1. Get a great profile image

Put yourself in a good light – literally. Your face is how you make connections with people. You can use your photo to showcase your personality, your style, what makes you you. 

You don’t have to spend a fortune on professional photographers or PhotoShop. Just follow these tips:

• Make sure your profile image is well framed.
• Make sure your face fills at least 60% of the frame. But break the rules if you are being creative! Mary Portas
• Choose your outfit and background carefully. Do you want the colours to match your brand for example? Check out Debbie Wosskow’s profile image.
• Consider showing yourself in action/at work. Harriet Green
• Use Canva to adjust the brightness, colours and get the right scale.

2. Get a great background image

Your background image can help show your brand, your values or examples of your work – so don’t leave it on the default blue image of lines and dots – please. It can also help tell your company story. 

Here are our top tips for crafting a great background image:

• Choose something that reflects what your customer wants or needs. 
• Use an image that is relevant to your geography. Carl Ratcliff
• Choose an image of your employees or place of work. Azheem Azhar
• Choose something abstract linked to your brand image. Jaimes Leggett
• Choose something that showcases your product. Melinda Gates, David Furlong
• Use graphics to display your brand messages. Emily Forbes, David Benigson, Chris Hickey, Liza Collard 
• Or simply use images that shows more of your personality. Prof. Jonathan A.J. Wilson PhD
• Use Pixabay or Unsplash to find free images to use
• Use Canva to create your image and add text, graphics and images. 
• Correctly size your LinkedIn header image to 1584×396 pixels, but remember its going to look different on mobile or smaller screens.
• Upload, preview and re-jig. You may need to move elements about to make sure they are visible behind your profile image.

3. Get an attention grabbing headline

Just stating your job title is a waste of prime advertising space. Use these 10 words to explain what you offer to your customer, a potential employer or prospective employees. You want people to connect with you because of what you can do, or what you can offer – so use this space wisely. If you are a sales manager – think about what problem are you solving for the customer. If you are a recruiter – what can you offer a candidate. What is your speciality?

• Look at colleagues, peers and influencer’s headlines for inspiration.
• Try to use adjectives.
• Consider who you want to connect with and use words that would attract them.
• Avoid corporate speak – make it personal and authentic.

4. Write an effective profile

This section is harder. Try not to use this as a space to list all your past achievements or job roles. Remember to include good keywords, keep it personal and show your passion. You’ve only got 2,000 characters so make them count. This is where you can sell yourself or your company and give more information that just a list of your job roles. Humanise your LinkedIn profile and make it more than just a CV.  

You can read more about how to write a good linkedin summary here.

Above all make sure you avoid these buzzwords!

We find that answering these questions can help formulate an effective LinkedIn profile:

• What do you do?
• Why do you do it?
• What problems do you solve and for what group of people? 
• How can you make people’s lives better?

If you need some ideas, have a look at these extremely well crafted profile summaries, but remember these are specific for their industry and have a tone of voice suited to their geographies.

5. Don’t forget to fill in your job descriptions

When looking to connect with people you often look through previous experiences. So many people, however, leave these blank or with very little detail. 

• Make sure you enter details about your job role, your responsibilities and your achievements.
• Make it quantifiable to show the scale or range of your role.
• Use the STAR approach to explain your job roles. S-ituation; T-ask; A-ction; R-esults.

6. Get recommendations

If you are lacking some American bravado then this bit can be hard. We find that giving recommendations can be the best way of earning some recommendation pay back. 

Its a great way of adding to your profile and showcasing your personality and services even further.

7. Add your skills

Make sure you add in what your skills are. That night shift at the supermarket will show your demonstrable team skills…don’t forget to mention them. Just make sure you tailor them and make them relevant to whatever your goals are.

If you think this section needs a boost – try up-skilling with some online courses. 

LinkedIn is an underutilised resource for UK businesses. If you want help or advice to boost your company’s profile, create custom graphic or plan your marketing strategy then, get in touch with Phil on 0151 268 0382.

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I’ve read hundreds of blogs and overloaded on infographics telling me to exercise my creative muscles, read widely, engage more etc. But at the start of a working week, I haven’t got time to read the top 100 most inspirational books or hang out with poets in the local cafe.

Just tell me what the secret ingredient is please

Having pondered this question for a while I have started to notice a recurring period when I am at my most creative. For me, it is usually when I am lying in bed, half awake, half asleep. A semi-doze where my mind wanders in and out of consciousness, putting half-remembered thoughts together. Somehow, somewhere, a new idea forms, a picture emerges out of the ether and a concept is crystallised. Aha!

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” The Tempest, Shakespeare

Once you shut your eyes, you have shut off the bombardment of information to your brain. The adverts, the noise from the radio, the view of the washing on the floor or the dust on the cabinet. Now you can fully process your day. Your brain is now in a world of its own and is able – to think. This stage is known as ‘hypnagogic’. However, the risk is you fall into a deep sleep and when you wake up, you are too groggy to remember any creative genius you had at the start of sleep.

Salvador Dali  used to nap in a chair while holding a key. When the key dropped, sometimes just a second after he had dropped off, he would wake up. Refreshed and full of creativity.

“ The hypnagogic is the ultimate paradigm-busting tool. As your brain slips into an associative, impressionistic state, it is no longer bound by conventional wisdom. Saucy ideas – impossible within a certain rational framework – clamour for attention. Images become metaphors for concepts, and suddenly everyone is a poet.” Jeff Warren, 2009

What if you haven’t got time to take a nap at 9.30 in the morning?

According to neuroscientist, Alice Flaherty, our brains are the most creative when flooded with dopamine. Brilliant! Can I put this in a smoothie?

No, but you can help the body manufacture it. Usually by doing something relaxing like having a shower, driving or some simple sitting and doing nothing. But, you also need some distraction. By focusing on something else, our subconscious mind can roam about, make new connections and overcome problems. So wash the dishes – urgh, or do some gardening. Doing something very mundane may help you come up with something truly amazing.

Back in the days when I used to write for television, I would dread the Monday meetings where we were asked to present our latest specialist factual programme ideas. I would have spent the weekend reading National Geographic, Scientific American, The Economist, Shortlist and The Week desperately looking for inspiration.

Nothing.

I would then sit in my favourite seat on the packed Edinburgh to Glasgow train and stare into the houses that whizzed by. And suddenly, while half imagining myself making-over the person next to me, there it was.

An idea.

Thank [insert swearword] for that.

Now, I know that it was the commute, not the articles that were the key to my creativity. Part slumber, part relaxed distraction were the secret ingredients. Well it all makes sense now. Thank goodness for the clarity of MRI brain scanning neuroscience.

“I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me.” Sara Blakeley, CEO of Spanx

There you go, Plankton, just have a quick nap or a shower and chill out. The secret formula will come to you. That’s probably ruined series 99 of SpongeBob, but it has definitely made planning my working day easier.

Now comes the crunch. Is what I have come up with original?

A Google search quickly solves that problem.

Urrgh.

Someone has done it before.

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely, but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.” (Mark Twain)

Oh, thank-you Mark Twain. But that’s not going to help me come up with the next great blog post. Or is it.

Use your kaleidoscope

While your idea might not be new, you can make it new, by reversing it, taking the opposing view, looking at it in microscopic detail or from a macro viewpoint. Use your kaleidoscope to keep turning and making new combinations.

And if this isn’t working, then go back to sleep and relax…perchance to dream.

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