11 - Your LinkedIn Profile Isn’t About You (And That’s the Problem)

Most LinkedIn profiles are… fine.

Well written.
Nicely structured.
Completely forgettable.

In this episode, I’m talking about why your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t read like a CV, and why your About section isn’t the place to list everything you do or how long you’ve been doing it.

Instead, we’re digging into the power of storytelling.

Real situations.
Real client moments.

I’ll walk you through why talking about yourself rarely works, and how focusing on what actually happened during client projects builds trust, connection, and curiosity far faster.

You’ll be invited to rethink your profile and pick three genuine moments where your work made a real difference, and to use those stories to make your LinkedIn profile feel human, relatable, and worth reading.

No corporate beige.

Just a better way to show what you really do.

Thanks for listening to the Making Digital Real podcast.

If something in this episode sparked a question, an idea, or a lightbulb moment, I’d love to hear from you. You can send me a voice message directly and I may even feature it in a future episode.

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Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Transcript

0:01

Hello, I am Rachel Ballantyne, CEO and founder of Edify and Empower Tutoring. I attended Mike's workshop on LinkedIn last year and it was an absolute game changer for us. All these little tips and tricks, they're complete marginal gains and they've accumulated to really, really exciting growth on LinkedIn in terms of not just vanity metrics with likes and reposts but also actual leads, far more warm leads, far more exciting conversations with prospective clients and a great, a far higher degree of conversions to actual clients. I can't recommend Mike highly enough, big fan of Mike's work. If you want somebody really authentic, just a nice, an all-round nice guy who won't rip you off, who actually knows what he's chatting about, Mike is your man. Hey everyone, it's Mike again and today, we are going back to LinkedIn, okay? And we're talking about your LinkedIn profile and the topic is changing your profile using the power of storytelling. Now, in my opinion, this is one of the easiest and most beneficial ways to get your LinkedIn profile noticed. The problem is hardly any profile that I see uses this magic. So, I'm going to go through it step by step today and I'm sure it's going to inspire you to head over, head back over to your LinkedIn profile and make some good changes. And I'm going to say something that I think is going to strike a chord with my listeners because most LinkedIn profiles are polite, they're well-meaning, they're a little bit professionally beige, they're forgettable and let's face it, they read like somebody's in a job interview where they don't want to upset anyone and there's lots of phrases like, I help, I support, I work with, I'm passionate about. Every single sentence starts with I and all of the profiles, well, many of the profiles that I read on a day-to-day basis, whether I'm working with somebody in a professional vibe or whether I'm working with somebody's son or daughter who's a university graduate or student, one of the things that I do is I work with students and uni graduates to build them the perfect LinkedIn profile because let's face it, we need to get some storytelling power in here because we don't want to just read a profile that is all about that person and nothing else. You might as well be reading a CV, okay? Now, the people reading your profile, they are not there to admire your career path. They're there to answer one question in their own head and that is, is this person for me? And you don't answer that by talking about yourself, you answer it by showing situations that they recognise, that psychological trigger in their brain that switches on saying, yes, this person is for me, okay? So, think about humans and how they actually remember things. They don't remember bullet points, they actually remember moments and that is what your LinkedIn profile should be doing, not shouting about you but showing what is possible if somebody wants to work with you or when someone works with you. So, here's the exercise I want you to do after this episode. I want you to think of three real situations, okay? And don't think of these as testimonials or polished case studies, they're real moments. Situations where something genuinely shifted when you started working with a client, okay? And here are the three questions that I want you to answer. What was happening before they found you? What were they stuck with, frustrated with or worried about? And what changed once you worked together? And why did that matter? When you're thinking about the situation that that client was in, I want you to think of an acronym which I often used in the world of sales and that is the FUDWACKER, okay? F-U-D-W-A-C-A, FUDWACKER. These are some key words that you can use when you're talking about how somebody felt or what their situation was before they started working with you and those letters stand for frustrated, upset, disappointed, worried, angry, concerned or anxious. So, let me give you an example of what I mean. So, instead of saying something along the lines of, I help professionals optimise their LinkedIn profiles. Well, that kind of tells me nothing. But imagine if we swapped that sentence for something like this and this is a real situation by the way. A client came to me convinced that LinkedIn didn't work for them. They'd been posting for months, they were getting no feedback on their posts, there was no engagement and they kind of assumed that they weren't the LinkedIn type. So, we completely rewrote their LinkedIn profile, we completely changed it and flipped it on its head and made it about the client journeys, the opportunities, what people have said, all of those things and we rewrote the entire profile including the images and the featured section to focus on three real client moments instead of their job history. Within two weeks, they were receiving messages from people, they were receiving requests for work, they were getting noticed and it basically helped them rebuild their business. Now, that is a story. People can see themselves in that story, they can feel the frustration and they can also understand the relief that goes on when finally something clicks and when something works and this is the thing most people miss because the you're about section on LinkedIn, it isn't there to prove that you're the best or qualified or amazing because your experience already does that for you. It's there to help the right person think that this feels familiar because familiarity creates safety and that safety leads to conversations. Okay, now talking about your clients and you don't have to name names if you don't want to, maybe the clients that you're talking about or the story you're mentioning, maybe these people are happy for you to mention their names. Ask them, you know, you're promoting them at the same time as promoting yourself and it's not bragging because listing your credentials is a little bit of a brag but talking about the journey that you took with your clients, that is not a brag and when you centre the story on the situation, not how brilliant you were, it kind of feels real and you're not really saying, look how amazing I am, you're saying look what's possible. Right, let's talk structure because I think this is where people overthink it. Short paragraphs, little bit of white space, some breathing room, an opening line that calls out the situation that your people might be in right now, the middle section being two or three short stories about those situations, those people, the transformation and then a simple closing section that says, you know, who your best place to help and what to do next. Maybe like me, you want to put on your about section the people that you don't want to work with, you know, I'm not interested in big corporate fancy projects that I have to, you know, submit a tender to or submit a form and hope that my bid will come in. I'm not interested in any of that. I'm interested in real people that want real results where I can have a good conversation with them and have a good working relationship during the project and have a laugh as well along the way. So maybe closing it with about who you won't work with rather than who you will. It's not a TED talk, it's just clarity. Now one last angle I want to leave you with before we close this episode. Just remember this, your LinkedIn profile is often read before someone ever speaks to you and in future episodes, we're going to talk and in future episodes, we're going to go on to some topics about how we can get people really interested in clicking on your profile and reading, okay? Ways to attract people like a magnet to your profile. You know, forget the posting, forget the content for now. Let's just make sure that you've got a fully built, strong LinkedIn profile. Even if you never do anything with it again, it needs to be there because if you have created a LinkedIn profile in the past, trust me, the algorithm will show that on page one of Google if somebody Googles you and if they click on it and there's nothing there because you never did anything with it, then that is a problem. So all of these things are for future episodes. Today, I just want to focus on the storytelling element inside your about section and possibly your featured section as well. And as always, if you want to have a chat with me about your profile, if you want to book a power hour, please just get in touch or leave me a voice message in the voice message link in the show notes. So final closing statement. Go back to your LinkedIn profile. Open the about section. Instead of asking, how do I describe what I do? Ask this instead. What happened when people worked with you? Pick three moments. Write them simply. Let the storytelling do the work. Because remember, when people recognise themselves in your profile, you do not have to convince them of anything because they already know. That's it, folks. Have an amazing one. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, and I'll see you in one week's time and have a good one.