Writing A Profile That Isn’t Crap

I have always been amazed by some of the professional profiles I have read online. Some of them have you clicking away thinking ‘Man, I wonder if they will even acknowledge my email’ while others have you thinking ‘Are they for real – they want people to pay them?’

Lately the majority of the ones I have seen had me thinking the latter. It should be no wonder why people pay to have professional profiles written on sites such as Linked In.

So how do you write a profile that isn’t straight crap?

I don’t know.

I’ve rewritten my profiles so many times, at any given point I couldn’t tell you what it says. But I can say that everything that is written in them is true.

I update my profile regularly, and that is how it should be.

One of the biggest mistakes freelancers make is not evolving. How can you explain not having learned anything new in over a year of freelancing? I can understand that happening if you work a traditional job – a factory worker may have the same task as they’ve had 6 months earlier. That is typically not the case with the online freelancer.

I used to work (yes as in typical job) for a company that had a motto of move at the speed of the Internet. That means: learn something new today, but expect to re-learn it tomorrow. You need to be able to take on new assignments, learn from it, and then do something else. The Internet is not stagnant, so why should the experience of an online freelancer be any different?

That is why a stale profile is a useless profile, or at least a sign that the freelancer is not suited for the online economy.

So if you are like me, an online professional that moves at the speed of the Internet, it makes as much sense spending time ensuring your information is updated as it does using the right keywords. If you are going to drop $100 on a professionally written profile, be prepared to update it in a month or so. Otherwise, save your money making a website and promote yourself the old fashioned way- with business cards.

For online professionals, writing a profile that doesn’t suck is all about staying fresh, because it’s the Internet, and search engines can’t read.