LinkedIn Makeover: LinkedIn Profile Optimization

Webinar: 10 Steps to a POWERFUL LinkedIn Profile (Sponsored by Career Builder)

2012-05-24T23:05:44Z

Today I presented a Webinar for CareerBuilder.com’s Empowering Employment Author Webinar Series. This series features authors & career experts who share their secrets, research, and tips to help job seekers. My topic was LinkedIn and I showed the audience 10 steps to optimize their LinkedIn profile.

The webinar went well and there were plenty of wonderful questions that kept me on my toes. If you missed it, don’t fear! CareerBuilder recorded it and is allowing people to watch it free of charge!

Facebook Vs LinkedIn, the winner is…

2012-05-03T14:54:21Z

Carol Brown contacted me today with a link to an article she just posted on her Website, OnlineCollege.org. The title of the article is 20 Compelling Reasons to Spend Less Time on Facebook and More Time on LinkedIn. Clearly this is written for a student but it’s a message that is worthwhile for everyone to hear.

Go read it now and come back to hear my take on it!

Winner Takes All

There’s a place and time for Facebook and there’s a place and time for LinkedIn. Although both are social networks, they each help you achieve different goals. LinkedIn is a professional network and it helps you connect on a professional level.

With that said, I also use Facebook for professional purposes and have found numerous opportunities through it. The real answer isn’t to choose between the two but rather determine how each network will help you achieve your goals and then use each of them purposefully. Know your objectives, create a process, and DOMINATE!

Thank you, Carole for the wonderful article! I love seeing students embracing LinkedIn! It’s the right thing for them today, especially in this tough job market.

Finding the Duplicate in LinkedIn’s Skills & Expertise Section

2012-05-02T21:27:52Z

LinkedIn’s Skills & Expertise section is becoming more and more important in optimizing your profile for LinkedIn search. It’s a relatively new section and it is slowly replacing the Specialties section that is located right below your LinkedIn Summary. In fact, new LinkedIn users don’t even have a Specialties section anymore!

The Skills & Expertise section of your LinkedIn profile allows you to add keywords to your profile so you can get found. LinkedIn even states that by adding skills and expertise to your profile, you will appear in keyword searches. This is an actual screen grab from a LinkedIn profile:

The Issue

You can add up to 50 keywords to your Skills & Expertise section. The problem, however, is that you can’t save this section if there is a duplicate item. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to have a duplicate and it’s very hard to find it in the mess of keywords.

How to Spot the Duplicate Skill & Save Your LinkedIn Profile

As a LinkedIn profile writer, I have run into this issue far too many times to count… but I came up with a quick fix!

Here it is:

Spotting the Dupe!

Copy your skills and paste them into Excel
Sort the column from A to Z
The skills align in alphabetical order and you can now quickly find the duplicate skill and save your work.

I hope you enjoyed this article! Let me know what you think in the comments!

Guest Blog: Life After The Army

2012-04-18T16:59:48Z

My friend and client, Curtez Riggs, (yes, I optimized his LinkedIn profile) reached out to me a few weeks ago. He asked if I would write a guest column for his new Website, Life After the Army. Life After the Army’s goal is to introduce and develop the concepts of personal branding, Internet entrepreneurship, and job hunting for Soldiers and Veterans.

Clearly, these are goals I can get behind! How could I say anything but YES!!?

My guest blog was published last week: Veterans: What does your LinkedIn Profile Say About You?

Here’s an excerpt from Curtez’s introduction:

Last year I needed some help establishing my profile on LinkedIn. My search led me to Donna Serdula, a resident LinkedIn expert, and Social Media Strategist who eagerly helped me establish my brand on LinkedIn. Naturally, when I needed a writer to discuss the benefits of LinkedIn to our readers, she was my first choice! (Hopefully this won’t be her last post)….

I hope you will join me over at Life After the Army to discuss this article!

Oh, and Curtez, I am sure there will be many more guest posts by me to come! Thank you for the opportunity!

Video: LinkedIn for Job Search, How to Stand Out & Get Hired TODAY!

2012-04-09T15:46:29Z

I am proud to announce the next episode of my online Webcast show: Social Media Makeover.

In this week’s episode of The Social Media Makeover Show, I help a job seeker retool his LinkedIn profile so he stands out from the crowd.

David Lodge is a business analyst, looking for his next job opportunity. He knows that LinkedIn is key but he needs a few tips to make sure his LinkedIn profile effectively markets him in this tight job market.

In this episode, you will learn:

How to optimize your LinkedIn Profile using keywords so your profile POPS TO THE TOP of Recruiter searches!
Maximize your LinkedIn Headline so recruiters are COMPELLED to open your LinkedIn profile and read more about you!
The SUPER SIMPLE SECRET that gets your phone ringing!!!

The Social Media Makeover Show is filmed at MallStars located just outside of Philadelphia, PA.

The show is shot using Green Screen Technology! Here’s a photo of me on set! As you can see, there is no background, elephant, or anything!!! (You have to watch the show to get the elephant reference!)

Watch the video on the Social Media Makeover Official Site!

MallStars is a professional quality video production service at an affordable price. Using Green screen technology, Mall Stars can transform you or your product anywhere by creating a blended scene against a green screen background.

NBC Special Live Event: Job Search and Social Media Presentation

2012-03-29T18:03:22Z

Tracy Davidson from NBC10 Philadelphia is committed to helping local displaced workers find jobs! I worked with her on “Jobs Week,” in which experts provided live online presentations to her audience. Following on the heels of Jobs Week, Tracy asked me to present at a LIVE studio event in front of an audience of job seekers.

I presented my TOP 5 ACTION STEPS to leveraging Social Media and LinkedIn in the job search. Luckily, I was able to record almost the entire presentation. It’s embedded below. If you are thinking, but I don’t need a job, this presentation isn’t for me! Think again! The advice I give is also applicable to the professional looking to brand themselves and find opportunities on LinkedIn.

If you have any questions, feel to comment below.

How Do I Rearrange LinkedIn Profile Sections, Experiences, or Recommendations?

2012-03-27T19:55:02Z

Over the last few weeks, I presented at a number of events talking about the power of LinkedIn. Regardless of the event, one question kept popping up over and over again. People wanted to know how they could change the order of their experiences, recommendations, and profile sections within LinkedIn.

Yes, it’s entirely doable to change the order of your LinkedIn profile; it’s just not extremely obvious HOW to do it. The sections can be moved by clicking on the header of the section and dragging and dropping it where you want it to appear. You can do the same with recommendations and experiences too! When you click, you’ll notice your mouse cursor changes… it becomes 4 arrows pointing outward. At this point, hold your left mouse button down and drag it where you want it to go.

Here’s the thing, however tempting it may be, I suggest keeping your profile as close to default as possible. By straying too far from the default, you may confuse your reader.

One change I recommend is grabbing the Personal Information section and placing it right below the Summary. This way your reader does not have to scroll to the bottom of your profile to find out how to contact you.

Rearrange Recommendations

You can rearrange recommendations however the caveat here is that you can only rearrange within the position the recommendation references. You can’t pull out a recommendation and place it under a new position.

Rearrange Experiences

If you have two or more concurrent experiences, you can also rearrange them! Again, they must be concurrent positions… meaning AT THE SAME TIME PERIOD.

HAVE FUN REARRANGING!!!!

Jobs Week at NBC: Social Media & the Job Search

2012-03-26T14:07:42Z

It was an exciting day for me! This morning I drove to Bala Cynwyd to the NBC 10 Philadelphia studios to record a presentation for Jobs Week.

What is Jobs Week?

Tracy Davidson and the ConsumerWatch team are helping people find jobs by featuring several local job openings on their newscasts and providing 30-minute webinars on NBC10.com each evening to help viewers hone their job-hunting skills.

I had worked with Tracy Davidson and her producer Alexis Leonard on a story about LinkedIn a few months back. When Alexis reached out and asked me to present for Jobs Week, I was thrilled! I am a huge fan of their work and I love how they are providing such amazing job information for people who need it!

Here’s a picture of me on set. This is right before the camera started to roll.

My presentation will air tonight at 7pm (eastern). The title of the presentation is Finding a Job in the Social Media Savvy Millennium.

Afterward, I will be on Tracy’s Facebook page answering questions posted to her wall.

If you’d like to check out my PowerPoint prior to tonight’s presentation, here you go!

Finding jobs in the social media savvy millennium

View more PowerPoint from DonnaTechDesigns

I hope you will tune in to the Internet broadcast. If you can’t make it until after 7pm, no worries! The presentation streams live at 7 and then later it’s embedded and you can watch whenever you want.

UPDATE!!!! You can watch my presentation on YouTube!!!

Thank you Alexis Leonard, Tracy Davidson, and NBC 10!

LinkedIn Profile Views, New & Improved?

2012-03-10T16:38:29Z

As a LinkedIn profile writer, I am often the first to notice changes to LinkedIn. Just yesterday I was working on the profile of an IT Consultant specializing in the Dental industry, when I noticed a pretty big change to the Who’s Viewed Your Profile sidebar widget.

Please note, this change has not been rolled out across the board yet, in fact, I haven’t seen it on any other profile.

The one thing I have noticed helping professionals maximize their use of LinkedIn is that very few people EVER look at this awesome widget.

The Who’s Viewed Your Profile widget is a great way to benchmark the success of your LinkedIn profile. This widget appears on the right sidebar of both your LinkedIn Home page AND your Edit profile page. It shows you the stats for how many times your profile was viewed in 1 to 90 days and how many times your profile turned up in search results any time over the past 1 to 90 days.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that if your profile is not getting many views OR it’s simply not turning up in searches, you need to optimize your LinkedIn profile!

Who’s Viewed Your Profile?

Here’s how the widget has looked for pretty much forever:

The new look is much more artistic showing intersecting circles. Unfortunately, from what I can see, this new design lacks some of the detail of the old design.

The daily views and the number of times your profile appeared in search is missing. Here’s the thing, you can click on the widget and you are transported to the Profile Stats page where you can see more detail. The detail omits the daily number and instead shows you a graph where you can see how your profile is performing over a 90 day period. The other issue is the reporting is in arrears… it’s not your current numbers showing but rather the month before’s statistics.

As you can see in this screenshot I took JUST NOW, the date is March 10th but the last reported week of the graph is February 26th.

Perhaps LinkedIn is in the process of beefing up the Profile Stats page… or by forcing more people to that page, they are hoping that more people upgrade to a higher plan because that’s where you can see exactly who has viewed your profile. The basic, free plan only shows you the last 5 people. If you want to see the last 90 days of visitors to your profile, you have to pony up and upgrade to a paid plan.

Discounted LinkedIn Plan

My suggestion to my clients is to upgrade to LinkedIn’s Personal Plus plan. This LinkedIn plan is only $7.95 a month if paid annually! That’s less than $100 a year! The thing is, LinkedIn is sneaky. The only place you can find this cheap LinkedIn plan is on the Profile Stats page.

Regardless, the Personal Plus plan is nearly perfect for the casual LinkedIn user. You get to see viewers of your profile over the last 90 days… and that is awesome! Think of the possibilities! You also get to see the keywords people are using to find you in search. This means you can see how successfully optimized your profile is for your desired keywords.

I look forward to seeing how LinkedIn rolls out this improved widget. Hopefully we will see even more detail in the Profile Stats page!

Follow Company Button on LinkedIn

2012-03-06T14:03:31Z

You’ve seen those social media buttons on Websites before. Heck, they are everywhere. With a glance of the eye you can see how many people Like a company’s Facebook page and how many Twitter followers they have.

LinkedIn decided to get into the game and last week they presented us with the LinkedIn Follow Company button!

It’s been just over a year since LinkedIn introduced Company pages and little by little we’ve seen their functionality grow. With the ability to easily market your company page, wider spread adoption can be expected.

The LinkedIn Company follow button acts and looks just like the Twitter and Facebook varieties.

It’s Easy to Create a Follow LinkedIn Company Button!

1. Visit LinkedIn’s Developer site

2. Enter your company’s name in the Company field. YOU MUST HAVE A LINKEDIN COMPANY PAGE ALREADY CREATED!

3. Decide if you want to include the count of followers or not…

Psychologically speaking, people are turned off by small numbers. You may want to hide the number of followers until you get to a decent number. What’s a decent number? Well it depends on your company. Are you a small, local company? 50 followers may be considered a decent following. Are you multinational? 500 followers may be decent for you.

4. Click GET CODE and copy it.

5. Paste the code into your Website’s sidebar… PRESTO! You are now a Social Media Superstar! Congrats!

So what’s the point? Why should anyone follow a company?

LinkedIn gives us the answer in their recent blog post:

Whether you are looking to stay up-to-date on company news, career opportunities or industry trends, following companies on LinkedIn is a great and easy way to gain insights and stay connected.

Follow companies that interest you. Keep up to date with what they are doing.

And if you have a company page, make sure you are using it! Post updates! List your products and services. Ask people to follow you!

Are you proud of your company page? Post a link to it in the comments of this post!