Introduction – Why Personal Branding Matters on LinkedIn
Why does a personal brand matter? This question often comes to the mind of newbies when they are setting up their profile or when they hear about its simplicity and ease. Now, the brand helps you earn more and get more clients in less time. And if you use your profile as a profile and don’t present it as a brand, then your profile won’t benefit you as much as a brand can. That’s why building a strong brand on LinkedIn is so important.
Define Your Purpose – Identify Your Audience and Core Message
Before building a brand, you have to think and decide what your purpose is, why you want to build a personal brand, whether you want to promote any of your services, or whether you want to do business of selling digital products, or whether you already have a business and want to generate leads for it.
This is one goal. The second goal is that you also have to keep your audience in mind, what do you want to show in front of the audience, meaning how do you want to show your brand to your friends in front of the audience, whether it is helping them out, solving their problems Once you have decided all this, you need to follow the steps below to convert your profile into a brand,
Optimize Your Profile – Photo, Headline, About Section & Skills
Before building a personal brand on LinkedIn, you have to set up your profile. The first step is to optimize your profile properly, which will help strengthen your brand. Otherwise, if you just put a DP on your profile like any other social media platform and write a little bit about it, then it will not build your personal brand.
A brand means that people can know you. When people are searching for something, your name should be on their minds. This is a sign of a strong brand, and that is possible only when you fully optimize your profile.
You will put a clear photo, write your about section in a very organized and well-organized way, and make the summary of your profile very good and up-to-date. Finally, you will write about your skills so that whoever visits your profile will know what skills you have. This is the only way to build your profile. You can convert it into a brand; this is the first step.
Professional Profile Photo – Look Clear, Confident & Approachable
So, your profile picture is your first impression. When someone visits your LinkedIn profile, the first thing they will see is your picture. If your picture is good and clean and meets the requirements of LinkedIn profile optimization, then they will explore your profile further.
Otherwise, they will leave your profile. What are the rules about pictures in LinkedIn profile optimization? One of the state-forward rules is that your profile picture should be a headshot, a completely clear picture, not blurry, and not a family photo or a vacation photo of you.
Rather, it should be a picture of you in good clothes and taken from the front, in which you are looking with a smiley face and confident. This is a straightforward rule that you have to apply to your picture.
Strong Headline – Combine Job Role + Value Proposition
After the pictures, the next thing that shows on your profile is the headline, and the headline is the only sentence that defines how professional you are in your industry. If you don’t organize and optimize your headline properly, even if a visitor decides to visit you after seeing your profile photo,
they will leave and won’t explore your profile further. You have to write a strong headline that also describes your job role and what value you can provide. You have to merge all of these and create a strong headline of your own. Remember that you must include keywords in it.
For example, if you are a web designer and you do a job, you can write a headline in such a way that you write the name of an industry, like helping hair salons to design their websites. If you write a headline in this way, then your profile will become more beautiful and better.
Strong “About” Section
So there are two ways to write an about section. One is that you write the about section using an AI tool, that is, tell the tool your details about who you are and what you do, and then it will write an about section for you.
And one is the manual method, that is, you have to write the about section in this way, starting from here, who am I, and when you reach the end level, that is, when you reach the ending, you have to write the ending in such a way that what kind of businesses can you help, and in the middle, you can write your experience, a party, etc., whatever you want to write.
If you write your about section in this way, it will be strong. And another thing to keep in mind is that you have to write the about section according to a storyline, meaning when a reader reads it, he or she will feel that a story is being told.
For example, I will give you an example, such as a web developer or A web designer can write that my name is Azmat and I have been learning web designing for the past four years, and now I have completely learned designing and I help restaurants, hair salons, and businesses to design their websites well so that they get more clients.
If you write your about section like this, the reader will see that you are a really honest person and that you have learned something or the other. You can also write that I am very good at this style of web design. That means if you can design a one-pager website well, you can write specifically about it. This will make your about section stronger.
Create Value-Based Content
There are many types of valuable content, meaning that if you are sharing valuable content, how can you make this content valuable? For example, you can share tips, or you can share personal experience and your learning, or you can share case studies, or you can discuss trending news related to this industry. You should always keep in mind that you should never post useless content, but rather you should provide value in it, which will make people know you well, and when they know you well, they will connect with yo u and your brand will be strong.
Develop Thought Leadership
You have to share your expertise consistently. If you have made a schedule where once in two weeks I will definitely share my expertise with people so that people can benefit from it, then you have to be consistent with it. Apart from this, every industry has different topics.
Some are very difficult, some are very easy, and some are of medium level. So you have to try to explain difficult topics to people in an easy way. What will happen from this? This will be a great benefit for you. When you explain difficult topics to people in simple words, people will say that you are very professional in your industry, and people like to associate with every professional. This will make people connect with you more and more, and your band will get stronger.
So you have to keep this in mind. This is a very big secret that I am telling you: you can cover complex topics. Everyone covers easy topics, but complex ones are very difficult. There are more difficult topics; you have to try to teach them to people easily and simply so that awareness increases among people related to your industry. Only when awareness increases will they be able to connect with you, and your brand will become an excellent and successful brand.
Show Proof of Work
You also have to keep in mind that you have to share proof with people. There will be some screenshots, before and afters, reviews of clients, and stories of clients. You have to keep sharing them with people so that an organic relationship can be created between you and the people, which can give a lot of growth to your personal brand, because when people get into a relationship with you and start trusting you, they will connect with you. Your personal brand will be strengthened.
Build a Unique Personal Brand Voice
So when many people start building their personal brand, they make this mistake, due to which they fail, and both their time and money are wasted. And that mistake is that they copy and paste the style and tone of others. If you think about the word personal brand, you will know that personal brand means your own brand. If it is your own brand, then you have to create a unique brand. You should never copy and paste. Because of this, you can waste both your money and time, and you will have to face failure.
If you copy and paste, thinking that you will also succeed by copying and pasting someone else, then this does not happen at all, and these things do not work in this way. Rather, you have to create your own personal brand. It will definitely take your hard work, it will take time, and it may also take money. But when your personal brand is created, then you will know what the real power of a personal brand is, what the power of a unique personal brand is.
Conclusion
Now that you have learned everything about how to build a personal brand and that too a strong personal brand on LinkedIn, you should always follow these steps. You should optimize your profile well. You should keep this clear in your mindset that what you want and where you want to take your personal brand. If you keep this in mind, both your hard work and money will be saved.
If you do not keep any props in mind and start a brand as is, then both your money and time will be wasted. And you should always remember that this mistake, if you just copy and paste other people’s brands and their tone, will destroy everything for you, and you will not get any benefit.
Your money, time, profile, and everything will be wasted in brand building, and it will also waste your time. Therefore, you have kept this in mind and never copied and pasted anyone else’s work and run it in your career, so that people can trust that it is unique. And if you want to learn and know how to promote your service after building your personal brand, then be sure to read this article.