Personal branding expert Tom Etherington from BNI Face in Sydney joins Dr. Misner on the podcast this week to talk about how to optimize your BNI Connect profile.
Dr. Misner has talked about the importance of filling in your BNI Connect profile in Episode 224 and Episode 566. Tom has some new tips for optimizing not only your BNI Connect profile but also your LinkedIn profile.
Completing your BNI Connect profile won’t guarantee that you get referrals–but not completing it will guarantee that you miss them!
Five Tips to Turn Your Profile into a Referral-Generating Machine
Fill in everything. Make it compelling, but keep it concise.
Write the profile in the first person. This is about creating a personal relationship.
Be clear about what you do. What are the benefits of what you do? How can it help people?
Have someone interview you about your business. If you can’t find someone to interview you, read your profile out loud for a sense of how you’re coming across.
Target referral partners with your keywords. You’re not just looking for clients in BNI. Don’t just focus on your main offering. Think about what people are searching for.
And remember to keep your profile up to date as your business evolves.
This episode is sponsored by Ivan’s Inner Circle. Become a founding member today!
Complete Transcript of Episode 665
Priscilla: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast. I’m Priscilla Rice. And I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. And I’m joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan, how are you?
Ivan: I am doing fantastic, Priscilla, and I’ve got with me a guest. This is one of the things I love about having a global organization is that we get to have people from all over the world, and today’s guest is Tom Etherington. Tom is a personal branding expert and a brand storyteller from BNI Face in Sydney. Now he’s originally from London, England, but he’s living in Sydney, Australia right now. He began his career as a journalist writing for newspapers and magazines. And BNI helped him transition from the world of employment, to running a business, and a business that he says he loves. And so he’s an expert in this area and his directors recommended that we have on the podcast. I love the topic. I want to welcome Tom to the BNI podcast.
Tom: Hi, Ivan. Thanks for having me on the podcast today.
Ivan: It is great having you here. I forgot to mention, you’re also married to Francis and you have two beautiful daughters. And I can’t even pronounce what that dog is – a cavadoodle?
Tom: A cavoodle. Yes. They are kind of cross between a Cavalier and a poodle. You’ll have to look it up afterwards.
Ivan: I will have to do that. Alright, we’re going to be talking about the BNI Connect profile, and so many people don’t fill in their BNI Connect profile. And I’ve talked about this in Episode Number 224, and Episode 566, so take a look at those. But you have some points that I think are also really important that I wanted to add to the BNI podcast, and particularly not just BNI Connect, but also the LinkedIn profile. So over to you, Tom.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. We get a lot of people coming to us for help with their LinkedIn profile, you know, to help them with their personal branding and start to get their message out there. But when we check their online presence, we found that so many of the members that haven’t filled in their BNI Connect profile properly, or even at all sometimes, and for the BNI members, it can be more important than LinkedIn in a way because there’s so many people from all over the world that can check them out and be looking for their services. And yet, sometimes it’s blank, or there’s just a few lines in there.
So a good example of that is a business coach in our chapter in Sydney who received a referral for a company in the U.S. because of the quality of his BNI Connect profile that we actually helped create for him. The guys in the U.S. were looking for a particular kind of business coach, they put it into BNI Connect, only a couple came up. And they chose the one in Sydney because of the quality of his profile, for that initial conversation anyway. So that’s what it can open up.
Ivan: I’ve seen that happen with a lot of people completing that profile. You know, I can’t guarantee you that you’re going to get a referral if you complete your profile, but I can guarantee you will not get a referral in BNI Connect if you do not complete your profile.
Tom: Absolutely. It’s just about opening those conversations. And once you’ve started that conversation, that’s when you can sort of begin that process of either onboarding as a client or a referral partner or whatever the objective is. And I always liken this to thinking about your BNI Connect profile as if it’s a giant BNI meeting in itself. So when you’re first introduced to someone at a BNI meeting, a real life BNI meeting, would you do things like talk about yourself in the third person, or start selling to them immediately, rattling off a list of your skills, or showing off, or even staring blankly at them and saying nothing? Because that’s what these big, blank profiles are telling people, especially the last one staring blankly at them saying nothing. That’s what you’re doing if you don’t fill it in. That’s exactly what happens. And that’s very common, it’s a lot more common than you think. Because often people join BNI, they rush that process through, and they don’t go back and fill it in. Or even if they do fill in correctly, you know, BNI transforms your business. So in a very short time, it could be completely irrelevant to what you actually do.
Ivan: Now you have five tips to give members, and I think they’re great. You want to share those?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. General tips for creating a BNI profile that can really turn your profile into a referral generating machine, so really get people connecting with your profile and ultimately connecting with you. So the first thing is, I’ve mentioned it already, is to fill in everything, to make it compelling but keep it concise. You know, people are very time poor. Look at other people’s, if it helps, you know, see what they’re doing and how they’re coming across and whether you like their profiles and how they resonate with you. I always think this is the biggest one, is write the profile in the first person; it’s from you. This is true on LinkedIn, of course, there’s a big picture of you on LinkedIn, and it’s very much in the first person, it’s about you. Even more so for the BNI Connect profile, I think, because BNI is very much about creating those personal relationships. So you really need to make it from you. And be clear about what you do. You haven’t got a lot of space on there. It’s a great opportunity, like I say, to introduce yourself, and start connecting with people, but keep it clear and about how you can help people, the benefits of what you do. So I think that’s incredibly important.
One thing we do is, if we get a client that we’re trying to help with their LinkedIn profile or their BNI Connect profile, is we interview them. I come from a background in magazines and newspaper, I used to interview people all the time. We use those same principles because people talk about their business a lot more passionately than if you ask them to write something down about it. So one tip is to, if you can’t get someone to interview you, then read your profile out loud. That’s really powerful because you can really get a sense of how you’re coming across, or read it to someone else. You can get a sense of whether you’re communicating exactly what you want to in terms of your benefits, your experience, your skills, all those things, and just how you sound, whether you sound friendly, you know, that’s another good thing. It’s very important, of course.
The fourth one I think, is to target referral partners. We get a lot of people that pretty much copy and paste from their website into their profiles, whether it be LinkedIn or BNI Connect. It’s not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes you’re dealing with clients. But other times you’re dealing with people who were interested in checking you out as a potential referral partner, which is to contact someone they can share education and information with. So it’s not the same thing as your customers, necessarily. Some of it may be. But I think you need to think a bit broader in those terms. And the other thing is to keep keywords in mind. There is a section for keywords in it. This is how the the business coach in our group, Anthony Wood, he was found by a couple of keywords that he put in, and whether there are similar business coaches out there who haven’t put those keywords in, I don’t know. But it’s incredibly important to think about what people are searching for. Just as if you’re doing an SEO campaign on a website or Google AdWords, all those kind of things. It’s the same principle. So just think about it.
Ivan: Can you give a couple of examples of a keyword in any industry?
Tom: Yeah, so for myself, for example, someone might put in copy-writing. Copy-writing is one of the services we provide. So it’s not just your main offering. It’s some of the things you do around that because people might not even know what they’re looking for. So they might not know they’re looking for personal branding necessarily, but they might know that they’re looking for a LinkedIn profile writer. So it’s just to think about outside the box a little bit.
Ivan: Do you know what the coach used? Do you know a couple of key words that that particular coach used?
Tom: Well, one of them, he uses the EOS system…
Ivan: The one that got the referral?
Tom: Yes. So he uses the entrepreneurial operating system. So that’s the EOS style of business coaching. So they were looking for that specifically.
Ivan: Okay. So he put that in his profile?
Tom: Yeah, all he put was EOS and it was in the keywords section. So there’s another section outside of the actual profile that appears to the public. There is just a keyword section, which they can’t see. But those things will pop up immediately. So there was literally two, there was one in Australia and one in Canada, I believe. And they contacted Anthony first, just because of the quality of his profile, and obviously they would have checked him out on LinkedIn as well. So often these things go hand in hand, you know, anyone in the BNI network would also be very active on LinkedIn usually.
Those tips are made a good start. We go into a lot more depth and those sort of things and help people create their profiles. But just those things are one of the things to bear in mind across the whole thing. So outside of these five tips, is just to bear in mind, the benefits you’re bringing, and whether that’s to your customers, to your referral partners, obviously, the benefits and your experience. And if you’ve got time in there, tell a little story about how you’ve helped someone. That’s what people really resonate with, those stories. We create stories for people, brand stories and personal branding stories, because people just remember those stories. I know you’ve talked about this before in some of your podcasts, they just stick with people and they are much more likely to connect with you on a personal level if you’re able to, you know, move them in some way with a story, we find that’s a really powerful thing to add. But yeah, there’s just a couple of sort of brief tips there. And I’m happy to, you know, talk to anyone, please connect with me on BNI Connect or LinkedIn. I’m happy to have a look at your profiles.
Ivan: And I’ll give your website here when we wrap up. Any other dos or don’ts that you’d recommend for people?
Tom: And I think the main one there is not to immediately start selling to people. Create the foundations of your personal branding, I think is the most important thing. And that is the BNI Connect profile and the LinkedIn profile, because if you then want to go and get more active on platforms like LinkedIn, people will always come back to your profile, and they’ll look at it and so you may be posting the best, you know, content in the world; if they come back to your profile, and it’s a little bit off. Also keep refreshing it, as I mentioned in the start, if your business changes a lot, you have a new offering, or you even just slightly refocus it, obviously, people talk about pivoting a lot, even slightly refocusing on a different part of your business, it’s very powerful. And it’s very important to get in there and change it so people are aware of what you’re focusing on and what you’re interested in promoting.
Ivan: So one time I had a member say to me, “Well, you know, I really don’t need to put it out there because I just do business locally. And I don’t need the whole world to know about it.” But what’s interesting is, I shared with him this story about the fact that, I actually shared him several stories of, people who put up their profile and got a referral locally from somebody internationally. One in particular was a parent who lived locally and reached out to the member in another country and said, “Hey, do you know anybody who does actually was landscaping here where I live?” And she went to BNI Connect and found a local landscaper to go work with. And so you don’t have to do business globally; you can be very local and still get referrals from people around the world. And completing that profile, I’ve said this before, it’s like taking an ad out in the newspaper and leaving it blank. I mean, can you imagine getting a full page ad in a newspaper or website ad and leaving it blank? That makes no sense. But that’s what people do in BNI sometimes.
Tom: Absolutely makes no sense at all. And often, you know, people are getting up at five in the morning and going in to their BNI meeting. They make an incredible effort on all other aspects of BNI with their One-to-Ones and helping people get the referrals and yet these things are marketing for you 24/7, the BNI Connect profile, the LinkedIn profile, it’s always there. So just show it some love, I think is the main message.
Ivan: Yeah, I remember looking for a photographer locally and several profiles popped up and the photographer didn’t have a photograph in their profile. Well, we’re out of time. Let me give everyone Tom’s website. It’s www.connectcontent.com.au. We’ll have the link here, connectcontent.com/au/BNI, and we’ll have the link here in the podcast. Tom, thank you so much for being on my podcast.
Tom: It’s a pleasure, Ivan. Thanks for having me.
Ivan: Over to you, Priscilla.
Priscilla Okay, perfect. Well, thank you both. That was some really interesting information. I’d like to say that the sponsor for this podcast is Ivan’s Inner Circle. Go check out the great content available at www.IvansInnerCircle.com, where he has assembled a variety of interesting topics for you to learn about and also for you to participate in. So thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice and we look forward to having you join us again next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast
第666集 引薦人的5個級別(經典播客) 由於 "666 "這個數字對某些人來說意味著一些邪惡的東西,所以我們認為我們將做一個 "魔鬼在細節中 "的播客。 這個主題的細節非常重要,我們認為與數字有關的事情會很有趣。 我們保證,這個主題不是邪惡的。 它很詳細,所以要接受這部分。 米斯納博士曾一度概述了一個引薦的16個級別。但當他在寫第二版《 Networking Like a Pro 》的時候,他意識到他的級別應該與世界上大多數BNI引薦單上的5個級別一致。 這5個層次的介紹是累積起來的,在書中有詳細的闡述。 您分享了希望您的引薦夥伴聯繫的人的聯繫信息。 您還分享了有關與潛在客戶聯繫的人的其他信息(名片,營銷材料,網站)。 你給潛在客戶一個關於你所引薦的人的個人引薦信。 你打一個私人電話,安排潛在客戶和你引薦的人見面。 您可以在潛在客戶和您引薦的人之間進行面對面的介紹。 引薦的級別越低,將其轉化為業務的難度就越大。你的目標應該是給出至少是3級的引薦 引薦人的5個級別在《Networking Like a Pro》第36章。第二版中的第36章。你也可以在Misner博士的博客上閱讀更多關於它們的內容。 由Networking for Success頻道在YouTube上為您帶來。 第548集的文字記錄 Priscilla : 大家好,歡迎回到BNI官方播客,由YouTube上的Networking for Success頻道為您帶來,該頻道有Ivan Misner博士和其他許多網絡專家。我是Priscilla Rice,我從加州伯克利的Live Oak錄音室為大家帶來。我今天在電話中加入的是BNI的創始人和首席願景官, Ivan Misner 博士。你好, Ivan ,你在哪裡? Ivan : 嗨, Priscilla 。我現在很好,我在北卡羅來納州夏洛特的新的全球支持團隊總部,在BNI的全球總部,BNI大約一年多前搬到了那裡,這就是我本週的工作地點。 Priscilla : 很好,跟我說說引薦人的五個級別。 Ivan : 引薦的五個級別-多年來,我已經撰寫了有關引薦的各個層次的書籍。 我曾經將其分解,我認為這是商務引薦中16個引薦級別。 我在 《 Networking Like a Pro 》 第一版中縮小了範圍。 但是在第二...
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