You want to learn how to master your LinkedIn personal Branding ? I promise you it’s not complicated. When I first started, I thought it would be very difficult to be consistent and creative, but I have learned from the Best, that you just need to follow that method.
It’s free to use and simple to learn. All you need is being very concentrated for the next 5 minutes. You feel ready ? 🤓
What is your LinkedIn personal branding ?
For Wikipedia :
Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception.
I would Add :
It’s teaching to your audience what is the identity, values, trust and expertise of your brand that make it stand up amount other brands. If your brand image is well done : they recognize and validate you. In fine, they purchase your services or products.
Basically, your friends knows who you’re. If somebody would ask them about you, they would easily say what you do in life, what you love, what kind of values you’re bringing in their life and what defines your personality. Ad to this your professional value and you get “branding”, it’s just a big word to say that people know you and your work. 😎
Why is LinkedIn important for personal branding?
- Your profile is your first door to show who you’re.
- It’s easy to reach thousand views on your posts.
- The social media is basically design FOR IT !
- You can create a real professional network.
- The algorithm is simple to understand.
- Everybody trust LinkedIn for the quality of its content.
Of course, it depends what is your activity, of course. If your target is B2c (that is, people, not companies), then you’ll have to turn to other networks: Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. But it doesn’t mean that you should give up on LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is full of “normal people” too !
B2c
I will tell you a funny story,
As well as a writer for Waalaxy’s blog, I am also a yoga teacher. With covid, I had to find online client for yoga on Zoom, but I had no budget.
- I tried Facebook groups = not so many people reacted. 😿
- I tried Instagram, publishing content everyday = Way too many competitors, I was hardly visible. 😭
- I tried sending automated messages for free on LinkedIn with Waalaxy = I found 80% of my new clients that way. 😍
Examples of B2c auto-entrepreneur : Yoga teachers, clothing shop, flower shops, bike repair, music teacher…
Sometimes we think that there is a rule about getting prospects at the right place, but, there isn’t. We just gotta try.
Now, let’s talk about option two.
B2b
Your target audience is in the B2b sector. (it means that you want to sell your services to companies), then, LinkedIn is 277% more efficient that the other social medias to find clients.
Examples of B2b auto-entrepreneur or freelance : Content creator, web designer, developer, event planner, consultant in marketing, community manager…
Here you are : trying to be part of the movement, becoming a freelance and trying to find your first clients. If it’s your case, we’ve got a guide about that specific subject : 7 tips to find 10 new clients. 🔥
How to build your LinkedIn personal branding?
I’ve created that 5 pillars infographic to show you what’s important for your personal branding. People need to know 5 things :
And, there is different areas of your LinkedIn, where they will be able to find it. (Title, banner, infos…) and for sure, in your content strategy, because you’re going to write about all those subjects in a subtle way that I am going to show you soon enough. 🔮
All those pillars drives us into 4 important aspects of your strategy : Your profile, your network, your content and how to transform people that are seduced by your work to new clients.
Polishing your (beautiful) LinkedIn profile
In this article you’ll find all the details on how to make those small changes that make a difference. 👀
- Change your profile picture if needed :Make sure you are smiling and we can see your eyes, here is an example of what it should look like :
- Decorate your profile picture: you can use a background with the colors of your company, it will help your profile to be more visible for the eyes :
- Personalize your LinkedIn job title. Make sure we can properly understand what you’re doing and ad it your value proposition. Example :
- Create your cover photo. Your banner must be personalized and represent who you’re and what is your passion/ job. (Tutorial to create your own, just here).
- Tell your story. First of all, use the bio to describe yourself, why you love what you love and why you’re doing it well.
- Use the selection to show your work. You can either link your blog, an article talking about you, a LinkedIn post you’ve done… Use it to show your expertise, only a tiny % of people really interested by you are going to look at it, but it’s part of the prospecting funnel.
- Fill in your experience and education : People need to be capable of understanding where you’ve worked and what makes you and expert of your subject. You don’t need to have the best experience in the world, your storytelling will help. 😉
- Translate your LinkedIn profile. If you want to be open to getting clients overseas, you need to start by translating your profile. (right corner of your page).
Building your network on LinkedIn
Social networking is your first move forward. If you want to be smart using LinkedIn, you’ll need to start showing up in other people feeds. What you want is :
To appear in the most relevant comments
The most relevant comments can have two reasons for choosing you over somebody else :
- You have written a long comment. (So, the LinkedIn algorithm think that you’ve spend time reading and writing and it must be constructive 🤓).
- You are always commenting that person’ post. (In that case, the algorithm categorize you as friends 👩❤️👩).
Being in the most relevant comment is not only an ego trip #personalchallenge. It’s a way to steal a bit of that influencer‘s audience.
Here for example. The views of that article are insane. You’re the 🥇 most relevant comment ? You will take advantages of the scope of the hearing.
The method to follow
💡 Scroll your feed every day for 5 to 10 minutes and comment on at least 10 posts related to your personal brand, your products or services. Repeat this 5 times a week to create your network. 💡
To create a feeling of being indebted
When you comment someone else’s post, that person want to reward you. It’s called Ben Franklin effect.
This perception of Franklin has been cited as an example within cognitive dissonance theory, which says that people change their attitudes or behavior to resolve tensions, or “dissonance”, between their thoughts, attitudes, and actions.
Basically, if you’ve been commenting somebody’s post few time and that person hasn’t repay you yet, the feel a sensation of discomfort and tension in their brain activity, so next time they see you in the feed, they will let you a little comment.
When you think about it, it’s the same with somebody giving you an amazing present for your birthday : you instantly feel that you’ll have to do best, or at least equal and the feeling never leaves you.
To build a community around your expertise
Building a network come with posting, commenting and following but also exchanging ideas and discussing trough LinkedIn messaging.
If you desire to do so, you could contact very active LinkedIn influencers and tell them that you have a story to tell. Maybe they will invite you to be the guest in their next webinar.
But that kind of invite as a price, and you know when the saying :
If there is no price, you are the product.
In that case, the product is your personal brand, your image and your audience. If you want to be invited to the experts party’s, you need to be very active on LinkedIn, to have a strong brand identity. But don’t worry, we’re working on it. 😉
Contacting your new LinkedIn friends (prospects)
There is a tool that LinkedIn calls Social Selling Index (SSI) That indicator helps you to see if you’re enough active on the social media.
It’s based on 4 pillars :
- Establish a professional branding,
- Find the right people,
- Exchange information,
- Build relationships.
You can check what your score is here, and see how much and were you have to improve.
If you need to Build better relationship and find the right people, you can use a free tool 👀 to automatically send connection requests and personalized messages to your target audience. 🚀
Creating regular (and good) content
Here is the trick, being regular and following the same editorial line.
Before you keep on going you’ll need to fill those 3 questions and really take the time for it.
- Why do I publish on LinkedIn?
- To show that I am an expert to who ? Employers, recruiters, potential clients?
- To create a community with who ? Experts, clients, people passionnate?
- To build a network with who ? Beginners, advanced, freelancers?
- Who is my target audience?
- Large (Top) audience : who do you want to speak to on a large scale?
- intermediate (middle) audience : who is right in between the large scale and the target audience?
- Qualified (bottom) audience : (Who is more likely to be following you and buying your services?
- What do I want to bring to that audience?
-
- Tips, tutos, definitions,
- Education around my specialities,
- Talking about what is important as an entrepreneur,
- Help them to be better in their job
- ❌
sell them my product.❌
-
LinkedIn content strategy for personal branding
Now you’ve commented people post, and find your audience, let’s talk about content strategy. 🥳
We have a method at Waalaxy that works more than well. We call it “The avengers”. The goal was to tame the algorithm in order to appear in our target profile ALL THE TIME.
Like this. 👇
And we find out the best recipe.
If you want few examples of that method to follow :
- Toinon with 165966 views cumulated.
- https://blog.waalaxy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Capture-décran-2021-05-20-à-16.34.07-1.webp with 116699 views cumulated.
Keen to see how we managed it?
Define your content guideline
You will write 3 times a week, no less, no more. Don’t worry it’s easier than it sound.
First, have you heard of the funnel : TOFU-MOFU-BOFU?
TOFU = Top of funnel
Write to your larger audience. 🎤 (1 post per week).
Find the subject that will talk to a large audience. Please make sure it’s a subject you like to talk about. If not, you’ll never find enough inspiration in the long run.
Here is mine, for example : Well being at work, the joy of freelancing, getting organized working from home, communication skills, how to speak your truth at work…
MOFU = Middle of funnel
Write to your middle audience. 🎤 (1 post per week).
Here you’re linking the Top and the middle funnel, to share and spread your knowledges Let’s say your buyer persona of bottom funnel is the freelancers in digital marketing and sales, under 35 years old.
Here are examples of themes : concepts of marketing, evolution of marketing, cold email, UX experience, where to find clients, how to build persona, how to do A/B testing…
BOFU = Bottom of funnel
Write to your bottom audience. 🎤 (1 post per week).
Now, that post in more precise. Let say, you’re selling a tool such as Waalaxy, to automate marketing campaigns, then, the goal is not to scream BUY THIS, IT’S GOOD SHIT. But, to explain how you can answer your audience need’s.
Here are examples of subjects : How to automate a campaign, why should you use cold email instead of trying to get phone calls, the results of that campaign and why it worked, your biggest mistakes creating the product.
You just need now to adapt those themes to your own company and the subjects that you like and you know how to talk about. Then do the same list of examples, even more. Write them down somewhere. ✍
What to post on LinkedIn ?
Please, go flip through the “12 Mistakes Not to Make When Posting to LinkedIn” guide before continuing. (but don’t forget to come back here 🖐).
Make sure you read at least those ones :
- Mistake 2: Not knowing how to structure your text = the guide gives you examples of what to do and not to do.
- Mistake 6 : Adding outgoing links = never put links on your posts, the guide will tell you why.
- Error 8 : Tagging half of your network so that they comment on your publication = just because it’s cheating, cheating is ugly and the algorthim and the users dislike it.
Error 9 : Using your company page = It’s way less attractive to the audience, unless you’re coca cola, but you’re not, so no.
Find ideas and organize them
To find an efficient way to organize them, you can use Trello or Notion. Any tool that is free or very cheap and as a system of cards. I personally love notion.
You can separate 3 columns, for TOFU-MOFU-BOFU and write your ideas.
Write your next posts
There’re worst that you could do to yourself is being unprepared (after driving drunk). Let’s say i’s monday and you haven’t plan anything and you need to write but you have no inspiration… So you’re going to write something but with no convictions. 🥱
To make sure it doesn’t happen, try to always have ideas of posts for 2 weeks ahead (so 6 posts). With time and practice, the ideas will just come into your head to right back to your notion and your Trello.
Ideas doesn’t last long in the brain, catch them and write them down.
let it simmer
That’s our special recipe :
- Wait 24 hours.
- Reread your posts.
- Remove 20%.
- Simplify.
- Ask yourself “if I read this post, do I leave a comment?”
- Give a funny reason to make an easy comment.
What you want is for people to comment your post. More you get comments, more the algorithm shows your content to more people, add a joke and few easy-to-answer questions at the end. 🚀
Get a scheduling tool
You will need to use a scheduling tool in order to follow your results and plan ahead. Personally, I use Podawaa, because it has a function integrated to join engagement groups and has a freemium offer.
But, you do you and you choose what you want. Just pick an easy to use. 😉
Conclusion
So, you’ve got everything you need to start your personal branding now. If you have a question about that method you can always contact us or read more about LinkedIn. 🔥
FAQ 1 : LinkedIn personal branding tips
To work on your personal branding on LinkedIn you need to :
- Have an optimize profile on LinkedIn.
- Be active on the social media and follow your competitors and targets feeds.
- Keep an eye on new ways to communicate. via LinkedIn (webinar, audio…).
- Create strong partnership.
- Publish 3 times a week following the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU marketing strategy.
- Get a tool to organize your idea, one to program your posts and one to send automated messages to your audience.
FAQ 2 : Is LinkedIn profile important for personal branding?
Of course. Your profile is your landing page. The first step to get to know you a bit better. Make sure it’s warm and easy to read.
It’s ok if your profile looks a bit more shiny on LinkedIn that in real life. It’s called “The LinkedIn effect”, and we all laugh about it, but we all do it. We are millions to use that social media, so we all try to make us stand out.
So, let’s be creative and have fun with our LinkedIn profiles. 😉
FAQ 3 : How to build my audience with Waalaxy?
With Waalaxy, you can use LinkedIn filters to find your target audience among all users, then you can add them into your CRM, send them automated connection requests or personalized message. You can also ask them questions to help you find what kind of content they would like to read on LinkedIn.
Examples :
→ contact people experienced in your topic by asking them for “3 tips for XXX issue”.
“Hi , I’m getting into LinkedIn content creation. As a copywriter, what 3 pieces of content would you give me to write a post that works?”
→ contact people who are a little less experienced on your topic, asking them “What is your main issue for XXX?”
Hi, I saw that you were a Biz dev. Have you ever thought about launching a linkedIn content strategy? And if so, what’s stopping you from doing it today?”
And, thanks to that trick, you can create your network and LinkedIn personal branding easier than ever. 😍
