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Uncategorized

Why Endorsements, Skills, and Recommendations Matter on LinkedIn

A lot of LinkedIn users that I see online have great profiles, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions are often the following. They’re weak in endorsements, recommendations, and/or skills. Often all three. It’s like these three are the step children of the various fields that make up a complete LinkedIn profile. Here’s why you don’t want to ignore these all-important parts of your LinkedIn profile.
Look at it this way. When’s the last time you bought something that cost more than a few dollars (or pounds or yen, etc.)? Being an Internet savvy person, what did you do? If you’re like most folks, you Googled whatever it was and read about what other people thought, right? Well, people are doing essentially the same thing on LinkedIn. We call this social proof in the marketing business. People are highly influenced by what other people think. Being endorsed is one of the ways of providing this social proof to people who visit your profile on LinkedIn. Recommendations are another way of providing this proof.
Have you ever asked a colleague about the car they just bought, the new restaurant they tried, or their dentist or doctor? For important purchases, finding the right product or the right service provider is often done through recommendations. Recommendations carry a huge amount of influence, and you should be asking the people you’re connected with, at least the ones you know well, to recommend you.
Finally, listing your skills matters a lot! Seeing a large list of skills along with the number of people who’ve endorsed you for them is a great way to position yourself as a professional. Not only that, but the selection of skills helps viewers get to know you. Both recruiters and people who are potential clients are going to scan these skills to help them understand who you are and what you bring to the party!

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Uncategorized

Three Ways To Boost Your Or Your Company’s LinkedIn Profile

Once you have your profile on LinkedIn all sorted out, you’ll want to use it to start getting business for yourself (or a job, if that’s what you want). There are several ways to do this, three of which I’m doing to talk about here. I’ll cover other methods in my other articles. So, check those out!
Tip #1: Understand Your Audience
Advertisers, copywriters, and salespeople of all types understand the necessity of really understanding who their target audience is. You need to too! You must understand what your target audience wants, why they’re there reading your profile, what their hot buttons are. Just like a professional sales letter writer, you need to get inside their proverbial heads and talk to them the way they’re already thinking. If you can do this, you’ll automatically mesh with your audience. They’ll not only like you, they’ll believe in you and frankly buy from you. If you alienate your audience, however, you might as well quit. This is that important!

Tip #2: Get Your Keywords Right
Keywords are the phrases that someone types into a search window in order to find web pages that match the keyword phrase. So, if you type in “restaurant Boise”, you should get a list of restaurants in Boise. Works the same way on LinkedIn. Someone might type in “accountant Dallas” in order to find accountants in Dallas, TX. I’m sure you can see how important having the right keywords in your profile are for people who want to do business on LinkedIn. So, couple of things. First off, you need to find what keywords people are using, or might use, to search for you on LinkedIn. You can ball park this by searching yourself and keeping track of what results you find. Second, you’ll need to use these keywords both in your headline and in your profile summary.

Tip #3: Make Use of LinkedIn’s Own Analytics
Although the amount of information you can get from LinkedIn varies according to whether you have a free or paid account, both types of accounts can glean a lot of useful information from your LinkedIn analytics page. You can see who’s searched for you. You can also get an albeit small list of keywords used. This isn’t a lot of information to go on, but it does help!

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Covid 19 LinkedIn LinkedIn ideas for engaging with your ideal client LinkedIn lead generation

LinkedIn lead generation in a COVID-19 world.

(Updated Sept 20th 2020)

It’s no secret that we are facing unprecedented times. Both the world and economy are seeing one of the greatest challenges we have ever seen. 

When I first wrote this article back in late February early March, everybody was basically freaking out about their business. Since then let’s face it a lot has happened. Cerb helped many Canadians, and relief packages were rolled out in the USA also.

Now we are in September almost October, and the question is where do I go from here?
In my opinion it is pretty simple, Go and Create your business to be almost all online.

Only if you actually need to be there in person, let’s face it,  most businesses really don’t have to do everything in person,  only a few do. Even restaurants have put almost their whole business online,  with take out and pick up. Online shopping has skyrocketed for everybody in the world. So really ask yourself.  Do I have to be physically present for what I do with my clients or can I do a lot of it on Zoom and only a little bit in person?

And lastly, am I using all of the tools, (especially LinkedIn) if you are in the B2B space primarily, to the fullest advantage I can?

I’m getting a ton of questions from my clients and potential clients asking us about our services?

  • Is it inappropriate to run outreach right now?

  • Should I keep doing outreach?

  • Should I adjust my messaging or strategy?

With everything that’s happening right now it’s important to start thinking out of the box and being more strategic.

For our clients that do only in person services it’s time to temporarily put on the brakes and to stop all outreach.

For instance people in the catering or gym membership business, we’re putting a temporary stop and all campaigns.

We also have to look at areas that are most affected by COVID-19.

So here is our first decision framework for our clients:

If your product or service would encourage activities that are in conflict with government containment recommendations, stop outreach now.

This is the one place where there is an immediate red light.

Another example of this would be any outreach campaign that is inviting people to live events.

Yellow Light: When to pause outreach and adjust messaging

Industries heavily affected by COVID-19

What do you do about customers with businesses that (1) do not encourage human contact, but (2) will be largely impacted by COVID-19.

Examples of this could be companies who are selling into the event industry, healthcare industry, transportation industry, retail, etc. While COVID-19 will impact all industries, there are some it will affect more directly than most.

In these situations, it may be more powerful than ever to reach out as these companies are in dire need. But, your messaging and approach will need to be altered for the new climate. If you reach out in a “business as normal” manner to these industries, your message will probably fall on deaf ears.

So here is our second framework:

If the industry you are targeting will be directly impacted by COVID-19, then pause your campaign for 1-2 weeks while the situation develops, and strategize a new message and approach.

Consider this bucket a yellow light area. Slow down, regroup, but don’t stop. I think it’s a real mistake to totally stop marketing for your company. With the drastic measure of closing of schools, and certain businesses I’m hoping that by May 2020 the virus will kind of burn itself out, and things may start to return back to normal again.  So if you don’t do any marketing for almost 2 months, and then you resume your marketing, but not until May or June,your company is going to be in big trouble.

Green Light: When to continue outreach as is

Industries that will not be directly impacted

the last group are looking at is industries that are not directly impacted by COVID-19. While the entire economy will be impacted, many industries will not see direct effects. Examples of these industries are B2B tech, consulting, professional services, agencies, digital marketing, recruiting, etc.

While all businesses will feel the effects of COVID-19, the industries that are not directly impacted are much safer to continue outreach to.

We are adjusting the messaging to address the economic troubles, but aim to steer away from outreach about COVID-19 directly.

So our third framework:

If the industry you are targeting is not directly affected, then continue outreach as is or adjust messaging to address the disruption in the economy.

Why you shouldn’t stop prospecting to yellow light and green light industries

It’s tempting to cut sales and marketing budgets when times get tough. It creates an immediate savings of cash. Yet, the problem with sales and marketing is that you don’t see the impacts of your efforts for 90-180 days.

So, if you stop prospecting now, you will feel the impact of that on your business in 3-6 months from now. If you combine a lack of prospecting with a down economy, you are setting yourself up for an even larger potential disaster in your business.

Sales and leads are what drive companies and during these hard economic times, you need them now more than ever.

Remote prospecting channels like LinkedIn, email, and phone provide no risk to the spread of COVID-19 so these channels are more important than ever.

Times are tough… so continue your marketing and lead generation prospecting on LinkedIn, the smart companies that do will survive, the ones that are driven by fear and panic will not.

We would love to help you survive these tough economic times please reach out to us. 

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Calgary LinkedIn Workshop LinkedIn

Calgary LinkedIn Workshop-from Mystery to Mastery

LinkedIn from Mystery to Mastery

Early Bird Discount code – 25Off

Is LinkedIn Still a Mystery to You?

This workshop will take you from “Mystery” to “Mastery”!

The professional world has finally realized the importance of LinkedIn as a business platform that serves multiple objectives. Besides being a central hub for professional branding, networking and career management, LinkedIn
is now becoming a growing source of news, knowledge and opportunity for professionals worldwide. Businesses now call on employees to participate on LinkedIn, not only for social recruiting but also for social selling, social media marketing and employee advocacy.

However, most companies don’t understand how to leverage LinkedIn as a phenomenal source of marketing and lead generation.

Allan Fine and Richelle Wiseman, are experienced speakers and between them,  they  have  trained hundreds of companies on LinkedIn for business. Join them to spend a day to learn about this amazing B2B social media platform, where they will reveal amazing tips and tricks they have learned.

Our goal with this live workshop is to provide useful information that is just as relevant for employees getting trained on LinkedIn as it is for professionals, executives and business owners trying to derive more value from their LinkedIn profiles. We will give you a solid understanding of how to market your company effectively with your profile and how lead generation on LinkedIn works.

Coffee breaks and a Full Lunch are included!

Who is this workshop for?

* You’re on LinkedIn, but you don’t know how to use it properly.
* You’ve heard about lead generation and marketing on LinkedIn but you have no idea how that works.
* You know having an amazing profile on LinkedIn is very important, but you don’t know exactly what that means or how to create one.

* You are a professional who wants to use LinkedIn to expand your networks and maximize your connections to create lead generation opportunities.
* LinkedIn beginners and more experienced users will benefit from this training. LinkedIn has changed its features and we can provide you with what the updates mean for new opportunities on the platform.

What should I bring into the event?

We will provide a workshop workbook for the day. Please bring your laptop or tablet to the event as we will be working on your LinkedIn profile live.

Is it ok if the name on my ticket or registration doesn’t match the person who attends?

Yes as long as you inform us of this information beforehand, so we can match registration with the person who attends.

 Start 2020 with LinkedIn Mastery and Maximize LinkedIn for your business!

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LinkedIn LinkedIn ideas for engaging with your ideal client

Here is your LinkedIn Profile PDF (Updated for Covid 19)

Download your

LIL-LinkedIn-Profile-UPDATE-Revised for 2020 and Covid 19

Categories
LinkedIn LinkedIn ideas for engaging with your ideal client LinkedIn lead generation LinkedIn Marketing

How to add captions to your LinkedIn videos.

Friday Fun Fact:

New Features to Get More From Posting: Video Captions, Share Articles Quotes, and See Translations Adding video captions to give your videos more context.

There are often times when your community members and first connections aren’t able to watch your video with the sound on. So for these moments, you now have the option to add closed captioning to your videos when posting from desktop.

Here is a tool I found to add captions to your videos, https://www.kapwing.com/
My recommendation is if you have a video that is over 500 MB, upload it to YouTube first, then download it again with YouTube downloader. YouTube compresses the video and keeps the quality pretty much the same.

You can now add closed captioning when sharing a video on LinkedIn from the desktop experience. You’ll need to have an associated SRT (SubRip Subtitle) file attached to the video before it can be posted.

Note: Closed captioning can be added to member and LinkedIn Page posts.

To add closed captions once you have created the SRT file.
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/93997?query=video%20captions  

 

Are you looking for some great LinkedIn training live?

We are putting on a workshop in Calgary Alberta Canada on January 31 2020. https://www.linkedin.com/events/linkedinmastery-lunchincluded
Hope to see you there!

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The LinkedIn Business Report

Get interviewed, get exposure for your business-The LinkedIn Business Report

Thank you so much for taking the opportunity to fill out this form as we are putting together a roster of businesses who are on LinkedIn that want to be interviewed. Once again there is no cost for this, and while we won’t choose every single business we will definitely get back to you by phone and talk to you about your business before making our decision.

Sign up to get your business interviewed!

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CBC news Canada

Job hunting tips from Calgary’s ‘LinkedIn Wizard’

Marketing and franchising consultant shares advice to make your profile stand out from the online crowd

Ryan Rumbolt · CBC News · 
 

A Calgary-based marketing and franchising consultant says LinkedIn has never been more useful for job hunters and businesses. (Maxx Satori/Shutterstock)

Thinking of a career change in 2018? Still looking for work after being laid off? Looking to grow your client base?

Building a stand-out profile on LinkedIn could help you get ahead, says Allan Fine, a Calgary-based marketing and franchising consultant with Executive Edge.

Some might think of LinkedIn as just another social network or that pesky website that keeps sending them invites. But Fine says LinkedIn has never been more useful for job hunters and businesses.

“[LinkedIn] now has over 550 million users worldwide, so for anybody who is looking to either get a job or get a business and create connections, LinkedIn is the No. 1 social media site in the world they should be using,” says Fine.

The self-proclaimed “LinkedIn Wizard” offered up some tips on tweaking your LinkedIn profile for success.

Get a professional headshot

“A great profile has different components,” Fine told the Calgary Eyeopener. “The first thing I can tell you is your headshot should make you feel ‘real’, it should be really professional looking.”

Fine compares having a unprofessional photo with showing up to a networking event in torn and dirty clothes.

“Does that give you confidence in hiring them or working with them? Probably not,” he said.

 

Allan Fine says your profile should show what you can do for potential employers. He says getting a professional photographer to take your profile picture is a sound investment. (Flazingo Photos/Flickr/Creative Commons)

He recommends paying a professional photographer to take your photo because “the money you [invest] in the headshot will pay off afterwards.”

Custom background

Fine says adding a custom background photo to your profile is another visual component of your profile that gives potential employers and customers insights into what you can offer them.

He says a good background photograph should highlight your unique “features and benefits” and should be specific to your skills and defining qualities.

“The mistakes I see with individuals and people in business are having a profile background that doesn’t convey exactly what you can do for them,” he said. “It’s very, very important that your profile background coveys the benefits of either who you or what you can do.”

Custom headline and summary

Fine says your headline and summary should expand on what you do, what you can do, and what you have done.

For job hunters, a well-written headline should portray your skills and also what training you’ve done “as far as … the degrees you have or the things that you’ve done in the past beforehand.”

Looking for work? Fine says your headline and summary on LinkedIn should showcase three things: what you do, what you can do, and what you have done. (Mike Groll/Associated Press)

Companies using LinkedIn to drive business should have a headline and summary that shows “what you can do for somebody if they work with you,” he said.

Video clips and multimedia

One of LinkedIn’s newer features is the ability to add video and multimedia content to your profile.

Fine says social media platforms for business “have gone 360 [degrees]” and employers aren’t blindly hiring off LinkedIn anymore. He says they want to see examples of what you bring to the table, and video is a “very, very powerful tool” for business professionals to showcase their skills or their personal brand.

“People want to work with people and it’s so important that your headshot, your custom headline, your summary really makes a difference in conveying that message to people, as far as who you are.”

Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is using LinkedIn to give a video update on trade talks with China, Fine said.

“LinkedIn can really deliver hundreds and thousands of leads to any potential business so people should be on LinkedIn that way also for getting lead generation.”

With files from the Calgary Eyeopener

CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices

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Categories
LinkedIn lead generation

What makes someone accept your LinkedIn connection request?

As a LinkedIn lead generation expert, one of the most important aspects of any companies lead generation funnel is to actually get their target market to connect with them, by accepting their connection request.

You might’ve seen my other article, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-trying-get-me-bed-first-date-allan-fine/ where I spoke about what happens 90% of the time, once someone sends you a connection request and once you accept. The very first thing they do is try to sell you their products or services. (Your thinking WTF? I just met you!)

That is probably the number one mistake I see 99% of all people making on LinkedIn, who are trying to use LinkedIn for lead generation. It just doesn’t work and almost always, the results are just dismal.

About a year ago I decided to formalize my LinkedIn lead generation system,

LinkedIn lead generation program

and during the six years of being a LinkedIn trainer, training individuals and corporations all throughout USA and Canada, these are the main 8 mistakes and things you should do that I have seen, that get results.

  1. Definitely do not try to sell someone your services or products if they except your connection request. LinkedIn should be about relationship building.
  2. When clicking on the connect button, ALWAYS include a personal message, that includes the person’s name and spell it correctly. (I can’t tell you how many times people have misspelled my name, BTW it’s Allan not Allen or Alan). I believe that really matters, spelling someone’s name correctly, that shows that you’re actually paying attention to what you’re doing and that you care.
Linkedin leads

3. Social media marketing has definitely taken a big shift over the last few years. It’s now all about relationship building, and making sure that you when you contact somebody, you propose a win-win situation. Definitely ask them about their business and what they’re up to, as well as any challenges they are facing.

4. The next thing is make sure your profile is 100% rockstar, the first thing they’re going to do if they receive a cold connection request is go to your profile. If your profile has a

LinkedIn connection requests

crappy picture, and you look like a serial killer (You know what I mean) then no one is going to accept your connection request.

Make sure all the information on your profile is up to date and all the links to websites and emails our working. Nothing says I’m really unprofessional more than someone clicking on the website in your contact information, and the site has been taken down and isn’t even on the Internet anymore.

5. The same thing for your website, if your website hasn’t been updated in years, guess what? People are judging whether to accept your connection request on that as well.

6. Is the message you are sending out congruent with what your profile says and what your website says. What is your call to action? What is your sales funnel?

7. On your profile do you have any endorsements, endorsements are like an testimonials, the more the better.

8. Lastly I only connect with people, and keep them as connections, if they fall into one of three categories:

A) Will they be my client?

B) Will they be a connector and send clients to me?

C) Can I joint venture with them on something else, or can I add value to them?

LinkedIn throttles your account from receiving new connections or building up your network at about 30,000. So while you may not be anywhere near to that, you have to think ahead a few years and if you are using LinkedIn for lead generation, eventually you will probably hit that mark. So I always ask people if they fall into one of those three categories, if after I connect with them and get to know them, they seem kind of wishy-washy, by giving me the thumbs up or not sure, response when I asked them if they want to have a telephone conversation. I disconnect and Block them.

I hope this article brought some value to you and I welcome all your comments and your thoughts on lead generation on LinkedIn and connections on LinkedIn. If I can ever answer any questions for you for free please let me know I would be happy to have a conversation with you.

Allan – https://leadwizard.ca/ – 403-246-7386

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Make LinkedIn easier to use - 10 LinkedIn Shortcuts for quick navigation.

Make LinkedIn easier to use – 10 LinkedIn Shortcuts for quick LinkedIn navigation.

LinkedIn is the only tool I use now for lead generation, I used to do Google AdWords, Facebook ads and SEO for my site, but I’m in the B2B space like millions of other businesses on LinkedIn. As a LinkedIn trainer for six years one of the biggest complaints I hear is, when LinkedIn rolls out new changes like they did in 2016 at the end, there is no easy documentation out there to refer to how to use it. That’s where I step in and help my clients and hopefully you with some LinkedIn tips and tricks.

So here are some easy links to navigate LinkedIn that you can bookmark this page and use it over and over again as long as you’re logged in your own account, they will automatically redirect you to the appropriate page for your account.

LinkedIn navigation

1.     Who’s Viewed Your Profile?

I really recommend having a premium account on LinkedIn especially for lead generation, and my view is if someone’s looking at your profile they’re interested in possibly hiring you, here is a quick link to it, view your profile 

2.     On desktop unlike mobile, when you accept someone’s connection request there is a link to quickly send them a message which I normally have saved on my mobile phone in my messages. On the desktop version though unfortunately it doesn’t work the same way so here is a link to your – New Connections

3.     As a professional LinkedIn trainer, unless you’re starting out with no connections at all I recommend you only connect with people who follow into one of the three categories, especially if you are using LinkedIn for lead generation:

A) People that you have prospected and will eventually be your clients.

B) People that won’t be your client but will definitely refer people to you.

C) People who are influencers or have 10,000 connections or more that you might want to do something with later on.

Let’s face it 99.9999% of people out there including maybe you, have never reached out to all the people they have as first level connections on LinkedIn, to talk to them once in a while. With that in mind if the people that you are connecting to are not engaging with you or you’re not engaging with them on a regular basis, then why do you have them as a connection?

My recommendation, remove them as a connection, and then if you doing lead generation on LinkedIn I block them as well because if they are not going to be my customer now or do anything with me they probably won’t in the future.

LinkedIn also suggests People that you may know, so have a browse through once a week and see if you see someone you know – People You May Know

4.     See who you already know on LinkedIn by importing your address book or a CSV file

5.     We all have the ability to see how we rank in profile views on LinkedIn. The more active you are the more profile views you will receive so try and communicate/update on a daily basis. How you rank in profile views , while I don’t spend a lot of time on this one, if you want to be seen as the absolute expert in your field, then this is a good metric to measure that by. PS: People want to work with the absolute expert in your field, make sure all your “I”’s are dotted and “T”’s are crossed as far as the things you need to be viewed as, to be seen as the absolute expert in your field ( Contact me if you don’t know what those three things are)

6.     We all now have the ability to “Publish a Post”. Don’t be salesy or Spammy, try to share great content information, ask a question, asked for people to help you solve the problem. (Like, Share & Comment) – Publish A Post

7.     #6 Advanced People Search

Advanced People Search – Often neglected and it’s the perfect way to find your target audience!

If you look on the right side of the page, you will see many of the filters you used to see in Advanced Search before the new user interface launched. They’re not gone, they have just been moved

8.     #7 View pending Invitations 

Some of these could be your next customers! This one is extremely important I feel as this time as opposed to you reaching out to somebody, somebody is reaching out to you. Remember though to follow the three rules in #3. Unless you’re brand-new on LinkedIn and need to build a base once again LinkedIn will eventually throttle the ability to accept or create new connections at 30,000 ( I know that sounds like a lot but if you are doing some serious lead generation on LinkedIn that number can come up pretty fast) so don’t just accept someone’s invitation unless you truly believe it will be strategic.

9.     LinkedIn Groups 

LinkedIn groups are extremely important , make sure you only join groups of people who you believe will be your target market unless you’re goal is to network with other people in your profession and industry. Too often I see my clients who have joined groups that contain mostly people who are doing exactly the same thing they’re doing, and so the possibility of getting any new clients not group will be zero. See if there any Group Discussions that you can take part in and share your knowledge https://www.linkedin.com/groups/

10. See who you already know on LinkedIn by importing your address book or a CSV file . A good way to start your profile by importing people you already know on Gmail or Outlook.

Need help? Don’t hesitate to reach out to me, I’d be happy to answer any of your questions for free. 403-246-7386

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