using linkedin i've closed multiple six-figure deals secured high-paying jobs and built an
effective personal brand on the platform now today i'm going to teach you my top
tips for using linkedin and how to effectively optimize your profile for the highest chances
of success when using the platform so if you're a business owner maybe you're looking for a new
job or you even just want to build a personal brand on linkedin then this video is for you
now before we jump onto the mac we're gonna go through some quick statistics for those of you
that are unsure whether you should invest your time in linkedin in 2021 is it still a platform
that's even worth using as of today linkedin have 722 million users now to put that into
context instagram have 1 billion and facebook have 2.7 billion so it's not the biggest social
media platform in the world but with a focus on business users it's an audience worth noticing now
40 million people look for a new job on linkedin every single week so if your company is hiring
your linkedin page could be a great source of traffic for new employees and obviously we
cannot do physical screening right now in person and so online tools are even more important and 81
of talent professionals have said that virtual screening will continue after the pandemic now
it's because of this that three people are hired using linkedin every single minute from the 55
million companies that are using the platform so it's safe to say that linkedin is a very effective
business tool but before we use it we need to establish why it is we want to be on the platform
in the first place are we trying to look for a job are we trying to sell our products or services and
reach out to new potential customers or are we just trying to network and build a personal brand
you need to figure out why you want to use it in the first place so you can cater your profile
to that reason and make sure you have the highest chances of success on the platform so think about
that before we now turn around go on to the mac and i'll show you my best linkedin tips and how
to optimize your profile okay so let's jump straight into how to optimize your linkedin
profile and leave the best first impression with your potential customers now what i'm not
going to do is show you how to create an account because it's super easy to waste both of our time
go over to linkedin.com hit sign up and your name your email address a few other details and you'll
create an account what i am going to do is go from the top to the bottom of my profile and show you
all the things that you need to make sure you have in play and some of the best practices as well
so we'll start from the top first thing we need to highlight is our cover photo or our background
image you want to make sure this is something relevant to you this is you doing what you do
best okay for filling a service or showing your product something relevant to what you're trying
to achieve from this profile if you don't have any personal images go over to linkedinbackground.com
there's a link in the description and you can use a ton of different stock images relevant to your
business but just make sure you have one on there so your profile does not look incomplete this is
just me at a social media seminar teaching some people about facebook ads and web-based funnels
we didn't have our profile image and this ideally wants to be a professional headshot
doesn't actually have to be professional from a photographer you can use a smartphone because
they all have great cameras these days and you can get your partner even to take a picture of you in
front of a wall uh plain wall ideally white or it can be a colored wall just no fancy uh wallpapers
unless it's relevant to your brand when we're doing anything and uploading any profile pictures
or any cover photos on any of our social media platforms we need to make sure that they are
continuous with our brand okay they're the right color scheme and so when someone goes on their
website and they go on our social media they can see that that brand has been followed across and
it just builds a better image and again a stronger lasting impression with our potential customers
we didn't obviously have our name make sure that's correct and our subtitle so here i say
i help business owners or here or i have i help business owners find success using social media
so we're directly calling out to exactly what we do we want this to be keyword reach richer people
when people search us they will be able to find us ideally if someone put social media for example
um or success um but it needs to highlight exactly who you are and what you do so i have
three companies two training businesses and one online digital marketing agency both of which help
business owners find success using social media so that summarizes absolutely everything i do
and for my potential customers they'll be able to tell that straight away
then have a location set be as specific as possible with your location
and then moving down we have our about section or our bio now it's really key in here there's an
age-old debate between um first person writing and second person writing or first person writing and
third person writing i should say first person is when we're writing about ourselves so
i am the founder of affluent.com or third person is jordan clatton is the founder of affluent.com
okay so we're writing about someone else now um it's a bit ironic because mine is third person
this was actually written by a member of our team so of course it would be third person but
people these days tend to lean towards first person more because it's more personal and you're
reaching out to your audience directly you're almost speaking to your audience when you're
explaining who you are and what you do third person is more so for the corporate world and
more professional based profiles but it really does not make it's not going to be the difference
between someone responding positively to an inquiry or a sales inquiry or negatively okay
it's really personal preference and what you like best third or first person but if you
are a customer-facing business you want to call out directly to your audience you're going to be
selling on the platform actively the first person in this day and age is probably going to convert a
bit better for you so you probably need to change this um but but you always should be able to
explain who you are and what you do in your businesses in two paragraphs maximum make
sure you put your extra social links in there as well because if you have a following on any
other platform or you provide content on the other platform people can then find out about that and
see that content but you should not put any more than two paragraphs in your bio if not then you're
just rambling and there's unnecessary noise inside there so get straight to the point and explain who
you are what you do and who you do it for going down well we can see this is an all-star profile
on linkedin um which basically just means we've got this profile filled in correctly i've had this
profile for quite a long time and i used to use this in an old sales based role which you'll see
in a moment we used to sell non-stop on linkedin all day every day pretty much every day of the
week um so it was pretty pretty full on but i learned a lot about the platform and how to best
utilize it i'm heavily zoomed in right now so you can see everything this is not normally how
your profile will look we'll come back to activity because this is something important to highlight
we want to go down to experience now what you need to do here is you need to make sure you
have all your relevant job experience and i say relevant because it needs to be relevant to what
you are trying to achieve right now in business and who you are trying to reach out to you know
don't need to put your your paper round job when you're 12 years old or the restaurants that you
used to work at i don't have all the restaurants i used to work out i don't have the apple store from
when i used to sell iphones and ipads i don't need to have that it's not relevant to what i'm
trying to achieve right now and so i only have job roles which are relevant to everything i'm doing
so i have a events manager for a nightclub business i used to run an events business
and uh yeah it taught me a lot about conversing with people and it was my first entry to sales
and then her business development executive at an advertising company again building that weight
behind the marketing agency that we have this is where i use linkedin a hell of a lot we used
to reach out to multi-million pound companies just on linkedin their ceos managing directors
i met the managing director of universal studios and the creative director just through outreaching
on linkedin alone i actually have a video on my youtube channel don't watch it right now
but i'll put a link somewhere you can watch it after this where i actually go through the kind
of outreach i used to use within that sales role number one business development manager and then
we're going up to our actual jobs that we have at now or businesses that we have now i should say
now when you have all of these listed make sure they are actually linked to a business profile
okay or a business page because you don't want this to be um when somebody clicks on this company
page it doesn't go through to anything okay it needs to have an actual company profile so
there's the credibility there and people can see exactly who it is you're working for or what your
company actually does okay because you've got a well filled in profile let's go back to mine
um so if we scroll down from here again just another thing to highlight on here we need to
make sure we have a very simple but to the point description of your business if it's your business
and for any previous job roles explain exactly what you did specifically so again any of your
potential customers can see uh what you did at those roles in your your previous experience
which again will back up and build credibility to your outreach we don't have education
now this doesn't matter if it's not relevant all education is good to put in here at some kind of
high level education you don't need to put your gcses if you're from the uk or the equivalent
if you're abroad it doesn't really matter what you did at a high school level in this day and age but
it doesn't matter if anything you did outside of that level so any college or degrees anything from
university or higher education extracurricular stuff add that in here i went to university i
studied architecture so i've got a certificate of higher education in architecture even though it's
not relevant to what i've got just builds that well-rounded profile and shows you're an educated
person so put that in there if you have that not that go to university means to an educated
person because this day and age it really does um licenses and certifications so again i've
got first aid at work here um actually expired in april 2019 so don't anybody be keeling over on me
and again i've got my certificate in higher education but again anything
that you have in there any certificate or certifications put them on there for
example if you join the affluent academy our training business for agency owners or you
enrolled in any of our learn ads programs or learn ads pro programs then you will be presented with
with a certificate when you completed that course so you can put in learn ads and you could learn
about one of our facebook ads courses and in here you could put facebook ad pro okay because
you went through our facebook ad pro course and you've got a certificate at the end of that you
can put your issue date and your serial number which is on the end of your certificate we don't
give certificates to anyone in our free training because you haven't gone through absolutely all
of us to learn about facebook ads so if you want a certificate you want a bit of a certification
on there which is validated by the cpd which is a global institution that certifies and
accredits online training programs then you need to be in our pro training anyway enough for that
skills and endorsement so this is where we can add anything that we are good at all of
our skills okay it's pretty straight to the point and self-explanatory this one so we can hit add a
new skill and we can type in any skills which are relevant to what we're trying to achieve right now
i've got a ton on here which are from previous job roles and you can see we've got a ton of
endorsements as well now an endorsement just means that someone is validating that you are who you
say you are and you can do what you're saying you can do so once you actually add all of your um
skills on here you can send a message to a couple of friends or your colleagues or all around the
office and basically say hey would you be up for endorsing me on linkedin and in return i'll
endorse you so it's a like for like someone you get some endorsements they get an endorsement as
well you're both building more credibility on your page but it's a really good thing to have and when
you're again you're doing outreach and someone visits your profile it validates that you are who
you say you are you can do what you say you can do going down from there we have recommendations so
here this is just a way of people leaving reviews on your profile i don't actually
have any relevant reviews to what i'm achieving right now but all reviews or recommendations are
a testament to your character and even if that's based on projects you've done before like we have
the creative director of universal studios here george walker great person to work with and that's
a big credible person which is validating that i conducted a really great project with them and
any recommendation you can get from anyone even if it's an old boss that you have from an old
job that you used to get on with send them a message get them to put a review in there for
you because it's just going to it's just going to again build a well-rounded profile and give you
more credibility so again do the same thing follow the same principle as uh endorsements here send a
message to people all of your colleagues all of your friends and say i'll leave a recommendation
for you if you you can leave a recommendation from me you can hit this ask a recommendation button
here and it'll literally send an invitation for you to whoever you want to send it to
so that's that and then finally on our profile we have interests so you want to make sure these are
relevant interests these are kind of interested i had when i was using linkedin a lot more in the
construction industry but this what this does is it allows your prospects when they come over to
your profile to see what you are interested in what kind of pages you like what kind of
groups you are into and so make sure these are relevant to to your business industry this is
the reason i haven't updated this is because it's not so important for me anymore i have
a well-rounded profile but for a beginner it's really nice to have relevant interests in there
when you don't have existing you don't have existing connections for example because this
is what's going to validate your profile and this is what's going to gonna going to um assert that
you are uh somebody who was genuinely interested in what you're actually trying to achieve on the
platform whether selling your products or your services or expanding your business so that is
how to build a well-rounded profile on linkedin really simple it doesn't have to be complicated
just make sure you get straight to the point there's no fluff on here and most importantly
it's genuine and honest okay everything on here no lies whatsoever don't bother putting i'm
featured in forms not about that they're selling off around this that any other because that kind
of thing doesn't really wash in your subtitle these days okay because everybody these days
the best-selling author it's not hard to get a best-selling author badge on amazon and so
i think people were starting here to get wise for that so shy away from doing that and just
offer out genuine value offer out or mention exactly who you are who you're trying to reach out
to and what you were trying to do for that person why should that they should accept your connection
request or accept your sales message now talking of connection requests i'll go over to my network
and what i'll do is just show you here and so this is where we see our invitations and
we see we've got 1493 invitations right now so we get a lot every day and our team actually go
through this and accept people um because they look at everyone's profile and just see okay is
this someone we want to accept now the way that linkedin works a lot of people have this wrong
you don't just want to accept everyone you can on linkedin having loads of followers on linkedin
doesn't matter no one cares about it there aren't linkedin influencers although they kind of are
people who feel like there are but it's not that kind of a profile it's a professional profile
for networking with people you genuinely want to network with so don't go around and launch
a profile just try to add as many people as you possibly can it's not going to go well for you you
just want to make sure you're adding people who you actually want to network or you already know
so people who are relevant to you and people you have a genuine interest in and if you are putting
in a a connection request in there put a personal message if i ever look at my connection request to
be honest because i don't have the time to go through every profile i just accept everybody
that puts a personal message in there okay it says to me that they definitely or they personally want
to reach out to me they haven't just spammed my profile or anyone in the marketing industry and
tried to accept me and try to add me sorry so all of you guys who have just accepted welcome to the
clan apologies if any of you have been waiting for a long time to to get accepted sometimes people
slip through the net but we are getting a lot on the daily basis the team do try and keep on top
of this but it's not something which is high up on the priority list so if you are waiting on an
exception you want to be accepted on linkedin then drop me over an email and i'll make sure someone
accepts you um but yeah we go for this one by one and you should do exactly the same thing look and
make sure the people that are trying to add you are relevant to what you're trying to achieve
on the platform itself or you want to gain value from what posts they could be potentially putting
out there as well so a couple of things to take into consideration we won't go on messaging or
jobs or anything like that for now because we are going to be doing a bit of a linkedin series
i do already have a video which is going through how to sell on linkedin so you can go watch that
after this um but we are going to be going through other areas of linkedin later on in future videos
but for now we're just going to keep it to the profile itself uh but one final thing i do want
to go through is activity and there's actually posts you can put out on your linkedin you put
a post out by going on home and starting a post very similar to any other social media platform
but if i go back over to the profile itself and i'll show you the posts that we've put out so if i
go and see all activity now what's key on linkedin and one of the big mistakes people make is they
try and sell through that post okay they put a lot of posts out there put a tiny bit of value
and at the end they have a call to action for some people to direct message them don't bother
doing that linkedin is a platform with a kind of platform where you build authority through value
just put out advice in your industry uh give out free value strive to do what we do and give more
away for free than your competitors have then your customers pay for it's not actually how we set
give more away for free than others have you paid for but technically it's giving more away for free
than your competitors have you paid for anyway irrelevant so yeah just provide value make sure
that you're not asking for anything in return you can share client results so you can do a bit of
a bit of a bit of ego building on that okay this all helps okay so for example for our agency we do
share our client results in here make sure you put a watermark so no one steals them
but again we're not actually trying to sell from this if somebody wants to message us on
the back of this they can so we're not being a leech on the newsfeed and nobody likes that
okay your profile will get down ranked your your post won't show up on the newsfeed as
much and you'll just leave a sour taste in the eyes or the mouth of your potential customers
so just give value away and don't ask for anything in return and business will come to you trust
me that's always how it works lead with value first and then follow with sales if you've got
a solid foundation a post on your page when you do go to outreach to people when you do go to
sell to somebody in messages on direct messages um then when they look at your profile and they
see that you're just providing value out there they're gonna have a good first impression of
you and be much more likely to respond positively you can always you can um also add posts onto your
business page as well so for example affluent.com we're regularly sharing content on there as well
okay lots of the same content but again if somebody wants to look at the business
profile they can see that we're building this brand on linkedin at the same time and that
builds a well-rounded brand for your company and ultimately leads to higher success and
conversion rates on the platform so i think that's pretty much everything i want to go through today
on building your profile is enough to to get you stuck in with and for you to take action
on we are going to again be creating more videos in the future on linkedin but for now
that's how to optimize your linkedin profile let's turn around to the other camera
okay so that is the end of this video today i hope you have enjoyed it please do comment down below
with your best tips for using linkedin what are the best things that you have achieved in using
the platform and things you have learned along the way let's all muck in and help each other
out as i said earlier we also have a sales based linkedin video i'll put a link somewhere around
this video make sure you go and watch that after this one if you want to learn how to sell your
products and services using the linkedin platform i'm sure we're gonna make more linkedin videos in
the future depending on how this video goes so yeah hope you have enjoyed it make sure you're
subscribed with your notification bell turned on and i'll see you all very very soon cheers