How To Get 500 Connections On LinkedIn FAST In 2024

Last Updated on July 12, 2023 by John Cirelly

So, you want to get 500 connections on LinkedIn fast eh? Well, you’re in the right place! In this article, I’ll share two ways you get can get 500+ LinkedIn connections quickly, and even teach you how to use those connections to get sales.

In short, the fastest way to get 500 connections on LinkedIn is to use an automation tool such as Dux Soup. This can help automatically send highly targeted connection requests with custom messages to help grow your network.

First, let’s touch on why having 500 connections on LinkedIn is important to begin with.

Why Does Having 500 Connections On LinkedIn Matter?

Having 500+ connections should really be your second goal on LinkedIn after you’ve completely optimized your profile. Yes, showing off how many people you are connected to may seem trivial, but in the business world, it could make or break a deal.

On LinkedIn, once you reach at least 500 connections your profile shows you have “500+” connections. This is what’s called a social signal, and it tells others that you’re well connected on the platform without you having to directly spell it out for them.

When you hit 500 connections, LinkedIn hides the exact number of connections you have. When you hit 500+ your profile really could have 510, or maybe 800, or maybe..

Basically, after you hit 500 connections, you can stop trying to gather connections as a vanity metric. But please, do not just fill your LinkedIn profiles up with random people to attain this magic number. You’d be doing yourself a disservice, and there’s definitely a better way, which I will be sharing with you in a minute.

So why would LinkedIn hide the exact amount of connections you have?

LinkedIn has never officially stated why this feature is in place, but if I had to guess, they probably don’t want to turn the platform into a high school popularity contest. With roughly 30% of all LinkedIn users having 500 or more connections, you can bet it’s a worthwhile goal to achieve.

Beyond showing people you’re well connected, having a larger network has a few other benefits that you may not have known about.

Priority in the LinkedIn algorithm – While we can’t be sure how the LinkedIn search and suggestion algorithm works, some researchers have theorized that number of connections may play a small role in how certain functions, such as search weigh in your favor.

A higher number of connections can convey trust – While this might not seem like a logical conclusion, connections are in a way a form of social proof. Proof to a stranger that you are real person and not a scam artist, bot, or fake account. Of course, there are other more powerful forms of social proof, but this does play a minor role.

More connections mean more opportunity – If you’re genuinely utilizing LinkedIn, every one of your connections should have a purpose. Even if that person doesn’t directly fall into your sales funnel, you can still use that relationship to craft introductions, and meet other like-minded folks. If your connection strategy is on point, most of your connections should be your ideal customers.

More people will see your content – Posting helpful content that positions you as an authority is a powerful long-term strategy for LinkedIn. The more connections and followers you have, the more opportunities will come your way.

The Fastest Way To Get 500 Connections On LinkedIn

What I’m about to share with you is considered ‘naughty’ by LinkedIn.

As in, if you abuse this method and go crazy with it, they may put you in LinkedIn time out for a few days.

You can use a little automation to kick-start your LinkedIn connection request quest using my favorite LinkedIn tool, Dux Soup.

(If you don’t want to use the tool, I’ll share the slower manual way too.)

Dux Soup is a tool that helps automate and streamline a lot of the repetitive tasks that you find yourself doing on LinkedIn, like sending connection requests, or searching for profiles.

There is a free version of Dux Soup, however you’re going to need the Pro version which costs $15.00 a month if you want to send automated connections. If you’re curious, I did a complete review of the software just last week.

Below I’ll break down how to get 500 connections on LinkedIn using Dux Soup.

Download Dux Soup

As long as you have Google Chrome and a Google account, you’re good to go. Click the button below to be directed download Dux Soup.

Once installed, you should see a friendly little duck in the top right of your Google Chrome browser. Believe it or not, that duck is going to help us get 500 connections on LinkedIn.

Create A Search For Your Ideal Connections

Dux Soup works directly with LinkedIn as if it were a human. We’re going to want to pull a filtered search of your ideal customers to connect with.

Click on Search then choose People then click on All Filters.

From here, we will want to filter down a search result that has people in our target market to connect with. Depending on your business, you may want to filter by location, school, or past company.

The most important filters you’ll want to make sure are right are the Industries, Services, and language tabs. Make sure those include your ideal customer’s language and service.

Use the filters to think about who your ideal client is. I personally try to target middle or upper-management positions that can still make decisions. These are people inside an organization who aren’t quite C level, but still have access to CEOs. You can target by Title in the Search Filter.

Why do I do this?

While LinkedIn automation works pretty damn well, I don’t want to risk botching a first impression with the head of a large company because of a glitch or poorly orchestrated automated outreach.

To contact CEOs of large companies, I recommend a much more personalized approach. (I’ll touch on this in another article).

Anyway, if you did your search correctly, you should have a list of 100+ ideal connections. Below are my results for the above search, which worked perfectly.

Preparing Your Connection Request

Now that we have a list of ideal connections, let’s ensure all of our ‘ducks’ are in a row. (sorry)

Open Dux Soup and click on Options. Here, under the Action tab we’re going to want to tag the individuals we’re about to send a request to.

I like to tag them with their industry and their position within their company. This helps in the future when I want to send out personalized messages to my connections.

Next, lets move over to the Skipping tab. Here we’ll tell Dux Soup who we don’t want to send connections. This is important because if we limit ourselves to only 100 connection requests a day, we want them to count. Here are my settings for this example.

I skip individuals who are outside my network, don’t have a profile picture, and match a specific regex pattern.

What’s a regex pattern?

Simply put, it’s a regular expression that lets Dux Soup skip profiles that contain specific keywords on their profile. Below you can see I’m choosing to skip profiles that work for Facebook, IBM, and people who are Self Employed.

(^|>)[^<]*?(?:ibm|self employed|facebook)[^<]*?(<|$)

Feel free to copy and paste the above code so you can edit it and use it in your Dux Soup Skipping options.

We’re almost ready to send. Now, while we’re still on the search page let’s bring up Dux Soup and make sure the ‘include custom message‘ slider is on.

Below, we’ll want to send a request with a customized message. This part is important so put a bit of time in it. I like to keep things short and sweet. I also called out the fact that we haven’t met, but I noticed we had some overlap in our industry.

Below is a quick message I came up with on the fly. It could have been better but believe it or not this worked really well.

Above you’ll see how it was short, explained why we’d be a good connection, and friendly. I also didn’t get too heavy-handed with the merge fields. If you want to steal this template, go for it, but please change it up a bit to match your industry and personality.

Or better yet, sign up for Dux Soup through our affiliate link and get our free Dux Soup outreach guide.

After confirming your merge tags are correct and your custom message looks good, go ahead and click Visit & Connect.

Kick Back, And Relax

Yep, that’s step four. Dux Soup is now doing all the tedious heavy lifting for you.

Give Dux Soup a few days and you should notice new connection requests getting accepted every day. You’ll be well on your way to 500 connections on LinkedIn soon! If your phone is constantly going off, you might want to disable LinkedIn notifications in your app settings.

You’ll notice you get a lot of generic ‘thanks for connecting!’ replies back, that’s perfectly fine. For some people who send a personal message back, I recommend manually viewing their profile and striking up a conversation. These are people who are actually engaged on LinkedIn who are in your target market.

As you meet new people, make sure to keep the Dux Soup search page open so the automation can continue to run the next day. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be at 500 connections on LinkedIn in no time!

Once you hit 500, you’ll have a solid list of people in your target market you can reach out to personally, or nurture with content you post in your news feed. We’ll touch more on this in another article.

Getting 500 Connections On LinkedIn (The Slow Way)

So, you don’t want to use a little automation to get connections quickly?

We’re going to be following the same thought process as above, but it’s just going to take a bit longer. You’re still going to go through the first step and search for your ideal target audience, but you’ll need to copy and paste your template message and modify it with the correct information.

Alternatively, you can send generic connection requests, but you’re going to notice a decrease in quality, and a lower amount of requests accepted.

We’ll want to use LinkedIn search to narrow down our target audience. If you read the first half of this article, its the exact same steps. If not, below is a picture of my search filter for who I personally want to target.

Click Apply, and you’ll be redirected back to your search results page. Here, manually skim through profiles until you find someone who you think would be a good fit.

Look for people with profile pictures, and check their company to ensure they are still working inside your target industry.

If you think you found a winner, click Connect.

Now select the option to send a custom message.

Copy your template in and edit the name and company manually. Give it a quick once over and click Done.

Now repeat this process 12,000 times, or until you succumb to arthritis.

Or ya know, give Dux Soup a shot. 😉

Conclusion

While getting 500 connections on LinkedIn might seem like a silly goal, it’s actually critical to building a solid foundation on the platform.

With more connections, you’ll be seen as someone who has a strong network, and have more opportunities to engage, and ultimately do business with people on the platform.

If you have any questions on this, be sure to drop them in the comments below.

Also, if you are interested in trying out Dux Soup, click the big blue button to receive a free Dux Soup Outreach Guide before being redirected to the Dux Soup site.