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Your #Career : 7 Things You Must Do To Maximize The Value Of Your LinkedIn Profile…Your LinkedIn Profile is One of the Most Important Career Marketing Tools you Have.

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You’ve done all the hard work to create a stellar LinkedIn profile. You have a professional headshot, a compelling headline and a complete, authentic summary (if you are still working on this, read this post for guidance). When LinkedIn says your profile is “all-star,” it’s time to turn your hard work into a tool that will advance your career.

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Here are seven actions to take (in four categories) to maximize the value of your perfect profile:

1. Make it visible. You don’t want to be the world’s best-kept secret, wasting all that effort you spent building the online representation of the real you. I recommend making every element of your profile visible to everyone. Through the Privacy and Settings option, you can choose to share your entire profile or just a few elements with public viewers. Allow anyone to see your public profile. What’s the value of creating your profile if you don’t showcase it?

 

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2. Keep it current. The more interaction you have with your profile, the more likely it will be seen by others. In fact, according to LinkedIn, you should “update your status at least 20 times per month in order to maximize your reach to approximately 60% of your unique audience.”

Stay connected with your contacts by updating your status regularly – letting others know what you are working on and the events you are attending, along with sharing links to the content you find interesting. 

Direct People to it

Sure, people can find your profile through LinkedIn searches – publishing all the right keywords is essential for attracting people you didn’t even know were looking for you. I call it planned serendipity. But you need to go beyond the random and unplanned connections. You need to send people to your profile so they can learn more about you.

There are two easy ways to get people to check out your profile:

3. Use a QR Code. You want people to learn more about you after meeting you at a networking function. Make it easy for them to get to your profile by creating a QR (quick response) code that links directly to your profile. Add your QR code to business cards, your resume, and your pitch letters. You can also create stickers with your QR code and add them to your name badge at networking functions.

4. Create LinkedIn buttons. Use the LinkedIn buttons to direct people to your profile. Under “Privacy and Settings” you can access your public profile settings (on the right side of the screen). At the bottom of the box, there’s an option to create what LinkedIn calls “your public profile badge.” This lets you choose from a series of button options that you can add to your email signature, Blog, Website, etc.

Repurpose it

LinkedIn provides a valuable, one-stop-shopping resource for people who want to know more about your expertise. But the act of putting your profile together is also a valuable, one-stop-shopping exercise in getting clear about your personal brand message and defining and documenting your career success. Now that you have all that content in one place, leverage that work for other applications. In personal branding, we have a technique we call “being lazy,” which means repurpose and reuse content. This helps ensure consistency and saves time and effort. Here are three ways to maximize the effort you put into build your amazing LinkedIn profile: 

5. Get a copy of it. You can export your profile to Word or PDF document to use in your career marketing activities. Here’s how.

6. Turn it into a resume. LinkedIn Labsprovides an option to turn your LinkedIn profile into your resume. First, you select your resume template, and then you can customize the content that you pull directly from your profile. This helps save time and ensures consistency between your on- and offline career materials.

7. Create your own website. There are a number of services that will let you import your LinkedIn content into their platform so you can create your own custom website. My favorite is branded.me (disclosure: branded.me is a partner of my company, Reach Personal Branding). They allow you to import your profile content into one of a variety of templates. Then you can customize your site with images, colors, fonts, etc.

Your LinkedIn profile is one of the most important career marketing tools you have. Its value is amplified when you get more people to see it, and when you repurpose it to support your personal branding efforts.

Remember, before you maximize your profile, you need to make sure it is compelling and reflects who you are in the real world. Learn how to build a stellar LinkedIn summary in this recorded webinar which you can download here.

 

Forbes.com | January 4, 2015 | William Arruda