LinkedIn For Business 2021: How to use your Personal LinkedIn Profile to generate leads | Tim Queen
Hey guys, what's up? Tim Queen here and today we're gonna talk about how you can use LinkedIn for your business. Before we get started, let's have a little chat about what's LinkedIn's main mission. And this will help you to understand how the platform was initially designed, and how it is used by a lot of people still today. And then we can see how we can tweak some of those features and use it for business purposes instead. So the main idea of LinkedIn basically was to have an online CV. So
companies who are looking to hire some people can find applicants and people looking for job can present themselves to the broad world, and then maybe getting contacted by recruiters or company hiring managers. So the entire foundation of LinkedIn is built around jobs and finding jobs, hiring people, finding people for certain qualifications, having basically a search engine for recruiters, they can look for candidates with specific skill sets, specific qualifications. This is one of the reasons why you have your personal LinkedIn profile, it is exactly built like this, you can upload your profile picture, you can give yourself a headline, a description of what you have achieved. You can have a professional work history, you have your education
section, you can have all kinds of information including volunteering experiences, articles, you have published books you have written, certificates you have accumulated on your profile, and the cause of that nature that LinkedIn is a platform for jobs primarily, there's a lot of features and a lot of strategies that people are trying to use LinkedIn for business misunderstand. Like, you have to understand that certain features that are made for people looking for jobs, and people looking to hire people. If you want to be successful on LinkedIn, you have to completely ignore all of this and instead focus on the features that you can use for yourself in order for you to attract warm leads for your business, and then turn them from lead into a customer. So now that we have established that your LinkedIn profile was initially intended to be an online CV, it's important that we have to deconstruct the entire thing and kick out all the nonsense that we don't need so we can use it for business. A good frame of mind to look at your LinkedIn profile, your personal LinkedIn profile, is to see it as your LinkedIn landing page, your own personal LinkedIn sales page, which will inform potential leads who you are, how you can help them and what steps they have to take in order for them to start a business relationship. It's just really like a landing page, or like a print ad in the newspaper or local magazine. And
when you can structure the entire page from top to bottom with exactly that reasoning in mind that this is your sales page, then you can use a lot of the features that LinkedIn is primarily offering for job applicants, and just flip them around and use them as a business lead generation tool. So how do you do that? First of all, you have to make your profile look professional. That means primarily get a good picture. I can't believe how many people who have been using LinkedIn for 10,
20 years still have a horrible picture that they took with their first generation iPhone, super blurry, super pixelated, they don't even smile, there is no good lighting, there is no shading, it just looks horrible. And this is really important because when someone is opening up your LinkedIn profile, the first thing they're going to see is your picture. So you have to make sure that you have a good picture there. And I really recommend that you get a professional
photographer to take a picture. That's not, doesn't cost the world. The profile picture is a really good investment and you can really get this like it's quite affordable, you can probably find someone giving you like a profile picture for your LinkedIn profile between like 50 to $100. And this is something you can keep for many years so it will pay off big times, especially when you consider that when people come to your LinkedIn profile and they don't like your picture and just click the back button. A good picture can convert way more people to scroll down and say, Hey, the picture looks okay, let's read actually what the person has to say. So for that reason it's a really good conversion optimization tool for your LinkedIn profile. The next thing that you want to do is you want to get a professional header image. Now, you could take simple picture,
if you want to, for example, if you were speaking in front of a larger audience, you could put this at the backdrop, the idea, what you want to use the header image for is kind of you want to emphasize authority, meaning you want to communicate some information really quickly with images. So that could, for example, heightening your authority, showing that you are a leader, that you are educating and entertaining your audience, for example, that you are a sought out speaker that your opinion is valued. That's why you could take a speaker picture, you could also take a picture like in a more intimate place working with a client, you're sitting together, or you're getting interviewed by someone. And another way is you can of course, use like a design template like if you want to do this yourself, you can go on canva.com, they have a couple of pre made templates, specifically for your LinkedIn header. Or what I would recommend go to Fiverr.
Find someone to design a LinkedIn header for you. And then maybe include your company logo, your slogan, ways how people can contact you, any website address, and then you can upload this to your LinkedIn profile. Now, this is the first step. This is very important. You just, we basically, think about it like this. There's someone coming to a LinkedIn profile, and they have 100 reasons why they want to go back. And you just kicked off to like,
there's two very major reasons why people would click the back button, and you just have blown them away. There's plenty of other things, other factors, why someone might not read through all of your profile. But we're going to work on the most important ones first, and most of them are actually at the top. Your LinkedIn headline is your one sentence sales pitch for any potential customer. It should clearly communicate who you are, what's your expertise/how
can you help someone? And who do you work with? Who are you? How can you help? Who do you help? If you can encapsulate this in your LinkedIn headline, it's really clear, when your ideal customer comes to your LinkedIn profile, they're gonna read the headline, they going to see, oh, he is helping people just like me, because you're describing your ideal customer, then you also describing a common challenge/solution. Now, if the client is facing a similar problem, and most often they are, then I'll know two things. One, you can help him or her solve a specific challenge that they're facing at the moment. And you specifically work with people like your ideal client. And then the last bit is, you can tell them a little bit about what you do, who you are, because that's the thing they care about the least, they just want to know, can you help me? And how can you help me and then they're gonna want to learn more about you like in that priority, you have caught their attention, you have eliminated three reasons why someone might just go off your LinkedIn profile and never return again. Now it's time to
build the trust. Like if you get over those three hurdles, you will get a lot more time like the first, the picture, the header, and the headline, this can happen like in like in a two to three second frame when someone is gone. But if you pass that test from a potential customer, he or she will give you a lot more time like I would say up to 30 seconds. To give them a reason to reach out to you to take some form of action is really important because now we can use several other features of your LinkedIn profile to really nail in trust and motivate them to take the first step, reaching out to you, writing a message, sending a contact form or picking up the phone. Now you have your regular profile description right at the top. Here, you will only see the first few lines of your description. So you have to be very strategic about what you're writing. And because the text in the first three lines has to trigger
enough curiosity that someone wants to know more and clicks the read more button to read the entire chunk of text. So you have to be very smart about what you're writing in your profile description. In your profile description. You can go into way more detail. You can basically see this as the full extended version of your headline. Talk about who you are, what problems and challenges you can solve for potential customers and then describe your ideal customer, which industry they're working in, what is the typical company look like, what is kind of like the headcount, the annual revenue, whatever your qualifying markers are. And then at the end of your description, you want
to tell them how they can get in contact, this is basically the entry to your LinkedIn sales funnel. Now, you will see not, not everyone will read your description, a lot of people will just continue scrolling. So you have to have multiple repetitions of the same information in order for you to capture most people's attention, like someone might not read the description, but they might go to your work history and and look at your company. So you can repeat the same information, who you are, how are you helping? Who are you helping? How can they get in touch? in the description of your company page and your work experience section.
Now that we have your basic information in your profile description, and your work history, there is the most important element of all, it's called the featured section. And this is one of the most, if not the most powerful tool on your LinkedIn profile that you can use to get people to take action. And what you can basically do is you can attach any links and social media posts, you could link to a text post, photo posts, video posts, you can link to external content, YouTube videos, a blog article, a contact form. And what I really recommend is to link to one of your lead magnets. This is something like a white paper checklist, a cheat sheet, something that can help potential customer analyze the situation or solve a certain challenge, take the first step towards solving something. And oftentimes what
you get when you have something really valuable information, and you putting this behind, like a email gate, then you can ask people to submit their name and email address before they can download this. And this will help you to build your email list, or you can send this directly into your inbox if you want, and then you're getting leads on autopilot with LinkedIn. That's really amazing. Now we're going to talk about how to set up an email automation for your LinkedIn needs in another video. But for now, let's continue. So what I would recommend putting your contact form and at least one or two lead magnets into your featured section.
So this will quickly fill up your LinkedIn pipeline on a daily basis on autopilot. Now, the remaining sections of your LinkedIn profile are actually rather uninteresting. You have for example, the education section if you want you can include your education, you can, for example, highlight what aspects in your study, align with how you are solving problems or potential customers today, so that has to be kind of everything else on your profile has to be framed: How did it bring you into the position where you are today, for example, if you let's say you studied biology, and then you end up switching over to engineering, you don't have to explain to them like if you're looking for engineering customers, you don't have to tell them too much details about the biology part like why you change your study.
There's nobody really cares about it, the only thing they care about is how maybe something in your biology study inspired you to switch over to engineering. So it becomes like one red thread through all of those life events. And eventually you ended up where you are today. So if you are a job seeker, pay way more detail into the education section, but if you are a business owner, it's not that important. It's one of those elements that was built specifically for jobseekers and recruiters. So you don't really need this. Just use it as a storytelling element
which tells the story how you ended up from the starting point to where you are today and how everything how all the dots are connected and tell a coherent story. And the same is true for skills. Basically, skills are totally useless like they don't mean anything. Most cases, when you see people have like 99+ skills. This comes from people just joining into like an engagement pod
and then they say hey, can you endorse me for all of my 50 skills? And the person says Sure, can you endorse me for my 50 skills too? And I said sure. And then over all they getting great ratings for any and all of their skills and we don't know shit if they know anything at all about this, this is just you can put whatever keyword in and I've seen this personally I, there's many people who are not even qualified to know if I am actually good in a service here because they have no clue what the skill actually means and still they endorse me for it, so this is basically LinkedIn created this as kind of like an approach for job seekers to put in the skills, which then will be searchable from the outside from the LinkedIn recruiter interface to look for people with certain skills. But basically anyone can pretend to know anything about it. And for business perspective, it's completely useless. Nobody cares about like, what kind of skills you have, you can still put them in, but don't expect them to create any results for your business. Then we have the recommendation section.
Now, this section, when you look, when you try to create a recommendation, you will see there is a lot LinkedIn is trying to guide you into what kind of recommendations they're looking for. And in most cases, it's framed in a employee-employer framework like, did you work with someone, were you the superior when you're writing the recommendation? Were you working under someone, were you working in the same project team? I mean, the way what I would recommend to use this, use that for customer testimonials. Ask your customers, the happy ones first, of course, to write your kickass recommendation on your LinkedIn profile, and use that as a tool to create social proof with potential customers. This will really help to build trust quickly.
Now you have a couple of other sections on the LinkedIn profile, you can add publications, I would usually use that for link building, creating links to other resources. For example, if you have a YouTube channel equal link to some of your most popular videos, if you wrote a book, you can link to the Amazon page where people can buy it. This is like you're using that for trust building and for additional social proof. You can add anything you want. There's options to add patents,
qualifications, again, the main focus here is for job seekers, but just use it as another form of generating trust with potential customers when they come on your LinkedIn profile. And then the last section, you have the info section, which can usually contains two information. One is groups and the second one is companies that you follow and influencers, those with the blue influencer batch such as Bill Gates, this section is quite distracting. So I would recommend to just unfollow most pages, there's not really any good information on LinkedIn, anyway, you can just read the newsfeed and just visit the page manually every once in a while. But it's not really useful from a potential clients' perspective to know, who are you like following, it's just creates confusion. And we want to eliminate as much
confusion as we can. So it's like a streamlined process, someone comes to your profile, they're reading it, and they quickly understand who you are, how you're helping, and who your ideal client is. When you can get, communicate all those three information, it's really easy to get like a lot of leads on your email list or to get people picking up the phones, sending emails. In order for us to eliminate distractions, we have to do one more thing, we have to eliminate your LinkedIn profile sidebar. Now by default, LinkedIn will display a list of people, which are called
people who checked out this profile you're just watching also checked out those other people. And we don't want that we want to turn this off, I'm going to put a link in the comment and the pinned comment where you can turn this off via direct link. So just switches it off and will be gone from your profile. And the reason is, imagine this from a customer perspective, this is kind of like the Amazon feature people who bought this book also bought those other books. Now, why someone visiting your profile, if you're looking to use LinkedIn for business, because they are looking for someone helping them to solve a specific challenge.
Now, what do people usually do when they do window shopping, they go into different stores and check out and want to see like who's the right person. And what often happens is someone checking out your profile and checking out your competitors' profile and your competitors' competitor. So you might just get like an entire list of 10 other competitors who are offering the same kind of services. So you just created like a tempting distraction on your LinkedIn profile,
which you don't want to have. You just want to keep people on your LinkedIn profile. And Amazon does that really well in another context, when they actually don't want you to get distracted, the moment you click the Checkout button, all the menus, you have to check this out, all the menus like where you can go into different categories are just gone. There's just the Next button we can say continue with your purchase. Because Amazon knows that when you eliminate as many distractions as possible, actually more people will complete the checkout process, add more money for Amazon. And if you can keep people on your profile, less distraction,
more likely that they read it. The more they read, the more trust they build and the more likely they are to reach out via email to download one of your email, lead magnets, to send you a contact form or to pick up the phone that you put into your contact information. Generally I recommend to really highlight your contact information throughout the entire profile. You could put your, let's say you want to get phone calls, put your phone number in your header image, put like a little arrow that say, okay, call me and then give them like a thicker framework, what do you want to be called about. You can also use the contact feature, where you can add a public email address, if you want, you can also keep it private. But this would be like an option where you can reveal your email address that you want people to send you emails from, you can put a link into your website or to your contact form. And if you want to share, you could
also share a public phone number in the contact section. Because that's quite hidden, and a lot of people who are new to LinkedIn, won't immediate click on that, you should also put it into your description, into your work experience section. And have another option on your featured section where you might link to your contact form which might on your website, which might also contain your phone number. Now, if you follow this entire process, you have a very streamlined clean landing page for your business on LinkedIn, which is very effective of telling people exactly who you are, who you're helping, who you're working with, and how are you able to help? What are the challenges that you can solve? What are the results that you can deliver? And then you have plenty of elements where people can get in touch, they can connect with you. If you have a follow button,
they can follow you or if they need some more time to build trust, they can click your contact information, whatever information you will share, your email, your phone number, your website, you can have your entire contact information again in your profile description and into your work experience description. There are so many ways how you can use that. And of course in your featured section, my most recommended call to action feature. And yeah, if you do that it works really great. So what, what do you need next, is you actually need to create content in order for people to get to visit your profile. Now there's two ways just for FYI, there's two ways how people can find you. One is for search, someone is going on LinkedIn search, but the search is quite,
I don't know, poorly designed, so you will not get a lot of search traffic because people don't use that as like a freelancer or experts search engine, they are most likely looking for people based on role titles. So if you're running a business, you will not find people searching, like for example, I'm looking for someone who's selling pools, like nobody types this into the search field. But the more likely case, and this is the most powerful way where you can use LinkedIn is by actually creating content. You can write articles, text posts, photos, videos, stories, live streaming, articles, newsletter subscription, group posts, there are so many forms, how you can share content on LinkedIn. And this is one of the best tools how you can drive traffic to your LinkedIn profile. And how does it work? It works really easy. You just have to write about topics that potential customers are interested in. I'm gonna put a
link up here about another video, I've actually hundreds of videos about how to generate traffic, you should really make sure that you hit the subscribe button and check out my video sections, how you can create content on LinkedIn to drive traffic to your LinkedIn profile. Now if you want to learn more about this, how you can use LinkedIn for business, how to use it to generate leads, how to start a conversation, how to get someone step by step from LinkedIn post on your phone, I highly recommend you check out my LinkedIn Accelerator Program, I'm gonna put the link down in the description and into the pinned comment below. It is really my very comprehensive online training program. It has by now over seven hours of content,
where I teach you exactly how to build a LinkedIn sales funnel from scratch, how to get more followers, how to write engaging content, how to create viral posts, how to generate leads, I'm gonna put the link down in the description and the pinned comment below. And if you want to get more videos about LinkedIn marketing and how to use LinkedIn for business, really make sure that you hit the subscribe button, turn the notification bell on and I see you in the next one. Bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
2021-03-18 19:59
