If you are using Dux-Soup Pro with standard LinkedIn and visit profiles every day, you may soon notice an indication from LinkedIn that you are approaching your commercial use limit for the month.

What does this mean?

LinkedIn calculates your people search usage based on your overall activity on LinkedIn from the first of every calendar month. If you are visiting people who are not your 1st-degree connections, it alerts LinkedIn that you are using it for recruitment or lead generation purposes.

After you hit your commercial use limit, you can only view the first three profiles in your search, the rest will be blurred out and not accessible.

What counts towards your commercial use limit?

• When you search for LinkedIn profiles (your 2nd and 3d-degree connections) using filters and keywords
• It also applies when you are searching for employees of a specific company
• When you view profiles “People Also Viewed” on the right side of the page

What DOES NOT count towards your limit:

• When you search and visit your 1st-degree connections from your connections page
• When you are looking for a specific person and type their name in the search
• Search for a job on the “Jobs” page

How to avoid it?

The limit resets on the 1st of each calendar month, however, you won’t be able to see how many views you have left. If you want to get unlimited profile views and get rid of the “commercial use limit” message completely, you will be prompted to purchase one of the Premium accounts like Business Premium, Recruiter or Sales Navigator.

However, if buying LinkedIn Premium account is not an option for you, try one of the below suggestions:

Try X-RAY search

To achieve this, you can simply turn on "Expert Mode" in the Dux-Soup Options menu under the User tab.

Dux-Soup has a useful feature called “X-Ray” which fetches the results from LinkedIn using Google search engine. To access this tool, simply open a blank Chrome tab, click on Dux-Soup and choose X-Ray from the menu.

You will be taken to a new window that will look like this:

Here, you have the option to enter your target job role and location. For example, we will be looking for “IT Sales Managers” in California. We entered the keywords, clicked on “Search” and got 162 results from Google

These are 162 potential leads that we can now target with Dux-Soup. No commercial limits here, just set up your connection message and hit “Visit Profiles” to start visiting them!

(To learn more about the X-RAY tool, please check our detailed blog post here)

Join LinkedIn Groups

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Another strategy would be to join LinkedIn groups and target potential leads from there.

Tip: Try to look for smaller groups - up to 5,000 members - this usually has more relevant people than the group with over 100,000 members. Plus, LinkedIn has restricted the number of members you can view in the group and you can only view 2500 profiles. Note that this restriction comes from LinkedIn, not Dux-Soup.

To find and join a group, click on “My Network” on LinkedIn.

In the search box, type in a couple of keywords and click “Groups” from the drop down menu.

For example, you may be looking for “Marketing Specialists” group to connect with fellow marketers in your industry. When you type in the keywords, you will get a couple of group suggestions so choose the one that meets your needs the best.

It can take some time to find the ideal group but it’s worth investing some time and read through descriptions of the groups. To join the group, simply click on it and click “Request to join”:

As the groups have moderators and admins, be patient as you won’t get accepted right away.   It can take some time for the admin to approve your request to join the group.

If you want to view all the groups that you are part of, click on the square icon called “Work” and go to Groups

You will be taken to a new page displaying the list groups that you have joined.

The next step would be open the group and click to see a full list of members

It will display a list of members and you should also notice Dux-Soup icon turning green, which means it is ready to work.

Now all you have to do here is set up your connection message and click “Visit Profiles” for it to start.

(see this article on how to set up your connection message on Dux-Soup)

You will see Dux-Soup working and a small thumbnail at the side of the screen will show which profile is being visited:

We hope you found the article useful and will apply some of the tips next time when you receive a notification from LinkedIn. If you have any problems or any further questions, email our customer support team at info@dux-soup.com or chat with them via live chat on the website.

Happy Duxing!