If you use LinkedIn actively, you need to be doing a few things monthly in order to maximize your benefits from the platform. These have to do with maintenance of your contacts and your profile, as well as making sure your profile shows you in the best light. In this article, I want to discuss this all in some detail. Don’t worry! This isn’t going to take long. A few minutes per month should do it!

Monthly Task #1: You should be exporting a list of your connections monthly. Look, if you’re spending time building up your connections, you surely don’t want to loose all this work if something should happen like you get your LinkedIn account shut down, even temporarily. Although, if you play by the rules, this shouldn’t happen, why let an asset you’ve spent time building up be in jeopardy?

Monthly Task #2: Another extremely important monthly task for you is to download your profile. Now you can do all of this at the same time. This is a handy changed LinkedIn has made recently. You especially want to download your profile summary. As you grow and change, your LinkedIn profile headline and profile summary will change as a reflection. You’ll naturally want to emphasize some aspects and deemphasize others. As you modify your headline and profile summary, though, it’s tempting to just delete the old ones. That’s probably a mistake. There’s often information or ways of saying things in an earlier profile summary that you might realize later are better than what you currently have. If the summary is deleted, you’ll have to try to reconstruct it. This is a less than ideal scenario!

Monthly Task #3: Finally, the third task I think is very important is to review your endorsements. Visitors to your profile scan your endorsements in order to quickly figure out who you are and what your skills are. Again, that changes over time. If you had a certain quality or skill four years ago and you were endorsed a lot for that skill, should it still weigh heavily in your current profile? Personally, I don’t think so. You might have changed jobs, changed rolls in your business or profession, or even changed professions totally!

Bottom line, you want to make sure your LinkedIn profile reflects and brands who you are Right now. That it shows you in the best light for your current purposes.