Turn Your LinkedIn Profile Into a Sales Funnel
LinkedIn is a fantastic resource for anyone looking for a job, career change or to expand their professional network. But if you don’t know how to put up a good LinkedIn profile, you won’t be taking full advantage of it.
You need to be able to be found or show up in more searches? Show up in the right searches and get more people to take action. These LinkedIn profile tips will help you increase your LinkedIn profile views in 2018. As long as you have the basics in place like having a professional photo and making sure your information is always up-to-date, here’s how to maximise your profile.
Specialise in Your Field to Stand Out
Since there are millions of people on LinkedIn, how do you stand out? Instead of being a generalist, show that you are a specialist in a particular field, niche down. Instead of pitching yourself as a manager, focus on presenting your profile as that of an IT Manager. Or go one step further, an IT Manager with expertise in health and safety. The more specific you are with what you do and what you’re looking for, the more likely you are to be found in the searches.
Granted there will be fewer people looking at specific niches. But those people are also much more likely to want to hire (or at least get in touch with) you. This approach of being laser targeted has been recommended by many experts who say that it will improve your search views as well as the quality of people who find you.
Treat Your LinkedIn Profile as a Sales Page
This is possibly the most important tip. A potential client, employer, or business partner isn’t interested in your skills and experience they are more interested in what your skills and experience can do for them.
And you need to be able to sell that. While your LinkedIn profile does serve as a glorified online résumé in part, it needs to be more than that if you want to attract key people of influence who will become your customers or business partners or potential employers. In principle, your profile needs be a good sales page to attract views and get people interested. The better you understand who you’re selling to with your LinkedIn profile, the more effective it will be. Always keep in your mind who you’re writing for and what they want.
Tell Your Story
Once you’ve figured out who your target audience is and who is captured by your LinkedIn profile, it’s time to start crafting a story. This is one of the most important parts of creating a great LinkedIn profile, and it’s also one of the most difficult. Effective storytelling, engages people in a way that a simple showcasing of your qualifications won’t. If you can create an emotional connection with your audience, the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile will be propelled.
Three key questions you need to ask:
What are your pain points?
How can you help ease that pain?
What will your reader feel like once you have?
If you can incorporate those three things into your summary, be a problem solver and you’ll have a profile that stands out from the rest. Use these sure-fire tips to help create demand with your story, and your profile will become very irresistible.
Add Call To Action
You will be surprised how many people forget to add any kind of call to action in their LinkedIn profiles. They put out a bunch of information, and then leave it up to the reader to do something about it without any instructions.
“If you want to increase your profit through efficient tax savings then get in touch. Send me an InMail or email me at abc@abc.com. I’m always open to chat about potential contracts, interesting projects, writing in general, and—when at all possible—golf.”
It tells the people looking at my profile, what they can get from me, and how they can start the process. It makes it very clear what I’m looking for. You can also list qualities that make a great call to action: brevity, strong action words, a value proposition, and contact information. Finally, you can also include these calls to action in your experience entries. Don’t overwhelm your reader with demands to connect or email you. But make sure that they never have to look very far to figure out how to get in touch.
Don’t be afraid to spice up your profile with media. You can include media in your summary and experience entries that show the kind of projects that you have worked on. It could be a link to an article that you published. Or a local news story covering the work your company does. It could even be a photo of you speaking at an event. You can upload videos too, which is a great way to start establishing a personal connection with your readers before they even get in touch and it helps to raise your profile and brand reputation. It’s another great way of showcasing your expertise and what you can do for your prospective customers.
And last but not least, this might help your profile directly but it will lead to more profile views and better search rankings. The more active you are on LinkedIn, the more you’ll improve your profile visibility, and the more likely people are to find you. Whether it’s because you’re connected to their connections, they see a comment in a group that you’re in, or you sent them a message a while back, your activity makes you stand out.
