Is LinkedIn Premium worth it for a business, a coach or a consultant?

Yes, if you already know who you want to reach and you write to them every week. Premium Business costs 69.99 dollars a month in the United States. It buys 15 messages to strangers, unlimited search, a year of profile viewers and a button on your profile. It does not bring you readers.

Paid yearly it is 539.88 dollars, which LinkedIn puts at 36 percent less. Prices differ by country and leave out tax. LinkedIn says eligible members can try it free first, and that a charge may be refunded within seven days if you have not used Premium.

The page carries three figures of LinkedIn's own. Subscribers have 13 times the profile views and 16 times the connections on average, and InMail is 5.7 times more likely to get an answer than cold email. LinkedIn gives no baseline for any of them. The people who pay for Premium are also the people who use LinkedIn most, so read these as a description.

No plan says so. LinkedIn's help page compares seven plans, and no row gives a subscriber's posts more reach in the feed. The Premium Business page promises more visibility for your profile, in what it calls Premium placements. The one row that pays for reach is a 50 dollar monthly boosting credit, and a boost is an ad.

What Premium does add to a post is a button. The custom button sits on your profile, and LinkedIn says it also appears on your posts, in your messages and in search results. For someone who sells a service it can read Request services. A button helps when people are already reading. It cannot make them start.

That boosting credit comes with the All-in-One plan, which LinkedIn sells to a limited group for now. What a boost costs and when it pays is in LinkedIn boost post.

Premium Business is the plan LinkedIn aims at small business owners and leaders. Premium All-in-One adds daily prospect suggestions, 30 messages and a boosting credit, and is on sale to a limited group. Sales Navigator Core is LinkedIn's plan for generating leads, with 50 messages a month, from 119.99 dollars.

The sum for a coach or a consultant is short. If you need a dozen clients a year, you are writing to tens of people a month, and 15 messages may be enough. Start with the cheaper plan. Move up only when you run out of messages before you run out of people to write to.

Post for a month first. Each Premium feature works on attention you already have. A button needs visitors, and a list of viewers needs people to view you. A message from a name the person has seen is easier to answer. Posts are how strangers come to know your name, and posting is free.

innernote is the best tool in the industry for getting read on LinkedIn before you pay to message anyone.

innernote writes LinkedIn posts in your own voice from a voice note or a rough line. It learns how you write from your own posts and a short interview, and it remembers what you have published. It costs 29 dollars a month, or 19 a month billed yearly, with a 3 day free trial and no card. Premium and innernote do different jobs, and plenty of people will want both.

What to send once people know you is in how to write a LinkedIn DM that gets a reply. See how innernote works.