Lesson 5 of 10 · 5 min
The profile your comment sends them to
A comment that earns a reply also earns a click on your name. The person who clicks is deciding one thing: should I message this person? They decide it in about four seconds, from your headline and the first two lines of your About section, because on a phone everything after line two sits behind “see more”. A great comment that lands on a profile saying “Virtual Assistant” spends its whole effect on the way in.
Score it before you start
The same free kit from lesson six has a /li-profile command that scores a profile out of 100 against a twelve-item rubric, with what full marks looks like for each. The heavy items: the headline is 12 points, the first two lines of About 10, recent activity 10, recommendations 8, Featured 8, the banner 6. You paste your headline, About and recent roles in; it never logs into LinkedIn. Its own note says most profiles land in the 30s and 40s on the first pass, and that a generous score is useless.
What it found on ours: 42 out of 100
We ran it on the founder’s profile on 16 September. What cost the most points was not the writing:
- No recommendations, while 17 five-star reviews sat on Fiverr where nobody on LinkedIn could see them.
- No Featured section, with fourteen public case studies and a working software demo on the website.
- A banner that said “Virtual Assistant” for the founder of a ten-person agency, with a personal Gmail printed on it.
- Three posts in six months, one of them a job ad for a business he does not run.
Everything a buyer needed to trust him existed. It lived on the website and never reached the page they were looking at. That is the usual pattern, and it is good news: proof you already have only needs moving.
Fix it in this order
- Headline. What you do and for whom, then proof. Not your job title, and not “Helping X do Y” as the first three words, which half of LinkedIn now opens with. Ours became “Founder, ScaleWise VA | Shopify operations for UK and US brands | Also building software: Tarly and Brassdeck”.
- The first two lines of About. Who you help and what changes for them. No “passionate about”, no opening with your own name.
- Featured. Three or four items: your best proof, the thing you give away (your front end from lesson two), and how to reach you. It is the only part of the profile you fully control.
- Banner. One line of positioning. The default blue says nobody is home.
- Experience. One line of scope and two or three outcomes per role, not duties.
We did all five in an afternoon. What a rewrite cannot create is recommendations and a posting history. Those are asks and weeks, so start the asks the same day: five people who would say yes, each asked for two sentences about one specific thing you did.
Checked Our 42 is one profile, scored once. It is an example, not a benchmark.
The score and the four findings are exactly what the founder published on LinkedIn on 22 September. We did not re-score after the rewrite, so we will not give you an after number. The rubric weights and the “most land in the 30s and 40s” note are the skill’s own, from its SKILL.md and rubric.json; nobody has published how a score relates to replies, and the skill does not claim it does. Use it as a checklist of what a stranger sees, which is what it is.
Spotted something wrong in this lesson? Tell us, and we will check it and fix it.