Whether you’re setting up your LinkedIn account for the first time or polishing your profile as part of a renewed effort to leverage LinkedIn, here’s how to get up and running in thirty minutes.

1. Create Your LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile sets the stage not only for your entire LinkedIn experience but, increasingly, for your career trajectory. A LinkedIn profile is today’s résumé, but unlike a résumé, you can’t simply ignore it for a while and then dust it off for an update the next time you’re job hunting.

Your profile should be equal parts descriptive and aspirational: you need to clearly convey your professional history and accomplishments, but your bio summary, job descriptions, and overall profile should convey a narrative that speaks to what you want to be doing . . . even if it’s not exactly what you’re doing today. If you’re a bank teller hoping to move up to private banking, your headline can read “financial services professional,” and your description of that college job at Starbucks can focus on your responsibility for totaling the daily receipts. Make sure your profile includes the following:

Name, photo, and headline. This is what people will see when you come up in search results, so make sure to use a good photo: 500 x 500 pixels is the ideal size for uploading. Even more importantly, write a headline that summarizes your professional identity in a way that will speak to your target audience, whether that’s potential clients, potential employers, or business colleagues. Think of that two-sentence headline as a teeny-tiny elevator pitch: if you had nine seconds to tell someone who you are, what would you say?

Summary. A multiparagraph or point-form bio that highlights your professional accomplishments. This is your chance to tell the story of you: what you’ve achieved, what you’re good at, and what people get from working with you. Be as specific as possible, backing up any broad claims (“I’m an innovative thinker . . .”) with tangible proof (“. . . who has led three different R&D initiatives that led to new product launches”).

Experience. As on a résumé, this is where you list each of the positions in your career history. Write a concise description of each role, again backing up your claims with specifics. Wherever possible, link the employer to its company page on LinkedIn (LinkedIn will suggest that connection when you enter your employer name). Think about how the overall chronology will look. If you have gaps in your timeline or a period of time when you worked through a series of short contracts, consider consolidating these under a single position like “independent consultant.” As in a paper résumé, you want the overall pattern to convey a coherent trajectory.

Recommendations. While some people try to rack up recommendations by the dozen, you can present a very respectable picture of your professional accomplishments as long as you have at least one recommendation for every position listed in your “experience” section. To get these recommendations, you need to reach out and ask your colleagues to write them. If there are particular professional accomplishments that you would like them to mention, offer some delicate suggestions in your e-mail request: “A quick refresher: when we worked together, I was the project manager for the store opening that came in ahead of schedule.” Take five minutes to reach out and ask for those recommendations, and make a point of asking for recommendations every time you finish a contract, major project, or job.

Endorsements. Introduced in 2012, LinkedIn endorsements are a feather-light version of recommendations and, as such, have met with widespread skepticism. Don’t worry about collecting endorsements, since they don’t carry a lot of weight and tend to accumulate on their own thanks to LinkedIn’s frequent prompts. The best way to nudge your endorsements in the right direction is to ensure that your list of skills includes the skills for which you’d like to be endorsed and, conversely, to decline endorsements for skills you don’t want to promote.

2. Make Connections

Once you are using LinkedIn regularly, you can and should take a sparing approach to making LinkedIn connections. In the first instance, however, you’ll need to get your core contacts into your LinkedIn network: the managers, colleagues, clients, and friends for whom you’d happily do a favor and who you could ask for a favor anytime.

LinkedIn makes this easy by allowing you to sync with your e-mail contact list: just go to “add connections” (under contacts in the main nav bar) and select the appropriate e-mail account. (If you use multiple e-mail accounts, run this process for each of them.) LinkedIn will peek through your e-mail contacts and identify anyone who is already on LinkedIn. You can then send the appropriate connection requests. Be sure you begin by unchecking the “select all” box on your search results and manually select the people you want to connect with. Yes, this is more time consuming, but it’s the only way to avoid spamming people with spurious connection requests and ensure that everyone you connect with passes the favor test. It’s worth running this synchronization process every three to six months in order to catch contacts or (increasingly rarely) to connect with people who have only recently joined LinkedIn.

3. Tweak Your E-mail Preferences

LinkedIn can easily deluge your main e-mail box with notifications, so I recommend tweaking your communications preferences (under settings) as follows:

• Under “Select the types of messages you’re willing to receive,” select Introductions and InMail only. Customize the “Advice to people who are contacting you” to specify the best way to reach you (mine includes my e-mail address and Twitter handle) and to let people know which kinds of opportunities you are interested in. You can also check or uncheck the types of opportunities that interest you; I err on the side of inclusiveness.
• Under “Frequency of Emails,” set everything to “no email,” except for “Replies/Messages from connections”; “InMails, Introductions, and OpenLink”; and “Receive Actionable Emails,” which you can set to “individual email.” That way you’ll receive messages that are actually messages, right in your e-mail where you won’t miss them, without getting spammed by a kabillion notifications about people endorsing you for your typing speed.
• Under “Select who can send you invitations,” select “Anyone on LinkedIn.” This means that anyone on LinkedIn can invite you to connect. If you get inundated by spam invitations, dial this back to “Only people who know your email address or appear in your ‘Imported Contacts’ list.”
• Under “Set the frequency of group digest emails,” set everything to “No Email.” If you’re interested, you’ll check in on the group’s LinkedIn page. Note that this doesn’t affect whether the group manager or group members can send you messages. To change those settings, you have to go in the individual settings for each group.

With these three steps, you’re up and running, but be sure to revisit your profile and connections regularly. Revising or adding something new to your profile once every week or two is a best practice that will make it easy to stay up-to-date, but if you’d rather set aside a couple of hours once every few months, you can revise your profile and resync your connections at the same time.

If you need a little motivation to keep to this commitment, just ask yourself: if your dream client or employer were to look at your profile tomorrow, would they see a current, accurate, and optimized presentation of your professional trajectory? If you’re making effective use of LinkedIn, that may be exactly what happens, so be sure that you and your profile are ready.