Today, I’m talking about 6 key LinkedIn tips.
Now let me preface this: if you aren’t on LinkedIn, you are committing career suicide. You have to be. It’s part of a package for good career management today, to be on LinkedIn. And not just to be on LinkedIn, but to be active on LinkedIn.
1. Have a professional picture.
Don’t have a picture of you cuddling your spouse or your kids, or you on a fishing trip with a fish dangling in mid-air. Have a very, very professional picture. That’s very, very important because we’re very visual, and first impressions count. So make sure you have a really professional picture. Dress according to where you are. If you are a senior executive, then I would suggest you have a suit and tie. But if you’re middle management or something a little bit less formal, then maybe business casual. But make sure you dress according to where you are in your career.
Also, this is something that people don’t know, but as soon as you put a professional picture on your LinkedIn profile, Google will recognize that, and it will give you a 1400 percent uplift in algorithm visits to your LinkedIn profile for free. So what can you do? It takes you three minutes, two or three minutes, to put your picture, a professional picture, on your LinkedIn profile.
2. Have a very enticing, alluring headline.
Now, in your headline, you’re allowed 220 characters, so make sure you get pretty close to 220 characters. Fill it right up. The more text you put on, as you will find out in the next couple of tips, the better it’s going to be for you. So, 220 characters, fill it right out. It’s not just your job title. You can have all sorts of different things that really entice the reader to want to review your profile more, because we read from the top down. We see your picture first, and then we see the headline. So, make sure you have an enticing, alluring, and a self-explanatory headline. 220 characters.
3. Customize your LinkedIn URL.
Now, if you signed up and you didn’t customize your LinkedIn URL, I can tell by the number you have numbers and letters after your name. That’s the default that LinkedIn gave you when you signed up. You need to go and customize your LinkedIn URL. So, it’s pretty simple. What you do is you open up your contact info, and then you go to the pencil in the top right-hand corner, blue pencil, open that up. One of the many windows that appear will say “customize your LinkedIn URL” or “edit your URL.” So, go and take those numbers and letters out of your name. Now, if you have a very common name, that could be more difficult for you, so you might have to have your middle name or your middle initial. But don’t have something that doesn’t relate to you. I’ve seen some terrible, just recently, I’ve seen some terrible URLs. It doesn’t relate to that person at all, nowhere near their name, a nickname or something. Well, you don’t want to be known for your nickname. You want to be known for your professional name. So, make sure you customize your LinkedIn URL. Here again, you are going to get another free uplift from Google, another 400. So, combine that with your profile picture and your LinkedIn URL picture, you are going to get an 1800 uplift for free just by spending five or ten minutes just adjusting those two. You are going to benefit immensely from just doing those two. So, customize your LinkedIn URL, have a professional picture, and an enticing LinkedIn headline.
4. Fill in the About section.
This is very, very important. So, this is where Google is going to give you further kudos. The more text you put on your LinkedIn profile, the more traffic you are going to get to your LinkedIn profile. So, the About section has a character limit of 2600. Now, you don’t have to fill that 2600, but get it close to that. Don’t just have a hundred and think that’s going to work for you. It probably won’t. This is where you put some of the buzzwords and talk about your career and things that have happened in your career. So, make sure you fill that out. Show your drive, your ambition, where you want to go. Anybody got any comments? I’m more than happy to answer them. I’m ready here. The comment below is open, ready for you to ask a question. Please feel free to ask any questions. So, fill that About section up, 2600 characters. Yeah, 2600. That’s a lot of text. So, try and get as close as you can to 2600. Google will thank you for that.
5. Have your skills, your keywords.
These are your functional skill level industry-specific buzzwords. So, play a game with yourself when you’re creating your profile. Think, if I was an executive recruiter or I was an HR professional and I was searching for my own profile, what keywords, what buzzwords would I type in to have your profile come out? So, if you’re in finance, you need to have, definitely, executive leadership, and then you would have Financial Planning and Analysis, MDNA (Management Discussion and Analysis), internal controls, auditing, change management. There’s all sorts of buzzwords. So, financial reporting, maybe, SOCKS, corporate governance. The list goes on. So, play a game and think about, well, what would I type in to have my resume come out? Very, very important. This is a crucial section. And don’t have just two or three or ten or fifteen. Have fifty, yes, five-zero. The more you have on there, again, the more you’re going to be found. So, I see people with 10, 12, 15, 20. Well, for free, you can add another 30, and that’s going to mean you’ll be found more when an executive recruiter is doing a search for talent like you. So, have your keywords, those are your buzzwords, those industries, skill level, specific buzzwords, keywords that are pertinent to you, your skills.
6. Fully complete your profile.
Now, a resume, your CV, is a maximum of three pages. There are some exceptions, a maximum of three pages. But on LinkedIn, you can scroll down all the way, you can keep on scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, you can fill it out. There are so many sections on LinkedIn. So, I would suggest you fill it right out from top to bottom. Yes, it’s going to take you a long time. You could do a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, and fill it right out because it will bring huge benefits to you. The more you fill it out from top to bottom, the better it’s going to be, and the more you’re going to be found because it’s your platform, it’s your window to the world. And if you are ambitious and you want to be found out by career decision-makers, whether they be HR people, it could be your future boss, or it could be an executive recruiter, you need to fill that right out from top to bottom. So, fully complete your profile.
