Love it or hate it, LinkedIn for freelancers shouldn’t be as hard as it often tends to be. The problem I have noticed has a few layers:
- Freelancers tend to be great at marketing everyone else except themselves. The amount of reflection there appears to be can leave you a little cold
- A lot of people use LinkedIn to spam message. It sets up a really awkward vibe of logging on to see something interesting only to find that you’re rolling your eyes again and again
- It feels incredibly dry and boring. Probably because you can’t get past the giant spotlight hanging above your head or the trash coming in through the Inbox
- OR it appears to look like something out of a teenage slumber party with little tribes yelling “yo go girl!” at every turn.
However, LinkedIn is useful. LinkedIn for freelancers means visibility. It also means the potential for leads through association and setting up that coveted position of authority all the cheat sheets gab about.
So, how do you use LinkedIn without wanting to vomit into the wastepaper basket? By understanding the algorithm better and what it can do for you.
Here’s some of the research I’ve found on LinkedIn for freelancers and general use
LinkedIn audiences are professional audiences
45% of LinkedIn content readers are upper middle management. That’s 61 million people who have budgets and make training and resourcing decisions you could be talking to.
44% of LinkedIn users earn more than $75K USD a year. They have personal budget to expand their skills.
Also, as far and algorithms go, from my personal testing as well as the literature I have read, LinkedIn is probably the one where you would think “wow, this guy spends a lot of time at home and not many hobbies.”
It’s a little desperate and a little naïve. But you can work both these to your advantage.
This is the place where people go to find talent and to be talent
That means it’s super important (and advantageous) for a freelancer on LinkedIn to be blatant about why you are there.
If it takes you saying something like “I am a freelancer, hire me for content” or whatever you jam is, do it. You stand out against the people who are only there under duress or chasing the full-time roles.
Remember, you can easily update your profile. And the beautiful thing about LinkedIn is that it’s so damn starved for attention, it’ll throw you a damn parade when you do.
So, get used to experimenting with LinkedIn profile content until you work out what your version of success is.
LinkedIn for freelancers doesn’t exist (kind of)
The first hurdle when using LinkedIn for freelancers is recognising it doesn’t really care about you as a self-employed person. It cares about you as a roadmap of wonderful signals to prove your career is one worth having.
The LinkedIn algorithm wants to know what you specialise in and tailor your experience and the experience of your prospects accordingly.
LinkedIn for freelancers is a bit of a toughie because we often do a lot of different things and a lot of roads have led us to where we are. As such, make sure you focus on what you want your top two goals for using LinkedIn would be with your profiles, work experience, blogging, video, and content shares.
It has to be a common theme. People like me tend to share a lot about different things and we slide down the rankings. We also spend a lot of time giving links for people to check things out. Makes sense, right? You want to look like you know a lot of stuff and are well-read and informed.
Wrong-oh buck-o. LinkedIn is like the digital version of the Hotel California. It wants you to keep people on the platform with no real reason to leave 80% of the time. That plus it’s difficulty in understanding where to put you if you have more than two goals means LinkedIn for freelancers can be a tough nut to crack when you initially arrive.
LinkedIn wants your content so bad
LinkedIn is meant to be the professional network. And it is. It’s also so hungry for content and participation, you can almost hear its stomach growling a mile away.
Despite being a professional network, the better performing profiles, short or long form posts are:
- Personable
- Lower on the jargon scale
- Longer in nature (i.e. long form observations and blog posts)
- Geared towards discussing the industries you’re in with critical thinking in mind
- Approachable for all levels of understanding and learning
- Don’t link outside of LinkedIn
LinkedIn wants you to play in its realm. It is a massive shut-in platform that really doesn’t like outward facing links. It rewards people who spend approximately 80% of their time producing content for the LinkedIn audience ON LinkedIn. You can link out to your website or other articles, but if you want a ratio, it has to be one in 5 pieces of content as a maximum lead a person off LinkedIn.
Yeah, I told you LinkedIn was seriously needy!
That makes LinkedIn for freelancers tough, I know. But if you can use LinkedIn’s blogging features, write long comments for your status, or even do the old trick of putting the link to the content in the second comment, you can work around it.
The kinds of content it wants are:
- Consistent in frequency. Be a regular poster. Set yourself a timetable and be there like the trip to the loo after your daily bran muffin
- Platform directed content. Long form discussion posts, stuff pointing to your services, profile and blogs, discussions in groups – all this kind of “at home with LinkedIn” stuff matters
- Content from people that have interacted with you in the past. It wants to see an audience build and relationships become ‘a thing’. It wants you to make other people come to LinkedIn and stay longer and longer. If you can act like a recruiter for LinkedIn by making people stay, you will be rewarded (sounds a little like religious door knocking, I know)
- Commentary, video, opinion pieces etc from popular people. Even if the content that person is producing that day is about as appealing as a soggy piece of lettuce on week old bread, LinkedIn loves people that play the game
- Be thought provoking. In line with LinkedIn’s desire to become the Hotel California of professional networking platforms, the more you get people stopping and pausing as well as commenting on your content, the more likely it is to favour you
LinkedIn is about making a case for you to be taken seriously as a professional. It wants to make you seem intelligent, competitive and peer orientated. LinkedIn for freelancers does mean talking to your peers and in your cliques.
BUT…a word of caution, don’t do it so much that no one else wants to play with you because you can accidentally turn clients off. Or worse still, stop being that recruiter LinkedIn wants you to be. If you talk to the same people all the time in order to game the algorithm, it will prioritise content from people bringing fresh meat to the grinder.
To do this, LinkedIn rewards the following behaviours:
- Interaction and participation with other professionals through appreciation and comments
- This interaction extends to following influencers and their pages as well as commenting on blog content
- Participating in groups – or starting your own!
- Using the SERVICES feature to highlight what you have on offer – this is especially true when using LinkedIn for freelancers because it gets the platform to recognise you have more than two reasons to exist (eventually)
- Gaining authority for the work you do by making use of the skills section
- Bolstering those credentials by linking publications and reports out in the wild https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/56598/adding-editing-or-removing-publications-on-your-profile?lang=en
- Publishing your heart out with long form pieces on the blog as well as shares on newsfeeds that invite discussion and tell a story
- Using LinkedIn learning to demonstrate your knowledge and learning in a visible way (often paid)
LinkedIn for freelancers: Sales edition
To promote yourself on LinkedIn is acceptable- as long as it’s tasteful. Examples of this include:
- Sharing the blood, sweat and tears story behind your latest release
- Feeling enormous gratitude for the accolades and awards (as opposed to accepting them as your right)
- Congratulating the amazing team that made your success possible
- Giving a behind the scenes look at a major achievement or milestone
LinkedIn is aware that people jump way to quickly into sales mode in your Inbox. In typical LinkedIn fashion, it’s a little too scared of losing the content it has by being harsh, so it’s probably not got the stones to implement a shadow ban or anything remotely useful.
However, if you can use LinkedIn’s starvation for content, it’s desire to move away from being a spam mill, and create direct content for the platform that is exclusive, you will likely find yourself offered in better quality search results.
A couple of things I have on my list to try to test LinkedIn for freelancers include:
- Staggering updates of profile information. Seeing whether doing LinkedIn over a few days or weeks keeps a continued elevated level. This would be preferable over a big hit with nothing else in future
- Experimenting with new profile sections
- Hammering out the services well. And then using them for promotional content
- Spending a week in LinkedIn groups and seeing where it gets me
If you feel like doing it together, hit me up. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebekahlambert/
Acing LinkedIn profiles
A lot of people fall into the trap of talking all about themselves. But what is effective is the same as your web page about- writing about how you fill a potential need for the reader.
LinkedIn for freelancers should be client directed. And directed in such a way that a potential client can immediately understand why they would bother hiring you.
The other common mistake is writing as though you’re doing a CV for a recruiter. In reality, your LinkedIn profile should not repeat the CV. It should act as an extension. And that extension should sell your products and services as the main drawcard.
Freelancers also often fall into the trap of being too shy and not adding information. Or adding too many things to over-compensate. This is true of both the written content being verbose or adding way too many jobs or qualifications.
What should be occurring when you scan someone’s LinkedIn profile is that you get an immediate sense, they have the:
- Skills (you can even take a skills assessment on LinkedIn and have it offered as part of your profile)
- Qualifications (completed- none of the 2 minutes at NASA stuff)
- Outlook on work and your attitudes towards it
- Personality (bold, brassy, quirky, clever, rebellious, girl next door/approachable, excited etc stand out in a crowd where people struggle to talk themselves up)
- There’s a strong position. You can be uber optimistic or cynical as hell, but never in between. Or you stand up for what you believe in (with action attached so people feel like they can follow you to the next stage). Or you are unmasking secrets others hold close. These sorts of positionings perform extremely well with profiles that want to sell their services and products direct. People don’t want beige because beige is what they expect to see at LinkedIn. Be brave enough to surprise them!
A novel approach to LinkedIn works wonders for attracting attention. Be relatable, useful and funny.
Focus, focus, focus
A strong profile edits as much as it adds. These additions should reflect your CURRENT goals and be written to support your main description.
LinkedIn for freelancers should be about three things:
- Demonstrating what you have on offer right now
- Past skills, work experiences and attitudes acquired that inform the now
- A clear and easy path to hiring you for that work
And when I say it has to relate, I don’t mean you need to include your work as a junior journalist in year ten to link to the copywriter you are now over the managerial job you had for 15 years. I mean you should be thinking about which skills you acquired in management led you to be the amazing copywriter of today.
Like any algorithm, LinkedIn has an expected formula
Actually, LinkedIn REALLY wants that formula. It gets easily nervous about your intentions if you go off script. That means you should pick keywords and phrases and repeat them the same way you might for your website’s SEO strategy.
Your LinkedIn profile should contain:
- Carefully chosen keywords, not buzzwords. Thankfully, these can reflect your Google keywords, so you don’t have to search out others
- A headline that equates to a value proposition-
- What you do
- How does it fill the void for your prospects?
- 1 to 2 paragraphs explaining what you do. This is geared towards solving the customer’s needs over showing how many trophies you have in your cabinet
- Work experience where the main focus is on now. Strong conversation, great keyword usage, and details clients give a crap about all go in here
- Former work experience should be treated as a support actor to what you do now. E.g. what skills you picked up that relate to what you do. It’s about creating a clear line of skill acquisition
- Don’t forget, even unrelated work experience is an exercise in capability building. E.g. I commonly share that working in the dating industry taught me to deal with people who had heightened emotions, making me an ideal community manager and crisis manager. It makes sense when I explain it. It doesn’t on face value.
- All roads lead to now. Everything you put on LinkedIn (from content to comments to profile etc) should be about supporting your current endeavours
The algorithm wants to know what you specialise in and tailor your experience and the experience of your prospects accordingly. Make sure you focus on what you want your top two goals for using LinkedIn would be with your profiles, work experience, blogging, video, and content shares. LinkedIn for freelancers is as much about being there in between profile updates as it is in having a strong profile. (sorry!)
The visuals matter
People expect a clear photo. LinkedIn has some trippy facial recognition analysis and found photos perform best when:
- Only one person or focus is featured
- The face takes up 60% of the photo space
- The figure is smiling
- Ideally with the figure looking dead centre to camera
- The image is clear
- It’s accompanied with a strong and fun header picture
It also doesn’t want to see you out drinking, with your boyfriend’s arm around you, or to (sadly) see a cartoon you instead of a real you.
However, the pandemic has brought about people putting real photos up as well as part of a movement to normalise working from home. So, if you have something that is of the “at home with this bad ass freelancer” you want to share, see where it gets you.
The bottom line on LinkedIn for freelancers when dealing with fussy algorithms
Always ask yourself-
- Does my profile make me sound credible, trustworthy and sought after?
- Does my content tell my prospects what they need to know?
- Am I building something here?
- Does what I am building have two prongs?
- Is it so easy to get in touch with me, could a kitten in mittens reciting Uncle Dick Whittington do it?
Oh, and a joke for you, considering we spoke about LinkedIn as the Hotel California. I once went out with a friend to see a band. He was a big band enthusiast. We were watching some pub rock and the drummer was singing.
He leant over to me and said, “Bex, I’m not sure about drummers singing.”
I thought for a moment and replied, “What about Phil Collins? And the Eagles?”
His reply? “Yes, but that’s just one band.”