Your headline is the whole first impression

Your headline is one line and it appears everywhere: on your profile, on every card in every list a client scrolls, in the title of your page, and in the structured data a search engine reads. It is the single highest-leverage sentence you will write here.

What it has to do

Name the work, and name who it is for. That is it.

• "Bookkeeper for small agencies and online stores"
• "Video editor for finance and business YouTube channels"
• "Executive assistant for founders in US time zones"
• "Shopify store manager: listings, orders and customer email"

Each of those tells a client in about ten words whether to keep reading. None of them contains an adjective about the person.

The four words that ruin most headlines

"Virtual Assistant", on its own, and "Freelancer". They are true and they are invisible: they describe a category with tens of thousands of people in it and say nothing about which one you are.

If your work genuinely is broad assistance, narrow it by who: "Virtual assistant for US dental clinics" is a different sentence from "Virtual Assistant", and it is the same job.

Two things a headline cannot contain

Contact details and links. The field rejects emails, phone numbers, bare domains and @handles, and so does your bio. Not to be awkward: a headline is indexed, and putting your phone number in it publishes it to the open web. Your contact details are on your profile already, shown to subscribed clients.

Write it for the list, not for the page

On your own profile the headline sits under a large name and a photograph, and almost anything reads fine. In a list it sits alone, at thirteen pixels, next to twenty others. Read yours in that context before you settle it.

If your headline would not make you click, it will not make anybody else click either.

It is also your job title

The structured data on your profile uses your headline as the job title, so it is what a search engine thinks you do. That is one more reason "Freelancer" is an expensive choice.

Yours is on the first screen of your profile.