How to promote your best self

Since moving to a digital environment, knowing how to market yourself is a skill worth investing in. Rachel Killeen discusses a few ways to make yourself stand out from the online crowd.

In psychology, one of the best ways to boost happiness is connecting with others and sharing skills and knowledge. This can also be good for your career profile and your business. Learning to share your skills, knowledge, and best practice is well worth the investment.

Review your profile pages

It is well documented that prospective employers, clients and business contacts check out your online profile before they meet you for the first time. This creates the first impression of you and your credentials. Google your name and review the profiles that relate to you and correct details out of date. Then look again at your profile to see how you can make the content relevant, useful and valuable to clients, employers or contacts who explore your profile for a specific purpose.

Throughout your career, you have learned, practised and honed a unique set of skills. Have you documented those skills fully in your LinkedIn profile, on your business website and on any sites that contain your profile? It is worth updating any profiles that are more than a year old and really consider any relatable milestones in your career – roles, qualifications, experiences, and skills.

Share your skills and knowledge

Where possible, add new content to your profiles. Think about why a person might want to read your online profile and provide content to meet the needs of those people – help them decide that you are a person they want to work with. Over the last year, you have most likely broadened your skill base. Think about how can you share some of this material, not only to expand your online profile but also to help others. A book or article reference, a set of guidelines, answers to FAQs, an article or web page or a briefing note – any of these posted on LinkedIn, on your business website, or as an email update will provide insights for others to benefit from and help to position you as an expert in that field.

Reveal your personality

While the debate may rage on about business being impersonal, the human touch has gained traction in recent years as companies and practices aim to forge personal relationships and build loyalty. Reveal one or two nuggets about who you are as a person in your LinkedIn or website profile or other social media – your hobbies, your favourite music, the sports you play or follow, places you visit, and books you might recommend. Forging connections with others is more valued now than ever, especially when people work from home and miss social and personal engagement. Highlighting your personality provides opportunities for small-talk and common-ground – or even illuminating opportunities for difference and debate.

Identify people you would like to connect with

It’s a curious fact that when you decide you want to connect with someone, it very often just happens. You design your online profile, your website communications, your Twitter comments and social media pages for a reason – to attract new employers, new clients and new career opportunities. Who are those employers, those clients, and what opportunities would you most like to gain?

Prepare your profile to meet those connections – what would a new client need from this website, from your LinkedIn profile, from your email updates? How will an employer seeking a person of your standing recognise that you are the person they require?

How do professionals at the next level profile their skillset, persona, and career journey? Look at the profiles of those in the roles in which you aspire.

Broadcast your capability by sharing your knowledge and actively demonstrating that you have the skills, the connections, the personality and the profile to take you to the next level.