Lady Titans: Ramp Up Your LinkedIn Profile in 5 Easy Steps

For women working in the trades, building a personal brand is essential to gaining visibility and credibility in a traditionally male-dominated industry. You work hard to elevate your business brands in your communities, but how much time do you spend on building yourself as a brand?

Want to grow your business? Click here to get a demo.

Why Personal Branding Matters

“Personal brand” is more than just a buzzword—it tells the story of who you are and helps give purpose to what you do. It also elevates yours and your business’s profile and empowers you to build relationships and boost personal growth. 

Think of personal branding as an investment in yourself. If you haven’t gotten started yet because you don’t feel you have time, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build trust and authority for both yourself and your business. CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Do you know what people are saying about you?

Leveraging LinkedIn

For building a personal brand, few social networks can compete with LinkedIn. Most people might look at it as a job-seeker’s site, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the largest professional networking site out there, which makes it ideal for anyone looking to establish a personal brand. Plus, it costs nothing to create an account!

LinkedIn also lets fellow industry leaders and potential employees find you and your company. Think of it as marketing via employee advocacy. In fact, leads funneled through employee advocacy convert an impressive seven times greater than other types of leads. 

Not sure how to start? We’ve got you covered with 5 easy things you can do today to ramp up your LinkedIn presence and build your personal brand. 

1. Create an account

If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, this should be the first thing on your personal brand to-do list. As we mentioned above, it’s free to sign up and create your own account. 

Side note: LinkedIn may ask you if you want to sign up for a Premium account. While it can be valuable if you’re job-hunting or recruiting, if you’re just getting started or using an account to network with others, it’s not necessary to pony up the money for a Premium account.

2. Set your profile picture

When choosing a LinkedIn profile picture, there are a couple of things to consider. First, you don’t need to set up a professional photo shoot to get a great high-resolution profile shot—You can DIY this by using your smartphone camera or find a budget-friendly photographer from websites like Fiverr.  

Second, make sure your photo is recent. Avoid using photos of yourself that don’t look like you’d appear to someone who meets you tomorrow. Make sure your face takes up at least 60% of the photo, and wear something you would normally wear to work. 

Check out this article for more great tips on choosing the right LinkedIn profile photo.

3. Add a background/banner photo

Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn offers users the opportunity to create a background banner image. Coupled with a strong profile photo, a great background banner can help you make a powerful first impression when someone visits your profile.

The ideal photo is 1584x396 pixels and up to 8MB in size. Your photo could be of your workspace, tools you use in your trade, a branded image that represents your company or your team. 

You can also use our LadyTitans banner template to quickly create your own visually appealing banner image.

4. Create a compelling headline

Headlines have a 120 character limit, so use that real estate wisely! Your headline should tell the world what you do and what you’re all about. Here’s a few tips to help you draft a headline that stands out among the crowd and helps people find you. 

There’s a lot more you can type into your headline than just your job title. You’ll want to look at what is searchable and get a keyword strategy that centers around keywords that are most searchable, relevant to keywords being searched, and most importantly, are relevant to what you do and who you are. 

Here’s a hint: LinkedIn uses a search method called the Boolean method to conduct more targeted searches on LinkedIn. Read this article to learn more about how it works.  

5. Use trusted sites to get data-driven personal branding solutions

There’s a wealth of resources out there to help you create quality content that gets you seen and provides advice (backed by data) to help you beef up your LinkedIn profile and boost your personal brand. Here are a few you can check out:

• Hubspot: The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn

• LinkedIn Blog: 20 Steps to a Better LinkedIn Profile in 2020

• Hootsuite: Amplify Employee Advocacy Tool

• Business 2 Community: Personal Branding on LinkedIn: 14 Strategies That Will Help

Personal branding helps you show up for yourself and for your company, too. It takes time to build your brand effectively, but the great thing is getting started is easier than you might think.  As you work to hit each of these small (but important) milestones on your way to creating an awesome LinkedIn profile, be sure to check out our LadyTitans Spotify playlist for some added inspiration!