How I Built 100k Followers in a Year
My principles for sustainably exceptional LinkedIn growth—that you can begin implementing right now.
Update December 2025: I wrote this quite a while ago, and there have been some updates to my philosophy since. However, it’s still very useful, so don’t let that stop you from reading it.
I grew from 0 to 100,000 LinkedIn followers in less than 12 months.
Within the same year I started posting, LinkedIn allowed me to go from a part-time college student walking dogs to making over $10,000/month.
Almost exactly a year after starting to post consistently (July 2022), I made nearly $30,000 in a single month through income streams deriving from my LinkedIn presence (mostly ghostwriting).
I did this all on my own, with almost zero prior social media experience, minimal coaching from others, and completely self-initiated.
This wasn’t a one-off, either. I’ve successfully applied my learnings with over 20 different companies whose leaders I’ve ghostwritten for and countless others I’ve coached.
I have skin in the game because I don’t only actively do it for myself—now having well over 200,000 followers—but I actively apply it for some of the world’s most impactful people.
I have written for creators with much bigger audiences than me, managed LinkedIn for founders of some of the world’s fastest-growing startups, and just a plethora of people with unfathomably high net worth.
In this newsletter, I’ll explain the exact strategies I used to make all of this possible in five key steps.
Now, keep in mind that this guide isn’t a direct play-by-play of what I did. I’ve grown as a creator over time, and I don’t believe in everything I used to do to get to this point.
So, you're not only getting my playbook for extraordinary results, but you’re also getting the benefit of all my hindsight.
If you just do what I tell you, you can build a fanatically loyal and incredibly high-value audience without suffering the scapes and bruises I had to endure to acquire the knowledge.
If you implement all of this consistently, it is literally impossible not to create equally transformative—or even more transformative—results in your life (sustainably and realistically).
Let’s dive in.
1. Mentally Preparing Yourself to Succeed
Succeeding on LinkedIn requires a few foundational mindset shifts.
Not caring about people’s opinions
Many people's biggest concern about posting on LinkedIn—since it’s done with their real name and face, and they’re probably connected to people they know already—is what people will think of them.
Y’know, their friends, former classmates, and coworkers. But it is completely bonkers whacko crazy to care about what other people think.
0% of those people are going to do any of this for you. Letting people’s opinions prevent you from fulfilling your potential—here or anywhere else—is the peak of self-destructive behavior.
Whether they think it’s admirable or cringe, you shouldn’t care.
Pushing through slumps and slow progress
If you’re like most people, you probably have not consistently applied yourself to something that requires an extraordinary amount of self-initiative
When you’re working through school or a job, however hard it is, you always know exactly what to do at all times. It is very simple to succeed in those things, irrespective of how much work it takes.
But with LinkedIn, nobody is holding your hand.
You can read posts like this for advice, but I can’t do the work for you (unless you’re willing to pay thousands of dollars for ghostwriting, which is definitely an option if you have the budget)
You will probably get zero likes when you post for the first time.
When you post the second time, you’ll get zero likes, and when you post the 10th time, you’ll probably—you guessed it—get zero likes.
But one day, you will get a like. And if you stay consistent, it’ll become 2-3 likes. Then 10. Then 20. Then beyond, which is exactly how it was for me.
You have to learn to be consistent no matter what. There’s no replacement for it. This is the nature of audience building.
Even if your first post gets 100 likes—which I hope it does—you will eventually have a slump to push through. And push through, you must.
2. Defining Your Niche
You need to define a specific niche in which to build expertise and authority.
This isn’t just so you know what to post about; it’s so you build true fans who know they can rely on you for insightful information on a specific subject.
It’s okay to experiment with this—I’ve switched my niche several times—but you ultimately want it to be aligned with something you can monetize, which is probably going to relate to the industry you already operate in.
Example: my friend from high school just got pre-seed funding from Y-Combinator for his cybersecurity startup, which he built from expertise in his day job (which he still works in).
He’ll soon start posting on LinkedIn, and he’ll post specifically about topics related to his business.
That’s where he has skin in the game, can build authority, and can translate the attention he creates to qualified leads for his business.
You don’t have to have a business to pick a niche, though. My sister posts sales content even though she’s an employee and currently has no meaningful ambitions to be an entrepreneur.
However, she has expertise in that field, and sharing sales content helped her just secure a new position at a company with a much higher growth ceiling.
I don’t want to put too much pressure on you, but it’s important to be very strategic about your niche on LinkedIn.
It’s very hard to start over if you build either a low-quality audience or an audience for something that you don’t want to write about in the future.
You can start a new channel on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. However, on LinkedIn, it’s tied directly to your identity. This makes it difficult to change course.
The best way to pick the right niche is to write something related to your current industry, broadly or specifically.
If you work at a software company, you can write about the specific thing your software does or the software industry as a whole.
Approaching niching this way means you’ll build a high-quality audience that’s ripe for monetization, just like Zach Wilson did with Data Engineering.
You’ll also notice that he has a huge audience despite being extremely technical.
This is proof that being as specific as possible isn’t an obstacle to building a large following; it’s actually highly conducive to it.
If you create generic content with the goal of “going viral,” you’ll be extremely forgettable.
But if you’re writing specifically on subjects in which you have skin in the game—a fundamental factor in being remarkable—you have a huge edge in standing out.
When I started on LinkedIn, I covered content writing and content marketing since I was a freelance B2B blog writer at the time.
My first post was about that, but eventually, I started posting about how I used AI for writing, which became very popular and since I built a huge following on LinkedIn, I just transitioned to focusing on the LinkedIn strategy itself since that’s what my business is.
3. Optimizing Your Profile
Your profile acts as the “landing page” of your LinkedIn presence.
When someone sees your post in their feed, your profile is the first place they go to get more context about you and what you do.
As a result, your profile needs to be optimized to capture attention and convert it. I’ll now go through each section of your profile and show you what to do with it.
Headshot
Your headshot is the first thing people see on your profile—both in your feed and when they open your page.
It’s not conceited to say that people are going to judge you by the quality of your profile picture. It’s just being realistic.
Showing up on LinkedIn with a low-quality phone photo is like showing up to a wedding in pajamas and flip-flops.
Sure, it’s better than nothing, but people will look at you sideways for doing it. So, do whatever it takes to take a good profile picture.
If you’re decent with a camera, feel free to set up your iPhone on a tripod, take a time selfie on a nice background, and spruce it up with Canva.
If you can get a professional headshot, I recommend you do.
A good headshot photographer doesn’t just have a nice camera, they understand lighting, angles, and expressions too, and will ensure you walk out with a world-class photo.
Finally, take 3-4 of your best candidates to Photofeeler, which is a free photo voting site where you can have people pick the best one (because crowd wisdom is much wiser than your own in this case; we’re really bad at picking our own photos).
Banner
If your profile picture is the first thing people see when opening your profile, your banner is the second.
One of my favorite banners is the one we made for UN/COMMON, one of our clients:
It’s on-brand, elegant, and showcases its branding in an elegant way.
Now, of course, you can write something that’s slightly more promotional without being cringe.
Justin advertises his course, but he does so in a way that just announces it exists and naturally inspires you to click through to his website to learn more about it instead of being like…
BUY MY COURSE NOW 50% OFF FOR A LIMITED TIME
That could give off flea-market vibes, which is the opposite of the premium brand he wants to foster.
He offers discounts, but he waits until you’re on the page to share that. To me, that makes it much more appealing.
Okay, now, how do you actually create your banner?
You can do it super easily in Canva—just search “LinkedIn banner” in its templates section, and a huge selection of pre-made templates with the perfect sizing will pop up.
You’re welcome to use another tool if you want, but Canva makes it so much easier.
I have a professional designer on my team who knows advanced tools like Figma and Photoshop, and we still use Canva as much as possible because it’s just so easy and has plenty of advanced features.
Tagline
Your tagline is the short introduction that accompanies your profile wherever it appears on LinkedIn.
This is arguably the second most important part of your profile—if not the most important—because it’s where you sum up the entire essence of your presence in 2-3 short sentences.
This is mine right now—though it’s obviously subject to change.
Leading with the “Founder” title provides some context of who I am. Then, “the highest level of LinkedIn strategy” talks about what I actually do.
And I think more than anything else, that’s what I exist to provide on LinkedIn and in this newsletter—non-generic, actionable LinkedIn strategy for people who need it.
My unfair advantage (in terms of standing out) is that I play LinkedIn at a higher level than pretty much anyone else because I manage not only my own presence but that of some of the world’s most cutting-edge organizations.
Of course, I emphasize that fact literally by clueing people in to who my clients are: highly-funded SaaSs (Series A, B, and C), YC-backed startups, and 8-figure marketing agencies.
That’s not exclusively who I serve, but it is the echelon of clients I serve. When I get to Series D/E startups and 9-figure companies, I’ll adjust it accordingly.
That’s just one example, however.
Adam Robinson, who, by the way, is one of the best examples of someone who absolutely understands how to leverage LinkedIn to its fullest potential, has a really excellent tagline.
Why? Because it…
Advertises his position as the CEO of a well-known company (authority)
Explain what his product is
Concisely explains what it does in a way that makes it instantly appealing
And you basically need to follow the same model.
Explain the value you offer in the most concise way humanly possible. Some people will give you set formulas to follow, which is fine to start with, but really, there is no formula for this.
Marketing is about sticking out. You need to frame your value in a way that makes you remarkable—literally, worth remarking upon.
I say, “I’m practicing LinkedIn strategy at the absolute highest level.” That is very interesting to people who are very interested in LinkedIn if I can back it up with evidence (which I do).
In the above example, Adam identifies people who visit your website.
That is incredibly monumentally freaking interesting to literally everyone with a landing page. And, of course, he shares his expertise related to that sort of thing in his posts.
Just explain your value proposition as concisely and as interesting as possible. There really is no formula for this beyond the principle of the thing. Just say something that’s interesting (while being honest, obviously).
Other stuff
Now, that’s not absolutely everything there is about profile optimization.
There’s also your…
CTA button
About section
Prior experiences
Recommendations
Featured links
Profile URL
…and more. But that would be getting way far away from the point of this newsletter, which is a (relatively) concise overview of the principles of building an increasingly massive, high-quality following.
I did teach that 80% of what matters is building an audience, and we’ll circle back to the other stuff in another issue of LinkedUp, so subscribe for more if you haven’t yet.
4. Publishing Content
Congratulations—you’ve now laid the foundation for a successful LinkedIn presence.
All that’s left for you to do is build your audience, which is the whole purpose of this post.
You do that with … posting.
So next, I’m going to show you how to do an amazing job at that.
What a good post isn’t
A good LinkedIn post is not what gets the most attention possible from the general public; it’s what gets the most attention possible from your target market.
Because just “getting engagement” on LinkedIn is not particularly hard. All you need to do is post ultra-generic engagement bait appealing to the widest possible audience.
I’m not going to cite specific examples (because I’m not going to shame anyone publicly), but currently…
A list of the top 10 AI tools
Links to free leadership courses from Harvard and Yale
Some cheesy quotes about motivation
…will always get engagement from someone.
If you’ve used LinkedIn for literally any amount of time, you will know exactly what posts I’m talking about (and the obscene amount of engagement they currently get).
But there’s a problem with these sorts of posts: they don't build true fans who appreciate your exercise in a meaningful way.
They are building unqualified, empty followers who will never convert into clients and customers. This is a sucker’s game.
Creating engagement slop is an almost literal Faustian bargain: you sell your profile’s soul in exchange for gratifying your ego, and like all short-term thinking, it always comes back to bite you.
So don’t learn this the hard way.
Listen to what I’m saying because there is a literal army of would-be gurus ready to sell some sort of solution for “going viral” in the fastest way possible.
It’s an easy sell for them—especially if they have perceived authority—because it appeals to your most primal desires to have strangers think you’re cool and funny, and maybe they’ll give you money, too (spoiler alert: they won’t).
Those people do not want you to make money; they do not care about you, your success, or your happiness.
I want you to use your LinkedIn presence to create financial freedom and play a literal infinite game that never stops making your life better year by year. Listen to what I am telling you because I actively do this for other people; I don’t just teach it.
So, every time you sit down to write a post, you should ask yourself:
“How can I provide as much value as possible to my target market in the most interesting way possible?”
Here’s how:
What does good content look like?
What does providing value actually look like? It’s easier to show you:
This is a post by one of my clients, Micah, covering a crucial topic in his industry: how your site’s user experience design has to be guided by hard data, or it’ll cost you a massive amount of sales.
It showcases his expertise by outlining specific ways ecommerce stores can improve their user experience design, and uses a nice visual to explain the idea concisely.
You can create a visual template like this (in your own style, of course) very quickly in Canva and reuse it every day.
Now, notice the example I’m using here isn’t some generic viral post with 50,000 likes; it’s a targeted post aimed at a specific audience with the goal of converting them into clients.
For the record, I have at least two posts with over 50,000 likes and, I think, a dozen or two with over 10,000 likes.
But most of them were very generic, aimed at a broad audience, and, as a result, did not create any meaningful amount of leads—basically zero, to be precise.
Justin Welsh, who has been the #1 LinkedIn creator for years, actually relayed the same information to me—his most “viral” posts have always produced zero or close to zero attributable sales.
This is not because going viral is inherently bad, but when something goes viral on LinkedIn, it’s usually because it appeals to a very broad—and thus diluted—audience.
That’s why I produce targeted content pretty much exclusively. As a result, I’m continually building a high-quality audience that’s ripe for monetization.
Speaking of monetization, this is another great post by my friend Connor Gillivan, who runs a search engine optimization agency.
He often uses visuals to explain concepts in SEO, and it’s almost always a big hit with his audience.
This post explains a pretty basic concept in SEO—he obviously can go into a lot more detail, and sometimes he does—but that’s on purpose because his target audience has limited SEO knowledge and contracts his SEO services for precisely that reason.
Jake Ward also creates SEO content, which is usually also high-level for similar reasons.
This post, where he showcased some of the most common SEO mistakes, was a great balance. It was understandable enough for a layman audience while technical enough to sufficiently showcase his expertise in his field.
If you think you can’t create graphics like this, you absolutely can. Again, Canva makes this super easy (though a little time-consuming).
If your goal is to make the best impression on a specific target audience—which it absolutely should be—I recommend taking the time to create visuals or have them created for you.
It’s ideal to post at least one or two each week in addition to the “normal” written content, which is obviously much more straightforward to produce.
Your goal isn’t likes and comments (though they will come if you’re doing a good job); it’s to impress a specific audience as thoroughly as possible.
The quality of your content is your remarkability factor.
It’s what makes people think about you after they’ve finished reading your post and eventually convert into customers of your products and services.
How often should you post?
This is why, starting out, you should only post as often as you can make quality content. Don’t feel pressured to post every away starting out.
Focusing on quality will be difficult at first, but you’ll immediately start building systems that enable you to produce quality content more efficiently.
The ultimate goal is quality content at the highest possible scale, 1-2x per day.
This means scaling the effect of impressing your target audience as much as possible, which leads to creating as much revenue as possible.
If you’re shoveling out generic viral bait every day, you will not convince people to invest in your products and services in any meaningful amount.
A huge rookie mistake to LinkedIn—and social media in general—is assuming all big accounts are rich. I can assure you that they are not.
I’m actually willing to bet that statistically, probably somewhere around 80-90% of LinkedIn accounts with over 100,000 followers produce less than $50,000 per year in revenue directly attributable to LinkedIn
In all likelihood, that’s being very generous.
But I’ve seen plenty of accounts with a few thousand followers producing well over 5 figures each month. How’s this possible?
Because those people are writing to impress people who can actually produce revenue for them. Write for the people who write your checks—that’s basically my catchphrase at this point.
Of course, being targeted doesn’t mean you can’t create a large audience. If you’re consistent enough—I’m talking over years—you can build tens of thousands of devoted fans (or more).
But please, please, please do not fall into the trap of trying to take shortcuts with empty viral bait. You only want true fans, not empty followers.
5. Building a Valuable Network
One of LinkedIn’s greatest strengths is how easily you can use it to create an unbelievably valuable network
It’s better at this than Twitter and YouTube, especially now.
As you grow your following of true fans who recognize your expertise in your niche, you also need to steadily build a network of people who make you smarter and passively create opportunities for you by virtue of being high-agency people.
This is just as important as building a quality following. Why?
Because having resourceful people in your network exposes you to much more valuable information and opportunities than riding solo.
This won’t necessarily get you tons of new followers (though it certainly won’t hurt), but it is extremely important for making the most of your time on the platform.
Because when you’re by yourself, you’re in a bubble, and thus suffer the extreme tunnel vision that comes from being one person doing one specific thing.
You need smart people around you, or you will be doomed to sit and watch people doing similar things to you grow much faster (because they are networking).
There is nothing more dangerous to your growth than existing purely in the extremely slim slice of awareness that is your daily life.
Here’s how to fix that by building a valuable network:
Connection requests
After you’ve optimized your profile and started producing quality content that establishes yourself as an authority in a given field, you’ve already done 90% of the work of networking (establishing yourself as someone worth networking with).
Valuable people don’t want to connect with people they perceive as non-valuable.
Not because they’re conceited (well, sometimes), but because their time is genuinely valuable, and they literally can’t afford to give it to everyone who asks.
But if you’re out doing cool stuff in public, valuable people will want you around them. It’s literally that simple.
So start sending connection requests to other people at a relatively similar audience level to you who are actively creating targeted, audience-facing LinkedIn content with the presumed goal of creating revenue rather than just farm engagement.
You don’t want to network with people who are just farming engagement.
They still haven’t unlocked the most basic principles of content creation, which means they will be a drag on your development. You want to network with smart people who are actually doing something productive with their content.
For example, Teddy Mitrosilis is someone I’ve become acquainted with recently.
He co-founded a B2B personal branding agency and uses his content to generate leads for it. This agency’s service is adjacent to mine, so it’s a really good person to network with—we both benefit from our mutual knowledge exchange.
How to “lock in” relationships
Once you’ve connected to a valuable person, move the relationship forward in some way; otherwise, it’s all for nothing.
A great way to do this is to offer to set up a 1:1 coffee chat—virtually by default, but literally if they happen to be near you. If you’ve succeeded in establishing yourself as a valuable resource, they are likely to accept.
My favorite strategy for retaining valuable people in your network is to get them all to participate in a strategy group chat.
The common goal is to trade LinkedIn growth expertise, but of course, it’s also an opportunity to swap knowledge about anything else.
As a bonus, you get the added bonus of being seen as a “connector” whom valuable people love and have a habit of rewarding.
But the best possible thing you can do? Combine both of these strategies.
Set up a 1:1 with them, then invite them to your nascent group chat. You’ve then created an extremely memorable interaction with you both, leading to a relationship that will last a very long time. And it’s so easy, too.
Reaching your “aspirational” connections
Now, there are inevitably going to be some people who you want to connect with, but there’s too much of a value gap between you two to make a relationship mutually beneficial in the same way your “normal” connections are.
This is because the perceived value you have to offer is much less than the perceived value they have to offer.
But it’s really important that you successfully connect with people who are ahead of you because networking with them and acquiring their knowledge will help you skip years—if not decades—of struggle and toil.
I don’t want to sound conceited, but just to hammer the point home, the reason I was making multiple six figures by the time I was 23 was specifically because I borrowed the knowledge of people who were ahead of me—both through their public material and direct interactions with them.
So it’s crucial that you not only identify these people but actively make moves to connect with them.
For example, I’d love to network with Alex Hormozi.
But at this point in time, even with everything I’ve accomplished thus far, the gap between my current perceived value and his perceived value is an actual Grand Canyon’s width in distance.
His talking to me for an hour would literally cost him tens of thousands of dollars in productivity—if not more.
But just because someone is currently out of your reach doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way forever.
For example, Justin Welsh is the person who inspired me to start posting on LinkedIn regularly.
I always wanted to network with him, but in my first several months of posting, the value gap between us, in his favor, was too large to make it realistic.
But over time, I closed that gap, and now we’re not only connected, but we’re actually friends who speak regularly.
How is that possible?
Well, there are three ways to connect with someone who’s (currently) very far ahead of you:
Giving them a lot of value for free
Offering a service that’s valuable to them
Paying them for their time
I’ll break down each.
Giving them a lot of value for free
Straight up, just do something for them that would cost a “normal” person money.
For example, Dickie Bush, who now makes $10,000,000 each year with his online businesses, got his first big break by getting a mention from Tim Ferris in his newsletter, who, if you don’t know, is a legendary podcaster.
He did this by compiling some of Tim Ferris’ knowledge from his extensive listening to his show and sharing it publicly, which Ferris then found and shared.
However, while potentially very effective, this method is less predictable because there’s no guarantee that they’ll see it.
Offering a service that’s valuable to them
My position as a LinkedIn agency owner puts me in the extremely unique position of having high agency people not only seek me out but literally pay me for their time.
This is not normal, but it’s reality. I get people worth millions—tens of millions—on calls to talk. Then, I send them an invoice.
On my current trajectory (with the case studies and referral network I’m building), I’ll eventually be doing this for people worth hundreds of millions—or billions (or at least the people who report to them).
How’s this possible?
Because I do something that not only do they not know how to do it, but they couldn’t be bothered to do it themselves even if they wanted to.
I will literally tell any prospective client, before I’ve even fully qualified them, anything they want to know about my operation (outside of actual confidential info like who my private clients are).
At Soleo, there are no secrets; there is only execution. And that’s what they pay me for.
But if you’re building a service from scratch, you won’t be able to benefit from this from the start.
You’ll be working—or should be working—on a performance basis for mediocre clients who run lukewarm businesses for which you struggle to get results (because their businesses' suckiness handicaps your own effectiveness as a contractor).
But those are the only people who will accept you starting out.
And if you grind that phase out and start building case studies, eventually, the heavy hitters will start knocking on your door (or they’ll at least answer when you knock).
At that moment, the service that makes you money becomes a vehicle for accelerating your network growth. Isn’t that cool?
Paying them for their time
This one’s pretty straightforward. Most people will accept money for their time if the offer is right.
They’ll either advertise this directly (like I will in this newsletter), or if you DM/email them asking for a paid call—optimally pitching a generous amount—they’ll probably accept.
If leveraged effectively, this can have a massive ROI. If you show up to calls with people years ahead of you with a list of problems you need guidance on, they can help you skip years of frustration.
I don’t think this one needs too much fleshing out, but I’ll emphasize the fact that you really, really need to invest in education right now more than you need to invest in stocks and bonds (metaphorically, that’s not financial advice).
If you want to grow on LinkedIn and make money from it, you should book a 1:1 LinkedIn strategy call with me.
In just one hour, I can realistically change the entire trajectory of your life by teaching you to leverage LinkedIn to its full potential based on your individual goals.
Closing Notes and FAQs
This has been a very high-level overview of the principles I followed to grow to 100k (quality) followers and beyond, but it’s more than specific enough for you to action right now.
At the risk of sounding cliche, the greatest tip I can give you is to just get started.
This all fundamentally started when I made a very intentional decision to keep posting on LinkedIn every day no matter what, because I knew what rewards stood on the other side, and continue to stand on the other side, of that level of tenacity.
So just do it.
Now, to close off, I want to answer some of the most common questions I receive about LinkedIn growth that I didn’t cover fully here.
How important is commenting?
There’s a school of thought going around that you literally cannot grow on LinkedIn without writing at least 20 heartfelt Shakespeare-tier comments each day.
I do not know where this came from, but I suspect the authors just want you to comment on their posts while they sound smart for saying so.
In any case, commenting has never been a meaningfully attributable part of my growth (receiving comments has; I’ll cover that in a second). It’s bordering on superstition.
I guess it can be useful for building your first few thousand followers, but maxing out your connection requests is a more reliable vehicle for that (which you should be doing, yes).
I do recommend commenting on 3-6 creator peers in your niche each day for the sake of networking and maintaining relationships—but not for the sake of farming followers.
What is totally recommended is replying to commenting on your posts.
Starting out, you should reply to 100% of comments (outside of trolls; just block them), and then 50% of comments as it starts to become tedious.
I dearly wish I could respond to all of the comments on my posts, but it’s just not possible at this time. I’m very thankful for each and every comment, as you should be, too.
I don’t know if this has an effect on the reach of your posts (I suspect it does to a small degree), but it’s mostly important for fostering true fans and showing that you care.
As long as you respond to comments, people will keep showing up to comment in increasingly large numbers.
Over time, you’ll build what the industry calls “Reply Guys”—people who respond to your post as quickly as possible in hopes of being noticed by you, being noticed by your audience, or both.
While I don’t like how diminutive this term comes across (I don’t reduce anyone taking the time to thoughtfully respond to my content as a “reply guy”), this tier of fans showing up in your comments section shows you’re doing something right in terms of providing value, some way or another.
Comments also, algorithmically, are very important (at least at the time of this writing).
While LinkedIn has introduced a partial “For You” suggestion system (that may become much more prevalent in the future), the system for serving impressions is still mostly referral-based.
This means that impressions spread via your network commenting and liking them after the algorithm theorizes that you’ll be interested in them (nobody fully knows how this happens, so don’t ask or listen to anyone who says they do).
Speaking of which…
How does the LinkedIn algorithm work?
It doesn’t matter.
Just write for human psychology, and you won’t have to worry about it.
Like all other social algorithms (more or less), the LinkedIn algorithm is doing its best to represent the interests of viewers so that they spend more time on the platform.
It will get better at this over time, too, much to the dismay of people who rely on “algorithm hacks” to grow.
If you create valuable content, the algorithm will reward you. It may not happen overnight, but it’s a certainty on a long enough timeline.
Does this answer disappoint you? It shouldn’t because I’m saving your LinkedIn life with it.
People who build their audiences based on algorithm hacks ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS have the rugs pulled from under their feet sooner or later when the platform—LinkedIn or wherever—adjusts the algorithm to better suit human psychology over gimmicks.
If you’ve ever seen one of those LinkedIn accounts with hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of followers that get barely two dozen likes per post, this is what happened to them (outside of the cases where people literally bought followers).
They built their audience based on selfies, “the homeless guy on the street I gave $10 to turned out to be the CEO I interviewed with,” and whatever yesteryear’s big “growth hack” was.
The same thing will happen to people currently posting today’s latest “growth hack”—Instagram visuals that will change your life, the top 10 Harvard AI TED Talks, etc.
People who have followed me for a while will know that I went through a 6-7 month phase where I did something similar to this.
It was a golden handcuffs situation because I received massive amounts of engagement while successfully creating leads (since my service is LinkedIn-related).
However, I eventually saw the light when I realized I was only creating empty engagements while burning/not creating true fans, thus endangering my long-term success.
I switched back to targeted content and, thankfully, still had a large audience for this, and I am continuing to grow.
Others aren’t so lucky—there are people out there who have permanently ruined their profiles with empty engagements, and the only realistic solution for fixing it is to reset their accounts.
This is why this post is about the principles I actively believe in rather than an actual play-by-play of my journey.
I don’t want you to replicate my journey; just take my advice now that I actively practice.
How do I make money with LinkedIn?
This is an extremely important topic, but I’m having to opt not to cover it in this newsletter as a standalone topic because I just have no room to do it sufficiently—it’s a topic for its own post.
However, I’ll give you a start.
The most reliable way to make money with your LinkedIn presence is to direct the attention you’ve created to a related service you offer.
This is why it’s so important to keep your content targeted and related to your expertise: you want to monetize it.
You can’t post pictures of your dog every day and turn around and start hocking a marketing course—even if you’re really good at it—because you don’t have an audience that recognizes your expertise in that field.
I create LinkedIn meta content because I run a LinkedIn-related agency.
If you run a cold email agency, you should be writing about cold emails.
Are you a fractional CMO? Write about marketing.
And if you want to build a sales training agency, for goodness sake, write about sales.
Then, create some sort of funnel—either organic traffic to a landing page, organic traffic to the newsletter to a landing page, or some variation of that—to capture and convert it.
You can try to sell digital products on the side—like courses and cohorts—if you want, but I don’t recommend this for pretty much anyone as a primary income source except the largest of creators who have spent years building dedicated audiences (and even then, eh).
You can make good money with them, don’t get me wrong (I have, after all), but it’s heavily reliant on maximizing engagement and running very strategic launch campaigns, and your income will come in sporadic bursts with launches, rather than the sustainable, predictable, growing income services are capable of producing.
If I sold LinkedIn courses as a primary income source, I could make decent money with it, but with a much lower ceiling than my agency's infinite ceiling since organic traffic would be my only way of creating sales (besides ads).
And it’d be much less predictable and sustainable, too. You can pop the champagne on a $100,000 product launch and make a chump change on the next.
Just look at what happened with people selling courses on Twitter—there are people who used to consistently make multiple six figures on courses there that are now job hunting thanks to the algorithm changes that have occurred there.
A lot of those people are refugees on LinkedIn now.
Is this a rule? Definitely not—just look at the consistently gargantuan income Nicolas Cole and Justin Welsh make on consumer-level educational products year after year.
But in my opinion, it’s something to aspire towards rather than immediately endeavor towards.
Both of those examples have audiences on multiple platforms—including extremely massive newsletters—anyway.
It's not realistic for 99% of people to replicate that model when there are much more straightforward monetization options available. I'd wager Nicolas and Justin would offer you the same advice.
The End
So yeah, that’s pretty much it. I just dropped an absolutely bonkers amount of value, and if you read it all the way to the end, you’re a champ. I don’t need to say much else.
Here are my asks, though:
You should subscribe if you haven’t already done so.
If you want to chat 1:1, go ahead and book a coaching call.
Finally, if you’re a B2B founder who wants to create qualified leads through visibility on LinkedIn, let’s talk about contracting my services.
That’s all I’ve got—see you next time.
Okay, this is absolutely crazy.
How long did it take you to write this?
Just recently started my linkedin journey, and this has been very inspiring 🙏 while also helping me understand that there are high leverage initial moves that are difficult to undo, like what target audience to go after.
Thank you sir!
Total 🔥🔥advice. Thanks.