My Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Part 1 – Creating a Great LinkedIn Profile

Hi, I'm Nick - welcome to the latest edition of my newsletter. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed already, and a warm welcome to my newest subscribers.

My passion lies in helping professionals build effective sales pipelines using LinkedIn, by getting connected to their dream clients. Known as ?????? ?????? ????????????????????, I’m a Marketing Consultant and Expert in Social Selling and Lead Generation, as well as a bestselling author, and creator of workshops and online courses on LinkedIn.

I'd love you to subscribe to my newsletter, and please share with any of your connections who might benefit from reading my content. It's also worth checking out the past editions of my newsletter here - I don't want you to miss out!

In this week's newsletter, I'm sharing My Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Part 1 – Creating a Great LinkedIn Profile.

If you’re new to LinkedIn, or you’ve decided that now is the time to start getting the most out of LinkedIn to help you develop and grow your business, it can be difficult to know where to begin.?Some people make the mistake of diving straight in, and then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they hoped for.

In my experience, only around 2% of business owners actually use LinkedIn the right way. The other 98% risk not engaging, or even alienating their prospective customers. In many cases, that’s because they’ve never been shown how to do it properly!?

Before you go any further, it’s important to do the groundwork. Make sure you have worked out what your LinkedIn goals are, identified your?ideal client profile?and chosen your own powerful keywords. Then lay the foundations by creating a killer profile to immediately impress your ideal clients, optimised to boost your discoverability.?

If you make sure your LinkedIn profile is appealing as possible, written with your ideal client in mind, showing what you can do for them and how you can solve their problems, you’ll be off to a great start.

One of my top tips is to look through each stage of your LinkedIn profile and ask yourself:?

‘Would I hire myself if I were in their shoes?’

Let’s run through each profile section, and look at how you can optimise it to be as client-focused as possible.

Headshot

Having a good LinkedIn profile photo is REALLY important. It’s one of the first places where you can make a great first impression and showcase your personal brand. Failing to upload a profile picture is one of the most basic mistakes on LinkedIn. It will make you look spammy and untrustworthy, while a bad profile picture will make you look unprofessional. Not the look you’re aiming for!

A study by?Todorov and Willis?showed that it takes 1/10 of a second to make a snap judgement about someone’s character from their face, including trustworthiness, likeability, competence and attractiveness.

Remember that people buy from people, and a professional headshot photograph is an easy way for your connections to verify your identity and shows your profile is in use and up to date.

Here’s a little-known secret that will boost your discoverability using your LinkedIn profile photo!?

Rename your photo file with your name and primary keyword/title, and then re-upload. For example, mine is ‘nickbagga-marketingconsultant.jpg’, This helps your image to score more highly in search results, improving your SEO ranking.

In my?Complete Linked In Mastery Course, I’ll take you through a detailed evaluation of both good and bad examples of headshots, and I also provide more detailed resources to help you really ace your LinkedIn profile photo.?https://thesmestrategist.com/my-beginners-guide-to-linkedin-part-1-creating-a-great-linkedin-profile/

Headline

?Along with your photo, your headline is the most crucial part of your LinkedIn profile as it creates that all-important first impression.

Your headline is the short block of text that appears underneath your name and is visible to anyone on LinkedIn, so it’s important to make sure that it’s as captivating as possible.?

To stand out and resonate with your ideal client, your headline should be professional and convey credibility. Instead of using the default headline ‘Job Title at Company’, it’s better to customise and personalise your headline. Be sure to incorporate relevant keywords into your headline, as this will not only make it easy to understand what you do at a glance, but it will help you to appear in relevant search results that your ideal clients are likely to use.

To read the rest of this article, where I'll guide you step by step through creating your 'About' and Experience sections, as well as getting the most out of Skills, Endorsements and Recommendations, follow this link to my website. You'll also find plenty of resources to help you get the most out of LinkedIn, including this video that shows you how to use formatting tools to make your LinkedIn profile stand out.

Once you’ve optimised your LinkedIn profile to speak directly to your ideal clients, you’ll be ready to start the ball rolling with building a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn. Watch out for part 2 of My Beginner’s Guide, where I’ll outline the key steps involved, using the proven approach I’ve used to win 85% of my own business.

I hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, and that you've learned something new. I'd love you to subscribe and share my newsletter - make sure you come back for more top tips on getting the most out of LinkedIn!

And don't forget to check out my FREE?Masterclass? - please feel free to recommend it to anyone who might benefit.

If you need more help or advice with anything LinkedIn related, I’d be delighted to hear from you. Please send me a DM on?LinkedIn?or email me at?[email protected]