Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #5

Personalize your Public Profile

The Public Profile is the URL that people can use to quickly get to your profile on LinkedIn. By default, it is a long alpha-numeric soup that is hard to type or worse verbally tell someone.

In my previous post I mention the need to develop strong branding for yourself with your profile. One of the ways we can do this is to update our Public Profile or more specifically, the URL that can be used to quickly access your profile on LinkedIn.

The default, like I mentioned before is a bit tough to memorize or for that mater type. Here is an example of this:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/name-changed/1/548/6b6 (not a valid link to protect the innocent)

Once it has been edited and made a bit more personal, it is much easier to remember, here are a couple of examples:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jnosal - simply using your name.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/mothernaturemarketing - or use your branding name.

Now that you have a personalized URL or Public Profile, you can use this to make it easier for people to see your profile. Add this link to your signature line in your e-mails, add it to your business cards, put it on your blog profile, or add it to the links on your web site. I would however, not put it on my resume, but that is a another post.

Once you have your personalized Public Profile have fun using the address to increase your exposure to the market with an easier to read URL and stronger branding.

Also, if you have a request for a specific blog topic, leave a comment.

NosalCentral is your central source for web solutions. Check out our site at NosalCentral.com to learn more about our services.

Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #4

Update your status/profile regularly

We have all received that weekly LinkedIn e-mail update and seen what has changed in your network. This could be a change to someones status, updated their experience or even updated their photo. Lets not over look this as a great resource for us to keep our network active and best of all communicate with our network. Why not take advantage of this free service of LinkedIn and get a little extra exposure for yourself in these e-mails that are sent to those in your network.

First lets look at how we can use this e-mail and or our home page to keep up with our network. Don't just delete the e-mail when you see it arrive in your e-mail box. Take the time to do a quick review. Look for the opportunity where you could send a comment or congrats to a member of your network. This could be a new job, a promotion or any other information that is communicated via the status field.

The home page is also a great location to monitor the same details but can be reviewed at anytime. And best of all is constantly being updated as the members of your network make changes to their profiles.


Up to this point we have looked at how you can monitor your network. Now lets look at how you can stay on the radar of your network and become a common person on the e-mails and home pages of those in your network. It all boils down to updating your profile regularly. Make some kind of change every couple of days.

Updating your status is the easiest since it doesn't require navigating through several pages to make a change. It is also the first thing you see in the e-mail or on the home page. This update could be as easy as copying the current status and pasting in the edit field.

Other updates could be simply adding a space or other character to the end of an item in your profile. Then a couple of days later you could back and remove the change you made.

On a side note, I am regularly asked what should I say in my status. Think of the status field as a way to communicate professionally what you are doing or what you are needing help with. When I was looking for a new job, I would post that I was looking for my next great career opportunity in the internet SEO and SEM field. I would also regularly post when I was looking into a given company to see if anyone had info or knew someone.

A really powerful way to use the status field is to develop a strong branding statement and post that statement. Use it to create buzz around who and what you do. You never know when you will have some one contact you based on your status. It worked for me when a clients spouse saw my status and contacted me to do work for them.

Make use of the weekly e-mail and home page updates on LinkedIn to stay visible and communicate with your network. Take the time to review the e-mail or your home page to keep your network active. After all networking is a lifetime activity and LinkedIn is a great tool to help this process.

Next time we will be looking at personalizing your Public Profile URL on LinkedIn.

As always remember NosalCentral, LLC. is your central source for web solutions in SEO, SEM and Social Media.

Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #3

Smile for the camera.

Having that great professional portrait of yourself in your LinkedIn profile is a great idea. It allows your connections at minimum to see your face and keep that mental connection between your face and your name. If nothing else it allow you to reach 100% complete for your profile (it is worth 5%).

Lets say you have a great picture of you and your spouse on your profile. This is great except, your name is Pat. If you do have this situation you will want to make use of the photo editing options in LinkedIn. After all, most don't have Photoshop around to do some serious image manipulation.

Navigate to the My Profile Photo option in the Settings. Next, click the Edit Photo link under your photo. The next window that opens, will be a copy of your photo with a yellow box around a portion of the image. This yellow box can be used to crop and define the exact area of the image you would like to use. Note the yellow square in the lower right corner allows you to change the size of the box. This will allow you to crop out your spouse, yes they will understand.

If you happen to be prematurely gray or, like me, loosing the mullet in the bad way where it is falling out. No I did not have a mullet, so get that image out of your head. There are instances that you may not want to put your mug up for your profile. How about using your alumni logo from college. Or maybe a logo associated to a certification that you have obtained. Or if you want to be real anonymous, create a simple white box that is 2" square and use that.

What ever you use as your photo, you want it to be professional. The great photo of you in the swim suit on the beach in Hawaii is a great memory, but unless you are a Pool Service Technician it will not work for a Marketing professional.

Another thing to keep in mind with regards to your photo is privacy. Some of us may be concerned about putting to much information out there. If you don't want all 50 Million LinkedIn users to see your photo you will want to adjust the settings that you have. Again take a look at the My Profile Photo settings and adjust the setting for who your photo is visible too.

The first option is My Connections, these are the people that you have a one to one connection with. The second option is My Network, there are all your connections and their connections out to the 3 degrees of separation.

If you have any comments or questions please feel free to post a comment.

And if you have a website that is not performing as well as you would like, contact me and I can show you options to increase the effectiveness of your website.

NosalCentral is your central source for web solutions.

Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #2

Does your profile make you look over qualified?

While we know discrimination is illegal, we have to face the facts that it does happen. How many of you have heard the statement, "you are over qualified"?

Lets look at a number of ways that we can limit the information that makes it easy for people to figure out your age.

• You generally want to limit your experience to the last 12 to 15 years. This of course might be an issue if you were with Nortel Networks for 31 Years. If you are in that predicament, try breaking up that 31 years into some of the smaller responsibilities that you had. This "project" from 1997 to 1999. Then this project from 1999 to 2003... So again this would allow you to show your most recent activity.

• In your "summary" and other areas, don't announce that you have a bazillion years of experience in a specific field. You could soften it a bit by stating the you have "10+" or "more than ten" years experience in your field. It still allows you to have expert status but not come off like you were a member of Noah's IT department on the Arc.

• A big culprit is the education portion of your profile. Don't define the years for your college time. If you have to, go back and delete the entries and create new entries, this time don't define the years, it is not a required field any longer.

• Don't be nostalgic and list old software and hardware in your skills. For example, TI-99/4A Basic Programing. Or how about... Certified in Word Perfect. DOS 4.2 or dare I say it, Windows 3.11. It is fun to reminisce with they guys at lunch but not on your professional branding.

Remember, we want to produce interest with our profiles on LinkedIn by having a solid skill set. But we we don't want to appear too old, expensive, or dare I say; over qualified.

Check back next week when we will be talking about your Profile Photo.

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Tips For Using LinkedIn Effectively #1

We have all heard that it is not what we know but who we know. Today networking is even more important since most people are not landing career opportunities from posting a resume on the major job boards or reading the newspapers classified ads. It is also known that only 30% to 40% of jobs are posted anywhere.

LinkedIn is a significant tool in the world of networking and today I would like to share with you a number of tips for using LinkedIn as a powerful networking tool. So over the next week or so I will be posting a series on

Make it easy for people to connect with you.

LinkedIn uses your e-mail address as the key to making connections with people. Why not make it very easy for people to make contact with you by placing your e-mail address at the end of your professional headline, AKA your title. Yes, you may have your e-mail in the e-mail field of your profile, but this is at the bottom of your profile.

An alternate to the Professional Headline would be to put it at the beginning of your summary.

Next time we will be talking about ways to avoid making it obvious how old you are.

NosalCentral is your keyword when it comes to SEO and SEM for your business.

Free FreeHand!!!

This was an e-mail that I sent in response to one of the guys from freefreehand.org. While it is not specifically a tip or trick regarding the internet, I figured it is blog worthy while I was typing it.

I am excited about the movement to get the FreeHand codebase released into the open source arena. I also would like to mention that I am still using FreeHand on a regular basis and avoid Illustrator at all cost. www.freefreehand.org

Please note that these are my comments or observations and do not reflect the opinion of my former employer Adobe Systems (Macromedia).

Lets step back in the way back machine to the time of 1994 Adobe was acquiring Aldus and FreeHand future was first questioned. Would Adobe continue to be the distributor and have both FreeHand and Illustrator? Fortunately, Jim VonEhr and the leadership at Altsys the developers of FreeHand and Fontographer negotiated to sever the contract bringing FreeHand back home.

Then came the talks to merge with Macromedia which was buying up companies and technology in a wide variety of areas with Director, SoundEdit and a bunch of other little programs that finally died or was rolled into another new product. Then in January of 1995, FreeHand 5 (Mac) was release and the merger with Macromedia was final. FreeHand 5 was the first version under the Macromedia banner. Development was hot with the windows and Mac version 5.5 release shortly there after.

Then there was FreeHand version 6... wait I mean version 7. In many users opinion the best release since the sainted version 3. The marketing was one of the biggest pushes I ever saw. There was a world tour that was happening and the support team was going on site visits to major customers and user groups around the country. The excitement was big. The features were big, Shall I mention Graphic Search and Replace? I still remember demoing that feature to the team at National Geographic in Washington DC and they were sold. FreeHand 7 if I recall did capture some market share but did not get majority share.

Then the focus of Macromedia changed, it was dotcom this that and the other. Shockwave was the new push of the company, all applications had to write to the web in some manor. Director had Shockwave. Authorware had Shockwave for Authorware. Dreamweaver was in its infancy, Flash was now in the product line and FreeHand was now trying to figure out its place in the new corporate focus. GIF and JPEG format was added. There was even a cool Shockwave player for FreeHand that looking back was in competition with Flash.

Lets not forget this was also the point that Macromedia did the re-branding of the company with the new logo and icons for the products. RIP Pat. It was at this time that the clock started ticking down the remaining life for FreeHand.

Yes there was continued development of FreeHand all the way up to MX AKA version 11 but there was never a push to market it like there was with Version 7. Macromedia was only continuing to produce because the loyal fans were still wanting more and dare I say, there was still profit in it. Trade shows never put FreeHand in the spot light it was only in a side station and if someone asked it would be shown. So yes, software too can experience Cinderella Syndrome, FreeHand was now the step child that no one wanted to focus on at the corporate level.

Adobe was the 2000 lb. gorilla and was dominating the market. Photoshop was an industry standard, (Remember xRes?) anyone doing anything with images was using Photoshop. Because of this they had an advantage in pushing Illustrator as the industry standard. By default, users assumed that Illustrator was what to use despite the fact that it has two pointer tools (yeah, now FreeHand has two also). Shall we bring up Quark XPress and InDesign?

While FreeHand and Illustrator are both illustration applications, they clearly have a difference in the person that would be using them. You and others can ask yourself this question. Did FreeHand get in the way of your creativity? Does Illustrator?

Lets jump back in the way back machine once again to 1988, I was looking and evaluating everything I could get my hands on to find a more efficient way to do illustrations, than pen and ink. My step dad just spent a fortune on a Macintosh SE with a 10 MB hard drive. I was a moth attracted to the porch light on a warm June evening. I got my hands on a bootlegged copy of Illustrator 88, FreeHand 1.1, Super Paint and anything else that I could beg, borrow or well steal to find the answer to my nagging question that there had to be an easier way to get my job done.

Illustrator could only work in keyline mode. FreeHand was allowing me to work in preview. Super Paint well, it really sucked. It was at this point that I found that FreeHand was not getting in the way of my creativity and causing me to jump through hoops to get the job done. I went on to make my employer millions with with FreeHand. I could also mention the whole color and black and white thing also. It's kind of like the Mac vs. Windows thing. Yeah you can do the same things on both. But which OS works in harmony with your creative side?

OK, back to today. I would love to see Adobe let go, it is time to let the 22 year old Adult move out of the house and out on it's own and create it's own future. There is still room for two illustration applications on this planet. Releasing the code base into the open source arena would be exciting to see what could become of FreeHand. Snow Leopard and IntelMac not to mention Windows 7 compliance. New features and Xtras could be exciting along with fixing a few of the bugs would not be bad also.

Free FreeHand!!!!

LinkedIn did it again...

If you have not been to the LinkedIn web site in the last few days you have not had the surprise of finding that they have changed the look and feel of the interface. So in this blog, I am going to give a bit of an overview of the changes that I see. And hopefully make the transition a bit easier for my readers. I am also doing this in preparation for next week when I will be giving several presentations on LinkedIn at various locations around the Dallas Ft. Worth Metroplex (check out my LinkedIn Profile for details about my upcoming events).

One of the first things I noticed with the new interface is the lack of navigation on the left side of your screen. Previously this was where you selected your Home page, Groups, Profile, Inbox and various other options. This has moved to the top of the window in the form of an horizontal menu bar. This is good from the perspective that you are now able to have a larger area for content. Moving the navigation to the top also brings all option to the top of the screen and now you don't have as great of an area to scan for your choices.

Another aspect of the menu that I like is the "More" menu. This allows a quick access to your various applications like Box, Events and the Reading List by Amazon. No more scrolling down on your profile to make a change in this area.

Another change to the navigation is the addition of a Jobs menu. This looks like it is a great addition for those that are posting jobs, but does have the one option for Find Jobs. While looking at the other options it was interesting to see that they listed the price for posting a job at $195 for a 30 day posting.

"Account & Settings" link has been renamed to "Settings". While we are looking in that area at the top you will also see a new link for Add Connections now sporting a new bold green color.

There is now an Advanced People Search under the Search drop down Menu. I think this was previously a beta feature that was being tested by all once you did your initial people search you had the option to go into an advance search.

I have also noticed that moving the navigation up to the top has now increased the width of the profile viewing area causing my e-mail address to now be on the same line as my title in the Professional Headline area. So if you are doing this as a way for people to more easily contact you, you will need to add some additional characters to separate the two items. I personally have chosen to use two hyphens.

When looking at someones profile I also noticed a feature that I had not seen before. It is a link on the right for "Search for references" looks like this brings up a summary of your common links. Will need to work with this a bit more but might be a cool option for establishing a list of informational interviews to network into talking with a hiring manager. Time will tell on this.

Overall, I really like the way LinkedIn has updated the interface. It is a much cleaner and organized experience and I believe that it will be a decreased for new users.

If you want to learn more about LinkedIn and up to use it as a tool for professional networking check out one of my upcoming presentations found on my LinkedIn Profile. www.linkedin.com/in/jnosal

Also keep in mind that NosalCentral is your central source for web solutions in SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing and Web Design.

jnosal

Introduction

Greetings from NosalCentral - Your Central Source For Web Solutions. My name is John J Nosal and I am the President of NosalCentral, LLC. a company that I started in July of 2009.

NosalCentral offers web consulting to small and medium sized business that are needing to increase the effectiveness of their web presence through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Social Media Marketing. In addition we can help you learn to use analytic tools to monitor your traffic and to react accordingly.

My goal with this BLOG is to share information about my areas of expertise like social media, SEO and other things that I run across from time to time. This will include tips and tricks on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and hints and tricks that will help in Networking with others.

A lot of the tips that I share will be from the perspective of the job hunt since I am active with a career networking organization called CareerConnection (www.careerconnection.org) where I am a regular presenter on the topics of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and there use in the job hunt.

If you have questions or suggested topics please let me know, I would be happy to write about the things you would like to know more about.

Happy Networking,
John