Category: LinkedIn

As a writer, I find the hardest thing to write is the ‘About’ page – whether it is my website, Medium, or LinkedIn.

There is something about writing ‘about yourself’ that everyone finds intimidating.

Whatever I write seems inadequate.

How can you encapsulate so much about yourself in a few hundred words?

Thankfully, LinkedIn has made the job much easier.

It gives a template, a space to write your bio, and a section to provide links to learn more about your work (or if you choose to market your products).

Perhaps because LinkedIn started as a resume sharing platform.

But now, it is emerging as a communication platform for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs (that includes authorpreneurs) to share ideas, find clients, and grow businesses.

Second only to Twitter in terms of making connections and growing your network, it is imperative to have a good LinkedIn Profile.

Why is it essential to have a good LinkedIn Profile?

Your LinkedIn profile is your landing page to manage your brand.

It is an excellent way to let people know who you are, what you stand for, and what you’re interested in.

It is your storyboard, where people can find you and stay updated on your activity.

Five ways LinkedIn profile helps you.

• To build your network.
• To establish you as an expert in your field.
• To manage your professional brand.
• To avail global opportunities.
• To track your professional milestones.

In a nutshell, your LinkedIn profile helps you get noticed.

Since your clients, recruiters and readers check your profile to know more about you, make sure your profile is complete and representative of you.

You need to optimize every touchpoint to build a following.

Let’s take them one by one.

Banner Image

Your banner is the prime real estate, which is the first thing people notice when looking at your profile.

You can use it effectively by bringing attention to what you want people to notice about you.

I have highlighted my books on my banner image, which I have created in Canva. It highlights my most important skill of being an author.

It also has my photo. A good profile photo increases the credibility of your profile and helps you stand out from the crowd.

LinkedIn users with a profile photo get up to 21 times more views than members without a photo.

You can also record and display a video on your profile introducing yourself, your achievement, and how you can help your clients/readers.

Tagline

Your tagline is the second most important thing people notice on your profile. Make it work for you.

My tagline is: Turn your big idea into a book with me in 30 days.

It explains my service in a sentece.

Read a few taglines and see which one stands out for you. Then tailor yours accordingly.

Featured

You can showcase work samples you are most proud of in the Featured section. It could be your posts, articles, newsletter, media or external links.

It is the most important section for marketing.

You can showcase as many items as you like, but I prefer three to keep it simple.

The three things you should have is:

1. A Free Offer
2. Your signature course offer
3. A call for subscription, often to your newsletter

Many people try to put too many things in the Feature section. That dissuades people from exploring. When you have only a few, people check them out.

In my case, they are likely to click at least one or two links.

They might click on the free book offer to take them to a post where I give the link to download Writer’s Toolkit.

They might check out my course Write Your Book In 30 Days.

Or they might click the newsletter link, which will take them to my Substack page, where they can read some of my articles and subscribe.

Conclusion

So many people are intimidated by LinkedIn. Particularly how to fill in the profile information.

The best way is to find a few profiles you like and build your own based on that. If you like mine, feel free to use it as a template.

Concentrate on three primary areas, Banner, Tagline, and Featured, and ignore the rest for the time being. You can always fill them in later.

This is the simplest way to build a good LinkedIn profile.

There are plenty of help articles on LinkedIn. Just google your question, and one or more articles will appear to solve your problem.

If you still have any questions you think I can help you with, ask them in the comments section.

Good luck.

See you on LinkedIn.

This is part 3 of the series of posts I am doing on LinkedIn.

If you are interested, here is a list of my other articles about LinkedIn.

One Cool Way to Grow Your Audience Beyond Your Wildest Dream

Lesson Learned During 30 Day LinkedIn Sprint

How To Get Started On LinkedIn

How To Write A Good LinkedIn Post

There are three types of content you can write on LinkedIn:

1. Post
2. Articles
3. Newsletters

In today’s lesson, I will talk about posts that are the most important and leave articles and newsletters for future issues.

LinkedIn posts are kind of mini-blog posts and they don’t take too long to write. Unlike Medium, they are short, punchy, and attention-grabber. They have a specific format, though. Once you learn it, you can create a post in less than 20 minutes.

LinkedIn is more about life lessons and personal stories rather than long-form Medium articles. They get a lot of views (clicks), likes, and comments because they are quick to read and easy to comment. It is also very easy to send people an invitation to connect or to get them to follow you.

If you have followers or connections, your post will go in front of all of them in their Newsfeed. Unlike Medium, LinkedIn’s algorithm is very good.

The LinkedIn algorithm favors posts compared to videos, images, or articles. Videos used to be big on LinkedIn, not anymore.

LinkedIn has over 660 million registered users and out of that only, 1% create content. The rest are all consumers, ready to consume good content.

Let’s figure out how to write a good LinkedIn post. But before that, we need to dissect a LinkedIn post.

Anatomy of a LinkedIn Post

A good LinkedIn post has a special structure.

It has a First Line, a black line, a third line, and a ‘…see more’ button.

Let’s have a look at them one by one.

First Line

The first line is super important. It is usually a hook to grab the readers. Here are some examples:

The traditional path in life is broken:

Attention is the new digital currency.

The worst LinkedIn content is:

You’re looking at a quitter.

I almost quit blogging two weeks ago. — Tim Denning.

The first line could be a question as well. Here are some examples:

Have I told you this before?

Not a bad picture, right? — Niharika

Are you trapped in a ‘bullshit job’?

Second Line

Usually, after the grabbing statement, the second line is kept blank, intentionally. The reason is, that the LinkedIn feed shows only three lines. After that, there is a ‘…see more’ button. By keeping the second line blank and giving partial information in the third line the LinkedIn writers invite the readers to click the ‘…see more’ button.

Third Line

The third line is to inject drama into the equation. Give them a partial answer to the question. Or write a leading statement that intrigues the readers.

See More Button

The “…see more” button is on the right-hand side of the text. Your third-line statement should entice readers to click that button. When they do, it is counted as a view.

When readers click the ‘…see more’ button they see 3 to 10 short paragraphs of writing which they will gobble up in less than 30 seconds.

I will get to how to write those paragraphs in the ‘do’ part of this article but first I want to give you a list of ‘don’ts.’

Because the ‘don’ts’ are more important than ‘dos.’ They can mess up your posts and they will get lost in the vast sea that is LinkedIn.

But if you take the advice and don’t use any of the ‘don’t,’ your posts will be circulated to thousands of readers.

So here the are:

The ‘Don’ts’ Of LinkedIn Posts

There are a number of things you must not do on LinkedIn. I want to list them right in the beginning.

• Don’t write a wall of text.
• Don’t have big paragraphs. No more than 3 lines per paragraph.
• Don’t write long posts. 1 to 10 paragraphs are the best.
• Open with a powerful line or a question.
• Don’t write more than one post a day.
• Don’t use stock photos. Any photo which features you is great, including selfies. On LinkedIn, people want to see your real-self.
• Don’t share other’s people’s stuff on LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn’t promote those.
• Don’t provide links in the body of the post.
• Don’t share your Medium articles. A better strategy is to break them up and make several posts from them.

Now that we have got ‘don’t’ out of the way, let’s concentrate on ‘dos’ of LinkedIn

Types Of Posts You Can Write

Most people think LinkedIn is a platform for professionals and you can only write about work-related topics. That might have been true a few years ago. Not anymore. In the past few years, LinkedIn has become a platform for everyone. It is not like Facebook, thanks heaven for that, but you can write a variety of posts on it and get a lot more views and engagement than you ever can on Medium.

True, you get paid on Medium but on LinkedIn, you can sell your services and products through the power of content writing. No hard sell required. You just be yourself and share your knowledge. Soon, people see you as an authority in your field.

In the rest of the article, I share several examples from my writing to show the different kinds of posts you can write.

Once again, I am no LinkedIn guru and what I am sharing below is my humble opinion. To me, my success on the platform is phenomenal, but it is nothing compared to what others are experiencing.

With little ado, here they are:

1. Your Story

Your story is always a good point to start. Start with your story. The rest will flow from there.

2. Change Story

The other kind of stories you can tell are the change stories. Where you changed or something changed by the action you took. Here is an example:

3. Lessons Learned Story

This is the third kind of personal story you can tell, where you have gone through some tough times or experiences and learned lessons from them.

4. Your Industry Update

You can share snippets of information about your industry and educate the readers like that. These kinds of posts demonstrate your knowledge in your field and establish your expertise amongst your readers.

5. Polls

Polls do extremely well on LinkedIn. They get propagated a lot. I like them because they give you excellent real-time data from engaged viewers. The following two polls helped me design the ‘Write Your Book’ course.

6. Videos

Videos used to be huge on LinkedIn, but for some reason they do not have the same kind of reach as they used to. But they still have their uses. I created my first video ever to introduce myself.

You should try to create a video once a week or so, because it gets people to know you better. Seeing you in flesh and blood, sharing a tip, or showing a bit of your life is a great way to build a bond with your audience.

Anastasia Forrest, a realtor, and the author plays guitar and sings a song once a week.

7. Things From Everyday Life

You can pick any aspect of your life and write a short post about it. You never know which one is going to hit the cord with the audience. I wrote about my journal writing. I thought little of it as I have written about it on Medium so many times. But it turned out my most viewed post.

8. Travel Stories

Travel stories always generate a lot of interest. Going away on a holiday is not a problem at LinkedIn. With Medium, I had to pre-write a bunch of articles and schedule them before going on a vacation. But with LinkedIn, I can just share where I am and what I am doing. They not only make an interesting read but also give me an opportunity to write something different, or something off the cuff.

9. Inspirational Posts

Inspirational posts are big on LinkedIn. They always get a lot of engagement. People genuinely like reading them and feel inspired. And they are very easy to write.

Have a read of the one below. Pay special attention to the white space and word art (symmetry) which attracts the

10. Provide A Solution

11. Tell stories

Tell brief stories to illustrate your point or to entertain. They make people stop scrolling and read. Make sure they are not too long and don’t have big paragraphs. Here are two of mine. Apologies, I couldn’t fit the complete stories in the images. The links are below if you want to read them.

Story Of A Florist

Conclusion

I only have been writing on LinkedIn since January 2022, but in three and a half months I have written over 100 posts. In future articles, I will share more examples with you. But for the time being, I think I have given you enough to get started.

Now it is your turn.

Follow me on LinkedIn if you like. I will read your post and leave you a comment.

If you are interested, here is a list of my other articles about LinkedIn.

How To Get Started On LinkedIn

Lesson Learned During 30 Day LinkedIn Sprint

One Cool Way to Grow Your Audience Beyond Your Wildest Dream

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Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

Ever since I wrote the article, How I am Using LinkedIn To Establish Myself As A Writer three months ago (and the subsequent article Lesson Learned During 30 Day LinkedIn Sprint), I have been repeatedly told by readers that they want to write on LinkedIn but don’t know how to start.

Besides, many people don’t see LinkedIn as a writing platform and have no idea of its reach.

I have decided to write a series of articles to get you started and help you understand the platform a bit more.

I am not a LinkedIn Guru, but someone who took part in Tom Kueglar’s LinkedIn 30 Days Sprint and benefited a lot from it.

As a writer, you can’t ignore LinkedIn. If Medium is the place to practice your writing, then Linked is the place to market yourself as a writer. Without a market, you won’t be able to become a professional writer.

Before I give you the first lesson to get started on LinkedIn, let me bust a few myths.

Myth #1 LinkedIn is only for professionals.

That might have been the case a couple of years ago, but not anymore. Although it may still not be like Facebook, where you can post pictures of your cat and the patio flowers.

As per LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is a platform for anyone who is looking to advance their career. This can include people from various professional backgrounds, such as small business owners, students, and job seekers.

You can use it to:

• Enhance your professional reputation
• Get spotted by headhunters and CEOs
• Build connections in your industry
• Stay up to date with industry news
• Increase the visibility of your brand
• Stay in touch with colleagues
• Find work as a freelancer
• Do job searches
• Sell your courses.

What LinkedIn provides you is a unique opportunity to showcase your expertise, whether it is as a writer, coach, business builder, stay-at-home mum, money manager, or fitness instructor.

If you want to sell your services, LinkedIn is the place where you can do it. Previously, you would build a website and have content there to establish yourself as an expert.

Well, we all know that nobody goes to websites anymore. There are far too many of them around for you to stand out.

On LinkedIn, you get noticed.

With over 660 million registered users worldwide (compared to 60 million on Medium), of which 303 million are active on a monthly basis, you can’t afford to ignore the platform.

Besides, 90 million of these users are senior-level influencers, and 63 million are in decision-making positions (Source: LinkedIn Statistics for 2022).

Myth #2 LinkedIn is only useful if you are looking for work.

The real purpose of being active on LinkedIn is to share your knowledge and expertise so that people see you as an expert in your field.

Where do you think the world’s best minds are active at? Two places – Twitter and LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn isn’t just a tool that’s used to search for a new job or connect with your employees. It’s a place for users to show off their expertise around a subject and grow relationships with like-minded people.” — Krystal Wu, HubSpot.

Even if you are not looking for work, startup CEOs and headhunters might be looking for you. You might find opportunities to collaborate which might not have crossed your mind before.

Myth #3 You should only post work-related content on LinkedIn

Surprisingly, the content that does well on LinkedIn is:

• personal stories
• life lessons
• how-to information
• industry news
• quick tips

All this should be succinct and helpful. Topics that encourage productivity, leadership, and professional success also do well on LinkedIn. Information presented in the listicle format that is easily digestible also does well.

Here are a few examples:

5 Easy Step To Get You Started

Okay, I am going to give you 5 step easy start. This week, just concentrate on these five things (four if you already have a LinkedIn account).

1. Create a LinkedIn account, if you haven’t got one already. Fill in as much information as you can to get started. (I will write a post about how to create a good LinkedIn profile a little later. At this point, keep your focus on getting started on the platform.
2. Each day spend 15 -20 minutes reading the posts you come across. As soon as you find one that you like, stop, read, and either ‘like or leave a comment. The LinkedIn algorithm will take notice of that and send you more posts like that.
3. Search the people whose work you like. Go to their profile and follow them. When you like any of their posts, take a moment and leave them a comment.
4. Write at least 10–20 comments a day on other people’s posts. Interacting with others on their posts is more important than writing on the platform.
5. Familiarise yourself with the platform before writing on it. Each platform has its own subtleties and nuances. You should get familiar with them.

In my next post, I will show you how to write posts on LinkedIn.

If you like, you can follow me on LinkedIn by clicking here.

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PS: If this article intrigued you, you might like these articles too.

• How I am Using LinkedIn To Establish Myself As A Writer
• Lesson Learned During 30 Day LinkedIn Sprint