The hack
Optimize your profile for building connections.
Why it works
Everyone is on LinkedIn. It’s nothe second Twitter, but with more people, and much worse content.
As with any social network profile, you should treat it as your mini landing page, where the conversion goal is to get people to hit that connect button.
Unless you are famous on the internet already, like the CEO of Vercel, you can’t get away with having a basic profile. You need to sell yourself and do it well.
The goal with this is to make you look like someone worth connecting with. This will help you with everything from getting responses to your cold connection outreach, growing the audience of followers to your organic posts, to making powerful real-life and online introductions with a simple link.
How to do it
There are two profiles that we can copy and learn from. James Hawkings (CEO PostHog) and Guillaume Moubeche (CEO Lemlist).
The first and most important part is the intro. The checklist to follow is.
- URL: Go with simplicity and make it your name: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-hawkins/, if you want to go crazy, feel free to copy G: https://www.linkedin.com/in/profit-led-growth/ (seems people are really going for those lately: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketing-master/)
- Profile picture: A simple picture where you smile works the best.
- Top image: Don’t sweat this one. Feel free to leave it empty, or add your company logo or simple slogan.
- Description: Include numbers if possible, users, revenue, growth, and anything to make you stand out. One sentence about what you do works as well. Don’t oversell yourself here, you want to seem qualified, but not scammy.
- CTA: Add a link to your website/blog directly there. It makes going from “who is this guy” to “nice website” very quickly.
- Connections: Get to 500+ connections if you don’t have them already. Having less will make you look like you just graduated.
The second part is experience. Try to make it short and sweet. People skim this part, so make it easy for them. Focus on numbers and things you achieved.
And lastly, the education part. This is the part that most people get wrong.
You are not in school anymore and no one cares that you’ve taken a chemistry seminar. Keep this part as simple as possible, degree and university are enough. Everything else should go.
Want to stand out? Forget “graduated top 20% of my class”, no one cares. You’re better off going for interesting and different like “won spelling bee competition”. It will make people smile, and you’ll look less of a try-hard.
