Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners

LinkedIn Profile Mini-Audit with Sybil Stewart Ep 127

• Brenda Meller • Season 1 • Episode 127

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Are you a solopreneur, business professional, or solopreneur looking to get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn Pie? Watch this LinkedIn profile mini-audit of Sybil Stewart. https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesagestewart/

TIPS we covered include:

▪️  Being intentional with your marketing message in your LinkedIn Header Image and changing the message periodically

▪️ Having a zoomed-in Headshot Photo, where your face is 50-60% of the circle

▪️ Suggested LinkedIn Headline updates, including the use of emojis

▪️ And more! 

Want a LinkedIn profile mini-audit? If you're a coach / consultant / solopreneur, download these 15 LinkedIn Profile tips, and follow the instructions in the final email: https://www.mellermarketing.com/list

LinkedIn "Power Hours" (Single Session, x4, x12)
Each package includes: 

  • LinkedIn consulting / coaching, personalized to your needs and focusing on your questions.
  • Review of LinkedIn profile / company page to provide guidance / advice / recommendations

https://www.mellermarketing.com/powerhour 

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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

Visit mellermarketing.com

Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)

Speaker 1:

Hey, this is Brenda Meller, back again for another LinkedIn Profile Mini Audit, and today I'm joined by Sybil Stewart. Hey, sybil, how are you doing today? Good morning, I am well and you I'm doing great and delighted to have you here. You're a member of Innovation Women and I did a little shout out in our last Speaker Friend Friday call and I said, hey, who wants a Profile Mini Audit as a speaker? And you had emailed me, so I'm delighted to be here today with you as I'm pulling your LinkedIn profile up on screen. Sybil, why don't you take a minute?

Speaker 2:

tell us your name. What do you do and who do you help? Yes, so hello everybody Again. My name is Sybil Stewart. People will tell me I am a brand positioning queen, so I specialize in helping female founders increase their visibility and their cash flow without losing their core.

Speaker 1:

And it sounds like you've rehearsed this and you've got such a great statement when I asked that. So, which is key, because if you're here to help people with marketing themselves and branding themselves, you gotta you gotta be on the ball with that as well. Awesome, so two directions we can take on this session here today. Sybil, do you have specific questions that you're looking for feedback on as it relates to your LinkedIn profile, or would you like some general feedback?

Speaker 2:

I love general feedback. I said, when you need help, you find an expert. So I'm really glad that I can phone an expert.

Speaker 1:

Perfect, all right, so let's jump right on in. So you're working with female founders, and I know you're also a speaker as well. When you're speaking to audiences, are you speaking to groups of female founders or what's the audience that you're speaking to?

Speaker 2:

So I've done a lot of college, university, women's empowerment stages, so helping these girls realize that, regardless of their career choices, they need a personal brand. And then I also do a little bit of corporate speaking as well about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship. So while my core consulting business is specifically geared towards female founders, my voice is for any woman who needs to own her space and her voice.

Speaker 1:

Okay, great. So categorically, we're all in the same bucket, so to speak, which is great. So, okay, I'll give you two pieces of feedback based on the images that are at the top of your profile. We've got your headshot photo and then we've got your brand image behind you, the brand header image. I haven't visited your website yet, but I'm assuming there's some continuity there with colors, fonts, the chest symbol right going in there. So my question for you is how long has it been since you've changed that? Is that a fairly new image or has that been on there for a while? That is probably a week or so old. Oh, wonderful, so you're right on top of it.

Speaker 1:

My feedback was going to be just making sure that you're thinking about changing out that image periodically, even if you're keeping some of the same brand elements, either changing out the messages or the ways they appear, things like that. I always encourage people to look at your profile from the desktop, which is what we're viewing right now, but also pull it up on the LinkedIn mobile app, just to make sure that all of the items that are in your header image at the top are visible. And, specifically, what's the one key message that you want people to walk away with from your brand header image, making sure that that's visible from the desktop as well as from the mobile. Now I noticed you say grab your personal brand audit and then below your headline you've got that link that you use, I love it. It says free your personal brand audit and then, below your headline, you've got that link that you use, I love it it says free brand audit inside.

Speaker 1:

One suggestion I might make in terms of your header is just highlighting grab your free personal brand audit, maybe in a different color. I'm thinking like we've already got white, so maybe it's yellow, or maybe it's red or something. Just to draw my eye in a bit, something to think about. Because then I look at that and I see that you've got a website. There's a link that's below and that could help just to pull that out. In addition, there's a lot of information on here. You've got basically one, two, three, four lines on there. I look at what might not be essential for them to know in the header image, like, for example, brand positioning consultant. That might be something that you could take off of there, and sometimes when we take items off, it just helps to create clarity and give more focal emphasis to everything else. That's on my expression, sybil, is like people are lazy. We just don't like to read a lot, and the less you give us, the more likely we are to read everything. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I was literally counting the words. I'm like struggling to align, I'm like two doesn't count, I don't think.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily the number of words, it's just I kind of look up, look down, look up and I think about how much am I reading? And it's almost like you want to think about this as like a billboard on the side of a highway. You know, you've only got a couple seconds to catch their attention as they drive by. Now, yeah, they're going to be sitting in front of the LinkedIn profile, but again, people are lazy and we're in this day and age of social media and things are being thrown at us so quickly, so we don't sit and ponder and, you know, consume it. We kind of skim. So if you can make it easier to skim on there, all right.

Speaker 1:

Next thing is your headshot photo, a beautiful photo that you have on here. What I recommend with headshot photo is that you make your face from basically the top of your forehead to the bottom of your chin. Your face should be about 50 to 60% of the circle. We really should be seeing just a little glimpse of your neckline on here, and part of the reason I encourage people to do that is that 50 to 70% of our profile views are coming from the LinkedIn mobile app and the other range you know range of individuals who are viewing our headshot photo or seeing it in a really tiny view when they're scrolling through the homepage feed, when you're coming up in search results, when you're posting, you're replying, you're commenting those types of things, and your headshot photo, your head headshot photo and your headline follow you around. So these are really important items.

Speaker 1:

And when you're more zoomed in with your headshot photo, you look more important, more approachable, you know, more engaging, so to speak, and as I'm leaning into the camera, you can see that effect. As I get further back, I feel a little bit more distant to you. So I might just take that photo and zoom it in. Might be a slight modification there. And the good thing is, inside LinkedIn there's a zooming tool so you can click on that and make that adjustment if you'd like. All right, let's see Now your headline is are you an accomplished professional seeking to elevate your personal and professional brand? Do you mainly work with women?

Speaker 2:

99%.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, I'm wondering if, if we could tweak and get the word woman in there. I've toyed with that.

Speaker 2:

So I went from woman in business, I went to female founders and everything felt really heavy until then. Okay, how can I keep pulling, but still give it?

Speaker 1:

So yeah, can I keep pulling but still give it. So yeah, I'll take a recommendation for that one. I think that from you female founders, and right away I'm like, are you an accomplished professional? Which seems like you went from very specific female founders to accomplished professional, which could be anyone that could run the gamut from you, know, not entry level but like experience, all the way up to C-suite in there.

Speaker 1:

The other thing I'd like to see in your headline is you've used it in some places, but not consistently throughout. They refer to it as camel case or headline case, where you capitalize all of the important words. So the A in accomplish, the P in professional, the S in seeking, the E in elevate. You have that in the second half. Brand marketing for experts, brand position, queen, keynote speaker you have all of those first capped, but in the first sentence it's not. So I would first cap that because I feel like it helps to give it a little bit more emphasis. It looks a little bit more important.

Speaker 1:

And the other thing is, as you are posting, as you're commenting, I'm going to go down to your activity feed to illustrate the point I'm making here. That headline, it's about the first line that follows you around. So I want you to be very intentional about what appears in those first 40 to 60 characters in there. And for you, I'd love to see female founder in there. And branding, brand marketing I feel like those are some of your keywords as well. I don't know if that goes in the first line, but I feel like we want something in there that helps me to understand right away in that previewable area, who you're helping and what you're helping them with. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Yep.

Speaker 1:

And we want to think about. The headline can be used to help to bring people back to our profile. So we see it here as you're posting. I'm going to click on your comment button next to see if, when you're commenting on other people's posts, let me see if I can find one in here. So we see your headshot photo and you can see here now when I'm talking about the headshot photo, how far back your face is. If you were to zoom in, we can see you and then the headline appears here as well. So the headline can be used to help to bring people back to your profile and our goal is to get them to come back so they can read the full statement on your headline, but also to scroll down and keep the right people reading longer. But if we need to be very intentional about those first few characters, is that helpful for?

Speaker 2:

you.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely Okay. Great, I do see inside your headline you've got. I love the use of emojis. I might suggest taking that chest symbol emoji and putting it before the A and R. Were you thinking that already?

Speaker 2:

I was like, when you're, you know how somebody else needs to do the thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're like I was thinking that in the back of my mind, but until somebody and I think you could start using that chess symbol. I don't know if you do this already in your post, but you know that word strategy and you know that that chess symbol I think you could use it and start to create you know I probably as part of your personal brand already and your website and other places, but use it more intentionally in your posts and things like that. The other thing is inside your headline. I see that you've used it's probably like one of those text formatting tools, because brand marketing for experts is bolded. You may be aware of this, so I might be telling you something I already know.

Speaker 1:

But when you use bolded characters in headline fields or in your about statement on LinkedIn, linkedin won't read those as words. They read them as characters, as images. So essentially that comes out of search results. Now you've got brand positioning queen in another part in your headline, but if you want to come up in searches for brand marketing, it's the trade-off here, sybil, because I like that. It's bolded, it draws my eye as a human being, but you're losing the algorithm, the SEO search results with that. So if it were me personally, I probably wouldn't brand it inside the headline or bold it rather inside the headline. But use bolding other places in your about statement and other places. But do be conscientious about the fact that when you bold it, those are now characters or symbols. They don't come up in search results, so just make sure that you're repeating them in paragraph format or in bulleted list in other areas. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Got it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, cool, all right, awesome. Let me see if there's anything else. Okay, I noticed right at the top on your right-hand side of your profile where it says University of Alabama at Birmingham and there's not a company page that's listed. Is that intentional? Do you have a business? Yeah, it's there, so it looks like probably. What has happened is you added in and congratulations, by the way, on being a TEDx organizer. What city are you affiliated with? This is Durham, north Carolina.

Speaker 1:

What I would probably do if I were you is move the Sage Stewart, your company, up to the first position. So, from your view, when you go into experience, there'll be a gray pencil icon and then there'll be an up down carrot and you can drag and move around your current experiences. So any that are currently open, you can move around in there. So move that up to the first position. And then the next thing you'll want to do actually, I'm going to pull up my profiles. I'm showing you this other technique is I want you to go to your top header card and there's a section in there where you have to enable your experience to show so that it appears at the top of your profile. Let me pull mine over on screen here first so I can show you what I'm referring to here we go.

Speaker 1:

Ok, so mine. It has my company, mellor Marketing, in the top right-hand side and below that is an education you know, most recent or the selected education. When you click on this gray pencil icon at the top of your profile, scroll down to where it says current position, you have to make sure it says show current company in my intro and it has to be the one that's in the top position on there. School, same thing. So you probably have school checked, but for some reason and it might've been accidental, sybil you might've been scrolling through and you accidentally unchecked it.

Speaker 1:

And I always tell people LinkedIn is confusing and it's not a perfect science, unfortunately, and that's why I have a business, because LinkedIn is confusing and all these little quicksand things happen and you might not even know how did I even set that up or how do I enable that button, how do I get that in there? So by having that at the top, then it helps to create that brand continuity to your business name and also could drive some people to visit your business page in there. Okay, is this helpful for you so far? That is awesome.

Speaker 1:

Thank you All right, awesome. Let me just scroll through and see if there's anything else that's capturing my attention in here. I've got some good use of featured. It looks like you're posting pretty regularly, I see, and I don't know if these were within the same time period. I see three days ago, three days ago. Keep in mind that within LinkedIn there's an algorithm penalty that occurs if you post too closely together, so more than 18 hours apart would be you get a penalty for both of those posts. It might've been this was like late the night before and this was the next morning, but I just want to make sure that you're aware of that. I usually tell people you know you should be posting at minimum once a week, working up to no more than once every business day. But just so you're aware, because some people aren't aware of that feature that's in there. And then, with the TEDx, do you know if TEDx Raleigh Durham has its own company page on LinkedIn yet?

Speaker 2:

So there's TEDx Raleigh. Yeah, let's just say we all have our own ones. There's about four or five organizers here, and each of ours would name something different.

Speaker 1:

So my question is could you link it to a page so we can get rid of that box with the blue boxes in it and get the TEDx logo there instead? So if there's a local page for the group that you are an organizer with, link it there. If there's a local page for the group that you are an organizer with, link it there. If not and you have the ability to do so, create one and get all the other board members and organizers to link it to their profile. And if everyone says no, we don't want to do that because then we have to keep up with posting and all these other things then link it to the national TEDx page. Okay, right, so there's a couple options, but do make sure you get that move to second position, cause we want to make sure that you're giving your business kind of the highlight inside there. All right, all right, I'm going to pause here. I just want to see what's this helpful for you today?

Speaker 2:

Oh, my goodness, so it's. It's why I'm not a LinkedIn expert. I tell people I know LinkedIn, but I am not a LinkedIn expert.

Speaker 1:

Those small details that I know to do, but, I right, you got to follow your own thing, so this was extremely helpful. Well, thank you for the opportunity. I always like getting the opportunity to talk to new people and kind of give their profiles a once over, and this is what I do for a living. I look at profiles all the time, so for me it's like it's easy to see you know minor tweet and your profile. I want us to let you know it's not bad at all. It's a good looking profile. So my goal with these mini audits is just to dial it up for you a bit and help to enhance and see what you don't see and maybe to give you some suggestions as well. So thank you again for joining me today. Sybil, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful and for our audience. I want to ask Sybil are you open to connection? So if people are visiting your profile after watching the YouTube video or listening to you on the podcast, are you open to connecting with them?

Speaker 1:

Oh absolutely yes, and I should just read that URL off before we pop off the LinkedIn screen here. So if you go to LinkedIncom slash in slash the Sage Stewart, that's T-H-E-S-A-G-E-S-T-E-W-A-R-T, and mention that you heard Sybil here on the LinkedIn mini audit with Brenda Meller. I know she'll be willing to accept you and, by the way, if you're interested in getting a LinkedIn profile mini audit, please go to MellerMarketingcom slash list and you can download my tips sheet of 15 profile tips for coaches and consultants. You'll get a couple of emails from me. The last email you'll get will have that opportunity to book your LinkedIn profile mini audit. With that said, hope you find this helpful and have a wonderful day.

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