How To Add Your Linkedin Profile Button To Your Blogger Blog

In my last post on promoting your Linkedin profile using the Linkedin button, I explained how to grab the Linkedin button code from your profile page. Even had pictures showing how you can make that happen.

Sales people found it very instructional and appreciated the clarity. It saved them time and they didn’t have to go searching around their account looking for stuff. They could go straight to where they needed to go.

However, many of my fellow sales reps have since come to me saying, “Well, I got this code. What do I do with it now? How do I get it into my blog? Why do I want to do this? Can you do it for me?”

If you’ve created your own blog, then adding the Linkedin profile button is very easy. It’s even easier than creating your blog using Blogger. We ran through the steps of creating your blog in the post entitled How To Create A Blogger Blog And Start Creating Sales Leads.

Here is what you do to add your Linkedin profile button on your Blogger blog.

First login to your Google account. After you get logged in, go to www.blogger.com/home. This will get you to your Blogger dashboard where you can select your blog. Once you select your blog, select the “Layout” tab and then click on the “Page Elements” heading.

The Blogger Page Element Layout Section

Find the link that says “Add a Gadget”. You will be adding an element to your blog. Click the link:

Gadget Selection

As you can see, a new window will appear. You will select the type of element to add from what appears in this window. In this instance, hit the plus sign (“+”) next to the element entitled "HTML/JavaScript". This will open up a new window to add in your HTML code:

The Configure HTML/Javascrip Window

Go collect the HTML code from your Linkedin profile page as we talked about in the post entitled Linkedin Profile Enhancement In Less Than 3 1/2 Minutes and paste the code in as shown:

Adding The button Code from Linkedin

Then add a suitable title:

Adding An Appropriate Title for Your Profile

And hit the save button. Your layout page will look like the following:

The New Gadget is Now In The Page Layout

And if you hit the “View Blog” link, you’ll be able to see your blog with your new Linkedin button:

What The Linkedin Profile Button Looks Like On Your Blog

And you are ready to go. Just like I said, so easy even a caveman can do it.

We’ll talk about adding other elements later. But for now, realize that this is yet another step in starting your personal sales lead generation program and promoting your expertise.

How To Create A Blogger Blog And Start Creating Sales Leads

Times are getting tough and we’ve seen the unemployment numbers growing.

I’ve seen more and more people out there on the job market and at job fares looking for something, anything, to keep them moving forward.

Incidentally, I’ve also seen a number of questions from sales people in the Manta sales community asking the same questions about finding suitable leads for prospecting. Questions like, “Where can I find real estate leads?” or “How can I get viable leads for cars?” or “How do I sell my stuff when no one is buying anything?”

This tells me a couple of things.

1. Sales managers are coming down hard on sales people to produce and increase revenue.


2. Sales people are looking for ways to increase their production.


3. Sales people are looking for ways to find viable leads.


4. Sales people are using the same old tired and unproductive methods of generating those leads.

There are no quick fixes or shortcuts that sales people can take to get them to the top of the mountain. There are no magic words or phrases that a salesperson can utter and have their prospect eating out of their hands. But I do think that there are words and phrases that salespeople can utter that will cost them the sale. I do think that there are things that salespeople can do that will cause their prospects to run to the competition. It’s less about finding shortcuts and more about eliminating bad, inefficient behaviors or ineffective activities.

Here is something to do that will help establish your credibility and reduce some of those bad and inefficient behaviors.

Write a blog.

Yes, maintain a blog. I’ve recommended to several people that if they are looking to generate leads, increase their visibility and enhance their credibility, the best and fastest way to do that is by getting themselves published on the web. When your prospects go to Google looking to solve their problems, you want your name and your solution to pop up. You want their mindshare when they are on the web looking to solve their problems. And these ‘problems’ can be anything from “what should I look for when buying a used car?” to “Where can I find a prospective employee?”

Unfortunately, most sales people don’t write or maintain a blog because they associate blogs with technical wizardry. It takes to much time. It’s too complicated. There’s too much technical trouble involved.

Well, this just isn’t true.

The tools available today make web publishing so easy, even the proverbial caveman can do it.

So if you are just starting out in sales, a seasoned sales veteran, an entrepreneur running a small business or unemployed looking for your next gig, here is a quick and dirty start to blogging using the Google web-publishing tool, Blogger to promoting your ideas and get yourself known.

First, you will need to access your gmail account. Google centralizes all of it various services around specific accounts. So if you have a gmail account, you can access several other Google services and Blogger is one of them.

So sign in to your Google account as if you were signing into your gmail. Then when the Google page comes up, open the page www.blogger.com and sign in using your Gmail name and password. Here I am logging in as my favorite defunct login, epwadmin.

Logging into Blogger

When I get in, you can see that this is my first time. I have no blogs created. The first step is to begin to create your first blog so hit the “create your blog now” button to get started.

The First Step, Getting Started

The next step is naming your blog. Here, you can see that I’ve taken the job hunting route and called the blog “The Business of Job Searches” (hey, job hunting is a sales exercise as well. And very popular right about now).

For the Domain name, I’ve taken the name “Findmeajob”. Here’s where things get a little tricky. You want the Domain Name to reflect the type of business or the interest as closely as possible. It will have a big impact on how your blog pops up on searches when searchers type in their search query.

Creating The Name and Domain Name of your blog

The tricky part arrives when you have a popular search term and someone else has already grabbed that domain name

If your Name is taken, Blogger will tell you to create a new one

So a different Domain Name has to be selected.

Name and Domain Name creation

Domain Name selection can be a critical factor in determining your blog placement when your prospects perform their searches. If I were writing a blog on my expertise on selling cars, then having a domain name containing the words “car” and “sales” would be preferable to a name like “moondog.com”.

Once you have the Domain Name set, type in the word verification. This essentially tells the system that a human being is setting this up and not an automatic bot.

Word Verification

Once you all of the information set up, click the continue button to get to the next page.

Template Selection

Now you have an opportunity to pick a template. This supplies the general look and feel of your blog. Once this is selected, all you have to do in the future is type in your content and not set up each page separately. Don’t worry. You can always select a different template at a later date. For this example, we’ll just select the first template. Once you have the template selected, click continue:

Blog is ready. Time to get started.

And you are done. Now when you click the “start blogging” you are ready to start.

Blogger Content Form

At this point, you can start putting in your content supply a title for your posts in the “Title” box and your content in the bigger box below. And you are in business.

If you click the “view content” link, you will see what your blog looks like to the rest of the world:

The way your Blogger blog appears to the online community

This will get you started building the skeleton of the blog. There will be other considerations such as titles (see the post on what needs to be in the title to make the search engines happy) and content. But it’s been my experience that sales people have more of a challenge just getting started. Why? Because they feel that starting a blog is a technical exercise and they use that to keep them from exploring this avenue for cultivating leads.

Another recommendation here. Under your account, you can set up multiple blogs. I would recommend one of the first domain names you set up be your name.

Next step is to begin writing on your expertise to attract those looking for solutions.

Little Known Blogger Secret That Will Drive The Search Engines Absolutely Bananas!

In working through my last Lotus Notes post here, I noticed something that may be of use to you if you are using the tool, Blogger, to run your blog.
This is where you really start to appreciate some of the work performed by your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine Marketing Team.
And if you are an independent sales rep, consultant or small businessperson maintaining your own blog for promotional purposes, you definitely don't want to let this optimization tip pass you by.
Check it out.

A Quick SEO Overview
First, a couple of things so you can appreciate and understand the workaround you are about to perform. This section is for the sales rep or the businessperson who knows very little about Search Engine Marketing. If you are familiar with Search Engine Optimization terms, skip down to the Ugly Filename section. But if the mere mentioning of terms like “Keywords” or “domain name” causes you a certain amount of angst, then give a quick glance through the following section.

When you first start talking with a Search Engine Marketing professional, the first thing they will ask you about are your Keywords. These are the words that you are targeting as “yours”. The words that you want to be associated with your business, your website and your blog.
When someone in your target market types these keywords and phrases into the search box on Google, it means that they are looking for something that involves this phrase. You want the search engine to find your site or blog as “extremely relevant” and put it right on the first page of the returned results. For example, let’s say that you are a real estate agent promoting yourself and you are offering prime real estate in San Jose. You want your site, and specifically a page on your site, to pop up when someone types into the search engine, “prime real estate in San Jose”.

Here are 4 things you need to look at to help make this happen:

1. Your domain name: First secure a domain name that has some collection of your keywords in it. This is the site name that your prospects will type in, and is a part of the URL. In this example, our hypothetical real estate agent would try to secure a name with a combination of real estate and San Jose, like www.sanjoseprimerealestate.com.


2. Page filename: The next thing to do is to actually have a page on your site with a filename that has some collection of these keywords. You’ve seen this before when improving your profile with Linkedin. Using your name in creating your public profile URL, such as www.linkedin.com/in/dalecarnegie makes your profile a lot more relevant to searched key phrases that include your name, over a profile like www.linkedin.com/in/345892.


3. Page Content: Then there is the content inside your page. You want to have a good mix of these keywords when you create your copy while making it readable for your clients, visitors and prospects.


4. MetaTags: Lastly, put your keywords in your Meta Tags. This will have an influence on search engine performance, albeit a small one thanks to some unscrupulous behavior back in the late ‘90s.

That’s a quick overview of using keywords to optimize your online presence and becoming relevant in your prospect’s online search. If you are selling your product or services and you want to take advantage of some of the ‘easy to use’ online publishing tools available to get your business going, these are the first things to look at.

Naturally, there are some other things to consider, but we’ll save those for another day. For now, these 4 elements are enough and the second one in particular, will enable us to improve our performance with Blogger.

Using Blogger With Pretty Titles And Ugly Filenames

Now let’s look at how to increase our site relevancy with Blogger.

First, find the “Enable Post Pages?” variable and set that to “Yes” in order to increase your search engine exposure. This will turn every one of your posts into it’s own page complete with it’s own page filename.

You will find this in the archive menu under the Settings tab in the administrator’s dashboard of your blog.



Once you have this done, Blogger will create a separate html page for each post and it will use the post title to create the filename for that page.

And that’s great!

Except that Blogger will only take the first 39 characters! Any spaces between words will be replaced with a dash and they still count towards your 39 characters!
Complicating matters even more, Blogger only takes full words when creating the filename. So if your title has a word that starts at character 33 and goes to character 41, Blogger will not pick up the first 6 characters of that word for your title. It will remove the word completely, which means your file name is now only 32 characters long.
So here is the challenge. When most of us are promoting our posts through email or an RSS feeder, we typically make the post title presentable to attract people. We want them to click, to read further, and to take some kind of action.
As a result, we typically create a headline for our post title like, “5 ways to create compelling value for your customers with Dale Carnegie Training” or “5 Little Known Sales Secrets using Dale Carnegie Communication Techniques”. While these titles may incite some curiosity from your prospects or visitors, the file name will look something like:

• Title: 5 Ways To Create Compelling Value For Your Customers With Dale Carnegie Sales Training
• Resulting filename: 5-ways-to-create-compelling-value-for.html

and

• Title: 5 Little Known Sales Secrets Using Dale Carnegie Communication Techniques
• Resulting filename: 5-Little-Known-Sales-Secrets-using-Dale.html

This is not what you want if your keywords are industry specific words or phrases like “Dale Carnegie Training” or even “sales communication techniques”. These particular keywords never made it into the top 39-character window and they won’t make it into the filename of the post page. Remember, if my prospect types in “Dale Carnegie Training” on Google, then my post will have relevance if “Dale Carnegie Training” is in the copy, but it won’t be nearly as relevant as a page that has relevant content and a filename that includes the phrase “Dale Carnegie Training”.

So you take your key words and you stuff them all in the front of the post title like, “Dale Carnegie Sales Communication techniques” or “Dale Carnegie Sales Training Creates Compelling Value For Customers”. Then the filename of your pages will look like:

• Title: Dale Carnegie Sales Communication Techniques
• Resulting filename: Dale-carnegie-sales-communication.html

and

• Title: Dale Carnegie Sales Training Creates Compelling Value For Customers
• Resulting filename: Dale-carnegie-sales-training-creates.html

This is better. The industry specific keywords “Dale Carnegie Sales Training” or “Dale Carnegie Sales Communication” are right there in the page name. Good for optimizing the pages around specific key phrases, but these titles really don’t motivate people to click. They read like the ingredients on a soup can label.

So your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine Marketing Team has to run a delicate balancing act between people and machines. And if you are a sales rep writing your own blog for self-promotion, then you are that team.
You have to create a title that is optimized so the Search Engine will index it favorably for certain phrases, yet it has to be compelling enough for human beings to take some action when they see it.
Sometimes these two things run counter to each other, especially if you are using the curiosity approach to getting your prospect to click on the title. What you need is a way to insure that your keywords are in the filename, but gives you the freedom to create a compelling headline for your prospects.

A Quick Workaround

Here is a way to get around this challenge and make the system work for you.

• When creating your post on Blogger, optimize your post title for your key words so the search engines will find it easily and index it appropriately. That is, put your keywords in the first 39 spaces that you have available. Blogger will use them in your title when you hit the publish button.


• Create you content as usual. Use compelling copy but also include your keywords in the body of the copy.


• Publish the page as you typically do.


• After successfully publishing the page, go back and edit the page. This time type in a title that potential prospects will find interesting and compelling.


• Republish the page.

Now your post will have a filename that is different from your post title. For example, I could have a filename like:

Dale-carnegie-sales-training-creates.html

But I can rewrite my post title to read like:

5 Explosive Techniques To Drive Your Sales! Dale Carnegie Sales Training Reveals How!

So now there is appealing candy for the Search Engines and appealing candy for human prospects as well. This should give you an edge when you publish your blog posts.
Oh, one more thing to keep in mind. Search Engines also place a high degree of importance on where your keywords are placed in your copy.
So that title that you just rewrote to make more compelling for your human readers still needs to have those keywords somewhere in it.
Isn’t balance fun?