00:24 Today we're going to talk about LinkedIn. A lot of people think about LinkedIn as a place for people who wear suits, lawyers, insurance agents. You know what I mean, but that really couldn't be further from the truth. I've created a helpful checklist for you based on everything discussed in this episode. Just text LINKEDINCHECKLIST, all one word to 44222, and I'll send it right over. I want you to think about this. When somebody googles you or better yet, go ahead and log out of your browser and log back in a incognito. Either log out, have someone else log in, do it from another computer, but the point is make sure that you go to google as a stranger, not as yourself. OK? And then type in to the Google search bar, your name, and tell me what comes up. I am willing to bet that one or two things are gonna pop up.
01:25 It's either going to be your LinkedIn profile if you have a LinkedIn account or your facebook profile. And guess what? Even if you are not active on LinkedIn, even if you are not active on Facebook, those two things are likely going to be the first two that pop up. So what I recommend to everybody who's on social media is that if you have opened up an account somewhere, even if you're not active there, if you're going to keep that account open, you need to make sure it looks as good as it can, right? Because you may want people to come on over and Google you and then land on the website that you just spent $20,000 creating. But unfortunately they're going to land where they land, right? And you only get that one, or I should say five to six seconds to make a great first impression.
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02:17 And, and the good news is it's so very easy to do this on LinkedIn and I'm going to give you some great tips to help you do this really well and pretty quickly. OK, first of all, you want to make sure that you have all star status on LinkedIn. And all that means is that you have completed your profile. And the great thing is LinkedIn will let you know what's missing in order for you to achieve this all star status. And, uh, another question I get asked a lot is if I use the paid version of LinkedIn, I don't, I get everything I need from the free account. But if you're a recruiter or someone who needs use LinkedIn a lot to do business, then it might be worth, worth it for you to explore the paid option. For me, it works fine to use the free version.
03:09 So getting all star status. First of all, let's talk about your summary of what a lot of people do in their summary is they make it, first of all, they do it in the third person, like the old fashioned way. The way that you write a resume and it's really dry and it would say like Jennifer Lehner achieved her degree in sociology from the College of Charleston and then pursued blah, blah, blah, boring. Even if you are a rocket scientist, nobody wants to read all that. Nobody has the time, so don't bore people. That's like number one and you'll see a lot of that. So you want to actually write your LinkedIn profile in the first person. It's so much more interesting that way. Secondly, think about telling a story so you can absolutely get creative, right? I've seen people start from the earliest days of collecting baseball cards and providing links throughout the story that will enhance the story that much more.
04:16 Right? So I grew up in a small town in Kansas, so maybe you can hyperlink the phrase small town in Kansas to go to, I don't know that that towns chamber of commerce or your favorite donut shop or whatever, but you could get really, really creative here. Uh, the other thing is don't have one giant chunk of text. It's very off putting for all of us really to see a daunting amount of copy, so you want to have a break up your text with a white space or even bullets. Bullets are great and think about having a section that's is who I am, who I can help, what I do like really, really direct. So as people are reading it, they could say, oh yeah, she's for me or he's not for me. And the other thing with your profile is let's keep it visually interesting.
05:12 So starting at the tippy top of your page, there's a banner and the. I'm not going to give you the specs on that because it honestly changes month by month, but you can easily Google LinkedIn banner specs and get the dimensions that you need. Hire someone at Fiverr.com or Upwork or do it yourself over at Canva.com, and I'll put all this in the show notes, but you can easily create a really attractive banner and Hey, as long as you have that, why not use that real estate to put another reminder of what it is you do or who you serve and maybe your phone number or your big domain name so they can't miss it. The other thing is your, your actual heading next your name, so whenever you move around Linkedin, this is, this follows you everywhere and LinkedIn is a database just like Google, so when people search google or Linkedin, if you have the right keywords in your, in your title, in your heading, then it's going to help you to get found that much more easily by the people who who need to find you.
06:22 OK? So you may have noticed when you're on Linkedin, some people will say financial advisors seeking opportunities in the home health industry. The point here is that your headline is dynamic. You can change it on a daily basis. You could change it based on whatever kind of outreach or networking you're going to be doing that day. If you know that people are going to be looking at your LinkedIn profile on a particular day, like let's say you're going to a convention or and you're going to be meeting a lot of people or you're going to be speaking, taking the stage, you can change your heading to suit that purpose. Again, highly searchable, so you want to put those keywords. If in my case, I'm a digital marketing strategist, I absolutely have that in there. If you're a consultant, it should be in there. What you do should be in there very explicitly.
07:12 This is not a place to get clever, although if you have room after the fact and want to say that you're passionate about diving deep sea diving or you're passionate about golden retrievers, you would be surprised what a great ice breaker that can be. All right. The next thing I want to talk about is the difference between a status update and an article, so when you head over to your profile, you'll see that there's an opportunity to share a status update or to post the link to something that you've read, an industry article that you think might be interesting to your audience, but then there's another place where you can post an article, and this is a really overlooked feature in LinkedIn, but it's really, really powerful. So what you're able to do is, and this is what what I like to do is if you're already blogging, is to literally copy everything from your blog post after you write your blog posts and then come over here to LinkedIn and paste all that into their word processor.
08:15 So when you go to post an article or to write an article on Linkedin, it actually opens up their really nice, easy to use sleek word processing tool. OK, so you. Not only that, I noticed the other day that I went to one of my blog posts because I was demonstrating this very thing and I copied the whole article and the article actually, or the blog posts had a lot of links in it, so a lot of the words and phrases and sentence were hyperlinked to outside resources, so I copied all of that and went over to LinkedIn and pasted it into an article and all those phrases and words stayed linked with, which saved me a huge amount of time. In these articles, you can put all sorts of rich media photos shifts, which are those animated pictures, slide decks, video. Really. You can put anything in there.
09:09 You can put anything that's embeddable like with an eye frame. You can also embed as well, so they look very good. They look very professional without a lot of work, a lot of extra work. The next thing is you want to make sure it will ask you to tag your article. I think you get up to three tags that you can use. This is very important and here's why. If LinkedIn thinks that your article is relevant to a larger audience using their publishing program called Pulse, they will share it out with the, with the hashtags or the the groups who follow the topics that you tagged and I don't know what their algorithm is because as it turns out, it's not like you have to have a ton of engagement, likes, shares, comments on any given article for them to put this impulse, but there is something that they're looking for and what will happen is much to my delight, this has happened several times where I'll post an article and Pulse will pick it up and thousands of people will see it way more people than would ever see it on my blog.
10:17 And here is the most important thing about posting articles on Linkedin. The minute that you posted an article on Linkedin, all of your connections are notified. This does not happen when you just do a status update. So this is huge. They're going to get a notification that you just published an article, so if you do this consistently, and that's really the key you guys with everything that we do online is that if you pick a lane and be consistent and you're guaranteed to see great results, and lastly I want to talk about another very overlooked powerful feature on LinkedIn and that's because it's relatively new and that is video, so a couple months ago LinkedIn announced that you could post native video to the platform and really all that means is that you could publish a video directly to LinkedIn without having to put it on YouTube first or Wistia or Vimeo.
11:19 You could just upload it directly to LinkedIn and it looks so, so, so much better. It takes up so much more space, so much more real estate in the newsfeed, so more people are likely to see it. That's number one. Number two is this is likely a pre cursor to LinkedIn having live streaming on the platform and because they want you to use this feature, they are favoring you when you do so. It's a really good time to take advantage of that and if you're shy about being in front of the camera, I would tell you that there are ways around this. First of all, you could do a video that is is a slideshare right or a slide deck and you could give some value to your audience. You could give industry updates, your top 10 list of favorite industry books, your favorite podcast, and you can actually just present that in a video format. LinkedIn having live streaming on the platform and because they want you to use this feature, they are favoring you when you do so. It's a really good time to take advantage of that and if you're shy about being in front of the camera, I would tell you that there are ways around this. First of all, you could do a video that is is a slideshare right or a slide deck and you could give some value to your audience. You could give industry updates, your top 10 list of favorite industry books, your favorite podcast, and you can actually just present that in a video format.
12:16 That is a slide deck and you don't have to be on camera, but I do think it's way more powerful if you. If you do get yourself on camera because the whole goal here is to connect with your audience. It's called social media for a reason, and you want to connect and engage. You want them to know you and like you and trust you because as we know, we all do business with people who we know, like and trust. This episode of the Front Row Entrepreneur podcast has been brought to you by the Front Row VIP, a private membership community where members enjoy all of the latest, greatest, and most practical tips and strategies for building an online business. This membership includes live coaching calls, a library of fresh step by step trainings and a support community. Unlike any you will find it anywhere. At the time of this recording, membership is open for a crazy low rate of $37 a month. You could go to frontrowvip.com to learn more. I've created a helpful checklist for you based on everything discussed in this episode. Just text LINKEDINCHECKLIST, all one word to 44222 and I'll send it right over. See you next time.
