Welcome to Scripe’s Personal Branding Basics Series! 🚀
This series is all about mastering LinkedIn and growing your personal brand. The goal: Set the foundation to use the potential of your LinkedIn activity as a compounding factor of your business and career growth.
This series is structured into checklists, because we all love to tick boxes, right? Let’s jump right in and start with the essentials: The LinkedIn Profile. Follow these best practices to grow the reach of your LinkedIn Profile. 🙋♀️
Why a Strong LinkedIn Profile and Personal Brand Important:
Building a personal brand and positioning yourself on LinkedIn is all about creating value through content that matters to your target audience. This means, that once they find your profile or you connect with them after an in-person event, they have to know who you are, what you do, and why they have to follow you.
In other words, your LinkedIn profile is your best business card, and building your personal brand is one of the key long-term investments in your career.
A Strong Personal Brand and a Polished LinkedIn Profile will:
- Increase the lead generation for your business
- Attract potential employees or employers
- Make a solid impression on potential partners
- Position you and your company more professionally
Use it or leave it, but polishing your LinkedIn profile is like having the perfect personal landing page, an opportunity to make a solid first impression at networking events.
Plus, a clear profile helps Linkedin to categorize you in a certain niche.
So let’s make sure your LinkedIn profile is fully on point! Let’s jump into that LinkedIn profile checklist (🤫 download the full checklist below).
LinkedIn Profile Checklist: Set The Foundation For your LinkedIn Profile
☑️ Foundation & LinkedIn Profile Checklist: 1. Set your LinkedIn profile to “public mode”
With a public profile, you can increase your reach potential on LinkedIn and in search engines. It also lets you customize your profile even better. Learn more about the public profile settings here or here.
2. Define Your Niche & Expertises on LinkedIn
Write down the industries in which you are active, the topics you are passionate about, and your core competencies. Keep them high-level, and pick 5 topics that you want to focus on.
3. Choose LinkedIn Profile Topics
Highlight those focus areas on your account adding them as profile topics. They are displayed as hashtags at the top of your profile. Creating content that matches those topics will increase your overall reach.
4. Set a Strong Profile Slogan
The profile slogan is the most shown information besides your name and picture. Better make it a strong one. Here’s how:
- Mission statement + Company + Role. (Other Companies + Roles (if applicable)).
- Company + Role. (Other Companies + Roles (if applicable)).
Check the full profiles of Marina Ziblis, Lisa Heiss and Laura Raggl.
5. Proper LinkedIn Profile Image
Selfies are nice, but maybe not the ideal profile pic for LinkedIn. Choose an image that shows a close-up of you, make sure it has a clean background and that appears in good quality.
6. Use The Potential of a Great LinkedIn Profile Banner
Besides the header section, the banner takes up the largest area of the profile. Better use that potential. Make sure your banner includes:
- Company logo
- Catchy company statement (Headline + Subheadline)
- Logos from partners/clients to add credibility
- Call to Action (optional)
Psst, we created some nice LinkedIn Banner templates to download for free here!
7. Add a Link & Call To Action to Your LinkedIn profile
In your profile settings, you can set a link to your website and add a call to action.
8. Polish Your LinkedIn About Section
You will see all versions of LinkedIn About sections – from short statements to people who share their whole biographies. Having a mix is a good way to go and it’s actually worth using the space of the section. A good About section includes:
- Clear mission statement / focus area
- Short backstory about how you got there
- Your motivation
- What you offer/want to provide for the audience
- CTA
9. Use the LinkedIn Featured Section Spotlight
The Featured section is the first section after your profile information. It allows you to highlight important posts (e.g. your LinkedIn Top Voice announcement ;)), links to your website, or other relevant resources.
🔗 Download the Full LinkedIn Profile Checklist in our Scripe Community Resources Hub:
Follow this LinkedIn profile checklist to grow the reach of your personal brand. As you can see, there are various ways to elevate your LinkedIn profile. Besides using this potential to grow your personal brand, having a consistent posting rhythm is key to growing your reach and elevating long-term LinkedIn performance.
Want to learn more about how to grow the reach of your personal brand on LinkedIn? Check out the rest of our Personal Branding Basics Series here.