All right, so it’s a beautiful day in sunny Brisbane so I thought I’d take this video outside. Why not? And today what I wanted to talk about was how to make your LinkedIn profile shine, generate more leads, more business for you in 2021. So let’s get right into it. Now, what I’ll do for people who aren’t really interested in the high-level theory is give you a bit of a template which you can download via a link below. But ultimately what I wanted to go over today was what are the core things that you really need to hit in your LinkedIn profile? It doesn’t have to follow an exact template as long as you’re hitting these sort of three key markers.

But overall, more than anything, more than these three specific things, there’s one thing specifically, in particular, that you need to do with your LinkedIn profile in order to generate results, generate leads, generate sales, and that is, I’m gonna cover it up for the grand reveal, trust. We need to build trust with our prospects, with our target market.

It all comes down to, do they trust us? Ultimately, when someone trusts us, then they’re gonna wanna talk to us, then we’re actually gonna be able to close deals, make sales. ‘Cause we won’t be able to do that unless they trust that we can help them. Now, there’s, I like to say, three key ways to build trust and doing that through your LinkedIn profile. All right, we’re gonna need to build credibility, establish ourselves as an expert, and/or likeability. Now, I’ve seen profiles that don’t necessarily have all three of these things ’cause they all lead to helping to build trust.

So if you’re fairly new, you can build on the fact that you’re an expert by niching. You can focus on a very specific area, saying that that’s all that you do or that’s your area of specialty, and when you specialize in something, it helps cement this idea that you’re an expert at what you do and it’s gonna make people wanna work with you, versus the generalist in their immediate network who whilst its very close and very trust-building because it’s someone face-to-face, they would wanna work with you over them because you specialize in something that perhaps their generalist friend does not.
So that’s the edge we wanna get when it comes to digital marketing.

So if you have been around for a while, maybe you are a little bit more general and you don’t want to niche, that’s fine. You just need to be able to build credibility around this. So we can build credibility by leveraging big brands that we’ve worked with, putting up on our profile picture established brands that we’ve worked with, and build trust through association and credibility by association with brands that other people trust. So they say, “Oh, well, if Google trusted this person to help them out, then maybe I should be able to as well.” And likeability, as well, really plays into this too. Once again, you might be new, you might not have a wealth of experience and results and client testimonials, but if you can build, you can build trust through likeability. You know, what’s your background? Have you done a lot of community work?

If you put out videos, you seem quite genuine. This can all help to build that trust. Now, like I said, I will be giving you a templated framework that’s gonna help break this down and make it very easy and it has headings that kinda covers each of these and depending on where you’re strongest is gonna be where you focus. Now, credibility ultimately is the thing you wanna put up front and center. What do I do and can I provide evidence? Or this idea that I can provide the results that I say I can. Expertise, that works with that, obviously. If you can do this and this, it’s gonna help. But a lot of people are starting out. New businesses, they don’t necessarily have a huge bank of clients to be able to leverage testimonials and really valuable content like that, which will help with credibility, but the more focused and niche you are, this will help build trust. And something else you can do here, once again, if you don’t have a huge backlog of testimonials that can support this credibility, is a really strong offer. Some type of guarantee that’s gonna help people feel more like they can trust that you’re gonna be able to be the one to help them out.

One of the best things I did when I first started was have a money-back guarantee. I was really backing myself and my ability to help people with their LinkedIn lead generation ’cause, ultimately, if I couldn’t, then I was happy to give them their money back and I was really willing to bet on myself and help people be more trusting and more faithful that, look, if worst-case scenario I wasn’t able to help them, they could get that money back. Luckily that wasn’t the case but it did help, especially when I didn’t have a lot of client testimonials in the beginning. And getting testimonials was something I focused on hugely ’cause, once again, that all helps with the credibility and the trust.

And then finally, as well, likeability. In the beginning, once again, before I had a lot of testimonials and a lot of credibility in the beginning, I focused on likeability, and likeability doesn’t mean being liked by everyone but what it does mean is putting yourself out there, putting who you are out there, ’cause what that’ll do means you’ll resonate stronger with certain types of people to the point where they’ll actually take action and wanna talk to you.

It might sound cliche but the more of yourself you put out there, the more you’ll start to attract the right types of clients. And I was putting out silly videos, doing handstands, rolling around, really trying to get attention, which is important too. You want people to focus, be able to see you, but it tended to start to get the right people to pay attention and get the conversation started. So it built likeability not necessarily broadly ’cause not everyone necessarily liked what I was putting out but it did help build likeability with the right people, the right type of people that I wanted to be talking with anyway.

So really, it all comes down to trust. Does your profile build trust? And how do we build trust? Credibility, expertise, obviously we can throw a strong offer as part of establishing that expertise, and likeability. Don’t need all three of these but you do need enough of one or all three in order to build enough trust to get people to want to actually talk to you. So like I said, I’ll include a link below with a great framework that doesn’t have you having to reinvent how to structure it out. It’s really gonna help you structure your profile and get great results with your LinkedIn in 2021. That’s it for today. I’m Ryan Caswell from B2BLeads.com. As always, have a great day.