Here is a clever LinkedIn Profile Attraction Strategy that you may have seen but not thought about using yourself. This form of “visual Search Engine Optimization” dates back over 5 years actually.
It was 2007 and George Bush was President. We were teaching another LinkedIn 101 Hands-on workshop at the University of Denver. These were pretty insightful people in 2007, don’t you agree? We had been teaching people to use Microsoft Word to create your LinkedIn profile and then use Copy/Paste to bring it into LinkedIn.
I got the idea to use bullets for lists and it worked! WOW!
We started teaching the use of bullets and that got the minds of our audience going. After the LinkedIn workshop, one attendee came up and presented a new idea:
If you can copy paste in the round bullets, you may be able to copy/paste in other characters as well. It was an awakening for me. I tested over 200 symbols from the Microsoft Windows Word symbols library, doing a copy/paste from a Microsoft Word file containing nothing but symbols. Some came over nicely, some not at all.
I wish I could remember who it was that had this brilliant and SIMPLE idea, but my 52 yr. old memory bank just isn’t cooperating.
I wrote a blog post on it in 2008 and it got a lot of traffic. In fact, you see a lot of this nowadays. In some cases, it can get to be a bit much or even “over the top”. So, over the years, we have settled in on a recommended set of symbols to use as bullets:
◊ ♦ ☆ ★
For example…
♦ Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud-based LinkedIn Training ♦ SaaS and Cloud Computing Conference Speaker, Trainer ♦ Keynote Speaker, Motivational Speaker, Conference Speaker
We recommend these for Call Outs:
◊ ♦ ► ◄ ↔ ☆ ★ ♫
For example…
► Author – “Rock The World with your Online Presence” 2010 ◄
We recommend these for Separators in Headlines, Job Titles, Company Names:
│ ▌ ◊ ♦
For example…
CEO, Integrated Alliances ♦ Corporate B2B LinkedIn Sales Trainer ♦ Keynote Speaker, Social Media Futurist, ENFP
This creative process reinforces the need to use a word processor like Microsoft Word so you can try lots of ideas. You may also want to turn off your Activity Broadcasts during this process as you would during any major profile changing period.
EXTRA TIP – This works very good with Twitter, Facebook and other platforms as well.