What's the Dollar Value of Your Linkedin Profile?

What's the Dollar Value of Your Linkedin Profile?

Now this seems like a strange question isn't it? I agree. But I think, it has an answer, or at least a rough way of estimation for a feel good factor, so read on.

Linkedin is influential

Linkedin has been the single most influential platform to connect with professionals all over the world. One of the ways in which you can use Linkedin to the fullest is by buying premium accounts which means access to In-mail, and a little more reach via special features + metrics on how are you faring in profile views & rankings.

This directly means spend, if not Investment.

In my last pulse article, I tried to say that the subscription services are too expensive, unless you are making more back (unless its a corporate account in which case accounting is complex). By the end of this page, you find more reasons, and a different way of achieving the same objective.

How do you calculate a dollar value of your profile?

Which leads us to the question, How do you know the dollar value of your profile?

And to answer this, lets use a Linkedin feature itself. Its called Linkedin Business Solutions. 

Using this, you can create SUPER Targeted Ads. Its almost  sniper accurate, if you know what you want out of it. And it even proclaims so.

So, while fishing around it, i checked out the pricing models and what were they charging for a profile view. (Since at present i am in Tokyo, around 100yen= 1 dollar for a rough approximation)

Right now, 1000 ad views on Linkedin = 2 to 4 USD

The CPC (cost per click) on an AD = 2 to 4 USD.

Here is a screen shot from the Advertisement tool.

Let's calculate

So, If you bought the premium account and your profile views jumped, it means that for every 1 click, to visit your page, is getting 2 dollars in your virtual piggy bank.

Dollar value of profile = 2 dollars X number of additional view your profile got

You can easily check the growth from your profile metrics page. It looks something like this.

Linkedin also provides you with your own vanity metric which you can keep trying to push up.

So if you are getting 100 profile views a week without doing anything, then thats 200 dollars of virtual value. So your profile is worth 200 Dollars a week. 

Remember, to reach your profile, your profile tile had to come up in a search or another page, and make the user click. If you were trying to do that using Linkedin Ads, linkedin would charge you 200 dollars.

You can also take a different approach and say suppose you had a commercial message on your profile. In such a case your profile would generate 1000 views = 2 dollars in 5 weeks. So your page value is 0.4 dollars.

Which means, if you are buying, its worth 200 dollars. But if you are selling, its worth 40 cents. (sorry to break it to you, but thats how advertising works).

An Arbitrage exists to benefit without Linkedin premium

Bottom line is that if you are paying 7-10 dollars a month for basic subscription, and you managed to get 5 extra profile views in that particular month, then you are even (by Linkedin standards). 

Now you can always claim that Linkedin advert is overpriced, but thats not the point here. The point is to achieve the same objective for less.

If you are an advertiser, you can see that there is an arbitrage here. The cost of an In-mail also happens to be around 4 Dollars each. 

So instead of buying an in-mail, its always better to create a tightly targeted ad on a CPM basis, and get your 1000 views.You will get access to all the same metrics, if you have targeted it to your profile page.

Want to reach out to Bill Gates?

In mail lets you write stuff, and guarantees a response, but if i have to reach out to Bill Gates, i would rather create an AD that would follow him everywhere on Linkedin and get a 1000 views than buy 10 In-mails via a premium account and then send him one. (if we wanted to do this just by spending money and nothing else)

Crazy right?  Do you think it will work?