How to Get More LinkedIn Connections (Without Being Spammy)

Hi, I'm Alex. I have over 20,000 LinkedIn connections and over 30,000 followers, and have sourced well over $8M in revenue from my LinkedIn presence over the last decade or so:

Buuut... I was doing well on LinkedIn when I had only 2,000 connections, and about the same in followers. And I'm here to tell you: don't stress over not having that many LinkedIn connections. That isn't what's preventing you from growing your business or pipeline.

Because most likely, you're here not because you want more LinkedIn connections, but because you want two different things:

1. more high-quality professional relationships, and
2. a larger audience of people who you want to see your content.

Both are good things to want. But they're different. If you "just connect with more people" but they aren't the right people, that'll get you ignored or your account flagged:

Or, let's say you're successful, and you "just connect with tons of L.I.O.N.s" — LinkedIn Open Networkers. Well, la-dee-dah! But now your network is a randomly-compiled list of people who created their profile in the mid-2000s. That's probably not what you want, since those people are unlikely to buy from you.

In any case, you can send 100–250 connection requests per week via desktop, with the higher end available if you have Premium and a good Social Selling Index (SSI) score. And honestly? This is more than enough if you're building your network in a high-quality way.

Why your connection count actually matters (and where people go wrong)

The 500+ connection threshold is real, in a psychological sense: you sort of "look like someone who's at least somewhat networked" to those who don't know you at all:

But don't confuse "having lots of connections" with having a good LinkedIn strategy. If you have irrelevant connections in your network, your post engagement rate will be low. LinkedIn will see this and conclude, "This person's content is not very valuable to their connections. Let's show it less often and to fewer people."

Boom: now you're in low-reach jail. Good luck trying to break out — it's not easy, and involves manually removing a ton of connections, one by one, and then letting time do its thing. Ouch. Even with a connection removal tool, it's painstaking.

So before you start sending a bunch of connect requests, let's dial in the basics.

Before you send a single request: get your profile right

Go look at your profile as if you've never seen it before. Blink three times, close your eyes, open them slow. Look at it with fresh eyes — because that's exactly what happens when you send a connection request to someone who doesn't already know you: they're going to click through, spend about three seconds deciding whether you're worth knowing, and either hit accept or ignore.

(What you really want to avoid is them clicking "Ignore" followed by "I don't know this person"!)

Fix your photo. It doesn't need to be a professional headshot, but it needs to look like a real person who shows up to work. You have no excuse these days — ChatGPT will take your Instagram profile pic and turn it into a proper headshot in less than thirty seconds. Because if it's blurry, cropped from a group shot, or makes you look like you're under 18, you're setting yourself back needlessly.

Write a decent headline. This is the single biggest lever alongside your photo. Your headline appears directly under your name in every connection request notification. Ask yourself: does this headline make me look like someone worth knowing in my industry?

For a deeper dive on how to write a great headline — including the 66-character truncation problem and how to signal credibility by role — read my LinkedIn headline examples guide. It has formulas and examples you can steal.

The first few lines of your About section are the tiebreaker. If someone isn't quite sure about you from your headline and photo, they might glance at your About section. Write it in first person, be specific about what you do and who you do it for, and don't bury the good stuff below a "see more" click.

Cover these bases and you'll have a much better shot at maximising your connection acceptance rate with the right people.

Start by connecting with the most relevant people

Most people start with cold outreach to random prospects, and wonder why their acceptance rate is garbage. Don't do that. Go in order, and don't bother cold prospecting until your network is of a decent enough size and full of people who actually know you.

Start with warm contacts

Start with former colleagues, classmates, people you met at a conference, people you've emailed with — anyone who actually knows you. They're very likely to hit accept, they already have some frame of reference for who you are, and if you've chosen well they might be able to introduce you to others they know, too. High-quality connection reach compounds: one warm connection might put you one degree away from fifty other people you actually want to know.

LinkedIn lets you import your email contacts directly and find matches — it's underused and worth doing once.

Second-degree connections of people you respect

Once you've worked through warm contacts, go peer-browsing. Find someone you know well who's a 1st connection, and browse their connections list. These people are already pre-filtered by someone with similar professional sensibilities. You'll find better signal here than you ever will from an advanced search full of strangers.

Don't worry about the etiquette: merely connecting with someone on LinkedIn is pretty low in terms of signal strength. You're not offending anyone's privacy just because you sent a connection request.

People who engaged with relevant content

People who regularly engage on content in your space have self-identified as interested in that topic. They're already paying attention to the same things you are, and they're not just using LinkedIn as a "resume house" — the mere fact that they're active makes them more relevant and more likely to accept.

Do try to engage on their content first — a genuine comment, not a "great post!" — then send the connection request. But do not, dear holy God in heaven, use this as an opportunity to pitch them something right off the bat. That's a quick way to rush familiarity and get blocked. Engage and connect because you, too, are genuinely interested in whatever they're talking about.

Who to skip (for now)

Skip cold 3rd-degree outreach to people with no shared context. Your limited weekly requests are better spent on warmer targets first. Honestly, I almost never send a connection request to a 3rd-degree connection — it's much better to build shared context in your ecosystem first, or to become at least somewhat known yourself. Get to 500+ quality connections and 10+ average engagements per post before you start fishing in cold water.

How to write a connection request that actually gets accepted

First: you don't have to include a note. The vast majority of my connection requests are blank — especially to warm contacts, second-degree connections, or people who already know my face from seeing me comment in their feed. Adding a note to every request doesn't increase your acceptance rate, and might even hurt it: unless it's crystal clear you're not selling anything, you're pattern-matching with every salesperson in their inbox.

In other words: write a note when you have something genuinely specific to say.

When you do write one, you have 300 characters. This is a forcing function, not a limitation. It's enough room to say one real thing. The goal is simple: show the person you actually know who they are. Sam McKenna calls this "Show Me You Know Me" — the idea that the fastest way to earn someone's attention is to demonstrate, specifically, that you've paid attention to theirs.

Things that work well

• A shared context: "We were both at MicroConf last month — great talk you gave on pricing. Made me think through how we're doing packaging & plans :)"
• A specific genuine reason: "Looking forward to connecting — [colleague] mentioned putting us in touch soon as part of the XYZ engagement."

Just take your sales hat off and use your normal social skills. What would you send in a text message to someone you were hoping to meet?

Dumb stuff that gets you ignored and blocked

• "I'd love to connect and explore synergies" — no credibility, no helpfulness, screams incoming pitch
• "We offer XYZ services" — you haven't earned that yet. We don't know each other.
• Following up immediately after they accept with an offer — this is why people don't accept notes in the first place

Just show that you're a real person who's not about to waste their time. This is where your headline, photo, About section, and connection request note (or lack thereof) all work together to tell someone in a split second: "Hey, I'm legit, let's connect."

How often to add connections

Forget any advice that says "send 20 requests every day" or similar. You don't need a quota, a spreadsheet, or a calendar reminder for this.

Do this consistently and your network grows at exactly the right pace: full of people you've actually interacted with, who already have some reason to know who you are. That's a fundamentally different network than one built by sending 100 cold requests a week to fill a quota.

The quality of your connections determines the reach of your content. A smaller network of relevant people will outperform a large network of strangers almost every time.

What about automation tools?

I have to talk about this because even though I don't personally use automation tools, many people do. If you've built a solid manual process and you insist on increasing volume, tools exist for that. Expandi and Dripify are more campaign-style tools; Phantom Buster is a solid all-around LinkedIn data tool; and Breakcold is honestly more in the realm of what we're talking about here — a way to build an outbound/CRM approach around LinkedIn, with both engagement and connection in one place.

But please don't start here. Automation amplifies whatever you put into it, at the cost of authenticity. If your profile isn't strong, your targeting isn't sharp, and you haven't figured out what a good connection note looks like — automation just lets you make those mistakes faster and at greater scale. Get the manual version working first.

And hey — you can also be like me and generate millions in LinkedIn-sourced revenue while never using automation tools to add connections.

Finally: revenue doesn't come from many connections, but from good ones

Remember that pruning your connections has to become a more frequent task than adding them once you're getting up into the 10k+ connections realm. Remove people who aren't adding value, who spam you, who never engage, or who only post low-quality content.

Instead of focusing on how many connections you can possibly add, focus on having a high signal-strength network. That tells everyone else — including LinkedIn itself — that you're a person of value.