How to Leverage LinkedIn to Build Your Brand with Donna Serdula

The Idea Climbing Podcast

LinkedIn is only a powerful tool if you know how to use it. My guest Donna Serdula and I discuss LinkedIn branding strategies in this episode.

Donna has almost 20 years of experience on LinkedIn. She is the founder and president of Vision Board Media, a professional branding company that helps individuals and companies tell their unique stories on LinkedIn and beyond.

Getting Started

Donna’s relationship with LinkedIn started in 2005. A colleague of Donna’s asked if she had heard of LinkedIn and said “You should join, you will get a lot of opportunities. Things just drop in your lap; you’ve got to sign up for it!” When she signed up, she saw that her profile looked like a resume. So, she copied and pasted her very dry, dull, out of date resume. She thought “Ok, opportunity, hit me! I can’t wait to see what happens here!”. Then nothing happened. It seemed like a huge waste of time.

She continued with her professional life and didn’t think much more of that LinkedIn profile for quite some time. She accepted another job, no thanks to LinkedIn. She found herself in a much more cutthroat sales type of environment. She was dialing for dollars; she was cold calling. Suddenly LinkedIn started to cross her path again. She was using it to enhance her cold calling, she wanted to learn about the people were that she was calling before she spoke with them.

One day she had an epiphany; she thought about all these people and every time she looked at their profiles, she was disappointed. She wanted to learn more about their story. Then it hit her, how was she showing up? She Googled herself and her LinkedIn profile was the first thing to pop up. She realized by lack of caring and lack of activity she was doing the same thing all the other people were doing – nothing.

That’s when she realized that your LinkedIn profile isn’t your resume. It’s much bigger than that, it’s your online presence, often your first impression, and your brand.

A BIG Shift in Thinking and Results…

Donna contemplated how she wanted to be perceived and what goals she was striving to achieve. She looked at LinkedIn strategically. She created a new profile that was much more aligned with her desired personal brand. As soon as she did that amazing results started to happen. She became a magnet for opportunities. People were searching for someone like her, and she was popping up in the search results. People were seeing her as someone in their industry that is a thought leader and cares about other people in her industry.

That’s when she realized she wanted to help other people do the same thing and get the same branding results. They need help with their resumes, help with their bios, help with strategically using LinkedIn as a networking tool, help with thought leadership assistance and so on.

How to Build Your Brand to Get Opportunities to Come to You

When it comes to LinkedIn certain things have changed, and certain things haven’t changed. When you think of the LinkedIn feed, that has changed massively. The LinkedIn profile hasn’t really changed, it’s still this huge area to really tell your story, to showcase your career trajectory, and it’s a place to get found. Most people forget that LinkedIn is a search engine. A lot of people think LinkedIn is just a professional social network.

Many people on LinkedIn are there looking for someone like you. That’s one place where successful branding strategies begin. What terms do you want to be found for? You need to be peppering those terms throughout your profile, that way you can collide with opportunity.

Many times, Donna finds big mistakes that people make are doing what she had been doing. For example, she was looking for opportunities in sales, but she was aligning herself as a job seeker. Her target audience wasn’t recruiters, it was sales managers and other people in her industry. She overhauled her profile, and the right people started to find her because she was aligning herself with the terms that those people were searching for.

She was on her way!

We also dive into issues such as:

• How to tell the right story on your profile.
• How frequently you should update your profile and why that’s important.
• More ways to build your brand on LinkedIn.
• The foundation of a successful LinkedIn branding strategy.
• How to build and leverage your network on LinkedIn.
• The importance of consistently showing up in the LinkedIn feed and how you should be doing it.
• Tips and tricks to work on your profile in terms of today’s environment.
• The impact of AI and storytelling on the platform.
• Elements involved with telling the right stories to make an impact.
• How to find the balance between sharing personal and professional stories.
• How to build effective and meaningful relationships on LinkedIn instead of just making transactions.
• Recommendations for topics and frequency for effective posting.
• How and when to take relationships off LinkedIn and into “the real world”.
• How to bridge the gap between having conversations and building a business.
• When to start giving and getting referrals for and from the people you connect with.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

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About the Guest

Donna Serdula is the founder and president of Vision Board Media, a professional branding company that helps individuals and companies tell their unique stories on LinkedIn and beyond. Bringing dynamic brand storytelling to the masses and empowering people to dream big – that’s the ink in her pen. It’s her Website, LinkedIn-Makeover.com, where she and her team of over 20 writers and coaches help people collide with opportunity and transform their lives via future-forward career branding.

She has authored two editions of LinkedIn Profile Optimization FOR DUMMIES.

Donna hosts the podcast Dream Big with Big Dreamers.

She’s shared her LinkedIn expertise at global conferences, presented keynotes and workshops, and has been featured in several high-profile news outlets.

Donna’s social links and website:

Website: http://www.linkedin-makeover.com/

Podcast: https://www.dreambigconversations.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todonna

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LinkedInMakeover/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donnaserdula/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/donnaserdula

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/donnaserdula