The unemployment rates are so high…
Can you afford to lose any potential customer or employer, looking for a professional with your skills, experience and talents?

If you already have a website that you’re trying hard to push up into Google’s rankings, there are two things that may help it:

* your business branding
and
* your own personal branding

But even for those of you who don’t own the said website, here’s a simple solution — you could use your LinkedIn profile as your professional home page.

If you choose to do that, you’ll want it to show up high in the rankings if a potential employer is ‘googling’ your
name.

By default, when you register/signup with LinkedIn, at the profile tab you’ll get a link to send traffic back it. That is a ‘raw’, common style link (URL) that will never help you show up in Google’s searches.

What to do, then?

Pretty simple, actually… You must go to “edit my public profile” and claim your name.
That is the equivalent of naming that page on LinkedIn with your own name. And that is way more powerful…

See?

Such a simple tweak may boost your efforts many times over.
You will see the power of professional business networking too, after that, through your new LinkedIn contacts network.

Ahhh!

I almost missed it… Allow the public to see your profile by selecting “full view.” – or it will stay ‘internal’ and hence, no more Google exposure, eh?

Here’s something for you to do, real quick…

Go to the LinkedIn website and find my profile there:
http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/SteveLorenzo

At the time I’m writing this post, if you’ll run a search on Google for my name ‘Steve Lorenzo’, you’ll see that my LinkedIn profile comes the fourth, after Twitter and FaceBook (twice).

Send me an invitation to connect on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn or MySpace… and don’t forget to bookmark this post with your preferred service (see down below). Thank YOU!

Would you be so kind to share this post with your friends interested on the subject, too? If so, here’s a handy tool for you to do it: just click the button below and select your preferred bookmarking website, or Twitter, etc… Thanks, again!

LinkedIn as a tool to promote yourself and your business –
a brief review

LinkedIn is probably the most extended international professional network, a concept only slightly (but significantly, however) different from the usual social networking model.

Some older LinkedIn Statistics (as of February 2008) said:
“ LinkedIn has 20 million registered users, three-quarters of a million of them are senior level executives at their respective companies. The site is growing by 1 million members per month. The average user is 41-years-old and has a household income of $109,000.“
Amazing, right?

LinkedIn focuses on helping all kind of professionals to manage their business contacts, but even better, being able to be introduced to others that are connected to them through their 2^nd or even 3^rd step acquaintances – what they call a connections network.

This was the key to LinkedIn’s success, most probably. At the moment I’m writing this, they proudly announce more than 30 million members (as per their own About LinkedIn page). Huge!

Seeing the power of this, I decided to review my own profile on the portal and to link it to other places on the Internet, like my blog here, for instance.

I’m pretending to be skillful enough for such apparently simple job.
I’ve spent just about 2 hours to update ‘make-up’ and carefully complete as much of my profile as possible in one round, yet when it came to find the LinkedIn badge to add it to my blog, I was stuck there for 3 hours.

My fault, of course; I should have checked on Google after the first 10 or so minutes, but even when I did that, finally, it was not so easy after all.

Finding the LinkedIn Badge on the site

So, starting with my googling and following some advice from here, another from there, I ended up with the beautiful badge that I proudly pinned on the right column of my blog.
Long story short, I finally found it under my Profile tab, at the edit option of my personalized Public Profile
(it’s the last one, on top of the Summary Section ).

Follow these steps:

♦ Open your own account and

° Login (called a sign in in this case) OR

° Join Today for those who are just jumping in

♦ Fill your e-mail and password if you already have an account to get through

♦ On the Home page that opens, look for the Profile tab from the left side

° Click the Edit my Profile link

♦ Find the last item, immediately above the Summary section, called Public Profile

° Click the [Edit ] link shown at the right end

♦ Under the Public Profile that appears there, select the discreet second bullet:

° Promote your profile with customized buttons

Drrrrums! Ta Daa!
You have finally found it!

To Learn How To Get Your Linked In Badge

from the LinkedIn website, you may watch a short video tutorial down here (click the image below)…

Here is the naked link if you wish to go there directly:
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?promoteProfile

(Still need an account and sign in or alternatively join if you’re an outsider)

Where to use your LinkedIn Badge, now?

Now, you are presented the very limited few badges available.

They offer only ten designs, plus one more special for the TypePad users that beams you up right into the TypePad’s TypeLists widget management system.

You will stay put and have nothing to tweak or configure, I should say. It’s straight and simple, quite spartan design. The badge you’re getting has a sole purpose: to link back to your own LinkedIn Public Profile page.

Actually, it is only an image (a proprietary one) that may be added with no fuss to any online portals or social networks, blogging platform or your own sites.

Having no JavaScript (it’s a html – href with an img src – tag) you’ll find yourself easy to insert it into your TypePad, MySpace, or Blogger template.

As for WordPress, my blog here is just the best example. Here’s how I did it!

Inserting a LinkedIn Badge into your WordPress Sidebar

♦ Login as admin into your WordPress dashboard
♦ Select Setting on the upper right side of the screen
♦ Click on Design
♦ Then on Widgets
♦ And Finally the Text category with the Add Arbitrary text or HTML link
♦ That opens the widget editor to the right
♦ Give it a nice title like Look at me or whatever you may dream of
♦ Copy/paste the html code previously taken from LinkedIn’s Badge
♦ Click Change to the bottom-left
♦ Then Save Changes
♦ And Visit Site to check it

Now you can say that you have managed to add a html link to LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn badge proudly stands out on the page.

The last step should be to go up to the beginning of this post and find Tips To Outrun Your Competition Newsletter widget.

° Enter your name and
° e-mail
° Click on the Steve, I’m A Winner! Count Me IN — (Subscribe button)

only if you want to receive from time to time, short tutorials, brief reviews and free advice on howto’s and why’s of Internet Marketing related subjects.

You’ll even get a nice free gift delivered to your Inbox if you choose to subscribe.

Hoping that my short tutorial here was helpful,

I wish you all the best!

Steve Lorenzo ,
in his gifting mood VaultBoss

PS
More to learn about LinkedIn and the best ways to use it to be found here:

How to REALLY use LinkedIn and even more resources… Let’s Connect!: A Practical Guide for Highly Effective Professional Networking

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Would you be so kind to share this post with your friends interested on the subject, too? If so, here’s a handy tool for you to do it: just click the button below and select your preferred bookmarking website, or Twitter, etc… Thanks, again for bookmarking my LinkedIn Badge post!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…