LinkedIn is a social network specifically designed for business professionals. It allows you to connect with colleagues, prospects and companies.
Your presence on LinkedIn will improve your brand visibility and awareness among your prospects and customers.
Some of the Benefits are:
Connection with the customers.
Build your network.
Increased Exposure.
Credibility Boost.
Gain new business.
Generate Leads.
Connect with prospects.
LinkedIn can be an amazing tool for salespeople if used effectively.
Following are the important points you have to consider to get the most out of your LinkedIn presence:
Your Profile.
It starts with your picture. You must have a sharp, professional looking picture shoulders-up, without any prompts or other subjects in view.
The old adage that ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ is certainly true when it comes to picking a picture for your profile.
And no matter how hard you’ve worked to write yourself a bio that will stand out and make people want to do business with you, a poorly chosen picture can completely undermine all that hard work if you aren’t careful.
You can also add a cover image, just like on Facebook.
This is a good way to make your profile more eye catching and it’s a great way to enhance brand awareness – if you have a logo then adding this onto a black background and making it your cover image will help tie all your products and services together and aid with your attempts to build authority.
Make sure your public profile URL is your name or if it’s taken come up with something as close as possible.
When writing your LinkedIn profile, something to keep in mind is that you can benefit from including keywords and phrases.
What these are phrases and terms that people are likely to enter into search engines – including both Google and LinkedIn’s own search function.
The idea here is simple: by using the right words throughout your content, you will increase the likelihood that those words will bring up your profile when someone searches for them.
At the same time though, it’s important not to ‘overdo’ the insertion of keywords as this will make your text seem awkward to read, damaging the impression that you’ll make on your visitors.
Meanwhile, when you overuse your keywords this can actually send a signal to Google that you’re attempting to manipulate their search algorithms at the expense of delivering great quality to your visitors – and the result is that they can end up penalizing your page by preventing it from ranking highly in the searches at all.
A good ‘density’ for inserting your keywords is around 1-2%. Moreover, Google is now capable of looking at ‘related’ keywords and using those to help you rank as well.
This is called ‘LSI optimization’ or ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’.
So as well as trying to subtly lace in your keywords, you should also be aiming to write ‘around’ the topic and include lots of synonyms and related terms.
This should occur pretty much naturally as you’re writing.
Your Headline.
It should state your position (stated in a language that shows your capabilities) as well as what kind of value you bring to the table.
The idea is to make yourself sound like someone that people would want to work with if they are in your field.
At the same time, you should also aim to put across a bit of personality to help make yourself feel somewhat approachable.
Summary.
Here you should be stating what you can do for your customers in a nut shell. Make it personal and compelling.
This is where you will go into a little more detail explaining what it is you do for a living and what the key elements of your business are and your major achievements.
Tip #1: Your summary and your headline do not need to be static fields.
You can update and freshen up the information you provide about yourself regularly – for instance, what was your biggest accomplishment this year?
As we age, so we gather experiences, accomplishments and knowledge; so you need to keep updating your profile to ensure that it conveys everything you have to offer.
Tip #2: Ditch the buzzwords! Remember how you’re always told to say things like ‘teamwork’ and ‘synergy’ and ‘initiative’ in your CV?
That’s old advice and it’s become something of a cliche.
Try to avoid making the age-old mistake of using big and impressive-sounding words to say… nothing much at all. Instead, focus on being honest, genuine and likable.
Likability is a big factor actually – no one wants to work with someone who comes across as unpleasant.
Experience.
This section feels like a resume but avoid the temptation. It should talk about your experience as how it would be useful to your potential customer.
Here, you can add each of your different job roles and briefly highlight the skills that you learned working in those capacities.
One tip though is to make sure that you include only relevant job roles.
The ideal scenario is that each of your former positions was in the same industry and that they together demonstrate your ascent through the ranks to become the best in your business.
You have the option here to list documents, photos, links and videos to back up what you say.
You don’t have to do this but if you can provide some evidence then this will help you to inspire more confidence and trust.
Connections.
These are the people you are connected. That is a story in itself.
You need to be careful about who you are connected, because a potential and important connection may judge you on the basis of your existing connections.
Another tool built into LinkedIn itself meanwhile is the option to add tags.
Click ‘connections’ along the top of LinekdIn and you’ll be presented with a list of people you know.
These are already in order of how recently you communicated and you can sort them in alternative orders and filter them in various ways too.
At the same time, you can also add ‘tags’ which essentially allow you to categorize each person in terms of the way you know them, the industry they’re in or anything else that might be useful.
Connect with customers, alumni and other acquaintances that are in line with your professional aspirations.
Groups.
Your presence in appropriate groups is one of the best ways you can utilize LinkedIn to advance your mission.
You need to join the groups where your customers and prospects are.
You can also join the industry or role specific groups where you can learn from others and contribute to discussions.
Search.
Learn how to use the advanced search function to narrow and even pinpoint the important connections, customers and prospects.
LinkedIn Pulse:
LinkedIn Pulse is a great tool that essentially allows you to make ‘guest posts’ on LinkedIn.
Normally, the idea of a guest post is that it will allow you to build a link back to your own website, while at the same time gaining some of the authority of the post that your post appears on.
Guest posting also has the advantage of allowing you to target a very specific market – that being the demographic that you are trying to sell to.
LinkedIn Pulse is essentially a ‘news service’ published right on LinkedIn itself that users can use to find interesting stories published by their connections, or that are within their areas of interest.
Lead Generation
You can utilize social selling with LinkedIn by making use of the power of lead generation.
Lead generation makes it easier for marketers to find and connect with their potential sales leads.
LinkedIn can make sales lead generation campaigns successful because the platform has over 380 million professional members.
Thus, the platform enables sales professionals to find the right prospects easily and quickly.
Imagine a platform that allows you to quickly search and filter the influencers and decision makers in your marketing niche.
That is what you get with LinkedIn’s advanced search feature.
Once you identify possible influencers and decision makers, you can save them as your leads.
The best thing about this feature is that you search for the right prospects and create high-quality lead lists.
LinkedIn also provides you with lead recommendations for the best decision makers and influencers that would be suitable for your affiliate business.
Furthermore, the TeamLink feature will let you see who within your company is connected to some of your prospects.
You can use such an opportunity to enjoy warm introductions that will certainly lead to sales if handled appropriately.
Once you have a reliable list of prospects and customers from LinkedIn, you can then advertise your affiliate products to them.
You can trust that a greater percentage of people on your list may purchase your products, especially if you searched correctly.
