Do you know what to put in your LinkedIn profile to get found?

Posted by efficiencycoach on Fri, 01/04/2011 - 14:13 in Blogs 1375 | report

I’ve recently been writing some training on how to use LinkedIn to generate leads for your business or practice. In the course of my research, I discovered that most people do not know what to put in their professional headline.
Very quickly, your professional headline on LinkedIn is the ‘strapline’ under your name which appears whenever your name appears on LinkedIn. Simple to a business’s strapline, your professional headline is something which defines, at a glance, your personal brand.

However, most people, let LinkedIn set their professional headline. I.e. they leave it as:
Job title at company

I don’t know about you, but my personal brand is much wider and bigger than:
“Chief Coach at The Efficiency Coach”

What about my book – ‘The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking’? My social media expertise? My business coaching experience? The value my services bring to my target market –lawyers and accountants?
In case you haven’t read many of my previous blogs on LinkedIn, one of the very powerful reasons to be on LinkedIn – apart from its 100 million worldwide membership – is that Google ranks LinkedIn very highly, and normally returns your LinkedIn profile in the top three results when someone googles your name.

Now, your professional headline is not only JUST read by google and humans – it is indexed by LinkedIn’s own search engine. An important search engine in its own right. Therefore, you need to also add in some keywords which describe what you want to be found for.

To summarise, your professional headline needs to include a combination of:

•    What you do
•    The value you bring to your clients
•    Keywords which someone searching for a person like you may use

After doing this research, I realised I had to change my own professional headline. Here is my professional headline:

“Author of 'The FT Guide to Business Networking', Speaker, Business Coach, Social Media Consultant”

Oh, and in case you didn’t know you only have 125 characters to write your professional headline...
What’s in your professional headline?

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The Joined Up Networker

I help professionals and firms become the Go-To-Expert. Unusually for someone with an Engineering Degree, I accidentally became a writer and used my knowledge on social media to write the current best-selling and award-winning book on networking, The FT Guide To Business Networking. (75 five star reviews on Amazon - and read the 1st chapter for free here) People frequently talk about me as someone who really knows her stuff – which may be the reason I have, over the last decade, worked with over 300 partners, coached and trained over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices. After nearly 5 years for working for BDO LLP, I realised I loved the intellectual challenge of working with accountants, so made working with accountants (and lawyers as I am a glutton for punishment) my sector specialism.

I was honoured to be a judge at the British Accountancy Awards in 2011 and 2012, plus I am a member of the Accountant's Club Global Advisory Panel.

I’ve always loved a challenge which is why I have solved the problem in my next book, which has perplexed many accountants in practice – ‘How to make partner and still have a life’. Click on the link to read the 1st chapter for free.

The Excedia Group was founded by myself and Jon Baker to bring clarity, perspective and knowledge to help our clients achieve their business goals. Over 75% of our work comes from professional service firms - both large and small, helping them get more clients via referrals utilising networking and social media. Over 30% of the Excedia group’s clients are small professional practices of between 1-50 employees.

My work splits into about 50% Executive & Business Coaching with Partners, Practice Owners & Potential Partners, with the rest split between training, consultancy and writing.

I adore writing, (as well as helping others achieve their business goals without selling their soul) which is why I blog regularly at Partnership Potential, Joined Up Networking, How to make partner and still have a life and venture-Now

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