Last month I wrote I am using LinkedIn to establish myself as a writer. The article generated a lot of interest. Since I just finished the LinkedIn30daysSprint with Tom Kuegler, it’s time to update you on what I learned.

First my achievements:

• I wrote 30 posts in 30 days and didn’t get stuck even a single time.
• My followers/connection numbers increased by 300, and it is at 1625 at the moment.
• I made several friends.
• I started a newsletter on LinkedIn, which attracted 500+ subscribers in 3 weeks.
• I announced a sprint of my own, ‘Write Your Book Sprint,’ and several participants enrolled for it, and I haven’t even written a sales page or designed the course yet.

I hadn’t envisioned I would achieve so much in 30 days. It is unbelievable what incredible results the focused effort can bring.

What did the Sprint Involve

The Sprint participants had to make two main commitments:

• Write a post every day.
• Engage with other participants’ posts.

Since the number of participants was very high, we were divided into three groups. Each day we commented on our group members’ posts.

You might think they were forced comments, but in fact, the activity generated some great discussions.

Reading 20–30 posts a day and then saying something helpful to add to the discussion was harder than writing my post and took much longer than anticipated.

Personal stories generated the most engagement for most of the participants.

Each day I spent close to two hours in engagement, and that was where I realized the strengths of LinkedIn is.

The Medium used to be like that previously but since the change of algorithm, reach has dwindled and so has the engagement from the readers.

LinkedIn has one great advantage over Medium; you can directly message the other person and make meaningful connections. If you take the sales out of the equation for a second, it is a great way to meet and stay connected to people with the same interests as you.

If You are a sparse LinkedIn User, these insights can help you do well on the platform.

1. Write a post every day. The LinkedIn algorithm favors the consistent creators (like all other platforms), and you are seen as an authority by your followers.
2. Publish your post early in the morning, preferably between 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM, US time. That is when most people are active on the platform if you miss that, later in the afternoon, between 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM and at night after dinner is the good windows to post.
3. Spend more time engaging with other people’s posts than writing your own. When you comment on someone else’s post, all the people from their network see your comment. If they like your comment, you can thank them and send a request to connect. This way, you can grow your network with like-minded people who already like your work.
4. Don’t use any scheduling software to post. LinkedIn prefers people type their posts in the interface. Scheduling software will adversely impact your reach.
5. Don’t batch write either. It takes away the spontaneity from your writing. Instead, write your posts the night before or the day you are going to publish.
6. Have a clear idea of your business and what you are offering. Then write your post in that niche.
7. Engage with people in your niche area, particularly those with a big following.
8. Follow the 80/20 rule. Give free advice 80% of the time, sell 20% of the time.
9. Practice copywriting. Say more with fewer words.
10. Experiment with different types of posts so you can see which ones feel right to you and which ones get the most engagement.
11. Be patient. Some posts will bomb, and others will skyrocket. So, learn by doing, show up daily, and let the algorithm work its magic.
12. Complete your profile because it helps the right people find and connect with you.
13. Store a few quotes to use on days you are too busy or too tired to write. Then, use the quotes as your posts on those days.
14. Focus on one area of improvement at a time. For your first week, you might focus on the top lines as engaging as possible. For another week, you might focus on how you format text in your posts. Later, you might ensure you end your post with something punchy. Don’t try to master everything all at once. Give yourself time to learn.
15. Have one place to put all your ideas for writing that you can easily access on the go. One participant suggested using index cards held together with a clip. I liked it very much and started using that. You could use a tiny notepad or Evernote etc.

How to approach writing on LinkedIn

My approach to writing on LinkedIn was different than most people’s.

• I didn’t go on the platform to impress anyone or make connections to sell them something. I concentrated on learning and getting better at writing.
• I asked for people’s opinions by polls and regular questions at the end of a post which helped me with my writing projects. People generally give you an honest opinion and are happy to participate in polls.
• I set aside 20 minutes each day to publish and close to an hour for engagement. I would have kept going had I not set myself a limit to writing comments.
• I noticed I had become a much better commenter from all the practice. NOw I am not afraid of leaving comments on viral posts or posts by well-known Industry figures.
• I realized it is much better to work in groups. Your group members support you, and you support them. You get to appreciate some very different perspectives. You get a daily appreciation for your work which keeps you going.

In Closing

Tom Kuegler is starting another sprint in March. It is worth participating in it, if you want to experience success quickly.

If you are already on LinkedIn and want to connect, my handle is www.linkedin.com/in/neeramahajan. I will be happy to engage with your posts if they interest me.

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

I have been writing on Medium for almost 18 months now. All this time, I had paid no attention to growing my audience. I have roughly 2600 followers, but I am aware most of them don’t read my articles.

I have a small number of subscribers to my publication Authorpreneurs, who get, on average, two articles a week from me in their inboxes. These are my niche audience who are interested in writing books. I write articles to provide them with writing, publishing, and marketing information.

In addition, I have been writing a Substack newsletter for more than 14 months. It is growing at a snail’s pace, but the subscribers are my die-hard fans who read everything I write and occasionally let me know if they liked (or disliked) a particular piece. 

Three weeks ago, I started writing on LinkedIn regularly. Imagine my surprise when I watched my connection swell, 10–60 comments on my post and whooping 490+ subscribers to my newsletter that is just two weeks old. 

What is going on here?

It is not that I have become a great writer overnight. I am still the mediocre writer who fights her daily demons to write a decent enough piece for publication.

But there are a few things in play here, though.

LinkedIn Algorithm

LinkedIn is at a point where Facebook was in 2012. LinkedIn wants to grow, and it wants its users to grow as well. So any post you write, if it gets a little interaction (as little as five comments in the first hour), LinkedIn sends it not only to all your connections and your connections’ connections and anybody who comments, their connections too. 

If your post gets a whole lot of interactions then LinkedIn sends it to everyone on the platform.

Of course, it is my hypothesis (I have no inside knowledge) but I have been seeing the magic happen for a few days now.

This recent one I watched unfolding was mind-boggling.

If your post gets a whole lot of interactions then LinkedIn sends it to everyone on the platform. 

This is exactly what happened to a fellow writer Sasja Nieukerk-Chomos who is also participating in 30 Days LinkedIn Sprint with me where we writing a post a day.

Sasja Nieukerk-Chomos wrote a post and it got close to 800 likes and hundreds of comments in the first hour. Then the post went viral. It now has 34,447 likes and 2679 comments and perhaps close to a million views (I can’t see the view counts only Sasja can).

Sasja Nieukerk-Chomos on LinkedIn: #leadership #psychologicalsafety #linkedin30daysprint | 2679…
18 years ago today my father took his own life. He was so damn tired. He was only 60 years old. My father was a…www.linkedin.com

Of course, the content of the post, the connection with the workplace (LinkedIn is a platform for professionals) and the touchpoints of the story helped but I haven’t seen it happening on Medium.

So in short, growth on LinkedIn is phenomenal at the moment.

LinkedIn Newsletters

I had my own taste of unbelievable growth. I started a newsletter on Linkedin last week which picked up 230 subscribers with the very first issue. This week when I sent the second issue of the newsletter the subscriber numbers swelled to 490 plus. 

It is not possible to get this many subscribers unless LinkedIn is promoting the newsletters. LinkedIn introduced newsletters just a couple of months ago, needless to say, they want more people to take advantage of that. But they are being more successful with it than any other platform including Medium or Substack. 

The reason is that most of the users on LinkedIn are professional and they are interested in certain topics. My newsletter is about writing, creativity, and productivity which are the right niche for the LinkedIn audience. 

Takeaway: if you want to start a newsletter think about LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Polls

Now here is the most interesting of all the observations. 

Last week, I wrote a little post asking the audience to help me choose the book cover for my next book. 

My coach suggested that I should formulated the post as questions in a poll, so that I could use the algorithm to advertise my book for free.

I used her idea about a book writing sprint I want to run. So I wrote a post and added a poll at the end of it. 

I have 857 views on the post so far. It will run for another six days. That’s for the power of running polls on LinkedIn. Now hundreds of LinkedIn users know I am creating a program. They feel part of its formulation, and I have people ready to take the course. They are even helping me shape the course. 

It is what my coach calls a win-win-win.

Takeaway

Tom Kuegler once wrote You Can Dominate Every Social Media Platform If You Do These 3 Things: 

1. Write five times per week.
2. Respond to every comment.
3. Follow everyone who interacted with you in any way.

I am applying this approach to LinkedIn and it is working. 

I will keep sharing my LinkedIn learnings with you. Stay tuned.

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For more tips and motivation, subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer.

A website is an absolute must for authors. As soon as a reader finds a new author, the first thing they do is check their website.

Your website is your home on the internet. Your readers should always be able to find you there. It is the best way of connecting with your readers outside social media. They can find out what books you have written, which one is coming next, and how to contact you. If you are blogging, they can learn from your articles.

It is one location that you have complete control over.

Social media platforms can change their rules anytime (like Facebook has done a few times now), and you can lose your audience in a single day. But a website is your own real estate in the cyberworld.

Besides, social media content has a shelf life of a few minutes, whereas your books, articles, and announcements are always there.

Your website doesn’t need to be complicated; simple is often better. Three key areas to focus on when designing and building an author site are:

1) Your books. These should always be the main focus. It would help if you had your books displayed in a way that is easy to understand and navigate, especially with a series. Each book should include the cover, description, and purchase links. This is also a great place to highlight any awards or reviews to help sell your books.

2) Gaining newsletter subscribers. This should be your second focus. Offer something of value, such as a free copy of your book or a short course to entice readers to subscribe to your newsletter. It is better done through a landing page.

3) Your information. Readers want to know more about you, so include an ‘About’ section that showcases your personality, information about contacting you, and links to your social media accounts.

If you have had any experience building websites, you will know they could be a nightmare. You spend hours and hours solving technical issues which seem trivial but end up giving you sleepless nights.

But my biggest problem was to figure out what should an author’s website look like. Unfortunately, there is not enough information out there, and whatever is there was contradictory and didn’t address a lot of my requirements.

I went to website design companies specializing in building author websites, but they asked $5000–$6000. I was not prepared to invest that much money into the website. So I started looking for other options.

Luckily I came across a managed solution that had all I needed on my website. It is built by a thriller author Nick Stephenson and his team, and I am very happy with my new site.

According to Nick, an authors website should have seven essential components:

1. Home Page
2. About Page
3. Books Page
4. Call To Action
5. Free Book Offer
6. Invitation to Join Your Book Review Team
7. Blog

Home Page

The Home page is the most visited page of an Author’s Website. Therefore, it must grab the readers’ attention while at the same time giving them enough information about you and your work.

You don’t need to write volumes about yourself or your books. Images work much better. Please check out my Home Page, and let me know whether or not it is inviting and gives you all the information you need.

About Page

About page is the second most important page on an Author’s site. It is where readers get to know you better. You should include here everything you want to share with them.

My About page has my photos, a bit of blurb about my writing history, and my second passion — sketches.

I

Books Page

Your “Books” page is the third-most visited page on your site. Most people will enter your site via the homepage. They would want to check out what other books you have written.

If you want to make direct sales of your books, you will do that from the Books page. For that reason, it is going to need most of the work.

You need to make sure you have a straightforward way to display your entire catalog. Each book should have a clear description and prominent “buy” buttons.

Free Book Offer

This is also the landing page where you offer a free book (or other goodies) so that readers get to know your writing style, and you start building your reader base so that you can announce your future books to them.

Invitation to Join Your Book Review Team

As you will be writing more books, you should build a review team to get to read your book first and provide you feedback. They are your beta readers as well as the ones most likely to give reviews on your book sales page.

Call For Action

You should have a call to action to join your newsletter at the end of each page.

Blog

Your blog is where you regularly publish to stay in touch with your readers. You can choose what you want to write there. I write articles primarily. I publish all my articles first on my blog and then on Medium, thus keeping the ownership of my intellectual property.

Final Words

My website still needs a lot of work, but I am happy where it is at the moment. I hope it is inviting and proving all the information my readers need.

I built it mostly myself, using a WordPress-based hosting service (nrdly.com) that has author-specific templates.

If you need any advice or have any questions regarding building or updating your website, ask them in the comments section. I am not an expert but I will try to answer them to the best of my knowledge.

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You can subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer.

I am participating in a 30 Days LinkedIn sprint with 80 other participants run by 

Tom Kuegler

. We are going to publish 30 posts in 30 days. It just started on 10 January, and I have already seen some fantastic results.

My first post, I Hate Sprints, got 1877 views and 58 comments. Even when posting daily on the platform, I didn’t get this kind of engagement. Before that, I never had more than 600 views and occasional 1 -2 comments.

Image by the author

Compared to other platforms, it is much easier to grow on LinkedIn. In three days, I generated 3215 views and gained 33 new followers.

Just a few days ago, I struggled to come up with personal stories. It felt as if my well had gone dry, but as I read other people’s stories, it triggered my memories, and now I have many more stories ready to share.

I found personal writing is much easier on LinkedIn as the audience is primarily professionals and refined, unlike Facebook and Twitter, where some troubled people try to put everyone down.

Short-form storytelling works much better on LinkedIn, as you get straight to the point.

Why participate in a sprint?

Why not do it yourself?

Because sprints work.

Tom Kuegler found that the first hour after posting on LinkedIn is crucial for the success of your post. For example, if you get five comments in the first hour, the LinkedIn algorithm thinks your post is engaging and promotes it.

Working in a cohort where everyone posts around the same time and engages with other participants’ posts, you can quickly get five or more comments within an hour.

Viola, you get LinkedIn machinery behind your post!

My 1877 views were nothing compared to another participant, whose Day 2 post had more than 10,000 views in 24 hours.

How LinkedIn Can Help You Establish As A Writer

LinkedIn is one platform that is most suitable for writers. Even more than Medium, Vocal, Substack, or Twitter. It has a unique blend of all the ingredients you will need to have an author career.

• You get way more views and fans on LinkedIn than Medium in way less time.
• You can create a useful post in less than 20 minutes which can go viral within 24 hours.
• The more people will see your posts, the more they will know your writing style and the value you can provide.
• LinkedIn allows you to send a newsletter (a brand new feature released just this year), which means you can build your fan base right on the platform without urging readers to join your other newsletter.
• You can win freelance work right on the platform. Most of the companies come looking for freelancers on LinkedIn.
• You can meet other writers and collaborators who could enhance your writing career much faster than working by yourself.
• You can market your products without getting penalized (most Medium publications don’t like when you promote your services).

Takeaway

For the next 30 days, I will be concentrating on posting on LinkedIn and sharing my learning here.

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

Since everyone is affected by the diminishing views on Medium, LinkedIn could be an alternative for us as a writer.

In 2008, Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, wrote one of the most famous blog posts in internet history: “1000 True Fans.”

Kevin’s 1000 True Fans concept was made popular by many gurus of online audience-building and monetization, just like Malcolm Gladwells made Anders Ericsson’s 10,000-hour practice rule popular through his book Outlier.

Kevin Kelly’s idea was simple but novel. He wrote:

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

He presented this concept at a time when creators were doing anything they can, including spending a lot of money to attract as many clicks as possible to their websites.

Clicks were considered the equivalent of ‘foot traffic” in brick and mortar stores, and the online entrepreneurs and creators were obsessed with increasing the number of visits to their stores.

Kelly showed them an alternate way using simple math.

If you have a thousand fans and they buy $100 worth of product in a year, you earn $100,000.

Of course Kelly had two criteria:

But this simple math had a major flaw.

Many creators, in fact, thousands of them, didn’t even have 1000 followers, let alone 1000 true fans.

I am one of them.

I have been writing online for almost three years now my email subscriber number is still in two digits.

My LinkedIn follower number is, 930

My Facebook followers are just 270

My Instagram followers are merely 80.

Most of them are family and friends. They are not buyers. I can’t launch a book or a course and expect to make a sale.

But then something happened last month.

I asked a simple question on my three social media platforms.

One person responded. She chose option one.

She wrote, “Please write the first one, and stick to basics. I will buy it because you explain things in simple terms.”

That one reader gave me all the confidence I needed to write the book.

I wrote the book for her.

And she bought it.

It was a big thing for me that someone paid $2.99 to buy the book that I wrote.

That single true fan gave me more confidence than 2.1 followers on Medium and 1000+ followers on social media.

You don’t need 1000 true fans. You just need one.

I don’t know how many followers I need to get 1000 true fans. Fifty thousand? One million? Many million?

I don’t know whether I will ever get them.

But I have learned that I don’t need them. I just need one person to believe in me, to buy my book, or to take my course to get me started.

Having a single buyer or client can give you enough confidence to get you going. The key to online business isn’t skill or even knowledge.

Instead, it’s confidence.

Most of us start with fancy titles like “book coach, yoga teacher, life coach, etc.” when in fact, we’re still right on the bottom rung of the ladder.

When a single client pays us even a tiny amount of money, it gives us just the boost we need to keep going. Aiming for a thousand clients, in the beginning, freezes us in our tracks.

I sold 18 copies of my book on the first day. I know six of those were my family and friends, but the rest 12 were true buyers.

I am starting my second book.

Once again, I asked my tiny little following, would they like to read the story of my journey from competitive to creative life in the form of conversations between my inner critic and me?

Three people responded in the affirmative.

I am going to write the book for them.

You don’t need 1000 true fans, you just need one.