jorgensundberg.net

Last year was a very successful year in terms of my own brand and the brands that I represent. Because I have got to a stage where the brands are known (at least to my target audience), I will shake things up a bit and change how I go about the online marketing. This includes how my blogs will run in the next 12 months.

jorgensundberg.net (that would be this blog!)

Last year, I put a lot of effort into writing useful and practical blog posts about personal branding, social media, LinkedIn and some other stuff. This paid off and I had just shy of 100,000 pageviews on this blog from Jan 2011 – Dec 2011. This blog has some 1,700 subscribers and gets a fair bit of commenters.

In terms of content for this year I will be shifting away from just social media and branding topics and write go a bit more genreal. Hang on you say, no more social media and branding content coming our way? Yes there will be, but not exclusively. Instead I will use this blog to publish more personal content, the things that I would like to read and the things that really interest me. I realise that from a marketing perspective this might just alienate some of the readers here. I hope some will find the new content of interest, and other people will find the blog through search and social media and hopefully engage with me.

Furthermore, I'm going to stop promoting this blog heavily on social media and rely on the old adage 'build it and they will come' (if it worked for Kevin Costner, surely it will work here…). This in my book means, I produce content that is of interest to me and if others find it interesting they will find it – I will not shove it down anybody's throat. And on that note, the content I will create will not only be blog posts but increasingly video, presentations and podcasts. I guess I will test all different forms of content creation and see what I enjoy producing and what seems to be working. So that's the scoop for this blog for the next year, hope you'll stick around but don't blame you if you don't of course.

The Undercover Recruiter (my first blog)

The Undercover Recruiter is the first blog I ever created, it's now two and a half years old which doesn't sound like much but in this context it is! It's recently achieved a Page Rank of 5 which is pretty good and means that it will be prioritised in Google searches and that advertisers start sniffing around it. The traffic numbers are terrific, the blog got about 500,000 page views in 2011 and has some 4,000 subscribers. I publish about 4 or 5 post per week on that blog which requires a great deal of time and effort of course but luckily there are a few great guest contributors that help out.

With the fact that this blog is so popular, I am henceforth going to focus on this one and when publishing my usual practical hands-on social media tips it will be there jorgensundberg.net which has been the case previously (provided it's related to careers or recruitment of course). Or I might just post it at both places, in slightly different versions. The way I see it, The Undercover Recruiter is where I can reach the masses and people who have never heard of me, which can be very useful. If they are interested, they will find my personal blog and hopefully think this is of value as well.

Link Humans (the company blog)

The blog at my company Link Humans is a different kettle of fish to the other two. It is designed to attract business, almost exclusively business to business (B2B). This means the regular 'How-To' blog posts are of limited use, my experience of clients in our industry is that they want to read case studies and success stories of competitors. And indeed, the most popular posts on that blog are case studies about Deloitte, Philips, CH2M Hill etc. This will be the focus on that blog moving forwards, we will focus on well researched, storytelling and inspirational content. In fact, B2B clients don't care whether you post once per day or once per quarter. What they are concerned about is quality information and that's what we aim for here.

Writing for other blogs on the interwebs

I regularly get asked to write posts for other blogs, to contribute to bigger and smaller blogs. Some of these offers come with money and others don't. In any case, I am rather blogged out and usually decline offers unless it's a really good opportunity for me to create value to that blog's audience. If you ever want me to feature on your blog, I suggest an interview type of piece as it's a little bit simpler to write up (at least the story is already there!).

So that's the plan for this year, do let me know what you think of this strategy – will it work you think?

Image credit: myself at Waitrose's butter shelf

Some say LinkedIn is simply a place to keep your resume or CV online for others to see. Others have realized that there are very useful ways of marketing yourself and/or your business on LinkedIn, using the different applications to your advantage.

Linkedin currently has 150+ million users, a number that’s gone up by the time you read this. When you Google yourself, you often find that your LinkedIn profile comes up as one of the top search results. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool that most of us should be using, not just recruiters and job seekers.

Whilst most people won’t need to market themselves on LinkedIn every day, it’s certainly useful to know a few tricks to try out for yourself. Here are 5 ways to promote yourself on LinkedIn:

1. Doing up your profile properly

Granted, this one’s probably not a killer tip but having the right profile on LinkedIn is vital to your success. Just like people check out your blog, site or resume, you can bet your bottom dollar they will scrutinize your LinkedIn profile with a fine tooth comb.

First of all, your profile needs to reflect all your other online communications. This mean it should stay congruent with your Twitter profile or bio on your company website. If the LinkedIn profile is different to other places, the reader might think something’s afoot – like you have doctored your presence to get a new client, a higher salary or just to attract more followers.

Here is a fine example from Chris Brogan, a guy that has his fingers in many pies but somehow manages do pull it all together on his profile:

Be sure to make the profile compelling enough for people to want to contact you. Shift the focus from yourself to what you can do for others. Think about your personal brand statement and how it can benefit a potential customer, employer or investor.

Let go of the past and instead write about what you are doing at the moment and what we can look forward to. Please don’t fill your summary section with snippets of what you have done in your career – tell us what you are chomping at the bits to do next. Just like a resume shouldn’t read like a job specification, your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t resemble an autobiography.

Finally, make sure you get the right keywords in there as well so that you are found in the first place, see more at How to Make Google Love Your LinkedIn Profile.

2. Importing your blog’s RSS feed

Assuming you have a blog already, you can import this blog feed into your LinkedIn profile so that your network can read your updates as you publish them. Don’t have a blog? Import the blog feed of your company blog or even an industry blog that you hold in high regard.

By having your network reading your blog posts, you are extending the reach of your content and you showcase your expertise to a very relevant audience.

The idea here is obviously that of Homebase and Outposts, you create great content on your blog and you use LinkedIn as an outpost for people to spot your updates.

You can either use the WordPress application or BlogLink which can import feeds from any platform. All you need is the URL of your blog’s RSS feed, which you typically get when you press the orange RSS button.

3. Creating Events and inviting people

The Events application on LinkedIn is a hidden gem. Let’s say you are putting on a networking evening in your city and you already have the details for this – all you have to do is create an Event on LinkedIn and fill in the details.

This will typically mean copying and pasting from your existing event description on Meetup or Eventbrite, it will only take you a minute but the results can be astonishing.

Once you have created the event, your entire network will get this update on their homefeed and they can click and check out the event. If they in turn click that they will be attending, their networks will be pinged as well and your event is now spreading like wildfire on LinkedIn.

If you want to be more proactive than this, you can click Share and send the event to any of your contacts as an email. I typically categorize my contacts, making sure I only send a London event to people who are based in the London region (anything else would be mis-targeting… lesson learned the hard way!).

4. Joining and being active in the right Groups

There are thousands of groups on LinkedIn and they can best be described as discussion forums and places where you share news with like-minded people. A lot of discussions you would see on an industry forum a few years back have now been teleported to LinkedIn.

Question – How many LinkedIn Groups have you joined? Did you ever check back to engage with other group members? Most of us join groups that are suggested by someone’s email and then never go back to visit, let alone participate in discussions.

Being in a group has several benefits; you can contact anyone in the group directly for starters. You are able to post new discussion threads and reply to current ones, which in turn will raise your profile and probably render you more useful connections over time.

The best way to approach the groups is to review which ones you are a member of already. Are they all related to your profession or interests? Do they have more than 1,000 members (anything less will have few conversations going)? I would suggest you clean out the groups which are not relevant to your career or business success.

There is a handy groups directory where you can search for your keywords, a simple search for “Social Media” generates 3,817 results and plenty of large and regional groups to join. To narrow down the results, just punch in more keywords as you would on Google.

5. Getting recommended

People will do business with those they know, like and trust – or so the cliché goes at least. On LinkedIn, you will get to know other users, you might even get them to like you as well by sharing information and helping out in groups for instance.

The trust bit is trickier, how can you trust someone you have never met in person? Well, in any offline situation you will ask for other people’s opinion – the good news is that LinkedIn has this all sorted out.

One of the strongest features of LinkedIn is the recommendation engine. Whereas you would have recommendations on your website, brochure or resume back in the day, the recommendations are now in the public domain and any potential customer or employer can check them out.

Not only can they read the recommendation and see whom it’s from, they can also click through and check out the referee’s profile (and in turn their recommendations) to make sure it’s legit.

This means you probably want to get cracking on getting at least ten good recommendations that will impress your profile visitors. You would typically get a few from old colleagues, old bosses and old clients – it’s important to get a balanced mix of referees. See more at How to Get More LinkedIn Recommendations.

Your turn

That’s my five tips for today, hope these ways help you achieve results on LinkedIn and do let me know if you have questions at all.

Your turn now to tell me what other clever ways are working for you on LinkedIn?

photo by: mariosundar

How I’m Tweaking My Blogging Strategies This Year