Profile

You may be tempted to jump in right away and start connecting but before that do dress up your profile. For a potential connect, your profile top section gets at the most 3 seconds before it gets dismissed. So, make those 3 seconds count to evoke enough interest to continue. 2 quick things that are highly recommended.

Headline, Location

1. Professional Headline: Headlines are meant to entice people to read further. At a minimum, you can use your headline to highlight your current position and company (e.g., "Growth Hacker at Awesome Corp"). Include function so that the user reading your profile gets your orientation quickly. Use words that communicate impact rather than just titles. Growth Marketing v/s Manager Marketing.
2. Location and Industry: This is useful when people are searching for you but it helps to make it easy for others to place you in the right context.

Professional Photo

Avoid those popular party shots and stick to something that would encourage people to see you in the right professional context. Profiles without a good picture perform very poorly when it comes to connect requests.

Useful to add a background picture to your profile. Add artwork with bold letters and covering no more than 20%. See best practices.

Short but communicative summary

If people do land on your profile, this is the first thing that can make or break their interest in connecting with you. Write a summary that provides a good reason for them to connect than just your story. Remember the elevator pitch concept, so synonymous with startups? An effective and yet short summary on why connect with you.

Note: Avoid or limit links, emojis, and absolutely no typos

Sections to your profile

Beyond the obvious about your professional experience, the organizations that you have been associated with, a short summary of your impact areas besides the schools you went to. Once again dress it up for conversion and not a wiki page about you and your achievements. Your target reader should see a great reason to accept your request.

Published content and link

People in positions get lots of requests to connect. Stand out from the crowd. Showcase articles, blogs you have published on LinkedIn or elsewhere such as Medium, etc.

Pro Tip: Post on LinkedIn without a direct link to external page / blog. Links pointing out of LinkedIn perform poorly. Instead if you need to share a link, add it as a comment and write about the link in comments in the main post.