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Karen Yankovich of LinkedUp Success

Karen Yankovich

Founder of LinkedUp Success

Karen Yankovich is the founder of LinkedUp Success. She’s a Social Media Strategist, LinkedIn Evangelist, LinkedIn expert speaker and podcast host. Her background includes over twenty years in the fields of information technology, marketing, and customer relationships, making social media her ideal niche.

Article

My Clever LinkedIn Headline Formula To Get You Noticed

I’m a social media consultant and I help entrepreneurs and small businesses create social media plans that bring in profits.

It’s nice to have followers but when it comes down to it, does it grow your business in the right direction?

Expert session

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

 Using a clever LinkedIn headline formula

Result if you follow the steps in Karen’s session

Show off your personal brand on LinkedIn and generate non-salesy sales calls

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

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

This is where you land when you just type into LinkedIn. Right? So we’re going to go to my profile here, and I’m going to show you a couple things that you want to pay attention to. And the first thing that I want you to think about is your headline. Okay?

A lot of people I see their headline, a lot of people’s headline, say, I’m CEO, or I’m an accountant or I’m an attorney. People, what I want you to do when you write your LinkedIn profile is I want you to speak to the people that are reading it. I want it to be client facing. People don’t care that your CEO, right? They care what you can do to help them.

So in this headline, which by the way, is searchable by Google, and which, by the way, comes up, and I’ll show you exactly what we’re talking about before I put my name in a Google search. And I’ll show you how it comes up.

And you’ll see in this Google search, and right here, like I said, the second thing that comes up is LinkedIn, but you can see my headline, right, so you can read that headline right into the Google search before you even get into LinkedIn.

So you definitely want to start off with a strong headline, and you want to have a headline that’s confidently telling people what you do.

Right. And so just really saying when you’re searching for your profile, I saw your name on Google. I noticed that you know, you mentioned that before that you have a you know, 60,000 followers on Twitter yet the LinkedIn result came above.

It did. Yeah, it does. Yeah, yep, 65,000 followers it says here and LinkedIn came out. I do not have 65,000 LinkedIn connections. So LinkedIn came up higher. Now if LinkedIn doesn’t come up as high for you, I do think that if you’re active on LinkedIn, it’s going to come up higher.

If you’re regularly posting and you’re giving new content on LinkedIn, it’s going to give Google more reasons to bring it up even higher, and you want that right. Especially if you’ve taken the time to have a great profile.

You want it to come up high, because that’s what people are going to check out. Right? You want people to be confident. You want to be confident when people are checking you out.

Okay. So again, in your headline, you know, I often tell people when they’re writing their headline, if you don’t feel a little queasy when you hit send, then you haven’t been confident enough in portraying yourself right so you don’t, you know, you don’t say I’m pretty good at this.

You need to say I’m an expert. Or like I say I’m a successful social media strategist. You want to move. Remember, you’re more expert than the people that you’re helping.

So nobody’s going to hire me if I say I’m pretty good at LinkedIn, right? So I own the fact that I’m a LinkedIn expert. And I know people that makes people want to hire me if they’re looking at your profiles, and what is confidently saying they’re an expert, and the other ones saying I do this stuff, you know, which one are you going to hire? Right? So you need to be confident and really, really go out on a limb and telling people how great you are in this headline.

That’s part of your personal brand, right? You really want to make sure that you’re positioning yourself as an expert in the eyes of your account, target customer. So this needs to be really okay. What would my ideal customer want to see when they read a profile or they’re looking to purchase from someone like me, right?

Right. So that’s us, like I like to use like a financial planner as an example. If you’re a financial planner, 4000, 40,000 400,000 other people have that in their headline on LinkedIn.

But if your headline says, I’m a financial planner that helps women over 50, or over 60 transition from a salary to retirement, now you’ve got people listening, right now you’re telling them what you’re doing, like who you help and how you help them. And that’s and now you’re gonna have people click on that. So think about what you do and what your special sauces that you can put in this headline to attract people to want to click on it.

I’m just looking at these headline now as well. And I just, normally a lot of people use it for their title, maybe their founder or, you know, marketing associate or whatever that might be in that area. So they used to be putting one, two, maybe three words in that area. I mean, I can see that you’ve got three lines, multiple word, what’s the recommendation?

So here’s the thing, Google reads this section. And I want Google to bring people to my profile. So I’m going to feed Google as much as I can. I’m going to think about what are people searching for that I want to come up as the search result. And I’m going to use those words in my headline. And I’m going to give Google as much as I can to work with, right?

So if somebody’s searching for LinkedIn speaker on Google, I want them to bring up my LinkedIn profile, right? Or social media speaker or social media strategist. So what you know, you don’t want to waste any opportunity to give more to give Google more reasons to bring people to your profile.

And LinkedIn, LinkedIn is also a powerful search engine in and of itself. So even if they’re just searching within LinkedIn, for a LinkedIn expert or LinkedIn speaker, I want my profile to come up so you want to use those as many of those words as you can in the areas that are searchable.

So just in that in that area, is there a minimum maximum amount of?

There is, I don’t know, I don’t actually know the number of this is about the maximum. I would be surprised if there’s more than three or four characters more than this. And you’ll notice I put the little stars into kind of make it pop a little. I just did that because I you know, I teach stuff. So, I show people, you know how to do this as you can see my headline. So I teach people how to do this.

And sometimes, you know, you want to just stand out from the crowd a little bit. So it’s okay to use these little extra characters. I don’t know the exact number, but you want to keep going until they till they knock you out. And then you want to keep tweaking it until you can use as many characters as you can.

Okay, and I think it’s important not to just think about it for search engine. I mean, it’s great to be found. But then it’s also super important to, you know, the reader or that target customer to make sure that you’re positioned to in their eyes as an expert and doesn’t look too nice to look natural.

And that’s probably more important than this keyword. So I agree if you can use the keywords, use them. But more importantly, more people are going to find this because they searched for you or they knew you or they got your business card or you connected with them because you’re in the same business group, right?

More people are going to see your profile that way then are going to find you from a Google search or LinkedIn search. So make sure that you’re exactly right and sure that you’re telling people how you can help them, most importantly.

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