How to Add Your Success Stories on LinkedIn for Better Traffic

How to Add Your Success Stories on LinkedIn for Better Traffic Have you noticed that your resume content and achievements are often too long to fit into your LinkedIn Profile? Despite the ease of uploading content into LinkedIn, there’s no way around the limitations (2,000 characters including spaces!) available for each job. However, if you get smart about keyword strategy and learn to condense your career story, you’ll fit it all in â€" AND get rewarded with more traffic on the site. Here’s how to describe your achievements, add keywords, and attract more interest from employers, while condensing your content on LinkedIn: 1 Write out each success story, using first-person style (as if talking to an interviewer). Your resume might state: “Closed 43% of all company sales in 2011.” However, this doesn’t tell the real story in context: I saw an opportunity to expand business to existing customers, proposed and developed new offerings for clients, and brought my close rate up 13%. I was able to generate 42% of all company sales in 2011. Great! So far, we have 203 characters and 36 words for this single accomplishment. 2 Next, add keywords for more LinkedIn traffic. Let’s say your goal is technology sales for education clients, so you’ll want to ensure that SAP, Cloud-Enabled, School District, and Data Security are used as keywords throughout your Profile. This turns your win into: SAP Cloud-Enabled Sales â€" I saw an opportunity to expand business to existing school district and university customers, proposed and developed new data security offerings for clients, and brought my close rate up 13%. I was able to deliver 42% of all company sales in 2011. Now, you’re up to 275 characters and 46 words â€" which can take up most of your job description unless you take the time to trim it. 3 Last of all, shorten your statement by removing unnecessary words. In first-person writing style, “I” is implied (so you can remove it). You can also use a thesaurus or brainstorm shorter words as replacements. Here, we’ve swapped out “K-12 and college” for “school and university,” removed “new,” and took out a few other words to cut down the sentence. SAP Cloud-Enabled Sales â€" Identified data security offerings for K-12 and college market. Increased close rate 13%; delivered 42% of 2011 company sales. You’re down to 154 characters and just 23 words â€" a 24% reduction from your original sentence and a 44% savings from the keyword-loaded version! As you can see, your content can be shortened considerably, while retaining the meaning and showing the context of your work. Best of all, your newly added keywords will be of importance to employers looking for a candidate with these skills. You’ll need to repeat these steps for each of your major success stories, but the process will get easier as you become more accustomed to injecting keywords and removing excess words. As you can see, the key is to ruthlessly chop off excess descriptors that don’t add keyword content, while writing power-packed sentences. Yes, it’s a few more steps, but your Profile MUST be written concisely, with keyword-dense content and personal flair. Otherwise, recruiters either won’t find you â€" or will quickly lose interest and click away to your competition. Need a competitive edge for your executive job search? As the #1 U.S. TORI award-winning executive resume writer, I create branded, powerful resumes and LinkedIn Profiles that position you as the #1 candidate PLUS arm you with the job search tools that will get you hired faster. My clients win interviews at Fortune 500 firms including Citibank, Google, Disney, and Pfizer, plus niche-market companies, start-ups, and emerging industry leaders. Get in touch with me  to experience the outstanding results my expertise can bring to your transition. Laura Smith-Proulx, CCMC, CPRW, CPBA, TCCS, COPNS, CIC