Growing Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is a brilliant way to build your contacts and increase your status and awareness within the professional community. Starting a profile can be quite daunting at first when you don’t know where to start, but having an excellent eye-catching LinkedIn profile insures that you’ll be found by the right people.

When you have your profile set up and ready to go, finding contacts can be a long process, to start building up your profile look at the people you used to go to school with, friends, family and people you’ve met at social events.

Status Updates and Engagement

At first you might lose motivation if no one interacts with your status updates, but it is important that you stay positive within your posts and update them regularly. This is because potential contacts will be able to see that you’re still active online. Eventually people will start to comment, interact and share your content.

It is also ideal to engage with other people within LinkedIn. You will start to get noticed and be more visible and eventually online users will start to recognise you.

Participation in Groups

Joining groups is a brilliant way to increase your contacts and your online awareness. This is extremely effective on LinkedIn, because it strengthens your connections. To get the full impact of joining a group you should start discussions, comment and submit your own blog posts and articles. But it is important to not overload the group with irrelevant information as you will be considered a spammer.

Profile and Keywords

The appearance of your profile is very important on LinkedIn, as this will be what your judged upon when online users view your profile. Everything down to the wording and format can reflect what kind of person you are. Most importantly, make sure your profile picture is a clear and well presented, as first impressions on appearance can stick with people.

When creating your profile you have the option to add in keywords. It is recommended that you use this option as your profile will be more likely to be viewed by the right kind of people. Though when creating these keywords, it’s important that you don’t put anything too extravagant as people will have to search for these terms, therefore sticking simple words give you a higher ranking.

Personalising Requests

When it comes to adding contacts into your LinkedIn page, it’s more professional to send personal requests. You will be more likely to be accepted this way, as by personalising a message instead of a generated one, it makes other people feel more important. Also it’s a good way to remind people where you have met or spoke to them, so they are able to recall who you are.

Endorsement and Recommendations

Many people are afraid to ask for endorsement on LinkedIn, but a lot of successful LinkedIn profiles use this method. Using your close contacts to promote yourself gets your name to a wider audience, also you are able to do the same for the other correspondent. This is also the same for recommendations, you should treat them as references as when you want one in return they will be given to you in the same professional standard.

Keeping your LinkedIn profile fresh and up to date will attract the attention it needs. Most importantly joining groups will increase your connections and give you more of a direct impact on your job search results. So step up your game on LinkedIn, and start to build up your second degree connections.