In this article
The story started simple.
It started with a request from Dave:
“Yo SQ, let’s try to figure out if we could get traffic from LinkedIn back to the blog.”
This one question led me down the rabbit hole of LinkedIn marketing — and in turn figuring out how to go viral, get traffic and build a brand.
And this was the result:
(Not too shabby, I think.)
But I’ll be honest. I didn’t do this alone.
My knowledge about LinkedIn and its mysterious algorithm — and how to do well on it — came from reading countless of case studies and interviewing the experts who have figured out the platform.
The result?
This HUGE list of tips you can use to succeed.
Keep on reading.
22 Tips To Help You Go Viral On LinkedIn
#1: Stop Focusing On Going Viral
Wait… What?
Is this some kind of clickbait article where you write a misleading headline and then tell me something completely opposite?
That may be half-true.
You see:
Going insanely viral is mostly a matter of luck. Nobody can ever explain why the “Cash Me Outside” girl become so famous overnight.
(I really want to know though.)
The next best thing you can do is to prepare for the day that you go viral.
But, you must first understand:
If you put all your focus on trying to become viral, what is likely to happen is that you will become encumbered, bitter and disappointed.
You’ll stop doing the right thing, and focus on all sorts of “weird tricks” and “hacks” to achieve virality, which defeats your purpose for being on LinkedIn in the first place.
Remember: virality is merely a mean to an end — not the end itself.
Manu Goswami says:
One of the biggest mistakes I’m starting to see on the platform is content creators who are so focused on views and likes. LinkedIn is about growing your brand and business but that isn’t just done by posting viral content. It’s actually done a lot better by genuinely helping people by connecting them to each other, finding them positions, or including them in stimulating discussions.
Instead of focusing on going viral, focus on helping people. Focus on becoming a resourceful person.
What happens is that people will begin to take notice of you, and even look up to you and treat you like a thought leader.
When that day comes, your posts will go viral by itself, because people will reciprocate due to you demonstrating your genuineness and authenticity over and over again.
#2: Build Your Personal Story
Most of us never figure out who we are.
We become parrots — copying and regurgitating thoughts, opinions and viewpoints that are not ours, but heard from elsewhere.
But, to succeed on social media, you MUST know who you are, or at least what you represent and who you want to be.
Why?
Because they are fed up with the insincere people showing off their fake “good life” without ever expressing the human side of themselves.
They want authenticity. They want sincerity. They want to see what it’s like to struggle and overcome.
Top LinkedIn influencer Michaela Alexis puts it succinctly:
I think the biggest mistake I see is people presenting themselves as somebody that they think they SHOULD be, rather than the awesome human being that they actually are. There’s been an idea in business for a very long time that we need to “leave our personal issues at home”, like we can all just somehow shut off the human part of our brain as soon as we step into the office. That may have been semi manageable, prior to platforms like LinkedIn that are redefining the business culture.
I have yet to meet or chat with a single person that doesn’t have an inspiring story to tell, and yet, so many users are avoiding telling that story and opting instead to mask themselves in itchy suits and spammy pitches.
You don’t have to be fake.
You don’t have to pretend to be someone else.
You can be honest, vulnerable and connect with other people.
But first:
You need to know who you are.
Michaela continues:
… I would run you through our personal branding workshop, which goes through your strengths, weaknesses, values, and goals. We’ll talk about your failures and what that failure taught you to help you ultimately succeed.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to establish your own personal brand:
- What are my values?
- Why do I do what I do? Who or what am I doing it for?
- What do I want to be known for?
- What do I want the world to know about me that’s unique?
- What topics can you talk endlessly about?
- What do people say about you? What do people praise you for?
- How do you do what you do? What makes the way you achieve results interesting or unique?
- What energizes or ignites you? What are your true passions?
Summing it up with a last quote from Michaela:
You’d be surprised at how quickly people succeed online when they just have a clear idea of who they are and why they do what they do.
#3: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is akin to your company homepage.
You can have the best content in the world, but if your homepage does not communicate its value proposition, you will lose your customer’s interest.
As Josh Fechter, founder of Badass Marketers and Founders puts it:
When people look at your profile, they decide whether you’re worth connecting with in several seconds.
It starts with your headshot.
Despite its recent algorithm changes to become more Facebook-like, LinkedIn is still at heart, a platform for professionals.
Which means:
Your pictures must look professional.
Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to be in a suit and tie to convey “professionalism.” As long as the photo is professionally taken and you look good, it’ll work.
Here are some examples:
Then, you have to optimize your cover photo.
According to Josh, there are three kind of photos that will increase your add-back percentage:
1. You with a relevant influencer in your industry
2. You speaking in front of prospects
3. You at a local landmark (only works if you’re connecting with people in your city)
An example of a photo with a relevant influencer:
Speaking in front of prospects:
Local landmark:
Once again, these help communicate professionalism, expertise and social proof.
Pro-Tip: To find out if your profile is “optimized” enough, measure your add-back percentage. Your add-back percentage is the percentage of connection requests you send out that get accepted.
After you’re done with the 2 photos, it’s time to work on your headline.
Polishing up your LinkedIn profile is like writing a good sales letter — lead with a attention-grabbing image, then hook their attention into interest with a fantastic headline.
Top content marketer Aaron Orendorff says:
“Think of your headline as a tiny sales pitch. You have to answer “here’s why you should trust me” or “here’s why I’d be a valuable addition to your network” and “here’s what I do and who I do it for best”
Here are some good headline examples:
When that is done, it’s time to write your bio.
Josh argues that the biggest mistake made by people on LinkedIn is the lack of specificity.
Meaning:
When glancing at the summary, you should be able to tell what the person does and how the person can help you.
Your summary should look something like this:
Fix that by writing a great value proposition. According to ConversionXL, this is what makes a good value proposition:
- Clear language
- Communicates concrete results your prospect or customer will get
- Says how it’s different or better than everyone else
- Avoid hype and jargon
- Read and understood in 5 seconds
You can also add your other social profiles to your summary to connect with others elsewhere.
#4: Get Endorsements From Your LinkedIn Connections
Most people think that they’re done when they finish optimizing their photos, headline and bio.
You should optimize every aspect of your profile, including your endorsed skills.
You can game this aspect by “trading endorsements.”
Message or email someone to endorse you while you endorse them back. Alternatively, to increase the likelihood of someone endorsing you, you can endorse the person first before messaging.
However, there is one caveat.
Because endorsements are so easily gamed, they may lose its value in the eyes of the person reading your profile.
Unless:
They are from an influencer or a well-known expert in your field.
Ben Bradbury tells me:
One thing I’ve learned recently is how endorsements work: the real value lies in being endorsed by people who are highly skilled in the respective skill. It comes up next to your skill when people are viewing your profile. When looking to increase your endorsements, focus on getting them from connections who are highly skilled.
Something like this:
Build relationships with the influencer, and then find a way to get him or her to endorse you.
#5: Get More Recommendations
Another aspect of your LinkedIn profile to optimize is your recommendations section.
This area is usually neglected. For example, look at this:
To fill up your recommendations section, reach out to people you’ve worked with.
Get recommendations from your clients, your ex-colleagues, your current colleagues or even your teachers and professors while you were in school.
While there is no fixed number you should have to be “successfully optimized”, Josh says that you should have a minimum of 5 recommendations.
So, go get them.
#6: Build Your Connections
After you’ve optimized your profile, it’s time to build up your connection base.
However… Before we begin, I have something to say:
There are conflicting theories on how important your connections are to generating views and going viral.
Hailey Friedman told me that:
It’s important to note that you do not need millions of followers on Linkedin to have your post seen by millions of people. In fact, the number of followers or connections you have has nothing to do with how many people see your Linkedin post. The Linkedin Gods are far more mysterious and fickle.
However, on the other hand, Vin Clancy, another LinkedIn influencer says:
… People not attempting to grow aggressively enough- if you only have 300 connections, content is pretty much a waste of time.
You need a fast follower/connection growth strategy.
While we may never have the actual answer, I believe it lies somewhere in between both, which is:
The number of connections does not influence whether you will go viral, but the number of connections help improve the chances of you going viral.
Why?
Because of one simple fact — all of your LinkedIn connections become your followers.
That means every time you post content, the people who are likely to see it are your connections.
Having a larger connection base help increases the chances of people seeing and engaging with your post, which increases the chance of it going viral.
However, don’t blindly accept everyone on LinkedIn either.
As with building any social following, the most important thing you should wish for is quality, not quantity.
You may have a network of 10,000 connections, but if they are all unrelated to your brand or who you want to reach, you will not get any engagement.
Connect ONLY with people who are your ideal customers and will buy your product or services, or at least engage with the type of content you wish to create.
So, how do you build up your connection base?
A — Connect all your emails to your LinkedIn Account
This tip is from Justin Wu, who says:
The first step would be to connect all your emails to your LinkedIn Account. LinkedIn allows you to import all your emails to seed your initial contacts. This will increase your audience size to help build your initial audience on content. So dig up all your emails that you have ever used in the past!
Import every single email you have and connect with people. LinkedIn will automatically send out a connection request to them for you.
First, click on my network in the top menu bar of LinkedIn. Then, you should be re-directed to this page, where you should click on more options:
Then replace your email accordingly and click continue.
B — Build connections through LinkedIn Groups
If you’re not on LinkedIn Premium, you will not be able to connect with anyone who is a 3rd connection.
Unless you’re in the same group as them.
One of the best parts of being in a LinkedIn Group is the ability to connect with anyone in the group.
Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your niche or your ideal customers, and then connect with them.
C — Build connections through Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups are another channel that you can tap on for relevant connections.
All you have to do is to search for the relevant groups you should join:
Click join, participate in the group and then create a thread asking to connect with everyone on LinkedIn:
If you’re lucky, a thread may already exist and you can simply connect with everyone who has placed their LinkedIn profile inside.
D — Connect with everyone who has liked or commented on your content
This is what Gilles De Clerck, another LinkedIn influencer suggests:
LinkedIn posting has been a big deal these last few months. People started being real, sharing personal experiences, showing vulnerability and attaching powerful lessons to it. Some have been incredibly successful building up a personal brand this way. Others are still working out how to hit the sweet spot but growing with every post nonetheless.
But what do all the views, likes and comments mean?
It means you have a potential audience.
Potential. Because one like doesn’t equal a follower.
That’s why it’s interesting to be able to re-engage with these people at scale.
All of the likes and comments you’ve accumulated are wasted if you do not connect with them.
They might see your content once, then forget you entirely.
However, if you connect with them, they will remember you and see your content in the future.
The thing is:
Without technology, this entire process can be a b*tch. (Multiple tabs addict, anyone?)
If you want a quick and dirty (plus techy way) of doing this properly, read these 2 guides:
E — connect with everyone using tech
Love tech and automation?
You’re not alone.
There IS a way of building your connections using automation.
Before you proceed, you need to have 2 LinkedIn tools in your tool kit:
- Linked Helper (automation tool)
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator (without this, you’ll get banned)
Then follow this automation process from Josh Fechter:
- Use LinkedIn Helper and write an invitation message
- Make it non-salesy and focus on something in common.
- Plug in a relevant search query into Sales Navigator, and then connect all 2nd contact in search.
Pro-Tip: According to Josh, don’t connect with more than 150 people in a 24 hour period. You’ll get banned.
#7: Be Consistent
In social media, there is ONE king — consistency.
GaryVee puts it quite simply:
“Okay, I started Gary. Now what?” you ask? Keep doing it for another five years and then come back to me before you ask again.
Virality is hard to predict, and it is false to assume that you have one at bat.
Create as much content as possible, so that you increase the possibility of one of them going viral.
In fact, this is the single most common tip amongst all of the influencers I interviewed for this article.
Thomas Ma, founder of SapphireApps says:
I would say you need to post every single day. Keep your story simple and make sure to document as much as you can people. People enjoy seeing the struggle and the rise of the entrepreneur.
Justin Wu expresses the same sentiment:
Next will be post consistency. Creating at least one content post a day. Two preferred for max content spread one in morning and another at afternoon. The post would have to be pure text, and maximum character limit (1300). LinkedIn favors long posts heavily.
Gilles De Clerck says the same:
Consistency.
Regularly showing your face in their feeds gives people the opportunity to get to know you. They’ll remember you and will start looking out for your posts. This is how you build trust and influence.
As you post more often, you’ll create opportunities for yourself to get better and find your sweet spot. Consistency beats perfection any day of the week.
Moral of the story?
I’ll quote Ben Bradbury here for you:
The one thing I see all the best practicing is consistency. The more you’re on the platform, the more LinkedIn pushes you in it’s algorithm. If you want to build an audience, you simply need to show up every day. No excuses.
#8: Share Your Journey
The above quote by Thomas Ma says it all:
People enjoy seeing the struggle and the rise of the entrepreneur.
People love to show the glamorous side of themselves on social media, even though life is not like that.
We all struggle through similar insecurities, fears and frustrations.
And it IS suffering through these obstacles that bond us together as a community.
We love movies because the idea of watching the hero struggle through challenges and eventually making it out on the other side excites us.
Guess what?
You can be the hero too!
Document your own journey, and bring others along with you.
Together with your audience, bring them through the rollercoaster of emotions as you struggle, fight and eventually win the day.
If you’re having trouble documenting your own journey, then follow Manu Goswami’s recommendations:
... you’d first need to share content about your journey. That content can be informative (articles with your original commentary in the caption), inspirational (stories of your peers or quotes you like), or a personal anecdote (related to not only your victories but your struggles and failures). You need to express your thoughts honestly and authentically in order to get people to relate to it.
Informative:
Inspirational:
Quote:
Personal Anecdote:
#9: The One Question That Will Help You Create Your Best Content
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugr8oAj3Rew
#10: Know The Type of Formats That Work On LinkedIn
When I first started using LinkedIn, it appeared that most people were simply sharing links to articles. They were either links to the articles they’ve written themselves, or links to articles they read and liked.
An example:
Gilles shares the same sentiment as me:
Link dumping.
Some people still seem to confuse social media with link sharing platforms.
They post a link to some piece of content they have an interest in and that’s that.
Social media is about building relations and sparking engagement - simply sharing links doesn’t achieve any of that.
There’s no imagination, no creativity, no dialogue - aside from LinkedIn not giving it relevance in its algorithm.
Turns out that it was a big mistake.
Harsh Jani describes:
One of the biggest mistakes I see on LinkedIn is something I myself made for many years. Posting external links as your update. Most important thing for any platform is to keep users on the platform for as long as possible. So, when you post external links, LinkedIn will punish you by not rolling the content out to as many people as possible, as they want people to spend as much time on the platform as possible!
There is a right way of posting that generates better reach and more views for your content.
What is it?
Justin Wu has actually ran some tests for himself, and this was what he discovered:
Don’t use links in your post at all. Don’t link to youtube either. LinkedIn favors content that is native.
LinkedIn Posts algorithm feed favors this in order (from best reach to least):
Texts
Images
LinkedIn Videos (Native)
LinkedIn Articles
Links
Videos (Youtube)
This what I found through posting for the past few months with the new changes.
I think native video ranks in middle from reports from friends. This is all assuming your post is just using one of the following above. If you combine links + images it could just penalize it further.
But, don't take any of our advice simply at face value. You can test it for yourself and see if those recommended formats work better for you. To make your posting more consistent, make use of many LinkedIn tools available on the market.
#11: Put Your Links In The First Comment
What happens if you’ve wrote an article for a blog, or another publication? Should you share the link on LinkedIn?
Yes, you should. And you can.
Remember, not everything you do should be done for views and views only.
However, if you want more views for your LinkedIn marketing, and still drive traffic to your content, there is a way you can do so, that is:
Place your links in the first comment.
Here’s what Hailey Friedman has to say:
This is the secret weapon that I first learned about when Guy Kawasaki posted about it on Linkedin in June 2017. He actually ran an A/B test with two posts that had the exact same copy- but one had the link in the post and the other one had the link in the first comment. The results were astounding.
The post with the link in the comments section got 3x as many views.
I tried the same thing, and got more views and clicks to my article:
Moral of the story?
Put your link in the first comment.
#12: How To Format a Viral LinkedIn Post
Before I carry on, I would love for you to understand:
Just because you’re utilizing all the “best practices” for writing and formatting a LinkedIn post doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to go viral.
It doesn’t work that way.
Good writing IS good writing.
Formatting merely enhances it.
That being said, here are the elements to making a viral LinkedIn post, as identified by the influencers:
A — Use spacing to make it mobile-friendly
Most people these days are getting their social media updates via their phone.
That means: the content you write should be mobile-optimized as much as possible.
One way to do this is write each sentence spaced out rather than huge chunks of paragraphs. If you have been on LinkedIn recently, you’d probably seen many people do this.
Here’s what Hailey Friedman says:
These days we’re constantly reading on the go. That means we’re often reading on screens no wider than 3 inches across. By spacing out your sentences, you’re ensuring that any given sentence is 2–3 “lines” long.
This breaks the post up into bite-size chunks which are easily consumed on mobile.
B — Create a wave pattern when writing
In her Viral LinkedIn Checklist post, serial entrepreneur Gretta van Riel identified that writing in a wave pattern increases the consumption of her content.
Hailey Friedman mentions the exact same thing in her How To Go Viral On LinkedIn blog post.
The concept is:
Start with a short sentence, and then make each subsequent sentence longer and longer and then gradually shorter and shorter, like a wave.
Josh Fechter is a master in writing like this:
Is there a psychological reason for why this works?
To be honest, I have no idea. I’ll update this post with more information when I discover the reason.
C — Write an engaging hook
Social media is all about grabbing the attention of your audience.
If you do not capture it in the first 5 seconds, you would have lost the person forever.
That’s why the most important thing you need to do is to write an engaging hook.
And in LinkedIn, your hook is the first 2 sentences.
When your reader scrolls past his LinkedIn timeline, he will only see the first 2 sentences before he has to click “see more.”
These 2 sentences are your grabber, your attention-capturing mechanism, your headline.
Spend 80% of your time on these first 2 sentences to hook your audience’s attention to read your copy.
D — Tell a story
As identified by researchers Chip and Dan Heath, stories are one of the main ingredients in causing sticky messages.
Apply the same concept to LinkedIn.
After capturing the attention of your audience, you must now tell an engaging story that will, in the words of the great copywriter Joseph Sugarman, “bring them down the grease slide.”
They should be hungrily devouring your copy… without even realizing they finished it.
But…
How do you tell a great story?
You can:
- Follow my friend Ben Sim’s advice of using “in media res” or start in the middle. Instead of following the conventional advice of telling your story chronologically, start your story in the middle (usually the emotional point.) This guarantees your story to be gripping and emotional.
- Use any of the proven storytelling formulas we have unearthed for you. These storytelling formulas have been used for years by Hollywood screenwriters, copywriters and fiction authors to tell stories that sell.
E — Add a CTA
LinkedIn favours posts that have engagement (denominated by likes and comments.)
How do you get that engagement?
ASK.
Close off your posts with a CTA. Directly ask your audience to do what you want them to do (like the post, comment) or get them to answer a question you have for them.
#13: Join an engagement pod
Do you want to know the secret behind why certain LinkedIn influencers are getting an insane number of likes and comments behind their posts?
They are part of the same group called “engagement pods.”
An engagement pod is a private chat or a group that agrees to engage with each other’s content when it is published.
Here’s what Justin Wu says about it:
Form a private chat group with other top LinkedIn writers and create an engagement pod. Everytime someone posts, the whole group will participate on the post that will help it shoot up in the feed/algorithm. Almost all social networks newsfeed is based on engagement & activity. Getting a lot of ‘organic’ activity will allow your post to get a nice kickstart.
While engagement pods cannot guarantee virality (it is still dependent on your content), it provides a nice organic boost to your content, allowing it to be seen by others.
Now, where can you find engagement pods?
You can:
1.Create your own
Connect with fellow LinkedIn influencers, and agree to form a pod together.
2. Find existing engagement pods
There is no easy way to find existing engagement pods, but one way you can do this is to message a top influencer (who repeatedly get lots of likes) and ask if they are part of an engagement pod.
3. Use Hey Engage
This is Gretta van Riel’s new baby. This platform allows you to discover and join engagement pods for multiple social media platforms.
#14: Engage and Interact
One of the biggest mistakes made on every social media platform is that people forget to engage.
Social media is increasingly turning into a 1–1 engagement platform. Engagement, not creation is the name of the game on social media.
In fact, this is usually quoted as the key to Tim Ferriss’s roaring success. As Tim says:
Treat everyone like they are important, because they are. You’re not only making yourself look bad by shrugging off a non-recognizable person at a networking event in an attempt to speak to a celebrity, but you’re risking offending someone who may be much more connected than you realized.
The same can be applied to LinkedIn.
Harsh Jani tells me:
LinkedIn is transforming into the SOCIAL NETWORK for businesses. For you to be social, it is key to build and nurture relationships. Have you heard about the 80/20 rule? I try to apply that for many things in life. For you to be successful on LinkedIn — I would say you should be spending 4 times as much time building relationships and interacting with people as you do creating the content. You ask — WHY? Because the people you engage with on regular basis will engage with you and your content and this will help push your content out further and to their audiences. The results can be mind blowing.
You have to engage with influencers’ content, reply to comments on your post, build up your network by connecting with people who comment on yours, and so on.
It’s a ever-hungry beast that you need to feed constantly.
As Gilles De Clerck puts it:
I use automation to scale my reach so I can build more relations faster.
Dux-Soup is a growth hacking tool you can use to auto-visit and connect with targeted profiles. This enables you to stack up relevant connections in your sleep.
It doesn’t end there. Connections don’t equal an audience and relationship building is not something you can have a robot do for you.
That is why, as soon as a new connection is made, you have to show up yourself. I try to talk to as many new connections as humanly possible. Again, you can ease this task by automating your intros. This may sounds counterintuitive, but how different are 600 hellos really going to be? As soon as they reply, you can start the conversation. I usually kick off by asking something ‘What’s keeping you busy these days?’
#15: Leverage Influencers
One of the secrets behind LinkedIn’s algorithm is this:
If an influencer engages with your post, your post will be shown to all his/her followers.
In fact, this was how I got “lucky” with my viral post.
I wanted to share with the LinkedIn community the fantastic piece of advice Michaela Alexis had given me, and had tagged her in the post.
In return, she commented back on the post, and the post was shown to all of her followers — which resulted in my post getting hundreds of likes.
While I do not recommend you to do this often (because it looks like you’re merely leveraging them for their following), you can do this skilfully like Clarice and Brandon:
#16: Use Engagement Posts To Turn Followers Into Emails
No matter how many followers you have on your LinkedIn profile, one thing is sure:
It doesn’t belong to you.
Instead, it belongs to LinkedIn.
At any point of time, you could be banned, removed or blocked.
Which means — you are always in that precarious state where all your hard work could be destroyed overnight.
The best thing you can do in this scenario is to drive your followers into a platform you can control: in this case, an email list.
How can you drive your followers into subscribing for your email list?
Simple: use the timeless concept of offering value or a “carrot.”
The method of delivery?
An engagement post.
Here’s what Josh says:
To turn your engagement into email subscribers, you can offer a relevant download or ask them for their opinion on a content release. For example, I asked my LinkedIn connections for their opinion on my book cover while providing a link to get notified when the book comes out.
Create a post that gives them a direct download, ask them to comment on your post, then send them a link to your landing page.
Here’s an example from Tim Queen:
#17: Use Appreciation Posts
LinkedIn LOVES appreciation posts.
Appreciation posts are posts where you publicly acknowledge the help someone has rendered you.
This has a double effect:
- LinkedIn loves these types of post so it gives you additional reach
- You deepen your relationship with the other person because you just vouched for his/her expertise in front of your entire LinkedIn network.
This is Josh’s formula for creating appreciation posts:
- Introduce the problem you had before your meeting
- Explain the credibility of the person you’re meeting using a tangible example
- Dive into the key learnings lessons from the conversation using bullet points
#18: Use Video
I’m about to start doing video. Not many people are, this will be a gamechanger. — Vin Clancy
Native video is a new feature that LinkedIn pushed out recently. As such, because it is so new, there aren’t many people that know what to do with it, or how to make it work.
I’ll assume that with video, the same principles I’ve laid out applies:
- be consistent
- tell stories
- create an engaging hook
That is something that has been done expertly by LinkedIn influencer String Nguyen.
Here are some of her tips on how to be consistent in creating daily video content:
I’ve trained myself to create content with my phone. Think about it: It’s connected to the whole world and fits in your pocket. Plus, I can push out content quickly Here’s some tips to create daily videos: One video, one minute One video, one message One message can be one question One way to start off is “Hi, my name is and I’m awesome at.. *then expand* The ultimate time saver is One take. It’s not easy, but one take videos are a great way to show your brains.
#19: Batch Content Creation So You Can Show Up Every Day
There will be days where you’re too busy and you can’t show up on LinkedIn.
There will be days where you feel like shit, and you don’t want to create something for your audience.
That is normal.
But only creating when you feel like it is a surefire recipe for failure.
Instead of giving you a rah-rah talk on how you should be consistent and do it every day, you should instead forecast your own behaviour and make changes so that you can show up every day.
As Ben Bradbury puts it:
If you’ve got 3 months to get a million views, you’re going to need to put out a lot of content. That’s at least a piece of copy a day, and potentially a video too, so I’d start by teaching you how to systematically batch your content creation, so you can show up every day for 90 days.
Most content creators I know follow what is known as themed days.
Basically, you split the days up into different themes. For example, you could leave Mondays for content creation, and Tuesdays for administrative tasks (and so on.)
This is something that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey practiced when he was running Twitter and Square simultaneously.
His days were split into themes:
Monday: Management and running the company
Tuesday: Product
Wednesday: Marketing and communications, growth
Thursday: Developers and partnerships
Friday: Company culture and recruiting
Choose the day you find yourself most creative at, and create multiple pieces of content all at one go.
#20: Repurpose Content From Other Channels
Do you always have to create unique and original content for LinkedIn?
The answer is…
No.
You don’t have to be stuck in the hamster wheel of new content every day.
Instead, you can utilize an underrated strategy for content marketing:
Repurposing.
Your best content can be deconstructed, repackaged and repurposed into something entirely new, posting natively on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Here are some ideas you can utilize to repurpose your content:
- Have an epic blog post that is doing well? Why not break the article into distinct separate pieces and share them on LinkedIn in native text?
- Have a Facebook status that is driving your engagement sky-high? Re-use the same status for LinkedIn.
- Answered multiple Quora questions that have a zillion upvotes? Re-use them for LinkedIn.
- Did a tweetstorm recently? Put them together as a status on LinkedIn!
#21: Interview Prospects
One of my friends Jos Aguiar built up his personal brand and company entirely off Facebook. He did this by interviewing some of the top entrepreneurs and marketers on Facebook Live.
He has started to do the same for LinkedIn as well.
Another person doing this really well is Allan Gannett:
Interviews aren’t just for podcasts and blogs. If you want to go all in on LinkedIn, treat it as an entirely new content creation platform.
Interview the people your prospects are interested in. Post it as a native video. If they refuse to appear on video, offer to do an email interview and publish their interview as a status or as a Pulse article.
You can also interview and highlight some of the top individuals in your field, like what Manu Goswami does for his #UNCONVENTIONAL series.
#22: Retarget Connections On Facebook
Did you know you can export your LinkedIn connections?
Yes, you can.
This is one of Josh's best growth hacks (and I have been targeted by it ha.) And so far from what I've seen, it's pretty under-utilized too.
First, head to LinkedIn settings, click "getting an archive of your data" and export your LinkedIn connections:
Once you click export, LinkedIn will send you a list of their emails. Upload them onto Facebook, and then run ads.
You No Longer Have A Reason To Struggle
If you were struggling to understand LinkedIn and generate the kind of views and reach that could your business, then congratulations.
I have just handed you the keys to LinkedIn domination, taught by some of the best experts who are killing it with LinkedIn.
All you have to do now is to take action, and put in the work.
Your hard work will pay off.
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