Making A Sharp Left - Part 1

Making a Sharp Left Turn- Part One

Business as we know it has changed. Have you pivoted? Have you made that sharp left? In this episode, we talk about LinkedIn tips to help with your overall presence.

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LinkedIn Tips

Below are the key talking points as well as the timestamps within the video. For the full transcript please scroll down just a bit.

  • 1- LinkedIn artwork
  • 2- LinkedIn profile headline
  • 3- Recommendations and endorsements on LinkedIn

01:30 LinkedIn artwork

03:20 LinkedIn profile headline

04:10 My LinkedIn pet peeves

05:40 LinkedIn skills and endorsements tips

Welcome to Market Me Social. #NerdzOn everyone. Glad to have you here today. This episode is going to focus on how we can be ready to pivot, or maybe you already have and are trying to sort out. So have the visual in mind of making that sharp left turn. Once again, we are in a situation from a business standpoint where you are being faced and I am being faced with having to make some critical decisions based on how the economy is going, changes in work structure, changes in work environment, and the list goes on and on.


So this is part one of a series where I’m going to just share a few best tips and practices of things that you can do from a digital perspective, like what can you do to enhance your digital brand. Some little things that you may have said, well, I don’t have time for that before and now you really want to make time because it’s even more important. So for this episode, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn for a minute.

So if you want to get on your LinkedIn profile and kind of follow along, I’m going to go through just a few sections where you may need to make some tweaks and make some adjustments to ASAP.

LinkedIn Artwork


Number one, your artwork. So take a look at your profile picture. Is your profile picture the same as your high school yearbook or your college graduation? It would be a good time to change it. Don’t use that old profile pick. It is very, very easy to get yourself a decent headshot. Any smartphone now can do it, just get someone to help you and use a tool such as Canva. We use Canva a lot for smaller graphics projects, such as making head shots. It’s very, very simple. Look at what LinkedIn has as far as parameters and for size and make that change.


And then the next, particularly when it comes to artwork is your cover art. So there is another opportunity to kind of like demonstrate who you are, what you do, maybe create some relationship to your brand, whatever is appropriate. If you’re an entrepreneur versus an employee, it may be two different types of things that you need to just kind of sort out, but use it. Don’t leave that kind of pixeled, looks like connect the dots kind of default thing that they have right now. Change that up and again, you can use something as simple as Canva to kind of come up with that artwork.


What I like a lot is just you’re trying to show your personality in some way. So use that digital real estate to kind of enhance that, make some decisions and make it relatable to what we’re going to talk about next. And that’s as you go through your profile, what are some things that need to be kind of highlighted in your profile?

LinkedIn Headline

So we’re going to talk about the headline next. That’s the first thing. So you look profile picture then underneath the profile picture is your name and then the next item is your headline. Now the headline is editable.


You can just simply put your job title if that’s what you want, or you can put something that’s a little bit more descriptive. And this may be an opportunity for you to get a little bit creative to describe who you are and what you do. Be careful though. Be careful. Here’s a caution. And again, this is going to be a personal opinion right here. It drives me absolutely insane. People who connect with me on LinkedIn that just have this transactional description about what they do. I will make you the number one person of the Himalayan Mountains today. And that’s there their message on their headline.


And it’s just … Just don’t do it. LinkedIn is a social network. Treat it like a social network. So ask your peers. How do you describe me? If there is one sentence that describes me, what would it be? Ask that from a few people that you trust and you’ve worked with for some time, take that feedback and turn it into a headline. It’ll resonate. It’ll be personal, especially for those that know you and it won’t come across as gimmicky or as like the very first thing that’s coming out of your mouth is buy something from me. You don’t want that in your headline.


Be very, very careful about how you make those connections. The LinkedIn is for developing your professional network to showcase who you are and to build on those relationships.

LinkedIn Endorsements and Recommendations

So that’ll take me to one other tip that when it comes to building relationships, there’ll be other LinkedIn tips that I’m going to use in future episodes. But for right now, if you are fairly new to LinkedIn and you haven’t used it much, or even if you have used it much, this is the time to go down to that section where it talks about skills and endorsements and recommendations.

And I’m not talking about necessarily your skills and endorsements. Yes. Go ahead and put those there, but take the steps to go out and start recommending other people. Go through your contacts and find ones that you’ve done business with in the past, provide a heartfelt recommendation, go through that connections skills.

And if there are skills that you have used or you’ve personally witnessed, whatever the context is, endorse that person and go out there and make those connections along that line. So those are the two things, two or three things for today.


One, your artwork, make it solid. Number two, be careful about your headline, make it descriptive, but don’t make it gimmicky. And three, find a way to give recommendations to other people and build up that connection that LinkedIn is for. So I hope you appreciate those tips today. Make sure you’re subscribed to my channel and give me that thumbs up and thank you for being here.