Unstoppable Career Growth: How to Build A Professional Brand on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become the go-to platform for networking, job search, and personal branding. When utilized effectively, LinkedIn is a powerful tool that can open doors to endless opportunities and propel your career forward.
In this episode, you'll hear insider tips, strategies, and actionable steps to help you create a LinkedIn profile that grabs attention, builds credibility, and positions you as an industry leader.
In This Episode, You Will Be Able to:
Create a personal brand that stands out
Build a comprehensive LinkedIn profile.
Take steps to build your network.
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Harnessing the Potential of LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become the go-to social media platform for professionals.
It's evolved a lot over the years and whether you are a seasoned professional or just starting out in your career, LinkedIn is a powerful tool to build your personal and professional brand.
It's a tool to help you advance your career in many ways. And today we're going to be taking a deep dive into the strategies on:
How to use LinkedIn to advance your career
How to open up opportunities
How to build a comprehensive profile to develop your personal brand
When I first started out in my career 20 plus years ago, I set up a LinkedIn profile and I used it as a tool for job hunting, and it was helpful. It helped me explore some opportunities that I saw with job postings.
I was able to connect with different people and expand my network, but I didn't truly understand how LinkedIn could attract opportunities that I didn't even know were out there. I had been with a company for five and a half years in the dental industry.
At first, I was looking for a job. I updated my LinkedIn profile, put together all of my experience and my sales awards, and built a comprehensive profile. But what I found with LinkedIn was so much more than I had originally thought.
I found the abundance of LinkedIn learning courses that I was able to take.
In addition to that, I started to follow posts, couple influencers or LinkedIn top voices on LinkedIn, and I stumbled upon a LinkedIn Top Voice, Heather Monahan. And Heather was so vulnerable and transparent and motivating with her posts, and it really inspired me to take a risk early on in starting my business, which I had no intentions of doing so at all.
It started with Heather's posts. She had started to share her experience of working in corporate, how she had a very successful year and career. However, she saw that there was so much more to what she could do, and I started to follow her post and I was like, “wow, these posts are so inspiring.”
And I started to engage with them.Then I started to say, well, what would it look like if I also use LinkedIn as an opportunity to build my professional and personal brand and inspire others?
It was just a lot of turmoil going on, and I wanted to use LinkedIn as a platform to inspire andmotivate others, to share my insights on how to have a successful career in sales, how to show up as an influential leader, and develop others. So I started posting on LinkedIn and people started commenting and my community started to grow and grow and grow.
Then people started to reach out to me and share how my posts inspired them, given them hope, or helped provide them with some insights into getting a job or accelerating their career. And eventually, what transpired was that people started to reach out to me and say, “Hey, could you hire me? Can I hire you to help me get a job? Write a resume? Build my LinkedIn profile?"
And through that experience I fell in love with helping others get their job. So then I started to expand my business with seals coaching, and people in corporate started to reach out to me.
Two and a half years later, here I am sitting, hosting a podcast. I had just finished writing my book, the Grit Factor Breakthrough, the Seven Roadblocks, standing Between You and Achieving Your Goals. I have a thriving consulting business. I'm a speaker and a top voice on LinkedIn, and it all started because I had updated my LinkedIn profile and I started to show up in building my personal brand, and through these steps of building my profile and working on developing my personal brand, I was able to understand this unique interest that I had in helping others achieve their goals and helping others see their unique strengths, their X factor, that maybe they don't see themselves. And also in helping them see the full potential and possibilities that they have and how that can help them achieve their goals.
Through working with some of my clients, they've been able to develop a greater level of confidence. They've gotten new jobs, they've been promoted within the organization, they've started businesses.
So if you're looking for a job, you absolutely want to be on LinkedIn.
There's no doubt about that because 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn.
So it's a huge opportunity to network with recruiters who are going to be looking for jobs for you, which in itself is a huge benefit, but it's also an opportunity for networking.
By just showing up on LinkedIn within two and a half years, I was able to build my community from 2000 to just over 25,000 in two years.
Just by filling out a profile, posting a couple of times a week, sharing advice, sharing insights, motivation, and it's built into something greater than I could have ever imagined. And it's opened up so many opportunities for my business, my career, and the people that I've been able to connect with.
Be Comprehensive
Start following people. Start engaging and start commenting, and at least explore what you can find on LinkedIn.
Building a comprehensive profile is the first step. I've had several clients, and I had one client recently who had been laid off. She had been looking for a job for six months and she applied to several jobs online, and she was feeling stuck. She wasn't getting anywhere. And when we started to work on her personal brand, her resume and her LinkedIn profile, then built a job search strategy, she was able to find a job within one month of working together.
The next step is building your headline. The headline automatically defaults to your most recent position, the job title. Itis an area that you can utilize to show your value proposition statement.
When I'm working with clients, we utilize the headline to optimize the search engine optimization on their profiles. So with the headline, we will walk through and look at what unique skillsets they have and what jobs they're applying to. What are the skillsets that particular job is looking for?
And what we'll do is go through and customize a headline. Optimize for SEO, for the jobs that they're applying to, for the jobs that they want to attract, or maybe just for what and how they want to build their professional and personal brand. So the headline is extremely important; it's like prime real estate: the profile photo, and then the headline.
Once people look at it, they make a first impression based on the profile and the headline, next, they go to the background cover photo. So they'll click on your profile, then they look at the top of your profile and they work their way down. Your background cover photo is at the very top of your profile.
A lot of times when I'm working with clients for the first time, they will have either a picture of a sunset or they have a picture of whatever default images are on LinkedIn, but this is an opportunity to showcase different skill sets, and also create and elevate your personal brand. So when I'm working with clients, we will customize a background cover photo to put at the top of the profile that's unique.
Then you move down to the summary. Now the summary can have up to 3000 characters. However, with the summary, I see a lot of people giving this kind of overview of their experience, and what I see a lot of people doing is either writing a short little paragraph or filling out the entire summary.
With 3000 characters, it's very overwhelming, and a lot of people won't take the time to read it, so unfortunately, most recruiters and hiring managers, and I say this from the experience of being a hiring manager, only spend about 15, 20, maybe a minute looking at resumes.
We don't go into a deep dive, we kind of scan through it, and there are particular areas I hone in on a resume when I'm a hiring manager for a sales team.
What jobs are they applying to, or what jobs do they want to attract, or what are the specific skill sets that they want to highlight for their, personal and professional brand? Then we will create a summary section highlighting specific skill sets, optimize for SEO, and when I say optimize for SEO, if you were looking for a job, when a recruiter goes into the search engine with LinkedIn and they say, I am looking for a particular person with five to 10 years, let's say outside sales experience.
It comes down to strategy. When you're looking for a job, you're going to move down to experience. So once you fill out the summary section, there are specific layouts that I'll work with my clients on optimizing the summary. It's easy to read and follow, then we move down to experience.
I always want to start with a verb, an action. And then if you're in sales, you wanna use metrics and percentages. I can share this with you because of my background as a hiring manager, as a sales for a sales team, when I would receive a resume and it would say, number one in the region, I would be a little skeptical because a lot of times the region includes maybe.
So I always say use metrics, percentages, and rankings, especially if you're in sales. So when I go through with my clients, we'll go through the experience. We'll look at the different roles that they're in. We look at the different jobs that they're applying to. We optimize each of the roles in their experience with SEO keywords.
Again, we look at starting each of the highlights of what they've accomplished with verbs. We include metrics, we include percentages to really highlight their experience and their unique X factor that I say each person has. Then once you get your experience, you move down to education and certifications.
Certifications could be any training that you've received. It could be while I currently had just finished a training earlier this year on the personality insights behavioral model, which is certification, personality assessments, communication skills, improving self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and collaboration within the workforce.
So you can add those certifications as well as another value to your background and experience. Then moving down to skills. Now you can have up to 50 targeted skills on your profile. You want to ensure that these skills are aligned with the particular roles. If you're looking for a job, the particular roles that you're applying to, and if you're not looking for a job, the particular skillsets that are unique about you and your professional brand.
So when I'm working with clients, we hone in specifically on the skills that they've had in their particular roles that they've been in, as well as how they translate into the new roles that they're applying to. I have a lot of clients who have said, You know, I have experience in X, Y, and Z industries." I have a little bit of experience in another industry, and I want to actually transition into that industry full-time or spend some more time in it.
Then I say, "Okay, well, let's remove the targeted skills that were from the industry you don't want to work in anymore because it's not relative. So with your skills, you could have up to 50 targeted skills, and you want to ensure that they're relative to the positions that you're applying to. Next are your profile projects and publications.
Recommendations are extremely valuable for what you are highlighting on your profile. So, if you have leadership experience and you've had experience leading teams, and you have people who recommend you as a leader, that supports what you're putting on your profile.
Algorithm of Linkedin
To dive into the strategy on how to use LinkedIn. Now, the algorithms with LinkedIn are always changing and it's something that I actively research on a consistent basis. I also take LinkedIn courses every year. Also, meet with a LinkedIn expert on a consistent basis to ensure that I am always in the know of some of the changes in the algorithms.
So I'm gonna talk as an overview of some of the strategies, but when it comes to the details and the algorithms that's ever changing, so that's something that I work on with my clients as the algorithms evolve, and I get a little bit more specific with my clients because it's relative to where the LinkedIn algorithms are at that given time.
So let's talk strategy.
Strategy to building your professional brand strategy. If you're an entrepreneur and you want to attract more clients, maybe you're looking for a job, this is where the strategy is important.
Identifying not only what are your unique skill sets, what's your X factor, and what's your value proposition.
That starts with developing a posting strategy. So specifically, for example, if you wanted to be promoted into a leadership role and you wanted to connect with the decision-maker and see the value that you have in your level of expertise in leadership,
You're going to want to post about leadership. So posting is, and it's not, similar to other platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but a little bit different because you're showcasing your leadership skills. In this particular situation, you'd be showcasing your leadership skills by posting, but not every day. But three to five times per week.
And now the algorithms vary depending on the day and the time. Uh, so we go into a deep strategy on strategy sessions on the algorithm portion, but posting three days a week is a way of building your professional brand.
Specifically on how you want to be, like what do you want to be known for in your professional brand? We also work on, um, Helping them with creating color schemes and different tools within Canva that we can use to build their professional brand. Those are all the tools that I provide my clients with.
But if you're just looking to just get started, maybe it's posting a quote that you saw that inspired you and posting it on LinkedIn, and then writing a caption as to what inspired that. What is it about that particular quote that inspired you? Then with each post, you wanna include relevant hashtags.
Now, the hashtags that are trending always vary, but as a rule of thumb, you wanna include three to five hashtags.
As I've shared, there's a lot of value in having a LinkedIn profile.
If you're an entrepreneur, if you know somebody who's an entrepreneur and they're looking to build a business, setting up a LinkedIn profile is extremely valuable.
