Now there are many ways you can build your brand online. But my oft-repeated reminder is that the quickest and simplest way for any time-harried professional would be a few clickstrokes on your LinkedIn Profile and voila! – you’ve made a headstart in building your online brand.

Don’t trust me?! Check out this insightful CNET article on how LinkedIn can actually enable your search engine rankings and an outline of 3 areas to focus on when you’re building that LinkedIn profile.

While there are a number of services that can help keep you up to date with your contacts–probably better actually–the mix of features as well as the huge and continued adoption of LinkedIn by professionals makes it a worthwhile Web marketing venue.

Wanna get started. Here are 3 easy, no-brainer steps to follow when crafting your LinkedIn profile.

Step 1:

What many may not realize is that these links are live, direct, and not “nofollowed” on the public profile page…which is the page that is openly available to search engine spiders.

Here’s what I’ve done with my LinkedIn Profile – added the LinkedIn Blog, which I edit at work, this blog that you’re currently reading – Marketing Nirvana and of course, my new found fascination to track my thoughts and webclicks via FriendFeed. All three are done via the “Other” options to add relevant anchor text links.

Go, edit your LinkedIn profile now

Step 2:

Now what you’ve done above may not be as useful unless you activate your public profile, which will be shown when users search for you on a search engine like Google. Of course, LinkedIn has always allowed you to set different levels of visibility to your profile when searched for, all of which can be modified on the Public Profile edit page. And, as you may have guessed mine is set to the Full View.

Alright, how about now?

Step 3:

And, finally, don’t forget to link to your LinkedIn public profile URL from other sites as well.

Now that you’ve added links, be sure to link to your public profile URL from other sites when appropriate. This way you’ll drive a little traffic to the profile, and depending on the link, also flow a little PageRank through the profile page to your chosen Web site or sites.

OK, forget about it. Maybe just bookmark me and edit me later.

But the most important way by which I build my personal/career brand is by blogging here on Marketing Nirvana (If you haven’t, how about subscribing to my blog) and that’s one of the reasons, I’m getting back to blogging regularly – continuing to solidify my brand. Let’s hope I stay on this blogging wagon or is it about not falling off the wagon? Either way, get blogging or get LinkedIn! And, stay at it.