Transcription
LinkedIn reach is completely different to how it was even six months ago. And this is a new era of LinkedIn.
Most people are still using the same old tactics that worked last year. They're creating the same posts using the same strategies and are confused why their posts are only getting a fraction of the reach that they used to. So today, I want to introduce you to a new strategy that's working for me in 2026 that you should take away.
Why should you listen to me about LinkedIn? My name is Chris Donley and I have built three eight-figure businesses previously and I've grown my own following to 1.2 million followers on LinkedIn. I've put this into a step-by-step guide for you that you can take away and start winning on LinkedIn in 2026. I'm going to break down exactly what is happening on LinkedIn. Look at the key changes and then the seven biggest tactical moves that you can make to focus on growing your profile.
Okay, so before we get started, I want you to think about what you see on LinkedIn. It is full of carousels. That's full of infographics. And you might be thinking, why? So that brings me to my first point, which is the LinkedIn algorithm. So last year, anyone could post anything. They could post a quote, a billboard, some generic business advice and get thousands of likes. And that has all changed now.
So LinkedIn has replaced its entire ranking system for content with a single AI algorithm called 360 Brew. It is a language model which is completely different from before that reads and understands your content semantically. So this old system explicitly needed you to follow someone or engage with something to be able to show you content. Importantly, the new system cares about relevance. The algorithm now checks that the content that you have matches the individual profile experience. So profile optimization is even more essential than before.
So what does that mean? It means gone are the days that you can post anything. The second thing about the algorithm, which has changed, is a focus on your content type. So 80% of your content should now fall within three core topics. So let me give you an example. If you are a marketeer, you should focus your content specifically around three core areas. And that might be digital marketing, out-of-home marketing, and then B2B sales. But you really do not want to be posting content for the sake of likes outside of your core area because it doesn't work anymore.
And even more so than that, the algorithm is now specifically giving three to five times more processing attention to the first one or two sentences of your profile. Meaning that your hooks are even more valuable than they ever were before. So the first most important lesson there is that you really need to work on your hooks and ensure that your hooks are directional, that they are about your topic and your area of expertise.
And the second really important lesson that's come out from the recent algorithm update is that LinkedIn is now prioritizing saves of posts. So importantly, your takeaway is you need to create content that is useful, it is valuable, and is educational to your audience about your topic.
So the final key shift has been the depth and about being human. The algorithm now factors in more depth than anything else. So both your content, but also specifically your comments. Meaning long gone are the days where people should be trying to get thousands of comments on their post saying "great post" or "good work" or even using some terrible AI automation tools.
So, the second most important thing that you need to focus on to dominate LinkedIn in 2026 is how to optimize your profile so that the machine can read it perfectly and that your audience can understand exactly what you do, which is your profile optimization and ensuring that your profile is becoming a landing page for your target customer.
So, first things first, who are you making content for? Who is your ICP? ICP being your ideal customer profile. So, what is it that you sell? Do you sell accounting services? Do you sell marketing services? Are you selling a SaaS software? Be really specific. And number two is what pain point do you fix? The idea here is to get really specific. For example, I'm an agency coach that helps agencies build more profitable businesses, or I'm a marketing manager that helps brands make more profitable campaigns.
So, what is your ICP interested in? And this is critical. Your content needs to match their interests. So if you are an accountant that is targeting business owners and you want to get them to read your content, you have to be creating content on tax, on strategy, on cash flow management, you know, reduction of liabilities. If you're a marketing manager, then the content needs to be campaigns. It needs to be frameworks. It needs to be examples of great marketing that's done at scale. So make sure that your profile mirrors this and satisfies the algorithm and the customer.
So here is an example of my profile. Founder of Searchable. I help businesses increase their traffic and their revenue from AI SEO. The About section is a chance then to give greater depth into myself, my business and my background and to try and build credibility. And then you have the Features section, which is a prime spot to direct customers towards your key offers. These two buttons that you can see on my profile can be designed to look like they are clear call to actions.
Always be aware that there is an opportunity to pick topics that fit your audience, but already know that they perform incredibly well. So, this is just smart topic choices. And if you do this, the algorithm will know who you are, what you talk about, and that you are clearly communicating to your audience.
So, when you're picking your topics, obviously, you want to pick the things that match your profile, that match your customer. We've already talked about that. Importantly though, you can pick topics that are already performing incredibly well, and just make sure that they also align with your audience. So if you check this out, you can actually see which topics on LinkedIn are performing the best right now. And so this is where you can use data to back up how you build your profile.
So this brings me on to point three, which is which formats are most successful on LinkedIn today. And so if you look at this data, you can see that infographics and carousels are the highest performing content on the platform. And so you as a creator and as a business owner should be thinking to yourself, if I'm going to do a presentation about marketing or a presentation about my business, you want to wrap that in the format that is working best for the platform at that time. And so if you're choosing to post in different formats moving forwards, you are actively choosing a harder route towards success.
People struggle with the idea of taking really complex educational content and turning it into visuals. And that is a skill set. And I want you to learn that skill set. Look at my content. See how we are able to take big ideas and distill them down into easy-to-follow frameworks. And so you can see here that infographics, carousels, and videos are the most successful formats. The reason I'm pointing you towards infographics and carousels is that they are the formats that convert the highest into followers. And so why is that? The reason is that people spend more time on carousels and infographics digesting the information, taking away the value, saving them down for later, which results in a behavior of following. Whereas videos, people view the video and move along. So if I was in your position today, how would I create content? I would focus very much so on infographics and carousels and trying to build as much education and value into my content.
So before we move on to step four in how to create educational content, I want to double-click on something which is so important about how you build a successful LinkedIn profile, which is adaptability. Now the platform changes, the content changes. When carousels are the most successful piece of content, you want to be posting carousels. When that shifts to video being the most successful format on the platform, you as a creator and as a business owner, you need to shift because you want to always be posting the most successful format.
And so previously we talked about how infographics, carousels, and videos, like the format of your content is very important, but even more important than that for me has always been the type of content. And so now you might be thinking, what content am I creating? Is it about myself? Is it about my business? Is it education? Is it selfies? And so importantly, step four is that education content drives the most followers and it drives the most views. And so what do I mean by education content? Simply put, you want to take the skill that you have and the knowledge that you have and package it in a way that your audience is easily able to read your content to work through your framework and therefore get value immediately.
The one thing I think that the world has got confused about content is that personality is the only way to drive growth. Whereas in reality, I am far more likely to get value from reading someone's step-by-step guide as to how to do lead generation or to how to build a business rather than seeing someone pose in a photo and tell me their story.
So, I'll give you a very clear example of how you can actually brand and create frameworks based on really well-known pre-existing topics. And the example I'm going to use is James Clear. So, James Clear talks about habits and how many books through the history of time have talked about habits. However, he was able to put in place a few very clear frameworks that are specifically his and that he is known for. One is obviously the title "Atomic Habits." Two is you get incremental gains by making a 1% improvement every single day. And as a result, immediately James Clear has been able to brand the idea of habits as his own. And every single conversation that happens about habits references James Clear.
So my perspective on personal brand runs counter to almost every personal branding expert I've ever seen. My theory is that it is much easier, much more scalable, and much more systemizable to be creating high-quality, high-value education content as opposed to personal content. So why is that the case? I believe that education content, when branded properly, is far more memorable, will lead to far more saves, will lead to far more value than anything else that you can create.
And so the prime example I can give you is that Simon Sinek created "Start With Why." Now, forever in company building, we have talked about purpose and vision and mission as being the things that drive companies and drive entrepreneurs. And yet, he was able to take that exact idea and brand it as "Start With Why" and give you a very easy-to-follow framework as to how to find your why. Now, he is memorable for that framework and people use that to implement within their companies.
And so, I'll give you a smaller example of myself. When I teach people how to think about sales, I teach them the SERVE framework, which is how you show up for and how you help your customers. And so, instead of just saying that me and my company are good at sales, I'm able to give you a very easy-to-follow, actionable step-by-step guide. And so, the difficulty for most entrepreneurs is showing up on camera. It is creating personal stories. It is creating, you know, vulnerable moments. But is it difficult to package up what you already know, give it a very clear title, give it its own intellectual property, and then post about that consistently every single day?
Which leads me to a point that I think most people don't think about with content, which is you have to post content almost every single day to satisfy the algorithms on most of the platforms. And so by having very clear, definable frameworks and education content, your team and yourself are able to do that in a much more systematized and scalable way than if you're having to create personal stories the entire time. And so my guiding point to all of you is that education content wins based on the stats, based on the evidence, it wins. But it becomes easier for you to do it if you focus on creating frameworks and step-by-step guides that your customers can follow.
Now, in 2026, another thing that's going to be so important to the success of your LinkedIn profile is the depth and the length of your post. And that is because the algorithm is favoring deeper and longer content. But let's take a step back and think why does deeper and longer content perform better? Which gives so much evidence and credence to what we were talking about with education content, which is that if people spend more time on your content, it signals to the algorithm that it is valuable content. Whether they like it or they comment on it doesn't matter. It's the fact that someone has dwelled on a video. And to give you a really nice frame to think of here, if you're on Instagram and you hover over someone's video and you watch it for a few seconds, how often are you then distributed that person's content five or six videos later? And so it's the exact same theory here. If someone spends time on your content, reads it, gets value from it, then the algorithm decides that content is good and distributes.
So if you want to guarantee your success on LinkedIn in 2026, you need to focus on pre-validating your content based on outliers. So first and foremost, what is an outlier? And what is pre-validated content? So an outlier is when a certain piece of content that another creator posts or yourself posts receives five to ten times more views than their ordinary piece of content. So why is this really important? So, if a creator or yourself are getting a thousand likes per post every single time and then suddenly you have a post that gets 5,000 likes or 10,000 likes, it's most likely that the content and what was said in the content is the hero as opposed to the creator themselves being the reason why it was successful. And so, it's very important when you think about your content that you give yourself a head start on creating high-quality, high-performing content.
So, what you don't want to do is you don't want to focus on big accounts. Big accounts have massive audiences already and as a result, they get a very natural lift with their content. So you want to focus instead on studying creators that have similar ICP audiences to yourself. So similar audiences, similar followers, and you want to focus on their videos or their posts that have done incredibly well already.
So I'll give you a really good example of this for myself. When I started my journey in creating content, one of the things I spoke about most was delegation. I always think that entrepreneurs underindex on delegation and so I post about it all the time. However, instead of just writing what I thought about delegation on day one, I instead studied every single piece of content I could find on the internet that had performed well in that delegation space. I found cheat sheets. I found infographics, carousels, I found videos. And by studying that content and the content that had already done so well, I saw there was a very clear framework within those pieces of content about how to teach delegation. I took that framework, I adapted it to myself, I renamed it, I gave it my own unique spin, and we started running that content on delegation from my account. And as you will see here, my delegation content has been successful on almost any platform we put it on. And that is because it's based on a pre-validated idea.
A lot of people have a problem with this because they think to themselves that you are stealing other people's content. But the reality is that content and stories and literature have worked the same way forever. And so let's take the bestselling author ever, James Clear's "Atomic Habits." "Atomic Habits" talks about the incremental gains that you make every single day by working on your project or yourself, and he has branded it "Atomic Habits." However, how many books predated "Atomic Habits" and focused specifically on that core concept? There are dozens of these books. So what I am saying to you is try and be more strategic about your content. Try and base it on things that have already done well previously. And I give the same advice to business owners. Rather than starting a new business or a new concept based on something completely new, often my advice is let's study businesses that have already succeeded. Let's look at business models that have already performed, and then try and build based on that roadmap.
So now you have done the hardest part. You have learned how to create views and how to grow followers on LinkedIn. Now it is about turning attention into revenue for your business. And so step five is how do you actually sell on LinkedIn? Selling effectively on LinkedIn is about establishing a very clear funnel. People fundamentally buy when they recognize a brand or an individual. And to be recognized, you have to be experienced five to seven times in the same way that if you go into a supermarket and you see a brand, you are likely to buy it if you have seen it multiple times before. And so what we're doing with personal brand and with LinkedIn content is we're giving people the opportunity to understand who we are and what we sell and giving some repetition so that they recognize us.
So let's think about a funnel for a moment. So at the top of the funnel is awareness content. This is the sort of content that people are able to easily understand, easily able to interact with, and as a result, get a sense of who you are and what you stand for. However, in the middle of the funnel is what we were talking about before. It's that education content. It's the consideration phase, and we want at this stage for people to be experiencing our frameworks, our lessons, our step-by-step guides. And so at this point, we have two different types of content. We have awareness to drive top-end awareness of who we are. And then we have consideration content, which is about how to get a greater sense of what we stand for and what our product delivers.
However, at the bottom of the funnel is a very important type of content, which we've called conversion content. And conversion content is very rarely going to perform well in and of itself. However, it is a signal and a call to action to those people you have caught in the funnel already who will now go on to make a purchase and will now buy from you. And so conversion content is much more niche. It is focused on exactly how you deliver your service. So this is a time that we delivered this service for this brand. It is a case study. It is "look at the results that we drove for this person." "Look at the results we drove for this brand." Or it is a testimonial. "Here is what a client said about our brand." "Here is what a client said about our campaign." And so this type of content very rarely ever performs. But because you have driven awareness content and you have driven education content in the middle, you have a big audience of people who are interested and recognize you. And so the conversion content is your opportunity to convert them from being followers into being customers.
So the biggest difference to selling in 2026 versus any other time previously is that saturation of content is much higher. More and more and more people are selling. And so what you need to do as an individual is to try and create high-quality lead magnets that give people value there and then in the moment so that they associate that value with you and are more likely to buy from you than they are from your competitor. Think about two exact same sales situations. It's you versus your competitor. Both of you are saying you do the same thing. However, you have given your customer an incredibly useful tool, a calculator, some sort of framework that they now use every single day in their lives. You tell me who you think the customer is more likely to purchase from.
And so, an example I have is I have something called the Creator OS, which is a Notion template with accompanying videos that shows creators how to create content at scale, focused predominantly on education. And so, that lead magnet for me brings people off social media, gets them subscribed to my list, and then I am able to sell to them afterwards. And so I want you to go check that out, reverse engineer it, and think how you can create high-quality resources that your audience can download and get value from.
I've been working in social media for 16 years. And in 16 years, I have seen the algorithm on various platforms change enormously. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to Instagram, everything continuously changes. And so the most important thing for you to take away from this video is that you do not want to leave yourself at the mercy of the algorithm.
The last piece of the puzzle to winning on LinkedIn in 2026 is deplatforming your audience. So you might be thinking, how do I deplatform people? And it can be as simple as you should set up a newsletter. You can use Kit and set up your own newsletter, and then give people a reason to leave social media and subscribe to you, which means you need to create something called a value exchange, which could be "I have packaged up all of my content into a downloadable resource for you," or "I have created a framework that you can download." "I've created a Notion template that you can use." Give people a reason to give you their email and give them something back in return. And my final point on exchanging value is make sure that if you're giving away something for free, it feels like it's worth something they would have paid for. And if you're charging for something, make sure that it feels like it's two or three times the value of the thing that you've sold.
If you enjoy this video, make sure you check out this deep dive which goes far beyond LinkedIn on how to become famous within your specific industry.