How Much Is LinkedIn Premium? And Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It? Find Out from a LinkedIn Insider!

As a former leader of LinkedIn’s Education Team and the official LinkedIn trainer for organizations from Harvard Business School to the Canadian Olympic Committee, by far the #1 question I get is:

“Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?”

To find out, let’s first examine how much LinkedIn Premium costs. And then let’s weigh that price against what it can and can’t do for you.

How Much Is LinkedIn Premium?

Like Baskin-Robbins, LinkedIn offers a number of different flavors for its premium services:

• For job-seekers
• For recruiters
• For salespeople

And so, depending on your use case, you can be looking at a price for LinkedIn Premium that ranges from $30/month to well over $100/month.

Can I Get LinkedIn Premium for Free?

Now, I suspect the sticker shock of the last section (“And I thought Netflix was getting expensive!”) may have you immediately wondering: Is there some way I can get LinkedIn Premium for free?

And indeed there is. Two ways, in fact:

1. If you’re a student who subscribes to Amazon Prime Student , you’ve eligible for 6 months of free LinkedIn Premium.
2. If you’re new to LinkedIn Premium, you’re eligible for a 30 Day Free Trial .

Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It?

Now, depending on how much you have to pay for it relative to what you’re going to use it for, your value equation for LinkedIn Premium may vary quite a bit.

But unless you can get it absolutely free, I’m going to give you a quick rule of thumb as a former insider: LinkedIn Premium isn’t worth it.

What gives me the confidence to say that straight up?

Well, the truth is that almost everything LinkedIn Premium can do for you can be done just as easily - and sometimes even better - without paying LinkedIn a cent!

And I say that as a Microsoft shareholder who would love nothing more than to pocket your subscription costs… ;)

But as someone who cares more about your success than making a quick buck, it’s my duty to point out the following:

LinkedIn Premium isn’t the only way to send personalized messages.

LinkedIn does a sneaky thing when you land on a 3rd degree connection’s profile. By default, they highlight the “Message” button in blue. So chances are, you click that button, only to be confronted with a sign-up screen for LinkedIn InMails and LinkedIn Premium.

But what they’ve distracted you from in doing so is that little “Connect” button to the left (or sometimes found even more sneakily under “More”). Because were you to click that button, you’d find… wait for it… the exact same functionality as InMails… but for free!

That’s right, by sending a personalized connection request, you can reach out to anyone on LinkedIn without paying LinkedIn a cent for the privilege.

LinkedIn Premium doesn’t guarantee you that your message will ever be seen.

As powerful as personalized connection requests are, LinkedIn often makes it seem like InMails are somehow a guaranteed way of reaching out. Kind of like sending your message via FedEx Overnight vs. carrier pigeon… :)

But the dirty little secret of LinkedIn is that the vast majority of LinkedIn users aren’t that engaged on the platform. I mean, let’s be real, LinkedIn is no Facebook or Twitter, let alone TikTok or YouTube.

So when you send someone an InMail, there’s no guarantee they’ll ever even see it. Chances are one or more of the following is true:

• They aren’t active on LinkedIn so never see their LinkedIn messages.
• They haven’t used LinkedIn since their own last job hunt and have forgotten their password.
• They signed up for LinkedIn with an old work email address and so all their notifications are getting lost in the digital ether.
• They got so tired of sales InMails that they marked all LinkedIn messages as spam in Gmail.

Which means that, even after shelling out $30+ bucks for a measly number of InMails, you can’t even rest easy knowing that your message got through.

On the other hand, we all know that every single professional in the world feels honor-bound to check their work email 3–30 times a day. So if you could get an email into their actual work inbox, you really would have a guaranteed chance to get it read.

And wouldn’t you know it, you can find anyone’s work address on www.hunter.io … again, wait for it… for free.

LinkedIn Premium doesn’t make you more likely to be found.

Because LinkedIn throws around stats like “Job-seekers with LinkedIn Premium are 2X more likely to be hired in the next 30 days,” you can be forgiven for assuming that there must be some magical aspect to Premium that gets you found more easily.

After all, we’ve all seen how advertisers can pay to have their offerings listed at the top of Google, Amazon, and App Store searches.

But here’s another important insider insight about LinkedIn: It makes about 6X more revenue from recruiters than job-seekers.

And so unlike in Google search, where you the searcher are the product and the advertisers are the true customers, recruiters really are LinkedIn’s true customers.

Which means there’s no way that they’re going to fix their recruiter search algorithm (which recruiters pay $10K/year/seat to access) to favor job-seekers (who pay a relatively measly $30–100/month).

So that aforementioned 2X stat is one of the oldest statistical tricks in the book: Correlation vs. Causation.

After all, if you were paying for LinkedIn Premium, wouldn’t you try to find a job as fast as possible so you can cancel that $100/month charge… ;)

The Most Important Use for LinkedIn Premium - And 3 Workarounds

While LinkedIn Premium won’t magically get you plugged-in with all your dream connections, it will do one important thing for you: Allow you to find as many people as you want to plug-into yourself!

That’s because if you find yourself using LinkedIn heavily for a while, chances are you’ll come across a screen that tells you you’ve run out of free searches and profile views for the rest of the month.

In other words, LinkedIn is trying to erect a paywall between free occasional users and those who are getting serious value out of it.

In these cases, don’t panic - you don’t have to immediately whip out your credit card. Instead, you may want to consider these three workarounds:

• Create a new LinkedIn profile just for searching and browsing. No one says you have to use the same profile for your brand and for your exploration. So feel free to create a second “burner account” since you’ll have a brand-new complement of monthly searches and profile views to work with!
• Search LinkedIn… via Google! You probably have already realized that Google is a better search engine for most sites than their own built-in searches - and that’s sometimes true with LinkedIn, too. So if you want to find people on LinkedIn without relying on LinkedIn’s search, just try variations like this: site:linkedin.com “product manager” Google Austin. In doing so, you can restrict your searches to just the perfect people on LinkedIn - without using up any of your LinkedIn searches!

• Get a free trial. Just like those super speedy LinkedIn Premium job-seekers, chances are you may not need to use LinkedIn heavily all the time. In which case a 30 day free trial may be more than enough to search, view, and connect with as many recruiters, hiring managers, and alums as you need. And then, just when you get your hire-on bonus, you can give yourself your own bonus - by canceling your trial!

LinkedIn Premium: The Bottom Line

So there you have it: The full LinkedIn Premium calculation. Both how much it costs vs. what it can and can’t do for you.

And so the bottom line is this: If you can get LinkedIn Premium for free (as a trial or via Amazon Prime Student), by all means go for it. There’s zero harm and a little upside.

But if you’re considering shelling out $50 or more a month just to do something that you can do for free, I can’t in good conscience recommend it. Because as much as I’d love to take your money, our time and resources are too scarce to waste on things that don’t get you the job, career, and life you want!

PS: Want even more insider LinkedIn techniques? Get all my FREE LinkedIn tools right now...