13 steps to turn LinkedIn into a lead generator from Lesley Morrissey

1. Optimise your profile to attract your ideal client – that means you need to know who they are. Download the Perfect Client Worksheet here.

2. Create a professional headline that makes it easy for your ideal client to recognise themselves. Include a couple of your keywords and eye hooks. Copy these ★ ♦ to save spending hours searching for them!

3. Invest in a good headshot – ideally get a professional to do it. A profile picture should be head and shoulders only and you are aiming for a friendly and approachable look. You must be looking straight into the camera; nobody trusts someone who won’t make eye-contact – even in a picture.

4. Add interesting contact information – your professional email (not gmail, aol, yahoo or btinternet – it should feature your domain name), the phone number you want to receive business calls on, more interesting web links than Company website. Remember you can have three different pages on the same website.

5. As a business owner you should approach your summary from a marketing perspective. Add headlines and sub-headlines to break up the text. Ensure there is a line space between every paragraph. Use those eye hooks to make your headlines stand out.

6. Include your keywords in your summary and, where possible, in your current and previous experience.

7. Ask your clients (and former clients) to write recommendations on your profile. Don’t be shy – people expect this on LinkedIn. If they don’t know what to write ask them to say what you did for them, what it was like working with you and what the results were.

8. Arrange your profile so that the summary comes immediately after the top box (with your name/contact info in), then your experience, then any books you’ve published or awards you’ve won. The endorsements can safely be pushed to the bottom – recommendations are much better to have.

9. Share your expertise by writing articles (like blogs), LinkedIn calls them ‘posts’. Always include a relevant image (don’t use Google images you can run into copyright fines – try www.freeimages.com).

10. Create a series of short tips and share them as updates daily. If you write 14 you have enough for 2 weeks – then you can recycle them (nobody will notice).

11. Use the advanced search filters to find the people you want to reach and start a conversation with them.

12. Find the groups where your target audience hangs out and be helpful, share your expertise and you’ll have a whole group of people who fit your ideal client profile paying attention!

13. Tag your contacts and follow up regularly.

For more information contact: Lesley Morrissey / lesley@insidenews.co.uk

Do I know you from somewhere?

Do you have a picture on your LinkedIn/Twitter profile? And is it actually picture of you and not a cartoon dog?

I was trying to track down some old uni friends. Figuring that by now they should be pretty high in whatever career they had gone into I turned to LinkedIn. It is, after all, the network for the business person.

Now if you’re looking for someone with a reasonably uncommon name, it’s not too hard to find someone. And the first person has a name that’s totally unique on LinkedIn. So easy. 

But for  the second person I was looking for there were 138 results in the UK alone and in the world 450. And for some reason they hadn’t added our shared university to their profile so I couldn’t use that.

But luckily they had a photo and even though it’s a fair number of year since we left uni, they haven’t changed much. So that’s another connection made.

And for the third person there were 8,912 results. Adding our university reduced it down to 8. And again the photo came to the rescue and saved me from having to look at each profile in detail to work out which was the one I was looking for. 

So photos – handy when people want to connect with you. And connecting with people – handy if you want to do business. Bit of no brainer really!