Transcription
If you want to grow on LinkedIn as quickly as possible, the things you do after you hit post are just as important as the post itself. You see, most LinkedIn users make this one catastrophic mistake after posting. They just hit publish and hope for the best. But that's the same reason why most people never see any meaningful growth. There's a reason why I've grown my account to over 40,000 followers and built a seven-figure business in only 3 years off the back of my LinkedIn content. And it simply boils down to the fact that I know what to do after I hit post. So, in this video, I'm literally going to show you the eight exact things that I do every time I hit post to make sure the post gets seen, engaged with, and converts into actual business results.
First up, and if you only do one thing in this entire video, do this. Respond to all your comments and DMs. I'd stay online paying attention to your content for the first 30 to 60 minutes after it goes live. Because responding to those first comments is going to help create that snowball of engagement. That early engagement matters a lot. So, if you get people commenting on your post, you want to reciprocate. And a pro tip here, whenever it's relevant, reply to each comment with a question 'cause that gets them replying again and it creates more comments on your content and it feeds the algorithm more and more. Same thing with DMs. If people are replying to your post and and sending you DMs based on what you posted that day, you want to create those conversations one-on-one, especially if they're with your ICP.
The second thing to do after you hit post is amplify your content with team and network engagement. So, a super simple thing you could do to help your post get momentum early on is have a social channel where you send your content for your team to go and engage. Especially when you're first getting started on LinkedIn, any engagement helps. And that, like I said, that early engagement matters a lot. So, if you can create a systemized way to make that happen, you're going to be in a good spot. One important thing to consider is to make sure these people leave thoughtful comments, not just one or two words of "great post" or "great insight." That's not going to do much. And the algorithm actually rewards those longer comments, especially like I mentioned earlier, those comments that start a conversation in the comments section. So, if the comment leads to another response, another response, that's going to feed the algorithm more and more.
The third thing I'll do after I hit publish is pay attention again in those first 30 to 60 minutes. That's a really important window for LinkedIn content. Pay attention to the post performance. And if the post isn't doing that well, adjust the hook or take down the post, rework it, and post it again. A lot of people are resistant to this because they feel like it's a bit overkill or that people are going to know that you deleted your content or that you edit it or you're taking LinkedIn too seriously. Who cares? It doesn't matter. But what does matter is giving your content the best chance to perform as you possibly can. And one way you can do that is by sort of A/B testing the hooks. And if you find that, hey, usually after I hit publish, like 15 minutes in, I've got like 10 to 15 likes or so. And if you notice the post only has two, it's probably not going to get much better. Your early post performance is a pretty good indicator for how it's going to do later on. So, if you're drastically underperforming in those first few minutes, it's likely not going to get much better. So, when you see that, one easy switch that you can make is you can actually go in and edit the hook. So, maybe you tried negativity bias in one of the hooks, but a listicle would have worked better. And you can really do this with any part of the post. The only thing you can't change once you hit upload is the media selection. So, you can't split test different images or different videos, unfortunately. But I'd treat your hooks kind of like a YouTuber treats their titles and thumbnails. You'll notice that on YouTube, if you look at someone's channel who's really growing effectively, they'll often be split testing different titles, different thumbnails. You'll see those change over time. You can treat your LinkedIn hooks the same way.
Now, for item number four on this checklist of things to do after you hit publish, you're going to take the focus away from your content and put it outwards on other people's content. You're going to go and engage with 10 to 15 ICP posts or ICP influencer posts. You're going to find people that are either in your ICP, so in your ideal customer profile, or influencers that your ideal customer follows, and go and leave thoughtful comments on their content. There's a few things this is going to do. Number one, you're just going to get in front of more people. You can kind of treat that comment as a billboard in this other person's comment section. So, people are going to see the insights and the thoughts you leave on other people's content and potentially be encouraged to check out your own content, your own profile. Second, when you comment and engage thoughtfully, often times people will start to reciprocate, especially if they're more active LinkedIn creators. You'll find that these people often start to see your content and comment on your posts. And it's this two-way street.
Now, the fifth trick on this checklist is super simple. All you're going to do is send 20 outbound connection requests every single day as you're going through and leaving these comments. Right? So, as you're scrolling and you see accounts that could be in your ICP or other creators that your ICP follows, send them outbound connection requests. What this is going to do is when they accept that connection request, it counts as a mutual follow. So they're now going to see your content the next time you post. It's going to show up in their feed. And you can do this as a way to manually build your audience without only having to rely on the algorithm. This is one of the most foundational habits that I recommend to founders and marketers who want to grow their audience on LinkedIn. And a pro tip here is you can use Sales Navigator, the tool on LinkedIn to filter for people who have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days. So a lot of times when people try to do this sort of outbound connection requests and building their audience manually, they send connection requests to people who just don't use LinkedIn a whole lot. So they waste these connection requests on people who are just never going to accept purely because they just don't use LinkedIn. Also, a pro tip here is send a blank connection request. You don't need to do a custom note. A lot of times those custom notes that you can send with the connection request appear to be spammy or salesy. The only time I'd recommend using this is if you meet someone at a conference or if there's other context that would be helpful for the person to see. But if you don't otherwise know the person, just send a blank connection request. It'll save you time and it works better. Another quick pro tip for finding people who are active on LinkedIn to send connection requests to is when you're doing your comments, look at the people who comment and engage. And then if you haven't already, send them a connection request because they've already shown you that they're active on LinkedIn. If this guy's posted in the past 24 hours and someone's commenting on it, that person who commented is likely pretty active on LinkedIn. And if they're in your ICP, they're probably a good person to send a connection request to.
By the way, if you're finding this video valuable and you want to learn even more about the exact strategies I use to grow LinkedIn audiences for founders, like the type of content that works, how to write posts that perform well, I have a newsletter where I reveal everything I know completely for free every single week. I send over a new guide, playbook, templates that you could use to write better LinkedIn content faster and grow your audience for your company. So, it's totally free. I'll drop the link in the description and I would love to see you in there. Now, back to the video.
Now, for number six, review your profile viewers. So, one of the best things about LinkedIn as a platform is you can actually see down in the profile who looks at your profile. So, who's going to your profile and looking at your content and showing interest? It's a pretty strong signal that someone's interested in what you have to say. And if they're in your ICP, it's a good signal for doing outreach, sending connection requests, all that good stuff. So, what I'd recommend doing every day before you log off LinkedIn is super quickly just go over to your profile tab and click on this "Profile views" analytics section. And again, you can actually see down to the account who's looking at your profile. So, what I'll do is I'll just go to this tab and scroll through and see if I find anyone who's in my ICP. So, for me, that's going to be CEOs, founders of tech companies. So, if I'm scrolling through here, you'll see a lot of noise of people that aren't really great fits. A lot of content marketers 'cause I post about content marketing stuff. So, that tends to attract those folks, too. If I keep scrolling here, we have a CEO. So, if I go to his profile, I'll see that I haven't connected with him yet. And it looks like this could be a relevant account. So, what I'll go ahead and do is just send a connection request. And James is going to be more likely to accept my connection request because he's looked at my content in the past day or two. And you want to stay on top of this habit because if you don't, you kind of build this backlog of weeks and weeks worth of profile views that you're just not going to get through.
Now, for item number seven on the performance optimization checklist, look at post-performance 24 hours later. So, one of the worst things you can do as a founder is just post content and then let it sit and never look back at it again. That content performance data will tell you a lot about what you should and shouldn't do going forward. Especially as you're first getting started on LinkedIn, you should be looking at your analytics religiously. So, when you post content, what I'd recommend is the next day when you log on to post again, just look at the previous content's performance. Did it perform better than you thought? Did it do worse than you thought? Was it a flop? Was it an outlier? And if it was either of those two, you want to understand why. So if something did perform really well, I want to understand why it did that so I can use that same strategy again and again and again. So for example, if I go to my profile and I look at my recent content, this one did pretty good. This one did fine. This one did a little bit better. It has an image. One thing I'm seeing a lot right now on LinkedIn is that IRL images, even selfies, are tending to do better in terms of post performance. So for this post about how I think reading is really important for content writers, I included this selfie with my bookshelf and it did pretty good. But last week I had two kind of outliers based on how I'm performing right now. And this post got over 70,000 impressions, over 300 likes, and there's a lot to learn from it. So when I look back at this post, the main thing that comes to mind for me is it's a genuine hot take that I actually believe. So it's something that a lot of people are thinking but might be afraid to say for fear of pushback because people are going to get upset that I'm saying, "Oh my gosh, junior content writers might actually be in trouble because of AI." And for a while, I hadn't really talked about that stuff as much for that exact reason. But I forget what was happening. I think I was reviewing applications last week and I was just so frustrated with the quality of writers that were coming in that I just decided that didn't really have anything to lose. I'm going to post this and see what people think. And it really resonated. Now, there were some people in the comments of those almost 200 comments that did disagree with me or called this insensitive or whatever the case may be, but there were a lot of people that agreed and it drove a lot of performance. Those genuine takes that drive conversation that might be a bit polarizing tend to do the best and this is a pretty good example of that. So then I took that and applied it to the very next post that I did and this is just another polarizing take related to content writing and AI and again it did quite well over 40,000 impressions almost 200 likes not as strong of a post as this one but I used the learnings from this post to inform the subsequent one and it performed quite well because of those learnings. Now, I didn't go and make every single post after that a repeat of this angle 'cause there is a line where you don't want to repeat yourself too much, but I'm definitely going to use this post, this angle, maybe even this exact copy in a month from now because I just know it works so well and I know it's a point that people seem to resonate with and it drives a lot of conversation. So, my point here in showing you this is there's a lot to learn from every post that you make, especially in the early days. Again, you want to accelerate that learning cycle as much as you can. And so what I'd recommend is if you publish a piece of content, the next day when you log on to publish your next piece, just look at the past post performance of the one you did before. And I'd make it a point to note down at least one thing that you could learn. You don't need five or 10. That's too much. But one to three items or learnings that you can take away from each post. If you genuinely do that, I would be shocked if your content does not perform drastically better in the next 30 days. You'll be so far ahead of almost every founder who's posting on LinkedIn because most of them don't do this. And even worse, most of them see something work like this and then just don't talk about it again or don't use it.
And now tip number eight is kind of related to the seventh one, but you want to add those outliers to your content bake. Like I was just saying, a lot of people will have one of these outliers. They'll see what worked. They'll understand, but then they just won't use it again. It takes a lot of work to find a winning post. It takes a lot of testing and iteration, especially if you're newer to this. It's going to take some time. So, when you find a content format, a topic, a media style that seems to really resonate with your audience and has outlier performance, don't just throw it away. Add it to your toolbox. Every single lever that you can identify that improves content performance, whether it's a media type, whether it's a topic that your audience seems to resonate with, whether it's a specific story your audience loves, add that to the toolbox and use it over and over and over again. A lot of people are far too worried about repeating themselves. That can be a concern. Like I said, I'm not going to post this same content every single day. It'll get a bit repetitive, but you do want to repeat yourself to a certain extent. That's how you reinforce different ideas, different points you have, different beliefs you want to instill in your audience. That happens through repetition. So, take advantage of the winners. So, again, if my audience seems to really be resonating with this conversation around AI and content writers, I'm going to talk more about that. I might say the same take in a different way. I might take a different spin on it. I might try different formats, but I'm going to use this again and again and again until it stops working. And one super simple thing you could do here is literally repost winners. What I like to do is if I have a winning post like this one in about two or three months, I'm just going to repost the same exact thing verbatim and see how it does. Often times it does the exact same. It might even do better. If it does considerably worse then it's a good sign that hey maybe that isn't a long-term repeated post topic I want to use. But it's such a low lift thing that you can rely on when you have a busy schedule that week to make sure you hit your content cadence and also just maximize performance. So, don't be afraid to repost winners.
So, you just saw what you need to do after you hit post, but you've got to make sure your content strategy is dialed in in the first place. So, head over here to this video where I'll teach you the only content strategy you need to know for LinkedIn this year. From the exact profile setup I use to the AI tools I use in my content workflow to the actual content itself. I'll walk you through everything. So, I'll see you over there.