Give yourself the gift of a LinkedIn profile makeover this holiday season, and see yourself reap the benefits over the course of next year. Trust me, we all need it esp. in this economic scenario. Chris Brogan, shared a Lifehack article on Google Reader earlier today – 10 Improvements you can make to your resume right now.

Reading through the article (nicely written by Thursday Bram), I realized many of these tips will be taken care of if you spend less time just fine-tuning or creating a LinkedIn Profile! Let’s go through the list.

1. Funky fonts – ditched!

It’s LinkedIn. Not only do you not have to worry about the wrong size of the font, LinkedIn also allows you to publish your resume in PDF format once you’re done editing your profile.

2. Put your skills up front

On LinkedIn, this automatically happens since you’ve your “Summary” and more importantly your “Specialties” right before you get into your detailed profile. Better still, feel free to add keywords you’d like people to find you by when they search for individuals in specific niche categories.

3. Spell check

Now, this is something I’d like to do on LinkedIn itself. But luckily my browser – Firefox, allows me to do that. Moving on…

4. Make everything match

This is when you send out an application with cover letter, resume, etc…

5. Minimize your job description, put dates at the end, don’t leave big gaps, align everything

LinkedIn is actually well suited and structured to enable you to stick to the above three rules. Plus, remember you can both print and PDF the final output (see #1)

9. Keep religious information out of it

D’uh!

10. Adhere to your industry’s conventions

This is actually the area where LinkedIn can provide you maximum bang for your buck! LinkedIn’s powerful people search allows you to find your colleagues with a similar title or a dream title. This should serve as a template as you craft a profile that adheres to industry conventions.

Better still, the new saved people search option (see above) allows you to receive an email with a specific search on a weekly basis. Here’s my most recent results for bloggers on LinkedIn!

Go on. Try LinkedIn’s People Search.