LinkedIn Made Simple

Fat Strategies in a Thin Book

Ryan Rhoten, Andy Foote

• Publisher: JETLAUNCH
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781641846370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Despite being one of the oldest Social platforms, LinkedIn is still largely misunderstood. Is it a place for your resume or a goldmine for leads? Somewhere between those spectrums lies the confusion most users experience. This confusion leads users to "gurus" who happily sell you one piece of the LinkedIn puzzle. To be successful on LinkedIn, you need the box with the picture to understand how the puzzle pieces fit together. LinkedIn Made Simple is the box with the image. With over 100 identified strategies, LinkedIn Made Simple provides you with a structured, step-by-step method to get the most out of LinkedIn to impact your business or career.

Part 1
Connect

Identify Your Audience

Your Ideal Audience

To get the most from LinkedIn, [Strategy #15] you MUST know your ideal audience. Your ideal audience will vary according to your goals. A job seeker’s audience may be hiring managers or recruiters, while a business owner may be looking for an audience for their products or services.

Fortunately, identifying your ideal audience is simple. Unfortunately, it’s not easy. As you go through this section and consider your audience, some things will come to you naturally, while other things will require you to do some investigation.

So, who is your ideal audience? If you’re having trouble visualizing someone, think about the problems you are uniquely qualified to solve. Who has those problems? As a reference, Ryan’s ideal audience is Mary. Mary is a business owner who struggles to find clarity in how she positions, packages, and promotes her business.

OK, your turn. Write down your ideal audience’s name or job title:

Note to job seekers. As you work through this book, it will help if you consider yourself a business of one, as my friend Mark Anthony Dyson suggested on Ryan’s podcast. Generally speaking, your audience is the hiring manager and the HR manager at your target company.

Audience Insights

Understanding your target audience is a bit more straightforward if you’re a business. If you are a personal brand completing this exercise, think about yourself as a business of one. Like a business, you are hired to solve problems for the company using your skill set. Whether you are a business or a personal brand you need to understand certain aspects of your ideal audience such as demographics and insights.

Demographics

Demographics are quantifiable pieces of information about your target audience. Demographics include age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, children, income, education, locations, and employment. Most of these things you probably already know about your target audience. [Strategy #16]. Demographics are essential for two reasons. First, they paint a picture of your audience, and second, demographics are needed for advertising.

As an example of how to use demographics when identifying your audience, Ryan’s audience, Mary, is between thirty and forty years old. She is married with at least one child. For the most part, Mary lives in the United States, but she can just as easily be a global citizen. She is college-educated and self-employed. Mary is usually a coach, consultant, or a business owner with no or a small team. Are you starting to picture Mary?

Now it’s your turn. For your ideal audience, capture the following information.

Name:

Location:

Age:

Gender:

Education:

Degree:

Field of Study:

School:

Employee: Yes or No

An employee is a person employed by a company and is paid for their skills.

Function (department):

Level (seniority in the organization):

Title:

NOTE: Titles can be nebulous and vary from company to company. If you’re not careful, they can lead you down the wrong path. For example, there are varying levels of the title president, so be as specific as you need to capture the right audience. We’ll discuss this in detail in the Search chapter.

Skills:

Years of Experience:

Income:

Language:

Employer? Yes or No

Annual Revenue:

What type of company is it?

Is it private, public, nonprofit?

What industry are they in?

The number of employees:

Do they follow specific companies (Apple, Target)?

Interests

One area commonly overlooked when determining your ideal audience is their Interests. [Strategy #17] To get in front of your audience, you need to understand their interests. So, take a minute and list out the following for your target audience.

General Interests (technology, marketing, sales):

Associations:

Publications they read:

Organizations they belong to:

Brands they follow:

Events they attend:

TV shows do they watch:

Social media platforms are they use:

Groups they belong to:

We’ll cover groups in more detail in a later chapter, but they are a great place to find and connect with your ideal audience.

Keywords and Skills

While not exactly a search engine, LinkedIn is like Google for 700 million-plus business professionals, which means you need to understand the keywords or phrases others use when searching for solutions to their problems.

Keywords, as Google defines them are: “An informative word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document.” When someone uses a search engine, they type into the search bar a keyword or phrase. The search engine then returns a list of things—in LinkedIn’s case, people or companies related to the keyword you entered. If your ideal audience is looking for a solution to a problem, what would they search for?

Capture those keywords, key phrases, or skills:

[Strategy #18] The keywords you list need to align with the skills you possess to help your audience solve their problems. A great place to find keywords is in the headline or titles of personal profiles. How do people in your ideal audience refer to themselves?

Links and Profiles Mentioned

PROFILES

• Mark Anthony Dyson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markanthonydyson/

Craft Your Story

Positioning

Before moving forward, you need to step back. Don’t worry, you’re not going far, just to the previous chapter and your answer to the question: What do you want to be known for? The answer to this question helps determine your positioning. How you position yourself on LinkedIn for your business or career is the difference between bringing opportunities to you or having them go to someone else. Positioning consists of three components.

1. Your goals: What are you trying to achieve? Why are you on LinkedIn?
2. Your audience: Whom do you want to work with?
3. Your story (message): What do you want people to know about you?

As Andy mentioned, whether you like it or not, you are judged every day. People judge you based on your clothes, actions, behaviors, online profiles, and yes, even your LinkedIn profile. If your positioning is not clear, people will be confused about what you do and how you help. You can avoid this by crafting a unique story for your brand.

Tell Your Story

[Strategy #19] When telling your story, it helps to break it down into smaller parts, then put it back together in a logical manner to define your positioning. When written correctly, as your audience reads your profile, they should be able to picture themselves in your story. A common mistake is focusing on yourself and not on your ideal audience. To help with this, break down your story into individual parts, starting with a situation.

Situation

To pull your audience into your story, you need to start with a situation they will understand. For example, you know your audience wants to achieve somethin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 Connect
• Identify Your Audience
• Craft Your Story
• Your Pitch
• Part 2 Converse
• Build Your Profile
• Create a Company Page
• Searching on LinkedIn
• Part 3 Convert
• Message Prospects
• Post Content
• Content Vehicles
• BONUS – The LinkedIn Algorithm
• BONUS – Quick Reference Guide
• Conclusion
• About the Authors