LinkedIn profile strategy
You’ve done far more interesting, valuable, impressive shit than anyone would ever guess from your LinkedIn profile. Possibly even more than you realize.
Maybe your profile reads like a dusty résumé nobody asked for.
Maybe it sounds like everyone else.
Maybe it’s perfectly fine.
And does absolutely nothing for you.
And that matters. Because people look.
Before the meeting. After the introduction. When someone recommends you. When they’re deciding whether to respond, hire you, refer you, invite you, or keep scrolling.
Your profile is having conversations about you when you’re not there.
Clients have landed jobs, speaking engagements, and consulting deals before their profiles were even finished.
So you tweak your headline. Rewrite your About section. Add your newest job. Ask AI. Read another article about “tips for the perfect LinkedIn profile.”
And somehow, you’re still staring at a profile that doesn’t feel like you and, more importantly, doesn’t work.
Which might be the worst insult of all.
“Templates are useful.”
A template has to work for everybody. That’s exactly why it can’t capture what makes you interesting.
Fill in the blanks. Pick a headline formula. Follow the About-section framework. Ask AI to “make this more compelling.”
You can end up with perfectly competent copy that could belong to 10,000 other people.
That’s not much of an improvement.
“LinkedIn is your online résumé.”
For years, people have called LinkedIn your “online résumé.”
It isn’t.
A résumé and a LinkedIn profile don’t have the same job. And treating your profile like a résumé with more room gives you exactly what you’d expect: a longer résumé.
Which is a lost opportunity for you.
Every section of your profile has a job. Those sections need to work together. What you leave out matters as much as what you put in. And the whole thing should lead somewhere.
Once you understand that, you stop asking, “What am I supposed to put in this box?” And you start asking much better questions.
“You know yourself best.”
Chances are, you’re too close to your own life to see what makes you so extraordinary. Or to see what other people see in you.
The thing you do extraordinarily well? It feels ordinary because you’ve been doing it forever.
The weird little project you almost leave off might tell me more about how your brain works than your impressive job title does.
That accomplishment you insist on keeping because it was a Big Fucking Deal might have absolutely nothing to do with where you’re going next.
And the three careers that look completely unrelated to you? I might see the Red Thread connecting them before you do.
This is why the problem isn’t that you have nothing to say. It’s likely that you have too much to say. Or you don’t know what to say.
The hard part is figuring out what matters, what doesn’t, what it all means, and what someone should understand about you when they’re done reading.
One of my clients had speaking experience. She didn’t think it was relevant.
I did, so we put it on her profile.
Before we even finished the profile, she was contacted about a speaking opportunity.
I’m not going to tell you that adding speaking experience to LinkedIn magically gets you speaking gigs. That’s not the point.
The point is that she would have left it out.
She wasn’t hiding it. She wasn’t being modest. She genuinely didn’t think it mattered.
I saw it differently.
That’s the work. You can’t leverage evidence you’ve already edited out of your own story.
I know. We touched on this already. But it’s important enough to say again.
Your résumé documents your work history. It’s a literal snapshot in time. Your LinkedIn profile can do so much more. It can take someone from knowing your job title to understanding who you are. It can show people how you think. What you’re really good at. What you care about. What you’ve accomplished. Where you’re going. Even what you’re like to work with.
That’s what I mean when I talk about taking a profile from 2D to 3D.
A 2D profile gives me information.
A 3D profile gives me a sense of the person behind it.
And every section of LinkedIn gives us another opportunity to do exactly that.
Facts in isolation.
The same information.
A completely different story.
Facts, context, connections, personality, and direction.
Before
Global Marketing and Communications Consultant | Strategic Communications | Nonprofit Marketing | Brand Strategy
After
Small Nonprofits, Powerful Stories | I will absolutely over-research your mission | My jokes are hilarious (according to me)
Both tell you what she does. But only one makes you want to know who wrote it.
And if you met her after reading the second one, you’d recognize her immediately. It sounds like her.
That’s what your profile should do: sound unmistakably like you.
Not imitate hers. Not make you funny if you’re not funny.
P.S. This headline landed her unsolicited compliments and a massive contract from someone who found her on LinkedIn.
Most people start at the top of their LinkedIn profile. Logically, that makes the most sense, right?
Not me. I start at the bottom.
I mean that literally. Like waaaay down at the bottom, with Causes. Maybe this seems ridiculous. Definitely nonsensical. But the process works.
Here’s why it works: I don’t want you deciding what your professional narrative is and then going hunting for things that prove it. We want to see what’s actually there first.
So we dig.
Narrative last.
We write your story after we’ve gathered and organized the evidence.
Evidence first.
We start with the facts, proof, and context to build a credible, compelling foundation.
Set the foundation. We start with the essentials so your profile is professional, complete, secure, and easy to find.
Add valuable context. These often-overlooked sections give a more complete picture of who you are, what you care about, and the breadth of your background.
Third-party validation. Show coverage, thought leadership, and what others say about your work.
More proof of what you do. These sections add credibility, depth, and context, showing the full range of your expertise and contributions.
Your professional foundation. We position your experience for maximum clarity, relevance, and impact. Not a list of responsibilities.
Proof points and offers. Show the best of your work and what you offer, so people can go deeper and take action.
Your big-picture story. Now we write the narrative: clear, compelling, and aligned with the evidence you’ve already built.
Connects everything. We finish with Skills, which ties your entire profile together and helps you get found by the right opportunities.
As we work our way up, patterns start showing up. Somewhere in there, people usually stop and say some version of: Oh. That’s what all of this means.
By the time we finally get to your About section, banner, and headline, we’re not staring at a blank box wondering what to say. We’ve already figured it out.
The top of the profile becomes the culmination of everything underneath it.
The projects you’ve worked on. The recommendations people have written about you. Skills. Certifications. Publications. Volunteer work. Awards. The weird side thing that doesn’t seem relevant. Your actual Experience, not just your job titles and responsibilities. Your successes. Even your failures.
Some of it matters. Some of it doesn’t. And some of the stuff you almost didn’t mention turns out to matter a lot.
Maybe you’ve spent your entire career walking into chaos and creating order, even though you’ve worked in four completely different industries. Maybe every job you’ve loved involved translating something complicated so other people could understand it. Maybe the thing everyone comes to you for barely appears anywhere on your profile. Maybe you’re exceptionally good at something you never want to do again.
That last one matters, too. Because we’re not building a shrine to everything you’ve ever accomplished. And we’re sure AF not building a funnel to more work you don’t love just because you’re good at it. (Nice way to make you miserable!) We’re building a profile that supports where you’re going next. Where you want to go next, not where anyone else expects you to go.
LinkedIn isn’t being read only by humans anymore. Its own systems interpret everything on your profile. Recruiters search by skills, titles, keywords, and experience. And AI tools increasingly surface, summarize, and compare professional information.
So getting found isn’t just about cramming keywords into your headline.
Optimize only for the machines, and your profile reads like keyword soup. Boring and ugly for humans.
Optimize only for the humans, and you can write something wonderful that nobody finds.
We need to do both.
One gets you found.
The other gets you chosen.
Sometimes, things happen fast.
Job offer in a week
She was barely into her Experience section when she started applying. Within a week, she had an offer. They looked at her profile and made the call within an hour.
Medical professional, 1:1 client
A dozen connections, one room
Twenty years at the same industry events. After her rebuild, more than a dozen connection requests landed from one workshop while she was still traveling home. People who now had a much better way to understand who they’d just met.
Entrepreneur, 1:1 client
The speaking gig
You’ve already met her. She almost left her speaking experience off.
Consultant, 1:1 client
More client results, in their own words →
I can’t promise you a job, a client, a speaking engagement, or 12 new friends at your next conference.
Nobody can.
What I can do is make sure that when someone looks you up, your profile gives them something worth finding.
From the blog: She got the job offer before her profile was finished · Twenty years at the same events, one rebuild · We rebuilt their profiles. Here’s what happened next.
You don’t need a completely different approach depending on how you work with me.
It’s the same thinking and the same framework.
What changes is how you want to work through it.
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Give me the whole system. I’ll do it myself.
This is the complete LYLIP framework in a self-paced course.
Right for you if…
You like knowing why you’re doing something.
You actually finish things when nobody’s watching.
I want to know what’s wrong.
You’ve looked at the damn thing so many times you can’t see why it isn’t working. I’ll record a personal 15-minute video: what’s working, what’s hurting you, and where I’d focus first. Plus $50 toward Optimize.
$147
Audit my profile →Give me the system, but don’t leave me alone with it.
Everything in Optimize, plus live sessions where I look at your actual profile and tell you what I see: the strong thing you buried, the thing you can finally let go. A small group doing the work alongside you. Same framework. More Natalie. (And an actual reason to be done by Thursday.)
$2,497next cohort, date TBA
See the current Lab →I want you in the room with me.
The private work. You talk. I listen for the thing you almost didn’t tell me, and the pattern you can’t see from inside your own history. Then we build your positioning and your profile together, in real time. The clarity tends to travel well beyond LinkedIn.
By invitationlimited private clients per month
Learn about The Protocol →There’s a book, too. Love Your LinkedIn Profile →
Natalie BertheLinkedIn Strategist & Author
Yes, I know a ridiculous amount about LinkedIn. But that’s not the most useful thing I bring to this work. Strategy is.
You’ll tell me about the prestigious thing you think absolutely belongs on your profile, and I’ll ask why we’re keeping it.
Then you’ll casually mention something you did eight years ago that you think is completely irrelevant, and I’ll stop you.
Wait. Go back. Tell me more about that.
Because the throwaway detail is often where the interesting stuff is.
I’ve spent more than 30 years working with businesses, founders, executives, and complicated problems: figuring out what’s really going on underneath the obvious thing, then building the framework that makes it make sense to everyone else.
LinkedIn happens to be an extraordinarily useful place to apply that brain.
I don’t invent a more marketable version of you. I help you figure out what’s already there, what matters, what deserves to come with you, and how to make the whole damn thing unmistakably yours.
Author of Love Your LinkedIn Profile | 30+ years of executive and strategic experience | Published in Fast Company and The Startup
LinkedIn's B2B trust factor is 30 points higher than YouTube and Facebook. Your profile is being vetted whether you're active or not.
We rebuilt four LinkedIn profiles. One got a job offer. One landed a speaking gig. One got dream-company proposals. All before they were done.
Six weeks of live LinkedIn profile work isn't for everyone. Here's who should skip the Optimize Lab, and who we're saving the twelve seats for.
Optimize Lab doors open tomorrow. The waitlist gets 48 hours of early access to 12 seats at the $1,997 founding price. Here's how it works.
If you mostly need to know what’s wrong, start with the Profile Audit.
If you’re ready to rebuild your profile yourself and you know you’ll actually do the work, Optimize gives you the whole system.
If you want the system but you’d like someone else’s eyes on your profile while you build it, that’s what Optimize Lab is for.
And if what you really want is me in the room thinking through all of it with you, take a look at The Authority Protocol.
Nope.
A checklist can tell you what sections LinkedIn has.
It can’t tell you which accomplishment you’re dramatically undervaluing, what you’re keeping because you can’t let it go, whether that weird side project belongs, or why three apparently unrelated jobs make perfect sense when you look at them differently.
It also can’t tell you how all those pieces need to work together so that your expertise is obvious to both LinkedIn and the people reading your profile.
That’s the work.
Absolutely. I use AI, too. But AI can only work with what you give it. And without a framework, AI tends to fall back on the same tired, generic LinkedIn advice you’re already trying to get away from.
If you’ve already decided the most interesting thing you’ve done is irrelevant, it never makes it into the prompt.
If you’re describing yourself with the same generic language you’ve used for ten years, AI doesn’t magically know which assumptions it should challenge.
AI can be incredibly useful for helping you articulate something. You still have to figure out what you’re trying to articulate.
Great.
But updated and strategic aren’t the same thing.
Adding your newest job, rewriting your About section, and swapping in a new headshot means your profile is current.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s doing its job.
Hell no.
Executives. Founders. Consultants. Business owners. Career professionals. Students. People looking for a job. People who love their job and aren’t going anywhere.
LinkedIn isn’t just where people look when you’re looking for a job.
It’s where people look when they’re looking at you.
There’s no responsible answer to that.
Sometimes it’s fast. Other profiles do their work quietly over months and years, creating opportunities their owners may never even know started with someone looking them up.
A great profile can’t guarantee what someone else will do after they see it. What it can do is make sure they’re seeing the version of you you actually intended them to see.
Not because every sentence is clever.
Not because you crammed in the right keywords.
Not because some LinkedIn guru gave you a score of 97.
Because you look at it and think:
Yes. That’s me.
Like the senior executive who literally giggled as he saw his profile come together.
And that’s everything.
No pressure.
(Your profile isn’t going anywhere. That’s kind of the problem.)
In the meantime, get LinkedIn strategy, profile advice, occasional rants, and whatever else I can’t stop thinking about, delivered to your inbox.