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Whether you are a sales rep, a consultant or a professional on the lookout for your next venture, LinkedIn is the place to connect with the right people. A comprehensive and regularly updated LinkedIn portfolio goes a long way in attracting future employers or clients.
When scouting for fresh talent, advisors, coaches, consultants and sales reps scan countless profiles to shortlist leads.
While uploading a clean and professional resumé is important, ensuring your LinkedIn profile is active and updated is equally vital. After all, active LinkedIn profiles receive five times more page views than inactive ones!
LinkedIn lets you post professional updates and samples of your work to its “Featured” section. You can use this section to update your followers about what you’re working on and upload a portfolio of relevant work samples & previous accomplishments to show off your skills and experience. This is invaluable if you are trying to find potential clients for your business.
In this article, we will look at why you should consider using LinkedIn to showcase your portfolio and how to add a portfolio to LinkedIn to increase sales!
First, let’s understand what a LinkedIn portfolio is and how it differs from a resumé and how the core part of a LinkedIn profile functions as a resumé.
Essentially, if a resumé tells people about your professional life, a portfolio shows them. For example, if you create content to demonstrate your expertise in your field, your portfolio will feature on your LinkedIn profile in a thumbnail-carousel format as articles you’ve written that prospective leads can find to learn about your reputation.
A resumé simply mentions any publications or companies that have published your content in a line-item format, with optional, secondary messaging to describe or reference the content itself.
Using LinkedIn to create a profile that hosts all the relevant information a potential client might find valuable can have several advantages. For example, you won’t have to attach a separate link for prospects to check out content that shows off your work. LinkedIn becomes the one-stop shop for leads to find out all about you.
There are many advantages to using LinkedIn to show off all your skills and achievements. Here are benefits of using LinkedIn as an online portfolio:
Featured content also helps generate social proof for your profile so you can show off your reputation and generate more leads from a strong LinkedIn brand.
Featured content on LinkedIn is a section on LinkedIn profiles to showcase posts and media content in a carousel-like format.
Let’s clear the air: a LinkedIn portfolio refers to the Featured section on LinkedIn profiles. Portfolio items are essentially the content you add to the Featured section.
The Featured section displays above your profile’s Activity section.
What type of featured content or portfolio items can you add? You can feature LinkedIn posts or articles you’ve written or shared, plus third-party media like images, documents and webpage links.
Media formats can include .jpg/.jpeg, .png and GIF.
Let’s look at some professional portfolio examples from LinkedIn influencers.
Sam Dunning created his LinkedIn portfolio by adding three external links to his Featured section to promote his business activities: his agency’s website, his podcast and his ebook for download.
And Morgan J. Ingram exhibits as his LinkedIn portfolio two high-performing LinkedIn posts with thumbnail images included plus a subscription link for his newsletter.
Social proof is anything that proves to people you are credible and competent at what you do. Adding samples of your work, achievements, recommendations, testimonials and certifications will add to your advantage by lending your voice an edge of integrity and trustworthiness.
By displaying social proof on your LinkedIn profile, you can leverage social selling.
Those looking to network with prospects will find that LinkedIn presents several opportunities to convert personalized interactions into sales. This is called social selling.
By adding relevant portfolio content to your Featured section on LinkedIn, you can attract your target audience to convert into sales.
Now that we know that using LinkedIn for your portfolio creates invaluable advantages for your professional life, let’s look at how you can build your portfolio on LinkedIn.
Here are the steps on how to add a portfolio to LinkedIn:
That’s it, that’s all you have to do to create an online portfolio on LinkedIn! Pretty simple, right?
How do you choose what content to add to your portfolio? We can help you curate the right content for your LinkedIn portfolio. Broadly, you should focus on highlighting these three categories:
Getting your profile in front of the right audience is not always easy. Luckily, with LinkedIn marketing software, you can leverage an intelligent prospecting dashboard with artificial intelligence to optimize your lead generation on LinkedIn.
Updating your LinkedIn portfolio helps with social selling so you can develop a great online reputation and boost your LinkedIn-prospecting success rates to win more sales!