WholeLife Matrix: Financial Viability – Marketing / Sales

On any given day, potential clients and customers may be viewing your profile on LinkedIn to learn about you.  They may be finding your profile by doing a Google search or by participating on LinkedIn. Are they seeing information that will convince them to contact you and work with you?  In this article, we offer some tips for optimizing your LinkedIn profile.

One of the most important elements of a successful LinkedIn profile is a professional picture of you. Having a professional picture taken by a photographer is best.   The picture should be a good headshot of you and should not include anything else, such as pets.

You can insert pictures, videos, and presentations into your profile so that people get a clear idea of what you do and how you may be able to help them. Your header should also speak to your target market and how you can provide solutions for them.

Your headline should not be just your title and company, but instead, should include keywords.  It is important to include keywords in your profile because, when you strategically place keywords, your profile will more likely come up on searches in LinkedIn and on Google.  You can use the Google keyword tool to find out what keywords people are searching for in your particular industry and location.

In the summary section of your profile, introduce yourself at the top.  You should write your profile in the first person, which is a style that is best suited for engaging people.  Often, profiles that are written in the third person sound more like biographies than engaging profiles that lead to a call to action. Let people know who you are and how you can help them, as you would in an elevator pitch.

As you are writing, ask yourself what your target market would want to know about you.  Aim to create a concise and balanced profile.  Use formatting such as bullet points, capital letters, or bold letters to emphasize important points, but be careful not to overuse elements such as bullet points.  Be clear about your experience and expertise and give examples to illustrate your points. 

One of the most important things that people often leave out of their profile is a clear call to action.  How can people reach you?  You increase your chances of people contacting you if you are inviting and say something like “How can I help you? Feel free to contact me at info@YourEmailAddress.com.”

If you have more than one business, you can focus on writing about your main business and weave in some information about your other businesses.  You can also create separate LinkedIn business pages for each of your businesses.

The experience section of your profile should include your career trajectory.  The job title section is important for SEO reasons.  Put keywords in it to increase the chances of your profile coming up in searches.  If you have a job gap, you can explain the reason.  You can also decide to exclude small jobs.

To start conversations with people on LinkedIn, you can create some standard messages to send to potential connections.  Before sending a message, incorporate some elements from the person’s profile to customize the message. 

With an optimized profile, you will make more connections with interesting prospects, more opportunities will come your way, and your business will be enhanced.

Want to know more? We are excited to offer our Sales2Win course. This course will distinguish you as someone who consistently maximizes their sales and achieves top results.