What makes you a LinkedIn light-weight?

We don't know what we don't know, right? The thing about change or doing something new is that people resist potential because they don't know what it is they are actually resisting. They make assumptions based on what they currently know and think they don't need something based on their own view of the world - their limited view. With LinkedIn people see this as an online resume and a place to connect with those they meet in real life only and have no concept of what it looks like as a sales tool, let alone a powerful marketing tool. If they do think LinkedIn marketing, they think about expensive ads and say things like 'I tried it and LinkedIn ads don't work for me'. They have rules about who they connect with and who they don't, like it is some elite fraternity club. That's fine, each to their own of course, but don't then go complaining that you don't have enough business on board or enough of the right kind of business.

1. Profile set up

Firstly, your profile is going to be half complete or you are thinking of your resume and write it like a list of skills and experience. You are going to be all centred on yourself, rather than be about what your customer gets out of working with you. You won't even be thinking about the fact that LinkedIn is a search engine and the key words that you use help you get found by your potential market either. It is also likely that you will be trying to be super cool or super intelligent and use fluffy explanations about what you do like 'Guru', 'Speaker', 'Ninja', 'Professional', 'Business leader'. You will write like your own personality type and polarise 3/4 of the population out there. Worst still you will have your profile so private that no one can see anything about you.

2. No content

It is likely you will also have liked a few articles of others from time to time and at best make the odd post which is a comment about someone else's content and it could even be your competitors. No one will know what you stand for, what makes you different and what your point of view is. If you do make any content it will be all outbound selling which says 'Look at me! Look at me!" and offers no real value to anyone but you. There will be no value in connecting with you. You'll be so afraid of making a mistake in a public place, with a phobia of typos to the point of stagnation. If you do write anything you'll spend half the day on one small article and you'll be thinking that you can't possibly keep up with the demands of content marketing. You will write for yourself and will not have considered other personality types either.

3. No Connection Strategy

You will have no concept of connection as an outbound mechanism and will wait for the world to send you a connection request. When someone does connect with you, mostly you will be annoyed and think "How dare they connect with me when we haven't met in real life?!" "How dare they connect with me and try to sell me something?!" You will be elitist about who you connect with and think that they must only be your most qualified potential client or past and current co-workers. You wont even be thinking about this as a strategic experience.

4. Thinking about LinkedIn as a satellite

You will be thinking that LinkedIn is a standalone platform and what you do here has nothing to do with the outside world. You won't be thinking of it as the centre of your marketing strategy and you certainly won't be thinking about it as your core blogging platform. If you blog you'll be thinking that the world is out there looking for your website and wishful thinking that they'll find your important content there and will be sharing it wildly. At best you might share a link via a post on LinkedIn and hope people will click through to your blog because your headline is so compelling. If you do get traffic to your website you'll be celebrating the fact that ten people read your blog today! Yay...

5. No idea what are good numbers

You will have no idea what really good numbers on LinkedIn looks like and will be super excited to get 10 likes or a few shares and think the world is opening up to you. If someone comments on a post you'll be panicking about what to say back and hoping for the best if you do. You'll respond in a way that shuts down the conversation because it is wayyyy too scary to have a public conversation with anyone. If you do start getting more serious about connecting you'd be happy with a few new people a day and the idea that there could be 30 or 40 people a day just is outside your ability to comprehend and you then judge how right or wrong they are for you before you even move forward. You might be the opposite and focus on getting massive clicks and likes or metrics that actually don't matter and at the end of the day because the phone never rings and you are spending a lot of time going nowhere.

So, what does 'Good' look like on LinkedIn?

1. Write your profile for keyword search terms in simple language and make sure your customers know what they get from working with you *(at the least).
2. Be generous with content that actually helps people and they know what you stand for by sticking to about 3 content themes that wrap up under your main point of value. Sell only a fraction of the ratio.
3. Connect with people that you meet in real life even if you don't know the long term purpose of it. Be sociable. Connect strategically with those who could be potential clients or who could influence - and do it widely (that may mean automation too).
4. Link your marketing across channels with LinkedIn as the centre of your universe for business to business activity (ask yourself how your product can become a B2B sale too!). Blog here on LinkedIn and forget about your website if LinkedIn has the bigger audience (yes, it is pretty likely that will be Linked in unless you are a famous journalist).
5. Set your goals and expectations higher and know that people doing LinkedIn well have connection is the tens of thousands, they have profile views in the thousands, and they have new connections of at least 30-40 a day without much effort at all. Their content will be shared widely with numbers in the hundreds to the thousands, but most of all the phone rings and emails come in with opportunity to bid on work. The more you do on LinkedIn the more work you get - ironically it may be from your second degree contacts and not your first even.

Here's what a good Reputation Marketing strategy looks like:

Anne Miles consults and trains on LinkedIn reputation marketing and assists independents, smaller business owners, and sales teams on using LinkedIn to build business.