In this episode, we discuss LinkedIn’s latest offering - an in-built freelance services marketplace - an additional function within your LinkedIn profile for adding ‘open to work’ banners to your profile picture, as well as the option to add various keywords about your service offering, so people can find you more readily when they need your skills.

It supersedes the ‘ProFinder’ offering they’d trialled a while back and, after a beta trial in the USA earlier this year, this service is now fully available to every LinkedIn user.

And most importantly - it’s free.

That’s not to say that sometime down the line there may be chargeable elements, but we’ll have to wait and see on that score.

For now, you can enable your profile to be searchable for a variety of keyword service offerings, so when people are searching the marketplace, your profile should then, theoretically at least, have more prominence for people to contact you directly about.

LinkedIn are wanting to offer a service that’s akin to the likes of UpWork, Fiverr, PeoplePerHour etc to add more value to the LinkedIn experience.

However, unlike the competition which will often just be a ‘jobs board’ from people wanting services which then invites freelancers to pitch/propose their wares, which can often lead to a race to the bottom when it comes to pricing; they’re doing things differently. The onus is on the person seeking work to be done to contact the relevant (to them) person to go about offering specs and negotiate pricing client-provider. 

We hope that this will be a positive step forward for LinkedIn, adding more features and relevance to an ever-expanding user base of freelancers and small businesses, edging away from their historical perception of being a job-seeker/recruitment oriented website like it was in its inception, with it being a glorified CV hosting jobs board.

This should mean good news to the small business and freelance community of the UK, and indeed, worldwide.

It’s free (for the moment at least!) so well worth you checking out. Find the relevant buttons in your usual ‘edit profile’ section on LinkedIn.

Reference:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/27/linkedin-rolls-out-its-freelance-services-marketplace-globally-after-picking-up-2m-users-in-smaller-us-beta/

https://www.linkedin.com/services

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BrumPod - The UK Small Business Podcast. BrumPod is designed for small businesses, because 2/3 of the hosts are small businesses! Our goal is to bring you topics that affect you as a fellow small business owner directly; everything from website tools and technology, changes in regulations, business networking tips, business growth.

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