Most people treat their LinkedIn profile like a CV they filled in once and then forgot about. It sits there half-finished, doing nothing, while they quietly decide that LinkedIn just doesn’t work for them. Your profile isn’t a CV. It’s a shop window that stays open while you sleep. Every time someone reads your post, likes a comment, or gets handed your name at a networking event, the first place they go is your profile. What they find in the first few seconds decides whether they connect, enquire, or quietly click away. A LinkedIn profile that sells does three jobs at once:

1. It tells the right person they’re in the right place
2. It proves you’re the real deal
3. It gives them somewhere to go next.

I spent the best part of an hour recently going through a client’s profile with her, line by line. Wendy had already had a go at tidying it herself, and there was still plenty to sort (there always is). Halfway through, she said something I’ve not stopped thinking about since.

“Business really flows from us as human beings.”

She’s right.

People buy people, and your profile is where they meet you, the real you, first. Here’s how to make your LinkedIn profile pull its weight, one section at a time.

Start with the hardest-working line: your headline

Your professional headline is the line under your name, and it follows you everywhere on LinkedIn. Every post, every comment, every time you turn up in search, that line comes too. It’s the single most-seen thing on your whole profile, and most people fill in about half the space and call it done.

A LinkedIn profile that sells doesn’t waste this area on a job title. Use it to say what you do and who you help, with a hook that makes people want to read the rest. If you’re staring at a blank box, get AI to help you. Give Claude or ChatGPT your profile and ask for an attention-grabbing headline with a strong hook that immediately says what you do and who you help. Then edit it so it sounds like you and not a robot.

Choose your words carefully; they cost you money. When I worked on Wendy’s headline, she’d written “public speaker”. We changed it to “keynote speaker”. Public speakers speak in public. Keynote speakers are the reason people buy tickets and attend events. That simple change positioned her – it didn’t just say what she did. Same two words of effort, a completely different signal (and yes, it quietly hints that Wendy gets paid to do it).

Tidy up your profile link

Your default LinkedIn address is your name followed by a string of random numbers, which is the digital equivalent of a name badge with the sticker peeling off. You can change it. Edit your public profile and set a custom URL, something clean like your name and what you do.

Why bother? Because now you’ve got a tidy link to drop into your email signature, onto your business cards (if you still use them), at the bottom of a proposal. People click it, land on you, and the whole thing looks deliberate rather than accidental.

Rewrite your About section so the first line does the heavy lifting

Here’s the bit almost everyone gets wrong. On your profile, only the first line or two of your About section shows before the “see more”. Everyone has to click to read the rest, and most won’t. So that first line is doing the job of an entire advert on its own.

Don’t open with “I am a…”. Open with the thing that makes your ideal client lean in: the problem you solve, the result you get, the question they’re lying awake asking. When I reordered Wendy’s opening line so the strongest bit came first, she read it back and went, “That is powerful”.

Nothing new was added. We just stopped burying the good stuff under the polite stuff.

Start your About section with a powerful hook. It drives curiosity – and that’s what a LinkedIn profile that sells does. Curiosity turns into interest. Interest creates desire, and desire creates leads you can convert.

One more thing. I’d keep it as one flowing block rather than lots of little paragraphs, because you’ve only got about a third of the space visible before the click. Make every character earn its place.

Build a Featured section (your visual sales shelf)

Between your About section and your activity, LinkedIn lets you add a Featured section, and it’s the most underused bit of space on the whole platform. It’s a row of tiles people can swipe through: images, PDFs, or links. Think of it as the shelf in your shop window where you put the things you actually want people to pick up.

Have a minimum of three, because it looks full and intentional that way. For a local business, that might be a tile for your free guide or lead magnet, a tile for your main service, and a tile for proof, so a case study or a talk you gave. One client of mine, a finance dude, has his two lead magnets and his free consultation sitting right there, so anyone landing on his profile has an obvious next step staring back at them.

Three quick rules. First, you can feature a PDF, so a brochure or guide becomes a little flip-book people can page through. Second, don’t feature a normal post, because it dates fast. Add it as fresh media or a link instead. Third, treat it like a shop display: every six months, look at your profile with fresh eyes and give the Featured section a spring-clean. It’s not a one-and-done.

Fill your Experience section with the right keywords

Now the honest bit. Almost nobody reads your Experience section word for word, and I tell clients that to their faces. So why fill it in properly? Keywords.

You get up to 2,000 characters per role and most people use about a hundred. Every one of those characters is a chance to tell Google, LinkedIn, and now the AI search tools exactly what you’re about. Someone searches for what you do, and your profile is in those results somewhere. Filled in properly, it might climb from page 1052 to page 987. Do that across every role and it adds up.

There’s a bonus too. LinkedIn watches whether your posts match your profile. When they line up, it trusts you’re the real thing and lets your content run. When they don’t, it quietly taps the brakes. So a profile packed with the right keywords isn’t only for search, it’s telling the algorithm who you are so your posts get a fairer go. Write a couple of sentences for each role, in plain English, using the words your ideal client would actually type.

Collect recommendations, and steer them

Recommendations are your social proof – the stuff you didn’t write yourself, which is exactly why they land. The trouble is people either have none or leave it entirely to chance. Make it a process instead.

Every time you finish a piece of work or deliver a talk, go to that person’s profile, hit the three dots, and request a recommendation.

Two things make it work.

1. Always send a personal message with a bit of direction, telling them what you’d love them to mention. Everyone says you’re lovely to work with. What you need is the specific result they got, so frame it for them: “as a result of working with you, I was able to…”.
2. You control what shows. A recommendation riddled with typos, or one that just says “she’s great”, adds nothing, so you simply don’t publish it (you can even send it back for a tidy-up).

Then wring every drop out of the good ones. They’re public, so pull the best lines into your other marketing, screenshot them as social proof, drop them into your posts, add them to your website. Getting them is hard work, so don’t let them sit in one place doing one job.

Last one: sort your banner

Your banner is the strip behind your headshot, and a surprising number of people leave it as the default grey or just bang up something from their camera roll. Use it. Your business name, what you do, a line that matters, and images that show your world: your product, you doing the thing, you on a stage if that’s your bag. It costs nothing, and it’s the first splash of colour anyone sees, so match it to your brand colours while you’re there. They matter more than people think.

Where to start to create a LinkedIn Profile That Sells

None of this is a weekend job, so don’t treat it like one. Do a section a week if that’s all the time you’ve got. The point is that a good profile keeps working long after you’ve shut the laptop, quietly turning the people who find you into people who want to talk to you. That’s the whole difference between a CV that sits still and a LinkedIn profile that sells for you.

If you want the bigger picture on turning LinkedIn into actual enquiries rather than just likes, start with our guide to using LinkedIn for local leads. And if the recommendations bit landed, it’s worth understanding how reviews and recommendations do the selling for you.

Want the full playbook for showing up and being seen as the real you? My book, Stop Hiding – Start Marketing, walks you through it, and every copy comes with the Show Up Vault: the full library of templates, prompts and workbooks to put it all into action.

LinkedIn profiles that sell: your questions answered