Raising Your Visibility with LinkedIn
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In the first part of this two-part series, I showed you some of the basics for improving your LinkedIn profile. In this article I’m going to finish fleshing out a LinkedIn profile and go over the more social aspects of the site. You can use these to draw attention to your knowledge and abilities.
Everyone engages in promotion of one form or another; it’s a necessity. If you’re an individual, some of the most traditional forms of promotion include business cards and resumes. The smart job hunters always include a customized cover letter with their resumes, written after performing a little research on the company. Most of the areas I’ve covered on a LinkedIn profile equate to the information you’d see on a resume. My profile is now 55 percent complete. It’s time to work on the “cover letter.”
I’m talking about the “summary” area. I’ve seen it referred to by LinkedIn employees as the “elevator pitch.” You can’t be sure who’s going to read it, but you can be sure of one thing – people search on the words you use in this area, especially the ones you put into the subsection marked “Specialties.” Guess what? Mine is blank, but it’s not going to stay that way.
The first thing I notice is that I can change my professional “headline” here; it has defaulted to my current job. So I decide I’m going to change it to “Experienced Technology Writer/Editor.” I can also change my primary industry of expertise, but since it’s already set to “Internet,” I leave that alone. Summarizing my professional experience and goals is tricky, but after looking at some examples, I write something that is at least okay for now. Polish can come later, as it’s often easier to polish a second draft than try to get it perfect the first time. I add a few specialties, and voila:
Next: So What’s Left of the Profile? >>
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