A LinkedIn profile is more than just an online resumé. It’s a reflection of your professional personality and acts as a sales tool for you and the business you represent. It’s your online brand — a proxy for the experience of doing business with you that buyers can use to detect where they’ll find value for their time. To help you create an effective profile, we have outlined 9 quick and easy steps to improve your profile. These are based on tips directly from Sales training provided by LinkedIn.

Making a strong first impression has never been so important. LinkedIn profiles are the go to resource for potential sales prospects or for anyone researching a company to work with. Whether you’re gathering leads, networking in your industry, or hunting for a new job, having an eye-catching, professional LinkedIn profile is a great way to make sure that you can be found by the right people at the right time. Open a tab with your linkedIn profile and see where improvements can be made.

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9 Steps To Improve Your LinkedIn profile

Step 1 – Make Your Profile Visible And Easy To Find

Before you can get more inbound traffic to your profile, it’s important to make sure it’s visible and that potential leads you don’t receive!

To change your settings from anonymous to public, log in to your account.

To the top of your page, click the ‘Me icon’ to view your activity
Select Settings & Privacy
In the privacy section, you can edit your public profile
You can now see your profile’s public visibility and other details in Edit Visibility.

Personalise your profile’s URL

Take this opportunity to personalise your URL for your profile. Make your custom URL your first name and surname or first initial and last name, to make it easier for people you’re targeting to find you.

On public profiles, people can see your full profile information. If you want to create a more selective presence, it’s best to set your profile to private.

Step 2 – Upload A Professional Photo

A LinkedIn profile can be an important factor in deciding whether your contact engages with you or not. At B2B Selling Institute, data shows that 65% of buyers base their decision on the degree to which they are informed by the seller’s profile.

When you are using professional photos in your online profile, it’s important to think about how you want to present yourself. It all comes down to how you dress and represent yourself when meeting with clients face-to-face. Your profile photo should be professional and representative of how you would appear in a face-to-face sales context. This will help make a good first impression and ensure they want to get to know you more.

Make sure your profile photo is high-resolution and cropped to 400×400 pixels so it doesn’t look pixelated in the space. Avoid photos of friends, no matter how handsome they are. Instead, use photos of yourself or a place relevant to your job description.

10 Tips For Picking The Right LinkedIn Profile Picture

Please provide an accurate picture of yourself
Use a high-resolution image
Make sure your face is the large part of the frame.
The single photo
Get someone else to take the picture for you
Choose the right expression
Avoid distracting backgrounds
Wear what you’d wear to work
For photos with the best quality, take them in natural light
Use filters wisely

Step 3 – Upload A Background Photo

Background photos are a key part of your LinkedIn profile and their selection can significantly impact how people see you. If they’re picked with the right interests in mind, they can set the tone for your profile and engage with you on social media.

Adding images to your social media profiles can help establish your thought leadership and credibility.

Step 4 – Write A Compelling Headline

Your headline will automatically be pulled from your LinkedIn profile, which may include the company you currently work for and the position. Your job title is also not particularly intriguing, so it would be better to add some interesting detail or numbers to your introduction.

A properly crafted headline will draw in potential prospects who would otherwise scroll away. The difference between staying and clicking, is often a well-crafted headline that communicates the value of a prospect’s visit. You do want to make sure the first impression your target audience has of you is good, so it’s helpful to know what parts are important when framing your ideal job. It may sometimes be hard to keep things concise, but it pays off in the long run.

The headline section is an important part of your blog post. This is where you showcase what you do and how it benefits a prospect. You also need to convince prospects that you’re the right fit for them by providing a ton of value and proof that your promises can be met. Ways to get in contact with you are also highlighted here, making further contact with potential clients easier.

Step 5 – Include A Personal Summary

The summary is a place for you to talk about your value in a condensed form. It should be geared towards your target audience, which means recruiting agents versus your potential clients. A common mistake would be to create a summary that is mainly aimed at recruiters. Having high selling quotas for the past three years is impressive, but you need to make sure that your prospects don’t perceive you as only selling to them. Customise what you have to offer and show it in a more effective way by emphasising skills only your buyer will care about.

Bringing a personality to your writing can help it come alive and be more interesting. This format is meant to show different ways to incorporate humour into your summary.

Passion – A sentence about what motivates you professionally and how that might affect your customer base

Background – A paragraph highlighting your professional career and achievements.

Company – One or two paragraphs about what you can offer your customers and how you’ve solved industry or customer problems in the past.

Call to Action – Contact details; how to get in touch

Step 6 – Add Your Work Experience

It’s important to look at work experience from the position of what each job contributed to your career as a whole. A resume is not where you want to list your accomplishments, where they at least want you to list what skills and experience were gained each job. Update your calendars on a monthly basis

The key is to balance your personality with your buyer-focused message. The two work in tandem to ensure that you’re offering an exclusive profile that helps you thrive in the marketplace. Ways you could be able to communicate this are by describing:

Have facilitated multiple customer goals on a wide range of subjects.

Help fellow coworkers collaborate on tough work needs

Create a dedicated team that can help with your buyer experience

Spend some time when you’re not helping your buyers, even if it’s just for charities close to your heart. Volunteering is great to give back to the community.

You should stay in contact with your customers after they have made a purchase to ensure quality customer service. Otherwise, the business you worked so hard to build can falter with poor customer service.

Step 7 – Add Rich Media

One way to get your prospect’s attention when applying for a job is to have a good profile with multimedia content already created in it. You can also show off how skilled you are by uploading materials such as presentations or infographics and showing them off on your profile.

You can add almost any media element to your profile summary. Before you do, make sure you carefully consider what you are trying to accomplish with the additions and what types of information might be best communicated via rich media. When using media as part of a process, it should be used only as it is relevant to the project. It should not be overused and must never distract from the overall goal of an activity.

Source content from your marketing team and use conversations with customers to add assets that will resonate with your target audience.

Step 8 – Add Skills And Get Endorsed

Incorporating skills into your LinkedIn profile can be a way of signalling to employers that you are somehow qualified. These skills can also be validated by 1st-degree connections on the platform to help them convey their importance.

This page can help show potential employers your skills, as well as a Verified Skills badge on your profile. If you want to show that you’ve been successful at taking the skills assessment and that your resume is as good as new, then you’re free to select specific scoring filters. There’s no time limit or restrictions on displaying your results.

Step 9 – Solicit Recommendations

To support what you have to say about yourself, ask for recommendations and endorsements from satisfied clients. Remember to give rewards in order to receive recommendations from others. In other words, offer your services before asking them for referrals in return.

When you’re ready to get a recommendation, you can do it from your profile page.

Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage
Select your profile by clicking your picture or name
Scroll down to the Recommendations section and click Ask for a recommendation
Who do you want to ask? part, type the connection you’d like to ask for a recommendation.
You will be provided with a list of names, if you are not sure which one to choose.
Type in the relationship and position and then click Next
If you have made any changes to your message and would like to send it, just click “Send”.
When asking for recommendations, it is important to give specific examples of what your client has benefited from the work. You can do this by including collaboration with you on the project and benefits they received.

Need further help with Marketing?

Having a professional LinkedIn profile is important for both businessmen and women, and businesses in general. A good LinkedIn profile will allow you to attract more profile views and increase your brand awareness. If you, or your business would like help with digital marketing, you can contact us for a free consultation.

VIMAR Digital Marketing is a proffesional marketing agency based in Portlaoise, Co. Laois. Our specialised team are experienced in growing personal and business brands online. Learn more about VIMAR here.