How to Promote Yourself on LinkedIn: Proven Techniques for Self-Promotion

June 6, 2024

With more than 1 billion users, LinkedIn is a great place to promote yourself.

But to do it correctly, you need to understand your audience.

This means understanding their needs and desires. And especially how you can help them with the solution you are bringing to the market.

Sounds easy. But many people struggle with this process.

If you are one of those, don’t worry, we will break it down for you in this article.

Know your target audience 🎯

If you target everyone on LinkedIn, you’ll end up targeting no one.

“If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first three sharpening my axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

You must understand who you’re serving and whose problems or pain points you are trying to solve before even thinking about promoting yourself on LinkedIn.

This is how you sharpen your axe.

You can only optimize your LinkedIn profile after you’ve done this marketing research.

Otherwise, you’ll make the wrong connections, post the wrong content, and use the wrong language.

Understanding your target audience will give you a clear direction to follow when setting up your LinkedIn profile.

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EXAMPLE Health & Fitness

If your niche is health & fitness, you’ll have a category of people, business owners, and managers that you want to target.

Instead of targeting the whole health industry, you can target a specific subcategory like weight loss planners or weight loss trainers.

Use the industry language 🗣️

To create a powerful message for your LinkedIn personal brand, you must position yourself as an insider in your niche.

You achieve this by:

Understanding the slang, jargon, and keywords that are used in the industry, and
Weaving them into your message.

For example, in marketing, people use words like funnels, ads, direct response, scale, etc.

In the crypto industry, you’ll hear things like cryptocurrency, blockchain, smart contracts, hyper ledger, Ethereum, etc.

If you’re targeting pilots in the aviation niche, you’ll use words like “take off”, “navigate”, and “final boarding call”.

Learn how participants in your niche describe themselves and their businesses.

Find out if your niche has its unique language and imbibe it into your LinkedIn profile, posts, articles, and messaging.

Refine your value statement

This is your most important message as it forms the basis of your LinkedIn profile and messaging. Make it the first thing people see when they visit your About section.

Reminder: your target audience doesn’t care about YOU.

They only care about solving their problems and achieving their desired goals. So, you must position yourself as a vehicle that drives them to their desired future.

Use this winning formula to craft your value statement:

I help ____ (niche)
To ___ (solve problem)
And ___ (get the desired result)
Through ___ (proprietary method)

Examples of how to market yourself on Linkedin #1 – I help accountants get qualified appointments with business owners and acquire 3-5 CFO clients every month with my accountant brand storytelling process. #2 – I help real estate agents get qualified home buyers who are ready to pay in full using my simplified BURF process.

If you’re finding it difficult to create your value proposition, write down:

Your niche or sub-niche
The main problems you’re solving
Your desired situation
Your result mechanism or proprietary method

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Initially, this might be a hypothesis—what you think will resonate with your niche market. Then you test it in the market to see if it works, get feedback, and improve your message over and over again.

Integrate these 5 emotional triggers into your value statement:

Frustration about their current undesirable situation
Empathy for others who have been through the same thing
Joy derived from achieving their dreams
Envy of others who have what they want
The thrill of experiencing something new

Be intentional about your LinkedIn connections

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Don’t send connections or accept connection invites just for the sake of it.

To get the best out of LinkedIn, you must have the right connections.

There’s no point in creating connections outside your target audience. Your connections should either be your prospects or your prospect’s connections.

Having the wrong connections only means that you’ll be promoting yourself to the wrong audience.

Go through your LinkedIn connections and remove any connections that are not your prospects or connected to your prospects.

LinkedIn has a powerful search feature with filters and Boolean logic that you can use to connect with the right people.

For example, if your prospects are family lawyers in New York, United States, type family lawyers in the LinkedIn search bar and search.

You’re looking for people, so select the People filter below the search bar.

Select the Locations filter, type New York, choose your desired location in the drop-down menu, and select Show results.

Voila! You now have 19,000 family lawyers in New York you can connect with. Click on the Connect button beside each profile and send connection invites one by one.

The right way to connect with people on LinkedIn

You should send a personal note with each connection request. Make it simple, friendly and natural. It’s not the time to pitch or showcase your value.

Don’t send more than 100 connection requests in a day. Otherwise, Linkedin might flag your profile or ban your account.

The magic number for LinkedIn connections is 500. Once you cross 500 connections, LinkedIn will only show users “500+” as your number of connections.

Aim to reach 500 connections before you start pitching yourself to your prospects.

Join LinkedIn groups related to your industry

LinkedIn groups allow you to participate in group discussions by answering questions and sharing insights.

This helps you build your reputation and visibility through helping other people.

If that sounds good to you, then the first step would be to identify relevant LinkedIn groups. Join groups where your target audience hangs out.

Once you know which groups you’ll participate in, it’s time to start contributing valuable content that attracts clients and customers without actively selling them.

A natural next step is to further connect with relevant prospects by sending connection requests so that you remain at the top of their minds.

Watch out: LinkedIn may be marketing your strongest competitors to your ideal audience

While you’re building your Linkedin personal brand, unknown to you, LinkedIn may be advertising your strongest competitors to your target audience.

Don’t allow this.

When people search for a keyword and land on your LinkedIn profile, they’ll see a section labelled People also viewed. This section lists other profiles that people who view your profile also viewed.

Let’s say you’re a line editor and a client looking for your service visits your profile. LinkedIn will show them the other profiles your profile visitors also visit. This means that LinkedIn is advertising your strongest competitors to your ideal clients. You don’t want that.

From your LinkedIn profile, go to Settings & Privacy, then click on the Account preferences tab. Under General preferences select the People also viewed option and turn it off.

Once you turn off the People also viewed option, LinkedIn will no longer suggest your competitor’s profile to your prospects when they visit your profile.

The best way to market yourself: sharing valuable content

It’s difficult to say what “valuable content” is.

Once you understand your audience and use the right industry language, you most likely will hit the mark whenever you:

Show what you are doing in the industry to solve their pain points: case studies, papers, etc.
Entertain with news from the industry
Make curious remarks about the industry How you do it, will also influence the reach you can get. So make sure you write well.

To find out what is currently hot on LinkedIn, visit our Top LinkedIn Trends page.

Over and out 🏁

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for promoting yourself and your business. In this article, we’ve outlined enough tips to help you get started.

TL;DR? Understand your audience first, and then create a great profile that accurately represents you and your work. From there, make sure to connect with the right people as possible and share valuable content.