Rock the World with Your Online Presence

LinkedIn is a powerful sales tool. To harness its potential, though, you need to use it effectively.

That starts with creating a great profile. The better your LinkedIn profile, the more likely someone searching for your product or service is to find you.

But what makes a great profile? And how can you build one with a minimum of fuss? Wouldn’t it be great if someone could take you by the hand and tell you exactly what to type in where?

That’s just what Mike O’Neil and Lori Ruff have done in Rock the World with Your Online Presence: Your Ticket to a Multi-Platinum LinkedIn Profile (CreateSpace, $19.95). In this well-thought-out book, O’Neil and Ruff, two of the world’s top LinkedIn experts, take you step-by-step through the process of building a robust profile.

The chapters and sub-chapters are laid out in the order each subject appears in a LinkedIn profile, starting with Name, Location and Industry, all the way through to Contact Settings and Opportunity Preferences. Not sure what to enter in a certain field? O’Neil and Ruff describe precisely what should go in there and provide examples.

In each section, O’Neil and Ruff share important Do’s and Don’ts, as well as best practices culled from their research into thousands of profiles. Their goal is for you to create your profile strategically, to give you an edge over the millions of other people on the site.

After you’ve built your profile (which, with the help of this book, shouldn’t take you very long) you’ll discover more about how to use LinkedIn. Additional chapters cover topics such as the LinkedIn Dashboard, Privacy Settings, Applications and Groups.

The book is well written and easy to read, with rock & roll metaphors sprinkled liberally throughout. (Hence the title.) The authors refrain from using jargon and explain everything clearly enough for even technophobes to understand. There are also plenty of screen-capture shots to illustrate precisely what’s being discussed.

Do the book’s strategies work? Is it worth investing twenty bucks and a few hours in front of your computer to create or upgrade your LinkedIn profile?

Well, using O’Neil and Ruff’s approach, I rewrote my entire LinkedIn profile. Not long afterward, I learned that when a person searched for the key words I used, my profile came up first. Score! That’s the best endorsement of this book I can make.