Posted Tue, September 2, 2014 by Julie Short - The HVAC Girl
I really enjoy reading Bruce Kasanoff's articles, so I decided to take action when I read his "Five Quick Ways To Improve Your LinkedIn Profile". The changes he recommends really are quick and I see how they would impact the value of my profile. It took me about 15 minutes to make the changes to my profile.
Pick ONE focus for your LinkedIN profile - no change.
Even though initially there may seem to be a dual-focus within my LinkedIN profile, I believe I have an argument for all some of it. I currently do marketing for HVAC companies, but my history shows a significant amount of engineering. The engineering history brings value to my marketing because I understand the HVAC industry and the products that they sell. Therefore, the emails and websites I create are based upon a real understanding of the HVAC clients. All that being said; I'm not changing it.
Turn your focus area into a short, powerful tagline - changed.
My dilemma is to address this change specifically to attract attention and search capabilities for an industry that is business-to-business (B2B) and whose consumers are engineers, architects, contractors, manufacturing reps, and building owners. "The HVAC Girl" must be kept as it is a marketing tactic and if anyone searches on HVAC within LinkedIN, I can be found. But how to make it a succinct tagline? "The HVAC Girl creates emails" - seemed too short. "The HVAC Girl - Engineer on a Marketing Mission" - seemed too cheesy. That's when I landed on The HVAC Girl - Email Developer & Website Creator
I didn't rewrite the summary, I flipped it around. As you can see in the before picture, the first thing listed is the benefit that my engineering background has to the marketing that I do. And then it lists how I help HVAC companies, manufacturers, and manufacturer reps. So per Bruce's recommendation, I put who I help and what I help with first and then why I bring value. Check out the revision.
The HVAC Girl LinkedIN Summary - BEFORE
Add a powerful summary - changed.
My friends know me as the purging queen, so "decrease the clutter" is my life's mantra, but I didn't go hog wild in this area for my profile. I kept my desired keywords for the search engines while restructuring how content was laid out to provide a cleaner look to my profile.
Strip away clutter - changed
Let me know what you think about the picture I have, I think that it is a good picture, but maybe someone has an opinion about that.