Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners
Enthusiastically Self-Employed is designed for you if you’re self-employed as a coach, consultant, speaker, author, solopreneur, or small business owner. Listen in for business, marketing, and LinkedIn tips, sprinkled in with stories along the way.
Listen to Enthusiastically Self-Employed for education and insights to help you to be successful and support the love you have of your business, while also supporting your bottom line. That means growing your revenue, reducing your expenses, and optimizing your processes.
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Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners
Are You A Speaker? Listen to this LinkedIn Profile Mini Audit of Nancie Steinberg Ep 144
Are You A Speaker? Watch this LinkedIn Profile Mini Audit of Nancie Steinberg
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanciesteinberg/
Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VjQQzChK7bI?si=lcLUiKsLaqibDLkE?sub_confirmation=1
Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile for Speaking Engagements
HEADLINE:
✅ Include the word "speaker" prominently.
✅Consider the most important keywords you want your target audience to see.
✅Prioritize "speaker" based on your goals.
SKILLS Section:
✅Add "speaker" or "public speaker" as a top skill.
✅Rank skills based on importance.
ABOUT Statement:
✅ Clearly state that you are open to speaking engagements.
✅ List your areas of expertise.
✅ Provide a bulleted list of sample talk topics.
✅Include a call to action directing people to your speaking information.
PROFILE PHOTO:
✅ Ensure a professional and engaging headshot.
HEADER Image:
✅ Use branding elements consistent with your consulting business.
✅ The message should work for both speaking and consulting roles.
ADDITIONAL TIPS:
✅ Utilize AI tools to generate talk topic ideas.
✅ Consider creating a dedicated speaker webpage on your website or platform like Innovation Women.
✅ Leverage podcast interviews or virtual meetings as opportunities to showcase your speaking abilities.
These tips will help you effectively position yourself as a sought-after speaker and attract more speaking opportunities via your LinkedIn profile and activities.
FREE CHECKLIST
LinkedIn for Speakers Checklist
https://www.mellermarketing.com/linkedin-for-speakers
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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
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Hey, it's Brenda Meller. I'm back again for another LinkedIn Profile Mini Audit, and this is to help support your speaking business, and today I'm joined by Nancy Steinberg. Hey, Nancy, how are you doing today? Good, how are you? I'm doing great, thank you, and I'm gonna pull up your LinkedIn profile as I'm doing that. Nancy, I wanna just ask the question if you could tell us your name and what are the topics that you'd like to be booked to speak about.
Speaker 2:Okay, nancy Steinberg, from New York City. I'm an expert in media relations, so that's an area that I'm interested in speaking about under the umbrella of communications.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, okay, and do you have any specific questions that I can cover for you in today's mini audit, or are you just open to some general feedback?
Speaker 2:Okay, a little bit of both. My one question would be the best way to maybe introduce that on my LinkedIn profile. My LinkedIn profile right now focuses on me being a consultant and working with biotech, pharma, healthcare companies, and I haven't really opened the door to being open to speaking, if that makes any sense. So I would love to hear your thoughts. I imagine you're gonna say in the about section I'm open to hearing your advice.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. The good thing is, nancy and I have worked with each other in the past, so she's like I don't know what to say in some of these areas. She knows some of the LinkedIn advice we'll have to offer and, generally speaking, what I will say to you and to our audience as well, nancy, is, if you want to be booked as a speaker, you've got to make it easy for people to know that you are a speaker, that you're speaking, that you're looking at getting more speaking opportunities booked and then what do you speak about and how can they learn more about booking you as a speaker or see some examples of your work or website or things like that? So we want to have some type of a call to action is what I'm looking for there. So what I look at right now in your profile and I will let you know that consultants and speakers are not too far off of the same path it's really easy to open that door to becoming a speaker as a consultant, because consultants have expertise to share. You usually do that in a one-to-one or a group format. Speaking is the same thing. You're sharing expertise. The difference is you're sharing it from the stage, whether an in-person stage or a virtual stage, so it's one-to-many. So little things that you can do to start to open that door to getting booked as a speaker. One thing would be someplace in your headline add the word speaker, just the word speaker in there. And sometimes I work with individuals, nancy, that haven't been booked for client engagement speaking at or speaking at a conference yet, but you have been a speaker in a podcast interview, you have been a speaker in a virtual Zoom room or a Zoom meeting or things like that, so you have held that role of a speaker in those sessions.
Speaker 1:I think we're fine with taking liberties and using the term speaker someplace in our headline. What I want you to think about is you get 220 characters in total in your headline, so think about if you were to list everything like one through eight or however many keywords you have. What's the top thing that you want your ideal target audience to know about you? What's the next thing? What's the next thing? What's top of the list, lower on the list, and think about where does your priority of being a speaker fall in that list of items. I might say maybe it's like second or third position, someplace at the top end of your profile at the beginning of your headline here rather than at the end. But you might say yeah, I really want it to be more of like an afterthought, like a secondary or a third element in that case, and you could certainly put it at the end of your headline, but someplace in your headline you should have the word speaker. How does that feel, nancy?
Speaker 2:That sounds good and I that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, all right. So, since the next thing is since you alluded to about, let's move down to the about statement next and we'll get into the paragraph in just a second here. But one thing I want to point out is this top skills section. This was something that LinkedIn launched about a year or so back, where now they give us the ability to mark what we want to be known for as our top skills. Now, if I were you, I might think about changing out one of those top skills to be speaker. Now I know that in working with media relations, public relations, you are a speaker. You are speaking in front of groups. I've seen you speaking in front of groups, so I know that should be. It feels natural to see that as one of your top skills. So I might think about again rank ordering. What's the first, most important thing? Maybe it is media relations, your area of expertise. Maybe speaker is someplace in the middle or towards the end of the list, but let's add the word speaker or public speaker someplace in there, so that's an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1:The next thing is in your about statement. So someplace inside here thing is in your about statement, so someplace inside here you should say detail your speaking business and let people know I'm open to speaking at conferences and events. My areas of expertise are media relations and public relations. A few of my sample talks could be and then maybe give a bulleted list of three talk topics and I'm going to give you an example of. I don't know if you're using AI in any of those tools nowadays, nancy, but I use Gemini and I might take like a topic. I might say create three topics for me that are about LinkedIn, for business development, for media relations professionals, and come up with really clever titles and let Gemini work its thing and come up with three. And you might go. These are cool. You might tweak some words in there, but if you're struggling with coming up with the top topics, just give them category descriptions of who you're marketing to and let your favorite AI tool come up with that. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that. That's very good. That's very helpful.
Speaker 1:Someplace in your about statement as well. I want you to think about what's the call to action if people want to book you as a speaker. Now, at the top of your profile you have an email address and a phone number If there's a separate place that people can go to look at your information of being a speaker. For example, you and I are both members of Innovation Women. I believe you're still a member there, right? I think I've got my membership there too.
Speaker 1:So, as a part of the Innovation Women community, there is an online speaker directory where you can create a speaker webpage. So even if you do not have a webpage on your website yet about your speaking business, you have a webpage that's public in the Innovation Women directory so you could redirect people from your about statement. You can say to learn more about my speaking expertise, visit and then put that page link. Now you're gonna notice there's no clickable links inside the about statement. In some versions of the LinkedIn mobile app, those links will be clickable, but even if they're not, nancy, someone could highlight, copy it and then open the tab in a new window so they can certainly have the means to visit you on there. How does that feel for you Makes?
Speaker 2:sense.
Speaker 1:That's an easy thing that you can do, and you're about same as just weaving in the mention of you as a speaker. Now, the good thing is, you've got a great headshot photo already, nancy. You've got a LinkedIn header that is using some elements of your brand your colors, your fonts, things like that and I think the message you have in your header image works as a speaker and it works as a consultant. Would you agree with that? I do agree. Yeah, wonderful. Okay, good, I'll stop our mini edit at this point, nancy, and I just want to encourage you to start working on those profile updates, making it easy for people to learn more about booking you as a speaker, to summarize for them the types of topics that you do, and to make sure that you're sprinkling that word speaker throughout your profile as well. I want to say thank you, nancy, so much for joining me today. Did you find this helpful?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. You gave me action items I can implement immediately. So that's great. I appreciate it, brenda.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you and, for those that are watching the video or maybe listening to this on the podcast later, if you're interested in a speaker profile mini audit, you can email me at brenda at mellormarketingcom and just use the subject line speaker profile mini audit and I'll give you instructions on how to get that scheduled. With that said, have a wonderful day and I look forward to seeing all of you on LinkedIn.
