The fastest way to create a boring, unoriginal LinkedIn profile that impresses literally no one: treat it like a template to fill in.
Preferably in third person.
Most people do exactly that. Which is why most profiles read exactly like that.
If you want one that actually works, I have bad news about your Sunday afternoon. It’s not a 30-minute project. It’s not something you knock out between loads of laundry because you found the right guide.
(Spoiler: there is no right guide. I looked. And when I didn’t find it, I wrote the book.)
Here’s what a quality rebuild actually is.
An excavation.
Building a LinkedIn profile isn’t filling in a template. It’s an excavation.
A template tells you what goes where. An excavation asks what’s already there, buried, that you walked past because you stopped finding it interesting years ago.
That’s why I build profiles from the bottom up. Evidence first, story second. You don’t start with a clever headline and reverse-engineer a life to match it. You dig through what you’ve actually done, and the headline falls out of the dirt at the end.
Filling in the blanks is fast. Digging is not.
What is the Red Thread on a LinkedIn profile?
The Red Thread is the line that connects where you’ve been to where you’re going. It’s the through-line that makes the right person land on your profile and think, “I need to talk to this person.”
It’s almost never sitting on the surface. If it were, you’d have written it already.
Finding it takes time. It takes honesty. And it takes someone who will not let you undersell yourself.
That last part is the one nobody warns you about.
The client with the patents she didn’t mention
I had a client who holds patents.
Patents. Plural. More than one.
She didn’t lead with them. Didn’t put them anywhere, actually. Didn’t think they were relevant to where she was headed.
“I’ve accomplished something most people never have” wasn’t relevant. 🙄
It was relevant.
Because duh. Of course it was.
Those patents proved she can do hard things. Unexpected things. Interesting things. Which matters to the right reader regardless of what she does next, because what they tell you is this person finishes what most people can’t even start.
And yet…she couldn’t see it. Not because she’s not smart, but because it was hers.
You are too close to your own story to read it the way a stranger does. The thing you find unremarkable is frequently the thing someone else can’t stop thinking about.
Most people don’t know what they’re sitting on until someone makes them say it out loud.
Why does a good LinkedIn profile take so long to build?
Because none of that happens by filling in blanks.
A template can tell you what to include in your Experience entry. Or help you brainstorm the right skills to include.
It can’t sit across from you and say, “Wait. Go back. You buried the patents.” It can’t catch the thing you skipped because you’ve been skipping it for a decade.
The time isn’t wasted. The time is the value. The digging is where the profile that sounds like you, and only you, comes from. Skip it and you get a fill-in-the-blank profile. Boring, unoriginal, third-person.
So when someone tells you a strong LinkedIn profile is a quick afternoon job, they’re describing a template, not the work that makes you stand out.
That’s the work. And it’s worth doing right.
If you want a place to start on your own, the free Profile Cheat Sheets walk you through which sections matter most and what belongs in each one. And if you want the full dig — every section, the same framework I use in private engagements — that’s what Optimize is for. Self-paced, with the examples and worksheets, so you can do the excavation without me in the room.
But do the excavation. Don’t start from a template.