoing basis. Add a few people every day really makes a difference in a short period of time.

These are just a few pieces of advice to help you start building your personal brand and really crack LinkedIn.

I’ve just launched my online course "Cracking the LinkedIn code" which covers all of this and more. The course is an interactive online course with six modules. For each listen, there is a short video followed by interactive exercises to help you really get started.

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Curious to learn more and start building your future-proof personal brand? Head to my website now to learn more www.oliveraust.com.

I am also giving away my expert's guide to personal branding for FREE right now. Based on my recently published book, Mastering Communications, this covers all the foundations of personal branding. Get your copy here.