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Created By Annie Jennings PR, National Publicist  
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3 LinkedIn Profile Mistakes That Prevent Credibility & Profit


Social media today

Maybe you use Facebook and Twitter, but is your unique traffic increasing substantially? Do 3-5% of those visitors buy from you?

If your traffic is not increasing substantially, then take a look at LinkedIn Marketing. Although other social networking sites have their place and purpose, none of them brings more profitable joint ventures, valuable clients, or product buyers than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s purpose is business! You can interact with others of like mind in the groups and say a lot more than you can in 140 characters. In LinkedIn, it’s easy to interact with others when you don’t need pictures to entertain. And, your LI profile is a powerful introduction to your audience that will pay off when you focus on what works and what you need to change.

Be sure to check your profile every month to make sure it’s not turning off your audience.

To shortcut your business success to its highest level, you need to update your LinkedIn Profile. Your LinkedIn profile says everything about who you are professionally and what you can do for your primary audience. Do you wonder why your profile visitors are few? If you aren’t getting at least 25 views a day, you are leaving fruitful connections, joint ventures, clients, and product sales on the table!

The 3 biggest mistakes that keep profile visitors and future business away

Mistake 1. Your LinkedIn Summary is All About You.

Example. Fitness Coach Ron allowed his virtual assistant to put up a hasty profile “telling” all about himself. With coaching help, he updated his summary (the most important part) with all “YOU” sentences instead of “I.” To make his summary more compelling, he needed to redesign it to read like his own website.

To engage his readers, he needed to pose sample concerns, questions, or challenges in physical and health fitness.

For example, “Do you procrastinate most days when you need to exercise? Do you wish someone else could do it for you?”

Before social media coaching, he just listed his accomplishments. After some social media coaching, he also wrote 5 bulleted benefits his clients would receive when they used him.

Example. Judy Krings, Positivity Coach, turned her confusing LinkedIn page to focus and feature her positivity coaching and her new Cuba Photos book that was the backdrop for her coaching.

Her improved summary:

“Are you struggling with Stuck-itis? Is overwhelm your middle name? Need to delete procrastination, perfectionism, or fear? Need confidence? Want answers? Positive Psychology is your ticket. Destination? Your Best Self Life! Positivity Changes Everything! http://www.coachingpositivity.com”

Judy shares what she can do for her clients:

“I work with clients who want a dynamic positive psychology partner to help them power up positivity and nix negativity. How? By energizing your unique strengths to help you evolve and problem-solve.”

Notice that Judy made her summary so much stronger with this testimonial:

“Charismatic and keenly capable, Judy is a superb coach whose warmth invites clients with challenging issues to map their success strategies and enjoy the journey to happiness and well-being. Dedicated, loyal, and curious, Judy’s coaching hums with a unique rhythm of wisdom and contagious playfulness. I highly recommend her to those seeking a talented, caring coach.”

— Ben Dean Ph.D., Founder/President MentorCoach LLC

Good things in this updated profile?

Judy removed all the former work references that didn’t match what she wants today. She asked questions about where her audience’s problems were, put a strong recommendation within her summary, and she used keywords such as “positive psychology” throughout her copy.

Her results? She certainly made bigger book sales, one of her goals, and she established herself as a top person and positivity coach. Notice her humor and wit. That helps!

Placement Matters

If you don’t engage in the important summary part and place it as the first section, you’ll miss out on attracting your primary audience to connect with you, and after some time, to trust, like and even buy from you. Every week, visit your profile and pay attention to all the people who have visited it, searched it, and found you. Interact with them and invite them to join you for further success.

That could be your own group! When clients form their own group, they can get so more visibility and credibility. They are seen as the expert in their field.

Mistake 2. You don’t use search engine optimization

You may not have realized that a LinkedIn profile is like your own website copy that entices your visitors to “buy.” You want headlines and benefits that grab. And, even more powerful, use keywords that your LinkedIn audiences puts into the search window when looking for your kind of information or service.

These strategies tell it all – who you are, who you help, and how you help them.

Remember the search windows that come up when you visit LinkedIn? Your audience who wants your service or products will put in keywords that match their interests. These rank you in comparison with your competition. Keywords matter because more of your best audience can find you easily out of a sea of other businesses. You want to build LinkedIn profile traffic just as you build targeted traffic to your website.

Your goal for your LinkedIn profile is to serve your audience community, showcase who you are, and get them to your website where you continue to earn their liking you, trusting you, and then buying from you.

Highly competitive coaches and consultants will stand out from the crowds and get ranked on the first page at least. You can build your ranking even higher when you change your keywords to phrases that count. One place to incorporate them is right under Your Name.

Example.

My webmaster did a test with my profile headline. We added these keyword phrases and measured their success in 2011 and 2012. Notice you have about 120 characters to use for this.

Example.

Judy Cullins (Keywords in 119 characters)

Brand Business With a Book | eBook Writing | Self Publishing | Book Marketing | 25 Year Writing Coach @bookcoaching.com

Ranking Results in 2011 and 2012?

eBook Marketing Coach #1 in both years

eBook Writing #2 in both years

eBook Coach #3 in both years

Book Marketing #6 in 2011 and #1 in 2012

eBook publishing #3 and #2

online book marketing #1 in both years

These kinds of rankings are helpful and show your expertise among the 161 million LinkedIn users. Those keywords get your LinkedIn audience to your profile! And that is worth a lot!  Include keywords in your recommendations and summary too. These can include your full name (maybe your URL), one of your book or program titles, or one of the keywords you use under your name at the top of your profile.

Mistake 3. You don’t focus on high-value strategies and actions that bring the biggest results

One complaint I hear over and over is that you don’t have enough time and energy for social media. You may think that marketing is like a root canal – painful and doesn’t bring enough results. Or, you just want to work on your other projects.

I can relate. I love writing books and blogs to help my audience of success-minded business people. I love content marketing to showcase talents, but also to enjoy all of the wonderful coaching relationships I’ve been in. So many clients have become long time friends. The good fortune of coaching is you get to work with insightful, spunky, and talented business people who just need a little guidance to get their word out.

If you are a coach or consultant, think about where your audience hangs out. I bet most of them use LinkedIn strategically. Their attitude? They think marketing is important to get more visibility, credibility and likeability (and sales to match). They are active in a few groups where their audience participates.

The smart ones also create their own group to show their expertise to a very targeted audience.

What to invest in and what to drop

Do you know what the best resources are that make your business hum along with just the right efforts and payoffs?

When I first used social media, I joined Twitter. At first, I collected a lot of followers and also followed them back. While this is friendly, it is a big mistake because of the lack of strategy. I learned from the pros – better to mostly follow influential people in your field and really enthusiastic business people who want what information you have.

You just won’t have the time to interact with 1000’s of people who are new and don’t know this game. Tweets are good for sharing tips, links to free books and teleseminars, and now blog post links that guarantee more targeted traffic. You’ll also want to retweet to your group others who are good role models and offer a lot.

Better to follow a few hundred of top people in your field, become friends, do them favors and relish your new online friends, because a joint venture with just a few will bring you far more than a product sale.

When an industry leader likes your content, they will share it with their huge groups, and you will become a major player in the online world. Ask them questions; offer to help them such as retweeting their message to your followers or recommending their books or programs. When you market to a primary audience, you won’t waste time, you’ll be part of a community, become friends and benefit by cross promotions and recommendations of one another.

Beware of tweeting too much. Your audience will leave you if they think you’re spamming. Tweet only a few times each day and post by hand your blog messages with graphics to your Facebook fan pages. Not many of Facebook people will respond to a tweet message. They expect pictures.

Check and correct what’s working and what’s not

You too will change your social media marketing strategy when you use Google Analytics to find out where your biggest traffic comes from.

For myself, these numbers told me that Facebook doesn’t deliver like LinkedIn.  My best referral sources from the summer of 2012…

1. Google

2. LinkedIn

3. Facebook

4.Twitter

In fact, just 2 years ago, my traffic doubled from submitting blog posts to the LinkedIn groups. When your web traffic expands, so does your business. You will get to your web traffic sweet spot too.

You probably remember these words: When you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you keep on getting the same results. Insanity! When you dump social media time wasters that don’t get you results, you are an evolved business person that doesn’t do crazy.

As LinkedIn continues to grow in number and you incorporate only High Level Actions (HLA’s) and strategies for your profile, you’ll notice many more searches for you and your business category, yielding more profile visitors. With a little effort and coaching you can change your profile to bring  the audience you want to serve (we can’t serve all audiences well)  to your LinkedIn profile.

When they love and want what you do, they will interact with you and most likely check out your website to find out more about you. These are the powerful steps that lead to what you want – more clients, more joint ventures, and more product sales.

Sharing is Caring!

What high level actions have you taken on your LinkedIn profile? What do you think brings you the most business on LinkedIn?