Most people will agree that LinkedIn is the best marketing tool on the planet for business professionals. And part of your marketing strategy, whether marketing yourself and/or your products and iStock_000064068585_Smallservices, should be to encourage marketing events or interactions with your target audience.

One of the most important marketing events on LinkedIn is profile views. When someone views your profile, it's like they walked into your store, ready to do some shopping.

So, how do you attract more shoppers to your store?
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Long-term strategy

Of course, almost everyone who checks out your profile could be a potential client/customer or at least know someone who might be interested in you and what you have to offer. However, ultimately you're looking for views from people who quite likely can help you achieve your business goals.
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To get on the path to long-term success, it's important to connect with your target audience and share great information, thereby nurturing the relationship and increasing your thought leadership status. Then, when they are ready to engage someone who has your expertise, you have earned your way onto their list–and hopefully it’s a very short list!
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Short-term strategy

In the short term, here are ten simple ways to get more of the right people viewing your profile.

1.  Optimize your LinkedIn profile headline. A headline is meant to grab the reader and encourage him/her to read more. If you need help with this, download my free worksheet The Definitive Worksheet to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile Headline on the free resources page of my website.

2.  Make frequent changes to your profile. Your connections will usually be curious about what you changed or added, so this one–if you don’t overuse it–works great.  Screen Shot 2015-09-24 at 6.41.13 AM

Make sure that the Notify your network button on your profile is set to green.

3.  Share your thoughts in a group discussion that has lots of previous comments. If there are lots of previous comments, then lots of folks will get notified when you make a comment–so make it a good one.

4.  Look at other people’s profiles. When people see you’ve looked at their profile, it’s quite likely they’ll take a look at yours if your headline suggests you might be an interesting person to meet.

Be sure your Screen Shot 2015-09-24 at 6.43.50 AMSelect what others see when you've viewed their profile setting is on the recommended setting of full disclosure. Then they'll see your full name and headline versus something like Insurance agent at Northwestern Mutual.

5.  Post your own status updates daily. This doesn’t take as much time as you think if you simply use the Share button on an interesting article you’ve read. Add a personal comment about the article, and you’ll get even more action from your network.

6.  Share, “like” or comment on other people’s status updates or published posts. This isn’t quite as powerful as posting your own status update, but the time commitment is a lot less. It only takes a second to click “like,” and it’s an easy way to stay top of mind with your network.

7.  Put more of your most important keywords in your profile–and put them in the right spots. For help with this, download my worksheet Keywords: The Key to Being Found on LinkedIn on the free resources page of my website.

8.  Endorse people. Not everyone is a fan of this feature, but it does spark lots of engagement–which usually results in more profile views.

9.  Include your LinkedIn URL in your email signature and Screen Shot 2015-09-24 at 7.04.39 AMon your business cards, resume, and other social sites. If you make it easy for people to find your profile, they’re more likely to take a peek at it.

10. Start writing longform articles using the LinkedIn publishing feature. Admittedly, this will take some work, and many of us shy away from writing, but over time this will get you more profile views. Also, one of the best ways to establish your thought leadership is to share your thoughts by writing.
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Take action

So, which of these steps are you going to take to increase your LinkedIn profile views? And keep in mind that if you get more profile views, you'll then get more traditional interactions (phone calls, emails, meetings, etc.). Of course, this will result in improved ROI for your time spent on LinkedIn.

For more easy strategies to improve your ROI, be sure to check out my video-based online LinkedIn training course Explode Your Revenues Using LinkedIn which is available for a limited time for just $97 when you use the promo code SALES at checkout.