Everyone starts at the top.
Headline first. Then the photo, maybe. Then they open the About box, stare at the cursor, write three sentences, delete two, and close the laptop.
(Two weeks later the headline still says “Experienced Professional | Results-Driven Leader | Open to Opportunities.” I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it.)
That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a sequence problem.
Why most LinkedIn profile rewrites stall in the About section
The About section asks you to summarize your entire professional value in a few hundred words. It is the hardest writing on the whole profile.
So naturally, that’s where everyone begins. It’s near the top. Tops are for starting.
Except you’re being asked to summarize evidence you haven’t laid out yet.
You don’t know what your Experience section says, because you haven’t rewritten it. You don’t know what’s in Projects, because Projects is empty. You haven’t decided whether the patents count, or the talks count, or that thing you did in 2019 you’ve never mentioned to a single soul.
You’re writing the summary of a story you haven’t told yet. No wonder you stall.
What is the bottom-up approach to a LinkedIn profile?
Start at the bottom. Work up.
Organizations. Recommendations. Publications. Projects. Volunteer work. Certifications. The sections nobody bothers with, sitting down at the bottom of the page where you never scroll.
(Pro tip: people DO scroll down there. Often. They just don’t talk about it.)
Build those first. All of them. Before you touch a word of your About.
Because that’s where your evidence lives. Evidence first, narrative second. That’s the entire method, and it’s the opposite of how every template on the internet tells you to do it.
Why does starting at the bottom actually work?
Three reasons, and they compound.
You find out what you actually have. You are too close to your own story to read it the way a stranger does. The stuff you’d never think to include is almost always the stuff that lands. But you can’t decide what matters while staring at an empty About box. You decide by laying the evidence out and looking at it.
Your narrative stops being a guess. Once the proof is on the page, the through-line gets obvious. The Red Thread — the line connecting where you’ve been to where you’re going — isn’t something you invent in the About section. It’s something you notice after the evidence is sitting there in front of you.
Skills come last, and that’s the tell. You can’t pick skills until you know what your profile says. They attach to your actual experience or they prove nothing. “Critical Thinking” floating free is noise. Same logic as the headline: it’s a distillation, and distillation goes at the end.
The order nobody teaches
Every LinkedIn expert hands you a headline formula. Almost none of them tell you what order to build in.
(Which is convenient, because the order is the part that takes actual work.)
The headline is the last thing I write with a client. Never, ever the first. It’s a distillation, and you cannot distill something that doesn’t exist yet.
Same with About. Same with the banner. Those are the top of the profile because they’re the conclusion — and you don’t get to write the conclusion before you’ve made the case.
Where Optimize comes in
Optimize is the course version of exactly this. Same framework I use with private clients, same bottom-up order, section by section, from the bottom of your profile to the top.
50+ short videos. Worksheets and examples for every section. Go in order, or skip what doesn’t apply and come back when you’re ready.
It’s $397. One time. Lifetime access.
Your profile isn’t stalled because you’re bad at writing. It’s stalled because you started at the hardest part with none of the evidence in front of you.
Start at the bottom. The top gets easy.