Struggling to become visible on LinkedIn? Here are 9 tips for creating a great LinkedIn Profile. These tips will help you expand your professional network on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the greatest platform to network and connect with professionals, a great place and a boardwalk for professionals from all over the world to develop new connections in your respective fields.
This helps in further in influencing power and visibility as a subject matter expert in the industry. Moreover, this platform provides excellent opportunities to those who make the best use of and build connections, engage in discussions to become more visible on LinkedIn.
Whether it’s building up your own professional brand or selling your skills in a specific market or industry, time, effort, patience and perseverance are needed!
Strengthening your active presence and optimizing your LinkedIn profile are two initial steps in increasing your visibility on LinkedIn.
Following are 9 tips for creating a great LinkedIn Profile. Implementing these tips will get the best results. More visibility creates new opportunities, prospects and leads from the right audience.
- A Great Profile Picture
The first thing that catches the attention of your prospective client is your profile picture. You have no option but to get a perfect professional click, with a solid background. Your image must represent your best self on your profile. Selfie or low resolution sad looking image and distracting background will not serve the purpose.
- A powerful and searchable headline
Your headline is the first searchable field on your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn’s algorithm cannot search you if you are using keywords that are not being searched. The headline serves as the first impression on your prospective profile visitor. A well-articulated and a well-defined headline can make you stand out from the crowd. It is of utmost importance to optimize your profile headline for better visibility.
Use targeted key words that are relevant to your profession or your business. People are not searching for statements. Targeting is essential to reach out to your target audience. Additionally, they represent the area of your expertise or your hard skills. These key words can be included in your profile summary, job description or headlines. Moreover, strategically prepared headlines, carries all the required information to inspire the client or a recruiter stay on your profile and read more about you.
- Use of customized URL
A customized URL can place your profile on a higher ranking in Google. It should reflect your professional side. LinkedIn users often leave this as is, but a customized URL can make a lot of difference on google search. Moreover, short URLs are easy to remember.
- Seeking recommendations and making endorsements
In order to rank high on LinkedIn search, you need to ask for genuine recommendations or testimonials. More recommendations will help more. These recommendations can be from your colleagues, clients, customers or bosses. Anyone who can write couple of lines for you, will add value to your profile. Ideally, you can give them the idea about your working with them on specific projects, your leadership, team or any other capabilities to highlight in their recommendation. A good set of recommendations would further uplift the visibility of your LinkedIn profile.
To reciprocate, you may also make sincere endorsements to their skills. One that is not less than honest and candid. LinkedIn experts suggest a minimum of 10 recommendations to help increase the visibility of your LinkedIn profile.
- Boosting up your LinkedIn network
More and engaged LinkedIn connections help increase profile’s algorithm ranking. You should consistently try to expand you high quality network, bigger network, better it is!
To increase your network, easiest process is to invite new connections. People who already know you are highly likely to join your network. Build a list of people you meet in events, webinars or on different LinkedIn posts. Find a common interest, or a common friend to build trust. Keep up with each other’s posts, and offer help, in giving advice or guiding each other on new business prospects, or career opportunities.
These actions will increase your number of connections and also show you as an active member who is willing to help. Supporting a cause is an excellent way to build network. Eventually, your community will help you in increasing your Visibility on LinkedIn. Your initial target is reaching 500 connections, once achieved, your profile will start getting more traction and visibility.
- Get your presence at other social media platforms.
Apart from growing your network, linking with relevant groups can improve your profile SEO. (Search Engine Optimization). Sharing your LinkedIn profile via other social channels or your website can also give a great boost. Cross-posting content and URL link on multiple platforms to bring traffic to your LinkedIn profile is a good strategy. Nevertheless, generally speaking, Twitter is more for broadcasting while Facebook is for family and friends. LinkedIn remains #1 platform for job search, business and networking.
- Keep Your Profile Active
Only 1% LinkedIn users actively produce content. Amazing that is. It means that there is no competition. If you can produce quality and targeted content, you will be able to make your LinkedIn profile visible.
Your activities go beyond just adding content. You can bring traffic by commenting on other’s posts, participating in groups or pages. On LinkedIn, and how you manage the traffic on your profile makes all the difference, the more you post or engage on others post, the more people will click on your profile. Powerful and engaging content is the easiest way to keep connected to the LinkedIn community.
- Posting articles on LinkedIn’s Pulse
Article writing is another way to increase your visibility on LinkedIn Another. This is a neat process to establish your credibility as a subject matter expert. Article readership is low, but if you know how to target your audience to attract their attention, you can get benefit from article writing. LinkedIn articles are also indexed on google and can draw people outside LinkedIn to your LinkedIn profile.
- Commenting on other’s content, Pulse articles, and using Hashtags
There is no one-way traffic. Engagement is always two ways. Your visibility also depends on how actively you comment on content and articles produced by others, particularly influencers who have large following.
Your comments have to be meaningfully articulated to catch attention. Ideally, your comment should add value to a discussion. One word comments such as, nice, great or awesome do not work!
Recently, LinkedIn introduced in 2016 and is still working on this component. It is not easy to understand how exactly hashtags work on LinkedIn, because we cannot find trending hashtags. Having said that, people are experimenting with the use of hashtags and results are amazing. In simple words, you can target your community better with hashtags.
As you go along on your LinkedIn journey, you will learn more about hashtags and how some hashtags can bring more visibility for your LinkedIn profile. In a nutshell, hashtags are building communities, you can create one for yourself too.
Pro-Tip:
Only build quality network, targeted to your goals. So define what your goals are, do not stay random. Targeting and relevance is the key to success.
Following these Nine Tips to increase your visibility on LinkedIn. Results can be phenomenal. It is often said that, “You need only one right connection on LinkedIn!”
Here are couple of great resources to help you succeed in your LinkedIn journey. You may also consider these great resources:
Guide for Building Your LinkedIn Profile
