A recent survey of the first 1,000 people to join ProfileTree.com shows how important it is to complete a skills profile with a photo. To maximise the impact of their marketing effort, this should be a personal image of themselves.

What makes the Best Profile Picture?

Skills profiles with head shots. In fact 9 of the top 10 visited profiles were head shots where the individual was smiling with excellent posture, eyes open, shoulders back. They came across as professional, yet each still reflected the skill or service the individual offered.

Based on the survey, ProfileTree.com says follow these steps to create the best profile pictures to attract customers and views:

1. Use a high quality photo.

2. Personality counts, the image should still reflect your brand and service. If it’s a professional service, then the profile picture should reflect a professional person.

3. Be energetic, but don’t distract possible customers by being dramatic in your photo.

Whether Self Employed or not, it is apparent that profiles with personal images are visited many times more than logos.

What not to do with Profile Pictures:

Avatars performed the worst, recording the lowest visits compared to any image. The survey found that even with impressive profiles, users were not getting views if they had an avatar.

Cartoon and animal images performed very poorly. The exceptions were for people who were artists or worked with animals. If you want possible customers to visit your profile, do not use cartoons or animals.

Graphic logos, from business or general graphics also did not attract much attention from potential customers, side by side, customers viewed profiles that had images of people just over 50% more than profiles with logos.

To conclude, the 1,000 users that were studied spent an average of 18 minutes creating their profiles, those that took time to upload a personal profile picture had 12 times more visitors than those with the stock image.

To ensure the maximum customers are attracted to your skills profile or online advert for yourself and your service – the first step is an attractive photograph. Spending time creating a text based profile online, ensuring key words and headings are excellent for Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google Plus may be a waste of time without adding an image that reflects your service and yourself.