Donna Serdula

Donna Serdula is the founder of Vision Board Media and Linkedin-makeover. She’s a LinkedIn profile optimization expert, speaker and author of LinkedIn Makeover: Professional Secrets to a Powerful LinkedIn Profile.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Donna’s success

Maximizing LinkedIn profile

Result if you follow the steps in Donna’s session

Generate more leads while creating credibility and trust

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

What I believe the first key is, is to truly maximizing your profile for generating leads, is thinking about it not just as your profile, but think of it in terms of the search result listing.

Because you have to remember, not everyone is searching for you, right? They might be searching for someone like you or they might be searching for a solution to an issue they have, or they might be doing more research on a product that they’re thinking about purchasing.

And so you will, and what they’re going to do is the way to type those keywords into the LinkedIn search bar. And then they’re going to start plotting through these search results. And you want to make sure that your search result is sexy, it’s compelling. It makes a person want to click on it.

And so what is the search result? What does it consist of? It consists of a couple things. It consists of your name, which we can’t really change, so we’ll just ignore that part of it. But it also consists of your profile picture and your headline.

And so, in terms of the first key, there’s a few sub parts to this, but I want to make, I want you to make sure that your profile picture is professional, that it casts you in the right light.

If you can’t afford to get it professionally taken, you know, make sure that you have someone take it for you, in which you’re not in the car. You’re not doing that like selfie stick, but really get it make sure you’re smiling, make sure you’re dressed well. You look clean, you look well adjusted, you look friendly.

These are really important parts of your profile. And it has nothing to do with writing. Just make sure that you look as good as you can. That’s the profile picture piece.

The other thing is your headline. And you know the headline as LinkedIn will do it for you. The default is simply your current job title and your company.

If you think of a headline, like a headline in a newspaper, what does the headline in the newspaper supposed to do? Right? It’s supposed to compel you to want to read more.

Well, does your current job title in your current company? Would that compel you, Liam to read more?

No. And I think this is a mistake that a lot of people and I made for a very long time until recently, actually, which LinkedIn kind of tells you, it automatically puts your current job title there.

So a lot of people think, okay, well, that’s what’s meant to be their current job title. But no, as you said, like it follows you everywhere around LinkedIn. And you know, if you google your name, it’s there.

So this is such an important headline to say, okay, you know, your target customer that ideal current customers you currently have. If they read this again, would they know what you do? Would they be bothered reading anyway?

Of course they wouldn’t. So you want to turn it into a benefit statement. You want to really show how you help people, you know, make it interesting, infuse it with keywords. So people really see oh, you know, I’m looking for you know, CRM and this guy has CRM in his headline, this is perfect.

You want to, you know, maybe something like, you know, helping people, you know, find their dream homes, if you’re a realtor, you know, but really showcase you know, what you’re doing and how you’re helping and make it a benefit statement.

You can certainly keep your job title in there, you’ve got, what is it? 100 and I think it’s 180 characters within your headline, I might be off by a few. I can’t quite remember at the moment, but you have you, have a little bit of room.

So you know, definitely put, you know, put a benefit statement in there and infuse it with some keywords, make it interesting, make it compelling.

And what’s going to happen is, like you said, it follows you around LinkedIn. Not only is it in that search result, but if a person is looking to see who’s viewed their profile, they’re going to see your picture, your smiling mug, they’re going to see that headline. You really want to make sure that it compels them to click.