In today’s world, consultants must simply know how to leverage LinkedIn. As per a digital marketing study, 49% of B2B buyers research vendors on LinkedIn and 80% of social media leads come from LinkedIn. For an independent consultant, an engaging LinkedIn profile and active presence is like a showroom for his or her consulting services. When a potential client is torn between two consultants of the same caliber, a strong LinkedIn presence could be the deciding factor.
Will Bachman has been running his own consulting business since 2008 and has built two top-tier independent consulting communities (Umbrex 😲and Veritux). In the latest episode of his podcast, “Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional,” Will shares the best LinkedIn practices for independent consultants. Over the past 10 years, Will has gathered insights from over 100,000 LinkedIn profiles 🤯. Some highlights:
Headline: Key point: get specific. Avoid the generic “Independent Consultant” or “Entrepreneur”–these headlines tell your viewer very little, if anything at all. Come up with something compelling, like your fishing line (shoutout to David A. Fields!) which captures the viewer’s attention and summarizes in a phrase who you serve and what kind of problems you work on.
Articles/Posts: Know the difference between the two. With posts, the goal is not to sell with them. Rather, their sole function is to engage people in conversation. 🗣
Get a Premium Account: Will recommends purchasing the “Business” premium account (~$60 per month), but he still discusses the other three options that are most relevant to independent consultants. The Business account comes with a number of useful tools/perks like 15 InMails per month and the ability to see who views your profile, just to name a couple.
These are just a handful of the many best LinkedIn practices that Will covers in his podcast. In addition to the podcast, he has a best practices document that pulls it all together. Not only that, but Will will be covering some of these topics live in an exclusive webinar for the CoSolo community. More on that below.
Time for a LinkedIn profile makeover! 💅 🎉Live Learning Event - Webinar and Q&A with Will Bachman
Come join us Wednesday, November 20th from 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST for a special webinar hosted by no other than Will Bachman himself! During this event, Will will dig deep into the best practices on how to leverage LinkedIn to increase your brand awareness which will ultimately help boost your sales. It is highly recommended that you read through the aforementioned best practices guide and/or listen to his podcast before attending the webinar. This event will not just be a mere recap of these two resources, for he will spend much of the time reviewing and providing feedback on 4-5 attendees’ LinkedIn profiles.
To register for this event, please follow this link. Helpful Tips from the Community
In our members-only Slack community, our members engage regularly to discuss and share knowledge. Ideas, tools, resources, and the like are circulated on an ongoing basis. Below are just 3 of the many interesting items shared over the past few weeks. Hopefully, they are as helpful to you as they have been for our members.
📞Business Telephone #: One member asked the community for a low cost solution for a business telephone number. The general consensus was that Google Voice was the way to go. However, there are a few caveats that members were helpful in pointing out: you have to call yourself about once a month to keep the number activated and there’s a good chance Google is storing your messages since they transcribe them. If these features rub you the wrong way, voip.ms might be a worthwhile option to check out.
💪Networking Tips: CoSolo’s very own Adrian Miller provides some great tips on networking in this interview with Ramon Ray. Additionally, Adrian shares stories and news on the ins and outs of business networking. Worth the half hour listen.
📊Powerpoint Templates: Slide Carnival is a great source that provides free Powerpoint templates and Google Slides themes. They’re professional, high quality, and completely customizable. Oh yeah, and did we mention that they’re FREE? 🤝 New Members for the Fall Term
We recently gained 🔟 new members! Stephen Stanczak, Bob Cottrell, Dave Stern, Winston Shih, Mark Dingle, Alex Sharpe, Mike Gammarino, Beth Toth, Alexis Owen, and Jessica Graves–welcome aboard! We are super pumped that you all decided to make the commitment to fully join CoSolo. Cheers!
BTW, special shoutout to Michael Feyen for referring Alexis Owens and Beth Toth, to Laura Stringer for referring Jessica Graves, to Deepak Lalwani for referring Alex Sharpe and to Winston Shih for referring Mark Dingle! 🎺Apply for CoSolo Membership🎈 If you are serious about building your independent or boutique consulting business and you think it will be beneficial to have other fellow consultants advise and hold you accountable, try joining us! You can try us out for 1 month risk-free. Please fill out our application here, which will help us assess if you are the right fit for our community.
If you have any questions, feel free to email tony@cosolo.co, or schedule a call with Tony here.