- Hey everybody, what's going on? It's Patrick Dang here. Now in this video, you're
gonna learn my 10 top tips to optimize the perfect LinkedIn profile. Now, the reason for why
LinkedIn is gonna be incredibly important is because it is the social media
network for business. And your LinkedIn profile is
almost like your online resume or your digital profile that
people are going to look at to get a first impression of you. So for example, if you are
in the market for a new job, people are gonna look
at your LinkedIn profile before they invite you
in for an interview. Or if you're in sales
or business development, if you wanna reach out to people and hopefully do business with them, they're gonna look at
your LinkedIn profile. Or if you're a recruiter, or if you want to network
with like-minded people, the first thing people always do is look at your LinkedIn profile, okay? And so in this video, I'm
gonna show you the top 10 tips to optimize your LinkedIn profile so that when somebody views
your profile for the first time, you're creating a
positive first impression, you're building trust and ultimately you're getting that person to take the next step. Whether that's you getting a job interview or getting a sales meeting
and getting the opportunity to pitch your product or service. So I'm gonna show you the best tips to quickly optimize your profile. Things that you can do right
now and get immediate results. And I've actually used these strategies during my time in
Silicon Valley at Oracle, as well as the different startups, getting meetings with potential customers and getting a lot of job interviews when I was looking for a job and I'm gonna show you the best 10 tips that I found to optimize my profile and I'm gonna show you how you can implement it for yourself. So if you're ready to
dive into the top 10 tips to optimize your LinkedIn profile, go ahead and leave a like on this video because every like does help
this video reach new audiences as it's a new channel. And if you're new to this channel, go ahead and subscribe
and turn on notifications because I'm gonna be releasing sales, training videos every
single week on sales skills, lead generation and LinkedIn. So if you're into that and you
wanna learn more about sales, go ahead and subscribe. So with that said, let's
go ahead and dive into the top 10 tips to optimize
your LinkedIn profile. Now, before you even dive into LinkedIn, tip number 1 is going to
be to define your goals. Now, everyone who is using LinkedIn is using it for a different reason. Some of you guys might
be looking for a job. Some of you guys might be
trying to sell something or recruit or maybe just, you're just trying to network
with like-minded individuals. Regardless of the case, you wanna make sure that you
have a clearly defined goal because it's going to
affect all the other tips that you're gonna learn in this video. So for example, if you're trying to sell
a product or service, you wanna tailor your LinkedIn profile in a way where it's custom made and written for people who are
your ideal customers, right? Because you wanna make sure
that when they look at it, they think, oh, this is someone I trust, this is someone that can bring value. I will take a meeting
with this person, okay? So no matter what your goal is, just make sure you have
a clearly defined goal, because again, that's going
to influence everything else when you are optimizing your profile. Now tip number 2 is going to be, have a clear profile picture. I cannot stress this enough because a lot of people out there are taking selfies or
they're using pictures that don't really make sense
for the LinkedIn platform. So make sure you have
a clear profile picture and let's go ahead and give you an example of how this works. So right now I'm on my LinkedIn
personal account, right? So let's say somebody is
trying to search me up and I'm just, this is just
a random example, right? So they type in Patrick
Dang, which is me, right? They are gonna press enter. So what's gonna happen
is that a bunch of people who are named Patrick
Dang are gonna pop up. And so if someone's searching
for me, they're gonna see, okay, this probably is the
guy that I'm looking for. So the first thing that
you're actually gonna see is this profile picture, you wanna make sure that it's clear. It doesn't necessarily have
to have a blue background like I kind of have it there. It can be maybe a natural
background, maybe some trees, the background doesn't really matter as long as it's not distracting
to your profile picture. And typically what I like to do is I actually like to have a headshot or maybe the torso up, but I wouldn't really do full body, just because it's hard to
really see the person's face. And you wanna make sure
people can see your face because that's how people
recognize other people. So again, make sure you have a
clear profile picture, right? And if you go into my profile actually, just extending the, talking a little bit
more about the pictures, for your background picture, right? You can kind of see here that I created a custom one for myself, Patrick Dang, Modern Sales Training, which is what I do, right? And that's what my company is about, but it doesn't really matter
what your background is as long as it just looks nice and it's not distracting, right? So you can actually just use stock photos or things like that because it doesn't
actually make a difference as long as it just looks clean and the emphasis is on
your profile picture. All right, so we're gonna
go into tip number 3 and that is your headline. So essentially what your headline is, is the first thing people see when they go into your LinkedIn
profile after your picture. So if you go back to this example, right? So if somebody searches my name over here, what's gonna happen is the
first line that they see is your header. So what you can do here is
you can put in your role, whether let's say it's account executive, sales development rep, or you're seeking a job, or
maybe you're an intern, right? And make it clear what you are so people have an idea of
who they are talking to and it's easy for them to find you. Now, another trick that I like to do is let's say you're in sales and you don't necessarily
want to call yourself a salesperson, right? You wanna use nicer names so
that it doesn't put people off. So for example, account executive
is another way to say it, but if you wanna go even a step further, instead of being an account
executive, you can actually say, hey, I'm part of the
strategic partnerships team, or I am in business development, right? So you can use different names. You don't always have to
use the official job title you have at the company you're at. You can kind of switch it up and really just use a
name that people can trust whether it's strategic partnership, sales manager, whatever it is just as long as you're not
deceiving anybody, right? That's another way to have a workaround and not call yourself a salesperson and be like everybody else. Now, the third thing you can
do when it comes to the header is that you can actually do what I did. And you see, in this example, I said, helping B2B sellers
schedule more meetings and close deals with
modern sales training. So you can actually write a header that demonstrates how
you help other people. Now, a simple formula that you can use to demonstrate how you
bring value is you can say, I help X accomplish Y by doing Z, okay? I help X accomplish Y by doing Z. So let's go ahead and
use myself as an example. So I help X, which is the
people that I wanna work with, B2B sellers and I help them accomplish scheduling more meetings
and closing more deals. And how do I do it? Well with modern sales training, right? If you use that simple formula, it's gonna be easy for you to
basically show and demonstrate how you bring value to
your ideal customers, okay? So those are gonna be the three
ways you can write a header. Obviously it's going to
depend on your preference and specific situation. Now for tip number 4,
you want to make sure that you have at least
500 connections, okay? So let me show you what I mean by this. So on LinkedIn, it
doesn't necessarily matter how many connections you have, whether it's 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000, right? When people look in your profile, what they're gonna see
is 500 plus connections. So when you click on that, it's gonna show that I have
3.5K connections, right? But it doesn't really matter because when people get
that first impression, all they see is 500 plus. So if you only have,
let's say 50 connections or 100 connections, sometimes for some people they think, oh, this guy's not well connected, he's probably not a
good candidate for XYZ, so I'm not gonna talk to him, right? So you wanna make sure that you just prevent those situations by
making sure you add people who are in your network. So people maybe you know, from school, friends and family, or maybe people who are
in your extended network and you wanna meet them, right? So just make sure that
you get to 500 connections just to be on the safe side and reduce the chance that
someone doesn't reply for you simply for that reason, okay? All right, so now we're
gonna move into tip number 5 and that is your summary. So going into LinkedIn right now, right? Essentially what the summary is, is you have this about page here. And that's basically a
summary of who you are, what you're about and how you can bring
value to other people. So for me personally, I kind of talk about my sales career in
Silicon Valley in Oracle, because that builds credibility, right? A lot of people know this company. I also share that I have
startup experience as well and I've trained over 50,000
students across 150 countries on sales training on various topics and ultimately I want
to inspire other people, help them advance in their sales careers and grow their business by
sharing my knowledge, right? And so that's how I'm bringing
value to other people. I'm sharing my sales skills and knowledge to help other people so
that they can achieve what they want to achieve. So for your specific profile
or your about page in summary, you want to think, who am I, what makes me unique
compared to everybody else and how can I bring
value to another person? And so really the summary is an extension of your headline, right? For example, I use the formula of, I help X accomplish Y by doing Z. So essentially you just
wanna build on top of that in your about slash summary section, okay? And it doesn't really matter you can make it a couple of sentences. It doesn't have to be a
crazy essay or anything, but just make sure people get the gist of what you are about. All right, so now we're
gonna move into tip number 6 and that is creating a custom URL. So a lot of people don't
actually know this, at the top of your LinkedIn page, you can press this button
and it basically says, edit public profile and URL. Once you click that what's gonna happen is you're gonna be able to enter a specific name for your profile. So as you can see at the top here, it's
www.linkedin.com/in/patrickdangofficial,
right? So if I send this link to anybody or if I put it into my email signature, people can click on it and go directly to my LinkedIn profile. Now, if you don't set this, it's gonna be a bunch of
random characters and numbers and you don't want that
because it makes it more difficult for people to find you. So I just wanna make
it as easy as possible for people to find you and that's gonna help
optimize your profile and build more credibility
when people click on it, right? Let's go ahead and move into the next tip and that is going to be your experience. So in the LinkedIn page, if you scroll down a little bit more, you got the about page, right? Which is basically the
summary that we talked about and then on the dashboard
basically just gives you the stats of who's viewing
your profile, right? And if you go down to the next part, typically what people are
gonna have is experience. So essentially what that's
gonna be is your job experience, intern experience, essentially
it's your resume, right? Literally, it's your resume. Here are the places I worked
at, this is what I did there, here is how I brought value
to the company I worked at or if you have your own company, talk about what you do, right? So if you, let's go ahead and
start in the bottom for me. I started my sales career at Oracle. So people know, okay, this guy worked at Oracle
as an account executive and then I moved over to a startup as
an account executive as well. Then I started my own company,
my sales coaching company and then later reincorporated that company as Patrick Dang Inc and so
that's where I'm at now. So for you guys, if you are looking for a job, right? You probably want to
fill out every single box so people know exactly what
you did at those roles. For me, it's not necessarily so important because I want to focus the attention on what I'm currently doing, which is running my own company, which is a sales coaching company and that's what I want people to focus on. But if you want people to know what your previous experience was like, you can kind of write a
couple sentences there. It really depends on your preference. So if you want the focus to be
what you're currently doing, you could do it like I did. But if you're doing it
more of a resume style, then you can add more descriptions to your different experiences so people have a better understanding of who you are and what you do. Now, essentially the formula
I use to write this stuff is, I help X accomplish Y by doing Z. So no matter what kind
of experience you have, you can always use that formula
to write your experience if you ever get stuck
on writing a little bit about your work experience. Now after experience,
obviously we're gonna go down into your education. Now, if you are someone
who is applying for jobs, obviously education is gonna be important, especially if you just
graduated from college or if you're in college, right? Because people will look at
that and they'll make a judgment on whether or not you're
qualified for the job, obviously. And if you already have a couple of years of experience of work, obviously then your work
experience is more important, but sometimes having education does matter because sometimes you might
find random connections. Like maybe the recruiter went
to the same school you did, and maybe that gets you
the interview, right? So they're always random things like that. So that's why you wanna
include your education. You don't necessarily have to fill it out. It's not that important
unless you are in college or you are just graduating college. But if you already to have work experience just put in where you went to school and that's pretty much all
you need to do for that. Also just quickly you can
put your volunteer experience here as well. For me, I volunteered
at the Boys & Girls Club and also at University
of Southern California, which is where I went
to business school at. It's something you can add, it's nice. It's not super important unless, you know, you don't have
much work experience. All right, so we're gonna
move into tip number 9 and that's going to be endorsements. So going down on my
LinkedIn page over here. Essentially what adores
skills and endorsements are, is like people are basically
giving you a thumbs up and saying this guy or this girl is good at whatever skill
you're putting up there, right? So for me, what people think I'm good at is the first, the top three skills, the social media sales and
public speaking, right? Because throughout my career,
I've always done these things and so when I meet people and they naturally connect
with me on LinkedIn, they just kind of give me the pluses there and they endorse me and say, this guy is legit in the subjects, right? But I also add that
it's not super important to have all these endorsements, right? As you can see, I have like 99 here and 96 here and 99 there. It doesn't really matter, but it's just a quick
way to build credibility. And a way to get endorsements is, one of the easiest ways to do it is if you endorse other people first, they are more likely to endorse you back. So in the beginning, when
I first created LinkedIn way back when I was in
college and things like that, I would endorse other people like my friends and my
peers and my coworkers and they would naturally return the favor and endorse me back, right? And that actually brings
us to tip number 10, which is recommendations. So under skills and endorsements, we have recommendations over here and it works exactly the
same as endorsements, right? Basically if you give a
recommendation to another person, praising them for maybe their skills, when you guys work together
or something like that, then they will naturally write
a recommendation to you back. They don't always do that, but if you write enough recommendations, you'll get enough back and then
you'll have recommendations for your LinkedIn profile. Now, also caveat that by
saying that, you know, it's not necessarily
super important, right? Because for me, I actually
only have three recommendations because it's not something I focus on. I can get a lot more if I really pushed it but again, it's not really important. It doesn't really make
that much of a difference, but it does make your profile
stand out a little bit more because people can vouch for you. So with that said, again, those are gonna be the top 10 tips to optimize your LinkedIn profile. Make sure you take action right away, because these are things you
can literally do right now within the next hour and
get a lot more results whether you're applying for a new job or you're trying to sell
a product or service. It's not enough just
to watch these videos, you really have to implement
it to see the results. And one more time, if you feel like you got a lot
of value out of this video, go ahead and leave a like, because every like does help
this video reach new audiences. And again, this is a
brand new YouTube channel. So if you are new to this
channel or you're new to me, go ahead and make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications
because I'm going to be releasing new training videos every single week. So with that said, my
name is Patrick Dang, and I'm gonna see you
guys in the next one. (upbeat music)
