Are you jack of all trades or a specialist? Many people make the mistake of trying to get as many skills as possible into their portfolio in the hope that everyone who connects with them will find something of interest.
This is a challenge on LinkedIn as the system generates a list of skills for you to get endorsed for. Most people tackle this by listing anything that they can do (and we know that most of us are multi-talented) and the list grows longer and longer. Unfortunately, when someone visits your profile and sees a massive list it can be daunting and they don’t really ‘see’ the skills base, just a long list.
My first recommendation is to spend a bit of time thinking about what your very best clients actually really value from you. If they’re the kind of people you want to work with and you enjoy delivering these really valuable skills – list them – and only them.
You know you have other skills – but these are the ones you most want to be found for and to be a specialist in. You’re doing that really powerful thing – niching. People usually hire experts, not generalists – they’ve often got those in-house. What they want is a specialist who had depth rather than breadth.
Maintaining your list
Now comes the tough bit. Lots of people who know you (and quite a few who don’t) will play the tick box game and endorse you for your listed skills. If they don’t see what they think you do, they may add new categories and, if you don’t monitor your list you’ll start seeing random new skills appearing.
Be ruthless and keep a note of your core skills and delete anything that’s not on this list!
It’s really hard to do, when someone has been generous enough to endorse you, but it’s your profile and, if you’re using it as a marketing platform, it has to work for your business.
This means you need to monitor that list at least weekly and cull the excess.
If you want to make LinkedIn work harder to promote your business join us on one of our LinkedIn Free Strategy sessions or sign up for this step-by-step webinar series to get some ideas that will turn LinkedIn into a Lead Generator.
