LinkedIn personal branding: A quick way to obtain results!

Do you wish to improve your LinkedIn personal branding? I assure you that it is not difficult. I thought it would be impossible to be consistent and innovative when I first started, but I’ve learned from the best that you just need to follow that process.

It is free to use and easy to understand. All you need to do is focus for the next 10 minutes. Do you feel prepared? 🤓

What is your LinkedIn personal branding?

For Wikipedia :

Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception.

I’d like to add:

It is teaching your audience about your brand’s identity, values, trust, and expertise that sets it apart from other companies. They recognize and validate you if your brand image is strong. In short, they buy your services or products.

Essentially, your buddies know who you are. If you asked them about you, they would quickly tell you what you do in life, what you enjoy, what values you offer to their lives, and what defines your personality. Add in your professional worth and you have “branding,” which is just a fancy way of saying that people are aware of you and your job.

What is the significance of LinkedIn for personal branding?

  • Your profile is your first opportunity to introduce yourself.
  • It is simple to get a thousand views on your blog.
  • Social media is essentially designed FOR IT!
  • You can build a genuine professional network.
  • The algorithm is straightforward to grasp.
  • Everyone believes in LinkedIn’s content quality.

Of course, this is dependent on your activity. If you want to reach people rather than businesses, you’ll need to use other platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is also full with “normal people”!

B2C

Allow me to share an amusing story,

In addition to my role as a writer for Leadsourcing’s blog, I also happen to be a yoga instructor. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I needed to find online clients for my Zoom yoga sessions, but I was faced with a limited budget.

I attempted using Facebook groups, but unfortunately, the response was not very encouraging. 😿 I tried leveraging Instagram by posting content every day, but the competition was fierce, and I struggled to gain visibility. 😭 Then, I decided to utilize Leadsourcing’s LinkedIn automation feature to send out automated messages for free, and to my delight, I acquired 80% of my new clients through this method. 😍 Some examples of B2C auto-entrepreneurs include yoga teachers, clothing shops, flower shops, bike repair services, and music teachers.

We often believe that there are set rules for finding prospects in the right places, but in reality, there aren’t any. We simply have to experiment.

Now, let’s move on to discussing the second option.

B2B

Your intended audience is in the business-to-business sector. If you want to offer your services to businesses, LinkedIn is 277% more effective than other social media platforms for finding clients.

Content producer, web designer, developer, event organiser, marketing consultant, community manager are some examples of B2B auto-entrepreneurs or freelancers.

Here you are, attempting to be a part of the movement by becoming a freelancer and seeking your first clients.

How can you improve your LinkedIn personal branding?

That 5 pillars infographic was developed to show you what’s crucial for your personal branding. People should be aware of five facts:

And there are various locations on your LinkedIn profile where they will be able to find it. (Title, banner, info…) and, of course, in your content strategy, because you’ll be writing about all of those things in a subtle way that I’ll show you soon enough. 🤩

All of these pillars lead us to four critical components of your strategy: your profile, your network, your content, and how to convert those who are drawn to your work into new clients.

Creating a (great) LinkedIn profile

  • If necessary, change your profile picture: Make sure you’re smiling and that we can see your eyes; here’s an illustration of how they should look:
  • Decorate your profile picture: You can use a background with your company’s colors to make your profile more visible to the eyes.
  • Make your LinkedIn job title unique. Make sure we understand what you’re doing and include it in your value offer.
  • Create your cover image. Your banners should be tailored to reflect who you are and what your passion/job is.
  • Share your tale. To begin, use the bio to define yourself, why you love what you love, and why you’re good at it.
  • Make use of the selection to display your work. You can either link to your blog, an article about you, or a LinkedIn post you’ve written… Use it to demonstrate your knowledge; just a small percentage of individuals who are truly interested in you will look at it, but it is part of the prospecting funnel.
  • Fill in your experience and education: People must be able to comprehend where you’ve worked and what qualifies you as an expert in your field. You don’t have to have the best experience in the world; your storytelling skills will suffice.
  • Make a translation of your LinkedIn profile. If you want to be open to acquiring clients from other countries, you should start by translating your profile. (in the upper right corner of your page).

Increasing your LinkedIn network

Social networking is your first step. If you want to be smart on LinkedIn, you should start appearing in other people’s feeds. What you desire is:

To appear in the most relevant comments

The most relevant remarks may choose you over someone else for two reasons:

  • You’ve left a lengthy comment. (As a result, the LinkedIn algorithm believes you’ve spent time reading and writing, which must be productive).
  • You are always commenting on that person’s posts. (In that situation, the system will classify you as friends).

Being in the most relevant remark is more than just an ego trip. It’s a strategy for stealing a portion of that influencer’s audience.

Take this example. That article’s number of view are crazy. You’re the most relevant comment? You will benefit from the hearing’s breadth.

The procedure should be followed Every day, 💡spend 5 to 10 minutes scrolling through your feed and commenting on at least 10 posts related to your personal brand, products, or services. Repeat this 5 times every week to build your network.

To provide the impression of being owed

When you leave a remark on someone else’s post, that individual wants to thank you. It’s known as the Ben Franklin effect.

This impression of Franklin has been highlighted as an example under cognitive dissonance theory, which states that people adjust their attitudes or behavior to resolve tensions, or “dissonance,” between their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.

Basically, if you’ve been commenting on someone’s post a few times and they haven’t yet repaid you, they will feel a sense of discomfort and tension in their brain activity, so the next time they see you in the feed, they will let you leave a small comment.

When you think about it, it’s similar to someone giving you an incredible gift for your birthday: you immediately feel compelled to perform your best, or at least equally, and the emotion never goes away.

To create a community around your area of expertise

Building a network entails not only publishing, commenting, and following, but also exchanging ideas and talking through LinkedIn chat.

If you want to, you may contact incredibly active LinkedIn influencers and tell them you have a story to tell. Perhaps they will invite you to be a guest on their next webinar.

But such an invitation comes at a cost, and you know what they say:

If there is no price, you are the product.

In this situation, the product is your personal brand, image, and audience. If you want to be invited to the experts’ parties, you must be very active on LinkedIn and have a strong brand identification. But don’t worry, we’re working on it. 😊

Contacting your new LinkedIn connections (prospects)

LinkedIn has a tool called the Social Selling Index (SSI). This indicator tells you if you’re active enough on social media.

It is built around four pillars:

  • Establish a professional brand
  • Find the right people
  • Share knowledge
  • Build relationships

You can find out what your score is here, as well as how much and where you need to improve.

You can use a free application to automatically send connection requests and customised messages to your target audience if you need to build better relationships and identify the ideal people.

Creating consistent (and excellent) content

Being consistent and adhering to the same editorial line is the key.

Before you continue, you must answer those three questions completely and thoroughly.

  • Why do I post to LinkedIn?
    • To whom am I demonstrating my expertise? Employers, recruiters, and prospective clients?
    • To form a community with whom? Experts, clients, or passionate individuals?
    • To form a network with whom? Beginners, experts, or freelancers?
  • Who is my intended audience?
    • Who do you wish to speak to on a wide scale?
    • Who is the intermediate (middle) audience: who lies between the large scale and the target audience?
    • Bottom-qualified audience: (Who is more likely to follow you and buy your services?)
  • What do I hope to convey to that audience?
    • Tips, tutorials, and definitions
    • Education in my areas of expertise
    • When it comes to what matters as an entrepreneur
    • ❌Help them improve their job performance by selling them my product.

LinkedIn personal branding content strategy

Let’s speak about content strategy now that you’ve commented on other people’s posts and identified your target audience.

Leadsourcing has a way that works extremely well. The goal was to tame the algorithm such that we would always appear in our target profile.

Keen to see how we managed it?

Define your content guideline

You will write three times every week, no less and no more. Don’t worry, it’s much simpler than it appears.

First, have you heard of the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU funnel?

TOFU = Top of funnel

Write for a wider readership. 🎤 One post per week.

Find a topic that will appeal to a wide number of people. Please be sure it’s a topic you’re interested in discussing. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to discover enough motivation in the long run.

Here are some of mine: job satisfaction, the joys of freelancing, keeping organized when working from home, communication skills, how to speak your truth at work…

MOFU = Middle of funnel

Write for your target audience. 🎤 One post per week.

You’re connecting the top and middle funnels here to share and promote your information. Assume your bottom funnel buyer profile is under 35-year-old freelancers in digital marketing and sales.

The following are some examples of themes: Marketing concepts, marketing evolution, cold email, UX experience, where to get clients, how to construct personas, how to execute A/B testing…

BOFU = Bottom of funnel

Write to your target audience. 🎤 One post per week.

That post is now more specific. If you’re selling a tool like Leadsourcing to automate marketing campaigns, the idea isn’t to yell BUY THIS, IT’S GOOD SHIT. However, to describe how you can meet your audience’s needs.

Here are some examples of topics: how to automate a campaign, why should you utilize cold email instead of phone calls, the results of that campaign and why it succeeded, and your biggest blunders when developing the product.

You only need to adapt such themes to your own company and the topics you enjoy and know how to discuss. Then go through the same collection of examples again and again. Make a note of them.

What should I post on LinkedIn?

Find and organize ideas

You can use Trello or Notion to manage them efficiently. Any tool that is free or very inexpensive, as well as a card system. Personally, I like the idea.

You can divide your ideas into three columns, TOFU-MOFU-BOFU.

Create your next posts

The worst thing you could do to yourself is be unprepared. Let’s imagine it’s Monday, you have nothing planned, and you need to write but don’t know what to write… So you’re going to write something but have no convictions.

To avoid this, try to always have post ideas for 2 weeks ahead (so 6 posts). With time and experience, the ideas will just pop into your head and lead you back to your concept and Trello.

Ideas don’t live long in the brain, so capture them and write them down

Allow it to simmer

That is our unique recipe:

  • Wait for 24 hours.
  • Reread your previous posts.
  • Take away 20%.
  • Simplify.
  • “If I read this post, do I leave a comment?”

Make a hilarious explanation for making a simple comment. You want people to leave comments on your post. Add a joke and a few easy-to-answer questions at the conclusion to increase the number of people who see your material.

Get a scheduling tool

To keep track of your outcomes and plan ahead, you’ll need to use a scheduling application. Personally, I like Calendly because it includes an integrated capability for joining engagement groups and a freemium offer.

But you do you, and you choose what you want. Simply choose one that is simple to use.

Conclusion

So you now have everything you need to begin your own branding campaign. If you have any questions concerning that approach, please contact us.