Featured Client: Viveka von Rosen of Linked Into Business

By: Andrea Lotz Tuesday May 12, 2015 comments Tags: featured client, success stories, clients

Viveka von Rosen of Linked Into Business is like a lot of small business owners. She struck out on her own to follow her passion, to make the best use of her unique skills, and to enjoy newfound flexibility. But, like most business owners, there are also a lot of aspects of business management that she isn’t so crazy about.

Viveka is one of AllProWebTools’ most vocal advocates, and we really appreciate all she’s done to spread the word. We talked with Viveka about how she got Linked Into Business started, and how she uses technology to navigate the unique challenges of being a business owner.

Of course, we also asked her for a few LinkedIn tips for small businesses. Look for our LinkedIn Q&A at the end of the post to see what Viveka considers “need to know” social media skills for small business owners.

Find Your Passion and Build It Up

Viveka found her passion somewhat by accident, when a speaker she had brought in to educate her clients introduced her to LinkedIn, then a brand new social media network. She immediately saw the potential of LinkedIn to expand her network beyond local contacts, and decided to learn all she could about it.

She continued working her other job for almost a year, while doing research on LinkedIn and gradually building a name for herself as a LinkedIn expert. Finally, she was able to quit her job and start doing social media training full time, founding her own company called Linked Into Business.

Find Ways to Do More of What You Love

Like most small business owners, Viveka quickly found that there are some aspects of running her own business that she loves. In particular, Viveka loves the freedom of being a small business owner. She runs her business from home, or on the road as she travels all over the world.

 “The sky’s the limit,” she says. “Really, I’m only limited by my own belief and what I think is possible.”

As a business owner, Viveka is able to spend more of her time doing the parts of the job that she truly loves. But of course, the parts she doesn’t love still have to get done.

“The stuff I wasn’t good at in my past life—metrics, measurements, technology—have been my biggest struggles,” she says. “Fortunately, I was able to learn how to delegate. And fortunately, nowadays, there are tools to do that.”

Viveka isn’t afraid to outsource the aspects of her job that drain her energy. She lives by the motto of, “Do what only you can do.” So she spends her time writing blogs, designing new courses and products, and doing hands-on LinkedIn education, and leaves the tech stuff to her assistant, and her partners—including AllProWebTools.

Find Tools That Enable Your Success

Viveka has been using AllProWebTools since April 2013. She came on board initially because of the complete integration. Compared to WordPress plugins, which are “too many moving parts,” she says, AllProWebTools is a much stronger integration—“It’s all one machine.”

“The second reason was ease of use,” she says. “It’s a really intuitive dashboard. There are other dashboards out there, but those have more than I needed, they’re not intuitive, and they’re expensive. So the third thing really was, AllProWebTools is so affordable.”

By using technology to automate, integrate, and delegate, Viveka is able to do more of what she loves.

There’s Payoff in Risk

Viveka left us with one final thought: “I was taking a huge risk moving from WordPress to AllProWebTools, but your willingness to work with me, your flexibility, and your ability to deliver made the risk pay off. It’s important for people to know there’s payoff in risk.”

“It’s just like getting started in social media,” she says. “No one know what social media was in 2007—no one knew what it was going to do for business and marketing, no one knew it was going to have the effect it did, so it was definitely a risk quitting my day job and jumping into this full time.”

New business technology is always a little bit of a risk. This was true of LinkedIn back when Viveka started Linked Into Business, and it’s true of AllProWebTools today. But, as Viveka says, if you see a solution to a real problem, there can be huge payoffs to taking a risk.

LinkedIn Q&A

We also asked Viveka a few questions about how small business owners can make the best use of LinkedIn, and we wanted to share what she had to say with you.

If you’d like to learn more about Viveka and the awesome training she has to offer, check out linkedintobusiness.com and sign up for free LinkedIn tips and tricks! There are all kinds of free resources you can access from her website.

Q: What makes LinkedIn such a valuable resource for small business owners?

A: With the free account, you can still create a really professional, nice presence. You can create the branding, the positioning, the credentials that you need on your personal profile and your company page. They also tell you who and how you can interact with. So pretty much anyone you need to connect with, there is a way of extending a conversation.

 

Q: What’s the number one LinkedIn faux pas or mistake that makes you cringe?

A: I have three, actually, and they’re all right up there. One thing is when people create a personal profile as if it were a company page. So they’ve got the logo instead of their photo, they’ve got a company name instead of their own name. And the reason this is such a faux pas is it goes against LinkedIn’s user agreement. The personal profile is about personal communication.

Another pet peeve is putting anything other than you last name in the last name field. It gets you found on Google, but if it’s reported, LinkedIn makes your profile unfindable.

My third pet peeve is when you connect with someone on LinkedIn, and they just plug you into their newsletter channel. I agreed to connect, I didn’t agree to get your spam. Harvesting emails from LinkedIn is a major no no.

 

Q: How often do you recommend giving your profile a bit of a facelift?

A: LinkedIn is always changing stuff. So anytime LinkedIn makes a big change, like they introduce media, or they introduce publisher, or they make a big user interface change, that’s a good time to go in and change your profile.

Obviously, if you’re changing a job, or if you changed your company name, you want to go in and change that on LinkedIn.

If you’ve got a new product or service, LinkedIn has fields where you can add those. You can even pull those sections up a little higher in your profile so they’re a little more visible.

 

Q: What’s your philosophy when it comes to making connections and building relationships on social media?

A: Always be of value. Don’t always be selling, always be giving. I’m always trying to give helpful, useful information.

Stay human. You want to get people to not only like your product, but to like you. That’s where the loyalty lies. Where my success lies is, I’ve created a strong relationship with my tribe. They like me, so they’re willing to listen to me and share my stuff for me, which amplifies my voice. Be likable, be helpful, be useful.

LinkedIn tells you to only connect to people you know. But that restricts your visibility and ability to engage! I say, connect to people you should know.