Three questions that will transform your LinkedIn profile
How to think deeply about a big opportunity
There’s a lotta upside
Your LinkedIn profile is the front door to your personal brand.
A great LinkedIn profile can help you build a powerful network, position yourself as a thought leader, secure job offers, or win new clients. It’s incredibly cheap online real estate with enormous potential future value.
Failing to properly craft your LinkedIn profile isn’t just amateur. It’s the act of leaving money on the table.
Switching focus
Unfortunately, people mostly fall into two camps when it comes to building their LinkedIn profiles.
They’ll either let it become an unused digital business card, collecting dust in the dark reaches of the interweb. Or worse, they’ll populate their profile with generic corporate fluff that means nothing to anyone.
Instead of just ‘filling in’ your profile and listing all the right things, I suggest you switch your focus to the bigger picture questions.
Three questions
Take 30–45 minutes to answer these three questions before you build your profile, and you’ll see disproportionate returns.
Who is this for?
There are basically three answers to this question.
- The first is that your profile is for recruiters, hiring managers, or executives at companies you’d like to work for.
- The second is clients. Your profile is designed to attract or retain clients of your company.
- The third is an audience. If you are working to build a following and craft a public personal brand, your profile is for your audience.
Who you design your profile for will have a significant impact on the rest of the steps in this article. Every other decision you make when designing your profile should address your audience and consider how to affects them.
What’s the call to action?
If you’re creating a great LinkedIn profile, you must be assuming that people are going to visit it. Once they’re there, what do you want them to do?
Every great LinkedIn profile should have a clear, compelling call to action. That is, something your audience can do to engage with you beyond just mindlessly scrolling through your expertise.
Your call to action will obviously depend on your target audience, but could include:
- Links to more examples of your work, including a portfolio, blogs or articles you’ve published, or your website.
- A link to book a meeting or consultation to learn more about your work and services.
- A giveaway that encourages people to sign up to your email list.
Once you have decided upon the call to action of your profile, you can craft the key sections (including your headline and ‘about’) to drive people towards this call to action.
Remember, your LinkedIn profile isn’t an end in itself. Instead, it’s the front door to a bigger conversion funnel that helps people better engage with you and your personal brand.
What do you want to be known for?
Think about your key skills, areas of expertise, or topics you’re interested in. What industries or sectors are you focused on? When people finally consider you a Thought Leader, what will it be for?
Make a list of 10 keywords (including skills, sectors or buzzwords) that will define your profile.
If you want to be known for a particular skillset (say Innovation), you need to be searchable in that domain. If people look for innovation specialists on Google or LinkedIn, your profile will come up — so long as you list those keywords on your profile.
Also, this process helps give your profile some shape and consistency, which are qualities of every great personal brand.
You obviously won’t be able to list all of your areas of expertise and skills. But this is the challenge of building a personal brand on the internet. You need to decide which parts of your personality are going up in lights.
Wrap up
Your answers to these questions will make it much easier to write a standout LinkedIn profile.
The key takeaway is to build your profile with your audience, outcome, and personal brand in mind.
Think about who you want to be, who you want to connect with, and what you want your audience to do.
These simple steps will help turn your profile into a valuable digital asset that creates opportunities you probably can’t even imagine.
