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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

How to Become a Thought Leader on LinkedIn

Being a thought leader is a good thing! They make more money, get more business, have bigger mailing lists, and in general have more influence. In today’s Internet governed business world, I’d almost venture to say that you can’t reach your potential without becoming a thought leader. So, if that’s true, and I think it is, how does one do this? Well, the good news is that you can do this right on LinkedIn. And, guess what else? There is no bad news!

Here are a few things you need to get into place and consistently do in order to establish yourself as a thought leader.

1. Be yourself! Thought leaders are first and foremost leaders! People need and are looking for guidance in various parts of their lives, be those career, relationships, health, or finances. In order to lead, you need to be a leader not a follower, and being who you authentically are is priority number one.

2. Create a lot of content consistently. You need to be creating LinkedIn Pulse blog posts probably once a week. You need to be using YouTube, SlideShare and other platforms that integrate easily with LinkedIn. People need to feel like the “see you everywhere”. The only way to do this is to have a lot of content out there—everywhere.

3. Start a Group on LinkedIn. Groups are wonderful for corralling people with like interests. If you’re going to create what Seth Godin calls a tribe, you need some way for them to communicate, get excited, and generally identify each other and identify themselves as part of the tribe. You have to be careful with groups on LinkedIn. You don’t want them to become “spam fests”, but that’s easily doable. Just monitor the group, and if someone starts treating it like their own person referral machine, just boot them out!

Follow these three steps consistently, and you’ll start to see the glorious results that all thought leaders see!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

LinkedIn Isn’t Just For Getting a New Job!

Before I got on LinkedIn and started using it for business, I thought it was just for finding a new job. At best, I thought of it as sort of a virtual Rolodex. I had no clue that it is the best platform around for networking and getting new clients! That was a long time ago. Now, most of my new clients come from LinkedIn! And, the best part of it is this—I don’t have to spend hours every day beating the pavement looking for business. A few minutes each day on LinkedIn does wonders for the bottom line, if you know what you’re doing.

How would you like to learn how to rock LinkedIn for business?

Excellent! Below, you’ll find the steps you need to take to make LinkedIn your main source of leads.

1: Get a professional looking head shot and use that for your photo.

2: Completely fill out your profile. You want to get to “All Star” status. That includes filling out nearly everything.

3: Next, you’ll want to spend some time writing your profile summary. Look at the summary as sort of an online sales letter designed to sell you. Write it in first person. Get some personal stuff in there as it relates to your work or business. Talk about how you arrived where you are, what you can do for people, and what your aspirations are for the future. Think about what you’d like to know about someone before you do business with them, or connect with them, and make sure you include that!

4: Connect with people on a consistent basis. Use LinkedIn search to find people in your target audience and connect with them. When people respond to your connect request, message them and start a conversation. Some of these conversations will end up in sales presentations for you and whatever it is you sell!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

How Service Businesses Can Rock LinkedIn

Most service businesses depend on slowly built up word of mouth for client acquisition. Of course, referral clients are the best. They come pre-sold on your services. But, that’s a slow way to grow or maintain your business. Not only that, it’s impossible to actually get a business off the ground through referrals. There’s no one to refer anything to you because you haven’t had any customers.

A lot of service businesses that I talk to don’t have a marketing plan in place other than word of mouth. And, as I just stated, that’s problematic. I’d like to make a suggestion to you, if that’s you. Try LinkedIn!

Most folks think of LinkedIn merely as a networking platform. It is that, but it’s so much more! Through LinkedIn, you can connect with over half a billion high earning professionals, many of whom might be interested in the services you sell. Interested? Let me outline for you exactly how you can use LinkedIn to grow virtually any business.

1: Get an account and choose the right level of package for you. Start free, if you want! You may or may not need Sales Navigator. For business purposes, it’s not that expensive, though. Again, you can start getting clients right now with a free account!

2: Target the right audience. If your business is local, then you don’t really need to be targeting people in another country, although don’t push them away, either! Connecting with anyone only grows the number of people that you’re indirectly connected with, and therein lies the magic of LinkedIn!

3: Don’t just wait for business to come to you. You need to consistently be reaching out to your growing network of connections. Don’t spam them. Just intelligently ask them if they would be open to exploring what your business offers.

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

How to Snag Your Next Job on LinkedIn

I’ll be honest with you. I run and business, and I use LinkedIn as a prospecting tool for that business. Having said that, I have a lot of clients who have used LinkedIn to find their next job, or conversely to find their next employee. I’ve coached a lot of people on how to do this. The method for finding a job is exactly the same as how you find a client. In this article, I want to tell you what I tell my coaching clients, when they ask me how to do this.

Step 1: Make sure your profile is current. This includes a killer head shot, a headline that really brands you, a summary that sells you, and having everything else current. You want to reach what LinkedIn calls “All Star” status on your profile. You can login to your account and see whether or not you’ve got that. If not, LinkedIn is great about prompting you on what to do.

Step 2: Connect with at least two thousand people. So, these should be all the people you personally know to some extent, plus more folks who are in the same target audience as the job you want. Not necessarily someone who might hire you, but someone who works in a related field or for a related company. Two thousand might seem like a lot, but if you put your mind to it, you should be able to get this done in a couple months’ time. Yeah, I know you want a job now, so for those who aren’t currently looking for a job, do this part FIRST! Get proactive! Build your account now so you can use it when you need to.

Step 3: Get a premium account, and start learning how to use the search feature to find possible businesses you want to work for. LinkedIn actually has a premium account for job seekers. You’ll probably want that for a few months while you’re looking. Connect with and message people who can help you in your search.

If you’ll do all of this consistently, you’re not going to be unemployed for long!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

End of the Year LinkedIn Clean Up Strategies

I do all of the following once a year and suggest all my clients do the same! You’ll see what I’m talking about in a second, but having a daily, monthly, and yearly routine for LinkedIn keeps my account fresh and current. Nothing is more of a turn off than a LinkedIn account that looks like it hasn’t been touched in the past five years. Read my list and see if this won’t work for you.

The first thing I do is update my head shot. I’m a stickler on having a professional, up to date photo of myself. As my rolls at my business change, I need to change my photo to reflect that. In addition, I always reread and update my profile summary. I run my own business, and from year to year, well, things change. My summary needs to reflect that! Along with the profile summary, I change my headline adding keywords or subtracting them, and massaging the emphasis of what it says, if needed.

That’s not all!

The above only takes a few minutes, not including the time it takes to get a new photo. (And, that doesn’t take long. All my photos are done with my iPhone. I just need to make sure I’m dressed appropriately.) In addition to all this, I update my experiences. Again, like all businesses, mine grows and changes. I want my LinkedIn profile to reflect that and be current!

If I have an accomplishment that need bragging about, of course, I need to add that in. Recently, another big thing I do is consider what type of content I’m adding in. Recently, for instance, I’ve been using video and SlideShare a lot. A year from now, will that still be current? I don’t know. I do know, however, that once a year I need to think about it.

My final tasks are to revise my groups, shedding some and adding others. Again, these reflect the current trajectory of my business. Lastly, I go through my email and make sure that I connect with any of my new contacts on LinkedIn.

This all only takes an hour or so, but it cleans up my account wonderfully! And, it invariably leads to more sales!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Why You Need to Monitor Your Privacy Settings on LinkedIn

Your goal on LinkedIn is to network, right? You want people to find your profile, scan it, and hopefully reach out to you. Or, if you’ve already reached out to them, you want them to accept your connect request. If that’s not happening, LinkedIn isn’t working for you!

When I take on a new client for social media marketing services, one of the first things we do is audit their LinkedIn account. We check the quality of their head shot, their headline, their profile summary, and everything else, including the number and quality of their recommendations. In addition, we also check their privacy settings! Oddly, it’s here that I often find issues.

You can set your privacy settings to narrow or broaden who can see your posts and your profile, and everything in between. Although, I can see times when you would want to restrict who can learn about you (like if you were a rock star with a LinkedIn profile, although I’ve never run across that), most times the broader the better. After all, you want more, not fewer people in your network, right? You not only want to influence your current connections, but you want more connections. And, most of the time, you want your content to not only position you as an industry thought leader, but you want it to gather more followers for you.

You just can’t do that if you’re not maxing out on who can see your stuff!

Another thing we take a look at, and this is more of a real privacy issue, is what apps you’ve allowed to use LinkedIn. Some apps can access your personal data, others can’t. (Think the fiasco with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.) My guess would be that you’d want to delete these apps. At least most of my clients do. Sometimes not, if the app is really useful. Although, they do appreciate knowing when and how their data is being shared.

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

How Social Selling Works on LinkedIn

According to Paul Sowada, Marketing Development Manager of Binocular, social selling is “taking out the pitching component of sales. You’re creating conversations about your product and services which organically can produce sales conversations.” Basically, social selling puts the relationship first, and the sales pitch, or sales presentation second. Instead of selling first, then building a relationship, you build a solid relationship first, then the product or service sales falls naturally out of that.

LinkedIn feels that social selling works! LinkedIn is after all a social media platform, one that’s geared specifically towards business. So, you’d think they actually have the “inside skinny” on this. And they do! According to their statistics, 78% of social sellers outperform their peers who don’t use social media, and strong social sellers are 51% more likely to reach their quotas. Bottom line here, social selling is a good thing, and it would behoove you to learn how to do it. So, let’s do just that. Let’s have a little primer on how social selling works on LinkedIn.

It Starts with Your Profile

Your profile establishes your personal brand. If someone wants to know who you are and what you stand for, all they need to do is to click on your name and read your profile summary. If they want validation, they can check out your recommendations and your endorsements. Think of your profile as a sales letter that’s selling you!

Next, Find the Right People

You need to next connect with your target audience. For most businesses and professionals, these will be people interested in buying your products or services. This happens on LinkedIn in two steps. First, you need to connect with a lot of people, then you use search to find the right types of people to connect with among your 2nd tier, or indirect connections, and over time, you connect with them!

Build Relationships

Just being connected, however, won’t cut it! You need to take this all a step further and actually build a relationship with your connections. This is going to take time. Think of it more like building a long-lasting asset rather than going for the quick buck!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Six Ways to Grow Your Brand on LinkedIn

Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is just for business—nothing else! So, it would make sense that LinkedIn should be your “go to” platform for personal and business branding. In this article, I’d like to show you a few things you can do to harness LinkedIn’s amazing power to brand either yourself or your business, or even a client’s business!

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn has a blogging feature called Pulse. If you’re not using Pulse, you’re missing out big time! Creating and posting blog posts on LinkedIn will not only get you a lot of eyeballs on your profile, but it will help people really learn who you are, what you know, and what you can do for them. Blogging on LinkedIn is tops!

Advertise Intelligently

LinkedIn advertising is somewhat expensive, but that doesn’t mean that using paid ads in conjunction with LinkedIn isn’t a good idea. Ads on Microsoft’s Bing network are still fairly cheap. And, YouTube’s video ads are cheaper still! Learn about paid advertising and send that traffic to your LinkedIn posts and profile!

Leverage Your Employees

If you have employees, you don’t need to be the only one working LinkedIn! Get them to carry part of the load and make regular posting part of their job descriptions. This doesn’t have to take a lot of time, and it doesn’t have to be a big distraction, either. You can multiply not only your efforts, but also your reach because you’ll be posting content on other people’s accounts.

Use SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In our case, we’re talking about how people search for other people on LinkedIn. Figure out how people are going to find you and then make sure those keywords are included in your headline and in your profile summary.

Use Video

If you’re not hip to video as a marketing powerhouse, you’re missing the boat! You, or your employees, should be creating videos, which you can post on YouTube and then sharing those on LinkedIn. Sharing is easy! Just a few clicks and now this content is available for all your connections to see.

Use SlideShare

LinkedIn owns SlideShare, which is a PowerPoint and Keynote sharing platform. Another great idea is to take your presentations, share them on SlideShare and then post them on LinkedIn. The more content you can post on LinkedIn the better!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

How to Turn Your Connections into a Tribe on LinkedIn

According to Google’s online dictionary, a tribe is “a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader.” Seth Godin popularized the idea of tribes in his book, aptly named Tribes. The idea being that people tend to find each other through the Internet, and also that businesses and thought leaders can take advantage of this phenomenon to sell more of their products and services. So, having said all of that, wouldn’t it be great if you…yes you…could build a tribe for yourself? Fortunately for you, LinkedIn is a great place to do this, and in the rest of this article, I’m going to show you a few things you can do to start to “tribalize” your connections. Do that, and you’ll never lack for business again!

One of the first things you have to do is to build community. You don’t want to just be connecting with people. You want to reach out to them and bring them into your world! You actually do want to build a relationship with them! One of the most important things you can do is to message your connections on a regular basis. And, when they respond, you want to deepen that relationship by actually having a conversation with them! You can easily manage this through messaging. No one’s saying you have to meet a few thousand people at Starbucks over the course of the year. You can be intelligent with this. But, if you want a tribe, you do have to go that extra mile!

The other thing you can do is to provide your tribe with pertinent information. Reports, videos, podcasts, audios of other types, all these things will serve to make people more familiar with you. You really should be considering the video component. And, those videos should show your face! Talking! Acting like a caring pro! To have a tribe means you’re the leader. So, you have to start acting like a leader. Do that and you’ll start getting paid like a leader, too!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Everything Starts with Your LinkedIn Headline

Besides your picture, your headline is the first thing people actually see when they run across you on LinkedIn. It’s the first thing they’ll read on your profile, and even if they’re searching and find you, they’ll see your headline below your picture in the search and suggested connection results. Your headline is what entices the reader to read more. If you have a boring headline, you’ve really shot yourself in the foot. If, however, your headline emotionally connects with your target audience, well, you’ve already won half the battle. Here’s some things not to do, and some things to do with your LinkedIn headline.

First off, never use your job title as your headline! That’s not only boring, but there’s no emotional connection with your target audience. Something like “IT Professional” says virtually nothing about you. Not only that, but there are probably a few million people on LinkedIn worldwide who’s title says the same thing. So, not only will you not stand out in the search results, but you’re not branding yourself as different from those other few million!

Instead of a job title, try saying something on a more human level that captures the essence of who you are and what you do. Using our example, what are you actually doing as an IT professional? Maybe you work for a school system, and you’re in charge of maintaining the school’s network. So, you could say something like… “Connecting Children Safely to The Internet.” That may or may not capture the real essence, so please don’t just copy and paste that, but it’s moving in the right direction! You can explain how you’re connecting children safely to the Internet in your paragraph summary where you can elaborate on being an IT professional.