Is Your LinkedIn Profile Working For You?

Do you know why landing pages are such a crucial element to the success of an online business? A landing page, if crafted well, is a targeted message designed to educate a specific subset of your audience, and lead them further into your sales funnel.

You see, the best landing pages are completely in control of both the experience once you're there, and how you got there to begin with. Whether through a targeted ad or selective keyword usage, the landing page author had youin mind when the page was written, making it an effective tool for communication and persuasion.

Your LinkedIn profile is just another landing page.

Over the past 90 days, my LinkedIn profile has been viewed over 700 times, which ranks me in the top 6% of my peers, and these views have led to many more connections and interest in my business and activities.

Optimizing my profile has partly led to getting more views from interested peers and prospects, but it also helps to make that profile more effective in delivering the kind of message I want those viewers to see.

You see, unlike a lot of people using LinkedIn, I'm notlooking for a job. I already have a job. In fact, I have my own business, The Social Media Hat, and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at SiteSell. What I'm using LinkedIn for is networking with peers and connecting with prospects, which means my LinkedIn profile needs to do a better job of talking to thosepeople.

What do I mean by that?

Well, take your Experience section for example. this is the area within your LinkedIn profile where you talk about all your past jobs and positions. It's great, and it's interesting, and it's likely totally irrelevant to someone who might be interested in contracting your services or buying one of your products. They don't care who you were working for in 1995... they want to see that you have the skills and expertise to help them with their problems. Today.

Clearly, my past IT experience has little relevance to my current services.

So at a high level, that means we need to look at our profile as a prospect might, and make sure that we're doing as good a job as possible in talking directly to them.

Like I said before, think of your LinkedIn profile as just another landing page within your overall Marketing strategy. With, of course, a few unique strengths and challenges.

On the plus side, a great LinkedIn profile will stand out and rank well within LinkedIn for those who may be searching within the platform for someone with your skill set. This goes back to what I mentioned before... if you want hundreds of people viewing your profile every month, for the kinds of services and topics you're interested in, you're going to have to talk about those things on your profile, just like you'd optimize your website for your targeted keyword phrases.

If someone's looking within LinkedIn for a "Hootsuite Consultant" I want to make sure it's my profile that comes up as near the top as possible (and it's currently #1 for that phrase).

On the negative side, we're clearly constrained within the limitations imposed by LinkedIn. You can't put a call to action button in the sidebar, or change the color scheme to more closely match your branding. We have to work with what we're given.

And that's why I put together The Ultimate Guide to the Perfect LinkedIn Profile. If you haven't read it and want the best possible LinkedIn profile possible, check it out. It walks you step-by-step how to optimize that profile, specifically for people who are looking to make sales, not get hired. And it gives you several different ways in which you can customize your profile so that it becomes a real asset to you and your business. There's also a checklist for you so that you can more easily go through all of the LinkedIn Profile Optimization steps.

So head over to The Ultimate Guide to the Perfect LinkedIn Profile and bookmark it. Plan to spend a few hours initially getting your profile up to snuff, and then come back to the checklist once a month or so, just to get some reminders on how to keep your profile fresh. And plus, as LinkedIn changes or other techniques are discovered, the guide will be updated accordingly.

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How To Score Better Results On Social Media, Faster

Social Media is quickly evolving and with more and more platforms appearing every day, we all strive for making the most out of the time we spend on social and staying on top of our game. I think what most of us are looking for, is great results at minimal effort, right? Especially when you manage multiple accounts across different platforms.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some techniques that are bound to help you maximize your impact on social media, while minimizing the time you spend managing your social media presence.

Choose the right platforms

Simply put, the fact that there’s a bunch of social media platforms out there doesn’t mean that you need to be present on each of them. It makes much more sense to focus most of our efforts on the social platforms that make sense to you and are likely to generate the most impact.

A recent study by Hubspot revealed that most consumers expect you to be active on all social media platforms, and especially Facebook and Twitter. In fact, millennials expect brands to be active on at least four platforms. But despite these expectations, the same audience is most likely to follow you only on half of these platforms.

The platforms that are more likely to have the biggest impact for your business are the ones that your audience is using and that are relevant to your product or service. If for example you’re a local retailer, a platform like Google+ is less likely to prove impactful for your brand so there’s no need to invest any time and effort on building your presence there, as your ROI will be relatively low.

A good way to decide where your time will have the most impact is running a super quick social media audit. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: List all the platforms you are active on with links to your social media profiles.
Step 2: Update any imagery and profile description that needs to be updated.
Step 3: Check some key metrics such as audience growth, reach, engagement and traffic generated from this platform.
Step 4: Evaluate your presence on each social media platform by checking your KPIs. This process will help you gain some perspective and assess where you should focus your efforts from now on.

Another way to make better use of your time is making a division between high frequency and low frequency platforms. For example, as a rule of thumb, Twitter is a higher frequency platform which means that it requires a higher number of posts. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn on the other hand, could be considered lower frequency platforms with the volume varying from one to two posts a day to one to two posts per week.

Of course this division comes down to your own social media strategy, how you’ve chosen to manage social media and the goals you have set for each platform depending on your audience. Making such a plan however, can provide you with a better perspective on allocating your time and placing your efforts where you need to.

Having an idea of how much time you need to invest on each platform will help you to organize your tactics and divide your time more efficiently.

Plan ahead

This is when your initial time investment will actually pay off in the long run. Planning your social media strategy ahead can save you a ton of time and stress in the future.

A social media marketing plan is a summary of everything you plan to do and aim to achieve for your business using social media. The more specific your plan is, the more effective you’ll be implementing it.

When putting together your plan, keep in mind that you’ll basically use this as a guide for all your future social media marketing actions. So it needs to be clear and concise, with well-defined goals and KPIs.

Another deciding factor for nailing your social media presence is the quality of its content as well as the way this content is being delivered. Content is what helps you grow an audience, build meaningful relationships with your community, deliver value and forge your brand’s identity on social.

If you are active on more than one social platforms you often could struggle with content creation as it takes up most of your time. So how can you organize the way you deliver content? That’s right, with a social media calendar! Having a social media calendar not only can save you a ton of time but it also allows you to better plan your outreach around significant dates.

Choose the right tools

From content curation to posting and analyzing your performance, it is important to keep your social media management simple and effective while minimizing the time you spent on performing your day-to-day tasks.

Luckily, there’s a bunch of tools out there to help you simplify your social media management save lots of time every day. Take a look at some of my most favorite tools of daily quick and effective social media management.

Content curation

Feedly

Feedly is basically a news aggregator that can pull any RSS feed. You can completely personalize your experience and add all your favorite news sources and blogs into a stream so that every day you can immediately find great articles in your niche to share. Feedly also shows the number of shares for each piece which is a great way to quickly grasp the social media buzz around a topic.

Canva

By now social media science has proven that this is what people love to retweet. And luckily, you don’t always need have professional design skills to put together engaging images for social media.

My absolute favorite tool is Canva because it’s insanely easy to use and you can have an amazing result in less than 5 minutes. Canva is offers pre-built templates for social media posts so no need to worry about resizing. Once you pick the template, the rest is basically just dragging and dropping. You can choose to upload your own visuals and build something from scratch or choose something from Canva’s amazing graphics and use customize it to fit your style.

Posting and scheduling

Buffer

Buffer is a great app for scheduling your content, especially if you’re managing many different social media channels. What’s even more time saving about Buffer is that you can quickly schedule content from anywhere on the web using their browser plugin.

Friends+me

Although it started as a Google+ tool, Friends+me is a good alternative to Buffer that allows you to schedule content across platforms, from anywhere on the internet.

Analysis and Monitoring

Tweetdeck

TweetDeck is sort of a wildcard tool as you can also schedule tweets but its real power lies in Twitter monitoring. Tweetdeck is basically a dashboard where you can keep track of your account’s interactions, monitor hashtags and keywords, making it faster and easier to reply to comments and engage in Twitter conversations.

Twitter Counter

When you’re on a tight schedule you need to get as many insights as possible without having to spend your whole day crunching numbers. From a quick overview of your account’s follower growth, engagement rate and most successful content to an insightful report of all the important metrics, it can all be done in just a click. Take a look for yourself.

Know what works

This requires a lot of experimenting to see what sticks best with your audience. For example, research shows that in general, visuals work on social but does this apply to your followers as well? What type of phrasing content or visuals lead to the best results? Experimentation, A/B testing and a good tracking system will provide you with all the answers you need. Some of the KPIs to look at:

Applause rate per post

This one is easily calculated across social media by dividing the number of favorites, likes or +1s by the number of social media posts within a specific period of time. For example, for Twitter, say I wanted to calculate the applause rate of my tweets during the past week, I would divide the total number of favorites (in my case 8) by the total number of tweets I sent during the week (that would be 10 for me). So my applause rate for the past week would be 0.8.

Conversation rate per post

Your conversation rate is defined by the total number of mentions or comments divided by the number of social media posts over a specific period of time.

Amplification rate

Your amplification rate is perhaps the most important engagement metric as it suggests brand visibility and awareness is the total number of retweets or shares by the number of social media posts.

Clicks and visits

This is another important engagement metric to measure in order to identify the traffic your social media activity generates. Keep a close eye to your Google Analytics dashboard and monitor visits for each of the messages you post across all social media platforms.

Depending on your marketing goals and specific marketing and social media campaigns that you might be running from time to time, the engagement metrics you focus on obviously differ. If for example you are running a promotion through Twitter, tracking conversions on top of everything else is very important.

Qualitative metrics

This part doesn’t necessarily have to do with numbers but it’s more of a qualitative approach on your social media engagement analysis.

Often times, people reach out to you on social media with comments, feedback, ideas or issues they might be experiencing. It is important to keep track of these messages in order to identify any emerging patterns but also use this information to report this first-hand input back to others in your company.

Total engagement

While breaking down your total engagement rate by type and level of engagement gives you much more perspective on how engaged your audience is, calculating the total engagement for a specific period of time is important.

Your total engagement rate on every platform is calculated by the total number of interactions (likes, shares and comments on Facebook, retweets, mentions and favorites on Twitter and so on), divided by the total number of posts shared on each platform.

For Twitter, you can even use this information to decide when it is the best time for you to tweet. For example, checking my Twitter interactions for last week, I see that I scored high engagement last Wednesday which probably means that Wednesdays at 5 pm is a good time for me to post content on Twitter and boost my engagement rate.

Now over to you! Tell us, how do you minimize the time you spend on social media while maximizing your impact? Let us know in the comments right below.

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Data for dummies: Four places to get started

It may be imperative to any marketing strategy, but collecting data is daunting to all the digital dilettantes out there. Here are four tactics to start off with.

Everyone knows what an important role data plays in marketing. From American Apparel creating custom audiences to Amazon somehow knowing everything about everyone, you constantly hear about brands using data in innovative ways.

But on the flip side, a Millward Brown Digital survey from the summer found that nearly half of marketers consider big data to be their biggest obstacle. According to that same research, only 14 percent are confident when it comes to utilizing data themselves.

We get it. Some marketers are data pros. But plenty aren’t. If you fall into the second category, here are four places for you to get started.

1. Determine

Part of why data is so daunting is because there’s so much of it. According to IBM, we as a society create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day.

That’s such a big number that when we tried to figure out how many bytes that translates to each second, even the calculator was like, “What the hell?”

To make it all slightly less intimidating, ask yourself one question before you start collecting data: What is your plan? Once your intentions are clear, you’ll have a better sense of where to begin.

But Ben Hookway, chief executive (CEO) of Relative Insight, points out the danger of being too inflexibly married to your plan.

“Quite often, you see people so obsessed with one specific thing. They’re looking so hard at that, that they miss other important, significant things,” he says.

2. Start small

Granularity is important. But there’s a fine line between knowing your audience and knowing your audience so well that you’ve freaked it out.

Brands like Google, Facebook and Amazon have become such a part of people’s lives that their creepiness is a bit more tolerated. If you’re not quite on their level, you won’t be let off the hook so easily.

If you’re at this, it’s best to start with simpler data sets, like location – weather dictates fashion, after all. Limit your behavioral marketing to things people have actually done on your site, not things you’ve gleaned about them elsewhere.

Don’t get too far into the weeds, lest you make someone feel like they’re being stalked.

“For a media company, asking your shoe size has no relevance to what your favorite radio station is. Asking for information that’d be appropriate based on what your business is and what your users expect from you is a good place to start,” said Fisher Fisher, technical product manager of Cox Media Group during ClickZ‘s most recent webinar.

3. Diversify

This ties in with point number one. Once your plan is in place and you’re collecting data, don’t just go for what’s the most accessible. Social listening is a perfect example of why you need to look at more than just the low-hanging fruit.

“There’s so much data on Facebook and Twitter that you’re bound to find whatever you think to look for,” says Hookway. “Just because it’s easy to get doesn’t mean it’s the right data to analyze.”

4. Unite

As you start collecting data, you’ll want to create profiles. Once you’re able to connect this person to this computer and that smartphone, you’ll be better at gauging individual customer journeys.

One pitfall during this stage is being 100 percent certain that you’re targeting the person you mean to. While social listening can be a lot of empty calories, social logins are a totally different story. Jamie Beckland, vice president of product at Janrain, points out that whatever you learn about someone from Facebook or LinkedIn is likely to be quality and accurate.

“There’s a lot of social pressure for those identities to be a real aspect of who that person is. It’s not going to tell you the depths of their soul, but there’s a high degree of confidence that someone is not going to lie to their friends and family about their age, their birthday and if they graduated from college,” he says. “If [social media] is something you can have the user opt into sharing with you, you have a higher confidence than you would with a disposable email address.”

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Mastering Your LinkedIn Profile

How often do you look at other people’s LinkedIn profiles?

How often do you look at your own LinkedIn profile?

If the answer to the second question is never … it’s time to bite the bullet.

Take 5 minutes and read this post, then go to your LinkedIn profile and do a quick sanity check with these six points. Also, consider the +2 Bonus Points.

Your LinkedIn Profile is Your Resume and CV

If you don’t think people are looking at your LinkedIn profile and making decisions about whether they should work with you then you probably should delete your profile.

People look at LinkedIn profiles to determine a lot of things. One of the most critical questions people seek to answer is this:

Do I want to do business with this person?

The time, effort and thought you put into your LinkedIn profile upfront is worth it.

Here are a few tips and points to consider. If you are already doing some of them great. If you are doing all them … Fantastic. If you have other tips and suggestions please add them to the comments section so we can all learn.

Why do this?

It’s simple. It’s so that you can Stand out in your Career.

The 6 – Six Initial Steps to Create / Update Your Profile

1. Current Picture – It should be a professional look
2. Current Role – Be candid if you are looking for your next challenge
3. Current Goals / Deliverables – What are you doing now? / What have you accomplished?
4. Degrees / Awards / Activities – Don’t make them up, people WILL check.
5. Professional Associations / Clubs / Non-Profit Work – If you don’t have any, perhaps it’s time to start. Your experiences matter.
6. Recommendations – Ask for them AND Reciprocate.

+2 … Nice to Have Options (Two Bonus Points)

1. Endorsements – Appreciate them. If someone writes you an endorsement you have the option of accepting it as is. Or, you can reject it outright. Or you can reject it with a suggestion to the author.
2. Have a Call to Action – This can help people move in the way you prefer. Let people know what you want. Don’t make them guess. They may guess incorrectly or they may not realize you want them to do anything.

These points were created for a post I wrote several years ago. The core elements of LinkedIn haven’t changed much. Some of the content buckets have moved around, but the core elements are still there.

Your LinkedIn profile lets people know
what they can expect when working with you.

Pro Tip: Continuity and Brevity Matter

Make sure your LinkedIn profile can be easily consumed. Everyone is busy. Put your information in “Bite Sized Chunks” and you will increase the likelihood of someone reading it and taking the action you suggested (See Call to Action above).

As always, if you have ideas and suggestions on how to use LinkedIn please share them in the comments. Let’s start a discussion.

Remember:

Your goal should be to help the reader decide:

Do I want to do business with this person? 

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Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Social Profiles for Search

Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Social Profiles for Search.

Your social network is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and sales. It provides you with a place to share content, communicate with customers and show how your product or service offers value to the community. However, there is only so much time and money that you can spend increasing your following. How can you grow your social networks organically?

Optimize for Search

Anything that is available for public viewing on a social media site will be indexed by Google. This means that you have a chance to rank for keywords when you create your Facebook page, Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, or Pinterest account. When done correctly, you will receive targeted traffic to your social media page, which should have links to your website or anywhere else that people can go to buy your product or your service.

How to Optimize for Search

You want to use keywords that are closely associated with your business and use them in the appropriate areas. This means creating a page name, URL and short description that has a targeted keyword in it. For instance, if you were a cosmetic dentist, you might have that keyword as part of your Facebook page, Twitter bio, or LinkedIn job description. You want to do this because Google will use information from these sections when it decides what to index.

Here is an example video on how to do this for LinkedIn:

The Advantages of Organic Search Traffic

There are many advantages to organic search traffic such as the fact that it is targeted and easier to convert. If you are a cosmetic dentist, you will get traffic from those looking to get their teeth fixed and need those services. Organic traffic is also cheaper to acquire, which enables you to get a larger return on the time that you took to create an optimized page.

Want More Local Customers to Find You Online? Download Your Local SEO Checklist Instantly!​

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Powerful Personal Branding Tips to Take You from Digital Zero to Social Media Hero

I don’t know about you, but I like to know who I’m doing business with.

I always appreciate when I know a little about the owner of a business and not just the business name—it helps me feel more comfortable about spending money with someone if I can see that they are who they say they are.

But personal branding isn’t just for the business owner—in the digital age, it’s for everyone, even your grandmother!

Tim Ferriss, Author of the 4-Hour Work Week has this to say about your personal brand:

“Personal branding is about managing your name — even if you don’t own a business — in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records. Going on a date? Chances are that your “blind” date has Googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.”

The point is, your info is out there, whether you’re aware of it or not. You can let it sit out there, looking good or looking bad on its own…

Or you can take control of it.

Your personal brand doesn’t just encompass your professional work it is anything related to you—online and offline.

Ready to take control? Here are 3 helpful tips so you can start building your own personal brand:

1. Google Your Name And See What Comes Up

This is step numero uno. If you have no idea what your name is associated with, you need to find out now.

Your name could be associated with nothing.

Or, you could share a name with a famous tiger-taming comedic actress in sweden.

But if you don’t check, you’ll never know.

Once you know what’s out there, you can work on influencing it. I find value in having a Google+ profile because it allows me to have a little more influence on what Google displays about me and how it displays that information.

And since Google is not only where most people start researching you, but also the place where you have the least control, any method of influencing it should interest you.

Did you know that you can set an alert on Google for your name and even your business? Sh-yeah, neato!

That way, when something new is posted online, like a news article (or a Facebook post that went viral for all the wrong reasons), you will get a notification #ThanksGoogle.

2. Develop Your Personal Mission Statement

Every successful company has a mission statement—something they strive to do or be.

At Blue Steele Solutions, our mission is to help small businesses grow, be more efficient, and perform like the big guys!

My personal mission is to make an impact in and through the areas I care about most: family, community, and marketing.

Ready to write your own mission statement? Start by asking yourself, “What do I want to be known for?“ Create a word cloud by writing down all the words you want to be associated with you.

Then, start putting these words into short phrases, little sound bites about you. Finally, write a sentence. Keep it short and sweet. Use strong verbs and focus on what you want to do and how you want to do it.

3. Get Digital

Part of building a personal brand is building and nurturing connections—and one place to start is with friends and family.

Guys, there are so many tools we can use to update our friends, family, and network about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Letting the people around know what’s going on with you is a great way to start networking (and be a part of your community at the same time!)

Social media is a great place to start, but that’s not the only marketing tool available to you. Building a personal website is awesome, but you have to know what you’re doing—you don’t want to build some junky weebly website that reflects poorly on you. The personal website might be something you put together down the road with the help of an expert.

In the meantime, you can use a few simple digital tools to tell your circles about the initiatives in your life that are in line with that “personal mission statement” you just made. Here are a few of my favorites:

MailChimp

MailChimp allows you to create newsletters and deploy them to your email contacts at no cost. That’s right! Free-gratis-frei!

Consider creating a monthly or maybe even quarterly newsletter—this helps you foster a sense of community and also keeps you in their minds for that mission you’re trying to achieve. That way, when an opportunity arises that falls in line with your mission, you’ll be the first person they call, and not the last.

LinkedIn

If you’re a professional and you’re not on LinkedIn, literally what are you doing with your life? Get on there!

LinkedIn is a necessity for a business professional (or anyone that thinks they will one day be looking for a job).

And unless you’re independently wealthy or have a secret trust fund I don’t know about, that’s basically everyone.

Your LinkedIn profile should incorporate your personal mission statement in some aspect, but it’s more than that.

It is a catalog of all your successes—like a digital resume. You can show off all the fun organizations you’re involved in and a listing of all the people that you have networked with. Instead of keeping a drawer filled with business cards (and facing the nightmare of sorting through them), LinkedIn sorts everything nicely for you—and it’s free!

Plus, LinkedIn’s publishing capability allows you to create posts in blog form to share with the online community. If you’re not ready to make your personal website just yet, LinkedIn publishing is a great place to start.

These Are Just Beginnings—Your Ultimate Goal Should Be A Website

At the end of the day, you have something of value that you want to share with people. Your business card, your social media posts, and your LinkedIn posts all should point somewhere—to one place that people can find out what you’re really about—and that’s your website.

If you’re in the beginning stages of building your personal brand, the website might be far in the future, but it should always be the ultimate goal.

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5 Tips For Connecting With Strangers on LinkedIn

Trying to build your network on LinkedIn but wary about reaching out to someone you don’t personally know? Think of it this way: when you go to a networking event, are you only going to talk to the people you came with, or should you branch out and introduce yourself to new faces? Thought so. Now that you’re convinced, tackle networking with these 5 tips for connecting with strangers on LinkedIn:

Personalize the pitch.

No matter what you do, never send the generic LinkedIn invitation to connect to someone you don’t personally know. Even if you briefly met this person at a networking event weeks ago, chances are, they probably forgot about you after taking your business card. Don’t put them in the awkward and uncomfortable situation of figuring out if they know you or not. Make it clear by personalizing your message, and including information on when you two met.

Get to the point. 

After you introduce yourself in a personalized opening paragraph, don’t waste any more time getting down to the point. Are you on a job search and interested in a position in this contact’s company? Or maybe looking for a mentor to guide you through the industry? Whatever the purpose of your invitation to connect is, be straightforward and state your intentions upfront. If possible, try to include how the relationship could benefit the both of you, instead of making it seem like a one-sided connection. 

Point out commonalities.

People will be more likely to accept your invitation to connect if they can find some common ground with you. Don’t make your potential new contact go on a hunt for it, point it out in your message. Did you both work at the same company in the past? Do you share a few connections? Establish this early on so the new contact is more compelled to continue reading your message. Start with something like, “I noticed you have worked with XYZ, I’ve been a client of theirs for years!” Making this common bond early on allows your potential new contact to see you as more than just another name on LinkedIn.

End with a call to action.

Now that you’ve stated who you are and what the purpose of connecting is, what do you want your new contact to do after he or she accepts the invitation? What are the next steps of your relationship, if any? End your message with a call to action. Do you want to set up a time to discuss career or business opportunities? Suggest possible times at the end of your message. Would you just like to stay connected on LinkedIn and nothing else? Add a note about how you look forward to any opportunities that may arise in the future for you two to work together.

Update your profile.

Many people decide whether or not to accept your invitation to connect based on your profile, so keep it as updated as possible before sending messages to new contacts. A profile with no picture, few connections, or very little information in the work history section could seem like spam to others, so make sure everything is filled out and complete. Remember, your potential new contact is scanning your profile to see how the relationship could benefit him or her, so list out every bit of information that could catch his or her eye, from that internship you completed in college to the time you volunteered for Habitat for Humanities. 

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How to Generate an “Earthquake” of Leads on LinkedIn

If Karen Nierlich’s office doesn’t fall into the ocean, she’ll be in great shape thanks to a unique new approach she’s utilizing on LinkedIn.

“I’ve been in business for a long time,” Nierlich, a San Francisco-based website developer, told me on a recent podcast interview. “I’ve done a lot of in-person networking. A lot of our business came from word of mouth and networking, meeting new people in groups. And, about two years ago, I decided that LinkedIn and all these connections could really help me. I just saw the potential to have my network online. I saw the potential to be able to take my LinkedIn network with me, if I decided I wanted to go someplace. You know … if California had its earthquake.”

LinkedIn Tip #1: The Time is Now!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again until I run out of oxygen – we live in the single best time in human history to turn your passion into a profession.

Nierlich is no exception.

“I have this picture of flexibility,” she says. “My kids are going to college pretty soon, and so I have this picture of myself taking off somewhere. Maybe … or maybe not. But, that’s what I wanted. So, I spent quite a bit of time reading about LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn Tip #2: Target Your Ideal Audience! 

What she found in her studies was an instant ability to target her ideal audience using the world’s largest social media network for professionals:o

LinkedIn Tip #3: The Riches are in the Niches!

Nierlich also learned that, on LinkedIn at least, the riches are often found in the niches.

“Like a lot of people, I was very resistant at first to picking a niche,” she says. “I run a web and marketing business called ‘Almost Everything.’ I really enjoy working with a variety of clients. I it exciting and new, to go from one industry to another. Then in the last few years, I’ve been working with a business coach who specializes in general contractors. However, I still did not specialize in general contractors until (I got serious about LinkedIn).”

LinkedIn Tip #4: Make Your Profile Client-Facing!

One day, Nierlich decided to give the client-facing, niche approach a shot on LinkedIn.

She reconfigured her entire profile to appeal to specific clients in a specific type of industry.

The results were immediate – and ongoing:

 “I got a handful of sales leads within the first couple of weeks,” she recalls. “And within a few months I’d generated 150 or so targeted, new leads for my business.”

Today, Nierlich is happy to report that she’s “100 percent full … and then some” in terms of her current client workload, with more leads lining up for work later this year … and almost all of them have come in via LinkedIn.

It almost seems too good to be true, until you understand the dynamics of LinkedIn and one of the most basic approaches to successful selling.

LinkedIn Tip #5: Understand the Opportunity!

First, there’s LinkedIn. With nearly 400 million members in more than 200 countries, and with two new members joining the network every single second, it’s the best one-stop shop there is to find and connect with other professionals worldwide.

Because it followed Facebook’s lead in terms of gathering as much personal information about each member as possible, LinkedIn makes it easy to sort and search its platform by everything from physical location to industry type to job title to schools attended and much more.

Step 1 is realizing your ideal client base is already on LinkedIn, just waiting to be found and connected with.

LinkedIn Tip #6: Understand the Psychology of Selling!

Step 2 involves understanding how to approach, engage and ultimately sell to those prospective clients.

As Dale Carnegie noted in his bestselling book How to Win Friends and Influence People, “I know and you know people who blunder through life trying to wigwag other people into becoming interested in them. Of course, it doesn’t work. People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves – morning, noon and after dinner.”

What Nierlich embraced over on LinkedIn was making her profile more “client-facing,” following Carnegie’s lead and moving away from what so many other LinkedIn profiles look like – a virtual résumé.

To illustrate the difference, here’s the first sentence of Nierlich’s new-look LinkedIn Profile: “WHAT WE DO: We help high-end residential contractors … grow their business with marketing and modern websites.”

The rest of her summary area flows into a natural evolution of how she helps her ideal audience (residential contractors) achieve one of their goals (crafting websites that attract them more business) while solving some of their biggest pain points (lack of time and expertise when it comes to creating websites and/or online marketing services).

Nierlich finishes off her summary area with social proof, including testimonials from happy contractor customers:

The best part was, she didn’t have to reinvent the wheel – all the content she needed was already there, just waiting to be re-formatted and shared in a way that would appeal to this target audience.

Now, does this mean Nierlich only does websites for contractors? Of course not! But in terms of identifying one specific type of customer and/or target market, it’s an ideal approach on LinkedIn.

(And, if you want to appeal to multiple audiences in different verticals, there’s an easy way to do that as well.)

“When I realized much easier it was to attract clients within a niche, suddenly it made a lot more sense to me,” Nierlich says. “That one could reduce one’s time, marketing efforts . . . and, now that I’ve started down this path, I feel like I’m being more helpful, because the advice I’m giving is so targeted to a certain profession.”

LinkedIn Tip #7: Stop Spinning Your Wheels!

She’s also eliminated one of her biggest challenges as it relates to everyday lead generation efforts.

“What I hadn’t been able to figure out was what to do on a daily basis,” she recalls. “I was spinning my wheels. I was thinking, ‘I should go do a little of this. And then a little of that.’ It was very unsatisfying because it felt so unfocused.

“So, the idea of focusing on a niche has been very significant for me. It makes me feel very confident in talking to people, and when I started publishing content on LinkedIn just for contractors, I realized I had information specific to contractors that could be very, very helpful to them. And, I had somebody contact me, just from one of my LinkedIn posts, to do work for them!”

The Rest of the Story – Listen to the Podcast!

There’s much more to share, including the daily routine Nierlich utilizes for lead generation on LinkedIn.

Bottom line: Anyone (and I mean anyone!) can replicate the success Karen Nierlich is having by following a few simple steps and rethinking your approach over on LinkedIn.

So what are you waiting for?

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