Use LinkedIn to help prospects find you

Summer is a great time to "beef" up your LinkedIn profile and make sure your personal brand reflects your marketing strategy

Full-time job seekers who see consulting or project work as a new career path, as an audition strategy, or as a way to generate some short-term income should consider the impact on their key marketing materials.  Your personal brand and your business brand are essentially one and the same in this scenario, and you need to think about the messages you’re sending in places such as LinkedIn. 

Last week, Jason Alba of JibberJobber.com (a terrific career management site), challenged his readers to submit their LinkedIn headlines for critique (you can see the result here).  I offered to help, which gave me a good opportunity to review some profiles and frankly found them lacking.  Then last night, someone tweeted a link to a rant about people’s About pages that applies to this subject.  That got me thinking.  So I’m going to devote a series of posts over the next four or five days to beefing up your LinkedIn profile to reflect your new consulting/project focus.  

First, though, I want you to set a baseline for who’s looking at your profile today (Who’s Viewed My Profile can be found in the right-hand column of your LinkedIn home page).  LinkedIn comes up short in the metrics area, but checking this a few times before you make changes will help you assess the impact of your changes on your search results.  It won’t tell you if more qualified people are finding you, but the data will be directionally correct.

Second, print out your profile.  Highlight all the references to your job search and to the specific skills you’re highlighting, including the ones in your Recommendations and Experience sections.  How will you need to change them to attract clients rather than employers?  Which words are repeated throughout?  Those are your current search keywords.  Are they the ones you want?

Finally, think about your profile in terms of solutions.  Write down how you can help people achieve their goals (e.g., I can raise your online visibility, I can help you build a killer low-cost computer).  The list you made in the previous step should help you with this exercise.  Over the next few days, this will evolve into your value proposition.

That’s all for today.  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about Recommendations.

P.S.  The advice I’m providing will help you beef up your LinkedIn profile without outside help.  But if you don’t want to spend the time or realize that this is not something you’re particularly good at, I will be happy to take you on as a client.  Just drop me a note at peter at consultantlaunchpad dot com.

Tagged as: LinkedIn, LinkedIn profiles