Intro 0:00

You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast, Episode 90. Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23

Hello, I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 90 of the good girls get rich podcast, brought to you by up level media, the proud sponsor of the simplest relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing system that gets you on the phone consistently with your perfect people, people who you can’t believe you’ve been able to bring into your world and build relationships with and that you can’t wait to have an opportunity to chat with because you know, they can change your business and your life possibly in such a huge way.

So we teach digital marketing with the human touch we love. I love the opportunities that digital marketing gives us we have that we can have a level playing field with some of the biggest companies in the world. We can use social media tools the way they do. But what I love about LinkedIn marketing is that it’s it works just like all the good old fashioned marketing stuff did from you know, the years before, what we knew we’re building relationships with people getting to know people. And that’s where the big money comes in. Right. That’s where the big money comes in.

So if you have listened to the show before, or if you love what you heard today, I love hearing from you. So make sure that you subscribe to us leave a review on Apple podcast or wherever you’re listening. If you leave us a review, I can showcase you in your review and upcoming episode, which is always fun. And also, I’d love for you to share this on social media.

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So if you love the full transcripts, or if you know somebody that is hearing impaired and can’t listen to the whole show, they can now read the entire show, not just the show notes, you’ll see that all on KarenYankovich.com/090. But you’ll also see the link to speak pipe. So you can you know, leave us a review and audio review. I can play that on the show. You can also just leave us comments. Maybe there’s a topic you want to hear right? Just dial in to speak pipe and let us know what you want us to hear or what you loved about the show.

Last week on the show, we had a big show, it was a big week for the good girls get rich podcast with AJ Wilcox on the show. And AJ was talking to us about LinkedIn advertising. And he is the first male guests we had on the good girls get rich podcast. So we love our guys, and we love you know, we’re we’re not really gender specific on the show at all, we are trying to be really inclusive of everyone. But I know that it’s often the women that need a little extra kick in the butt to be more confident in in the work that they’re doing. So that’s that’s how we focus it. But I loved having AJ on the show, if you haven’t listened to the show yet, you’ve got to go back and listen to it. It really dives deep into LinkedIn advertising, which could be a really big part of the work that you are doing with your business in this upcoming year.

So today we’re diving in, it’s a little bit of a training episode, we’re diving into your experience section on your LinkedIn profile. And you know, the reason I wanted to talk about that is because I have been doing a lot of conferences this fall. And often when I do conferences, we do LinkedIn profile reviews, sometimes I do with teams, if you’ve got a conference coming up, and you think you’d love to have a great LinkedIn speaker and a team of people there after the talk at your conference to do LinkedIn profile reviews for your conference attendees. We’d love an intro to your to your organizers. But what we find is that many times, especially at like a conference where you’re listening to the show, so you have an interest in LinkedIn, you have an interest in digital marketing, an interest in elevating your personal brand.

But often at a conference, they’re hearing for the first time, a lot of the things that you hear on this podcast week after week. So they are not taking advantage of some of the tips that you already know how to do because your listener.

So I find that many, many people write to LinkedIn profiles, like it’s a resume. And I get that, right. That’s how we thought of LinkedIn when it first came out. And it’s important that you’re listening it, right. I mean, I talk a lot about how you want to tell people about you on your LinkedIn profile, but make it about them, right, nobody really cares about you. They care about what you can do for them. But at the same time, you do need to have a place where you can list your skills, list your achievements, but it doesn’t have to be dry and boring. You still can create a profile that is less resume like and engaging. So people actually read it.

Have you ever read anybody’s experience section on LinkedIn? Or their listing? I have, you know, I am, I experienced that word, and excel and I can create a mean spreadsheet Like who? Like, yes, you want to list some of that stuff, but it’s not readable, right? It’s not really engaging anybody. So I think that there’s a happy medium for this. And that’s what we’re going to talk about here today.

Can you relate to this digital experience section on your LinkedIn profile, some maybe look like a resume, right, totally unreadable and not engaging. So you know, imagine if not only is your headline engaging, and your summary or your ABOUT SECTION engaging, but your experience section is engaging. Right now, I know that this is that most of this is work is done up front. So I know that it’s working, I don’t have a magic wand as much as I’d love to have one. You guys have any resources about that, please let me know, you know, whatever magic wand to do this work.

But the work that you’re doing in this experience section can be done up front. So if you’re looking at your experience section right now, or you’re thinking, yep, that’s me, my experience section is just dry and just lists my my achievements, we’re not going to take that out, I’m just going to give you some tips in the show today. And how you can think a little bit more creative with this, I want to give you a little push to to be creative with the experience section of your LinkedIn profile.

So the first thing I want to talk about in the experience section is the titles of your experience. And I’m guessing that it’s very likely that your titles and your experience is the title that was on your business card. Because that makes sense, right? That’s what we do we create, we say, Okay, I was an account executive, I was a manager, I was a CPA, you know, I this was the title I had at this job, I get that. But if you’ve listened to some of the episodes, and will refer back to an episode, we talked about keywords, you can use keywords in those titles. And for example, if you are a CPA I just a conference for CPA, so they’re on the brain. And your your focus, though, is forensic accounting, you can still put CPA, and then dash forensic accounting guru or forensic accounting specialist, right.

So you’re being a little creative with your title. You know, when you niche down, you do get more business that way we talked about on the show that on the show a lot. So don’t be afraid to do that. Don’t be afraid to put keywords in your title and get creative with your titles. Now, here’s the thing, I don’t want you to make things up that aren’t true. Okay, I don’t want you to to flat out lie in your title. And say you were president when you weren’t president. But you can pull things from the work that you do to make your title more creative. So that it hooks people a little more, right.

That’s what we’re really, really looking to do with your LinkedIn profile from start to finish. We’re looking to hook people so that they want to read more, right, just like when you watch the news at night, and they say, you know, coming up next, and then it’s like three hours later. Like, that’s kind of what you want to do only you don’t want to drag people out for three hours, you want to hook them a little bit. So in your title be a little more creative than just CPA or SEO, because nobody searching for SEO, right. And we want you to come up in search results, we absolutely want you to come up in search results. So make sure that you’re creative when you’re creating these titles and use your keywords.

So when somebody is on LinkedIn, searching for a forensic CPA, you come up, right, if you just put CPA in, you’re not going to come up when somebody’s searching for a forensic CPA, because they don’t even know you do that. And when we do these LinkedIn profile reviews, I say, you know, you look like every other CPA, every other, you know, attorney or whatever it is, I’m speaking in front of that are on LinkedIn, the only way you’re going to get more business from LinkedIn pro actively. So people are I mean, re actively where people are searching for you. So that you can have in the search results if you feed the search results, so that they know when to bring your profile up. And that starts with the titles. So look, look through your titles and your experience section first, and see if you can jazz them up a little bit. And give them a little bit of juice and give them a little bit of creativity. Again, staying in authenticity, but giving people a sense of what made you different in that role.

OK, the next thing I want to mention to you is as you go through your experiences, sections, right, I want you to think about what’s relevant to what you’re doing now. So let me give you an example. So think about, like what it is that you’re doing.

Now an example that I have is, um, if you look at my LinkedIn profile, in the early Oh, gosh, the early 90s, I own a company called infinity Communications Group. And I was the vice president of the company. And but I did pretty much everything. Okay, I did, I was, you know, responsible to all the sales people responded to me, reported to me, so I was going on sales calls with them. And I was interfacing with the people, we had contracts with the products we were selling in the services we were selling, it was all part of my role. I also the, you know, the bookkeeper reported to me. So I was also responsible for the payroll reports and the hiring and the firing, and the HR stuff and interviewing people. And what benefits package did we have? And do we need new conference room furniture? And was it time to move when we were looking for office space, right? taking out the garbage, whatever, everything rolled up to me. But you know, so if what I was doing now was human resources related, I would be talking about that, in my experience section for my role at infinity Communications Group. But it’s not, right. Nobody cares. Nobody. It’s not that I’m hiding that I did human resources. It’s just not relevant to what I’m doing now.

So I don’t talk about it at all. I just talk about the work that I did at infinity Communications Group, that’s sales and marketing related, because that is relevant to what I’m doing now. Right. So you’ll also notice, by the way, if you look at the Infinity Communications Group experience on my LinkedIn profile, that my title, I believe, and I’m not looking at it right now, but I think my title says, Vice President of Marketing and media, because social media is a key word for me. And marketing is a key word for me. So I’ve written that. So it’s true. My business card didn’t say that. If what I was doing now is human resources related, I could say, Vice President of human resources, we didn’t have 10. Vice President, we said, we have 10 people that work for the company. Right? So it’s authentic, even though even though I’m kind of recreating it, it’s not I’m not, I’m not out of authenticity, because it is the work that I did.

And I am making it easier for you, the current contact of mine, to understand what makes me uniquely qualified to do what I’m doing now. I’m helping you get comfortable giving me your money, right to hire me to to help you. Because I’m saying, I’m not giving you like, you know, again, remember I said earlier, nobody really cares about you, they care what you could do for me, you, you know, if you’re hiring me to help your company with LinkedIn strategy, you don’t care that I knew what had to buy office furniture in 1995, right. So it’s not relevant, it doesn’t need to be there, I and you’re not going to read all of that. So it’s not about me, I might have had awards, maybe maybe I want an award for Best office furniture buyer, right ever on the planet, you don’t need to know about that reward at that award, right? Because it’s not relevant. So it isn’t really about me. And the fact that I won this award, it’s about you.

And by the way, I did not win an award for Best office furniture buyer, I might have maybe qualified for an Award for Worst office furniture buyer. But in any case, thankfully, I don’t do that anymore.

So you understand what I’m saying go back through your experience, and just pull from those previous experiences, what’s relevant to what you’re doing now. So that you’re making it easy for people to see why you’re uniquely qualified to be doing what you’re doing, currently doing, and makes it easier for them to make a hiring choice.

The next thing I want you to think about and pay attention to what this says, okay? It does not say job experience, it says experience. So if you have experience as a member of a board of directors, okay, if you have a experience as the president of the PTA, if you have experience of the president of your college sorority, that means that showing people that people look to you, as a leader, I want to see that on your experience section, it doesn’t just have to be jobs you’ve done, it absolutely can also be experienced, you have that position that that shares that other people have confidence and faith in you that they appointed you or or voted you as president or, or has confidence with you on the board of directors of their nonprofit or of their Corporation, right.

So that’s experience, I want you to include those as you are creating this section for yourself. Because that’s an important piece of letting people know, again, your goal is as you’re building you what you want your LinkedIn profile, to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you when you’re building these profitable relationships that we talked about all the time on this podcast.

So by creating experiences on your profile, and letting people know where other people have had confidence in you, position you as a leader position you as somebody that they had confidence in, that helps helps you get to that yes, with your new relationships. So So the third thing is make sure that you are including things that are not necessarily things you got a paycheck for, but are things that show that you have leadership ability.

And the last thing I want you to think about as you’re building your experience section, is to build the story of you from old to new.

Okay, so when you were in high school, you were to McDonalds, okay? Know that i would i mean this, I don’t necessarily think you have to put McDonald’s on there every single job you ever had. But you can, especially if you can say something about, like, if what you’re doing now is food services. Put that in there. Because you can say you can put McDonald’s and you can say in there, like make it engaging, you don’t have to say things like, you know, never missed never was late for the for a shift, right? You have to say things like that.

But you might say that if what you’re doing now is like quality control or right like things that might you might say that’s where I learned, instead of saying never being late for your shift at McDonald’s, you can say, that’s what I learned the importance of making sure we have coverage. Right, if that’s relevant to what you’re doing now, I really saw how our customers suffered, if somebody showed up a half hour late and we didn’t have enough people to cover those shifts. Right.

So it isn’t about bragging that you worked at McDonald’s, because let me tell you everybody worked somewhere when they were in high school that, you know, they got paid minimum wage for. So it isn’t about that it’s about telling the story of you. What did you learn from that experience, that, again, makes you uniquely qualified to what you’re doing? Now? Tell me a little bit of a story.

Maybe when you were to McDonalds, you were, you know, you got an award for you know, customer service, because you know, people new difficult customers, like I would imagine, if you work in any kind of restaurant, if there’s if you have regular customers, you know, who were the people that are difficult, and maybe you were the person that they gave all the difficult customers to, because you had that sweet tongued way of smoothing them over. And helping them understand that, you know, that and helping them get out of there with a great experience. And maybe not everybody had the patience for that. Right? But you did you were the one that everybody shoved to the front of the line when you know, that crazy person walked through the door.

Tell me that in the story in that experience. Because if especially if that leads you to be uniquely qualified to do what you’re doing now, right. So take that same concept. As you’re going and go back start at the beginning, started the very first experience you have there and take that, that same concept, and build up into each experience a little bit of story, make it engaging, make it make me want to read it, and make me understand how what your journey was like, like, this is your journey, this experience section is your journey, your LinkedIn profile is your personal brand.

So look at this experience section as telling the journey of you. This will make you stand out from the crowd, I promise you, right? So do you understand that you see how, how this can make that dry dough experience section, something that’s really working for you. So let me just recap this a little bit, go into your titles and add a little creativity.

Don’t make stuff up. Don’t lie, don’t be on, on with it inauthentic, be authentic with it. But know that it’s okay. If it didn’t say that on your business card, okay, you buy from if you need someone’s permission, here’s your permission. Okay, to put that on there.

The next thing I want you to do is look through your previous experience sections and pull from there, what’s relevant to what you’re doing now, and get rid of the stuff that’s not relevant, it doesn’t need to be there. Okay, the more you talk about the things that are relevant, the easier link time LinkedIn is going to have bringing you up in the searches that you want to come up in. If you’re talking about all this different stuff you’ve done, it’s going to be harder for LinkedIn to zero in on when to bring you up. Okay, so pull from what’s relevant, pull from the previous experiences, what’s relevant to what you’re doing. Now, don’t forget about those experiences that you had, that maybe you didn’t get a paycheck for. Because that is important that positions you as a leader, maybe you know, that maybe it’s but maybe it positions you as somebody people voted for.

And you know, and then had confidence in you. So make sure you’re incorporating all that into this. And then lastly, build the story of you tell us your journey from the first job you had to the job you have now, so that people are engaged, and you’re helping them understand why you’re uniquely qualified for them to hire you. Okay, whether it says as an employee, or as you know, as a contractor, or as a coach, or as a yoga teacher, whatever it is you’re doing. So I hope that this is helpful to you, I hope that it’s relevant. You know, at the end of the day, I want you to get business from LinkedIn. And this is a little bit of work up front that you have to do, maybe it’s a little, a lot of work up front, maybe need to just put an hour to on your calendar, and sit down and do this, okay.

But here’s the thing, it’s not just another thing on your to do list, because once it’s done, it’s done, you still it’s never finished. But it because it’s your your LinkedIn profile is a living, breathing, always being updated, you know, piece of your marketing, or your personal branding. But once it’s done, you just have to tweak it. And tweaking it makes it really easy, and makes it much simpler. So get it done, get it done once and then it’s not going to get in corporate, it’s not going to be a part of your ongoing overwhelm with your marketing. Right?

You can be it allows you to start using this powerful platform where the business is happening right to its maximum, the work you’re doing is up front and and you do need to look at it on occasion. And then you just can incorporate the simple systems to update it into your world, you know that I’m here to support you with this because I know that this is not. It’s simple, but it’s not always easy, right? That’s why I do this work.

We’ve got a free Facebook group that I’m in all the time, we do pop up live strategy sessions. So you’re welcome to join us there, you can just go to Karen yankovich.com slash Facebook group. But if you want to dive deeper into this, at the end of October 2019. And hopefully, we may do this, we’re looking at maybe doing this maybe twice a year. But right now, we’re going to be doing a free five day LinkedIn profile challenge, where we’re going to be I’m going to be all around for a whole week helping people get their LinkedIn profile updated once and for all.

Okay, you can join the waitlist for this at LinkedIn profile challenge. com, we’re going to be starting at the end of October. If you are listening to this, and it’s when it’s beyond October 2019, the waitlist page will still be there, especially if we if we think to do it again. Or that link that that URL will go to something I never will I never announced that URL, this podcast that goes to nowhere.

So go to LinkedInprofilechallenge.com to get on the waitlist. We haven’t done this in years. So I’m so excited to create this challenge. Again, I can’t even tell you all the fun things. We’re incorporating into this challenge. It’s going to be so fun. So go to LinkedIn profile challenge. com, get on the waitlist for the upcoming LinkedIn profile challenge. Again, if you’re listening to this beyond the fall 2019 No worries, we still got you covered. We’ve got another one coming up in the spring of 2020. And if you listen to us even beyond that the URL goes somewhere. So we’ll help you with it one way or another.

Before you go. I’d love for you to help me out. Take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone. Share that on social so that you know and maybe even say I’m joining Karen’s LinkedIn profile challenge join me to at LinkedIn profile challenge.com. Okay, we would love for you to share that with all of your friends. And remember when you do that, I share it with my audience if you tag me in it, and that helps us both get more visibility. You know that I want this to be simple for you. So let this be simple. And I will see you back here again next week for another fun, amazing episode. We have a good one for you next week to at the good girls get rich podcast