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After you know your goals, you need to determine how to present yourself. This
presentation is done by setting up a profile. You can set up only one profile on
LinkedIn, so it needs to work for you in a variety of ways.

You also have the option of setting up a company page, but we recommend that
unless you’re specifically setting up a company page with several employees, wait
until you’re more familiar with LinkedIn to do it. You want to be familiar with how
things are done on LinkedIn before you promote yourself. If you have several
employees who will be active online and need to get started right away, by all
means do it.

Setting up your profile is deceptively easy. The quality of your LinkedIn profile is
highly important. As with any career-related activity, you are judged on a variety
of measures, including the description of your previous successes and your
willingness to help others achieve their goals.

We recommend that you start with a profile to support the main goals you have
and then revise as you go along. For example, if you’re looking for a job, your
profile contains very different content from that of a business owner doing market
research. We cover these differences in the rest of the chapter.

Preparing a content strategy

You’ve probably heard a good deal about the concept of content strategy. It boils
down to evaluating what content you have and what you need to meet a specific
marketing goal. Content can be articles, product descriptions, videos, audio inter-
views, or any material that informs people about you or your business.

To illustrate, one of your LinkedIn goals might be to find new consulting clients.
If this is the case, you want to review all the content you have created that shows
off your consulting expertise. Then you can start to share it on your profile. You
can then use this newly repurposed content in other channels, such as your news-
letter or blog.

Begin by doing an inventory of your e-books, posts, proposals, and so on, and
determine what content you can use to let colleagues learn about you on LinkedIn.
Then make an editorial schedule for yourself so that you can create in a timely
manner any new items you need. Usually if you don’t schedule a specific time to
do it, you won’t. For inspiration, look at other people’s profiles and see what they
have posted.

CHAPTER 11 Considering LinkedIn 177