The Bloggin’ BUZZ

Makeover Monday

Charlotte Stallings is the first person to take advantage of my Free Profile Makeover offer! Charlotte is relatively new to social media, but has a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Plaxo.

For this particular makeover, Charlotte has chosen for her LinkedIn profile to be reviewed. Charlotte’s LinkedIn profile can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottestallings. I have taken screen shots of Charlotte’s profile and numbered various areas to make it easier to follow along.

1. You can change this name from “My Website” to “Getting Smart! LLC” which will assist your google rankings on the name of your business and brand your business once more on your profile. I would add “Appearances on CNN“. In addition, if you have a blog (or any other sites that you control/own), you should feel free to add them here (at least one speaking site is good as well…if this is a focus). Utilizing this tool implements a free backlink from a high ranking site which also assists in your Google rankings for any one of the websites that you link to.

2. Perfect! So many people either don’t realize that you can customize this link or don’t take the time to do so. Congratulations for taking the initiative! This helps make it easier for people to find your profile on LinkedIn simply by typing your name in a Google search. In addition, it’s so much easier to remember than the magical number combination assigned by LinkedIn.

3. Your business is mentioned, but I have no idea what your business does without clicking on the link. Without an incentive to do so, most people are not going to take the time out of their day to click on a link that may or may not have anything to do with them. You could be losing prospects simply by not allowing people to make that qualifying decision for themselves upfront. Let us know in 3-4 sentences what Getting Smart! LLC is all about, why it was important for you to start this business and who you serve (answering WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) to your profile viewer.

4. & 5. Similar to the comments in #3, insert information to help us to understand your competencies. In particular, highlight your experiences at these businesses that help to show your reader how those experiences lend themselves to your competence at Getting Smart! LLC.

6. This will adjust as you change the information I suggested in #1 to reflect the name of your website.

7. Great! Inserting your interests is something that a lot of people fail to do, but is extremely important to help your reader feel an affinity towards you…this is especially true if your interests are either similar to your reader or intriguing to your reader. It also helps you to appear more like a person and not a company. This is extremely important because in most cases, people buy because they know, like and trust someone. Inserting your interests helps to further the potential relationship between you and your prospect. As you are also a professional speaker, I would put “speaking” or “presenting” as an interest (I LOVE “stimulating and lively conversation” – that’s fantastic as it says a lot about you).

8. Great job! Joining and participating in groups is a great way to build visibility for yourself and your company. You have an additional benefit in that some of your groups are exclusive and therefore also lend themselves to building your credibility. Just be sure to be active at some level with these groups to take advantage of their visibility.

9. Good contact settings!

10. After seeing your contact email address, I got confused. Here’s why: I had already seen that the name of your company was “Getting Smart! LLC” which doesn’t exactly match your email address @gettingsmartonline.com.

I went back up to the link found at #1 and when I clicked on it, it linked to www.charlottestallings.com. This led me to be even more curious, so I decided to enter the web address indicated by your email address (www.gettingsmartonline.com) and found the same duplicated website (at least, I don’t think it’s a redirect). Both sites are also copyrighted under Charlotte Stallings (not the LLC). (On the off-chance that these are duplicate websites and not a redirect, I would recommend the following reading articles from Search Engine Journal and Google Webmaster Central and Site Pro News.)

My confusion lies in understanding what it is that you want to brand: Getting Smart!, gettingsmartonline.com or charlottestallings.com.

Outside of what I’ve listed above, I have 3 recommendations:

1. Use the Update Feature – keep people updated on what you’re focused on now. This could be a new client, speaking engagement or new project. The advantage is that this gets sent out to your contacts in a weekly message from LinkedIn.

2. Recommendations – You don’t have any recommendations and have offered one. Spend time once per week and make a recommendation to someone that you value, either a previous co-worker, vendor, client, etc. If you are sincere in your recommendations, they will come back to you.

3. Summary – fill in your summary (found under “Edit My Profile”). The summary truly lets you express more of your personality, who you are, what you do and other items that are important to you and set you apart from the crowd. This area also allows you to fill in your “Specialties” which are used as keywords in LinkedIn searches.

BONUS: You can increase your visibility and set yourself up as an expert through the utilization of the Answers feature (located at the top of your LinkedIn page). Answers allows you to ask or answer questions within a specified industry. The person that asked the question has the capability of ranking the best answer after closing the question. When this occurs, this recognition is noted on your LinkedIn profile. People are recognized for their expertise on a weekly basis.

I hope this was beneficial for you!

Deidre Hughey

Me! Me! I want to get my social media profile analyzed for free!

(I want to get my profile analyzed, but I would prefer for to keep my review private.)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 8:35 am and is filed under Put Some Punch In Your Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.