Richard van der Blom
Personal Profile Checklist
1. Aware
- Edit your custom url (i.e. https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardvanderblom/)
- Select your profile picture to be publicly visible
- Have a brief spoken introduction—record it in the app
- Have a professional background photo
- Connect your profile to the correct company page, ensuring the logo will appear
- Make sure your profile strength is “All Star”
- Decide whether a profile in another language has added value
2. Interest
- Make sure your contact info section is up-to-date
- Upload a document, a video and a weblink in your featured section
- Put a link to your calendar in your featured section
- Put a smartlink presentation with valuable and insightful content in your featured section
3. Interact
- Write a strong call to action in the first three lines of your About section
- Include a Personal Professional Introduction (P.P.I.) in your About section
- Include a paragraph about your knowledge and expertise in your About section
- State the value of yourself and your company
- End your About section with a call to action and your contact details
- Make sure your visible recommendations are the most relevant ones
Content Checklist
1. Daily
- Check and respond to your messages in your inbox
- Check your notifications on desktop or the mobile app
- Check your received invites and respond
- Invite people that share relevant content to connect
- Follow company pages that share relevant content
- Publish at least two posts
- Give relevant comments to at least ten posts
- Check the hashtags you follow for relevant posts
- Re-post a well performing post in three relevant groups
- Perform a content search on relevant keywords / buzzwords and comment on LinkedIn
- Use a scheduling tool or set an appointment in your agenda to publish a post
- Connect with people who engaged with your posts
2. Weekly
- Create SmartLinks (*in Sales Navigator) to share valuable content
- Publish at least one poll every month
- Write an article every two months emphasizing your thought leadership
- Set up Google alerts on relevant themes and keywords
- Look at the analytics of your posts of the last month. Analyze what posts performed well and why
(topic, #hashtag, time)
3. Monthly
- Storytelling: Create a personal post at least once a month
- Thought Leadership: Publish company content including white-papers, articles, or reports
- Events: publish information about upcoming events, including webinars
- External News: Identify valuable articles (not published from your company), share the post and
provide additional insights - Analyze your followed hashtags and add or delete based upon added value
- Use RSS feeds to follow your most relevant content sources
- Collect your content ideas in one central place like a bookmark tool or notes app for later use and inspiration
Relationship Checklist
1. Connect
- Send an invitation to connect with those you’ve spoken to this week
- Respond to received invitations
- Withdraw outstanding invitations after one month
- Follow the Company Page of your potential clients
- Invite all the people in your clients decision making unit (DMU) to connect
- Send an invitation to authors of relevant and inspiring content
- Connect to relevant visitors of your profile
- Connect to new followers of your profile
- Follow your top 100 connections on other social media platforms
2. Build Relationships
- Respond to received messages in your inbox daily
- Respond to posts of your top thirty contacts
- Use a Smartlinks in Sales Navigator and share exclusive content only 1-on-1 with prospects.
- Send a welcome message to your new connections
- Respond to anniversaries and job changes
- Endorse five clients for their three most relevant skills
- Ask actively for endorsements to boost your own top skills
- Write a recommendation for someone once a month
- Create a list on Twitter with the active profiles of your prospects and their company accounts
3. Convert
- Send an informal meeting proposal message to hot prospects
- Ask connections if they want to receive your LinkedIn newsletter
- Ask connections to follow your personal hashtag
- Ask your satisfied client for a recommendation after completing a project
- Use a tool like Calendly to make it easy to schedule an appointment with you
Sales and Settings
1. See
- Check Who Has Viewed My Profile and connect with potential clients
- Check Who Has Viewed My Profile and start a conversation with 1st degree connections
- Check your new followers and invite those who belong to your Target Audience to connect
- Check who is responding to your content from your 2nd and 3rd degree network and reach out to
them - Reach out to 2ndor 3rd degree connections who have commented or voted on your poll
- Become a member of five relevant Groups
- Reactivate 1st degree connections such as former ambassadors, clients, or colleagues by
proposing a 15-minute catch-up call
2. Search
- Search for interesting and relevant events for your target audience, click “Attend” and have a look
at the attendance list - Use an Advanced People Search to find potential clients
- Identify potential clients and reach out with a connection request to ten people
- After accepting a connection request from a potential client, send a
follow-up message to build trust - After positive response to your follow up message, ask for a short introduction call
- Work with marketing to find out which companies visited the company website
- Work with marketing to identify the most engaged readers of the company newsletter and reach
out to these contacts on LinkedIn
3. Settings
- Add at least one personal and your current work e-mail address to your profile
- Add a phone number in case you have trouble signing in
- Activate two-step verification for enhanced account security
- Set “Profile Viewing Options” on “Full Profile”
- Set “Manage Active Status” to “Everyone on LinkedIn”
- Select and adjust the notifications you want to receive on LinkedIn
- Select and adjust the notifications you want to receive via e-mail
- Select and adjust the notifications you want to receive via push messages on mobile/tablet
- Get a copy of your data every 6 months
- Get a copy of your connections every 3 months
Richard van der Blom
Richard van der Blom is the Founder/CEO of Just Connecting HUB, an international operating agency providing Virtual & Social Selling LinkedIn training and consultancy. Since 2010 he has provided training and sessions for over 250.000 professionals and served more than 850 companies worldwide. Amongst his clients are companies like Nestlé, NetApp, InterSystems, Salesforce, TEVA, Philips and many more.
Author of 200 blogs and reports on Social Selling & LinkedIn, and publisher of the annual LinkedIn Algorithm Report. Furthermore he is a member of an independent LinkedIn Tink Thank since 2015 and an experienced KeyNote Speaker.
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Download Richard’s checklist PDF here:
LinkedIn Checklist v1.0.pdf (2.2 MB)
More resources from Richard here:
https://tribe.justconnecting.nl/join
If you are just getting serious about LinkedIn, print this out (or turn it into a Google checklist or spreadsheet and do the work!