How to Set Your LinkedIn Profile for Public Viewing

By Joel Elad from LinkedIn For Dummies, 2nd Edition

After you fully update your LinkedIn profile, your next goal is to share it with the entire world, not just your LinkedIn network. The best way to accomplish this is to set up your profile so that your full profile is available for public viewing.

Setting your profile to full public gives anyone looking for you has a better chance of finding you because of the increased information tied to your name. When you make your profile public, it gets indexed in the Google and Yahoo! search databases. This makes your online identity accessible and controlled by your access to LinkedIn. You give increased exposure to any companies, projects, or initiatives that you’re working on by having that credit published on your LinkedIn profile.

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Go to LinkedIn and log in. Click the Profile link in the top navigation bar.

You arrive at the Profile page. Look to the right of the Edit Profile and View Profile tabs, for a link that says Change Public Profile Settings.

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Click the Change Public Profile Settings link.

This step takes you to the Edit My Public Profile settings page.

(Optional) To set a custom URL for your LinkedIn profile, fill in the text box next to the Set Address button.

You can enter anywhere between 5 and 30 numbers or letters, but don’t put in any spaces, symbols, or special characters. Then click the Set Address button to save your changes.

Keep your URL changes to a minimum (preferably, just set it once and leave it) so that everyone will know how to get to your profile, especially search engines. (If you change your custom URL later, the previous custom URL is no longer valid.) Otherwise, you’ll have different versions of your profile with different URLs in different places on the Internet.

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Scroll down the main Public Profile section on the page and determine what parts of your LinkedIn profile you want available for public viewing.

Pick which sections of your LinkedIn profile are public. To reveal a section on your public profile, simply select the check box next to that given section. Your basic information is already selected for you by default, but you can decide whether to add your education, positions, groups, or any other indicated section. As you add more sections, a preview of your Profile page on the right side of the page gets updated.

Click the Save Changes button.

You’re taken back to the same Edit My Public Profile settings page, but now you see a confirmation message at the top of the screen.

When you’re editing your LinkedIn profile, you can scroll down and click the View My Public Profile as Others See It link to see your public profile. On that page, you can click a button to view your full profile. This way, you can see the difference between your public and full profiles.