Profile views can be important on LinkedIn.  People are impressed when they view the profile rankings of people in their network and see you at the top of their list.  People assume it means you are popular, in demand, desired, hot!  It conveys credibility, knowledge, skills.  But what they don’t need to know is: it just might mean you’ve read this post and know how to game the system.

There are several ways to get profile views, in this post I’ll discuss one of the easiest and most effective long term solutions: use a script to simulate your viewing of lots of people’s profiles!

Remember the norm of reciprocity?  This is a bit tangential to that, but the net effect is the same, if you look at other people’s profiles, some small percentage of those people you look at will notice that you looked at them and out of curiosity will look back.

How to Game the System Just By Viewing Profiles

The first thing you need to know is that most people don’t get many profile views on LinkedIn.  You might think it takes hundreds a day to stand out, but actually it doesn’t take many views to rise above the masses.  You will be in the Top 2% of LinkedIn profile views if you get just 10 views a day;  Top 1% takes only a little more (I don’t recall the number).

Several experiments I’ve run suggest the number of people looking back at a random person looking at varies between 1-5%.

So, if you want 10 views a day, you need to have viewed as many as 1,000 profiles.  And that’s why automation is so important!  With the method and script I’ll share you can easily do 1,000 profiles a day every day.  And, you even get to control who you are looking at, meaning the percentage of people who do look back at your profile can be the sort of people you might want to have a real connection with.

The “Game”

For this game I’ll show you how to use Tamper Monkey or the JavaScript console.

Step 1:

Create the people search you want in LinkedIn.

Step 2:

When you get the search engine results page (SERP) you can open up the JS console and paste in this script, then hit (you can also use TamperMonkey to manage and run the script automatically). The script will then view every profile in the search results, up to the MAX_PAGES_TO_PROCESS limit defined (in the code this defaults to 10). The script replicates the real behavior of a user, so it will use realistic timings and will pop-open a window to view the profile, then close that window automatically, then move on to the next profile until it advances to the next results page and will repeat the process.

var script = document.createElement("script"); script.src = "https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"; document.body.appendChild(script);

var MAX_PAGES_TO_PROCESS = 10;
var searchResultPagesProcessed = 0;

function ProcessSearchPage () {
    if (!$('a.page-link[title="Next Page"]').length) {
    } else {
        var matches = $('a[class="title"]');
        var totalTime = 0;
        var total = matches.length;
        var MINIMUM_TIME_BETWEEN_CONNECT_CLICKS = 24123;
        var MINIMUM_TIME_TO_LOOK_AT_PROFILE = 24123;
        var RANDOM_TIME_MAX = 10000;

        for (i=0;i<total;i++) {
            var link = matches.eq(i).attr('href');
            var text = matches.eq(i).text();

            var randomAdjust = Math.floor((Math.random() * RANDOM_TIME_MAX) );
                        
            setTimeout(function(link,text) {
                    console.log(text + ':' + link);
                    
                    var myWindow = window.open(link, "_blank");
                    setTimeout(function(windowHandle) {
                            if (!windowHandle) {
                                alert('Pop-up blocker probably preventing new windows.');
                            } else {
                                windowHandle.close();
                            }
                        }, MINIMUM_TIME_TO_LOOK_AT_PROFILE, myWindow);
                    
                }, i*MINIMUM_TIME_BETWEEN_CONNECT_CLICKS+randomAdjust, link,text);
        }
        
        totalTime = total*MINIMUM_TIME_BETWEEN_CONNECT_CLICKS+RANDOM_TIME_MAX;
        
        setTimeout(function() {
                searchResultPagesProcessed++;
                
                if (searchResultPagesProcessed < MAX_PAGES_TO_PROCESS) {                
                    $('a.page-link[title="Next Page"]').eq(0)[0].click();
                    setTimeout(ProcessSearchPage, 20000);
                    console.log('Processing page '+searchResultPagesProcessed);
                }
            },totalTime);
    }
}

$( document ).ready(function() {
    ProcessSearchPage();
});

Step 3: Profit!

And that’s it! Just remember which page the script ended on and start it on that results page the next time you run it until it has gone through all the search results. Because it works with the results you built through your search you can choose to target people in particular industries, locations, etc.