If you’re among the many professionals making this mistake on LinkedIn, it’s costing you countless potential clients and new business. Here’s how to fix it.
To this day, it kills me.
I can’t believe I’d been making what now, in retrospect, seems like such a massive mistake with my LinkedIn profile.
But it wasn’t entirely my fault. (More on that in a moment.)
Here’s the important part: Once I fixed this mistake with my LinkedIn profile, it helped me generate six figures in just 90 days for my brand-new business.
I’ve seen others utilize the same remedy I discovered to earn five figures on a monthly basis along with generating 1,000+ new sales leads in 60 days. All from LinkedIn.
Before I share what this big gaffe was and how to fix it, I need to explain why the mistake was happening to begin with.
LinkedIn – Then and Now
When LinkedIn was first launched in 2003, it was hyper-focused on helping connect job seekers and hiring managers with one another.
As a result, everyone joining LinkedIn was trained, in a sense, to set up his or her individual profile page to read like a virtualrésumé.
As a result, most of us set up a profile page that was all about us – where we worked, our job titles and duties, where we went to college, etc.
We even talked about ourselves in the third person, something you normally associate with egomaniacal pro athletes and celebrities!
Fast forward to today.
With 400 million members in 200 countries, LinkedIn has mushroomed into the world’s #1 online platform for professionals to engage, interact, create and consume industry-specific content and much more.
Most important, it has become, in my opinion, the single fastest, easiest and most effective place online to sell your product or service to your ideal clients and customers.
The Big Mistake
With all that said, far too many of you reading this right now are making the same sales-crushing mistake I once did – having your LinkedIn profile read like your résumé.
And, moment of honesty here: Aside from your mom, nobody cares all that much about your workplace history, accolades and awards you’ve earned or even what your job title is.
Rather, your ideal clients and customers on LinkedIn care about themselves. They care about getting their problems solved. They care about finding a product, service or person that helps them achieve their goals.
If you truly want to create a killer LinkedIn profile that attracts clients and generates warm, inbound sales leads, it’s critical to stop making this mistake.
The Solution
Instead of having your profile read like an online résumé, you need to make it all about how you can help a specific, targeted audience of customers and clients achieve their goals by utilizing your service or product.
Go back through your LinkedIn profile (especially your Summary section) and try to answer this question: How is what I’m sharing here going to help my ideal client or customer solve his or her biggest problem? How is what I’m writing right now going to help my ideal client make more money, save time and solve core challenges I know he or she faces every day?
More good news: I have an entire copy-and-paste template you can steal to make this transition easy.
For instance, you can start with a fill-in-the-blank sentence like this for your LinkedIn profile’s “Summary” section:
WHAT I DO: I help [MY AUDIENCE] achieve [THEIR GOAL] by providing [MY PRODUCT or SERVICE].
See how client-facing that is?
(Note: Go here to see some great examples of how other professionals in various industries have applied this one sentence to their LinkedIn profiles.)
It’s all about flipping the old, outdated view of LinkedIn as a job seeker/hiring manager network upside down, and instead building a personal brand that makes it clear who you are, what you do, and the unique value or benefit you can bring a specific audience in the workplace.
Once you have your profile in order, going out on LinkedIn to find, engage and sell to your ideal clients and customers becomes far easier.
Making This Mistake on LinkedIn? Fix it ASAP!
So what are you waiting for? Go swipe this template, fill in the blanks, and within a few minutes you can have an all-new, client facing LinkedIn Profile that will set you up for the same type of success these professionals are enjoying on the network.
Get to it!
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