How To Make Your Networking Profile Work For You

Building an Internet presence is something many people have invested a lot of time into – and many are absolutely blowing a great opportunity to further their professional objectives. I’m constantly amazed at the number of individuals unfortunately unaware of how simple changes to their networking profiles can turn their networking profiles into powerful tools that actually impact their business objectives.

Granted not everyone joins networking platforms to further their professional objectives, and that is obviously fine. I’ve personally developed a number of great relationships that have nothing to do with business objectives through on-line networking platforms.

For those that do care about how on-line networking platforms can further their professional objectives, an Internet presence can be developed in a very short amount of time simply through the profile you create on a networking platform such as Ecademy, LinkedIn, et al. Unfortunately the way many people construct their networking profile, it does nothing for them from a business exposure perspective.

Heidi Heyns has been kind enough to let me use her as an example. Heidi and I are connected on LinkedIn and Ecademy. She is a wonderful caring vibrant personality who absolutely excels at her profession of – voice-over actor. When I first saw Heidi was on Ecademy, I Googled her name, and sure enough, this was what I found:

Heidi Heyns – Ecademy Profile
I am So completely Filled with Light at all the LOVE I have experienced in this place called ecademy… If you are new, PLEASE say hello and if you ask, …

I recommended to Heidi if she cared about actually generating business leads as a result of belonging to Ecademy, as opposed simply enjoy the social aspects of Ecademy, she should make some simple changes to her profile. I explained that once Google grabbed the new more descriptive text from her Ecademy profile it would be more supportive of her business objectives.

She made the recommended changes such that her Ecademy profile hit in Google now looks like this:

Heidi Heyns – Ecademy Profile
Commercial voice-over actor, message impact expert and consultant. I can help you not just reach, but also more effectively appeal to your target audience.

Shortly after implementing these changes, Heidi sent me a note that said:

“OH wow! …Ron! Have you seen my new revised profile??? I am getting completely different kinds of emails… BUSINESS emails!”

On a site like Ecademy, you can actually drive what the descriptive text says in Google given Ecademy basically supplies the first 150 characters of what you type in the “Profile Text:” box when creating your profile. The search engines like Google use this as the descriptive text below the hit link. This is extremely powerful.

Unfortunately, you can’t do this on all networking platforms. Some networking platforms only provide the search engines with generic descriptive text you can’t control. The search engines then use this generic text below the hit link such as LinkedIn et al.

LinkedIn: Heidi Heyns
Heidi Heyns’s professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a networking tool that helps users like Heidi Heyns, …

By simply making a small adjustment to your networking profile content on sites such as Ecademy where you can drive the descriptive hit text, you create a useful hit in Google that actually has a chance of adding to your Internet presence in a way that is supportive of your business objectives.