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Linkedin has over 830 million members and more joining every day. If you’re a sales professional or someone who needs to find lots of people, but the right people, how do you sort through all those people to find the right ones? LinkedIn provides basic search functionality with its free and LinkedIn Premium plans, but you may need LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator helps you find the right people, first, because it gives you broader search across LinkedIn, and because it has more powerful search criteria like:

• Title

• Function

• How long they’ve been at their company

• Seniority level

• Whether they’ve posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days (which helps you to know if they’re active on the platform and would actually respond to a message there)

Sales Navigator helps you keep track of the right people once you find them by allowing you to create saved searches and saved lists. You can also create alerts so you know when people are in the news, when they receive a new job, when a company is seeing a mass exodus of employees, and more.

In addition, Sales Navigator gives you 50 InMails you can use to contact people you aren’t connected to (although in most cases I recommend only contacting 2nd connections anyway).

Sales Navigator’s lowest-priced plan is $80/mo, so it isn’t cheap (compare plans) if you just think it will be fun, but if you’re serious about LinkedIn and you think you’ll be closing deals, then it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the benefit you’ll receive.

I’ve been paying for Sales Navigator for…gee, 10+ years? And I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I’ve closed way too much business to ever dream of giving it up.

At BlueMethod, we actually require that our “done-for-you LinkedIn” clients have a Sales Navigator account. It’s an essential part of how we provide our services, especially our connection campaigns.

Any Sales Navigator questions I can help you out with? Leave a comment below.

I will assume you already know that LinkedIn is the right place for you to connect with your ideal audience and deliver your message. If you’re not so sure, I recommend you read my summary of The 7 Systems of Influence and then return here if you feel reassured that LinkedIn is indeed the place you want to focus your attention.

What is a Personal Brand?

Your personal brand is not what you think about yourself, but what others think about you.

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” — Jeff Bezos

What do people say about you when you’re not around? Do they say that you’re:

• Kind?

• Generous?

• Smart?

• Effective?

• Easy to work with?

Do they say “She’s great with anything tech-related,” or “He’s a brilliant marketer,” or “They’re really great at communicating in difficult situations?”

No matter what they say, it’s all part of your personal brand. But simply having a personal brand is not enough. You need a powerful personal brand.

What is a Powerful Personal Brand?

A powerful personal brand is one that helps you accomplish your objectives. If you’re an executive, perhaps you want to:

• Grow your business

• Attract and retain top talent

• Share a message

If your personal brand facilitates these outcomes, then it’s powerful. If it’s merely nice to have, but you’re not sure how it benefits you or your business interests, well…that’s nice.

What a Personal Brand is Not.

A personal brand is not fake…that is, you can’t fake it for long. If you try to fake a personal brand, the personal brand you’ll end up creating is that you’re a faker.

In order for a personal brand to be powerful, it must be authentic. Sincerity and real intent are key.

I once met a colleague in real life, after working together virtually for several months. After talking over dinner for a few minutes, he said, “You’re the same in real life as you are online.”

I took that as a great compliment and it’s what we should all strive for.

Another colleague once told me about the time he met a celebrity entrepreneur. “That guy is a total jerk,” he told me. “I was in his house for a few minutes, he didn’t even know me, and he’s telling me how he hates people coming up and asking for his autograph at events and he calls his own customers and fans ‘losers.’”

I was disappointed to hear this, because up until that time I thought that entrepreneur seemed like a nice guy. It’s easily possible my colleague was exaggerating things, but regardless the personal brand of the entrepreneur was tarnished, at least in my eyes. If you’re a jerk behind the scenes, it’s only a matter of time before everyone will find out.

3 Ways to Build a Powerful Personal Brand on LinkedIn

When it comes to building a powerful personal brand that will help you in your business and career, there may be no more accessible and quick way to do it than on LinkedIn.

Sure, you could write a book, but that’s hard and takes a long time (trust me, I’ve done it a few times).

You could get into a bunch of magazines and build a personal brand that way, but again, I’ve done that too, and that also takes time and substantial effort (although I have a PR firm that can make it easier and faster).

On the other hand, you can start building a powerful personal brand on LinkedIn today, it won’t cost you a dime, and you can get results immediately. Here are three ways to make it happen.

1. Optimize Your Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is first place to work on your personal brand. We’ll talk about making meaningful connections and creating compelling content in a moment, but the reason optimizing your profile comes first is because if you have an outdated profile, that will hurt your efforts to connect with others. Also, if you’re creating great content then people will consume it and visit your profile, but if your profile stinks…well, that ain’t no good.

To optimize your profile, start from the top and work your way down.

• Photo. Is it professional? Can people recognize you in real life from it? Are you following LinkedIn best practices for your photo? Are your settings set to “public” so that anyone can see your photo? (click on your photo to see if the settings are public)

• Banner. Most people will only look at your banner for a split-second, if at all. It’s not a place to cram as much information as possible, it’s only a place to reinforce your personal brand. If you have nothing but a blank area with a tasteful version of your company’s logo, that’s fine. A cityscape of where you live is also ok. If you’re a speaker, a photo of you in front of an audience is great, or if you’re an author, this is a good place to promote your book. No matter what, keep it simple and clean. Don’t try to communicate too much.

• Name. Just your name, unless you have credentials your ideal audience will recognize. Even then, you may want to just use your name.

• Title. If you’re the CEO of a well-known company, you’ll probably want to include that, but for the vast majority, including famous CEO’s, it’s often more effective to use what I call your “personal brand tagline.” This is a short statement that says what you you, who you do it for, and the results you deliver. For example, “I help salespeople in the solar industry 10x their leadflow,” is a great personal tagline, assuming that’s what you do.

• About. This is your bio, and it’s one of the most important parts of your LinkedIn profile. Others sometimes disagree, but I strongly favor a bio written in the first person, none of this “So and so is an effective executive who…” This isn’t a Wikipedia entry, this is your chance to speak directly to your ideal audience, so talk to them like a normal person! In your About section, tell us again who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and the results you get. Then tell us a story. We’re hardwired to pay attention to and remember stories, so make it long, make it dramatic, and give us insight into who you really are. Your goal is to make strangers come up to you and say, “I read your LinkedIn profile and I feel like I know you!”

There are many other things you can do to optimize your LinkedIn profile, but if you focus on these, you’ll be at least 80% of the way there. If you want more detailed tips on LinkedIn profile optimization, grab yourself a copy of 60 Days to LinkedIn Mastery.

2. Make Meaningful Connections

Once your profile is optimized, the next step towards building a powerful personal brand on LinkedIn is to make lots of meaningful connections.

LinkedIn allows you to have 30,000 connections and unlimited followers (these are people who don’t count as connections, but they have opted to follow you and therefore they see content you post).

Don’t get me wrong—I would never advocate connecting with folks just for the sake of bumping up your connection number. There’s no point in that, it’s a waste of time. However, if you can connect with people you can serve, and who can serve you, then the more connections the better.

To start out with, connect with everyone you already know. These people are highly likely to accept your connection request because after all, they know you! These are also people who are likely to appreciate your content and share it with others. In addition, when you add these people, it grows your total network of 2nd connections, or people on LinkedIn with whom you have at least one connection in common, which leads to our next step in your connection strategy.

Connect with peers and colleagues who are 2nd connections. You always want to connect with 2nd connections and almost never 3rd connections, because if someone receives a connection request from you, and they see that you have 50 mutual connections, that might be all they need to see. They’re thinking, “Looks like we have a lot of friends in common, might as well connect with this person.”

On the other hand, when you send a connection request to a 3rd connection, they say, “I have no idea who this is, and nobody I know knows them either…I think I’ll pass.” Don’t waste your time on 3rd connections unless you have a compelling reason.

The reason to connect with peers and colleagues is that these people are also likely to accept your connection request because they’ll see that you work at the same company, or went to the same school, or are in the same industry.

So far, we’ve ignored connecting with who you really want to connect with—your ideal audience. That’s because when we get to your ideal audience, we want them to see that you have as many mutual connections as possible, and the only way to do that is to grow your network first. Once you’ve done that, then you start reaching out to members of your ideal audience, and now they’ll be more likely to accept your connection request.

Creating a large network is key to the next step of creating content, because LinkedIn only shows your LinkedIn content to a fraction of the people you’re connected to. The more people you’re connected to, the more people will see your content, and the more impact your content will make.

3. Create Compelling Content

This is where building a personal brand really happens.

Plain old text posts tend to perform the best on LinkedIn, although LinkedIn is constantly tinkering with the algorithm, so the only sure way to know what works best for you is to experiment.

Note: When I say “post” I’m talking about going to the homepage of LinkedIn, where your feed is, and clicking in the area that says “Start a post” and then typing.

As a general rule, don’t post photos, don’t post videos, and don’t write articles—none of these will perform as well as a plain text post. But again, sometimes you’ve got to experiment, so try all of them out to see what works best for you.

In order to create compelling content, the kind that build a powerful personal brand on LinkedIn, it must be:

1. Professional. I don’t mean formal, but this isn’t the place to talk about what you had for lunch, your sick dog, how your neighbor won’t mow his lawn, etc. This is not Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and it certainly isn’t TikTok. Keep it focused on professional topics, things related to what is in your personal brand tagline. Also, no religion or politics! Trust me, you’ll regret it.

2. Personal. Although you want to be professional in your topic selection, you want to get personal in the sense that you want to be authentic, real, and vulnerable. Talk about how you feel about things. Don’t be afraid to open up. People want to know who you really are. Some of the best posts I’ve ever read on LinkedIn have been people talking about their professional challenges and struggles.

3. Relevant. If people don’t think your content will help them, or that it’s not interesting to them, they won’t read it. On the other hand, if you can help someone solve a problem, that’s relevant. If you have a unique perspective on something that matters to a lot of people, that’s relevant.

Now, a few best practices for creating LinkedIn posts that get attention:

• Get comments. Comments are the lifeblood of posts. When someone comments on a post on LinkedIn, it sends a signal to LinkedIn that people are interested in your post. That makes LinkedIn want to show your post to more people, which can lead to more comments, etc. One way to get more comments on your posts is to respond quickly to people who comment on your posts and get them engaged in conversations back and forth.

• Ask questions. Asking a question is a great way to get comments on a post. Make sure the question really invites people to respond. Don’t ask a question that is too easy nor too hard. Ask questions that people feel they simply must respond to. Ask a question at the beginning of your post (otherwise people may not know you’re asking a question in your post) and again at the end (to remind them you really want their answers).

• Be contrarian. Be bold, make a statement, and say something others may disagree with, but don’t be needlessly offensive. “Only men should be CEOs” would be contrarian, but offensive and stupid. “I don’t hire anyone with an MBA” is also contrarian, but interesting. Everyone will want to know your reasons, and you’re going to get strong opinions on both sides which means lots of comments. However, remember that it’s important to be relevant, and that goes for yourself as well as your audience. There are lots of contrarian things you could say to get lots of attention, but if it’s not building your personal brand in the way you want, it’s not relevant to you, and there’s no point.

How often should you post each week? At least once, but for most people 2-3 times is realistic and enough. If you can post every day, and keep up with the comments, more power to you–the more you post, the faster you can build your personal brand.

There are many other things you can do to build a powerful personal brand on LinkedIn (that’s why I wrote a whole book about it) but if you did nothing but follow the tips above, you’d be well on your way.

I Don’t Have Time For All This

That’s how I feel sometimes!

Good news then, we have a done-for-you LinkedIn service for busy executives and time-strapped entrepreneurs who know they need to do all the above but simply don’t have the time.

You already know a lot of people in the real world.

You probably have thousands of people in your address book.

You don’t want to add them all manually on LinkedIn.

Thankfully, LinkedIn makes it easy to add all your existing relationships as LinkedIn connections. Here’s how:

Step 1: Log into your account.

Step 2: Navigate to “My Network.”

Step 3: Find “Add personal contacts.”

Step 4: Enter your email* or click “More options.”

*If you use an email service that LinkedIn integrates with (Gmail or its enterprise version, Outlook, Yahoo!, or AOL), then put in your email address and click “Continue”.

If you do not use one of these email services, or you have a spreadsheet of contacts to upload, click on “More options” and go to Step 4a below.

Step 4a: Upload your spreadsheet of contacts.

Skip this step if you connected to your email account—this is only in case you’re uploading a spreadsheet or CSV file of contacts.

If you have your contacts in a spreadsheet, you’ll need to save it as a CSV or text file before uploading it.

A note on formatting—you can’t simply upload a big list of email addresses (although you used to be able to do exactly this). You’ll need to format your file with the contact’s first name, last name, and email address. If it’s not formatted correctly, LinkedIn will display an error that says “Uploading Contacts File Didn’t Work” and they’ll instruct you that:

• “First Name” should be typed at the top of the first column.

• “Last Name” should be typed at the top of the second column.

• “Email Address” should be typed at the top of the third column.

Once you know your file is formatted correctly, then click on the button shown below and upload your file, then continue to Step 5.

Step 5: Follow directions to connect your account until you see something like this…

In the old day, LinkedIn would allow you to “Select all” and connect with thousands of people instantly. As usual, someone must have misbehaved and ruined it for the rest of us. Now, LinkedIn forces you to check, one by one, the people you want to connect with.

However! This is still a LOT easier and faster than having to look at your address book and then search for each person you know and connect through each of their profiles.

So get to it! Check the boxes next to those you want to connect to, then click on the “Add connections” button at the top, which will now be blue.

Step 6: Skip it!

You do NOT want to do what LinkedIn offers you next. Just click the “Skip” button.

Chances are, these people are already on LinkedIn, but they’re not using the email address you have for them with their LinkedIn account. If you check these boxes and send them invitations, they will get an email inviting them to join LinkedIn and connect with you.

“But I’m already on LinkedIn!” they’ll say, and then they’ll delete the email.

A week later, they’ll get another email saying, “So and so is inviting you to connect on LinkedIn!”

They’ll continue to get these emails until they unsubscribe. Now they’re annoyed at you, so you’re better off skipping this.

That’s it!

You’re all done! Although it may be tedious to check all those boxes, this is the fastest way for many people to add thousands of high-quality connections. After all, these are people you already know outside LinkedIn. You’ve probably done business with them or know them from school or other areas of your personal life. They’re highly likely to accept your connection request and be interested in what you’re up to.

The benefits of lots of high-quality connections on LinkedIn…

Why should you care about growing your connection count on LinkedIn? Well…

• Would you like to be paid more?

• Would you like to sell more?

• Would you like to get more and better job offers?

• Would you like to grow your business?

• Would you like to recruit top talent?

All these things and more can and will happen if you grow the number of high-quality connections you have on LinkedIn.

For example, let’s say you want to post some content you believe will help your business grow.

If you have 500 connections, and you post that content, LinkedIn will show that content to a fraction of your network. An even smaller fraction will even see it, because they may not be logged into LinkedIn when you post it. Let’s say that whatever you post, 5% of your network will see it. That means 25 people will see your post.

Is that enough to get you the results you want?

However, if you add all your contacts, you might have 5,000 connections on LinkedIn. Now, instead of 25 people seeing your post, it’s 250. But it gets even better than that…

Let’s say someone comments on your post. When they do, people they are connected to can see their comment on your post. This might mean that another 100 people see your post. But it gets even better than that…

When someone comments on your post it sends a signal to LinkedIn saying, “People like this content” and then LinkedIn thinks, “Hmm, maybe we should show this content to more people to keep them on LinkedIn.” LinkedIn will then display your content to more people, and if they comment on it, then the cycle repeats and more and more people will see your post until thousands, tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people see it.

However, if you only have 500 connections, you’re starting the process with only 25 people seeing your post, and that may not be enough to get a single comment, and so your post dies there.

More connections = more people seeing your content.

This doesn’t mean you should connect with anyone and everyone you can. If you’re selling a SaaS tool to IT managers on the east coast of the US, there’s probably little reason for you to connect with the guy who owns a local gardening business in Bangladesh. There’s little chance you can help each other, or ever will be able to. Not only that, but your network probably won’t help him, nor will his network of connections help you.

However, the people in your address book are probably meaningful connections, so it makes sense to start there. Then, you’ll have access to connect with tens of thousands more people, and can continue to grow your network and serve more people with your content and expertise.

Three last things…

If you need help with LinkedIn, consider our services:

• Connection Campaign Management. Let us do all the work of connecting you with your ideal audience. This monthly service will grow your network with high-quality connections, month after month.

• Full-service Done-For-You LinkedIn Management. Profile optimization, connection campaign management, and content production—we do it all for you.

• Buy 60 Days to LinkedIn Mastery. 60 LinkedIn tips + less than 15 minutes a day will turn you into a master of LinkedIn. Now a WSJ and USAToday bestseller, available in print, Kindle, and Audible formats.

Do you have a photo on your profile? If you don’t, that’s the first step, and you’d be surprised how many people have no photo at all.

However, you don’t merely want any photo, you want a great photo! And you certainly don’t want a bad photo. There are some seriously bad profile photos on LinkedIn (check out 29 LinkedIn Photo Mistakes To Avoid to see what I mean).

My rule of thumb for a photo that meets the minimum requirements is that it should allow us to recognize you in real life. There are a lot of things you could do beyond that, but that’s the main thing. Here’s how to make it happen:

1. Face the camera. Don’t show us your back, side, or backside. It doesn’t mean you have to be 100% beaming the camera, but if I meet you face to face and I’m shaking your hand and I can’t recognize you from your photo because you were turned or not even facing your photo, that’s a problem.

2. Don’t wear sunglasses. Are there exceptions? Sure, but unless wearing sunglasses is part of your personal brand and you’re always wearing them, then don’t.

3. Get close. If I can see your entire body from head to toe in your LinkedIn photo, that means your face is too small for me to recognize easily. Something between just your face showing and your head to your waist is about right.

4. Light it up. Come out of the shadows and let us see you. Don’t just avoid a dark room when taking a photo, but also shadows from tree branches or wires, and never, ever, put yourself between the camera and a window.

5. Look sharp. Your photo should be at least 400 x 400 pixels at 72 dpi. It not should be blurry in the least.

6. Stay current. How old is your photo? Mine is 3-4 years old, but luckily I’ve been blessed with a timeless beauty that…ah, who am I kidding? I need a new photo. If yours is more than 3-4 years old you probably do too.

7. Beware the background. If you have black hair and stand in front of a black background, you may end up looking bald. Lighting, focus, color, and contrast are great friends, and dangerous enemies.

8. Dress the part. If your audience on LinkedIn is most likely to meet you in real life in a professional setting where you will be dressed professionally, then dress that way in your photo.

9. Be yourself. That is, don’t use a group photo. No wedding photos. No bro photos of you and your buddies. No family photos. No work team photos. No sports team photos. No pets! Just you, by yourself.

10. Bonus tip: Brush your teeth and smile.

What rules would you give a LinkedIn newb on how to get a good photo for their profile?

Pssst! Want more simple LinkedIn tips like this? Get 60 of them in my book, the USA Today and WSJ bestseller, 60 Days to LinkedIn Mastery.