How to grow your business with using your LinkedIn profile

• Deep dive: 6 steps to build trust on LinkedIn and make more sales.

• ICYMI: Webflow’s $4B journey.

• Cool things I saw to take your business to the moon.

• Opportunities for you and your business to take advantage of.

• Top tools for your business.

Grow your business with a great LinkedIn profile

Trust is key to growing a business. A big part of this is trust in the founder.

When you’re doing sales or content for your business, one of the first things people do is check out your profile to see if you are someone they can trust.

Having a great LinkedIn profile is super important to growth, especially when you’re just getting started.

The trust equation

You need 3 things to build and maintain trust:

1. Credibility

2. Reliability

3. Emotional connection

Your LinkedIn profile can make or break this equation.

Who would you rather trust between these two profiles:

So let’s break down how you build a profile people trust.

1. Pick the right profile picture

Don’t overthink this.

Pick a professional (and recent) picture of yourself - your prom picture is great, but you no longer have only 5 little hairs you called your “beard”.

It is a profile picture though, so make sure your face is the focus and is clear. Smiling has also been shown to build trust, so let those pearly whites shine.

(good pp)

2. Win people over with your cover photo

There are a few ways you can approach the cover photo.

Your offer with a CTA:

What you write about:

A customer testimonial, this one is a clever way to build more trust quickly:

With all of these options, try to show exactly the value people will get, but keep it simple. The cover photo is to get people to read more of your profile. Don’t write too much, no one will read it.

There’s no need to make something completely new here though. Find a cover photo you like from someone doing well on LinkedIn and change it to fit you and what you do.

3. Drive traffic to your profile with a crisp headline

Every time you post or comment on LinkedIn - people see your headline. It is critical to push people to your profile.

And more people means more revenue.

There are again multiple ways to approach the headline (so go find some inspiration). But there are a few things you should try to incorporate:

• What value you provide (e.g. build your personal brand)

• Who you help (e.g. B2B SaaS companies)

• Your role (e.g. Founder of)

You have very few words that show up in the comments section. So you want to put the value you offer first - it’ll get people to click on you.

4. Be yourself

Although you should copy formats that work. You still need your personality (and your business) to shine through.

So use your brand colors, use language that you and your target audience use on a day-to-day basis, and add some humor. Don’t drown in a sea of sameness.

On the more practical personalization:

• Change your custom URL (you don’t want “/MichaelJordan126728”)

• Have a catchy phrase to describe the link in your bio (e.g. “Learn how to go viral with AI”)

5. Get engaged in the About section

The aim here is to convince someone who’s been seeing you a few times to take the step and get on one knee. Or in this case, take the next step down your funnel.

There are 5 key parts of the About section:

1. Hook: Get people to click on “see more”.

2. Your story: Build a personal connection.

3. Value: What’s in it for them.

4. Social proof: Build authority and trust.

5. Call to action (CTA): Sell the next step. In most cases, this is to follow so they see more of you and when they are ready to buy, you are top of mind.

6. Be relevant with your experience and education

What you’ve done in the past might not always be so relevant to what you do now - the offer you’re making.

So make sure you put the most relevant business at the top. This could be your day job, your newsletter, your business, or whatever will show the most reliability and credibility that you will deliver what you are promising.

For each experience:

• Put measurable results

• Links to articles or anything that could show what you built

Make sure to remove anything that is irrelevant to what you want to accomplish with your brand. For example, your high-school job as a waiter (unless you do restaurant recruiting).

ICYMI ⏮️

Last week I deep dived Webflow. The powerful website builder empowering people to become visual developers.

After 3 failed attempts at starting and 2 Y-Combinator rejections later, brothers Vlad and Sergie Magdalin along with their CTO Bryant Chou have built a $4B business that powers over 3.5M users to bring magic to life.

Click the link below to learn how Webflow got the ball rolling by finding their unique entry and used their customers as growth hubs.

My picks to take your business to the moon 📽️

• Sam Altman on how much equity to give your first 10 employees (link)

• How to build a moat with SEO (link)

• Sam Parr’s content strategy (link)

• How to generate leads on TikTok (link)

Cool Opportunities 🛎️

• Matt Gray is hosting a virtual coffee break on Thursday, 20 June @ 13:00 EST. Where he will break down his 5 proven steps to consistently add 10k new followers every month (link)

Tools of the week 🔨

• Mailsuite: Free email tracking for Gmail and Outlook

• ViralCuts: Short-form video animators that make your brand go viral

• Baremetrics: Subscription analytics for your business.

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