Today, I have the great pleasure of being the host on the Final Day – DAY 15 -of the Virtual Blog Tour for Melonie Dodaro, author of the brand new book, The LinkedIn Code: Unlock the Largest Online Business Social Network to Get Leads, Prospects & Clients for B2B, Professional Services and Sales & Marketing Pros. 

That book will be celebrating its official launch on Tuesday June 3rd, 2014.

MELONIE DODARO is the founder of Top Dog Social Media, a social media agency that helps brands, businesses, professionals and sales teams use social media marketing and social selling to boost their visibility, attract new customers and increase their revenue. Dubbed by the media as Canada’s #1 LinkedIn expert and social media strategist, Melonie provides LinkedIn training to corporate sales teams and speaks worldwide at both industry and corporate events and conferences.

Yesterday, Melonie visited Alisoun Mackenzie’s blog at http://www.alisoun.com/blog where she asked Melonie to share her top 3 strategies for selling through LinkedIn.

Today, I’d like to share with you a recent interview I had with Melonie where I asked her about writing clear LinkedIn profiles and using LinkedIn groups.

***INTERVIEW***

KAT: I work with so many heart-based solopreneurs who struggle when it comes to writing their bios and social media profiles. They swing back and forth between worrying about sounding too immodest and yet adequately sharing who they are and what they do. What advice can you give us for writing our LinkedIn profiles that provides a good balance?

MELONIE: The secret is to make your profile client focused. If you write a profile that is client focused, it removes the issue of talking about yourself altogether. Your profile should be written with the intent to help your ideal clients to find you when searching, self select themselves and quickly determine that you understand their problems and have a solution.

To do this you must not only understand your ideal clients well but you must use the language that they would use to identify you and your product or services as well as themselves and their needs.

KAT: When considering which LinkedIn groups to belong to, is it better to choose ones that are relevant to our business field and areas of personal interest or groups that aren’t but have members who represent our ideal clients? Can you give us an example relevant to a service-based solopreneur?

MELONIE: The majority of the groups you belong to should be groups that your ideal clients belong to.

LinkedIn allows you to join up to 50 and I would advise you to make use of all of these. A good balance when joining groups would be to join up to 5 groups that are relevant to your field or industry, up to 5 groups based on your own personal interests or hobbies and 40 or more that contain your ideal clients.

For example, let’s say that you coach speakers. While you might join a couple of coaching groups, the bulk of groups that you would join would be speaking related groups, because this is where your ideal clients are.

KAT: Here at Rocking Your Path, we’re all about taking simple, effective fast action steps to help move us forward especially when we’re feeling stuck or confused. We define a fast action step as one that we can complete in 15 minutes or less. What fast actions do you recommend are best to focus on first to help us leverage our time and effort on LinkedIn?

MELONIE: Your initial fast action steps would involve updating your profile to ensure that it is complete, client focused and search optimized.

Your first action step would be to identify your top ideal clients and get to really know them. Think about what their hopes and fears are, what language they use and how they identify and describe themselves. After you have completed this you can break down your profile in to a number of fast action steps and update each of those sections with the information about your ideal clients that you just created.

*** END OF INTERVIEW ***

I hope you enjoyed this brief interview with award-winning social media expert Melonie Dodaro, and that you’ll check out her book The LinkedIn Code THIS Tuesday, June 3^rd, 2014. You can register for a ‘launch reminder’ so you don’t forget to pick up your copy at:

http://topdogsocialmedia.com/book-launch/pages/pre-launch.php

When you buy The LinkedIn Code during its official Amazon launch, you’ll receive dozens of valuable free gifts from Melonie and her friends and colleagues.

You can CLICK HERE to find out more about the book, and these free gifts.

Thanks for reading! Please do share your comments and thoughts below. I love reading your feedback.

AND…if you’d like to read more of Melonie Dodaro’s expert insights and helpful tips on using LinkedIn for business, you can head back over to the first stop of this Virtual Blog Tour at Eric Van der Hope’s blog at http://ericvanderhope.com/erics-blog/. Then, just follow the links around to read all 15 of Melonie’s information-packed interviews.