How I Gained 468K LinkedIn Followers (and Make $1.1M/Month)

at the start of 2024 I had the fastest growing account on LinkedIn I grew my profile to 272,000 followers in 12 months and today I'm at 468,000 followers and growing at a rate of 11,300 followers a month all without spending a cent on paid ads here's the Ultimate seven-step Guide to get your audience to its first 100,000 followers so that you can add $2.8 million of annual revenue to your business first off I'm not just an outlier here I've given this advice to thousands of Founders and each of them had minimal experience probably just like

you you know I remember helping Steve GNA a tech entrepreneur who started with zero LinkedIn audience no presence and really no idea on how to stand out fast forward today and Steve has over 44,000 loyal followers and not just that he launched a podcast with over 3 million downloads and drove over $7 million of annual recurring Revenue to his business or someone like k Thomas that I helped to grow to over 600% on LinkedIn in just 5 months and I've advised hundreds of more Founders do just the same all you have to do is really

follow these seven steps I'm going to outline in this video first you got to set up your profitable profile this is really the first impression that people see when they go and visit you this is what people often Skip and then you just don't get the results that you're after you know what I found over the years is that LinkedIn is a salesperson that never sleeps you know while you're out there you're exploring the outdoors your LinkedIn profile is there converting people to your newsletter into Revenue while you sleep so you don't want to come

across like some scrub your LinkedIn present should be your competitive Advantage people make subconscious judgments based on the looks and under a second you want to make sure you look clean confident and confident once you sign up for LinkedIn you need to update your profile with an amazing head shot the goal is to go from this to this here's a quick trick to get a fantastic head shot at home so you're going to go and grab your iPhone and then have someone take a photo of you that way you're using the back side of the

camera not the front side that you generally would use for a selfie which is going to make you look a lot worse get some window light on a cloudy day and S at a 90° angle so it likes you from one side switch to portrait mode so you blur out any distracting background then take the photo close enough so that you don't have that much Headroom finally then send your image to your computer and drop in an app like pixler if you're a beginner or something like Lightroom or photoshop if you're more advanced you're going

to crop the image and then voila great head shot without a budget if you can invest in a photographer then you should do it I recommend it so that they can do all this and a lot more the truth is that that headshot is your first impression and you want to nail it great photography is a quick way to signal to people that you have great taste and taste is the most rare skill in the world it's a trust signal and using good photos on LinkedIn and on your website is going to make a big

difference and then help speed up your growth from there you're going to want to add your company to your profile make sure it's a nice logo and that the company page has a description that really sells people on what you do reach out to your team and make sure they also have their company profiles updated on their LinkedIn so that it's all consistent finally you want to set up your tagline this should be a simple single line that conveys who you are and then the value you're going to add to your audience Pro tip you

want to aim to own a word in the mind of your audience James clear owns the word habit I own the word systems Ryan holiday owns the word stoicism what word are you aiming to own in the hearts in minds of your audience if you don't know this exercise will only take you a few minutes and it is well worth it here are a few examples of copy that you can adapt qualification and one key idea this is a simple straightforward approach that leads with your qualifications here's my headline it has my job title and

company name then it has one key message that's important for my audience to know about me right now that's that I help people with proven systems to grow a profitable audience with Organic content but before we convert traffic we have to get traffic and that comes from posting one of the core metrics that no one talks about is reposts the more people that want to repost your content the better the LinkedIn algorithm favors posts that get reposted so we want to ask ourselves why would someone repost this and then reverse engineer that repost this is

how we'll hijack the linked an algorithm and grow to 100,000 followers fast and the way to do this is to post and learn what works best practice is to post once a day at a consistent time every day if you need to you can start with a Monday Wednesday Friday posting schedule and then gradually increase your Cadence but the more you can post the faster you'll learn and the faster you'll grow so what should you post what word do you want to own in your customers minds and what content will help you get this there

to start use the iy guy exercise make four lists what you're good at what you can be paid for what the world needs and what you love to do then populate your iy guy which is the meeting point of these four areas it's the overlap where then you can find your best topics the topics that meet in the center are ideal for attracting your first 10,000 followers and creating predictable profit in the future I discovered that I love systems audience growth building communities and Entrepreneurship and so these are the topics that I talk about consistently

now let's take it one step beyond that icky guy to your content categories these are the subtopics inspired by your icky guy these content categories become the drum bead of your content schedule these are the things that you talk about constantly and you become Niche famous for they're going to establish the world that you own these are going to be what people know and love you for so what are some ways to generate post ideas from your content categories well Mr Beast is notorious for staying up all night obsessing over his video ideas I've obsessed

for 10 years over finding the best ideas and in the process I develop what I call the LinkedIn idea machine you can use this framework to come up with over 30 Amazing Ideas in just 30 minutes for each content category that you outlined above you want to brainstorm lists tools facts guides systems summaries and Frameworks then go to the next level with deep dive cont content with ideas data stories reasons Trend reports expert quotes research summaries and Industry breakdowns our goal is to be the absolute best in our category and we want to be as

generous as possible we basically just want to take all our knowledge and give it away the more generous we are the more repost we're going to get and the more repost we get the more growth the more growth the more revenue and after you come up with a backlog of valuable ideas you should use the 5year reflection framework this is another framework to come up with endless ideas this single exercise has been responsible for my biggest hits on LinkedIn so first get a pen and paper reflect on The Last 5 Years what systems templates checklists

do you wish that you had 5 years ago now think about it to the U of 5 years ago you are now an expert you already know the advice that you wish you had to avoid dead ends challenges and a bunch of obstacles your goal is to help the you of 5 years ago find Clarity find belonging and the growth needed through the content that you're about to create so you're going to write down things like the lessons you've learned mistakes you've made your achievements underrated skills successful routines your personal experiences failures obstacles challenges insecurities

what things have shaped you and the things that you wish you had known then once you have all these content ideas it's time to start crafting your post now scroll stopping hooks are the key to every content format on LinkedIn the top three lines of text are the main thing that your audience are going to see when they see you post and you want to make sure they stop in their tracks anything that you write below those three lines gets cut off and hidden behind the SE more text and so this makes these three lines

which are the hook the most important part of your post David ogi the father of advertising one said this on the average five times as many people will read the headline as read the body copy when you have written your headline you have already spent 80 cents of your dollar having a scroll stopping Hook is 80% of the battle if no one makes it past the front door to see the rest of your content you're not going to go anywhere and so look at these 10 hooks I've written these 10 hooks have garnered over 24

million views no hook no virality great hooks build iconic Brands just do it the hook lives on three lines that's about 225 characters without line breaks but our goal isn't to stuff as many words into that space as we can it's to make the words we use as compelling as possible additionally notice how I use Simple language fifth grade level it's easy to read and you don't have to stop and wonder what I'm talking about I keep the sentences short kinetic they have a nice Rhythm to them and they're just easy to read long sentence

short sentence question answer this is the Rhythm that you want to perfect the more simple and easier reading the more likely people are to continue and stick with you here's a second example again with this hook I established both a benefit and Authority in the first line while using specific numbers to back up my claim so that it's not generic before we get into the body the post there are two magic words I recommend that you use in your hook I've put these two words at the front of six 67% of my viral posts can

you guess what they are oh wait they are I and I here are three examples combine these two magic words with a scroll stopping hook and you'll get 1,000 followers a month in no time but if you want to get beyond that to your next 10,000 you'll have to master how your hooks interact with the rest of your post and that means using my four power formats you're are the four formats that work to grow my account and add 30,000 followers a month this first power format is the long form list for this first format

we combine the hook with a second visual hook hit the media button and then attach an image to the post which is going to look like this you'll want to focus on Square images or images that have some sort of vertical layout horizontal images will get crushed and cropped and then look horrible on LinkedIn this image is your post thumbnail so it's something that's going to catch your audience's eye and then get them to keep on scrolling down the feet they'll read the hook and then click see more to read the full post you want

to maximize the value per image and create insane Intrigue you know a picture speaks a th000 words and we want the image that you choose to speak 10,000 the image you combine with your hook can be something custom designed a photo of yourself that's related or some visually striking image that relates to the post maybe it's even a screenshot of a customer question or even a handdrawn resource like this over time you'll find the perfect pairing you don't need money to do this you need creativity and iteration flashy videos and Graphics do not work and

please avoid AI once you attract someone's attention the full post is where you deliver that massive value and then once they click see more the audience will arrive at your long form list this is a list of interesting items and statements that really relate to the hook that you've promised people the truth is that LinkedIn rewards the length of time that someone is engaging with your post I call it engaged time spent or ETF s a high ETS will drive a high growth of profile views and followers long form lists keep audiences reading longer than

scrolling the newsfeed and that's a huge signal to LinkedIn that what you're sharing is valuable if you combine your hook with a series of snackable insights you'll keep people reading once they click and they'll love it here's two more compelling examples in why each Works take time to pause the video and study each or go to the description in this video below the like button to get the Guide it explains each of these formats in depth with full illustrations and while you're down there hit the like button of this video And subscribe if you like

these systems the second content format is the long form Carousel a carousel is a series of images that you can click through to view one at a time you've got a long form format list but instead of making it from text you make it from a series of images with carousels people spend time reading your post without having to click on a new page my LinkedIn carousels have pushed over 30 million views a month here's an example of an effective Carousel that generated over 2 million views you'll notice that the hook is actually more than

three lines because I Nest words inside of the first image in the carousel without any extra clicks so you have extra room to craft a strong hook now you see how each time I click forward in the carousel there's another list item it's a long form list where each item gets an individual image in your Carousel in the final image I include a call to action which is crucial because this is how I'm driving people from the carousel to then sign up to my newsletter and this is a technique that I'll talk about more in

the final step of this video but you're not going to want to miss it to create a carousel you'll need to create a PDF document that's a series of square-based images you'll then upload that document to your post by clicking the add document button to actually create these image PDFs you'll want to use figma to create the images and then export those images to a PDF I like to test out my best copyrighting on xir I see it as a gym for copyrighting and the best X threads get reposted as carousels on LinkedIn if you're

converting an xost there's a special service that you're just getting started that I'd recommend I cover all these steps on how to do this as well as detailed examples of effective carousels in the download below this video so you're going to want to click that below the video in the description and get that download the third power format for LinkedIn is a long form hook stacking a hook stack is a long form list without the numbers instead you string together short statements that build on what the hook established then you end with a payoff with

a good hook stack you can't help but read each line until you've accidentally read the entire thing here's an example of a hook sack that I built this is one of my top six performing posts ever you can see how each line leads to the next with this format you often don't need an image to be effective it's that good so if you do add an image you're just superp powering it here's another hook stack this is one of my top performing posts with over 2.4 million views it starts with a killer hook and just

keeps layering on more and more but the real reason these hook Stacks do so well is that I superpower them with the next format the long form image this is my favorite current format right now instead of clicking to see a long form list you put the entire list inside of the compelling image I handw write these for about 20 minutes every morning this way people immediately see the entire thing and then they sit there absorb bit and click through to read the rest of it now I've curated all of these insights and then handrawn

them and jam-packed them into these handdrawn images but you can use designed images as well if you want to use canva or figma but again hand drawing is what I've preferred when you combine a scroll stopping hook with any of these powerful long form posts your audience growth and engagement will Skyrocket the next step is to power up you have a profitable profile you post on a consistent schedule and you pair that with your scroll stopping hooks with the four power formats in other words you're either already at 10,000 followers or you will be soon

that means it's time to level up first soak in Inspiration follow the best people you can on LinkedIn who should you follow I'm going to be honest the best place to start is my profile if it's not already obvious I've spent thousands of hours obsessing over LinkedIn it's kind of sad and I want you to steal everything I know so go to my profile follow me and hit this Bell so you get alerted to Notifications whenever I post this way you'll see the updates to my strategies in real time based on everything I've learned over

thousands of hours of research then you're going to power up your LinkedIn it's all about absorbing insights from other top creators using Tapo X's Chrome extension Tapo X is the single best app you can use for LinkedIn it combines analytics Ai and inspiration all in one app they should sponsor me but they don't so I just love what they're doing so I'd recommend that you download them for your desktop then when you visit your top Creator you're going to see them on this right side bar of your screen you can see all your detail analytics

you can see their top content and it's going to just help you develop higher performing content it's a game changer because it customizes it for you Tapo XX also has insane analytics that allow me to track my growth I can see my followers engagements Impressions and profile views over time for the last 30 days 60 days and 90 days and I can access my top performing content in seconds the next step in powering up your LinkedIn is using Creator mode on your profile scroll down to resources and turn Creator mode on this enables the follow

button on your profile which is going to increase your view to follower conversions it also gives you access to several powerful profile features that you're going to be able to take advantage of okay now we're ready to really win on LinkedIn these tips will help you get from 10,000 to 100,000 followers on LinkedIn no more Basics first first of all you want to post 7 days a week in a perfect world you should post your posts manually without scheduling them on some other platform LinkedIn gives less attention to prescheduled posts and so I write all

my own content and then I post it manually next you don't want to share links on your post LinkedIn wants people to actually stay on the platform and so if you go and have some external link it's going to think that you're getting people to leave LinkedIn and then it's not going to share it that far now here's a way to share external links without getting penalized which I'll share at the end of this video but by default don't add links to your post please we want to help you grow I don't want to hinder

it with these external links a second Advanced LinkedIn strategy is to use the twx Chrome extension this will help you understand top performing content from creators on X X is like a gym for copyrighting the best copyrighting bodybuilders are on X and when those creators repurpose their content on LinkedIn they absolutely kill it because the competition for attention is much higher on X sorry LinkedIn it's just the truth my X account is one of the largest and most engaged on any business account on X so go follow my X account and then use twx to

discover my best performing content formats you can study these formats and then bring them to LinkedIn now my next Advanced tip is to engage with comments for 30 minutes every morning after you put your post live take notes of the most common questions you can then add those questions to your LinkedIn ID idea machine and use them to go and create your content buckets connecting with a group of other like-minded Founders and creators is one of the best ways to grow exponentially on LinkedIn you can then deepen that relationship off platform by sharing what's working

in a WhatsApp group Mr Beast attributed his massive growth on YouTube to a group chat that he had going with seven other creators if you want to go and have a meteoric rise on LinkedIn then you should use this method too instead of just learning from your own post you can actually learn from a group of other creators that are crushing it as well share your greatest hits share what's working what's not working the dead ends you're experiencing your bottlenecks and then all learn together as a group support one another and win together this has

been huge for my personal development and growth on every social platform use this Outreach template you see here to message 20 accounts per week now reaching out to people sometimes can make people nervous so you're going to want to pick accounts that have 10,000 followers more than you do and start a conversation with them aim to become friends and grow together send this to start via LinkedIn DM hey name loving your content big fan of your post on insert subject what are your goals on LinkedIn then you're going to send this after they respond my

goal is to get to 10,000 followers by December 31st and drive people to my business would love to grow together cool if we collab in a WhatsApp group and share what's working for one another on LinkedIn once we Implement all these steps winning on LinkedIn we're ready for the final step winning off of LinkedIn so the goal of all this attention that we've just driven on LinkedIn is to convert that attention to a business and life that you love if you get 100,000 followers but you're just hating your life well then this is all just

a wasted effort so let's return to your profitable profile and our posting strategy it's time to transition our massive audience from LinkedIn to our convertkit newsletter if you watch the first video in this series you know that as early as your first a th000 followers you want to create a convertkit newsletter to convert your rented audience to an owned audience that way when you grow past 100,000 followers and Beyond you can transfer that audience from LinkedIn to your owned audience in your newsletter which is your most valuable audience LinkedIn drives as much as 65% of

the revenue in my portfolio of online businesses our business grew over $2 million of revenue from LinkedIn alone last year and that's when my audience was at only 50,000 followers let's level up your profitable profile so it becomes a lead generation machine we'll use my own Prof file as the ultimate example first as you can see here I've set up my cover photo Banner to mention the foundos newsletter I mentioned that there over 107,000 people signed up so it must be good and I tell people that you can sign up via the link in BIO

additionally notice how I promise how often I'll be posting I give people an impression of what they are going in signing up for I give people a reason to follow and a reminder to click on the Bell to subscribe second you can see that my tagline mentions my most important value proposition I'm the founder and CEO of founder OS and I help people with proven systems to grow a profitable audience with Organic content which for me is my biggest opportunity right now more on that in the next video in the series below that we have

my bio you want your bio to be the ultimate credibility pitch so here's how you know your bio is doing an amazing job it all comes down to your follower to profile conversion rate a good LinkedIn profile should convert 5% of your profile visitors to follows a fantastic bio like mine converts 19% of all people who visit it into followers if your bio sucks your conversions will suck too as you can see my bio starts with credibility building about who I am and what I've done why should you listen to me well the bio provides

the context additionally I share in single lines what value I'm offering so that anyone who visits knows exactly what I do this is the hook stacking formula that we talked about but applied to my bio be as concrete as possible and use as many hard numbers as possible so that you build the credibility keep track of these numbers and update them over time next once I've established what I'm offering I add my core call to actions these are the three clear next actions my audience needs to take the first should always be your convertkit newsletter

then link to one or two products that are lead magnets that your audience can get instant value from finally you're going to want to plug all your other social media channels even if you haven't started building them out yet this is an easy way to start growing an initial audience across all these channels at once and helping you become more omnipresent if you already have big audiences on those platforms this is a free strategy and way to grow them much faster next we want to add a call to action that will appear under our name

everywhere we post since you've already turned on Creator mode you now have access to this feature hit this edit icon scroll down and set your button as a clickable link add the URL and set your text my call to action sends anyone who clicks to my founder L program this is where I teach Founders everything that they need to know to get to millions in Revenue next is the featured area which is between our header and a Bo section this is where you want to add links to your two most important pages so you can

promote those set the first as your convertkit newsletter and then the other one as a core product that you offer to do this click Add profile section click recommended then add featured click the plus icon and then add your link write a title that's strong a short call to action of no more than 20 characters and then ignore that description part finally set a great thumbnail image when you add your links they'll look like this tweak your links so that the text looks good and it doesn't overflow design the call to action thumbnails so that

they're irresistible on brand and compelling to click this entire section of your profile now drives your audience to your business this is where you're going to get the real Roi from LinkedIn next we're going to promote our newsletter and our core product in our post I mentioned that LinkedIn will penalize your post if it's viewed with an external link so here's how you can get around that after you post wait and watch after a short time LinkedIn will start to push your post to as many people as possible if these people engage with the post

linkedin's going to promote it to more and more newsfeeds once you see that your post has taken flight now you can append that call to action to the end of it by editing the post by this point LinkedIn is already rewarding you for sharing your post and so it's not going to stop sharing it and so it's fine to now add your external link I use this technique all the time I see my post take off and after 45 minutes I edit it and add this external link this way I get the most possible views

on any post but I also convert those views to my newsletter to my products and my workshops which drives millions of dollars of business every year because to be honest 10,000 or even 100,000 followers is just the beginning the next video in this series is my full guide to taking all this audience and growth you've now experienced and then use it to drive Revenue to your business and become a true Auto preneur I'll show you how to harness this LinkedIn audience you've now grown so you can work from where you want when you want how

you want with whoever you want thanks for watching and good luck growing your LinkedIn audience