Building A Kickass LinkedIn Content Strategy: The Ultimate Guide

What you need to post on LinkedIn to take your personal branding efforts to the next level.

If you’re looking to start an entrepreneurial venture, switch to a new career, publish a book, or do just about anything that involves your professional skills, the most powerful platform to make a noise on is LinkedIn.

You can nurture a loyal audience, build social proof, establish credibility, and claim thought leadership in your chosen field.

All of these are supremely valuable assets when you’re about to take a major leap in your career, and LinkedIn can help you with them.

Don’t believe me? Here are some stats to help you picture the scenario better.

• Nearly 830 million users from more than 200 countries are on LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn gets about 31.16% of traffic from the US. India follows at 6.97% and the United Kingdom at 6.15%.
• The LinkedIn community represents 10+ million active jobs and access to 9+ million companies.
• There are more than 100,000 articles published every week.

The organic reach potential of the platform is insanely high. Case in point: here’s a screenshot of the analytics of some of my recent LinkedIn posts from the past week —

Notice how every post has more than 15,000 views, whereas my follower count on LinkedIn has just breached the 15,000-mark. In 2022, LinkedIn is the only platform on the internet where my average views are more than the number of people who follow me.

If you haven’t started posting on LinkedIn, now is the best time to start. This post will be your ultimate guide to building a kickass content strategy on LinkedIn so you can start publishing posts to build a stellar personal brand online.

Ready to get started? Let’s dive right in.

Please note: The following tips are applicable only after you’ve optimized your profile. If you haven’t done it yet, here’s a guide on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for lead generation.

Step One: Establish Content Brackets

When you’re targeting building a personal brand on LinkedIn, the first question you should ask yourself is: What should I post about?

The answer lies in what your goal is with LinkedIn branding. Do you hope to get new clients for your freelance business? New customers for your SaaS product? More speaking gigs?

Based on your goal, you can optimize your content into a few brackets, as shown below:

• Life as <a student of your undergrad college>
• Life at <your current role/company>
• Insights from a recent personal or professional experiment you performed.
• Insights from a recent personal or professional experiment a student or client of yours performed.
• Advice related to your chosen profession.
• Some beginner mistakes people make in their career in your chosen profession.
• Personal stories that highlight some key personality traits you want to showcase on LinkedIn.

Step Two: Determine Key Post Types

Based on how you formulate the above content brackets, here are a few key post types you can experiment with —

1. Stories that evoke sentiments

• How I Made to <your dream college>
• How my family reacted when I <broke into your dream career>
• A graduation day picture with a message about your key lessons, reflections, or takeaways that add value to the reader.

2. Statistics related to your chosen profession

• How much time it takes to <achieve a particular desired milestone in your chosen profession>
• Your best month in your profession where you overcame some incredible odds.
• X% of <people in your chosen profession> fail because <reason>

3. Surprise and contrarian opinions

• Life is not as rosy at <a desirable company or institute related to your chosen profession> as you think.
• The way you’re tackling <some pertinent problem related to your chosen profession> might be why you’re not getting results.

4. Personal and professional experiments

• I sent five connection requests every day on LinkedIn for a month. Here’s how my network grew.
• I took a cold shower every day for three months. Here’s why you should never do the same.
• I built my website with no code in 3 hours. Here are ten reasons you should consider the same.

5. Analysis of case studies

These are the type of stories where you break down the success of some expert in your chosen profession and list some actionable takeaways for the reader. Some example posts:

• How a 21-year-old college dropout built a 7-figure online business from his bedroom.
• This 65-year-old Unicorn founder discovered her passion after retiring from her lifelong job.
• What this YouTuber does to make a 5-figure income for every video.

6. Comparisons

These are the type of stories where you post a comparison related to a personal or professional growth you achieved. These can drive a lot of engagement and help the audience relate more to your story.

These types of posts are also the best cases where you can use a picture (for example, two years ago vs. now) to connect your face to your personal brand without worrying it might be clickbait.

Step Three: Start Posting

Now that you have a clear picture of what you want to post about, the next step is to start posting.

Stay tuned for more if you’re wondering what post structure and type to use, when to post, and how to reach your target audience. The next article in the series will discuss the ideal post structure that will get you tons of views.

Note that I have prepared a detailed guide to help you ace the LinkedIn game. Grab your copy here.

Final Words

LinkedIn, the social media platform for professionals, is currently investing hugely in its creators. This is one of the best times in the history of LinkedIn to start posting fairly regularly there and build your personal brand.

The first step to doing that is to define a content strategy aligned with your goals on the platform. Summing up, here are the key post types you can make on LinkedIn to start your journey:

1. Stories that evoke sentiments
2. Statistics related to your chosen profession
3. Surprise and contrarian opinions
4. Personal and professional experiments
5. Analysis case studies
6. Comparisons

What other post types have garnered huge engagement for you on LinkedIn? Do share the links and your takeaways from them in the comments below.

Please note that this article is part of a 4-episode series on how to build your personal brand on LinkedIn. Grab The Ultimate LinkedIn Guide for immediate access to premium content on how to ace the LinkedIn game.

If you’re looking for more help in getting started with LinkedIn, here are a few resources for you: