How to optimize your LinkedIn profile for outreach
When you do outreach on LinkedIn, the first thing the person receiving your message does is click on your name. Your profile plays exactly the role your website plays in cold email: it is where the reply gets decided.
That is the fundamental difference with email. Someone who receives a cold email has to make an effort to check who you are: open a browser, type in your domain. On LinkedIn, your profile is one click away, in the same window, and people look at it before they even decide whether to reply. An empty profile gets no replies, whatever the message says.
1. The photo
A real photo, taken in decent conditions, where your face is visible. This is not about vanity: a profile with no photo, or with a cropped holiday snapshot, looks like a fake account, and fake accounts are exactly what people fear when they get a connection request from a stranger.
Frame your face and shoulders, not your whole body. The thumbnail shown next to your message is a few dozen pixels wide: in a full body shot, nothing is recognizable.
2. The banner
By default, LinkedIn gives you a flat blue block. It is the most visible sign of a profile nobody has taken care of, and it takes up the top quarter of the screen.
Anything is better than the default banner: your logo, a photo of your offices, an image of your product, a sentence saying what you do. What it contains matters less than the fact that you spent five minutes replacing it.
3. Your public profile address
By default, LinkedIn assigns you an address made of your first name, your last name, then a dash and a string of letters and digits. It looks something like linkedin.com/in/marie-durand-4b7291a3.
It is a setting, and it can be changed. You get a clean address, something like linkedin.com/in/mariedurand, that reads well, can be dictated over the phone and dropped into an email signature without looking like a machine identifier.
One detail that matters later on: this address format, your prospects' addresses this time, is what serves as the identifier when you load contacts into a tool, and what you will supply to look up a phone number.
4. The headline, under your name
It is the most read line on your profile, because it follows your name everywhere: in the connection request, in the inbox, in the feed. And it is the one people disagree about most.
The formula everyone recommends goes like “I help [target] achieve [result] through [method]”. Its advantage is that it is explicit. Its drawback is that it has become the marker of a category: the freelancers and consultants who sell themselves on LinkedIn. If your targets are SME owners or large accounts, that formula files you under a heading you do not want.
The point everyone agrees on, whatever the form: the headline should state the outcome of what you do, not your internal job title. “Head of Development” tells nobody anything. What you let your customers achieve does.
On our own profile it says “CEO & co-founder Emelia”, and nothing else. No hook, no promised outcome. That is a choice: we prefer something square and institutional to the freelance register. But it is a matter of culture and audience, not a rule. If your market expects an explicit promise, put one there.
5. Five hundred connections, before any automation
It is the reference threshold on LinkedIn, the point where the network shows “500+” instead of an exact count. Below it, your profile visibly says you have just arrived.
But the real reason is not cosmetic. You do not automate on a new or empty account. A recently created account, with no history and no network, that suddenly starts sending thirty connection requests a day is the textbook profile LinkedIn restricts. The account gets blocked before it has served any purpose.
Add people for a few weeks before you launch anything: your colleagues, your customers, your former colleagues, the people you meet. You can use automation to help, as long as you stay at a few requests a day: what gets a new account restricted is the volume, not the tool. What matters is that the account has some activity before it has volume.
6. The About section
This is where LinkedIn lets you write real text, long, with no format constraints. Almost nobody fills it in, and those who do put three lines in it.
Use it. Explain what you do, for whom, how, and with what results. It is the only place on the profile where you can go into detail, and it is exactly what someone hesitating to reply will read. The first lines count double: LinkedIn truncates the text and only shows the rest after a click.
7. Experience
Filled in, clear, and above all consistent with what you say in your messages. A profile claiming expertise that the career history shows nowhere produces the exact opposite of the intended effect.
One technical point almost nobody checks: when you enter a company in an experience entry, make sure you select the one that has a company page on LinkedIn. That is what makes the logo appear next to the line. With no page attached, LinkedIn shows a grey square, and the whole profile looks slapdash.
8. Posting, and the snowball effect
This is the element that changes the most, by a wide margin. When your prospect clicks on your profile, they land on your posts. If they see posts about the subject you have just written to them about, showing that you know it inside out, you are no longer a stranger cold calling: you are someone in the field getting in touch.
And there is a second effect, less obvious. When you automate on LinkedIn, you send connection requests, and the people who accept join your network. Even the ones you sell nothing to now see your posts. The more outreach you do, the bigger your audience; the bigger your audience, the further your posts travel; the further your posts travel, the more credible your outreach.
Outreach feeds reputation, and reputation feeds outreach. The two do not add up, they multiply. That is also why a LinkedIn account used for outreach should never be a ghost account created for the occasion.
Every post Emelia publishes brings us a lead. Not a hypothesis, a repeated observation. Posting is not a side activity you keep for when you have time: it is half the work, and the other half depends on it.
The profile is ready, what comes next
A properly filled in profile is worth nothing if the account gets restricted on the first campaign. The next two pages are the direct complement to this one.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we get asked on this topic, answered briefly.
Do you really need 500 connections before doing outreach on LinkedIn?
The number itself is not a LinkedIn rule, it is the threshold at which the profile starts showing “500+”. What really matters is not automating on a new, empty account: an account with no history that starts sending thirty connection requests a day is exactly what LinkedIn restricts. Build a network first, even a modest one, over a few weeks.
What headline should you put under your name?
Two schools of thought. The “I help [target] achieve [result]” formula is explicit, but it files you under freelancer and consultant, which can work against you with large accounts. The institutional formula, role and company, is more sober. Either way, the headline should state the outcome of what you do, never an internal job title nobody understands outside your company.
How do you change your LinkedIn profile address?
From your profile, the “Edit public profile and URL” link (« Modifier l'URL et les paramètres publics du profil ») at the top right. There you replace the string of characters assigned by default with your first and last name run together. This address is also what serves as the identifier in outreach tools.
Does posting on LinkedIn really help with outreach?
Yes, in two ways. First because the prospect who receives your message clicks on your profile and sees your posts there, which decides their reply. Second because the people who accept your connection requests stay in your network and see your posts afterwards, even when they never buy. Every post Emelia publishes brings us a lead.
Do you need a LinkedIn Premium account for outreach?
Not for the profile itself, which you look after the same way either way. Premium changes the connection request limits and access to Sales Navigator, which is covered in the LinkedIn limits.