If I Started LinkedIn in 2025, I'd Do This

if you can get these three things right your LinkedIn will grow fast you'll build a strong personal brand and network and you'll get so many opportunities and leads that you don't know what to do with them all and if I knew what I'm going to show you in this video s years ago when I started my LinkedIn journey I would have saved myself years of time spent learning the hard way since starting on LinkedIn I built an audience of 32,000 followers I Ed the platform to land my dream job without having to send thousands of

applications and since then have left that dream job to build a business of my own off of LinkedIn that's doing over a million dollar in Revenue per year I've also helped over 40 entrepreneurs launch and scale a LinkedIn content strategy of their own and generate millions of Impressions and millions in revenue for their businesses so today I'm going to take all seven years of my experience they condense it down into this video show you exactly what I would do if I had to start over from scratch and give you some of the best advice I've

picked up over the years like how to set up your LinkedIn profile to be a magnet for clients and new business how to network with anyone without looking needy how I think about content creation to build your personal brand and build yourself into a thought leader so you never have to worry about New Opportunities or new business again and more that could possibly change the course of your career and your business now it doesn't matter if you're the CEO of a multi-million dollar company or the founder of a bootstrap Scrappy startup the stuff I'm going

to show you in this video is all stuff that you can apply right now to improve on LinkedIn build your audience get more leads and I know it's cliche but the first thing to look at and really nail is your profile it's the first thing that people are going to see it's your first impression so you want to nail it your profile on LinkedIn is like a professional billboard just like businesses put up Billboards to advertise at a huge scale and attract customers you can treat your LinkedIn profile the same way way but online and

you can use it to display your skills experiences and achievements to potential clients and customers you want to make a good first impression and the better you design it the better you set it up and follow best practices the more effectively you'll be able to convert new visitors into followers and ultimately customers or people who are offering you a job but what I see a lot of times in people's profiles is it's too vague it's not interesting it's confusing or there's a poor offer nobody knows what you do it's not clear and they're missing all

sorts of important parts of their profile like a good profile picture a header Banner a good headline just Basics that need to be dialed in and I want to mention something now that's going to show up later in this video but it's important cuz it's going to show up on your profile when people land on it you want to make sure you're active on LinkedIn posting and interacting with other content because that shows up on your profile too and people can see hey if they land on your profile and Tommy hasn't posted in 6 months

they're going to be less likely to stick around and want to follow and I know these mistakes and errors seem like I'm nitpicking a little bit and they're not a big deal but if you've been running with them for a while and making them and you're not getting the results you want on LinkedIn they probably make a difference and there's your answer and the tactics and approach that I've used to build a successful LinkedIn profile has changed over the years as I've gone from someone who was looking for a job and more of an individual

contributor again looking for employment now to someone who's building a business using LinkedIn it's helpful for both but your approach is going to want to vary depending on which one of those you are for example when I was looking for a job and really using it to get job opportunities I was a lot more focused on documenting what I was learning because I was earlier on in my career I didn't have as much experience I couldn't really position myself as as an expert and this is an area where a lot of people get wrong on

LinkedIn when they first start is their earlier in their career they want to build a personal brand but they're like I don't know what to talk about I'm not an expert in anything I haven't had a ton of experience in this field whether it be marketing or sales or somewhere else in business the good thing is you don't have to be an expert for your LinkedIn to work you can really focus on documenting your journey and positioning yourself as someone who is earlier in your career you'll also find that early on in your career the

focus of your profile might change quite a bit for example I started off in the Health and Wellness space I wasn't even in marketing and then I shifted into more General marketing and then I shifted into social media marketing and now I finally landed in B2B marketing and SAS marketing and that's where my agency and my current business is based so it's okay if you switch the topic that you write about especially if you're early then of course as I was doing this I made sure I had a good profile set up a good headline

my bio was accurate and I was posting pretty consistently again documenting my learnings now as I shifted from employee to business owner that approach to LinkedIn in my profile changed a bit as I went from more broad to a lot more narrow in my focus because I was really focused on growing my specific business so I run an agency for B2B companies who want to grow on LinkedIn so a lot of my content now is about founder-led marketing LinkedIn content strategy B2B marketing it's very focused whereas earlier on I was kind of jumping around a

bit more and experimenting and I was more talking about broad marketing when you have a specific business that you want to promote and you want to grow using LinkedIn you want to make sure your positioning is Crystal Clear I'll also talk about that more later in the video now real quick as far as profile setup Basics your headline is something you want to take care of I like the simple equation of rule plus company plus one line of a value prop so what's the value that a reader is going to get from following you so

for myself CEO at compound I also have co-founder at bluecast a software company I launched and then building a social media agency for B2B companies so they know my role they know my company they also know what they're going to get if they follow me so if they're interested in social media strategy for B2B companies they're going to follow my LinkedIn you also want to make sure your about section or your summary is set up don't overthink this I like to keep it simple anywhere between 5 to 10 sentences include some social proof so why

should someone follow you so for example in mine we've helped 35 Plus early stage SAS and service Founders launch and scale founder-led content in the past one and a half years so giving evidence of hey I know what I'm talking about this is why you should follow me for this topic and again even if you're earlier in your career you could write documenting what I'm learning about marketing or documenting what I'm learning about sales as I'm looking for a job with an early stage stas company and you'd be surprised even if you're earlier in your

career how many experienced credit able people will follow you because they respect that you're documenting your journey in public and then of course LinkedIn Basics you want to have your job descriptions or your experience listed out so as you pick up more experience whether it be roles at companies you're working for companies you've started make sure they're accurately listed on your LinkedIn profile kind of a no-brainer but worth stating just in case so wherever you're at in your journey just make sure your LinkedIn profile is set up properly it's such a low lift thing you

can do in literally 10 minutes and it could be the difference between someone who could potentially change the course of your career following you and connecting with you or just bouncing from your profile so take it seriously now with how popular Ai and automated messages have become authenticity in real connections are more effective than ever and Linkedin is literally like a digital networking event or conference that is on 24/7 imagine walking into an industry conference where anyone that you want to connect with is there LinkedIn is that event except it's online and literally everyone in

the world that's in your industry is on there and just like in a networking event the more you engage and put yourself out there the more connections you're going to build and the more opportunities you can find but to be honest there was a period early on in my LinkedIn Journey where I sucked at this and there were three Cardinal mistakes that I was making that I would just avoid straight away if I was starting over again so let me help you out number one do not send generic connection requests you have no idea how

many times I get connection request that go something like hey I saw you liked so and so's post we should connect or hey I saw we're in the same industry so we should connect and they have no Mutual connections they've added no value and honestly the worst ones are hey I saw you were human and breathe oxygen so I thought we should connect it's like give give me some personalization either send a legitimately personalized DM or connection request or just send a blank one you'd be surprised how often blank connection requests work really well but

when you send a clearly automated connection request it doesn't build any connection and it defeats the purpose of that networking event like feel that we just talked about it doesn't feel authentic it feels impersonal and no one legit is going to want to respond to you that way I would rather you send five personalized connection requests or just five blank ones than a 100 clear clearly automated ones that aren't going to get you anywhere if you aren't giving any context or reason for your message or you don't have mutual followers that give you social proof

don't be surprised when people ignore you if you take 5 minutes or less to look at someone's profile learn a little bit about them and their experience it'll give you the ability to write a more personalized message and I guarantee you'll make a stronger first impression and get more Connections in return if I was sending connection requests right now which I often do on a daily basis to build my network I either send a blank one cuz again they convert pretty well or if I genuinely know someone from somewhere I'll drop a note and include

that in the connection request just keep it simple don't overthink it but also don't just use automated BS if you do this and nothing else you'll be miles ahead of your competition on LinkedIn now there are two more things I wish I could go back and kind of do over that I would tell myself so here's the second one do not only reach out when you need something another one of these killer mistakes is sending that connection request they accept it and then you just don't engage or don't nurture that conversation until you need something

until you're trying to sell them into your coaching program or into your agency or into your software and if you connect with someone you don't send them anything there's no Rapport built there's no actual relationship and then you go and try to hard pitch them how well do you think that's going to convert think about if you went up to someone completely random on the street like when I walk down the street I go outside in Austin walk down the street there's all those solicitors and people trying to get you to donate to stuff on

the side of the street I don't think I've stopped for them once I don't know them I don't have a relationship with them but if it was a friend that I saw that was like Hey I'm raising money for this cause do you think you could donate I would absolutely be interested it's the same thing on online when you're building your LinkedIn Network only reaching out when you need something feels very one-sided it's transactional and nothing good is going to come of it you might get lucky occasionally but in the long term you're not going

to get many opportunities networking should be a two-way streak right you want to build that relationship over time and then eventually either when you know you have an offer that's relevant to this person who you have a connection with you can pitch them and they're going to be open to it so don't think about it from I'm just trying to network with this person to get money out of them think about it like I'm trying to build a relationship an actual friendship with this person and I don't really care what comes with it just let

go and be your real authentic self Don't Force It the opportunities and the money will come if you just focus on building actual connections and adding value so for example I'll message some folks on LinkedIn just completely out of the blue and give them some recommendations on their LinkedIn profile or a post that I saw of theirs that was on the timeline that I thought could have been better I'm not pitching them I'm not trying to get them to work with my agency I'm just trying to add value up front and make that connection first

and then over the course of weeks or months we might go back and forth occasionally and again deep in that connection I might meet them at an industry event or something like that if they happen to be in town in Austin and eventually one day either them or someone they know might need a service that's in my category they'll recommend me because they know me take the same approach and apply to your business if you want any kind of long-term success this is how it's done now there's one more of these major networking pitfalls that

I wish I knew when I was first getting started don't neglect follow-ups and engagement literally thousands of people will connect with someone on LinkedIn and never follow up or never engage with a post of theirs again failing to actually nurture those relationships over time is going to lead to a weak Network you might have 5,000 followers or 10,000 or even 20,000 followers but if they're not actually invested in you and have a relationship with you you're not going to get much from them in the long run but on the flip side if you stay consistent

with engaging on their post reaching out occasionally via DMS again not to hard pitch but just to strengthen that connection just like you would with a friend in real life people are going to respect that you're committed and playing the long game and this doesn't take a long time you can do this this in 5 to 10 minutes per day I don't need you to spend 3 hours on LinkedIn going and messaging people literally 5 to 10 minutes is all you need to start building real connections with folks on the platform I personally like to

do 10 follow-ups per day it could be sales conversations I'm having it could just be folks that I want to get in touch with and kind of open up that relationship now like I mentioned earlier something that wasn't as big of a deal earlier on LinkedIn even when I was coming up was posting content on the platform it used to be just purely a hiring and jobboard platform nobody was really posting that was more for Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok or all these other platforms but the platform has changed quite a bit in the

past 5 years alone and has become more of a Content creation platform they're really pushing for it actually so if you want to get ahead on LinkedIn build an audience and a really strong Network you want to take advantage of this shift and focus on building your personal brand and actually understand what you need to do you want to look at other people who are posting on LinkedIn and see what they're doing well the mistakes they're making as well so you can avoid falling into those like you're learning from my mistakes early on now and

there are five personal branding mistakes that again I wish I could go back and fix and do over I'd be so much further along if I had just avoided these early on first is inconsistency so in reality most people that say they want to post on LinkedIn do so extremely inconsistently they start strong they're going to post every single day they maybe do it for a week or two and then they just fall off or they'll post sporadically like I've talked to Founders and people who want to post on LinkedIn who will post two or

three days in a row go dark for two weeks come back post again go dark for another month come back and that's just not a way to build a consistent engaged audience think of it like going to the gym you know that New Year's resolution crowd that is super excited they have all these goals they're going to start on January 1st by the time January 14th 2 weeks end of the year comes around a lot of those folks that said they were going to get in shape are back on their couch not working out and

with posting content again same thing posting inconsistently like that makes it really hard to gain momentum and because of that people often feel like their efforts are wasted and they're not seeing any growth or recognition from their content but it's just because they're not consistent the way you fix that to expand your time Horizon don't worry about building a LinkedIn audience in one week it's not going to happen or even a month I would really commit 6 to 12 months of posting content zoom out so that way you're not so worried about how your posts

perform on a day-to-day basis you know that you're committed to this you know that you're going to be consistent again using the fitness analogy the person who just shows up to the gym for 30 minutes every single day is 100% going to beat out the person who goes in for a 2hour workout 7 days a week for one or two weeks and then falls off because they burnt out so zoom out expand your time Horizon 6 to 12 months is what I would commit to minimum if you can do that if you can post consistently

for 6 to 12 months you will be so far ahead of everyone else it will be insane personally one of my biggest competitive advantages is that I have not stopped posting for 7 years like since I started I don't think I've taken more than one consecutive day off from posting on any platform including LinkedIn and that's why I win with content now the second mistake is self-promotion I see way too many Founders and thought leaders make their content too self Center they're constantly promoting their products and their services and every single post feels like a

sales pitch the people who end up doing this tend to get really low engagement Their audience gets fatigued by all the pitches and there's no real reason to follow them right like think about the people that you follow on social including LinkedIn you're likely learning something from them or being entertained by them they're not just pitching you their services now occasionally they will but you're not following them for that so because you get it and you're so smart instead of just doing this whole sales pitch thing and shoving your product down your audience's throat you're

going to take more balanced approach a super basic rule of thumb I would recommend is the 8020 split between content that educates or entertains and content that pitches another framework I like here is Gary V's jab jab jab right hook so the idea is that Jabs are sort of value adding again educating or entertaining and then a right hook would be some sort of sales pitch or a product highlight or a case study or something that's more bottom of funnel another framework I like to use to organize my topics is top middle and bottom of

funnel so a Content funnel top of funnel is broader more personal stories middle of funnel is more industry expertise that's specific to your ICP but still not a sales pitch it's value additive bottom of funnel is going to be your sales pitches so your case studies your feature highlights your product announcements things that aren't going to get as much reach on LinkedIn but are good for converting the audience you built through the top and middle of funnel content whatever framework you want to use to organize your content topics just know that you shouldn't spend more

than about 20% of your time pitching unless you're going through a very specific launch but that's a topic for a different video in short you want to become the go-to resource for your Target audience so for example if I can become the go-to resource for my audience and be2 be content and social they're going to come to me when they need that service if you're an email marketing copywriter looking for a job and you're posting about email marketing copywriting and become a go-to resource in that category someone who needs some copywritten for their email is

going to think of you first and you didn't have to pitch them directly see how that works another one of these mistakes that I was super guilty of was forgetting to engage with my audience even if you're posting consistently like five to seven times per week but you're not engag in on people that comment on your content but also other content on LinkedIn you're going to get really low engagement and pretty slow growth on the platform and by not engaging it gives the impression that you're more interested in broadcasting or talking at people than building

an actual engaged community on the platform and that'll result in less and less meaningful relationships and therefore less opportunities for you so an easy fix here is whenever you set aside time to post content on LinkedIn go and engage with other folks as well just like what we mentioned earlier with sending connection requests and DMS to folks you don't have have to spend a ton of time here I don't want you spending 5 hours per day commenting on LinkedIn post that's not a productive use of your time but if you can commit 15 to 20

minutes per day of sending relevant thoughtful comments on target audience posts or posts from other influencers who your target audience follows I promise you you're going to see faster growth and you're going to see more leads and opportunities which is the real thing we care about come through from LinkedIn a pro tip here is I like to build a spreadsheet with accounts that I'm going to go comment on just so I can go super quickly pull up the Google sheet and look through that list see if those people have posted anything new leave a comment

that's thoughtful and relevant and there we go I go on with my day now when I first started out I really struggled to define the niche that I was in and logically it makes sense right you think that going broad is going to allow you to attract more people because your potential reach for your audience is broader but if you're not specific with your Niche and your value proposition in other words why someone should follow you they're going to land on your profile and they're not going to know what to do they don't know what

you stand for they don't know what you're going to post about if you're posting about email marketing one day dog pictures the next day YouTube strategy the next day sure you might pick up some followers but if you get really dialed in and say again for example myself I want to be known for B2B content that is my Niche someone knows that if they want to get better at B2B content they're going to follow me whether it be here on YouTube or on LinkedIn or any other platform there's this whole idea in marketing of if

you're trying to Target everybody you end up targeting nobody same thing applies on LinkedIn get specific with your Niche and figuring out your Niche especially if you have a specific role that you're already working in or a specific business that you're trying to build is actually pretty simple just look at the skill sets that you use in that role or in that business that your target audience cares about whether it's employers or clients and make that your Niche I'm working with Founders who want to grow on LinkedIn it's in my best interest to post about

how to grow on LinkedIn and how to do B2B content the correct way because if someone that's in my target audience so a founder or an investor or a marketing leader at one of these companies comes across my profile they're going to see that I know what I'm doing I'm confident and they're going to reach out for my services eventually when they're ready but if I was posting about all sorts of different marketing content or getting into sales content or personal development or leadership it would be super confusing and they wouldn't Reach Out say pick

one Niche you can get a little bit broader as your account gets bigger but early on if you're trying to grow from scratch like if I was going to start over again today I would pick one Niche one topic become the guy or girl that's going to be most well known for that topic by your target audience by the way like I said earlier if you are in the first few years of your career and you don't have a lot of experience you don't need to position yourself as an expert in this Niche yet doc

M what you're learning in that Niche right see I'm trying to get a job in email marketing but I'm just getting started I'm 6 months in I don't know what the hell I'm doing I'm not going to try to position myself as an expert because someone might reach out thinking that I'm an expert and then I might end up being a fraud that's not good don't do that instead document what you're learning so if you saw or read a Blog about email marketing that was really interesting to you share your takeaways on LinkedIn or if

you listen to a podcast from an Ecom brand owner about how they run email marketing share your takeaways on LinkedIn or if you had an experience with a client that taught you a lesson that could be a story story that makes it onto your LinkedIn profile you see what I mean you don't have to fake it till you make it I say The Best For Last this is probably the most crucial thing that I wanted to mention here and that's fear of judgment or criticism I know when I was first starting the post I was

very concerned or worried about what my friends or family were going to say I was like oh my gosh this is cringe what if this person from high school sees this and makes fun of me or what if my college friend sees this and thinks this is cringe that was what was going on in my head the thing is if you never conquer this fear you'll never post consistently enough to succeed your body's natural defense mechanisms want to keep you safe and sheltered and away from that criticism because it's uncomfortable you don't want to go

through that but if you can recognize it and get around it and just post anyway and realize that anyone that's hating on your content that's more of a projection of themselves and what they have going on in their life than what you're doing you'll be in such a great spot and you'll be able to use LinkedIn the way it's meant to be to unlock massive opportunities for yourself now the other layer to this if you're already posting is a lot of folks fear negative feedback or criticism on post so again the random internet person that

sees a post out of context comments and says they hate you and that you're worthless and that you don't know what you're talking about and you don't deserve to be in this field we all fear that guy right the problem is if you write with that person in mind and trying to appease them and make sure everyone's happy your content is going to get very watered down because having a specific stance or point of view is one of the most effective things you can do on LinkedIn but if you're worried about criticism from this random

internet person you're going to take a more safe approach and it's going to be more sterile it's going to be boring and when it's boring it's not going to pick up traction I'm not saying you got to go full extremist on me here but you need to actually share your opinions even if they have the potential to have some blowback and honestly the way to overcome this is quite simple a lot of times if you're posting content on LinkedIn you have some sort of experience whether you're an industry veteran with 10 15 years of experience

or you're just getting started and youve spent the past 6 months really diving deep into your industry you still have something to share you have a level of skill you have a level of knowledge you've done the work so you shouldn't be afraid of what some random person on the internet is going to say like do you really want to let that third degree connection from your high school or that friend of a friend or that random Anonymous account that's just trolling in your comments keep you from growing your audience getting your dream job or

building the business that you've always wanted to it sounds silly when you say it out loud right now the single determining factor in whether LinkedIn will work for you or not whether the platform will help you unlock opportunities or whether you'll flop and not grow Get Low engagement all the stuff we want to avoid is whether or not you're willing to be consistent like I mentioned earlier in the video in Inc consistency is something that plagues people who say they're going to post on LinkedIn but never do if you can get around this you solve

99.9% of the problems that you run into because by posting consistently you'll develop the skill of writing better and better content I would recommend as you get started commit to a Cadence of three to five times per week once you become more proficient you can ramp that up to seven but if you're nervous you're like oh my gosh I don't know how I'm going to fit this in my calendar start with three less than three is not really worth it start with three times per week get more comfortable ramp to five eventually consider ramping to

7 you'll be in an amazing spot but if you can get around that fear of criticism you can get around that inability to be consistent you will win so big on LinkedIn and I'm very excited for you and that's everything I would tell myself if I was starting LinkedIn over from scratch today now in this video I gave you some pretty high level advice on the content creation side of things but you might not have the specifics of what exactly to post you don't have any templates to work off of which is why in the

next video I'll give you five specific templates that you can copy paste and steal for your LinkedIn profile so I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you over in that next one