5 tips to improve your LinkedIn profile so clients will notice you immediately

LinkedIn is a great online business platform with lots of opportunities. To find these opportunities you must connect with more people. Use these tips to improve your LinkedIn profile to become connected.

At this moment you have about 200 connections or less? You only connect with people that you have spoken with and have met personally?

I will be honest with you.
This is a mistake.

Connect on LinkedIn

When you are in a room networking, trying to find people that you can help. It is not helpful when you only talk to people that you already know.

Expand your network with new people. Connecting these people with your connections that can help them will make you shine.

You want your business to grow and become big. The best and easiest way to do this is to help as many people as you can.

LinkedIn

Increase your chances to become big by using the online tools helping even more people. These tools can make it easy for you.

Tools like LinkedIn have a lot of data they use to find similarities between you and possible connections. LinkedIn is looking for hooks that you would normally look for in the chit-chat part of your conversation. You are looking for a link where you can connect easily with the person you are talking to.

LinkedIn does this for you.

You just have to use it and connect with people you have never spoken to before. LinkedIn is creating a window of opportunities to meet great new people.

LinkedIn is the most important online business networking platform. It has 238 million members in over 200 countries and is available in 20 languages.

It is a great platform when you want potential clients to find you. Especially if you work in a business to business (B2B) environment. Maybe you are a career coach and work with employees, or you are a business coach and work with small business owners. Or you are a team coach and work with management teams, boards and CEO’s.

Open yourself to more connections on LinkedIn and actively search for potential connections. LinkedIn will show you more potential connections when you are connected to more people.

The more connections you have, the more open LinkedIn will become for you.

Here are 5 tips you can use to get more connections on LinkedIn.

Increase LinkedIn connections

1. Business cards

When you meet new people during events, a training or when you speak at an event. Ask for their business card.

Once you are back in the office, add these people in LinkedIn using their email address that you find on their business card.

  1. Find their profile on LinkedIn using the search bar at the top
  2. Click the ‘Connect’ button
  3. Select ‘Other’
  4. Enter the email address
  5. Include a personal message.
  6. Hit ‘Send invitation’

After this action you can file their business card…. in the trash can. Your new connection will keep their LinkedIn profile up-to-date. A business card is on average outdated within 18 months.

2. LION

Become a LinkedIn Open Networker (LION). According to the policies of LinkedIn you are not allowed to invite people to connect that you do not know.

However, there are people on LinkedIn that call themselves LinkedIn Open Networkers and they are more open for connecting with people they don’t know.

You can use this to grow your network faster – you are just more open to connect with people you have not met before. See for example How to be a LinkedIn Open Networker – Some tips to do this the right way.

This doesn’t mean you have to connect with everyone that invites you. Look at their profile and see if you find it interesting to connect. If yes, connect. If no, just click ‘Ignore’.

3. Email address

Add your email address to your LinkedIn profile, for example in your Summary. This way you make it easier for people to connect with you. They can now use your email address and follow the steps in point 1.

4. Premium account

Order a premium account to get more access. With a business account (EUR 360 per year for Basic version) you can get in contact with anyone via InMail (10 per month). You can see more profiles when you search and see full profiles of people that viewed your profile.

And there are more advantages when you have a premium account

5. Connect with your email contacts

Find the people that are in your email address book and within LinkedIn. When you use an online email service like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail this is easy to do.

LinkedIn will find contacts in your address book that are also on LinkedIn and that you are not connected to on LinkedIn at the moment.

Find email contacts in LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/fetch/importAndInviteEntry

Why are your LinkedIn connections growing so slowly

  • You don’t actively invite new people to connect
  • You only accept invitations from people you have met before
  • You have an incomplete profile
  • You forget to include a personal note with your invitations
  • You don’t check the ‘People you may know’ suggestions

5 tips to improve your LinkedIn profile so clients will notice you

What can you do to get quality and quantity in your LinkedIn connections?
Let’s start with the potential clients that lands on your profile in LinkedIn. Make sure your profile is clear to them. Some basic tips:

Improve your LinkedIn profile

1. Photo

People are more open when they meet and you smile. So, when you meet new people at networking events, smile. 🙂

Research has also shown that people remember the names better of people smiling in photographs.

5 important things for your profile photo LinkedIn and other networks:

  1. Smile – preferably the Duchenne smile
  2. Show your face
  3. Large profile photo – high quality
  4. Consistency – same photo in the online networking sites
  5. Gravatar – use gravatar so your profile photo gets connected to comments in WordPress blogs

For more information see, The perfect profile photo for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more – 5 tips

Change your profile photo here: linkedin.com/profile/edit-picture-info

2. Professional Headline

This is one of the first things people read when they land on your LinkedIn profile. It should give the reader a good idea of what you can do for them.

When your profile says, coach, owner, director, founder or something similar it does not help the reader.

Try to add your marketing message here. Answer 4 questions:

  • Who do you help?
  • What is their problem?
  • How do you solve it?
  • What is the result for the client?

Combine the answers to these four questions into one sentence, your marketing message.

You have 120 characters for your professional headline. Add a sentence that explains to the reader What’s In It For Me (WIIFM).

The professional headline in your LinkedIn profile is displayed in the search results. Here you see a LinkedIn profile in Google:

LinkedIn profile in search results

For most people their LinkedIn profile is listed on the first page when you search for their name in the search engines. That makes a clear professional headline even more important.

Create your perfect Professional Headline: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit-basic-info

3. Website

When you add the URL of your website, you can choose Company website or blog. Better is to select ‘Other’. Now you can add 30 characters to describe your website or a specific page in your website.

This tells the visitor of your profile more about your website than just ‘Company website’.
Choose other for website on LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit-additional-info

4. Contact information

You have a profile on LinkedIn to connect professionally with other people on LinkedIn. Your ideal client is probably on this platform. This depends on your hyperspecialization. You can also connect with partners and suppliers.

Make sure these people can contact you when they visit your profile on LinkedIn. Maybe they want to become your client or ask you a question.

Add your email address. It is good to have a special email address just for LinkedIn. It helps me to see when people add my LinkedIn email address to their subscriber list without asking for my approval. I never use this email address to subscribe to a newsletter.

Add your phone number and Instant Messenger (IM) like Skype or Google Talk.

Change or add your address, phone number and IM here http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit-personal-info

5. LinkedIn URL

When you become active with your LinkedIn profile, you want to share it with people. You can add it to the signature of your email for example.

This will be easier when you can remember the URL for your LinkedIn profile. This can be solved by customizing the LinkedIn URL to linkedin.com/in/yourname.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/public-profile-settings?trk=prof-ovw-edit-public_profile (At the right side – in the box ‘Your public profile URL’)

Bonus: Complete profile

Make sure your profile is 100% complete. People with a 100% complete profile are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities via LinkedIn.

What do you need to complete for a 100% complete profile?

  • Your industry and location
  • An up-to-date Current Position (with a description)
  • Two past positions
  • Your education
  • Your skills (minimum of 3)
  • A profile photo
  • At least 50 connections

What have you done lately for results with LinkedIn?

Share below your number one tip for an effective LinkedIn profile for coaches. Looking forward to see your tip.

Feel free to post your LinkedIn profile if you are now open for new connections ;).
Mine is linkedin.com/in/ernohannink, feel free to invite me to connect.

Credit photo: connect.euranet

By Erno Hannink

Sparring and accountability partner for entrepreneurs who create sustainable positive impact. Explores decision-making. Shares his insights on this in, articles, books (Dutch), podcast, newsletters, and tools. Has a life mission to reduce social and ecological inequality. Father of two children, husband of M., runs, referee for the national soccer league, and uses stoicism for calm. Lives in the Netherlands. Speaks Dutch, English, and German.