Do you want to do Personal Branding? Use Linkedin Pulse! What’s the best way to get your name out there? I bet everything on the blog. You are a professional in your field – freelance or employee, it doesn’t matter – and you want your name to be mentioned in all industry-related discussions. Or at least in the most important ones. My solution leaves no way out: you have to buy a web hosting that allows you to publish a website on the Internet. To publish any website online, you need to register a domain and start writing.
Or rather, you have to publish content that can attract attention. The goal is clear: to be personal branding. The…and make your name known to the right people. Today this activity can attract the attention of an increasing number of professionals. But often the compass is lost and everything is exchanged for personal branding. What are we talking about? I rely on Luigi Centenario’s definition when I have to explain the boundaries of this activity:
Personal branding means using branding techniques for people. In concrete terms, it means setting up a strategy to identify or define our strengths and communicate effectively what we know how to do, how we know how to do it and why others should choose us.
Personal branding is communication. You have to make people understand what you do, what your professional characteristics are, what your field of action is. Can you do this with Facebook? Can you do it with Twitter? Also, but you need a web page that allows you to argue and show something concrete.
The Topic Of This Post
- 1 But there is LinkedIn Pulse
- 2 Curate your profile
- 3 Work on the editorial calendar
- 4 Organize your content
- 5 Focus on the visual
- 6 Will LinkedIn Pulse replace the blog?
But there is LinkedIn Pulse
That’s right, that’s a big breakthrough. The blog is the main tool for personal branding. But social blogging allows you to merge two different and useful realities: an already formed community and a different platform from the usual status update. In other words, you have a blog within a social network.
There are several solutions for those who want to focus on social blogging (Medium, Tumblr, Facebook Note) but one of the most effective and significant responses to the name of LinkedIn Pulse. This project is born within your LinkedIn profile and allows you to create articles that will be shown in the online resume. To publish, just a few steps are enough:
- Enter the profile.
- Go to the personal page.
- Click on Write a New Post.
In a few seconds, you are in front of the editor: you can write and publish articles focusing on minimal but sufficient formatting. You can add images, you can create bulleted lists, and highlight text with the blockquote. You can also insert links in the text. The basic functions of blogging are there, and they allow you to do personal branding. How?
Curate your profile
Your LinkedIn profile is the most important page, a kind of landing page often after having …of the blog: people come to the article, read it, and want to find out more. They want to know who you are, what you do for a living. And if you have all the skills you show.
This is why your profile must be treated like a Zen garden: it is useless to write content on LinkedIn Pulse to do personal branding, and then leave the personal profile without attention and with old information.
You must complete all the required fields trying to be precise and exhaustive. But not excessive in the descriptions. Upload multimedia content, such as presentations and documents, to describe your work. And avoid unserious profile photos.
Work on the editorial calendar
Don’t run away from this condemnation: to do personal branding with LinkedIn Pulse you have to manage updates through the editorial calendar. So you have to organize the publications with a document that allows you to rationalize everything that has been defined upstream.
Social blogging does not mean the absence of objectives, but the organization of the resources you are using. Pulse allows you to reach certain people with tools suited to the platform. The audience that reads you is made up of professionals, colleagues, people specialized in the search for personnel.
The content you post on Pulse must be a lure for the user you want to reach, and as you can see from this graphic, there is no shortage of numbers. Do you want to do personal branding? You have to work on the editorial calendar. And you have to do it so as not to conflict with other platforms.
Organize your content
Why are you betting on Pulse? Why do you want to do personal branding? And because you believe that through this tool it is possible to intercept people interested in your profile. So you have to create suitable content, as anticipated above. I believe that it is useless to use Pulse to simply anticipate blog posts or to copy what you have already published.
Okay, maybe all of this won’t have consequences from one point of view SEO Maybe Google will see the LinkedIn post as duplicate and won’t bother your main project. But try to put yourself in the shoes of the user who follows the blog feed or your Facebook account: what are you giving to these people? What value are you conveying? Why should I read something you have already proposed elsewhere?
LinkedIn notifications.
Don’t forget that LinkedIn Pulse is an interesting weapon: it allows you to notify all followers of the publication of a post, so you can take advantage of the network created on LinkedIn to show the right people what you write, what you know, what you are worth.
Without forgetting that LinkedIn offers a series of tools to share content: you can participate in discussions in groups, you can share Pulse posts on your personal wall or other social networks. It won’t be the best from an SEO point of view, but on the social side, it has all the credentials to get great numbers.
And how do you want to develop this possibility? By posting content you’ve already seen? 🙂
Focus on the visual
LinkedIn Pulse doesn’t give you a lot of customization options. Indeed, you can only write and publish articles. On one point, however, you can work: visual content. You can insert the main image (plus all the ones you need in the post) to communicate your brand
The cover image can be initialed with your logo An interesting solution, given that the first posts are inserted in the personal profile and help you to present Pulse in the best possible way in the shares on Facebook and Google Plus.
If you want to storytelling your professional figure, if you want to tell what and why you do it, you have to take care of the details. True, the contents are important. But sometimes you need that extra attention that allows your post to stand out in the crowd. And to convey the values of your brand.
Will LinkedIn Pulse replace the blog?
No! LinkedIn Pulse is an excellent reality, an ideal solution to alternate blog content with a notebook dedicated to a specific audience. Pulse is a decisive platform for those who do not have the time and opportunity to open an independent blog. My opinion? Nothing can replace WordPress.
Nothing can retire the versatility and capacity of this CMS to obtain the best possible result, especially if you aim at the Inbound Marketing logic. In any case, LinkedIn Pulse can be a valid alternative to a professional insurance blog, also because it is grafted onto a platform that should bring together content and professionals use for your business.
The logic that drives you to use Pulse to do personal branding is right, but you have to use this tool to create quality: this is my opinion. Do you agree? Have you started using Pulse yet?
Leave your opinion in the comments.
