Monetizing LinkedIn: Engaging Your Profile Wtih Your Resume

Your success on LinkedIn is primarily dependent on attracting opportunities. That starts with your LinkedIn profile. The stronger your profile the more likely you will get the attention of those who need your product, service, or job skills.

It’s my belief that your profile has the potential to be quite a bit more powerful than your resume. This is because of all the attachments and add-ons incorporated into the LinkedIn profile.

From a marketing standpoint this makes your LinkedIn profile a great “first contact” device. I will always send people to my profile before my resume simply because is has more depth and width.

As I have said many times in this blog, the key is to get people interested in you enough so they take the next step in investigating you. That step in most cases would be visiting your website to learn more about you and your business or job skills.

This is why I recommend that your profile is written for the reader in terms of what you can produce or have produced avoiding discussions of what you did which have far less interest to and impact on the reader.

You can then use your resume for the more detailed description of your abilities and specific skills. This slightly different approach to your resume gives you a link of interest for the reader. You can now promise the reader a more detail view of who you are and what you can do.

One other very valuable point here is that your fellow LinkedIners are the perfect crowd to help you improve both of these documents. Don’t hesitate to post a question in the Question and Answer forum asking for opinions on either of these documents. (As a side benefit to this type of question you innocently get people on your website to look at your resume!)

My suggestion is that you take a small piece what is on your resume or profile and write a different version (obviously trying to improve). The ask very specific questions in the detail of your question about what you are trying to accomplish.

Example: You might write a employment listing that tells what you produced and then take a slightly different angle (still focusing on what is produced) and ask the readers: Which of the two is more impressive? Which is more interesting or compelling? What suggestions do you have for how I should state this?

The key to this exercise is to be very specific as to what you what to know. If you don’t do this you are likely to get a lot of very vague comments that don’t really help you tune what you’ve done.

From Flyn

If you’d really like to power up your profile and learn a number of things you can apply to your resume as well, you should attend my upcoming webinar “Empowering Your Profile: Strategies for Job and Business Seekers.” You can find the information on this webinar workshop in the events page link above my picture.

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