LinkedIn for Business Boosting: The 3 Essential Steps!
With LinkedIn in your pocket, which now has over a billion users, there are many ways to boost your personal brand! This will help you to build a robust network, grow your presence, and utilize LinkedIn for business acceleration!
At my weekly LinkedIn Live audio event, my good friend Victor Iyanuoluwa, a LinkedIn growth Strategist, and I held an engaging live audio discussion. We talked about using LinkedIn for business growth!
How? It’s all about finding a growth strategy tailored to your personal brand. While it is important to remember that growing your presence on LinkedIn takes time and effort…
✅ Be consistent, ✅ Be authentic and ✅ Be patient
…And you will see results that might surprise you.
Without further ado, here are some of the highlights & ways on how to get started
LinkedIn for Business in Three Essential Steps:
1️⃣ Ask Yourself Why You’re Here
This is the beginning of mindfully positioning your brand on LinkedIn.
Before even creating a profile and posting, you have to ask yourself why you are on LinkedIn, what you are looking for, and what your purpose and goals are.
Some people are unaware that LinkedIn is more than a job-applying website! Others think they need to have a profile just because everyone else does.
Orient your mindset to suit a more positive growth outlook; that you are here to grow, develop to become a better person, learn, and to support others. This is the mindset for a personal brand that does business in the right way!
And a magical framework that can help you a lot here is the Japenese IKIGAI model!
2️⃣ Creating Your Profile
LinkedIn is not a social networking platform, and thinking about it that way would be underestimating its power.
You are not using the platform for scrolling and occasional showing off. You are using LinkedIn for business reasons and motivations in the first place.
As a career and business-boosting platform, your profile is key. Hence, the first thing to do is create and optimize your profile. There are some details that most people overlook that may highly set you apart.
Here are 6 specific ways to orient your LinkedIn for business:
Place a professional profile picture. Unlike the casual ones you could use for other social networking platforms. This one should show your face clearly without a distracting background.
Design a banner (aka billboard) showing who you are and what you do for the eyes of your specific target audience. This may include logos, brief sentences and pictures.
Create a captivating headline. It should clearly mention which problem you can solve for your specific target audience (not your job title, which is not as telling as a precisely curated, captivating headline).
Write a compelling and concise “About Me” section showing your personality, again, the eyes of your specific target audience. Start with a hook sentence, highlighting the challenge that you solve!
Update your experience, education, projects, skills etc.. so that people can have a reference on who you are. Mention the best achievements and highlights of your career history in a vivid way.
Add relevant keywords to your headline. Do the same for the “About” section and “Experience” section for better search engine optimization.
Did you notice I mentioned repeatedly that “your profile should be talking to a specific target audience”? This is crucial to build your personal brand effectively.
3️⃣ The Gold Mine of the Featured Section
“The Featured section” is a section is a great spot to highlight professional achievements with relevant links.
Some of the things you can put include:
✨ Recent projects and accomplishments.
✨ Articles, podcasts or blog posts you’ve written.
✨ Any media coverage you have been featured in.
✨ Awards or certificates.
✨ Work that is dear to your heart & relevant to your expertise.
If you don’t have any articles or blog posts, that’s fine. Part of growing your LinkedIn account is curating content, and this is stuff that can end up in your featured section. For example, a monthly newsletter .
Summary
LinkedIn is a goldmine for opportunities. Investing the right amount of time and effort, along with a solid plan will open up new frontiers and will turn your LinkedIn presence into an ATM machine!
What can stop you from leveraging your LinkedIn for business today??
Finally, do you want to build an effective personal brand today?
The “LinkedIn Influence Accelerator” is my course for founders, coaches, and communicators. It is crafted for professionals who want to create an effective personal brand that generates opportunities!
