LinkedIn Adds Profile, Feed and Payment Tools for Side Businesses

LinkedIn announced on Oct. 15, 2026 a set of profile, feed and payment features for people running a side business alongside full-time employment. Engadget

The package covers four areas rather than one workflow. It touches how identity is shown, how posts are discovered, how people connect after meeting in person, and how expertise can be paid for directly.

Profiles will let users show multiple jobs more clearly. The change reflects portfolio careers, a term for holding several ongoing professional roles at once, instead of fitting everything under a single current title. LinkedIn said users adding founder to their profiles rose 70 percent over the past year, along with growth in users listing multiple ongoing roles.

The direct payment feature is Advice Sessions. It allows paid one-on-one meetings and consultations booked through LinkedIn. It will be available first to Business Premium subscribers in the US. LinkedIn will not take a cut of earnings from those sessions.

Feed control is also in test. A Network feed would show only posts from existing connections and followed accounts, with no algorithmic recommendations, meaning posts chosen for you by software, mixed in. For users who follow many accounts, that separation keeps posts from people they chose apart from posts selected for discovery.

For in-person contact, LinkedIn is adding a business card feature that can be saved to a phone wallet app. The aim is faster follow-up after meeting face to face, with the contact stored on the phone rather than on a paper card that can be lost.

Two updates for creators complete the set. LinkedIn is adding an analytics dashboard for tracking how posts perform. It also plans to expand its revenue-sharing program that shares pre-roll ad revenue, the income from short ads that play before a video, with video creators.

LinkedIn described the effort in a post titled "New Ways to Build Meaningful Connections, Grow Your Side Hustle, and Earn on LinkedIn," published Oct. 15, 2026 and categorized as Product News and Company News. The company said the tools are intended to help users build and strengthen relationships, grow an audience around what they know, and turn expertise into opportunity and income. LinkedIn

The broader context here is LinkedIn's existing hiring tools. The company already operates hiring-side agents, including Hiring Assistant and the Hiring Assistant 2 update announced Sept. 29, 2026 with advanced reasoning, memory and personalization, plus job-seeker aids such as Job Match and Hirer Insights. Adding tools for independent sellers balances that transaction. Charging zero platform fee on Advice Sessions fits the same approach. It favors getting more experts offering sessions and rebooking over collecting a share early on.

In my view, the combination that matters for independent workers is multi-role identity plus direct payment plus cleaner distribution. Most creator monetization fails on discovery and trust, not on payments. Analytics and pre-roll sharing help established video producers, but paid consultations depend on qualified inbound requests. A chronological Network feed and collaborative formats like Collaborative Posts could matter more than they appear, because they let a practitioner reach nearby audiences through people they already know.

One caution worth keeping in mind is that none of this removes the day-to-day work of running a side business. Scheduling, scope control, taxes, liability and reputation management still sit with the individual. What changes is less friction inside one system where professional identity already lives. I have watched my own adult children combine full-time work, contract gigs and audience building, and the tool they keep using is usually the one that reduces switching between apps.

Looking ahead, if LinkedIn delivers reliable booking, payouts and feed relevance, the long arc is constructive. More people can test expertise in public, find first clients without building separate infrastructure, and keep their day-job identity intact while doing it.