My client’s headline is better than yours.
No, really. I have proof.
Have you ever had someone randomly reach out to tell you how much they love your headline? My client did.
Which tells us her headline is doing exactly its job: making people stop in their tracks to look.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because we spent two hours on that headline alone.
Two hours. On one line. WORTH IT.
(I will die on this hill.)
Why would someone compliment a LinkedIn headline?
Because it surprised them. And delighted them.
Most LinkedIn headlines don’t earn a second glance, let alone a compliment. They read like job descriptions pasted into a character limit. “Experienced Marketing Professional | Passionate About Growth | MBA.” Your eyes glaze over before the pipe symbol.
When a headline actually says something — something specific, something with a point of view, something that makes a reader think wait, what? — it earns the pause.
That pause is the entire point of a headline.
What most LinkedIn headlines actually say
Here’s what I see constantly:
🔹 A job title. Just… the title. “VP of Operations.” Thank you, that tells me nothing about what you’re actually good at.
🔹 An “I help” statement. “I help organizations achieve their strategic goals.” So does everyone. Next.
🔹 A keyword dump. “Leadership | Strategy | Innovation | Excellence | Synergy.” I’m already gone.
These headlines aren’t wrong. They’re forgettable. And on LinkedIn, forgettable is expensive.
Your headline appears in search results, in comment sections, next to every piece of content you engage with. It’s working in places you never visit. Or not working. And you’d never know.
The headline that earned a compliment from a stranger
Here it is:
Small Nonprofits, Powerful Stories | I will absolutely over-research your mission | My jokes are hilarious (according to me) 🤣
Let’s break down why this works.
“Small Nonprofits, Powerful Stories” tells you exactly who she works with and what she does. No guessing. No “I help organizations achieve outcomes.” Small nonprofits. Powerful stories. Done.
Partnered with her banner — as it should be — they have the whole picture.
“I will absolutely over-research your mission” is the part that makes you laugh and tells you her approach. She’s not just a storyteller for hire. She’s the person who will disappear into your annual reports and come back knowing your organization better than half your board does. That’s a selling point disguised as a joke.
“My jokes are hilarious (according to me) 🤣” is the humanizing beat. A weird, self-aware little fact that makes her sound like a person you’d actually want to work with. And for the record, she IS objectively funny. And she definitely DOES laugh at her own jokes.
Three components. Who she serves, how she works, who she is. Each one doing a different job, all of them earning the pause.
Two hours on a LinkedIn headline is not overkill
I know what you’re thinking. Two hours? On one sentence?
Yes. And another four on her About section.
Because a headline that makes someone reach out to compliment it didn’t come from a template. It came from excavation.
This means:
🔹 Figuring out what she actually does 🔹 Who she does it for 🔹 What makes her approach different 🔹 And then compressing all of that into a line that stops the scroll
That work is invisible. The result isn’t.
What makes a LinkedIn headline worth stopping for?
Not cleverness for its own sake. Not keyword stuffing. Not a job title with extra words around it.
A headline that works does three things:
🔹 It’s specific enough that a stranger knows what you do without reading further.
🔹 It has a point of view. Something that makes it sound like a person wrote it, not a form.
🔹 It survives the thumbnail. Your headline shows up in more places than your profile, and in most of those places it’s all anyone sees.
The reason most headlines don’t work isn’t that people can’t write. It’s that they are following a formula that, quite simply, does not work. It’s that they cannot see what makes them unique in their field.
This was my client exactly.
Fortunately, she was willing to put in the work. Two hours on a headline, four on an About section, and even more on the clarity on why she’s so damn good at what she does.
The upshot? A stranger loved it enough to say so out loud.
That’s not a compliment. That’s a headline doing its job.