With more than 400 million of users and 1 billion of searches every day, LinkedIn is currently the most viable podium for job-seekers to position their skills and stand out as a professional. In other words, a strong LinkedIn profile can build a strong reputation and grow your professional network.

However, the success on LinkedIn is based on a strong self-branding. To shine out on this vibrant professional networking website, you must show your value proposition which means you need to pitch your skills and show your strong points.

But if you lack the self-branding skills to do it yourself, let us guide you with these 6 helpful tips:

1. Create a Killer Headline
First things first.A headline is your first chance to grab the viewers and force them to explore more of your profile. Considering the tactical role of a headline, it is important that you create it like a title of a story that leaves your audience with an urge to read more about your professional journey.However, you should avoid using industry jargons and buzzwords that sound similar to the viewers. Instead, you should use pick words that says specifically something about you and help the viewers identify your skills and talent.

2. Inspire Readers With an Impressive Summary
A summary is strategic section of your LinkedIn profile to hook your readers and build their interest. To make it impressive and compelling, you need to develop this section in a way that leaves your readers feeling inspired. Rather than writing a plain summary that sounds dull and boring, you need to make it sound like a story of your successful career.

Just like a narrative, it should begin with an awesome introduction, build interest of readers in the middle and ends with an impact. Your summary has to inspire your readers to the extent that they want to be a part of your journey by offering you an invitation or throwing a job offer.

3. Highlight Your Skills and Endorsements
To market yourself as a professional, it is important to showcase your skills and endorsements that set you apart as a professional. Thanks to LinkedIn, you can do it with its ‘Skills and Expertise’ section. However, it needs to be placed strategically to grab attention of viewers.

By default, LinkedIn puts the ‘Skills and Expertise’ section after the ‘Experience’ which in my opinion is not the right place to highlight your skills. Thinking of it as a marketer, it would be more appropriate to have your ‘Skills and Expertise’ section right after the summary. So, if you have 99+ endorsements in all of the major skills, it will be an opportunity to convince an employer that you know your job.

4. Spice It Up With Multimedia
Your LinkedIn profile is your face to an employer and that face should have a certain personality. Luckily, LinkedIn gives you many tools to tweak your profile and portray yourself as a bankable professional. Infographics, videos and photos are some of the multimedia elements you can add to your LinkedIn to create the right perception.

For example, you can create a LinkedIn video in which you can talk about your professional journey and how you planned your career. You can even discuss about a dream job and the professional ambitions you want to achieve in future. Let’s say you are an academic writer who offers his services to students who need help with assignment, you can pitch your research and writing skills and how it makes you a competent assignment writer.

5. Stand Out With an Appealing Photo
A photo speaks for your personality. Therefore, it needs to bring out your true demeanor to your audience and makes you stand you out from others. When branding yourself on LinkedIn, a photo creates that first impression to the viewers and if you successfully do it, you have won half the battle.

6. Include Words Employers Typically Use in Job Descriptions
Knowing that your LinkedIn profile aims to seek attention of potential employers, having right words in your profile is critical to make it relatable to your specific job. What you need to do is find job descriptions matching with your title and then optimize words that relate to your profession so that when an employer goes through your profile, he is able to relate you to a job.

WordItOut is a word cloud tool that helps users search frequently-used words in a text. All you need to do is copy and paste the text from different job descriptions and you will get a word cloud showing the words that have been commonly used in the job descriptions.

As an active job-seeker, you need to consider LinkedIn profile as a way to promote your skills. Applying the above-mentioned 6 tips will help you brand yourself as potential contender in your niche industry.