HOW SELF-EMPLOYED PROFILES CAN SET UP THE EXPERIENCE SECTION ON LINKEDIN

Are you self employed and do you want to promote yourself on LinkedIn? Well, there is now more 'prestige' given to the self-employed, as it's now recognised as a job category in the Experience section.

If you are in the early stages of starting a business and don’t want to build a LinkedIn Company Page this is a better option than before!

Previous to the self-employed category being added, you had to go down the route of choosing a make-believe self-employed business within your Experience Section. 

These were the LinkedIn Company Pages that were created to cater for the millions of self-employed people, so they could add this to their profile.

It's good that LinkedIn are recognising this as a work category, and even more so recently with so many starting their own businesses.

To set up your profile being self-employed:

Go to the Experience Section of your profile and add a new Experience entry (or edit your current Experience). You will see there’s a new option within the Employment type list. 

The categories listed here are now:

• Full-time
• Part-time
• Self-employed
• Freelance
• Contract
• Internship
• Apprenticeship
• Seasonal

You DON’T HAVE TO include your Company Name either. So you could have an Experience like this. I have used Social Media Marketing Specialist as the Title just by way as an example.

Or one that looks like this if you want to include the name of the company. It depends where you are on your journey of creating your business, deciding on the name, registering the name of the business, and how you want to promote yourself!

However, I would advise creating a LinkedIn Company Page for your business! When profiles (and potential clients) view your Experience Section, if they click on the entry it will take them to profiles who have similar job titles.

Important part: If you create a Company Page, any profiles who click on your Experience Entry will be taken there to read more about what you do, and take action (hopefully).

I understand not everyone wants a Company Page, or the desire to grow a page following (for example, self employed, solopreneurs) but this is a solid reason why they should.

This option is better as IT DOES NOT take POTENTIAL CLIENTS away to view similar profiles! Remember, these profiles could be your competitors. #ShortAttentionSpans

Don't worry about posting on the Company Page regularly, just set up the details and images (Canva is a great resource), your main call to action button, and share updates now and again. Keep using your Personal Profile to engage and connect.

Get a 30 minute call set up to discuss how I can help you get confident with a user-friendly scheduling tool for your Company Page here

Description

Make sure you explain clearly and plainly about what you do. Let people know how you can help them and/or their business.

Include any call to actions that are relevant to your goals and to help people get in touch, hire you, or book a short call to find out more.

You can add some personalisation and branding in the form of bullet points and emojis. To start the emoji picker on desktop click on Windows key+[fullstop]

But remember, before you click on Save with your new self-employed settings – check the following!

An option to update your headline Yes or No? You definitely don’t want to delete that “perfected-character-counted-emoji-loving-key-word-rich” headline!

LinkedIn will replace it with the standard:

[Job title] at [Company Name]

and delete the tailored headline you have crafted. Well hopefully you have already saved your Headline in Word in a neat file labelled in a folder! 

Unfortunately a few years ago I forgot to backup my Headline and lost it, after spending hours on perfecting it!

Industry choice

You could also revisit your Industry choice – are you in the closest category to what you currently offer? 

For example, you may have altered your services from being an accountant to training people and now it would be wiser to appear in the Professional Training & Coaching rather than Accounting category.

Media

Using MailChimp or another software you could create a landing page and link into your Experience Section to sell a product or service (eg if you don't have a proper website setup as yet). If you need techie support on this I can give you recommendations of who can help.

If you are just starting out you could upload a pdf of your services with a strong call to action so people know how to contact you.

Get a 30 minute call set up to discuss how I can help you with "Engagement Ensured" content here

DON’T FORGET!

Once you are happy with your new self employed Experience entry, make sure to share it with your network by switching the button 'On'.

This can really promote some engagement and remind everyone what you do! It's amazing how these reminders can jog people's memories and keep you in their minds for when they are ready to buy from you.

Hope this helps, you can read more of my blogs about using Services in your profile on LinkedIn here or how to set up an event on LinkedIn here.

Everyone deserves a seat at the LinkedIn Table"