Author: Joe Escobedo
Contributor at Forbes.com
So you have a LinkedIn profile. You've added your recent company and job title. Now what?
Time to make your LinkedIn profile work for you, by building a personal brand that will supercharge your career and boost your income.
In this piece, freelance content strategist Virginia Bautista, who makes $3,000 a month from LinkedIn alone, shares nine steps to build a powerful personal brand on LinkedIn.
1. Setting your goals on LinkedIn. What exactly do you want to accomplish on LinkedIn and how do your goals tie-in with your career and your personal brand?
Write down your objectives, specify how you’ll achieve them and track your progress. For example, let’s say that you want to increase your connections by 1,000 in 12 months. So you break it down to having 85 new contacts per month. Now how are you going to do that?
Knowing what you want out of LinkedIn makes the platform so much more fun to use.
2. Get to know your audience better. When you try to appeal to everyone, you won’t connect with anyone. Have a clear picture of who you are writing for by creating an audience persona. Ask yourself: "What are their challenges? How can I help solve their problems?"
To learn more about your audience, do research on your industry. “You can also join LinkedIn and other social media groups. Read the conversations; ask questions. This will help you create content that resonates with your target audience,” explains Bautista.
For example, as Bautista’s target audience are freelancers from the Philippines, she joined the Facebook groups Freelancing Philippines, Professional VAs and Freelancers Hub Philippines. From these groups, she found out that most freelancers are concerned about the “race to the bottom” trend in bidding sites like Upwork. Those offering the lowest rates are getting most of the jobs, essentially making it tougher for everyone to charge an agreeable professional fee.
“These insights enabled me to write content that give freelancers a better choice, which is to build their personal brand on LinkedIn,” Bautista adds.
3. Find your niche. Once you’ve clearly defined your audience, narrow them down further. “My biggest mistake when I started publishing on LinkedIn was writing without any specific audience in mind,” says Bautista.
So how can you find your niche? Bautista suggests two tips: target a particular industry and provide a solution that addresses your audience’s needs.
“As a freelancer for nearly 10 years, I chose to focus on the freelancing industry because I understand the issues freelancers go through. And since not so many Filipinos know how to use LinkedIn or aren’t aware of what LinkedIn is, I thought I could teach freelancers how to use LinkedIn to thrive in the industry,” says Bautista.
4. Build quality connections. The size of your network doesn’t matter as much as the quality of your connections. LinkedIn has an efficient search algorithm that allows its users to find relevant connections. Look for these professionals, connect with them, engage with them. Your posts will get more organic clicks, views, likes and shares.
Using LinkedIn’s advanced search function to find the right professionals to connect with is easy:
Type in the job title or any keyword describing your target audience. For example, if you want to target CEOs, type CEO in the search box, then select ‘People’ on the categories below.Refine your search using the available filter on the right sidebar. This is a critical step. If you want quality connections, consider your target audience and your niche as you select the users you want to connect with. The results will only be those from within your network (first-, second-, third-degree connections plus other members of groups you’re in).Connect with the list of suggested professionals and customize each message when sending out your connection requests.
Bautista explains her approach: “What I used to do was type ‘freelance’ in the search box to find freelancers within my network. I then refined my search by country to find freelancers only from the Philippines and selected second- and third-degree connections. This search gave me around 35,000 freelancers from the Philippines. I sent them personalized messages with my connection requests and took it from there.”
Bautista gives the example: "Hi Juaymah, my name is Virginia, a freelance writer for nearly 10 years. We're both members of the Facebook group Freelancing Philippines. I wish to add you to my professional network and I hope to collaborate with you in the future. Thanks and have a great day!"
5. Reach out to key influencers in your target industry. If you’re new in your target industry, the easiest way to generate awareness and interest for your brand is to partner with influential and relevant people. Attend offline events where you might get the chance to meet them and when you do, tell them a bit of your story. And of course, remember to connect with them on LinkedIn.
“I once sent a cold email to the founder of Freelancing Philippines. Her group has over 11,000 members which I thought was a huge following. She replied to me, let me join her Facebook group and I was invited to be a guest in a live interview titled ‘Facebook Live with LinkedIn Power User Virginia Bautista.’ That led me to growing my own connections who regularly read what I write,” says Bautista.
6. Tie in offline marketing with your LinkedIn strategies. Take advantage of offline events and do promotions to encourage your target audience to connect with you and check out your articles on LinkedIn. Get creative with your social copy and write headlines like “Are You a Freelancer? Here's Why You Should Stop Acting Like One” that will entice them to click. Don't just self-promote. Build your brand by giving value to your audience.
“I attended a face-to-face workshop for freelance virtual assistants. I shared how I thrived in freelancing without going to bidding sites and by just using LinkedIn. At the end of the event, I left them with this call-to-action: ‘Connect with me on LinkedIn and learn more about how you can succeed as a freelancer by making LinkedIn work for you.’ This helped me gain more connections and have more people read the content I publish. They also motivate me to write articles that help solve the issues they face in the industry,” says Bautista.
7. Create helpful, original content. Support your content with research, check the facts from multiple sources and offer fresh ideas. “I personally prefer publishing long-form articles on LinkedIn as they allow me to provide more industry insight,” says Bautista.
The drawback here is that long-form content (1,500+ words) takes more time to produce. Still, if you’re building a personal brand, writing long-form puts you in a position of authority. It takes skill and courage to make your ideas public, after all.
Bautista’s tip when writing long-form: Use bullet points to highlight your key points. Make your story crisp and clear by removing unnecessary words. Make your copy scannable. Avoid jargons. Use simple words.
8. Reinforce your brand from other media. Republish your content in other platforms. This is a good way to increase awareness on your brand and it will help people recognise you more.
Bautista says she republishes her articles on Social Media Today and Freelancers Union. “I get several connection requests from people who had read my articles on those two platforms.”
9. Be social. Engage with the people who took time to comment on and share your posts.
Bautista shares an observation: “I’ve seen LinkedIn users with huge following who don’t engage with interactions on their posts or page.” It’s called a social network for a reason. It’s not entirely polite to start a conversation then take yourself out and leave people to it.
Also, think before you like, comment and share. Every action you take on LinkedIn contributes to your overall branding.
(Additional reporting by content strategist Megan Leung.)