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Posting on LinkedIn but not seeing results? If you feel like you don’t really have a strategy for how you’re using LinkedIn, Joe McKay breaks down the three types of posts that actually move the needle, and how to make them work for your business.
The 3-Pillar LinkedIn Strategy That Turns Followers Into Paying Clients
LinkedIn feels broken for many business owners and marketers. You craft what you think is brilliant content, hit publish, and watch it disappear into the void with maybe a handful of likes from your most loyal connections. Sound familiar?
Joe McKay knows this frustration intimately. When he first started creating content on LinkedIn, he earned a measly $500 for an entire batch of posts. But instead of writing off the platform as another social media time-waster, he decided to crack the code on what actually works.
Two years later, Joe has built a six-figure LinkedIn ghostwriting business and helped his clients generate over 2 million impressions. His secret isn’t some mysterious algorithm hack or insider knowledge—it’s a systematic three-pillar approach that any business owner can implement.
The Problem with Random Posting
Most LinkedIn users post randomly, hoping something will go viral and magically transform their business. Some days it’s a motivational quote, other days a company update, and occasionally a half-hearted attempt at thought leadership.
This scattered approach doesn’t just waste time—it confuses your audience about who you are and what you offer. Your ideal clients can’t tell if you’re a serious business partner or just another LinkedIn influencer sharing broetry.
Joe discovered this during his six months of paternity leave when ideas were bubbling in his head with nowhere to go. “I found myself just starting to share them,” he explains. “And LinkedIn was just the most logical fit for all those ideas and those thoughts to go out.”
But sharing random thoughts isn’t a strategy—it’s therapy.
The Three-Pillar Framework That Actually Works
Through trial, error, and careful observation of what generated real business results, Joe developed a systematic approach to LinkedIn content. His framework consists of three distinct types of posts, each serving a specific purpose in the customer journey.
Pillar 1: Awareness Content (30% of your posts)
These posts are designed to reach as many eyeballs as possible within your professional network. Think of awareness content as your LinkedIn dating profile—it needs to be interesting enough to make people want to learn more about you.
The best awareness posts are story-driven and narrative-led. They might include your professional origin story, lessons learned along the way, or insights that would resonate with a broad professional audience. Joe recommends a powerful brainstorming technique: “Writing a letter to yourself two years ago, and where you were then and the things that you wish you knew.”
The key to effective awareness content is the hook—those first two to three lines that appear before the “see more” button. Joe suggests three proven strategies:
- Use specific numbers that draw the eye
- Open a loop that creates curiosity
- Challenge conventional wisdom or create a pattern interrupt
Remember, awareness content shouldn’t be directly about your services. Its job is to establish you as someone worth following and remembering.
Pillar 2: Trust-Building Content (60% of your posts)
This is where most LinkedIn users should focus their energy. Trust-building content demonstrates your expertise and builds credibility with your ideal clients. Unlike awareness posts that cast a wide net, these posts should speak directly to your target audience’s challenges and interests.
Joe has a great insight here: “The best content, the most effective content, is not created from scratch, it’s actually found.” Instead of staring at a blank page trying to ideate, harvest content from your existing business interactions.
Every discovery call where a prospect asks you a question about your expertise could become a LinkedIn post. Common challenges that come up repeatedly in client work are perfect fodder for trust-building content. The insights you share during delivery calls can be repurposed to demonstrate your value to potential clients.
This approach ensures your content feels authentic and valuable because it’s based on real problems you’ve solved for real people. It also makes content creation infinitely easier—you’re not creating from scratch, you’re simply sharing expertise you’ve already demonstrated.
Pillar 3: Strategic Offers (10% of your posts)
Most business owners either never make offers on LinkedIn (turning themselves into unpaid influencers) or make offers constantly (coming across as pushy salespeople). Joe’s approach finds the sweet spot: making strategic offers roughly 10% of the time.
These don’t have to be big-ticket sales pitches. Your offer might be subscribing to your newsletter, sending a DM for a free consultation, or downloading a lead magnet. The key is providing clear next steps for people who want to engage further.
The best packaging for offers is client results. A screenshot of positive feedback, a breakdown of how you helped someone achieve their goals, or a case study of successful outcomes creates natural opportunities for strong calls-to-action.
From Content to Conversations: The Present Commonality Technique
Creating great content is only half the LinkedIn equation. The real magic happens when you turn that content into meaningful conversations. But most people either lurk silently or resort to the dreaded “pitch slap”—immediately trying to sell to anyone who shows interest.
Joe uses a technique called “present commonality” to start authentic conversations. The concept is beautifully simple: reference what you have in common right now, at this present moment.
Think about meeting someone at a wedding. You don’t immediately launch into your life story or try to sell them something. You start with what you share: “So, bride or groom side? How do you know [couple’s names]?”
On LinkedIn, present commonality might be someone viewing your profile, liking your content, or commenting on your posts. Your outreach message references this shared experience: “Hey [Name], thanks for checking out my profile. Did anything stand out?”
This approach feels natural because it acknowledges the interaction that already happened. You’re not cold-calling—you’re following up on demonstrated interest. Then you simply hand over the microphone and give them space to respond.
The Algorithm Trends You Need to Know
LinkedIn’s algorithm continues evolving, but Joe identifies two key trends for 2025 that smart business owners should understand.
First, video has “landed in a big way” on LinkedIn. The platform now includes a TikTok-style video feed, which means portrait-oriented vertical video gets significantly more reach than traditional horizontal formats. If you’re creating video content, make sure it’s optimized for mobile viewing.
Second, there’s a growing preference for what Joe calls “normcore” content—intentionally unpolished, raw, and obviously human posts. As AI-generated content floods the platform, users are gravitating toward content that signals authentic human creation. This doesn’t mean your content should be sloppy, but overly polished, formulaic posts may actually work against you.
Your Profile: From CV to Customer Magnet
Before implementing any content strategy, audit your LinkedIn profile with fresh eyes. Most profiles read like online CVs, focused on impressing visitors with achievements and credentials. But Joe suggests a fundamental mindset shift: your profile shouldn’t be about you—it should be about the people you’re trying to serve.
Instead of listing your impressive background, focus on your ideal client’s needs and challenges. Use your “About” section to speak directly to their pain points and demonstrate how you solve them. This customer-focused approach immediately makes your profile more relevant and compelling to potential clients.
Starting Your LinkedIn Transformation
If you only have 5-10 minutes daily for LinkedIn, Joe recommends focusing on two activities: thoughtful commenting and strategic connection building. Scroll through your feed and leave genuine, specific comments on posts from people in your target audience or industry influencers. Skip generic responses like “great post” and instead reference specific points that resonated with you.
Simultaneously, send connection requests to interesting people you discover through this commenting activity. Don’t include aggressive sales messages—focus on building your professional network with relevant connections.
The Long Game of LinkedIn Success
Joe’s transformation from $500 posts to six-figure business didn’t happen overnight. It required consistency, patience, and a willingness to experiment with what worked. But his systematic approach removed the guesswork from LinkedIn marketing.
The three-pillar framework ensures every piece of content serves a specific purpose in your customer journey. The present commonality technique transforms content engagement into meaningful business conversations. And focusing on harvested content from real client interactions ensures everything you share provides genuine value.
LinkedIn success isn’t about going viral or amassing thousands of followers. It’s about building authentic relationships with the right people and positioning yourself as the obvious choice when they’re ready to solve the problems you specialize in.
Your next LinkedIn post doesn’t need to change the world. It just needs to move one ideal client one step closer to working with you. With Joe’s framework, every post can do exactly that.
The LinkedIn Content Strategy That Actually Works Episode Transcript
Rich: From earning $500 for his first batch of LinkedIn posts to building a six-figure business in under two years, my next guest has mastered the art of creating content that resonates.
As a LinkedIn ghostwriter, he’s helped solopreneurs, founders, and CEOs generate over 2 million impressions and establish powerful personal brands. Now he’s paying it forward by coaching other solopreneurs to build a business they love.
Today we’re going to be talking about the type of content that generates interest, traffic, and leads with Joe McKay. Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe: Thanks for having me, Rich. Great to be here.
Rich: Well, LinkedIn is my favorite social media platform, so I’m excited to jump into the conversation today. I know I love it, but what led you to focus on LinkedIn as a primary business development channel, especially for solopreneurs and small business owners?
Joe: So I think the time that I started really focusing more seriously on LinkedIn and spending a lot more time on LinkedIn in 2022, it dawned on me that it was the only social media platform that I hadn’t completely fallen out of love with, whether that be Facebook, Instagram, I never really got into Twitter or X.
But I think in the early stages particularly, I kidded myself that it was productive to be scrolling LinkedIn. So I found myself just naturally hanging out there. I really started getting into LinkedIn when I had six months off for the birth of our second child, our son, and I found my head, even though I didn’t have work or a paid job, I found my head just bubbling with a lot of ideas and thoughts. And as a way to cleanse those and get them outta my system and into the world, I found myself just starting to share them. And LinkedIn was just the most logical fit for those ideas and those thoughts to go out.
And so that’s when I really started to stumble into LinkedIn as a platform to contribute content beyond the, “I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just started this new job as CEO of the world” or those kind of things. And that’s the beginning of the journey, and I guess here we are about three years later where it’s the backbone of my business.
Rich: Okay. So when you’re working with your clients, I know that there’s a number of types of LinkedIn posts that you feel businesses should be creating to create a comprehensive content strategy. Can you explain what those three are?
Joe: Yeah, for sure. So look, the three posts that I think every business that’s serious about LinkedIn should be creating, really the first bucket is awareness. So the goal there is reach as many eyeballs as you possibly can.
The second bucket is around trust building or expertise building content. And this is really where you start to get more focused on the audience that you want to talk to, the ideal customer that you’re trying to serve, and you’re trying to build credibility and demonstrate your expertise to that audience.
And the final category of posts, and this is where I see a lot of gaps when I audit B2B content strategies, is around making offers in content. So making an invitation for someone to work with you with a strong, clear call to action of what they can do next if they’re interested.
I see a lot of awareness generating content. I see more and more memes. I see more and more videos. I see some trust building stuff, but I just would love to see more at that kind of bottom of the funnel, to use that old language, where you make an invitation and make it a very clear decision for someone to make if they’re interested in working with you.
Rich: All right, so let’s go through the first two fairly quickly, and then we’ll spend some more time with the making offers.
So awareness, you mentioned memes. And sometimes I feel like I love memes, they sometimes are exactly how I want to express myself, but I often fear that we’re heading into Facebook territory.
So when you’re working with professionals, owners, solopreneurs, what are some of the awareness type posts that you recommend?
Joe: Yeah, so these are typically going to be story or narrative led posts. So they might be a brief overview of how you got to where you are today, or the hardest lessons that you’ve learned as a beginner.
One technique that’s really powerful to brainstorm around this is writing a letter to yourself two years ago, and where you were then and the things that you wish you knew. Awareness on LinkedIn is less about memes, I would say, and more about bringing some of your personal stories, experiences, recollections and maybe milestones along the journey. But they’re typically going to be more story led content that has a broad appeal beyond who you are specifically trying to talk to in terms of an ideal customer, if that makes sense.
Rich: And do you recommend any sort of hooks or anything specific? Because obviously anybody can share their history, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be seen. So are there anything that you recommend that we include in these awareness posts just to get a few more eyeballs on them?
Joe: Yeah, so you make a good point around hook. So the hook being the first kind of two to three lines that appears above the fold or before the ‘see more’ button in a LinkedIn post.
This is really important real estate. Every character counts in the hook, and so things that work really well in terms of hooks on LinkedIn are specific numbers or figures. They can be big numbers, but even just very specific numbers tend to draw the eye.
If you can open a loop, so if you can pose an open question that triggers that need that we all have to see how the story ends or see what comes next, is a great way to easily grab – or not easily – but is a great way to hook attention. So numbers, open loops.
If you can challenge conventional wisdom, or if you can throw something out that just feels like a juxtaposition, or something that doesn’t, two pieces of a hook don’t sit well together, that can also just trigger our need to figure out what is going on here. That kind of pattern interrupt, that would be three strategies that you can use to maximize the hook. That’s going to get more people to click, see more. And that is a great signal to the algorithm that this post is interesting and relevant and valuable. So that will then spread your content further and wider.
Rich: All right. The next one you said is expertise or trust building. And how do we shift naturally into doing those kind of posts? Are there specific things that you recommend that we include in that second tier of posts?
Joe: Yeah, so when we talk about building trust and demonstrating our expertise, this is naturally going to lend us to narrow our focus more towards our ideal clients and the audience that we actually want to serve and who we want to work with.
My philosophy, when it comes to creating content, and especially when it comes to creating trust building content, is that the best content, the most effective content, is not created from scratch. It’s actually found. So a great place to go looking for trust building content is in your existing interactions with customers.
So if you hop on a discovery call and a prospect asks you A B, C question about your field of expertise, that could become the bones of a LinkedIn post if you are in sales conversations or delivery calls. Things that keep coming up time and again for prospects or for clients, the value adding parts of your process, if you can give snippets or insights into what it’s like actually working with you.
I take the mindset of trying to harvest content rather than stare at a blank page and kind of ideate and create things from scratch. I much want to look around inside the four walls of my business and see what I can grab and repurpose and put back out into the open market to create content.
Rich: All right. And now the third one is making offers. And I’m sure it’s kind of a fine line here where maybe you don’t want to go overboard. It doesn’t sound like you’re recommending we go overboard, but you’re still making it obvious that there’s something to buy or engage or some sort of step to take. So how do we position those, so we don’t come off like we’re all about sales or that we’re being really pushy?
Joe: Absolutely. So there’s two factors to consider here. I think the first factor to consider when it comes to making offers in content is frequency and the ratio. So just to recap on the three buckets and kind of my golden ratio, I guess, would be 30% awareness, 60% trust building, and roughly 10% making offers.
So the first step is not to do this all the time. If all you do is post offers, you will come across as sleazy and pushy. If all you do is create awareness, generating content, you just become a LinkedIn influencer. Which works for some people, but is probably not, for your audience, the people listening, is probably not the strategy.
So the first factor to consider is do this sparingly, 10% to 15% of the time. The second factor to consider is the offer doesn’t have to be a big call to action. It doesn’t have to be an offer to buy my high-ticket package. It might be to subscribe to my newsletter. It might be to send me a DM, to have a conversation or for a free audit or something like that.
So you could have a lead magnet, you could have your newsletter, you could have a free service that you offer. So you can make offers at different scales, as well as drip feeding them in and amongst the other pillars of your content to make sure that you’re not coming across as too pushy.
I think the best packaging for an offer is client results. So if you have, it could even be as simple as a screenshot of a great message from a satisfied client. It could be a breakdown of how they achieve you, helped them achieve the result. Good feedback on social media, things like that. A great kind of packaging for an offer, and you can have a really strong call to the action, call to action after you’ve demonstrated that success for your clients.
Rich: All right. Now, I know you work a lot with solopreneurs, but I do know that you work with, you mentioned also CEOs and some other people. Is there any shift in recommendation if instead of we’re looking for sales, we’re looking for employees? Do you ever have clients who are like, I need my LinkedIn profile to be attracting people who want to work with me, and if so, does there have any shift in those three types of posts that you mentioned?
Joe: It’s a really good question. It’s not typically a focus of the work that I do, and the people that I’ve worked with typically, the primary focus is leads, revenue, that kind of thing. I do see a win-win when you are building your personal brand, when you start creating content regularly, the most effective way to do that is to be authentic. And that word is getting thrown around a lot at the moment, but if you can be yourself, that is going to give people an insight into what it’s like to work at your company.
And so I think largely the categories of content as a framework still apply. And the bigger picture idea of being authentic, trying to be genuine, obviously not fabricating things, not sugarcoating things, I think is a great way to give people a peek inside the culture that you’re building at your company.
If talent attraction is a particular focus, then you might spend part of your kind of awareness generating content, really focusing on hero-ing some of the employees that are in your business already. I think really great personal brands don’t put themselves in the spotlight, they are the spotlight, and they shine that spotlight on the people around them. So whether that’s customers, lead gen sense or if it’s other employees or talent in a talent attraction sense, I think using your personal brand as a spotlight and shining it on the people that you want to hero is what’s going to attract like-minded people to you.
Rich: Alright. Now social media algorithms are constantly changing, and some people are constantly chasing those algorithms. Trying to make sure, are there things that we should be thinking about now in 2025 that are popular on LinkedIn that you’re recommending to your clients? Or should we be thinking about trying to create content that is algorithm proof as we’re generating these new things?
Joe: Yeah, so I think there are two parts to this. My first thought is it’s really important to lean into your strengths and create the types of content that best reflect you and the brand that you want to build. And even if you’re creating your own content, the types of content that you feel most effective and comfortable creating.
So if you’re a whiz with the written word, then I would lean into that. If you are good on camera, then you might want to experiment with video. So my first piece of advice would be stick with what comes naturally to you and play to your strengths.
Having said that, there’s no point trying to fight against the machine. The algorithm has certain things that it prefers and so we do need to be aware of those in terms of trends and things that are coming or that are already here in 2025. Video on LinkedIn has landed in a big way, so there’s the TikTok style video feed. That means that portrait oriented vertical video is way more likely to get picked up than horizontal widescreen video.
So if you’re creating video content, first thing would be to make sure it’s portrait orientation. I do help clients increasingly with getting on camera and creating video content because things are moving in that direction. There’s still a lot of room for written content on LinkedIn. So video is definitely one.
The other interesting trend that I’m picking up on is as AI clearly plays more of a role in the content that you see in the feed, this is bringing a return to what I call ‘norm core’ content. This is like your crocs and socks style content. Like it’s just a little bit unpolished. It’s a little bit, you can tell it’s raw, it’s very human, it’s just norm core. It’s not super tightly formatted with really short, punchy sentences and one-line paragraphs and all that kind of stuff. I think there’s still a lot of that out there, but it’s so easily replicated.
What I’m seeing now is stuff that is intentionally unpolished and raw and very human to signal that, hey, I’m doing this myself, and I see naturally just a leaning towards people really enjoying that content more as the AI slot is just insidious at the moment. So norm core and vertical video are my trends to watch in 2025.
Rich: Alright, and so we’ve talked so far about us creating our own content, but a big piece of social media is obviously the social aspect of it. What do you recommend for engaging with other people’s content on LinkedIn in a way that maybe builds relationship rather than just promotes our own content?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. This is a fantastic way to get started with business development, relationship development on LinkedIn. If you’re not at the point of wanting to or being able to create your own content regularly, the first thing is comments.
So if you allocate 15-20 minutes and you scroll the feed and you have a goal to leave thoughtful comments on a small handful of posts, that is a great way to get your headline, your photo, your brand in front of a new audience. When it comes to commenting, a great place to start is a genuine specific compliment.
Take the time, read the post. And rather than just saying ‘thanks for sharing’, or ‘great posts’, pick out one specific thing. Make the original poster’s day. Contribute to the conversation if you want to, but a really specific compliment is a great place to start. It gets you some reps in putting yourself out there on LinkedIn, and from there it’s building on the original poster’s idea.
It might be constructively, of course, sharing your own perspective or your own opinion if it differs from the post. But commenting on other people’s content is a great way to diversify against the algorithm in terms of just creating your own content all the time.
The other really valuable asset that LinkedIn has is obviously the one-to-one messaging capabilities that you’ve got. Everything is very clear, it’s very visible who you’re talking to. The whole professional element to LinkedIn means that it’s easy for you to find the right types of people. And so reaching out one-to-one if it’s done in the right way is also a really effective way to use LinkedIn.
And fundamentally, that’s how LinkedIn all started was about your professional network and connecting with relevant people in your audience. So I’m seeing a big return to the one-to-one message as well.
Rich: When you’re talking one-to-one, are you talking about LinkedIn Messenger?
Joe: Yeah. Direct messages on LinkedIn to your connections. Yep.
Rich: Perfect. Because that’s where I wanted to go next. Because you can have that offer type post, but it’s sometimes for many people an awkward segue to slide into their DMs, as people like to say.
So what are some techniques that you use with your clients on going from that public arena to a one-on-one conversation, and then how do you get them out of LinkedIn Messenger and then maybe on the phone in a Zoom call or meeting face-to-face?
Joe: Yeah, look, I love talking about this because, to be very blunt, there are so many people doing this so badly that the bar is so low to do this well. The pitch slap feels like it’s rampant on LinkedIn, and I think it’s probably the worst thing that can happen on LinkedIn. And so we definitely don’t want to do that.
But I think this phenomenon of all these operators that are getting it wrong is leaving everyone very fearful about trying their own way. And so a lot of people on LinkedIn are just lurking. They’re scrolling through the feed and there’ll be no kind of visible sign of their interest. And so that means the opportunity is huge.
When it comes to initiating a one-to-one conversation on LinkedIn, a guy called Richard Moore explains this concept of present commonality. And it’s the approach that I use in all my LinkedIn outreach or my one-to-one outreach actually on any platform. And so I guess the best way to explain present commonality is actually if I ask you a question, Rich, I’ll give you a scenario and see what you would say in this situation.
So let’s imagine you are going to a wedding. You are going to this wedding by yourself, and you’ve arrived at the venue a few minutes early. And you look around the seats and you realize that you don’t know anyone else that’s going to be at this wedding other than the couple. And so you’re going to go and sit down next to someone that you don’t already know. And you sit down next to them and you’re waiting to fill in a bit of time. What is a question that you might lean over and ask that person sitting next to you at the wedding?
Rich: First question would be is, “Bride or groom? What side of the family are you on and what’s your connection?”
Joe: Exactly. Yeah. And so most people will say that’s a very logical light lift, super natural question to ask. And that is present commonality. The thing that you guys have in common at that present moment is the bride and the groom, the couple that you’re both there. So we want to reference present commonality to break down barriers and start conversations in an effective way.
So what that looks like on LinkedIn, is let’s say someone’s viewed your profile. Let’s say someone’s liked your content or they’ve commented on your content, that’s the thing you’ve got in common. So your outreach message to that person might be, “Hey Rich, thanks for checking out my profile.” Once we’ve addressed the present commonality, we just want to hand over the microphone and give you the opportunity to say something.
So to do that, I would say, did anything stand out? That’s the outreach message formula that I use across new followers, new connections, people who engage with my content that’s referencing present commonality. And then just simply handing the microphone over with no push, nothing too cringey about it. Just giving them an opportunity and space to share if they want to.
Rich: So are you saying, because I get these alerts like these,” 27 people looked at your profile” so you’re following up with them and saying not exactly the same way, but you’re saying, “Hey, I noticed you were stalking me. And just thought I’d ask was there something interesting in my profile that you found”, or something like that. And I would probably phrase it differently than that. But then again, knowing me, I might phrase it exactly like that just to get a reaction out of them. But that’s one approach that you might take.
Joe: Absolutely. So I think profile viewers, and I do invest in LinkedIn premium, it’s not cheap but I do invest in LinkedIn premium. Because I think that allows you to then see everyone who’s viewed your profile. And I see that as a really high intense signal that we want to use on LinkedIn. And so profile viewers is a great place to go looking, especially if you’re thinking about talent attraction.
But for leads and clients as well, reaching out to people who’ve checked out your profile is a great source of leads. And so that message that you shared there, use a bit of humor, break the ice. I think that’s a great way to approach it.
Rich: Very interesting, because I haven’t done that. I have Sales Navigator, so it’s definitely something I could take advantage of, and I will definitely be trialing that out.
And when you were telling that story about the wedding or that example about the wedding, it reminds me because people think I’m this master networker, and honestly I’m not. When I put on my own events and I know more than 50 people in the room, I’m very comfortable. But when I go to a new event and I know one or nobody there, it is really challenging for me.
I have a ski house, and when I go up there, we go midweek and there’s almost nobody there. So most of the time I get to ride the chairlift by myself, if I’m skiing by myself. But then there’s always that time when you’re with somebody else. You and that person, 5, 10, 15 minutes, depending on the length, and you have to make small talk. And I always start the same way. I always start with, “Hey, any good runs today?” Or, “Where are you up from?” Because these are, as you said, the present commonalities between them.
In the wedding example and in the chairlift example, the only difference is there’s a set period of time where we’ve been forced into this situation. This may be an unnatural situation where with LinkedIn there’s always at the end of this, one of us wants something from the other, or maybe both of us want to work together.
Is there anything that we can say or do that might be different than the chairlift or the wedding example, and maybe we’re recognized that, look, we’re on this platform because we want to build our businesses, but still doesn’t come across as smarmy or sleazy or anything like that?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. There is a business tool, a business networking tool, and so there’s typically an outcome or an agenda that is behind interactions on LinkedIn. I think being open with that, realistic about that. I always try and use kind of permission-based messaging, “Would it make sense to hop on a call”, things like that rather than trying to push too hard or be too direct.
But yeah, look, I think as well that we can potentially get caught up a little bit too much in overthinking this stuff. And the people that are there who are interested, who are shopping or considering engaging people on LinkedIn, and this is how the game is played. And if they’re not, they won’t respond. They’ll just probably move on with their day.
And so I think it’s important to be mindful of it, but at the end of the day as well, it’s got to get comfortable with the potential for rejection or things like that, too.
Rich: Absolutely. If somebody’s listening right now and they want to improve their results on LinkedIn, what would be the first thing you would recommend they tackle? Or alternatively, if they only have five or 10 minutes a day to give to LinkedIn, how should they spend it?
Joe: Yeah, so if you’ve got five to 10 minutes a day to spend on LinkedIn, I would be doing a mixture of some thoughtful commenting on relevant, whether they’re influential people in your field or people who fit your kind of target audience. I’d be trying to leave a handful of thoughtful comments on people that fit that in your feed.
And I would also be trying to send some grow your audience, essentially build your list of connections. So sending a few connection requests, maybe again on those posts that you are commenting on, finding interesting people in your orbit there and making some outreach to those people. Without any particular agenda or message initially, but just to grow your audience.
I think the number one thing from a hygiene point of view is just refresh. Read back over your profile with this mindset shift when it comes to the ‘about’ section particularly. So when LinkedIn started out, it was your CV online, and so the ‘about’ section was about the profile owner. Like it was about me. I actually think now the way that a LinkedIn profile should be set up is really not about the person whose profile it is, but about who you’re trying to talk to.
And so I would also encourage you to revisit your LinkedIn profile with that lens in mind rather than promoting how impressive you are and maybe all your achievements and things like that. And your own story, flipping that more to be towards the audience that you are trying to serve, or who you’re trying to attract.
Rich: Okay. Now I understand you have a gift for our listeners, The Solopreneurs LinkedIn Playbook. How can people get a copy of that?
Joe: Yeah you can head to joemackay.info, that’s J-O-E-M-C-K-A-Y info. You’ll grab my weekly newsletter there, The Solo Success School, and you’ll get a copy of my End-to-End LinkedIn playbook. I’ve spent way too much time on LinkedIn over the last few years, so I’ve dropped everything I know about LinkedIn into that playbook, and you get a copy of that when you when you join my newsletter.
Rich: Excellent. And if people just want to connect with you, where can we send them?
Joe: Yeah, take one guess on which platform I’m hanging out on? You can find me, Joe McKay, on LinkedIn. Otherwise, through JoeMcKay.info, you’ll be taken to my kind of landing page, and you can find all my contact info there.
Rich: Awesome. Joe, thank you so much. I will see you on LinkedIn, I’m sure, in the near future. And I appreciate your time today.
Joe: Thanks for having me, Rich. Good to talk.
Show Notes:
Joe McKay is a LinkedIn ghostwriter and content coach who helps solopreneurs, founders, and CEOs build standout personal brands. Visit his website for free content, and be sure to connect with him on LinkedIn and let him know you heard him on this podcast.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.