LinkedIn Personal Branding: Getting More Clients and/or Landing a Job

1. Intro: Hi everyone. I'm Alexandra code here. I'm a SAS marketing consultant. And then this course, I'm going to show you exactly how you can get to over 20 thousand followers on LinkedIn. How you can use LinkedIn to grow your personal brand, get more clients, get a job, and really just showcase your subject matter expertise. So I've taken my over six years of using LinkedIn on a daily basis to bring to you all of the secrets you need to use this platform effectively. So I'm going to show you exactly how you can create your personal brand online can, depending on your goals, how you can get to as many as, you know, over 20 thousand followers on LinkedIn. Of course, this is the number of followers and connections I got and time. So it took me over five years to build this audience, but it's definitely something realistic if you want to stick to using this strategy for anything from just strengthening your top leadership in your industry, getting more clients, getting a new job, or just networking with people. So I'm going to show you exactly how you can increase your profile views, how you can get your posts in front of more people. You can get people to engage with your post. And we're also going to talk a bit about the mistakes you should avoid making when engaging with people on LinkedIn. This course is super straightforward as I'm going to take you through exactly every single step you need to consider when starting and scaling your LinkedIn social strategy. So let's get started with the course. 2. Telling if LinkedIn is right for you: So before we get started, I wanted us to really go over see if LinkedIn is truly the right channel for you. Because depending on your actual job, your industry, LinkedIn might not be a number one priority is essentially to establish the right approach with LinkedIn strategy, there's roughly five main areas to consider. Number one is where your target markets spends their time. So if you're looking to use LinkedIn to get more clients or to grow your personal brand. Regardless of your role, you really needs to understand where your audience, aka your future clients, or your future company spends their time. Because for instance, if you sell, Let's just imagine you have a small store and you sell anything from posters, any kind of handmade goods. In most situations, LinkedIn won't be the best solution for you unless you are targeting B2B companies. So if you want to sell to other companies, yes, LinkedIn is the go-to place. And if you are maybe a marketing consultant or you work in social media, or you worked as design freelancer. Lengthen is definitely the right place for you to start finding clients, really engaging with other people in your network and so on. So you really need to think about who you are targeting. Be a person or a company and see if they spend your time on LinkedIn and also how they spend their time on this specific social network. Because the second to keep in mind here is again, your objectives. Again, if you're planning on selling something like hens on products, LinkedIn is definitely not the best place for that. However, if your goal is to grow your personal brand, share ideas, network with people, just talk to other people, find new clients. Just establish yourself as a leader in your field, or maybe you just want to find a job, then LinkedIn is definitely the go-to place for you. Then moving on to the third, and that is what kind of content to your target customers or clients needs. So this ties into my previous idea on really analyzing what your target market once. Because again, in some situations, so for example, if you are a freelance graphic designer, you might be better just boasting, showcasing your work on Behance or Dribbble, or even on Instagram. And similarly, if you create video content, again, the best place to showcase your work is definitely not LinkedIn, and instead you will want to look at YouTube, Vimeo, and so on. But if your target market is, maybe marketers may be founders, maybe just someone in a management position at a company. You can definitely create written contents, sometimes even video, even images, events, and so on, on LinkedIn. So this is when you should approach LinkedIn as a go-to channel for really sharing your thoughts. And if you want a comparison between Twitter and LinkedIn, I would say that Twitter is a bit more casual in the sense that you can get by with just quick, short tweets on trending topics. Where as on LinkedIn, you really need to provide your thoughts, your research. And this is a big keyword because most of the time, the most successful LinkedIn posts are really the ones where you can research a topic, provide maybe a small case study in villages. Keep adding value to your industry. Points to keep in mind when deciding if LinkedIn is right for you, is how you are going to prioritize your tactics. So again, if you are creating graphic images, for instance, illustrations or maybe you're a web designer, you might find some value with LinkedIn specifically when you want to find the right prospects and reach out to them. However, there's other channels you need to prioritize. So in the case of a designer that's going to be again, instagram, Behance, Dribbble, and so on. Then you might want to only occasionally use LinkedIn. So if your target market does not spend the majority of their time on LinkedIn, it's better to prioritize the other channels. Essentially. Keep in mind, and we're going to talk about this in the bonus section. There is ways of mixing channels. So for instance, you can create YouTube content, download that file, and upload it on LinkedIn as well as long as it suits your audience. And I've seen a lot of designers. Both your illustrations on LinkedIn as well. However, you sometimes need a bit more of a story behind that image. Plus you need the right network and we're definitely going to talk about how you can create that network. Now, the final point to keep in mind is, do you want to go for a profile or accompany page? So as a quick example, I have chosen to rely on my profile page for LinkedIn because again, it's just suits my needs. It helps me showcase my personal brand, find clients, talk to people, do all the networking, keep up with trending topics using the industry. Whereas I still have a, let's say company page. So if you go to your profile, you'll to manage and go to the company specifically, this is my agency, if you will, kind of how I normally work with my clients. So I did start growing this page to some extent. However, the way the algorithm works on LinkedIn at this very moment is that it does prioritize your humans, if you will. So the actual profiles as opposed to company pages. So ultimately it's very hard to grow both your profile, your own personal page, and your company page. So to begin with, you need to prioritize what you want to focus on. There has been a lot of times when I was working with other companies, so I had to juggle both my personal profile. And in that case, the number one priority, which was the client and they are at LinkedIn page. So you can definitely juggle them at the same time. However, it's super hard to grow both of them at the same time, if you will. So definitely choose what you want to focus on. Usually I do recommend starting with your personal brand and then maybe in time you want to add a LinkedIn page, company page on top of that. Now I have prepared just a couple of hands-on examples. So maybe this situation specifically applies to you. So number one is, if you are a freelance writer and tech for instance. So writing in SAS as an example, you can use LinkedIn for pretty much everything from finding clients, jobs to growing your personal brand, networking and so on. If you are a software developer DO using LinkedIn should be strictly for getting discovered by recruiters, and that's pretty much it unless you do want to grow your brand and time as you scale to being a CTO. Graphic designer, again, you will only need to use LinkedIn minimally to find clients, showcase your work, maybe talk to some other designers in the space. And the most interesting thing is that you can create partnerships with other people that offer services in your industry. For example, as a designer, you can pair up with a UX writer or with a content writer and create kind of like a bundle of services. And then if you are a marketing manager, you can use LinkedIn to share your expertise to find new jobs, new clients, again, due to networking, to find prospects, obviously, to also find new partnerships. So for instance, I drew my network a lot because of the partnerships I had throughout my career. And finally, for this section, I just wanted to talk super briefly about the benefits of using LinkedIn effectively. Number one is obviously growing your professional network. Then it's building a professional online presence. So really developing your personal brand. Keeping in mind that LinkedIn alone won't be as effective as if you were to pair LinkedIn with other efforts like going on webinars going and speaking at events, having maybe a YouTube channel and so on. Then another benefit is that it can help you stand out from your competition. So I've had a lot of clients who just reached out to me because of my LinkedIn presence, then obviously you can use it to find a new job or new clients. And finally, and the, I would say that a lot of people don't use LinkedIn for this, but it's really one of the most effective values you can get out of LinkedIn. And that is getting tips, getting support from your network, getting recommendations for anything from, from just finding a new job, a new client, to structuring the way you work, to tips on marketing, again, talking to people and seeing how they do marketing and so on. 3. Setting up your profile - Part 1: And finally we are going over how to set up your profile. And I'm going to show you exactly everything you need to do from the beginning with details to pay attention to what options you have to customize every element and so on. So the most obvious first thing is the visuals. So what people see you and they end up on your profile. So as you will see here at the very top, I have this, let's call it a cover image if you will. Now, I wouldn't say this is necessarily super effective, but it's definitely an extra personalization. You can try to highlight what you talk about, what you're an expert at. If there's a specific call to action like in my case, I'm trying to promote my newsletter because I want pretty much everyone who ends up on my profile to also sign up to my newsletter. So I've just kind of prioritize this. Next is the most obvious profile image. Again, keep it simple, professional, but something else to keep in mind is when you click on this, there is this view profile video option. So basically this is a feature you can only use on your mobile and you're going to record an intro video with yourself. So what happens is that besides just the basic profile image, you can actually give people a personal intro. You can talk about who you are, what you do, why people should connect with you on LinkedIn. If you're looking for a specific job, if you're hearing just to connect with people and so on. And the past, before this feature was in place, people would use this sign here. And basically you would add this again on your mobile. It's the fancy version of your name. In my case, I keep it simple. I just state the pronunciation of my name. Other people use it again for a quick intro or to try something fun. It's up to you really. Keep in mind all of the features are available for an edit here. So basically this is where you add in your name. Again, keep it simple. You might want to add an emoji if you want to. Fun fact, if you add an emoji here with your first name when somebody uses an automated tool to contact you, you will see this because instead of just your name, you will also get that emoji next to your name message. So it's obvious that they did not write that themselves manually. Then there's the headlines. So this is super important and in my case, I change this every month, I see. So what's important in here is to be super clear about who you are and what you do. Number one is really stating your role. So it can be like in my case, a growth marketer or a performance marketer. Or it can be something like freelance content writer, freelance graphic designer. And then something else I do because this headline is important when people search for you. So that LinkedIn can pick up the keywords you have in here to show you two more people essentially. So something else I do is I write a couple of the industries I'm active in just to make sure I appeal to the right people. Because otherwise you'd have people in completely different industries reaching out to you. Sometimes this is good if you want to maybe just recommend them to another person you work with, another freelancer, you collaborate with that most of the time. Trying to do networking with them. They won't really be super responsive. So it depends. Again, keep in mind, have their role in there, have maybe some industries or your value proposition. A lot of people on LinkedIn just kind of write something super simple, like I am the person you go to if you need help with SEO, or I am something super specific. For example, in marketing, I see a lot of people that are product messaging experts. So this is definitely an interesting take to consider. Then there's the current position. This is important because the current position will be displayed in here so people can see if you're associated with a certain big company or university. Or you can just display like I do, you're a company essentially. And make sure you have the show current company in my intro. There's the industry. Again, this is interesting because let me just show you how this works. So let's imagine I'm looking for a growth marketer and I will be looking under people. So let's just say that right now I'm the client that's kind of looking for a growth market or to work with. And they're all filters. They have the option to sort by industry. So you want to be either under marketing, information and technology, whatever your industry is. Moving on, you have this section talks about, and here you will add just some extra keywords. And this is only available if you have the creator mode on. So make sure this is turned on because it just shows these extra things for people who check out your profile. And it helps with being discovered by anyone who's looking for someone interested in these topics. So generally I recommend less than your industries were just the topics you write about on a regular basis. Moving on, we have the location. Now this is tricky because I have tried switching my location every month. So I've tried locations in Europe. I've tried locations in the US and yesterday generally having the location placed in the US. Let's just say it does bring more people over to your profile. A lot of the times those people were trying to pitch me a product. So they were trying to sell something to me or they were inviting me to add a new event. That was not a free event. So they were just kind of trying to sell something instead of really looking to connect with me. So ultimately, I decided to just go back to a location that was in, let's say super popular as much as possible. I would recommend keeping your own location. So if you are in the US, definitely just leave your location in there or add a location within your county. So for example, if you're from a town in Texas, definitely add something like Austin, Texas because it will put you in front of more companies. There are looking for people nearby. On the right side here you have this contact info section, which you can just add it from here. Yes, I recommend adding in as much information as possible. Specifically, you want your website and maybe some social networks. Adding your email is optional. And I also like to add my birthday just because it's something in super proud of. So it's an extra touch that kind of represents my personality essentially. And then you have this website in here. You add this website from the editing options here. Basically this is any website you want to highlight. It doesn't have to be like in my case, your personal website. It can be a company website, it can be a video, it can be an eBook, anything you've created, a recent article of yours and so on. Since we're still talking about this visual cues, if you will. You can see here that I have this open to work badge, if you will. From this button here, open to, you will have the option to click on open to work. So this is if you are looking for a job, but it doesn't have to be just a job. So for example, in my case, I do have the contract option turned on. So I would recommend turning this on if you are a freelancer as well. And then maybe some job titles you're interested in. So that when somebody looks for a content contractor, they can come across your profile. And there's two options in here. I have the all LinkedIn members option turned on, which adds this open to work badge or photo frame. At the disadvantage is that if you work with a company, you'd definitely one, either. Not saying you are open to an editor role or click on the recruiters only. Which means that this badge D open to work photo frame will not be displayed publicly. However, people using LinkedIn recruiter will be able to see that you're open to a new role. Now, this is tricky because in the past, I've worked for a company that had another sister company. So technically somebody from that sister company could see that I'm open to work, so I was not using this, I did not use this option at all. So really think through sign of the options in here. Again, under open to you will have the option to display that you are providing services. I highly recommend this lists all of the services you provide. Some details in here. Some info on this and this well, also create a services page for you. You can customize this however you want to. In my case, I still need to add some articles, but right now you can only add images. So add images of these eyes you've created, even just like screenshots of copyrighting work you did in the past or articles. And you can invite clients to leave a review here. But I generally recommend just having them leave the review on your main page here and the recommendations. But just a quick note for this services page, there's a bunch of options in here from requests to client projects you've had maybe in the past, the status of your reviews and so on. So it's kind of like a small portal for freelancing. The next important thing is the feature of this section. If you did not see this on your profile, go to Add profile section. And there's a bunch of sections you can add in here. If you don't already have them. In here, you can display links, posts, LinkedIn posts you already have, essentially just go to this plus sign. You can also add your newsletter, any kind of link, an article if you will. This section is, I would say the best way to use this is to one, make sure you have your priorities right. So if your number one priority is to promote your newsletter or a place that first, if it's finding a new role or whatever, again, place that as a priority and then just display some of your work. So in my case, I have chosen to display some thought leadership posts. I have. You can also display your writing work, your designs, and so on. This is super important because it gives them profile visitors. Quick look over what you do essentially. Then you'll have the activity section. So super quickly here, we will discuss more about what posts you need to create and so on. And one of the next lectures in this course. But the basics, this is where you create the post. You're probably familiar to some extent with this. Again, in one of the next lectures, we will go over the exact formats and content types you can create it at this point, what's important to understand is that this activity is public on your profile. You definitely want to always keep showcasing your subject matter expertise. Also keep in mind that it's not just what you post here on their posts. This is honestly the feature I use the most I just kind of go through the posts I've had. But there is also the all activity section where you can see some of the other content you've liked, maybe comments you've left and so on. And again, this is all visible to anyone on LinkedIn. So your activity basically is always public. Then under the activity you have the About section. To be honest, I still struggle to put together a short, concise description. So I just kind of briefly talk about some of the things I'm passionate about. And now so I left in here a quick call to action that I'm open to networking in here. It really depends on what you want to get out of LinkedIn. If it's just growing your personal brand and highlighting your Todd leadership. You want to highlight those points, your expertise, maybe a words you have, maybe just topics you'd like to talk about. Some results you've had in the past, things like that. Specifically, I also like highlighting why people should follow you essentially on LinkedIn. On the other hand, you are looking for freelancing work. You want to display your services, maybe some clients you've had in the past. And of course, if you are looking for a actual job, like a full-time job or a part-time role. There's some other sections in here that we will discuss in the next video that's coming up in a couple of seconds because we are taking just a quick break so that I can give you the time to actually added this as we are going. Then we're going to look at the remainder of your profile. 4. Setting up your profile - Part 2: Awesome. So now that we have everything about what we do while we're goals on LinkedIn. It's time to get into the, y'know, the requirements, if you will. So the part where every recruiter just jumps do it. It's not just whenever you want a job because sometimes even when you want the freelancing role. So if you want to write about a topic or do some graphic design work, your clients will still look at your experience. So any here, what I recommend is as much as possible displaying all of the rules you've had in the past, as long as you do not have a contract with a company you've worked with, that doesn't allow you to talk about that specific partnership. For each of these rules, essentially, you'll want to talk briefly about them. So kind of what you did at that job, what results you've had. If you have a role like currently, you'll want to briefly just talk about the company, like what does the company actually do? So you have this plus sign option in here in which you can add either a carrier or break or a physician. Again, I recommend going through most of these details except there is one. Yes. So the employment type, this is not mandatory in my opinion. It's up to you. If you want to say this was a full-time job or a contract based rule. Whatever. Something else I recommend is making use of the media section. So like you'll see in this example where I highlighted some of my content I created during my time with this specific company. If you work like right now would accompany you can just link to your at home age or to a video, whatever you can kinda do, you use your own profile to promote that company. Then the other interesting thing is these arrows, if you will, where you can change the order of your current roles. Because like myself, you might have multiple roles kind of going on at the same time. So you definitely want to prioritize one of them. Now, below this is the education section. Again, this is pretty straightforward. I've don't add your high school info in here because nobody cares about that. So it's mostly about formal education or courses you've taken and so on. There's also similarly this licenses and certifications section for this. In the past, I had like 50 here, but I realized that most of them are not that important. So if you just look at what I did, I kept the most important ones. Some of them have expired. So the point is actually keep these up-to-date. Besides the important ones, I also highlighted some of the more interesting ones because since I am active in the AI industry, I want to some extent to highlight my knowledge in this space. And of course, for each of these, just make sure the show credential option is valid. Next, you have the volunteering options. This is interesting because some people display these under experiences. So for example, in my case, I am a growth mentor on drove mentor. And most people just display this under expertise, but I'm doing this for three, so I'm volunteering, so I opted to have it in here. I'm also a mentor in the women in revenue community and in the past, but it was a translator. So kind of add everything that you think is relevant either to your career or to your own values. Because I've seen a lot of people volunteer and not the same industry that they're active in. So for instance, if you've ever volunteered at a dog shelter, you can definitely add this in here if it suits your personality, your image. This is an interesting part if you asked me, but to some extent this will help with discoverability. So people finding your profile, I think it mostly just helps recruiters to begin with, to get an idea of your skills. When you look at jobs, Here's an example here where you will get this badge that says your profile matches this job. So if you click on this, it says your skills are a strong match for this job. Whereas this example where you don't get the same thing, essentially, this is not accurate by all means. This is just like a rough orientation for you to understand straight away. If this job is suited for you. Then there's another example here where you have a preferred skill badge and let me just show you what that is. So again, under the editing options, you will see I have these badges for surgeons scales like the SDO, Microsoft Word, google Analytics and specifically and what you can try doing as well as clicking on take scale quiz. And this is going to take you through all of the skill assessments that LinkedIn has made available. Not everything's in here essentially, but you can find a lot of things from the design stuff to cybersecurity. It really a lot of marketing stuff. In TAC, pretty much. Tools and technologies are specific tools like anything from Adobe, anything from Google should be in here as well. Everything's like an alphabetical order. A lot of stuff in here. I wouldn't say this is mandatory, but it's honestly, it's fun. So definitely interesting to consider. Also, I recommend playing with the reorder options. So click on these three dots and reordering to make sure that your skills are highlighted first. Because on the profile page, only a couple of them, usually three, sometimes more depending on how the UI on LinkedIn changes. So you definitely want to highlight your biggest skills, if you will. And again, some of the editing options under the three dots, there is also the endorsements settings. So this is where you decide who can leave an endorsement. This can be pretty much everyone. You will start noticing that a lot of these people just kind of randomly indoors you, which is fine. But to be honest, these endorsements do not matter a lot. So they don't really help. From any perspective. It's, it's just some extra keywords essentially on your profile. But now we're moving over to the most important part, regardless of whether you are looking for a job for a new client, or you just want to grow your personal brand. In any of these situations, you want recommendation and you want a diverse recommendations. So in my case, I've received recommendations from a freelance writing mentee I had from some clients, from people I've worked with in the past, including managers, collaborators. Again, more, more clients, more managers. You want these people to talk about. Again, about your own personality, how you work, how you work with others, what services you offer, what results they got and so on. It would be nice if you could occasionally returned the favor and give a recommendation yourself. Moving on, you have discourses section, this is the most useless vein on LinkedIn. In my case, I've just added some interesting courses I had in college. I would say this is completely different from the certifications barred. Then you have the languages section. Again. You can see I've added any language. I know at at least an elementary level what matters ultimately is full professional proficiency or just partial proficiency. If that's a thing. Then there's this section with interests in either people, companies, you follow groups in here. The thing is that, by the way, every time you apply to a job, for example, at this company, unless you say you do not want to follow them, LinkedIn will follow this company automatically. So you have to go back in here and click on multiple companies to really and follow them. The thing is people will see this because again, this is public as well as the groups you are in. Most people won't look at this, but it might help you kind of display your interests, if you will. But nobody is really going to look over this unless they're obsessed with finding out more about you. And finally, the causes section. Again, this is straightforward. You have the options in here, like on whatever is at the top interest to you so that people can reach out to you either because they need a quote from you, a partnership with you, a any kind of help or maybe they have a job in the States. Yeah. This is pretty much all about the profile page. I highly recommend you go and either set up your first LinkedIn page or tweak the one you have to make sure that your value proposition ultimately just shines through. And in the next video, we are going to look over how you can do networking on LinkedIn, because networking is, in my opinion, and if you ask probably a lot of other people, it's the most important part of being successful on LinkedIn. 5. How to network on LinkedIn: In this section, I wanted to talk about how to do networking on LinkedIn. And I'm going to keep the section super short because ultimately, this is pretty straightforward. But the catch is that it does take a lot of time looking at my current network. We see it looks roughly like this. So these over 20 K followers, and if you want to see or exact number of connections, just go to my network and you'll see the connections in here. So currently I have almost 22 thousand connections. And connections are those people that they send you an invite and you have to accept it essentially. Whereas followers just that, keep up with your content, but you do not see their content unless you follow them as well. So the situation goes in my, oh, no, let's say experience with LinkedIn. And I've been on LinkedIn for I think six years. I initially started connecting with people myself. So the way it works most of the time, if you want to grow your network, is to actually start taking active steps and start connecting with people. So I started at connecting with people in the marketing industry when I was just getting started with my career because I wanted to just talk to them to hear more about their experience and start networking, if you will. Later on, a lot of my connections came from people. I need it a quote from or I had to start a partnership with or whenever I needed some help at work or I needed to partner up with someone, I needed somebody's input. I would reach out to them most of the time via LinkedIn. Currently, I am still going my network because I'm becoming a bit more interested in the travel industry. So I'm talking specifically, I'm searching for people like travel market. So what I do is I add in this keyword, then I go to people and you can sort this however you want to and just start reaching out to people, for example, in specific locations. And when you send them in a connection and white, you can add in there a note before you hit send. So you can say something like Hi, I am. Just kind of introduce yourself, talk a bit about what you do currently and what your expectations are. Because when somebody receives a connection request, they want to know who you are, what you do, and most importantly, how you came across their profile. Navy, you've talked to them in the past. Maybe they don't remember you at this point, or maybe you want something from them, either tips, a job opportunity or anything like that. So what's important to understand at this stage is that networking is roughly a very active process. You start from making a list of people you want to learn from, people you want to target. So potential companies you want to work ahead, or you can go to who's viewed your profile on LinkedIn and see who has looked at your website, but maybe you're not connected with them yet. Definitely send them a connection request if you think their profile suits your interests as well. And maybe you can start networking with them. What's super important? Because I was making this mistake at the beginning. When I started with LinkedIn, I would connect with people with the same profile as myself at a marketer's. Now the problem is that just connecting to other marketers doesn't help you reach your prospects. Instead, you want to think exactly about who your target market is. So we've already talked about this. Knowing who your target market is, their needs, pain points, their jobs to be done, what content they wants to read. You're going to instead look and try to network with those people. So in my case, that's founders. So I can look for something like a CEO, a founder, a co-founder. Or you can also go to impressions of your posts. I mean, you can sort by however many days you want. This gives you a rough idea of the impressions and engagements you've got on your post. And specifically, it helps you see exactly what the current demographics are on your profile. You can sort by location, industry, job title. If you look here, this is not super accurate. That's why I only have like 7% founders, 4% marketing managers. In reality, it's like 70% people in marketing. So it can be. Content marketing manager, a content writer, a content specialist, a BBC experts. So their roles are varied. Linkedin doesn't yet know how to associate these like super well. One final note. So if you're going to look, for example, for founders, look under people. And you will have a bunch of filters in here from connections to the locations. The current company, if you wants to connect with people at a specific company. But I mostly like the old filters option because for instance, you can connect with somebody who's already connected to someone in your network. So I can add in here a CEO for instance, or at co-founder or whatever. I can also make sure I select the exact location. I can sort by just industry profile language, service categories. For for example, I would use this service categories with my past job. I was searching for product marketing managers, our ICP, who provided writing services. So I went to this service category and throwing on the rhyming option. Then you click on Show results. And well, in this case there's only one person essentially. So you can kind of reset some of these filters to get more recommendations of people you can connect with. Now I would recommend sending these invites, our regular basis. So for example, if you need help with a partnership and you need to reach out to, let's say founders don't send a 100 invites during the same day, break them up. So you send 20 every day. Your account is not yet solid. Start by sending just a couple of them every day, like five instead of 50 straightaway. I, for instance, can send 50 at once, but they do get blocked for a couple of days in the sense that I cannot send a new invite after awhile. So personally, I haven't been actively growing my network and quieter, except for the occasional help I need. Once you have this network. And technically another way of continuing to grow it is to engage with people in your network and they don't have to be in your network. You can use hashtags like this growth example in here, where you can see people talking about the same topic and it doesn't even have to be a hashtag. It can be anything. It can be like marketing in general. And after you search for this, you'd go to post. And again, you will have your filter options in here. So you can see, for example, recent posts in the past week, for instance. You can also sort these posts to see maybe the latest or just a top match depending on your exact needs. So there's a bunch of filters in here to make sure that you find content according to your expectations. So for example, with my past role, I would be using one of these keywords to find out people that wrote about this topic. So again, you can just go and pick their industry. So it can be, for instance, travel. And now, and now we're going to get topics on marketing from people that are active in the travel industry. So this is like a great way of really being super specific. So you can start engaging with these people. Leave a like Lever reaction, leave a comment. Make sure you share it if your network is interested, I don't recommend being spammy and starting bagging pupil. So do not tag people unless you're best friends with that person. Or it's like super relevant to something you talked about yesterday, or maybe you just wanted to add that the member. So be careful with tagging if you will. You can also use descend the option to directly send disposed to people you talk to on a regular basis. But the biggest secret, if you will, to really growing your network, is posting content and diversifying the content that you create. And one of the next videos we're going to talk exactly about what types of content you can create. That in the meantime, just like super briefly to understand how LinkedIn works is that it's really important to post on a regular basis, but definitely not too much. So I, for instance, try to post three times a week. So for instance, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday and Friday are definitely not always the best. It depends. It also depends on your timing. Because the thing is that after you make a post, you want to get engagement as soon as possible. But It really depends on what you want. So for instance, my posts, Let's just look at this one, for instance, where I just took a tweet, turned it into an image. So besides posting on a regular basis, it's also important to engage with the people that write to you from leaving a like or a reaction to leaving a comment. And usually I recommend always leaving a comment, but sometimes I'm, I'll be honest, I'm lazy. I do not feel like answering every single person. Ideally, you do want to keep this post accident. Because what happens is that once you leave this comment, somebody will get it in their feed. They will see either your new post or this comment, or obviously they can see the comments other people have left and this just helps push your content to the top. So to recap, posting regularly, not too much, definitely not two times a day. And besides posting, engaging with the people that leave comments and the comments. And if you can keep this discussion going, That would be amazing. Something I just wanted to highlight here is that you should not worry too much about how many likes you get, how many shares you get, how many comments you get. So for instance, in my case, with a bit over 23 thousand followers, this post, which honestly it's a basic type of both. It's just my opinion. It's not a lot of it's not like research, like the study, a case study. It's just my opinion based on my own observations. So this post only got 4,520 views. What this means is that one, It got to a lot of people, but the actual interactions with it aren't that explosive, if you will. And let me tell you something. I do not care about how many likes I get, how many comments I got. To be fair most of the time you want to aim for getting a lot of comments because this means that people are interested in what you said. They have an opinion, they wanted to debate that topic so you can keep the conversation going. Definitely you do not want more comments than likes because usually this means people do not agree with what you've said. So I've had a situation during my first year on LinkedIn when I posted something controversial, which honestly I liked because it gets that attention. But I also had a lot of people who are not happy about what I post that even though it was just my own opinion, again, based on observations. Now the reason I'm saying these stats, so the number of likes and comments and so on are not important is one. They change a lot in the past. I've had hundreds of these, sometimes I've had fewer. But really the biggest thing is that a lot of people, the way they use the internet. So think about your own habits of using social media and YouTube. Sometimes there's people that do not like to leave, likes, not even on YouTube. They do not comment. They just look, they just watch. But just looking through these posts. Just watching a video I share doesn't mean they don't remember me. So ultimately, I talk to way more people than those that engage with my posts. And a lot of them start talking to me. Or we could have a call, for instance, because they know me from LinkedIn. They are fans of Mike Post. I've had situations where I was talking to someone who never interacted with my posts. And he was like, You know, I'm a huge fan of your LinkedIn. I'd read all of your post. So I know what you do. I feel like I've known you for a while. So this for me was like super eye-opening. Because I realized, especially once these situations became more common, I realized that what matters ultimately is the people that remember you and those that ultimately will recommend you for a job. We'll give you some tips, will talk to you. By the way, if you really want to see your reach, if you will, go to your profile, head over to analytics and check out your profile views. So a lot of the times you will find people in here that are maybe your role models. Maybe they work at companies you want to work at. Maybe they have all of these fancy titles and they're looking at your profile, they remember you, maybe they don't need something straight away that at least you know, that they are familiar with you. This is my hack for making use of a network. Definitely want to talk to people. I remember at some point I posted on LinkedIn, just a simple post. That's sad. I was open to having a quick call with people in my network and just chatting, marketing and growth. So a lot of the people in my network, again, most of them never engaged with my posts, but they were open to chatting with me. So we took the discussion over to our messaging and then later on had a Zoom call or a Google Meet call. By the way, you can send audio messages via ions, LinkedIn as well. So for instance, I would receive a lot of just audio snippets from people who prefer to speak, as opposed to just writing everything, especially when they want to give you some tips. They definitely don't have the time to just write everything now. So final secret from me because I use this a lot. Get yourself a tool like tele or a loom and send an actual video of yourself introducing yourself. I recommend this for anything from networking with people to inquiring about a job, to finding a client, to talking to prospects. So for instance, I use these videos a lot for account-based marketing when I want a bit more engagement in customization when talking to prospects. So really you're just going to create a short, easy to share a video about who you are, what you want from that connection. Most of the time has been highly welcomed because it's just it's something different from the other boring messages people. Yeah. 6. Quick break!: So I really wanted to take just the super-quick break less than a minute. If you will, feel free to pause the chorus and get back to it tomorrow. Don't forget the address. Sell for reminder. I have a lot of students who drop off Midway when the best content is ultimately towards the end of this course. As a quick reminder, there will be a project and also a bonus sections with a lot of extra secrets, which helps you just tweak your profile and increase your presence, either your own personal brand or you can use a lot of these tips to just grow a brand on LinkedIn as well as you follow through this entire course. By now, you should have built a solid profile that highlights your personal and your services value proposition. And also you have all of the resources you need, all of the tips, all of the secrets to build a strong network. Of course, I need to motivates you right now to actually stick to building that network. So if your goal right now is to really have strong presence on LinkedIn or two, during LinkedIn into a source of new leads for your business than I would definitely recommend really sticking to growing your network, at least up until a point wherein it's just going to grow naturally. We've talked about everything you have to do. The next section of this course, we are just briefly going over how to engage your audience on a regular basis. And then we'll get into some more secrets like what types of content you can create, how to get ideas for that content, and really how to optimize LinkedIn to its fullest. 7. Keeping an engaged audience: So now that you have a decent network to begin with and you know what sustainable steps to go through to actually draw this network continuously. Let's talk a bit about how you keep that audience engaged. Because yes, posting on a regular basis helps a lot, but it's more than just that. So to maintain an active account slash enactive network, the number one rule is to post regular content. Again, it depends on your industry and you will start seeing some patterns in time. For me, what works best is three times a week. Depends on what you want for me. Believing it one day sometimes in-between posts gives people in my network enough time to discover that post and to engage with it. So my goal is to get every single post in front of everyone in my network. So I want to drag that post as much as possible and give people some time to look over it. So if I have a very successful post, I tend to wait a bit more like a week so that people can just stop talking about it is essentially the second is to diversify your content and activity. If you look at my own posts, I tend to prefer middle length posts. Sometimes they're longer and sometimes they're just like lists and stuff. I do try to diversify a bit by adding some images. Sometimes it's just a chart or whatever, or it can be like a screenshot or a tweet that you turn into an image. I also have my newsletter which I share every two weeks. And if we scroll down a bit, because to be honest, most recently I've been mostly posting content like this, but I would also add some event announcements like this, or a brief video from when I attended a webinar or a podcast or whatever. This is, just an extra step besides just text, again, more videos. So it's a mixed really. Again, this example of a chart, it can be an illustration. It can be whatever suits your audience and whatever they would be interested in. In time, you'll start seeing them being more interested in certain things. So for example, I got decent engagement with this post. However they preferred, as you can see in these, that this unique take on a rather controversial topic. So what I would recommend, especially when diversifying this content and even when you just write anything, try to think of the topics that nobody else tackles. It's either these unique points of view or the, you know, the obvious trends that everyone talks about so that when somebody searches for that topic, they can easily find your profile. Now the third to maintaining an active network is to talk to people. So exactly what we talked about during the networking section. But what's important here is to really understand that you also need to maintain those private relationships. So it's not just comments and likes. It's really helping people, even just real message. So sometimes I would see people in my network talk about something and instead of leaving a comment, I reach out to them directly. Maybe I have something interesting to share. Maybe I have an opportunity for them. Next is connecting your LinkedIn strategy with your other marketing efforts. Again, if you go on a webinar, vague that and package it into content for LinkedIn, like the small video. If you have an event elsewhere, like I had asked me anything session in a specific community post about it on LinkedIn, so people don't have to stick to LinkedIn alone. Keep in mind that I still prefer sharing links as a comment as opposed to within the post itself. Because the LinkedIn algorithm, once people to stay within LinkedIn. So when you share something external, they don't prioritize that post. So if you want the exposure, keep your links to a comment, right, the post. And then after the post is live, your link in the comments section. Finally, partner up. Again. This is what I did with the webinar in a couple of days. I'm going to have another interview where I'm going to these that interview with a snippet and then later on I will put the full interview on LinkedIn. You can also create posts in partnership with someone. So for example, every month, in my case, I chose to create this series where I go over one way in which companies can stand out within a crowded market and a specific industry. So I reached out to Andrew here to get his taught in an industry where I don't have, let's say my main expertise or just because they wanted some extra tips from him, essentially partnered up with him to create this contents specifically. So partnerships can look and just a bunch of ways and shapes and sizes. It's really, it really matters to get your industry understand your target market and what they want because of partnership can be something simple, like you going and giving your thoughts on a post that somebody in your network left. Maybe you have a freelancing best friend and you want to exchange LinkedIn engagement if that makes sense. Or maybe you want to contribute to a newsletter they have on LinkedIn or to a video, a live event, anything like that. And partnering up again, it works for individuals. It works with companies. It works with companies that are partnering up with individuals. So if you want to build your own personal brand on LinkedIn, you can start considering actually pairing up, not just with other people, but actually with other companies. I know a lot of companies that use this strategy where they want to partner with, let's call them influencers in the field. So it can be anything, it can be talking about their product, attending an event, pretty much anything you can think of. So in the next section, we are just going to dig deeper into exactly what you can post to maintain this engagement and how to get the best ideas. 8. What to post and how to get ideas: Let's talk a bit about the types of content you can post on LinkedIn. What works usually, again, depending on your audience and how to get the ideas for your posts. So first of all, you have a bunch of content formats, which are pretty much the option LinkedIn gives you super straightforward ones from a textbook. And once you click on create a post, you will have a couple of extra options in here. One of the options is to add a photo. And I've chosen two photos for the purpose of this example so that you can see that you can actually create slideshows if you will. So you can use this strategically to have like a simple guide, for instance, like on Instagram, if you're familiar with really creating one image tab or for anything you want to share. Then there's the obvious sharing a video, adding a document. This is super interesting because I think that up until today there's still few people leveraging this feature. So I've uploaded in here a PDF file specifically, and it's like a cheat sheet. So what happens is that once you post this, people will have access to this document directly in LinkedIn. So you can share guide, any white papers, any kind of downloadable resources. Especially because gated content isn't doing that well anymore because people don't want to give their emails for just an e-book, you can just go ahead and share it straight away on LinkedIn than some other posts sides are sharing that you're hiring or celebrating an occasion. So this is like a template. If you feel like using, for instance, this imagery that LinkedIn provides, Generally I would recommend using your own content. If you join a new company, post an image with the product, or you wearing the latest swag from that company, whatever, essentially, just make sure it's customized. Then you have the best feature on LinkedIn and that is creating a poll. So pulls in general tend to get a lot of attention on LinkedIn because everyone is interested in giving you're taught. You will actually see a lot of people just creating polls for the sake of having them. Instead, try to use them strategically. If you are genuinely interested in a topic, run a pool, or if you are doing some form of research, again, you can make use of LinkedIn to get that data. Fun fact, I recommend playing a bit with the pole duration, but definitely try to keep it as either three days or one week, sometimes two weeks. If you want more insights, essentially, one day is definitely too little because you want as many people as possible to contribute. And the fun fact is that when somebody submits their opinion by your pool, once this poll is done, they will get a notification so they are reminded once again of you and the content you put out there. Next, we have some extra options in here. And you can do the same thing from just here, like creating an event, for instance, I highly recommend event when it comes to LinkedIn for various reasons. What happens is that you have a lot of options of getting in front of people. On one end, you can invite people directly to D vent and they will get a notification, again, putting you in front of as many people as possible. And also when somebody attend your event, they are network will get a notification that this person they are following attending your event. So this thing gets you some last minute sign-ups to your own event as well. And it's definitely interesting if you want to boost your personal brand to actually start hosting these events and doing the networking, positioning yourself as a thought leader. The video feature in here is pretty straightforward. Again, most of the time, LinkedIn will prefer shorter videos, like snippets, for example, when you want to tease an interview you participated in or an upcoming webinar you're speaking at usually will wants to keep these videos short. But once you start growing your network, you can start posting some longer videos just because you already have that network to leverage and really get them over to the content that you have to create these videos, there is a lot of tools out there. You might also work with a professional video producer, or maybe you are one yourself. So this is the perfect chance to showcase your skills. But otherwise you can just go to canva, search for LinkedIn videos and you will get a lot of templates. Usually what I would recommend for LinkedIn though, is to avoid. These many elements. Instead you want something super simple like maybe this here or this example here. And really you just wanted to showcase yourself. You speaking on a specific topic, you talking to somebody else about a trending challenge you have in your industry and so on. Next you have the right article option. So in general, if you'd just go with publishing a classic article on your own profile, this is going to lead you to an editor. And basically you can both content as an individual article. So the problem with this is that in the past few years, I'm not saying this is going to be the situation forever. So you definitely need to keep an eye on how this is evolving. But right now and I'm estimating that this is going to be the case over the next few years as well. Linkedin does not really prioritize LinkedIn articles. So really the number one thing you should continue to create as LinkedIn post. So irregular post, not necessarily an article. However, you can still use this whole editor for building a newsletter like I have one myself. This here is the newsletter I have on LinkedIn. It shows you how many subscribers I have. Basically, when you create the newsletter, you have the option to send a notification to your entire network. So in my case, out of the 23 thousand people that follow me, almost 4 thousand subscribed, at least up until now. So you can see all of the additions I have. And basically, let me just briefly show you how it looks like. Again, you have a lot of options to customize this. But it's basically just like an article that people receive whenever you want to essentially as a notification, not everyone can have a newsletter. So there's a couple of requirements including being an active posterior on LinkedIn before you get access to this feature. So I recommend searching for create a newsletter on LinkedIn. So search for this on Google and you will get all of the steps for really creating newsletter in here. Also keep in mind you can only create one newsletter at a time. So if you are working with a client and need a newsletter for them, you will need to create it via the company page. So just go here and then again start the process from scratch. And as we are speaking, you can see that at the very top of my feet is a poll. So it's exactly what I was mentioning about polls being prioritized by LinkedIn, especially when you have the source by top filter on. Now, just briefly, of course, if you go to work groups specifically, you have the option to create content in some groups as well. But if you look through a couple of groups in here, you'll see that people aren't really engaging with these posts. A lot of times the content in here is super Spanish. So I wouldn't say it's really worth it. I've definitely try this in the past, but it's just not effective at the moment. Next, they wanted to briefly talk about where you can get ideas for these posts. So the most obvious tip I have for you is scrolling through your own feed. Or as I've already told you, you can use specific hashtags, capex, and just look at those. So one quick look through all of the posts here. You can see I have this poll on specifically the no meeting day topic. Then you can see a mix of company post, post from individuals. Some of them are a bit more personal or some of them are just strictly company related. Then you've got your ads, of course, you've got typical images, photos, screenshots, announcements, and really obviously you also have your classic job listings. Then you have, Let's say the thought leaders that share case studies resolved. As you can see, the network that this person specifically has created is very interested in these steps because there are actual tactics, actual tips, hands-on, stuff you can use in your day-to-day work. And that of course, you will find a lot of just opinion and posts with some tips in there, some more announcements. This is just scrolling and really engaging with these people. To begin with, we'll give you a lot of ideas that are classic piece of advice I have for you is to. Of the ideation process, just like you would with regular content. So think about where you go to for new article ideas. And it can be anything. It can be product reviews, it can be forums, it can be used. You've heard recently. It can be simply just talking to people. Or if you really want to keep up with the trends, sometimes even before they are big trends, I recommend using the exploding topics website, sort by, let's say the past year. And then you can choose the category you're interested in. So if you're in healthcare and just click on health, and you will get a couple of recommendations and see exactly how people are interested in this specific topic. And then you can take some of these topics and start talking about them on LinkedIn. So that may be, you will be the first or at least among the first to tackle that topic. Since I mentioned talking to people, one of the best ways in which I get my own topic ideas is to talk to my clients or to do networking with people in my industry. So if you're talking to someone, you're consulting, the founder and market or whenever, you will get definitely a couple of questions or intriguing topics that you can tackle later on, on LinkedIn. And finally, just look at what other successful companies are doing on LinkedIn, BB your competitors, or maybe just other people with a similar personal brand to yours in the similar industry. So you can go to their company page and just look through the posts. They already have few what they talk about. Don't pay attention just to the topics, but also to help people are engaging with these posts. In this case, for instance, they just posted an announcement of an upcoming webinar, specifically on Ask Me Anything session and they added the link as a comment. So if you remember, I told you about the strategy being more effective for getting your post at the top. However, in this case, they don't have a lot of followers. So these posts are just not getting in front of as many people as they would want to. Really kind of, especially if you're doing competitor analysis, really check out the comments section because as you can see in here, the interaction is minimal. So you really want to see if your target market ultimately is interested in post like these. Of course, you can look at individuals as well and also you can check out groups specifically. Again, the content in there is not always the best one, but sometimes you find groups that are a bit more engaging, like Search Engine Land, for instance, it's a decent one in the marketing space, but definitely not as big as the Slack group, for instance. 9. Finding clients: So if you are a freelancer taking this course, you are probably highly interested in how you can use LinkedIn to get more clients and maybe even maintain that relationship with your clients. Because sometimes you're going to have clients that need just a bit of help with maybe a specific type of surveys. And then you might lose touch with them for quite awhile. So maybe you're not working with them for a couple of months, but you can use that time to really showcase your expertise on LinkedIn and get in front of them once again. So maybe they reach out to you for other services they need. So there's a couple of requirements before you actually get started with finding clients in time. Ultimately, LinkedIn is going to be the channel that you use to, let's say, keep in touch with people that find you through referrals. So once you get a referral from a past client, this new prospect will reach out to you, maybe true length and maybe through email. So it's always nice to really maintain an active profile on LinkedIn. And let me tell you I've had several situations where I would post, for example, a video of me speaking at a webinar. Then I would get clients because they loved my approach to a topic. So they thought I was the perfect fit for the services they needed. The number one requirement before you start looking for clients is obviously having a regular presence on LinkedIn. And another important part is having a niche. So if you're just going to talk about general topics, so for example, about marketing in general, it's very difficult to truly speak to one person in your target market. So instead you want to pick your niches. So remember how I told you to add your industries and your expertise in your headline on your profile. I was talking to this other market or at some point that wanted to start his own LinkedIn strategy. And after a couple of posts, who realized that his posts were pretty much too general and then nobody was interacting with them. So his approach was to switch it all up and start talking to a specific audience. For example, if you do marketing in the travel space, talk about topics that are very specific to that industry. If you are a designer, the FinTech space, you obviously want to post regular illustrations or UI designs, specifically from other fintech clients you've had in the past. And this list just goes on. So again, adapt the content that you have, your niche and specifically to the requirements of your target market. Then the second and we've already talked about how to build this, is having a decent network. So the bigger your network, the easier it is for you to reach out to more people. Because one, your posts will be out there in front of more people into the more people you are connected with, the bigger chance you have for people to discover you via LinkedIn search. Let's be honest, I've had situations where somebody reached out to me because we had Wendy shared connections or similar. So definitely an interesting point of view here. The third is knowing where to look. On one end, you can use certain keywords like looking for freelance work, looking for a writer, freelance, whatever, hiring a freelancer, or we are looking to hire a specific person and a specific role. Or I'm looking to talk to somebody or looking for subject matter experts in a specific field. You want to kind of juggle with these keywords as you look through posts. So you can find a lot of opportunities where people are, you know, they need help with specific services. So they go out there to be fully open about this and get as many submissions as possible. So this is one straightforward way of finding some freelance opportunities. Of course, you can also keep track of them on your own feed, because as you scroll down, you will see some of these opportunities. Then there's also the option for you to go and make a post about the services that you offer their role you're looking for the maybe you're just wanted to offer some advice. So again, if you go to start to post, you can just write this down or go to add to your post. And B, can I find maybe an expert to talk to you if you don't need help with anything in particular, or you can just offer help straight away. So as you can see, there's a bunch of options in here, or you can just write everything down. But the, let's say the most straightforward and classic way of finding roles is in the jobs section. Now this ties into why it's important to know how to filter for these clients. So for example, let's assume you are a designer, UX designer, illustrator, UI, fashion designer, kitchen design or whatever in your keyword in here. And then knowing how to work the filters. Because for instance, you can go to Job Type and select specifically contract work or temporary rules or part-time work. Whereas if you are looking for a full-time role, you'll have to sort it like this. Of course, you can also just go ahead to experience level and select your level of experience. Usually I recommend choosing a couple of options. So for example, if you're a junior or a mid-level, choose more options in here. I prefer to just look at all of them without this filter on, but it really depends on your current status. And there is some other options in here, including if you go to All Filters. There's also the industry part. So if you're looking for a designer job in the financial services space, again, this is an option. I also sometimes do the keyword trick where I add in freelancer as a keyword specifically. Because sometimes there's differences between what people classify as a contractor and what a freelancer really is. You'll start finding jobs that are super obvious, like industrial designer and this is a freelancer rule. All of the details in here, you really need to know how to look at whether this is the right company for you. Go to the company page or you can see some details in here. For example, this company is too big for what I like in general, I personally prefer startups, but maybe you want to work with a bigger company. And if you are assessing these companies, I generally recommend using glassdoor as well. So if for instance you want to work at Facebook now, metta, you just Google metal glass door, click on basically the first link. Then you can start checking out some reviews, looking at some salaries, seeing what types of interviews they have, what benefits they offer and so on. So ideally you want to go beyond just the LinkedIn. And even if you are a freelancer, I still recommend checking out the company before. It depends on the type of work you performed. If it's just content writing most of the time their culture isn't going to influence you. You don't care about that because you strictly work with maybe one person. So what matters ultimately is just getting alone with those people. What I would definitely recommend is applying to these roles. Be they in the form of a post or listed under jobs, talking to whoever needs the services. It can be a marketing manager. It can be a product person. It can be just a founder. This would be it for this section. And then the next one we are in looking over the specifics of finding a job. Although this section is going to be super short because it's pretty much the same thing essentially. 10. Finding a job: And now we're going to discuss how to find a job on LinkedIn. I recommend looking over the finding new clients section as well. Because again, having a strong presence and knowing how to sell yourself and how to even just make a post about your availability matters a lot as well when it comes to finding a job. Like with finding clients, you can always go and start a post. Write about your expectations from this new role. Make sure that on your profile, you have the open to work badge during the day. So again, go to open too. Open to work, just like we discussed with the section on setting up your profile so that all of the roles you are actually open to our displayed. Now, when a recruiter sees this, they are going to get a rough idea of the job titles you're interested in. So if they see something like content manager, they will reach out to you for pretty much any content rule. So going back to jobs, I recommend being as open as possible. Just defined all of the right jobs. Because for instance, if you were to search for a keyword like marketing manager, you might not get a recommendation. The head of marketing or a marketing specialist, unless the job description uses the marketing manager keyword. So what I do instead, I just searched for something like marketing. And this gives me access to a lot of roles. Some of them are generalist roles, some of them are things like product marketing, maybe it's content marketing. And this applies if you're searching for a rolling content instead of marketing, look for something like content. And this will give your roles like content lead as well. And it really, to any kind of industry, make sure you choose the exact experience level you have. Generally, I recommend clicking on most of these except for internship. Unless you are interested in an internship, then leave out the company because you do not want to necessarily work at this specific company unless maybe you do render a specific job types. So again, if you want a full-time role, make sure this is checked. You might be open to a temporary role. So being full-time for a year, for instance, there's options like internships, volunteering in here. Then there's the on-site and remote situation. So if you want a remote job, make sure this is specified. By the way, this easy apply feature in here. This allows you to essentially just click and apply to a role straight away using your LinkedIn profile. So you don't have to send a cover letter or to go to another page, essentially. And discourse, there is some extra filters in here. So for example, if you want to do marketing within a specific industry, you have your options in here, so you can do marketing and we always stayed, for instance, just be open to your industries as much as possible as long as you are confident with them. I would recommend even when you have this easy apply feature is to go to the website or to directly reach out to whoever posted the job. It can be a recruiter, it can be an HR manager, it can be the founder, like in this case, do also reach out to them separately because sometimes, especially with jobs like this where you get a lot of applicants, it's easy to get lost. Basically to really not be seen among all of the other applicants. So try to stand out as much as possible. And other option is to directly reach out to this person before hand. In practice, I've had situations where I would reach out to the recruitment manager or whoever was responsible for recruitment and they would not get back to me. So the application that line would pass and I hadn't applied to the rule. So nobody ever got back to me. So I recommend sending in a formal application and then maybe reaching out to the recruitment manager to see if they can give you some extra details about their role and to really started connecting with them. You can also send like a customized video or a cover letter. So it's an extra thing besides what you already have on LinkedIn. 11. Ending: We are at the end of this course. Congratulations on setting up your profile and learning all of the secrets of LinkedIn and how to grow a personal brand on this network. Now, there's a couple of extra tips we will go through in the bonus section. And right after this closure video, we are going over the details of the project so that you can actually get started with creating some content for your LinkedIn and really start your LinkedIn strategy straightaway. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn. And also, remember there's a couple of extra courses you can look through if you're interested in content marketing and becoming a better content writers, starting a freelancing career and so on. And let's move on to the project section. So please head over to the Resources section and you will find in there are some extra details for the project essentially. But what I really want you to do at the end of this course, now that you've set up your profile, you'll learn how to build a network, how to engage with your audience, what types of content you can create. I want you to go ahead open up a Google Docs or any kind of document and write down five posts. So I want you to go not true, just the ideas, although you can definitely start with brainstorming them. But to create really full, complete posts for anything or industry to really showcase your subject matter expertise. And then you are gradually going to post them on LinkedIn over the course of this length. We don't have to share these ahead with us, but I do hope you will share your profile. Whereas again, you can just kind of list that in a Google Docs as a link and we will check it out. This would be the end of the course. We'll go over the project, share with us your results. And don't forget the Baptist section, the bonus section coming up ahead. 12. Bonus tips: So for this bonus section, I wanted us to have a look at some extra tips that you can use for using LinkedIn and for scaling your strategy there. So the number one topic is, do you need your premium account? Now, there's a couple of situations where you might want a premium LinkedIn account, but that is definitely not for career purposes because you most likely do not have the budget to spend on LinkedIn just to get a premium plan because all of these things that they promise you here essentially aren't all that in practice. So you can do everything in here except for the learning new skills board, which is why you need LinkedIn premium to access the LinkedIn courses. So besides that, it's relatively easy to get in touch with recruiters boundaries and so on. Yes, you won't see how you compare to other applicants, but this is not accurate by all means. Really the only case when you need a premium account is for business purposes. So if you are doing marketing or sales for a company, for a client. Now, a trick when it comes to this is that sometimes you will get a notification, so you will find it here and then a, so you will find it here. And there are notifications that lets you know that you can get one month of LinkedIn premium for free. So in my case, I've had that premium accounts twice, so for two months completely for free. The only thing to keep in mind is that you do have to cancel your subscription before that month ends, so you won't get charged because the cost is really high. However, some of the things you will be able to do are, again, if you go to work here, you will find the learning section and a lot of courses in there. You can also get a lot of insights into who is viewing your profile. So right now since I don't have the premium account activated, I only get a couple of these profiles. When you have a premium account, you're also able to send any mail messages. So right now, if I want to reach out to a person, I need to go to connect with them and add a note to this invite. However, if I were to have a premium account, I can just send a message. As you can see in here, these are the benefits, but I definitely recommend waiting to get that premium free offer essentially. Now heading over to our profile page for a bit, we've looked at everything that really matters. However, you will see two other sections in here, and one of them is editing your public profile and URL. This is an option for you to add is the way your profile looks like to the public. So two people who are not LinkedIn users or those that are not signed in to LinkedIn. So this is technically what everyone, regardless of whether they have an account on LinkedIn or Nazis. So you might want to turn off stuff like through maybe courses, certifications, just some details essentially. And maybe just leave your experience, for instance, your past experience. Again, you can close and this is what I would recommend, not necessarily showing your articles and the posts you make because you don't want just anybody to copy them, for instance. And also here at the top, super important, you have the option to edit your URL. So for instance, in my case, super simple with my name and that's it. Interesting feature is adding your profile in another language. For instance, if you are in a country outside of an English-speaking country, not in the US, not in England, not in Ireland, Northern Australia, and so on. Or you want to move and find a job in another country. So for instance, if you're moving to friends, you will want to add your entire profile in French if this is completely up to you, but it helps you showcase your expertise in our language. When we were talking about newsletters, I told you how important it is to understand when people, so your followers and ultimately your connections receive notifications from you. Something super handy you can do is head over to your notification section and go to settings. And then here you have a bunch of options, essentially strictly related to notifications. So I recommend going through all of these, for instance, through the network ones. In here, you will see all the different types of notifications and update. People can receive. Now, it's entirely up to you what types of notifications you want to receive. So this means that somebody can just come in and turn off all of their notifications. But generally you want to assume that they're going to get most of these notifications. So for instance, in my case, I do not like receiving a notification whenever I have a new followers. So I've turned this off, but a lot of people, for instance, have the who's viewed your profile notification turned on. So this means that when you look at somebody's profile, they will get a notification. They will know that you looked at depth profile. Another interesting part is under network, you have here a bunch of notifications related to the event. So for instance, events updates. So this means that if you make an update to your own event, the people who've already said they wanted to attend your event will get a notification. You can kind of use this as a reminder essentially. So it really depends on what you want to change. But there is also a dedicated event reminders. So a couple of minutes before and events a day before an event, and a lot of other similar notifications that I really recommend looking into. Because this way you know that when you, let's say start organizing and events and start inviting people, dare specific types of notifications they can get. And it's not just them, it's also their network because as I told you, when somebody attends your events, they are network will also be notified that this person is your event. Now for the jobs section, so if you're looking for a job or for a new client, I just had this job alert feature I wanted to point out. So in general, the way this works is that once you start looking for a job, LinkedIn will pick it up and started creating a job blurred. But you can also just manage them from job alerts in here. You can turn on and off your notifications and job recommendations. So it really depends if you want to receive these. So generally you will receive these either via email or as a notification here, but it's definitely handy if you wants to keep up on a regular basis with new jobs, new opportunities in your field. Finally, another final tip I had was using the Network section effectively because in my opinion, this is underutilized. So there's a couple of things you can do in here from obviously keeping an eye on your connections, on your invitations, on people you follow groups, events and so on. But specifically, I like, for instance, the newsletter section in here because it gives you an overall look at all of the newsletters you're subscribed to. And fun fact, you can go to every single one of these newsletters and see how many subscribers they have and just compare it with your own stats if that makes sense. So this is interesting for competitor research, if you will. And you have some extra things under my network that very few people use, including bringing your personal contact. So here on the left side of the screen, or if you click on More Options, you can instantly connect with other people you've talked to in the past via e-mail for instance. So you can use this to immediately find all of your clients, all of the people you've worked with in the past, all of the people you've talked to before and just keep connected with them. Because the thing is this gives you a starting network on LinkedIn of people who already know. So fun fact, I did this at some point. And I still do this because I find it super efficient in the sense that, for example, with my newsletter, I know that everyone who is engaging with my newsletter and finds that everyone who has subscribe to my newsletter via my website, for instance, not just on LinkedIn. Actually knows me. I've talked to them before, I've worked with them. I needed something from them. I've helped them in the past. I've mentored them. They've mentored me. You got this network to begin with, and you just need to bring it over into LinkedIn. So these are pretty much all of my tips for now. Once LinkedIn updates, anything because they're going as far as I know to launch some pretty interesting features including LinkedIn spaces, which are spaces where you can jump into a conversation via audio and talk to other people on a specific topic. So this will give you again, a lot of exposure to other people in your industry, to your target market. And it will also be able to increase your personal brand even more. So there's a lot of features LinkedIn just keeps on adding. I definitely recommend going for this strategy if you have realized that this will help you with your goals. And I will see you in a future course, enjoy the rest of your day and have a wonderful career.