You’re probably familiar with the basics of search engines and Google rankings…but did you know that LinkedIn lets you manipulate your profile information to achieve higher rank?
LinkedIn profiles rank high on Google organic search. If you want to influence ‘getting found’ on Google, an optimized LinkedIn profile will get you there.
Here’s how it’s done:
1. Create your public profile
2. Select Full View – very important
3. Create a ‘vanity’ URL…i.e., instead of the default URL, customize your profile with your name. For example, mine is www.LinkedIn.com/in/VictoriaIpri
4. Use this link in your email signature, on your web page, when you comment on a blog, and other places across the web to boost your visibility
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Along with optimizing your vanity URL, promote your website to Google and other search engines through the links right there on your profile page. You know that spot that says “My Website”? Don’t leave it that way! Edit the tag by clicking on ‘Edit’, then ‘Other’, then type in your actual website name so it appears on your profile page.
As well, if you have a blog, use the new blog App to link your blog posts to your profile page. Then be sure to add the URL of your blog in the additional available line back where you modified your website URL a second ago.
Ta Da! Instant Optimization!
Optimizing your LinkedIn profile is not difficult if you know what to do. We know what to do…so let us help you. Contact me, Victoria Ipri, at 800-614-4619, or email me at ModelloMedia@gmail.com to learn more about affordable, professional profile optimization that can bring stunning results.
Victoria Ipri is CEO of Ontogeny, Inc., a full service Internet marketing firm with an emphasis on copywriting and social media. She welcomes your questions and comments about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Look around the Green Buzz Agency Blog for her other excellent articles on Linkedin.
Feel free to send an invite to connect with members of Green Buzz Agency on Linkedin: Tod Plotkin, Sara Evans, Jennie Nowers, Brittney Grove, and Jennie Ryon. Or join the Green Buzz Agency Linkedin Group.
You can see them just up ahead, glimmering in the social media sun like gold nuggets—your potential clients. You may know who you wish to target, but how do you entice them to get to know you…without fruitless cold-calling and a potentially obnoxious hard-sell?
Social networking allows you to establish camaraderie and build a rapport, literally from scratch, without ever leaving your desk. It’s never been easier to get in front of your dream client…if you know how to leverage the power of LinkedIn.
Grab Your Prospecting Pan…We’re Going IN!
During the gold prospecting days of the 1800s, the gold pan was the tool of choice, used to sample the soil to find the richest areas. But a pan was only a pan if you didn’t know how to use it correctly. The skilled prospector had to shake the pan just so, to allow gravel to slough away, revealing any valuable gold nestled beneath.
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Fast forward to 2010. You are the prospector. LinkedIn is the gold pan… excellent for prospecting, but only if you know how to shake away the time-wasters and find the gold… people who are looking for your products and services.
How do you demonstrate your value? By optimizing your profile. Here are four ways to make your profile work for you:
- Tagline: Found right under your name on your profile page, the ‘tagline’ tells people what you do, who you are, and the value you provide.
- Web links: Link to your website, blog or articles to show, not tell, what you’re all about. Perception is reality, right? Don’t make people dig for what they want to know. Put it out there where they can easily see it.
- Summary: Tell your story! Let your potential clients know who you are, how you can solve their problems and what differentiates you from the competition.
- Recommendations: Satisfied clients will tell your story many times over, and more effectively than when it comes from you. Let others sing your praises.
Bring Home the Gold
You’ve got the right pan. You’ve shaken and sifted and sampled the soil. Now it’s time to bring home the gold! Social networks like LinkedIn are great for prospecting, establishing common ground and starting wonderful business relationships. Of course, not every pan-full will yield gold, but like the prospectors of old who hiked to the hills day after day to make that one valuable find, don’t give up. With time, patience and perseverance, fields of gold can be yours.
Victoria Ipri is CEO of Ontogeny, Inc., a full service Internet marketing firm with an emphasis on copywriting and social media. She welcomes your questions and comments about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Look around the Green Buzz Agency Blog for her other excellent articles on Linkedin.
Feel free to send an invite to connect with members of Green Buzz Agency on Linkedin: Sara Evans, Jennie Nowers, Tod Plotkin, Brittney Grove, and Jennie Ryon. Or join the Green Buzz Agency Linkedin Group.
We all know the old philosophy question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it did it still make a sound?” Regardless of where you come out on the question, if you’re a technology marketer about to bring a new product out the answer is a resounding “NO.” Back in the day a launch was pretty straightforward, varying only by scale: put out a press release, get your media prepped, coordinate your advertising, mailings and coordinate customer updates, tradeshows, collateral. There were natural gathering points for announcements and people waited eagerly to see what was new and exciting.
That was then.
Now, a marketer has to cut through the fog of information, find the audience hiding inside, and figure out how to get the attention of the attention-challenged long enough for it to register in their consciousness. In a few hundred words I can’t guide you through the intricacies of building out a multi-channel launch plan but I can share what I’ve learned to help you off in the right direction: First, know your target and why they will care.
Second, know your space. That is, don’t make people work at understanding where your product fits. This is not the time to create a market—that comes later with the analysts, press, broader marketing activities. Find the world the product lives in and place it at the top of the heap. Tout its value and advantages over others in the space.
Third, find out “where they live.” That still means knowing what your targets read, where they go for information, what events they attend, but it also now means what blogs they read, who they follow on Twitter, who they know and what groups they participate in on LinkedIn among others.
Fourth, message frequently—but more briefly– adjust your message to your different audiences, and invite dialog. Product launches today are not the one way flow of the past; it can’t be a fire hose of information because people won’t stay still long enough to get soaked. Use social media liberally, but don’t use it rashly. There’s a fine but definite line between social media spam and real announcements. There have been enough books and seminars built on the topic that I won’t even attempt to educate on that topic, but I will urge you to either hire an expert, learn from an expert, or leave it to an expert.
Fifth, work out early looks by journalists, bloggers, even analysts. Most can be trusted to keep your confidentiality if there’s a time sensitivity to the launch. Otherwise, letting them leak out a first look can start generating buzz for you ahead of your own efforts. And, if they don’t like what they see that informs you how you need to proceed BEFORE you launch and someone seagulls on you.
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Sixth, email isn’t a dirty word. Used well it’s still a key vehicle for reaching large numbers of targeted potential customers, and new product introductions rank high on the list of things interested parties will open an email to learn about. And stick with it. With spam rules in mind, work your lists and database thoughtfully. And as an aside, don’t be shy about cleaning your list up. It’s false comfort to have a 20k database of names, 15k of whom have never opened a thing you’ve sent them or about which you know very little if anything. Better to have a clean, targeted database of 5k interested parties to which you can add more. Don’t worry about opt-outs either: they’re telling you they’re not interested in what you’re telling them, so save yourself the trouble.
Seventh, wherever possible, use whatever customer information you can. Whether it’s an anonymized case study or a full-fledged testimonial, or even a single quote from a beta customer, that adds dramatic credibility to your efforts. If they’ll talk to the press or analysts, all the better. If they’ll appear on your behalf at an event, better still. Regardless of how much or how little, find someone other than your own people who will say something about what you’ve brought out to market.
Finally, keep it fresh by tying the launch into the larger business or technology issues the product serves. Share information with your targets, involve them, even passively, in your community building. Familiarity breeds interest (another old saw notwithstanding), and the more you wrap around the product through its launch period and beyond, the more noise that tree will make when it falls.
Alan E. Gold is the Chief Marketing Officer at TradeStone Software, Inc. Follow him on twitter @alanegold or email him at agold@tradestonesoftware.com or reach him on skype by his handle: alan.gold
Unless you’re living in Turkmenistan, you’ve repeatedly read or heard that success on social media is closely linked to engagement. What do we mean by engagement? Definitions abound, but I like this one from a marketing page on Wikipedia: “Engagement measures the extent to which a consumer has a meaningful brand experience when exposed to commercial advertising, sponsorship, television contact, or other experience.”
Ah yes. There it is. “Meaningful brand experience.” If you’re a sole proprietor working from a home office, you might not think of yourself as having a brand. In terms of social media though, you do. And nowhere among social media sites is this realization more important than on LinkedIn.
If, despite your best efforts at engaging with others on LinkedIn, you’re going nowhere fast, something is clearly wrong. What could it be? In most cases, it’s not your effort…it’s your approach.
Let’s pretend for a moment:
You’re standing in line at the store. You hear a voice saying your name. You turn around to see a good friend standing behind you. You smile big, your eyes widen, your voice rises as you exclaim, “Hey!”…in fact, a host of physical changes take place automatically which generally signal, “I’m happy to see you!”
You’re standing in line at the store. You hear a voice saying your name. You turn around to see someone you don’t recognize. You step back slightly with a quizzical look on your face. Who is this guy? How does he know your name? Oooh, this is creepy. You begin to sweat. Your body is screaming “Danger!” as your brain kicks into high alert and looks for a way out.
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Moral of the story? People talk to friends. People buy from friends. People tell friends about friends. Your friend in line at the store comes with ‘built in’ value that immediately puts a smile on your face. The stranger…not so much.
Ergo…while your job on LinkedIn is to network, you must do so with real value behind it. How can you add value? The easiest way is to drop the canned LinkedIn messages. You know, the one that says “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”, or, “I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile.”
Is that how you talk to your friends? These canned messages have all the pizzazz and personality of dry toast. When you choose to invite someone to join you on your network, tell the person why. Explain who you are and why you believe there is reason to connect. Something like, “Dear John, I noted you are employed with ABC Company. My company, XYZ, does business with ABC. Let’s connect!” Isn’t this more enticing than a canned message? Or, if you’re asking for a recommendation, wouldn’t you rather receive, “Mary, I’d be honored to receive a recommendation from you based on our collaboration on the JKL project.”
Word of Caution: don’t go overboard and send your entire resume! A few sentences will get the conversation started and put you on the path to creating a deeper connection.
It takes only seconds to write something fresh and meaningful! Next time you feel like you’re in a pickle on LinkedIn, review your approach. Look for ways to entice others to be part of your network. If you run out of ideas, think of Elvis, who once said, “I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.”
Alternatively, call me at 800-614-4619, and let’s brainstorm on other great ways to strengthen your LinkedIn profile and get more business.
Victoria Ipri is CEO of Ontogeny, Inc., a full service Internet marketing firm with an emphasis on copywriting and social media. She welcomes your questions and comments about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Look around the Green Buzz Agency Blog for her other excellent articles on Linkedin.
Feel free to send an invite to connect with members of Green Buzz Agency on Linkedin: Sara Evans, Jennie Nowers, Tod Plotkin, Brittney Grove, and Jennie Ryon. Or join the Green Buzz Agency Linkedin Group.
Due to the current economic uncertainty, government contracting is looking more and more secure and lucrative so it’s not surprising that even commercial businesses are vying for more government contracts. Yet a government customer can be more difficult to acquire because of the bureaucracy and formal bidding process. For companies selling products and services to the federal government, traditional marketing strategies may not work. The challenges for marketers are made even more difficult when dealing with government decision- makers who are difficult to engage via conventional means. When doing business with commercial clients, one does not have to navigate through all the federal requirements necessary when bidding a contract. However, the best kept secret is that when doing business with the federal government, it is still about relationship building, just as much as it is about meeting the requirements in the RFP.
The concept that the government customer is the ultimate target for customer relationship management (CRM) is gaining traction among government marketers. For government contractors, we must shift the spotlight to our customers rather than focusing on our products and services. The reason is that the government customer expects to be in control and is in control more than ever before. The development of a CRM strategy for a government-serving company could lead to increased sales leads and relationship-building within the federal government while increasing market share. The challenge for many companies is without a clear understanding of how to execute a CRM strategy for government customers, it would be unwise to implement a CRM strategy, since substantial resources are needed.
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Companies should first develop and publish a CRM strategy, and develop a long-term implementation plan to achieve the CRM best practices for the government IT sector. The CRM strategy should include a description of the corporate strategy, corporate business goals, organizational structure of the CRM effort and a communications plan. Shortly after finalizing the CRM strategy section, the internal communications plan for the company can be developed and published. It is vital that the internal staff be aware of the benefits of CRM for it to work. To do so, the best way is to conduct a pilot program before officially launching the full-scale program.
A CRM Pilot Program is a long-term goal and only viable once the processes are in place. Prior to the pilot program, the marketing team must prove to the executive staff that the organizational departments are able to function properly with a small margin for error. This will be determined based on interviews with managers of the departments involved and also by doing test runs and shadow plans for a span of 3 months. The customer for the pilot program will be chosen from a list of customers provided by senior sales staff. Once agreed upon, marketing will create marketing materials including a brochure, microsite and e-commerce center specifically for the customer. The pilot program will span six months to gather enough data to make unforeseen tactical changes, evaluate processes, and assess additional supporting areas which may be needed. Once the pilot is closed to the customer, the marketing team and strategy executives will create an extensive report and incorporate lessons learned into the original CRM strategy. Then, the final report will be presented to all staff.
In conclusion, take a cautious stance when developing CRM plan and consider implementation to avoid costly pitfalls. If a company decides to implement a CMR strategy for government customers, the marketing team must be able to measure the results to tie it to profits, provide value for the customer and engage the customers. The government customer is unique and providing products and services to the government can be problematic. Fortunately for established companies, they have the expertise and history of serving the government. However, there is sometimes a lack the operational means to capture the customer needs. Without doing their due diligence, companies will not be able to implement a successful CRM program.
Victoria Schmidt is the Marketing Manager at Avaya Government Solutions. Follow her @Phishskins or email her at victoria.schmidt@ymail.com
