CREATE A SIMPLE LINKEDIN PROFILE
1. Firstly go to the LinkedIn Website: www.linkedin.com. The first step is to fill in your first name,
last name, email address, and password. Use an email address that is associated with your
company’s domain name if you can. Once done, click “Join Now.”
2. After you click, “Join Now,” you will be redirected to another page. Enter your employment status,
country, zip code, company name, and job title. Take time to review the different options for
employment status as you will may choose “Employed” or “A business owner.” When you complete the
company name field, a new field will appear for your company’s industry. Fill in all fields and click
Create My Profile.
3. LinkedIn will send you an email to verify your email address. It is very important that you verify your
email address. You can either clicking on the link in the email or copying and pasting the link into your
browser.
4. Now LinkedIn will offer to find people that you already know on LinkedIn. They do this by examining the
contact list of any webmail contacts. We suggest you opt to skip this step as you can always do this
later once more familiar with LinkedIn. You will be asked to either fill in your email and email password
or click Continue, or click “Skip this step.” Skip for now.
5. If you have not already confirmed your email address, LinkedIn will now ask you to confirm your email
address before you can continue. (See step 3.)
6. Once you have confirmed your email address, LinkedIn will offer you a chance to invite other people that
you know to join LinkedIn by inputting their email addresses. You can either choose to type in some
email addresses or click Send Invitations, or you can opt to skip this step. For the purposes of this
guide, we are going to skip this step.
7. LinkedIn will now ask you if you want to pay for a Premium (paid) profile, or if you would rather have a
Basic, free profile. Click the “Choose Basic” button.
8. The initial set up of your LinkedIn profile is now complete. LinkedIn will now redirect you to your new
LinkedIn home page. If LinkedIn shows you a video pop-up, you can either watch the video, or click the
“x” in the top right to make the video go away.
9. To edit your new profile, hover over the “Profile” dropdown menu and click “Edit Profile.” We suggest the
following settings:
a. Add a photo to your profile. You want other users who are searching for you to immediately
recognize you with a good photo.
www.kmdm.co.nz
0800 273363
[email protected]
b. Fill in your past work positions, and a description of each. Link to that company if it has a
company profile on LinkedIn. Be as detailed as possible as you will ask for recommendations
(otherwise known as testimonials), from connections later on.
c. Fill in your past education. The more info the better, Unless you have very little and experience
is far more relevant! Note that LinkedIn users can leave recommendations for the interactions that
they’ve had with you at education facilities.
d. Skip the Add recommendations step for now. You can come back to that once you have
completed your new LinkedIn profile.
e. We also suggest skipping the Add connections step until you have completed setting up your new
LinkedIn profile. (You want your colleagues see the completed profile, rather than a version in
progress.)
f. Add your company website and any personal websites to your profile. LinkedIn is a highly ranked
website on the web. This is great SEO link juice.
g. LinkedIn gives you the option to link a Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. This will enable
you to post LinkedIn updates to Twitter.
h. Customize your public profile URL by clicking Edit next to your Public Profile URL. You will be
redirected to a view of your public profile. Click on “Customize your public profile URL.” We
recommend that you include your name in your URL. In addition, you might choose to include your
company’s name or acronym appended to the URL (especially if your name is already taken).
Words can run together or be separated with dashes, but no spaces are allowed. Click “Set
Custom URL” when you are done.
i. Fill in a personal summary. This should be a short description of your work and education
experience. You can also talk about your company and its services. You have 2,000 characters
to work with. When users view your profile, they will see a truncated version of your summary with
a “View More” link. Thus, we recommend putting the most important information about yourself in
the first paragraph, so that LinkedIn users will be able to see your most important information
without clicking the “View More” link.
j. Add a list of your specialties. If you need ideas for these, see if you can add any that you have
listed on your resume. The character limit for this section is 500 characters.
k. Add any other information that you’d like other LinkedIn users to be able to view, such as interests,
honors/awards, contact information, birthday, and marital status. You can control the visibility
settings of your birthday and marital status by clicking on the padlock next to each of those fields.
10. Adjust your privacy settings to your needs. You can adjust your privacy settings by hovering over
your name in the top right of your LinkedIn screen and selecting “Settings” from the dropdown
menu. Here, you can adjust settings for the following:
. Activity broadcasts (otherwise known as status updates)
a. Your activity feed (this shows things such as what you’ve recently updated on your profile)
b. What information about you others see when you’ve viewed their profile
c. Who can see your connections
d. Profile photo visibility
e. What displays on your “public” profile (that is, the profile that will be shown to users not signed in
to LinkedIn)
f. To edit the privacy settings for your birthday and marital status, you will need to return to the Edit
Profile page and click on the padlock next to each of those fields.
11. Once you’ve completed setting up your profile, start adding new LinkedIn connections. To do this,
either click on “Add connections” on the Edit Profile page, or click on “Add connections” in the
Connections dropdown menu at the top of any LinkedIn page. There are (at least) four different ways to
add new LinkedIn connections:
. Fill in your email address and password, and LinkedIn will access your webmail contacts. You will be
given the option to select which of your webmail contacts you’d like to connect with.
a. Upload a contact list file from your computer by clicking “Import your desktop email contacts.”
b. Enter email addresses in manually in the box under “Enter Email Addresses. Enter email
addresses of people to invite and connect. Separate each address by a comma.”
c. Search for your colleagues by typing in a name in the search box in the top right of the
page. When you find someone you want to connect with, click on the “Add <name> to your
network” link on their LinkedIn profile.
12. Ask for LinkedIn recommendations by either clicking on “Ask for a recommendation” on the Edit
Profile page, or hover over the “Profile” menu, click on Recommendations, then click on Request
Recommendations. You may also decide that instead of using LinkedIn’s request recommendations
feature, that you would rather send a personal email, or talk to your colleague in person.
Congratulations on setting up your LinkedIn personal profile! Our next LinkedIn Blog item will teach you
tomaintain and optimize your LinkedIn personal profile.
www.kmdigitalmarketing.co.nz | 0273362407 | [email protected]