Karen Yankovich

I am!

Karen Yankovich

Everyone should know how to use LinkedIn for business. You would be missing out on you. You would be missing out on that chance to make a great first impression and I’ll tell you why I said that. If you’re marketing your business online in any way, shape, or form, you’re a subject to people searching your name on a Google because they want to know more about you. What’s going to come up is your LinkedIn profile.

If you’re taking the time to create a great profile, to be active on LinkedIn, and to present yourself the way you would want to be seen, that’s priceless.

Karen Yankovich

Absolutely. You can go tap down.

If you need to reach somebody using LinkedIn, you can go right to them versus finding a receptionist, passing through all those walls that we’ve put out to get or people to be able to get to us or to get to the people that we want to reach. Knowing how to use LinkedIn for business can make your dream come true, which is exciting at the same time.

Karen Yankovich

I love social media. I use all, probably, almost every social media platform. I love them all for different things and I get what you’re saying Luis, that it’s not fun for you but when I need to shake some money out of the trees, I go to LinkedIn and that’s fun for me. Therefore I recommend everyone to know how to use LinkedIn for business.

When I need to kick up the revenues or when I’m trying to launch a new product or service or I need to find partners, I go to LinkedIn. For all the revenue generating activities, that’s where I go first.

One of the things that you could do Kamala is like you can’t go to LinkedIn and say, “Okay, I’m here. What happens now?” You have to spend time there just like any other social media sites.

Let’s just use groups as one example. I hear a lot about how groups are dead and there are not a lot of activities. So, be the person that’s creating the activity. Post questions. Go in and respond to other people’s questions.

Pick 5 groups that you think are active and they’ve got people filled with the kinds of people you want to connect with and start responding to every single post. Start responding to blog posts. Read the blog post. Add your little twist of genius to it. People are going to want to get to know you. They’re going to be like, “Who’s this guy that always commenting on my blog post?”

Especially if your comments are authentic, they show that you know what you’re talking about. People are going to want to start to connect with you. You’re going to start to see your connections grow. Your growing connections, those are leads.

Karen Yankovich

That’s one thing you could do. Just go in and start sharing your genius all over the place and let people start coming to you and they will come to you. This is how to use LinkedIn for business particularly if you are new to this platform.

Karen Yankovich

We need to take care of few essential things in order to know how to use LinkedIn for business. First of all, you need to remember that your LinkedIn profile needs to be client facing. It’s about you with your personal brand but make sure you’re telling people how you help them because that’s going to be more interesting to them. They’re going to want to connect with you if you’re telling them how you can help them.

So maybe you’re the CEO and maybe that sounds impressive but most people aren’t searching for CEOs. They don’t really care that you’re a CEO. So make sure when you’re writing your profile, you tell people how you can help them which is important in knowing how to use LinkedIn for business.

Let’s say you’re a financial planner. You may be the most credential financial planner on earth and you have all you credentials listed there but if you tell me that you’re a financial planner with all these credentials, I feel like you’re the same as 50,000 other financial planners on LinkedIn. However, if you put in your headline, “I’m a financial planner that help women over 50 years old migrate their finances from a corporate paycheck to a work from home or entrepreneur or retired lifestyle.” Now, I’m paying attention. You need to know these in order to learn how to use LinkedIn for business.

Karen Yankovich

Absolutely. You know the essentials of how to use LinkedIn for business.

Just like you should on your About Page, give them a Call To Action. Tell them what you want them to do next. Tell them, “Here’s how I want you to call me,” “Get/Grab my free whatever,” “Listen to my podcast” “Subscribe to my podcast.”

Tell them exactly what you want them to do next and they will.

Karen Yankovich

I think it’s extremely important to do that and I think that’s the first thing you need to do because if you’re getting active in groups, what you want is when people check you out, is for them to be impressed with you.

The first thing you need to do before you start getting active, if you want that activity to be most effective is take some time to create a great profile and that starts with a great headline.

Again, your headline is not your job title. It’s how you help other people and I like to see it who you are, who you help, and how you help them. Put that in your headline.

Also, remember when you’re doing all of this in your profile, think about keyword because Google leads LinkedIn and LinkedIn is a huge search engine and of itself, so if people are searching a LinkedIn speaker, I want my profile to come up. So I make sure I use that in my headline. I use it in my summary, which has 2,000 characters that Google reads.

You want it to be client facing but you also want to be very keyword rich. This is one of the important thing in knowing how to use LinkedIn for business. Think about what people are searching for that you want to have as the search result and use that over and over throughout your profile so when people scan it, there is no doubt what it is you do and how you can help them.

Karen Yankovich

Yeah. That’s a great a way to do it. If you’re not sure, ask some of your clients. Like if I close my business tomorrow, what would you be searching for to replacement? Ask people what they’re looking for that you can help them with.

Keyword research applies to all social media sites but most importantly to LinkedIn because, as you said and I love that you mentioned the About Page because you can talk about the About Page and you probably know that most often, the most visited page on a website and that’s because we want to know more about the people we do business with. So that’s leads me right to why you need to be doing all of those same things on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn, people are checking you out so you need to check out.

Karen Yankovich

It really depends on what you really want to happen. I know people that have quite literally grab the URLs like talktokaren.com and said, “Let’s talk for 15 minutes” and they put their call to action. So they have that tied into an automated tool and it literally get people go right on their calendar.

To me, I like to warm them up a little first. I have a free video series. So, I tend to put that in my head or image, which I don’t think it’s there at this moment but it probably will be there in a day or two.

So, typically send people to my freebies or whatever I’m promoting that’s free, that is typically the beginning of a funnel to something. Everyone who is looking for how to use LinkedIn for business should know this.

I like to bring people into my freebies. It may even just be, “Check out this three blog posts. These are my 3 most popular blog posts” or podcast interviews. It’s just about getting people into your funnel. I love it if I can make it something that at least gives me their email address.

Karen Yankovich

For me, it always goes back to just be authentic if you truly want to learn how to use LinkedIn for business. Most people will connect with you if you give them some reason to.

Fine, if you both worked at McDonald’s when you were 20 or you both went to the same college or you’ve got a couple of groups in common. When you ask that connection request, just put something and personalize it. I would say, almost all of the time, they’ll accept that.

There are people that just aren’t active on LinkedIn. You can’t make somebody that doesn’t look at LinkedIn for 2 years at a time connect with you. But, if you know they’re active on LinkedIn, chances are, you personalize your connection request and they’re going to accept it.

From there, I like to just really truly get to know them. Be of service to them. If they are writing on LinkedIn, share, like, and comment on their post. Just continue to be of service to them for at least a couple of weeks and then, maybe hit them up and say, “Hey, you know what? You do this, I do this. I think there might be some synergies here. Would you be open to a quick phone conversation?” These are the little tips you need to apply if you are looking for how to use LinkedIn for business.

It’s so much easier to do than you would imagine. It happens so easily.

Karen Yankovich

More eyes on your stuff is always a good thing. If you create blog post around your podcast, you can take that same blog post and post it over on LinkedIn as a LinkedIn long form post and you can put the media right in there. You can link your top podcast directly to each section of your LinkedIn profile.

So I would absolutely use LinkedIn as a way to get more eyes on your content. It’s quite literally duplicating it on LinkedIn as a long form post. You could change it up if you want to but, I’ve done a ton of research on that and I see no need to change it up unless you want to. There are no Google dings or anything like that and maybe I get another 100 people that see it.

Karen Yankovich

I agree with you Luis but I think that the thing that stands out for me on LinkedIn versus all of this other ones is…

Karen Yankovich

Yeah, you want to meet people on Facebook. You and I met on Facebook and we got on the phone pretty quickly. So those same things can happen on Facebook but on LinkedIn, it’s just much more common phrase to say, “You know? Let’s talk. Maybe there’s some synergies here”.

I think it just happens more quickly and that’s why I lean to it. Because, you go to a networking event, like an in-person networking event, you’re looking to meet with people. You’re looking to help each other out, support each other, and see what kind of synergies there are. I think people have that same mindset on LinkedIn. I don’t know if that same mindset is quite as prevalent on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. To some degree, it absolutely is.

Karen Yankovich

Okay. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.