Category Archives: LinkedIn Tips

Make sure you are not hidden

June 24, 2019 by ,

Are you unwittingly hiding your photo? Here’s a 2 minute check for you to make sure you’re not.

Over the past month this has been the case for nearly 20 people in the classes I’ve run who thought their photo was there for all to see, so I thought I’d share this with you.

Although we can see our photo, sometimes settings get changed and so people outside our 1st degree connections cannot. Clearly this is not good as:

► you lose impact and the chance to make a good 1st impression
► it gives the wrong impression, what are you hiding?
► it can make people more wary of connecting with you, reducing opportunities.

Here is a 2 minute check to see who can see your photo and make sure that you are not a grey image (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Tips, Optimise your Profile, Using LinkedIn
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5 Steps to Success on LinkedIn

March 30, 2019 by ,

Using LinkedIn: 5 steps to successThere has been much written about LinkedIn over the years and how it can work for you in business. Given that I have spent the last 10 years training companies and individuals on it, you are likely to expect that I’m going to be positive about what it offers. You’d be right, I’m a fan.

Having said that, I also recognise there is no single way to benefit from it – from job seeking to recruiting, networking to online training, business development to inbound marketing, the potential uses are many and very varied.

There are, however, some key underlying elements that we can all tap into – key steps to success if you like – and what we are going to look at below are some that will prove beneficial to using LinkedIn effectively, whatever your motives are for being on the site.

1. Decide what your current objectives are

LinkedIn is such a potentially wide-ranging tool, that you can use for a whole host of different reasons. Indeed, during your career as you enter different phases, your use will be radically different according to your current needs, situation and role.

Therefore, our first challenge is (more…)

Article Categories: B2B Advice for LinkedIn, Business Development on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips, LinkedIn Training
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Dress Appropriately – LinkedIn Advent Calendar (Day 2)

December 2, 2018 by ,



In the real world, when we meet someone face to face but before we have the opportunity to speak, they are already starting to build a mental image and first impression of us. They create a back story, imagine what we sound like and even how the conversation would start. It’s instant, it’s automatic & it’s based on what they see.

The same thing happens on LinkedIn … except there, all of this is conjured up by and based on our Profile.

In particular, the top part of our Profile – the Introduction Card – serves exactly that purpose and creates this first impression. Above all, it has two very visual parts that we need to use to influence and, to an extent, direct that first impression.

Those elements are the banner & our photo.

Let’s take the banner first. This is “prime real estate” (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Tips, New LinkedIn Profile, Optimise your Profile
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10 LinkedIn Tips and Advice revisited

August 27, 2018 by ,

Over the past few weeks, I have sent out a series of LinkedIn hints and tips in infographic form relating to elements on the site that I have been asked about, that I have seen have been causing issues or things that have changed and were worthy of a mention.

I have decided to bring those together in a single post to save you having to search them out on my LinkedIn feed in an effort to be extra helpful .. oh, and with an additional explanation below each one in case the image does tell you the whole story!

Hope you enjoy and do feel free to share!

1. Don’t send your message before you want to

When you go to your Messenger system, there are occasions when, quite naturally, you might want to start a new paragraph and have hit the key to go to a new line in the message and yet found that the message instead has been sent. Annoying!

That is unfortunately the default format on LinkedIn. However, if you go to the Messanger area then just next to the “Send” button, you will see three dots which allows you to turn that off and allow you to format your message as you wish. (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Marketing, LinkedIn Tips, Optimise your Profile
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Saved searches and Search Alerts on LinkedIn

August 14, 2018 by ,

LinkedIn Groups searchThere’s a quick way to keep up to date with new people who fit the prospecting criteria you’re interested in, without lifting a finger. Essentially, new business prospects delivered to your inbox every week … automatically. Sounds interesting? Then read on …

When I’m using LinkedIn for targeted business development, my first port of call is unsurprisingly LinkedIn’s people search function – not just the initial search box at the top of every page but the filter filters that used to be called the “Advanced Search” in its previous incarnations.

Being able to target the type of person I’m looking to approach using a combination of job title, company, location, industry or any of the other filters that LinkedIn offers is an absolute godsend. That’s also why it always takes up an important slot in the “LinkedIn for Business” workshops that I run.

Creating the right search takes time though, particularly if you are going to make sure that you cover all the bases which will include variants of relevant job titles for the type of people you are targeting. (I talk about that in my “Think before you search” post in more details) Once you have done so, you don’t want to lose your work – instead you are going to want to use that time and time again, to build on it as required. (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Advice, LinkedIn Strategy, LinkedIn Tips, Social Selling, Using LinkedIn
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Giving Kudos on LinkedIn

July 30, 2018 by ,

LinkedIn has been prolific in the last few months in rolling out a huge range of new elements across the site, often first on the mobile devices before then trialling and releasing them on the main desktop version.

One such feature that seems to have just received the ‘desktop treatment’ is called Kudos which was released about 6 weeks ago on mobile and allows you to thank specific people in your network for standing out in some way. They do this by giving you the chance to create and post an update containing an image which looks rather like a type of digital postcard, thanking that person for standing out in some way.

Now before you switch off, that’s really quite a nice thing to do. We know how powerful and important ‘Recommendations’ are on the site and while there are some amongst us (my hand’s firmly ‘up’ at this point) who are less convinced about ‘Endorsements’ because of the rather random way they are given by some (hey, I have double figure endorsements for my skill in ‘Extreme Ironing’ which is fairly random in itself), (more…)

Article Categories: LinkedIn Site Changes, LinkedIn Tips
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