With personal branding becoming as important as company branding, establishing yourself as an expert has become an essential element of your company’s marketing strategy. Creating LinkedIn articles to promote your personal brand can be a way to establish thought leadership and create brand awareness with a potentially larger audience.
Why Create Articles for Personal Branding?
Generating content as a way to establish expertise and advance one’s career has been a time-tested strategy in the world of academia. Leveraging that strategy with content that is insightful and engaging will help you market yourself and your company.
Why LinkedIn as a Content Publishing Platform?
If generating content helps your company then why not publish content on your blog? Generating subject matter expert material for your company blog is a good way to attract and engage with your audience. The company blog should be a place where all company leaders and employees publish content. However, you should also look at publishing new or repurposed content on your LinkedIn profile.
When you publish an article on LinkedIn, it is added to your network feed where all of your first degree connections and followers can see it. If you are leveraging LinkedIn for B2B lead generation, then adding these articles can help you engage with your network.
These articles also help you to gain exposure to a wider audience. The article will be cataloged by Pulse for everyone on and off of LinkedIn to find. It adds another way for prospects to find you and learn more about you and your company.
LinkedIn Article Creation and Publishing Best Practices
So then how do you create a LinkedIn article that will establish you as a subject matter expert, engage your audience, and help you to attract prospects to your LinkedIn profile?
Create Long-Form Content
LinkedIn recommends creating long-form content for your LinkedIn article. There are various definitions of what constitutes long-form content, but it is usually described as content that is more than 700 words. In addition to length, you will need to make sure that your content is thoughtful, insightful and will be useful to your prospects.
You can create content that solves a specific pain point, answers a specific question, highlights upcoming industry trends or teaches them strategies to make their tasks more efficient. Whatever type of content you chose, make sure you make your content valuable for your readers.
Make Your Content Easy to Read
Creating long-form posts doesn’t mean generating content that is hard to read. Writing content that is between the 6th and 9th-grade reading level will increase social shares and engagement.
You will also need to make your content easy to scan. Creating short paragraphs and subheadings will allow those who will only engage with your article for 20 seconds to find the answers they want. This leads to our next tip, optimizing your article.
Optimize Your Article Like You Would a Blog Post
You will need to make sure that you follow the same optimization strategies for your LinkedIn article as you would for a company blog post. LinkedIn designed and launched Pulse as a way for mobile users to organize their article feed and for Google to scan and categorize articles. Because of this, LinkedIn’s algorithms scan for keywords and HTML just like Google algorithms do.
Make sure that you include keywords your prospects are likely to search for on LinkedIn in the body of your article as well as the post’s headline and subheadings. When you are publishing your article on LinkedIn make sure your subheadings are properly optimized and you include links in your article back to relevant pages of your company website.
Include Images and Video
LinkedIn allows you to add a cover image to your long-form article that will be seen on your newsfeed and in Pulse. But you should also include images in the body of your article to make it more visually appealing. LinkedIn also allows you to add video to your content and recommends that you add videos to your LinkedIn posts to increase engagement.
Stick to a Schedule
If you are looking to promote your personal brand with LinkedIn articles then you will need to create and stick to a publishing schedule. The consistency will help you grow your audience and potentially help you become a micro-influencer on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn recommends a monthly or bi-weekly publishing schedule to stay top of mind. When you are considering which publishing schedule to follow, you will want to think about your other activities. Make sure you can consistently create engaging and valuable posts once or twice a month in addition to everything else you need to do.
It is better to start with once a month posting and increase your activity to bi-weekly once you establish a routine than to start with a bi-weekly schedule and realize this isn’t sustainable.
Have Fun
While this may seem to be an odd tip to add when it comes to creating articles, it is an important one. Don’t just create these articles because you think you have to or because you want to push more people along in your sales pipeline. Generate long-form LinkedIn articles because you genuinely want to help your audience. The enthusiasm will come through, and you will receive more engagement with your content.
Personal branding is showing who you are, what you know, and how those two things have shaped your company. Generating LinkedIn articles as a part of your branding strategy will help you accomplish this on a platform that is designed to help your connections know, like and trust you.
If you want to leverage LinkedIn articles to grow your personal or company brand but don’t have the capacity to create your own content, then talk to us. Part of the RevGrow strategy for our clients can include LinkedIn article creation and publication service. Learn how we can help you add this essential element to your LinkedIn lead generation strategy.
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About RevGrow
RevGrow is a Lead Generation and Business Development firm based in Dallas-Fort Worth and proudly serves clients throughout the United States. RevGrow helps businesses grow their revenue by generating a predictable flow of qualified leads and appointments using LinkedIn. To get these results, RevGrow positions you as the authority in your field and someone prospects will know, like and trust. You can connect with RevGrow on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
This article has been recently updated and was originally published on July 27, 2018.
