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Monday, December 23, 2013

Five Tips for Crafting a Winning Profile in a Professional Networking Site (Part 6)

You may have figured out by now that after providing the first four guidelines in crafting a professional profile, I was teaching you to aim for coherency. And why is coherency crucial to your success?

First and foremost, you want to get noticed by potential clients by appearing as many times as possible in job searches. How can people know you're available for projects and tasks if your profile is not made visible to them in the first place?

Second, clients are looking for specialists, not dabblers, in their field. Just like in a typical resume, clients look for workers with tenure in previous jobs.

It would take around two years to learn all the ropes of a specific field, and on your third year onward, you'll find yourself easing into a routine and choosing projects with which you're most familiar. 

If you work on a freelance basis, you may experience dry spells from the start. But your advantage is you can use the extra hours that you would have spent dressing up and commuting to and from work to hone your skills.

So, having said all of the above, here's the fifth and last guideline in crafting a winning professional profile:

Be specific with keywords.

Let's say your competency lies in copywriting. Copywriting encompasses a wide range of areas, since companies, enterprises, and manufacturers have different strategies to market their products and services. 

So think about the majority of spec ads that you've written in the past. You may have teamed up with an entrepreneur that provides pet grooming services, and you wove relevant information about diabetes in dogs into your copy. 

Or how about writing for a website that relies heavily on traffic to sustain their business? A copywriter needs to master SEO among other skills to entice online visitors to place their orders.

With these things in mind, you may type in keywords like "print ad," "SEO copywriting," and "advertising copy." By being very specific, you exclude the other forms of copywriting (or writing, in general) and you separate yourself from other freelancers.

By doing this, the chances are high for your name to come up in job searches. And when you back things up with a lucidly written profile, surely you will catch the interest of potential clients.

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