Creating a LinkedIn Profile URL That Fits on a Business Card

All LinkedIn users have both a default public LinkedIn profile URL and a full LinkedIn profile URL. The public profile is what people who aren’t connected to you see when they search for you on LinkedIn. The private profile is what people in your LinkedIn connections mostly see when they check you as a connection.

There are a number of problems with the default public profile URL, including the fact that the URL is long, clunky, and difficult for people to find in search engines…and those are its good traits!

The default public profile also doesn’t fit well inside an email, on a business card, or on a banner. What you want is a shorter snappier LinkedIn URL that you can use in correspondence, marketing materials, Web pages, signatures, and in other places where a long URL isn’t appropriate.

In less than 500 words, here’s how you create your own (relatively) short customized LinkedIn URL, such as http://www.linkedin.com/in/joehertvik.

Note: This post was updated in July 2015 from its original version.

Customized public LinkedIn URLs are free for both basic accounts and upgraded LinkedIn accounts. They’re also easy to create. Before I put in a customized URL, my public LinkedIn URL looked something like this.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=999999999&authType=name&authToken=9C-X&goback=%2Enmp_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1&trk=NUS_CONN-connte /* not an actual LinkedIn URL, but dang close */

Not really suitable for a Web site or anything else, is it? Using LinkedIn utilities, I changed my public LinkedIn URL and now it looks like this.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joehertvik

Much better for posting and searching. Here’s how I did it and how you can do it, too.

• Go into Edit Profile on your full LinkedIn profile. Click on the little gear shown next to your LinkedIn URL. If the little gear isn’t showing on the LinkedIn Edit Profile screen, move your mouse over the area where it should be (shown here) and the gear may show up. In some instances, the word Edit may appear next to your URL. Click on either the gear or the word Edit next to your URL to get to the next screen.

• LinkedIn will take you to your Public Profile page. On the right-hand column of this page, look for an area that says Your public profile URL. Under that area, you’ll see the current URL assigned to your LinkedIn profile. Click on the liitle pencil icon next to your current URL to change that link.

• LinkedIn will now let you enter a unique URL for your profile that starts with the address www.linkedin.com/ln/. You may get a box that looks like the figure below or LinkedIn may simply let you modify your current URL. To get your own customized profile, all you have to do is enter the last 5-30 characters of your unique URL. After entry, click on Set Custom URL or Save, and LinkedIn will set up a unique public LI profile URL that is customized to you.

Your unique URL will be created using the format ‘http://www.linkedin.com/ln/unique ID’. Note: you won’t be able to enter spaces, symbols, or certain special characters into your unique ID name. In my case, I entered ‘joehertvik’ as the last part of my URL. Now I have a unique LinkedIn URL of http://www.linkedin.com/in/joehertvik that takes readers directly to my public LinkedIn page.

I can use this URL on my Web site, business cards, banners, documents, or any other place where a long LinkedIn address would be awkward.

And that’s how you set a customized LinkedIn URL that points directly to your public profile.

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