Yo! Welcome to the next episode of The Reeder where you get actionable tips and strategies for creating memorable content every Saturday.

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Nobody signs up for keeping old content around forever.

AI tools read every page you've ever posted — buried or not. Your buyer’s getting handed something from 2019, and they have no idea it’s stale.

There's a name for this: Content Debt.

Storyblok surveyed 550 enterprise marketing leaders about it. Two numbers stuck out like the guy who ordered fish.

→ 34% of content budget goes to fixing content that already exists.
→ Enterprise teams burn 105 hours a week auditing, updating, and archiving old work.

The report breaks down what to kill first, what to keep, and the three things that actually work to reduce your content debt.

Find out what your bill looks like→

To begin this series, I showed you how pocket culture is quietly breaking marketing.

Then I gave you The New Rules of LinkedIn — and promised to blow up and rebuild my own strategy in public.

Two weeks ago, I showed you how LinkedIn misclassified me and the 5 step strategy I’m using to fix it.

Today, I’m rebuilding my profile.

This week I found out my LinkedIn profile was a much bigger problem than I thought.

After training hundreds of execs and professionals on their LinkedIn profile, I’ve realized most treat it as an afterthought. Kinda like their garage. It's dusty. There's a bike with a flat tire in the corner and four boxes nobody's opened since the move. But the car fits, and there's room for the Christmas stuff, so…  good enough.

Profiles get the same treatment. Profile photo is there, current role's listed, and maybe a couple skills are listed, so… good enough.

Then I opened my own garage.

Here's where the analogy breaks down. A messy garage costs you nothing.

But your LinkedIn profile is by far your most valuable digital asset.

One reason is pure volume of eyeballs. 

More people will see your LinkedIn profile than shake your hand this year.

More than 26,000 people saw my profile over the past 12 months. I travel for work and I get around, but I'm not shaking that many hands. You probably aren’t either. 

Even though I knew better, I had all the usual excuses lined up to defend why I’d let my profile get dusty, 

Business is good.

It's not doing any harm.

Does rewriting my About section really sound better than golfing?

But researching the new rules of LinkedIn and rebuilding my strategy from the ground up, I found that "not doing any harm" was dead wrong. It was doing real damage, quietly, the whole time.

So I audited and updated my entire profile to improve my visibility — to humans and LLMs — and to make sure LinkedIn’s new classification engine knows who I am and what I do.

Today I'm revealing every finding, every update I made, and why. Partly because this series has taken off more than anything I've written this year, and you crazy people clearly want the unedited version. Mostly because I want you to be able to do this too.

Attract and convert the people who can buy from me and people I can help.

Usually those are the same group. But not always. Some people can hire me to speak or bring me into a brand deal, and some are just interesting humans I want to trade ideas with. It's not always about the Benjamins.

Whatever your goals are, your profile has to support them. That part hasn't changed.

What has changed is how people find you.

LLMs entered the chat. As search shifted from Google to AI assistants, LinkedIn became the #2 most-cited source for LLMs (Meltwater, 2026). Which means people can now find you through your profile without ever seeing your content.

Then LinkedIn's interest graph joined and made it a group chat.

The machine now has a much bigger role in deciding who, if anyone, sees you. And it determines your audience and reach by reading your profile to figure out what you're about. (I broke that down in full here.)

Anytime you're playing on someone else's territory, you're playing by their rules. LinkedIn changed the rules. But my profile was still playing the old ones.

So I audited my profile, and…

Before the “what,” here’s the “how.”

The verdict: C-

I was never a 4.0 GPA kinda guy, but a C-minus from your own system stings. There's nobody to blame but me. 

My own audit flagged things I've never thought to look for. And others that had been wrong for years.

Here are the five that mattered most — and the last one is something I never expected.

The largest and most valuable real estate on my profile — full-width, top of the page, the first thing all 26,000+ of those people saw — was a promo for Reed Between The Lines with three platform buttons.

I created it when the show launched three years ago because promoting my new project was the right move.

But I’ve since paused new episodes, and I’ve grown The Reeder into a full-time business. So every visitor learned I have a podcast, but not much about what I sell or what I believe. That’s a big gap on the conversion front.

Your banner is a billboard. It’s the largest image on your profile, so if you sell something, it should point to your core offer or newest launch (then back to core offer). 

So I swapped the podcast for what I actually sell: B2B content strategy, and the promise behind it. Then I added a proof bar underneath, because a claim is more believable when it isn't standing there by its lonesome.

(Shoutout to Emily Court for redesigning my banner and Featured tiles. If you need a glow up, she’s your gal. DM her and tell ‘er I sent you. )

Old headline: I help B2B marketers and execs build durable content systems | Founder @ The Reeder | 12K+ newsletter readers

I see two problems.

First, I had to work out what the headline is even for now that my banner is doing real work.

But that banner is a JPEG. LinkedIn's classification engine only reads text — headline, About, work history, skills, etc. Every word Emily designed into it is invisible to the machine.

So the banner only helps once people make it to my profile.

My headline goes everywhere. Every comment I leave on someone else's post carries my name, my photo, and my headline. That's the entire introduction. No banner, no logo bar, no proof.

So the headline has two jobs the banner can't do. Give the machine my category. And give a cold stranger the whole “pitch” in one line.

New headline: B2B Content Strategy | Every company creates content. Almost no one creates believers. | Founder, The Reeder

Category term up front for the machine. My actual belief in the middle for the human. And it plays off the banner instead of repeating it — the banner says builds trust before it's time to buy, the headline says creates believers. Same idea, two angles.

The first half of my About is the best writing on my profile. It opens on building trust before people need it, explains the 95-5 Content System, and gets to the point fast.

But then it falls apart  and devolves into a résumé with big headers like “MY BACKGROUND”  and “WHAT I DO NOW.” Then closes with a list of every channel I publish. 

I counted the ways off my profile. Six.

Most LinkedIn profiles are dead ends, but mine was the opposite problem — which turns out to be the same problem. Six doors is a hallway, and a hallway isn’t great for conversions.

I cut the résumé headers and the channel list, and rewrote the opening around what I actually believe: most content teams are fighting over the 5% who are already looking, and losing the 95% who decide everything.

The proof is still in there. Gong, Clari, Ramp, Notion. It just comes after the belief now instead of standing in for it.

Then I went from six CTAs to two.

I went back and forth on this. The obvious move is "book a call," because that's where the money is.

But my profile isn't built for the handful of people ready to buy today. It's built for the much larger group still deciding whether I'm worth listening to.

Subscribe is the honest ask for that group. And the people ready to hire me will find the calendar link just fine.

I had two video posts doing roughly the same job, and one lead magnet.

I'd picked those two videos because one was to announce a new YouTube series, and the other performed well. That was the whole thinking. Good or recent post, pin it.

The LinkedIn Growth Guide is doing real work from a reputation and conversion standpoint. But the two videos weren't doing any. They were in there because they were good posts, not because they moved anyone anywhere.

And my newsletter wasn't in there at all. Which probably explains why I occasionally hear, "oh, I didn't know you had a newsletter."

That one stings every time.

I started with the math. 95% of the people who land on my profile aren't ready to buy from me. Not today, maybe not even this year.

Which is exactly why this section exists.

Featured has one job now: turn a visitor into a follower or a subscriber. Growing my audience across newsletter, YouTube, and LinkedIn is my second-biggest goal this year, and this is the highest-intent real estate I've got for it.

Three tiles, three ways in.

Subscribe to The Reeder. Direct link, no detour, no more "I didn't know you had a newsletter."

The LinkedIn Growth Guide. “LinkedIn for Executives” is a real pillar of this business and my #2 flagship offer, and that guide is genuinely good. It earns its slot.

Watch YouTube videos. YouTube is new, and it matters. It'd be silly not to move credibility and traffic from here to there — same audience, longer format, more room to actually teach.

This one I did not see coming.

My profile shows a "Top Skills" card, and it reads Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Writing, Sales. Looks great. I'd glanced at it a hundred times and moved on.

But that card is a display setting. Underneath it is the actual Skills list. And that's the one LinkedIn reads to decide what I'm actually expert in. Because I spent the first half of my career in sales, mine was ordered Sales, Customer Service, SaaS, Account Management, Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Salesforce.com, Tutoring.

Content Strategy ranked 17th out of 20.

Then I checked the endorsements. 150 for Sales. 114 for Customer Service. 110 for SaaS.

7 for Content Strategy.

I left Gong's sales floor in 2019. But my skills section never got the memo, and every one of those endorsements is still voting against me.

Then I went looking for how deep it went.

Buried in that same export is a file that shows exactly how LinkedIn labels you for advertisers. It's the closest thing you'll get to reading the machine's mind.

Mine listed 22 job titles. Nine were sales titles, five were strategy titles and four were content titles.

Not one of them contained the word "marketing." And "content strategist" wasn't in there at all  because LinkedIn had split "Content Strategy Manager" into Content Manager and Strategy Manager, two separate entries.

My category got cut in half. Neither half is what I do.

Then I found the field feeding it. My job title said Head of Marketing & Founder. At a company I own with my wife. "Head of Marketing" implies I work for someone else, it buries Founder in second position, and it puts the word “marketing” in the one spot where content strategy should have been.

Reordered the list so Content Strategy is first, deleted the ones that stopped being true a decade ago. Simple. 

Then changed my title to Founder & Content Strategist, so my category finally lives in a field the machine reads.

5 minutes of work, and it's the fastest classification change available to anyone reading this.

Go look at yours right now. You might be surprised what you find. 

Oh, and I got a new profile picture.

No grand strategy here. I just wanted a new one. Figured if I only get one first impression, it should count.

I went from formal sweatpants to my Sunday best.

More than that, my profile stopped being a liability and started being an asset. One that appreciates every week.

You can see the whole thing in all its glory here.

BTW, I ran it back through my own system, and it gave me a B+ (tough critic!).

I'm sure I'll keep tinkering, but it's crispy and accurate now. It says what I actually do. That’s gotta be good for business.

It’s not profile views. Volume is tempting, but it's the wrong scoreboard for me at this stage.

For the next 90 days I'm watching who lands on my profile, and what they do next. Newsletter subscribers. Lead magnet downloads. DMs from people who want to hire and partner with me.

Because if profile views get cut in half, but I’m attracting my ideal audience, that's a win. Publish what your target audience will love, not what everyone will tolerate — and the same rule applies to who your profile is built for.

Next week is the final chapter of the rebuild. I’m going to cover what the hell to actually post.

Yeah, big shocker, huh? The content guy is finally going to talk about content. 

I’m breaking down which topics, formats, cadence, time of day, the whole thing.

Then I'll be back in 30 days with results.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

PS: It took me 8 hours to research, write, and edit this newsletter.

If you like today’s post, you can help me grow by forwarding it to one person with a quick “You’ll love this newsletter. Totally worth signing up.”

Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

Follow me on LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram | TikTok

It feels counterintuitive, but I swear this helps me write my best content.

Jen Allen-Knuth agrees, too. So I know I’m on to something.

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