If I Started LinkedIn in 2026, I'd Do This

LinkedIn has changed and the way you grow on the platform is completely different from when I started seven years ago. I know this because I'm in the trenches every single day working with dozens of the top voices on LinkedIn. We've grown multiple pages to tens of thousands of followers completely from scratch. And if I was personally trying to start out on LinkedIn this year and grow, this is exactly what I do step by step. There are three levels to this blueprint I'll walk you through and it's crucial that you start with level one, just get going. The single biggest obstacle that keeps most founders and CEOs from generating leads from LinkedIn and making the channel work for them as a marketing channel is just the fact that they never start posting, they're so caught up in their head overthinking concerned about what other people are going to think about them that they never even hit publish on that first post. Odds are if you're watching this video, and you haven't posted yet, there's someone whose opinion you're worried about, whether it's an old co worker, a former boss, someone in your friends and family, you have to get that out of your head immediately. It's all imposter syndrome. And the crazy thing is you've started a company, you run a successful company, you've hired a team, you've gotten to a certain revenue milestone. And yet you're sitting here scared of posting on LinkedIn. So this entire first step of the blueprint is about addressing that getting over and getting your first three posts live on the platform. And the first thing I want to do here is build your content routine. One common mistake I see founders make when they try to start writing content on LinkedIn is they want to batch create content, they see a video on Instagram or on YouTube talking about how you should batch create your content, sit down on a Saturday or Sunday and write for four to five hours and get all your content done for the week. So you don't have to do it at any other point while you're busy with other stuff with your team and with customers. It sounds great in theory, but what this does is it fails to cement your routine as a writer and content creator. If you're only doing something once a week, it's not going to become a habit. Instead of doing one long session, block out 30 minutes per day to sit down and write your content. Even if there are days where you sit down and you have no idea what to write about, you're totally lost and burnt out, and you have writer's block. Sit there and just stare at the blank page if you need to. But 30 minutes a day, lock that out to create content. And with those 30 minute blocks in that first week, I want you to commit to publishing three posts, they don't have to be good. In fact, they're probably not going to be that good. The goal is simply to get three posts out. And to make this super easy for you, I'm going to give you three specific content formats to test this week. The first one is going to be your origin story post, just write a post telling the story of how and why you started your company, we consistently see this origin story post be one of our clients top performers. Every single time we start with new client at compound, we run the origin story post and it crushes. Here's an example of a great one from wayway at momentic that talks about how he almost became a pharmacist and instead switched to computer science and a decade later has now started a company and raised $15 million. Super strong hook. And if you read through the rest of this post, you'll see this is the sort of flow that I'm talking about here. The second post I want you to publish is a customer story post or a case study post. These are super straightforward, perhaps the most straightforward posts you can do on LinkedIn, and they do perform well every single time. They're more of a bottom of funnel, even more salesy posts, but they still tend to perform quite well and can drive quite a bit of attributable demos from the platform. Here's an example of a case study post from Austin at Unify documenting their work with Pylon. This has a bit more of a cinematic case study video. You don't have to do that if you don't have the resources to do so. You can even just do text only or case study graphic, but this case study customer story post is a classic that works pretty well. And your third post for the week is going to be an industry hot take. So what's one opinion that you have about your category that most people are afraid to admit. Pick one and write a post about it. Ideally, it's something that gets you a little bit emotional, even a little bit angry. That emotion is going to bleed through into your words and it helps stop the scroll. In this example, which is actually a pretty tame one relative to the ones that I'll post, but everyone talks about how December is a slow month on LinkedIn. So I thought I might make a post that counters that and give you some specific post ideas to post in the month before the new year. By the way, if you're watching this in December, check out these post ideas, try them out for yourself. So those are your three post you're going to publish for the first week. And once you hit publish on each of those pieces, I want you to spend another 10 or 15 minutes on the platform commenting on other people's content. These are going to be posts from either people that are in your ICP, so in your ideal customer profile, or influence your accounts that your ICP follows. But really, at this point in the process, even if those accounts that you're commenting on don't fall into either of those two categories, it's okay. I just want you to get in the habit of leaving comments on other people's content, especially right now at the point that LinkedIn is in and its lifecycle. Outbound commenting and engagement is a great way to get people onto your profile and sort of solve for the cold start problem that a lot of founders will deal with when they first start publishing because nobody follows you yet. So the way you get people on your profile to view that new content you're publishing is by going and engaging with others. And part of that along with commenting is going to be outbound connection requests. So you've posted, you've done your comments. Last thing you're going to do before logging off for the day is send 20 outbound connection requests. These are just simple blank connection requests. They don't take any time to write messages, no personalization, nothing to send blank connection requests to ICP accounts, this should take you 510 minutes max, and that'll round out your workflow for the day in this getting started phase. And that brings us to the second phase in this content founder blueprint, which is get good once you've proven to yourself that you can in fact publish a post on LinkedIn, and everything's fine, nobody was judging you, you're going to want to keep posting more consistently and start to level up the content you're actually publishing. So you can go faster and more effective and generate more leads from the platform. And you'll notice in that first phase, we didn't even really talk about your profile optimization or how you should set up your profile because that really doesn't matter super early on. I just wanted to get you posting. But once you do start posting and you're going to get traffic to your profile, you want to make sure that profile is optimized to convert as many of those impressions into followers as possible. And the way I like to frame this is you want to treat your profile on LinkedIn like a landing page. You know how when you run paid traffic on Meta or even LinkedIn itself, you're going to send people to a landing page and that landing page, that website is usually optimized to drive a click or a conversion. You want to treat your LinkedIn profile the same way. So how can you set up your profile to turn as many of those eyeballs into followers and customers as you possibly can? First thing you're going to do your profile picture, this is not that complicated to a simple professional headshot. Don't use an AI image, don't do anything that's overly fancy, no selfies, make sure it's close up shoulder and above my profile is a perfect example of this the header, you can do what you want. I have a little bit of a scrappier one, you can do a branded header, I don't really mind the header is probably the least important aspect of your LinkedIn profile. Next is your headline that one liner underneath your name. Again, don't overcomplicate this. A lot of people do these fancy headlines that actually end up making them look less professional and less legitimate. All you want to do if you're a founder or CEO is put CEO at company and then a one liner explaining the value prop of your profile. Mine is building a social media agency for B2B companies. So if someone looks at that headline, they know what I do in my company and they know what they're going to get out of following my account. And once you have that one liner, go to your about section. Again, a lot of people overcomplicate this, you don't have to write a novel or something super short and concise and effective that communicates what you do, who you do it for, ideally some social proof. So in my about section, I actually mentioned that I've worked with over 50 plus early stage SaaS founders as in social proof, and then let people know what they're going to get by following me. And I also give a little CTA to click the featured link to subscribe to social files, which is my newsletter, which brings me to the featured link, which is the next section in your profile, you want to optimize one of the biggest things with optimizing your profile is making sure you give your audience the next obvious step in your funnel. So once they follow you on LinkedIn, how can you move them one step closer to a purchase? If you have a newsletter or a lead magnet, this is going to be where you want to do that. So for my featured links, pick one to two featured links, don't do more than that. And then what I recommend is having one of them be to your homepage or demo page, and then one of them be to a newsletter or lead magnet. So I have mine go to Bluecast, my SaaS, and then I had the other one go to social files, which is my newsletter. By the way, if you want to subscribe to that link in the description. I send out blueprints every single week with how to grow on LinkedIn. But on LinkedIn, I want to get as many of my profile visitors to that newsletter as possible so I can capture their emails. And the last thing with profile setup is making sure the rest of your links are set up. So my main link in bio, as you see, goes to my newsletter. And you can also have a custom button. So what you want to do is click edit and then go down to premium custom button. You do need LinkedIn premium for this. I would recommend doing this if you can afford to do so. And you'll just click edit custom button. I have mine to view my newsletter. Again, that's where I want to drive that traffic and I'll have it go to that newsletter homepage and click done. And what you'll see is if I go to a post of mine, that custom button actually shows up right underneath my name and profile picture. And in feed, people can see that CTA without even having to click to my profile. So that puts me in a good spot with my profile, making sure it's optimized. And now when it comes to cadence, and when we're in this get good phase, you want to go from just posting three times one off to having a consistent output of content. My recommendation here would be post five times per week, daily Monday through Friday. This is the ideal cadence on LinkedIn. It's consistent enough that you'll be showing up in your ICP's feed pretty close to daily. You can even go on the weekends if you want to. And if you're feeling like five is a bit overwhelming to you, you can start with three per week. That's fine. I would not start with less than three per week. And as you ramp up your posting cadence, you want to be intentional with rotating the different types of media that you're using in your content. Those first three posts are going to be text only just to keep it simple. But once you start posting more consistently, you want to have a combination of text only text plus image text plus graphic carousels, even some short form video can work. It's not as overpowered as it was last year. But having a good mix of different media types is going to be very important. So you can assess what works well for your audience. But be intentional about having a good mix of different media types just to keep the content mix feeling fresh. In this get good phase, the blueprint, you'll also want to double down on your focus on your hooks. So those first one to three lines in your LinkedIn posts are the most important. important by far. There's so much great content that gets buried underneath terrible hooks. And my practical advice here is in hooks, there are certain hook levers that you could use to make them more effective. There's a list of them. So for example, negativity bias, using a narrative hook, so story based hook, using specific numbers and metrics in your hooks, using a listicle, trend jacking, these are all things that you could use in your hooks to make them more effective. A lot of the okay hooks that do fine, but not great only have one bad hooks have none. And they're just like all over the place, total mess, but pretty okay hooks that aren't terrible, but they don't pop off usually have one the best hooks that actually perform on LinkedIn have anywhere from two to four hook levers. So for example, if I go back to this case study post from Austin, the hook is pylon CEO Marty Kausas was sending 40 LinkedIn DMS a day trying to MacGyver his dream outbound system with clay four weeks after switching to unify they drove 300k in pipeline. Here's their playbook. There's a lot of different hook levers in there. So one scenario telling the story of pylon CEO to their specific metrics, 40 LinkedIn in DMS for weeks 300k and pipeline specifically monetary numbers tend to work really well. You have credibility jacking with popular names in the hook like pylon is a very well known company in that space. Another hook lever is using power words like playbook or checklist. And you also see that and so you see how there's multiple hook levers crammed into the single LinkedIn post. So as you're sitting down for your 30 minutes every day to write your five posts per week, spend the most time on those hooks be intentional with those hook levers that you're using. And what I'd recommend is right two to three variations of each hook, spend most of your effort leveling up your hook writing skills. This brings us to phase three in the content founder blueprint, which is get smart. And this is where you have a consistent output you've been posting for a while, how do you make sure to optimize that continue to refine so you can grow faster and more effectively on LinkedIn. The first part of this is starting to understand your analytics. And the good thing about LinkedIn is that understanding analytics is not incredibly difficult. All you want to do is at the end of every week, look back at the content that you post and pay attention to see if there are any outliers. There's no crazy formula here, you don't need a crazy spreadsheet, literally just scroll through the five to six content pieces you've published most recently and notice if any have outperformed. So if on average, you get anywhere from 10 to 20 likes, and you have a content piece that gets 100, that's a good sign. And that's an outlier. So you want to look at what you did in your hook, what the topic selection was, what the media selection was, and start to understand why that did better. So that will allow you to start to identify trends. So for example, when we look across our client accounts, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, those origin story posts that didn't always used to be a go to, but we just started seeing it so often that these types of posts where we tell the origin story of a company just overperform every single time. It's so it would be stupid not to do it consistently. What a lot of founders don't understand about social content, specifically LinkedIn content, it takes a lot of work to find a content format or content piece that is a winner. So when you find a winner, you want to understand why it performs so well. So you can replicate that in future pieces. And you'll want to repurpose your best content ideas. So there's three different ways I'd recommend doing this. One is winning idea new format. So for example, the origin story post, we know that does well. If you post that in a text plus image format, you might want to do a video where you talk through the origin story next. Or if you notice a text only post with a framework or listicle does well, you might want to take that and make it into a carousel. You can take a same winning idea and publish it in a different format. The second way to repurpose winning ideas is use a winning format with new ideas. Say you see long form narrative plus image tends to work best for you, which is a pretty common pattern we'll see across our founders right now, you'll want to find different narratives that you could function that you could use in that format. The third variation of repurposing winners is my favorite and the easiest one is literally just copy paste. If you notice that your origin story or another post does extremely well three months later, do the same exact post, you can tweak it a little bit, maybe experiment with the hook a bit. But if you have a winner, you can do something as simple as taking that exact post and just posting it again, three to four months later, no one's going to remember. And if they do, they don't really care. So don't be afraid to reuse content entirely. This is very taboo for founders for some reason, they get really nervous about this. And it's not a big deal. If you know something did well, use it again. Now with all that said, you could follow this step by step and there's still a decent chance that you'd struggle to grow. Reason being LinkedIn is changing as we speak. And you need to understand what is changing behind the scenes and why. So click here to go to the next one where I break all that down for you. So you don't have to dig through white papers or research it all yourself. I'll see you over there and good luck.

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