🔟 How to 10X Your Brand on LinkedIn...

One of the best network investments I ever made was becoming more active on LinkedIn – in today’s world, personal branding is a superpower. Just look at Elon Musk, his personal brand helps him raise billions, sell billions and recruit the best talent out there.

And it works. Personally, I have seen how LinkedIn can be used to generate leads, get in contact with otherwise unreachable people and build genuine connections in business. All things that make doing business a bit easier.

But for me, starting was daunting, so let me help you get going…

4 Steps for Founders to Get Value from LinkedIn

1. Get into the right mindset

One of the biggest mistakes on LinkedIn is to rely on your company page to do anything – it’s a dud, LinkedIn is about connecting people, so if you want to have an impact and get traction, you will have to use your own, personal profile.

For startups, you basically have two worthwhile approaches:

1. Executive content: Founders and leadership build up their personal brands and use that to accelerate growth through partnerships, opportunities and sometimes even direct sales.
2. Employee-led content: Once the founders/execs are on their way, get the rest of the team going. Clear vision and alignment here are key (see point 2 below).

(Not that company LinkedIn is useless, it’s just that it’s better geared for big brand building, i.e. corporates.)

2. Build your strategy

Next up, there’s a lot of noise out there, so to be successful you have to get really specific.

I quite like the steps Morning Brew founder Alex Leiberman lays out in this video, specifically:

• The Audience of One: Think about that one person you create content for that represents all the people you want/need to talk to. Everything you write, write as if you are writing for that person. Pick an influential leader and it will motivate you to write things they will find interesting. Chances are, many other people will too.
• Finding the middle ground: Writing down “what you know”, “what excites you” and “what your audience needs/wants” and then only focusing on the topics that overlap, ensures you become laser-focused.

3. Save your sanity with a content plan

Now that you know your niche and topics, you need to know how to create a HUGE amount of content that actually adds value.

For that, I really like the content brainstorming method in Justin Welsh’s LinkedIn course – Justin built a simple content framework table that lists types of posts at the top and topics you want to write about on the left. That way you can mix and match types with topics to create a whole roster of things to talk about.

Types of posts that are easy and effective include:

• Comparing A to B
• Lists
• Lesson learnt
• Contrarian observation

4. Automate the most draining parts

Anyone who’s ever tried this before will tell you the biggest stumbling blocks are:

• Actually writing the content
• Keeping it consistent (rain or shine).

It’s not a 1 or 2-week game, LinkedIn delivers rewards, but it takes time and consistency. You have to bite the bullet and commit to making this a part of your life for the next 3 months, then 6 months, then year 1, 2 and so on…

Or you can get help… put in a few hours of strategy and planning and then automate all the grudge bits like so:

• Content writing – use Stream to brainstorm content strategy and ghostwrite for you.
• Posting – automate it with Buffer.