As it’s Friday 13th I thought you might like to have a black cat ‘walk’ across your screen for good luck.
Success on LinkedIn, however, relies on more than just luck. Getting your profile to ‘All Star’ status is really just the beginning, after all this is not a network like Facebook (although some people seem to think it is) posting a few personal updates and expecting lots of likes and comments is not a strategy. To be successful on LinkedIn you need to create your own luck.
4 Steps to Creating Your Own LUCK on LinkedIn
- Look to measure your LinkedIn activity. Start by recording what your baseline is now, today. Then each Friday review the week, celebrate the wins and track the following;
- Number of new connections
- Number of profile views for the week
- Running 90 day total of profile views
- Number of actions taken
- Check your Social Selling Index score, and then check out the suggestions and resources to improve that score.
- Understand what your intentions are with LinkedIn. The majority of users are still approaching LinkedIn to find work, even this requires proactive activity. Using the platform to just reach out to recruiters and apply for posted positions is like accepting a new job for a salary of $50,000, when the hiring company were willing to give you $250,000 if you had just asked. You are leaving way too much on the table. Whether its for business development or to find a new job or track down old business connections or build a bigger network you have to be very clear about what you are using LinkedIn for and what constitutes a good return on your time spent.
- Consistent activity is much more effective that jumping in with a burst of updates, shares and likes. Don’t you find it annoying when you look at your LinkedIn home page and someone in your network has obviously been sitting at their desk for the last hour ‘catching up’ on the network. Its like they have thrown up all over your home page with post after post after post. I end up having to turn off their notifications to get myself some air! There are lots of tools to help you control the pace of your activity, making it appear as if you are hanging out on LinkedIn all day, when in fact you might be spending just 10 minutes a day with your morning coffee.
- Keep at it. Rome was not built in a day and neither is your LinkedIn success. Far too many times I have seen people take advantage of the one month trial of Premium membership and then complain 30 days later that its not working for them. Often they have not taken the three steps above to even know what the real improvements are. It takes time to find your way on a platform that offers so much, most of us are not even scratching the surface of whats possible. Success will come with purposeful action and intent, but a more realistic measure is 90 days.
Consistent small actions each day will ensure that you build your network and make it manageable. 5-10 minutes per day. Pick a time of the day that you are going to dedicate to this. Active times on LinkedIn tend to be before work, lunchtimes and after work.
Look to spend about 1 minute on each main action each day. That may mean doing just one of the actions per day under each heading and rotating them.
There are 22 key areas on your LinkedIn profile that you can edit and brand to stand out more. In fact a full personally branded LinkedIn profile can increase opportunities by up to 40 times according to LinkedIn. In our free report “5 Steps to Boosting Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn” you can get a head start – click here to access the free report.