by KarenYankovich | Feb 8, 2017 | Uncategorized
It’s a common issue.
We’re BUSY with our to-do lists. We’ve got to service our clients. One part of our business is sucking up a lot of our time. Distractibility …. Yup.
I want you to stop. Take a break from your to-do list for a few minutes. And tell me, if I had a magic wand, and could grant you the business of your dreams within 6 months, what would that look like?
Would it look like it does today?
Or do you want to be doing more speaking? Writing that book? Doing more workshops? Go ahead, dream big. Remember, I have a magic wand. Write out your day, how does it unfold? Who are you spending time with?
Now, go on over to LinkedIn. Take a look at your headline. Does it reflect that big goal of yours?
Often, I’m finding it does NOT. I speak to people every day about how to use LinkedIn to build a nice profitable sales funnel, a funnel that brings their business to that big dream place. But almost always I need to convince them to declare it in their headline. Convince them! Craziness.
So if speaking is a goal of yours, declare it. Call yourself a keynote speaker in your headline. Please don’t make things up! But if you’ve ever done a keynote talk, no matter the size of the audience, you’re a keynote speaker. Own it.
Are you a Realtor who is looking to crack a new sales milestone this year? OWN it. Step in to it. Start using the words to describe yourself.
If you’re not sure how to explain what your role is in your big dream business, then spend some time searching the profiles of others that are doing it now. If you need more support, grab my free video series at www.first3things.com. (Hint, video 2 is all about your headline!) Find those keywords, and search. See how the most successful people in your industry are describing themselves
I want you to do the same. Our big dreams CAN be achieved, but they start with US. We have to own it and declare it, and LinkedIn is the place to start. Tell the world how great you are! If not you, then who? It’s not bragging, it’s owning our worth and owning our dreams. This is the first step to achieving. Tell the world what you want them to know about you.
Drop your LinkedIn headline in the comments below, I’d love to cheer you on!
by KarenYankovich | Oct 10, 2016 | local business, Social Media and PR
Your business is on Main Street, not on Wall Street.
You see the Fortune 500 companies doing it, getting publicity and visibility, but what about YOU?
It’s just as important to build credibility and trust when working locally, I’d say even MORE important if you want to STAY in business. Now, are you wondering how can you do that virtually through LinkedIn?
Here are five tips on how you can use LinkedIn to increase your local business:
1. Establish Yourself as a Local Expert
Increasing familiarity with your business is so important when building a profitable foundation in a local business area. Showing local clients what you do, how you do it and your success rates right from the beginning will attract the local client base and establish trust in your abilities.
You might even want to get a LinkedIn company page up and running to focus solely on your businesses brand. Once you have it made, go ahead and promote yourself! LinkedIn has multiple options now that allow you to promote your page as advertisements to target segments. Get your business out there, get connecting with people and show them your successes. And don’t be afraid to brag a little!
2. Attract Top Employees
Every business needs a strong employee base to enhance productivity. Once you’ve established yourself as a local expert, recruiting top tier members to support your business is essential for growth.
Make use of the job postings section. Seek out suggestions from credible sources and get digging on which you believe can enhance your business.
3. Build a Network of Local Business Owners
As I mentioned in my Social Media Quick Tip: Local LinkedIn Networking Groups article, I love local-based networking groups. People love to do business with associates, which make it a key topic to consider when growing your local business and network of clients.
Join a few local networking groups and see what the conversations about; or even start your own! From there, you can engage with local business owners, give recommendations, post blogs and mention events you may have coming up. From here you can establish connections, as well as gain multiple clients from your participation in these groups.
Once you’ve built this network, connect with your local clients! It’s a great way to stay in touch, further your client base and support the people who support you!
4. Host Events and Promote in Local LinkedIn Groups
Getting face-to-face meetings with potential clients is the ultimate goal in building relationships with local business owners. By hosting events relative to your audience, you create the opportunity to get in front of these businesses that may need your help.
Promote these events in the location-based groups you have created, as well as post your events to other local groups that attract your target audience.
5. Don’t Forget Personal Branding!
When it’s all said and done, your business is nothing without your personal brand. Be sure to stay true to what you have a built and maintain these positive social networking relationships through your brand image. After all, you are what you post!
Ready to get started? Check out this free video series! www.gmctips.com You’ll learn some fun ways to get more clients!
by KarenYankovich | Apr 23, 2015 | Uncategorized
Twitter and LinkedIn are two of my favorite places to build your personal brand.
I’ve talked about what your personal brand is and why it’s important so in this post I want to focus specifically on what you can do on Twitter to make that brand shine!
[Tweet “Here’s how to use Twitter to make your personal brand shine!”]
1. Claim your handle
In Twitter land with 284 million active users, your name may very well be taken. And that’s ok. You don’t have to tout the brand of you in every which way especially if you are a service or product based business. Be clear and simple. If your personal brand is about having fun, then have fun with it! And leave @JoeSmith1998 for the other guy.
Some examples of how to adapt and overcome when your name is taken:
- @j_canfield not @jackcanfield (chicken soup for the soul book author/creator)
- @sitepointdotcom not @sitepoint
- @soc_media not @socialmedia
2. Build the foundation
I know I’ve talked about these specific tips a lot but it is that important and deserves to be repeated.
- Make sure you have a professional headshot as your photo or a clean logo design if you are showcasing your business.
- Fill your short bio section with a few keywords, a call to action and a link to your website or opt-in form.
- Finally add your location. This helps make you more visible in targeted searches, and frankly people like to know where you are from.
- Bing, bang, boom! Your soon-to-be followers and prospects just got a nice shot of who you are and what you do.
3. Become known as an expert
I am a huge fan of using social media to showcase your expertise. This is a big piece of your brand and one that Twitter can help you with immensely. A few simple strategies as you start is really all you need.
First, if you blog regularly you should make sure those blog posts show up in your Twitter feed, linking back to the post and ultimately to your website. Second, anytime you write an article or post an update on LinkedIn you should set it up to also auto-tweet to Twitter. This literally takes 30 seconds. Third, watch for trends or topics that are in your niche to come up in the media/social media sphere and then comment on them! One easy way to do this is to set a google alert to give you a heads up when that topic, name, or company has been mentioned online. You can then read what’s happening and comment on it with your best professional expertise and advice!
Remember:
- Type up tweets (3-5) for each blog post you write, upload them to a scheduler and link to the blogs
- Make sure your LinkedIn updates auto-post to Twitter
- Set up a Google Alert on a specific topic or person who is in your business niche, wait for the action, and then talk about it
4. Set up a Twitter list
Create public Twitter lists that will become a resource for those who need the information you provide. For example if you are building a business helping writers, set up a Twitter list of agents for them to follow in each genre. If you are a life coach create a Twitter list of other Twitter feeds that you find smart, inspirational, and full of good advice. If you are a financial planner make sure to have a list of the best financial tools, news sites, and resources that are on Twitter. And everyone should have a Twitter list of those in their field that they listen to, admire, and learn from. Your prospective clients will appreciate learning from them too.
5. Share and engage like you would in person, it’s social selling!
A fair portion of your tweets should actually be re-tweets, which is sharing in the Twitter world. This sharing and then engaging after the sharing is just like social networking, only in the online world. Be sure to ask questions of businesses and people who are at the top of your arena. Engaging influencers (those who have a lot of followers) in your niche gets you noticed and ultimately increases your standing in the Twitter follower field.
Make it a point to:
- Re-tweet and share on a regular basis
- Ask questions to your followers as well as influencers in your field
- Engage, talk back, share more
One way I like to remind my clients about building their brand is by telling them to, “Ask yourself: Who would you be at a networking event? How would you act? Then be that, but online.” It’s you, only better and that’s brilliant.
Need some more advice on building your brand on Twitter? Come join me in my LinkedIn group where we ask any questions, we share and we care about helping entrepreneurs like yourself.
by KarenYankovich | Apr 16, 2015 | Uncategorized
You know I’m a Twitter lover! Now I have even more reason to love this platform after the recent announcement of the Twitter and Google partnership has become public.
This deal gives Google access to the almost 9,000 tweets per second (yes that is a real stat) streaming through Twitter’s feed and Google is prepared to add these tweets to their search engine in real time. Meaning: you click ‘tweet’ AND boom it’s searchable outside of Twitter-land in a matter of seconds.
What this really means is your social media content will start to play a much bigger role in your SEO. Having a Twitter feed that is fresh, updated often (click here to read my post on how often I recommend), and foundational in regards to your brand, will go a long way toward extending your reach and moving you up in the ever-present battle for search engine list recognition.
[Tweet “What you need to know and understand about the Twitter and Google partnership.”]
5 Things to Think About, Know and Understand When Google and Twitter Comes to Fruition
Here are the 5 items you need to think about, know, and understand when this collaboration comes to fruition, some say in as little as a few months time:
- Your Tweets will now be accessible, always and forever. All of them. Now is more important than ever to really think about how your business needs to be perceived, what your focus is and your brand message. The danger of confusing your customer or downright alienating them is even higher. This is due to the fact that a simple creative tweet that used to pass into the 9,000 tweets/second oblivion, now can be found via Google. So that tweet that you really thought had just the right tone to bring you thousands of new followers, but in reality fell flat and failed? Is still there…just waiting to be found.
- It’s not all about your Twitter followers anymore. The really nice feature of this Google + Twitter partnership is the fact that you will reach your customers more easily who don’t have a Twitter feed. They will get access to your real time marketing, promotions, events and more. And finding ways to get in front of those prospects who are not adept at navigating social media platforms, but love to use the Google, is very much a win in my book.
- Using Twitter for real-time marketing is more important than ever. Twitter is run by the users. It has launched revolutions, created global trends, and given us access to celebs (of any field) in a way that most of us never would have before. People we wouldn’t have the ability to see in real life, let alone DM via a Twitter chat. Use this to your advantage. Make sure your tweets are current, promotional, and conversational. Join the Twitter party, make an effort to “work the crowd”, and see who else you get to tag along via Google.
- Using Twitter for foundational branding is more important than ever. Yup this slightly contradicts my above statement, but in reality it is very important that you do both. Because of the fact that your tweets will be accessible via Google, as a business owner you must now be very clear on: your business why, who you serve, and how you help them, now and in the future. Get clarity on that now because what brands your business today may not be how you want to brand it in the future unless you stick with your foundation. Stay focused on those 3 questions and what you tweet about today will still be relevant when someone pulls it up in a search engine list far into the future.
- Start thinking strategically about your hashtags and word choice. If you don’t already, that is. Hashtags are already a great searchable twitter tool so you should already have a list of best keywords for your business and be using them. But if not, now’s the time to get on it. Hard to say exactly how hashtags will play in the Google SEO, but we know the 140 characters will have much more bang for your buck, so make an effort to choose those words wisely, thoughtfully and with some marketing research to back it up.
You know I love Twitter: it’s fast, it’s democratic, its content is not to be underestimated, but only 23% of adults actively use Twitter, so as a platform it has a ways to go to reach Facebook (71%) and still falls short of LinkedIn (28%).
The Twitter and Google partnership, changes all that.
So what should you do first? Get on Twitter and get ready, today!
Need some inspiration on how to best create your tweets? Want to know what your foundational content might actually be? Interested in finding out the best way to use Twitter for your biz?
Join my LinkedIn group, (click here!) we can help you with all these questions and more.
by KarenYankovich | Dec 5, 2014 | Uncategorized
Lately a question has popped up in my groups and among people I connect with at the conferences I attend.
The question has to do with LinkedIn.
I give my spiel about how wonderful LinkedIn is and someone invariably asks:
“But won’t my boss think I am job hunting if I’m updating my LinkedIn profile?”
My answer is a resounding NO.
Having a pretty, professional, and polished LinkedIn profile is about personal branding NOT about job hunting.
Recently I have talked a lot about personal branding. I discuss how everything we do online and off these days creates, proclaims, and declares you and your personal brand. I talk about how important it is to take control of that brand, and create it yourself.
It also holds true for the brand you share as a part of a bigger whole aka the company you work for.
Tell your boss: You are more valuable to your company with a polished LinkedIn profile than without.
[Tweet “You are more valuable to your company with a polished LinkedIn profile than without.”]
With a polished personal profile you will:
- make better connections for your company
- make better connections for yourself
- have better research opportunities for prospects, customers and future hires
- make the company look polished and professional AND devoted to its employees
- show everyone that you are proud to work for your company – a HUGE factor in building online social proof and trust
And what boss wouldn’t want you do to that?
There is one caveat here: constant profile updates CAN be misconstrued if not handled correctly.
To make sure you DO handle this right, just do one simple thing. Turn OFF your activity broadcasts.
Do this in 3 simple steps:
- Log into your LinkedIn profile and hover over your profile pic in the top right. Click on Privacy and Settings.
- Look to the middle of the page for Privacy Controls. Click on Turn on/off your activity broadcasts.
- UN-check the box that says: Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies. Then click SAVE!
Doing this allows you to update your LinkedIn profile freely and at anytime you wish to create a stronger personal brand for yourself AND your company.
It’s a win-win folks! But turn it back on when you’re done, so you can stay top of mind with your connections when you’re posting your LinkedIn updates.
Have a question about what to update first on your LinkedIn Profile? Join me in my LinkedIn group and ask away! (Or send your boss my way and I’ll tell ‘em for you)
