My Two Cents About Creating Content For LinkedIn

What posting daily for ~2 years has taught me.

2-min read

TL;DR: Ignore the numbers, put the blinders on, and post until you don’t want to any longer. Once it feels like a chore, drop it and only focus on the important stuff—building a business, doing your job, and loving the process of it all.

The real work happens there. Not on LinkedIn.

Let’s get into it.

1. Don’t care about your engagement and follower count. It’s all a distraction. Ironically, when you do the following, those things take care of themselves.

2. Don’t care about other people’s engagement and follower counts. Put the blinders on and stay focused on Number 3.

3. Only put out stuff that you’re happy with and that speaks to your target audience. The only goals (literally) with any of this are to a) be top of mind when someone needs what you have to offer them, and b) inspire a much-needed change in your industry. That’s it.

4. Stay on brand and have unique takes on otherwise common topics. That’s the hack—the only hack. Btw, this is also how you accomplish Number 3.

5. Do this for you. The only way to ever sustain this for a long period of time is to love the game. Few can do that. They run out of steam and content. The creative process is the game. The rest takes care of itself.

I couldn’t tell you what many of the “top influencers” on LinkedIn do. I don’t even follow them. That says a lot about actual “influence”.

For you operators: 

You’re building businesses that are infinitely more important and valuable than LinkedIn numbers. Sure, your awareness on this channel can help. But you could stop today and be fine. Or better yet, never start and preserve your already limited badwidth. 

But if you do, at every single point it should be because it’s enjoyable, and for nothing else.

Personally, I don’t pay attention to follower count because I don’t care enough. And I see engagement for exactly what it is—whatever.

I do however pay attention to qualitative data. Because it matters.

Things like DM’s from people saying they like my content, feedback in the comments, and how many people are tagging their peers and teammates are key indicators that I’m doing the right things.

Side note: I know for a fact that there are a lot of the right people who follow my posts who never engage. Let’s call them passive onlookers. And they don’t show up in the numbers.

How do I know? They tell me—out of the blue in an email or DM or on a call. It’s happened enough that it’s safe to assume it goes on a lot more than I even know.

What I’m getting at is that inspiring thought and having unique takes on topics in your industry has a lot more of the right influence than engagement numbers will ever tell you.

Engagement hackers who post trite, surface-level content devoid of value don’t have that. And they never will. Because they optimize their content for numbers, not value to a specific group of people who speak their language.

In conclusion, this is the game:

Ignore the numbers, put the blinders on, and post until you don’t want to any longer. Once it feels like a chore, drop it and only focus on the important stuff. 

The problem with trying to find hacks or force content creation is that you take the blinders off and lose sight of what really matters—building a business, doing your job, and loving the process of it all.

The real work happens there. Not on LinkedIn.