Should you pay for LinkedIn Premium?

Here’s a question: Is LinkedIn Premium worth paying for? Executive summary: Probably not in the long term, unless you’re looking for an in-house job, but in the short term, it may be worthwhile. Let’s take a deeper look. 

Ordinarily, I don’t think LinkedIn Premium is extremely valuable for us as freelancers. LinkedIn is the place to be for networking, but its job search features are really geared toward people looking for, or hiring for, in-house positions. Maybe that’s what you want. But for a freelancer, LinkedIn Premium’s features have not, historically, been very necessary or appealing. I’m just not that convinced of the value of seeing who viewed your profile, or being the “featured applicant” for a job, or “assessing your standing in the job market” through the Competitive Insights feature. Just not that crucial for a freelancer, although I’ve heard good things about the LinkedIn Learning classes that are included with Premium. But I would not have really recommended paying for Premium…

Until…a few months ago, when LinkedIn drastically limited the quantity and length of “connection notes” that you can send from the free account. 

What’s the value of connection notes? 

When you connect with someone on LinkedIn, you’ll then get a pop-up, asking you if you’d like to “Add a note” to the connection request. You definitely want to do this, for two reasons:

• Almost no one does this, so it makes your connection request stand out
• It’s a must, if you’re connecting with people who don’t know you. This is particularly important if you’re marketing to direct clients. Envision an international marketing manager, wondering why a translator or interpreter is contacting them? It may seem obvious to you, but perhaps not so much to them. 

Enter, the connection note; a brief message that you can send along with your connection request. Back in the day (until October 2023), LinkedIn had no strict monthly cap on connection notes. They had some “undisclosed limits” based on your usage, but in October 2023, the connection note limit entered the room, capping most free account users at 10 notes per month, 300 characters each, which recently dropped to five per month, 200 characters each. 

LinkedIn is allowed to earn money. And LinkedIn, like most social media platforms, is cracking down on what you can do with the free account. This is, after all, capitalism. But what does this mean in practice for us, as freelancers who need or want to market our businesses? 

Steps to take

First, make sure that you’re at least using your five free notes. You can’t carry them over; it’s five notes per month, use it or lose it, so make sure you use them. 

Second, if you’re actively marketing, especially to direct clients (which is a lot of freelancers right now, given the past year’s shifts in the agency market), do the LinkedIn Premium free trial, send out as many personalized connection requests as it will allow, then assess whether you want to continue. 

The LinkedIn Premium free trial is easy to sign up for, and easy to cancel. You have to enter a credit card, but just set a reminder the second you activate the trial, and then cancel it at least one full day before you’re going to get charged. I got a free trial offer just by clicking the Premium link in my left-hand sidebar, or you could follow these instructions.

Whether to continue

As freelancers, we tend to be frugal, or even cheap, about paying for online services. But particularly if you want to work primarily in the direct client market, it’s going to cost at least some money to make money. I now spend almost $6,000 a year on these types of subscriptions (Zoom Pro with extra storage, Thinkific, Gusto, QuickBooks Online, Happy Scribe (a video captioning tool), Payment Practices, Carbonite, Google Workspace, Text Aloud, AnyCount, and probably more that I’m forgetting about). But without them, I would have no business at all. You really have to think of these tools in terms of ROI: how much work do you have to land or retain in order to pay for them? In most cases, not that much! 

Even if you purchased Premium Business, LinkedIn’s mid-level Premium tier, it would cost $575 if you paid for the full year at once, and this would give you access to a lot of messaging capability on LinkedIn. In the grand scheme of things, $600 isn’t a ton of work to earn; if you landed just one medium-sized freelance project, it would be worthwhile. 

So here’s what I would do: sign up for the Premium free trial for a month, do a lot of LinkedIn-based marketing during that month, and then re-evaluate. I start with a short note (ChatGPT is good at tweaking the tone and complying with the character count), like “Hello [name], I hope you’re doing well! I’m a [describe what you do] and I’d love to connect.” After someone accepts that, you can send them something like you’d write in a normal prospecting e-mail (Here’s a potential crossover between your needs and my skills, would you be the right person to speak with about whether my services might be helpful?). 

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