4 Tips for Supercharging Your Business's LinkedIn Profile

In his book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business, search engine optimization and online marketing expert consultant Ted Prodromou explains how you can use LinkedIn to quickly engage with ideal customers, partners, and employees, showcase your company and attract new opportunities. In this edited excerpt, the author offers some key tips to help you create a LinkedIn profile that gets people clicking.

When people search the internet for your name, your LinkedIn profile will most likely be one of the top search results, so you want to make a great first impression. Your LinkedIn profile provides people with a comprehensive summary of you, your education, work experience, and your achievements. Your LinkedIn profile also links people to other social media properties and websites where you can showcase your expertise.

Your LinkedIn profile consists of:

• Your headline
• Your photo
• Status updates
• Vanity URL
• Summary
• Applications
• Experience
• Education
• Recommendations
• Additional information
• Personal information
• Contact information

These sections are particularly important to your LinkedIn image:

1. Your headline.

Your profile headline is the single most important part of your profile. It will appear next to your name in the search results. As your name appears in the search results, your headline must be compelling enough to make people want to click on your profile to learn more about you. You should never put just your name and company name in your headline.

2. Your photo.

It’s very important to use a professional picture in your LinkedIn profile. First impressions are very important, and people will judge you within a few seconds when they see your LinkedIn profile. Save your casual pictures for Facebook and Twitter. The best LinkedIn profile pictures are engaging and inviting. I recommend a headshot focusing on your smiling face. Your profile will be associated with your company so you want to present a consistent, professional image and not avatars, caricatures, or other images that aren’t congruent with the image you're establishing for you and your business.

Never use your company logo as your personal profile picture. First, it’s not engaging and doesn’t give people a chance to get to know you. Second, it’s a violation of the LinkedIn End User License Agreement.

3. Experience.

Your current position and your past three positions will be displayed in your profile. Up to three additional positions will be displayed if the viewer clicks on View All.

Make sure you add a brief but clear description for each position. Use your target keywords in your description, so you'll be found when people search for your skill sets. If you're going to use the Request Recommendations option, I recommend sending personal invitations to one person at a time something along the lines of this:

I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks in advance for helping me out.

LinkedIn is about building strong personal connections, and using automated tools is not the way to build a strong connection with me or with others. If you want a good recommendation from someone, take the time to write a personal invitation, and you will receive a much better recommendation than you would from a mass invitation.

When asking for a recommendation, make sure you include personal details about how you met, projects you’ve worked on together, and other details about your working relationship. Specify exactly what you want in the endorsement, such as a specific project you worked on together or to highlight a certain skill set of yours. Some people even prefer that you send them a brief endorsement you’ve written about yourself they can edit or modify to save them time.

Notice you can create another professional headline in your Experience section. This lets people instantly get to know you and learn how you can help them when they view your profile.

4. Contact information.

This is the section where you can add links to your website and blog, which will generate lots of web traffic and help your search rankings. Links from popular sites like LinkedIn are very valuable, so you want to use this trick when you enter your website or blog URL.

One of the most common mistakes people make when adding their website or blog URLs is to choose one of the default options like Personal Website or Blog. Choose Company Website so it displays Company Website instead of your actual company name or target keyword phrase. This helps add valuable links and keyword phrases in your LinkedIn profile that will help your Google search rankings.

LinkedIn also lets you add social media feeds to your LinkedIn profile. This lets your profile visitors see what you’re up to on the social media front, such as on Twitter or Google+.

One of the newest additions to your profile is "Publications," where you can display your published books. To use this section, you must have a valid ISBN number for your published book. Your publication listing includes your book title, publisher, publication date, and a description of your book. You can also add a link to your website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other website where people can purchase your book.

Your LinkedIn profile is now optimized for the search engines and is ready to promote.

Most Recommended Marketing Tools By Pro Bloggers

This is the Part 1 of the "Recommended Marketing Tools" series - where successful bloggers share the marketing tools they couldn't live without. Co-authored by James Richman.

Most successful bloggers are not only great storytellers. They know the best and most effective tools of the trade too.

In collaboration with James Richman of 1stWebDesigner, we've asked some of the most influential bloggers as to what are their 3 most recommended tools for content creation and promotion. We asked them what are the tools they couldn't live without and here's what they recommend.

Winning tools for this round are: Buffer, MailChimp and Google Analytics. Be sure to check out new tools and share with us in the comments what we've missed!

Kristi Hines

Kristi is author of Blogging for Business: A How-To Guide and one of the most trustedfreelance bloggers in the online space.

Her blog Kikolani covers blog marketing and blogging tips for personal, professional, and business bloggers.

Tools Kristi Can't Live Without

I am a marketing tool addict. I love seeking out new tools that can simplify specific areas of my business. While I was only asked to share three tools that I couldn't live without in my business, I couldn't help but sharing five that I use on a daily basis.

Cyfe

One of the biggest challenges of being a soloprenuer is finding the time to manage my clients and my business. I use a lot of different platforms for advertising, email marketing, invoicing, publishing, SEO, social media, and web analytics.

Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard software that allows me to see data from most of the platforms I use in one place. It saves me a LOT of time - without it, I would have to go to Facebook Insights, FreshBooks, Google Analytics, MailChimp, Moz, and several other websites to see my business data on a daily basis.

Rival IQ

Competitive research can be a great teacher when it comes to marketing strategies. I use Rival IQ to keep up with other freelancers in my space to analyze their website, search, and social media strategy. I also use it to help my clients identify areas in their online marketing that could use some improvement based on what their competitors are doing.

My favorite feature is the ability to quickly compare multiple business's website titles, Twitter bios, Facebook descriptions, and other social taglines and get alerted when competitors make changes to any of these. It's a great way to make sure your business is offering what your customers want.

Oktopost

As a freelance writer, one of the things I do for my clients is promote the content I create. This helps them accomplish their content marketing goals, including traffic generation, social engagement, and conversions. Oktopost allows me to promote content to all of my social channels in one platform and get social engagement and click through analytics.

My favorite feature is the ability to not only post to my social profiles, but also to Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Thanks to the analytics Oktopost provides, I can see which groups offer the most engagement for my content and keep up with comments that need replies within each group.

Danny Brown

While Danny blogs about marketing and social media and where we're heading, he also blogs about what it means to us as humans.

How we can tell better stories; be better businesses; and live better lives. After all, business comes and goes; but we only get one shot at being good people, in life and in business. He's the co-author of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing.

3 Tools Danny Can't Live Without

Sprout Social

It's the only social media dashboard worth using if you're serious about keeping tabs on engagement levels, topics that are important to you, and a mobile experience that replicates the desktop one perfectly.

It's not as cheap as Hootsuite, but the features are more than worth the investment(besides, Hootsuite gets pretty expensive if you want the kind of reporting that comes with your Sprout Social license).

Buffer

It's just perfection. Everyone is busy, and not always around when it comes to growing awareness of you or your brand.

Buffer makes it simple to schedule content delivery, and at a time when it makes sense for your audience. Their analytics are useful for seeing what type of content works, and they just make the web a better place. :)

MailPoet

This is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to create email lists, forms, newsletters, and more.

Their features are excellent, they complement the most popular email services, support is awesome, and the metrics really help you understand how effective (or not) your email list is. Excellent, and the one I recommend every time.

Jacob Cass

Jacob Cass is a strategic, multi-disciplinary designer & Art Director who has worked with clients such as Disney, Jerry Seinfeld, Red Bull, Nike & VitaminWater.

Although his skill set is vast, his major skill sets lie in the world of art direction, visual design, brand identity design, brand strategy, UX, UI design, interactive design (mobile + web design) and print design.

3 Tools Jacob Can't Live Without

Buffer

It allows me to find great content to share, across multiple platforms, as well as give key insights to each post.

Follow Up Then

Allows me to follow up with people I email.

DropBox

Allows me to easily share files while having peace of mind.

Kevan Lee

Kevan is a professional writer with a knack for storytelling and is a Content Crafter at Buffer.

He specializes in blogging, email marketing, and content creation and writes for Buffer, Lifehacker, Time, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, The Next Web.

3 Tools Kevan Can't Live Without

Buffer

Quite simply, this saves me the most time in online marketing, every single day. I can schedule to every social media channel I've got, all in one chunk, then spend time the rest of the day to work deeply on other tasks, knowing my social media is well taken care of.

Canva

Incredibly, I can create some pretty snazzy imagery at Canva - and I have zero design experience! It's intuitive, straightforward, and easy to learn. I create at least an image a day at the site.

MailChimp

I can send automatic emails every time a new blogpost publishes and greet new subscribers with a custom, happy message. Mailchimp handles it all, from start to finish.

Jason Swenk

Jason is a digital-preneur and author with 12+ years running a successful digital agency until he sold it in 2011.

He started his digital career with Arthur Andersen in the 90s. After realizing the vast opportunity in digital marketing, he quickly started his digital agency in 1999.

Since then, Jason has worked with some of the biggest clients in the World from Aflac, Lotus Cars, Hitachi, AT&T, Coke and Legal Zoom.

3 Tools Jason Can't Live Without

Infusionsoft 

Infusionsoft is a great platform to organize contacts and automate marketing efforts to help you save time and increase sales in the process.

TinyPNG 

TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!
tinypng.org

LeadPages

Leadpages is a dynamic software company that creates simple and beautiful software and web apps that allow businesses to grow large and devoted audiences. Their goal is to create insanely useful (and technologically sound) tools that work almost instantly, make life easier, and eventually change our industry.

Lewis Howes

Lewis Howes is a bestselling author, entrepreneur who has built several multi-million dollar online businesses, and former professional Arena League football player. He hosts The School of Greatness, a talk show distributed as a podcast.

Howes co-wrote the 2009 book,LinkedWorking: Generating Success on LinkedIn ... the World's Largest Professional Networking Website

3 Tools Lewis Can't Live Without

GoToWebinar

Aweber

It allows me to promote my webinars via email marketing.

LewisHowes (WordPress)

My WordPress blog allows me to post useful content to generate more leads for my business

Maria Elena Duron

Maria Elena specializes in creating community, connection and commerce working with high performing entrepreneurs, executives and businesses on how to manage their personal brand, the conglomeration of personal brands in their company and their business brand.

3 Tools Maria Can't Live Without

Twitter

As founder and moderator of #brandchat, Twitter has been the most useful and effective community building, connection and relationship building tool. It's also a great tool to keep up-to-speed with what's important in my industry and to our connections.

Constant Contact

A whole fleet of marketing tools (campaigns, newsletter, event marketing, email marketing, social campaigns, autoresponders and easy social sharing tools) that help the small business owner build their list. The quality of your list determines the quality of your business.

LeadPages
Provides the instant "lead page" creation to be able to quickly segment your list building. Again, your list is key to the success of your business.

Brian Honigman

Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, freelance writer and professional speaker. He works with both startups and brands improving their content marketing, social media and search engine optimization efforts.

He's spoken at NYU, UNICEF, Huffington Post Live, the American Advertising Federation and for other organizations and conferences.

He is also a contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Forbes, the Next Web, Wall Street Journal and others.

3 Tools Brian Can't Live Without

Buffer

Saves me time every day and allows me to quickly schedule social content for the weeks ahead while keeping in mind the unique nuances of each social channel I'm active on.

MailChimp

Allows me to quickly create a weekly newsletter that's beautiful, simple and engaging. It's a free way to build a healthy list of subscribers.

Contactually

Helps act as a mini-CRM to help me better manage the contacts in my greater network. Love using it on the go on mobile to help me better manage relationships with others when I have extra time.

Neal Rodriguez

Neal helps mid-sized businesses and enterprise level organizations meet and exceed the objectives for which their websites were developed.

He has a 10 year track record in generating exposure and revenue for companies from the search engines - SEO - major social media platforms, and everywhere else on the web.

4 Tools Neal Can't Live Without

I'm not the typical marketer who solely uses tools developed specifically for marketing activities. As a content marketer, I help clients and myself develop content that has the best chance of securing viral exposure.

I use several tools for this, such as Google Trends, the Reddit Top section, and just recently I've found BuzzSumo to be key in finding content that has enjoyed viral or at least the most exposure among a given topic. From there I aim to tie it to a brand's vertical and develop content ideas. I could also get ideas from random things that are occurring in my life at the moment.

Google Trends

BuzzSumo

Majestic

I also use some tools that are developed for marketing purposes. Such as Google's Keyword Planner and Majestic. These are mostly SEO plays; they tell me how popular keywords are and the quantity and quality of links that are pointing to a website I may want get a link from.

Keyword Planner

Jeremy Goldman

Jeremy Goldman has been working with companies looking to take their operations online and inject "social" into their processes for over a decade and the author of Going Social: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media.

Under Jeremy's leadership, Kiehl's won the 2009 WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development, achieved a Top 25 ranking in the L2 Digital IQ Index in the Beauty & Skincare category, and received a Top 50 Facebook IQ ranking amongst all luxury brands.

3 Tools Jeremy Can't Live Without

Buffer

Such an easy to use interface that lets me send content to multiple social platforms at once. Plus, as someone always on the go, the ability to easily schedule content for the perfect time is a must.

Evernote
As a digital marketer, this is an no-brainer. Evernote lets me quickly and easily store random ideas for blog posts that pop into my head, wherever I am. If I find an article that inspires me, I can email that to Evernote, or use their easy Chrome extension to clip content. It's the second brain I never knew I needed.

SocialBro

The most underrated platform out there for managing and parsing your Twitter following, SocialBro lets me surface interesting and unexpected relationships, create dynamic Twitter lists, target my content at the perfect time, and so much more.

Francisco Rosales

Francisco works with small and mid-size business on creating and implementing successful online strategies through social media, advertising, content and email marketing.

He is also author of the online courses "Likeable to Profitable" and "Email Marketing [not so] 101." As well as he offers training and consulting and blogs at SocialMouths, an award-winning social media blog.

3 Tools Francisco Can't Live Without

Mailchimp

Basically because I use email marketing as a lead generation tool, and there is nothing online that can compare to the effectiveness of email to drive conversions. Mailchimp simply because I consider it the best ESP in the market by far.

Facebook Power Editor

Just because Facebook practically killed organic reach doesn't mean the platform no longer works to generate leads and drive business. The opportunities Power Editor offers to tap into different kinds of audiences of highly targeted prospects is not available anywhere else.

Insightly

I use Insightly as my CRM. Many of us focus too much on marketing and then drop the ball on sales. This gives me visibility of the opportunities and the relationships being established at the business level.

We hope these recommended tools by some of the influential bloggers help you better craft your content as well. Writing great articles is just half the battle. You need the most efficient tools as well to aid in your promotion and getting your content discovered by more and more people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonha-revesencio/most-recommended-marketing-tools-by-pro-bloggers_b_6633850.html

8 Ways to Better Market Yourself on LinkedIn in 2015

Best Tips from the Pro's for the best year in LinkedIn!!!

LinkedIn has always been the industry standard when it comes to marketing yourself professionally, but the past few years have seen the social network’s importance and reach increase dramatically. TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn has roughly 187 million unique visitors per month, and that number looks like it’ll continue to grow.

In addition, LinkedIn has ramped up its efforts to become a content platform. In the past three years LinkedIn has acquired Slideshare, Pulse and Newsle; all of which hint at a continuing push towards content distribution.

Instead of just maintaining your profile and company page and being active in LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn is now encouraging brands and individuals to leverage its robust, new publishing capabilities. It is clear that LinkedIn sees itself as a vital part of the future of content marketing.

Building out your LinkedIn presence can seem intimidating. There are so many options now that the thought of exploiting them all can overwhelm even the savviest marketers.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Strategies, Tactics & Tools for Content Marketing in 2015

Keeping this problem in mind, I set out to track down the most influential and accomplished LinkedIn experts and ask them to weigh in on their recommendations for making the most of your LinkedIn Marketing.

Viveka von Rosen: Leverage LinkedIn’s CRM

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Vivekavon-Rosen-picture.png.png

Viveka von Rosen is a prominent LinkedIn expert and author of the book LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day. Her recommendation not only highlights some interesting, often overlooked LinkedIn features, but also shows how they can be used to strengthen your networking connections.

Viveka notes that “LinkedIn is about building relationships, and one of the best ways of building relationships is to show your top prospects that you were listening to them.” With this in mind, she points out that LinkedIn actually provides users with fairly robust CRM tools.

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Linkedin-CRM.png.png

She recommends leveraging these tools in five steps:

1. Research your prospect or client. (Better yet, have a conversation with them – maybe at a conference or trade show?)

2. Make your notes about the person on their LinkedIn profile. (Click on the star icon to “unfold” LinkedIn’s CRM feature.)

3. Set a reminder to follow up with your prospect.

4. Find an article of your own or search Pulse to find content you think they might be interested in.

5. You can also tag your prospects, segmenting your network in a way that makes sense to you, and that will allow you to follow up with them in smaller groups.

Brian Murray: Be Active, Get Noticed

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Brian-Murray-picture.png.png

Brian Murray is the director of talent and culture at the prominent New York-based Digital agency Likeable. Although Brian’s profession is technically HR, he is careful to note: “My audience is NOT HR professionals. It is people with agency experience who love or have a focus on social.”

This is already a powerful lesson. The first step to connecting with your audience is identifying who you are aiming to target. Once you know who you want to notice you, Brian outlines the next step: “I share relevant content that causes them to continue to see me and recognize my name. When I reach out they are a lot more likely to respond than a cold email from somebody who doesn’t regularly use the platforms.”

We tend to misunderstand why it is that we trust certain people online or give them a certain degree of credibility. Brian nails it on the head with this insight. Oftentimes it’s not the amount of followers you have, it’s how often you show up on people’s radar. Perhaps the best piece of advice Brian gives derives from an analogy to sales:

Similar to sales, the time you need to make a sale is not the first time you call or email them. They need to trust you. They need to see you.

Going further, Brian believes that the only thing people like more than seeing someone tweeting or sharing things they love is when you engage with that audience and provide personal interaction. This actually speaks a lot to another piece of advice I got from our next expert.

Stephanie Sammons: The “10 in 10″ Rule

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Stephanie-Sammons-Picture.png.png

Stephanie Sammons is a renowned LinkedIn expert, named a Top 30 Marketing Thought Leader and a Top 25 Social Media Expert by LinkedIn, who coaches professionals on how to maximize their social presence. Her recommendation for marketers and business owners who hope to build their presence is to adopt what she refers to as the “10 in 10” rule.

“While others are pumping out content and status updates to their entire network” Stephanie instead encourages professionals to “go one-to-one with 10 of your connections 10 minutes a day.”

If you spend 10 minutes a day engaging personally with 10 of your valued LinkedIn contacts, you will grow your influence.

The first step in her process is to identify your MVC’s (Most Valuable Connections) LinkedIn. “These may be prospects, clients, influencers, or advocates for your business. Next, study their profiles and learn more about who they are, what they do, and who they help.”

She continues by noting that “once you are armed with greater intelligence about your MVC’s, strive for a one-to-one engagement with at least 10 of these individuals per day. One-to-one engagement can be in the form of a personalized, private LinkedIn message, a public comment or conversation, a or even an @mention.”

The reasoning goes that a personal, intimate connection with a smaller number of followers can be much more beneficial than an attempt to please everyone. This appears straightforward, but it seems that so few actually spend the emotional energy necessary to foster these connections.

Stephanie offers the assurance that although this consistent connection is hard to maintain, it will be well worth it in the long-run and ultimately lead to social media success.

Lewis Howes: Leverage LinkedIn Pulse

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Lewis-Howes-Picture.png.png

While there is no denying the effectiveness of a more personal approach, LinkedIn has recently become more than a networking tool. The past few years have seen Linked grow from a job-hunting, and resume site into a publishing empire. So how can marketers or professionals leverage this increasingly important aspect of LinkedIn?

Lewis Howes is a LinkedIn expert who hosts the School of Greatness podcast and he recommends leveraging the new LinkedIn Pulse platform by consistently creating engaging content on your profile. Howes points out that until recently the publishing platform was only reserved for select influencers. However things have changed recently and this presents a big opportunity for marketers to earn the attention of the right professional audience on LinkedIn:

With Pulse open to everyone (not just influencers), it’s a massive opportunity to expand your reach.

This is not just a hunch either. Howes shared that he’s “seen a big bump in traffic and leads from this alone” and assured me that this would be the most effective way of reaching a larger and more targeted audience on LinkedIn in the coming year.

Looking at the current trend of LinkedIn’s updates and acquisitions, Howes’ prediction feels spot on. LinkedIn has already gotten hundreds of millions of users accustomed to networking on the site, and now they hope to build that same familiarity with consuming and creating content. The ability to get in on the ground floor of this kind of change is too good for marketers to pass up and should not be ignored.

Alex Pirouz: Have A Strategic Plan In Place

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Alex-Pirouz-picture.png.png

The previous advice has all concerned committing to continuous and sustained interactions with your professional network, but sticking to so many initiatives at once is difficult. Alex Pirouz, a serial entrepreneur who founded Linkfluencer.com, offers a bit of sobering yet crucial advice.

His advice is dead simple, but so often overlooked. “My top tip to anyone looking to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool is to first create a clear plan on what they’re looking to achieve from the platform.” Drafting a plan requires: “looking over [your] marketing objectives over the next 6-12 months, identifying the target market [you] would need to connect with in order to achieve those objectives and then building a LinkedIn profile that resonates with this audience.” Just like you would plan your editorial calendar, you should plan your LinkedIn posts.

Not having a plan is the number one reason businesses aren’t using LinkedIn to it’s full potential.

Alex told me that “over the past 12 months we’ve trained over 8000 businesses on how to leverage LinkedIn to grow their business and over 90% of those we speak with don’t have a plan or clear strategy.” He quipped that Ben Franklin said it best, “People don’t plan to fail they fail to plan.”

Bert Verdonck: Earn Greater Visibility With Slideshare

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bert-Verdonck-Picture.png.png

Bert Verdonck is the founder of the pioneering social agency ReallyConnect and a LinkedIn expert in his own right. According to him “one of the most underutilized strategies on LinkedIn today is the use of rich media and SlideShare in particular.”

Most people have no idea of the impact SlideShare can have on their LinkedIn marketing.

Besides being, as Bert refers to it, the “YouTube for Powerpoint,” he told me that “Slideshare links index brilliantly well, often ranking higher than LinkedIn or Facebook.” As if this was not reason enough to embrace the platform, LinkedIn purchased Slideshare in 2013 and has since offered substantial integration capabilities.

He notes that, “Of course, there are some SEO experts who let you pay a ton of money to artificially increase your search results, but SlideShare is for free and beats a lot of other strategies easily and in a natural way.”

His logic here is simple, but speaks to an understanding of the way search visibility works. Slideshare offers “a lot of quality content and Google loves great content, resulting in higher natural rankings. People will find you more easily for your topics.”

In other words, Slideshare helps your profile become more visible not only by putting you higher in search rankings in the search engines and LinkedIn, but by providing engaging content your potential audience wants to see when they do reach your profile. Talk about a win-win scenario.

Neal Schaffer: Embrace Long-Form Publishing

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Neal-Schaffer-Picture.png.png

Neal Schaffer is the author of the excellent LinkedIn book Maximize Your Social as well as a social media coach, consultant and trainer. His recommendation for professionals looking to maximize their LinkedIn presence is to take advantage of long-form publishing.

Neal points out that “LinkedIn opened up their blogging platform to all users in 2014, but very few have taken advantage of being a part of the LinkedIn publishing empire.” Sure people have taken to posting some content, but the efforts of many users are scattershot or lack-luster short-form posts. Instead, Neal believes LinkedIn should be treated like a full-fledged syndicated blog.

If you are only blogging on your corporate blog you are missing out on the opportunity to get your content in front of eager eyes on LinkedIn.

This is a wasted opportunity because “when you blog on LinkedIn, your content is seen not only by your connections but also by others who are consuming news on LinkedIn Pulse.” Neal mentions that he has seen great long-form content by users that “received more views than their number of connections, and some that have literally received hundreds of thousands of views.”

As LinkedIn positions itself as a content platform, the benefits of embracing a content-centric strategy will become more and more pronounced. Stay one step ahead of the curve by creating engaging, rich, long-form content.

John Rampton: Call Out Your Profile Often

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/John-Rampton-Picture.png.png

John Rampton is a social media expert and columnist for publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. The advice he gave was something that frustrated him because it is so easy, yet so many people miss it. “I can never understand why people go to networking events, hand me their business card, and they don’t have their LinkedIn profile on there.”

He continued, “They have other social networks on there, but LinkedIn is THE professional networking site. When I want to size you up professionally, that’s where I go.” While it’s certainly easy enough to find someone on LinkedIn, John is right that the additional step to make people go through is an unnecessary barrier between connecting.

Don’t be shy about calling out your LinkedIn profile. Put it on your email, business card, etc… – anything with your name on it, your profile should be there too.

Another place he feels people miss calling out their profile is in their email signature. “Email is the same thing, your professional email can just as easily be an additional touch point or place to connect.”

Especially for people working in sales, John feels that having a LinkedIn profile link in email is such an easy, effective opportunity to connect that people miss all too often.

“My other recommendations would be leveraging the LinkedIn publishing platform and engaging more frequently, but these efforts are all maximized by having more connections, and calling out your profile is such an easy way to bring that number up.”

Lastly, here are these same LinkedIn marketing tips in a ready to pin infographic!

http://www.business2community.com/linkedin/8-ways-better-market-linkedin-2015-01114663