LinkedIn profiles  are our one and only place to build connections and a network around our experience. Sure, other social media platforms give us an opportunity for us to talk about our experience but our LinkedIn profile  allow us to showcase our capabilities without having to repeat numerous times.

Creating a killer headline and an exceptional summary are half the battle as whether we are job seekers or seeking to build a business, the additional information on our profile that starts with the “blue box,” begins to play a stronger role. Your headline and summary are your searched terms but once appearing in search results, a connection is made after review of your basic information is reviewed.

The Linkedin “Blue Box”

The LinkedIn blue box is what is seen first when your profile is clicked. Your name, headline, location and industry are displayed at the top. Thereafter, the information displayed is what makes networkers want to connect with you or move on to someone else. The items displayed beneath this basic information is some of the most  important as people want to know what you bring to their network – whether that be an alumni connection, a job connection or shared information.

8 Tips to Enhance Your LinkedIn Profile

1. Status Updates. Your status update is displayed immediately beneath your basic information. Status updates have become increasingly popular with the LinkedIn integration with Twitter. Automating posts from twitter to post on LinkedIn has been used extensively but not widely accepted. Different audiences. Your LinkedIn status is business and not what you ate for dinner, where you went or how your children are destroying the house. Be selective on what you share in your status but be sure to update at least 1x per day to show that you are an active networker.

2. Current Employer. Your current employment is what stands out when people are looking for people within their industry to connect with, are looking for a referral to do business with OR want to cross check your resume. Your most recent experience needs to match your headline and summary. If you are job seeking your opening paragraph of your summary will reflect that however the body should match your career aspirations and your experience.

3. Past Employment. Your past employment is where some get queasy. A position that you only held for a few months or admitting that you worked for a company that was an “in-between” job is never pleasant however long gaps are almost worse. Adding your previous employment for 5 to 10 years (up to 10 years only if it relates to longevity in a field) not only shows that you are employable but that you are eager to work (also can show that you jump around). This is also a great way to connect with coworkers that you have lost touch with. Also, remember, beneath the blue box you can add information about each position you held and your role in the company. Suddenly that “in between” job may have a whole lot more meaning than just paying the rent.

4. Education. Your education in the blue box is not much more than where you attended. This is pretty much letting people know that you did further your education and also for an alumni connection. Beneath the blue box allows you to expand upon your your degree, years of attendance, additional information about the school and activities you participated in.

5. Recommendations. Your recommendations are highly regarded as people want to see that you are well liked, trusted and respected within your industry. When seeking employment or trying to build a business, your recommendations are taken into consideration as if you have performed well for others, then you will perform well for them. The question always arises as to whether ask for the recommendation or to wait for it to be provided. This is never an easy question as some do not think to give a recommendation as they are either not as active on LinkedIn or are unsure as to what to say. Best practice is to consider the person that you would be asking. Have they freely given out recommendations with out being asked or from your experience with them, do they need that nudge?

6. Websites. Websites is set to the default of my website, my company, my blog, my RSS, my portfolio and other. The option of other allows you to add your actual company name for the website and the name of your blog. A common mistake made by many is not changing the default. Changing the default to Other and customizing your links not only introduces the names but also provides a familiarity to them.

7. Twitter. Since the development of the app and the integration with Twitter, you can add your  Twitter account as a separate line item. Cross connecting is always encouraged however cross posting, as discussed above, is not always welcomed and generally warrants a “hide” of your profile. Why? People share items that are now always LinkedIn worthy. Best bet is to set your LinkedIn Twitter to “Share only tweets that contain #li”. This way you can hashtag your tweets of an article, a quote, etc to be posted on your status.

8. Public Profile. Your public profile is customizable to your name or something of the like should your name be a common one. This is another common mistake that people make by not creating a custom profile. Your custom profile does not contain a series of. For example, your custom profile would be: www.linkedin.com/in/yournamehere and not www.linkedin.com/pub/name/seriesofnumbers. To customize, simply click edit and create your profile name when prompted.

The LinkedIn blue box does pack a powerful punch as before connecting, this is the main exposure people have to you and base their decision to connect from this initial information. If your profile blue box snippet peaks their interest, they will scroll down to review your summary, expanded work history and education. If not, they move on.

We just wanted to let you know that Extreme Ezine will live on with new owners, a new design, and a new topic of discussion.

We want to thank Brian for selling the site to us, and we know that you will appreciate the changes we will be making here. There will be changes made over the next week that include a new logo we are having designed right now. We hope you stay with us as the changes are made.

New Topic:

Since I already write about internet marketing on Hot Blog Tips, my partner and I decided to create a new topic here. From now on, this site will be all about Social Media, extreme social media! We will be discussing tips, products, applications, sites, and much more; all in reference to social media. We hope you will enjoy it with us, and feel free to ask questions, or contact us through the contact page with suggestions for topics.

And now for the introductions:

Keith Bloemendaal

That’s me, and some of you may already know me from Hot Blog Tips (which I also purchased from Brian). I have been an internet marketer for over 2 years, and that has become my full time job. I write about my experiences in blogging and internet marketing on Hot Blog Tips, I also own an e-commerce site, and recently partnered with Nick Cardot to create a Social Bookmarking site (still in beta testing).

I have also spent the last 2 years learning all about social media, and my goal is to use that experience to help others here on Extreme Ezine. I believe there is so much more to social media than just creating a Twitter account and sending out links to self promote. And, while there aren’t really any rules with social media, there are methods that work better than others.

Tee Riddle

Hello and welcome to the the new Extreme Ezine! My name is Tee Riddle and I fell in love with social media a little over a year ago. I began, as many have, on Twitter and have become a fascinated user of Facebook to solidify my brand.

As Keith pointed out, there’s much more to social media than self-promotion and it’s my goal here to make social media – well, more social! In the last year I have witnessed the true power social media has for building a brand and a business. It is my goal to share what I’ve learned about making real connections using social media with you here at Extreme Ezine.

When I’m not tweeting or liking, I enjoy growing vegetables in my home garden and blogging about it on Veggie Gardener.

My Twitter username is @TeeRiddle and you will usually find me tweeting about social media, vegetable gardening and anything else that crosses my mind.

I hope you enjoy the changes here at Extreme Ezine and travel with us throughout this journey.

As mentioned in my last post, I have decided to shut down the Extreme Ezine site, blog and newsletter. Keith Bloemendaal of Hot Blog Tips has agreed to purchase ExtremeEzine.com for $2.1 million. Ok, slight exaggeration, but he is buying it. Most of you probably already know Keith, and if you don’t, stay tuned, he’s a great guy. I fully expect this site to take off with Keith running it.

Your Feed Subscriptions
If you want to continue with your feed subscription, and you should, do nothing. I will be transferring the feed to Keith so everyone can continue with the new admin. As far as the newsletter subscription, you will need to re-subscribe. I will be sending that information shortly to the list.

What About Me?
I’m still online and you should actually see more of me very soon. You can find me at http://blog.csc4u.com/, stop by and check it out. Don’t forget to comment and subscribe.

There you have it. The Extreme Ezine will live on. This will be my last post, I’m handing the keys over to Keith right away. It’s been fun and I appreciate every one of you.

For those of you keeping up with the Extreme Ezine, you probably know I have several other business interests outside of internet/ezine marketing and blogging, both on and offline. In fact, I make very little from the Extreme Ezine, financially, but have really enjoyed running it. I have become more and more active in local online business consulting and I have flat run out of time. I can no longer run the Extreme Ezine effectively, so I am sad to announce I am shutting it down along with several other sites. I’m not going anywhere, I will still visit your sites, run my niche sites and focus on my consulting business. The only blog I plan to keep is on my consulting site which you can find here: http://blog.csc4u.com/

Our List
I have always stated from the very beginning that the Extreme Ezine subscriber will always be safe and we will never sell or give those email addresses or any other information. I will delete the list and everyone will be automatically unsubscribed. The database will be permanently destroyed and no one will take it over.

Your Links
I respect and appreciate everyone that has taken the time to read and comment on the blog and I will keep those links active by keeping the site up as for as long as I can, unless someone offers to buy the site, that is. In that case, everything will be up to the new owner. Interested? Make me an offer. As long as I keep the site and am able to keep it online, your links will stay active and do-follow, although the importance will no doubt dwindle.

I will keep comments open for a while and eventually I will close all post comments, but, like I said, previous comments will remain intact. I really appreciate everyone’s work and support and I owe a lot to many of you. Thank you my friends, it’s been a blast.

I’ve mentioned before that I need to work on the quality of our list and increasing our email open rate is at the top of the list. In fact, I was going to send out a few messages and then delete everyone that didn’t open any of them. I’m glad I didn’t. I found this thread on the Warrior Forum: Aweber Stats explained. It looks like I will have to find another way to get rid of inactive subscribers. Basically, the email open rate stats we get from any autoresponder should be used as a guide only. There are several reasons opens are not or can not be counted and other reasons some counted as opens may not have actually been opened.

The way we determine how many emails were opened is by embedding an tiny invisible image into your HTML message. Each time this image is ‘downloaded’ from the server another email open is counted.

So what about text emails? Not counted. What about email clients where the ‘images’ are turned off? Not counted. What about filters that prevent images from displaying? Not counted. Starting to see why our email open rate isn’t exactly a 100% accurate measure? On the other side of the table we have some emails shown as open because of the email client’s preview pane. The image is requested so the email is considered open even though the subscriber may simply delete it from there.

So what’s a marketer to do? Continue on I guess. It’s just statistics. Get a great email auto-responder, build your list, promote your products and build relationships. As for the Extreme Ezine, I’ll work on increasing our open rates as well as the click throughs. Eventually I may still think of a tactic to dump the dead weight but in the mean time we’re pushing forward. Any thoughts on the matter? Do you have a list?

No disclaimer required: You will find my affiliate link in the article above for AWeber. I’ve been using AWeber exclusively and it’s one of my top recommended products. Even though I can gain financially should you use my affiliate link, the truth is I would recommend AWeber without a financial incentive.

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I wasn’t going to post about Google’s recent toolbar pagerank update because there are about a million other posts about it already. But I just noticed that while all of my pages, other than the index page, went to a N/A, the about page on DennisEdell.com has a page rank of three. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not jealous, I just want more than Dennis lol

Seriously, I need to get those pages back up and the way I see it I have about 45 days before the next update. I think I’m going to make another test of it because that’s what us geeks do. I’m going to use blog commenting to bring my Friend’s Page up and other link strategies to bring up the page rank on our photo gallery. I’m not sure about the other pages yet. Now I’m talking about pages her, no blog posts. Any ideas?

I left over thirty blog comments so far today using http://extremeezine.com/friends/ as the URL. The first blogs I commented on was everyone on that page. Are you listed there? See Are You A Blogging Friend To The Extreme Ezine? Get On The List!

Any suggestions other than the linking that I’m already doing to get out of the nasty n/a club?

One more thing that has bothered me for a while. Sheryl from the Blog Co-Op brought it to my attention. My pages and older posts, INCLUDING my index page are not cached by Google. I have no idea why, how to fix it or if it’s even important. Do you?

Speaking about the Blog Co-op, they also joined the n/a club. Brad and Sheryl are the very best of people and they go WAY out of their way to help others. I’m going to link to their forum, The Internet Marketers Guild, and the Blog Co-op from my front page and it would be great if some of you would too. The entire reason for the Co-Op is to help bloggers like us. I think giving back a little is the least we can do.

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Back in 2008 I formed a ‘Friend’s List‘ where I link to blogging friends. Something close to a blog roll I guess but a much bigger list. These are blogging friends that are active on the Extreme Ezine. I just received a comment by Kissie with Just Kissie that I had a link up that hasn’t been active for over a year. She was right and I have been pretty lazy on keeping that list up to date so it’s time for a little spring cleaning. If you are subscribed and participate here you should be on that list so leave a comment below and remind me.

What to leave for your link: I will only add blogs, no static sites, niche sites etc.. All I need is your name, the name of your blog, the URL and any title tag you want to use. I won’t be adding anchor tags but a title tag is fine. Something like this would be perfect:

Name:
Blog Name:
URL:
Title Tag:

The reason for our Friend’s List is two-fold. First, it’s a way for friends to make friends. Second, I use it every now and then to reconnect by going down the list. I will spend the next few days going over the list, cleaning it up and adding new blogging friends. Your comments will make that task a little easier.

Note: Do you have a similar list on a separate page? Leave that link too. I’ll link to other lists at the bottom of our page.

What do you think? A waste of time? See any benefit? Don’t forget to leave your link.

The do-follow issue has been discussed to death lately. It also seems to be driving a wedge between a few bloggers in our community. And the fact is: We are all just guessing unless we are on Google’s payroll. Even so, bloggers can be a passionate group and we can get pretty vocal. Because of this, I am reluctant to post this but, in the traditional blogger way, I can’t help myself.

So here we go… For what it’s worth, I’m going to prove that Google does index some blog comments. It doesn’t show that any weight or authority is being attributed to blog comments but they are often indexed. I suspect many of you, if not most of you, already know this but it seems to be a recent debate. This doesn’t show that any weight or authority is attributed to the content or links attached.

My scientific experiment is flawless and precise NOT. I have a Google alert setup for my name, of course, and I see my comments showing up in the alerts all of the time. Yesterday I commented on John Sullivan’s blog. Below you can see a print screen of the Google alert from my comment on his post My Real Agenda.

Now lets take a unique string from that Google Alert and blog comment:
“The funnest statement I’ve heard in a long time:”

I also used that exact sentence when I Tweeted the post and sent it to Facebook. If you take that sentence, put it in “quotes” and Google it, you get one result (at the time of this post). Can you guess what Google indexed? Facebook, Twitter or my comment on John’s Blog?

I thought it interesting enough to share. Now let me have it. I’m a big boy, I can take it lol I wonder if this post will eventually come up in that same search? Fingers are crossed.

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I stopped selling banner ads on this blog over a year ago because I didn’t feel I could give the advertisers their money’s worth. The click-through rate (CTR) was always super low and it didn’t seem to matter what image or ad was displayed. That’s why this site is third-party banner free, not because I don’t want your money.

I have also been a blog banner advertiser for years now. I have advertised various sites, programs and products using banner ads on blogs and websites. For the most part, I hate to say this, they have failed miserably. I could just be very bad at banner advertising but I think blog banner advertising probably isn’t the best use of our advertising budget. Sure, it’s relatively inexpensive unless you are going after the really large sites and design and setup are a breeze.

I haven’t given up yet. I have several banner advertisements running on a few blogs right now and I’m determined to make banner advertising work. I will stop all current campaigns and try smarter ad practices.

Blog Banner Advertising Challenges

Challenge #1: There are several challenges to running banner advertisements on a blog. First of all, the layout. We all love our beautiful blog themes but most of us have become immune to the 125 pixel banners grouped in that right sidebar with one or two larger banners. Yes, bloggers get banner blindness very quickly.

Solution:
Contact the blogger directly and ask if you can advertise on a particular, upcoming blog post that will be relevant. Ask if your banner ad can be embedded into the post it’s self, the same way we do for our own ads from time to time. For example, a banner ad designer promotion would fit nicely with this post. This obviously takes more effort but I believe it will pay off.

Challenge #2: The second challenge is the ad getting stale. Most blogs sell banner ads by the month yet in the video below Mike Blinder says, “If it goes stale it will fail”. Referring to banner ads he says online ads die after nine days.

Solution:
This can be corrected if the ad image remains on your server and in your control. We can update the image on the fly without waiting to renew the ad. The links will stay the same but we are in control of the image and landing page. Weekly changes and lots of testing are the solution I think.

Your Thoughts? Do you offer banner advertising? Are they selling? Are they effective? Do you buy banner ads? Is banner advertising dead?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrSQ5SqwgIk

Ok, many of us have been fighting the same battle for a very long time. The battle… Too many projects – not enough time. We start a blog or website and just as things start getting interesting we start another. And another. The next thing we know we’re up till two in the morning everyday trying to keep up. That battle can only be won if we know what we’re up against. Below shows how a single blog post can take up to five hours or more.

1. 2 Hours: The first step to any post is deciding what to write about. It is impossible to put a time on that step. Once we have our subject we need to consider our keywords. A little keyword research goes a long way. Now we draw up an outline and begin to form the post. We sometimes go to a dozen or more sites checking details and researching facts. We also need to decide which posts are relevant enough to link out to. Once we have the outline in order it’s time to check sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. Having someone proofread your article helps a lot. Now we’re almost ready. All we need now is an image. Searching for that perfect image that we are allowed to use can take a lot of time. So we publish our post. If you are anything like me you just spent at least two hours of your time on this single post. But we are not finished investing time on this blog post.
2. 1 Hour: Now it’s promotion time. The post needs to be pinged, dugg, and tweeted. We need to add the post to our Facebook and FriendFeed. We need to add the post to the best blog directories and build backlinks. If we really want success we write a couple of separate unique articles to submit to article directories linking back to our post.
3. 2+ Hours: Hopefully we’ll get a bunch of comments to moderate and reply to. We clean up the spam and moderate the rest. We need to follow the link back to each blogger that commented and return the favor. Here’s where many of us get very distracted. Reading posts and comments, following links and commenting more. I’ve lost many hours here.

I have heard some bloggers say they can toss up a post in twenty minutes. I envy them. What about you? Do you spend a lot of time on a single post? How many blogs are you running and how often do you post?

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spaunsglo/ / CC BY 2.0