LinkedIn is a useful business to business site but it’s not particularly intuitive to use unless you’re on it almost all the time.

It often shows up high in search results for your name and quite a lot of businesses are finding that it’s their best source of new leads.

So how can you get the most from LinkedIn?

Start by making sure that your profile title is good.

So many titles are just the person’s name and (maybe) their company name,

When someone searches in LinkedIn – which is happening more and more nowadays – they see your name, your photo and the title from your profile.

The title should be used as your call to action – reinforcing what you offer – rather than the usual boring position in your company followed by the company name,

Do a few searches on LinkedIn to see what stands out and use those as a model.

Make sure that your profile photo is professional and reasonably up to date. Good quality cameras are everywhere so there’s absolutely no excuse for a poor or missing photo.

Then fill out the rest of your profile. Make sure that there is sufficient information in it for people to decide that they want to do business with you, rather than letting them guess.

You can also ask people to leave testimonials on your LinkedIn page – this adds to the social proof element of the site and good testimonials make all the difference.

List a few skills that people can endorse you for – this doesn’t mean much in the real world but on LinkedIn it adds to the social proof. Each person who endorses you will have their profile picture shown which means that visitors to your profile get a series of visual clues.

You can also link to any videos you have on sites like YouTube – these videos can be viewed from within your LinkedIn profile or on YouTube itself.

And if you’ve got a published book on somewhere like Amazon, you can link to that as well. This adds credibility as being a published author is held in high regard.

You can get more help with your LinkedIn profile by watching this video: