6 Places to Add Keywords to Your LinkedIn Profile

[tweetmeme]

Ask someone in business today what social networking tool they use, and you’ll probably hear Facebook or Twitter.  But sports marketing guru and author of LinkedWorking,” Sports marketing expert Lewis Howes told attendees during Social Media Success Summit 2010 that he believes quote, “LinkedIn is the number one social networking site on the planet today. And…It’s the number one site for anyone looking to build their business.”

He may have a point.

Export LinkedIn Contacts

One reason LinkedIn is so powerful is that it makes it easy for you to export your database. That’s the reason we use networking tools, right? To connect with people. You can’t do that easily on Facebook – you can only download your friends’ email addresses, not the people who like your business page, and you can’t get any email addresses from your Twitter followers.

Why Use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to connect with more than 187 million professionals in over 200 countries, whose average household income is estimated at $109,000. Plus executives from all the Fortune 500 companies are members – so you’re keeping pretty good company!

Create a Keyword-Rich Profile

The first thing you need to do to get started on LinkedIn is to create a profile. This is your opportunity to tell the rest of the community who you are, what you do and what makes your business unique.  It may be tempting to post your resume here, as many people did when LinkedIn first began. But if you want to reach particular contacts through LinkedIn’s search feature, you need to optimize your profile with keywords.

Here are 6 places to add keywords to your LinkedIn Profile:

1. Professional Headline – located underneath your name; include keywords here to emphasize your skills as a copywriter, and your niche as well.
2. Current Occupation
3. Past Occupation
4. Websites – LinkedIn’s default choices are “My Website,” “My Company,” and “My Blog.” But, when you edit your profile, you can choose “Other” and replace those headings with keywords that describe your website, company, blog, or other social networking site, like Facebook, for example.
5. Summary – This is the area where you can advertise your services to your target market. A lot of people list their resume here, but as a copywriter, this is your opportunity to use the persuasive sales-writing skills you’ve learned to market your own services.
6. Specialties – A list of keywords related to your business.

Here is an example of how I use keywords in my own LinkedIn profile:

If you’d like to improve your LinkedIn presence, contact gloria@gloriarand.com for a free consultation. I’ll be happy to help you out!