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April 4, 2010Linkedin is going to be an essential part of your freelancing career, so it is very important to get used to this website and to really deepen your understanding of what you can do and achieve with this website. Here are some of the key steps you need to undertake to get your LinkedIn profile working for you.
Deepen Your Profile
Work on your profile and fill it in especially photograph and what your current job situation is and also your current status. I will then recommend going through and putting in all of the information about yourself, so the summary is pretty important. You need to make sure this is pithy as well as contains a little bit of your personality. You do not want this to be just a dead CV page.
At the same time, please remember that linked in is not Facebook. One of my friends has a huge linked in page with so many different applications, videos, slideshows and hundreds of groups he is a member of. It takes a long while to scroll down his page. Of course, you do want to put in relevant information and maybe videos and slideshows if they are relevant. But your LinkedIn page is a business page designed to bring in new consultancy clients. It is not a way of communicating what you’re up to with your friends, leave that for Facebook.
If you go to the applications tab on the left hand side of linked in, you can set up your blog to sync with your linked in profile. There are a couple of applications to connect your WordPress or other blog to your linked in profile. You can also set up twitter to connect with your profile. I would be a bit careful about putting on too many applications because they just can clutter up your page and put people off. Also, they are very distracting especially things like where you have travelled in the world etc.
Develop Your Network
The absolute key thing about linked in is in building up your network and then be able to find and contact new people who are part of your linked in connections. So follow the steps on the linked in page, to go through your outlook, Gmail or Hotmail accounts to find out who else is connected with you on linked in. You can send an e-mail to all of the people who are registered on linked in and but are not part of your network and connect with them.
Go through your spreadsheet of freelance consultancy contacts and e-mail all of the relevant people an invitation to connect on linked in. You can also ask your current and former colleagues and of course everyone you meet in a business environment. By doing this, you can then access their network and even get invitations because of your mutual connections.
Developing your network is an ongoing and important part of your freelance consultancy business development work.
Join and Contribute To Groups
There are numerous groups on linked in and you can do a search to find those which are relevant to you. Once you are on those groups you can do a bit more work to see if they have any physical meet ups, message board postings and other ways in which you can connect with members. You can use this as a way of connecting with your blog for example.
You can search for groups in the groups directory. I just did a search on management consultancy and 241 different groups came up. You can also set up your own group which may do for this blog. When I typed in freelance consultant, there were 27 groups which came up. You can visit these to find out which are relevant for you and you can join many different groups including groups by industry, function and location amongst others.
Probably best to work out which are the best groups for you and then dedicate some time each day or week to read through some of the posts and contribute as desired.
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The power of LinkedIN can’t be underestimated. Great resource. Thanks for the tip.