How to get the most out of your LinkedIn account

1. Complete your profile

When you click on your profile while you are logged in you can see a box in the top right that might look like this:

When you first sign up for Linkedin you go through and answer questions about your work life and business qualifications and all this information adds to your profile completeness. The more complete, the easier it is for other people to find you, it’s as simple as that.

2. SEO your URL

When you first sign up for LinkedIn you are automatically assigned a jumble of letters and numbers as your URL. You can easily customise your URL to instead be your name or your company name. This is much better for search engines like Google and Bing and ensures that your professional LinkedIn page will come up BEFORE your not so professional facebook page. Make sure you do this when you first set up your account though because once you  start linking to your account on blogs and other websites, then you customise your URL, all those old links will become inactive.

3. Join relevant groups

There are hundreds of thousands of groups of linked in and if you can’t find one that you’re looking for then you can even make your own! I, for example, belong to a few camera groups and some melbourne small business groups. These are great places to meet other people in the same boat as you and to share great ideas for moving your business foreword.

4. Make sure your content is positive

Google actually gives Linkedin preference in search results, so if your name is John Doe and you have a LinkedIn profile and someone searches for John Doe in Google, your LinkedIn profile will be one of the first results. This is why you need to make sure that you have a great page showing off your best assets and qualifications, especially if you are unemployed.

5. Take LinkedIn’s help

Again, when you are logged in and click on your profile there is a golden box in the top right of your profile that says “Improve your profile”.

Click this as often as you can. It will ask you questions and suggest way that you can improve your profile.

6. Connect your twitter

This is only a good idea if you are professional on your twitter. If you are tweeting pictures of your saturday night out with the guys, either set up a second professional account or leave it off your linkedIn page. It is better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to tweet a picture and remove all doubt.

7. Get recommendations

If you don’t have clients or colleges that you can ask for recommendations then you can get together with friends and all help each other out. You can meet people in the groups and help each other out. Nobody climbs the ladder by themselves, recommendations can really help you out.

8. Network

That’s the whole point to LinkedIn but I know so many people who set up an account and then never do anything with it and wonder why it’s not working for them! You don’t have to worry about being shy on the internet, get out there and meet new business people and set up some connections!

9. Link to your LinkedIn

The more links you have coming to your site from other sites the bigger your digital web becomes. The bigger your digital web becomes the more attention you can catch. Link from your facebook, your blog, your friends blog, other peoples LinkedIns, comments in forums or on articles. The list just goes on and on and once you star the easier it gets.

10. HAVE A GOOD PHOTO

For the love of good have a good photo. I know that I might seem a bit biased on this subject because I take professional portraits for a living, but really that just makes me more qualified to talk on this subject. A great photo should get a message across. It can be confidence that makes people want to work for you or it can be relaxed but in control that makes people want to work with you. I took the photo up the top of the head of Bioderma Australia during a casual meeting they held in a cafe and even though it’s in a casual scenario and he’s meeting a bunch of strangers who would decide how his product would be introduced to a new country he still looks calm, cool and in control. A photo of you at a party  says that you like to party, a professional portrait says that you are a professional. Contact me for the best photo that has ever been taken of you.