Here’s a hard truth I’ve been telling LinkedIn users since 2012: 99 percent of LinkedIn profiles get this wrong.
Their About section reads like a virtual résumé — job titles, years of experience, a list of skills, a closing line about being “passionate about driving transformational results.”
Senior buyers don’t read that. They open the profile, scan the first two lines of the About section, and decide in about seven seconds whether you’re worth a longer look.
If you’re using LinkedIn to attract clients (instead of job offers), your About section is the closest thing you have to a sales asset on the platform. Stop writing it like a CV. Here’s the playbook for writing one that actually books calls.
Don’t Be This Guy (Or Gal)
I once spent a few days sorting through my LinkedIn connections. I discovered I was connected to 229 “Masters,” 75 “Gurus,” 45 “Ninjas,” 15 “Geniuses,” 3 “Rock Stars,” and even a pair of “Sensei.”
To quote tennis great John McEnroe during a 1980s on-court meltdown: “You cannot be serious!”
Calling yourself an expert (no matter how cool-sounding the word) doesn’t actually make you one. We live in a “prove it” era of online marketing. Talk is cheap. If you want people to hire you, you have to demonstrate expertise — not claim it.
Clever vs. Clear
Way too many professionals try to “stand out” on LinkedIn with clever headlines and About sections. “Lead Generation Ninja.” “Growth Wizard.” “Storytelling Architect.”
Skip the clever. Be clear instead. The job of your headline and the first 300 characters of your About section is to make a senior buyer say “yes, that’s the kind of person I help” within seconds. Cute is the enemy of clarity.
Here’s the simple formula we use for headlines on every client account we run:
Service I Provide + Target Audience(s) I Serve
Here’s how mine reads:
“Done For You” LinkedIn Lead Generation for Small Business Owners & Consultants
The service: “Done For You” LinkedIn Lead Generation. The target audiences: Small Business Owners and Consultants. No “CEO.” No “Founder.” No “Visionary Leader.” Just the offer and the audience.
If you’re a Small Business Owner or a Consultant, you know within half a second what’s in it for you if you connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s the whole job.
The “WHAT I DO” Formula for Your About Section
The first line of every About section we write for clients follows a simple template:
WHAT I DO: I help [TARGET AUDIENCE] achieve [GOAL] by providing [PRODUCT/SERVICE].
Here’s mine:
WHAT I DO: I help Small Business Owners and Consultants attract, engage, and sell to their ideal clients online by providing “Done For You” LinkedIn Lead Generation services.
Three things this does in two lines:
- Names the specific audience you help (so they self-identify)
- Names the specific outcome you produce (so they know what they get)
- Names the service category (so they know what they’re hiring you to do)
That’s the first 300 characters of your About section solved. It’s also the only 300 characters most senior buyers will ever read before deciding whether to click “See more.”
Riches Are in the Niches
When I first met her, Kathryn Bishop was almost ready to give up on her business and go back to teaching. She’s an Accountant, Bookkeeper, and CPA, and she was struggling to stand out from a crowd of countless others on LinkedIn.
The breakthrough came when we niched her positioning. Kathryn’s dad was a contractor, her mom was a CPA. She literally grew up in the construction industry — on a job site every Saturday morning by 8 a.m. with her dad. So we rewrote her LinkedIn headline:
Construction Accounting & Bookkeeping 👷 Construction Payroll & Taxes 🏗
And we rewrote her About section to be all about how she helps contractors and construction companies get industry-specific bookkeeping and tax expertise.
Within 60 days, Kathryn called me in a panic: “You need to turn these LinkedIn campaigns OFF! I have too many new clients!” Her husband Brian quit his day job to come work for her. And more than two years after we stopped working together, she’s still getting new clients from the foundation we built.
That’s the power of niching down on LinkedIn.
Now, I can hear the protest: “But I can work with anyone — my services aren’t limited to one audience!” Great. Go that route, and prepare to be ignored.
You cannot succeed on LinkedIn trying to be everything to everyone. If you try, you’ll be nothing to no one.
What Goes in the Rest of Your About Section
Once a buyer clicks “See more,” the rest of your About section has one job: make them comfortable enough to take the next step. Here’s the template we use for clients:
WHERE YOU’VE SEEN ME (or MY WORK): Bullet list of media credits or big-name clients. Use industry-specific emojis instead of bullet points to break up the text visually.
WHAT MAKES ME UNIQUE: Your backstory, your unfair advantage, your specific angle. This is where Kathryn’s “I grew up on construction job sites” lives.
SERVICES I PROVIDE: Bullet list (with emojis) of what you actually do.
PROBLEMS I SOLVE: Or, if you prefer to focus on the positive, BENEFITS MY CLIENTS REALIZE.
WHO I WORK WITH: Specific job titles, company types, or industries.
WHAT CLIENTS SAY: Two or three real testimonials with full names and company names. (If you don’t use the full name, prospects assume you made it up.)
READY TO TALK? A clear next step. Email, website, LinkedIn DM. Don’t make them guess.
Use ALL CAPS phrases as the lead-ins for each section. They visually break up the text and make the section scannable.
Add Some Visual Sizzle
I’m a big fan of using emojis instead of boring bullet points. They bring much-needed visual sizzle to a section of LinkedIn that doesn’t allow real formatting.
Yes, I know — some people think emojis are “unprofessional.” May I politely suggest you get over yourself. 🤣
The way people read on LinkedIn is by scanning. Big, boring blocks of text without white space get glossed over or skipped. ALL CAPS section labels and tasteful, industry-relevant emojis are how you stop the scroll.
Less is more, though. Don’t use 15 emojis in one bullet list. Pick the right one for each line and move on.
Stop Doing These Five Things
- Third-person bios. “John is a senior consultant who…” reads as ghostwritten and outdated. First person, every time.
- Buzzword stacking. “Synergistic,” “thought leader,” “results-driven,” “transformational.” Senior buyers register these as filler.
- Vague outcomes. “Drive growth” means nothing. “Add 30%–40% to retainer revenue in the first year of engagement” means something.
- Industry-everything positioning. “I work with companies of all sizes across all industries” attracts no one. Niche down.
- “Reach out anytime!” Replace with a specific next step and a link. Anything less puts the work on the buyer.
Bonus: Repurpose Your About Section in Your Experience
Sometimes people skip your About section and start with your Experience section. So copy and paste your About content into your first job listing’s description. Belt and suspenders.
And if you serve two or three genuinely different audiences, take that one step further and give each of them their own Experience entry under the same company.
What to Do With This
If you don’t know where to start, the fastest move is rewriting your headline using the Service + Target Audience formula and rewriting your first line of your About section using the WHAT I DO formula. Even if you change nothing else, those two lines do 90% of the work.
For more on the first impression you make on LinkedIn, this is a good follow-on read: the seven-second LinkedIn hack that instantly engages your ideal prospects.
Or — if you’d rather have someone rewrite your headline, your About section, your Experience listings, AND run the outreach behind it — that’s exactly the work our team does for established consultants and senior business leaders. Profile, content, conversations, and booked calls. You show up for the calls.
Everything above is the how. If you want the why, and the reason the platform rewards this kind of profile in the first place, LinkedIn’s co-founder answered that himself.
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