Linkedin Tips: How To Make Your Linkedin Profile Work Harder For You

Are you making people work way too hard to get in touch with you? Are you making your Linkedin profile work hard enough for you? If you don't have actual contact information in your Linkedin profile then you're using Linkedin to tease people, not to meet new people and, as my friend, Grover Mollineaux,  says, "Nothing good happens until you meet somebody." If you don't have actual contact information on your LInkedin profile, you're like a pretty girl who won't give out her phone number or email address and then wonders why she doesn't get dates.

Do you have actual contact information on your Linkedin profile or is your profile just a tease?

On her Linkedin profile, a recent graduate of West Virginia Junior College wrote a passionate pitch for a job in her field of study but her Linkedin profile provided no contact information whatsoever. Oh, and she didn’t belong to any Linkedin groups. I’ll say more about Linkedin groups in a moment.

One Kanawha Valley Linkedin use wrote on his Linkedin profile “the best way to get in touch with me is email” but he failed to put his email address on his Linkedin profile.

A friend of a friend of mine recently paid a lot of money to be on the radio. During her radio appearance she mentioned that she needed people to refer math tutors to her for business reasons. Well, I did what I always do: I looked her up in Linkedin and, wouldn’t you know it, there was no phone number and no email address on her Linkedin profile. Well, after I did some Googling I found her email address and her phone number and emailed that info to my friend, Charles Pique, who is a math tutor. Then I emailed the person on the radio to tell her she made me work way too hard to help her and asked why she doesn’t have actual contact info on her Linkedin profile. She wrote back and said she had “made it all public” and she didn’t know why I couldn’t find her contact info.

From that comment it was obvious to me that she hasn’t actually looked at her own profile or she would see what others see: that she is not making her Linkedin profile work hard enough for her and she is making other professionals work too hard to find contact info. I don’t know, maybe she already has all the business she needs but if you’re like most Linkedin users, you need clients so make it easy for clients to find you.

I have my email address in the “summary” field right beneath my name and then it appears again under “contact settings”. Most Linkedin users have no actual contact information under “contact settings”. I’ll never understand why not.

Now, let’s talk about Linkedin groups. Linkedin groups are a powerful way to instantly make yourself easy to reach by other Linkedin users. There are geographic groups, professional groups, hobby groups, all kinds of groups. Let’s say you want to do more business with the people who live in your town. Go to the “groups” field and type the name of your city or state and see if there’s a group by that name then join it. Or, let’s say you want to meet other people who share your interests or hobbies. In the “groups” field simply type “coin collecting” or “gardening” or whatever and look at the available groups and join some.

When you sign up for a group, you’ll be asked if you wish for other group members to be able to contact you via Linkedin. Check the box that enables that function. If your group has 10,000 members you’ve just become accessible to 10,000 people.

Make your Linkedin profile work harder for you. Make people who look at your profile work less. Put some actual contact info in your Linkedin profile and join some groups.