The Complete LinkedIn Seminar: Strategy, Summary, Photo, and the 500-Connection Rule | Career Speaker Series

This is the complete session from Richard Lowe’s LinkedIn training webinar for the Career Speaker Series, lightly edited for readability. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction

Brian Lubeck: Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us today for the Career Speaker Series. This series brings you the nation’s top career authors, who provide tips, tools, and best practices you can use to create a successful career strategy. It’s Brian Lubeck, coming to you from Terre Haute, Indiana, the crossroads of America. My journey has taken me from San Diego, California right into the middle of America, where I get to introduce you to America’s top speakers on career and professional development. With me today is Richard Lowe, CEO of The Writing King, speaker and best-selling author of Focus on LinkedIn. In the next hour, you’re going to learn how to use LinkedIn to make more money, generate more leads, and find jobs. Get your pen, paper, or electronic device ready to take notes, and remember: ask questions. Submit them through the menu, and I’ll share them with Richard toward the end of the program.

A little background on our accomplished speaker. Everyone has a passion, and his is to write. He enjoys writing entertaining novels, uplifting stories, and educational books, and watching as others learn, laugh, and even cry from reading. He takes special joy in helping people write their books, keep their blogs up to date, and create well-written LinkedIn profiles that show off their talents and skills: helping someone finish the novel they’ve been working on for 30 years, publish the business book that communicates their brand, or write their memoirs so their grandchildren will remember them. His areas of expertise: branding expert for LinkedIn Makeover, capturing your unique brand on LinkedIn; ghostwriter, helping you write your book, the story of your brand, your memoirs, or your ideas; and blogging and social media. Please join me in welcoming Richard Lowe.

What we’re covering

Richard Lowe: Good evening. My name is Richard Lowe, and I am the author of Focus on LinkedIn. Let me start by giving you a little bit about what we’re going to cover. We’re going to cover personal branding. We’re going to talk about why you want to focus on LinkedIn as opposed to other social media. We’re going to focus on a strategy you can use, and why you want to allow others to see you: how you write up your brand, what order the parts of your profile should be in, what LinkedIn is all about, which is relationships, how you link your websites and blogs to LinkedIn, what the company page is for, strategies for groups, how you deal with recommendations and endorsements, offline marketing with LinkedIn, how you incorporate media such as videos, network-building strategies, what LinkedIn spam is, and that LinkedIn is not Facebook. Very important to know. And then a question I often get asked: can I have more than one profile? We’ll get to the answer.

I’m a LinkedIn branding expert. I started this journey about three years ago. I left my company, Trader Joe’s, where I was the director of computer operations for 20 years, and I decided to take an early retirement and become a writer. That was a great decision. One of the things I did at that point: I wanted to make my LinkedIn profile perfect, so I hired a company called LinkedIn Makeover and bought their premium service, which is $1,000, to update my LinkedIn profile, which was pretty awful at that point. About a year later, the lady who runs it called me up and hired me, because I’d been blogging like crazy, and she hired me as one of her branding experts. Shortly after, I became a senior branding expert, and that’s what I am for them now.

The photo on this slide is actually from a birthday party, because, a little trivia, I’m also a belly dance photographer. I photographed about 1,800 belly dance shows in California before I moved to Florida, and made friends with over a thousand different dancers. These dancers were all at a party of mine. So I’ve got a very rough life, as you can see. It’s very difficult, but I somehow persist.

LinkedIn is a personal branding platform

Richard Lowe: Now we’re going to get into the meat of it, and I’m going to go pretty quick, so take notes and write your questions as you think of them.

What is LinkedIn all about? LinkedIn is a personal branding platform. That means it’s not about your company, or the product you’re selling, or your service. It’s about you. When I go see Joe Smith’s profile, I’m looking to find out about Joe Smith. I want to know what he does. I want to know what he’s good at. I want to know what he’s accomplished. Then maybe I want to know a little bit about his company and his products. But the focus is: who is Joe Smith? What can he do for me? Is he the right person for me? All these questions should be answered by LinkedIn.

Personal branding is the image you want to portray to the world. You could equate it to how you dress. Do you wear a hat? Are you clean shaven? Do you bathe? It’s as simple as that in real-life terms. And then it comes down to how you portray your experience, what you’ve done in your career, how you’ve helped the community. All these things feed into your personal branding. There are also things not appropriate for personal branding: you don’t want to be seen by the world as a drunk, unless for whatever reason that is your personal brand. Probably not, though.

Why LinkedIn, and when it isn’t the answer

Richard Lowe: Why LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a professional network, and it is by far the biggest one out there, and certainly the best one. But it’s not always the right one for everything. LinkedIn is very good for your profession and putting yourself out there, and you should always have a profile. But for a business, they might want to focus on Facebook. For example, there’s a local auto repair shop that found Facebook works better for them to interface with the community, because they’re very local, and Facebook tends to be very social. So they use Facebook for their business a lot more than LinkedIn. But for your average person, all the way up through CEOs, because LinkedIn is your personal brand, even if you’re using Facebook for your business, you still want a LinkedIn profile for yourself, which then points people to your Facebook if that’s where you do your primary marketing.

Focusing on LinkedIn has an advantage: if people look for you on the internet, they’re going to find you on LinkedIn. LinkedIn tends to bubble up very high in the search engines, because it’s a very highly rated site. If I look for my name on Google, my LinkedIn profile is probably going to be first or second. And employers and people looking for your talents are looking on LinkedIn, because it’s the biggest place to look. But it’s not exclusive: your community, blogging, radio shows like this one, Facebook, Flickr, all these things can fold into your overall strategy.

Strategy: audience, message, then tactics

Richard Lowe: What is the strategy for using LinkedIn? You start by figuring out who your target audience is. In the case of the auto repair shop, their target audience is people in the local area who are having trouble with their cars, especially people who got in accidents and have insurance. Insurance is a big thing for them, because people without insurance don’t get repairs as quickly or pay as much. So they’re much more targeted. For me, I’m looking for people who want to buy a ghostwritten book, and they’re not cheap, so I’m looking for successful people who want to tell their message.

Which brings us to message: what is the message you want to get across? For the car repair shop, the message is that they take insurance, that they know the insurance companies inside and out, and they’ll get you the best deal as well as the best service.

Then we get down to tactics. Blogging: for me, as an author, blogging is very important. I probably write two to three blog articles every single day of the week, five days a week, because that’s my strategy for getting people to know me. Other people might use Facebook, like the auto repair shop, or their website, which is more permanent and product-oriented than a blog. Or you could use LinkedIn’s own articles feature. And there are a bazillion other platforms. If you’re a computer person, you might look for specialized forums that are totally off social media. You have to find the best tactics for you based on your strategy, and you can’t know that until you know your target audience. That’s one of the first things: who are you trying to reach?

You’re on LinkedIn to be seen

Richard Lowe: This is very important: you’re on LinkedIn because you want to be seen. As a LinkedIn branding expert, I run across a lot of people who want to turn everything off. They don’t want anybody to see their picture. They don’t want anybody to see anything about them. My answer to them is: well, why are you on LinkedIn? You’re on LinkedIn to be seen. So first of all, don’t put anything on LinkedIn that you don’t want people to know. But except for the obvious things, like maybe your phone number and address, open it up. Let people see your photo, your profile, whatever it is. That’s what it’s for.

And as a side note, on all social media, and I’m also a security person: never put anything you don’t want the world to know on social media, regardless of privacy or security settings, because it can leak in any number of ways and get out.

What should a LinkedIn summary include?

Richard Lowe: On LinkedIn, it’s by you, and it’s about you. That means you want to make yourself look good. Don’t put anything negative in your LinkedIn, ever. You want to present yourself in the best possible light, because that’s part of your personal brand. If you were a circus clown, you’d want to present yourself as the best possible circus clown that exists. You don’t want to appear arrogant; you just say: I’m an excellent writer. I’m a best-selling author. I’ve published 51 books. I’ve ghostwritten 12 books. [113+ authored and 54+ ghostwritten as of 2026.] These are important things to let people know. It builds up your credibility.

You also want to wrap that around keywords and key phrases. I’ve got keywords: ghostwriter, best-selling author, LinkedIn branding expert. Those get built into everything on LinkedIn: the experiences, the summary, and so on. That helps search engines figure out who you are and what to surface you for. If you search LinkedIn for ghostwriting, you’re going to find me high on the list; I think I’m number three on ghostwriter, and it changes all the time. That’s because I have that keyword optimized, and I get a lot of hits from people looking for ghostwriters. So keep keywords in mind; that’s part of your research for building your LinkedIn.

Now, you write up your brand in the summary section. This is both good and bad: you have 2,000 characters. That’s about three-quarters of a page in 12-point font. It’s not a lot of room, which means you have to be succinct and to the point. Understand what your goal is: I want people to know they can hire me as a ghostwriter and buy my books. It’s in the first person. It’s about you: use the word I, use the word my. It is not a resume. Do not write it as a resume; you will scare people away.

Describe your industry. Introduce yourself and give your credentials: I have 33 years of management experience. I’ve written 51 books. An MBA might be a credential. Your results and accomplishments, with numbers: “I increased sales by 51% in 2007.” Actually put hard numbers there. If you’re in the financial industry, be careful; there are laws about publishing financial data, and we run into that at LinkedIn Makeover all the time. But put in actual numbers, not just your job description. “I’m a manager and I shuffle papers”: nobody cares. If I’m hiring somebody, what I want to know is what you did and how well you did it.

And then a call to action. This is exceptionally important, probably the most important piece next to the first sentence, which is the hook. You have to tell people what to do. They’re reading the summary, okay, sounds good, and they’re done. You need to tell them at the end: call me. Email me. Buy my product. Whatever you want them to do, just tell them. Don’t even say please. Call me, here’s my number. Email me for more information. It’s absolutely vital, because you’d be amazed: if people don’t see that, they don’t ever do anything.

The headline

Richard Lowe: The headline is what appears in the search engines: the LinkedIn search engine, Bing, Google, all of them. The headline is bolded and right there. It’s the thing that grabs people’s attention, and it’s also the most important place for keywords; any keywords in your headline get weighted heavily by the search engines. That can be challenging, because keywords may not grab attention. Everybody puts their job title. “Best-selling author” alone is kind of weak. You might put a phrase, “I can ghostwrite anything for you,” or use separators with various keywords. Whatever works. Just remember the headline is, next to the photo, the most important thing you’ve got.

And LION: a special term. LION means LinkedIn Open Networker. Normally on LinkedIn, people shouldn’t connect with you unless you know them or invited them. If you’re a LION, you’re saying: everybody can connect with me, I want a big network. The reason this matters: LinkedIn considers unsolicited connection requests spam, and if you get reported for too many of them, your account might be suspended, and you’ll be dealing with LinkedIn customer support, which, by the way, is not by phone; it’s by email, and it tends to be slow. So you can connect to a LION without worrying about being reported for spam. For anyone else, message them first, or share a group with them, or better yet, get them to connect with you.

What makes a good LinkedIn profile photo?

Richard Lowe: Your profile photo is of paramount importance. Spend the money on a good professional photo. Go to a professional headshot photographer. They know how to pose you, they know the lighting, they’ll use Photoshop to fix anything that’s wrong, they know where you point your eyes. Spend the hundred, two hundred, five hundred bucks, whatever it is. Even if you don’t have the money, go to the department store in the mall and get the $29.95 special. But make sure it’s a professional photo, and you’re dressed appropriately for the brand you’re portraying. Upper management: suit and tie. Computer person: more casual. Circus clown: dressed as a clown. Actor: dramatic. Make it appropriate for your brand.

Don’t use selfies. Ever. Selfies are awful for anything, really, and especially awful on social media. And look at your background. I have seen photos with cemeteries in the background. I’ve seen photos with beer bottles. I have seen photos of people bent over throwing up in the background. Don’t do that. It generates a poor image of you. And make sure you’re not cropping photos; I see this a lot, where somebody has a picture with an old girlfriend and crops it, and there’s an arm hanging in the frame. It’s unprofessional. Look straight at the observer, with good lighting, not at the floor. And make sure your photo is the same across all your platforms: the same photo, or at least the same set, on Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, and so forth, so your brand is consistent everywhere.

Section order

Richard Lowe: I’ll go through this one quickly: you want your sections in a certain order. Your summary should always be first; it tells people who you are and what you do. Your experience is usually next. But if you have a lot of honors and awards, you might want those over your experience. If your focus is volunteering, you might move that up. If you’re just out of school, you might want your education over your experience, because your experience might just be working in a liquor store. Play with the order depending on your focus and what makes you stand out, but the order I present here is generally good.

One thing about languages: always include languages, even if it’s only one. And if you have multiple languages, be sure to include them, because that can help you get jobs. If you speak Spanish and English and Tagalog and Chinese, you’ve got three more markets beyond English you can serve, and that is very powerful. Include certifications if you’re certified in anything. If you’re certified in 45 things, don’t include all 45; put a reasonable limit, half a dozen. And don’t put license numbers; that gets into privacy issues. Just say you’re a certified contractor, and if they need the number, they can call you.

Relationships, not automation

Richard Lowe: The whole purpose of LinkedIn is to form relationships. Consider it as if you were at a trade show, or a job fair, or networking in real life. You’re out there shaking hands, passing business cards around, talking to people, patting each other on the back, telling them about you, listening to them talk about themselves. This is about creating relationships. You don’t use LinkedIn as an automated machine. I really don’t like the automated tools; you see those all the time, where you get thank-yous for things that make no sense. Make it personal.

So when you get a connection request, reply: “Thanks for connecting with me. What can I do for you?” Always make it about them. Never make it about yourself until you have a relationship. What can I do for you? How can I help you? What about my profile did you like? These are ways to approach people, and it gets them interested, because everybody wants to know what can be done for them.

And then get your relationship off of LinkedIn as fast as you can. That sounds kind of weird, but quite a few people turn off email notifications from LinkedIn, so they don’t find out you sent them a message until weeks or months later. You might think they’re being rude, but they never got your message. It’s sitting on LinkedIn. So once you have a relationship formed, get it onto the phone or email, where you can communicate in real time. I have been messed up by this many times: why hasn’t this person called me back? He never got the message.

One setting you want on most of the time: notify your network of changes. The purpose of LinkedIn is to be known, so when you make a change, you want people to know. Unless you’re looking for a job and you don’t want your boss to know: in that case, turn off notifications, make your changes, then turn it back on. Be cognizant of that depending on what you’re trying to do.

Your other audience: the search engines

Richard Lowe: You also have a relationship with search engines. It’s invisible, but you have it. Search engines visit your LinkedIn profile probably every day, sometimes several times a day, each one of them. They look over your entire profile and find keywords; they’re trying to find ways for people to find you. They’re also trying to find ways that you’re trying to fool them. If you keyword stuff, meaning you just dump a list of keywords into your profile, Google and Bing are going to say: aha, he’s trying to fool me, and throw those keywords away. Don’t try to fool the search engines. But keep in mind you have two audiences, people and search engines, and you have to write for both.

And search engines like change. This is very important. If you create the perfect LinkedIn profile and then walk away and never touch it again, you will not get hits, except by accident, because the search engines will say: this guy’s doing nothing, and drop you down the rankings. So one of your strategies has to be changing things on a regular basis, daily even. That means status updates: a link to an article you found interesting, a photo, a little paragraph that you took a class and learned something new, a video, a change to your summary. Anything that’s a change will cause you to rise in the search engines. Do it as often as practical: at least weekly, daily if you can. I do it daily, because I’m on the internet all the time. At the barest minimum, once a month, make a change or a posting of some kind. That keeps you in the attention of the search engines and of people, because people get notified of those changes too. It pops you up on the homepage, and you’ll be seen.

Linking your web presence together

Richard Lowe: You have several fields in LinkedIn where you can put your blog, your website, any other site that’s important to you; I think you get three of them. Use them. If you have a business page on Facebook, put it here. If you have a blog, put it here. You’ve only got three, so pick the most important ones. LinkedIn is treated very highly by the search engines, so links here boost those other sites in the rankings.

And link things both ways. I blog all the time, and I post those links into LinkedIn, and I get an amazing number of hits on my blog from LinkedIn. My blog points to my LinkedIn, and my LinkedIn points to my blog. Same with a website. You funnel them to each other. If you want people to end up at your Facebook, your LinkedIn might point to Facebook, but maybe your Facebook doesn’t point back. It depends on your strategy and your primary output; decide how you link them together.

The company page

Richard Lowe: Company pages used to be very full-featured; LinkedIn has reduced them to a few paragraphs and what’s called Showcase, which is 250 characters and a couple of pictures. It’s still worth doing if you have a company; it’s free. Write up a blurb about your company, following the same rules as your profile, only focused on the company, and include the showcases, the logos, and images. Don’t spend a lot of time on it; its purpose is to introduce the company and a few products, and people will click through to your blog or website.

One trick: create a CNAME for your company page, a subdomain like company.yourdomain.com that points at it. Here’s why. The company page has to be associated with a profile. Say a person who works for you creates the company page under her profile, and then she leaves and takes her profile with her. If all your links across the web point at that page directly, you’re stuck; you’d have to chase down and change every link. With the CNAME, you change it once in your domain settings, and it’s changed all over the web. People have associated company pages with the receptionist’s profile, the receptionist leaves, and it’s her profile, not the company’s. Very inconvenient.

How do you use LinkedIn groups to build a network?

Richard Lowe: Groups are a very important part of your strategy. Groups are where you’re going to meet people. The most important thing to know: groups are part of your network. Your network is the people you’re connected with, plus the people in your groups. Anybody outside your network gets charged to send you an InMail message, and you’d be charged to message them. That’s to help prevent spamming. If they’re in your network, in a group with you or connected to you, it’s free.

So join as many groups as you can, up to the limit of 100, as big as you can find, related to your topics. If I’m a writer and I can find a group of 100,000 writers, that’s a great group to join. Second criterion: make sure they’re reasonably active. Look for postings from the last week or the last couple of days. If the postings are six months old, don’t bother, unless you just want to make your network bigger.

And post in them once in a while; it’s part of your strategy. Go through your groups, answer questions, ask questions, comment. Don’t spam. You don’t need to promote your products; you’re promoting yourself, your credibility, your skills, how you help people. This builds your reputation. Focus on a few of the larger or more active groups, build up a rep, and those people will start connecting with you. You can even close a few messages with: feel free to connect with me. Use groups to build connections, just like a convention floor. You wander around, and you talk to people.

How do you get LinkedIn recommendations from busy people?

Richard Lowe: Recommendations are very, very important. When I look at a person’s profile, I want to see who’s recommended them. I want to see which high-level manager, which influencer, which keynote speaker has recommended them, or which customer, if they’re a business. I don’t care about people who have worked for them; that’s a useless recommendation, because they have no choice.

So get lots and lots of recommendations. Dozens and dozens. Get them wherever you can. If you go to a seminar, get the speaker to recommend you. If you know a CEO of another company, get them to recommend you. If you’ve done business with customers, get all of them. And reverse the flow: recommend them as well. “This was a great customer.” “I was at this guy’s speech; it was awesome.” It builds credibility, people like people who recommend, and it puts your name in other people’s profiles.

There’s a trick to getting recommendations: write them yourself. If you ask the keynote speaker or the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company for a recommendation, he’s going to say, “Sure, I’ll give you one.” He’s never going to do it. Unless you write it for him. In the recommendation request box, you write: “I’d like you to recommend me. Here’s my suggestion,” and the text. All he has to do is cut and paste. Ninety percent of the time it comes back really quick, saying done, maybe a word or two changed. You increase your odds dramatically by writing it for them. It sounds kind of weird, but believe me, it works, and sometimes it’s the only way to get recommendations.

Endorsements: get them as often as you can; LinkedIn’s pretty automatic about it. What endorsements do is say: this person has these skills, and a lot of people agreed. It’s good for a first glance at what a person’s good at. Other than that, move on. Not that important.

Offline marketing and media

Richard Lowe: Offline marketing is where you can really leverage LinkedIn. Put your LinkedIn URL on your business cards, your stationery, your email signature. Put it anywhere that makes sense. If you’re giving a speech, put it on the handouts. If it’s too long, get a domain name or a CNAME for it. You want people going to your LinkedIn profile, where they become permanent connections.

Media is actually very important. Your summary and your experiences can hold video, presentations, graphics, documents, and links, as many as you want. Don’t overdo it. For example, I did a profile for a guy who has one of the largest leather factories in the world, and it was under construction. He made a little two-minute video walkthrough of the factory: the big machines, the vats of chemicals, the hides being processed. Kind of a cool video. Keep them under two minutes if you can. He put it on his profile and got an amazing number of comments and hits, because it’s interesting. People love videos. Google loves videos. So include videos, slideshows, documents. I’ve got three or four on my summary and six on each of my recent experiences, and I rotate them once in a while. If a video’s stale, put in a different one. That’s the beauty of the web: you should be changing it.

If you’re shy, here’s a trick: record just audio, and put a picture up, and speak over the picture. That makes it much easier, and it still draws people in. Slideshows work great too. When you give a presentation, put the slides on LinkedIn, and all the people from the presentation who want the slides have to connect with you to get them. It’s a cool way to get people to connect.

Network building: LION, handbuilt, or willy-nilly

Richard Lowe: You have three network-building strategies, really. The LIONs build the largest possible networks; there are people out there with 50,000 connections. I don’t know when they have time to do anything else, and I think it’s kind of silly, because how can you have a conversation with 50,000 people? Handbuilt is what I do: people I know, people I’ve worked with even for a minute, people I’ve talked to. And willy-nilly is: you connect with anybody, but you’re not really trying. Handbuilt works the best, because these are people you actually have relationships with in the real world; you’ve at least talked to them on the phone once. I’d recommend people be LIONs in the sense of accepting connections, but not the 25,000-connection kind.

One important thing about connections: anybody who connects with you can see all your other connections. What that means: if you’re a car dealer or a salesperson, you don’t want your competition seeing all your customers and vendors. So don’t connect with your competition, if that applies to what you’re doing. It’s an important part of your strategy.

And spam: you’re going to get spam requests. It happens all the time. Sometimes it’s obvious: the gorgeous photo obviously pulled from the internet, with some misspelled words. Sometimes it’s not so obvious. Take a look at the profile and make sure it makes sense. False profiles are all over the place, and there are a lot of con men in the world. Be careful, don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, but it does happen, and there are people who don’t intend you well.

LinkedIn is not Facebook, and one profile only

Richard Lowe: This is very important, and I have to stress it a lot: LinkedIn is not Facebook. Facebook is a social site, for socializing. Think of it as the barbecue after the Super Bowl: everybody’s talking and chatting, the personal stuff, the politics. That’s not LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, don’t talk politics unless you’re a politician or that’s your business. Don’t post anything controversial; that’s for Facebook or offline. Keep LinkedIn professional. Treat it like a trade show in a suit and tie, and it will do you very well. And don’t post those math puzzles and weird pictures. Nobody likes that.

And multiple profiles: I get asked this occasionally. Somebody has two careers, a home business and a job: can I have two profiles? LinkedIn’s terms and conditions do not allow multiple profiles. Don’t do it. They will close you down. You get one, it needs to be your real name, and don’t even go there, because if they find out, they’re not very sympathetic. At least one of them will be shut down.

The takeaways

Richard Lowe: The takeaways are straightforward. LinkedIn is a professional network for branding yourself first, your company or product after. You need a strategy, and then tactics based on that strategy. Make sure people can see you; make yourself as visible as you can. Write up your brand and make it exciting, using facts: numbers and accomplishments. Put your sections in the order that makes sense. Remember LinkedIn is about creating relationships; it’s not an automated program, and people know when robots are talking to them. Nobody’s interested in being chatted up by a robot. Be a person. Build relationships. Link all your social media and blogs together. Do a company page if you have a company, but don’t spend a lot of time on it. Learn to work the groups. Really work recommendations; get as many as you possibly can. Take advantage of offline marketing. Put some videos in your profile. Build your network the way that fits your strategy. You’re going to get spam; just deal with it. Remember it’s not Facebook. And don’t do multiple profiles.

Audience questions

Brian Lubeck: Richard, thank you very much. We have a couple of questions. The first is about the value of LinkedIn Premium: is it worth it if you’re looking for a job? That’s from Mercedes out in Salt Lake City.

Richard Lowe: If you’re looking for a job, LinkedIn Premium is very useful, because it lets you see everybody who has looked at your profile. Without the premium level, you only see the first few. With it, you can see that recruiters have looked at you, and you could send them a message: what did you find interesting about me? That alone is worth a lot, and it gives you additional reporting capabilities. I think it’s only a couple hundred bucks a year, and you can pay by month. So if you’re looking for a job: yeah, get it.

Brian Lubeck: Another question about the liking process on articles: does liking notify the search engines, would it be considered a change?

Richard Lowe: That’s something I’m not that familiar with, honestly. Liking just lets people know you’ve liked it; it doesn’t seem to do much. I don’t get notified that people have liked my articles; there’s a counter, but no prod. It does tell me if people shared them, and I much prefer that people share my articles than like them. Sharing opens it up to everybody, whereas liking just says, yeah, I thought this was cool. I don’t think liking has any value to the search engines at all. It’s better to be shared than liked.

Brian Lubeck: Another question about career transition: when you’re moving from one distinct career to another where you don’t have much experience yet, how do you strategize the profile?

Richard Lowe: Oh, this is perfect, because I had to do that. I was a computer guy for 33 years, a manager in the computer industry working for a retail chain, and then: bang, I’m a writer. A whole different career, and I didn’t have any books written yet. I wasn’t a ghostwriter at the time. What you have to do is go through your whole LinkedIn profile and work it toward that goal. How did your previous experiences prepare you for the career change? For me, being a computer person and a manager prepared me for being a writer, because I learned how to manage projects, how to write proposals, how to structure things. So I fine-tuned my profile so that it looked like my entire career was aimed toward being a writer. Then, when I became a writer, I created a self-employed experience that went into detail about being a writer and what I can do for people. And eventually I created my own company, and I have two current experiences: one that I’m a published author, in detail, and one that I’m CEO of The Writing King, in detail. You can have as many experiences as you want, and you can create specialized ones; if you work with a charity, you can create an experience for that. That’s totally fine. Basically: rework your profile to aim it that way.

Brian Lubeck: Excellent advice. That relates to another big challenge a lot of job seekers face: if they’re currently unemployed, what should they put for their current position?

Richard Lowe: When I was unemployed, I took up consulting, and I put in: I was a consultant. Even though I was only doing a very minor amount of consulting, a couple hundred dollars a month for that brief period, it still counts. It’s consulting, so I put in a consulting company, and there it is. What were you doing when you were unemployed? I was a consultant. And you write it up, and it actually looks very good. Or you could say you were on a sabbatical, or any number of other things. I’ve had clients do that: they tell people they were on sabbatical for those two years, or they were a missionary, and they create it as an experience. And sometimes it’s best to leave it blank. It depends on your strategy.

Brian Lubeck: Could you say more about when it’s appropriate to leave it blank? Say a person stops working in December, and it’s January now.

Richard Lowe: Okay: I was an employer at Trader Joe’s, and I employed several hundred people. It’s expected that somebody leaving a job might have a couple-month gap. I would usually ask them, “So what’s this gap?”, they’d tell me, and that would be fine. If it’s more than a few months, you might want to add a little to your summary: “went on sabbatical during this period.” You don’t want to get into medical conditions; don’t do that. And you definitely don’t want negatives: “my boss fired me and I had a hard time finding a job.” Don’t do that. Put in the consulting thing if you have to; anybody can consult or write, or you had a part-time job. Or leave it blank with a line in the summary. I’ve had people do that.

And as an employer, I like seeing consulting. Okay, you weren’t in a job for two years, but you were consulting. What were you doing? It opens a conversation: I was doing this and this. It shows me the guy has drive. He’s trying to survive; he’s trying to start a business. That’s a big plus, actually. Whereas if it’s blank, it brings the question: was he sick? What happened here? And it might stop the conversation. Consulting opens the conversation.

Brian Lubeck: Right. You want to be mindful of the impression you create in the mind of the recruiter or hiring manager. And it looks like we have a final question about a double identity, so to speak: a person has a second profile, and they’re trying to figure out how to delete it.

Richard Lowe: That’s a good question I’ve never considered. They may have to ask LinkedIn support. I honestly don’t know a way to delete a LinkedIn profile yourself. LinkedIn will most likely contact them and tell them they have to get rid of one, and they may shut one down, and you may have to work with support.

Brian Lubeck: So, good word to the wise: as you’re creating your LinkedIn profile, treat it as the final draft, so you don’t have a mistaken draft or alter ego out there. But hope is not lost; continue to develop the one you want to keep. And real quick, one simple action step for the next 24 to 48 hours?

Richard Lowe: Take a look at your strategy and your tactics. Those first couple of slides. If you have a strategy at all; if you don’t, formulate one. What do you want to accomplish, and who is your audience? Those are the two most important questions. Is it recruiters? Job seekers? Customers? Get more specific. Then narrow that down to the message you want to put out there, and make sure your profile has that message. Everything flows from those two things.

Brian Lubeck: Excellent. Richard, we’re out of time for tonight, but I want to thank you so much for sharing your experiences, your philosophy, and especially your insight: a great balance of the overview and the technical aspects. I wish you well as you continue to carry your message that transforms lives through the written word. To our audience: thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us. Your continued investment in your career will give you greater control over your career, and your personal happiness too. Until next time, best wishes for your continued success.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.