LinkedIn – My Story

I was hooked when I started using LinkedIn. As a corporate marketer, I saw the immense value the platform had to offer, and I immediately wanted to focus on it.

I focused so much that people started to ask me for advice. Eventually, I wrote a book to help even more people use it. Companies even started contacting me to assist their sales teams with their profiles. Before I knew it, LinkedIn became my business.

So many people use the platform now that it has become a standard professionally.

Learning how to leverage LinkedIn for your business is extremely important if you want to use it to show others that you are an expert at your business. How do you do that? It comes down to building your credibility and showing how you benefit others through your profile.
 

Building Your Credibility

You want to get to a point where people are coming to you to solve their problems, in other words, you want to become a magnet.  
In your summary and work experience sections make statements that show you know how to solve your customer’s problems. Provide evidence. Give out numbers of your results and provide other forms of social proof.

For example, “I have converted over 200 leads.” Or for social proof an example would be, “customers have expressed total satisfaction with all our contracts.”

Numbers are easy to back up but how do we back up the social proof? Getting LinkedIn recommendations and testimonials of course!


 

Recommendations

My LinkedIn profile has hundreds of recommendations and they’ve been extremely beneficial for my business.

Recommendations validate your profile by providing evidence of your success. People will see that other LinkedIn users have interacted with you and had good experiences , so good that they took the time to write a recommendation for you.

You’ll want to put recommendations in your summary section and in your work experience section. In your summary section integrate quotes to support your top successes that you can showcase. In your work experience section try to put a few recommendations for each position you’ve described.
 

How To Ask For Recommendations

Asking for recommendations can be a daunting task if you are not used to doing it. The first thing you’ll want to know is that only first level connections can write recommendations.

What does this mean? Well, this means you should connect with people you’ve worked with previously before you send them a message asking for a recommendation.

The content of your message will depend on how well you know the person.

If they tend to be the busy type you’ll probably want to pre-write your ideal recommendation for them and ask them to edit it. Or if they are slightly less busy you can write down bullet points with areas you want them to cover.

Whatever you choose you’ll need the content of the recommendation to be relevant to where it’s posted. For example, you’ll want a recommendation related to the work you did with that person if you’re putting it in the work experience section.

Not super complicated, right? Just make sure you outline the areas you’d like your connections to write about.

Adding recommendations to your profile will provide proof of your actions and build your “expert” status. By using recommendations you’ll be able to show you’ve created value for others.

This will help develop your profile into a magnet that will attract new clients.

 

Action Steps

  1. Ask a first level connection for a recommendation in a LinkedIn message. Make sure you let them know what type of content you’ll need them to cover.
  2. Plan to put a few recommendations for your work experience section. Remember to make sure the recommendation is related to the job being described.
  3. Integrate quotes from recommendations into your summary supporting statements you’ve made about your success.

 

Result You Will Achieve

Getting more recommendations to boost your credibility on LinkedIn and position you as an expert in your field.

Mentor: Dan Sherman

Founder of Linked Success. Dan has more than 20 years of corporate marketing management experience and with successful firms ranging from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 companies.

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.