Links in LinkedIn Posts

YOUR LINKEDIN QUESTIONS ANSWERED!

Do you have questions about your LinkedIn profile or how to use LinkedIn? Send your questions to our LinkedIn Expert Debbie McCormick and she’ll answer them in the magazine! Use info@LinkedInBossLady.com with subject Dear Debbie.

Dear Debbie:

Is it okay to put a link to my website in my LinkedIn posts?

                                                                                                             Lauren V.

Hi Lauren, thank you for the question.

This is something a lot of folks don’t know: if you put a live link into your post, taking the reader off of the LinkedIn site, LinkedIn will punish you by not distributing your post widely.

Here’s their reasoning: they want you to stay on LinkedIn. They want you to interact on the site, read the ads, connect with people, right?

So if you invite people to go off of the site, they say, “Oh no you don’t” and keep your post to themselves.

I’ll give you the work-around to that in just a sec, but first let me say that you can upload almost anything to LinkedIn so that your readers can see what you want them to without taking them off the site, including:

• Videos

• z Pdfs

• z Slides

Now if you do need to take them off of LinkedIn to see something, there are two things you can do as a work-around. I actually recommend doing both of these on the same post.

Say you’re inviting your readers to something you’ll be doing live.

At the end of your invitation, insert the link but make it a “dead” one, meaning that it’s just type, not a live link. If you did only that, the reader could easily copy and paste into their browser to go where you want them to go …a tiny extra step.

But you can do something in addition to that:

Post your invitation with the dead link in it, telling readers they’ll find the live link in the first comment.

After posting the invitation, YOU be the first comment, saying something like “Here’s the link to the [thing you’re inviting them to], then insert the live link.

LinkedIn will figure this comment work-around out in due time, so use it while you can.

This way your readers have two chances to go where you’re inviting them to go.

__________________________________________

I’m happy to answer your LinkedIn questions every week in the YES I CAN Living Magazine.

For further help or support from me, feel free to schedule a one-on-one Profile Assessment at https://BookWithDebbie.com.

You can find me on these platforms:

 LinkedIn.com/in/DebbieMcCormick

@LinkedInBossLady

facebook.com/DebbieMcCormickConsultingLinkedIn