Hi folks. Great to see you again. If you are new to this channel, my name
is Bill Benoist. I'm certified professional career coach here in Silicon Valley. Today,
it's going be a really short video. I'm going to keep this under five minutes, but what I want
to do is I want to share with you the steps for creating a vanity URL with your LinkedIn profile,
also known as customizing your LinkedIn URL. Now, I recognize a number of people that may
have turned on this video have already done this. But I've also noticed that there's a lot of people
out there that have still not customized their LinkedIn URL. And this is something I really
highly encourage you to do. Not only if you're in career transition or you're looking for a new job,
but also if you're a small business owner and you want to promote yourself out there. It's
just a way to show hiring managers, recruiters, even customers out there that you are tech savvy,
and that you have attention to detail that the little things matter in life.
So let me go ahead and share my screen with you. For demonstration purposes, I've actually created
a brand new LinkedIn account. The only thing that I've done with this account since creating it was
add a profile photo. So, there's no background image on the banner. There's no work history.
There's no “About” statement. There are no connections. This is simply LinkedIn fresh
out of the box. And what I want you to notice is up here in the address bar, this string of
numbers that LinkedIn has placed as a default next to the username. And this happens when you create
a brand-new LinkedIn account. We have 810 million users on LinkedIn currently as of 2022. And a lot
of people have already gone and customized this, but I've still seen a lot of LinkedIn profiles
that have never changed this number out there. And you really wanna do this for a number of reasons.
Number one, it really kind of, you know, when you have this, this string here with that string
of numbers, it looks really kind of tacky on a resume. But by changing this, you're just showing
the recruiter or the hiring manager that your tech savvy, that you have attention to detail that the
little things matter in life. And you know, also by customizing your LinkedIn URL by creating this
vanity URL, it's also making it easier for search engine optimization. So, search engines out there
like Google, Bing, those things, are going to be able to find you a lot quicker. So, we want to
customize this a lot of different reasons. It's not gonna make any kind of changes whatsoever
to your LinkedIn account. In general, it's not gonna affect your contacts, your postings, nothing
in history. It's just simply going to change the URL address and that's all its gonna do.
So, to make this happen, what you want to do is when you're in edit mode, you go over here to edit
public profile in URL. And by the way, just to get into edit mode for those of you that might not
know that is when you've signed into your LinkedIn, you're on your homepage of LinkedIn,
just go over here and click on your name. And that puts you in edit mode. You'll know
you're in edit mode because you see these little pencils here where you can make changes and stuff.
So, once you're in edit mode, go over and click on edit public profile and URL. And then you'll see
a little pencil right here. It says, edit your custom URL, personalize URL for your profile,
and you see a little pencil there. So, you're gonna click on that
and you're gonna simply go over to the far right of that number. And you're gonna backspace over
it until you've removed everything. And then you will go ahead and click on save. And that's
all there is to it. And I'm gonna go ahead and click on home and I'm going to go over here and
I'm going to reload this page, go back into my edit and you'll see that number is gone.
So, one thing I should have pointed out, and that is that sometimes we have very common names. And
so, when you click that save button, it may not save because that name's already been taken. So,
what you need to do is you have to play around with it sometimes, you know, so instead of
having your first name H and last name, you might want to have a first name, middle name,
last name, or a first name, middle initial, last name. Remember to keep the hyphens between
these, uh, names because spaces will not work. Periods will not work. Uh, first initial,
middle initial name, last name, try to keep the URL as close to your username as possible. It's
gonna look a lot cleaner on your resume. So, I hope you found this video informative and useful,
and if you haven't already done, so make sure that you subscribed it as channel hit the bell
notification. As I do upload new crew tips and strategies every Tuesday, and I hate for you to
miss anything. Thanks again for stopping by. And I look forward to seeing you next week, take care.