50 Steps to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile For Business
Stuart Beattie
Author Bio
So LinkedIn is a powerful tool that is going to help you find your next customer, business partner or employee but why should you listen to me?
I have been a big advocate of using social media for a variety of business purposes and have focused almost exclusively on LinkedIn to get results. I recently completed my MBA from Imperial College London, where I examined how social media should be used in companies to make them more efficient and profitable.
Over the years, I have used LinkedIn to:
• find new customers in completely new territories which resulted in me winning significant business and cutting the average sales cycle in half
• find and hire five new employees onto my team – in two cases the roles were very specialist with only very few people worldwide who were qualified and experienced enough to fill them
• find two new jobs for myself
• help many companies significantly improve their sales performance by identifying, targeting and winning new customers
I have experimented with lots of different techniques and believe I have made all of the mistakes there are to make. By reading this book, you will be able to get a significant head start on many people and won’t have to go through the pain I went through to become an effective and efficient LinkedIn super user. I am not just going to teach you to ‘push the buttons’ to make LinkedIn work, but am going to give you practical suggestions based on my hard-won experience on how to get the most out of it by projecting yourself in the best light possible to prospects, new business partners, potential new employees, new employers and anyone else you want to engage with in business.
Description
Is your LinkedIn profile a useful business tool or just your online CV?
When we set up our LinkedIn accounts several years ago, many of us just included our past jobs and maybe a few details about our education, hobbies and interests. At best, our LinkedIn profiles look like online CVs. They don’t present us in the best light and certainly don’t encourage the people we want to work with to get in touch with us.
Would you like to get more out of LinkedIn to help you contact the right people?
By setting up your profile more efficiently and using many of the new features that have introduced since you originally set it up, you could significantly enhance the value of LinkedIn and become more effective at contacting the right kind of people you need to in your business.
Create a highly optimized LinkedIn profile in just 50 steps
In this book, you will discover how to:
– Setup your LinkedIn profile to make it more efficient to use
– Control who can see your profile, and how often you receive email updates
– Determine who your LinkedIn “audience” is and how you should write your profile with them in mind
– Optimize your profile to take advantage of all of the new features LinkedIn have introduced
– Start thinking about how to align LinkedIn with your business regardless of whether you are selling, recruiting or creating a consultancy business from scratch.
Don’t fumble around in the dark trying to set up your LinkedIn profile – I have made mistakes and researched all of the best practices so you don’t have to!
Whether you already have a LinkedIn profile or are creating one from scratch, after going through my 50 steps will have a highly optimized profile that will make working with LinkedIn easy and will allow you to start communicating with the people you need to in order to move your business forward.
Don’t let this powerful business tool go unused.
Book excerpt
With over 300 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is a very powerful database of potential contacts. Most people currently only use LinkedIn to keep in touch with ex-colleagues and to find a job. While these are very valid uses of LinkedIn, there is so much more than it can be used for. For example, it can be used by:
• sales teams to help find new prospects
• business owners to build relationships and create strategic alliances
• hiring managers to find new employees.
If you are trying to find somebody to advance your business in some way then using LinkedIn is almost certainly going to help if you use it correctly.
However, all of these uses of LinkedIn rely on one thing – contacting people who don’t know you and have no reason to respond. This means that you need to get your point across quickly and effectively to stand a chance of making progress and building a relationship with them.
Imagine what you would do if you received a request through LinkedIn from somebody you didn’t know. What would go through your mind?
• Who is this person?
• Why are they contacting me?
• What do they want from me?
• Are they looking to genuinely help me or are they scammers?
Basically, you would justifiably be suspicious. You would want to know more before clicking reply to respond to them. After gathering sufficient information you’d be able to make a decision whether to reply to them or just delete their request.
This is what is going to happen when you approach somebody for the first time. They are likely to look at your profile to work out who you are, what you do and what is in it for them. If your profile is set up correctly this is exactly what you want to happen as you will be described to the reader in the way you want to be.
In this book we will go through step-by-step instructions covering how to set up your LinkedIn profile from scratch. You will learn the best practices required to set up you LinkedIn profile to achieve maximum effect and get the results you are looking for.
About this book
This book is divided into four parts to make it easy to understand the objectives of each section.
Part 1 goes through the mechanics of setting up a LinkedIn account from scratch. If you already have a LinkedIn account you can either skip this section completely or just skim through it to make sure you have all of the basics covered.
Part 2 explains all of the different settings associated with your LinkedIn account. At first these can seem quite daunting as there are so many of them. However, if you go through each one in turn, you will be able to make decisions on the settings you require to make your LinkedIn profile work for you instead of it being a burden.
After going through all of the settings, it is important to setup your LinkedIn profile to ‘market’ yourself as effectively as possible. Part 3 goes into detail about how to make your profile interesting and engaging so that people reading are able to quickly and easily understand what you can do for them regardless of whether you are looking to sell them something, offer them a job or get them to employ you.
Part 4 briefly describes some of the possible uses for LinkedIn once your profile is set up. Going into detail about each business aspect that could use LinkedIn is beyond the scope of this book, but this section gives links to online resources to help you get started.
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50 Steps to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile For Business