Your LinkedIn account is a powerful tool to:

But you may be unknowingly preventing yourself from achieving any of these.

In this article, you’ll discover the ten most common LinkedIn mistakes people make that hinder their success.

Check if you’re guilty of some of them.

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1. Not Allowing People to Message You

When recruiters or potential partners can’t message you, you lose out on opportunities. When other users seeking to connect with you can’t message you from your profile, you miss out on opportunities to build relationships and grow your network.

2. Not Being Active

People wouldn’t bother sending you connection requests or messages if your last LinkedIn activity was one year ago.

You can’t build your personal brand on LinkedIn without:

  • Posting content
  • Engaging with other people’s posts
  • Sending and accepting connection requests
  • Participating in relevant groups

You’ll miss opportunities if you’re inactive because you won’t know when someone contacted you on LinkedIn or when they posted potential opportunities you might be interested in.

3. Spamming People With Your Pitch

When you send the same messages to hundreds of people who are not looking for your skills or services, most of them will block you or flag your messages as spam.

Pitching your skills, services, or products in every comment section will only turn off users.

Don’t send a pitch immediately after a user accepts your connection request. It looks creepy and makes you come off as an opportunist who doesn’t care about giving value.

4. Inconsistency Between Your Profile and Work Experience

Decision makers won’t take you seriously if you say one thing on your resume and your profile says something else.

For example, a business owner who needs a copywriter for their landing page finds your profile which you’ve highly optimized for a copywriter role. But after checking your resume, they discover it doesn’t fit your profile description in any way.

They’ll be suspicious and will be reluctant to contact you for the position.

5. Not Personalizing Your Connection Requests

When you send a connection request without including a personalized message, you miss your chance to

  • Create a human connection with the user, so they know you’re a real person and not a bot or spammer
  • Influence a positive reaction from the user

Avoid using templates when sending connection requests. These templates have been overused and will look unnatural and spammy. Ask yourself, “would I say this to this person if I met them for the first time in real life?”

6. Not Having Recommendations and Endorsements

A LinkedIn profile without recommendations is like a business without client testimonials. Potential customers who land on your profile will have no social proof that’d have made them trust you enough to buy your product or service.

When your skills are not endorsed on LinkedIn, you will hardly appear in search results when recruiters search for those skills.

7. Lack of Relevant Keywords in Your Profile

You won’t show up in the search results if you don’t infuse your industry keywords in your:

  • Headline
  • About section
  • Experience section
  • Skills section

This means you lose potential customers, valuable connections, and job opportunities because people can’t find you when they search for someone with your skills, product, or services.

8. Incomplete About Section

Your About section is where you promote yourself on LinkedIn. If you fail to complete this section, you throw away your chance to

  • Naturally infuse relevant keywords
  • Highlight your strengths and accomplishments
  • Show your target audience how you can help them
  • Give potential customers enough useful information about your product or service
  • Trigger your desired action from the reader

9. Using LinkedIn’s Default Profile URL

Your LinkedIn profile URL is a chance to infuse your branding or keyword into your profile. If you don’t customize it, you miss out on the SEO juice you’d have gotten from that URL.

Besides, the default LinkedIn profile URL is long and ugly. You want a memorable URL that you’d be proud to share with others.

10. Not having a proper profile photo

Your first impression is essential; your profile photo is the first thing people notice when they visit your profile.

Don’t use an image

  • Of low-quality
  • With poor lighting
  • With busy background
  • In which you’re not appropriately dressed

It won’t portray your best self that you want your viewers to see.

It’s worse if you don’t have a profile photo. People will feel you’re a bot, scammer, or unserious person.

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