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

LinkedIn Profile Mini-Audit for Coach / Consultant: Angie Cox Ep 148

• Brenda Meller • Season 1 • Episode 148

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Here are the key LinkedIn tips I shared with Angie Cox: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelacoxmsn/ during this LinkedIn profile mini-audit.

✅ Brand Consistency: Ensure your LinkedIn profile aligns with your website's branding, including colors, fonts, and imagery.

✅  Regular Profile Updates: Update your header image at least once a year to keep your profile fresh and engaging.

✅  Optimize Your Contact Information: Use the website section to direct visitors to your most important online destinations, such as your personal website, LinkedIn newsletter, and a community you're building.

✅  Craft a Compelling About Section: Prioritize your primary audience and highlight common themes between your different roles.

✅  Prioritize Content Creation: Develop a content calendar and brainstorm ideas to simplify the process of creating regular LinkedIn posts.

✅  Leverage Your Employer's Platform: Share relevant content from your company's LinkedIn page to save time and increase visibility.

✅  Network Strategically: Be open to connecting with others on LinkedIn and mention that you were referred by me.

✅  By implementing these tips, Angie can further enhance her LinkedIn profile and attract more potential clients and collaborators.

Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/N4-wCftnkI0

Download my FREE checklist of 15 LinkedIn profile tips for Coaches and Consultants at https://www.mellermarketing.com/thelist

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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 today for a LinkedIn profile mini audit, and today's very special guest is Angie Cox. Hey, angie, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing great, Brenda. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for being on. I'm going to go ahead and get your profile shared on screen here, angie, and as I'm doing so, could you tell us a little bit about you? So tell us your name. What do you do and who do you help?

Speaker 2:

So a little bit about you. So tell us your name. What do you do and who do you help? So I am Angie Cox. I am a clinical unicorn that translates clinical ease to med tech and health tech professionals that are trying to break out into the healthcare realm.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so break out into the healthcare realm. So does that mean expanding beyond being in the practice to doing something on their own? Or tell me a little bit more about what that means.

Speaker 2:

Oftentimes healthcare can be really difficult to break into, especially if your background's more technology driven or business driven and things of that nature. So a lot of folks come to me because they honestly don't know how to get in. Once they're in, they then have a little bit more difficulty understanding exactly what is needed in the clinical space and communicating with the clinical side of things, whether it's doctors, cnos, chief nursing officer, your chief medical officer, all of your clinical leadership and things of that nature that are really trying diligently to explain what they need, and I'm the one who gives them the realistic stories to help them kind of pinpoint exactly why they're there and what they can do to help.

Speaker 1:

Okay, great. So it sounds like you're speaking to people who would be in a leadership role within the healthcare realm. Is that correct? Yes, okay, wonderful. And do you have any specific questions about your profile, your page, your activity on LinkedIn, or are you just open to some general pointers?

Speaker 2:

A few questions, but go ahead with general pointers and then I'll put my questions in where I see fit.

Speaker 1:

Okay, sounds good, okay. So, first thing, you've got at the top of your profile really great headshot photo and then the banner image that you have in the background. I'm curious if I were to click off of your profile and go to your website. Is there similar imagery, colors, fonts, things from your header that are on your website?

Speaker 2:

Colors and fonts yes. Imagery no.

Speaker 1:

So that might be something to think about, especially if I'm not sure if this header image has it been on your profile for a while or is this a fairly new image?

Speaker 2:

It's a few months old.

Speaker 1:

Okay and few months old is not old at all. I look at if you've updated at least once in the past year. You're in good shape. But what I like as a marketer is to see some brand continuity. So if I were to leave your profile and go to your website, I want to see some brand imagery or some brand continuity. It gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling like this is a fully baked business and, yep, I'm in the right place within there.

Speaker 1:

So that might be when you're ready to do another header image update, which, again, at least once a year but you can certainly update it more frequently twice a year, quarterly or even monthly Might be something to consider. And I always think, angie, about your header image is like a billboard on the side of a highway and your profile visitors are like cars driving by, and we know that cars will drive by the same billboard multiple times In LinkedIn. We know that people will come back to your profile again and again, especially if you're posting regularly, if you're commenting regularly and maybe someone's been here before and they they come back and there's a new image, an updated image inside the header and that might capture their attention and speak to them. What do you think about that?

Speaker 2:

No, I love that.

Speaker 1:

I love consistency, so I try to be consistent across all boards, okay great and you're a member of my recipe program, so for someone like Angie, it's a little bit more challenging for me because she's followed so much of my advice already. In terms of her name, field has really great designations in here. Her headline has a lot of the elements that we've already spoken about. Speaking to key messages for your ideal target audience, I'm going to click on contact info just to see what's inside here. You're using the three websites in here, so you've got NautilusSolutionsMecom. Is your website? The second link it looks like it's for your LinkedIn newsletter. Is that correct? Yes, wonderful, nice, creative use of that space in there. And then tell me about the third link that's in there HealingHeartsHubcom.

Speaker 2:

That is still developing, but, in honesty, it's truly to be more sensitive about elevating our healthcare employee experience, and so I want to offer a sounding board that's not connected with any or facilitated with any other hospital out there, so it's a safe place for them to come. So it's slowly turning into a community of healthcare professionals.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful, okay, so what I look at is inside the website section. I want you to keep in mind that the only people who are really going to see this are your first level connections. So I like to think about what are the three places you want to send people next after they visit your profile, as it relates to your business goals. So would you agree that those are the right three places?

Speaker 2:

Yes, Okay perfect, good.

Speaker 1:

So again, intentionality is all in place here. Because she's a member of the recipe, she's already doing a lot of the work. This is a little bit more challenging to think about. What else could I give you inside here? Let me just scroll down and see if there's anything else that is capturing my attention. If not, I think we might shift to you and to your questions. Yeah, nothing's really jumping out at me as I'm scrolling through. It looks like it's in pretty good shape here, angie, so why don't we take some of your questions? Would that be okay?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. In the recipe program you have these checklists, which are wonderful, and I have been going through the checklist. So on the first part of the checklist I noticed that creator mode. Is that something that's still going on? Do we still have creator mode? Does it exist anymore, or was it something old?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a great catch and I'll go back through to make sure that the checklist links are now updated, because creator mode has been retired. I think it was actually earlier this year that LinkedIn made that decision to discontinue creator mode as a setting per se, but a lot of the features that they gave access to within creator mode are still on LinkedIn. So, for example, when you turned on creator mode, the follow button became your default. That still exists, so if you turned it on, it's still set up that way, and they also give you access to some of the other LinkedIn services and solutions LinkedIn Live, linkedin Audio Events, etc. By the way, audio is being retired soon as well, and they also gave us the ability to add hashtags at the top of our profile. That no longer exists as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you've got a copy of a checklist that I haven't updated yet. I'll double back through that, but you are correct in that creator mode was something that LinkedIn used to have, but, yes, it has been retired.

Speaker 2:

Okay, great. Now. Something a little bit unusual about me is, even though I am an independent consultant in my own business, I also have a part-time job on the side. So you see in Trova listed there in my section, yes, and then you'll see it in my about section as well, and I wanted to see if that makes sense.

Speaker 1:

Okay, are they aware at in Trova that you have your own business as well on the side? So there's no, no need to hide it. I sometimes I have people that will work a side hustle or we used to call it moonlighting or something on the side in the weekends and things like that. As long as there's not a conflict of interest to show it on your profile, what I always recommend is that you speak to your primary audience first, which may have some overlap in both groups, but sometimes the primary audience in your case might be for your own business and your secondary audience might be for the part-time employment that you hold on there, or it might be reverse order. So I want you to think about which is your top priority. Is it Nautilus Solutions or is it Entrova, would you say?

Speaker 2:

It's a difficult call just because both of them are revenue streams that I'm currently hoping to continue on. In the perfect world, I would want a full-time position within Trovo with Nautilus on the side as another revenue stream, and then Healing Hearts Hub as a membership, with another revenue stream. So I'm really trying to build my brand out and expand my reach for sure. So it depends on the day and the time and what's going on. If I'm currently promoting for Nautilus Solutions, then Nautilus would definitely be in the forefront.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

So what I might suggest and let me just click to refresh your profile and we'll look at your about in the collapsed view is in the first four lines, what I would do is think about the common denominators or the things that are the same about Nautilus and Entroba and, in the first four sentences, describe that.

Speaker 1:

So it might be on a broad level, I help clients and team members to achieve their business goals, support their healthcare journey, and I'm just making this up as I go along. So talk about the things that are common themes with all of the audiences that you serve, both as an employee and also as being self-employed. So that might be the first paragraph and then the second paragraph. If you're on the fence about it, I would say let's put the employer, even if it's a part-time employee, let's put the employer second, because you can't go wrong with that approach, especially if your hope might be to move into a full-time role with that organization, and then put Nautilus in the third position. So I think what you've got there is a great starting point. I might just suggest adding in an intro paragraph what do you think about that?

Speaker 2:

No, that's great, and the intro paragraph is the paragraph about the common commonalities between the two. Exactly, exactly, awesome. I was writing that down too, you're welcome.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Any other questions before we wrap up for today?

Speaker 2:

Not really. Linkedin is definitely something I have been engaging on and working on for quite some time. The one great thing about your program is it actually helped me, encouraged me, to remember to post more often. So I'm trying to do a post every Monday for Monday motivation, and then Wednesday when and those are different just to keep me posting but then finding the right things to post. Do you have an idea of how long should you spend creating and crafting your post? I could get lost in this and spend hours and I just don't have hours to spend.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would say I don't want you spending hours creating a post. I think it depends on the individual. If you're resharing an article like maybe you find an industry article that talks about motivation in the last two months of the year, for example, and you're resharing that, it may not take you more than five or 10 minutes. You click on the share link, you add in some setup text and you click on publish. As opposed to if you're creating like a custom video. It might take you a little bit longer because you're doing some editing, creating a thumbnail, things that go along with it. But I don't want the time commitment to be a hurdle. So if I were you, what I would do is if in Trova, are they active on LinkedIn? Do they publish posts from their company page?

Speaker 2:

I believe they do Okay.

Speaker 1:

So I might suggest, like once a month, and if you're posting on average twice a week, so let's just say in a month there's four weeks, a total of eight posts.

Speaker 1:

Let's say that one of those posts you do a repost with your thoughts from your company page that helps to support your employer. You don't have to find the content it's already something that's published out there and republish that out. And then for the other posts, what I might do if I were you, angie, is just spend an hour when you have some free time and just brainstorm different ideas of things that you could post, because I feel, from what I hear from many of my clients, is the biggest struggle is coming up with what to post. And then, once we have those ideas, it doesn't take as long to maybe knock something out, whether it's just text or a graphic that we create in Canva, or finding a favorite inspirational quote from a Google search or an industry article, things like that. But if you have like a list of ideas to pull from, I think that can help with reducing the time it takes to publish posts. Does that help you?

Speaker 2:

Yes, I think your social media calendar idea, too, would probably help a lot with that.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely yeah, and Angie's referencing inside the recipe. We've got a content calendar bonus which kind of walks you through planning and brainstorming and coming up with different ideas. But yeah, certainly that could be a good guide for you going through that.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful, I just need to schedule it and get it done.

Speaker 1:

There you go as we wrap up our time together today. Angie, I want to ask the question are you open to individuals who either are watching this on YouTube or listening to it on the podcast later? Are you open to them inviting you to connect?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Just please mention that, Brenda, and that you saw the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful and I'll just read it off for those that are listening on the podcast. You'll go to linkedincom, slash in slash, angela Cox, msn. And I will put the link in show notes if you're interested in checking that out. Let me just stop the screen share here and I just want to say thank you again, angie, for your time today and looking forward to continuing to watch your progress on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, brenda. Have a great day. You too, take care.

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