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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Three Negative Things Your LinkedIn Profile Reveals About You

LinkedIn is about business, right? Right! Just about business, and quite frankly, no one wants to do business with people who are suspect, don’t believe in themselves, or to use a phrase common a few decades ago, throw off a negative vibe! Yet, I see so many profiles that do just this! They hurt your cause instead of help it. Often, I think this is unconscious. I don’t think people with profiles like this are trying to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, but they are? You might be wondering, what exactly am I seeing? Well, let’s talk about three things I see often that really put me off and make me not want that person in my world.

No Picture or Poor Picture

At least once a day someone sends me a connect request and they don’t have a picture! What’s up with that? How could anybody expect LinkedIn to work for them if they don’t have any kind of picture at all? It is, after all, a business networking site. What is wonder is this. Why are they hiding? What’s wrong with their face? Should I trust them?

Then there’s the people who have photos, but they’re very poor in quality. You don’t have to have a professional head shot like an actor would, but you do need a clear photo that shows you at least wearing business attire.

Lack of Passion About Your Work

When I read your profile summary do I feel like I’ve read this all before? Are you faking it, or are you really stoked about what you’re doing? I don’t want to do business with people who aren’t passionate about what they bring to the table. And, frankly, I would never hire someone who seems that way, either. So, get passionate and pour that passion into your profile!

“Seeking Employment”

This last one might be my own pet peeve, but saying “Seeking Employment” in your headline is a real turn off for me. Seeking employment is not a job, it’s not a career, it’s not an occupation. It tells me nothing. Get rid of it!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Three Ways To Alienate Just About Everyone on LinkedIn

Even though LinkedIn’s not Facebook, where virtually anything goes, I’m still often amazed at what I see happening on the platform. LinkedIn isn’t the place to forget your manners! It’s a business networking site, plain and simple. Not everything goes as it does on some other sites, which shall not be named. (Oops! I already did!) But joking aside, your goal on LinkedIn it to create business for yourself, to network with people who can help you, or even to get a new job. Why screw it up by acting stupid? What’s my definition of stupid? Here are a few things I see regularly on LinkedIn, all of which should be absolutely avoided.

Spamming! No, I don’t mean sending out a few million emails telling people about how they can save 50% on their next order of Viagra. I’m talking about unsolicited advertising to people through messaging. Virtually every day somebody hits my inbox with yet another five-paragraph long essay about their new, “ground floor” business opportunity. I’m not against advertising. I’m in marketing, after all! I’m just against stupid marketing, and this is stupid marketing!

Pretending you know someone in my network when you don’t. Look, I’m an open networker. I won’t IDK you if I don’t know you. I even say so in my profile. So, why pretend? Perhaps you’ve got something great I need to know about. Just because we’re not currently connected shouldn’t be a problem. Just connect with me for goodness sake! Then ask me if I’d like to know more about you. I’ll probably say yes.

Downloading my email from LinkedIn and spamming me again! If I didn’t subscribe to your email list, then I don’t need to be receiving emails from you. If you want to add me to a list, then ask my permission. It’s called permission-based marketing for a reason!

Look, I’m a pretty easy to get along with guy! But seriously! Some folks just don’t use common sense on LinkedIn. Don’t be one of them!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

More Cool LinkedIn Hacks You Must Be Doing!

LinkedIn just gets better and better and better! I’ll be honest. When Microsoft bought LinkedIn, I felt a little, how shall we say it…trepidation about what they might do to the platform. Honestly, I’ve not liked all of Microsoft’s changes. Especially the part about moving so many of the free features into the paid only part. I do like free, but I also understand business. So, I get it that I should be paying for these capabilities. There are, however, quite a few things you can now do with LinkedIn that I completely adore. And, I’ll like to go over a few of those with you today. Hopefully, you’ll get as excited as I am and start utilizing more of LinkedIn’s cool features!

One of my favorite, new “hacks” for marketing on LinkedIn involves SlideShare. In case you don’t know, SlideShare is a platform where you can post your PowerPoint, Keynote and other slide presentations. It was bought by LinkedIn a while back, so it makes sense that the two easily complement each other! I make a lot of slide presentations in my business, both for webinars and for speaking engagements. I can get a lot more mileage out of those slides by making them available on SlideShare. Also, when I post a new slide presentation on SlideShare I always share it on LinkedIn. I’ve done this for my clients’ too. The results are amazing! A lot more views and a lot more interaction. Talking about branding, right?

My other favorite “hack” involves YouTube. This goes hand in hand with the PowerPoints I create. I create those normally for making into videos. This gives me a lot more content to spread around. One great place to share my videos is on YouTube. I can share the video straight to my feed, or I can post it to select groups that I belong to. This is a powerful way to get the right eyeballs on myself and my profile!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Your Three-Step LinkedIn Hack

If you need a way to sell virtually anything, LinkedIn is the place to be! Doesn’t matter if you’re selling coaching, books, gold, or airplanes, with LinkedIn’s half a billion users, you’re going to find more leads and more prospects than you can get to in a life time. Well, I should qualify that last statement. If you know how, you can do this. If you don’t know how, then quite frankly, LinkedIn will remain a mystery to you and honestly, just a big waste of time. So, with that all in mind, let me show you my three-step hack that I use to find more business right on LinkedIn than I can deal with. Ready to get started?

The first thing you need to do is you need to connect with a lot of people. At first, don’t worry if they’re in your target market. Your first goal is to build up your connections to at least a thousand or so. Now, don’t connect to everyone all in one day. That will look unnatural and put your account at risk. What I did when I got going was connect to fifty new people every day until I got my connections up to about two thousand, then my account built on its own.

Next, you’ll want to start reaching out to these connections. A great way to do this is to message people when they accept your connect request. You’ll want to say something generic. You do NOT want to spam people with a big long paragraph about how cool you are or your product is. Just reach out pleasantly! If someone ignores you, just keep trying every now and then until you get their attention. Remember, not everyone checks their LinkedIn account daily. So, if you’re being ignored, it’s more likely that the person just hasn’t seen your message yet.

Finally, after you’ve messaged with someone back and forth for a while, you’ll want to invite them to talk with you in more detail about your offering. This shouldn’t be a full-blown sales presentation, but more of a 15 minute get to know you session.

Do these three steps consistently, and you’ll soon have more business than you know what to do with!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Seven Pro LinkedIn Hacks You Might Not Have Thought Of

Okay, you’ve opened an account, filled out your profile, included a great head shot, and wrote a winning profile summary as well as completed everything required to reach “All Star” status on LinkedIn. Now what? Now’s when the fun starts. In this article, I’m going to show you seven great things you need to be doing consistently in order to reach “Boss” level on LinkedIn.

Numero Uno: Check in every day! Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Yet, you’d be amazed at the number of people I reach out to on a daily basis who finally, sometimes after a few months, message me back saying that they just don’t check their account that often. What a waste!

Two: Publish an article on LinkedIn’s blogging feature, called Pulse. You don’t have to be Malcolm Gladwell. Just be you and write about what you know about. Write about what you think your target audience might find interesting. If you absolutely can’t write, hire someone to write it for you once a month. That actually won’t set you back too much and it will be well worth it!

Three: Add videos or other media to your profile. Link to examples of your work. Link to your website. Have an infographic created that shows people part of the process of what you do.

Four: Follow movers and shakers! They might not actually connect with you, but follow them anyway. Share their status updates with your audience!

Five: Connect with these people and others who you think would be important to your network.

Six: You can do this one better if you have a paid subscription to LinkedIn. But, given that you have that, you need to be researching who’s looked at your profile and connecting with them and messaging them. They’ve already shown that they’re interested. Follow up with them!

Seven: This one’s going to take some time, and you might not want to do it, but in some industries, it’s going to be one of the most important things you do. Figure out who in your contacts are local to you and actually invite them out for coffee. Yep, it’s a little old school, but it works great!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Three Daily Best Practices for LinkedIn Users

Done right, you can get more business and leads out of LinkedIn than you can get to. You have to do some work, though. For instance, you need a complete profile along with a head shot that brands you as a professional, and you’ll need to spend consistent time beefing up your connections. That all lays the ground work. After that all you really need to do is to spend a few minutes on LinkedIn daily. I’ve been a LinkedIn user for years now, and I’ve got this all down to a science. Want to know how I keep my LinkedIn account humming along at peek proficiency? Here’s three things I do daily with almost religious fervor. Do this and you’ll never have to prospect for business again.

Just as with most social media, the first of you daily tasks is to update your status. Just as with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms, every day you need to let folks know what you’re up to and what you’re doing. Doesn’t have to be earth shattering. Doesn’t have to even qualify for interesting. You don’t have to give details if details aren’t warranted. Just say something about your normal business day. If you want to get organized about this and save yourself some time, use Hootsuite and load up status updates in advance!

Your next daily task is to check your network and accept inbound connection requests. The more people you’re connected to the better LinkedIn is going to work for you. Each of these requests is taking you one more step towards your goal of turning LinkedIn into a prospecting and business machine. Accept these requests on a daily basis!

Finally, you’re going to want to message people who’ve connected with you and who’ve accepted your own outbound connection requests. Your goal is to build a network, and you can’t do that by being a wall flower and never communicating with anyone!

Do each of these tasks daily and watch your LinkedIn account become your single most important business asset!

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LinkedIn

Your LinkedIn action plan, make sure you have one for phenomenal success in 2022

Content marketing is going to be key on LinkedIn for the same results you only needed to send out messages before, in the past!

Gone are the days when you needed to only send out messages to first connections.

I call it the four pillars of success on LinkedIn for 2022.

#1 Making sure that your profile is 1000% rockstar.

#2 you’re building your list of first connections and followers on a regular basis.

#3 Having a Content Marketing and a Content Engagement strategy on LinkedIn. (Just posting content on LinkedIn and no one engaging on it within the first 60 minutes of posting, tells the LinkedIn gods, that your content is not valuable. Therefore they will show your content to no one)

#4 Using the LinkedIn event platform to promote your educational marketing events (Webinars) on a monthly basis.

If you don’t do this correctly, not much is going to happen for you as far as lead generation marketing on LinkedIn.

If you’re thinking right now while I have no idea how to do any of this?

I got you covered!

I have your back!

Get My LinkedIn Action Planner.

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Five Steps to Building a Huge Following on LinkedIn

How would you like to be able to create leads and prospects for whatever it is that you sell almost instantly? How would you like to have prospective customers and clients finding you and asking to buy your product or your service without you ever having to lift a finger, do any follow up, or yet another sales presentation? What I’m really asking is this. How would you like to have a ready audience already pre-sold on you and your products and services? If this sounds too good to be true, you don’t really understand the amazing power of LinkedIn. If you know the steps, you can do this on LinkedIn, actually fairly easily. So, what about it? Want to know how you too can build a smashing business on LinkedIn? It’s very simple, and there are only five steps.

First off you need to have a polished profile that is not only complete, but that sells you in advance. Basically, your profile, especially the summary, is your sales letter for you and your business on LinkedIn. Next, you’re going to have to create unique, valuable content aimed at your target audience on LinkedIn. By content I mean blog posts for LinkedIn pulse, status updates, and the like. You might want a short report accessible through a squeeze page that you can link to so you can build a list of interested followers.

Of course, none of this will matter if you’re not connected with anyone! So, you’ll need to consistently build your network. On LinkedIn, you can be connected to up to 30,000 people. Surely out of that many you can find enough customers, clients, and referral partners to build a business out of!

You’ll want to substantiate who you are and what you sell through real recommendations. Real, as in not fake, by the way! LinkedIn is a quality platform, and quality always wins out! And finally, you’re going to have to stay on top of your industry’s announcements and news. After all, you want people to see you as a thought leader, right? So, lead!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

Becoming a Thought Leader on LinkedIn

A “thought leader” is someone who’s positioned themselves as an expert in a given profession, interest, or business. Being a thought leader has tremendous advantages. You get more and better clients. You get hired to speak at events. Your business flourishes. If you’re wondering how you yourself could become viewed as a thought leader by your peers, you’re in the right place. LinkedIn is the perfect platform for you too!

Think about the thought leaders you know of, Gary Vaynerchuck for instance, or Tony Robbins. Why do you think of them as thought leaders? Is it because someone just told you that they were? Probably not! It’s because every time you turn around you see a book or video that Gary or Tony did. In online marketing terms, it’s because they have an amazing amount of content online that consistently builds the idea that they’re thought leaders and reinforces that idea.

You can do the same yourself, and you can do it on LinkedIn! As a matter of fact, LinkedIn is the perfect place to “thought leaderize” yourself, if you’re a business person. Why? Because it is the business platform par excellence! Here’s what you need to do to get the ball rolling.

You need content and a lot of it. You need status updates, blog posts, LinkedIn pulse posts, and you also need to be taking this content and cross promoting it and reusing it on other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. There’s a battle going on in cyberspace for eyeballs and to win that battle, you need content, and a lot of it.

You need quality content too! It can’t be junk, or rehashed nonsense. Can’t be yesterday’s news or something that’s been repeated forty million times online. You can’t farm this out. You’re going to have to do it yourself from the beginning, unless you have a huge marketing budget and can afford to hire a marketing company.

Here are a couple more idea. Try to pick a “niche”, for lack of a better word, that has less competition. Go narrow and deep, not broad. Also, realize this is a marathon, not a sprint! Something like this isn’t happening overnight. Plane to take a year or two to get where you want to go. That’s a long time, sure, but think of what you’ll have when you get there!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn Marketing Social Media Marketing

What To Do With Your LinkedIn Profile If You’re Starting a Business?

I get this question all the time, and it basically goes something like this. “I’m working, but I’ve also started a business. How do I use LinkedIn for my new business without tipping off my current boss?” I really, really wish I had an answer to that, but I don’t! At least I don’t have the answer I think everyone wants to hear, that you can do this neatly and efficiently in the same profile, or that you should actually start a new profile and run two accounts at the same time. Neither of these will work. Let me explain why.

Having a profile serve a dual purpose just isn’t going to work. You’re either employed or you’re not at a given business. The only real way I know to approach this problem is as follows, and just so you know, this is less than perfect, but it’s doable! You broaden out and generalize your profile.

Let’s have a quick example. Suppose you’re an IT manager for a given business, and suppose you want to start a social media marketing business on your own. What ties those two together? Well, using technology for business is more of an “umbrella” concept that each of these can fall under. So, instead of being the IT manager for XYZ company, you become an expert at marketing technology. That way your profile will make sense to your boss as well as to prospective customers of your new venture. This actually works quite well, and I’ve seen many people do this with great effect.

The only other option is to create a new account for a second person, who just happens to be you. Unlike some social media platforms, Twitter for instance, LinkedIn discourages this type of thing. If they catch you, and they will in short order, they shut down both your accounts. You might think you can get away with this, but think of all the things that would have to be different on the second profile, work dates, for instance. Do you want to lie about all of that? Having a second profile is the least viable of both these options. Stick with what I call the umbrella method.

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